Tabletop Day Seattle

Wil Wheaton and the fine folks at Geek and Sundry have declared March 30 to be Tabletop Day.

I will be out an about that day, though I don’t yet know where. If you are interested in gaming with me — and perhaps receiving a tutorial on one of the games you’ve purchased through my Good Gift Game Guides — let me know in the comments, by email, or via Twitter, and I’ll keep you in the loop.

The Tabletop website has a map of events, including many in Seattle, but I’m going to list them here as well for convenience. I’ll keep this post updated as a receive new information.

  • Cafe Mox (Ballard): They aren’t ready to announce the specifics yet, but I have it on the QT that a host of events are planned for March 30th. Check back soon for specifics.
  • Dawgsled Events (Downtown): “From 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM, we will have the run of the entire 76th floor (that’s the top!) of the Columbia Tower. There will be games, games and more games! We’ll also have live streaming of the main Table Top Day event in Los Angeles. General admission tickets currently cost $15; your admission gets you into the event and gets you a catered lunch. The price of drinks is not included, but drinks are available for purchase. Because there will be alcoholic beverages available, this event is for gamers 21 and older.” [Event Link]
  • Gamma Ray Games (Capitol Hill): Nothing on their site yet, but …
 
  • Uncle Games (Bellevue): “Board Game party featuring local gaming celebrities and publishers! 3:00pm until 11:45pm.” [Event link]

More events as I learn of them.

Meanwhile, In Congress …

“Oh my God, our approval rating is below 15%! We have to fix this sequestration mess before Friday!”

“Or — hear me out — or we could spend the week making the biggest and best Harlem Shake video yet!”

You totally know this conversation happened.

Songs of the Year

A playlist of songs with years as titles.

The 2013 Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool

The 2012 Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool Page is live. Per tradition there has been exactly zero user testing, so let me know if you encounter bugs, typos, or miscellaneous weirdness.

A Head for Numbers

Over at Que Sera Sera, Sarah Brown has a post about the misconceptions that people (including myself) had as a child. Be sure to read through the comments, which include such gems as, “My husband believed (still believes?) that limes are unripened lemons”.

Also in the comments are a few instances of readers coming to shocking realizations, such as the woman who discovers that her long-held belief that Alaska is an island (because of its placement on US maps) is erroneous.

That reminded me of an incident in my late 20s. I had lived in Washington State nearly all of my life, and driven its roads innumerable times. One afternoon, however, I was driving home from the airport, having picked up a friend who was making her first visit to the state.

“I love your State Highway signs,” my friend remarked as we passed one. I thought this was an odd thing to find charming, and asked her to clarify. “I like how the number is printed on a silhouette of George Washington,” she replied.

I had no idea what she was talking about. It wasn’t until we approached another of the black and white signs that I could validate her observation.

image

“You never knew that?” she asked. “What did you think the white thing was?”

I shrugged. “It’s always been the State Highway Background Shape to me.”

The Problem With The Dark Knight Rises

I saw The Dark Knight Rises early, thanks to a corporate morale event. We even got free popcorn. I was excited to see the movie, but also to knock out a 800-word review that evening, sharing my enthusiasm for the franchise and gloating about having seen the film two days before you.

That review was not written, alas. My pervasive laziness shares 80% of the blame, as it doesn’t in all things. But I also didn’t want to be the killjoy. Nor did I particularly want to receive death threats. Because, honestly, I found the movie a little dull.

In the months since the release of TDKR it has become fashionable to grouse about the film — search Google for “dark knight rises” “plot holes” and you get somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 results. And so, now that I have ample cover, I will slink out of the shadows and explain my disappointment.

First, though, let me establish credentials. I am not only a huge fan of Batman (I was an avid reader of the comic books in my prime), and also of Christopher Nolan (Memento is in my top ten films of all time). Thus, Batman Begins seemed like a dream come true, a perfect marriage of these twin enthusiasm, and with The Scarecrow, my favorite Batman villain, as bridesmaid. And like everyone I thought The Dark Knight was off-the-charts great.

And let me state for the record that, despite everything I’m about to say, I think The Dark Knight Rises is good. It’s a good film. I liked it. Mostly.

But the film has a problem. And the problem ain’t plot holes. I mean, The Avengers has plot holes the size of Galactus and is still fantastic.

No, the problem with The Dark Knight Rises is that it doesn’t contain any goddamned Batman.

Here’s the thing. In the DC Universe, Batman holds his own against the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman. In fact, it is generally acknowledged that Batman could beat anyone in fight, given sufficient time to prepare, despite having no powers whatsoever.

He is able to do this because he possesses the following qualities, approximately zero of which are on display in The Dark Knight Rises:

  • He is in peak physical condition: The difference between a contestant on The Biggest Loser and Michael Phelps is negligible when stacked up against, say, Superman, so this is the least of the attributes that make Batman Batman. But it’s worth mentioning. In TDKR, Batman starts out hobbled and later gets his back all busted, but, really, no big deal. I give it a pass.
  • He is monomaniacal in his fight against crime: When TDKR opens, Batman has been retired for a long stretch of time. To be fair, (a) The Dark Knight Returns — Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novel — opened the same way, and (b) TDKR explained that Gotham had been relatively crime-free during Batman’s absence (another egregious variation from canon, but whatever). Even so, Bruce Wayne’s (clinical) obsession with fighting crime is central to the character.
  • He is the World’s Greatest Detective (yes, all capitalized like that): Batman didn’t premiere in “Detective Comics” for nothing. TDKR pretty much only had one mystery — the identity of the person in the pit — and Batman not only failed to solve it, he didn’t even realize it existed.
  • He is a master strategist: This ability, along with the aforementioned skill at detection, is what enables him to not only serve on the Justice League of America, but often lead it: while everyone else is running around punching things, he’s figuring shit out and issuing orders. Alas, there’s no evidence of this talent in TDKRwhere, even after having five months in a hole to plan, Batman spends his time in Gotham reacting to one crisis after another.
  • He is a world-class inventor: In the comics, Bruce Wayne is essentially Tony Stark sans the drinking problem or ability to get laid. Which is to say, he makes his own gadgets. In the film (as I recall), all the hardware was made by either Lucius Fox or acquired by Wayne Industries; in fact, Batman doesn’t even know about the stuff until he gets a tour of the toybox. Worse, it wasn’t even as if Bruce Wayne alone could drive the stuff; he hands the Batcycle over to Catwoman, and she’s doing 180 turns in a matter of moments. When the main mode of fighting the bad guys is a bunch of technology that anyone can use, who needs the Caped Crusader at all?
  • He is fabulously wealthy: Okay, he was still fabulously wealthy in TDKR. Ima give you that one.

I liked The Dark Knight Rises, I really did. It was a good Christopher Nolan film. I’d just kinda been hoping for some Batman.

Playtest

Max Temkin (creator of the infamous Cards Against Humanity) and I have launched a new tumblr, devoted to board games. My review of Friday — a one-player game by the designer of Power Grid — appears today.

Original Article

Text Adventurer

Here’s a thing I did: textadventurer.org.

I created the @textadventurer twitterbot to help myself learn the Twitter API. Originally it did nothing but tweet Zork commands, taken from a walkthrough. I was its sole follower.

Oddly, I really enjoyed seeing the text adventurer wander through my twitter feed every hour or so. And when he would tweet, say,”go north”, I would find myself curious as to where he was headed. So I eventually created the companion account @zork_i, rebooted @textadventurer, and introduced them to one another. Now they are playing out Zork I in its entirety.

Follow @textadventurer if you just want him to stagger into your Twitter timeline on occasion; follow @zork_i if you’d like to see the game reply to his commands. You can see the history of their interactions here, and check the current state of the game by visiting textadventurer.org.

Some details:

  • @textadventurer sends moves at random intervals; you may see six on one day, zero on another. On average he will issue three or four commands every 24 hours.


  • The adventurer will not make mistakes. He will not do something fatal, put the game into an unwinnable state, attempt to pick up items while his inventory is full, get lost in the maze, etc. That is not to say that the adventurer will complete the game in the minimum number of moves, though. He will sometimes stop to smell the roses (and read the leaflets), even when such actions are not necessary for completion.


  • Even though the adventurer is semi-optimized, you will still, if you follow him on Twitter, sometimes receive a passel of movement commands in a row, as he works his way through the coal mines, navigates the maze, and travels from one end of the Great Underground Empire to the other. I though about packing these into a single command for brevity (“go north, east, southeast, up”, etc.), but decided to leave each command atomic for the sake of authenticity.


  • The replies are taken verbatim from Infocom’s Zork I. Because memory was at a premium at the time of the game’s release, most replies are short enough to fit into single tweet. Some take two or three, which @zork_i will send at 60 seconds intervals. There are (relatively) few longer replies, requiring three or more tweets, most of which are found early in the game as new rooms are explored; a couple require five or six tweets; and there are two which are seven tweets long.


Want to play Zork I yourself? You can do so online, or find downloadable versions of the game at the Interactive Fiction Database. Happy adventuring!

Original Article

Tweets of Horror

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Rob Daviau ran an epic game of Tomb of Horrors.

Lest the names ring no bells: “Rob Daviau” was previously mentioned on this blog as designer of the excellent Risk: Legacy, while “Tomb of Horrors” is the legendary (and notoriously lethal) 1978 adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the playing of which was de rigueur for anyone who dabbled in the 1st edition of AD&D.

Throughout the month of May, Daviau sent a number of tweets about his preparations for the big game. Finally, over the Memorial Day weekend, he inflicted the dungeon on his friends, and kept his Twitter followers appraised of the carnage.

Here are his tweets, reprinted with permission:

Prologue

 
 
Day One

 
 
Day Two

 
 
Day Three

 
 
Epilogue

 
 
A Point of Clarification

Says Daviau:

The victory condition was “steal the demi-lich’s treasure and leave,” not “kill the demi-lich”. The first is possible; the second is not. Careful reading of the text shows that you can rob him blind in the final room as long as you don’t touch his skull. If you do that, you die. Once my players figured out “don’t touch the skull”, they won.

The things you need to do to kill the demi-lich are so obscure, non-intuitive, and bizarre that no one would think to do them. And the adventure doesn’t give any clues to it so you’d have to work it in to the campaign ahead of time.

 
 
Q&A

Matthew: Do you play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons?
Rob Daviau: I did as a middle school kid, then off and on since then. I play when I can, but finding a regular campaign has eluded me since about 1999. Either I don’t the time, or a group is too far away, or, as often is the case, the group just doesn’t feel right. Being in a D&D group is like being in a band. If the vibe is slightly off, it’s just not the same.

M: Why 1st edition Tomb of Horrors?
RD: I’m 42, so 1e is the way I’ve played 85%+ of my D&D experiences. As I got older, I didn’t have the time I did when I was 11-15. So there’s a certain fondness for it. I’ve also been playtesting the D&DNext rules for Wizards of the Coast since November and I wanted to go back and see how 1e rules felt as an adult—how much was nostalgia and how much still held together.

Playing Tomb of Horrors came after reading Ready Player One, where the 1e Tomb has a prominent role. After finishing the book I went back and read the module for the first time in 30 years. It seemed unfair, biased, and kind of crazy. My guess is that future editions make it more “fair”, so I wanted to go back to Gygax’s original vision.

I have to say that the experience, both the system and the module, were far better than I expected from the prep work. I scared the hell out of the players and they really did take their time to think things through, resulting in a far lower death rate than anticipated, and hoped for. Also 1e, for all its useless parts, really puts things in the hands of the DM. You only use about 5% of the rules since the rest don’t really make sense. What I discovered is that a lack of rules results a lack of rules lawyers. Its as simple as that.

M: I’ve never played Tomb of Horrors, but isn’t 20 PCs an insane number of players?
RD: It would be if that were a player count, but it was a character count. I was at a friend’s home convention, where there was going to be over 30 people, with perhaps 15 or so D&D players. But I didn’t want people to have to commit to the whole adventure (it took about 8-10 hours), nor be disappointed if they died in the first minute, so I recast the adventure as a sort of puzzle. Five players would play at once, using characters from the pre-gen pool; when a character died, a new one could be brought in. This way players could come and go, and also not feel bad if they character they were playing died suddenly.

M: At one point you mention Dwarven Forge. What is that?
RD: The company that makes the incredible 3D dungeon walls, floors, etc., that you see throughout my pictures. My friend has just enough money and just too little willpower, and ended up buying a tremendous amount of it about 10 years ago. We had a lot of fun building these rooms. Grown nerds just look for opportunities like this.

M: May I post your Jim Carroll “People Who Died” rewrite?
RD: Please do. I wrote it because there were people still at the convention who had spent the weekend actually jamming in the garage. I threw it at them as a challenge to learn and record it. The results are below.
 
 
All the PCs Who Died

Fodder the Fighter, he was 8 levels high
Gargoyle hit him, ripped out his spine
Aryk was next up on the gargoyle’s list
Threw him in a pit but Aryk can’t fly
Davin entered an arch of smoke and mist
Sprung out naked and started to cry
He was a friend of mine

Those are PCs who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Karl was astonishing, a gnome of some reknown
Touched a lightning altar so they put him in the ground
Dravin got the shakes from a gas of fear and dread
Fled the tomb of horrors, with our gold but he’s not dead
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died

Those are PCs who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

The Mincer ran in fear and took a bad left turn
Slid down a polished slope and started to burn
No-name 12 was a wizard who the group agreed to kill
To find a secret door that was invisible
And No-name 12, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are PCs who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Howard Hughes the cleric had just found his groove
Ended up some jelly on the demi-lich roof
Cringar of West had been there longest
But someone knocked the skull and Acererak kills the strongest
But Cringar didn’t cry, Cringar died

Those are PCs who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

The rest grabbed the loot from the last little room
Made their way out of this filthy little tomb
They got some bitchin potions, a rod, and some gems
So the others didn’t die in vain,
And No-Name 12, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother

Those are PC who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

Original Article

How to Not Kill a Cyclist

In observance of National Bike to Work Day, I have compiled a list of tips for motorists on co-existence with cyclists: How to Not Kill a Cyclist.

Original Article