Animon Story

 

An action RPG has to have a few things in place for me to consider playing it: a good general system, a combat system that isn't too different from the non-combat one, and tools for making fun combat encounters on the fly. You have no idea how many times I've been disappointed on getting all three of these essential points. Pretending that systems that do not provide these three points aren't flawed is a special kind of silliness, but We here at All the Things Under Heaven and Earth try not to engage in spurious self-deception; only truly foundational self-deceptions allowed on this blog, and only for irony's sake!

So the premises of Animon Story is absolutely irresitible to me: it's essentially a digimon/pokemon nostalgia grab, with a promise of a working system for kid and creature creation, evolution system, and a working combat system. Does it live up to these promises?

Eh.

This may have finished off a fundamental love of storygames as most people understand them in my soul.

The book is attractive, feeling good in my hands. The art is appropriately cartoony without being simplistic. The visual design and flow of my eye is unobstructed. It's not the most incredible book I've ever held, but it's a darn nice one.

The character creation is really nicely done, well-organized for running with kids. I was able to help both children make interesting choices about their animon and their kids in a timely manner. My kids were super excited to make animon, and they were a bit weirded out at the thought of having as much detail on the kids as they did, but they quickly warmed up to it after I reassured them it was a good idea to have the kids be cool too. They're here for the monsters, I'm here to see if a game works! All should be well and good, right?

Well, sorta.

One of the problems of a storygame is that it asks players to hurt their characters in favor of the drama. Some players, like myself, are more than happy to do such things. There's a fundamental disassociation in my soul that lets me look at such mechanics with a more detached eye. The character is not me. I want a good story. I better allow the character to get hurt. Even as a child I understood this.

Try telling that to most children.

Go ahead.

Didn't work, did it?

These mechanics are built around the players hurting the bond between kid and animon, and then mending it. Children don't inherently want to do this. Adults don't, either. They want to think they're the kid, they want to have friendships with their creatures, they don't want to sit outside the construct and watch dispassionately. And so the kids bounce off. And I suspect more than just the kids will. Combat has similar things in it, where the pain of getting a good combat is pushed onto the players to create it. It's a bit jarring to see the philosophy for what it is and that I actually do hate it. The loop is too long to allow one to store up a bit of pain and then unleash it quickly.

All of this typical nonsense in storygames, but the real bullshit is that the game does not decide if its combat is sport or war. Combat as sport requires game balance, requires good tools for building encounters on the fly. Combat as war who cares??? Just try to kill the players and let them figure it out. But both require a good stable of opponents and even better adlib mechanics. And Animon Story has neither. The game just has levels and doesn't tell you how they factor in, as if combat was war, but there's a huge dissonance in that Digimon and Pokemon treat combat as sport. 

Oh, and you can't evolve in your first session. That's kind a staple of Digimon. Why is it slowed down here?

I really wanted to like this game. Zak Barouh seems like a nice dude and has a lot of passion for his game. I really appreciate that level of passion from anyone, even if I don't like their stuff. That doesn't make my distaste for the game any better, but instead makes it less palatable. This is a guy who clearly wanted to design something joyful. And maybe it does for other people!

But all I got out of this was disappointment.

Such a shame.

Marvel Dice Throne

So this happened on Christmas.

Like I've said before, Dice Throne is what I call a treadmill game: the goal of the designers is to get you to keep buying more stuff from them to keep kitting out your modular experience. If it’s done poorly you got something like Marvel Champions: just ooooone mooore expansion and then the game will be more than acceptable! And given how much money that means, it’s never acceptable!!! EVER. From my Season One review you’ll know I already found that set much more than acceptable: I used it almost every day for a year before wanting another box. I wanted to get Season Two, but I got outvoted for the Marvel box by certain smaller compatriots.

Last note: I am a weary Marvel fan. I began as a precocious child who called Marvel editors to chat (see here for more on that) to a jaded post-One More Day bitter man. I do not like most of Marvel’s modern comics, buy Rippaverse and Alterna, and at this point I await the day Marvel’s stupid decisions catch up with them and they decide they want to compete with manga, which is currently stomping the shit out of them, and good riddance. 

Really the last note: I know Marvel is a jerk to work with. They have a rep in the TTRPG community as divas. So the Dice Throne people, should they read this, need to understand who the vitriol is really aimed at. The Dice Throne folks, in my opinion, aren’t trying to get us to buy again so much as let the incredibly stuck up and arrogant pricks at Marvel know they’ll play ball. Some will rankle hard at me saying it, but Marvel’s arrogance in licensing is a poorly kept secret.

So we’re going to get the man-bitching out of the way: the character selection is… unfortunate. No Peter Parker, Steve Rogers, or Tony Stark is a “we don’t want to make money!” move, flat. With the glaring exception of Captain Marvel I do not mind the rest of the choices. But Captain Marvel being in the box hurts my already jaded soul. Obviously the gambit paid off, coz these incredibly talented people got to make the X-Men box! But man the gambit, while necessary, is painful.

The graphic design feels weird to me this time around. There is so much freaking purple everywhere, which for whatever reason bothers me. The design of the symbols can also be really busy, particularly on Scarlet Witch and Loki. Mileage (and taste) may vary, of course, but this is my blog, so the graphic design isn’t as much to my taste as the cleaner, less purple, Season One box. 

All that’s (not) well and probably a bit grating to read. What do I think of the one thing anyone who reads this blog knows I actually care about: the design? Is this treadmill treating me well? Will I buy more? Yes, yes, and definitely yes! Allow me to elucidate, oh you who put up with my bitching. 

I love the character designs for this box, for two reasons. As a singular box these characters are really fun to play, especially Captain Marvel! Anyone picking up this box is going to get a truly varied set of characters. From “punch me, I dare you” Black Panther, to Loki, who made my brother CACKLE in glee as he played him, there isn’t a dud in the box. It’s not there. If anything I am clicking with these characters faster than Season One! Now, granted, this ain’t my first rodeo with the game, but several characters (I’m looking at you, Moon Elf and Treant) from Season One I totally bounced off for the first six months. That simply didn’t happen here. Make of that what you will. I will write more the characters in follow up posts, but for now I happily can say I love all of them.

As a TTRPG designer who has made a whole ten bucks (literally), I found myself a better designer after playing this box. I didn’t comment all that much on the particular characters in Season One coz I honestly didn’t have much to say, beyond the characters worked extremely well! Playing this box, however, I found myself in an entirely different world. I actually felt disoriented after the first game, coz the style was so different. CP ramping was almost non-existent, defensive abilities weren’t as powerful, and base damage was a lot higher. The games were faster, much faster than I was used to. After a few games I found myself leaning into the new style, learning to appreciate that I couldn't lean on my defense and making the most of the main roll phase. There's an urgency, a demand to focus on the right now, that isn't in the season one box. What you prefer does actually come down to taste, not an objective standard: I've played with people who hate the Marvel box for the very reasons that make it good, and who would love Season One for the same reasons they hate the Marvel box.

That.

Is.

A. Fantatstic.

Success!!!!

I've had more conversations with people about their tastes between these two boxes than you'd expect. What's more it's not even "Oh such and such box is better, I prefer the design style of such and such box." Good game design drives you straight into the subjective, far far away from whether or not the game itself has any merit. You talk with your friends coz the objective reality has been handled for you.

As far as balance between the season one and Marvel box I got, on a casual level they hold up really well. Ninja's two outings against Thor was so inhumanly painful for him I was shooting Blake inappropriate jokes for awhile, laughing about how Ninja clearly wanted a... piece... of  Thor. Yeah, a piece. We'll just say that. It was hilariously awful for Thor. But at the same time Scarlet Witch can tear into everyone, and there's no general feeling that anyone is actually outmatched here. Are there characters who are objectively better than others? Sure. Can I leverage a viable strategy to get around it? Definitely. That's not a small thing to achieve.

So, let's sum this up. Not only did the Dice Throne folks manage to make a product with Marvel (who not only don't actually care about their characters but also are notoriously picky and unrealistic in their goals), not only did they make a fantastic box that I find to be a triumph of design, not only is it balanced with the box I already had, but they get to do it again with the upcoming X-Men box. I hope the designers patted themselves on the back, coz man they deserved it.

Dice Throne Remixed Season One

 

Look, folks,  this not a game box that passed any of my prejudices. Not only is it expensive and bulky, but it's what I call a treadmill game: the game wants you to buy more of it, over and over, as you get more and more tricks and gimmicks to add onto your ever-growing collection. Bad treadmills are explicitly about getting the next thing and experiencing the next dopamine hit. Good treadmills are actually good games, with the dopamine hit. I don't have the space, so I put a pause on my buying of Heroes of the Grid. I'm sure as hell not going to go buy another treadmill game. Welp, a friend of mine gave it to me as a gift. A year ago. You don't turn down gifts. I've played it almost every day, sometimes up to five times a day. I've played it with a variety of ages, from young kids to grannies. And I can say this, pretty definitively: I'm still learning these eight characters in the box. There's a depth going on in this 99 dollar box that I did not expect.

Let's get down to brass tacks: Dice Throne's center is "just" Yahtzee. Pick up the five pretty dice, roll 'em three times, keeping whatever you like, all to get a result from on the board, which has special abilities and attacks. 

This means that, in order to successfully pull anything off, you aren't rolling against another player, per se, but instead against your own luck. And this has a real effect for the table environment: it doesn't feel as personal. In fact, sometimes you feel bad when they don't pull off an attack, or at least I do! If they do pull off an attack, that's fine, you usually get a defensive roll, which is unique to your character. And these defensive rolls aren't just "cancel the hit", but can sometimes get the defender real advantages that shift the game in their favor. There isn't a moment when everything is shifting around. If you pick up the dice it matters. I've never, not even once, seen a dead turn, where not a thing happens.

Of note are the myriad conditions that are part of every character. Some of them are extremely simple, and some are incredibly complex, requiring a good and solid reading. The designers were extremely good at ensuring that conditions of similar complexity are grouped appropriately with characters. None of the conditions are useless, and none of them are too powerful. All of them require some skill to use, even if the character is simple enough. It's all in the Goldilocks zone, folks: just right. 

The last bits are the cards.The cards cost Combat Points (CP), usually up to 4 at a time. The effects are appropriately grouped to the complexity of the character, with very few of them being actually expensive. There's four  types of cards: main phase, upgrades, roll phase cards, and instants. Main phase cards have all kinds of different effects, grouped around the theme of the character. Upgrades let you shift up the abilities on your board, and can even add new abilities for you to roll. Roll phase cards let you muck about with your dice rolls, and this is honestly where some of the biggest "Oohs!" and "Ahs!" of the game really come about; there's nothing like mucking about the with the dice and they still freaking get their roll. Instants can be played at any time, and can turn the game on its head. All of this is clearly explained by the rules and expertly laid out: I handed this to my “I can’t play games like that” mom, and she had it within moments, nevermind enjoying herself as she began cooking up strategies on her own!

None of this would make a difference if the character design wasn't any good. I'd have chucked the box, gift or not, if the character theming wasn't good. This kind of game needs strong vision for all the characters, as well as allowing the characters to be played in a myriad of ways. It is not an easy thing to design for. The character is where all the previous parts are assembled together, and either are more than the sum of said parts or far less. And the game really delivers here! Everyone, and I do mean everyone, plays differently and well. I’ve got my favorite (paladin, to the shock of no one), but I enjoy all the others and can win with them, should someone take my vengefully armored baby. They all come in a range of complication levels, from the “I hit you and you can’t hit me back” barbarian to the treant, who commands a small army of spirits, all of whom require a great deal of finesse to use correctly. None of them feel unbalanced against each other: if two players of equal skill did a barbarian (the simplest) vs treant (the most complex) battle it would be a damn close game. 

The only real issue with this box is its price, but only in the abstract. 99 bucks plus shipping sounds expensive, but I’ve put the hours in on this game, folks. I can tell you that I got way more than a 99 buck value for this game. If this sounds like fun to you, I can promise that actually investing in this particular box is more than worth the effort and cash. But if you're wanting to get something a bit more casual, something that you wouldn't actually use all that often, I wouldn't recommend something of this scope. Maybe I'm wrong, but I certainly wouldn't buy this box if I wasn't going to use it as often as I do. If someone really got through my prejudices hard enough to get me to consider trying it, but I wasn't sold, I would get me the "little" two character packs and give it a shot first. And then, if I liked it, I'd save up.

It's hard to say "Yeah, sure, get this!" when a box like this is so much, up front. That's a thing I don't think is ethical to say. I will, however, say that I have gotten alot more joy, drama, and outright surprises out of this one box than anything with this level of difficulty has any right to provide. I am getting another box, I am putting more money into this. It's worth my time. It might be worth your time as well. 

Destruction Will Not Heal You

  "For it is better to preserve the just with the evil than to subvert the just for the good"

Anynomous, Commentary on Matthew

Over the years I've come to know many a disgruntled formerly homeschooled Catholic or Protestant Christian. Some of you will be reading this going "HOW DARE YOU AIR MY DIRTY LAUNDRY." Here's the sad part.

I'm not.

Y'all are all saying the same words, in the same tone of voice, with the same sad eyes that scream disillusionment.

And it breaks my heart.

Frankly, I'm there too. Still.

My father, while I was growing up, told me two things that have never not served me well. I added a third precept, because he implied it with the first two but never thought to say it: 

1. All of life is grieving.
2. If you could be in someone's body like it was your own you'd go catatonic from the pain they've been passively holding onto.
3. By grieving, you become open to others and can help them with their pain.

All of life is grieving. I'm sorry, folks, there is no avoiding this one. You can't not grieve. Life hurts, it just does. Anyone who says differently is lying, and that's all there is to it. Or, worse, they're selling you something to where you're distracted from your pain. You can piss and moan and bitch about how life shouldn't be painful, but honestly what's that going to get you? You're just wasting energy on pissing and moaning and bitching. Now, granted, if you don't actually want to live I suppose that's okay. But fucking hell, if you're reading this blog it's because you actually want to live. And live well. Somehow. Somewhere. You want to live. And in order to live you must grieve. You must be able to look at the world and say "THIS HURTS LIKE FUCKING HELL" and you must be uncomfortable, you must be pained, you must sorrow and shed tears over it, because the world is worth grieving over. You are worth too much to waste in refusing to do it. It is not that the pain makes you better, it is what you do because you are in pain that makes you better. You are meant to face the dragon that is the world with the sword of grief in hand, with the shield of rational thought in the other, clad from head to toe with the conviction that your life means something and is worth defending. And make no mistake, your life, the real one, is a fragile thing. It needs defending. So grieve!

Unlike many a disillusioned post-Christian, I actually saw shit go down in the Catholic Church as a teen. I was there, behind the closed doors, watching many a critical fumble or outright malfeasance occur. I got to see these politics happen, in real time. And yeah, at the time it about broke me to witness them. The road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops and there is no sight better than the back of a bishop as he leaves. But most people, when they think of these bishops, of these malefactors who honestly need to be forcibly removed from their posts (and if they get banged up in the process c'est la vie it's better than what most of you deserve) do not have a specific picture of what these blasphemers of the Law of God are actually like. It's not that they can't get a good picture, or if they have enough empathy that they can't develop a good one, but the mind is open to fantasize about anything it wants in relation to these people.

Let me blow that up. Right now.

Those bishops, who did so much harm to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, are not mustache-twirling meglomaniacs. Oh no. We would be lucky to have that kind of evil, because that kind of evil engenders righteous anger, which summons holy fire to burn the motherfuckers out. Holy anger requires specificity, intimacy, love, to be effective. And evil meglomaniacs love, in some way, and thus the blasphemy is easy to spot, easy to get worked up over, and easy to treat.

No, we have something much worse. We don't get big bad guys, but small, mean, cowardly, fuck ups. They dissemble and hide because they know they are small. They remain nondescript, milqetoast, tepid, thoroughly mediocre men so that way you can't do more than summon a mild disgust and try to ignore them as fast as possible. They're not a virus, they're a cancer.

I saw all this going into adulthood. After a few years of witnessing it I went  to the Orthodox Church in a rage. That was not the right thing to do. After barely a year I returned to the Catholic Church where my family was, confused and hurt, and finally began to grieve. When I finally opened up to my dad about what I had seen, and how the evils I had seen were worse than anything I could have imagined at the time, my dad sadly told me to remember that all burdens are in physical pain too, not just spiritual. The way a person holds their soul is the way they hold their body. If anyone could be in another's body as it was their own for even a second they'd double over from the horrific pain the other person was in, and they'd probably die from the shock of just how vicious, how truly horrific, the other person's universe was.

When I asked what the point was, my father told me that what I was witnessing that was draining my soul so was that I had seen what happened when someone let that pain get the better of them, at the large scale. The bishops weren't bad, they were simply ignoring their own pain and thus ignoring everyone's pain. And we were doing the same thing back. The key was to accept that you were already in horrific agony, had blocked almost all of it out, and needed to get to where you could feel the pain and process it.

The third point is mine own. My father was not at a point where he could teach me this one, but I learned it from repeated experience and confirmed it with my parents later, after more than a decade of slogging away at the garbage the world had handed me. Many of you will read the above and go "That's nice, but the world is a horrible place and I need to fix it now. I must help take control over the systems of control and reform them" and other Marxist platitudes that are just such utter bullshit. 

Systems cannot enable justice. 

Only people can. 

And they need systems in place to be able to do that. But in order to be a person who can take advantage of the dark and terrible sword known as System you must have conquered your own darkness first. You must be worthy, and it is not impossible that you be in such a state.

Don't roll your eyes. I mean it.

Look, the years from 2016-2022, six years, were spent suffering from horrifying flashbacks. Almost hallucinatory level memories of rape, torture, and other things that are so fucking bad I'd rather write about my rapes than write about them went through my head. I'd wake up, go to work, do my best to not wreck my family, and then spend the evenings they went to bed suffering. Years of nights spent practically pulling my own hair out, sobbing until I was hoarse, almost checking myself into a mental ward multiple times because I just didn't want to be a human anymore, and almost throwing up sponatenously because I'd had a flashback and the pure disgust of what I was feeling were normal occurences. I hated every moment of it. But my wife told me it was worth going through. She never wavered on this one fact:it was all worth grieving over. I was not wasting my time by using it to grieve. I was not abandoning them by being in pain. Without her support and constant reminder that I was not a waste of a human being for sitting alone at night and crying my eyes out while I tried to keep my dinner down I wouldn't be here.  As far as I was concerned that was my real job.

Because of this, I 've never really done anything about my professional life, nor do I really care to. I work at a government helpdesk. It's not my favorite job, and frankly there's months I dearly wish I had something a bit more fulfilling to do than arguing with end users about their tier ones screwing them over, but it's a job. Money comes in. The fact that I am making money from an entity that I regard as a globalist empire is very secondary to the fact that it's feeding my wife and kids. I don't have the luxury of being idealistic about it, because of that whole recovery thing we were talking about above. I just don't. I go to work, do the job to the best of my cantankerous ability, and go home. Hi, I'm the government, and I'm here to help.

I wrote about my experience of the evacuation of Afghanistan on this blog before, practically while it was happening. But I left something out. While I was in the backrooms, watching things going down y'all simply couldn't freaking comprehend because you're just not here to see it, I was involved in the saving of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of lives. Yeah, I failed to do more. That legit haunts me. But I was in the right place, at the right time, and said a few words to the right ears... and more than a few people made it out that otherwise wouldn't have. I didn't even do that much. But simply by being available and open to helping and paying attention, no matter what it cost me, paid off.  I really hope I get to meet these people at the Last Judgment and find out what happened to them afterwards. I hope to meet the people I couldn't get out and beg their forgiveness for not being able to do more.

Anyone here sitting around just bitching about the state of the world or yourself able to claim that?

No?

It's not like I went out to look for that. It fell right into my lap, I chose to pay attention, and that was that. It was a small, quiet, very quick moment. If I hadn't been so focused on healing, on restoring, and doing only what I could do for years before I couldn't have done it then. And y'know what? I've been able to do it more often since then. There's more than a few people out there who are alive because of my direct action. It's a good feeling.

But they weren't something I chased.

I focused on cultivating life, starting with mine, and found that it inevitably spilled over to others.

Now we're here, to my point. Yup, took awhile, but without the previous context it's hard to comprehend exactly what I'm saying. But now you have the context. Now, most formerly homeschooled adults are (at best if they're honest) heavily disillusioned about what they were taught as kids. That's normal, as befits those who were (at best) misled. They're more than vaguely aware that what they were taught wasn't actually Christianity, but some Satanist faux-Christian parody that should, in fact, make them sick. But they're stuck in a conundrum: they know there's a God; they've felt the Light, they know He's real, even if they'd quibble over my use of the word know, since they haven't caught on that knowing something very rarely involves that fallible thing called the mind. But the things that have been taught to them are clearly cruel, clearly awful, and don't add up with this experience. But now these well-meaning folks are in a damned if you do, damned if you don't, situation. They either choose to stay loyal to the light they know to be real, or they accept the doctrine they were only half-taught as true.

It's an awful choice. No one can make it and feel good about themselves, forevever.

But there is a third path. It's not as painful in the long run, but it is more complicated, and it is, in some ways, much harder than sticking to the two choices above: to take seriously the following words of the Master Himself:

2 The scribes and Pharisees, he said, have established themselves in the place from which Moses used to teach;

3 do what they tell you, then, continue to observe what they tell you, but do not imitate their actions, for they tell you one thing and do another.

4 They fasten up packs too heavy to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; they themselves will not stir a finger to lift them.

5 They act, always, so as to be a mark for men’s eyes. Boldly written are the texts they carry, and deep is the hem of their garments;

6 their heart is set on taking the chief places at table and the first seats in the synagogue,

7 and having their hands kissed in the market-place, and being called Rabbi among their fellow men.

8 You are not to claim the title of Rabbi; you have but one Master, and you are all brethren alike.

9 Nor are you to call any man on earth your father; you have but one Father, and he is in heaven.

10 Nor are you to be called teachers; you have one teacher, Christ.

11 Among you, the greatest of all is to be the servant of all;

12 the man who exalts himself will be humbled, and the man who humbles himself will be exalted.

13 Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces; you will neither enter yourselves, nor let others enter when they would.

14 Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that swallow up the property of widows, under cover of your long prayers; your sentence will be all the heavier for that.

15 Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that encompass sea and land to gain a single proselyte, and then make the proselyte twice as worthy of damnation as yourselves.

Matthew 28: 2-15

Most of the New Testament is the apostles writing letters to the churches and telling them how they'd fucked this up. Out of the 27 books in the New Testament, TWENTY-TWO directly address heresies and frankly really scandalous sexual shit going on in the Early Church. The New Testament is not some lovey-dovey "Oh God is love" namby pamby horseshit, it's the apostles, who had met Christ and been total idiots while they were with him (or in the case of Paul after actively killing Christians for years) going "YOU IDIOTS NEED TO STOP BEING IDIOTS KTHX"... which is exactly in line with how the prophets talked to Israel in the Old Testament. And how we view the churches now.

An objective reading of the Bible, where you go along with the assumption that God is the good guy as the texts intend, show a humanity that is almost irrevocably broken. Virtues turn to stumbling blocks in the blink of an eye, the evil always seem to win out, and if the just live too long they become the bad guys.There's only one this didn't happen to, and He was killed because the rest of us couldn't stand to have something that good and pure live.

But for, whatever reason, God chose to give direct life, life itself, through very broken and stained hands. Sometimes He even uses their otherwise irredeemably awful words too. But He didn't leave. Now, either He is actively going through those stained channels (and dont' think you're less stained than them) or He isn't. Either we accept what the text says, which is that God openly allows the unworthy access to His life and you're one of them, or we don't. And if you don't you have to somehow come up with how you're better than the assholes you don't like.

Good luck with that one.

I'd prefer to just forgive them and myself for not being good enough to fail at their level. That actually has seemed to do some good for me and those around me.

And that is a lot better than most. I mean, we're wanting cold hard results here, right?

Alphacore #1

Many have accused the Rippaverse of being a stunt. They have gotten at July’s writing with a level of bad faith that isn’t surprising, but still annoying. And frankly there’s some basis for this: July’s dialogue is awful and he chose to start the Rippaverse with a slow burn world-building arc. July has said repeatedly that he did this on purpose. After all these repetitions you can either believe him or be an idiot. But with the hiring of Chuck Dixon to write Alphacore, the Soska Sisters hired full-time, and Mike Barron to write Goodying, the picture changed. July backed up his declaration that he was in for the long haul.

Welp, here’s the first non-July project, Alphacore #1! It’s next to me as I write. It’s quite pretty, as per the Rippaverse standards. This is a premium product. It’s pretty obvious where a lot of the money went. I could go on, but it’s repetitive at this point. Point is: this is a really well put together book, especially for 28 bucks.

The pencilling by Joe Bennett is amazing, front to back. There's a reason why he was a front-line penciller before being blacklisted for not being on the side of the cancel pigs. His storytelling particulary is on point, something that has been pretty standard for the Rippaverse so far. But there are not one, not two, not three, but FIVE fucking inkers on this book. FIVE. What the hell is this? Why are there five inkers on the project? There is no way they can maintain visual continuity with five of them, no matter how much they may talk, email, or cuddle after their orgy. And it shows in the product, trust me. There's moments where characters radically change appearance and you can tell it's coz that inker didn't stick to the other four freaking inker's styles hard enough. One of the characters, a cop called Wilkins, suffers more than any of the others, in some spots looking like something out of a redneck satire. I would have been okay with waiting a bit longer for the book, even swapping its debut out with Yaira #1 if that was a thing that needed to happen. But it wasn't, and that leads me to believe that we may see more crap like this. It is because Joe Bennett is so good that the book doesn't look like a total travesty, as opposed to just janky. The instant you hand a lesser penciller to five inkers there are gonna be problems.

Oh, and there's two colorists, and they really didn't freak talking to each other. They clearly didn't even try. One of the strongest moments in the whole book almost falls part coz I can't tell if the guy is supposed to be a red-head or a fucking blonde.

The fact that all of this adds up to "okay" art is a miracle. It's just janky at times. This could have gone a hell of a lot worse. Hand this to any lesser artists and it would have been a complete laughingstock.

Fortunately the story is awesome. Oh my God I love the story in this issue. Chuck takes the 96 page format and makes it sing. The beleagured and harrassed Alphacore, comprising the idealistic-but-dumb Bryan Solari, smart-but-temperamental Ingrid Valdez, and the silent cypher Braxten, stumble acrost the machinations of the shadowy Michael Copper and Lilian Ronashi. The book opens with Solari stopping a bombing attempt at a bank... only for the bomber to be legitimately surprised when his bomb goes off. It's one hell of an opening. And it just rolls from here. The story builds and builds and builds and then doesn't explode (literally), in the best way possible. The Alphacore are beautifully rendered in their frustrated-and-flawed glory. See, they want to be "regular" cops, but they're not regular, they're Excepts, and they're only wanted for whenever other Excepts are screwing around! This isn't a totally unreasonable request. Alphacore are justifiably frustrated, coz they want to be cops. And they can't just be cops. So they get more and more frustrated and start making mistakes. These are people just being people, with the epic consequences of their mistakes and frustrations being front and center. It's to the credit of Chuck that every beat of the way makes sense, but isn't defended or glorified. I love that every single second of these flawed characters is fun. Heck, my pulse started going up! It was fun! I had a great time! And the ending felt so damn good to read. I mean it. This is why I buy superhero comics. This. Right here.

I'm going to address Chuck Dixon's ending note now. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the mainstream U.S. comic book industry is falling apart at the seams. Sales are horrible, the books are worse, and frankly if I was an artist having to draw one of these new books I'd cry, coz they're so boring. Dixon's ending note, and the fact that 1 million bucks (so far) has been spent to glory in this end note, not to mention the incredible comic book before it... that should be very disconcerting. Change is here. If change keeps looking like stories like this the mainstream needs to get with the program, and quickly. But they won't. The note will go unheeded.

Alphacore has a lot of problems, and I spent most of the review bitching about them. All the things I said are true, but they are potentionally misleading. 

This book is so much more than the sum of its parts.

A lot more.

And it is a failure of me, as a writer, that I cannot adequately explain that. This comic builds on itself in a way that very few outside of Chuck Dixon can adequately do these days, nevermind hit it out the part like he does. The ending of this comic feels good. This comic feels amazing to read. There are so many problems with it, but everything clicks together so fucking well that it's honestly a bit breathtaking to witness. This is a great comic. Buy it. Yeah, there's problems, but man that last double page spread is so fucking cool. 

I love it.

It really is that simple.

Don't Play the Game

 

There's a phrase in the fighting game community I like: "Don't let them play their game". The idea is that each character in a fighting game interacts with the mechanics of the game in a unique way, and thus have their own way of playing the game, and their strategy is to find a way to play their form of the game. The basics of any fighting game are to deny the opponent their form of the game, while getting to maximize your own time playing your game.  

So, for instance, these are the shenanigans that my favorite character Sub-Zero can get up to, should he put you into the corner:

Now, why am I pointing this out?

Because, as a geek, I've noticed that this logic is pretty damn near universal, especially when it comes to debate. I've never, not even once, seen this not be an issue. If you share assumptions then certain logical outcomes are certain. Sorry, there's only so many ways to skin the rabbit in a way that works with power. And yes, trying to keep power/politics out of the situation is naive. Power is a magnet: if you're set up to be in agreement with its assumptions you will, eventually, go to where the power is. It's a matter of time. Power, whether it be military, cultural, personal, will always win if you give it an inch.

I disagree with where society is going, and always have. Hell, I'm not sure I've ever agreed with any society at any point in time. That may be because of the sheer number of times I've seen groupthink be harmful. So I acknowledge there may be an irrational impetus in there. But, looking the rage, distrust, and outright incoherence of where we're at I don't think I'm entirely off the track. So I don't want to be like what the society around us wants. That means my assumptions are different, and if they aren't different I must make them different, to avoid the pull of power. And so, if I wish to maintain what I think is a good outlook on life, my assumptions must be radically different from what society assumes. They can't play their game, not even for a moment.

Here's some of the assumptions I keep running into with our society that I think aren't just wrong but are obviously wrong. And by assumptions I mean things that you can more or less ascertain if you just a take second and actually look at the world and how it operates.

1. People are, by nature, good and if we could just get the bad programming out it would be fine.

Nope. I've never agreed with this, because it's just manifestly and obviously untrue.  Everyone, from every culture, has a degree of brutality and evil to them, and you can't not pass it on. The attempts to "reboot" have always been disastrous, and there's so much blood in just the French Revolution (which implemented 10 day weeks, temple prostitutes to Reason, and a generous severance package from life if you disagreed with them), nevermind the Nazis (who adapted Marxist principles to the scale of nations, that's literally what nationalism is), and definitely the Bolsheviks (whose attempts to rewrite human nature resulted in a black market that choked out the "legit" one).... people are social animals. They're immediately imprinted upon, from the moment they come into existence. There are no blank slates.

And even then, humans are programmed to follow the path of least resistance, which leads to entropy and death. Social programming is there to stop us from killing ourselves due to sheer indolence. You need people around to tell you how to fight against your own ennui. Which is everywhere in you, all the time.

You. Need. People. That's HUMAN 101 folks. 

So no, the programming is not the problem, on principle. People just do bad things with the programming they're given, and the best human programming attempts to make it as difficult as possible to subvert it.

2. Categorical imperatives are the key to morality.

I've written about this before. If such and such was applied universally would it be right? That's the categorical imperative. It assumes that humans can figure crap out. Again, that's manifestly untrue. If you think religion is the problem with that please, explain the 20th century, which implemented the openly atheistic principles of the Enlightenment, like the categorical imperative... to absolutely disastrous effect. Anyone who wants to defend the categorical imperative has to explain why it didn't impact the bloodshed of the 20th century, an act suspiciously like trying to deny the nose on your face. Somehow you'd have to go through the works of the Marxists, Communists, and Nazis, and prove they didn't have the categorical imperative behind them.

Good luck.

3. The key to a good life is minimizing pain while maximizing pleasure.

That's called hedonism, specifically epicureanism.

And that's, again, obviously wrong. 

Most of the things I've found worth doing in my life have not just been horrifically hard, but painful beyond cruelty. But if I hadn't have done those things I would have become less, lost my peace, which is not the same as being happy. To quote George Lucas "Happiness is only for a moment". You can't control whether or not you're happy, but you can control whether or not you're at peace.

Yes, that means learning to sit in the midst of the inferno as it rages around you and accepting it. Or, as St. Silouan puts it: "Keep thy mind in Hell and despair not". Yes, it means that you have to let go of the idea of happiness as an end point, or even as something worth thinking about at all.

The modern world only makes sense if you accept its assumptions. Assumptions are either correct or they're not.  If you accept the assumption you accept the logic founded upon it. The only way out is to reject the assumptions. You either look at the world around you and go "Yup, that tracks" or you don't.

And honestly? I don't. And haven't. And never will.

Enclave

 

I have a hatred for shills disguised as reviews. You know the ones I'm talking about, where there's nothing wrong with the game, it’s obviously perfection, and it's within their best interest for them to say so. I also have a hatred for "reviews" that do not reflect table experience. A read-through of a game is not the same as a review, and frankly most "reviews" of RPGs are outright fraudulent.

This is not a review.

So to get it out of the way: I am not an objective source. I love this game. Robby, the designer, has helped me with mine own baby, Crescendo, which has a similar vibe. Robby’s opinions on things aren’t exactly my own, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I look up to and respect his opinions more than I normally would, even if I don’t completely agree with him on implementation. You are not reading someone who can be objective.  I’ll tell you what I’m looking for when I look at the industry and why I love this game so much, and you can make up your own mind.

So, here's my concerns. Most RPGs do not teach good table talk. Modern Dungeons and Dragons destroys most good habits people could have built for RPGs, takes a dump on the wreckage, and then salts the earth so that way its shit JUST stinks and can’t compost. Most people who get away from the game Ron Edwards generously said caused  “brain damage” in its players find it takes years, sometimes a decade or more, to undo the damage wrought by WOTC’s trainwreck. All RPGs have to contend with The Great DnDisaster in their texts, either leaning into the brain damage, or fighting against it constantly on every page. Heck, some games go so hard against the DnDisaster they actually create entirely new problems of their own! All in an effort to help people heal from the damage!

But then there’s my least favorite part of the industry: the “rules-lite” garbage. Masquerading as “getting out of the way”, the lite-reactionaries throw out most of the supportive structure that’s actually good to have in the mistaken belief that most of us will go looking for supporting products or want to make up whole swaths of the game at once. Sorry, I’m a parent, not an unpaid designer.

That’s technically true because someone paid ten bucks for Apex. Once. So I am a paid designer! Hooray!!!

Point is, it’s usually not rules-lite, but rules-anemic. It’s infuriating. 

For those who are curious: yes the above is my nice opinion about the state of the industry; I’m not naming names, nor am I speaking my very pointed opinions on the “solutions” to the DnDisaster. The above is simply what’s going on, stated strongly so that the actual shitshow that is modern RPGs can be looked at with accuracy.

What in the everloving fuck does this have to do with Enclave, you may ask?

Simple.

Enclave is one of the best introductions to RPGs ever made, easily rivaling the classic Tenra Bansho Zero. This anorexically thin book is what I’d honestly throw at anyone who’s recovering from the DnDisaster AND total noobies, at the same time. This game is a gold standard for what RPG rules should be like.

How? Why?

By hyper focusing on merging mechanics with the conversation as tightly as possible. See, the DnDisaster can rightfully be called “brain damage” because it puts the two key aspects of an RPG, conversation and rules, in as acrimonious a rivalry as possible. Spoiler alert, but power gaming and taking advantage of a metagame shouldn’t be a dirty word. If you flinched at that congrats: your own sense of playing games itself has been turned on you. Hence why it’s called “brain damage”. And why I continue to use the term unironically. 

Enclave melds these two elements so tightly that it drops dice altogether. For some that is going to be a huge no-no;  rocks or nothing! And that would be sad, because the one thing I have found while playing Enclave is that it helped me remember how much fun just making shit up can really be… except there’s a short but robust system of rules in place to help keep things easy and fair. 

Part of this has to do with the book itself. At “typical” RPG size and 60 pages, Enclave simply isn’t what I like holding in my hands. It feels flimsy to hold. I don’t like that. But the fact that I’ve never had an issue looking up a rule in this “FEED ME A BURGER PLEASE”-sized book is something I must begrudgingly acknowledge. Some of this is definitely because the book’s organization is very clear. But the utility of a thinner rule book was honestly lost on me until this game, where the rules actually do matter in running the game, so that’s what I’m talking about now.

The gameplay itself is, as Martha remarked of Crescendo, “rules invisible”: all the rules faithfully respond to narration already going on, or are so intuitive that all it takes is a moment’s glance to understand the rule. So it’s not that you forget the rules, but that they encourage you to do what you already wanted to do to begin with. It’s not often you find a ruleset that’s so dedicated to legitimately getting out of the way, while providing support by giving you mechanics in spots where there would be questions as to how to handle things, like Rally. 

Of more questionable worth is the apparent hatred of numbers, while still using the concept. Is ++ really different from 2? Functionally? No. I get where Robby is coming from, and I applaud the attempt to keep the game as grounded in the conversation as possible, but I personally think the game goes too far, taking out useful trackers like HP and DCs simply because numbers are bad. But, and take notes here kiddos, the systems that replace the numbers are functional and more than satisfactory. Assigning color levels to stuff looks weird till ya do it, and then it makes sense. Now, I'm not new to RPGs, so I can't speak to whether or not it's better than numbers, but criminy it does work. Could it have stayed similar to previous  systems? Yes. Does it work anyways? Also yes.

There are very games on the market today that actualy focus on the conversation that aren't incredibly reductive, aka PBTA. Enclave isn't reductive, but focused. There's a mechanical variety to Enclave that's really subtle, quiet, but there. Sometimes the best things in life are the really quiet ones, which give just the right nudges, at the right time. And Enclave is exactly that.