Tasks for Thursday Night/Friday

• Write next Tribe.
  
• Finish and post Jamie's Tale.
  

I'm getting a late start due to a post-D&D nap... my sleep's been pretty broken up this past week. So I might end up sleeping again before finishing the longer of these tasks. Or I might get them done quickly and end up getting a good start on the next day's stuff. It's kind of hard to predict.

Propping Up Justice

I got a question in my Formspring inbox asking me what I think about the Prop 8 ruling. I have to say that like Newt Gingrich, I'm disappointed in Judge Walker for not recusing himself from the case due to his obvious conflicts of interest.

First of all, asking a human being to judge a case relating to human rights is always a bad idea... that's like putting the fox in charge of the, uh, foxhouse. We all know how that ends.

Second of all, as a rational individual, Judge Walker was clearly susceptible to reality's well-known liberal bias and extremely prejudiced against the sort of "non-traditional" or "alternative" evidence that the defendants' case depended on.

I ask you, in the 21st century do we still believe that an idea gets to choose whether it's going to be a fact, a supposition, or an opinion? Of course not. So why do our nation's courts insist on enshrining facts as having special privileges over the unsupported prejudices of fearmongering bigots? Even if we presuppose that the government has some interest in the truth, it's not like every fact leads to some greater revelation.

So who would have been better to hear the case than Judge Walker? Off the top of my head, I can think of a few possibilities for jurists who could have overseen a trial much less biased against the defendants.

1. A Criminal

Criminals are, as the proverbs tell us, "a superstitious and cowardly lot", which means that while they might still give the facts a full hearing, they wouldn't necessarily elevate them to a level where they're somehow above fear and innuendo.

2. Bizarro, Superman's Flawed Duplicate

As we see in cases ranging from Texas v. Lawrence to The Board of Education v. Brown, Bizzaro World's jurisprudence often results in rulings that are a cliched opposite to how similar cases were resolved here on Earth Prime. As a bonus, Judge Bizarro's habit of referring to the court as "me" in his crayon-scrawled rulings would probably pass as "folksy" to Prop 8's supporters.

3. Harvey "Two-Face" Dent

Let's face it: flipping a coin is probably the closest way to a fair and rational system that could have found in the defendant's favor. That's not to say that deciding issues of civil rights using purely random methods is all that fair or rational, but hey, it beats subjecting the rights of minorities to a majority vote, doesn't it?

You know, I'm starting to think that maybe I shouldn't have written this right after watching the cinematic trailer for DC Universe Online...

D&D Combat Mid-Mortem.

I'm going to post the transcript from last night's session later... I want to be wide awake when I use search-and-replace to format it, so I don't end up with weird errors like I did last time when I threw it up more or less immediately.

A single combat round went slower this time than it during the test. A lot of that was me. I think in retrospect I probably should have broken the session off at 11 instead of plowing on, because my brain does get fatigued and that makes it hard to do the spatial reasoning stuff. At the very end I almost skipped one player's turn and also forgot the fact that you can't take actions after a charge.

I think part of the slowness was also the battlefield... I was experimenting with adding difficult terrain, and the way I did it was describing the bottom of the quarry as being full of difficult terrain that would make movement take longer (because you'd have to go around it or through it, with a net effect either way of taking extra actions to get anywhere). Not very exciting in excecution. By the time we got to the end of the round I'd stopped penalizing movement, and I'm not going to do that when we pick it up next week.

I think difficult terrain can have a use in an ACME game, but it's got to be a relatively concrete thing... a big patch of it you could use to dissuade a shifty monster's chosen tactics, or that is on a direct line between you and some enemy archers. It has to be placed deliberately, in other words, so that it can have a deliberate impact. Otherwise it's just "movement takes twice as long", which makes the first round a wash.

The other thing I learned is that the halve monsters HP/double up their attacks thing might make the fights go quicker but it can also prevent any of the individual monsters from sticking around long enough to show what they can really do. Since I'm making a point of making each NPC in a fight distinct from each other (Goblin circus performers in the test, elemental animals in this session) to make position tracking easier, this can be a bad thing because each one's got some interesting tricks to show off and the fight can lose something based on which ones drop in the first round.

So instead of double attacks and halve HP, I think I'm going to leave their HP alone. This will mean that the typical monster is between a standard an elite, which means I'll be splitting the difference on experience. This will result in fewer opponents in a standard fight, which is something I want to do anyway, and one of the reasons every fight has at least one elite in it.

I'm also thinking that since the players end up waiting for their turns, I'm going to make "intro text" for each fight that I can post here giving a better description of the foes they're facing and better hints about their capabilities (who looks fast, who looks tough, etc.) I generally favor giving more information over less, but trying to put it into a scrolling Skype window can be tough.