Ultimate Campaign

I’ve commented before that one of the things I really like about Paizo’s approach to Pathfinder is their willingness to do something different. Of course, the usual stuff is still there, too. In the hardcover rulebook line, the Advanced Player’s Guide, Ultimate Magic, and Ultimate Combat all serve to provide players with their fix of new classes, archetypes, feats, and spells. For gamemasters, there’s the plethora of Bestiaries with Bestiary 4 now announced for this fall. But amidst those, there are also books like the GameMastery Guide and the NPC Codex, all of which take a break from the usual style and offer up something new or a twist on something old. Even those books I mentioned as delivering the usual stuff still have a number of new options in them. Archetypes, for example, while appearing everywhere now, were new in the Advanced Player’s Guide.

The latest hardcover rulebook from Paizo is Ultimate Campaign, a book dedicated to an aspect of roleplaying that most books completely gloss over, something some people even gloss over in actual play: non-adventuring time. The vast majority of the rules in Pathfinder (and indeed, most roleplaying games) cover adventuring—fighting monsters, disarming traps, casting spells, travelling through dungeons and wilderness, etc.—and pay very little attention, if any, to what players’ characters get up to between adventures. But for many people, downtime is as much part of the game as the adventuring side is. Where do these characters live? What do they do when they’re not adventuring? What happens if characters try to run a business? What about ruling a nation? How about their families and other relationships? The answers to these questions and more help to define fully fleshed-out and believable characters. They add an additional dimension to the game and provide character motivations beyond just loot. Ultimate Campaign helps players provide answers to these questions and more. Is it a necessary book? No, of course not—no book is really necessary other than the Core Rulebook and maybe the first Bestiary—but it is a very different and useful book. It’s also a very good book and has quickly catapulted itself to one of my favourite books in the hardcover line.

The TARDIS in Orbit!

Crowdfunding is an interesting thing. People are using it for just about everything these days, from the truly necessary to the fun and interesting to the utterly pointless. This one falls under the fun and interesting category. A father/daughter team from Florida is putting the TARDIS into orbit—well, a miniature replica of the TARDIS at any rate. They’ve already raised the $33,000 they were aiming for, and additional funds will allow them to put a larger TARDIS into orbit.

At first glance, this may seem an utterly preposterous notion. How can they even manage this? But they’re not actually building their own rocket. Instead, they’re booking space on a pre-existing rocket that will be taking lots of other stuff up as well (things from universities, research groups, and private companies), so this actually looks quite doable.

Why are they doing this? Well, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who this November. It’s a way to celebrate that landmark, so why not? Really, when it comes down to it, there’s no other reason than “why not?” but sometimes that’s all you really need. Alas, I’m broke and can’t help out, but clearly there are lots of people who can. Check out their video below or visit their Kickstarter page for all the technical details.

Thoughts on a New Doctor for Doctor Who

Now that Matt Smith has announced that he isleaving the role of the Doctor with this year’s Christmas special, people are, not surprisingly, speculating on who the next Doctor might be. Some people are probably even speculating on when the next Doctor will leave (after all, from the moment Matt Smith got the role, people were asking him how long he would stay). So I thought I might as well get in on the speculative act and give my thoughts on what I would like to see in a new Doctor.

A lot of people are listing established actors that they feel would be good fits for the Doctor. People are throwing a lot of names out there, some extremely well-known and famous, others not quite so famous but still fairly well-known. These names run the course from Sir Ian McKellan to Patrick Stewart to Helen Mirren. And of course, if you’re going to name a specific name, there really isn’t any other choice but to name someone well-known because otherwise...well...you’re not likely to know any other specific names to name. If I were to go that route, I’d probably choose Chiwetel Ejiofor just because I think he’s pretty awesome. However, I think Neil Gaiman makes a very good point that the next Doctor should be someone unknown, someone who comes without preconceived expectations of how he or she should play the part, someone who can surprise us all.

Of course, while I look forward to being surprised by the new Doctor, there are certain things I hope to see. This doesn’t mean that if I don’t see these things, I’ll automatically hate the new Doctor—I haven’t disliked a single Doctor yet—they’re just things that I would be looking for if I were in charge of the show (I can dream, can’t I?).

Doom Comes to Dustpawn

For some reason, ever since the adventure was first announced, every time I see the name Doom Comes to Dustpawn mentioned (generally in comments on the Paizo messageboards), I misread it as Dust Comes to Doomspawn. I don’t know why. I just know that I have to keep correcting myself in my head. I had to be extra careful just to write the name correctly above, and I will likely have to be extra careful throughout this review. Since I can’t stop myself making this frustrating misreading, I thought I’d share it with all of you, possibly causing you to make the same misreading from now on and share in my frustration.

I am so cruel.

Of course, the question is, does Doom Comes to Dustpawn deserve my cruelty? And the answer is that it most definitely doesn’t. Doom Comes to Dustpawn by Mike Welham was the winning entry from last year’s RPG Superstar, a contest Paizo runs annually to find new writing talent. It’s been a very successful contest for Paizo, bringing a bunch of great new writers into the gaming world. Old pulp science fiction stories are the very clear inspiration for this adventure about an invasion from outer space, but, of course, reimagined as fantasy for the Golarion setting. The adventure cleverly mixes site-based encounters with event-based ones, allowing for an adventure that builds towards a specific climactic event, but does so in a very open-ended way, leaving the player characters to guide the action and development to that point.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Matt Smith Leaving Doctor Who

I have to admit, this kind of took me by surprise. I expected Smith would leave at the end of Series 8. In fact, I could have sworn the BBC previously confirmed he would be in Series 8. But that is not the case. He is now confirmed as leaving at the end of this year, in the 2013 Christmas special. The full story is here.

The eleventh Doctor is not my favourite Doctor, but I have enjoyed Smith's performance, even if I've criticised many of the stories he's appeared in (and there are aspects of the character that bug me, particularly his dismissive attitude towards women). Indeed, Matt Smith's Doctor has often been one of the few saving graces to otherwise weak episodes.

So now the debate begins on who will be next. They may even have already decided. It's just a matter of when they'll announce it...

Site News and Thanks

I've added an "About" section to the blog. It contains a couple of brief sections on what Of Dice and Pen is all about and who I am in case anyone was wondering. I may add more detail as time goes by. People can also make requests or otherwise just say hello in the comments section of that page.

I just wanted take a moment to say thanks to all who come to the site. I've been overwhelmed by how much the number of views to this blog have increased in just the last couple of months. The site passed 25,000 views about a week or so ago. That's only three months after it hit 10,000. Considering it took close to a year and a half to make that first 10,000, I'm pretty happy. Sure, there are sites out there for which these numbers would be a drop in the ocean, but they mean a lot to me. A powerhouse article has been my Sexism in Steven Moffat's Doctor Who? essay. It quickly rose to the most-viewed post on this blog and kept on climbing. At this time, it has nearly seven times as many views as its nearest competitor, my review of the Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition, and it continues to gather 100 to 200 views per day. If you do a Google search for any variation of the words Doctor Who and sexism, my essay is generally at or near the top of the list. I'm simply stunned. Thanks to everyone who has read that article (whether you agree with it or not) and any other articles on this blog. Thanks also to all those who have left comments. I appreciate you all!

Doctor Who - The Name of the Doctor

Series Seven of Doctor Who has come to a close in an episode that is supposedly game-changing. And I suppose in a sense, it is. The Doctor’s greatest secret has been revealed...sort of. With its revelation, tons more questions have arisen, and very few old questions have found an answer. But in another sense, it’s really not all that game-changing. “The Name of the Doctor” is a quite typical Steven Moffat finale. Indeed, to a great extent, if you’ve seen his previous finales, you’ve seen this one too. There are a lot of grand ideas mixed with complex interweavings of time-streams and plotlines. There are a lot of things happening because they have to happen. People do things because, “This is what I’ve already done.”

Like many Steven Moffat stories, “The Name of the Doctor” is best enjoyed if you just turn off your brain because, as complex as Moffat likes to make his plots, when you pause to examine them, they start to fall apart. Better to just let things happen, be taken in by the spectacle, the rapidly changing images, and the bigger-than-life ideas. Unfortunately, turning off my brain has never been something I’ve been particularly good at. As such, the problems start to stick out like a sore thumb: the repetition of old ideas, the lack of believable characters, the plot holes. I’ve watched “The Name of the Doctor” three times now, and to be fair, each time, I’ve enjoyed it a little more than the previous time. The are a number of good individual moments throughout the episode, and each time I’ve been able to appreciate those moments a little more. Alas, strung together as a whole, the episode falls quite flat.

And then there’s the ending. Oh, the ending.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

REALLY BIG SPOILERS

SERIOUSLY, YOU’VE BEEN WARNED

Doctor Who - Advance Thoughts on "The Name of the Doctor"

This Saturday, the season finale of Doctor Who will air, and it will supposedly wrap up all the loose ends of the Moffat era, as well as reveal the Doctor’s greatest secret and solve the mystery of Clara. It’s a lot for one episode to accomplish, even at the breakneck pace of all the episodes in Series Seven. But that’s the promise.

Some people have been lucky (or unlucky?) enough to have already seen it due to a distribution error that resulted in a bunch of copies of the Series 7, Part Two Blu-rays being sent out early to people who had pre-ordered. I am not one of those people, and I have done my best to avoid spoilers for the final episode. However, in advance of seeing the episode, I wanted to discuss my thoughts on the subject of the episode’s title, and whether or not we really will learn “The Name of the Doctor”.

The question “Doctor who?” has been a focus of much of Steven Moffat’s time as showrunner, and even in his scripts before that. Both “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead” bring it up. Since the conclusion of Series Six, the question has been brought up repeatedly, often to the point of sounding unnatural, sometimes multiple times per episode. In “The Wedding of River Song”, Dorian calls it “the first question”, and on a meta-level, that’s absolutely true. Way back in 1963, when the first episode of Doctor Who aired, the very first words encountered are the title, and thus the question.

Doctor Who - She Said, He Said

So the latest prequel for an upcoming Doctor Who episode is available. This one is for this week’s Series Seven finale, “The Name of the Doctor”. Entitled “She Said, He Said”, it’s one of the longest prequels they’ve filmed. It’s also one of the dullest. For people who haven’t seen it, here it is:

The idea of presenting a pair of monologues as opposed to an actual scene (making this not really a prequel, I suppose) is actually an interesting idea, and I’d approve if the material Clara and the Doctor are talking about was actually interesting, but it’s not. On top of that, monologues by their very nature do what Doctor Who has been doing far too much of lately: they tell rather than show. Monologues can work great when they’re about things we’ve actually seen or as a change of pace. The Doctor goes on quite a bit about how perfect Clara is, how she’s perfect for him, but this is something we’ve never really seen. What about Clara is so perfect? What sets her apart from other people? The only thing unique about her is that she’s lived more than once. But she doesn’t even know that (from what we’ve seen so far, at any rate). There is nothing else about her that makes her an individual and different from other people. So why is she so perfect for the Doctor?

Clara, in turn, refers to not falling in love, a trick she performs twice a day, implying a growing love between her and the Doctor. This is something that has been thrown into a few lines of dialogue here and there (in “Hide” and “Nightmare in Silver”), but is also something we’ve never really seen. Indeed, we’ve seen very little of the relationship between Clara and the Doctor. We’ve never seen them get to know each other. Do they know each other?

Each monologue also has an annoying change in perspective at the end. Both Clara and the Doctor begin speaking as we know them now (up to the end of “Nightmare in Silver”), but then switch at the end to speaking from a point of view after the upcoming finale. I understand the effect Steven Moffat was going for here, but I personally find it very jarring, and unnatural. It doesn’t place tantalizing hints. Instead, it just reminds you how unreal everything is. And yes, Doctor Who is about a ton of unreal, impossible things. But it should feel real, and it doesn’t. And without feeling real, the “Impossible Girl” is no more impossible than anything else in the show. It makes me not care at all about her mystery.

Of all the prequels, "She Said, He Said" is the most easily missable.

Doctor Who - Nightmare in Silver

I’m a big fan of Neil Gaiman. However, I have to be honest and say that I only actually discovered him a few years ago. Oh, I had heard about him before that. I just hadn’t gotten round to looking at any of his work. But once I did get round to it, I began devouring lots of it. I still haven’t read everything he’s written (indeed, there’s a lot I haven’t), but nonetheless, I rank him very highly amongst my favourite authors. As such, I was very excited when I learned that he was writing an episode for Doctor Who Series Six. I felt that his style was perfect for Doctor Who, and I turned out to be right. His episode, “The Doctor’s Wife” was not only the best of that season, but easily the best of the eleventh Doctor, and one of the best Doctor Who stories of all. “The Doctor’s Wife” was a wonderful homage to everything that had come before it (right back to 1963) and simultaneously took the show forward, adding to the show’s mythology, and giving new insight into the show’s most iconic character—the Doctor’s TARDIS. It did so in ways that the more recent “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” can’t even compare.

So naturally, I was excited once again to learn that Gaiman was writing another episode for Doctor Who, to air near the end of Series Seven, an episode that promised to make the Cybermen scary again: “Nightmare in Silver”. And it does. “Nightmare in Silver” is, alas, not as good as “The Doctor’s Wife”, but that really shouldn’t be held against it. It’s a clever and enjoyable episode that not only effectively reinvents the Cybermen, but also has a wonderful examination of the Doctor’s psyche. It’s not a perfect episode and there are a number of little flaws here and there (more from execution, I think, than script problems), but in a period of Doctor Who where most episodes are far from perfect, it stands out well above the majority of its competition.

SPOILERS FOLLOW