Still Cold

Well. Both shoulders are a bit sore at the moment. I had my tetanus jab on Friday, in a late-afternoon rush of vaccinations. I'd arranged for an appointment for the kids and I after school, but like an idiot, I forgot because I was busily preparing for a dinner-visit from Elder Son's schoolteacher. Anyway, the doctor's surgery actually rang me about fifteen minutes after the appointed hour, so I threw the kids back into the car and we zoomed down the hill, where they were promptly shot full of flu-vax and hepatitis A vax. I didn't need the hep A, since I had a dose of the real thing way back when, but my tetanus immunity was likely on the wane, so I got that instead. I also neglected the flu-vax because time was short - but I caught up with it today, just to even things up.

The needles they use these days are fine, delicate things. I barely feel them going through the skin. But intra-muscular dosages still ache, even though my shoulder muscles are now large enough that a half-mil of fluid doesn't really constitute much of an insult. Mind you, I suspect I shouldn't have spent an hour or so on Saturday working with a shovel, helping out the cub-scouts and their new garden project. Not that it really did me any damage, but that tetanus-jabbed shoulder didn't feel too good afterwards.

Nor did my left knee. Time was it wouldn't have bothered me to spend half an hour on the back of a tilt-tray truck tipped up to fifty or sixty degrees, scraping heavy clay soil down into a raised garden bed. Now, though -- well. Apparently my left knee is no longer comfortable with supporting me at some berserk freak of an angle off vertical, while I'm simultaneously trying to shovel large quantities of earth downslope. In the rain.

Mmm. Admittedly, it wasn't much rain. But it was cold. And wet. And damn, but that clay soil gets sticky fast. I didn't feel at all guilty taking Saturday afternoon on the quiet at home with the kids after that.

The Friday night dinner went well. Elder Son's teacher this year is a wonder. He's having the best year of his school life so far - well regarded by his classmates, his cello lessons accepted, his use of the computer to do most of his writing work accepted, his imagination and his love of words and narrative not just accepted but encouraged. He actually looks forward to school these days, and it's completely impossible for me to thank his teacher enough, especially after the hard times last year. Anyway, Nat and I decided that instead of the 'parent-teacher meeting' we were supposed to have prior to the release of school reports, we'd just invite the teacher to dinner.

Happily, Natalie managed to be there even though she was on-call. (She's on-call a whole lot lately, what with the lead-up to holidaying in Borneo). We had a medley of steamed Chinese-style dumplings, followed by Vietnamese spring rolls, and finally, a tray of rich chocolate-ganache tartlets topped with home-made marshmallow. Personally, I wouldn't have stuck the marshmallows on top, but Younger Son was very pleased with the marshmallows he and I made, and he wanted to show them off. Okay, fine. They didn't really hurt the dessert anyhow. And it was a nice evening all round.

Hmm. Thinking more about those needles. I've been wondering how much of my lack of pain from the jabs had to do with the modern needles and vaccines and techniques, and how much was simply age and lack of sensitivity. But I watched both boys get their jabs. It was pretty well done: doctor on one side, nurse on the other, hit both shoulders at once and its all over. Both boys were pretty nervous - and well they ought to be. The Mau-mau did not cover herself with glory, getting one of her jabs first, before the boys had theirs. In fact, she screamed blue murder, cried, howled, struggled... when it came time for her second jab, Natalie actually held her in a complete wrap-up so she couldn't move, but she screamed just as violently as before.

She is, however, a notorious 'performer'.

Anyway, the boys were nervous, yes. But when the needles hit flesh, I could literally see them both relaxing, at least a little. They were obviously not enjoying what was going on, but clearly the event was well within their tolerance, and there were no waterworks whatsoever. This from a boy of ten and a boy of seven - and within minutes, it was clear both of them had pretty much forgotten the whole incident. So I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that yes, they've made some decent advances in hypodermic technology and techniques since I was ten years old or less...

...but the Mau-mau sniffed and sobbed all the way home. Sitting behind me in the car, she moaned to herself until Younger Son cracked and said: "It wasn't that bad. I had both mine at once!"

To which she replied, in a sad, tiny little voice laden and oozing with purest Hollywood pathos: "I just couldn't... take it."

At which point, dear reader, I admit that I asked her to be quiet until we got home. Because I couldn't take it any more either!

Sunday, Natalie's sojourn on-call came to an end. And with the winter rain closing in for the day in a big way, much was made of Natalie's most recent purchase for the Wii: Lego Harry Potter.

We've got a few of the Lego titles for the Wii, and the kids seem to enjoy them. I took a look at Lego Star Wars, and thought it was a bit of a laugh, but not really engaging enough to keep my attention. And I've watched some Lego Batman over the boys' shoulders, and seen nothing that really caught my eye. But I have to admit that this time, the Lego/Wii combination has pulled off a blinder. The sense of humour, the puzzles, the complex, meandering storyline -- but most of all, the massive array of Stuff To Do And Explore has managed to interest even me.

The game's a hoot. I even like the cut-scenes. Yes, they're long, but they do such a very good job of conveying crucial story elements from the movie while still rendering them in animated-lego-toy sort of fashion that it's impossible not to get a giggle out of them. Watching Lego Snape sneer and growl wordlessly at Lego Harry Potter; seeing the Lego Dursley family flee a rain of little invitations to Hogwarts... yeah, it's cool. Plus it does a nice line in shared play, so the boys can kick along together without too much drama, or you can even hand a remote to the Mau-mau, if you're prepared to put up with her version of gaming...which can be tricky.

Meanwhile: I've been working around house and yard, though I'm a bit hampered by the knee at the moment. (I really should be at sword training tonight, but there's just no way the goddam knee will put up with lunges or even deep bends.) And trying to catch up on writing, and laundry, and cleaning. The usual run of stuff. Plus I've got a couple random friends in hospital at the moment, for various injuries and illnesses: been dropping by to visit, taking them the odd DVD movie, etc. It all adds up.

Making preparations for the Mau-mau's upcoming fifth birthday, too. We'll probably be on holiday when that happens, but we'll have to make a fuss regardless. Seeing as how she spends much of her time playing at being a kitten or a cat, I've managed to locate an inexpensive cat-costume online. It arrived the other day, and it looks the goods. It's made by the same company (I think) that made the zip-up spotty-dog costume that Elder Son totally loved when he was about three, so hopefully it should provide the same quality of wear and usage. Of course, a full-body, zip-up, black, plushy kitty-cat costume isn't going to be very practical for the Mau-mau in Borneo, is it? On the other hand, I can't imagine her not wanting to wear it... so maybe I just better leave it here and give it to her when we get back. Otherwise she'll probably give herself a full on case of heatstroke.

I've also tracked down a source of plain cotton tee-shirts, and ordered a pink one in her size. It should be here pretty soon. I'll mess around with some fabric paints, and produce a sort of cartoon of a Tinkerbell-type fairy, with the Mau-mau's head/face, and I'll paint her new red boots (thank you, Rowena!) into place on the fairy's feet. Then I'll caption the whole thing with the old Black Sabbath song: "Fairies Wear Boots". Reckon the Mau-mau will like it, and the obscure pop-culture reference will make me happy too.

The kids are getting excited by the prospect of the trip, now. Younger Son's concept of time is still pretty elastic; he's not exactly certain how long it is until we leave, so he gets all wide-eyed at every reference to an aeroplane, and has to be reassured that we're not actually leaving tomorrow, no. Great Cthulhu... I hope he's a little more restrained than he was the last time we took a family holiday. That was New Zealand, back at the end of 2007, when he was just turning four, and he was a mad little handful. I've still got a photo, somewhere, of him taking a leak on "The Party Tree" in Hobbiton (from the movie.) I didn't even realise he was doing it until it was too late to do more than take a photo... he just slipped away from us in the group, and next thing I know, there he is, watering possibly the most recognisable tree in the world at that time. Yeesh.

And of course, in Borneo we'll be visiting orangutans. If that doesn't send him spiralling skyward, I don't know what will...

...okay. It's late. I have work to do. Gotta roll. But the good news is: we'll be back in time for the Federal election, so, you know, Our Votes Will Count.

Sh'yeah. Had a bit of a laugh reading the local paper this morning, checking up on the candidates for our electorate. Labor is fielding an ex-hospital administrator, with "strong local football club and surf-life-saving club ties." Meanwhile, the Liberals are offering us an ex TV-newsreader described as a 'prominent local personality.'

And the Greens? Pfeh. You'd almost think they were taking this seriously: their candidate has a background in social welfare and general management, and was the campaign co-ordinator for the party at their last election outing. So... experience and relevance both? How can that possibly compete with footy and surf life-saving ties? Or awesome TV-newsreader gravitas?

Those Greens. They'll just never learn, will they?

Cold, Wet And Wintry.

The boys are off for the weekend on a scouty excursion thing. They're overnighting down in Hobart, in a whirl of rollerblading, ice-skating, rock-wall climbing and museums. Doubtless there will be singing, too. Campfires I rather doubt: it's pissing down outside, and has been for much of the day.

Natalie's on call, so the Mau-mau and I had to make the best of it. I took her up to the top of Mt Barrow this morning, in case we could find snow. There was a bit of it, yes -- muddy and melting, but enough to delight a nearly five-year-old girl. And it was snowing on us at the time, which was kind of cool. No, strike that: icy fucking cold.

We took the dog as well, just for hoots. He bounded out of the car on the mountain top, and lolloped his way straight to the nearest puddle. The water was crystalline, and I imagine it was no more than a degree above zero -- because he lolloped out again a lot faster than he went in, with the most remarkable look of canine confusion on his face.

Next he stuck his nose in a snowbank, and left it there for a while. Lots of sniffing. And presumably, lots of doggy sinus-freezing too. Because immediately he finished that, he took a quick pee and then sprinted back to the car and started trying to find a way in. The wimp! (And he threw up in the back of the car on the way home, too.)

The Mau-Mau and I didn't last much longer, truth to tell. The wind was blowing a fierce gale, cold enough to suck the breath from your lungs. We had our hats and gloves and jackets and boots and all the other bits, but really -- ten minutes was about all we could handle. That was okay: the Mau-Mau thought it was marvellous.

I got some shopping done, and did some DIY stuff in the garage... jeez.

You know, one of the big problems with intelligence is that one tends to see it as an all-purpose tool. You look at a hammer and a chisel and a chunk of pine, and you think: hell, it can't be that difficult, can it? Tradies do it all the time. What have they got that I don't, except maybe the butt-crack?

After ten years in the Rural Dad role, I can do a lot of basic stuff. Plastering, for example. I can do that. And simplistic carpentry. And tree-felling. And welding. And fence-erecting, and plumbing, and... yeah. But it's never pretty. It works. It lasts. But it's not attractive.

Sometimes I think there are people who are just born with this stuff. My dad, for example. He doesn't just build the odd chunk of furniture. Oh no. He manages full-on art, even when he's just making a chair out of an old barrel. And he could do that shit back when I was, like, five years old, so he'd have been maybe twenty-seven or so. No way he had time to learn all that stuff, so, you know - how'd he do it?

It's enough to provoke a certain feeling of envy at times, and leads to odd conversations with visiting tradesmen, viz: "Ahh, yeah. So that's a Froonburger's Spanner Joint, eh? Remarkable. Just remarkable. Say -- did I happen to mention there are at least three distinct points on the human body that a trained practitioner can strike to engender certain death? Of course, two of 'em are just obvious, but the knack of stopping the heart by disrupting the pacemaker mechanism with a thoracic strike is actually quite tricky to master..."

You know. Just so the guy with all that tool cred (and the alarming butt-crack) knows that the reason I can't get my goddam uprights perfectly vertical is that I was busy learning how to kill people with my bare hands, not 'cause I'm just fundamentally incompetent.

Anyway. I built the ladder. It's well anchored. It's solid. It's even reasonably neat and vertical. It isn't pretty, but it works, and it will last.

The Mau-Mau and I made marshmallows together. Vanilla ones, yeah: and a big FORK KEW to Cadburys and Nestle and Allens and every other prick bastard who makes those toxic bags of pink, yellow, orange and white squishy chemistry down at the supermarket. I've got real goddam marshmallows now: nothin' but vanilla, sugar, and gelatine, and you can just bite me because tomorrow I'm going to make heart-attack hot chocolate with proper marshmallowy melty goodness.

The Mau-Mau was impressed too. But that was because she got to lick the eggbeaters afterwards. And even better, she got herself some quality Godzilla time when we were finished.

Got some writing done: five hundred words on a new project, a few hundred on the libretto, a thousand or so on the novel. That's all good too. So: now it's time for bed, more or less.

I want to finish with one final request: Mel Gibson -- have you applied for US citizenship yet? If not, would you hurry up and do so? I'm hoping that eventually everyone will forget you ever had anything to do with Australia... with a little luck, we can dump Braveheart onto Youtube, and make the poor Scots take the blame for you and everything that comes out of your racist, sexist, nutjob mouth.

Uhhh, What?

Oh, yeah. Thursday.

Been a busy one. They had a pupil-free day, Monday... school-wise, that is. I agreed to have another session of Shattered Worlds, because I figured I could do it down at Amazing Neighbour Anna's place, and take the Mau-Mau too. That way I'd have all the kids out of the house for about five hours, and Natalie could enjoy her day off. A bit.

Things went a little loco, as always. Instead of four lads playing this time, I had... umm... seven. Three of whom hadn't even heard of this 'RPG' stuff before - until Anna's lads and mine talked about it at school.

I regard it as a small triumph that I kept the attention of seven boys between the ages of eleven and seven completely focused on battling imaginary goblins for five straight hours. Cue amazed parents in all directions, yes.

It's working well, though. The noisy lad who likes to be at the centre of things is, perforce, learning to wait his turn and co-operate. And Elder Son, who never ever thinks about anything before he does it, has now had two near-disasters, and is beginning to consider the actions of his priest of Thor in a new light. The young boy who is frequently drowned out by his older brother and tends to keep out of the limelight wound up leading a rag-tag peasant band in a last-ditch defense of the courtyard as the goblins swarmed the walls... very nice all round.

And yes: Natalie got most of a day to herself. Not that it helped a lot. She's a bit down in the dumps at the moment. She's not good with the Dark Days of Winter -- whinges about being cold, doesn't deal with the short days and lack of light, dislikes the grey and rainy stuff. There's plenty of other things hassling her at the moment too - but winter doesn't help.

Tuesday, theoretically, I had some time. I wrote. And I put up some insulation. And I did a frockload of laundry, and shopping, and cooking, and some gardening, and I slow-roasted a pork shoulder for dinner: crispy, crackly outside, moist and pull-apart tender on the inside. Yay me. Sorry, pig.

Then I dashed into town and watched shitty Japanese movies with the Cool Shite mob. I made them watch Lair Of The White Worm a few weeks ago. I'm not sure they've forgiven me yet...

Wednesday involved more insulation and laundry and writing. And then there was the evening of martial arts. I've got one student old enough and advanced enough to be doing some of the nastier throws, with the really shitty break-falls that spin you in the air and drop you from waist or shoulder height. And it would be okay if there was somebody else around he could throw - but the other kid his size and skill level has something called chondromalacia, and we're being gentle with him for a while.

So yeah, yours truly is being used as the crash-test-dummy in teaching some of the uglier throws and falls. I wouldn't mind, even at my age, except that the mats we use are dense foam puzzle-mats without a lot of softness, and frankly, after fifteen or twenty falls out of hane-goshi, I feel like a sack of shit. So. I'm going to go shopping and see if I can't find a few gym mats - the kind with velcro down the side to join 'em together. We'll only need four or so: just enough to make a decently padded space so I can survive these goddam throws. Hane-goshi. Tai-otoshi. Tomoe-nagi. Kata-guruma. Oh - and o-soto-guruma: what a total bitch that one is.

Where's that take me? Today, Thursday. I was going to sword training this evening, but Natalie is down, and she's on call. I'd have had to get sitters or visitors or something to look after the kids, and I just didn't think it was fair to Natalie. So after a bit of private sword training and then the hour-and-a-half with the schoolkids in the afternoon, I brought the kids home, and we just cleaned up, dealt with the rat cages, went through the musical instrument practice, and had dinner. Oh - and I managed to find a couple of Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies online. I put 'Eegah' on for the boys: they thought it was hilarious. Unfortunately, Natalie came home about halfway through... and apparently didn't find Richard Kiel's "giant caveman" impression nearly as hilarious as the rest of us.

Ah well. You get that. She liked dinner -- polenta-crusted baked salmon with rice noodles and salad with sushi dressing. That usually buys me a bit of cred.

Meanwhile...

I'm increasingly pissed off with the shift to the fossilized, egregiously stupid right wing of politics in this country. Gillard has the helm now, but she hasn't got the message. We didn't hate Kruddy 'cos he was a boring dipshit - even though he was. We hated him because he sold himself as an agent of change: change from that syphilitic pustule John Howard and the politics of pathetic cowardice. And when push came to shove, Kruddy was an even bigger coward than Howard. Howard played on the electorate's most shameful fears to get his ugly little ass elected, but Kruddy didn't have the stones to move us back towards sanity, no matter how much we begged him. He kept on being afraid: afraid of refugees, afraid of the Internet, afraid of nudity, afraid of beer, afraid of Christian disapproval, afraid of gay marriage, blah blah blah.

Kruddy lost favour because he was a nasty little coward, too paralysed by fear of losing popularity to actually DO any of the things he'd promised. He gave us some money. He made a couple of apologies. He had a shot at taxing resource uses, yeah. Whoopee. But ultimately he just kept playing the politics of fear.

And Aunty Julia?

Same shit. As ever. For fox sake: Pauline Hanson has just come out and publically approved Gillard's shiny 'new' East Timor proposal. And that odious prick Conroy is still sucking the teat of the God Squad, whining about Eevul Kiddie Porn and planning to shut down all the bits of the Internet that frighten him.

More fear.

When did Australians become such craven cowards? Didn't this country get started by a bunch of crims in leaky wooden boats? Didn't our present PM arrive from a sad little third world nation beset by the traumas of war? What happened to the iconic, legendary courage of the Diggers? Why are we terrified by a handful of sad, desperate people trying to flee some of the ugliest places on the planet?

This is pathetic.

So, all this goes through my head, along with a glass of rum and lime. And then I hop on the phone, and I call an old friend who works as a TV producer, and I pitch an idea for a TV doco series. Each episode would be maybe forty minutes. And each one, very simply, would hang on interviews with people from despised demographics. You'd maybe take a few quotes from the John Howard/Bogan crowd, talking about why they hate these people, and you'd intersperse those quotes with real-life interviews with prominent, valuable members of Australian society from that group.

The first show would be called 'Bludgers'. And we'd get shit-heels like Wilson Tuckey to talk about the eevuls of the Dole. Meanwhile, we'd interview pretty much every writer, artist and musician in Australia to show that half the reason they could do their thing was because they had the Unemployment system to fall back on. (Don't take my word for it, folks. Ask any working creative type you know. If they've never been on the dole... you're talking to a miracle.)

And businesspeople. And innovators, yeah. Because in Australia, the JobSearch payments are a safety net. You can actually take that nifty idea of yours and have a go, because if you fail, you don't lose your medical insurance, your house, your credit rating and your life. If you fail, you can roll with the punch, live the poor life for a while, and try again.

What else would I do? Oh, in a flash I'd do a doco called "Fags", and I'd be interviewing prominent gay men. Bob Brown, yep. Sportsmen - Ian Roberts. Artists, musicians, businessfolk. Performers. There's heaps. And of course, if you do an episode on "Fags" you've got to do "Dykes". And "Coons". And "Reffoes", and "Pakkies" and "Wogs", and -- pick your pejorative, go with the flow.

So that was what I pitched to my friend the TV guy. But he's good at saying no, so now I'm posting it hereabouts. Don't get me wrong: TV guy was impressed. But he pointed out that currently, the TV people are so goddam conservative -- even at SBS and ABC -- that he didn't think it would stand a chance.

That sucks. Because my friend the TV guy is right: it's a fucking good idea. And somebody ought to run with it. Real people, people with brains and a little empathy and courage: we should be doing this. We should take those stupid, fuck-awful pejorative terms that John Howard's pathetically spineless demographic likes to use in private, and we should make them public, and we should put real people and faces to them. We should be saying loudly: yeah, you can use these words, you can live in fear of these people, but really all you're doing is labelling yourself as a pathetic, cowardly, craven-arsed little nobody without half the guts and brains and integrity of the people you're trying to insult.

Because I, personally, am beyond simply being tired of these useless, noisy, bullying little toads. I don't believe for a fraction of an instant that 'the majority' of Australia is really so pathetic and cowardly. Sure: I've seen racists and dickheads. Every country's got 'em. But mostly, when I look closely, the real racist, misogynist, homophobic arsewipes are actually few and far between. It's just that they're arrogant and they're loud, and they're being curried by politicians who think these loud, arrogant, loathesome fools represent a larger group.

The funny thing is that most of the people who mutter agreement with these idiots are simply ignorant. They piss and whinge about refugees and queue-jumpers and fags and all the rest - but they've never actually met the people they're talking about. All they know is that someone - some loud, arrogant, spineless prick - has offered up 'refugees' and 'queue-jumpers' and 'fags'

as a convenient, simple reason to explain why things aren't all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. And instead of looking for real answers, the ignorant mob is happy to bay and howl at the straw man they're offered. And yet, in my experience, when you introduce the merely ignorant to real, live examples of their supposed enemies... they rather quickly discover their errors.

Truly? I don't think the vast majority of Australians are such cowards and racists. I think they've been offered easy answers and scapegoats by opportunist pricks like John Howard. I believe that if we spent some time and effort on showing that majority of people the true nature of the groups they habitually revile, we might just see some changes in the nature of pubic debate.

But that wouldn't make easy votes for an upcoming federal election, would it? And so, yet another politician talks 'change', and offers up the same old goddam fearmongering.

We deserve better. And we've got to ask for it, because if we don't, the moral cowardice of our so-called 'leadership' is eventually going to turn us, as a society, into the pathetic little slaves of fear that they assume we are.

Game Mechanics

Okay. Shattered Worlds will be a skill-based system — because I farkin’ hate the rigidity of character classes. Also there will be no nonsense about ‘alignments’. Characters will do as they see fit, according to their nature, whether they be players or the lowliest spear-carrying non-player. Good old D’n’D achieved its position by being the first modern RPG, not the best.

In a skill-based system, actions taken by characters are assessed for success or failure by a dice roll against their ability in a relevant skill. You want to shoot an arrow accurately? You need archery skill. Want to pick a lock? You’d better have some training there, yeah?

When it comes to using the skills, the GM assigns the task facing the character a level of difficulty. The character is then required to make a dice roll which matches the level of difficulty assigned to the task.

This process — this dice-rolling mechanism — is central to the game. You need to have it pretty thoroughly nailed down before you can go doing much of anything else by way of game design. In general, there’s two ways of handling it. The first is pretty simple: you go with a sort of linear scale based around something like a d20 or a d100 roll, and base the success roll against the character’s skill.

This is the road taken by a lot of well-known and popular RPGs. It’s the DnD method, for instance — insofar as DnD actually uses a skill system, that is. Fantasy Games Unlimited used a d20-based system to good effect: your character would develop levels in whichever skill, and when you had to test it, you might score a few modifiers on the roll depending on circumstances and how the Game Master felt, but ultimately, you had a Basic Chance of Success which was somewhere from 1 to 20.

For a long time, I worked with a system based on d100, but with a few twists. Players never knew exactly what their skill level was. I used to keep track of their skills myself. All they knew was a vague verbal description - anywhere from ‘abysmal’ to ‘master’, with ‘average’ falling somewhere in the middle.

The reason I chose such an obfuscatory tactic was, very simply, that the linear-scale systems are quickly and easily ‘cracked’ by savvy gamers. You know your character’s abilities down to the last decimal place; you throw the dice, and you know instantly the outcome.

I wanted more room to move. ‘Fudge factor’, if you will. I wanted to be able to keep characters alive if it suited the story, and I wanted to be able to do it without blatant, obvious intervention. I called it the ‘Hidden Hand’ system, and it worked pretty well, on the whole. But there was a lot of book-keeping, wasn’t there? A typical character might have fifteen different skills at various levels of expertise. Six players in a group: that’s ninety separate numbers to keep track of, session after session, game after game. Sure, you can cut corners with computers and good record-keeping, but... ouch, y’know?

D20 systems never really caught my interest at all, by the way. With only twenty possible outcomes... well, if you incorporate the idea of ‘critical’ successes and failures in your game (which is always fun) then you’re looking at a game process wherein one in every ten attempts to do something is either a critical success or a critical failure. So unless you start designing complex ‘critical’ tables (I’m lookin’ at YOU, RuneQuest) or throw in a secondary ‘intensity’ roll, pretty much any gaming session is going to be filled with a lot of seriously wild outcomes.

I’ve driven a car for nearly thirty years. Can't say yet I’ve had a ‘critical failure’. Possibly one occasion I’d call a ‘critical success’. So — one in ten? That’s a fucked-up game mechanism right there, if you're trying to simulate something that 'feels real'. (Or at least has that sense of verisimilitude you get in all the best stories.)

The alternative to the linear-scale systems is a sort of grab-a-handful method. In these systems, the necessary score for success gets higher as the tasks get more difficult. The twist is that as your character gets more skilled, you get to throw more dice. The old ‘Ghostbusters’ game used to work that way, and there are quite a few modern games that work in similar fashion.

I’ve never done much work with it before, but this is the mechanism I’m using for Shattered Worlds. The core die is 1d10, and levels of difficulty are based on the number 6. So: if you’re faced with a Level 1 task, you need to roll a 6 or better to succeed. Since you get to roll 1d10 for every level you have in the appropriate skill, it’s pretty easy to carry out a Level 1 task by the time you have 2 skill levels. In fact, if you do the math, rolling 2d10 (as you would with 2 skill levels) means you have a 90% chance of rolling a total of 6 or more. By the time you’re rolling 3d10 (for 3 skill levels) the probability of success jumps to just under 99%

The really interesting thing about this system is that the nature of the bell-shape curve you get from all that dice-rolling brings about some funky probability shifts as things get more difficult. Take the situation above: level 1 problem, versus level 2 skill — 90% success; level 1 problem, level 3 skill — 98.9% success. Now: let’s consider a level 5 problem, shall we?

Since our success number changes by 6 per level, you need to throw 5 x 6 = 30 to beat a level 5 task. If your skill level is 5, you have a 50% chance of success — exactly the same as a character of skill level 1 encountering a level 1 problem. However, if you have a level 6 skill, you’re throwing 6d10. So... what are the odds of success now?

Since I’ve had a good stiff rum drink while I’ve been typing this, I can’t tell you precisely. I can, however, tell you that it’s distinctly less than 90%. And if your skill is level 7, your chance of success is considerably less than 98.9%

In fact, the more challenging the problem gets, the more the probabilistic ‘playing field’ levels out. So: while a character with skill level 4 should be pretty bloody confident about being able to throw a 6 or better to beat a level 1 task, a character with skill level 8 doesn’t have anything like the same degree of confidence about beating a level 5 task.

I like this. I like it a great deal.

I like it because it solves a major problem for me in terms of magic. As a storyteller, I don’t like supremely powerful magical types because it’s just too easy for them to fuck up your plotlines. How do you pose interesting problems for characters who can solve ‘most any difficulties by dropping an asteroid on them? But: if you grade magic spells by power, and raise the task level appropriate for powerful spells — well, even quite powerful magicians stand a reasonable chance of failure, and failed magic is never, ever a good thing. Thus, by virtue of the central game mechanism, you create wizard types who are reluctant to hurl around seriously overpowering stuff because it’s dangerous, dammit! They could get hurt!

I like it also because it means while there’s a big difference between a highly trained practitioner and a noob, the differences get less important the higher up you get. Two characters battling, one with a skill level of 8 and one of 7 — they’re almost even. On the other hand, between a 2 and a 1 there’s quite a big difference, probabilistically speaking. That’s useful. It gives new characters incentive to stay away from really dangerous types until they’ve got some mojo of their own. It means you can always provide a challenge even for highly skilled characters just by creating a few skilled enemies. And it means that the highly skilled sorts will sneer at base-level problems — but will never have reason to be overconfident of their ability to handle things that are close to their own level.

There remains only the question of critical successes and failures. Personally, I like ‘em. I like the added fillip they hand the storyline. I enjoy the element of improvisation it forces on me as game master, and I really enjoy watching the players when they roll a critical: they tend to get awfully excited, which is fun.

Therefore: to the central mechanism of rolling numbers of d10 equal to your skill level, I’m adding a familiar element: 1d20. I’m calling this the ‘Kaboom! die’. A roll of 1 is bad. A roll of 20 is good.

Obviously, this still looks like a ‘ 1 in 10 is critical’ mechanism. But remember: it’s decoupled from the basic success/failure system. It’s an enhancer, not a dictator. If you don’t like the odds, you could change it to a d100 roll for the Kaboom effects, for example. However, I’m keeping it relatively simple. Roll a success plus a 20 on the Kaboom die: that’s a true critical success, with all the shiny special effects. Roll a failure plus a 20 on the Kaboom die: lucky you! You can gather up all your d10 and roll again, adding the new total to the old. In this way, characters of low skill have a chance of succeeding at really difficult tasks. Roll a success and a 1 on the Kaboom die: minimal success - no special effects or extras of any sort. Roll a failure and a 1 on the Kaboom die: true critical failure, with all the disastrous side effects and vile trappings.

So — with the ‘critical’ outcome decoupled from success or failure, we no longer have that 1-in-10 nonsense. And with the bell-curve system provided by throwing numbers of dice, rather than throwing against a linear structure, we get a subtle bias that evens things out towards the upper levels, making the game more interesting and challenging for high-level types. Of course, it does mean that highly skilled characters can pretty much wade through the lowly types... but really, that’s the kind of effect we’re after, isn’t it?

That’s my take on things. Anybody with a better head for probability: if you can kick holes in what I’m doing here, I’d be grateful.

Sigh...

Iceland's boss just married her female partner. And here?

Gillard's just shown the limits of her tolerance.

Julia Gillard's Personal Opinion on Gay Marriage

How do we get these politicians who are permanently stuck in the 1950s?

A Tip Of The Hat

It should be obvious to most by now that I do not like politicians. With very few exceptions, I find them to be lying, self-serving, fundamentally dishonest, manipulative, untrustworthy, contemptible little people, obsessed and consumed by the game of 'power'. (It is a sad but accurate truism, in my experience, that the people who most desire the power to rule are among those least fit to do so -- and anyone with the sense and integrity to potentially rule well also has the sense to stay the hell away from the job.)

Nevertheless, sometimes one of 'em will say or do something which hints at, perhaps, a touch of truth, or possibly even a degree of honesty. And since hope springs eternal and I believe in positive reinforcement, I will usually make the effort to acknowledge such things.

Our shiny new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has already disappointed me by not taking Stephen Conroy and making him Minister for Licking Public Toilet Floors in Kings Cross - a job for which he may not actually be qualified, I admit, but which he certainly deserves. I understand the Ms Gillard has a delicate line to walk for the moment. She's in power as a result of a nasty little coup, and no matter how much Kruddy-boy earned his newfound political obscurity (and he most certainly did earn it, yes) there will no doubt be people who look askance at her for taking power at his expense. Some of those people have to be placated. Conroy is part of the price.

I know this. But I remain disappointed, because Conroy is a poisonously stupid human being, whose ridiculously 19th century outlook bids fair to completely cripple our chance at 21st century communications and democracy. Still, there's an election coming up. Perhaps we can convince Conroy's constituents to wake up and smell the effluent.

In the meantime, I am honour-bound to acknowledge that today, Julia Gillard managed to earn a small degree of respect from me. Questioned by the media regarding her religious affiliations, she very clearly explained that she does not believe in a God.

Unmarried but living with a long-time partner, first female Prime Minister - she's already on tenuous territory, in theory. And now, here she is outing herself as an atheist. Yes, fine, she's claimed the moral high ground by professing her tolerance for the faith and beliefs of others -- but it doesn't change the fact that she has quietly but firmly broken away from an image and an idea that few world leaders can escape. (Gough Whitlam did say he wasn't Christian, of course. But he said he was a 'fellow traveller', whatever the hell that means.)

It could be argued that if she'd claimed to be Christian, she would have been found out. But these days, what difference would that make? All she'd have to do would be to claim the others were lying to 'smear her and her faith'. In fact, it would have been easy to turn it around and make faith an issue, what with Tony Dicktogs being something of a notorious fanatic.

She didn't do that. She just asserted her personal stance, and left it at that.

That's not going to earn her a lot of friends in the Jebus camp. But hopefully, the smarter ones will recognise her statement of truth for what it is. And the dumb-ass ones were probably all going to vote Conservative anyhow.

As for me -- well. I haven't changed my mind about politicians in general. I've known too many. And Julia Gillard is still a politician. But as of today, at least, I will give her credit for more courage and integrity than most of the politicians out there. That doesn't make her a decent human being yet, no. But it brings her closer than anyone we've had in government for a very long time.

Birthday Celebrations

Urgh. I'm very tired.

It was one of those things that just seems to happen. We planned a simple tenth birthday party for Elder Son, themed around 'Science Fiction', with a bit of a retro kick. And here's a shot that'll give you the idea:

From left to right: Younger Son is the Robot Sidekick. The Mau-Mau was utterly delighted to be painted green as the Small But Intensely Annoying Alien. (Yes. She loved that bit the most of all.) Elder Son, the star of the show as it's his party, is resplendent in the silver helmet and lightning-bolt T-shirt of Rick Steele, Space Hero. And on the end there is The Time Traveller, who has come forward from the Victorian era - or some equally moustachioed point in history.

It should have been simple. I had a couple of games sketched out. We had the snacks laid on. And we planned to finish up with a really retro SF film on TV so we could all point and laugh at the dopey 1950s stuff.

Well. First, my oldest friend in the world turned up with his wife. They came all the way down from Far North Queensland, where he and I grew up, and they stayed with us Friday and Saturday night. Which of course meant they were here Saturday afternoon and evening, yep.

Now, my old friend Kev is from a big family, and his various brothers and sisters have done themselves proud in the brood stakes, so he gets along well with kids. Very well, actually. That was handy, certainly, because it meant I could slough the Robot Sidekick suit onto him: he and Younger Son spent a couple of cheerful hours in the morning with spray paint and cardboard boxes and scissors and duct tape and sparkly pipecleaners - and Kev's wife Sue kicked in with glue and pictures cut out of various catalogues and magazines.

The real problem was more in the guest list. Y'see, it happens that most of Elder Son's invitees were part of multi-kid families. Families we get along with. Families whose kids play with our kids. And so, instead of inviting, say, TWO kids of roughly his own age from these families, it was only proper that Elder Son invite a total of seven. And then there were the singletons from elsewhere.

So: ten kids who know each other well and play together frequently. (The Mau-Mau's two bestest friends were included in that group. Just to enhance the potential for kid-based disaster.) Plus parents who also drop in on each other a lot. Plus a couple of old and dear friends whose sense of humour closely parallels my own.

In the end, it was barely controlled chaos.

The kids rocketed around on their own for a while. When they showed signs of boredom, I broke out the padded lightsabre/swords, and introduced 'em to the game I called Use The Force, Luke.

In this game, you have two teams of two competing at a time. You could have more teams, but I only had two padded safety swords. One player is the Padawan, who wears a blindfold and carries a padded sword. The Padawan's job is to whomp five kinds of crap out of the opposing Padawan, who likewise has blindfold and padded sword. Each Padawan has their very own... uhh... fuck it, can't remember the Lucas-speak, so I just called 'em "Obi-wan". The job of an Obi-wan is to shout directions to his particular Padawan, so the Padawan can zero in on the opposition.

Of course, that implies that the 'Obi-wan' types are capable of thinking about left versus right for someone else... and that the Padawan players are prepared to listen. What really happened was that the two Padawans would stagger around, waving their padded swords until they hit something. Usually a bystander, but occasionally a tree, a dog, or even a house. At this point, the Padawan would flail away violently while everyone else laughed themselves stupid. Eventually, the two Padawans would finally (generally by accident) blunder into one another, and thwack away until one was declared dead.

Seriously: I nearly choked when a young Darth Maul-painted lad staggered too far sideways, and thwacked the Robot Sidekick. Because, of course, poor Younger Son in his Robot costume had bugger-all peripheral vision, and therefore no real idea of why he was suddenly being clobbered with a padded stick. Young Darth Maul was not to be put off by that, though: he just kept pounding away until somebody managed to drag him off and point him at the proper opposition...

The sun went over the mountain about then, and the temperature plummeted. Natalie started a small cookfire. Meanwhile, the boys decided that even if the game was officially over, they didn't want to play any other sissy party games. Not even with the official Frisbee UFOs I'd bought for the party. Nope. What they wanted to do was go on beating the snot out of each other with padded swords, but this time, without blindfolds.

Okay.

That went on until Natalie's cookfire got going, whereupon everyone charged off to singe marshmallows and wieners. Of course, now that Elder Son is ten, he and some of his older friends are capable of making off-colour 'wiener' jokes that are actually kind of funny, so when you've got a dozen kids and half a dozen adults jostling for position around a small fire, trying to toast wieners...

Actually, the moment that nearly killed me came when I was headed back into the house. One of the younger kids who was quite innocent of all this 'wiener-joke' stuff bumped into me. And he had a complaint. You see, one of the other kids -- his older brother, actually -- had rather maltreated him during the cookfire. The quote went like this: "He whacked my wiener off, and it fell in the fire!"

That really didn't help me with the beer I was trying to drink. When I managed to breathe again, I consoled the youngster, pointing out that we'd have no more whacking of other people's wieners at this party, because that sort of thing is just weird...

The temperature just kept plunging, though. We ducked inside, and turned on "This Island Earth" for laughs. I made a lot of popcorn, and we watched an appropriately square-jawed and deep-voiced scientist get kidnapped by aliens who closely resembled older, taller Oompa-Loompas. These 'Metalunans' had the immaculately forced curls of the Gene Wilder Oompa-Loompas, except their hair was white, not green. But they were tanned to almost the same shade of orange. They also had dangerously epic foreheads.

The movie was satisfyingly crap, yes.

At the end, some youngsters left. But some remained, as did parents, and friends. So we decided to extend festivities to a dinner party. Very nice, yes. By this time, the remaining kids had worked out that Kev was a total sucker, so the four boys were continually jumping on him, trying to clobber him with whatever weapons they could grab. I offered him all the support he could expect from an old friend: I got him beer. Sometimes.

Finally, once we'd finished dinner and cake and stuff, Natalie dragged out the Wii and "Lego Rockstar". And oh, dear. Did I mention my friend Kev is one of the most thoroughly tone-deaf and rhythmically deprived people I have ever heard of?

Let's put it this way: when he got the microphone and began singing, pretty much everyone stopped to stare. Keep in mind that this is 'Lego Rockstar', which is kid-friendly and pretty noncompetitive. And that the difficulty was set on 'Easy'.

Given those pieces of information, you will understand my assessment of Kev's musical talents more thoroughly when I tell you that at the end of his session, he had scored a total of 3%.

Yep. Three percent.

Never seen the like of it before or since. I'm planning to make him a T-shirt that says "Mister Three Percent", just as a reminder.

Anyway. We drank and sang and thumped on drum-simulators and twanged toy guitar-analogues and had a damned good time for a whole lot longer than the kids should really have been awake.

Never mind. Elder Son had himself a fine tenth birthday party. Various parents had a damned good evening. Kev and Sue -- who have now gone on to Cradle Mountain, where they will be freezing their tropical little arses off right now -- seemed to enjoy their visit too... and once I get a solid night of sleep, I expect I'll feel a lot better as well!