GURPS Centurion: Etain

GURPS Centurion: In my introduction to the Generic Universal Role-Playing System, I proclaimed that it had unrivaled versimilitude and granularity. To illustrate this, I will take some of the main characters from the Neil Marshall movie 'Centurion' and assign them stats according to GURPS. I'll also take a scene or two from the movie and use that to illustrate the deadly versimilitude of the combat system.

Keep in mind that, while this post isn't focused on the movie, the following will contain spoilers for the movie Centurion.

Centurion is a fabulous, largely unknown, chase/action movie set in ancient Scotland. It will likely be coming up in my Movie Web Mondays some time over the next year or so, but in the meantime know that it's a gory, straight-forward movie with good acting from Michael Fassbender, Imogen Poots, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko, and Liam Cunningham. The purpose of this article, though is not to sing the praises of a largely unknown film. It is to show an example of how straightforward character creation is in GURPS: it's a simple-but-large set of descriptive choices that do a great job of representing the characters from this or just about any other movie.

In the movie Centurion, Etain is called a she-wolf. Silent since her youth due to the fact that Romans had cut her tongue out when they assaulted her and destroyed her family and village, Etain is a fierce woman who speaks through extreme action. She is introduced to the plot as she kills an attacking slave in just a couple of strokes of her spear, and it's only later when she leads the Ninth Legion into an ambush that her true nature as a Pict spy is revealed. A tracker and guide, she displays a predatory mastery of the hunt that one of the Romans calls witchcraft. She's clearly depicted as a broken, damaged woman that is psychologically scarred and she's effectively reduced to a beast of hatred and killing.

Notes about the character sheet, above: I always redesign my RPG's character sheets to be more aesthetically linked to the campaign at hand and to be more efficient with the expenditure of space. While the standard GURPS sheet is by far the most well-designed I have ever seen produced by a publisher, I still found ways to make things a bit neater for my own GURPS sheets. For this example, I also compressed a few of the fields to make room for a character illustration from the movie. The yellow box in the bottom left is just a small bit of play aid for some of the most necessary stats in your average GURPS combat. Filmateleven on this.

I don't use character points after character creation. So when I make my GURPS characters, I don't like to put the points costs directly on the sheet, and I encourage my players to do likewise. Instead, they make a laundry list of what they spent their points on and I go over that instead. Here's where Etain's points went, with a breakdown of each phase of character creation including point costs in brackets:

Etain [100 points total]
Attributes [69 pts sub-total]: ST +0 [0]; DX +2 [40]; IQ -1 [-20]; HT +1 [10]; HP +0 [0]; Will +2 [10]; Per +4 [20]; FP +3 [9]

GURPS attributes consider a 10 in any stat to be average. Etain doesn't really exhibit any particular strength, and she certainly looks too small to be stronger than the average man, so I left her Strength at 10, and her Hit Points, which default to the same as Strength, were kept at the standard value. She exhibits a sort of predatory dexterity--not graceful, really, but competent in her movements--so I went with a 12 there. Based on her instinctive behavior and the fact that she is probably psychologically scarred, I gave her Intelligence 9. She gets Health 11 for general fitness, and 14 Fatigue Points (which default to the same as HT) for extreme stamina throughout the movie's chase. She is strong-willed and extremely perceptive, so those stats clock in at 11 and 13, respectively, which are derived from IQ.

Influence and Wealth [-4 pts sub-total]: Attractive [4]; Languages: Latin (accented, illiterate) [2], Illiterate [-3]; Cultures: Roman [1]; Struggling Wealth ($375 starting, $338/month) [-10]; Reputation 1 (Picts: heartless Roman-killer, 10 or less to recognize) [2]

Etain gets ogled and approached by two lecherous characters, but she doesn't get much notice for her looks otherwise--that sounds like Attractive, the lowest positive appearance modifier, to me. In addition to her native language (Pict), she seems to understand the Latin-speaking Romans well enough, but since illiteracy was the norm at the time, I assumed she was as well. To pass as a servant and tracker, she must also have been generally familiar with Roman culture as well. She couldn't be making much, and so I docked her wealth level to Struggling, and Arianne recognizes her by name and reputation, so I made a low-level Reputation for her as well.

Advantages [48 pts sub-total]: Acute Smell 2 [4], Combat Reflexes [15], Fearlessness 4 [8], Fit [5], Less Sleep 2 [4], Outdoorsman 1 [10], Reduced Consumption 1 [2]

At one point in the movie, it seems as if Etain is smelling out her quarry from a distance, so I added Acute Smell 2, which will add 2 to her Perception when checking for scents. Combat Reflexes is pretty much a gimme with a combat-crazed character like hers, and she seems to have no pause when it comes to diving into mass slaughter, so I gave her Fearlessness 4. Fit seemed to fit with her character being a dogged tracker, and Quintus Dias' narration brags that she and the other Pict hunters could go without eating or sleeping much, so I included Less Sleep 2 and Reduced Consumption 1 to reflect that. She also exhibits familiarity in the wild, so I included Outdoorsman 1, which adds 1 to relevant outdoor skills.

Disadvantages[-70 pts sub-total]: Bloodlust (SC: 12 or less) [-10], Cannot Speak [-15], Intolerance (Romans) [-5], Secret (Pict spy, converted to Enemies(Romans) upon discovery) [-30], Sense of Duty (Pict nation) [-10]

Etain has no tongue, so she gets Cannot Speak for certain. She also has a violent hate for Romans--Intolerance (Romans)--and a tendency to lash out in a deadly manner when possible, which looks like Bloodlust with a self-control number of 12 or less. She is secretly a Pict spy, so if she fails to keep her secret, it converts into dedicated enemies in the form of the Romans who find her out. And she has an acute Sense of Duty to the Picts--it seems she would have killed Arianne if it weren't for the fact that it'd bring a curse on the Picts.

Skills [57 pts sub-total]: Animal Handling (Dogs) IQ+1 [4], Animal Handling (Horses) IQ [2], Area Knowledge (Caledonia) IQ+3 [8], Axe/Mace DX+1 [4], Brawling DX+1 [2], Hiking HT+1 [4], Knife DX+1 [2], Naturalist IQ-1* [1], Navigation (land) IQ+1* [2], Riding (Horses) DX+1 [4], Running HT [2], Spear DX+3 [12], Stealth DX [2], Survival (forest) Per+1* [2], Thrown Weapon DX+1 [2], Tracking Per+2* [4]

Skills in GURPS are purchased in levels relative to the controlling attribute, based on the difficulty of the skill. For instance, the first point in an easy Dexterity skill--such as the Knife skill--gets Etain that skill at a level equal to her DX, whereas she needs to spend two points in the average dexterity Spear skill to get it to equal the same level. Hard skills require four points to equal their controlling attribute, and after that the cost increments increase by four--8, 12, and so on. The skills marked with asterisks have an extra 1 added to their levels because of Etain's Outdoorsman 1 talent. For her skills I focused on the combat and tracking fields, with the spear being her weapon of choice and her tracking based on lots of area knowledge of Caledonia (the Roman name for Scotland) and her already high Perception.

At a total of 100 points, Etain is a pretty modestly priced character--GURPS 4e considers a 150 point character to be on the low end for heroic types. A lot of that, however, comes from the fact that she has some severe disadvantages. In the average GURPS game, she'd probably be over the limit for disadvantages, which is normally capped at -50% of starting points. But you can see from this write-up, she's a deadly character when in her hunting element.

Stolen from the Editor's Desk: Gamers are Weird

Stolen from the Editor's Desk: There are a lot of opinion columns, write-in articles, and advice editorials in the greater medium of the written word. Virtually none of these advisors are particularly qualified, either. There's nothing to stop them from giving bad advice. Except me. Stolen from the Editor's Desk involves me taking some sort of advice column and tearing it a new one, all for your sake. Bad advice, meet the nerdery.

On the Today Show, Some-Rich-Guy was on their 'The Other View' special giving advice on relationships. The question was whether it was okay for a guy to play video games if he was in his thirties. The pontiff's reply: no, it's weird, he shouldn't enjoy video games at that age. You can view the idiotic exchange here, but before I lay into this over-the-hill metro-sexual non-jock, let me set the background on the opinion-giver.

Donny Deutsch is the CEO of an ad agency. He is rich and probably bought his way onto the Today Show as part of increasing his advertising footprint, so you should respect his opinions about relationships. Never mind that he's been divorced, got his girlfriend pregnant and then left her before the birth, and that he was named as the 'other man' in divorce proceedings involving another woman a year later. He's got gobs of money, so he is an authority on male behavior and what makes for good mates.

I, on the other hand, am the wordsmith of a blog and a dedicated life-long nerd. I fantasize regularly about living inside a to-scale mockup of the starship Serenity, and I'd like to make a homemade arcade unit before I turn thirty. I've been married since 2008, and despite the fact that my wife got pregnant, I managed to stick around to actually be a father to my son. In fact, I actually enjoy being a father, which I'm sure Deutsch finds 'weird' as well.

I'm twenty-five years old, a working man, husband, and a father. But I don't feel like I'm approaching the upper end of my gaming shelf-life. In fact, since 343 Studios is making another Halo trilogy starting with Halo 4 in 2012, I'd say that about clinches that I'll be playing Halo games for at least another six or seven years. And why is that weird? Is it weird for an adult man (or woman, for that matter) to enjoy books, or movies, or television into his thirties? I really doubt that Deutsch would claim that, since he likes to advertise in those media to, ya know, adults.

Let me explain something. In a special such as this on any talk show, the people asking these questions are almost always asking about single people in the context of dating relationships. They're asking (perhaps inappropriately) for strangers to weigh in on personal hang-ups and either challenge or empower them with stamps of 'okay' or 'not okay' behavior. If they're using this pundit's advice to evaluate a spouse, they really lost the battle already and should have dealt with perceived problems before they got this far.

"He's got gobs of money, so he is an authority on male behavior and what makes for good mates."

But, and this must be very clear, the question is not about obsessive or addicted game-playing behavior. This is about Deutsch deigning to dictate that it is never acceptable for an adult man to enjoy video games as a hobby. The speed with which he retorts that it's weird clearly indicates that a man who comes home from work and spends an hour drinking is much more socially acceptable to him than a man who comes home from work and spends an hour playing L.A. Noire. Of course, as a New Yorker father-eating businessman, I'd bet he'd prefer a man who passed out each night after work and spent virtually all of his free time trying to score tail while at business meetings in over-priced restaurants. Welcome to New York, pal.

Since Deutsch didn't have the human courtesy to treat a viewer's question seriously and explain his rationale, I think I'm going to put words in his mouth: Video games are a kids' toy. As you get older, games are for dorks, and if he's playing games at that age he's probably a gross fattie who doesn't deserve to occupy his wedge of the bachelorette population. Men in their thirties should be focused on chain-dating, social climbing, and playing sports in clubs where half the members spend half the time standing around talking in their sweat-wear while watching younger members actually play segue-polo, speed-ball, or squash. If they have a personal obsession, it might be with work or professional sports, which is okay because pro sports are cool, and they are replete with ads that push the over-saturation envelope.

Because whimsy, imagination, and creativity have no place in an adult man's life. Whimsy, not escapism, is the desire to see more magic, wonder, and optimism in the world today, and to take part in that which we could never experience otherwise. Imagination, not childishness, is the exercise of exploring the limits of our world, our reason, and our projections of ourselves in entirely other-worldly settings. And creativity, not mindless consumption, is the constant hunger for new explorations of our fantasies as they become worlds in themselves.

Why don't you want those qualities in a thirty year-old man? Or a sixty year-old man? Or a woman, for that matter?

"I'd bet he'd prefer a man who passed out each night after work and spent virtually all of his free time trying to score tail while at business meetings in over-priced restaurants. Welcome to New York, pal."

Don't get me wrong, there are other ways to develop the traits I described above, but studies in the industry have shown repeatedly that those uplifting qualities define career gamers--people who define themselves by their hobby and spend years actively investing into it. There are bad traits linked to gamers, but I think you'd be hard pressed to compare extreme video gamers' socially negative qualities to extreme sports fans' socially negative qualities. Not unless I missed all the headlines of nerd riots when Halo: Reach was released. And while some of these elements are common in movies, movies encourage passive escapism and bland acceptance of processed entertainment with the unenlightened refrain: "it's only a movie". In a game, players are encouraged to change what they don't like or find unacceptable. And, if it's not possible within the confines of the game itself, gamers are much more likely to address their problems with game developers.

Deutsch and the rest of the talking heads on the Today Show also happen to be too old to understand what is starting to happen with today's thirty year-olds. The thirty year-olds today are the leading edge of the first generation to be raised on video games. They have no memories of life before video games, when electronic games weren't a part of popular culture, and a great number of them could probably chronicle the timeline of seminal video games alongside major life events. The fact is, whether the old holdouts trying to mold public opinion like it or not--whether they understand it or not--the gamers that are growing up now and evermore will be lifers. You can either accept it or revel in your own irrelevance as it grows. I think it's pretty clear what the Today Show and the media grognards they represent have chosen.

And what was Deutsch doing in his thirties? Fighting his way to become a (I'm sure well-earned) CEO of his father's company and buy out his own father's ownership, likely more-or-less in respone to getting fired from the family business a few years prior. I'm sure if you pinned him down on what he thought was normal and acceptable behavior for a man in his thirties, he'd probably come up with a horrifying list of activities that turn man into a shape-shifting, spineless creature that undulates seamlessly between lemming and remora.

So I'll tack another tag onto this post. Elitist CEO snob, baby daddy, other man Donny Douche--er--Deutsch: don't be that guy.

Movie Web Monday: John Hurt

Movie Web Monday: Each week, I'll look at a specific actor's roles across three good movies. The third movie will in turn tie into the first movie of the next week's actor, whose third movie will continue the pattern. I will go through actors and movies at this rate, with the following limitations in mind: every movie(or television show) invoked will be one I either own, or wish to own; no movie or actor will be invoked twice. So sit back and enjoy as you fall into the nerdery's movie web. (Oh, and I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, telling you just enough to know if you'll enjoy the movie)

John Hurt: Man of the dour

Movie: Hellboy II (Own it)

John Hurt, as the father-figure Professor Trevor Broom, plays a small but important role in Hellboy II. As part of the prologue/exposition/flashback that opens the film, the audience gets a glimpse of his tenderly eccentric father-son relationship with the young demon, along with a fun series of engaging visuals. But what really glows in these opening moments is the softly amused love in Professor Broom's eyes. There's nothing faked, forced, or false about his feelings--which are a cornerstone of Hellboy's life, at least in the movies. The audience also gets to see that Hellboy was raised with a playful endowment of the fantastic occult that lies beneath the mundane world in these movies. It's with a jovial half-wink that the surrogate father responds to his son's certainties about the nature of the opening fairy tale:

It makes for a nice counter to the otherwise much more dark and depressing plot of the antagonist and the loss of the world's magical fancy. It's a poignant way to start the film, and helps to reinforce that fathers--even when absented by the grave--have a huge impact on the principal characters of Hellboy II.

Movie: Alien (Own it) Light Spoilers

Watching the Alien movie today is a cheap experience. It's cheap because it's one of those affectations that simply cannot replicate the effect of that first viewing. Nothing but fresh perspective can really capture the tension that fills the largely uneventful first hour of the movie, where every crappy piece of cobbled together technology, every petty grouse, every shot of these space bums sweating in their pajamas, makes you certain that they are not prepared for what is going to happen to them. John Hurt plays Kane, and though you might not remember his character's name, he is the second most memorable character of the film--maybe the most memorable. No one forgets that moment in that scene. It's set up so well, acted and directed with such casual precision, that the first time you see it you've been utterly disarmed.

The cast is composed of a prickly collection of co-workers. You get the sense that they all might have been friends at one point, if only it weren't for the claustrophobic lack of personal space and intensity of their interactions. Kind of like college roommates during finals week. John Hurt's Kane really helps to sell this impression. When he's incapacitated by the alien facehugger, the crew falls apart in the stress of the decisions to be made. Likewise, his revival is followed by a jovial meal in which all the crew comes together to laugh, eat, and co-mingle in a familial atmosphere one more time before they return to their base of operations. I mean, think of Kane's last words--his last moments before the gory reveal--and it could almost be any fond memory from anybody's own past:

Only after that he starts to choke and sputter as an alien embryo chews its way through his lungs, sending him seizing onto the dinner table, where his ribcage bursts open and the little bundle of Freudian complexes leers at the dinner guests. Without John Hurt's dry demeanor earlier and his disarming levity in the scene immediately prior, the reveal would be less scarring on the psyche of cinema. But, as it is, the dinner scene in Alien is one of the most recognizable moments of popular science-fiction.

Movie: Outlander (Own it)

And so we go from a movie and a scene that needs no introduction to a movie that few know about. Outlander is a clever take on a Beowulf adaptation, where the humans are 100% mortal except for the fact that one of them was born in another star system and that Grendel is a bioluminescent alien monster. Starring Jim Caviezel, John Hurt, Ron Perlman, and Sophia Myles, it's a tremendous piece of work for such a small, unknown film. John Hurt, sporting chic Viking braids on his hair and beard, plays Hrothgar--an old king who wields his responsibility with heavy care. We're introduced to him as he spars with his daughter Freya--redheaded(!) Sophia Myles--and talking with her about getting married to his heir-apparent. If you keep your ears open during this scene, you find that Hrothgar is a man clearly trying to get his affairs in order. The next scene shows Hrothgar talking to the would-be lucky guy, Wulfric, and giving the old stop-perpetuating-negative-viking-stereotypes talk. In a movie that is defined by bursts of sci-fi/fantasy action and kinetic gore, it's a tender moment of cinematic beauty and soft words. And it contains one of the movie's best lines, in John Hurt's gravelly voice:

With so much already done in the monster movie genre, Outlander manages to be fresh and original even when it uses some classic tools--like the guy who goes off into the woods by himself to take a leak immediately getting pasted. But, in having so much of the story revolve around images of responsibility and culpability as individuals and leaders, it really manages to feel like something much more than another fun take on a new monster movie setup.

Movie Web Monday will continue next week with a new actor, picking up with some other prolific player from the last movie listed above.

Don't Be That Guy: Prisoners of WoW

Don't Be That Guy: One of the best things about being one out of several billion is that there's always somebody doing something stupid. If you keep your eyes open, you can usually wait for a stupid person to try something first. Watch them fail, laugh, and be sure not to repeat their mistake. Or read my blog and get the skinny straight from the Nerdery.

World of Warcraft is a divisive little piece of nerd-product. As an MMORPG, it's part of the genre that is used to mock nerds as a social group at least as much as glasses, snorting Urkel laughs, and Star Trek tech arguments. For those of you who don't know, MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. The MMO portion of that describes any game in which there is no hard limit on the number of players participating in the same session--successful MMOs have hundreds of thousands of players connected during their peak hours.

Most MMO games are also RPGs, largely for practical development reasons. In an RPG video game, players will generally spend most of their time striking off on their own or in teams for small group instanced combat. This is by design, as it provides less strain on the game's servers if fewer players are in the same area at the same time. The other big reason MMORPGs are by far the most popular iteration of the online genre is because video game RPGs are almost always primarily concerned with experience, character advancement, and loot grinding. Character advancement is very different from character development, as it refers to some way that the game gives you more power as you play for longer amounts of time. You might kill a giant rat for five experience points, and after getting one thousand experience points you get a chance to learn a new attack power. The next level will come after geometrically more experience, and the next after that, and so on, such that players might spend days of play-time at higher levels to level up just once.

Loot grinding is another huge element of MMORPGs in general and World of Warcraft specifically. You see, in addition to having nuanced combat powers that your character can develop, MMORPGs also feature items and resources that can be found, mined, bought, or harvested. These items can greatly increase the power of your character, or can just be sold when found to save up for something better. This is the core value of loot grinding--there's always cheap stuff to be found, but there's always something better out there.

So there are two grinds in WoW--the level grind of killing things repeatedly to gain experience and the loot grind of collecting gear and gold to get that ultimate piece you want. Level grinding is a personal trial that can't easily be outsourced--you have to kill the stuff yourself--and most players prefer to control their advancement carefully anyways. Loot grinding, on the other hand, is easily outsourced and usually players do so happily because it just isn't that fun to virtually chop wood or mine gold for hours on end. Not in WoW, anyways.

This demand creates an opportunity. People who don't mind the tedium of tapping gold veins for days on end can make offers to impatient people in a trans-reality exchange: people pay real money to get in-game gold. The suppliers in this scenario are often called gold farmers, because of harvest-reaping-selling pattern of the industry.

In this article, a former Chinese inmate dishes on how the guards there used teams of prisoners to gold farm in a rather lucrative scheme that exceeded the profits that inmate labor in factories could produce. They'd be forced to mine gold in 12 hour-a-day shifts, and when the prisoners failed to meet their quota, the guards would punish them in much the manner you'd expect of a Chinese prison. The article reports that an estimated 80% of all gold farming is done in China, and the informant stipulates that many other prisons in China must be following suit.

There's several layers of don't-be-that-guy, so let's work through them.

Unenjoyable video game-maker: don't be that guy. When at least half of your product's content consists of something your clients would rather pay more money to skip, and that prison inmates are forced to do in 12 hour shifts, you've overshot the goal of progressive difficulty for your game and gone into programming-douche-baggery. I mean, making repetitive-but-essentially-enjoyable gameplay dynamics is one thing, but we're talking about something that boils down to a hunt-and-click dynamic that gets old after three minutes. To put this in physical perspective, that'd be like giving seating priority at a football game to people who get their tickets punched by all the vendors multiple times. It's meaningless activity that has no direct bearing on whether someone is worthy of the reward, and it doesn't really improve the game's experience.

China: don't be that guy. This is an intrinsically ideological one, but when you see it you will poop bricks. China, the world's foremost communist power, in whose century we supposedly live, has state employees (ie, the guards) using state resources (ie, the prison labor) to pander to one of the most prevalent pieces of rampant capitalism known to the modern world (ie, MMORPG players) for personal gain. Estimates are that there are well over a hundred thousand Chinese gold farmers (though the inmates are probably a minority in that group), and each one of them is a silent condemnation that comunism as a state structure generally only works as a pariah system that feeds off of more dynamic economies. Especially after the ridiculous expense of the Hong Kong Olympics, it comes off as throwing a garish party to impress your neighbors and then driving your jallopy down to the local soup kitchen for breakfast the next morning.

Prisoner of WoW: don't be that guy. Bear with me on this one. I'm not going to be one of those idiots who try to belittle the anguish inherent to this work--it may be playing a video-game, but it's externally directed, limited in focus, and done in long shifts that probably lead to freaky nightmares of being haunted by cel shaded icons that tingle with the promise of cheesy money sound effects. And then there's the specter of martial punishment, which is the bad part. Imagine two prisoners in the prison courtyard, punished by being forced to stand outside with their arms upraised for hours on end:

As the guard passes by, Liu whispers out of the corner of his mouth, "What did you do?"

The other guy, a scarred and heavily-built tattooed man named Po, replies, "I shanked my cell-mate with a sharpened toothbrush. He was a lazy, worthless slug who kept complaining about laundry duty."

A pause as the guard passes in the other direction.

"What did you do?" Po asks.

"Um..." Liu hesitates. "I didn't collect enough gold in this American video game they've had me playing."

"Your name's Liu, right?" Po mumbles with a sneer, freezing for the guard to pass again. "What's your cell block? Maybe I'll look you up."

"I get beat with pipes, too!" Liu blurts defensively.

As a Chinese inmate, it's got to be a hard sell to the other cons that you're actually recieving your fair share of abuse from the guards. It's a hideous catch 22 where finding the solace in your prison routine comes with the risk of looking like the guards' pet.

Things That Should Be In Mass Effect 3, But Probably Won't Be (Part Four)

I love Mass Effect. The third and final installment--with little more than one teaser trailer and one gameplay trailer released so far--already has me grabbed by the wrinklies, and I'm certain it's going to be a truly epic end to a great saga of heroism and hard choices. But there are a few things that I'd really love to see--that I think are very possible for the Bioware team to make--that I'm fairly certain won't make the cut. These are things that should be in Mass Effect 3, but probably won't be:

I want a time-management dynamic.

Why I want it: This one is very straight-forward and easy to implement. Mass Effect 3 begins with the Reapers Abyss-slapping earth. We're looking at cities being wiped out and continents being overrun. I don't think Shepard should feel the luxury of hunting down that lost wallet on the Presidium, or talking down a hanar from proselytizing. He should be panicked, rushing from system to system gathering support or assembling a super device or whatever Bioware decides we should do to nuke the ferrite-Cthulhu fleet. A simple time mechanic would be great for this. ME 3 could set this in concrete or conceptual units. Maybe rather than saying traveling to this system takes 24 hours, they could receive an emergency message from earth that London has been completely wiped out, or that the northwestern territories are in ashes, or something similar. In any case, nothing makes you appreciate your choice to save the Migrant Fleet quite as much as knowning that the Reapers turned Polynesia into crumb-cake while you dawdled. This could also be used to make certain decisions tougher--do you help the quarians against the geth, which takes as long as three other missions, or do you run to other systems getting help from less needy people?

Time management isn't just a new resource or a dynamic story-telling element, either. It could be a challenging hook to ensure players do the game again. If I was playing and had only enough time to experience  say half the content of the game in a single play-through, I'd play it again to manage time differently. But, given Bioware's narrative choice dynamic, I'd probably feel like going back and playing at least two more times so I could experience the alternate choices for all that content as well.

This would make for a compelling way of making a content-rich RPG that doesn't hinder the tension of its story by giving the player too much time to explore every nook and cranny of the galaxy while their homeworld is supposed to be going up in smoke. Virtually every mainstream game of the past few years suffers from this, and I think a lot of the plots, themes, and tones of the games' narratives degenerate terribly from it.

Why I won't get it: I'd like to think Bioware has thought of this, and that if they don't incorporate this element it's because of a really good, compelling reason from a dramatic perspective. I doubt it, though. I'm sure that the real reason not to do this is because it might be seen as limiting the 'freedom' of players to explore the game. Which would be appropriate if it weren't for the critical distinction that most of the Mass Effect series' beloved exploration is in terms of going through and reveling in the choices they get to make and the revelations about the universe and character motivations that come to light in the process. Having time-management incorporated into the game would just ensure that those revelations are endeared all the more as being painfully bought at the cost of other choices, experiences, and discoveries.

I want more mutually exclusive choices.

Why I want it: Tying in with my dreams of time-management above, Mass Effect 3 needs to have more decisions that preclude other story-telling options. For much the same reasons as above, increasing the number of mutually exclusive choices would help to make players feel even more attached to the decisions that they do make.

An early commercial for the first Mass Effect game actually alluded to this dilemma, clearly evincing an early awareness amongst the Bioware marketing department that this was a powerful dramatic promise to make: There's a hologram of a planet, with flashing red indicators around its globe as a stream of radio transmissions plead for help. In the half-light of the Normandy's command deck, Shepard scowls, arms crossed as he hears the human colony's resistance being swept aside. Closing his eyes in grief, he waves away the hologram, and the computer chimes in that the ship is heading to Noveria instead. As a wide-eyed and sober-looking Shepard stares out the window of the Mako as they drop into Noveria's atmosphere, a narration sums up the moment: "To save the galaxy, there are many choices to make--none of them easy."

Cue dramatic music, fade to logo.

Buy me that game.

Why I won't get it: Video game RPGs--even Bioware's--seem to have an urgent compulsion to give players as much opportunity to experience their content in one play-through as possible, even when they incorporate other elements that try to encourage replay value. I suppose the prevailing reasoning is that you can't guarantee players will give a game a second run-through, so you should make sure they get to experience all of the detailed, high-quality content they can the first time through. If so, it's a reasonable assumption, but I don't subscribe to it. I think that's probably why this particular choice dynamic will not become a developer's focus anytime soon. It's just a shame that Bioware has the wherewithal to highlight it in promoting the first game without giving it the full treatment they could have in that game or its sequel. But for now I can hope for Mass Effect 3 at least.

Don't Be That Guy: Caught Holding the Bag

Don't Be That Guy: One of the best things about being one out of several billion is that there's always somebody doing something stupid. If you keep your eyes open, you can usually wait for a stupid person to try something first. Watch them fail, laugh, and be sure not to repeat their mistake. Or read my blog and get the skinny straight from the Nerdery.

Here's a glorious true story from the Nerdery's backyard.

A young lady--we'll call her Red--was house-sitting for a family in Chicago while they were out of town. The home-owners owned several dogs, and so much of the house-sitting involved basic pet care needs: feeding them, taking them out for walks, cleaning up after them...

Especially that last one.

After a few days of taking care of the pets, Red stopped by the house to find a dead dog. Worried and a little bit emotional, she called up the home-owners. The dog happened to be rather old, and so they reassured her that they weren't unduly upset. Red wasn't sure what to do with the cadaver, so she asked the owners, who said their vet could take care of the cremation and then bill them for it.

All Red had to do was get the dog to the vet. In Chicago. In the summer.

Unfortunately, as a young city-trotter, she doesn't have a car. So she'd be forced to take the deceased dog on the El--that's the elevated train system for those of you who are urban-impaired. Suffice it to say that Red was not looking forward to lugging a worm-bait doggie onto the train on her way to the vet's dust farm, so she decided to improvise.

With what I can only imagine to be a thick pair of rubber-gloves and a lot of TLC, she hefted the meat puppet into a piece of travel luggage. Maybe with a trash bag for an additional liner, or maybe she wasn't planning on using that luggage piece ever again. In any case, onto the train she hustled her postmortem cargo in a conveniently wheeled travel bag, settling rather embarrassedly into the conveyance's vinyl seat.

I'm sure at this point Red was casually sniffing the air, nervously checking to see if the truly manifest canine was emitting a noticeable odor. Maybe I should've doubled up the trash bags? Could I get a citation for this? The thoughts must have come in a constant stream that made the distraction of a stranger addressing her seem welcome.

"Hey there."

"Um...Hi."

"What's in the bag?"

A pause. Red didn't want to be just another urban horror story: "So I was riding the train and this lady next to me had a frickin' dead dog in a travel bag. No, she wasn't a taxadermist; it wasn't stuffed. She just had a rotting pup in her carry-on." So she decided to lie:

"Oh, just some jewelry and stuff."

Moments later, the stranger snatched her precious parcel and made a clean getaway. I can't imagine Red put up too much of a fight, though, if only for fear of the contents tumbling out in the middle of any potential scuffle.

Now, imagine the dirtbag mugger's reaction when he carted the bag off to some secluded place and checked out his haul. I'd like to think he went straight to a fence or pawn-broker with the bag:

"Hey, Earl, whaddya got?"

"A nice bag of bling, Jimmy. Check it...out?"

He opens the bag to find a plastic garbage bag. Curious, he unwraps the secreted contents while Jimmy leans his head close over the package to get that first glimpse. Then comes the dramatic reveal: there's a delay in the realization, as Jimmy's face freezes in momentary puzzlement as he tries to make sense of what he's seeing. A wig? A stuffed animal? Then there comes a whiff of decay.

"Whathehell?!" Jimmy half-gags and covers his nose and mouth as the realization dawns.

Earl, shocked and disappointed in his haul, overturns the bag to see if his victim tried the classic hide-the-valuables-under-the-dead-dog ploy. The corpse canine plops onto the floor as he shakes out the contents.

"Earl! Whathehell, man?!" Jimmy shrieks louder this time. "Not on my f---ing floor!"

"Maybe it's in the dog?" Earl suggests, making a hesitant gesture.

"No, no no no!" Jimmy stomps, stopping Earl before he can touch the dog. There's an awkward, tense silence. "Is this some kind of prank?"

"What? No," Earl defends himself. "This lady was on the El with this carry-on, and she said it was jewelry, I swear."

Another pause.

"She must be some kind of sick-o," he concludes.

So, for all you highwaymen out there: keep in mind that your average Chicagoan is probably not going to volunteer that she has a haul of valuables with her on the El. So if you are told that, think twice. It might be a putrid pooch.

Dead-dog-mugger: don't be that guy.

Week of Chicago Dogs: Day Seven

Week of Chicago Dogs: As Americans near their various and as sundry Independence Day celebrations coming this July 4, there will be a great number of hot dogs consumed. Most of them will be grilled, Oscar Mayer numbers with a pathetic assortment of condiments of least resistance. A few of them, God help them, will have ketchup on them--ketchup! To help liberate the masses from mediocre hot dogs, this next week will detail the essence of a good Chicago-style hot dog from several Midwest vendors. You're welcome.

You might observe that there are seven days in a week. Hence the Week of Chicago Dogs must finish today, July 4th, with a seventh Chicago Dog vendor. Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend of closing down on the fourth of July. I'm not sure if this is the case in your neighborhood, but instead I have a couple of other notable local hot dog places to check out when you're in the area.

Dog n' Suds: A retro-style drive-in diner in the middle of a small downtown suburb known only to adjacent communities, Dog n' Suds is a little slice of the old days. A hot dog place within walking distance of three schools, it's a seasonal delight that has tasty sweet coney dogs, chunky cole slaw, and meaty, soft fries. The real highlight here, though, is Dog n' Suds' trademark root beer. A smooth, low-fizz root beer that has a creamy aftertaste that reminds me of a perfectly post-melt float, it's a treat all its own that we regularly buy by the bottle.

Slott's Hots: Another small, cozy Vienna Beef hot dog parlor on a busy downtown street, Slott's Hots cranks them out quickly during it's packed lunch hours. It also features a special for 99-cent Chicago Dogs during slow hours. It's been a while since I've stopped by Slott's, but I recall them having a nice salty mix to their hot dogs thanks to a healthy helping of their tangy mustard.

Hope you're all enjoying your Independence Day, and that you had the foresight to get a Chicago Dog some time over the preceding week. If not, there's always tomorrow and every day after that. Treat yourself to a slice of urban goodness. Grab a Chicago Dog.