Leveling Up: I Do It Weird

  Thanks to my G+ feed and the great folks on it, I am going to talk about how I do things and confuse the heck out of everyone.

  The topic at hand is leveling up in AD&D 1e and the fees, mentors, etc. The DMG tells us;

"Experience points are merely an indicator of the character's progress toward greater proficiency in his or her chosen profession..."
"The gaining of sufficient experience points necessary [for] a character to be eligible to gain a level of experience but the actual award is a matter for you, the DM, to decide"

  Interesting, isn't it? Gary goes on to outline a system of rating a character and the roleplaying involved and then discusses a program where characters will be out of play for weeks and spend money, sometimes vast sums, to level up. The fun thing? Going from 2nd to 3rd level should typically cost you so much money that you technically should be 4th level already.

Fast Film Review - Blade Runner (Director's Cut)

  It is hard for me to write a review of Blade Runner.
  No, for a funny reason. I picked the director's cut of Blade Runner as my thesis topic for my Film class in college. I've already written about 250 pages on this sucker and I just want to post the papers as PDFs!
  But I recently watched it with my older kids and wanted to write about it, so....
  Quick review follows.

Stranger Things - Episode 6 Review

  Please see the wider internet for general recaps.

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT THIS TIME!!!

General Notes:
Slightly different order.
Cinematography and Editing:  Ives and Zimmerman are at it and it is great. Want examples of how camera and editing work well? Watch the scene where Jonathan is in Nancy's room an laying on the floor. Pay attention to camera angles, lights, and cuts. Now the scene an Lucas' house and how the editing takes us into the story.

Acting: Matarazzo was even better than last episode; the kid is great. Heaton was less engaging and frankly I suspect it is because Dyer was so damn flat; last episode was a head fake, I think. Ryder and Harbour were in Expositionville so they were mainly there to listen to character actor Amy Seimetz to a great job. Catherine Dyer was nicely effective as evil female agent #1, too. Brown had a little more to do and seems to be a solid, yeoman actor.

Directing: Good, especially for a largely Expositionville episode. The cough "teen drama" cough stuff was a mess and we'll talk about the younger guys in full.

Stranger Things - Episode 5 review

Taking my birthday to watch more episodes quickly. Remember, I review but I don't recap; there are great recaps all over.

General Notes:
Acting: Harbour, Ryder, Heaton, and Wolfhard were all good to great. Matarazzo stood out - the kid was great in this one. McLaughlin, Havens, and Keery are great journeyman actors and have good instincts - I really like Havens; the man will be a 'HITG' before you know it. Brown was great in the flashbacks but struggled in the contemporary scenes with how little she has to work with.
  And Dyer. That girl. She had a few good scenes, holding out hope.... Perhaps she is finding her feet, perhaps her issue is direction? Let us hope she isn't just doing a head fake.

Cinematography: I knew Ives was back before I looked at IMDB. His style isn't intrusive (quite the opposite) but it is distinctive; like Lindsey Buckingham on guitar. The cinematography keeps being great and the use of light was very good in this one.

Stranger Things - Episode 4 Review

  There are really good recaps all over, so I only review.

General Notes:
Acting: Harbour is on point this episode; try to imagine how hard it would be to act like you're acting, re-watch that diner scene, and get back to me. He was great. Ryder did a good job of doing the Roy Neary arc of appearing crazy while being aware of more than others. Joe Chrest looks like he might get to be more than 'the dad too tired from work to notice the little things', which is good because he's a solid actor. And, with feeling, Cara Buono is surprising me with her very consistent portrayal.
  Millie Brown keeps doing a lot with a little. Charlie Heaton is actually getting a chance to act and is doing well. Joe Keery put in a journeyman performance and Natalia Dyer keeps letting me down. Watch the scene between Nancy and Steve in the side alley at school; Keery is pretty good. Dyer is using the same performance as when Barb wanted to leave the party.

Cinematography: Drom now on I think I'll just mention when it is NOT great. Tod Campbell did a great job; he had shout-outs to the Searchers and Stagecoach in his use of cameras and I freakin' approve.

RPGaDay - Catching up! - Character Moment you are Proudest Of

  Hard to say. But I will go with this one.

  In Lew Pulsipher's Tonilda campaign there are two main places of dread: Skystone Castle and Mount Thunder. The party was deep beneath Mount Thunder and already weak when we were hit by an ambush of Pyromancers. After a hard fight they fled and we were out of spells and low on hits.
  And the pyromancers had alerted the Ogre King - the entire tribe was on the way to slay us.
  We could not leave the way we came in, so we had to head to the arch, a long, narrow, stone arch bridge over a vast abyss. When we arrive it is held by a balrog.
  Yes, really.
  I was playing Andune, my then 6th/6th cleric/magic-user. He was at 24.5 hit points (Lew and I both track 1/2 hit points) but had a good armor class and a Mace of Disruption, meaning I had a shot at disrupting him. I was also the only guy above single-digit hit points.
  I read a Scroll of Protection vs. Fire and ran out to fight.
  4 rounds later I am at 6.5 hits and he's going strong. We tie initiative. W have the same dex. Same weapons speeds. Simultaneous hit.
  We both hit.
  I do minimum damage, 2 points.
  He does minimum damage - 6 points.
  I roll for disruption - natural 20!
  The balrog is sent away, I collapse, the party drags my barely-alive carcass over the bridge. We spend 2 hours hiding in a closet to avoid the ogres.

  Andune kept the balrog's whip and put it over the mantle at his tower.

Stranger Things - Episode 3 Review

  Remember, other places have great recaps, so I only review!

General Notes:
Acting: Natalia Dyer is bringing me down, man. The girl seems to have two acting modes - vaguely perky and vaguely confused. David Harbour is doing a decent job of keeping Hopper an interesting character. Winona Ryder was channelling Richard Dreyfus in CEotTK pretty hard, and in a good way. She did a fair job as coming across as 'really obsessed' rather than just loopy. Cara Buono is the hidden gem of acting in the show, BTW.
Cinematography: Continued great use of lighting, movement, blocking, etc. I can only say 'the cinematographer is really good' so many ways.
Editing: Continues the downward slide seen in last episode. The opening editing in particular was a mess, but this might be because the director demanded it. Hard to say, since some of the later cuts were confusing and jarring.
Directing: I was taught that under-acting is the fault of the actor, over-acting is the fault of the director. We are edging up on the director needing to get a grip on his actors. Ryder is doing OK, but Caleb McLaughlin is edging up on hamminess.

SPOILERS FOLLOW!!!

Short Reviews of Short Stories

A few short bits-
Ted Chiang:
'Hell is the Absence of God' - terse, good pacing, and nonsensical. The plot, such as it is, depends upon the universe that Ted makes being very literally illogical.

'Division by Zero'- the writing wasn't as good as in HitAoG, but still quite good. The central idea is ludicrous. Any competent mathematician knows that math is just a model, a tool, not reality. The idea that a mathematician would be driven to suicide by discovering the Godel was right is is silly as the idea of a cartographer becoming suicidal upon learning a street had been added in Brooklyn.

'What's Expected of Us'- good writing, again. Again, bone-deep stupidity in the idea. The core premise - a device is invented that proves people have no free will; this results in despair, etc. My problem? If humans lack all free will then learning that wouldn't change anything; we couldn't decide anything, after all - we would lack free will. I find it as ridiculous as a man who writes books about the total lack of free will being proud of his test scores.

  I find Chiang to be a rather odd duck - his writing is competent but his ideas.... They strike me as the sort of ideas that stupid people think are profound. Or the sorts of ideas you hear from someone smoking weed.
  'What if God did something we didn't understand?'
  'Ooooh. Deep, man.'

Ken Liu:
'Single Bit Error'- Here because it is explicitly written because HitAoG was written. The writing is yeomanlike, and OK. But the story is nothing more than the statement 'no amount of evidence, direct or indirect, will convince me God is real, not even an angel meeting me face to face'. When I first read it I re-read it because I could not imagine anyone saying something like that on purpose. I think he was aiming for profundity, but each time I re-read it I am gripped with fremdschämen.

In much of recent work that I read, particularly in short fiction, I see a lot of what appears to be an author believing they are saying something profound when they are, instead, revealing their own shallowness of thought. That is the closest I can come to the feeling much of contemporary SF/F instills in me.

What Do You Mean, 'What Is It For?'?!

  Ah, the internet, where you can argue over all sorts of things. The most recent internet argument I got into was with someone explaining that monsters with a no-save level drain are badwrong and there is no reason to have them other than,

  "...imbecilic blind worship of the past..."

  Uh-huh.
  Of course, I had already pointed out some reason for having such monsters in your game, to wit;

• Instilling terror in the players
• Driving quests for spells, etc. to get Restoration
• To 'throttle' level progression without nerfing XP/raising the bar or railroading players

  Now, I guess I might have just tossed in a link to a past article of mine, but there is that to say and more, so here we go.

What Do You Mean, 'What Is It For?'?!

  Ah, the internet, where you can argue over all sorts of things. The most recent internet argument I got into was with someone explaining that monsters with a no-save level drain are badwrong and there is no reason to have them other than,

  "...imbecilic blind worship of the past..."

  Uh-huh.
  Of course, I had already pointed out some reason for having such monsters in your game, to wit;

• Instilling terror in the players
• Driving quests for spells, etc. to get Restoration
• To 'throttle' level progression without nerfing XP/raising the bar or railroading players

  Now, I guess I might have just tossed in a link to a past article of mine, but there is that to say and more, so here we go.

Personal Note: Me and Stranger Things

  So.... Stranger Things. Set in Indiana in 1983, in a small town. Focuses on kids who play D&D.

  While I moved a lot as a small child by the age of 4 I was back where I was born, Indiana. I lived near Muncie, famed in D&D lore because of Knights of the Dinner Table. But there was a lot of gaming in Muncie, as I recall.
  I lived in al area near the towns of Redkey and Dunkirk, where the downtowns look like this;

this;

this;

and this;

  Yes, that is the entire 'downtown' of four different towns. It looks a lot like where the protagonists of Stranger Things live, doesn't it?

  Here is the view facing south from where I went to high school;

The other directions only vary in that one field is soybeans.

  I was a bit older than the boys in Stranger Things that are hanging out with El and a bit younger than Nancy and her friends - in 1983 I turned 16.

  My AD&D 1e campaign was 5 years old in 1983 and as I recall the party was dealing with a group of evil monks.

  Anyway, I identify with a lot of the characters in Stranger Things because it is, in an odd way, about me and my friends. Sure, archetypes are what they are for reasons, and tropes are useful, yes. But this hits awfully close to home. Very literally.

Stranger Things - Episode 2 Review

  Watched Eps 2 & 3 back to back with the oldest four sons on Sunday night. My wife has decided not to watch a show that features a missing son as a major plot point.

General Notes:
Acting: I wasn't too pleased with Winona Ryder's performance until the scene at her workplace, where she was great. David Harbour stayed great and Millie Brown did a lot with a little. I was impressed by how effective Shannon Purser was and am floored that this was her first acting job - she was great. Cara Buono is really growing on me, too.
  Natalia Dyer, however.... While she may be going for subtle, she is hitting me as wooden.
Cinematography: Tim Ives is on this one and he was great, again. He doesn't distract from the action, but he has excellent framing and excellent use of camera movements; rewatch the scene where Jonathan enters the woods for the first time and observe how he moves the camera. Great stuff.
Editing: Not as smooth as Ep 1. The cuts back and forth about the pool scene were ham-handed but that may be the fault of the director.
Directing: With the sole exception of the pool scene I mentioned above, the direction was solid. Minimalist and effective is what I love and overall, I got it.

Spoilers Follow!!!!!!!!!!

Characters:  Joyce had some nice growth and exposition and her hysteria didn't descend into narm, thankfully. Convincing the audience that you are hysterical without it being funny is hard, but they pulled it off. Jonathan got some great development and the writing and directing gave us an insight into how isolated and lonely he is without a hint of pathos. 

  The three boy protagonists were handled very well, as was El, and they were allowed to be different, emotional, and belligerent in a realistic way. 

Story: The second episode can be hard, and the cutaway to High School Drama made this tougher. The dynamic between the three lads and El grew well, and the development of Mike's role in the cast is coming along well.

  The High School Drama bit is frankly odd. So far the character of Joe is a bit tough to fit into the story in a meaningful way and the drama between him and Nancy is damn near an afterschool special, and not one of the good ones. My sons and I speculate that either the Drama Club transform themselves into last-minute heroes, are redeemed by giving their lives to stop Demogorgon, or are eaten as a cautionary tale, a la the film Halloween. 

  Which means we need to talk about the pool.

  Barb getting snatched by Demogorgon was a nice but. The bad guy is everywhere, watching, and can get you any minute, giving him a real Boogeyman vibe.

  Back to Joyce where lights act up and Demogorgon tries to come through the wall.... Boogeyman, indeed.

Notes: I may need to re-watch, but it appears that the area the kids call Mirkwood is close to the homes of Will and Steve but far from the homes of the other boys. Based on Demogorgon and Eleven, it appears the lab is also in Mirkwood. Is the creature limited to an area? Hmmmm.

References: A ton of them, again. 

  We see a jaws poster. Later blood drips into water and a monster attacks. That was fun.

  The episode title reminds me of The Monsters Come to Maple Street, the classic episode of the Twilight Zone where aliens use fear to destabilize a neighborhood. 

  I mentioned the movie Halloween, above - the antagonist of that series is name-dropped in the episode.

  We also have a shout out to Star Wars and the force.

  Guys in hazmat suits? Double shout-out to E.T. and Hell of the Living Dead!

  The creature at the walls looked like Videodrome and Day of the Dead.

  There were more, too.

RPGaDAY: Best Session of the Last Year

This was a rough one to choose, but luckily I already gave a write up here.

RPGaDAY: Dice

  I prefer dice but I also have two dice rolling programs on my phone and, Back in the Day, I even used (someone else's) Dragonbone die roller.
  All else being equal I like dice in and of themselves. They can be very decorative, they make fine gifts, and they are a physical reminder of the randomness of our largely mental hobby.
So: Dice first, then random numbers.

  I have seldom played diceless, but that's fine, too.

RPGaDAY: Dice

  I prefer dice but I also have two dice rolling programs on my phone and, Back in the Day, I even used (someone else's) Dragonbone die roller.
  All else being equal I like dice in and of themselves. They can be very decorative, they make fine gifts, and they are a physical reminder of the randomness of our largely mental hobby.
So: Dice first, then random numbers.

  I have seldmom played diceless, but that's fine, too.