Listen to the Rain

I just saw a couple tweets about it from one of his co-workers:

コナミコマンド「上上下下左右左右BA」の生みの親であるプログラマーの橋本和久さんが、昨夜、亡くなられたとのこと。ご冥福をお祈りいたします。

— TECHNOuchi ♓️🅰 (@TECHNOuchi) February 26, 2020

在籍時代、一緒のチームになったことはないですが、社内で交流もあり、ほんわかした雰囲気のある優しい方でした。同じ船に乗り、僅かながら時間を共にした者同士として、訃報はちょっと辛いものがありますね。天国でもゲーム作り続けてくださいね。ありがとうございました。

— TECHNOuchi ♓️🅰 (@TECHNOuchi) February 26, 2020

Which read:

"Hashimoto Kazuhisa, the progenitor of the 'Up up down down left right left right B A' Konami Code, passed away last night. Rest in Peace."

"We never worked together when we were both at Konami, but he was always warm and friendly when we communicated. As someone who joined at the same time as me and who I was only associated with for a short time, news of his death was a little hard to hear. Please keep making games up in Heaven, and thank you for everything."

Hopefully in his next incarnation, he'll input the code and have 29 more chances.

But seriously, we could all hope to have such a legacy. ご愁傷様でございます to everyone in his life.

One dead in California synagogue shooting.

Antisemetism never went away. It's been a continuing problem for years, and it's getting worse. I remember reading a well-meaning post after the Charlottesville march with a goyishe woman talking about how allies needed to stand up for the people that the alt-right was targeting. Muslims, LBGTQ people, immigrants, women, black and brown people.

Notice anyone missing from that list?

I feel like awareness has increased since then, but not by much. When Representative Omar made her comments recently, it felt to me like both the left and right immediately used her statement and response as attack each other over our heads. I even saw several prominent leftists wag their fingers at anyone who was offended by Omar's comments, because we were giving fuel to the right by doing so. Look who we were standing with, they said.

I'm sorry. The idea that Jews aren't really Americans, that we're a fifth column secretly undermining the country, is exactly the root of this hate. It's the reason a woman הי״ד died today in California, because a man believed that we're promoting immigration in order to undermine the "white race" and take control of a divided country. It's exactly the same. It doesn't matter if it's someone on our side who said it, and the part of the Left that complained about us reacting to it aren't our friends.

But that's for a later post. A woman is dead because people still think we secretly run the world.

May the table set before them become a snare;
may it become retribution and a trap.
May their eyes be darkened so they cannot see,
and their backs be bent forever.
Pour out your wrath on them;
let your fierce anger overtake them.
May their place be deserted;
let there be no one to dwell in their tents.
For they persecute those you wound
and talk about the pain of those you hurt.
Charge them with crime upon crime;
do not let them share in your salvation.
May they be blotted out of the book of life
and not be listed with the righteous.
-Psalm 69:22-28

What a great way to end Pesach.

Tod Douglas Megibow (z"l), 1951-2012. May his memory be a blessing.



I said kaddish for him last night, on the beginning of the first of Sivan, and lit the candle. This picture is from this morning. His obituary is still online here.

I did not get the chance to know him very well. We only interacted a handful of times, since he was very busy with practicing law and schoolpsychnerd and I lived in Japan for three years. He thought fast and talked fast, like he was trying to get just a few more words out than the flow of time would let him. I honestly found him a bit overwhelming, but as far as I know, he liked me. He liked my level head and my thriftiness. I wish I had gotten the chance to know him better, to hear more of his stories. I wish he had been able to visit us in Japan, or in Chicago. He wrote a book based partially on his life. I've never read it.

In the interview linked there, he said:

"In this business if you don't laugh, you cry."

He and my father built the chuppah together, for the wedding.

( Psalm 130 )

Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy dies at 83.

I never watched Star Trek when I was younger, nor did I really watch it when I got older. I've seen a few of the movies (I, IV, and whatever Nemesis was), a few scattered episodes here and there, and part of the first season of Enterprise back in university before we just mutually decided it wasn't worth watching.

Despite that, I still ended up as a second-order Star Trek fan, mostly through library books when we'd go visit my grandmother. I've read dozens of Star Trek novels in addition to spending hours pouring through Memory Alpha and Beta, and my favorite novels were always those of the original series. And of those, my favorite novel is Spock's World. I've been planning to reread it for a while now, but I think I need to push that up to next on my list.

His last tweet seems even more poignant now, in context:

— Leonard Nimoy (@TheRealNimoy) February 23, 2015

LLAP indeed. ברוך דיין האמת \\//

How are those concepts connected? Well, I'll explain!

One of the problems I frequently run into in the games I like to run and play is how long character generation takes. It's an unavoidable problem with any system that allows a wide variety of player choice--they'll have to figure out what they want to play, figure out what abilities they want to take that fit their concept, spend those leftover points on things that might be useful, go back and forth with the other players on what the proper distribution of character resources should be, etc., etc. I don't want to knock group character generation, or even spending a session doing so, because some of my players really like it. I don't blame them, either. Part of the reason I like more complex systems is that I like the give-and-take of planning out a group and trying to cover for all eventualities in skill and power selection.

The thing is, this directly disincentivizes killing characters. Or, I suppose if you want to have less agency ascribed to it, it disincentivizes running a game with high lethality. If anyone dies, in addition to all the normal headaches of integrating a new person into the group, you now have to wait for the dead person to create a new character, which will take the same length of time as before. Even if they really have a concept nailed down and know the system, they'll still have to spend all their points, make sure everything adds up, and so on, and that's time they're not playing. There isn't really any way to get around this without reducing the number of choices necessary for character generation.

I realized that part of the reason I don't like games with assumed lethality probably has a lot to do with this problem. I like games with a lot of widgets and mechanical crunch to get my teeth around, but I don't want to kill people off because that complexity directly feeds into the annoyance of making new characters. I tend to get around it by adding narrativist mechanics like Luck/Drama Points, but there's another way to reduce the problem: random character generation.

I'm not talking OD&D-style 3d6-in-order character generation, because that leads to characters of widely-varying power level in any system where stats actually matter (admittedly, that's not OD&D). However, something like Reign's One-Roll Character Generator is pretty amazing. The chart's in that link, but you roll a certain amount of dice--eleven, by default--and check the matches on the various categories and adjust your attributes as described, and check any non-matching dice on the events table (there are three in the rules--only one is listed there). The rules specifically give you the option to take some dice and set them aside in a set already, so someone who knows they want to be a mighty sorcerer can set aside five 9s and roll the rest to see what happens. In addition, each die of the set provides 5 points worth of abilities when compared to the point-buy method, so all characters are balanced and it's easy to adjust the power level of characters up or down as desired.

This is amazing. It's probably the best random character generation system I've ever seen and half has me tempted to just throw all this out and use Dragon Reign, the D&D-esque fantasy conversion for Reign, but I've spent a bunch of time on this so far and I don't want to just give it up. So, how can I replicate a system like that?

Reign's One-Roll Character Generation works because everything has a fixed value so it's easy to set things up to map to the dice. That goes directly against the idea that Advantages would have different costs, but then again, Advantages having different costs makes character generation take longer as well so maybe that's a bad idea. As long as I can avoid the problems of Toughness vs Improved Initiative, then I'm not wedded to either cost structure.

Speaking of Advantages, Reign uses them too, but the One-Roll Character Generator doesn't. Only a very few options give you Advantages, so that's something I want to take into account.

Another option that doesn't require everything to be quite so meticulously balanced is a lifepath system, the way Fading Suns or Traveler or Burning Wheel do. So, for example, someone who wants to be a court wizard would take the Raised in the Lap of Luxury Path, that gives +1 Charisma and +1 Intelligence, and then +1 Empathy, +1 Lie, +1 Persuasion, +1 Etiquette, +1 Lore (Nobility), and the "Noble Birth" Advantage. Then they'd move on to the Young Noble Path, then the Apprentice Sorcerer Path, picking up Stats and Advantages and Skills along the way. This lets me tailor things specifically to the setting and tells a lot about one's character before they start, plus it provides a good selection of skills and prevents the kind of direct focusing that you tend to get with pure point-buy if the system isn't set up to discourage it, such as with geometric costs or other balancing factors. The obvious disadvantage here is that I have to write a bunch of lifepaths. Then again, I'm not sure how much of a disadvantage that would be for me...

I could even add an option for random lifepaths, too, if people can't decide. Beyond the Wall, a OSR game about a group of childhood friends who go off and have adventures, designed to emulate YA books like The Chronicles of Prydain or The Earthsea books, has something similar. Because of Beyond the Wall's focus, the lifepaths are designed to determine who lives in the characters' town, what buildings are there, and how the characters know each other. It's extremely well designed.

If I want to run any kind of dungeon bash or hexcrawl game where lethality is assumed, I'll need to do something.

I could have gone my whole life without learning the Japanese for "to be buried alive."

RIP E. Gary Gygax.

I no longer play D&D, or particularly like class/level based systems, but D&D is one of the main reasons there even is a role-playing hobby, so indirectly, I have Mr. Gygax to thank for all the hours of fun I've gotten so far pretending to be an elf/embodiment of reality/vampire/whatever.

RPG.net has a black background today. They may have done it to reduce loading times and server errors, but I like to think it's a memorial.

When the newsroom is full of activity, it's almost always bad news.

We have several TVs. They're usually off--after all, on a normal day the wire provides us with updates--but they get turned on for two things that I've seen before. Tragedies, and sporting events. I could probably write an entire essay just about that, but not now.

It's interesting that, for most of the day, the fax machine has been broken and its warning siren has been going off. At least the sirens I'm hearing aren't from ambulances carrying away the wounded.

Just when you're old enough to appreciate the stories, they can't tell them anymore.

May your next incarnation be as good for you as this one was.

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in."
-Hubb McCann, Secondhand Lions