Movie Review: The Four

The Four (Chinese, 2012)

Imagine that the X-Men lived in ancient China, that they were working for the imperial Secret Service, and that they were fighting zombies.

That is a rough description of the plot of this new film, which features Deng Chao (Judge Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame), Liu Yifei (Forbidden Kingdom), Collin Chou (Forbidden Kingdom, The Matrix) and Anthony Wong (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor), among others.  The story is inspired by a wuxia novel by Wen Ruian. But other than the setting and a few standard wuxia movie tropes, it doesn't bear much resemblance to wuxia films like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Hero.

Though Wen's novel The Four Great Constables follows the tales of several constables serving the imperial justice system, this movie puts its protagonists in two organizations: Department Six, which is the more typical organization serving the emperor; and the Divine Constables, a group of pardoned criminals led by a former imperial bodyguard, who work among the common people to uphold justice and solve crimes.  Complicating this is the presence of a group female constables from the mythical land of Penglai, who've been sent to assist Department Six.  All three of these groups are trying to solve a counterfeiting plot, but there are plenty of hidden motives and political intrigues to complicate matters.

Nearly everyone in this film has a superpower, not limited to the usual wuxia abilities like qinggong (superleap), qigong (internal energy), running up walls, and performing incredible feats of swordplay. These people can transform into monsters, exhibit telepathy and telekinesis, summon fire and ice, and other powers.  There's nothing that is too obviously an imitation of Western comic book superheroes, with the possible exception of Liu Yifei's character, whose need for a wheelchair is awfully reminiscent of a certain X-Men character (though the filmmakers gave the baldness to Collin Chou).

In addition to the detective story and the superpowers, there are a couple of romantic subplots.  Despite spending most of the movie looking sullen and never smiling, Deng Chao is the object of affection for two of the female characters.  He's an indecisive sort: he can't make up his mind which girl to pursue, and he can't make up his mind whether to join the Divine Constables or return to Department Six.  He's not the most compelling character, and his ability to serve as lead is compromised by the large cast and convoluted plot.

With so much going on, this movie is a bit confusing, especially at the beginning, where it follows the tradition of many Asian films by throwing the viewer in at the deep end and letting you tread water until you figure out who all these people are and what's going on. But once you get past that, it becomes interesting. The interaction between the characters, especially the members of the Divine Constables, is a lot of fun, and it's nice to see Collin Chou doing something besides showing off his martial arts skills. Anthony Wong also makes more than a cameo appearance, putting in an enjoyable turn as the gentlemanly leader of the Divine Constables Zhang Zhengwo. The superpowers aren't overused or overpowering, the villain doesn't do too much maniacal laughing, and the acting is uniformly good.

Oh, yeah, there are zombies, too. It's not a zombie movie, and they're not Western-style gore-coated, brain-eating zombies. But there are zombies, and they're kinda cool.

The Four is supposed to be part one of a trilogy.  If the sequels are produced, I'll take a look.

Why I Love the Doctor

I've been a fan of Doctor Who for more than 20 years now.  I've enjoyed the series as he regenerated from his 6th incarnation to the 7th, from the 7th to the sadly brief 8th, and during the long hiatus until Auntie Beeb brought him back to the small screen a few years ago in his 9th version.  I made the effort to see everything I could of his earlier incarnations as well, and grew, like many fans, to have a special fondness for his 4th self.

Like many long-time fans, I was a bit apprehensive when he returned in 2005 with an entirely new production team and actor.  What would the new creative team do with him?  Would he start having romances?  Spend all his time on Earth because the new show had an even more limited budget than the old series?  Would all his prior history be treated as if it never happened?  Would he stop being a Time Lord?  Would he stop being so innately British?

I was immensely relieved when it turned out that the new series runners wanted to behave much as if that hiatus between 1989 and 2005 had never happened.  The new Doctor was the 9th.  They even acknowledged that the American-made 8th Doctor story was part of Doctor Who canon.  The Doctor was still a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He still traveled through time and space in his TARDIS, which still looked externally like a 1960s British police public call box.  I gave a sigh of relief that the BBC hadn't tried to completely re-imagine the concept - just bring it into the 21st century television world.

Suddenly my beloved series had a real special-effects budget.  The aliens weren't just people in ill-fitting rubber masks.  We could see thousands of Cybermen or Daleks instead of 6, because the effects were no longer limited by how many extras and props were available.  But more importantly, and this is why I love Doctor Who more than ever:  The series has a heart.

The old series made me laugh, it made me excited and joyful and occasionally a little irritated.  But to a large extent, despite the history of the Doctor, everything seemed to happen in a vacuum.  There were times when a story would make reference to past events, when you felt there was something the Doctor was feeling, but in some ways it seemed that the Doctor had an even stiffer upper lip than a real Brit.  He didn't often show his heart.  He didn't seem to miss his companions when they left, or even remember that they'd ever been.  He didn't mention his 'granddaughter' Susan.  His human companions were the ones who did much of the emoting.  The Doctor was usually just benevolent or indignant, like a distant relative you don't often see. 

And except for bringing back recurring villains, the series didn't have much sense of its own history.  There were a few plotlines that connected the events of more than one story, such as the Key to Time saga.  But most of the time, once a story was complete, whether it had taken an hour or three hours to tell it, it was never mentioned again.  The companions didn't have conversations about how scary it was to be chased across time by the Daleks, or demand to know why the Doctor had apparently abandoned them at some point in a previous adventure, or make the Doctor explain more about his race and where he came from.  Each story was basically the same basic concept:  The Doctor and his companions arrived somewhere (usually not where they intended to go), there was a monster menacing the local residents or a sinister plot brewing that would result in something awful happening, the Doctor and his companion(s) became separated from each other and from the TARDIS, and the Doctor finally saved the day. 

The new series does many of the same things.  There are still monsters and sinister plots, the TARDIS still doesn't always take the Doctor where he intends to go, he and his traveling companions often get separated, and the companions still frequently serve as the "heart" of the series.  But now the Doctor has a heart, too.  He has towering rages and grief and regret and loneliness.  He sheds tears.  And he loves his companions.  They are not just audience-identification devices to allow him to explain plot elements.  They are real people who are meaningful to him . He misses them when they're gone. We know why he needs them.  He's lonely, he needs company, and he needs someone to keep him humble.  Without them, he might transform into something more horrible than any enemy he has ever faced.

The companions have changed, too. They're not just people who ended up with him out of curiosity, or even by accident.  They want to be there, because they feel a connection to the Doctor. Sometimes they get angry with him, or doubt him, or are even afraid of him. And they're genuinely useful to him as something other than a glorified puppy.  They can do things on their own that will help his plans, and they can make their own plans. 

Some of them have loved him, too, or wanted to love and be loved by him.  Sexuality has entered the Doctor Who universe.  Fortunately the producers haven't let that progress into showing all the details.  The Doctor is, after all, a non-Terrestrial being.  He is somewhat asexual. The producers seem to realize that a 900+-year-old Time Lord having a romance with a human may be the worst kind of May-December romance - though if they have a story that calls for the Doctor to have a romance, they aren't afraid to proceed with it.  They are willing to explore every facet of human experience, not just fleeing from monsters.

Another facet of the series that the new series has eagerly explored is time travel.  Yes, that's in large part what the show has always been about.  But more recently the producers and screenwriters have really played with that concept.  The Doctor doesn't just use time travel to go to the past or the future, he uses it to affect events in ways he couldn't otherwise do.  In the new series we have seen characters grow from childhood to adulthood knowing the Doctor, while he from their perspective never changed. We have seen the Doctor run in and out of his own timeline.  We have seen time bent back on itself until every moment in history was occurring simultaneously.  We have even seen the Doctor and one of his companions living their lives in parallel but in chronologically reverse order. Time travel has become an important element of the series, not just a sort of conveyance, and the writers aren't afraid to make the audiences' brains hurt a bit when we are posed with a temporal paradox.

There are some things that make me less happy about the new series, but I won't go into those here.  Overall I love the new show.  I love everything they've done with it.  I won't lose any affection for the original series, but I'm glad to say that as I've matured and changed, so has Doctor Who. I hope we can continue to grow up together.

Making Magic Magical

Roleplaying is a challenge.  It's always difficult to balance the rules with player choice, to keep the story flowing, to give each player sufficient 'screen time'.  Sometimes it seems that just following the rules takes up so much time that there isn't room for, well, the roleplaying part of a tabletop RPG. 

There are lots of areas of roleplaying that I could go on about, but in this post I'm talking about roleplaying magic.  Magic has a lot of rules controlling it, as I mentioned in my previous posts.  Consequently it often gets short shrift in the roleplaying department.  Years ago, when I took my first stab at playing a spellcaster in a D&D game, I thought I'd try to make it more interesting by coming up with a 'trigger' word for each spell, that could act as a code word between myself and the other players so they would know which spell I meant to cast without my having to state openly, "I cast magic missile". 

Most magic spells in D&D require a verbal component, the equivalent of characters in Harry Potter shouting out "Petrificus totalus!" when they paralyze someone.  But the descriptions of the spells in the manuals don't tell the player what the verbal component of each spell is, they just indicate whether or not a verbal component is required.  I thought it would be fun to come up with my own verbal components, personal to me.  But it quickly became too much trouble to maintain.  Whenever I added new spells to my character's spell list, I had to invent new verbal components.  It didn't do the GM or the other players any good, either, because they couldn't remember what my invented command words were; they were too preoccupied with managing their own characters.  And it interrupted the flow of play because in addition to looking up how the spell worked I also had to find out what my command word was. I was disappointed that I couldn't use that idea to enhance my roleplaying.

How spells look when cast is another item that I wish could receive more attention during actual play, yet it seldom does.  Spells typically include a description of the spell's appearance or effect, but in my experience no one ever uses them to enhance the verisimilitude of roleplaying.  We just say "I cast fireball" and leave it at that, going on to roll the dice for damage and move on as quickly as possible to the next player's combat action.  There's no cinematic description of what happens to the victims of the fireball from the GM, either, because that would take too much time, and the GM's already juggling too many other tasks. 

I understand the reasons behind this lack of description, but I can't help feeling just a bit sad that our roleplaying sessions often tend to be just a lot of in-game terminology instead of something more flavorful.  We don't stab enemies viciously in the gut, we do a power attack for 26 points of damage.  The fireball doesn't send the orcs screaming into the distance with their hair on fire; it does 16 points of fire damage.  One could argue that good players and a good GM could add lots of descriptive color to the game, but when the game already has so many detailed rules to keep track of and the players only have a limited amount of time to play each week, adding 'flavor text' requires extra time and energy that no one can spare.

The origins of magic and its workings within the setting of the game often don't get much attention, either.  Nearly every setting for D&D includes the concept of wizards guilds or colleges, and supplementary books may contain the names of a few, but it never makes any difference in actual game play.  I've seldom seen a player get a discount on magic items by purchasing from an old schoolmate, or be required to pay annual dues to her guild, or wear a particular insignia to represent where she was trained.  Magic items also tend to become commonplace in most high-magic settings.  Ordinary non-player character citizens are very seldom impressed by magic.  It seems old hat, like something you see every day.  Someday I'd like to take my wizard character into a small rural village and cast a light spell, and have the locals respond with awe, or even fear, rather than looking at my character as if she's just yawned. I'd like to be required to present my magical credentials to the local authorities when I enter a city, or get into rivalries with other schools, or be very secretive and refuse to tell anyone about my magical training if they ask.  Actually I could do that last one, but usually no one asks. 

I suppose I may be asking too much to add all this cinematic description to a roleplaying game.  If I want cinematic, perhaps I should just watch a movie, or play a console RPG like Skyrim that has exciting cut scenes, or read a book.  But I can't help it; the writer and movie watcher in me wants my roleplaying experience to be a little more like a book or movie, and a little less like playing Monopoly.  

Magic Without Limits, part 2

As I write I'm sitting here watching my Significant Other play Skyrim.  There are a lot of things to like about the magic system in Skyrim: All spells can grow more powerful with the character's level; there are no forbidden schools so you can be good at every kind of spell if you desire; magic is fueled by magicka that regenerates automatically or can be replenished with potions; you can summon magical creatures to your aid freely as long as you have enough magicka; you don't have to spend any time preparing spells or sleep a certain amount before you prep them; and you can wield magic and weapons at the same time.  That's not to say that magic is unlimited in the game; you still need magicka, you have to learn spells, and you have to learn special abilities to create magic items.  Naturally since Skyrim is a single-player game and your in-game companions can only do so much, character abilities don't have to be as balanced as they would be in a multiplayer game such as a tabletop RPG.  In Skyrim your character is the star of the show and doesn't have to share the limelight with anyone.  But I still wouldn't mind if tabletop RPG designers would take a page or two from the Skyrim book of magic.

In addition to just the general magic rules, another area where I'd like to see some change is the concept of familiars.  In D&D, a wizard can have a familiar that grants the PC some bonuses and advantages.  But familiars must be chosen from a limited list of creatures.  Most of those creatures are ordinary animals.  You have a cat, a rat, or if you're  Harry Potter fan, an owl.  Sure, familiars are handy, but they're also a bit of a liability.  In previous iterations of D&D, if your familiar died, you lost a character level and couldn't summon another familiar for a year.  To me that always seemed like rather a harsh punishment when a familiar just gave you a bonus to perception and a conduit through which to cast spells.  In general I found few players who were willing to use their familiars to deliver spells for them, since that risked possible injury or death of the familiar and harm to the spellcaster.  It just wasn't worth it.  The game designers also made odd rulings, such as that bonuses provided by the presence of a familiar were only available if the familiar was within a limited distance of the PC, meaning that if you sent your familiar off to do something you lost your bonus.  Having to recalculate bonuses just so my familiar could serve as a messenger never seemed worthwhile, either.  I found that when I did have a familiar, I never really made use of it.  I was too worried about losing it.

Not only was I frustrated by the liabilities of having a familiar, I was also frustrated by the sheer banality of the familiar choices.  I've always felt magic should be mysterious, and at least somewhat unique to the individual.  Yes, my mage learned the same spells as every other mage, but why couldn't her spells look different when they took effect, without having to take a special feat to achieve that?  And why couldn't her familiar be unique to her, a representation of her personality, not just another cat or rat or bird?  I'd like to see a system in which the mage crafts her own familiar, a kind of homonculus, as part of a sort of graduation ceremony.  Let the player choose from among a menu of options for the familiar's abilities.  And make the familiar a little tougher, so the mage won't have to expend so much energy being concerned about the familiar's safety.  Let protective spells cast on the familiar keep it safe even when it is far from the mage character.  Perhaps even let it learn to cast a few spells of its own.  It should never be as powerful as the PC, but let it do a little more than just add a couple of points to perception rolls.  Make familiars unique and interesting and useful. 

One can argue that the rules of D&D, at least the 3.5 edition (I know nothing about 4th edition) do allow for a number of the above alterations to familiars.  A player can select feats to strengthen and enhance a familiar, to select something other than the standard familiar types, and to allow the familiar and PC to get more benefits out of the relationship.  But all of those things are character options that have to be chosen instead of something else.  You have to sacrifice being able to do something cool with your own spells in order to do something cool with your familiar.  I honestly don't see how allowing familiars to be a little more exciting would seriously unbalance gameplay.  

Paizo's Pathfinder RPG has offered a substitution of a bonded magic item in place of a familiar, but that too has limits, and doesn't address the inherent dullness of familiars that I perceive.  I just don't want a cat; I want a weird creature that didn't exist until my mage created it.  I want something that is inherently mine, something special to me.  Pathfinder also offers an alternate character class that can summon a strange creature to serve, but I don't want to have to take a different class (and learn different rules) just to get a weird critter as companion for my character.  The closest I've ever come to satisfying my desire for such a creature was having a druid character create a bogun.  It wasn't a terribly useful creature, and I had to wait a ridiculously long time to be able to cast the spell, but it did so much toward satisfying my desire for a cool little buddy that was all my own.  I never understood why there wasn't an equivalent spells available to wizards.

As another observation, I don't think there should be multiple arcane spellcasting classes anyway.  There should just be mages, or wizards, or whatever you choose to call them, and all the different flavors of how spellcasting works should be variations on that base class.  If you want to play a wizard who draws magic inherently from within instead of learning spells by rote, you should be able to do that with a minimum of alterations to the core class.  I find that in practice the sorcerer class and the wizard class don't really differ that much, particularly since both draw from the same spell list.  I've always thought that if you're going to have a class that functions differently, it should do so right down to the basic spells list, no overlaps.  If players had more control over the look and feel of their spells, it would make these overlaps less obvious, and less irritating to players like me who want to be unique.

While I'm on a roll, why not let mages use weapons?  The argument has always been that wizards spend so much time studying magic they don't have time to learn any combat skills.  I don't contend that a wizard should be as good a fighter as, well, a fighter.  But at least let my wizard pick up a sword without incurring a penalty.  And let me have two attacks per round, like everyone else.  Let me attack and then turn invisible, or summon a light and detect magic.  Is that really going to ruin it for everyone else?  I doubt it.  I can concede the argument for not letting spellcasters have increasing iterative attacks like some other classes, but I don't really see the point for keeping them eternally at a single attack per round.  I've seen plenty of games where the fighter goes through the battlefield like a whirlwind at higher levels, when fighters can have many attacks per round, while the mage is still stuck in "cast then move" mode. Wizards do have some very powerful high-level spells available to them, but the assumption that the wizard is like a guy with a rocket launcher at a knife fight is exaggerated in my experience.  I find that I seldom have the right spell prepared at the right time, or if I have the ultimate spell ready I can't get a clear shot to use it without risking harm to the other player-characters.   And most well-prepared GMs will make sure that there's plenty of magical opposition to keep a high-level wizard busy in a boss fight. 

Well, that's enough harping about magic rules for now.  Perhaps my next entry will be on some issues around the roleplaying of spellcasters that have been on my mind.

Magic Without Limits

Since my last post about roleplaying, I sadly haven't done a lot of it.  One of my GMs has been busy with other hobbies and hasn't been available.  But recently another friend decided to run a few one-shots for us, and that, combined with this blog, got me thinking about how magic is handled in roleplaying games.  

Roleplaying games are all about trying to apply fairly rigid rules to things that don't necessarily fit within those rigid confines.  Player-characters can usually only move a certain distance each turn, for example, disregarding that people don't all move at the same rate of speed.  Game systems that use character classes, like D&D, usually define those classes within a certain limited set of abilities that don't really approximate how real live people function or behave.  Why can't a wizard use a sword?  Why doesn't a fighter have the ability to play a musical instrument?

Magic is one of the areas that has many, many rules applied to it in every RPG I've played.  There's good reason for this; without some limits, the magic-user characters have the potential to overshadow the abilities of all the other player-characters.  But sometimes, as the author of the blog I mentioned above contends, the rules are just too restrictive.  

One of the irritants of playing D&D is the limitation on how many times per day a magic-user can cast a certain type of spell.  If the GM should happen to put the party in danger more than once during a session, the mage character's arsenal of spells may run dry.  A magic-user can carry around magical implements to supplement the arsenal of memorized spells, but those are expensive to buy, difficult to make, and they too can eventually run out of magic.  

Recently the game designers have tried to lift some of this restriction by allowing magic-users to cast certain spells at will, without any per-day limit.  But that allowance is only applied to low-level spells, spells that typically are either "utility" spells or that don't do much in the firepower department.  And let's face it, a lot of D&D is about fighting.  A player of a magic-user has to do a lot of prep work or risk being unprepared for the situations she may encounter.  In my experience, that often means that when I'm playing a magic-user I haven't chosen to prepare the right spells for the situation, unless I know in advance what we'll be facing.  And the limitation that prevents my mage from using a sword with any facility means that in some combats my character is just a bystander.  My only option becomes the decision to prepare the same set of offensive spells every session. I never have an opportunity to use any of the other interesting spells the game designers have created because the situations where those spells would be effective are too rare and too unexpected.  Casting the same spells every time gets a bit boring.

I've mentioned before that I tend to be indecisive, and this adds to the challenge of playing a mage.  That's another reason I tend to stick with the same spells every game session.  I wish for a system where I could have more flexibility in what I do with my mage's abilities, and do it on the fly.  Why can't I swap one prepared spell for another if I discover that what I've prepped isn't the best for the situation I'm facing?  I also with I could swap energy types - if we're fighting a creature that isn't vulnerable to fire, and I prepped a fire spell, I'd like to be able to switch the fire for ice or electricity.  Current rules demand that I take a special character option in order to do that, one that means I have to forgo some other character option in order to do the energy-swapping.  I realize the game designer are trying to maintain balance between the different character classes, but it sometimes feels to me that they're overdoing it. 

The game designers have tried to give magic-users lots of spell choices, which is both appealing and frustrating to me.  I can only have so many prepared each day, which means that there are dozens of interesting spells that never get used.  There's also a tendency to produce more and more new supplemental books with more spells, and eventually some of those spells become just different flavors of the same old thing.  I wonder why you need three different versions of an invisibility spells to get from "invisible until I attack something" to "invisible all the time"?  Why not just make the spell's power increase with the character's class level?  Some spells do that, but why aren't they all written that way?  Why should an 18th-level wizard's ray of frost spell do exactly the same damage as a 1st-level wizard's ray of frost?

D&D also includes a mechanic called Difficulty Class (DC), which helps to determine how effective a spell is.  This is a figure based on a combination of several other character statistics.  But DC increases on the basis of spell level, not character class level.  As a result the DC of a 1st-level spell stays the same, no matter what the character's class level is.  The 18th-level wizard's 1st-level spells are no more difficult for an opponent to resist than the 1st-level wizard's 1st-level spells.  Doesn't it seem reasonable that a very powerful mage could put a whole group of ordinary people to sleep with a snap of his fingers?  Yet by the rules of D&D, it isn't any easier for that powerful mage to put a group of people to sleep than it is for a mage fresh out of mage school to do it.  There are a few ways that can be changed, but those methods are very limited. The most common one is by increasing the character's base ability score that controls spellcasting, usually intelligence.  But what if I want my mage to be stronger or faster instead of smarter?  Do I sacrifice improving the DC of her spells so she can be a little better at other things?  Or do I risk that as she encounters more powerful foes her ability to overcome them with magic won't be sufficient?  The practical result of the DC dilemma is that as magic-user characters increase in level, they rarely use their lower-level spells.  What use is ray of frost that does only a tiny amount of damage against a huge dragon with hundreds of hit points, even if you can cast ray of frost as often as you want?

Of course, "as often as you want" is a bit of a lie.  Magic-users in D&D are limited to one spell per combat round.  It's true that in the current version of D&D a combat round lasts only 6 seconds, so you can in practical terms cast 10 spells a minute.  But when your fellow players can have their characters stab something with a sword two or more times per combat round as they increase in level, it becomes frustrating that your mage can still only cast one spell per round.  You can't use a magic wand and cast a spell, either.  In the D&D universe, casting spells take up a lot of time and hand-waving.  The designers offer some options to allow you to expand beyond those limitations, but as with other methods of stretching the rules, you have to sacrifice something else, sometimes several somethings, to gain that ability.  I know I'm not the only player who daydreams about being able to, say, zap an enemy and immediately turn invisible.  But without a lot of tinkering with character options, that's just not possible.   

All this whingeing about D&D rules takes me back to the complaint of the the author of the blog I mentioned in the first paragraph.  You can use plot elements to keep the magic from getting out of control when you're a writer, because you're in control of everything.  I realize that in a game you need some limits, something to give the players some direction and keep things balanced and equal.  But I really do think the designers of some games have gone a bit overboard with setting limits on magic.  It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone took away some of the restrictions.  Would magic-users really become the spotlight-hogging unstoppable powerhouses the game designers fear?  In the hands of some players, the answer is probably yes.  But I think most players would set their own limits in the interest of keeping it fun for their friends. 

I like playing magic-users, but I don't think anyone needs to fear me becoming too powerful.  I'm not interested in being the most important player in the game.  I just want to have more fun.  So here's a call to the game designers:  Come up with a magic system that doesn't have so many limits!

Roleplaying Daydreams

In addition to my interest in Chinese and movies, I also enjoy playing roleplaying games - some console, but mainly tabletop:  Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, Mutants & Masterminds, Champions, Warhammer Fantasy...  I've been playing for about 18 years.  Most of my closest friends are also roleplayers, and several of them act as Dungeonmaster / Gamemaster / referee for our games. 

Roleplaying inspires my imagination.  It's like writing a collaborative novel or screenplay.  Some of my roleplaying experiences have inspired my writing.  But sometimes all this inspiration can be a little frustrating.  I often find myself thinking of game settings or stories that I'd like to play in, but no one else is interested, or there's no place in our schedule for another game.  I'm planning to convert one of these ideas into the plot for a novel.  But I don't want to do that with all of them.  I don't necessarily want to create all the characters and the plot and action myself.  I like seeing what my fellow players do with the basic concept of a campaign setting, what kind of characters they think will suit that setting and how those characters will respond to the events the GM presents us with.  

When I propose one of these ideas to my gaming friends, their response is often "When are you going to start (the game)?"  This response is also a source of frustration to me.  I've tried GMing a couple of times, and I didn't really enjoy it.  I'm indecisive as a player, and I don't think an indecisive GM is a good idea.  I don't really enjoy dealing with all the rules you have to juggle in order to direct and referee a game.  I also fear that I might try too hard to tell the players how to play their characters to suit the way I envision them, which I don't think is really a good behavior for a GM.  There's a limited amount of dictating character behavior involved in GMing, but I'm afraid I might overstep the bounds. 

Of course, even just coming up with the concept and letting someone else run it might pose other problems for me.  Would I be unhappy with what someone else does with my concept?  For that reason, I try to keep my concepts pretty simple.  And just to amuse myself, I'm going to describe some of them here.

1.  When looking for a basic way to start a new fantasy campaign, I think making the player-characters professional monster hunters ought to be a good start.  It gives an opportunity for them to face a variety of challenges, which would increase in difficulty as the characters increase in level.  They could travel, and possibly become famous and wealthy.  If more complexity is desired than simply a "monster of the week", perhaps they could end up fighting an invading army using monsters as weapons, or combating a secret army of vampires/demons/extraplanar beings infiltrating their homeland.

2.  The PCs are hired by a wizard or group of wizards to collect magic item components and potion ingredients.  This gives them a convenient place to acquire some magic items, which their employer(s) might give them to help them with their tasks.  As they increase in level, they can be sent off to distant lands or long-forgotten ruins to acquire magic items that have been lost to the ages.  If one wanted a deeper story, perhaps the wizards are building an ultimate device to take over the world, or to defend it against some terrible threat predicted by prophecy.

3. A "Hyborean Age" campaign, similar to Conan the Barbarian.  Magic is less common and more feared, common components of high-magic fantasy are absent.  Plate armor is unknown, everyone doesn't have a horse, and every town doesn't have an inn.  Everything is just a little more rugged than in typical fantasy games.  It wouldn't require any major revisions to the rules of Pathfinder or D&D, except to remove the availability of some goods and services. 

4.  I like superheroes, too.  I've played in a number of games, in which the characters were all heroic defenders of a single city.  Someday I'd like to play in a campaign in which the characters are part of an organization similar to the Justice League, with lots of really powerful heroes defending the entire planet, not just one city.  But to make it more interesting for the players, the characters would be newcomers to this organization, not yet assigned to the biggest tasks.  They might be called on to work with the "big guns" occasionally for a special mission - or even to cover for the big names if the Alpha team is off-world or busy with something else.  

That's all for now.  The next time I get an idea, I'll probably add to the list.  For the present I'll go back to wistfully daydreaming about one day getting a chance to play in a campaign like one of the above.

Movie Review: Jeremiah Johnson

Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

Directed by Syndey Pollack

Starring Robert Redford, Will Geer, Stefan Gierasch, Delle Bolton, Josh Albee

Jeremiah Johnson is one of my favorite movies.  It's one of the few movies in the "Western" genre that I really like, although it isn't a typical example of that genre.  There are no cowboys, no gunfights, no stagecoaches.  The story is set about 20 years earlier than most Westerns, which most often take place in the 1870s.  The titular protagonist isn't a veteran of the Civil War, but of the Mexican War.  

In some respects Jeremiah Johnson has a similar theme to the much better known Dances With Wolves.  When I first saw Dances With Wolves, I liked it, but since I've come to find it rather disappointing.  It's pretentious and overlong.  I find it particularly annoying that the love interest for Kevin Costner's character isn't a Native American woman, but a white woman who has been raised as a Sioux, as if Kevin Costner couldn't fall in love with someone who wasn't white.  The movie has to have some backstory about the protagonist, as if to convince us we must be interested in him.  The Indians are noble and the whites are venal.  

What I like about Jeremiah Johnson is that it doesn't do any of those things.  We know he was a soldier, but we don't know anything that happened to him during the war.  He doesn't have nightmares or flashbacks.  We don't know where he came from or anything about his childhood or family background.  

Some of the people he meets are decent, some are horrid.  It doesn't matter whether they are Indians or whites.  The Indians do what they do not because they are evil or noble, but because that's what their culture tells them to do, as do the whites.  Jeremiah isn't heroically trying to save the Indians from oppression.  He's just trying to live the life he wants to live.  He marries a woman he doesn't know and falls in love with her afterward.  They don't even speak the same language.  This movie tells so much more about the experience of the West than the romanticized vision of Dances With Wolves does.

I love that this movie doesn't talk too much.  Jeremiah doesn't have a lot to say.  The wordiest character is the motormouth Del Gue (Stefan Gierasch), whose appearance just highlights how quiet Jeremiah is.  Most of Robert Redford's performance as Jeremiah involves using expressions and body language to convey thoughts and emotions, with as little dialogue as possible.  The movie gives me, as the audience, room to enjoy the gorgeous scenery of Utah and think about the themes and plot elements of the story without constantly being distracted by some character prattling.  

It's also funny.  There's a lot of gentle humor.  When Jeremiah, new to the life of a trapper and hunter, worries that his legs will give him away when hiding behind his horse during an elk hunt, his mentor Bear Claw (Will Geer) laughs, "Elk don't know how many legs a horse has got!"  Jeremiah first meets Del Gue buried up to his neck by Indians who are thwarted from taking Gue's scalp by the fact that Gue shaves his head.  Though the movie has a lot of serious and painful moments, they are offset by the funny ones.

There's romance, too.  As I mentioned above, Jeremiah is forced into a marriage he doesn't want.  But he comes to love his bride, even though they don't speak the same language.  He also develops affection for his adopted son.  The whole story is told with great simplicity, which makes it both charming and satisfying.

This movie also makes me cry.  I cry at the end, every time.  I'm not quite sure what I'm crying for.  But I'm glad the movie ends as abruptly as it does.  I don't want to be told what happens next.  I can imagine this film being made now would include an annoying voiceover epilogue by Del Gue telling us what happened to Jeremiah.  Instead, we are simply told that as far as the singer knows, Jeremiah Johnson is out there still.

I hope he is.