Month: January 2022

Just before the apocalypse, I tossed out a blog post about how 2019 was a good year for movies, cleanly beating out 2015, 2016, and 2017, and getting a less overwhelming but I would say still decisive win over 2018. 2020 was an absolute trainwreck of a year for movies, of course, with the frontrunner being…what, Birds of Prey? New Mutants? Wonder Woman 1984? Sonic the fucking Hedgehog? These are movies that would usually struggle to make it into the top five, and they’re fighting for first place. I have no idea what the final top five movie would even be. Monster Hunter? Mortal Kombat Legends? Onward? We’re basically just grabbing something out of the garbage and shoving it onstage to make sure the live action Mulan doesn’t get it. Maybe we should give fifth place to Xiran Jay Zhao’s YouTube video about why Mulan 2020 is bad. Maybe we should give first place to Xiran Jay Zhao’s YouTube video about why Mulan 2020 is bad.

What about 2021, though? Can it compete with 2018 and 2019? Does it at least hold up to 2015, 2016, and 2017, indicating a recovery from the damage the pandemic did to the film industry? Our standout films of the year are definitely Dune and Encanto, and I think that combo holds up well against the one-two punch of Joker and 1917 that pushed 2019 so high in my estimation. Spider-Man: No Way Home even provides solid competition to Endgame in its fan-service-done-well niche. 2021 also provides a pretty standard share of solid popcorn movies to round out the top five: Shang Chi, Black Widow, The Suicide Squad, No Time To Die. I’ll even call out Free Guy and Jungle Cruise as being fun even though they’re not top five material in this or any other year, but I think it’s worth noting when even the bad films are good enough to pass ninety minutes if (for example) you want to hang out with your little sister for an hour or two while she’s visiting for Christmas.

Still, the top five contenders for 2021 are a bit weak compared to what we’ve had in years past. 2017’s also-rans included Wonder Woman and Lego Batman, 2016 had Rogue One and Zootopia, 2015 had the Martian.

Most years have one stand-out film, and 2021 had both Encanto and Dune. On the other hand, the trailing films compare pretty poorly to most other years and get absolutely pulverized by 2019’s top five contenders, like Knives Out, Endgame, Toy Story 4, Detective Pikachu, the Lego Movie 2, and Spider-Man: Far From Home. Overall, I think 2021 in film holds up well against most other years, and might even be joining 2018 and 2019 in The Best Three Years Of Film Which I Have Bothered To Investigate Even A Little Bit, just on the strength of Dune and Encanto, but it’s doing so as a clear third place behind the other two.

In Gravity Falls S2E16, Roadside Attraction, one of the show’s twin protagonists, Dipper Pines, is trying to get over an unrequited crush on a significantly older girl. His friends recommend he try to date someone else, and his great uncle Stan, a professional con artist, gives him vague and confusing advice about talking to girls that eventually gets boiled down to the three Cs: Confidence, comedy, and something else that starts with C. Stan also advises Dipper to practice flirting with lots of different girls, particularly since they’re on a road trip and he’s unlikely to ever see any of the girls again. Dipper takes his advice and sees initial success, but it so happens that every girl he’s talked to shows up at the final roadside attraction on the trip, stumbling across him on his latest date and demanding an explanation. Dipper runs away, leaving them all fuming, one thing leads to another, and they end up fighting a drider. Dipper learns a valuable lesson about respecting women and erases all the phone numbers/email addresses he collected.

Except, uh, that’s bullshit. Gruncle Stan has his redeeming qualities, but none of them really apply here, so we can safely assume that he’s sleazy with women and would’ve encouraged Dipper to be the same, playing the field long past the point where it would’ve been disrespectful to do so. But the narrative acts like Dipper actually did this – he never even got within the same zip code of it. The one interaction with a girl we see outside of montage is a thirty second mildly flirtatious conversation that ends with her giving him his email. Even if we’re really generous with time compression for the sake of a twenty-two minute runtime, this is one conversation that ends with an invitation to a date, not even an actual date, let alone some kind of real commitment. Just because Dipper has been invited to go on a first date with one girl doesn’t mean he’s not within his rights to go on a date with another girl, or even that he’s obligated to tell the first girl (who he’s shared all of one conversation with) about the second.

If Dipper’s done anything even close to wrong, it’s that he doesn’t text or email any of the girls, when accepting their numbers/emails might suggest an intention to communicate more, but 1) his lesson-learned moment at the end is erasing them all, so apparently that’s the opposite of what the show wants from him, and 2) even that’s pretty presumptuous. If it were a boy giving his number to a flirtatious girl and later acting like he’s entitled to communication, we wouldn’t hesitate to call him self-centered and controlling.

Particularly since Dipper wasn’t even particularly flirtatious in the one interaction we actually see entirely. He suggests she pose for a funny picture and then he pretends to drop her phone, which is kind of dickish and the girl would’ve been justified in being mad about that, but instead she takes it in exactly the spirit Dipper intended it and gives him her email address with only a subtle prompt – an email address which Dipper goes on to ignore, so even if she felt that gentle nudge was obligating her to give away contact information she didn’t want to, Dipper never even used it.

Even when Dipper does accept a date from recurring character Candy, who he has no interest in (Stan convinces him he shouldn’t be picky – the one piece of truly bad advice Stan gives to Dipper), he’s showing poor judgment but hasn’t done anything wrong. Candy is the one being more intimate than Dipper is comfortable with (although we can’t hold Candy at fault either, because Dipper has been pressured by someone else entirely into pretending this is what he wants).

It’s realistic that a twelve-year old would lack the maturity to recognize that he hasn’t made any commitments and therefore can’t be held responsible for breaking them, and that his twelve-year old would-be dates would likewise lack the maturity to recognize that just because they feel jealous doesn’t automatically mean that feeling is Dipper’s fault, but the narrative doesn’t treat this like Dipper being buffaloed into thinking he’s done something wrong when he hasn’t. It acts like Dipper has been dating all of these girls steadily without telling any of them he’s seeing other people, or has been making out with them before riding off into the sunset to do the same thing at the next stop, or that he’s directly lied to them about how seriously he’s taking the relationship. The episode wants to make a point about pick-up artists being scummy, but the problem is that actual scummy behavior would be out of character for Dipper, so instead this is an episode about how if you ever crack a joke to someone, they now own you and you’re not allowed to talk to other people without their permission.

Every now and again, the idea of using poker hands as an RNG for a TTRPG comes up, usually in the context of some kind of western. How would that work?

Five Card Poker

The most obvious way to do this is to just deal out a full five-card poker hand to each player, then let them play a hand whenever they make a check. A better hand is more likely to succeed. After playing a hand, they discard it and draw an entirely new hand.

About 50% of all poker hands are a single, and about 43% are a pair, so you would probably want the standard TN for something anyone could accomplish to be Jack-high, and the TN for most things that you would expect to require expertise to be a pair of Jacks. Your odds of getting two pair or better are about 7%, which is pretty close to a critical hit on a d20. It’s unlikely, but not so unlikely that you don’t usually see one or two in every session. A three-of-a-kind, straight, flush, and full house are all much more rare but still common enough that you’ll very probably see them happen over the course of an entire campaign, loosely comparable to rolling triple sixes on a 3d6, which does happen now and then. Once we get into four-of-a-kind and especially a straight flush or royal flush, we’re getting into territory that’s technically possible but unlikely to come up even once across an entire mid-size campaign.

But this raises the question: How do you add in skills? If your gunslinger is real good at shooting, how does that get reflected in this system? The most obvious way to do it is by allowing them to draw more cards to make a hand out of, but working out the probabilities on that is a huge headache and the value of additional cards goes down the more of them you already have. If you want a narrow range of power between the weakest and strongest characters in the game, that can still work, but even a fairly mundane wild west game wants a deadshot to be much, much better at shooting than a shop keep with broken glasses, so this extra cards approach only works if every character in the game must be a gunslinger with more-or-less the same skills or else if you’re willing to have a game where characters draw 20+ cards to assemble a poker hand out of when they’re using their best skill. At that point, you don’t really feel like you’re playing poker at all.

The second most obvious solution is to convert the poker hand into some kind of total number, to which your skill bonus is added. The problem here is that it’s hard to find a conversion that works across all poker hands. For a single or a pair, the answer seems obvious: Just add the cards together. This way a pair is, on average, worth twice as much as a single. Here’s the problem: Two pair (a hand with four cards to add together) is much more common than three-of-a-kind, and four-of-a-kind is less common than every five-card hand except the straight flush and royal flush. To make the convert-to-number method work, you have to give special conversion methods to most hands (although not the most common hands, at least) to make less common hands more valuable. For example, with two-pair sevens and threes, instead of just adding 7+7+3+3 for 20, you might add 7+3 and then multiply by 1.25 and rounding down for 12. Since three-of-a-kind is on average worth 1.5x a pair, having two-pair be worth on average 1.25x one pair is mathematically sound, but also now you have multiply things by 1.25. Then you have to find some similar conversion for the straight, flush, and full house that all give average results between three-of-a-kind and four-of-a-kind, even though four-of-a-kind is only 1.33x the value of three-of-a-kind. Or you can add a multiplier to four-of-a-kind beyond just adding all four cards together, at which point you’ve sacrificed what little consistency this system had.

The best way (of these three that I’ve thought of, anyway) to incorporate skill bonuses into a poker-based RNG is to have skill bonuses just promote the kind of hand you have. If you have a pair of sevens and a +1 skill bonus, your hand is now two-pair of sevens and some other card that is lower than sevens. With a +2 skill bonus, it becomes three sevens. With a +3 skill bonus, it becomes a seven-high straight. With a +4 bonus, it becomes a seven-high flush. With a +5 bonus, it becomes a full house, sevens over something else.

Two things you’ll notice about this system: First, it’s possible to get normally impossible hands through skill bonuses. If you get a pair of twos with a +3 skill bonus, you now have a two-high straight, which is normally impossible. If you have a pair of sixes with a +4 bonus, it becomes a six-high flush, which is normally impossible because the only way for six to be the highest card of a flush hand is if it’s a straight flush. This is weird, but doesn’t really impact anything. Just roll with it.

Second, we only ever care about the number value of one card in any hand. For two-pair, we only care about the value of the higher pair. For full house, we only care about the value of the triplets. For a straight, we only care about the highest card of the straight. This makes things simpler to resolve anyway. Instead of having over a hundred different combinations of a full house each of which represents a minutely different TN, a full house represents the same two-through-ace scale as every other hand. Jack is the default difficulty, but minor circumstantial bonuses or penalties can nudge the difficulty up to a Queen or down to a ten or whatever.

Hand Building

Another way to do this is with hand building. That means that when you make a check, you don’t discard your whole hand. You discard only the cards used to make the check. You can play a single card to get it out of your hand, taking a dive on whatever check you’re making to try and build up a stronger hand. If you’ve got two-of-a-kind, for example, you could hold onto that and junk other cards until you’re able to get three, or two-pair, or a full house, or something. Building a flush would mean taking a dive on a lot of checks, but it’d be much, much easier to build a flush than to draw one straight from the deck. In fact, it’d be easier to build a flush than a straight, since each card you replace when building to a flush has a 1-in-4 odds of building your flush, but only a 2-in-13 (or slightly worse than 1-in-6) odds of building your straight. Actually, the odds aren’t quite 1-in-4 or 2-in-13, since the cards you’ve already drawn from the deck affect the odds in ways that vary depending on exactly which cards are in your hand, but the basic math still works out: Drawing a flush straight from the deck is less likely than drawing a straight, but building a flush when you get to select which cards to replace will usually go faster than building a straight.

And this also encourages players looking to get rid of junk in their hands to find skill checks that don’t matter so they can safely take a dive on them. This leads to players interacting with the mechanics instead of the narrative, attempting tasks which are challenging enough to warrant a check but which have nothing to do with anything just to manage the abstract, game mechanical resource that is the cards in their hand. Proper game design should be making mechanics and narrative harmonious, so we’ve definitely gone off the rails here.

Hand building sounds interesting, but really only works in board games where you can tightly control when checks are called for in order to guarantee that all checks are relevant and you can never safely take a dive. Then hand building is about minimizing the damage of getting rid of junk, rather than wasting time with actions that totally negate the damage. Unfortunately, the open-ended nature of a TTRPG makes it basically impossible to prevent players from finding things to do that call for a skill check while having no real consequences for failure. They can try to play a fiddle and the worst that’ll happen is they aren’t very good, try to chat up the ladies at the saloon and the worst that’ll happen is they’ll get slapped in the face. They can even throw out some junk cards on activities that could hypothetically cause great harm, but won’t do so except for catastrophic failure. They can try to swim a river to get rid of an unneeded seven of clubs, and while they won’t make it to the other bank, they’re probably not going to straight up drown unless they play a two.

Texas Hold ‘Em

The last RNG idea I’m going to look at here is Texas Hold ‘Em. Each player gets a hand of two cards, and there’s a river of between three and five cards shared between them. With a seven-card hand, the odds of a pair or better are 82%, which means you can make pair of Jacks the base TN for challenges that an ordinary person might struggle with but will probably be able to manage. The odds of three-of-a-kind or better are 15%, which is a pretty good spot for something that experts can manage easily but ordinary people will struggle with, which means you have two pair in between if you need more granularity in the “routine for experts, tough for ordinary people” space. A flush has about 5% odds, making it the natural 20 of the system, and even a four-of-a-kind is not so unusual that you wouldn’t expect to see it once or twice in a campaign. Only the straight flush and royal flush are so rare as to be unlikely to come up across an entire campaign.

On the one hand, it’s good that more hands are coming up. There’s more granularity in the scale of TNs, since more of the potential results are actually achievable, compared to the five-card probability spread where singles and pairs totally dominated the space with only 7.5% of the entire scale left over for anything better than a pair. With seven cards, we have TNs that are 80%, 40%, 15%, 10%, and 5% likely to be hit, and then four more TNs higher than that which are mostly the domain of people with skill bonuses, although an untrained person can still hypothetically hit them. This is a pretty good spread. It gives you room for characters with bonuses ranging from -1 to +3 where each step on that scale is a big deal, so you’d expect this to be the kind of game where you probably don’t level up much, which makes sense. You don’t usually get zero-to-hero stories out of the old west.

The problem is that it’s kinda hard to do the Texas Hold ‘Em thing with three different rounds of revealing cards on the river for every single check. Probably you’ll just put five cards on the river all at once, and then replace them all once a check is made. You could replace just one card, with a first-in, first-out system so that the card that’s been in the river the longest gets removed, but then you get into all the problems with hand building and the bizarre meta-gaming behavior it encourages, with people trying to make useless checks to get the river moving when it’s bad, and trying to avoid all checks to keep the river still when it’s good.

Conclusion

I don’t have one, particularly. I just had a string of disconnected thoughts about how to do some kind of poker-based RNG for a TTRPG, and since I have no plans for any game along those lines any time in the future, this blog post was the only outlet.