FT

I Was A Goblin: Made To be Broken

Dungeons and Dragons’ sell was simple and appealing. You were the hero in a fantastic world – you could star in an epic saga of your very own. Set against this was the fact that Dungeons and Dragons was a game, and moreover had been put together by hardened wargamers. This meant rules, and lots of them. What’s striking to me now is how TSR (the publishers) hit quite by accident on marketing gold – an endless series of rulebooks and expansions, each minutely detailing a different area of gameplay. I don’t remotely think this is because Gary Gygax planned a gotta-catch-em-all strategy; I think it is because he kept thinking of new rules and wanted somewhere to put them.

Adding to the lunacy was the game’s split into D&D and Advanced Dungeons And Dragons. The former was hardly simple – the latter yet more complicated, and apallingly structured. Even so by the standards of the emerging RPG genre AD&D was only averagely hard to grasp – some games carried more fearsome reputations. The character generation process in Chivalry And Sorcery, a medeival stickler, was reputed to take six or more hours.

Players of D&D split into two groups – those who cared about the rules, and those who didn’t. A referee from the former camp mixing with players from the latter was a recipe for a short, and possibly tearful game. But even a referee who believed in the ‘spirit, not the letter’ – like me, for instance – would find themselves in difficulty when a player turned out to be a ‘rules lawyer’. It’s hard to keep a game flowing when every decision requires endless cross-referencing and justification. To make matters worse, Gary Gygax himself had a firm and oft-stated position on the use of rules: they mattered. All of them. ALL. OF. THEM. If you were ignoring – or worse, modifying – a rule, what you were playing was not D&D.

The result of this forest of rules was that the AD&D gameworld evolved a logic of its own which took it well away from any book or saga any of its players might have encountered. Heroic fantasy rests on its sense of mystery, magic, the inexplicable. Wargaming rests on its internal consistency and statistical simulation of likely events. The two don’t naturally mix. As we’ll see in the next post, D&D’s attempts to quantify the fantastic resulted in a game of often bizarre implications.

Tom in FT /TMFD • No Comments

Americans!

Americans! Is this true?

Answers in the comments box please! Or return to your blogs and give me links. Or whatever, you know.

Tim in TMFD • No Comments

David Gill

David Gill (Man. Utd. Chief Exec) is advocating the re-organisation of the Champions League again (towards the foot of the piece). Fundamentally, what they’re after is a competition in which the largest, richest clubs play each other very regularly. The only way to provide the solution David Gill wants is to have an actual real European Super League, preferably with no promotion and relegation. That’s where the money is, right? That’s where the real (Real) excitement lies?

Except not, obviously. The glory of football, the interest in sport in general, derives from uncertainty, from unpredictable outcomes. A world in which no Brian Cloughs can steer their Nottingham Forests to consecutive European cups, or Mourinho’s Porto can’t earn the right to play in the final of Europe’s biggest cup competition on sporting merit, is a world in which people won’t be interested in soccer. And even if you picked Europe’s top fifteen richest clubs and had them play each other, there’d still be the ones at the foot of the league, there’d still be the meaningless games and the players would be the same anyway (it’s not like the biggest clubs are prevented from buying up any player they want as it stands).

Gill says: “Even Uefa president Lennart Johansson said last season’s final between Porto and Monaco was possibly caused by the impact of the revised format.” I know it’s obvious, but last season’s final was caused by Porto and Monaco beating the other teams to get to the final. It’s hardly the fault of the competition’s design if David Gill’s team, or those he calls “the big clubs” are not actually good enough to beat Porto or Monaco.

That’s why we’re interested.

I’m reminded of speaking to a Fulham-fan friend of mine a couple of years ago, when his lot were in the enviable position Everton are in right now. “We’re leading England!” he said. I looked at him, alarmed at what seemed like uncharacteristic nationalism. “We’re leading England against the multinationals!”

I know what he meant.

Tim in TMFD • No Comments

Why Boxing should be banned

Why Boxing should be banned

The Manager of Amir Khan gave an interview this morning*; I was unsure whether I’d heard things correctly. Sadly I had.

The main thing is to ‘secure Amir’s financial security’. Maybe they should look to secure the security of the financial security of his finances? Also, Amir needs an offer because ‘the race relations that have come out good with Amir Khan’. They’re also hoping things ‘can be sorted out imminently…in the near future’

Oh dear. I fear Frank Warren will run rings round them. I can sense an argument being had in the Khan camp – cash in now why your star is high. No thought that by doing good things and becoming a champion, he will get all the offers in the world. Take the money quick, seems to be the argument, rather than run the risk of not cashing in now and losing lots if you turn out not to be as good as people thought or hoped.

Lets look at that logic again – give me some money now because I might not be good in future when we hope I’ll be good. I can’t help think that the slide into Prince Naseem-levels of chasing any buck rather than following his talent has begun.

I pretty much knew it anyway, but this interview was the final nail in the coffin for me; boxing will never get cleaner or better, and the idea that it might joins the Parliamentary road to socialism as something that won’t happen. The punters don’t really want a clean sport, a unified title, champions acting with grace and dignity. The say they do, but don’t. They just want to see people getting their heads smashed in.

Like fox-hunting, I’m pretty agnostic about the activity, but the people who like it disappoint me. Getting pleasure from watching animals ripped to shreds, and seeing humans whack each other lets the species down. If people want to bash each other up, then let they. Just don’t let anyone watch. It’s not a nice spectacle inside the ring, but it’s utterly hateful outside it.

* (Click the link at the top right for the interview)

Dave Boyle in TMFD • No Comments

The sport on TV most often in my boyhood was Chess.

The sport on TV most often in my boyhood was Chess. My Dad used to play Chess – pretty well, too, he won his club tournament 11 times in a row and they had a special rose bowl made after the tenth, so when he finally lost the cup he’d have something to keep. Of course he tried to get me interested – but I was never very good, a mid-table performer on the school ‘chess ladder’. The bookshelves in our house were full of chess – openings, gambits, defenses. Dad would watch the great battles between Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi, and I would sit by him and doze – chess is not really made for TV. But the formality of it, and the fierce concentration on the players’ faces, made an impact.

So there has always been a sort of mystique about chess for me, entirely divorced from the game itself. Nowadays Dad doesn’t play chess much, his hobby now is diving: there is no mystique attached to diving for me. The things that fascinate, I think, are the things the smaller you constituted as part of the adult world – natural for them, strange or symbolic for you. The chess I played on cheap boards in our draughty school art room was not the same game as Dad played with his special wooden pieces that had green felt on the bottom and fell into their carved box with a rich, satisfying clack-clack-clack.

I don’t know what my Dad thinks about Bobby Fischer, whose match against Boris Spassky would have happened when he was two or three years into those eleven wins. On the front cover of Bobby Fischer Goes To War, a book about the game, there’s a picture of Fischer sitting over a chessboard, staring at the reader. The hair, the suit, the stare, everything about the picture is evocative, because everything in it reminds me of old photos of my Dad, the model – my model – of the clever, awkward, early 70s man.

Except there are other old photos of my Dad, where he’s swimming or ski-ing or laughing or holding me: the simple fact of his family and social life (compared to Fischer’s paranoid isolation) meant that I couldn’t recognise him in the words of the book, only in the pictures of chess clocks and men in crumpled suits. Maybe that’s why I didn’t finish it, or maybe it was that chess isn’t a great subject for the layman. It’s hard to describe unless you are willing to get your hands dirty, show diagrams of chessboards and get into details: this book isn’t. When it talks about the chess the grandmasters played it reads more like music criticism.

Like Mozart’s music, [Spassky's] chess was a brilliantly fluid combination of form and fantasy. He himself took pride in being labelled the ‘Pushkin of chess’, explaining…that it was ‘because of my elegant and harmonic style’

This is elegant, and sets Spassky up against the deep logic of Fischer, but actually tells me nothing about how the form, fantasy and harmony might translate to style on the chessboard. After six or seven chapters I gave up. There were hints, though, of a book within the book that I might go back to: a book about the hold chess took on the imagination in the early 70s that led to it being on television in the first place for my Dad and I to watch. (Think for instance of the word ‘Grandmaster’ as a cultural boast, bouncing from the boards in Reykjavik to the New York Boroughs…). Bobby Fischer Goes To War is trying to be that book, but by focusing on a match it forces itself to address the actual games played, and in doing so loses its thread. Or maybe it’s just me who’d think that, since I’m not really looking for a book about chess; I’m looking for a book about my Dad.

Tom in TMFD • No Comments

There are posters all over London for an upcoming double bill of White Collar Boxing.

There are posters all over London for an upcoming double bill of White Collar Boxing. It has nicely been posited as an East End vs West End rumble. The West End event takes place in Mayfair and is billed as “The Black Tie Brawl”, whilst the East End bout is just said to be in Bethnal Green. But hold up, this is white collar boxing. Whilther these faux pretensions at class warfare that seem to have been fed into the mix.

I have a feeling that there will not be much white collar action going down. Rather it is an opportunity for amateur boxers who were a bit tasty in their day to get together after their day job. And dressed up as some form of territorial battle. The East End and the West End, for which read Mayfair, have never been traditional rivals. No-one who lived “up west” existed in the same social world as those who lived in the East End, there was literally no crossover.

This is not the case now. Bethnal Green is full of people who work in the City. Mayfair still has many of the moneyed class that was there beforehand. Perhaps there might be more in common between both areas, perhaps not white collar but doing all right. Those living in Bethnal Green might aspire to have Mayfair lifestyles, suddenly the crossover becomes one of social aspiration vs family money. So maybe the sites make sense after all. Much like settling some strange micro-class warfare with a few rounds of Queensbury Rules. No Boxing But Class Boxing.

Pete Baran in TMFD • No Comments

TV Highlights

TV Highlights (sort of) of the Wimbledon vs Liverpool match I mentioned here.

Dave Boyle in TMFD • No Comments

Texas Rangers rookie relief pitcher Frank Francisco was arrested for…

throwing a folding chair into the stands during an altercation between Oakland A’s fans and the Texas bullpen. The woman who got her nose broken by the chair is married to one of the main hecklers. Officially, of course, I disagree with this action, bad move rookie, you could have killed someone, etc. Unofficially, it’s kind of thrilling and awesome. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more. I’ve yelled some stuff into the visitor’s bullpen at Fenway myself.

Dudes were talking smack all game I guess, Francisco just gave up a homer to tie the game and got yanked; instead of hitting the showers, he went back to the pen like he knew it was gonna jump off. The Rangers are morons anyway, the Oakland fans are morons, that’s what happens when you razz the bullpen / disrespect the fanbase. Many frowns, take ‘em down, pass ‘em around, it’s awful on both sides, a dirty shame, a real black eye for the National Pastime.

Yet this was Oakland. They might have been saying some toxic shit. Oakland people have never gotten over being bitchslapped by Gertrude Stein all those years ago: “There’s no there there.” They hate the world, the world hates them, circle of life, move along, nothing to see here. So: it’s a push.

However, this was nowhere near the best heckling ever. That would belong to my friend Mike as we stood at the Satyricon in Portland Oregon in 1984, waiting for our buddy Jeff to come on with his crossover metal/pop band called Alloy. The band onstage: ISCARIOT, THE DARK MASTERS OF METAL. Every dude looke like “Spider” in School of Rock. They would screech and then jam and then wait…portentously…trying to milk it…and then go off into sub-Rush drum-led histrionics. Sounds okay, but it sucked and you better believe it. So during one of these pauses, Mike goes all “Take off, you knob!” right at the lead dude. Guy stared, trying to scare us with his supposedly demonically possessed eyes, but nothing happened. Now THAT is good hecklage.

But we didn’t get chaired for it. Hey, horrible things like this make the sports world go round, more for the talk shows and experts to “fight” over. I don’t really want this to happen a lot, but it’s gonna, and I guess the worst we could do is to overreact to something as pure and spontaneous as taunting the opposing team’s pitcher and then getting out of the way of the chair that player throws so that his wife catches a nose jammy.

Ain’t that America.

Matt in TMFD • No Comments

No excuse at all

No excuse at all

I know it’s reknowned as a library, but surely this is taking things a bit far. Songsheets? In full colour .pdf format? Blimey… This does prove, quite conclusively though, that arsenal fans do have the worst chants ever, considering the freddie ljungberg one is the only one with more than three words in (rubbish “new” chants (to the first noel????) not withstanding).

CarsmileSteve in TMFD • No Comments

Wrexham? Damn near killed them!

Wrexham? Damn near killed them!

Hot on the heels of Hearts ground woes comes the saga at Wrexham.

The background can be found on the excellent Red Passion site, which covers these revelations from the club chief executive (and former Lincoln City Chairman) John Reames; I think Mr Reames reveals much about the behind-the-scenes goings on at most clubs. Naturally, there’s talk of ground sharing at Chester (more business brains being deployed there. Sheer genius!) Even so, better than the first suggestion of groundsharing in Warrington. He’s getting closer, and may soon discover that the best place for Wrexham to play is, er, Wrexham.

If you want to waste some time, you could do worse than visit the short-lived Dismal Jimmy fanzine which was very funny indeed. Almost as funny as the hysterical letters of the current club owner which he had placed on the club website in an amazing fit of transparency, egotism, and appalling sentence construction.

Dave Boyle in TMFD • No Comments