Pheasants are really stupid birds. They’ll go into a potato patch, dig up a potato, and start eating it. But if anything distracts them enough to make them look away from the potato, they’ll drop the potato. “Ugh!” they say. “Someone’s been eating this potato!” And they’ll move along to the next potato until… “Oh! Gross! Someone’s been eating this potato!”

You end up with a whole line of potatoes with one or two bites out of them.

In my personal little headcanon I like to imagine zombies do the same thing: “RAWWWGGHHH!! DELICIOUS FLESH!!!! MUAAARGHHH… Oh. Gross. This one’s dead. Let’s get another one.”

Query: “My PCs were drugged, captured, tortured, and put on a slow boat to their execution. The villain comes in to interrogate them and they just toss one-liners and empty threats at him. How do you get your players to take your villains seriously?”

Kill them.

I’m not saying you should capriciously seek to slaughter them, but if the logical outcome of the PCs’ actions is lethal then let the dice fall where they may and don’t protect them from the consequences.

A lot of GMs shield their players from the negative consequences of the actions they take… and then wonder why the players keep engaging in bad behavior. (One common reason for this is that the GM is protecting the railroaded plot they’ve predesigned. But it just demonstrates how the railroader’s desire for rigid conformity actually just creates a compounding fragility which makes it ever more difficult to achieve the conformity.)

Conversely, I’ve played in games where PCs had explicit script immunity and had great experiences. But it requires the players to erect a rigid wall between their metagame knowledge and the actions of their characters. If the characters start acting as if they knew they had script immunity things go bad very, very quickly.

I’m generally a fan of Sherlock (the modern reimagining of Sherlock Holmes by Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss that’s so ubiquitous I’m just going to assume you know about it). I have some rather lengthy thoughts on how Moffat’s handling of Doctor Who has gone off the rails that I may spew across the Alexandrian at some point, but Sherlock has managed to mostly avoid those problems.

Mostly.

Unfortunately, there’s a real danger that the problems Sherlock is currently laboring under could turn into a metastatic cancer on the series (as evidenced by Doctor Who).

Let’s first consider the decision to simply not resolve the cliffhanger at the end of the second series. The ambiguity they attempted to embrace is arguably interesting, but it’s a burnt earth approach to writing: They presented a seemingly insoluble puzzle, implied that the solution to it would be amazing, and then deliberately failed to deliver. Fair enough. But that means the one thing that won’t be effective again is hanging a cliffhanger on a seemingly insoluble mystery: No one is going to take it seriously because you’ve already made it clear you have no intention of providing a satisfactory conclusion.

And yet what do they do literally three episodes later? Present the exact same cliffhanger a second time, but this time featuring a different character.

That would be lazy and uninspired writing at the best of times. But it’s particularly anemic because they’ve already established that they have no intention of following through.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I stop watching your show.

The more insidious problem, however, is the sloppy writing in the third series. (Exactly the sort of sloppy writing that we’ve been seeing a lot of over in Doctor Who.) A key example is the end of the season finale: It depends entirely on Magnussen failing to search them for weapons, despite the fact that the episode explicitly established that Magnussen has everyone he meets with searched for weapons. (It’s particularly silly because the only thing establishing Magnussen’s paranoia about weapons accomplishes is to render the ending of the episode into nonsense.)

In order for Sherlock to work as a series, it has to deliver sharp, clever scripts that support the conceit that its main character is sharp and clever. If it stops doing that it’s going to die a quick death, no matter how sexy and talented its two main stars may be.

I saw Blade II in the theaters with a large group of people. One of my enduring memories from that film is from the drive home, when a member of the group insisted on criticizing the film because its vampires failed to honor the rules of Vampire: The Masquerade. I thought it was bizarre that someone felt that one piece of speculative fiction should be bound by the rules of another.

I mention this because I’ve noticed that fiction featuring time travel seems to bring this behavior out in people who would otherwise find it ridiculous to, say, hold Short Circuit to the Three Laws of Robotics (or whatever). It seems that a lot of people have very firm ideas about how time travel is “supposed” to work and they’re very unhappy whenever a film violates those “rules”.

SPOILERS AHEAD

This is something I’ve mentioned previously while talking about the handling of causality in Looper. That made sense to me because the Looper’s version of time travel was so unorthodox and unique. But I was really kind of taken aback when Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar prompted similar outrage for its use of a pretty bog-standard bootstrap paradox.

For those unfamiliar with bootstrap paradoxes, they involve any situation where an event appears to cause itself. This most often occurs with information. For example, you send a message back in time to yourself and then, when the time comes, you know what message you have to send because you already received it. But… who wrote the original message?

It hurts your brain because you’ve spent your entire life living a temporally linear life, but it’s widely used in time travel stories. (In fact, sometimes it can seem as if it’s almost impossible to find a time travel story that doesn’t feature a bootstrap paradox.)

RESOLVING THE BOOTSTRAP

How can the 5-dimensional creatures in Interstellar create a wormhole that’s required for their own existence?

There are a couple of ways to resolve (or, perhaps, understand) bootstrap paradoxes and maybe relieve your headache.

First, assume that the linearity of time is an illusion. Interstellar talks about this in the form of time being a “canyon” that the 5-dimensional beings can climb into and out of: All of time exists simultaneously. This radically changes the concept of causality (possibly eliminating it entirely.) In this scenario the question, “How can they create a wormhole if they need the wormhole to create wormhole?” is like asking, “How can you drop a rock into the canyon if the rock will land at the bottom?”

Second, and perhaps slightly easier to grok, is the “hidden iterations” theory of establishing stable timelines with time travel. Take the scenario in Terminator, for example. We can imagine a first iteration of events in which causality proceeded normally: Sarah Connor had sex with some random dude from the 20th century and gave birth to a son who later led a rebellion. Then SkyNet tries to use time travel to kill her son, so her son sends Kyle Reese back in time. This creates a second iteration in which Sarah Connor has sex with Kyle Reese and gives birth to a different son who also grows up to lead a rebellion. The timeline is now a stable loop and no longer changes (until James Cameron gets a really cool idea for a sequel).

Similarly, one can imagine an “original” version of history where humanity’s space program never found a wormhole and decided to do something like colonize Mars instead: Most of the human race dies off, but our civilization survives and eventually evolves into the 5-dimensional beings. And then the 5-dimensional beings look back and say, “It still sucks that billions of people died on the planet of our birth. I think we can fix it, though.” And then they send the wormhole back through time and rewrite the history of their own creation (but this time without the mass extinction event).

Third, in the specific case of Interstellar, you can assume that there is no bootstrap paradox: Cooper is simply wrong about the 5-dimensional aliens being a future version of humanity. (One of the really great things about the film, actually, is that it features a lot of people being wrong about a lot of things…. or maybe being right about them, but in ways that the film is not interested in proving one way or the other.)

Common misconception: It’s not accurate to say “roll the dice” when you’re only rolling a single die. It would also be inappropriate to say that you’re rolling a single dice.

Actually, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, this isn’t true: First, the singular use of “dice” is recognized as correct.

Second, The singular “die” dates to 1393. The singular use of “dice” dates to 1388. So, technically, the singular use of “dice” is actually older than the singular use of “die”.

Furthermore, the plural use of “dice” only dates back to 1330. So, essentially, both “die” and “dice” have been used interchangeably as the singular form of the plural “dice” since Day One.

While I’ve got you thinking about dice, though, you might as well check out the “Dice of Destiny” article I wrote back in 1999.