Gormongous

If anyone's interested in moving beyond anecdote and how they personally pulled themselves up by their bootstraps: http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/cps/characteristics-of-minimum-wage-workers-2014.pdf

Are you seriously saying that everyone who feels forced to work someplace that doesn't pay minimum wage is just being stupid/lazy and not considering all their options? Because that's a staggeringly ignorant statement to make based just on your own experience. It took me literally fifteen seconds of googling to find an article that nuances the argument a lot more than "work someplace else if you're not getting paid enough."

Well... It depends. Different gamemasters are good at different things. Personally, as much as I love the McElroys and The Adventure Zone, I find Griffin not to be very good at empowering his players to play their characters in interesting ways. It's really easy to tell the various points at which, during episodes four and five, Griffin transitions from the premade adventure to his own work, because suddenly the players are getting told to go places and do stuff, with the alternative being Griffin saying, "Okay, nothing happens until you do it." He's just got this amazing fantasy novel laid out in his notes and his players are going to act it out for him. It's still a lot of fun to listen to it all go down, but I cringe at all the times that Griffin says "no," even when his players are coming from a place of strong roleplaying, because he doesn't want to go off his rails. That's something with which I've personally struggled as a GM and it bugs me that Griffin's not even trying a lot of the time. Also, Griffin keeps talking about cheese like it's an invention about which a neo-medieval society wouldn't know and man that drives me crazy as a historian.

Yeah, I guess my issue was David saying that several of Sekigahara's mechanics seem like they're solvable, even though he personally was unable to solve them, and that that's a strong reason not to dig into the game with repeat plays. The gap between "seem like they're solvable" and "are solvable" is voluminous and filled with truly excellent designs at all levels of complexity. In the case of Sekigahara, the sneaking suspicion that the interaction of several simplistic mechanics might be solvable, if not for all the randomness of drawing blocks and cards, is the crux of the design itself, not a problem to be engineered out of it. That's why I was disappointed that David was so fixated on "fixing" Sekigahara after only two sessions with another player who had not yet grasped the mechanics to the same degree that he had.

And, in the case of adjunct instructors, "time worked" only applies to the time spent teaching the class, so the "generous" wage of $65 an hour paid to teach a three credit-hour course is actually slightly less than minimum wage even if the adjunct is some ridiculous machine who's able to keep prep and grading to twenty hours a week. In general, the idea of a "contractor" has drifted so far from the spirit of the law that it's functionally unrecognizable.

Saitama always looks bored, man. There's nothing in the series that keeps him from being bored, not for more than a few seconds. It's a pillar of his character, the whole "greatest samurai lets his sword rust in its scabbard" thing. Dude's bored even when he's on the moon. I know, I should just disengage. I'm not seeing it and this isn't helping me.

Again, why should I take the word of Boros for anything that Boros says about Saitama? Why must I rely on informed characteristics from a protagonist's opponent, in a show where previous opponents have repeatedly and systematically misjudged said protagonist, for the basics of that protagonist's character motivation in the series' climax? Why is this one opponent right about Saitama's fundamental being when all the others were wrong? Because they're both really strong this time? Like I said, the only emotions that Saitama expresses, besides boredom, are annoyance at Boros' arrival on the planet and resignation that he has to hit Boros harder. I must be stupid, because the "respect" about which you keep treating as obvious was not shown to me. You've extrapolated a bunch of stuff from a few offhand comments that are delivered in stereotypical shounen style, but to me they feel like fan theories about the last scenes of Taxi Driver being a dying hallucination by Travis Bickle: plausible and even interesting, but not explicitly supported in the text, so not a very satisfactory explanation to me about what the whole thing is about.

If two characters don't act or think the same in the vast majority of circumstances, but are still proclaimed to be "the same" because of some non-totalizing aspect of their character, then I think that is lazy writing and a needless concession to genre conventions in an otherwise tightly-written show. I'm sorry that you can't see my point of view here. EDIT: Yes, I know that ONE wrote the webcomic, but it was adapted by Murata Yusuke into a manga and that's a source that Suzuki Tomohiro and Natsume Shingo also used for the anime. "Writers" seemed like a succinct way to address all of these cooks in the kitchen.

He's not the same as Saitama. He's gathered a crew of thousands of aliens from all over the galaxy, including at least three powerful fighters who serve him with extreme loyalty, to support him in his quest to find the ultimate opponent. Saitama sits at home, clips coupons, and fights only when attacked or when confronted with injustice. They're completely different characters, except for the fact that they're both fighters of unparalleled strength. That's what I mean about the writers of One Punch Man making concessions to the shounen formula: "strong but bored" describes the vast majority of all characters in that genre and they all have this "brotherhood of arms" thing going on because no one has a life outside of fighting... except Saitama, who does in his own small way, but apparently he's the same as the rest, in the end. That's disappointing to me.

I'm glad you got something more out of it than I did, Twig. I simply did not see that emotional depth in the show's various beats, especially at the end. The idea that Saitama could have used his full strength but didn't in the final battle, out of respect, doesn't hold much water for me when Saitama is repeatedly disappointed that every other fight in the series ends with one punch. Why now? Why is this adversary, who has barely any setup, suddenly an inspiration for him to hold back? There is no groundwork laid for it, not like there is when sparring with Genos. Neither visually nor verbally is there a sense of recognition from Saitama about Lord Boros. He simply fails to defeat Boros with one punch, voices annoyance at Boros' motives, takes a bunch of hits, and then kills Boros with a combo that culminates in a "serious punch." Sure, Boros informs the audience at the end that Saitama is overwhelmingly strong and that he wasn't ever really trying, but literally every other opponent of Saitama has also informed the audience about Saitama... incorrectly. Why, now, do we take someone's word for what's going on inside him? Because it conforms with our expectations of who Saitama is, as a character? I am unsatisfied with that as a writing choice. The transition from "understated for the sake of humor" to "understated for the sake of pathos" needs to be smoother and clearer in its execution. To take a different example, I liked Genos' brief moment of recognition with Sweet Mask, as similar people on different arcs. Genos, overall, is useful as a lens for looking inside the other characters, since he's established to have a strong inner monologue and an open mind about others' abilities. But he's not present at Saitama's fight with Boros, where the laconic battles the melodramatic, so we have no perspective on what's actually going on. Your interpretation is plausible but has no explicit support in the text itself, so I stand by my assessment that the finale was a misstep, if only for underplaying the show's supposed themes. It's certainly not remotely as bad as, say, the foggy mess that was the finale of My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, but it has a faint resemblance to it, again if you're correct in your reading. EDIT: Also, to answer your question about rules, I initially understood One Punch Man as a high-concept anime about the strongest being in the universe, like Trigun is a high-concept anime about a militant pacifist who never takes even a single life. For Saitama to be holding back sometimes takes a lot of the texture away from that concept for me, like if Vash were fine with having to maim and cripple people when necessary. It's cool that the writers of One Punch Man want to do something else, but I find it much less interesting as a somewhat tepid psychological study on the loneliness of mastery, personally.

Yeah, this goes back to what I was saying above: if the writers wanted this implicit pact to be the defining element of the fight, I feel like they needed to do something to bring it out, besides having the villain just talk at him about how strong he is, which is just like how every other fight went in the series. Get rid of Saitama's comic deadpan for a moment, have him actually say more than an annoyed brush-off or a one-word acknowledgement, anything would do just to start a dialogue, if the connection is meant to be there. It's frustrating to me, for all the reasons I've listed.

I guess I liked being able to sell One Punch Man as a high concept: it's about a dude who can defeat anyone with one punch and about that not solving everything. Therefore, it's disappointing to me that the decision was made to abandon that concept for no apparent benefit to the show beyond a brief rush of heightened stakes for the finale. It goes without saying that Saitama's absolute power is still functionally infinite, because he's the protagonist of a combat-focused anime, but making his effective power less than infinite at any given point in the plot is a concession to genre conventions that I had thought One Punch Man wasn't interested in making, not least because it flattens the show's narrative arc into something much more traditional and unambitious. I imagine that, from the point where the anime leaves off, events will conspire to face Saitama with stronger and stronger opponents, forcing him not to grow stronger, but just to use more of the strength that he already has, which shakes out to the same damn thing, and... Eh, been there, seen that, bought the Bleach T-shirt. I'm glad the anime exists how it is, though. Like I said, near-perfect!

I really wish I were watching your version of that show. I had major problems with the first season of Better Call Saul (I can't stop typing "Better Caul Saul," which is gross): it was a drama starring a bunch of characters out of a comedy; Saul's character development is glacially slow considering that the audience already knows its endpoint from Breaking Bad; and all the episodes except the one about Mike had a very set arc where Saul makes an initially dumb or greedy action, that action precipitates a crisis, Saul agonizes over it, and then he does the right thing in the end. Overall, the show lacked a lot of texture for me, and good performances by Jonathan Banks and Bob Odenkirk really weren't carrying it through the many soft patches. Maybe I needed some time away from it and maybe the finale of last season is the face of much-needed things to come with the show. Who knows! I'll find out when I get around to watching the premiere this weekend...

I think people have different bars in different places for different people in different industries. Not in my case, but in others, I could easily see how a selection of Blow's inconsiderate opinions, of which there are several from which to choose, makes him a jerk to them. No one's fundamentally a jerk, at least I hope not. It's all context and your own personal threshold of tolerances.

Well, I finally caught up with the entirety of One Punch Man, and I thought it was a near-perfect anime, until the final episode with the fight against Lord Boros went entirely off the rails. Count on this coming up in the next episode of Key Frames: A Podcast About Anime!

I actually don't have much of a dog in this fight, having never played a Jonathan Blow game but having reasonably enjoyed his editorials, and I mostly think that my ill will towards Blow comes from repeated Twitter arguments that he's made over the last few years about there being no causation established to his satisfaction between negative rates of women studying computer science over the past three decades and entrenched attitudes of sexism in said field. It feels like a weird position for him to stick to, seeing that he's also argued vociferously for accepting outside assessments of sexism in gamer culture as a chance to self-reflect and grow, but it feels very unconsidered for what's otherwise a very considered online persona.

Congratulations, SAM!

Personally, I think that the high-level strategy of Sekigahara is a house of mirrors. There is so much randomization in the initial block placement, every draw of cards, and every draw of blocks that it's virtually impossible to minimize the role of chance in any consistent way, even among experts, but the extreme simplicity of the mechanics with which the players have direct contact—moving blocks and playing cards—invariably leaves most players chasing the chimera of perfect or near-perfect control over chance. In over a dozen games, I've never seen anyone catch it, at least not for long. As with a lot of our understanding of military history, it's tempting to want to boil the flashpoint to a matter of opposed bluffs, but it's always just a little bit more: opposed bluffs modified by what each side thinks is a reasonable outcome, or rather the disparity between them, and by a little bit of wishful thinking, even among the best players. That's why I'm really wary of people saying that Sekigahara needs to be boiled down or bulked up, because more complexity would make the game a matter of skill and less complexity would make it a matter of luck. Also, something that would have been nice to hear discussed on the podcast: the "living rules" of Sekigahara are posted by GMT for free on their website, giving a good look at wargame-style section-and-subsection formatting but also eight pages of historical and design notes. Calkins gives a very detailed description of the leadup to the battle, the battle itself, and the immediate consequences, above and beyond what you'd find on the Wikipedia page, and then spends several pages explaining what parts of the Sekigahara campaign inspired what mechanics and the effect that he hopes each achieves. It's very cogently stated and I wish more games would have designers with the courage or personal clarity to explain their process like that. Certainly, rereading it now, it answers a lot of David's questions about loyalty checks and card management!

Having listened to the podcast, I particularly like how Julian articulated the purpose of the "traitor" card. It seems inconsequential (and often is) but its presence in the deck makes fully flushing your hand during a battle, either to win the battle or just to refresh your selection of cards, a not-always-optimal move. Without it, there's no point to holding cards back, especially for the attacker, and I've eventually come to appreciate the slightly increased weight it puts on pushing a victory too far and on playing cards that you might need elsewhere. However, I don't understand the panel's ostensible confusion over movement. It's fairly simple: each block has a base moment of one, and three things (presence of a leader or castle at the start of the move, movement along a highway, and discarding a card for a "forced march") can bring it up to a maximum of four. However, every four blocks above four in a movement stack reduce that movement by one. The fact that movement of large stacks is prohibitively expensive to perform serves as a counter to the attacker's general advantage in Sekigahara: the attacker must move divided, concentrate their force at a point, and then attack after having exhausted some of their cards to concentrate forces, which combines with the traitor card to make attacking a risk unless the attacker has minimized all possible variables. This is a "stack of doom" solution that it would be good for 4X designers to consider, I think. This pattern continued on the podcast with the conversations about combat and initiative, really. Combat is structured the way it is to heighten the will-they-won't-they tension of bluffing that you have the cards to make that massive army of yours fight at all (and there's nothing more satisfying than sending four blocks against a sixteen-block monster protecting a major junction and confirming your suspicion that they were hoping the sheer size would keep you away). Initiative is structured the way it is because initiative is Tokugawa's advantage, just like position is Ishida's advantage (the asymmetry in the game is extreme for its relative simplicity and yet it's almost invisible if you've only ever played one side). Some of this episode, thankfully not most of it, felt like a group of blind men with an elephant, as Rob noted: each of the panelists found a mechanic overly straightforward and thought it could be abstracted further, when really the competing demands of all those barely-there mechanics joins together to make a surprisingly intricate game that pushes hard on both players to balance everything, without needless Avalon Hill-style complexity forcing them to lose perspective. Finally, if I had to give one piece of future advice also related to last week's episode, a group of relative amateurs guessing at the putative top-level optimization of a game that they've just learned doesn't make for the best design roundtable. If you look, for instance, on BoardGameGeek, there is almost no consensus over multiple threads about "optimal" strategies, except Ishida taking Kiyosu and Tokugawa taking Aizu in the first couple of weeks. Even then, the randomization of starting forces and card hands can make those actions sub-optimal, too. Woe betide the Tokugawa player who has to face four Uesugi blocks the first turn and reinforcements there afterward, making a march on Kyoto a huge risk. The genius of Sekigahara is how it demands flexible awareness of overall strategic situation while still knowing the line of best fit (a gradual consolidation of forces and territories over the first four or five weeks, followed by an advance along one or both highways and a climactic battle in the sixth or seventh week).

You're totally right, but I believe there's a difference between player anarchy that comes from players choosing to kill an important NPC (a good response to which even a good GM can't really plan) and player creativity that comes from players finding alternate solutions (for which there are plenty of tools, both formal and informal, at a GM's disposal and the ability to respond to which is half of what makes a good GM in the first place). I'm sympathetic to a less-experienced or less-talented GM getting caught off-guard by either, but it still makes them a not-very-good GM in a certain light, just like an open-world game that has no contingency for you discovering the third-act enemy fortress is not a very good open-world game in a certain light.

I personally would like to see you be a guest on Idle Weekend, even though that's the ultimate corruption/collusion/communism of "podcast network operator, podcast editor, and special guest." Also, if at all possible, my dream is having you and Tom Chick on the same podcast, so I could hear two of the most thoughtfully opinionated people I know going at it, but that's silly of me. I look forward to whatever you all do!

Yeah, I also feel that the deliberate firewall there is a bit too high at times, but it's whatever is comfortable to the Thumbs. We're not the ones who'll get brigaded by 4chan if the latter takes it poorly that people are talking about a game they made on a gaming podcast...

Yeah, that's an excellent summation of the strategic problems for each side: Ishida has to take and hold the best chokepoint to establish a resource advantage over Tokugawa and to force at least one of the game's deciding battles at a favorable location in the road network, while Tokugawa has to determine how and where to concentrate forces in order to break the Ishida line, either to win a military victory or to force them to fall back to a less logistically advantageous position. Generally, the Tokugawa have the advantage in this nexus of decisions, because the game usually rewards the violence of action, but smart and confident reactions by Ishida can counter even a strong opening by Tokugawa. I've had an amazing game as the Ishida where I managed to engineer a battle of mutual annihilation with the advancing Tokugawa force, sure that Tokugawa Ieyasu himself was leading it and that his death would end the game with my victory... but no, my opponent had quietly exchanged Tokugawa with the Maeda leader up north and went on to win an unspectacular victory via points, one I was glad to concede. I'm very excited to listen to this podcast. EDIT: Also, I've owned this game for two years now, with regular sessions of play, and I'm still not sure when to bring out the Mori. As Ishida, you have to bring them out in order to win, but I have no feel for when the best moment is to flush half my hand for the strongest homogeneous force in the game—probably because it's different, every game. I think that's very good design.

I found this episode of the podcast more than a little frustrating, mostly because the discussion about the "right" way to play a game (a not-good way to frame a discussion about anything, really) went so frequently to the well of "artistic intent" as the assumption of optimal experience and because it ended up with a consensus that advocated for uncritical, even passive conformity to that intent. There was barely any acknowledgement of the perks of playing a game in any way other than "the way it was meant to be played" and none at all of the fallibility of the author within their own work. I mean, Rob got close when talking about how some gamemasters tend to react negatively when their party goes off the rails in their RPG campaign, but then he doesn't take the final step of concluding that a GM who's not prepared for their party to go off the rails is not a very good GM—likewise, an open-world game that has no provision for a player experiencing a narrative element out of its intended order is not a very good open-world game, at least from a storytelling perspective. A counterpoint to almost everything Rob and Danielle said: virtually all of my most memorable and most relatable gaming experiences have come from at least a partial violation of artistic intent. I also wasn't thrilled that Rob and Danielle both sprung headfirst into advocating the professionalization of leisure (why aren't you accomplishing something in your free time, says a capitalist society that only validates certain activities as a means for achieving happiness insofar as they produce salable skills) but that's an issue for another day.

Not even accidentally. Urban decay is a blight to be bulldozed, full stop. The closest that you get is, in an old-growth city where expansion has stopped or shifted, the interplay between user-created neighborhoods and actual patterns of commerce can be unexpected and interesting.