It's a mark of confidence that I say, "Things can always be worse."

And they still can, but that drop from one bad thing into a worse one can still be bad.

Still got a lot to hold onto, even if it was unexpected.

Hmm.

So.

This is my understanding of the economy, at large.

There's this finite amount of money in the country. It's some value, and we don't really need to know what it is, just that it's limited, and not in a, "some day, this will all be known," but in a, "it's all spoken for, save for the pennies which have fallen through sewer drains and such".

Okay. Fine. We use this money for money-type purposes. Exchanging it for goods and services. This is fine ... but when we spend money, where does it go?

Corporations, generally. Corporations, that in turn, do two things with their money.

A: Save it.

B: Use it to make more money.

I think A is bad because it's removing money from circulation that could be used elsewhere. I'm not an economist. It might be that people taking money out of circulation and sitting on it is fabulous. But from what I can tell, it really means less money to go around. This means that what money we have should be worth more.

But this is where we run into B. Corporations want to make more money, so they put money into advertising and such to help sell their products better. So. Now, our money is worth more, but we're being encouraged to spend it as though it weren't. Where does this money we spend go? After the costs of maintaining the company, it's all to A and B.

So money is harder to get. The government fixes this by making more money, thus lowering the value of money. Where does this influx of money go?

All to A and B. Your Average Joe (from what I can tell) is probably also going to try and save, and make more money, but realistically, the economy can't support this. So, in a nutshell, the economy we have, doesn't work. It's failing, and only the people who are in that miniscule percentage that controls 90% of the world's wealth thinks otherwise.

Awesome, I've identified a problem. Now, how the hell do we fix it?

Now. I'm not a professional, so my ideas will all be flawed. Sorry, professionalism is for people who can afford school (which I can't (thanks, EDD, for telling me that a one-hour exit interview with my former employer counts as me not telling them why I left!)). Anyway.

The way I see it, there are a number of ways to go around this. Firstly, we need some way to make it so that there is a standard of living that requires no money whatsoever to maintain. Basically, everyone should have an inalienable right so SOME form of shelter, running water, and food. This would be your basic economy, where no matter what, you've got a place to live, the ability to recieve mail, electricity so that you won't freeze in winter/burn in summer, somewhere to sleep at night and protect whatever belongings you own, food so you won't starve, and running water so you can maintain a hygenic lifestyle.

A lot of people, I imagine, would probably be happy with just taking this and adding nothing to the system -- just subsisting on it. 'cause you don't have to work. Well, the thing of this is, if you manage to work some form of healthcare into this, then working will be its own incentive. If you want anything other than those bare neccessities, that'll cost money, and to make money, you need to get a job. Anything that you realistically don't need outside of what's been identified as a right to you, you'd have to earn.

This would never work, of course, because it's too much work, too much money would go into it, and there's an assumption that enough people would be willing to work on the infrastructure of the system to keep it running. Those people, in turn, would get money which they could use to buy goods and services, thus fueling the economy in theory ... but I'm not a professional, so it would all fall apart.

The only other thing I could think of, unfortunately, is figuring out how to get companies to make more jobs.

Unfortunately, this goes against their point A, because downsizing saves money, making one person do the job of two saves money, and making more jobs doesn't.

And since they both have the money and influence the government, why would they want to change?

Are we making a new class of royalty in the modern age, where the only way to survive will be indentured servitude in exchange for corporate housing?

I don't know. But I do know it sucks, and I can't do anything to change it, either way.

Breakdown: A Review

(Alternate title: Do Not Buy This Game!)

First off, this game is hard. Take everything you know about video games, and all the tricks you know to handle them, and how to deal with tough enemies. Now throw that all away, because none of it will do you any good.

This game is REALLY hard. They like to throw you at enemies you don't have a way to damage yet, and go through some 'frantic puzzle' shindig where you're trying to evade one-hit kill enemies left and right just to get to the door at the end of the level. Except that the door is a vault door, and it takes your character nearly thirty seconds to turn the wheel. Did I mention the enemies aren't very slow, and it's a small room?

Yeah. Expect, if you buy this game, that you will die. A lot. Fortunately, there are checkpoints, which are triggered regardless of if you save or not. Unfortunately, the game doesn't pull any punches.

This game is billed as a first person fighter, and I suppose it is that. Unfortunately, people who like fighting games are probably not really going to get into this, as it doesn't feel much like a fighter. People who are into FPS games might get more into it, but quit because the controls are really designed for it to be a fighting game, not a shooting game.

You get guns in this game, of course, though their use is somewhat dubious once the fighting element comes to the fore. Why bother shooting a marine at point blank with a half a clip from your M-16 to take him down, when you could just punch him once, and have the same result? And, you can block bullets with your hand, but not a gun, thus making the guns even more useless to fight anything except for bugs. Which the game will give you, but still.

If you are the type of gamer who likes to face an enemy that can only be beaten a single way, and not having any clues to what that way is (thus allowing you to retry, thanks to the checkpoints, repeatedly, until you do figure out that one way you were meant to be allowed to win), then this game is probably for you. It'll keep you coming back, probably forever.

If you are the type of gamer who's more concerned with progress through the game than mastery over the game, this is not the game for you at all. And that's a real shame, because the story of this game is fantastic.

You wake up with no idea of who you are, and everything you go in this game is from the first-person point of view. Everything. This makes the back-flip manuever a little dizzying.

From there, the game's next innovation in storytelling is that your character hallucinates. You see things. This is just plain awesome, because you see wierd, plot-relevant things, as opposed to the Max Payne continual review of paths of blood through a dark abyss. At one point, he looks down at his arms, because his skin and muscles have completely melted away. He's just a skeleton, until the hallucination ends.

There's intrigue, as you meet characters who hint darkly at what's really going on, and what's still going to happen. There's a bit of sci-fi that comes off as schlocky, but you suspect is that way for a reason.

And unless you want to deal with the game's increasingly ridiculous challenges (you and a mine-card versus three m-16 armed soldiers, and their tank) that just go to a scale that leaves you stunned (running from the game's final boss at about the midway point, if even that, and unable to damage him, yet still needing to put enough distance between you and him to turn a series of increasingly slow valves), and then just get worse (you versus a helicopter, with a rocket launcher. Except, the helicopter can only actually be hit while it's already firing its vulcan cannon at you, and needs about six direct rockets hits to be taken down), however, you're never going to be able to see exactly how the game turns out.

And given how the game's greatest challenge is due to poor design instead of intent, every time you have to fight multiple enemies in HTH combat, you might as well just reach for the reset button if you make a single mistake. Then again, given how quickly the game kills you, chances are you'll be reloading to your last check point before you even get out of your seat. I think it's a real pity a story and plotline this much fun were hidden in a game so needlessly challenging (and the 'easy' mode isn't, folks) as to render it unplayable. This is the kind of story I'd like enough to watch as a series, as long as I didn't have to be the one pressing the buttons to make it happen, because lets face it; it's not going to happen.

The difficulty is approximately enough that a six year old thrashing on the buttons randomly is going to fare about as well as someone who's been playing the game for hours.

If you liked this game: Go cure cancer with your spare time. I'm sure it's easy in comparison.

If you didn't like this game: Go to EB today and trade it in -- like I'm about to.

Killing Your Campaign in 30 Easy Sessions

Another Pedantic Diatribe by Brian Randall

(As requested by Dunefar.)

So, I have referenced the 'bad' game I was in, but avoided the specifics of what exactly was wrong with it that upset me so, instead analyzing the underlying reason for the failure.

We know that it was that the GM's expectations and mine didn't match up. So why bother recording them here? Well, the truth of the matter is that some of these can apply to other players and GMs. You may see things here that you'll realize you want to keep an eye out for to avoid in your own game.

You may get an idea for how to accomplish what our GM tried, only without making it such a painful experience.

Okay. There's a lot of backstory, and the campaign that the GM tried to run garnered an awful lot of fallout. It resulted in a lot of bad things, some of which will be detailed later.

Anyway. The premise for the game is this:

It's an Alternate Reality campaign, which means the players create characters that are supposed to accurately model themselves, and see how they fare. The setting is the afterlife. Apparently, however, the afterlife is some 13 digit number of people in a big tournament, each tier of the tournament being 25 days long, and resulting in 90% of the people in the tier getting the 'tier fate'.

Tier one's tier fate is to have your soul destroyed to power the new sun.

This is a mistake right here, people. Imprisoning your players is generally something you want to avoid, and keep to a bare minimum as often as possible. People tend to play games in RPG formats with other people because of the unlimited choices and possibilities. If you're going to be stuck in something so linear, why play it with dice and papers at all?

Anyway. The populous of the tournament is divided evenly between Core Worlders (real people) and the various Mirror-Worlders (characters from fantasy novels, video games, etc.), Monsters, Aliens, Demons, and Angels.

I didn't really find the religious overtone offensive. I didn't find it interesting, either.

We each got lists of people we could pick to put on our 'watched' list, so we could see how well these random ten people (anyone, real or not) were doing, and increase the odds of running into them. In theory.

There's a major problem here, though. The players, at the start of the game, are divided evenly into two groups -- those who have played with this GM before, and those who have not. Those who have, ask if they can play their former AR selves, who have apparently saved the world before.

The GM approved.

This was a huge mistake, amounting to favoritism on the part of the GM. The players who had played before found themselves surrounded by an ungodly number of super-powered allies (including the GM himself!), and three largely ineffectual enemies. When I asked the GM if us new people would get anything like this, he asked me who I knew. I mentioned my friends in #void, and the GM put the dice away, said, "They're all dead", and moved on to speak to someone else.

In the actual tournament events themselves, I have to admit, the GM was a miracle at pacing everything so that you had to fight until your last couple of points of Body (HP, essentially), to win. Unfortunately, every single conflict was either this, or someone finding a way around the battle. There was never really any conflict we had where we could wade in and kick butt. It was always a struggle that often left a few party members dead, or the NPC allies showed up, and the enemies were reduced to ash before we could blink.

I was playing the game to have fun and do things, but I never got to do that -- I ended up having to spend all my CP on support abilities (healing, weaponsmithing, craft, inventor), because no one else in the party wanted to. And if I hadn't invested in these abilities, the entire party would have been killed before then.

Of course, I was never allowed to role-play this out, except for the healing. It was just noted down, and then the bonuses applied to the dice. This is, admittedly, a failure of the other PCs, but it resulted in me not having fun, because I wanted to be on the front lines with my friends, and was relegated to support. The GM really should have seen to it that the game was flexible enough to allow something else, but he didn't.

Anyway. I mentioned previously that the game was divided into two groups of players, those who had been, and those who hadn't. The people who had no allies started dropping out of the campaign, one by one. Almost all of them left.

Which brings me to another point of GM inflexibility. At one point, on a tournament mission, one of the players suddenly decided that he was going to go crazy, and kill the people we'd paid to help us cross a desert, to rob them blind.

Being forced into the combat, we helped out friend out, and then yelled at him for what he did. As it turns out, the GM was herding us into a scenario where we'd end up fighting the entire Demon faction in the tournament, and one of the PCs just straight out killed half of the people who were supposed to be our one single 'in' to the Angelic host to make the battle even remotely survivable.

He knew about this in Tier one, and didn't mention it until Tier five (I got this second hand), when the players unanimously decided the game had become unplayable due to the fact that the PCs just couldn't progress against the Demons.

Admittedly, there should be repercussions for a character going insane like that. But holding it against the rest of the party well enough to destroy the campaign, given that the player in question dropped out three sessions after going ballistic?

Another problem I had was the lack of a moment to ever shine. I've touched on this before, as I wasted all my CP on trying to help everyone else out. I think, that pretty much everyone who ever games, especially in a large group of players, wants at least one moment to shine, to pull something amazing off, and to really make a difference.

This was a privilege reserved for players with pre-existing allies, unfortunately.

When I tried to make an ally of my own within the game, he turned out (after the fact) to be some baby-eating-monster that the other PCs refused to associate with me because of. All of this, just to try and gain some of what the GM's favored players already had.

I had a lot of grievances, one of them being that when I aired my complaints on my blog, the GM e-mailed me in reply. The net result was that he wouldn't listen to any of my points, and then told the other players that he had to 'deal' with my complaints, but we were all ready to game (complete with rolling-up-of-sleeves motion on his part). I'll admit, he didn't throw anything worse at me as punishment for my perceived transgression. But he also didn't even try to fix what I pointed out as flaws.

I told the GM early on that I hated the tournament part of the game, and was only playing because I thought that there was something beyond the tournament. Basically, that the world was larger than just this forced regime, and we could do something without being so rigidly forced. The GM said, "Oh, just wait and see," without actually promising improvement. I told him that if things hadn't changed by tier three, I would be dropping out of the game.

I think, realistically, waiting 10 months for a campaign to get to the 'good part', and continually getting nothing, is another one of those not-so-much- fun things.

Now, looking back, and knowing what kind of person the GM is, I have to say, his game is exactly the kind of game he'd like to play in.

Unfortunately, it's far from perfect for everyone else. This is another case of player and GM expectations just not matching up. Mostly a laundry list of personal grievances, but it gives you an idea of what NOT to do.

What I've Learned As a GM

A stream-of-thought essay on Game-Mastering by Brian Randall

We, as gamers, put a lot of stock in 'good' GMs and 'good' players, as components for assembling a 'good' game.

But, realistically, what makes a 'good' game? Different types of gamers will want different things. The easiest way to get on the road to a good game, as I've found, is to participate in a bad one. That is to say, a game which gives you exactly what you don't want.

I ended up going through a horrible game quite by accident, and came to some conclusions that most of you will probably already have known.

Now, I'll spare you most of the specifics of the bad game I went through, as the details aren't really relevant. This is meant to be more of a pedantic dissertation on the philosophy of gaming (and GMing, specifically) than the details.

And realistically, that's an important factor in your games. What it all comes down to is this:

You, as a GM, probably have an array of sourcebooks at your disposal, if you're using a system that's been around and your players already know. You've got rules galore for managing pretty much everything you could want to manage. There are other tools you can apply, too. Dice, of course, are the most obvious ones, as almost any game I've ever been in relied on them for their mechanic. Figurines, for those of you who want to take detail to the next level.

But, as I realized through the aforementioned horrible game, for me, 'role playing' wasn't about the dice, or the stats, due to the fact that the GM pretty much ignored the dice and had exactly what he wanted to happen take place. This was done badly, in this instance, but showed me that it could be done better, too. The truth of the matter, I realized then, was that gaming is about playing your role, and the dice (or any rules at all) are all secondary to mission #1 of gaming: having fun.

We take gaming seriously, and on some forums, we may take it too seriously. Rules Lawyers are a well known stereotype, but let's look at them after we apply mission #1 to them. For the Rules Lawyer, very likely the game (the RPing, specifically) is secondary to the system it's run in, and the rules that make the world you're in. For the RL, the game is ultimately less about RP, and more about doing what you want within the system. This is not exactly getting to the point where you 'win the game', but it's getting you to a point where you're playing, and ostensibly making progress.

Now, before anyone gets the idea that I'm saying RLs can't RP, or have no interest, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just pointing out what is their primary drive in the game. RLs are gamers, too, and they're in the game to have fun.

Looking at a few other stereotypes, we get the Combat Monkey and the Drama Queen. Both of these players have clearly definable goals -- the Combat Monkey wants to fight, get better at fighting, and fight some more. And maybe he'll RP along the way, and maybe all his fighting is pure RP because he's on a quest for vengeance. Most likely, though, the Combat Monkey archetype is there to fight, because for him (or her), that's what the game is 'about'. That's the fun part.

The Drama Queen, of course, wants to RP, talk their way around most confrontations, and see about doing things that work (most likely within the system), to accomplish their goals without fighting as much. Or maybe just as much as the CM, only it's, you know, dramatic. This is also valid, but most DQs are really all about the character interaction, the thrill of BEING someone else. That's the sea route to comedy India in terms of fun for them.

Taking what we've learned here, your ideal 'good' game is going to cater to what your players want. As a GM, it's your job to make sure that their goals and yours are close enough for you and your players to have fun. Because, let's be honest. If you're not having fun, it's not much of a game, is it?

Any time your game becomes so serious that you have to kick someone out of it, and no longer speak to that person as a friend, or every time you end a friendship over something your GM did to you ... you're taking something that's a game way too seriously. Because you've just taken the entire thing into the realm of no longer having fun, in which case, why are you bothering? The only reason you're ever going to get a 'bad' game is, in short, by having a GM that fails to meet the player's expectations.

Of course, your players may demand things you don't want to give them, in which case, take a step back and ask yourself if it's going to be fun gaming in the first place. Communication is the key to any good game, I believe. Some players will go for the cruel, sadistic, unfriendly, and monster/trap/evil NPC/natural accident route to the extreme, and make you suffer every inch of your journey until it's complete. And if that's what you're looking for in a game, to make that final reward that much sweeter, then it's perfect for you. But it might not work so well for someone else.

This isn't to say you can't surprise your players once in a while. There's no reason everything should be sunshine and roses the entire trip. If it's too easy, it may lack desired dramatic tension. But communicating with your players is the key here. Communication is always the key. Check with your players and see what they want. As a GM, be flexible enough to change things to suit your players.

The worst thing you can do as a GM is to make an immense, structured, static world, and expect your players to go through it a specific way. Because if your players make a move that throws you, they're suddenly running into things and NPCs that you've statically assigned to screw them over or not care, or just wonder why the heck they're around. And now you're not having fun because the path you wanted them to go down isn't being trodden, and they're unhappy because they're running into things that aren't helping them reach their goal.

This may sound an awful lot like saying, "always let the player win; it's not about the player versus the GM". And it may be. Check with your players, and see what expectations they have for their characters. Players can get attached to characters, and pretty upset if their character is killed ... then they have to create a new one. Permanent character death is one of those things you have to seriously consider before bringing it into your game. Will your players enjoy gaming knowing that at any moment a bad die roll means they're either out of the game, or their character is gone, and they need to start over? For some people, the answer is going to be yes. For others, it's going to be no.

But this brings us back to the instructions for how to play (and to GM) a 'good' game. And that's to play together. To work together with your players to what their goal is. Give them the challenge they want -- don't be afraid to throw them a few surprises, because the game will get boring without it. But always be sure that you know what they expect out of the game, and that they know what you're planning on giving them.

Realistically, as some of you already know, you don't even need rules to run a 'good' game. If you're all working together, you don't even need a GM, let alone the dice. Use exactly what you're comfortable with, if it's every single core book and supplement ever created, or if it's just, "Let's all work together and tell a story."

That's about it out of me.