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.

Video Game Replay: Portal/Portal 2

Spoilers Ahoy

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

I’m Serious, go play it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It did, however, leave everyone wanting more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more:

Director Explains "Wolfs 2" Cancellation - Dark Horizons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Spoilers Ahoy

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

The two make an interesting comparison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me back up a tad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⚔

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🛡

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sex-Haver Energy”

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

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

Memory is a wacky thing.

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

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

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

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

So: Deadpool & Wolverine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s two possibilities here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woah! Slow Down, Maurice!

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

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

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

And that’s it.

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

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

Don’t Panic: Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at 40

Well! It turns out that this coming weekend is the 40th anniversary of Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky. I mentioned the game in passing back in July when talking about Salmon of Doubt, but I’ll take an excuse to talk about it more.

To recap: Hitchhiker started as a six-part radio show in 1978, which was a surprise hit, and was quickly followed by a second series, an album—which was a rewrite and re-record with the original cast instead of just being a straight release of the radio show—a 2-part book adaptation, a TV adaptation, and by 1984, a third book with a fourth on the way. Hitchhiker was a huge hit.

Somewhere in there, Adams discovered computers, and (so legend has it) also became a fan of Infocom’s style of literate Interactive Fiction. They were fans of his as well, and to say their respective fan-bases had a lot of overlap would be an understatement. A collaboration seemed obvious.

(For the details on how the game actually got made, I’ll point you at The Digital Antiquarian’s series of philosophical blockbusters Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style.)

These are two of my absolute favorite things—Infocom games and Hitchhiker—so this should be a “two great tastes taste great together” situation, right? Well, unfortunately, it’s a little less “peanut butter cup” and a little more “orange juice on my corn chex.”

“Book adaptation” is the sort of thing that seemed like an obvious fit for Infocom, and they did several of them, and they were all aggressively mediocre. Either the adaptation sticks too close to the book, and you end up painfully recreating the source text, usually while you “wait” and let the book keep going until you have something to do, or you lean the other way and end up with something “inspired by” rather than “based on.” Hitchhiker, amusingly, manages to do both.

By this point Adams had well established his reputation for blowing deadlines (and loving “the whooshing noise they make as they go by”) so Infocom did the sane thing and teamed him up Steve Meretzky, who had just written the spectacular—and not terribly dissimilar from Hitchhiker—Planetfall, with the understanding that Meretzky would do the programming and if Adams flagged then Meretzky could step in and push the game over the finish line.

The game would cover roughly the start of the story; starting with Arthur’s house being knocked down, continuing through the Vogon ship, arriving on the Heart of Gold, and then ending as they land on Magrathea. So, depending on your point of view, about the first two episodes of the radio and TV versions, or the first half of the first book. This was Adams’ fourth revision of this same basic set of jokes, and one senses his enthusiasm waning.

You play as Arthur (mostly, but we’ll get to that,) and the game tracks very closely to the other versions up through Arthur and Ford getting picked up by the Heart of Gold. At that point, the game starts doing its own thing, and it’s hard not to wonder if that’s where Adams got bored and let Meretzky take over.

The game—or at least the first part—wants to be terribly meta and subversive about being a text adventure game, but more often than not offers up things that are joke-shaped, but are far more irritating than funny.

The first puzzle in the game is that it is dark, and you have to open your eyes. This is a little clever, since finding and maintaining light sources are a major theme in earlier Zork-style Infocom games, and here you don’t need a battery-powered brass lantern or a glowing elvish sword, you can just open your eyes! Haha, no grues in this game, chief! Then the second puzzle is where the game really shows its colors.

Because, you see, you’ve woken up with a hangover, and you need to find and take some painkillers. Again, this is a text adventure, so you need to actually type the names of anything you want to interact with. This is long before point-and-click interfaces, or even terminal-style tab-complete. Most text games tried to keep the names of nouns you need to interact with as short as possible for ergonomic reasons, so in a normal game, the painkillers would be “pills”, or “drugs”, or “tablets”, or some other short name. Bur no, in this game, the only phrase the game recognizes for the meds is “buffered analgesic”. And look, that’s the sort of think that I’m sure sounds funny ahead of time, but is just plain irritating to actually type. (Although, credit where credit is due, four decades later, I can still type “buffered analgesic” really fast.)

And for extra gear-griding, the verb you’d use in reglar speech to consume a “buffered analgesic” would be to “take” it, except that’s the verb Infocom games use to mean “pick something up and put it in your inventory” so then you get to do a little extra puzzle where you have to guess what other verb Adams used to mean put it in your mouth and swallow.

The really famous puzzle shows up a little later: the Babel Fish. This seems to be the one that most people gave up at, and there was a stretch where Infocom was selling t-shirts that read “I got the Babel Fish!”

The setup is this: You, as Arthur, have hitchhiked on to the Vogon ship with Ford. The ship has a Babel Fish dispenser (an idea taken from the TV version, as opposed to earlier iterations where Ford was just carrying a spare.) You need to get the Babel fish into your ear so that it’ll start translating for you and you can understand what the Vogons yell at you when they show up to throw you off the ship in a little bit. So, you press the button on the machine, and a fish flies out and vanishes into a crack in the wall.

What follows is a pretty solid early-80s adventure game puzzle. You hang your bathrobe over the crack, press the button again, and then the fish hits the bathrobe, slides down, and falls into a grate on the floor. And so on, and you build out a Rube Goldberg–style solution to catch the fish. The 80s-style difficulty is that there are only a few fish in the dispenser, and when you run out you have to reload your game to before you started trying to dispense fish. This, from the era where game length was extended by making you sit and wait for your five-inch floppy drive to grind through another game load.

Everything you need to solve the puzzle is in the room, except one: the last thing you need to get the fish is the pile of junk mail from Arthur’s front porch, which you needed to have picked up on your way to lie in front of the bulldozer way back a the start of the game. No one thinks to do this the first time, or even first dozen times, and so you end up endlessly replaying the first hour of the game, trying to find what you missed.

(The Babel Fish isn’t called out by name in Why Adventure Games Suck, but one suspects it was top of Ron Gilbert’s mind when he wrote out his manifesto for Monkey Island four years later.)

The usual reaction, upon learning that the missing element was the junk mail, and coming after the thing with the eyes and the “buffered analgesic” is to mutter, screw this and stop playing.

There’s also a bit right after that where the parser starts lying to you and you have to argue with it to tell you what’s in a room, which is also the kind of joke that only sounds funny if you’re not playing the game, and probably accounted for the rest of the people throwing their hands up in the air and doing literally anything else with their time.

Which is a terrible shame, because just after that, you end up on the Heart of Gold and the game stops painfully rewriting the book or trying to be arch about being a game. Fairly quickly, Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian go hang out in the HoG’s sauna, leaving you to do your own thing. Your own thing ends up being using the backup Improbability Generator to teleport yourself around the galaxy, either as yourself or “quantum leap-style” jumping into other people. You play out sequences as all of Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian, and end up in places the main characters never end up in any of the other versions—on board the battlefleet that Arthur’s careless coment sets in motion, inside the whale, outside the lair of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. The various locations can be played in any order, and like an RPG from fifteen years later, the thing you need to beat the game has one piece in each location.

This is where the game settles in and turns into an actual adventure game instead of a retelling of the same half-dozen skits. And, more to the point, this is where the game starts doing interesting riffs on the source material instead of just recreating it.

As an example, at one point, you end up outside the cave of the Ravenenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, and the way you keep it from eating you is by carving your name on the memorial to the Beast’s victims, so that it thinks it has already eaten you. This is a solid spin on the book’s joke that the Beast is so dumb that it thinks that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you, but manges to make having read the book a bonus but not a requirement.

As in the book, to make the backup Improbability Drive work you need a source of Brownian Motion, like a cup of hot liquid. At first, you get a cup of Advanced Tea Substitute from the Nutrimat—the thing that’s almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. Later, after some puzzles and the missile attack, you can get a cup of real tea to plug into the drive, which allows it work better and makes it possible to choose your destination instead of it being random. Again, that’s three different jokes from the source material mashed together in an interesting and new way.

There’s a bit towards the end where you need to prove to Marvin that you’re intelligent, and the way you do that is by holding “tea” and “no tea” at the same time. The way you do that is by using the backup Improbably Drive to teleport into your own brain and removing your common sense particle, which is a really solid Hitchhiker joke that only appears in the game.

The game was a huge success at the time, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was very funny but very hard. You got the sense that a very small percentage of the people who played the game beat it, even grading on the curve of Infocom’s usual DNF rate. You also got the sense that there were a whole lot of people for whom HHGG was both their first and last Infocom game. Like Myst a decade later, it seemed to be the kind of game people who didn’t play games got bought for them, and didn’t convert a lot of people.

In retrospect, it’s baffling that Infocom would allow what was sure to be their best-selling game amongst new customers to be so obtuse and off-putting. It’s wild that HHGG came out the same year as Seastalker, their science fiction–themed game designed for “junior level” difficulty, and was followed by the brilliant jewel of Wishbringer, their “Introductory” game which was an absolute clinic in teaching people how to play text adventure games. Hitchhiker sold more than twice those two games combined.

(For fun, See Infocom Sales Figures, 1981-1986 | Jason Scott | Flickr)

Infocom made great art, but was not a company overly-burdened by business acumen. The company was run by people who thought of games as a way to bootstrap the company, with the intent to eventually graduate to “real” business software. The next year they “finally” released Cornerstone—their relational database product that was going to get them to the big leagues. It did not; sales were disastrous compared to the amount of money spent on development, the year after that, Infocom would sell itself to Activision; Activision would shut them down completely in 1989.

Cornerstone was a huge, self-inflicted wound, but it’s hard not to look at those sales figures, with Hitchhiker wildly outstripping everything else other than Zork I, and wonder what would have happened if Hitchhiker had left new players eager for more instead of trying to remember how to spell “analgesic.”

As Infocom recedes into the past and the memories of old people and enthusiasts, Hitchhiker maintains it’s name recognition. People who never would have heard the name “Zork” stumble across the game as the other, other, other version of Hitchhiker Adams worked on.

And so, the reality is that nowadays HHGG is likely to be most people’s first—and only—encounter with an Infocom game, and that’s too bad, because it’s really not a good example of what their games were actually like. If you’re looking for recommendation, scare up a copy of Enchanter. I’d recommend that, Wishbringer, Planetfall, and Zork II long before getting to Hitchhiker. (Zork is the famous game with the name recognition, but the second one is by far the best of the five games with “Zork” in the title.)

BBC Radio 4 did a 30th anniversary web version some years ago, which added graphics in the same style as the guide entries from the TV show, done by the same people, which feels like a re-release Infocom would have done in the late 80s if the company hadn’t been busy drowning in consequences of their bad decisions.

It’s still fun, taken on its own terms. I’d recommend the game to any fan of the other iterations of the Guide, with the caveat that it should be played with a cup of tea in one hand and a walkthrough within easy reach of the other.

All that said, it’s easy to sit here in the future and be too hard on it. The Secret of Monkey Island was a conceptual thermocline for adventure games as a genre, it’s so well designed, and it’s design philosophy is so well expressed in that design, that once you’ve played it it’s incredibly obvious what every game before it did wrong.

As a kid, though, this game fascinated me. It was baffling, and seemingly impossible, but I kept plowing at it. I loved Hitchhiker, still do, and there I was, playing Arthur Dent, looking things up in my copy of the Guide and figuring out how to make the Improbability Drive work. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t amazing, it was amazingly amazing. At one point I printed out all the Guide entries from the game and made a physical Guide out of cardboard?

As an adult, what irritates me is that the game’s “questionable” design means that it’s impossible to share that magic from when I was 10. There are plenty of other things I loved at that time I can show people now, and the magic still works—Star Wars, Earthsea, Monkey Island, the other iterations of Hitchhiker, other Infocom games. This game, though, is lost. It was too much of its exact time, and while you can still play it, it’s impossible to recreate what it was like to realize you can pick up the junk mail. Not all magic lasts. Normally, this is where I’d type something like “and that’s okay”, but in this particular case, I wish they’d tried to make it last a little harder.

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As a postscript, Meretzky was something of a packrat, and it turns out he saved everything. He donated his “Infocom Cabinet” to the Internet Archive, and it’s an absolute treasure trove of behind-the-scenes information, memos, designs, artwork. The Hitchhiker material is here: Infocom Cabinet: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy : Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams

Strange New Worlds Season 3 Preview

I haven’t had much of a chance to talk about Strange New Worlds here on the ‘cano, since the last season went off the air just before I got this place firing on all thrusters.

I absolutely love it, it really might have ended up as my favorite live action Trek. Between SNW and Lower Decks, it’s hard to believe maybe the two best Trek shows of all time are airing at the same time.

Over the weekend, Paramount posted a preview of the next season, which is presumably the opening of the first episode, directly following on from last year’s cliffhanger. Here, watch this, and I’ll meet you below the embed with some assorted thoughts:

• Hey, that’s the music from “Balance of Terror!”
• I know this makes me sound old, but I can’t believe that’s how good “TV Star Trek” looks now.
• Closely related: I really love this iteration of the Enterprise design. I can’t believe how good the old girl looks in this show. Inside too!
• I saw someone griping about Pike being disoriented at the start of this, but I though that was a pretty clever piece of filmmaking to have Pike need a beat to get his bearings in order to give the audience a little space to get their bearings as they get dropped into the middle of a cliffhanger from a year and a half ago.
• Star Trek has always been a show about people working together to solve problems, but I’m always impressed at how good a job SNW does at genuinely letting every member of the cast contribute to a solution under pressure, and do it in a way that the audience can follow along with.
• It’s been fun watching the LED screen tech from The Volume expanding out from The Mandalorian and into the industry at large. Case in point: the Enterprise Main Screen really is a screen now. There’s a camera move about halfway through that clip where the camera tracks sideways towards Uhura’s station (while the Balance of Terror music is going) and the parallax and focus on the screen stays correct, because it’s really a screen. Every cinematographer that’s ever worked on Trek over the last 50 years would have killed for that shot, and they can just do it now. Go look at that again—can you imagine what Nick Myer would have done to have been able to to that in Wrath of Khan? Or Robert Wise?
• I’m a simple man, with simple tastes, and someone on the bridge going on the shipwide intercom with a warning always works for me.
• And big fan of the pulsing movie-era “alert condition red” logo.
• This also gives me an opportunity to introduce my invention of The Mitchell Index. It goes like this: the quality of a given episode of SNW is directly proportional to a) if Jenna Mitchell is in the show and b) how many lines she has. So far, it’s been remarkably accurate, and this clip is close to to highest score yet recorded. She even gets the big idea!
• Speaking of Mitchell, love the way she tags the Gorn with a real torpedo too; sure, you gotta make the dud look good, but also: their shields are down and screw those guys.
• Heh, “Let’s hit it.” Hell yeah.
• Man, I love this show.

Ten Years of the Twelfth Doctor

I missed it with everything else going on at the time, but this past August marks ten years since the debut of Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor Who, who is, without a doubt, my all-time favorite version of the character.

His take on the character boiled down to, basically, “Slightly Grumpy Aging Punk Space Dad”, and it turns out that’s exactly what I always wanted. Funny, weird, a little spooky, “kind” without necessarily being “nice”. If nothing else, the Doctor should be the coolest weird uncle possible, and, well, look at that picture! Perfection.

(This is a strange thing for someone who grew up on PBS reruns of Tom Baker to admit. But when I’m watching something else and wishing the Doctor would show up and kick things into gear, it’s now Capaldi I picture instead of Baker.)

Unlike some of the other versions of the character, Twelve took a little while to dial in. So it’s sort of appropriate I didn’t remember this anniversary until now, because this past weekend was the 10th anniversary of the eighth episode of his inaugural series, “Mummy on the Orient Express.” “Mummy” wasn’t the best episode of that season—that was easily “Listen” or “Dark Water”, but “Mummy” was the episode where I finally got what they were doing.

This is slightly embarrassing, because “Mummy” is also the most blatantly throwback episode of the year; it’s a story that could have been done with very few tweaks in 1975 with Tom Baker. The key though, are those differences in approach, and one of the reasons a long running show like Doctor Who goes back and revisits old standards is to draw a contrast between how they were done then vs now.

Capaldi, unlike nearly all of his predecessors, was a genuinely well-known actor before climbing on board the Tardis. The first place I saw him was as the kid that falls in love with the (maybe?) mermaid in the criminally under-seen Local Hero. But his signature part was Malcom Tucker in The Thick of It. The Thick of It is set “behind the scenes” of the British government, and is cut from the British comedy model of “everyone is an idiot trying to muddle through”. The Thick of It takes that model one step further, though, and posits that if that’s true, there must be a tiny group of non-idiots desperately keeping the world together. That’s Malcom Tucker, nominally the government’s Director of Communications, but in reality the Prime Minister’s enforcer, spin doctor, and general Fixer. Tucker is clearly brilliant, the lone competent man surrounded by morons, but also a monster, and borderline insane. Capaldi plays him as openly menacing, but less straightforwardly malevolent as just beyond caring about anyone, constantly picking up the pieces from the problems that the various other idiots in Government have caused. Capaldi manages to play Tucker as clearly always thinking, but it’s never clear what he’s actually thinking about.

Somehow, Tucker manages to be both the series main antagonist and protagonist at the same time. And the character also had his own swearing consultant? It’s an incredible performance of a great part in a great show. (On the off chance you never saw it, he’s where “Omni-Shambles” came from, and you should stop reading this right now and go watch that show, I’ll wait for you down at the next paragraph.)

So the real problem for Doctor Who was that “Malcom Tucker as The Doctor” was simultaneously a terrible idea but one that was clearly irresistible to everyone, including show-runner Steven Moffat and Capaldi himself.

The result was that Capaldi had a strangely hesitant first season. His two immediate predecessors, David Tennant and Matt Smith, lept out of the gate with their takes on the Doctor nearly fully formed, whereas it took a bit longer to dial in Capaldi. They knew they wanted someone a little less goofy than Smith and maybe a little more standoffish and less emotional, but going “Full Tucker” clearly had strong gravity. (We’ve been working our way on-and-off through 21st century Who with the kids, and having just rewatched Capaldi’s first season, in retrospect I think he cracked what he was going to to do pretty early, but everyone else needed to get Malcom Tucker out of their systems.)

Capaldi is also an excellent actor—probably the best to ever play the part—and also one who is very willing to not be the center of attention every scene, so he hands a lot of the spotlight off to his co-lead Louise Coleman’s Clara Oswald, which makes the show a lot better, but left him strangely blurry early on.

As such, I enjoyed it, but spent a lot of that first season asking “where are they going with this?” I was enjoying it, but it wasn’t clear what the take was. Was he… just kind of a jerk now? One of the running plot lines of the season was the Doctor wondering if he was a good man or not, which was a kind of weird question to be asking in the 51st year of the show. There was another sideplot where he didn’t get along with Clara’s new boyfriend which was also unclear what the point was. Finally, the previous episode ended with Clara and the Doctor having a giant argument that would normally be the kind of thing you’d do as a cast-member was leaving, but Coleman was staying for at least there rest of the year? Where was all this going?

For me, “Mummy” is where it all clicked: Capaldi’s take on the part, what the show was doing with Clara, the fact that their relationship was as toxic as it looked and that was the point.

There are so many great little moments in “Mummy”; from the basic premise of “there’s a mummy on the orient express… in space!”, to the “20s art deco in the future” design work to, the choice of song that the band is singing, to the Doctor pulling out a cigarette case and revealing that it’s full of jelly babies.

It was also the first episode of the year that had a straightforward antagonist, that the Doctor beat by being a little bit smarter and a little bit braver than everyone else. He’d been weirdly passive up to this point; or rather, the season had a string of stories where there wasn’t an actual “bad buy” to be defeated, and had more complex, ambiguous resolutions.

It’s the denouement where it really all landed for me. Once all the noise was over, the Doctor and Clara have a quite moment on an alien beach where he explains—or rather she realizes—what his plan had been all along and why he had been acting the way he had.

The previous episode had ended with the two of them having a tremendous fight, fundamentally a misunderstanding about responsibility. The Doctor had left Clara in charge of a decision that normally he’d have taken; Clara was angry that he’d left her in the lurch, he thought she deserved the right to make the decision.

The Doctor isn’t interested in responsibility—far from it, he’s one of the most responsibility-averse characters in all of fiction—but he’s old, and he’s wise, and he’s kind, and he’s not willing not to not help if he can. And so he’ll grudgingly take responsibility for a situation if that’s what it takes—but this version is old enough, and tired enough, that he’s not going to pretend to be nice while he does it.

He ends by muttering, as much to himself as to Clara, “Sometimes all you have are bad choices. But you still have to choose.”

And that’s this incarnation in a nutshell—of course he’d really rather be off having a good time, but he’s going to do his best to help where he can, and he isn’t going to stop trying to help just because all the options are bad ones. He’d really rather the Problem Trolly be going somewhere nice, but if someone has to choose which track to go down, he’ll make the choice.

“Mummy” is the middle of a triptych of episodes where Clara’s world view fundamentally changed. In the first, she was angry that the Doctor expected her to take responsibility for the people they came across, here in the second she realized why the Doctor did what he did, and then in the next she got to step in the Doctor’s shoes again, but this time understood.

The role of the “companion” has changed significantly over the years. Towards the end of the old show they realized that if the title character is an unchanging mostly-immortal, you can wrap an ongoing story around the sidekick. The new show landed on a model where the Doctor is mostly a fixed point, but each season tells a story about the companion changing, sometimes to the point where they don’t come back the next year.

Louise Coleman was on the show for two and a half seasons, and so the show did three distinct stories about Clara. The first two stories—“who is the impossible girl” and “will she leave the show to marry the boring math teacher”—turned out to be headfakes, red herrings, and actually the show was telling another story, hidden in plain sight.

The one story you can never tell in Doctor Who is why that particular Time Lord left home, stole a time capsule, and became “The Doctor”. You can edge up against it, nibble around the edges, imply the hell out of things, but you can’t ever actually tell that story. Except, what you can do is tell the story of how someone else did the same thing, what kind of person they had to be ahead of time, what kinds of things had to happen to them, what did they need to learn.

With “Mummy”, Clara’s fate was sealed—there was no going back to “real life”, or “getting married and settling down”, or even “just leaving”. The only options left were Apotheosis or Death—or, as it turns out, both, but in the other order. She had learned too much, and was on a collision course with her own stolen Tardis.

And standing there next to her was the aging punk space dad, passing though, trying to help. My Doctor.

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Both Moffat’s time as show-runner and Capaldi’s time as the Doctor have been going through a much-deserved reappraisal lately. At the time, Capaldi got a weirdly rough reaction from online corners of the fanbase. Partly this was because of the aforementioned slow start, and partly because he broke the 21st century Who streak of casting handsome young men. But mostly this was because of a brew of toxic “fans”, bad-faith actors, and various “alt-right” grifters. (You know, Tumblr.) Because of course, this last August was also the 10th anniversary of “GamerGate”. How we ended up in a place that the unchained Id of the worst people alive crashed through video game and science fiction fandoms, tried to fix the Hugos, freaked out about The Last Jedi so hard it broke Hollywood, and then elected a racist game show host to be president is a topic for another time, but those people have mostly moved the grift on from science fiction—I mean, other than the Star Wars fanbase, which became a permanent host body.

The further we get from it, the more obvious what a grift it was. It’s hard to describe how how utterly deranged the Online Discourse^TM was. There was an entire cottage industry telling people not to watch Doctor Who because of the dumbest reasons imaginable in the late twenty-teens, and those folks are just… gone now, and their absense makes it even more obvious how spurious the “concerns” were. Because this was also the peak “taking bad-faith actors seriously” era. The general “fan” “consensus” was that Capaldi was a great actor let down by bad writing, in that sense of “bad” meaning “it wasn’t sexist enough for me.”

There’s a remarkable number of posts out there what’s left of the social web of people saying, essentially, “I never watched this because $YOUTUBER said it was bad, but this is amazing!” or “we never knew what we had until it was gone!”

Well, some of us knew.

I missed this back in November, but the official Doctor Who magazine did one of their rank every episode polls on the advent of the 60th anniversary. They do this every decade or so, and they’re always interesting, inasmuch as they’re a snapshot of the general fan consensus of the time. They’re not always a great view on how the general public sees this, I mean, a poll conducted by the official magazine is strongly self-selecting for Fans with a capital F.

I didn’t see it get officially posted anywhere, but most of the nerd news websites did a piece on it, for example: Doctor Who Fans Have Crowned the Best Episode – Do You Agree? | Den of Geek. The takeway is that the top two are Capaldis, and half of the top ten are Moffat’s. That would have been an unbelievable result a decade ago, because the grifters would have swamped the voting.

Then there’s this, which I’ve been meaning to link to for a while now. Over in the burned-out nazi bar where twitter used to be, a fan of Matt Smith’s via House of the Dragon found out that he used to be the lead of another science fiction show and started live tweeting her watch through Doctor Who: jeje (@daemonsmatt). She’s up through Capaldi’s second season now, as I type this, and it’s great. She loves it, and the whole thread of threads is just a river of positivity. And even in the “oops all nazis” version of twitter, no one is showing up in the comments with the same grifter crap we had to deal with originally, those people are just gone, moved on to new marks. It’s the best. It’s fun to see what we could have had at the time if we’d run those people off faster.

This all feels hopeful in a way that’s bigger than just people discovering my favorite version of my favorite show. Maybe, the fever is finally starting to break.

Dungeons & Dragons (2024): Trying to Make a Big Tent Bigger

Dungeons & Dragons is a weird game. I don’t mean that as some kind of poetic statement about role-playing games in general, I mean that specifically within the world of tabletop RPGs, D&D is weird. It’s weird for a lot of reasons, including, but not limited to:

1. It’s the only TTRPG with with actual “real world” name recognition or any sort of cross-over brand awareness.
2. For most of its existence, it hasn’t been a very good game.

And then for bonus points, it’s not even one game! Depending on how you count it’s at least six different related but totally incompatible games.

The usual example for a brand name getting turned into a generic noun is “kleenex”, but the thing where “Dungeons and Dragons” has become a generic noun for all RPGs is so strange.

It’s so much more well known that everything else it’s like if all TV shows were called MASH, as in “hey, that new MASH with the dragons is pretty good, ” or “I stayed in and rewatched that MASH with the time-traveller with the police box,” etc.

There was a joke in the mid-90s that all computer games got pitched as “it’s like DOOM, but…” and then just pitched the game regardless of how much it was actually like Doom; “It’s like DOOM except it’s not in first person, it’s not in real time, you don’t have a gun, you’re a pirate, you’re not in space, and instead you solve puzzles”. D&D is like that but for real.

Which is a testament to the power of a great name and the first mover advantage, because mechanically, the first 30-or-so years of the game were a total mess. In a lot of ways, RPGs became an industry because everyone who spent more than about 90 seconds with D&D in the 70s, 80, or 90s immediately thought of ten ways to improve the game, and were right about at least eight of them. (One of the best running bits in Shannon Applecline’s seminial Designers & Dungeons is how many successful RPG companies literally started like this.)

And this mechanical weirdness isn’t just because it was first, but because of things like Gary Gygax’s desire to turn it into a competitive sport played at conventions, but also make sure that Dave Arneson didn’t get paid any royalties, and also show off how many different names of polearms he knew. As much as RPGs are sold as “do anything, the only limit is your imagination!” D&D has always been defined by it’s weird and seemingly arbitrary limits. So there’s a certain semi-effable “D&D-ness” you need for a game to be “Dungeons & Dragons” and not just another heroic fantasy game, not all of which make for a great system. It’s a game where its flaws have become part of the charm; the magic system is objectively terrible, but is also a fundamental part of it’s D&D-ness.

The upshot of all that is that for most of its life, D&D had a very clear job within the broader TTRPG world: it was the game that onboarded new players to the hobby, who then immediately graduated to other, better games. The old Red Box was one of the great New Customer Acquisition products of all time, but most people proceeded to bounce right off Advanced D&D, and then moved on to Ninja Turtles, or Traveller, or Vampire, or GURPS, or Shadowrun, or Paranoia, or Star Wars, or any number of other systems that were both better games and were more tailored to a specific vibe or genre, but all assumed you already knew how to play. It wasn’t a game you stuck with. You hear stories about people who have been playing the same AD&D 2nd Edition game for years, and then you ask a couple of follow-up questions and realize that their home rules make the Ship of Theseus look under-remodeled.

Now, for the hobby at large that’s fairly healthy, but if your salary depends on people buying “Dungeons & Dragons” books specifically, I can see how that would be fairly maddening. The game, and the people who make it, have been in an ongoing negotiation with the player base to find a flavor of the game that people are actually willing to stick around for. This results in the game’s deeply weird approach to “Editons”, where each numbered edition is effectively a whole new game, always sold with a fairly explicit “Look! We finally fixed it!”

This has obviously been something of a mixed bag. I think a big part of the reason the d20 boom happened at the turn of the century was that for the first time, 3rd edition D&D was actually a good game. Not perfect, but finally worth playing. 4e, meanwhile, was the best-designed game that no one wanted to play, and it blew up the hobby so much that it created both Pathfinder and served as one of the sparks to light off the twenty-teens narrative RPG boom.

Another result of this ongoing negotiation is that D&D also has a long tradition of “stealth” updates, where new books come out that aren’t a formal revision, but if you pull the content in it dramatically changes the game. AD&D 1 had Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana, AD&D 2 had those Player’s Option books (non-weapon proficiencies!), Basic had at least three versions (the original B/X, the BECMI sets, and then the Rules Cyclopedia). 3rd had the rare Formal Update in the form of the 3.5 release, but it also had things like the Miniatures Handbook (which, if you combine that with the SAGA Edition of Star Wars, makes the path from 3 to 4 more obvious.) 4e had Essentials.

2024 is a radically different time for tabletop games than 2014 was. As the twenty-teens dawned, there was growing sense that maybe there just wasn’t going to be a commercial TTRPG industry anymore. Sales were down, the remaining publishers were pivoting to PDF-only releases, companies were either folding or moving towards other fields. TTRPGs were just going to be a hobbyist niche thing from here on out, and maybe that was going to be okay. I mean, text-based Interactive Fiction Adventure games hadn’t been commercially viable since the late 80s, but the Spring Thing was always full of new submissions. I remember an article on EN World or some such in 2012 or 2013 that described the previous year’s sales as “an extinction level event for the industry.”

Designers & Dungeons perfectly preserves the mood from the time. I have the expanded 2014 4-volume edition, although the vast majority of the content is still from the 2011 original, which officially covers the industry up to 2009 and then peeks around the corner just a bit. The sense of “history being over” pervades the entire work, theres a real sense that the heyday is over, and so now is the time to get the first draft of history right.

As such, the Dungeons & Dragons (2014) books had a certain “last party of summer vacation” quality to them. The time where D&D would have multiple teams with cool codenames working on different parts of the game was long past, this was done by a small group in a short amount of time, and somewhat infamously wasn’t really finished, which is why so many parts of the book seem to run out of steam and end with a shrug emoji and “let the DM sort it out.” The bones are pretty good, but huge chunks of it read like one of those book reports where you’re trying to hide the fact you only read the first and last chapters.

That’s attracted a lot of criticism over the years, but in their (mild) defense, I don’t think it occurred to them that anyone new was going to be playing Fifth. “We’re gonna go out on a high note, then turn the lights out after us.” Most of the non-core book product line was outsourced for the first year or so, it was all just sorta spinning down.

Obviously, that’s not how things went. Everyone has their own theory about why 5th Edition caught fire the way no previous edition had, and here’s mine: The game went back to a non-miniatures, low-math design right as the key enabling technology for onboarding new players arrived: Live Play Podcasts. By hook or by crook, the ruleset for 5E is almost perfect for an audio-only medium, and moves fast, in a way that none of the previous 21st century variants had been.

And so we find outselves in a future where D&D, as a brand, is one of Hasbro’s biggest moneymakers.

Part of what drove that success is that Hasbro has been very conservative about changes to the game, which has clearly let the game flourish like never before, but the same issues are still there. Occasionally one of the original team would pop up on twitter and say something like “yeah, it’s obvious now what we should have done instead of bonus actions,” but nothing ever shipped as a product.

5th edition has already had its stealth update in the form the Tasha/Xanathar/Mordenkainen triptych, but now we’ve got something that D&D really hasn’t had before: the 2024 books are essentially 5th Edition, 2nd Edition. Leading the charge of a strangely spaced-out release schedule is the new Player’s Handbook (2024).

Let’s start with the best part: The first thirty pages are a wonder. It opens with the best “what is an RPG” intro I have ever read, and works its way up though the basics, and by page 28 has fully explained the entire ruleset. To be clear: there aren’t later chapters with names like “Using Skills” or “Combat”, or “Advanced Rules”, this is it.

The “examples of play” are a real thing of art. The page is split into two columns: the left side of the page is a running script-like dialogue of play, and the right side is a series of annotations and explanations describing exactly what rule was in play, why they rolled what they rolled, what the outcome was. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

This is followed by an incredibly clear set of instructions on how to create a character, and then… the rest of the book is reference material. Chapters on the classes, character origins, feats, equipment, spells, a map of the Planes, stat blocks for creatures to use as familiars or morph targets.

Finally, the book ends with its other best idea: the Rules Glossary. It’s 18 pages of The Rules, alphabetical by Formal Name, clearly written. Theres no flipping around in the book looking for how to Grapple or something, it’s in the glossary. Generally, the book will refer the reader to the glossary instead of stating a rule in place.

It’s really easy to imagine how to repackage this layout into a couple of Red Box–style booklets covering the first few levels. You can basically pop the first 30 pages out as-is and slap a cover on it that says “Read This First!”

Back when I wrote about Tales of the Valiant, I made a crack that maybe there just wasn’t a best order for this material. I stand corrected. It’s outstanding.

Design-wise the book is very similar to it’s predecessor: same fonts, same pseudo-parchment look to the paper, same basic page layout. My favorite change is that the fonts are all larger, which my rapidly aging eyes appreciates.

It’s about 70 pages longer than the 2014 book, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that both books have the same number of words and that the extra space is taken up with the larger text and more art. The book is gorgeous, and is absolutely chock full of illustrations. Each class gets a full-page piece, and then each subclass gets a half-page piece showing an example of that build. It’s probably the first version of this game where you can flip through the classes chapter, and then stop at a cool picture and go “hang on, I want to play one of THOSE”. The art style feels fresh and modern in a way that’s guaranteed to make everyone say “that is so twenties” years from now; the same way that the art for the original 3rd edition books looked all clean and modern at the time, but now screams “late 90s” in a way I don’t have the critical vocabulary to describe. (Remember how everything cool had to be asymmetrical for a while there? Good times!)

Some of the early art previewed included a piece with the cast from 80s D&D cartoon drawn in the modern style of the book. At the time, I thought that was a weird piece of nostalgia bait: really? Now’s the time to do a callback to a 40-year old cartoon? Whose the audience for that?

But I was wrong about the intent, because this book is absolutely full of all manner of callbacks and cameos. The DragonLance twins are in the first couple of pages, everyone’s favorite Drow shows up not long after, there’s a guy from Baldur’s Gate 3, the examples of play are set in Castle Ravenloft, there’s Eberron airships, characters from the 80s action figure line, the idol from the old DMG cover, a cityscape of Sigil with the Lady floating down the street. It’s not a nostalgia play so much as it is a “big tent” play: the message, over and over again, is that everything fits. You remember some weird piece of D&D stuff from ages ago? Yeah, that’s in here too. Previous versions of this game have tended to start with a posture of “here’s the default way to play now”, with other “weirder” stuff floating in later. This takes the exact opposite approach, this is full-throated “yes, and” to everything D&D. So not only does Spelljammer get a shoutout in the 2 page appendix about the planes, but rules for guns are in the main equipment chapter, the psionic subclasses are in the main book, airships are in the travel costs table. Heck, the para-elemental planes are in the inner planes diagram, and I thought I was the only person who remembered those existed.

And this doesn’t just mean obscure lore pulls, the art is a case study in how to do “actual diversity”. There’s an explosion of body types, genders, skin tones, styles, and everyone looks cool.

Theres a constant, pervasive sense of trying to make the tent as big and as welcoming as possible. Turns out “One D&D” was the right codename for this; it wasn’t a version number, it was a goal.

Beyond just the art, 2024 book has a different vibe. There’s a whimsicalness from the 2014 version that’s gone: the humorous disclaimer on the title page isn’t there, there isn’t a joke entry for THAC0 in the index. If the 2014 book was an end-of-summer party, this is a start of the year syllabus.

The whole thing has been adjusted to be easier to use. The 2014 book had a very distinct yellowed-parchment pattern behind the text, the 2024 book has a similar pattern, but it’s much less busy and paler, so the text stands out better against the background. All the text is shorter, more to the point. The 2014 book had a lot of fluff that just kinda clogged up the rules when you were trying to look something up in a hurry, the 2024 book has been through an intense editing pass.

As an example: in the section for each class, each class ability has a subheading with the name of the power, and then a description, like this:

Invert the Polarity Starting at 7th level, your growing knowledge of power systems allows you to invert the polarity of control circuits, such as in teleport control panels or force fields. As a bonus action, you can add a d4 to attempts to control electrical systems. After using this power, you must take a short or long rest before using it again.

Now, it’s like this:

Level 7: Invert the Polarity Add 1d4 to checks made with the Sonic Screwdriver Tool. You regain this feature after a short or long rest.

For better or worse, it’s still 5th edition D&D. All the mechanical warts of the system are still there; the weird economy around Bonus Actions, too many classes have weird pools of bonus dice, the strange way that some classes get a whole set of “spell-like” powers to choose from, and other classes “just get spells.” There still isn’t a caster that just uses spell points. Warlocks still look like they were designed on the bus on the way to school the morning the homework was due. Inspiration is still an anemic version of better ideas from other systems. Bounded accuracy still feels weird if you’re not used to it. It’s still allergic to putting math in the text. It still tries to sweep more complex mechanics under the rug by having a very simple general rule, and then a whole host of seemingly one-off exceptions that feel like could have just been one equation or table. The text is still full of tangled sentences about powers recharging after short and long rests instead of just saying powers can used used so many times per day or encounter. There’s still no mechanic for “partial success” or “success with consequences.” You still can’t build any character from The Princess Bride. If 5th wasn’t your jam, there’s nothing here that’ll change your mind.

On the other hand, the good stuff is largely left unchanged: The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic is still brilliant. The universal proficiency bonus is still a great approach. Bounded Accuracy enables the game to stay fun long past the point where other editions crash into a ditch filled with endless +2 modifiers. It’s the same goofball combat-focused fantasy-themed superhero game it’s been for a long time. I’ve said many times, 5e felt like the first version of D&D that wasn’t actively fighting against the way I like to run games, and the 2024 version stays that way.

All that said, it feels finished in a way the 2014 book didn’t. It’s a significantly smaller mechanical change that 3 to 3.5 was, but the revisions are where it counts.

Hasbro has helpfully published a comprehensive list of the mechanics changes as Updates in the Player’s Handbook (2024) | Dungeons & Dragons, so rather than drain the list, here are the highlights that stood out to me:

The big one is that Races are now Species, and Backgrounds have been reworked and made more important, and the pair are treated as “Origins”. This is massive improvement, gone is the weird racial determinism, and where you grew up is now way more important than where your ancestors came from. There’s some really solid rules for porting an older race or background into the new rules. The half-races are gone, replaced by “real Orcs” and the Aaisimar and Goliaths being called up to the big leagues. Backgrounds in 2014 were kinda just there, a way to pick up a bonus skill proficiency, here they’re the source of the attribute bonus and an actual Feat. Choosing a pair feels like making actual choices about a specific character in a different way that how previous editions would sort of devolve that choice into “choose your favorite Fellowship member”.

Multi-classing and Feats are flushed out and no longer relegated to an “optional because we ran out of time” sidebar. Feats specifically are much closer to where they were in 3e—interesting choices to dial in your character. The they split the difference with the choice you had to make in 5e to either get a stat boost or a feat, you still make that choice, but the stat boost bumps up two stats, and every general feat inclues a single stat boost.

The rules around skills vs tools make sense. At first glance, there don’t seem to be weird overlaps anymore. Tools were one of those undercooked features in 2014, they were kinda like skills, but not? When did you use a tool vs a plain skill check? How do you know what attribute bonus to use? Now, every attribute and skill has a broad description and examples of what you can use them from. Each tool has a full description, including the linked attribute, at least one action you can use it for, and at least one thing you can craft with it. And, each background comes with at least one tool proficiency. You don’t have to guess or make something up on the fly, or worse, remember what you made up last time. It’s not a huge change, but feels done.

Every class has four subclasses in the main book now, which cover a pretty wide spread of options, and sanity has prevailed and all subclasses start at level 3. (In a lot of ways, level 3 is clearly the first “real” level, with the first two as essentially the tutorial, which syncs well with that if you follow the recommended progression, you’ll hit 3rd level at the end of the second session.)

The subclasses are a mix of ones from the 2014 book, various expansions, and new material, but each has gotten a tune up top focus on what the actual fantasy is. To use Monk for example, the subclasses are “Hong Kong movie martial artist”, “ninja assassin”, “airbender”, and, basically, Jet Li from Kiss of the Dragon? The Fighter subclasses have a pretty clear sliding scale of “how complicated do you want to make this for yourself,” spanning “Basic Fighter”, “3rd Edition Fighter”, “Elf from Basic D&D”, and “Psionics Bullshit (Complementary)”.

Weapons now have “Weapon Mastery Properties” that, if you have the right class power or feat, allow you do do additional actions or effects with certain weapons, which does a lot to distinguish A-track fighters from everyone else without just making their attack bonus higher.

The anemic Ideals/Flaws/Bonds thing from 2014 is gone, but in it’s place there’s a really neat set of tables with descriptive words for both high and low attributes and alignment that you can roll against to rough in a personality.

On the other hand, lets talk about whats not here. The last page of the book is not the OGL, and there’s no hint of what any future 3rd party licensing might be. The OGL kerfluffle may have put the 2014 SRD under a CC license, but there’s no indication that there will even be a 2024 SRD.

There’s basically nothing in the way of explicit roleplaying/social hooks; and nothing at all in the way of inter-party hooks. PbtA is a thing, you know? But more to the point, so was Vampire. So was Planescape. There’s a whole stack of 30-year old innovations that just aren’t here.

Similarly there’s no recognition of “the party” as a mechanical construct.

There’s nothing on safety tools or the like; there is a callout box about Session Zero, but not much else. I’m withholding judgement on that one, since it looks like there’s something on that front in the DMG.

There’s very little mechanics for things other than combat; although once again, D&D tends to treat that as a DMG concern.

The other best idea that 4e had was recognizing that “an encounter” was a mechanical construct, but didn’t always have to mean “a fight.” This wasn’t new there, using games I can see from where I’m sitting as an example, Feng Shui was organized around “scenes” in the early 90s. Once you admit an encounter is A Thing, you can just say “this works once an encounter” without having to put on a big show about short rests or whatever, when everyone knows what you mean.

Speaking for myself, as someone who DMs more than he plays, I can’t say as I noticed anything that would change the way I run. The ergonomics and presentation of the book, yes, more different and better player options, yes, but from the other side of the table, they’re pretty much the same game.

Dungeons & Dragons is in a strage spot in the conceptual space. It’s not an explicit generic system like GURPS or Cypher, but it wants to make the Heroic Fantasy tent big enough that it can support pretty much any paperback you find in the fantasy section of the used book store. There’s always been a core of fantasy that D&D was “pretty good at” that got steadily weedier the further you got from it. This incarnation seems to have done a decent job of widening out that center while keeping the weed growth the a minimum.

It seems safe to call this the best version of Dungeons & Dragons to date, and perfectly positioned to do the thing D&D is best at: bring new players into the hobby, get them excited, and then let them move on.

But, of course, it’s double volcano summer, so this is the second revised Fifth Edition this year, after Kobold’s Tales of the Valiant. Alert readers will note that both games made almost the exact same list of changes, but this is less “two asteroid movies” and more “these were the obvious things to go fix.” It’s fascinating how similar they both are, I was expecting to have a whole compare and contrast section here, but not so much! I’m not as tapped into “the scene” as I used to be, so I don’t know how common these ideas were out in the wild, but both books feel like the stable versions of two very similar sets of house rules. It kinda feels like there are going to be a lot of games running a hacked combo of the the two.

(To scratch the compare-and-contrast itch: At first glance, I like the ToV Lineage-Heritage-Background set more than the D&D(2024) Species-Background pair, but the D&D(2024) weapon properties and feats look better than their ToV equivalents. Oh, to be 20 and unemployed again!)

The major difference is that ToV is trying to be a complete game, whereas the 2024 D&D still wants to treat the rest of the post-2014 product line as valid.

As of this writing, both games still have their respective DM books pending, which I suspect is where they’ll really diverge.

More than anything, this reminds me of that 2002-2003 period where people kept knocking out alternate versions of 3e (Arcana Unearthed, Conan, Spycraft, d20 Star Wars, etc, etc) capped off with 3.5. A whole explosion of takes on the same basic frame.

This feels like the point where I should make some kind of recommendation. Should you get it?That feels like one of those “no ethical consumption under capitalism” riddles. Maybe?

To put it mildly, it hasn’t been a bump-free decade for ‘ol Hasbro; recently the D&D group has made a series of what we might politely call “unforced errors,” or if we were less polite “a disastrously mishandled situation or undertaking.”

Most of those didn’t look malevolent, but the sort of profound screwups you get when too many people in the room are middle-aged white guys with MBAs, and not enough literally anyone else. Credit where credit is due, and uncharacteristically for a public-traded American corporation, they seemed to actually be humbled by some of these, and seemed to be making a genuine attempt to fix the systems that got them into a place where they published a book where they updated an existing race of space apes by giving them the exciting new backstory of “they’re escaped slaves!” Or blowing up the entire 3rd party licensing model for no obvious reason. Or sending the literal Pinkertons to someone’s house.

There seems to be an attempt to use the 2024 books to reset. There seems to be a genuine attempt here to get better at diversity and inclusion, to actually move forward. On the other hand, there’s still no sign of what’s going to happen next with the licensing situation.

And this is all slightly fatuous, because I clearly bought it, and money you spend while holding your nose is still legal tender. Your milage may vary.

My honest answer is that if you’re only looking to get one new 5e-compatible PHB this year, I’d recommend you get Tales of the Valiant instead, they’re a small company and could use the sales. If you’re in the market for a second, pick this one up. If you’ve bought in to the 5e ecosystem, the new PHB is probably worth the cover price for the improved ergonomics alone.

Going all the way back to where we started, the last way that D&D is weird is that whether we play it or not, all of us who care about this hobby have a vested interest in Dungeons & Dragons doing well. As D&D goes, so goes the industry: if you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, when D&D does well the rising tide lifts all boats, but when it does poorly D&D is the Fisher King looking out across a blasted landscape.

If nothing else, I want to live in a world where as many people’s jobs are “RPG” as possible.

D&D is healthier than it’s ever been, and that should give us all a sigh of relief. They didn’t burn the house down and start over, they tried to make a good game better. They’re trying to make it more welcoming, more open, trying to make a big tent bigger. Here in the ongoing Disaster of the Twenties, and as the omni-crisis of 2024 shrieks towards its uncertain conclusion, I’ll welcome anyone trying to make things better.

TV Rewatch: The Good Place

spoilers ahoy

We’ve been rewatching The Good Place. (Or rather, I’ve been rewatching it—I watched it on and off while it was on—everyone else around here is watching it for the first time.)

It is, of course, an absolute jewel. Probably the last great network comedy prior to the streaming/covid era. It’s a masterclass. In joke construction, in structure, in hiding jokes in set-dressing signs. It hits that sweet spot of being both genuinely funny while also have recognizable human emotions, which tends to beyond the grasp of most network sitcoms.

It’s also a case study in why you hire people with experience; Kristen Bell and Ted Danson are just outstanding at the basic skill of “starring in a TV comedy”, but have never as good as they are here. Ted Danson especially is a revelation here, he’s has been on TV essentially my entire life, and he’s better than he’s ever been, but in a way that feels like this is because he finally has material good enough.

But on top of all that, It’s got a really interesting take on what being a “good person” means, and the implications thereof. It’s not just re-heated half-remembered psychology classes, this is a show made by people that have really thought about it. Philosophers get named-dropped, but in a way that indicates that the people writing the show have actually read the material and absorbed it, instead of just leaving a blank spot in the script that said TECH.

Continuing with that contrasting example, Star Trek: The Next Generation spent hours on hours talking about emotions and ethics and morality, but never had an actual take on the concept, beyond a sort of mealy-mouthed “emotions are probably good, unless they’re bad?” and never once managed to be as insightful as the average joke in TGP. It’s great.

I’m gonna put a horizontal line here and then do some medium spoilers, so if you never watched the show you should go do something about that instead of reading on.

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The Good Place has maybe my all-time favorite piece of narrative sleight of hand. (Other than the season of Doctor Who that locked into place around the Tardis being all four parts of “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”)

In the very first episode, a character tells something to another character—and by extension the audience. That thing is, in fact, a lie, but neither the character nor the audience have any reason to doubt it. The show then spends the rest of the first season absolutely screaming at the audience that this was a lie, all while trusting that the audience won’t believe their lying eyes and ignore the mounting evidence.

So, when the shoe finally drops, it manages to be both a) a total surprise, but also b) obviously true. I can’t think of another example of a show that so clearly gives the audience everything they need to know, but trusts them not to put the pieces together until the characters do.

And then, it came back for another season knowing that the audience was in on “the secret” and managed to both be a totally new show and the same show it always was at the same time. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

The next Dr Who Blu Ray release is… Blake’s 7?

It turns out the next Doctor Who blu-ray release is… the first season of Blakes 7? Wait, what? Holy Smokes!

I describe Blake's 7 as “the other, other, other, British Science fiction show”, implicitly after Doctor Who , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Red Dwarf. Unlike those other three, Blake didn’t get widespread PBS airings in the US (I’m not sure my local PBS channel ever showed it, and it ran everything.)

Which is a shame, because it deserves to be better known. The elevator pitch is essentially The Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai in space”; a group of convicts, desperadoes, and revolutionaries lead a revolt against the totalitarian Earth Federation. In a move that could only be done in the mid-70s, the “evil Federation” is blatantly the Federation from Star Trek, rotted out and gone fascist, following a long line of British SF about fascism happening “here.”

It was made almost entirely by people who had previously worked on Doctor Who, and it shows; while there was never a formal crossover, the entire show feels like a 70s Who episode where the TARDIS just never lands and things keep getting worse. My other joke though, is that whereas Doctor Who’s budget was whatever change they could find in the BBC lobby couch cushions, Blake’s budget was whatever Doctor Who didn’t use. It’s almost hypnotically low budget, with some episodes so cheap that they seem more like avant garde theatre than they do a TV show whose reach is exceeding its grasp.

On the other hand, its got some of the best writing of all time, great characters, great acting. It revels in shades of gray and moral ambiguity decades before that came into vogue. And without spoiling anything, it has one of the all-time great last episodes of any show. It’s really fun. It’s a show I always want to recommend, but I’m not sure it ever got a real home video release in North America.

So a full, plugs out release is long overdue. The same team that does the outstanding Doctor Who blu-ray sets is doing this; same level of restoration, same kind of special features. Apparently, they’re doing “updated special effects”, except some of the original effects team came out of retirement and they’re shooting new model work? Incredible. The real shame is that so many of the people behind the show have since passed; both main writers, several of the actors, including the one who played the best character. Hopefully there’s some archive material to fill in the gaps.

Blake ran for 4 years, presumably the Doctor Who releases will stay and 2 a year with Blake getting that third slot.

Happy Bell Riots to All Who Celebrate

Stay safe out there during one of the watershed events of the 21st century! I was going to write something about how the worst dystopia Star Trek could imagine in the mid-90s is dramatically, breathtakingly better than the future we actually got, but jwz has the roundup of people who already did.

Can you imagine the real San Franciso of 2024 setting aside a couple of blocks for homeless people to live? To hand out ration cards? For there to be infrastructure?

Like all good Science Fiction, Deep Space Nine doesn’t say a lot about the future, but it sure says an awful lot about the time in which it was written.