Brent P. Newhall's Blog
Reviews – Sep 2008

16 Sep 08 – Houses of the Blooded

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Saalon and I have talked before about the future of tabletop roleplaying. It started with the fantasy hack-and-slash of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970's, followed by the introduction of generic systems like GURPS and FUDGE in the 1980's (allowing for modern games, science fiction games, etc.), and the explosion of more open and acting-driven systems with White Wolf's World of Darkness in the 1990's.

What's next? I think I may have found it.

I spent much of the weekend devouring a 400-page PDF for Houses of the Blooded, a new tabletop RPG system.

Very roughly, it's World of Darkness in the Dune universe. It's focused on helping you to play a role more than kill goblins.

In particular, players can temporarily take over as referee.

As with many tabletop games, whenever you attempt something tough and outside your character's normal abilities, you roll dice. But the dice don't determine whether you succeed; if you roll high enough, you as the player get to decide if you succeed or fail. If you don't roll high enough, the Narrator (Game Master/referee) decides if you succeed or fail.

So, no matter what you roll, you may still succeed. But there's more to it than even that. You roll a number of dice at a time, which may be more dice than you need. You can reserve any number of dice as your "wager," and roll the rest. If you roll high enough, not only do you succeed, you get to add one fact to the success for every die you reserved in your wager. So, if you're leaping out of a bedroom, and you wagered three dice, you might say "Yes, I succeeded. And there's a balcony outside, and I land on it, and it goes all the way along the building." Three facts added for the three dice wagered.

This is revolutionary. It provides a simple way for players to control the progress of the game. They're not inventing super-powerful weapons out of thin air; they're influencing the game to make it more fun.

Can it be abused? Well, anything can be abused, but the system makes it clear that 1) each fact must agree with the story so far, and 2) if you try to add a fact that helps you and hurts the other players, you're not welcome in the game. Simple as that.

It's hard to describe why I find this so exciting. It just feels right to me, and it feels like something that will help the roleplaying industry move forward.

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12 Sep 08 – Dead Poet's Society

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So I watched Dead Poet's Society a couple of months ago. I'd heard it was good, but never really got around to it.

It knocked my socks off.

First off, it's beautiful. The cinematographer goes to great lengths to capture the beauty of prep school grounds in New England. From the fiery colors of the forest in autumn to a heavy winter snowfall, the movie just looks gorgeous.

Secondly, it's not about Robin Williams. In fact, he's only in a few scenes, and in them he plays a quiet, bookish, somewhat eccentric literature professor. Nothing wild about him at all.

Third, it's about growing up. It's about a bunch of boys who realize the need to carpe diem. Who realize that just doing what they're supposed to do isn't enough.

And the film's infused with great poetry. Classic poetry. Poetry to make one feel like the top of one's head had been taken off, to use Emily Dickinson's phrase.

It's a grand film.

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6 Sep 08 – Osamu Tezuka's Brilliant Buddha

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I recently finished Osamu Tezuka's Buddha, a manga adaptation of the life of Buddha. It's about 3,000 pages that focus on the historical man, and the evolution of his philosophy, as opposed to attempts to teach you Buddhism.

I had to be careful when reading this book, as I couldn't simply pick it up, then put it down; I'd get sucked in and read through to the end. This is partly due to Tezuka's unique style: he likes to mix up a dramatic story with occasional sight gags, and keep things moving with action scenes. He had a tremendous gift for pacing and entertainment.

So the story moves quickly, and presents Buddha's life with sympathy and directness. Again, this book doesn't try to teach you Buddhism; it chronicles Buddha's life. However, one can't do that without exploring Buddha's philosophy.

I learned that the great spiritual teachers of Buddha's time mostly taught asceticism—that one must forego the pleasures of the world and punish one's body so as to free oneself from earthly desires. While Buddha agreed with the importance of discipline and abstinence, he rejected the idea of inflicting pain or otherwise hurting oneself.

In fact, he believed in hurting nothing. Radical for the time. He really wanted to achieve enlightenment, and he struggled to achieve it.

Now, the manga glosses over a lot of Buddha's later religious teaching, which gets pretty extreme by non-Buddhist standards. He claimed to perform astral projection every day, and that he could teleport.

But the manga cares less about that than about Buddha's moral journey. I gained a nice understanding of Buddha's teachings; how they evolved in response to the events around him.

So, in all, I'm thoroughly glad that I finished this. I learned a lot, and in a way that kept me entertained throughout.

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