The 4E Campaign Book is one of my favorite 4E products to date.

I’ll start by mentioning some of the things I *didn’t* like.
-Elemental Priests aren’t nearly as interesting as the old elemental clerics were. I see what they were going with- they have all these other power sources for leaders, so they don’t need to be restricted to the cleric- but I don’t think it worked particularly well.
-Sorcerer-Kings aren’t as powerful as they used to be, and I don’t think the game captures the arcane/psionic joining that the original game had.
-Defiling. I’m not sure I liked the way they’ve handled defiling and preserving here.
-Almost forgot this one. Editing. How many references to page XX were there? This isn’t the Malkavian clanbook. :P

Things I liked and disliked.
-Wild Talents. I love Wild Talents. I like that they’re included. Some of them are kind of ‘eh,’ though, and there’s nowhere near the diversity and craziness of 2E wild talents, which I thought made for some of the most fun game situations.
-The art. Some of the art was really interesting, and certainly evoked Athas in my mind. Some of it was recycled, which is always kind of ‘eh.’

Things I really liked.
-Alternate treasure. Instead of an item in the item-poor world, how about the favor of elemental spirits, or breakthroughs in the Way? I think these are neat additions to the game.
-Themes. The Dark Sun book has introduced Character Themes, which give more options for your characters. Want to be a gladiator? Add the gladiator theme to your character. Each theme gives you a secondary role, a new encounter power, options for powers at higher levels, and access to feats and prestige class, most of which are quite interesting. Big plus here.
-Templars were reflavored, and unlike the Elemental Priests, I really like what they did here. “Templar” is now a character theme you can apply to your character, and templars are basically sanctioned arcane magic users. Very cool.
-On a related note, the sorcerer-king Warlock pact. Really like this- your warlock was granted power through the rituals of the sorcerer-king.

It’s a breakdown of what I see as the four core tasks that constitute most gaming experiences. I’ll leave a link to the full article, but for  a tease, here’s the Cartesian graph that finally let me start wrapping my mind around where I was going.

Look forward to any comments.

How Games Talk to Us.

So, today is a very geeky day.  It’s Star Wars Day #2, because Star Wars was released 33 years ago today.  It got overshadowed by Empire day, but….  It’s also Towel Day, because DNA (Douglas Noel Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and other books author) died two weeks ago, and today is the day to remember his death, and to carry your towel.  It’s also the Glorious 25th of May, which for Pratchett fans, means you can wear the lilca if you were there.

Because of this, it’s also also also Geek Pride day.  Apparently this is a newish holiday – it’s maybe 5 years old.  In principle, I’m all for this.  Celebrate Geekiness.  Hell, that’s kinda the point of this blog.  In practice, I hate it.

Here is the wiki page.  I call your attention, specifically, to the manifesto.  I’ve bolded the parts that particularly offend me.

Rights:

1. The right to be even geekier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not like football or any other sport.
4. The right to associate with other nerds.
5. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
6. The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
7. The right to be out of style.
8. The right to be overweight and short-sighted.
9. The right to show off your geekiness.
10. The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities:

1. Be a geek, no matter what.
2. Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
3. If there is a discussion about something geeky, you must give your opinion.
4. To save and protect all geeky material.
5. Do everything you can to show off geeky stuff as a “museum of geekiness.”
6. Don’t be a generalized geek. You must specialize in something.
7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.
9. Never throw away anything related to geekdom.
10. Try to take over the world!

 Let’s examine them individually after this broad comment: I get that geeks can be repressed, feel like outsiders, not fit in, etc.  I was a geek, but I was generally able to fit in.  I know it’s hard out there for a geek.  But if it’s ever going to *not* be hard out there for a geek, we’re gonna have to do more than just quietly sulk.

The right to not leave your house.
Seriously?  This isn’t good.  I know the instinct.  I’ve had days when I just didn’t want to talk to anyone but my family, and I just wanted to sit on the damn couch, play games, and have pizza delivered.  YOU CAN’T DO THAT.  As much as it’s enjoyable, you can’t let yourself do that.  You’ve got to get out.  You don’t want to, but YOU HAVE TO.  Encouraging people not to is actually not so good for us, as a … species?

The right to have few friends (or none at all).
Don’t revel in this.  Seriously.  It’s not good.  It’s not healthy.  I know.  People are idiots.  They’re annoying, and difficult, and it’s easier to just play games.  DON’T.  I’m not saying join a dance club.  But you can find some people you can stand to hang out with for a few hours from time to time.  If you’re painfully awkward, use the internets.  Kids these days have it easy.  Meetup.com and Wizards.com have a great source of social networking.  Boardgamegeek.com does too.  And when all else fails, you still have a FLGS (Friendly Local Game Story).  Apparently going out to meet new people is hard.  DO IT.  They’re geeks.  You’re gonna play DnD.  It’s the most tailor made social situation you could find.  And occasionally, you’ll be shocked to find out you actually like them.

The right to be overweight and short-sighted.
I’m back and forth here.  I know.  We need glasses, we’re out of shape.  And you need to be comfortable with who you are.  But maybe just a little star afterwards that says *But we’re trying, okay?  I’m not thrilled with the idea of geeks going “I’m fat, I’m slovenly, and I’m proud of it!”  DON’T BE.  Our places should not have to have signs that read “If your odor or hygiene offends, you may be asked to leave.”  Seriously.

Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
Don’t.  Be yourself.  You’re nerdy.  Trying to out-nerd everyone is fun for a bit, but it doesn’t build any actual relationships.  You just end up competing, and then you’re done, and you go home with no friends.  Be who you are, embrace your nerdiness (although really, I prefer geekiness, but….), but don’t try to turn it in to some weird point of pride.  Because then, that’s all you’ve got, and that’s not good.

Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
This one is just being picky, but – we’re not a monolithic, homogenous group.  As evinced by this blog (if anyone else posted), geeks are a diverse group.  Some geeks aren’t going to want to see things you want to see.  It’s okay.  We don’t need to be creating inter-geekdom rifts over whether How To Train Your Dragon is a geek movie, because it has dragons and animation, or if it’s a kids movie, and only idiots want to see it.  Go see movies you want to see, and take your friends.  That being said, if they make another Serenity, you all better fsckin’ be there opening night, next night, and all week.

I hate to say this, because it will sound flip and disrespectful, but it’s the same sort of thing as other minorities go through, though on a lesser scale.  Be harassed for who you are.  Band together to stop being ashamed, and embrace your uniqueness, and revel in it.  Then come over the top of that, and become a full person, who has things that inform who they are.  You can debate where the balance between embrace and inform is, but at some point, pride can cross over to isolationism, and then you’re unhappy.    I know, I’m over simplifying, but that’s what worked for me.  I’ve integrated geekiness in to my life now, and it makes me much much happier than when I defined myself solely by my geekiness.

It’s pretty interesting now.  If anyone doesn’t know, my son Max is autistic (technically he’s on the autism spectrum with a diagnosis of PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified), but…).  So it modifies things a bit.  Ignoring the fact that my 16 year old sent me a text message today that read “Two by Two, Hands of Blue” for no discernable reason, has arguments at school about how many Death Stars there were (she was wrong, strangely),  plays MMOs, and mocks people for liking Star Trek, there are the little ones.

Both of my kids (aged 2 and 3) can use touch screen phones.  They can find the games they want, select them, play them, and then close out and pick new ones (Max is better at it than Kayleigh, but both are pretty good). 

I’m pretty sure they’re both getting Android tablets once they come out (I wasn’t allowed to buy them iPads or Touches).

Max has a complete understanding of both how to use a mouse and a touchpad.  He is currently playing Insaniquarium – an older PopCap game about feeding fish.  With the right set up, he can do pretty well.  He knows to buy more fish, he knows (mostly) to feed them, and he knows his goal is to get the egg for a new fish.  He also creates and deletes profiles (thanks Max).  And he can spell his name on the keyboard, although he is insistant that Max is spelled MNAX, not MAX. 

He can also navigate around the 360 Netflix and pick a show off the list, and play it, although he likes the shoulder buttons too much, so it’s hard to get just the one he wants.

Both kids play dragon and princess.  Max very much enjoys being dragon, and Kayleigh enjoys “Oh no!  Dragon’s chasing me!”  They have a ton of dragon toys, and seem to be quite fond of them.  Kayleigh desperately wants to be a mermaid right now.  She can also identify manatees by name. 

They’ve both seen (and requested to watch) the old Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie.  They also enjoy rolling big squishy dice.

So that’s a start.  ;)

If you’re curious my search path, I was looking to see if Brooks Mitchell wrote for any websites besides the one I read him on, because I don’t much like the rest of the content on that site.  If you don’t know who Brooks Mitchell is (and I don’t expect anyone does), check out Snowfly.com – he’s pretty interesting.  In any case, I searched for “Brooks Mitchell” Call Center.  And apparently that got me to the PDF for Travis County Justice Center.  Which I had to open, being morbidly curious.And there was some really amusing stuff in there.  I think I enjoy it because I build the story in my head, based on the list of charges.  There’s a lot of bad stuff – assaults, family violence, drugs, etc.  Some of them are clearly car accidents and the like, and that’s bad.  Those I kinda skip over,  and find the nice chains.  Also, there are some awesome names.  Also I learned that apparently assault by strangulation has a specific charge – there’s assault, assault with intent to harm, and then  Assault with intent/reck (presumably reckless disregard?) impede breath/circulation.  Seems highly specific…..

Forgery of a Financial Instrument. x5  Credit Card Abuse.  Theft $100k-$200k.  Theft $1.5k-$20kx23.  Attempt to obtain prescprition drugs fraudulently.  Possession of a Controlled Substance PG1 <1g. 

Presumably PG1 relates to the type of drug.  I like to imagine it’s vicodin.  So here’s this nice lady, just trying to get by.  She’s got a few (okay, 5) fake credit cards, and she’s really stressed about it cause the balances are really high now.  She’s made about $300k, but she needs to get her new supply of meds, and she can’t convince the pharmacist that the prescription is real.  He finally calls the cops, and they show up, and bust her.  Awwww.

Theft 100k-200k, Falsely Holding oneself out as a lawyer.

“No, no, I am a lawyer.  I’ll just need my fee up front – $100k, and I’ll make sure all your problems go away.”  Cut to courtroom.  “My license?  Um, I don’t really…you see…it’s…” *clang*.  I like to picture this guy like Jeff Winger from Community.

Riot participation, 2x Organized Criminal Activity. 

There were at least two of those on the same page.  “Let’s start a riot!”  “Yeah!  Awesome!” 

A**** B**** C*** BURGLARY OF HABITATION
A**** B**** C*** BURGLARY OF HABITATION
A**** B**** C*** BURGLARY OF HABITATION
A**** B**** C*** BURGLARY OF HABITATION
A**** B**** C*** PROHIBITED WEAPON
A**** B**** C*** UNL POSS FIREARM BY FELON
A**** B**** C*** ENGAGE IN ORGANIZED CRIMINAL ACTIVITY
A**** B**** C*** ARSON
A**** B**** C*** THEFT >=$20K<$100K
A**** B**** C*** FAIL TO IDENTIFY FUGITIVE INTENT GIVE FALSE INFO 

Dude has three first names, which sets you up for failure.  But MAN, that’s like a modern Shadowrun game.  “I didn’t want to get the license, so I just upped the TN by one, and got it.”  “We need cash.  Let’s go knock over some houses.”  “BUGGER!  The fuzz!” “Set the house on fire!  Then run!”  “Aw, man, they caught me.  Is the ST gonna use my fake SIN against me?  Yeah, he is.  Man!” 

Burglary of a Habitation.  Burglary of a Habitation.   Attempted Burglary of a Habitation.

Had to go for just one more, didn’t you?

That guy’s name is Clarence.  I’m gonna guess he’s a white collar crime type of guy. 

Dude named Marco arreseted for laundering 3k-20k in cash.  And another guy named Salvatore (either his middle name is IX, or he’s the 9th guy with his name, it’s not clear) was arrested for carrying a switchblade or brass knuckles.  Another guy named Stevo for: 

GAMBLING PROMOTION
KEEPING A GAMBLING PLACE

Apparently he was driving a mobile home full of slot machines, while drunk? 

Reading the list, it certianly looks like there’s a mob presence in Austin, going by the names and the crimes…. 

Also, the sheer number of DWI arrests makes me wonder why I ever got on the highway.  I particularly like when they’re combined with Assault on an Official and Obstructing Highway Passageway.  

Disclaimer: None of these people were convincted of anything, based on the document I was reading.  It’s all just setting court dates for the alleged offenses.  Innocent until proven guilty.  IANAL. 

See when I was in college, I wasn’t trying to draw to inside straights or check-raising nut flushes to take down pots. I was wondering why I couldn’t ever pull down a swamp when I needed it or trying to figure if I’d left myself enough mana to counterspell if I had to on my opponent’s turn. Yes, dear readers, I was a Magic: the Gathering geek.

I’d gotten into the game when it was just starting out, and although I didn’t have any of the power cards from the early sets, between the ex-wife and myself, we had more than enough cardboard crack to put together decks of varying sizes and effectiveness. Finding just the right mix that made a deck potent enough to kill opponents quickly was something I aspired to but never really got the knack for. I played in exactly one organized tournament and found myself blistered in two matches to bomb out miserably. If “n00b” and “PWNED” had been part of the parlance of the day, they would have been applied to me quite liberally.

There were a few other geek related outlets for me, dabbling in RPGs (Call of Cthulu, which is how the ex and I met), and the odd strategy game (I had a few Avalon Hill bookcase games in the day, a couple of which have survived the divorce and multiple moves since then). Movie geekery was ever present, video gaming a distraction at the arcades that not longer exist on The Drag (Le Fun and Einstein’s I still miss you sometimes).

Flash forward a decade and a half later (Jesus, it’s been that long?) and I find myself drawn into bar league poker and develop some proficiency at it. Eventually that would lead to the bi-monthly cash tourney I play in today. At this particular juncture it only netted me a third place finish in the bar championship, garnering me a spot in the quarterly championship and an autographed picture of poker pro David Williams. Williams had just finished second to Greg “Fossilman” Raymer at the 2004 World Series of Poker Main Event. Looking at the picture I knew only that Williams won a shit load of money and that he bore a striking resemblance to Tim Duncan.

A year or so ago, I’m listening to a poker podcast and I find out Williams has two other claims to fame beyond his poker play. He apparently has appeared in a commercially available foot fetish porn video…and before he became a high stakes card player he was a professional on the Magic: the Gathering circuit. It turns out Williams is only one of several former Magic pros turned Poker Players. The transition in card games has proven quite lucrative for them, to the tune of several million dollars.

About this time I also learned about Bertrand Grospellier, or ElkY as he’s better known. ElkY was a world ranked Starcraft player (another game I had some familiarity with, though I never conquered it). ElkY also plied his geek trade professionally, in his case in Korea where Starcraft is bigger than I ever imagined. He hasn’t won a WSOP bracelet yet, but does have high stakes WPT and EPT titles to his credit and some deep cashes at the World Series last year. A bracelet for him is only a matter of time.

That there should be this particular intersection of geek culture and gambling really shouldn’t surprise me. There are skills these geek outlets foster that lend themselves well to poker. Knowing your deck construction well to know the odds of drawing a card you need isn’t that far removed from calculating outs and relating it to pot odds. Resource management in Starcraft is just a different shade of bankroll management in poker. And both realms tend to reward the more intelligent participants well.

So was my involvement in these aspects of geek culture preparing me to be the card player I am today? Possibly. Can I build on that and extend my skills beyond doing well in the various home games I play in here? The answer to that question may come in July.

As many of you know if you’re friends with me on FB or follow me on Twitter, I got confirmation of receipt of my wire transfer to the Rio in Las Vegas. I am now pre-registered for WSOP Event 54: $1000 buy-in No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em. It’s not the best bankroll management to make this leap. Standard bankroll management dictates you shouldn’t spend more than 10% of your roll on any one buy-in.

But my play this year has contributed most, if not quite all of my buy-in. It’s been a dream of mine for a little while now. And as Cake once sang, “As soon as you’re born you start dying…so you might as well have a good time.” I don’t harbor illusions I can win this thing, though anything is possible. It is one of the things I love about this game. But I think my chances of cashing are better than average. After that, who knows?

I know a lot of you have already wished me luck on FB or Twitter, and to you I extend my deepest thanks. I hope I represent for the geek kind well.

Now shuffle up and deal.

It was at a game store in Madison.  I was reminded that game store employees are assholes.  I waited in line for 7 minutes to buy a thing of dice for $9 while someone did a huge preorder, and the guy tried to find it all, etc.  When I called later to find out who had run the game, he just said “I can’t keep track of the people” and was done.

But.

It was an old school game store.  As in signs on the wall that said “Stench is only for Troglodytes” and “If your clothes or hygiene offend patrons, we may ask you to leave.  Hygiene counts!”  And two dudes playing Warhammer with beards down over their bellies.

It was kinda funny, really.

This was my first game of 4e.  I have to say DAMN, they did a good job.  I read the quick start rules, and a pregen character from one of my friends (who should post here, but doesn’t).  That was really all I needed.  It was *very* odd being the guy asking questions about the rules, but the other players were nice, and the basic rules are pretty simple.

I have to say, I’m really impressed with 4e.  I was really skeptical when I was watching it come out, but it’s really well done.  We were all first level, but no one felt like they had to cower in the corner.  Everyone had interesting things to do all the time, and the daily/encounter/at will breakdown was really interesting.  We were very synergistic even without any preplanning (my character is a Warden – having an ability to grant everyone combat advantage made me extremely popular).   We had to look up a sum total of one rule, and it wasn’t even very important (how far you can jump with an athletics roll).  At first level, I felt like I had a character, not a potential.  And there were plenty of things for me to decide on at the beginning, rather than needing 5-10 levels to get it going.

The Encounters system is good too.  I came in, sat down, and got 2 minutes of “Here’s where we are, here’s what’s in front of us.”  Then we jumped in.  There was a minor (very ) minor puzzle, because they’d solved it last encounter.  There was a challenge room where we spent 10 minutes investigating, making decisions, and doing things.  Then there was a big fight with a nasty monster where I got a beatdown, and then we gave a beatdown.  I left feeling very satisfied.

Or, put differently:

I want to hang out with Joss Whedon.
I want to *be* Aaron Sorkin.
Kevin Smith is the guy that shows up at the game cause he’s friends with someone else, and I can’t tell him to leave.

Wolf populations are on the rise in WI. Wolves are eating deer. Hunters shot less deer.

The logical conclusion?

Wolf hunts.

………………

I….

It’s….you see….deer….wolves….hunters are….

I can’t even really begin to address this. But it’s made my head hurt so very very very very very much today.

I actually found that story while looking in to this one: http://www.jsonline.com/business/90405254.html

Not in that paper, but that’s the online version that had the story I was looking for.  The comments in that story frighten me tremendously.  From comment 1, it’s intensely political, completely lacking in context, and vitrolic rhetoric.  It’s not until the “Hey, I work there, here’s the facts” that it settles down.

People just worry me, all over.

The Anime Industry runs on copyright infringement.

Just about everything the fan community does with anime is infringing somehow. This type of statement could be made about fandom in general, but it’s particularly true with anime. And the anime industry wouldn’t exist as we know it without it- in Japan as well as the US.

In Japan, we see a thriving doujinshi industry, fan-created comics that may use the characters and character designs of other works. They’re highly derivative, highly original, highly accepted, and highly illegal. In “Free Culture,” Lessig attributes this to Japan’s lack of lawyers. In many cases, creators and industry people don’t seem to care, or even approve. Some famous manga authors got their start with doujin.

Anime did make it to the US in a limited fashion (most famously, Macross, Voltron, but also things like Grandizer, Spaceketeers, and Battle of the Planets). The practices of trading fansubs (fan-subtitled works) and fan translations grew the industry tremendously. Then and today, there could be problems with just about everything fans do. Fansubs, fan translations, fan art, fan fiction, anime music videos, anime showings, all of it- all very possibly infringing.

But the anime industry wouldn’t exist without the fans, and notably the work of the fansubbers- without people in Japan taping shows off the air or laserdisc, and sending the shows to their friends overseas. Without people translating the shows and making subtitled versions and sending those versions to their friends. Without distribution being set up, particularly after the rise in popularity of the Internet. Without fan clubs showing the works in local communities and local universities. And all of those actions are potential infringement.

The anime community, and particularly the fansub community, developed a code of ethics. Don’t sell fansubs. People can pay for the cost of the media and shipping, but that’s it. (At that time, video over the Internet was unthinkable except in stargazing dreams.) Encourage the purchase of US licensed anime goods. Stop distributing material once it’s been licensed in the US. People really didn’t worry about copyright law so much. That’s not just true in the anime world, it’s pre-Internet (really if you want to go back a bit further, pre-VCR), but it just didn’t come up quite as much. You can trace mentions of copyright in news stories and journals and so on going back decades- issues with copyright have increased exponentially. It used to be something lawyers worried about, and became something that everyone has to worry about. There are a variety of reasons for this. I talk about it quite a bit in my other blog, but take a look at books by Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and William Patry if you’re inclined to learn more on the subject.

But things happened. File-sharing became possible, then prevalent. People panicked. Laws changed. The anime industry and anime fandom was part of all of this and caught up in all of this. There’s still an uneasy codependent relationship there, which is different from the relationship between the **AAs and other types of fans. There have been a few research papers on the subject which you can probably find with a little digging (I’ll post some after I have a bit more time to dig them up).

At any rate, this tension between copyright law and ethics, between fans and producers, still exists. I certainly buy a lot of anime. But I’ve also watched fansubs, and I’ve also participated in anime showings and conventions and a lot of the other fan activity that occurs.

Like anything else involving copyright, the subject is not black and white, and it’s not easy, and we shouldn’t pretend that it is.