Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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

  • Should the Media Ban Reporting on Mass Killings?

    As I understand it most Australian media organizations have an agreement with the various health departments not to report teen suicide, on the principle that copycat suicide is a real risk among teenagers and the benefits that accrue from reporting on any child’s suicide don’t outweigh the risk that it might trigger another. Furthermore, whenever the media report on a suicide – whether by a normal person or a star – they have a self-enforced code of conduct which requires them to put the contact details for a suicide counselling service at the bottom of the report (in both print and online). I’m not sure if this consideration extends to television or not. This is based on the same principle that people reading the report who are themselves at risk of suicide may benefit from the information, or may be at risk of commencing their own suicide plan if they read about someone else’s. I think the study of suicide is quite advanced and these principles are based in well-established understanding of how suicidal people move from ideation to action, and in societies like Australia that have very high suicide rates it’s a very useful kind of intervention. As far as I know Japan, which has an even higher rate than Australia, doesn’t have any such code of conduct for its media.

    Recent mass killings in Norway and the USA have attracted their usual round of sensationalist media coverage, and as these events become bigger, more ferocious and more meticulously planned I find myself wondering whether the media have a role to play in preventing their frequency and ferocity. The Aurora killer clearly had copycat elements of both Columbine and Utroya and there’s a disturbing trend towards these mass killers trying to increase their numbers, even using techniques that they won’t personally witness or that will occur after their death, in the case of the Aurora shooter’s apartment. This article from the Australian ABC includes an interesting interview with a forensic psychiatrist who claims a direct link between the style of reportage and subsequent events, and the strong claim that these mass killings are temporally linked – that the grotesque footage from one will be likely to inspire others within a short time. The psychiatrist interviewed there suggests that instead of sensationalist rolling 24 hour coverage of the murder and all its gory details, the media should be presenting a highly localized, very boring and dry style of reporting that restricts its national value and strips it of sensational elements. This, it is implied, will reduce the risk of copycat killings.

    The Aurora case is particularly interesting because their is evidence not just that the killer planned for a long period of time, but that he was seeking help before he did it, and that he showed signs of regret and repentance after, which though sadly too late for the victims do suggest that there was something going on in the mind of the killer that could have been reached out to beforehand. Not only did he leave the building when he was still in a position to kill people, but he waited for the police to come, he warned them about his apartment rather than just letting them go there and die, and he showed signs of confusion and illness at the court appearance. Apparently also he wrote details of his plans and sent them to a psychiatrist, who sadly didn’t receive them (though maybe that’s no longer true). Could it be that this person was actually in a position to be helped before the killings? Could it be that the movement from fantasizing about mass murder to enacting follows similar stages and is as (weakly) preventable as suicide? If so, then surely the media have a part to play in working to prevent these killings? Here, then, are three suggestions for changes the media could enact in order to play a more constructive role in the prevention of mass murder.

    1. A complete ban on reporting mass killings: beyond a simple one line statement, in television and press. For example, when someone goes on a shooting spree, instead of filling the news for three days with every detail, the media simply report it like the weather: “today a mass shooting occurred in [location], involving one perpetrator and more than [say, 5] deaths. Police are investigating and local media are reporting the details in the affected area.” No photos, no footage, no follow-up and no details. Maybe online newspapers from the affected area should agree not to report it (presenting it in print only) so that there is no way the details can be made available at a national level without going to huge lengths.
    2. A strict code of limited reporting: So that the press agree to, for example, no more than a specified amount of coverage per hour, or only cover the event briefly in their main news reports, and don’t give certain specifics. Especially, the exact number of dead and wounded, weapons and tactics used, and the identity and history of the killer should all be suppressed. This means that anyone contemplating such a mass killing needs to come to terms with the fact that their name will never be made famous.
    3. Completely wipe the killer from history: in addition to not reporting their name, the government proceeds to wipe their identify from the records, so that no future planner of a mass murder can find any information about the past achievements or life history of the perpetrators of previous crimes. Delete the killer’s records from school yearbooks, local sports records, etc. so that any noteworthy achievements they have ever made are deleted from the record. In this case the “talented scientist” who did the Aurora killings would have their name removed from any publications they have done, perhaps replaced with “convicted mass murder” or something [I don’t believe this Aurora killer was actually a scientist but if he were…] When you wipe 12 people from this world, you should not achieve infamy – you should be forgotten by all but your family and those whose love you betrayed with your acts. By doing this the government guarantees that the murderer becomes no one of note, and that anyone else who is falling into this strange worldview will not be able to find any common ground with those who came before them. All they have is a name and a face, and unless they go to the killer’s town and look their details up directly, they will learn nothing about their forebears. With no identity, how can this person be a role model for future killers?
    4. Provision of counseling advice: when reporting on the shooting, the media could agree to a code of practice for guiding future murderers to counseling. Perhaps a contact number for a specialist phone line, with a phrase like “If you are feeling alienated and lost, or constantly fantasizing about killing other people, please call this line.” Perhaps for the Aurora killer that would have been enough for someone to at least try and help them. I once had a friend commit suicide, and she was plagued for months beforehand with constant thoughts of doing it. The help she sought wasn’t enough for her, but in some cases it is. Perhaps if the same approach were applied to potential mass murderers some of them would break out of their reverie and find a better way to move their lives forward.

    I am in favour of option 1, on a trial basis of, say, five years, across the entire USA, Europe and Australasia. I think it would be hard to prove that it made a difference because the killings are rare events and the stochastic properties of sequences of mass killings would be hard to study, but I think it’s worth a try. There’s no strong public interest in knowing the horrible details of a stranger’s death in another town, but there’s a lot of value in potentially being able to reduce the frequency and severity of these tragic events. It doesn’t have to be mandated by law – it simply requires all the media to agree to a voluntary code of conduct. Of course it would require that they give up the financial benefits that flow from the extreme attention that the media get during such events, but I think that’s a small price to pay for the possibility of reducing rates of these hideous crimes. But at the very least it should cost them nearly nothing to put a message about seeking help on the screen. It would be nice to see the media give at least that much back in return for being free to present their lurid and sensationalist crap, but I’m probably asking too much of both our media and political overlords. Unless America can come up with the even more radical idea of restricting access to military-grade weapons, I can’t think of anything else that would work…

  • How Lethality Changes Adventure Flow

    I had my third near-total party kill (TPK) in yesterday’s Warhammer 3rd Edition session. This one was so savage that I had to drop a hidden thief from the monster roster, because it was clear that I’d overpowered the opposition. This is an adventure I’d previously run using Pathfinder, and the difference in deadliness of the setup was obvious, though I don’t think it was a difference due to the system per se. This change in lethality also affected the flow of the adventure and forced very different decisions on the players. Since this is the first time I have ever run exactly the same adventure twice, it was interesting to see how the adventure changed the second time.

    The basic setting of the adventure was a fairy stolen from an onsen (hot spring) that the PCs had been sent to chase. They were following the gnomes who stole it down a steamy volcanic valley, but what they didn’t know was that the onsen fairy – which gives the onsen its healing powers – had been sold off months before by the owner, and the pot that the fairy was imprisoned in, that the gnomes had stolen, was empty. The adventure resolves when they find this out and go back to confront the onsen owner, but to find it out they have to somehow deal with the gang of gnomes who stole it. In this world, gnomes are criminal thugs, a kind of race of East London grafters, with little honour or regard for each other and no respect for non-gnomes.

    The near-TPK occurred when the group of three PCs were approaching a jumble of rocks in the middle of the valley, just on the far side of a muddy stream of hot water and shrouded in steam. Behind the rocks were three gnome minions with steam rifles, a half-orc sorcerer and a gnome fighter. Because the party scout had failed his observation check the gnomes got a free surprise attack with their steam rifles, and firing as a group with the Rapid Fire action card they managed to seriously mangle the group in the first round – they hit the insane dwarf troll slayer and nearly killed the elven scout, and only narrowly missed the wizard all in their first action. The party were already carrying critical wounds from the previous session (an encounter with some steam mephits) and the results were devastating. The dwarf charged into battle but he spent the ensuing couple of rounds incapable of hitting anything due to the gradually accumulating effects of his wounds; the wizard spent half of the following rounds casting healing spells; and the scout took a mortal wound the following round. I decided to give the wizard one chance to pull off a heal spell to prevent death on this scout, which he managed (though he couldn’t bring the scout back to consciousness) and it was at this point that the fourth gnome thief should, in the original plan, have backstabbed the wizard. This would surely have killed the entire party, because by this point the dwarf was really labouring and his enemy still undamaged. So I let the gnome thief idea slide, and even then their main foe managed to run away – the dwarf was literally too exhausted to run after him, and just let him go[1]. At the end of the battle the tally was: dwarf and wizard on half hit points, dwarf carrying three critical wounds, wizard and scout carrying two critical wounds (one away from death!) and the scout on 1 hit point. This from a battle with a single fighter, a single wizard and three minions. I guess I overpowered the fighter slightly. Also in this session I was using a house rule I conceived of after the previous adventure: the wizard can only attempt to heal any one set of wounds on one person once, and so needs to wait for a PC to become injured again before attempting another healing spell. This is because the rechargeable spells could be used infinitely often outside of combat were this rule not to apply, and adventuring would become trivial.

    From this ambush the PCs’ goal was to head down the valley to its mouth, where they would attack the gnome camp and recover the onsen fairy. But with such a heavy accumulation of wounds and no idea whether they were going to be ambushed again, they changed tactics. They retreated and set an ambush of their own, on the assumption that gnome soldiers would come up the valley to finish them off. So instead of stumbling on the camp and overhearing the gnome crime boss complaining about the missing onsen fairy, they waited and were rewarded in the morning with hearing him walking up the valley, ranting to his underlings about what he was going to do when he found the fairy. At this point the players didn’t know the onsen fairy was missing – had the gnomes already got possession of the fairy the adventure would have been over at this point, since they would have left without coming back to kill off the PCs. Gnomes don’t bother with vengeance when they can settle for money! So actually, had the adventure been a straight “rescue the stolen goods” operation they’d have failed at this point, and would have either lost the fairy or would have had to track the crime boss for days, suffering a regular series of ambushes on the way (and the initial risk of losing him altogether). They basically only completed the adventure because of the twist of the missing fairy.

    In this case the players almost “lost” the adventure without actually dying, because they basically had to give up on their original plan. I think this is yet another example of how even when the party has healing magic available to it, WFRP3 has the same atmosphere of extreme danger and weakness that imbued WFRP2, but without the associated constant frustration of not being able to do anything successfully. In WFRP2, adventuring was dangerous because the PCs were useless at it. In WFRP3 it is very dangerous even though the PCs are good at it, with a range of magical abilities and skills they can use. For me this is the perfect combination: adventurers who feel like adventurers rather than cowherders with a gun, but who are under the constant very real threat of death. I think in their next adventure the players are going to be very, very careful …

    —

    fn1: This arose because the dwarf had a critical wound that prevented him using a free manoeuvre, and another critical wound that meant every melee action cost him a fatigue. Getting into battle and then hitting people and changing stance thus accrued fatigue rapidly, and had he chased the gnome he would have been so fatigued by the time combat resumed that he wouldn’t be able to move. He literally just lowered his axe and slid down it into the mud once the gnome started running! I really like the fatigue rules in WFRP3, they put a huge extra dimension of risk-taking into combat.

  • Fighter Mortality Under Different Character Generation Methods

    As part of my continuing exploration of the statistics underlying Pathfinder, I’ve been comparing mortality for different types of fighters under different types of character generation systems. The basic Pathfinder rules recommend a point-buy system, but also allow for 4d6 choose the best three. I’ve generated PCs under all four point buy systems, 4d6 choose the best three rolled in order, 3d6 rolled in order, and the purposive semi-random system I developed for previous posts on this topic. Between them these cover the gamut of possible ability score generation methods.

    For the point buy systems, I spent the points under the following rules:

    • Spend as many points as possible on the most important ability score for the fighter type (strength for strong fighters, constitution for tough fighters, etc)
    • Spend as many of the remaining points on a secondary score: strength for non-strong fighters, and constitution for strong fighters
    • If any points remain, spend them on the last remaining physical ability score
    • If balancing between point allocation is necessary, wherever possible choose ability scores so that they are the minimum value required to achieve a given bonus (so 16 for a +3, not 17)

    This guarantees maximization of bonuses and roughly orders scores in the strength/constitution/dexterity priority list.

    I ran 1,000,000 simulations pitting a fighter against an orc, with all the orc ability scores randomly determined. Half of all orcs were ferocious (randomly determined). The fighter’s race, class type, and ability score generation method were randomly determined, to ensure a wide spread of ability scores across all types of fighters. Results were calculated as mortality rates – this is really just an addendum to previous research so more detailed analysis was not conducted.

    Results

    The results are shown in Table 1, as mortality rates for the different ability generation systems for both Meek and Ferocious orcs. Mortality rates are given as percentages of all fighters who participated in the battle.

    Stat Generation Method

    Orc Type
    Meek Ferocious
    Rolled in order
      3d6 51 76
      4d6 best 3 36 62
    Purposive Random 35 61
    Point buy
      Low Fantasy 34 61
      Standard Fantasy 19 44
      High Fantasy 21 46
      Epic Fantasy 12 32

    In a somewhat surprising result, 4d6 choose-the-best-3 has a similar mortality rate to the point-buy system labelled as “low fantasy” by Paizo. Mortality rates for fighters pitted against ferocious orcs only reach the 30% mark that one might expect of a CR1/3 monster in the Epic Fantasy scenario.

    Conclusion

    Rolling 3d6 in order significantly reduces survival rates compared even to a low fantasy point-buy system. Survival of these fighters against ferocious orcs does not differ between standard and epic fantasy builds, suggesting that these categories are essentially irrelevant. New boys fresh out of the village on their first adventure should only consider taking on an orc if they are confident that their genre setting is Epic. Otherwise, they should expect a bloody and gruesome end.

  • The Moral Quagmire that is Paladinism

    In briefly surfing through the Paizo messageboards I stumbled upon this highly contentious doozy of a thread: Is torturing intelligent undead an evil action? The resulting thread is a microcosm of the murky debates that surround good and evil in a game that recreates a moral universe radically different from our own, but my position falls on the side of the anti-religionists everywhere: Paladins, while good in the framework of the game, are your classic evil bastard when viewed through the prism of modern morality. One commenter sums up the perverted morality of the Paladin quite nicely on the first page:

    It’s also hypocrisy like that, that causes no one to feel bad at all when a Paladin bites the dust

    Yep, count me in with that position.

    Of course, in a world of intelligent undead and actually evil gods, the Paladin’s vengeful “goodness” suddenly makes perfect sense. We should all say a prayer of thanks to the Flying Spaghetti Monster every morning we wake up and find ourselves not in that world.

    From a DMing perspective though,the thread raises one interesting question: how to handle players who lie during torture. The OP claims that

    The party melee unceremoniously decapitated the magus the same way they had his vampiric predecessor. (The players lied and said they would spare him if he sold his master out)

    I hate it when players do this, because you have to act your way through a situation where they get the information and don’t have to worry about a prisoner or potentially vengeful future enemy. Also, realistically it’s the only way you can trust the information you receive from torture: if a prisoner knows they’re going to die they’ll just fess up any old shit as quickly as possible to avoid another round of burnt-poker-rogerings. When players then do the coup-de-grace anyway, it’s like a cheap exit clause for them with no penalty.

    So I came up with a new rule that I carry across all campaigns: players can use the old “promise them their freedom if they tell the truth but then kill them anyway” routine, but if they do it repeatedly they’ll get a kind of nasty light in their eyes that every enemy will recognize: the “I don’t really mean these platitudes I’m telling you” light. Once this light gets in their eyes, torture becomes permanently useless. I tell my players this early on, and from then on they only use this technique very sparingly, when they’re in desperate straits (i.e. really can’t risk letting the guy go) or the torturee is really so evil that slaughtering them is a favour to the universe, and lying to them beforehand just the icing on the cake.

    This rule, I have found, makes players much more willing to find alternatives to torture when they deal with low level minions, and much more aware that every person they let go may be a knife in their back later, or an evil they haven’t slain. It also makes torture and taking prisoners a much more complex undertaking.

    But in either case, I don’t think I’ve ever run a campaign world where undead can be tortured. Except maybe vampires. The rest of them will just laugh it off and sneer at the players as they refuse to blab. If you want to find their secrets, you have to dig a little more carefully than severing a few digits and casting a few cure light wounds. They’re liches, not mercenaries with a skin problem!

  • The Epidemiology of Pathfinder: The Importance of Weapon Finesse

    This weekend I continued my work on the epidemiology of Pathfinder, including an expansion of my programs to allow for different types of point buy. In the process I took the advice of some commenters at a related thread on the Pathfinder message boards:

    I think for the non human fast fighters dropping weapon finesse makes no sense. Because they can hardly hit if they drop that. I would recommend changing it to dropping improved initiative for the fast non-humans.

    In my original simulations I had built non-human fast fighters with improved initiative and weapon focus, but in this revision I changed this around so that non-human fast fighters drop improved initiative and keep weapon finesse. The results, though still not presenting a stirring defense of the decision to play a fast rather than a strong fighter, do bear out the suspicions of those commenting on that board, that for fast fighters weapon finesse is the most important feat to choose. Table 1 compares the results with weapon finesse that I generated today with the previous set of results that dropped weapon finesse in favour of improved initiative. The results in Table 1 are shown for combat with meek orcs (lacking ferocity) to be consistent with the previous post. Similar effects are observed against ferocious orcs, however.
    Table 1: Non-human mortality with and without weapon finesse (revised)

    Race No Weapon Finesse Weapon Finesse Odds Ratio
    Dwarf 43.6 37.0 1.32
    Elven Ponce 52.2 44.2 1.38
    Halfling Loser 61.6 49.7 1.62

    The odds ratios in Table 1 are provided to show which race suffers the most from lack of weapon finesse, and it is no surprise that it is the halflings. This is because they do the least damage, so the loss of hit chances affects them the most.

    These results don’t change the fundamental conclusion that fast fighters are a very bad choice, but they do indicate that if one is going to pick this fighter build, weapon finesse is a very important feat to choose.

  • Your Inequality Challenge

    Life Expectancy and Wealth in the UK, 2004

    I’m doing some research work at the moment on a certain country, and have identified a negative relationship between inequality (measured using the Gini index) and all-cause mortality. I’m not at liberty to identify the country, or the details, of course. This negative relationship means, in essence, that the more unequal a small area becomes, the lower the death rate in that area. The effect is very very weak, so essentially can be dismissed as a policy concern (other aspects of the area’s economy drive much greater increases or reductions in mortality).

    Typically, when a result like this occurs, people will dismiss it as either a statistical oddity or will say that the inequality effect is operating as a proxy for other phenomena – for example, the observed values of inequality measure the effect of past rapid economic growth, or are a proxy for some other aspect of the economy or society (social capital, corruption, etc.). The reason for this is simple: it’s very hard to construct a mechanism by which increasing inequality can reduce mortality, but it’s easy to say that inequality increases as wealth does, and that increasing wealth reduces mortality (a fairly solid fact). There is a model for how inequality can increase mortality, through mechanisms such as reduced social welfare support, or inability to seize necessary cultural or physical capital – there are quite a few convoluted mechanisms proposed by which relative inequality can have this effect in wealthy countries like the UK.

    I’m a realist in this regard, and I don’t think relative inequality is important to health – I think it’s absolute inequality that determines health, in the vast majority of cases – thus in the short term development is more important than equality (or, in many cases, basic rights – see e.g. China). But this data I’m playing with measures relative inequality – that is, it measures the distribution of wealth, and looks at the relationship between this distribution and mortality after adjusting for absolute wealth (how rich an area is).

    So, here’s a challenge to my reader(s): can you propose a social mechanism by which increased relative inequality reduces mortality? This mechanism needs to work across regions with a diverse range of income levels and other forms of social determinants of health. Imagine it in your own country, if you like: whether you’re living in Sao Paulo or on the edge of the Amazon, greater disparity in wealth will reduce mortality. Can you explain how this happens without falling back on arguments that a) the measure of inequality is a proxy for something else or b) higher absolute wealth generates higher relative inequality.

    Have at it, if you dare!

  • Strange Congressional Decisions 3

    This week’s New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has a concise and informative overview of the US Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare, which is well worth a look. It even includes a cool table showing how each judge decided on each of the key issues, with pictures. Consistent with all its coverage to date, the NEJM continues to be upbeat about Obamacare (though not so upbeat that they call it by its catchy handle, rather than its boring full name): they characterize the judgment as “upholding nearly all” of Obamacare, and describe the supreme court process as the “denouement” of the story. In NEJM-land, while the tea party and Republicans fume and rave, the practical folks in politics and the law have accepted the reality of a US healthcare financing landscape that incorporates Obamacare.

    The article also gives some nice insights into the reach of the Court’s power, and the thinking of the chief justice. In talking about his conclusion that the individual mandate lies within Congress’s “power to tax,” the article reports:

    Relying on precedents requiring the Court to give a statute an interpretation that preserves its validity, if one is possible, Roberts concluded that the mandate could reasonably be read as “establishing a condition — not owning health insurance — that triggers a tax — the required payment to the [Internal Revenue Service].” That Congress had labeled the payment a “penalty” rather than a “tax” was not determinative, he concluded, of whether it could be viewed as a tax for constitutional purposes. Rejecting the arguments of the joint opinion, he stated that Congress’s failure to use “magic words or labels” would not invalidate otherwise constitutional taxes and that unlike a penalty that punishes unlawful conduct, the payment was a tax that someone chooses to pay rather than buy health insurance.

    The first sentence suggests that opponents of Congressional laws are on a wing and a prayer when they go to the Supreme Court, which is required “to give a statute an interpretation that preserves its validity,” and (as Roberts observes elsewhere in his decision) it is not the responsibility of the Court to decide on the content of legislation: Roberts observes that the Court “possesses neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments.” He also opened his judgment with a “disquistion” on, amongst other things, the limits of the Courts power to invalidate laws. Roberts was hailed upon his accession to the court as something of an originalist, I think, and people who see originalist judges as a strong bulwark against big government should be careful what they wish for – an originalist interpretation of the constitution appears to put a lot of limits on the role of the Supreme Court, as well as the government. Those who applauded Roberts as a conservative judge are of course railing against him now after this decision, but it’s probably worth noting that judges in general aren’t particularly predictable: the supposedly most liberal judges (like Beyer and Kagan) turned on Obama over his “coercive” medicaid penalties on the states, and all seven judges agreed on their right to review the act.

    On the issue of whether Obama’s threat to penalize states that do agree to Obamacare’s medicaid expansion, there was an interesting contrast between Roberts’ opinion on whether the individual mandate is coercive, and whether the medicaid expansion is. On the individual mandate, he says that “the payment was a tax that someone chooses to pay rather than buy health insurance” (in the words of the article). But about the penalty on states he argues that

    by tying not only new money but also existing Medicaid payments to participation in the expansion, the policy crossed the line from encouragement to coercion, violating the 10th Amendment

    So, it’s coercion when you tell a state that if they don’t pay money on A they’ll have to pay money on B; but when you make the same demand of individuals, it’s a choice that they make. There’s perhaps a difference between the two positions in terms of contracts (the states “had not agreed to, nor could they be expected to anticipate” the change in medicaid perspective that Obama is foisting on them). But surely one could argue the same about taxpayers: when I paid my taxes I didn’t do so on the reasonable understanding that at any time Obama would levy an additional tax on me if I didn’t spend a lot of money on health insurance I don’t need[1]. Maybe this is a facetious point, but it seems to me that in this judgment states are afforded more rights (against coercion) than individuals, which is a bit weird.

    Given these judgments, it appears that the main disagreement between justices on this decision arose from their varied interpretations of the commerce clause, and that this ruling places limits on the expansive powers the Congress had previously been allowed, which I have written about previously. Gun nuts and 18th century re-enactment fanatics will be surprised to note that it was the Ginsburg minority judgment that came out in favour of forcing all Americans to buy guns:

    Ginsburg’s dissent criticized his “crabbed reading of the Commerce Clause” as evoking “the era in which the Court routinely thwarted Congress’s efforts to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it.”

    But if, contrary to Ginsburg’s hopes, Roberts’s decision shows “staying power” then in future the Congress may no longer be able to mandate that all able-bodied Americans own guns, and thus will the tyranny of the Feds be complete. Perhaps if there were more democrat appointees like Ginsburg on the court instead of “crabbed” nativists like Roberts, all Americans could have the pleasure of owning a rocket launcher, whether they want one or not.

    Sometimes it really does seem like American constitutional debates are stranger than fiction. When compared to Australian High Court judgments and the (generally very reasonable) response of governments to them, the Supreme court seems very weak. Our High Court is quite happy to invalidate huge tracts of tax law or 100 year legal fictions (like Terra Nullius) without so much as a by-your-leave and certainly doesn’t seem to see itself as having any requirement to lend government laws validity. It squished several years of immigration law without blinking, and nobody on that court seemed to have paused to consider whether they were over-reaching themselves. It will be interesting to see whether and how they act on the Carbon Tax, because I think every government in Australia has learnt the hard way that the High Court doesn’t consider the policy goals or the government’s political situation in the slightest when it makes its legal decisions[2]. Perhaps conservative Americans should be wishing they had Australia’s (liberal) Michael Kirby sitting in judgment of Obama…

    As a final note, I’d add that the opinions of high-level judges, whether British or American or Australian, can be remarkably well written and pithy, and can be beautiful exercises in both advanced English and logic. They can be a joy to read. Because High/Supreme Court judges are largely appointed for life and completely free of political pressure, they can also be remarkably forthright in their views, and sometimes their statements can be a joy to read (Michael Kirby’s writings on discrimination and homosexuality can be very good examples of this). From the wikipedia page on Justice Roberts, I found this pithy gem from a Roberts majority opinion on a case about schools that incorporated race in their selection process, ostensibly to undo prior history of race-based discrimination: “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Whether you agree that this is the solution to ending racial discrimination, it’s a joy to see things written so directly in policy debate!

    —

    fn1: ha!

    fn2: Julia Gillard (our PM) seems to always get bad luck, so just on the basis of probabilities I guess that the High Court will throw out the whole thing, and furthermore will rule that carbon dioxide is unconstitutional. Or something.

  • Current Gaming: Play-testing 13th Age

    image
    Bring out the bardic depth charges!

    Over the past few months I have been involved in a roughly fortnightly series of adventures to play-test a new RPG, 13th Age. Since play-testing is over and the product is now at a kind of first draft stage, I thought I’d give my thoughts on the system. My thoughts, however, will be heavily tainted by the experience of the group I am gaming with, which consists of an excellent and energetic bunch of players and a brilliant GM, whose achievements I have noted before.

    13th Age was co-developed by Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet, I think, two quite famous figures from both inside and outside of D&D. It was billed to me as old school gaming with indie flair, or something along those lines, and is based extremely loosely on the fundamentals of D&D3.5. The blurb on the website says:

    Our goal with 13th Age is to recapture the free-wheeling style of old-school gaming by creating a game with more soul and fewer technical details. …13th Age makes the play group’s campaign the center of attention, with a toolkit of rules that you can pick and choose from based on the kind of game you want to play. The mechanics draw from classic games as well as newer, story-based games.

    I’m not really convinced that there is a “free-wheeling style of old-school gaming” but to the extent that “free-wheeling” in gaming can be encouraged by the rule system, I think that 13th Age does a very good job, and I think that its simple and flexible rules do encourage a rough and ready approach to gaming that is more adventurous than one would find in Pathfinder or D&D. On the surface it feels like classic d20 D&D, but in actual play it behaves quite differently, for a variety of reasons. It has some mechanisms in place to enable PCs to step outside their niche using skills, but the skill system itself is very light; it has redesigned all characters along the lines of 4th edition powers, but has included more old-school spell rules as well; and it has incorporated some elements into character creation that make it very easy to generate story arcs and plot-based gaming, but in such a way that they can also be jacked for immediate effect outside of plot arcs. This makes the basic rules very flexible. I’ll summarize some of the key changes here.

    Character classes are very “4th Edition”: PCs have powers that operate daily, per battle, or at will. They have recoveries (i.e. healing surges) and feats that can be used to enhance specific powers. Interestingly, AC is determined by class + armour type – specific choice of armour is not relevant, only its weight and the character class. Thus some classes are constrained to operate best in specific armour types. Saves are very 4th Edition: roll over 11 or over 16 to save, with no modifiers. Looking at my character sheet, it’s a 4th Edition PC sitting there looking at me.

    Background defines skills: At creation, each PC gets 8 points (or is it 10?) to spend on backgrounds of the PCs choice, which can have a maximum rating of +5. There are no skills in this game, and every time a PC attempts an action that requires a skill check they roll d20, add their level and an appropriate stat bonus. Then, if they can convince the GM that one of their backgrounds is relevant, they can add the rating of their background to the roll. So when we need to track someone, our insane Dwarven axeman uses his Tribal Dwarf background to add 3 to the roll; when we need to investigate insane arcane phenomena, my PC (Raucous Rella the Tiefling Bard) calls on the fact that she is the Reincarnation of a Famous Wizard (+5). For lying, cheating and fast-talking we have Raucous Rella’s Wandering Troupe (+5); for stealth we have the halfling’s … halfling-i-ness. And so on. If you can convince the GM that it applies, you get the bonus. This means that instead of having a wide range of specifically applicable skills, the character sheet contains a couple of lines for backgrounds, and that’s that.

    Icons and Relationships: Perhaps in something of a nod to Japanese gaming (whether they know it or not), the creators have included a section in the rules for the relationship between the PCs and a set of 12 (I think) powerful figures that vie for supremacy in the world of the 13th Age. These “Icons” are not necessarily gods, but they have great status and power and their machinations in the world play an important role in shaping the destiny of nations. The PCs can have positive, negative or conflicted relationships with icons, and can use these relationships as resources in-game. These relationships may thus play the role simply of contacts or social tools, or they can be hooks and levers to get PCs into complex campaign stories. Over time relationships can change, of course. So far we have only used a relationship once – the rules for this seem to be quite vague and hard to operationalize, but the Icons’ presence in the world has been crucial to our understanding of power plays going on in the background of a couple of adventures, so make for excellent plot hooks. Perhaps in a way they function as a more accessible and temporally influential form of alighnment.

    Characters are Heroic: PCs are intended to start as heroic adventurers, and they gain power rapidly as they increase levels. They also (aside from my bard) start off with a fair amount of power, and are intended to be able as a group to take on fairly challenging opponents. Combat intensifies rapidly, and PCs have lots of ways of doing significant amounts of damage in combat. Our rogue and barbarian, particularly, do ferocious amounts of damage. There are also some cute mechanics involving additional effects on dice rolls – if, for example, Raucous Rella rolls an even number and hits she can give off a battlecry that gives one nearby PC a chance to save against one ongoing effect. These kinds of things make for rich combat decisions and avoid reducing every battle to a chain of hit rolls.

    These characteristics in total lead to a fast-paced, flexible and free-flowing gaming experience, where all mechanics are aimed at encouraging PCs to jack their characters to handle the situation, and GMs are encouraged to play to the moment. The system, by being designed for flexibility and speed, encourages esoteric choices, stunts and improvisation. In some areas the system is too vague (particularly with the icons and relationships, which sit there on my character sheet seeming mostly pointless) and when it strays too close to D&D it can be frustrating – using d20s to resolve actions really annoys me because of its unrealistic effects, for example, and my bard being able to cast Charm Person only once a day is a classic piece of Vancianism. But it has just enough extra elements to relieve the game of some of D&D’s more stultifying effects, and not to feel like just another flavour of D&D.

    If you’re looking for something that feels close enough to D&D to pick up quickly, but has more flavour and incorporates some of the better ideas from outside the world of D&D, and if you like a game that encourages innovation and fast-paced action through its rules, then this is the game for you. If you’re really wedded to a game without daily powers or skills, or if you need a game that doesn’t contain any elements of story and plot development (even if only coded in as options) then I would avoid it. If you need detailed simulationist rules to float your boat, this is also not the game for you, but otherwise I think it can appeal to most players. I think it might be a system best suited to experienced GMs, because its flexibility raises the risk of GMs walking into big mistakes that can damage adventures or campaigns, but if you’ve enough experience to handle those risks (or haul your arse out of the fire after you make the big mistakes) then I strongly recommend giving this system a go to see how well it supports your creativity. It’s a good effort and well worth a go!

  • Why Poor Kids Don’t Go to University

    In today’s Guardian there is a very simple and cute opinion piece that summarizes very nicely the reasons that poor children don’t go to uni. Coming from a poor background myself, I feel I have some insight into the social and cultural factors that bear down on children from poor families to stop them from going to university, and I think I can strongly agree with this article. For example, the author (Peter Wilby) states:

    What stops disadvantaged young people getting into Oxford – which still draws more than 40% of its students from fee-charging schools – is a combination of the high formal entry requirements, the need to display cultural capital and social poise during college interviews, and a sense that the university is an elite club that they can never belong to.

    Speaking of the (admirable) philanthropic efforts of a hedge fund billionaire from a poor part of Wales, Wilby adds:

    Most of the youth of Ely and Splott – and of all other poor areas in England and Wales – are barred from Oxford long before they reach 18 and, given what we now know about the effects of early poverty on educational achievement, from as early as the age of three.

    and in these two very short and simple comments is the central explanation for poor childrens’ under-achievement at the end of high school, especially in the generations who matured in the ’80s and ’90s: university entrance is determined as much by culture as by simple financial barriers. I remember reading an opinion piece about poetry a while back now, in which the writer described his interview for admission to Cambridge: he was expected to recite poetry from memory and, being from a poor school, he had no education in such esoterica. The examiner didn’t even let him finish, but just laughed and kicked him out. I think a few years ago the entrance interviews for Oxford and Cambridge were abolished, and that’s exactly why: they’re exercises in proving cultural capital, not genuine assessment tools, especially in a country where accent identifies class. How does a 17 year old hide their class background in an interview with a professor where they have to recite Homer?

    Where culture does not come into play, one’s family’s economic situation often does. Poor kids go to schools in poor areas, where teachers are bad and resources limited; by high school they are academically weak and in societies where class discrimination is an unspoken rule (like the UK), their teachers give up on their higher education prospects. I was lucky in this regard: I moved to Australia at 13, and even though at age 16 I didn’t know what university was, my career advisor recognized my maths talent and advised me to seek entrance. I think in many schools in the UK a similarly-placed advisor would simply assume that uni was for someone else, and not bother telling me about the world of academic endeavour. Again, this is culture – unless one is lucky enough to have teachers who believe that the little shits they deal with daily deserve to cross class boundaries, one will get a teacher who has been ground under by the anti-intellectual culture of working class Britain, and will be recommended only a limited range of career options. In Australia the situation was very different when I went to school, and so I discovered at age 16 that being a scientist was not just something that the idle rich did back in the 19th century.

    With these cultural and economic barriers in mind, Wilby has some very entertaining suggestions to the aforementioned philanphropist as to how to achieve greater equality in education outcomes. The first is cute:

    if Moritz wishes to remove barriers to improvement among the disadvantaged, he would do better to launch a fund for schools in Ely and Splott, the poorest localities of his native Cardiff, or, better still, take a helicopter and drop £75m in £10 notes over those areas

    and the second is well beyond the tolerance of British society, I think:

    Oxford could transform the composition of its student body simply by writing to every comprehensive in the country’s 100 most deprived areas and guaranteeing a place to the highest performing pupil, even if he or she manages only three B grades. Instead, it hides behind the convenient myth, for which there is no evidence whatever, that applicants are put off by “debt”.

    This is a variant of what (I am told) China’s top university does: it reserves 50 places for each of China’s provinces, and assigns them to the top 50 students who apply. This doesn’t eliminate inequality, but it guarantees that the university takes the top talent from all areas of the country, even if the top talent from those areas is second rate compared to the centre. I’ve had the pleasure of supervising a Master’s student from one of those provinces, and I think I can safely say that the policy hasn’t harmed China’s academic achievements. Perhaps Oxford should try it …

    Wilby finishes with a stirring defence of the attitudes of Britain’s poor:

    True, poor families tend to be debt-averse, mainly because the credit available to them carries eye-watering interest rates. But they know, as well as anyone else, a gift horse when they see one. A university course does not involve debt as conventionally defined, merely an obligation to repay fees, in very easy instalments, if the graduate’s subsequent annual income rises above £21,000, which is roughly the current level of median earnings among the working population. It is a graduate tax in all but name. To suggest that the poor can’t understand that is not only wrong, but patronising.

    This is a nice defence of the autonomy and agency of poor people, and to a great extent I think it’s probably true, but I would add one disagreement: it’s well established that a lot of poor people went into shocking debt to buy a home with dubious prospects during the housing boom. So it’s not the case that poor people are “debt-averse” in the modern world: they are happy to go into debt if they think it will profit them. I think the problem is that people from poor communities don’t in general (at least historically, when I was a kid) see a university education for the guaranteed income-raiser that it is, but see it as some kind of hobby for toffs who don’t need a guaranteed income. I think Wilby is right in observing that, if poor people understood the value of university education the same way that they understood the importance of the “property ladder” they would certainly assess low income student loans in the way that he says; and the evidence as presented by Wilby certainly suggests that the minority of people from poor families who do understand this are not deterred by Britain’s recent huge increase in fees.

    What this means is that the best way to get equality in outcomes at the university level is not necessarily to target low fees, but to improve education in primary and secondary schools. Obviously everyone wants someone else to subsidize their education, but when push comes to shove any system that can defer the capital outlay should, in theory, get the poor kids coming to uni in droves. That years of deferred fees and student loans haven’t achieved such a thing suggests that there are significant economic and cultural barriers to education participation that kick in long before anyone from a poor background gets near signing up for a 9000 pound loan. And well-meaning folk who wish to reduce that inequality need to look at the long game: attack primary school and secondary school disadvantage, and cultural resistance to education, and provided there is some kind of fee deferment process, don’t worry so much about the charge for university itself.

  • Japanese Boutique Brewing 2

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    Tonight I discovered a restaurant called sharaku (projecting happiness) in Shinjuku, near the southeast exit, that sells 10 types of Japanese craft beer. Sharaku is the name of a famous ukiyo-e artist from the middle of the Edo era (I didn’t know this till I looked it up in Wikipedia). They also stock a range of imported beers, but my interest was in the local stuff (I can drink Belgian beer anywhere, but the Hideji beer company almost certainly doesn’t have sales outside Japan!) Their selection of local beers changes by the month: this month they had 10 beers from three companies, in Miyazaki, Fukuoka and Miyagi (I think). The beer pictured is a pale ale made with Cascade hops, a nice aromatic number. The chap at the bar gave me a leaflet for Hideji Beer Company that rated each beer in five dimensions and also gave a serving guide – information for the true connoisseur. The beers were good (I also tried taiyo raga, sunshine lager) and the shop’s explanations matched the taste of the beer perfectly. If you’re in Japan, don’t have time to speed on down to the far end of the country, and want to try some regional beers, I recommend this place (the food was really good too). Japanese craft beers can be a bit intense, but there’s a really interesting culture of local beers here – you would never guess from the common picture that the big companies present, but I’d say it’s close to the US in its diversity, and some of them are really cool. Plus, some of them incorprorate really nice Japanese design, and they have a strong seasonal motif (as does everything in Japan). If you’re in Japan, obviously the best thing you can do is try the sake, and if you visit a restaurant like Kujirayama (whale mountain) you can try a wide selection of regional sake, along with amazing food[1]; but it’s also worth seeking out some of Tokyo’s craft beer sellers, and sharaku does a very good job of show-casing the industry. Try it if you can find it!

    Turtles also adorn beer!

    —

    fn1: I cannot recommend kujirayama highly enough, and in fact I would say that if you come to Japan and you can only spend time in Tokyo, the best decision you can make is to book a hotel in Kichijoji (try the Toyoko inn) and eat in Kichijoji every night: the Thai food here is awesome, Bloomoon has an atmosphere that craps on anything in your country, and Kujirayama has some of the best examples of Japanese food that you can find for a reasonable price. Kichijoji also has a beer bar (holic) with a crazy robot-salvation game, and of course you’re near the studio ghibli museum and on the central line, so you can visit all the boring places (sky tree, museums, whatevah!) quickly and easily. There’s no cat-bus, though.