something new for Yom Kippur

For several years our congregation has had double services for the high holy days (fire codes, y'know...). Since there are two services, they don't have to be identical; all the prayers are the same, of course, as are the torah reading and sermon, but the music is different. One keeps the long-standing "classical Reform" style that only comes out (in our congregation) on the high holy days -- operatic-style choir, organ, music you can only listen to and not join -- and the other uses more-accessible melodies where you can understand the words, led by a cantorial soloist. Guess which one I prefer. :-)

The first year we did this, the earlier service got the less-formal music. The next year I suggested switching (thinking we could take turns, because everybody prefers the time of the later service), but it didn't happen, and hasn't in the years since (people keep asking).

The problem on Yom Kippur is that we've set things up so that you can stay at the synagogue all day -- morning service, afternoon service, study sessions, dramatic presentation of the book of Jonah, end-of-day service... staying all day really helps to focus on the day and away from the fast and the world outside. But, the people who actually stay all day, rather than leaving after the morning service and coming back at the end, are, overwhelmingly, the people who want the less-formal music. I can't speak for anybody else, but for me this is not mere preference; the "classical Reform" style actively interferes with my kavanah, my spiritual intention. I've tried really hard, but I just can't do it. So people like that have a choice come early, find something to do for two and a half hours, and then continue with the rest of the day, or suck it up and go to the late service.

But we have an opportunity this year. After some renovations completed about a month ago, we have a suitable space in which we can have a service in the style of our Shabbat morning minyan, to run concurrently with the late service. We'll do that until it's time for the torah service and sermon, and at that point we'll all go to the sanctuary. So we're having 2.5 services this year. I wonder what this will do to the early (sanctuary) service, but I've heard enough people say that they want to be in the sanctuary (even if it's early) and not in the chapel with the minyan that I don't think it will be a problem. Y'see, both the new service and the early service offer more-accessible music, but there are other differences: the new service, arising out of the minyan, will likely attract a crowd that is more fluent in the service and more interested in achieving that kavanah I spoke of. You can do that in the sanctuary services, but it may be a little harder with the addition of more English responsive readings and the like.

I'd be excited about the new service anyway, but I'm especially excited because I will be helping to lead it. My rabbi can't be absent from the sanctuary service for the whole time, so he'll come to the start of ours, then join the other one already in progress later, at which point lay leaders will take over. I got the t'filah. The t'filah for Yom Kippur has extra stuff that's not in there the rest of the year, but I've practiced and I think I'm ready. While the responsibility is palpable (more on that general theme in tomorrow's daf bit), it's also exciting. I often reach my best kavanah when I'm leading like-minded people, and I'm looking forward to seeing what this will be like on the holiest day of the year.

women and role-playing games

Elsewhere, in a locked entry, a game designer asked what game designers ought to be doing to market role-playing games to women. (Women gamers are definitely a minority.) I wanted to record my (slightly-edited) reply to him. (If this post generates discussion, I'll probably point the original poster at it. This post is public.)

What got me into RPGs, in high school, was that it was a natural outgrowth of the books I was reading. SF&F nerd ostracized by the "cool" kids was the right basis, as it turned out. I, not the guys around me, was the instigator.

Once I got to college I found games to play in, all run by men, and I played rather than running for many years. (As a self-taught GM I was pretty terrible at it.) I was often the only woman in the group despite trying to draw female friends in. I didn't try to analyze it much then; I chalked it up to geek/non-geek rather than male/female. (I didn't know too many female geeks.) There wasn't much "R" in the RPGs I was playing at the time, by the way. More about that later.

More recently, I've seen the "associate" effect [that somebody else wrote about] dominate -- a woman who plays in the game because her husband does, etc. I don't think it's a new trend; I think it's just that I'm now in a position to run into it more. The most recent campaign I played in started with three women (among seven players): one was a not-very-interested wife of a gamer and both of them drifted away after one session; one was the wife of the GM and she was very interested but had a low threshold for rules-geeking; and I was the third. The two women who stuck around both engaged most with (1) storytelling and (2) interesting magic (not just direct-damage spells, though we used those too). I should note that I personally detest games like "Once Upon a Time", but I love the cooperative storytelling of a campaign with a plot and an arc through it. (What's the difference? Maybe the pace? Dunno.) I liked pure-hack-and-slash games when I was in college, but now they don't draw me. I want to craft a three-dimensional character who shares an interesting world with other non-cardboard characters.

To market to women like the two of us, then, emphasize the power of the system to tell interesting stories, to allow character development that isn't pure-optimization stat-wrangling, and throw in some interesting magic. Oh, and don't make the rules so complicated that they get in the way of the story; D&D 3.0/3.5 had its flaws but combat was smooth and spell effects were easy to calculate, and that's huge. I walked out of the only game of Traveller I ever played an hour into character creation because the whole thing was just too complicated. (Bookkeeping is fine -- RuneQuest! was one of my favorite RPGs, back in the day -- but it has to stay in the background.)

So that's one woman's view, for what that's worth.