Geek Power

Midnight Chronicles went from IMDb Moviemeter rating 6,865 to 28 last week -- up 24,417% in popularity -- putting it adjacent to other such low-budget fare like Knowing and Observe and Report.

Coincidentally, this week was also GenCon -- where I imagine the DVD was released. That's really an astronomical improvement and rating for what is an essentially indie feature with no major distributor (Epic Level Entertainment, whose only other distributed films are Xombie: Dead on Arrival and The Gamers: Dorkness Rising) and no advertising. I haven't even seen banner ads at EN World.

For nerd-friendly fare I'd think studios should pay attention to this as a booth at GenCon is practically free by studio-marketing standards. I also think studios should be more friendly to RPG adaptations of their franchises. There's no money involved, but it keeps a franchise's fan base active and you can mine the good ideas that were developed for later films, comics, or TV series.

Midnight Chronicles is also available on iTunes and through RPGNow -- though I'd recommend the iTunes route for downloading since RPGNow doesn't have the bandwidth to handle big downloads yet.

Midnight Chronicles itself is impressive in certain aspects. Production quality is strong -- a few terrific special effects, some really nice outdoor scenes and outdoor cinematography. Many of the performances turned out quite well -- I think they benefitted from going after actors who could perform instead of actors who could help them get distribution (of course, what helps the movie likely hurts the producers). The action direction and fights scenes are, unfortunately, rather tame -- too slow and careful.

But the real problem is the story. There's some good elements here and intrigue being set up between the different factions -- at one point it felt like it could be a strong Babylon 5 kind of series. But it's not a series. It's 100 minutes and I think they introduced as many as 15 or so characters, all of whom are launching their own story. So instead of one fully developed story we get the first 5 minutes of a dozen or so stories. I had to laugh when at about minute 68 (!) they introduce the secret surviving twin brother of some high-ranking legate who helps head the resistance. Save something for season two folks!

This cripples the story as a film -- and is also way too much for even a series pilot (which is what the Midnight Chronicles was originally intended as). In a series pilot you need to cleave more closely to a film mode -- find your core couple characters and key on their stories so that we have an enjoyable episode and get a chance to know them. Roll out the extra characters and plot complications as the season unfolds -- because, unless that first episode catches, you otherwise won't have a season to tell your story.

Which leads me to my last general lesson that I've learned writing. Movies are small -- at about 22,000 words they're really equivalent to a novella. Especially in a genre piece where you've also got action set pieces and such eating up minutes, you really need to choose your story and focus on it. And pilots are even smaller -- though you can leave a few hooks in them for later exploration.

Must remain strong, will weakening...

I'm moving in 24 days. There is no need to cart around an additional 3 heavy hardcovers. I can't even play a game in lord knows how long.

But, still...


UPDATE: Willpower lasted until 6 o'clock. Anyway, I can use the exercise when moving.

Burn the Rope

Via Play this Thing!:

Stay for the credits after playing You Have to Burn the Rope -- if you need help, or not, check out one of the walkthroughs.

Indie Computer Games

Used to be that I'd own a PC because that's where all the games were. Now all the big games are on consoles -- but the PC still has to be my platform because I like wargames, and they're pretty much only on here (Matrix Games has most of the selection).

But I'm also discovering a wide variety of fun Independent Games. Manifesto Games has a good selection. Play this Thing offers daily reviews to point you towards interesting stuff.

And there's an annual contest called the Independent Games Festival that has a great list of "Best of" for various years. Many of the games appear to only be sold via their own website.

I just started playing last year's winner, Aquaria -- which is a very fun arcadish, adventurish, puzzle-solving RPG -- albeit a bit chicky. Here's some video:

Wizards Who Specialize in Philosophy of Mind Conjure...

My guess is that strangething already knows about this, but the rest of the D&D folk might like to check out this bag of tricks of Stupid D&D Monsters (via ENWorld). I particularly liked the Room of Death further down the page.

See also the rabbit-duck.

Stross on Gygax, VR, and World Domination

Charles Stross has a post titled Gary Gygax, World Dictator up -- here's part of it:

Sad to say, the political landscape of the early to mid 21st century has already been designed -- by Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons.

Gary didn't realize it (D&D predates personal computing) but his somewhat addictive game transferred onto computers quite early (see also: Nethack). And then gamers demanded -- and got, as graphics horsepower arrived -- graphical versions of same. And then multi-user graphical versions of same. And then the likes of World of Warcraft, with over a million users, auction houses, the whole spectrum of social interaction, and so on.

Which leads me to the key insight that: our first commercially viable multi-user virtual reality environments have been designed (and implicitly legislated) to emulate pencil-and-paper high fantasy role playing games.

Sure, Second Life shows a pattern for Ludic environments that is non-RPG based, more user-directed -- after the pattern of LambdaMOO and similar -- but again, the LambdaMOO experiment fell out of dissatisfaction with the fantasy RPG limits that the earlier MUDs imposed on social interaction, and the MUDs were basically networked multiuser implementations of the Colossal Cave Adventure and friends, which all came back to Gary Gygax.

There's no bloody escaping it. The gamers have given rise to a monster that is ultimately going to embrace and extend the web, to the same extent that TV subsumed and replaced motion pictures. (The web will still be there -- some things are intrinsically easier to do using a two dimensional user interface and a page-based metaphor -- but the VR/AR systems will be more visible.)

I'm not sure we've reached the equivalent of Netscape's 1.0 release. New interaction mechanisms are going to come along, especially once the VR experience moves away from the desktop computer paradigm and goes mobile, using PDAs or smartphones, head-up displays, and ubiquitous location services (and speaking of the latter, it is reported that the Galileo PRN codes have been cracked). But VR will be the first medium where the primary path to commercialization will be through game-play.

If you subscribe to the theory that the structure of a language also structures the ways of thinking of its native speakers, then think about what effect the basis of the new hyper-reality will have on the future.

RPG Geekdom

I released a new game book in electronic format via RPGNow and ENWorld today.

I had entertained the notion of going into RPG publishing full-time, but that's an even more brutal business than screenwriting. Not only are pay scales low, but the frequency of doing work--under contract!--and not getting paid for it is stunningly high. And, since nobody has any money, there's typically little point in calling out the lawyers.

One of the saddest parts, is the churn rate in great game designers. The Steve Peterson responsible in part for Champions (and why I go by Steven Palmer Peterson in all my writing) is working in computers somewhere now, despite helping design the equivalent of the calculus for roleplaying games.* Aaron Allston writes novels now. The folks at Pagan Publishing are now all mainly doing video or computer games.

But terrific new designers keep popping up -- and I'm adding a few more of them to the link list at the right.

Adrian Bott -- He's been doing some work for Mongoose, and I mainly got interested in the excellent, and very non-railroady, Drow War series. If you trawl the better game shops you might also find a delicious bit of nastiness titled, The Book of Unremitting Horror, to which he contributed.

Monte Cook -- One of the few designers who I suspect could actually write RPGs for a living for the rest of his life. My current players are suffering through multiple of his books at the moment.

Bruce Cordell -- The squamous illithid overmind of psionics. Check out Hyperconsciousness for psionics pushed to where it really ought to go -- and for an example of why it's worthwhile to think more seriously about one book -- one author for RPG books. The unity of vision allows for something very interesting.

Charles Rice -- We started the RPG writing at the same time. He's written buckets of material, and his books for d20 Modern are one of the best reasons to play the game.


* While some might take this as a mere joke about the complexity of Champions, or the fact that I used to write up stuff for my Champions game during our high school calculus class -- I also mean it because such a vast number of very influential ideas came out of that system. You can see analogs for multi-powers, elemental controls, and variable power pools in many modern games. Effect-based design was something Champions pioneered, and is now practically a cliche. Even genre emulation, Champions via its wahoo knockback rules and friendly way of keeping people from getting killed too easily, can be traced back to it.

Book Prices in Dungeons & Dragons

Brad DeLong has posted an article about the rules put into place when the University of Naples was established in 1224.

Students at the university had to use their books as collateral, it seems, and if they didn't pay off their debt before they left, the books would have to stay with the university.

Professor DeLong goes on to mention:

Back in the thirteenth century, a book copy sold for the same share of national product that $14,000 is today.

Just prior to that:

At the end of the fifteenth century, a book copy sold for the same share of national productivity that $1400 is today--the equivalent relative expense to this laptop I am typing on.

The ten-fold drop in price is largely due, of course, to Gutenberg.

I always thought that putting fantasy-era RPG prices in dollar equivalents, or at least having dollar equivalents floating around, would do a great job putting things in perspective.

My Favorite Book Cover

Off to the right is my favorite book cover image ever. It's for some edition (who can keep track of them?) of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game published by Chaosium.

After I found this nice high-res image on the web I chopped out the middle bit to 800x600 and made it my desktop. Now I just stare at the screen and mumble unspeakable oaths all day.

How Writing is Like Being a Wizard in Dungeons & Dragons

Big congratulations out to Richard!

He not only received a couple option offers, but also a manager (!) via InkTip, within a few days of posting something there again for the first time in a while.

Richard has recently done well in some contests, had a short produced, and done some writing on assignment: Dog in Space. He's a terrific example of how putting in the time, i.e. constantly writing, can make something happen, even in the wilderness.

If you clicked on the "Dog in Space" link above you'll likely see a somewhat disturbing looking dog. And it certainly sounds like Richard had his doubts about that assignment as well. But he soldiered through it, made a little money, and gained some invaluable experience (and perhaps a writing credit).

*****

In Dungeons & Dragons it can be awfully tempting for a low level wizard to sacrifice two of their wizard levels to pick up something like some monk training. You get a +3 to all saves, good skills, and the always valuable evasion. Moreover, all you sacrifice for these benefits is maybe one magic missile spell and a cantrip.

And, assuming you're playing that character for a while, that'd be a terrible mistake.

Because once you hit 17th level you'll realize you traded all that off for a power word, kill or timestop.

*****

Writers are in a similar situation. As a beginning writer (either novels or screenwriting) even if that book/script does pay off, it'll likely be around a few thousand dollars. And getting that couple thousand dollars will take months of work.

Clearly, working at practically any other job for a few months will earn you a bunch more money than writing, so the rational choice would be to scrap the writing. I imagine more than a few of you have been told this repeatedly by your relatives.

But the value of that first sold book or screenplay is like the value of that first wizard level -- it makes everything you do later more valuable. Moreover, for novels, the book itself becomes more valuable as you build your career. If it's decent, even a moderately successful pro writer can earn money off it for years.

Even if what you're working on doesn't sell, it helps push you through to where you write stuff that does get published/picked up. Then, once you do establish a career, all that stuff you wrote earlier gets a second chance. Some of it won't deserve a second chance, but I'm confident that some of it will.

So, if you have some confidence in your ability to make a career at writing, and have an opportunity to trade off a little extra money now for the time you need to get an additional novel or couple scripts written, I think choosing the writing is not just a starry-eyed matter of following your dreams, but a rational long term investment.

3rd Edition Nation, 1st Edition Rules

Via Mythusmage I read about Maine resident and blogger Lance Dutson getting sued by Maine tourism advertising contractor, Warren Kremer Paino Advertising, for criticizing them and pointing out (correctly) that an advertisement they put together includes the number for a phone sex operation, and not the Maine tourism board.

Mr. Dutson is getting sued for a few million dollars it seems. Fortunately, it looks like he's going to get some help in defending against this.

Since there seems to be bi-partisan loathing for this sort of thing, and "loser pays", like in the UK, seems to be the solution, does anyone know why we don't have that here in the U.S.?

I've heard occasionally that "loser pays" is too corporate friendly, but has it actually worked out that way in the UK?

In fact, a lot of things in the U.S. feel a bit like we're still playing Brown Box Dungeons & Dragons or running Windows 3.1, while the rest of the democracies have moved on:

• no instant run offs for presidential elections creating all these unpleasant situations where you're not voting for your actual first choice
• the quaint artefact of congressional districts, even though you likely work, live, and go to school in three different ones -- honestly, it seems their entire function is to facilitate gerrymandering and promote budget deficits via pork.

750 things Mr. Welch can no longer do in a RPG

J'aime Wells, soon to escape from Rutgers Philosophy, has started up a new blog of her own. She inaugerates with an interesting post about comics expanding beyond the adolescent male demographic.

She recently sent me a link to 213 Things Skippy Can't Do -- for those who don't know, it's a list of things a soldier tried to do but got told not to since he's a soldier now and higher ranking sorts don't like to see soldiers doing anything besides cleaning stuff.

The rather mundane thing I remember not being able to do was put my hands in my uniform pockets. Not quite sure what purpose those pockets had...

RPG.net, a festering cesspool of bitter vitriol spewed about roleplaying games, has posted a likewise hilarious, albeit in-joke riddled list of 750 things Mr. Welch can no longer do in a RPG. If you've played Dungeons & Dragons and their ilk you'll recognize much of the behavior. If you haven't, the list will reinforce all your stereotypes and introduce you to a few new ones.

Dire Unsolicited Query Letter

I experimented recently with sending out snail-mail query letters. These unsolicited letters are so toxic, and strike such fear into the heart of Hollywood, that one came back having gone through the following process:

The recipient sent it, unopened, directly to the firm’s legal department. A highly paid legal office worker then placed the unopened letter, along with a standard form letter on cotton-fiber company letterhead telling me that the query hadn’t been opened due to legal mumbo-jumbo, into an 8.5 x 11 envelope. They then sent that envelope back to me—certified mail so that they would have a paper trail showing that I received my unopened query letter.

Any creature so terrifying certainly deserves a standard, d20 system, writeup:

Dire Unsolicited Query Letter

Tiny Construct

Hit Dice: 1/2 d10 (2 hp)

Initiative: +2 (+2 Dex)

Speed: 20 ft. (4 squares); flutter 20 ft. (poor); priority 2-3 days

AC: 14 (+2 Size, +2 Dex), touch 14, flat-footed 12

Base Attack/Grapple: +0/-9

Attack: Bite +1 melee (1d4-1 + 1d4 career damage)

Full Attack: Bite +1 melee (1d4-1 + 1d4 career damage)

Space/Reach: 5 ft./5 ft.

Special Attacks: Paper trail

Special Qualities: Construct traits, flammable, optional qualities

Saves: Fort +0, Ref +2, Will -5

Abilities: Str 8, Dex 15, Con —, Int —, Wis 1, Cha 10

Skills: Disguise +4

Feats: —

Environment: Any coastal

Organization: Solitary or bulk (50-300).

Challenge Rating: 2

Alignment: Desperate

Advancement: —

Level Adjustment: —

The envelope is unremarkable, save for its thinness—just thick enough to hold a single folded page. It’s addressed personally to you, but uses the long version of your name. And who the hell do you know in Leoti, KS?

The dire unsolicited query letter (DUQL, for short) is the bane of beginning agents, assistants, and development executives. It typically comes in the form of a number ten envelope bearing a single piece of paper—but may include colorful pages, letters of recommendation from someone’s creative writing teacher, perfumed paper, mock-ups of potential movie posters, a potential cast list, a potential cast member, and underwear.

When first spotted, a potential victim may make a Sense Motive check opposed by the DUQL’s Disguise check. If the victim fails, the DUQL immediately attacks.

Combat

Paper trail (Ex): The primary threat posed by a dire unsolicited query letter is that it creates a paper trail linking you to a vague idea in such a way that you, your employers, your friends, your family, and other random acquaintances may be exposed to a lawsuit for being even remotely involved in a film to which one (i.e. a lawyer) could—with a small stretch—have a description that included one of the adjectives, verbs, or nouns found in the letter.

Not opening the letter and quickly handing it back to the letter carrier, or to your firm’s highly trained strike force of legal commandos is the best way to minimize the career damage suffered.

Each successful hit by the query letter delivers 1d4 career damage, in addition to the normal damage. The career damage you’ve suffered serves as a penalty on Profession check to gain a promotion or increase your Wealth rating. Any unsuccessful Profession check for either of those purposes removes all accumulated career damage.

Flammable (Ex): It is made out of paper after all. DUQLs suffer double damage from fire.

Creature Options

Like mini-templates, gamemasters may add these options, mixing and matching as they see fit. These options modify what the DUQL can do, and may also modify the DUQL’s challenge rating.

□ To Whom It May Concern (Ex) [-1 CR]: Not addressing a particular person makes this a dead give-away. The DUQL suffers a -5 on all Disguise checks.

□ … You See, It’s A Period Drama… (Ex) [-2 CR]: It’s a brilliant and touching script that won oodles of awards… covering the tragic plight of a young peasant woman living through the Irish Potato Famine.

There’s little chance you’ll ever be involved in this sort of a film; if you are so involved, there’s little chance the writer will ever see the film; and if the writer does see the film, they won’t be able to get any money out of your now-bankrupt movie studio.

The DUQL’s attacks only hit on a natural twenty and those hit may make a Reflex save (DC 5) to avoid all damage.

□ Certified (Ex) [+2 CR]: The victim of the DUQL must sign for it—giving the screenwriter a permanent record that the letter made it past the shields.

The results of this are dire—increase the critical threat range for all attacks to 18-20 and any successful attack also deals 1d3 permanent points of Conceptual Taint. When the hapless victim gets involved in any future films they must roll 1d20 and add the total number of Conceptual Taint points they’ve suffered. If the roll beats DC 20, then the film suffers a plagiarism lawsuit.

There is no known way to remove Conceptual Taint, unless you have access to a druid of at least 7th level. On the upside, certified letters are so inherently scary that victims receive a +2 bonus to their Sense Motive check when first encountering the DUQL.

□ Priority (Ex) [+1 CR]: In addition to using the expedited speed of 2-3 days delivery time, the envelope looks more official, is larger, and more sturdy.

Increase the DUQL’s size to Small, making all normal adjustments for size. Give it a +2 Strength and -2 Dexterity. Increase the hit die to a d10 (6 hp) and grant it +1 natural armor. Due to the official look of priority mailing, the DUQL receives a +2 equipment bonus to Disguise checks.

****

Why did I sign for it?! What could I possibly have been thinking? It was a doomsday scenario. The letter would haunt me the rest of my days: “A team of vampire and werewolf supermodels must battle cybernetic terrorists from the future, bent on converting the world to their cultish religion -- IN THE PAST.” Every studio film (that makes money) includes at least one of those elements.

I considered getting killed then resurrection -- but that wouldn't work. My only hope was getting killed, then a reincarnation spell where I come back as a badger...

All text of the DUQL is designated Open Content and released under the Open Gaming License. The Open Game Content may only be Used under and in terms of this License.

How Screenwriting Is Like Magic: the Gathering

Magic: the Gathering is a card game that you play in three phases. In phase one you collect the cards you'll use by spending way too much money or beating up smaller kids at your school--much like collecting baseball cards. In phase two you construct a deck from your collection. In most games the deck must have no less than 60 cards but can have as many cards as you want. In phase three you then play the actual card game using your deck.

During the phase two part you will find yourself wanting to add all these cool cards you have--throwing as much stuff as possible into it. Due to the laws of probability being what they are, this is a bad plan. You should strive for as small a deck as legal. In essence, you've got 60 cards to put in the deck; which 60 cards would maximize your chances of winning?

In a screenplay you've got maybe 100-110 pages to tell your story. Occasionally you can get away with more, but most of the time you cannot. Moreover, unless you're writing an epic, do you really need that much more screentime than Casablanca (102 minutes) or The Maltese Falcon (101 minutes)?

Pages are the currency of screenwriting. You've got maybe 105 of them to build characters, explain the world, carry a plot, develop arcs, and throw in some scares, thrills, laughs, cries, or whatever.

So one of the decisions one has to make as a writer is how to "spend" those pages. If I'm writing an action or horror piece (which I usually am) I already know I've got a large part of my page budget devoted to action seuqences. While these will do some double duty as character development, there's only so much character development you can fit in that scene where the monster rips out 40 spleens.

This plays out in my decision about how many characters I'll include. After all, each character costs pages. So normally I try to merge characters as much as possible.

It also factors into plot complexity -- how many different things can you have going on in a movie. This is why focus is so helpful to a movie. While you can make good multi-arc films, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Magnolia, movies are seldom hurt by trimming them down to a sort of elemental purity.

Anyway, my two most recent screenplays are kind of polar opposites in this--they're both bloody horror pieces but one focuses mostly on a single character, often alone. I found this to be difficult since, with no one to bounce off of, it's a challenge to develop the character. But it's an interesting challenge so I wanted to go through with it.

The other screenplay has like 8-10 characters though, almost like a disaster film. And I wanted to give each of them a little story--which means really little, like an arc that plays out on three pages spread out over the whole film. It forces you to try to give scenes a lot of dimensions, but I'll have to see if I made it work. One advantage of having lots of characters is that you're never at a loss for what to do in the script. There's always someone you can put the camera on.

City of Heroes Update

Sung requested I update the city of Heroes information so that everyone in our group can keep some sort of track of who's online and what they're playing.

City of Heroes: we're on the Liberty Server

Steve's Heroes:
Recursive
Vesuvius

Sung's Heroes:
Fire'Lord
Fire'Storm
Lady'Blaze
Shadow'Spawn

George's Heroes:
Torrancean
RoboX
FureX
Super-boy

John's Heroes:
Captain Jimmy
Bent Space

Jerome's Heroes:
Obsidian Bane

Note: to add any of the heroes above to your CoH friends list, type in the chat window:

/friend hero name
Eg: /friend Fire'Lord



********
I'll also update my World of Warcraft information:

World of Warcraft

Eonar Server:

Steve's Characters [Horde]:
Trespass

Feathermoon Server

Steve's Characters [Alliance]:
Umbranic
Leucauge
Gipper


I mainly play Trespass since the Eonar server is easier to get on and a little less crowded, though its population is getting up there too.


*******
Finally, in the "no news means it's sinking into the Abyss" category I've still heard nothing from any of the producers or director. On the other hand, it is Hollywood and the same incomprehensible forces that can explode a project in 96 hours can rebuild it in something like that time.

In a -- perhaps unrelated -- bit of news, one of the other companies that was interested in making The Sound emailed me on Thursday. They emailed out of the blue last October as well, but, from what I understand, the business is a little gossipy so I figure there's a decent chance they've heard things.

Triple Post (3 of 3): Online Games

I've wound up actually playing two online games, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft.

I'd probably let one of them drop but, since I subscribed in large blocks in order to pay a bit less, I'm in this zone where I can still play both of them before making a decision which way to go. And, given that "The Sound" is supposed to start filming before either of those subscriptions run out, I'll possibly not feel the pressing need to save the monthly fee afterwards.

They're both great games. I slightly prefer the game play in World of Warcraft. There's an awful lot to do -- quests pay off well and you can have up to twenty at a time (I often have a stack of 15 or so, many of which are grouped in a similar location), crafting skills have you out scrounging herbs and making potions and trying to get the craft skill up, and the auction house brings Adam Smith's invisible hand to the land of make believe.

City of Heroes has a great hero building system -- complete with a wide variety of costumes. The game play feels a little more repetitive than WoW, but you get little benefits every level. Also, after not too long playing you can pick up some nice and fast movement powers; WoW feels sort of slow getting around after CoH. The chat features are also just a little more convenient. However, if you die you do get experience debt, which can make playing feel a bit more like a grind.

The best thing about City of Heroes, though, is that another of my old friends, Sung, is playing it -- along with his brother, George, and George's wife, Jessica. It's vastly more enjoyable to play these games with friends, particularly when we've all spread out since this way I get to catch up with them a bit. Sung is actively recruiting the members of our old gaming group -- so, Scott, there's just something seriously wrong with a long time Champions player like you not getting online with us.

If you happen to be picking up, or already playing either game, I'll put the server names and character names (in order of who I usually play) I use here:

City of Heroes
Liberty Server

Heroes:
Recursive
Vesuvius


World of Warcraft
Feathermoon Server

Characters:
Umbranic
Leucauge
Gipper