Author Archives: Andy

“Say it again or I’ll break your other wrist”: thoughts on 24

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Over the last several months, Michele and I have gotten hooked on the TV show 24. We’re on the last disc of season 4; at this point, I believe that I’ve seen enough of the show to offer the following observations:

  • This show features more “red-shirted ensigns” than all the Star Trek series combined. Whenever Federal Agent Jack Bauer heads off on a mission and decides to bring with him the hitherto-unknown Agent McGivens, you can be sure that Agent McGivens’ sole purpose is to take the first bullet and thus warn Jack that the bad guys are present.
  • At any given time, approximately 45% of the staff at Counter-Terrorist Unit headquarters (where Jack works) is in the direct employ of the bad guys. Next time there’s a terrorist threat, the most effective possible response would be for CTU to immediately arrest all of its own employees and start questioning them. Eventually, one of the many traitors will spill the beans and save Jack precious hours’ worth of skulking around Los Angeles hunting terrorists.
  • Are you romantically involved with Jack Bauer? Are you related to him? Are you his boss or a coworker? Perhaps you dated him in high school, or competed against him at a spelling bee in the fifth grade? I’m sorry to tell you this, but: for the rest of your (short) life, you and everybody you know will be routinely kidnapped, shot, stabbed, held for ransom, blackmailed, beaten, chased, tortured and killed by Jack’s innumerable enemies. (And sometimes by Jack.)
  • CTU is utterly incapable of defending anything from anyone. About every other episode, the following exchange takes place at CTU headquarters:

    Jack: Where’s Kim? You said you’d keep her safe while I was out in the field! Tell me where Kim is or I’ll break your arm!
    Coworker: Take it easy, Jack. She’s totally safe. She’s at the Incredibly Secure Safehouse, and I sent Agents McGivens and VanNeuwenHeisen with her. They’re pros, Jack, you know that.
    Jack [looking relieved]: OK. Thanks.

    What we, the audience, can glean from this conversation is: Agents McGivens and VanNeuwenHeisen are already dead, the Safehouse has been quite thoroughly ransacked, and Kim is once again in the hands of the terrorists. That is, assuming she even got to the safehouse, which brings me to my next observation:

  • If you are traveling to or from CTU headquarters, there is a 75% chance that your vehicle will be ambushed and you will be kidnapped. Whenever somebody says something like “Kim? Oh, she’s on her way back to CTU,” you may assume that her car has already been ambushed and she is once again in the hands of the terrorists.
  • Terrorists: have you captured Agent Jack Bauer? Have you beaten him around a bit, handcuffed him to a pipe somewhere in your hidden base, and left him there while you attend to more pressing matters? My friend, I hate to tell you this, but he has already escaped, acquired heavy weaponry, killed most of your minions, transmitted the location of your base to CTU, called in an airstrike and a SWAT team, and is right now taking aim at you from his hiding place in the ventilation shaft directly above your head.
  • The one sentence you really don’t want to hear from Jack: “You don’t have any more important information, do you?”
  • And last but not least, a final message to would-be terrorists: Jack Bauer is in Los Angeles. Do yourself a favor and find another city upon which to unleash your dastardly schemes.

Jack Bauer, we love you… and we’re a little scared of you.

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Drawing moral lines in wargaming

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One of the first events I attended at Origins this summer was a small roundtable discussing the topic of ethics in gaming. How should one approach dark, evil, or morally ambiguous themes in a roleplaying game? Of the three forum participants, I recognized two as having written game material that would have, back in the Old Days of gaming, sent Jack Chick into an apoplectic frenzy; so naturally I was interested.

It was, indeed, an intriguing discussion that showed me a few new ways to think about the topic. While I’m not usually one to explore Dark and Mature Themes in my roleplaying games (no matter how hard I try, my Call of Cthulhu games usually end up as pulpy, tongue-in-cheek affairs), it is heartening to see that behind the surface-level shock value of, say, a game supplement about satanism, there is an author who is fully aware of the ethical territory into which he’s ventured, and who is determined to handle the topic responsibly. Of course, not all game authors approach gray moral issues with such care, but I have renewed respect for those who do.

One of the most interesting points brought up during the discussion, however, was that ethical issues can crop up even in types of games we don’t normally think of as dark or controversial. One of the presenters–Ken Hite, I believe–pointed out that players can run into moral quandaries even in a area of gaming like historical wargames–a genre I’d generally perceived as so clinical in its approach to its subject matter as to leave little room for shades of gray. Hite mentioned a wargaming friend who refused to play the side of the Confederacy in any wargame (presumably because of its support for slavery, although I don’t think Hite specified). For this player, no matter how historical, detached, or neutral the game’s approach, taking on the role of the Confederacy was a moral line he was unwilling to cross.

Normally I might not have given this point much consideration. I enjoy historical strategy and wargames, but I’ve rarely thought of them as having an ethical edge–I’ve never seen anyone object to playing the Germans in Axis and Alies, and wargames that deal more closely with ethically-blurry conflicts (such as wargames about the Arab-Israeli wars or the German-Russian front in World War II) are careful to focus purely on the clash of military forces, avoiding the atrocities and war crimes that sometimes accompanied them.

All that to say, I’m not accustomed to viewing the hobby of wargaming as an activity with serious ethical elements. But the very next day at Origins, I was surprised to find myself catching a glimpse of that moral line–in Advanced Squad Leader, of all things. The final game I played in the small Origins ASL tournament was a scenario called “Mila 18”–depicting a Jewish revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. One person controls the poorly-armed but determined Jewish fighters, while the other player controls the SS troops sent into the Ghetto to crush the revolt by killing and rebels and “mopping up” the Ghetto’s buildings.

Now, I suspect that the Mila 18 scenario is intended as a salute to the bravery of the Jewish fighters who rose up to fight the Nazis against overwhelming odds. (It certainly isn’t any sort of glorification of the SS.) But it felt vaguely uncomfortable to control the German troops–and not just generic “German troops,” but a specific historical SS unit–sweeping through the Ghetto carrying out a mission that was evil by any objective standard.

Why did it make me uncomfortable? Under ordinary circumstances, I have no moral qualms about simulating historical military actions on the board of a wargame, however brutal those battles were in real life; but the looming shadow of the Holocaust cast this scenario in an entirely different light. Although I played out the scenario to the end (the Germans lost), I didn’t like pushing those little SS markers around on the gameboard. Does a scenario like Mila 18 cheapen the memory of the real-life sacrifice and murder that took place there–and if so, why does it prompt moral discomfort when a scenario about, say, the Normandy invasion does not? Or is this scenario an important, maybe even critical, reminder that no matter how far we try to distance ourselves from the real horror of the wars we clinically simulate, there remains a serious ethical element to wargaming?

In the end, it’s a game and a hobby, and I probably won’t lose sleep over it. But I think it’s healthy to periodically stop and consider where our ethical boundaries lie, even for something like gaming. And I’m always up for a good game of Advanced Squad Leader, but next time I think I’ll stick to more uplifting parts of the war–like the Eastern Front, or the Pacific War, or… ah, never mind.

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Open letter to the musicians of the world

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We interrupt this long gap of blog silence to bring you an important message.

Musicians of the world,

You know that super-secret hidden track you guys keep putting at the end of the last track on your CDs? Well, you may stop doing that now. It was last considered “cool” sometime around 1991. In 1991, it was a fun surprise (the first time) to be listening to a CD and come across a totally unexpected little treat at the very end of the last track. But these days, it loses some of its effect when we can see it coming from a mile away:


So if you’re looking to do something really unique and cool with your band’s newest album, try something fresh and different… like recording Satanic messages backwards on it, or something.

Sincerely,
A Music Fan

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You say paLADin, I say PALadin

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What is so hard to pronounce about the word “paladin”?

I do not exaggerate when I say that probably 50% of all people I’ve ever played D&D with pronounce it puh-LAD-in. I used to fanatically correct them, but now I don’t generally bother. What’s alarming is not that people pronounce it incorrectly; it’s that years of exposure to the incorrect pronunciation of the word is starting to finally get to me: in my most recent D&D game, I came this close to saying it myself.

Gaming has a bizarre sort of vocabulary, so I suppose it’s not too surprising that a lot of that vocabulary tends to get mispronounced. A few examples from my own storied gaming career:

  • for at least several years after I was first introduced to the term, I pronounced elite as “ee-light.”
  • I also pronounced melee as “mee-lee” for many, many years. In fact, I’ll be honest: I still don’t really know how to pronounce that word. I usually aim for a vaguely sophisticated, French-sounding “may-lay.”
  • one friend of mine (who is hopefully not reading this blog) consistently pronounced “salvo” as “slave-oh.” That’s not so much a mispronunciation as a complete misreading of the word. I never outright corrected him because I didn’t want him to lose face, but I did try to conspicuously use the word “salvo” in conversation (not the easiest task in the world) in an effort to correct him. To this day, I don’t know if it worked or not.
  • and of course, there’s the classic “My character is a level 5 halfling rouge.” That’s one I see spelled incorrectly all the time, although most people pronounce it properly in spoken dialogue.
  • (I won’t even get into “Cthulhu” and his ilk, because those are supposed to be unpronounceable.)

Any classic wordplay goofs that I’m missing?

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Remembering the dungeons of yesteryear

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This weekend I had a chance to do some old-school, first-edition, dungeon-crawling, goblin-hacking RPGing. The stuff of which the first RPGs were made back in the 70s, before games got angsty and introspective and narrative and all that.

I was actually a bit nervous about running an old-fashioned site-based dungeon crawl. The game we were playing (Castles and Crusades) is a great little system for doing old-school gaming, so I wasn’t too worried about that. But “dungeons” have never really been my forte as a GM. I appreciate the idea behind them, and I like the just-have-fun-and-don’t-ask-questions aspect of most dungeons. But as hard as I try, I have never really been able to silence the voice in the back of my mind that asks those nagging questions like “Why does this random dungeon exist out here in the countryside? What do the goblins eat and do during the 99% of the time when there aren’t adventurers hacking their way through the dungeon? How does it make sense that there’s a beholder in this room, and there’s a green slime in the next room over, and a room full of giant ants across the hall?”

But I did my best to ignore those pesky questions of “realism” and just ran the adventure as written (the module we played was “Dark Chateau” by Troll Lord Games). And it was a blast! Driving home after the game, I was so excited that our dungeon crawl had gone well that I started reminiscing about other dungeons that I’ve enjoyed over the course of my gaming career. I came up with four dungeons that stand out in my memory as being particularly fun and entertaining:

  • The ruined castle of Herubar Gular in the Trollshaws. This was from the sample adventure in the MERP rulebook, and I’ve run this adventure for just about every gaming group I’ve ever played with. This was a multi-level dungeon beneath a ruined castle–nothing too spectacular-sounding, but the real fun of this adventure was infiltrating the ruined castle to get to the dungeon. The castle layout allowed for some truly interesting tactical possibilities, and each of the groups I ran through this adventure came up with a different scheme (some successful, some not) for getting inside. As far as dungeons go, this one was pretty “realistic,” although there were some quirky monsters to encounter (a golem, a kraken, a few others) in addition to the usual orc patrols.
  • Undermountain: The Lost Level. (Incidentally, one of the inspirations for this blog’s name.) This was a single-level dungeon crawl designed to be fit into the Undermountain uber-dungeon, but I just ran it as a standalone dungeon. Fun layout, great monsters (including a pack of animated severed skeletal hands–creepy!); this dungeon had nothing truly innovative in it, but all the pieces just seemed to come together. Also, you know how most dungeons have one or two super-poweful magic items hidden away so securely that the party could only ever find them with the GM’s blatant help? Well, this was the one such dungeon where the party stumbled across the Awesome Magic Treasure on accident, and without any help whatsoever from me, the GM. Cool!
  • Nightmare Keep. Hoo boy, was this one ever epic. By far the highest-level adventure of any kind I’ve ever run (I think it was recommended for a party of 17th-20th level PCs), this 2nd-edition D&D mega-dungeon just about had it all. Because it was so high level, it featured all those insanely powerful monsters that you usually just read about in the Monster Manual but can’t actually use in your game due to their power level. I remember few details of this dungeon (and I’m sure I mangled reworked it heavily to fit my gaming group), but I recall something about an undead dragon turtle and a demi-lich. Good stuff, good stuff.
  • Forge of Fury. This was a lower-level dungeon published back when 3rd edition D&D was just coming out and they were trying to support it with a line of short adventure modules. We had a lot of fun with this dungeon, which involved a good mix of fighting and non-combat challenges–I remember an entertaining bit of diplomacy as the party tried to talk its way past a roper (a bizarre monster that was more powerful than the PCs). The final battle was against a young dragon, and was a tough fight for low-level adventurers; the PCs planned out their battle strategy very carefully beforehand, and it paid off when they were victorious. (I do recall that somebody failed a Dexterity roll and fell into a lake while wearing plate armor, though–I don’t remember how that worked out for them.)

Ah, nostalgia. I can’t say that these four dungeons were the best-designed or most brilliantly written ones available, but they stand out as some of the most fun old-school dungeon exploring I’ve ever run in an RPG. If you should happen upon one of them, pick it up, give it a run through and let me know if you had as much fun as I did. And watch out for the giant centipedes lurking in the room just down the hall–if you pass the gelatinous cube, you’ve gone too far.

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Back from Origins

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Well, I’m safely back from my road trip out to the Origins convention in Columbus. Much fun was had, much gaming was done, and much money was spent. I’ll post a few photos in a bit.

I had a great time. One of my main objectives (born of a trip to Gencon a few years back) was to spend less time wandering around gawking at stuff and more time playing games, and I feel that I succeeded. The vast majority of my time at Origins was spent in the “war room” playing Advanced Squad Leader. A few random thoughts on the Origins experience:

  • Say what you want about their unkempt appearance, fanatic devotion to trivial topics, and their tendency to dress up in skimpy costumes clearly designed for much different body types than their own, but I find that gamers tend to be a friendly and enthusiastic bunch. I’m not the most socially-outgoing person in the world, but I forced myself to interact a bit more with people at Origins, and almost without exception the people I talked to and gamed with were fun and interesting people.
  • I learned that when you play a single game for more than ten hours straight, you experience an emotional rollercoaster ride in which you alternate between wanting to never stop playing, and wanting to never even look at the game again. Sometimes you experience this addiction and revulsion at the same time.
  • The convention center at which Origins took place is very large. The “war room” in which I spent most of my time was geographically about as distant as possible from the parking garage where my car (and game equipment) were stored. That meant that every time I needed something from my car (more dice, the ASL rules, Mt. Dew) I had to make an epic hike across endless halls filled with gamers, up and down stairwells, through twisty winding passages to get there. (On the plus side, maybe that helped to burn off a few of those Mt. Dews.)
  • It was glorious to see people playing “monster wargames”–games so large that they require multiple tables to hold just the playing boards. I think the physically largest wargames I saw being played were a Europa match and some sort of massive Barbarossa campaign, the map for which occupied at least four tables.
  • That said, there were fewer wargamers at Origins than I expected. The ASL crowd there was a bit on the small side–that made for a fun day-long tournament, but if you came looking for some all-weekend-long ASL action, it was up to you to organize it yourself once the tournament ended. (Personally, I enjoyed the smaller crowd since it gave the event a more informal and personal feel.)
  • I’d originally planned to play as much Star Fleet Battles as ASL, but I ended up not even breaking out my SFB rulebook once. After the ASL tournament ended, I decided that my fragile mind simply couldn’t handle switching gears for a day of SFB.
  • Only once did I nearly fail my saving throw and plunge my family into bankruptcy with frivolous game purchases, and that was when I was briefly seized by a desire to purchase lots and lots of Warmachine miniatures. I snapped out of it a few minutes later, but it was a close call. I played a demo game of Warmachine with one of the company reps, then started thinking about how cool it would be to own dozens, hundreds, thousands of miniatures, enough to make my own invincible army… but that way lies madness. I fled the temptation.

There’s more to be said, but I suspect I’ve bored you enough for one afternoon. To sum things up, Origins was a lot of fun, and worth attending if you’re in the area. Certainly not as big an event as Gencon, but if you’re having fun playing games, that shouldn’t really matter much. And next year, if you should spot me at Origins huddled in a corner surrounded by boxes of newly-purchased miniatures, go ahead and put me out of my misery.

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Of MerpCon, and Middle-Earth memories

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Brace yourself for MerpCon! That’s right, a convention devoted to roleplaying in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (largely, but not exclusively, through Iron Crown’s vintage Middle Earth Role Playing game). This will be the second such convention, and this year it looks like Michael Martinez (a familiar name if you follow any Tolkien newsgroups or discussion forums) will be the guest of honor.

I won’t be going this year, but it’s nice to see that the convention is apparently enjoying some success. Things are pretty bleak these days as far as roleplaying in Middle-Earth goes–Decipher’s Lord of the Rings is on life support, Iron Crown has long since lost the Tolkien license, and most of the fan-created Tolkien games out there currently seem to be either outright abandoned or are lingering in perpetual half-finished limbo. Nevertheless there are some good fan-driven Tolkien gaming sites out there at which the faithful still gather.

Iron Crown’s MERP game holds a special place in my heart, for it was one of the first RPGs I played regularly; I got many years of enjoyable gaming out of that thin red rulebook. Critics today tend to scorn it for its complexity and the rather non-Tolkien-ish elements that crept into it from its roots in the Rolemaster game system, but I can say that no such critique ever even occured to me when I was playing and running regular games using it.

Well, I take that back. I probably did realize on some level that the humorous and extremely gruesome critical hit tables in MERP (and there were many, many such tables) did not exactly line up with Tolkien’s grand vision for Middle-Earth, but I was having too much fun to worry about it. So what if, in the novels, Aragorn never had to worry about getting his jawbone driven into his brain by a lucky orc flail to the face, or about the risk of permanent paralysis from a crushing blow to his spine? Let me tell you, it sure made for some mighty fine gaming…

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Spam of Warcraft

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I suppose it was inevitable. I checked my character’s mail in World of Warcraft this evening to find a few of these messages awaiting me:

Warcraft Spam

Wow! What a great deal. When an offer is this fantastic, it’s certainly understandable that one’s desire to share it with others would overwhelm one’s concern for their privacy.

(More seriously, I hope Blizzard puts a stop to these in-game spammers as quickly as possible.)

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