Pathfinder Campaign Setting

A MOMENT OF SELF-PROMOTION

Paizo is a game company operated by several people I like and respect. One of those people asked me to contribute to the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting a while ago, and I metaphorically leapt at the opportunity.

I have come to find most fantasy pastiche settings tedious these-a-days, but Pathfinder sparks. In addition, I'm part of an all-star cast of writers on this thing, and for once, I'm pleased with my work on an RPG product, instead of slightly sickened.

It goes on sale in a couple of weeks, so if you're of a gamer persuasion, look into it. It's going to be pretty great.

4th edition: The Sting of the Smalltime

As geeks, comic books and games are our Big Time. These industries are the recipients of our grail-like yearning.

But these industries are still so very small, with a correspondingly small amount of money compared to other entertainment channels.

Because these industries are so small, even though they might have the very best content talent, they don't have the best business talent. To wit: People who want to make hobby games for a living top out at Wizards of the Coast. People who want to make money for a living top out where the money is -- brokerage firms, marketing firms, insurance companies, banks.

This means that the hobby game business usually has inexperienced or experimental marketing and business talent. Even if you DO have state-of-the-art game design, you don't have the best people selling to you.

So you get a company that -- even if they have correctly identified what they need to do -- has severe difficulties delivering on it.

Enter 4th edition. Lots and lots of people have said lots of things about the new game, and if you care much, you've already read them, so I'll skip to my verdict: It's a fine game. It's a fun game. I don't love it, but I bear it no ill will.

However, the game itself is not what is interesting or lamentable about 4th edition. It's the business.

The great flaw with 4th edition D&D is that no one was particularly asking for it.

Third edition D&D was and is a serviceable game, which the market was still using and enjoying. The market was not ready for an upgrade (and unlike the Vista comparisons, many will never be ready for this particular upgrade). I predict the market will absorb 4e tolerably well. But they didn't ask for it.

Now compound this flaw with where we started. When you're primarily pushing a product on brand equity, you better have some damn good sales people out front, because the product will not sell on merit. You're selling its D&D-ness, not its betterness.*

Wizards doesn't appear to have damn good sales people, and as I said up top, they probably can't. Anybody who's really good gets called up to the majors.

So we have a boatload of ice chests in Anchorage. But the people who can sell fridges to Eskimos are already out in the field, working for GE. The ice chest manufacturers must hawk their own wares, with predictably mediocre results.



*This is not to say that they didn't try to sell it based on its betterness. The game design staff -- seemingly the vanguard of the marketing effort -- tried to convince the market of the game's betterness. But they've been unable to convince a portion of the market, and so the real force in sales comes from brand equity, i.e., "This is all the D&D there is! Buy it!" Eventually, you need to come to the sober realization that even if YOU think the game is better, mixed reception means it is not, in fact, empirically superior.

Or Something Like That

The road to hell is paved with the best laid intentions of mice and men.

Fungus Eating Radiation

I'm ready to jump on whatever ecological holocaust bandwagon drives by, because I've been trained to expect the worst. Yet, I'm also an unaggressive contrarian, which has the upside-down benefit of making me a quiet optimist. My wife doesn't understand it either.

When ecologists say that nuclear waste will pollute the Earth for 10,000 years, I think, "Really? I think nature's more resilient than that." A couple hundred years I can buy, but 10k seems like somebody did some envelope math and then issued a press release with a lot of exclamation points.

Sublime mathematical models can only tell you what you tell them. And you don't know jack to tell them about large-scale ecological consequences.

For instance, global warming: I'm ready to believe that something scary is going on, but what exactly? And is it really all that irreversible? And is it so terrible if it isn't? Maybe. But nobody knows. Nobody knows how to know.

I bring this up because Cosmos Magazine is reporting that inside the busted Chernobyl reactor, fungi are converting radiation to biomass. A reactor exploded and nuked the town in 1986. The place isn't pristine, but in only 22 years, wildlife has started the cleanup job without our help.

Among the many things that we live with every day and barely even begin to pretend to understand are fungi. For something so common, so edible, so vital to nearly every ecosystem on Earth, we don't know exactly where they will grow in the wild, or when, or how. There is historical data and best guesses. But what we don't know could fill a book...mobile. They are pretty much the garbagemen of Earth, but nobody saw this coming?

Maybe we're not so screwed after all.

Now What

This morning I woke up sort of annoyed about something at work, and thanks to the sideways way brains operate immediately after sleep, I started thinking about the scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden makes a human sacrifice.

Link to YouTube

When I was a kid, if you had asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I thought you wouldn't make fun of me, I would have told you that I wanted to write science-fiction novels.

When I was 12, I wrote 60 pages of a sci-fi story that might still exist on some unlabeled 5-1/4" floppy disc in my parents' house. I haven't seriously tried to write prose fiction since.

I've slowly, doggedly worked my way through most of the Planet Stories books that Erik sent me, and the pulpy stories of Mars, Earth, and Venus have seeped into the cracks.

A+++++++++

Man, listen, if you're ever feeling down about yourself, just go read your eBay feedback. I swear, I'm the friendliest, most communicative, best packer in the world.

My Weekend Jeopardy Category

Rhymes With Things I Forgot to Take to the Beach

$100: Worn on heads both skinny and fat.
$200: Lets you sneak peeks at all the fun lasses.
$300: A bright idea for a dumb fella.
$400: So hoopy froods won't have to cry foul.
$500: Keeps sand out of each derriere.


If my wife hadn't packed suntan lotion, that'd be the final jeopardy answer.

Still had a good time though!

Barn Door's Open

You might have noticed the slowdown last week when trying to access the site. I had an all-time high of readers -- 13 in one day! Didn't know why until I was cruising around my normal sites tonight, and found a hat tip from Bird Dog over at Maggie's Farm.

It's startling every time when people I link to wind up linking back. I've stopped trying to keep QT a secret, but I sure as hell don't advertise. I get lulled into thinking that my half-dozen readers are the only people paying attention. Even though everybody keeps telling me the Web is 2-way, I still think of it as a 1-way thing, like the phantom books or newspaper articles I imagine myself writing.

Which is goofy; it's like nailing your manifesto to a telephone pole and expecting only the people you tell about it to read.

In addition to being surprising though, it's -- ok, I admit -- gratifying to know someone else is paying attention. I like thinking I might have an unexpected positive effect on someone outside my normal influence.

Maggie's Farm posters do not appear, on the surface, to be kindred spirits. They are quick and sure with their many opinions. I am often neither, and only occasionally in agreement with them when I am. Also, they are proud Yankees, and regardless of my address, I am a Southerner at core.

Nonetheless, I like reading the Farm Report! They help me think differently over there. Any time one of the regulars deigns to brave the Mid-Atlantic, door's open, y'all. Drop on by.

July Linkdump

Things I've left open in my browser lately:

I Was a Mad Man
From Design Observer, A true-life story about a guy who burned through the ad industry, and at least partially inspired a thirtysomething character.

Aside: Thirtysomething was set in Philadelphia. Maybe worth a hometown look.

More Creative Thinking on Solar Power
Specially stained glass "increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell 'by a factor of over 40'".

Thanks to $140/barrel oil, we're finally looking at more whens and fewer ifs on solar.

Crisis of Confidence
Speaking of playing catch-up on squandered opportunities, here's a link to Jimmy Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech delivered as President in 1979 -- somehow even more relevant now than 30 years ago. If you're cynical about your politicians, maybe you could stop shooting the messengers so much.

4e D&D Tools Roundup
This list will be out of date any second now, but it's a good one so far for fan-generated 4e stuff.

Guerilla Drive-In
I don't know much about this yet, but I aim to find out.

The Book of Kell(er')s

Tim Keller has been turning up in my field of vision a lot lately.

My friend, Scott, sent me a link to an hour-long video of Tim Keller giving a talk at Google's home office about why God is more likely than not-God. He's also pushing his book, The Reason for God, and he makes a damn good case.

While his thinking is persuasive, what I found most appealing was his ability to be kind and gentle while displaying cirque-level mental agility.

The guy can think. He can think with you, and he can think with you while you're attacking him. During the Q&A portion of the talk, people came out of the audience attempting to tear down his ideas, and Keller listened to them and reasoned with them while they mocked his point.

Intelligent, educated people rarely display humility; the least wise of them actively eschew it. It's edifying to watch someone model humility while keeping pace with Google engineers. In an hour of impressive speaking, this is the part of Tim Keller that I find most fascinating.

The hour passes quickly. It was a good investment for me, maybe for you too.

Link to YouTube video.

Otyugh

A couple of weeks ago I secured rights to otyugh.com. I was amazed that a six-letter, blatantly geek-relevant url remained in the wild. So I domesticated it.

In D&D, an otyugh (seen at right) is a creature that lives in garbage, and attacks creatures that come near. At work, I keep a little rubber otyugh under my monitor, totemically sifting through my deletions, hoarding lost, valuable phrases.

Quickthinking.net lay for years before I tied it to this blog. I hope to use otyugh.com sooner that that. I've got an idea about what to do, but I'm open to suggestions.