Death to the d20 Skill Check

 

There are a couple great bundles on itch.io right now:

Palestinian Relief Bundle

TTRPGs for Trans Rights - West Virginia

On the off chance that somebody reading this post in the next few weeks isn't already aware of these, well, now you know! Get in there! These are both great causes and they're asking incredibly low prices for a ton of cool stuff; both bundles contain, and either bundle is worth it just for, FIST (an immaculate work of genius, reading which is akin to touching the face of God). Highly recommended!

The second bundle also contains Songbirds 3e, which I'm reading through right now. Beautiful design, lovely writing, lots of fascinating ideas. I was, however, brought up short by this:

It's my bête noire: the d20 skill check. A completely average, untrained person can accomplish the impossible 15% of the time? And the highest bonus you can get on a check (at least from stats and skills) appears to be +9, so even the world's greatest expert at something is going to fall at a task of normal difficulty 10% of the time?

This isn't to pick on Songbirds, which is better equipped than most D&D-derived games to ameliorate the weird badness of d20 skill checks (with complications instead of outright failure, and multi-check challenges to squash the variance a bit). Songbirds just happens to be in front of me (and to have made some infelicitous choices in describing the DCs). These systems are everywhere, a crummy bit of received unwisdom that we can't seem to quit even though Traveller's beautiful 2d6 checks are right there.

In a 2d6 system, even one that has fairly small modifiers, it's possible to have a DC that's literally impossible for an average, untrained person (say, DC 12 in Stars Without Number, where an untrained character gets a -1) that a highly competent character (with, say, +3 from the relevant skill and +2 from an attribute) will succeed at more often than not. A particularly specialized character (with the Expert class ability, the Specialist focus, etc.) can do the impossible regularly even at lower levels, and at higher levels can do it almost routinely. That's cool! It gives players satisfying character definition just from a few +1s, without demanding loads of crazy bespoke special abilities.

SWN, true to its Traveller roots, is a little fussy—much more granular with skills than most OSR games. But 2d6 is still great even with a minimalist system. Look at FIST! Apart from some very narrow trait-based specialization, you've basically just got a -4 to +4 range of modifiers from attributes. An unspecialized character is only rarely going to get a full success on anything, but a specialist will usually succeed, and almost never outright fail, in their wheelhouse. Every point counts for a lot; finding time for a smoke break so you get a +2 on your next RFX roll makes a huge difference. It's all satisfying and rewarding for the player, but with plenty of room remaining for things to go horribly, unpredictably wrong (especially when you push the characters to do stuff they're not good at).

Marketing Song

I used to work in advertising (shame, shame) and would collect wretched fragments of slide decks and reports to the board and whatnot and turn them into silly little poems. Was poking through some of my files just now and was like, oh, these. I should put these up on the ol' blog. Et voilà:

 

SEARCH DOES NOT LIVE IN A SILO

Search
does not live in a silo.
Search is a human behavior
that is embedded in the customer journey.

Crawl, walk, run:
Minimum viable product.
Desired consumer behavior.
Desired future state.
System of the future,
become relevant.
Drive desire.
Convert.

 

OPERATIONALIZING THE LIFECYCLE

Do we need to change the way we work?
Does our structure set us up for success?

Thank you.

NEXT STEPS

We'd like to align
on moving forward
with reaching out
to all of the recommended subcontractors
for availability.

 

SHORTFALLS

address shortfalls
in practice-area capabilities

continue network rationalization

begin disposal process

 

AN UNPRECEDENTED APPROACH TO BRAND MANAGEMENT

design-driven brands
are future-focused
agile systems
in a deliberate state
of constant evolution

an agency
that is machine-driven
but human-led

Flyover Country: Chapter 3

"City Gate" by Hector Ortiz

Continued from Chapter 2.

At this point, the crew are right back where they started (meeting Elias Bensaïd at the Café Cosmopol about a job) and right where I want them: beholden to both the Milieu (who provided them a ship and expect it to be put at their disposal from time to time) and the Commonwealth spy agency, IRIS (who essentially swiped the ship via some legal skulduggery and also expect to be able to call on the crew for odd jobs). The new job, however, involves neither of them directly.

Elias explains (French accent, remember): "A businessman in the Collines, Manny Saleh, finds, in the foundation pit his people are digging for a new building, something old is there, underground. He wants help getting in, he shares a percentage. Now, Manny is not such a bad guy, for a slumlord. But Manny is, how you say, a big wheel on a small…bicycle? He is the king in his quartier; he cannot imagine he would be betrayed, does not understand how small he is in the big picture. Manny believes he has kept his find a secret, but he has not. He thinks he calls me, I send a locksmith"—he gestures at the crew—"we help him fence his treasure, fastoche. A little cut for you, a little cut for me. We must convince him things are not so simple. Not only because we want a bigger cut, but because they are not. Others want what Manny has found."

He starts counting out advice on his fingers. "One, Manny doesn't speak Mandate well, so use l'argot; he will be better disposed. And don't be rude about his height. Two, right away, he will say, bon sang, why does Elias send so many people, I will not pay for all this! You must convince him, this is a bigger job than he comprehends. You will not only open his treasure box, you will find out who else is snooping around, you will conceal what you find, you will contrive to remove whatever treasure is there without these snoopers perceiving you, you will protect the operation with force if necessary. Three, don't let him name a price yet. He will try; it will be low. I tell him, my people must assess the situation. Tell him the same. Gather evidence, build a case for us. And four, be subtle. You don't show up all at once, you don't come with flashy vehicles, with high-tech gear. Manny is being watched already. Questions?"

They ask a few, and learn that Manny has ties to two Milieu syndicates active in his area: the Najeebs and the Bautistas. Both will expect a cut if something valuable comes from his dig, whereas Elias wants to carry this all off as quietly as possible and keep the biggest cut for the crew and himself. After a bit of haggling, everybody agrees on a 60/40 split of the take (i.e., 40% for Elias and 10% for each PC).

* * *

Getting to Manny's construction site involves either flying (extremely indiscreet) or hoofing it. The trip is a bit of a schlep: almost 10 kilometers, mostly uphill, through the Collines du Sud, the ramshackle favelas that climb the ridge east of Sainte-Odile. Leaving Sainte-Odile and entering the Collines on foot, the players have to pass through a checkpoint (manned by Tefera Personal Defense, the private-security firm contracted by the city to police the wealthier disticts). The cops try to shake them down a bit—six armed individuals, including one with a sniper rifle (Batias picked it up while shopping at the spaceport) and one with a spear, are surely up to no good. Sarai manages to sweet-talk their way through without them having to cough up a bribe, though.

There aren't many major roads, mostly just crooked alleys and lanes between tightly packed buildings, shaded from the oppressive suns by awnings and canopies. The crew stops partway up for a late breakfast at a market stall, enjoying some poulet à la moambe and fresh fruit (Roman abstains, of course). Then they decide to split up: Batias, BQ, and Krissa will head straight to Manny's construction site while Mustang, Roman, and Sarai check in with some of their underworld contacts to see what they can learn about Manny, the Najeebs and Bautistas, and whether there's any buzz about the find yet.

* * *

The direct path turns out not to be. After encountering a vendor selling pineapple-and-goat kebabs and helping themselves to second breakfast, Batias, BQ, and Krissa come around a corner into a small open area where three lanes meet, where they find a large and growing crowd. The collinaires are banging on a door, waving weapons, shouting—and throwing rocks at a gravcar (think a spinner from Blade Runner) that's hovering above the scene. Unfortunately, the mob is yelling in l'argot morrovien (i.e., French), and Mustang and Sarai are the only two PCs who speak it. Should they try to find a Mandate speaker? Backtrack and find a different way up?

Before they can decide, Krissa finds her compad buzzing—the pilot of the gravcar, having spotted three armed outsiders enter the picture, is trying to contact them. Krissa picks up, and the pilot explains the situation: Her client is in the building below that the mob is trying to force their way into, afraid to come out on the roof for a pickup. Could they disperse the mob, or at least make sure the roof is clear? (A few collinaires have managed to climb up there already.) The pilot loops the client, one Simon Katib, in; he's willing to cough up a solid 500 credits for the PCs' assistance. Sure, they say!

…but they're still willing to hear what the mob has to say, if they can find a collinaire who speaks Mandate. As they push their way through the crowd, they do find one, and he asks for their help: Apparently the building the mob's trying to break into is some kind of brothel where a few gangsters have lured local teenagers with promises of easy money and are now holding them at the pleasure of some offworlder pervert who flies over from the Green Zone a couple times a week. The collinaires want their kids back and they want the pervert dead, but they can't scrape together more than a couple hundred credits to pay for assistance.

The PCs put their heads together. Simon, it seems, is bad news. Simon's money, however, is pretty good. Maybe there's an opportunity here to get paid…twice? In his spaceport shopping spree, we learn, Batias didn't just get that sniper rifle; he also picked up a demo charge, some glowbugs, some thermal flares, and a grapnel launcher (He's basically broke now. This will be a recurring theme.) He takes aim at the brothel roof, fires, and clocks a collinaire in the head. Whoops. He tries again, sticks the landing, and secures the rope. Our heroes ascend.

On the roof, one collinaire is trying to batter the door down, one is shouting to the crowd, and one is now sitting on his ass, clutching his concussed, bleeding head. The PCs shoo the uninjured pair off the roof at gunpoint, then herd the injured guy into the corner farthest from the door. Batias boldly steps to the edge of the roof, dodges a couple rocks—the crowd's mood has turned decidedly against the PCs—and then gesticulates for them all to back off, waving his rifle menacingly. In spite of the language barrier and the fact that he's wildly outnumbered, Batias manages to cow the mob.

The pilot eases the gravcar down toward the roof, and Krissa tells Simon to come on out. He emerges, makes a run for his vehicle—and gets tackled by BQ. Chaos ensues. Simon panics, the pilot starts hollering over the comms, and a couple of the gangsters from the brothel comes up the stairs to see what's going on. After a brief standoff with the better-armed Batias, the gangsters simply close and lock the rooftop door and retreat. The PCs insist they're still going to put Simon on the gravcar; they just want to be sure he doesn't fly off without paying them. The coax the pilot down.

Now covered by Krissa's laser pistol, Simon is bundled into the back seat. To the pilot's dismay, BQ clambers into the front passenger seat and jams a stun baton (another recent spaceport purchase) into her ribs. Krissa and Batias squeeze aboard. They get Simon to unlock his compad, then wrestle it away from him and drain his accounts, netting 2,000-odd credits. They start debating what to do next—should they just dump Simon straight into the mob? He wets himself. Now the pilot cuts in.

"Listen," she says, "I don't give a shit what you do with him at this point"—Simon wails miserably—"I just want to get out of this in one piece myself. If I shut down the flight recorder and get you out of here, will you cut me part of the take and help me make it look like a kidnapping?" Sounds good to them: They transfer her a couple hundred credits, throw Simon to his grisly fate, and speed away. The pilot puts them down up at the top of the Collines, not far from Manny's construction site, hands over her laser pistol, lets them bind her hands, and then slips away to await "rescue."

Krissa stands watch while BQ tries to wipe the gravcar's computer system and Batias sets a demo charge in the cockpit as Plan B. BQ's a smart guy, but he has no background in computer science and struggles to make heads or tails of the system. When Krissa's precognitive powers tell her that an armed corporate-security gravflyer is about to swoop down on them, they rip what electronic components they can out of the dashboard, disappear into the nearest alley just in time to avoid detection, and then set off the demo charge, blowing the gravcar to smithereens.

* * *

The whole Simon Katib misadventure occurred in a single short-handed session, with half the group unable to attend, and started with one sentence in a random-encounter table I slapped together for the trip up through the Collines: "Some kind of street gathering is being broken up as a grav vehicle comes in to land, or a mob is gathering to attack the grav vehicle." I rolled up a slimy little NPC for it to revolve around, extrapolated from there, and then watched my players make a delightful mess out of it.

A precognitive psychic makes her own luck, to some extent, but we also established here that the group is just naturally lucky. So many things could've gone wrong for them but didn't, particularly when it came to bullying NPCs into backing off without a fight. Batias facing off against an entire mob, in particular, could easily have ended with him being ripped to shreds; the collinaires mostly had rocks and clubs for weapons, but a good number of them had zip guns or pipe rifles, and there were several dozen of them!

Next: Chapter 4.

Flyover County: Chapter 2

"Spaceship Cabin Interior" by Simon Murton

Continued from Factions & Faction Turn 1 (and more directly from Chapter 1).

Once the crew are up in space, an encrypted signal arrives, directing them to break orbit and head out to the far side of Betharan III. The voyage will take 48 hours, so they have plenty of time to decompress, get to know each other, follow the developing news from Penrose, and chat up Commander Vasia—or, as it turns out, Lieutenant Colonel Mira Kaji, of IRIS's Special Reconnaissance division. Deciding that she's in good hands with the crew, she drops the "Vasia" alias, although she doesn't tell them much about herself or the specifics of her mission.

Mustang gives Kaji one of the Konyri revolvers she looted from a dead royalist—Mustang is already proving to be a bit of a gun hoarder—as a souvenir of her time on Morrow. She's touched. Sarai digs around in the ship's mess and whips up an astonishingly tasty tiramisu from ersatz ingredients. Turns out she's a culinary genius! Roman declines to eat any, creating what will turn out to be an unreasonably long-lived suspicion among certain of his crewmates that he's secretly an android.

In orbit of Betharan III, the crew finds…nothing. They wait a bit, and a stealthy warship of unfamiliar design—the IRIS cruiser Alekhine's Gun—swims up out of the planet's sensor shadow, alarmingly close to their ship, and extends an umbilical to dock with them. After some trepidatious debate, they board the Gun, with Kaji in the lead. A motley group is arrayed to meet them: two officers in unmarked black uniforms, one of whom soon escorts Kaji away; three espatiers in armored vacuum suits, with void carbines; a half-dozen personnel in loose-fitting jumpsuits of several different colors, some carrying toolkits and others dataslabs; and one guy in a short-sleeved button-up, slacks, and a tie. One of the espatiers remains by the umbilical, one goes aboard the PCs' ship with all the jumpsuit-wearers and the tie guy, and one accompanies the second officer as he leads the crew to a wardroom.

The officer politely, nervously, but firmly informs the crew that techs need to sweep the ship and invites them to relax in the Gun's wardroom, where they can chat with him; an aide serves bhujia and the best chai they've had in a long time. The crew don't get much out of the officer, but one of the jumpsuit-wearers eventually comes back and quietly confers with him, and Mustang surreptitiously records the audio of their conversation.

The officer apologizes (in a stuffy British accent): The techs, he says, accidentally “overloaded the axionic confinement conduit, sent a quantum surge through all the starboard collector brackets, and zapped the central computer,” and parts of the computer database were lost. They've managed to restore most of them, he explains, but—and he's terribly sorry—there are a few items they'll need to input manually. He gets a compad from the tie guy, then passes it to Sarai, who has presented herself as the crew's leader.

Their transponder and registry documentation have all been changed. It's obviously still referring to the same ship—same dimensions, same fittings, same maintenance problems—and the crew manifest is the same as before, but the ship is now shown as being owned by some company in the Commonwealth they've never heard of, Lambda ValuDyne; its home port is now registered as Satu Mare, on Rustam (the nearest Commonwealth planet); and it's leased indefinitely to…well, that's one of the blank fields they now need to fill in. Its registration number is different, too, and the “name of vehicle” field is also blank.

The officer prompts the PCs to name their company and rename the ship (which they'd initially named after Sarai's player's trusty old Acura—RIP to a car that carried us all over the Pacific Northwest!). When Sarai tries to just give it the same name, he gently suggests otherwise, noting that, “Unfortunately, there is another ship, physically remarkably similar to, but legally distinct from, this one, which I believe has a registration code ending in those letters, and which goes by that name."

He assures them that if they'll simply “remind” him what the names of the ship and the company are, he can “tidy up all of the details.” He recalls that the players' enterprise, whatever it was called, was a licensed and bonded transport company registered in the Commonwealth, and that if they have any questions, he believes he has the name of their solicitor around here somewhere—she's the same one who represents Lambda ValuDyne. (Is that unusual? No, of course not. Perfectly above-board!) “Ah, yes, here it is, Leila Pak. Do contact her at your earliest convenience.”

Eventually, the players settle on (silly) names: Their ship will henceforth be known as Quora, and their licensed and bonded transport company is Yahoo$.com (with a dollar sign instead of an “s”—write that down). And with that, it's time for the Gun to be on its way. The crew are herded back aboard Quora, and off they go. Payment will process when they're back in Morrow's orbit and can sync with other network nodes. (Commonwealth credits are some kind of crypto-ish digital currency; transactions require at least one third party to verify them—these hazy details are things I promised, back in September or October or whenever this was, to hash out in greater detail. Have I yet? No, of course not.)

Kaji has repaid Mustang's gift generously: she finds an IRIS-issue laser carbine packed up in a neat little case on her bunk (rules-wise, a regular laser rifle, but Enc 1 instead of 2). The rest of the crew wanders around poking at everything on the ship with knives and broomsticks, trying to figure out whether, and where, IRIS bugged them. They find no bugs, but by Quora's reactor manifold, they find that one of the techs left a bottle of aguardiente and a pack of cigarettes in a chalk circle. Batias, BQ, and Krissa drink most of the booze, but add a cookie and a slice of cheesecake to the circle to compensate.

The trip back to Morrow takes only a day; BQ's really getting the hang of piloting this thing (i.e., I've been generous with XP and he's got both ranks of the Starfarer focus now). Roman and Sarai send a message to Leila Pak introducing themselves, asking whether the crew could be of assistance, and inquiring about the status of the lease from Lambda ValuDyne. Everybody listens to Mustang's recording of the conversation between the IRIS officer and tech: Turns out the tech was just telling the officer that their work was done, and the officer was trying to workshop some made-up technobabble about axionic this and quantum that. “Just tell them we wiped the system, changed the registry, and pulled the Milieu's bugs. It's spy shit, they'll understand,” said the bewildered tech. The officer was undeterred.

Elias has a new job lined up for them when they return. He gives them coordinates for a secure landing pad at the Havre; they spend the evening exploring the spaceport a bit: shopping, lining up commodity deals, gambling—Batias and Krissa use the latter's precognitive powers to rip off an operation too small to have a metapsion for a bouncer—and keeping an eye out for potential henchpeople for Sarai, who has taken the Henchkeeper focus. In the morning, Elias sends a vehicle to return them to the Cosmopol, where he'll brief them on this next job.

* * *

I've handled XP as a mix of party progress (everybody gets one XP at the end of every session) and individual goals (everybody sets a short-term and a medium-term goal; one XP for accomplishing the former, two or more for the latter). The steady drip of session-based XP meant that everybody got to level 3 in very short order in terms of in-universe time spent (they've only just completed their first-ever job here, after all).

I might be a little stingier with the XP if I did it over again, but on the other hand, these characters are supposed to be veteran criminals, and I don't mind them heading into their next job being a little tougher and more capable. The default XP curve in SWN also gets very steep fairly quickly; it'll take them a while to get into the middle levels, and then a long time to gain each level past 6 or so.

I realized somewhere in here that I hadn't done enough to give the PCs a shared history or connections with each other, so I started encouraging them to interact with each other, including by having each player come up with five rumors about their character (some true, some not) and then distributing these among the crew. I haven't always leaned on the rumors enough, but they did result in some good character development, they got a few conversations going, and they launched the still-unfolding "Roman is a secret android" theory. (He's not. It's very obvious.)

Next: Chapter 3.

On Reviewing and Rating Things

John Fleck as Trent in Dead Mail

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I went to New Orleans for the Overlook Festival, our second horror film festival in the past eight months or so (she's a huge horror fan and film blogger). Saw nine films in four days, which is always fun, and got in a lot of good eating and drinking (despite me having fractured a premolar the day before leaving, whoops).

Highlights included Cuckoo, Dead Mail, and I Saw the TV Glow—each quite different from the others, but with one big strength in common: outstanding vibes. Fantastic sound and music, wonderful evocations of time and place. Moody, beautiful, and all quite moving. Each anchored by fantastic performances, too (Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens in Cuckoo; Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in I Saw the TV Glow; pretty much everybody in Dead Mail, although John Fleck really stands out—maybe the best of the whole festival).

At the other end of the scale, after having watched seven variously low-budget indie films, most of them foreign, Abigail was a shock to the system, and not in a good way. It took all of thirty seconds to register that it was going to be a very Hollywood experience, and not much longer than that for me to know that I wasn't going to like it. The film has problems, starting with the fact that its one good twist isn't; the entire marketing campaign has been built around the fact that Abigail is a vampire, something the characters don't learn until halfway through. The pacing isn't good. The kid is more annoying than scary. But there are some strong performances (including Dan Stevens again) and the effects are pretty great. It's not a good movie, but its most serious crime is just being a kind of movie, and particularly a school of character and dialogue writing (the Joss Whedon Marvel Cinematic Universe school, to be precise), that I can't stand.

How do I rate this stuff?

* * *

I got very into Letterboxd last year. I had started back in 2022, but at the beginning of 2023, in a resolute New Year's spirit, I decided that I wanted to write more—more of everything. A poem every day! A novel! Short stories! Essays! Book reviews! Film reviews! Most of this fell by the wayside; I wrote a few poems, made some haphazard progress on a couple different novels I've been drafting forever, and wrote a dozen short book reviews. Mostly I just wrote TTRPG stuff…and silly little movie reviews. Letterboxd stuck. I've written 136 reviews now—every film I've seen since January, 2023. (Most are short, and some just a single line, but a few are proper essays.)

So I've had to think a lot about how to rate films. Or really, I've just rated a lot of films, and of the course of the past fifteen months, I've had plenty of time to try to understand what my ratings meant, rationalize them a bit, try to develop some kind of consistent rubric going forward.

Letterboxd gives us two options: We can just “like” films or not, or we can give them star ratings. And of course we can use the star ratings however we want (only giving between one and three, for instance), but the fact that the vast majority of users employ the full range, from half a star to five, compels me to do the same.

It is interesting to think about the less-granular options, though. Heart or no heart is as simple as it gets. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Liked it, didn't. Add one more option, and we have, perhaps, “loved it, liked it, didn't like it,” or, if we're thinking less about our own simple enjoyment and more as critics of some sort—trying to predict whether others will like the work we're evaluating—we have a traffic light: go ahead, caution, and stop. Of course, “caution” contains multitudes. Is it flawed but enjoyable? Expertly made but soulless? Great only for fans of a particular subject or particular genre?

Maybe we add another option: Good, good but not for everybody, bad but some people might like it, bad. We could probably analyze the hell out of that approach, but we know we're going to end up with a ten-point, five-star system, so let's just jump ahead. Going to five options brings to mind an academic grading scale: A, B, C, D, and F. Excellent, good, average, poor, failure. And the fact that Letterboxd has a ten-point scale (from 0.5 to 5.0) but presents it as a five-point one is interesting. Five points: good. The ability to tweak them up and down a bit: fussy, maybe, but definitely tempting. We can still map them onto letter grades; we just fudge it a bit and say everything is either plus or minus. A+, A-, B+, B-, C+, C-, D+, D-, and two different shades of F: “just missed a D-” at one star and “may God have mercy on your soul” at half a star.

This feels pretty good to me. It does mean that reviews will tend to bunch up in the 3–4 range, but that's fine; thanks to word of mouth and our ability to guess what we're going to like from trailers and by drawing conclusions from directors' and actors' past work, we usually don't see a lot of stuff that we hate. Giving an enjoyable film one or two stars seems brutal. I admire Osita Nwanevu, boldly going out there and slapping three stars on everybody's sacred cows, but I don't think I can do it.

3.5 stars is a good movie. Can't complain. Didn't connect with me on a profound, personal level, but I enjoyed it all the way through. A notch or two below that, 3.0 and 2.5 are the middle of the scale, even if they won't be the middle of anybody's histogram (except Osita's). 3.0 is enjoyable but seriously flawed. Worth watching, on the whole, but missing something, or messed something up. Didn't stick the landing. 2.5 is just on the either side of that razor's edge: has a bunch of good qualities, but has enough flaws, or serious enough flaws, to just not be enjoyable in the end. Two stars was probably doomed from the jump, though it might have some charms: a terrible screenplay, an inept director, a stupid concept. Below two, we're in “I might walk out of the theater” territory (but for the fact that I stubbornly never do).

4.0 is really good. Unambitious but perfectly executed, or ambitious and flawed in fairly minor ways. Add an extra half star, and that's about as good as it gets. A masterpiece. Practically flawless. And then if I watch it again and, at the end of the second viewing, I'm thinking, “Yeah, I'm gonna watch that a third time (and a fourth, and a tenth),” that's our five-star gold standard. I'm trying to limit the number of five-star films, but it turns out I'm a pretty soft touch. I love movies! 4.0 is my most common rating; I've given more 4.5s than 3.0s (although if I go to enough festivals, that's bound to change).

So where did I land on my most recent festival faves? Four stars all around! And Abigail? Fuck it: 1.5 stars, which is probably half a star harsher than my rubric demands, but whatever, I get to call audibles sometimes, and I'm sick to death of “She's right behind me, isn't she?”-ass dialogue.