The REAL Health Care Debate We're Having

I want to be extremely clear about the implications of my previous post. There are two, and only two, possible outcomes from what's going on this summer:

1) We choose once again to maintain the status quo...likely for at least 3 or 4 years, or

2) We do something that makes the system at least marginally better than it is now.

You'll note I didn't say, "Make it worse." That's because there is no way to make the system worse than it is. The only way to even claim that it's possible is to hold to a Faith Based Free Market Tautology breathtaking in its inability or unwillingness to confront reality. As I said earlier, businesspeople are not inspired to give consumers their best. They might or might not ACTUALLY give consumers the best offering, but that is incidental to what they're actually doing, and sadly all too infrequent. In my time in the cubicle jungle I have to say that confusing, lying to, or ignoring customers seems to be considerably cheaper and as effective, if not more so, than actually providing superior products and services (aka, Ayn Rand gets bitch slapped by reality).

So let us be clear. Either something is done, and it's at a minimum a marginal improvement on the current system or we PRETEND that we're delaying things to produce a better plan, when in fact we're delaying things to kill the reform effort. I'd love to say to guys like Grassley and Baucus, "If you think the current system should be kept in favor of any reform, just have the fucking balls to say it...I'm sick and tired of the goddamned concern trolling you guys are doing."

Will the result be perfect? It's in the sausage factory. Of COURSE it won't be perfect. I'd like to see a public option at a minimum. But no matter what comes out, it'll be better than the steaming pile of dog's vomit we currently call a health care system.

Why Government Health Care Can't Be Any WORSE Than Private Health Care

Via Kevin Drum, discussing a particularly Kafkaesque episode with his cellular service provider (in this case, Verizon), and the whole episode's tie-in to our current health care debate:

Frankly, my dealings with the government, on average, are better than most of my dealings with corporations. The government might sometimes provide poor customer service just because they lack the motivation to do better, but corporate America routinely provides crappy customer service as part of a deliberate and minutely planned strategy. I'll take my chances with the feds.

Yes, yes. I know. "DMV." "Lazy gummint workers." "Cell service is an exception." As is credit card service. And cable TV. And high speed broadband service (where it differs from CATV that is). As is petroleum. As is financial services. As are cars.

You know what? When there's that many exceptions to the, "Free markets are best for customers," rule then the rule is just WRONG. Get over yourself, business guys. You don't work that fucking hard to provide superior service. You work that fucking hard for an in-ground pool and vacations in Costa Rica. If you need to screw your customers to get the pool and the jungle tour, you just try to keep the mark on the gaff as long as possible.

The Theory And Practice Of DMing RPGs..."Working On The Railroad"

So here I am with a CD disc full of every Traveller Sourcebook, game, adventure and supplement ever made. I have a pretty good crew of players...the chemistry is pretty good. So now I have to put it all together into an interesting campaign. The RMP may be interested in this as will Mellow Engineer, but other than that, unless you're morbidly curious you may wander off.

Problem, and opportunity, is that the Traveller adventures were written in a way unfamiliar to most modern DMs. Today, intro text is scripted and tactics are outlined for you ahead of time. These are not. A shocking amount of time it's hard even for a DM to figure out what the intended plot was. Luckily I am an experienced DM. Running a game is like being the leader of a jazz band. You may set the overall beat and melody, but you have to be ready to let someone solo. There are certain beats you HAVE to hit...those you set up so that nothing the players do short circuits it. (Sorry, any of my players that have been reading this...but sometimes you really ARE getting railroaded).

I knew in rough outlines, what I wanted to do. There were three modules I wanted to hit for certain: Research Station Gamma, Twilight's Peak, and Secret of the Ancients. But those would be maybe 7 to 10 sessions of gaming. Plus, there's the whole Fifth Frontier War thing in the background of the official campaign setting. I wanted to include that.

Finally, I wanted the characters to REALLY have an impact on events (something they've already done, it having been built into Twilight's Peak...they've wiped out a major clandestine enemy logistics base), and that means putting them into the mix militarily and politically. What was interesting was how this vague intention fed from the character generation.

Three of the five had backgrounds in Intelligence and/or commando operations. Maxine, run by our token female, started as a support type, but much to her players amazement, took serious left turn when she was commando trained, commissioned and retained an extra term. I remember thinking, hmmm, so she's going to be the team's trigger puller.

Next, Lesk, the Mellow Engineer's character, turned out to be a thief and a seriously strong psionic...which was the intent, but in a campaign where the military adversary is a race of psionics, useful. OK, so I can see some things I can do with that.

Then Chip, the scout, kept rolling "special" missions for his assignments. Looking over the list of skills for Special Missions (bribery, forgery, streetwise) I think we can all read between the lines about what "special" really means. This is a guy who keeps getting redirected into Intel operations (it helps that the Scout Service is where civilian intelligence resides in the campaign...basically he kept getting used for CIA missions).

Gerard is our high Social Status Navy guy. Not much there to meet the eye, but any group needs at least one person the local aristocrats will at least talk to. OK then. I'll find more for him to do...he just doesn't know it yet.

Malcolm was the last rolled up. Intelligence school so often he ended up an instructor. Specializing in interrogation. OK, so here we have an actual professional at the Intel game, someone who really was part of the Imperial Intel apparatus. That tore it.

I already have a preference for intrigue when I run a campaign, and here I had a crew of folks who were either black bag guys on either side of the law, or closely associated trigger puller types. Plus one knight/Naval Officer. I could work with this.

Now, part of my CD was a "campaign sourcebook"...The Spinward Marches Campaign. It's setting was post war, so I wasn't going to be using it, but it had a whole section on the course of the war, so I started looking that over. Depending on events the dates might change but the events wouldn't.

Therein I discovered the other main thrust of the campaign. The war starts off badly as a politically well connected Grand Admiral, promoted past his Peter Principle point, ignores valid intelligence by the normal Naval Intelligence and Scout Service agencies. Apparently, they'd embarrassed him in the past and he created a parallel intelligence office dedicated to telling him what he wanted to hear. That this plotline, written 20 odd years ago was an almost perfect mirror of the show we've had to live through.."Fun With Bushie"...is simply a bonus.

He was opposed by the Grand Duke, who retained his contacts with the Intelligence professionals, and who would seize control of the fleet during the war and effectively prosecute it thereafter. Now I could see how the group could be integrated...Malcolm would be of the professional faction, forced out for his affiliation; Maxine a junior officer protege. Gerard could be the political victim of the toady Commodore that took over intelligence duties for the Grand Admiral. Chip could work for the Scout service side, and Lesk could become a very valuable asset managed by the Scouts. (As it turns out, unwillingly...but I can work with that too, since he's hardly history's first unwilling intelligence asset).

Character generation and two paragraphs in a sourcebook and the campaign had its shape: "War, Mutiny and the Secret of the Ancients."

Without putting any spoilers in, the group has been seriously roped in on the Secret of the Ancients part, having in the process acquired a technology from the Twilight's Peak site: a set of teleport discs that frankly I made sure they have because I think it'll be fun to see what they think up to do with them. Every Ancient site is lousy with that kind of thing...should arouse their cupidity the same way +3 Flaming Swords capture a DnD player's.

Shortly, there will be a Star Trek-y section loosely based on the Leviathan adventure (which sucked as an adventure, but the ship, a Merchant Cruiser, was pretty cool). It'll go outside the Marches, so I get to generate a couple subsectors for them to explore while part of a larger mission. That'll also allow me to include a batch of the smaller (one nighter) premade adventures. I still haven't decided if they'll get the Leviathan or one of her sister ships (I'm leaning towards the Leviathan or the Decameron).

There's also some long term adversary stuff going on, but that's just getting started and I know that one of them at least reads this, so I'll save the spoilers.

Ultimately, they will determine whether the Duke succeeds at seizing the fleet and then discover exactly what happened 300,000 years earlier to the Ancients. And in the end save and/or destroy the Imperium. Since that's the end of this particular campaign, they really DO get to choose that one...

If Mark Twain Had An Internet Account And Reviewed Movies

This archly wicked review might well be the result...

Carpe DM…Translation: “The DM is Whiny” (The Theory And Practice Of GMing RPGs, Part 2)

OK. So as I was saying before with RPGs, I started DMing Traveller, or rather “Classic Traveller” (there’ve been a couple version since the original 1981 edits of the little black books), recently.

Back when I got the source stuff for the campaign, up to and including the CD-ROM, from Far Future Enterprises, I started making a mental list of the stuff I’d have to change. In the RPG parlance, I knew there’d be a lot of homebrew rules. I already knew two things right off the bat. Several more major things popped up in the course of my campaign prep and the first couple sessions.

I mentioned the unique character generation, where you start with a mature set of skills; the corollary there is that you’ve spent anywhere from 4 to 30 years in military or quasi-military occupations. With all the hazards that pertain thereto. The character generation system had a survival roll every 4 year term (later, one for every year-long assignment). Fail it and die.

In addition, it had the old hardcore character generation rules; roll 2 dice in order for Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education and Social Standing. If you wanted to be Navy and rolled crappy INT and Social Standing? Better roll high on enlistment, buck-o, or you were out of luck. Actually there was a weird synergy there. You could “hunt medals” in your military career, taking penalties to your survival roll for bonuses to decoration rolls (decorations increasing your chance of promotion). Those of you with ruthless streaks no doubt see where this is going.

If you rolled a crappy character you’d get him into a risky profession, say Army or Marines, where you could take outrageous chances for medals. The dice modifier equivalent of stripping naked, gluing feathers to your butt and charging a machine gun nest with a toilet plunger while making “woo woo” noises. Then when probability caught up with you and you croaked, roll another character until you got a guy whose characteristics you liked.

Those two rules were going to have to go, replaced by roll seven times, discard the low roll and assign to your stats as desired method and a medical discharge roll rather than death roll. I added a chance of characteristic loss to go with a discharge, and the ability of the player to try and overcome medical discharge, to give someone who didn’t feel like they were “fully baked” yet have a chance to stay in.

Ok, so far so good. What else? Over the history of the game, Game Designers Workshop…the now defunct home of Traveller as well as other games including some very nice board wargames (read: hideously complicated games…I had weird tastes)…anyway, GDW released rules and character generation supplements over the course of the early 80s until they effectively abandoned “Traveller” for the “Twilight 2000” and “2300AD” RPGs.

The original 6 professions were Navy, Marines, Army, Scouts, Merchants and “Other”. Over the course of the game, expansion books greatly enhanced character generation for Navy, Army, Marines, Scouts and Merchants…you got WAY more skills over the course of a career. “Other” was expanded by another sourcebook, but not in terms of depth…instead it got broader. Instead of what seemed to be a generic roguish character, Other became Barbarians and Doctors and Hunters and Bureaucrats and Scientists, Pirates and of course, Rogues. But they all had the same low skill allotment.

When the supplements came out back in the 80s, Army and Marines were first (“Mercenary”), followed 6 or 7 months (and what felt like an eternity to me) later with Navy (“High Guard’) and an even longer eternity later by the Scouts (the imaginatively named “Scouts”). What happened was everyone stampeded to the cool Army/Marines careers, and there was a sudden dearth of ship based skills in most groups. And so it occurred, on down the line until “Merchant Prince” came out and allowed mercantile players to have some real fun buying and selling. So I had to homebrew some skill roll eligibility rules to ensure that all characters at the end of a term of service had had a similar count of skill roll opportunities (if not skills). I had to test that out with a few character roll ups. Seemed to work, at least well enough that the “Other” characters weren’t obviously disadvantaged. Enough so that one player picked Rogue, and his skill count had more to do with luck than anything structural.

What else was a problem? Well, although the Third Imperium background was considered the gold standard of SF RPGs it had some structural defects. The Imperium was huge and impersonal, which removed one common source of pride for PCs: that they were big swinging dicks in the universe making big differences in their worlds. Also, since the characters were “born” with a mature skill set, there wasn’t that “level up/always something new to do” pull for the characters.

So I had to fix that. I’ll cover the former point in my next, and last, post (concerning putting together a fun yet not obviously railroaded narrative in an annoyingly wide open universe); but one thing was obvious…there would have to be experience rules. Traveling takes time, a week and a half to two weeks per “jump” (a discreet distance traveled in a starship) so training of various types would and could take various amounts of time (3 months, 6 months, 9 months or a year per level, depending). I also needed a way to reach a point of diminishing returns to keep people from being the world’s foremost authority on Ship’s Tactics or whatever. Which I finally managed to put the finishing touch on recently.

There was one area that required little alteration. I mentioned that GDW was a BOARD wargame company? Their intensive combat rules were based on a board wargame. D&D’s original combat rules were clearly based on miniatures rules…move x number of inches per round, etc. Even back in the 80s, there just weren’t that many folks who played miniatures. I’m sure it surprises no one that I was one of them…I played tabletop Napoleonic wargames but even I didn’t play D&D the way it was supposed to be played…everyone just sort of declared where they were and the DM kept the positions in his head (it was always a he...I played with women, but none of them have ever wanted to DM).

Wizards of the Coast’s D&D 3rd edition, while I was away, dropped the fiction that we were all out there adjudicating disputes with rulers…and came up with combat rules that basically derived from board wargames. They did keep the mini-figs instead of using cardboard counters, although now you buy them pre-painted and they’re sold like collectable cards…you get them randomized in a box, unless you pay market rate on the secondary minis market. You can take the company away from the business model, but you can never take the business model entirely out of the company. But I digress (even more than usual, I mean).

Anyway, the GDW Traveller combat rules, “Snapshot”, played eerily similar to what the group had been doing with D&D 3.5 all along…rules that came twenty years after GDW released “Snapshot”. Those rules would cover from close range to (in some cases) long range combat, for both guns and hand weapons. Since “very long” was 250m and up, I figured I could simply cover that range increment abstractly. And in fact, so it has turned out (a recent encounter started at a klick…and all of that was conducted in the “once a minute a target appears during a rush, and you can shoot at it” way (a unit deployed in combat formation, using bounding overwatch will cover 1000m in somewhere between a half and hour to two-plus hours). The one thing the group took to like a duck to water was how to do combat. (What they constantly have to remind themselves about is radio contact…you can talk remotely, unlike D&D, and they’re constantly poking each other to remind each other to “tell the rest”…something I’m allowing because contrary to popular opinion, I’m not a total dick and it really is a novel concept when you’re used to D&D.)

The final, major piece of homebrew was “Difficulty Class” or DC, the target roll of dice for success or failure at any given task. For the first few sessions I was winging the DCs for tasks. It felt unfair to me, god only knows how the group perceived it. Pretty much the same if the eagerness with which they seized on the table I made up is any indication.

As a rule generation example this one is fairly typical. It’s based on two insights and one statistical reality. First the statistical reality: the center of a two six sided dice, normal probability curve is 7 and it’s a fairly steep curve, so average “difficulty” will play off 7 as a target and change by increments of two.

The two insights were that 5 categories are more than enough to describe almost any situation (thank you survey design in grad school!), therefore difficulties are all described as either “very easy”, “easy”, “average”, “difficult”, and “very difficult”. Second insight: that skill level 3 is “professional grade”…the rules themselves state that if a person has Medic-3 they qualify for the title “Doctor”. Arbitrarily, I set “master” skill at 6, and not so arbitrarily “beginner” is 1.

Put the two together…a task that would be of average difficulty for a beginner has a target of 8 or more (the statistical 7 plus 1 for skill level), whereas a task that could be described as average for a master is 13 (statistical 7 plus 6 for skill level). All difficulties can now be decided in my mind by answering the question, “How difficult would this be for ‘x’ skill level?” An appendectomy is easy for a doctor, but average to difficult for a beginner. Heart surgery is average for a master, difficult for a professional, and very difficult (at least!) for a beginner. If you can put it in words, the chance that everyone agrees with your assessment (and hence thinks you’re playing fair with them) goes WAY up. So was born the three column, five row table at the center of skill use.

The point I’m making? If you as a GM have a problem, your group has or will have that problem in spades. If you look back up over the decisions I’ve described (especially if you’ve ever played Traveller) you can see that everything I’ve done is to increase enjoyment by providing a sense of accomplishment, or a sense of fairness.

There’s only one game out there whose purpose is to make the player feel like they’re a tiny ant and that the GM is out to get them (mainly because he is): Paranoia. From which players derive enjoyment. It’s not an everyday game though…

Making the game enjoyable, rewarding and fair from your players’ point of view isn’t the most important thing you do as a DM, it’s the ONLY thing you do, or rather should do. Everything else is record keeping.

Next: Putting together a campaign where you manage to move characters smartly from one situation to another despite the fact that they can literally get into a spaceship and zip off in another direction entirely. On a whim.

The Bond Market Described

Via Dan Gross:

Finally, the notion that the market is telling us something—anything—ultimately rests on the erroneous assumption that financial markets represent the collective wisdom of rational actors processing information efficiently. There are plenty of cool-minded forward-thinking investors in the markets. But there are also a lot of lunatics, fools, sharks, widows and orphans, government actors with ulterior motives, algorithmic traders, greedy speculators, and whack jobs. The markets resemble the Star Wars bar scene more than they do the economics faculty lounge at Princeton.

The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues (The Theory And Practice Of GMing RPGs) Part I

The title comes from a classic pen and and paper RPG from the 80s called "Paranoia".  The political lamp is decidedly NOT lit.  After recounting my lawn-a-cide last time, I find that I am interested in discussing other things that are going on around here rather than just what's going on in Washington.  I do have other interests.

One of those things is "Geek Night".  As it happens those of us out there (like Stephen Colbert) who played D&D when we were little nerdlets occasionally visit the mothership.  So for the better part of two years I have been playing D&D 3.5 with a bunch of very cool folks, discovering that you can have even more fun with elves when you're an adult (for one thing, by calling them "tree humpers"...they HATE that) than when you're a teenager.  We've been meeting every other week (mostly) with the same crew of folks (mostly) and having a high old time (mostly).

We first started playing in "Forgotten Realms", the by now default D&D setting.  One problem.  Thanks to having been designed back in the dark ages (the AD&D era) it had a LOT of baggage.  Not least of which is a series of merchandising novels that pretty much put you in a straitjacket.  There's one way to present (and play) Forgotten Realms, and don't you DARE violate the way it's supposed to be.

Booooorrr--ING!  Thieves are thieves, Fighters are fighters, etc., etc. ad nauseum absurdum.

So when we lost our wizard to ennui and our flagrant lack of compliance with the way he thought way we should be playing (see above) one of our number trotted out the new "default" D&D setting from Wizards Of The Coast..."Eberron".  Now I will freely admit that the conceit of Eberron--that magic in many ways replaces technology but with similar effective end points--is simply a gimmick to allow elves to duel with orcs on top of moving railroad trains, while the dwarf hijacks an airship to swoop down and rescue the orc from the vicious elven mercenary (think Mission Impossible meets The Good, The Bad And the Pointy Eared).  But it is well executed.  Pretty fun too...it allowed me to play a shapeshifter with a nasty case of PTSD as result of his experiences at the end of an all encompassing world war.

But D&D has a problem, a systemic one.  There's a "sweet spot" to the game...starting about Level 5 and ending about Level 13.  Most of the interesting stuff happens in between those two points...before Level 5 a stiff breeze can cripple you and after Level 13 or so the scaling gets out of hand and you increasingly find it difficult to throw out a challenge that isn't either too much or too little...an oscillating system forever on the verge of getting out of control.  Our group collectively started getting close to 13 and we were running out of prepublished stuff to play (for the reason I just outlined you don't see many commercial modules for Levels 15 to 20...it's all but impossible to get the level of difficulty "just right" at that point...it HAS to be personalized).  The GM for Eberron is getting his Master's and wanted some relief from prepping.  It was getting time consuming.

That's when I stepped in.  As it happened, I had something I was really, REALLY interested in revisiting.  When we were casting about for a way to not have to end "geek night" when we lost the aforementioned Fandamentalist, and before we settled on Eberron, I had been lamenting the loss over many a relocation (some more frantically rushed than others...leases will run out from time to time) of all but the dreg ends of what had been a truly impressive collection of pen and paper RPG games.

The loss I felt most keenly was a game called Traveller.  It was, to SF RPGs what D&D was to Fantasy RPGs...the very first, the wellspring, the alpha and omega from which all subsequent games derived.  Its system was gloriously different from the d20 system we were playing.  It had all KINDS of spiffy aspects, including a character generation system that started you out with your mature skill set (instead of the usual generic, "You have left home to seek your fortune..." start) and a backstory as famous in its time as Forgotten Realms is to D&D now.

So there I was, hanging out in a game shop trying to find some Eberron sourcebooks when I ran across the reprint.  Apparently Marc Miller, the original designer of Traveller, had decided to reprint the old "little black books" of Traveller having reacquired the rights to the game at some point in the past.  After a quick consultation with the group regarding their willingness to contemplate playing something other than D&D at some point (the consensus was "why not") I started acquiring books and refamiliarizing myself with the game system and campaign setting.

This has gone on for a bit so I will leave you with this insight, stolen blatantly from Spiegelman's "Maus"...

And here my troubles began.