Ireland Trip - Day 2

Remember what I mentioned about Ireland being an ideal country for sleeping, if you find rain relaxing? The environment was so relaxing that I actually didn't get out of bed until about 5pm, by which time Eddie and Bethany were preparing for a trip back to the UCC campus, this time for a meeting of WARPS, the wargaming and role-playing group that would be putting on WARPCon over the weekend.

We arrived a little late after a quick dinner at an Irish Burger King to find a number of games already going on. Eddie, who is still something of a Magic fiend, quickly got into a match, while Bethany and I mingled a bit, and I got to meet a couple of the folks organizing the weekend's convention. We finished up playing a game of Ticket to Ride: Marklin -- Bethany, Eddie, myself, and a shy Irish fellow with a very serious tremor but who otherwise was bright and as amiable as his shyness allowed.

Back home again -- this time without a stop at a pub on the way. Back to sleep to prepare for another day.

Ireland Trip - Day 1

Bethany and her fiancee Eddie met me at the train station in Cork, and after a short bus ride, we ended up at their cozy condominium. They showed me the guest bedroom where I'd be sleeping, then gave me the chance to clean up a bit. I'd been awake at this point for about 23 hours consecutively, but with the chance to freshen up and the fact that the sun was still up (and I was told that the sun actually being visible is a rarity in Ireland, so I shouldn't waste it), I decided to head out with them for a brief walking tour of Cork City.

We ended up at a semi-enclosed market called the English Market, which reminded me very much of International Market Square back home, except with much more 'staples'; plenty of butchers, fishmongers, and vegetable sellers abounded, with only a few touristy-type shops that sold chocolates or other delicacies. My first purchase in Cork proper was a bottle of apple juice laced with blueberry juice, while Eddie picked up pork chops (more like steaks to my eyes), potatoes, and cabbage for that evening's dinner. We stopped briefly at Tesco (the only supermarket in Cork City) to pick up some more staples and snacks, then headed back home.

Dinner was simple and very tasty, and afterward I finally indulged in sleep. Turns out Ireland is an ideal country for sleep, if you find rain relaxing -- by the next morning, a steady drizzle was falling and I ended up sleeping well past noon. Eddie headed into work at about 2pm, and Bethany and I planned to meet him later at the college's Med-Ren group (basically a re-enactment/SCA type group). Bethany took me on a more tourist-oriented walk of Cork City, showing me some of the local architecture, and we stopped in a pub for a drink to rest and wait for the Med-Ren meeting.

Med-Ren basically consisted of a bunch of college folks learning how to wield medieval weaponry -- the spear was on particular display, but some dagger training was also available. I begged out, on the pretence that since I'd had a beer earlier, I shouldn't wield weapons while under the influence of alcohol, so instead I ended up spending much of the evening talking with an amazing Irish woman named Rosheen, who'd been a practicing archaeologist for the better part of two decades and had a seemingly inexhaustable store of tales about things that happened on various dig sites and expeditions, mostly in Scandinavia and Northern Europe. She joined us on another pub trip following the Med-Ren meeting and we ended up eating dinner there (having taken it out from a nearby fish-and-chips place) and talking until midnight.

Back home, back to sleep and the promise of another day.

Ireland trip - Day 0

If you've read the blog about my GenCon trips, you know that travel days can be just as eventful as vacation days. My recent trip to Ireland was no exception.

The plan started taking shape back in September, after it was finally clear that a long-promised raise was coming through which would allow me to afford the trip. Then it was simply a matter of booking the flight, applying for a passport, and waiting for the departure date to arrive. Which, eventually, it did.

I slept better than I'd expected to, rising early enough to do one last load of laundry containing the nightclothes I'd worn. Then Senior drove me to the airport -- arriving at 2:00 for a 4:00 flight, I'd finished checking my bags and passing through security in about fifteen minutes, I then discovered, sheepishly enough, that the place I needed to be to do currency exchange was back outside the security area.

The theme of the series of flights from Minneapolis to Dublin was 'early'. I was early to the airport, but karma repaid me by having my flight to Chicago land fifteen minutes early, and the flight from Chicago to Dublin not only left 10 minutes early (all ticketed passengers had checked in), but with a 70 mile-per-hour tailwind for much of the first half of the flight, we ended up landing in Dublin nearly an hour early.

How did I know we had a 70mph tailwind? Turns out international flights are cool. Aer Lingus, which I flew on, had monitors where the flight conditions flashed throughout the flight, interspersed with maps showing the GPS position of the plane. But it turns out, no matter how cool the flight is, international travel takes longer than it takes for the cool to wear off -- I am not at all looking forward to the flight homw.

Culture shock didn't really set in on arrival -- all airports pretty much look alike and are festooned with signs so that it's very difficult to lose your way. My problems began upon leaving the airport and looking for the bus that would take me to the Heuston train station. I didn't really get any sleep on the plane, and so had been up for about 20 hours consecutively at that point.

"I'm not really sure what to do," I told the driver as I climbed aboard the bus.

"First thing is, you pay me."

So I did. I had gotten 150 euro in Chicago, since the booth that did the currency exchange was convenient from the international terminal, but I wasn't yet prepared for a currency where everything below 5 euro was transacted in coins.

Riding through Dublin on a bus while sleep deprived, you get the idea that this is what would happen if some Brobdingnagian creature devoured all of human culture, then selectively vomited some of it back out over two square miles. Riding down a street with a mishmash of buildings of various sizes and colors, the bus would then turn right and drive down a stretch of two straight blocks of bed and breakfasts. Then a left turn and we were driving through a square surrounded by posh department stores. Another right, and we were driving past Trinity College and a bunch of ecumenical buildings well over a century old. It was vaguely phantasmagoric -- I almost expected at some point to see flames bursting from the roofs of tall towers like in 'Blade Runner'.

Arriving at the train station, I discovered I'd just missed a train and would need to wait an hour for the next one to leave, so I went looking for a "pub" that the person I was coming to see had said was in the station. It took me about five minutes to find it, as it was the only thing indoors in an otherwise open-air train station. It was called the Galway Hooker, and oddly enough, especially for someone now on 21 hours without sleep, it appeared to be run by Poles. The big Polish cook was waiting for me order at the breakfast buffet, but I recognized very little, and the little I did recognize made little sense. There were, for instance, beans that looked like pork and beans, but with no pork. (Turned out everything else was pork, though.) There was a pair of puck-like meat-looking things, something that looked like a boiled hot dog, a very oddly-shaped bacon-like thing that, if I'd had to guess, I'd have called a 'rasher', and a container of sautéed mushrooms. Last, and most confusing, was a bunch of deep-fried potato wedges, which I'd have thought were invented by Arby's rather than being part of a 'traditional' Irish breakfast. I let the old couple behind me go ahead while I puzzled out the offerings, and once it was my turn again, the cook took pity on me.

"Full breakfast?" he asked.

"Yes, please," I breathed out in thanks.

'Full breakfast' meant one of everything -- one each of the pucks (the darker one was 'black pudding' while the lighter was 'white pudding'), one hot dog (which was actually a lightly packed sausage), a rasher (and it was actually a rasher), a scoop of beans, a scoope of mushrooms, and the potato wedge in the middle of it all. And a fried egg and two slices of white toast. I ate it all, greedily, then relaxed for a few minutes before heading out to the train.

Trains in Ireland are astonishingly modern considering some other parts of the country. (I'd have this same weird feeling many times over the course of the trip, such as being shown a smart-chipped ATM/debit card used by pretty much all Irish banks, while walking to that bank on a cobblestone street following a patch first laid out in the Middle Ages.) They all have free Wi-Fi, and while it's not fact, it exists, which kept Sophie (my iPad) useful. I ended up sitting across the aisle from a girl who didn't look to be over 16, and who had an iPad mini and an Android smartphone, but who got off the train at Limerick with a bunch of other folks looking for all the world as though they were heading back to college. A beverage truck staffed by two attractive Polish girls rolled up and down the length of the train; I spent over 10 euro on snacks and beverages at least partly so that I had an excuse to keep talking to them.

The weirdest part of the Irish trains, though, was the restroom. Not because of the facilities - there was a commode, a sink, all the regular stuff - but because the restroom was circular, complete with a sliding door that was controlled with buttons and spoke to you to remind you to lock it.

Upon arriving in Cork, Bethany and her fiancee Eddie picked me up, and we all rode another bus back to their condo. About which, more later.

Top Ten Classic Rock Intros

OK, so I was in the process of putting together evidence to show just how much the presence of Monte Cook on the D&D Next design team was going to result in a cool-yet-unplayable game experience, when, shock of shocks, Cook announced he was leaving WotC due to differences of opinion with "the company".

Mind. Freaking. Blown.

The new lead designer appears to be Mike Mearls, the guy who put together the most punishing scenario in the Age of Worms adventure path, and while I still don't think D&D Next is going to end up being the Golden Apple of RPG gaming, I'm less worried that it'll be a giant gaming turd.

So moving on...

At about the same time, I was participating in a pub quiz, and during the music round one of my teammates responded to the opening of The Hollies's "Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress" with the comment, "Best rock song intro ever."

Really? I thought. That's the best we can do? So I've spent the last six months dutifully listening to KQRS and trying to put together a slightly more accurate accounting of best rock song intros.

Right away, of course, I ran into a definitional problem. What constitutes an 'intro'? Well, it's the part before they start singing, isn't it? (Forgive the rhetorical flourishes -- I've been watching a lot of Zero Punctuation lately.)

So does that mean the single chord that opens The Beatles's "Hard Day's Night" or Elton John's "Rocket Man" counts as an intro? Sure, why not.

OK, then what about "Crazy Train", which opens with Ozzy Osborne shouting "All aboard!" and cackling maniacally? Well, maybe.

And how about songs where there isn't any singing, like the Edgar Winter Group's "Frankenstein"? Where does the intro end and the song begin there?

Well, OK, clearly we need some ground rules here:

1) The song must have vocals.

This avoids the whole existential 'where does the intro end and the song begin' problem referenced above.

2) The start of the vocals indicates the end of the intro, unless such vocal consists of what is now termed a 'rock utterance'. The 'rock utterance' is any vocalization like 'hmmm', 'yeah', 'ooh', or the like which is basically just an excuse to treat the singer's voice like just another instrument. (For examples, see about 2/3rds of the intros to the songs on Aerosmith's "Big Ones". Steven Tyler loves him some rock utterances.)

Now I fully admit that someone could put together a list of the top ten rock intros that violate one of my two rules above, and that some of the songs on that list would be objectively better than some of the songs on my list. When that alternate list happens, I'll worry about responding to it, because for now, I've got my own list to do.

10) Bon Jovi, "Dead or Alive"

Right off the bat we start off with controversy -- most folks would probably recommend "Livin' On A Prayer" as a better rock opening. However, starting the list off with this song lets me begin explaining the concept of 'style points'.

There's nothing specifically wrong with "Livin' On A Prayer", but it is fundamentally very similar to many other rock intros -- I could probably just have gone with Autograph's "Turn Up the Radio" as number 1 and saved myself a lot of research time -- but uniqueness counts. So too does the idea that the purpose of the intro is to introduce a song, and "Dead or Alive" definitely invokes the 'Old West' feel that the song will then mine for semiotic references. Plus, it's pretty damned cool -- if a rock intro makes you think, "Hey, something cool is about to happen," then it's done its job.

9) The Doobie Brothers, "China Grove"

On the other hand, sometimes just some kick-ass guitar riffs make for a great rock intro. This one definitely invokes 'fun time' as part of its intro promise, and the song doesn't disappoint.

One thing learned while looking for the YouTube reference for this sone -- the intro loses something significant when performed without the keyboard part.

8) Roy Orbison, "Oh, Pretty Woman"

The sabermetric study of baseball statistics (you were just waiting for me to sneak in that reference, weren't you?) has a concept called "era adjustments" -- the purpose of an era adjustment is to take into account that some times in baseball history were especially favorable to or hostile to a particular kind of player. Without era adjustments, we'd think all the great pitchers pitched in the Dead Ball Era and during the mid 1960s, and all the great hitters played during the 20s, 30s, and the Steroid Era.

You can do something similar with rock songs, particularly with respect to 'covers', where one band re-makes a song originally made famous by another band or, more rarely, where a band makes a song famous that wasn't originally famous when done by another band.

When making an era adjustment, it's a good idea to have a baseline in mind, and in our case, we're going to use Van Halen as the baseline. For instance, when Van Halen covered the song "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks, Ray Davies of the Kinks mentioned that he prefers the Van Halen cover to the original song, comparing the original to a prop plane and the cover to a jet fighter. (Later, when informed of this, Eddie Van Halen said he was flattered but that he preferred the original, saying "Ray, that prop stuff is the shit.")

On the other hand, Van Halen also did a cover of Roy Orbison's classic "Oh, Pretty Woman", and the result is pretty much what Van Halen called his cover of "You Really Got Me" -- modernized, but not really improved.

By the way, you will not find a Van Halen song on this list, not even the intro I judge the best of all Van Halen intros, "Hot For Teacher". I feel the same way about this as I feel about Jack Morris for the Hall of Fame -- someone has to serve as the equivalent of the 'you must be at least this tall to enter this ride' sign, and I have no problem with Morris being that guy among baseball pitchers or Van Halen being that band for rock intros.

7) KISS, "Detroit Rock City"

I'd be willing to bet that, if you surveyed people about what specific song they thought of when you said the words 'classic rock', this song would be in the top 5, and maybe the top song overall. It might not rate as my best rock intro, but it's arguably the ur-example of a classic rock intro.

6) Golden Earring, "Radar Love"

If a song was going to challenge #7 above as 'classic rock intro you think of when you hear the words 'classic rock'', this would be the one.

This song also does the 'intro to the intro' thing -- the opening guitar riffs don't seem to have a lot to do at first with the drum and bass riff that composes the actual intro to the song, but then you realize that the guitar riffs are meant to invoke 'the road' (which is why this sone also makes some great traveling music).

Golden Earring as a band is a really interesting story -- their two well-known US hits, "Radar Love" and "Twilight Zone" came out more than a decade apart, suggesting to some that this is a band that came within one song of being a 'one-hit wonder'. In fact, the band is Dutch and has had multiple hits on the Dutch charts in its over 50-year career.

"Twilight Zone" was disqualified from the list, of course, because of the spoken-word component of its own intro:

Somewhere in a lonely hotel room
There's a guy starting to realize
That eternal fate has turned its back on him.
It's two AM.

That would rate very highly on a follow-up list of 'best rock song intros with words'.

Finally, you haven't lived until you've done 'Radar Love' on Rock Band 2 as the drummer and gotten the 'great solo!' pop-up.

5) Joe Walsh, "Life's Been Good"

Joe Walsh's career as a rock star was predicated on his ability to build songs around awesome guitar riffs, and this song is no exception. Though other riffs might be more complex, this one is, in my opinion anyway, the most classic.

If I ever end up writing a TV series featuring a lottery winner as wandering private investigator, this song will be its theme.

4) The Police, "Synchronicity II"

Some might be offended by the inclusion of a synthesizer riff on my list, but two things:

First, the riff presages the 'weirdness' that is the dual-story in the song's lyrics (though I disagree that the 'something' that crawls up from the depths of a Scottish lake is actually Nessie -- even in the 70's it was presumed that Nessie was a dinosaur, not a humanoid creature).

Second, the traditional guitars and drums come in quickly enough, with what for the era, was a thrashing dance beat. (Kids these days probably consider it tame, though.)

In these ways, the intro to "Synchronicity II" definitely hits the style points meter, and hard.

3) The Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter"

Probably the most influential rock intro on this list, and in a depressingly ironic fashion -- the song itself is pretty clearly anti-war, given the lyrics, but it's best known for being used in Vietnam war-era depictions of the combat itself. It was used in the TV series "China Beach", and eventually found its way into the "Call of Duty" soundtrack. Ultimately it's all cash for the Stones, and the song is good enough to warrant being recognized by the current generation of gamers, but it's more than a bit sad that some folks who know the song only from gaming might not actually pick up that it's not really the song they might think it is.

2) Molly Hatchet, "Flirting With Disaster"

Take "Detroit Rock City" and add a fifth of Jack and you get this.

Another ironic twist, given the title and the chorus, is that the song is really just about the singer's ambiguous feelings about his musical career, not about any deep political or philosophical issue.

1) Supertramp, "Take the Long Way Home"

Style points. And it's my list.

Depressingly, Roger Hodgson (who is now billed as a singer-songwriter) does this song on his tours, but only with the piano part. Without the synth opening chord and especially the harmonica, the intro just isn't the same. The version linked above is a cover that nails the intro, but doesn't carry that energy through to the song. The original Supertramp version remains definitive.

A few other honorable mentions, more to show that I did my homework than anything else:

Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water"
Def Leppard, "Pour Some Sugar On Me"
Guns 'n' Roses, "Welcome to the Jungle"
Tom Petty, "Runnin' Down A Dream"
Night Ranger, "Sister Christian"

and of course, probably the best-known rock intro of all:

Led Zeppelin, "Stairway to Heaven"

Not Actually Why Fourth Edition Died

The problem with Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, arguably the biggest problem that any edition of D&D has ever faced, is that the people who were designing it didn’t know a goddamned thing about Design Space.
- Kris Hanson, "Why Fourth Edition Died"

A Pre-emptive Critique of D&D Next, part 2:

While pondering the next point in my own in-my-head series of essays on the coming D&D Fifth Edition and why I'm not looking forward to it, I ran across a pretty impressive essay by a Canadian game store owner named Kris Hanson. He argues persuasively, in both the linked essay above and a followup to it, that the failure of 4th Edition D&D was a failure of design, and specifically, a failure of design to do the sort of things that are routinely done in Magic: the Gathering, Wizards of the Coast's (WotC's) other major game product.

Hanson isn't saying that D&D needed to be more like Magic -- rather, he's arguing that the design function in D&D should be seen as much more like the design function in Magic, and that the D&D designers simply failed to mine their design for as much interesting stuff as the Magic designers have. I find the argument fascinating because, at heart, Hanson is arguing that 5th Edition should incorporate exactly what I think WotC will incorporate for 5th Edition, and is precisely why I think 5th Edition will fail. Specifically, I think this is one of the two pitfalls I talked about last time -- that the designers might fail to define the game sub-systems specifically enough to create a truly modular game.

Hanson is right about one thing -- Mark Rosewater, the head designer of Magic: the Gathering, talks a lot about Design Space. Specifically, he describes how Magic design can fill two basic and seemingly contradictory human needs -- familiarity and novelty -- by taking a familiar game mechanic and tweaking it in new and hopefully interesting ways. Hanson then goes on to list a bunch of things that D&D could have done in this 'design space' vein, had D&D designers been thinking like Magic designers:

The design space here is mind-boggling. Off the top of my head: a whole list of Encounter Powers that could be made better by giving up a Daily; Encounter Powers that take two full rounds to use; Daily Powers that change when in certain circumstances (underground, flying, in the sunlight, whatever); a list of At-Will powers you can give up using for the rest of the encounter to make way better; a list of At-Will powers that are as strong as Daily powers, but use up the character’s healing surges as a cost; Lifetime powers, powers that can only ever be used once, ever; uncontrollable powers that go off in certain circumstances, but the player has no control over them; come-back powers that allow you to do incredible things for the cost of an action point; counter-powers that allow a player to stop another player or NPC’s powers from going off as an immediate interrupt; mind-drain powers that steal another character’s powers for a turn, or treat that power as spent; dramatic powers that allow you to influence story events in subtle (or, for dailies, not-so-subtle ways)…

For starters, I'll point out that some of these 'design spaces' are actually being mined, but by module writers, not the D&D core designers -- for instance, I'm running a D&D Living Forgotten Realms adventure tomorrow morning that incorporates an 'uncontrollable' power for those who possess a specific story award from a previous module. The core problem with Hanson's thesis, though, is that D&D designers can't think like Magic designers, not always, and there are good reasons for this. Hanson himself already intuited one:

What the designers of D&D tried to do was create a homogenized environment in which none of the powers effectively broke the rules, and that’s really the wrong way to build a game that’s made out of a bunch of crazy powers.

If you have a game, like Magic or Pathfinder, where the game is about characters that have a bunch of crazy powers, then perhaps that kind of design perspective is desirable. (Although frankly, the ultimate 'characters that have a bunch of crazy powers' game has already been written, so why bother?)

I'd argue that 4th Edition D&D is a game about characters doing their jobs for the greater good, and as such I am absolutely convinced that the designers of 4th Edition D&D had a well-defined structure for all the game-mechanical sub-systems of their game. In some cases I know this because the designers told me so -- for instance, in the Player's Strategy Guide, there's a chart that lists the expected values of the game's core numbers (AC, attack bonus, etc.) by level. In other cases I can intuit this based on the choices that the designers made for some game sub-systems, and more specifically, the choices that the designers chose not to make.

Let's take feats, for example. Feats were first introduced in 3rd Edition D&D, and I can honestly say that the designers really had no idea what they were doing when they created the feat system:

• Can feats give you skill bonuses? Sure. (+2 to two specific skills [Alertness], +2 to any single skill [Skill Focus])
• Can feats give you saving throw bonuses? Sure (+2 to Fort, Reflex, or will, depending on which feat you take)
• Can feats change the way you interact with core game rules? Sure. (Blind-Fight changes the way you interact with the concealment rules, while Ambidexterity and Two-Weapon Fighting change the way you interact with the 'fighting with a weapon in each hand' rules)
• Can feats change the way your spells work? Sure. (Metamagic feats, which were an evolution of the AD&D spells that modified things like spell durations)
• Can feats allow you to do things other characters can't do? Sure. (Things like Spring Attack and Whirlwind Attack, which I think are specifically what Hanson, and many D&D players, is specifically thinking about when he talks about feats.)
• Can feats grant you class abilities?

It is specifically that last item that convinces me that the 3rd Edition designers really hadn't defined the concept of feats and were just using the idea as a 'catch-all' for cool concepts that didn't fit anywhere else. For example, your character's weapon proficiencies are determined by which class you take (fighters can use any weapon that isn't designated as 'exotic', while wizards have only a few specific proficiencies), or to a degree by which race you take (a hold-over from old-school D&D, where what are now races were once classes). By taking the proper Weapon Proficiency feat, you could represent the ability to use without penalty a weapon that your specific class or race wouldn't normally be able to use (such as a wizard wielding a two-handed sword). But the real kicker, in this respect, was Weapon Specialization.

In the 3.0 Player's Handbook, the list of fighter class abilities includes something called 'Weapon Specialization', which is an ability that fighters could gain at 4th level or later. But the actual ability was defined as a feat -- one that a fighter could take either with a fighter bonus feat, or by using one of his general character feats that he'd gain every third level. And because Weapon Specialization is a feat, it is listed in the feat list and described in the feat descriptions just like any other feat, even though only a fighter can take the feat. (This would eventually be 'fixed' in Pathfinder, when Paizo's designers realized that assuming that every fighter wanted to spend feats on Weapon Specialization, Weapon Focus, Weapon Mastery and the like was just silly and reconfigured all these abilities to be fighter class features.)

In 4th Edition, meanwhile, feats were much better defined. If you took a feat at a particular tier (heroic, paragon, epic), you knew what kind and size of bonus it should apply (+1 to attacks per tier, +2 feat bonus to skill checks per tier, etc.). Most important, if you had an idea for something cool, you could tell if it should be a feat at all, and if so, what kind of feat. If it was something that modified your ability to interact with the core game rules, it might be a feat if it was accessible to any character; if it represented a particular talent that a given race had for something, it would be a racial feat and be listed in a different feat list. If it represented a modification to an existing class feature, it would be a class feat and be listed in yet another area. If it allowed you to combine the abilities of two classes, it would be a multiclass feat, etc. And, if it didn't fall into any of these buckets, it wasn't a feat and you'd have to find somewhere else to put it -- perhaps make it a power and define it for certain classes or make it an advanced skill option.

It is this last thing -- the ability to say 'this cool thing does not belong in the feat list, we need to find where it does fit' -- that gives the game both structure and extensibility. Because feats do certain specific things and not other things, you can create a concept like 'themes' (a combination of what would otherwise be powers and class abilities) and discover that you haven't just created something that makes feats irrelevant or that is irrelevant when taking feats into account. (Contrast with the late 3rd edition concept of the 'skill trick', an idea which basically boils down to "these things look like feats but are too weak to be 'real' feats, so we'll make you pay skill points for them instead", except that any of them that simulate actual feats will both appear to be and actually be pointless when compared to an actual feat.)

Similarly for powers -- I've never seen anything that specifically defines how to construct a given power, but I'm convinced that there are at least ground rules if not a full design document for power creation. The rule would be something like this: an at-will power deals 1 die of damage and has some additional minor effect (applies a status condition until end-of-next-turn, can be used against a small number of additional targets, etc.). An encounter power of level X does Y dice of damage; subtract dice for each of the following that applies: it can be used as a close burst or close blast, it can affect multiple targets, it applies status conditions, it applies those conditions as 'save ends' rather than 'until end-of-next-turn', it has increased effect when used with a particular game-mechanical object or if used against an opponent which a particular keyword. The laundry list of 'design space' that Hanson lists seems superficially interesting, but without a clear analysis of the relative effectiveness of the various power options, all you're doing by providing such a list is giving players a chance to data-mine the powers list for min/max options -- the chance to figure out which ability gives the best positive punch for the smallest drawback. (And nowhere is this more sickeningly true than the munchkin-friendly 'merits and flaws' systems that Hanson seems to like, but I've learned to react to with the same level of revulsion as if I'd found a rat skeleton in my restaurant stew.)

However, there's an even bigger problem with Hanson's determination that D&D design needs to be more like Magic design, and it has to do with this comment from the original essay:

Understand that the only interesting powers in the whole of the game were those in the Player’s Handbook and those in the Player’s Handbook 3. The originals and the _only_ set of powers that were at all different or strange. One could argue for the powers from Essentials, but seriously, fuck one.

No, really, there's a reason that the Essentials powers (and to a degree other game elements) have such a different feel to them than the main powers, and though I hadn't considered it until I read Hanson's essay, I know believe that they were D&D's attempt to become more like Magic.

When Hanson thinks about Magic card design, he's thinking about the splashy cards that break the rules of the game -- the cool rares, in other words. But there are lots of cards in Magic, including a lot of cards that are deliberately bad. When I think of Magic design, though, I don't think of splashy rares -- I think of Volcanic Hammer and Shock, and what they mean.

You see, the very first printing of Magic: the Gathering included a card called Lightning Bolt. Later, the same company both designed and printed cards that were strictly worse cards than Lightning Bolt -- Volcanic Hammer did the same damage but cost more to cast, while Shock cost the same to cast but did less damage. Neither of the later cards had any mitigating condition that made them comparable to Lightning Bolt -- anybody looking at the three cards could easily see that Lightning Bolt was the best and would use it in preference to the others. Then why were the other cards even printed? Because you don't always get to use Lightning Bolt.

Magic: the Gathering has successfully promoted the idea of 'environments': specific groups of cards and card sets which can be 'legally' played. In theory this only applies to tournament play, but since the concept of an 'environment' also creates some sense of competitive balance, many casual players choose to abide by a particular set of environment rules as a way of limiting what cards they can expect to see out of their opponents' decks. At one extreme, an environment can consist of 'only the cards we open at the table during this event', while at the other extreme, an environment can be 'any Magic card ever printed by WotC in any format'.

While some chose to view Essentials as WotC's attempt to stealth-promote 'D&D 4.5' (I did at the time), a better analogy might well have been that WotC was trying to produce a 'D&D Standard' environment as opposed to the 'D&D Modern' of 4th Edition. This makes even more sense when you consider the character creation rules of the D&D Encounters program -- the characters for Encounters are meant to be created using the Essentials books (the 'core set' for D&D Standard), plus the most recent published book (the 'expansion set' for D&D Standard). The older 4th Edition books, and the books that were no longer the most current 'expansion' books could be used in 'D&D Modern', but not in 'D&D Standard', and some DMs might well say that the Essentials books weren't legal in his 'D&D Modern' environment (which helps explain why there are whole series of weapon-related and defense feats in Essentials that are strictly better than anything published in 'core 4E').

The problem with this is that many people playing D&D have been playing for as long or longer than they've been playing Magic, and the idea of separating D&D into 'environments' is silly to them -- in effect, all versions of D&D are 'Legacy' where anything published for an edition (and anything published for a previous edition, if it can be converted) is fair game.

In a sense, this makes the call to 'unify the editions' more sensible -- if the people buying and playing your game want to be able to use anything ever created as fuel for that game, then it would seem that an edition deliberately designed to allow for that would be a huge hit. But there's a peril in that, too, and it has to do with the other pitfall I pointed out in my first essay on the topic -- making things too specific that the modules have to be used in their entirety or not at all, limiting their appeal. More on that next time.

Fear and Loathing in the Free City of Greyhawk

A Pre-emptive Critique of D&D Next, part 1:

The next edition of the venerable Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game is coming, announced by its owners a few weeks ago. The name 'D&D Next' has adhered itself to this change like an opportunistic barnacle, all the better to avoid the negative connotations already associated with the phrase '5th Edition'.

It doesn't matter what you call it, though. I'm pretty unexcited about the new edition, despite all the current announcements meant to excite gamers just like me:

- We're uniting the editions!

This is a wonderfully emotional statement, meant to evoke positive feelings from people who've played and enjoyed D&D at any age. Whether you loved the original White Box, or the classic AD&D hardcovers, or edition 3.5, this rallying cry suggests that you'll find something in D&D Next to love.

Problem is, the entire idea of 'uniting the editions' is vague and undefined, despite World Famous Professional Game Designer Monte Cook's articles intended to explain just that. (Big piece of evidence in favor of my point: the final paragraph of the first of these pieces ends with the words, "A lot of sweeping generalizations? Sure.")

- We're having a two-year public playtest!

This one seems to me to be particularly cynical and ill-advised, though I'm pretty sure I know why it's in here.

4th edition D&D was polarizing -- there were many gamers who enjoyed playing 3rd edition D&D, had spend a fair amount of money and time purchasing and learning the various game sub-systems involved with that version of D&D, and didn't really see the need for change. Another chunk of gamers became vociferously upset at the changes made to the Forgotten Realms setting, a setting which isn't the oldest setting for D&D but is probably the best loved and certainly the best selling 'brand' D&D has.

During this transition, Paizo Publishing, who once had the rights to publish the long-running Dungeon and Dragon magazines, announced that they would be taking advantage of the Open Game License published alongside 3rd edition D&D to produce what they called the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, but what most of its devotees call 'D&D 3.75'. Paizo held a pretty visible (for D&D) year-long public playtest, where the core game materials were available for free download, before finally releasing the core game books as hardbacks. Pathfinder, surprisingly, is now selling very well -- in some circles, Pathfinder is seen as selling nearly as well as 4th edition D&D itself -- and this 'year-long public playtest' has thus entered gaming lore as one of the keys behind Pathfinder's success.

Ergo, if a year-long public playtest led to a good-selling game, a two-year-long public playtest should lead to an even better-selling game! Right? Right??

- We want you to be able to play the game the way you want!

Again, a wonderfully vague and positive marketing message, but in this case at least there's some small amount of crunch underlying the fluff -- the way that the folks at Wizards of the Coast (WotC) seem to think they'll deliver this 'you can play the game any way you want' experience is by providing a core game, plus lots of 'optional rules modules' that can be plugged into the core game or not based on player and DM taste.

I'm not sanguine about the odds of WotC's designers succeeding in this goal. It's a tough goal to begin with (ask anyone who has worked in a 'universal' role-playing system like GURPS or Savage Worlds), and WotC's decision to focus on player feedback will make what I consider the core element in creating such a modular system far more difficult to achieve.

One could argue that I should give WotC's designers more slack -- after all, they did successfully transition from AD&D to 3rd edition over a decade ago, and that was a monumental effort that changed much of the core game system. But the example I see as 'best transition to new modular game system' isn't D&D 3E, but rather the change from 3rd to 4th edition Champions back in 1989.

Iron Crown Enterprises owned a number of games loosely categorized under the name 'Hero System': Champions, Danger International, etc. Each setting had its own core rulebook, and while many of the concepts between games were similar, each game had enough unique elements that were difficult to translate to other Hero System games that it was hard to really justify the grouping of games as a single System. The Champions 4th edition design team chose to tackle this problem, and succeeded so well that 4th edition Champions became the most popular of the Hero (now HERO) System games, and despite over 20 years and two new editions, remains essentially unchanged from that 1989 first printing.

One of the team's great successes was the structure of their character abilities. Character abilities, in HERO, as in many other games, characters have characteristics, skills, powers, and what HERO calls 'talents'. While these different sets of abilities can interact, they are for the most part independent -- if you want better permanent characteristic attributes, you spend points on characteristics, but if you want temporary characteristic bonuses, you buy them as powers. If you want to represent your ability in a particular area of physical or intellectual activity, you buy ranks in the skill associated with that activity, but if you want an ability that represents a particular aptitude with a whole class of physical or intellectual activities, you buy a skill enhancer talent.

HERO developed a system by which character abilities were constrained based on the kind of ability under consideration, and then did its best to keep those constraints in place. One could argue that the places where Champions 4th edition were weakest were exactly those places where the character ability structure was blurred or started to break down: martial arts were defined as skills, even though their practical effect was to combine bonus combat damage and skill levels in such a way that they would have made more sense as powers, while 'special senses' (radar sense, x-ray vision, etc.) were defined as powers even though they were inexpensive and mostly non-combat related to the point where they would have made more sense as talents.

Where the system worked, and it worked in most places, it allowed a game master to say 'okay, we're playing '20s era gangsters -- no powers' or 'we're playing superheroes, everything is in play with a 300 point limit'. You can plug in and unplug different character ability elements without feeling that you need to micro-manage precisely what's legal and what isn't within each game element you're allowing. (Of course, you can still do that if you want to -- it's just not required prior to play.)

For D&D Next, though, there are two equally disastrous routes that could be followed, and it's not clear which of them the designers will take (or will be directed by Hasbro Corporate to take, if this is a project mandated from 'on high'):

The designers could fail to define the game sub-systems specifically enough to allow for a truly modular experience.

Or the game designers could define the sub-systems so parasitically that each module is usable only as a defined unit which has little to no interaction with other modules, limiting the modules' utility.

Next time - a more detailed discussion of these two pitfalls, including examples.

Shame, Rediscovered?

In that Burger King, Andy Boyle thought he was listening to the disintegration of a couple's marriage. He was really hearing the crumbling of his own ethics and self-restraint. We can't stand by and let an alliance between technology and poor judgement disintegrate all decency, and turn every human exchange into another tawdry and destructive episode on a never-ending social media highlight reel.
- Dave Pell, Gizmodo, "The Day Privacy Died"

Those who are accustomed to reading through this blog are aware that I'm not a great fan of Gizmodo. Articles like the one quoted above are one reason why.

Quick recap: the article describes a situation where a couple started arguing in a public place -- a Boston area Burger King restaurant, to be precise. What made this argument different is that someone else in the restaurant decided that the argument would make interesting fodder for his Twitter feed. He posted snippets of the argument, pictures of the couple, and even short bursts of video taken from his smartphone. And as will sometimes happen in this age of immediate gratification, the tweets went viral and the video of the argument was eventually broadcast on ABC News.

Mr. Pell is horrified at the injustice perpetrated here -- not by the arguing couple, mind you, who decided to impose their argument on everyone else in the restaurant, but by Andy Boyle, the guy who tweeted the argument. Why? Well, Mr. Pell has this odd idea that an argument between two people in a public place is, nevertheless, just between the two people arguing.

That's pretty spectacularly wrong, but Mr. Pell goes one better -- in trying to explain the distinction between 'celebrities', who Mr. Pell seems to believe ask for this kind of thing simply by virtue of being celebrities, and 'non-celebrities', Mr. Pell uses the example of Anthony Bourdain, who had a nude picture stolen from a hacked device and decided to 'get in front' of the issue by posting the picture to his own Twitter account. How does Mr. Pell equate the two?

The whole incident doesn't paint a pretty picture of the state of our often obsessive culture. But I'm sure it didn't surprise Bourdain. He's a celebrity. He chooses to be in the public eye. He expects to occasionally have to deal with a violation like this because he knows the rules of being a celebrity.

But if Andy Boyle's actions are an indication of a broader trend, we are entering the age of the unintended celebrity, where the new rules state that we all run the risks associated with fame without necessarily enjoying any of its benefits.

Get it? If Scarlett Johannsson's phone gets hacked and naked pictures of her start showing up on the Internet, well, that's just the rules of being a celebrity, and a fair price to pay for all those celebrity benefits. But when the police do things in public that would be embarrassing to be revealed to a wider audience, it's valid to invoke the laws of privacy to prevent that revelation from happening.

This is, of course, exactly the opposite of the way things should be. If your phone is hacked, whether you're a celebrity or not, that's wrong, and doing anything with the information you get is equally wrong. On the other hand, if you do something in public, you should be prepared for the 'public' that can be made aware of your action to be much more than just those folks within immediate earshot.

If anything, this episode awakens some small bit of hope for me that, perhaps, etiquette is not entirely dead yet.

Etiquette can be best described as a set of social expectations by which society agrees to abide. There is no formal punishment for violating the rules of etiquette, but the informal punishment is always to make the violation known and thus causing embarrassment and shame for the violator. Of course, 21st century America seemed to be 'the land shame forgot', which made etiquette and social politeness all but impossible to enforce. Without even this informal enforcement mechanism, there's no real drawback to being impolite or boorish...

...Unless your boorishness might get posted to the Internet. Perhaps the picture of your scrunched-up face will be the target of folks writing LOLcat captions for a week, or maybe your rant against Hispanic people who don't seem to want to learn English will become the new hot ringtone.

Is that a good enough reason to mind your manners? Perhaps instead of the day privacy died, this will be remembered as the day good manners were reborn.

Let's Talk Percentages

I am a college senior about to graduate completely debt free.
I pay for all of my living expences by working 30+ hours a week making barely above minimum wage.
I chose a moderately priced, in-state public university.
I started saving $ for school at age 17.
I got decent grades in high school & received 2 scholarships which cover 90% of my tuition.
I currently have a 3.8 GPA.
I live comfortably in a cheap apt, knowing I can't have everything I want.
I don't eat out every day, or even once a month.
I have no credit card, new car, iPad, or smart phone -- and I"m perfectly OK with that.
If I did have debt, I would not blame Wall St. or the government for my own bad decisions.
I live below my means to continue saving for the future.
I expect nothing to be handed to me, and will continue to work my @$$ off for everything I have.
That's how it's supposed to work.
I am NOT the 99%, and whether or not you are is YOUR decision.
- An anonymous image posted to Facebook

If the master's house caught on fire, the house negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would.
- Malcolm X

About a month ago, a group of people started camping out in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in New York City. Within days, others had joined them, and by the end of the first week, word had gotten out, mostly through social media, that this was the start of a civil protest: one that has come to be known as 'Occupy Wall Street'. The people there, and the people in similar 'occupy' movements that have sprung up around the U.S. and the world, identify with what they call 'the 99%', which is their way of dividing the world between those who work on Wall Street and make exorbitant amounts of money, and those who are basically having their money taken away by this '1%'.

You may think that's a deliberately provocative comment there, at the end of that last paragraph. It's not. I can back it up. But first, a bit more about the occupiers.

If nothing else, the occupiers have accomplished one amazing thing: they've shifted the tone of conversation in this country about the role of government in the national economy. Since 1980, the national conversation about the role of government has slowly shifted from how government can support those who need economic help, to about how government can get out of the business of providing help to anybody, but can help protect the money that extremely wealthy people already have. Case in point: in 2007, the government moved quickly to approve $700 billion in aid to beleaguered banks, with few strings attached and no effective oversight, and it turned out that many banks didn't actually need the money they were given, as evidenced by how quickly many of them paid the money back when it became politically unsatisfying for them to have it. Less than two years later, the House and Senate argued for months as to whether or not $40 billion was too much money to provide to extend unemployment benefits during a time of vast and increasing unemployment.

Now, well, the protesters have amazing public sympathy and support; according to one poll, New Yorkers are overwhelmingly supportive of the protest and the protesters right to assemble -- including a majority of self-identified Republicans.

A lot of people are fretting that the protests don't seem to have a point; the protesters need to make specific demands, they say, or at least get a logo. These people are missing the point.

Fundamentally, the protests channel two sources of moral power: the concept of civil disobedience, enunciated by Thoreau and glossed with non-violence by Gandhi, and the power of the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment and its promise that "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" should not be prohibited. Even more to the point, the occupiers are making a point simply by being where they are -- that government, originally constituted for the people and by the people, no longer truly serves the people, despite frequently engaging in rhetoric that suggests it still does. That's why government agencies are so loath to move against the occupiers, except when they break out of their civil disobedience zone and do something that can be, even in part, a justification for a crackdown. If, say, the New York Police Department moves in en masse and evicts the Occupy Wall Street crowd from Zuccotti Park, they're admitting that they're not protecting the right of the people to peaceably assemble -- they're protecting the privilege of those who work on Wall Street to not have to look out their windows and wonder what these teeming masses are 'really' up to.

In the process, a lot of interesting points get raised. For instance, more people have been arrested for Occupy Wall Street related activities, which harm nobody outside Zuccotti Park, than have been arrested for tanking the U.S. economy via fraud and misrepresentation.

Okay, second would-be provocative statement. Time to back this up.

Steve Eisman. John Paulson. Michael Burry. Jamie Mai and Charlie Ledley. These are the names of people who made a crap-ton of money during the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008 for a good reason: they all figured out that the exotic investments being cooked up by mortgage brokers were basically crap and bet heavily against them. Their story is told in "The Big Short," by Michael Lewis, a writer who probably expected a much bigger to-do to be made of this book than was made about "Moneyball", a book which was basically about using investment ideas in baseball. The point is, when the big banks lamented that nobody could have foreseen how the collateralized debt obligations and other alphabet soup investments they created were ultimately worthless, they're wrong -- very few outside the banks themselves knew, and even they didn't figure out the true extent of the problem until the big banks basically, as one, stopped letting them bet against the securities they'd been betting against.

The supreme irony of the anonymous Facebooker's image is that, despite her own assertion that working her ass off, not expecting handouts, and not blaming other people for her own bad decisions as 'how it should be', when the big banks realized they'd made bad decisions, they went straight to the government for a handout and blamed subprime mortgage holders for not realizing they were being sold magic beans and throwing them out the window. That's why I think of her, and others like her who are finding it cathartic to assert so-called 'traditional' values in the guise of not siding with 'the 99%' as house negroes -- they're taking up blankets and fighting the fire because, if the house burns down, they don't have anywhere to live. They like the system, because they see themselves as being able to participate in it, perhaps even one day rise above it. They believe in what used to be called The American Dream.

So here's my last point -- the difference between these house negroes and the actual 1%.

Most people believe that, if you've earned money -- by labor, by investment, by whatever legal means -- that money belongs to you.

The 1% believe that, if you have money and they can get it away from you -- by raiding your pension fund, by charging you exorbitant fees to get access to your own money in a bank or investment fund -- then it belongs to them. And they believe they can get all the money. And the 1% aren't just looking at the 99%s money; they're looking at all the money. Every member of the 1% wants every dollar that exists, and will stop at nothing to get it. If you still don't believe me, check out David Cay Johnston's book "Perfectly Legal", on how the super-rich game the tax system so that they pay less in taxes than you likely do.

That's why, even if you don't 'agree' with the 99%, you're in the 99%. Unless you're a selfish asshole.

Come On, Irene

Because the group is defined only by minimum standards, it places Herman in a group with players who are vastly superior to him, while eliminating those who are only a little bit behind him.

- Bill James, "Whatever Happened To The Hall of Fame?"

What’s easier to evaluate is how much coverage Hurricane Irene received in comparison with other hurricanes. By that standard, the coverage was quite proportionate to the amount of death and destruction that the storm caused.

- Nate Silver, fivethirtyeight.com

Hurricane Irene has come and gone, but the battle to determine if Irene was 'overhyped' is raging just fine, thank you. The battle has produced some unexpected soldiers on either side, perhaps none more surprising than fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver, who apparently felt the need to defend himself from 'overhyping' the storm (in an essay entitled "A New York Hurricane Could Be a Multibillion-Dollar Catastrophe") by writing an essay explaining "How Irene Lived Up to the Hype". Unfortunately, Silver's methodology doesn't live up to his rhetoric -- for a former baseball sabermetrician, Silver's analysis is stunningly shoddy and arguably supports the exact opposite of the argument he's making. Where does Silver go wrong?

1. The main metric for comparing 'hype' is largely irrelevant to the argument.

Silver correctly points out that, when comparing 'hype', one should compare apples to apples by comparing news coverage of Irene to that of other tropical storms. Unfortunately, he commits a rookie sabermetrician's mistake by finding a source of data for his comparison (NewsLibrary.com), and then crafting his model to match his data.

NewsLibrary.com is a searchable database of newspaper articles, with some magazine articles and television broadcast transcripts thrown in for good measure. It seems highly reputable. The problem, though, is that the main argument in favor of Irene being overhyped has nothing to do with how many times it was referenced in The Orlando Sentinel or Newsweek; it's the number of times someone glanced at a computer or smartphone and noticed that a story about Irene was the top news item on Yahoo!, or on Google Reader; and the number of times someone logged into Facebook to see a link in their News Feed to a story about Irene; and the number of times they checked Twitter to see #HurricaneIrene trending, often with links to the same news stories.

By ignoring blogs and other online sources of news, Silver missed a lot of chatter about Irene in his 'News Unit' metric (NewsLibrary.com doesn't reference Silver's own article, which appears only in the NY Times online blogs). By ignoring social media, Silver ignores the 'force multiplier' that Facebook and Twitter served to the stories that did exist, some in traditional media sources, and others online. And, given the nature of Google rankings and people's interest in passing along links, the stories that were visible were largely stories that were apocalyptic or frightening. (How many Facebook statuses did you see that read, "This guy doesn't think Irene will be all that dangerous, but I'm praying for the folks on the East Coast anyway!")

A counterargument that Silver could make would be that incorporating social media into the analysis would unfairly penalize Irene for occurring during a time of relative social media maturity; Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, two very damaging storms from 2008, came along when social media was still in its infancy, so to speak, while Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, two of the most damaging storms in US history, occurred just over a year after Facebook was launched and before Twitter even existed.

The counter to the counterargument, of course, is that this is precisely the point -- social media were a huge part of what made Irene so ubiquitous, and particularly stories about how apocalyptic Irene's approach to New York could or would be. Silver's 'News Units' deliberately underestimate the degree to which Irene was being 'talked about' based on its appearance in news sources.

If that's not enough, Silver's measure also makes Irene look less hyped than other storms in another dimension as well -- since the primary source for stories in NewsLibrary.com's database come from newspapers and magazines, and newspapers and magazines have been in decline throughout the entire period of Silver's analysis, there are fewer newspapers to carry stories about Irene than there were to carry stories about 1992s devastating Hurricane Andrew.

If one takes into account the fewer number of sources in Silver's source data from 2011 versus other periods, then compensates for the recent rise of social media, Irene's placement on Silver's list of 'most covered' hurricanes would clearly be higher than 10, possibly much, much higher. Keep that in mind; it'll become even more significant in the next point.

2. Silver commits a fallacy of comparison by putting Irene 'in a group' with more devastating storms, rather than comparing it to other storms of similar intensity.

This is where the James quote at the top of the essay comes in -- James is writing about a baseball player being considred for the Hall of Fame based on being compared to players who are much better than he is while other, similar players are left out of the comparison. Silver does something similar in his essay.

Though Silver provides a list of 20 hurricanes with 'most media coverage', he compares Irene only to the others in the top 10, of which Irene is #10. Silver freely admits that every other storm in the top 10 was more powerful than Irene (Category 3) at their strongest, and that only Hurricane Gilbert was weaker than Irene (Category 1) when it made its US landfall (though Gilbert had already done massive damage as a Category 5 hurricane in the Carribean). However, this analysis leaves off the storms below Irene on the list of media coverage. The next five:

- #15 Hurricane Fran

Was at its peak strength of Category 3 when it made landfall in North Carolina in 1996. Resulted in 27 deaths (22 direct) and over $3 billion in damage.

- #14 Hurricane Katrina

No introduction needed here - easily the most deadly and damaging tropical storm to hit the US. It was a Category 5 hurricane while just off the coast of Florida, and was Category 3 when it finally made landfall in Louisiana.

- #13 Hurricane Wilma

Another Category 5 hurricane in 2005, Wilma came after Katrina and surpassed it on the scale of hurricane intensity, becoming the most intense tropical storm ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. Wilma remained extremely powerful while tracking through the Atlantic Ocean, remaining a Category 3 hurricane while moving northward, but the only US land Wilma crossed was the Florida peninsula, limiting the damage it did in the US. (The Yucatan peninsula, however, was another matter.)

- #12 Hurricane Isabel

Another storm that reached Category 5 status, Isabel was the costliest and deadliest hurricane of 2003, making landfall in Virginia as a Category 2 hurricane. 16 deaths were directly attributable to the storm (another 35 were indirectly attributed), and it did about $3.6 billion in damage.

- #11 Hurricane Ike

A Category 4 hurricane that made landfall in Galveston, Texas as a Category 2 storm; with 103 direct deaths and nearly $30 billion of damage just in the United States.

For comparison, Irene is currently slated as having caused or contributed to 40 deaths and about $13 billion in damage. Keeping in mind, however, that both of these totals are provisional, and that the initial prediction in this case is likely to be exaggerated (Silver's own essay pegs Irene at $14 billion, but also points out that it's a provisional figure), given the propensity of those in the media to want to justify their reportage. (Compare the 9/11 attacks, which were originally estimated to have caused over 6700 deaths, but which have since been revised to fewer than 3000.)

So, given the likelihood of reducing the death and economic damage tolls from the hurricane, Irene (2.25 Silver News Units) belongs 'in a group' with Isabel (1.88 Silver News Units) and Fran (1.47 Silver News Units), not with Rita (3.13 Silver News Units) and Andrew (3.68 Silver News Units). Remembering that both Irene and Fran pre-date the social media era makes the comparison even more stark -- clearly Irene received far more 'news' coverage than was warranted by its size and damaging capability.

There's one more complaint I have about Silver's essay, but it's a bit nit-picky; Silver produces a list of 'normalized' U.S. economic damage figures for hurricanes by Category, then claims that, because Irene's current estimate exceeds Silver's 'normalized' Category 3 value of $12.7 billion, that Irene did damage "tantamount to a Category 3 hurricane". Silver, a practiced statistician, should be aware of the biases in his statement, given that Katrina was a Category 3 hurricane and its near $100 billion in damage provided a powerful 'long tail' to drive up the averages of all other Category 3 hurricanes in his study. That Irene did more damage than a typical Category 1 hurricane is due to its landfall -- most Category 1 hurricanes land in parts of the US that are accustomed to hurricanes and engineer appropriately. New Jersey, which saw just one Category 1 hurricane from 1900-1996, has much more property likely to become damaged, as they don't take such engineering specifics into account (and probably shouldn't, given the rarity of hurricane events there).

All told, Irene was a dangerous storm that received much more attention than an event of its strength and rarity warranted.

The Drysdale Test

In particular, I thought that since one has to argue, in my opinion, that Drysdale had a strong positive influence on pennant races, we should look carefully at Drysdale's performance in two categories:

1. Down the stretch (August 10 to the end of the season) in those years when the Dodgers had a chance to win, and

2. Against the one team the Dodgers most needed to beat in those same seasons.

That sound reasonable?

- Bill James, "Whatever Happened To the Hall of Fame?"

First off, fair warning to any of you who come here and don't care for baseball stuff. I'm about to write some baseball stuff.

The penultimate chapter of Bill James's book, "Whatever Happened To the Hall of Fame?" is entitled, simply, "Don Drysdale". The chapter opens with a section called The Case For Don Drysdale, and after reading it, if you have any interest in baseball at all, you're convinced that Don Drysdale belongs in the Hall of Fame. The next section is called The Case Against Don Drysdale, and after reading it, even if you've already read the first section, you are convinced that Don Drysdale doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame. James then breaks down the factual arguments of both sides, identifying which points have merit and which are just talking points, and still doesn't come to a conclusion.

He finally comes to a conclusion after going through the study noted in the quote at the top of this essay -- the idea being that, if Drysdale truly was a 'big game' pitcher who helped his team win pennants, then that would push the weight of the argument over to the side where Drysdale belongs in the Hall.

The closest comparison to Don Drysdale in today's Hall of Fame debates is starting pitcher Jack Morris. Morris has many advocates for the Hall who note that he was a famous, ace pitcher, known for his endurance and his performance in big games, specifically Game 7 of the 1991 World Series. Morris also has detractors who point out that the overall weight of Morris's career statistics, his ERA, his won-loss record, etcetera, simply don't carry the weight of a Hall of Fame career. Hall of Very Good? Absolutely. Just not one of the all-time greats.

It finally struck me that, since one of the arguments used by Morris's supporters was that he was a big-game pitcher who helped his teams to championships, that we could give Morris the Drysdale Test and see just how much of an impact he had on pennant races in his career.

For starters, it might surprise you to learn that in only eight of Morris's 18 seasons as a big-league pitcher did he pitch for a team that needed his help in making the post-season -- the 1984 Tigers won going away, and the other half of his career was spent pitching for clubs (mostly Tiger clubs) that didn't even make the playoffs. However, in the eight seasons where Morris's performance might have had an impact on the pennant chances of his club, here's how he did 'down the stretch' (from August 10 until the end of the season):

63 starts, 23 CG, 37-26, 2.95 ERA

That's pretty good, actually significantly better than his overall career rates. So you could argue that Morris did 'turn it up' down the stretch of a pennant race.

In games he pitched against the key opponent of his team's chase:

18 starts, 7 CG, 5-7, 3.48 ERA

The won-loss record isn't quite so good, but the ERA is still better than his career total. Note that I'm leaving out Morris's abysmal numbers in 1994 against the Chicago White Sox when it was pretty clear that he was done as a pitcher (Morris was 1-2 in 4 starts against Chicago with an ERA of exactly 9.00, giving up 23 ER in 23 innings) and didn't pitch after August 10 anyway.

Combining these two factors gives us what James calls the "purest of the pure"; the biggest games Jack Morris ever pitched, not counting the World Series. Because there were few of these games, I've expanded James's definition of 'key opponent' to any opponent with a chance to win the race. How did he do?

Sept 21, 1983 -

Morris started the first game of a doubleheader at home versus the Orioles with the Tigers trailing by 6.5 games. Though the pennant race odds weren't great, the Tigers and Orioles would face each other six times before the end of the season, including the doubleheader, so if the Tigers could sweep the table or at least win 5 of 6, they'd give Joe Altobelli's Orioles a run.

Morris gave up three in the top of the second in classic Earl Weaver style -- a leadoff homer by Eddie Murray, then a single sandwiched between three walks, the last forcing in a run. The Tiger offense wouldn't help out any against Mike Boddicker as Detroit would be shut out 6-0 en route to an Oriole sweep of the doubleheader.

Morris would get his 20th win of the season a week later in Baltimore, beating Scott McGregor 9-2, but by then the Orioles had already clinched at least a one-game playoff over both the Tigers and Yankees.

Morris 0-1, team 0-1

Oct 3, 1987 -

Morris took the mound on the second-to-last day of the season with the Tigers and Blue Jays tied in the divisional race. Morris pitched well, allowing just two runs in nine innings, but Mike Flanagan also pitched well for the Jays, matching Morris's mark through nine and even continuing through the eleventh inning. Sparky Anderson went with his closer, Mike Henneman, in the tenth and watched him pitch a no-hit three innings. Jimy Williams, however, went with Jeff Musselman in the twelfth rather than closer Tom Henke, and Musselman allowed two singles and a walk to load the bases with one out. Williams still didn’t turn to his closer, choosing to go with Mark Eichhorn, who gave up the game-winning hit.

Morris certainly didn’t lose the game for Detroit, though his was one of a number of factors leading to the 12th inning Detroit win.

Morris 0-1, team 1-1

August 27, 1988

Morris entered the game and pitched an excellent 7 innings as his Tigers built up a 5-1 lead. Then in the eighth, Morris seemed to lose it – two walks, two wild pitches, and two singles led to two Brewer runs and Morris was pulled in favor of Willie Hernandez with two out to end the inning. Morris wouldn’t get the win, though, as Mike Henneman would blow the save in the 9th by allowing the Brewers to tie the score. The Brew Crew would eventually win in the bottom of the 12th on a Rob Deer home run.

The Tiger bullpen pitched very poorly in support of Morris, but even so, had Hernandez come in at the top of the 8th rather than after Morris had already allowed two runs, it’s possible the Tigers could still have won the game.

Morris 0-1, team 1-2

September 5, 1988

Toronto was surging, having won four straight coming in, and Detroit was staggering, having lost four straight. If a ‘stopper’ was ever needed to save the pennant race, it was here.

Morris, however was flat, giving up three in the second en route to an 8-inning, 11-hit, 5-walk performance that his offense bailed him out of by tying the score in the bottom of the 6th. Willie Hernandez would pitch the 9th and 10th, and give up the game-winner on an Ernie Whitt solo homer.

Morris 0-1, team 1-3

Morris would not face Boston, Detroit’s key opponent, during the 1988 stretch run.

By 1991, Morris had gone to the Twins as a free agent. In 1991, the only game Morris pitched against the White Sox was the first game of a doubleheader on October 3, after the Twins had already clinched the division. Morris was pulled by manager Tom Kelly after 5 innings, probably to protect his availability for the playoffs. The Twins lost the game when closer Rick Aguilera blew the save opportunity in the 10th inning, yet another extra-inning loss in a Morris start.

This one doesn't really count.

August 27, 1992

Signed by the Blue Jays in the off-season, Morris’s Toronto club was just four games ahead of the Brewers when Morris faced off against Jamie Navarro. Morris pitched an outstanding 7 innings, while Navarro made a mistake to Toronto DH Dave Winfield resulting in a 3-run shot that proved to be more than the margin of victory.

This would be the first and only game Morris would win in this situation in his career, and just the second that his team would win.

Morris 1-1, team 2-3.

Morris did not face the Yankees down the stretch run in 1993, and did not pitch at all during the stretch run in 1994, so this sum indicates Morris’s pennant ‘clutchiness’. While Morris himself had some good outings and some bad outings, Morris’s teams went 2-3 in these five starts, and Morris himself was 1-1 with three no-decisions.

Hardly the kind of performance I'd expect from someone supposedly worthy of the Hall of Fame based on his performance in big games.

The Fortified Garden

It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls.
- Aristophanes (from the "Masonry" entry in Civilization IV)

Back around the time when Apple began forcibly establishing control over its iPhone ecosystem (it wasn't yet called iOS at that point), critics of the move referred to the resulting environment as a 'walled garden', one where users were 'trapped' to only use Apple's technology in ways approved by Apple. Apple then extended their control to monitoring what tools developers were using to provide apps to that ecosystem -- only Apple-provided application programming interfaces and libraries could be used, or the app couldn't be carried in Apple's App Store.

Critics of Apple's position liked to argue that Apple's walled garden wasn't sustainable -- that developers would chafe under the restrictions and bolt for the greener, more open pastures of Android, and that users, following the developers, would do likewise. Frequently, the rhetoric of 'freedom' is used, as if those criticizing Apple are all in favor of openness and transparency.

There have been a few folks who've defended the walled garden, mainly from a user perspective and mainly because of security. Hardly anyone, though, had bothered to point out to developers why a walled garden might be superior for them.

Turns out the right analogy isn't a walled garden, but a fortified one. That's what Apple has built, and it's exactly what small, independent developers need.

Just over a month ago, a company called Lodsys LLC filed a lawsuit in an East Texas court against seven small-to-tiny iOS developers over a patent it holds regarding a method of processing purchase transactions within an application. Lodsys didn't invent the patent -- it purchased it from its inventor as part of a 'portfolio' of intellectual property, and is now trying to make that investment pay by pursuing what it believes are infringements of those patents. At the time, the expectation was that Lodsys might use those developers' communications with Apple as a way of incorporating Apple into the lawsuit, adding the bigger company's deep pockets to their potential payout. Some expected that Apple would help with the developers' legal battle or even pursue other actions sympathetic to the developers' position, but would likely stay out of the suit itself.

That's...not quite what happened. (Note: most of the links in the next few paragraphs regarding the legal situation come from the excellent Free and Open Source Software Patents blog.)

First off, Lodsys, as if trying to ward off any Apple involvement in the suit, affirmed that Apple had purchased a valid license covering the patent in question and that as such Apple was not a target of the suit.

Apple then responded with a strong cease-and-desist letter directing Lodsys to withdraw its complaints against its app developers, asserting that the rights it has as a license holder allow it to provide the licensed technology to its developers.

Lodsys published a letter disagreeing with Apple's position and carried on with their lawsuit, which was unsurprising.

Then, Apple did something that pretty much nobody expected -- they filed a claim in the same East Texas court asking to intervene and be added to the lawsuit as a defendant. They're not just sending 'assistance' -- Apple will actually have a legal team in the courtroom assisting with the defense of their app developers.

Apple's defense against Lodsys's claims is that, since Apple has a license to Lodsys's technology (which Lodsys has already asserted to be true on their own website), and since the developers aren't creating their own code for transactions, but using Apple's provided APIs that contain that technology, and since the transactions all occur on Apple's own App Store, and since they're used to send apps to devices that Apple has manufactured and sold expressly for the purpose, that Lodsys has already been paid -- by Apple -- for the use of their patents, and that Lodsys can no more go to the developers and ask for more money than a farmer can come to your house and demand 50 cents an ear for the sweet corn you bought at the grocery store.

That defense brings up two very interesting points:

1. Is this the real reason Apple was so adamant about not allowing third-party APIs in iOS?

The timing of Apple's announcement about changes to their developer agreement prohibiting 'third-party APIs' for iOS development made many believe their motivation for doing so was to screw Adobe, who was just about to come out with a set of third-party APIs to do just that. But what if Adobe's announcement simply reminded Apple Legal that allowing third-party APIs (which might or might not have purchased valid licenses for the Lodsys transaction patent) would weaken Apple's legal defense against attacks against their developers?

2. Do Google's Android developers have the same kind of protection?

This isn't just an academic question -- Lodsys is also filing lawsuits against Android developers for violating the same patents Apple is defending their devs against. Given that Google rejected an offer from Sun to license Java for use in their Android OS (scroll down to "Google's Rejection of Sun's Licensing Offer"), how likely do you think it is that Google decided to send cash to a small IP holding company, just in case that company tried suing their developers?

Google's independent Android app developers might feel a bit safer if they had walls to protect them like Apple's developers do.

Blast from the Past: Game WISH Necromancy

With the return of the 20x20 Room, I thought it would be a good thing to revisit another post from the old Simulation16 gaming blog:

* * *

I wasn't around when the Game WISHes were first going up. Their spirit lives on in the Lunchtime Poll and other game memes, but I don't see anything particularly wrong with casting a little animate dead on some of those old WISHes from time to time. Today I'll be focusing on WISHes #7 and #8:

List three or more maxims/proverbs/bits of conventional wisdom/etc. that you’ve learned in your gaming career, and explain what they mean and how you’ve seen them apply in your gaming experience.

and...

Pick three gaming maxims that other people wrote about and discuss how you think they have applied, or not, in your experience as a gamer. Do they make sense? Are they true or false? Maxims that simply never occurred to you are also eligible for discussion.

I'll just use three maxims, two of which are my own (as far as I can tell), and one of which I cribbed from another respondant.

1. The coolest track on the album never gets played on the radio.

Given the number of gamers who also seem to be musicophiles, this experience can't be all that uncommon. Just among the CDs I have with me right now I can point to a handful of examples:

Album: "Jagged Little Pill", Alanis Morissette
Radio tracks: "You Oughta Know", "Hand In My Pocket", "Forgiven", "You Learn", "Head Over Feet", "Ironic"
Coolest track: "Not the Doctor"

Album: "Tonight And The Rest Of My Life", Nina Gordon
Radio tracks: "Tonight And The Rest Of My Life"
Coolest track: "Now I Can Die"

Album: "Everything You Want", Vertical Horizon
Radio tracks: "Everything You Want", "You're A God"
Coolest track: "Shackled"

I could go on, but you get the idea. (Not that you necessarily agree with my particular picks, but you still get the idea, I'm sure.)

Favorite characters are similar, in my view. Unless your character is merely a list of attributes and items that sits in a folder until you're ready to play him in the next game session, you probably end up thinking about the character, his motivations, your goals for him as a character and such between sessions. As such, you almost certainly come up with 'scenes' or 'bits' or something you think of as incredibly cool. And, nine times out of ten, that incredibly cool thing you thought of will never actually come up in the game. Maybe the circumstances simply never come up, or maybe you get to just the right moment and you suddenly realize that there are other players at the table who want their share of the action rather than sitting back and watching your solo adventure. However it happens, and it doesn't have to be anybody's fault, there are going to be things about your character you never get to express in-game.

Personal example: (Long-winded character story alert!) One of my favorite characters was an AD&D thief named Pseudolus. He had a Dex of 11 and an Int of 15 (back when having those stats made no sense for a rogue-type character) and his name was inspired by the Zero Mostel character in "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum". He was a con-man who made his living as a 'soothsayer', and he attached himself to the party by doing a 'reading' for another character (the Grandmaster's character, actually), then refusing to leave the group until he was paid. He had a secret agenda - he was one of a number of throwaway minions of a minor evil in the campaign, and the character Pseudolus had done the 'reading' for had secretly been paid to assassinate another party member for the minor evil, then decided to renege on the deal and keep the money he'd been paid. Pseudolus was ordered to 'keep an eye' on this character in preparation for an appropriate moment's revenge. When the party managed to defeat a beholder, then left it in the wild while returning to town to find a way to cart the carcass somewhere where it could be sold for magical components, Pseudolus slipped away from the party and managed to get the thing back to his 'master'. The disappearance of both Pseudolus and the beholder corpse was simply too convenient, so I took up a new character.

Later, when the minor evil had succeeded in preparing for the final part of his Grand Plan, Heatmiser let me bring Pseudolus back - but rather than an ineffectual wanna-be soothsayer, he'd tricked the boy out in full Bad-Ass Lieutenant mode. The kicker was that Pseudolus wasn't really evil - even though the entire party was convinced that he was; he'd simply been an example of neutral-lazy, bordering on evil but never being really committed enough to go all the way. With Pseudolus's return coinciding with the disappearance of an NPC that the Grandmaster's character had married, the party immediately split into two camps - one, led by the Grandmaster's character, who wanted to simply destroy Pseudolus outright and sift the solution to the evil plot from his scattered remains; the other, led by the Self-Focusing Spotlight's character, who wanted to redeem him.

After the session in which we spend our last night in civilization before setting off on the last leg of the quest to rescue the Grandmaster's character's wife, I wrote up a scene for Heatmiser in which Pseudolus decides to indulge his long-standing infatuation with the SFS's character by ditching the party, bar-hopping through the seedy part of town until he found a barmaid with a sufficient resemblance to the SFS's character, getting her alone, then forcing her to do the things he'd long hoped to do consensually with the SFS's character. But when the moment arrived and Pseudolus was about to release all his frustrations in an (ahem) orgy of self-indulgence, he found he couldn't go through with it - the SFS's character had actually touched a core of decency that even Pseudolus hadn't realized he had. Pseudolus let the barmaid go, suddenly aware that this was merely the first act in an unavoidable train of events that would end with him betraying his master and dying horribly, and possibly pointlessly, as a result.

Heatmiser was good enough to let that story become part of the album, part of the campaign history, but it never got any airtime. We never played it out or even acknowledged the scene at the table.

2. Never joke about goodbye unless you mean it.

Like many gamers, I am a huge fan of Knights of the Dinner Table. For quite a while, I collected both KoDT and KoDT Illustrated. Then, in a recent issue of K:Ill, the Brothers Fraim used what I imagine is an infrequent but not unknown gimmick in comicdom - the 'oh, look, I guess we killed off all the characters and the story is over, bye!' joke, where you turn the page and realize that the story isn't over. The expected reaction, I suspect, is a heart-into-your-throat 'oh no, say it ain't so!', then a 'thank God' when you turn the page and find out the story isn't over after all.

My gut reaction was "Thank God." And that was before I turned the page.

Turns out I'd been buying and reading K:Ill more out of loyalty and inertia than out of any real enjoyment I was getting out of the thing. Once I realized that, and that the world wasn't going to come to an end if I stopped buying K:Ill, I stopped buying K:Ill. The Brothers Fraim gave me a perfect 'out', and I took it.

I've played in and run games that have used similar 'tricks' - ending a session with the defeat of the party and suggesting that the campaign is therefore over. The next session invariably ends up only attracting half of the regular players - the rest, having been given the 'out' by the DM, realized that they weren't really enjoying themselves and were only attending out of habit and decided to take the 'out'. Almost invariably, those campaigns die out shortly after this happens.

For the record, I'm not predicting the end of K:Ill. I would be curious, though, to find out if the comic ends up suffering a drop in subscription renewals and over-the-counter sales as a result of that simple joke.

(Follow-up: K:Ill actually ended its run within a number of issues of pulling that joke.)

3. When you stop trusting the GM, stop playing.

This was one of the original maxims in Game WISH #7, and I only wish I could keep it in mind more often than I do. When I see this maxim, the Duke of Dorkness always comes immediately to mind.

I complimented the Duke of Dorkness in an earlier post regarding the handling of absent players. What I didn't say then is that these side-adventures are often more enjoyable than his main plots. Nearly every one of the Duke's main plots can be boiled down to the following formula:

1. Alert the PCs, usually through a warning from an NPC, that 'something big' is about to go down.
2. Let the PCs spin their wheels in investigative or preparatory actions for as long as they wish until the appropriate amount of time has passed for the plot to begin. Make any conflict that happens during this time inconclusive, unless it can be used to hinder the PCs.
3. Begin the plot, ignoring anything the PCs have done in advance, finding rationalizations where necessary to explain why preparations were ineffectual. Allow the PCs to arrive too late to actually prevent the plot from coming to fruition.
4. Conclude the plot, usually by bringing in an NPC to 'fix' the problem.

An example seems called for here.

The Duke had been running a slightly modified version of a published Champions adventure, where Black Harlequin decides to turn an amusement park into a series of deathtraps. The North Force: River City Division (NF:RCD) had received word that someone (not specifically Black Harlequin) was planning to disrupt the opening of Omega-World, a super-heroic theme park based on a prime-time-soap-like TV series surrounding the adventures of a group of heroes. NF:RCD reacts by incorporating Omega-World into the patrol routes of all active heroes, ensuring that regular overhead surveillance is made. In addition, the local super-investigator begins looking into the situation, trying to identify any threats to the cast of the TV show, as well as looking to see if any villains had tried this sort of trick in the past. Finally, NF:RCD asks for and receives permission to accompany safety inspectors on their final tour of the park before it opens; no problems are identified.

Opening day arrives. Within a couple of hours it becomes obvious that every significant ride has been extensively modified to turn it into a deathtrap, despite none of these modifications being visible on the previous day's safety inspection and some (particularly the roller-coaster mods) being so extensive that it becomes difficult to imagine how the changes could have been accomplished without being noticed by our overhead patrols. My own character is allowed to 'push' his teleportation abilities to save a group of normals on a 'gravity drop' ride from being turned into human paste, at the cost of suffering BODY damage that cannot be healed by a teammate's Aid power, and with the result that everyone on the ride still ends up in the hospital, most of them in the ICU from their injuries. NF:RCD finally tracks Black Harlequin to his makeshift HQ on the Omega-World site, only to discover that five members of the writing and production crew are being held hostage, despite no one mentioning they were missing when the park opened. After defeating him, NF:RCD learns that Black Harlequin had a long-standing fixation on one of the recurring villains on the show, though again none of this information was available prior to the beginning of the adventure proper.

Another, easier to describe example: North Force (this is prior to the RCD period) learns from a mystical heroine, Aura, that a particular villain is seeking a number of artifacts from museums around the world to complete a summoning ritual intended to bring an immensely powerful spirit into the world. NF travels to each location as directed by Aura, arriving just in time to see one villain take the artifact in question and teleport away while the rest of the villains battle with us, are defeated, and are then teleported away themselves by an unseen and unstoppable force. Once all the artifacts are in the villain's hands, Aura directs us to the ritual site, where we are prevented from interfering in the ritual itself thanks to the presence of an unbreakable Force Wall, and where the summoning itself is successful, except that one of our teammates, previously captured and intended to be the 'sacrifice' to the spirit, manages to live long enough through Aura's intervention to allow her to Mind Control him into speaking the lines the spirit needs to hear to realize that he's being manipulated and to head off on his own to ponder the nature and purpose of his existence (how she does all this through the still-present Force Wall remains a mystery).

In addition, the Duke tends toward unilateral character re-writes whenever he feels that a particular build is becoming 'abusive'. He tends to over-build his villains to the point where the entire group prefers to fight the agents in an agent-villain combo group because the agents can actually be taken one-on-one. Nevertheless, as much of a liability as he is to enjoying his own game, the camaraderie among the players is enough to keep me coming back most of the time, despite knowing that most of the players in the game would happily play in a different game if run by a more trustworthy GM.

Knowing what to do isn't the same thing as doing it - not by a longshot.