D&DNext: The Cursory Examination

Since like a hundred people cared what I thought about Gatsby, here’s a much more contentious topic that everyone is weighing in on – the D&D Next playtest rules. I had a quick look because I still don’t care, and my thoughts here are based on the quickness of that look. Your mileage may vary, product subject to change without notice (this is a playtest, after all)

- It’s still D&D. D’accord.

- They have somehow done a good job of bringing together a lot of ideas from all the different editions, which must have been tricky as hell. Most pleasingly, I see the simplicity of redbook here, with the one line stat line. They’re kobolds, they have 2 hit points, they have an AC of 14, they do X damage. Done and dusted. If you’ve ever felt that D&D lost its way around the time it became AD&D, there’s something for you here – but it doesn’t have THAC0s, so you come out ahead – AC goes upwards, thankfully. There’s also Weapon Proficiences back from 2nd ed, but also a proper skill list from 3rd, but simplified right down to what you’re trained in, like 4th. There’s still Saving Throws but now they’re just Ability Checks (welcome to 1977, D&D!).

- Probably the worst idea is what they did to DC checks. In 3rd, it was 10, 15, 20, 25, 30. Now it can be anything from 1 to 30. More flexible to the needs of the situation, but good luck remembering that the DC for resist poisons is 17, not 19.

- Backgrounds are a nice idea although again, it’s a stone-age one by gaming standards. They give your character a sense of identity beyond class. We have two priests in the set: one who was a knight and one who was a priest. You get different trappings, skills and world impact. It’s like Warhammer (they even made the Halfling a commoner). Welcome to 1985, D&D. Big hi to Rob Schwalb, Warhammer maestro now working on 5e, perhaps showing his hand.

- Themes could be a nice idea, because they provide an extra vector for a class. My class as a fighter means I get weapons and hit points, but then I can be a killy fighter (striker) or a defendy fighter. This allows for an extra place to put many of the fun powerups from 4E (others are in class abilities – maybe? It’s hard to see where the level powers come from). Problem is, the only themes we get to see in the same class for the two clerics: one is defender, one is healy. The fighter is a slayer, the rogue is a lurker, the wizard is a magic user. It’s only going to be really interesting if you can swap themes (and backgrounds) across all classes, if mages can be lurkers and clerics slayers and rogues healers. That’s hard to balance but otherwise we’ve just got kits back again. Which is okay, but it loses the fun of 4e where you could fill the same party role with a completely different ethos. The most boring thing about D&D is that clerics are healers and fighters are fighters, and clerics really need to heal here again, because healing surges etc are gone. If it turns out we can have lurker clerics, this will be more interesting. Right now, we don’t know.

- No sign of so-called modularity in mechanics.

- I have no idea if it has balance issues ala 3E. By making it a lot simpler, they may however just dodge that issue a little bit because it’s harder to care.

- Everything else is pretty much the same. It’s D&D. You go down a tunnel and hit gelatinous cubes with axes until they die. You search for secret doors. Elves are immune to charm and sleep. Yadayadayada.

Overall, if you like D&D but found 3E too fiddly and 4E too fiddly and too high-powered (or too mechanical), you’ll find this one up your alley – it’s like 0D&D cleaned up ala 3e with lots of the toys from 4e. But if you have no problem with 2E or 3e, there’s no great benefit to changing over that I can see. But familiarity may be what the market really wants – it would explain why they keep making clones of the game, after all.

Diablo 3 and WoW: a financial perspective

A friend I cannot name works for a major Australian bank as an actuary and share-wrangler. One of his jobs is to collect financial info from international sources to track stock market trends. His most recent North Korea report made mention of the dent Diablo was creating in other companies. NCSoft (makers of City of Heroes, Guildwars and Aion MMOs, and Mount and Blade) had sales drop 8% when D3 went live, and added in their report:

 

In its second day of releases yesterday, Korea PCcafe rankings revealed that Diablo 3 market share surged to previously unseen levels of 26%, up from 16% on the first day. Based on our visits to PCcafes yesterday, we think the Diablo 3 phenomenon will continue in the next few weeks placing further negative sentiment on NCsoft, which is expected to release Blade & Soul on June 27. 

Meanwhile, Activision dropped 3%, partly due to resolution of a lawsuit, but also because of Diablo 3 errors. And in a sign of possible desperation, Blizzard was offering a free copy of Diablo 3 to anyone who prepaid for World of Warcraft for a year. WoW is beginning the big decline.

Do the money people know the score? You decide.

I looked nothing like a rose

Since The Great Gatsby is my go-to answer for my favourite book, I suppose I should weigh in on my thoughts on the new trailer just released. But the short answer is that it told us very little; it proved all my predictions while only allaying a few of my fears.

Cards on the table – I am a great fan of Baz Luhrmann’s work – he manages to continually be bold, idiosyncratic and unconventional, in an industry that heavily punishes all three. I’ve always felt he was a good match for Gatsby, and Gatsby generally a good match for him. Luhrmann excels at creating textual worlds, dense in their hyperreality: he did it spectacularly with Verona Beach in Romeo and Juliet (where billboards offered up Prospero Cola) and with the illusory remembered Paris of Le Grande Epoque in Moulin Rouge; creating the impression of the Jazz Age just as Fitzgerald did is a task perhaps only he is worthy of tackling. Naturally, then, his Jazz Age New York is centre stage and the grand star of the credit’s opening, living large, in the same hyper-colours and clean lines as Peter Jackson’s in King Kong, but with more swing. Moulin Rouge also showed he knew how to film excess in a way that was both vulgar and enticing; naturally his version of Gatsby’s revelries are the most exciting we’ve seen portrayed, inviting the viewer for once to actually want to be there.

The typical criticisms have already appeared about using rap music, and should be ignored for being as infantile and racist as they always are. Modern music is no more out of place in a period film than it is to have Spartacus speaking English, and rap music has so many parallels to jazz it would be ridiculous not to use its language in a film like this. And Baz is not simply jumping for the obvious – most of the trailer is underscored with a fairly obscure U2 song, “Love is Blindness” which is lovely in its thick, despondent sense of menace, its portrayal of the destructive, toxic nature of affection, naturally undercutting the vivacity and playfulness of the images, hinting with the camera angles and pauses of the shadows beneath the style. Which we needed because, along with the dazzling Art Deco and gorgeous cityscapes, it was beginning to look like there would be no rotten veneer underneath at all. But Baz is building to it, and he seems to get there.

We can also be sure Luhrmann will handle the symbolism deftly – if we can have Prospero Cola and the green fairy of absinthe appearing literally, the Eyes of Dr Mecklenberg will be child’s play. I liked seeing Nick and Gatsby on the dock itself, bringing the metaphor onto centre stage. Again, Luhrmann goes beyond just the obvious.

I’ve been worrried about DiCaprio, but he looks to be strong in the role. His great curse as an actor – his inescapably boyish looks, that made him look so clownish as an old J. Edgar Hoover – are here an asset to highlighting the Peter Pan nature of the character. He also looks sufficiently small and humbled in the presence of Daisy. The weak parts come where (as in Edgar) he must play the villain, because he has so little menace. That may, however, end up being a virtue. It depends on how much romance Baz demands of the story.

Script-wise, we hew closer to the book than ever – if we can judge by the trailer, Jordan has the largest role ever in this version, Owl-Eyes and Klipspringer get a showing, Daisy seems constantly about to stumble over in confusion, which is an improvement on Mia Farrow’s stunned-mullet approach, Wolfsheim is pulled forward to provide the menace DiCaprio can’t – but in tone, the trailer still seems quite romantic. Romance is where Baz’s head lives, and even his dark endings are epic tragic ones, and as such tend to ride very close to farce. Many chuckled when DiCaprio wept in the dirt in Romeo and Juliet, and I never felt the tragedy of Sabine’s death in Moulin Rouge was really honest because the first half of the film had worked so hard to clothe her in cartoonish style. It is so easy to miss the point with Gatsby and turn it into a tale of good versus evil, of dreams dashed and love pure and untramelled even when it loses against the foul cheap dust of the world, and Lurhmann is easily seduced by such tragic tales. But in the end it is common humanity that ties the book together, that reveals the jazz age as a tawdry sham and exposes even the glittering Daisy as a monster, in the pettiest and most pathetic sense, that turns the end from a romantic tragedy into a slideshow holocaust of banality. Edgerton is talented and seems to know to play Tom down but we have images of him and Gatsby coming to blows, and the whole point is Tom doesn’t need to do that. He wins without firing a shot because he has money, and Gatsby doesn’t. I think Baz wants him to be a moustache twirler like all his other villains – Richard Roxburgh and Bill Hunter, for example. But Tom is far too much a vacuum to be a melodramatic beast, and any suggestion of it usually takes away Daisy’s culpability in all of it.

In short, Baz is like Gatsby, he believes in love, in the orgiastic future, that even when facile, even when dangerous there is power in dreams; but I always felt the book was about hate, about the smallness of people, about the shallowness of even a brilliant, glorious dream – yet hopeful because of that, because beneath the artifice are a few simple human things worth caring about. Finding that in a film would be difficult for any director; and while Baz has got a great cast and a gorgeous eye, I feel his mountain of gold and glamour will make it hard to find a heart of anything, no matter how shadowed and shallow he makes it.

But the shirts – the shirts made me smile.

The TMNT shooting script

Like some Hollywood insider, I have stealthily acquired from my sources the shooting script for the new TMNT film.

In Predator We Trust

It’s time to rethink the Predator, people. Warrior-nobility aside, we’ve been casting them as the badguy. And I’m not sure that stands up. Walk with me:

Point the first: They are “drawn to battlegrounds”.

In the first and second films, the predators are drawn to the most dangerous places on earth – in the first film, the drug war in South America, in the second, the drug war in slightly-futuristic Los Angeles. The suggestion is it goes to those places because all the carnage and killing makes it likely they’ll encounter plenty of warriors to make good hunts. But that doesn’t hold up to hunting logic. If you want to get a good challenge from a grizzly bear, you don’t go to the grizzly bear arena where grizzlies are fighting each other to the death, because then your average target will be half-chewed and eaten before you get near him. If you want a challenge, you find a quiet lone grizzly at his full strength, and you kidnap his daughter. You know, like in Commando. You don’t wait for him to come to South America and waste ammo on some drug dealers first.

And this “ultimate hunter” thing runs into trouble with point 2 -

2) They “take trophies”.

Or do they? Yes, they skin their victims and take heads. But they don’t take them home with them. The pick up vessel in Aliens vs Predator doesn’t stop to collect all the skulls the last predator must have been storing somewhere. When Arnie arrives in Predator 1, the predator has skinned his victims, yes, but he’s tens of miles from that site and shows no intention of going back after he kills his victims. So he skins people, but where does he put the skins? In a pouch?

So here’s an alternative idea: he skins his prey to scare the hell out of everyone else in the area.

Now we’re starting to get a new idea of the creatures. They go to the worst warzones on earth. They identify and track down the worst killers in the area, defeat them effortlessly and then leave their mutilated bodies around – as a warning to others.

Now hold that thought as we go through some other points:

- they’re invisible, and move in mysterious ways

- but they can be sensed by voodoo priests (Predator 2) and Native American Shaman types (Predator), so they have some kind of spiritual presence

- they have dredlocks, perhaps indicating a strong sense of spirituality and connection to Rastafarianism.

- they have been visiting earth since before the last ice age (AvP)

You see where I am now.

The Predators are gods, or aliens masquerading as gods, and they are here to HELP US. When humans are swarmed by too much warfare, and look to be consuming ourselves, an invisible force descends, butchers all the best warriors and terrifies everyone else into ceasing fighting. They are trying to save humanity from our own destructive ways. They are HIPPIES. That’s also why they skin corpses, they are probably trying to recycle the carcasses into nice hats or wallets or seat covers or something.

I know what you’re going to say: if that’s true, then why did they bring the Aliens to the South Pole for training exercises? But that’s not the right question. The question is: why did they bury everything at the South Pole under a thousand tons of ice? See, I think they brought the aliens to earth to STUDY them (assuming they didn’t just find them here already – Prometheus may have something to say about where the “jockey” came from – there were giants in the old days, people), then one day they discovered humans. Being gentle creatures and not wanting to kill the alien queen, they froze her and buried her deep under the ice so she couldn’t harm humans until they could find a way to safely extract her. By the time they had done that, they realized that the alien was not only dangerous to humans, but so were the humans themselves. This amazing new species was on the verge of wiping itself out. The solution is to become invisible and watch from the sidelines, and interfere when it became necessary. Sometimes they could be subtle, other times, they needed a nuclear bomb (hence Sodom and Gomorrah).

Some accidents occurred along the way that caused us humans to worship them as gods. Some stories leaked through. This is why all ancient myths have something like the titanomachy, where the monsters/evil serpents are destroyed by the gods, but lurk around, waiting to insert evil into us again. Only the gods can save us – immortal, invisible, dredlocked spirit masters of beyond. Predators? No: PROTECTORS. And every time we run into them, we kill them with a tree of some sort. Or Danny Glover.

And the lord sayeth, this is my blood, shed for you, and Jesse Ventura said, if it bleeds, we can kill it….

Beginning is not the hard part

The world is full of aphorisms.

Pretty much all of them are false.

Not just because they boil down wisdom to a soundbite, but because they’re designed to run on faith. They’re designed to keep you alive when the rockslide buries you. Articles of faith are always lies. And that’s fine, as far as it goes, because they can help. But it’s not fine because it builds false hope. And when you hit the reality, you suffer because nobody told you.

So allow me to disabuse this notion about beginnings.

They say that the journey of a million miles begins with a single step. This is true, technically. But it is then followed by a journey of a million miles, minus one step.

They say beginnings are hard, and they are. Getting from zero to one may be one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. But what they don’t tell you is that every single step after that is just as hard. Comparatively, beginnings aren’t hard. Beginnings are, at most, just as hard as everything else. But usually, they’re easier.

They’re easier than the point ten steps in when the joy of starting wears off. When every new step only confirms the pointlessness of the endeavour. When every line of creation only makes the work more inept and disgraceful. When the exhaustion sets in and every inch burns. Oh, and my personal favourite, when you’re close to the end and thus failure is a million times worse because it will waste everything you’ve done. And when you’re inches from the finish line and the terror of crossing it is slightly more agonizing than crawling on the broken glass in front of it.

Beginnings? Beginnings are hard, yes. Beginnings are all the fear and none of the knowledge, all the pressure and none of the distance. Beginnings are hard.

And then it gets much, much worse.

 

Nothing About Gaming: Mankind Splits the Atom, And Puts It On The Moon

“Since Mankind Split the Atom, And Put It On The Moon”, or Why My Mum Is Awesome

My mum’s a worrier. It’s just her nature. She worries about what to cook for dinner and how many potatoes to peel. She also worries about stranger stuff. Heavier stuff.

Like, she wonders about if I was interviewed or something and asked about what I learnt from my mother, what I would say. Or if there was one thing she would be remembered for saying, what would it be. One time, while watching a spy movie with some identity switcheroo nonsense in it, she wondered what things she would be able to say to convince or remind us who she was, if she looked totally different. Strange, and it gets stranger.

One time, she told us that as a little girl, she was terrified of being stabbed in her sleep because she’d seen that in a movie once. To prevent this, she twisted under the covers constantly, so the descending knife would miss her undulating body. An odd thing to do and an odder thing to admit to your kids, but I’ve never forgotten it because as a worrier and a child, it was one of the most important things I’ve ever heard. Because I had my own night terrors, and thought it was just something I had, that there was something wrong with me that sometimes I couldn’t sleep at night for the terrible things I could imagine. Suddenly I knew it was okay to have weird neurotic fears, which is an important skill in a terrifying universe.

I’ll also never forget my mother telling me her pen name. She has yet to write a book. I’m not sure she ever wants to or ever wanted to write a book. But as a child, she did what I think many of us have done, and came up with a very clever spin on her own name, perfect for adorning her many works of literature. Again, it was a small thing but it was something I’d done as well by the time she told the tale, and I’d never told anyone I had, because it was silly to think of such things. With the story above, she gave me permission to be afraid; with her pen name, she gave me permission to dream.

Regarding the spy identity switcheroo, my instinctive answer was “Eat Fruit!” and “Have Something Substantial”. Not great wisdom, but they were two oft-repeated orders that spoke not just to a concern for good nutrition but a wily deflection of any childish attempt to subvert the natural order and feast upon sweets or snacks. That we were hungry was no justification – there was always something better to eat to solve that problem.

That same kind of shrewdness populates a lot of things I remember my mother teaching me. I remember her taking time after we’d seen an advertisement on TV about “natural goodness” and explaining carefully that all those things about “natural” products not having any “chemicals” in them was a gigantic manipulative lie, because everything was a chemical. Which was a science lesson and a lesson in scepticism. Scepticism was a lesson I learnt all the time from my mother, particularly about the media. That’s a skill that has served me well as a political animal, and indeed, is the whole reason I am one in the first place – because my mother taught me to see where I’m being lied to, and care about it.

The grandest example of her scepticism however, comes from the time mankind split the atom, and put it on the moon. That’s going to take a bit of explanation.

First, let me set the scene. It is the early nineteen eighties. Although extinct now, packs of mad, blood-thirsty encyclopaedia salesmen stalk the earth, and their primary prey is stay-at-home mothers. My mother is just that, and even bought a few over the years, but what the unwitting salesmen don’t know is she is a science teacher when not at home.

The difficulty of selling encyclopaedias is it was a crowded marketplace, and nobody needs more than one. So you need to explain to the customer why your encyclopaedias are the best. This may require pretty diagrams and charts, glossy pamphlets or, the biggest gun of all, snappy patter. It is the last that concerns us here, because the particular encyclopaedias my mother was being shown on this particular day, were the “first true scientific collection for the scientific new age, since mankind split the atom, and put it on the moon.”

You need to understand that my mother is an unassuming woman, quiet, polite and kind. She doesn’t like upsetting people. So she was serious when she handed the salesman a shovel and asked him to dig upwards by explaining that particularly insane sentence. What did that mean, she asks, about splitting the atom and putting it on the moon? The salesman stops, startled but not prepared to show weakness, and repeats the phrase, only more dramatically.

My mother is unassuming, quiet, polite, but she also has her mother’s spark of mischief, her father’s terrier-like tenacity, and when her blood is up she loves the thrill of the chase like a great white shark.

Which atom did they split? And where did they put it on the moon? And how did they put it there? Using more atoms? The questions continued, until beleaguered and finally aware how out of his depth he was, the salesman fled, and my mother triumphant again over ignorance and banality. Or so the story goes in my head, anyway. It is a lot more heroic the way I see it, and probably a lot funnier too, now the story has been passed down.

In reality, it was a very small moment that meant probably little more than a chuckle to her to remember – and she may have even forgotten it now. But there are times when we need to borrow other people’s strength or positivity to fill our own, and that’s what stories are for. So sometimes, when I get tired of fighting idiots, I think of my mother, and a small but total victory that warms my heart.

I think of splitting the atom, and putting it on the moon.

Some Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Characters

These are some of the characters I play on City of Heroes, a MMORPG I enjoy. Maybe you can use them in your game. They all have “bad habits” which could make them interesting NPCs, foils or even villains at times…

Marvel Atomic Hero Robo Roleplay

I caved and got the Marvel RPG pdf after some nice person sent me some cash last week (thank you Peter). I didn’t get the $400 for rent, but I got a nice few days with a shiny new RPG without the stress of having to review it, which is much appreciated. Still too early to form a total opinion, but I like it. There’s a lot of talk about how D&D 5e will be modular, but because of the way Cortex works, it already IS modular. There are about twenty things you can do with every dice roll if you want to get really tactical, but you can also just roll to hit if you want, and the system works fine each way.

It’s main flaw is it is NOT very friendly for chargen, because there isn’t a complete list of all the power options. If you don’t know that The Thing has a cool power effect where he breaks the scenery a lot, you can’t find it anywhere else in the book.  Likewise GMs could use more guidance on building NPCs. There are lots of really really fun dice tricks, making for a tactical and tactile experience full of kapwing and kapow in the best sense, but not always a clear idea of what all those tricks mean on a deeper level.

However, the emphasis on smooth, stylistic chargen is lots of fun, particularly designing Milestones and Distinctions.  Here’s my first go at Atomic Robo, which might give you a feel for the system.

Atomic Robo!
Affiliations: Solo d8 Buddy d6 Team d10

Distinctions:
I Used My Violence On Them!
Action Scientist
88 Years Old

Power Set: Atomic Robot
Godlike Durability d12
Superhuman Strength d10
Cybernetic Senses d6
SFX: Collateral Damage (as per Thing), Immunity (gas, toxins, disease, pressure), Invulnerable (except electrical attacks)

Tools of Science
Lightning Gun d10
Grenades d8
SFX: Area Attack, Dangerous
Limit: Gear

Specialities:

Combat Expert d8
Science Master d10
Tech Expert d8
Vehicle Expert d8

Milestones: 

Destroying the Scenery
1 XP when something heavy falls on you
3 XP when you are Stressed Out by physical stress
10 XP when you cause an enormously valuable or large thing to be destroyed (eg Tokyo, the Empire State Building, a pyramid)

Horsefeathers!
1 XP when a seemingly normal person or situation you encounter is revealed to be strange or crazy
3 XP when monsters or villains show up unexpectedly
10 XP when something threatens to destroy the world or the universe

 

A Fiasco Replay

My Smallville game was cancelled last Friday because of illness, so we decided to try out Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco instead. Morningstar won his second Diana Jones for it, because his mind leaks genius rpgs like a stricken oil tanker onto the penguins of gaming. Except good oil. Never mind. Anyway, here’s a replay of how it went.

We couldn’t decide on which playset to use so we narrowed it down to six and rolled a d6, and got the Golden Panda. This was cool because almost all of us liked Kung-Fu Panda, and it was a big inspiration. Since we weren’t using one of the playsets in the book, I can’t really comment on those. Each playset contains lists of ideas for character relationships, items, needs and location – you have a relationship with the player to your right or left (which took some sorting out since we were playing on line, god bless Google Documents), and each relationship ends up with either a need, an item or a location. Like I said, I can’t speak for the core game but the ones we got from Golden Panda were a little bit uninspiring, although obviously they have to be very general to allow for freeforming and interpretation. Still, I’m used to systems doing a bit more of my grunt work. Fiasco depends a lot on everyone being ready to throw in lots of ideas about the genre and to produce conflict, the system doesn’t do much of that for you. Which is okay, you just need good improvers/creative types or there will be a lot of humming and harring. Which is okay too though, humming and harring can be part of the fun.

We also didn’t do much actual “roleplaying” in the strictest sense, because (as I’ve always found) when people have more authorial control they tend to stay in author mode. This is why a lot of people think sim-ish play is the best for creating the actor voice – when all you can control is one person, it is easier to slip into acting through them entirely.

You can see the diagram of relationships we came up with and the characters in this post on my Smallville campaign blog. Also the text of the game follows below that. I was playing Old White Beard. I originally saw him as the wise master but when I realised the game desperately needed lots of cross-purposing, I recast him as a revenge-seeking bastard in his second scene.

Once you’ve got those, everyone does a scene around the table, repeating until there’s four scenes. Each scene involves your character and you get to decide if you establish the scene (set up what it’s about) or resolve it (choose how it ends). Being a GM, of course, I was used to doing neither! In most traditional RPGs, players set scenes and dice resolve it! Luckily, we had dice so most of the time I rolled to see which one I would do (odds/evens).

Halfway through there’s a thing called the Tilt, but mechanically it does bugger all, which I felt quite let down by. Again, I’m used to my mechanics doing a lot more. I was kind of expecting things to be a lot more random in general, too – we pretty much knew where the story was going by half way (and had a good idea about it before that). Which again, is okay. I guess I was just expecting the tables to be throwing up a lot of the Fiasco stuff, but in fact, what makes it a fiasco is the scene resolution mechanic.

There are four scenes per player, and half of them have to end badly and half of them have to end well. That means you need a lot of things to go wrong, and trying to come up with ways for that to happen is generally what creates the Fiasco. Bad things happening means people working at cross purposes (who are forced to hang out, because you guys are the only principle characters) or people having terrible luck or misfortune. And because most gamers tend to be nice, the bad things get shared around to everyone, so that even the “bad” guys have bad things happen to them. And that’s really what makes a fiasco (or a farce) – everybody has a bad day all at once, not just the heroes first, then the villains.

Interestingly, this ties in with my post from last year about how if your chance of success is 50% or lower, things tend to feel grim. The way to mess with Fiasco would be to change the black/white ratio. Increase the black dice and people’s lives go down the toilet even more – everything falls apart, the center cannot hold.. Increase the white dice and things come to fruition – bad guys do strike, but then are later foiled by heroes.

Which I found interesting: although it is a shared story-building experience with very strict, formal rules for scene composition, and thus the antithesis in many ways of most RPGs, in the end, the biggest factor, the biggest influence on tone is your chance of success. Something to think about there.