I have not read Dreamwidth for... some time, mostly because of the issue where you feel bad about not having done a thing so you don't want to think about it and don't do it (now return to feeling bad about not doing it) but circumstances make it easier today so, er, hello, and this is me avoiding a hundred non sequitur comments saying "oh good, you're not dead", it applies to anyone who's likely to read this, sort of thing.

I have dice. I have dice in a multitude of shapes [1] and colours. But something that's been bothering me for a while [2] is... are they any good?

( I demand more randomness )

[1] Six.
[2] Thirty-five years.
[3] I have no idea if this would be obnoxious or helpful in practice but it seems worth giving it a go.

I've been dreaming more recently. The usual round of anxiety dreams and vaguely plausible scenarios. This may not be a good sign, given the sleep/madness relationship.

ceb and I watched Gance's magnificent 1927 silent _Napoleon_ over the weekend, and it struck me midway through that of course dog cinema is still in black and white. The big innovation in dog cinema was "smellies", with the tragic attendant discovery that some of the stars of the anosmic screen actually smelled of lavender or something equally insufficiently stinky. Before smellies, dog cinemas employed half a dozen specially trained farting dogs on highly specific diets who generated all the smells on demand; the steam-powered scratch-and-sniff smell roll organ was not a success.

It struck me I should probably link my lockdown boardgame project here:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2406498/welcome-blunderdome-tragedy-least-16-parts

Updated with fresh comedy deaths, er, when I feel like it. Sorry.

Not, alas, ancient (today we have the D&D 3rd Edition _Epic Level Handbook_) or related to encumbrance, but this struck me at the time so here it is.

The Epic Level Handbook is intended to extend 3rd Edition past the normal level cap of 20... well, indefinitely. The first chapter makes it pretty clear that epic [1] characters are not only the bee's knees and the dog's bollocks but, improbably, both at the same time. Names like Baba Yaga and Gandalf fall off the page. "Given time, they rival the powers of the gods", and indeed later on ascension to godhood is mentioned as a possible campaign goal.

There's an actually rather useful chapter about skills which emphasises the way epic characters can be supernaturally competent even without magic - example (high) difficulties are given for tasks like balancing on a cloud, squeezing through a space smaller than your head, or - a personal favourite - forging a document without having seen an example beforehand.

So far, so good. Now we come to a list of epic prestige classes. 3rd ed has prestige classes anyway; not classes you start with, like cleric or monster-whacker, but ones you qualify for by being special, like arcane archer or dwarven defender. The qualification criteria tend to be some mix of skills, alignment, being a dwarf, character factors not measured in game mechanics - but the epic prestige classes, of course, you just aren't allowed them at all unless you are over 20th level and hence as previously mentioned bestride the world like a colossus.

One of the epic prestige classes is the Union Sentinel, "a member of an elite police force that guards the demiplane-city of Union". They "patrol the city streets" and "are regular sights in Union, appearing in small units of two to five."

I don't know about you, but when I worked through the previous chapters, I did not expect one of the things epic-level characters to do to be "beat cop"; even given that the demiplane-city of Union is super-amazing, surely an epic character who wishes to defend justice can do it more effectively than pounding the pavement and, presumably, arguing the toss as to who gets to be the grizzled veteran in the squad today.

There's more of this stuff (in sharp contrast to, say, the divine emissary, who there's one of per god) - a legendary dreadnought might be employed by a prominent ruler or noble, "engaging in staged combats for money" (given that even a 21st-level character is expected to be worth about a million gold pieces, and presumably expects a worthwhile quid pro quo for each fight, what is this - professional wrestling for Croesus' court?)

I daresay Conan the Barbarian sometimes murders people for money, but can you imagine him collecting a wage packet afterwards? Elric of Melnibone clocking in late and being chewed out by his sergeant?

(Union is kind of silly; there's a 15th level fishmonger, raising the question of why he bothers selling fish, even given that he has a super-amazing interdimensional fish portal. I'm not making this up. There's a 10th-level innkeeper, too. The earlier chapters have a bunch of stuff about an epic campaign shouldn't be a regular campaign with bigger numbers which, apparently, the author of this chapter thought was complete rot.)

[1] as a side note, this book uses the word "epic" to mean "anything restricted to characters above level 20" and as a result I have now read the word so often it has lost all meaning.

The other odd thing about the work canteen is wildly inconsistent portion sizes. Sometimes when I have eaten there it's been a normal sort of amount of food for midday lunch.

Other times... well, ceb and I went there for lunch when it was roast chicken, which turned out to mean "half a bird". Half a bird each, that is, and they didn't exactly stint on the Dauphinoise potatoes, either. Now, I cycle about 11 miles on workdays, so this was very welcome, but unexpected.

Maybe that was just an oddity? Nope; roast chicken again today, half a bird each, and the pork joint yesterday was a fair old chunk of a pig, too.

I wonder if lunch is sometimes hilariously small. I hope not.

I have just finished reading a detailed critique of Atlas Shrugged:

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/series/atlas-shrugged/

... even the COBRA Commander dialogues at the end, although they drag a bit.

I'd recommend it (the critique, that is, although we are probably all old and wise enough to be able to read the book without being brainslugged) if you like that kind of thing.

What came as news to me was - I knew enough about the book to know that Rand's heroes are loathsome and amoral by conventional standards, but what I didn't appreciate was that _Rand's_ standards are wildly inconsistently applied; we're three chapters in when we're told approvingly "Desperate for funds, with the construction of [the protag's grandfather's] line suspended, he threw down three flights of stairs a distinguished gentleman who offered him a loan from the government."

They steal, they cheat, they bribe, they initiate force with gay abandon, they sometimes give their friends absurdly sweetheart deals, and of course they all end up at the end living in a collective society. Conversely, sometimes the villains' villainy is demonstrated by them squeezing the harshest possible deal out of the heroes... but isn't that what Randoid supermen [1] are supposed to do?

The second surprise was that although the book is taken by its advocates as outlining a realistic philosophy, a sensible way to act in the face of a scenario they believe is already happening, the plot does depend on someone inventing a perpetual motion machine and a cloaking device, and someone else finding a Garden of Eden with everything one might want in it.

The third thing that struck me is this: whenever anyone does anything nice, today's edgelords dismiss it as "virtue signalling", apparently because it is inconcievable to them that anyone might do something nice because they want to do something nice.

However, to Rand altruism is an ever-present danger. She felt about it much as Jack Chick felt about works salvation. The Randoid supermen are distinguished as supermen not least because they can resist the temptation of altruism, a gateway sin toleration of which will inevitably cause society's collapse into a communist dystopia.

[1] all of whom are white except one who's nominally Latino but explicitly described as being pretty darn white, and usually blonde and blue-eyed. As opposed to the villains who are all ugly and I'm pretty sure some of them are described as having especially big noses, by which I'm sure Rand might have meant literally anything.

Warhammer Fantasy Role Play (1986) is a game which is not D&D. It tries not to be D&D, and often succeeds, but it has the assumptions of D&D deeply baked into its worldview.

However, this is not a serious critique [1], it's just an analysis of carrying capacity. In WFRP, your carrying capacity (in arbitary units) is 100 times your Strength. Characters weigh 10 times their Toughness. Hence, since Strength and Toughness are measured on the same scale and more or less come out the same, you can carry ten naked people.

Dwarves' Toughness is on average higher than their Strength, but a dwarf can carry 200 times their Strength, so only about 18 naked dwarves. Or about 24 elves.

Item availability is also odd. We start with a reasonable scheme that describes item rarity and the odds of finding an item of a given rarity in a settlement of a certain size. So far, so good.

Leather boots are Common. The odds of being able to find a pair in Altdorf, the capital of the (thinly disguised Holy Roman) Empire are 4 in 5. But, you say, boots have to fit you? The odds of finding a pint of house wine in Altdorf are also 4 in 5. If you want a bottle of good wine in the single largest city in the game, the odds are only 55%. A dagger? Arrows? Clothes pegs? A saw? Why, they might be clean out of stock - at 80% each, the odds are that they _are_ out of one of those.

[1] although it doesn't have an index, fuck's sake, 1980s RPGs, what's with that?