Blog @ Canadian Geek

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A recent word storm has sprung on the net over the date of this year’s New York ComicCon, which apparently falls on the Jewish festival of Passover. This Rant is going to touch on that, the writer of the initial criticism and about society as a whole, I suppose, so if you are the type who does not enjoy, appreciate or respect the opinions of others in regards to religion, please stop reading now.

I only wish I could feel as passionately about anything as a traditional Jewish observer does about their faith but I don’t. I lack the personal resolve to commit myself so intrinsically into anything that I will always be relegated to the sidelines of absolute beliefs. And while I seldom comprehend one’s absolute devotion to, well, anything, I can respect it. To a degree.

Neil Kleid is a New York based cartoonist who has, at the end of January, taken some offence to the fact that the 2008 New York ComicCon is being held on the weekend of Passover. He posted an open letter on his LiveJournal stating as such.

Without knowing all of the particulars of why a show that had, for the previous 2 years been held in February, moved to April, Neil decided to take the organizational committee to task for allowing the show to occur at the same time as Passover. He actually states that he is “annoyed that the folks at Reed (Exhibitions) didn’t even take the holiday into account.” without actually knowing if it was taken into account or not. He further states that “it’s frankly insulting” that the organizers didn’t even take the time to “open a calendar and see whether the dates of the convention conflict with major holidays”. Neil knows a lot for someone who, in his opening, admits that “I don’t know the details” about why the date changed.

Lance Fensterman, head of the NYCon replied to Neil’s comments and made it clear that that weekend was all that was available to them at the venue where the con was being held. Even after seeing Lance’s reply, Neil still was not happy. So my question becomes, how far do we go please everyone?

I can remember a time when everything and I mean everything was closed on Sundays and Christmas (except essential services). It’s hardly the case these days, especially when you see movies like AVP Requiem opening on Dec 25th. Has Christmas become less of a holiday because of it? Well Neil thinks that “the decision to take the dates given (for the NYCon) despite them falling on Passover makes our holiday appear to be of lesser import.”

While I can’t disagree with his feelings, I do have to ask, where does it end? At what point do we draw the line when considering holding an event that falls on a holiday? What are the criteria? Do only certain religions get considered? With an increase in the number of “recognized” religious dates, how could anyone schedule anything without raising the ire of some group of people?

And I can’t believe for one minute that nothing happens on Passover. Like Christmas, the movement to provide not just services but also entertainment to those who do not recognize certain religious holidays is growing fast. As a member of the sector that no longer HAS to be open nearly every day of the year but is EXPECTED to be open every day of the year, the arrogance of any individual to say that an event shouldn’t occur because they can’t be a part of it offends me, especially when laced with the ignorance expressed in Neil’s open letter.

It’s sad that there are people in the world who are still looking to be persecuted instead of dealing with actual problems. The NYCon did what they have to do as a business and I’m sure it was not an easy decision to make. The fact that Neil, without knowing anything about why it happened, instantly skewed the happenings towards a bashing of his religion is a bit disturbing to me. Instead, why didn’t he just email them and ask, “Hey, did you know you booked your con on Passover weekend?” Had he done that I’m sure the comic internet community would have had to deal less with the passion of Neil’s faith.

I’m sorry you’ll have to miss the con, Neil. I applaud your faith but your attack on people without knowledge of why they do what they do is truly more damaging than a comic con on any holiday.

-The Shepherd

My roleplaying experience has pretty much revolved exclusively around Star Wars.  My first game was the West End Games 2nd Edition Star Wars RPG, which I played for many years.  When I joined the SWRPGA, the d6 rules were still going strong.  When WotC published the d20 Version of the Star Wars rules, the club pushed back quite severely, myself included.  In hindsight, it was rebellion for the sake of rebellion rather than a real aversion to the new take on the rules.  Eventually, the senior members of the club realized that we had to embrace the new rules so that the new players didn’t feel outcast.  As for myself, I didn’t pick up the d20 rulebook for many years, as I tried to focus more on storytelling than gameplay mechanics.  Eventually, I found a copy of the first edition rulebook at a used bookstore, so I decided to purchase it.  By that time, the Revised Core Rules had been out for a while, but the changes weren’t so significant for the mechanics I wanted to utilize, so I didn’t care that much.  Shortly thereafter, I burned myself out trying to run the SWRPGA - and I wanted to spread my wings, so to speak.  I started a new site, d6d20, originally dedicated to ‘anything but Star Wars’ and passed the torch at the SWRPGA.  Fast forward a year or so - and the Star Wars Saga Edition was announced.  I didn’t give it much thought, but as the release neared, I became excited.  Coupled with a new-rekindling of my love of Star Wars, I bought the book.  I was very impressed with the rules - and I lifted the ‘ban’ on Star Wars at d6d20, which has resulted in a number of Saga games popping up.

While I had a bit of mechanical play-through with my group of players in the Dawn of Defiance  campaign provided by Wizards.  I also had the opportunity to run a scenario of Saga at the EGA’s RPGCon.  This gave me a few more insights into the system to write a better review of the game (it also gave me another experience - Running a Con Game).

The one main goal of the Star Wars Saga Edition is to capture the cinematic nature of the source material.  Ultimately, I think they’ve succeeded.

Character creation is quicker than your standard d20 game.  The first stages are the same - attribute generation, species selection, class selection.  There are no surprises in the attributes they are still Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, and Cha.  The core book contains a good smattering of the species from the Star Wars universe (Humans, Bothans, Cereans,  Twi’leks, Gungans and Zabraks, to name a few), each have their own advantages and disadvantages, and I think that the species are fairly balanced against each other.  Once you have your attributes and species selected, you move onto class selection.  In Saga, there are five base classes: Jedi, Noble, Scoundrel, Scout, and Soldier.  As with other d20 systems, your class gives you particular abilities and access to certain feats.  Your class also determines your class bonuses to a new somewhat concept - your defenses.

In Saga, instead of Saving Throws, you have static ‘defenses’ that improve as you level (by one point every other level).  The three defenses are familiar terms: Reflex, Fortitude, and Willpower.  Doing away with saving throws lowers the amount of rolling done by the players and speeds combat up significantly.  As an example - when attacking, the attacker rolls his attack.  If his attack roll (including bonuses) is equal to or higher than the defender’s defense (in this case, Reflex), the attack succeeds, then damage is rolled.  An interesting side effect of the way your defenses improve is that armor becomes less helpful, as you have the option to either wear armor and take its benefits or take one half your character’s level.  As what I would consider to be common armor at best gives you a +4 to your Reflex Defense (and no bonus to your others), you would quickly want to shed your armor.  I feel this mechanic (intended or unintended) really helps drive the ‘feel’ of the Star Wars Universe.  When you watch the movies, the heroes don’t wear armor, so it makes sense that the game mimics that.

 Another addition to the classes are talent trees, an idea obviously taken from d20 Modern.  It is a welcome addition and gives players an opportunity to specialize their characters in their class.  Having certain talents also ends up being a requirements for some of the Prestige classes in later levels.  Also, characters are granted feats.  Feats are the same as they were before - no comments to be made there.

The truly interesting concept in Saga is the reformed skills.  Not only has the number of skills been reduced (albiet, only slightly), but the way they are used has changed too.  Even if untrained, your skills improve over time, by one half your character level (rounded down) - which means, no clumsy skill rank system.  Each class is given a number of class skills which they can train in (each class is given a particular number of skills they can train in initally, plus their INT modifier).  Training in a skill grants you a +5 bonus to all checks relating to that skill.  Some uses of a skill require training, but the basic uses do not.  In addition, you can train in new skills through the Skill Training Feat, or improve your Training in a Skill with the Skill Focus Feat (which grants another +5 bonus).  As one of my online group member’s put it: “you’re unskilled, skilled or have a masters degree”.  I haven’t played with the system at higher levels, so we’ll see how having everyone with a +5 (or more) to their skills just because they have 10 levels goes when I get there.  Overall, I like the mechanic.

Force powers seem to work well.  As a Jedi, you are able to train and get a set of powers, which you can use - once per training in that power in a situation.  If you rest for a minute, you regain all spent powers.  Its a simple mechanic (it involves the Use the Force skill) and in my experience is alot easier to administer than the d6 counterpart.

The only other additions to combat is the condition track and damage threshold.  The damage threshold is a number that is generally your FORT defense (plus any modifiers) that represents how many points of damage you can take before moving down the condition track.  So, if you take damage equal to your damage threshold and you still have hitpoints, you move down the track by one square.  The condition track has 5 steps (-1, -2, -5, -10, helpless) and represents how wounded you are.  As you move down, the greater the penalties you incur when performing tasks.  It works nicely and like everything else, its pretty simple.

A problem we encountered at the Con game was that according to the rules, you cannot grapple an opponent without having certain feats, and in general, the unarmed combat rules were lacking.  We worked around that in our game as a quick fix, but if I was running something longer term, I’m going to need to develop some new house rules.

Online, there has been a number of debates about the rule mechanics of kneeling.  The rules seem to contemplate only two stances: Prone and Not-Prone.  I felt this did not fit the game well, so I made a ruling that basically halves the bonuses (and penalties) for being Prone.  I think this fixes that ‘hole’ to my satisfaction.

 Another comment I had regarding the book was its lack of vehicles.  From my understanding, the Starships of the Galaxy sourcebok is almost entirely stats for starships, but the land vehicle area still is lacking somewhat.  A fellow Con-goer, commented on the lack of ‘fluff’ or setting in the book.  Personally, I felt that most people picking up the game were already quite familiar with the Star Wars Universe, so it wasn’t required.  The information the book does provide covers all 6 movies and provides a bit of information regarding some major Expanded Universe happenings.  I see his point, but for my style of GMing, what is there is good enough.

I think that Saga is an excellent addition to my library and anyone with an interest in any former edition of the Star Wars RPG would find this system easy to learn.  The rules are set up for fast-paced action (assuming you set up your encounters correctly), with a low amount of dice rolling, and a real sense of character advancement.

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There’s no disputing comics have grown in the last couple decades. Point the finger at the Dark Night, Watchmen, the Punisher or whoever you wish but a lot of the charm and innocence of the comics of yesterday have departed us in favour of more “real” and “gritty” stories.

I’m not even sure if the supposed harmless or all ages titles being published today are really that good for kids either. I was informed by one parent that “Mouse Guard” was too violent for their 9 year old but a part of me thinks back to the fantasy animal books I read as a youngster (”Watership Down” popping to mind instantly) and wonders why today’s parents are concerned with showing their children images of mice sword-fighting snakes and each other. But that’s not really the point of this Rant.

What is more concerning me is the recent push by publishers to create comics for kids, specifically, educational comics. I’m not against education in comics, in fact I’ve learned as much from comics as one could, I suppose, but when these books are targeted at schools to be used as tools for kids, there is one thing that pisses me off more than anything.

The price.

Case in point. Standard comics (Spidey, Sups, etc.) are generally 24 pages of story, full colour, for $3 which breaks down to about $0.13 per page (if we use the actual solicited numbers, 32 pages, cause you should count the ads, it’s $0.09 per page). In my opinion, not a bad deal for some storytelling and artwork that I get to keep around and revisit when my whimsy hits. However educationally generated comics seem to have a much higher value.

Barron’s Graphic Classics produced two books in late 07, one based on Dracula and the other adapting “The Man in the Iron Mask”. Both books are 48 pages for $8.95 ($0.19 per page). Capstone Press offered a great selection of books for Black History month in the December Previews featuring not just the standard King Jr. and Jackie Robinson but also Booker T Washington and Wilma Rudolph. Sadly the books are 32 pages for $7.95 ($0.25 per page). And in 2006, HH bought several books from Rosen Publishing, with the intention of reselling them to the schools we had been dealing with. I was so excited when I first saw the books that I didn’t even look at the price. Talk about sticker shock. 32 pages for $11.95.

I complained to Rosen and apparently I wasn’t the only one and they did shave off $3 per book but that still left them in the realm of unreasonable. And not just for the price but also for the quality of the storytelling and the art. They were sub-standard by comic market levels and when I attempted to continue my dialogue with Rosen as to why their books were so pricey (I stayed away from commenting on quality), they never responded directly, only saying they were sorry I was unhappy with their product.

There are exceptions and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Eureka Productions and their series of “Graphic Classics” (usually 144 pages for $10 BUT, black and white). Overall, I am befuddled as to why comics that work so hard to entertain and educate kids feel the need to price themselves so ridiculously high. It is the same reason I never wanted to carry Pokemon cards in my stores as the price per pack, and we were on the low end at $6 for a 6 card pack, was offensive when compared against Magic The Gathering, which I could retail for $3.75 for a 15 card pack.

Is the market aimed at children so cut-throat that the “bleed ‘em dry” mentality must be so dominate? When you have a new breed of readers/players/collectors every couple years, isn’t the longevity of your product a bit more secure than that of an aging Super or Spider-fan? I’m truly at a loss.

Which is why when schools ask me about these books, I warn them ahead of time. With budgets as tight as they are, I can get them 5 times the page count and value for their money against an educational book by getting them an “Edu-manga” and teachers love that. 24 pages for $8, come on! Educators may be desperate for tools to help teach kids but they’re not stupid.

On a parting note, I should mention that a fairly big name comic publisher mostly known for their horror comics is jumping into the mix. IDW, home to such children’s classics as “30 Days of Night” and “Gene Simmons Dominatrix” is debuting the first of their children’s picture books with January’s “Michael Recycle”. Order your 28-page book for only $15.99 today!

The Shepherd

There’s a number of challenges that face roleplayers these days.  The lack of time, the lack of ‘new blood’, getting/keeping a gaming group alive are just a few of the things that we find ourselves dealing with.  And that only covers face-to-face!

As primarily a play-by-post roleplayer, I find the time excuse (generally) to be moot.  With that said, it is easy to become overwhelmed if you join/run too many games.  But if you know what your limits are, you can organize your day to put in the 10-20 minutes to put up a post or a flurry of posts in a game or two.  The problem with play-by-post is the time.  Things aren’t always as fast as you’d like them to move.  For instance, I just ran a sample Star Wars Saga combat session, which took almost a month.  Granted, I did let the players ‘take their time’ because I was writing exams.  In both of my games, I’m trying to get a posting rate of 3 times a week, which I’m having difficulties achieving due to my players, when I really should just post without them if they are unable to notify me of their absences. 

When trying to get new people to play, some common responses are:

• RPGs are too complicated (”I don’t know all the rules” / “I can’t create a character” / etc.)
• RPGs are too boring (”It’s just a bunch of people sitting around a table munching snacks?”)
• RPGs are too time consuming (”It’s going to take hours, and we still won’t have gotten anywhere!”)

Yes, time is always a factor - but if its something you enjoy doing, you’ll find time for it.  Of course, if this is someone who’s never played before, you might want to introduce them into a one-shot in the system you’d like to play in or play a pick-up game that is designed for one-session play.  The point being - you can get somewhere in just a few hours.  Then, if you liked the one-shot/short-session game, try a multiple-session game.  Going back to my original statement - if you like it, you’ll find time to do it.

RPGs are boring…well, I guess I can’t provide an argument to that.  If you don’t like it, that’s fine - you don’t have to do it.  But really, how is ’sitting around a table eating snacks’ any different than any other thing you do with your friends?

Finally - the game is too complicated.  I won’t deny that many games are very complex.  There are some that aren’t.  Even with that said, once you learn one system, you generally can run pretty much any sort of game you’d like (to varying degrees of success).  If you learn the d20 system, you’ve got D&D, Modern, Mutants and Masterminds, and Star Wars pretty much covered.  Sure, each have their own ‘tweeks’, but the basic mechanics are the same.  The same goes for the World of Darkness games - you’ve got the full supernatural spectrum covered.  So, once you’ve learned something, you can play a range of games.  Of course, if you’ve never played, it can take some time to learn.  Personally, I think the best way to learn is to just start playing.  If you’re trying to introduce someone to gaming, help them to make them a character (ask questions like, what do you want to be good at, etc), or have the GM give them a character skeleton (allow the new person to customize by providing the personality and background).

These are just a few ideas to help introduce new people to games.  I certainly don’t know how to solve all the problems.  Hopefully, the gaming community can continue to discuss how to introduce new players to our hobby of tabletop gaming.

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I see on forums (forii?) across the webernet with people questioning how and why certain stores “only” get certain things, why things are missing, why one store gets books a week or two after another store, etc. I thought I would take this week to answer some of those questions instead of going on about how much I hate the “Christmas” season and, in kind, humanity in general during said season.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

“There were 2 covers for “Amazing Ultra-Men” but my comic shop only got the ‘B’ cover.”
“My comic shop didn’t get “All-New Fierce Guy” this week but Ted’s Comics did.”

Both of these questions have a simple answer - human error. Now, where the human error occurred, that can vary. First, there’s the store owner/manager/trained monkey who has to record the order, either in the old-fashioned pen and paper method that gets mailed or faxed to the distributor or entered into a data form that gets emailed to the distributor. They may miss a line or miss-type something that results in that book not getting ordered.

The second error could occur when the product becomes available and the peoples in the distribution warehouse are “pulling” product for stores. This is a pretty simple process, in essence, where good folk read a pull sheet and grab that quantity of a certain type of comic and put it into a box for Joe Retailer. What can get complicated is when you think about the fact there are 3500 plus stores in North America who are all getting their comics “pulled” at the same. Every week. All year long. And pull sheets aren’t sorted by title; they are generally sorted by code numbers, making the potential for boo-boo’s even greater.

It’s got to be a bit of a tedious process and I can easily see how Billy could have thought that he pulled 40 copies of “The Mighty Omegas” for Alex’s store in Wyoming but accidents happen and with several million comics a month being distributed across NA, fatigue and human error is bound to occur.

Oh, and then there’s the shipping companies. I have gotten boxes for stores in other provinces and other stores have gotten boxes for me. It happens.

“The latest trade of “Unbelievable Mutant Mommas” was supposed to be out last week but it didn’t ship. When’s it gonna be out?”

When it’s late, it’s late. We, the lowly retailers, don’t get always get updates when late product is going to finally arrive. Sometimes we do but with the sheer number of books shipping in a week/month/year that are running late, we just can’t remember them all and, no, there’s no quick reference master list with that type of info.

This kinda goes hand-in-hand with, “How much will it be when it arrives?” or “When you were selling this product 4 years ago, how much did you sell it for?” A good business person knows a lot about their product. An excellent business person knows an awful lot. But in the end, there’s only so much we can know and sometimes even less we can instantly access to give you some instant gratification. Sometimes, we need a moment or it may require some research and if it does, please be patient. If a busy business owner is willing to take the time to find it out for you, cut them some slack while s/he interrupts what they were doing to tell how much your $3 comic costs exactly (yes, it does happen).

“My store carries “The Excellent East Coast Bashers” but not “Ted Humphries - Squirrelly Avenger”. Why don’t they carry both?”

In short, there’s a lot of f***ing comics out there kid and we only have so much money to buy stock. The key to that sentence is that we BUY our product. Whatever you see on the shelf, we had to purchase and cannot return or exchange. Once it’s in our store, it’s ours forever.

Back in the day, newsstands (drugstores and the whatnot) all got their comics from regional distributors and could tear off the covers of unsold comics and return them for credit. While eliminating the risk of over ordering, the profit margins were small and with the extra paperwork to get credit for unsold product, the effort outweighed the return and many stores got out of selling comics.

From there stemmed the “Direct Market”, where retailers would buy the product outright for bigger margins. This led to stores being able to support themselves by just selling comics, assuming they were savvy enough to know what to buy and how much. These days most retailers cry out for huge margins and full returnability not realizing the absurdity of the request.

“Can you order…?”

This question can end a million different ways but the answer is generally always the same. If it had a street date of more than a couple of months ago, it’s no longer available. Most companies make their product, comic or toy, based on initial orders from distributors. Sometimes they make a little extra but there are very few distributors who “stock” merchandise. Once the product is released, that’s usually all there is. The exceptions to these tend to be trades and Manga, mainly due to their lack of collectibility, which are often reprinted and kept available.

There’s more (there always is) but you probably have better things to do. I don’t, so ask me what more you would like to know about this wacky, madcap industry called comics. Until then I shall remain your

Shepherd

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Welcome to Canada, home of the over converted SRP and constantly fluctuating dollar. As we’ve all heard by now, the Canadian dollar is hovering at par with the US and publishers of comics, magazines, books and more choose not to either A) adjust their cover prices or B) just remove them all together. I guess it’s better to look silly than professional.

Many blogs and columns have addressed the issue with a lot of people who aren’t in the know trying to speculate why publishing houses are doing (or, more acurately, not doing) when it comes to cover prices. I won’t go there cause the only people that can answer that are the head honchos at Marvel, DC, Random House and more and currently, they refuse to do so. What I will touch on is what the people on the front line ARE doing about it.

In Edmonton about 3 weeks ago, a BIG news item came out talking about how Audrey’s Books was now charging the US cover price instead of the Canadian. A nice gesture, sure but not without it’s flaws.

First, they didn’t institute this policy until the dollar actually touched par. Why didn’t they feel the need to not overcharge customers when 3 weeks earlier the dollar was sitting at 1.04? Was the 4 cents too much to lose? Hard to image when you’re charging cover prices based on a 1.35 exchange rate. So, even though it was too late in the game they manged to get some media attention and look like darlings. (And I’m not meaning to pick just on them, many businesses did this - car and applicance dealers, etc. - but Audrey’s got a lot of media attention over it.)

The second issue is how they and several other businesses have decided to just start charging people the US cover price, basically giving people this huge discount against what they were paying the week previous (even though the week previous the dollar was only about 2 cents more costly). Again, a nice gesture but what happens in a month or 6 time when the dollar drops again? Will these stores just flip back to the overinflated Canadian price? Probably except the issue then becomes that the covers prices won’t be adjusted properly and stores will be taking a loss.

Charging the US price is a short term solution that only plays customers like a yo-yo which is why HH, who started discounting Cnd cover prices more than a year earlier, has adopted the policy of pricing all of their product based on the exchange rate they are billed at by their US distributors. Pepole pay what we pay. That seems fair.

And for full disclosure, this was not a concept we came up with. Kelly Dowd, owner of Red Skull Comics in Calgary, began this policy back in 1998, when the dollar was in the gutter and it was a gamble since he was then charging more for many books. Most publishers wouldn’t price comics with the actual Canadian exchange rate becasue it was so high. So if the dollar was sitting at 1.65, they would use 1.5 in hopes to keep more customers. Sadly, this cost retailers money but Kelly discovered that if you have a good store and your prices are fair and honest, it won’t matter what the price tag is, people will still come and buy from you.

So thank you Kelly for helping us help the Geeks of the world. Well, at least the Geeks in the Edmonton area.

* First Rant in a while and I’m a bit dreary so my apologies if this lacks it’s usual venom.