I love crowdfunding sources, but there is one thing that I don't love. I don't love my fellow crowdsourcers. When we aren't bullying the people we profess to be supporting, we are finding new things to complain about. The latest in a long list of ridiculous complaints is the recent outcry about Patreon's new fee structure. Patreon announced that the would be shifting the charging of fees away from the creators and putting the cost of the transactions onto the backers in order to maximize revenue to the creators. This was done in response to a number of complaints by creators that they were losing as much as 15% of the total pledged to them to fees and that the fees were fluctuating. To remedy this issue, Patreon decided to charge patrons a fee of $0.35 + 2.9% of their pledge instead of charging a variable fee that depended on type of transaction etc. to the creators.
In response to this, a bunch of backers have flipped out. This is ridiculous. Why? I've got a couple of reasons.
1) The fees are exactly the same fees that you would pay at an AM/PM Market. They charge you $0.35 to use your debit card and they add the percentage processing fee they are charged by the bank (usually between 2.5% and 4%) to the price tag of items in the store. I don't see people picketing AM/PM demanding the $0.35 back on their pack of gum, and I don't think it is fair to complain to Patreon or the creators either.
2) This is an extremely reasonable fee. If you look at the graph below, you can see how much this costs patrons.
At a level of $100, this fee doesn't even come to a total fee of $3.50 and yet it ensures that the creator will receive 95% of that $100 instead of losing an additional $3.25.
3) It only really affects microbackers. It makes it so that the person pledging $1.00 is in reality pledging $1.38 and that the person backing at $5 is really backing at $5.50. Let me get this straight. You are losing your shit over $0.38 more money out of your pocket that allows more money to go into the pocket of someone you are supposed to be patronizing? Some patron you are. Microbackers might matter to creators in large numbers, they can help pay the bills after all, but in my experience they are more trouble than they are worth. We've all seen the concern troll $1.00 backers on Kickstarter. Look, $0.38 isn't going to break your bank and it allows more money to go to the creator that you supposedly believe in. Didn't know you were such a free rider. I thought you wanted to support a creator's efforts.
I personally never backed below $5 in any of the projects I backed anyway. Why? Because I knew fees were coming out and that I'd rather give $4.50 to a creator than $.75. I back within my budget and support projects I admire. I wish I could support more. I cannot, but I CAN afford to pay an extra $10 total on all my pledges combined. Does this prevent me from backing 1 more project at the $10 level? Sure.
It also means that when I increase my pledge to Saving Throw Show to $100, they'll be getting $95 instead of $85 and it will cost me less than they would have lost otherwise.
The Christmas Season is a wonderful time for movie viewing. It's fun to cozy up on the couch with family, or put together movie marathons with friends. And there are so many fantastic films that feature the Holidays as a backdrop.
Today's selection is a personal favorite. It's a film that hits all of the right notes for a Christmas movie. It has snowfall, friendship, a Dickensian sensibility, romance, and fantasy. It's also a film I adored when I was growing up and it still holds an extremely warm place in my heart. I might even venture to say that it is one of my favorite, even with its canonical lapses, films featuring Sherlock Holmes.
Featuring a screenplay by Chris Columbus and direction by Barry Levinson, Young Sherlock Holmes creates a wonderfully lovable version of Holmes. As a demi-Holmsian, which is to say someone who is a fan and not a scholar of the Holmesverse, I am frequently taken aback by portrayals of Sherlock Holmes as a distant or harsh person. It's a depiction that is often used to capture his intelligence, and how quirky people find him, but it is one at odds with the fact that Holmes is skilled at disguise, friendly with children, and frequently laughs or is genial when meeting old friends. One of my favorite such moments is when he meets McMurdo, the boxer/bodyguard in "The Sign of the Four." He's a man of many friends and that doesn't match how he is frequently portrayed. The Sherlock of Young Sherlock Holmes doesn't suffer fools, but he is genuinely good-natured with his friends. He is well acted and shows emotions running from joy and excitement to despair. Nicholas Rowe is one of my favorite Sherlocks.
The film also touches upon the importance of spending time with friends around the Holidays. It's a perennial film in our house.
On December 1st, I send out a tweet with the hashtag #ChristmasMarathonAdvent that recommended watching Christmas in Connecticut starring the ever wonderful Barbara Stanwyck. While I love watching Christmas movies the year round, and count down the days until Hallmark channel starts running their marathon, I realize that most people wait until the Christmas season to watch films. I also realized the #ChristmasMarathonAdvent wasn't the pithiest hashtag. So, I decided to transform daily tweets into daily blog posts people can use to create their own Christmas Movie Advent Calendar to count down the days to Christmas Eve.
The wonderful thing about Christmas films is that they run the genre gamut from children's fare to noir mysteries and from romantic comedies to action films. While there are some who might argue that films like The Last Boy Scoutdon't belong as "Christmas" films because of their violence and profanity, I don't take that position. The Last Boy Scout is a problematic film on many levels, including how it resolves the family conflict underpinning the narrative, but it is in the end a film about overcoming cynicism and embracing family. That's the requirement that I hold Christmas films to because Christmas in America is about spending time with family. Since I used The Last Boy Scout as an example of A Christmas film, it will not be included in the Christmas Marathon Advent Calendar as the days move forward, but other "controversial" films might. The list will be filled with films I enjoy. Films from a catalog from which I pull the films I watch every holiday season as my family and I have our own Christmas Season Movie Marathon.
Today marks the 3rd day of December and today's selection is one of my favorite Christmas movies, and one of my favorite John Wayne movies.
3 Godfathers is an interesting adaptation of the 3 Kings story. In this film, three ruthless bandits give up freedom in order to save the life of a new born child. The film has been remade a number of times, and parts of it don't age well, but the underlying message of love and selflessness is wonderful.
As I posted last week, my current D&D campaign "Tinker, Tailor, Dwarf, and Spy" takes place in the "Known World" setting that was originally published in the Cook Expert Set of Dungeons & Dragons. The players are currently adventuring in northern Karameikos, but I have plans to have the players wander into Darokin and Glantri. For those who aren't familiar with the Known World, it is a hodge-podge setting that includes an anachronistic combination of cultures ranging from the Roman Empire to Renaissance tech societies. Karameikos, where the players' characters are based, is a high-medieval culture and thus is an ideal starting society for the "default fantasy" campaign.
As I mentioned above, even though the characters are based out of a default fantasy kingdom, they will be wandering into Darokin and Glantri which are countries inspired by renaissance level cultures. Darokin is based on renaissance Florence and Genoa with a strict plutocratic government. Glantri is based on renaissance Glantri with the country being a "mageocracy" rather than plutocracy. Because the players will likely be traveling into these two nations, I had to ask myself whether or not I wanted to include firearms in my D&D campaign. After some back and forth, I decided that I would indeed be introducing characters who use Muskets, Pistols, and Arquebuses, but limiting them to Darokinian society.
In preparation for this move, I purchased the Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting by Green Ronin in the hopes that it included the rules for the Gunslinger archetype for the Fighter Class. It turns out that it wasn't necessary to purchase the full campaign guide, as Matthew Mercer has been kind enough to provide the Gunslinger rules as a Pay What You Want file. After reading the archetype, I found that it didn't fit exactly what I wanted to have in my games. The Tal'Dorei Gunslinger is closely based on the Pathfinder Gunslinger character class from the Pathfinder Ultimate Combat Guide and as cool as that class it, it comes with all of the "fiddliness" of the Pathfinder system. Matthew Mercer's Gunslinger kept that fiddliness and I wanted a class that fit with the simplicity of 5th edition.
In the end, I read through the existing archetypes and feats in 5th edition and realized that I didn't need to come up with an entirely new archetype or create new feats. All I needed to do was reskin some existing rules to fit the theme.
The first reskin I will be using in my game is the creation of a Blackpowder Marksman feat. The feat will be identical to the Crossbow Expert feat on page 165 of the 5th Edition Player's Handbook. That feat is pretty powerful and makes crossbow using Fighters extremely powerful options in 5e. A key element is the first benefit which lets those who possess the feat to "ignore the loading quality of crossbows with which you are proficient." In other words, it allows crossbow using Fighters to attack more than once when using an Attack action. I thought that it was fair to have a feat that applies all of these benefits to a person who uses black powder weapons.
While I don't want to spend any real time getting into the weeds of the Arquebus > Crossbow > Longbow > Shortbow argument, I will share the reasons for why I am happy with this quick fix. First, as argued effectively by Richard Berg in his wargame Arquebus, while the longbow's effectiveness had been reduced by the innovation of plate armor, "crossbows took more time to wind and fire than an arquebus, which had similar penetrative abilities but a far lower rate of fire." Looking at the stats for the crossbow and comparing them to the longbow, we see that these attributes are taken into account in 5e. The heavy crossbow does 1d10 damage and requires reloading while the longbow does 1d8 and doesn't. The Crossbow Expert feat allows a Fighter to use a crossbow with the same rate of fire as a longbow, something ahistorical but perfect for fantasy. In D&D a combat round is only 6 seconds long and a high level Fighter can shoot his longbow 8 times in a combat round (and thus a crossbow 8 times). That's not at all realistic, but it allows the damage curve to keep up with mages and hand to hand combatants. This is high fantasy after all and limiting arquebus/musket use to 4 shots per minute might be accurate, but it wouldn't be fun. So long as you keep the damage for the black powder weapons within reason (which the DMG does), game balance is retained.
Once I made this slight concession to fun over fact, I began looking to the character class archetypes to see how they fit the model of Musketeer. What I found was that two of the archetypes in the Player's Handbook reskinned nicely to be gun toting characters. I was especially impressed with how the Battle Master archetype fit for Musketeers. Since only a few of the maneuvers for the Battle Master specified "melee weapon," it meant that these abilities could be used with missile weapons with only minimum change. I quickly wrote up a page using The Homebrewery that included the Musketeer archetype based on the Battle Master. I haven't stated up the Eldritch Knight version, but if one limits the spell list properly it's easy to see spell as "magic ammunition."
Lastly, I created a background that would allow even non-Fighters to be proficient in "simple" black powder weapons and classified the arquebus as a simple weapon with the pistol and musket counting as martial weapons in Darokinian Society.
Just ran the second session of a new 5th Edition D&D campaign. The campaign takes place in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos where the player characters are members of a secret police force that investigates threats against Duke Stefan Karameikos. The secret police force is called The Tinkers and they answer to a secretive mastermind named The Weaver. This combination of factors led the players to name the campaign "Tinkers, Tailor, Dwarf, and Spy."
The Grand Duchy is one of the main "starting" kingdoms of the Mystara game setting. I've long been a fan of the Mystara Setting for Dungeons & Dragons. One big reason for this is that it was the setting used in the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert and BECMI editions of D&D. The biggest reason though, is that I love the bizarre anachronistic mashup of cultures in the game. You have a culture based on the Roman Empire that is doing trade with a culture based on renaissance Venice. It's got a touch of everything.
Having a bit of everything does take away from the verisimilitude, but when you add the reasons for the Hollow World setting inside the world the setting actually makes sense. The world of Mystara is hollow because the god Ka the Preserver, the first dinosaur to attain sentience and eventually immortality, sought to create a refuge for the societies that collapsed on the surface of the world. One could induct from this that Ka's sponsor builds the surface world from the collapsed cultures of other worlds.
At least that's how it works in my mind-canon, not that it will affect the campaign that all of the kingdoms are actually rescued cultures from other worlds. Though that will allow me to bring in some of the material from Freeport more fluidly.
The campaign begins with The Weaver sending the characters to the town of Stallanford to investigate whether the annual King's Festival is being used as recruiting grounds for the Cult of Halav. After the PCs have been given time to do initial investigations and get a night's rest, Orcs attack the town and kidnap the town's cleric who is also the man the PCs are supposed to spy upon.
I'm using the King's Festival module as the launching point for the campaign, with the following open threads added.
1) Depending on what happens, the surviving Orcs may seek to have the PCs put to trial for murder/wrongful death. 2) Is the cleric a part of the Cult of Halav? Is that cult a threat to Duke Stefan? 3) Is the big bad a part of the Iron Circle? Are visitors to the Orc Caves also members of the Iron Circle? 4) Who is the Weaver? 5) Who is Bargle the Infamous?
In 1977, Metagaming Concepts released Microgame #1. Metagaming's Microgame series was an attempt to bring to market complex and playable wargames that had limited components and a low price point and the line was a runaway success. A large reason for that success is the high quality and amazing replayability of Microgame #1, or as it is better known OGRE. The game was so successful that it not only launched a fad, it formed the basis for the early financial success of two companies. Metagaming first, and then Steve Jackson Games.
The $2.95 price point of the game made it extremely affordable, and interestingly up until recently you could once again buy a copy of the basic game for $2.95, but what made it a classic was its easy to understand rules and how well they fit the game's fictional concept. It's a concept that is instantly intelligible the moment one looks at the game's cover illustration. It is the struggle of multiple small units against a nigh invulnerable towering giant. It is army vs. Kaiju, village vs. giant, weak vs. strong. Can the weaker force prevail, or will they fall before THE OGRE?
The giant tank rumbles toward its target . . . its guns are
destroyed, its movement crippled, but only a few defenders are left.
Will they stop the robot juggernaut, or will it crush the Command Post
beneath its gigantic treads?
The game's success led to more Microgames, some of which expanded the Ogreverse and others like Melee and Wizard formed the foundation for complex and fan adored role playing games. When Steve Jackson left Metagaming, he made sure to bring OGRE with him and it helped launch his new company's success as did a continuation of Microgame style games including Car Wars and Battlesuit. Eventually Steve Jackson Games moved on to other ventures like GURPS and Munchkin, but when an OGRE Kickstarter raised almost a million dollars in revenue it proved that there was still demand for battle in the Ogreverse. One might even credit OGRE with Steve Jackson Games' recent non-Munchkin revival. That Kickstarter has led to a revival of the OGRE line, the return of Car Wars, and now a newly released video game on Steam. The game has been developed by Auroch Digital, who's earlier adaption of Games Workshop's classic Chainsaw Warrior demonstrated their ability to do quality adaptations of classic table top games.
BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR is an
attempted homage to Hitchcock's classic film THE BIRDS. Following in the
footsteps of many nature gone awry films, BIRDEMIC's story links the
crisis at hand with mankind's ill treatment of the environment. In NIGHT
OF THE LEPUS, it was genetic research. In KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS, it
was farmer's use of pesticides. Here the birds are responding to global
climate change.
While this kind of political commentary puts
BIRDEMIC strongly within the "nature attacks" genre, it also moves it
away from Hitchcock homage and into drive in theater formula.
Hitchcock's film is about interesting personal relationships, but
BIRDEMIC's attempts at these kinds of storylines fall flat as the
screenplay spends more time discussing stock options than it spends time
letting us get to
know the main characters.
A skilled film team
could have turned BIRDEMIC into an entertaining film along the lines of
ARACHNOPHOBIA, but filmmaker's amateurism prevented that from happening.
Ironically, the film's charm is rooted in the filmmaker's amateurism.
The filmmaker and crew were clearly excited to make the project and this
shines through the awkward camera angles, bad editing, and terrible
digital special effects.
The film is a sincere film, even if it is a bad one.
