TNG Season Three Was an Absolute Banger
I've been doing a re-watch of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's a corny show, but it's also a great show. Season one had a lot of stinkers, though. Season two had bright spots. But they really hit their stride in season three:
Who Watches the Watchers: First Contact goes way, way off the rails, and the planet's inhabitants worship the captain as "The Picard," who only convinces them of his mortality by dying. But just for a little while.
Booby Trap: La Forge is not very good with non-holographic ladies.
The Vengeance Factor: A peaceful planet with a dark underbelly. Riker falls in love with a lady, and then shoots her.
The Hunted: Another peaceful planet with a dark underbelly. The Enterprise crew stage a revolution.
The High Ground: Wouldn't you know it, another planet dealing with rebels. This time, the rebels die. Except not from the thing Dr Crusher was trying to make them stop doing, but from guns. Also, they predict the Irish unification of 2024. Tick tock, emerald isle.
Deja Q: The best Q episode, hands down. There's a mariachi band and cigars.
Yesterday's Enterprise: It's almost a shame the season ends how it did, otherwise this would easily be its best episode. Tasha gets to go out in a blaze of glory instead of for no reason, which they directly reference in the episode.
The Offspring: Data kindly but sternly asks that Riker stay away from his daughter.
Captain's Holiday: Riker pulls the greatest prank in the history of Starfleet.
Hollow Pursuits: La Forge thanks Barclay for making everyone forget about his holodeck girlfriend issue.
The Most Toys: Even in the future, rich people are just the pits.
Sarek: Picard and Spock's dad swap brains, and we get to see what Patrick Stewart can really do.
The Best of Both Worlds: Better than most of the TNG movies.
Of course, there are some stinkers. Every season of Star Trek has stinkers. Troi's mom shows up. There are trade negotiations. There's a bad courtroom episode. And they established that every season had to end with a two-parter. But season three started the unambiguous good times of TNG.
Wait, That's Gary Oldman?
I think the first movie I saw Gary Oldman in was Batman Begins. Not long after, I was a teenager and dodged my parents’ prohibition on the Harry Potter franchise (they were right, eventually, but for very different reasons of course) I saw him as Sirius Black and had no idea that it was the same guy. And when someone got me to watch this weird nineties sci-fi movie about elements and love or something, I again didn’t recognize him as the antagonist until way later. I’m currently into the second season of Slow Horses, and it’s more of the same – wait, that’s Gary Oldman? He’s amazing!
There are actors who are good, but you can never forget who you’re watching. I’m not talking about the folks who sort of always play the same types of characters due to typecasting or whatever, or actors in comedies or action movies where there’s less breadth in characterization. It’s more that for most actors, their star power overshadows their role.
Like, say, Jeff Goldbloom. I love me some Jeff Goldbloom, and he is a suave eccentric gentleman, but it’s always Jeff Goldbloom up there. Tom Hanks is always Tom Hanks, and a lot of his movies would have done very poorly without his genuine likability. Al Pacino’s great but he’s always Al Pacino. Meryl Streep, Helena Bonham Carter, and Angelina Jolie prove it’s not just an issue with guys. John Lithgow. David Tennant and Matt Smith, as heretical as it is for a nerd to criticize a Doctor. They’re fine, or great, or astounding actors. But you never forget who you’re watching. They don’t disappear.
There’s the method actor type, the canonical example of which is Daniel Day-Lewis. A guy who supposedly goes for it so hard it’s annoying to those on set, and does two movies a decade but they’re Very Important Movies that film students will study and I will not find very fun to watch. Marlon Brando method acted too, and was obviously amazing. But he shared the same problem as Day-Lewis: even though they lived as their characters, and produced amazing performances, I can’t avoid seeing the actors first and the characters second. They lived their roles, but didn’t disappear into them.
I think Gary Oldman is the greatest actor working today. He inhabits his roles to the point where you look past the actor and just see the character. As if you’re not watching TV or a movie, and you’re reading a book instead. There are others – Karl Urban has made me do similar double-takes. But nobody does it like Gary Oldman.
New Dungeons and Dragons Rules
So Wizards of the Coast released their first play test material for the next version of Dungeons and Dragons. The first batch of stuff is on character backgrounds and races. I think the new rules are overall good. Not perfect, but pretty good. Based on vitriol on the internet, I might be in the minority, but the angry folks are always loudest. A bunch of things, on first glance:
Making ability scores a) tied to background and b) completely flexible negates the mechanical requirement for a bunch of old-fashioned race-stat combinations. Not all elves are slender braniacs, and not all orcs are big brutish tanks. This change felt pretty obvious after Tasha's came out last year, but it's cool to see it codified.
Half-races just being mechanically one or the other is kind of a bummer. But creating a system to pick and choose aspects from two races to combine (like how the half-elf and half-orc already worked, more-or-less) would be really awkward.
Nowhere in any race description does the document even suggest a predetermined alignment. The lone exception may be with Tieflings, with "for better or worse" having ancestry in nasty things, but they explicitly say it has no effect on moral outlook.
The concept of completely customizable backgrounds (with some pre-generated ones if you don't want to) is very good. I basically did that already and reflavored the official ones to get close to what I wanted for a character.
I'm not sure about the Ardlings. They feel like de-buffed Aasimar, which puts them more in line with a celestial-flavored Tiefling. I guess that's the point. I don't care for the animal head thing.
A flat 50 gp budget for equipment feels fair, but for a brand-new player, a "this or that" choice was way easier. That said, your rogue can now buy studded leather, two daggers, and a bag of ball bearings on day one and be pretty much set for the campaign.
Combining Magic Initiate into three lists (Arcane, Divine, Primal) is very good. Especially for the Primal list – it feels like Rangers got some caster representation. But I imagine an Ancients Paladin or a Scout Rogue with appropriate skills, Thorn Whip, and Hunter's Mark would be a better Ranger than most Rangers.
Getting free Inspiration on a 20/d20 is fine, but the DM's I play with aren't stingy with it. One suggestion I saw was to give Inspiration on a 1/d20 instead to even out the bumps, which feels nice.
I have mixed feelings on the "only player characters crit, and then only on weapon dice" thing. Seeing a full-HP low-level character get massive-damage killed in one hit from a crit feels bad, but also makes for good stories. And you never feel more powerful than when you crit-Smite an undead creature as a Paladin. Bursty damage is hard to design a game around, but it's usually pretty fun in practice.
I do not like "all nat 1's are fails" thing at all. If you finagle a +12 or whatever in a skill, you should basically never fail at that skill check.
...
I did not intend on writing that much about Dungeons and Dragons. I guess I have a lot of ideas. But I would never want to actually be in charge of this stuff. There are a lot of angry people on the internet this week who are pretty upset about their play-pretend-with-math game. Some people stuck with 3.5e or 4e, I'm sure some will do the same with 5e.
Re-Listening to Podcasts from the Dark Times
A good chunk of my job involves standing at a fume hood, mostly by myself, and doing stuff with my hands. Early on in grad school I started listening to podcasts, and they're great for when you're doing extended solo work.
I kind of only listen to two types of podcasts. There's the "two or three friends just talk about stuff" type and the "one person tells you about historical stuff" type. Sometimes the first type has a vague outline but it's better as it becomes more freeform, because the show is really more about the people than the topics. The second type is effectively a history audiobook that is released a chapter at at time. I know I'm weird, because the more popular interview shows and the murder documentaries and public radio essays don't really do it for me.
There aren't really even that many examples of either type that I actually enjoy, so I end up listening back through favorites. Usually this entails downloading episode 1 and just going through it in chronological order. I'm currently going through a Roderick on the Line re-listen, which is a perfect example of the "just some friends talking about stuff" type.
Podcasts are especially nice when the world is terrible and you just want to hear cool people talking about cool stuff. The problem with the more free-form types, though, is when you get to certain points in time. Say, November of 2016, when a little over 50% of Americans just sort of had to sit and blink, or panic, or plan a move to Canada. If I'm doing a podcast re-listen, I sort of have to skip a few months.
The other, obviously, is around mid-March 2020. We all had to start taking the wrong kind of vacation. It's pretty wild to think how (most of us) reacted to a few cases here or there. Compare that to the current, "who cares lol" wave of mid-2022, where there are something like an order and a half magnitude more cases than early 2020 despite a decent vaccination campaign (at least in California) but many people seem to think that everything's fine. But I digress.
It's been more than two years, so the panic at the start of the current unpleasantness is kind of history now. But it's hard to listen to people say "well, we'll get through this eventually" because we really haven't yet.
So, maybe two periods of podcast re-listening time to skip now.