Everyone vs Just Us

 

   This silly title sums up the debate that goes on right now with things like Warhammer and The Rings of Power and TSR.

   Companies try to make stuff for Everyone. That’s just Economics 101. Nobody wants to make things for a niche — it’s bad for business.

   But some fans seem to think that those “things” and that “stuff” should be made exclusively for them.

   If you read more than 3 mangas, you are a fan; that is, you’re the same thing, the very same thing, as that Japanese teen who read five thousand mangas.

   If you drink kombucha at least once a month, you are a fan — the very same thing as that woman who drinks kombucha every day.

   A fan is a fan, period.

   If we try to make fandom more complex, it’s a very slippery slope. Indeed, who’s to decide if you’re a worthy or unworthy fan? Who is going to be the judge of that? It is gatekeeping.

   Someone who read The Hobbit when they were 10, but not any of the other books since then, and who haven’t seen any of the movies. Fan, or Not A Fan?

   Someone who only ever saw Ralph Bakshi’s movie, back in 1978, and only ever read the first half of The Silmarillion. Fan, or Not A Fan?

   Someone who saw the first two films of the Peter Jackson trilogy, but not the third one, and not The Hobbit trilogy. Fan, or Not A Fan?

   Someone who played a heck of a lot of MERP in the late eighties and early nineties, saw all the movies several times, but never read any of the books, because reading is hard. Fan, or Not A Fan?

   Someone who did a PhD in Fantasy literature with an emphasis on Tolkien, but only ever watched the first Peter Jackson movie and disliked it. Fan, or Not A Fan?

   Someone who’ve seen every movie 35 times, read every book 9 times, and have their own YouTube channel devoted to the realm of Lindon. Fan, or Not A Fan?

   Someone who named their open-source medical imaging service “Orthanc.” Fan, or Not A Fan?

*

   Fandom does not have levels. You can’t be a Level 5 fan or a Level 12 fan, or a Level 20 superfan. That is my opinion. Of course, lots of folks will disagree.

   My belief is that fandom is declarative, just like becoming a Muslim; if you say the words out loud, you automatically become the thing. There is no trial period, no probation, no test, and no prerequisites. For instance, if you say, “I am a huge fan of the Royal family!” you just became a fan of the Royal family — it really is as simple as that.

   Like saying you love something.

   “I love strawberries.”

   “No you don’t. You don’t KNOW strawberries like I do, and I love them WAY more than you ever will.”

   Preposterous, right?

   What we have here is a dad protecting his children from “everyone” and effectually keeping things “just between us.” Ernie Gygax got in trouble for that one, even though it was his business partner who posted the image.

   It means that TSR (that’s the sixth or seventh one) wants to keep playing tabletop role-playing games in the same style as before. But the picture here absolutely sent the wrong message.

   Same goes for this—

   Warhammer wants to keep its lore exactly as it was established in the beginning — but they still need Lyla Mev’s and Dana Howl’s and Senasuke’s and Sword ’n’ Steele’s business, as well as the countless other female gamers and hobbyists who don’t have YouTube channels but play the game and paint miniatures nonetheless.

   So, Just Us needs Everyone’s business, or else they’re gonna go bankrupt.

   “True” Tolkien fans still need everyone else to watch the movies and subscribe to Amazon Prime… or else there would be no movies or shows.

   If you remove all the people who don’t know Middle-earth all that well, and if you subtract the money they spent to see Peter Jackson’s movies or buy the DVDs, those trilogies would’ve flopped for sure.

   Amazon is making a show for everyone — your mom, your fourteen-year-old niece, your Sri Lankan landlord, people in retirement homes, et cetera.

   Hardcore fans will always disagree. Obviously.

   One YouTuber said that The Rings of Power is fake fan fiction. At first, I was puzzled by that. I’m a fan of Conan the Barbarian… I write a novella about Conan… but… it’s fake… so I didn’t really write it? WTF?

   Then I realized the guy didn’t mean [fake] fan fiction, but rather [fake fan] fiction. Okay, that makes more sense, sorta. But it brings us right back to: what in the name of God is a fake fan? Who decides if you’re worthy to love something? Who has that kind of authority?

   It is frightening.

   In MMORPGs, noobs are the Everyone to level 60 trolls’ Just Us.

   And, to a lesser extent, D&D is the Everyone to Pathfinder’s Just Us.

   But this is definitely not restricted to gaming and entertainment.

   The ultra-rich are the biggest of all Just Us clubs. Any society that allows 1% of its people to control more than 50% of the wealth is in R’lyeh-deep trouble.

   Again, Just Us needs Everyone’s business — and debt — in order to be able to remain “Just Us.”

   For the tip of the pyramid to remain the tip of a pyramid, it needs the rest of the pyramid, but for the base of a pyramid to remain the base of a pyramid, it doesn’t need the tip.

   That’s why I believe the base shall win. In the end, Everyone will prevail over Just Us.

Who Can Enter The City

 

   I wouldn’t have thought in-game gatekeeping was still an issue in D&D, but a recent episode on Twitter made me realize that it was still around indeed.

   Someone said that their DM wouldn’t allow one specific character to enter a big city, because of the character’s race. “One of my friends now plays an outcast Mind Flayer,” I replied, “and nobody bothers the party because of it.”

   I got some angry comments.

   One guy said that the townspeople were secretly preparing a bonfire for the entire party.

   Another guy essentially said that my parents should have beaten me when I was a kid. For real.

   I did not reply to such an offensive thing, of course.

   Next would have been something along the lines of “The Catholic priests at the private school you attended when you were 12 should have raped you.” I mean, what’s the difference between being way out of line and being way, way out of line? It’s just one more “way.”

   Yeah, those bois are intense. Don’t mess with their game.

   Are there haters like that in the Monopoly fandom?

   I once played Monopoly with the Arkham Horror monsters and gates active on the board, and no one took offense to that. I once played Munchkin without the curse cards, because my nephew was bummed by those, having drawn five or six in a row. Again, no reprimands from the community, and no threats.

*

   Back in ’85 or ’86 my friend Thierry insisted on playing a Drow magic-user. They all told him he was crazy — although nobody said his parents didn’t beat him enough.

   Three years later, the first Drizzt novel hit the shelves; suddenly, Thierry wasn’t that crazy after all.

   Same goes for Illithids.

   Nowadays, Drows can pretty much go wherever they want. And what about Tieflings? They literally look like little devils — no bonfire for them? Kill the squid man, but the devils are okay? It’s absurd. Try to be coherent in your bigotry, at the very least.

   In Gloomhaven, nobody bothers you at the city gates. Inox have three colossal horns on their heads, like demons. Valraths look terrifying. And what about those Harrowers? They’re just like Mind Flayers! What are the city guards doing?

   I’ll tell you what they’re doing — they’re not discriminating based on physical appearance. Horns? Tentacles? Green skin? Welcome to Gloomhaven, as long as you’re not EVIL.

   Burning strangers at the stake just because they don’t look like everybody else: are we still there? And who is “everybody else” exactly?

   Maybe in Warhammer Fantasy, with the mistrust and paranoia and zealous Witch Hunters everywhere, I get it — the militia won’t let you through Nuln’s gates if you have tentacles on your face. But D&D? This is a game that has Aasimars and Loxodons and Dragonborn and Autognomes, for crying out loud!

   Anyway, if a fantasy city is ever attacked from within, OF COURSE the culprits are gonna be people who look perfectly innocuous. So.

   Since you have no way of telling who’s dangerous and who isn’t, why not let everyone in? What’s the use of stopping some races and not the others?

   Who even makes that call? The city guards? They’re not experts—

   What about all the spells like polymorph or alter self? Perhaps this person is just a Grey Elf who missed their save and were polymorphed into something vaguely resembling an Illithid. Do the guards manning the city gates have any idea what an Illithid actually is? A level 14 wizard, sure — but a city guard?

   What if a Duodrone shows up with three Monodrones in tow? I’m sure they have their reasons, since the One and the Prime works in mysterious ways… but what will the city guards decide? They have probably never even heard of Modrons. Allow these baffling beings into the city, or not?

   And while we’re at it, why do people role-play the actual “entering the city” part? Just say, “You get to Waterdeep, you settle in the usual tavern / inn, and the next morning, right on time, your contact shows up with the map and the advance payment agreed upon.”

   You just saved three hours there.

   Seriously, how much time do you have on your hands? Cut to the chase.

   My friends and I only play about 8 hours of D&D per year.

   The Tomb of Horrors begins with the lines, “The party has arrived at the site of the demi-lich’s last haunt. Before them is a low, flat topped hill, about 200 yards wide and 300 yards long. Only ugly weeds, thorns, and briars grow upon the steep sides and bald top of the 60' high mound.” Have you any idea how much longer that adventure would have been if it actually began in a big city like Irongate or Greyhawk? The ranger needs new arrows, but the arrowmaker is a Montague, and the ranger is a Capulet… It’ll never end. You’ll never get to that Tomb.

   The Illithid homeworld is the size of the rings of Saturn. How many North Americas and South Americas and Africas and Europes and Asias and Australias can you fit on the rings of Saturn? Hundreds of them. So there must be trillions of Illithids living there. D&D adventurers only ever encounter the ruling class — privileged, high-psionics Illithids — the ones who get to sail out into space aboard Nautiloid ships, and the ones who get to probability travel.

   But there ought to be so many, many, many others.

   You’ve got your Illithid Leonardos da Vinci, your Illithid Oprahs, your Illithid Confuciuses, your Illithid Kanye Wests, your Illithid Angela Merkels… And any one of those might leave their homeworld unbeknownst to their Elder Brain or Illithid Putin, because random rifts happen and freak wormholes happen. If your Tabaxi rogue went from Faerûn to Khorvaire just by stepping through a weird light, it can happen to Illithids, too. And perhaps some of them are quite glad to leave their hive world. Statistically, not all of them like it there.

   I said it before in my August 2019 post: if a race is monolithic, if each and every member of a race is exactly the same, then it’s not a race but a caricature.

   Gith led a slave revolt a long time ago. Why wouldn’t it happen again? Those low-psionics Illithids can — and will — be pissed at some point, won’t they?

   The Illithid in my game is such an outcast; he led an all-too-brief thrall uprising, but the whole thing was quashed in a matter of days.

   You have Jarlaxle and Drizzt, a Drow rebel and a Drow heretic; they exist, and nobody denies that, not even the guy who wants parents to spank their kids. So why not an Illithid Spartacus?

   Bottom line is, I don’t care what Venger Baphomet thinks. It’s the fun that matters, not the rules and not even the lore.

   If one of my players wants to play friggin’ Asmodeus, I’ll find a way to make it happen. Maybe there was a coup — a hostile takeover of Asmodeus’ physical form. The real Asmodeus is now trapped in a puny Human body — someone named Junko — while Mephistopheles himself now occupies Asmodeus’ body. “Junko” needs the help of the PCs to expose the usurper and reclaim his throne. Something like that.

   Forty years ago, they wouldn’t allow a Drow to enter any city or town.

   Now you’ve got K’thriss working for one of the Masked Lords of Waterdeep.

   Stay ahead of the curve. Let the people in.

   (Further reading: Flintlocks and Witchery has a great article titled “Evil or Something Like It,” published August 28, 2019.)

The Optimization Community

 

   As a game designer, the more tools you give to the players, the more options you provide, the more combinations and sequences you allow, the more you’re chipping away at your game’s human experience. The more things players need to compute, manage, or plan, the less they really interact with each other socially.

   In chess, the players usually don’t talk at all — there are way too many scenarios and moves to consider. In MTG, some players talk, but not that much — there’s a lot to keep track of. In Gloomhaven, since it’s collaborative, the players do interact — but there are long periods of silence at the table when each one is busy considering which initiative to pick, which action combo to select, depending on which room they’re in and which monsters they’re facing.

   I played enough Gloomhaven to retire my Brute and start playing a Beast Tyrant, but I’m convinced my Brute could have been much more effective in combat. Hardcore players would have looked at my deck and character sheet, and said, “This sucks. You need this perk, and you need to add two of those things in your attack deck, and you need to pick that third level action card and always couple it with that fourth level card… and then you’re gonna kick some serious butt.”

   Dicebreaker have a nice video on YouTube in which they explain why they loved Old School Essentials. No skills! No feats! Just say what your character is attempting to do, and roll the dice! They’re absolutely right. It’s liberating. 5e can be so complex sometimes, it’s almost Gloomhaven — the DM rolls dice for the monsters, and nothing else. Players already have all the information, all the DCs they need, in their feats’ descriptions. The DM is only there to witness.

  

   This screenshot was perfect for a post about optimization — but I didn’t take the time to properly research this so-called “invincible” build. If you’re interested, look it up yourself. I have full confidence in the capabilities of those who make such things.

   If there is a way — any way — to do something in a game, somebody’s gonna find it. I mean, these guys are relentless. You have to admire that.

   If there is a way to finish Scenario number 15 in just 8 rounds in Gloomhaven, somebody’s gonna do it.

   If there is a way to build an invincible wizard in D&D, somebody’s gonna do it—

   Look at good old Mille Bornes. There isn’t an infinity of choices there: you can only ever have 6 cards in your hand; you want to hold on to any Remedy Cards you happen to draw — spare tire, gasoline, repairs — but also want to keep a few Hazard Cards up your sleeve (so to speak) to be able to slap them on other players when they make too much headway. And you want the biggest Distance Cards, of course.

   

   You can’t optimize Mille Bornes much. It’s not MTG. It’s not Gloomhaven. There is no “deck building” to speak of. But the players interact with each other and trash-talk a lot, but in a friendly manner.

   “Another 100 miles? Here’s a Speed Limit for you. Boom!”

   “You bastard. I’ve got an Accident right here with your name on it.”

   “Slap it on Julie: she’s at 525 miles already!”

   “She’s got the damn Safety.”

   “I hate you!”

   I said it before and I’ll say it again: in D&D and in any other tabletop role-playing game, the most important part of your build is you. Not which feats or Archetype or subclass you pick. You. Your personality. Your attitude. Your sense of humor. Your ability to gracefully accept failure, and perhaps even overplay it a little, just to make everything more dramatic.

   Viari was a memorable character, not because of Dual Wield Mastery, not because of Supreme Sneak, but because of the player himself: Patrick Rothfuss.

   Optimization is a marketing gimmick. There are more players than there are DMs — so why not give more agency to the players? why not sell more books directly to the players?

   Wizards of the Coast may be putting some DMs in a tight spot by doing that. Indeed, if something is in this or that book, why wouldn’t you accept it at your table? It’s like if an actor showed up on a movie set and said to the director, “I can jump 200 feet. I can do it once in the film.” But the shoot is Schindler’s List, and there is no 200-foot jump anywhere in the script…

   I’m still DMing in an old-fashioned way. I’m the one who spends 300 hours building terrain and painting minis, so I get to decide.

   Want an example? Here’s one: invisibility no longer exists in my game, except for some very specific monsters. The spell, invisibility, doesn’t exist, and Potions of Invisibility are merely a legend.

   Why? Here’s why.

   Between 2007 and 2013, I ran a campaign based on the HBO’s Carnivàle, and the party’s wizard had the ability to make himself and up to 3 of his friends invisible. As soon as a remote possibility of danger arose, that’s the first thing they always did. “Okay — we’re all invisible.”

   After three or four years of that, I decided to give them a taste of their own medicine; the coven of witches knew they were coming, and all 12 witches were invisible, too. They had left all the doors ajar, just not enough for anyone to be able to slip through: whenever a door moved, a witch targeted that area with attack spells.

   But it proved to be one of the most boring fight scenes I ever ran in my entire life.

   A month later, a curse deprived the wizard of his mass invisibility spell. Good riddance.

   When this whole “Carnivàle” campaign ended, I started a new miniatures campaign — something I hadn’t done since 1987. And I thought: if I start buying and painting minis again, I don’t want invisible characters or monsters. Your miniature is here but this monster can’t see you but you can see the monster but not this other monster there which is invisible too but I’m still putting the miniature on the table because I worked 9 hours on it…

   My point is, if you don’t want to suffer through something tedious and painful — don’t. Aren’t you the one who invests most of your time in this thing? You also deserve to have fun; you’re not there just to roll dice for the monsters.

   Invisibility is a pain in your ass? No more invisibility!

   Invincible Tortle wizards cramp your style? No Torles in your world!

   The Players Handbook / Dungeon Masters Guide divide was bad for business, because players didn’t buy the DMG. In 1985 when Unearthed Arcana hit the shelves, both players and Dungeon Masters snatched it — a win for TSR.

   Now, every new sourcebook is marketed towards players and DMs. Always.

   But DMs still have the last say.

   I can imagine a new D&D player who buys three different books at $30 a pop, reads them all, studies them, places sticky notes throughout, and then builds the most awesome, the most perfectly optimized character… and when they find that elusive group to play with, the DM says, “This race doesn’t exist in my world, neither does that Archetype—”

   What a bummer for new players, right? They bought three books, studied them thoroughly, and for what?

   Perhaps we’re seeing the beginning of a D&D schism: WotC vs individual Dungeon Masters. Maybe one day individual DMs are gonna be the game’s biggest problem.

   In MMORPGs, that split does not exist, because the Dungeon Master is the video game company itself — a bunch of servers stacked in a datacenter somewhere. If the company “publishes” a new race, a new feat, it’s automatically approved, and allowed everywhere in the game; there are no fussy individual Dungeon Masters to say, “Actually, my world doesn’t have that.”

   Unless you are an Adventurers League DM, you really don’t have to allow anything you don’t want at your table. Hell, I got rid of invisibility, and no longer allow multiclassing, either, because switching careers all the time is Warhammer, not D&D — you were a pedlar, then a bodyguard, then a bounty hunter, then a slaver, then a mercenary captain, then a judicial champion, and finally, a witch-hunter? What the bejesus is going on? Who does that?

   

   Why not a Rat Catcher Pharaoh Shukenja Troubadour, while you’re at it?

   So — is there a way to reconcile the two sides?

   In my opinion, those two sides can be mutually exclusive in a good way.

   My nephew plays in 4 or 5 different games of Minecraft. One game is just for building castles and stuff all by himself. Another game is to interact with his friends and have a good time. Another one is to get bullied by powerful (i.e. adult) players wielding “hacked” superweapons. Et cetera.

   Same goes for D&D. If you have fun building optimized / invincible characters, have at it, go crazy, build 10 of them if you want. That’s an entire long weekend of pure fun, all by yourself.

   But then, come game day, you can play that Miniature Giant Space Hamster with 1 Hit Point, and if you are a really great player, the Space Hamster’s gonna steal the show, and be way more memorable than any dragon tamer pirate ranger.

   The short answer is: You Can Do Both.

   The long answer is: sooner or later, you’ll have to be able to do both.

   You claim to be a veteran tabletop role-player, don’t you? That’s great. But you have to be able to play puny roles, too.

   In Pendragon, I once played another player’s squire. It was my choice. I wasn’t forced to do it. Some of the other guys at the table made fun of me, because we were young, and full of testosterone — but I don’t regret playing this character: it was an awesome, formative experience.

   In Nephilim, I once played an entire game as a rat. My human host had died in combat, and we were right in the middle of the desert, with no other humans to possess. So, instead of losing lots and lots of precious Vitae, I reincarnated into a nearby rat — and played the rest ot the adventure like that. Another player (whose host had survived the desert encounter) carried me in his backpack. Later in that adventure, I had to fight a ferret. A normal ferret. And it was hard. I still remember that combat. When my rat finally killed the ferret, it was more satisfying than cutting down a goddamn Mind Flayer!

   In Star Wars, I once played a protocol droid. No combat skills. Just talk. So, I talked a lot.

   In Bloodlust, I once played a magical scimitar. My human wielder was played by another guy, and I constantly had to deal with him and try to make him do what I wanted, and go where I wanted to go. Like Elric with his evil, sentient sword.

   Optimize all you want, build fine-tuned characters, but if you aspire to become a well-rounded tabletop role-player, one day or another you’re gonna have to play somebody else’s henchman — or scimitar — or Space Hamster — or droid. You have no choice; it’s like medicine; you’ll have to perform every procedure at least once, or they won’t give you a degree. Yes, that includes at least one rectal exam⸻

   

   This one’s too much for me. It reminds me of that cream pie blunderbuss in Steve Jackson’s Toon. Sure, it’s perfectly optimized — but what the hell, are you a Sun Elf, or Bugs Bunny?

   

   So, should you “ready your ranger” in minutes, or build that super-optimized troll slayer maharajah ranger?

   Again — and in conclusion — why not do both?

   Things are not gonna change. We get a new sourcebook every 4 months. We’ve got more numbers to crunch, and so we crunch more numbers: we keep trying to emulate what AIs do, instead of getting better at what humans do, and optimizing that.

The Universal Rule of Crap

   Let’s hop on that buzz train and talk about The Rings of Power — but not right away. It’s a 10-minute read before we actually get to the Rings. I’ll make it worth your while, My Precious Reader.

   At first glance, this post may seem like a lengthy rant, but it isn’t. It’s just that this time around, Yours Truly is gonna have to list a lot of crappy things before he gets to the point. I’m not mad. I’m not cranky. But Chris Gore is right: 99% of films today are garbage.

   Important things need to be said — so bear with me, ladies and gentlemen.

   Here we go.

   I saw all three Lord of the Rings movies, and they were crap.

   Gimli doesn’t even know that Khazad-dûm has fallen over a thousand years before. It’s absurd.

   Somehow, Saruman knows there is a balrog lurking within the mines of Moria; he’s got a god damned book with a PICTURE of the balrog in it. What the actual fuck bucket? That’s ridiculous.

   Shelob, one of my favorite characters, doesn’t even speak. Why?

   And please, can we all agree that the Eye of Sauron is a metaphor? With the palantír stolen from Minas Ithil, Sauron can “see” things far away, but it’s not a huge flaming eye sitting on top of Barad-dûr.

 

   In the book, Gandalf and Saruman never fight. In Ralph Bakshi’s movie, the wizards do have a clash of sorts, but it is rather abstract and very elegant, like a Certamen in Ars Magica. In Peter Jackson’s film, Saruman and Gandalf violently fling each other against walls and ceilings — two disheveled old men fighting with their canes.

   This scene is getting worse with each new iteration.

   It’s a mess. It’s a disgrace.

   Nevertheless, for an entire generation, Peter Jackson’s trilogy is the best thing they ever saw.

 

   I get it. Teens and young adults were awestruck in 2001 and 2002 and 2003; The Lord of the Rings movies arrived at the best possible moment — like D&D for Gen X, or like the first set of Magic: The Gathering for older Millennials. Right into that sweet, sweet spot, and right when you’re ready to embrace it and fully, wholeheartedly enjoy it.

   It’s okay.

   But — still — those movies are crap.

   Don’t worry, though; for my friends and I, the magical-thing-that-completely-changed-our-lives-and-rocked-our-world was First Edition AD&D — and it was crap.

   I saw The Hobbit, part 1, and it was embarrassingly bad. I did not bother with the other two, and I never will—

   Thorin and Company are attacked by orcs, and — outta the blue — Gandalf finds the entrance to a VERY LONG tunnel that leads directly to Rivendell. Seriously?

   And it happens to be the one night of the year when Elrond can decypher the moon-letters on Thrór’s map. Moon-letters? What is that?

   And Radagast somehow managed to steal the Witch-king’s own blade? Appalling.

   [refills coffee cup]

   I’m not done yet. Like I said — bear with me, please.

   The Phantom Menace was crap.

   Attack of the Clones was crap.

   I didn’t see Revenge of the Sith, but I assume it was crap.

   I saw The Force Awakens, and it was hard sun-baked donkey manure.

   I haven’t seen The Last Jedi nor The Rise of Skywalker. I don’t watch The Mandalorian. Haven’t seen The Book of Boba Fett... So I can’t comment on those films and series.

   Even Return of the Jedi was crappy. Luke walks a penis-shaped plank floating over a giant, gaping vagina full of teeth. Really? And those Ewoks. Come on…

   The Dungeons & Dragons movie with Jeremy Irons was horseshit. Why would the next one be any different? Are the people involved not almost the same as in 2000?

   The American Gods show was a glistening pile of stinking crap, despite Neil Gaiman’s personal involvement. I can’t imagine what the man had to endure with countless TV execs vetoing his every decision literally all the time.

   By now, you’re probably thinking, “So this guy believes everything is crap?”

   No, I don’t. Some things are excellent. You just need to find them.

   Remember The Incredible Hulk, the 1978 TV show starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno? That was awesome. Bixby is so good as doctor David Banner — he makes you feel all sorts of emotions for the character. This show wasn’t overly “Marvelized.” It wasn’t at all infantilizing. And Lou Ferrigno, well, he is to the Hulk what Adam West is to the Batman: a legend.

   Remember Conan the Barbarian, the first one, back in 1982? Now that was something, wasn’t it? It’s not a cinematic monument, but it isn’t annoyingly clean and cliché, and it isn’t a god damn caricature of an age past. It’s grim, ugly, and brutal. Even Ridley Scott’s Gladiator looks like an upbeat period piece next to Conan.

   The Laundry Files, by Charles Stross, is an excellent series of books. Smart, engrossing, funny and terrifying all at the same time. Nothing in there is either easy or lazy. Stross challenges your brain, and your brain takes on that challenge. It’s a wonderful treat.

   Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, the 2019 TV show, is as close to perfection as you can get. In his movie, Zack Snyder refused to include the squid; he said, “it would take 15 minutes to explain the squid.” Without any explanation, Lindelof showed us the squid in all its grotesque glory — and his Watchmen won 11 Emmys. Do not explain, ever. Just tell a story.

   The X-Files. The Sopranos. Breaking Bad. Sherlock (the one with Cumberbatch)…

   Good things exist out there… but they are few and far between, that’s for sure.

   It is our unkillable, gullible optimism that seems to be the problem. We always assume that the next thing will be mind-blowingly good. Like Dune. Like Kenobi. Like The Rings of Power.

   Before that infamous Vanity Fair article came out, I saw people say stuff like “Counting the days already! CAN’T WAIT!!!” or “September 2: date reserved and locked in!!!”

   We’re so dumb. We never learn.

   We assume the next thing will be good — and it’s almost always crap.

   And it is positively futile to suddenly realize that something is crap 3 years after the fact. You already paid for the thing. You already fed the system.

   Again, I haven’t seen The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, but I witnessed SO MUCH hype when those movies first came out. And now, 3 years later, I keep seeing things like this—

 

   Where were you 3 years ago? We needed people saying those things out loud back then; now, it’s useless, because The Crap Factory already made its money, because The Steady Production Of Crap continues unabated. We need to learn to sniff out the crap earlier — waaay earlier — in the process.

   It’s like “the Emperor has no clothes.” In the beginning, no one says a damn thing, but as soon as one voice states the obvious, everybody start to pile up like crazy. It becomes a pop-up echo chamber.

   YouTuber PhilosophiCat said that George R.R. Martin’s books were “about nihilism — where good never triumphs, and potential heroes die meaningless deaths, and the world descends deeper and deeper into misery, chaos, and despair.”

   Well, that’s Tuesday in the Middle Ages.

   Yes, the Cathars were brutally exterminated — a senseless mass murder. Babies, too.

   Yes, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake — a meaningless death.

   It’s real life, it’s not Disney.

   If and when you give the audience exactly what they want, it becomes absolute crap.

   I remember the series finale of NBC’s Grimm. Literally five minutes after it ended, someone tweeted, “EVERYONE’S ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

   That’s your audience. That is us.

   In CBS’s Blue Bloods, all fans seem to care about is whether Danny is gonna end up with his detective partner, Maria. They don’t understand that the screenwriters already used this storybeat once in the show, when Jamie got together with his partner on the job, Edit. Writers won’t do this twice in the same show: it would look stupid. And then what — Frank with Abigail?

   I’m fed up with Mulder marrying Scully, Patrick Jane getting together with Lisbon, and Castle getting together with Beckett. The audience is dumb.

 

   There are two or three different fan film “trailers” of The Silmarillion out there, and they’re all unadulterated crap. You get a glimpse of some dark tower with a red thing glowing on top of it; there’s something resembling a volcano in the distance, with legions of orcs marching next to it; then you see 8 or 10 silhouettes walking in single file on a mountain ridge in an astounding vista. In short, stuff that you have seen before. There’s absolutely nothing new there.

   But it gives you an insight into the public’s mind. We’re begging for the same movie over and over again. We don’t want new. We want recognizable. We want well-known.

   For me, it’s a huge relief whenever potential heroes die meaningless deaths and the world descends deeper and deeper into misery, chaos, and despair.

   Indeed, it is real. It hurts. It stays with you.

   Planet of the Apes, the first one, doesn’t have a happy ending — and it sticks with you for a long while.

   Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem doesn’t have a happy ending — and it sticks with you.

   Good shows are being cancelled because of poor viewership. Networks shouldn’t do that. For Life was excellent, and we needed much more than just two seasons of it. What we don’t need is 10 Fast and Furious movies.

   As I said at the beginning: I’m not mad, and I’m not cranky. I won’t even watch The Rings of Power, because I don’t have Amazon Prime, have no intention of getting it, and the whole thing is gonna be crap anyway.

   Believe me, I’d like them to prove me wrong, but they won’t.

   It’s gonna be crap.

   Not because of Sophia Nomvete, the actress who plays Disa — she’s probably awesome. Not because of Ismael Cruz Córdova, the actor who plays Arondir — he’s probably amazing. Not because of full metal jacket Galadriel. But because Crap is a recipe, and most industry execs follow it to the letter.

   They are physically, intellectually, and most of all, contractually incapable of writing good, compelling stories.

   Even when they BEGIN with a good, compelling story — like American Gods, the novel — they end up turning it into vile, inexcusable crap. Really, what else can I say?

   If Amazon were to actually deliver a splendid, formidable story, like HBO’s Rome, for example, then all the rest wouldn’t matter anymore — who should or shouldn’t have a beard, who should or shouldn’t wear a full suit of plate mail, et cetera.

   Since the Vanity Fair article and the Super Bowl trailer, we have this enormous shitstorm going on, and the focus of all that indignation is on a couple of small, immediately noticeable points. Almost no one seems to focus on the true, concealed, overwhelming, central issue: a deep-rooted bulletproof entrenched systemic crap-factory culture.

   That’s the real problem.

   We have a living body lying on a table in front of us, and that body is the entertainment industry. It has cancer, a couple warts here and there, and an ingrown toenail. Since we’re powerless to cure the cancer itself, we just stand there and argue about how to best cure those warts and that nail—

   But the body’s still dying, and it’s the cancer that’s killing it, not the damn warts.

Worldbuilding examples: Lucas, Tolkien, Peter Jackson

First example — Star Wars

   Darth Vader is second only to the Emperor, everybody knows that. But it didn’t seem to be the case in 1977.

   In Episode IV, Vader is the muscle. He doesn’t even sit at the conference table, and paces around the room like an attack dog on a leash. That’s exhibit A.

   Admiral Motti says, “Don’t try to frighten us with your sorcerer’s ways, Lord Vader.”

   If the supreme ruler of the galaxy is a 10th dan black belt, no officer will ever joke about someone’s “karate shtick,” right? It doesn’t make sense. Motti’s scathing words, “Your sad devotion to that ancient religion...” unequivocally indicates that the Galactic Emperor, in Lucas’ mind, was not a Sith at this point.

   Vader begins to Force choke Motti — but is ordered to stand down. That’s exhibit B.

   The Sith Lord clearly isn’t the Emperor’s second-in-command here.

   In ’77, galactic domination ain’t Vader’s chief concern: he is mostly obsessed with finding and killing his old master. “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed,” he says. “The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”

   In the script, we can read: “Grand Moff Tarkin, governor of the Imperial outland regions, enters. He is followed by his powerful ally, The Sith Lord, Darth Vader.”

   That sounds odd, doesn’t it? After all, Himmler wasn’t a “powerful ally” of Hitler’s — he was under his command. Mussolini was a powerful ally: not actually in the Third Reich, but from another country. That’s what an ally usually is. If you belong to the same military, you’re not an “ally,” you’re either an officer or a soldier. That’s exhibit C.

   Three years later, in The Empire Strikes Back, there are no new Grand Moffs. Vader is the Emperor’s right-hand man, and he calls him “my master.” The Emperor is now a Sith, too. Worldbuilding has occurred.

   In the very beginning, it was a military empire, with a lone “sorcerer” ally who wasn’t that impressed by the Death Star. Later, it became a Sith empire — with military personnel.

   Huge difference.

   We can assume that Vader isn’t actually part of the Galactic Empire in ’77. He stands to the side, like Destro in G.I. Joe — scary enforcer and / or independent contractor. The Sith Lord is Tarkin’s powerful ally, not the Empire’s. Seems like the Grand Moff personally hired Vader to retrieve the stolen Death Star plans; an unusual situation quite similar to Vader later hiring the bounty hunters to find the Falcon.

   Tarkin, not Vader, has a direct line to the Emperor. “I’ve just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently.”

   Vader isn’t a ranking officer in the Empire. Not yet.

   Get this: in a “Revenge of the Jedi” deleted scene, the new Death Star commander refuses to let Vader enter Palpatine’s throne room.

   When they remake A New Hope — let’s face it, it’s inevitable — they’ll rectify those details; Vader will indeed sit at the conference table, and Motti won’t mock him at all.

*

   Whether or not you agree with this analysis, one fact remains: the character of Darth Vader is much more dominant in The Empire Strikes Back than it was in A New Hope ― and that is due to cogent worldbuilding. How many times have we heard game designers say: “If your players connect with one NPC, give that NPC more importance in the next games.”

   It is what Lucas did. Both kids and adults loved “The Sith Lord,” enjoyed his “sorcerer’s ways” and his “sad devotion to that ancient religion.” So, now, let’s give him more screen time and make him less of a loner, less like Merlin in Camelot; let’s take King Arthur — boom, he’s a sorcerer too! The Galactic Emperor himself is going to have his own sorcerer’s ways and a (no longer sad) devotion to that ancient religion. Vader is gonna be the Emperor’s apprentice. Thus, technically, the Empire’s number two.

   That’s how you worldbuild.

   Overhaul. Interweave.

   After A New Hope, Lucas took governor Tarkin’s “ally” and the unseen Galactic Emperor, and linked them directly to one another. It made good sense, and enriched the world’s core principle, which is the Force. Imagine what Star Wars would be if Lucas had failed to do that.

Second example — The Hobbit

   In my penultimate 2021 post, Low-concept vs High-concept, I talked about the giants that we see in The Hobbit, when Bilbo and the Dwarves are crossing the Misty Mountains. I thought it was totally preposterous, but someone recently told me that the “stone giants” are indeed mentioned in the source material. I was taken aback. Yes, it has been a long while since I read The Hobbit. I didn’t recall that one sentence, like, at all. My bad.

   “Bilbo… saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang… they could hear the giants guffawing and shouting all over the mountainsides.”

   Believe it or not, those insane 300-foot tall elemental giants did not come from Peter Jackson’s fevered mind. So he was right to include them in the movie, wasn’t he?

   Since we’re discussing worldbuilding, this is noteworthy.

   Tolkien wrote The Hobbit around 1933, including the duelling giants for stylistic effect, fairytales and all. After that, as he started working on The Lord of the Rings, he completely scrubbed these creatures. His world was slowly shaping up, and he kept the Trolls, the Ogres, the Orcs and the Goblins, but abandoned the Stone Giants. Why?

   He knew they wouldn’t fit. Even at that early stage, Tolkien certainly knew who Melkor would be, and how he would have perverted some of Arda’s creatures to make Trolls, Orcs, Goblins and so forth; but a race of rock hurling titans — how come? It’d upset the world’s balance. Indeed, why puny 40-foot Balrogs when you could have an army of towering elementals the size of the Statue of Liberty?

   So Tolkien cut them out and never spoke of giants again in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales.

   Top-notch worldbuilding.

   But then Peter Jackson went and undid that.

*

   There’s a reason why Lucas scratched the name Starkiller, and there’s a reason why he cut the scene with Biggs Darklighter: they are bad names. Writing the script, Lucas probably tried many permutations — Starlighter, Starwalker, Darkwalker, Skylighter, Skykiller. In the end, he kept the one name that sounded really good.

   What Disney is doing, returning to pre-1977 drafts and bringing back those deleted names and characters, is bad worldbuilding.

   If there’s a Dark side and a Light side, there should be lightsabers and darksabers — right? Bad, and almost childish, if you think about it. When my nephew was 4 or 5, he saw a blue fire hydrant on the street, across from the park, and as soon as this information registered in his five-year-old brain — those things on the sidewalk aren’t always red, there can be other colors — as soon as he knew this, he started looking for the green ones and the yellow ones and the black ones and the orange ones. For months.

   So, yeah, lightsabers… darksabers… shadowsabers are next on the list, probably.

   All lightsabers in A New Hope were supposed to be identical: white. That would have been great, I guess. Adult sci-fi. Then Lucas thought it would be more dramatic if the good guy wielded a bluish blade (Heaven is blue), and the evil guy had a reddish one (Hell is red). Maybe not George’s best worldbuilding choice.

   Forty-five years later, it’s Toys ‘R’ Us Star Wars.

   And what’s going to be the “light” / “angelic” equivalent of the Nazgûl? The Nazgood?

   What Peter Jackson did was bad worldbuilding, too. Tolkien removed the stone giants from all his works after The Hobbit, so why in hell is Jackson boisterously reintroducing them? Sure, the giants are present in the book — but you also need to look at all the other texts of Middle-earth, and see the big picture, and understand why the author did what he did.

   Good worldbuilding is about adding layers to what’s already there instead of constantly inserting new stuff. Remember that nifty little Ring of Invisibility Bilbo found in some random cave? It turns out that it’s much more than just a generic Ring of Invisibility… That’s right. Think about doing the same in your tabletop role-playing games; instead of introducing a powerful new item, just take that “ordinary” +1 dagger the party found during their very first adventure — and make it speak all of a sudden. It’s an intelligent dagger +1 / +3 vs demons / devils, and it needs the party’s help to go free its former owner from a sorcerous prison inside a huge derelict steampunk meteorite!

   “But why didn’t it speak to us for an entire year?” It’s up to you, the DM, to come up with a cool reason. Maybe the dagger was simply observing the player characters and assessing their worthiness?

   Bad worldbuilding is when you go over the edge. Things were okay before, but then you add something more, and it all goes to hell. That’s what happened in White Wolf’s World of Darkness towards the tail-end of the storytelling game craze; with vampires and werewolves and changelings and mages and celestines and mummies and demons literally everywhere, why and how would there be any normal humans in positions of power anywhere?

   The Star Wars universe is fine without Starkiller and darksabers.

   Middle-earth is fine without Stone Giants.

   The World of Darkness was fine with just seven vampire clans and a few garou tribes.

   The most significant difference between good worldbuilders and bad worldbuilders is that good worldbuilders know when to rein themselves in.

Is Your Party Democratic?

   Don’t worry: this post isn’t political.

   It’s a reflection on which in-game means belong to one character alone, and which resources belong to the entire party or group. In some instances, said question can be annoyingly and surprisingly problematic.

   To demonstrate, I’m going to talk about the amazing game my friend Jean-Pierre has been running since the early nineties. Bear with me for a while, ladies and gentlemen, and you’ll see exactly what kind of pickle I’m alluding to.

   Jean-Pierre’s game is a genuine homebrew world with its own original mechanics, stats, proficiencies, and magic system. We also get something called “Dragon Points,” possibly the most valuable resource in the game. Dragon Points are not like Fate Points in Warhammer — they are not “spare lives” for your character, video game style. (“I’m fresh out of Fate Points; the next time I die, I die for good.”) Rather, Dragon Points are like Anything Points, in that you can spend one — or more — at any given moment, to secure those additional arrows your character forgot to buy while passing through town, or to ensure that the sacred scroll he or she is carrying miraculously didn’t get wet when a tidal wave swept the coastal village, or to add a number of successes to an important To Hit roll or ability check. Dragon Points allow you to intercede directly, like if you were to become your own Dungeon Master for just a second...

   As the party is waiting outside the throne room, they happen to hear some other guest mention that Her Majesty the Queen absolutely LOVES a rare wine from Ullendale. Your character can choose to spend a Dragon Point to actually have a bottle of Ullendale wine in his or her pack. When the party is finally allowed entry to the throne room, the Queen’s mood immediately lightens as she is presented with such a thoughtful gift.

   You only earn a Dragon Point when your character does something formidable, heroic, or truly hilarious. They’re hard to come by.

   Around Christmas time, two years ago, Jean-Pierre sent an email to all his players. It was a quiz — five increasingly difficult, in-universe questions about his game world, with a total of 15 Dragon Points to win, per player!

   Personally, I have been jotting down notes and sketching cool NPCs and redrawing city maps in my little notebooks for over twenty years, so I got four out of five questions right, for a total of 12 Dragon Points. No other player approached that in the quiz. One player didn’t even bother to answer the email, not because he’s a bad player, not at all, but he knows he isn’t good at remembering weird fantasy names and fictional places.

   So now my character, Stygia Steve, has a huge pool of 12 Dragon Points. I’ve never had so much of that precious asset in all my years playing in this game.

   First time we get together and play since the pandemic began, our party finds itself into an especially nasty fight with an unkillable samurai zombie and a tough Dwarf zombie, plus a couple undead wolves — and our big plate-mail-clad 17th-level tank is rapidly dropped to 3 HP. Fuck…

   We don’t have a healer per se, so the monk tries his very best at first aid, and my character decides to use the free-form magic system to conjure up some degree of healing, but it is costly, very costly indeed; I’m gonna have to roll at least 30 on my 3d12. Almost impossible.

   “What if I spend a Dragon Point on that roll?” I ask.

   “You add 10 to your result,” Jean-Pierre says.

   “I’ll do it.”

   I roll 3d12, and get 6, 4, and 2. Plus 10 for the Dragon Point, it’s a total of 22, and I needed 30 for that spell to take effect. I wasted a Dragon Point, damn it.

   We need our tank to get through this accursed place — so I try again, and this time, I spend 2 Dragon Points, adding 20 to my roll. The roll succeeds. Our tank regains 30 Hit Points, putting him at 33, but it is still an awfully long way from his max HP.

   So, guess what? I do it again. Two more Dragon Points, and another 30 Hit Points healed.

   The big guy is at 63 HP now. It is safe to continue the adventure, right?

*

   Stygia Steve has 7 Dragon Points left, and the adventure is not over yet. What happens after the next nasty fight? Everyone will pressure me to “heal” the tank, even though healing spells are not my character’s specialty…

   I’ll be able to burn another 6 Dragon Points for three 30-HP healing surges, and then attempt a fourth and last one with 1 Dragon Point… and then…

   What is the worst thing that could happen?

   You can almost see it, don’t you?

   My character could eventually find himself in a situation where he must make a very important dodge to avoid falling into an acid pit; 26 to succeed, 16 on the roll, and if he had a Dragon Point in his sleeve, he could push that roll to 26 and make it by the skin of his teeth.

   Or, he could be hanging off a cliff, while the other characters are either down or busy fighting several opponents some fifty feet away. No helping hand available for Stygia Steve; he loses his grip, and falls to his death. If he’d had at least 1 Dragon Point, I could have said, “I spend a Dragon Point and there’s a long, gnarled root not ten feet beneath me — and I try to grab on to it…”

   But I don’t have any Dragon Points left.

   So I die.

   It’s hypothetical. But still a head-scratcher.

   One player takes comprehensive notes for years and years, draws sketches, memorizes the names of kingdoms and cities and rivers and remote mountain ranges, and then, one day, it pays off. Boom: 12 Dragon Points!

   The party’s tank alone is going to benefit from that.

   Might seem wildly unfair, sure, but the tank protects you and everybody else in that party, doesn’t he?

   Yes he does. He is always right between us and danger.

   So where’s the problem?

   It’s a conundrum; sooner or later, somebody’s going to die for lack of a spare Dragon Point — and it might very well be the one guy who had all the Dragon Points to begin with.

   Am I entitled to keep at least 1 Dragon Point in my sleeve, you know, just in case? In other words, what resources are mine and mine alone?

   I remember seeing this in the early eighties: the paladin is at 2 HP, and the thief (there were no rogues back then) is the only one in the group with a potion of healing… and he refuses to “waste it” on the paladin. Different times. We were way more selfish.

   Now that we live in a sharing economy, naturally, we share resources. Your character found a potion of extra-healing during a solo game last weekend? That potion is still going to benefit the next character in your party who ends up in dire need of healing, whoever he or she may be. And yes: when comes your character’s turn to be in dire need of healing, there might not be any healing resources left in the party’s pool.

   Here’s one easy solution. If you create a quiz to reward those players who take abundant notes, the rewards should be ability improvements and / or single-use powers.

   Question 1. Difficulty: average. Reward: add +20 damage to any melee attack your character makes. One use only.

   Question 2. Difficulty: hard. Reward: increase your character’s Constitution by 1, permanently.

   Question 3. Difficulty: very hard. Reward: even if your character isn’t a spellcaster, he or she gains the ability to regenerate 1d20 Hit Points, 25 times (3/day max). Self only.

   See what I mean?

   While we’re here, let’s broaden the scope of this rumination. Why not replace most magic items with innate character abilities? It’ll only prevent preposterous min/maxing shenanigans. I have seen players transfer all useful items and amulets and bracers and rings to one Dwarf fighter, and then this super-buffed character entered the boss’ lair alone, and fought the entire combat all by himself, while the rest of the party cowered in the corridor, “feeling naked.” And this wasn’t in the eighties, mind you; it was four years ago.

   Not fun tabletop role-playing. Again, video game mindset.

   The ultra-selfish players of 1983 look pretty good now, don’t they?

   Three words: Innate personal powers.

   And it works wonders on NPCs, too. Instead of giving Fingon the Elf a +3 longsword, give him an added +3 proficiency bonus, and the innate ability to hit creatures that can only be hit by magical weapons. It’s much better. The bonus lives inside that NPC instead of in a blade that can — and will — be stolen from him at the very first occasion.

   I’m not mad because of the Dragon Points thing. If I burn them all to heal our party’s tank, so be it. And later, if good ol’ Stygia Steve croaks because he doesn’t have any Dragon Points left — so be it. But it’s a thought-provoking prospect, and writing an article on this topic seemed like a worthy idea.

   We’re due to play our next game in three weeks. Literally anything can happen. And I shall write about it right here. Of course.

   I’ll share.