Bookpost #6

 

I know, #5 was only like four posts ago, but it's been many months in the interim! Thankfully, my drive to read is not as repressible by bad moods as my drive to write.

 

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Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke)

I think this is one of those things that, like a lot of Silver Age science fiction, you have to read as a kid to really love. Having encountered a bunch of its ideas filtered through all manner of improbable other channels (e.g., the novelizations of the Doom games—which I absolutely adored as a kid—riffed on the whole “aliens that look like demons from Christian mythology” thing), and being about seven decades too late for any of its ideas to seem forward-thinking, I can't say I thought highly of it. Sexist as a matter of course, trying hard to be racially progressive but stepping on every conceptual and linguistic rake imaginable (including the n-word over and over again), and too didactic to have much in the way of compelling plot. Cool ideas but fairly lifeless execution. A classic museum piece.

Platform Decay (Martha Wells)

It's Murderbot! We love Murderbot, don't we? My assessment of System Collapse still stands, more or less (“All the Murderbot books are starting to blur together in my memory a bit, which I think is 50% the extremely generic titles and 50% that, well, there’s a bit of a formula at work here. Still enjoyable!”) but this one, thanks to an interesting setting and a few gripping action scenes, actually stands out more in my memory than the couple that preceded it. Lots of grist for the Mothership module mill here. The humor is wearing a little thin, though.

Uprooted (Naomi Novak)

One of my best friends gave me Spinning Silver as a gift a while back, expressing regret that she hadn't been able to find a copy of Uprooted, which she liked better. And I've talked to at least two other people since who made the same assessment: Oh, you liked Spinning Silver? You gotta read Uprooted! It's even better! Well, I finally did, and reader, I did not like Uprooted nearly as much as Spinning Silver. It was enjoyable, certainly, and the first act is a clever twist on a bunch of hoary old wizard-school tropes (although the enemies-to-lovers stuff could hardly be hoarier or more bluntly telegraphed), but I thought it outstayed its welcome a bit—one grueling battle or other ordeal after another after another only to arrive at exactly the conclusion we expected all along. It did make me want to write more Cairn stuff, though, so that's a win.

The Correspondent (Virginia Evans)

Read this in order to make an informed guest appearance at the same friend's bookclub while visiting her. Found it not only to be pretty good, generally speaking, but oddly resonant with my own life; in some ways, the protagonist is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God version of my mom (my mom is great, for the record; the grace of God is powerful stuff). Evans does an excellent job of giving her a voice that remains consistent and recognizable even as she code-switches widely across different media and different correspondents. A believably and reliably unreliable narrator.

Antarctica (Claire Keegan)

Borrowed this from my dad on a camping trip after he'd finished it, thinking I'd never read any Keegan. Kept surprising myself by realizing “Oh, I've read this before” and dimly remembering what came next—turns out I'd previously read at least six of the 15 stories in here. The narrative structures are sometimes a bit conventional, building methodically to a climactic moment of horror or catharsis, but the prose is wonderful, and her ability to conjure rural Ireland and the American South alike is striking. “Ride If You Dare” is my hands-down favorite.

Late Fame (Arthur Schnitzler)

Pretty lightweight, but enjoyable and evocative. Unsparing of its characters (and the tendencies of theirs you will surely recognize in yourself and people you know), but warm and good-hearted on the whole. I'm curious to see the serendipitously recent film adaptation starring Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee, both of whom I love.

The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai)

Squarely part of the weird, uncomfortable little micro-genre in which straight women write relentlessly bleak, borderline cruel tragedy porn about doomed gay men. Credit where it's due, though, she's a great writer. Strong characters, a compelling story (or set of interlinked stories), a wonderful not entirely nostalgic vision of 1980s Chicago.

Orbital (Samantha Harvey)

Insubstantial but charming and beautifully written. Lovely descriptions of the station, of Earth from orbit, of the inner lives of the astronauts, of the fragility and impermanence of everything we know and care about.

The Cactus League (Emily Nemens)

Oddly gets a bunch of little things wrong about baseball, and doesn't really go anywhere narratively or thematically in the end, but features distinct, well drawn characters, some of whose little lives are tremendously moving.

The New York Game (Kevin Baker)

Baker is kind of an annoying old-school crank when it comes to baseball stats and strategy (the word “ribbies” appears repeatedly, God help us) but the New York history is delightful and hey, he is writing about ancient history, after all, as baseball history goes. A bottomless well of fun trivia.

Trouble and Her Friends (Melissa Scott)

In the same used-books section of the senior center shop in Hot Springs, Montana, where I scored the whole History of the Runestaff series and a bunch of Andre Norton novels for two bits a pop, I grabbed a couple of Melissa Scott hardcovers (for the relatively princely sum of $1.25 each). Was just flipping through things, reading the first couple paragraphs of each book to see if the prose was any good, liked the cyberpunk cover design of this one, enjoyed the first page, picked up another of Scott's (see below), thought the first page of that one was pretty solid too, bought them both. A whole year later, I finally got around to reading them. And they're really good! This starts out feeling, as a lot of early-90s SF novels do, like a relic, extraordinarily conservative in some of its predictions of the future a century hence, wildly over-optimistic about others. It just gets better and better as it goes, though, with strong characters and a keen eye for the social and political dimensions of the technology Scott is interested in (even if the technical dimensions are now quite dated). She has a wonderful yen for giving everybody and everything unusual, improbable names.

Dreamships (Melissa Scott)

Like Trouble, this features a mostly queer cast of characters; unlike Trouble, here Scott has confidence enough to imagine a future in which being gay or bisexual is so normal that it goes entirely unremarked on. Readers who are not old enough to remember the 1990s probably cannot fully appreciate how optimistic and visionary this was back in 1992, but it warms the heart. This one is a fun blend of cyberpunk and planetary romance, and again combines some rather dated ideas about future technology's physical form and capabilities with some really sharp, prescient ones about the social, political, and economic aspects of advanced computing and networking. The ethnic jumble of the setting being substantially Chinese and American made me think, naturally, of Firefly, and wonder whether that show's creators had read this. And, in silly Firefly-related news, I recently watched Flowers of Shanghai—I've been on a huge Tony Leung kick—and its score finally jolted me into realizing, 25 years late, that the Firefly score is an erhu-heavy mashup of American Western music with Chinese classical. Which, for all the show's heinous flaws, including its abject failure to ever live up to the promise of the setting (or feature Asian actors), is pretty neat.

Skills: Who Needs Them?

Is there anything interesting left to say about TTRPG skills? Probably not. But sometimes the brain itches, and writing down a bunch of stuff that other people have said a million times before, but slightly different this time, scratches the itch.

* * * 

Imagine five people: three athletes, a generic fantasy adventurer (a fighter, maybe), and a regular schmo.

Our athletes are an endurance runner, a weightlifter, and a baseball player. We're going to ask all five people to try their hands at the athletes' sports: they're going to run a marathon, lift an extremely heavy object, and play in a baseball game. And we're going to think about how to represent this in a roleplaying game.

Consider the marathon first. This is something with a low barrier for entry and an almost infinite number of grades of success. Let's assume that all five of our participants can run; it's probable that, given enough time, all five can run (or “run”) the whole marathon. It might take Joe Schmo 12 hours, but he'll get there. Our marathon runner should probably post the best time of the five, and Joe should probably post the worst, but a substantial degree of uncertainty is reasonable. The marathon runner might have trained hard for this but just not be built for it, whereas the adventurer might, despite never having trained for a marathon specifically, have developed tremendous distance-running skills while fleeing gelatinous cubes and the like. The weightlifter is probably much more fit than Joe, but she doesn't necessarily run well. Maybe she pulls a hamstring halfway through the race and has to limp across the line last.

Lifting weights (or heaving a fallen pillar out of the party's path in a dungeon, perhaps) is totally different. It's a strict binary: each person can either do it or they can't. Success might come with costs (a hernia?) and failure might be particularly drastic (crushed to death?), but the weight either is gonna get lifted or it isn't. The professional weightlifter's training will ensure that her technique is good, and she'll be most likely to avoid injury; the baseball player, who probably lifts weights frequently as part of his training, will also have good technique but probably doesn't have the same maximum capacity. If the weight is significant enough to pose a real challenge for the weightlifter, Joe and the runner won't be able to budge it, and the ballplayer and adventurer are likely (if somewhat less likely) to similarly just not be able.

Finally, we send them into a baseball game. Again, the level of challenge could vary quite a bit, and there are many grades of success (from just putting the ball in play to getting a base hit to hitting a home run). Any of these people might have some amateur baseball experience, but assuming that our pro ballplayer is good, and assuming the level of competition is enough to challenge him, the bar for any level of success is extremely high. The ballplayer himself might strike out on three pitches; it happens frequently enough. The other four are very likely to strike out, although the adventurer's combat-honed hand-eye coordination might give her a better chance to put the ball in play, and the weightlifter's massive strength might help her muscle a hit out of the park if she does manage to make contact.

* * *

Now, what the hell kind of RPG skill system is supposed to represent all of this? These are three challenges that, in 5E or any D&D-based system with a similarly stripped-down skill list, are likely to be represented by an Athletics check. If we have a system that doesn't lock certain skills to certain attributes (e.g., my trusty Stars Without Number), we might get a little stat-based variation (using CON bonuses for the marathon, STR for the weightlifting, and STR, DEX, or maybe even WIS for baseball). But how can the same flat skill bonus apply to all three?

Said flat skill check works passably well for the marathon, at least for separating the pros from the schmo. A d20 check isn't ideal—creating enough separation between Joe and our endurance runner that there's only a 2.5% chance of the former beating the latter requires giving the runner a bonus advantage of +15 (and that 2.5% chance is still pretty excessive)—but a 2d6 system will handle it easily with some comparatively small bonuses. Of course, if we only have a single Athletics skill, moving to 2d6 won't make the runner meaningfully better than our other pro athletes, which is weird, but we'll come back to that.

The skill check doesn't work so well for weightlifting. Even if we create the same kind of skill gap (Joe only succeeds 10% of the time; the weightlifter only fails 15% of the time), that's weird. This doesn't feel like something where everybody should be balanced on the razor's edge between success and failure. Sometimes, doing something difficult is a matter of raw aptitude. Training and experience might give you a slight edge and a lower chance of disastrous failure—you know just where to grip for maximum purchase, and you're not going to throw your back out in the attempt—but in the end, you're simply strong enough to lift that heavy thing or you're not. When games call for skill checks in situations like this, they probably just…shouldn't. Dragging that stone pillar out of the doorway simply requires 14+ STR. Maybe you can substitute something else (weightlifting experience? being a dwarf?) for one missing attribute point, maybe you can make an Athletics (or similar) check to see whether you injure yourself, but just doing the thing is a binary.

And baseball? It doesn't seem like a normal set of dice is going to be able to model how hard it would be for an untrained amateur to, say, hit a major-league slider. Nobody does that, not even the best amateurs in the world, until they've seen a few dozen in the minors, at least. So now even our 2d6 skill system is under some strain. If an untrained, physically average person in one of the XWN games (-1) goes head-to-head against somebody with maxed-out skill (+4) and the maximum stat bonus (+2), there's still ample room for an upset—a roll of 10, 11, or 12 by the amateur will beat snake eyes from the pro, for instance. Even in Traveller, where the untrained penalty is harsher (-3) and there's no hard cap on skill level, our pro needs a total DM+7 just to be guaranteed not to lose a contest—which is more than a starting character can have, and that in a game where starting characters are mid-career professionals and further advancement is slow and difficult.

* * *

Now, do we really need our TTRPGs to be able to model the difference between an average person and a top-tier professional baseball player? In a literal sense, no—when are our characters ever going to play pro baseball?—and metaphorically, probably not, because the literally one-in-a-million talent of an MLB player is a degree of aptitude games don't need to encompass (even if they need better granularity than “nobody can ever have better than a 95% chance of doing anything, or less than 5%"). But something like this comes up pretty frequently, especially in games with non-fantasy settings. The difference between a trained pilot and somebody who's never been in the cockpit, or between a university-educated physicist and a high school dropout, or between a professional programmer and somebody who's never touched a computer? Pretty vast!

Traditional skill checks work for feats like the marathon: anybody can attempt it, but physical aptitude and training go a long way toward making high-level success possible. Simple ability checks (or ability gates, even, without a roll) work for feats like weightlifting. Either you can, or you can't. For this third category, in which people are trying to do things that are challenging for them, in spite of their extensive experience and training, and would be simply impossible for an untrained person, who wouldn't even know how to approach the problem (or what button to push, as it were), we might have to combine the two types of check, and conceptually separate skill from training. You need training to even undertake the challenge; your skill determines the likelihood that you succeed.

Now, it's not completely impossible that an untrained person could fly a jet, or a spaceship. Maybe they've seen other people do it enough to have a rough sense of how it's done, even without any training. Maybe they should, as in Traveller, face a steep penalty instead of being locked out of the skill entirely. But is that penalty determined programmatically? Is it something you put in the rulebook? (E.g., Program is -5 for untrained characters, Pilot is -3, Surgery is -4, etc.) Don't characters with different backgrounds and experiences have an argument for different modifiers? If you're a soldier who's deployed from a dropship a hundred times, you probably have better odds of piloting one than a farmer who's never even seen a spaceship, even if neither of you formally has either training or skill.

And, again, there's that problem of too-general skills. Advocates of skill systems often say they help to define and humanize a character, but any system that makes a marathon runner, a weightlifter, and a baseball player mechanically identical—and equally good, or nearly so, at one another's sports—isn't doing a great job of defining and personalizing its characters. Then again, does anybody want to go to the level of GURPS (or even further) in terms of granularity? If we start splitting piloting into myriad sub-skills (sailboats, large merchant ships, helicopters, fighter jets, space shuttles), we run into the problem that any given character's skills are useless (or at least not optimally useful) 99% of the time, unless the GM finesses everything to make sure there's always a sailboat or helicopter handy.

There's a great, and reasonably popular, solution to all these problems and more (like the weirdness of level-based skill advancement, wherein a character crosses some abstract experience threshold, and poof, now somehow instantly knows how to do new things, potentially including things they got no new training or experience in). Ditch specific skills, let players define their characters' expertise narratively (via “backgrounds” or similar), and work out the numbers by some combination of negotiation, consensus, and GM fiat:

• “I used to be a shuttle pilot, so I don't think it'd be a huge stretch for me to figure out piloting this fighter, given there's no immediate time crunch or danger."
• “Remember when we did a bunch of climbing down in the catacombs a few sessions ago? We learned a lot from that, and climbing this ivy-covered wall seems to be more straightforward than that was.”
• “Naah, I don't think a few hours studying at the local library was enough to substantially deepen your knowledge of arcana.”

Of course, I get why major (or “major”) publishers rarely present games like this—a mass-market game needs to cater to all players, including those who can't abide by loosey-goosey rulings and those who don't trust their fellow players with this kind of freedom—but for a home game, with the right players, it works like a charm. And yet the dream of a perfect skill system persists, even in the sparsely populated and OSR-inclined backwaters of the blogosphere and Reddit.

It should be robust, yet lightweight. Flexible, yet a vehicle for deep character personalization. Suitable for a simulationist approach, yet not excessively granular. I look forward to reading about it! I'm sure as shit not going to come up with it myself.

Signs of Life, Thoughts on Greatness

 

It’s been a busy summer for me: three far-flung weddings on three different continents, two of which we spun into short vacations; a long dog-sitting stint at my sister’s place; and a move, in the midst of all that, to a new apartment, complete with various snafus getting the internet set up. We still haven’t fully unpacked, and I still haven’t set up my desktop computer. But I’m mostly settled in, and I’ve got my decrepit 12-year-old MacBook Pro up and running—it’s time to get back on the blogging horse!

* * *

In my absence from Online, I missed getting to comment on either ESPN’s “Top Athletes of the 21st Century” or the NYT’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” This probably should have been an opportunity for me to reflect on the fact that I don’t have to write about every piece of engagement-bait nonsense barfed up by our floundering media giants, and yet here we are.

Being lazy engagement bait, both lists are stupid on their faces—let’s get that out of the way first. Trying to rank athletes is something of a fool’s errand even within one sport, even a sport like baseball (my lifelong sporting obsession) that’s absolutely drowning in data. How do you compare pitchers to hitters? How do you compare guys who played pre-integration to those playing today? Even within a much shorter time span, can you compare the speed-crazy 1980s to the power-mad steroid era at the turn of the century? Now try to compare baseball players to basketball players. All the stats go out the window; we’re left with awards and accomplishments—championships, trophies, All-Star selections. Now compare them to water polo players and gymnasts. There are almost no points of connection. It’s an exercise in absurdity.

The absurd exercise managed to get even more absurd, albeit also more interesting, in ESPN’s hands, because—despite supposedly having polled their affiliates all over the world—they came up with an improbably U.S.-centric list, with 56 of the selections being American-born (and plenty of the remainder having attained their fame, or at least the greatest measure thereof, here). Unsurprisingly, the list, especially the top half, is very light on soccer players, and there’s almost no representation of sports that are neither popular here nor dominated by our athletes at the Olympics (one solitary cricketer, for instance, down at the very bottom). Basketball is overrepresented, in keeping with ESPN’s contractually dictated biases. But it’s the inclusion of Olympians that’s particularly perplexing, when you get down to trying to understand what the editors mean by “the top athletes,” “the greatest athletes of the 21st century,” or “the best athletes of the 21st century” (they use these terms interchangeably).

The single greatest athlete of the 21st century? Michael Phelps, apparently. Which, sure, the guy was amazing…in an athletic niche that almost nobody pays attention to, three years out of four. Maybe that's enough, though; if you’re indisputably the best ever in your sport, no matter how marginal that sport might be, you’re the greatest, right? Except that if Olympic dominance like Phelps’s is good enough for the #1 position, surely all-time great cross-country skier Marit Bjorgen and all-time great speed skater Ireen Wüst are in the top five, or at least the top ten, right? Nope—they’re not on the list at all. Are there any marathoners, any distance runners at all, any representation of Kenyan and Ethiopian dominance in those highly visible sports—ones in which far more regular people participate as amateur competitors than in things like gymnastics, ice hockey, auto racing, American football, or even, for all its recreational popularity, swimming? No, of course not. Americans don’t know them.

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In the literary world, or at least one tiny-but-influential corner thereof, a bunch of very different people approached a similar question about a completely different subject and botched it for similar reasons. The best books of the 21st century, as selected by a bunch of NYT contributors, are even more preposterously U.S.-centric than ESPN’s list of great athletes. They chose 87 books by Americans! Entire continents went unrepresented, or almost entirely unrepresented (Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was the only selection by an Asian author who lives and works in Asia). To the very limited extent that the contributors engage with Asia or Africa, it’s almost all through the eyes of Americans and a few Europeans (Min Jin Lee, Katherine Boo, Marjane Satrapi, Mohsin Hamid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Hisham Matar). All of these authors were born in Africa or Asia or have close family connections there, so it’s not like this is literary tourism or colonialism, but it is still a degree of remove from the reality of life in other countries, in other cultures—an incuriosity about the world except as communicated by the same little coterie of English-speaking MFA graduates who write all our novels, our short stories, our essays, and, of course, our book reviews.

The American literary ecosystem, dominated by a few institutions like the Times, is a small, closed system. A group of authors who are the product of the same class, the same cities, the same schools, all reviewing each other’s work—no surprise that nothing new enters the system, and that the criticism of what does get covered is invariably toothless. Book clubs and attentive individual readers pick up the books covered (and nearly always recommended) by the Times, they sell (modestly, but well enough), and the cycle continues.

It’s striking that when the Times published an alternative list of reader selections for the 100 best, 39 books were shared between the two lists. (When this second one dropped, I was online enough to peck out some salty Reddit comments on my phone.) Many of the other 61 show up as runner-up recommendations in the original list, too; there’s enormous overlap between the lists, which would be surprising in light of older stereotypical expectations of authors’ reading preferences (obscure, thorny, experimental) and those of bourgeois newspaper subscribers (middlebrow, unchallenging, conventional). Times change, I guess. Even the literati are now firmly middlebrow, inward-looking, and narrow-minded.

It’s not news that American readers are parochial; for all our imperial ambitions, we’re a famously parochial people. We don’t follow the news of the world except when our military is (or might be) involved and we know perilously little about other cultures, about geography, about the history of the rest of the world. We rarely read anything in translation, and what little we do is almost always European—mostly 19th-century classics, the occasional more recent Nobel winner. We don’t trust ourselves to recognize greatness on our own, I guess.

* * *

What is greatness, anyway? As presented by ESPN and the NYT, it’s somewhere near the intersection of “what we know and like” and “what’s marketable.” The “top athletes,” or “top books,” sure, I’ll buy that as a list of who’s got the biggest sponsorship deals, the most Instagram followers, the most sales, the most Google searches. And the “best,” if it can’t be quantified by sabermetric number-crunching, might as well be purely subjective. But the greatest?

Maybe a quarter-century is just too short of a window for evaluating these things. When we think about the literary canon, and even when we think about the great athletes of the past, we tend to think about legacies, about influence—the first to do it, the inventors, the bar-setters, the ones who invented styles, revolutionized genres, spawned a thousand imitators. Things can be great without being good; they can be great without deserving moral approbation.

What’s the greatest TTRPG of all time? (See, I managed to find my way home eventually!) It’s D&D, obviously. It doesn’t have to be the best, it doesn’t have to be your favorite, and it doesn’t have to be unproblematic. Greatness is objective, undeniable, beyond all that.