I guess Monte Cook has been back at Wizards for ~4 months? And he’s been writing a column? This makes sense, given that there’s now an announcement about this 5e playtest.

Looking back on 4e, I still think it was a really solid edition, but I’ve come around to agree with some of the criticism with regard to losing some of the old school flavor. It’s inevitable that a thick layer of mechanics, no matter how crisply designed, are going to focus people’s attentions on that.

One part of 3e and Pathfinder I strongly want to remain addressed or fixed in some fashion is character power level. 4e rather strongly pushes a philosophy where PCs get a sort of metaphorical +2, and if nothing else, I found that to be a revelation. If there’s anything I would preserve from 4e, this would be at the top of the list. (Second would probably be: fighters and their ilk should not be inherently less interesting to play than casters as they have been with previous editions.)

This is in contrast to 3e and even Pathfinder, wherein you get some kind of bonus or interesting ability but there’s a trade-off baked into the ability. The game is balanced for characters without that sort of advantage, so any advantage a PC receives has to be offset with some penalty or substantial drawback.

I recall this being true in particular of the sorcerer’s at-will attacks. You get an ability to make some kind of attack. Fantastic! So I don’t need a crossbow? Well, not quite. A crossbow requires a move action to reload but it does 1d8, which is too much. It would also be too powerful for a caster to do more damage than some spells, so it’s 1d4 or 1d6 + 1 for every N levels of sorcerer. Oh, and at-will is too powerful, so you’ve got a fixed number of uses per day. There’s a neat mechanic attached to some of them which makes it worthwhile but in our analogy of 4e handing out +2, this is more like +0.5.

As you go on and on, you see that there’s a limit to how awesome even Pathfinder can make you. They can bolt on additional abilities all they want, but they must be 3.5-esque in terms of versatility and power level and they must be in lockstep with what’s gone before.

Note that, at least from a balance perspective, I’m entirely sympathetic. The system has got to work. And people who like 3.x are presumably fine with this. I mean, I’m saying all that stuff up there like it’s a bad thing! There’s nothing wrong with people enjoying that flavor of mechanics. Hell, it’s far and away more interesting than many of the 3e classes, especially for fighters and whatnot. Nevertheless, this is something that has bugged me ever since 2e and Pathfinder is more of the same when it comes down to it.

Anyway, I don’t want to spend all my time knocking Paizo’s product. More power to them if they can make something of the contracting tabletop RPG industry. It seems like both they and WotC have their work cut out for them, though. I fear I’ve turned this blog into some kind of platform of doom and gloom but I can’t lie: I suspect our hobby will only become more and more niche.

I found a list here, from the Unofficial White Wolf Wiki:

• Russell Bailey
• John Bridges
• Chad Brown
• John Chambers
• Mike Chaney
• Ken Cliffe
• Shane DeFreest
• Brian Glass
• Craig S. Grant
• Sara Luebke
• Aileen E. Miles
• Ethan Skemp
• Michelle Webb

You can hit the list of layoffs to find links to each person’s White Wolf CV. There are a lot of names here that go way back before you even start talking about such as Ethan Skemp and Aileen Miles.

I reiterate, this time with emphasis: holy fucking shit. It breaks my heart.

Now, I don’t pretend that I would even recognize any of these people on the street, let alone that I have any sort of personal relationship with them. I only have a relationship with these people insofar as I’ve spent countless hours curled up with books they’ve written, typeset, and otherwise lovingly crafted. I couldn’t have bought and read a decade’s worth of White Wolf books without recognizing at least some of these names.

It’s tempting to opine about the whole White Wolf/CCP thing. Of course some part of me feels bitterness. But if the complaint is that CCP is killing White Wolf, I have to wonder whether White Wolf would’ve survived, alone, for this long.

No, I don’t really have any big pronouncements. Recessions suck. I’m sad about RPGs being on the decline. White Wolf was one of my favorites because I like creepy and/or modern shit.

Arguably this is what happens when times change; the old stuff, which has its own merits and trade-offs, falls by the wayside or is otherwise transformed. They are replaced by new things, which also have their own merits and trade-offs, and will themselves, at some subsequent time, be replaced or transformed. It’s not the end because it’s never the end; RPGs live in on multiple forms. Many of their concepts and mechanics are now more pervasive than they’ve ever been. And in a more concrete sense, White Wolf itself still lives, as does WotC and numerous indie developers.

That’s about all I’ve got.

When Lion came out, I decided to check out the state of the art in ostensibly user-friendly (read: GUI) email clients. I don’t pretend to know much about how Apple Mail It was purely curiosity. But a number of issues have cropped up in my mind.

• Gmail can get really bloated, memory-wise. I was surprised when Mail took up less than 200MB; I assumed all mail clients routinely took up at least twice as much. Gmail often takes up something north of 500MB. (I suppose Chrome doesn’t help, if only because its multiprocess model necessarily involves a RAM tax.) Part of this is that I keep it open all the time, or rather I used to; now I feel obligated to close it now and then to keep my RAM clear. On balance, I don’t want to care about RAM, but in practice I feel I have to. I share a laptop with my -girlfriend- wife, which means Gmail effectively occupies 1GB or more. Running a Minecraft server on my desktop machine means I’m consistently down by 1GB, at least until I move it off.

• The idea of having my mail on every machine is less of a concern now. Chiefly this is because I have a smartphone; if I don’t have a laptop with me, I always have my phone. IMAP means that changes on one client propagate elsewhere automatically, whether it’s on the phone, the iPad, or a full-fledged computer.

• I can use an email client offline. This doesn’t happen that often, admittedly, and when I am completely offline I’m typically on vacation. Still, there were a couple of occasions recently where my connectivity was poor enough to make Gmail sluggish. A mail client simply had to download my messages once and I could read and search all of them without hitting the server via my flaky connection.

• An email client is consistently faster when it comes to common UI operations. This is not to say that Gmail is slow, at last not most of the time. Most of the time, it’s fast enough. But when it’s not, it’s quite frustrating when a simple search takes longer than it really should! Contrariwise, once a client downloads my mail, I’m not subject to network delays. Yes, the client can be slow due to limitations of my machine, but those same constraints apply to the browser as well. Furthermore, the difference between searching my mail via Gmail and on my own machine continues to narrow, at least for me.

• With Gmail + IMAP, I have the best of both worlds. I can check mail via a browser should I need to, but should I have the need, I can use the client. This is the strongest point in favor of retaining Gmail, modulo other logistical issues: it does’t have to be either/or.

That said, there are some significant drawbacks, at least to Apple Mail in particular as well as Gmail/IMAP.

• Gmail/IMAP integration isn’t that great. Or maybe I should say that IMAP itself isn’t that great. It’s a folder-based paradigm, which treats emails like files. I think that’s ridiculous. IMHO, people only think about emails that way because it’s been thrust on them, and it’s not like most people understand the filesystem paradigm in the first place. Labeling/tagging a message is a “copy” operation, which is dumb. Archiving a message means “move to All Mail,” which is silly, too. Overall I’d say the mapping is somewhat leaky. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s fault in particular; I prefer Gmail’s model, but I wouldn’t expect Apple to sign on to that model wholesale.

• Your -filters- Rules don’t sync across multiple machines. It seems that previously you’d have to pay for MobileMe to get this, which is/was ridiculous. Perhaps iCloud will fix this? It would be surprising if it didn’t, esp. considering they’re offering a full-fledged email service as far as I can tell.

• The keyboard shortcuts aren’t nearly as good. Although there are hitches now and then, for the most part I can drive Gmail entirely through keyboard shortcuts. Mail’s keyboard shortcuts are merely OK.

All this really amounts to in terms of my behavior is that nowadays I often have Mail open on my personal machines. I don’t shy away from using Mail on iOS devices, either. Beyond that, I still use Gmail for chat and I use it for most email operations that aren’t simply reading or deleting. The thought remains that I could, if I really wanted to, make the switch. I’m just not sure what it would take for me to do it; certainly I have no reason to now or in the near future.

Sometimes, in the course of one’s life, one is left with a one-off task. In this case, I needed to call a binary a whole lot of times, and do something with the output each time. The details aren’t important; I just needed to write a wrapper script for this binary, do a modest amount of processing on it, and then output the result to a file. This is a pretty common task, one to which the command line in general and *nix in particular is well-suited.

Now, for various reasons, I prefer not to do this via shell scripts. I don’t have a hard and fast rule for when or why. Unless you routinely write shell scripts (I don’t), you’ll inevitably spend a bunch of time looking stuff up that you looked up, oh, six months ago. Or at least I do. I don’t enjoy it, so if I can’t do it with a few commands, maybe one loop or so, then I prefer to use a scripting language. I have the advantage of better/clearer failure modes and simpler syntax and I feel like I’m learning something more powerful and more widely applicable in the process.

One of my “favorite” things to forget and look up again is the difference between [[ ]] and [ ] in tests. Another one is how you loop over a file or output from a command (while read line; do bar --baz $line; done <foo and foo | while read line; do bar $line; done, respectively).

If you have no trouble remembering this stuff or you write scripts often enough, I suppose this is moot. There was a time when I was scripting enough that I didn’t have to look all this stuff up every time, but that time is past. YMMV and all that.

Anyway, the point is that I probably could’ve done this with something like this (which is simplified somewhat):

ARGS="--bar=baz"
CMD="~/bin/foo"
KEY="quux"
MIN=0
MAX=10000
 
for $(seq 0 1000) num do;
  $CMD $num $ARGS | while read line;
    if egrep -q $KEY <<<$line; then
      value=$(egrep -o '[1-9]+$')
        echo "$num,$value"
    fi
  done
done

I’m sure I have a bajillion bugs in there. For example, I am not at all confident about the outer for loop syntax. And while it was easy to write, I’m not doing anything with command line args, doing any error handling, or anything like that. (On the other other hand, I uh underestimated how easy this was. That’s partially why I’m convinced there are bugs in there.)

I still don’t know how to write idiomatic (typo: idiotmatic) Ruby, so this is going to be very rough. Still, it feels natural to me, minus one or two hitches:

ARGS = "--bar=baz"
CMD = "~/bin/foo"
KEY = /quux/
MIN = 0
MAX = 10000
 
def main
  (MIN..MAX).each do |i|
    out = %x[ #{CMD} #{i} #{ARGS} ]
    out.split('\n').each do |line|
      KEY.match(line) do |m|
        value = line.split(' ')[1]
        print "#{i},#{value}\n"
      end
    end
  end
end

I’m not confident about the outer loop once again, and I’m not sure the call to match() will do what I want, let alone whether it’s elegant. Still, I feel pretty good about it. I love Ruby’s pattern of passing in blocks.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I had to use Python. And don’t get me wrong: I love Python. It is through Python that I learned to love scripting languages. Processing a file line by line was, I think, the real epiphany. And list comprehensions are wonderfully expressive.

But man alive is it awful for this sort of thing. I’m not even going to bother writing it out in Python. I’ll just excerpt, from the 2.7 subprocess docs. Here’s what they say should replace backticks output = \mycmd myarg``:

output = Popen(["mycmd", "myarg"], stdout=PIPE).communicate()[0]

Mind you, this is if you did from subprocess import *. Generally I don’t, which means it ends up looking like this:

output = \
  subprocess.Popen(["mycmd", "myarg"], subprocess.stdout=PIPE).\
  communicate()[0]

Yes, once you have it written, sequestered in its own function that you never touch again, it’s not so bad. However, this is firmly in the category of something I will not be able to (and have not been able to) remember months later.

It is also not discoverable in the sense that it’s highly particular— stdout=PIPE? Really? Compare and contrast opening a file (for line in open('somefile'): print foo(line) or [foo(line) for line in open('somefile')) with this monster. Even my Ruby example could have used backticks if I hadn’t remembered the %x syntax. The best I can say about subprocess is that it’s a) better than Popen in Python 2.4 (or whatever), and b) it’s easier to search the web for than %x.

The kicker of course is that rest of the Python script was very easy to write! However, since calling the binary was changing some external state, though, I had to make sure it was doing the right thing. In the end building and testing the call to subprocess.Popen() took longer than the rest of the script. In an otherwise elegant, no-bullshit, batteries included language, the subprocess module is a terrible blemish. It doesn’t look any better in Python 3.0, either, unfortunately.

Even more unfortunately, this is ultimately why it would be my preference to use either Ruby or shell. Ruby seems to work well for a variety of tasks, from writing a full-fledged webapp to some grungy text manipulation. You don’t have to compromise because it’s quite easy to use it for Python-y things as well as Perl-y things. It’s just a shame that Python seems to treat this case with a bizarre kind of fussiness incongruent with the rest of the language and standard library.

One of them was unboxing my roleplaying books. They’d been boxed up as part of some home improvement and I never got around to unboxing them. This weekend, I did. It’s hard to describe how I felt. It was bittersweet, in that I felt nostalgic but also some sense that I might be done with roleplaying for good.

And then just now, I saw that White Wolf had put up their publishing schedule for 2011 – 2012. Huh.

I’ll admit I’m less than thrilled by the whole V20 thing. (I guess we’re all curmudgeons now?) (Uh, “now”?) There wasn’t much thrill in a game I wasn’t all that interested in, although on some level I have to feel happy for the people for whom this is a big deal. The guy who runs my FLGS certainly seems pleased. My visits aren’t often these days, and he brings it up each time. I don’t have the heart to tell him I thought Requiem was a superior game by nearly every measure.

On top of that, I presumed that the nWoD was all but dead. Perhaps that says more about me than anything else: from glancing at DriveThruRpg.com, it seems there’s been a trickle of releases. It’s difficult to see at what rate with DriveThruRPG’s interface, but it doesn’t seem like that many. Maybe that’s consistent with the rate before the move to digital publishing in any case.

I’m rambling.

So then I see the new publishing schedule, and it’s an interesting mix. Releases are one per month, as far as I can tell, and the list goes out to 2012. Remarkably, it seems they’re releasing new material for the old games (including finishing up some of the old Technocracy Convention books, ha!). But the majority is either nWoD or Exalted.

Another notable piece is that there’ll be another nWoD expansion game, a remake of Mummy.

Finally, it looks like some of the print on demand stuff came through. On top of the oWoD stuff, a bunch of nWoD stuff will be on here. So there’s that.

My own hiatus

My thoughts on roleplaying these days are few and far between, as I’m sure I’ve reiterated the few times I’ve posted lately. That’s persisted. I’ve spent more time reading, coding, working, or goofing off. A big chunk of it is that my core gaming group is heavily ensconced in their own game, for which I have little interest. Hearing about their game evokes the opposite of what I’d imagined; the more I hear about it, the less I’m interested in roleplaying overall.

I’d say it’s a phase, as these things do move in cycles. Two year cycles, though? That’s the last time I posted any really coherent thoughts on roleplaying. Oh, I’m sure I’ve played some one-shot D&D since then. But I never ran Changeling, nor Dark Sun, nor Geist, nor anything else.

What’s funny is that when I was shelving my books the other day, I was reminded about how I kept acquiring books even after I’d ostensibly lost interest. I’ve got a fair number of D&D books I haven’t read. In my defense, some (but not all) were gifts. Some of the later Vampire: the Requiem books are mostly unread. I probably finished The Mage Chronicler’s Guide.

There’s something alluring about the books, though, as always. The Requiem clanbooks in particular were among the most enjoyable role-playing books I’ve ever seen or read.

This is all just a long way of saying that I’m sure I could get interested again if I tried. But do I want to? I’m not sure! This I will say: as of this evening, and it sure is tempting to crack open a role-playing book or two in the meantime. I might have achieved the point (seven years?!) at which there’s enough nostalgia to get me reading, if nothing else.

autocorrect

I didn’t realize this was going to be as big a deal to me as I thought. Actually, I’d forgotten about it entirely until I started writing a couple of blog posts. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the built-in autocorrect is actually pretty handy. The vast majority of the time it does the right thing! Were I using Vim to do most of my writing, it might not matter so much; Vim has so many handy motions that it’s easy to jump between words, sentences, and lines in order to fix mistakes quickly. For a standard (read: less arcane) input method like this one, though, I’ve only got the standard ctrl-a, ctrl-e, alt-left, alt-right, and so on. Having the OS correct the litany of stupid typos I make regularly helps.

I had sort of wondered why this wasn’t an OS feature in the first place. Input fields are common as mud and autocorrect has been a feature in word processors for a long, long time. So why isn’t it in the OS? Who knows? It is now.

Irrationally, I worry that a feature like this will erode my typing accuracy.

fullscreen apps

To some extent, I’m being conspicuous when I use them. There’s no real reason that I need to use Safari fullscreen while blogging. After all, Chrome is my main browser. But it does have a nice way of focusing my attention. I’m also trying out Apple Mail, and segregating it to its own space means I’m less likely to fidget with checking it.

mission control

I was a litte worried about Mission Control doing away with Snow Leopard’s way of laying out windows via Exposé. Leopard laid out windows sort of haphazardly and without obvious consistency. Snow Leopard made it into a grid layout, which made it a little harder to figure out which window was which but looked a lot neater and cleaner overall. Mission Control looks to restore it back to a semi-haphazard layout, grouped by application, which seemed like a loss of functionality.

What rescues it is the presence of a gesture for application-level Exposé. With that, I don’t have to Cmd-` my way through two or more Chrome windows. I’m not sure how useful Mission Control’s facility for selecting one or more of an app’s windows is, though.

launchpad

It’s pretty! I’ll give it that. But I am not sure how useful it is.

It looks like it finds all of your apps, which is a good thing overall. It’d be dumb if it didn’t.

However, putting them into iOS-style folders and whatnot is odd. For example, I’ve got a bunch of git clients (Tower, GitY, GitX, GitHub) sitting in my Applications folder. There’s also a Development folder in Launchpad. Except it actually corresponds to /Developer. When I moved my various Git.* apps around in Launchpad, it created /Applications/Developer which had only the Git.* apps in it.

Call it a leaky abstraction, I guess. Or a corner case, given that the majority of apps go under /Applications in any case.

scrolling, gestures

I’m fine with the new scrolling. I guess I’ve lived with it for a week, like I said I would, and I don’t feel like turning it off.

The gestures are kind of messed up out of the box, though. Two finger swipe for fwd/back is fine in theory but it doesn’t work at all in Chrome (expected; I presume they’d have to make a code change) or even System Preferences (!). It’s easy to switch it back to three finger swipe, and I did that.

I like the new scrollbars, although once again they’re hideous in Chrome. Chrome still has the old scrollbar gutter, and the gray scrollbar is always present. The Chrome team is working on it, or so I hear.

TTFN

That’s all I’ve got for now.

I sort of want to write something about Resume and whatnot, but I’m out of steam at the moment. Perhaps another time. John Siracusa’s excellent review of Lion covers this in more detail, and he probably says it better than I would anyway.

It’s JavaScript and Ruby that’ve influenced me most lately. Functional patterns in particular have attracted my attention. I really dig stuff like this in Ruby:

open('somefile').readlines.each do |x|
  print x
end

And then I spent a whole boatload of time in JavaScript, where you get to do stuff like this:

var someArray = [1, 4, 2, 3, 5];
goog.array.forEach(arr, function (e, i, a) {
  console.log("Here's a number: " + e);
});

What I really dig about this pattern is passing in a function where I can do whatever I like. The factory pattern becomes much simpler. We can pass this around to whoever:

var url = "/foo";
var reqFactory = function() {
  var req = new Request();
  req.setUrl(url);
  req.addHeader("baz", "quux");
  return req;
};

The current conundrum involves implementing some kind of retry logic. In one case, I need to build a new request each time the request fails. In another case, I just want to retry for a certain subset of exceptions. In yet another case, if I make the request and it doesn’t have what I want, I want to re-issue it.

In Java, it’s— it’s messy. I don’t know what the Java-esque way of doing it is, quite frankly. I find myself wanting to create a Retrier interface which defines an onSuccess, onFailure, and a doRetry method.

I’m not sure what each method should return; what if I want to be able to return whatever it is that we got from the request? Do I create a wrapper class w/generics? I think this is how it works in the Kingdom of Nouns. The nouns just keep proliferating.

The one thing I think Java has going for it is anonymous inner classes. I feel like the way files and classes proliferate in Java is nuts, and being able to keep the implementation of such as a Retrier close to where it’s used seems like a win. It’s a one-off, right? A whole class & implementation & file devoted to it feels like it’s belaboring the point.

I’m sure at some point I’ll figure it out and/or get used to it. In the meantime, every time I want to add a layer of abstraction, it feels like massive overkill. I almost wrote up code samples for the above but it turned out to be too much effort. I can’t be as glib with it, at least not yet. Oh well.

Then I started reading The Next Wave in Digital Offerings. I got really confused as to what was what until I looked at the catalog entry for Class Compendium: Heroes of Sword and Spell. It spells things out pretty clearly and I sort of feel like an idiot for not being able to figure it out. Oh well.

I’m not sure how I feel about this method of splitting up the books. I suppose there’s no inherent reason why someone unfamilar with D&D would find the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual triumvirate less confusing (aside from the bundle of three books you’d buy).

In any case, I still haven’t picked up any Essentials books. What can I say? I haven’t felt much enthusiasm about roleplaying lately. Maybe that sums up the reason for the decline in roleplaying overall. It’s effort to set up a game, to wrangle a playable group of characters, and so on. Oh, sure, my thoughts on Essentials as a game or a system is mostly unchanged: the move towards simplicity is probably a good idea, I like the price point for the books, the size is pretty adorable, and overall, I’m intrigued. The fancy hasn’t struck me. Admittedly I’m probably more likely to run a World of Darkness game of some sort. That’s still unlikely.

Character builder

I’ve still tried to follow the stuff about D&D lately, however, and another thing caught my notice. They’re finally doing a web-based version of the Character Builder! It’s been discussed before, but they mention it once again in the November news. This is quite a development. I own a Mac laptop and it was always a little silly that I could only do things on my Windows machine. I sort of get why. If they’re going to hire developers in the Seattle area, there’s a very high chance that any candidates will have worked for Microsoft at some point in their career. That biases things in favor of Windows and, to some extent, client technology. I’m trying not to make a value judgment here, because neither of those things are inherently awful— Windows is obviously the dominant OS, and you work with the talent you have available to you. So the original client was in .NET.

That’s done in Silverlight, apparently, is also understandable for those reasons. However, it seems like a pretty big mistake. Yes, I know: it’s easy to second-guess whoever’s in charge as I sit comfortably at home. There’s nothing riding on me successfully finishing this blog post. Hear me out.

Silverlight is a dead technology. I get that it uses .NET, so they wanted to be able to use that expertise. Although the writing was on the wall, arguably, the team couldn’t possibly have known that Microsoft was going to deprecate it when they started (link). That announcement was last week or so. But let’s be honest: it was never terribly popular outside of a few highly specific applications. I’ll grant you that Netflix streaming is a huge win. I can’t name much else, outside of Microsoft’s own stuff.

The other wrinkle is that there is no mobile story (as geeks call it these days). I could see not having figured out something for the iPad. If we assume a 12 – 24 month development cycle, they started well before the iPad was out, and although the iPad lived up to the hype in terms of sales, you can’t predicate your development cycle on that. Even so, the lack of any solution for Android or iOS is baffling. Mobile is enormous and it’ll continue to grow. And Silverlight runs on zero mobile devices. Not a single one! Yikes.

I think there’s some good news, though. As I understand it, Silverlight is just a frontend. The rest of the stack may be Microsoft tech, but that’s outside of Silverlight’s purview, modulo whatever interop stuff Microsoft has set up to make it easy to deveop apps. As part of that, Wizards has got tools in place for adding and editing game data. Writing a new client is somewhat “easier” than doing the whole thing from scratch, since “all you’d need to do” is write a new frontend to interpet the same data you were sending down to the Silverlight client. (Scare quotes highly intentional.) Here my ignorance about the Microsoft stack precludes me from informed commentary: it seems like ASP.NET is would be the right answer to this, to provide some relatively .NET-like way of writing a web client. I’ve no idea what the situation is with mobile devices.

There’s also this:

There are five things I really, really like about the new Character Builder.

1. It’s ultimately portable. I can use it on any computer or computer-like device, wherever I am.

Hang on, there. Does this mean there is a web-based client after all? Otherwise I don’t get what a “computer-like device” would be— notebooks, netbooks, and laptops are all fancy words for small but “real” computers running desktop operating systems. iPods, smartphones, iPads, and the like are all small “computer-like” devices, running mobile operating systems. They don’t run Silverlight. Windows Phone 7 runs Silverlight, apparently, but once again, that came out only recently. An iDevice client wouldn’t be amiss, of course, so maybe that’s in the works. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Bill could just be referring to netbooks and their ilk.

Miscellany

When I did visit my FLGS a week or two ago, it was interesting to hear the local guy pass on the latest news about White Wolf. The Afterword in Mirrors indicates that the new World of Darkness isn’t over per se, just that it’s going digital only, right? This fellow indicated that it was over. Probably confusion, right? Probably. It’s easy to see why, though.

He also mentioned old World of Darkness books being available as print-on-demand. I have a policy that I like to summarize in terms of “I try to stay out of religious wars.” This includes PC vs. Mac, emacs vs. vi, 3e vs. 4e, and yes, old World of Darkness vs. new World of Darkness. (Against my better judgment, I’m tempted to write up a sort of farewell post to the oWoD. Maybe someday.) I was already leaving at the moment, so I murmured something polite and stepped outside. Folks at that store appear highly sympathetic to the old World of Darkness, and that’s fair. No use is pissing on anybody’s parade.

It is a little sad as I think back. I bought most of my Mage: the Ascension books from his store. And when the new World of Darkness came out, I bought a ton of Vampire and Werewolf books used. (I owned them previously, but having moved from the east coast to the west coast, I left the majority of my WoD books at my parents’ house.) I’ve relegated all but M:tAsc‘s books to the other room.

Mostly they all gather dust. I don’t have the heart to read them. I strongly suspect that they won’t hold up for me. The way I figure, it’s better to stick with my hazy memories from about 10 years ago than to realize concretely just how dated the books, the setting, and the aesthetic will feel to me.

ttfn

Until next time, blog.

"Look, no one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said 'Let's get rid of all of our fans and replace them.' That was never the intent," Mearls said.

Man. I know no reasonable person believes that. Even so, I feel pretty bad for the Wizards folks. No matter what they do, some subset of the RPG fans will hate it.

Call it the narcissism of small differences, if you like, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. The Internet offers gigabytes of evidence which suggests we’re all susceptible to those dynamics. They don’t call them Edition Wars without reason, whether the conflict in question is D&D 3e vs. 4e, or old World of Darkness vs. new World of Darkness. If there’s a bright side, it’s that people care enough about the pastime to express strong opinions about it.

To hear the author tell it, even this article provoked some amount of controversy! The Escapist posted the whole transcript in an effort to clear the air. It’s funny that people (apparently?) accused the author, Alexander Macris, of having some kind of intrinsic bias in various directions.

D&D and the “death spiral,” for instance: does anyone doubt that although 4e might’ve sold “well,” the industry continues to shrink? I’m not saying anyone has to like it. I’m just pointing out that it’s a no-brainer: there are many more choices, media-wise, than there were in the days of 1e, 2e, and to some extent, 3e. Or about the alleged axe Macris has to grind: do people not give any weight at all to the criticism of 4e? Reasonable people can disagree on issues like whether there are simply too many concurrent effects for many people to track.

Towards the end, they get into an interesting discussion about how the current environment for games differs from the environment D&D came out of. The short of it is that RPGs— or any board game, really— are competing for time with video games. Video games have many strong incentives to get you up and running very quickly, whereas learning an RPG or any sort of board game typically takes time. It’s a boostrapping problem: how do you start playing immediately if you have no idea how to play? I imagine that first hour, if that long, is extremely fragile.

It’s a tough problem, and I’ll confess I don’t know enough about, well, anything to predict whether or not the Red Box approach is likely to work. The time investment is still an issue: people are willing to spend comparable time on MMOs for raids and such, but by that point they have some idea of what they’re in for and they’re reasonably sure they’ll enjoy it.

And if it’s a hurdle for players, it’s often worse for the DM. There are ways around this, like making the mechanics of encounter-building very easy. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be that way in any case; I might very well be projecting.

I think they’re right in some sense that the more you play an RPG, the more you’re likely to get out of it. But that’s a tough sell, isn’t it? For an MMO, the game is fun immediately, without ramp-up time and without having to find like-minded people. Frontloading the experience is one way to deal with it, but we’re back to the bootstrapping problem again.

At this point, I’ve begun to regret not having picked up Essentials. Oh, sure, I knew what I was getting into with the Red Box, and I still want to play it. And I’m a goddamn collector! No, the problem is that now I’m curious. I want something to read through and digest.

I foresee a trip to my FLGS in the next week or so.

Let me say something up front: the Red Box is priced to move. I assumed it would be somewhere around $30. That’s just how RPGs go these days. I assumed it’d be $35 and was not going to buy it. It’s $20. The same goes for the Heroes of the Fallen Lands book. Given that a nice hardcover RPG from White Wolf or Wizards goes for around $30, it’s hard to imagine not picking up one or the other if you think you’re ever going to play it.

At all events, I bought the Red Box, and I’ve had a chance to flip through it.

My first impression is that it’s quite adorable and delightful. It really makes me nostalgic. I can’t pretend I grew up with any of the $color boxen— I started with D&D 2nd Edition around the time that the black book came out. Before that, though, I was an avid fan of the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks. The means of introduction in the Red Box just so happens to be a gamebook-style choose your own adventure. It’s as if they’re trying to warm the black chunk of ice that serves as my heart. I’m flashing back to when I flipped through AD&D 2e for the first time. Even when I acquired the PHB, I read the “what is roleplaying?” introduction over and over. If anyone’s trying to compel me to have children, the Red Box is the most persuasive argument I’ve heard by far.

Mechanics-wise, all of the differences are not clear to me. Based on what I’ve heard, the engine— basic mechanics like defenses, attack progression, daily/encounter/at-will, saving throws, and so on— are mostly unchanged. Rather, they’ve changed the implementation layer, the classes and how they function.

When I heard about this, I had mixed feelings. I purchased a ton of books already and having invested a lot of time in 4e before Essentials. A lot of complaints that I hear are animated by ideas I’d rather the designers not act on. I strongly believe that 4e is a huge step forward in aggregate. People may get bogged down by choice, but as I saw it, it made a strong case for playing something other than spellcasters. They incorporated many concepts from indie RPGs, and in general made D&D that much easier to run.

Even so, it’s undeniable that 4e can really get bogged down in play. Some of this has to do with a preponderance of choices. People end up haggling over what to do, or simply can’t decide and default to using the same powers over and over. It can be difficult to track conditions. Experience mitigates this substantially, but for some people, it doesn’t seem to help.

From flipping through the Red Box books, Essentials’ thesis, so to speak, appears to have two parts: a) the fundamentals of 4e are solid, and b) classes can still be fun without being terribly intricate. In theory, that is pretty persuasive. They could rejigger some classes so they’re on par with the previous ones without reducing their potency. In practice, the implementation details are, er, essential. I think they have a lot of wiggle room, but hitting the sweet spot between overwhelming and underwhelming choice seems like a real challenge.

We’ll see how this works out with the Red Box. I’m guessing that, if nothing else, I’ll pick up the Essentials stuff to say in the loop. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even try running it for the group that found 4e too overwhelming.