Desolation of Smaug

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

Oh my, it is late. I'm not talking about the hour either. I'm talking about the crushing realization that I didn't do a nerdview of last year's An Unexpected Journey. Whatthefrak, nerd? Well, last year's failings aside, here's a toasty nerdview of the second film in The Hobbit trilogy.

Expectations 'Odor': I was not blown away by the first installment of The Hobbit. I didn't hate it, but the fact that I wasn't rushing to review it last year is really damning evidence that the movie just wasn't that spectacular. (Did I really not review it?! What planet is this? Am I just losing it after one midnight showing too many?) An Unexpected Journey didn't have the same heart as each movie of The Lord Of The Rings, and too much of the story felt compromised for flashy additions to the world and total BS action sequences. The skiing derrick down the rock face of the goblin caves was especially eyeroll-inducing. I didn't like the abundance of CG baddies--especially the George Lucas Goblin King that was just outright gross. And they didn't include "fifteen birds in five fir trees", which I had already said I really really wanted to see included.

But this next movie stands to include so much more that I'm excited about. Mirkwood and Thranduil's creepy elves. Laketown and Bard the badass the bowman. Erebor revealed. Mega Nibelungenlied imagery. The battle with Smaug over Laketown.

And, if I'm honest, I'm intrigued by the inclusion of an auburn-haired elf-maiden. And by intrigued I mean, intrigued…

But seriously, I expect Bard to really shine as a common man hero in this film, taking the spotlight completely from Thorin and maybe even Bilbo. I want Smaug to be intelligently scary. But I want them to tone-down the over-the-top BS of the first Hobbit film and stick closer to believable, visceral action. An Unexpected Journey had very few action sequences that weren't cartoonishly unbelievable. And while you could say that this is deliberate because the films are actually a recreation of Bilbo's book, that's not highlighted as a theme of the movie and is a poor excuse to make such ham-handed glittery special effects pieces instead of real hands-on fights like the ones that made The Lord of the Rings popular. Overall, I want a film guided by a more controlled and focused plot than last year's film.

Appreciation 'Beef': Well, frak that feldercarb.

No, seriously. Bad bad badness.

First let me begin with a non-spoiler spoiler alert. This movie is pointless. I am totally going to spoil the crap out of this movie in the course of this review because none of the so-called plot movements actually matter and there's no real dynamic--no change--to the characters or setting in this film. It is seriously just a long piece of exposition to get us to the third movie.

Before I really let into the movie, though, let me get the good stuff out of the way. The opening of the film is interesting, showing a scene based on Tolkien's notes that shows Gandalf was the one to strong-arm Thorin into starting his quest for the Lonely Mountain. That's followed by a nice bit with Beorn, a shape-shifting bear/Liam Neeson type. But the film starts to dip with the spiders of Mirkwood sequence--it's well-done, but it's too long compared to how rushed most of the film is, and the fighting begins to get implausible here. Characters repeatedly free-fall from hundred-foot tall trees only to be conveniently caught by spider webs, just-right branches, or outright plot protection.

Bard is cool, and is probably the only character in the film that is worthy of his depiction in the book. That's not to say that he's faithfully adapted from the book--not even close--but he is at least as cool as the literary Bard the bowman, and just what I'd hoped from him. I do think that Thorin, Bard, and Kili look way too much alike, though, and considering Thorin should have like at least one foot of beard this is just salt in the wound. Luke Evans plays Bard perfectly and he looks the part, but coming in alongside Thorin the visual similarities tend to wash him out as a tag-along.

Let me spell it out: Thorin Oakenshield uses his beard as a measurement of masculinity in the books. He wishes people well by saying stuff like "may your beard grow ever longer". We should have no clue what his cheeks look like because it should be underneath three pounds of beard.

Of course, Bard is also mired in the middle of one of the dumbest settings in the movie: Laketown. Rather than being a hardy bastion of men living in the wet blindspot of Smaug, the Laketown of the movie is a frigid derrick of the same Tudor-style buildings we saw in Bree except suspended over water. The culture is soulless and the people accordingly bland to the point where no one even seems to register that they're living under the tyranny of the most toothlessly impotent mayor ever. I might consider this a dramatic criticism of society if the police state imagery was consistently realized, but the town guards only come out to prolong the plot of a film that is mostly filler. Bard makes a big deal out of needing to smuggle the dwarves into Laketown--which was no problem in the book--and the sequence of him bringing them in is good for a little tension. But later in the movie, a band of thirty orcs in armor and two elves just show up in Laketown without any mention of how they did so or any recognition from the rest of the town at all. Seriously, with orcs jumping across the rooftops of the town for like twenty minutes in the middle of the night, no one seemed to notice. When I'm in my basement and my toddler's running around in his room, I hear it above me like a sack of potatoes being bounced around a port-a-potty. I think thirty armored orcs would be slightly less stealthy than my two year-old son, as hard as that may be to imagine.

Evangeline Lilly as Tauriel is hot without showing any skin. Here endeth the nice part about her character. Tauriel is the dumbest, least articulate, reactionary, over-powered Mary Sue sleaze I can recall from any movie ever. An "original" character forced into the plot of the movie, they decide that in order to make us like her she should be better than everyone at everything. She out-BSes Legolas in terms of absurdly super-powered shots and moves. Like shooting an Orc's arrow out of the air to save Legolas. She also heals Kili from a Morgul wound with so much ease that it makes Elrond look like a stuttering poseur rather than a three thousand year-old sage. And when she meets Kili, she immediately puts on the googly-eyes at him and proceeds down a clumsy romance sub-plot that ends with her being the worst person ever.

Before I explain that, though, let me spell out another gem of truth from Tolkien's Middle-Earth: elves and dwarves do not get along. Gimli and Legolas' friendship is supposed to be a historic exception by a wide margin. Let alone romantic compatibility--labradors do not mate with spaniels, so to speak, in Tolkien's books. Heck, human-elf pairings are so rare in the setting that every one of them is well-known and eminently proven to be a bad idea. That's the whole subtext of the tension in Aragorn and Arwen's relationship--which was a century-long courtship that was still awkward for them.

Anyways, back to how Tauriel's randiness ends up making her the worst person ever. So after getting all oo-lala over Kili, Tauriel meets with Thranduil, Legolas' d-bag lush of a father. Thranduil, tells Tauriel that Legolas wants her bad, but he won't let his son get his elf on because Tauriel is a common elf. She acts hurt by this even though she was just checking out the dwarf meat she tossed in the dungeon. Later, when Kili is wounded while escaping Mirkwood, she abandons her home to try to catch up to him and help him. When Legolas, too dumb to know better, follows her she immediately smirks and wiggles her nose at him, saying she knew he'd follow her and help. Yeah--she leads on the prince of the elves to get him to commit treason all in an effort to save the dwarf hunk she met one day before. Then, when they finally catch up to the dwarves, Tauriel ditches Legolas in the middle of a fight to go play doctor with her favorite beardy-boy.

Worst. Person. Ever. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh included her as a tack-on character to try to give the film some grrrl power, and instead they made a cliched slander against the entire female sex.

There are more BS moments throughout the film, but one of the biggest is molten gold apparently having a melting temperature of Hershey's chocolate. First, century-old kilns full of gold are melted faster than defrosting a Thanksgiving turkey. Then Thorin rides a river of molten gold on a metal bucket with his bare hands inches from the molten ore. Finally, Smaug gets completely submerged in it and hops out as easily as a kid getting out of a hot-tub.

What began as a hopeful improvement on the first film quickly slides down into every mistake made by the first movie. The drama is drowned out by over-the-top posturing and wide angle shots, ensuring that you can't even see the actor's expressions during the most tense moments. There is no close up face-twitching drama of Denethor's hall in this flick, just shouting in front of beautiful backdrops. The fight sequences are dazzling displays of special effects with no practical integration to make it feel real or plausible. It's so bad that Gandalf's encounter with the Necromancer is literally him standing still, staff upraised while putting out a Sue Storm shield of white light while a shadow shrinks his personal bubble.

Really.

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': Oh man, I think you can guess I did not enjoy this flick too much. Amongst its many flaws, this film indulges in way too many Byrne holds for any one plot to bear. A Byrne hold, named after comic artist John Byrne, is when a character holds another aloft by the throat. It's a moment of abject helplessness, where the victim is spared from death only by the capriciousness of the one holding their throat. And usually the only reason the villain doesn't snap their neck then and there is because of bad writing--the writer needs the victim to survive, so the victor hesitates for no good reason.

In this movie, we have 13 dwarves, Bilbo, Gandalf, Tauriel, and Legolas who all directly fight bad guys throughout the movie. The antagonists have Azog (the white orc), Bolg (his strapping son), Smaug the dragon, and the Necromancer. All of them engage in personal combat at least once in the movie. Bolg several times. None of these characters die in the course of the film. Twenty-one principal characters all actively fighting and trying to kill each other in a three hour film: no one succeeds. And when you remember that most of these characters were in An Unexpected Journey, you have the worst kill ratio of all storytelling time. And that's not for being able to. For fully one half of the movie, Azog and the Necromancer could easily execute Gandalf but don't because of the Byrne hold effect. The dwarves dump a dwarven statue of liberty's worth of molten gold on Smaug, and he not only isn't wounded by the attack but he also doesn't kill them as he so easily could at that point. Smaug's entire conversation with Bilbo is twisted from the casual biplay of the book to be "I am totally going to kill you, but I won't just yet…cuz." It's infuriatingly stupid and I can't comprehend how we're supposed to be engrossed in this action when every character is plot-protected anyways. Heck, a mortally-wounded Kili falls down a circular staircase with an armload of swords and axes and he even makes it to the ending credits. It's an absurd lantern hanging on the fact that these characters are invulnerable to stupid flashy plot twists until the third movie, at which point two-thirds of them will die. The only character they could have been killed off in this movie, but wasn't, was Tauriel. And she's never in any peril in the film because she's superwoman.

I've got a lot of other issues with this film, many of them relating to comparisons between the book and the film, but these ones are just issues of a clumsy movie itself. The film has no natural arc--no beginning, middle, and end, no development of the characters. Though we did get some of that in the previous film, this one just throws "action" and scenery at us until it ends in the most unforgivable manner possible--in the middle of a fight.

This movie was supposed to be about Smaug, yet he wasn't in half of it and he survived the non-climax of the film. Not to be dramatic, but I wouldn't blame anyone wanting their money back.

General Enjoyment 'Cheese': This film stretches my goal as a reviewer--I'm not sure someone reading my words would decide to see the movie. Unless their mind was already made up, of course. And I think I'm happy about that. This is the sort of big-budget clusterfudge that I use to weed out bad reviewers in my own reading. See someone who liked this film? Idiot. Complimented its pacing? Hack.

Now, I'm not saying you can't enjoy this film. I'm really not. I think people with no love for the book and a sort of Harry Potter expectation of events could enjoy what they see. But for people who love the first trilogy and even merely like the books, I don't see how they could enjoy it. And I don't see how anyone at all could honestly look at this movie and say it was really necessary for anything more than introducing a few elements that could have been elegantly fit into the other two movies.

Then again, Peter Jackson doesn't seem to know about elegance anymore. Like Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim or George Lucas when making his prequel trilogy, he seems lost in a sea of funding and yes-men glad-handing along his bad ideas.

So not worth an all-nighter.

Yeah, desolate is right

Agents of SHIELD (First 6 Episodes)

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the Nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

This is my first review Nerdview of a television series, and as such it's perfectly appropriate that I weigh in on the latest Marvel media property: Agents of SHIELD. I've got several other more important projects on the blog-burner right now, but this is probably the most immediately timely, as I can actually sound off on the series in the middle of its first season.

Expectations 'Odor': If you read my blog post earlier this summer, then you know that I've been looking forward to Agents of SHIELD for some time. I love the way SHIELD stories interweave the greatest characters and plots of the Marvel universe into a coherent story, especially in the post Civil War continuity (which at some point in the future I'll probably cover for those who aren't Marvel-fans). Secret War in particular was a great mini-series that showed how SHIELD and The Man push around superheroes to make the world safer--whether they like it or not. In particular, I like the SHIELD stories that expound on the ways mundane or low-powered agents of SHIELD are able to stand on the same field as Hulk and Iron Man. Sure, individual SHIELD goons don't last, but as an organization it pulls the strings of many of the heroes in the Marvel universe while still being a fundamentally mundane organization. As a fan of watching little guys push big guys around, it resonates.

So with Agents of SHIELD I want to see at least a bit more development of that theme: what place do NSA-types in suits have in a world of girder-grinding, lightning-throwing, super-sonic super-humans? But I also know that what we've got here is also a Joss Whedon series, and with that we're pretty much guaranteed several specific elements. First, that means a women-heavy cast of primaries, women warriors, and not necessarily in in believable roles or casting. I mean, Eliza Dushku kicking more butt than Tahmoh Penikett in Dollhouse--the heck?! Second, it means that disestablishment themes are probably going to either erode this version of SHIELD, or the team will be some sort of Black Ops splinter group to maintain Whedon's happy for rogue heroes. Third--and this is really something to be excited about--it means that the show will probably have different ages played on-screen and in the plots. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had Giles' personal life and character growth become a significant plot thread while also making us endure Buffy-as-waitress type plots. Firefly had Book alongside Kayleigh and River. Even Dollhouse, which revolved around brainwashed youth themes, showcased a lot of drama amongst the middle-aged conspirators being mocked by their own vapid creations. In Agents of SHIELD, then, we can look forward to Coulson and the youngest agents having distinct characterization and focuses in the meta-plot of the series.

But do I think Agents of SHIELD will be good? Yes. Great? Honestly, maybe. Just maybe. Because there's one element that I think could make a SHIELD show superb that I don't think Whedon would ever touch: the procedural. The thrill of investigation, of plots having certain core steps repeating to represent that the characters are in fact doing their jobs and not looking for this week's interesting thing. The Mentalist, Law & Order, and detective classic shows like Columbo are all great procedural series. In those shows you're guaranteed certain steps to get thrown into the matrix of a new mystery for nearly every episode, and it works. The most critical procedural to compare to Agents of SHIELD, of course, is The X-Files. Even though The X-Files featured outlandish plots, special effects monsters, and conspiracy theories, most of the episodes fell into a procedural format that established that even in the BS-filled land of The X-Files, they were still part of the FBI, which was a job and an organization that stretched beyond the cast of the show. Heck, they even had a petite warrior-woman mismatched with a physically uninspiring nerdy guy, all the better for Whedon to take notes.

But at least it won't be Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD.


Appreciation 'Beef': Bumbly bumbly bump. What's that? Oh, Agents of SHIELD is on? I mean, we're six episodes in and I'm still waiting for it to get started. I feel like these first six episodes have been part of a long, exceptionally badly-paced pilot episode. The writing is weak with only brief commercial-length moments of good scripting. The cast ranges from sublime to bland all the way down to absurdly annoying.

"As a fan of watching little guys push big guys around, it resonates."

In terms of the greater plot of the show, they've introduced a good number of elements from the greater Marvel universe, with Extremis, (proto-)Graviton, and the Chitauri being featured in the show so far. I'd probably suggest they slow down with their inclusion of these diverse elements, taking their time to establish more drama and mystery around them, but for the most part these kinds of Easter eggs are the most exciting thing in the show for Marvel-philes like me.

The action is fairly well-done, with Ming-Na Wen pulling off the physicality of warrior-woman Melinda May capably. Brett Dalton as Agent Grant Ward definitely does a better job of selling his stunts and action, but that's to be expected. So far two of the six episodes aired ("Girl in the Flower Dress" and "FZZT") have not featured much traditional action, and that's a positive trend I'd like to see emphasized in this series. In a world of superpowers and eldritch gadgets, combat should be brief and deadly, and there's a very real trend towards inserting bland fist fights to pad out the show where drama and actual investigation should sit.

Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson is great, and when he's actually placed in a scene where he gets to chew the scenery a bit, it's awesome. His moment with the terminally ill firefighter in FZZT was a gripping bit of drama that helped shed a little light on his seemingly spastic behavior--he's a man crushed by his own brush with death. I think the mystery around his revival/resurrection/reboot is a bit over-played, but since it is the only real over-arching mystery of the show right now, I guess I'll have to take it.

The rest of the roster, though, makes very little sense. First of all, six principal characters always feels light to me. (Heck, if you include Zordon and Alpha Five, the Power Rangers show started out with seven.) And that tiny roster is exaggerated by the red shirts of this show who are so paper-thinly developed that names and characterization are hardly ever given. In "Eye Spy" and "Girl in the Flower Dress" there are way too many scenes where there's no one on screen except two or three main characters, which is silly when you stop to consider the enormity of these plots, SHIELD itself, or even the density of SHIELD personnel in the movies. You can try to justify it by saying they need a small independent team or whatever handwaving goo-gawing you want, but in the end it's just a way to cheap out on production costs with a smaller cast, and it shows. Heck, half the episodes don't even show an actual flight crew for the massive plane they fly around--and if that bird can be managed by a lone pilot and no flight crew, then I'm a body double for Chris Hemsworth.

(I'm not, by the way.)

Setting the light weight of SHIELD in the show aside, though, the simple composition of the team is ridiculous, both in a contextual sense for the purpose of the team and in a meta-textual sense for the purpose of the show. They have a combat-competent leader in Coulson, but his almost petulant need to flout the regs is pretty vain since the show doesn't seem to have a boss for him to report to and have conflict with. As it is, having Coulson as leader constantly have to explain himself to basically all of his subordinates is not only tiresome, it's eminently stupid. Agent Ward is pretty strait-laced for a SHIELD agent type, but in a group full of recalcitrant misfits he ends up being either a sullen by-the-book regs-thumper or broody pretty boy by way of compensation. Melinda May is also very capable in combat, but reluctantly so due to her unexamined backstory. And in any case she's the only character we've seen piloting their plane, so the lady should be sitting in the plane most of the time anyways. Fitz and Simmons are a victim of their own silly premise--both annoyingly interchangeable, mutually-dependent, and inept at combat. The plot of "FZZT" revolves around the two characters being plot clones of each other, highlighting how they're doubly tiresome. So all in all, we have a SHIELD roster of a six person team with only three combat effective members, two of which do not ordinarily want to be in potential combat situations, and two who are incredible liabilities in combat situations.

"...we're six episodes in and I'm still waiting for it to get started."

And then there's the sixth member of the team: Skye. Skye is a former info-terrorist hacker the team brings on…'cuz. Normally a television show brings an outsider into a team of specialists to give the audience--also outsiders--a sympathetic window into the specialists' world. I call this a schlub (see my post on Gerard Butler for another example), and Agents of SHIELD has no need for a schlub, because everyone is largely ignorant or obtuse to each other team member's area of responsibility. So what does Skye bring to the team? Smug uselessness and pathetic attempts to be sexy with a smoker's voice? At first I thought they'd use her to introduce a sinister traitor meta-plot to define the first season, as it was clear she was maintaining contact with her Rising Tide info-terrorist group. Instead, that betrayal plot gets ham-handed four episodes in with the revelation that she was just doing it for her boyfriend, and that her acts of treason that got federal agents killed were mitigated by her stupid hormonal love connection. Not only do Coulson, Fitz-Simmons, and the plot itself give Skye a pass on her crimes, but the cast collectively tells Agent Ward to just get over it by the next episode. What was the point of introducing the betrayal and treason plot if the end result was to ditch it at the earliest and clumsiest opportunity?

Ugh. I can rant about Skye all night, but I won't. I will just sum up with this thought. The crew of the Serenity, assembled by luck and lowest-bidding to accomplish odd-jobs of the criminal underworld, was better selected, more disciplined, and more capable of addressing most SHIELD-oriented threats than the team in Agents of SHIELD. They had four combat capable crew (five on River's good days), a dedicated pilot, tech person, medic, and a seductress who could stay in character long enough to actually pull cons off.

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': Agents of SHIELD has got me going through the motions. Don't get me wrong, I'm still watching this show every week, and I honestly believe there's potential in the show they've created, but so much of it is bumbling along right now that I feel like a Marvel-holic getting a watered-shot of a simulacra of the stuff to which I'm actually addicted.

Now, it may seem like I'm being a little harsh in light of the excellent Marvel movies, but wait: I'm going to get even more acerbic as I dial in my disappointment. We're six episodes into this series. Let's put that into perspective. By this point of screen-time (using show chronology, not airing chronology), Firefly had introduced Niska in "The Train Job", developed the entire crew's fabulous rapport in "Shindig", and blown everyone away with "Our Mrs. Reynolds". The X-Files had already given all of us the uber-willies in "Squeeze" with a boneless super-malleable cannibal serial killer, and established a good procedural investigative style and partner dynamic with "Conduit" and "Shadows". And Agents of SHIELD's stumbling is made even more unforgivable by the fact that The Blacklist, which started the same week, has been superb--especially in the ways that the Marvel show fails. They've got a great team that is diverse-yet-plausible, fantastic writing, good pacing, and several interesting meta-plots.

I'm waiting for Agents of SHIELD to come into its own, but I'm not holding my breath.

General Enjoyment 'Cheese': As it stands, I think Agents of SHIELD will only appeal to a very small section of fans of the Marvel cinematic universe. I'm not going to assume everyone is going to get annoyed by the same elements the same amount as me, but there are just too many compromises to something that needs a very focused formula to work as a show. It still has too many superhero and genre elements to appeal to viewers who don't like the movies or comics, but those elements are so watered-down and subverted by the cliched action of the show that the movie and comic fans are going to feel let down at best or outright alienated at worst.

I hope that people will, like me, give Agents of SHIELD a chance to fix their problems, but even more so I hope that the creative team behind Agents of SHIELD will actually take the effort to fix these problems to make a series worthy of Mordor five or more seasons.

After Avengers, Joss Whedon is the magical summoner of comicbook fans.

(Fourth post this week, so the deficit is down to 3 out of 31)

A Pregnant Pause in the Blog Sprint

Man, I take a week off and quite a lot of things happen. We had CliffyB proving he's the popped collar of the gaming industry, E3, more dismal Xbox One news followed by a surprise reversal, a couple of interesting new Kickstarter projects, and Free RPG Day this past week. Now, since I'm a little behind, I'm going to try to cover all these things briefly in one post, so I won't forget to mention them.

On the running Xbox One debacle, there's some mixed news. Specifically, on the questions of DRM, Xbox had been looking more and more arrogant and defensive. Enter E3 and Angry Joe, from the Angry Joe Show.

If you check out Angry Joe's (remarkably diplomatic with a low cuss-count) interview with Larry Hryb (Xbox's Major Nelson), you get a real good view of the sarcastic, patronizing, and disrespectful way Xbox is handling the concerns of consumers:

"Xbox One is the future. Do you want to come with me to the future?"

"I'm not a lawyer--are you a lawyer?"

"You're not on the development team, are you?"

And so forth in response to Joe's questions on the key concerns of the Xbox One's DRM policies. It's really worrisome, and the fact that convivial Major Nelson is shilling so hard for Xbox that he becomes this abrasive makes it all the more shocking to me. I mean, Angry Joe may be known for curse-filled rants and ripping apart bad games, but I think he's a teddy bear overall, and he's surprisingly forgiving of a lot of video games and their companies (I really think he drank Bioware's Kool-Aid on the Mass Effect 3 "extended ending"), and his interviews are really polite and respectful. Even when he's asking hard questions like he did of Major Nelson. Plus, Joe hasn't even gotten around to the really big implications of the Xbox plan. They are:

1) Microsoft's goal is to price control the console game market through trust-like activity between Xbox and game publishers. If Microsoft can make consumers swallow their DRM pill and anti-ownership assault on consumers, then age will be the only practical factor in determining the cost of a game. As it is, when a AAA game tanks, second-hand retailers get a surplus of returns that drive down not only the cost of used games but the new products as well. If they can cut out that consumer-based check on game quality, then Microsoft and Developers could form a closed loop for pricing their games so that you'd never be able to find a good deal for a game, no matter how bad it is. Heck, if price control wasn't the point of this policy, it'd be pretty silly of Microsoft to invest in developing their own re-vamped digital distribution system when they could've saved a lot of money by porting other services like Desura or Steam to their box. But by keeping it all in their hands, they control the prices of their games, and the only reason to lower prices would be to stay competitive with Sony and Nintendo. Maybe.

2) The daily check-in policy, while trumped up as an anti-piracy measure, is almost certainly a method to farm customer usage information. Let's just think about this for a second--there are a lot of ways to accomplish what Xbox claims to be trying to do: combat piracy through online verification. A daily online check-in is not necessary. Most simply, you could make it where installing a game from the disc itself requires an online handshake that flags that game as the 'active' version of the game, and deactivate any other installs from that game CD. So why have the daily online policy? To upload a cache of your Xbox's activity. Now, I'm not talking about some conspiracy theory where Xbox is interested in stealing your identity or anything, but the Xbox's TV and game-playing activity for millions of users would be tremendously valuable marketing demographics they could easily sell to advertisers, publishers, whoever. And don't bet the farm that Xbox would ever pass those new profits on to consumers through cheaper prices.


Then the heavens lifted and Microsoft's collective voice boomed from their emerald fortress: they would reverse their DRM and online policies, including their region lock, apparently. First of all, let that be a lesson to all you corporate apologists out there: us entitled raging nerds can make a difference. Maybe. Personally, I think it's just as likely that Microsoft backed down through a combination of investor pressure and the dire predictions of lawyers that they were going to get caught with their briefs down.

More importantly, however, look at Larry Hryb's comments, quoted above, just one week before the whole company reversed course. Granted he's a paid cheer-leader for Microsoft, but that kind of arrogance behind the project doesn't just go away. The certainty that these draconian measures are the "future of gaming" doesn't just go away. And the dishonest implication that this would be a difficult policy to reverse hints at a more insidious truth: if Microsoft decides that it's worth it, after the bad PR dies down and the first few waves of Xbox Ones have been purchased, to try to quietly reinstitute these or similar measures on a captive audience, they'll try. The way they're pulling back their vaunted Family Sharing Plan--which was generating some excited buzz--smacks of a bargaining chip to give customers when the other shoe drops.

And if you need anymore reason to retroactively hate Microsoft for what they almost did or might try to do again, here's some chaw in your maw: Cliff Bleszinski, the popped collar of the gaming industry, jumped in to defend Microsoft's plan to prune-squeeze gamers. CliffyB, as the wannabe Situation is known, is the creative "mind" behind the Gears of War franchise, and he recently stepped down from Epic Games to basically not shut up about his stupid cult-of-the-game-developer ideals. Now that Microsoft has about-faced despite his eloquent erroneous defense of their plans, he's sounding off that these developments will be bad for the industry and the consumer, predicting: "More studios WILL close and you'll see more PC and mobile games" Dun-dun-DUN!!! Wow, Cliffy, thanks for that realization, and thanks for trying to pin long-standing consumer patterns on consumers' reactions from last week. Cliff Bleszinski: don't be that guy. Also, don't be on the same issue as him. And if you're in the same region as him, check out the real estate market elsewhere.




Kickstart: Fanciful Bloodsport, Musical Mystics, & Frigid Freaks

Fairytale Games

What it is: Fairytale Games is a character-based card game of survival, exploration, and battles to the death. Set in a world run by the evil trinity of the Dark Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and the Snow Queen, the three tyrants secure their rule by persecuting any upstarts, especially those associated with the Enchanted Forest. Their method of persecution? A public bloodsport set in the wilderness of their kingdoms, pitting all sorts of classic fairytale figures like the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Alice, Pinocchio and 36 more in a Hunger Games sort of scenario.

Why it's exciting: The game promises to be a unique take on a lot of familiar figures, turning Pinocchio, for instance, into a tortured sort of Frankenstein's monster, and making the damsels into hardened survivalists that would make the originators of these violent fairytales proud (because most of the original fairytales are way more violent than Disney's sterilized versions). The mechanics involve laying out cards in a freely expanding grid as you explore the world, recruiting or killing off other survivors, finishing quests, and gaining items. And since it promises to support 1 to 10 players it is a rare game indeed that both features solo play and stabbing up to 9 buddies in the back in the course of one game. Very fun. They're nearly funded, and the stretch goals will potentially unlock a huge number of extra cards for backers--including a zombie version, or miniatures at the very highest stretch goal. I'm not a huge card gamer, but this set looks more like a dynamic battle game than a shuffle-fest, so I'm already in on it.



Anthymn

What it is: Anthymn is a typical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), where players take on the roles of heroes in a fantasy land in the midst of turmoil. Except all the players are mages in this game. And all magic is tied to music. So spells are actually uniquely composed tunes, and battles are actually special effects duels of music and fire. Players choose a faction based not only on gameplay style, but on musical play style--picking from classical, electronic, tribal, or other styles that have a specific look, culture, and magical power associated with them.

Why it's exciting: This Kickstarter campaign is not looking healthy. With less than two weeks to go, they are at less than $30,000 of their $600,000 goal. Which is a real shame, as this game shows a lot more imagination and guile than almost any other game being crowdfunded right now--they promise a rich, dynamic, player-created soundscape where players trade and teach others their battle-songs, and the core mechanics of the game sound like they will educate people on the basics of musical theory. Even if you aren't going to back this project, you should really consider spreading the word so they have good exposure and support should the worst happen. But seriously, back this. Where else can you be this frakkin' cool playing a trumpet? (Four years of band camp will tell you: nowhere--unless you count that football game where you finished half-time with the Braveheart speech and a trumpet blast)

Frozen State

What it is: Take a bunch of Russians in a necessarily wintry setting, add in some critters from John Carpenter's The Thing, throw in a global apocalypse and old school Fallout-style gameplay, and you have Frozen State, the best thing to come out of Moscow since Sean Connery. Created by Snow Arc, the computer game features an older style of RPG campaign, where you pick one of three preset characters and run them through an RPG where you battle the elements in addition to hostile survivors and things-with-too-many-mouths/limbs/bumpy-bits. The game will involve a non-linear campaign where seeking out resources and loot in devastated Siberia is a constant lure.

Why it's exciting: I really like the wintry setting, and the fact that survival will be a central element is cool. They're talking about making a meaningful day/night cycle where going out at night is dangerous due to weather and the creatures drawn out by darkness, which sounds atmospheric and crunchy. I haven't pulled the trigger on this one yet, though, as its funding is in British Pounds, and I've yet to back a pounds-based project. But with all the cool goodies they've got and the fact they're shooting for a Windows/Mac/Linux release, this might be the time to do it.



Free RPG Day

Last Saturday was Free RPG Day 2013. An annual observance since 2007, it's a chance for RPG publishers and retailers to team up to give players free demos, supplements, and teasers of their games in an effort to spread awareness of their games and promote the hobby in general. This year Pathfinder, Battletech, Star Wars, Cosmic Patrol, and more all got their free on at your Friendly Local Game Shop (FLGS). Make sure to keep an eye out for freebies next year, and support your FLGS. It's a great way to browse other systems and maybe add a few new games to your hit-list.




So what have I been doing while all this stuff was going down?

Getting daddied up.

Again.

Once more my irresistible procrastinator genes have so infected my offspring that my son cruised past his due date. So once more we got to schedule our son's birthday, essentially, by going in to the hospital to get induced. Man, you do not sleep well once your pregnant wife gets to her due date. Throughout the later stages of the pregnancy you start to look at her like a damp, full grocery bag--any sudden movement could tear out her bottom and wreck a whole lot of perishables. But once you hit that final week to deadline and go past it, things take on new severity. Like when Sylvester the Cat drinks the nitroglycerine in the old 1940s cartoon, every movement is sudden death. Needless to say, it's hard to sleep in that kind of environment. (And adding a second boy under 3 years old to our household probably won't help!)

Then, the next day, you go through a weirdly calm morning of getting things ready, shipping the kid off to the grandparents, and then try to have a nice brunch before going in to the hospital for the scheduled horror show. Few things in life are quite so unpleasant as trying to eat with a woman who's pregnant with a child other than their first. Something about that first birth and the 20 or so hospital staff touring her monstrous hoo-hah gives a woman the impression that everyone wants to hear about what's going on with their sensitives forever. For at least one year per kid, everything is mucous, membranes, and fluids, and any time you try to gracefully bow out of the all-access experience, you're instead rewarded with an eye and earful of something you'd rather believe was only the province of R-rated movies. There is no escape.

The build up is kind of mesmerizingly complex, but also tediously long, and you don't really feel like much of what's happening relates to what's about to occur. The little lady is thrown into a flattering hospital ensemble, hooked up to machines, and set on display in the middle of a sci-fi creche. It's like the Disney Alien Encounter, except the lights are on, nothing is sanitary, and the grotesque monstrosity in the middle of the room is the one doing most of the screaming.

And the main event--whew. First, there's a whole lot of doctors and nurses taking the Livingston tour of your baby's den, and then when he comes out, you're suddenly surprised that your huge wife was able to hold, feed, and pass the little Roswell alien. It's like Mary Poppins' hand-bag, except when it starts, everything improbable is going in, and then when something comes out it's totally different--though no less improbable.

So that's been my week. That, and spending the past week fending my two year-old away from the fascinating newborn. On the hospital ride home, he calmly tried to convince us that the new addition would be more comfortable back in mom's belly. But since she nixed that plan, he's stuck with a little brother. Poor guy.

Nerd Citizen

Today's been a fairly lazy day on the Nerdery front. I've been working on several gargantuan blog posts that will take a good deal of work due to either the tremendous writing/editing load necessary or due to editing media I want to attach to the associated blog posts.

In particular, I've been stalled by the release of the addictive State of Decay, which came out on Tuesday on Xbox Live Arcade. I'm currently in the research and evaluation stage of writing a review for it (ie, I'm playing the game as much as my spazzy, tow-headed spawn will let me). That should be forthcoming within the next handful of posts, if all goes well the next few days.

The big news in the Nerdery, though, was a small package I received in the mail. Tearing into it, I dropped my engraved metal Citizen's ID Card, a beautiful little reward for most Star Citizen backers. Featuring my planned character's name, my founder and pledge status, and a really neat engraved circuitry design along the top and bottom, this is a first class bit of totally superfluous game bling. And I love it. I love getting collector's editions of games specifically because of these sorts of baubles. In the Fallout New Vegas collector's edition, for instance, you get a neat case with a starter deck of Caravan cards, a graphic novel, and a handful of poker chips from the casinos featured in the game. The Dragon Age: Origins collector's edition came with a fabric map of Thedas. Which is awesome because I can now say I've literally caressed Ferelden to my cheek. I love you, you hound-loving nation of malcontents.

Now Star Citizen is fast joining those noble ranks of uber-sexy nerd add-ons that make me unjustifiably enthused for the game beyond the promised gameplay experience. Plunking this plate down on my laptop keyboard, I then snapped a few pictures and threw together the following image. Later tonight I'll be reviewing my character's crew contracts, which will totally be used as an in-game charter for anyone wanting to serve aboard my Constellation-class merchant ship. Oh yes, I'm serious. In the coming weeks, I'll probably share my multi-page crew forms at some point in the future, as well as my detailed thoughts on space-mining as a potentially deep gameplay feature for Star Citizen.

In other nerd news, I've been taking baby steps towards cosplay ever since the euphoric epiphany that was the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo. I'm still at the point where I'm just testing stuff out as I research options and pick the brains of much more experienced and talented cosplayers. Most of the stuff I'm actually doing right now is helping out some other fine folks with a project of theirs while also using that effort as an opportunity to sponge up their methods and talents as best I can. But, I'm not just working on other people's stuff. You could say I've got some nerdy projects in the works.

I'm hoping to have something relatively wearable ready for my son within the next week, so if that happens as I hope you can bet you'll get some more images of it in the next few days. The idea is to present him with this as a novelty consolation prize for being ousted as the cutest thing in our household once his little brother is born. Of course, I think this makes him even cuter than any merely human son could ever be--he's not just cute now...he's supercute!

Don't Be That Guy: Microsoft Building Bridges

Oh no, they're doing that other thing.

Microsoft has probably been one of the most talked about nerd topics over the past 48 hours. With its announcement yesterday for a next generation gaming console called "Xbox One", the much beloved company has injected the intersphere with healthy debate and carefully-worded critiques.

Now before I get into it, let me stress a few things. First of all, this is all a confusing mess of rumor, opinion, and spin. But Microsoft has been building up to this conference for months, and the fact that they gave such a poor showing (few really exciting game announcements and then horrible spin on policy issues they should have anticipated) makes you wonder what they were doing with the extra delay. Secondly, things might not be as bad as they seem right now, and--much more likely, considering how bad a bath Microsoft is taking over this--it is possible some or all of these problems might be addressed before the system's release.

So Microsoft's big reveal of Xbox One. Terrible name. Let's just get that out of the way. Xbox is the console brand, so when referring to the three generations of console, we're supposed to call them what? Xbox original, Xbox360, and Xbox One? That sounds dumb and not at all like a progression. The conference focused on non-gaming assets for the console, including an exclusive NFL partnership, interactive TV, and a Spielberg-produced Halo live action series exclusive to box users. That's pretty darn cool. But they showed virtually nothing exciting on the game side and only offered a vague promise for fifteen exclusive year one titles, eight of which will be new franchises.

Greeeeeat. Anyone thinking we're going to get at least three or four Gun Valkyrie? Decent games with wasted potential that will never be realized due to lukewarm sales, at best. Plus, with previous generations, each system had 15-20 games at launch, so having only 15 exclusives lined up for the first year is kind of weak if you figure than half of them are probably shooting for system launch releases. Especially when you figure in that the first year of a console's life is the best time to get exclusive titles on it. The longer a system is out, the more its age becomes a liability, and the more likely it is that developers would rather cross-platform.

Anyways, there's a degree to which we're all left waiting the next two and a half weeks before the gaming side of things is cleared up, but there are four steamy loads that have dropped this week, and they're creating most of the buzz around Microsoft and the Xbox One.

1. Always On

Microsoft is a bunch of lying liars who lie. First they confirm that there's no "always online" requirement to play games on the Xbox One, but then they turn around and say a connection is required ("daily" is the latest iteration) as part of handshake protocols to confirm your library. But requiring that you're online for any interval is the same as always on, because: A) the installation management system as described can't work without online verification; B) the primary reason to play offline is to avoid using the internet altogether, either because you don't have it or don't want to use it--Microsoft is thumbing its nose at all such players in this move; C) Microsoft is setting the interval for these mandatory online handshakes, which means that their system will dictate how often you need to be online and when. That effectively gives them control over when your internet is allowed to go down or otherwise be unavailable, as your connection going down close to the required check-in time means no Halo 5 for you.

Furthermore, Always On is really about the Kinect needing to be on and connected to your Xbox One at all times--always watching and listening. Forget the Orwellian implications for a moment. I don't want to have to get into a shouting match with my two year-old over what we watch because Xbox One has hijacked my television. That's not a service, that's a major handicap to anyone not living alone.

My son has trouble enunciating the word "Percy"

2. No Backwards Compatibility

The lack of backwards compatibility shouldn't be a surprise, but the fact that not even Xbox 360's top selling games will be supported sets a dangerous precedent when you consider Xbox One's other policies. It indicates they have no desire to allow gamers to use their products past the console's expiration date. In the case of previous generations of consoles, that's not a big deal--you could just keep your old console and game on it whenever. The stringent online handshake requirements of Xbox One as outlined so far, however, change all of that. Eventually, when Xbox Two comes out in six years, they'll start phasing out the server-side support for Xbox One games, and you'll never be able to use the old hardware again once they make that decision because a network connection is required. It's not like they're going to suddenly phase in a legitimate offline mode out of pure charity when they're about to release a new product, right?

Microsoft trying to out-jeffries Mike Jeffries

3. Mandatory Installs + 500GB Hard Drive

 Looking at the next gen of console games, a 500GB Hard Drive is a big fat joke, especially since the new system's physical architecture is non-modular. Even if you don't use your box to store video and music (and with the new concept of the all-in-one entertainment center, they really want you to download other media to your Xbox One), I'd be very surprised if next gen games used less than 20GB per installation. And that's before you start snagging the superfluous DLC that's becoming more and more common, or the huge save files attached to most console games. My Xbox 360 has several games installed on it, and they take up an average of 7GB--and that still relies on the disc for essential assets. Essentially, the combination of drive sizes and markups plus mandatory game installation means that you're going to have a cap on the library of available games you can use on your Xbox One. All this on a system that doesn't permit users to swap out the paltry 500GB drive means that, assuming an average game clocks in at 20-25GB installed, you'll be able to fit maybe twenty games onto your Xbox One before you have to start uninstalling things.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO.

4. Secondhand Fee

Larry "Major Nelson" Hyrb said on his blog this morning that you get access to your installed games while signed into your own profile. So if you have Halo 5 installed on your machine but aren't logged in, you can't access it. (How is that for offline-friendly?) Also, the only 'potential scenario' for this fee that has come out of an Xbox rep is that a new game's secondhand fee would be retail. Retail! So if I get Call of Duty Recursive Ops: Collector's Edition and really don't like it, the best I could get on eBay would be $5 to $15 at best for the game, since anyone who got it from me would have to pay full price to use it. Otherwise, it's just a coaster. In a world where publishers are forcing pre-order and collector's edition bloat, this secondhand fee is going to damn gamers who do and who don't get games early. Either you pre-order and get screwed over by the Duke Nukem Forever and Aliens: Colonial Marines of the industry, or you wait and get screwed over having to pay a premium for pre-order DLC to complete the game experience.

Steve Ballmer is confused by the idiot masses and their misleading memes

The crux of the Xbox One as a gaming platform is the mandatory elements, and they've bungled it completely. The plan as outlined so far is vastly inferior to established, successful digital distribution models ike Desura and Steam, and instead of doing the logical thing and using discs as an offline handshake protocol, they're trying to set themselves up as a cable service alternative where every game is pay-per-install.

Now retailers like Gamestop will work things out with Microsoft, probably arranging for a mass markdown on their secondhand fees as part of the refurbishment process. But that deal, which Microsoft will bilk for whatever they can get, will result in a poorer deal for individual gamers who get stuck having to foot the bill on that deferred fee. That games aren't going to be permitted personally-initiated and arbitrated sales is ridiculous. Sure, they're going to have an as-yet-to-be-revealed service for exchanging games online, but I guarantee you that that service will come at some sort of premium, if only as a perk of having a paid membership. This is just another policy that is trying to Falcon Punch individuals and small businesses in the balls--any local retailer chains or rental places are going to get reamed by this policy, and I bet Microsoft won't care enough to work something out with them.



I really wanted to stick with Xbox on the new generation. I got the 360 early on for games like Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Mass Effect, Dead Rising, and the Halo franchise. I want to keep riding the horse that brung me here. But right now I don't foresee myself buying anything but a PC for the time being. And for those of you kids who want to say something idiotic like "this is the future" or something like that. No. No.

No.

Offline play does not mean you are a grognard or a pirate. It just means that if you're going to have a system in your house that aims to be the hub of your entertainment center, it had better actually work the way you want.

Microsoft has a lot of damage control to do before E3. If they're even neck-and-neck with Sony in terms of showing there, they'll have lost the next console war before it began.

In related news, Sony's stock got a 9% boost the day of Microsoft's terrible announcement, and Microsoft has dropped more than 1% in the same time-frame. Classic.

Microsoft: don't be that guy.



Also, if you think I'm harsh (and don't mind a lot of fuming f-bombs), check out Angry Joe's thoughts on the subject.

GM Tips: Know Your System Expounded

GM Tips: It's easy to get into any number of RPGs as a new player, but getting started is a rocky, uphill battle for the Game Master, as he must wrangle player personalities, schedules, and the rules of the system in addition to developing his own plot. Hopefully, a few personal lessons will ease your GMing burden, or at least illustrate how one nerd shoulders the burden of the Game Master.


Before I get into today's tips for GMs, I want to point out that early yesterday morning May officially became the highest traffic month in the history of the blog. Woot! Also, with nearly two weeks left, May is going to be the first month to reach a personal goal for me since I started the blog. It's an embarrassingly modest goal, and I originally thought I'd hit it in month three of blogging, so I'm not going to share it right now. But I wanted to thank you guys for reading and to let you know that it means a lot to me. Now tell your friends, you anti-social dorks.

*fist-shakes*

As a completely pointless token of my thanks, here's a pic of something fun I made on Friday. Yeah, sometimes this is what I do, too.

Check out my under-moisturized hand and freaky ET fingers.

Okay, now to your almost regularly scheduled Nerdery: In GMing 101 I stressed first and foremost that you know your system. Knowing your system is an invaluable element of situational awareness as a GM, and it goes beyond the rules found in your core game book and extends to understanding your perceptions and those of your players. If you want the lay-abouts to enjoy the game, that is. If you don't, then by all means plow into whatever rules system you fancy and bedevil those silly fun-seeking players.

Here I'll provide some examples of RPGs that I own, their most important mechanics, and what factors normally lead me to play a game with that system. This is a good principle to ply when in the early stages of planning an RPG campaign, and it extends to any discussions you should have with your core players before putting too much work into a game. It really would be unfortunate to get three sessions into a new campaign to find out that your players, system, and setting are a poor match for each other. Unfortunate, but not atypical.



GURPS
Primary Mechanic: Roll 3d6 and total the rolled result, looking to get under your effective skill for the action.

For being so notorious for math and character-building minutiae, GURPS has one of the most straightforward primary game mechanics of any dice-based RPG system. You throw your three six-sided dice and want to get low results--at most equal to your skill for the specific action. That's it. Physically, a player is doing the same thing whether jumping a bridge or fast-drawing a pistol--throwing 3d6--and it's only the specific modifiers and player choices that change. Now, damage does call on players to roll different numbers of six-siders, but that's a small, clear deviation from the gold standard. GURPS players need no odd-sided dice, don't have to alternate between mini-game diversions for game mechanics, or hover over whether or not they want to roll high or low. You want high rolls for damage, and low rolls for everything else.

Now, that simple game mechanic has a whole range of applications, and because of that the core books for GURPS are really thick with well thought-out and detailed rules. And the huge library of supplements out there are usually an expansion and explanation of the simple guidelines in the two books of the core set. For instance, the Low Tech series of GURPS supplements build on the ancient arms, armor, and economic aspects of playing a gritty game in eras before firearms became commonplace. But there are basic lists of swords and medieval weaponry in the core books, but they tend to be a shorthand list meant more for simplistic and stylized games with action movie mentality--equipped with Low Tech, you can specify weight and cost for pauldrons rather than an entire suit of armor. This pattern means that a GURPS supplement often fits in well with the core set, but it also isn't as likely to be a game-changer as other RPG expansions. Depending on your personal sensibilities, this could be an asset or a liability.

Breadth: Anything.

GURPS is the Generic Universal Role-Playing System, fool. Of course you can cover any setting. And Steve Jackson Games has supported GURPS so well that there are probably multiple supplements to the rules to cover any genre or setting you might have in mind, whether it's spy action movie, transhuman punk sci-fi, or frakkin' Watership Down. GURPS has it covered. Now, it doesn't mean that GURPS covers all genres equally well--it's generic, so any game system that's tailored to a setting and well done should be better than GURPS in their specific goals. But if the governing factors lean the right way, you can totally get into just about any sort of game with GURPS.

Deciding factor: Weight and encumbrance.

The encumbrance system of GURPS is emblematic of what makes it unique as a system, and I find that if I'm looking to play a game where I don't care much about encumbrance, then GURPS might not be my choice. For example, if I were to play a super-powered genre game, I'd probably think twice about using GURPS. And this isn't just because I'd ignore the encumbrance system in a GURPS Supers game--the finite one-second resolution of a GURPS turn feels contrary to the pacing of a comic book story. The only way I'd want to do a GURPS Supers campaign would be as a gritty deconstruction of most genre conventions, but as a four-color game I doubt I'd use it. For my current GURPS Myth game, however, one of the central themes of the campaign is the journey and daily survival of the characters. The system's way of handling hiking, fatigue, encumbrance, and the deadliness of medieval combat were central considerations for me when planning the style and plot of the campaign. So even though medieval fantasy settings are the most common amongst RPGs, there's really no other system I know of that I'd consider using to run my Myth game.



World of Darkness
Primary Mechanic: Roll a 'pool' of d10s and count the number of dice that come up as 8, 9, or 10. The more dice that 'succeed' the better. 10s get rerolled and any extra successes added.

World of Darkness is a game tailored to a specific campaign style, and--while it's not strictly limited to the default setting--it is distinctly geared towards evoking the themes of the main setting. Called the Storytelling system, World of Darkness is geared towards a more conceptual method of role-playing games. Rolling in combat covers hitting, damage, and defense in the same dice roll. There's also a sort of mini-game related to characters' morality and sanity that is the cornerstone of the game, where PCs who commit immoral acts relative to their current level need to test for declining morality and any eccentricities or delusions they might develop at the same time. Finally, it's worth mentioning that World of Darkness is actually a collection of different related games all based on the storytelling system. One game focuses on vampire PCs, another on werewolves, one for mages, one for Frankenstein-type monsters, and so forth. They all share the same core rules and some straightforward variation of the morality system to represent the values peculiar to the sub-game's protagonists and their own eccentricities.

Breadth: Supernatural and occult games, especially ones based in a modern setting.

World of Darkness is nothing without eldritch, magical, or at least weird powers at play. There's also a lot of drama stemming from internal party and character angst, so if you don't want monster PCs to be at least somewhat conscious of their metaphysical problems, it might be a poor fit. A recent supplement, Mirrors, gives some high-level suggestions for porting the game into a fantasy, sci-fi, or post-apocalyptic setting. But even so they still need to accommodate or at least address the key themes above.

Deciding factor: the morality system.

I love the morality system, and because of that World of Darkness is one of those games I'm always interested in playing. Because the morality mechanic features a different set of standards for slipping morals, characters tend to skirt the fine line of sanity and ruthlessness in a world of monsters. It's evocative and rare, and to even try to make morality and sanity similarly large elements of other games takes a lot of shoe-horning and handwaving.

Dungeons & Dragons (or any D20 really)

Primary Mechanic: Roll 1d20 and add relevant modifiers, comparing the total against a target number.

D&D is the ultimate representative of RPGs for most people--nerd, gamer, or otherwise. But I'm another story. Sure, I'd always heard of D&D, but I didn't get into a game of it until I'd already gotten three or four other systems under my belt. It may be mitigated by my prior experience, but the core mechanic of D&D is kind of clumsy to me. The simple 1d20 mechanic is complicated by the addition of action points, which can be used for extra actions, special abilities, or to add 1d6 to the main roll. Then weapons' damage are based on any dice but 1d20. So even though it's a classic legacy game mechanic, it's really the least comfortable system for me.


Breadth: Niche stylized action and heroes.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition has little breadth in the main system--the company Wizards of the Coast is currently only making the standard D&D setting and Gamma World variation, which is a wacky post-apocalyptic setting. But there's Pathfinder and the True20 systems based on the third edition of the game, made by Paizo Publishing and Green Ronin Publishing, respectively. Pathfinder is still a traditional late medieval fantasy setting, but True20 is designed to cover almost as many settings as GURPS, albeit with less depth and scrutiny. But the core of all of these d20 games are still fundamentally limited to high action, low-grit campaigns.

Deciding factor: setting.

Frankly, I don't think I'd ever run a fantasy game with D&D. The rules are hamstrung by classes and mechanics that really take a lot of tweaking or handwaving to make it mesh with my approach to fantasy games. However, for a comic, irreverent, and ludicrously lethal short-run game, I love Gamma World as an easy game to get into. Ironically, the only game I'm really interested in running based on the D20 system is Mongoose Publishing's out-of-print Starship Troopers RPG. There, the class system fits military specializations reasonably well, the high-action rules fit with the war angle, and the tweaks to the core of the D20 system make it lethal enough for players to feel fragile in the face of their alien enemies.

Mother's Day, Nerdery-style

It's Mother's Day today, a day to honor that special lady who gave birth to you, nurtured you as a youngster, and then nagged you until the day you escaped moved out on your own. Mother's Day in the United States dates back to 1908 and the specific efforts of Anna Jarvis to get the day recognized as a national holiday a few years after her own mother's death. Her work bore fruit in 1914 as the USA recognized the day nationally, but by the 1920's she began campaigning against the commercialization of the holiday--which is a real peach of a thing of her to assert since she had trademarked the term "Mother's Day" and "second Sunday in May" two years before it was even a US holiday. Chief amongst her complaints about Mother's Day observers: printed cards and chocolates. Yeah.

A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment. -Anna Jarvis [from Wikipedia]

Ouch. Feel that burn. So grab a card and try to write something heartfelt in it to try to convince her you didn't phone it in this year, or you can share something meaningful to you both by sitting down and watching a couple of good, long movies together. Maybe you can share a box of chocolates, too, since you were probably lame and got her something like that anyway, right? Plus, the movie marathon has the double bonus of keeping her occupied quietly while giving her plenty of time to reminisce over when you were cute and precious. Granted, there are a lot of chick-flicks you can probably select that fit your mother's particular tastes, but here are three classic movies that are sure to make your maternal unit feel appreciated and give you both some mutual quality time before you flee back to your own place before the baby stories get their annual rehearsal. Spoilers ahead, but if you don't already know these movies you deserve it.

The first film is about a young waitress stuck working in a crummy diner and living a shallow, day-to-day existence. Living with a free-spirited roomate and her overly expressive hunk boyfriend, the main protagonist is stuck in a world where she lives on the meager thrills of her friend who has it all. Until she meets a brooding, intense man with urgent passions and a destiny to fulfill her. The two fall in love and awaken new emotions in both their lives, only to have another man from their past take away everything they have in a night of violence and loss. The waitress survives, but her love is lost, leaving her with a new sense of life's preciousness as she moves to a new life with a baby to remember him by.

The second film is about a single mom and her estranged son. The mother is the victim of a miscarriage of justice and has had to watch her son grow up from afar. Despite having been separated by social services for years, the mother's love is stronger than ever when the son's long-lost uncle comes into the picture and helps re-unite mother and son. Chased by the police and one overzealous officer with a steely determination, the battered family is forced to live on the road and deal with their past demons. The mother realizes that it's never too late to hug her son and tell him just how much he means to her, and the son learns that it's okay to cry. A real heart-warmer.

The third movie on the Nerdery's Mother's Day list is about the legacy of one mother on her son's life as he moves into adulthood and full maturity. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, this mom fights the prognosis for years to ensure that her son is provided for and equipped for the future. Even years later, the son marvels at his mother's fortitude and foresight, giving him a template for living his life. One of the film's most emotional scenes comes at the site of the mother's coffin, where he has to confront the contrary forces of being his own man and honoring his mother's plans for him. It's a moving drama of revelation and emotional breakthroughs as the son learns that some women are just two-faced hussies out there to hurt you. Eventually, he comes to appreciate that mother always knows best, and her preparations help him to meet the woman of his dreams--who just so happens to be just like his mother.



Sounds like a wretched afternoon of Lifetime original movies, doesn't it? Don't worry, these movies also happen to be 100% Nerdery-approved sci-fi classics. They're Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Terminator 3, respectively. Huge, mega-emotional chick-flicks in which women have the corner on all the plot's power with just enough sci-fi budget injected into them to pose as action movies. So cuddle up with moms and watch the first three Terminator movies today. She might complain about the violence and liberal gun-toting, but you'll know that when she gets quiet during Kyle and Sarah's deep connection or Sarah's love for John that she appreciates the truth--Terminator is Mother's Day gold. Plus, I bet she won't be complaining during the time-jump scenes in the beginning of the first two movies.

Just sayin'.

Terminator 1, 2, and 3: total chick-flicks

*Oh, and yeah, Terminator 3 closes the circle on John Connor being the most Oedipal hero since Oedipus himself. In the future, he selects his own father for a mission he knows for a fact to be a suicide mission, and he fosters the love between his parents with a picture he's had his entire life. Later, he doesn't really connect with his own bride-to-be until he identifies her strength as reminding him of his mother. Yeah, Oedipal analysis on Mother's Day... classy.