Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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about

An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Shitty DM-ing

    Of course one complains about one’s DM in private, but it is not often that one gets the opportunity to complain about a DM in public. Today I joined a new role-playing group (one of these pub-based ones) and went along for my first ever session, proudly clutching my newly-created character, and my session was completely ruined by the DM-ing. So badly ruined, in fact, because the DM kicked me out after 2 hours.

    In a nutshell: our party went the wrong way through the dungeon and ended up in the final battle way before we were ready. My character was the first to be attacked and died instantly. After the survivors ran away and the battle was over, I was told that, since I had died, I should leave.

    No shit.

    Of course, it didn’t happen quite this simply. The DM had 2 opportunities to prevent us reaching the final battle early, he had an opportunity to prevent the battle going quite as badly as it had, and he had ample opportunities after the battle to provide me with a new character to play. But he didn’t, because he was completely unwilling to deviate from the adventure-as-written. That is shitty DM-ing!

    In detail, the mistakes ran in this order:

    1. I suggest searching a little shrine outside our target, the main temple, thinking it might have a secret tunnel to the temple. It doesn’t, but has a teleportation room behind the altar which teleports anyone who steps into it to the most deadly level of the main temple. Even though I did a really good search check and I’m an elven wizard, I get no hint of magic or risk, and there is no triggering device. You just step into the alcove and you’re gone. The DM doesn’t bother changing this to include a triggering device, of course – why should he care if a 1st level elf character gets teleported to the Room of Death? The obvious triggering device – a holy symbol of the religion in question – would have been sufficient for us to know that  there was a secret route there but that we couldn’t use it…
    2. So everyone followed me through the teleporter, into the deepest level beneath the temple (we didn’t know this of course) and we were immediately attacked by 2 Ogres who we slew very tidily. To slay them, our Half-Orc Barbarian had to go into a frenzy so, being a Half-Orc barbarian, he decided to charge off to make the most of his frenzy after he had killed the Ogres. This is good role-playing, folks! While everyone else looted corpses, I followed the barbarian in case he ran into trouble. We reached a trapdoor in a side corridor, which (unbeknownst to us) was the escape trapdoor from the room where the Head Priest of Evil and his Bastard Skeleton Construct were hiding out. Again, here the DM could have stopped our Progress to Destruction by making the escape route locked from above (hardly unusual!) He didn’t, so the Barbarian did what a frenzied barbarian would do, and hauled himself through to attack the occupants. I did what any stupid elf would do, and followed to try and help…
    3. Instead of finding a way for the other characters to join us immediately, the DM followed the adventure-as-written and had them all stop in the middle of the previous room  to communicate with a ghost that provided some helpful clues. This delayed them all long enough for our Date with Doom to proceed casually…
    4. Back in the Room of Destiny, the Barbarian had managed to haul open the trapdoor and climb into the room, in the process  knocking over the Head Priest, who was standing on it (incidentally, another very good way to prevent us entering in the first place…) He followed this up with a good solid blow to the head, but even though prone and stabbed the priest managed to reel off a (successful) Hold Person, paralysing the only fighter in the room. Seeing this, I cast my only offensive spell (Colour Spray, which hurls lots of bright colours everywhere) and ran behind a pillar to avoid magic. The DM asked me if I would like to hide but, seeing I had just brought attention to myself with a big rainbow spell, I said no. Of course my spell failed (stupid ADnD spell rules) so the Priest wasn’t stunned, so he called forth his Emergency Guardian, a massive four armed skeletal construct that was in the pillar I was hiding behind. With nobody else in the room or moving, this construct naturally attacked me first, and since I was a level 1 wizard it sliced me and diced me.
    5. Now, of course, the remainder of the party reached the room but because some were in plate armour they couldn’t climb through the trapdoor quickly and took some rounds to gather. In the meantime this crazy Construct stalked around the room and killed off both NPCs. The Barbarian escaped his paralysis and killed the priest, and we discovered that the only weapon which could harm the construct was in the possession of one of the dead NPCs. So, having nothing else to do, the Rogue looted the body of the Priest while everyone else desperately tried to find a way to deal with the Construct. Here were 2 more opportunities to end the battle  early – the Priest’s death could have disabled the construct, or he could have had a magic control device on his body which the rogue could destroy. But neither condition was in the adventure-as-written so… everyone fled, in 2 different directions
    6. Once everyone was safe out of the room, I asked the DM if I might have another character to play. The other players pointed out to him that since the Priest had died, all of the monks from the temple who he had specially enchanted to be his prisoners would be free of his spell and I could play one of them. He said no, and I said  “so what? I just go home now?” and  he said “Yep”. 
    So I left, 2 hours into a 4 or 5 hour session. I have never seen a player kicked out of a game for dying before. I had barely taken part, this was my first session in this new group, and multiple plot junctions where my (and the NPCs) deaths could have been averted were ignored because the DM refused to change the adventure-as-written. I can’t imagine that he conceived of such a poor opinion of me in just 2 hours that he really needed to work that hard to get rid of me. He went against the wishes of the whole party in denying me a new character (he even said “I don’t accept your argument” as if it were a debate about the damage a longbow does or something). Everyone else was getting along fine. I really do think this was just a case of bad DM-ing, combined with a good dose of good old-fashioned bullying control freak.
    This is the second pub-based rpg group I have tried in London, and the other one is hardly going much better. It is a sad irony to me that having arrived in a city where I will finally get an opportunity to experience a variety of role-playing, I can’t because the nerds in question are so horribly socially maladjusted. I suppose there is, however, no option but to persevere…

  • Neo-con blogger self-hate

    It appears that John McCain’s campaign blogger has covered himself in infamy by saying bad things about Dungeons and Dragons. His particular comment:

    Goldfarb compared the editors to a blogger “sitting at home in his mother’s basement and ranting into the ether between games of Dungeons & Dragons.”

    This is apparently terribly offensive… so offensive he had to apologise (I won’t link to or print the apology, it’s so bad and useless it burns my brain). 

    I don’t think it’s offensive at all. That quote perfectly describes the average chicken-hawk member of the  right-wing blogging community (minus references to cheetos, of course). This would explain why right wing bloggers like “Ace of Spades” were so offended… witness, oh fat libertarian cheeto-sucking lunatics, how even John McCain – a man who has his emails printed for him – has you all worked out. 

    Of course Ace Of Spades responded to the apology with typical style – “I think he meant to make that crack about Rifts or Vampire or some gay-wad game anyway.”

    When someone sneers at you, the best solution is always just to sneer at someone else, more sneerily.

    Anyway, the actual relevance of this issue – one can only hope that somewhere a pre-teen, one-hande-reading 30 year old who thinks he is eligible to join the Navy SEALS because he has, like, a killer score in Medal of Honour is now infinitesimally less likely to vote for McCain.

    (Also, the comments at Pandagon are pretty funny…)

  • Reconfiguring D&D: the skill system

    In explaining why I am considering a reconfiguration of D&D and the d20 system, I mentioned the key goal of making a single universal skill system the driver of the entire gaming process, so that it would cover skill resolution, combat, magic and saving throws. Under such a model there would be no process which could not be resolved by application of a suitable skill to a task. This begs the obvious question, since I am reconfiguring D&D: why the d20 skill system?

    I used to be quite enamoured of the idea of a skill system with grades of success, as represented by the over-complexity of Rolemaster. Under this model, a skill check gives a series of possible outcomes – complete or partial failure, partial or complete success. However, continuing attempts to apply this skill system in actual gaming situations over many years (using Rolemaster, derivatives of Rolemaster, and various homebrewed systems) all led to the same problem: many tasks aren’t amenable to a graded system of categories of outcome, and these categories often bear little relationship either to reality or to the relative powers of the characters as represented in their attributes. For example, should a Rolemaster thief with a pick locks bonus of 36 be the sort of character who routinely gets partial or complete success against a lock which is, say, “difficult” to open? The whole process of assigning difficulties and results is too abstract. And in the case of opening a lock, what is “partial success” anyway? Either it opened or it didn’t. All too frequently, “partial success” meant “try again”, which really just slows gameplay down considerably. In situations where partial success might be relevant – say, trying to sneak up on someone – then it was the skill of the opponent which ultimately became  relevant to success, when they got a chance to do a search check as a consequence of their partial awareness of their stalker. And then how does one resolve a result of “partial success” on both sides of this challenged skill check?

    In such instances the character is essentially making a challenged skill check against their target’s skill, but mediated through the assignment of difficulty levels dependent upon the environment. To follow our previous example, first one assigns a difficulty to the thief’s stealth attempt dependent upon lighting, cover, perhaps also the target’s degree of alertness; and then, one assigns a difficulty to the target’s perception check dependent upon the result of the player’s roll. It would be much easier just to have a direct challenged roll – one skill against the other – and apply a net adjustment to the player’s roll dependent upon the environment.

    This is exactly how the d20 system works. The difficulty is set by the environment or by the target’s skill check, and the result is either success or failure. The success contains within it a certain level of magnitude, given by the difference between the roll and the target number. This skill check system significantly simplifies the process of skill resolution, and speeds it up. Even combat rolls as currently envisaged contain an element of this. The attacker makes a skill check, and the target is the enemy’s AC, which behaves very much like a challenging skill. If one were to replace AC by, for example, the result of a reflexes save, one has essentially a challenged skill check. One could then go further, and rule that all combatants are assumed to be “taking 10” if they also attack … which is what the current rule system pretty much assumes with AC. 

    This can be taken even further if one takes the difference between the target number and the roll as damage done, with some appropriate weapon-related modifiers. So if the opponent’s AC is 15, and the attacker rolls 18, 3 hps damage are done (plus strength and a weapon-related modifier).  In such a case we have wrapped the skill roll and its consequences into a single determination, removing the need for further dice rolls and decisions, and relating damage done in combat directly to level of skill. 

    Of course, the same considerations could be applied to magic. The target for the spell is set by some kind of saving throw, and the difference between the spellcraft roll and the target number, multiplied by spell level, is the damage. From this determination system it is a simple step to eliminating spells altogether. Effects could be given a level, so that for example daze is level 0, stun is level 1, fear is level 2, etc., and  the duration of the effect is determined by the spell roll… 

    This covers all the major aspects of the role-playing process. The best part, however, is that under the d20 system the scale on which difficulty is determined for an action (usually between 9 and 20, for example, or a d20 roll plus a skill) is very similar to the scale  on which skill bonusses operate (usually between 1 and 20). So there is a natural symmetry in using skills to determine the difficulty of all tasks, and using skills to determine the success of those tasks. We can complete this symmetry by finding a way to relate hps to a skill in some way, and also relate the availability of spells to a skill in the same way. Having done this we have reduced the entire process of character development to the process of generating attributes, and generating skills. There will be no saving throws and no armour class; just skills, and skill modifiers.

    This completes the other part of the challenge which I have always seen in role-playing systems – making a single, internally consistent system for resolving all tasks in an imagined world. There is no particular reason that one would have to do this except a sense of completeness, and it is this completeness I want to achieve by reconfiguring the D&D skill system.

  • Baldur’s Gate 2 – my 3 favourite moments

    There are only 3 computer games I have ever played start to finish – Halo, Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich (hilarious) and Baldur’s Gate 2. I think Baldur’s Gate 2 would have to qualify as absolutely the best computer game I have ever played. It was challenging, it had excellent dialogue, excellent plot and a fine atmosphere. Recently brought to reminiscing about its excellence by some of the second-rate games I have played in the last few years, I thought I would share with the uncaring internet my 3 favourite moments (i.e. battles) from the game.

    1. The Umber Hulks in Nalia’s Castle

    According to the walkthrough which I visited to refresh my memory as to the name of this place, the 4 Umber Hulks in the basement of Nalia’s Castle only qualify for the comment “there  are 4 Umber Hulks in here”. This comment hardly encapsulates the 5 hours of pain (on christmas day, 2001) which I went through to slay the bastards. At this time I was about 8th level, and since this was my first ever computer game (honestly) I was still labouring under the illusion that using loopholes in the rules was “bad faith” play. So I didn’t rest at all in Nalia’s castle and by the time I got to the basement I had no spells left. I completed this adventure using only magic items. I had, for example, no spells to protect my players against confusion and no healing left. So there was no way I cold fight 4 Umber Hulks directly. In order to get through this room I had to use a tactic, and developing the tactic convinced me that BG2 is the siznich. The tactic was: send Yoshimo (the assassin) into the room under stealth, with all the other PCs lined up as far as possible from the door, my mage in front carrying a wand of cone of cold, that had only 5 charges… Yoshimo ambushed the closest Umber Hulk and fled, drawing that single Umber Hulk into the room. If he cut to the side of the door quickly, the Umber Hulk’s confusion ray would fall harmlessly into empty space. Yoshimo then stealthed himself, and once the Hulk was through the door he shut it to prevent any others straying through. At the same time my mage would unleash cone of cold on the charging Hulk and all 3 other characters would unleash their most powerful ranged attacks. Yoshimo would lay in a second backstab and then peg it for the back of the room as Minsc charged forward to finish off the Hulk, which was hopefully frozen still by the cone of cold. Save, and repeat 3 times. Disaster would occur if any of the following happened:

    1. Yoshimo failed his stealth roll in the Umber Hulk room – if so, 4 confusion rays hit him at once, the room turned black and a horrible grunting, screeching rending cacophony ensued as the 4 Hulks tore him apart
    2. Yoshimo failed to backstab the Hulk successfully – if so, the above would also occur
    3. Yoshimo didn’t make the right distance between himself and the Hulk once he was outside of the room – if so he would be caught in the cone of cold and/or confused by the Hulk
    4. Yoshimo failed to close the door – if so more than one Hulk might slip through, and we were all doomed
    5. the mage (Imoen, I think) failed to deliver cone of cold and back away in an orderly fashion – if so, the Hulk caught her and tore her apart before Minsc could intervene (I had maximum gore settings, and I liked Imoen, so this was a bad sight for me)
    This is an example of effective use of all party members, I think. In one of the 4 battles, Yoshimo was confused and wandered about the room while the battle proceeded, but after 5 hours of learning and then applying this tactic it finally worked. Needless to say this was the last time I tried to stick to the spirit, rather than the letter, of the AD&D second edition rules in playing the game – from now on I rested wherever possible.
    2. The Portal Warden
    For some reason my lead character was a bard, so I had to undertake the mission to free the actors from the Five Flagons Tavern to start my own theatre. This involves going into a pocket dimension and battling a big tough magic user demon chap to rescue them. For some reason I found this battle hideously difficult, perhaps because I didn’t yet understand magic resistance, so I was fighting uphill. The magic user in question summoned huge quantities of Demons and the like, and the battle was entirely uphill. Fortunately for me, I had a rod of resurrection, and the last half of this battle (which took an hour of real time!) was spent with my PCs dying, and me resurrecting them using the rod. After each resurrection the PC would have to scrabble around picking up all the magic items he or she had dropped, while under attack, before returning to the fray, only to die again… this battle ended with my lead character down to nearly no hps, and all the other PCs dead, and the remaining charges of my rod of resurrection (and possibly some scrolls) used to raise them all. Nothing quite captures the thrill of skin-of-your-teeth fighting than resurrecting multiple PCs mid-battle to launch straight back into the fray. I felt like Stalin!
    3. The final confrontation with Irenicus
    All the walkthroughs tell you that in the final battle, Irenicus will summon 4 demons and if you have protection from evil spells on you, they will attack him instead of you. Needless to say, I didn’t read the walkthroughs. This was another battle that took an hour, and it didn’t seem to go according to the book at all. I don’t remember Irenicus adopting his slayer form – instead, he cast some kind of tricksy spell (Shadow Walk?) in which he becomes invisible and his perfectly functional simulacrum runs around distracting you, while you fight the demons. I killed the demons and realised that the Irenicus I could see was a simulacrum, but sometime during the combination of spells he used (the withering spell, and a web or darkness-type spell) he and his simulacrum cast another one of those tricky shadow walk spells, and when I next looked there were Irenicusses everywhere, and I lost track of the real one, even using True Seeing. There followed a period of intense combat in which a great many spells were wasted, and darkness fell (in meat world), and it ended up with all of my PCs hors de combat except Imoen, who was down to her last magic missile. She cast this on Irenicus, but he still had a spell reflection on – as did Imoen. So I sat stupified with horror in front of my screen, watching as the little sparkling mote of my last offensive spell bounced backwards and forwards between Imoen and Irenicus – who were almost in melee range. Unfortunately for me, Imoen was well below the level of health at which a magic missile cast by Imoen could be ignored, so I sat there biting my nails and waiting for the inevitable… only to find that Irenicus’ spell deflection failed one level before Imoen’s, and the magic missile hit him – and killed him. That’s right, I gnawed my nails down watching a game of highly elaborate pong finish the most complicated and interesting game I have ever played… but the worst of it is, something was wrong with my installation of BG2, so after I had killed Irenicus, the cut scene crashed and I lost the game! So I never got to save the final scene, loot Irenicus’ body or get the reward the elves had promised me. I didn’t even get to export my characters, so I’m not sure now  who I even played.
    So it was that my favourite game ever ended in torrid confusion, but ever since that day when Irenicus’ shield fell and my elf-girls’ lowest level spell brought his tyrannical reign to an end, I have been questing to find a game with a similar mixture of complexity, difficulty and fun. I fear that in the new era of computer games it  will never come…

  • Neverwinter Nights 2: First Impressions

    I booted up NWN 2 for Mac a few weeks ago, and have played through to about 8th level already, at what for my inept level of talent is quite a pace. I am currently being sidetracked by my Dwarf mate, Khelgar, and his quest to become a monk.

    My impression of NWN 2 so far is that it is vastly superior to NWN, but nowhere near as good as Baldur’s Gate 2. No surprises there… the graphics are nice, although on the Mac at least it has a few annoying interface issues. Particularly, I can’t seem to slow the window rotation speed, so as soon as my mouse touches the edge of the window the whole scene jumps rapidly, making it difficult to focus on the point you want to see. The first person camera is almost useless, because frequently one is under attack from all sides, or from a long range, and the camera doesn’t give a clear sense of this (not that this matters – I never use first person camera). Also, of course, NWN 2 is right-mouse-button based, and the Mac doesn’t have one… but this is easily circumvented. Amusingly I have had to switch from “Space” for pause to “enter”, because if I mishit my space I strike the kana entry button on my japanese keyboard, and this buggers the software completely…

    The plot seems to be better than NWN 1, and the play is more like the original Baldur’s Gate. You have direct control over all your PCs, including all their attacks and spell-casting and movements if you turn on “puppet mode” (which of course I did, because even on its weakest spell-casting setting the AI chews through the sorcerer’s spells too fast). The side-adventures for companions seem to be quite good, and there is a degree of interaction and script quality in this which is much higher than in NWN 1. Neeshka and Khalgur are particularly entertaining.

    Unfortunately I have chosen to play a Warlock, which so far is nowhere near as entertaining as I had thought it might be. This is not too bad since I get complete control over my companions, so I can also essentially play a sorcerer, fighter and thief, though I can’t change their character class, but it’s good enough for me. The encounters are not as difficult as I would like, although there was a battle in a warehouse which was actually quite challenging, requiring regular saving and restarts and the use of most of my magic items. One frustrating little aspect of the gameplay is that you can only be defeated if all your PCs die. So if one PC with no healing spells or skills remains alive  at the end of an encounter, you all get resurrected with 1 hp. This is sensible, I suppose, since it assumes a basic familiarity with first aid on the part of all PCs which is reasonable given their profession; but it also means that battles are a tad easier. Though the final battle in the aforementioned warehouse was only won by me after 2 tries, with Neeshka on 1 hp and everyone else “dead”, and bereft of magic items – I think that counts as “challenging”. Nonetheless, I would have spent several more hours on the job if PCs were non-resurrectable…

    Overall it is holding my interest well, particularly since the companions are almost entertaining and the battles occasionally challenging. Unless things go drastically awry with the plot, I think I might even see it through to the end…

  • Role-playing by Skype

    For the last year or so while living in Japan I have been running a role-playing campaign set in the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, a time ripe with possibilities for adventure. Unfortunately, my Japanese is not good enough to role-play in that language, and Japanese role-players are rare (especially in a country town). This is a shame, since I really wanted to try and do this while I was there  (both playing, and doing so in Japanese – which is beyond impossible).

    So in order to continue role-playing I decided to do it over skype with the old players from Australia. The Delightful Miss E joined in for lack of anything better to do, and the good Dr. A joined from Amsterdam. So for 6 months to a year we had a campaign running with 2 Australians, 1 Australian in Amsterdam, and 2 Australians in Japan. The whole thing happened in Skype, for 3-4 hours every 2 -4 weeks on Thursday evenings (Thursday mornings in Amsterdam). 

    Role-playing in skype is remarkably possible, though it has its limitations. The main limitation from the DM point of view is the inability to see people’s character sheets and dice rolls. Only one of my players was familiar with AD&D (the rest are complete role-playing amateurs) so they had to have things regularly explained to them, and this is hard to do over skype. One needs to reach over and point. I made Excel spreadsheets for character sheets, which were a big bonus, and I was in the process of redesigning them to incorporate automatic attack rolls, etc. so my players didn’t get so bogged down in detail, but then I moved to London and we haven’t got around to restarting yet (and I don’t have a reliable internet connection for another week or so). I was also kind of hoping that the July release of 4e would lead to an improvement in my online role-playing opportunities, but sadly they seem to have cocked up the release of the most innovative role-playing enhancement in the whole package. So it’s back to skype… 

    Interestingly, playing online with beginners helps one to understand where the complexities are in the system. The noticeable problems one finds when one is unable to point at the physical part of the character sheet are:

    • ability scores vs. adjustments/bonusses: this is just a ridiculous waste of time and complexity. Why bother?  Just give everyone an ability score roughly between -1 and -4, have it affect everything directly, halve the strength of all modifications to ability scores and make +1 magic items slightly rarer
    • multiple attacks: we all know the Hit Point System is meant to be abstract – 20th level human beings don’t have the ability to sustain 20 times as many solid dagger blows as 1st level human beings, they have more luck, take more glancing blows etc. But multiple attacks make it seem as if the system is based on direct attacks and defenses. They are also fiendishly complex to administer and very tedious when people are typing in the numbers after they roll them (and bad at adding to start with, and drunk, somewhere in Sydney, on the other side of the world). Ideally the abstract nature of the combat system would be reflected in the multiple attacks, with higher level characters gaining a slight improvement to damage with every additional possible attack, perhaps not commensurate with the full base damage, so that essentially a 20th level fighter is better at squeezing damage out of a sword than is a 1st level fighter
    • spell levels and character levels: you’re a 3rd level mage, so you can only use 1st level spells. Why? This is like the ability score/adjustment thing, it’s pointless. Since I can’t be bothered going through the entire spell list of every class and dividing it into 20 levels of spells, this has to stay – unless the actual spells go. This is particularly frustrating to explain and keep reminding people of when they are multi-classing and spell-using. Sheesh! At least I used power points, so the  issue of memorised spells was not relevant.
    • spell casting: if you’re using a touch spell like <i>ray of enfeeblement</i> in combat you have to a) do concentration b) roll touch to hit c) possibly roll damage d) tell me the details of the spell so I can roll a save. This takes a long time under the drunk/remote/inexperienced/typing conditions alluded to above. If we could resolve all of this with one single roll (so spell-casting is no more time-consuming than combat), life would be so much easier…
    • armour classes: this is unavoidable, i think, but it’s really hard to get the right AC from someone given all the possible conditions they can be in. Barkskinned, Wisdom-enhanced, mage-armoured monks who have been surprised, for example. I tried writing every possible situation in the aforementioned spreadsheets, but it got difficult. This problem would be eliminated by the 4e virtual tabletop, methinks, but sadly…
    We were, as I mentioned, doing all our skype playing by typing not talking. This experience has helped me to see what parts of the system are tedious, what parts are hard to explain or contradictory, and given me some ideas on improving them. I shall return to these in future… but in the meantime, suffice it to say that role-playing <i>can</i> be done over skype, though it is a little slow at times and requires learning slightly different manners.

  • Chimaerae: The Battle Thumb

    So called because of its bizarre resemblance to an enormous thumb, the Battle Thumb is the Chimaeric creation which elevated York Constructs, Inc. to greatness. Bought in bulk by the armies of several nations, the Battle Thumb is much respected for its endurance, great strength and reliability. Though not easy to armour, its hide is naturally thick and it has some resilience against extremes of temperature. It is not agile but is highly mobile, requiring little space to turn and capable of reversing as well as walking forward. It is not capable of high speeds but its cunning physiognomy makes it a stable combat platform in any situation – mounted archers can fire from its back even when it is at full sprint. It is also capable of carrying quite heavy weights, though it is not efficient given its overall size and its speed and mobility decline rapidly as the weights increase.  It is, however, an excellent scouting and light combat mount, especially useful for archers, scouts and skirmishers, and useful for adventurers who need to move over rough or mountainous terrain. It has one other admirable trait which makes it much desired by military planners – it can eat anything. This beast is rather uncharitably referred to as “the Duke of Yorks Cock” by many soldiers.

  • Current reading: The Black Magician Trilogy

    I am in a holding pattern this week, because tomorrow the Delightful Miss E joins me from Japan, on Friday is my 35th birthday, yesterday I moved house, and on Saturday a friend of Miss E’s  is coming here on a holiday (from Japan). So in between all these things there is not much to do except tidy my new house and … ah … read. So I need trash, and as a consequence I am reading a fantasy trilogy.

    This time around the trilogy is about a slum girl who becomes a novice magician in a very privileged guild. She is super powerful of course but everyone else hates her because they are rich and she is poor. So it’s kind of like Harry Potter meets Ursula le Guin meets Trotsky. Of course the poor girl has to prove herself, gets help from well-meaning rich people who, you know, care for the poor, and then she stumbles on a dark and evil magician who is super-powerful and going to kill everyone. All is not, of course, as it seems. In this instance there is some dispute as to who is good and who is evil (which is a nice degree of nuance for a fantasy trilogy).

    There is again a hint of the Global War on Terror written in the books. The magic guild is in the nation of Kyralia, which lies at the heart of an alliance that includes a very harsh and clearly islamic-seeming nation with very harsh laws and slavery. I am thinking Saudi Arabia, except in a nasty twist we get to visit this kingdom’s version of Mecca and discover that the book contained therein holds no real power. Hint, hint, nudge nudge, wink wink. The alliance seems to be pretty pluralistic and accepting, as if in fact it were a modern secular state… but over its borders is evil and mysterious sachaka, which is exotic and oriental and once laid waste to by the mages. It doesn’t contain much civilisation by the sound of it, and what it does contain is unknown and dangerous. Sounds a lot like Afghanistan… and it sends regular assassins to Kyralia, terrorists even…

    … There are also hints that the head of the magicians’ guild is, perhaps, a difficult man burdened with a hard task, who is forced to make unpleasant decisions for the sake of the greater good… almost like, um, George Bush.

    I don’t believe people actually intend to write these ham-fisted allegories, I think they just come out the way they do under the pressure of the times. It is fun to read too much into them – wait until I get onto my review of Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing. Which will have to wait, because I am reading John Kooley’s book on the foundation of the Taliban next; and then I have discovered a clear rip-off novel, which is Flashman in Space, and which I also want to read.

  • things never seen…

    Besides a bit of grainy ww2 footage, I’ve never seen a pogrom in action. But thanks to the joys of online worlds, anything is possible. Here is a pair of 12 year old losers hunting down a couple of online characters they think are gold farmers or bots. The first one takes a healing potion, and  the second one tries to tell them to go away. I wonder if these are really bots? The commenters certainly aren’t so sure.

    The game is runescape. It looks really bad.

  • Current gaming: Traveller

    Variety is one of the good aspects of playing weekly for 3 hours in a haphazard tavern environment with a large club. Because groups collapse, change and reform quite quickly one often moves between groups, or starts a new campaign after a short time. So I have had an opportunity not only to play (a rare innovation for me) but to play different systems. So far, WFRP and A song of Ice and Fire, but this week was Traveller. I haven’t played Traveller since … 1989? A long time ago! It hasn’t changed  much either, the same dry and simple system, the same sense of an empty universe, the same 70s techy feel. I remember when I first got traveller nobody had home computers in the real world, and the computers in the spaceships were clearly envisaged as the mainframes of the ancient world  – taking up huge amounts of space and having just enough power for navigation and firing weapons. Now of course your average Tech Level 15 Traveller “4bis” computer sits on the dashboard of any decent Japanese car…

    Traveller also had that sense of being lonely on the edge of space, which I liked, and of being very <i>normal</i>, which I don’t like at all. Neither of these properties has deserted it in its latest incarnation. We have in fact plunged off into the never never, some little island of systems isolated in The Great Rift, a vast empty patch of space which cannot be crossed in a single jump, and so is inaccessible to normal spaceships. Our top secret mission – to scout out a secret jump path to enable the Empire to cross the Rift. The complication – the bunch of star systems we are investigating is inhabited by loony low-tech Frenchies, who reached the systems many millenia ago on generation ships of the European Space Agency (!) and may be a tad touchy about ending their isolation. I like this a lot! Though I wonder how the ESA managed to land Frenchies in the Great Rift when they can’t land a robot on mars. But I suppose they were aiming for Alpha Centauri and missed. I just hope me and my mates don’t end up having to do a Dunkirk – we have not enough fuel to get back…

    … anyway, it has all the elements of classic Traveller – we’re skipping around possibly hostile star systems in a freighter, not particularly well armed (though better than the locals!), trading our way to the next system and trying to work out how we will make our fortune. My suggestion is going to be: betray the Empire, sell a trade route to a big trading company, and become fabulously rich and powerful on the proceeds, in a wierd French backwater space system where everyone worships us as Gods. But I presume that something is going to go horribly wrong very soon. Which is a shame, because I won’t be attending for the next 2 weeks, and I rather suspect I will miss all the fireworks.