Theory vs. Practice, or "How did I get myself into this mess?"

I'm going to assume the dearth of posts lately hasn't escaped your notice.  This isn't like the other long periods of blog-silence, my creative energies are being channeled elsewhere these days.  A few months ago, I started talking about the Dresden Files RPG.  Well, now I'm actually running a campaign of the game for my gaming group.  I'm even keeping a wiki of the campaign for the group, or others, to follow along.  If you're at all interested in such stories, you might find it worth a read.  Although I've already fallen behind on the session synopses, surprise-surprise.

Despite the last few posts I've written here being about the theory of running RPGs, I'm finding myself completely overwhelmed at times trying to follow my own advice.  Yes yes, "Gaming is hard," blah blah blah.

Take my earlier posts on making all called rolls count.  The general advice there was making both failure and success interesting, and not calling for rolls if either state was boring.  In practice, this is more difficult.  A big part of playing RPGs is getting to toss dice.  Most players will balk at the idea of letting their dice sit idle for the majority of a session.   It's not so simple, because most failure states are boring, and players ask to roll their dice.  A lot.  Typically, this will go something like, "I want to find out what I can about that NPC and what he's been doing."  (Maybe your players word their questions that vaguely; I try to push my players for specifics, but sometimes I forget.)  Because my players hate me, this will always be regarding an NPC for whom I have not prepared answers.  Which leaves me about 3-5 seconds to answer the following questions:

• Is this NPC worth an answer?
• Will the player have the capacity to find these answers?
• Do I have an answer to the question at all?
• What makes sense, and does this critically affect anything?
• How difficult should this be, and what is their chance of success?
• Should I encourage them to take measures to increase their chance of success, if needed?
• What should success look like?
• What should failure look like?  Should I just deny the information, let them have it after a delay, cut off a finger for the information?
• Oh crap, they're already rolling.  Why are they already rolling?

Yeah, no pressure.  Repeat that for four more hours and you can see how all that theorizing about proper challenge design gets chucked out the window in favor of hemming, hawing, and hedging. 

A lot of this is me being my own worst critic.  I have incredibly high expectations for myself, and despite my feelings of inadequacy, my players have issued mostly praise for the way things have gone so far. 

I guess the lesson is that RPG theory is only as good as its ability to be implemented under fire.  (I.E. No battle plan survives enemy contact.) 

When to call for a roll: Further thoughts

I've considered a few more things worth tacking on to my previous post about calling for rolls.  Hey, if I'm lucky, this could turn into an entire series of posts.

The Knowledge Dump
Many games have knowledge skills; for example, in D&D 4th edition, you have History, Religion, Arcana, Dungeoneering, and Streetwise.  It can be tempting to put game information behind these skill rolls in order to get some use out of them.  I'm inclined to think these days, however, that that is a bad idea.

Information about the game world touches on a lot of elements.  It gives depth to the setting, showing off the skills of the GM (or whoever wrote the material being used).  It provides players tools for interacting with the setting and understanding the nuances of how things work.  It can even be critical for short-term goals, such as deciphering the instructions to a puzzle in a dungeon, or discovering the location of a mission-critical goal. 

So why would putting any of that behind a skill roll be a good idea, given the chance of player failure?  If it's mission-critical stuff, then we're back to the problems in my first post on this topic.  If it isn't mission-critical, then risking the players not rolling high enough does not provide anything.  Your world will seem flatter and less interesting for the lack of information.

However, if only ancillary information is put behind knowledge skill rolls, some players may be less likely to take them, since they don't provide anything "necessary."

Success, but . . . 
The Dresden Files RPG describes this strategy as, "Success, but . . ." and I really like it.  That scenario from before, with the locked door?  Instead of interpreting failure as the players not getting through the door, the players get through the door but make so much noise that they attract a guard's attention.  I like this, as it makes failure much more interesting without letting the game grind to a stop while your players make the same roll over and over until the dice-gods relent. 

Here's an example to put it together:  Let's say your players are looking for the location of a mages' tower long lost to common knowledge.  They rightly suspect that the historical archives in the capital city will have the information they seek.  The player with the best score in History would want to go to the archives to study and find this information. 

In the past, I might have had the player roll, with a bonus to the roll for using all the reference material of the library.  This still invites the possibility of failure, unless I make the bonus so outlandish that the information was coming one way or another.  I don't think this is a very interesting way to do things.

There needs to be a way to give the information on a failed roll, but offer up a minor penalty to the players anyhow.  You could say that the research takes longer, depending on how badly the roll failed, but that can be game dependent.  In some games, the passage of extra time might not mean much to the players, nor to the GM.  Instead, let's say that failure results in needing the staff of the archives to help the players find the information they seek.  Of course, the staff of the archives doesn't work for free, so it'll cost the players some amount of gold to pay for the services.  Even better, let's say that instead of paying in gold, the players could offer to run "errands" for the archivists, retrieving specific historical texts from the locations they visit, including that mages' tower.

Failure has been made more interesting, but what about success?  If the players are getting the information either way, success needs to be more than just, "You don't get punished."  Perhaps, in finding the location of the mages' tower, the players also find some other interesting bit of information.  A treasure depot, perhaps?  Or maybe they learn about some of the defenses the mages' tower used to have, giving them a heads up on what to expect when they get there.  Maybe there are monsters in the tower now, but the excellent research gives them an advantage in combat when they fight the monsters.  In a completely different route, you could say that the player's research leads him to translate a section the archivists had been unable to interpret previously, so they pay the players for their help. 

It seems like it would be difficult to make every skill roll this dynamic and interesting; not every player action is quite so complicated, after all.  Still, as far as skill rolls are concerned, I think a little extra planning and the right frame of mind can do a lot to add to a game.

When to call for a roll

I tend to discuss RPG topics with my friends, and one of the topics that came to mind a while back has stuck with me enough that I think it's worth putting to the blog:  When do you ask your players for a roll?  It might seem simple enough, but it starts delving into the fundamental aspects of how (and why) RPGs are played.

For the uninitiated, RPGs tend to have players roll dice to determine the outcome of any event the player wants to resolve which would have an element of randomness to the outcome.  For example, you would roll to see if you hit a monster with a fireball, and then roll again to determine how much damage the fireball does to the monster if it connects.  But you might not roll if you're, say, hitting a door with an axe, since inanimate objects tend to be easier to hit.

There was something in the Dresden Files RPG books that I really liked, and I think makes for a great jumping off point.  This is the advice they give GMs when considering whether to ask their players to roll:  "1.  Consider success.  2.  Consider failure."


When you're asking someone to roll for something, there is the implication that they could fail at what they're trying to do.  For the game to be fun, both success and failure need to be interesting.  Combat seems to cover this automatically; if you succeed at a combat roll, you're that much closer to victory, and if you fail, that much closer to defeat.  But skill and knowledge checks, well, there are definitely right and wrong ways to handle those.  Here's some examples as to how that might work:

The Inevitable Victory
Let's say there is a locked door, and a character with a skill for picking locks wants to get through it.  If they succeed, great, they get to find out what's on the other side, but what if they fail?  Some GMs might just tell the player to try again, and keep that up until he gets it right.  That's boring.  Same thing if you let every other player with a lock picking skills to take a crack at it, as the odds are good that at least one person will roll high enough to make it happen.

Oh, and if they get through that door?  There needs to be something worth seeing on the other side; if it's nothing of interest to the game, then you shouldn't have had them roll to get through the lock in the first place.

The Quick Recovery
Let's take another scenario:  This time, you have the player in a treacherous situation, like avoiding a trap or accident of some kind.  The player rolls to avoid the trap but fails.  The consequence?  Let's say a small penalty, or some minor damage.  This is a fine consequence.  But let's say that you then avoid any situation where the consequence would matter . . . what was the point?  If the trap did damage to the character, but the character immediately gets to sleep it off, then there was no reason for asking him to roll to avoid the trap in the first place.

The Necessary Success
Quick story:  I ran a game in which my players spent a lot of time fighting an evil lich who had raised an army of zombies.  At the end, they met with the leaders of the combined mortal armies to push back against the lich; the idea being that they were going to ask the military leaders to lead the charge against the lich.  So I had a player roll to see if they go for it.  He failed . . . and I just let him have it, anyhow.

What was I going to do?  The game had been building to this climactic final showdown, why would I just cut it off because of a single roll?  That roll should never have been called for in the first place.

So, I think I can see a few principles for calling for rolls in an RPG:

• Success needs to be meaningful to the player's goal
• Failure needs to have consequences that are both felt and tested
• The game cannot hinge on a successful roll

I'm willing to bet I could come up with a few more, but this seems like a good place to start.

Non-Combat Gameplay

First things first:  If you think video games can be more than just mindless entertainment, and actually enjoy considering their potential and meaning, then you should be watching Extra Credits over at The Escapist.

That said, their most recent video was about non-combat gameplay.  In short:  A great majority of video games are mostly played through combat, and while this is both entertaining and a cheap way of introducing tension and drama, it neglects the many other aspects of life that video games could entertainingly portray in order to tell a good story.

Why is this so?  I imagine it's the same reason sex, by which I mean scantily clad females, is so ubiquitous in video games.  A great deal of both the creators and the players are male; while this has balanced somewhat in the last decade or so, men seem to be the dominant force in the industry.  And let's face it:  Men like violence.  I don't mean this in any sort of denigrating way, it's just the sort of fantasy which we enjoy.  Let's save psychology and philosophizing about why that is for another time.

Could you make a game that is entertaining which doesn't involve combat?  I've no doubt.  But I think the thing that will ultimately make that sort of game successful is a good story, not good mechanics.

The problem is that unless you have programming good enough to respond to a wide variety of player inputs, these sorts of games will probably be a long series of if/then statements.  If player does X, computer responds with Y.  Which is fine, and I'm sure it can be more complicated than that, but it will eventually boil down to predictable management of minutiae, which is going to be problematic for this sort of gameplay.

The entire idea is that you're offering a different way of overcoming obstacles in these games.  Not combat, basically.  If you don't replace the elements that make combat a cheap dramatic resource (tension, risk, the unknown possibilities), then the gameplay becomes formulaic.

Which is not the kiss of death for game, as I said; it's just that the impetus is then on making a good story.  I loved the Phoenix Wright games, and I think they're an excellent example of this sort of thing.  But I'm skeptical we'll ever see a game that fully replaces combat with philosophical debate, pushing the cloak and sheathing the dagger.

The Dresden Files

I've always been reluctant to be too critical of variations in media.  What I mean is, if someone turns a book into a movie, I try not to get hung up on the differences and simply appreciate each for its various merits.  Not that there isn't room for that.  It's just that the criticisms are often a measure of what you wanted the translation to be, not what it is.

At least, until I started reading The Dresden Files.

Originally, I was introduced to the short-lived (one season) series on the Sci-Fi Channel (before it became SyFy).  The premise:  Harry Dresden is a hard-boiled Chicago PI, and also a wizard.  He's not shy about it; in fact, he advertises in the phone book as a wizard.  He spends his time handling various cases for clients as well as providing his services as a consultant for the Chicago PD on cases that are "unusual."  He uses a hockey stick as a staff and a drum stick as a wand.  It's like Harry Potter meets film noir. 

At the time, I appreciated it for what it was.  Then I found out a friend of mine read the book series, and a few loans later I was tearing through the books.  It's been a while since I've gotten to enjoy fiction like this, and it's been refreshing.  Maddening, too, since I finish them so fast I'm left with a constant thirst for more. 

Recently, my girlfriend rented the DVDs of the television show for me, and it's been bittersweet.  It's fun seeing the show again, but I'm having trouble appreciating it the way I did before I knew about the books.  The show was cheesy, to be sure, and definitely would have benefited from being picked up by any station but Sci-Fi.  Still, I find myself picking it apart for all the things that differ from the book.  There's perfectly reasonable explanations for the changes in many cases, but it's difficult to enjoy all the same when I spend more time thinking about the differences than appreciating it for what it is. 

Not much else to say on this, really.  Just a recommendation to pick up the books, and a plea to some other network to clean up after Sci-Fi's failure to recognize a quality franchise when it comes along.

It could always be worse

So, I caught the last half-hour or so of the LOST series finale, which effectively doubled the amount of time I've spent watching the show over all.  Call it a mix of morbid curiosity and a desire to understand the reactions of my friends who watched it.  Apparently they went the "Fulfill characters' stories" route rather than the "Explain all the sci-fi mysteries" route, which angered a lot of people.  I guess everyone was already dead the entire time, or there was a parallel universe that was purgatory, or something.  I didn't get it.

It actually reminded me of the ending of a series I watched on Cartoon Network a few years ago, The Big-O.  The premise was awesome:  A post-apocalyptic world where the only survivors were the inhabitants of Paradigm City, a place controlled by a corporation with an agenda.  Forty years after the event which turned the rest of the world into an uninhabitable wasteland, nobody in the city has any memory of their lives before the incident, leaving them to struggle with understanding their history, their lives, the traditions and customs that drive and bind them . . . and at the center of it all, the protagonist:  Roger Smith, a billionaire superhero reminiscent of Batman.  Oh, except instead of fighting crime in a funny suit, he acts as a "negotiator" for hire and fights monsters and robots in his giant robot ("megadeus"), the Big O.

Neat, eh?  As the series wears on, we learn a lot about the world.  People slowly discover memories, personal or otherwise, of life before the apocalypse, something of great interest to the Paradigm Corporation.  We learn that there is life outside of Paradigm City, both when giant robots attack from beyond the city, but also when Roger encounters a woman who works for "foreign powers." 

Roger seems to be on the cusp of discovering the relationship between the Paradigm Corporation, the apocalypse, and the foreign powers when the series ends.  As it ends, Roger finishes a fight with another giant robot, and . . . we see him open the door into a control room, where one of the characters sits and operates a console that seems to be directing everything.

That's right . . . it was all just an illusion being programmed by someone.  What a ridiculous cop out.

Still, at least it's an ending.  Many of the shows I enjoyed watching were started, only to drop before they finished (Inuyasha), or be transferred off of the channel I watched it on (Naruto).  Some of them suffered from a lack of interest and vanished before they intended to (Undergrads), while still others carried on but became a shell of what they once were (Heroes, The Simpsons).

So, LOST fans, it could be worse.  At least you got an ending, even if you didn't like it.

You're not qualified to have fun

I haven't written about it much here, but back in 2008 I started playing World of Warcraft.  I always wondered why people found such games so addicting, but, well, now I know.  I haven't written much about it because it's kind of a specialized interest; it's easy enough to write a single review of a game, or even a short series, but WoW is one of those games that can take up a lot of attention.  People even have full-time jobs just writing about it!

Recently in game, I applied to a new guild.  For those who don't know, players band together in groups called guilds to facilitate higher level play.  Often, the "endgame" content requires 10-25 players to accomplish, so being a part of a guild not only provides a (semi)stable structure for doing so, but also offers a stronger sense of community than you get otherwise.  In many ways, it's almost required to be a part of a guild in order to see that endgame content.  You can just group together with strangers (pick-up groups, or "pugs"), but often times this can be very stressful; expectations are very high, and there's very little patience or tolerance of mistakes.  Sometimes it's akin to demanding a PhD for a burger flipping job.

I recently applied to join a guild on my server.  If you think it sounds funny to say that I applied, as if it were an actual job, then you're not alone.  I was rejected, and my reaction was worth pondering for a moment.

Some people take this game very seriously.  There are people who play many, many hours a day and are highly competitive about completing "world first" achievements.  Even though some guilds will never play on that level, they are very serious about completing the same content.  As such, their standards can be exceedingly high.  They won't take someone into an instance who hasn't been there before (which leads many players into a Catch-22 scenario).  The wide variety ways that you can customize your character become irrelevant, as suddenly there are "right" choices and "wrong" choices.  There are people who will tell you that you're a substandard player based on, say, a 1% difference in health pool, or a 2% difference in damage.  The fervent belief in such things can be almost religious.

It's an odd thing, being rejected for what is, at its heart, a hobby.  I mean, it might make some sense for an intramural sports team, for example (although people would understandably be upset about perpetually riding the pine), but this is a video game.  I can't imagine someone saying, "No, you're not good enough at Donkey Kong, you can't play with me.  You'll drag down the entire game."

There's certainly something to be said about playing as well as you can.  If you're counting on nine (or 24) other people to put on their "A game," it can be frustrating that progress is blocked because someone is slacking off in one way or another.  Still, the level of elitism and hostility that arises out of a cooperative hobby is very surprising sometimes.  Perhaps it's just an extension of the GIF theory.

4th Edition

I've been struggling on topics to write about lately. Politics are just leaving me too melancholy as of late. Science is bogging me down in pretty much every other waking moment of my life, so I'd prefer some escape from that at the moment. I haven't felt very insightful lately when it comes to theology or philosophy. I'm just a bit too strapped for cash at the moment to be writing about video games (well, new ones at least).

Then I remembered that Dungeons and Dragons was something of a popular topic previously. That's something I can write about, right? And if I can write about it without driving away 90% of my audience, all the better!

The topic up for grabs here is the 4th edition of D&D. If you're not familiar, Wizards of the Coast released the fourth edition of this classic game several months ago. Also, if you're not familiar, I'm going to suggest you go read up on the topic, because the rest of this post won't make much sense to people who haven't played it before. I'll try to fill in the blanks, but I can only do so much with a single blog post.

Before 4th ed. was released, I'd only played 3.5. What can I say, I've only been at this for a year or so. I thought I'd mainly compare my thoughts on the new edition to its most recent predecessor.

As far as combat-powers and abilities go, I really like where 4th ed. is. In 3.5, spellcasters could only cast a limited number of spells each day before they were spent. Martial characters didn't have this problem, but they suffered from a distinct lack of options. They generally would walk up, hit the monster, wait for their turn to whack it again, and repeat ad nauseum until it stopped moving. As time went on, this started to pale in comparison to the reality altering hijinks of wizards and clerics.

The new edition seems to get around this by offering all characters something to do each round. Powers are now divided into At-will (which have unlimited usage), Encounter (which can be used once each fight), and Daily (which can be used once a day). Martial classes and spellcasters have these alike, and each one does something different but at comparable power levels. With the power gap closed, it's useful to have fighters and rogues in the party, and clerics and wizards don't steal all the thunder. In fact, I've been playing a cleric in my current 4th ed game, and my main contributions to combat are healing.

All in all, I like where the system went. Characters have various options at their disposal and each class has a specific and useful role to play.

Non-combat situations, on the other hand, have suffered slightly. All those spells that casters used to have access to which could be used outside of combat are now gone. They've been replaced by rituals, but rituals are burdensome and expensive, useful only in critical or non-spontaneous situations. When they take 10 minutes (in game) to cast, you can't just pull them out of your hat, so to speak.

In addition, the skill list has been cut down dramatically. While this is useful in simplifying what used to be a complicated and intimidating arrangement, it leaves a lot of people unsure of how to apply their various skills, and I've found it also makes players reluctant to use them as well.

Perhaps saying that the rules here "suffered" is overstating it a bit. It may just take time for players familiar with the 3.5 system to adjust to the new metagame. Still, there was far greater versatility in non-combat approaches to the world in 3.5 than is apparent in 4th ed (so far).

Over all, I like 4th ed. If I ever get the chance, or even have the time, to run a D&D game again, I'm not sure whether I would choose 4th ed or 3.5 for the system. Both are fun and enjoyable, and both have their advantages and disadvantages. Then again, the way grad school is progressing, I may not have to worry about it for several years.

Oh well. At least I still get to play.

Campaign Differences

Last week, Shamus put up a link on his blog about the end of my campaign (which was originally his). In the resulting discussion I told Shamus I'd discuss how things turned out differently between our respective campaigns. He thought other people would be curious as well, so I decided I'd turn it into a blog post.

Major Warning: This post won't make much sense if you're not familiar with Shamus's campaign, so I'd recommend reading his stuff before you read my own, or at least read them side-by-side. This post is largely about the differences between our campaigns, so it'll reference his material heavily without going into a lot of specific details. The only place you'll see heavy details are when I find them amusing or when my campaign included material not written by Shamus. Also beware: This post is a behemoth.

The Intro
This isn't technically part of Shamus' campaign, but I'd never been DM before and I thought a little intro mission was needed so we could get comfortable with the system. This was a pretty silly cliche intro, but the characters had no backstory so I had to come up with something. They answered some ad on a bulletin board looking for mercenaries. The overworked city guard needed an escaped criminal picked up, dead or alive. I should point out that their proof that they killed the right guy was to cut off his hand with his distinctive ring still on it. Bleh. Anyhow, it was a pretty simple investigation followed by some easy battles. Well, relatively easy. The elven cleric almost died at the hands of a barbarian. Most amusing part? The party snuck around a hide out, then spent an hour discussing how to ambush the gangsters within. The fighter got bored and walked over to the door and tried to bash it in. "Tried" is the operative term here. So much for the element of suprise, eh?

The Trip to Mar Tesaro
I tried to stay true to Shamus's material on this part, which was a mistake. There was an entire scene of role playing while the characters took a ship over to the island the game would be set on. I was a new GM. Shamus probably had a nice environment set up for his ship with great chances of interaction. Mine played out more or less like a static movie. "Okay guys, now here's another thing happening that will turn out the same whatever you choose to say or do." I tried to make it interactive, I really did. Retrospect tells me a lot about what I did wrong. In the end, they were ship-wrecked at Mar Tesaro. I wanted to follow the normal rules for swimming and drowning and so forth, but I realized that was going to wipe out my guys very fast. Nobody had ranks in swim, and I think they'd have died before they abandoned any of their gear. They ended up getting to keep everything and still end up washing ashore on the beach. The players were happy, but I think it could have turned out better.

The Adventure Hook
So, why were my guys on a ship in the first place? Their initial mission was supposed to be a "test." The king sent them after that criminal because he needed adventurers to accompany one of his special forces operatives on a journey. The journey? There really was no journey, but that wasn't important, since they were getting shipwrecked anyhow. The character was a Blade Lord, a fighter-type character who might seem suspiciously familiar.

After they'd shipwrecked the only people who seemed to have survived were the party and a sailor named Beck. If you don't know Shamus's story, Beck had a pregnant girlfriend on another island and he wanted to get back to her. Beck was supposed to act as the fill-in; since there was no rogue in the party, they needed someone who could pick locks and do other skillful things. He was almost worthless in combat, but he had levels in an NPC class. That happens.

The party ends up finding the sword that belonged to their special forces guide, Oltean, indicating that he'd survived. For some reason, it looks like he started heading south without his sword. The party decided to go chasing after him with his sword. (This takes the place of Endo the monk, who had was the one to head south in Shamus's game.)

Breakshore
This portion of the adventure wasn't terribly different from Shamus's version. The party rolls into town, finds that their mark has fled south, and get a side-quest to filch some stuff out of the blacksmith's house, currently occupied by enemy soldiers. Again, no rogue meant they had to come up with a creative way to get rid of the soldiers guarding the front door. The bard summoned a celestial owl, which lead the soldiers on a wild goose chase through the woods. The party then went down to get stuff out of the basement, but I still ended up making the same mistake Shamus did: No light source for the party, so the dwarf should have been the only one who could see. Oops.

Shamus originally intended that quest as a way of restocking his guys, since they lost a bunch of stuff in the shipwreck. My guys didn't lose a thing, so they took it as a chance to load up on stuff. The funny thing was, the quest was to liberate some stuff for the resistance to utilize; weapons, armor, supplies, etc. The blacksmith told them if they pulled it off, they could grab a few things out of the supplies. My guys couldn't use most of it, but they wanted to take ALL of it. I had to talk them out of it. I also provided them the same magic horn that Shamus gave to his players. I gave it very minimal stats, based on what Shamus wrote of it. This would teach me some lessons in how to properly balance a magical item later on.

Breakshore was also the first chance for the party to interact with the game world. We were three sessions in at this point, and here was my first problem: The guys weren't interacting with my world. Yes, they were hitting up locations in the village, but the NPCs? I had to goad them into asking questions. My guys approached the NPCs like this: "Hey, we're looking for a guy, have you seen him? Oh, he went south, thanks. Hey, can you give me anything to help me out?" It was a little more drawn out than that, but that question came up a lot during the campaign.

My next problem was the elven cleric. This character worshipped the elven god, but these were mainly human lands; there were originally no temples for the elves anywhere. As soon as we entered the town, the cleric says, "I go to the Corellon temple." Um . . . uh oh. I tried to solve this problem with a reference to the island's history.

In Shamus's story, the original inhabitants of the island were a group of peaceful, rustic elves. They were killed by a group of dwarves for the riches of the mountain. This invoked a curse from the spirit of the mountain on all who would mine its bounty. What I came up with was a follow-up curse on the elves because of the evil of the dwarves. When great dwarven leaders die, their ashes are sometimes imbued into weapons to give them great power. When the original dwarven king died, his ashes were turned into a weapon, which resulted in a curse on the elves who were killed. Their spirits would restlessly remain in the land, and future elves who tried to dwell on the island would lose their normal carefree spirits.

Well, this subplot seemed like a good idea, but I didn't do a very good job weaving it in.

Jolana Village
In Shamus's original campaign, the party could either head southeast over the plains to Jolana Village or head southwest through the forest to Woodhurst. In both his campaign and my own, the players opted to head across the not-so-fruited plains. This played out exactly as it did in Shamus's campaign, which was largely due to the awesome map and dungeon notes Shamus posted about this leg of the journey. I threw a few more traps in on the way to the dungeon, but otherwise it was almost identical. Thanks, Shamus!

The Weather Hills
Shamus's party skipped right over this part. His cleric was high enough in level to cast a spell for walking on water, so they just crossed the river. My guys weren't high enough at that point, so they had to work their way through the goblin infested hills. This was a pretty good "dungeon."

I had the hills set up as a natural maze. There was a natural path, filled with thick undergrowth, running between the various hills. The party could cross over the hills, but it wouldn't get them through any faster, and they'd be exposed to attack from the goblins. The party didn't have a map, but they generally knew they needed to head southeast. At each intersection, I rolled randomly for the traps they'd encounter on a table I made. A failed spot check resulted in a trap that triggered, and the goblins would spring out and attack.

They only got attacked once, but this turned out pretty good all the same. The party fighter ended up in a pit, which made it a pretty interesting fight, as he'd have torn right through the goblins.

There was one other trap that rather failed. I found a template for trapped weapons, which deal damage to the wielder when they swing it the first time, so I had the goblins leave a trapped greatsword sitting in the middle of the plain. Of course, the party fighter scooped it up, but he had no intention of using it. He was a dwarf; his waraxe was his only weapon! I figured he'd do something with it at some point. Even if he only sold it, the shopkeeper would get injured checking it out. Except . . . he "sold" it without telling me when he got to the next town. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Crossway
This part, too, turned out very similarly to Shamus's campaign. A membership to the mage's guild from a wizard they killed led the party bard to try to impersonate him to get discounts on new gear. This lead to an arrest attempt on the party. I felt bad for railroading at this point, but I wasn't given much choice. The bard tried for a good 15 minutes, real time, to talk his way out of arrest. This was in spite of the repeated statements by the guards of, "Surrender or my 20 soldiers will attack." At one point, I should have had the soldiers just attack them and carry their battered bodies in front of the town magistrate, but I hadn't statted them out. Oh well.

The rest turned out similarly. The dungeon housing Mordan was pretty fun to build. Rather than have them search for traps and kill monsters, I searched out some logic/maze puzzles from the web and built them into the dungeon. The party had a rough time figuring them out, but they made it through and liked them quite a bit. There was a maze where you could only turn right or left at each intersection and a Theseus and the Minotaur maze. There was a third, but I can't recall it now and my notes are nowhere to be found.

The freeing of Mordan almost was a disaster, though. Shamus's guys freed him, then ran like the dickens. My guys released him, then sat in his chamber and argued about it for a long time. Even after I had their NPC run away, screaming in terror, they still sat and argued. It almost resulted in an in-character fight, as one of the players tried to introduce some background to his character. (A family killed by a lich in the past . . . do adventurers ever come from a normal, non-traumatic background?)

The Chase
At this point, things started to diverge from Shamus's campaign a bit. The party, running from the now free Lich King, fled south, all the way to a village named Tal Podere. Here is where the party started falling prey to attacks by Mordan's undead monsters. Shamus never said what the stats were for these monsters, as he custom made them. In the beginning, I just put a ghast out there and called it a gravewalker. Later on, I started upgrading them because the party was just tearing through them too quickly. Bigger claws, better armor and stats, and eventually a size increase made them pretty formidable.

This is also where the party finally regrouped with Oltean, the soldier they'd been chasing after since they landed on the island. It seemed like the players expected him to rise up and take control of the situation after the Queen's mind-control helmet was removed (If you're lost, I told you to read Shamus's stuff first!). He had no idea what was going on, so the players were left to decide where to go from here.

At this point, I should point out that I decided I'd have a little fun statting out Oltean's character. If you read the basics of the character at his website, you'd see that Shamus and Co. came up with a custom character class with a custom weapon. I thought it would be fun to try this thing out and see how it played. I chose to give him the 'vorpal' ability on his sword, just as a wild card. This will come back to haunt me.

I also started passing notes to the cleric when they slept. As the cleric held the lich's phylactery, she was having nightmares where the lich was trying to invade her mind or scare her into returning the phylactery. I used them to either induce paranoia or foreshadow coming events, but everything was colored with half-truths. I didn't find out until the campaign was over, but apparently we were a hair's width from the cleric attacking the rest of the party. I guess it worked.

The Diversion
After rescuing Oltean, we had a player absence, and a lack of a desire to skip a week, so I ended up with a great side quest. The cleric stayed behind in Tal Podere to take care of Oltean and learn some new spells while the bard, the fighter, and the NPC headed east to Sar Diga.

The players in Shamus's game never touched Sar Diga, so it was something of an empty space on the map I could work with. I had to figure out what kind of set-up would make sense for this place. There was a ferry that ran exclusively to it. It was a coastal city. I decided that it was a port town, though shut down because of the war, and a very wealthy one at that. It was going to be a center of black market trade on the island, but it never came up.

The party was lured out there by a call for musicians in the city. With the closing of the port, business was hurting in Sar Diga. The magistrate had decided that he would have a large party, with the dual goals of cheering up the local business leaders and hopefully getting some of the illicit business connections moving (again, this part didn't come up). The bard agreed to play at the party, and money was even provided for the rest of the party to attend. It was bizarre, though; the guys acted as though the party was going to be attended by ninjas out to get them. The party was to be held in the ballroom of a fancy hotel in the city. It even had a skylight and fire escapes, they were that wealthy. During the bard's intermission, a buxom blonde approached him and slipped him a note with a room number (coincidentally right next to the room they were staying in) on it. How could he pass it up?

After the party, the bard went up there to "meet her." Of course she was scantily clad, but before any shenanigans could go down, there was a pounding on the door. Into the room bursts a group of soldiers and the town magistrate, who just happened to be married to the buxom blonde. Oops. The bard, in a burst of inspiration, dives out the window onto the fire escape and torches the curtains on his way out, delaying any pursuit. He calls over for his comrades to join him, and they realize that the ladders leading to the ground for them were all destroyed. Up to the roof they went! There, they saw movement in the ballroom again, through the skylight. They went and saw the same blonde talking to some guy. It turns out he was the magistrate's assistant, and they were trying to get the magistrate killed so the assistant could take power. They figured the players would do the job when her husband busted in on the midnight rendezvous. Of course the players had to leap through the skylight to confront her. I totally intended for it to happen. I didn't intend for the fighter to fall flat on his face and nearly kill himself when he did it, but it was pretty amusing all the same.

*Crash*
Bard: Ah ha!
Beck: How dare you?!
Fighter: *Splat*

That fight was a challenge, but they still won. The woman went to jail, the assistant died, and the players were now owed a big favor from a city leader. They returned to Tal Podere for the cleric feeling pretty pleased with themselves.

By this time, Beck had racked up quite a bit of gold. The players were sharing the loot with him, and he wasn't spending anything so he could take care of his pregnant girlfriend when he made it home. On the way out to Sar Diga, the players (jokingly, I hope) talked about ambushing Beck and stealing all of his gold. It was a little unnerving, to say the least.

The Mine Riots
I included this part of Shamus's quest the first time the players entered the mining town (Della Minera). My players were not as clever as Shamus's; they decided to just kill all the gravewalkers in the mine and return for the reward. Afterwards, they realized that all the slaves were going back to work. They tried to then bargain for the slaves' freedom, but there was no way it was going to happen in that town, and they lost interest after they left.

The Big City
The players finally made their way to Fol Thron, the capitol of the southern part of the island. Unlike Shamus, I did end up including the encounter with the war criminal in the gibbet. My players not only freed the guy (to the protests of the bard), but gave him a horse to leave on as well. They were pretty steamed when the Queen told them about his crimes. They kept talking about tracking him down; I really should have turned that into another quest.

Fol Thron didn't have many differences from Shamus's group, with the exception of how I got them in to meet the crooked General. When they were in Tal Podere earlier, the party stopped an attack by gravewalkers during the night. After the long discussion with the city council about the whole affair, the party asked the town magistrate for a letter requesting audience with the Queen. He provided it, but couldn't guarantee that it would do anything for them.

When the players were ready to run out of the city without even trying to see the Queen, thinking she was in league with Mordan, or perhaps would try to kill them to steal the orb, I had Beck swipe the letter while they were doing other things. Beck ended up going through all of the bureaucratic shenanigans (behind the scenes, of course), but he brought them before General Tarvin.

Which was a mistake on my part. When that fight finally took place, our fighter blew his horn at the enemies, just as Shamus's players did. The difference was that the fighter then killed Tarvin in the next round. The wizard never cast a single spell. You'd be surprised how many of my fights turned out this way.

Taking down Noreeno
The Queen sends them on the same quest to kill Noreeno, with the party getting to the halfling village a day or so ahead of Noreeno. At first, the party seemed pretty content to ambush Noreeno on the road into town, which was fine by me; it would mean that they'd actually have a challenging fight with a wizard.

However, that changed when the party started squabbling over tactics. You see, the fighter wanted to dig a hole in the middle of the road and wait in it for Noreeno to come by, then leap out and slay him in one crazy blow. When I asked how he intended to get out of the hole, he said he'd dig stairs into it. When I told him that such a project would require quite a few hours of work, and probably some sort of Crafting skill check, he gave up on the plan in favor of just waiting in the brush by the road side.

The party didn't end up attacking Noreeno out in the wilderness; with his entourage of soldiers and other spell casters, they decided to try to ambush him in the village hotel. Which was a total disaster.

First, we had an extra player with us. This guy wanted to play a rogue, but couldn't commit to our regular sessions. He only showed up this one time. He ended up playing Oltean, but tried to play Oltean as a rogue. Oltean was a fighter in heavy armor. It wasn't good. I ignored certain things just to let him have some fun, but the strategies employed by the other players made that difficult.

This guy had Oltean climb up on the roof of the hotel, waiting for a signal to swing into a window and attack. Meanwhile, the players snuck up to the floor where Noreeno and crew were staying. The cleric cast Silence on the fighter, who was now a walking zone of absolute quiet. He then proceeded to walk into every hotel room unchallenged and slaughter everything within as it slept. Meanwhile, Oltean waited on the roof for a signal that never came.

I even tried to get one parting shot off at the players, including a letter in Noreeno's belongings that looked like a message for the Queen, but in reality was Explosive Runes for anyone who killed him enroute. They didn't fall for it, sadly.

In an amusing twist, the party had decided that they needed to bury Noreeno in his entirety, not just his ring. I had them attacked by gravewalkers while they did it, which resulted in a chase where they fled from dozens of the things back across the river to Fol Thron. Probably a pretty heavy dose of railroading, but I think if I'd left them to their own devices they wouldn't have known what to do next.

Southward Bound
The players ended up heading to the southermost cities on the island in search of the lost Prince Garrett; first to Telwin Port, then to Washport. They wanted to find the Magus Archives, but didn't really know why apart from "possible clues" that it could provide. My players, just like Shamus's, simply paid bail for the guy and left town. The bard ordered a fancy, undead killing bow before leaving, expecting it to be delivered to Washport in a week.

In Washport, the players encountered a mob-like group of anti-adventurers who had shut down the town's magic industry, hoarding it for themselves. They made their rounds each day, collecting "protection" payments from every shopkeeper, but wouldn't allow anyone to sell anything remotely magical (scrolls, potions, etc.). This would become the most frustrating part of the adventure for me.

My players tried to confront them in the crowded market streets as they first rolled into town, but the mob played it ignorant and cool and just walked away from them. They went to a tavern that night, and a halfling fighter from the group was in there. He was quite drunk, and decided to start flapping his mouth off at the party when he saw them. "You guys think you're *hic* heroes, do ya! Ha! We own this town. Just try to touch us, just try it!" At that point, in the middle of a crowded tavern, the fighter and the cleric pull out their weapons and attack the unarmed halfling.

The halfling escaped and then gathered his cohorts (five in total). The leader of the group challenged the party to a one-on-one duel; if their champion could handle the mob's champion, they'd leave town and never bother Washport again. If not, then the players had to shut up and get out themselves. The dwarven fighter of the party decided on a duel with the dwarven barbarian in the mob.

Here is where I regretted not being more careful with the magic items I'd given the party. After the barbarian had the fighter on the ropes, the player pulled out that magic horn I'd given him and started blowing on it. Over and over and over. He did this, healing himself up in between blows with potions, while the barbarian just sat there stunned. I was flabbergasted at this tactic; so much so that I let the player get away with taking far too many actions each round. After healing back to full health, he knocked the barbarian out, and the cleric told him to finish the job. The mob was just going to knock them out, it wasn't going to kill them. I ended up having the rest of the mob attack. This went badly, too.

I had one of the mobsters statted out as a werebear, exactly as seen in the Monster Manual. Nobody had silver weapons; I figured this fight would be extremely challenging for them. This was not to be. Remember that vorpal sword I'd given the party NPC? Yeah, first blow out of the gate, he chops the head off of the werebear. The fight ended soon thereafter.

The entire thing was frustrating for me because, in giving my players all these goodies, I was making it impossible to challenge them appropriately. They were waltzing through all of my encounters. Lessons learned, I supposed, and after that fight I retooled that magic horn to be much less game-breaking.

Heading for the Mountains
As the players headed out to the Magus Archives and Mount Khelberg, I had a surprise for them. In the wilderness, they were ambushed by a red dragon. This was supposed to be a challenging fight for them, as the monster would blow fire at them, then hide while waiting for his breath weapon to be ready again.

Sadly, this wasn't meant to be, either. At one point, the dwarven fighter dropped his magic axe and grabbed a bow. With it sitting there, gleaming on the ground, the dragon couldn't resist and flew over to pick it up. Guess what? Their NPC with the vorpal sword walks over and chops the thing's head off before it can fly away. What was supposed to be their most challenging fight was the shortest one to that point in the campaign.

I was crushed, but this taught me quite a few lessons: Don't get attached to your encounters, don't give your players overwhelmingly powerful magic items, don't be surprised when things go awry, allow your players to do cool things, etc.

Anyhow, the players eventually made it to the Magus Archives. Once again, I have to thank Shamus for his descriptive details in these things. Inside, Shamus placed a statue that was clearly trapped by the mages for anyone who would break in later. So, I described a few trinkets on there, knowing what horrors they would unleash on the player greedy enough to take them. The party fighter, knowing the cleric could simply prepare "Remove Curse," grabbed all five cursed items on the statue. As amusing as these things were, it rather dulled their effect that it was just a bit of a laugh for them, rather than something to be feared and avoided.

Freeing Fiore, and on to The End
The players freed Fiore, just as Shamus's did, though I think I railroaded them into tossing Mordan's phylactery into the box. I'm not very good and giving subtle clues, and the players aren't good at taking them. I didn't want the campaign to drag on the way Shamus theorized it could have had this solution not been taken, and I don't think the players did either. It turned out to be for the best.

The explosion of the mountain was also the culmination of the cursed axe sidequest. When a lava channel opened up in the Chasm of the Dead, the elven cleric tossed the axe in , LoTR style, and the curse was lifted. Bonus XP all around!

From this point onward, the campaign played out almost exactly as Shamus's did. The dwarves attacked while the players were in the wilderness, but they completely demolished Telwin Port. Without Beck there to rally the defenses (he stuck with the party the entire game), the city just wasn't able to survive. The party met with the dwarves and convinced them to join with the Queen to defeat Mordan. They then helped the Queen's men defend the bridge for a night.

Actually, that deserves some mention, because it was a very fun battle. I gave Beck the ability to man a catapult the way Shamus did, which worked out to be a good use for him. Each of the players were also given control of three low-level grunts with a sword and a bow; this would give them options, since the cleric tended to just sit in the back and buff/heal, while the bard tended to just sit in the back and buff. This also saved them from being overwhelmed by the large number of gravewalkers I threw at the party. I only used two waves, but it was an exciting battle all the same.

The party then went north and killed Mordan. The only major change here was in the "rescuing party," the army that kept Mordan occupied in the north. In Shamus's game, it was a powerful NPC from a previous campaign. Since my players didn't have that past to call upon, I had Oltean's people finally show up to rescue him. There was some post-adventure awkwardness to work out with this solution, but it settled things enough for me.

That's about everything I can recall from the entire affair. Questions and comments are welcome, as I'm betting there are details I left out. Looking at the size of the post, though, I doubt it.

Being a new DM

Over in my post about the end of my D&D campaign, davej asked about what it's like to be new to the game and have to act as DM. I started to write an answer, and realized it was getting long enough to warrant a separate post on the subject.

If you've never played an RPG before and then you go to DM, it's not as bad as most people would lead you to believe. It does, however, require a lot out of you.

1. Learn your rules as thoroughly as possible before starting. Your first game will go so much more smoothly if you know how the game runs, and your players will look to you for answers when they can't remember how certain things operate or how they perform something they want to do. That said . . .
   
   
2. Expect your first session to get bogged down. People are new to the game; there will be a lot of flipping through the books to look up rules and general confusion about what the players can, can't, should, and shouldn't do. Just try to deal with it as best you can.
   
   
3. Always prepare as much as possible before hand. If you don't know your material, it could lead to problems when the players try to play further than you've mapped out. If that 4 hour session ends after only 2, people won't be very happy. I always tried to have material for at least 2 sessions ready to go: Maps drawn, NPCs statted out and personalities planned, encounters put together, and so forth. Now, this may sound like a contradiction, but . . .
   
   
4. Be flexible. Your players will sometimes do stuff you didn't expect them to do. Roll with it. Allow them to come up with clever alternatives that you hadn't considered. Give them a chance to succeed wildly (or fail miserably), even if it does alter things that you'd planned. It's part of the game for players to do amazing things.
   
   
5. Don't be afraid to use pre-made material. In the beginning, it can be difficult to figure out what to put together for a complete adventure. NPCs to stat out, maps to draw, treasure to place . . . it can be a bit intimidating. Modular adventures are nice because someone has done that work for you already; you just have to present it. Even just pulling monsters from the Monster Manual(s) can help, as you have encounters right there ready to go. Anything that makes your job easier in the beginning is a good thing. And finally. . .
   
   
6. Don't get too attached to your NPCs. They'll start to feel like your own characters, especially if you've spent a lot of time statting them out and working on their personalities and backgrounds. Don't be afraid to let them die. Nothing frustrates the players like a recurring villain who they can't touch, or a tag-along NPC who does all the cool stuff while they watch. If the players catch the villain, it's time for him to die. If you send an NPC with the players, make certain they are still the ones in the spotlight.

I hope that helps, dave. Good luck with your first game!

End of a Campaign

As you may have heard, I started playing D&D sometime back in October. I'd never played before, so starting out as the Game Master was pretty intimidating. Still, I learned as I went, and my guys were learning, too, so we still managed to have ourselves a good time.

Last night was the last official session of that campaign. It seems as though it's quite rare for an RPG group to finish up a campaign, so I feel pretty good that we completed this one. There's a few things to wrap up epilogue style, but the finished the major campaign objectives last night.

The storyline comes from Shamus's D&D campaign. You can read his version of the story there, otherwise I'll summarize for you here.

The party, an elven cleric, dwarven fighter, and half-elf bard, were shipwrecked on an island they'd never visited during a storm. The island is in a state of civil war, so their presence is not welcome. In the course of their attempts to escape the island, they inadvertantly unleash an ancient evil, a lich king sealed away long ago.

They proceeded to spend the rest of the variously fleeing from this powerful creature and trying to figure out how to defeat him. Along the way, they saved the mayor of a city, defeated a local mafia-style outfit, released the tormented souls of a long dead elven people, and freed the long trapped guardian spirit of a very special mountain. (I take seriously the idea that your players should get to do cool stuff.)

Last night they finally defeated the lich king. His phylactery (an item which holds the lich's power) had been sealed away, and thus his power had been severely curtailed. This being the case, when the players defeated him, his spirit was trapped without escape.

The whole experience of going through all this has been quite fun. It's given me some writing experience and given me a lot of knowledge about how to play the game. I maintain unreservedly that these games are for anyone. Even if D&D's high fantasy and combat heavy rules aren't for you, there are games out there that will scratch your particular itch.

Happy Pi Day!

To think I almost forgot! I miss Mole Day every year, too.

Go out and celebrate all thing circular. Like, um . . . wheels?

Or just eat some pie. Works for me.

Settle down, Nancy

Yeesh, who put sand in this guy's underdrawers?

I tend not to read Slate much because, well, it's Slate. This article was pointed out to me, however, and I couldn't help but comment on how much of a negative Nancy this guy is. Allow me to summarize it for you:

"D&D is a terrible role-playing system. Why? Because, that's why. It totally sucks even though it's the most popular one on the market, and it's just people being stupid that keeps all the other great systems from making it, even though RPGs are stupid anyways."

(That was my paraphrase, btw) Think I'm exaggerating? Go ahead and read it. The guy complains about D&D in a way that reflects on all RPGs, tabletop or video game in nature. Then he laments that D&D is just too darn popular for his favorite systems. I guess the man (nerdy as he is) is keeping them down, or something.

The guy just seems to need something to complain about, and Gygax's death made for a good opportunity. I hope he hasn't quit his day job.

Update
Shamus wrote about the story today, and subsequently posted a link to my blog. Welcome, Twenty-Sided readers! Thanks for stopping by.

WWJC?

Earlier today I was listening to Fear the Boot, a podcast about tabletop roleplaying games. One of these days, if I ever get around to updating my blogroll, I'll add them to the list. The episode I was listening to revolved around religion in roleplaying games, and it's an interesting topic.

In DnD, you can play as a cleric. The cleric is dedicated to his or her deity, and gets all of their divine spells from said god. However, most clerics don't sit in the temple and preach but go out into the world on wild adventures. There's really no comparison to anything you might find today.

The humorous thought this brought to mind is the "favored weapon" system, wherein each deity favors a certain weapon, which allows the clerics who worship said deity access to that weapon. This makes me wonder . . . what would Jesus carry?

I can humorously imagine my pastor carrying a sawed-off shotgun around because it was Jesus' preferred firearm. But in seriousness, what might that weapon be? I can think of three possibilities:

• Sword - Jesus did say that he came bearing the sword.
• Spear - Lance of Longinus, anyone? I guess Jesus wouldn't remember spears too fondly, but I can imagine them having some sort of significance.
• Whip - Jesus did clear the moneychangers out of the temple courtyard with one. Perhaps he was skilled in its use.

Anything I might have left off? Add your two cents.

Some geeky thoughts

This post will probably increase my dork factor by a large magnitude, but what do I care? All four of you readers can judge me as much as you want.

Earlier last year, I was reading Shamus Young's synopsis of his Dungeons and Dragons campaign as he wrote it on his blog. It sounded neat, like something I might actually enjoy. So, back towards the beginning of the fall semester, I started playing Dungeons and Dragons. I actually have two games going; in one I'm the game master (Note to my players: Don't follow that link above, I'm using his campaign as my basic outline), while in the other I'm just a player. I've never played an RPG aside from video games, and those have almost nothing in common with their tabletop brethren.

The point of this post isn't really to talk about the games themselves, but more to talk about the things I've learned since starting.

First and foremost, I can understand why people have a hard time picking up the hobby. Bad press over the years and obnoxious, stereotypical fanboys already stack the cards against it, but most people don't have a soft spot in their heart for reading text books. When you first start out, you typically have a lot of rules to learn. Now, that's not to say that you can't do it in easily digestible bits; nobody starts out learning chemistry with the equations for electron behavior. Still, it's intimidating. Ideally, you'd have someone who already plays introduce you and hold your hand through it.

But that directly contradicts my next thought: There's really a lot of people these games should appeal to. Dungeons and Dragons was spawned by The Lord of the Rings, and that's pretty popular since the movies. Even if fantasy isn't your cup of tea, most people have a fictional genre they love (historical, sci-fi, horror, etc.), and there's an RPG out there that would probably fit that bill.

I realize that some people liken it to being an 8 year old "playing pretend," but I like to think of it in other ways. It definitely gives aspiring actors/actresses an outlet for practicing their craft in their spare time. Writers also get to put their skills to use. If you've ever watched a movie or played a video game and thought, "Oh, I wouldn't have done it like that, I'd have totally done it differently," well, these games give you a chance to play that out. Did you ever read those "choose your own adventure" books? It's a lot like that, except instead of a book you get a live narrator.

Hm . . . I have more thoughts, but this post is getting quite lengthy already. Perhaps I'll add more in the future.

Theoretical Biology

Earlier this year, I did a round-up on what I thought could conceivably be a biological explanation for vampires. I think such thought experiments are neat. I'm going to make you endure another.

This past week in my seminar course, we talked about this worm that has no digestive tract, no mouth, and no anus. It obtains all of its metabolic needs from bacteria which live just under its skin. The worm absorbs minor nutrients from the environment, mainly dissolved gases, and the bacteria use them to create metabolites which they share between themselves as well as with the worm. Sometimes the worm directly absorbs the bacteria for fuel as well. The worm's waste products are absorbed by the bacteria for fuel as well.

I find this to be fascinating, and we spent a good while wondering how situation would evolve. Since we were all molecular biologists, nobody had an answer. Still, I was left with one intriguing question:

What if people had turned out like this?

Think about it . . . no digestive tract at all, coming or going. What would this mean?

For starters, any joke using the punchline, "Wrecked 'im? It nearly killed 'im!" would never be known. Uranus would no longer be a funny planet name. No one could make fun of Preparation H or use "stomach problems" as an excuse to get out of work.

On a more serious note, many things would be radically different about people. You wouldn't have obesity, as all of our energy would be self-sustaining. Consequently, you wouldn't really have body-builders, either, as you couldn't get the additional energy that would need. Agriculture would never have developed, nor would hunting. What would have been the premise for the beginning of human civilization?

Of course, though we would have no mouths, we'd have to breathe a lot more, as those bacteria need the CO₂ to build sugars with. Perhaps many more nostrils? Of course, with no mouth and no tongue, this leaves open the question of how communication develops. Perhaps vocal cords still exist in whatever airways we'd use, so there would still be some form of vocal communication, but it wouldn't resemble anything we call language.

And, well, reproduction is a whole other case entirely. Without a waste tract coexisting with the reproductive parts, would those parts have turned out the same? Or would they be entirely different as well?

Go ahead and add in your $0.02. I'm curious what the thoughts are on this one.

The stupidest monsters ever

Actually, I think Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) had the best one. I forget the name of the creature, but it was apparently a flesh-rending horror. However, it was so stupid that it would think that if you couldn't see it, it couldn't see you. The key to escaping a horrible death was to cover your eyes if you made spotted it.

Anyhow, that theme brings us to an article about some of the dumbest monsters in Dungeons and Dragons. I'm inclined to agree, although I'm thinking that having a room of death with just the floor, ceiling, and walls is not enough.

Hat tip to Shamus, who generated a great discussion, including the guy who made one of the stupid monsters. Fantastic.

Distractions Abound

Y'know, a responsible blogger might have followed up his post, and its consequent linking to by a much larger blogger, with further posts to convince new readers to stay. Then there's me, the guy who disappears for days at a time.

So, what's my excuse this time? Well, crazy school stuff. Busy, busy, busy.

Also, in much nerdier news, I've been preparing for my new Thursday night activity. I'm starting a D&D game with some buddies, and yours truly is the GM. I'm probably cementing my single status for the next 10 years, but my glass is still half-full. I'm looking forward to it.

My other time drain has been this: The Order of the Stick. It's another webcomic about, about a bunch of D&D players. Also, they're stick-figures. It's hilarious, in an incredibly dorky kind of way. I recommend it, if that's your kind of thing.

Super Happy Weekend Fun Poll

I'm working on a presentation this weekend, so no political rantings, scientific drudgeries, or philosophical musings. Instead, I thought I might get the rest of you to participate (all 3 of you, or however many actually manage to return).

The new season of Heroes starts Monday, so I thought it might be a good time to break out the question that was asked of me: If you could have any of the Heroes powers, which one would it be?

I think it's a better question than usual. Most other superheroes tend to be overpowered (Spiderman, Superman, etc.), so you usually ask for a package deal. The Heroes cast seem to be one-shot characters.

Your choices:

• Self-healing (Claire)
• Healing others (Linderman)
• Remove memories/block powers (Haitian guy)
• Create illusions (That one lady)
• Pass through solid objects (DL)
• Super strength (Nikki/Jessica)
• Manipulate electronics (Micah)
• Communicate with electronics (That Israeli soldier-lady)
• Manipulate space-time (Hiro)
• See the future (Isaac)
• Telepathy (Matt)
• Manipulate people (Eve)
• Radioactivity (Ted)
• See how things are "broken" (Sylar)
• Invisibility (Australian guy)
• Appear in people's dreams (That Indian kid)
• Locate any other hero (Molly)
• Fly (Nathan)
• Absorb powers (Peter)

Did I leave anyone out? Vote in the comments, I don't know how to make a poll. Also, feel free to discuss predictions for the new season.

I think I might go with flight. I'd enjoy it more than any of the others without the risk of abusing it, and it comes with far fewer drawbacks than some of the "cool" powers. Linderman's ability to heal others would be nice, but he's right that the weight of only being able to heal the world's wounds one at a time would be taxing.

On the other hand . . . if I had Hiro's powers, I could finally go back and meet Jesus.

After further thought . . . I couldn't be trusted with invisibility. Who could?

By the way . . . yes, I know Blogger allows you to add a poll to the blog. The problem is, it adds it to the sidebar, not in the post, which really screws up the formatting on the page. I really ought to hire a professional to deal with this stuff for me. And when I say "hire," what I really mean is "wheedle into working for free."

Science in lieu of news

Oh, there's so much happening in the news lately, and so little time to blog about it right now. I'll get around to it before week's end, I suppose, but in the meantime I shall thrill you all with some scientific geekery. I'm supposed to be giving a presentation next week on microbial bioenergetics, and my initial paper topic fell through. So, since it won't be my presentation, I thought I might share my thoughts with you suckers interested readers.

Recently, the genome for an exotic microbe known as syntrophus aciditrophicus was sequenced. The link goes to the PDF of the news article. I'd originally read it as an HTML story, but I'm not sure if that's open access. You may need access to Science to read these things anymore.

Anyhow, the microbe is already interesting because it's a syntroph. This means that it can't exist on its own but relies on a symbiotic relationship with another microbe, typically a methanogen. S. aciditrophicus creates H₂ in the course of its metabolism. However, build-up of the gas shuts down its metabolic processes, making them energetically unfavorable. Thus it partners with another microbe which can utilize the H₂ and thus survives.

This diagram take from the article linked above

There's quite a few syntrophs out there, and they have similar metabolic situations. What makes the genomic sequence of S. aciditrophicus so interesting is that it's missing all kinds of genes that they would expect to be there for the metabolism it seems to perform. Many of the genes found have only limited homology to known genes with appropriate functions, but many are just simply not there.

This leads to all kinds of questions about how the thing actually survives. Does it utilize its partner for these missing steps? Does it do the steps with some protein which simply hasn't been identified? Or does it use some novel pathway for accomplishing these processes?

It's an exciting mystery as far as I'm concerned. Your mileage may vary.