Open Tab Bankruptcy, Q1 2025, Part II
Open Tab Balance Transfer Wednesdays continue!
The cleanest copy I’ve ever seen of Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants [1996] was uploaded to the Internet Archive as an RF rip sourced from an internal HBO tape. Over on blusky, Chris Person describes some details, and then goes into more detail over at The Aftermath: The Person Saving The Media You Love Is You. Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants is one of those weirdly lost pieces of media; I saw this on cable back in, I guess, college, and then it’s vanished except for terrible VHS rips on youtube.
Which also provides an excellent excuse to link to Ricky Jay’s Magical Secrets | The New Yorker.
All that said, my all-time favorite Ricky Jay trick is the thing he does in the first five minutes of: Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters and Ricky Jay - YouTube. (Which is another semi-lost Ricky Jay documentary.)
The folks behind the “George Lucas Talk Show” got a group of commedians together to do a live read of the script of Episode I: THE NABOO MOVIE - A 25th Anniversary All Star Live Reading of Star Wars Ep 1: The Phantom Menace - YouTube. Tony Hale (Buster Bluth) as Qui-Gon! Tawny Newsome (Mariner from Lower Decks) and Haley Joel Osment (yes, from Sixth Sense) as Padme and Anakin! Episode I is a deeply weird movie, but if nothing else this reveals that the script wasn’t the biggest problem. There actually was a way to say those lines and make it work.
There’s this elevated, enclosed passageway in Venice called the Vasari Corridor, which I am embarrassed to admit I only found out about via this CNN travel article I clicked on as a form of fully-inflamed procrastination: The Vasari Corridor is a secret passageway through central Florence — now it’s open to the public. Fascinating!
State of Play: Wolfgang Baur crunches some numbers - Kobold Press: Baur outlines the state of the business over at Kobold Press; wild to be how large a percentage kickstarter revenue is. I think these kinds of small-to-medium businesses are where kickstarter really shines.
Fully playable Star Wars: Battlefront 3 Wii build leaks online: it was always rumored that it was close to done, but wow!
Willem Dafoe on His Acting Career, ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Nosferatu’: yes.
Mary Tyler Moore accidentally nailed a perfect trick shot in The Dick Van Dyke Show (1962): If you’ve never seen it, you have to watch this; this real amazing parts are the looks of shock that play across the faces of both Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke who can’t believe they saw what they saw, but then get it together to finish the scene. Stone cold pros, the both of them.
Patricia Lockwood · Diary: Encounters with Aliens: Patricia Lockwood is watching The X-Files! “So then the show becomes about something else, something deep and dark as water, it is carried rapidly past all other unsolved mysteries to ask: what if a woman were irreplaceable?”
Satellite Photos of Middle Earth: nicely done.
Interview: Demolition Man Writer Daniel Waters: A couple of amazing tidbits in here, including an incredible semi-pitch for the sequel.
Late Doorbells
Story Time:
Two days after christmas, just before 11:00 pm, the doorbell rings.
Reader, I cannot stress enough how unusual this. In the fifteen years we’ve lived here, I think I can count on one hand many times the doorbell has rung after dark, and never closing in on midnight.
My particular middle-class suburb is not a part of town where people are “out and about”. We don’t get a lot of solicitors of any variety, this particular suburb isn’t on the way to anywhere, it’s not between things, the demographics skew older. People out on the street at all is unusual. This day in particular seemed to have a lot of people around; family around for the holiday, presumably? There had been lots of “teen voices” all evening, with a a real “home on break and bored” quality. Not a problem, but like I said, unusual.
(By comparison, back when I lived in the party central portion of a college town, an evening without teen voices sounding like they were mid-prank would have been the unusual one.)
But: the doorbell. Unusual. Unnerving. There is absolutely no good reason for someone to have rung that bell.
We don’t open the door, but through the window, there’s a kid standing there, somewhere in the 18–20 range, hoody over his head, holding some kind of a box or something. Can we help you? He says something we can’t quite hear about a charity or a church and an iPad giveaway? The thing he’s holding could be an iPad box. This has a real door-to-door scam vibe, but, at 11 at night? Strange on it’s own merits, and again, really out of character for this neighborhood. We yell “no thank you honey, have a nice night” through the window, he moves on. Strange!
My house is at the top of a T-junction, and between that and with where my house is on the lot, there’s a window upstairs where I’ve got a really clean view up and down the street in all three directions. I’m curious, so I stroll upstairs and watch to see where the kid goes. He’s across the street. The neighbors there don’t open the door either, he moves on. Meets up with four other kids that are also out and about in the streets, have a conversation I can’t hear in the middle of the intersection. Stranger.
As a group, they all move on to the next house. The same kid that came to our door goes up to that door. The other kids in in the group hides behind bushes and around corners. What? At this point I start weighing my options pretty fast. Should I go yell at them? Call the police? What the hell are these kids doing?
Then they all pull out their phones and turn the cameras on, and it hits me: they’re fucking prank youtubers!
C’mon kids, not cool. Long irritated sigh. I want to go out and pull the kids aside and say something like “look, we all moved out to the ‘burbs specifically to avoid shit like this.” Like, I’m not going to call the cops on these kids, but someone will. And, to put it politely, I can think of at least two people down the street the direction they’re moving who are likely to unload a shotgun through the door if a strange teenager rings the doorbell close to midnight.
Our HOA has retained the services of a “private security company,” whose whole job seems to be to orbit the neighborhood and frown at people. I poke around to see if we have the number to for them; this is pretty much exactly what those twerps are supposed to be for, roll up in their official-looking car and yell “what are you doing” out of the window. Can’t find it.
At this point I’m stomping around the living room flapping my arms in irritation. I feel like the neighborly thing to do is to help find a way to stop these kids from waking up any more retired people without them getting shot by the cops, but no real ideas are coming to me. There’s this deeply irritating sense of, really? On top of everything else, we have to deal with this too? Do we need bouncers for neighborhoods now?
Right at this point a police cruiser roars by the house with its lights going in the direction the kids were walking. Couldn’t see what happened after that.
Stray Notes on Unsettled Times
About 20 years we all spent a lot of time talking about The Singularity. Remember, the thing where we were all going to upload our minds into a computer in just a few years and live forever? Oh, but also the AIs were going to become supersmart and take over?
The whole thing was deeply silly, but for some reason we spent several years with all the Serious People pretending it was something to just around the corner, despite the fact that it was blatantly just “the rapture,” but with computer words.
That whole discourse was always a weird jumbled mixture of the plot of Terminator, Christian Apocalyptic theology, and unexamined anxiety about capitalism; in the parlance of today “A man will invent the singularly instead of going to therapy.”
(And I note that in today’s LLM/AGI discourse, we kept the bit about the robots being about to take over, but somehow lost the part where we all get to go to cyber-heaven. Huh.)
The bit that stuck with me from that era was the concept of “a” singularity, in the broder sense. A historical moment where there’s so much change so fast for whatever technological or historical or other reason, that it’s impossible to see beyond, the future is clouded until you get past the inflection point.
“The Singularity is coming!” they kept saying.
Well, it came all right. Just not the one they were rooting for.
At about the same time, I was living next door to a couple who had left New Orleans after Katrina. I was never entirely clear how they ended up in my corner of Northern California, which they strongly disliked in a way that I, as someone who grew up in and actually does like California, was extremely sympathetic to.
This was the era where we started using the phrase “grim meathook future,” but weren’t yet sure how ironic we were being. I remember someone in the broader post-cyberpunk author world—knowning who I was reading a lot of at the time, it was probably either Bruce Sterling or Warren Ellis—said something like “maybe that’s just how it is now, every couple of years a once in a thousand year weather event will show up and wreck a major city.” The sort of comment where your initial reaction was to think “that’s a little pessimistic, gosh” before realizing that no, that was obviously true.
Maybe that’s just how it is now.
Like most people in my age group, all my grandparents were involved with the WWII war effort in one way or another. The War came up a lot, as you might imagine, mostly as this crazy shared experience they all had.
One time, us kids were asking my grandmother questions about something related to the whole effort, why something had been the way it was.
“You have to remember,” she said, “we didn’t know we were going to win.”
That’s not a huge insight, but I was young enough that it was the first time I’d really engaged with the idea. As far as school was concerned, that was the war where America Saved Everybody, the idea that the people involved didn’t know the end of the story yet hadn’t ever occurred to me.
Obviously, that stuck with me, but what really stuck with me was the look on her face; a woman in her 70s remembering how scary her early 20s were.
Looking forward to telling our grandkids, “you have to remember, we didn’t know how this was all going to turn out.”
Open Tab Bankruptcy, Q1 2025, Part I
Free to a good home: My Open Tabs!
It’s that time again, where I perform an Open Tab Balance Transfer from my Browser to Yours! Wednesdays in January, we work our way through all the tabs I wanted to do something with this year, but never quite figured out what. In roughly reverse-chronological order, as I work my way from right to left in Safari:
New Year, New You, New Tabs: Oh hell yes Today in Tabs is back, ish? Like Rusty says, New Year, New Tabs. If you didn’t already have these open, they’re New to You.
Never Forgive Them: Ed Zitron sums up his central thesis of the Rot Economy, and how it intersects with Doctorow’s “Enshittification Theory”, as well as explaining both “where AI came from” and “why are there so many updates.” Just phenomenal work, if you only click one link here, make it this one,
Casual Viewing | Issue 49 | n+1 | Will Tavlin: Will Tavlin answers the question “why does Netflix look like that?”
'A Complete Unknown': The Ballad of TOSHI: Merrill Markoe, who is the source of everything anyone liked about David Letterman’s show, asks the question “why is there this lady hanging around A Complete Unknown but never saying anything?” The answer will made you so mad!!
Cats can get bird flu from raw food. Here's how to protect them | AP News
The sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet' revealed by AI: The “AI” part is a little facetious, but maybe we’re gonna have Cetacean Ops after all. Seems like every 9–18 months we get another “we can almost talk to whales!” piece. I assume they know exactly what they’re doing and have been messing with us the whole time.
Porphyrios (whale) - Wikipedia: Speaking of whales, there was a whale that terrorized shipping outside of Byzantium for sixty years?! Excellent.
Every Game Has The Community It Deserves: how video game design shapes the community that builds up around it.
https://www.codingfont.com: yeah, here we go, it’s a bracket to determine your favorite monospaced font, basically my catnip.
Next Wednesday: more tabs!
Icecano Style Guide: Megacommas
Like toy cartoons from the early 80s, we try to maintain a certain amount of educational content here on Icecano to make sure the FCC doesn’t pull our broadcast license. As such, we offer this excerpt from the Icecano Style Guide!
Everyone knows the simple “comma” punctuation mark. English also has a variety of what experts call “megacommas”, punctuation marks that are like commas, but “more so”. Like many parts of English, the rules for using these bizarre symbols are inscrutable, complex, and originally stolen from another language.
Commas, of course, are the easy one: Officially, they’re used to “separate clauses in a sentence”, whatever that means, but most people know the shortcut is to use them in a sentence whenever you’d stop to breathe.
Are there similar advices for the other megacommas? As my high schooler found out earlier today by accidentally asking me a question, and as you are about to find out now: yes! There are simple “what you’d do while talking” guidelines for using these that “big grammar” doesn’t want you to know! They are as follows:
Em Dashes: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you’d point a Harrison Ford finger at the other person as you were saying the part between the dashes.
Parentheses: if you were saying this out loud, the stuff in the parentheses is what you’d turn your head and say to the person next to you to get them caught up.
Semi-Colon: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you lose your train of thought and start talking about something else.
En Dash: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you say “ummm” before continuing.
Hypen: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you’d forget to pause between words and mash them together like one of those German compound words.
Square Brackets: if you were saying this out loud, this is the part you’d mutter to yourself.
Curly Brackets: if you were saying this out loud, this would denote a scope, and variables defined here would not be accessable to the rest of what you were saying.
Angle Brackets: if you were saying this out loud, this would be the part translated from Russian.
We hope this has been of assistance.
Snoozin’
Over the holiday break I got these nose strip things that are supposed to open up your nasal passages so you sleep better? You know, the ones that look like a band-aid as redesigned by a bored Star Trek production designer? I have to admit, they do a remarkable job opening everything up, it really does feel like more oxygen is getting in while breathing through the nose. I can’t really say if they help me sleep better, but they sure do make the part of the middle of the night where I stare at the ceiling and try to figure out what my last dream meant more pleasant, A++!
Station Ident: 2025
Welcome to 2025. It’s the future. This is Icecano.
Good Morning.
My name is Gabriel Helman. I write things, mostly to make computers do things, sometimes for people to read.
Let’s see what happens.
2024, Signing Off
A long time tradition of mine was to end the year by texting “Let’s All Try Harder Next Year” on whatever instant message/chat/social media mechanism was the current container of “the group chat”. It was supposed to be funny; but also a sort of oblique New Year’s resolution; no specific goals other than “trying harder.”
I fell out of the habit for what are probably obvious reasons, as The Twenties got going it seemed less and less funny; as a tweet from the Old Twitter said years ago, “no resolutions this year, it’s the circumstances turn to improve.”
2024 was not a great year, personally, professionally, politically, socially. Or maybe, to put that another way, ’24 was a year of huge disappointments; ’23 spent the year looking like things were getting better, ’24 was an extended exercise in the world saying “naaaahhhhhhhh.”
2024 was the culmination of a lot of failures, and ’25 is where those consequences start to play out. But, to quote Waring Hudsucker: “Failure should never lead to despair. That despair looks only to the past, in business and in love. The future is now.”
None of us know what 2025 has in store for us, but I’m perfectly confident that I’ll be worse—and stupider—than 2024 in nearly every way as the Disaster of the Twenties rolls on. I think the right attitude is to be looking for opportunities to reflect the year’s energy back at it, aikido-style. Otherwise, not much we can do except hold on to each other and find a way though it.
There’s a whole “post an image with the energy you’re taking into 2025” meme going on over on bluesky at the moment, and:
See you all in the future.
Linkblog, 2024 Year In Review Edition
I was catching up with someone IRL recently and the blog came up, and they asked the very reasonable question, “what do you write about?” And I had to answer, “well, mostly I review movies and I’m rude about AI.” Sums the year up!
If you’ll indulge me, the Icecano tradition is to use the end of the year to do a little reflection and navel-gazing. First, some stats! The final score for the year was just a hair over 178,000 words across 177 posts. That was quite a bit more than last year, and it’s a funny coincidence for those two numbers to be so similar. This year feels like it’s going to end up being the historical high-water mark; I have some other things in mind next year to direct some of that energy towards.
The big project for the year was getting Software Forestry up off the ground. This was one of the projects I was kicking around a couple years ago before I realized I needed some more practice and lit off the blog. Of these 8 pieces, the last one was my favorite, but it kind of needs the series to built up to it. Software Forestry returns early next year.
I wrote a lot of movie reviews this year! They were fun, but also much, much harder than I was expecting, so I kept chewing on them hoping I’d learn how to do them and they would get easier. They never did, but they were still fun to do. I’ll let you be the judge if I actually got any better at it, but my absolutely favorite piece I wrote all year was this review of Legally Blonde. Of everything I wrote, this is one of the few that turned out exactly the way I was imagining ahead of time.
The tech side of the house was mostly split between making fun of Space Glasses and being mad about AI; my favorite piece I wrote on that front was the two parter of Crushed and Pianos, which weren’t technically inspired by either, but was extremely about both.
The nicest thing I can say about Squarespace’s analytics is that they have lots of room for improvement? The material from this year that got the most “organic” traffic (whatever that means with the decayed web of today) were the Software Forestry pieces and my reviews of the Tales of the Valiant core rules and Game Master’s Guide.
One of my highest-trafficked pieces continues to be last year’s What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man, which is extra funny because it has a 100% bounce rate after zero seconds. Somewhere, some search engine is turning up my review when people are searching for, presumably, animated gifs and that’s hilarious to me and I am so, so sorry, irritated visitors! Also still drawing traffic from last year was You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”, which people actually seemed to stick around and read.
I also got a real uptick in traffic the last month or so, mostly to seemingly random older pieces? Some SEO incantation somewhere must have sorted me a little higher. If you’re a new visitor, hit up the contact info in the Ahoy There! page and let me know where you’re coming in from!
With that all said, here are what I think were the year’s Greatest Hits; the pieces I wrote this year that I thought worked particularly well, or that I was extra pleased with, or that got a good reaction, in roughly chronological order:
Jan 7: I Had A Dream Last Night, And I’m Mad About It
Jan 19: Books I Read In ’23: Part 5—Planescape & Friends
Jan 26: X-Wing Linkblog Friday
Jan 31: 40 years of…
Feb 2: A construction site! We need that good feminine energy: Barbie (2023)
Feb 20: Playthings For The Alone
Mar 4: The Sky Above The Headset Was The Color Of Cyberpunk’s Dead Hand
Mar 7: “Hanging Out”
Mar 15: Nausicaä at 40
Mar 29: Getting Old
Apr 5: Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Wes Anderson 2023 Double Feature
Apr 10: Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: Oppenheimer
Apr 12: Getting Less out of People
Apr 29: Movie Review Flashback: Zack Snyder’s Justice League
May 1: Movies from This Year I Finally Saw: Dune Part 2
The double feature of
- May 15: Crushed
- May 17: And Another Thing: Pianos
May 20: Hey Boyos! The Phantom Menace at 25
Jul 3: No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)
I wrote a “trilogy of philosophical blockusters” about Douglas Adams:
- Jul 24: Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002)
- Oct 30: Don’t Panic: Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at 40
- Nov 15: So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams (1984)
I wrote a quartet of reviews about “new kinds of D&D”, followed by what I’m playing instead
- Jul 26: Tales of the Valiant
- Oct 7: Dungeons & Dragons (2024): Trying to Make a Big Tent Bigger
- Nov 22: Tales of the Valiant: Game Master’s Guide (2024)
- Nov 29: Read This Book Next! Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024)
- Dec 13: TTRPGs I’m Currently Playing: Cypher System + It’s Only Magic
The “Why is this Happening” trilogy is the thing I worked the hardest on all year. The end result of two years of stewing on “AI”, and fundamentally the sequel to last year’s Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself. I used a bunch of the prototype ideas I’d been kicking around for what became Software Forestry, so while this isn’t formally part of that series, this acts as a kind of opening act throat clearing:
- Aug 26: Why is this Happening, Part I: The Stuff That Sucks
- Aug 28: Why is this Happening, Part II: Letting Computers Do The Fun Part
- Aug 30: Why is this Happening, Part III: Investing in Shares of a Stairway to Heaven
Oct 16: Ten Years of the Twelfth Doctor
Nov 25: Older Movies I Re-Watched Recently: Legally Blonde (2001)
The entire politics tag is a real rollercoaster of what I was thinking over the last several months, but the final wrap-up is as good a summary as any of them:
- Dec 9: The Fumble
Doctor Who and Joy to the World
And we’re back on Christmas with a new Doctor Who, once again written by Steven Moffat.
The Christmas Special has been a staple of the show since it came back in ’05, and after a few years trying out being a New Year’s Day Special instead, Davies made sure it was back on the 25th. One of the various interview clips doing the rounds for this sees Davies and Moffat asked why Who is such a good fit for Christmas, and the best answer is given my Moffat as “The Doctor occupies the same place in a child’s mind as Santa Claus.” Hard to argue! Despite that, or maybe partly because of that, the christmas specials have always been “the weird ones.”
They’ve always had two not-totally-compatible sets of goals. On the one hand, they’re the the only new episode in the long 9+ month gap between seasons. New Who has tended to be a spring show, so even when the show was at maximum production, the christmas show would air 4 or 5 months after the last episode and 4 or 5 before the next. The push there is to make it a “big one”, something “worth the wait”.
On the other hand, it’s Christmas. The order of the day is something fun and entertaining you can watch at the end of a day that was already full. Go have a good time hanging out with a fun character getting into hijinks.
This gets magnified as the Christmas special tends to get pressed into service as a Doctor’s first or last show. Last year was Gatwa’s big solo debut, this year is a much more casual business-as-usual special.
And so, the end result of that tension is we get a pretty standard Moffat Christmas Special (complimentary.) Moffat tends towards “fun and frothy comedy” as the speed for christmas episodes, and that’s not a bad instinct, and that’s certainly what we have here. He likes to make ‘em as Christmassy as possible, and keep it just on this side of full-blown farce. It cooks along, uses as much of that Disney+ money as it can, fun locations, wacky concepts.
The past christmas episode it reminded me the most of “Voyage of the Damned”, in that it was a fun adventure in a high concept setting in which nearly the entire guest cast, including the big-name guest star, got killed off in horribly tragic ways. So, standard Doctor Who, then.
As is usually the case at Christmas, the whole enterprise is held together entirely on the raw charisma of Ncuti Gatwa. He’s great here, having clearly settled into the part, managing to really hit that note of having a twinkle in his eye while also being sad.
Gatwa reminds me a lot of Capaldi early on, in that the show ended up with a better & more interesting performer than maybe they were expecting, and took a while to figure out just how to deploy him. Like Capaldi’s first christmas episode, this felt like the show settling into what this take on the character can do. The obvious contrast here is with “Boom”, and while that was an episode that was very easy to imagine Smith or Capaldi starring in with no major changes, it’s much harder to imagine either of them starring in this. Gatwa clearly knows how he wants to do this, and the show is finally catching up behind him.
“Space Shenanigans caused the Christmas Star” feels like the sort of thing Doctor Who was going to get around to eventually, and so six decades in they finally do it. The time between where the Doctor is being obvious to anyone in the audience paying attention and the on screen caption making it official was painfully slow, weirdly bad pacing that makes it a bigger deal than it should have been. But it makes up for with the sly joke revealing why there were no rooms at the inn—they were full up with time travellers there because it was Christmas. That might be the most Douglas Adams joke that Adams never wrote himself.
The best part of the episode, though, was the year the Doctor spent hanging around the hotel with Anita. Structurally, it’s very strange, it’s as if they found a different, better idea for the episode half-way through and then tried to do both. The result is you end up in the very strange place where the guest character with the biggest emotional impact on the story and the Doctor is not the one played by the big name guest star, and it distorts the pacing such that the end feels terribly rushed, and Joy’s Big Decision happens almost entirely off-screen. I’m not suggesting they take that out, far from it, I sort of wish they had leaned further in and made that the whole show, because it’s spectacular. Every Doctor ends up with a story where he’s stuck in one place and has to make do while things catch up with him, or vice-versa, and Gatwa’s take is uniquely suited to making that premise sing.
We spent a lot of time last year talking about Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor as a new, more emotionally healthy model, and this is a perfect example. He just gets a room, helps out, makes a friend. His time sitting around with Anita makes an interesting implied contrast with past companions; do things really never slow down enough for them to sit around and talk? That’s a neat take on the character as he’s been, and I hope the micro-epiphany around not having chairs sticks.
More broadly, I hope all this stuff around the Doctor becoming healthier is going somewhere beyond just operating as the blanket reason why Gatwa doesn’t play him as having untreated ADHD. “You really do have friends and you both shouldn’t and don’t need to be alone,” is a well the Old New Show went back to many times, but never moved past that. I’m not sure what’s on the other side of that door for a show with this premise, but I hope they try to find out.
As a stray continuity point, I think it’s interesting that for the first time in a long time, when asked if he was married, the Doctor just said no, without a reference to River (or Elizabeth I, or “The Aztecs.”) With the Tennant 08 Revival now a year in the past, Old New Who seems to have really slid back into history next to Old Who. This really was the start of Season 2 of New New Who, no matter how grouchy the wikipedia editors get.
The COVID stuff caught me really off-guard; I was not expecting Who to ever acknowledge that the pandemic happened at all, much less to do so with full-throated rage at the UK government. I think this was the first piece of media of any kind I can remember seeing with a scene set in a hospital COVID ward. I didn’t object to it, but that was some pretty strong medicine to slam into without warning. I guess we’re far enough into Long March that we can start grappling with what happened during that terrible winter of 2020. Probably a good sign.
Overall, big fun, I enjoyed it very much, looking forward to more.
At this point, it’s clear New New Who didn’t do anywhere near as well as anyone hoped. This time last year there was lots of big talk about a broad new glorious future stretching out ahead of us, but now everyone is a little more muted, with anything past the already filmed second season of the Gatwa/Disney era seemingly undecided (and as yet un-commissioned.)
I suspect we’re going to be picking apart the reasons why the Disney+ era didn’t launch like they were expecting for a long time, but anecdotally it’s clear that “Space Babies” was a little too much for a lot of people. That puts something of a pall over the proceedings; rather than a bold beginning, it’s starting to feel like this might be a little footnote before Who goes back into hibernation for a bit.
As fun as this episode was, there’s nothing here that’s likely to turn around the low viewing numbers left in the wake of the last series, like “Doctor Mysterio” in 2016, there’s a real sense of “really, that’s all you’re doing?”
The thing about Doctor Who is that it was actually, properly cancelled at least three times—in 1985, 1989, and 1996—and then also had near misses in 1969, 2009, and 2023, and those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. The other thing about Doctor Who is that despite that, they’re still making new episodes 61 years later. For Doctor Who fans, convincing ourselves it’s about to be cancelled again is our love language. There’s always going to be more Doctor Who, it’s just a matter of how long we have to wait.
Finally: I love that “mavity” looks like it’s just going to be an ongoing in-joke, and not pay off anywhere.
Happy Holidays, Everybody
Christmas, first night of Hanukkah, and new Doctor Who all on the same day! I’ll take it!
I hope you’re all doing well out there, and regardless if you’re celebrating one of those holidays, or another one, or “just Wednesday,” I hope you’re all having a better day than you expected.
Star Trek: Lower Decks Warps Off
As I think I’ve expressed before, I’m kind of fascinated by Big Franchise storytelling. Please note that the word “fascinated” in the previous sentence is not necessarily meant to be a synonym for “enjoy” or “approve of the existence of.” “Franchise” vs “series” is kind of a know-it-when-you-see-it thing, but broadly we’re talking about long-running multi-media entities that sustain themselves past the contributions of any singular participant.
One of the things that’s interesting to me about those kinds of Franchises is the way that some of them get into a groove and just keep going. Look at Law & Order, which has had at least one show on the air every year for 34 years and going, with no sign of stopping. Something like a thousand hours to date. Every year, 20-40 new hours of Law & Order, forever. Or, The Simpsons, CSI, most soap operas, the “Frasier Crane” Cinematic Universe. How much of any of that do you need? But, if people still like it, why stop making it?
Then you have the ones that get stuck in these weird cyclical, boom-to-bust loops. They’ll start with something popular, have a period of commercial and maybe even critical success, and then a sort of death drive sets in where the material gets worse and worse until augers into the ground, dead. The concept will usually eke out an existence surviving in spin-off or fan-made material until someone else comes along, dusts it off, and says “why not just do a good job?” and the cycle starts all over, and they find out.
Bond is probably the ur-example of this? Everyone on earth knows who James Bond is, and everyone whose seen more than one Bond movie can tell you their least favorite.
Star Trek is an extra weird example of a cyclical francise. By my count, it’s augured in at least three times by now. (1969, 2005, 2013/16.) Unlike most other similar long running francises—Bond, or the other big Star movie series—it’s not about a singular group of characters, it’s about a setting, a core premise, but the characters are up for grabs.
On the one hand, Trek feels like the sort of premise where you really can just keep going with Star Trek: New Ship Name forever. On the other hand, how much of that do you really need? By my count, there’s 11 TV shows and 13 movies (with more on the way), which is something just shy of 600 total hours. How much is enough? And the answer to that is very simple, because in all honestly, I’m much more likely to give a new a chance if it has the Star Trek logo on it that not, and I’m not alone.
Back to the Law & Order comparison: what’s different? TNG started in 1987, and then it, Voyager, and Enterprise were basically the same show that just swapped out the cast and sets every couple of years, same as the cop show. But that strand of Trek staggered to an ignominious end by 2005, long past the point where anyone was watching or cared, whereas L&O just kept on trucking.
I’m being slightly facetious in that comparison, because the big difference is that L&O maintained the same level of quality the whole time. The TNG-era Trek, and I’m putting this mildly, did not.
Part of the reason for that, is that Trek requires a very specific tone that’s genuinely hard to do. Star Trek always works best when it’s a little funny, and the heros are back on their heels a little bit. This is why Star Trek IV: The Whale One is the best movie.
Star Trek is also frequently extremely dumb. I’m hesitant to call it “camp” exactly, if for no other reason than it’s not British, but it’s in the same zip code. The premise is intrinsically silly, and requires a very specific camp-adjacent tone to work. You have to treat the material sincerely, you can’t be making fun of it or going full spoof, but a big part of the reason why we’re still talking about a show from the mid-60s was Shatner and Nimoy’s ability to wink at the audience like “yeah, we know what that looks like, just roll with us here.” If you take it too seriously it implodes under it’s own weight and does a sort seriousness integer overflow and becomes ridiculous. Too silly and you get something like Star Trek V: The One Where Scotty Knocks Himself Out. A big part of various Trek incarnations working or not comes down to how well they threaded that needle. Sincere, but not Serious.
The biggest challenge to maintaining that tone, frankly, is a very specific corner of the fanbase. They want their show to be taken seriously as Serious TV For Big Kids, which usually means darker lights, meaner characters, more space fights, and less time spent on characters and relationships. (Science-Fiction fans traditionally have dismissed that last one as “soap opera stuff”, which is a big part of why SF shows tend to get cancelled after a year.)
What happens as something fossilizes into a “franchise” is that it stops being about anything other than “more of itself,” and chases a smaller and smaller group of diehard fans who end up hating it anyway. And then it gets cancelled, having become inexplicable to anyone who didn’t take a degree in Deep Lore (or even to those of us who did.)
Thick with all these problems and more, TNG-era Trek plowed into the ground in ’05. The late aughts and twenty-teens was absolutely thick with reboots, remakes, attempted Cinematic Universes, and sequels, both legacy and otherwise. Thanks largely to the corporate shenanigans around Viacom/CBS/Paramount breaking up and then reassembling, all Star Trek had to show for the early part of this period were the three Chris Pine movies. Those only managed to be a partial restart, leading Trek to be almost totally absent from the first part of the Legacy Sequel Wave.
Then, fresh of the cratered disaster that was Star Trek Beyond and flush with zero percent interest rates and the insane peak of the streaming era, CBS/Viacom decided to get back into the small screen Trek business in a big way with their own CBS All Access platform and Star Trek: Discovery.
Discovery came of the gate with all the edgy, “I’m not your dad’s Star Trek!!” energy of a fifteen-year old that’s just discovered Hot Topic. The best review I’ve ever read of Discovery is Elizabeth Sandifer’s takedown at Tardis Eruditorum: Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: Star Trek: Discovery
But then, Disco was followed up with Star Trek: Picard, which was even worse; it felt like something you'd make up to bully wanana-be prestige legacy sequels. One returning actor and character, who has a new, edgier trauma background, totally different aesthetics, just terrible, but not uniquely so. Just the same terrible baseline that most TV was operating under. The sort of thing where you look at it and ask “why bother bringing it all back if this was all you were going to do with it?”
Somewhere in there they announced that next, they were going to do a comedy cartoon, Rick & Morty–style, written by one of the Rick & Morty showrunners. This was right about the height of the Rick & Morty fanbase being absolutely deranged about the McDonalds chicken nugget dipping sauce? I don’t even remember the details. The problem with Rick & Morty is that while funny, it’s fundamentally mean, about bad people in a bad universe who never get better. That’s exact opposite of Star Trek.
That was enough for me, I tapped out, stopped paying attention.
The Pandemic Years started and began to tick by, and I kept hearing about it, hearing good things. On a whim, armed with a free trial of Paramount+ and with nowhere to go and nothing better to do, I gave it a shot.
Having said all of that, you can imagine my surprise when Lower Decks quietly turned out to be the best Star Trek ever made.
The premise is straightforward: instead of the usual Bridge Crew, it’s Star Trek from the perspective of four Ensigns working in the “Lower Decks” of a Federation Starship. Star Trek plots, but from the perspective of those characters that normally would be standing around in the background. From that, it’s easy to imagine a show that looks like a cross between the TNG episode “Lower Decks” and that episode of Buffy told entirely from Xander’s point of view. But Lower Decks had more ambition than that.
Because the ship itself is also from the metaphorical Lower Decks—it’s the USS Cerritos, a California-class ship which we learn have always been around but off screen, doing the grunt work and cleaning up after the Big Hero ships like the Enterprise have moved on. There’s an esprit de corps to the California class ships, but they know they’re not the ones that get the attention.
(In a nice piece of worldbuilding, all the California-class ships are named after smaller cities in California, while the shuttles are all named after CA state parks.)
Critically, while they might not be the best of “the best of the best,” they aren’t incompetent or inept, and they aren’t cowards. This isn’t Inspector Clouseau in Space. They’re the Star Fleet equivalent of “regular people.” They know they’re not the A-Team, but they’re still Star Fleet, and they’re going to muddle through as best they can.
The show takes the approach that Star Trek–style Hijinks are happening constantly to everyone out in space, the Enterprises are just the best at dealing with them. Everyone else is in a little over their heads and has to muddle through.
On top of that, the show has two genuine innovations on the Trek formula. First, it assumes all the weird stuff that happens in Trek episodes is common knowledge. Weird aliens, time travel, spacial anomalies, they know what this stuff is. Trek has a tendency to give its characters “TV amnesia” and have them be surprised every time something shows up, but not here. The characters have the same basic working knowledge of “how Star Trek works” that the average fan does.
But the real genius of Lower Decks is that the characters act like real people. These aren’t the frequently programmatic Space Heros of other Treks, the Lower Deckers have anxieties, fears, ambitions, messy relationships with each other, complex friendships, painfully recognizable flaws. They’re all good people. But none of them are great people.
But this is Star Trek, and if Trek stands for anything, it stands for the idea that “tomorrow” is going to be better than “today,” and that applies as much to people as it does to their stuff. So they learn, and get better, and find ways to move forward. One of the central axes of the show is a mother and daughter learning how to see each other as real people beyond those roles, and it works. And this isn’t “Riker’s dad shows up once, they knock each other over, and then he goes away never to be mentioned,” this is a slow boil over five years. Friendships evolve and mature. Characters start dating, break up, and then learn to be okay with it. Characters who initial seem like dorks or pompous windbags turn out to have depths that can’t always be seen at first from the Lower Decks.
It’s also screamingly funny. A lot of that you get almost “for free” just by putting people who act like real people in wacky Star Trek situations. It’s a show where some “Star Trek Thing” will happen, and then someone will actually say what you always wished someone would say; they crack a joke, or act freaked out, or groan that there’s yet one more “some kinda spacial anomaly”. A group of people who encounter a Star Trek Thing, and instead of saying “Fascinating” they’re much more likely to say either “oh man, one of these again,” or “Oh shit!”
Star Trek is already a heightened melodramatic cartoony universe, so moving to animation doesn’t heighten that so much as it lets them move faster and avoid the endless padding of walking up and down hallways.
It’s a show clearly made by people who love Star Trek, but are not in the least bit precious or defensive about it. They know exactly what’s cool about it, and also exactly what’s deeply ridiculous. This lets them spin out an insane number of deep cuts while making it completely accessible to newcomers.
This lets them do things like drop the Ferengi War Memorial to the Profits lost during the Dominion War, with the confidence that it’s funny on its own without needing to recite an entry from Memory Alpha at the audience.
It’s one of the first things that really seems to have cracked how to use 600 hours of previous material as an asset rather than an anchor. Core to that is the recognition that people know how franchises work, they know they’re coming in “late.” You don’t have to spoon-feed the audience, they’re used to picking up what’s going on from context. They can look stuff up on the internet later, you just have to make this work within these twenty minutes, and then if they really want to they can go see what “the Dominion War” was later and then laugh at the joke again.
My favorite example of pulling a deep cut and making it work are the Dolphins. “Cetacean Ops” was a running background joke on TNG. Hall signs, PA announcements, the occasional oblique line of dialog. The internal technical documentation, later cleaned up and published as the TNG Technical Manual described that a portion of the Enterprise was filled with water, and a percentage of the crew were Dolphins, who ran the navigation department, their underwater background making them better at navigating 3D space than any landlubber. There are different stories about how serious any of this was, whether they ever actually intended to put Dolphins on the screen in the 80s or if it was a fun joke, like the engines having been built by Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems. Either way, everyone seems to agree that the combination of SeaQuest DSV and Johnny Mnemonic scotched any serious idea of putting a live-action dolpin on a star ship.
With that as the background, Lower Decks just has a pair of Beluga Whales—Lieutenants Kimolu and Matt—as part of the reoccurring cast. It never gets talked about, they’re just down in the whale room navigating the ship. The characters go hang out with them, they come along on away missions to water planets, we’re told they throw great parties. Its fun, it’s wacky, a great piece of utopian future world-building, and if you happen to know this obscure trivia from thirty years ago you just laugh a little louder and a little harder.
I watched this with two kids who have seen very little Trek overall, and they loved it, and they accepted that once or twice an episode dad would laugh uproariously at something they didn’t understand they could ask him about later.
I enthused about it least year as part of the Fall ’23 Good TV Thursdays, and everything I said then holds up and then some.
As long as I’m slinging links, I very much enjoyed this interview with Mike McMahan: Lower Decks’ showrunner talks doing a Star Trek show on his terms.
What’s Star Trek about? I’d submit it’s: highly competent fun characters with interesting relationships with each other having wacky space adventures in a fundamentally optimistic future. It’s also about people who have lived a little, who have lived through Some Disappointments, who are having those adventures to help heal over.
Despite being animated, or maybe because of it, Lower Decks ended up as the most confident, and the most Human version of Star Trek to date. I loved every second of it.
To loop back where we started, this really did feel like a show that could have run forever, cut down in its prime. I’m sorry it’s gone, but feel lucky we got what we did. Why keep dusting franchies off and making new versions? Because sometimes you can actually do better.
And it’s got the best Trek opening credits to date.
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.
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.
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 CoolDadTM 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:
- International, wide-spread repudiation of incumbents.
- Running a Woman of Color in a racist, sexist country.
- The overall Information Environment being wired for the other team.
- 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.