Weekly Geekly Rundown for April 28, 2023

Geeking Out Over Interesting Items in the Pop Culture and Table Top Gaming Geekosphere. Some new. Some old. The Geekerati Way.

Happy Arbor Day!

The Geekerati Newsletter’s Weekly Geekly Rundown isn’t going to feature The Happening among its recommendations, but I couldn’t help but laugh this morning as the local news wished me a “Happy Arbor Day!” this morning. I have terrible hay fever and it’s all because of the beautiful Crab Apple trees in our neighborhood. They bloom in cream and pink, and drive my nose crazy. Even with a full dose of Claritin, my forehead itches beyond belief. This combination of Arbor Day wishes and allergies brought to mind M. Night Shyamalan’s much maligned 2008 film The Happening and gave me a new appreciation for it because this spring it certainly feels like the trees are out to get me. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a glimpse at Shyamalan’s transformation of a good tight short story idea that would make a good Outer Limits episode into a 91 minute film.

Now that I’ve touched upon the horrors I face every spring, let’s move onto the actual recommendations.

Advantage in D&D? What are the odds?

Matt Parker, my favorite Mathematical Comedian, has a recent video discussing how the advantage mechanic in D&D affects the probability of rolling a high number. The video is an excellent rundown of the mechanic that applies the logic to a couple of die types, meaning that it also helps to show how similar mechanics influence games using different polyhedrals.

Matt uses a combination of computer simulation, actual physical modeling (which is really cool), and mathematics to give a complete picture of how the mechanic increases the average value of the end result. I do wish he’d done a little more step by step in the mathematics sections as those watching on apps might be left asking, “Hey, were did that step come from?” That aside, it’s a really cool video.

It’s mechanics like this that show you how much the D&D game has changed over time to become a more “heroic” game. The benefit from advantage, a benefit that player characters receive far more frequently than any particular opponent, is massive and it adds to the feeling that characters have become more powerful over time in D&D. Whether you like this particular aspect or not, I like it just like I like step-die systems, it’s a very elegant way of giving a benefit in play.

I’ll be writing up simulation code in R to demonstrate his findings with a wide variety of dice. For the time being though, Matt has provided his Python code for us to play around with. Ironically, the code is shorter than the license to use it.

import random

number_of_sides  =  int(input("How many sides on your dice? "))

sum_of_results = 0.0

trials = 0
while trials < 10**6:
    sum_of_results += max([int(random.random()*number_of_sides)+1,int(random.random()*number_of_sides)+1])
    trials += 1

print("Average result of rolling two and taking the highest is about {0}".format(sum_of_results/trials))

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2022 Stand-up Maths

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
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furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Adding Extended Game World Time to Your RPG Campaigns

Chris McDowell’s recent post regarding how to set up a campaign in his upcoming Mythic Bastionland RPG discusses what he calls “Start and Scope.” These are essentially “campaign scale dials” that allow a GM and players to discuss the social level of any campaign (what he calls start) and how long the campaign is expected to last.

The start option basically determines what tier of society the player characters are from as a group and it aligns partly, though not perfectly, with the Three Orders of Medieval Society: Oratores (priests/”those who pray”), bellatores (nobles/knights/warriors), laboratores (peasants/laborers). It’s a dial that parallel’s mechanics in the Ars Magica role playing game, in that various orders of society are represented in a directly mechanical way. Where I to give Chris a bit of design advice, it might be two fold. First, to make the dial more directly reflect the Three Orders. There’s a lot of good social commentary to be had in that use and Chris’s prior games have some interesting social commentary. The second, is to allow for the possibility of a campaign that features all three at the same time just as Ars Magica does with its Magus, Companion, Grog.

As for the scope option, there are a number of interesting things going on in his conversation of this dial. The initial use of this dial allows GMs and players to negotiate just how long they want the game to last, and this is a conversation that happens far too infrequently in game campaigns. Typically, my groups assume that the campaign will exist from start to some abstract point when it either ends climactically or peters out after having lost inertia. I love the inclusion of this discussion. I own a TON of games and having negotiations like this would allow me and my groups to play more games together while minimizing disappointment. It’s a great idea.

Embedded within this discussion of scope though is another interesting mechanic that echoes both Ars Magica and Pendragon, two of the best medieval role playing games ever designed. Like Chris’s Mythic Bastionland, the Ars Magica system emphasizes the passing of seasons both within and between game sessions. It is an important element of Ars Magica because each session tends to focus on a single Magus character with other players playing companions and grogs. This makes rotating who is the Magus player matters in order to give all players a fair shake at being powerful. Pendragon is a little different. In Pendragon, there is only one adventure per year. This adventure can last multiple sessions, or not, and once it is finished the calendar moves to the next year. This mechanic allowed Greg Stafford’s brilliant Pendragon Campaign to have vast scope and for the campaign to take place over generations.

All that said, Chris is doing some really interesting stuff with his next Bastionland product.

Quick Groundwork for a Campaign

The Conan Relaunch and How RPG Fans Overlook One of the Biggest Promoters of RPGs in Hobby History

I already posted about how there is a new Conan Comic Book coming out from Titan Comics and how it will be written by Jim Zub. I’m a huge Conan fan and a fan of Zub’s and I see this as a great combination. What I didn’t talk about there was the impact that Fredrik Malmberg has had on the role playing game hobby. Midnight’s Edge has a very indepth interview with Malmberg and Zub discussing the new Conan release.

Who is Fredrik Malmberg and why is it kind of awesome that he owns the Conan IP? I’m glad you asked. Fredrik Malmberg is the Ian Livingstone, if not the Gary Gygax, of Swedish role playing game designers. This is a man who regularly attends Gen Con as well as ComicCon. He went from local game store owner to game publisher to Hollywood and Video Game magnate and no one outside of industry professionals talks about this guy. It’s bad enough that we forget the grognards who helped design older RPGs when we didn’t have the internet at our fingertips. In the modern day, it just seems unforgivable to me that we don’t talk about Malmberg more.

In 1980, Malmberg and a couple of friends opened a game store in Hjorthagen, Stockholm to sell games like Dungeons & Dragons and Runequest. By 1982, Malmberg expanded this company to include a publishing brand called Äventyrsspel that licensed the Worlds of Wonder game from Chaosium so that he could publish games and adventures based on the Magic World setting in that game. They took this license and used it to create the Swedish equivalent of Dungeons & Dragons, a little game called Drakar och Demoner (Dragons & Demons, man is that a metal name). That’s a game name you might be familiar with because Fria Ligan just released an update of that very game this year called Dragonbane. They also debuted the game Mutant, also recently updated and published by Fria Ligan, and eventually produced the Mutant Chronicles role playing game, a number of board games based on that property, and two wargames Warzone and Chronopia that held their own against Games Workshop.

There is a ton more about Fredrik Malmberg’s career, including the fact that his company owns the rights to Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane. That’s right, if you liked Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s Solomon Kane RPG, and I did, then you’ve got Malmberg to thank for letting Shane license the property. Malmberg has worked with many of my favorite game designers like Bill King and Matt Forbeck and his legacy is visible in the current role playing market. If you want a full rundown of his influence on the hobby, you should check out Shannon Appelcline’s look at the Swedish Roleplaying scene.

Film Reviews by Friends

Courtney Howard reviews the latest adaptation of Peter Pan.

My friend Luke Y. Thompson has three pieces up this week.

• Discontinued, an independent film starring Langston Fishburne and Ashley Hutchinson at Cinegods.

• Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Peter Pan & Wendy at SuperHeroHype.

Let me know what you think of their reviews.

Weekly Classic Film Recommendation

This week’s classic film recommendation is the 1950 Nicholas Ray film In a Lonely Place. The film stars Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in a psychological romantic tragedy that touches on the themes of post traumatic stress and how the suspicion of murder can disrupt a relationship. These are themes that were also touched upon by The Best Years of Our Lives (a film that is obliquely namedropped in In a Lonely Place) and Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Suspicion.

In a Lonely Place, like Suspicion, is usually classified as a film noir, but I’m not one who would classify either as such. Film noir has some form of corruption at its core and neither In a Lonely Place or Suspicion take place in a world that is as morally corrupt as your typical noir classic. To me, they are romantic psychological thrillers. They deal with issues of trust and trauma and how those affect our ability to love one another. That isn’t to say there aren’t noir elements to In a Lonely Place, it does take place in the most noir city in the world (Los Angeles) and like Sunset Boulevard is about a screenwriter, but those are not enough in my mind to place it within what I think of as truly noir. Then again, I think of the Nick and Nora Charles detective comedies as noir, because of the Dashiell Hammett connection, so my definition is a little different than most.

In a Lonely Place begins with our protagonist, and famous but struggling screenwriter, Dixon “Dix” Steele driving to his favorite “industry” dinner hangout. This opening scene is where we get the first glimpse of Dix’s anger, an anger that may be a legacy from the war. This scene is also where we see our first significant continuity error, unless it was common for people to just drive in the middle of the road in 1950. Upon arriving at the restaurant, we learn that while Dix may have a temper he is loved by many in the industry, even by those he has slighted in the past. He’s an angry, but compassionate man. It is this combination that gets him into trouble.

During the dinner, he briefly chats with a hostess at the restaurant and invites her to his home to provide him with a synopsis of a book he’s been hired to adapt but is too lazy to read. It is while this young woman (Mildred Atkinson played by Martha Stewart…no not that one) is at his home giving him the synopsis that Dix meets Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) the woman with whom he is doomed to fall in love. He soon sends the young woman away, and instead of driving her home has her walk to the local bus stop late at night. A decision he will come to regret as she is found murdered the next morning.

Nicholas Ray does a couple of very interesting things with this scene. One of them is excellent, one of them should have been used in the mystery of the film but was dropped, and one that is just strange. The scene where Dix wanders into his bedroom to change because he is so bored by the synopsis being given by the Mildred, only to open his window to see the radiant beauty that is Laurel Gray is magnificent. It is narratively sound and the cinematography is a delight to see.

The scene also contains a moment that made me ask, “why did they drop this plot point?” Mildred cries out in panic several times as she gets carried away in performance during her synopsis, only to be silenced by Dix who is worried what the neighbors might think. This was a perfect opportunity for a red herring, both for the investigators in the film and for the audience. One of the things that made Suspicion work so well is that the audience was as suspicious as the characters in the film. That could have been played up here, it is later in other places, but is completely abandoned. This likely happened in the editing bay, but it was a poor choice.

Speaking of poor choices, in the middle of the synopsis Nicholas Ray has Martha Stewart (notice I’m using the actress’ name and not the character) act directly into the camera as she delivers some of the details. It’s a moment where we are in Dix’s point of view, and are supposed to get a sense of what he is experiencing, but the direction and acting here is clumsy and overbearing. It doesn’t quite work. It might, if Dix was even more annoyed by this than he was, but he isn’t and so we end up with a dissonant moment in an otherwise excellent scene that sets the stage for the mystery.

Mystery? Did I mention that Mildred gets murdered? She does and in a heartless manner, a manner that makes Dix a suspect. He is given this news by his friend Det. Sgt. Brub Nicolai (Frank Lovejoy) who served under him during the war. Lovejoy is wonderful as the moral center of the film. He is an honest Detective trying to get at the truth of the matter, no matter where it leads him. Lovejoy’s performance is excellent and made me wish that there were half a dozen Brub Nicolai films. I would have loved to see him as the Detective investigating a number of crimes in Los Angeles. He never lets his preconceptions, or those of others, get in the way of his pursuit of the truth. He is kind, a good friend, but an honest broker who will do what needs to be done if it needs doing. Where Dix is a character who acts rashly and then earns forgiveness, Nicolai is a character who treads carefully but will even he have to ask for forgiveness in the end?

I’m not going further into the plot, there are some excellent twists. These are twists in the same sense as Suspicion. They don’t change your mind or leave you guessing, instead they are an examination of the psychology of a man who has seen the elephant and heard the owl hoot and who has the unseen scars that war leaves behind.

Just watch it already.