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Population: One

1. Arts (DALE 1-7)

January 8, 2010
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This was my second run-through of Arts, both times as a GM. Last time I ran it on high; this time was on low, as expected. I was kind of looking forward to finding out how deadly the final fight was on low, but this wasn’t the right group for that, which is perhaps for the best.

I ran down at the Games and Stuff game day for long complex reasons – can’t make it down there usually, but for special occasions I can. It’s nice to meet new folks. The table was Susan, Tom, Trevor, Nina, Frank, and Zach – two newcomers, four fairly experienced players. I’d only run for Susan and Tom before. We had a nicely balanced group with two leaders, a controller, two strikers, and a defender.

I still like Arts a ton. It caters to my tendency to stretch the roleplay. I think we ran about an hour and a half before the first combat, which given that Games and Stuff has limited time available was a touch long. But man, hamming up Torleaf and the teachers is totally worth it. I played him differently than I did the first time – a bit more fey, a bit more snotty – and it was equally fun.

The transition out of the first skill challenge was, once again, tricky. If I ever run this again I need to make sure I really get why the NPCs are going where they’re going, because it’s really easy for one of the PCs to short-circuit the skill challenge. This is allowed for in the text but I keep tripping over the order of certain events.

I DME’d the first fight down a notch to allow for two completely new players. If I’d had more time I might have stretched it out more but I knew I was short, so easier to avoid bloodying the entire party. I then ran the second skill challenge – which is consistently awesome; the effect on players when they realize what just happened to them is priceless. Skipped the second encounter (really sorry!) and hit the third encounter hard. It turns out a non-optimized group will still beat the low level encounter handily if they win on initiative.

So that was still fun for everyone. Lots of rampaging around the room. I kept dazing Frank (newcomer) which I felt guilty about, but then again it’s not my fault if he misses three saving throws in a row!

Someday I will run Arts for a kitted out group of level 4s and I will rock out the final encounter challenge with all my might. But no matter how I run it, it’s great on so many levels: lots of roleplay, excellent combat.

“Mother Hen”

January 7, 2010
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We started a new year of glorious movie-going with Sherlock Holmes. It was better than I expected, but it did not rise to brilliance.

The raw material is pretty raw. Checking — yeah, fairly inexperienced screenwriters who haven’t written anything great; I don’t imagine the script gave anyone a lot to work with. I give the writers credit for knowing their Alan Moore, though. (Blackwood is Gull. Ritualistic killing of women in order to bring about a future in his own image? Been there, read that.) Despite stealing from the best, though, the story was simple and uninspired.

Guy Ritchie is Guy Ritchie. Things explode. On the whole it was a touch more subtle than anything else he’s ever done, which may or may not have been due to the acting. I found his camera work on the frenetic side, and I’m usually highly tolerant of quick cuts. It wasn’t a work of great craft, really. The epitome of this would be the Holmesian fighting style.

There’s a fun bit in the first five minutes where Holmes pauses for a split second, maps the fight out in his brain based on his observations of the target, and then executes. It occurs to me tangentially that perhaps the writers know their Grant Morrison JLA as well. Shades of Prometheus? I may be overanalyzing. In any case, Ritchie gives us the sequence twice: once as imagined, once as enacted. It ought to be great, but it isn’t, perhaps because there’s never any payoff. It’s just a thing, and it’s only used in the trivial unimportant fights. You’d expect him to use it and fail to demonstrate how scary an opponent is, or at least to use it, but nope. It vanishes a third of the way through the movie, never to be seen again.

So obviously and in retrospect unsurprisingly, it’s up to Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. to elevate the thing. Which of course they do. Downey’s Holmes hooked me in the sequence where his need to show off undercuts his friendship, because it’s played for laughs — ha ha, look at Holmes get pissed off and incisive — until he’s actually wrong about a key point. Which leads to bitterness. Which transitions directly into a sequence of self-destructive Holmes. Which is perfect.

I loved this vision of the characters. Holmes is a dangerous, angry, haunted man. Watson is compelled by his friend’s brilliance, and is also pretty dangerous. Ex-army, so he should be. Great work from both actors.

The women have much more thankless tasks. Kelly Reilly’s Mary is surprisingly strong, and is one of I think two characters in the film who ever get the best of Holmes. I think this is absolutely necessary in order to maintain the Holmes/Watson/Mary love triangle, but still, it’s a good bit. In fact, I think she has the edge on him twice. Still and all, it’s a very slight role.

Alas, Rachel McAdams is stuck with the “major” female part, in which Irene Adler is relegated to a helpless pawn. For a master criminal, an awful lot of people out-think her, and she needs rather a lot of saving. I was disappointed.

One line review: rompity romp romp romp. I liked it.

Goals for the Year

January 7, 2010
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My goal is to play in and DM a grand total of 50 LFR games or more during 2010. One a week, no big deal, right? I run a game day every two weeks, which covers half of that; I have a few more Embers of Dawn sessions to go; I go to conventions, which means a lot of games in a short timespan; and I do home games.

The goal behind the goal is to get one of my characters to paragon tier and foster paragon tier play in the Baltimore area. Right now, play at the two major Baltimore locations is 95% 1-4 and 4-7. Pump up the volume!

I’m using this bloglet for tracking. I will try to record each game, with light notes on how the game went, what I thought of the module, and so on. It’s an experiment in short-term focused blogging.

Google Chrome OS Quick Reactions

November 19, 2009
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I’m certainly going to want to run it somewhere. I mean, hey, new toy.

They’re talking a lot about the cloud; they’re not talking very much about the implications of what’s essentially a client OS. Will the cloud software be open source? If not, you’re awfully limited: it checks the signature of your OS every time you boot it. Can’t do much hacking that way.

Also, custom firmware. Everyone who’s been bitching about the iPhone as a closed system should be paying close attention to this. In some ways this is tighter than the iPhone; an iPhone doesn’t check the cloud to see if it’s been hacked every time it boots up.

OK, you can download Chrome OS for your machine regardless, but there will also be finetuned Chrome OS devices. I’ll be curious about such details as performance differences.

Probably edits to come after the Q&A. Surely someone will ask about open sourcing the cloud.

Twenty Palaces

November 12, 2009
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I just read the debut novel from Harry Connolly, Child of Fire. It’s urban fantasy/horror with a crime fiction feel: if you’ve ever read a book where a couple of investigators roll into a small town and clean up some corruption for their own reasons, you know the approach. There’s an excerpt available.

I’ll give it a solid B. The plot gets a bit complex in the middle; I think I counted at least four distinct factions in the town, which is sort of a lot. The writing’s good, the protagonists are reasonably interesting, and the world’s good. You can tell it’s designed as a series, with lots of back references to origin stories. There are rules about how magic works.

I like the idea of a secret society — the Twenty Palaces — which ruthlessly eradicates magic. I like the source of magic. Connolly writes good creepy modern monsters. I read someone calling him Lovecraftian, but that’s wrong: he’s mining the same post-modern horror vein as Esoterrorists. The scene where he confronts the source of the town’s problems is pretty darned good.

NBA League Pass

November 5, 2009
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I wouldn’t need the League Pass if I was still living in Boston. But down here? It’s awesome; worth it for the Celtics games alone but when I can check out other interesting games at moment’s notice… that’s superb.

I wish it was in HD. The lack of high def is mitigated by the presence of home announcers sometimes. Listening to Tommy and Mike makes me feel all at home.

The Celtics bench is better than it was two years ago. Rasheed should practice his inside game for when he needs it, but otherwise I’m totally content. When Davis gets back, that’ll be another improvement.

The Big Three are not as good as they were two years ago. Garnett didn’t miss those alley-oops even last year. Possibly he’ll play back into better shape, but Allen’s still a bit down from his peak. It’s not a huge dropoff, but it’s there. Pierce has stayed pretty even.

The Additional Two are much improved. Perkins is a beast at his new weight. Rondo’s got it. Still no jumper, but he’s smarter when he’s unguarded now.

But If It’s Us!

October 23, 2009
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The current schadenfreude election race — if you’re a Democrat — is the NY-23 House race. You’ve got a moderate Republican, a Democrat, and a third party social conservative. Doug Hoffman, the social conservative, is getting lots of national attention: endorsements from Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and so on. It is symptomatic of the split in the Republican Party. Cue Daily Kos smugness.

It is oddly reminiscent of the doomful prognostication regarding the Lamont/Lieberman primary in 2006. Daily Kos did a couple of retrospects of that smuggitude recently. Alas for those who would learn from history, no parallels were drawn between the two elections.

Let’s Put On A Show

October 19, 2009
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Susan and I caught the So You Think You Can Dance tour last Thursday. I’m not sure I’d shell out for the season 6 tour, but I had more fun than I expected at this one.

As expected, it was relentlessly full of tweens and parents, with a scattering of oddballs like us. The overall vibe, as Susan noted, was a high end Disney show. I imagine they’ve learned from High School Musical and so forth. The dances, of which there was not enough, were situated in a rather bland pudding of dancer banter. These kids are not in fact trained in the ancient art of standing on a stage and sounding conversational, excepting of course Evan. It showed.

Most of the dances were refined and tuned from the show versions, to good effect. Different intros, better performances, and so on.

Best dances, not in order:

Kayla and Kupono’s addiction dance. It brought me to tears again. Kupono’s overwrought performance style fit the theme and Kayla does vulnerable very well.

Phillip’s solo. He got a full solo; everyone else had a show-style 1 minute solo, but the Chbeeb got a few minutes to do what he does. He got the biggest solo ovation of the night, too (with Brandon as #2 in that regard). His sense of rhythm and bodily control are superb.

Brandon and Janette’s pop contemporary dance. The thievery dance, I suppose you’d say. Lovely and fresh as always.

Biggest surprise:

Randi and Evan’s samba. Of all the ballroom dances to include, that was the second one, after Brandon and Jeanine’s pasa doble? But it was really good. Randi seems a lot more relaxed now that she isn’t competing, and they really rocked it. Randi and Evan were a solid couple and if any couple not named Brandon and Janette was gonna get two dances on the tour, I suppose they’d be the ones.

Biggest disappointment:

No solo from Janette, no Brandon and Janette ballroom, etc. Maybe she was sick? It seems like a pretty glaring omission. I mean, she’s the one person who didn’t get a solo, out of all twelve performers.

Peace Out

October 9, 2009
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Apparently everyone already knew the Nobel Peace Prize was going to be used as a way to increase someone’s influence. Reuters had the story two days ago. Not that anyone was paying attention.

Wanted – a peace maker or rights activist engaged in a current conflict whose influence would benefit greatly from winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

That is who Norway’s Nobel Committee will choose for 2009 Peace Prize laureate if, as experts expect, it returns closer to Alfred Nobel’s notion of peace. Past prizes went to climate campaigners, life-long diplomats and grass-roots economists.

Nobel’s will doesn’t exactly allow for this. The prize goes “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” I could get snarky and say he deserves it for preventing McCain from becoming President, but I’m not sure I feel quite that snarky about McCain.

On the other hand, I probably do feel that snarky about Palin. The world’s a safer place without her in the Executive Branch. Hey, good work, Obama.