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This morning, Eileene sought my advice on an issue troubling her, involving some online bickering about whether some TV show or other deserves criticism for its dubious “science.” I’m not entirely sure exactly what specifics of bad science are in question, or which show is under discussion, or even exactly what the problem was, because Eileene wasn’t entirely coherent, but the issue might be solved by establishing what qualifies as good or bad science fiction.

You have to be careful to define your terms when arguing science fiction, because the very words “science fiction” mean radically different things to different people. (Establishing clear definitions alone might solve the dispute.) For purists, science fiction is fiction about science, including technological applications of scientific principle and explorations of what the world would be like if natural law as we understand it were different. Properly speaking, science fiction does not include several themes which often get labeled “science fiction,” including:

• Futuristic utopia/dystopias, unless the imagined society depends conceptually on scientific speculation (1984).
• Stories which employ high-tech tropes, but are not at all about scientific speculation (Star Wars). Aliens, spaceships, and death-rays do not, in themselves, qualify unless the story depends on their existence and explores these tropes as scientifically interesting. Such stories place an emphasis on gee-whizzery instead of science, and are often called “space opera,” whether or not they actually take place in space. It is possible, though tricky, to write science fiction without technology beyond the stone age, including death rays, etc. (Niven’s “Not Long Before the End”)
• Stories which use buzzwords like psychic powers, radiation, and genetics—often nicked from true science fiction—to justify its elements without actually addressing the science behind these buzzwords (any superhero comic book involving radiation-induced superpowers). Genetically heritable telepathy is not science fiction just because it sounds more futuristic than oracular visions or “the witch’s sight;” if you don’t describe the mechanism underlying this telepathy, you’re not writing science or, technically, science fiction; you are writing fantasy, sometimes called “science fantasy.”

A less doctrinally pure concept of science fiction includes these and similar departures from science-as-story.

Such definitions, of course, have their weaknesses. For one thing, they’re extremely fuzzy at the edges. What’s the difference between an author who wants to explore societies which, like the Confederacy, embrace anachronistic notions of nobility and employ inefficient modes of technology to enforce that anachronism, and a hack writer who just likes knights and dragons and wizards, so he writes a story about an alien planet where heroes, aided by psi-active advisors, pick up their laser-lances, mount their robo-horses, and ride out to slay genetically and ecologically implausible giant lizards? There is a difference, though it is one of degree.

Another problem is that true scientific validity is almost impossible. Natural laws are deeply intertwined, to a point where, if you break one scientific rule to play the game of “what if,” you almost immediately make a recognizable universe impossible. What if the gravitic constant were variable? Well, probably there wouldn’t be any chunks of matter larger than an atom. Tough to write a decent story about that, except perhaps an apocalyptic discovery of a method for making the gravitic constant vary, and what happens when some idiot genius throws the switch. Even good sci-fi writers make mistakes, sometimes dramatic ones: Jules Verne calculated the force necessary to propel a spaceship to the moon by cannon, but failed to realize the impact would turn the astronauts inside to jelly. Whoops! The life Robert L. Forward imagines on a neutron star in Dragon’s Egg almost certainly can’t exist, but he pretends it can because, without it, he has no story at all. The difference between honest mistakes made while pursuing scientific “what ifs”, mistakes made deliberately because there’s no other way to pursue a particular “what if,” and mistakes made by a writer who simply doesn’t care are significant, although they, too, are a matter of degree.

A third problem is that science fiction can be true and pure without being good, and vice versa. Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine is scientifically plausible but remains a tedious, almost constipated read, while the original Star Trek series has some entertaining episodes despite employing utter crap science.

Neither the vague boundaries of science fiction nor the fact that bad science can be fun, however, mean that anything goes in sci fi. Much of the value of science fiction lies in the exploration of science; that’s the whole point of the genre as distinct from the rest of literature. Sci fi fans like to see some hard science now and again, just for the sheer exercise of it: what if a dinosaur-killer meteor hit earth today? What if we could condition people at birth to be content in a rigid caste system? What if we could travel back in time and alter historical decision points? Even the best writer won’t get the answer exactly right, but he gets points for plausibility—or loses them for implausibility. When a writer too transparently ignores his own premise or simply proves too transparently ignorant of natural law, he commits two sins: he misses the sheer interest of exploring the ramifications of his premise wherever they lead, and he risks breaking the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. (This morning, Eileene circled around the issues of how a walking corpse, unable to give artificial respiration because it doesn’t breathe, can nonetheless speak despite the fact that speech requires breath, and how that same walking corpse, lacking tissue regeneration, avoids collapsing in a pile of goo within a few days, especially after damaging his body by engaging in fisticuffs.)

This, too, is a matter of degree: different audiences have different thresholds at which willing suspension of disbelief is broken. The more scientifically sophisticated, the more sensitive to inconsistencies and bad science. A ten-year-old might have no trouble with a walking, talking android (played by a human actor); a machinist may wonder why it employs such an inefficient design and how it got such realistic skin; a Nobel-caliber cyberneticist may suffer from knowing that its model of artificial intelligence is mathematically impossible. When Doctor Who jiggers a super-science beam to close a time-space continuity in episode 10, a casual viewer may think that’s fine, but a fan who pays more attention may be forced to wonder why the good Doctor didn’t do that back in episode 5, when it would have been so much easier than sneaking into a Dalek-controlled space station and getting a dozen humans killed in the process. For the fan, such inconsistencies spoil the verisimilitude, and make it obvious that the Doctor can always do just enough to win in the end, no more, no less, whether or not it makes the least bit of sense. When the writers will clearly cheat to reach a happy ending after precisely two harrowing setbacks and a final showdown, dramatic tension evaporates.

Despite being a matter of degree, however, inconsistencies and bad science in science fiction are always cause for complaint, although small transgressions deserve only small complaint. These twin sins hurt any sci fi narrative, by denying the audience proper dramatic tension and by undermining the most appealing aspect of sci fi, the intellectual exploration of internally consistent alternatives to the natural law and technological limitations we understand. Small scientific inconsistencies spoil some of the fun for at least a portion of the audience. Excessive scientific inconsistency renders a story worthless to everyone but small children and the ignorant. Some inconsistencies are minor quibbles; others are significant errors; some are just plain stupid.

No, don’t expect me to sort all the bad science out into those categories; sci fi fanboys are far too quarrelsome to make that effort worthwhile.

Posted by at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I hate call-in radio. The call-in radio waves are, of course, dominated by the great right-wing bloviators, but even on stations aimed at my own educated, east-coast liberal demographic, there’s no end to dumbasses. Educated, east-coast liberal dumbasses.

For no clear reason, given that she despises both the show and its host, Eileene turned Brian Lehrer on the radio this morning. I couldn’t listen very long before I stepped in and turned it off again. One listener called in to voice a complaint that Obama supporters are behind him strictly because of the color of his skin. Not just some minority of race-motivated ninnies, but all Obama supporters. I’ve seen similar accusations elsewhere that Clinton supporters are only interested in putting a woman in the White House, and that all Democrats are voting against one of the candidates out of racism or sexism.

Naturally, neither charge makes much sense; to a huge extent, those who would like to see a woman win (as opposed to seeing a black man lose) are the same liberal folks who would like to see a black man win, and vice versa, for essentially the same reasons, and with roughly equal intensity. I’m one of ‘em; I’m not voting for anyone because of their demographic pigeon hole, but I’d consider a disruption to an unbroken history of white males a small bonus. And, of course, there must be Democrats out there who don’t give a tinker’s damn about race or gender, but have to line up behind one—that’s all the choices there are, now.

For that matter, neither remaining Democratic candidate is running on demographic credentials; while they won’t turn their noses up at votes, no matter how shallowly motivated, they can’t afford to chase their own demographic visibly enough to alienate everyone else. It’s absurd to think that everyone in either camp is motivated entirely by those subtle (and occasionally less subtle) hints Clinton and Obama drop to the effect that “I’m one of you” when speaking to highly homogeneous crowds.

Still, absurdities happen in politics. Things that don’t make sense are nonetheless true in politics. I doubt the knicker-twisted caller would be much swayed in her belief by appeals to common sense. And, sadly, iron-clad proof is scarcer in politics than paupers in the Senate. Yet, on this rare occasion, we do have proof:

If Democratic voters were motivated for either candidate strictly by the candidate’s race, there would be no movement in the polls whatsoever. It was no great secret in the very earliest days of the primary season that Clinton was white and Obama black. Unsurprisingly, Clinton remains white and Obama black to this day. If race were the only determinant, no Democrat would have changed his mind. Yet—mirable dictu!—some Democrats have changed their minds since the opening of the primary season. Therefore, they are motivated by factors other than race. Q.E.D. A similar proof that Clinton supporters are motivated by more than gender is left as an exercise to the student.

I don’t suppose even iron-clad proof would move the idiot caller; working your way to blanket statements like that, and believing them with the fervor necessary to make angry calls to the radio station takes a commitment transcendent of demonstrable reality.

Posted by at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Out in the semi-arid stretches of the Midwest, that zone between the corn belt and the Rockies, there’s a stretch of unremarkable back road, the kind that used to be called a highway before Eisenhower’s interstate road system redefined the word and killed a lot of chicken-scratch towns. It’s not on any of the road maps, but you can see it on those new satellite photo websites, if you know where to look, because a big smudge like the one they’ve got over Dick Cheney’s house—really!—would just draw attention.

You can drive it, too, if you want, though I wouldn’t recommend it. Driving hour after hour wondering if you’re going to run out of gas before one of these desiccated little ghost towns proves to have a working gas station is hard on the nerves, especially since cell phone reception is pretty dicey. If you do risk it, though, drive it in the early morning, a little before dawn, and make sure one of your headlights is out. Bring a good supply of singles and small change.

Before too long, a county sheriff will pull you over and give you a hwarning about that headlight. If he’s having a bad day, he might even give you a ticket. Ask him—politely!—if there’s anywhere you can get gas and maybe some breakfast. He will direct you onto an unnamed dirt-and-gravel road. Pay attention, because there’s no sign at the intersection, and no landmarks to speak of; you’ll miss it if you blink. The sheriff will recommend a breakfast. Thank him, even if he gives you a ticket.

If the sheriff recommends the hash, get your gas and drive on. If you go to the diner, no good will come of it.

If the sheriff recommends the peach cobbler and a coffee, though, get your gas and stop in the diner. Order coffee and the cobbler. When you’re ready to go, pay for it with exact change, and leave two dollar bills under the saucer for your coffee cup as a tip. At this point, you can still leave safely: just exit by the front door, drive off and return to your life. But if you’re determined, head back through the tiny hall to the left of the counter, past the bathrooms and storage closet, and out the swinging aluminum door in back. If you’ve done everything right, no one will stop you. Stand on the back stoop, look up into the morning sky, and ask any single question, three times, right out loud.

A voice like the smell of cinnamon will whisper the true answer in your ear. A second voice, like the rasp of a cat’s tongue, will whisper in your other ear the true answer to a question you didn’t ask. You will live with both answers for the rest of your life.

Posted by at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently joined a guild—excuse me, society—in Pirates of the Burning Sea, which in turn means an end to fence-sitting on where to pitch my tent in the game’s economy.

Factory production is a matter of complete disinterest to me as far as fun value goes, but it cannot be ignored. There is simply too much money to be made in production, and even if a player doesn’t particularly want to be rich, he has to make money to keep himself supplied with shot and ship repairs, not to mention buying expensive ships in the first place. (Hopefully, a player looking to buy a ship is moving up in the market, but replacing a vessel sunk in battle is a sad possibility.) Things must remain this way: shipping supports the entire game, and if the burning seas are to have pirates, then the pirates must have something interesting to prey on—other players. The game, therefore, must employ some kind of device to make players want badly enough to haul cargo that they are willing to become potential targets. The developers chose to do this by making the economy dependent on player production; apart from the barest necessities of shot and crummy ships, both available at grossly inflated prices from ‘bots, all the equipment—ships, shot, crew rations, repairs, luxuries, and the raw materials to make them—come from player production.

So I knew I had to get into running a few factories sooner or later, preferably sooner, but kept putting off the decision because it didn’t sound like fun. (It isn’t, especially. Not to me.) My last remaining excuse was a reluctance to sink money into a factory that would prove redundant for friends in a guild. Now I’m in a guild, and I can set myself up in the colonial economy.

It’s a very small guild—I was the fifth person to join—yet by the time I joined, it had already covered its bases: shot, repairs, and ship components. It fell to me, then, to produce high-end raw materials like zinc, gold, teak, and ironwood, which are not strictly necessary, but are used to produce certain high-quality items that can give a player an edge. Unless the French manage to conquer territory from their enemies—unlikely, when we’re the smallest of four factions—our only sources of these goods is in the hotly-contested center of the map. Dangerous territory: we’re likely to lose these cities to British or Spanish conquest, and consequently be forced to pay heavy taxes on production. Even if we don’t lose these towns, they’ll often fall into zones of contested control, wherein merchants are subject to unrestrained attack, losing their cargoes to pirates or enemy nations.

Nonetheless, the assignment suits me just fine. People need more iron than gold, more oak than teak. So in accommodating my guild’s needs, I am “forced” into a low-volume, high-margin operation. As long as I’m patient, I can time my zinc and gold runs for low-risk times. And the chance that France’s enemies will snatch our vulnerable zinc, gold, teak, and ironwood sites doesn’t entirely work against me; as long as the need is there, I can pass the increased production costs onto the consumer, and the dangers put off the potential competition. The zinc market, particularly, raises my hopes: only once in several weeks of play have I seen zinc on sale in any of the more stable French ports. Nobody, but nobody, is selling zinc.

Giddy at the prospect of a monopoly, I launched my zinc enterprise yesterday by departing from the path of sound economics. Rather than laying one massive cargo in the auction house, I placed several small lots at different prices, anywhere from 600 to 750 doubloons per ton. This tactic offers several advantages: it lets me find quickly what the market can bear, it lets me fleece a few gullible customers, and next to 750db/ton, 600db/ton looks positively reasonable. It’s not; these prices are sheer robbery, 400% to 500% the cost of production. Overpricing may cause buyers to decide they can (or must) live without my zinc entirely, but it’s worth a shot. If it doesn’t work, I shall humbly retreat to offering zinc at the one price I’ve seen quoted, a mere 300 doubloons a ton—still a 100% profit margin.

There’s more ways to practice piracy in the Caribbean than by running up the Jolly Roger and seizing hapless fluyts.

Posted by at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clinton and Obama had another debate. I did not watch the entirety, but, judging by the post-debate news commentary, and by the “highlight” clips I’ve seen, not a lot happened. Clinton got booed for trying to paint Obama as a plagiarist, but apparently scored some points with her closing lines. They don’t read like much; I guess you had to be there. Nobody has much to say about Obama at all. Tactically, the debate might be considered a draw, or possibly a slim win for Clinton, since a high note at the end will be more memorable. Strategically, the debate was probably a slim victory for Obama, who has the lead and the momentum, and for whom “nothing happened” is moderately good news.

Maybe that is why Obama chose strictly to defend against the plagiarism smear rather than counterattack: he may figure he’s fine as long as the boat isn’t rocked, and counterattacking runs the risk of looking mean-spirited and otherwise unpresidential. Maybe he chose right; certainly, he knows more about politics and campaigning than I do. Nonetheless, I wish he’d taken further Clinton to task for her hypocrisy.

Obama and his speechwriters knew the opportunity would arise in the debate, and doubtless prepared his lines on the subject. If I’d been in charge, he’d have said something more like this:

[relaxed] “Yes, I borrowed a line from my friend and political confidante, at his suggestion. I took that suggestion because they are good words, and deserve to be repeated. There is nothing wrong with that; politicians often repeat words that deserve to remain in the public discourse: [fuzzy look of patriotic pride] ‘We, the people,’ ‘the better angels of our nature,’ ‘I have a dream.’ I notice Senator Clinton herself has pinched a few lines from my own campaign: ‘fired up and ready to go,’ and ‘Yes, we can.’ [grin] That’s okay, too. We might expect her to come up with her own material [raise eyebrows, slight shrug], but if she’s running out of ideas, she is welcome to borrow some of mine [indulgent smile].

[shift to aggrieved sorrow] “What bothers me is not that she steals my lines, or that she accuses me of stealing lines, but that she does both at once. She would have you believe that it’s wrong for me to quote strong political voices, but that it’s all right for her to do so. She wants the privilege of establishing a double standard, and which direction it should operate. [stern frown] In doing so, she seeks to live by the politics of another party, a party which for years has argued that taxes are for other people to pay, that torture is acceptable as long as it’s our guys doing it, that political allies are above the law, that every vote should count only after they turn out to be votes for the right person—all to the detriment of the nation.

[open, honest face] “I believe in a different standard. I believe that the rules, formal or informal, should apply equally to all people. I will repeat true words, no matter who said them, and I certainly will not try to tar my opponents for my own shortcomings.”

You can get through that in sixty seconds, including pauses for emphasis. It calls Clinton a hypocrite while calling attention only to verifiable specifics. It makes Obama look good-humored and positively generous while making it impossible for her ever to use someone else’s words on the campaign trail without attribution, which is damn near impossible; there’s only so many ways to say, “Vote for me!” It ties Clinton to the detested Bush regime, and calls the voters’ attention to the larger fight ahead, once the Democratic primaries are settled.

(Postscript: A counterattack like this would have produced fruit even before the debate ended. As an alert Josh Marshall observed, Clinton borrowed her husband’s lines without attribution right there in the debate. Like Marshall, I believe there’s nothing wrong with this in itself. There is, however, decidedly something wrong with doing so while smearing an opponent for the same thing.)

Posted by at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had my attention called this morning to egregiously bad writing, a book called Eternity of Blood. After a few mercifully short excerpts, I could never bring myself to read the original, but I am satisfied that I have learned all I really need to from this savage critique. It’s easy to pigeon-hole the writing because it reads like a laundry list of the sins of bad fanfic: over-the-top power fantasies, pornographic episodes, schizophrenically short attention span, and some crazy, mixed-up vampire revisionism that makes Anne Rice look like William Shakespeare’s more talented sister.

Surprisingly, Eileene was not the one to call it to my attention, at least not directly. (She has browbeaten me into regularly reading the site where I found the link.) I say surprisingly because she makes a habit of alerting me to book deals, either written by someone familiar or by someone who got that book deal through maintaining a web page, preferably both. Most especially, she likes to tell me about book deals for lousy writers.

She means to be encouraging: “If these losers can get a book contract, so can you.” I suppose so. Unfortunately, citing examples like this tends very strongly to be discouraging: if these losers have book contracts and I don’t (yet), it either makes me suspect that my writing is crap (and, like the author of Eternity of Blood, I’m just too incompetent to realize it) or makes me suspect that writing skill and having something to say are immaterial to the process, that it’s just a big lottery.

Or rather—ha ha—a crap shoot.

Neither is the complete and accurate truth, of course. A lot of the luck in getting published is the luck we make ourselves, through persistent and aggressive selling of ourselves and our material. I’m dreadful at both, so it’s hardly surprising that a large body of dubious work has made it to Barnes & Noble’s shelves before Fairyland—A Survivor’s Guide. I’m certain that Fairyland will find a home sooner or later, if I just keep at it. That doesn’t prevent me from peeking back at my writing in fear of finding errors sufficiently glaring to turn off any editor, but when I peek, the book is basically solid. Or so I tell myself in the despair that comes in the wee hours of the morning. If I keep at it, I’ll make it.

But please, please, God, let Eternity of Blood be self-published. If an actual, paying editor decided this was a great way to sell print, I may have no choice but to hurl myself onto the railroad tracks.

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past Sunday’s NYT contained an editorial that got under my skin. Donald Ray Pollack’s central topic was one of first-time voters, galvanized by two presidential terms’ worth of spectacularly bad government. Pollack presents his tattoo artist, Doodle, as his sole example:

“‘I’ve never voted,’ he says in a soft, almost apologetic voice. He shifts a little on the stool. ‘It never seemed to matter much before which one of them was in there, but lately things have got so bad that I think I should give it a shot.’”

What got to me was not Doodle’s preferred choice (Obama), nor the reasons for his choice, but his main reservation: “The bad thing is, a lot of people figure some nut job will assassinate him if he gets elected.” Pollack writes that one of his students fears the same, and cannot bring herself to vote for Obama out of fear for his life. Pollack’s encounters are not unique; I’ve seen people on three politically-minded online forums that I follow convinced that Obama, if nominated, will be assassinated.

I’ve had it with this “Obama assassination” meme. Sure, it’s conceivable—almost certain, in fact—that someone, probably several someones, will get it in their tiny, little, racist brains to resort to a gun to keep the White House nigger-free. Maybe some of them will work up the nerve to try. It’s possible one will succeed. Conventional wisdom among security agencies is that it isn’t that hard to kill a president, or a presidential candidate, not if the assassin is willing to die in the process. Of the forty men who have held the office, four died from assassins’ bullets, a ten percent rate. Others, including FDR and Reagan, have had narrow escapes. We lost a major presidential candidate, too.

But that hardly means we should go through life expecting our candidates to die, and allowing that expectation to sway our vote. If ten percent of our presidents were killed, that leaves a full ninety percent who were not. Allowing actual, real-live armed nutjobs to dictate our political future is unthinkable; allowing the fear of merely potential, perhaps entirely imaginary, gunmen to do so is flatly ridiculous.

I think that what I’m seeing is less a considered worry over a real danger than a measure of how whipped Democrats have allowed themselves to become. Kennedy was not an especially good president, but he has become mythologized in Democratic eyes, largely because his death began a long period of almost unbroken failures for the Democratic party: a string of lost elections broken only by Clinton, who won by compromising the party’s principles, and Carter, vilified for national problems he neither created nor swept under the carpet, as Ronnie and every Republican since has done. Democrats haven’t had a candidate they felt proud of since Kennedy, and have become so used to seeing their hopes dashed that they’ve started dashing their own hopes before politics and circumstance do it for them. If the Republicans mount a smear campaign, Democrats sigh and presume the public will fall for it. If the political climate looks favorable for the Democrats, they hunt around until they find someone capable of losing: Dukakis, Kerry, and even now they’re still considering Hillary Clinton. If they find a candidate that looks liable to sweep the election, they began imagining scenarios by which we can all still lose. We’ve been down so long that we’ve just stopped trying.

I am tired of this defeatism. How could we have lost so much, so thoroughly, so long? By deciding ahead of time that we’re going to lose. By settling for making a lukewarm statement instead of fighting for the right. By conceding the political dialogue to the hateful and selfish. By being too much in love with being the victims of Kennedy’s death, much in the way the South is too much in love with being victims of the Confederacy’s loss, or minorities are too much in love with the idea of being victims of The Man. Playing the victim is easy, and comforting in its way, but it won’t fix the problems we face, any more than it stopped the sons-of-bitches from creating those problems.

Stop finding excuses. Shut up, just shut up about a bullet with Obama’s name on it. Worry about that bullet if and when it comes. Right now, vote to win, and keep voting to win in the future.

Posted by at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve mentioned PS238 before; it’s a black-and-white comic book about a secret school designed to educate super-powered children, buried beneath an ordinary-looking grade school in an ordinary town. The kids have to come to terms with their powers right alongside the tribulations of childhood. Unlike the angst-ridden tales of superheroic adolescence Marvel is so fond of, the PS238 kids do so in a fairly friendly and forgiving environment, with plenty of adult supervision. It’s much more fun. Like Aaron Williams’s earlier Nodwick, the comic relies heavily on sardonic humor, specifically directed at the kind of unthinking enthusiasm required to live by the tropes of adventure fiction. I’m deeply into sardonic humor, so the comic is right up my alley. I particularly love the character of Zodon, self-described future master of the world, who mocks the pre-adolescent heroes for their heroic naivete while living with his own, very similar, villainous blinders. You know: the habits of mind that lead Bond villains to employ over-elaborate death traps, or that cause Doctor Doom to announce that nothing can stop his evil machinations just before the Fantastic Four stop him.

I bring this all up because Hero Games is creating a PS238 roleplaying game, and I’m dying to read it. I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for Hero Games ever since playing Champions in my college days. Champions is an early superhero-themed RPG, and the only one I’ve seen to date that I would trust to depict that genre in an RPG milieu.

The heart of the system is the brilliant separation of every superpower’s outward appearance, which the game calls its “special effect,” from its game effect. Where other superhero RPGs might allow you to select a power for shooting laser beams out of your eyes, or another to hurl lightning bolts from your fingers, or another to fire jets of flame from attachments on your power suit, Champions just has you purchase an “Energy Blast,” paying character points according to how much damage it does. If you want your jets of fire to behave differently from your superheroic buddy’s laser beam eyes, you decide how it behaves differently not by how it looks, but by how it performs differently as a game mechanic. Those jets of fire might be able to hit a small cluster of targets at once, or maybe they can only be used six times before the incendiary juice runs out, and they definitely won’t work if you aren’t wearing the power suit. All of these differences, and others, can be represented as power modifiers: “area effect,” “charges,” and “obvious, inaccessible focus.” Applying useful modifiers raises the cost of the power in character points, while inconvenient modifiers lower the cost. It’s an elegant way to represent just about any superpower you care to name without resorting to 500-page list of specific powers, and it avoids the inevitable questions of what to do if the power you want isn’t on the list, and what to do when your idea of how a lightning bolt works is different from the rules’ idea of how a lightning bolt works. It’s also the reason I’d only trust Champions with a superhero campaign.

That’s not to say that Champions itself was elegant. Oh, no. The turn sequencing, the attributes, the six or eight different ways to apply damage—all of that got plenty messy. That simplified list of basic superpowers still took up a whole page, and the rules describing those powers a lengthy chapter. The way the powers were priced made it possible, with painstaking attention, to combine powers in ways that created unstoppable superbeings who could wipe out their peers designed in a more straightforward fashion. It was a minimaxer’s wet dream, and a glorious tactical exercise, but not an elegant system. But since my Champions-playing friends were also MIT students, complexity wasn’t a problem, and we had loads of fun with it.

After I got out of college, Hero Games came out with a radical revision of the whole system. Not just one of those periodic, spurious “expansion and simplification” facelifts that Dungeons & Dragons gets, but a complete change of scale and mechanics that rendered characters in one edition unrecognizable in another. For various reasons, I never got the new edition, and thought it had gone out of print, retired to collectors’ bookshelves. The PS238 announcement proved me wrong, and, knowing I’ll buy the game, I can’t help but wonder how well the radically new rules work.

See, not only does PS238 strike me as a great place to run an RPG campaign, but I’ve had a hankering for returning to the superheroic glory days of college, because, for reasons only partially clear to me, our current GM has selected the d20 version of Mutants & Masterminds for his space opera campaign. He chose a superheroic system as a way to handle futuristic, technology-endowed abilities like genetically-modified supersenses, direct mind-to-computer links, and aliens with the ability to fly. Just because such things are possible doesn’t mean they’re the focus of the campaign, nor should they be. But looking over the rulebook, seeing what could be done, makes me daydream about superheroes for our next project. And, because I would never subject my math-challenged friends to the number-crunching intensity of the Champions I cut my teeth on, I find myself hoping that the newer edition will satisfy, matching passable simplicity to its original flexibility. Fingers are crossed.

Sadly, even if the current edition of Champions is everything I could ask for, we won’t be using PS238 for a setting. Our previous campaign before heading into space was my own “Prairie Mage” campaign, using a house-modified Mage system. The PCs were all adolescents in an unremarkable town somewhere in Nebraska. They had to come to terms with their newfound magical powers right alongside the tribulations of high school. Unlike the angst-ridden tone of the typical Mage game, the PCs operated in a fairly forgiving social environment, with not-too-stifling parental supervision. As a GM, I relied heavily on sardonic humor to highlight the PCs’ plight. Trying to put the same players through PS238 would be too much like a television spinoff, or, worse, a clone run by a competing network, the kind of program that spoils the fun by too obviously milking the original’s success.

Posted by at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My tabletop RPG group is currently involved in a space opera campaign. This doesn’t always work so well, because, despite being generally geeky—we play Dungeons & Dragons, after all—we as a group aren’t deeply familiar with sci-fi tropes.

I didn’t recognize the disjoint immediately. At first, I just thought I was having a good day, being generally on the ball when I understood before anyone else the nature of the alien generation ship we had stumbled upon. In a later episode, when another player got an expression of dawning understanding and announced that we were dealing with an android, I found myself thinking, “Uh, yeah. Get with the program; we already knew that.” (I was wrong; actually, I already knew that.) Only when Dave (the GM) referred to the Marsport news service as the Martian Chronicle, and I was the only one to emit an appreciative groan, did the penny drop: my gaming friends don’t read science fiction.

In retrospect, this should have been more obvious. Mulling over what I knew of my fellow players’ sci-fi exposure, the list was pretty short. Three of us know sci-fi only through the movies, not through original, more numerous, and generally more science-y books. One of us is intimately familiar with that subset of sci-fi that involves zombies and giant, man-eating beasties, and ignorant otherwise. One of us knows nothing but Star Wars, and kept saying over and over as we discussed the campaign set-up, “As long as it’s like Star Wars, I’m happy,” clutching that sentence like a mantra that would protect her from vector arithmetic, genetic engineering, and whatever heresies Star Trek, which she never watched, might commit against George Lucas’s holy writ.

That’s rough on Dave (our current GM), who has to present the plot elements in a way the group is prepared to deal with. It’s also rough on me; I am familiar with a fair chunk of science fiction, and especially hard science fiction, the kind that looks to science for inspiration rather than for flimsy excuses, the kind that pays as much attention to tidal forces and radioactive half-lives as to death rays and mutant powers.

Dave is taking it with better grace than I (Big surprise, yeah?), although I’m keeping the frustration to myself. Maybe this is because it allows him to cadge from old stories; that’s a lot less work than coming up with something original, and a good GM is grateful for an opportunity to cut corners without spoiling the fun. More likely, it’s because he’s a decent human being, and I’m not, but regardless, it highlights a pitfall of RPGs:

Make sure your players are familiar with the source material, or, if they aren’t, be prepared to simplify things to their level.

I had a bad experience with the same group when I tried to run a film noir game stolen from the classic LucasArts graphic adventure Grim Fandango. I knew my players weren’t that familiar with film noir—heck, I’m not all that familiar with it—but they were willing to watch a few classics, like The Maltese Falcon, to get up to speed. Eager to get the campaign up and running, we made the mistake of starting the game before this essential homework. Too late, we discovered two problems. First, my players all thought they knew more than they did, on the basis of a couple comedy sketches, and designed their characters in ignorance. The characters’ motivations, therefore, broke down in play. Second, it turns out that none of my players liked film noir. Even now, this boggles my mind. You may not like the people film noir depicts; they are a rather dirty lot, protagonists included. But how can you not recognize the essential coolness of the genre? When, all too late, this became clear, I tried going back to more introductory, mood-setting episodes, but the damage was done; we’d blundered too far down too many wrong paths to recover. Hard-edged, cynical people aware of their sins didn’t match my players’ escapist fantasies, and we cancelled the campaign before the halfway point. The only thing you could call complete was the disaster.

Dave’s getting by because he’s leaning on the Firefly television series, which all of us but the Star Wars fan have watched at least a few episodes. I keep hoping for Nivenesque studies in orbital physics and social Darwinism, but I’m resigned to the fact that they are unlikely to materialize. When he’s dealing with players who can hear “The Martian Chronicle,” and know there’s a joke there only because Mike is groaning, a GM can’t afford to take anything for granted.

Posted by at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m stealing this entry from Eileene. It was her idea; I’m merely elaborating on it, possibly saying what she was groping towards saying when she sought my input this morning.

A common entry on atheists’ complaint lists about theists behaving badly is the smug little assertion that “There are no atheists in foxholes,” simply put forth as an axiomatic truth. It is, in fact, entirely untrue: plenty of atheists undergo the terrors of enemy fire without a sudden conversion.

Even if it were true, that little piece of theological fiction is irrelevant to questions of whether God exists. Superstition of all kinds finds fertile ground in people who find themselves in dangerous or unpleasant circumstances beyond their control: sports fans who insist on “lucky” rituals, the poverty-stricken who buy lottery tickets, the terminally ill who fall prey to quack medicine, and desperate people of all kinds who turn to prayer. It is hardly surprising that soldiers in the terrible, pants-wetting fear that live combat generates might find comfort in the notion that everything will be all right in the end, no matter how bad things seem as the bullets whiz past. That isn’t evidence of the existence of God; it merely demonstrates human willingness to believe what we would prefer to be true, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Atheists who experience foxhole conversions are literally crazed with fear; they hardly make sterling authorities on theological subjects.

But set aside whether the argument has any forensic value. Quite apart from its strength as an argument, the foxhole argument is deeply insulting, which is why it appears so often on “Why Jesus Freaks Piss Me Off” lists. The claim is insulting because it implies that atheists’ commitment to their beliefs is shallow, easily broken in a time of stress, in presumed contrast to a Christian (or other religious) commitment to God.

This morning, Eileene raised the question as to whether theists ever experience a comparable conversion in times of agonizing fear, and, of course, they do. Theists’ faith is frequently shaken by personal disaster. Struck by terrible and undeserved loss, the faithful ask, “How could a kind and omnipotent God allow this to happen to me?” Jesus himself, according to biblical reports, doubted when his execution became too agonizing: “Lord, Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) He caught himself immediately, of course, according to the same account, willing himself back onto the straight and narrow, but even the supposed messiah did doubt, however briefly, when his mortal peril became undeniable. If the Son of God finds his beliefs shaken in the shadow of death, how could atheists be held to standards of unshakeable belief?

I’d never considered this point directly alongside the snotty foxhole allegation, but now that I have, I am intensely curious as to how the numbers stack up, and I’d bet a lot more people lose their faith than gain it in various metaphorical foxholes. It’s easy to believe that human suffering serves some unspecified “greater plan” when it happens to poor brown people on another continent, or when it happens to sinful people you don’t like very much, but when floods, cancer, and infant death strike home, when they suddenly become real instead of theological abstractions, the disjoint between a loving God and human suffering comes into sharp focus. Most believers find their faith strengthened by such trials, but many very sensibly come to realize that either God is not the omnipotent master of all creation, or that He needlessly chooses to let humanity suffer. A mother mad with grief over a dead infant is far stronger evidence against an infinitely just God than a soldier mad with terror under enemy fire is evidence for one.

That faith is broken as well as forged by intense personal stress is a powerful blow to the sanctimonious little claim that, when the chips are down, we all believe in God, and that, somehow, that means He’s out there. If we could distill that notion down to an equally memorable sound bite, we might finally hear the end of atheists and foxholes.

Posted by at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s old news by now that Michigan and Florida voters are not, currently, being counted towards the Democratic presidential primaries, although the superdelegates from those states are. The exclusion stems from decisions by Florida and Michigan, who decided to advance their primaries in the calendar.

Such a move holds a tempting appeal: early primaries exert a disproportional influence on the elections. An early lead is an important advantage among the candidates, attracting free advertising in the form of news coverage and scoring voters in later primaries, who often get behind the front runner as a gesture of solidarity, or in the belief that the front-runner has more support, and therefore is more electable in the general election. Candidates, eager to take an early lead, must cater to states holding early primaries, making early promises to win these states; Iowa and New Hampshire get a lot of attention for this very reason, and have a powerful ability to set the national agenda. Michigan and Florida, coveting this power, tried to take it for themselves, leapfrogging other states with unilateral decisions to hold early primaries.

Unfortunately for Michigan and Florida, the national Democratic party had some rules in place against just such a move, and for very good reasons.

First, gaining influence over the national elections through early primaries can only come at the expense of the current early states. Michigan and Florida weren’t aiming to have an early say too; they sought to have the early say instead of Iowa and New Hampshire. From the national perspective, Michigan and Florida deserve no particular status.