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Month: April 2004

Five minus one

April 19, 2004
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I didn’t like Five Deadly Venoms as much as I thought I would. The kung fu was awesome, particularly the final battle, which provided a suitable climax to the movie. The DVD transfer was, again, superb. The story didn’t really grab me, though.

I think in retrospect I was expecting big kung fu action with all five Venoms from the first minute, which is not what I got. Instead, I got a somewhat complex mystery, and I wasn’t quite in the mood for that. It was a pretty good mystery, and I only figured out who was who five minutes before the revelation. Also, I’ve realized that I like the big sweeping epics like Water Margin better than the close-focus kung fu flicks, on average.

Worth watching, and I have another Venoms movie to watch (same actors, not a related plot), and I’m looking forward to that one. Just not as much fun as the other Shaws I’ve seen so far.

Winter Hill drama

April 18, 2004
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Mention Count: 2.

In Angel, characters have Drama Points, which can be used for a number of quasi-narrative purposes. PCs get either 10 or 20 at the start of the game, depending on how powerful they are otherwise. (Think of the difference between Angel or Buffy on the one hand and Xander or Wesley on the other hand.) They have five uses, as follows:

Heroic Feat, which gives you a +10 bonus on any one roll; I Think I’m OK, which instantly heals half the damage a character has taken to the point it’s used; Plot Twist, which creates a “lucky break” for the characters; Righteous Fury, which costs 2 Drama Points and gives a +5 bonus for all rolls for one fight; and Back From The Dead, which allows a character to come back from death.

You can get more Drama Points by trading in experience points or — more interestingly — acting in a number of ways which reinforce the genre. For example, self-sacrificing heroic actions earn Drama Points. The GM also has the option to give out Drama Points when he takes over narrative control of a situation. For example, if he narrates that a PC is knocked out without warning, said PC gets a few Drama Points in exchange.

Since Life and Death on Winter Hill is a short-term game, I don’t think it makes sense to hand out experience points. I’d cut out the middle-man and just grant 4 or 2 Drama Points per session, depending once more on the power level of the character.

What are the genre conventions I want to encourage? I do actively want this to take place in the Whedonverse, so I think giving out Drama Points for witty lines makes sense. Drama Points for angst doesn’t make as much sense. Loyalty, on the other hand, is fairly important. Perhaps 2 Drama Points every time someone makes a difficult decision involving loyalty? I’m not sure exactly how to codify that. Possibly Loyalty should be an disadvantage in character generation, much the same way as Honorable is in the base rules.

I’m also thinking about other ways to use Drama Points as narrative currency. I want to give players narrative control over NPCs, both because I like making players do my work for me and because I think I can leverage that control for more emotional involvement. (More on that in a later post.) It seems like you should be able to invent an NPC for 1 Drama Point, and take over long-term control of an NPC for something like 3-5 Drama Points.

Finding the needle

April 18, 2004
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From an interview with Matt Wells of Gigablast:

“Another major feature of Gigablast is its ability to index Web pages almost instantly, Wells explains. The network machines give priority to query traffic, but when they’re not answering questions, they spend their time spidering the Web.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

His comments on the reasons for Google’s success are dead accurate, by the by. PageRank was not as important as size and freshness.

When fighting back

April 18, 2004
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I really haven’t had a lot to say about the Iraqi insurgency. Or, if you prefer, rebellion. Or terrorism. Or uprising. Me, I’ve been thinking of it as “the Iraqi disaster,” but I must admit that’s a somewhat loaded term.

I think in retrospect I’m a little wary. There’s this great debating tactic: when someone posts about problems in Iraq, and says “this is the sort of thing I was worried about; this is the sort of thing that proves my point” you go over and say, at the top of your lungs, “Look! She’s happy that American soldiers are dying!” It’s not a great tactic because it convinces people. It’s a great tactic because it reinforces the convictions of the people who use it, and allows them to feel all morally superior.

Still. This is the sort of thing I was worried about, and it’s the sort of thing that proves my point. I wish I’d been wrong.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army has a fairly firm hold on Najaf. Najaf is a holy city, and if American troops attack it, the Mahdi Army will swell with recruits. The United States cannot afford to allow rebels to control a major Iraqi city. The wicket is more than a little sticky.

It wouldn’t matter if it was UN troops. The only armed force that could do anything about the problem without making the problem worse is an Iraqi armed force. Unfortunately, we don’t have the kind of credibility and authority in Iraq which would make it possible for us to convince a sizable Iraqi military effort in Najaf. Not that there was going to be any way to establish that kind of credibility.

The only likely path out of this is negotiations, and those are going to be difficult for entirely different reasons — mostly issues of face. Muqtada al-Sadr doesn’t have to back down, and Bush won’t.

The current casualty levels are high in relation to what we’ve seen over the course of the last year, but low in absolute terms. This is cold, but it is also true. It also doesn’t entirely matter, because the question is how longer we’ll be willing to watch a hundred Americans die every month with no exit strategy in sight.

Juan Cole is still the best place to go for analysis of the Iraqi situation. The Command Post has a conservative bias but that doesn’t keep them from posting both good and bad news.

Raoul uneaten

April 18, 2004
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Poppy Z. Brite’s new book, Liquor, is a pretty huge change of direction from her early work. It’s not horror, it’s not gory, and it’s not the work of a writer fascinated by young gay men in New Orleans…

Strike that last; maybe it’s not such a huge change. Still, no vampires or other creepy-crawlies. It’s a foodie novel set in New Orleans, and it’s well-written, so it’s pretty much perfect for people who love cooking. I wouldn’t call it terribly deep but I enjoyed it. Her husband is a cook, and she’s got the feel of the restaurant world down pat as far as I can tell based on the summers I spent running dishwashers on Nantucket.

As a novel, it’s got a fairly loose plot and a paucity of tension. As a slice of life piece, it’s a lot of fun.

Final battle

April 17, 2004
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Sadly, Kwame lost, but it won’t hurt his career. Which is good — I think he’d have been a better hire than Bill, although I’m sure Bill will do a good job for The Donald. On the other hand, Bill certainly did a better job on the final task than Kwame. Kwame was stuck with Omarosa no matter what, but he should have at least tried to sideline her.

Even given that he’d kept Omarosa, he might have had a chance to win if he’d defended himself in the boardroom. I’d have used the situation as an excuse to trot out the “I always hire people who are smarter than me” line, which has the advantage of being true. I’m pretty sure Kwame’s management style works better when he’s had the chance to build and/or mold his own team rather than inheriting a bunch of subpar workers.

I’m already looking forward to Apprentice 2, in large part because competitors can think about strategy now. This season, since nobody knew how the final few shows would work, strategic planning was a shot in the dark. Now, I think it’s clear that you want to ally with another strong competitor; the goal is to get to the final four and then out-interview your ally. That way you get him or her back on your team for the last task; it’s immensely important to have a strong employee there.

Mind you, that’s not exactly what Bill did (unless Bill and Amy had a stronger alliance than we saw) and it’s more or less what Kwame did. So it’s not a guaranteed win. Still, I think that if Kwame had dealt with Omarosa better he’d have won because of Troy’s strong support, and it’s certainly the strategy that got Kwame and Troy into the final five.

WISH burn

April 16, 2004
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WISH #92 asks:

Have you ever gotten burned out as a gamer? What did you do to combat burnout? Which things you tried helped, and which ones didn’t? Which ones would you recommend to a gamer with burnout?

I actually feel a little burned out right now — not a lot, but a bit — so good timing. Hm.

I think that burnout is a life phenomenon for me, not a gaming-specific phenomenon. My work is keeping me too busy to think about gaming as much as I’d like, and there’re a bunch of other things swirling around, and I have trouble working up the enthusiasm to generate characters or think about GMing or anything. Which saddens me. (Yes, this is a typical symptom of depression; yes, I know.)

Mostly I just nudge myself to press on regardless. I don’t skip gaming even if I want to. I grind out character descriptions no matter how I feel about them, because I know they’re better than I give myself credit for. I read gaming material that’s given me joy in the past. I spent a while this week transcribing NPCs from Classic Organizations into Hero Designer, just to get myself back in the groove of thinking about HERO. And all that works pretty well.

Belichick writes

April 15, 2004
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A few days ago I was listening to Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball) on the morning sports show on WEEI. He didn’t say anything deeply surprising, but he did mention that he’d run into Bill Belichick at his agent’s office in New York the other week. Apparently, Coach Belichick is writing a Moneyball-style book about football — no surprise, since he takes the same value for money approach as Billy Beane. I’m looking forward to it, assuming he successfully navigates the publishing rapids.