Speaking of Captain America Controversies -- Hulu Recommentation Friday: CAPTAIN AMERICA (1990)

There has recently been a bit of a row regarding Captain America (see here and here). Some conservatives are irked that the good Captain, and his friend The Falcon, are uncomfortable with a Marvel Universe political movement that bears similarity to the Tea Party movement.

I'd like to inform those conservatives out there who think that this is "new" or a "big deal" that they are wrong. While it could be argued that someone who was frozen in 1945 and who awoke in the late 60s (or early 00s depending on the retcon) might be conservative to the point of being out of touch with most modern Americans, but Marvel has never written the character that way -- nor are they likely to start anytime soon.

If you look at the history of Captain America's career since 1972, you see the following pattern. Captain America quits in disgust over Nixon's behavior. Cap retakes the mantle when Jimmy Carter is elected. Cap is ostracized by the Reagan administration, then fired and replaced by someone more conservative (today's USAgent) during the first Bush Administration. Captain America retakes the mantle during the Clinton Administration. During the Bush Administration, Cap fluctuates between favoring soft or hard power -- depending on the writer and the proximity of 9/11 -- before he is shot and killed after leading a Civil War against government superhero registration policies. Cap is "resurrected" during the Obama administration.



Most of these decisions were made for one of the following reasons. Either there were real world issues that Marvel wanted to engage in their comics to give them depth, or they needed to reassert the value of the Captain America brand and stop having "Nomad" (or "The Captain") wander Route 66. If you're conservative and you wanted Captain America to represent your political philosophy...too bad. He doesn't. He's a comic book character.

It isn't controversial and it isn't new. If you weren't so busy trying to be offended, you might just notice that the stories where Cap quits/is fired/is killed are some of the best runs in the history of the series. They demonstrate the depth of the character and his convictions.

Oh, and since when is pointing out the dangers of "movement" driven populist democracy Un-American? I thought the whole shared powers structure that the Founding Fathers set up was due to concerns with the power of faction and "fear" of majority faction.

WHAT IS CONTROVERSIAL...is that HULU watchers have given the 1980s movie version of CAPTAIN AMERICA 3 stars. 3 stars?! Really?! But it's terrible.

Now on the iPhone: Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks -- WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN

Searching my through my favorite interwebs sites the other day, I stopped by the Official Fighting Fantasy gamebooks website and discovered, much to my pleasure, that Wizard Books was releasing several of the Fighting Fantasy titles as iPhone applications. The first book in the series to see release was the classic Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the book that started the whole Fantasy Gamebook phenomenon back in the 1980s when I was a wee lad.

The Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were a book series created by Games Workshop co-founders Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (who are that rare breed in the gaming industry game designers and keen businessmen) that combined the reader interactivity of the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books with the game mechanics of early role playing games. Readers of Ian Livingstone's Dicing with Dragons (Signet), a book Livingstone wrote to introduce audiences to the role playing hobby, it comes clear that Livingstone was inspired by the solo adventures offered by Flying Buffalo in support of the Tunnels and Trolls role playing game.

Here's how Livingstone describes Tunnels and Trolls, one of four games he thought "worthy" of introducing neophytes to:

If Tunnels & Trolls (T&T) did not have one special feature (apart from the general ease of play), no doubt it would have achieved little in the way of popularity -- indeed, its author claims that it was originally designed purely for his own entertainment and that of his friends. Role-playing is generally a gregarious pastime -- one person is the referee and designer of the locations to be explored, and several more are needed as players. However, many people are keen to engage in role-playing but for one reason or another cannot participate in groups of like-minded enthusiasts. An isolated geographical location or lack of free time or transport, or work involving unsociable hours can all conspire to produce the solitaire role-player. In common with some other RPGs, Tunnels & Trolls has a considerable number of ready-to-use adventures, but, unlike most others, which are generally designed for normal group play, most of the Tunnels & Trolls adventures are specifically designed for solitaire play, and thus fill a distinct need in the role-playing market.

Emphasis mine.

Two things emerge from reading this paragraph. First, that Livingstone admires what St. Andre accomplished with T&T -- both in simplicity of rules and in innovation. Second, that Livingstone looks at role playing as an industry. That paragraph reads like part of a SWOT analysis someone might write as background for the introduction of a new product line. Livingstone and Jackson have always been at the forefront of new technologies when it came to integrating role playing and media. Interactive 900 line rpg adventures, video games, books, mass market paperbacks, board games, and miniatures war games are all in the line of products in which they have been directly involved. Now we can add to that long list -- iPhone application translations of their gamebooks.

While Livingstone and Jackson may have received inspiration from St. Andre's T&T both in the idea of a solo adventure market and the importance of simple rules, their Fantasy Gamebooks truly took T&T's solo adventures to the next level. Where the solo adventures by Flying Buffalo typically came in around 32 - 64 pages, the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were the size of full length paperback novels -- around 220+ pages -- something that enabled them to add greater narrative to the stories making for "deeper" interactive experiences.



Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which was drafted under the working title Magic Quest, was the first Fighting Fantasy Gamebook released into the market. It featured very simple rules, later products demonstrated how "deep" these simple rules were, and a relatively simple story. You were a warrior in search of wealth and glory who has climbed to the peak of Firetop Mountain in order to claim the treasure of the Warlock Zagor. You didn't have a very heroic motivation, and the world wasn't very well developed. The book was very much an early D&D style module translated into solo play. Go into a hole, kick down doors, kill things, and take their stuff. At least that's how it seems at first.

You see, there is only one real "solution" to the book -- other books in the series would have several possible solutions -- and it wasn't an easy solution to discover. You had to map your progress, especially considering there is a maze in the middle of the adventure. If you map it, the maze isn't complex, but if you don't...the frustration is substantive.



The latest application for the iPhone is a direct translation of this first gamebook -- a very good direct translation. I was able to use my old hand drawn map as I played through the encounters, and thus was able to find some nice enhancements and some minor glitches in the game.

I have to say that after playing one of these as an app, I'm going to buy whatever books they release in this format. It works better than flipping back and forth, and I can't cheat when fighting the battles -- it maximizes the play aspect by keeping track of all of the combat information and your equipment. The app limits your options to those you genuinely have available to you and you can't flip back and forth to see which choice is superior. You really have to play the game as it was designed.



I also appreciated the way that the app incorporated and enhanced the artwork from the original book. The app has the original line artwork from the book, but if you touch the images they get enlarged and become color images. The transformation from line art to color shaded art work makes for some very impressive images. The ghoul and the cyclops statue were two of my favorite images in the original, and they look even better in color.



As much as I loved playing through, I did notice two significant flaws -- likely corrected in the current updates. When I "lost a point of Skill" after looking into a portrait of the Warlock, I performed an action which should have returned the skill point to me -- in fact it should have returned up to two lost Skill -- but my skill remained at the lower rating. Additionally, when I acquired a magic sword, I was prompted to discard my current sword -- which was correct -- but the only sword listed in my inventory was the new magic sword and I had to discard it. This didn't affect game play, as the I still received the bonus for the magic sword even though I wasn't "technically" in possession of the weapon. These are two significant, but not overwhelming glitches in the game.

If you like Fantasy and want a fun application that is good for quite a few replays, you should purchase Warlock of Firetop Mountain for your iPhone. If you don't have an iPhone, you should buy the paperback which was re-released last September. On February 10th, the second Fighting Fantasy App Deathtrap Dungeon was released -- and bought by me.

BRAVESTARR -- Hulu Recommendation Friday

The cartoons of my youth were both wonderful and mildly disturbing. I have an active love hate relationship with the Filmation animation formula. Essentially, the formula is Hero (male or female), Competent Sidekick of Opposing Gender, Cool Animal/Anthropomorpic Animal Sidekick, and Annoying Comic Relief (Snarf/Orko). This hero faced a villain who was somehow in league with "dark forces."

To be fair, only about half their shows used this formula, but the character archetypes they created created the template for other companies cartoon templates as well. Would we have had Thundercats with Mumm Ra if we hadn't had Skeletor? I think not.

The writers and animators who worked using this framework had a seemingly limitless ability to apply the template to almost any genre. It worked well with the Planetary Romance narrative style of the He-Man, She-Ra, and Blackstar shows as well as for the Space Western format Bravestarr -- and it later worked for non-Filmation shows like the aforementioned ThunderCats.

As much as I liked the cartoons, there were a couple of things that bothered me. I despised, and still do, the lame comic relief characters. I blame Orko for Jar Jar Binks. The shows also had an obsession with presenting "moral lessons" that were often too heavy handed to be taken seriously. Even a 10 year old knows when he/she is being talked down to regarding moral choices.

Those things aside, the cartoons were imaginative and entertaining. I could have recommended the He-Man series that is archetypal for the genre, but I have a fondness for BRAVESTARR. The show came late in the decade and features the voice acting of Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime) as the anthropomorphic horse sidekick .30-.30. How awesome is that? The sidekick is named after rifle ammunition!

An RPG Ahead of Its Time -- Flash Gordon & the Warriors of Mongo

In the nascent days of role playing game yore -- 1977 to be exact -- Fantasy Games Unlimited published one of the first Science Fiction role playing games to hit the market with Flash Gordon & the Warriors of Mongo. The first two science fiction role playing games were TSR's Metamorphosis Alpha (1976) and Ken St. Andre's Starfaring (1976). Flash Gordon was one of a couple of games Fantasy Games Unlimited published that was co-written by Lin Carter -- yes that Lin Carter, the one who is responsible for most of Appendix N being in print -- with another being Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age.

Where Royal Armies was a set of miniature warfare rules set in the Hyborian Age, the Flash Gordon role playing game was an attempt to create an entirely self contained role playing game complete with campaign setting and campaign in one 48 page volume. That's quite a thing to attempt and I have been surprised at how well Flash Gordon accomplishes its goal -- especially given the low esteem in which the RPG.net review holds the game.

The book has its flaws, but it also has its brilliance. The flaws lie within the underlying rules for the conflict resolution system. The brilliance lies within the freeform campaign implementation system, a system remarkably similar to the Plot Point and Encounter Generation system mastered by Pinnacle Entertainment Group in their Savage Worlds series of games. More on this later. It's time to look at Flash Gordon & the Warriors of Mongo.

System Mechanics

In a brief note at the beginning of the book Lin Carter sets out his chief objective in the drafting of Flash Gordon. "My own personal debt to Alex Raymond, and my enduring fondness and admiration for Flash Gordon made this set of rules a labor of love. I was dead set against Scott's [Scott Bizar] first idea of doing a book of wargame rules and held out for adventure-scenarios, instead."

Carter wanted a game that was able to capture the excitement of the old Flash Gordon serial through the use of a collection of adventure-scenarios bound by a single rules set. Rules that were intended to "provide a simple and schematic system for recreating the adventures of Flash Gordon on the planet Mongo." With regard to their goals, Carter and Bizar both succeeded extremely well and failed monumentally.

The system is simple...and confusing...at the same time.

Characters roll three "average" dice for the following four statistics -- Physical Skill & Stamina, Combat Skill, Charisma/Attractiveness, and Scientific Aptitude. It's an interesting grouping of statistics that demonstrated FGU's willingness to look beyond the "obligatory 6" statistics created by TSR. The inclusion of Combat Skill as a rated statistic is in and of itself an interesting choice.

At no point is it explained what an "average" die is. Is an "average" die a typical six-sided die that you can find in almost every board game ever published, or is it one of those obscure and hard to find "averaging" mentioned in the Dungeon Master's Guide? The rules aren't clear regarding this, but the fact that "rolls of over 12 indicate an extremely high ability in the specific category" [emphasis mine] hints that it is the "averaging" die to which they are referring -- later difficulty numbers hint that it might be the regular dice that are used. Not that it matters much, as you will soon see.

After rolling statistics, players choose from one of the following roles -- Warrior, Leader, and the Scientist. This leads one to wonder which group Dale Arden fits, but that is another conversation entirely. The primary effect of choosing a particular roll is to add one point to the statistic most related to the profession.

These attributes are later used to determine success based on a very simple mechanic. Stat + d6 > TN. For example, if the players are in the Domain of the Cliff Dwellers it is possible that they will encounter the deadly Dactyl-Bats.



If the players decide that they want to fight off the Dactyl-Bats the success or failure of the action will "depend upon the military skill of the most skilled member of your group. Roll one die and add the result to your military skill. A final total of fourteen or greater is needed to drive off the Dactyl-Bats." Failure indicates the character is wounded and that the party must rest. It's a simple resolution, but one that lacks any significant cinematic quality. It feels awkward, and other mechanical resolutions in the game are similarly weak. Typical punishment for failure on an action is a loss of a certain number of turns. These turns are valuable as players need to recruit enough allies to defeat Ming before he has time to become powerful enough to squash any rebellion. While the statistics of the game are firmly rooted in roleplaying concepts, the resolution and consequence system still echoes board game resolutions. This is a weakness in this game, as is the inconsistency of resolution techniques. Fighting a Snow Dragon is resolved in a different manner than the encounter just discussed.

I imagine one could build a good game conflict resolution system built around the statistics highlighted in Flash Gordon, but this book lacks that system. I think it might be interesting to try to use a modified version of the Dragon Age pen and paper rpg system as a substitute for the mechanics in the Flash Gordon rpg. They are simple enough that it wouldn't require a lot of work. One could also use the OctaNe system if one wants to stick to the "narrative" feel that Bizar and Carter seem to have been attempting here. OctaNe succeeds where this game fails mechanically -- and OctaNe's system is ridiculously easy to learn and use.

Game Campaign System

This is where Flash Gordon really shines. The game's basic structure is that of a "recruitment" campaign where the players must journey from land to land -- based on how they are connected on an abstract schematic and not based on actual geography though the schematic takes those into account -- where they encounter various challenges and face various foes. For example, let's say our stalwart heroes find themselves in the Fiery Desert of Mongo. If they are mounted on Gryphs he journey will be easier than if they are not. It is possible, though not guaranteed, that the players will encounter Gundar's Gandits who will attempt to capture the players and sell them into slavery. The players may also encounter a Tropican Desert Patrol made up of troops loyal to Ming. The end goal of the area is for the group to recruit Gundar and his men, but that requires role playing and/or defeating the Tropican Desert Patrol. The description of the Desert and the possible encounters are abstract enough that they could easily inspire several sessions of roleplaying -- with a robust system like Savage Worlds -- all it lacks is a nice random encounter generator like the one found in The Day After Ragnarok to fill in the holes.

In essence, the Flash Gordon role playing game includes one or more major encounters for each geographical region of Mongo. As they players wander from place to place, they can/will face these challenges. What is inspired, and ahead of its time, about this structure is that the encounters are "story plot points" that must be achieved but can be achieved in the order of the player's choosing. There is room for exploration of the world at the same time that the players are succeeding at mandatory plot points. It is a narrative campaign without the railroading. Pinnacle Entertainment Group uses a similar structure in their Rippers, Slipstream, and Necessary Evil campaigns. It is a system that allows for narratively meaningful and fun play without the need for extraordinary planning on the part of the Game Master. All it lacks is a method, like the random encounter generator I mentioned above that is used by most plot point campaign systems, to fill in the scenes between the set pieces. Though it should be noted that there is sufficient information within the Flash Gordon rpg to easily construct a set of encounter generators with very little work.

Conclusion

Criticisms regarding the underlying conflict mechanical system, or lack thereof, are spot on when it comes to Flash Gordon. Character generation and conflict resolution lack any feeling of consequence or depth. BUT...If you want a campaign road map to use with another game system, preferably a fast-furious-and-fun one or a "narrativist" one, then this product is a deep resource. It will save you from having to read pages and pages of the old Alex Raymond strip in order to get an understanding of all of the minor details necessary for the creation of a campaign. You should certainly read the Alex Raymond strips, they are wonderful, but reading them should never be made to feel anything remotely like work. Bizar and Carter have done the work in presenting the campaign setting, all you have to do is adapt it to your favorite quick and dirty rpg mechanical set.

Japanese Fanta Commericials are Awesome!

Since I have to study various Costing Systems for a mid-term this evening, today's post must be brief.

Thankfully, Japanese Fanta commercials are awesome!



I might just stat up a couple of the teachers for a Teenagers from Outer Space game in a future post. It might be interesting to begin a TFOS adventure at a Japanese school run by "Fanteachers."

Ah, the Madness and Confusion of the OD&D 6th Printing (OCE) Edition

Apparently, this printing lacks a nice little quote on the bottom of page 19 referring to the damage of weapons, "All attacks which score hits do 1-6 points damage unless otherwise noted."

No wonder I couldn't figure out how much damage weapons do in the alternate combat system.

Shatner + Edgar Allan Poe = Pure Awesome

You know you want to watch it.

"Click play," quoth the Raven.