Another night of D&D this week, this time with my friend Stephan playing as Mika, a fae-loving cleric (I think). We met in the Green Griffin Inn (franchise pending), and decided to travel together so he could learn skills to help his home area, and I could learn tales to recite as a bard. We set off on our quest towards a mine that was marked on a map that I got last week from the dead goblins.
Along the way, we found a pit with a dead mule that was an obvious trap that had been sprung. Mika and I, Torinn, the silver dragonborn Bard, avoided any issues with the trap but upon investigation, found human tracks mixed with prints of goblins and wolves heading off into the woods. Now, here was a dilemma. We are low-level characters with little power and easily killed. Our compatriots (2 other players) were absent on this night, so we could either risk all to save a human or go to the village and try to bring people back to help. We opted to save the human, which ended up as a small battle with a wolf. A larger wolf had run off, with the goblins gone before that, so we saved a villager. I healed him and we got to the village next to the mine relatively easily after that…we named the mine/village area Stonehaven.
Upon arrival, we discovered a house was on fire from a goblin attack, so we helped put it out and then I regaled the townsfolk with an impromptu tale of our mighty battle near mule pit. I might have embellished a little, but nevertheless, all the villagers were more interested in us two strangers than they were in the house fire we helped to extinguish. Nice, more interesting than a house fire. It should be on the Yelp reviews of my performance.
We spent the night at the human’s home, entertained the family, Mika helped improve their marriage, everyone loved us. We got some better weapons and lots of information about the mine, some nearby ruins, a village elder, etc. And some rations. We went off to explore the ruins while everyone else went to the mine to dig. The ruins turned out to be magical, with evidence that dwarves and goblins used to live there together, which is odd for mortal enemies. We found an evil altar in a basement, found some magic was active, collected some artefacts, and tried to leave. The two goblins and the wolf were not fond of us being in their basement altar and attacked when we left. A short battle later, and the wolf was dead, with the two goblins trussed up and ready for transport. We ended the night by deciding to haul the goblins to the fae and let them decide what to do with them.
Surprising gameplay elements
I thought most of the story would be created/run by the DM, and most things would unfold as turns. Not so much. For example, as we approached the pit with the mule, we knew it had been a trap but weren’t sure if it was an ambush, too. Mika led the way with us using our stealth to sneak through the adjoining underbrush to get to the pit without being detected. I would never even have thought of it. I just assumed we’d walk over and be presented with several options, some rolls, and then the story would continue.
Even when we started the night, at the Green Griffin Inn (franchise pending still), we did a small role-play where Mika and Torinn met each other and agreed to travel together. It’s all backstory of course, but I wasn’t really expecting that aspect as much. Then later, when we were at the house fire, Mika had some spells to help put out the fire. I had nothing that would help, but the DM asked me what I was doing…umm, I don’t know. What am I supposed to be doing? Oh, I can pretend I’m part of the bucket and sand brigade. Okaaaay. And when it was over, I performed for the crowd with our tale (not really, just said I did…I didn’t act it out or anything). But we were improvising our story more than I expected.
And then later, when we were at the villager’s house, Mika and Torinn were talking about other weapons and Mika decided that Torinn should have a short bow and 40 arrows. So out of nowhere, he just asked Deganar if he knew someone who could make them for us. Apparently, he knows a Fletcher, and thus he arranged it for us for free. Of course, we had saved his live, a friend’s house, and his marriage, while also entertaining his kids AND deciding to buy him a new mule. (Don’t ask; I only helped pay for it, I thought it was a bit over the top, but it sure convinced him to help us for life. I hope he doesn’t get unalived helping us, seems like a good bloke). We had another dilemma after the night’s last battle, which was the goblins were asleep and I wanted to kill them. But Mika doesn’t like to kill sentient beings unless he has to when they’re attacking us. Wuss. 🙂 I wanted to notch an arrow between their eyes. I didn’t even get to use my Thunderwave for the night.
But I did use my new blue dice that are easy to read with my tired eyes. I just need to find a good figurine to be my silver dragon bard. 🙂 With a horn and a lute, and a lyre and a flute!
Sorry, can’t stop to chat right now, we’re off to give the tied up goblins to the fae. Cheerio!
I know, I know. You know that I’m nerdy, socially awkward, into fantasy, a bad dresser, and your immediate thought was, “How is it possible that Paul has never played D&D before?”.
Well, never fear! Your expectations have been met. A friend and I were talking at work about video games, fantasy stuff, MtG, and all things related, and I mentioned that I’ve never played D&D but was open to it. A few months later, he’s starting a quest, needs more cannon fodder, err, players, we canvassed some people, and lo and behold, we have a crew!
I had five people in mind to ask if they were interested. One was out of the D&D world these days, mostly into regular board games, but thanked me for the invite. Another apparently has a real life, who knew? Well, I did, but I asked anyway. Another declined because, well, he’s in TWO other games that have been running for more than 5 years. He’s covered.
And two more said yes. So we’ve got a core group of 4 plus our DM, and two others who are likely but busy at the moment. We all had to start our quest with character design.
What’s good for a newb?
We’re playing version 5 / 5th edition D&D; I didn’t even know there WERE editions. So, yeah, total newb. They asked what clan / class / character I wanted to be, and I had no idea. So I googled things like “Good characters for newbie”. Inherently, I don’t want to be necessarily “leading” a quest, I’m more like hero support. Which matched well with a bard aka the storyteller. Toss a coin to the witcher, and all that. It kind of resonated with me so entertainer / bard / dragonborn / silver etc. came together relatively easily.
I have a rapier, dagger, and four musical instruments to focus my bardic powers — a horn and a lute, and a lyre and a flute! The lute was automatic, the rest I had some choice, but no real guidance as to which would be better or worse. I got to choose some spells (Thunderwave!), but the book had strong guidance as to which were good combos for first-timers.
Devin (as DM) and Owen aka Timm the Cleric helped me hone my combos, and distribute my points across the six attributes. Vicious mockery sounds like a great weapon to wield constantly. And we calculated a bunch of #s that affect things, but I just went with the numbers they gave me and left the formula to some future consideration if needed.
Putting it to the test
The DM laid out a quick landscape with a bridge, and Timm (the Cleric) and Torinn (the silver dragon Bard) got to fight them. Timm attacked — and missed. I attacked and also missed. The goblins attacked Timm and did a bit of damage. Then they attacked me — and rolled a natural 20. Timm and the DM went, “Oh. Well. We don’t have to count that. This is just practice.” Apparently, a natural 20 against me is not good. They did something else, and I took an 8-point hit when I only had 9. Umm, that seemed bad.
Timm healed me on the next round, attacked and missed again. I gave him a Bardic Inspiration (extra die role for the next time) and did Thunderwave (magic spell) that pushed them back 10 feet and did massive damage but not enough to kill them, apparently. Another round, I did Thunderwave again, and they were dead.
Timm examined the bodies and learned some stuff about maps and types of poor armour / who made it, etc., and got some basic loot. I don’t really understand what any of that meant and whether it would be relevant in the future, but I got a basic feel for the game.
I don’t really understand how time works in the game. 10 rounds equals a minute, and you play for X amount of minutes before rest, etc. It felt like Hagrid’s explanation of currency to Harry Potter that there are 29 Knuts in a Sickle and 17 Sickles in a Galleon, i.e., 493 Knuts in a Galleon. Simple as pie, right?
Anyway, I’m more along for the ride; everyone else has played before, and we can “table talk” / “strategize” out loud, so it’s all good.
What if I die?
When I dropped to one point away from death, my game mortality suddenly seemed super-important. I wanted to know, what happens if I die? Is it just that I’m out? I don’t need to come back next week? Apparently, some games do work that way, particularly in older versions, but this team’s rules basically would have me “respawn” as a new character. Psst…it might be Torinn’s cousin Tarinn with all the same characteristics. Or I could do it randomly by rolling. Worth a consideration at some point, but in the short-term, dying isn’t fatal. Get it? Hehehe
So I killed my first two goblins, cast two spells, gave Bardic Inspiration to my quest team, and swung my rapier and missed. Or was it my dagger and I threw it? Something sharp and pointy that did nothing. I like Magic better, Magic can’t miss.
What’s next?
Three things happen next. First and foremost, we launch the quest together. Seems obvious. Secondly, I decide if I want to get my own dice (I’m leaning towards yes, just so it’s easy to read with my tired eyes). And third, I COULD get myself a silver dragon bard to be my physical character. Yes, I’m geeking out. Hey, I already bought decent large font playing card decks this week…does that have anything to do with D&D? Absolutely not, I just wanted some nice cards to practice some tricks with, but it is equally pretty geeky. A silver dragon ain’t too far off that scale.
I’m still 1320 days from retirement — that’s 3y, 6m for those who can’t do the math — but I’ve been reading about some of the psychological elements when you retire. Obviously, one of the biggest hits happens to your social network. You spend 7.5h or more a day at work with a group of specific people, and then you retire, with many of them never to be seen again except perhaps in grocery store checkout lines or a movie theatre lobby. The literature differentiates between “personal life” friends and “location-based” friends, and work or school are most often the latter. Some people hang on to acquaintances and friends like glue. I, however, do not.
I think back to my elementary school days and I had lots of acquaintances, but only 2-3 friends who translated outside the “location”. A kid, Tony, was one of my favourite people. A bit quiet, nice sense of humour. Another, Tania, was super nice, also quieter. And Giselle, who was definitely NOT quiet. When I graduated from a Catholic elementary school, and went to a public high school, I separated from all of them.
For early high school, I had two main friends Pat and Mark who lived in the house behind us and went to the same school. I picked up another friend, Paul aka Rufus in Grade 11/12 or so, and we were tight school friends but rarely did much outside of school. Giselle moved over later in high school to the same school, and we reacquainted but we weren’t really close. Different strokes. There were a couple of people I really liked interacting with…Jennifer, a girl named Lauren, although I didn’t know either very well. I can think of another girl, and I can see her face VERY clearly, but I don’t remember her name today. Gone from my memory, I guess. When I went off to university, I didn’t have any emotional goodbyes, I was just transitioning to a new place. I didn’t stay friends with really any of them much. Notice a pattern?
My life at Trent University was a bit of a whirlwind in some ways. I was surprised to see a guy I knew named Neil from high school who was in my same program. We knew each other from high school, it wasn’t that big a place, but I didn’t really know him. I didn’t really get his sense of humour in high school, and never really got to know him then. At university, we took most of our classes together and hung out regularly at campus. Looking back, he reminds me a lot of Tony from elementary school and I remember thinking that I was disappointed that I hadn’t got to know him in high school. But while I was at uni, I wasn’t really “part” of the program’s crowd. Not that there was a real program crowd. I had another good friend, Heather, and we hung out regularly. Yet most of my time was spent either working at the library 15 hours a week or connecting to my long-distance girlfriend in Toronto. When I left Trent, I thought, “Oh, absolutely, I’ll stay in touch with Heather and Neil, absolutely”. I even thought I would stay in touch with the people from the library. When I left, they all came out as a group to say goodbye to me — 30 people from across the department all came! I was a STUDENT, they didn’t make that much effort normally for people who were FULL employees. I’m sure some of it was “hey, let’s do something for lunch”, but I was really touched by it. I did know them all, interacted with them regularly, asked them about their families, work, sports teams, etc. They were my work family. But when I went off to UVic, I said goodbye to all of them and well, most of them fell by the wayside. Location-based friendships.
When I went to UVic, life was very different. I was worried that I would be either fully ensconced in the law library or studying in my room all the time, with no friends and no real connections. I lived in residence for the first 7m I was there, moving out just before finals, and I accidentally became an extrovert of sorts. Don’t get me wrong, I was still an introvert, but I got to know my neighbour Jason. And another guy across the hall, David, then Alkis down the hall a bit further. We all started going over to dinner together most nights. I added in Deb and Pat, and soon there was a loose crew of 6-8 of us always going over together. I’d wander down the hall and say, “What time tonight?” and then tell everyone else. Maybe I was lonely more than an accidental extrovert, but I became social glue that bonded an island of misfit toys into a group of friends. It surprised me, to be honest. Jason, David and Mike were some of my favourite people that I have ever met in life. Our friendship took a hit when I moved out, but the next semester we still managed to do some stuff here and there. I didn’t really bond with too many people in law school, probably only one really, Joe was his name. But I thought I would be friends with these people long after university. Then I moved to Ottawa and pretty much all of it went to nothing. They were, regrettably, highly location-based friendships. Jason and I stayed in touch for awhile, and I worked with Mike on a project one time.
When I first came to Ottawa, I thought that I would be here a few months and go back. Instead, I met a girl, Cheryl, and dated for a couple of years. I made a bunch of friends and then some became really good friends — Aliza, Seb, Julia — while working at Foreign Affairs. While I am still good friends with Aliza, I had thought that I would also know Seb and Julia all the way to my last years of life, to be honest, and yet as time progressed and we all moved around, those friendships were hard to maintain and slowly drifted. I’m not particularly good at knowing how to maintain friendships over time without regular contact and social media links weren’t enough. I moved to CIDA and met my now-wife, plus made a dozen or so more friends, of which several have continued further. Some of them are easier to maintain because my wife is the glue for them. There are some people I worked with in the policy branch and multilateral branches of CIDA that I miss working with. People who, at the time, were some of my favourite people ever. And yet a few years later, no more contact.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a pity party, nor were any of these losses open chest wounds. As I got older, I realized that many of the friendships were situational. Location-based, I guess, although that doesn’t really resonate with me. Some of my bosses like Bob or Gaby or Michel, I spent a lot of time with. Christine. And I enjoyed seeing them every day, hearing about their lives. I could list another 20 work friends that I enjoy working with, some that I’ve stayed in touch with, many that I haven’t. A couple of work lives in Laurie and Kathrine.
But once the work bond was broken, most drifted away. I know this will happen when I retire, and I thought I was prepared for it.
I am not.
Early departures
During the pandemic, I was surprised to learn of two people retiring. Not that they weren’t of age, or going early, just more that I hadn’t seen them in a while and had no idea that they were getting close to their date. I am older than I look at work, so often people are surprised to find out that I’m actually entering my late fifties and not just over 50. Some bosses have assumed they were older than me and then were surprised to find that they weren’t. It works that way for me, too; I’ve assumed bosses were automatically older and then found out they weren’t. But because my wife is younger, and a lot of friends are younger, I hadn’t really thought much about others retiring. I tend to be the oldest one in groups.
I was a bit shocked to hear that Geoff was retiring. He was a director, on his second career almost after a major change, and he had lost a wife to cancer. I used to work in the same directorate as him, and regularly had to interact on files, collaborate on corporate stuff, or just be in the same meetings a couple of times a week. When I changed jobs, I’d still frequently wander by his office late in the day, maybe every month or 3 weeks or so, and chat for 10-30 minutes. A lot of the time, he’d tell me about some new project he had going with his team that he was excited about. A bit older than me, obviously, but a good guy to chat with, and I really enjoyed those chats. And in mid-pandemic, he was gone. Not dead, just retired. I didn’t even get to say goodbye really, although I tried before he left. Not much notice for me, although others knew about it. But in the transactional world of pandemic work-life, we didn’t have any reason to talk.
Another good friend and mentor retired last year. And it saddened me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally happy for him. But I have worked on and off with him over the last 15 years, and he was absolutely in my top 5 of favourite people in all of ESDC. Another boss retired about 7 years ago, which leaves probably three.
Or two because a really good friend is finished tomorrow. Tuesday. I met Angie back in 2008 when I joined my current branch. She was a PM-06 in the team doing the Departmental Performance Report and Report on Plans and Priorities, and since I handled Performance Measurement, we ended up working closely together. No drama, no BS, a straight shooter, and a great person to talk to when I needed a calming perspective. I worked with her directly for 10 of the years since then, sometimes side by side, sometimes supervising her nominally. At one point, she transitioned away from one of her sets of files more into another, and that grew into a third area that she’s been doing for the last 8 years or so. It was great to see her doing all of it, and I was both happy and proud for a friend.
But make no mistake about it. She works to live, not lives to work, and she has been looking forward to her retirement date for a very long time. I’ve been asking people about how they mentally approached their retirement (if they are already retired) or what they’re thinking now. Most people do fall into the classic three tropes:
It’s like parole…I’ve served my sentence, completed my time, and now I’m being released from my cage.
It’s like graduation…I’ve worked long and hard, and that last day is the celebration / bookmark for the end of a long period, before I consider starting what’s next.
It’s a transition…I am decreasing my work time and increasing my leisure time, but it’s a gradual transition that has been going on for some time, this is just my last day of work, I’m already “transitioned”.
I won’t say which is her view, that’s not my story to tell. Everybody is different.
But I knew there would be no big celebration for her departure at work. First of all, she would HATE it with a passion. I asked if I could take her out for lunch and talk about her views on retirement, and her question was, “It is JUST US going for lunch, right?”, worried that I might be planning something.
Second, many of her own work crew have already retired. Oddly enough, she was telling me at lunch about a big project that she worked on in her career with several people, her favourite project in all of her career, and they just decommissioned it in the last year. She was joking that it was perfect timing for her to be “decommissioned” too.
Third and perhaps most telling, the pandemic has screwed up a lot of those types of activities. Nobody is in the office on the same days anymore, there’s no obvious sense of a team or bonding anymore. Your work unit is mostly “it,” with a lot of other stuff that is pretty transactional.
So, I convinced her to at least go for lunch with me, and insisted she let me treat. In a normal world, I would thank her for her service (unstated), tell her how amazing she’s been as a friend and coworker (also unstated; she hates that ****) and wish her well (clearly stated).
I am committed to making sure this is not the last time I see her. I have her email address, and I’ll reach out to her. We may even do a small project together. I have an idea for a book I want to write, and there’s a lot of data to manage for the background. Funny enough, she actually said one of the things she’ll miss in retirement is not having the need/opportunity to do various things in Excel anymore. She loves Excel. Welllllll, I said, strange that you mention that desire. Cuz my project might need some Excel magic. 🙂
In the meantime, since I’m telling my story and not hers, her departure surprised me emotionally. I knew it was coming, and I’m super happy for her. I also thought I was ready to say goodbye to people when I retire in 3y, and yet here’s someone leaving even earlier, just one person. I could analyse it intellectually that it’s one more lost person in a large network of acquaintances, but that’s not who she is. She’s one of my five favourite people of the last 20 years of work. A good friend, and my work-life will be diminished by her absence.
It leaves me pondering. Is THAT the real transition? Not a graduation where you say goodbye to everyone but perhaps a slow series of a thousand smaller cuts. And somewhere in there, a blade slips a bit, and you get a deeper cut of the blade.
As I said, I won’t let this one go without more effort. I’ll let her get through her golf days, but then, next fall, she’ll have no excuse to avoid at least another lunch. 🙂 But I will still miss her at work.
My wife was noting that she had a FB memory the other day of me from four years ago announcing that I had done my full plan for the coming year of shows — NAC, Great Canadian Theatre Company, Ottawa Little Theatre, everything! Many of those shows were later in the winter/spring season, but the plan was in place! Until March 2020 when all those plans joined the global swirlies.
We’ve done a few things here and there, mostly for special occasions or shows, but this was our first real “hey, this looks good, why not?” impulse. And since it was Andrea’s birthday, the synergy was hard to miss. Particularly with your wife asking you several times early on if you’ve bought tickets yet so that she doesn’t have to plan something else for her birthday. 😉
The show was “My Jokes Are Up Here” with four female comics performing for the night.
Erica Sigurdson led off, and also served as moderator/host for the night. Many of the comics are known for being on various Canadian television and radio shows, almost none of which I watch (The Debaters being the most prominent), so they were all “fresh” to me. She was obviously the most polished of the group, and handled audience interactions well. It was a fabulous start to the night, mostly around standard fare of the life of a 49-year-old woman living in Vancouver and travelling for shows. While a bunch of the “jokes” were not nominally hilarious, her delivery was flawless and they all sang for the whole set. Awesome opening.
Christina Walkinshaw was up next, a former Carleton student who got some reaction to having a tie to Ottawa. A bit younger, and nominally single for the set, she covered standard fare like dating apps, d*** pics, etc. She says she prides herself on trying to be a really “positive” person, very upbeat and perky, but she did a couple of darker jokes in the middle. One of them was almost Andrew Dice Clay-cringeworthy (“What’s worse than ants in your pants? Uncles!”). It was not indicative of her set, just a one-off perhaps to show she can do darker, and was an example of a joke someone told her while working cruise ships. She tried to do some audience interactions, but I wouldn’t say an older crowd at Centrepointe’s Meridian Theatre is the best group for that feedback energy. I’ll come back to that in a second.
Rebecca Kohler was my favourite of the night. She is an Ottawa native, and started strong with some riffs on French immersion as a kid, the teacher’s pronunciation of her name, etc. She also did a regular impression from time to time of a rich white woman’s startled manic laughter (you’d have to see her to see it), and so the bits would occasionally swing to the side for a moment. Expertly done, great pacing for the presentation, and a good mix of life in the modern era. She had fresh takes on sex, vibrators, and learning to masturbate as a chubby 14yo in her parents basement. But her best bit was about her enjoyment of lesbian porn. Her final take might spoil it for any man out there or create a fetish for them for cat videos, it could go either way. The final story though around anal adventure? Jaw-dropping funny. Excellent night. She wasn’t quite as polished as Sigurdson, but she was awesome.
Jen Grant closed out the night, with a little bit of her act on her life in Wakefield. I find it hard to pinpoint exactly what was off with her show for me. She was funny, that wasn’t it. But it seemed slow, almost a little too flat, passive maybe? I didn’t feel like there was much energy in her delivery or bits. A few places for pacing between bits made for a VERY quiet theatre. I feel like in a more intimate venue, like a comedy club, she’d rock. A big wide theatre? Not so much. She did a little bit of audience interaction, and it was good, but nowhere near as good as Sigurdson’s at the beginning.
Which leads me back to an interesting element for the night. For those who watch comedy specials or go to clubs for shows, you can tell that the good comics generally know their audience. Russell Peters generally knows what they’ll react to, or Taylor Tomlinson, or Jeff Foxworthy. If any of them asks a specific question, they generally know the audience is going to be close to that demographic. It’s the same profile as they had at the previous 20 shows.
But the audience at Centrepointe shows skew very heavily towards older, diverse but still mainly white, married and with some disposable income to buy tickets to a comedy show that isn’t for hardcore fans downtown at a comedy club. So when one of the comics went to do a small bit about apartment life, she asked how many people in the audience were living in / renting an apartment. Dead silence. It totally threw them off. Equally, when they did their bits about Tindr, d*** pics, dating in general, etc., the audience laughed, but it was often the laugh of “isn’t that interesting” as opposed to “you are living my life!” roars that they would get in a comedy club that skews younger. That’s not their fault, they’re doing one-off shows, not everyone in the crowd is a standard demographic, so harder to gauge in advance. Just something that stood out three or four times.
As a small aside, there was also the standard challenge that all comedy ensemble shows face when they do a booking like this. This was their first night together (I don’t know if they’re doing it elsewhere too or if this was a one-off), and some of the bits overlapped. Over time, comics who perform together often realize that if they’re going on third, and doing a bit that overlaps with the first comic’s take on d*** pics, then they either need to refer back to it so it seems like a continued conversation and then take it in a different direction OR drop it entirely from their set. Comedy clubs have the same problem, luck of the draw for some comics going earlier lessens their need, but if you come out 6th in a long lineup, and do your bit that mirrors the same subject matter of someone else earlier, the laughs still come, but not anywhere near as loud. I once saw a comedy set where four comics in a row gave their standard take on dating apps, making it abundantly clear that they had not listened to the previous comics’ sets AT ALL. Some of the jokes were IDENTICAL. Not in a “they stole my joke”-sense, but more “I’ve heard this commentary before”. The fourth person got almost NO reaction other than polite laughter.
However, those are small issues, and it was a good show. I’ll probably search for some more stuff online for Rebecca Kohler, although all four were good. We had debated taking Jacob, but he would have HATED the night, missing the meaning of most of the jokes, as we expected. I loved stand-up shows when I was his age, but it’s a different world after all. A few more years, maybe.
Andrea and I really didn’t get into digital photos until February 2004, and we haven’t scanned many old photos (yet!). As such, I only have two albums processed for 2002 — one from an outing where she went rock climbing and another from a conference later in the year.
July was the rock climbing outing, where Andrea and Amanda went to Vertical Reality on Victoria Island here in Ottawa. If Andrea later said I was making her climb the walls, well, she had experience.
Over the late spring and all through the summer, I was working with a group of students at Carleton University to organize a conference in September at a downtown conference centre. We got some heavy hitters to come out, and produced a fairly solid report on HR challenges for the time. Here’s our organizing committee.
So that’s it for us in the gallery for 2002. A short review of the year. See the full gallery below…
