The Gender Genie

The Gender Genie is all the rage today, it seems. Radley Balko explains it pretty well. The script will try to identify the gender of the author of a chunk of text you give it. Supposedly the web version is only a little more than 50% effective, but it nailed the stuff I threw at it five out of six times. So I guess I owe everyone an apology for my testosterone-laden prose.

Parliament Is In Session

Coming to you directly from the Mothership
Top of the Chocolate Milky Way, 500,000 kilowatts of P.Funk-power.
So kick back, dig, while we do it to you in your eardrums.
And me? I’m known as Lollipop Man, alias the Long-Haired Sucker.

My motto is:
Make my funk the P.Funk

George Clinton’s keepin’ the coffee shop funky on a Friday afternoon. There are worse places to be. But you, you’ve got to ask yourself a question right now. Look into your heart.

Do you have the funk?

I’ve got the funk.

Rockers of the Seelie Court

How little I knew about Radiohead didn’t occur to me until I saw the band members filtering onto the stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion last night. I’m not talking about their music. I’ve listened to all their albums more times than I can count; they’re a shoo-in for my Top Five Bands of All Time. But as for the members of the band, or the buzz around them, or even what most people thought of their newest album — in all these things, I was in the dark. It’s as if I decided unconsciously at some point that for this band, unlike the rest of my favorites, I’d eschew the normal web-site-browsing, interview-reading behavior, and concentrate solely on the Music Itself.

With Radiohead, there’s plenty in the music to keep you busy. They’ve wended a long and wacky way from the Brit-grunge of Pablo Honey to the experimentation of Kid A and Amnesiac. I can’t decide if it’s the straight-up guitar adrenaline or the artsy whistles and bells that keep me interested; probably it’s the synthesis of the two. Whatever the case, Hail to the Thief, their newest album, has it in droves. Seeing them live was only an option thanks to the eBay artistry and incredible generosity of Bryan — friend, loyal reader, and frequent Polytropos Commenter.

They took the stage amid ravenous applause. First thought: “Wow. Thom Yorke is short and skinny.” Second thought: “I don’t even know the names of the other guys.” They were all still dressed like the guitar bums who got “Creep” played to death on the radio back in the day. Judging from the way the bass player bobbed around, he still thought he was in that band. The other chap of note was Tool Guy, whose actual name is Jonny Greenwood. He lurked on stage left with a bunch of very strange device that he plugged, massaged, and unplugged in order to coax out strange sounds and bizarre loops. He was also the guy who played all the really hard guitar parts.

I’m not going to gush, so let me just get it out of the way and say that this was the best concert I’ve been to in recent memory. I can’t even think of what the competition would be. But, with a couple exceptions, it wasn’t one of those jump up and down, wave-your-arms-around sort of concerts. If you were watching the audience and not paying attention to the music, it would seem very strange. Everyone in the pavilion was on their feet, and most were swaying or grooving, but nobody was dancing outright. You’d be tempted to think that people weren’t into it, but then the song would end and the roaring and applause would come crashing forth like a tidal wave. Then you’d realize that the audience had been utterly transfixed and enchanted the whole time. And it happened like that for song after song after song. The last time I was so tripped out to music was also with Radiohead, but that was listening to OK Computer while pumped full of painkillers after getting my wisdom teeth yanked out. This time, it was just the music.

Thom Yorke was not what I expected. He was like Puck, especially as drawn by Charles Vess. (Here’s an inadequate picture, the only one I could find online.) He was clearly good at doing all sorts of things, and made it look easy, but all the while behaved as if it was a terribly funny joke to him. He pranced and cavorted around the stage, beckoning for the audience to cheer when the whim took him. Even when his voice had you mesmerized, he’d be smiling mischieviously. It bled a little into the other members of the band, and lent the whole concert a strange aspect of Faerie — it was as if they were just up there having a blast, and the fact that it was transporting the audience into a quasi-mystical rapture was just a side effect of their little game.

If you’re even the remotest fan of the band, and if they’re still coming to your town, village, or hamlet, catch them on this tour. For the fans, here’s a setlist with a few comments:

1. The Gloaming
2. 2+2 = 5
3. Sit Down, Stand Up
4. Where I End and You Begin
5. Airbag
6. Pyramid Song (mind-blowing)
7. Paranoid Android (whatever is one step up from mind-blowing)
8. A Wolf at the Door
9. Sail to the Moon
10. You and Whose Army? (There was a camera up by the piano, projecting on the screens on either side of the stage. Yorke would stare into it as he sang, which is the point that cemented the Puck analogy for me.)
11. There There (This is the one that sounds pretty good on the album but completely takes you by surprise live. Three of them on drums, and one guitar and one bass. Tres cool.)
12. Go To Sleep
13. Dollars & Cents
14. We Suck Young Blood
15. Idioteque
16. Creep (Yorke introduced it by saying “We really like this song,” with no sense of irony. It still holds up. The huge lightboard behind them burned hot white during the chorus, and was pulsing in time with Tool Guy’s guitar.)
17. The National Anthem

First Encore

1. I Will
2. Myxomatosis
3. Just
4. How To Disappear Completely

Second Encore

1. No Surprises (On the line “Bring down the government / they don’t, they don?t speak for us,” the whole audience burst into wild cheers of agreement.)
2. Everything In Its Right Place (Tool Guy and the other guitar guy sat up in the front, each with a looping machine. After the song was in full swing, the other three members waved to the audience and walked off, one by one, while their parts kept getting looped through again and again. Then it was just Tool Guy, getting his looping machine all set to go. Then he waved and walked off too, but the loops kept on going for another five minutes or so, while on the lightboard, the word FOREVER kept scrolling by, in letters so big only three of them could fit at once. So, not exactly what you’d call a profound moment, but nifty nonetheless.)

The Bar Just Got Raised

A hearty welcome-to-the-blogosphere is in order for Chad Engbers, whose new blog, Locust Wind, comes on strong right out of the gate. In order explain the name, he launches into an explication of U2′s Bullet the Blue Sky.

But “explication” is such an ugly word. If, for you, it conjures up images of a mopey craftsman pounding relentlessly on something with a dull hammer, then to imagine Chad explicating, you have to envision Zorro with a rapier in each hand, snicker-snacking away at the governor’s thugs with casual aplomb.

In other words, it’s fun to read. So go read it.

My Beef with d20

On with the gamer hat. The following is an attempt to articulate some thoughts I’ve had about the effect of the d20 system on current roleplaying game design. It is part rumination, part rant; if you’re someone I talk about RPGs with on a regular basis, you�ve probably heard it before.

When the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons came out a few years ago, it made a big splash, and the ripples are still, well, rippling. All in all, it was an incredibly positive development. Wizards of the Coast called on good people like Jonathan Tweet to work on the new edition. The new rulebooks were sleek and even well-written, an unusual perk in the industry. More importantly, the rules had gone through a major streamlining and, unlike previous versions of D&D, were actually functional by modern design standards. Like every third roleplayer on the planet, I started playing D&D again when third edition came out.

D&D 3.0 was just part of a larger program, though. It formed the core of something called the “d20 Game Engine” or just “d20 System.” Part of it was something innovative and cool — Wizards was open-sourcing their rules. Basically, anyone could write adventures, sourcebooks, or campaign settings for D&D, or even design entirely new games based on the core rules. There were strictures, but they didn’t involve licensing fees — only the clear delieanation of open content, the placement of certain logos, and a plug that “The D&D Players Handbook is required to use this product,” or something to that effect.

So far so good. The Open Gaming License allowed for a big burst of RPG content, and helped Wizards sell lots of Players Handbooks along the way. But above and beyond all this, was interested in making the d20 system a sort of universal system for roleplaying. In-house, they developed Star Wars d20 and d20 Modern. They let other companies do d20 Call of Cthulhu, d20 Babylon 5, and probably others I�m not aware of. (A clarification: the different between an OGL game and a d20 SL game is that the former has to say in it ‘requires the Players Handbook,’ whereas the latter is a standalone game based on the same mechanics.)

All these games, despite their widely different milieux, shared some core mechanics. Universal roleplaying systems are nothing new. Everybody remembers GURPS; some people even still play it. I don’t have a problem in theory with the notion of a universal system, but I do have some problems with d20 and the number of games it’s gobbling up along its merry way. I can see the problem that d20′s designers faced — they needed a system that was flexible enough to fit virtually any story setting, but detailed enough that it would be something they could actually trademark. For example, no one could object to the following as a universal game system:

1. Characters in the game shall have Attributes, which are general, and Skills, which are specific.
2. To resolve an action, a player rolls a die, and adds the value for a Skill and one for an Attribute, if applicable. These are compared with some target number in order to resolve what happens.

Though I’m sure someone imaginative could construct a setting where even this ruleset would prove limiting, it’s pretty darn flexible. But it’s also way too general for anyone to claim ownership of. d20 has added a few things to it:

• The signature addition is that that randomizing die has twenty sides to it. A minor addition, though it is one that has concrete implications — compared to the use of a four-sided die, say, in d20 games fortune is going to play a relatively important role.

• In d20 games, the Attributes are the same: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma. Making these part of the core system irks me to no end, for reasons you can bet I’ll get to.

• d20 games have character classes and levels. Classes are general ways of describing who a character is, and depending on the game, can be tightly or loosely structured. Levels are a widely familiar notion — as you increase in levels, you get more powerful. You go up levels by acquiring experience points.

There’s a little bit more to it, of course, but the stuff described above hits on the problems I have with d20. Its origins are in D&D-style sword-and-sorcery, and key elements of its design remain rooted in that setting. They don’t translate as well into other settings and genres, and using d20 for those purposes creates games that aren’t as cool, wonderful, and helpful in telling stories as they could be.

First Problem: The d20 Six

The distinction between Attributes and Skills isn’t a necessary one, but it’s helpful and common, and there’s no reason to quibble with it. But there are a couple different philosophies about what distinguishes the two groups:

1. Attributes are a character’s intrinsic qualities, and Skills are things they pick up during life. Your basic nature/nurture division.
2. Attributes are core aspects of a character that are important to the setting and that all characters have to greater or lesser extent. Skills are more focused aspects and abilities that characters may or may not have.

From either perspective, d20 has problems. Let’s go with #1 for a moment. The core six attributes suit D&D to a T. Built into the game is the notion of a party of adventurers, including the Burly Fighter, the Quick Thief, the Smart Magic Guy, etc. But if we were designing Grad School: The Roleplaying Game (to use an extreme example), how helpful would these six be? Neither Strength, Dexterity, nor Constitution would be likely to come up very much. It might be easier to go with a simple “Athletics” attribute that included a lot of those things. Intelligence should probably be broken up — into Memory and Reason, at the very least. And so on.

For an actual d20 example, let’s use the Star Wars RPG. The first edition of the game (designed by Greg Costikyan, who has a fine blog) used Strength as an attribute, sure, but it also had “Mechanical,” which described how good you were at operating and fixing vehicles, and “Technical,” which described how good you were with computers and bypassing security systems and whatnot. These made sense for that particular setting, and would have been ridiculous in a D&D game. Sure, you can use the d20 Six in a Star Wars game, but why wouldn’t you want an Attribute that described how you good you were, generally, at flying stuff — something that comes up all the time in Star Wars?

Moving on to #2. This is the take on Attributes and Skills that I prefer, because it gives a lot more flexibility, and also because making a distinction between your innate and learned abilities doesn�t strike me as all that important in a roleplaying game. Lots of great games use attributes that are custom tailored to their world. Examples: Amber (Psyche, Strength, Endurance, Warfare); Everway (Earth, Air, Fire, Water); My Life With Master (Self-Loathing, Weariness, Love).

In the original Call of Cthulhu RPG, one of the attributes was Education. This fit perfectly in a setting where many of the characters were scholars, and their ability to pore through ancient tomes was often a central part of the story. In the Cthulhu mythos, in other words, how educated you are is one of the most important things that describes you. It ought to be an Attribute. But in d20 Call of Cthulhu, it’s not — we have our old friends the D&D Six, and education is a side stat.

The reason that the Six work at all is that they do cover a number of general traits that people have, and they’re nicely divided between physical and mental attributes. Over the years, their definitions have slightly shifted to accommodate gaps — for example, Wisdom now includes “perceptiveness,” which it didn’t do in the first editions of D&D. (There wasn’t an easy way to measure how good you were at noticing things back then — one of the system’s glaring weaknesses.) So they do a pretty good job. But it seems to me that picking the attributes for your game system is an easy, elegant, and clear way to say “This Is What This Game Is About,” and forcing the Six to fit into any mold diminishes the games that emerge.

Second Problem: Character Classes and Levels

Classes are only a problem if they’re as stringently defined as they are in D&D. Again, sword-and-sorcery stories are full of archetypal characters like the Sorcerer and the Valiant Warrior. In D&D your class determines all the most important things about you, but fortunately d20 is flexible enough that this doesn’t have to be the case in all games. Call of Cthulhu d20, for example, is largely skill-based. But I can think of cases where plugging characters into character classes at all feels wrong. But why on earth would you want character classes in, say, Babylon 5? The characters on the television show had such varied pasts, and came from such vastly different races, that a broad, skills-based system definitely seems appropriate. But d20 B5 labels Sinclair as an “Officer” and Delenn as a “Diplomat.” I’ve just been re-watching season one [yes, yes, I know, thanks for asking . . . there are some wince-worthy moments but it'll be worth it in the end], and Sinclair is both more active and more effective as a diplomat than Delenn. Trying to boil down such complex characters into classes just ends up being reductive.

I haven’t played d20 Modern, but in reading through the rules I noted that its basic character classes are: The Strong Hero, The Quick Hero, The Tough Hero, The Smart Hero, The Dedicated Hero, and The Charismatic Hero. WTF? When the classes don’t even represent anything specific in the game world, but are just abstraction of the Attributes, then what’s the point?

But, as I said, that’s not an intrinsic problem to d20. Levels are, though.

I first understood the source of the whole level thing in D&D when I read the Iliad in college. Here were all these heroes trapsing around the battlefield, getting into fights. They were clearly a cut above the rabble that fought around them, and it was equally clear that there was a hierarchy of strength, combat ability, and general bad-assedness — the Greeks called it “arete.” No one doubted that Achilles was the highest-level fighter at Troy, and that Hector was right below him. Odysseus and Sarpedon and a few others were on the next rung, and on down from there.

This sort of hierarchy works for Greek epic myth, and it works for sword-and-sorcery. It wouldn’t make sense in a game that, for example, wanted to recreate absolutely realistic Bronze Age combat. I’m betting that in the chaos of a real battlefield, being very skilled is important, but no matter how good you are you’re not going to be able to fight off six opponents surrounding you, and luck is going to play a very strong role in whether you survive until sunset.

Levelling presumes a certain kind of story, where the characters are much more powerful a few years into the storyline than they were at the beginning. It also works best if the stories you want to tell involve starting out with young, wet-behind-the-ears characters. Now, you could easily make a game where there isn�t a big power difference between levels, but then why bother with them in the first place?

That sums up my quibbles with the d20 system. The problem is not that d20 leads to bad or ruined games. Lots of people play them and are perfectly happy with the systems. But the d20 system is pervasive — Star Wars, B5, and Call of Cthulhu all already had roleplaying games, which are no longer being published or developed. Almost all the new, high-profile RPGs that come out — certainly the ones I saw at Gencon this year — were either under the OGL or the d20 System License. And none of these games are quite as good as they could be if they had a little bit more design flexibility, so that their rules could more naturally fit their setting, so that form could follow function. (I should also note that the problem of glomming a system designed to do something else onto a new setting isn’t specific d20, and isn’t even new. Both the old Middle Earth Roleplaying and the new Lord of the Rings RPG make the same mistake.)

If I ran the circus, I would change the d20 System License so that the d20 Six weren’t the required Attributes. I’d also do away with levels and character classes as core required elements of the d20 system. (It’s possible that without those things, there wouldn�t be enough left in d20 to license — I’m not sure.) Then I’d encourage d20 designers to explore the boundaries of the license in order to come up with truly innovative games, instead of carbon-copying D&D and making a handful of cosmetic changes.

Don�t let the fact that I�ve rambled on about this for far too long suggest that I think that The State of Roleplaying Is In Crisis. But none of the big new games of late have been quite as good as they could be, because they’re all bound too tightly to d20.

Holy EMPHASIS in LETTERING, Batman!

Over at his Journal, Neil Gaiman addresses one of the comics questions that has always plagued me – what’s up with all the extra emphasis in dialogue? First, the question, from a reader of 1602:

. . . I’ve read the first issue, and I like it, BUT! WHOSE idea was IT to EMPHASISE every other WORD any CHARACTER says to ANOTHER CHARACTER? because IT gets REALLY really REALLY annoying SOMETIMES. Y’know, novels generally just assume the reader can figure out where the emphasis is, and this doesn’t seem to happen so badly in your other comics…so why in this one? It really breaks up the flow of dialogue, unfortunately.

And Neil’s answer:

Actually, I pretty much agree — if I’d known it was going to be in upper and lower case lettering when I wrote the script, I certainly wouldn’t have used so many stressed words. I actually like them when you’re doing all-upper-case lettering; I can use them to show what the stresses are, and try and push the words over into something that you hear rather than see . . . Once it moves into upper and lower case (it was an edict from Marvel, not something I chose), I think you read it more like prose, and the stressed words tend to attract attention, rather than disappear into the balloon.

I agree that the emphasis is less obtrusive using all-caps lettering, where it’s accomplished through boldface. But even this is something that I’ve never gotten used to. Granted, comics are their own medium, and different rules apply. I’ll buy that a certain amount of that kind of emphasis is perfectly cool in comics that wouldn’t be cool in prose dialogue, especially because in comics the words are drawn and become, in effect, part of the artwork. But too often, emphasis in lettering has distracted me rather than subtly cueing me to hear the words in my head.

In between starting and finishing this entry, comics guy and fellow Common Grounds lurker Steve Conley has convinced me that the real issue here is not lettering emphasis per se, but whether it’s done well. When I read Dave Sim’s Cerebus, I didn’t have the same reaction to lettering that I do with many other comics – because Sim knows how to do it effectively and seamlessly. (Incidentally, Steve cited the same two folks as Neal – Sim and Eisner – as examples of truly good letterers.) It’s only some of the time that the lettering distracts me, and those are the times when there’s a problem with the lettering. Which raises an interesting question: does the artistry of a letterer rest entirely on making the lettering transparent to the reader? Is there ever a situation where you’d want the letters to call attention to themselves as artifacts?

Jim Henley is unimpressed by the first issue of 1602, by the way. I was planning on waiting for the trade paperback to come out before reading it, but now I’ll have to check out Issue #1 so that I can quibble with him. Or maybe even agree.

The Treacherous Queue

Netflix is a fixture at Polytropos HQ. We get the most mileage out of it by renting TV shows and miniseries. Over the years we’ve watched The Sopranos, The Avengers, Six Feet Under, and I, Claudius. Right now we’re making our way through Babylon 5. Scattered in among the discs for the show of the moment, we rent plenty of movies. Which show we’ll be watching at any given moment is a matter for amicable consensus, the hallmark of a harmonious marriage. When it comes to the movies, though, it’s a free-for-all.

I have a decided advantage here, because I log on to Netflix more often than Suanna. Thus the Queue contains more of my choices than hers, and I more frequently bump mine to the top. She has access to the account, of course, and could easily compete with me, but she’s much more laid back about these things. With great power comes great responsibility, though — when we find ourselves watching a really bad movie that has somehow bubbled up to the top of the Queue, there’s only me to blame. Case in point: last night. The movie: Serendipity.

I have been trying to reconstruct my thought process at that instant, however many months ago, when I added the movie to the Queue in the first place. It hadn’t been recommended to me by anyone. I don’t remember reading any reviews one way or the other. I think it must have been one of those times where I picked it out on the strength of the actors, something I almost never do. After all, an actor could star in one of the best movies of all time, but most of the rest of his movies could suck. (This is called the “Gabriel Byrne Effect.”) But I did it this time. As I was clicking on the little red “RENT” button, I was no doubt thinking to myself, “John Cusack is a fine actor and a great boon to any film is in. If he’s involved in this project, it has to be good.” But I was also thinking to myself, “Kate Beckinsdale is dreeeeamy.”

And she is, to her credit, quite dreamy in Serendipity. So dreamy I wanted John to punch her. The first time she did that thing with her lip, it was cute, very disarming, all that. But the fifteenth time, you started to worry that she had a facial tick or something. Same deal with the thing she did with her eyes, and that other one with her hair. Her entire performance was based on her using cute looks to distract us from the fact that the things she was saying made absolutely no sense. John isn’t as bad, though I shudder to think of the amount of time his hair people must have spent giving it that just-a-little-tussled look before every single scene.

The director, Peter Chelsom, possesses a terrifying power – he can make talented actors set aside their basic instincts and behave like stupid people. In our Hollywood-obsessed society, I believe this qualifies him as a bonafide supervillain. He has directed nothing else you’ve ever heard of, but it’s worth noting that his very first film is called Treacle.

After we finished watching it, Suanna didn’t even need to say “I told you so.” She just had to smile and fix me with a look that said “You never, ever, ever get to make fun of any movies I put on the Queue, ever ever again.” I have learned my lesson. Months hence, when I put Underworld on the Queue, even though I can already tell it’s going to be bad, it won’t be because of Kate, but because, y’know, vampires versus werewolves. How cool is that?

Bye Bye, Butcher

Idi Amin was a brutal, twisted dictator, but to the kids I knew in Liberia and Nigeria, he was more than that. He was the personification of evil. Stories of his atrocities were told and retold, and acquired mythic status. The fact that he had long-since been thrown from power only increased his mystique — it was as if he might be wandering Africa, whispering into the ears of other dictators, spurring them to do terrible things. Certainly it was assumed that Samuel Doe must be on speaking terms with “Idi.” Either he had a special relationship with the Devil, or was the Devil himself.

Now he’s dead. About time. Though he’s been in a coma for a few years, he enjoyed a couple decades of luxury living in Saudi Arabia before that. The Saudi royal family really knows how to pick their honored guests, don’t they?

I’m Not a Political Hack, But I Play One on TV

From the Congressional Quarterly e-newsletter. Hat tip to Suanna.

The campaign staff of GOP gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger could be adding a new but familiar face. The Los Angeles Times reports that actor Rob Lowe may become an adviser to Schwarzenegger’s California campaign. Lowe, a longtime Democratic activist and former “West Wing” star, is a friend of Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver. Citing unnamed campaign sources, the Times says the couple asked Lowe to take a senior campaign spot.

And his new show, about lawyers in D.C., is cleverly named “The Lyon’s Den.” Get it? Boy, I got high hopes for that one. What a career: teen heartthrob; joke; actor on a great TV show; even bigger joke. What, did he think he could pull a Clooney?

Fair and Balanced

The following is presented in celebration of Fair and Balanced Day.

Fair:

• The beautiful and the just.
• Liz Phair
• F.A.I.R.

Balanced:

• This sculpture made from crap on my desk.

Not Fair:

• Broken AC in D.C. in mid-August
• Life (according to my mom, as a reply to “That’s not fair!” — “Life isn’t fair.” Spoken with a certain amount of triumphalism.)

Not Balanced:

• The Segway, apparently.
• The budget.

Neither Fair Nor Balanced:

• Oh, I dunno . . .