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I blame Facebook. It used to be that certain things were the preserve of men. Not just men, but unattractive loser men. This made things easy. If you saw a guy with a twenty-sided die or a BASIC manual then you knew that beneath any superficial good looks or social skills lurked an irredeemable dud. Sure, some of us making those judgements were gamers ourselves, but at least we were clever enough to hide our Monster Manual deep in an Anthropology 101 folder when reading it on the bus.
The preconceptions started to fail with the explosion in “social networking”. All of a sudden the internet was no longer a place for certain breeds of weedy or overweight men, it was a place where your girlfriend shared photos and played quizzes about pop-stars with people she hasn’t seen since high school.
Facebook opened people’s eyes. And it isn’t surprising that some of those people might wonder “if that internet thing turned out to be cool, maybe we should test out some other things in the geek ghetto?”
Shelly Mazzanoble is on the cutting edge of this trend. A self-confessed girly-girly who “owns more flavours of body lotions than Baskin Robbins could dream of putting in a cone”, Shelly has become a roleplayer.
Confessions of a part-time sorceress is Shelly’s book about her experiences in gaming. Shelly’s book is part confessional, and part “how to” guide. It is also a well-written, entertaining Grande double-caramel Caffe Mocha of a read.
Style
Unfortunately most of the people who are reading this review are not going to be Grande double-caramel Caffe Mocha people. We are, after all, members of a forum about roleplaying games and not members of a Facebook group dedicated to the products of Jimmy Choo.
If you, like me, prefer your prose to have less froth and a darker, slightly bitter flavour, then you probably won’t be a fan of Shelly’s book. Fortunately for Shelly, you and I are not the target audience. Shelly is writing for the uninitiated, but quite possibly primed; Blackberry carrying marketing executives; fashionistas who have just discovered that you can buy Clinique 3-step products over the internet; and mothers with a gym membership and a TiVo.
Shelly’s challenge, and the challenge for publishers Wizards of the Coast, is how to get that target audience to pick up her book. The cover is a good start. And the inclusion of friendly pink sidebar comments, extracts in loopy fake hand-writing and pictures of stylish, thin and attractive people (including the author) help. The constant capitalization of “DUNGEONS & DRAGONS ®” is one mistake in the style. This serves only to thrust the name in your face every time it appears, which is unfortunate because for many people that name still carries an awful lot of negative baggage with it.
Apart from that small misstep, the look of the book is mostly spot-on.
In any book of course, appearances are a minor consideration compared to the writing. And Shelly’s writing style does seem perfectly suited to the target audience. It is the epitome of chick-lit. The type of writing that positively encourages you to use the author’s first name when writing a review of her book. It is full of friendly irreverence, asides about shoes and wise-cracks. It is not serious, it is not focussed – but it fair races past your eyes in an uplifting, bubbling stream of words.
Content
Keeping the target audience in mind, I was expecting Confessions of a part-time sorceress to focus less on the “how to” of roleplaying, and more on the “why” of it. Certainly from my own perspective the bits I enjoyed most were the bits in which the author showed some critical analysis and looked at what made her enjoy roleplaying:
"Still wary about going fist to claw with a red dragon? Don’t write it off until you consider the following statements:1. You like listening to and telling stories.
2. You like storytelling games in which you work with your fellow players, not against them.
3. You like smack downs, beat downs and low downs, but a trip downtown curbs your enthusiasm against venting your rage.
4. You like adventure.
5. You like your friends.
6. You don’t like your friends and would like to make new ones.
If you agree with at least one of the above, dig out your dice and sharpen your pencils. You might be a dragon lady after all. Dungeons and Dragons satisfies the requirements for all five statements above (number six is a maybe – no promises) but perhaps the most unique game-play element is that it is noncompetitive. Hear that? Noncompetitive, as in it takes the group working together to overcome an obstacle. You take turns, advise and protect one another, even heal and be healed when the going gets too tough. I know! That’s not a game – that’s friendship!"
Can you start to see where my Facebook connection is coming from now? Dungeons and Dragons started out as a wargame with hideously complex rules about combat, and virtually nothing else. Many of us have been looking past those combat rules for years, but for the Shelly’s of the world they have become almost utterly subsumed by the social networking aspects of gaming.
“'Yakama is moving forward to see what the clump is,' Hank tells us and moves his miniature on the play mat.'Fight! Fight!' Ursula says.
'Loot! Loot!' Jak says.
'Shop! Shop!' [Shelly’s character] Astrid says.
…
Before its Astrid’s turn, the poor four-legged beast gets clubbed with Ursula’s greatsword and Yakama’s longsword. I cringe. That’s not exactly how we handle things at the animal shelter."
It is clear from her descriptions of in-game events that Shelly’s favourite passages of play are those between the combats - the witty banter with her tablemates; the interactions with NPCs; and the development of her character. Roleplaying has long been moving towards emphasising these parts of the game, and it seems that this has had the effect of broadening its appeal.
Shelly has a test group which follow her on her journey into roleplaying. This test group contains five similarly minded female friends who all start the book as non-roleplayers. Shelly first introduces the subject to them by asking them what they know about Dungeons and Dragons and the people who play it. This is a particularly clever device for bringing stereotypes out into the open and it allows Shelly to address those stereotypes head on. You might expect her to try and deflect them a little, but she doesn’t. She tells us that her own earliest recollections of roleplaying are of a schoolmate who “wore a black trenchcoat and black Dickies every day”, had a terrifying beady-eyed stare and “wasn’t smart enough to be a nerd, so we dubbed him a psycho.” Is this figure representative? Well, yes:
"Here’s the deal. I don’t expect you to change your mind about who was playing the game in 1982 and who, if anyone, is playing the game now."
I find the author’s pragmatic acknowledgement of the gamer-geek stereotype reassuring, because to a large degree I agree that it is true. We might not game with them, but I am willing to bet that most of us know gamers with bad personal hygiene, antisocial habits and all the tact of a dead badger.
Perhaps because she feels obliged to (she is, after all, writing for Wizards of the Coast) Shelly goes further than I would by not just acknowledging, but also accepting, creepy gamers:
"If we can’t change the stereotypes we might as well embrace them. Is it weird to foster a strong social network, or to allow games to create a bond between people? Maybe for some, sure. As adults, friendships become more ephemeral and downtime a rare commodity, so finding time to get together with your friends week after week to “play a game” says a lot. If a nerd is someone who is hyper-smart, a tad socially retarded, creative, strategic, and does math problems and crossword puzzles as a form of relaxation, then yes, you’re right. Nerds probably do play D&D. Even though I haven’t let “x” equal anything other than bad judgement and beer goggles since freshman year of college (okay, maybe junior year. Or last summer. Whatever), I’d be honoured to be counted among the nerds. Nerds are in. Everyone’s embracing the nerd these days."
Hmmm. I suspect that in a few conventions’ time Shelly will be regretting those words.
Anyway, along with the stereotypes about the people who play, other misconceptions raised by the test group (such as that roleplaying means having to dress up and speak in a fake English accent) are raised and addressed early on. By the end of chapter 1, the author has clearly outlined what role-playing is, and almost as importantly, what it doesn’t have to be.
Shelly’s test group makes another appearance near the end of the book. In one of my favourite chapters, Shelly invites them over for cocktails and dessert and then ambushes them with the basic D&D rules and forces them into a game. The resulting chaos really highlighted for me the potential appeal of roleplaying to a wider group. A problem for Wizards is that perhaps Dungeons and Dragons isn’t really the vehicle to deliver on that potential. Shelly’s group clearly had some fun, but seems to me that this was despite the rules and the game’s focus on combat. Like the author herself, the parts of gaming that Shelly’s friends enjoyed were the interaction, the storytelling and the playing of a role – areas where I feel Dungeons and Dragons has traditionally been weak.
In between these chapters is rather a lot about the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons. I have never been a fan of reading rules at the best of times, and despite some really charming attempts at lightening the mood (accompanying descriptions of each alignment with a “celebrity example” is a particular piece of genius) I found these sections a bit of a struggle.
Overall then, the content of Confessions of a part-time sorceress largely lives up to the presentation. It is witty, entertaining, light-hearted fun – but there is also some substance beneath the froth.
Capturing the target audience
As I have made clear, I am not a member of the target audience for this book. I enjoyed it, and I could see the appeal it might have for others – but I also felt a bit of a spectator. In places the book didn’t really engage me, but it didn’t really try to either.
So how does the target audience perceive the book? Well, unfortunately I can’t really comment. My wife is a girly girl. She loves clothes, shoes, make-up and her entertainment to be bright and breezy. She also took one look at Confessions of a part-time sorceress and did nothing more than raise one carefully shaped eyebrow before wandering out of the room - perhaps to gossip about the latest episode of America’s Next Top Model with one of her friends on Facebook.
I suspect my wife’s reaction won’t be uncommon. And I suspect that many of the readers of this book will be people like me, male gamers with an interest in finding out how we are perceived by others and, perhaps, looking for a little affirmation. But I also think that this is a book whose time is coming. Roleplaying really does have appeal beyond its existing social groupings, and there is a developing awareness that its geeky ghetto contains hidden gems. You might say that Shelly Mazzanoble is one of a new wave of property developers sniffing around the slums, and we might soon find that our neighbourhood is becoming gentrified. I hope that is the case. And I hope that in the not too distant future my wife will ask to borrow Shelly’s book – and maybe, just maybe – ask to join in a game.
Ratings
It has been a real struggle to work out how to rate this book. I feel it is unfair for me to judge it as someone outside the target audience. On the other hand, the only tools with which I have to judge it are my own experiences and preferences.
Ultimately I have decided to go with what I know and what I prefer. For that reason I give this book a 3 for style. I loved the humour and the light touch, but overall Grande double-caramel Caffe Mochas are just a little too sweet for my taste. I also give this book a 3 for substance. The beginning of the book with its analysis of the appeal of gaming, and the later chapters with the focus on gaming experiences both inside and outside the ghetto will fascinate the majority of gamers – but I suspect the large middle chunk on rules will be as lost on you as it was on me. If I were writing a review for a general audience and I was someone other than a male gamer, then I suspect my ratings would be very different, and significantly higher.
In closing, I just want to emphasise that in my view this book – and what it represents – is a very good thing. Roleplaying has long languished in a ghetto which has largely been of its own making. Confessions of a part-time sorceress is a clear indication that it doesn’t have to remain there. Roleplaying is a better place with Shelly Mazzanoble and her friends in it.
