Dungeons & Dragons 4th

I ran a session of D&D 4 yesterday, and some notes!

The game is with adapted characters from D&D 3.5. I only have two players in the game. In D&D 3.5, one of the characters was a complex sheet of three different character classes - two regular classes and a prestige class - and the second was a paladin with a prestige class. They got folded into her being a rogue and him being a paladin. There was some concern that they'd "feel different", but I don't think that's a big problem because now by "feel different" we really mean "much more interesting combat than they were". Which is all we did - combat, hehe. We had two, as I called them, "contextless combat encounters" so that when we played the game on normal adventure stuff they wouldn't be overwhelmed by the options that their characters presented. There are quite a few options, might I add. Heck, you can just go to the wiki and see for yourselves. Antarah's sheet, in particular, is "verbose". His word. :) The character sheets are pretty rugged but I've always felt a little dissatisfied with how pedestrian D&D characters feel in terms of natural ability and don't inflict it on my players - so they're probably about a level or maybe even two "better" than their actual levels suggest.

The first encounter was the sort of generalized, fairly disorganized encounter that is de rigeur for 80% or more of D&D encounters. Y'know. The characters come on the scene with an erratically placed group of monsters and they fight. In this case, two wyverns, an ettin marauder and a poison-eyed basilisk. What were they doing in a snowy field? Who cares. Contextless combat encounters, hehe. The encounter was a normal encounter for a group of players that size.

The second encounter was a couple levels lower, but it had characters in an entrenched position - down a corridor and up some stairs to a room. The stairs had been covered with rubble to slow the characters, and at the top of the stair there was a picket. And before the rubble there was a pit trap. Whackiness ensued.

The first fight they basically just rolled over. They crushed it. In playing D&D 4, that's been my experience with encounters of equal level - the PCs generally tear through them pretty easily. The rogue sneaks ahead, gets a surprise round, probably gets a couple of sneak attacks before anyone can freakin' move to carve out a big chunk of hit points from a foe, and they're already in a position to flank with the rest of the party. It was like a meat grinder.

The second fight, despite the encounter being two levels under the level of the PCs, by far proved the more challenging encounter (a couple of orc bloodrager brutes, two tiefling heretic artilleries with a couple of levels added on them and a foulspawn grue controller). They used up virtually every healing resources they had - all their encounter powers, all their daily healing powers, almost everything. And because the enemy were alert with sentinels and a tightly controlled initial environment, the rogue couldn't do any of her tricks. They had considerable difficulty getting past the pit - an NPC was captured in the pit for, like, three turns - and over the barricade. Even once they broke through, the melee was initially contained by the monster melee fighters. It was not a meat grinder. Indeed, if the monsters had been the same level as the player characters, it might have been a meat grinder in the other direction. Which was indeed sort of the point - I wanted to see how, y'know, intelligent enemies in a fortified position would do, but weak enough that the PCs would be almost assured victory.

We played the combat encounters on our laptops using MapTool 1.2 from RPTools. It's a free Java applet that allows me to make a map on my computer over here and then they can both connect to my computer and we can move tokens on that map, etc., completely replacing a traditional battlemat. And the Internet has allowed me to download roughly two hundred maps, too.

The players said they had fun, which is good. They both liked that their characters had a lot of "things to do". The powers for the various character classes also pretty strongly give themes to the classes. Adrienne said it, herself, "All a rogue's powers are so selfish." Whereas the paladin's powers aren't. They're all about helping allies, drawing fire and such.

From the GM's perspective, when going into D&D 4 I was deeply concerned because a lot of the monsters have been changed - esp. the high level ones - to remove a lot of their supernatural powers. Almost all spells and spell-like effects are just gone. But in play, I found I didn't care - when a monster has a laundry list of supernatural powers, well, you don't end up using most of them, after all. And for non-combat purposes there's always GM fiat! Rather than saying the monster used their charm person spell, I can say they charmed the person some other way. And the monsters are divided into roles that make it easy to build a "monster party" with the soldiers and brutes protecting the artillery and controllers. Additionally, adding in the concept for minions, elites and solo monsters provides even more utility and flexibility for the monsters.

This is where the game has been most obviously influenced by MMOs, too. Minions allow a GM to create trash mobs while elites and solo monsters allow one to create mini-bosses and bosses.

And I LOVE minions. They can be of any level, but they are dispatched by any successful attack executed by them. So you can finally have the king's elite guard be all 12th level fighters without all the burden that brought in previous games - like the rogues' being unable to incapacitate them in one blow, which made stealth-based games almost impossible. Guards rogues could kill in one blow wouldn't ever notice a rogue and if a guard saw a rogue, there was simply no real way for a rogue to stop that guard from alerting other people. But now a rogue can get spotted, and if they win init most of them can be removed in one quick strike. You can now sorta play, y'know, Sam Fisher characters, and everyone should know how I have a boy crush on Sam Fisher!

So, all in all, I think that - at least in terms of combat - D&D 4 is simply a clear and obvious improvement over D&D 3.5.

Hot Wet Planet

Thanks to the beautiful people at Fandom Wank, I discovered this thread over at RPG.net about a game called, ahem, Hot Wet Planet. It's pretty much as horrible as it sounds. Or as Darren MacLennen put it, "You can develop your writing skills by playing a dumb barbarian, a rape victim or a tentacle monster."

Here are two "attribute scores":

Attr = Attractiveness, beauty, appearance. It's chosen as -2, -1, +0. +1, +2, etc... It may not be more negative than a -2 for any player-character. +0 is normal, but still considered attractive by human standards. For female characters, Attr adds to Def when they are attacked with harmful intentions (such as somebody trying to kill them or injure them), but subtracts from Def when they are attacked with lustful intentions.

So, if you're a woman, being hot means that you can't be killed, but you can be raped.

HWPE = Hot Wet Planet Effect, which is an overall level of the Hot Wet Planet's mysterious energy influence upon the character. The higher the HWPE, also the higher the character's libido & constant arousal (more than exponentially increased for each level up), but also HWPE can add to Psi for "danger-sense", and makes it less likely that the character will be attacked for the purpose of becoming a meal. On the negative side, a higher HWPE makes it more difficult to resist the Hot Wet Planet's mental & emotional effects. A higher HWPE for the guys makes them more aggressive, domineering, sexist towards the girls, more likely to fight each other, etc... A higher HWPE for the girls makes them more submissive, more shy & easily embarrassed, a lot hornier & wetter (all the time), less able to cover themselves, and overwhelms their willpower to force them to flirt & sexually expose themselves - even when they don't want to, nor intend to - and magnifies pleasurable sensations. The mental & emotional effects can be countered by Det.

And some more game text!

In addition, some unidentifiable element of the environment is changing the survivors, eroticising them, making the females constantly horny yet more shy at the same time, more youthful, more like a guy's wet-dream fantasy, and removing all their body hair from their neck to their toes. The guys get bigger dicks, muscles, a penchant for crude violence, and that sort of thing, as if the planet was turning the men into barbarian warriors.

In the background, unknown at least at first to the Offworlder survivors, the planet's higher lifeforms have a simple mass-mind that is using it's powerful psionics to mentally influence and sometimes dominate the humans in lecherous ways, having it's strongest effect on the females (who gain the benefit of being occasionally protected, & subtly forewarned about real dangers); many of the younger (or younger appearing) women discover they are incapable of wearing underwear, or any kind of pants, or even anything more covering than an indecently short tunic or mini-dress...and the effect is becoming stronger with the passing of time.

Then there are the Tentacle Monsters to contend with....the size of a small car or as large as a house, in many shapes and forms, but always having phallic tentacles and a sexual obsession with humanoid females.

What more needs to be said? But, on dear lord in heaven in whom I don't believe, a great deal more is said. The author of this game is offended at people's offense, apparently living in a world where publicly discussing wanting to pretend to be a rapist tentacle monster is socially acceptable. Still, it's handled with the typical RPG.net subtlety of trolling the person, flaming them, and then banning them, but, hey, it's RPG.net. That's why people go, I guess. But, yes, a great, great deal more is said.

This hobby is depraved, isn't it?

Planet Hulk and World War Hulk

I just got done reading the Planet Hulk and World War Hulk storyline. And . . . well, I've got some comments on it and the nature of heroism and villainy in Marvel comics.

First, in Planet Hulk - or at least in the Illuminati stuff that preceded it - Doctor Strange, Mister Fantastic, Iron Man and Black Bolt decide to take the Hulk and shoot him into outer space. The only person who objects is Namor.

OK, let's make this clear. None of these people had the right to do this. They kidnapped the Hulk. That's just the plain truth. Was he a danger? Oh, sure, some of the time, definitely. He also did a number of good things, too, and much of the bad he did was done under a variety of duress.

I believe the point they were trying to raise was . . . how do you handle power when the government can't do it. That's sort of the subtext of all superhero comics. The legal authorities can't handle things so superheroes, generally unaffiliated with the government, fill the gap. Y'know, the military can't handle Magneto so the X-Men come in and do that, or whatever.

However, traditionally, superheroes were very reactive and employed a minimum amount of force to handle the situation (and place the well-being of civilians above everything else). They don't do pre-emptive strikes. They went to great lengths not to kill anyone. They took extraordinary care to avoid civilian casualties. What I would say the traditionally accepted justification for this is the authorities would regard seeking out fights as vigilantism - but a citizen is allowed to act to save themselves and others in a crisis situation. Going out and finding Norman Osborn and beating him up before he does something wrong is vigilantism. Preventing him from blowing up the Thanksgiving Day Parade is just being a good citizen.

So, Fantastic, Black Bolt, Iron Man and Dr. Strange violated that precept. Furthermore, I mean, if you're gonna do something like that . . . the Hulk? Most of of the time, y'know, the Hulk is hitting the right person or acting in self-defense. We're not talking the Red Skull, here, but a nice guy in a horrible situation. What they did was kidnapping.

But it wasn't just kidnapping. To trick Bruce Banner - a very clever person - into being shot into space, they misappropriated an android of Nick Fury. I . . . I mean, uh, SHIELD is this big, important para-military organization in the MU. They impersonated an officer, they almost certainly broke a dozen security clearance issues, they misappropriated SHIELD resources - just this really big laundry list of security violations. The kind of stuff that would get a person prison time.

Or to break it down in a different way, what would be the reaction of heroes if Doctor Doom reprogrammed an android of Nick Fury in order to kidnap the Hulk and shoot him into outer space?

Or to break it down even further: Marvel decided to turn Strange, Black Bolt, Tony Stark and Reed Richards into villains. They violated a whole raft of laws to kidnap Bruce Banner and they shot him into space.

Then it goes wrong. I mean, not even blaming those four for what happened to the Hulk on Sakaar, it goes wrong and the Hulk comes back and destroys Manhattan in World War Hulk because he's pissed off at being shot into space.

Oh, sure, he doesn't kill anyone. He does kidnap people, torture them (obedience disks?!) and destroy a major American city in the process. Yeah, they were bad guys, but two wrongs don't make a right. STILL. We all know this.

So, they also decide that the Hulk needs to be a villain, too.

I wish people actually read this journal because I'd really like an answer to why Marvel seems bound and determined to turn virtually every "hero" in their universe into a villain? I mean, you've got Cyclops ordering torture and murder, you've got Professor X having been revealed to be doing cruel mental manipulation for decades - I mean, stuff like making Scott and Alex Summers forget that they had another brother kind of horrible mental rape (and, again, not even to someone it could be argued "deserved" it like, y'know, Sabertooth or Mystique, but doing it to hide the fact Xavier was responsible for their deaths). You've got "heroes" kidnapping people and shooting them into space, or putting people in indefinite lock-up in extradimensional prisons. I mean, is there a single major hero out there, as Marvel hero, who hasn't done things that simply can't be justified as being "heroic"? And why have they decided to turn so many of their marquee characters into bad guys? I'm not getting it.

Scaramouche review

We watched the 1952 remake of Scaramouche - the one starring Stewart Granger. To fess up, I got it because of the six minute long sword duel between Scaramouche and Monsieur de Maynes which I've heard is the gold standard of swashbuckling cinematic duels. Well . . . hey, it is!

What I found in particular is that while academically aware that Hollywood cinema deeply influenced the Jackie Chan era of Chinese stuntmen and their often mind blowing antics, I haven't actually seen a lot of those movies. But with Scaramouche, I saw the kind of stuntwork that clearly presaged Chinese action movies of the 70s onwards. Not only the actors doing their own stunts, but crawling all over the scenery while swordfighting, swordfighting on narrow surfaces, swordfighting swinging from ropes, the tossing of everything in sight at each other, dropping heavy things from a great height to try to hit the other guy on the head . . . while lacking the kinetic oomph of a Yuen Woo-Ping directed fight, you can easily see all the elements that we'd see again in kung-fu movies. The visual language is clearly the same. So, great going, guys!

So, was there more than a swordfight? Yes! While Stewart Granger played Scaramouche's bemused insouciance to a T, I think that the show was stolen by Mel Ferrer was the villain, le Marquis de Maynes. Ferrer really caught the "it's great to be me" vibe that a viciously murderous wealthy and good looking French aristocrat should have. Obviously, de Maynes loved his life, especially when it involved killing someone, or bragging about killing someone. Even at the end, with a sword to his heart, the actor projected what I felt was perfect for the character - simply amused resignation that his time had come.

Even compared to the novel, however, it was pretty fluffy. In the novel, Scaramouche slowly evolves into a revolutionary idealist from a jaded cynic. While in both he's driven by the murder of his friend, in the movie it's all about revenge (and, to be fair, how hollow revenge is, which I liked - revenge is idiotic and I'm glad that the movie, as in the book, the desolation of seeking revenge is made clear). In the novel, well, it's actually about the Revolution, and eventually the Revolution's excesses! The movie doesn't touch on any of that, and wraps it up with a wedding.

And typical for a 50s movie, the female roles are pretty bland. Which I don't like, but it's something you've got to accept in most movies from the 50s onward. There are two female leads - played by Eleanor Parker and Janet Leigh, both talented actresses - but they exist merely as objects of love or lust for the hero. In the end, he chooses the good, pure and high born girl instead of the low born and quick witted woman with experience. Oh, well, I suspect that after the end credits roll Scaramouche would be going back to the actress in about ten minutes after being completely bored with his pure little noblewoman. But, like I said, while I don't like that kind of thing, I've learned to endure it.

Marked Woman review

The little lady and I just got done watching Marked Woman, a Bette Davis/Humphrey Bogart movie directed by Lloyd Bacon (who also brought Knute Rockne to the screen, introducing to a wide audience a certain Ronald Reagan, hehe). The 1936 crime piece is about "hostesses" (read: prostitutes) who operate in a mob owned clip joint. One of the hostesses, played by Davis, gets involved in a murder and initially resists the ADA (played by Bogart) in convicting the mobster - but after the hostesses' sister is murdered she bravely plays ball with law enforcement and brings the mobster to justice. Apparently the movie was inspired by New York's protracted battle against Lucky Luciano.

I really just watch loving Bette Davis act. She's just so splendid. Bogart and most of the supporting cast are also quite good, and at times the actor who plays the gangster, Eduardo Ciannelli, almost steals the show. But the reason to see the movie is, without a doubt, the chance to see Bette Davis act. She plays a wonderfully dignified, street smart call girl and the script doesn't degrade her, nor the other women in it. The thirties in cinema really was the height of this kind of behavior - movies with female roles that weren't just pathetic pandering girl stories of female sisterhood or whatever, banal romantic comedies or the even worse multitude of stories where women are merely victims of appendages of male protagonists. Roles where women could be honestly powerful started to decline in the 40s, and by the late 50s were almost gone altogether. They were gone by the 60s and 70s. Though they've started to return, I am just staggered at the numerous powerful female roles that I see in the cinema of the 30s, before women's role in movies was reduced to nothing but cheesecake victims as it has been much of my adult life. Because of when I was born, I grew up in an atmosphere almost void of powerful female characters. On the rare occasion Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts would make a movie that was a cut above the standard fare even those actresses are generally forced to work with, it was like a small window into a different film making universe where women weren't second class citizens. To me, Bette Davis flings open all the doors to that world - while the movies acknowledge the social reality of woman's powerlessness in a man's world, the movies, themselves, by featuring women in so many fully developed roles have really opened my eyes.

The upshot being, see this movie. And see a lot of movies with Bette Davis in them. Even the bad ones are pretty good. And see how movies were made before female roles in movies were crushed by all those banking interests who didn't want women to get uppity ideas.

Hancock movie review

Me and the li'l lady and a friend of ours saw Hancock the other day. We were somewhat amused by it. In particular, we liked Will Smith as the cranky, bumbling superhero whose antics were both benevolent and often incompetent. Critiques of the quality of the movie, otherwise, is a fairly weak script and incoherent plot plus mediocre effects. The upshot? If you like Will Smith, see it. If you don't, don't. Since I like Will Smith, I kinna liked the movie.

To me, though, what was really interesting is the PR man who turns Hancock's life around. I was getting a very It's a Wonderful Life feeling from it. In It's a Wonderful Life, one of the subtexts is that bankers do good in a community. Bankers are these benevolent people and crap like - the movie is functionally an advertisement for the banking industry. In a similar fashion, the PR protagonist of Hancock is this committed guy who wants to save the world by convincing corporations to do good deeds. I sort of threw up in my mouth about that. I mean, of all the impossible things I found that the most impossible. A superhero that can fly, bounce bullets off his face and move with incredible speed? That's downright realistic compared to an advertising guy trying to save the world through corporate benevolence! To me, that's the worst part of the movie - how it kisses the ass of corporate America and the praise for the ad industry.

Driving in California - those damn road signs!

Driving in California can be frustrating. The signs here sorta, well, suck ass. I mean, I've gotten fairly seriously lost in rural California twice in two years on long distance trips. In most states, when highways split there are these big ass signs that tell you what to do. I've driven all over the country, and I've never gotten lost like I have in California. What'll happen is I'll be driving down a highway and then, without me noticing it, I'll be on a different road! And then, y'know, I'll look at a map and say, "Ah, I take this road it'll lead over to the road I want to be on."

That doesn't happen. What happens is I find myself in rural California on roads that have no signs, no indications of direction, no markers for what community you're going to - nothing like that. Just this rural winding of roads almost entirely without any markings whatsoever. I will sometimes find myself totally without a single idea where I'm at or what direction I'm going in. Sometimes, roads will literally just end without warning, or turn into dirt paths.

It's pretty frustrating, and it's never happened to me in any other state!