With ‘Full House’ sequel, Netflix confirms they’re playing a very deep game.

My first thought on watching the pilot for Fuller House, both a sequel and note-by-note retread of the 1980s nostalgia king sitcom Full House, was, “How did the platform that produces Bojack Horseman think this was a good idea?”

The pilot—the only episode I’ve seen, and the only episode I am likely to see any time soon—plays as an awkward mix of a self-aware “Very Brady” style parody, a winking reunion show, and an overly sincere pilot for a sincerely anachronistic sitcom. And of course, this is because it is all of those things. The entire original cast returns to reprise their roles, with one notable (and noted, in one of the only truly unpredictable moments in the pilot) exception.

Everyone gets a line or two to remind us who they are, what they did 30 years ago, and what stereotypical character traits they represent. Everyone gets a chance to mug for the camera and sneak in their catch phrases. As a side note: with an adult understanding of Bob Saget’s adult humor, it’s hard not to read the repeated references to Danny Tanner’s overweaning cleanliness as a meta-joke. The show ends with a passing-of-the-torch moment that will resonate as being truly iconic for anyone who actually remembers the original Full House pilot and leave everyone else—including people who otherwise watched the show—scratching their heads.

On the subject of predictable moments: despite having had it stuck in my head on at least 11,347 occasions in my life, I never realized before now that the first line of the theme song is “What ever happened to predictability?”

In the original series, this line was meant to be at least a bit of a wistful semi-subversion, as the show’s focus was on a non-nuclear family in a non-traditional household and all the unexpected problems and unconventional solutions they came up with. I say “wistful” and “semi”, because of course, Full House was the late-80s prime time idea of white suburban family entertainment: clean as a whistle, never quite as racy as the carefully coached hoots and hollers of the live studio audience would have us believe. (Have mercy.)

In the tacitly updated version, this same line plays a lot more straight. Whatever happened to predictability? Why, it’s right here where you left it, 29 years ago. “This baby never went out of style,” says Dave Coulier, holding up an amazing technicolor dream shirt from his character’s wardrobe. There’s a comedic beat that seems to last an eternity, by the time John Stamos replies, “That’s because it was never in style,” you will have already heard this line echoing in your head so many times that you feel like you’re stuck in a Groundhog Day loop and haven’t figured anything better to do with infinite time than watch Fuller House.

I don’t want to sound like the show is terrible from start to finish. There are a few genuine laughs early on, most of them having to do with Stephanie Tanner. The character of Kimmy Gibbler, whose defining trait is awkwardness, has the least awkward transition from decades past. She’s never had a problem making herself at home in the Tanner household before, and she still doesn’t. The character works better as a self-assured adult than as a gawky tweenager.

In many cases, the show does work as a reunion show or a nostalgic parody, so on that level it’s worth watching at least the pilot for anyone with fond if hazy memories of the original.

It’s the pilot for the actual sitcom, of which I understand some 10 or so episodes follow, that’s painful. I mentioned Bojack Horseman up above. If you’ve watched that other Netflix show (it’s kind of like Californication, “but, like, a animal version”, with the premise that the main character is a washed up star from a late 80s/early 90s sitcom, and also a horse) before sitting down to Fuller House, you’ll find it almost impossible to not have the lines “Now that’s what I call horsing around!” or “Go home, Goober!” run through your head at multiple points, and this isn’t even mentioning the danger of getting Too Many Cooks stuck in your head.

These things show us that sitcom parodies suffer from their own peculiar version of Poe’s Law. Apparently the best way to lampoon the TGIF-style shows of yesterdecade is to just follow their lead exactly, beat for beat and note for note. When you’re watching Bojack or Cooks, in the back of your head you think they’re probably exaggerating. But then you see an earnest and very conscious recreation of those same sitcom tropes and you realize, no, they worked so well because they were so completely and perfectly on the nose. And in trying to deliberately re-capture the lightning (or maybe the fluorescent lighting?) that was Full House in a bottle, Fuller House somehow does it all in an even more on-the-nose way.

So why did this show get made? And why did it get made by the “network” that brought us Bojack?

To understand Netflix’s plan, we must, as a brilliant surgeon once said, “quietly enter the realm of pure genius”. My first thought when I had actually finished watching the show was “Why was this made?” To judge by the critical ratings, that was a lot of people’s thoughts. But when we’re talking about entertainment media, that question is really, “For whom was this was made?” and if you find yourself asking that question, the answer is, “People who aren’t me.”

Compared to a traditional network, Netflix’s original programming approach seems to be all over the place. They snap up import rights, pick up discarded and discontinued shows from all over the place, make gritty dramas and savvy comedies and bizarre cartoons and licensed properties. A traditional network will cancel even a successful show if it’s attracting “the wrong demographic”, but Netflix isn’t a network at all. It’s a subscription-based distribution channel. Where a network is actually in the business of delivering eyeballs to advertisers, Netflix’s whole revenue stream is based around those eyeballs.

Thus, the point of any Netflix original production is to be the “killer app” to some group of people, the thing that gets new people to sign up. For some people, this was House of Cards. For others, it’s Orange is the New Black. Or Marvel’s [Latest]. Or another season of their canceled cult favorite.

And for some people, mostly older people who have probably never had a streaming media subscription and who otherwise likely would have been among the last holdouts? It’s going to be Fuller House.

Last spring when the show was announced, a lot of people asked questions like, “Is this going to damage the Netflix Original brand?” or “Is this going to be the death-knell for Netflix?” Well, I don’t know if Netflix has released anything like exact viewing numbers for Fuller House, but it’s apparently done well enough for them that they’ve already ordered another batch of episodes. This is not at all unusual for their original productions, and while this means we can’t exactly call the show a stand-out yet, it does seem to signal that their “brand” is fine.

There might not be a lot of Bojack or Orange fans streaming it, but have you seen how many things are under the Netflix Original banner these days? I doubt very many people, or even very many households, watches all of it.

Netflix is living in the long tail of the market, building a broad catalog of things that individually appeal to as broad a spectrum of the market as possible. This is the opposite of the traditional approach, which is to try to make everything you do appeal to the “mass market”. It gives us shows that would otherwise not exist (like Orange is the New Black, Bojack Horseman, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, or Grace and Frankie, or even Fuller House), shows that are not completely watered-down and sanitized and homogenized because when Netflix streams a series, they’re not worried about who they might turn off but who they’re going to hook in.

Simply put, Netflix doesn’t have to worry about the “18 to 35” demo with Fuller House. They already have those people’s subscriptions. Anyone who’s still worried about the future of original programming on Netflix after this trainwreck can relax.

The fact that they’re willing to make a show that does nothing for you personally indicates that they’ll continue putting out shows with no regard for pleasing everybody.

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Update: After I posted this, Twitter user @Trevel had this to say, which I think just about sums up the key to Netflix’s approach:

“Arguably the best thing about Netflix is that I’m the customer, not the product.”

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Spherical Goblins: Inference of Destruction

One of the first columns I wrote under the heading of Spherical Goblins was on the subject of how to read the rules. This one is, I suppose, a bit of a sequel to that. I’m writing it to address one specific source of confusion for many players, and to use that example to discuss a general case that causes confusion.

This is fitting, as “specific” and “general” are watchwords for rule interpretation in 5th Edition, as in “specific beats general”. These three little rules are meant to be a key that unlocks the rules, or a razor that cuts through confusion, but the problem that some people have is figuring out what is specific and what is general.

There is a whole series of Frequently Asked Questions in 5th Edition that are all founded on the same misconception about a general rule. It’s really just one question, phrased in different ways. Two of the most common:

• “When I make a bonus attack using Crossbow Expert, do I get to add my ability modifier to the damage?”
• “If my monk uses Martial Arts or Flurry of Blows, can I still add my ability modifier to the damage of the extra attacks?”

Now, in that column I linked to in my opening, I spoke about how the rules for a special ability like Martial Arts or Crossbow Expert are largely self-contained, how there aren’t more detailed rules governing them somewhere else, only the general rules with which they interact. An attack you make using one of your special abilities follows the general rules for attacking, except where th ability itself lists an exception.

In the case of these abilities, the exception is that you can use a bonus action to do it. None of these abilities say anything about adding an ability modifier to your damage or not, which means you follow the general case. The general case is yes.

Yet enough people are unsure about this that they feel the need to ask, and whenever there’s that much uncertainty about a thing, there are most assuredly going to be people who are certainly wrong about it. There are tables out there where players are shorting themselves damage in every round of every combat. Why? Because instead of following the general rules for attacks, they are inferring the existence of a general rule that governs bonus action attacks in particular, and they are applying it to any ability that grants one.

The existence of this rule is intuited from the specific rules governing what 5E calls “two-weapon fighting”. When you are wielding a light melee weapon in each hand and you use one of them to attack using the Attack action on your turn, you can spend a bonus action to attack with the other one, at the cost of not adding your ability modifier to the damage. So if you’re a rogue and you’ve got Dexterity of 16 and you’re wielding two short swords, you’ll do 1d6+3 with one and 1d6 with the other.

This specific rule is meant to be a quick-and-dirty representation of the ability to make a slightly wild swing or stab with your off hand, though in keeping with 5E’s general economy and simplicity, the words “off hand” and “main hand” never appear in the text. If the weapons you’re using are identical, then it doesn’t matter at all which one is in which hand; if they’re not, then it hardly matters, to whatever extent that it does, you’re subtly encouraged to envision the hand holding the bigger or better weapon as your main one. Any actual mechanical difference comes out in the wash.

The key thing here is that the fact that you don’t do as much damage with a bonus action attack when it’s delivered in this fashion is not a general rule, though, but a specific one that represents a specific thing; the off-hand nature of the strike.

How is this specific rule mistaken for a general one?

Because it seems to be the closest thing to a general case for bonus action attacks. It doesn’t require a feat. You don’t have to be a particular class or choose a particular option. Anyone who can hold a couple of small axes, swords, or daggers can do it.

And because to someone who has not yet grasped the underlying logic and structure of 5th Edition’s rules it feels like there must be a general case to defer to, it feels like this must be it.

As I said at the outset, this is a specific example of a general problem. This tendency to turn towards specific rules for clues to some hidden general one permeates the way new people tend to approach the game.

For instance, another common question is if poison resistance confers advantage on saving throws against poison. Dwarves have both, and it’s hard to get poison resistance as a PC without being a dwarf, which leads many people to conclude that yes, they are inextricably linked.

But the key here is that dwarves specifically get both. As in, the rules specify that they do. If poison resistance—resistance to poison damage, following the general rules for damage resistance—was the same thing as advantage on saves against poison, the description of the dwarves’ particular hardiness against poison wouldn’t need to mention both.

This is counterintuitive to most people, even veterans of most roleplaying games. A lot of rules texts include more clarifying elaborations than 5E does, reminders of general rules that are useful in context but ultimately redundant within the larger system the text represents. In such a rule book, the entry for dwarves would mention advantage on saving throws alongside the damage resistance as a reminder, a reference to a general rule officially spelled out elsewhere. The rule about two-weapon fighting would likewise be repeating a general case, if not establishing it.

5th Edition eschews these redundancies almost to a fault. None of the spells that inflict the charmed condition spell out the effects of that condition, for instance. They merely reference it and add their own specific effects. In another game system, the text for charm person might include language like, “The creature is charmed by you, becoming unable to attack you and granting you advantage on Charisma checks while the condition lasts.”

But that would be repeating information that is general to a condition shared by multiple spells and other effects, so they don’t. Instead they only mention things that are peculiar to the spell charm person in particular, like the fact that the charmed creature regards you the caster as a friendly acquaintance, or becomes hostile to you when the condition ends.

And so, almost predictably, this creates a new source of confusion among people who feel the charmed condition itself must be more than the two bullet points listed under the heading of “charmed” in the appendix on conditions. They look to charm person as being the nearest thing to a general case, in the same way that dwarves are seen as the general case for poison resistance and two-weapon fighting is seen as the general case for bonus action attacks, and so they conclude that the charmed condition intrinsically includes the notion that it changes how the target sees you, or induces hostility afterwards.

In other words, they operate under the assumption that being under the charmed condition basically means “being under the effects of charm person“.

Categorizing these errors and picking apart the thinking behind them might seem mildly interesting to someone who knows better, and pointing out that they are errors might be useful to someone who’s confused, but my purpose here is to do more than that. My purpose in writing this blog post is to help everyone who plays 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons to better understand how the rules work and why they work, so that specific corrections or clarifications about the rules become less necessary.

In my post about procedural logic, I talked about how to read a rule as a process. Now I’m going to zoom out one level and talk about the same thing on a more macro level, how to fit rules into a hierarchy.

Applying procedural logic to a rule is a bit easier if you have any kind of a background in computer programming. The same is true of this skill, particularly if you’ve ever studied any kind of object-oriented programming language or made use of typed data structures.

Basically, it comes down to inheritance.

Imagine the rules of the game as a chart that looks like a family tree, or rather, a forest of related trees. At the top of one tree, we have top-level rules, like “Roll a d20, add modifiers, compare to a Difficulty Class”. That one would have three branches, for attack rolls, saving throws, and checks, and each of those would have their own branches, which would branch further.

Any rule that occurs at any level of any tree is going to be passed down to the branches below it. This includes rules that modify or even negate higher-level rules. For instance, the rules for attacking include rules for damage rolls, which specify that you add an ability modifier to your damage roll. The rule for two-weapon fighting branches off that, and it includes a rule that removes that ability modifier. One branch below that you can find the Two-Weapon Fighting style available to warriors, which puts the ability modifier back on.

The Dual-Wielding Feat, which (among other things) removes the limitation that the weapons be light could be found either branching from the general case of two-weapon fighting or the style of that name, and would inherit whichever damage modifier rule was being followed by its parent.

So when you have a case and you’re not sure what rules it’s inheriting, you just need to figure out what it’s branching off from. This sounds more complicated than it is. In practical terms, it’s just a matter of following references.

The geas spell inflicts the charmed condition. Its text references the charmed condition. So if you’re not sure if you should be looking at the charm person spell or the charmed condition, you just follow the reference to the condition. The charmed condition does not reference any spell; spells reference the condition. So geas and charm person are both just branches hanging below the condition in the inheritance tree. No matter how much it intuitively feels like a spell that charms a person should refer to the spell called charm person, no such reference exists.

Similarly, the rules for Crossbow Expert might read a bit like the rules for two-weapon fighting, but at no point does it say “you can make an attack as a bonus action, as you would if you were using two-weapon fighting”. The reference is simply to making an attack, so the next thing up the tree would be the general rules for attacking.

It’s just an extension of applying procedural thinking: follow the reference, follow the rules that cover that reference, and you’re done. There’s nothing else to do.

Would it be tedious to run through this process each and every time someone wants to cast a spell or use a special ability? Obviously. But it’s also not necessary. For most people, there will only be a small handful of areas where this kind of confusion arises. Once you’ve used this technique to acquire a basic understanding of where a rule fits into the structure of the rules, you don’t really need to do it again for that rule. And the more you do it, the better an understanding of the overall shape of the system you’ll have, which means you’ll have a better ability to intuitively understand how it hangs together when you encounter a new ability, a new rule.

Perhaps the best skill for avoiding this confusion, though, is simply the ability to recognize when you’re making an undue inference in the first place. Once you understand how self-contained the rules that govern a spell or feature are, and you understand how rare redundant elaborations or reminders are within the text, it gets a bit easier.

Then you can read a spell like shocking grasp and realize that the fact that metal armor gives you advantage on the attack roll is not stating a general rule for all spells that do lightning damage, or it wouldn’t be listed in this specific spell.

You can see that wizards and some druids have an ability that lets them regain a few spell slots in the middle of the day and realize that if this were something that all casters could do, it wouldn’t be listed for these two specific cases.

And while sometimes this means you’ll wind up nerfing some great idea you had, in general, this kind of clarity benefits players, both by allowing you to have a better idea of what exactly your character is capable of while also preventing you from applying limitations from multiple unrelated sources.

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Alexandra Erin has been playing roleplaying games since 1989, and has been experimenting with game design and related theory since about one week after that. If you enjoy her writing, you can find her original D&D content on the DMs Guild, or support her directly.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Hugo Stuff: Just taking a moment to acknowledge…

…that the Hugo nominations are going on right now, and they will be an ongoing thing through the end of March. I echo the sentiments of Mr. John Scalzi in saying that if you can nominate (meaning, as I understand it, that you already had a World Con membership as of January 31st, including a membership for last year’s), you should nominate.

Even if you can’t fill out all your allotted choices in every category, nominate what you can, where you can. Please don’t let any sense that you don’t know the field well enough to confidently assert that something is truly “the best” stop you; the purpose of the nomination is not to make that determination, but to provide choices for the wider fandom as a whole to make it later. Nominate your favorites, nominate whoever and whatever you thought was notable in 2015, and if you feel insecure or like an impostor, know that there are people out there who not only never question their own right to participate, they’ll never question their right to dominate.

The fact that a small, self-entitled clique that sought to wrestle control of the award away from fandom at large was able to game the ballot formation so effectively last year came down to how low participation in the nominations historically has been. The fact that this same clique was given a thorough drubbing by fandom at large in the actual awards came down to how high participation was.

I haven’t been talking about the Sad and Rabid Puppies much this year because the Hugo Awards are going to happen every year and I don’t want that to be my life, but I understand they’re still at it, still spinning the same narratives, still spreading the same propaganda, still appealing to the biases and suspicions of the biased and the suspicious. I don’t know how much impact they’ll have.

For nominations, there are three possibilities: they’ll have another walk in the park, their machinations will be shut out entirely, or they’ll have some impact but not be able to seize as total control as they did last year. I think if everybody who was mobilized to get involved and vote on conscience and merits rather than politics stays involved, their ability to unduly influence the process will be nullified, but that depends on a big if.

My name has come up in a few circles as a possible nominee. By that I mean, I know that some people have nominated me, but that’s not the same as making it onto the ballot, even without any puppies piddling in the box. In truth, it is an honor just to be nominated, even if I don’t make the short list. It is an honor to have my name being mentioned in conjunction with some of the giants of the field.

If you’re a Hugo voter and you didn’t realize I was even in the running, the way I understand it is that people are nominating me in two categories: Fan Writer and Best Related Work. Fan Writer, as I understand it, is for people who write about fandom and sf/f media, which is something I do from time to time both in this space, and on my Twitter, and (mostly in the form of Star Trek meta) in other parts of the web.

The fan writing I believe they’re referring to is primarily my writing last year about the Hugo Awards and the puppies and related sad/angry animals, which you can find mostly (along with other similar things) filed under the deliberately dismissive heading of Noisy Nonsense.

The “related works” I have heard people talking up include both my satirical “Sad Puppies Review Books” series (also available as a collection, with a few bonuses, here) and the parody e-booklet John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular. 

I am not going to tell anyone how to nominate or how to vote. I do have some mixed feelings about the Related Work category being used in this fashion, but not so thoroughly mixed that I’d turn down a nomination. I will, however, point out that my satirical efforts also fall under the broad heading of “fan writing”, and as the Best Fan Writer category is for a writer and not a particular work, you could safely nominate me in that category and know that I will take it as a nod towards my silly writing as well as the more serious stuff.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.