Space Battleship Yamato: The Final Battle

I am not an expert on Space Battleship Yamato. I didn't watch Star Blazers as a kid, and I've only seen a little bit since then, including the first anime movie. Still, when I saw that this live action version of the story had been filmed, I knew I had to see it, and I'm not disappointed that I did.

While it is a re-imagining of the story, much of the first two thirds of the film remains faithful to what I know of the source material, at least in spirit, with the biggest changes being to beef up the female roles a bit by making Yuki, the female lead, into more of a bad-ass and changing the gender of the ship's doctor.

It's only when the crew comes face to face with the enemy that things really start to diverge from the source material. The enemy aliens are made far more alien in this version than they were in the original, which I think ends up working rather well. I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but the ultimate fate of many of the characters also ends up being different than that of their animated selves.

The style of the movie is spot on, from the uniforms, to the sets, to the ship designs. All of it remains faithful to the source material while making the necessary adaptations for live action.

Many of those adaptations appear to borrow heavily from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, and this also seems to work. After all, the Yamato is supposed to be a renovated WWII battleship, so it makes sense that it would have similar interiors. The comparison to Galactica is probably most apparent on the flight deck, with the similar white bulkheads and jumpsuited ground crew readying fighters for launch.

These similarities of style bring to mind other similarities between the two stories. Both feature a mix of fighter and capital ship combat. Both feature themes of friendship, loss, duty, and survival. Both feature Humanity's last warship on a quest to save the species.

Overall, the movie is well done, although it does lag a bit near the end, and I'm not convinced that it was necessary to do the ending the way they did. It's still a good ending, just not the one I would have chosen.

I should point out that the lag is all the more noticeable because the rest of the movie is very well paced. Despite the fact that I was reading subtitles, it did not seem like a 131 minute long movie.

I highly recommend this one to fans of Japanese sci-fi.

The copy I got through Amazon appears to be from Malaysia, and while the overall quality is good, there are a few scenes that look like they could have been transferred better. I hope this will eventually get a US release, and that they will take a bit more care in its production. The English subtitles on this version are well done, with only a few obvious errors. There's also subtitles for Chinese and Malay.

Technoir 1.0

Technoir looks very interesting. This cyberpunk roleplaying game by Jeremy Keller is one of the projects I chose to back on Kickstarter, largely due to my like of his earlier game Chronica Feudalis. The book has yet to go to press, but Jeremy recently made the pdf available to the backers of the Kickstarter project and put it up for sale online.

While I don't normally read entire rulebooks in pdf form, I made an exception for Technoir. There were two reasons for this. The first is that, when reading a pdf, books laid out in a digest format are easier for me to read than those laid out in the more standard 8.5x11 size. As long as the font isn't too small I can read it on my Kindle, and if I'm at the computer I can read it two-up on the screen, just like I would if I had the print book in hand.

The second reason that I read the whole book in pdf form is that it's a very interesting read. The most interesting part is the combination of Transmissions and plot maps. A transmission is a setting outline that consists of a very brief description of the technology, environment and society of the setting followed by six each of contacts, events, factions, locations, objects, and threats. Astute gamers will note that six each of six different items makes for an array of items that can be randomly selected by rolling 2d6, and that's exactly what the GM does to generate a plot.

As the players create their characters, the GM randomly rolls for three items to make up the starting plot map. They then associate the three items to each other, noting the reasons for the connections. Meanwhile, the players will reach a point where they give their characters connections. They then have the ability to call on those connections for favors prior to the start of the game. If they do so, those connections are added to the plot map. By the time all of this is done, the GM should have a starting situation for the players to find themselves in just as soon as they've finished their characters, or shortly thereafter.

As play progresses, the plot map will grow as either the players bring in elements through their actions, or the GM adds additional elements to keep the story going, either rolling to bring in new ones, or choosing appropriate ones as the situation warrants. Eventually, the GM may even bring in elements from an entirely different Transmission if the story moves beyond the bounds of the beginning one.

I'm so interested in this concept that I started building my own Transmission even before I finished reading the rules. I'm not sure yet whether I'll try using it when running the game for our group, but it's certainly a possibility.

The rest of the game is interesting as well, but is going to take some getting used to. It's all about applying "adjectives" to other characters. In the case of mooks you can apply the adjectives of "unconscious" or even "dead", but that's not allowed when it comes to more important characters, which looks like it might takes some getting used to.

Normally conflict scenes in RPGs have a well-defined end-point: when one side runs out of hit points the conflict is over. This applies even in many newer games which feature social conflict, as they often feature what is essentially a pool of social hit-points. Since this doesn't happen in Technoir, it's going to be up to the GM and players to decide when conflicts end.

Players are going to have to decide for themselves when to give up since they can't just keep going until they run out of hit points. If their character gets "bloody" in pursuit of a goal they have to decide if it's still worth it. Mechanically they can continue on, but does it make sense in terms of story if the character doesn't value the goal that much?

GMs need to make the same decisions for the major NPCs. The following questions have to be asked during conflicts:

• What are my character's goals for this conflict?
• Have those goals been met?
• Is it still worth pursuing those goals in light of the damage taken?

Of course, it is still possible for characters to die as a result of conflict, it just won't happen until the conflict is over. At that point characters roll a d6 for every physical injury adjective they've taken. One "6" means they are dying, and two means they are dead. This means that a determined character can continue to pursue their goal no matter what damage they take, but in the end could find they've expended everything they had to do so.

In this game though, dead doesn't necessarily mean dead dead. A "dead" character can still be saved, but if the attempt fails, then the character is permanently dead.

The basic mechanics of the game interest me as well. It uses three types of d6: action dice, push dice and hurt dice. When you perform an action you take a number of action dice equal to the value of the "verb" that you are using (verbs being stats), plus you can add a push die for every adjective you have that helps you, as long as you have enough push dice in your pool, and finally you add one hurt dice for every adjective you have that hurts you.

When you roll the dice any dice that match a hurt die are removed. You then look at the highest value of what's left. If there are more than one of the highest value then that value X becomes X.1. You compare the value to the target number, and if it's higher the action succeeds, and an adjective is applied to the target. The target number is the value of one of the target's verbs which the target can raise by using their own push dice.

Any adjectives applied this way are "fleeting" and are easy to remove. If the player or GM wants to make an adjective last longer, then they must spend push dice to do so. One die makes the adjective "sticky" and two makes it "locked". These dice are then given to the controller of the character affected.

This last bit adds in a nice pacing element to the game in that players start out with all the push dice. The GM can't do anything permanent to the players until they start doing serious stuff to the NPCs. This should allow for the game to accelerate at a pace influenced by the players.

Overall, I'm looking forward to getting this game to the table, and hope to follow up with my observations after we've done so.

Three Kingdoms

My introduction to the Three Kingdoms came from one of the original Romance of the Three Kingdoms computer games from Koei in the late eighties or early nineties. I never quite figured out the game, but was intrigued as to where the story came from.

I continued to interact with the Koei games over the years, both the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series and the Dynasty Warriors series, and my desire to know more about the story behind the games eventually led me to buy a four volume edition of Three Kingdoms.

That was several years ago, and I only recently finished reading them. Written some time in the 14th or 15th century, Three Kingdoms is a historical novel, and can be a difficult read at times. It certainly doesn't flow the way that modern novels most often do.

It's also difficult to tell just what the focus of the novel is until you are quite a ways into it. The cast of characters is enormous, and the entire first volume is largely a prologue to what eventually becomes the main story, which is marked by the appearance of the character of Kongming.

After that, the narrative picks up quite a bit, as the the story of Kongming is arguably the main plot of the novel. After Kongming’s death, there’s a definite feeling that everything else is epilog, despite being the better part of the fourth volume.

There’s also a feeling similar to that produced in some versions of the Arthurian legend, where you have mundane history leading to an era of larger than life heroes followed by a slide back into mundane history. This is reinforced by the fact that none of the heirs of the actual Three Kingdoms are capable of holding onto the achievements that their predecessors made, and are instead eclipsed and overthrown by a fourth faction that re-unites China.

To give you an indication of how dense this novel can be, the original version of the movie Red Cliff was filmed in two parts that added up to five hours of screen time. The events covered in it take up less than half of the second volume of Three Kingdoms.

Early elements of the wuxia tradition can be seen in many of the battle descriptions. While the battles include huge armies, it is often duels between generals that settle the matter, with a losing general’s side falling into disarray and being slaughtered and/or driven from the field.

These duels are not described in great detail, often consisting simply of a description of the number of passes made between duelists and the final blow that decides the outcome. Sometimes though, unique weapons are named and described, or generals are described as blocking missile weapons with their melee weapons, or they are described as defeating countless regular soldiers.

The only time I can recall a general being killed by a common soldier, that soldier was immediately promoted to become an officer and became a named character in the book. Otherwise, combat with soldiers only served to tire generals, but they would either win through, or be finished off by another general, not the common soldiers.

If you decide to read this, and choose the same version that I did, then I suggest starting with the afterword in volume IV, and reading it up to the point where the author suggests you start reading the novel itself. It will give you a better idea of what the focus of the novel is, and keep you from feeling as lost as I did throughout the first volume.

My Take on the Origins Awards

If you won an award at Origins 2011, then you should probably just move along, because I'm likely going to offend you and that's not my intention. This is meant as a criticism of the awards themselves and not those that won them.

I don't think there was a bad product among the winners, I just think that many either weren't the best, or weren't properly classified.

It's been about three weeks now, and I've had some time to digest the results of the 2011 Origins Awards. Listening to episode 215 of the Dice Tower helped both confirm and solidify my initial impressions: the Origins Awards are a joke.

I don't want to minimize the accomplishments of some of the winners, particularly the folks at Evil Hat for their wins with the Dresden Files RPG, but in most cases the best of those nominated did not win, and in several cases it was the worst that did.

Let's look at the winners, starting with the single most egregious in my mind: Best Historical Board Game. The winner of that category was Catan Histories: Settlers of America Trails to Rails. This game shouldn't have even been nominated to this category. Just because a game has a lightly pasted on historical theme does not make it a historical game.

Moving on, we see Zombie Dice winning the best Family, Children's, or Party game. First, the category itself has issues. A family game is different from a children's game which is different from a party game. Mashing them all together makes little sense. I suppose they are going for best "casual" game, but they need to rethink the definitions of the board game categories if that's what they are going for.

Zombie Dice is not a terrible game, but every other nominee in the category is better. If you tell someone "you can only have X number of games for the rest of your life" no one is going to choose Zombie Dice. At least a couple of its competitors in the category could conceivably end up on such a list.

The same could be said of the winner of the Best Traditional Card Game category. Back to the Future is not a game I've played, but it's pretty obvious that the only reason it won was due to the theme. I've not actually played any of the games in the category, but I've heard really good things about some of them. I've heard no one praising Back to the Future in a similar manner.

For Best Board Game, the apparent top tier of the board game categories, at least the winner is a good game. Unfortunately it's also the weakest of the nominees. Every game in the category is better, but Castle Ravenloft apparently wins because it's Dungeons & Dragons.

Moving on now to roleplaying. While I think Dresden Files is a great game, and a serious contender for best roleplaying game, I would have chosen Fiasco. Everyone I know who has tried it has made it one of their go-to games. It's simple and innovative, and consistently produces good gaming sessions.

Best Roleplaying supplement is a close one. Having run both Dresden Files and Pathfinder games I have found the Advanced Players Guide more generally useful than Our World, but am willing to admit this is probably the most subjective call out of a lot of subjective calls in this article. As such, this is the one category where I don't really have an issue with the winner.

Moving on once more, we come to Best Hobby Game Accessory. Our nominees include such wonderful choices as Color Primer: Dragon Red... really? People couldn't find better nominees for this category than a color of paint? At least it didn't win, but the winner was almost as bad: a Cthulhu dice bag. A dice bag won the Best Hobby Game Accessory. I guess the Crown Royal bag wasn't eligible. Unless the bag actually opens into an extradimensional space, I think a better candidate could have been found. In fact, I have one, actually an entire category: everything else nominated was a better choice, except maybe the paint.

Most of the problem here is the over-broadness of the category. Everything else was specific to miniatures painters or players of a specific game, whereas the dice bag is more generic. Never mind that it doesn't even look very practical: it's cute and has broader appeal, so it wins.

I would have given Best Gaming Publication to Hamlet's Hit Points, but I haven't read Shadowrun: Spells and Chrome, so I can't say it didn't deserve to win. I can say that a category that includes both gaming fiction and non-fiction is a poorly designed category.

Best Miniature Rules: Heroclix won this. I know a lot of people like Heroclix, but were the rules included in the Blackest Night Starter Kit significantly different enough from previous editions to warrant inclusion in this category? Also, a BattleTech technical readout counts as rules? This category needs to be tightened up.

I can't really comment on the Best Play by Mail or Play by Email game, except to point out that the very existence of this category really calls into question the thinking process of those behind these awards. It's 2011, you have ten categories to cover products in a vastly diverse hobby, and you dedicate one of them to Play by Mail games.

I do have to give them credit for the Hall of Fame entries, which was the one area of the awards that I could agree with 100%. Although, paired with the Play by Mail category, I think this just goes to show that the Origins Awards has a much better grasp of the past of gaming than it has of the present.

Of course, anyone can whine about the poor quality of gaming awards, but what would make for a more useful system? I have some ideas, but I'll save them for a later post.

Podcast Update Update

A quick followup to my most recent Podcast Update.

I've been listening to the Chronicles: Pathfinder Podcast. After listening to three and a half episode so far, I expect that I'll probably go back and listen to the rest as time allows.

They feature a good mix of discussion of rules crunch and interviews with Pathfinder authors. They also make it very clear before straying into the realm of spoilers for players. This differentiation between the "companion" and "chronicles" sections of the podcast makes it possible for both players and GMs to make use of the podcast (players simply have to stop listening about half way through).

Definitely worth checking out for any Pathfinder players.