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.