Weekly Geekly Rundown for November 8 and November 15, 2024
Sorry this is late. I’ve been remarkably busy.
The Tiger, The Princess, Monty Hall, and Probability
Every now and then I encounter a book that changes the way I think about the world. Sometimes a book has one insight and sometimes it has several. In the case of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, I've lost count of the ways it has forced me to re-evaluate my perceptions. This is partly because the book covers a wide terrain of psychology and partly because it presents so many interesting observations.
One of my many takeaways from the book was how we don't think intuitively about statistics. Let me restate that in a paraphrase, while our mind is great at seeing patterns in nature (even sometimes when they are not there) our mind is not great at seeing the patterns that underlie probabilities and statistics.
This is an important observation for game design and game play. We've all seen the player who has rolled several low scores on to hit rolls in a D&D session who says "the odds are getting better of me rolling a 20" or the player who has rolled 6 "aces" in a row in Savage Worlds who picks up the dice and says "the odds of me acing again are 1/(some huge number)." In both cases, the individual is wrong. While it is true that given a sufficiently large draw that the die rolls of a player will tend toward the mean, prior die rolls have no influence on future die rolls. As an extension of that, the player who has already rolled 6 "aces" has exactly a 1/6 chance (assuming a d6 is being rolled) of acing on the 7th roll. The prior rolls have no influence over the initial roll. The answer would be different if the person had stated before rolling at all that there chances of acing 7 times was 1/(some huge number) but it isn't true after the person has successfully aced 6 rolls and is now rolling the seventh roll.
When I was a 21/Craps dealer as an undergrad in Nevada, I saw how this kind of flawed logic could have real financial consequences. "Wow!" The player would say, "there have been a lot of 7's rolled in a row, so it's time to 'buy' the 4 at a 5% vig." Their underlying assumption is that prior rolls affect future outcomes in die rolls.
They don't.
My usual response to these kinds of players was to say, “Don’t you know that it’s unlucky to be superstitious?”
Another area where our statistical brain fails us when intuition and deduction meet. A great example of this phenomenon is the Monty Hall problem where a player is given three choices, shown the results of one of the selections they did not make, and then asked to either switch or keep their original choice. The correct answer to this question is counter intuitive and requires a kind of abstract thinking to visualize. I'll let the good folks at Khan Academy explain why.
If you play and design role playing games, take a moment to think about how this dilemma will affect game play in hidden information games that you design and play. And let this be a reminder that understanding how a probabilities work can make you a better player, designer, or game master.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
In general, I’m about 50/50 on Adam Sandler films. His man-child character sometimes annoys me to high heaven, but he can be capable of making genuinely touching stories as a writer and actor. Sometimes he surprises me by combining the two. For example, I found his film Hubie Halloween surprisingly charming. Other times, he abandons comedy all together to demonstrate his range as an actor as he did in Punch Drunk Love. Then there are those times when he plays the “everyday guy” in either a romantic comedy with a “Sandlerian” twist like 50 First Dates or a father/uncle coming to grips with what it means to be an adult.
These “everyday guy” films are where I fell in love with Sandler as an actor. In part because they feel like old style Hollywood films. Sure, they have echoes of manchild in them, but watching them is like watching a Disney live action film from the 60s/70s. The antics are goofy, but underlying the zaniness is a core that says “choose life, choose family” that really appeals to me.
This is why it was a pleasant surprise to read Luke Y. Thompson’s positive review of Click from 2006 over at Westword (God do I miss the days of great local independent papers and the Voice Media empire). Click is a twist on the It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)/Defending Your Life (1946) genre where people come to appreciate how good they really have it. Like the remarriage film, it’s a formulaic genre but it’s also one of my favorite genres. These are films that ask us to reassess our priorities and focus on those we love. When they have happy endings, they are heartwarming and life affirming. When they have unhappy endings, as in Nicolas Cage’s The Family Man, they are among the saddest films out there. I prefer the Comedy to the Tragedy in this genre, but both can provide catharsis and provoke thought about the best way to live.
In many ways Click is trite and it has more than a few Sandlerisms, but it’s a film I’ve watched more than a few times and I never regret leaving it on.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
It’s that time of year again when Hallmark Channel, Great American Family, Amazon, and Netflix all compete for our viewing attention with Holiday themed Romantic Comedies. A lot of people love to make fun of them, but I just love them. As soon as the calendar hits Thanksgiving, and yes we wait for Thanksgiving, our house begins its Holiday Romantic Comedy marathon. It’s nothing but these saccharine films, with short breaks for Holiday classics like Going My Way and White Christmas.
Courtney Howard often works the Netflix beat and so she recently reviewed the latest entry in the Netflix Holiday Cinematic Universe (aka the NHCU) Hot Frosty. The film stars the always charming Lacey Chabert in the lead role. Chabert is the current “Queen of Hallmark” and has starred in a number of their better entries. That she’s starring in a Netflix film might make some fans wonder if she is leaving the confines of the Hallmark Channel for new shores, she also has a new Hallmark film this season starring opposite one of my favorite television actors Kristoffer Polaha (a fellow Reno/Sparks-ite). It looks more to me like Chabert is doing what she’s always done and working hard to entertain the American public and get as much work as she can doing it.
Based on Courtney’s review at Variety, and the trailer, it looks like Hot Frosty pulls from a lot of classic Romantic Comedies including Splash and many versions of Pygmalion. The premise is that Chabert’s character has brought a “sexy snowman” to life, but that even if he looks human he’ll still melt if it gets too hot. This one is for all those shipping Frozen’s Olaf with the characters of your choice. Well if Olaf had a six-pack.
It sounds, and looks, like a wonderfully charming film that might get more than one play this season. Courtney’s review doesn’t spoil the plot (though can you really spoil a Romantic Comedy?) but it does provide some wonderful analysis of key moments and discusses the films that influenced this production. Check out the review, while I eagerly count down the moments to Thanksgiving morning when I’ll be allowed to bring this up on the TV.
Pocket Monsters for Your Basic/Expert D&D Games
I was scrolling through the sunny screens of my “for you” the other day on a certain formerly bird sound named social media when I came across a really cool RPG project. Hodag, over at the No Foes No Traps blog, did a 31 Days of B/X Pokémon project throughout the month of October. Every day there was a new entry with monster statistics for a different pocket monster. Hodag began the month with my favorite starter pocket monster, Bulbasaur and kept going from there. Now I just have to find an excuse to include these in my regular game sessions and contemplate creating B/X rules for a Pokémon style game.
Fighting Fantasy is Back!
I can still remember the first time I read the first volume in the Fighting Fantasy Series, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and the frustration of dying time and time again before I finally solved the labyrinth. For years books like the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and Tunnels & Trolls solo modules were the one of two ways I was able to engage in the role playing game hobby. The other was by playing D&D, and other rpg, games on my friends computers or my Nintendo and Sega. The series holds a very special place in my heart which is why I was so happy to read that Steve Jackson Games would be producing a new run of the series.
In 1982, British game designers Sir Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson introduced Fighting Fantasy, a revolutionary set of solo adventure books that combined nonlinear narratives with dice-rolling tabletop RPG mechanics. Now, this fantastical, multi-million-selling book series returns to the United States thanks to an historic 50-book publishing collaboration with Steve Jackson Games. The first books in the series will be available in early 2025.
In a bit of irony, the Steve Jackson who introduced Fighting Fantasy is a different Steve Jackson than the one who runs Steve Jackson Games, but the Steve Jackson who runs Steve Jackson Games did write a couple of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks.
Whew! That was quite the sentence.
Witches and Fear
Rebekah King has an interesting post discussing when and how Witches have been figures of fear in society that asks whether Witches as a concept are still scary. Her answer is that it depends on the story being told and I think that’s fair. Movies like Bell, Book, and Candle and I Married a Witch provided the foundation for accessible friendly Romantic Comedy witches like Samantha from Bewitched and series like WandaVision and Agatha All Along draw heavily from these friendly shores. But it should be pointed out that Fritz Leiber demonstrated that even the domesticated Witch was something to be feared in his book Conjure Wife, a book that was adapted and turned into the film Burn Witch Burn (aka Night of the Eagle).
Matt Thompson over at Critical Hit Parader recently discovered, and shares with us, that Bob Dylan is a fan of the author Arthur Machen and his story The Great God Pan. Arthur Machen’s stories hold a special place in my heart, largely because when I brought my copy of Machen’s The White People and Other Weird Stories to a Guillermo Del Toro signing at my local bookstore in Glendale, it led to me having the opportunity to chat with him for about fifteen minutes. Since he’s one of my favorite directors, it was a big treat. I have a super blurry photo to remind me of the event, but I forgive the blurriness because small bookshop employees aren’t professional photographers and my memory is blurry with nostalgia and joy anyway.
Skeleton Code Machine has a series of articles on Mechs in what they call “Mech Week” and it is one heck of a read. Check out all the articles. They open the series with a definitional post that asks if, for the purposes of their game related discussion, whether Iron Man is a mech. One of the things I loved about this piece is that the post refers to a (potentially apocryphal) encounter between Diogenes the Cynic and Plato that is discussed in Book 6 of Diogenes Laërtius’ The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers in which Diogenes humorously and ingeniously critiques Plato’s definition of a man. The authors at Exeunt Press give a good overview of the encounter, but leave the best part of the joke to their footnote. It’s a joke that leads one to think about the very nature of defining things and the challenges one faces, which was the point of this first article. Any definition, just as any measurement, will be arbitrary, but it might also be necessary for further discussion.
I could talk for hours about how Diogenes Laërtius’ tale perfectly represents the beginning of any Socratic dialogue and how they often spiral from what appears at first glance to be prima facie obvious is in the end insufficient. What makes Diogenes the Cynic’s response so brilliant is that he has put himself in the Socratic position. Typically it is the interlocutor who offers the definition and Socrates who shows the weakness of the definition eventually ending at an absurdist position. Diogenes jumps a few logical steps, but ends up in a place one can imagine Socrates finishing. Having Plato, the student of Socrates and his most “pious” biographer (other than perhaps Xenophon), be the one who starts affirming the definition is a wonderful bit of philosophic reversal akin to Aristophanes’ 90 minute fart joke The Clouds. The link above is the the Loeb Classical Library edition of Diogenes Laërtius’ work, but you can read a free translation on the Gutenberg site and I’ve edited the link to direct you to the section on Diogenes the Cynic.
Given the recent social media announcements by Cryptozoic, there was only one way this recommendation could go. I’m recommending the original Mayfair DC Heroes role playing game that is being re-released via a new Kickstarter that launches next week.
DC Heroes is unabashedly my favorite role playing game and I’ll be doing a long form review and defense of that position next week. I think that the core MEGS (Mayfair Exponential Game System) that Greg Gorden designed, and that Ray Winninger refined in the 2nd Edition, is elegant and allows for complex narrative role playing game sessions. It is to this day the best “cinematic” system I’ve ever seen and it is extraordinarily flexible. At the center of the simplicity and power of the system is the “AP” or Attribute Point that is the baseline measurement everything in the game. This baseline measurement allows a GM to easily determine how fast something is moving, how far a character throws something, and so much more.
The system is referred to as the Mayfair Exponential Game System (though it’s technically logarithmic) and that exponential transformation can be adapted to whatever setting you like. The rules tend to describe each increase in AP value (from 1 to 2 let’s say) as a doubling of the value. That’s not exactly what is going on though and once you understand what’s really happening you can manipulate the baseline assumptions to any genre. According to Greg Gorden (and you can listen to him talk about it in the interview I’ll put in the other post) he based AP values on the assumption that every 10 APs increased the base value by x1000. For example, if you assume that 0 APs of Weight is 50 lbs (as DC Heroes assumes) then 10 APs is 50,000 lbs.
Instead of each AP being double the past AP in intensity/measurement, the real transformation for any Base Measure uses the equation below where for DC Heroes the Base Measure for Weight is equal to 50.
Essentially you pick a value for the multiplier at 10 APs, in the case of DC Heroes this is 1000, and multiply that value to the power of the number of APs divided by 10 using decimal exponents of 1000. You can see the subtle difference between the exponential transformation and “merely” doubling the value below.
For DC Heroes this distinction doesn’t really matter as the doubled value will always fall within the “range” of the real value, but understanding the real equation allows you to shift the system to new settings while keeping everything else the same. Because DC Heroes is emulating stories where both Batman and Superman are fighting foes together, this larger shift from one AP to the next allows for these characters to hang out and fight the same foes. It has the disadvantage of very low level characters looking the same.
However, if you wanted to run a “Street” Level campaign all you have to do is change the multiplier. If you change it from 1000 to 100 you get far more granular characters and that measure was what Ray Winninger used for his other MEGS game Underground.
I could go on and on on the beauty that is the DC Heroes role playing game, and I will soon in a post devoted to the topic, but I’ll just let you get a taste of the game play via a series Warner put out when their DC Universe site was home to streaming content. Freddie Prinze Jr. runs a short DC Heroes campaigns for an interesting group of players and it’s a lot of fun to watch.
I continue to be impressed with how the ways I’ve influenced my daughters’ tastes in music has led to me discovering new bands and songs that I would never have found otherwise. I was out walking the dog the other day and turned on my Amazon Music account to see that there was a new category containing new pop punk/pop rock songs and so I hit play. My daughters and I share the Amazon account and so our overall “likes” are very diverse. One of the first songs on the list was Wretched Trajectory by Origami Angel and based on the title alone I thought I’d like it. I was right. It has elements of Jimmy Eat World smashed with other pop punk and alternative sounds, but it works. I am particularly fond of the first transitional bit before the refrain.
Any list discussing how my daughters’ tastes and mine align would be incomplete if it didn’t include a Good Kid song. It seems I’ve turned my daughters into avid pop punk fans and they’ve turned me into a Good Kid fan. They have a similar vibe to Franz Ferdinand and Cake and I’m always in the mood for that. Those influences are abundant in the song Break.
Since I’ve mentioned Jimmy Eat World, and since seeing the in concert in Irvine is one of my fondest memories of Southern California, I’m gonna throw in a quick Jimmy song. No, I’m not doing The Middle. As much as I like that song, it gets plenty of play. I’m recommending Sweetness. It’s a song that “rocks” harder than a lot of the hair metal of the ‘80s and it has an enjoyable video.
While it’s a bit of a tonal shift, I would be a complete failure as a pop culture commentator if I didn’t mention that Paul Di’Anno of Iron Maiden passed recently and that his vocals helped shape the sound of what is one of the most important metal bands of all time. The Album Killers is a…well…killer album filled with some really fantastic musicianship and it contains one of my favorite metal songs Murders in the Rue Morgue. It starts with a melody that makes you think it’s going to be a “cinematic” metal song like Metallica’s Orion, but then it kicks in with a strong punk melody. All the standard Maiden aspects are there dual harmonizing guitars, great solos, but with Di’Anno’s punk ethic. Di’Anno eventually left the band, but a part of his legacy is that Maiden songs continued to be story based and refer to literary sources.
I mentioned this film earlier during the Witch discussion above, but it’s an absolute classic that influenced a great number of entertainment properties that followed. Bell, Book, and Candle starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, Hermione Gingold, and an older Elsa Lancaster (THE Bride of Frankenstein herself) as Aunt Queenie. The romance is compelling and it fits the period inbetween Halloween and Christmas nicely by being a film about the supernatural, but one that focuses on love. Obviously it influenced Bewitched, but you can see echoes of the movie in the series The Good Witch on Hallmark as well. I have to be honest though and say that as great as the cast is, and it’s great, it’s the Siamese cat familiar Pyewacket who absolutely steals the show.
Thank you for the mention!!
Glad you enjoyed the Plato's Mech post. I had a lot of fun putting that one together. Did you send in your coloring contest entry yet? There's still time!