Weekly Geekly for October 18, 2024
Weekly Geekly Oddity: Asymmetric Game Play
Before I get too deep into this week’s Weekly Geekly Oddity, I thought I’d share that I created a Geekerati Discord Channel if you want to chat about stuff in between posts. This invite link will be valid for the next 7 days.
In the early days of role playing games, there was a lot of push back against class based games like Dungeons & Dragons and this was particularly true of the Basic version of the game. Critics didn't like the inflexibility of classes and believed that they were overly restrictive to player options, but one of the things often overlooked was how this inflexibility provided an interesting asymmetry in play experiences. The Dungeons & Dragons play experience was different depending on the class you played. The game had different mechanical sub-systems based on the class you played and those shifted the game experience for the players.
More recent versions of Dungeons & Dragons have even broader opportunities for asymmetrical play experiences, but with the rise of “consistent” mechanics the different play experiences are less dependent on class choices. This is in part due to a shift in the definition of “game balance” from the early editions of the game to the post-3rd edition model. As much as the Dungeons & Dragons game now has mechanical options for a variety of asymmetrical play styles (more on that later), when it comes to the combat experiences of characters that asymmetry has decreased. In order to understand this, one only needs to look at the reasons for the design choices in the early editions of the game.
The underlying logic behind Dungeons & Dragons being a class based game rather than a skill-based one, was articulated by J. Eric Holmes in his classic Fantasy Role Playing Games, is that classes were created to foster teamwork by giving each class a distinctive role in an adventure as a way to make everyone “matter.” One of the advantages of table top role playing games is their ability to foster friendship, and one of the best ways they do this is through the synergies created by soft-asymmetrical classes. Given that soft-asymmetry strictly enforced cooperation, it encouraged players to work together for a goal and provided a foundation for less in-group conflict than a more free form skill based game allowed. If you only have one Thief in the party, there’s no one arguing who’s better at picking pockets and no competition to “be the best in the party” at something. In a “balanced” party, everyone is the best at something, just different somethings.
The asymmetry didn’t end with class roles though. In early versions of Dungeons & Dragons each class had specific mechanics that applied only to that class. Fighters gained multiple attacks per round. How many and how they were calculated varied from edition to edition, but it existed in almost every edition of the game. Thieves had percentile based skills that allowed them to Climb Sheer Surfaces or Hide in Shadows. No other base class had either these skills nor a percentile based mechanical subsystem. Wizards had spells and were required to store these spells in spell books which limited which spells they had access to. Clerics also had spells but they had no spell book limitation and they had Turn Undead which used a unique sub-system of its own.
The variation in abilities and sub-systems meant that a player had a very different overall experience depending on the class selected. If the players decided to play single class campaigns, the experiences could be vastly different from a play style perspective. The difference in play experience would extend to mechanics experienced as how one approached combat.
While different classes having different abilities and mechanics fostered a certain kind of asymmetrical play, there were kinds of play that were largely overlooked in low level play in the early editions. When Dungeons & Dragons shifted to unified mechanics for the majority of actions, the rules began to focus less on classes and more on unified mechanics to facilitate asymmetric play experiences.
This trend began with Dungeons & Dragons 3.x and has continued with different levels of granularity ever since. As mentioned before, in earlier editions of Dungeons & Dragons the play experience from character to character was very different, but the overall play experience was more similar across groups. If players wanted a different game experience, they played a different class because class choice significantly changed player experience with the game.
In post-3.x D&D players can choose to play entirely different game experiences without the need for changing characters classes. What do I mean by this? Starting with Dungeons & Dragons 3.x, players could choose to play a tactical miniatures game, a skill-intensive dungeon crawl, or a narrative storytelling role playing game. These are all potentially completely different experiences.
Could players do this with earlier editions of the game? Yes, they could. However, with the exception of higher level “domain” play, there was little mechanical support for these other kinds of play. What makes 3.x, and later editions of the game, different is that you can play these three ways, plus you can play a pub running simulation where you never interact with other players, a magic item design factory game, an art dealership game, or a mercantile simulation. Interestingly, with the exception of the magic design factory game, you can do all of these as solo game play experiences. The 3.x game system has mechanics that allow for simulated economy games. All you need is to take your character with a high Craft(Beer) and have that character make decisions about what kind of beer her or she wants to make, buy the supplies, make the rolls and you know how many CP, SP, or GP the character earns each week. You can do this until the character dies of old age.
The 4th and 5th Editions of Dungeons & Dragons streamlined the skill system a great deal, but they still included mechanics that allowed for this kind of pub simulation play. In 4e you would use the Skill Challenge Mechanics and in 5e you would use a combination of skill or item proficiencies against Difficulty Class numbers to engage in this kind of play. Thankfully, these streamlined systems aren’t as granular as 3.x where you were literally counting the amount of CP earned toward the manufacture of an item, but that style of play is still there.
If an economic Sim is what you want to play 3.x and later can accommodate you. If you want to play a narrative game that is mechanically, rather than performatively, supported then 3.x with it’s “diplomacy,” “intimidate,” and “bluff” checks is the game for you. These skills, and skills like them, encourage non-combat/narrative solutions with mechanical support. Roleplaying seduction scenes can either be replaced, or supplemented, by the mechanics rather than relying on a potentially arbitrary ruling from the DM after a long acted dialogue.
Come to think of it, when I look at many of the complaints against 4e they actually come down to a complaint about the reduction in mechanical representation of role play elements more than anything else. I often read that “4e is a good tactical miniatures game but not a good roleplaying game.” That’s a statement that’s only true if you think that roleplaying scenes require rolls. One of my personal critiques of skill-based systems, and Rolemaster, was that they were roll playing games and not role playing games. Yet many critiques disliked 4e because it shifted away from being a roll playing game in narrative scenes.
You can narratively role play the crap out of 4e. You can free-form play it without miniatures. You can story tell with it. There are tons of game design options as you add more sourcebooks. What you cannot do, is run an inn copper piece by copper piece using the basic mechanics of the game. The 3.x game approached the question from a mechanics based mindset (which you can read about here and in the D&D/GURPS article below). We still have asymmetrical play styles mechanically embedded into post-3.x rules, but they are less granular.
I Liked D&D More Before it Became GURPS
“Almost all old school dungeon delving is an off the cuff Player VS DM negotiation made in the moment.” — Jim Zub
This trend of asymmetrical play in D&D, and in RPGs, started early but tended to be highlighted at “name level” and above. You can look at the War Machine and Dominion rules in the old BECMI Dungeon & Dragons game, and they are central to skill based systems like GURPS, Champions 4th Edition, or Runequest. These games all have mechanics that allow for simultaneous asymmetrical play experiences. Not just the soft-asymmetry of classes having defined roles, but actual different play.
I’m not advocating for, or against, a particular form of asymmetric play, but just wandering through thoughts about how role playing games have facilitated different play experiences over the years.
If you want more discussion of asymmetry in game play, here is a video by Extra Credit discussing asymmetry in computer games. It inspired this Weekly Oddity and has me thinking about whether I've personally experienced periods of simultaneous and asymmetrical play in any past campaigns and wondering if you have any stories of your own experiences of asymmetrical play to share.
Weekly Film Article Cavalcade
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
Back in 2001, Luke Y Thompson reviewed The Others starring Nicole Kidman for the New Times. His overall review of the film is positive and, possibly unintentionally, makes the case that sometimes the best formula for a horror film is the classic formula. I agree whole heartedly with that sentiment. As much as I like good updates to the genre, there is a reason that the classic formula is the classic formula. It works and The Others is a case where it works extremely well. I’m not quite as hard on the ending as Luke is, but I’m grateful he steps around spoiling it as like Caddo Lake it’s a film worth experiencing without the end being spoiled. If you are interested, I recommend picking up the Criterion Collection edition. It’s got a number of interesting bonus features and it’s currently on sale.
Luke’s a little harder on the Arnold Schwartzenegger action horror film End of Days. My absolute favorite passage in the review is when Luke provides us with a hint of what the film could have been:
Given that director Peter Hyams managed to temporarily resuscitate Jean-Claude Van Damme's career with Timecop and Sudden Death, and given the aforementioned T2 similarities, there was plenty of reason to hope that End of Days would be the grand-slam battle royal to end them all, a take-no-prisoners, blow-up-the-world celebrity death match pitting Arnold against his toughest foe to date . . . Satan.
Hyams is an odd director in that he’s directed some very good stuff like Capricorn One, The Star Chamber, Running Scared, and Timecop. He’s also directed some less than impressive fare like A Sound of Thunder and The Musketeer. Looks to me like his films are best when he’s “all in” and as Luke highlights in his review of End of Days, Hyams was more phoning it in than all in on this one.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
One of the highlights of the first Suicide Squad for me was Joel Kinnaman’s performance as Rick Flag and I thought Kinnaman and the character were done dirty in the sequel. He’s got a charisma that I find compelling and I’m always on the lookout for a film he is staring in. Last year, I watched him in John Woo’s Silent Night, a solid 5/6 out of 10 on the Woo Meter. The Woo Meter ranges from Last Hurrah for Chivalry to Mission Impossible II and measures just how self-indulgent the imagery of a film is and there is a high correlation between number of doves in a film and its Woo Meter score.
As a 5/6 Silent Night had some enjoyable elements but fell a little flat for me and was about 50/50 with both audiences and critics on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not often you find consensus there, so I’d keep that in mind. Based on Courtney’s review of Kinnaman’s latest film The Silent Hour over at Variety, it looks like he’s in yet another mediocre action film. I was particularly taken by her critique that the film underutilizes its central conceit after the first act.
While the film’s first act does a decent job audibly connoting Shaw’s struggles, as the soundtrack emulates tinnitus and malfunctioning hearing aids, it only allows infrequent glimpses into Shaw’s and Ava’s compromised perspectives thereafter — something the material could’ve used to better advantage.
I’ll still be checking it out because I like Kinnaman and I have a near obsession to watch everything Mark Strong stars in, but I’ll be waiting for it to hit Paramount+.
Glimpses from the Substackosphere and Bloggerverse
’s Weekly Report hit my inbox early this morning and it’s good as always. I particularly enjoyed his comments about Caddo Lake (currently on HBO). It’s a well shot and well acted film that builds suspense nicely and uses its conceit very well. Like Mark, I won’t reveal the conceit, but will add that once you figure it out you will know where the story is heading. I left the film feeling both happy and sad. I’m eager to watch it a second time, this time with my wife, so we can chat about the “message” of the film and how it fits with why we like the sitcom Frasier so much more than Cheers.
In a recent piece giving Dungeon Master advice over
, reminds us to make sure that as Game Masters we should work hard to act “as though the whole [game] world is always real.” As Nate puts it, NEVER BREAK KAYFABE during play. When I’m speaking as Boriz Tzerkov Arch-Mechanist of the Clockwork Orthodoxy, I want him to feel real to the players. I want them to know when they are talking to HIM, they are talking to him and not to me. Though they are also talking to the entire Collective Mind of the Orthodoxy, but that’s another issue.Metagaming can be a fun part of play, but it can also destroy a sense of wonder about the setting you’ve created. There’s a reason one of my old gaming groups invented the “Meanwhile, back at the Ranch” in joke. It was a reminder to set aside the chat and metagaming and return to the world. Sure, we play games to hang out with people we like, but we also play for emergent stories.
As a side note, his discussion of diagesis reminded me of when film critics talk about music being “diagetic.” What they mean by this is that the music the audience is hearing is also being heard by the characters in the film. It’s not mere score. I remember when one of my wife’s classmates used this term, a term from film criticism and theory, during a class on sound design and sound editing. The professor responded quickly with “it’s Source as in Source versus Score.” It reminded me that we must always make sure our lexicon fits who we are talking with, which is one of the reasons I liked Nate’s piece so much. It had that academic language (diagetic), practical language, and fun language (Kayfabe). It was written for multiple audiences.
In yet another interesting post
discusses the connections between art, music, and role playing games. This time, he focuses on the art of Patrick Woodruff, who did art for Judas Priest and Budgie. I love how Matt includes Guitar Picks highlighting his blog name, demonstrating that the album featured is from his own personal collection. Album art in the 1980s and 1990s is, in many ways, a kind of visual Appendix N for an entire sub-group of gamers and it’s always nice to see more examples of the influence.
The cover of Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny reminds me a bit of Carl Critchlow’s art for Role Aids supplements Sentinels and Apocalypse. Carl is best known, to me, as the creator of Thrud the Barbarian.
has an interesting update this week over at the. There’s a brief discussion of The Electric State role playing game. It’s the third game based on Simon Stålenhag’s narrative art, a series of artwork that has inspired two streaming companies to develop series and film. The Tales from the Loop series from Amazon Prime was the first and a new movie is coming from Netflix starring Millie Bobbie Brown and Chris Pratt. This latest film is directed by the Russo Brothers, so I’m expecting a less morose tone than the Amazon Prime series. That series made me feel lonely just watching it, even as Simon Stålenhag’s has an opposite effect.
I was most excited about the Engineer’s discussion of Maladum. My copy is sitting on my shelf and I’m waiting to downsize my game collection a bit before cracking it open. One does need table space and in order to get that I’ll need to deconstruct some garage shelves that have games I don’t play on them. I’m a big fan of Battle Systems products and cannot wait to watch the Engineer’s campaign series.
In his latest article discussing why you should give Original Dungeons & Dragons a try over at
, Thog highlights how reading Jason Cone’s and Wayne Rossi’s OD&D Primer changed how he approached the game. Thog was kind enough to let us know that the book could be found online and on his Substack Community Dungeon Discord, but it looks like the link to join has expired. I found it over on the OD&D Pro-Boards and have uploaded it here.
Like Thog, mine own experience with OD&D was changed when I began to engage with the OD&D community. When I read Jason Vey’s older mini-books at his Grey Elf D&D page, I became committed to playing OD&D as well as newer versions of the game. I liked Jason’s stuff so much, I’ve purchased a number of his game designs and interviewed him a while back when he ran his Sword & Sorcery RPG Kickstarter.
Speaking of Kickstarters, I’m very excited about the latest Kickstarter from Monolith Games. They are currently funding Conan: The Hyborian Age role playing game and it marks the fourth game system our favorite Barbarian has been adapted to (AD&D Modules, TSR Conan, d20, and 2d20 from Modiphius). I’ve downloaded a copy of the Quick Play rules and this looks like a lot of fun. I’ll be reviewing another game by Monolith Games soon, no spoilers there, and I’ve really liked what their design team has done in both board and role playing game formats.
As a last stop this week,
is revisiting an old podcast episode covering the classic It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. It never ceases to amaze me how generation after generation, the works of Charles M Schulz continue to speak to us. I’ll definitely be listening to this episode on the drive to work next week.
Role Playing Game Recommendation
It’s hard to generate genuine dread and horror in a role playing game session. You can gross players out, give them jump scares, or maybe give them a taste of suspense all through good storytelling, but to have them feel the prolonged anxiousness of dread is a difficult task. Role playing game mechanics don’t often support them as much as you might want. I’ve read many a play report of Call of Cthulhu campaigns that ended up as nothing more than Team Alpha Nuking Nyarlethotep and gunning down Mi-Go with high caliber rounds. The game’s mechanics support that style of play as much as they do player where characters are shaky academics who fall into despair at the mere thought of riding the subway.
So when one finds a game like Dread where the mechanics themselves help to amplify the tension the players experience as the adventure continues, one has stumbled on one of the perfect mechanical representations of the horror genre in role playing.
To quote the game:
Beyond the door we could hear the highway, the cars, the trucks, the roar of freedom. Beyond the door. But the twenty feet between us and the door, between us and the highway... Only the lighter's dying blue flame interrupted that ocean of darkness... where It waited, just where we left It.
Explore hostile worlds of your own creation with Dread, a game carved from the intense emotions buried in your favorite horror stories. Through individually crafted questionnaires, players are coaxed into revealing their characters' abilities, shortcomings, personalities, and fears. These characters are plunged into macabre tales devised by the host. When moments of conflict and peril arise in the story, it is the players' nerves, rather than the whims of dice, that determine the fates of their characters.
This PDF, a few friends, your own sick imagination, and one set of Jenga® blocks is all you need.
Music Recommendations
It wouldn’t be fair to my daughters to go through the entire spooky season without recommending a song from one of their absolutely favorite films. For as long as I can remember, History and Mystery have adored The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Citizens of Halloween is one of the best songs in that musical.
Keeping in the songs related to movies my family and I love, I have to include the People are Strange cover by Echo and the Bunnymen. The original song is a classic and this cover version is used to good effect in the film. Movies like The Lost Boys are why I have a love/hate relationship with Joel Schumacher films. He seems to alternate between brilliance and camp, but with The Lost Boys he found the perfect balance of both and the scene featuring this song is on the brilliant side.
On the campy side is Tim Cappello’s I Still Believe, one of two scenes that demonstrate that Joel Schumacher is the master of the sexy saxophonist trope in film. The other example is in St. Elmo’s Fire. The full song is below, but I’ve included the clip from the film as well because the moment that Jami Gertz and Jason Patric make eye contact is one of my favorite sexy moments in film. So much is said without any dialog.
Type O Negative’s Summer Breeze was the perfect song to open the film adaptation of Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer. The 90s were the peak era for teen horror and the stories of Lois Duncan served as the foundation for two of them. I Know What You Did Last Summer was a direct adaptation of her book and Teaching Mrs. Tingle in part inspired by her book Killing Mr. Griffin. Duncan was a talented author of horror and suspense tales who tragically encountered personal horror when her daughter Kaitlyn was murdered in 1989.
Film Recommendation
Long before he amazed us with his martial arts prowess in the John Wick franchise, but after he’d already become one of my favorite martial artists in Only the Strong, Mark Dacascos starred in the best martial arts horror film ever made. Brotherhood of the Wolf is based on the French legend of the Beast of Gevaudan. It’s a legend that has inspired everything from werewolf tales to Beauty and the Beast and it provides fertile ground for an amazing action film.
![Blu-ray Review] Scream Factory's 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' Collector's Edition is More a Collection of Scraps - KILLER HORROR CRITIC](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fffec27e6-baa7-48dc-991d-158fc65d182d_721x408.jpeg "Blu-ray Review] Scream Factory's 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' Collector's Edition is More a Collection of Scraps - KILLER HORROR CRITIC")
Samuel Le Bihan plays Grégoire de Fronsac, one in a long list of characters who made me come up with the heuristic “Never piss off a veteran of the French and Indian Wars.” Grégoire de Fronsac is both a veteran of that war and a biologist sent to Gevaudan to investigate the mysterious happenings there and from the opening moment this film signals that it will be well acted, interesting, and filled with beautifully shot action. Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel are fantastic as well as aristocrats in a France that will explode into Revolution before the century is over. Cults, secret societies, werewolves, and martial arts. This film has it all and it’s amazing.
Whenever I think of The Others, I remember it opening the same week as Session 9, and absolutely crushing it so hard that people barely remember it. Which is a shame, because of the two I prefer S9.
Another great issue - thanks for mentioning Critical Hit Parader and for noticing the guitar picks!