Remembering Myth

Bah--these gaps between posts, while diminishing, are not deliberate. Think I'm going to assault you with a flimsy excuse about "life issues", "work schedule", or "It's so hard being a new parent"? Hah! Shows what you know. I'm a nerd, and while all those things have been occupying me, I've been dinking around doing nerdy things, too, so I'm not giving any excuses. Nope.

Think that I'm going to start making it easier on myself to update the blog more regularly by cutting content, depth of posts, or posting link-filled drivel like most other blogs? Hah! Shows what you know. I don't believe in lowering the bar, and I certainly don't believe in using only ten words to make a point when one hundred words will reinforce the position and a thousand words will completely sponge out opposition.

Think that I'm limiting myself by the intense, nerd focus of the blog? Hah! Shows what you know. Today I'm going to drag you back to 1997, when Bungie was not yet a household name but no longer a garage-sized developer, either. When games were pretty much always 2D and resembled their topics of violence like Picasso paintings resembled his subjects. When the only way to get a "visceral" gaming experience was to take shots in between matches with your favorite Street Fighter character--it's Chun-Li or M. Bison, you know it--and shake your head a lot. That's right, we're going back to the release of Myth: The Fallen Lords.

Now I permit two divergent opinions of Myth: The Fallen Lords and its sequel Myth II: Soulblighter. The first opinion is that it's the best frakking game ever made. The alternative opinion is that it's one of the best frakking games ever made. See what I did there? The only other valid opinion to have regarding Myth is ignorance, and that won't hold up by the time you're done reading this.

Early in 1997, my big brother drove me to the local Computer City in the outlet mall near our house. Handing him a five-dollar bill and letting him foot the change, we bought a boxed demo of the game Myth: The Fallen Lords. Since this was still a few years before the internet became the favored medium of distributing software demos, and since it was also the first game that actually captured my interest before release, it was and has remained the only boxed game demo I've ever purchased with my own money. Plus about 70 cents of my big brother's cash, and about a quarter of a gallon of gas thrown in for audit purposes.

I've mentioned Myth a few times in the blog so far. It was one of the first games I really played to death in its heyday and even in the years after Bungie was sold to Microsoft. Featuring the proper blend of storytelling and intuitively addicting gameplay, Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soulblighter were all kinds of inspiring and fulfilling. Upon its release, Myth: The Fallen Lords became an instant personal hit for striking three chords that no game before it--and few games since--have done.

CD Art to 1997's classic Myth: The Fallen Lords

Myth was... awesome tactics

The Myth series of games were real-time tactical computer games. Real-time sub-genres encompass any game in which time passes at a steady rate. The alternative to this is the turn-based game, in which time passes in discreet chunks at uneven intervals, much like your average board game. Another typical aspect of the tactics genre is a lack of unit or building construction. In a strategy game, like Starcraft, you construct a barracks using some largely conceptual resources and then use those same resources to build marines in that same barracks--all of which occurs in real-time while managing the rest of the game. Not so with a tactical game like Myth. You start off with a specific number of units, who may or may not be surviving veterans from previous missions, and you receive no additional units except for finding the occasional stragglers elsewhere on the map. It lacks the resource management and base-building that makes the strategy genre so popular, but it also demands more decision-making precision on behalf of the player, as mistakes and losses are more costly and irreparable.

The other thing that really made Myth shine as a tactical game was its approach to simple-but-dynamic combat. With forces that typically fell around thirty men for a given mission, you'd have to pay careful attention to how you moved your soldiers and in what formations. While strategy games at the time and many still have at their heart a simple rock-paper-scissors mechanic, Myth innovated with dynamics that emphasized timing and position instead. Getting your archers in a line formation on a ridge or having your dwarves flank a force of undead axe-wielders was the key to victory, and made it more viscerally engaging than simply knowing when to spam air units to counter enemy tanks.

Myth was... a technical innovation

Even though Bungie was a cottage game company at the time, Myth was part of the leading waves of the computer game industry. Its in-game graphics were a combination of 3D rendered terrain and 2D sprite collections for units and viscera. In one of my earlier Mass Effect posts I mentioned the nature of 3D rendering--adding skins to a mesh, which moves based on the keyframes of an animation skeleton. Well, Myth was still a little before those days. The terrain itself was a very simple mesh, not having the contours or fine details of a human figure, with a very low resolution skin. And, since it's terrain, it doesn't need to move, so no keyframes were needed. The units and most of the games' other details, though, needed to move. And, with a freely rotating 3D camera, they needed to be drawn at all sorts of angles. In steps the ancient and venerable 2D sprite.

A 2D sprite is a collection of flat image files that are called up based upon the perspective of the camera in a game. If, say, you're looking at a standing warrior unit from the three-quarters perspective, then the sprite references the appropriate image and displays it. It makes for a rough equivalent for 3D units, and requires a lot more work for the artists, but in these early days of 3D gaming it was simply the only way to have 3D game-play in real-time.

Imagine you're looking for someone in a crowd, only you don't know what they look like. 2D sprites would be like having a handful of photos of the person from different angles, whereas 3D rendering might be represented by having someone with you who knows what the objective person looks like. Having those photos handy for comparison is quite a bit less reliable, but it's something that you could mass produce even when it's too much trouble to get a first-hand witness. That's what 2D sprites are for, and they're still used in less noticeable roles in modern games, too.

So maybe it's not so pretty anymore, but the graphics were cutting edge at the time. I think.

Above you can see what the game actually looked like with the two elements coexisting on the screen. Note the rubble in the foreground and the building's corner to the left--these too are rendered in true 3D, hence the lines are more clearly defined and the objects have more consistency as the camera moves around them. Still, the ability to have tactics and gameplay that were not only three-dimensional but also embraced a freely controlled camera made Myth: The Fallen Lords a novel and thrilling experience at the time. And when Myth II: Soulblighter added the ability to save your completed missions as 'films', allowing you to roam around and survey the battle from different camera angles than you used the first time, well it went to a lot of gamers' heads. As happened again when Bungie brought that feature to Halo 3 ten years later.

Myth was... a fabulous setting

There are two general ways to creatively react to your inspirations: imitation and emulation. Imitation is easy to recognize and easy to tackle, and it involves you picking what you admire from the inspirational source and simply shoe-horning it into your own material. Emulation, on the other hand, involves more research and insight, and if it's done right or wrong your fans might not even see the relation to the source material. Because emulation involves trying to recreate and adapt the methods by which the inspirational material was created--to divine the process and re-tool it to create something of your own. I believe Myth is inspired by and emulates the works of Tolkien. That is, without being very much like Middle Earth in any superficial ways, Myth tackles the setting in a way that I think Tolkien would have if he were a game designer in the 90s. You see, Tolkien was all about creating a syncretic sort of mythology that incorporated themes from the Germanic and Old English myths that inspired a lot of his early academic career, but with a keen focus to create a thoroughly British fantastic folklore. I'm pretty sure the guys at Bungie had a similar goal--in addition to their seven step plan to world domination*.

The game's setting is inspired by the fatalism of Norse, Celtic, and Germanic myth. It's set in a world without elves, where the dwarves are surly tinkerers rather than axe-swinging braggarts, and where evil wins fifty percent of the time. Literally. See, in the Myth setting, time is on a cycle of Light and Dark, and each rules for a thousand years before falling to the opposing order (or disorder, as the case may be). And each time civilization sways, it is conquered by a Leveller--a spirit that is a champion of order and justice to end every age of Dark, or a malign destroyer to end every age of Light. It's very Norse and gloriously stoic, as the stories plod through grim humor, violent heroism, and constant sacrifice. And the voice actor, the James Schneider, who introduces the missions captures this perfectly. Listen to his Old World brogue and seasoned ramblings at the Myth journals website--simply click on the sound bar to the right to enjoy quality, intriguing story-telling and tingling tension--that is Myth, baby.

I'll go on about the setting more in later posts as I share bits of my ongoing GURPS Myth campaign, but for now, I'll share a comparison. One of these things is not like the other...

This one's MINE!

The first image is the starting map used in Myth: The Fallen Lords. The second image is my RPG campaign map, shown at one-third of its maximum size to maintain a certain geographic mystique for my players. I've added something like two hundred towns, settlements, rivers, lakes, highways and other fine details to the setting--and you know what? I'm still working on this bad boy, too.

I'm a sick, sick nerd.

*No, really. Seven steps and Bungie will rule the world, provided we aren't first destroyed as part of a demonstration of Christopher Johnson's righteous wrath. Hurry, Bungie, hurry!

Don't Be That Gal: Painting-Pisser

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.

It has been alleged that I have a blog somewhere on the inter-web. A too-long-untouched blog. I find this report disturbing and completely true. I mean, gorram it, a month?

Oh well, there's an impressive backlog of article ideas and stubs waiting in the wings, so hopefully I'll be able to nudge towards my original goal of one hundred posts in the first year of my blog. Unfortunately, some of the once-topical posts will be a little outdated, but they still make great fodder for the Nerdery.

Speaking of which, there was an article from last month that qualifies for a Don't Be That Guy post with a healthy helping of 'what-the-frak!?' on the side. A woman named Carmen Tisch walked into the Clyfford Still art museum in Colorado, punched an offending piece of art, dropped her pants to rub her flank against it, and finally shared some...'water' with the exhibit.

No, really.

This is so easy I'm not even going to really make fun of Ms. Tisch, who supposedly has a history of alcoholism and driving while inebriated. She also had an armed robbery charge that was later dismissed against her. If her behavior in the Still exhibit is a typical intimidation tactic for her, I'd wonder if her charisma is what got the charges dropped. In any case, I'm not going to attack this peach. She's a winner, and I don't think you need convincing on this point.

Instead I want to understand this. What drives this kind of behavior, in any state of mind? First, let's look at the victim of the inablution, "1957-J-No. 2":

I must say, I don't appreciate modern art. This painting impresses me even less than Chicago's "Cloud Gate," and that's saying a lot.

Given the context of the Tisch event, my eye is drawn to the lemonade-stain on the right edge of the piece. Could this be some sort of dark prophecy, foreshadowing 54 years ago the ignominious fate that would befall this noble canvas? Perhaps Still is a much more modestly endowed American Rimbaldi, his prophetic art limited to un-classy reactions to his work. If that was the case, can we really hold poor Carmen Tisch responsible for her actions, or was she caught up in the holistic power of Still's transcendent genius? Was she an offender, or merely unhinged by the realization that as she was looking into the departed Still's painting, he was staring back at her from the 1950s...

Or, perhaps with the appropriate prescription of beer goggles, this painting looks like a public toilet. That might draw the sequence of Tisch's actions into better focus, if we imagine her bleary logic. "Ugh, I hate it when the person before you doesn't flush," she bemoans, striking the lavatory. She claws, looking for a handle, before making her seat of the artwork and relieving herself. "Ahh, that's better, now I can go outside and enjoy the art exhibit...Why is everyone looking at me? I hate it when people make eye contact in the bathroom."

Carmen Tisch: trans-temporal victim of eldritch art or beer-addled misunderstanding? Eh, don't be that gal in either case.

Happy Nerd Year: 2012

As we move into the new year, we're often bombarded with vain nostalgia for the past year and cacophonous pledges to accomplish this or that in the coming annum. In the interest of actually posting a somewhat timely topical article, I wanted to post something about the coming year. But, rather than add to the din of New Year wishes, here's a tribute to Nerd Year 2012--a preview of movies, games, and other nerd bread-and-butter coming up in the next dozen months.

Movies of 2012
John Carter of Mars
Coming out March 9, 2012
This is a classic piece of pulp-era nerdery, based on a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is a sci-fantasy epic about a Civil War veteran who finds himself transported to a brutal, dying Mars--dubbed Barsoom by the Martians. Once there, John Carter finds that he's imbued with terrific strength on this other world, and he quickly becomes a sensational hero to the disparate tribes of Martians. Despite being set on Mars and featuring a few pieces of shiny that the uninitiated might mistake for technology, the Barsoom series is a fantasy series of eleven books that spans a couple generations of characters in a romantic, flesh-baring vision of Mars as a paradise slipping into a desert. The film adaptation is supposed to be based on A Princess of Mars, and--while a few changes have obviously been made--the previews so far look very promising for this to be a faithful translation to screen. The cast features some strong, seasoned actors in key roles to anchor the film--Dominic West, James Purefoy, and Willem Dafoe--while some standout young actors play the leads. If nothing else, John Carter of Mars will be a completely unique action-adventure experience, with spectacle and glitter amongst hard pulp-era muscle and excitement.

Battleship
Coming out May 18, 2012
This film, if you can take the fickle opinions of internet personalities seriously (which you can't), signals the downfall and low-point of western culture. Forget about Mamma Mia, the Clue movie, or the whole debacle that is the SyFy channel: basing an action special effects movie on the Battleship board game is the death knell of western culture. 2012, indeed.

Or, you know what, I could admit that I'm excited to see this movie. It'll probably be bad, predictable, and justifiably panned as a franchise-exploitation flick. But you know what? Battleship can use some cross-market franchising--Hasbro basically tanked the awesome Battleship Galaxies board game before it was even released, and that was the first notable product in this line for years. So who cares if there's a rushed crappy video game based on the movie, or lunch boxes, or plastic alien masks that croak "you sunk my battleship"? The movie will be starring Liam Neeson, feature yet another set of aliens in giant spaceships covered with oil refinery greebles, and the latest trailers show boarding actions and alien power armor. That's cool. It also looks like it wants to be a US Navy promotion vehicle, with a lot of first act glamor shots and steel-jawed squids making Nelsonian calls. This, too, I'm thrilled about. And, if more people can be a little less concerned about the negative hype the movie's getting, I bet the theaters will be populated by entertained popcorn-munchers.

The Hobbit
Coming out December 14, 2012
This is the big one: true nerd bread. Seriously. After a little period of production limbo, The Hobbit is nearly out, and with Peter Jackson directing once more. With a full-length trailer out, you can get a glimpse of everything any real nerd needs to get fully pumped: all of the original actors reprising their roles, with the marvelous Martin Freeman playing the young Bilbo Baggins; thrilling visuals; the combination of humor and dark adventure particular to The Hobbit; singing. That's right, the singing excites a real fan of Tolkien's premier work. A central narrative and immersive element of Middle Earth, songs are a colorful cultural thread of ancient sensibility throughout the books--especially The Hobbit. The latest trailer shows the dwarves singing about the Lonely Mountain and seems to show clips of what can only be the "Crack the dishes and chip the plates" song, too. Provided they include the warg-riding goblins singing "Fifteen birds in five fir trees" I will be over the moon. Singing orcs are just plain cool. On the one level, it's important to illustrate that orcs have a culture and social independence of their own--they're not just mindless antagonists, they have an oral history and social joy of their own. On the second level, you know you're in trouble when orcs start to sing about killing you.

Between the fidelity apparent in the previews, the return of the established masters of The Lord of the Rings, and the elegant shift in tone to a story that starts out much lighter and transitions into dark foreshadowing, The Hobbit is going to be the perfect way to end 2012.

Games of 2012
Mass Effect 3
Coming out March 6, 2012
I've already touched upon my enthusiasm for the Mass Effect series in previous posts, so you should know by now that I'm waiting with bated breath for the concluding chapter in Shepard's struggle to save the galaxy. Bioware has already announced that Mass Effect 3 is going to have multiplayer content, melee abilities, and vertical level design. That's great news, and I can't wait to hear more, but I really want to see if they include any of my hit list for Mass Effect 3.

Aliens: Colonial Marines
Coming out spring 2012
Over the past 26 years, James Cameron's movie Aliens has maintained its status as the best and most popular of the Alien tetralogy. This is probably at least partly owing to the pubescent bad-ass bliss embodied by the Colonial Marines in the action flick. Hudson, Hicks, Apone and the rest of them may fold like a deck of cards when the space-carnivores start tearing into their squad, but the look, the feel, the tech, and the swagger of these space marines are still some of the highlights of the whole setting for a lot of fans. Who cares if they're just a facile vehicle to set up a poorly justified anti-Vietnam symbol with absolutely no logistical probability whatsoever, right? Well, with Aliens: Colonial Marines, fans of the movie are finally getting the game they've wanted for the past quarter century. An immediate sequel to James Cameron's film, Aliens: Colonial Marines puts players inside the head of troopers investigating the fate of Hadley's Hope on LV-426. Unlike any franchise game before this, however, this game strives to capture the small-scale tactics and gadget-fun that has thus far eluded gamers. If the much-vaunted 'Alamo moments' of the game are done well, I know what game I'll be playing on a regular basis every time I watch the sci-fi classic.

XCOM
Coming out March 6, 2012
In the early 90s, a computer game series strove to give gamers a complete tactical and strategic experience as they defended the planet against mass UFO invasion. It was called X-COM and had five installments from 1993 to 2001. Players controlled individual squads in small-scale conflicts, fighting aliens in house-to-house combat, and then, between missions, spent their time coordinating research and investigation into the alien threat on a global scale. It offered a tremendous amount of variability and choice to players, delivering a stylish combination of gameplay experiences that is lacking in the contemporary gaming landscape. The imminent remake, simply titled XCOM, is going to revive the spirit of the game while still tweaking the core formula: players will assume the role of a 1950s-style man-in-black investigating early extraterrestrial incursions, all from a first-person perspective. The developers promise that investigation, team tactics, and research will still be major factors involving gameplay, so hopefully developer 2K Marin will be able to bring fire to sci-fi tactical gaming after an 11 year absence for the series.

Blog posts of 2012
Dumbasscience
There's a few Dumbasscience posts stewing in the Nerdery's to-do pot. I've got several old issues of Popular Science magazine to harvest for great examples of bad ideas getting good money. There's the whole Pluto planet re-definition debacle to rave about--it shouldn't be a surprise that I've got a lot to say about that one. There's even a film to go along with the Pluto post. There's another movie that will be reviewed in concert with a Dumbasscience post: Fathead. And since 2012 will doubtless have plenty of new bad ideas being proposed, there will be even more developments in this category later on.

Nerd Bread and Butter
There's still a good number of nerd cornerstones to be covered with Nerd Bread articles--the fantasy and science fiction genres, for two to start. Analyses of the three game media are also going to get articles: board, video, and miniatures games. After that, there's a whole world of Nerd Butter to go through while I'm at it--including a rant about The Lord of the Rings at some point, a selection of exemplary comics, and a few for requisite pieces of modern science fiction, too.

And more...
Rants on the nature of nerdery, superheroes, and more GURPS action are all going to get served up by the handfuls. I'll be posting a few RPG freebies that should be of general use, some more Nerd pics, and maybe I'll finish the GURPS Centurion thread sometime in the coming months. I'm sure there a few idiots waiting to explode in the new year, so expect a "Don't be that Guy" article or two in 2012, too.



So that's a preview of Nerd Year 2012 for you. Enjoy, and keep following. Filmatleven

GM Tips: GMing 101

GM Tips: I've presented articles extolling the role-playing game as a great past-time that is an intelligent, imaginative, and creative way to spend your time and money. It's a growing hobby that has become much more popular since the formative days of 1979, but there's still a huge hurdle to getting involved: the GM. 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 I shoulder the burden of the Game Master.

As the year ends, the crush to get a few more blog posts finished mounts. Will the stress of publishing three (or more!) articles in one week make my head explode in a viscous explosive aneurism of productive overload? Only time will tell.

This article has been stewing for a while, and I'm quite ashamed to admit it. It's been promised to a young friend of mine for several months now. Well, reminiscing about early RPG experiences and then distilling them into productive advice has been an invigorating and frustrating process. I hope these tips, meant for brand new GMs especially, will help other nerds elsewhere pool their collective imaginations even more harmoniously due to their elegant wisdom.

Either that, or at least you'll get a better idea of how I personally harangue my players into serving my RPG plots.

The task of leading a group of RPG nerds as Game Master is a daunting one. As I mentioned in my Nerd Bread post about RPGs, the GM has to be outgoing, coordinated, extremely well abreast of the rules and plots of the game, and really has to do all of this at a pace that keeps his players entertained. But, while there are numerous responsibilities to being a GM, I find that most new GMs (myself included, once upon a spaceship) neglect to realize that they only need to be responsible for a few key elements of the game at a time. Below I have four manageable areas that are pretty easy to address and go a long way towards setting the foundation for a long, successful, and fun RPG campaign.

Know your RPG system.
This bit might be easy to overlook, especially when you only know a single RPG system, but it is important if you're a first-time GM or an old beardy fellow like myself with a dozen systems on the shelf and another dozen on the computer. The key to knowing your system is knowing the features of your chosen rules set. This is different from simply knowing the rules. This is about enlightened awareness, not empirical knowledge of your game's book. Your system of choice might have rules for survival in the wilderness, but you really should know if they work well if those rules might come up in play. Knowing what does and doesn't work in your system--or how certain things work--keeps gameplay smooth and well-coordinated.

For instance, when playing a game of the latest edition of Gamma World, I keep in mind that gameplay is supposed to be tough, fast, and fun. So I cut loose on my tendency to have overblown plots, well-developed antagonists, and hyper-detailed combat. Players might have a poorly placed botch result in the death of one or more PC, but in a system where character creation is just a couple of die rolls, that makes it fun and quick to get back into the game.

In a GURPS game, on the other hand, I keep in mind that the system is all about detail and drama. There's a tendency for combat to bog down if you don't manage it properly, as there's a large number of great-but-overwhelming options for players. So when I use the full combat rules, I use the NPCs to drive player actions and lead them in how to fight. I might emphasize that an NPC is getting desperate and using Fatigue to make rapid attacks to help nudge players towards matching their frenzy, etc. But in any case, I try to keep GURPS combats shorter than most other RPGs when you look at it turn-for-turn, and instead emphasize the heavy cost of those intense, short sequences of violence.

When I first started to really GM games, it was to the sweet western tune of the Serenity RPG, which uses the Cortex system by Margaret Weis Productions. It's a fun, cinematic system that really dials in the dynamics of the TV show that gives players the ability to spend plot points to modify dice rolls or even spontaneously add plot twists to the story. At first I led this as I did other games I'd played in the past (notably Dungeons & Dragons 3.5), and that was an okay start. But when I started to properly direct the plot point dynamic by giving players unfair challenges that forced out-of-the-box solutions, that created some fun moments that my players still reminisce about nearly seven years later. Conversely, my early attempts to learn and memorize the nitty-gritty paraphernalia of the rulebook met with failure and frustration--remembering a lot of the fringe rules off-hand is nowhere near as important as mastering the system's core dynamic.

In any case, the habit I have formed for my own games is this: obsess over learning and refining the game's rules right until a session starts, and then stop. Once the game starts, I try to forget about the stack of rulebooks on my gaming shelf--it's just my players, our story, and my rules. Anywhere from twenty to fifty percent of all the judgments I make in a game are off the cuff, and while they're informed by the rules I read doggedly in my free-time, I try not to obsess over an abstract sense of whether I made the 'correct' call or not. I'm the GM; all my judgment calls are correct. Except when they're not.

"...remembering a lot of the fringe rules off-hand is nowhere near as important as mastering the system's core dynamic."

Know your setting.

Knowing your setting is all about having the principles of the fictional universe well-established, even if the canon itself is hidden. It's a key to good fiction and to good role-playing. This doesn't mean you need to know every little detail about the farmer's outhouse in that little hamlet on your world map--it means you know why things work the way they do. That way when your players ask you an unexpected question--like how many strawberries they can buy for the party with ten shillings, or if they could hit an enemy boarding shuttle with the armored underside of an unarmed transport--you can come up with a reasonable, consistent answer even if the rules are coming out of your keester.

And this ties in to preparation. Preparation is good, and if you are thinking about the world and campaign as a whole, I don't think anything is wasted. That said, if you've got a game coming up and you've only put in 30 minutes of work into the upcoming session, don't panic. Don't panic. Just play the game, and let player decisions and curiosity fill out what you didn't plan. Besides, the average group of players will probably destroy your plans about one hour into the session anyways, so no need to stress over a little ad libbing. A lot of times when you find yourself making spontaneous GM calls in the moment you'll find that you make the game feel even more responsive to player choices and consequences, and that's the heart of role-playing in the end.

And another note on knowing your system, which I'll expound upon in later posts: change stuff. Make house-rules, redesign character sheets, cut and paste your own GM screen, and do anything else that makes the game more intuitive for you. Just because you're playing with professionally-made materials doesn't mean they best fit your gaming style or preferences--nerd up and make it fit.

"...it means you know why things work the way they do."

Know your players.

No matter how well you do as a GM, you need your players. Even if you have a totally antagonistic play-style where the players huddle together and say, "oh sh1t, Benz got Trow nao, we're hozed"* you still need the players to enjoy the session if you want them to bother coming back. And if they come to game expecting a well-balanced combat-heavy experience and you instead deal a dramatic plot with high-minded social interactions, they will cry "OMG, hackz."**

So know what your players are expecting, and make sure you give them a good idea of what you have in store for them--in story terms, in content, in pacing, and in game mechanics. A number of GMs out there even go so far as to make prospectuses while planning out a new campaign, distribute it to interested players, and gather feedback before the first session even begins. That's a little overboard, but if you don't do something similar in an informal manner, at least, you're asking for trouble.

In describing the story to your players, let them know what stories inspire you, but also what specific elements inspire you. Saying you like The Lord of the Rings isn't as helpful as explaining you love the details of the journey, managing supplies, and crossing diverse terrain that is emphasized more in the book than the movies. Also be sure to give your players an idea of the content you'll be including in the story. A general movie rating is helpful, especially if you go by category: "PG language with R-rated violence" for instance. In my grittier campaigns, I like to plum the depths of my personal knowledge of anatomy when describing violence, and that's not something you should generally spring on unsuspecting players in my experience. Pacing is an after-thought for a lot of campaigns, but if you have unusual pacing in your games you need to be aware of it. I think most RPG players expect 1.75 fight scenes per session: two in an ordinary session, with one large boss fight every four or so sessions that takes up the majority of a night's game. My current campaign so far has had about .5 fight scenes per session: we might have two or three sessions pass without combat altogether, and then have one adventure dominated by a single fight scene or a couple of brief, violent ones. The pacing is sometimes dictated by the game mechanics and your own interpretations of rules, which is why it's important you spell that out to players ahead of time, especially if they have their own copy of the rules.

I'm good friends with the members of my core gaming group, so I've been lucky on these counts. Before starting our current game, for instance, we had a couple of nights where we just hung out, talked about the setting and their character ideas, and watched movies that I explained were inspiring to the composition of the campaign. Our first RPG together, however, was a more special case, and it helped me learn the lessons described above. Being a Serenity campaign, we already had a few of the elements of story, pacing, and content laid out for us, and since the Serenity RPG rules had just been released, I thought that was taken care of as well. Note that uncertain qualifier. The inaugural game night began with the players assuming a mix of ship crew and prisoners on a penal transport ship that struck disaster while under-weigh. When I described the grisly scene of one crewman who'd suffered explosive decompression, I realized that--while the women players' looks were tremendously rewarding--I probably should've warned them. Eh, tough cookies. Later in their adventures, the players balked at the prospect of buying food and fuel for their ship--issues that are normally dire but still glossed over in the movie and television series--when I prompted them to do so. And, even though the rules were designed for the setting, I still needed to house-rule after-market modifications to spaceships, specific strength limits, and the running rate of slaves on Whitefall. All lessons learned.

*Computer-gamer language, personally associated with the worst habits of RPG players.
**Hackz: Petulant players will usually attribute unexpected or unjustified defeat to being the victim of aggressive cheating through game-hacking.

"Even if you have a totally antagonistic play-style... you still need the players to enjoy the session if you want them to bother coming back."

Know the atmosphere.

GMing the right atmosphere is that little something extra that--when done right--can make a game session truly special. Good atmosphere--and being aware of it--can be the difference between a game of fantasy epic goodness and a night of combat-guessing-games. You can make atmosphere through vocabulary, voice, sounds, sights or even food. Vocabulary is one of the fundamental ways of creating atmosphere, but it is more often a pitfall for bad RPG atmosphere, because you and the players are improvising and it is therefore easy to say something ridiculous. For instance, in a medieval European setting (or any of the countless fantasy iterations thereof) your average town guardsman should never be heard to say, "You've gotta be frickin' kiddin' me!" no matter how apropos it may be. If you can manage a passable accent to fit a character, do so, but even if you're lousy at accents, a good GM changes his voice to match distinct characters if only to differentiate them from the dozens of speaking roles he will assume.

Sounds are my favorite tools in crafting a good gaming atmosphere. I now have nearly 9 hours of music in my iTunes Myth RPG playlist, and I've even split up the list into music appropriate for general mood, action sequences, tragic moments, or scary scenes. With the click of a button, I can queue up a good theme to supplement a grand speech or a disturbing dirge to set my players on edge in a dark cavern. I also have a couple dozen tracks of ambient sound effects--rainfall, campfires, marketplace noises, and battle clatter--that I pull up whenever players spend much time in a given setting. Sure, it requires a bit more preparation, focus, and coordination to play composer for your RPG, but it makes the emotions of your game run a bit higher.

Food can also create or interfere with atmosphere. As someone who personally doesn't snack, I don't usually choose to provide snacks in game. Fortunately for my players, my wife and one of the other wives who plays with us are big into bringing or making snacks for everyone. But crunching into a bag of Doritos when the player-characters are marshaling for grand battle can really tank an atmosphere as well, so I try to make sure every session has some low-key time that works for snacking. That manages the disruption of food on gaming atmosphere, but food can help improve gaming atmosphere, too. You can eat food that, if not the actual food  eaten in your setting, invokes the same mood you're trying to establish. For an RPG session that coincided with my birthday in real-life and a winter holiday in our Myth game's timeline, for instance, we ate a meal that would be typical of citizens in the setting: coney and civey (rabbit stew) and Italian panforte for dessert, two entrees that date back to medieval times. It was a good meal, and made for a very focused gaming experience.

"Good atmosphere--and being aware of it--can be the difference between a game of fantasy epic goodness and a night of combat-guessing-games."

So there you go, GMing 101. Just remember: know your system, know your setting, know your players, and know your atmosphere. These are good principles for the preparation and execution of your games, and they span GMs of all rules sets and abilities. Next set of GM tips will probably provide some more concrete examples of how to make your game your own.

Movie Web Monday: Bob Hoskins

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)

In a major break with recent blog policy, I'm posting two days in a row. And today's article, like many of the posts that will be following, is one that I've been sitting on half-finished for a while. Believe me, the movie web stretches far and wide, so don't make the mistake of thinking that the chain of succession stalled in the gap. This week, we have the inimitable Bob Hoskins in three movies where he plays three engaging villains that each have a plot that involves assuming a sort of distorted father role in protagonists' lives.

Bob Hoskins: Correctamundo

Movie: Enemy at the Gates (own it)

The intro to Enemy at the Gates is a marvelous juxtaposition of savagery. We begin with Joseph Fiennes' narration that quickly sums up the stakes of the battle, remarking that the fate of the world hinges on Stalingrad. (There are few places in World War Two history where such a statement could be supported, but I think it's fair to say that the siege of Stalingrad is one such linchpin.) Then we get to see the brutal, cruel, and apathetic machinery the Soviet Union employed to desperately wage this stage of the war. Men are shipped to the front lines with virtually no supplies in crowded train cars that superficially resemble the popular depiction of Nazi internment cars. Only half of the soldiers are equipped with basic weaponry. They are launched on suicidal wave-attack formations, and then shot by their own officers if they retreat without orders--orders which never come. It's a grim conflation of values from the average World War Two movies that makes the Nazi and Soviet belligerents feel more interchangeable and ambiguous.

And then we get Bob Hoskins as Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. You first meet him as he gives a Soviet commander a pistol to kill himself for failing to hold the line, and then you revel in his snapping badger of a speech to the remaining officers of Stalingrad's defense. With Hoskins behind the characterization, Khruschev is both wryly funny and deadly--deadly deadly--serious. Plumbing the officers and commissars for suggestions, he listens to a handful of nervous party-line suggestions, all of which fall into the category of 'shoot those who don't fall into line'. When Joseph Fiennes as Commisar Danilov suggests that the Soviet political officers actually try to find good examples, heroes, for the beleaguered defenders to emulate, the Soviet pit-bull creeps up to the beanstalk Danilov and asks in a Brillo-pad-tender voice:

It's such a great, fun little moment, but still played completely straight thanks to the subtle depth of Bob Hoskins in this role. There's sinister anticipation, intimate anxiety, and sadistic humor all commingled in one perfect vignette. This deep introduction colors his later scenes as Khrushchev ingratiates himself as a bullish father-figure in Vassili's growth as a hero of the people, adding an engaging level of tension from another Soviet source in the second act of the film.

Movie: Hook (own it)

Steven Spielberg's Hook is one of the defining pieces of cinema that my generation devoured at a young age. A modern adult-centric sequel to the classic Peter Pan story, Hook follows the mid-life adventures of failed father Peter Pan as he gets dragged back to Neverland. At the bottom end of the intended audience's age, I went through junior high hanging out with kids who'd chant "Rufio! Rufio! Ru! Fi! Oh!" at large events, kids who earnestly worked on their crow, and otherwise enjoyed Hook as one of the few fantasy films accessible to kids in the early nineties. Part of the elegant power of this film--like many of Spielberg's enduring works--lies in the strength of the four principal characters: Robin Williams as Peter Pan, Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell, Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook, and Bob Hoskins weighing in as the most enjoyable iteration of Smee ever--by far. By liberating the consummate goon from the mindless affirmative support Smee has always embodied, Hoskins' Smee was still mired in comical stupidity, but the actor also made him engagingly charismatic and vaguely devious at the same time. The marvelously unique minion's character is wonderfully encapsulated when he and Hook brainstorm how to get poetic, meaningful vengeance on Peter Pan. With a ding of a bell, Smee announces his own wicked plot with:

With Hook condescendingly correcting his henchman's verbiage, Smee nonetheless outlines a plan to use Pan's children to gain thorough revenge on Peter Pan--a plan that Hook clearly would not have developed on his own. Smee being a productive part of Prosthetic's crew is not just a novel approach, but it is so dynamically and enjoyably developed throughout the film that Hoskins stands shoulder to shoulder with Hoffman as the eponymous villain--even stealing a few scenes. Add to that the charismatic manner in which Smee barks back and forth with the rest of the pirates in the film, and you get a sense that Hoskins' Smee is the real power behind the Jolly Roger's tiller in Hook.

Movie: Unleashed (own it)

Unleashed is the most violent saccharine movie you're ever likely to see. It's a film about a quiet, child-like martial arts prodigy raised to be a human attack dog for a British loan shark, and it sits on the action chops of star Jet Li and director Louis Leterrier as well as on the acting chops of Bob Hoskins and Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman plays a saintly, patient, blind piano-tuner named Sam, who stands opposite the man holding the main character's leash: 'Uncle' Bart, played by Bob Hoskins. The juxtaposition of the sweet and the dangerous in this movie cannot be overemphasized--just taking a selection of moments from the movie's three acts illustrates this. Act one includes a scene where a man is killed outright when he's punched repeatedly in the windpipe. The second act has the main character learn about ice cream and his first brain-freeze with a cute girl, and the third act involves our hero tossing two bad guys at once by their junk.

That's right, I said it. I'll just give you a moment to let that sink in.

As with the other two movies, Bob Hoskins plays a character who is interesting and deep even in his most profoundly iniquitous moments. Unlike Khrushchev or Smee, however, Uncle Bart is absolutely vile and it's really only the marvelous realization of the actor that makes his loathsome character bearable on screen. He's a torturous loan shark, involved in blackmail and prostitution, murder, and he's a methodically cruel slave master to the main character Danny. And yet he plays the right moments off with a coy smile and understatement that make the audience actually enjoy the human diaper stain's contribution to the story. A prime example is when Bart is asked how he managed to turn a human being into a mindless fighting machine. His reply: "It's like my saint of a mum used to say..."

Look at that coy smile. Out of context, you might try slapping congenial as a label on that mug, but he's using that old wives' proverb to euphemise the systematic dehumanization of a person. It's boggling to watch, and enjoyable in its powerfully disconcerting subtlety in a movie that is otherwise un-subtly painted in contrasting tones of blood red and shining gold.

Leave it to Hoskins to find that critical transitory element in such an inky black-hat character. And leave it to him to make him smarmy and funny and subtle even when the rest of his on-screen moments involve murder and beatings.

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

Christmas at the Nerdery

We have a saying at my parents' house: "Shut the frak up, Whitey, I'll update the blog when I get the chance!" Or something to that effect. And, even though it's the twenty-fifth of December, that saying still got a holiday iteration tonight. So here's a little added Christmas present for my readers: a post.

You should enjoy it, I made it myself.

There are a few Christmas movies that I have to watch every year: It's a Wonderful Life, sure. At least one version of the Christmas Carol, definitely. The muppet version is quite good, and who doesn't love Michael Cain? A Christmas Story, absolutely. As of today I have three shirts that referencing some of this movie's best scenes. Die Hard, one or two. Yippy-kay-ay-yay, my friend.

And then there's a National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Now, I'm no National Lampoon fan. Chevy Chase is usually fun, though, and this installment of the Griswolds' tetralogy is by far the best. One of the things that this movie captures about the holidays (in my experience, at least) better than any of the others listed above is the way the much vaunted season can be magical and mundane, infuriating and intimate, maddening and soothing, all in turn. Sometimes, it can be all those things at once. When I was a kid, some of favorite moments from the film were those with the sled, or the crazy old aunt and uncle, or the squirrel-chase through the home. Now, while those scenes still give me miles of entertainment, a new scene resonates with me more than any other. As a father, husband, and former bank employee who got the holiday hose while breaking his back, I love it when Chevy Chase' character, Clark, hits rock-bottom when he realizes that his boss pulled the financial rug out from under his Christmas plans:

"Hey! If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me, I have one. I'd like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight. I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here, with a big ribbon on his head, and I want to look him straight in the eye and I want to tell him what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is! Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?"

I love that sentiment, and there's a certain clever progression to the Litany of Insults (tm). First, we have the obvious two: cheap and lying. Then Clark moves on to rail against Mr. Shirley's worthlessness with no-good, rotten, and four-flushing. Four-flushing, by the way, comes from poker slang and means someone who operates as though they have a flush even though they only have four out of the five cards needed. Then we have three hyphenated terms for a vile person: low-life, snake-licking, and dirt-eating. Follow that up with two past-tense verbs that serve as adjectives of habitual problems associated with evil southern men--inbred and overstuffed--and you have the first break in Clark's three-iteration pattern. It's too bad, but considering Clark's stress at this point, you can forgive him. Ignorance stands alone thematically in the list, appropriately enough, and blood-sucking and dog-kissing are good hyphenates for inhuman behavior. That's followed by four terms of lacking--brainless, dickless, hopeless, and heartless--that attack his intelligence, forthrightness, potential, and sympathetic value. Then, as any good slander should evolve, Clark's rant closes with a string of aspersions on Mr. Shirley's appearance (fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed) and a general vessel with which to store all these epithets (sack of monkey shit). At the end, Clark is impressed with the effective power (it's really a well-constructed deconstruction of another human being) and the weight (it's also extremely embarrassing, well-done or not) of his words--hence the hallelujah and holy shit, respectively. And after something like that, anyone would need some headache relief.

Masterfully done, Mr. Griswold. And I'm sure anyone over a certain age knows the feeling. Even if you don't watch Christmas Vacation every year for the holiday spirit it exudes, I highly recommend this scene for anyone coping with bad bosses in the corporate world.

A few years ago--exactly when is neither important nor hard to figure out--I tossed together some alternate words to Jingle Bells. It's an ode to the exhilarating-yet-truly-unsatisfying commercial hunt, the frustration of gifting that irascible and sphinx-like loved one who has everything, and the thoroughly sensational brain-washing of pop entertainment. I can't think of many things nerdier and Christmas-oriented.

Unless, of course, you sing along. Out loud. That would be better, and much nerdier.

Dashing through the store on an all-night coffee binge,

down the aisles we roar, living on the fringe!

Cash registers ring, making people fight,

what war it is to shop and scream a last minute song tonight!

Elmo toys, Elmo toys,

they're all out of stock.

Maybe my kid will be a brat and I'll get him a rock.

Standing in the row, while I'm thinking of my Dad,

I should start to go, I'm making people mad!

But they don't know my pop--how tough that it has got--

they don't know on Christmas day he'd bought it and forgot!

War movies, war movies,

who stars in that one?

If it's obscure enough he won't have bought it Amazon.

Fighting with your son over what's appropriate,

you don't let him have fun, he just doesn't get it!

"'R' stands for Relative, 'PG' is Pretty Gay,

if you really loved me you'd give me Die Hard Christmas day!"

Star Wars Three, Star Wars Three,

you're not thirteen yet.

Why the heck did George Lucas make Star Wars so violent? 

Merry Christmas, nerds.

Interval Error: Integer greater than 30--Whatthefrak?!

Bah, this blog has not been updated in far, far too long. With only one blog update in October and none so far in November, I have well and truly earned a big kick in the Star Wars Essentials. Worse, I totally missed the opportunity to make a timely post for Armistice Day. Thanksgiving, too. And there are at least five or six partially done articles awaiting me in my Blogger queue. Really unacceptable.

Now I could blame the fact that most of the past month and a half has been going through the painful transition of losing one job, searching for another, and getting settled into a new job--as this is my fourth week in a completely new, exciting field. And truly, time flies when you're waiting on a paycheck. Except when it doesn't. Concurrently, I could blame my laxity on my eight-month son--I'm sure he's been draining my batteries. Nerd dads can always blame their kids, right? Audumla and I are beginning to look for a house, too, and are getting into property-hunting frenzy over one piece of real estate we'd like to make our own Jotunheim in particular. It's not easy, let me tell you. Plus, I've been feeling ill, and I haven't had much time at home.

Also...also...also...

Eh, I'm a nerd. You know the truth. I've been playing around:

GMing my GURPS campaign with my game-serfs players. I've recently added a friend to our group, and the next session should see a sixth player joining our clutch of nerds. The game itself is on the edge of the slippery slope towards epic conflict, and as such I might start putting summaries of our sessions on the blog here in the future. I'd say the near future, but who the heck knows? Not you guys reading at home, that's for sure. In the meantime, I'll give you a snippet of where each of the player characters is in their personal development. Ten Green Gem Vine, warrior-monk of the emperor's guard, is moving towards becoming a bit more of a diplomatic sage and less of a combat troll--not necessarily because we've had like 3 session dry-spells without any combat. He's also investing in his teenage acolyte's sword-fighting skills. Vera Wealwa, the falconer huntress, has had to all but give up on her primary livelihood whilst in the capital city and is instead living on housekeeping skills--ignominy most foul! Keagan Na Anyon, the blowhard blacksmith, has recently had his foot shot off by a dwarven hand gonne--thankfully, the Heron Guard should be able to mend the wound and reattach the foot. Should. The beggar known only as Crow continues to operate on his own terms, and spent most of First Day celebration sparring with other Provincial ex-pats. The mysterious temptress Danlyra has revealed her last name is Filorin--a noble house from the eastern kingdom of Gower--and is metaphorically showing some ankle of her secretive past.

Playing the long-neglected Fallout: New Vegas. After trying--and failing, FAILING*--to get all of Deus Ex: Human Revolution's achievements in 2.6 playthroughs, I decided to move onto an older game that had been sitting unfinished on my game shelf for far too long. That's the newest Fallout game, Fallout: New Vegas. It's a fun improvement on Fallout 3's awesome system, and there's no inferior point of comparison in graphics, scale of sandbox, depth of story, or richness of challenges between the two games. It was especially fun to be playing a game with a proper economy and a huge list of purchasable equipment after Deus Ex's lackluster inventory system and paltry gear selection. Also, there's no being forced to shoot tied-down women in the face, so that's another way that Fallout was a refreshing change of pace from Deus Ex. Powering through about 100 hours of gameplay, I was able to beat one of the DLC (downloadable content for you old folks and jocks) quests and get about halfway through the game's main plot. It's expansive, fun, and engrossing. I can't wait to go back to New Vegas, but for now I've been waylaid by the newest pretty thing...

Since Armistice Day, playing Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. This one I've been waiting on for a while now, and the wife and I even schlepped out to the nearest GameStop for a midnight release of the game. And we bought the huge special edition game guide, which clocks in at about 700 pages--with two bookmark ribbons. Two! It's made by Bethesda, the same geniuses who made Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Unlike those previous three games--all of which were based on the same utilitarian game engine--Skyrim is based on a new game engine that makes everything prettier, more crisp, and a lot more dynamic. The Scandinavian-themed setting is full of cloud-choked, snow-capped mountains that you can freely explore, and the characters are detailed to a new, fabulous degree that helps to make everyone appear distinct even amongst members of their own race. There's a huge bevy of quests that is almost overwhelming for completionists like myself. It's been a fun, engaging little not-so-little derailment in my personal life.

Reviving my wargame juices. I played role-playing games at a young age, but it was the wargame Warhammer 40,000 that first really got me into a lot of the games and hobbies I play today. After many years of being a willing pawn in Games Workshop's soulless nerd farm, I'm no longer a true fan of their products. I've even divested myself of my first army (space marines, go figure) via eBay over the silent interim. But I still have hundreds of minis and find the occasional need to purchase other companies' minis to represent RPG characters or to flesh out some other wargame system. One such system that I'm finally starting to get around to playing after owning for over a year is Two Hour Wargames' All Things Zombie. Now, Two Hour Wargames is a small game company that makes rules sets but not miniatures. I like companies like this, because if they don't make rules tailored to their own miniatures it means I can use my own vast stable of models, and these sorts of rules sets tend to be more inclusive because of their generic nature. The Two Hour Wargames rules sets also have the unique advantage of being playable competitively, cooperatively, or even solo. That's a huge bonus for me, and I've gotten to play a more involved cooperative game in the past couple of weeks that has helped to cement my enthusiasm for this system. Expect to read more about it in the future. I've also fallen in love with a generic space battles game that does a great job of simulating Battlestar Galactica fleet action. Expect to hear more about it--Colonial Fleet Battles--in the coming weeks as well.

Netflix. Darn you, Netflix. What days I have had at home when one of the above distractions haven't grabbed my free time by the ruge have inevitably been lost to the lure of the Netflix Instant Watch. At the click of a few buttons, I can spam a day watching Frasier or Malcolm in the Middle episodes back-to-back-to-back, watching a half season or more in one sitting. Its insidious convenience means that I'll watch crap movies not worth a complete viewing (Season of the Witch, why would you do that to Ron Perlman?!) in the hopes of finding that unknown gem you didn't know you were missing out on (Ironclad, you scratch my siege-warfare itch). On the bright side, there's a lot of fodder for future blog posts, but it's certainly no help in meeting a personal deadline.



In conclusion: I'm still here. The blog will still be getting updated--more regularly, I assure you. A perfect storm of life hiccups and nerd traps have momentarily pulled me away from the keyboard, but I will keep updating, and I will expand the breadth and scope of the Nerdery.

Filmateleven.

*Insert angry, impotent fist-shaking here. Shake harder, boy!