Every so often I’ll discuss plot holes in movies. Sometimes I’m critiquing a movie I liked. Other times I’m excorciating a movie I hated.

For example, last month I posted a lengthy essay discussing (among other things) some significant problems with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

Another example would be the plethora of plot holes Peter Jackson created in The Two Towers. (Gratuitous examples include teleporting ents, the elven legion from Lothlorien that teleports to Helm’s Deep, and Faramir’s strangely psychic ability to know events taking place in Rohan on the same day that they occur.)

And frequently, during the ensuing discussions, someone will trot out what I’ve come to refer to as the Big Sleep Fallacy.

The Big Sleep is a classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. It’s a noir detective story based on Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name and Chandler also wrote the screenplay. It’s widely considered to be one of the best movies ever made. It’s also remembered as having an incredibly convoluted plot. The most notable example of this is that one of the murders in the film is never explained. When asked about it later, Chandler himself couldn’t identify the murderer. It’s a huge gaping plot hole.

And the Big Sleep Fallacy looks like this: “The Big Sleep was a great movie. The Big Sleep has a famous plot hole. Therefore, there’s nothing wrong with having plot holes.”

Err… No. If you think that makes sense, I’m afraid you’re in dire need of a remedial logic class.

If you want to go for the weaker conclusion that “movies can have plot holes and still be good”, then you’re in decent shape. But with the stronger conclusion you’re assuming the unstated premise that “great movies are without flaw”. And even if you can swallow such a patently ridiculous premise, you’ve now introduced an ancillary conclusion that “plot holes aren’t flaws”… which also appears to be patently ridiculous.

You can also scent the fundamental error here by noting that The Big Sleep is specifically noteworthy for having such a significant plot hole while still being considered a great movie. In other words, that type of thing is unusual and therefore merits mention. If great movies routinely had gaping plot holes lying around, then the appearance of one in The Big Sleep wouldn’t be of notable significance.

… and that’s my rant for the day.

I’ve spent the past our or so browsing through Traps & Treachery, Grimtooth’s Traps, and the Book of Challenges for inspiration in designing a trap-laden dungeon of doom.

While reading the last of these, a supplement published by WotC during the early days of 3rd Edition, I was struck by the following piece of advice for the neophyte DM:

Make Them Dig Deep: In a lair of cold creatures, only the sorcerers will be able to muster enough fire spells to win. Using many of the same type of creatures drains a subset of the party’s resources while never tapping into another subset. The heroes need to ration resources, and that benefits those on the receiving end of the PCs’ wrath.

This advice is not given as a “one true way” of doing things. It’s instead offered on a platter of several different ways of mixing things up and structuring encounters and adventures in way that makes things just a little bit tougher for the PCs than they would normally be.

But if you’re ever looking for a concrete example of the difference between the design ethos of 3rd Edition and the design ethos of 4th Edition, that quote isn’t a bad place to start. Because any 4th Edition designer would consider that quote to be anathema: It violates two of the core principles of 4th Edition gaming (“all characters should participate in all encounters” and “strategic resource management is bad”).

A couple of days ago I mentioned in the comments that, in my opinion, “the narrow range of options that results from this design ethos is bland and boring”. It was particularly because that comment was fresh in my mind that this quote jumped out at me while I was reading. It’s a perfect example of the type of gameplay that was unceremoniously stripped out of 4th Edition.

Here’s the two-bit tour of the current financial crisis: In an attempt to cure the woes that led to the Great Depression, the banking industry was regulated. These regulations were designed to rein in unchecked greed from running us, lemming-like, off a financial precipice. Over the past thirty years, the Republican philosophy of de-regulation — championed by conservative leaders like Reagan, Bush, and McCain — systematically dismantled these protections. The warning flags were raised with the S&L crisis in the late ’80s (which included significant scandals including George W. Bush’s brother and John McCain himself). But, after the S&L bailout was paid, these warning signs were largely ignored and the Republicans continued on their de-regulating crusade.

Which brings us to today. With a significantly deregulated mortgage market, lenders issued riskier and riskier mortgages in the pursuit of more and more money. And because the banking industry had been deregulated, they were able to package these risky mortgages into unregulated securities… which could be sold to give them more money to make even riskier mortgages. In many ways it resembled a pyramid scheme and eventually, like all pyramid schemes, it collapsed as the risky mortgages started failing.

Today the value of these securities has completely flat-lined. They’re worthless paper because nobody has any confidence in the value of the risky mortgages on which they’re based. But our entire deregulated financial system is so heavily invested in these worthless mortgages as a result of the unregulated securities they were packaged into that the entire system is in danger of eminent collapse.

(Warning: The previous paragraphs contains gross over-simplification of a complex issue.)

So, enter the bailout: The government will buy up these bad mortgages (although no one is sure exactly what they’re worth), which will hopefully save the financial institutions which foolishly invested in them. If you think of the bad mortgages as a thug with his foot on the windpipe of the financial institutions, we’re grabbing the thug and giving the financial institutions a chance to get back on their feet.

But there’s a problem with this analogy: There is no thug and no innocent victim here. The financial institutions we’re trying to help get back on their feet were the ones putting their feet on their own windpipes.

What’s needed here is not a rescue. It’s an intervention.

Here’s a better analogy: Our financial institutions are cutters. They like to hurt themselves. It’s not really their fault. It’s just that, collectively, they’re incapable of controlling their own greed. We need to get them help. And an important part of that help will be putting them in a straitjacket so that they can’t keep hurting themselves.

The name of that straitjacket? Regulation.

And this is my primary objection to the Bush bailout plan: It throws money at a symptom without actually curing the disease. The fact that the symptom itself (the dead weight of these sub-prime mortgage securities) is bad enough that it needs to be addressed doesn’t mean we should be ignoring the disease. And that means that part of this bailout needs to be a re-institution of the post-Depression regulations that were put in place to stop exactly this kind of disaster from happening again.

But there’s also another problem to be addressed here: The bad mortgages.

The bailout is designed to buy up those bad mortgages, wave a magic wand over them, and make them disappear. (This looks like another analogy, but it isn’t. The Treasury Department really has no idea what they’re going to do with these mortgages once they buy them.)

But, again, that’s just a crude attempt at treating the symptom. The problem is that these are bad mortgages. Just transferring ownership to the public isn’t going to change that fact.

So why are these bad mortgages? Because (a) the people who borrowed money under these mortgages are likely to default on their payments and (b) the value of the property itself has been devalued so that foreclosure won’t recoup the lender’s investment.

And why are these people likely to default on their payments? It’s not as if anyone wakes up one day and says, “You know what would be fun? Getting foreclosed and ruining my credit!”

Well, there are two primary reasons:

(1) They have lost the income that allowed them to make the payments on the mortgage. (They may have lost their job or the other costs of living may have risen to a point where they can no longer afford the payments.)

(2) The size of the payment has increased to the point where they can no longer afford the payment. (The result of an adjustable rate mortgage, a balloon payment mortgage, or similar “teaser rate” schemes.)

There’s little that can be done about the former (short of strengthening our economy in general), but the latter is — once again — the direct result of deregulating the mortgage industry. The types of mortgages are predatory in nature, irresponsible for both lender and borrower, and (as we have seen) extremely dangerous for our economy.

It should be obvious to anyone looking at this crisis objectively that these types of loans need to be regulated out of existence. Like usury interest rates, there is no reason for them to exist.

But I would go one step further. We shouldn’t just be getting rid of these loans going forward, we should be figuring out a way of retrofitting the existing loans so that the people currently holding these loans can continue making their monthly payments.

I’m not a mortgage expert, so I don’t know the best way of accomplishing that. But we know that the homeowners with these mortgages were (and probably are) capable of making a reasonable monthly payment. The goal is to find a way to restructure these mortgages to lock in this reasonable monthly payment. And that may be offering a lower interest rate; extending the term of the loan; or any number of other things.

For the loans that we end up purchasing as part of this bailout, this type of retrofitting should be relatively easy to carry out under the auspices of a properly formulated agency. For other loans of this nature out on the market, we can probably offer incentives to encourage/bailout the financial institutions needing to restructure these “assets” on less favorable terms.

REHABILITATION PLAN

So instead of talking about a “bailout”, let’s instead talk about a Rehabilitation Plan based on three pillars:

(1) We will treat the immediate symptom of this crisis by buying up these bad loans, giving our financial institutions some breathing room.

(2) We will re-institute proper regulation of our financial system to insure our economic security in the future.

(3) We will retrofit existing ARMs and similar mortgages to reduce the foreclosure rate. This will benefit homeowners, help to stabilize these rocky segments of our financial markets, and reduce foreclosures (which will also help the real estate market recover and further stabilize the market).

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

CHARACTER BACKGROUND: DOMINIC TROYA

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Character Background: Dominic Troya

With the first prelude concluded, we now move on to introducing the rest of the main characters for In the Shadow of the Spire, starting with an Imperial priest named Dominic Troya.

But while you’re reading that, I’m going to back up and continue talking about the first prelude featuring Tee and Agnarr. This prelude was a modified version of The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho, an adventure by Mike Mearls.

One of the issues I faced in designing the prelude was the non-standard party composition: Agnarr was a 1st-level barbarian and Tee was a 1st-level rogue. A barbarian is obviously pretty interchangeable with a fighter, but that still left two of the four core roles — cleric and wizard — unfilled.

But, truth be told, I find the typical hand-wringing over the need for a “standard party” to be a trifle overwrought. I’ve played with lots of odd-sized and odd-classed parties in D&D before, and I’ve virtually never found it to be a problem.

The one exception I’ve found is the mostly immutable need for some form of magical healing. Combat in D&D is strongly designed around the hit-and-heal cycle: The game assumes that you’re going to get hit and that you will then be healed.

Everything else, in my experience, is negotiable. Yes, if you’re missing other key roles in the party they will be missed. Without the consistency of a fighter, adventuring days will probably be shorter. Without the firepower of an arcanist, more powerful enemies will need to be avoided. Without a rogue, traps will become far more dangerous. And so forth. But, as I talked about in Fetishizing Balance, this is just a matter of adjusting the difficulty of encounters and the style of gameplay to suit the characters that the players want to play.

In fact, I’ve even played in a couple of short adventures without magical healing. This isn’t so much impossible as it is radically different. Without magical healing, combat in D&D almost instantly turns into a grim ‘n gritty exercise. Wounds take days or weeks to heal and any kind of serious injury — which can be almost trivial to receive — will force the party into rehabilitation. Hit point inflation still makes it possible for higher level characters to pull off some amazing things, but they’ll suffer for it.

In the case of the prelude, however, this grim ‘n gritty environment wasn’t what I was shooting for. (In no small part because I was using a published adventure as a foundation and I would have had to pretty much toss out the whole thing.) So I targeted the party’s shortcoming — magical healing — and provided a healing totem that had been given to Agnarr by the shamans of his tribe.

Mechanically this was basically just a wand of cure light wounds that worked with a command word instead of a spell trigger (so that it could be used without having a cleric in the party). And, if you’ll pardon the pun, it worked like a charm. Several encounters still needed to be adjusted due to the smaller group size, but with a large supply of magical healing available to them the barbarian and the rogue were still able to enjoy traditional-style romp through a dungeon crawl.