New on Desk #44 — Night Mission Week

I’ve been having a nicely routine week. Hypomanic, which is to say productive. Mainly D&D stuff, but still. Writing at night, sleeping during the day like a vampire. Got to the point that the newsletter itself is late simply because I slept the entire day — but no worries, I’m even quicker than usual about bashing out a few thousand words about life in the geek lane.

Nocturnal emissions of the writing desk

There are various artistic temperaments that we certainly could classify more comprehensively, but let’s consider mine for a moment. Know yourself and all that.

It’s not a mystery to me that I am of the “temperamental” type: high on ideas, best at working with inspiration. Lazy, and you wouldn’t believe how high the threshold is for me to do anything when I don’t feel like it. I do work on improving my discipline (it’s basically the bottleneck for me in being a productive artist), but when I look at other authors around me I think I have a pretty good handle on what I am in comparison: cleverer and more passionate than the average turkey, but fuck I’m lazy and comfortable with not doing anything. I hate that about myself.

I probably wouldn’t get much done ever if it wasn’t for the occasional higher-energy period when the intellectual curiosity overcomes laziness. I’m pretty sure that this is a cyclical brain chemistry thing more than a matter of “inspiration” — I’m curious by personality and inspiration is all around us, always — but whatever it is, sometimes it just gets easier to care about doing anything I absolutely don’t have to. This often enough leads to a productive time-period like the present, with me plugging away at whatever at a somewhat elevated rate of productivity.

(The way I discuss my moods generally aligns well with what is known as a bipolar disorder. In the interest of acknowledging that some people have real, essentially crippling mental disorders, I’ll clarify that I have not looked for a diagnosis on that front, and don’t really think I need one. If my subjective experiences with my own brain chemistry are abnormal enough to classify like that — not to be taken for granted — the syndrome is at most very mild. I prefer thinking of myself as more of a melancholic waste of space.)

Working a night job seems to correlate with all kinds of health issues ranging from heart attacks to brain aneurysms, so fun times in healthy lifestyle land and all. Still, I can’t help but like how working the night shift at the writing desk allows me to get things done. In the quiet of the night, when everybody else is sleeping, there are no distractions. Getting a bit sleep deprived helps blunt the though process, which helps with focus. Combine that with some caffeine and it’s possible to actually get stuff done. By the time the morning sun rises (can take quite a while in the Finnish winter, that) I well might have a finished manuscript on something or other on hand.

I hope the current lazy, simple fall days keep going for a bit. I might get back on track with the writing plan we established in early summer, before I got swept to play at forestry for weeks on end.

What have I been writing this week, anyway

More D&D cruft, of course! Specifically, I wrote a reasonably comprehensive overview of the Monk character class this week for the Coup campaign. This might not seem like much, but Monk’s a more complex thing than one might think. The ideas that went into that class have been brewing for several months. The Assassin class happened as pretty much an after-thought; it’s really just a Monk variant (or subclass, as they like to say).

My take no the Monk is pretty fresh in the wider history of D&D Monk ideas. Check out these bullet points:

• The Monk should support the kungfu monk archetype Gygax was driving for with the original Monk class. The rules should, however, be more empowering and, well, less dumb. I’m going less with a fixed list of random-ass class features and more with a flexible charop chassis that has the potential to empower some quite different kinds of dedicated monastics.
• I also wanted to interpret Monk in light of current day xianxia fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with the ’70s kungfu movie thing that the traditional D&D monk does, but as I mentioned in the first of these newsletters, I have some ideas for doing xianxia with D&D mechanics that I wanted to try out..
• The Monk should be a monastic specialist, which is to say, a specialist in leveraging downtime efficiently in training as a member of an intentional community. Old-school D&D in general should be more about downtime maneuvering, and the Monk has an unique take on that because the very class concept relies on long stretches of downtime spent in “self-cultivation” to develop amazing monk talents. It’s a class that gets better not just by gaining XP, but also by just sitting around, and isn’t that exciting! A bit like the Wizard, the only class in orthodox D&D that actually has a similar in-built downtime activity in the form of spell research.
• I had this crazy insight about the Wizard actually being a Monk multiclass. I mean, they both like living in monasteries working on personal projects, right? So let’s see where that goes. Seems promising right now.

I included what, four-ish different cultivation systems (magic systems, just using a different parlance) for the Monk to work with, too, which right now seems pretty good for giving the Greyhawk setting some variety of monastic tradition. As is my take with magic systems in general, characters of any class can get into the fun, so this isn’t as insanely over-engineered as it might seem at first glance. I’ll probably write more detail on the cultivation systems at some point, depending on what direction the campaign takes.

The Thief class is also in that same file (my content management is brilliant and the material is divided very logically into files, no matter what you may hear); I wrote it a few weeks back, but check that out too if you haven’t seen it yet — I’m pretty happy with that one, too.

Monday: Coup de Main #20

On the practical side of the Coup campaign, our session last Monday went swimmingly: I had been expecting that the players might actually have to spend some serious time chewing on the downtime maneuver data that I’ve been force-feeding them, but like good adventurers they actually just set all of that aside and decided to hurry back to the Ytragern manor to finish up their exploration of the place. Make sure that it’s safe for potentially spending weeks there later on in a bibliophilia-fueled downtime activity and all that. It doesn’t hurt the sense of urgency that Rob is pretty sure that he blew the jig a few days back — he’s been running this social fake-out spy-op against/with an agent of the Greyhawk Wizards’ Guild, feeding false information to keep them from shouldering their way into the manor, but now it’s possible that they’re not trusting him anymore. In a word, it’s conceivable that the wizards might come in any day now and just sweep all the remaining treasure into their spacious robe sleeves.

The downtime maneuvers are heating up, though. We have all sorts of funky time-limited concerns, so much so that the regular players have started being pretty rigorous about calendar-maintenance and advance planning. The party has several adventure hooks with time-sensitive operative windows, a court date in a couple of days, and who knows what else. I enjoy this all very much, of course. We could frankly really use a couple or three more PCs just so the party could have enough man-power to spread around to take care of all concerns. As it is, everybody’s trying to cram a crazy amount of preparation and maneuvering into just a few days of downtime here and there.

The party tried to spend a few days after the spring festival in preparing a new crew of hirelings to take with them to the manor. Rob’s gotten sentimental with his gang of henchmen, plus he needs them to stay in Yggsburg to keep an eye on things, so he wants to phase his old gang-pals away from the front-line. Astur the Lawful Good Fighter took up the gauntlet of hiring and organizing a new crew of NPC adventurer fodder. This is very appropriate in the sense that Astur has a straightforward farmboy style that plays well with the locals, but there’s a bit of an issue with his Charisma — the score is just fine (11), but Esa the player seems to have an amusing tendency of rolling let’s say questionably, which has led to Astur’s downtime adventures being an exercise in frustration. It wasn’t easy this time either, but he did manage to scrape together a team of six naïve hirelings. Four after he voluntarily sent two home as excess to requirements, and three after one decided he didn’t like the leadership style. Well, it would get worse once they’d finally get to the mansion itself.

The mission at the mansion was pretty simple: the party would use the attic key, which they were pretty sure was the only way to get into the very securely locked attic, and then loot the shit out of the collection of obscure items they were certain could be found there. Plus, they’d need to take care of this phase spider (a particularly nasty monster manual critter) they knew to be nesting in the attic.

The attic certainly didn’t disappoint when we got there, the place was indeed completely full of all kinds of boxes, crates and barrels. The phase spider could have been a serious problem in the cramped conditions, but the party had a highly elaborate tactical doctrine and even a bit of effective magic to go with it: a careful debate on the metaphysics of phase spiders vis-a-vis Protection from Evil (Mentzer text) convinced us that the spider actually couldn’t phase within a Protection, which proved tactically quite relevant.

Despite the party knowing about the spider and being relatively well prepared for it, combat is as combat does, and the new hirelings, as yet untested in combat, completely cracked when threatened by the 40 kg mid-grown (they get bigger, this was a teenager) Phase Spider. New hirelings get to roll an automatic Morale check when going into combat for the first time, you see, and possibly a second one when encountering something eldritch, and so on and so forth. The party had specifically chosen to not spend several weeks training and conditioning the new hirelings before taking them to the manor, which became something of a problem now that the spider was real and right there and ready to eat us all.

The party as a whole weren’t in any serious danger with the spider; there was too many, too calm men there ready to put it down the moment it stopped climbing and phasing and surprise-attacking and doing this whole Gigerian alien shtick. The hireling panic directly caused one of them to get poisoned by the spider, lethally, which unfortunately served to cause the dreaded double-fracture that happens when the morale fails but the commander manages to regroup the men, only for them to break again. As the convention goes, consecutive failures of the élan cause nigh-irreparable harm to the troop attitudes in the long term, meaning that it’ll become exponentially more difficult to repair the damage.

After the spider was dead the party split up into attic exploration, guard and hireling management duties, with the latter being about Astur trying to sweet-talk the two surviving hirelings to muster up instead of covering downstairs and plotting against the party. The hilarious part of this hireling saga is that while it took an hour for Astur to convince the hirelings to rejoin the party in the attic, it only took a few seconds for the next horror to break their morale a third time. I’m sorry, but I think we have to discard this bunch and start again on the hireling front — their morale penalty has ruined them.

That next horror wasn’t anything too outré by local measure, anyway — just an undead cursed floating head of a savage Hepmonaland tribesman intent on biting everybody to death after being released from its storage crate. The party knew that it was there from the incessant thumping, if not what exactly it was, so the player characters were very much prepared to face it when it burst out. Not so the hirelings, but that didn’t prevent the PCs from making short work of a critter that could have been remotely threatening in some other circumstances, as opposed to being merely scary.

The floating head left behind something akin to the Terror Mask for the party to mull over, which is always fun times. It was time to wrap up the session, but the dice indicated an event that had occurred once before at the manor already: the second, competing adventurer party hired by the Greyhawk Guild of Wizards had arrived at the manor and were ready to confront the party over the treasures of the attic. That’s what we’ll start with tomorrow.

Wednesday: Boardgames at Old Dog

The boardgame night is a nice change of pace in the middle of my usually more rpg-centric life in that boardgames are casual. We could stand to get some more players, but this works for me as a pastime: drive to town, maintain my flea market table, sit with the guys for a few hours with food and boardgames and monkey-sphere news. It’s not like there isn’t any ambition at all, but it’s pretty modest compared to the amphetamine-fueled tiger spirit of roleplaying. Perhaps we’ll do this for a while this winter, particularly if one or two more people start sitting in regularly.

Hey, That’s My Fish! is a light abstract/icebreaker that’s been making the rounds in our local boardgame scene ever since it came out in like 2003 or something like that. I personally like games of this type, so they tend to see a lot of play as warm-ups. Abstracts (it’s a boardgame category — think Chess or Go) aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, but make the game simple enough and it’ll be able to satisfy Platonic philosopher types like myself who like to speculate about the strategic doctrine implied by the game’s simple rules, and also the players who just want to play something non-convoluted as a warm-up. The penguin game (it’s Finnish name is much less stupid than that horribly fawning thing it’s known as in English) delivers in this regard. It’s got the usual zero-sum multiplayer game issues with having to, you know, play with other people, but that’s either something you accept or not.

We’ve played this as a warm-up for two sessions now, and the players are getting smart to my moves. The most important strategic bit of the penguing game is the adversial multiplayer game principle of encouraging the player in your downflow (on your left) to play against your other opponents, but at this point I’m just happy if we can improve our board awareness (whose victory you need to prevent moment to moment) and the basic tactics (like don’t cluster all your penguins in one place). If I can keep the team working on this, I think we can keep improving.

We got started a bit late and didn’t have any real ambitions anyway, so the centerpiece game of the evening was Mykerinos, another ’00s classic. (We have one player who hasn’t played all these olden goldies, and most others, myself included, haven’t played them in years anyway, so we’ll probably be playing a lot of old eurogames in this boardgame club.) Mykerinos is a relatively cleanly executed tempo bidding game (sort of like role-selection games, except it’s not roles so much as bidding opportunities that the players prioritize over) with what I’d characterize as a modest, pleasant amount of complexity. It’s light middleweight, not quite heavy enough to be a real headliner, but it worked for us here because it was new for one of the players. It wouldn’t be difficult to rack up like three matches of this one in one night if you wanted to.

I otherwise like Mykerinos myself, but it has the very particular boardgame flaw of being difficult to grasp on first encounter. The game is basically a tempo bidding game where the players take turns picking out bid positions on a series of items (archeological plots) in an effort to spread their bidding resource (archeologists) into the lots so as to get as many first or second places as you can. The tempo part comes in because there is limited room for bids, and because (and this is elegant) the first player to stop bidding wins any ties, so the bidding isn’t just about how much you’re willing to pay, but also about when you place your bids and when you pass. All this is well and good, but the part that is hopelessly confusing to new players is that while you’re making your bidding choices and attempting to collect scoring series of items, you’re also required to consider a second tempo bidding process going on in the British Museum. While the archeology bidding game is cycled through four times during the game, the museum bidding happens interleaved with the archeology thing, subtly progressing until the end of the game. The first-time player will certainly realize that the museum determines the winner when they see how the archeology plot points get multiplied by the museum points, but by then the game’s already over and yeah, you lost because you didn’t invest enough into the museum.

I consider this a flaw in the game due to the relatively detached nature of the two layers of play; Mykerinos could exist in a recognizable form entirely without the museum scoring multiplier part. It would be a simpler game, more akin to the penguin game in complexity (and actually game mechanics, too — I could very easily interpret the penguins as doing tempo bidding of a kind in their area control game, too), but is that such a bad thing? I don’t have a personal problem with the game, but I suspect that it would find more favour if it didn’t have the unforced complexity. Maybe I should try it some time, explain the game to new people and just leave the museum part out as an “advanced game” feature. (Mr. Brown needs a new activated ability without the museum, but I imagine something could be thought up.)

The newbie lost, but who am I to philosophize about the causes — I lost as well, with Sipi taking home the Mykerinos crown with a disgustingly degenerate play. He basically vacuumed up all the Violets (Lady Violet, the prettiest museum patron among the five suits) and crippled my set play, winning despite having like 15 extra archeologists just twiddling their thumbs at the end. I imagine that if I had been less focused on teaching the game I could, in some what-if universe, have noticed the trend and interrupted it. I’ve won so many games of Mykerinos by simple bid optimization over the last decade, though, that it never even occurred to me to actually pay attention to what the other players were specifically doing. Maybe we should play more of this just to get me a chance at revenge.

We already agreed to play more next week, I think Sipi even intended to bring the game. Looking good.

Watching TV: The Good Place

One more tidbit of my week: I’ve been watching the American comedy-thriller tv show The Good Place recently. Finished three seasons at this point, midway into the fourth, so it’s fair to say that it’s worked for me. By this point it’s getting long in the tooth (in an ideal world it’d have wrapped off after 2nd season), but chances are I’ll finish it, having gotten this far.

The thing about The Good Place is that the first season is pretty dumb in an interesting way: the show pretends that it’s more stupid than it actually is, so much so that there’s a real danger that you’ll drop it before the actual plot gets underway. The storytelling would be superior if the show started from the 2nd season, basically. The 1st season storyline introduces the characters, sure, but it also makes a really big point about being a dumb American social comedy with an intellectually thin premise. When the show reveals at the end of the 1st season that yeah, the creators actually knew how dumb the show’s premise is, and that it’s not actually like that at all, it comes as such a surprise in part because of how well it pretends to vapidity.

(To be clear for those familiar with the show, the dumbness of the 1st season is not the Evangelical-moron picture of Heaven it paints; the story’s quite clear about being satirical in that regard. The dumbness that the show convinced me of, that almost caused me to stop watching, is how the satire itself is shallow, saying nothing more profound than “Heaven is a fucked up idea”. It’s like watching a high school atheist’s social media account, except with studio execs ensuring there’s nothing personal about it. It all gets massively better when the show reveals that it knows how shallow it is. I’m not convinced it’s a good idea to pretend to be dumb quite this well, though; don’t you just cause people to drop the show prematurely?)

At its best The Good Place is kinda-sorta on point about various philosophical ideas and whatnot, but mostly it’s a comedy-thriller, which is to say an entertaining character piece that gets carried by its plot twists. That’s the kind of stuff that starts to wear on you when it continues season by season by season by season. The writer is clearly ad-libbing season to season, too, which is a shame because I think there’s potential for a fairly solid novel — or a single-season tv show, why not — here.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that 1st season ending twist is ultimately the only reason the show’s been successful on the market. It’s such a shocking surprise, and opens the story up in such a dramatically and thematically healthy way, that the rest seems to just run on the momentum of that. Well and good, maybe that’s the recipe to success in tv entertainment. The production values (cast of actors in particular) do contribute to the show being pleasant, but without that twist it would have all been a tremendous waste of time.

State of the Productive Facilities

In hindsight it’s pretty obvious that starting the Coup campaign wasn’t the cleverest of moves in terms of getting shit done outside the gaming table. It seemed like a good idea for grounding my plans for a crowdfunding project, and the campaign’s been an absolute delight, already a great artistic success, but man do I spend a lot of perfectly good writing time doing campaign development instead of working on something publishable.

I probably should just start thinking about publishing the Coup campaign as some kind of weird “hey grognards a snide millenial rewrote the Greyhawk campaign setting aren’t you happy” project. Get some wider use from it.

I really, really should make a point of sitting down and working on my actual project board stuff in the coming week. The gaming will go perfectly well without me producing 20 sheets of new material every week for it.