Just Passing on a Little Congratulations...

Now... tell me that movie isn't gonna be awesome.

I Like D&D But Sometimes Real Life Gets in the Way

With all the triathlon talk around here lately, I’ve been wanting to do a post on straight Dungeons and Dragons for at least two full weeks.  I mean, I like triathlon and all—I love it, really—but this blog was conceptualized as a blog specifically about storytelling for folks running online role-playing games.  And yeah, I’m not dogmatic enough to feel like I need to keep the blog on-topic or anything, but at the same time, it’s been months since we’ve done anything even remotely related to D&D, and that seems like a shame.  So that’s what I’d like to do today. 

But first…

Sally and I picked up a copy of the latest Competitor Magazine a couple of weeks ago at the Milford Y-Tri.  Competitor is a free, presumably ad-supported magazine that I’ve seen in a lot of the local bike and tri shops around NYC and Connecticut, and I wasn’t hugely surprised when we found copies in our goodie bags after the race.  So having finally finished The Way of Kings—which I liked a lot, if you’re wondering—I finally had a chance to leaf through my copy of the May 2011 Competitor during lunch last week.  And I’m glad I did.

The most interesting thing about the magazine was an article and photo-shoot about the supposedly “new” breed of Millennial runners, i.e. competitive amateur runners from the post-Gen X/Gen Y generation.  Essentially, the article points out that young runners aren’t just runners anymore, now they’re trail runners or triathletes or dedicated cross-trainers or whatever, and they like to look fashionable when they train or race.  Which is fine.  I mean, it was certainly a good excuse for doing a photo-shoot with an attractive spokesmodel.  But through the article doesn’t say it, I’d argue that the growth of fashion and cross-training for runners is really about the growth of triathlon and the cross-pollinating effect of combining three separate competitive populations into one new(ish) combined sport.  After all, fashion is and has been a huge part of cycling culture since its inception thanks to the massive European influence on the pro tour, and so by introducing runners to cycling, triathlon has incidentally introduced them to whole range of sports fashion as well.  Hell, Competitor itself shows the point perfectly.  The articles are written from a fundamentally runner’s perspective, and yet you see it in bike shops and at triathlons.  The fact that they gave it out at a triathlon to a bunch of at-best casual runners simply speaks to triathlon’s ability to broaden a running magazine’s consumer appeal.  And that’s all good.

Anyway, I’d not have brought any of this up were it not for a basic desire to link to the photo-shoot and include the cover-shot of sportsmodel Ann Wessling in today’s post.  So here’s the link. 

If you’re curious, Ms. Wessling hosts an online triathlon news show called TriCenter that’s available in 5-minute chunks on Competitor’s website.  I watched a bit of it the other night and liked it, although I think it’s a shame the way that the triathlon pro tour focuses so exclusively on Iron distance races.  For my money, the International distance (aka Olympic) races are MUCH more exciting.  For example, Sally and I watched the USA Triathlon College National Championships on one of the CBS Sports networks on Saturday night, and we both found it thrilling in a way that the inevitably cut-up recaps of Iron distance pro races never are.  And yeah, if you’re wondering, they race Oly’s in college these days.

Now on to D&D…

It was my birthday recently, and I confess to buying a couple of presents for myself in honor of the event.  One was Wrath of Ashardalon, a D&D board game based loosely on the game’s 4^th Edition rule set.  I bought it because my girls have been wanting to learn to play D&D for while now, and with the old Dungeon! board game—the one that originally introduced me to the world of D&D lo these many years ago—apparently no longer in print, I’ve struggled with how to bring them into the game’s basic ideas.  Fortunately, Wrath of Ashardalon is a board game, which makes it far more visual than the core D&D game itself is, but even so, I was still a little worried.  The box claims that Ashardalon is intended for ages 12+, and my girls and aged 6 and 7.  On the other hand, the game comes with a million little figurines, and I figured that at worst the girls and I could play with those while I helped them through the games’ various decision points.

For experienced players, Wrath of Ashardalon is a nice mix of 4E and simplified board game rules.  It comes with five basically pre-generated characters, though each has a small mix of power cards that allows for some individual specialization, as well as a wide variety of monsters, traps, and encounter conditions that come in card decks and which thereby generate random dungeon effects naturally during the course of play.  By far the nicest thing about the game is that it requires no DM or Referee.  Turns occur in three phases, with each Player acting for his character, for the dungeon itself, and then for the various monsters under his control.  So far, we’ve found that play is fun and relatively straight-forward, but it can bog down a bit if one Player accumulates a bunch of trap and monster cards.  We’ve also found that the game plays best with 3 players. 

From my standpoint, the game is good because it’s pretty easy.  After only two sessions, my older daughter had the rules down cold.  During their turns, characters can take two actions, a Move action and a Standard action, which in this game is either an Attack, a Disarm Traps check, or a second Move action.  However, unlike full D&D game ruleset, there are no Minor Actions.  For that matter, there aren’t any Immediate Interrupts, Immediate Reactions, or Attacks of Opportunity, and you can’t gain or yield Combat Advantage.  All of which means that the combat in Wrath of Ashardalon is a lot less tactical than it is in full D&D.  There’s no Shifting, and there’s very little reason maneuver.  For example, you can’t improve your odds to-hit via tactical movement, and there’s no reason not to use Ranged Attacks with a bad guy adjacent to you.  As a Player, pretty much the only decision you have to make is which power to use and when to use it.  Also, there are very few Healing powers in the game, so every time we’ve played, the game has become something of a war of attrition.  Thus, the strategy revolves around using your big powers early enough to keep yourself from being overwhelmed without using all of your best powers before you reach the individual villain for each specific encounter-set.  And yet, even with that my kids ask for my thoughts on what they ought to do nearly every time.  But that’s fine.  At least they’re having fun.

Wrath of Ashardalon is a fun game.  Yes, it misses some of the essential role-playing that is the soul of true D&D, but it’s an excellent way to introduce people to the game, and unlike the full version of D&D, there’s a discrete beginning, middle, and ending to each miniature adventure.  It’s also good way for experienced players to pass some time with friends without getting into all the math and sheet set-up that’s involved in a regular D&D campaign.  I like it, and I recommend it, especially to folks who like fantasy adventure books but who think D&D is just too weird to actually play.  Wrath of Ashardalon is a great way for those folks to see what the fuss is about.

How Do You Promote Women in Sports?

Past the link below, you’ll find a short post on SB*Nation’s pro-cycling blog written by a female pro cyclist, along with a bunch of pics of various women of pro cycling in various states of undress (all quite safe for work).  Sure you can enjoy the pics—and to be clear, everyone involved in the discussion past the link seems to take pleasure in doing so—but the issue at hand is a little more interesting.  The writer asks whether the girls taking these pics are basically doing a disservice to the seriousness of their sport by selling themselves as sex symbols instead of as professional athletes.  The issue comes up because the writer herself was asked to do a pin-up shoot, and while she was happy to be sexy enough to be asked, she ultimately wanted to sell herself as an athlete first—albeit one with a drool-worthy body.

Thus the question, which I think is a fine topic for the football offseason: What do you think?  Can women athletes who sell themselves primarily with their physical attractiveness still be taken seriously as athletes, or do they at that point become little more than highly skilled fitness models?  I mean, can you even imagine Tom Brady or someone of his caliber posing for Playgirl?

Here’s the link, titled “The Elephant in the Room”.

For the curious, my answer is different depending on whose benefit we’re worried about.  If you’re a female pro-cyclist (or triathlete or bobsledder or whatever), and you want to make a living from your sport, then I think, yeah, you have to do whatever you have to in order to put food on your table and pay your mortgage.  Pro-sports people are basically entertainers, they get paid to a large extent according to the amount of interest and publicity—and thus sponsorship—they generate, and that’s just the way it is.  You don’t like it?  Go sell insurance for a living. 

I mean, I’m not saying that every female athlete—or every male athlete, for that matter—ought to basically pose nude, but I do think that athletes are like any other celebrity, and that they’re therefore justified in doing whatever will keep their names and faces in the papers so long as they’re comfortable with it.  Bottom line, that’s how they make their money. 

Does it help if they can get on the podium occasionally?  Of course it does.  That’s the object of the sport, and then, too, there’s the prize money to consider.  I think winning should always be the primary objective of any professional athlete.  My only point here is that if you’re struggling to make a living as a professional athlete in a small market sport—and there are lots of sports out there with athletes that fit that description—then you’re justified in doing whatever you can to make your living.  Beyond that, you can only hope that your success on the field (or the track or the pool or wherever) is enough that folks see you as an athlete first and not just as a sex symbol.

The other side of the equation, then, is what’s best for the sport.

Here, I gotta say that I think all those glamour shots are poison.  Lindsey Vonn is one of the most successful skiers in American history, but then she posed in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, and even her fellow competitors wondered if she was still taking the sport seriously.  But while I think the move was a no-brainer in terms of Vonn’s personal finances and her personal ability to attract sponsorship, I think that the real damage those shots did was to the sport as a whole.  I mean, why take any of it seriously when the best woman is the world is better known for what she looks like in a bikini than she is for her actual skiing?  Because look, regardless of the quality of the athletes involved, there’s a reason why folks don’t watch the Lingerie Bowl to see quality football.  Bottom line, football isn’t fundamentally what’s on display there.  In marketing terms, the football isn’t where the Value Proposition is most closely focused.  And if that’s maybe not such a big deal to specific individuals participating in sport, I think it’s an absolute deal-breaker for the sports themselves.  People go to a bike race to see bike racing.  If what you’re really selling is boobs, then that’s a problem.  There are lots of other, better places to see boobs than at a bike race, even a bike race with a lot of hot female racers.

These sports need to know what their value propositions are, and they need to sell on them rather than the sex appeal of their stars.  The sex appeal is just a bonus.  It doesn’t hurt, but if it becomes the point, it actually damages the value of the brand.  That’s as true in bike racing as it is in anything else.

Friday Mad Science: Sex & Danger Edition

I mentioned yesterday that my first story was a spy-piece that featured a seduction at gun-point.  Well, after I finished drafting yesterday’s Storyteller’s Playbook, I went searching back through my archives and managed to find a version of that story that I’d re-written as a 3-page comic teaser.  A friend of mine then drew the pages and inked them, leaving me with a cool little comic short that’s perhaps a bit confusing without its dialogue.  Still, it’s an example of a couple of principles that are often at work in gaming, and so I’d like to share it with you. 

First, as we discussed yesterday, this piece works as an opening even though we as readers have only hints of what’s going on in the larger plot.  The hints are enough, and the fact that they leave us wondering is actually a good thing. 

Second, my favorite thing about writing comics is that it’s a collaborative process.  As a novelist or short story-teller, you work in a vacuum.  But comic writers, screenwriters, playwrights, and yes, even game masters all tell stories collaboratively.  In all of these media, the story can’t come alive until someone else experiences your vision and adds to it, often in ways that are completely unpredictable.  And sure, you can cut down on the amount of unpredictability in the final product by writing very detailed, proscriptive scripts—or by railroading your players with a very narrow set of choices in order to keep them strictly on track—but any experienced comic writer, screenwriter, or even game master will tell you that this is not the way to get your best, most valuable input from your creative collaborators.  You create a more predictable product at the cost of lessening the others’ creativity.  That is rarely a wise trade-off.

Folks wonder why I’m not writing comics anymore and why I switched to writing for gaming.  One of the main reasons is that the storytelling process is very similar but writing for gaming requires a lot less overhead to see your vision turn into some kind of storytelling reality.

Writing Exercise: 3-Pages of Sex and Danger

Set-Up: Below you’ll find the link to an original 3-page comic script that was adapted from that first short story, the one I described yesterday, along with links for the actual sequential art pages based on that script.   

Exercise: Read the script and then look at the pages.  Notice how the artist changed the storytelling.  Then decide for yourself what you would have done differently, either as an artist or as a writer adapting dialogue to the finished art.  How would you have used your creativity to add to the story without changing the total intent?

Script, Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

If you get a chance, I’d appreciate some comments below.  We haven’t had any comments yet, and I’d like to change that, especially since I removed the login requirement that the Comments Section previously required.

Sex Sells!

Heh.  I suppose I really ought to write about the Oscars or something.  I mean, we finally watched The Hurt Locker, and it really was a great flick, even if the story was stolen.  But then I thought to myself, "Self, we need more readers.  And y'know what sells?  SEX!  So... we need to write about sex.  Or porn.  Or just filthy girls who want me to slap their asses while they call me daddy.  Our degenerate readers probably really LIKE that stuff."

Eh... What are you gonna do?

So, without further ado, I hereby announce that I have it on very good authority that a whopping 66% of women WATCH PORN!  66%!!!  Wow!

Man, I must be missin' the boat or something.

And if that's not enough, here's a woman who claims that She's Not a Sex Machine!  Boy, I feel sorry for her man.

Lastly, Ben Rothelesburger announced that he "did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky."  I mean, er, well... I mean, he did bang her and all, but...  well, she seemed like she was only a little unstable at the time, and er... it totally wasn't rape.  Mostly. 

Bunch'a filthy wankers.

*sigh*

This is the worst blog post ever.  BTW, scientists also announced that it was definitely a meteor that killed the dinosaurs.