Misogyny in James Jacobs' "Burnt Offerings"

My group and I are starting to play through the "Rise of the Runelords" adventure path, and so far it seems "Burnt Offerings" adventure by James Jacobs, the first adventure, is giving me an endless amount of material for exploring misogyny in role-playing games. When I got back into roleplaying after a hiatus, I was excited by the art in Pathfinder Core Rulebook, since not only was it better executed than in D&D 3.5e Player's Handbook, but also featured more women in more roles, and whose clothing and armor sometimes did not reveal the midriff, naked legs, or cleavage. The rules also did a decent job of alternating pronouns. It was a shock, therefore, when I was met with so much sexism in "Burnt Offerings."

NOTE: Beyond lie spoilers; read at your own peril.

Choosing an eBook reader

I spent the past week trying to trying to decide which eBook reader to buy, both for myself as well as for my siblings. C. and I have had a Kindle 3 (now called Kindle Keyboard) for over a year now, and it's been very nice, but the keyboard interface is driving me crazy. So, I have been looking at Sony PRS-T1 and Nook Simple Touch, and -- to some degree -- the Kindle Touch. As always, all three have good and bad points, so the trick is deciding which has the most good points. Since this turned out to be a really long and involved process, I placed it behind the cut below, for those interested.

The DM of the Rings

Lately I've been discovering some roleplaying comics that everyone else has discovered several years ago. However, that does allow me to read large number of strips without having to wait for them to be updated. So, in the past few days I have been reading way too much of Order of the Stick, The DM of the Rings, and Darths and Droids. I'm already a third done with Order of the Stick and just finished reading The DM of the Rings from start to finish; the Darths and Droids I only started.

I have to say that out of the above comics, The DM of the Rings captured my attention the most. It was just brilliant on the part of the author, Shamus Young, to recast the Lord of the Rings movies as a D&D campaign ran by a railroading DM and munchkin players, with Gandalf nothing more than an NPC. The mechanic works seamlessly, and many hitherto questionable turns in the plot are easily explained in this way.

Several of the strips, such as "LXXIII: Schrödinger's Familiar" and "CXXI: Blasphemy!", had me laughing out loud, and I was giggling at many more. Mr. Young has a great talent for picking out moments from the table-top RPGs, especially D&D, that many of us have either experienced ourselves or can envision playing out in a real game. As a result, I laughed as much because of the witty parody and expertly presented jokes as I did because the comic pokes fun at ourselves, the table-top RPG players.

The writer's comments about refereeing a game, which he inserts below many of the strips, are also very apt, funny, and penetrating, such as the comment for the "LXI: Words Get in the Way" strip:

If you're having trouble with wayward players derailing your carefully designed plot, you can always fix this by making the game non-interactive.

Let me know how that works out for you.

The advice to the players dealing with a railroading DM is similarly spot-on, as in the "LII: I specialize in Ranger-ing" strip:

When dealing with railroading DM's, never waste skill points on the tracking skill. If it's part of the plot, you'll find it no matter what you roll. If it's not part of the plot, then it doesn't exist anyway.

Like with the actual comic, a lot of these comments were made even funnier by my seeing myself in the aforementioned railroading DM who gives out no treasure, invests a lot of time into names that the players won't remember anyway, and has the PCs fight the same monsters over and over (in my most recent campaign, the wolves got the lucrative contract).

Alas, despite all the positive points, the comic does suffer from the same gay bashing and male chauvinism that I've come to expect from roleplaying comics. Thankfully, it is restricted for the most part to the player of Aragorn, who repeatedly makes moves on Legolas believing him to be an elven hottie, as well as tries to bed every female NPC the party meets. In one of the strips, Aragorn even uses the euphemism The other San Francisco treat when Legolas objects to the insinuations that he is gay. However, it is possible, based on Mr. Young's observation at the bottom of the "XLVII: -2 to Maturity, +2 to Funny" strip, that this is, in fact, satire and he is actually poking fun at the homophobic and sexist players that all-too-often plague D&D games:

The rulebooks never say that players earn XP for finding ways to imply the other guys at the table might be gay, but you would never know this from observing their behavior.

That said, it's clear the author appreciates this kind of jokes too, as can be further attested by the "The Elven Hillbillies", where he knowingly perpetuates the shaming of transgenderism and mental retardation much to the enjoyment of the audience. The one commenter who was bold enough to offer a mild criticism, Comedic but less than what i have come to expect from you, got shouted down by the overenthusiastic crowd of Mr. Young's supporters.

Overall, I had a lot of fun reading The DM of the Rings, and will no doubt be thinking about it for a long time to come, as well as recommending it to my players, who will no doubt see in it their own struggle against railroading. In fact, reading the comic has almost convinced me to give the classic sandbox campaign a try, since I do see too much of myself in the comic's DM for my own comfort.

Fantastic Names That Are Not So Fantastic

While reading Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords Player's Guide by F. Wesley Schneider, I came upon a passage about a clandestine organization in Varisia:

These rogues belong to a loosely-organized association of bandits, smugglers, and thieves called the Sczarni (SCAR-nee). The Scarni [sic] rarely prey upon other natives of the land ... (p. 9)

Having grown up around speakers of Polish, what immediately caught my attention was the group of consonants in the name of the organization, scz. That's not a combination that would appear in English, and likely looks rather intimidating to USonians not used to seeing Eastern-European languages, hence the pronunciation guide. However, the guide is misleading. My native USonian wife pronounces it something like \s'kzarni:\, while I would say it more like \s'tʃarni:\. Either way, the cz combination is not simplified to a \k\ sound with the z being "silent." It seems like the writer or the publisher had the same thought, since two words later, the name is misspelled, dropping the "silent z."

So, that having been said, here is my main issue with Sczarni and Mr. Schneider: what possible benefit is there to adding extraneous consonants to a fantastic name? Sure, we have all experienced the USonian fascination with Xs, Zs, and apostrophes in fantasy names (e.g. Drizzt Do'Urden), and I can even stomach that to some extent, but Schneider goes even further. Not only is he adding an extra z, but he then makes it silent! In effect, the z serves a purely aesthetic function, making the name more exotic at the expense of readability, which the author knew about, since he felt the need to provide pronunciation guide.

What makes this even worse, however, is the author's -- likely subconscious -- assumption that the language spoken by the Sczarni not only uses Latin alphabet, but also works like English. How do I know that? If that were not the case, then the word Sczarni itself would be a transcription into English of the alien language that engendered it, and therefore would be phonetic and would not require an additional pronunciation guide. As an example, consider what would happen if the Player's Guide was transliterated into another Earth language, say Chinese or Russian, both of which have pronunciation rules that are more regular than in English. You cannot, for example, write it in Russian as Скзарни and then insist that it's pronounced Скарни. It would be similarly nonsensical if one transliterated the word into Chinese characters, say 斯可自兒尼 (sī kě zì ér ní), and then insisted that it ought to be pronounced as 斯可兒尼 (sī kě ér ní), dropping a character¹.

So, in conclusion, I think that in addition to the common advice not to overuse Xs, Zs, and apostrophes, we ought to add one more: when writing them in English, treat the names as phonetic transcriptions. Granted, when I think about it, I'm guilty of doing this as well. In a recent game, I had an NPC whose name was Ariane Schulze (i.e. Ariane Constable), whose last name used German orthography instead of the phonetic Shultse. I shall watch out for this in the future, however.

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1. Apologies to the native speakers for my inexpert Chinese transliterations. ↩

G-Drive Mini RMA Process

Before going to Taiwan, C. and I bought a G-Drive Mini 500GB external hard drive at the Apple Store to use as a portable backup. We used it throughout the year, especially once I sold my desktop I used in Taiwan. Once we got back to the US, we discovered that the hard drive had bad sectors, and now quite a few of our files were corrupt. I recovered all I could using ddrescue, which did an amazing job of extracting every last bit of information.

C. then filled out a request for RMA on G-Tech website. The website is a bit wonky, and their automated scripts were telling us our G-Drive Mini was not a G-Tech device. An email she sent them, however, explaining the situation got a quick response of an RMA number and instructions on how to send it in. The address for RMA is actually Hitach North American Logistics Center in California, which was a surprise; I did not realize G-Technology was a part of Hitachi.

Today I called to ask some final questions, like confirmations that the part numbers are correct (mine is different from one stated on RMA) and that the drive is, in fact, still under warranty. I got a hold of a customer service rep immediately, and he was very courteous and seemed knowledgeable. Their phone system is linked with online communications, so after asking my name, phone, and email, he was able to pull up the RMA and Cree's original email. He verified the part number, and also helpfully told me the drive is under warranty until September of 2012, which probably means it's a 2-year warranty, at least. I'm very impressed in how easy it was to get the RMA, as well as contact and speak with customer support.

About a week later I received a UPS package with the replacement hard drive, along with the cables and leather protective pouch like the one that originally came with it. In other words, the RMA process went entirely without a hitch, and the drive is still under warranty. Of course, now that I got a SABRENT EC-UEIS7 external enclosure and a 1TB Samsung F3 hard-drive, we don't really need the 500GB G-Drive Mini any more, so the factory refurbished hard-drive is going on Craig's List. Still, I was very pleased with G-Technology's (or Hitachi's) RMA process and would definitely be open to buying Hitachi hard drives in the future; I can't really blame the bad sectors on them, since the little hard-drive must have been through hell during all the moving and the possibly-improper use on non-flat surfaces.

Making Passwords Stronger

Ever since reading XKCD comic about Password Strength, the question of whether my own passwords are good enough has troubled me. I've always tried to be conscious of security issues, though never fanatically; I felt my secure password (I have three-four passwords of increasing complexity) was secure enough to deter a chance cracker that is not too keen on spending too much time on me personally. Of course, if an experience cracker was after me, I don't have the delusions that an extra letter or ten is going to deter her.

One major issue I had with my password scheme is that there were not enough gradations. I have one password for various websites that I would not care much if my account was compromised. Another, though perhaps even less secure than the first, is used for accounts that I care about, but not overly, such as Facebook, for example. The third, and the most secure one, is used for -- and here's where the problem lies -- my online banking, administrative accounts on my computers, and websites that require eight character passwords with digits, uppercase letters, and such. It's this last category that makes me uneasy, more so since reading the How Big is Your Haystack? article by Steve Gibson of Security Now! fame. According to the "Brute Force Password 'Search Space' Calculator" on the page, my secure password would take ovegoryer four million years to crack in an online attack, but only a day and a half in an offline attack, or as little as "2.29 minutes" if a "massive cracking array" is used. Granted, that's still not bad, but computers are getting more and more powerful with each passing year, so I would imagine the "massive cracking array" will soon be contained in an iPhone. As you no doubt see, the main problem is that my secure online password is the same as my secure offline password, so someone who, for example, steals my laptop and cracks my root password has the potential of being able to access not only my Gmail (Google requires eight-character passwords) accounts, but also my online banking.

Therefore, I spent some time with the "Brute Force Password 'Search Space' Calculator" as well as the Password Meter and came up with a more secure password that I can now use for my important stuff. Instead of coming up with a different password altogether, I used a strategy similar to the one outlined by Vic of Tech Garten about making your password stronger. My secure password thus went from 68% score on the Password Meter to a 98% without my requiring to memorize a wholly different password.

The reason I went with this approach rather than, like the XKCD suggests, coming up with four nonsensical English words is the ease of remembering. True, perhaps if I was creating my first secure password remembering four English words would be easier, but over a dozen years of using my existing password has cemented it in my brain like no English words can. Moreover, having to type some 25 characters every time I need to log in somewhere suffers from a similar problem to using a randomly generated password: there is a strong incentive to have one's browser "save" the password just to avoid having to type it every time. As things stand, I feel fairly good about my 11-character password that could take up to 1.83 years to crack even using a "massive cracking array."

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Starter Set

Yesterday we finally finished the 4th edition D&D Roleplaying Game Starter Set that we've been carrying around for several years now. It was quite a bit of fun, actually, despite the strangeness of the 4th edition. The final encounter especially had a very good balance of interesting topography, unusual mobs, and moments of wonderfully high tension. Each of my four players had a chance to see their character shine in the limelight.

NOTE: Stop reading now if you don't want to see spoilers.

The previous encounter, Encounter 2, was quite the opposite. Intentionally or not, it seemed to provide only frustration to the players. Firstly, there were way too many mobs, eleven altogether. Coupled with four players, that meant that fifteen creatures had to do something each round. That took ungodly amount of time, especially considering that the rules were somewhat unfamiliar to the players more used to 3.5 and Pathfinder, and one completely new player (as can be expected from a Starter Set). I don't see the need for so many creatures packed into one encounter.

Secondly, the spells cast by the Goblin Hexer made the encounter even more protracted because of the penalties due to concealment and blindness as a result of Vexing Cloud and Blinding Hex. It's also puzzling how the rules for blindness and concealment are handled. In the Starter Set (or maybe 4th edition in general?), attacking a concealed target involves a -2 penalty to attack; there is no 20% to 50% chance-to-miss present in Pathfinder. The blinded condition grants total concealment to the target, yet the rules for total concealment are not included in the Dungeon Master's Book that came with the set. Even with the simplification and despite the significant beef-ups to attack rolls in the 4th edition, a -2 penalty still made it difficult for the players to hit their targets.

Thirdly -- this was also a problem in the third encounter -- there was little distinction between the Goblin Cutter minions and Goblin Blackblade encountered in the previous room of the dungeon. Both had the same armor, weapons, attributes, and to-hit modifiers. And yet, due to the minion mechanics, while the Goblin Blackblades had 25 HP, the Cutters only had 1 HP each. Even with my describing the former as looking much more muscular and seasoned, the players expanded valuable powers trying to deal as much damage as possible to the minions. The same was true for the Giant Rats present in the encounter; the players expected them to be at least somewhat similar to the neighboring Fire Beetles, yet while the beetles were the last foes to be defeated due to their high hit-points, the rats were being sliced in half by a successful attack (that usually dealt damage in the double digits). Another curious consequence of the minion mechanics is that the Giant Rats, Goblin Cutters, and the Hobgoblin Grunts (who are, supposedly, much more fierce than the goblins) all had the same hit-points.

Finally, with all this going on, there seemed to be a discrepancy in the characters' hit-points and the damage dealt by the monsters. Even the Dwarf Fighter with his 31hp had a hard time, since a successful Fire Spray attack by the Fire Beetles (which, being a blast, could affect multiple PCs) dealt 3d6 fire damage. Even at the average roll of 10-11 damage, the Fighter would be dying after three successful attacks if there was only one beetle; with two beetles and over a dozen rounds of combat (due to the protracted nature of the encounter), this was definitely a problem. With 64hp between them, the beetles were assured at least several rounds to wreak their havoc. The same thing goes to the Goblin Hexer's two hexes. The +7 to-hit against Will or Fortitude (which were relatively low, between 11 and 15) meant an almost assured hit, and dealt 3d6+1 and 2d6+1 damage, respectively.

Overall, despite being fun overall, the Starting Set was not nearly as good as it could have been. The 3.5e starting set, which we played years ago, felt better balanced and put together, although that might just be a memory tinged with nostalgia. There were, however, several good things about the Starter Set. The most notable one was the more substantial Dungeon Master's Book, which in addition the to the ready-made encounter also featured a sizable section on creating new adventures, including descriptions of monster types, advice on making the setting interesting, sample traps, and a dozen-or-so monsters to choose from, among them Black and White dragons. These extras were lost on me, however, since the Starter Set left me unimpressed with the 4th edition, so I had no desire to make adventures using its rules that skew the system even more toward hack & slash.