2024’s Strange (?) Box Office

The post-COVID movie box office continues to be very different from the pre-COVID one, but as of this year I’m not sure we can keep calling it weird? It seems like this is the year the “new normal” settled into place, especially without the gravity of “Barbenheimer” distorting everything.

Crack Domestic Yearly Box Office - Box Office Mojo open in a new tab and scan down that list. This year did a little worse than last year, a little better than the year before than, and compared to the rest of the pre-COVID era, worse than almost every other year of the 21st century, even without taking inflation and increased ticket prices into account.

As has become the standard, a bunch of movies that seemed like safe bets absolutely tanked, and a few movies everyone assumed would do “well but not great” absolutely blew the doors off the joint.

Mostly, I have the same opinion as I did about 2023’s strange box office, but in brief: I think movie theaters have found themselves charging a premium price for a non-premium product, and are doing that in a world where essentially every other movie ever made is easily available, and a whole lotta people spent the early pandemic building a home theater better than every mall screen from the 90s. Oh, and the pandemic still isn’t over, either.

As has been frequently said, there used to be both good stuff and crappy stuff, but the crappy stuff cost less. Now we live in an age where the crappy stuff mostly costs the same as the good stuff, and all the people who made crappy stuff don’t understand why they’re going out of business.

Speaking of crappy stuff, I sat down to start writing this as it became clear that Kraven was going to bomb harder than either Madame Web or Morbius, which is kind of breathtaking? Maybe bluesky will prove it really has the juice and has taken twitter’s old mantle by convincing Sony to let it bomb twice.

The movie I want to talk about, though, is The Fall Guy. I didn’t say anything about it after I watched it, because there wasn’t much to say! Fun movie, really enjoyed it, attractive charismatic leads clearly having a good time, fun stunts, good movie! Everyone here enjoyed it.

(It’s also got, in the form of that Miami Vice Stunt Jacket, maybe the single best example of “Chekov’s Gun” as structural device I have ever seen. If I was teaching a writing class I could do a whole session just on that.)

A decade ago, that movie would have done fine, not great, but pretty good, probably $150-200 mil domestic, about that overseas, respectable return on investment. You know, Mummy Returns business. Instead, not so much! ⌘-tabbing back over to Box Office Mojo, I see it landed at a positively abysmal $92 million, which would be pretty great for you or I personally but for a big tentpole is a full-blown disaster.

And I bring all this up because, as you can probably guess, I watched it on streaming on Paramount+ about a month ago, because there was absolutely no universe in which I was going to spend the price of a new Zelda to take four people to go watch it in a suburb theater with blown out speakers. Plus, you know, I could pause it so we could all reload on snacks at the halfway point.

I do want to sharpen a couple of points on my existing thesis. I said before that a lot of people spent the early pandemic building a good home rig, but what I really meant was most people over about 35 or 40: as such, the Boomers, middle-aged Gen-Xers and Elder Millennials all have nice home theatres, but the younger Millennials and below do not—and they want to get out of the house. In the twenty-teens, making movies for dudes in their 40s was great business. Now, that’s the worst possible demographic.

Between that, and the higher prices of not just movies but everything, and the fact that means that movies have competition in their price point they didn’t used to have. Oh, and there’s that whole pandemic thing. Folks are still going to movies, but I think they’re much more risk averse, on multiple dimensions. They’re much less likely to go see something unless they know it’s going to be worth it; not gonna risk it on a maybe bad movie you can watch on streaming in a few months anyway.

And, just to put my bonafides back on the table, there’s about a ten-year stretch starting in 1996 where I’m pretty sure I saw just about every movie released in American theatures, because you could still get tickets for five bucks and even if the movie was bad it was still the cheapest way to spend two hours on a weeknight. Now? Less so.

So the movies that hit it big seemed to mostly be either somewhere to take the kids for a couple hours, or big community events that everyone was going to see, and maybe sing along with. So, Wicked, Inside Out 2, and Deadpool did great, but everyone waited to watch Furiosa at home.

Worth pointing out that there was only one superhero movie this year and it made a zillion dollars, so that really feels like the right model for that genre going forward?

We also got a couple of full-blown disasters in the form of Megapolis and Joker 2. As far as the first of those go, I’m not nearly as big a fan of Francis Ford Coppola as most people who own the number of Criterion DVDs as I do but you know what I am a fan of? Deranged weirdos making art for an audience of themselves alone. From that perspective, if using your vineyard money to make the movie you wanted to make with the people you wanted to work with is failure, please let me fail too!

Joker 2 is the one I really rolled my eyes at. I mean, I’m broadly of the opinon movie studios should give piles of money to people with no oversight more often, not less, but Todd Phillips? Really? The guy who made that terrible Starsky & Hutch movie, and then the Hangovers? That’s the guy you hand the blank check to? Meanwhile, even fresh off Barbie, Greta Gerwig can’t even get Netflix to commit to releasing friggin’ Narnia in theaters? I can think of a lot of people I’d give $200 million dollars to before that guy.

I was reminded recently that for a stretch in the early 90s, John Carpenter had a deal where he could make any movie he wanted with no oversight as long as the budget came in under $3 million, the assumption being that at that price point, it didn’t matter what they did at the box office, the movies would earn their money back on home video. The theatrical release was, essentially, an extended advertising campaign for the VHS release.

The two movies he made under this deal were Prince of Darkness and They Live, which all things considered seems a pretty cheap total price for the best documentary ever made about the Reagan Administration.

Carpenter, by this point, had already directed at least five stone cold classics—Halloween, The Thing, Starman, Escape from New York, and Big Trouble in Little China—of which only Halloween did anything approaching “well,” but all of which had long and successful afterlives on home video.

That insight—that in a post-home video world, the theatrical release could just be advertising instead of the “real show”—feels more accurate now than it did even at the time. So, of course, we live in a world where the entire “home video” income stream has been absolutely burned to the ground by Netflix. The same Netflix that seems to have settled into a groove of making incredibly expensive unwatchable schlock.

Feels like we need more of of those Carpenter deals, and fewer huge checks handed to mediocre white guys. More cheaper movies that have a hope of paying for themselves with the long tail, and more movies you can bring your kids and sing along to.

All that said, my hands-down favorite movie of the year was Hundreds of Beavers and that was barely released. Which, is now streaming and out of disc, and I cannot recommend it harder. Do not watch a trailer, do not read about it, just scare up a copy and press play and go in cold, trust me.

This is where I’m supposed to type some kind of pithy conclusion, and I don’t really have one? It’s clear the whole industry is still inside a fractal series of upheavals that no one has figured out yet. And, you know, I like movies! I want them to keep making them, and I want people to make a living doing so. They all just, you know, gotta accept that it’s not 2019 anymore, and never will be again. Theatres have a different job now, and they have to figure out what that is.

Adaptations as Commentary

I got into a conversation with the kids about the changes the made to Lord of the Rings from the books to the movies, and it struck me, kind of for the first time, how much those changes reflect the world of the late ‘90s.

To turn into Caption Obvious for a moment: All art is inexorably linked the cultural and social context of the time of its creation, and adaptations get it two ways, both the context from the original work, and then its own context. In the best case, you can use the one to comment on the other. As the adaptations slip away, and the context drifts, it gets easier to see which parts really were “better storytelling technology” and which were, oh, that’s just what the 90s were like.

I chewed over the changes in their own right around this time last year, but what I’m saying is, I don’t think anyone would consider “we went left home to fight evil, and then when we came back discovered it had taken root at home” boring and anticlimactic now. Cutting the Scouring of the Shire says a lot more about “the west” circa 2000 than it does about the book’s pacing. That they thought that wasn’t interesting enough to keep kinda feels like one of the skeleton keys that unlocks everything that happened in real life over the last quarter-century.

My point is I think a LotR movie made today would handle that whole end very differently. Very differently.

On the one hand, there are two many remakes and reboots and unasked-for sequels, and on the other hand I genuinely want to see what LotR would look like made by people who lived through the various catastrophes of the 21st century, instead of by people who grew up in a world where “bad things” only happen “over there.”

Video Game Replay: Portal/Portal 2

Spoilers Ahoy

No seriously, I’m about to spoil two of the best games of the last 20 years, and if you somehow still haven’t played them, bookmark this post and head over to Steam right now trust me.

I’m Serious, go play it.

My kids had never played either of the Portal games, so on a whim a couple of weeks ago we fired them up on the SteamDeck and played through them as a team. (Technical sidebar: the PS5 controller makes an excellent bluetooth controller for the SteamDeck when it’s connected to a TV, and really easy to set up! Ironically, a million times easier than trying to use my old Steam Controller.) I played them both when they came out, but hadn’t since.

Portal is a perfectly crafted jewel of a game. The gameplay is perfect, the puzzles are interesting, the design and look of the game perfectly matched with what the game engine can do.

It’s also got maybe my all time favorite piece of narrative slight-of-hand I’ve ever seen in a video game.

Recall that the frame for the game is that you’re Chell, a “test subject” for Aperture Science Labs, testing out their “Portal Gun.” Structurally, you move through a series of levels, each of which is a confined space where you need to use the gun in increasingly complex ways to make portals to get from the entrance door to the exit. The portals themselves are person-sized wormholes or connections that you can drop onto most flat surfaces, connecting disparate areas of the geography. But also, objects—including yourself—keep their momentum as they pass through the portals, so not only can you use them to navigate around obstacles but to build a variety of slingshots, catapults, launchers. You redirect lasers, confuse turrets, bounce objects. Critically, you also don’t have another kind of gun, just the portal one, so puzzles that in a “regular” first person shooter would be solved via firepower here have to be solved by variable cartography.

The puzzles are from the “duplicate, then elaborate”school of design, each one adds some new twist or obstacle or complication that you have to combine with what you leaned last time.

The only other character is the robot voice that’s giving you instructions—that’s GLaDOS, voiced by the staggeringly good Ellen McLain, who seems to be running the show. She’s a computer mastermind in the HAL/SHODAN sense, but a little ruder, a little funnier.

Each test chamber has an opening graphic or placard, giving the chamber number, counting up to 19. The opening sign also has a series of icons indicating which obstacles this room has, with the array lighting up more and more as you move through the game.

The visual design of the game also perfectly matched what the upgraded Half-Life 2 engine it was using could do. The test chambers were mostly white high-tech spaces, sort of 2001 crossed with the Apple store, with the occasional moving panel or window. Big doors slide open to reveal pneumatic tube–like elevators between levels. Metalic panels indicate walls that can’t have portals opened on them, as opposed to the normal glowing white walls. Most of all, the visual design was very clear and focused. Considering the strange geometries you could create with the portals, this was critical to making the puzzles solvable, you could always get your bearings and get an eye-line to where the exit door was, regardless of if you could see how to get there yet.

This is where I pause and remind everyone that Portal wasn’t released on it’s own. It was the “other, other” new game in the Orange Box collection, bundled with Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2. Portal was clearly the one they had the least commercial expectations for; Team Fortress got all the ads and early chatter, Episode 2 was exciting because it was moving the Half-Life story forward, Portal had the quality that it was the bonus track on the album, the fun tech demo.

And so there was no reason to believe that Portal was anything other than it presented itself as: 19 puzzles with this cool portal tech, which would presumably show up in Half-Life 3 as part of a “real game.”

If you paid attention, though, there were some indications that things weren’t quite right. Every test chamber had at least one observation window looking down into it, and while you could see chairs and computers, you never saw a person moving around on the other side of the translucent glass. GLaDOS wasn’t ever openly malevolent, but sometimes seemed a little off. And there were a few places where you could slip “backstage” of a test chamber, and find strange graffiti and other abandoned debris. There was nothing you could do to interact with it, though? GLaDOS never mentions it? Just a fun little easter egg, I guess, like the G-Man peeking through windows at you at the start of the first Half-Life A little strange though, for a glorified tech demo?

So then, when you get to Test Chamber 19 and then instead of the game ending GlaDOS tries to dump you into the incinerator, you get to have the absolutely breathtaking realization that no, you fell for it, you didn’t just beat the game, you beat the tutorial.

The rest of the game is making your way through the infrastructure of the testing facility towards GLaDOS, using all the portal tricks the game carefully tought you earlier. You find out that, hey, the reason you never saw anyone behind those windows was because GLaDOS killed them all, and now instead of a fun tech demo puzzle game you’re in a 1:1 duel to the death with an evil computer. It’s great! Then there’s a song at the end!

Part what makes it so great is the length: it’s not short short, but it knows how not to wear out its welcome. Replaying it, I think we beat in in three after-school nights, neither rushing nor going terribly slowly. Perfectly paced, satisfying without being overlong, trim without leaving you feeling cheated.

It did, however, leave everyone wanting more.

It was, and I’m marking it down here, a huge success. Portal ripped through the circa 2008 nerd culture like few things I’ve ever seen before or since. It quickly flipped from “the bonus track” to “really, there’s no way to get this without that dumb-looking Team Fortress?” The cake memes were everywhere. Making a sequel was an absolute no-brainer.

They announced Portal 2 in 2010, it was released the next year. Unlike the first game, this was a full triple-A standalone release. In a world where it had already become clear that Half-Life 3 was never going to happen, this was Valve’s Next Big Thing. Structurally, Portal wasn’t a lot like Valve’s other work, Portal 2, on the other hand, was absolutely A Valve Game.^TM

This is where I pause and admit that my opinion most of-of-step with the video game–playing mainstream is that I do not, personally, care for either of the Half-Life games. This is not a contrarian hot take, I’m not about to try to convince you that they’re Bad Actually, I understand why they are as popular and beloved as they are, I am aware of all the ways they were incredibly innovative and influential.

I feel the same way about the Half-Lifes that I do about Cola: I acknowledge that it’s very popular, don’t have anything against it, but it is not my preferred flavor. I guess, in this strained metaphor, the original Deus Ex is Mountain Dew?

Because this is going to be relevant in a moment, let me attempt to sketch for you what I don’t like about them. I’ve thought about this a lot, because it’s very strange to beat a game, think to yourself “well, that was okay I guess, but not that great” and then have everyone you know declare it to be the greatest game of all time, and then have that happen even more so with the sequel. You gotta stop and make sure you’re not the idiot, you know?

Valve shooters tend to be extremely linear games where you make your way though an environment, alternating segments of “traversal” where you have to find the one way forward, and “encounters” which are either an in-engine cutscene, a shootout, or more rarely, a puzzle to get past. They very much like to imply a larger, more complex environment out and around you, but all the doors are locked and impassable except the one door or vent you can go through. It’s all stage scenery, basically. And while it’s cool that the cutscenes don’t take your control away, it sometimes feels like you’re watching the game get played for you. In my less charitable moods, I describe the Half-Lifes as “slowly walking down an elaborately decorated single hallway.”

And the obvious follow-up question here is, well buddy, even just limiting ourselves to first person shooters from the turn of the century, that also pretty much describes Max Payne, which you loved, so what gives? Broadly, I think it’s two things. First, those fake environments. I prefer sprawling non-linear environments in games, but I don’t mind something more linear. What drove me crazy about Half-Life 2 especially was you’d get these vast city-scapes, and then only a tiny little alleyway was available to you. Vice City had already been out for two years! Deus Ex did all kinds of things with open spaces on limited computers! Max Payne didn’t irritate me as much because you spent all your time in naturally-enclosed areas; abandoned subways, empty office buildings, and the like. I spent a lot of time wishing City 17 was more like Hong Kong in Deus Ex and less like the Black Mesa facility.

But mostly what I didn’t like was I thought most of the actual shooting was pretty boring. I like games that structure “encounters” more like puzzles—this is why I prefer turn-based tactical fights in RPGs, why I like X-COM more than Diablo, and so on. One of the things I loved so much about Max Payne, was that between the fact you really could take cover and the bullet time mechanic, each shootout functioned as a puzzle—how do I get through this without being hit? More than once I’d get through a fight, and the reload, muttering “I can do better.”

The parts of Half-Life 2 I really liked—the sawblades vs zombies village, that big physics puzzle with the crane—were encounters that functioned more like puzzles. It wasn’t just “keep an eye on your ammo remaining and watch the floor for those crab things.”

I disliked the way Half-Life 2 would get you to the next set-piece, and then say “okay, this is a gravity gun puzzle” or “nope, this is just shooting,” or “yeah, this is a laser-guided missile puzzle.” There were very very few opportunities to mix and match, or find your own solution to anything.

This sounds like snark but isn’t: my favorite part of Half-Life 2 was the final level where you have to use the gravity gun to bounce those energy spheres around and disintegrate things. That was something new, and didn’t play like anything else. I wish the whole game has been like that.

I bring all this up because Portal 2 has this exact structure, and I loved it.

Portal 2 opens with the swagger of a game being make by people who know they’re making a hit. Portal sometimes has a slightly hesitant quality to it, beyond just being the “bonus game,” in that you can tell the developers aren’t quite sure if the audience is going to buy what they’re selling. Portal 2, on the other hand, is clearly made by people who know the audience loved what they did last time. It has a really solid take on what worked from the first game and leans into them. Among other things, that means more humor and more atmospherics. It also knows it has more space, so it settles in, puts its feet up, and gets comfortable.

Valve hadn’t been known for funny games, and while Portal was funny that humor tended to be subtle and deadpan. But the jokes were everyone’s favorite part, so Portal 2 comes out of the gate making it clear that this is a comedy: a terribly dark comedy, but a comedy.

It opens with a fairly bravura set-piece, where you start in what looks like a 1950s hotel room, do a couple of tutorial moves to learn the controls, go to sleep, and then wake up terribly far in the future. The room is ruined and overgrown, and things have clearly gone wrong. The first new character of the game, Wheatley, quickly arrives to finish your tutorial. He’s a spherical robot driving around on a track on the ceiling, and he’s played by Steven Merchant, who at the time was mostly known for the UK version of The Office. The opening turns into something of a technical flex as Wheatley starts driving your hotel room around on a larger set of tracks, crashing into things, disintegrating the walls, as you have to move around and avoid being thrown out. As the walls fall apart, you get glimpses of that same backstage infrastructure from the first game—you’re still in the same Aperture Science facility, just in a new part. On paper, this is a classic Valve “live action cutscene”, a lot like the opening train rides of both Half-Lifes, but the key difference for me was that it was very funny. The slapstick of the room crashing into things, Wheatley’s stuttered apologies, great stuff.

You’re once again playing Chell, a silent protagonist in the style of Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman. Unlike Half-Life which dances around why Freeman never says anything, here’s it’s lampshaded directly; Wheatley thinks you have brain damage, GLaDOS later refers to you as a “mute lunatic”; the writer, Erik Wolpaw has said several times that she just refuses to give anyone the satisfaction of a response.

The utilitarian, 2001-esque test chambers of Portal were very spooky in their own subtle way, and then the backstage areas even more so. Portal 2 knows not to try to recreate either of those, but keeps finding new ways to riff on the same basic environmental grammar.

You quickly find yourself back in the facility from the first game, but long-abandoned and gone to ruin. The first few levels are the same intro test chambers from the first game, but now overgrown and abandoned. It’s an inspired way to reacclimatize returning players to the game while also onboarding new ones, while still making it clear this this game is going to be different, and very spooky.

But, like the first game, Portal 2 knows not to overstay its welcome with any particular batch of ideas. The game passes through, roughly, five acts. After the opening act in the ruined facility, you accidentally wake GLaDOS up, and she retakes control, and she decides to get back to work.

This second act is the one most the first game, with GLaDOS running you through new test chambers. The facility itself becomes much more of a character, with the chambers “waking up”, walls reorganizing themselves, the various panels shaking off years of debris before re-assuming their test configurations, becoming less ruined and more like they were before.

The best example of the second game’s swagger is the way it uses GLaDOS herself. While she was used sparingly before, here they know she’s the best part of the game, and make sure to use her to the fullest. Her voice is less artificial, and she has more things to say, and they’re funner.

My favorite example of this is that as her frustration mounts, we end up with an extended series of jokes where rather than questioning your skills or value, she just starts calling you fat in increasingly bitchy ways. GLaDOS is far more human in this game to the character’s immense benefit, there’s a sense that her behavior in the first game is her “professional demeanor”, and in the second game she’s gotten tired and frustrated enough that the “real her” is spilling out.

While this is going on, most levels have a spot where Wheatley peeks through a half-opened panel or around a corner. A carefully-designed set of blink-or-you’ll-miss-it encounters that make sure you never blink. Eventually he stages a rescue, and the third act is once again backstage of the testing facility, making your way towards GLaDOS. Similar in design to the backstage second half of the first game, the facility here come across as larger and more menacing, with more things going on that just your strange tests. Views recede into a blue haze past the industrial strutures, where is all this, exactly?

The closest the game comes to replicating the first game’s surprise twist is at the fight with GLaDOS—it looks like so far we’ve mostly been re-staging the plot of the first game with better graphics and funnier writing, but then Wheatley takes over, goes all megalomaniacal, straps GLaDOS to a potato battery, and throws the pair of you down a long shaft.

The best, and most famous part of the game is the fourth act, set in the abandoned 50s, 70s, and 80s–era testing facilities. Turns out the whole facility was built inside an abandoned salt mine, working from the bottom up, and everything you’ve seen so far was just the very top layer.

This is where we meet the last new character—Cave Johnson, played by JK Simmons in full “bring me pictures of Spider-man” mode, the founder and now deceased CEO of Aperture Science, via his leftover recordings. Johnson’s rants, and GLaDOS’s snark in return from her position as a potato perched on your gun, makes for the game’s best writing.

This is where the game most settles into it’s Half-Life 2 style structure, you alternate between navigating your way up to the next level through the abandoned structures, then solve a test chamber or two designed with an appropriately retro style of tech, and then go back to traversal. Like the first game, it does a remarkable job of teaching you some new portal tricks with the test chambers, and then letting you loose to use them as you try and move around between those test chambers.

It’s worth noting how much exposition they cram into the jokes Cave Johnson and GLaDOS make at each other—most specifically how much time they spend talking about moon dust, which seems like just another wacky detail until you find out why, and realize they’ve been giving you the solution to a puzzle the whole time.

Finally, you make it back up to the “modern day”, facility, where things have gone horribly wrong with Wheatley in charge. It’s a remarkable piece of design work that, using the same basic pieces, the freshly re-ruined facility manages to be the most menacing yet. It’s positively apocalyptic with tangled up rooms and looming fires on the horizon as you try to keep the whole place from being destroyed and solve Wheatley’s terrible puzzles.

The key difference structurally between the two games is that the second knows it can’t recreate the Big Surprise of the first, so it doesn’t try. Instead, the second game is built around anticipation, each act has an end goal that gets declared at the start and that you spend the whole time working towards: escape the facility, escape GLaDOS, climb back out, defeat Wheatley. While this keeps the game moving forward, it does tend to blunt the puzzles a little; unlike the first game there’s a tendency to try and rush through them so you can see what happens next.

That’s part of how Half-Life 2 structure’s worked too: you’d get a goal, then fight your way through whatever it was to get where the goal needed you to be.

Which brings me back around to why did I like Portal 2 so much more than the Half-Lifes? For starters, I like the humor a lot more than the post-apocalyptic melodrama. Mainly, though, it’s the puzzles. While I found the shooting encounters frequently boring, the portal puzzles never were, and kept building on themselves in fun and interesting ways. There was never an “oh this again” moment, there was always some new twist or “yes and”. And whereas the linear and confined nature of the Half-Lifes felt limiting, here it made the puzzles feel even possible. Knowing there’s one way through keeps the tangled wreckage at the bottom of the test shaft from feeling overwhelming. You’re not going to get lost, you’re not going to chase the wrong path, let’s just look around for the one place you can shoot a portal and keep moving.

As an aside on that point: there’s a regular Discourse that pops up with video games around how much player affordance is too much, every 9–18 months someone would get mad about yellow paint on ladders back on the old twitter. Portal 2 does a really elegant job of this by using light; most of the facilities are very dark, especially the older ones, and the few spotlights that are there will just casually play across the area where you need to shoot a portal. It’s a slick way to draw the eye without making it insultingly obvious. (There are a few places where you’d have a collapsed bridge but then the fallen wreckage would just happen to form a perfect walkway over to where you need to be, which gets a little eye-rolling.)

Both Portal games are a masterclass in this, in game design that subtly wiggles its eyebrows at the right answer and then lets you think you solved it all on your own.

Narratively, the game has a pretty conclusive end, there’s room for more but no real un-pulled threads. From a design perspective, this also felt like the definitive statement on these mechanics. Half-Life 3 has become a vaporware meme because there’s still so much plot and mechanics you could build on top of those games, but conversely no one really clamors for a Portal 3, because it doesn’t need one. Any new game with those portal mechanics would need to do something new, something different, and whatever that might be, it wouldn’t be Portal. The Portal/Portal 2 diptych might be the only perfect 1-2 punch in all of video games, and there’s no reason to make more. Outstanding work, just as fun over a decade later as they were when they were new. I’d say something like “they don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” but no, they never made them like that at any time, except those two.

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I will just throw this out here though: I’d pay real money for a game just called “Three” that let you play as Gordon Freeman, Chell, and Alyx simultaneously, swapping between them to solve portal/gravity/bullet gun puzzles as you had to team up with GLaDOS to defeat those aliens.

TTRPGs I’m Currently Playing: Cypher System + It’s Only Magic

It can’t have escaped notice that I written something like fourteen thousand words on “new kinds of D&D” on the ‘cano so far this year, and all of those pieces ended with a kind of “well, not really what I’m playing these days but seems neat!” Which brings up the obvious follow-up question: what am I playing these days? Well…

Something that I think is really under-theorized in TTRPGs are GM Playstyles. Every decent RPG these days has a list of player archetypes: the actor, the puzzle-solver, the rules lawyer, etc, but very rarely do you see GM style addressed in anything more detailed than a reminder that it’s not a competition and you need to support your players.

I think a big part of the reason for that is that GM Style ends up being closely linked to the design of the particular game itself. Most games—and I realize the word “most” is a load-bearing word in this sentence—support multiple player styles, but generally have a much narrower list of “right” ways to run them.

The result of that is that most people who run games, especially those of us who've run multiple systems, will find one and glom on—“this is the game I’m running from here on out.” We can’t always articulate why, but you’ll settle into a ruleset and realize how much easier and more fun it is to run, and I think that’s because it’s a game where the designer runs games the same way you do.

I’ve said before that 5th edition D&D is the first version of that game that I didn’t feel like was fighting me to run it the way I wanted to. I genuinely loved the whole 3.x family, and that’s probably the ruleset I have the most hours with at this point, but at least once a session I would say both “bleah, I don’t remember how that works,” and “man, I don’t care. Just roll something and we can move on.”

A big part of that is I like to run games in a more “improvisational” style than D&D usually assumes—and just to be crystal clear, I’m using “improv” in the formal, technical sense as a specific technique like with Improv Comedy, not as a synonym for “ad lib” or “just making things up.”

And it’s not that you can’t Improv D&D, it’s just that for any given mechanical encounter you need to know a lot of numbers, and so the game tends to screech to a halt as you flip through the Monster Manual looking for something close enough to run with.

(My go-to guidelines were when in doubt, the DC was 13, and the players could always have a +2 circumstance bonus if they asked.)

So with that as prologue, let me tell you about my favorite tabletop RPG out there: Monte Cook’s Cypher System.

Like a lot of people, Cook was somebody whose name I first learned due to his being one of the three core designers of 3rd Edition D&D, along with Johnathan Tweet and Skip Williams. Tweet, of course, was the big name rockstar developer, having done both Ars Magica and Over the Edge, and was supposedly the guy who came up with most of the d20 system’s core mechanics.

Cook, though, was one of those people I realized I already knew who he was despite not knowing his name—he was one of “the Planescape Guys,” and was the one who wrote the modules that brought Orcus back.

After 3.0 came out, Cook did a bunch of weird projects like the criminally underrated Ghostwalk, and got hit in one of the early waves of layoffs. He started his own indie company, and ended up as one of the first people to explore selling PDFs on their own as a business model. (Which sounds absolutely ancient now.)

I thought his indie stuff was some of, if not the best third party 3e D&D material out there. But even more so, I found his stuff incredibly easy to use and run. This was a guy who clearly ran games the way I did. By contrast, my reaction to Tweet’s stuff, who I respected and admired tremendously, was to stare at it and think “but what do I do, though?”

Cook also had a blog—I think on LiveJournal, to really emphasize the 2004 of it all—which had a huge influence on how I ran games, mostly because I’d get halfway through a post and already be shouting “of course!”

He also did a mostly-forgotten game published variously as Arcana Unearthed and Arcana Evolved that I thought was the best version of 3rd edition; it was the game 3.0 wanted to be without all the D&D historical baggage. One of the many neat things it had—and this is foreshadowing—was a much cleaner & more comprehensive system for crafting magic items, including a very cool way to make single-use items. Want to store a bunch of single-use Fireball spells in marbles and distribute them to your fellow party members? You can do that.

Flash forward a decade. Just before 5e came out, Cook released his big magnum opus game, Numenera. I bounced off the setting pretty hard, but the rules, those I really liked.

Imagine the initial 3.0 version of D&D, and strip it down until all you have left are Feats and the d20. The core mechanic is this: everything has a difficulty from 1 to 10. The target number is the difficulty times 3. Meet or beat on a roll to accomplish the task.

And here’s the thing: that’s the only way tasks work. All you need to do to make something work in game is give it a difficulty score. Going hand in hand with this is that only the PCs roll. So, for example, monsters use the same difficulty score for what the PCs need to roll to hit them, and also what the PCs need to roll to avoid being hit by them. Occasionally, something will have something at a different level than the default, a difficulty 3 monster with stealth as level 6, for example. It’s incredibly easy to improv on this when you really only need one number, and you can focus on the big picture without having to roll the dice and do math yourself on the fly.

It's funny—on 3rd Edition/D20 Jonathan Tweet always got the credit for the clean and simple parts of the game ("Um, how about if Armor Class just went up?") and Cook got the credit for all the really crunchy rules & wizards stuff. Which made sense, since Tweet has just done Over the Edge, and Cook had just spent years working for ICE on Rolemaster. So, building his own system from scratch, Cook ends up with something from the "bare minimum number of rules to make this playable" school, whereas Tweet’s 13th Age went completely the other direction.

Alert mathematicians will have noted that difficulty levels higher than 6 are impossible to hit on a bare roll being above 20. Rather than modifiers to the roll, you use things to increase or decrease the difficulty level. (When the game came out, I cracked that Cook had clearly won a bet by making a game where the only mechanic was THAC0.)

Most of where the PC’s options come from are their Abilities, which are effectively 3e D&D feats. They’re some thing a PC can do, a power, a bonus to some kind of task, a spell, a special attack.

Players can also have skills, in which they are either trained or specialized, which decrease the difficulty by one or two steps respectively. A player can use up to two “Assets” to decrease the difficulty by up to another two steps, and they’re delightfully abstracted. An Asset can be anything: a crowbar, an NPC assisting, a magic gauntlet, a piece of advice you got last session about where the weak point was. They’re as much an improv prompt for the players as they are a mechanic. If you can decrease the difficulty down to zero, it’s an automatic success, and you dont have to roll.

Which brings me to my two favorite features of the mechanics.

First, the PCs have three Stats—Might, Speed, Intellect—but rather than scores, they’re pools. Your skills & abilities & assets represent your character’s baseline normal everyday capabilities. Your Stat Pools represent how much extra “oomph” you can deploy under pressure. So if you’re trying to Bend Bars & Lift Gates, and having a friend help with a crowbar didn’t get the job done, you can spend some Might points and really get that portcullis open.

Your pools also act as your hit points—physical damage drains your Might pool, psionic attacks drains your Intellect. Special powers or spells also spend pool points to activate.

“I have to spend hit points to kick the door open?” is a reaction most everyone has to this at first glance, but that’s the wrong approach. Your pools are basically a representation of how much “spotlight” time your character can have during an encounter, how much cool stuff they can do before they have to sit down and rest.

Because also, getting your points back is incredibly easy; there’s really no reason to ever enter an encounter—combat, social, or otherwise—without a full tank.

This works for all tasks, not just the punchy combat ones. So you get these great moments where someone will be trying to bluff their way past the border patrol and decide they’re going to be charming as hell as they empty out their Intellect pool, or yell that they’re going to bullet time as they dump their speed pool on a dodge check.

Which brings me to my single favorite RPG mechanic of all time: something called “The GM Intrusion.” At any point, the GM has the option to throw a wrinkle in and call for a roll anyway, usually when the party has cleverly knocked a difficulty down to nothing.

The examples in the book are things like a PC trying to climb a cliff with a specialized rockclimbing skill and a rope harness making the climb check zero, and then the GM says “well actually, it was raining earlier, so I’m gonna need a roll.”

But, the kicker is that the GM has to pay the PC for it. The GM offers up an XP for the Intrusion, and the player has the option to accept, or two spend one of their XPs to reject it. Actually, the GM has to offer up 2 XPs, one of which the player being intruded on has to immediately give to another player, which also does a really neat job of democratizing XP rewards.

Cypher is one of those games where “1 XP” is a significant item, players generally get 2–4 a session, upgrades cost 3 or 4 depending on what you want.

The place where this really works is if you use cards to represent those XPs. (They have a bunch of really cool XP decks for sale, but they’re dirt easy to make out of 3x5 cards or use repurposed playing cards.) A player saying “and that makes it difficulty zero!” followed by the GM silently sliding an XP card into the middle of the table is peak. I like to give the card a couple little taps before I say something like “so what really happens is…”

This gets objected to from some quarters, usually in the form of something like “putting your thumb on the scale is what I was already doing as a good GM, why should I have to pay for it?” And, well, that’s the reason, so that you have to pay for it. This makes the extra difficulty both explicit and collaborative. Instead of monsters suddenly growing an extra 30 HP they way they tend to do in D&D, here the GM has to openly offer the extra challenge, and allow the player to turn it down. Sometimes they’re just not in the mood, and would rather pay the XP to get past this to what they really want to do.

Like the stat pools, XPs aren’t just a score to make characters better. In addition to actual character upgrades, you can also spend them on things like retroactively creating an NPC contact, or acquiring a base of operations. They’re the currency the players get to use to wrest control of the game away from the GM.

Rounding out the mechanics are the Cyphers themselves. In simple terms, Cyphers are powerful, single-use magic items. In the original Numenera they were all assumed to be scavenged and barely understood ancient tech. So an item that acts as a single-use Fireball grenade might actually be an ancient power cell that no one knows how to use anymore, but they know if they mash these two metal bits together it blows up real good.

Later settings introduced more “subtle” cyphers, as appropriate for the world. In the game I’m running now, Cyphers have included a marble that if you throw it grows to the size of a bowling ball and does a tremendous amount of damage, a high-powered energy drink that does a bonus to any speed task, and “the advice your aunt gave you when you were young,” which they haven’t tried to use yet. (It’s a -2 to any task difficulty, as long as they yell “oh! That’s what she meant!” before rolling.)

PCs can only have a few Cyphers on them at a time, and are supposed to always be finding new ones, so the game operates on the assumption that the players always have a small set of very powerful one-shot powers they can deploy. It keeps the game fresh, while discouraging hoarding. Like XPs, these also work best on cards.

I saw someone complain that Cypher was just “the players and GM handing metaplot coupons back and forth,” and yeaaaahhhh?, I can see why you might get that impression but also that’s the completely wrong philosophy. There are definitely sessions that feel more like a card game, with XP and Cypher cards slapping onto the table. But this is what I was talking about with GM style; I like having a formalized, easy to deploy way where both the GM and the players can go “well, actually…” at each other.

Character creation is similarly stripped down, and is one of the signature elements of the system: you make your character by filling in the blanks of the sentence “I’m an [adjective] [noun] who [verbs].” The noun is effectively your character class, but they’re more like a starting template. The default nouns are “strong guy”, “fast guy”, “smart guy”, “talky guy”—Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Bard, basically. The other two let you pick up some specializations. In practice, those three choices just determine which ala carte menu you get to pick your starting powers from.

That all lands somewhere around “rules medium”, in that you can probably fit all the mechanics on a single postcard, but the book is still 400+ pages long to fit all the Abilities and Verbs and all.

Despite the heft of the book, I’ve found it to be a system where the rules just melt away, but still give you enough framework to actually resolve things. When I really need the rules to back me up, there’s something there, otherwise, just say “sure, let’s call that difficulty 3,” and keep moving.

As I said, I bounced off the original Numenera setting pretty hard. Briefly: the setting is a billion years in the future, full of super-science and nanotech and post-plural-apocalypse. "Now", is roughly a medieval setting, where everyone runs around with swords fighting for feudal lords. But, instead of magic we have rediscovered super-science, monsters are the results of ancient genetic experiments, or aliens, or long-abandoned robots. Cook always enjoyed playing with the Arthur C. Clarke line about "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and here took that all the way up to eleven—the only magic is terribly advanced technology.

The other place he leans into his strengths is that his previous games (Ghostwalk, Ptolus, the setting for Acana Unearthed) had very cool, evocative, exciting setups, and then tended to have a tremendously boring resolution or explanation. Here, mysteries about but are fundamentally unexplainable. “Who knows, it’s weird!!” is the end of every adventure; a setting built around all cool setups that can never be explained or resolved ever. That’s a real “your mileage may vary” flavor if ever there was one.

But the problem is that all ends up just being “turbo D&D” but with different latin stems on the words describing the superpowers. Despite being a world dripping in nanotech, crashed spaceships, power armor, genetically-engineered robots, jetpacks, and all, for some reason the equipment chapter is all swords and polearms. Dude, I didn't buy a book with a robot on the cover to pack a halberd.

I can see why they decided to use this as the setting for the Torment-not-a-sequel. There are ways in which it’s a lot like Planescape, just without all the D&D baggage.

But there is something so deeply joyless about the setting. In the back, he has a list of Inspirations/Recommended Reading, which is both his homage to Gygax's similar appendix in 1E D&D, and also his list of primary sources. Nausicca, which is what I think the setting most resembles, is listed under movies, not books. Which means he only saw the movie, which is 90 minutes of crazy stuff happening, and not the book, where you get to find out what the heck is going on. And then he lists Adventure Time, and I'm all, Monte—where's the sense of fun? Ninjas never steal an old guy's diamond in this game. Maybe he only saw that episode where Bubblegum dies?

As an aside: later releases for Numenera did a better job of embracing the “weird superscience future” side of setting. I know this because despite bouncing off the game I kept picking up supplements for it because I wanted to find a way to make it work and I kept trying to figure out how to shear the rules away from the setting. They did a couple of other games with the same basic mechanics—including the spectacular “RPG for kids” No Thank You Evil which we played the hell out of.

Fortunately, they eventually pulled the combined rules from the other games and broke them out into their own book as just The Cypher System Rulebook. Like I said earlier, it’s a hefty tome, but it has all the “stuff” from the previous stand-alone games, along with a whole bunch of advice on how to lean into or out of various genres with the same rules, especially regarding how to make Cyphers work depending on the vibe and setting you’re going for.

Speaking of advice, the Cypher core book came out at roughly the same time as another book Cook did called Your Best Game Ever, which is a system & setting–agnostic book on “here’s how I think RPGs can and should work”. I cannot think of another example of this, where someone wrote a whole about RPGs, and then separately put out a book of “and here’s the rules I built specifically to support the philosophy of play from the other book.”

So not only does the Cypher core rule book have some of the clearest “here’s how this game is supposed to work and here’s how to make that happen” text I’ve ever read, but then if you have follow-up questions there’s another 230 pages of philosophy and detail you can read if you want.

This should happen more often. I’d love to read a “philosophy of RPG design and play” book from Tweet, or Robin Laws, or Steve Jackson, or the Blades in the Dark guy, or Kevin Siembada, or any of the other people who’ve been around making these games for long time. I don’t know that I’d agree with them, but I’d sure like to read them.

The “generic RPG” is a hill a lot of people have tried to climb, with mixed success. The obvious primary example here is GURPS, but then you have games like Shadowrun which are really four or five different games stacked on each other in the same cyber-trenchcoat.

Cypher is also a swing at the Generic RPG, but a better example of what it’s going for is the post-3.0 D&D d20 era, or the constellation of games “Power by the Apocalypse,” not so much one big game as a core set of bones you can assemble a game on top of. You could mix-and-match stuff from d20 Modern and d20 Future, but you’ll probably have a better time if you don’t.

The Cypher book doesn’t talk about settings but it does talk about genres, and has a long chapter outlining specific advice and tools for making the rules work under the narrative conceits of various genres. The list of genres is longer than I was expecting, there’s the usual Modern/Fantasy/Science-Fiction entries, but also things like Horror, or Romance.

The place where it really started to shine, though, is when then started doing “White Books”, separate genre & settings books to plug into Cypher.

On paper these aren’t that different than the sort of settings books GURPs or d20 would do, but the difference is that with Numenera covering the bases for all the classic science fiction & fantasy tropes, the White Books have the flexibility to get into really narrow and specific sub-genres. The generic stuff is back in the core book, these are all books with a take. They tend to be a mix of advice and guidelines on how to make the genre work as a game, a bunch of genre-specific mechanics, and then an example setting or two.

They did a fantasy setting, but instead of Tolkien/Howard/Burroughs–inspired it’s Alice in Wonderland. They did a Fallout-in-all-but-name setting with the wonderfully evocative name of Rust & Redemption that makes the mechanic of “Cyphers as scavenged technology” work maybe even better than in the original.

And then they did a book called It’s Only Magic, which might be the best RPG supplement I’ve ever read. The strapline is that it’s “cozy witchcore fantasy.” It’ a modern-day urban magic setting, but low-stakes and high-magic. (And look at that cover art!)

The main example setting in the book is centered around the coffee shop in the part of town the kids who go to the local magic college live in. The “ghost mall” is both a dead mall and where the ghosts hang out. It has one of those big fold-out maps where practically every building has an evocative paragraph of description, and you’ve knocked a skeleton of a campaign together halfway through skimming the map.

Less Earthsea and more Gilmore Girls, or rather, it plays like the lower-stakes, funnier episodes of Buffy. Apocalyptic threats from your evil ex-boyfriend? No. Vampire-who-can’t-kill-anymore as your new roommate? Yes. The Craft, but there’s three other magic-using witch clubs at the same school.

The other (smaller) example setting is basically Twin Peaks but the ghosts aren’t evil and the whole town knows about them. Or the funnier monster-of-the-week episodes of the X-Files.

It’s really fun to see what “Urban Fantasy” looks like with both “Cthulhu” and “90s goth vampire angst” washed completely out of its hair.

There’s the usual host of character options, NPCs, equipment, and the like, but there’s also a whole set of extra mechanics to make “casual magic” work. Cyphers as scented candles and smartphone apps! Theres a character focus—the verb in the character sentence—who is a car wizard, a spellcaster whose feeds all their spellcasting into making their muscle car do things. It’s great!

There’s a bunch of really well thought through and actionable stuff on how to run and play an urban fantasy game, how to build out a setting, how to pace and write the story and plot in such a genre. One of my themes in the all the RPG writing I’ve done this year has been how much I enjoy this current trend of just talking to the GM directly about how to do stuff, and this is an all time great example. The sort of work where you start thinking you probably know everything they’re going to say, and then end up nodding along going “of course!” and “great point!” every page.

It’s exactly what I look for out of an RPG supplement: a bunch of ideas, new toys to play with, and a bunch of foundational work that I wouldn’t have thought of and that’s easy to build on.

This is where I loop back around to where I started with GMing styles; whatever the term for the style I like is the style this game is written for, because this is the easiest game to run I’ve ever played.

Like I said, I tend to think of the way I like to run as “Improv”, but in the formal sense, not “just making stuff up.” Rules-wise, that means you need a ruleset that’s there when you need it to resolve something, but otherwise won’t get in your way and keep you from moving forward. You need ways the players can take the wheel and show you what kind of game they want to be running. And you need a bunch of stuff that you can lay hands on quickly to Improv on top of. I used to joke that I’d prepare for running a TTRPG session the same way a D&D Wizard prepares spells—I sketch out and wrap up a bunch of things to keep in my back pocket, not sure if I’m going to need them all, and with just enough detail that I can freestyle on top of them, but don’t feel like I wasted the effort if I don’t.

The example setting here is perfect for that. One of the players will glance at the map and say “you know, there’s that hardware store downtown,” and I can skim the two paragraphs on the store and the guy who runs it and have everything I need to run the next 30 minutes of the game.

Great stuff all around. Gets the full Icecano Seal of Approval.

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Edited to add on Dec 16: Regarding the list of people who I suggest should write books about RPGs, it’s been brought to my attention that not only did Robin Laws write such a book, but I both own it and have read it! Icecano regrets the error.

I Can’t Think of an Apple vs Wolfs pun, sorry

Okay, for everyone who manages their information diet better than I do, here’s the short, short version: As part of Apple’s expanding TV&Movie ambitions, they made a movie called Wolfs starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, directed by Jon Watts (the guy who did the Tom Holland Spider-Mans. Spider-Men?) Apparently, at the last second, Apple changed their mind about doing a real theatrical release despite earlier promises, and now Jon Watts is going all scorched earth on the promo circuit.

For more:

Director Explains "Wolfs 2" Cancellation - Dark Horizons

Michael Tsai - Blog - Apple’s Movie Theater Beef With Hollywood

My initial reaction was, well, could have been worse, we all could have woken up with a copy of Wolfs on our phones we can never delete.

But my real reaction to all this is: Aaahhhhh, Hollywood is learning why there aren’t any exclusive video games on Macs. Because man, whatever else, it is so funny to watch Apple treat literally George Clooney and Brad Pitt like they were independent iOS devs.

It feels really clarifying, though. Turns out that old thing about “Apple is number 1, Users are Number 2, Devs are Number 3” applies to everyone. And that’s the thing about Apple, is they just can’t do “partners”. They just institutionally can’t handle doing something that might make them less money than they could just so their partner will be happy. They just can’t do it. There’s no spreadsheet column for “this option will lose us less money but make two of the biggest movie stars in the world mad.”

So the stuff they do well are things they can do completely on their own, and things that require an actual partner, as opposed to a vendor, always fail.

I don’t have a snappy conclusion here, but I do expect a lot of sixcolors apple report cards next year to include a phrase along the lines of “but they didn’t even treat George Clooney right, so I don’t know what I expected.”

The Fumble

Attention Conservation Notice: This isn’t an attempt at a holistic explanation of the election so much as it is an attempt to store my current mental state for future reference, and as such, it may be even less coherent than normal. If you want to read an actually coherent holistic explanation from somebody who knows what they’re talking about, the best one I read was: The Deeper Reasons Democrats Lost. Also, this is best read if you imagine me talking in a calm, normal, reasoned sort of voice for the first thousand or so words, and then every thousand after that getting increasingly agitated and loud with a sort of “I don’t care if they kick out out of the restaurant!” borderline hysteria by the end.

It’s been a month or so now since the election, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate the way I feel about how things went down, especially in the wake of a million “this confirms my priors” postmortems. I’m disappointed and irritated, to put it mildly, but it’s also a very specific disappointed and irritated that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then it hit me: I feel the exact same way about the Harris/Walz campaign as I do about the 1990 San Francisco 49ers.

For those of you that don’t have 30+ year old sports failures memorized, let me recap. As the 1990 season started, the 49ers had won two Superbowls back to back, Joe Montana was at his peak, Jerry Rice could catch anything, their win in the previous Superbowl still holds the record for “most points scored by a team” and “widest margin of victory.” They’re blatantly the best team in the league, and in contention for “best team of all time.” This is the team people mean when they talk about "The 49ers". People start murmuring about “A three-peat”; at the time, no team had ever won three Superbowls in a row, and the Niners looked like they were about to make it look easy.

This was the era where the NFC was totally dominant, so the other “best team in the league” were the New York Giants. As was becoming tradition at the time, the “real” superbowl was going to be the NFC championship game. Coming into that game, the Niners looked unstoppable, they’d already beat the Giants once that year, there was this mounting excitement that this really might happen. Lots of “you’re only saying it’s impossible because no one ever has” vibes.

Wikipedia has a surprisingly compelling summary of the game, but the short version is: game turned into a grueling defensive slugfest, with both teams staggering down the field and mostly kicking field goals. The Niners stayed ahead, but barely. Then, in the fourth quarter, Montana took a hit so hard not only was he out for the rest of the game, but he wouldn’t play again for almost two years. Steve Young did his best, but then with under three minutes to go, the normally infallible Roger Craig fumbled the ball, the Giants recovered, and at the last second kicked a field goal. Game was over, Giants won 15–13. And that was it. Giants went on to win the Superbowl. Whoops.

I’m not saying the Niners “deserved” to win, because that’s not how this works. I’m also not saying that the Giants only won because they got lucky with two unexpected disasters. What I am saying is that I watched that whole season, and I know the Niners could have won that game, but when it really mattered they couldn’t get it done. There is a very specific kind of irritation watching someone who should have been doing well enough that those disasters didn’t matter.

And that’s how I feel, a month out from Harris/Walz blowing the big game, is that bone-deep frustration that this was winnable.

A lot of that is fueled by finding out just exactly how close it was. It was a broad rinsing, but shallow; the last numbers I saw showed that something like 200,000 votes in the right three or four cities would have swung this the other way. Still a loss, but that’s not a mandate, or a landslide. There wasn’t One Cool Trick that would have done the job, but you get the sense that any number of combinations of Little Cool Tricks might have. Heck, this could have gone either way based on how nice the weather was in the midewest that Tuesday.

Like all Presidential elections, this was all vibes, and the vibes went bad. The winning vote was “bleah, who even cares anymore.” Because the specific big difference between this year and 2020 was the group that showed up to vote against Trump in 2020 didn’t show up this time.

I will say this though: I will go to my grave convinced that if they’d let Walz continue to call people weird and leaned even harder into “do you really want more of these assholes?” and “not going back” that Harris would have won. “Weird” was working. Not going back was working. Turn the Page was working.

Instead, I guess that was “too negative”, Walz vanished, and Harris started campaigning with the daughter of an infamous war criminal who came to national attention right when the voters you’re trying to court got old enough to be politically informed. To be clear, I don’t think Liz Cheney cost any votes, but she sure didn’t get us any. That was all wasted effort.

So now we’re in the middle of the Democrat’s most despicable tradition: the post-loss argument about which group to throw out of the boat. This year it’s the Transgender community, who have committed the terrible crime of “continuing to exist.”

Throwing the civil rights of our transgender sisters and brothers under the bus to try and pick up a few votes is, of course, a moral horror. “But!” I hear the worst people alive say, “it’s just a sound strategic move!” No! It’s a stupid strategic move! Because look—there’s already a whole-ass American Political Party whose core platform is “not everyone counts as real people.” The voters whose issue is “I only want people like me to be treated well” are already voting for the other guys! Why would you go see a cover band when the real band is playing next door? So you end up in Electoral Stupid Limbo, where you’re not bigoted enough to get the bigot vote, but have made it clear to a group of voters looking for a candidate that you won’t help them out if you win. So they stay home!

This is what is so enraging about abandoning “weird”, is that “weird” made it clear that this was the platform for everyone else. The Republicans have tied up the weirdo bigoted middle-aged white guy demographic, and I’m convinced a campaign centered on “screw those guys, we’re sick of them treating us like crap” would work, mostly because it was working.

I’m gonna come back to that in a second, but if you’ll indulge me, my entry for the department of “recent surprising events have confirmed my priors,” is that I remain convinced that there are, effectively, no such things as “undecided voters.” What you have is, both “teams” have a core group of voters that always show up, and then each team has another pool of people who will either vote for them or stay home, but won’t switch sides.

And yeah, there are definitely Trump-Biden-Trump voters, but if you dig in a little further they all seem to be voting for “not the chick,” rather than any kind of team preference. These guys aren’t “undecided”, they’re “sexist” and that’s a different problem.

This is one of the places where I think using the sports metaphor is really apt. Trying to “flip” voters is like trying to convince people to root for a different team. “Come on and root for the Cowboys just this once, the 49ers aren’t even going to make the playoffs!” Absolutely not, that’s deranged, I’m gonna root for whoever the Cowboys are playing. The people you want to get are the people who watched every 49er game until Steve Young retired. “Come on back! We’re good this year! Lemme tell you the good news about this neat kid we got to play QB!”

The big difference, I think, that this election really displayed is that the Reps have a larger group of core voters, but the Dems have a larger group of “maybes.” Higher floor vs higher ceiling.

There’s a fundamental tactical asymmetry here, in that the Red Team can focus on depressing Blue Team turnout and have that work, but the opposite doesn’t. After a decade-plus of playing the refs, the Red Team has gotten very, very good at this. The Blue Team has to actually get the “maybes” to turn out to win.

The problem is that the Dems keep trying to pick up the other team’s “maybes.” That’s the endless “pivot to the center” that never works. Why? Why spend all that time courting people that aren’t ever going to vote for you?

I think the “fourth why” really is how old most of the Dem leadership is. Most of the people running the show, either “on camera” or more importantly “behind the scenes” have been doing this since the 70s. A lot of great things game out of the 70s that I like a lot, like Star Wars, or The Sting! But things have changed since then.

One of the big things that changed is that the dems are now the “big tent” diverse party. They haven’t won the “white vote” since before Jimmy Carter. (I’m using “white” here as a shorthand for straight, cisgender people whose ancestors were from select areas of western europe and are probably Protestant, in the vague American way.)

I think the core problem, the “fifth why”, is that those 70s era leaders still think of “white, probably Protestant men” as the “real voters.” “If we can get them, we win!” Nope. Statistically, they vote Red team. Like it or not, and there’s a class of consultant who really do not, the Dems have been the “everyone but white guys” party for half a century.

And look, there is a way to maybe get that mass of vaguely racist, vaguely sexist white men to show up, and that was to run somebody that looks like Joe Biden But when you’re running a young-ish woman of color, there’s no getting that vote. They’re gonna find a whole bunch of reasons why they obviously support women, just not this woman. That’s not great, but it should not be a surprise. That’s just baked-in to the population we have. Once you’ve got a candidate that looks like this, you have to put all the energy on “everyone else.”

Speaking of the “male vote”, there was a lot of chatter around the fact that Millennial white men went for Harris but Gen-Xers went for Trump. And, while that’s accurate, I don’t think that it’s a “generational” thing so much as I think there’s a standing wave somewhere around 35-40. There’s a certain kind of dude who’s finally successful, got a good job, fancy truck they like, has all the wraparound shades he’ll ever need, is well paid, successful, and they can’t figure out why people still don’t like them. Their kids are jerks, their wives aren’t as hot as they thought they deserved. (These are the “I’ll do anything to protect my family” doofuses who refused to wear a mask. “I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that” was wear a mask and get vaxxed, it turns out.) There’s that oft repeated line about people getting more conservative the older they get, and this is usually framed as now you make enough money you’re for tax cuts, but no, I think this is about guys who never learned that the trick was to grow their own personality and develop empathy deciding that if they can’t have “social power” they might as well get some “political power.” The number of dudes online who made their whole personality “if Trump wins I’ll get laid” was bizarre. (And so I’m calling my shot now, in another two elections we’re going to get a whole set of thinkpieces about “why have Millenial men gone to the right?” Because they passed through that threshold.)

There’s a deep, deep insecurity there. (I saw someone online say that if we could cure baldness, the male vote would move left 20 points.) This is where the anti-elite thing comes from: a whole bunch of comfortable, insecure men who have convinced themselves that someone, somewhere think they’re better than they are, and they’re gonna vote for someone to take them down a notch. The people who want to be jerks, but think the worst possible thing is for them to be criticized for being a jerk. They tend to really dislike “liberals” because they’re giving “those people” things they “don’t deserve,” but mostly they dislike anyone who makes them feel like maybe being a jerk isn’t the best idea possible. The Red Team’s whole messaging the last several cycles has really centered on this: these people think they are better than you, but they are not! Let’s take ‘em down!

I’m bringing all this up because this was one of the brilliant things about having Tim Walz being the one saying “weird,” and why it was such a mistake for him to vanish after the convention.

There aren’t a lot of “cool dads” in pop culture, not as good role models anyway. So having Walz show up as CoolDad^TM saying, basically, “hey, fellas, there’s a better way to be a man and protect your family,” seemed like a real opportunity. This is the “toxic vs tonic masculinity” we were all talking about back in September.

And that’s what makes this election so maddening, is because what they were doing looked like it was working.

The real teeth-gritting part is that I can almost, almost see the logic in trying to peel off some R votes in an election where the stakes are “this guy wants to be a warlord.” There are probably Republicans to campaign with who are broadly well-liked enough for that to have worked. Clint Eastwood? Arnold Schwarzenegger maybe? But instead, they front and centered the Cheneys, and this is the other problem with having your leadership be that old, because to them the Cheneys are fellow “serious people”, but to everyone in that critical elder Millennial to younger Gen-X demographic, instead the Cheneys are “a big part of the the reason all my high school friends aren’t still alive.”

Again, I don’t know if that actually lost votes, but it also sure as hell didn’t gain any, and it was a huge opportunity cost versus things that could have.

Having someone that looks like Walz pointing at the loser weirdos calling them loser weirdos, while the creeps made fun of his kids? That was working.

But the real problem, the actual catastrophic problem there, is that the Dems didn’t actually have an answer to “well, if Trump did all these crimes, why isn’t he in jail?” Your whole argument about saving democracy evaporates when this is the third election in a row you’ve run on that, and haven’t been doing anything to save it with the resources you already have. To be fair, that wasn’t necessarily Harris’ fault, but it was her problem. If you’re a less-engaged, lower-information voter—which by defintion all those “maybes” are—it’s real easy to hear all “that stuff” about what Trump did, and then conclude it’s bullshit because obviously if it was real he’d be in the slammer. (But if you focus on the fact that he’s weird and gross? All that “danger to democracy”power slides away, and he’s just another asshole.)

Voters like it when the people they voted for actually wield the power they gave them. The dems have a long and inglorious history of just… not doing what they can because reasons. Because that’ll score more moral points with… somebody?

I was mid-draft of this mess when Biden pardoned his kid, and as near as I can tell the reaction from the Dem base was “yeah, man, like that! You shoulda done that one day one and kept going.”

Most normal sane people, the people you want to vote for you, would also absolutely do whatever they could do pull their kids out of a fire. The people you were gonna get blowback from weren’t going to vote for you anyway. It was a perfect microcosm of not using the power available because they thought that might impress… someone? Someone who still didn’t vote for them? Instead, you were asking people to come out and vote for someone who wasn’t even willing to help his own son until it was clear that wasn’t going to hurt him politically, but his party was going to fight for you?

Your sales pitch can’t keep being “the other people might do things! Vote for us so we keep doing nothing!” That’s a bad position.

A whole lot of people showed up in 2020, and the Dems didn’t do anything to make sure those people stuck around, instead they assumed they would and tried to flip others. There’s a sense that summer 2021 was the Democrat’s “Mission Accomplished” moment. “We’re done! Democracy saved! Pandemic over!” And then they let all the social programs expire and all the criminals off the hook. And then a whole bunch more people died?

Of course, when you do wield power, you have to actually show off a little, make some noise, take the credit. There’s a line I read somewhere over the summer that Biden was Progressive President with Centrist Vibes, and that’s stuck with me. And part of that was just not talking about the things they did manage to do.

Which brings me to my last major problem, which is that it’s hard to miss that people believed a lot of obviously untrue stuff this cycle. The Information Environment is absolutely cooked for the Dems these days, after years of Reps playing the refs and a media owned by a shrinking group of very rich Billionaires, who, I think, genuinely wanted Trump to win.

Pretty much every post-mortem on this one I’ve read boils down to “voters believed a lot of really obvious and easily disprovable lies.”

I continue to be slightly baffled by how much certain chunks of the center-to-left hate Biden? But aslo, if you only get your news from the NYT, I guess that makes sense. There’s a basic “tell people what you did and then keep telling them” side that the Dems can’t do, and big chunks of the media will refused to help with.

There’s a story I can’t find a link to again about a group of people who voted for Trump because “he gave us money last time,” and it turns out they thought the COVID stimulus checks were his personal money, not—you know—a program the Dems in congress voted for. This also tracks very closely to some conversations I had in real life over the summer, where it was very clear the people I was talking to were convinced Trump did a whole lot of things that were actually done by the Dems because he, you know, put his damn name on the checks.

There’s also that chart that was going around showing that “knowingly consuming” political news tracked incredibly closely with candidate choice: those that consumed a lot went Harris, those that didn’t consume any went Trump. (The other theme for this piece is that I failed to keep my references organized, so of course I can’t find that chart again.)

But the key word there was “knowingly.” I’m gonna loop back to that “male vote” for a second, because there is so much weird right-wing manosphere garbage in every “male hobby” out there. Video games, gyms, table top gaming, everywhere. So you start going to the gym, and maybe you personally don’t listen to Rogan, but the other guys there do, and this stuff seeps in. I cannot tell you how many middle aged guys I know who consider themselves to be proudly “independent centrists” and then two sentences later they start quoting opinions that would have got you kicked off 4chan a decade ago. It’s insane how good a job the far right has done in building out a media ecosystem that doesn’t look like one. It ought to be the easiest thing in the world to build out a youtube channel talking about Warhammer or Battletech or Star Wars, or TTRPGs from—if not a left perspective—at least from a non-fascist perspective, but instead I keep getting youtubes with the caption “pretty funny!” or “sounds about right!” that are just straight up nazi propoganda over promo photos of Luke Skywalker and Kathleen Kennedy. And then, the real kicker is, if you “don’t consume political news” you don’t have any context and aren’t reading any of the stuff pointing that out. Neat!

The flip side of all that, though, is that we’re clearly in a post-campaign era. I think overall Harris & co. ran a really solid campaign—excepting the part where they lost, obviously—but the other guy just mumbled his way though various slurs and swayed on stage to music made by people that hate him. But nothing got covered like that, and you end up with coverage about made-up versions of the two candidates. This post-truth era where no one believes either candidate will do what they say they will, good or bad. (Which is causing a lot of shocked pikachu memes at the moment.)

So, to summarize: going into this, the Dems had four big problems that I think mattered more than anything else:

1. International, wide-spread repudiation of incumbents.
2. Running a Woman of Color in a racist, sexist country.
3. The overall Information Environment being wired for the other team.
4. Not having an answer for “if Trump did all these crimes, why isn’t he in jail?”

And this is why I’m so frustrated about them abandoning “weird”, because it cut through all of those like a hot knife through butter:

The worldwide anti-incumbent attitude? Weird/Won’t go back neatly harnessed that energy, aikido style, and directed it away, framing this as moving on from what was basically the “Trump-Biden” era, but also the whole 90s era political scene that’s just never gone away, and the guy that Biff from 80s classic Back to the Future was literally based on.

The racist/sexists? “Do you want those weirdoes to be in charge?”

The Information Environment? No one would cover things like policy proposals, but they sure as heck carried “weird.” There’s no way to garble that!

Trump’s crimes? If you talk like he’s a threat to civilization, you have to answer why you don’t act like that. But if you just keep pointing out what a sadsack dipshit loser weirdo he and his cronies are, that drains all his mystique away. Plus the Red Team hated that, and started doing some really, really dumb things because of it.

You gotta focus on the base. Your own base. Not take your base for granted and try and pick up the other guy’s. Parts of this campaign felt like that kid in class who skipped the final project but tried to make it up on extra credit. (Didn’t work for them ether.)

I think the key political element of our times is that everyone, and I mean everyone is absolutely seething with anger. The entire Trump project is based on harnessing that from one subgroup and redirecting it towards everyone else. That health insurance CEO was gunned down while I was wrapping this up, and the utterly wild reaction to the shooting is what I’m talking about. People are done. This was basically the third “table-flip” election in a row, and that can’t be great. “Weird” was a way to harness that, direct it, say “we hear you, and we’re as mad about the same stuff you are.”

Would it have worked if they’d kept going with “they’re weird and we’re mad” ’til the end? I don’t know, but I’d sure like to have found out.

Oh wait, they’re really kicking us out of the restaurant…

As Long As We’re Talking About D&D: Things I’d Change

I was talking with someone IRL over the weekend about the glut of “new kinds of D&D” that came out over two volcano summer, and I knocked out my standard list of things about 5e I don’t love, and expressed to them (as I have previously here) that I wished one of the “revised 5e” projects had made larger changes, and my friend asked the very obvious follow-up question of: well okay, what would change then? Fair enough! I do, in fact, have thoughts there.

Note this isn’t the same as “what’s your ideal RPG”; that would look like a hybrid of Star Wars D6, Feng Shui, Cypher, Bard’s Tale, and X-Com, not have classes, be full of dice pools, and probably would be unplayable to anyone else.

But, assuming a baseline of D&D 2024 and Tales of the Valiant, and trying to keep it feeling like D&D while fixing stuff I don’t like, here’s what I’d change if I was in charge of a “sixth edition”, roughly in order:

The Combat Action Economy. This is one of those places where’s I’d make it a little more complex in order to make it simpler.

I really dislike the lumpy, multiple-sized actions each character gets in combat. You can Move and Attack, except sometimes you can also do something else? All the 21st century editions have this extra weird half-an-action, whether it was the Free/Swift split system in 3rd, or the Minor action in 4, or the worst-of-the-bunch Bonus actions in 5. And they get even stranger when you add in the various kinds of “not-on-your-turn” reaction options. Complicated, but also limiting, worst of both worlds.

I’d probably do something like Pathfinder 2 did and just give everyone 3 action points, and some actions take more than one point. And then this opens up some interesting options, like allowing faster attacks that use one less action for an accuracy penalty, or trading action points between characters, or just throttling how big an effect something has by how many points you spend on it.

A Caster that Just Uses Spell Points. And I don’t mean the weird “use spell points to make a spell slot,” I mean, “Magic Missle costs 2 points per missile, go nuts.” This was always what I liked about Psionics so much—the Psion used spell points like a grown up, and you didn’t have to worry about the wonk-ass “Vancian” system.

I really like systems where players have to budgets pools of points to spend on powers, and if you keep the numbers small enough—like you do under 5e’s Bounded Accuracy—the arithmetic isn’t too onerous. I think most classes could use a pool of “you get so many cool stuff points a day”; the Monk even already has that. Think of them as “Time in the spotlight in this fight” points. I’d replace every one of those weird pools of dice various classes have with a pool of “class power points”.

With spells especially I think there’s a whole set of cool mechanics hiding there, all of the metamagic and spell-shaping features are so much more simpler and more flexible when you can just charge a couple of extra points. Area of effect, amount of damage, range, all as multipliers of the points you spend.

My inclination would be to just add back the Psion with their own spell list and ignore the haters, but the right move would probably be to remodel the Sorcerer to work this way, and then rewrite the spell descriptions to work with either slots or spell points.

The unarmored melee combatant. This is my longest standing beef with Dungens & Dragons specifically and its descendants generally. There’s a whole set of cool unarmored archetypes—swashbucklers, pirates, gunslingers, Indiana Jones—that are dodge, parry, get out of the way fighters, and there’s never a good way to play one of those. I know there’s a whole class that has “no armor” as one of its signature things, but it comes with a lot of schtick payload, and sometimes I don’t want to play Bruce Lee, I want to play Inigo Montoya, you know?

And look, I get it. This is one of those weird, primordial Gygax things, this is a game where the defense stat isn’t called “Defense”, it’s called “Armor Class.” This is the sort of change that sounds easy, but every obvious solution is either worthless or game-breaking. The most-direct route is to make a Swashbuckler subclass of Fighter, but maaaaan, I’d sure want to be able to do that for Rogue and Ranger too, at the very least. My inclination would be to make an “Armor Proficiency” that you could take as a feat that lets you add your proficiency bonus to your AC when not wearing armor, but that feels like it has half-a-dozen unintended consequences I’m not thinking of.

Usually, I pair this complaint with the closely matching complaint that any action-adventure character, regardless of their job, should be able to throw a combat-viable punch. But, 5e24 has at least two ways that any character can become a viable pugilist, so that’s one long-standing complaint solved!

Success with consequences. I’m not a huge fan of critical fails, but I love me some “success, but with a complication.” Big shoutout to the old Star Wars d6 and the “wild die” here. There are a lot of specific cases in D&D-likes that have something like this, and there are obvious ways to houserule a solution (miss the target by less than 5?) but I’d love a formal, system-wide “so that worked, but also…” It’s funny, this seems like one of those things that basically every non-d20 system has.

Moar feats. Especially in class-based systems, I like being able to pick up extra features from the à la carte menu, it’s a great way to dial in a specific character without needing the superstructure of a subclass or prestige class or some such. My favorite house rule from the 3.x days was to give everyone a feat at every level; the initial fear was that the party would blow the roof off of the power curve, but instead everyone took the weird fun non-combat ones, instead of just taking power attack because you had to. The downside here is that you just added another 50 pages to a core book that’s already 100 pages too long.

Bards and Rangers without spells. It drives me crazy that those classes get spells; ever since the 3.x days that’s felt to me like a “doing homework on the bus to school” solution. I would add a “with spells” subclass to each, like the Fighter and Rogue have. Rangers irritate me on a purely aesthetic level, like, what, Strider isn’t a cool enough character on his own, you gotta throw spells on there too?

Bards are the one that really bugs me, though, because “play music to cause an area effect” is just begging for a cool set of custom mechanics. Bard’s Tale had this cracked 40 years ago, and everyone should go crib from that. If the Battle Master Fighter subclass gets an entire set of powers and mechanics, Bards certainly deserve one.

Don’t prepare spells. “Guess what features of my class I need today” is a minigame I can’t stand. For the classes that still have to prepare, I’d flip it around the other way, and say you can cast the spells you know at-will, but you can also have so many spells per day prepared in a quickdraw state, you can cast with half the action points or something.

And as long as we’re talking about magic users, some quick hits that I haven’t fully thought through:

• I’d gut and rebuild the warlock, and really lean into being the mirror universe cleric.
• Wizard with a sword and a gym membership needs a subclass, like a reverse Eldritch Knight. “No, I’ll save my spell points, I can handle this with my bare mitts.” (Yes, I know about the Pact of the Blade, and no, that’s not what I mean and you know it.)
• Cleric subclass that’s a little less knight templar and a little more Van Helsing.
• I’d ditch material components all-together. These either get ignored, or used to keep Wizards from doing their thing. They’re not fun, and I think the “balance” they bring is overestimated.

And speaking of ditching long-standing under-loved mechanics, I’d shove Alignment into an Optional Rules sidebar. I’ve been running D&D, in one edition or another, for almost forty years, and I’ve never cared about alignment once. The game doesn’t need it, but those alignment charts are fun. I’d ditch it all together, but it feels a little too foundational, and if it was gone the Outer Planes would make even less sense than they already do.

I’d bring back the 4e phrasing of per day and per encounter powers. Put the short/long rest stuff in an optional sidebar thing, “here’s how to adjudicate this in a non-gamy way if you really need to”; I also really like having “an encounter” be a mechanical entity in it’s own right, and not just fights, but “scenes”.

Retool the Monk. It does not escape me that the key features of the Monk—unarmed attacks, AC from something other than Armor, and multiple attacks at level 1—are all things I think everyone should get access to. Which is funny, since Monk is my favorite class! But I think spreading the “action hero” stuff out would let the Monk really lean into its own thing. Personally, I’d juice up the martial arts movie aspect of finding ways to use the environment—the Jackie Chan thing of constantly picking up pool cues, or chairs, or lose saw blades to fight or defend with. Not “doesn’t use armor” so much as “doesn’t need to carry equipment.” I really like the 5e24 Monk, I don’t think you’d have to work that hard to replace those level 1 features.

Cabel Sasser’s XOXO Talk

This was two months ago now, but in case you missed it, I want to strongly recommend Cabel Sasser’s XOXO talk.

The less you know going in, the better. It’s 20 minutes, get a beverage and settle in. The opening is a little clunky, but trust me.

Older Movies I Re-Watched Recently: Elmore Leonard 90s Double Feature—Jackie Brown (1997) /Out of Sight (1998)

Spoilers Ahoy

I got left without adult supervision recently, and ended up having a late-90s Elmore Leonard double feature of Jackie Brown and Out of Sight. I’d seen both movies when they came out, hadn’t seen either since. They both hold up!

The two make an interesting comparison.

Jackie Brown isn’t anyone’s pick for Tarantino’s best move—it’s the one where people go “oh right, he did that one too!” Pam Grier and Robert Forster had never been better—and neither one would have a part that good again. For everyone else, this is clearly a minor movie in their respective bodies of work. I remember reading a review of Jackie Brown at the time that said something along the lines of “Tarantino could probably make a movie like this every eighteen months for the rest of his life.” And yeah, everyone in this movie has a quality like this is a break between “real” projects. Not that they’re not taking it seriously, but everyone involved already knows what movies are going in the first line of their obituaries, and this isn’t one of them.

With Out of Sight, on the other hand, you get the sense that everyone knows this is the Big One. This is the start of Soderburg’s comeback, Clooney is still “the ER guy”, Lopez is still a b-player. But there’s a swagger to it; maybe the set was riven by anxiety, but overwhelming sense you get from this movie is: everyone knows this is working. This movie cemented Clooney and Lopez as major movie stars. This was easily Soderburg’s best movie to date, and certainly his most successful, since sex, lies, and videotape. After this, he joins the ranks of major directors. This was it, and you can tell they know it. They’re working their butts off and it is paying off.

Both director’s tics are on full display; there are a lot of closeups of Bridget Fonda’s feet; there are a lot of mid-scene freezeframes of Jennifer Lopez.

One of my favorite things about Jackie Brown is how smart everyone is. All the major players, Jackie Brown herself, Michael Keaton’s ATF agent, Sam Jackson, Robert Forster’s bail bondsman, all know what’s going on; they know that there’s a whole series of double-crosses in play, but they’re all used to being the smartest person in the room, and are all confident they still are. To steal a quote from another movie, at the end they all find out who was right, and who was dead.

There’s a scene at the end where ATF agent Ray Nicolette, played by Michael Keaton, realizes both what’s just happened, and how much he’s been played, and then spends a beat quietly replaying the events of the movie, realizing what’s really been going on this whole time. He’s still got a lot of options, Jackie Brown is still in a lot of potential trouble, but she’s also given him a tremendous gift if he’s smart enough to see it. He is. You watch him consider his options, and he takes a breath and decides he’s good, he’s done here. Jackie Brown is free to go.

Structurally, Jackie Brown is one of Tarantino’s least ambitious movies, and to the movie’s benefit. The most sleight of hand the movie does is around that aforementioned smartness; everyone has a plan, and the audience doesn’t get to find out what they are until they happen. There are long stretches where the suspense is the audience wondering “what is happening right now?” whereas the characters all know.

Unlike Jackie Brown, everyone in Out of Sight is dumb. Even the smart characters Clooney and Lopez are playing spend most of the movie doing very dumb things. (The Soderbergh/Clooney movie with vibes closest to Jackie Brown is Ocean’s 11.) There are parts that play more like a Coen Bros movie, but meaner.

Out of Sight starts in what we later learn is the middle of the story and extends forwards and backwards along the character’s relationships. But this isn’t just the same out-of-order storytelling as something like Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction reorganizes events so that the epiphany that drives all the action takes place is in the last scene of the movie. We’ve already seen the reasons for, and consequences of it, and then with Sam Jackson’s last line of dialoge the movie slots into place the reason for everything we’ve just seen.

Out of Sight is doing something altogether different. It’s structured like a memory, not dream logic in the David Lynch sense, but how you would remember these events after the fact.

A specific example: the scene where Lopez and Clooney seduce each other. From a strictly technical sense, the scene is edited as two sets of interleaved flashbacks, the first in the bar, the second in a hotel room. But it all plays as they way you’d remember it later; no one remembers things in strictly linear order, memory tends to be images linked by emotion, so we get a hand on a glass, and then a hand on a thigh, and then a smile—a collage.

(Soderbergh dials this all the way up in his next movie, The Limey, where the entire movie is effectively Terrance Stamp thinking about what’s happened on his flight home afterwards.)

It’s remarkable how good Clooney is here. He was still “the ER guy” at this point, and the way he quietly underplays lines like “I wasn’t asking permission” makes it clear his stardom wasn’t a fluke. Lopez is on fire, managing to land the very tricky mixture of “highly competent agent who always gets their man” and “but this time I’d like to have an affair first.”

Out of Sight is also an incredibly sexy movie, especially for one where basically everyone keeps their clothes on. From the first moment they look at each other, there is absolutely no question about why Lopez and Clooney are doing extremely dumb things to get together; their chemistry positively sizzles, you could practically cook on the heat they give off.

Which makes an interesting contrast to the central romance in Jackie Brown, between Pam Grier and Robert Forster. Their characters are both older, more disappointed, with a longer debris field of personal wreckage. Their almost-a-romance isn’t about heat so much as kindred spirits, they’ve both been disappointed by the same kinds of things. When Lopez and Clooney get separated, the energy is, well, it was fun while it lasted. When Grier walks out of Forster’s office, it’s just terribly sad; one more disappointment for both of them.

They both end on the same sort of “downer-upbeat” vibe; things aren’t great now, but the trend lines are going in the right direction.

On paper, Jackie Brown is much closer to my sensibilities; smart people outwitting each other, good music. But I found 25 years later, I preferred Out of Sight. I don’t have a deep insight here, but I think maybe the older I get the more sympathetic I get for people doing dumb things hoping they’ll work out. They usually don’t, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. But mostly, I thought the movie was just more fun.

Read This Book Next! Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024)

And the “New D&D” double volcano-asteroid summer comes to a close with the release of the 2024 revision of the 5th Edition D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Let me start with the single best thing in this book. It’s on page 19, at the end of the first chapter (“The Basics”). It’s a subsection titled “Players Exploiting the Rules.” It’s half a page of blunt talk that the rules are not a simulation, they assume good-faith interpretations by everyone, they don’t exist as a vehicle to bully the other players, and if a player is being an asshole tell them to stop. Other games, including previous iterations of this one, have danced around this topic, but I can not remember a rule book so clearly stating “don’t let your players be dicks.” I should add that this comes after a section called “Respect for the Players” that spends a page or two finding every possible way to phrase “If you are going to be a DM, do not be an asshole.” It’s incredible, not because it’s some hugely insightful or ground-shaking series of observations, but because they just say it.

(There are a couple people I played with in college—no, no one you know—that I am tempted to find for the first time in 20+ years just so I can mail them a copy of these sections.)

Let me back up a tad.

A running theme through my “New D&D” reviews this year has been: where were people supposed to learn how to play this game? At one point I posited that the key enabling technology that led to the current D&D-like boom was twitch, which finally let people watch other people play even if they didn’t already know someone.

Like I talked about last time, TTRPGs have this huge mass of what amounts to oral traditions that no one really wrote down. Everyone learned from their friend’s weird older brother, or that one uncle, or the guy in the dorms, or whatever. And this goes double for actually running the game—again, one of the reasons 10’ square-by-square dungeon crawls were so common was that was the only style of play the Red Box actually taught you how to run.

As much as “new player acquisition” was a big part of D&D’s mandate, that’s something it’s struggled with outside the era of the Red Box; text actually answering the question “okay, but literally what do I do now that everyone is at my kitchen table,” has been thin on the ground.

D&D tended to shunt this kind of stuff off into auxiliary products, leaving the Core Books as reference material. The classic example here is the Red Box, but as another example, if you go back and look at the 3.0 books, theres no discussion on what “this is” or how to play it at all. That’s because 3e came out alongside the “D&D Adventure Game” box set which was a Basic-eque starter set that was supposed to teach you how to play that no one bought and no one remembers. (The complete failure of that set is one of the more justifiable reasons why 3.5 happened, those revised books had a lot of Adventure Game material forklifted over.) 4E pivoted late to the Essentials thing, the 2014 5e had three different Starter Boxes over the last decade (with a new one coming, I assume?)

And this has always been a little bit of a crazy approach, like: really? I can’t just learn the game from this very expensive thick hardcover I bought in a bookstore? I gotta go somewhere else and buy a box with another book in it? What?

By contrast, the 2024 rules, for the first time in 50 years, really seems to have embraced “what if the core rule books actually tought you how to play.”

Like the 2024 PHB, the first 20 pages or so are a wonder. It starts with an incredibly clean summary of what a DM actually does, with tips on how to prep and run a session, what you need to bring, how do it. It’s got an example of play like the one in the PHB with a sidebar of text explaining what’s going on, except this time it’s explaining that the DM casually asked for what order the characters were in as they were walking towards the cave before they needed to know it so they could drop the surprise attack with more drama.

It’s got a section on “DM play style” which is something almost no one ever talks about. It’s got a really great section on limits and safety tools, and setting expectations, complete with a worksheet to define hard and soft limits as a group.

Then that rolls into another 30 pages of Running The Game. Not advanced rules, just page after page of “here’s how to actually run this.” My favorite example: in the section on running combat, there’s a whole chunk on what to actually do to track monster hit points on scratch paper. There’s a discussion on whether to start with the monster’s full HP and subtract, or start and zero and add damage until you get to the HP max. (I’m solidly an add damage guy, because I can do mental addition faster than subtraction.) I literally can’t ever remember another RPG book directly talking to the person running the game about scratch paper tracking techniques. This is the kind of stuff I’m talking about where we learned to play the game; this was all stuff you learned from watching another DM or just figured out on your own. This whole book is like someone finally wrote down the Oral Torah and I am here for it.

For once, maybe for the first time, the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide is actually a Guide for Dungeon Masters.

Like the PHB, you could sheer the first 30-50 pages off the front of this book and repackage them as a pretty great “Read This Book Next!” softcover for a new Red Box. From that point, the book shifts into a crunchier reference work, but still with the focus on “how to actually do this.” Lots of nuts-and-bolts stuff, “here’s how to work with alignment”, “here’s how to hotrod this if you need to”, the usual blue moon rules, but presented as “here’s how to run this if it comes up.”

In the best possible way, this all seems like D&D finally responding to the last decade and change of the industry. Like how Planescape’s Factions were a direct reaction to the Clans in Vampire, so much of this book feels like a response to the “GM Moves” in Apocalypse World. Those moves weren’t hugely innovative in their own right—there were a lot of reactions to PbtA that boiled down to “yeah, that’s how I already run RPGs”, but that was the point, those were things that good GMs were already doing, but someone finally wrote them down so people who didn’t have direct access to a “good GM” could learn them too. The effect on the whole industry was profound; it was like everyone’s ears popped and said “wait, we can just directly tell people how to play?”

For example: the 2024 DMG doesn’t have a section on “worldbuilding”, it has sections on “Creating Adventures” and “Creating Campaign” with “campaign settings” and worldbuilding as a secondary concern to those, and that’s just great. That’s putting the emphasis on the right syllables; this is much more concerned with things like pacing, encounter design, recurring characters, flavor, and then the advice about settings builds out from that, how can you build out a setting to reflect the kind of game you want to run. Fantastic.

However, the theme of this book is “actionable content”, so rather than throw a bunch of advice for settings around and leave you hanging (like the 2014 DMG,) this includes a fully operational example setting, which just happens to be Grayhawk. It’s a remarkably complete gazeteer, nice maps (plural), lots of details. This strikes me as a perfect nostalgia deployment, something that’s cool on its own right that also will make old timers do the Leo DiCaprio pointing meme.

Following that is a remarkably complete gazeteer of cosmology, offering what amounts to a diet Manual of the Planes. It does a really nice job of the whirlwind tour of what’s cool and fun to use from what they now call the “D&D Multiverse”, while making it clear you can still use any or all of this stuff on top of and in addition to anything you make up.

Something else this book does well is take advantage of the fact that there’s already a whole line of compatible 5e books in print, so it can point you to where to learn more. There’s a page or two on things like Spelljamming, or Sigil, or The Radiant Citadel, which is fully useful on it’s own, but then instead of being coy about it, the book just says “if you want to know more, go read $BOOK.” That’s marketing the way its supposed to work.

On a similar note, before it dives into Greyhawk, the DMG has a list of all the other in-print 5e settings with an elevator pitch for why they’re cool. So if you’re new, you can skim and say “wait, armies of dragons?” or “magical cold war you say?” and know where to go next.

(Well, everything in print plus… Dark Sun? Interesting. Everything else in the table is something that got into print for 5e, so the usual stuff like Forgotten Realms, Raveloft, and Planescape, but also the adapted Magic: The Gathering settings, the Critical Role book, etc. Mystara isn’t here, or any of the other long-dorment 2e settings, but somehow Dark Sun made the cut. Between this and the last-second name-change reprieve in the Spelljammer set, there might be something cooking here? sicks_yes.gif)

There’s also the usual treasure tables, magic items, and so on.

Between this and the PHB, the 2024 books are a fully operational stand-alone game in a way previous iterations of the “core rules” haven’t always been.

⚔

Okay, having said all that, I am now compelled to tell you about my least favorite thing, which is the cover art. Here, let me link you to the official web page. Slap that open in a new tab, take a gander, I’ll meet you down at the next paragraph.

Pretty cool right? Skeleton army, evil sword guy, big dragon lurking in the back. Cool coloring! Nice use of light effects! But! There, smack in the center, is Venger from the 80s D&D cartoon. My problem isn’t the nostalgia ploy, as such. My problem is that Venger is a terrible design. Even if you limit the comparison to other 80s toy cartoons, Venger is dramatically, orders-of-magnitude worse than Skeletor, Mum-Rah, Megatron, Cobra Commander. Hell, every single He-Man or She-Ra bad guy is a better design than Venger. Step that out further, every single Space Ghost villain is a better design than Venger. D&D is full of cooler looking stuff than that. This cover with Skeletor and his Ram Staff there instead of Venger and his goofy-ass side horn? That would be great. This, though? sigh

He shows up inside the book, too! Like the PHB, each chapter opens with a full-page art piece, and they’re all a reference to some existing D&D thing, a setting or character. And then, start of chapter 2, there’s Venger and his big dumb horn using a crystal ball to spy on Tiamat. And this is really the one I’m complaining about, because all the other full-page spreads are a cool scene, and if you want to know more, there’s a whole book for that. But for this, the follow up is… you can go watch the worst cartoon of the 80s, the DVD of which is currently out of print?

And I hear what you’re saying, it’s a nostalgia play, sure, yeah, but also, it’s 2024; the kids that watched that show are closing in on 50, or thereabouts. The edition that could lean into 80s nostalgia for the purposes of pulling in the kids back in was third, and I know because I was there. “That’s the bad guy from a cartoon your parents barely tolerated” is a weird-ass piece of marketing.

As long as I’m grousing, my other least-favorite thing is towards the end, where they have something called a “Lore Glossary.” On the surface, this is a nice counterpart to the Rules Glossary in the new PHB, but while the Rules Glossary was probably the single best idea in the new books, this Lore Glossary is baffling. It’s a seemingly-random collection of D&D “trivia stuff”; locations, characters, events, scattered across various settings and fiction. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why things get an entry here; Fizban and Lord Soth get entries but Tanis doesn’t, but Drizzt, Minsc, and Boo do. There’s an entry for The Great Modron March but not Orcus which, okay, spoilers I guess. It’s all details for settings rather than anything broadly applicable; the book was already too long, it didn’t need 10 more pages of teasers for other books. Both Venger and the main characters from the 80s cartoon (as “Heros of the Realm, The”) are in here too. Again, it’s just plain weird they leaned in that hard to the old show. I assume that someone on staff was a huge fan, that or there’s a book coming out next year that’ll make us all go “ohhhh.”

The last thing I have anything negative to say about is the new Bastion System. On it’s own, and having not taken them for a test drive yet, it seems cool? It’s a pretty solid-looking system for having a player or party create and manage their own base of operations, possibly with Hirelings. Ways to upgrade them, bonuses or plot hooks those upgrades get you.

I’m just not sure why they’re in this book? It feels like a pitch for a “Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook” or “Complete Guildhall” got left without a release slot, and they said “let’s put the best 20 pages of this in the DMG.” Everything else in the book is applicable to every game, and then there’s this weird chapter for “and here’s how to do a base-building minigame!” Sure?

Personally, I love hireling/follower/base-building systems in computer games, but stay far away from them on the tabletop. The base management subgame was one of my favorite parts of both BATTLETECH and the first Pillars of Eternity, for example, but I don’t think I’ve ever had the desire to run a tabletop game with something more complex than “Wait, how many GP do you have on your character sheet? Sure, you can buy a house I guess.”

There’s nothing wrong with it, but like the Lore Glossary I wish they’d tried to make the book a little shorter and 10 bucks cheaper instead. (And then gave me the option to buy the blown-out version next summer.) Actually, let me hit that a little harder: this is a $50 384 page hardcover, and that seems like it’s out of reach for the target audience here. I don’t know how much you’d have to cut to get down to 40 bucks, but I bet that would have been a better book.

Finally for everyone keeping score at home (that’s me, I’m keeping score) Skill Challenges are not in this one.

🛡

And so, look. This is still 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a reason they didn’t update the number, even fractionally. If 5e wasn’t your or your group’s jam, there’s nothing in here that’ll change your mind. If 5e was your jam, this is a tooled-up, better version. This book is easily the best official D&D DMG to date. Between this and the ToV GMG, it’s an unexpected embarrassment of riches.

I see a lot of chatter on the web around “is it worth the upgrade?” I mean, these books are fifty bucks a pop retail, there’s nothing in here that’s so earth-shattering that you should consider it if you have to budget around that fact. Like buying a yacht, if you have to look at the price tag, the answer is “no.”

Honestly, though, I don’t think “upgrade” is the right lens. If you want to upgrade, great, Hasbro won’t decline the money. But this is about teeing up the next decade, setting up the kids who are just getting into the hobby now. More so than in a long time, this is a book for a jr high kid to pick up and change their life. I’ve said before that as D&D goes, so goes the rest of the hobby. I think we’re all in good shape.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Weird times, but we’re all still here, and that’s something to be thankful for at least.

Whether your celebrate the American holiday of Thanksgiving, or the non-American holiday of “It’s just thursday man, calm down” I hope you’re all have a good day out there.

Delicious Library Crosses Over

Okay, this one hurts. Amazon has finally turned off the thing Delicious Library used, so the app has been discontinued.

Over at Daring Fireball, Gruber has a really nice writeup about how Delicious Library was the exemplar for the era of apps as art in their own right that seems to have mostly passed: Daring Fireball: The End of the Line for Delicious Library

Personally? I have a Delicious Library that contains (almost) everything I own. “Dad, did you scan these yet” was a standard phase of any new purchase or gift. Books, games, toys, whatever, the thing where it could pull data on anything with a UPC or EAN from Amazon was amazing. Even more amazing was the barcode scanner app for the iPhone that used the camera. Just walk around the house zip, zip, zip.

You know how they say you should have a list of everything you own for insurance purposes? I had that! Plus, the ability to see when something was bought was surprisingly useful. “What birthday was that?” You could answer those questions! I loved it.

It was clear DL was on its way out: Wil Shipley has been an Apple employee for years now, the app hasn’t been updated in ages, the Amazon link was getting… “sketchy.” But there just isn’t a replacement.

This is the sort of think where all you can do is throw your hands up and make a sort of “ecchhhhh” sound. One more great thing we used to have that’s gone because the easiest way for some middle manager somewhere to make one of their KPIs was to break it.

Although, maybe the most maddening thing about this one is that I would have absolutely paid some kind of subscription fee to Amazon (directly or indirectly) to keep this working, and… nope. Not an option.

Older Movies I Re-Watched Recently: Legally Blonde (2001)

Now this is a movie that’s aged well. There’s a smorgasbord of delightful things about this movie, but I think my favorite is that structurally, it’s a reverse Hero’s Journey; rather than go on a journey of discovery herself, Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods enables everyone around her to go on one.

Unlike something like Clueless (also brilliant, but in a very different way) this isn’t a movie about a coddled under-achiever, someone who was living up to low expectations who then learns what to do with her life. Quite the opposite! As the movie opens, Elle Woods is at the absolute pinnacle of her world. She’s president of the sorority, people come to her for help and advice, she’s well-liked and respected in her community, everyone in her orbit is proud and impressed. She has the quality of someone who’s about to 100% a videogame—all she has left is one more achievement to unlock, getting married to the prize hunk, and then she can put it on cruise control. She’s already won.

So when her jerk boyfriend decides to become her jerk ex-boyfriend, her attitude is less heartbreak and more an irritation at a job left incomplete. The other people in her orbit advise her to leave it, be happy with the 99% run, but no. She pursues him to Harvard not as a lovesick dumpee, with with the energy of someone loading up Breath of the Wild muttering “okay, the last shrine has to be around here somewhere.”

One of the other really great things about this movie is that it never treats Woods as being less-than. She gets into Harvard not becase she pulls a favor or a trick; she legitimately has the smarts to do it over a weekend. She wasn’t going there before not because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t want to. The reason “Like it’s hard?” became such a meme for a while was this—this is a character for whom it really wasn’t hard, and has now deployed that talent to a new domain.

A critical part of all this is the way Witherspoon plays her. Woods is never embarrassed or ashamed, her low points come from the culture shock rather than “learning a lesson.” And always with dignity and a rock-solid sense of self. There’s never a moment where she doubts herself, or rejects her roots, there’s no scene where she throws out her pink jackets. But even more critically, she’s not stupid. She knows things are different “here” than back “there”, but also pink is a great color, and if they can’t see that that’s their problem. You get the feeling most people would play the part as either vaguely self-delusional or recoiling; Witherspoon goes the other way, and plays Woods as legitimately confident, and gives her an air of slightly pitying these “elite” kids for how small their lives are. She knows she’s right, and she’s willing to give everyone else a chance to catch up.

Her lowest point in the movie comes at the non-a-costume-party-after-all party—which one suspects is only in the movie so they’d have a shot of Reese Witherspoon dressed as a Playboy Bunny to put in the trailer. But this is one of several places where Witherspoon picks up the slack the script leaves; as written, her line when she realizes her jerk ex is going to stay that way is something like “I was never good enough for you,” but she delivers it in a way that makes it clear she is thinking the exact opposite. Again, not heartbreak, but irritation at herself for the wasted energy.

Her attitude attitude then is basically to shrug and say “well, I’m already here, so how hard can this be?” And, from that point on, the movie delights in reminding us that Woods is as smart or smarter than all the rest of these dorks, she just knows different stuff, and constantly reinforces that being an expert in two worlds is more powerful than just being an expert in one.

The movie is very careful to present the world at Harvard Law as different, but not better. The lives and ambitions of the ladies at the nail salon, or the women back at her sorority in LA, are just as important as the dorks in law school. Her friends from back home coming out to support her unquestioningly is directly contrasted with the backstabbing nature of the law school, and not in the school’s favor. They might not know much specifically about what’s going on, but they know who their friends are.

The engine of the rest of the movie is Woods knocking down challenge after challenge as the people around her grow. The other characters have to learn to put their prejudices aside, expand their views of what counts as expertise, reconsider what matters. Meanwhile, Woods plows forwards, the mere fact of her presence acting as the catalyst for their growth.

(Topic for a film class: Elle Woods is basically the monolith from 2001, discuss.)

Her core flaw is an inability to see when people are bad. This isn’t presented as naiveté, but as her own default optimism being used against her and turned septic. Every time someone in her life acts against her—her boyfriend dumping her, the dad from Alias taking a pass at her, Liz Sherman lying about the party—Elle’s reaction is more to be mad at herself as anything, “How could I not have seen this?” Most importantly, the lesson isn’t to lose her optimism, but to cut the toxic people out of her life faster.

These things all click together at the climax, with Woods in court for the first time. The text of the script is ambiguous about what happens at the ending: did Woods luck into a solution or was that her plan all the time? But the glint Weatherspoon puts in her eye as she snaps the trap shut makes it clear—Elle Woods has finally learned how to turn these people’s expectations against them, and she has nothing left to learn.

She’s now achieved the pinnacle of success in two worlds. The people around her, on the other hand, have much left to do.

Tales of the Valiant: Game Master’s Guide (2024)

“New D&D” Double Volcano Summer continues, and, I guess, has moved on into Double Asteroid Movie Autumn?

Over the summer we had two revised 5th Edition player’s handbooks in the form of Tales of the Valiant and D&D (2024), and now their respective Dungeon Master’s Guides are arriving.

Once again, Kobold Press got out of the door first, with the Tales of the Valiant: Game Master's Guide

(As an aside, which I am putting in a parenthetical because I am too lazy to format a footnote tonight, I have always disliked “Game Master” as the generic form of “Dungeon Master.” I understand all the ways both legal and conceptual that “Dungeon Master” is undesirable as the general term, but “Dungeon Master” is a very specific kind of weird that that I think fits the role, whereas I’ve always found “Game Master” too generic. There are too many other kinds of games that could have a “Game Master,” but very few that could have a “Dungeon Master.”)

Let’s pause for a moment and ask the obvious question: why have a whole separate book for Dungeon/Game Master?

If we’re honest, the real reason that Dungeons & Dragons (and D&D-likes) are published as a triptych of rulebooks—Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual—is that’s how Gygax organized AD&D 1, and everything since has followed suit. Of those three books, the “Dungeon Master’s Guide” has always been the weird one. Like, you need a whole extra book for that? Most other games manage to fit “how to run the game” as a single chapter at the end of their single book.

(In this day and age it seems a little crazy to require three thick hardcovers for a TTRPG, but I’ll accept that it made more sense back when they were three thin—and cheap—hardcovers. I have the “orange spine” later printings of the 1e AD&D books, and all three next to each other, including their covers, is still thinner than the new 2024 PHB.)

Not that a dedicated “how to run this” book is a terrible idea. The basic idea of splitting the rules into a Red Box–style “read this one first,” “read this one next” pair makes a lot of sense.

D&D—and its close relations—have always had a bad habit where the books will present a list of rules and options, but won’t actually say when and how you might want to use those options. Some of this has been explicit over the years—wanting to “reward mastery” is the usual excuse given. The books were always stuffed full of a lot of “here’s what you can do” and not a lot of “and here’s when you would want to.”

There’s always been this huge blob of tribal knowledge, urban legends, and re-learned lessons that you have to absorb from somewhere to actually run the game well, and that stuff never used to get written down anywhere.

One of the reasons why everyone ran dungeon crawls in the 80s (or “dungeon crawls” in the forest on an island with hex maps) is that the Red Box/Blue Box did an amazing job explaining exactly how to run that, and then just… didn’t tell you how to do anything else.

In practice, though, that’s not really what the DMGs have been for. The original DMG from ’78 was more-or-less Gygax’s manifesto (and, as it turned out, final statement) on how the hobby he helped start should work. It’s one guy’s crazy vision fully unpacked. But not a whole lot of “okay, here’s what you gotta actually do.”

As such, the DMG became the book without a clear role in later iterations. As the game got updated, the content of the other two books was fairly obvious and is pretty well fixed: the PHB holds the core rules for the game and is the minimum viable purchase, the Monster Manual has a bunch of monsters. The DMG, though, was always sort of a grabbag, holding a mixture of blue moon rules, advanced options, advice, and material cut for space from the other two books. The clearest example of the DMG’s status is that when 3rd edition was revised into 3.5; the PHB and MM stayed nearly identical, but the DMG was essentially a ground-up rewrite.

The upshot of all this, though, is that the DMG is where each iteration gets to make a statement—this is what we, the people making this version, think the DM needs to know about. This goes even more so for D&D-adjacent books like this one, it’s an opportunity to freestyle, to show off.

Of course, this has been a mixed bag over the years: whatever else you can say about the respective qualities of their editions, the 4e DMG ended up as probably the best ever written, whereas the 2014 5e DMG was a haphazard collection of tables, lists, and half-baked advice.

So how did Tales of the Valiant do? TL;DR: Now this is the stuff. This is the sort of book where I could walk through practically every section pointing and going “oooh!”, but I’ll limit myself to the stuff that really stuck out to me.

Previously, I said the ToV player’s book felt like having a really experienced DM sit down and share their accumulated house rules and experience running 5e, and that goes even more so for this book.

This opens with a really good explanation about what the GM actually does. For example, this is the only book I can remember spelling out that part of the GM’s job is to be an event planner. It’s got an incredibly clear-eyed sixteen or so pages of advice about how to run a game. There’s the usual “types of player play-styles” breakdown, and a section on Session Zero.

But then there’s a section on what kinds of supplies you should bring, how to take notes, how to check in on players and make sure they’re having fun, what to do when someone doesn’t show up. Other iterations of other games have danced around this stuff, but I can’t recall a book that laid out this clearly “okay, here’s the job.” It’s great! I wish I had read this at 15!

This is followed some really solid advice about how to run a campaign, how to structure adventures, pacing, encounter mixes. There’s a section on different “flavors of fantasy” which is just a great “let’s get our terms straight” glossary, including examples of fiction in those categories.

The chapter on worldbuilding is similarly full of really solid advice—“here’s what you actually need to think about when sketching in a setting”, along with a bunch of “and here’s some fun detail you can use for color or to really dig in.” For example, the worldbuilding section on deities and religion feels like someone finally getting to flex a degree in the best way; the text makes a distinction between henotheism and polytheism, and then a page later there’s a sidebar on syncretism. It’s full of little details like that to help get up past “you know, like Gondor, I guess?”

The main bulk of the book are a solid batch of expanded & blue moon rules for the “three pillars”—combat, exploration, and social.

There are a lot of books that contain tables for randomly or semi-randomly generating or stocking dungeons, but this is the only one I can think of that explicitly talks about things like how the choice of entrance to the dungeon sets the mood for the dungeon as a whole. Furthermore, there’s also some good advice on when to use and not use elements like puzzles.

There’s a whole set of rules for running chases as a more abstract encounter that seem really run, more like something out of Feng Shui than a D&D-like.

And my beloved 4e Skill Challenges are in here! The basic structure of “you need 6 successful checks before 3 failures of any of these related skills” was such a great way to resolve any number of non-combat encounters. D&D-likes have long struggled with the fact that “fighting” is a mechanically complex and satisfying sub-game, and “not fighting” tends to be a bunch of talking followed by “okay, roll…. charisma, I guess?” And yes, the role-playing part is fun, but part of what makes the fighting fun is that mechanical complexity, and I’ve always wished for that kind of mechanical detail in the other two pillars. Skill challenges were such a great way to use more of your character sheet while “not fighting”, and I’m glad to see them again.

Speaking of ideas from previous iterations of D&D, the homebrew section here also brought back the monster template idea from 3e. This was a set of “features” you could plug onto an existing monster, if memory serves, things like “lycanthrope” and “vampire” were a templates, so you could make a, were-owlbear, vampire goblin, and so forth. Here that idea gets dusted back off with a whole set of templates you can apply to 5e monsters—including, delightfully, templates based on the 4e character roles. So now you can make a Kobold Striker, Controller Pirate, Leader Gelatinous Cube. Those roles, like a lot of 4e, felt like a great idea from a different game, and this feels like a much better way to deploy the concept.

Finally, the original AD&D DMG had something called “Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading,” which was a recommended reading list of the sort of fantasy or sword & sorcery books that Gygax thought were appropriate as reference material. Since then, having a list of recommended & inspirational reading has been something of a tradition for RPGs. Other iterations of D&D sometimes has one, sometimes not; other RPGs frequently have them. I like these a lot, partly because I’m always looking for more recommendations, but also because it gives a great insight into where the designers are coming from—what books do they think you should go read to play the game right? It’s serves as a really nice bookend with whatever they thought was important to put in the “What is an RPG” section at the start.

The ToV GMG has the best reading list I’ve ever seen. Heck, if you get the PDF version, it might be worth the price all on its own. Not just novels, but films and TV, games, nonfiction. In addition to all the books you think it has on it, it’s also got Quest for Glory, Arcanum, and Disco Elysium on the list, which is enough to sell me, but it also has stuff like Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, Discworld, Zardoz, and Big Trouble in Little China. It’s a really broad list, but also, as the kids say, non-stop bangers. I recognized maybe just over half of the stuff on here, and I’m going to be using this a source of new material for a while.

Really, an all-around great piece of work. I have a teenager that’s learning how to run games, and I’m going to be leaving this in conspicuous places where he can find and read it.

“Sex-Haver Energy”

Somewhere in the last couple of years I had read “something” “somewhere” that described Kurt Russell as having “sex-haver energy.” And he does! The phrase stuck with me as I lost the grip on the source. Part of the problem with our fractured media environment is finding something a second time feels like it should be possible, but rarely is. Was it an article? A tweet? Something from my RSS feeds? Apple News? Linked off one of those? The decayed google search didn’t turn up anything either.

Anyway, I stumbled across it again! It was in Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny - Blood Knife, which I dug up to drop a link in my piece on Deadpool. It’s funny, because I had completely forgotten that was the origin, despite remembering the article very clearly. The reason my searches never turned it up was that the phrase was actually about Snake Pliskin, not the actor that played him.

Memory is a wacky thing.

Anyway, go read that; one of the best analyses of modern media I’ve read in a long time.

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

I’ve got a soft policy here on the ‘cano not to review or talk about pieces of media unless I mostly liked it, because, look, I think that Ebert “hated hated hated” review is as funny as anyone, but in general, what’s the point?

But sometimes I impulse-watch something over the weekend and I’m struck by the need to just wave my hand at it and say: Really? This was the best idea they had?

So: Deadpool & Wolverine.

I guess I should say up front that I enjoyed it! It was a fun watch with a beer on a friday night, but then I made the mistake of continuing to think about it.

Of all the possible takes on a movie with this title, the one they went with was “they keep pointlessly fighting each other until they hold hands inside a Kirkland Signature Warp Core and become best friends?”

The really remarkable thing about this movie is the way they genuinely didn’t have a take on why those characters should be in the same movie beyond “it would be funny if they fought each other.” Or maybe, more to the point, no one involved seems to have had a second idea.

I don’t want to belabor this point too far, but we’ve got two characters whose defining trait is “doesn’t play well with others,” the the concept for the team up is… they don’t play well with each other? That’s it? The single most obvious thing, and then nothing else?

And the action isn’t even that interesting! Just bland, poorly shot, the same crap you see in any other mediocre direct-to-streaming schlock. At least Deadpool 2, which I also was “meh” on, was directed by one of the John Wick guys and knew how to shoot a gunfight. All three Deadpool movies have struggled with “how to make action funny”, a concept Jackie Chan had mastered by at least Police Story (1985), but this one is by far the worst. And it’s got that same endlessly bloodless digital fighting, where there are plenty of computer-generated squibs, but no one gets hurt, and the outcomes of the fights never matter.

I’m not a big-budget hollywood writer, but it seems to me, the funniest thing to do with a Deadpool and Wolverine team-up is to stick them in a situation they couldn’t solve by fighting? Just to pick a random scenario, this feels like the point where you send the main characters back in time to get some whales and make them have to figure out how to navigate modern-day San Francisco or something.

Instead, we get warmed over ideas from a show that ended a year ago, leading a rag-tag band of cameos from movies you’d forgotten into a big CG fight with no stakes. It’s just characters from other, better things talking about how exciting it is they’re on screen together, while providing ample evidence to the contrary.

This movie is a perfect example of what I mean when I say I think most movies would be better at one MPAA rating lower—I’m not opposed to swearing or fake gore, but both lose their effectiveness when there’s this much, it just becomes background noise. Imagine how much funnier if they had had to choose which one “Fuck” to leave in. Imagine if they had had to write punchlines for those jokes instead of just having Hugh Jackman grimace and say “fuck” again.

Ang, ugg, okay, I remembered this just as I was about to hit “Publish” so sorry about the janky segue from the previous paragraph, but my actual least favorite thing about the three Deadpool movies has been how they handled the character of Vanessa.

The marvel movies especially have always had an approach to human relationships that seems like it was written by aliens (see the seminal Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny,) but the Deadpools are by far the strangest. Personally, I think Deadpool works better as a chaos agent with no confirmed “real life”, but I get where they were going with giving him a girlfriend. But, every movie they find some way to sideline the character, so that Deadpool is off trying to prove something she doesn’t know about. It’s the most “women only exist as prizes” take on relationships I’ve seen in a long time. Deadpool 2 was bad enough when they un-ironically fridged her while also making references to the run on Deadpool written by the woman who invented the term fridging, but this time they just… broke up? Because he’s not trying hard enough or whatever? So she shows up at the very start and the very end, and the rest of the movie he’s trying to “get her back” without having a conversation with her about, say, what she wants? Like, does Morena Baccarin charge by the word or something?

Also, “Deadpool tries to go straight and be successful in civillian life” also sounds like a phenomenal premise for a movie. Instead they burn that off in one scene and get back to the useless fighting.

This really feels like the final apotheosis of the marvel movies slide from “fun action movies” to “content.”

There’s no better example of how this movie works than its treatment of the TVA. As a show, Loki was mixed bag that ultimately refused to live up to its initial promise, but the one consistently great thing about it was the production design. The whole look of the TVA, the sets, the props, the costumes, genuinely S-Tier. And so when the TVA shows up in this movie they just… didn’t use any of it? The TVA office sets in this look like they’re from a mid-list Netflix show, not the second-highest grossing movie of the year. The TVA trooper costumes are all worse. They couldn’t even leave the sets up? Use the same costumes? Leave the plans somewhere the movie team could find?

There’s two possibilities here:

1. They didn’t care enough to get the real thing.
2. They couldn’t tell that their versions were dramatically worse.

Either one works as an explanation for this movie, at large.

So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams (1984)

One of the great things about growing up before “the internet” was that you could form an opinion about a piece of art without knowing what anyone else thought about it. Unless something was extraordinarily mainstream, you’d get to talk to maybe half-a-dozen people about any given thing? Maybe Siskel & Ebert would do a piece on it? A review in the paper? Some friends at school? Mostly, you were left to your own devices to like something or not.

So then, one of the really strange things about living though “the internet” emerging was the experience of going online and discovering the places where your long-held opinion diverged from the world at large. For example, it turns out that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is a book basically no one liked, which came as quite a surprise to me, since I liked it very much.

The book turned 40 this past weekend, coming out a few days after the HHGG Infocom game, and like that game I’ll take the excuse to talk about it some more.

It’s not really a Science-Fiction comedy, it’s a magical realism romance novel that just happens to star the main character from Hitchhiker. It’s striking how different it is from Adams’ previous work, and frankly, from his work that followed.

Of course part of that is that while it was his fourth book, it was his first novel from scratch, not based on something else. The first two HHGG books were (heavily) reworked versions of the first two series of the radio show, the third book was based on a pile of ideas that was variously a Doctor Who episode, a pitch for a Doctor Who movie, and the concept for the never-made second series of the TV version. As such, it’s his first piece of work not building on ideas that had been clanking around since the late 70s.

As I mentioned way back when talking about Salmon of Doubt, So Long and Thanks for All The Fish kicks off what I think of Adams’ middle period. You get the feeling that’s the sort of direction he wanted to move in, not just recycling the same riffs from a decade earlier. There’s a real sense of his, at least attempted, growth as an author.

Infamously, So Long was the book that after a year and multiple extended deadlines he still hadn’t actually started, so his editor locked him in a hotel room in London for two weeks, during which he cranked out the novel. I had two pretty strong reactions to learning this via the aforementioned internet; first, finding our that this whole book was, essentially, the first draft explained a lot, and second, there are very, very few people who could have written a book even this good in a single panicked fortnight.

Adams occasionally expressed regret that it was never really finished, and it shows. Or rather, it’s obvious what parts he cared about, and which parts he never got around to polishing.

So, let’s get the criticisms out of the way.

The previous books have a very strong Narrator Voice, extending out from the fact that the radio show was narrated by the Guide itself, and so even the narration in the book that isn’t explicitly a guide entry has the same tone and character, and is presumably still the Guide telling the story. Here, though, the narrator is clearly Douglas Adams himself, including a few places where he directly addresses the audience in what feel as much like his notes to himself as they do anything else. And there’s a little standalone epilogue about the virtues of not being able to concentrate which is fine on it’s own, but in the context of the book’s creation feels a little overly protest-y.

And it’s funny he has such a presence in that way, because in addition to that, while Arthur Dent was always clearly an author stand-in, there’s also never been less distance between the two as here. This book includes at least two events that happen to Arthur that Adams claimed really happened to him (that’s the story about the biscuits and one of his dates with Fenchurch.) Fenchurch herself is supposedly an amalgam of the two women Adams dated in the early 80s, and she lives in the flat Adams really lived in. There’s parts of the book that feel a lot more like Adams swapping stories over beers rather than an actual, you know, piece of fiction.

It’s not really funny in the same way the other books are, and a lot of the attempts at humor fall flat. There’s a joke about a planet ruled by lizards that the population hates but keeps voting for because “the wrong lizards might win,” that never really coheres and feels like something from one of the endless 80s Hitchhiker knockoffs than something from the real thing. There’s a running joke about a trucker who doesn’t know he’s The Rain God that is mostly very funny, but never really connects to anything else. Even Fenchurch, who is a great character, feels like she has a name where the author was trying to outdo “Ford Prefect” and came up short.

The character most hurt by this is Ford. Zaphod and Trillian don’t make an appearance in this one, so the action cuts back and forth between Arthur’s low-stakes romance and Ford being an extra-disreputable Doctor Who, crashing from one end of the galaxy to the other. This is a version of Ford you can most clearly imagine being played by Tom Baker—or rather, being written by a person who misses writing for Tom Baker—there’s a bit where Ford is stalking around Arthur’s house saying “beep beep beep” which isn’t all that funny on the page but that Tom would have made sing. It’s never entirely clear why Ford is doing what he’s doing, but not in a intentionally ambiguous way, more of a series of “I’ll explain laters” that just never really pay off. The Ford scenes are fun, but of all the book they read the most like rough drafts. It’s hard not to imagine that the book would have been better if Ford crashed into the narrative for the first time at the same time as he crashes into Arthur’s house.

It’s also interesting that Arthur doesn’t really start acting like old Arthur until Ford shows up, which says a lot about how those characters work. Arthur is a character who looks like is going to be a classic “straight man” comedy sidekick, but then starts arguing back and refusing to go along with things, refusing to give up agency despite not having a clue as to what’s going on around him. Here, he really doesn’t have anyone to argue with, and spends the book in a completely different gear until Ford shows up.

On the other hand, Marvin shows up at the very and and proves both that he’s the best character in the series and that “aggressively depressed robot” is an absolutely bulletproof concept.

Having gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about the parts that work. Because the parts that work here really work.

The main body of the book follows Arthur, who returns to Earth, which is somehow un-demolished. The population has dismissed the “thing with the yellow spaceships” as a mass hallucination and/or CIA drug experiment. (Exactly how the Earth has returned is never totally explained, but there’s an ambiguous dream sequence that I always interpreted to mean that the Magratheans had slid the Earth Mk II into place where the original had been. Regrettably, the book declines to mention if Africa has fijords now.)

He goes about reintegrating into his old life, buys a computer, meets a girl, falls in love, teaches her how to fly, both literally and metaphorically. One of the great things about Arthur in this book is that he gets to be the one that knows things for once. The scene where Fenchurch pulls out the Guide and starts asking questions is truly great—finally Arthur is the one who gets to answer instead of ask.

His girlfriend, Fenchuch, is strongly implied to be the person who was going to provide the final readout of the original Earth’s program to find the Ultimate Question; she’s been at loose ends since that failed to actually happen. As such, Arthur digs up the location for “God’s Final Message to his creation” that he got in the previous book, the two of them hook up with Ford, and the three of them hitchhike back out into space.

That end, though. Whatever quibbles I might have about the rest of the book, the end is perfect. The whole premise of “God’s Final Message” both takes a swing at resolving the ongoing philosophical questions that undergrid Hitchhiker while still being actually funny. It really feels like a guy wrapping up this phase of his career. Happy endings, of a sort, resolve most of the open items, send Arthur off into the sunset.

(One of the reasons I have such disgust for Mostly Harmless is that not only is the book terrible on it’s own, but Adams screwed up the perfect end to the series he already had in order to do… that?)

It’s a slimmer volume than its three predecessors, both physically and figuratively, serving as more of a coda than a full installment on its own, but still sending off the series on the right note. It’s not more sophisticated to have bad things happen to people than good things; art isn’t of lesser quality if the characters finally catch a break.

Anyway, I didn’t let those dorks on the web change my mind. It’s still great.

Stray Music

On a pretty regular basis I get a stray piece of music stuck in my head, some tune I can’t immediately recognize. You know, that thing where you kind of hum along with it, thinking “Is this from something? Are there words? What is this?” And then you finally get far enough in to it that you recognize it.

For me, it always, 100% of the time, turns out to be one of the pieces of background music from Sim City 2000.

Woah! Slow Down, Maurice!

I’m a decade late to this, but please feast your eyes on:

This so perfectly captures why Gaston is my favorite Disney antagonist. Because he’s not a “villain”, he just an asshole. He’s not summoning the powers of darkness, or setting kingdom against kingdom, or scheming of any kind. His entire program is:

1. He wants to hear a lot of compliments
2. He wants to bang the hot nerd

And that’s it.

It’s so deliciously low-stakes for a Disney Fantasy movie that also includes, you know, a giant monster man and a singing candlestick. And that’s part and parcel of why I love that movie so much, because the core engine of the plot is that the three mediocre men in Belle’s life collide with each other, and while nothing that happens after is is her fault it all becomes her problem. So even by the end when you’ve got a rampaging mob attacking a castle, the root cause is still one asshole who couldn’t handle that only 99% of the village liked him.

The end result is that two of those dudes get their act together and the third one falls off a roof. And, you know…

“The First Time as Tragedy, the Second Time as Farce”

And it turns out none of it mattered.

The polls really were wrong. Just not in the way anyone had guessed; no one had “solid proper rinsing by Trump” in their list of guesses.

The usual post-election grievance, told-you-so, cognitive bias express—she’d have won if only she’d agreed with me on this—quickly descended into vacuous points-scoring as the scale of the rinsing settled in. Because there wasn’t One Cool Trick that could have won this one—it turns out this really wasn’t an election about policy, or campaigns, or ground game, or Get Out The Vote, or spending, or experience, or the personal qualities of the candidates, or The Information Environment, or even Harris’ race or gender. This really was a vibes election; and the vibe that won was “ehhh, who cares.”

Because the candidate that won was “did not vote.” As I write this, Trump got a million and change less votes than he got when he lost in 2020, Harris meanwhile got about 12 million less than Biden. Unlike early indications, a whole lot of people stayed home. That’s a large enough number to defy easy explanation.

It’s traditional, in these sorts of pieces, to offer a theory of explanation, so here’s mine: I think this is where a decade-plus of Obstructionism-as-Policy paid off. The point to gumming up the works wasn’t to change minds or drum up support, but to make voting seem pointless. And so, when it mattered, a whole lot of people threw up their hands and stayed home.

You add to that the increased prices in the shadow of the pandemic, and a country awash in right wing propoganda as background noise—again, the the goal of which is to suppress turnout—and the demographic that determined the outcome were the “low-information” former voters who said, “nothing ever changes, what’s the point?” (Probably with a side order of “I voted to save democracy the last two times, and all that happened is my grocery bill doubled.”)

This also happens on a backdrop of the elections in the shadow of the pandemic being very bad for incumbents world-wide, so there’s an element of “throw the bastards out”, but keep in mind people didn’t change sides, they just declined to participate. There certainly were some small number of Biden-Trump voters, and we’ll be hearing endless fawning interviews with them over the coming weeks, but it seems clear they didn’t make a difference.

It would be so much easier if there was a thing. Personally, I desperately want the reason to be whatever idiot told Tim Walz to stop saying “weird”, but it seems clear, looking at the numbers, that this result was priced in early; whoever the Blue Team ran was going to lose, and whoever the Red Team ran was going to win, all other details being unimportant. No big lesson here, no moral point, just apathy. It’s hard to believe anyone would sit this one out, but being able to turn away while muttering “not my problem,” is a core American trait. There’s something poetic about America choosing autocracy because not choosing it wasn’t worth the effort.

The other worst American vice is a sort of toxic optimism, the belief that things will work out, it’s not that bad, it’ll be fine, you’re overreacting. I am here to tell you: no. This is not going to be okay. We’re in real trouble now. This time, we are well and truly fucked.

I don’t think any of us are capable of imagining the catastrophe that has befallen us. Not necessarily because of the scale, but because while deadly, it is going to be so stupid. Less 90s Dystopian Movie Future and more dropping dead from the results of a regulation-free food supply. Speedrunning the reasons why we have a professional civil service.

There’s some cold comfort from the knowledge that there’s going be plenty of opportunities for grim, joyless schadenfreude over the next few years as the leopards gorge themselves on faces. I have to confess an almost hysterical fascination with how the “Find Out” phase of “Oops All Tariffs” is going to go.

But make no mistake: everyone, everywhere, is in more danger now than they were a week ago.

It’s also traditional to end these sorts of pieces with a ray of hope, an exhortation to keep fighting, a source of optimism. On those fronts, I will decline. Partly, because as we’ve just demonstrated, Hope leaves a lot to be desired as a strategy; as the man says, it’s the hope that kills you. The aesthetics of “resistance” didn’t work last time. Optimism is what got us here in the first place. The moment calls for something else. Some “secret third thing.” I don’t know what that is yet, and neither does anyone else.

All we can do now is hang on to each other and brace for impact.