Eating Crow: FFG Star Wars

 

I have never pretended that any opinion of mine is correct. I have considered writing things that will get more than a dozen reads on this blog and experimented with branding. I have always decided not to, coz I ultimately don’t want this blog to be a brand. I just want people to find someone saying exactly what he thinks, no matter how flawed and sometimes outright outrageous it is. Over the years I’ve occasionally written Eating Crow posts coz I changed my mind on something and think it’s good people read about that on the internet, where everyone is right all the time!

I was wrong about FFG Star Wars. Here's why.

The basics of the game revolve around a set of six dice: the ability, proficiency, boost, difficulty, challenge, and setback dice, pictured below:

Each of these dice share a number of symbols on them that help generate differing types of results. There's a lot of openness in interpretation. While there's a general slowdown from having to sort through the dice, I've found that the amount of richness that can come out of a single roll more than makes up for it. Could you go and have normal dice do this? You can! The core books actually include a conversion chart... and it's a nightmare to use. I wouldn't do it.

The problem?

The dice are about 20 bucks for a package, and in typical FFG fashion there's not enough. You'll need at least two sets of these at the beginning, and you will probably want to just keep getting them until you've got six or seven packs. That's 140 bucks, all told. On just dice.

The core books are also a bit of a money sink. There's three of them, covering the three "types" of Star Wars stories: criminals, military, and Jedi. There's a lot of overlap between them of course, but there's just as much that's unique to that particular book. And they're fun to read! They really are! The FFG folks did a good job making them coffee table books.

About ten years ago I bought all the core books and two sets of dice, over the course of about a year or two, and then went on deployment, got a group together… and hated the game. I was playing with former DnD min maxers in a game that resembled DnD in format… and didn’t play anything like it. Please understand I’d sunk quite a bit of money into this game, was in a place where adapting to a new system was a bad idea (and I didn't really know that) and was criminally short on sleep. I was pretty bummed out, came home, put the books up on my shelf, lost the dice... and then forgot about the game.

The years went by, and then a buddy of mine told me that he really liked the Genesys system and was more than willing to defend it against detractors. I just sorta sat and watched as people came at him about the absurd cost of the system and even its practicality. My buddy went and defended the practicality of the system but made no efforts to defend its cost. I jurst sorta filed it away, while making my own complaints about a system I'd seen not work too terribly well. I respected him for standing up for his beliefs, and resolved to eventually give the games another chance.

Yanno.

Whenever that was gonna be!

And then my kids watched The Skywalker Saga. 

And found those books. And started begging to play. I shrugged, told them sure, and made characters with them. They went acrost the three books, grabbing options and gear relatively evenly. I've not really thought about gear lists in a long time, but boy did I get a new appreciation for them as I watched my kids. For them the gear lists were a direct portal into the setting of Star Wars itself, one that they did everything they could to leverage for their own enjoyment. They just wanted me to read every last item and asked how it worked. And the long prose really helped there, let me tell you! It was actually a lot more fun than I expected, overriding my experiences with the former DnD-heads bitching about they wanted more gear, coz they wanted more options to blow people up with.

But character creation being fun is a nice bonus. I want the game to be good. So I got a set of dice and we went to planet Ord Mantell, where a gigantic kaiju had dropped from the orbiting moon to attack the Imperial base there. And every. Single. Second. Of that session was sheer gold. The kids leaned into the dice, oohing and ahhing over them, asking how they could get more yellows and blues, changing narration accordingly. They understood what the dice were for: crafting an exciting narrative. And they leveraged them as thoroughly as they could.

You really need more than one set of dice to run this game. I'm sorry, but you do. That's about 35 to 40 bucks, just right there. Buy yourself a book and that's a hundred bucks. That. Is. A. Problem. And it's pretty ubiquitous to FFG's money decisions. So, if you don't like FFG, this isn't going to change your mind, and I can hardly blame you.

But.

But.

These two sets of dice solve more problems than most RPG books of the same price. They just do. I'm not gonna pretend to you they don't. And if I can just pick up a set of dice instead of reading yet another blowhard telling me how to fix RPGs I'm gonna do it. Maybe you won't. That's cool. That's on you.The book is really secondary to the dice. All the systems they present work, and they work well, and the books themselves are worth the money you spend on them. 

Together?

Yeah, that smarts.

But honestly, folks have spent hundreds of dollars trying to do what FFG is offering for a fraction of that. And I find that worth my time. And cash.

Star Wars Unlimited: Starter Decks

 

Someone really freaking knew what they were doing here!

I kinda chuckled when I saw this game was coming out. I mean, c'mon folks, Star Wars has had a lot of card games over the years. Some of them are amazing, some of them not so much. They all seem to die ignoble deaths. Heck, the Star Wars CCG has continued for years, with people creating custom cards for the game, as people refused to let it die. I've looked through some of these rulesets and just... I never saw anything I found truly special. I know, I know, that's probably a really heretical thing to say or whatever, but I just couldn't bring myself to really care about anything of the things that I read.

I bought a starter set for Unlimited off reading the rules.

Why?

The base structure fixed two fundamental problems I have with most card games: resource management and the turn order. In Unlimited, Resources aren't a specialized card type, but "normal" cards that you choose to dedicate to that task each round. So instead of just having a specialized card for the task you, the player, must make a conscious choice as to what to give up. Dunno about you, but I think of that as good game design. I like having to make that choice. It gives weight to a part of the process I've usually found annoying. I found later that sacrificing cards to make Resources made the later rounds peculiarly satisfying, as there was a history of what I had sacrificed right in front of me, on the board, reminding me of what had been given up for my victory or defeat.

And then there's the actual round structure: you each take a turn, doing one action at a time. This means that most T/CCG stupidity is fixed immediately. You can't just start making combos and building without someone having the opportunity to stop you. There's more interaction and chances to figure out what your opponent is up to. I actually found myself leaning a bit more into real-life sparring tactics, finding cards that could be built upon multiple ways to try and disguise what I was doing. Sure, that was limited coz preconstructed deck, but there's some bluffing games hiding just under the surface that I really want to get into more.

I'm good with just these Starter Decks, because the basic game flow itself is so fundamentally good. You start off somewhat slowly, playing one, maybe two cards. The choices, few as they are, are extremely important. You don't have a big hand of cards and the ones you dedicate to be resources feel consequential. It hurts to lose them. Every time. You hope you chose wisely. Hope. There's a logic to it, with higher costing stuff probably getting dedicated so that cheaper stuff can be played. And it needs to be played. The ramp up in complexity and intensity is incredible. 

The leader mechanic, where a big damn hero shows up for just the cost of an action after a certain number of turns, creates an additional layer of excitement and tension, as Luke comes out the turn before Vader and can be ready for him, not to mention he can heal himself by equipping his lightsaber, so he can tank a whole hit from Vader. Vader, for his part, might be able to get out a turn before Luke and make sure there's nothing for Luke to defend. 

And meanwhile the engine of war builds into this furious crescendo of death and fury. Because playing a card as a resource is an option, it means that at about round eight you'll probably stop playing resources and play more cards, leading to a much faster experience. The moment we figured out that we didn't have to play the resources was when the game naturally went nuts. It was a really good feeling.

I've played this game about a dozen times per deck, with two other people cycling out and playing as well. All the games have been different, the strategies and mindgames were very different each time. I won't pretend to be a master of this game. I'm sure there's people who are better already. I haven't gotten any more cards yet. I'm going to, but not to patch the system. I'm gonna get it coz I wanna see what happens when I get different leaders and new decks onto the field! Even if you just changed out the leader a lot would change.

Obviously, your mileage may vary. You may not like the constant back and forth or find giving up cards to play others too stressful or whatever. But, for my part? I like games that reward my choices. And Star Wars Unlimited's Starter Decks do that in spades. The game ramps up to a roaring finish that is a lot more than "keep swinging until the game is done". The nature of the choices themselves change. 

And that's why I play games.

Playing the Pokemon TCG As An Adult

This is all Kyle's fault.

I had played the card game as a kid, preferring it to the video games. Not much has changed on that front in the decades, but I'd dropped off as I got older and encountered the inevitable conservatism of teenagers. I always kept my finger somewhat on the game, until my brother-in-law Kyle got me a couple of decks, coz he's Kyle and he's always trying to get my grump self to do stuff. I found that the game worked very differently from when I was a kid... which actually changes the way I remember the game in a really weird way. And it's interesting to see my children play it and what they get out of it.

So for those of you who don't know: in Pokemon you build a 60 card deck. Six of those cards become Prize Cards, which are put to the side. Whenever you knock a Pokemon out by doing enough damage to it you take 1-3 prize cards. Whoever takes all their Prize Cards, takes out all the opposing Pokemon (so that way there's no one to fight), or the opponent has no cards to draw, wins! However, in order to deal damage to a Pokemon you have to have energy cards... which do nothing but attach to your Pokemon, usually once a turn. The inherent problem of the game then becomes getting the energy out of your deck onto your Pokemon in a timely, orderly, and constant fashion, before your opponent does it faster and better. Fortunately the designers realized the inherent limitation of this issue and have provided a lot of really good ways to get through the deck quickly and to find the cards you need to.

The biggest thing about the game is that it is deterministic: with the exception of some attacks, damage is a static and known quantity. You know how much energy they need to pull off an attack, even if you don't know if they have enough energy in their hand. But you do know what they need, and how often they should be able to get energy onto their Pokemon. Because of this you're able to somewhat reliably guess the flow of battle and plan accordingly. This is of course means that the hand is the ultimate resource. Since it is mostly unknown to the opponent, one should keep it as secret as one can. "Cheat" cards like Switch (retreat a Pokemon for free) or Welder (see right), or Boss's Orders (which forces out a Pokemon that your opponent doesn't want now) are the actual game: tricks that you use to outsmart your opponent by controlling the tempo of the game. You are trying very hard to get around that tempo as much as you can, and your ability to do it in a way that surprises your opponent seems to be the core of the game.

Which comes as a surprise to me as an adult. See, as a kid I had sensed that there was a deeper game going on, didn't know what it was, and so I went with the deck archetype that let me cut out the unknowns as much as possible: the Beatdown deck, which always sported powerful basics who, with a little bit of help, could one-shot other Pokemon before they evolved. A good Beatdown deck could clean out an opponent in six turns, right about the point when most "normal" decks had finally gotten going. It was a wildly successful format at the time. The Pokemon folks decided that wasn't how they wanted the game to be played, so they upped the HP on most Basic Pokemon, making one-shots a lot harder to outright impossible, while upping the damage of evolved Pokemon a ton, meaning that even a Stage 1 Pokemon could reliably kill most Basics very quickly. These are good changes, and I'm finding that I'm enjoy the deeper game of Pokemon a lot, not to mention teaching it to my kids. There's this "Look three or four turns ahead" going on, where I'm realizing that killing a Pokemon right now may end the game for me in a few turns, and so I'm having to tiptoe and set up the game so that way when I do move it's going to stick.

The thing that didn't change, however, is the creativity that Pokemon engenders. So many cards, so many ways to combine them, and so many ways for people to express themselves! It's been amazing tinkering with my Charizard deck and helping my kids tinker with theirs. I'm always getting surprised by the things they decide will work that I think obviously shouldn't... only to find that actually? It works out just fine. Ya just gotta be adventurous and see what combines.

Is there a problem of the constantly revolving sets and updating the library so people can keep building? Sure. I'm gonna hafta figure that part out. But I have no intention of competitively playing, or even suggesting it to my kids. At least yet. 

I didn't expect to come back to this game. I'm glad I did. They rebalanced the game, forcing people to actually play the game that was intended in the first place. It's fun making decks, testing them, and recalibrating them. Once I accepted the limitations of the game, I found that I had a fast and furious race to the finish.

But don't think I'm letting this card out of any of my decks, ever.

The Marvels

Okay, I'm about to get really really harsh. And, before that I do that, I wanna say something that literally everybody I have read or watched that has criticized this movie has said, and this includes those supposedly racist conservatives:

Iman Vellani is a pure joy to watch. I have never seen someone enjoy being a superhero so much as her. I wish her all the luck with her career in the world.

This movie is pure shit. My God, it hurt to watch this one. It's not as bad as Thor: Love and Thunder, which I couldn't even get through. But it's shit. The script is dumb, a good villain is wasted, the action is boring as hell, Brie Larson needs to get out of the MCU, and obvious fanbait to keep me watching has become actively resented, and just... Marvel can you please just stop?

So, the script is dumb. Captain Marvel, who murdered billions of people, hasn't been locked up for war crimes, nor does she turn herself in for having committed one of the greatest acts of manslaughter ever recorded... like you lost me right there. Right there I'm done. Why does the rest of the universe trust her? Why the hell does she have a singing husband on a silly planet of singing people? Why is the elephant in the room not acknowledged by anyone but the villain???

Oh, Captain Marvel feels bad about it? Her poor feelings are hurt??

Tough.

People have been imprisoned for life for a lot less.

And that's not where the script keeps being stupid. Why is our villainess, Dar-Benn, a villain??? There's this completely unnecessary mustache-twirling element added to a character who frankly didn't need it. Her planet, her people, are dying. There is absolutely no reason for her to go evil to be the antagonist. Quite the opposite! She's the only one with a sane complaint in the cast! Her going "I'll steal a sun and doom another planet and put someone else through what my people have been" makes no sense at all. If she cares about her people then, on some level, Dar-Benn cares. It would have been far more interesting to see her trying to take out Captain Marvel (RIGHTFULLY), only to relent when she realized that the destroyer of her planet could restore it. A lot could have been done with Dar-Benn to make her a more potent and interesting antagonist and just the sheer lack of imagination hurts.

The action is boring. No, it's not fun. Or even moderately interesting. This movie was clearly designed for a phone-addicted audience. And that's the most effort the action is getting from me, coz clearly it doesn't deserve more.

Brie Larson can be a fantastic actress. I've seen her try. I've seen her care about projects. When Brie Larson gets going in a role she can really dial in and turn her energy way up. And that is nowhere near this role. I can't even call it a character. Modern Captain Marvel is boring as hell, and required the Iron Man level of rehabilitation that the MCU originally gave him. And she didn't get it. She's just comic book Captain Marvel, which is... um.

Okay, quiet part out loud, most of the earlier MCU projects were improvements over what's honestly crap source material. Age of Ultron as a comic book event is awful. Just awful. Civil War is when the comics made character assassination cool. Secret Invasion is just shit.

NOTICE HOW MOST OF THIS IS TIED TO BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS????

Point is.

A lot of the MCU works coz they took good basic ideas from half-wit writers (don't balk, I'm complimenting Bendis's recent stuff by calling him a half-wit) and applied actual effort to them. Are these revolutionary or even vaguely high art ideas? Absolutely not, but they were fun, and popcorn cinema is a legit way to go. But in order to do popcorn cinema right you have to get good actors who care about the source material to play the hell out of the roles, stupidly competent writers who have to scrub the shit stains off diamond-quality ideas, and directors who love the source material enough to be critical of it and know they can do better.

And Brie Larson ain't got it.

The only soul in this production who does is Iman Vellani, and God she deserves so much better than this nonsense.

Also, I'm done with these post-credit scenes. Vellani's was fun coz it's two people who clearly like the source material just riffing off each other, but the alternate universe stuff... it's not working. It's just not. This is exactly where Marvel falls flat on its face, Exiles excepted, and Marvel needs to cut it out. 

Please hire good writers and directors who truly love the source material and give Iman a story worth being so damned adorable over. Junk this phase crap, and just let us see Ms. Marvel scout out talent, have fun doing it, and go back to our fun popcorn flicks.

I know they're not going to do it.

But in my last screams of protest over a franchise that has clearly lost its soul I will not go out quietly.

Oh, there's one bright spot to this. Just one. I can see who the shills are now. Coz anyone who claims to like this trash is most definitely a shill. More and more the conservative right's critiques are looking downright prescient: the supposedly compassionate left reveals their true colors of pro-corporatist and totalitarian zombies, with the most they're able to summon being "this was fun!"...

Seriously? That's the best you can do? "It was fun" is the best you can do???

Dude, Iron Man was a lot more than fun. I'm not claiming it was the best movie ever, but it had heart. It had soul. Tony was driven to do what he thought was right, and to hell with everyone else. Everyone knew they had watched something special. The deniers were met with just raw joy. So they had to shut up. I've learned, slowly but surely, but that such joy is the key to defending controversial things. I used to argue with a lot of people about the merits of The Last Jedi. It doesn't go anywhere, coz people can find any reason to dislike something. So I just tell them that I found the movie so beautiful that it stunned me to silence. I tell them about my friend who called me in tears, because she found the whole movie deeply cathartic. That the movie had communicated something transcendent to the both of us, and it was that simple. The same with The Rise of Skywalker. I got a lot out of the movie, and part of the trick is to meet the angry with the very simple statement: "But it changed me. I'm sorry it didn't you" and to drop it from there. It's not something I'm terribly good at doing, but it is what needs to happen.

There's no joy in the defense of The Marvels. It's just an annoyed "shut up racists", said with no oomph. Coz... well... there's nothing in this movie that's actually fun! Or cathartic! Nothing! It's just hollow nonsense. Defending this movie doesn't make you a good person, or anti-racist, or anything. It just betrays a lack of depth, on your part. I mean, c'mon folks, The Marvels could have been one of those fake movies in The Boys... well that's not quite true, is it? It would have to not have poor Iman in it. 

I hope they do right by her. She should be the new face of the MCU, backed by competent writers and directors, allowed to do what Doudney Jr. did. If there was any justice here that's what would happen. But that would be way too optimistic. 

And "optimism is cowardice", as Spengler so correctly points out.

Toy Story 4

Let's get the unpleasant stuff out of the way first.

There is such a thing as woke. Okay? I don't deny it. It's Marxism in artistic form. And, contrary to what many leftists will tell you, Marxism is evil, flat out. By cutting out the person and just reducing them to where they happen to be in society you create something just utterly... well it's not art. It simply isn't. Anyone who pretends that a character like Riri Williams and Kamala Khan (from the comics, calm down!) aren't woke is lying to themselves. 

So.

Woke is real. Woke is bad. It just is. Go cry if you disagree.

Toy Story 4 ain't woke.

"But- but Bo Peep-". Bo Peep ain't woke. She's got a really unfortunate change of voice actor, yes. But she's got seven years of being on her own, after being shunted around and abandoned. Woody's loyalty to Andy, and thus to Bonnie, is unique to him. It's why the other toys follow him. We've known that for awhile now. There is no reason to think that Bo is just as loyal to a child, so it's not exactly a character change. Bo doesn't have much of a personality in the first two films and if you disagree, you're wrong. Bo's love of Woody's loyalty, one of the few things we do know about Bo from the first two films, is intact here and it's actually one of the reasons why everything works out! She clearly misses having a child to love and the movie shows that, really really openly. It's not subtle, and if you missed it you need to stop watching movies while looking at your phone.

The other big elephant in the room is that nobody saw a need for this movie. Now, to be fair, this has been the general reaction to every single Toy Story movie since the first. Now someone who is actually reasonable is going to say that Toy Story 3 should be an exception. I mean, Andy gives up Woody! It should be over! I mean, sure, in theory, but here's the dirty truth about these movies: they make more of them coz they make money off of 'em. And it has always been that way. That's not a new thing. You can either accept that or not.

I suggest you do, coz this is a really really good movie and well worth its time.

Toy Story 4 picks up a little while after Bonnie gets Woody and Co. from Andy. Woody isn't being played with, which he finds disheartening. But he's a kind soul, so he tries to help out Bonnie, even if he's not wanted. This has... consequences. A lot of consequences. Like, damn, the sheer number of consequences. This, right here, may be my favorite part of the movie: the plot never stops juking left. I was constantly being surprised, as entire characters, situations, ecosystems, are developed right on the spot. They make sense. They're coherent. They add to the world of Toy Story. And I love every step of the way. It takes a lot for me to prefer plot to characters, and here boy howdy do they weave a good plot.

That's not to say the characters are bad. This movie has an embarrassment of riches, character-wise. Bo's voice actor replacement is as unfortunate as the character is well-written. Gabby Gabby is a compelling antagonist, who gets the only redemption arc in the series so far. And even the new stuffed animals, who I would normally cringe so freaking hard at, I find charming, coz somehow Pixar got it just right. 

Ultimately, this wouldn't make a bit of difference if the movie isn't coherent, something that Pixar is well-known for. And the theme this time around is extremely coherent, even moreso than the previous entries: you have to have someone to reciprocate love with. It is not enough to love. You have to be loved back too. And it is worth getting hurt for, over and over and over and over and over again, to find someone who will share love with you. The twisty plot, the character work, it all says this one message, that love is worth it, as consistently as you can ever get.

Is Toy Story 4 a bridge too far? It certainly looks that way, popularly. Reception seems to be mixed to negative. But I think that's a shame. There's some really heartfelt and amazing stuff in this movie. I feel like a better person for having watched it. And, I mean... that's starting to feel more and more like a rarity these days? I don't know, I know that's not just me feeling it. I miss feeling that way more often about movies.

And it does here.

I'm gonna enjoy it.

You do you.