Miles Prower

I grew up on Sonic.

I watched the syndicated cartoon at sleepovers, and lost my shit when I heard it was on regular TV. I read the comics from Issue #26 until I was a freshman in college, and I drowned myself in Ken Penders’ lore about the Floating Island and Tails as the Chosen One.

Sonic fanfic was the first fanfic I ever read, even before the excellent Mega Man: The Series. I was reading OC Do Not Steal characters in Sonic fanfic before I was old enough to know how self-serving they were for the authors.

My favorite game for years was the Sonic 3 and Knuckles collection, and I always played as Knuckles because I couldn’t figure out that holding up and down moved the platforms in the Carnival Night zone. I never managed to get all the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic and Knuckles, but I could get them in my sleep in Sonic 3.

And it wasn’t until college that I got the “Miles Prower” = “Miles Per Hour” pun.

Sexuality, Wolverine, and Ice King

That title is why the Oxford comma matters, folks. No one wants to read that slash fic.

This is going to be a bit of a grab bag. I don’t really have in-depth thoughts on any of this – at least, not yet – but I want to at least signal boost these things.

Also, I decided to post this with basically no editing. Someday I will start integrating more images into the blog, and proofread the hell out of everything, but for now I just want to keep momentum going and keep posting.

Subtext Sexuality

Did you know that the first appearance of the Morlocks and Callisto was heavily influenced by the sex-positive sci-fi romp Barbarella?

There’s a lot going on in the margins of old comics, almost all of which I didn’t notice. The biggest example that I missed was the queer subtext of Storm and of Kitty Pryde in Chris Claremont’s run on the X-Men – there’s an excellent essay touching on it, and the Miles and Rachel X-Plain the X-Men podcast has been pointing out specific instances of this.

It’s fascinating to me, like tilting a painting and finding it’s got a whole other dimension you never noticed. When I first read most of Claremont’s stuff, in early college, all of this flew right over (under?) my head – the only piece of sexuality that made me think was Kitty’s relationship with Colossus (which is its own can of worms). Now that I’m going back through, queer sexuality is another perspective to read it through for a better understanding, just like race relations and Professor X being completely awful.

Wolverine and Kitty?

“There’s a story that I’ve heard told more than once about the fact that Claremont had said that Kitty was Logan’s true love, that that’s where he was going with it.” – Greg Rucka. (23:40, source here,)

Ewwwwww.

Even setting aside the extreme morale problems, it would be a massive betrayal of both characters, unless Claremont changed a lot of both characters.

Logan’s well-written romantic relationships have always been either about running to something, or running from something. Mariko Yashida represented the honor he was running towards; Silver Fox represented the past he was running away from, when he was an assassin. The Jean/Logan relationship didn’t work because Jean was just The Unattainable, and pursuing her was at most the desire to have the humanizing love that Cyclops had.

Pursuing (adult) Kitty wouldn’t even be that, because while Kitty is a good person, it was always her age and innocence that made other people value her idealism. The other X-Men wanted to make the world safe for idealists like her – they didn’t believe in everyone living as idealists.

And so, I continue to maintain that authorial intent is bullshit, for reasons exactly like this. (So no, they aren’t “jiffs”.)

The Ice King

You know a creator that does handle creepy relationships well? Pendleton Ward.

I don’t have a whole lot to say on this subject, but I’m consistently impressed by how nuanced the writing is for the Ice King in Adventure Time. After the first few episodes, it’d be easy to write him as just a bumbling villain with a heart of gold: “Aww, he kidnapped another princess, and is trying to force her into a non-consensual marriage. That’s our Ice King!”

Adventure Time doesn’t do that, and it’s to Ward’s credit. From the beginning, the show treats Ice King with a mix of pity, humor, and genuine acknowledgment of his creeper status. Even when the show pushes Finn and Jake to feel bad about hurting the Ice King, it never pretends that that pain is equal to the pain he causes with abductions.

I don’t really have anything to add beyond that. I just appreciate that Adventure Time doesn’t make light of abduction… like, er, that one song from The Fantasticks.

You know the one.

It pains me that that song is so (*%$in’ catchy.

[Note: I’m only three seasons in, so there’s still time for things to get screwed up, I suppose.]

Some Thoughts about 4X Games

Note: I wrote this while watching Adventure Time in the middle of the night. Hopefully the idea gets through -- this is fundamentally a subjective piece, not a review.

--

My name is Matthew Pecot, and I want to like 4X games.

I’ve spent most of my gaming career enjoying them, starting with Civilization 2’s eighty-page manual and running to the present day. I’ve obsessed over the Civ games, Sword of the Stars, Europa Universalis – I even picked up Pandora: First Contact because it billed itself as an Alpha Centauri successor. “Rock You Like a Hurricane” always makes me think of mind worms.

And yet, now, I’m starting to look at the way I play these games, and they’re more bowling than fencing. The main reason for this is that 4X games have a huge problem with feedback loops, in part because each gameplay cycle is so long.

Let’s look at how I play an average round of a 4X game. I choose my starting advantages/faction, I kick it off, I play for about thirty minutes… then I restart. And again, and again, until I feel like I have the opening moves figured out. I do this because the opening turns are the only part of the game I feel like I can solve. Just like a Zergling rush: If I haven’t built an expansion by turn X, then I know I’ve failed.

How do you know if you’re failing in a science victory? Or in an arms race during a cold war? 4X games don’t do a good job of letting you know how you’re doing – except during a war, then there’s a good feedback system. The rest of the time, your evaluation of progress is based on how well you will do in a war. There’s a good intellectual challenge to evaluating an enemy, but 4X games bake so many systems together to come up with combat effectiveness: available allies, tech level, morale, local terrain, commanders, reinforcement rate…

Smarter people than I can make those calculations, and play the game of gathering intel to fill in the variables. That’s not for me, though, especially with games as complicated as Europa Universalis. (Ironically, those games tend to have the most information available on other factions.)

I generally prefer to play these games very solo-style, though, more like a citybuilder than a 4X game. I’d be happy playing a Civ game without any other factions, just building up, and trying to build up Health faster than I could expand. It’s the same reason I played EU III as England: Because I could face a life-or-death struggle at first with Scotland, then I never had to worry about a European war and could just focus on colonization and trade.

The problem is that even if you’re playing against yourself, you’re not the only bar to measure against. Sure, you might think that the only thing that matters is if you feel accomplished, but these games are part of the zeitgeist. You’re going to talk with your friends, and in the worst case, they’re going to look over your shoulder and point out what you’re doing wrong. (My boss did that to me midway through an EU IV game. I ended up playing another 20 hours as a result.)

So, what’s the consequence of all of this? A lot of repetitive actions that feel meaningless. If I’m taking actions, but don’t see how well I’m doing, they don’t feel very impactful. It doesn’t help that, for most of a 4X game, you’re employing the same stratagems and movements you have before, and because they’re turn-based, there’s not much of an intrinsic reward when you execute them well.  

The scale of a 4X game amplifies this, because at a certain point any given action is meaningless. You’ve already lost, or you’ve started to snowball so hard that you’re effectively unstoppable, in which case you’ll win if you just keep clicking End Turn and queuing up the latest buildings.

This is why the 4X games I enjoy the most are actually roleplaying games: They add a sense of emotional meaning to your play, even if mechanically the actions are rote. Civilization is actually the furthest away from roleplaying of all the 4X games I enjoy, because it has relatively little historical grounding or sense of exotic location; Europa Universalis is on the other side, with an incredibly deep sense of place.

This also explains why Beyond Earth feels so lackluster: It has almost no character. The mechanics for each affinity barely touch on what they’re supposed to be, and the quests are just a bunch of placeholder text. Compare that to the thrill of following Magellan in circumnavigating the world (and having mechanical benefits from doing it), or seizing Orion from its guardian, or… you get the idea. The only thing that makes a 4X game stirring for me is the sense of place and adventure.

Everything else is just forty hours of clicking End Turn.

To the Moon, some thoughts

To the Moon was a big hit in 2011, but I finally got around to finishing it this weekend, and a few pieces fell like billiards in my Rube Goldberg brain. So, there are some thoughts I’ll need to spit out… and here they are.

Quick briefing: To the Moon is a Gone Home-style interactive story in the framework of a JRPG, built in RPG Maker. (If you remember FFVI / FF3, you remember the visual style, how hard the designers had to work to bring out emotions in the characters, and how it was usually written tongue-in-cheek.) The core of the plot is a sci-fi device that lets specialists go into a person’s mind as they’re dying, go back to their childhood, and let them create a memory-timeline that lets them fulfill one wish. With this, the framing of the game is a Memento-style journey as the scientists go from the man’s last memories to his childhood, so that they can understand him, in order to set up the new memories.

I’ve got three things I want to look at: Comparisons to another RPG Maker game, the character of River and portrayals of autism, and the structure of the ending. Also I have a playlist at the end.

I have to draw a comparison to Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, another super-indie RPG maker game. From a storytelling perspective, both games have similar depth, with characters living with the memories of past pain, although To the Moon wears its heart a little more on its sleeve with that. Comparing to Embric really brings home one of the chief weaknesses of Moon, though, in that the moment-to-moment dialog is pretty weak in Moon.

Our viewpoint characters are two scientists, a pair that bickers like buddy cops, one serious and the other cracking kamehameha jokes. They’re useful for pacing, because by responding and commenting on what they see, they break up the heavier scenes and give us comedic down-tempo moments before going back in. The characters never get beyond being the odd couple, though, and when the story does lean on them to do emotional heavy lifting, it feels misplaced.

They’re also just… not funny. At best, they get a wry chuckle. The dialog for them feels like the kind of amateurishness that used to be associated with RPG Maker games. It stands out even more compared to how complex and (usually) well-written River and John are. It’s like if Jay and Silent Bob made up most of the dialog in Dogma, then played a crucial emotional role in the finale. The scientists aren’t bad characters, they just don’t have any creativity invested in them.

The first half of Moon is carried by the character of River, and her relationship with John. River is very clearly living on the autistic spectrum, or another mental status that shapes how she views the world, and Moon doesn’t softball how much that changes things. (Disclaimer: I have one friend who may be very high-functioning autistic, but my experience with autism is very limited, and I acknowledge that I may be incorrect on some things.)

River is by far the best-written character, with dialog that clearly brings out her specific worldview. One line in particular stuck with me – she’s been asked out to the movies, but ends up sitting separate from the guy, and doesn’t understand why he was assuming they would sit together. “We were both watching the same movie, in the same room.” The game doesn’t shy away from addressing the loneliness inherent in this different worldview, but it doesn’t explore it too deeply.

The flip side is that the hardest thing in Moon is accepting the validity of River’s choices. Because of her condition, she values different things than most people, and so it’s easy to call her decisions stupid or idealistic. They aren’t, though: She just has different values. Spoiler territory abounds here, so I’ll just leave it at that. Suffice to say that Moon forces you to accept that other people have the right to decide how to live their lives, and we cannot dictate it for them, only support them in their choices.

Spoiler warning – this final section will be entirely a discussion of Act 3 and the ending.

I’m not a huge fan of the ending, though. Anything in Act 3 would probably feel weak, because Acts 1 and 2 were where all the reveals about the past happened, but the dramatic tension in Act 3 is entirely linked to a communication failure between the two scientists. In theory, this is justified by “There’s no time to explain!”, but there’s been an established trust between the two for the entire game, so it comes off feeling entirely forced.

I’m also going to put on my writer hat, and say that the direction Act 3 went undermines the emotions of the rest of the game. In Acts 1 and 2, To the Moon is about understanding the small tragedies that go into a man’s life, from his childhood until his last regrets. Act 3 is undoing all of those tragedies – the scientists give John back everything that was taken from him, from fixing the identity crisis that pushed him to try to live differently, to giving River the care she needed so she never had to decide between the lighthouse and her own life.

It’s especially disappointing because To the Moon opens the door on an alternative ending, based out of the moment that got me tearing up most in the entire game. (It’s worth noting that this is based on an inference, and that inference could be wrong.) John and River met as kids, and promised that they’d meet again the next year, but he doesn’t remember / make it because of the trauma and beta blockers he took in the wake of his brother’s accident. They did promise that, if they forgot or couldn’t make it, they would meet on the moon – hence John’s desire to go to the moon, although that memory was fuzzed out by the trauma and he didn’t remember why.

The idea of John and River promising each other that they would meet again, and him clearly being driven by that even to his death bed (since his wish was to go to the moon), but he never realized that he had already met up with River and married his dream girl, absolutely floored me. The way that love echoed through time, and the tragedy that he didn’t realize he’d accomplished it, was the emotional high point of the story for me. When I saw the ending the game wound up going with, I wanted to shake the two scientists. You won, guys! He wanted to go to the moon, but he was already there! All you need to do is wake him one last time and tell him that, and he dies happy. Instead of a bittersweet ending about understanding yourself and your love, the game goes with an ending about fixing everything.

Playlist for thinking about To the Moon:

“For River”, from the OST

“I Will Follow You into the Dark”, Death Cab for Cutie

“Paper Boats”, from the Transistor soundtrack

“We’re Going To Be Friends,” the White Stripes

 “Wander,” by Kamelot

Mechanics Improv in D&D

Who says improv is just for dialog? I’ve been running a pen ‘n’ paper Dungeons & Dragons campaign for my coworkers, and it’s been tons of fun because of mechanics improv. I’m usually not a big fan of combat-oriented roleplaying, but this let me hit the swashbuckling highs and lows I want from RPG combat.

If you’re interested in making combat more dynamic and over-the-top, give the thoughts below a try and let me know if they help. This is mostly aimed at D&D, but it can be easily adapted to any other rules-heavy combat that you want to feel creative.

Invent bullshit mechanics, then stick with them. Early on in this campaign, we had an Indiana Jones minecart combat, and players started shoving enemies off the edge – then they asked what happened if they pushed enemies into other enemies. Once I decided that Enemy B got a save to avoid getting pushed as well, my players made that a standard tactic, and eventually were pinballing enemies off the environment to break terrain. My players got more tactical space to work within, and encounters tended to have more flourishes.

Roll to confirm crits and fumbles. 4^th Edition went the wrong way with critical hits, in my opinion: Automatic max damage actually takes away from the drama, because then there’s no roll for damage. By using the old 3^rd Edition rules, you’re adding drama with the roll to confirm, plus the potential for higher damage. Similarly, fumbles inevitably lead to “that one guy” who has bad luck with everything, so everyone can laugh with him.

Side note: Another reason crits work is because they give justification to break the rules, because crits mean you were just that awesome. The party defender confirmed a crit when saving against a blast attack, so I gave him a minor action; he used it to jump over and shield the barbarian, who fumbled the save.

If a player makes an intuitive leap, they’re usually right. The more creative and MMO-like your encounters are, like “this monster heals when bloodied”, the more people are going to try to figure it out, and they’ll start explaining their theories to the other players. If they decide that they have to destroy the mystical pillars to keep the boss from healing – hey, maybe that’s a cooler idea than your original encounter design. Hey, take the credit.

Move quickly. This is less “how to be dynamic” than “how to avoid being un-dynamic”, but nothing hurts creativity or awesome action than stretching it out over ten-minute turns. Try to keep the game moving quickly, then people are more likely to try interesting things instead of playing cautiously. I feel like having single-encounter sessions also helped us move quickly, or feel like things were happening rapidly, instead of just getting through turn X of encounter 1 of 3.

Use the Awesomeness : Rule-Breaking ratio. If a player wants to do something that breaks the turn order, I’m not going to disallow it, but I’m not going to let it be super-effective. I had a dragon about to use a breath weapon, and the barbarian asked if she could throw a golden demon head on a chain at it (don’t ask) to block to attack. I decided she’d roll a d4 and reduce its damage by that much: It didn’t have much of an effect, but it felt cool and did have some kind of impact. All anyone wants is to feel like they’ve accomplished anything, so you can always bend the rules to an amount that’s commensurate with how much more fun it’ll add.

I’m not sure how to foster this, but encourage the “Holy shit, you can do that?” moments. This campaign’s gone through about six encounters at Level 1, but every fight brings out a power that makes everyone double-take. Last session, it was realizing that the monk’s daily could let him punch about fourteen guys at once; sometimes, it’s just a massive buff. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to keep this self-discovery happening, but if you can, it’s very fun for players.

Hopefully someone out there gets some use from these thoughts – I’ve really enjoyed running this campaign, even though it’s turned into just a combat campaign, which I normally don’t enjoy. It doesn’t hurt that this mechanics improve helps keep my prep time down, because instead of having to create deep encounters, I can combine a few ideas with a few monsters, and during the session we find ways to make it dynamic and fun.

Give it a try, and let me know what you think.