gonna call the president, gonna get myself a private eye

This media blow’s good for either $10 cash or $20 in house credit. Have a shot while you think it over.

Chinese Democracy: Any album 14 years in the making has a certain weight of hype behind it. Chinese Democracy does not live up to that hype. But I still like it. I never counted myself among GnR fans but the mastered versions of “Madagascar” and “I.R.S.” rock out pretty hard. I don’t think drunken frat boys will be singing “Rhiad and the Bedouins” at karaoke twenty years from now, but not every album can be Use Your Illusion.¹

Pandemic: I played this at Greg’s on Sunday and had a blast. You and 1 to 3 other players make up a CDC disaster team. Outbreaks of four different diseases - represented by yellow, red, black and blue cubes² - break out in major cities around the globe. Your task: travel to these cities, quash the outbreaks, and research a cure to put an end to them.

Complications:

• You draw cards that have city names on them. These cards act as an in-game currency, allowing you to travel across the globe in an instant or research a cure. But the limited number of cards may mean that you can’t get to a critical location at the right moment.

• Every turn, you flip over two outbreak cards and infect the cities depicted with one disease cube each. If a city already has three disease cubes - or if you flip over an Epidemic - the disease can vector to adjacent cities. This can start a cascading effect that will plague an entire continent.

• Each player has a special ability that makes one rule of the game easier. The dispatcher can move players between cities instantly; the researcher can hand off cards from her hand; the scientist can research cures cheaply; etc. A lot of the most exciting parts of the game happened between turns, when we coordinated our moves to deliver the right people to the best possible places.

The game immersed us very quickly, from the panicked babbling of four people planning at once to the heavy silence when Bangkok went viral. Good, quick fun.

The Happening: Not sure where all the disappointment came from. I’ve been waiting to see this team-up for a long time and I stayed on the edge of my seat throughout:

… oh, you mean that other Happening. Yeah, that shit sounds awful.

Keep on the Shadowfell: I played this with Jonathan, Dev, Jen, Nathan and Will S. on Wednesday a week. I named my pre-gen dragonborn paladin after a Santana album; he named his tiefling warlock after a Rush song. That’s what D&D’s all about.

Thoughts on the new edition:

• I can’t imagine playing this game without minis. Tactical movement reigns supreme - a 1-square shift at the right time turns a stand-up fight into a massive beatdown. Being able to catch the right number of targets in a burst, or put a wall at your side to fence in your enemies, makes all the difference.

• Understanding player roles helps a great deal. We nearly lost our rogue in the first fight because she went toe-to-toe with a couple of minions, instead of ducking and stabbing and gaining sneak attack damage. My paladin soaked a little too much damage in the second fight and quickly hit 0 hp. Know the difference between skirmishers and defenders, and between leaders and controllers, and the odds work in your favor.

• Playing at 1st level became fun again. Every 1st level character has at least four options to choose from in a round - two at-will powers, one encounter power, one daily power - in addition to just running up and hitting a guy. Options mean tactics, which makes for engaging gameplay.

D&D still runs best at one speed - sword-and-sorcery combat - so I don’t think it will replace every game in my library. But it still does what it does better than any game on the market today.

Deadwood: Oh. So that’s what the fuss was about. S1 spoilers under the cut:

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¹ Strictly speaking, only two of them can be.

² I christened these outbreaks Yellow Fever, Red Death, Black Plague, and Bluemonia.

wayne’s world, wayne’s world, party time, excellent

My weekend updates come two days late. I have so much weekend that it crashes into me when I step on the brakes.

Friday I went with a friend to see Dave C. in a revival of Superman: The Musical (from the folks who brought you Bye-Bye Birdie and Annie). It’s fun and silly and over the top in the ways that only a 60s musical can be. The authors hit on a conceit that it took years for modern comic books to find - that the only way to challenge a man who can’t be hurt by anything is to play on his human side. Dave C. had the strongest and clearest voice of any of the cast, but they were all entertaining.

Then I stopped in at Phoenix Landing for Katie H’s birthday. I can never go there without feeling that I have to keep an eye out to make sure any female friends aren’t molested - though Friday’s crop of females included three jiu-jitsu instructors - and it usually keeps me from having an absolute blast. However, all my caution went for naught on Friday, as someone took the unexpected step of detonating a stink bomb a little after midnight. Some frequently asked questions.

Q: A stink bomb? Are you sure?
A: Yes.

Q: Could it have been a natural gas leak?
A: Possibly, but I discount that because (A) not even natural gas smells that bad and (B) the staff didn’t seem in any hurry to get us out.

Q: Could it have been a really bad “human odor”?
A: As bad as that is, that smell tends to disseminate pretty quickly. This was too concentrated.

A wall of people surged to the exit in a fairly orderly fashion, cuing me to exit as well. I’m still glad I got to wish Katie a happy birthday and dance for a little bit.

On Saturday, after accidentally punching someone in the mouth during jiu-jitsu class, I went to Rachel’s for a surprise birthday party. I get remarkably neurotic around any complex enterprise - anything where presentation or the Grand Gesture become a big deal - so I channeled my neuroses into something useful by sitting in the living room on lookout. Bob Holt seemed genuinely surprised.

What followed was one of those incredibly laid back parties with 6 to 10 people in a living room, hovering comfortably between happy and silly drunk, swapping stories about childhood with no pressure or expectation. We talked about cable access TV, embarrassing high school moments, and professional football:

Serpico: Lawrence Taylor, greatest linebacker in the NFL …
Professor: Until Ray Lewis.
Serpico: Right, right. I suppose to reach that pinnacle of performance, you do have to either do cocaine or murder a man.
Professor: You have to do something to reach that level where killing a small white man holding a football feels right.

On Sunday I returned to tabletop gaming with a bang, hosting a game of Mutants and Masterminds in the new apartment. Fraley, Carubia, O’Keefe and Serpico showed up to roll d20s and save Boston from the combined efforts of Derek Jacobi and a pile of cockroaches.

Later that evening, I saw some folks playing Rock Band at Orleans in Davis Square. Now I must play Rock Band.

well, I’ve got friends in low places

Joe (a/k/a Big Daddy Hookup) had some extra pavilion seats for the Sox’ first game of the season against the Yankees. I quickly pounced on two of them. Wanting to share the tickets with the person who’d most appreciate them, I immediately thought of Victoria (a/k/a Tessie) and called her up.

How fun can a baseball game be with driving rain, sub-40 temperatures and a Sox loss? A hell of a good time, I say. Amanda (a/k/a Sarah Connor, Attorney at Law) and Joe recounted their trip to Tokyo to see the Sox play. Apparently the legendarily disciplined Japanese cheering section has now been introduced to the phrase “Yankees Suck.” That kind of gunboat diplomacy I can get behind.

And, of course, pavilion seats afford you a nice, unobstructed view of the players you’re yelling at.

“That’s some Gold Glove fielding right there, A-Rod,” I yelled, off his early game error that left a runner on first. Later, after a neatly fielded double play: “You’re still not very good!“

Giambi, starting the season with a masterful .050 average, homered one off the recovering Timlin. “Nice work, juicer,” I yelled. “Almost at .100! You’ll get there!“

I dragged myself out of bed on Saturday into 60-degree temps and went to advanced instructor training for jiu-jitsu. Good news: my judo keeps getting better. Better news: the current crop of newly certifying instructors, including Katie (a/k/a the Redheaded Brown Belt), keep getting much better. They already have poise, confidence, engagement with the audience and good technique. Keep at it, trainees.

I finally saw Will (a/k/a Sketchy Bear) and DJ’s (a/k/a Gimli son of Gloin) place in Dorchester, a cozy little walk-up with some real class to it. I helped Serpico, Meghan, Will and Auston stat up characters for a forthcoming Mutants and Masterminds game. Boston can sleep soundly, knowing that Deluge, Rumble, the One-Man Battalion and an as-yet-unnamed ghost monk watch their streets. Afterwards, Will and I played Pain on the PS/3, which combines ragdoll physics models, crunching sound effects and cartoonish graphics for a perversely fun game.

Today’s theme: nicknames.

like a castle in its corner, in a medieval game

CNN confirms the passing of Gary Gygax.

I think I first started recognizing Dungeons and Dragons from ads in the back of the occasional Marvel Comic that I’d buy. One day in 4th grade I discovered a huge standing display of D&D boxed sets in the local Waldenbooks - the black box with the red dragon on the cover, for those who remember it. I begged my parents to let me buy one, which they said I could - out of my own pocket. So I scrimped and saved twenty whole dollars (plus $1 tax) and walked out with one about a month later¹. I was already familiar with Choose Your Own Adventure books, and video game RPGs like Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. But the idea that I could make and explore my own worlds thrilled me to no end. It turned on an addiction that I’m probably never going to get over.

Now here’s the pathetic part: I spent far more time preparing to play D&D than I spent actually playing. I had a friend, Stephen, who’d play D&D on occasion but liked Champions and Marvel Super Heroes better. My friend Patrick liked Shadowrun - the cyberpunk RPG where the 2050s look just like the nightmare of 1985 - and we played on and off for a couple summers. Other than that, though, I never had a regular gaming crew in high school. I was always too conscious of the judgment of the “cool kids” to risk admitting that yes, I liked half-elven fighter/mages and slaying pit fiends. Those kids at the corner table? With the greasy black hair and the pasty skin and the Dungeon Masters Guide with the cracked spine? They had more cojones than I did.²

I got back into D&D in college, with the gentle coaxing of Kevin H. and Serpico. I played a big, glorious mess of a one-off game with them and about seven other people one spring. Inspired, I took the slow steps necessary to start running my own campaign. Melissa, Serpico, Kevin and Aaron followed the trail I set for them, recovering two ancient artifacts that outlined a ritual for godhood and keeping them out of the hands of the demonic/celestial crossbreed, Duvaran the Fair. There were vicious halfling mercenaries and religious zealots and genocidal elves and half-orc barbarians and snow dragons and kobold traps galore. I think I even worked a barbazu in there. Good times.

Without RPGs, I never would have run the 7th Sea campaign (The Lost Histories) that got Melissa and Fraley better acquainted. Without RPGs, I never would have known Christine any better than I did. I probably wouldn’t still be friends with Bobby, Auston, Dana J., Will S. or half the people I went to school with. I probably wouldn’t still be reading. Or writing.

I’d also probably be at least $1000 richer, judging by the contents of the bookshelf closest to my computer, but that’s neither here nor there.

I’ve had a rich and imaginative gaming life so far and I’ve only been at it sixteen years. You’ll find me and a regular crew at the nursing home, shaking polyhedral dice and arguing over who has initiative. I can almost promise.

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.” - Oscar Wilde

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¹ This should be especially funny to anyone still in the hobby, where $20 will buy you about 2/3 of one of the three core handbooks you need to play D&D today.

² Not hanging out with geeks all the time in my developing years had its other advantages, of course, so I don’t rue the whole experience.

the victims have been bled

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons and father of the modern role-playing game, has supposedly died today.