Ginger Stampley, at >a href="http://www.whiterose.org/pam/"> Perverse Access Memory asks, in her 74th Game WISH column:
Name three or more supplements (or core books, for that matter) for existing game systems that you’d like to see. Why? What inspires your interest in these supplement? What existing supplements or materials are you using instead?
Well, this is a relatively straightforward enough question. There are two that spring to mind very quickly.
First, I have spoken in the past about the Aria system, which I regard mostly as a brilliant, but ultimately failed, experiment. Aria had two books-- a main system, which I thought was interesting, but ultimately unplayable, and a world creation book, which I thought was even more interesting and potentially useful as a general supplement, rather than just Aria. Aria was sort of intended to be a system for making other systems, though, and one promised supplement that I had eagerly (and leter bitterly) awaited was the Aria Magic supplement.
In the library of books never written that exists in my mind, the Aria Magic book would have been a fairly large tome, built along the same lines and with the same strengths, as the Aria Worlds book. Which is to say, no matter how flawed it might be to practice it, the book would have been a good college try at explaining how to design a magic system for a given fantasy world setting. There have been lots of times where I tried to either emulate a magic system I liked from a set of books, or create a magic system de novo but system-writing is, in a word, tough. Or rather, writing balanced, coherent systems is tough.
Writing coherent worlds isn't trivial, either, and the Aria Worlds book took an approach I really liked. Each chapter had not only the concepts and rules (as such) but also two examples. One example, (the Northmen of the Firth, or some such) was sprinkled through each chapter, to illustrate each point as it came along, then a final larger example (the City State of Somewhere) at the back of each chapter.
Note, of course, these were extended examples, like two threads that ran through all the chapters, ending with a nice description of each culture by the time you had reached the end of the book. Then there were chapters of more examples, once all the rules were given: A chapter full of eight small examples, and another chapter which was one extended example.
I thought, then and now, that this was just a brilliant way to write a meta-system, and I would have dearly loved to see an Aria Magic book that took the same approach. Several running example threads, and a cap of larger complete examples woven around a competent set of meta-rules for magic design would have been a godsend at that phase in my gaming hobby, and damned interesting reading, now. Bonus points for examples of failures, discussions of trade-offs, how to hunt for loopholes, and generally how to get what you want out of the system. Even more bonus points if there were a few chapters tying it all back to the Aria Worlds supplement, too.
The second would be a supplement or two for Nobilis. I'm not, in general, the kind of GM or player who wants or needs a lot of supplements for a game. Generally speaking, if I can't see a good way to run a game out of the main book, then I probably don't want to buy it at all. I can certainly see ways to run good games from the main Nobilis book. On the other hand, the main Nobilis book is still flawed. Even though the one existing supplement is for LARPS, I've found it helpful in filling in some (some!) of the mechanical details. What I would look for in another Nobilis supplement would be something similar-- something to fill in some of the social details.
Nobilis is as much a social game as Amber, but it lacks the support that the Amber game has in, well, the Amber novels. The Amber novels not only give the Amber game a good, solid set of NPCs and examples of how they interract together, the game in my opinion is built on them directly. Nobilis, while it has a few token examples in the book and the existing supplement, does not focus on them, nor can it begin to really go in detail about how the Nobilis interract with each other. Something that goes into detail on how various Nobles might view and act upon their various Codes; how they might resolve differences (when they exist) between their codes and the codes of their Imperators or Family members; whether there are any organizations that cross the Code lines of the Imperators-- do the Powers of Birds and Beasts, say, have an affiliation to each other or an organization that cuts across their politics? What other leagues of that sort might exist?
The third... took a little time to come up with. I am not, by my nature, a big supplement buying kind of guy, although I have been in the past. Strictly in order to round out the third, I'd have to say: well, Ginger mentioned something like The Economic Order, so I can't swipe that one. But in the same vein, I wou;dn't mind seeing something lke The Political Order, or GURPS: Governments. (And if that last sounds boring, I note that GURPS: Religion is one of the best supplements they put out, and I bought it long after I stopped playing GURPS on a regular basis.) I don't think a lot of people have a good grasp of how governments actually govern today, other than the broadest strokes. It's hard to believe that many people have the same grasp of other government systems, whether they're modern or historical. And a guide that gives good thought and guidelines to creating fantasy or SF governments-- ones that really govern on a day to basis as well as in the political sense-- would be a great read, in my opinion.
One thing I do want to add, though-- I have absolutely no desire to see the fabled Rebma Supplement for Amber. I'm not impressed with Wujcik's interpretation of very much at all, and I'm almost positive that I would be very unhappy with his interpretations of Rebma-- and given the scarcity of information we'd have on Rebma, it would have to be almost entirely whole cloth.
Ginger Stampley, at Perverse Access Memory asks, in her 73rd Game WISH column:
What’s the biggest PC-driven shift you’ve ever experienced in a campaign? If you were a player, what made you feel like you could successfully change the GM’s world? If you were a GM, was this planned or something the PCs surprised you with?
Oh, let's go with something light-hearted, this week, as I finally catch up to WISH Present. That this is probably the best example I can think of, doesn't hurt, either.
Once again, fade back to my happy, innocent (comparatively) days of undergrad gaming, sprawling out in someone's dorm room, taking over a rec room, or a student center lounge area from those freaks who actually wanted to, you know, study.
Somewhere toward my junior or senior year, one of our GMs (same guy who ran the space prisoners game from the last entry, actually) took it upon himself to run a vampire-themed game using his favorite (and mine at the time) system, GURPS. In retrospect, he had intended it to be a serious game, hving taken inspiration from some Saberhagen books as I recall, which few if any of us had read.
Thing is, somewhere in character creation, we call got the idea that this was to be a light, silly game. I think it was because we had all had a pretty serious disdain for the overly serious Vampire(tm) games that were just then starting to hit our awareness. The other reason, probably, was because for Chrissakes he decided to set it in the same town we went to school-- Peoria.
Nothing serious happens in Peoria!
So right from the start, in the first session or so, there was a radical shift as we got ourselves into beer and pretzels mode. I remember only a few scenes, but I dearly remember Bartholomew, the ex-Vietnam veteran and all around not-to-bright, beery, boozy biker suddenly thrust into the power and glory and decadence of being a vampire... without understanding why.
Took him a while for him to realize he was a vampire, it did. Bart was the sharpest crayon in the box.
I do also remember the group's hard core atheist (no, that wasn't me, although I suppose by sticking to my moderate convictions I am that groups hard core atheist today...) playing a fundamentalist Christian in the same boat. He realized what was going on a bit quicker, and was a whole lot of fun watching.
Needless to say, it became a comedy game very quickly. Actually, it became a slapstick comedy game very quickly. Not one of our longest-lived efforts, but the GM had the grace to roll with it, watching his nice, serious game torn to shreds by the players.
Two Line Review: This volume concludes (Yes! Concludes!) the story begun in _The Golden Age_. It is a book of passion, energy, and ideas... the central most of which, alas, happens to be completely wrong because either the author, the principle character, or both, just don't know what the Hell they're talking about.
I reviewed the first two volumes, as well, and they are archived on Google Groups at:
_The Golden Age_
_The Phoenix Exultant_
In the first two books, without spoiling things too terribly much, our main character Phaethon comes to believe that his entire life is, literally, a lie-- there exist technologies in extremely common use which allow people to edit their minds and memories directly. False memories are implantable, and true memories can be erased. Adventures ensue to determine how and why this was done to him, and to regain his rightful place and property so that he can do what he really wants to do, namely, take the starship that he has built, and go exploring the galaxy.
In the course of said adventures, he comes to believe further that there is a threat to his entire civilization, the so-called Golden Oecumene of Earth, which is composed of all the sentient creatures (human, human-origin but deeply modified, and pure computation based) in this solar system. Naturally, Phaethon's other problems are bound up in all of this. This concluding novel shows Phaethon and his very small band of supporters trying to deal with this threat from beyond the Golden Oecumene.
At this point, I would like to pause, and berate myself for not mentioning something that turns out to be important from the second book, _The Phoenix Exultant_. There is a small passage in the book wherein one of the sophotechs (computation based intelligences, the smallest of which ever mentioned has the equivalent of at least one hundred thousand human minds) explains to Phaethon why they have been, in a nutshell, so completely useless to Phaethon in all their wisdom. In brief, it is because the rigid ethics of the sophotechs refuse to allow any use of force at all (except, like modern Libertarians, the force of economics and personal shame.) They cannot force any person or group of people to do the right thing-- they can't even force a person not to harm himself, and so they will blithely go about letting the human-based population of the Golden Oecumene do stupid things right up unto their collective extinction.
This would have been acceptable, had the sophotech not also espoused, at the same time, that his (and by extension, all sophotechs') philosophy was correct. Provably correct. Universally correct for every form of intelligence and consciousness. This rankled, but it was only a passage of a few paragraphs. Perhaps a couple of pages at best, so I decided against bringing it up.
I decided incorrectly.
This is the core conflict of this novel, because the enemies that Phaethon perceives originate outside the Golden Oecumene. They do not share the same moral grounding as Phaethon and his sophotechs, and long, reasonably interesting stretches or time are spent discussing the differences and the ramifications between these two systems of thought. The problem is, to be blunt, either the author or the main character are completely wrong on some key points. In the course of these discussions, we learn more about the sophotechs and their "architecture" for lack of a better word. The point from the second novel is made again (and again and again) and augmented with even sillier ideas.
The thrust of the book is that morality is universal, invariant, and provable. The sophotechs are an expression of this-- they are intelligent and conscious, but incapable of contradiction, internal or external. Their will to compute (ie, their will to live) is a conscious thing which can exist only in the absence of internal contradiction. If you convince one that it is inconsistent, it will no longer desire to compute, and will vanish in a puff of logic, not unlike the machines that Captain Kirk routinely bollixed in just the same way.
Furthermore, THIS EXPLICITLY APPLIES TO ETHICS AND MORALITY!
At this point, mathematicians and computer scientists in the crowd should be feeling distinctly nauseous. This is because even twentieth century mathematicians know that this just isn't possible. Any sufficiently power system of logic must necessarily contain legal formulations that can be neither proven nor disproven. Further, no axiomatic system (and the sophotechs' system is axiomatic) can be proven to be consistent from the inside without actually being inconsistent to begin with.
Having gone this far, I don't even have to spoil the book and tell you who turns out to be right or wrong. It just doesn't matter. If the sophotechs are right, it can only be because the author decided to write a book that deals with a mathematical subject without bothering to look up Kurt Godel. If they are wrong, then the main character, Phaethon, supposedly one of the best engineers and computer scientists of his time, is a complete idiot.
It's a shame, too. There are some nice scenes in the book. Before I realized what the hell was bothering me about the whole set up (and really, I should have spotted it immediately, so perhaps that's a credit to the writing, I don't know) I was enjoying it quite a bit, wondering whether Phaethon was right or wrong in his gamble and his approach to defeating his enemy. There are some other nice ideas, too.
I should note also that, as in previous books, characterization and dialogue are not strong suits, either. The characterization has finally settled down a bit, and the three or four main characters are drawn with adequate consistency. The dialogue, on the other hand, is still crashingly disturbing. At no point can I imagine that these words are coming out of the mouths of people who live tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years in the future. They'd sound clumsy coming out of the mouths of characters from the 1980s.
My final recommendation here, is that if any of these sound interesting despite what I perceive as flaws, wait for the whole thing to come out in paperback.
Two Line Review: Uh... as a second book in a series, this one is particularly difficult to really review without spoiling the first one. Let's sum it up by saying, "Middle Book Syndrome."
Which will tell you a lot of what you need to know if you haven't read the first one. The first one ends with a cliffhanger that is the logical extension of which way a particular dilemma was settled, so I don't want to go into too many details.
In rough terms, though, this has middle book syndrome written all over it. It's hard to imagine the sense of wonder going out of the setting, but that's really exactly what happened here. Over the course of the first book, we're really told a lot about the way things work, and there are no comparable revelations here. In fact, we know so much about the way things work that the one or two points of mystery to the whole second act of this hopefully three act play weren't really very, er, mysterious.
Which is to say, me and my unaugmented brain managed to figure out the resolution well in advance of the highly augmented beings in the story. So much so that when one element was revealed, I wanted to smack the characters, because they had no right to have been deluded that long (on the one hand) or be that smug (on the other.)
However, while it didn't make up for the loss of the sense of wonder, we did get to see more of the world at large and get a better feel for how it developed that way. There was a good deal of historical excursion along the way.
Also, Wright tried to do a fairly ambitious thing here, I think. In the course of the book, our hero Phaethon has cause to interract with the absolute dregs of his incredibly wealthy (by our standards) society. It's often remarked that the very poor of the 21st Century West are still much better off than most people of a thousand years ago. I think Wright was trying to convey the same sense here, that Phaethon should see these people who by our standards should have a comfortable life, as being unbearably poverty stricken and unhealthy by comparison.
That I can't tell if this was his intent or not means, ultimately, that he failed regardless his intent. But it was an ambitious attempt, if that's what it was.
I also noted that Wright has a problem with voice and character. That problem continues here. To some degree, it's with Phaethon, and to some degree due to the circumstances in the book, it's excuseable. It also affects some of the supporting characters, particularly a clone of his wife Daphne, and there it's not excuseable. Daphne seems to morph from bubble-headed socialite to Nancy Drew, detective at large, with alarming ease. She exists to do what is needed to be done.
In summary, it's not all bad, but it's definitely not all good. If the first had been of this quality, I wouldn't buy a second one in hardback. But it does look like the ending has been set up now, and since I'm 2/3 there, I might as well buy the last one when it comes out, too.
[This review was originally posted to Usenet, and is archived through "makeashorterlink" on Google Groups.]
John C. Wright, 2002
Two Line Review: Strange. Very strange. Unpolished, but interesting.
First and foremost, let me state that this is the first in a series of two volumes. It's noted as such in the inside of the dust jacket, but I somehow managed to miss this when I bought the book. Note also that this is not a book that wraps anything up; rather, it ends as a rather large cliffhanger with many more questions left unanswered than are actually resolved.
So if that mode turns you off, don't buy this book for another year (I'd guess.)
Now then, to review: I'm really not sure where to start. The book follows the actions of the main character, named Phaethon, who happens to be the sone of Helion. Actually, the main character's name is Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconsciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043 (the "Reawakening.") This is not only a name, but a description of what Phaethon is in a physical sense, and a description of legal standing.
His full name is mentioned in the first few pages, and by the end of the book, most of that jargon will actually make sense. In Phaethon's society, the so-called Golden Oecumene, that sort of precision is justified-- the Golden Oecumene is an extremely distant future earth world, which seems to have run through not just one cultural singularity, but perhaps as many as three, and come crashing out the other side leaving nothing but a vapor contrail. The precision is justified because the technologies which exist allow thinking beings to have almost unlimited control, not only over the physical world, but over their own consciousnesses.
At the opening of the book, Phaethon is present at his father's home at the beginning of a milennial celebration intended to set the tone of society and its endeavors for the next thousand years... and he is absolutely bored out of his skull. Moreover, he shortly becomes convinced that he is quite literally living a lie, and that either vast amounts of memory has been stolen from him, or worse, at some point in the past he had agreed to have those memories excised from his consciousness.
The book which follows is Phaethon's quest to rediscover what he has forgotten about his personal history, and even more important, to determine why it was done and what his own hand in this activity was. At the end of the day, I liked this book, and I'll buy the concluding volume when it comes out in hardback. But oh, Lord, there are flaws here.
The first flaw is the amazing embarassment of riches in this book. There are, quite possibly, too many nifty ideas for a volume of this size. And there are some ideas which aren't so much nifty as they are silly. It's hard for me to suspend disbelief enough to accept a suit of armor made out of element 900 ("Chrysadamantium"-- it's in the unpredicted "Continent of stability" dontchaknow.) A fe of the other physical technologies were somewhat silly, too, and could have been excized, I think, without much danger.
Most of the other innovations and ideas were more directly related to the story, but still dizzying, especially for the first half of the novel. There are more varied forms of consciousness, on and off stage, than I can ever remember seeing, and Wright describes them in detail, as much as he can. There are the base neuroforms-- that is, people more or less like us, but augmented. There are the Warlocks, who have managed to integrate their consciousness and subconsciousness, dreaming and waking worlds; and the Invariants, who are near automata in their devotion to logic. There are Compositions and other forms of massminds. There are Cerebellines, who have tinkered with their brains to allow resolution of multiple patterns and hierarchies of meaning; there are non-standard xenoforms. Then there are the strictly artificial "sophotech" intelligences, ranging from the relatively puny Harrier (with the capacity of a mere hundred thousand humans) through the great Earthmind, as intelligent as a trillion humans at once.
Then, add that the characters, though still having physical substrates, live most of their lives in a completely artificial (or at least augmented) mostly-consensual reality. Add that the consensual reality has multiple levels, from unadorned, through several stages, into a full immersion where the master of whatever space you're in is allowed to manipulate not simply your senses but, if you allow it, your emotions, your thoughts, and your identity.
(And, for that matter, your memories, which is really the driver of the plot-- the story is predicated on 'sophotech' technologies which have made an exact science of cognition: Consciousness can be sliced, diced, folded and chopped into paper-snowflake patterns, and in many cases restored to normal if the resulting consciousness is willing to be restored. And this is all an old enough development that there are vast bodies of custom and law to deal with it all.)
Despite Wright's eager explanations of all these effects through the books, though, it can be overwhelming, especially in the first half of the book.
Another flaw is that Wright really needs to get a handle on characterization and voice. By the second half of the book, it's clear who, or at least what sort of person, Phaethon is. But for the first half of the book, Wright hasn't hit his stride and Phaethon seems to morph into whatever the scene's tone demands. It's unsettling and deistracting.
On the good side, this lends itself to a bunch of very nice ideas and very nice set pieces, even they don't always dovetail with the rest of the story. On the other hand, it also makes for some pretty goofy scenes. For example, we are beaten over the head with the "middle Dreaming" level of consensual reality, where information tags around objects flood the user's mind with contextual, symbolic and factual information. But when Phaethon is called to a court proceeding in which he igures highly, he completely fails to take advantage of anything remotely similar to download the appropriate legal information into his mind. It was a glaring example of plot-induced stupidity-- or perhaps the author forgot about the implications for a scene or two.
Still, by the second half of the book, things were beginning to settle into my head, and I was able to concentrate more on the themes of the book (more Gnostic in tone than "The Matrix" could ever think about being) things went better.
I believe this is Wright's First book, or at least his first SF book. It reads like it. He should perhaps have written a few less ambitious books before this one. But I'll still buy the next one, and anyone who likes Vernor Vinge, David Zindell, Walter Jon Williams (for _Aristoi_) and similar works might want to read a chapter or two in the bookstore to sample it.
[This review was originally posted to Usenet, and is archived through "makeashorterlink" on Google Groups.]
Ginger Stampley, at Perverse Access Memory asks, in her 72nd Game WISH column:
Talk about a few characters you had to stop playing before their stories felt finished. Where do you think they would have gone?
Hmm. Two spring to mind that had seen enough play that I had a very strong concept of them, and that had already gotten some story arcs set around them. The first was back in my undergraduate days. Alas, I no longer remember the poor schlub's name, but it was probably something like Frank or Fred with a real-world-sounding last name. I'll call him Frank, I guess.
Since the game was set in my undergrad says, that means it was one of two systems-- either some variant of the venerable Dungeons and Dragons, or GURPS. In this case, it was GURPS-- a science fiction with both interstellar travel and high enough tech that it had a little cyberpunk in it as well. The background of the game was grim-- Mother Earth was dominated by megacorporations, the largest and nastiest of which was a weapons manufacturer that profitted by provoking wars between Earth's settled worlds, and selling to both sides. All the characters started out as people who had, in some way or other, pissed off said corporation, and the game began with all the PCs and a few NPCs in the prison hold of a ship heading back to Earth to stand trial for crimes real and trumped up.
Frank (we'll call him that) and his brother were squarely in the camp of "real crimes." They would have called themselves "freedom figthers" but in today's parlance, they were probably terrorists. We were a bit vague in determining just how careful they were to avoid civilian casualties, and whether they put office clerks for the megacorporation on their target list, or not. Not that they didn't have at least some justification-- their homeworld had been mostly depopulated by those weapons, and Frank's brother (another PC) had undergone extensive and not entirely voluntary modifications at the hand of that company.
Frank and his brother were two sides of the same coin-- Frank was the brains, and had extensive cybernetics to make him so, while his brother was the combat machine. They were designed that way outside the game just for that duality. Frank was the cold, calculating one who would sit in a dark room helping coordinate the rest of the characters' actions, whether it was through a combat scene, a burglary or infiltration, or talking their way out of a traffic ticket. Frank was the spider at the center of the net. His brother, by contest, was not nearly as bright or dispassionate, but he was one of the toughest bastards in the group.
All in all, it was a fun game with a good premise, and what I thought were generally good characters-- there were also gun-runners, smuggler-pilots, underground journalists, even a doctor who smuggled medical supplies where they weren't supposed to go.
What I would like to have seen out of the game-- and probably I'm expecting too much, in retrospect, because it was a college game, and we were not known for running the very deepest of character studies, back then-- was enough success to get us into some highly questionable ethical grounds. I would really have liked there to come a split-- even a temporary one-- between Frank and his brother. I'm not sure, looking back, how that might have happened, since both of them were ready to chew broken glass in order to get revenge, but it could, conceivably, have happened.
Probably, given our age, none of that would have happened, though. And as that was not only pre-9/11, but even pre-first World Trade Center bombing, it was a different world entirely. I don't think one could run that game, today, without the players feeling like there was a Moral To The Story breathing down their necks.
The other, more recent character, was a long standing, somewhat intermittantly played Amber character named Thomas, a son of Caine. In retrospect, while Thomas was a fun character, and the GM was one of the best I've played with, the game itself was more than a little frustrating. It kept starting and stopping, and stuttering forward in time, sometimes in large intervals. I think the game was actually falling apart and reforming in the background, but because all posts went the the GM and I was never sure which characters were PCs and which were NPCs, the situation wasn't always clear to me.
Thomas Cainesson was (for me, at the time) something of a rarity among Amber characters. He was, pure and simple, a Good Guy. Not all of this was detailed when I created the character-- much of it came out in play, and in flashbacks-- but Thomas had family issues. Thomas had father figure issues. THomas just never got along with Caine, no matter how much both of them tried. I no longer have a good idea of Thomas' stats, or his rankings in various auctions, but he was on the jockish side of things. His past, prior to the start of the game, was that he was a junior member of the Eric//Julian/Caine cabal, and led a substantial number of the forces of Amber in skirmishes with the forces of Chaos that never made it into Corwin's chronicles, because he might nto have been aware of them before the close of the books.
That's where it all started to go wrong for Caine and Thomas, because during the war, Caine let Thomas think he was dead along with almost everyone else. It was the "almost" that pissed Thomas off, and ended with him breaking first saving Caine's life at the final battle, then breaking Caine's nose out of frustration. Caine also concealed Thomas' parentage from him, which led to him accidentally almost killing his own mother just shortly after he learned that the woman was his mother. He concealed the existence of several siblings, and several of them came to very bad situations, as well, because none of them every had the full story.
Indeed, Thomas eventually had to put down one of his own brothers (Grey) by killing him over the Pattern of Rebma. How do you do that and remain a hero? You wait at the center, trick him into setting foot on it, and then break his neck with your bare hands. This is for "Did not detroy the universe" values of "remain a hero" in my book, but Grey really was one of the villains of the piece, as far as I can tell, because Thomas ended up going down as a true hero of Amber for that one.
Yes, old Thomas had family issues. Ended up giving Caine his blood curse, after a while.
Had the game continued-- and I wish it would have, if it could ever have stabilized-- Thomas would eventually have had to come to terms with the fact that he and Caine were just never going to get along. A lot of Thomas' problems were caused by Caine being Caine, but Thomas didn't help much. He was, despite his reputation as a man of action (which is how he thought of himself, too) rather reactive and passive, rather than active. He'd solve a problem if it were given to him by someone else, but he wouldn't initiate anything. And while he wasn't a lapdog about it, he continued trying for far too long to gain his father's approval and his trust-- and, at core, while he probably had Caine's approval, that version of Caine was simply incapable of the kind of trust and respect Thomas wanted.
He was getting there-- almost the last thing I remember from that game before it went radio silent for the last time was Thomas giving the kind of blood curse that only a son with centuries of grievances, who had just very nearly killed his mother (whom he knew and loved, just not as his mother) becuase of his ignorance, and who had probably caused her irreparable mental damage as a result.
Thomas had, right at the point, more than gotten over Caine. But he needed to play out the other half, where he realized that he had overreacted. He needed to suffer the consequences fo that overreaction, and realize that he was still just as much in Caine's shadow as before. He needed to stop reacting to Caine, positively or negatively, and start acting on his own initiative. He needed to be independent. Basically, aside from the war hero stuff, he needed to be a man.
I have, in the past, threatened to blog on subjects of interest to computer scientists, graduate students, and graduate students in computer science. Something of a counterpoint to Uncertain Principles, Signal + Noise and some others, which tend to blog from the perspective of faculty members.
Since I have just taken a final exam in Concurrent Software Technique (in the obligatory Java) perhaps this is the right time to begin with an entry from the student's point fo view. And as Uncertain Principles kicked off with a post about student evaluations of professors, it seems only right that someone should write an article from the counterposition-- professorial evaluations of students... which is to say, course grades. (I suppose we'll handle letters of recommendation elsewhere.)
Grades are one of those all but necessary evils in this corner of academia-- almost everyone in the game needs grades to some extent. Some disciplines, like engineering or computer science, hold with them the assumption that you can stop your education after the bachelor's or master's level, put that relevant degree in a frame, and seek professional employment. And certainly, having been on recruiting missions for various engineering companies, yes, grades certainly matter for new graduates seeking employment.
Those students who desire or effectively require the full PhD (for instance, physics, where a master's degree is most often described to me as something between a booby prize and a door prize on the way out) are still dependent on them to a point, because it's relatively rare to stay at one institution from the cradle to the grave, and admission to other schools will be based, at least in part, on prior grades.
So unless an institution is so well-regarded, it cannot simply do away with the concept of grades, which invariably boil down to a single character (perhaps two, with a plus/minus scale) symbolizing your understanding of any given subject, and a three or four significant digit number characterizing your academic performance overall.
I don't really envy professors that particular job. Done honestly, and with an honest sample of students, it is not only time-consuming but it can turn into an indictment of your own teaching skills. This I say, having been on the grade-assigning side of the fence for long enough, when I held one of those almost-mythical teaching assistant positions where I held a larger say in grade assignments than the professors who were nominally teaching the course. (That's what happens when I grade each and every set of papers, and the break points are then determined by a conference between myself and the professors.)
Worse, though, the "standard" tools for assigning grades to us poor slobs, the students, are remarkably crude. Judging too heavily on homework is a mistake because while I don't cheat, copy, or suffer anyone to copy off my assignments, I know full well that there are enough students who do to render the exercise nigh pointless. The other common alternative, though, is to give one or two standard examinations and grade heavily on those.
That can be worse, though, because test-writing is an art form, and while I know that some professors spend considerable amounts of time worrying about the format and structure of their tests, it seems pretty apparent to me that many do not. For the former, there are Uncertain Principles and Signal + Noise, who obviously care about what they do. We gave oral exams in the class I TA'd, and I can personally attest to having given great thought beforehand to the questions I was going to ask.
On the other hand, though I have never heard a professor say outright, "Ah, I didn't give much thought to this exam!" I know to a certainty that some of them simply don't. Professors who might, unaccountably, be reading this, please be assured, I am not guessing at this. I, like any perspicacious graduate student (or even undergraduate, I think) can sometimes simply tell.
I recall far too many instances (many of these pertaining to the same professor) from my undergraduate days, giving microelectronics that were far more difficult than they intended to be, because the professor admitted that he hadn't bothered to solve the problem before he issued it to the class as a test. Joy. Sure, that balances out, because everyone is in the same boat, but it is certainly not fun while you're taking the exam, wondering if it's you who's not really cut out for this engineering stuff, or just the professor who's not really cut out for this teaching stuff. And it speaks terribly of the professor, in my opinion.
I've gotten exams which were obviously written only an hour before-- because they were fresh xerox copies of an exam handwritten in pencil, with the ink still smearing and the pages still warm. Thanks, professor, you're important to us, too. (It didn't help that that individual was clearly winging each and every lecture, using someone else's lecture notes from the web, that he had perused, but not thought deeply about. A shame, too, since he really knew his shit and really loved the material.)
And perhaps my favorite example of professors obviously not thinking about their exams is probably unique to computer science, especially programming courses. It is reasonable to put computer code on a piece of paper and ask questions about it as a form of testing. It is not reasonable, however, to put computer code which you have not compiled and whose bugs you have not eliminated on a piece of paper and ask questions about it as a form of testing. This happens far, far too often. Worse, it is almost completely avoidable, because often, all you need to do is compile and run the code (if it even compiles!) to determine that you've done something incredibly stupid.
So, yes professors, we often do know when you're winging the exams.
More subtle, though, are the exams which just make me tilt my head (and often, mutter dire imprecations) wondering, "What made you thought this was a suitable exam question, or exam style? What makes you think that this is really a good gauge of conceptual understanding?"
I'm sure every graduate of a technically-inclined program, be it in engineering or the sciences, has their own tales of professors who habitually gave exams where the averages were down in the 50's or lower, with no real point in mind for the difficulty level of the exam. (Only one professor has ever given me a reason for that practice which made any sense. All others I have asked merely shrugged.) I've even had classes where the exams were so ludicrously simple that I felt cheated.
(Yes, I am rather hard to please.)
And given the state of engineering today, there is a large and rapidly growing disconnect between engineering as it is practiced, and engineering as it is typically tested for in school. No one, for instance, sits down and consults Zverev and goes rooting through tables when they start to design a filter, anymore, unless there's something terribly exotic or troublesome, going on. Rather, we fire up our simulator/synthesizer software of choice and work in that environment.
And yet, those basics do need to be understood, and that understanding evaluated as part of the academic process; and far too often, the method of choice is still to park a poor student down with a pencil, a sheet of paper, a problem and (if he's lucky) a table of relevant values fro that type of problem, and tell him to come back in 120 minutes with an answer.
I would be shocked if other technical fields were much different in this regard. Electrical engineering is rife with this disjoint between pedagogy and practice, and it's to the point where I can no longer count on GPAs to tell me much of anything for new graduates, except "This is person is probably not a low grade moron or an egregious cheater." If I am lucky, the new graduate will come from my undergraduate engineering school, and I can ask him his grade in one or two particular lab courses, and form a good opinion based on my deep familiarity with those classes. I am often not so lucky.
And, once again, computer science has it's own particularly exaggerated form of this phenomenon. Where an engineering student might be told to solve a problem in pencil and paper, where he would ordinarily have a text or a computer in front of him, a computer science student is far, far too often given a sheet of paper and told, "Write a program in this language, that performs this function." (Or, slightly more common, given half a program and told to complete the other half.) This started out as a pet peeve of mine when I was taking elementary courses whose only purpose was to make sure I had mastered the language-- because, of course, they could not be certain I was not stealing the homework assignments from someone else. A necessary evil.
It is, however, becoming a larger and larger peeve, as I honestly cannot think of a larger disjoint between practice and pedagogy than that. I simply cannot. No sane person in industry sits down and writes code out by hand, without references. No sane person even types up code into their compiler, while looking at references, and expects it to be right the first time. I cannot, then, understand the purpose of administering an exam on that basis. Not only is it just plain silly, but unless the course is low level and about the particular language in the first place, when I am forced to do this, I am thinking particularly about the language in which I am (trying desperately) to write, not about the underlying problem that the code is supposed to solve.
I cannot understand what my limping through hand written, unpremeditated Java (for instance) code is supposed to tell a professor about my underlying knowledge of anything but that. I had opined recently that I despise pseudocode, but I am forced to admit that this is probably a reasonable application for it. Few things in academic computer science are as frustrated as knowing to a certainty that you could, if sat down at a compiler, write a program to answer the question, but just entirely blanking on a few key pieces of syntax or idiom.
I do know that this style of exam gives me the sweats every time I see it, and nightmares every time I take one. Invariably, I have to count on having done well enough on the homework to make up for the unimportant, but downgraded mistakes I will make on the exam. It could be just me, but I tend to think not, considering the savage bitchfest that the topic generates every time it comes up amongst my peers.
(For bonus points, I occasionally get half and half exams-- half questions about code that was clearly never compiled, and half questions telling me to write code with the expectation that it needs to be correct as it flows from my pencil. This, in short, is infuriating.)
All of which is convincing my, not very slowly, but quite surely, that many subjects at the graduate level and possibly senior graduate level in computer science and many engineering disciplines are simply not served by conventional pencil and paper examinations at all. Certainly, class projects, term papers, and presentations are time- honored solutions to some of these problems, but there are some problems involved here, as well. It's much harder to implement this in a quarter-system university than a semester system university, for instance. A quarter-system might leave you eleven or twelve weeks to teach a subject, and about half of that will be spent teaching enough that the students can start to understand a larger project. Also, especially for course-burdened undergraduates, no one wants to face four to six project deadlines at the same time. (Although it couldn't be much worse, from where I sit. I'd probably take it.)
Oral exams are an option as well, as long as class sizes are small enough to warrant the massive investment of time on the part of the professor. For that matter, learning to ask essay questions on exams would help, as well, but for some reason that isn't done (often enough.)
I've been coming to think that, if we only had enough hardware to make this practical at most universities, it would be interesting to give students, "Here, write me a program that does this...." style exams at computer terminals. Instead of writing the programs down on a piece of paper, by all means, give the students carefully personalized computers, with standard compilers, standard compiler and library documentation, and no internet access. That might still be brutal (now you have the damned compiler bitching at you, making you nervous!) but certainly closer to practice in the real world and not nearly as hideous as writing it all out in pencil.
The obvious drawbacks would be the amount of hardware and university computer labs required to make this feasible, as well as the stability of the hardware itself-- one shudders to imagine trying this on Windows machines.
I'm sure there are other innovative methods for testing material as well. Unfortunately, few professors seem to be interested in finding them.
Ginger Stampley, at Perverse Access Memory asks two questions, this time, in her 71st Game WISH column. The second is:
Do you rely on the NPC as presented, or are you usually looking "between the lines" to figure the elements that are hold-backs? Do you care that the NPCs might have as many conflicted qualities as the PCs? Should a game really revolve around the PCs in every respect, including a certain "artificial" quality to the secondary cast? Or are you happier if the NPCs are "sticky"?
These are easier questions to answer-- but then, I always find playing easier than GMing, too.
Pure and simple, whether I look between the lines for hidden qualities of NPCs depends on the GM running the characters. If I think that there's anything more than the obvious behind the NPCs in general (as there so obviously is in House of Cards) and the GM(s) in question are any good at it, then, yes, I'll read between the lines.
It's fun, if the GM does it right. It's also, speaking from experience, hard to run a game where the NPCs are real enough to do that. If the GM isnt' doing that, or is doing it badly, I won't bother. I won't enjoy the game as much,
either, but that doesn't necessarily imply that I would stop playing.
I do think that the game should tend to revolve around the PCs, though. The word 'tend,' there, implies to me that some of the NPCs, even some of the major NPCs, should be conflicted. They should be real people. On the other hand, it's not hard to go a little overboard with it: If every major NPC is horribly conflicted about some known issue... enh. At least phase the conflictedness in and out of the storyline as appropriate, so that they're not all conflicted at the same bloody time.
Those conflicted NPCs should get a chance to resolve themselves, too. There comes a point in the arc of all NPCs (just as for all PCs and for all characters in long running fiction in general) where failure to resolve some conflict one way or the other starts to strain any sympathy and interest. I can utter the Eight Deadly Words about an NPC, too.
Trying to put this succinctly, a given NPC shouldn't upstage a given PC all that often... and the NPCs as an ensemble shouldn't upstage the PCs as an ensemble, either.
Ginger Stampley, at Perverse Access Memory asks two questions, this time, in her 71st Game WISH
column. The first is:
When you plan or play your NPCs, do you intentionally leave out some of the story for each? Do you hold something back and let the Players imagine the rest or do you present NPCs from the core of who they are? Is time a factor-- a short game or one-shot not allowing much character depth? Does NPC expertise shine through? Or are there character foibles that cloud the better qualities of the NPC? Are there short-cuts to get this across?
Well, I'll deal with the easy parts first: I don't run one shot or intentionally short games. I almost finished that with, "And I never have!" but on reflection, I did once run a one-shot adventure, but it wasn't high on characterization, so to speak.
Regardless, I generally don't do it, so it's not even close to my expertise. Thus, all my answers are in the context of longer running games.
Like Ginger's NPCs in House of Cards, I have two or three main categories for In Media Res, my Nobilis game. The obvious split is between beings of power (Excrucians, Imperators, extremely powerful spirits, the Erus, other Nobles, etc) and... well, everyone else, really, with the possible exception of Anchors (of the PCs and the NPCs alike.)
The other split, more relevant here, is the purpose for which the character exists. Some NPCs start out as filler, essentially-- I might need some random Chancel inhabitant or person on the street, or the situation might even require that some Noble show up previously unrelated to the plot as a sort fo a walk-on. These characters tend to get the template treatment-- I'll jot down a few notes about who they are and why they are where they are, and if they develop further in play, that's great.
Other NPCs are created with a certain role in the story, large or small. For these NPCs, I can't (and don't try to) detail everything about them, but I certainly need to have them more grounded than the filler characters. I don't think that implies that I intentionally leave anything out of their backstories, either. A minor peeve of mine is Schroedinger's NPC who, in the process of developing himself, also manages to say or do whatever it is that's necessary to get the plot moving in the direction the GMs want. If I intentionally left sections of background blank, the temptation to do that would be too strong, I think.
And while I represent them, as much as I can, from the core of who they are, that core is certainly not (I hope) readily apparent the first time they walk on stage. Zelazny is reputed to have said, once, that a key to characterization was for the author to know at least one important thing about each main character that the readers didn't. It was never clear to me if that implied that it was something the audience would never figure out, or merely something they wouldn't figure out until much later.
Regardless, I've been trying to take that maxim and alter it for role-playing-- many of the major NPCs with definite story roles do have qualities on which they act, that are not at all apparent to the players at the moment. I've found it useful so far, though, to have those hidden pieces of character motives be linkages to other important NPCs or places... in some cases to NPCs that haven't shown up, yet, or places that have not yet been visitted. In my experience (or at least in my mind) that makes the setting more dynamic than static-- if the PCs pull on the thread of one NPC, they might find several others moving in ways they didn't expect at all, for better or for worse.
I also very much assume that the players will eventually reason out, spy out, or in some fashion discover some of these hidden motivators, whether Zelazny intended his audience to discover his or not. I regard this as part of the reward of playing.
And that, I think, implies that there are NPC foibles in the game. I don't think that precludes expertise from shining through, though, where appropriate.
(And my players are invited to speculate on which NPCs had story roles from the beginning, and which were fillers, as long as they don't expact me to actually confirm or deny anything.)
Dear Hollywood,
You are no longer allowed to spend hundreds, or even tens, of millions
of dollars on a third or higher numbered film in a series of high-
grossing blockbusters. You have demonstrated total incompetence too many
times.
Instead, you will henceforth simply give me half that money, in return
for which I will take a big fat orange crayon in my left fist, a big
fat blue crayon in my right, and draw you a seven panel cartoon strip
that is far more logically coherent, more emotionally satisfying, and
more true to the mythic sources you thought you might use.
That is all.