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I’m a big fan of deck-building games. If you haven’t played Ascension, either as a board game or as an iPad app, you should definitely do so. Both iterations are fantastic.

But that’s not my point today. Today I played Quarriors, which is a deck-building game using dice instead of cards. It is exquisite. I don’t mind dice the way a lot of gamers do… Just because a game incorporates luck doesn’t negate the strategy involved. Quarriors let’s you build up a collection of dice that represent a selection of spells and creatures that changes with every game. The games are quick and engaging, and more often than not the final score is nail-bitingly close.

This one is definitely worth picking up if you enjoy these kinds of games.

So, yeah, as noted in the last post, I play Pathfinder.  Pathfinder, for the unfamiliar, is a tabletop roleplay system based on Wizards of the Coast’s Open Gaming License, and is specifically an evolution of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5.  I played D&D3.5 a lot, and when D&D 4th edition came out, I tried it but was extremely disappointed.  Eventually, enough people mentioned Pathfinder to me that I figured I’d give it a look.  It didn’t take long for me to convert; not only is the source material gorgeous and well-written, but the entire system is fantastic, and the campaign setting is brilliant.  Instead of breaking the game up into countless different campaign settings, Pathfinder’s world of Golarion has many regions that each have a very distinct feel.  It works wonderfully.  And the organized play system, Pathfinder Society, is excellent as well.

I tried running D&D online games a few times, but it never really worked.  I seem to have found a sweet spot with Pathfinder Society, though, using Skype and a great virtual table program called d20pro.  I’ve been running Pathfinder Society games this way for a few months now, and it’s been going great.  I really recommend this system, especially for anyone looking to do so tabletop RPG with friends who are geographically distant.

The hardest part about running these games is the mapping.  I do my own maps with ProFantasy’s Campaign Cartographer, and while they’re not pixel-perfect, they illustrate the game’s settings pretty well.  As I map modules, I’ll post my maps here, so maybe some other GMs can get some use out of them.

Can’t recommend Pathfinder Society and d20pro strongly enough.  Also, to make GMing even easier, Hero Lab allows for direct character and NPC importing into d20pro.  It’s a bit of an investment, but makes set-up a lot easier.

We did get in a bunch of Pathfinder, and while I still contend the venue was pretty meh, the Pathfinder games were fantastic. A big tip o’ the blog to the Yale Varsity Pathfinder Society Team, which probably doesn’t actually exist, but was in fine form nonetheless. 3 great sessions, a lot of laughs, and some of the best con groups I’ve ever been in. We had withdrawal on Monday.

I have an awful time trying to sleep in hotel rooms. The discomfort in my legs from running on a treadmill instead of a track is not helping anything, either.

My wife and I are attending ConnectiCon in Hartford, CT, this weekend. We’re trying to hit as many cons as possible this summer, since we’re both off work for a few months and that’s unlikely to ever happen again. We skipped PAX East this year over the rape joke asshattery, and will be missing GenCon, the one we really wanted to make, because my sister apparently hates me and scheduled her wedding for that weekend. Way to be selfish, sis.

Anyway, this is probably my least favorite con so far. It is majority cosplay, so most people are in costume; some of them are awesome, but a lot of them are awful. Also, you should be barred from cosplay at a certain age, and that age can be specified as the exact moment you stop looking like a kid desperately seeking the attention of your peers and start to more closely resemble a scary middle-aged creeper desperately seeking the attention of kids. Your mileage may vary.

ConnectiCon is also very anime heavy, and my general feelings about anime are “Meh.” All the cosplay and anime don’t leave a lot of time for games, which is the main reason I attend cons. We might be playing a few sessions of Pathfinder tomorrow, but neither the event program nor the roleplaying coordinator could tell me the level range of the game we signed up for, so it’s either cool for a level two summoner and inquisitor team or we’ll have a wide open schedule tomorrow evening.

Eh. It is what it is. I guess the cosplay folks need a safe space to do their thing. It just doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for gaming.

Wow. This place got dusty. Been to busy over he last year to blog, I guess. Went back to college to finish my degree. It’s going to take longer than I’d hoped, but it’s turned out to be a lot of fun, so I’m good with it.

Signing up for Twitter brought me back. I can’t be expected to say all I have to say in 160 characters. So I’m cleaning up a bit here so this site can handle any overflow. 215 comments to trash? Dammit…

Sometimes I think my wife is a bit too sensitive about childbirth issues.  We’re nonparents by choice, a decision that has little impact on my life except for the obvious lack of offspring.  It seems harder on my wife, and I usually assume it has more to do with the expectations absorbed during her childhood in the South than actual social pressures here and now.  Then I see nonsense like this Jillian Michaels fiasco, and I realize that my wife is probably right and I’m an asshole for doubting her.

This thing is all over the web, with most accounts similarly titled.

Jillian Michaels: I Won’t Ruin My Body with Pregnancy

‘Biggest Loser’ trainer Jillian Michaels has a hard little body and she plans to keep it that way. Michaels, 36, tells Women’s Health she is unwilling to become pregnant because of the way it would change her body.

“I’m going to adopt. I can’t handle doing that to my body,” she told the magazine. “Also, when you rescue something, it’s like rescuing a part of yourself.”

Notice, of course, that the headline and Michael’s actual quote are barely similar.  This has a lot of people upset, and rightfully so, as it’s sloppy journalism meant to turn a mundane interview into a controversy.

My bigger concern is the gender issues at work.  In order to formulate the misquote, one must have believed that the results of pregnancy on a woman’s body equate to ruination.  And not one, actually, but a quick Google search turns up hundreds of journalists who assume equivalence between the effects of pregnancy on the female form and destruction thereof.  There’s no small amount of misogyny behind that kind of thinking.

Just as important, there is no way a man making the controversial version of the statement, along the lines of, “I don’t want to get my wife pregnant because it would ruin her body,” would even register as news, despite the addition of gross misogyny and implied spousal ownership.  Jillian Michael’s crime was not rejecting parenthood, but rejecting motherhood.  The concept that a woman might not want to have children is dangerous to an entire industry and frightening to the countless women for whom having children was less a choice and more the result of a lifetime of expectations.  And that’s exactly why so many unscrupulous web journalists have been able to drive up traffic with a carefully constructed lie, quite possibly destroying a woman’s career in the process, a punishment for nothing more than the decision not to give birth.

Despite Jonah Goldberg’s mind-bogglingly stupid misinterpretation of history, American Fascism is a product of right-wing ideology.  Need an example?  How about xenophobia.

CNN Poll:

Do you agree with President Obama that Arizona’s new immigration bill is “misguided”?

No: 52%
Yes: 41%
Not Sure: 7%

When even a slim majority believes that it’s perfectly hunky-dory to require people of a specific ethnic background to carry identification papers with them at all times, you’re doing more to support fascism than any supporters of free CAT scans for poor people could ever dream of.

I hadn’t seen the latest nonsense from Roger Ebert until Penny Arcade took it on today, which makes me feel like I’m out of touch, because the last time Roger Ebert embarrassed himself by talking about video games, I caught it on the first day.  I guess I’m not in the loop the way I used to be.  The short: Roger Ebert sets up a straw man in the form of a talk given by Kellee Santiago, and picks it apart to prove that video games can not be and never will be a form of art.

Tycho handles the situation well, but fails to mention what I think is the most important aspect of this almost surreal situation: it is almost painfully obvious that Roger Ebert does not play and has never played video games.  His views on video games are about as valuable as his movie reviews would be if he only watched the trailers.   Take this quote from his article:

Her next example is a game named “Braid” (above). This is a game “that explores our own relationship with our past…you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there’s one key difference…you can’t die.” You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

I mean, the man is trying to understand a video game, something he is by his own admission completely unfamiliar with, and the only way he can manage to frame his argument is to point out how it doesn’t follow the rules of chess.  It’s like saying a painting can’t be art, because the viewer doesn’t have a limit on how long he can view it, whereas basketball has a shot clock.  When one can only make an argument by constructing false parallels, perhaps it’s time to bow out of the argument.

To be sure, I really don’t care much in the abstract about whether or not Roger Ebert thinks a video game can be art.  He is old, he is rigid in his antiquity, and he has no foundation of experience upon which to build a meaningful argument.  What bothers me is that he is taken seriously enough about this topic that he feels empowered to revisit it.  I’m sure he wonders to himself condescendingly why people get so worked up, and why they can’t just enjoy video games without demanding the medium be respected as an art form.  It would be a flawed but understandable critique from almost anyone — with the glaring exception of someone who has built his professional career critiquing an art form not universally accepted as true art.

Digby had smarter things to say about this than I do, so see her for actual content.

I just need to make a quick comment.

Bias is not a good thing. Right? We all agree on that, don’t we?

People and candidates for public office should be judged on the basis of their ideas, stance on the issues, character, experience and integrity, not on the basis of age, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion or disability.

Therefore, we must repeal the 19th Amendment. Yes, the one granting suffrage to women. Because? Well, women are biased.

Just look at the poll results in today’s newspaper.

Men favored the attractive former beauty queen Sue Lowden over the graying Harry Reid by 22 points, while women shunned their gender mate, choosing Reid by a 2-point margin. Which proves women favor Democrats.

That is some fantastic satire. The fact that it is accidental depresses me, and makes me wonder if good writing is really a matter of luck.

UPDATE: Apparently, the problem isn’t that Thomas Mitchell writes unintentional satire. The problem is that he doesn’t understand the difference between satire and Internet trolling. Basically, he thinks he was being satirical, but the point he was trying to make was inconsistent with satire, in that satire is meant to cast a critical eye at the subject matter, not merely piss off people who disagree with the piece. The latter is common trolling, and is embarrassing when engaged in by angry, antisocial pubescents, let alone “professional” journalists.