Jesse Heinig

D&D Through the Eyes of the Rara Avis

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 21:20:38 GMT

I had a unique opportunity recently, and as it falls within the purview of game design, I must, of course, report about it!

One of my co-workers, Miss B_____, is an experienced game designer who not only creates content for MMOs but is also a familiar long-time player of many role-playing games such as Savage Worlds. Miss B_____ happens to also have never played Dungeons & Dragons in any form.* Because of this novelty, I had the chance to chronicle her interactions with the Dungeons & Dragons game, specifically the 3.5 edition, as I included her in a Dark Sun group. Many of her questions were ones that I expected, but it is good to hear them empirically.

(I should note here that Miss B_____ hates being called "Miss B.," but I have informed her that this is a stylistic choice in the fashion of Victorian writers who obfuscated the identities of characters by using only their initials.)

Some of Miss B_____’s commentary included:

“Why do we have ability scores, if we only use the modifiers that they produce? Why have the ability score at all?”
This is, of course, D&D’s equivalent of legacy code. Since the early days, character ability scores have ranged from 3-18, with the bell curve displayed in the beginning of the first edition Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Old-time players are familiar with this range. They have learned that an 18 is a great score! A 3, not so much. And 10 is average.
Another part of that legacy lies in the fact that early editions of D&D/AD&D used lookup tables for ability score bonuses. You couldn’t rely on mathematically deriving your bonuses or penalties just by knowing your ability score. You had to look it up on a table. Your character’s chance to bend bars or lift gates was a percentage, with a very low rate of success at above-average strength scores but rapid increases for extraordinary strength. The bonus to reaction time for a high Dexterity score was not the same as the bonus to Armor Class, nor was it the same as the bonus to resist mental effects due to a high Wisdom score. Thus, each ability score had its own progression and its own table, which in turn meant that the score was important to note down, in order to compute the bonus.
By the time of D&D 3^rd edition, this discrepancy was removed. Every ability score gives bonuses on a reliable progression chart that is the same for all scores. Dexterity gives you a bonus to your Armor Class and Wisdom gives a bonus to Will saves, but the value of that bonus was always the same if the scores were the same. A 14 in a score grants a +2 bonus, regardless of which score or what it’s modifying.
The curve on ability scores remains, though. A score of 18 is less common than a score of 12. This could be due to randomization – D&D 3^rd edition does include random character rolls still – but it is also in the point-buy system. The cost for a high ability score increases on a per point basis. Having an 18 in a score means that other scores will be lower overall. This increasing cost, even though the benefit is only a meager +1 or +2 in the end, is designed to create scarcity. If you create a character with an 18 in a score, your character will be extraordinary in that area and mediocre to terrible at everything else. A character with a more balanced range of scores, like 12s and 14s, will not be particularly exceptional but will have an overall better total of scores. Despite what J.E. Sawyer over at Obsidian might tell you, this system creates a distribution that favors more average or close-to-average ability scores. If a player chooses a high ability score, it must be done with the deliberate knowledge that the character is not as generally competent as other characters. Thus the extra cost for a score of 18 – even if an 18 score is just a +4 modifier instead of the 17’s +3 – is much higher than the +1 you’d gain by going from a score of 11 to a score of 12. Partly this recognizes that a high ability score is, in itself, unusual and special. Partly it recognizes that for low-level characters who don’t have many modifiers to their dice rolls, having a +4 from an ability bonus instead of a +2 is a pretty big deal. (At higher levels, a +2 bonus is mostly incidental, but by then you have magic to augment your ability scores anyway.)
The original observation is one that is not lost on designers as well as players. That’s why some of the alternative OGL systems out there do away with ability scores and just use the modifier – so you might have a Strength score ranging from -5 to +5, for instance.

“Why is ‘level’ used for both your character’s power and measuring spell effectiveness?”
Folks who’ve read the aforementioned AD&D 1^st edition books know the answer to this one! D&D made the deliberate decision to overload the use of the word “level.” In fact, an explanatory paragraph in the Player’s Handbook explains that originally, characters had ranks, spells had power, monsters had order, and only dungeons had levels. (“A 9^th rank character encountered a 7^th order monster on the 8^th (dungeon) level and attacked it with a 4^th power spell.”)
I honestly don’t know why they settled on this. It does cause some dumb problems because your character level has nothing to do with spell level, which means that a 5^th level wizard can’t use 5^th level spells.
Some variants of D&D decided to have spells match with character levels on a one-to-one correspondence. Arduin famously has spells of 20^th, 30^th, and higher levels. This causes the problem that the granularity is so fine that you can’t always tell where to place a spell – is spider climb a level 2 spell or a level 3 spell? Is it really better than magic missile or sleep? (3^rd edition D&D thinks that it is!)

“How come my character is so constrained in what she can do?”
This is really more of a comparison to some of the open-skill games that have come about in the turn-of-the-century game designs. This sort of thing started happening back in the early 90s with Shadowrun, World of Darkness games, and stuff like Deadlands, in which your characters could make skill checks without necessarily being trained in a given skill. (I guess that Traveller and Twilight: 2000 had some of this, too!) By the time that AD&D even adopted skills (the clunky “nonweapon proficiencies” of late 1^st edition), they had actually taken a bit of a step backward. Early 1^st edition AD&D assumed that some characters would have a “background skill” that might be a trade or profession that the character had studied as an apprentice before adventuring, and gave some general guidelines about letting people just try to do things in their background area and roll with it. The later nonweapon proficiency system categorized many different kinds of skills mechanically, but it also made little provision for people using a skill without any training. Thus, if you didn’t pick up the Heal skill, you couldn’t try to give medical care to people. Period.
By 3^rd and 4^th edition, D&D had adopted mechanics for untrained use of most skills, but low-level D&D characters have always been laughably bad at making various kinds of checks. First-level characters suck; it’s an old truism of the game. Worse still, the general slide toward strict mechanization in 3^rd and 4^th edition – ostensibly to protect players from bad DMs – also means that the rules are pretty rigid about what skills exist, what you can do with them, and when you can even try to make a roll. This just led players to try to find ways to eke out the most specialized performance possible. Thus we get organized play adventures where 1^st-level rogues are expected to hit a difficulty of 40 (on a 20-sided die roll!), because some player out there figured out a way to make a totally crazy optimized rogue who can get a +20 bonus out the starting gate. Ergo, we must (1) make it impossible for people to use their abilities and (2) punish everyone because one player decided to exploit an overdesigned system. The attempt to protect players from bad DMs leads naturally to players exploiting the ostensible protections, which leads to DMs escalating their arms race. And so the cycle of life continues.
For someone who plays games like FATE and Savage Worlds, the constraints on a D&D character seem arbitrary and constricting. Skills really take a back seat to fighting, because fighting is at the roots of where D&D came from. Thus, it’s not too hard to make a character who is pretty good at some skills, but getting over-the-top in fighting means you have to really work at building a character who does only that. There’s not a lot of push to have a personality or any kind of history. You can have them. D&D just doesn’t really care one way or the other. And you certainly can’t establish that your character is awesome outside the boundaries of the small box of skills and meager class abilities that you get out the gate. But you don’t want to start with a high-level character; without having played the character through the low levels, organically, you will have a hard time organizing or even choosing your various powers!

“I have, like, two powers!”
See aforementioned “low-level characters suck.”
Lots o’ modern RPGs have taken a very unstructured approach, in which characters are able to attempt a great many things, and they find some relatively appropriate trait and make a roll. D&D 3^rd and 4^th edition are not like this, in that there are rules for almost every contingency and everything is tightly defined.
Oddly, early D&D was not like this. Sure, your original Fighting Man could do exactly one thing: attack with a weapon once per round. Your Magic-User could cast one spell – and only once! But everything else was fair game. Trick a monster? Sure, try it. Create an ad hoc trap and lure the enemies into it? Might work. Jump the chasm, swim the river, climb the cliff on the other side? Yeah, just give it a try and roll.
Robilar, the fighter played by Rob Kuntz in one of Gygax’s early Castle Greyhawk dungeon adventures, was part of the old character pantheon who wasn’t a Magic-User. Robilar achieved wealth and fame by wrecking the Temple of Elemental Evil by himself using his wits and reacting to situations with novel ideas. D&D had plenty of rules, but it also had plenty of openings for people to take their own approaches to problems. This is, sadly, a tendency that has diminished in '90s and '00s modern RPG design as many successive games have used rules to straightjacket the game in order to protect it against bad players (as noted above) and recognized that lots of rules can sell more books.

That’s all for today . . . next time, scarcity mechanics in AD&D 1^st edition!

* Miss B_____ did actually play exactly one game session of 4th edition D&D, and she described it as one of her worst experiences in gaming, ever.

How to run (or design) a game of Dark Sun.

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 05:53:33 GMT

I recently picked up and read the 4th edition D&D version of the ol' DARK SUN setting. DARK SUN is a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting from 1991, set in a divergent fantasy world that is a sere desert filled with bizarre creatures and . . . oh, just go read the wikipedia entry.

DARK SUN as a game world has always resonated with me, partly because of its bleakness, partly because of its themes, partly because it does a wonderful job of tearing down and rebuilding many fantasy game stereotypes. I have avidly collected material from the game line for quite some time, so I hesitantly picked up the latest iteration of the setting, the 4th edition D&D books.

Unfortunately, the 4th edition version of DARK SUN veers heavily away from the elements that made the game so memorable. This is a shame because the heavy hand of marketing is clearly all over the books. It seems that marketing departments in game companies just can't leave development well enough alone.

The real problem that I have is that it is not hard to run a good DARK SUN game. The game has several prominent themes, many of which are explicitly called out in the game books. Promote these themes and you can have a great time in the DARK SUN campaign setting. Ignore them and you start to slide into a mish-mash of ideas that don't hold together.

1. Athas (the world of the DARK SUN campaign setting) is a world of resource scarcity.
Metal is very rare on Athas. So is fresh water or shelter outside of the forbidding city-states. Survival is a major undertaking. Low-level characters in DARK SUN games should be struggling to make ends meet. In the city-states, everyone already owns everything good -- metal, water, shelter. Outside of the city-states, resources are so rare that it's easy to get lost and die in the desert wastes. Characters struggle to procure the resources that they need, and along the way they may have to shank a few fools. When you get your hands on something really good -- a metal sword, access to a well, knowledge of a hidden oasis -- it's really worth something and everyone else wants to take it from you.
This theme also appears in the fact that characters in Athas are tougher than most other D&D setting characters. They have to survive on their own, with their own strength and toughness instead of magical trinkets and metal armor.

2. The environment in Athas is ruined as a result of bad choices and the evils of greed, corruption, and lust for power.
Arcane magic in Athas -- wizardry -- is inherently dangerous to living things, and used recklessly will ruin the landscape. The entire ecosystem is precariously close to devastation due to defiling magic. Anyone who uses arcane magic must make hard choices about whether to follow that same road, even when survival is at stake. Is one person's life worth the cost of further polluting an already denuded landscape? Players have a chance to be responsible in their use of magic, but there is always the temptation to slide into defiling. No arcanist is safe from this temptation. Similarly, those who reject arcane magic completely must still come to grips with the reality that the sorcerer-kings who despotically rule the city-states are masters of wizardry and likely can only be deposed with the help of wizardry in return.
Characters can set as long-term goals the restoration of part of the ecosystem of Athas, but even that route is fraught with peril; the ancient history of the world set it on its path to destruction due to misguided attempts to change the world's evolution.

3. The hostile environment is a backdrop for the heroes' perilous choices.
Environmental challenges, though they are rampant throughout Athas, are not key to the game. If you make 60 Constitution checks against dehydration and fail some of them and die, this is not compelling, dramatic, or heroic. Rather, the environmental hazards of the setting serve to heighten the tension of the dilemmas and challenges that characters face. A rampaging monster is even more dangerous if the characters have gone without water for two days already. A corrupt templar who controls the local well can extort the characters into doing awful things just so that they can get the water that they need in order to survive. The heat, sandstorms, and desert visages of Athas are a means to create a more dangerous setting for the hazards that the characters face.
In my own DARK SUN games, I give the players small blue glass beads to represent their water supply. When it's time to drink some of that water, the players have to give up the tokens. As the supply of tokens dwindles, people get suspicious. They get nervous about having enough water for the next day. They start to hoard their water and look greedily at other people's tokens. The immediacy of having that measure of survival right in front of the players heightens the tension.

4. The changes wrought in the environment are reflected in the creatures of Athas.
DARK SUN was novel in its conception partly because it turned many of the character types into barely-recognizable variants of their usual fantasy versions. Elves are insular, desert-running tribes of scoundrels. Dwarves are hairless and live in human cities. Halflings are cannibals. Each character type had a core piece of its identity intact, but altered by the harsh strangeness of the setting. The monsters, too, are bizarre and tend more toward reptiles and insects than the fantasy tropes of evil humanoids or legendary beasts. Everything uses psychic powers, just as a simple survival mechanism.
If you accept the fundamentals of the DARK SUN setting, you need to embrace these changes in theme and physical form for the characters and creatures of Athas. You can't tell players "Oh, those work just like normal, but we only changed the name." The world is a dangerous place filled with bizarre oddities, not a desert setting that is the home for the marketing department to plop down a few disparate critters that tested well with player surveys about what they liked in the Forgotten Realms setting.

These themes then give you the tools to build your DARK SUN campaign.
Low-level characters are concerned with survival. While they have formidable physical abilities and innate psychic powers, these are just to give them a chance to survive the hardships of the world. In an urban setting, everything necessary for survival is owned by someone else. Characters have to work as gladiators, miners, thieves, or scavengers in order to scrape by. All of this is overseen by a corrupt bureaucracy of templars who will line their pockets and exploit the characters with the threat of enslavement, fines, or mutilation -- possibly even execution. Characters who flee the city-states have a whole different set of problems; they have to find water, food, shelter. Any place that's habitable is already inhabited by someone or some thing. Gathering resources in the wild is incredibly difficult, and characters will constantly be challenged by monsters, slave-traders, and enemy tribes, all in the context of the harsh environment that makes facing these difficulties even harder.
Mid-level characters have earned their metal weapons and secured their ability to survive against the harsh backdrop of Athas. Now people will look to them for inspiration and guidance. Gladiators and fighters have become heroic figures, and people flock to their banners in hopes of following a great war leader to prosperity. Clerics and druids deliver the message of their elemental powers, but this message is a challenge to the authority of the templars -- a war of ideas; a charismatic priest will rally the mob and turn them into devoted followers. Preservers secretly advance their art by finding ways to communicate with others of their ilk, whether through the Veiled Alliance or through other underground channels. Thieves and bards establish a broad social network that helps to direct them to the best pickings and the wealthiest scores in the city, but this at the same time exposes them to the dangers of struggling against the nobles and templars who try to catch them. Psionicists start to teach other students to harness their innate psychic talents, or seek seclusion where they can further hone their talents without interruption.
High-level characters have moved beyond simple regional concerns and now try to reshape themselves or their world. Spellcasters try to repair the damage done to Athas' environment, often by undergoing radical personal metamorphosis in the process. (Evil magicians hasten the demise of the world in order to further their personal agendas.) Warriors lead great armies that have a chance of overthrowing sorcerer-kings. Rogues inspire entire tribes of slaves to seek freedom and personal determination. Psionicists pit themselves against the Order, fighting against other great minds to determine the proper role of the psyche in the world at large.

That's all there is to it. DARK SUN is not a hard game to run -- or to develop.

It's a damn shame that the 4th edition iteration dropped the ball. Perhaps the 5th edition (sorry, "D&D Next") will deliver on these old promises.

1st edition AD&D: Why do orcs carry coins?

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:47:50 GMT

"Everyone has a purpose in life, even if it's just to serve as a negative example."

Among the many oddball game mechanics of 1st edition AD&D (and carried over into the Basic set and its successors) was the notion that your characters gained experience by bringing treasures back home. It's like the Zork game, where you score your points by bringing the treasures back to the empty house and putting them in the trophy case. If you made it out of the dungeon with a sack of gold and brought the money home, you earned experience points, which in turn put you that much closer to gaining your next level of experience!

. . . this makes very little sense, of course. How come digging ancient coins out of a dungeon makes me a better magician? Shouldn't my skills be improved more by facing peril, exercising my special skills, and learning from my mistakes?

By 2nd edition this convention was mostly gone. (Mostly.) Thieves still earned experience from money -- after all, that was ostensibly their motivation: get filthy rich as quickly as possible! Nobody else did, though. Instead characters earned experience from doing things related to their character class roles. Mages earned experience from casting spells. Fighters earned bonus points from killing things.

Paragraph five, and I haven't even mentioned orcs yet. Hang on.

Now, aside from the fact that 1st edition AD&D included costs for training to gain levels that were so high that some characters could never afford them even after hauling out enough money to gain a level from gold alone, this mechanic did serve an interesting function. By the time of 3rd edition D&D, the game included a table listing how much money a PC was expected to have at each level. This provided a nice expectation of how much treasure characters should earn and what the total value of their gear should be. This way, DMs could easily eyeball a list of treasure and have an idea if it would make the PCs really powerful, or leave them in relative paucity, which was important because gear has a big effect on what PCs can do. If you never give out a magic sword as treasure, then that monster that can only be hurt by magic weapons becomes a big deal!

In 1st edition, the expectation of treasure is tied to experience points. You'll earn most of your character's experience points from treasure. If you're not gaining treasure, you don't gain levels, and you keep playing low-level adventures until your character dies or strikes it rich. If you're getting a lot of treasure, you gain levels quickly, and you jump to harder challenges. In a sense, 1st edition AD&D had a built-in expectation of how much treasure you gained, in that characters with lots of treasure were de facto high level characters, while characters with very little treasure were low level.

Now, consider the humble orc. The orc is a typical adversary for first-level characters -- maybe even somewhat higher level characters, when in large groups or with exceptional leaders like shamans and fighters. If the expectation is that defeating some number of monsters gives your character experience points, and that your character should gain some amount of treasure, then your characters have to gain treasure from defeating the orcs. Click the mouse, hit the monster, monster goes POP and coins fly out! That's how it worked in Diablo, after all.

But why would orcs have pockets full of copper pieces? Orcs as traditionally presented in (A)D&D come from the model in Tolkien's novels. They're a species of physically powerful creatures of limited intellect with rampaging appetites and full of wrath and hate. They are evil by definition, because they were created by a greater evil power as servants. (That's Tolkien's model -- D&D leans on the assumption that orcs are the creations of evil orcish gods, for the most part, but that invokes the issue of asking why the orcish gods must be evil.) More importantly, orcs are typically portrayed as being unintelligent, uninterested in crafts or arts or education, short-sighted, and mean-spirited. That is, they have below-average Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores. It's hard for them to work together, because they are all nasty people (low Charisma). They have trouble planning, delaying gratification, and resisting temptation (low Wisdom). They aren't very good at skilled crafts or planning (low Intelligence). This is a formula for a culture (such as it is) that functions only in small bands where might makes right and they take what they want through violence. They're not farmers or craftsmen. Perhaps a few orcs make weapons, because they need weapons to conquer. Beyond that, it's all brigandry and conquest. The quintessential D&D orc is made to fight adventurers. So money isn't really part of their lives.

Consider: If orcs do not have an economy, if they don't have towns, if they don't engage in commerce, then they have no use for coins. What good is a gold piece if there's nowhere to spend it? The only thing that orcs respect is strength. If an orc wants something, he takes it. If it's owned by someone else, he fights and kills that person and takes it, or loses and slinks away (assuming that he survives). Coins are worthless to them. If a band of orcs overcomes an adventuring party, the orcs would happily take all the weapons. They might take armor and food, too. But money? Useless! What, is the orc going to walk into town and haggle over a pie? Obviously not.

So why do orcs carry coins? Because monsters must have loot. Even in the notes in the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, Gary Gygax says that there must be great treasure to be had. It makes some sense if you consider the fate of many adventurers. Adventuring is a fool's game. You can settle down on the farm, raise some kids, have a reasonably secure life as long as your lord keeps the land safe in the starter town. Going forth for fortune, glory, and magic items, that's a good way to die horribly. The incentive -- the treasure -- must outweigh the risk! So the monsters must have treasure -- not for them, but for the adventurers.

A clever DM can work around this to some degree. Even orc-weapons and orc-armor must be made of metal that can be salvaged. Adventurers might bring back such spoils as trophies, or to sell to blacksmiths as raw materials. The orcs need never have a coin, while the heroes secure their money supply in trade by taking spoils back from the orcs. Orc leaders and orc chiefs will have tools, objects of art, perhaps even magic items that they've garnered from their raids -- and of course the meanest orcs have the best loot, not only because they beat up the other orcs and all of the wealth trickles up to the despots, but because the toughest monsters must have the greatest treasure! But can you really eke out a thousand gold pieces of value from low-grade orc-armaments? And can the local blacksmith afford to pay you a thousand gold pieces per party member for those things? Probably not . . . so the orcs wind up having pockets full of coins.

Another possibility is to look back to the inspiration first taken by Gygax and Arneson back in the mists of '74. In Tolkien's world, orcs were the servants of greater powers. Perhaps the orcs have no economy of their own, but they may bow to someone who does. A powerful evil lord, a wicked priest, a cruel dragon -- all of these might value coins. Orcs could be ordered to steal money and bring it back to these masters, or perhaps the orcs do have a marketplace -- an EEEEVIL marketplace -- where they can use these coins to purchase weapons, armor, and trinkets from other vendors who value such coin and will put up with rude, crass, brawl-prone customers.

Of course, since orcs as described in the Monster Manual would be opportunistic, they will be more than happy to move into the ruined remains of a village or castle that they've overrun. Indeed, orcs are inhabitants not only of caves, but of many a dungeon for low-level characters. Such places might still have hidden stashes of treasure, left behind by their former inhabitants. To the typical orc, a sack of coins is probably useless and might well be left in a basement where it lies. The orcs are probably more concerned with looting weapons and food. That's what the adventurers are counting on when they raid ruins and dungeons: Ancient coins, lost gold and jewels, perhaps even gemstones that have lain undisturbed since their original owners died long ago.

Naturally, you can change this up by changing the orc. Give orcs an economy, and they do have a use for coins. In fact, since orcs are presented as subterranean -- they can't stand daylight in D&D, or in Tolkien's work -- they may very well dig up their own gold and silver and make their own coins. (No wonder dwarves hate them -- the orcs dig up the same metal that dwarves do, and then make shoddy things with it.) Not all orcs are created equal: Some may be smarter, more charismatic -- the orcs who take up crafts and trade, unique among their fellows, who convince thugs to protect them from the other orcs who would rob and kill them. Perhaps the orc chief hoards coin so that he can purchase his own magic weapons or hire mercenaries to fight on his behalf, or to strike a bargain with an evil wizard. In such a scheme, the lower orcs on the totem pole would collect coins to turn over to the chief, and if the chief values it, it must have worth -- suddenly coins do become a valuable source of barter; if you can turn over a large stash of coins to the chief, you gain value and esteem in his eyes. Coins are not just an economic resource, but a status symbol in such a tribe.

The more you want orcs to actually have a use for coins, the more you have to make them like actual people. Their motivations must include some reason to gather coins, other than an obsessive-compulsive Chinese-vampire-like need to pick up every copper piece they see. That means they have to trade those coins or use them somehow, which means that they have to work with others. They have to see a value in using coins, and reason out that sometimes coins are better than just brawling. This is hard to do if you assume that most of your orcs are chaotic evil and have an Intelligence of 8 and a Charisma of 6.

Unfortunately, the more you humanize the orc, the harder you make it to justify using them as villains. In many D&D adventures, it's OK to kill orcs because, well, they're orcs! They're evil, they're dumb, and they want to kill you. It's that simple. Doesn't matter if the orcs never sally forth from their Cave of Chaos to challenge the Keep on the Borderlands. Your paladin can detect their evil automatically, and that's all the justification you need to slide a sword into their guts. Your young daughter who's just learning the game doesn't have to worry about the moral ramifications of killing someone who might be a person. You kill the orc and take its treasure.

wickedthought examined the orcs-as-people question through his game Orkworld, which presented the equation from the orks' perspective -- a culture that hadn't yet reached the technological and social sophistication of the humans and elves around it, and that risked extinction at their hands. Certainly in a typical D&D campaign the PCs wouldn't hesitate to eliminate every orc they encounter, and in Dark Sun one of the great movers and shakers of the campaign history actually succeeded in total orcish genocide.

So we're left with a problem. If orcs are automatically evil -- if they're made by some evil person, or were created long ago by a sorcerer or deity or fluke of magic that left them inherently, intrinsically, unsalvageably evil -- then of course adventurers need to kill them; you can't reason with them or change them or expect them to hold to any kind of deal and not betray you the moment that the situation allows. But those kinds of orcs also are the least likely to have any kind of economy that values coins. If they serve a greater evil power that is stronger than they are, then they might have the chance to find value in money, and this could certainly be part of the architecture of a campaign -- but it's generally not the assumption of the adventure module that sends some PCs into a dungeon for two or three game sessions of fun that's unconnected to a greater plotline. If orcs aren't automatically evil and/or dumb then they are more likely to reasonably have coins, but the kinds of creatures that use money and engage in trade are also the kinds of creatures that you can talk to, deal with, maybe compromise with, reach some kind of accord. Then you have to open the door to the possibility that maybe your adventurers aren't just killing orcs, they're negotiating, arguing over territory, fighting over resources -- you're not just wiping out vermin; you're going to war against a neighboring state. In that sense, the orcs are like people who look different, maybe think a bit different. Maybe they still have problems -- they don't get along well with others, they have bad tempers and short attention spans and they're better at fighting than at talking.

AD&D 1st edition didn't really deal with these questions. The orcs had coins because monsters had to have treasure. Later we got farmer orcs in the Forgotten Realms and orcs with uneasy ties to local human communities in Scardale and Rashemen. But since orcs were always described as being in separate tribes with their own customs and beliefs, it was still ok for your adventurers to kill orcs in the local dungeon, because those orcs were bad even if the other orcs were good. And the half-orc in your party was a good guy! Maybe.

What if the orcs don't have coins, but you get the money from the local baron or sheriff who puts a bounty on orcs? They do raid farms and kill people and cattle and steal things, after all. They're like tribal bandits that refuse to bow to the law of the land. Maybe you can take an ear or a topknot as proof . . .

Yeah, it's a bit of a problem. (You have now hit your USDA recommended daily allowance of cultural insensitivity.)

Peace out.

1st Edition AD&D: Why have character classes?

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 09:04:32 GMT

The origin of character classes is, of course, part of the shrouded history of role-playing games, but it's not hard to see it. D&D (and later, AD&D) came from the miniature wargame Chainmail, in which players manipulated various military units. Obviously each of those units had some set of characteristics and a role to play on the battlefield. When players made the jump to controlling individuals instead of units, why not use the same sort of divide? The individual you controlled would have a set of characteristics based on what that individual was supposed to do.
. . . of course, there's also the issue of randomly-rolled ability scores, and nonhuman races and their effect on the characters, and . . .
. . . that's really all tangential to the character class business at hand. This hypothesis might not even be correct.

Anyway, character classes came with the earliest editions of D&D -- the Fighting Man, the Magic-User, and the Cleric. As mentioned in Matt Colville's excellent post about playing the early editions of D&D on his blog Squaremans, all of these characters had essentially one thing that they would do. The Fighting Man swings a weapon once per turn. The Magic-User has one spell to cast, once! Same for the Cleric. It wasn't until later that the Thief, the Paladin, and the other classes made their appearances.

By the time of AD&D 1st edition, there's a fairly broad range of classes. The ranger has arrived, somewhat changed from a prior appearance in Dragon magazine. Same with the illusionist. The druid, the paladin, the monk, and the thief all were in prior D&D0 books. The assassin is there. The bard has an appendix for its unusual, specialty case. Each class has its set of features. Some of them are redundant -- the paladin does everything that the fighter does, with more bonuses and more restrictions. It's the use of various ability score requirements that enforces scarcity. Not everyone can play a paladin, because you won't always roll a 17 score in Charisma!

Now, after D&D, there's a riot of other games that show up -- some from TSR, many from other companies. Almost immediately, people start making games that are not fantasy adventure games. Games like Metamorphosis Alpha, Bushido, Recon, Boot Hill. Many of these games have no character classes at all. Instead, people roll for their abilities, but there's no class distinction. In some cases people may actually get to pick some of their abilities. In Traveller, players can choose -- to some degree -- the sorts of skills that they learn as they pursue careers. Of course, as a trade-off, their characters can die during the creation process . . .

Eventually all of this design leads to a sort of divide. AD&D and many other games, like the Palladium games, all have character classes. A plethora of other games, like Marvel Super Heroes, West End's Star Wars, and Paranoia do not. Instead they provide lists of skills and abilities to define characters. Thus begins the great gap between class-based systems and skill-based systems.

All through the '90s there's an explosion of skill-based systems. AD&D grafts on its own skill systems with Non-Weapon Proficiencies, which appear in late 1st edition books, become a full (albeit not well-integrated) system in 2nd edition, and finally adds a unified skill system in the 3rd edition. Meanwhile, games like Champions, GURPS, and the World of Darkness series promise nothing but skills. Players have a number of points, and they pick the powers they want a la carte. In some cases, such as the World of Darkness, there are limitations in certain categories, so you can't spend all of your points on one super-power. In others, like Champions, the game designers actually provide examples of how to spend your points in ridiculous ways to make characters that are nonsensical and really not useful for any sort of normative gameplay. (The World of Darkness actually has sort-of classes, because its various clans/tribes/traditions/splats define how you can spend your points.) Game players and designers promote this as the new thing. You can build just the character you want. No arbitrary restrictions! No limits on what your character can and can't do! Pick what you want to be great at, make your character great!

By the end of the '90s we start to see a problem. Game designers create systems in which the draw is the ability to pick through a list of skills and powers and choose (or create!) the ones you want. To compete with other games or to sell more books, they keep creating more skills and more powers. GURPS winds up having over 300 skills. The World of Darkness games sell companion books with new secondary skills, additional clans/tribes/traditions/splats, and new powers to go with them. The level of complexity keeps going up and up.

So . . . you're making a vampire character for a World of Darkness game. You have a copy of the Vampire Players' Guide. You decide to spend some points on the Security skill, since you want your vampire to know how to break into places and sneak into people's homes. But wait! the Players' Guide has Lockpicking as a separate skill. Do you take Security? Do you take Lockpicking? Do you have to split your limited points between both? Do you even know to look in the supplement for Lockpicking if this is your first time playing the game?

You decide that this is too much work and you jump into Shadowrun 3rd edition instead. You have a wiz street samurai and you're in your first fight with some punks, and you decide to gut one with your cyberspurs. Except . . . cyberspurs don't use your Edged Combat skill; they have their own skill, Cyber-Weapon Combat. In which you didn't put any points, because you didn't know. Oops!

The very flexibility that was the hallmark and selling point of skill-based systems, becomes their downfall.

Of course, the modern incarnations of D&D have their own robust skill systems. They have to -- players expect to be able to choose skills for their characters, to have some direction over what they play and to be able to make characters as mainstream or as oddball as they want.

Character classes, it turns out, offer handholds that afford useful hooks for players. A character class:
1. Guarantees that you won't forget something important. If you want to play a character who swings swords all day long, you pick a fighter (or similar crazy class with fighty powers). You know right off the bat that you can pick up and swing those swords, use the good armor, and get the good attack bonuses and powers. It's built into the class.
2. Makes an easy choice for character creation. If you're a new player and you don't know what any of this RPG stuff means or how you play, it's really simple for the gamemaster to say "Do you want to play the guy who casts magic spells, the one who is all sneaky, or the one who clobbers things in combat?" Bam, choice of character class is made, and your fundamental characteristics are ready to go. Depending on the game, you may have some or many ancillary choices to make. But you don't have to have an entire skill and power structure explained to you, then spend the next several hours trying to pore over a list of 300 skills to pick the ones that you think will let you do what you want to do. (If you're unlucky, you might be stuck with a game system where the skills aren't intuitive, and you build a character whose skills don't do what you want.)
3. Provides niche protection. Since gaming is a social activity, chances are you're playing with a few friends. So what happens if everybody decides that they are playing sword-swingers? Maybe you have a great time ripping through enemies; if you know what you're doing and that's the kind of game you want to play, no problem. But maybe you wind up playing and nobody can deal with the magical problems that come up, people keep getting blown away by traps, and the one guy in your group who min-maxes all his characters spends all the time cleaning up the monsters and rolling over the challenges while everyone else is bored. And there's nothing like boredom to kill a game group. Character classes allow you to assign fundamental roles to the party, and make sure that those roles are covered. Then, in any game that assumes the use of those roles, you know that everyone will have a chance to do what they do best -- a chance to shine. Even in skill-based systems this idea comes up; in Shadowrun your new character can't reliably be a street samurai and a decker and a mage. But you probably need all of those to complete your runs, so everybody plays a role and everyone has their chance to kick ass.

Of course, skill-heavy systems excel in other ways. For experienced players, they allow you to build a character that doesn't fit into a ready mold. You don't have to pore through obscure supplements to find a character class that exactly fits your idea. (Ever try playing a cleric/rogue in D&D 3rd edition? It's a pain in the ass because it's not an idea well-supported by their choices of classes.) You can optimize your point spending to make sure that your character excels with spike performance in specific areas, and ignore other areas that are not important to your character. You can often built in interesting character background elements through the use of bonuses and penalties that can cost or give you points, respectively. But you have to know what you're doing. And it's easy to screw up. Many point-based games provide pre-generated characters as examples, but if your goal is to make your own perfectly customized character, odds are that what you want won't be the same as what's in the book!

For this reason, class-based systems still have something to teach us. When we play tabletop role-playing games with our friends, everyone is there to have a good time. Everyone wants to contribute and have an opportunity to feel like their character did something special -- whether it's smiting a bad guy, protecting the party with a spell, or having that moment of a moral dilemma that provides powerful drama. Character classes help to provide defined roles that tell players "Here are the characters that you need to succeed" and "Here's how you can split up your duties so that everyone has something important to do." They also make it easy for new players to grab on and jump in -- if you enjoy Conan stories, you can just say "I want to play a barbarian" and let the game give you a set of thematically-appropriate abilities. Conversely, you're stuck with the templates as given, until and unless you and your group start tinkering to customize your individual characters, because by the time you have some experience under your belt, you start realizing that the best way to make the game fun is to make it play your way.

Another artifact of mad genius? Or just a slow evolution from wargaming? I don't know, but hey, it gives me something to write about at 2 AM.

1st edition Ad&D: Gygax's mad genius and the sweet spot level

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 22:28:30 GMT

Many game systems have popped up in the last couple years promoting "1st edition feel!" or a return to the "good old days" of gaming. Some of them attempt to be straight up open-license carbon copies of 1st edition AD&D. Of course, none of them can actually recapture the magic of 1st edition AD&D, because a big part of that magic was the fact that 1st edition AD&D was experimental and none of us knew what the heck we were doing when we played it back in the day, and it was a crazy, unformed time with friends just knocking around having fun.

Nowadays folks like to think of the modern game design as more sophisticated and more polished, which it generally is, and there's a mix of nostalgia and derision for early role-playing game design. It's not entirely undeserved -- early RPGs have some mind-bogglingly complicated exceptions to the rules, but there are also some hidden gems.

Anyone who's played a lengthy campaign of 3rd edition D&D (or 3.5, or Pathfinder) recognizes that there's a "sweet spot" for gameplay around levels 3-12. Your characters are competent enough that instant death is unlikely as a result of a single die roll, but they are not so complicated that finishing your combat turn takes a dozen choices and multiple references to multiple rulebooks. Beyond this level -- sometimes a bit earlier, sometimes a bit later, depending on how you built your character, but often exacerbated in Pathfinder because it makes characters even more complex -- the level of character options and the demands of gameplay choices make it hard to actually play the game. You spend so much time making sure that you have the optimum spells and powers, and computing all of your bonuses, that it slows down combat and even some non-combat situations. Heaven help you if one of your players is new to the game; it's going to come to a screeching halt. Plus there's the implicit contract in the latest editions of games, in which the rule books are supposed to cover every eventuality; the more complex your character and the greater your number of choices, the greater the likelihood that some action will devolve into a book war with players and GMs rushing to look up obscure rules to figure out who's "right."

Interestingly, 1st edition AD&D sidestepped all of this with a clever bit of design. It's rarely recognized as such, though, because the reasons for this design were never explicitly stated.

In 1st edition AD&D, your character classes come with associated "level titles." Your fighter might be a Swashbuckler, or a Hero, or a Veteran. This title is automatically assigned at a specific level, so this can cause some goofiness, because why is my greatsword-wielding, plate-armor-wearing fighter considered a Swashbuckler? At one point, level titles were so pervasive that in some adventure modules, NPCs were referred to by their level titles and if you wanted to know what level they actually were, you had to look it up in the class table.
Now, one of the built-in assumptions of AD&D is that low-level characters have adventures in dungeons, mid-level characters have adventures traveling overland, and high-level characters are landowners whose adventures are mostly political and warfare related, with the occasional jaunt into heroics. This divide is so explicit in D&D that the boxed Basic, Expert, and Companion sets made the division along the fault lines of the sets themselves; Basic characters tackled small dungeons, Expert characters went on long trips to wilderness locales, Companion characters ran their own landed domains, and Master characters engaged in the epic quests for immortality.
A consequence of this combination of level titles and implicit adventure styles is that characters in 1st edition AD&D have "name levels" -- the level at which you gain your final title. After this, you don't gain a new title, but you also stop gaining hit dice. In effect, your levels beyond this are fairly trivial (unless you're a magic-user and looking to gain high-level spells, of course). A fighter going from 9th level to 10th level gains 3 hit points with no bonus for Constitution. It's a drop in the bucket after 9d10 + Constitution bonus at each level.
What's going on here? Well, essentially, your game's got a soft level cap. Sure, you can gain as many levels as you want . . . but the returns for doing so are very limited. A fighter gains very little for gaining levels after 9th -- just a few hit points, maybe the occasional improvement in attack rolls or saving throws, and a better attack rate at level 13.
Contrast this with the 3/3.5/Pathfinder model, in which your character's linear advancement continues at every level. At high levels, your characters will have hundreds of hit points, with correspondingly ridiculously high attack bonuses and saving throw bonuses, plus any level-scaled class features at extremely high levels. As anyone who's played in an epic level game can attest, the system starts to break down because the divide grows too great between characters who have a high bonus and characters who don't. A 30th level fighter's attack bonus is so much higher than everyone else in the party that enemies whose armor class is challenging to the fighter are untouchable to the cleric or the rogue!

So 1st edition AD&D had a built-in mechanism for limiting your character's level scaling. After name level, your character's hit point gain slowed down, as did most other ancillary benefits. Some didn't -- the design was inconsistent, after all -- but a 12th-level fighter was really not too much tougher than a 9th level fighter. At that level, the character gained more benefit from magic items than from extra levels, really. A few character classes do not have a name level at which hit die progression stops, but these are all classes that have a built-in level cap -- the druid, the monk, and the assassin. They all stop at level 14-17 anyway!

Now, of course the fighter continued to improve in attack rolls. A fighter's attack table improves every other level up to level 17 in 1st edition AD&D. But, unlike the constant increase in Base Attack Bonus of 3/3.5/Pathfinder, there's another built-in limiter in the system: Armor Class. The ol' 1st edition Armor Class (which starts at 10, and goes down to get better) drops to -10 and ostensibly doesn't go below that. (A couple of monsters have AC better than -10, but one of them is a god with -12, who can't be attacked unless she allows people to attack her anyway!) There's a range of 21 points of Armor Class, and that's it. Essentially, your Armor Class "tops out," just like hit dice.

Speaking of hit dice, those don't just top out for PCs, they top out for monsters, too. Monsters top out at 16 hit dice. After that, a monster may be more dangerous because it has more special abilities and more bonuses, but no monster gets beyond the 16 hit die tables for attacks and saving throws.

Maybe it's incidental, or maybe it's an artifact of Gary Gygax's mad genius, but in 1st edition AD&D, you are actually playing a game that's built to keep your characters in the sweet spot. After name level, many of your improvements are fairly small. There comes a point at which your character cannot improve any more -- you can't eke out any more armor class, you can't get a better attack table, you can't get better saving throws; you can only add bonuses from magic items and spells. This, of course, makes sense when you go with the implicit gameplay that goes with name level: You gain the ability to construct a stronghold or guildhouse, and you're expected to be playing politics now, which means that more hit points and better attack rates are not really going to be much help anyway.

One pundit on the internet proposed what he called "E6," a campaign using the 3e rules in which characters simply don't advance beyond level 6. This comes from a similar impetus. In effect, 3/3.5/Pathfinder attempted to be infintely scalable, but with infinite scalability comes infinite complexity. At some point the system overburdens the players with too many choices, too many modifiers, and a breakdown between the values for optimized characters in a field vs. non-optimized characters -- at the very high levels, it's just far too easy to have a character who will never make a saving throw, always be hit by monsters, or never be able to score a hit in combat, because the gulf between character abilities becomes so great. (The epic level sourcebook tried to address this by making advancements in attack bonus and saving throws flat for all characters, but the gulf is already there.)

This hidden level cap plays into another important factor: demi-human level limits. If your fighter gains only minimal improvements after level 9, then a level limit of 7 or 8 is not nearly as punitive to a demi-human character. A half-orc, who can become a 10th level fighter, has just as many opportunities to build a stronghold and participate in high-level play (with magic items contributing much of his combat power) as any human character! For characters with low level caps, like a half-elf cleric or a halfling fighter, it's obvious that the intent is to use those classes in a multiclass format to supplement another class's abilities -- a halfling who wants a little extra combat ability is a fighter/thief, and even if he only has 4 levels as a fighter, he can advance as a thief with no limit and he gains the benefits of using better weapons and starting with more hit points.

Sadly, none of this reasoning is explained anywhere in 1st edition AD&D. So was it mad genius? Or just a fluke of design? With Gygax and Arneson deceased, we may never know, unless someone manages to ask one of their players.

Next up: Why have character classes at all?

Holy Constitutional writ.

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:31:04 GMT

I've seen discussion about the Tea Party protests and Occupy Wall Street protests that all lean on the same basic principle of Constitutionality -- often discussing infringement of various civil rights, typically from the original Bill of Rights. OWS protesters tend to point out that "free speech zones" are a violation of the first amendment protections of free speech and assembly, and that police use of pepper spray and batons on unarmed, unresisting protesters is a violation of fourth amendment protections of due process. Tea Partiers I'm less familiar with, but a lot of them seem focused on the fear that the government will take away their guns in violation of the second amendment's protection of militia formations. (I'll leave the validity of the arguments of either group out of the equation for now, as that is not the focus of this commentary.)

What fascinates me is that both of these underscore a specific presupposition that enters the national dialogue at a very basic level: The notion that Constitutionality, or legitimacy implied by the "Founding Fathers" (which, depending upon the specifics of the discussion, might include only the architects of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, or might extend an umbrella over all of the writers and activists involved in the separation of the United States from Great Britain). This is, itself, a form of flawed argument: Appeal to authority. Folks keep going back to this notion that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are unimpeachable authorities, and that anything that contravenes them (and, in common extensions, the "intent" of the Founders) is thus wrong.

Now, the Constitution is a real marvel of a document, both in its attempt to create a system of government that rejected the old feudal model of Europe (notably by including the work of then-modern philosophers as well as inspiration from other local groups such as the Iroquois Nations) and in its ability to inspire a government in spite of its incredible vagueness in some of its provisions. This does not, however, mean that it is a supernatural document, nor that it should always be taken as a given that the Constitution is itself correct in all things. Indeed, the very notion of a Constitutional amendment presupposes that the Constitution may need modification from time to time.

Thus, when people attempt to justify their positions by referencing "Constitutionality," they are falling into an old trap -- the use of a specific document, "holy writ" if you will, to justify a position, rather than relying on actual reasoning. Of course, the Constitution does determine legality in the U.S., but "legal" is not the same as "appropriate." (See the Jim Crow laws for an example of legal-but-inappropriate.) The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights also do enshrine very important principles of liberty and equality (well, with a few amendments along the way), but we must remember that these are documents almost 200 years old; they say almost nothing about many matters considered modern issues. The original Constitution doesn't talk at all about abortion, gay marriage, file sharing, entanglement of investment and savings financial institutions, or the internet. How could it? Many of these simply weren't issues when it was written. Legal interpretation has often had to rely on a "halo effect," the implication that the Constitution protects all rights and that simply because a right is not explicitly enumerated doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

This has an unfortunate side-effect, though, of blunting reasoned debate. When people talk about these modern issues, especially in the context of the Tea Party or the OWS protests, they often talk about the Constitutionality of things going on. Do gay people have a right to marry? Do individual business owners have a right to discriminate against specific ethnicities or religions? Over and over you'll hear sound bytes about a "Constitutionally-protected right" as if that completely resolves the matter. These protected rights get thrown about on both sides of the arguments -- on the one hand, the fourteenth amendment guarantees that all citizens of the U.S. shall have all the same rights; doesn't that protect gay people's right to marry the partner of their choice? The first amendment prohibits the government's interference in religion and vice versa; doesn't that mean that the government can't pass a law that prohibits religious people from discriminating against other people who are considered a violation of their religious standards?

If you keep going back to the well of "This is Constitutional" or "This is what the Founding Fathers believed," you are going back to argument by authority. You're asserting that some final authority justifies a particular law or action, without actually examining the ramifications of that justification. We live in an era where information is available in greater detail and greater quantities than in any earlier period of humanity, in which we can and should apply critical examination to our policies and our politics. When you're talking about legal precedent, sure, the U.S. Constitution is the ultimate tie-breaker about the law -- when it actually has something to say on the topic.

Should gay people be allowed to marry? Constitutionally, isn't that a protected right? But the real question that should be asked is, why is that right protected? Why do we allow this or not allow it? What is the affect on our society? The answers to those questions are already in, as gay marriage is protected in other parts of the world outside the U.S. -- allowing gay people the right to marry their partners of choice improves their sense of participation in the civic process. They do not feel disenfranchised. They benefit from the rights and protections of such partnership, which encourages them to exercise and protect those rights for everyone. (If only married people get the benefit of not testifying against their spouses, for example, and you're not allowed to be married, what is your incentive to vote to protect that right?) And the kicker is, of course, that the effect on society is mostly negligible. Some gay people get married. They weed the lawn, wash the car, send the kids to school. Life goes on. The world doesn't end.

By this standard, it doesn't matter that the Constitution doesn't talk directly about gay marriage. (It really has very little to say about marriage at all.) By adopting the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as the signature documents of our society, what we're stating is that we have a commitment to a particular way of life -- the so-called American Way that Superman used to champion -- that these documents attempt to support and uphold. To really promote that way of life, we must examine them critically and understand what those documents are trying to do, and how that influences our modern way of living. We need to understand that these are documents trying to codify a system of equal justice, protected rights and liberties, and necessary government for the establishment and protection of a civil society.

Similarly, some folks like to talk about the writings of Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin and use the documents or letters of these Founders to justify various positions. (Pithy quotes are a common favorite.) The reality is, though, that these were just men -- in fact, a subset of people; privileged, land-owning, mostly slave-holding, educated white men. Why should their opinions and their writings necessarily be considered the ultimate authority on politics and law? This is not to say that they are without merit -- these men did attempt to enshrine the ideas of equal treatment and justice. They just weren't perfect, nor should they be considered wholly error-free and without flaw.

Thus, it is incumbent upon us -- people living in the here and now, grappling with the issues of the modern world -- to exercise judgment and rational analysis to inform ourselves and our society about the reasons why we uphold certain social standards and laws. Simply saying "The Constitution says so" or "Ben Franklin had a pithy quote about security and freedom" doesn't cut it. What do we want from our society? Why? How do we get it? To arrive at justice and liberty, we must analyze the reasons behind our laws, the way we implement them, and the values that we claim to uphold.

"The Founding Fathers said . . . " just doesn't cut it any more. It's been over two centuries. As children of the modern age, we must look to modern ideas for our solutions.

The Big Damn Firefly Post.

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 08:08:33 GMT

Spoilers ahoy!

I've spent the last year slowly chewing my way through Firefly and, finally, Serenity, so that I can be familiar with the property. Certainly it has a cachet with a particular viewership, who constitute a rabid fanbase. I've written a little bit about the show on Facebook while digging through it; now here's my full summary.

Firefly raised my hackles from the start because it was originally presented to me as "Star Trek done right." Considering that there are plenty of episodes of Star Trek that do things right, this is really just an inflammatory nerd hipster statement. It's also completely inaccurate inasmuch as Star Trek and Firefly do not, really, have that much in common. Star Trek is usually utopian futurist social commentary. Firefly is a Western that happens to have space ships.

Since Firefly only scratches the science fiction genre in a few episodes -- most of its episodes are heist shows -- the drama from the stories comes from the character interactions, and from the adventures and danger that the characters face, rather than from an examination of the impact of technology and science on the human condition. That means that the show will ride on its ability to deliver clever, insightful characterization as well as the occasional action sequence, which it seems to hit . . . most of the time.

So, without further ado . . . (I originally did this breakdown on Facebook, but I'll see if I can be more comprehensive here.)

The Characters

Malcolm Reynolds: "Mal" is supposed to be the lynchpin of the Serenity, as he owns the ship, decides on the jobs, and barks at the crew. The writers telegraph that he is a bad man by calling him "Mal" (Latin for "bad" or "evil") and he is certainly a scoundrel at best. While the writers tried to soften him a bit early in the show ("The Train Job," in which he winds up handing over desperately-needed medicine that he and the crew stole, and thereby botching a job, which has consequences down the road), it's pretty clear that he's (in the words of Rachel J.) an "emotional retard" and he is quick to rely on violence, threats, and general browbeating. He also talks a lot about loyalty and how anyone who crosses his crew crosses him, but then he proceeds to lay into his own crew and push them into bad positions or even threatens them himself. In short, he's a bully with a quick tongue, who tries to convince everyone that he's protecting them. Protecting them like the Mafia, maybe.
This would be forgivable, as it means that Mal is a very flawed protagonist, except that he also deforms the characterization of people around him. (See notes on Kaylee and Inara, below.) Worse still, in the movie Serenity, the writers are stuck trying to churn out a heroic action sci-fi film, and his motivations suddenly become "noble" in a way that doesn't resonate as consistent.
Mal's major assets seem to be his plethora of war experience and his willingness to shoot, stab, punch, or maim anyone who ticks him off. On the up side, it's a formula for him getting the crew into trouble.

Inara: Inara is ostensibly a nod to having a strong and attractive female character. As a Courtesan she is trained in many arts and in culture, she chooses her clientele, she can walk away from any job that she doesn't like, and she has the backing of a powerful Guild. She knows how to manipulate people, she understands emotions, and she rents a shuttle from Mal, which means that she makes enough money to come and go as she pleases and she's not beholden to the rest of the crew. Spot on, that makes her a stand-up character and a confident woman with a lot to talk about. She can even make or break a job ("Shindig"). Then, of course, we throw Mal into the mix, and her character falls to pieces. There's an obvious undercurrent of desire between Mal and Inara, who absolutely refuse to discuss it. Mal generally responds to it with a cutting remark and then goes about his business. Inara, by contrast, allows it to completely destroy her ("Hearts of Gold,") and lets Mal walk all over her. So much for a strong woman. Wouldn't the first thing you learn at Courtesan school be "Never fall in love with a client or a cohort"? Wouldn't she spend, I dunno, months or years learning to identify these emotions, deal with them, handle them in a constructive way, even manipulate them to get her lovers to do what she wants? Apparently not. While love can make people do crazy things, desire is Inara's business. Thus, the writers manage to completely hamstring their attempts to make her competent, by showing that honestly, she's not that good at her job, and she can easily be used and tossed aside by Mal.
By the end of the first season, Inara finally makes the only viable decision. Destroyed by her desire for Mal, she knows that she must walk away because he will never make good on its promise (in "Objects in Space"). By the time the Serenity movie rolls around, she has apparently done this, and it's only a threat to her in her place of chosen respite that causes her to contact Mal, when forced.
An interesting character who took too long to walk away from an emotionally abusive relationship and thus undercut her own legitimacy as someone who owns her emotions and controls her life.

Wash: Hoban Washburne is an oddity in that he is essentially an unnecessary character. He has a perfunctory relationship with Zoe and a role as the ship's pilot, and he also interjects funny one-liners. His main contribution is that in "War Stories" his jealousy over the connection between Zoe and Mal causes him to create strife, which leads to unexpected twists in the story. Beyond that he's just a wisecracking stick-jockey. This is why he dies in Serenity. He's not necessary to move the story forward.

Zoe: Zoe is Mal's "number one," the strong tiller who keeps the ship on course. So used to taking direction from Mal in the war, she generally does not question his brutal ways, but simply follows orders and makes sure that everyone else stays in line. Zoe is something of a cypher; she is not nearly as talkative as Kaylee or Wash. She knows her job, knows her limits, isn't afraid of a scuffle, and has a deadpan "I will drop you" stare down pat. She also lets down her guard with her husband Wash, which provides for a handy softening of the character from time to time.
Were I to rewrite Firefly, I'd get rid of Mal and make Zoe the captain instead. She's obviously got the skills and the motivation; she simply is stuck living in Mal's shadow. When she takes charge in "War Stories," she shows that she has what it takes to conduct an incredibly dangerous operation without hesitation, and she's able to make snap decisions. All of this shows that she's very much together and phenomenally good at what she does.

Kaylee: As a second strong female character, Kaylee is the upbeat, up-front, chatty counterpoint to Inara's reserved keeper of secrets character. Her job as the ship's engineer makes her absolutely necessary, and shows that she is a woman of great talent and intelligence. For her, mechanics and ship engineering come naturally, and she enjoys them. She enjoys a great many other things, too, and is always happy to share her joy. She's also one of the only ones to regularly question whether the crew is doing "the right thing" -- but when persuaded into a heist, she happily goes along and lends her skills ("Trash"). She's played up as being soft-hearted and smiles, with a genuine charm that draws people to her ("Shindig").
Kaylee unfortunately suffers from one of the same problems as Inara: Mal completely deforms her character. Since Kaylee and Mal don't have the same dynamic as Inara and Mal, the impact is lesser, but it's still noticeable. Mal treats Kaylee's sunny disposition with a surly grumpiness that is undeserved, and he mocks her for her interests (see Kaylee's fawning over the pretty dresses in the beginning of "Shindig"), then when this upsets her, does Mal ever apologize? Does he realize that he can't just treat people like garbage? Of course not. He realizes that he needs Kaylee for a job, so he buys her off by purchasing the pretty dress and using her to get into a ball where she can wear it. And she lets him get away with it. The message is clear: If a woman likes pretty things, you can insult her and mock her and then just buy her off with those pretty things. You don't need to actually apologize to her or recognize that you treated her badly, in order to be allowed to use her. Perhaps the writers didn't intend that message -- but by letting Mal get away with that kind of behavior, that's the message that they establish for him and for Kaylee.
Kaylee's relationship with Dr. Simon Tam (below) is much more straightforward, in that Simon simply has no tongue for it and keeps saying the wrong things, or events interrupt the dynamic that leads to their hook-up. It's charming to watch.

Jayne: Jayne is another bad man. He's also comic relief. His hat ("The Message"), his song ("Jaynestown"), his ill-timed moments of priceless dialog ("Ariel"), his running commentary are all designed to hammer home the fact that he's simple, he's a thug, and he doesn't have two brain cells to rub together. He's also hungry for money, power, and advancement, which constantly sets him at odds with Mal. He's the one who constantly advocates for the simplest way to deal with problems: Kill the source of the problem. Essentially, he's like Mal, except that he's not cunning. Entire episodes ("Jaynestown") are built around the simplicity of his motivations and the ease with which the rest of the crew and the audience can poke fun at him.
Jayne is not, strictly speaking, a necessary character. He does fill the role of raising simple questions for the audience so that other members of the crew can explain their reasoning, or to allow other crew members to seem more sympathetic in contrast to Jayne's often-brutal actions.
Jayne can be occasionally positive. He sends money home to his mother to help his sick sibling ("The Message"). This is likely because he's too simple to be philosophically inclined toward justifying evil deeds. He simply happens to be a guy with big guns and not a lot of brains, who likes to get paid.

Dr. Simon Tam: Simon fills a couple of character niches. First, he's an advocate for River, which gives her a hook into the crew and keeps the rest of the crew from turning on her. Second, he's a romantic foil for Kaylee. Like her, he is a man of conscience, and he's portrayed to grapple with that conscience constantly. His background as a child of civilization, wealth, and privilege allows him to be cast as the uncomfortable outsider to the crew's roguish ways, often with humorous results. He's also the prime mover behind the episode "Ariel," and necessary for the events of River's escape that lead to the Serenity movie.
Simon is an interesting dramatic piece in that he often speaks up against the criminal acts that the crew will commit, but he doesn't know how to resolve the tensions that this creates. As a result he's often and regularly threatened by Mal. This underscores the fact that Mal is a bad man, and it plays as a stand-in symbol to show that people from the civilized Alliance are considered "weak," while people from the rag-tag resistance like Mal and Zoe are "strong." It's essentially a microcosm of the American myth of the "rugged frontiersman individualist" versus the "soft, educated liberal with principles." Given the tone of the show, of course, the doctor is almost always the loser, and is often brutalized for his moral stance. He does, however, get the occasional opportunity to take the high ground, as when patching up Jayne ("Trash").
Simon is a "bridge" character in that he is halfway between the crew and River. He is awkward with people, but not completely alienated like River. He is intelligent, but not on the level of his sister.
Simon is also, unsurprisingly, the character with whom I can best identify. He's intelligent, he wants to help people, he's utterly devoted to the ones he loves, and he's completely inept with women. Sounds familiar.

River Tam: As I noted in my early analysis, River is pretty obvious to science fiction fans right from the outset -- she went to the Ender Wiggin school for gifted youngsters, which means she's a conditioned killing machine. Of course, during the series itself, we don't get to see much of this, other than her gunplay in "War Stories." Beyond that, she has the trope of being the unpredictable crazy person who can get the crew into trouble or get them out. She also motivates Simon's continued presence with the crew.
River is, at heart, not a very complicated character. Her job is generally to freak out and cause some kind of complication, up until her hyper-competence kicks in ("War Stories", "Objects in Space", Serenity movie).

Shepherd Book: Book is almost forgettable as a character, up until he isn't. His job isn't to be the voice of moral authority -- that role falls on Simon's shoulders. Rather, Book is the voice of experience and wisdom. When he speaks from the book, he's just parroting its lines -- he turns a blind eye to the bordello activities in "Heart of Gold," and he certainly doesn't condemn River as a witch along with the superstitious townsfolk in "Safe." Mostly, Book is a tease -- he obviously has a special, hidden past, as hinted at in "Safe." This past is never adequately explained or explored, though it seems likely that Book may have been an operative of the Parliament at some point. What motivated his character to take up orders, and the full depth of his experiences and moral code, will remain sadly unexplored.

The Episodes

Firefly is, as noted earlier, mostly a Western that happens to have space ships. It also has a significant share of heist episodes. Rather than doing a tedious breakdown of the episodes, I'll hit some of the dramatically important points.

Firefly is almost never science fiction. The reason is that science fiction happens when your story is motivated by some conflict or change in the human condition or culture as a result of some hypothetical advancement of science or technology. In Firefly, the characters are still doing the same things that people do every day, just in a different context. You could replace the spaceships with wagons and it would be a frontier-town-hopping Western with most of the stories left largely similar.
Now, some noteworthy bits.

"The Train Job": A straight-up train robbery that meets the producers' demands to "soften" the roguishness of the characters. It does set up the later events in "War Stories," so that's something at least.

"Shindig": This episode really epitomizes everything that's messed up in how Mal deals with his crew. He treats Inara like crap, he insults Kaylee for her taste, then he buys off Kaylee and drags Inara into a duel that threatens to endanger her career. He then stumbles through the duel and barely manages to eke out the next deal.

"Our Mrs. Reynolds": This episode felt very uncomfortable. Mostly it's at Mal's expense, which is a bit different from other episodes that poke fun mostly at Jayne, sometimes Simon, and occasionally Wash. It also shows that the only way that Mal and Inara can be remotely intimate with each other is if one of them is unconscious, and that they can't be honest about their feelings at all. Annoying!

"Jaynestown": This comedy piece is very well done, because it's not just the crew making fun of Jayne, it's everyone on the whole planet (without even realizing it). It's mostly a fun romp with a little morality tale in the mix.

"Out of Gas": The obligatory flashback episode, and a nod to continuity as the compression coil that breaks and provides the lack of air is the same one that Kaylee mentions earlier in the series. This is a necessary episode to show the formation of the crew without just having them talk about it around the dinner table, but it still drags a bit because the flashbacks are interspersed with the tension of Mal's imminent (but averted) demise.

"Ariel": The most heisty heist episode of them all, "Ariel" has much in common with Ocean's Eleven and similar formulas. It even has the complications followed by a betrayal of a team member for a better cut (Jayne's attempt to sell out Simon and River). It's the continuation of part of River's story as well, which makes sense since diagnosing River is what motivates Simon to undertake this job and offer it to the team. Of course, heist stories are fun, and this episode is no exception in that regard. No real wrap-up for the blue-gloved men, though -- we still don't really know anything about them, about the sonic device, why they can get away with killing Alliance personnel with impunity, etc. This is also an episode that plays up Simon's morality, because even though his goal is to diagnose River, he still stops to help a patient who would otherwise die, knowing that doing so jeopardizes the mission.
Props also to Jayne's sudden, perfect utterance of his rehearsed line when it's completely unnecessary. Comedic timing at a good clip.

"War Stories": This is an episode where Zoe really gets to shine. She makes decisions, she takes care of business, she works as leader when Mal's out of the picture. There's also some development for Book (as we learn that he's kind of a stone cold mo-fo), and for River (blindfolded gunplay) and even Kaylee (we see that her sunny disposition cannot handle the stress of combat). In western terms, this is basically the "prison break" episode.

"Trash": Saffron's return works fairly well in this episode, which is another heist episode. Naturally Saffron is the betrayer, but she is also betrayed in turn.

"The Message": One of the few actual science fiction episodes, since the story hinges on Tracey's special cargo -- vat-grown organs that have been transplanted into his body, and which must be transported in a living human shell in order to remain viable. Of course, Tracey manages to ruin this cargo, too. This episode also treats us to Jayne's hat, and then proceeds to try to do character development on Jayne in the worst possible way: By having him read a letter from his mother. Show, don't tell! Nice bit of flashbacking to Jayne and Zoe's past.

"Heart of Gold": This episode showcases why Mal is a jerk, too. It's another straight-up western, with the crew busting the chops of a local landowner who's being a self-righteous and inconsistent asshole. Along the way, Mal manages to sleep with one of Inara's best friends, which leaves Inara crying on the floor. This, of course, is a death sentence for Inara's friend, because the writers dare not leave that loose end hanging while trying to keep up the tension between Mal and Inara. It does form the "breaking point" that causes Inara to decide to leave, because Mal won't put up and tell her that he wants to have a real relationship with her.

"Objects in Space": Fascinating episode, as River gets to save the crew after everyone else gets mauled by the bounty hunter Jubal Early. This one is also lightly sci-fi, because Early has everyone trapped on the ship out in space -- I suppose the western parallel would be if everybody was out on some plain in the middle of nowhere and he rolled his little wagon up next to theirs in the dead of night and caught them at the camp site. In this case, though, you can't even run off into the plains in the dead of night, because it's space, yo, and you'd die.

Serenity, the Movie

Ok, so, Serenity has a bunch of stuff stacked against it. The show ended with a ton of characters underdeveloped. There's a huge plot hanging over the entire movie, and it has to be resolved, and it is a big sci-fi plot that requires the characters to be all heroic and self-sacrificing without getting paid, which flies in the face of their prior characterization. We have to have some space dogfightin' and some gunplay and some tense horror moments and some funny lines from Jayne. Also, while we're at it, we need to have River go to town and be a total badass, because that's where she was supposed to go but she didn't get to do it.
Folks who say that this movie has problems are not wrong, but those problems stem from the fact that there is too much to do, not enough time in which to do it, and the requirement of a Hollywood story with a Hollywood ending.
Some pundits have commented that Serenity is supposed to be the second season of the show. That seems fairly reasonable. Many scenes in the movie could easily be expanded into full episodes (The Operative's first appearance, for instance, could be flashbacked around Simon and River's escape; River's sudden killing spree in the middle of the bar could be a component of a larger job-run in which the crew are engaged). Certainly the movie attempts to grant a little bit of closure to the characters -- Book and Wash both die, Simon and Kaylee finally hook up, Mal and Inara resume their insipid dance of never saying how they feel but at least Mal stops calling Inara a "whore." River has her moment to shine, as she shows off what she was made for -- a killing machine designed to fix the problem of the Reavers, unwittingly unleashed by the Alliance in an experiment gone awry.
Whedon noted in an interview that he wanted the movie to express the notion that people have to be given the ability to choose, even if those choices are bad ones. I'm inclined to agree with him, but I don't see why this commentary is justifying anything that goes on in the movie. Mal doesn't make a "bad" choice when he decides to show people how the Alliance's experiment went wrong and created the Reavers. He actually starts stepping up to become a hero (in a way that is inconsistent with his previous portrayal as an angry smuggler and thief). Really, the "bad" choice that is made goes all the way back to the Alliance trying to make a pacifying agent in the first place -- so really, Whedon is defending the right of the Alliance to attempt such a thing. Which seems a little odd, since the whole destruction of the Miranda colony is a cautionary tale against doing just such a thing.
There's also some ordering problems. Mal sets his mind on getting to Miranda and learning its secret -- and later, sharing that secret with the 'Verse -- before he has any reason to do so. He's being hunted by the Operative, all of his friends and safe havens are being burned to the ground (quite literally, as the Operative wipes out Haven, where Shepherd Book lives and dies), he's at the end of his rope financially and with Serenity, and so he decides to make a suicide run through Reaver space to a dead colony to learn the mysteries inside a River's head? This does not seem like the Mal who knows that he has to confront the Operative to put this to an end, and that there's no percentage in all of this business. Sure, he won't turn over River -- it's well established that he has some sort of control complex about the crew of his ship -- but his course of action seems to fly in the face of his prior characterization. It's an attempt to make him "heroic," but it doesn't sell.
Then, after the ship and crew escape from Miranda and through Reaver space and make it back to Mr. Universe's lair, then we are treated to the death of Wash. Character death is a big deal in movies like this; this isn't a horror film. You can get a lot of mileage out of it. Instead, Wash dies somewhat arbitrarily, killed by debris after successfully piloting through a huge space battle and landing the Serenity against all odds. That's fine, but if they'd pulled his death back a bit earlier into the film, it could've been a motivator that drove the crew to the extremis of going to Miranda. Consider, for instance, if Wash had been sent to find out more about "Miranda" off the ship, on a planet somewhere. He makes contact with an old pilot friend, someone who's been there. He finds out a little about the secret of Miranda. He realizes that for River to be whole, they have to go there -- then he gets killed. The crew, tracking him down and finding what happened, now have to follow up, to get closure on Wash's end. But instead, we get a senseless death. Which is OK, I suppose, since those happen too, but really, if you've already got a problem giving your characters solid motivations, and you're going to kill someone out of the crew anyway, you might as well solve both problems at once.
Apparently at the end we're supposed to get the impression that the Operative was lied to by Parliament and as a result of learning the truth on Miranda he decides to let the Serenity and its crew go, but . . . this is really just implication. Did the Operative already know about Miranda? Why does he care? He already implicitly believes in doing awful things to accomplish a greater good, so how come the Miranda experiment would change his mind about anything?

So, yeah, the movie has an uphill battle, and it misfires in some places, but it's still a pretty solid piece of moviework. Especially on a $40m budget shot in something like 2 months.

And that's it!

. . . oh, wait, you wanted to know what I thought personally, not just dramatically. OK.

Well, Firefly is fun television. It's not great sci-fi, but it's interesting human drama.
Serenity is, as noted above, a problematic film but still a cool one to watch.

Now, comparing Firefly to Star Trek is kind of a lost errand, because there's so much of a difference between the two of them, but that difference shows why I prefer Star Trek to Firefly.

Star Trek comes from the '60s, from the utopian notion that through progress, science, technology, and unity we can solve all of our problems, become better people, and make a better, safer world without poverty, hunger, racism, sexism, or violence. It doesn't always work, and it's a blissfully brassy notion that comes from our past, but it's an ideal for which to strive. I believe in this kind of ideal. I believe that people have a long way to go, but that we can choose to be better to each other, that we can work together to make great things, and that we should care about each other and see past things like gender, culture, skin color, and history, in the hopes of making a better future. This is a vision -- a dream, if you will -- that can be hard for viewers to accept. We live in the 21st century now and technology didn't save us or destroy us. It just gave us cell phones and the internet.

Firefly is dystopian. It's the "used future" that pops up in Blade Runner and Star Wars. In Firefly, people made it to other planets, where they immediately set up being jerks to each other. The principal characters are rogues, scoundrels, con-men, thieves, killers . . . you name it. They judge people based on all kinds of facile characteristics, they are quick to leap to conclusions and to engage in violence, they are ornery, they pick fights without provocation or based on prejudices and past grudges. In short, they're very much the same human beings we're used to dealing with day in and day out. That makes them more approachable to the typical viewer. These are people we can relate to; they're flawed, like us. But their world is crummy because of it, and if the Alliance really is trying to make a better society (something that Whedon himself asserts), then these are people who have decided to screw everyone else and go their own way even though it means murdering, stealing, and cheating. They're not nice people.

So, I'll stick with the idea of the Star Trek future, where people are kind to each other, where humanity has learned a few lessons, and where we've maybe gotten over some of our problems as a species -- even if it's a little bit unbelievable. I can certainly understand the appeal of Firefly to folks who like westerns, who like drama, and who find something to identify with in its troubled and rambunctious cast.

Moving on.

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:23:22 GMT

Just a few days ago I had to cut someone out of my life. I don't have a lot of experience with this and the whole process has left me profoundly shaken and questioning what I could have done differently. What else can you do when you fall for someone who has no feelings for you, and it hurts so much that the only thing you can think to do is find a way out before it destroys you?

Unfortunately, this has cast a pall on an otherwise exceptionally satisfying life. I still have a phenomenal job -- I get to work on Star Trek every day and I'm paid well to do so. My contributions are appreciated and people like my work. I have the chance to learn new things -- whether it's advancing my training in martial arts, or the dance classes that I've recently been taking. I get to live in a city with gorgeous weather all the time and travel around to go on hikes and visit charming or wondrous sites. I made the switch to being a vegetarian a while ago, which has helped me to appreciate being kind to animals even more. I'm in good shape for someone my age, thanks to a regular and constant exercise regimen (as well as the aforementioned diet). I finally found my self-confidence, and now I'm fearless.

So now I must move on, and learn to be content with being alone. (If I were a good Buddhist, this would be simple, but alas, I am not.) It's a shame, too, as I don't give out a piece of my heart lightly, or often.

I just hope that all of the hurting ends.

One Year!

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 02:26:06 GMT

A little over a year ago, I landed my current job with Cryptic Studios. The year since then has been quite a whirlwind.

The job itself is phenomenal. I work with highly intelligent people and I have the opportunity to work with Star Trek, a property that's been part of my life since watching reruns of the original series with my father when I was very young. My contributions are respected by the team and my skills are noted.

Having a job gave me the means to chart my own course again. I now have a nice apartment in a pleasant town. San Jose has been excellent; the weather is phenomenal. I can afford to study kung fu again, and to take dance lessons, and to find other avenues to pursue interesting experiences with my time. I'm hoping to travel to Europe soon, now that I can afford such expenses.

This has also given me a great deal of peace of mind and security. I have finally learned to have confidence in myself. This is a lesson that has been a long time in coming.

The only blemish on an otherwise amazing life is the lack of anyone special with whom I can share it. But, that alone cannot stop me from getting out and experiencing wonderful things.

What a difference a year makes. What will happen in the next year?

A Small Tribute

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:41:26 GMT

My friends may be aware that I have recently lost my spark of creativity and have thus found myself unable to write for several months. Yet I cannot simply let the birthday of H. P. Lovecraft pass by unremarked (August 20!). Thus, I called upon my training from the "Isaac Asimov writing plan," which I pursued for a while some years back -- in the footsteps of that master of science fiction, I made sure to write something every day, no matter the condition, just to make sure that I could write under any circumstances.
Thus, to celebrate the birthday of H. P. Lovecraft, I present a short story that I wrote in the style of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith. I wrote this all in one draft late at night, so forgive me if it is somewhat uneven; and I made certain to engage in some rather overwrought prose.
Enjoy!

“The Minds of Mortals”

   I relate this narrative not to alarm, but rather to inform. Humanity, you must understand, balances on the edge of a fragile precipice, from which there is no escape and beneath which lies only the endless cosmic void. The minds of mortals, in a vain attempt to make sense of such an uncaring and capricious state, construct whimsical notions of causality and consistency, but no such axioms are truly necessary for existence. Indeed, the cosmos will hardly notice or care when humanity is extinguished in some future time. This unfortunate instability on the part of the human mind, however, leaves humanity ill-prepared to deal with the unwholesome and utterly certain reality of its transient existence and its malignant neighbors.
   My own experiences in this regard are not unique, although they are clearly outside the norm. The vicissitudes of my early life could not prepare me for the role that I now play; indeed, the academic awards with which I was feted and the mathematical and scientific problems with which I grappled were, in retrospect, of little consequence. My transition into the state in which I now find myself was quite arbitrary. That is not to say that it could not have been prevented, but it was certainly not the result of any fault or merit on my part. The attentive listener will understand, then, that the same fate could as well befall any man or woman, for it is not a matter of choice but of coincidence.
   In my case, the coincidences were not especially extraordinary. I had recently relocated to the city of San Francisco, a teeming and crowded metropolis on the windy, cold and fog-shrouded shores of the Pacific coast. The great and struggling boom of population during the Gold Rush had left the city with a patchwork assemblage of straining, crumbling edifices, tenements, and apartments, squalidly hunched upon the hillsides and cradling one another like huddled lepers. Fires and earthquakes had ravaged the city and left their pock-marks and scars, but always the people had rebuilt in ever more ambitious designs. In such a city, of course, great thinkers and traders congregated to exchange their ideas, to argue in pursuit of some perceived notion of intellectual superiority, or to test their notions in the cauldron of humanity. My own goals were not unlike these others, to pit my own theories and, by extension, my social status against my peers.
   As an academic, my usual social circles took me away from the peninsula, into the idyllic settings of Berkeley and Stanford, in places where I could mingle in the rarefied atmosphere of intellectual sophistication. Of course, even such academic facilities are not without their share of eccentrics, and, perhaps, the hall of mirrors created in such settings accelerates the process of becoming divorced from what most of humanity would consider “normal.” That such aberrant thought processes might have singular insights into some of the realities of the human condition is, of course, a notion quickly discarded by the academic mainstream.
   It was in such an aberrant situation that I found myself drawn into unexpected circumstances. My work had involved the computation of certain very difficult problems, which in some academic circles were believed to be insoluble; my particular specialty lay in reducing these problems to steps that could be apprehended and processed by rote, so that rapid computation of complex problems was possible whether by automation or by hand. Of course, this presumed that the mysteries of the universe were, in fact, solvable by the processes that humans considered self-consistent. Thus, my work was predicated on the accuracy of the processes of reason, which is, as is now known to me and to you, is a faulty premise.
   In the process of expanding my connections in academia I made the acquaintance of a woman of distinguished faculties but somewhat dubious reputation—to wit, her scientific experimentation took her outside the boundaries of conventional acceptability. Though her early work had been credible and even inspired, her more recent pronouncements were met with increasing skepticism. Further, she had recently become quite insular, and refused to publish results. There was some murmured talk of removing her tenure, but her eccentricities had, at that time, not yet resulted in any malfeasance with which the administration could create sufficient justification. Nevertheless, this woman’s understanding of certain elements of the human brain’s functions in processing information was of especial interest to me, and I determined to overlook her flaws and pry from her the necessary wisdom with which I could carry on my work.
   Over the course of several months I befriended this errant professor, and I started to pry into her work and her secrets. Though I attempted to engage her in conversations about her early career, she dismissed such attempts as mere plays to her vanity, or as worthless chaff that stemmed from the ignorance of her youth. Her current work, she indicated, would be of paramount importance, but was too delicate to be shared. Nevertheless, I persisted, hoping that I could marshal her research for my own ends.
   As I earned the grudging trust of my cohort, I recognized that she had become a slave to her own work. She had fallen into obsession with patterns that would be considered trivial, and terrified of many subjects that would be considered mundane. The oddest of events or items could excite her fancy or inspire terror: Mushrooms, crabs, water jars, even the chopsticks common to the many Asian restaurants of the area would all cause shudders of revulsion. In spite of this, it became increasingly clear to me that her deranged thoughts still contained the spark of some narrative to which I was not privy, and I became increasingly inflamed with the thought of discovering this secret.
   Eventually, an opportunity appeared in which she required my assistance directly. The academics of the university had threatened to withhold her funding until she produced evidence of the utility of her studies. Unwilling to do so, she knew that she would lose access to many of the facilities that she used to store her experiments, and that the university would surely seize her precious work. Thus, she enlisted me to aid her in absconding with her private collection so that she could relocate it to a sanctum that she had prepared for her continued experimentation.
   In transporting the strange devices and specimens that she had kept, I finally had the opportunity to see the nature of her work, but it simply puzzled me further. Like all those who studied the human brain, she kept specimens of the type in sample jars, labeled in a crabbed script that defied comprehension. She also compulsively hoarded a strange variety of shafts, both of metal and of wood, ranging from the thickness of a tongue depressor to the fine point of a needle. So far as I could discern, many of these objects served no purpose, and indeed they seemed to excite her revulsion much like the chopsticks previously mentioned, so I could not apprehend her reasons for keeping them.
   Shortly after we undertook to move her materials, she disappeared without warning. The university faculty, of course, were secretly relieved that the problem had resolved itself, and tasked me—her closest confidant—with cataloguing her work and bringing to the department of psychology anything that might be of note.
   I spent over a week in the remains of the laboratory, vainly attempting to make sense of the chaos that had been scattered thereabouts. She had not left the dripping, fetid basement in a state conducive to research or habitation. Many of the metal rods and depressors bore rust and the corrupting sheen of rotting fluids, most likely from being forced through some sort of tissue and left befouled. In addition to the many books and research materials that she kept on a massive metal bookshelf, a bizarre artifice of aluminum wire and tinsel hung like an ailing ornament in one corner of the room. All of the sample jars had been emptied, save one, which bore no label whatsoever, but several boxes stuffed into cabinets were filled with various rotting glands extracted from cadavers. Her notes, such as they were, seemed incomprehensible and bore fanciful pictures of bat-like tentacled creatures in the margins.
   As I sat one night in the basement, cursing my decision to involve myself in this endeavor and thus becoming responsible for it while gleaning no useful information from the experiments, I glanced at the unlabeled sample jar and was struck with the peculiar notion that the two eyes, still descending from the separated brain by their nerves, were staring at me. Of course, the eyes had no muscles and no lids and could not move nor blink, so all that they could do was stare; still, the sensation was so overpowering and so unsettling that I was compelled to stand and take my leave of the basement so that I might take in some air. Once I left the room, the sense of unease passed quickly, but I was still loath to return, until I heard a crashing of glass and an unexpected squelching sound, like a bladder filled with oil being propelled across the floor by the expulsion of the fluid that it contained.
   I ran quickly back into the room, but the damage was already done. One of the narrow basement windows had been shattered, and the sample jar broken as well. Its contents—the entire brain, eyes, and nerve column—were gone, with only shattered glass fragments and preserving fluid left behind. As I fumbled with the lights and approached the remnants, I noticed that the base of the jar held a card sheathed in plastic, which had been occluded from view by the small rim around the bottom of the jar itself. On the card was written, in a crabbed and cramped script, the name of my former co-worker, as if to indicate that the brain had been hers, somehow extracted and placed in the jar.
   I moved quickly to the window and saw that it had been forced open, and some putrescent brown substance coated it. The smell of decay and overpowering mushrooms hung heavy in the air. In the distance, in the night, I could see a flailing shape, which promptly rose into the air, looking much like a bat carrying some roughly circular mass.
   Now fearful that I might have contracted the same madness that somehow had overtaken my colleague, I turned to flee the chamber, only to find that the door had been closed. A brilliant light suffused the room, and my eyes were overwhelmed. When my vision returned, the strange aluminum artifice in the corner of the room glowed with an unearthly light. The metal seemed to melt and re-form itself, flowing upward in an apparent rejection of gravity. From this aperture came a conical creature, easily the height of two men. At its apex was a ribbed tubular neck, upon which balanced a spherical mass surmounted with several eyes placed at irregular spaces along a circular plane. Slim tendrils descended from the sphere, twitching and feeling at the air, and halfway down the conical shape a thick tentacular limb ended in a crab-like claw.
   Upon noticing this being, I immediately cried out, and I stumbled toward the doorway of the room. The entity easily reached an impossible distance, its tentacular limb seeming to stretch and distend as the claw seized upon me. It lifted me with a gentle motion, rotating me sideways and placing me upon one of the tables as I shouted and beat upon the rubbery flesh of the tentacle with my fists.
   As I lay secured on the table, the creature reached forth its other claw and plucked out several of the metal bars from the cups in which they were haphazardly stored. These it proceeded to insert into my body at various points, a process that caused me to lose consciousness at several junctures. At one point I was overtaken with seizures and I vomited, but the creature never released its crab-clawed hold upon me.
   The entity finished its process by drawing from the container several of the finest needles, and then placing these squarely through my skull. As it did so, I became acutely aware that the creature had specifically destroyed several of the regulating glands of my body, and that it was doubtless doing the same with my brain. My fear and emotions drifted away as the creature replaced my consciousness with a construction of its own making. I realized at some point during the process that my brain could scarcely continue to function when much of its tissue had been destroyed and disrupted by a series of metal needles, but this did not seem to result in my death or to impede my thinking processes. Indeed, I was overcome with a greater clarity of reason than I had possessed before, and I quickly came to deduce that just as the brain of my colleague had been stolen away by the unknown bat-like creature earlier, this creature now undertook to remove or replace my brain so that I might continue the work of my colleague without hindrance or threat of having my own mind removed.
   The transformation took some time, but as the creature’s work progressed, I became indifferent to the discomfort and the pains of my body, until eventually I was fully deadened. At length, the creature released its claw from me, seemingly finished with its handiwork, though I could garner no sense of whether it exhibited any satisfaction. Then it returned to the aperture and, in a wave of heat and intense light, it vanished back to whence it had come.
   Thus it is that I find myself transformed, and you will understand now that my actions do not stem from any sort of hysteria, nor from insanity, but rather from the simple fact that my brain has been wholly replaced and my mind purged of many of the weaknesses that afflict humanity. This, of course, means that I do not feel any sense of fear, remorse, or duty, except to continue the work for which I have now been so thoroughly modified. I am simply a tool for the continuation of this function.
   You will understand, then, that it is not harm that I intend you, but rather to preserve you from the possibility of having your fragile flesh damaged or stolen. While the pain will be excruciating for a short time, you will doubtless find your condition much improved at the conclusion of this process. I can assure you that it will be significantly quicker and less painful if you remain still as I insert the necessary probes.

What would you do . . .

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 06:32:20 GMT

What would you do if you knew that you would never, in your life, discover a true love, companion, or soul-mate? How would you change your goals and your expectations? Would you be able to live with this?

Writer's Block: Going the distance

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:21:44 GMT

Would you uproot your life and move to another city for someone that you love?

View 2139 Answers

Yes.

Marian.

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 02:05:24 GMT

I got struck by a kind of writing jag earlier, and wound up with this:

Marian swung her leg over the saddle and dropped quietly from her horse. Her soft leather boots made nary a sound as she landed on the forest floor, in spite of the small and curled leaves of the oak trees. Where the oaks sprawled, the forest was soft earth; at the edge of each oak tree’s clearing, a riot of underbrush, thickets, and briars choked the ground. To the untrained eye, the forest was an impassible barrier except at the few narrow paths and roads that passed from shire to shire. For an experienced hunter, the forest’s animal runs and trails provided a great many twisty byways and secret routes.

Though the rest of the hunting party was not far behind, Marian did have a decided advantage. She was lithe, tall, and wiry, unlike the typical plump and rounded housewives of the village, and could easily squeeze through narrow paths and under the low-hanging boughs of the brush. With her hunting bow in hand and a pair of arrows strung on loops on her belt, she dropped to her knees and crawled down one of the animal runs. Fresh spoor confirmed her assessment that a pig had come this way recently. Not far behind, she heard the barking of the hounds, then spotted her quarry—sure enough, a young pig rooting through the dirt in search of morsels.

Quietly, Marian shifted herself on to one knee. She opened the oilskin pouch at her hip and withdrew her coiled bowstring and planted the bowstave against her foot, bent the supple wood and looped the string over it. She finished stringing the bow and cautiously withdrew one of the arrows from the belt-loop on her side. Unlike archery practice, a quiver was not entirely practical in the cramped and weedy conditions of forest hunting.

The bow bent smoothly as she drew the arrow back, sighting toward the young pig. She stilled herself and waited for the animal to find a morsel that drew its attention, then let her breath out and released the arrow. The pig squealed as the arrow struck it squarely in the ribs, and tried to turn and flee, but its legs failed it after only a few steps. Marian dropped to her hands and knees and scrabbled after the pig to finish it.

Marian drew her dagger as she came upon the struggling pig, and set the bow to one side as she leaned over it to finish it. She approached warily, keeping the dagger between herself and the pig—wounded animals being the most dangerous—and prepared to sweep the dagger across the beast’s throat.

From behind, the hunting party’s shouts and barks changed in tenor. Marian paused in her task and spared a glance back, but she was too far in the brush to see the hunters. The whoops of hilarity and the thrill of the hunt had given way to shouts and screams. Metal clashed and the hunting dogs howled from wounds. Though Marian couldn’t see what was happening, she knew the sounds well enough: fighting. Not just a scuffle with a hunter’s quarry, but battle against other men.

As the fighting wore on, the dogs grew silent—likely dead. Marian knew that this meant that the hunters were being massacred. She pulled her arrow from the wounded pig’s side and withdrew deeper into the brush, where she waited silently.

Eventually, she heard the sounds of the victors ending the survivors, and she strained to listen. Guttural voices spoke.

“That’s the last of them.”

The responder spoke with a French accent. “Anyone noteworthy?”

“No,” came the reply. “Just some house guard for one of the local landowners.”

“That’s a few less for us to kill when we sack the manor, then,” the Frenchman stated flatly.

Marian kept herself quiet as she strained to listen further to the conversation. She heard the sound of booted feet tramping the area, and the victors looting the dead. The pig let out a low squeal and writhed, and she heard the crunch of brush nearby, and someone crouched and started down the animal run toward her.

Pushing the bow behind her, Marian drew up her riding cloak and curled herself into a tight ball under the thorny brush, just like she would when hiding from her prey on the hunt. The figure, a mail-coated man, smashed his way through the branches until he reached the dying pig.

“What is it?” said the Frenchman from somewhere back in the ambush under the oak tree.

“Just a dying pig,” replied the soldier, who drew his dagger and finished Marian’s work. Then he crawled back out from the brush, dragging the pig with him.

Marian waited for the tramp of hooves to fade into the distance, then crept back into the glade.

All around the oak, dead men lay, their eyes staring up in stark anguish. The other hunters were not armed for war, and their leather coats or woolen garments were not equal to the swords of their attackers. Bodies had been hewn, and even the ladies of the party had been slain.

Marian was no stranger to hunts, but this brutal warfare unnerved her. The king’s battles against his father and later in the Levant had shown the full face of brutal war, to be sure, but such events were always far from her home. Butchering the women who came along only to enjoy the ride and the thrill of watching the hunt—Marian had always been a headstrong exception—proved the attackers even more ruthless than expected. The hunters’ gear had been searched, rings taken, knives stolen, trinkets and garlands ruined. The savagery of the attack filled Marian with a sudden fear for the manor house, the next target of the French-speaking man. Though she was but a part of the hunting party and a guest of her neighbors, she dreaded the thought of further killing.

Those horses that hadn’t died in the attack had been stolen; a good horse was too valuable to leave wandering the woods, especially for sellswords. Marian raced through the forest toward the manor, using the familiar hunting paths that weaved back and forth through the haunted wood. She could certainly make better time than horsemen, since she could skirt through tiny hidden paths where horses wouldn’t fit, and the soldiers likely didn’t know the terrain as well as she did.

Marian arrived at a scene of despair. The manor house was no castle, though it was not defenseless; a heavy wooden stockade surrounded the house and its associated buildings. The lord kept a retinue of house guard, though many able men had already left to serve in the war with the king.

The palisade was already aflame, as were several of the buildings inside the stockade. A ragged force of men in mail coats huddled behind a makeshift wooden barricade and pushed their way toward the gate. A few defenders remained on the wall of the palisade, firing arrows at the attackers, but just as often they ducked down to avoid retaliatory crossbow-fire. The attackers numbered easily in the dozens—perhaps as many as a hundred. In a country already feeling an acute shortage of soldiery, the force was sizeable.

Marian was astounded. How had this many men crossed the countryside unobserved? How had they arrived here, to attack in the heart of the kingdom, without anyone knowing? To be sure, with the king away, his subjects were unruly, but this was unprecedented.

Marian discarded any notion of joining the battle; she was alone outside the palisade, and even if she managed to injure one or two of the attackers with her bow, she only had a handful of arrows. She would quickly be cut down, or shot with a crossbow, or worst of all, captured. Instead, she crouched down to watch, and to hope.

The battle proved brief. The defenders had to retreat from the flaming palisade, and could not stop the attackers from destroying the gate. Soon, the soldiers swarmed into the compound, and met the few remaining defenders in hand-to-hand combat. The clang of metal and the screams of the dying resounded as the afternoon wore on, and it was all that Marian could do to choke back her despair. As the soldiers took control of the burning remains of the neighbor's home, she fled back into the forest.

Afternoon light filtered through the oak trees as Marian wandered, shocked and numb, through parts of the forest that were strange to her. She could survive a short time there; she knew many of the plants and creatures of the wood, and with her bow and her knife she could at least forage for the night and make her way home in the morning.

When she came to her senses, Marian realized that she had wandered far from her familiar haunts. She could hear the sound of running water, and she suddenly realized that she had nothing to drink with her—all of the hunting party’s food had been on their horses. She headed to the edge of a rushing stream that babbled its way over a gray, rocky bed. Falling to her knees, she cupped her hands in the stream and quenched her thirst, then splashed water over her face, her neck, and her hair.

Somewhat refreshed, Marian stood and looked to gather her bearings. She had followed a somewhat-used trail, that much was certain, as regular footprints made their way to the river ford and on the other side. Marian carefully unstrung her bow and stowed the string in her oilskin pouch, then used the stave to help her way across the stones.

As she reached the middle of the river, a trio of men stepped out from behind the stones at the far side. A large man with a ready grin stepped forward ahead of the other two, and splashed his rag-wrapped feet into the water. Marian halted briefly, but noted that unlike the soldiers she’d seen before, they had no armor and no swords, only thick cudgels and walking staves.

“Hello, miss,” intoned the heavyset man as he hopped across the stones toward Marian. “You seem to be crossing our byway here.”

Marian shifted her weight slightly and replied, “The forest is the king’s land and this ford is certainly no place for a toll. Nor do you have the look of toll-men.”

The man chuckled and said, “No, we collect our own toll, because the king’s men are not about to do so. Then we bring that toll back home to wait for the king’s return, you see?”

Marian shook her head. “I haven’t any money to give you. I just want to be on my way.”

The man frowned and clucked his tongue, now only a few steps away from Marian. “You must have something you can trade, eh? We can’t just let anyone pass this way.”

One of the other two at the far side of the river cried out, “’ey! She can always pay with a tumble!”

The big man gave a short laugh. “Aye, we wouldn’t be her first Johns, I expect.” He reached a meaty hand toward her chin. Marian took a half-step back and rapped his knuckles with her bowstave. The man let out a yelp and withdrew his hand, then raised his own staff in response.

“For that, miss, you’ll find yourself lying on your backside after I give you a taste of my staff,” he growled, and swung his staff heavily in an arc. Marian easily ducked under it; her relatively small stature (at least compared to her opponent) and her quick footwork made it a simple matter, though she certainly lacked the advantage of reach.

One of the men on the river bank shouted, “I’ll give her a taste of my staff!” Marian started to find herself annoyed by the repartee, and she brought her bowstave around again, but the large man blocked the swing with his quarterstaff.

“Missy, you are testing my temper,” he said as he stepped forward and pushed her back with his weight. Marian brought her bow down along the quarterstaff and smashed it into the man’s knuckles again, which prompted a grunt of displeasure, but that was just a distraction as she kicked him in the shin as hard as she could. He let out a howl of pain and collapsed to one knee, then thrust at Marian with the end of the staff. Before he could stand again, she turned sideways to evade his attack, then brought up the bottom of the bowstave. It snagged on the rocks as it came up through the water and the wood sprang as it smashed into the man’s jaw. He fell backward onto the rocks, stunned by the blow. Marian took a cautious half-step forward and placed the end of her bowstave on his throat, just above his collarbone, and leaned slightly against it.

“It seems,” she said evenly, “that you are the one who is on his back, my little John.”

The man blinked and spluttered, spraying the water from his face, and then let out a sudden, sharp laugh. He laughed again, hearty and friendly, as a broad smile spread across his bruised face. “Miss, you have surely bested me in word and wood. Let me get to my feet if you please, and I’ll see you across the river.”

Marian stepped back and let the man stand. He shook the water from his face and gave her an exaggerated bow, then gestured for her to follow him across to the other side.

As the two of them reached the other side of the river, the sallow-faced heckler glanced at Marian, then at her large companion, and swallowed whatever he had thought to say.

“One last thing,” said the large man. “Since you’ve beaten me at my own game, I must have your name.”

Marian’s thoughts raced. Her name and family were well-known in this land, and she might be held for ransom, or turned over to enemies—perhaps the same people sacking the lands of the neighboring manorial lords. The sun was setting now and the birds squawked and sang overhead, oblivious to her plight, and she pulled up her riding cloak over her damp hair to ward off the chill and responded with the first name that came into her head:

“Robin.”

Father's Day Doggerel

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 19:26:37 GMT

To all the dads
Good and bad
Happy and sad
Skinny and fat

It's time to reflect
And pay some respect
For the work you have done
For your daughter or son.

When you held 'em
Or fed 'em
Or taught 'em
Or lead 'em

Sometimes it was tough
But you pushed through the bother
For the person you loved
Who called only you "father."

Just One Weekend

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 06:58:00 GMT

Let's see . . . Saturday morning: Shaolin kung fu, including some review and some monkey-style grappling and ground fighting. Saturday afternoon: Visit by the parents, some catching up, and a nice casual dinner; plus they gave me a rice cooker that they don't use. Saturday evening: Buzz on up to the Sonoma area in the north bay, hang out with some friends and play a little Vampire, then spend the night there. Sunday morning: Enjoy the drive back down from Sonoma in the lovely summer weather. Sunday afternoon: Stop for a quick lunch, then stuck in traffic. Blast! Finally made it to Pacifica to rendezvous with the D&D pals for a game. Sunday evening: Back home and into the workout routine, with even more ab work, plus another set of endurance reps after the cardio to really add some burn. Now for a relaxing cup of cranberry juice and an hour or so of peace before bed.

Not too shabby for one weekend.

Vampire: The Passion - Clans and Lineages

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 08:13:42 GMT

More vampy-ness!

Clans and Lineages
Almost every vampire claims descent through an unbroken chain from the ancients of the prehistoric world to the mythical first one (or few) whose curse has passed down from Embrace to Embrace and spread eventually to every vampire extant. While a few vampires may not know their origins, or one might occasionally claim to stem from some new and unheard-of process of transformation, for the great majority of vampiric society, the Embrace brings with it some measure of the choices and preferences of the vampire who turned the fledgling. Vampiric legends state that in Biblical times, the curse of vampirism had spread through five, or thirteen, or perhaps forty different branches.
By the modern age, these many branches -- if all of them ever existed -- have winnowed down considerably. Still, vampires from related sires will evidence similar capabilities, and so they are often considered "clans," a sort of extended family of the undead. These clans also have their own quirks of blood and fate that produce a range of lineages somewhat more specialized than their parent origins.
Blood is the source of existence for all vampires, but time has shown that the power of the blood is not simply in undeath -- the blood fosters in each vampire certain emotions, predilections, and supernatural abilities. Every vampire learns to awaken certain birthrights, the Disciplines, in order to survive, but the influence of blood shapes the Disciplines of each vampire. So, too, does the blood create varied lineages; each progenitor’s blood carries the influence of personality, experience, and pain, which floods into every childe.
A clan refers to the broader line from which a vampire claims descent. Every vampire's clan is set by the the clan of the sire -- when a vampire Embraces a mortal, the new fledgling's blood takes on some of the key characteristics of the parent. Clans tend to have shared backgrounds, interests, or geographic origins, but by the modern era these distinctions have greatly blurred and it is possible to find members of all clans in many places throughout the world.
A lineage refers to a narrower offshoot of a particular clan. Every vampire also possesses a specific lineage, which further refines the interests, background, and abilities common to its members. As usual, it's possible to find the occasional vampire whose personal predilections do not align with a lineage's traditional foibles. Since sires tend to select for people who have specific characteristics, though, this is uncommon, especially among lines with exacting standards.
A vampire's clan and lineage will provide a set of expectations and assumptions that other vampires will make about the individual. A given vampire will often be expected to perform tasks and hold interests that align with a clan's general worldview. Vampires who do not fit into this mold may find that their divergence helps in making a more personal way in the world, but also ostracizes them from the rest of the clan, due to the failure to meet the expectations of their relatives.
Consanguineous Disciplines: Every clan and every lineage possesses a consanguineous Discipline, a particular Discipline that tends to manifest easily and readily in members of that line. Some such Disciplines are fairly common among a broad swath of Kindred society, while others are a bit obscure or unusual -- the Embrace is neither fair nor even-handed, after all. A newly-Embraced Kindred will find that the consanguineous Disciplines are the first to manifest and the easiest to practice. Improvements in the Disciplines similarly tend to come more quickly and easily in the consanguineous Disciplines.
Every vampire also manifests a personal preference that forms an additional consanguineous Discipline for that individual. Thus, it can be dangerous to make assumptions about the capabilities of a given vampire on the basis of clan and lineage.
Estranged Disciplines: A Discipline that is not consanguineous for a Kindred is generally referred to as an estranged Discipline; a Kindred might express "That Discipline is estranged to me." These Disciplines are somewhat more difficult to learn, though time, practice, and instruction can awaken them in most Kindred.
Exotic Disciplines: A rare few Disciplines are so unusual that they have special requirements, or are only known to a very select lineage. These exotic Disciplines typically cannot manifest in vampires outside of a particular lineage, except through intense instruction, strange magical devices, and unusual twists of fate.
Weaknesses: Every lineage manifests a peculiar weakness -- a foible of the blood that gives the vampire a particular flaw. While some lines might consider their weaknesses to actually be signs of breeding and culture, many vampires discover that the weakness is a hurdle that further increases the difficulty of unlife.
Not all weaknesses are equal in their severity. As always, the Embrace takes different vampires in different ways, and some vampires are more fortunate than others in that regard.

Vampire: The Passion

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:29:41 GMT

Many years ago I worked for a little outfit called White Wolf, where we made some games. If you're reading this LJ entry, you may have heard of them.

Anyway, fast forward to 2011, when there are a couple different versions of this game called Vampire. The latest iteration of the original is on its way -- Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition, and if you haven't ordered a copy yet, you should -- and the successor, Vampire: The Requiem, is also kicking around with a big following.

I've done a little writing for Vampire from time to time. I had a slight hand in shaping the revised iteration of the Tremere clan, and I had the opportunity to tweak some blood magic and some live-action rules and some Kindred of the East. Occasionally, though, I just get this weird notion to tear it all down and give the world my own take on a little bit of Gothic-punk personal horror.

Vampire: The Passion
The world that we believe to be mundane and pedestrian is just a shadow-play cast over a much more horrifying and unfathomable world. Mundane humanity ignores or pretends not to notice the fearsome shapes that prowl in the night. In this World of Darkness, cursed creatures have existed since time immemorial, and they move quietly among and prey upon the masses. To protect their interests, they conceal their existence from mundane eyes, but they exert a subtle and pervasive influence over the unwitting herds of humanity.
Hearkening back to the earliest days of civilization, vampires represent many of the fears - and desires - of humans. Ageless and graceful, vampires epitomize beauty and youth, but they are also monsters with a terrible, murderous thirst. Existing as pale reflections of the humans that they once were, vampires lurk at the fringes of society. They use the criminal underworld, the seedy excesses of secret decadence, and the backroom handshakes of politics as their domain for money, for power, and for blood. Yet in spite of their supernatural powers and their centuries of expertise, vampires must remain carefully hidden away, their true natures concealed, lest the teeming hordes of humanity rise up and expose the undead to sun and fire.
Vampire: The Passion is a Storytelling game of personal Gothic horror. Vampires possess great supernatural abilities, and they have the potential to live forever, always beautiful, elegant, and changeless. Yet every vampire must deal with the wrack and turmoil of the mighty lusts and hatreds that well up from the undead heart. Eventually, the vampire will perform some heinous act, and must come to grips with the savagery that lies seething beneath the polished exterior. There is no turning back to humanity; the vampire is forever an outsider there, spinning a web of lies to conceal the predator's need for blood. Only other vampires can truly understand this torment, but they too suffer the same curse, and will eventually betray their better natures out of hunger, desire, or fear.
Vampires speak of the Passion that drives their existence because the central need for blood consumes so much of the vampire's thoughts. While all but the rankest fledglings understand that the undead must remain hidden and must maintain a careful detente with their neighbors and their comrades, every vampire feels the heat of hunger, the fire of anger, and the flash of terror with stark and explicit clarity. The elders among the undead do not speak only of the modern conceit of overwhelming emotion; they compare their condition to the Passion of Christ, the suffering so great and so foreordained that its fulfillment was the only salvation for mankind. To vampires, though, their Passion can lead only to damnation.

Media Matters.

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 12:06:41 GMT

Now that I've been gainfully employed for a few months I've finally had an opportunity to catch up on a lot of media that I've missed over the last few years.

Alpha Protocol: Espionage CRPG from Obsidian. Worked my way through this game and I'm going through a second run. I like it quite a bit. Dialog system is tense. Controls are a little twitchy (obviously designed for console and tough to adapt to PC). It's a smart game with some really challenging gameplay (occasionally frustrating). I enjoy that it accommodates different playstyles (playing as a stealth operative, a gadgeteer, or a tactical assault guy are all valid, as are social approaches of all kinds).

James Bond: Over the winter break I finally saw Goldeneye, Goldfinger, and Dr. No. Curious to see the development of the spy genre and Bond in particular. Enjoyed the spycraft in Dr. No. Goldeneye was really cool in wondering about Bond's relevance after the Cold War. I'm inclined to agree with the assessment that Bond is the myth of English power, the fall-back of the privileged upper-crust white man who can go anywhere, kill anyone, have any woman, and show the unflagging power of the British Empire, just on the heels of that Empire's fall -- that is, a fantasy of when Brits "ruled the world." I wonder if we'll get a media equivalent for the declining United States as a world power?

Firefly: Partway through the series. Don't really like the characters. Pretty "meh" about it. I'll finish it, I suppose, so that I can just nod and smile thinly when my friends go all ooh-ahh about it at game conventions. Doesn't turn my crank. Would likely rather play Starship Valkyrie (a pseudo-Star Trek/Starship Troopers/BSG game) than Firefly as a LARP.

Dead Space: Action/horror space game. Kinda fun, but very difficult. Disorienting sometimes. Like the novel use of microgravity environments. Dislike the "run around like a chicken and try not to die because you can't affect the game" bits.

Boneshaker: Steampunk novel by Cherie Priest. Award-winner set in an alternative Seattle with airships and zombies. Nice setting, some heavy-handedness in the way the plot unfolds. Using an earthquake to keep one of the main characters from turning back on his quest for identity and closure over his missing father is unnecessary; if the character's motivations are strong, they will drive him forward in spite of the dangers. Feels right now like it's more of a setting that happens to have a story dropped into it, than a story that happens to showcase a setting.

Eastwood: Finally saw High Plains Drifter over the break. Interesting that it's not the only movie where Eastwood hints that his character is an avenging spirit -- really sets a style for the supernatural western (and a clear influence for the Deadlands RPG).

Godfather: Saw Godfather II over the break as well (thanks Ashley!). Interesting follow-up. Like the way that the movie parallels the Cuban revolution with the events in the family. Interesting to see the protagonist(?) unraveling and becoming paranoid as time goes on, and of course the full-circle beginnings of it all, plus the reminder that all of this has roots in vengeance that goes in an endless violent cycle. Have heard that there's a special cut that puts all of the movies and their scenes into one chronological sequence. Probably less interesting to watch that way, but worth watching just for the analytical interest. Looking forward to seeing that last movie next time I have a chance to visit L.A. and have Ashley dust off her collection, even though I've heard that Godfather III is by far the weakest of the lot.

Really, it's kind of absurd how much relevant movie I've failed to consume in the past, considering my work as a creative designer and author. Better late than never . . .

Tron: Legacy (a.k.a. "The Fall of Lucifer, Digitally Remastered Version")

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 02:07:48 GMT

So back in 1982, I was a wee child and I went to see TRON. I didn't yet know a lot about computers, but it was a very pretty movie with a lot of crazy action and therefore I forced my parents to see it many more times, probably much to their annoyance.

For those who do not recall, the original TRON film (which was removed from consideration by the Academy for a special effects award on the grounds that "they cheated by using computers") follows the adventures of a young programmer who's zapped by an experiment into a digital world and there must do battle with evil programs, join up with some good programs, and overthrow the massive Master Control Program and its henchman Sark, so that he can release evidence that will show that he was the actual programmer responsible for creating the video games that made mad amounts of money for his employer, rather than the evil Mr. Dillinger, who appropriated them and claimed the credit. Also, light cycles and identity disks. Along the way, the movie also makes some religious metaphors: Sark exhorts to conscripted programs that anyone who professes a "superstitious and heretical belief" in the Users (that's us!) will receive the "standard, sub-standard training" that will lead to their eventual de-resolution in the games. That is, if you believe in a mythic creator, you will be thrown to the games to be destroyed! Christians thrown into the gladiatorial pits by the Romans (or any number of historical cases of oppressed religions, I suppose). Likely the movie got away with this because as a Disney-produced film, it was seen as a fantasy piece about a young protagonist "sucked into a magical world," which is a common Disney set-piece, and thus anything that happened in the magical (er, technological) world was just a part of that Otherville rather than a reflection of or commentary on things from our world. Of course, since we created programs and their computer world, it only makes sense that their world is a reflection of ours . . .

I was expecting TRON: Legacy to be bad. Really bad. Like, mind-numbingly atrocious. I figured that Disney would put on an amazing computerized light show, which I got, and that they would pay absolutely no attention to the story or the characterization or the mythology of TRON itself, and I was kind of right there too, but I was blown away by the fact that they actually HAD a mythology.
It's been 28 years since TRON, and just as advances in technology have given us crazy computer graphics and processing power now, they've updated the Grid as well. Inside the system, everything's flashy, fluid, bloomy, and particle-effect-erized. No more rasters and vectors!
The story opens with Sam Flynn, son of the former protagonist Kevin Flynn, pranking ENCOM, the company that Flynn the Senior took over at the end of the original film. Sam resents that his father vanished in 1989 under mysterious circumstances, and he refuses to take responsibility for the company, in which he is a majority shareholder; thus the company has marginalized his foster father Alan Bradley (creator of the TRON program from the original movie) and turned itself from a company that works to foster innovation and spread data awareness and useful technology into a pastiche of Microsoft, making successively newer iterations of a bad OS for which it charges an arm and a leg. (Zing at Microsoft!)
Now, I'm going to take a brief detour. You may be familiar with this story.
A distant creator who is not of this world, but comes to be in it, arrives and attempts to create paradise. He has a vision for a perfect order and a harmonious world, and to achieve this vision he enlists the aid of a creation to whom he gives great power and authority. His right-hand man, though, does not understand his vision, and cannot achieve the wisdom of the creator. While trying to follow the plan, this right-hand agent comes to resent the creator and the imperfections of the world, so he attempts to overthrow the creator. But he cannot create anything of his own; he can only take what has been made by the creator, and re-use or change or corrupt it. So he attempts to make his perfect order, according to the original plan, but he cannot understand the full scope of the creator's vision. There is discord and the creator becomes distant from his creation. In time, all of creation becomes corrupt and falls under the sway of the lieutenant. People come to resent the creator and the world is full of vice, violence, and brutal authoritarian regime.
Eventually, the son of the creator comes. Raised by a foster father, but never feeling like he he truly belonged, this son arrives in the corrupt world after having been "far away," and he comes to save the people. He renews their interest and belief in the creator, and he fights against the wicked regime.
But the fallen lieutenant means to steal away the secrets of creation from the creator, and thus to use them to unlock his way to the place where the creator resides -- the heavens above that are the exclusive domain of the creator. He sends his agents to tempt the son of the creator, and when that fails, he moves to steal the creator's secrets, because the presence of the son has moved the creator to take a hand in the affairs of his world once more.
In the end, the creator must annihilate his lieutenant, an echo of himself, in a move that seems to mean the end of them; and the son ascends to the heavens.

So, now that you've read the fall of Lucifer and the war in heaven from Revelations, you've seen TRON: Legacy. Except that in TRON: Legacy there's also Quorra, an autonomous program who arose spontaneously in the Grid -- an "iso," or isomorphic algorithm, a program of a sort that generated automatically when the creator started to set his plan in motion. The "isos" were purged in a pogrom by the lieutenant, but she is the (apparently) last survivor of them. So she's along for the ride, an amazing combatant but a naive innocent who knows only that she lives in a world that is cast down from paradise. Plus there's light cycles, and light jets, flyers, trams, you name it. All rendered in liquid beauty with the latest in effects technology, which is a little bit jarring but makes sense in the context of the movie following technological advances in computing from our own timeline.

Of course, the movie isn't a "tour de force." It won't "free your mind" like the Matrix or Inception. It's not trying to make a grandiose statement about the nature of consciousness. Rather, it retelling an old story in a new form for the digital age.

Sadly, the characterizations are slim. Ok, I get that Sam Flynn is an angry young man who's acting out. I get that Kevin Flynn is trying to come to terms with the fact that his presence in the Grid has repercussions beyond his initial intent. I get that Quorra is a naive personality with little depth of character. But I don't feel like I *know* anything about these characters. I feel like my sympathies with Sam Flynn are the result of ham-handed Disney dialog about his rebellion against ENCOM's IP control policies (a major laugh, considering how Disney treats its own IPs). I don't know why Kevin Flynn thinks that the isos would change everything, or why the isos were considered "imperfect" by Flynn's renegade architect. I also don't have the sense that the programs are extensions of things going on in our world. In the original TRON, there's a cut that goes from the arcade with players driving around light cycles, to the inside of the machine where the programs are riding their light cycles. I never really feel like the programs are actually doing things that programs do -- in a sense they have their own autonomous world now, perhaps because it's ostensibly the one made by Flynn's plan, but it doesn't seem as "connected" to our world.

The symmetries between this movie and the original are occasionally clever. There's a lot of circular action: The discs, of course, are circles; and naturally they are thrown out and come back. In many places the dialog is circular, with characters referencing things that were said in other parts of the movie, only in a new context, or with a reversal of characterization. Some characters repeat signature lines from the first film.

In the end of the original TRON movie, Kevin Flynn debarks a helicopter landing on ENCOM at night. Time-lapse speeds up the scene as night falls over the city and cars streak by on the highway while the city itself is lit up, and we come to realize that our world is becoming like the world inside the computer, all lights and grids and motion. At the end of TRON: Legacy, Sam Flynn returns to our world (with a surprise) and goes for a ride on one of those freeways during the day, past towns and oceans and forests, a reminder that with all the digital glory of our modern world, we have many things to appreciate in the real world.

The movie could've benefited by more examination of the role of the isos and more connections between our world and the computer world, as well as a little more understanding of what's going on in the computer. (The original TRON wasn't shy about referencing computer hardware, like the I/O tower or "pure power, straight from the source," especially when the MCP berates Sark with "You've almost reached your decision gate and I can't spare you any more time." The new movie is much less dedicated.)

Overall, TRON: Legacy is certainly an action-adventure film. It's not a brain-twister -- Kevin Flynn may have achieved great wisdom during his time trapped in the Grid, but he does not have wisdom to share with us, the viewers, in a way that will change our thinking. The characters participate in an adventure that is a beautifully-rendered retelling of an old story, with a few new twists. The end leaves room for a sequel, but I actually feel it might be better sold turning into a television series that has time to explore all of the nuances and niches that were left by the two movies.

85/100.

Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader (movie version).

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 08:40:52 GMT

These days I wind up seeing more movies than I used to, simply because I have free evenings and not a lot of local associates and fellow ne'er-do-wells. I would imagine this is kinda why James Steele saw so many movies. This time out, I saw "The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader," which you already know if you read the title of this post.

This film was thoroughly, relentlessly "meh," which is a pretty stern condemnation of the studio's treatment of the source material. It's pretty clear that the mommy-daddy fighting between Disney and Walden, and the subsequent budget reduction, really cut into the movie's production values. Not only that, but the writers decided that it would be too hard to showcase the story in the order shown in the book, so they make up a McGuffin (the seven swords of the seven Telmarine lords) and change the progression of events in the book. Guys . . . if you're getting paid megabucks to write screenplays for Hollywood, perhaps you should accept that your job may be challenging and occasionally difficult and actually put in the time to make the story work cinematically instead of copping out with "It's too hard to do what we want when we follow the book, so let's just screw around with it."

Along the way, the screenwriters managed to miss the whole point of the book. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader begins as a journey to discover the lost Telmarine lords, then turns into a journey to defeat darkness (in the movie, green mist) and, for at least one character (Reepicheep), an attempt to reach Aslan's Country (heaven, if you follow the theological interpretation of the series). This means that the voyage of the Dawn Treader begins as a mundane journey but turns into a spiritual quest and therefore showcases the old saw that "it's about the journey, not the destination." The screenwriters apparently decided to toss this out the window and instead make the journey a pursuit of seven magical swords that, laid on Aslan's stone table (which has somehow wound up in the Uttermost East), will break the spell of an evil green mist that is stealing people away.

The young principal actors do a good job -- credit to them. They probably read the book and then read the screenplay and then dutifully soldiered on as best they could.

Other websites have hacked apart how the movie differed from the book, but my major complaint is not that it cut scenes or made up characters or removed characters, but it changed the focus of the book from spiritual allegory to an adventure film. This is starkly underscored by Eustace's dragon transformation. Eustace is arguably the most important character in the book, as he is the one who undergoes the most character development. He goes from a thoroughly rotten and priggish brat (which, not surprisingly, coincides in Lewis' work with being analytical and logic-driven) to a sympathetic character because he grows due to suffering the consequences of bad choices. In Lewis' work, of course, Aslan has to turn Eustace back from a dragon into a boy by digging into the dragon-scales and tearing them away -- Lewis' way of saying that you can't get rid of bad habits (like rational thinking) on your own, you have to let God get his claws into you and really change you to the core in painful ways. There's a dream-scene in the novel in which Eustace has a dialog with Aslan to try to understand how his superficial changes will not be enough to turn him back, but this is completely removed in the movie in exchange for turning Eustace the Dragon into an action hero. Thus, Eustace's character development is never really explored; he just gets turned into a dragon, heroes around a bunch, then POOF he's a boy again and now he's not bratty. Similarly, the golden bracelet that transforms him and pains him (the "first step" into his bad choices, the one that leaves a scar) is visible but it's never really addressed other than to have Lucy just toss it aside. BLEAH! On the up side, it should be intriguing to see Will Poulter in the next film, as he does a good turn of Bratty Eustace and does not have enough time later as Repentant Eustace. (Again, likely because he spends too much time as Dragon Eustace.)

Normally I wouldn't harp on special effects over story, but it's also pretty clear that the effects budget was all blown on the sea serpent end-story confrontation that does twenty minutes of video game boss fight.

Overall, unimpressive. That's a real shame, too, because Dawn Treader is consistently one of the most popular books in the series, and its episodic adventure-turned-spiritual-journey could've been an interesting film. Sadly, the filmmakers . . . got lazy.

Next up will be The Silver Chair, where we get more Eustace Clarence Scrubb, Jill Pole, and (here's hoping he's not a CGI insert) Puddleglum the Marsh-Wiggle. With any luck the returns and reviews on Dawn Treader will convince the studio not to mess too much with the search for Prince Rilian and instead to get back to just telling the damn story (a cautionary tale about what happens when you forget to say your prayers every night before bed; but since Lewis is so relentlessly Christian allegorical that he apparently missed that when Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund that they are "too old" for Narnia and must know him by another name in our world, he is essentially comparing Christianity to a grown-up version of childrens' make-believe).

Deconstructing Niall Ferguson

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 10:57:49 GMT

So tonight I had the dubious joy of plowing through a substantial chunk of Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, ostensibly a historiography of the rise of finance. Ferguson (who is known in some circles as a "counterfactual" historian) also makes the grandiose claim that he believes that all history is irrevocably tied to finance and that finance drives all wars and all social events. I think that pegging complex systems on any one simple cause is a load of horse puckey, but that should not be surprising, as I wound up taking issue with a lot of Ferguson's self-aggrandizing posturing in his love letter to the Chicago school of economics. Then again, a lot of economic modeling is kind of the history of trying to use a single input or equation to explain the complexities of market distribution, so this is probably just a habit of economists.

(So, I still have to go back and add some rigor to my last LJ post about economic fallacies, but I haven't made it to storage yet to pick up all my references, and thus it'll have to wait.)

Warning! Algebra ahead!

Anyway, Ferguson has the usual Chicago-school belief that if we just let the markets run themselves everything would be fine for everybody, and he chortlingly celebrates the "failure of the socialist welfare state" (apparently, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and even France don't exist in his world). What I've come to recognize in the Chicago school is that it prizes efficiency of markets over everything else, which strikes me as terminally flawed because economics is dealing with the distribution of goods and services to actual people, and if your distribution network is totally skewed and not giving essential goods and services to people because that would be "inefficient" (i.e. because they are too poor or because the market does not actually follow your simplified model), then your study of economics is doing a shit-poor job of making the world a better place, and why the hell are you bothering? (Whew.)

Ferguson then goes on to make some bizarre claims, like his examination of microfinance in Latin America, where he claims that the inability to make legal title claims on the land where you live is hindering economic development because people have no houses as collateral to get loans to start their own businesses. This is, of course, predicated on the assumption that (a) everyone should be starting a business (and who would be working for them? apparently nobody is a laborer in his model) and (b) everyone should be starting a business (because if you start a business and grow the economy, that's obviously better than any alternative that might be part of your cultural way of life or your choice about lifestyle). This ties into my second observation about fundamental failures in modern economics, which is that it's not really an interdisciplinary field; economists keep tossing out these models that make assumptions about culture and psychology that just aren't true. After all, the standard market model assumes that people in it are rational actors working to maximize their utility, and that's totally untrue, or else there wouldn't be marketing. Plus, people do not evaluate long-term costs effectively; psychologically, we're wired to devalue long-term costs by about 50%. Hence procrastination. Which also means that people do not judge value correctly against long-term costs, and we get stupid crap like companies maximizing short-term profitability at the expense of long-term viability. Or me blowing my pocket change on an ice cream bar today instead of saving up for a copy of Fallout: New Vegas later.

Ferguson really gets my goat because he makes all kinds of bald claims that are based on the assumption of the ignorance of the viewer. He decides to trot out Milton Friedman, for instance, so that he can mention the famous equation
MV = PQ
. . . which is, in fact, not Friedman's at all, but goes back to John Stuart Mill; but since Friedman is kind of the patron saint of the Chicago school, naturally Ferguson uses this as one of his key points when he goes on one of the favorite Chicago school rants: The evils of inflation. He brings out the Argentine inflation crisis (probably because it's more modern than Weimar Germany) in order to lay home the notion that "inflation bad!" without bothering to recognize the major difference between mechanical inflation and hyperinflation (hint: modest inflation over time is actually not a bad thing; it's when it's too fast for purchase power to keep up that it's really bad) and then goes on a rambling tangent about Chile and how Pinochet seized power in a military coup from Allende, ostensibly because people were revolting against Allende's "welfare state," all while totally ignoring the fact that Pinochet was backed up by the CIA as part of the U.S. policy of containment of Communism. (Fun fact: Allende was democratically elected, and we still overthrew him in favor of a military dictator!)
ANYway. Back to MV = PQ!
(That's [M]oney supply * [V]elocity of transactions = [P]rice index * [Q] index of real expenditures, which is Q for reasons I'll explain later.)
So, Ferguson throws out this rash statement that if the government prints money, prices must rise. His justification: If M goes up, then P must go up. This is mathematically sound: if you double M, then you could double P and your equation remains valid:
2MV = 2PQ
But it's also a total disservice to the fact that you could balance your equation in other ways, like halving the velocity of money:
2M * .5V = PQ
or doubling the real expenditures index:
2MV = P * 2Q
So while trying to claim that printing money always leads to inflation, he basically just "omits the truth" for the audience. Convenient.
Wait wait, let's back up a sec and see if these actually make any damn sense. I mean, could you ever actually have a situation where you print money but you also see the velocity of transactions go down?
Well, right now (Nov. 2010), the U.S. is injecting additional currency into the market, and at the same time the savings rate of U.S. consumers is up. So the money supply is up, but the amount that people are spending is down! Why, that's an increase in M with a decrease in V! Hot damn!
What about the other situation? Could you increase the real expenditures index?
Well, the real expenditures index is actually a column vector in the expanded format of the equation (which I won't reprint here, as it involves sigma notation, which is a notorious pain on the internet). It's a column vector of the quantities of sales, where prices are row vectors. What does that mean? It basically means that Q is [Q]uantity of crap you're selling.
In the short term, supply is inflexible. If you go to the supermarket and they have 3 jars of mayonnaise on the shelf, you're not getting more than 3 jars, and that's that. But in macroeconomic theory, supply and demand are fungible -- that is, they can be shifted. (In reality this doesn't work at all. You can't eat a week's worth of meals in advance, or delay consumption of meals for 3 months and then catch up later. Yet another example of how economics has little to do with reality.)
Anyway, this means that the other expectation -- raising Q -- totally fits your theory of demand! That is, people show up demanding to buy stuff. In the short term, prices rise because there's too many people with too many dollars demanding too little stuff. In the long term, though, your businesses respond to that demand. They see money out there and they want it, so people start finding ways to fill that demand! They make new companies, take out loans, hire new workers, and they produce so that they can meet the demand and get that money. Prices drop from competition and the companies have employed people. Hey, everyone wins!
So if you don't get inflation -- if you inject money (M) and you don't get a huge increase in prices (P) -- then either consumption rate is down (V) or else companies are expanding to supply more goods (Q).
. . . which means, if you buy the equation in the first place, this could be a good thing!
And suddenly, the decision to inject a ton of capital into the U.S. economy looks like it might not be an entirely bad idea after all!

A lot of this makes me wonder about Ferguson's background. Was he a child of privilege? One of the common factors that I often see in the Chicago school is this embrace of theoretical positions (as the T-shirt says, "That's all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory?") without regard to the actual consequences. Ferguson, for instance, goes on about how we must dismantle socialism and welfare, and how it's not affordable, yet he never once explains what we ARE supposed to do with our elderly retirees. Do we just leave them out in the snow to die of exposure? He gleefully explains that this now exposes people once more to "risk," but are we talking about the risk that you may not be able to afford medical care and thus spend the rest of your life crippled or invalid, or saddle your family with huge medical debts? What's the benefit here? He positively glows over the notion of "personal retirement accounts," which is the system whereby instead of a social security backed by the government your elderly people just stick part of their income into an investment fund so that brokers can play with it. He points up that workers in Argentina wholeheartedly adopted the system and saw massive increases in their retirement funds, which is a really pretty test-case scenario that totally ignores the fact that markets can go down as well as up, that markets cannot expand infinitely, and that investment bankers can and do engage in risky transactions or moral hazard that can compromise your investment -- any of which would nicely wipe out retirement savings for your "personal account," with nothing but a shrug and a "sorry, I guess you don't get to retire after all." (Remember what happened to your 401(k) after the crash in 2008?)
Ferguson is absolutely paranoid of inflation, and he tries to tie it to riots and social upheaval, but modest inflation can actually be good for middle-class consumers -- it makes their debts and mortgages more manageable, because a debt of $100 yesterday is easily paid tomorrow when $100 isn't worth much and is easy to get; the people who really take a hit from inflation are the wealthy, the elite few who have money tied up in investments and stand to lose out if inflation outruns the rate of interest on their holdings. Similarly, when you get rid of social programs and cut government safety nets, the folks who really get hit hard are the poor, those who rely on these things for survival. If you're rich, it's really easy to say "Oh, we should just get rid of government programs" because you don't rely on them anyway. You don't need food stamps, or Medicaid, or subsidized bus and rail transit.

Anyway, that's enough for today. I think next I'll tackle an idea I've been kicking around of segmented economies, which is probably handled by those indexed vectors that I mentioned earlier, and which would very neatly explain how the bulk of the U.S. stimulus money managed to vanish before our eyes and the folks who needed it most and stood to do the most good with it -- the middle and lower classes -- didn't get to use a dime of it for consumption, and instead it vanished into the pockets of wealthy banks, investment firms, and private individuals, there to languish without creating any actual economic progress. Oops.

The Market of Sociopathy.

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:57:41 GMT

Recently, a friend's Facebook entry became a weird sort of ideological battleground with Tea Partiers, would-be revolutionaries, and conspiracy theorists coming out of the woodwork. It's a shame that politics and economics are so heavily intertwined, because it means that you can't discuss one without discussing the other, but that's only natural since as I've opined before, "Economics of the process of determining the distribution method of scarce resources. Politics is the process of deciding who makes those decisions."

tl;dr below!

One thing I want to tackle, though, is this free market buzz that's been going around. Some folks keep clinging, like Tiberian bats, to this notion that a free and unregulated market is so super-efficient that it fixes everything and has no problems. Unfortunately, as much as I wish that were true -- it would be great if we could just let stuff "run itself" and it would be as close as you can get to perfect -- this is just not the case.

But I've said before you can't just make claims or motivate someone through fear if you want to make a valid argument, so I shall follow my own lead! Here, then, are some contraindicators to "free market" notions that an unregulated market makes everyone happy.

To my thinking, the underlying problem is that a "free market" ideology comes with certain underlying assumptions that simply aren't true. Veblen and Schumpeter already addressed some of these (rational buyer, gold standard, & c.). I'll tackle a few others.

- Claim: The free market regulates itself, because companies that engage in harmful practices lose business and lose to competitors.
Reality: How many times lately have you read about a company engaging in harmful business, like selling dangerous products, dumping toxic waste, or gambling with investors' money on shady deals? How many times did the company actually fall because of competition? The problem here is that large companies -- "megacorporations," to borrow the parlance of the cyberpunk generation -- are easily able to survive temporary drops in income, especially when their income is not based on selling a product but on generating a revenue stream through other models like subscriptions or investments. Free market advocates assume that if your company sells a harmful product, word will get out and soon everyone will flock to a competitor. But not all companies have direct competitors! If it were discovered today that your cable company were piping brain-destroying signals straight to your television (like Spike! channel), would you be able to switch to another company? Depending on your neighborhood, maybe not. Also, this is a punitive model. The presumption is that a company does something harmful and THEN, as a consequence of this harm, the company loses business. So how many people does a company have to hurt, first? If a company releases toxic goo that engenders cancer in everyone in a municipality, maybe the market will punish the company -- at the expense of all the lives that were ruined before anything was ever done to stop it.

- Claim: There can be no monopoly in a free market, because monopolies are inefficient (they set prices above equilibrium) and therefore a new competitor will always arise because there is room to make profit in that margin.
Reality: Anyone who studied the oil barons and the rail barons knows that this isn't true. The argument seems mathematically sound. The problem is that it assumes that you're starting at a competitive state -- that is, that any small start-up can generate enough capital to challenge the market of the monopolist. This isn't true in the era of megacorporations. A large corporation can easily take a loss in a restricted market (say, the one city that a small start-up serves) in order to preserve its long-term monopoly by driving a competitor out of business before the competitor can grow. Failing that, a megacorporation can just buy up the competitor. One of my friends laments the loss of a particular brand of mints that can no longer be found in stores. Turns out these mints were wildly successful -- so, by the free market theory, they should continue to be produced to meet demand, right? Wrong. Wrigley's (the candy/mint/chewing gum manufacturer) actually noticed a decline in their mint sales -- their market share was being eaten by the competition. Instead of making a better product, Wrigley's just bought the competing company, folded it up, and discontinued their mints. Nice job, free market!
There's another problem here, too. Not all markets are suited to direct competition. Take a look back at your cable provider. Ever wonder why so many cable markets have only one or two providers, and they're almost always big name companies like AT&T and Comcast? Well, a competitor can't very well run their own cable straight to your house. It's a huge infrastructure investment to tear up sidewalks and put down cable to a subdivision, and a terrible risk if nobody decides to sign on. Are you really going to have four cable lines all running to your neighborhood, with each neighbor picking which provider they use, and the providers having to fight for market share by competing in pricing? Heavens no. Once you have a physical cable line in place, all you really want is the data on that line. Turns out in the '90s, you could do this! Laws were in place that made big cable providers (AT&T, Comcast, et. al.) lease their lines to other companies. If Earthlink wanted to sell you cable, they could. They'd just lease the cable line from the owner, then sell you cable that they got on their own contracts with the networks. This meant competition, which drove prices down! If Earthlink could sell you the same channels more cheaply than AT&T, then AT&T had to find ways to cut prices and become more efficient. So what happened? The big cable companies lobbied the FCC to remove this requirement. In the interests of the "free market," they demanded deregulation, and it passed. As a result, they can now refuse to provide cable access to any competitor. So what's a competitor going to do? Run their own new cable line to your house? Unlikely . . . and suddenly there's no competition for cable.

- Claim: The free market spurs innovation, because you need the "next new technology" to be competitive and create a niche for your profitability.
Reality: Once again, the megacorporation gets in the way. The notion of the market driving innovation looks sound on paper (like, say, Communism) but the reality is very different: A large corporation that already earns its profits from a tech sector has a vested interest in not facing competition. Just like a start-up competitor (above), a new tech competitor faces the juggernaut of a large corporation and its ability to outspend in the short term in order to maintain its continued existence. Worse still, technological innovation is an inherently expensive and risky business. If you're making a new wonder drug or a new computer chip, you need money to research it, money to make your test designs, money to get through the gauntlet and onto the market. Where's that money coming from? Big corporations who already dominate the market, or wealthy investors who just want a return on their cash (and thus are skittish about investing in risky projects). Once again, the big company buys out the innovator -- in some cases, simply shelving the innovation so that it's "business as usual."

You see the repeated pattern of the big corporation's influence here? Now before we go overboard, don't start conflating notions like "well, all big corporations must be evil" or "big corporations must be the only thing wrong with the economy!" Those aren't true either. And big corporations do help us -- they allow the use of economies of scale, which is how you can get cheap cars, computers, and other labor-intensive gewgaws. Corporations also allow you to create public investment in expensive projects, which is a really good way to raise capital. They just happen to come with a bunch of other built-in problems . . .

So here's what it comes down to: The market may excel at allocating goods -- but it only does so for certain goods in very specific models. If you're allocating a public good, like infrastructure, it's terrible. If you're allocating a good for which there's no simple substitute, or your buyers aren't rational (hint: that's the point of marketing), or your buyers don't have perfect information, or your sellers can control the market terms . . . well, it's pretty bad.

The biggest sticking point of all is simply this: the market has no morality. By pure market-driven math, the market will always allocate food to a rich oligarch over a poor starving family, because the oligarch can and will pay more. It doesn't even matter if the oligarch then just throws the food away -- the market doesn't care what you do; it just allocates.

Now you might argue that some people get value out of "doing the right thing." Your wealthy oligarch might choose to limit his consumption because he realizes that if he overinflates the value of food, other people will starve! And the utility (the value) to him in not letting this happen is greater than the value of a meal that will just be half-eaten and thrown out anyway. Unfortunately, this is not true for a large portion of humanity. Depending on which numbers you cite, this portion might be as high as 20%. Sociopaths -- people with no social sense, no empathy, no ability to "feel" for other people -- will never, ever make such a moral utility judgment, except perhaps to cover for the fact that they are sociopaths. So these sociopaths will "play the market." They'll drive competition out of business by using their position to undercut, then establish a monopoly. They'll slip into markets that do not permit for simple substitution, like cable television delivery, and squeeze out any chance of a competitor entering the market at all. They'll break laws and commit crimes because the cost to pay a fine is lower than the cost to comply. They'll sell at "equilibrium" prices when that equilibrium means that people are hurt, or killed, because the market will allocate to whoever will pay, not whoever really needs something. And the market rewards them for it.

The market is imperfect because it does not feel. It does not care if you are a friend. It doesn't care that you are starving, or that you have cancer, or that there just aren't any jobs to be had, or that some drunken idiot rammed your car while you were a teenager and ruined your legs and your spine. It only cares about whether you pay.

And that's not perfect. Far from it. It is, dare I say it, evil.

We are living beyond our means.

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:11:49 GMT

At the end of World War II (where all modern U.S. history eventually winds up), the U.S. was left as the foremost manufacturing power in the industrial world. Europe was basically a heap of rubble. Japan had just been nuked, twice. China, India, the many and varied African nations -- they lacked the industrial infrastructure and education to compete in any broad way with the U.S. on the global economic market. So we rebuilt the world.
This ushered in decades of prosperity. With the Great Depression a memory, the GI Bill serving up homes and college degrees for returning veterans, and countries all across Europe in need of U.S. goods and trading in U.S. dollars, the economy surged forward. People started to live by the dream of the culture -- every family, a home of its own. (In many cultures, you live in the traditional family house, staying with your parents, and pass it on to your children.) The national highway infrastructure turned the country into the paradise for the automobile, and people raced to snap those up. Leisure spending crept up as people demanded televisions, movies, vacations. Bolstered by its manufacturing base, its universities, its huge population base and its then-stable currency, the U.S. was able to live beyond the dreams of most other nations. With years of work Europe would rebuild its infrastructure and eventually forge a stronger E.U. Later, brush wars to "contain Communism" would suck up the U.S.'s resources and youth, and eventually collapse the Soviet Union under the weight of military spending. Life was good.
This pace of rapid industrialization led inevitably to new technologies. The constant drive to make better, faster, shinier gewgaws and consumer goods -- and to race to the moon, to build a better bomb, and to crack the secrets of surveillance and codes -- gave us nuclear power, computers, genetics, plastics, and a host of other toys. It also gave us the internet, which is how this screed makes its way into the wild.
That's the key: The internet sends knowledge out into the wild. When you want to build infrastructure, you need a location, you need labor, you need materials, and you need knowledge. Before, you had to build in places where you could have labor and knowledge. You built a steel plant in the U.S. because you had a workforce that could handle the technology to construct the damn thing and a base of ready labor in the people that lived in the large communities of the U.S. If you wanted to make a nuclear reactor, you had to do it in a seriously developed nation; nobody else had the materials (refined uranium), the knowledge (how to make a controlled fission reaction without blowing yourself up), the labor (educated nuclear scientists). All they had was location.
With the internet, with knowledge in the wild, you suddenly have labor and knowledge anywhere you want it. The same is true to some degree thanks to the fax machine, satellite communications, the telephone; ubiquitous communication makes ubiquitous information. Your location can be any place on the planet where you can plop down your parts, and you can get materials anywhere by plane, by ship, by helicopter, hell, even by camel. You don't have to build your factory near a university, or even in a developed nation; you can plop it down in the middle of a desert somewhere (the low humidity means less rust!) or perhaps at the base of a mountain range in some hinterland. Impoverished people will come to you, looking for work. And the spread of information means you can find educated people anywhere. Someone made it out of that ghetto in Calcutta, in Kowloon, in Addis Ababa, and got a degree. You can hire him or her. Suddenly the U.S. doesn't have anything with which to compete.
And the U.S. has a lot of laws. A lot of laws. That's why we have 40-hour work weeks and (sometimes) medical benefits and vacation days and worker protections and why we don't have sweatshops (that people know about) or unsafe factories (when we can catch them) or child labor. We outsource that crap to other countries.
So what's happening? Globalization is happening. The standard of living in the U.S. is declining because standards of living elsewhere are rising. In China, the median income is surging. Thousands -- maybe millions -- of people who were below the world poverty line are suddenly becoming "middle class." India has actually become enough of an industrial powerhouse to have its own entertainment sector, and we got Bollywood. (Grant Collier, of Infinity Ward, once jokingly said that the U.S. would always be a world leader because of our culture -- "Where will people go for movies or videogames? Bollywood?" he laughed. And today we have Slumdog Millionaire winning awards.)
Now you might here some folks tell you that the obvious answer is that we have to get competitive by removing those laws. I mean, you can have child labor and sweatshops and unsafe factories in India or Pakistan or Yemen. That's how you get your really cheap T-shirts. Make them in huge quantities in places where you don't have to pay anything, really, and ship 'em over. But that . . . that is a race to the bottom. It's saying that we shouldn't protect anyone, anywhere from exploitation, because someone, somewhere is going to be, well, evil.
The alternative is to try to push for other countries to raise their standards. We may have to wait 'til there's a huge garment fire in China before their sweatshops get more safety. Maybe India will need an entire generation of underprivileged children to sweep into the polls and enact child labor laws. But the U.S. should have been parlaying its influence to make these things happen. It's good for them -- it protects people from exploitation and abuse. It's good for us -- it means that we stay relatively competitive on the world market.
Sadly, the U.S. has squandered its influence. That influence was wasted on generation after generation of brush wars, and McMansions bought with refinanced housing debt, and huge cars with terrible mileage financed by killing research budgets into alternative energy, and pissing away international goodwill and personal savings rates. Now the U.S. isn't in much of a position to do any leading, seeing how China holds the purse strings.
So it's time for the inevitable adjustment. A lot of people in the rest of the world are getting their shot at consuming some of the resources that the U.S. has been hogging for half a century. If we're graceful, if we are careful, if we mind our money and act responsibly, then we may be able to slide down into an adjustment. Real buying power of U.S. wages has declined steadily in the last decade, maybe more; people have been using their debt, mostly from refinanced homes on exotic CDOs, to keep up their lifestyles. We've lived high on the hog for so long that we think it's a right, not a privilege or a luxury. And we will scream, and yell, and wave guns and threaten anyone who dares to suggest otherwise -- just look at the Tea Party.
So much for graceful, careful, thrifty, and responsible.
The alternative isn't pretty. As the U.S. needs to find ways to finance its national debt, that means austerity measures. But nobody wants to pay more taxes. Who cares that it's your civic duty, right? You got yours, and fuck everyone else. Instead you wind up with rioting like in Greece. You wind up with increasingly bitter people looking for alternatives and places to put blame -- like blaming Mexicans for "taking all the jobs." (Immigrant labor disproportionately impacts high school drop-outs, which should tell you something about who's complaining.) Like blaming the gays for "bringing the wrath of God down on America." (Gay couples tend to be affluent and childless, so they actually spend more; they also don't have marriage benefits, so they pay more in taxes. Both of these actually help the economy.) Like turning to religion to answer your questions instead of reason. Like using fear to motivate people, instead of diplomacy.
England went from an empire to a stately nation with a series of bangs abroad, as it lost its colonies and eventually lost all its money in the bitter war at the very beginning of this posting. The U.S. doesn't have that option. If there's going to be unrest and displacement and violence, it's going to be at home. And if you don't go out with a whimper, the alternative is a bang.

Time for Michael Steele to bow out gracefully.

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:11:47 GMT

I believe that RNC chairman Michael Steele should step down -- but probably not for the reasons that you think.
Between the misuse of funds and the offbase commentary, and now with the most recent claims that the fighting in Afghanistan is "Obama's war" (here's a hint: the U.S. became involved in Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up opposition to the Soviets, and later we started Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001, so calling this "Obama's war" is wildly inaccurate), Michael Steele has shown that he's not providing useful guidance and he seems focused more on talking-head sound bytes than upon actual, useful dialog or policy. It's like he's cribbing from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity in his attempts to inflame listeners by using charged statements regardless of their accuracy or relevance.
Now a cynical liberal might say "Great, keep him there, he can keep talking trash and causing problems for the Republicans." And to a large extent I feel that problems in the Republican party are self-generated, between their attempts to appease social conservatives who want to force their religious beliefs on other people and the party's drive to inculcate fiscally uh . . . well, Tea Partiers, who naturally would be aghast if they actually understood the level of war spending and corporate bailout spending that the Republicans have backed.
The problem is that Steele has become nothing more than a talking-point punching bag. If we want substantive movement on issues in this country, we have to discuss real issues. We have to discuss them in a meaningful way and dissect them for causes, then join together looking for solutions. You'll never get everyone to agree on those solutions but you need some kind of progress if you want to make changes. With Steele spouting pure rhetoric, he's not contributing to any sort of meaningful dialog. As John Stewart said on the Daily Show, he's a "partisan . . . hack." I WANT the RNC to have a tough-as-nails chairman who spits constructive policy and has a staunch opinion on how to approach this country's structural problems, and who is able to articulate step-by-step how those solutions will work, with research and evidence from experts and history. I WANT the DNC and the other minor parties to have to rise to the occasion and provide the same level of dialog.
Instead we have these effing screaming contests of people pointing fingers and running absolutely terrified of anything that would approach a real structural change because undereducated voters are scared of it and will vote them out of office. I mean, seriously, "Keep the government out of my Medicare?" That's a total failure to understand what the hell is going on -- and that ignorance is blocking any real attempt at progress, as people dig in like mules and resist policy changes on the strength of misunderstanding and fear.
And if we can't get past fear, then what's the point of being able to think?
Did you know:
* Immigrant labor actually improves the economy slightly (it's about 1%) by driving down prices and making basic amenities more affordable? The people who take the biggest hit from competing with immigrants are generally high school dropouts. (Source: Atlantic Monthly)
* The recently-passed half-hearted health care reform bill is expected to lower the amount of money that the federal government spends on healthcare, not to raise it? (Source: Congressional Budget Office)
* Comparing veterans under age 65 in 2009 to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, *five times* as many veterans died from lack of health care as did those who died in the Middle East?
* In spite of the Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down Texas' anti-sodomy laws, both the Montana and Texas Republican party platforms include the goal of criminalizing homosexuality?
* Drilling a relief well for the Gulf oil disaster at the depth and technological challenges present is about a two-to-three month operation, so there's no way for that project to move faster? (Source: My uncle Dave, who worked for Exxon as a ship's chief engineer up until his retirement)

[Camstuff] Character ties, redux.

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 23:46:24 GMT

With my prior character denied at Top, I'm building an alternative to play for six months. If you're interested in a connection with a curmudgeonly sort who doesn't answer phone calls and curses at people in Polish, drop me a line.