WEP '12, Day 13 - Competitive TV Part 2, Around the Horn

Well, crap.  Looks like I hit Save instead of Publish last night.  Friday the 13th, indeed.

Despite this show being around since 2002, I've only started watching Around the Horn regularly in the last few years.  The show of "competitive banter" features a host, Tony Reali, and four sports journalists.  The journalists express their opinions of the major sports news of the day before, and Reali gives them points based on how clever and persuasive they were in their arguments.  Periodically, one of the competitors is booted from the show for being too far behind.  The last two standing have a one on one showdown, and the winner gets 25 seconds at the end of the show to say whatever they want, excepting what you can't say due to FCC regulations.

And that's it.  Unlike most of the shows I'll be discussing in this series, there's really no long term for Around the Horn.  There's no cash being passed around, except as salaries to the people on the show.  Being eliminated first just means you get less face time that episode.  They keep track of who's scored the most points, but that's just for bragging rights, and the current champion, Denver journalist Woody Paige, got his 71 points because he scored a 40 point bonus for being the only one on the show, and maybe on ESPN overall, to pick the Broncos to beat the Steelers last week.

As much as I enjoy the show for the competition, it also lets me see the top twelve topics in sports without having to sit through the usual Sports Center type hype show.  Plus you even get the occasional insightful point or funny line.  In truth, this isn't a show for everyone, but if you like banter and sports, you could do much worse than Around the Horn.

WEP '12, Day 12 - Competitive TV Part 1: The Amazing Race

It's come to my attention that the only TV I really go out of my way to make time for these days are competitive shows.  The Amazing Race, The Next Iron Chef, Around the Horn, Top Chef, and Chopped.  The astute among you will note that that's also three competitive cooking shows out of five.  Let's have a look at the shows in chronological order and see what I think of them and why you might like them.  We'll start with The Amazing Race.

The Amazing Race has been the gold standard of reality shows for quite some time.  Survivor may be both older and more popular, but The Amazing Race is simply better.  The show follows a number of teams of two in a race around the world.  Each team has a pre-existing relationship, be it friends, family, lovers, and so on.  Each episode usually represents a single leg of the race and, with some exceptions, the last team to arrive at that leg's destination  is eliminated from the race.  This goes on from episode to episode until, in the finale, there are three teams left.  The first team to reach the finish line splits one million dollars.

I'm a big fan of the show, even though I've missed around half of its nineteen seasons, as the show does two seasons a year.  For me, it represents the best of the competitive shows.  That's because that while a strong relationship with your partner or with your competitors can help, having a bad relationship doesn't mean you're doomed.  In other words, victory or defeat is purely about whether or not you make it over the finish line before the other teams.  There's no tribal councils, no alliances to vote people off, no votes from the audience at home.  Get across the line first and you win.  Get across the line last and you lose.  There's nothing in-between.  And that alone makes for a more interesting show to me.

With the show entering its twentieth season, I recently watched a copy of the first season on DVD.  The differences are instructive.  The show was harder back then.  The tasks you had to overcome were more challenging, and the clues as to how to get from place to place generally less clear cut.  Furthermore, the spreading of smartphones makes it a lot easier to just get your taxi driver to look up directions to a place you've never heard of, which was something you really couldn't do back in 2001 when the show debuted.

The show was more tactical, too.  In the first season there was a Fast Forward on every leg of the race except the last one.  The first team to get to a Fast Forward could use it to skip all tasks and go straight to the finish line of that leg.  But a team could only use the Fast Forward once in the race, so it was a big deal to decide to go for it.  Furthermore, if you went for it but another team beat you to it, you could end up even further behind, as the Fast Forward is usually well off the race route.  Nowadays, however, there's only one or two Fast Forwards in each race, so you might as well grab it when you can.  So the teams in the lead, who don't really need it, usually grab the Fast Forward and pad their leads, while the teams who are behind don't even bother since it's almost certainly gone by the time they get there.

The show has gotten better in some ways, though.  The inclusion of the U-Turn, a once or twice per race opportunity to force another team to go back and do another task before they can move on, allows teams to go on the offensive in a way that wasn't available in the early races.  The production values are better, and the fact that they've done this for 11 years shows in how they schedule tasks.  It isn't possible for a team to get an eleven hour lead like one team did in the first Race, and damned difficult for a team to get a full 24 hours behind the others the way one team did in that race too.

So even though I'm not sure the modern version of the race is particularly better than the 2001 version, I'll still be there when the show comes back next month for the twentieth season.

The world is waiting...

EDIT: It occurs to me that I've already discussed Chopped on this blog.  Things haven't changed such that the old entry is invalid, so you can read it here.

WEP '12, Day 11 - Old Republic Log XIII

Bah.  I was ready to pull another last minute posting tonight at 11:30 when the internet (and phone and cable, yay bundles!) went down for two hours.  Nevertheless, we press on despite all that WOW (the cable company, not the game) tries to do to slow us down.

Things have been busy, if low key, on the Old Republic front lately.  I've gotten Tasia to level 20, Kelynn to 19.  I also switched the Guildmaster status from Alia to Kelynn.   Our third guild attempt at Hammer Station ended in the same ignominious failure that the first two tries did, though we consoled ourselves by slaughtering every living thing in a Heroic 4 Mission on Coruscant.

Matt and I did another Heroic 4 by ourselves on Balmorra with our Sith.  My companion can actually tank pretty well now, so I provide the healing and tanking both, while his characters kill everything.  I realized that while my heals are all time based, the protective force field I can put on my allies is an instant cast, so whenever I need to emergency heal someone, I do the Static Shield, then my faster but smaller heal, then finally the slower bigger one.  Works pretty well.

Kelynn's looking more and more troopery all the time now.  The helmet helps, even though her eyepatch sticks through the helmet lens, which is pretty awful.  I dropped enough credits to get a decent looking helmet on Kelynn's companion, but since he can't wear the one Kel's got on and he can wear the one I bought, I left it on him.

I did finish Coruscant, so I'll do a brief story spoiler section after the portrait.

Tasia, Level 20 Sith Sorceress, Balmorra
Kelynn, Level 19 Vanguard, Taris
Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant

Coruscant SPOILERS follow.

Are you cleared for SPOILERS?

Right.  So following the betrayal of the rest of Havoc Squad, your first task is to cut off the supplies they're getting from the criminal underworld on Coruscant.  Surprise, surprise, that means blasting your way through the same three criminal organizations that every other Republic class is.  There's this bit where you're running down the guy who mentored Havoc Squad in the first place, and you discover that the last criminal gang has been co-opted by the Imperials, but other than that, it's pretty straight forward.

I did get an interesting choice at the very end, though.  I'd been infiltrating a small enemy space station and I came upon the captured Republic Senator who was nominally my mission objective.  He was strapped to a chair that was rigged with explosives.  I could rescue him, but doing so would set off an alarm and maybe allow Wraith, one of the traitors, to escape.  So I went Dark Side and left him in the bomb chair and went off to confront Wraith.  She immediately blows the chair and kills the guy, saying:

"Mission failed, Lieutenant."

To which I reply:

"You're the mission, Wraith."

We fight, and she dies.  I have to cover my ass with the general I'm taking orders from and I took a huge -180 affection hit from my law & order companion, but I got the job done.

The question I have now...and as it's a class quest, I'd have to get a new Trooper from level 1 to 19 to find out in play myself...is whether or not anything different happens if you free the Senator.  Are there guards?  Does she ambush you?  Or did I let Wraith blow a Senator to meat chunks for no reason than my own paranoia?  (And desire for Dark Side Points.)

It's enough to make one wonder.

WEP '12, Day 10 - Lesser Known Candidates Forum

This was going to be another Old Republic log, but I found something better.  This morning, I caught the tail end of the Lesser Known Democratic Presidential Candidates Forum.   Looking for it online, I found a link to the other side of the coin, the Lesser Known Republican Presidential Candidates Forum.  The latter is interesting too, considering that it has a guy whose solution to everything is to "contact orb soul spirit Jesus with Braingate."

But perhaps as one might expect, Republican fringers aren't as wacky as the Democratic ones.  In particular, the Democratic half includes an appearance by Vermin Supreme.  His solutions to the Zombie Apocalypse sounds pretty good to me, but the highlight of it was watching "Mr. Supreme," as the moderator called him, glitter-bomb Anti-Abortion crusader Randall Terry because Jesus told Vermin Supreme to turn Terry gay.  That's near the end of the Democratic video if you'd like to see that play out.

The thing about it is that by opening the forum to anyone who managed to get on the ballot but who hasn't been invited to any of the "real" debates, they pretty much neuter the ability of any of these guys to be taken seriously.  Republican John Davis, for example, who really doesn't say anything too different than, say, Michele Bachman or Rick Santorum, still gets tarred with the same wacky brush because he's sitting two seats away from "orb soul spirit Jesus" guy and next to "9/11 drone planes and tower rigged to blow" conspiracy guy.

It's interesting to me how many of these guys are single-issue.  Beside the aforementioned "orb soul spirit Jesus" and 9/11 Conspiracy guys, there was "attack Iran" guy and "hunt down the illegal immigrants" guy, and a 38 year old who's a Tea Party favorite on the Republican side.  The Democrats had a guy focused on Thorium nuclear reactors as a way to solve the oil crisis, a couple of highly religious guys, the anti-abortion guy, and of course, Vermin Supreme who isn't so much a single issue guy so much as an issue all to himself.

There are the occasional good points and even moments of near statesmanship, such as the guy in the Republican forum who said that he thought that the President had done has he'd thought was best but that his efforts simply hadn't worked.  But as reasonable as he sounds, it's hard to take the whole thing seriously when it's mixed in with a guy calling to "contact Jesus" for guidance.  And it's even worse on the Democratic side when you're sitting on the same podium with a guy in robes with a boot on his head, and, as it turns out, a handful of glitter in his pocket.

WEP '12, Day 9 - The Fate of Dungeons & Dragons

No sooner had I written up my treatise on why I was leaving Fourth Edition behind then, mere hours later, Wizards of the Coast announced the worst kept secret in gaming.  They're working on a Fifth Edition of the game.

The writing had been on the wall for a year or so.  Fourth Eidition products were coming out less frequently.  Most of the Fourth Edition design team had been let go and Mike Mearls promote to take over.  They brought back Monte Cook of Third Edition fame.  We all knew it would happen.

The thing is, it doesn't seem to be happening the way I thought it would.  My guess had been that they'd announce the new version at this year's GenCon, with an expected release date of Spring 2013, so that 4E would have lasted five years or so.

But no, the announcement of "D&D NExt" came today, with an explanation that starting in Spring 2012 there will be an extensive playtest period.  They swear that this time they'll listen to the playtesters.  We'll see, but I signed up to be notified by 'em anyhow.

So there it is.  If you consider Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to be First Edition, and I do, then there was 12 years between First and Second, eleven years between Second and Third, eight years between Third and Fourth, and now perhaps five to six years between Fourth and Fifth.  I think that suggests that Fourth Edition was the least successful of the modern D&D rulesets, which feels correct to me.

So, let's see how the playtest for Fifth works out, shall we?

WEP '12, Day 8 - Ending the Story

I was running my long running Fourth Edition D&D game when I came to the realization that it was time, maybe even long past time, to wrap the story up.  This particular campaign had been going for three and a half years now, with as many as six players and one DM, myself.  With some variance, the game has been played almost exclusively at my brother's dinner table.  Over those years, we've seen his daughter Julia grow from a screaming baby to a precocious four and a half year old who watches Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.  It's been awhile, in other words.

So why am I calling it a campaign?  Well there are, as with any major decision, several factors.  First of all, and the one that hit me hardest as the 23rd level party annihilated a 31st level monster without taking any significant damage, is that Fourth Edition D&D breaks down during Epic Level play.   It has become too hard to challenge them with published monsters.  They're regularly kicking the ass of creatures way above their level, and they're only 23rd level.  The game theoretically supports up to level 30, but I don't know that monsters exist that can threaten a 30th level party.  In a game I played in, we took a bunch of 30th level characters up against Orcus and we massacred him.  It wasn't even really close.

So the game itself is breaking down.  But what else?  Well, the second part is that with the mechanical aspects falling apart we have to turn to more roleplaying.  But that's hampered by the fact that the Fourth Edition universe lacks all verisimilitude.  It doesn't make sense how adventurers can do what they do, and there's no real attempt to impose some kind of rational universe.  For all that D&D 4E was criticized for being "video gamey" this is where the charge is most accurate.  Fourth Edition doesn't put forth a coherent world, and that makes roleplaying in it too hard.

Finally, I got a Christmas present from one of my players of the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG.  And I like it.  I think it could be just what I'm looking for, a low magic, rules light system that everyone can get a 10 hour briefing on the word via the HBO A Game of Thrones series.  Which you should go ahead and watch anyway, because it's worth it straight up, regardless of whether or not you're going to play the RPG.

So with reason to end it, and a successor named, I'm going to bring the campaign to an end next month and start anew with A Song of Ice and Fire.

The king is dead.  Long live the king!

EDIT: And I got this one in with less than a minute to spare.  We continue on, unbowed by time!

WEP '12, Day 7 - The Republican Primaries

And so, the inevitable politics post.

Has there ever been a less enthusiastic body politic than the current Republican electorate?  While united in their desire to replace President Obama, about the only thing else Republicans in the field seem to be able to agree on is how much they don't like the current crop of candidates.

Like kids on a Ferris Wheel, each of the prospective candidates has ridden to the top, then spun back down again.  First Bachman, then Perry, then Cain, then Gingrich, then Paul, and now Santorum.  The only exceptions seeming to be Romney who is the center of the wheel that the others rise and fall around, and Huntsman, who as a moderate in a party that no longer believes in moderation, never had a chance in the first place.

It seems like it will be Romney.  He "won" Iowa, though there's some debate about that.  He's going to run away with it in New Hampshire.  That will likely scrape off Huntsman.  He's ahead in South Carolina, where a significant Romney victory will probably do in Perry.  Paul always hangs in until the end, and Gingrich, who's been running with almost no money anyway since his campaigns' early defections in the beginning of the year, might stick around just to take shots at Mitt, whom he blames for his collapse in Iowa.  I'm guessing that unless Santorum does remarkably well in South Carolina, he'll kack it after a defeat in Florida, but there's room for error there yet.

And so, it'll be Romney.  Whom no one really likes.  The reason that no one's enthused about Romney is because no one knows who he really is or what he really believes in.  The Massachusetts Health Care bill Romney signed as Governor of Massachusetts is similar in most ways to the "ObamaCare" that Mitt swears is destroying the country.  Shockingly enough, when he was Governor of a left-leaning state he was willing to tolerate all those sticky social issues like Abortion and gay Marriage that he now, as he panders to a right leaning body politic, he says he abhors.  And so on, and so forth.

In short, one gets the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that Mitt will say whatever you want to hear just as long as he gets to be the guy to redecorate the Oval Office.  And indeed, maybe that very chameleon like ability of his to try to be all things to all people will let him beat President Obama in November.

But that doesn't mean that we'll have any idea what kind of a President we're going to get.