Wherein I Talk About Batman

Batman wears two hats. The first is the hat the rabid fans put on him, where he is a god pretending to be a human. His powers come in the form of resourcefulness and omniscience, rather than thunderbolts, but he's still a god. That's the version we saw in Grant Morrison's run on Justice League, and it's the version we see in latter-day Frank 'Unedited' Miller's work.

The other hat Batman wears is the hat where, for all of his crazy skillz, he is just a human being. He can be caught off-guard by other normal people. Hell, he can be defeated by other normal people, because even a punk-ass can get lucky.

The most successful interpretations of the Batman let him wear both hats.

The Dark Knight Returns is awesome. Everyone remembers it for the story where Batman holds his own in single combat against Superman (without using Kryptonite for most of it). It also includes a story where Batman is defeated in single combat by a non-super teenage lunatic bodybuilder. There's no contradiction, either. Those two stories handily fit in the same volume, and no-one cries foul.

Part of what helps is the frequent glimpses you get inside the Batman's head during the whole four-issue run. Even as he's pulling off his crazy badass nonsense, Batman's inner monologue is frequently noting how much of what he gets away with is luck, or how desperately he has to work at it all. It gives him a kind of vulnerability that is necessary. That the art mercilessly depicts the potato mash that is made of his face or ribs or whatever when he screws up doesn't hurt on that score either.

The Dini/Timm animated version of the Batman is similarly layered. He can take on a swarm of super-androids in one episode, and struggle against a few normal thugs in the next; and it all feels perfectly coherent.

Some people like Batman because he exceeds the human. Others like him because he doesn't. The most compelling versions somehow reconcile both.

What the hell, hair?

Every morning I wake up with hair out of a goddamn anime series. Apparently that's what the stylist who lives in my pillow thinks my look is. I have had it in many different styles, from Tezuka to Toriyama.

It's not just the crazy amount of loft and volume, it's also how it's sculpted into shapes and remains stiffly in it's new pose until thoroughly drowned in the shower.

Here's what it looked like this morning, though I'm not sure if the photos really do it justice.

Post-resurrective Counselling

I'm a fan of Order of the Stick, which for those of you who don't know is a D&D-based webcomic which is both funny and dramatic.

Anyway, in one of the most recent published compilations of OotS, Rich asks the sorts of questions one rarely hears about characters that have been brought back from the dead. 'If my corpse had dirt inside it, is that dirt still there?' 'Did my intestinal bacteria come back too, and if not, how do I get more?'

In another webcomic which is suspiciously D&D-like, called Zogonia, one of the characters returns from death to a body that is free of all the abuse he has inflicted on it over his life. Teeth he lost in a bar fight are back, all his ugly battle scars are gone, and so forth. One can assume his lungs are now restored from the years of hobgob pipeweed abuse. He immediately refuses to go into battle, because he doesn't want to damage his newly-restored skin.

Back in OotS, the resurrected character has a little trouble resuming his material life after months as a disembodied spirit. Specifically, he needs a reminder that movement is achieved by the use of legs, instead of gentle force of will. One imagines his re-introduction to the concept of physical discomfort was just as hilarious.

I think in an appropriately postmodern version of a setting with resurrection, there might well be facilities to help people through the difficult adjustment period. Yogurt shops for the intestinal bacteria. Tattoo parlors to get your essential art replaced. Helpful bullet points to remind you of all the foibles of the flesh. Maybe even a guy who gives you a little wound, so you aren't paralyzed by the need to keep your newfound perfection intact.

Now I'm Inspired...

I'm totally designing that siege thing as a board game now. If it gets anywhere, I'll post a link here.

False Conflicts

This is something I see a lot of in games. There's a conflict, and you win... or you start the conflict over... until you win. There's only one acceptable outcome.

Now, that can be okay for some games. Some games are all about the challenge, and building skill to defeat the challenge, so you can move on to the next one. It is, however, really bad for many story-based games.

Players like multiple endings. We like to feel that our decisions make a difference. Even the very basic choice of the two endings of the original Blood Omen added a lot to that game. The many different endings to Ogre Battle and Princess Maker are in many respects the entire point of those games.

A desperate siege can end like Helm's Deep or like the Alamo. Those are both perfectly valid stories, and when a game's designers choose the outcome for you, they remove a chunk of your ability to participate in the game.

It doesn't even have to be all or nothing, I think you could do a perfectly good game where you had a siege set-up, and a number of story-significant characters... and at the end you'd get a blurb about what happened to each of those characters based on the outcome of the game. Characters who survived could be heroes, or cowards if they escaped, or captured, or whatever. Characters who died could be forgotten, or martyrs, or even just remembered by the enemy as worthy foes.

One of the best games for avoiding false conflicts is Way of the Samurai. Your character wanders into town with no backstory or agenda, and is immediately put in the position of making choices. Stand up for the common folk, or join one of the factions that oppress them? How far will you go for money? And the game is very short, because there's no saving the game, and you're supposed to play through it many many times to explore what different decisions mean.

Possibly the best genre for this sort of thing is, unfortunately, Japanese dating simulations. I say unfortunately, because it's not a genre that really appeals to me. At the same time, the typical dating sim is all about managing relationships with a handful of different potential love interests, and your relationships with each of them are tracked separately on certain scales, and at the end your choices have created some wildly variant outcomes. That's worth a lot to me.

I just wish that there were more action and/or strategy games that took that route. Imagine a strategy game with a large branching tree of scenarios, where losing one battle doesn't mean that the game boots you back to the start of that battle (or more commonly to your most promising saved game), but merely takes you to another battle which is the logical next step after losing. I'd play that.

In Villain Drag...

From left to right, that's Jasmine as Jafar, Snow White as the wicked Queen, Mulan as Shan-Yu, Cinderella as the wicked Stepmother, Aurora as Malificent, Pocahontas as Governor Ratcliffe, Belle as Gaston, and Ariel as Ursula.

I love it when people play with classic character designs. I don't know who did this, but they did pretty well. I just wish the composition was more dynamic.

Belle looks good in hunter gear, but Jasmine in dark sorcerer getup is my favorite.

Start At The Good Stuff

There's a Penny Arcade comic about the game God of War 2 with dialogue relevant to this subject:

Gabe: "I'm fighting the Colossus."
Tycho: "Whoa!"
Gabe: "I broke his arms in some water wheels and cut out his eyes. He chased me across an entire island! Then I climbed inside his body, draining his mystic energy with a sword I got from the king of the gods!"
Tycho: "Is this the last level?"
Gabe: "This is the first level."

There's a lot right about that.

All too often, RPGs are all about the cool stuff that isn't happening now. You get to have cool powers later. You'll have the scenes you want to see later. These are hints about an awesome plot you'll interact with later.

The things you get now are less awesome. Well, screw that.

As an example from my own play, I was running a D&D game. The PCs had started at 3rd level to get them out of the instant death zone, but they were still not exactly big shots in the setting. Then I introduced their opponent: The Earthquake Cricket.

Blatantly stolen from the Reign RPG, the Earthquake Cricket is the size of a small mountain... range. It sticks feelers into the soil and drains all the nutrients for miles around, creating a barren wasteland. When it's done, it jumps to new feeding grounds and lands like an atomic bomb. This thing had killed one nation already, and was nearly finished with another. Since any of the neighboring kingdoms could be next, they'd all sent their heroes to deal with the thing... and they'd all been killed by the enormous monstrosity.

So the PCs were plan B. One of the heroes, before dying, had sent her familiar back to tell of a possible weakness - a small hole on the back of the cricket's head. So the King called in a favor from the Eagles and had the PCs airlifted onto the cricket, where they entered the monster and began a desperate quest to kill the geography-sized monster from within before another kingdom died.

Wouldn't you know it, crawling around in the critter's veins while dealing with its biological hazards and immune system and parasites was a lot like a dungeon crawl with encounters of CR 2-4. So the PCs were facing level-appropriate challenges, but the stakes and scenery were the sort of thing that you'd associate with much higher-level shenanigans. It was awesome.

My next game is going to begin with finding out what the players want to see happen and having those things happen. If that means an epic duel between estranged kung-fu brothers on the walls of a siege that will decide the fate of nations while the general who betrayed them all offers a devil's bargain to those sent to bring him to justice... well, so much the better.

Two Great Tastes

Maybe actually daily updates will come with more practice. Who can say?

Y'know, Wizards of the Coast owns D&D and MTG. Those are their two best-known properties.

How the hell have they not combined them yet?

You cannot tell me people would not jump at the chance to play in Alara or Ravnica; or even Kamigawa and Dominaria. Where are those sourcebooks? They have all the art and flavor text they could possibly need done already.

I mean, I'd like them to hold off on doing such a thing until the system they're supporting isn't ass, but still.

Flavors Of Overly Difficult

Hey, so I have a chance to make up for one of my missed days. Good times.

Everyone who is even vaguely old-school as regards RPGs knows about the Tomb of Horrors. It was an old AD&D module, designed to be run at conventions and tournaments. It was supposed to be so difficult that to have your characters survive through it would be worth major bragging rights.

And it was seriously difficult. There were traps that set up patterns to avoid them... and then broke those patterns to mess with you. There were nested secret doors that led to dead ends. Even getting in was tricky, because there were two false entrances to the dungeon. Hell, there was even a false ending, with a false boss fight and an illusionary self-destruct of the tomb.

Here's the thing, though. Most of it was not the kind of difficult you could solve with clever or reasonable thought. Most of it was the kind of completely arbitrary Death-No-Save nonsense based on choices you made. And there were so many bluffs and double-bluffs that those choices were essentially blind ones. So getting through was impressive, but in the way that throwing a coin ten times and having it come up heads every time is impressive.

Even the end-boss, Acererak the Demi-lich was a unique home-brew (at the time) monster with entirely arbitrary invulnerabilities and responses to spell effects. There was no way to know or to deduce how to defeat it. Which is the rub, because dealing with the unknown is a fine way to test people's skillz, but only if their skillz are at all applicable.

The ToH was originally designed to defeat some specific and very clever players, who as it turned out, when faced with the thing, just cut the Gordian Knot and sent a huge number of disposable creatures in first, since most of the traps would kill any warm body no matter how badass, but only once. Or at most ten times as the pit slowly filled in with corpses.

Contrast that to the 3rd-edition equivalent module, The Red Hand of Doom. That's a genuinely very difficult adventure. It is filled with fights where the PCs are just plain outgunned. It's like they wrote it, then just said it was designed for lower-level characters than it actually was.

But while TRHOD is difficult, it's not difficult in a totally unfair way. It doesn't have Death-No-Save traps that are mysteriously unfindable by Thieves like TOH. A party of adventurers that are super on top of their game can beat the thing. There's just a really small margin for error and a lot of opportunities to screw up. Which makes it, of course, an actual test of skill.

So if someone has legitimately taken a character through TRHOD, then they actually have bragging rights as an awesome tactician. If someone has legitimately taken a character through TOH, you should let them pick your lottery numbers.

Not So Much 'Soul' As 'Free Time'

Yeah, I missed a couple of days there. Bad discipline. Partly it's because my weekends are filled with both working and gaming, and partly it's because Battle For Wesnoth has consumed my soul.

If you like fantasy tactical wargames, check it out at http://www.wesnoth.org/. It's a lot of good stuff for free.

Brevity is the Soul of...

I've recently been reading a bunch of the old-school 2000 AD magazine. A lot of the features are based around telling complete stories in 4-6 comic pages. That is awesome story discipline.

Lots of them have to do a whole three-act structure in those few pages: introduce the futuristic concept, set up the conflict, resolve the conflict. Bam! There's no room for gimmicks or long filler fight scenes. Most combats are one panel gunfights Old West style. It maintains a really high content to length ratio, and it is amazing to see how tight the crafting is.

A lot of it isn't very good, but that's fine, because the bad stories are over quickly, and a reader can just shrug and move on to the next one. And a lot of it is quite good story, beyond the necessities of the form. I'm loving it to pieces.

Apologies and Hatred

So, I intended to post to this thing every damn day, even if the posts wound up being short and/or low-quality. Then yesterday I got my Swine Flu vaccine, and it knocked me waaaay out. So yeah, that's my first missed day. I'm sure there will eventually be others.

Anyway, I'm going to try to get in two posts today to make up for it, but one of them (this one) is mostly going to be a cut-and-paste job from another guy's work. It's important work with ideas that need to be spread around, and the author has given permission for it to be replicated anywhere by anyone, with or without attribution. The author's name is Frank Trollman, and he's a very smart man. Honestly, If I just devoted this blog to promoting his more notable efforts, it would probably justify itself as both content and labor.

I hate D&D 4th edition. I hate it so bad. If I had to pick one thing I hate most about it, I would say that it was the way they took decent concepts and implemented them in the worst way possible.

For example, they divided the game into three tiers: Heroic, Paragon, and Epic. This makes a lot of sense. Some settings are like Conan's Hyborian Age, where even the big badasses of the setting (like Conan) ride around on horses (without wings) and nobody can take on a Tyrannosaurus in single combat. And that's really distinct from the setting of Bronze Age Greek Myth, where a big badass (like Herakles) can hold up the sky and threaten the Sun with his bow. Saying that the first exists in the Heroic Tier and the second exists in one of the higher tiers is a really good move.

D&D4E immediately puts flying mounts in the Heroic Tier and the only maneuver that disarms people in the Paragon Tier. This represents a fundamental disconnect, because it denies Conan (and the rest of his Heroic Tier brethren) the ability to disarm his enemies while simultaneously declaring him a chump for not using a flying mount to get around.

Anyway, the rest of this post is Frank's and concerns the abominable Skill Challenge system.

Anatomy of Failed Design: Skill Challenges

So as we know there are many different design goals you can have in making a rule or a subsystem. And as such it can be difficult to determine if a rule is functioning correctly. When a halfling slinger throws a rock at an ogre's head, is the rule functioning right when the ogre goes down or when the ogre stays up? That depends on what your goals are. And yet, we know that 4e Skill challenges are a failure. Not just subjectively, but objectively. How do we know that?

Well it goes back to design goals. And for that, we're going to take relentless Skill Challenge booster and designers Bill Slavicsek and Mike Mearls' actual word for it. see, skill challenges are something that really excite him, and considering how infectious that excitement is, it seems that his stated design goals probably have a fair amount of resonance.

'From the first discussions about D&D 4th Edition, we knew that we wanted a mechanical subsystem as robust as combat that could handle the other things PCs do in an adventure—namely, social encounters and challenge encounters. We didn’t want a system that reduced all the intricacies of a situation to a single die roll; we also didn’t want a system that failed to add to the fun of an adventure. What we did want, for the situations that called for it, was a system full of tension, drama, and risk… the very essence of any D&D encounter.' – Bill Slavicsek

Get Everyone Involved!
The first goal of the Skill Challenges is to keep people from feeling that their characters have nothing to contribute. That is, to get everyone trying to do something every round of the challenge rather than just sitting back and eating Doritos while the Diplomancer talks. Again.

A worthy goal. But wait a minute, Skill Challenges don't do that, do they? Indeed, since any failure on the team counts against the team's failure numbers, anyone who isn't the half elf diplomancer or bullysaurus who so much as opens their mouth during a social encounter to let words out instead of filling it with Doritos is actively hurting the team's chances. Each roll has a chance to add to the failure quotient, so if you don't have the best roll the entire team is better off with you not rolling at all. That's bad, but it's actually worse than that, because in addition to relegating the rest of the team to Doritos munching, they take longer to resolve than the old system. So not only has the core objective of pulling the excluded players into the game not been achieved, the excluded characters are actually excluded for longer in real time.

What to do instead: One of the key components to getting people to try to contribute is to make their contributions be positive, or at least neutral. That means not using up party resources to act. The party could be limited by the number of total challenge rounds, or individual characters could be knocked out of the challenge after they individually rack up enough failures. Either way, a character who was ill suited for a challenge could still pull a success out of their rounds and the team would be richer for that assistance (however minor).


Be Dynamic!
The second goal of the skill challenge was to get people to throw around different techniques round after round. "Each skill check in a challenge should grant the players a tangible repercussion for the check's success or failure, one that influences their subsequent decisions." In short, people shouldn't just spam their best skill, they should be responding to the tests tactically, making different choices each round and over the course of the challenge the results of their actions should "Introduce a new option that the PCs can pursue, a path to success they didn't know existed."

Cool concept, right? Doing all kinds of different stuff on a round by round basis. Why doesn't it work out? Well, he reason that never happens is because the difference in a Bullysaurus' Intimidate bonus and his Heal check is generally more than +/-10. That means that even if next round you find out that another skill is two steps easier than your focus skill (and remember kids: there are only three difficulty steps), you're still better off just using your focus skill again. It's not even a question. If your focus skill could work at all, you just use it next round without fail.

What to do instead: This is more complicated, because you could attack it from several directions. The first is the skill bonuses themselves. If you tightened up the bonuses a lot you could just tantalize people with a shot at an easier skill check and have them jump ship willingly to a secondary or tertiary skill. Or you could go after it on the resource management end. If individual skills couldn't be used every round, you would obviously end up using different skills now and again. If skills had some kind of skill fatigue where using the same skill over and over again was increasingly difficult you would eventually want to switch over to another technique voluntarily no matter how far apart your skill bonuses were.


End Binary!
The third goal is to keep things from being a boring and static binary choice of success or failure. No longer are things just a die roll to see whether you succeed or not, there's... stuff.

Another worthy goal. But um... it totally is binary. As things stand, it's even more binary than rolling a d20 because you can't do degrees of success. The challenge ends the moment you get sufficient successes, so there's really no possible way to get more than the minimum success. Really, for all the stuff where you go round by round and make all kinds of rolls, you still only get 2 end results: success or failure. And there is nothing in there to allow you to get a better success or a worse failure.

What to do instead: There's no real excuse to have a dozen die rolls be incapable of generating more than 2 end results if that's your goal. Obvious methods include setting the task to a finite number of rounds and having a minimum number of successes to count as an overall success with additional successes raising the level of awesome - or having a terminating number of failures for each participant with characters allowed to just keep adding cherries on top until they are forced to stop. In either case you could cut it short when player were just trying to get across a chasm or something essentially binary while still allowing dice to keep getting rolled during a tense negotiation to see if you could get an extra plate of shrimp out of the deal.

Other Difficulties
The Difficulty level has been discussed extensively. With charts (http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/gaming/dnd/4e/skill-challenge-broken.html). A key portion of any mechanic would be to make it so that the results weren't mathematically untenable.

It is highly problematic to call success on an individual die roll "success" while success on the overall challenge is also called "success." The fact that "failure" has the exact same confusing double meaning is equally bad. The part and the whole need to have distinct terminology so that we can talk about them. The individual die rolls could create "steps and setbacks" I don't even care. It just has to have a different name from the result that comes from tallying all the rolls together.

And finally, for goodness sake, whatever your system is, actually use it. When Mike Mearls describes using skill challenges, he says stuff like this:

'As the characters travel through town, it is important that they all make an effort to keep a low profile. When the PCs take one of the actions above, each PC in the group must make a separate skill check. The group, as a whole, must have more successes than failures in order to succeed overall. Otherwise, the group fails (including on a tie).

The PCs can each use a different skill, provided each skill is allowable for that action. Each PC can also aid one other PC. One PC can receive aid from more than one ally.'

I man seriously, what the heck is that? It's not recognizable as a skill challenge out of the book. Which basically tells us what we've always known: that the designers just did random stuff and never even paid lip service to the skill challenge rules they were actually writing down. Don't do that. If you come up with something that seems to work better than the original methods, you should write that one down. You should not publish something that has little or no relation to the rules you actually use in your game that seem to be working.

-Frank

Anyway, I'll be back later today with some more content.

Too Long, Did Read

The Name of the Wind came to me with glowing recommendations. It's the first part of a story about a young boy who grows up to be a great wizard. It is also too damn long. I mean, it reads like the author was paid by the word.

There are two things that can sustain my interest through a high word-count: quantity of content, and quality of writing. This has neither. It takes 650 pages to do what A Wizard of Earthsea did in 50, and the writing is of only passable quality.

Also, despite the length, the novel does not stand alone at all. There's no natural beginning, middle and end to it, it just starts and then continues only to just stop at an arbitrary point. Deeply unsatisfying.

The plot (what there is of it) is bog-standard, or rather a series of bog-standards all run together: loss-training-revenge, underdog-at-school, the-enigmatic-teacher, etc. etc. There's nothing wrong with some classic plotting, but the writing simply isn't good enough to make them feel more than predictable.

The world-building is... uneven. There's some oh-so-clever nursery rhymes that the author has devised for his setting, which are kind of fun, but feel like the author trying too hard. There's not a lot of development of the world's geography or history. At the same time, it feels like there might be a well-realized setting, if only the author would show it to us; but the focus remains squarely on the protagonist.

The protagonist narrates most of the story directly, and he was both clever and funny enough to carry me most of the way. He is also self-absorbed and egotistical, and it can be hard to tell if that's deliberate or just the author sliding into Mary Sue-ism. I think it isn't, but I don't think I should even have to ask.

It's not bad, but it's certainly not GREAT like I was told. There is genuinely a lot to like in the book. I just wish it didn't come with twice its own weight in padding. Is there just no market for non-doorstop fantasy books any more?

Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite in 30 seconds

I'm not going to lie to you, Chris Sims and his Invincible Super-Blog are at least half of the reason why I started to blog myself. He has an annual contest about hilariously summarizing comic-book stories, with deliberately terrible art. This is my first entry and I hope you like it.

I want it to be clear that the art could have been much more creatively terrible if I had better software. The images aren't displaying at full size for some reason, but they should get bigger if you click them.

Brief Movie Review

I saw the Sherlock Holmes movie last week, and it was pretty good. I just wish they'd left out a couple of characters who served exactly no purpose except to make the story excessively busy. They have a perfectly serviceable A plot (the occult murderer) and a wonderful B plot (Watson's impending marriage and the resulting stress on the two investigators' relationship). That was all they needed. Including not one but two characters from the literature, each of whom deserves to have a plot revolve around them, and then relegating them to irrelevance is just tacky.

Also, Holmes' exquisitely realized cerebral-predictive fighting was a set-up without a payoff. It's a great way to demonstrate some things about the character, but it's just there, not doing anything, and certainly not being worth the screen time spent on it, except as an unsatisfying and empty spectacle. It's a comparatively minor nitpick, but it's such a great gimmick I'm disappointed they didn't do more with it. It doesn't even show up in the situations you'd think Holmes would most want to use it, which is confusing to me.

The story is serviceable, but not special. The rest varies between solid and awesome. It was also very well previewed, so if you've seen the trailer, you know whether or not you'll enjoy this.

This Is Real

(note: I work Sundays and game Sunday nights, so Sunday posts are always going to be short snippets.)

This is a true story. This is also an insane story. If I could find four or five comparably insane stories, I'd write them all up and submit them to Cracked.com, but I can't, because this story is incomparably insane.

So, back in the days of the Old West, there was a guy named 'Big Nose' George Parrot. Apart from having a hilarious name, he was one of the murderous outlaws of the period. His claim to fame begins when he tried a train job with the James brothers, screwed up, and the outlaws had to shoot two lawmen to make their escape.

Now, the James brothers immediately fled the state, but Mr. Parrot did not. This was a mistake, because the Union Pacific Railroad put a $10,000 price on his head. That's almost a quarter of a million dollars in modern-day money. I have to assume one of the lawmen was a relation to the head of Union Pacific or something because that is crazy money for one hilariously-named outlaw.

George got caught and hanged, but that was only the beginning. His body was turned over to a doctor for scientific purposes. The doctor sawed open George's skull to examine his brain for 'signs of criminality,' and gave the sawn-off top to his assistant. He then had George's torso partially flayed, and sent the skin to a tannery to be made into a medical bag.

Read that last sentence again and let it sink in.

That's not science. That's not even mad science. That's just mad.

The doctor also wanted some of the skin to be made into shoes, and instructed the tanners to leave the nipples on.

The doctor got his shoes and medical bag. He only wore the shoes once, at the inaugural ball for the first Democratic Governor of Wyoming. That was him, incidentally. Yes, the first Democratic Governor of Wyoming was an insane doctor who wore human-leather shoes made from the skin of a murderer. Do not fuck with that guy.

Indeed, this story came out seventy years later in the 1950s, when construction workers digging up the former Governor's back yard found George's skeleton (with open-top skull) sealed up in a buried whiskey barrel. The guy who dug that up must have really thought hard about his politics after that. I mean, nobody knew it was George Parrot's skeleton at the time. My impression would have been that that Governor had disposed of one of his political enemies in a gruesome fashion.

The authorities tracked down the madman's former med student, who had become the state's first woman doctor, and was still alive. She still had the skull top, and had used it as an ashtray and a doorstop over the decades, continuing her mentor's tradition of flagrant contempt for the dead. She told everyone the whole story.

The skull and shoes are on display in a museum in Nebraska. The medical bag has never been found.

Stone Cold

Nobody is reading this journal yet, and it's midnight, but I'm making a post anyway. I am a trooper.

When I first saw the movie Prince Caspian, one scene in particular stood out for me, the failed assassination. When Miraz wants to kill Caspian, he doesn't poison his food or have him quietly strangled. He doesn't try anything that might be mistaken for a natural or accidental death. No, Miraz sends roughly one shitload of crossbowmen into Caspian's bedroom at night to surround and brutally perforate his (supposedly) sleeping nephew. In a process that will leave a large number of unmistakably murderous wounds.

That is a man who does not fuck around.

He really didn't leave himself any room for plausible deniability there. No-one's going to believe that an entire unit of his soldiers went rogue and killed the heir to the kingdom for no reason. I can only assume that if any of the other nobles asked what happened to Caspian, Miraz would have the bolt-riddled corpse dragged in and dumped on the floor. Then he would ask if anyone had the balls to say dick to him about it.

It's not the way I'd run a country, but I'm not a horrible murderer with a shitload of crossbowmen. Miraz was playing to his strengths, and I can understand that.

Inaugural Post

Well, I was going to start this journal off with a long post about narrative predetermination in games, but I've just come back from out of state and that's too much like work. So instead you get what I'm sure will be a recurring feature, a hopefully amusing musing from my various geekeries.

In the Warhammer 40K setting...

It occurs to me that some of my readers may not know of the glorious madness that is Warhammer 40,000. For those people, a short description...

It is the year 40,000 A.D., and the universe is a horrible place. Humanity has had its ups and downs over the eons, and right now it is so down that it is presented as the Holy Roman Empire... iiinnn spaaccce! Between now and then, there was a period called the (Dark) Age of Technology when humanity reached dizzying heights of science and engineering, but there have been a couple of declines and falls since. Most of the knowledge has been lost, but the tech was durable and idiot-proof enough that quite a lot of it is still in use thousands of years later. Also, humanity is beset from without by many horrible alien enemies and from within by heretics, madmen, and traitors. The Imperium of Man maintains a vast and poorly-coordinated military to fight these threats. It is largely a pastiche of features from 2000 AD Magazine and is presented both straight as a horror setting and as a knowing parody of itself.

Where was I? Oh yes...

In the Warhammer 40K setting, the most common weapon in use by the human military is a thing called a Lasgun. As its name implies, it is a gun that fires a laser beam. The weapon is not especially effective, but it is very economical as it needs no ammunition. Like all things of value, the Lasgun was invented in the Age of Technology and most of how it works is now forgotten, but the factory-cathedrals keep making them and the soldiers keep shooting them and getting new ones when they break.

A Lasgun draws its power from a power pack, and when this pack runs low on juice (after 20-30 shots), the beam ceases to be strong enough to burn, but can still be used to dazzle enemies and signal allies. The power pack can be recharged in any number of ways, from leaving it out in the sun, to putting it in a campfire, to shooting it with another Lasgun. That last one is the problem, because apparently shooting a Lasgun with another Lasgun will fully recharge the target, providing energy for 20-30 more Lasgun shots and violating the law of conservation of energy pretty badly.

Now, given that this is a setting where people fly spaceships through the afterlife, you might think I'm taking this a bit seriously. Bear with me.

What if what the Imperium calls a Lasgun isn't a weapon? What if the power pack is nuclear or similar, and doesn't actually need recharging? What if it's just a signal flare, and the things they do to the power pack to 'recharge' it just overheat it so it has to vent power through the signal beam, incidentally weaponizing it?

That would make a terrible kind of sense, in a 40K sort of way.

It would also explain a lot of the weapons of the Imperium of Man, if they were all hilarious kludges of better but non-weapon technology. I mean, the Plasma Gun tries to kill its user roughly once every six times it fires, so I suspect it's just a power conduit that got drafted at some point. Chainsword? That's a highly-advanced hedge trimmer. Meltagun? Microwave.

The best part is that even though WH40K humankind is reduced to fighting with overclocked antique kitchen hardware, they're remarkably competitive with the actual weapons used by the various highly advanced alien species that they have to fight. So where are the actual weapons from that era? How bad-ass must that stuff be?