Wax Banks

If.

2009-07-17T23:08:28-04:00

If a fella comes off as a pretentious overcompensating ass in his writing, but his wife's been in the ground just a little while and he's obviously having one of those what-is-life,-really? periods...do you hold it against him? What kind of person does that make you? Or him, really?

Too long; didn't read.

2009-07-15T17:37:49-04:00

In 2001 (02? 03?) Zhan suggested I take a look at two community (i.e. 'Web 2.0,' i.e. 'social networking') websites: MetaFilter and Plastic. He was killing a lot of would-be thesis-researching time on those sites at the time, as I recall.

Plastic was the smartest, funniest Slashdot-like site back then.

MetaFilter was the deepest.

I sent my $5 for a MeFi membership, joined Plastic for free, and pissed away many many hours reading and occasionally ranting over the next mumblemumble years.

Plastic's gone and MeFi celebrates ten years of dilettantism, inanity, dogmatism, and genuine love this weekend. Here's to Matt Haughey, the most successful community architect on the Internet, and to the blue, green, and grey.

Trying to figure out the history of fantasy roleplaying games. One in particular, for the moment.

2009-07-13T22:42:47-04:00

[Why do I care? Because tabletop roleplaying is extremely important in the evolution of modern American fantasy, not only generic fantasy but the mass-mediated fantasies that lull us to sleep (and rouse us to fight - each other, if no one else). D&D is far and away the most popular pen-and-paper roleplaying game - that doesn't matter as much in the post-EverQuest, post-World of Warcraft era, but it still matters. The new books are bestsellers, and D&D still gives popular fantasy - books, movies, and games - much of its basic structural and stylistic vocabulary (y'know, the bits that don't come from Tolkien and Star Wars and such).

Plus, what can I say? Lately I spend my weekends rolling dice. I wanna know what's going on, and why.

I'm not an authority on this stuff - this is my attempt to put down the 35-year history of one game that's had tremendous influence. I'd like to try to talk about the nature of that influence later, as I think about it more. And so we're clear: I wasn't there, and this isn't about What A Swell Time It All Was Before The Suits/Millennials Ruined It. Nor is it cultural history. This is one attempt to summarize the history of a design as I see it. Probably I'm all wrong - I'm sure I've overestimated the irritations of actually playing AD&D, which I'm limited to reading rather than playing. This is all Big Angry Declaratives because I get that way sometimes, but really the whole thing has a giant question mark on top of it.]

OD&D

In the beginning you had miniatures wargaming - Napoleonics, Ancients, and so forth. Gary Gygax wrote a fantasy-wargaming ruleset, Chainmail. In 1974 he took a bunch of Dave Arneson's ideas (in particular the central conceit of roleplaying games, 'You are your character'), mixed them in with his own fantasy-gaming preoccupations, and produced Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop game that was much closer to individual-scale wargaming than 'storytelling with dice.' Indeed, original D&D was more a Chainmail expansion than a full-blown game in its own right; while the three 'little brown books' presented an alternative combat/measurement system, D&D players were expected to own Chainmail, and to be familiar with the conventions of miniatures wargaming. The game's setting was straight-up midcentury pulp fantasy, with no small amount of Tolkien (and a few spoonfuls of Lovecraft) thrown in to sweeten its heavy Leiber/Howard men-of-mixed-morals flavour.

Other games followed, from Tunnels & Trolls (a D&D knockoff with simpler rules) to Arduin (an unofficial D&D expansion/knockoff with grungy production values and a few very clever rules tweaks, like 'critical hits') to Bunnies & Burrows (probably the most unique product design of the hobby's infancy). Mechanically, none of the games approached the elegance of later story-centric RPGs, but their limitations actually encouraged a DIY culture of homebrews, retrofits, handwritten houserules, and idiosyncratic interpretations (often geographically based around regional gaming communities). The RPG community then was more or less adjunct to the wargaming hobby, though it slowly developed an identity of its own. Gygax remained active and authoritative in the community, and in an effort to assert something like the 'canonical fantasy roleplaying game' (indeed the canonical D&D rules(!), given the multiplying houserules, interpretations, and variants) he released the obsessively elaborated Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as three core hardcover books between 1977 and 1979.

(This is the sanitized version of the history; I'm cutting all the personal politics and character assassination and corporate/interpersonal maneuvering, not to mention avoiding discussion of Gygax's personality and readily apparent social/psychological predilections, which are very important to the recent history of American fantasy but are a little too knotty for this post. Or at least this paragraph.)

AD&D

AD&D 1e represents Gygax's attempt to perfect fantasy roleplaying, and his (in)famous First Edition Dungeon Masters Guide is in some ways his canonical statement as a game designer. AD&D differs from OD&D in a couple of key respects - not least the astonishing number of world-data and combat-engine tables, system patches, baroque subsystems, and formerly-optional-now-official rules specifications that ballooned the ruleset from OD&D's 116 half-sized pages to four times that many large-format AD&D pages - full of cramped small print, to boot. The key shift in D&D design philosophy in the late 70's was arguably just hubris: Gygax's project went from a modest effort to adapt fantasy minis wargaming to a new style of play, to an attempt to 'authentically' recreate his beloved pulp-fantasy worlds. Gygax insisted that medieval-society simulation was not an AD&D design aim, but it seems he was being disingenuous: AD&D is obviously an attempt at simulationism, but the subject of Gygax's simulation was fictional rather than historical. The interpretive, improvisatory play of OD&D mutated into a much, much rules-heavier game in less than five years; for better or worse, later editions of D&D continued the AD&D line rather than the deliberately run-and-gun original D&D play style.

Back to Basics

Gygax's company, TSR, produced a clean, streamlined version of D&D - the 'Basic Rules,' edited by Dr. John 'The other John Holmes' Holmes - as an introductory product. It covered only low-level play, which in those days was still assumed to cover many many months of gaming. The Basic Set in three major editions (Holmes, Moldvay/Cook, and Mentzer), along with its expansion/companion products the Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals rules, developed in parallel with AD&D's First Edition; Aaron Allston's 1991 Rules Cyclopedia presents a single-volume comprehensive version of D&D, the endpoint in its design evolution and the most complete (and expansive) single D&D product.

AD&D 2e

Meanwhile, Gygax focused on AD&D, and was preparing a second edition when he left the company (for above-mentioned political/personal reasons, it seems). TSR put out AD&D 2e in 1989 without Gygax's direct input, and without his name on the cover - [editorial] putting the game's original designer in the position he'd put Dave Arneson in with the release of AD&D 1e.[/editorial] The second edition refined some rules and added a few new subsystems, particularly proficiencies (non-combat/-dungeon skills), but it was in most regards a fine-tuning of AD&D with much of Gygax's perversely-charming aesthetic flavour and personality gone (in the interest of playability, consistency, customizability, etc.). Crucially, the 2e era saw the release of more than a dozen campaign worlds by TSR, from the gothic horror of Ravenloft to the space-fantasy universe Spelljammer to the much-loved multiverse setting Planescape. This profligacy was accompanied by increased focus on fiction publishing at TSR :while earlier products (e.g. Dragonlance) had seen simultaneous adventure-module and fiction development, the AD&D 2e gaming products drew heavily on the company's plotted fiction rather than vice versa. This business development reflected a growing emphasis on structured narratives in fantasy roleplaying, a play style to which D&D, with its wargaming roots and heavy combat emphasis, was not terribly well-suited - the 2e non-combat elaborations notwithstanding.

TSR was purchased by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. WotC was the publisher of the massively successful Magic: The Gathering card game - selling a billion cards in the first two years of production - and showed a willingness to rethink the purpose and simulation/narrative/game balance of AD&D. Advances in game design, and shrewdness about the nature of the tabletop-gaming audience, made for a stark change from TSR's unself-consciously nerdy presentation and corporate culture. Indeed, you might say 3e was the first edition of D&D that tried to be 'butch.' Any such attempt is doomed to failure, of course, given the adolescent-escapist nature of pulp-fantasy gaming, but WotC knew that the shot of testosterone would appeal to its post-Magic target markets.

D&D 3e

Opinions on WotC's 2000 release of D&D Third Edition vary, often revolving around its primary innovation: the introduction of a universal task-resolution mechanic. Whereas previous 'Did it work?' rolls might be resolved with odd combinations of polyhedral dice, D&D 3e (which is, remember, essentially AD&D 3e) simplified the game's central mechanic. 'Did it work?' was resolved in 3e by rolling a 20-sided die, adding a proficiency modifier (+2 to an attack with a magic sword, say, or +5 for a highly-proficient action), and comparing the result to a fixed difficulty level or opposing score. If the action succeeded, its degree of success would then be determined by another dice roll - the loss of d6+2 'hit points' from a broadsword, 2d8+6 in damage from a tentacle lash, etc. In a marketing masterstroke, the basic game engine - called the 'D20 System' - was made available to third-party publishers, which could make D20-compatible products under WotC's 'Open Game License.' The hobby flourished for a couple of years prior to the various Bush-era economic catastrophes, and saw renewed commercial interest and media coverage at D&D's 30th anniversary in 2004.

[Upon further reflection: The OGL is obviously the biggest deal about 3e - a big deal for the industry, but also an opportunity for a huge number of new writers, designers, and artists to try their hands at games-making. This article is about D&D as a game engine, but any serious consideration of modern fantasy gaming should have more to do with the OGL, Blizzard Online, and Magic: The Gathering than with D&D as such. Oh well.]

3e's combat system all but required miniatures (or tokens) and a 1-inch grid - and these rigid play-setting requirements freed the designers to produce a complicated combat game that was enjoyable in itself (though overdesigned with too many special cases, in my mind). Yet the system clearly aimed to be an all-to-all fantasy simulation of some kind, still reflecting the hobby's wargaming roots in well-intentioned but misguided attempts at 'realism.' The 3e rules were the endpoint of AD&D's evolution - a complex, highly customizable variant of the 1979 game's strict pseudo-simulationist design. It was the heaviest D&D ruleset yet, and bore little resemblance in style or (seemingly) design philosophy to Gygax's original works.

D&D 4e

With the rapid proliferation and bubble-burst of third-party D20 products, and facing stiff competition for young males' attention from the unbelievably popular World of Warcraft - which has seen far more play, by far more players, than every edition of D&D put together - WotC (now a subsidiary of Hasbro) struck out in a new direction. Building on the elaborate gameboard-based combat system and increased emphasis on numerical optimization that dominated D&D 3e play, but consciously rejecting the top-heavy skills system and fine-grained character customization that 3e had inherited from AD&D 2e, the designers of D&D 4th edition (2008) moved the D&D franchise in a new direction that puzzled some gamers and thrilled others - and crucially built a new young audience. 4e hearkens back to the dungeon-exploration flavour of OD&D and jettisons the overwrought non-combat skill system of 2e/3e. The main design decision is this: play centers on a streamlined, balanced, numerically consistent revision of the 3e combat system, which is like a complex chess variant with menu-driven 'powers' per token and a flexible task-resolution mechanism (still utilizing the unified 'd20 plus modifier vs DC' mechanic). The basic element of 4e is the 'encounter' - generally a combat setpiece with strict rules governing position, movement, and physical interactions; the system's emphasis is on maneuverability and (in a design decision obviously drawn from online 'roleplaying' games) party synergy - indeed 4e's bestiary and difficulty ratings are designed for well-balanced adventure parties.

In other words, 4e is the first D&D engine that makes no attempt to simulate anything - it's its own game, like Tetris, and in purely mechanical terms has about as much in common with Magic: The Gathering as it does with AD&D 1e. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, importing outside game materials to the modular, expandable 4e ruleset is trivial, and Dungeon Master customizations are unprecedentedly quick. In particular it's the first version of the game in which DMs can be confident at every stage of design and customization that their personal materials won't break balance or playability - it is, in other words, a well-written API for developers (DMs and publishers). And while 4e combat can be sluggish, it constantly provides interesting choices for players - the basic metric of game-design quality. It's the most refined D&D combat system so far.

On the other hand, it's just (largely) combat! D&D remains a juvenile escapist fantasy game, without even the old editions' gritty pulp veneer and raggedy nerds-in-the-basement aesthetic to leaven the rock'n'roll-fantasy hijinks. And the family resemblance between editions has faded with time, and while it's easy to run an OD&D adventure in 4e, the game's heavy math vibe, its post-World of Warcraft cultural emphasis on numerical optimization and stock 'character builds,' can lend 4e play a rote or button-mashing quality at times. OD&D wasn't built for anything in particular, so you could do an awful lot with it (as long as you didn't demand, say, narrative complexity or originality or cultural richness, etc.). 4e is built to do one thing, more or less, and does it well - and while you can do all the 'old school' things with it, the system's elegance does dissipate the more you tinker with its underlying math. It doesn't like to be houseruled - and since many gamers will insist on the importance of their houserules, they'll end up with versions of 4e that are much more rickety than the Rules As Written. OD&D and AD&D were made to be houseruled and homebrewed - which is, you might charitably say, a collection of glaring design weaknesses turned to ostensible cultural strengths.

The arc

The way I see it, the evolution of D&D has followed a bit of an up-and-back trajectory: from the quick'n'dirty duct-taped assemblage of OD&D to the distended, monolithic AD&D lineage, reaching the end of the line with D&D 3e. A game that was once about 'being good at pulp-fantasy fun-having' turned into a game about 'being good at playing D&D' - it started to become its own category, its own experiential end, but 3e never achieved independence from its structural forebears. And so you get the evolutionary hard-left: 4e's return to comparatively rules-light design, stripped of simulationist/encyclopedic pretense, catering to a hobby that's now part of a tabletop/online/computer/console gaming continuum rather than a nerdy niche of its own. I say 'rules-light' while acknowledging that 4e features the most complex (not complicated) combat system of any D&D edition, its designers attempting to split the difference between enormously complicated online games and the narrativist advances of less mainstream RPGs (from adolescent storytelling engines like Vampire: The Masquerade to the rich culture of indie RPGs, with their evocative mechanics and (general) total lack of combat emphasis).

For my money, 4e is less a sequel to 3e or AD&D than a bold solution to the problem the 3e design team identified but couldn't solve: What the hell is the point of a new D&D game? The 3e team waffled and gave a game that was even more 'Advanced' than AD&D, but with a modern, consistent, rules-heavy game-mechanic philosophy replacing Gygax's Asperger's-tinged amateur-encyclopedist (and, let's face it, glorious and infectiously joyous) excesses. The new edition chucked the brand's formal expectations and found its purpose in an older question: What was the point of the original game? Like it or not, 4e offers the first truly original product to bear the D&D name in 30 years.

The next, bigger question is: how has American fantasy changed around these games, in parallel with them, often heavily influenced by them?

And since it's late and I've been writing since 5:30 this morning, if you don't mind I'll try to answer that some other time. See you.

Food.

2009-07-13T13:49:58-04:00

Of course I find food obsessives ridiculous. Never moreso than when they're borrowing affective postures from their literary betters:

So, clearly, decent food can be had at more than reasonable prices [at the Cheesecake Factory], but it takes some careful choosing on a menu with more than 200 offerings. The biggest drawback is the mall-like atmosphere, a sense of faux everything that is perhaps inevitable in any large chain. The fact that any of the 146 CFs around the country can put out this astonishing variety of food is an impressive work of corporate organization and efficiency. But I left feeling sad, and not sure why. I think, on reflection it was because of the sense that what we'd just experienced was simply a company responding to the demands of America, and the demands of America were helping us to take our food one step backward rather than one step forward, and I don't think we have time for backward steps.

Well, no, but if you're worrying about how no one makes 'slow food' anymore and don't give a shit that doctors are all about hair-trigger optional C-sections - or you were as interested in the importance of Twitter during the recent Iranian uprising as you were in a democratic goddamn uprising in a nearly-nuclear theocracy run by imbeciles and lunatics - then your worry about 'backward steps' comes off as a little goddamn precious. Does 'faux everything' make our world worse? Yes it does. Is the availability of cheap tasty food at the shopping mall really the worst possible case? Nope. Does your Overwhelming Sadness at the availability of an unbelievable variety of (mass-produced freeze-dried sensually-denuded) cheap food in the suburbs seem like a gross luxury, given that the suburbs themselves are so complexly mind-warping that the Cheesecake Factory doesn't even crack the list of the Top 50 Things Worthy of Scrutiny About This Fucked Living Arrangement? Yes it does.

And you know what? The Cheesecake Factory sucks, just like lamely recreating the first scene from the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to promote your basic-cable TV guest appearance sucks. Just like Hollywood sucks generally, and massive income inequality sucks, and mosquitoes and designer clothes suck, and the bourgeois food-tourism that passes for 'adventure' TV sucks. Plus it sucks extra that David Foster Wallace is dead, John Coltrane is dead, Robert Altman is dead, and we have to go on pretending that weeping into your tastefully-arrayed miniscule portion of honey-glazed whatever counts as having an existential crisis.

Keep writing, Mr Ruhlman. You take it seriously and ask new things of yourself and I admire that (a great deal) (but only that).

Keep preening, foodies everywhere.

The fallout is bad but it's bomb I'm afraid of.

This is how you review the written word!!

2009-07-10T22:02:13-04:00

Dig it.

My life just got much worse in a hurry.

2009-07-10T17:16:38-04:00

I just spent eight minutes reading the blog of a gossip-blogger with the stage name 'Perez Hilton.'

Everyone who supports this imbecile: go fuck yourself, hard, now.

Music Markup.

2009-07-10T15:57:51-04:00

[This turned out to be something, but it's still just about Phish, so if you're at all skeptical about this sort of thing, skip to the bottom paragraph and be done with it. Seriously! You have been warned.]

For many Phish fans, the segue is the true measure of a set's fluidity and complexity. In Phish-fan parlance there are two kinds of segues - the bracket and the arrow. Take this setlist, from 4/5/98 in Providence:

Oh Kee Pa > YEM, Theme > McGrupp, Gin → Cities > Sparkle, Melt

The crucial element in there is the Gin → Cities marking, which denotes an improvisatory bridge between the songs, a passage that's neither the clattering midtempo rock of 'Bathtub Gin' nor the thumb-on-the-turntable sludge-funk of Phish's Talking Heads cover. Not only does the music not stop, it changes form to get from one tune to the other. If the tunes aren't in the same key, the band might start the second song wherever they already are, tonally, and drop into the right key after a few seconds or minutes - or the may walk the circle-of-fourths for a while before alighting on a suggestive key, which might prompt a new musical direction. The point is, when you see an arrow on a setlist, it means something is going on, risks are being taken, truly new music is coalescing in the gutters between tunes. The word 'composition' is being stretched and joyously repurposed onstage. For Phish fans (as for Deadheads) there's nothing better than a clean-but-crazy segue, one that in retrospect makes perfect sense but could never have been predicted at the outset of a jam. For many fans, those are the holy moments.

The bracket segues, on the other hand, can denote anything from the stop/start of OKP > YEM to the band fading out 'Theme' while Anastasio tosses out the opening licks of 'McGrupp.' Old Phish setlists tended to be heavy on the brackets and light on arrows - though once in a while you'd stumble across some absurdity like this, from 2/20/93 in Hotlanta:

Wilson > Reba, Tweezer → Walk Away → Tweezer > Glide > Mike's → My Mind → Mike's > Hydrogen → Kung → Hydrogen > Weekapaug → Have Mercy → Weekapaug → Rock and Roll All Nite Jam → Weekapaug, Fast Enough for You > Big Ball Jam > HYHU > Terrapin > HYHU → Harry Hood, Tweezer Reprise

Yes, the show is as ridiculous as its setlist. (And a fine copy is available in the Live in Atlanta box set.) The Glide > Mike's Song suite feels like a single performance; the frenzied quote-heavy performance of 'Glide' carries over as Anastasio starts whipping up the 'Mike's Song' guitar line, and when the band slingshots into the tune it's like the resolution of the previous song's tension. The spirit is improvisatory though the setlist was at least partly written in advance, and if the set wasn't full of onstage composition, it did feature wild onstage rearrangement - songs popping up within other songs, lengthy quotes piling atop one another, an anarchic party-hearty spirit that might've seemed strange from a bunch of 20something nerds. 'My Mind's Got a Mind of Its Own' evolves organically out of a cooled-out 'Mike's' jam; 'Kung' starts up where 'I Am Hydrogen' should be; 'Have Mercy' slips into a 'Weekapaug' longueur before a brief KISS tribute, and the whole scene feels like a single suite. Segues got more meaningful later on in the band's career, as average song length stretched far beyond the old standards:

Halley's Comet → Tweezer → Black-Eyed Katy > Piper, Antelope

That's 11/22/97 II, one of the canonical Phish sets from the band's greatest tour by far, Fall 1997. In this case the setlist hides more information than it reveals: 'Halley's Comet' skips right past the usual outro chords and into a greasy funk groove that mutates, after fifteen minutes or so, into a terrifyingly intense 'space jam' - roaring noise and feedback, celestial synth textures, and a pounding lost-in-a-cave beat from Fishman on drums. The whole thing lasts 25 minutes, and if it's the most interesting and uplifting jam of the set, its appeal is matched (in other ways) by the devastatingly sexy Tweezer → BEK middle portion. The set wanders all over the goddamn map musically, and there's nothing in 'Halley's' or 'Tweezer' that would explain what transpired between the two songs.

In the future we'll make improv-rock setlists as we now make 'tag clouds' on blogs - the heaviest tracks will simply be noted in a bigger font, and big breakaway jams will get their own 'Jam' notation in 48pt blinking Comic Sans, and the world will be light. Or shit - by then I suppose the world will be shit. I wonder whether they'll look back and say this post sped up the process of beshittening, or stemmed the tide for a moment - or perhaps they'll say nothing at all, as I've just done.

Well. To sum up: Improv-rock fans use straightforward markup for their setlists, which in combination with fan expectations and collective knowledge enables complex evaluation and info-exchange - despite the data's lossy compression scheme. This notation is unique to improvisatory rock; most jazz fans rarely need to note segues in this way. What's important to me isn't important to you, probably, though the fact that it's important (to me) might be an entryway by which you access the hidden heart of Just Another Human Being. And so how will I find my way into yours?

Easy pieces.

2009-07-07T09:23:15-04:00

Wally

the day.

2009-07-06T17:28:28-04:00

that day i will tend to things.
you will not take the sheet rolling over in bed.
that day i will skip breakfast i think.
i will walk only away.
that day i will eat an unhealthy dinner.
i will try to read a book and fail.
i will lose my place.
that day i will hate sunshine.
i will not want to be touched.
i will watch children sit.
you will not be singing along as you walk in from work.
that day i will be tired.
i will fear to sleep.
you will not make up funny words over dinner.
i will have my way on the issue of the television.
that day i will not know what sentences should look like.
you will not turn from the unwashed laundry rolling your eyes.
that day i will forget obvious things.
i will catch myself not breathing.
you will not again gather into a human shape
what remains of me
that day.

L,
W.