UncleBear Media

This is the original “Jumping the Dire Shark” article, first posted March 6, 2006.

Somewhere along the line, I jumped the shark. It doesn’t have anything to do with the utter absence of any kind of mission statement for this website, which has been all over the map in terms of content over the past 10 years. I mean that I, personally, jumped the shark in the way I think about roleplaying games. I have some whackass idea that roleplaying is about playing a character, developing interesting storylines, doin’ a little worldbuilding, having fun with friends and being entertained while exercising some creativity. Silly me. It’s apparently all about rules and numbers and I’m doing it all wrong.

Let me give you a f’rinstance. Green Ronin just release a product on RPGNow called Advanced Race Codex: Humans. It’s the first of a planned line of player character race books. The thought behind this line is that past 1st level, there really isn’t any great benefit to playing one race or another; you get an extra this-or-that or a special racial ability, but after that it’s all class feats and such. You know, I have a friend who only plays dwarves in fantasy games, regardless of the system. He doesn’t do it because dwarves get this-or-that bonus or kewl powers or whatever; he plays them because he likes their culture, their personality, their innate dwarf-ness. He plays dwarves because he likes to play dwarves. They’re interesting to him.

And herein lies the ski rack: I agree with him. I really don’t give a damn if my character is maxed out and pumped up. Maybe I don’t want to play that guy. I have, over the past few years, had a fabulous time playing “unplayable” characters. A pacifist in a WWII game. A wizard who sucks at spellcasting, who’s only a wizard to begin with because it’s the family business he was forced into. A holy man who’s losing his faith. I enjoy playing the types of characters I enjoy watching or reading about, people with flaws, personal struggles, and moral dilemmas. The problem is, most roleplaying games aren’t set up to handle that. You only take disadvantages on purpose if you’re mining extra points to buy more kewl powerz with. You’re hurting your chances of success (i.e., killing things and taking their stuff in order to get more kewl powerz) as well as the success of the party.

It’s the game part of roleplaying that I honestly don’t like and don’t enjoy. Never mind that real heroism is finding the way to defeat the trolls in spite of the fact that you can’t huck a fireball worth shit, or your deity doesn’t feel like granting you that spell at the moment because you told him to piss off, or you just don’t think killing is the answer. I like to play heroes, not guys with a +15 BAB. That’s not interesting to me. Anyone can chuck dice and add; I like to explore creative solutions.

See you on the other side of the shark tank.

continue reading…

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Free! Now in the Downloads area!

Created for Domnio: Risus Dungeons but usable for any Fantasy Role Playing Game! Create new spells and spell effects in the Name-Adjective-Noun(ish) format. You get Helu’s Finger of Suggestion! Zalim’s Pyrotechnic Simulacrum! Phnot’s Irresistable Darkness! But wait, there’s more! Download now and you’ll also get Gethimeld’s Dreaming Door, Oglan’s Protection from Mud and Peacekick’s Secure Grease absolutely free! Now how much would you pay? Nothing! Because it’s a FREE DOWNLOAD!!!

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This is a rerun. It was originally posted on August 27, 2007.

I used to be a geek, before most geek things went mainstream. Now geek is everywhere. Everyone owns computers and gadgets. I know lawyers into anime, doctors in graphic novels, cops who play massive multiplayer games, and stockbrokers who play D&D. The weird stuff isn’t fringe any more. The stuff I like isn’t that unusual any more. If geek is everywhere, then who really qualifies a geek?

Some have suggested that it’s not a state of fandom or enthusiasm toward a thing that makes one a geek, it’s the slavish devotion to the thing that goes far above and beyond that of a normal hobbyist. By that logic, you can be a quilting geek, a power tool geek, or a fashion geek. I don’t buy it. I just think that’s an obsessive/compulsive disorder. With the internet making everything accessible to everyone, nothing is really obscure or fringe any more, and sizeable groups of fans can be gathered together on any topic. Geek is dead. It’s a post-geek world.

Even if you disagree and say I’m still a geek, I no longer conform to to habits and behaviors of traditional geeks. If the phrase “jump the shark” can be applied to things that have permanently and fundamentally strayed from their original premise, then in my Post-Geek life I’ve Jumped the Dire Shark.

The other thing that places me firmly into a post-geek life is that I’m no longer on the cutting edge of the things I used to be geeky about. I hardly ever see first-run movies and rarely even catch DVDs when they’re first released. I don’t buy single-issue comics, and wait months or even years for trade paperback collections. There are few books that I read upon release. Most of the games I play are long out of print. The good stuff will be as good tomorrow as it is today, and time will sort the fads from the classics. I coined the phrase Long Tail Fandom to describe this phenomena.

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Even the Doctor could eventually run out of time. He was down to his last regeneration, his last life. Long ago, he’d made a decision on how he’d spend it, when it finally came around. A trip down memory lane can be a literal thing for a Time Lord. The Doctor would revisit places that held personal significance to him, drop in on old friends, spend his final days remenciscing, in peace.

With a new Doctor Who RPG being released by Cubicle 7 Entertainment, I’ve been thinking of campaign ideas and what I’d like out of a Doctor Who game. Some of it comes down to fanwank; I’d like to run semi-sequels to some classic adventures, explore “what happens next”. I’d like some cameos by past companions and supporting characters (and allow players to take them as PC’s); “whatever happened to”. I’d want a different Doctor, to eliminate debate over which Doctor to use, and nip any criticism about whether this-or-that action would be “in character” for this-or-that regeneration. To address all of this, I came up with the idea of The Last Doctor.

The Fanwank
To make some of the story ideas I have in mind work requires a little speculation. These ideas necessarily aren’t supported by canon, but they’re not in serious contradiction with it, either. There are three assumptions going in, which I’d have the Last Doctor explain along the way:

1. Why the Doctor doesn’t meet a lot of other Time Lords
The simple answer is, he’s avoiding them. Prior to the Time War and the destruction of Gallifrey, he was officially disapproved of if not an outright outlaw. He didn’t want to deal with other Time Lords either looking down their noses at him or trying to stop him. After the loss of Gallifrey, there are presumably still Time Lords out and about, traveling from Gallifrey’s past into the universe’s future. Knowing that any Time Lord he encounters is destined to die, possibly by his own hand, the Doctor avoids them because it’s too painful to face them.

2. Time Lords can’t see or remember the future of their personal timeline
When the Doctor teams up with his past and future selves, he never seems to remember it clearly. There are a number of deus ex machinas to explain this, and it doesn’t matter which one you use. Time Lords out in the universe post-Time War won’t go to future Gallifrey to discover it’s not there, and they’ll all either somehow avoid hearing about it or forget it when they arrive back in their own “present”, Gallifrey’s past. This is the rough one to make work.

3. You can’t change the past in your personal timeline, but you can change the future
It’s established that you can change things that have already happened in your life, but if you haven’t lived it yet then events can still be changed.

All of this matters for one important reason:

The Twist
The Last Doctor isn’t the Doctor at all. He’s another Time Lord who, in the future, heard about the Time War and the burning of Gallifrey. He heard it from one of the Doctor’s former companions or acquaintances (I haven’t figured out who yet). Posing as a future incarnation of the Doctor, he’s visiting the “past” of the Doctor’s personal timeline and meeting with people who knew the Doctor, gathering information and piecing together what really happened. Because the destruction of the Time Lords is in the future of his personal timeline, he thinks he can stop it.

Along the way, all of the major big bads will be encountered – the Master, Daleks, Cyberman, and so on – from various periods of Doctor Who comtinuity. The player characters will be given clues to who the Last Doctor really is and what he’s up to. And the final Big Bad will be the real Last Doctor, with a Companion Dream Team (I’m thinking Susan, Jo, Sarah Jane, K9, Leela, and Rose — all women and a robot dog, unless players want to play any of those characters), who have to stop the Fake Doctor last he accidentally destroy the universe with his meddling.

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Since everyone’s settled in from GenCon now, and ramping up for DragonCon, I figure it’s time to broach the subject of kit: what you lug around at cons and game days, and what you lug it around in.

For the past couple of months I’ve been lugging two small messengers bags around to game days. The first contains a binder and a couple of game books. The other contains a pencil case packed with dice, playing cards, poker chips, mechanicals pencils and 3×5 index cards, as well as a couple of bottles of water. It is the bare minimum amount of kit I can get away with. If I could think of a way to carry less, I would. I’ve got a backpack that would fit everything, but it’s big and bulky and that feels like more of a hassle than two bags slung on opposite shoulders.

I’ve got a slightly larger bag that will accommodate everything but the water, but I really don’t want the water in with the books in case of leaks. And ditching the water is flat out; roleplaying requires a lot of talking, talking dries me out, and when I get dehydrated I get sick. I can buy a bottled water on-site for $2 a bottle, or I can buy a six pack of bottled water at the grocery store for $2 and pack it in. No water fountain to refill from, either, so I can’t get down to one bottle. Water is a cash-or-carry situation.

So it’s time to ask the readers: What do you take with you to game days, and what do you carry it around in? And how do you handle the issue of hydration without going broke?

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With apologies to the Chatty DM, I’m going to keep adding my own thoughts to the series he started as ideas come to me. Today I’m going to talk about how I manage to crank out new content 7 days a week on a fairly consistent basis.

As some of you know, I work as an automobile insurance claims adjuster. I work in a relatively secure facility, because we deal with medical records, legal documents, and other sensitive personal information. The computers we use are locked down to approved applications, email is monitored, an internet access is through a portal that logs where you go, even though there’s a whitelist limiting sites that are accessible.

There are four (4) computers, spread out between the break rooms, that have open internet access (there’s a blacklist and some nanny software, but no one’s really dumb enough to wander to those types of sites at work anyway, we hope). Four computers, for about 600 people at this campus. Basically, you log on, check the ball scores, or check your bank balance, or look for that one email you’ve been waiting for, and log off again so the next person can have a chance. This, obviously, is not an ideal situation for blogging.

Personal laptops are okay in the break room, but people look at you oddly unless you’ve got textbooks out and are obviously doing work for a class. Common sense tells me taking that kind of personal electronics into a secure facility is a bad idea. Plus, the time I’d get to blog is minimal; a few minutes before work, two 15 minute breaks, a 45 minute lunch. I don’t want to have to look for an outlet (there are very few in the break rooms), then boot the laptop, and so on. Not worth the time lag. So I have some alternative methods.

Alphasmart
Longtime readers know of my love affair with the Alphasmart. No, I will not shut up about it, ever. It’s a word processor, period. It costs about $250, and weights about 2 lbs. Mine shows 4 lines of text and holds 8 files, accessed by keys labeled “file 1″ “file 2″, etc. Newer models have 6 lines of text. It runs on AA batteries, which I change about once a year. It was designed for classrooms where the school can’t afford computers for every student, it is made of high impact plastic, and it is frickin’ indestructible. Testimonials on their website talk about people taking there Alphasmarts to places you wouldn’t take laptop – climbing the K2, racing the Iditarod, and extreme stuff like that. With the Alphasmart, I pull it out of my bag and press ON and it’s on, that fast. No booting time. I press the file key and there’s the file, right where I left off, no load time. It auto-saves every keystroke. I can write anywhere. When I get home, I connect it to my computer with an ordinary USB cable and send the files to whatever application — Word, OpenOffice, WordPress — that I choose. Easy, easy, easy.

That’s how I write a little bit in the few minutes I’ve got.

Notebook
I used to carry around a Moleskine or a Hipster PDA, and still do most of the time. The problem is, they tend to get crushed and messed up in my pockets. 99% of the time I have some kind of courier bag with me, and those smaller-format data capture devices tend to get lost.

So I bought myself a stack of single-subject notebooks. With the back-to-school rush, they were a 5 cents each. Easy to find in a bag, slimmer than a binder and space-economical. The first caveat is that notebooks are not for writing; it is a pain to sit down and transcribe handwritten notes into the computer. Notebooks are for notes, ideas, lists, a catchy phrase or sentance you might want to include. Do not attempt to write a whole blog post in the notebook.

What I do is brainstorm: things to potentially write about. This could be a sentance: “write something about last week’s game session”. If you have a large idea of what the post will contain, bullet point the thoughts you want to cover. If you envision it as a series, bullet point the posts in the series you see yourself writing. Never take any of this as a commitment, however; you never have to write all of this stuff, unless you foolishly tell your readers you’re going to. You can change your mind as you go; I often find that once I start writing the ideas evolve and change the outline.

When I get a few minutes with the Alphasmart (or at home on the computer) and I don’t have a partcular topic to write about, I browse the notebook and see if anything catches my fancy.

Sandy
Ideas come to me at all times. For raw data capture, I’ve switched from using the Moleskine or HipsterPDA in my pocket to using my cell phone. I’ve got it with me, so it’s one less thing to carry, and it doesn’t get crushed or bent. I’ve got an account with Sandy — IWantSandy.com — who acts as my personal assistant. When I get an idea, I send a text message to Sandy. I could email myself, but I have an unlimited text plan; to send an email costs a nickel a piece. The messages are then collected at my page at Sandy’s site. They’re also emailed to me, and I’ve got a filter set up to throw them into a separate folder. Ready to write and stuck for an idea? Check the folder or the Sandy page.

There are other ways to accomplish what I’m doing with Sandy, of course. There’s Jott, which I never got into, but allows you to send notes via voice mail. I know people who use Tumblr or other blogging services that allow you to post by email or text message and sent a “post” to a semi-hidden blog that collects ideas. The concept is to just capture thoughts so that when you have time to write, you can find a topic to write about.

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This started in the comments of another post, and I want to expand upon my thoughts here.

I would like to nip something in the bud right here and right now, because it insults my intelligence as well as yours, it insults the designers of the game, and it frankly just makes me angry. I would like everyone to stop spreading the Hasbro propaganda that the 4th edition Player’s Handbook is so chock full of awesome that there simply wasn’t room to include certain races and classes.

That’s not to say that the PHB doesn’t contain some awesome; there’s good stuff in there. But 4th edition D&D is probably the most calculated, well thought out edition of the game ever. Things were not exclused with any sort of deep regret. Things were excluded by design. Conscious choices were made, with very good reasons, all of which I understand, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don’t. It’s their product, and they can make the design choices they feel best for both the product and their business. There’s definitely a business strategy in there, and that’s fine, too, because Hasbro is a corporation and the sole purpose of a corporation is to generate a profit for its shareholders. That they contribute to this quirky little hobby of ours is incidental to their goals. I don’t begrudge them that. As a consumer, I have the power to buy, or not to buy. It’s an even equation there.

Yet I will not tolerate being lied to. No room? Bull crap. The 3.5 PHB and the 4e PHB both contain 316 pages. 4e adds two new classes, warlock and warlord, and removes four, barbarian, bard, monk, and sorcerer, net plus two. It adds three new races, dragonborn, eladrin, and tieflings, and removes two, gnomes and half-orcs, net minus one. Yes, it also adds new things like powers, paragon paths, and rituals, but it also uses a larger font in the body text, leaves a lot of white space unused, and has a crap-ton of full-page art. All of those were design decisions, for layout if not game design. A choice was made to lay the book out in the manner it’s laid out. It did not happen by accident. This product was not so ill-conceived that someone went “Oops! Gotta cut something! What’s expendable?” .

There’s no reason not to be honest. Most of the stuff I’ve read from the designers has been honest. It’s bloggers and fans who, in feeling the need to be defenders and apologists for the design choices, that are perpetuating this myth. Stop. Now. Please. To keep spreading the idea that “it’s so packed with greatness there just wasn’t room” is a bald-faced bob-damned lie that probably originated in the marketing department at Hasbro. They designed a really good game, and while not everyone agrees with the direction they took and it’s certainly not to everyone’s tastes, it’s still a good game. They had the guts to do something bold and different.

And they did it on purpose.

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This is a rerun. I repost it periodically because ask me about it.

Secret Contents of a Certain Government Warehouse
This file attempts to catalog and describe the contents of a particular secret government warehouse. In the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, this warehouse was the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Likewise, the first episode of the “War of the Worlds” TV series shows that the Martian war machines from the first invasion attempt were also stored in this warehouse.
continue reading…

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Allow me to begin by saying that I’ve never played a paladin in my life. Ever. The closest I’ve come was a particularly pious ranger/cleric back in 2nd Edition, a character I played for three years and had tons of fun with. I’ve always been Gnome Illusionist/Thief (or Wizard/Rogue). As that’s just not an option for me in 4th Edition (and I’m not bitter, no, not me, mention PHB2 at your own risk, back away slowly, say what again, SAY WHAT AGAIN, THEY SPEAK COMMON IN WHAT?!?) I decided that out of deference to a prevailing meme here at UncleBear my first 4e character should be a paladin.

(Yes, I bought the PHB. I decided it was more important for me to know the rules and the character types, including races and classes, to help design fluff. I can borrow a DMG in the mean time, and will pick it up next month.)

Glancing through, I’m looking at the new races I can play. Dragonborn. Yeah, okay, innovative. *cough*not*cough* I was playing dragonewt characters in Runequest a couple of decades ago (Glorantha represent!). I could play a lizard man in Encounter Critical back in 1979. But unlike EC lizard men, do dragonborn have an edible excrement mutation that gives the rest of that party +10% to their camping roll? I think not. And at least lizard women with boobs could be doxies in EC, which explained the NEED for the boobs, in the context of the game.

Ooh, I can play an Eladrin! What the eff is an Eladrin? It looks like an elf. But I can also play an elf. Or a half-elf. So, three flavors of elf. But no gnomes. Okay. I can clearly see why there was no room whatsoever to include gnomes in the PHB. Or half-orcs. I’m still holding the position that including half-elves but excluding half-orcs is racist. But I’m trying to build a character here, so stop pulling me off on tangents.

I decided to go with dwarf. Dwarf paladin of… it doesn’t really matter. Because in my head, he’s an undercover gnome. Undercover gnome paladin of Garl. Agent of G.A.R.L., the Gnome Active Resistance League. We’re in ur game underminin ur reality. Sleeper agent. So deep cover that I’m not even going to tell the game master, in the event that I ever run this character. Because paladins should always have a cause.

Here’s where I’m going to stop. I’ll get back to my impression of the ins and outs of character creation in a future post, along with the actual, you know, character I created.

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While tinkering with the 4th Edition Player’s Handbook and putting together a few characters to get a feel for things, I had a startling realization. More than any previous edition of Dungeon & Dragons, 4e is really built around the concept of shemping and flair.

Back in first edition there wasn’t really a lot that differentiated, say, one 5th level fighter from another. Strength bonus, if any, and hit points. Your 7th level magic used varied from my 7th level magic user only in which spells and how many they could cast, and hit points. You get the idea. The differences were minute. They were shemps. The flair came from the personalities we gave them, and from the magic items they carried.

In 2nd edition, I played a lot of clerics because they were the most varied characters in terms of ability options. A priest of this god was wildly different from a priest of that god. The “Complete” books (Complete Ranger, Complete Paladin, Complete Psionicist, etc) gave more options within each class. Characters stopped being shemps, differentiated by flair.

3rd edition was more skill-based, which allowed customization, and had prestige classes. Add in multi-classing and the metric crap-ton of third-party material and you go nuts. There was no excuse to have a shemp player character.

With 4e, it feels like we’re back to the beginning. Truncated skill list. No multiclassing. Specific Paragon Paths. My 13th level elf fighter looks an awful lot like your 13th level elf fighter. They’re shemps, and the flair is the personality you give them and the magic items they get. They really did go back to the well of OD&D in that respect.

Now, this might seem like I’m griping, but I’m not. I’m seeing this as an opportunity. It means I really don’t need to put a lot of effort into building my character. I’ve never been a munchkin, I’ve never been a powergamer, so I’m good with a shemp, because while it doesn’t let me built a mechanically-great character, it makes it hard for me to build a character that sucks, either. For new players, that’s an edge. For people like me, it frees me from having to make system choices and allows me to make character choices — what do I do with these skills and powers that are essentially foisted upon me based on race, class, and level. How am I going to roleplay this person, who isn’t that different from the people around him? That’s an idea I dig. I want to play 4e.

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