 if it didn’t decide to eat the cardboard castle.
 Maybe I am buying too many toys. But in my defense, I am in my second childhood, and sometimes I just need to play with toys. It solves a lot of problems that I am too old and tired to make go away otherwise. And it also makes a good short post when the idea bag is short on short topics and the time for writing is limited.
In Dungeons and Dragons games you are trying to bring characters to imaginary life by getting into their deformed, powerful, or magic-filled heads and walking around in a very dangerous imaginary world. You have to be them. You have to think like them and talk like them. You have to love what they love, decide what they do, and live and die for them. They become real people to you. Well… as real as imaginary people can ever become.
But there are actually two distinct types of characters.
These, remember, are the Player Characters. My two sons and my daughter provide them with their persona, personality, and personhood. They are the primary actors in the stage play in the theater of the mind which is D & D.
But there are other characters too. In fact, a whole complex magical world full of other characters. And as the Dungeon Master, I am the one who steps into their weird and wacky imaginary skins to walk around and be them at least until the Player Characters decide to fireball them, abandon them to hungry trolls, or bonk them on the top of their little horned heads. I get to inhabit an entire zoo of strange and wonderful creatures and people.
Besides the fact that these Non-Player Characters can easily lead you to develop multiple personality disorder, they are useful in telling the story in many different ways. Some are friendly characters that may even become trusted travel companions for the Player Characters.
D & D has a battle system based on controlling the outcomes of the roll of the dice with complex math and gained experience. In simpler terms, there is a lot of bloody whacking with swords and axes that has to take place. You need characters like that both to help you whack your enemies and to be the enemies you get to whack. There is a certain joy to solving your problems with mindless whacking with a sword. And yet, the story is helped when the sword-whackers begin to develop personalities.
Crazy Mervin, for example, began life as a whackable monster that could easily have been murdered by the Player Characters in passing while they were battling the evil shape-changing Emerald Claw leader, Brother Garrow.
But Gandy befriended him and turned him from the evil side by feeding him and sparing him when it really counted. He became a massively powerful ax-whacker for good because Gandy got on his good side.  He helped the players escape the Dark Continent of Xendrick with their lives and is now relied upon heavily to help with combat. He was one of the leaders of the charge on the gate when the Players conquered the enthralled Castle Evernight.
Not every NPC is a whackable monster, however. In the early stages of the campaign the Players needed a magic-user who could read magic writing, use detection spells and shielding spells and magic missiles, and eventually lob fireballs on the bigger problems… like dragons.
Druaelia was the wizard I chose to give the group of heroes to fulfill these magical tasks. Every D & D campaign requires wizarding somewhere along the way. And Dru was a complex character from the start. Her fire spells often went awry. When Fate used a magic flaming crossbow bolt to sink a ship he was defending, killing the good guys right along with the bad guys, it was with a magic crossbow bolt crafted by Druaelia. Her fire spells went nuclear-bad more than once. She had to learn along the way that her magical abilities tended more towards ice and snow than fire. She learned to become a powerful wielder of cold powers. And while she was comfortable in a bikini-like dress that drove the boys wild because she grew to love the cold, she didn’t particularly like the attentions of men and male creatures that went along with that. More than one random bandit or bad guy learned the hard way not leer at Dru. There are just certain parts of the anatomy you really don’t want frozen.
The Player Characters will need all sorts of help along the way, through travels and adventures and dangerous situations. They will meet and need to make use of many different people and creatures. And as Dungeon Master I try hard to make the stories lean more towards solving the problems of the story with means other than mere whacking with swords. Sometimes that need for help from others can even lead you into more trouble.
But as I am now nearing the 800 word mark on a 500 word essay, I will have to draw it all to a close. There is a lot more to say about NPC’s from our game. They are all me and probably are proof of impending insanity. But maybe I will tell you about that the next time we sit down together at the D & D table.
Even as certain unnamed world leaders are suggesting people inject disinfectants to treat COVID-19 (…), tracing efforts at least are moving ahead more rapidly than expected.
European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services Thierry Breton reports Tim Cook will deliver an early version of Apple’s and Google’s contact tracing tech to developers on April 28. Not a moment too soon, as confirmed global cases have now reached 2.76 million, with 905,000 of those in the United States.
Users will be able to share their status with health authorities who can then contact anyone who passed within that user’s Bluetooth range. When done correctly, contact tracing allows health authorities to isolate chains of infection and, in the case of the US, may allow certain states to loosen quarantine restrictions earlier than others.
Critically, the tracing system will be voluntary and have protections in place for privacy.
But here’s where the voluntary and the involuntary begin to blur.
South Korea successfully used digital contact tracing to COVID-19, but drew heavily on surveillance cameras to keep track of the infected and limit their contact with healthy citizens.
It’s being used in India as well, where geo-fencing, CCTV footage, and even call records are also being employed to track primary and secondary contact of COVID patients.
That’s…well, a little less comfortable for our tastes. And then there are drones.
We weren’t the only ones utterly horrified by the idea of a drone that searches the populace for symptoms, and the town has apparently revered course and flown right back out.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some real privacy issues being raised here, still.
Apple and Google have been pretty transparent about their project’s abilities and limits, as well as the potential privacy pitfalls inherent in contact tracing. But they can be as transparent as they’d like and it doesn’t solve the problem that we just don’t know how this technology will be used after we get the all clear and life is back to normal.
The Department of Health and Human Services has already said it’ll loosen privacy rules to make it easier for hospitals and their vendors to share medical records with public health officials.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has held individual meetings with Facebook, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and IBM to assess how to use smartphone data and other aggregated information to trace the spread of COVID-19 and determine if Americans are maintaining social distance. The focus, status, and meaning of those efforts is unclear.
And answers aren’t forthcoming.
HIPAA laws include language that allows federal officials to waive privacy rules in case of a public health crisis, but when HIPAA was passed in 1996 health data were primarily in the hands of hospitals, insurance companies, and doctors offices. Not Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
Not drones that watch you cough.
Morally, it’s difficult to argue that we shouldn’t do anything we can do to slow the spread right now. And with a second wave of COVID-19 expected to coincide with fall flu season, that doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon.
But this uneasy balance between privacy and safety is something we have to address sooner or later. It was a question after 9/11, and it’s a question now — how much of what we consider private are we willing to relinquish for the greater good?
And who do we trust to determine what the greater good is?
Alumni Profile
McClymont, WCL ’87, Goes Global with Her Fight for Human Rights
The United States has the largest prison population in the entire world, but Mary McClymont, WCL/LLM ’87, is working to change that by fighting for humane, constitutional prisons and advocating alternatives to jail. McClymont has always felt passionately about human rights, and as the new president of the Public Welfare Foundation, she is able to continue her career of advocacy for the disenfranchised.
After completing her law degree, McClymont worked at the D.C. Bail Agency. As McClymont says, “Even then I knew that I wanted to work with poor and disadvantaged [people].”
Helping the poor and disadvantaged is a consistent theme in McClymont’s career, and she views the law as “a great mechanism to bring about social change.” After years of work in the American criminal justice system, McClymont traveled to Thailand where she worked at refugee camps. This experience expanded her scope to an international scale. “I recognized that human rights