A Million Hit Points
http://roger.carbol.com/1Mhp/index.php
Great 4E DMing Advice
http://roger.carbol.com/1Mhp/index.php?entry=entry081113-102405
4th Edition DnD and Why It Rules
Crunchy! ]]>Reflections on The Dark Knight
http://roger.carbol.com/1Mhp/index.php?entry=entry080722-095713
The following probably contains spoilers, so I'd strongly recommend you see the movie first before reading any further.
Many have placed the movie in the 'superhero' genre, which I think is a bit regrettable and a bit inaccurate.
It's more realistic than the other Batman movies, and more realistic than most superhero movies. It's a great movie but it's not fantastic, in the original and archaic sense.
Gotham City actually looks like a real city. It actually has daytime now. The buildings look like real buildings, and there isn't 200-foot statues of Greek gods everywhere. The monorail is no longer a hundred yards above street level.
The violence is ugly, brutal, and short. There is a rare authenticity to it.
The characters too are more realistic.
The Joker is a very accurate portrayal of a sociopath, and shares much with Hannibal Lecter.
Like most sociopaths, he lies. Almost constantly. About important things and unimportant things. It's like they don't even really have an internal model of the truth at all.
The Joker's issue doesn't really deal with order or chaos per se; he's not actually a Trickster archetype, for the most part. His issue is control. He's a Chessmaster archetype, again similar to Hannibal Lecter.
Throughout the movie, the other characters are constantly acting in response to The Joker. He attacks, they counterattack. He believes he's always in control and he's right. Even when he's locked in the interrogation cell with Batman, he's still in control of the situation.
As it turns out, control is also a pretty major issue for Batman. And also for Harvey Dent, both before and after his incident.
The need for control, the need for power -- these are the themes of serious works. It may be fair to ask, at this point, control and power over what, exactly?
I'm not sure there's a single answer to that, but one compelling answer is: control over the monopoly of violence. A monopoly that is traditionally held by the State.
Several themes are explored throughout the movie.
One of the fundamental themes the movie deals with is the selfish nature of humanity versus the selfless nature of humanity.
The Joker, true to his sociopathy, is supremely selfish -- the personification of the trait, to some degree. He also assumes, more often correctly than not, that everyone else is, too.
His mode of control over other people generally consists of offering them the opportunity to be selfish. His schemes succeed in the opening bank job, his insinuation into the mob, and his conversion of Harvey Dent. It succeeds on some level but fails on another with his ferry stand-off -- a bit more on that later.
Harvey Dent is selfish too, although it motivates him to do good, at least initially. He covets fame; he wants to be beloved by the citizenry. He likes his adulation from afar, though -- he is uncomfortable at his own fund-raising party.
His selfishness is revealed when he torments his prisoner.
Two-Face is even more selfish. Despite believing himself somehow unbiased or fair, he's not out there randomly deciding whether or not to kill random people. He's deliberately targeting his victims for revenge.
The coin toss is his way of denying responsibility for his actions, which brings us to another theme of the movie.
The acceptance of responsibility for one's actions versus the denial of responsibility is also a significant theme.
This is personified most directly in Two-Face, whose gimmick is not about order or chaos, but responsibility and guilt. He is tricking himself out of guilt, which means he at least still has some concept of it.
It's completely alien to The Joker. Like other sociopaths, there's never any chance he might feel badly about hurting another human being. They're just hollow pawns to him.
Batman and Dent are heroic because they do accept responsibility for their actions -- perhaps accepting more responsibility than they really deserve. Dent apologizes more than any other character in the whole movie, and he's always sincere about it. Batman takes the fall for crimes he didn't even commit. Lucius Fox takes a stand based on similar principles.
And now we find ourselves back at the ferry stand-off. The people aboard, as The Joker predicted, do act selfishly. They selfishly avoid taking on the guilt of killing tens of thousands of people. It's no wonder The Joker couldn't see it coming.
That's the bulk of what I wanted to say about the movie, but there's a few other miscellaneous observations that I wanted to share.
It might be worth noting that there's basically no female characters at all, really. Rachel Dawes is more of a plot device, a MacGuffin, than a real character.
It's interesting to see just how manipulative Alfred is. He happens to use his powers for good, but it's still manipulation.
In conclusion, yes, it's a good movie. See it, think about it, talk it over with friends. ]]>"Mind Meld" -- Worth Seeing
http://roger.carbol.com/1Mhp/index.php?entry=entry080706-205930
Mind Meld: Secrets Behind the Voyage of a Lifetime is 75 minutes of two guys having a chat. They're long-time friends and they've both led extraordinary lives.
It's worth watching, in my opinion. There's a lot in it.
They happen to be William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, but that's missing the point. ]]>All is Made Clear
http://roger.carbol.com/1Mhp/index.php?entry=entry080624-161948
http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=1504
Lore hits it right on the head here. ]]>"I'll stab him in the face."
http://roger.carbol.com/1Mhp/index.php?entry=entry080617-105436
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=280929
He's unchained, alright. ]]>Thanks for everything, E. Gary Gygax
http://roger.carbol.com/1Mhp/index.php?entry=entry080304-143146
IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME, NOT THE LETTER OF THE RULES, WHICH IS IMPORTANT. NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME. AS YOU HEW THE LINE WITH RESPECT TO CONFORMITY TO MAJOR SYSTEMS AND UNIFORMITY OF PLAY IN GENERAL, ALSO BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. WITHIN THE BROAD PARAMETERS GIVEN IN THE ADVANCED DUNGEON & DRAGONS VOLUMES, YOU ARE CREATOR AND FINAL ARBITER. BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEON & DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE. MAY YOU FIND AS MUCH PLEASURE IN SO DOING AS THE REST OF US DO!
]]>The Symbolicizer
http://roger.carbol.com/1Mhp/index.php?entry=entry080226-104157
Behold, The Symbolicizer! ]]>On Dwarves, and Their Arranged Marriages
http://roger.carbol.com/1Mhp/index.php?entry=entry080109-094609
I'm going to run off on a bit of a tangent -- and it's not even supported by the 4e information I have so far. But bear with me.
Between the slavery to the giants, the war of liberation therefrom, and all the other problems since then, dwarves have taken a beating. They hid out in isolated mountain fortresses for some time.
Let's say that all this abuse has led to them losing quite a bit of genetic diversity. They're still a viable population, but not by much.
This gives us a bit of a hook to hang some known dwarven tendencies off of. Why they have such a fetish with knowing their ancestry back two dozen generations, and why they have arranged marriages.
If you let them marry whomever they wanted, they'd probably end up marrying their cousins, of some degree, just out of statistical necessity.
Carefully building arranged marriages, after considering the ancestry of both individuals as far back as can be managed, is one way to try to avoid inbreeding.
Fail to do that, and you end up like the duergar. ]]>
