Patrick Weekes's page

Thanks -- expect any future stories involving Caelthras and the swordsman to involve sleep-debt and nursing problems.

And hey, the toys aren't safe for newborns? Guess Elastigirl will have to live on my writing desk for awhile.... :)

One of the best parts of having a two-day old son is being able to look indignant and say, "What? No, sweetie, these are for the little dude. I'm not really into action figures any more. These will go up in HIS room."

Are you going to satellite, or simplifying by going to antenna only?

If you've got Enterprise, you've got UPN, which means you've got "Veronica Mars" and "Kevin Hill", both of which made it onto my Tivo list.

"Veronica Mars" is a show that they're having a tough time categorizing (which explains why it's having ratings trouble, although it has consistently improved each week). Essentially, think Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only instead of teen-drama-horror/fantasy, it's teen-drama-mystery, with our lead a high-school girl who used to be in the in-crowd but was ostracized after her father (the former sheriff) dared to accuse the richest man in town of murder. Now her father is a private investigator, and Veronica helps him out while using her mad Nancy-Drew-skillz to help her friends on the side. Just got picked up for a full season.

"Kevin Hill" is a very well-written drama (although it's not as serious as it sounds -- more like Ally McBeal before Ally McBeal went over the edge into self-parody) about a cool lawyer who inherits a year-old baby girl when his cousin dies. The show is kind of about him figuring out this whole baby thing while dealing with weekly court cases. Not an action-thriller or vampire-hunting masterpiece, but it's well-written and has good acting. (And here I studiously ignore my wife's enthusiastic helpful comments of "And I could watch Taye Diggs read from a telephone book for a full hour and not get bored!")

I've also heard great things about two comedies, "Scrubs" and "Arrested Development", although I don't watch the former (it's on opposite Veronica Mars, and has always been opposite something I want to watch more) and have just started watching the latter.

Yeah, we got "Son of the Mask" instead of Ep III. That's the first time in a long while I've heard booing during a trailer.

Looking back on it after a good night's sleep, what impresses me so much is their ability to blend the stories so seamlessly, so that the kids get an action story, the teenagers get a self-confidence story, and the adults get a family or mid-life-crisis story, and none of the stories trip over each other. They all work.

And yeah, loved the Dr. No stuff -- and glad Frozone didn't get the villain label. :)

Just got home from seeing it. Man, what a wonderful movie.

I'll gush more in the morning, but wow... that movie was awesome. They told a superhero story and a midlife crisis story and a family-comes-together story, and they did all three really really well. I pretty much take Pixar's beauteous creations for granted, but their storytelling ALWAYS catches me by surprise. I forget just how good they are at that stuff. You could tell how much they loved the superhero genre -- just loved it, and embraced it, and went full-geek on it with wild grins the whole time.

Great piece in Amazing Stories, of course, too, which didn't hurt my expectations going in... :)

I'm currently reading Caleb Carr's "Angel of Darkness", the sequel to the on-the-New-York-Times-Bestseller-List-for-a-year "Alienist", which is the mystery set in 1890's New York.

Very cool stuff -- as good a job at capturing the feel and flavor of the city as, say, China Mieville was in Perdido Street Station. Of course, China was making his stuff up, but I can't honestly say whether that makes it harder or easier. Likely a bit of btoh.

It was also a different read for me because I'm used to reading whodunnits -- most of my wife's mystery reads are whodunnits. In this case, not having a cast of likely suspects sitting around waiting for you to guess the right one gave it a different feel.

Anyway -- I'm sure others here have read it, too, but just to reiterate the "All genres are fun" statement, I'm likin' the mystery.

"This could be any of the afore mentioned possibilities in either thread including singing "Here we are! Born to be kings we're the....""

You know, I know it's dumb, but I still get goosebumps reading that. I know. I'm shallow and easily manipulated. I can deal with that.

"A similar effect allows him to inspire folks to move silently (once again using any number of bardic music options)."

I thought, but am not sure, that there was a line in there about the GM being free to limit this use if it doesn't make any sense. For example, on a Move Silently check, or a Bluff check if you're not quietly playing the background music at a social function. I recall there being an OotS joke about that, in fact. But that's a nitpick.

"1. Why would anyone complete/do more than a round's worth of inspiring (courage)? Most fights only last about six rounds. The bard could always go "Good job!" and get another five rounds. "

Definitely. While other classes can benefit from a good knowledge of the game, the bard is a class that pretty much requires that knowledge. There's a time to keep singing for several rounds, and there's a time to stop singing and use your voice-activated magical items, spells, and so forth.

The bardic music bit is nice because it lets you decide the length. If you want to stop and start piling on the other bardsongs (hitting someone with greatness and heroics at the same time), you can do that. If you need to use a spell -- or just call out something only you know -- then you can do that, too. But if it's a legion of ogres led by iron golems and pit fiends, and you think the fight is gonna go longer than six rounds, then you can keep that song up all day if you want to.

"2. Why would anyone ever carry an instrument? It's like taking more than one level of Ranger in 3.0."

Forced to agree in large part here. I really like the fact that some magical instruments require ranks to play, so the bard can't just pick up the Lyre of Blasting if he's been inspiring everyone with epic poetry. Beyond the magical instrument notion, and, uh, roleplaying the desire to play an instrument, I got nothin'. I usually give my bard a few ranks in an instrument and a lot of ranks in something purely spoken -- this lets me play an instrument for flavor text or if I ever find a magic version of that one, but I can primarily get away with shouting inspirationally in fights.

Only other thing to note: a mastercraft instrument can give you a bonus on your Perform check, which could at some point be important (although not for most bardic abilities, which require that you have ranks, not that you make a perform check).

"3. Inspiration tends to work on large crowds of fans rather than people you hang out with."

I don't see this as broken. If I want to inspire courage in a bunch of commoners who are about to be attacked by orcs, those guys are my allies -- and thus, I can give them the benefit as long as I keep playing.

Actually, if I were an absurdly powerful bard (20th level) and were the only hero in a town that was about to be attacked by Orcs, then Inspire Courage would be pretty fun. I'd be giving every commoner who could hear me a +4 to hit. For a commoner, that +4 bonus is a heck of a lot more inspiring, relatively speaking, than it would be for the rest of my 20th-level party. For them +4 is relatively paltry as bonuses go. It doesn't hurt, but it's nothing outlandish. For the commoner, that +4 is huuuuuge. So I still buy this -- it doesn't likely come up in game very often, but it can work.

"The rules do not support a whole lot of choice for the bard when it comes to inspiration. If the bard doesn't make with the music he will hear about it from the rest of the party. Am I right?"

I figure it depends. Sometimes yeah. Other times, I hear the party look over and say, "Just shut up. We'll deal with this," which is their polite way of telling the party bard to save his valuable uses for more critical battles.

"So as a bard (read support class) it is your duty to support/inspire your group to feats of courage. That is going to get old quick unless you can come up with something inventive to do new each time."

My players vary their flavor text. Sometimes it's "I feint high, then unload with a low slash, stab, and spinning hack to his ankles!", and sometimes it's "Full-round attack." Why should the bard be any different? Back in the big campaign, the party bard would sometimes come up with a good title, "I play the song of King Haloran, who fought against evil undead with a sword of blinding light -- and then I draw my flaming sword as a move-equivalent action." And other times, yeah, he'd just say, "Inspire courage." It depends on how far the camera is zoomed in at that point, and how much people want or need flavor text right then.

Vic, you're a lifesaver. I'll check my Tivo and reset.

See, but fundamentally, you're applying your own flavor, saying, "That flavor makes no sense," and using that to judge the bard. For what it's worth, I agree with you. :)

Of course, I've also been inspired by having something loud playing on the radio while I'm doing bag-work or shadowboxing, and I've been inspired by a coach's pep-talk. The only difference between that and the bard is that I don't have you telling me what kind of music I was listening to or what my coach said, and why therefore it was stupid of me to feel inspired by that stuff.

I mean, yeah, if I was listening to "Don't it make my brown eyes blue", then I was kinda lame for getting inspired to keep my intensity up and beat the heck out of that bag. I give you that. But that wasn't what I was listening to. And you don't get to decide what my bard sounds like.

Given the level of historical accuracy in Dungeons & Dragons, I'm fully justified in making my bard sound like the Queen's "Princes of the Universe" if I have a bunch of Highlander fans for buddies and decide that's a cool effect -- because it's not just him playing. It's a limited-uses-per-day magical ability. Or I can just as easily say, "Yeah, it sounds like a flute, but to people who've grown up with flute music, this is the fluting equivalent of someone totally rocking out to 'Princes of the Universe', so act like you're hearing the equivalent of that."

What, you're going to tell me that holding up a cross and saying Hail Marys is stupid because skeletons don't have eyes and probably don't come from a monotheistic society that even had a Virgin Mary in the first place, and then use that logic to decide that turning undead is also broken? Because that's what turning undead is, right? Cross, Hail Marys? Come on, who holds up a cross for six full seconds when vampires and zombies are coming towards them? How stupid is that?

You're trapped in flavor text you don't like. Applying this same logic to other classes and abilities would also make them sound pretty stupid. If you don't like the bard, that's fine. You don't have to like the bard. It's not a law. But I think you would benefit from an honest assessment of your reasons for not liking the bard -- which seem to be "it sounds dumb using built-in assumptions I have", and those assumptions don't have to be written in stone. I mean, I agree -- YOUR version of the bard DOES sound pretty dumb. I wouldn't play YOUR version of the bard. MY version of the bard, however, makes for a fun evening.

No offense intended, sincerely. There are classes I don't like, for reasons about as good as your reasons for not liking the bard. They're mechanically good but just don't do it for me, and I can come up with lots of reasons that all ultimately boil down to "Because of my ingrained assumptions about them."

Hey, Forbidden Planet was based on "The Tempest", yes? I could see Abrams doing a modern-day interpretation complete with some new spins on Ariel and Caliban, and a mad scientist or magician who caused the plane crash in order to take revenge upon one of the passengers for a wrong done unto him years ago...

And, of course, the hot naive daughter who, knowing Abrams, turns out to be a military-grade sniper specialist and taijitsu expert.

Of course, I personally am getting increasingly hypothetical, since my brilliant local ABC affiliate decided to do a last-minute tweak to the schedule, and my Tivo faithfully recorded the appropriate time and day for Lost, only to give me "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy". Stupid presidential debates...

Just me, I guess. :)

Read the second one over the last few nights, and loved it as well. Now that she's determined to write a full series out of it, I'm impressed by the worldbuilding she's working in. Fun mix of classic tropes and new twists. I highly recommend it.

If I recall correctly, I stopped halfway through "Spine of the World" when I realized that I wasn't being entertained. "The Crystal Shard" ain't Shakespeare, but it's got some beautiful and fast-paced fight scenes that showed a real love of the characters. Reading "Spine of the World", I ended up feeling like I was watching a moody drama when I'd signed up to watch an action flick.

Glad to hear that his latest stuff has recaptured the old magic!

Have you considered using a username other than Patrick?

-Other Patrick :)

I play other d20 or effectively d20 games. Right now, I'm GMing a game that I've described roughly as "swashbuckling musketeer-era Babylon-5-politicking fantasy, set in a floating city and using Mutants & Masterminds for the rules". I mix this game up with a d20 Modern game that we call "Not the X-Files" -- homebrewed boogeymen that the team (a paranormal crimes division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs) can never really prove exist, that kinda good stuff.

I don't play a lot of other stuff, usually because I'm either writing or doing real-life work. :) I did get a massive kick out of Knights of the Old Republic, though.

My group is blessed with a number of intelligent and sarcastic people:

"How about I go first, and you rush in and save me when something horrible happens."
--party bard, answering a question about party order while entering a dangerous room

"It looks like the party bard was here two or three days ago, he was pregnant, and he has pups. No, wait, that's a badger."
--DM, after the party ranger blew a tracking check

"If you try to kill a hydra by chopping off its head, it won't work, 'cause it will just grow back two heads. So what you do is use a double-barrelled shotgun and shoot it in the heart and cut off the flow of blood to its brain so it dies of lack of oxygen."
--A gaming buddy's five-year-old son (and likely future gamer)

"What's the Disable Device DC on an Iron Golem?"
--The party's extremely optimistic rogue

"Shping" became one of our multi-use phrases. It's primarily a verb, and it means, "Use the Wand of Identify upon". As in, "Dude, that armor is glowing and spiky and has dragons enameled all over it. You should totally shping it!"

"Naked dwarves are considered vermin, right?"
--Party's female elven wizard

Player: Wait. Did you just say, "The FIRST demon"?
DM: (shifty-eyed) You worry too much.

Unattributed:

"Trying to come up with Dungeons and Dragons-themed parade floats is...harder than it sounds."
"Wait, blue dragons are what, again? Lightning? $@#!" --after a successful Shocking Grasp
"I'm NOT the closest person to the Pit Fiend, okay? I'm not!"

Interesting points. Now that I think about it that way, you're right. The bard is useful, but his bardsong abilities don't really map well to a lot of the fiction out there. They actually map better to history -- the drummer or piper marching along with the American revolutionaries whose spirited song keeps morale up and helps people keep their timing during the batttles, for example.

From fantasy fiction, off the top of my head, the closest thing I see is the minstrel. In fantasy fiction, the minstrel rarely sings or even shouts encouragement during battle. His songs are almost entirely done around the campfire or during the journey. This is big for morale -- a lot of times, he's described as raising people's spirits or keeping them going. In D&D terms, this would be something like a small but long-lasting morale boost to attacks or saves or something -- a bardsong that takes an hour or so of mostly continuous playing to activate, but which lasts all day thereafter. From a team perspective, that's cool, but it'd be truly dull to play as a player, unless I had much better other abilities. "Yeah, I'm a rogue, except that I can't sneak attack, I occasionally cast spells, and I give people a +1 on all attacks and saves as long as they listen to me around the campfire."

On the other hand, I can see the minstrel shouting something heroic at the beginning of the battle -- and your comment about it taking six full seconds isn't quite accurate, since he's still got a move action. He can draw his sword and shout, "To arms, to arms! Let your blades ring true, sons of Mishal Tirac!" And if he's beyond first level, he can do that while moving his normal movement rate. Fantasy fiction is actually full of that sort of thing -- when ninjas pounce upon the heroes, there's one guy who shouts something while drawing his sword, one guy who immediately launches a flurry of arrows at the bad guys (an archer with quick draw), and one guy who charges forward and immediately attacks. From a dramatic perspective, drawing your sword, pointing at the enemy, and shouting is perfectly viable.

So actually, now that I think about it, it works from a game perspective -- a boost that takes a round to activate but lasts for a long time, so it's good in any fight that is going to last more than one round -- and it also works from a dramatic perspective. The only place where it doesn't work is where you take the flavor of his abilities and apply gaming standards to them.

When you think about it, how often in fantasy fiction to people stop and pray to their gods for six full seconds at the beginning of a nasty fight while arrows are flying at your friends and monsters are charging? This logic would make "Protection from Evil" a lousy fit for D&D, except that it doesn't really take six seconds, and it's not JUST stopping to pray to one's god. But flavorwise, you don't make it sound like you're dropping to your knees and ignoring the incoming peril. You flavor it as raising your warhammer and shouting, "Ghaeldir, lord of battle, let my strikes ring true!" in the ancient language of your deity's choice.

I'm not sure I agree -- although I'm a huge OotS fan.

From a logistics perspective, OotS is:

- A pretty large comic and
- A comic that relies upon a continuing storyline

If OotS moves to Dragon, how does that work? Does Rich stop doing it online and move to only doing it once per month? I like 2 per week much more than 1 per month. Does Rich take it offline but put a whole bunch of them in an issue of Dragon? That's going to require a lot of pages, given the sizes of his comics, or you're going to have to shrink things down a lot -- and the visuals are an important part of the presentation. Does Rich leave them up on his website and then put selected standalones up in Dragon? That's possible, but then there's the risk of people complaining about paying for their Dragon magazine and having some of its pages taken up with stuff they can get for free on the web.

These problems are by no means insurmountable, but as somebody who creates a large newsletter/small magazine every few months for my nonprofit, I can tell you that laying out something that was designed for a different format (figuring out how to show something on the page when it was designed for the Web) creates a lot of hassles at times.

Like I said, though -- I love OotS. I'd love to see them make it work somehow. Or I'd love for them to bring Rich in with some other project -- something that's designed for Dragon specifically but that has the same humor that makes OotS so wonderful.

Chalk me up in the "Would love to see GiantITP in Dragon" line, unless of course that means that OotS can't get updated as often as a result. (I don't think I've ever laughed out loud at "stab" used as a sound effect before yesterday.)

I'm torn with fiction appearing in Dragon. I'd read it, but then, I'm pretty massively in the minority -- it's almost always "What we want less of" in the polls I've seen. And now that Paizo has other magazines dedicated to fiction, I wouldn't be surprised, or even really bummed, if Dragon restricted its fiction to special occasions, like a big-name gaming writer doing a short story in conjunction with a big release of a new product or something.

That said, I'd still read the fiction whenever it came out, so it's not like I'm against it. :)

Rather than say exactly what I said before, I'd like to discuss the mechanics themselves, stripped of flavor.

Courage, Competence, Greatness, Heroics: The bard has the ability to give people morale bonuses to hit and damage at low levels, competence bonuses to skill checks at early mid levels, competence bonuses to attack and Fort saves (and hit points) at mid levels, and a morale bonus to AC and saves at high levels. Mechanically, the bard gets these abilities often enough to make them useful, and the abilities, while not awe-inspiring, are good enough that other classes can concentrate on things other than buffing with their spells.

The bard's suggestion ability is extremely useful provided that the campaign is right. In a political intrigue campaign, it's fantastic. In a dungeon hack, it's limited.

Countersong: Limited enough to almost be flavor-text. I don't see this one come up very often unless I deliberately write something in as a DM to make the bard use this.

Fascinate: Useful in campaigns when the DM hasn't got nothing but rooms full of immediately hostile monsters. Yeah, in some campaigns, this isn't useful. In a campaign in which all the opponents are undead, Clerics are more powerful than rogues. In the average campaign, though, I'd rank Fascinate as decent. Not fantastic, but decent.

Freedom: A great way to remove some effects without burning valuable spell slots in other casters -- provided that you've got a minute to spend. This makes it a very useful spell out of combat. If you've got a campaign where casters might ever run out of spells and where bad guys use spell-like abilities on a regular basis, this ability is really helpful.

Spells: Good as utility spells. Better at buffing people than delivering damage. The bard is easily the weakest Caster Level == Class Level caster out there, but he's not really meant to compete with the party wizard or cleric in spellcasting. The wizard and cleric have 2 skill points per level and generally lackluster class skills.

Skills: Rockin'. Very very rockin'. Enough flexibility to allow a lot of different character concepts, and enough skill points to let you be good at a lot of stuff.

Lore: Bardic lore is, in my opinion, wonderful -- because it gives the DM a great chance to give out information when people don't have ranks in the appropriate knowledge skill. While this is great for DMs, and a good DM can make it very useful for the party, it's not exactly a stunner of a cool thing for the party bard. This ability gets much cooler if the DM plans enough to write down information on cards and then hands them to the bard's player, so that the bard's player can give the party the information himself. Saying, "Yes, you know that..." and then explaining everything as the DM doesn't make the bard's player look cooler, even if it's the bard who knew that information and got it for the party.

General offensive ability: Not wonderful. The bard can get himself to the point where he can hit once per round (buff spells, bardic performances on himself, etc), but he'll never be a big damage disher like the rogue (who is essentially the bard, combat-wise, with sneak attack). This means that the bard is better served by waiting for good opportunities to hit than trying to rush into combat and help out from the front. A bard with a bow who sings and readies actions to fire at spellcasters can help out a ton. He's a precision attacker, not a damage-disher. Both are useful.

General defensive ability: The bard is problematic here. He usually wants the equipment that would go to either the party ranger or the party spellcaster, so he's either got a lousy AC or a good AC and half the party's armor/rings/bracers. Again, the bard isn't meant to be a front-row fighter.

What he can do that nobody else can: The bard is the best buffer in the game, hands down, based on the number of times per day that he can do it and the length of time he can keep it going. The bard also fulfills the important party role of utility man. A Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, and Rogue are a decent 4-person party. If you have a 5th player, the best roles for him are utility roles, roles that cross traditional class-duty barriers. Rangers (bit of fighter, bit of rogue, bit of druid), Monks (bit of fighter, bit of rogue, massively defensive), and Bards (bit of every class) are the best options for this Utility Player slot. The bard can help the traditional party of four by buffing and assisting in combat, handling the social skills to give the rogue a chance to focus on traps or other skill areas, and round out spellcasting areas that the Wizard and Cleric don't have.

Where he stinks: A campaign with little social-skill use and a lot of combat, especially if the party has a chance to rest regularly -- meaning that casters are almost always running on full, and the bard isn't needed.

Where he rocks: A roleplaying-heavy or social-skill heavy game. Unpredictable games, where the party isn't sure what's going to happen on a daily basis -- maybe today we're in tense negotiations, but then there's fighting, and then there's going to be some exploration and skill use, and then... that's when the bard rocks.

In short: Take the rogue, lose the coolest offensive power, and gain some spells and utility buff abilities. In some campaigns, that's a lousy trade. In some campaigns, it's a great trade. It always depends.

I'm hurt by all the hatin' for the Bard, which is one of my favorite classes. (Bard and Ranger... and I liked 'em BEFORE 3.5 hopped up the skill points).

From the sound of it, what people don't like here is the flavor-text. And that's just silly. You can play a bard whose performance style is Trash Talk if you want. You can play it as an inspirational speech -- don't TELL me that Henry V's "Once more unto the breach" speech, delivered at a bloody yell while waving a sword around, isn't inspiring.

What you're sort of doing by this "Nope, they have a lap-harp and sing about rainbows and unicorns" mentality is allowing the Wizard, Cleric, and Fighter to be the kickass modern-day fantasy incarnations that make them cool, while shoving the bard into the goofy old-days incarnation. You do that, it's no wonder the bard isn't fun to play.

But mechanically, if you really have trouble with a character class that can give all his buddies a +1 to attacks and damage (+2 at 8th, +3 at 14th...) for AS LONG AS HE KEEPS PERFORMING, then you're not really examining all the options. Sure, it's not the most glamorous job in the world, sitting in the back row while plinking the bad guys with arrows and giving the front-row people a bonus to hit and damage, also freeing up the Cleric from having to use some of his spell slots for buffs -- but c'mon. As long as I keep performing -- and every round after the first is free, except that I don't get to use verbal components or verbal command words -- you get a +1, or more at higher levels. That's not good?

I don't play my bards as goofy poets unless I want to. I played one who talked like a football cornerback (having heard them miked on ESPN a few times). "What have they got? WHAT have they got? C'mon, man, they got NOTHIN'. You gonna let that ugly scaly thing hit you? You gonna LET him do that? I DON'T THINK SO. Hey, scaly thing! Give your mama my best -- I know I always do! THAT'S what I'm talkin' about!"

No lap-harps for me, man.

What's always impressed me about Gaiman was that he could do the deep intense brooding symbolic stuff one minute, and then segue smoothly into a perfectly captured deadpan-delivery line the next -- something that wasn't out and out hilarious, but was just so perfectly indicative of the character of the speaker that it made you smile.

Offhand, I still remember (sans spoilers) the protagonist of American Gods having his soul judged, and the line made about the feather. Silly, throwaway line, but it perfectly established the character of the speaker.

(Vague enough to avoid spoilers, I'm hoping...)

For want of a nail... if I'd known a few days ago I wouldn't have deleted it. Sorry.

I think I too often fall victim to genre snobbery. I don't THINK of myself as a mystery reader, but when my wife is done with her latest Julie Smith novel, she passes it over to me and I read it. As a result, I read more mysteries than I think I do, but I tend to read more female-protagonist mysteries, since that's what my wife likes -- Sue Grafton, Julie Smith, etc.

And apparently watching "CSI" with her and reading these has paid off in terms of my ability to follow tropes and catch the out-of-place element. I bought one mystery in the airport, seeing good reviews and an illustrious sales record. On page 39, I turned to her and said, "I just figured out who the murderer is." On page 320, it was revealed who the murderer was, and I woke my wife up in her airline seat by shouting, "Duh!"

Not a BAD mystery, by any stretch -- I mean, I love watching "Monk", which often tells you who the killer is right at the beginning, and in some of Julie Smith's books, the reader knows who the perp is pretty early on. This one was just much less surprising than it thought it was.

I should probably go read those masters of yours... :)

Recently had a chance to read Kristen Britain's first book, which I'm remembering now as "Green Rider", which is probably close but not quite right. I really enjoyed it a lot, mostly because it did NOT do something that just bugs the heck out of me in a lot of other fiction. It had a heroine who felt as real as most epic-fantasy heroes.

There's sort of more texture to that statement than might initially be apparent. One of my writer buddies writes primarily gender-themed fiction, almost always with strong, gritty, violent heroines, and it's sort of spoiled me for a lot of traditional fantasy. Regardless of historical accuracy (and there's more than one version of history, anyway), I'm a product of the modern age, and I like my fictional heroines to kick butt. Too many fantasy series, many of which have many other good qualities, lose me by giving me a heroine who wanders around in a gauzy dress doing plot-convenient magic while everyone else gets to swing swords and kill stuff. Or perhaps she just wanders through the book getting rescued by one strong man after another. The women I know aren't like this. My mom isn't like this. My wife isn't like this. So why would I want to read about women like this?

(Note: This is my personal opinion, and it's a hot button for me. As I said, it threw me out of novels that, in many other ways, I considered quite good -- so I don't imagine that this is a problem for a lot of other people. I'm also trying not to consider Cinderella-fantasy, in which the young heroine is unappreciated but uses magic or some other gift and eventually wins recognition by the handsome powerful guy -- because that's not epic fantasy. That's Cinderella-fantasy, in which a lot of the stuff I just complained about is good and right and perfectly appropriate.)

Kristen Britain does, I think, a great job of making a heroine who feels about as real as the average epic-fantasy hero. At one point, I got grumpy, thinking, "She's letting these magical friends of hers do most of the heavy lifting -- how empowering is this for a girl if she's getting help from fairies and eagles and ghosts?" And then I remembered how much help Garion got from the voice in his head, or how much help Rand gets from the Dragon in his head, and so on. I realized that I'd been sort of thinking in a double-standard -- it's perfectly fine for the young fantasy hero to get help from mentor-figures and spirits, but the heroines should do everything themselves.

So I got over that, and then I enjoyed the heck out of the novel. Her hero is a girl, and it's not a big female empowerment thing, it's just what it is. There are enough female warriors, generals, and spies in the story to make it clear that in this fantasy world, women are allowed to do anything the guys do, and they don't even do it with a "Wow, look at them do it all themselves" double standard.

Beyond that, the magic is fun, the characters are appropriately interesting and engaging, and I liked the fight scenes a bunch (I'm sort of a fight-scene snob). If you enjoy epic fantasy, I'd give this a try.

Good points on both ends. One thing I'd add:

A D&D movie should be different from a fantasy movie. Fantasy movies, generally speaking, are about individual heroes who get some spear-carriers to accomplish small tasks, provide comic relief, or look good in tights. (I think RotK did a good job of showing us two movies at the same time, for what it's worth.) D&D is not about that.

D&D is about teamwork, teamwork, and teamwork. It's about a group of people who are equals. The wizard can lay down some serious smack, right up until an ogre hits him -- unless the fighter is there holding off that ogre so that the wizard gets the big spell off. Modeling a D&D movie off the usual tropes of fantasy movies, and then trying to paste the D&D feel onto it, is probably not going to work. Silly as it might sound at first, the ideal movie-type to model the D&D movie on would be...

...The sports movie.

Take any of the good football or baseball movies that involve a team coming from behind to win the big game (even if the big game is really "not losing all their games" or "proving that they have what it takes to compete as equals". Sure, they have a lead -- the quarterback, pitcher, center, whatever. But it's all about the team. The wide receiver who learns to keep his ego in check for the team... the lineman who vows to protect his quarterback or make holes for the runner... the running back who gets called in every time it's 3rd-and-short and the team needs a few critical yards... the kicker who gets no respect until it's time for him to make the game-winning field goal...

Replace quarterback with wizard, running back with rogue, lineman with fighter or barbarian, and kicker with cleric, and you've got yourself a good D&D movie. A team that comes together against all odds to get it done, when nobody thinks they can. "Alright, Dex, I'm extending the range on my hold person -- when that warlock gets paralyzed, you WILL be in position to knock him out. Mace, I need you to keep the ogre off me! Grungor, Blackleaf needs help with those goblin warriors -- can you get in there to open up a hole? Okay, critical hit on three! One, two, three CRITICAL HIT!"

Silly, yes, but I dunno. Might be worth a thought.

Yeah, me too. Saw the second half tonight, after forgetting to Tivo it on Wednesday (Tivo'd the opener, but forgot to get the season pass). It's on the season pass list now. I know from Alias that there are times when I'm gonna be disappointed in the eventual resolution (or lack thereof, in some cases) of a J.J. Ambrams mystery plot, but man, he knows how to control the flow of information to the viewer just perfectly. Good suspense at just about every commercial break, wonderful tension, and good surprises already. I was completley wrong on who the criminal was (avoiding spoilers as much as possible), and I love the idea of gradually revealing the mystery through repeating the crash scene from different points of view.

What really interested me in the first D&D movie was the wealth of opportunity that was so completely squandered in so many ways. D&D offers several particular tropes that are good for movies, and several that are bad for movies. For example, as a movie viewer, I wouldn't mind seeing a movie where a character runs out of spells for the day, but I don't want to watch a movie that is slavishly devoted to making sure that the wizard character never casts more than his allotment of spells. It's good as long as it's dramatic and interesting. So in that area, I'd want to see a middle ground.

D&D monsters are great on the big screen -- and they have so much flavor already built into them -- again, making them dramatically appropriate to the same degree that they're dramatically appropriate in the game. Mind Flayers should be sneaky and evil and telepathically dangerous, even if that means giving them abilities (in the movie) that they don't have in the game. It should be exciting. It should be interesting.

In the first movie, they had spellcasting, and they had monsters... and both of them kind of went wrong. The spellcasting was irrelevant, for the most part, which is just silly -- don't make a D&D movie with only one spellcaster, who loses her bag of magic powder for most of the movie and doesn't actually get to cast any spells. And the beholders... I mean, I know, this is a massive nitpick, but my wife, NOT A GAMER, was watching this, and she went, "Wait, THOSE are beholders? In YOUR game, beholders are scary and dangerous, and the guys go, 'Oh, s____' if they see one. And the movie treats them like guard dogs!" If my non-gaming wife knew that this was a bad idea, what happened in the creative department over there? That was kind of the whole spirit of the movie right there in a nutshell.

Overall, I left the D&D movie feeling like somebody had a really fun movie idea that used some fun tropes and didn't take itself too seriously -- and then a bunch of other writers got ahold of it and changed things without paying attention to what it did to the overall story, until the movie was about one character instead of a team.

Nevertheless, if the next movie brings people in, that can only be a good thing. D&D is a game is getting more mature in some ways as the average age of gamers increases, but we need to keep bringing in the young people to ensure that the game stays around -- and that it keeps getting printed and marketed. If that means making a movie that faithfully represents the kind of gaming I enjoyed about 15 years ago, then cool -- get the kids with some whiz-bang stuff.

-Patrick

I think I have to fall into the other category -- I don't loathe Enterprise with every fiber of my being, but after a promising first season, it fell off my watch list in season two and, when I occasionally watched it in season three, I really wasn't wowed. This is all just personal opinion, mind you -- I like shows many other people loathe, and I try to avoid "dislike because of snobbery" as much as possible.

For me, the big issue ended up being what I perceived as the blandness. Kirk was always a bit of a wild card, and he could crack a joke or go in with phasers blasting. Picard had the calm reserve and a strong Shakespearian depth beneath. Sisko got to emote more than Picard did, and I really enjoyed DS:9 (while feeling like I had to defend it) for something that was in the Trek universe but different. Voyager didn't do it for me once they brought Seven into the picture -- most of the episodes felt too easy, and it felt like the writers shied away from giving Janeway any personality to pin on her after the first few episodes, so that she could do whatever was necessary in a given show.

And with Enterprise, I feel like the same thing is going on. It's possible that the recent season with the new war stuff solved some of those issues, but it just wore me out. I felt that they would take interesting steps toward creating a morally ambiguous situation worth arguing over, and then they'd pull the last punch by having one side do something obviously stupid to reveal themselves as "the bad guys" and let it be okay for Archer & Co. to blast them.

Again, just my opinion, and it's the opinion of someone who stopped watching halfway through season two and only came back for individual episodes of the end of season two and all of season three. (And I totally agree with Big Jake that I'd rather be serving under O'Neill.)

The important thing, of course, is that it entertains you for an hour. If it does that, it's doing its job, and nothing else is really important.

I think I'm not doing so well with SG:A... I'm a ways behind on my Tivo list, but last week, I watched "Poisoning the Well", where the team meets a bunch of humans who are making themselves inedible to the wraith. At about 40 minutes into it, they were agonizing over using a terminally ill human who'd volunteered to be a test subject for consumption by the wraith prisoner. After the third scene of them agonizing, I turned to my wife and said, "Y'know, Farscape would have had the guy in there with the wraith about twenty minutes ago."

As a DM, it hit me awhile back that I'm the only one with all the information, and that I can make a lot of use out of that. I'd spent time trying to scare my players with how much damage my bad guys were doing, or what high-level spell they could cast... and I realized that with good description, I could scare them just as much with something a lot less powerful.

For example, the PCs encounter a knight in soot-covered full plate whose armor spikes glow a dull and angry red, with smoke pouring out of the cracks between the armor with such intensity that the dark knight is just a dim silhouette, primarily visible by the glowing hot armor spikes. The knight wields a flail whose head is fashioned from a human skull scorched by some great heat, with glowing red spikes driven through it at odd angles to form the spikes of the flail.

My players could be nervous at this point. Maybe he's undead. Maybe he's an outsider. Whatever he is, he's got a flail with a skull for a head, and that's almost never good. What they don't know is that this seemingly deadly guy is a Fighter2/Cleric3, and all he's done is cast Obscuring Mist (which made the smoke, with different flavor text) and Magic Weapon (which made the flail turn from a masterwork funny-looking flail into a magic weapon). For my players, this guy is a pushover -- but they won't initially know that.

So for me, the good adventures are the ones that aren't afraid to use stuff like this. With a good DM, you can be terrified without actually being anywhere near that unfortunate total party kill. The evil bad guy can have some neat tricks without being overpowering.

Also, on a completely different note, I like adventures that are hard to break. Maybe I've just got psycho creative players, but they will ALWAYS find some way to break the adventure. "What, walk into that place, the whole group, right in the open? I don't think so. We know it's full of bad guys. All the good people in town stay away from it. We're grabbing torches and lighting the building on fire. That'll get those pesky bad guys to come to us!"

What I'm Watching:

I was definitely bummed when the credits rolled on the last episode of Angel (although I just watched it again last night, having saved it for several months on Tivo for the wife, who's been running around crazy). That said, I'm still finding good stuff to watch. Currently on my list:

Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis: I'm giving the new show a shot. The original series is not to everyone's taste, but I've got a soft spot for it after being intrigued by the idea of an SF show that wasn't Star Trek or even space-oriented -- we had Babylon 5 and Stargate, and that was more or less it, as I recall. I like that they've kept the political field changing, and, as I said, the new series is looking pretty decent (for a first-season show).

CSI: I only watch the original, mainly because I only need so much procedural mystery in my life, but it has interesting plots and doesn't take itself too seriously. This is one I watch with the wife, since she's the mystery reader in the family.

Justice League (now "Unlimited"): Aside from being massively irked when Cartoon Network changed the title this season and thus caused it to briefly fall off my Tivo's radar, I'm enjoying this series a lot. In season two, they let the writers get more creative (I'm guessing they were under orders to keep things simple and establish the world for newcomers in the first season), and there have been some great little dialogue exchanges and subtle flashes of character that really impressed me. Plus, you know, explosions.

Monk: Another one I watch with the wife, who is disappointed with herself if she can't solve the mystery in the first fifteen minutes -- but Monk isn't really about the mystery as much as much as it's about the character, the humor, and the sometimes-funny, sometimes-sad, always-sweet stories.

Dead Zone: I guess I'm surprised that this show doesn't have more popularity in the SF crowd, because it's one I've been very impressed with. Few shows take the time to logically figure out how a given magic/SF system really works and than extrapolate how that would affect somebody's life. I've been consistently impressed with the writing on that show, and while it doesn't have many hyperspace jumpgates, I think it's still doing good stuff for the SF world -- asking questions about predestination and fate while consistently delivering an intriguing and well-written story.

Kim Possible: Okay, yes, it's a kid's cartoon. But come on. If anybody can sit down and watch a single episode featuring Drakken and Shego and THEN tell me they don't like it and it's just a stupid show for kids, they're welcome to their opinion. Until then, step down. It's funnier than two-thirds of the sitcoms offered during prime time by the networks, and it has explosions, Shego, hilarious bad-guy dialogue, Shego, healthy life lessons connected by a believable friendship between two unbelievable heroes, and Shego.

That's more or less what I'm watching. Two USA shows, two cartoons, and the reliable Stargate series and its new spinoff. Anybody have suggestions for other stuff, or heard anything fun about the fall season?

Thanks,
-Patrick