"I'm not a geek; I'm a level 15 wizard..."
8:32 a.m. -- 2008-09-04
I'm running out of 'confessions' to write about, and the name of this blog is increasingly inaccurate. Still, here's one...
In my teenage years, and for a while thereafter, I was into roleplaying.
Nothing kinky. I mean the (now almost vanished) pastime for spotty geeks with funny-shaped dice, where you create a character and play out adventures in a fantasy or science fiction world. My friends and I would take turns to construct intricate challenges involving shipwrecks, dungeons, arenas, political intrigue, trade, magic... it's fair to say that we were ubergeeks.
It started innocently enough, with Dungeons and Dragons. A friend invited me to join his game, and I was hooked. I spent a couple of hours a weeks as a half-elf. I still have the little painted figurine for that character somewhere...
I enjoyed that game, played a few more, and eventually I moved on to the Hard Stuff. The Crystal Meth of roleplaying games is GURPS: the Generic Universal Roleplaying System. It uses a lot more detail, both in the representation of characters and during play.
Bear with me...
Before getting down to play in GURPS, a character is defined using a points-based system. So for example, if you want to be exceptionally strong, or dextrous, those things will cost you some points. Want your character to know how to speak Swahili, how to sail a yacht or how to grow orchids? Those things will cost you points, too.
Typically, a player is permitted a hundred points with which to build a character, so they have to be used wisely. In addition to spending points to be ambidextrous, literate, rich or whatever, one can choose to have disadvantages. These free up some points, so you can spend them elsewhere. For example, colour-blindness is worth -10.
It's a short, logical step that most roleplayers take at some point, to move from thinking about the character they are creating to thinking about themselves. In its elaborate detail, GURPS provides a framework for describing just about anybody; friends and foes, heroes and politicians. And the funny thing is... just about everybody is built with a hundred points. It all balances out. The genius in your maths classes who barely knew his left foot from his right; the airhead who was good-looking and rich; the sports star who was dull and a bully... whatever. Even Stephen Hawking might be might be found to be a '100 point character' once we tally up his genius and contrast with his substantial disadvantages.
I could create a fairly accurate character sheet for myself, taking account of my skills, hobbies and interests and so on. (I won't bore you that... not least because I would lose a big chunk of my anonymity.)
But how to represent you-know-what?
Transvestism would probably come under 'mental disadvantages', along with things like absent-mindedness and miserliness. But how to categorise it?
Cross-dressing might be thought of as an addiction, although that is normally meant for drugs and similar substances. The character must satisfy their needs daily, or suffer withdrawal symptoms. Wearing girlie clothes regularly would be a reasonably benign addiction, because it's relatively inexpensive (new clothes every once in a while and a bit of Elizabeth Arden...) and the substances involved are legal. Well, maybe not in Saudi Arabia; I don't know. Is the 'drug' incapacitating? Well, that depends on whether or not you can go out while in the throes of your addiction, I suppose. Anyway, the net result would be a measly -5 points.
Alternatively, we might model it as a compulsive behaviour. Compulsions are worth between -5 and -15, depending on the severity. I'd say that it's not as harmful as compulsive gambling, nymphomania, compulsive lying, kleptomania or whatever. So again, probably -5 points.
Next up: delusions. Some transgendered people are full-on schizophrenic, perhaps really believing that they really are a person of the opposite sex. -15 points for something that, and a lot of roleplaying of some socially awkward situations in which strangers will tend not to like you. This doesn't really characterise my own gender-confused experiences, though. Few if any of trannies I have known were delusional.
There's also the possibility of representing transvestism as a secret. This is probably the classification that I feel fits my life best. The points cost of a secret is dependent upon the severity of the consequences, were the secret to be discovered. For example, if discovery of your secret is liable to get you executed on the spot, it might be worth as much as -30. My secret would 'merely' result in serious embarrassment, causing some of my customers to go elsewhere and putting a strain on my marriage... so again it's worth about -5 points. If I lived in Iran where they "don't have any homosexuals" the points cost might be rather higher.
We might also consider the issue of having an enemy. Transgendered people risk attack and other nastiness from homophobes, after all. (Pretty harsh, given that we're almost all straight, but there you go...) The points cost of an enemy depends largely upon the power of that enemy, and the likelihood of their actually appearing and starting trouble. In this case, we're talking mostly about beered-up town centre dregs; not very powerful and relatively easy to avoid... unless your circumstances are different. So maybe -5 points for this 'enemy' as well.
In summary, transvestism could take several different forms, but it will seldom be a severe disadvantage. Even with the addition of an 'enemy', it's unlikely to be worth more than -10 points. In other words, it's about as undesirable as having a low pain threshold, or a stutter. Cheer up; it's not the end of the world!
It's also the same as laziness, which is my other disadvantage. I had a good idea about six years ago, and I've been living off my reputation ever since... If I could change just one thing, I'd keep the knickers, but lose the laziness.
But not today. Today, I'm going to spend at least an hour reading some friends' diaries, and leaving silly comments.
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