J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, both released the same year, are eerily similar. The parallels cannot be intentional, but let me present the evidence and you can be the judge.

What follows is a comparison of several major and minor characters in both the novels and the series¹ describing the roles they play. Could so much similarity be coincidence?

The Protagonist

Buffy Summers

Harry Potter

The protagonist is intense and driven. Gifted with powers far beyond those of his compatriots, The Protagonist is attractive and a natural but unwilling leader. She quickly finds herself isolated by the stress of her position, which leads to aggression and anger even against friends and allies. The protagonist has little respect rules and authority, and as such is constantly in trouble with The Authority Figure. Due to the supernatural nature of The Protagonist, he is the only thing that shields the world from evil, and she is continually tasked with covertly saving the day from ever-more-powerful enemies.

The Brainy Best Friend

Willow Rosenberg

Hermione Granger

Pretty, but bookish, the brainy best friend is a whiz at everything, possessing smarts and a diligent study ethic. This excess of brains and resourcefulness is balanced by social awkwardness. Then intense curiosity and intellect leads her to dabble in more powerful magics than she aught. Ironically, she finds herself attracted to The Right-Hand Man.

The Right-Hand Man

Xander Harris

Ron Weasley

The Right Hand Man lacks the attractiveness and charisma of the Protagonist. He’s usually the comic relief of the bunch, and finds himself caught in awkward and embarrassing situations. Although he acts the coward, beneath lies a backbone that shows itself in the face of evil and adversity.

The Standoffish Mentor

Rupert Giles

Professor Dumbledore

Aloof and anachronistic, this knowledgeable older man is both an asset and a puzzle to the Protagonist. He usually goes by only his last name. He offers clues and knowledge, but saving the day is always left to The Protagonist. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses is a steely interior that belies his bad-boy youth.

The Fantasy

Angel

Sirius Black

The Fantasy is the man of the protagonist’s dreams. He represents the normalcy and perfection that the protagonist desires, but the reality of the Fantasy’s past prevents this dream from becoming real. The Fantasy is ragged on the edges, on the verge of unhinged, and is forcibly excised from The Protagonist’s life.

The Authority Figure

Principal Snyder

Professor Snape

While they’re both on the same side, The Protagonist and The Authority Figure are continually at odds. The Protagonist and his friends often interpret The Authority Figure’s motives as evil, when really they come from the character seeing the world in a different way, having different information, and protecting his own interests. The Authority Figure can’t stand The Protagonist, but reluctantly finds himself helping her when danger is imminent.

The Rebellious Werewolf

Daniel “Oz” Osbourne

Remus Lupin

This brilliant, quiet, scrawny male transforms into a feral vicious beast once a month, which his school friends help him hide, and restrain him from harming innocents. He lacks respect for authority, intentionally violating the rules. This character always finds himself playing second or third fiddle, where he is a competent but unexciting ally.

The Rival

Cordelia Chase

Draco Malfoy

Rich, attractive and self-centered, The Rival and The Protagonist continually find their paths crossing, despite the fact that there is no love lost between them. They constantly compete. The Rival feels extreme social pressure to be something he really isn’t cut out to be, often acting cruelly to those she finds weak or unattractive. Yet The Rival often finds himself laughed at by others during her moments of weakness.

The Mother Hen

Joyce Summers

Molly Weasley

The working-class Mother Hen is a frumpy and stressed-out worrywart who constantly fusses over The Protagonist. She always acts in the best interest of the kids, to the point of being a hindrance to them stopping evil forces. Although initially kept in the dark about the kids activities, when she comes face-to-face with what The Protagonist faces, she becomes a steely protector.

The Supernatural Schoolyard

Sunnydale High

Hogwarts School

Although a beautiful, welcoming place during the day, the setting is home to monsters and creatures of great power. Travel outside at night is quite dangerous. Despite this, the main characters are constantly sneaking around academic hallways late at night. The setting is a place of great power, which draws trouble to it. The melodramatic antics of high school provide a constantly shifting backdrop over which the child characters are constantly struggling with adult intrigue and danger.

1. At least as far as season three. That’s all that’s available free on Hulu. ↩

def loot(character_sheet_file)
  @xml ||= Hpricot::XML(character_sheet_file.read)
  @loot ||= @xml.search("//LootTally/loot[@count!='0']").map do |item|
    res = item.search("//RulesElement")
    case res.size
      when 0: nil
      when 1: coder.decode(res.first.attributes["name"])
      when 2: coder.decode(res.last.attributes["name"].sub(res.first.attributes["type"], res.first.attributes["name"]))
      else    res.map { |re| coder.decode(re.attributes["name"]) }.join(" ")
    end
  end.compact
end

Character files from D&DI Character Builder store loot as a list, but the names of magic items are concatenated with names of their connected mundane items, so you have to mix them based on the magic item’s @type.

Also, the Character Builder stores every item you’ve ever added, even if you deleted it immediately, so you have to filter out items with a count of zero. You have no way to tell if this was an intentional item purchase, an item accidentally clicked on or a found item from a module, so items with @count=0 are useless.

What could I possibly be building‽‽‽

“Grind” is, perhaps, an inappropriate term—I was playing a game, after all—and I met a lot of cool people and excellent DM’s along the way. Our tables included the prototypical nerds and die-hard gamers, but also parents and their kids; women are also fairly well-represented in Southern Californian D&D.

Mizrae’li, my character for the event, is a gladiator-trained Drow and tough as a coffin nail. She’s an unconventional fighter that zig-zags across the battlefield harrying enemies with her whip and throwing axe, keeping their attention while her allies finish them off. Laconic on the best days, she holds a lifelong grudge against the dark cult that sold away her childhood, and her hunt for them led her to Zhentil Keep.

At the last convention in February, SPEC 1-1: Shades of the Zhentarim, offered some missing history between 3rd edition Forgotten Realms and the 4th edition set 100 years in the future. This time, for SPEC1-2: Zhent’s Ancient Shadows, I teamed up with three of the five players from the first half. It was supposed to be a meatgrinder—one of our friends had his character die in the first fight and had to turn back. We were no little bit nervous.

We were returning to Zhentil Keep to clear out the undead menace we had uncovered before. Gathered with us was an army of clerics and paladins whose vocation was destroying undead. For six hours we carved our way through wights, vampiric trolls, and a huge, bone-shard-spitting [REDACTED]. It was a miracle we even survived, yet we were only halfway finished.

After an extended rest, we climbed a mile-long chain into a floating cathedral, and confronted a horrific [REDACTED]. The thing was so tough we had to take another rest after one fight. What we learned lead us on a chase through the city to some familiar ruins, an army of undead on our heels. Our allies and us pitch an epic last stand, as we complete the ritual that banished the undead, we were cheered by a victorious army.

Module box text has never left me as speechless or elated as it did that night. SPEC1-2 was by far the best written and most challenging adventure I’ve played in Living Forgotten Realms. The game would not be fun if every Friday was this stressful, but as the pinnacle of a long con. it was perfect.

But the best part was playing the module with my group of friends—most that played SPEC1-1 with me as well—an my fiancée by my side for the last half. And against the perfect DM: he scoffed at my character concept at a lowly first-level, but has since been brought around. But he was perfects hardcore. Almost all of the minis he used were exactly as described, and when he slapped down that [REDACTED], everyone at the table shrieked in fear.

I generally don’t tout this hobby because of the bad stereotypes given to its players, but it’s just too rare today to have a group of people of all ages sit at a table and play a game—good clean fun. And this past weekend, the only way to describe the experience is epic.

• It’s violent enough that I cringed. The movie is “patently too adult for … children 17 and under” and the fact that it’s not rated NC-17 is evidence of a moronic and/or corrupt MPAA.
• In all of 163 minutes, the only part of the whole flick I didn’t believe was a human able to walk in the open air of Antarctica in a peacoat and face sock.
• It had the finest, most tightly-controlled art direction I’ve seen in a film since Amelie.
• Multiply how great the art and story were, divide one by the result, and you get an approximation of crapitude of the music.
• It shows in excellent detail why powers like those of the motherfucking Flash are so dangerous.

In the previews: Terminator will be dumb. Star Trek looks like the story they wanted to tell all along and never had the technology. I’d want to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine even if Gambit wasn’t in it.

I’m going to try something new here, and introduce my readers to a side of me I usually reserve for my closest friends. For the past four months my distraction du jour has been the new Dungeons & Dragons Living Forgotten Realms campaign. My character, the repulsive yet good-natured Körgeth Tunneldredger has travelled around the Realms finding adventure—and having it find him.

Living Forgotten Realms is a more strictly-administered version of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, where DMs report their results online and players earn in- and out-of-character awards that they take with them from game to game. The modules are designed for conventions, but the true benefit is that anyone in the world can sit down together and play the game with the character they’ve built themselves, and so long as it adheres to the creation rules, won’t disrupt or imbalance the game.

I’ve since passed the test to DM home games, and have twice run Pieter Sleijpen’s module, Inheritance. It’s an incredibly well-written module with some nice free-form RP opportunities and brutally challenging combat.

Warning: I’ve tried to omit any information that might spoil the module for a first-time player, but inherently there are some clues. If you want to play this module, you probably shouldn’t be reading this.

Unlike most modules, Inheritance has quite a focus on skill challenges and RP-only encounters, less on fights. I find Skill Challenges … um … challenging to run for a couple reasons:

• During free-form RP, type-A players tend to dominate the encounters.
• When one player succeeds a check, many DMs will announce, “you notice <dramatic revelation>.” But by doing so, it stifles RP, as the players have no need to converse with each other.
• Players often metagame, attempting to do what they’re good at, rather than what fits the situation. These types of skill challenges often become backwards: the player asks, “I’d like to make a Diplomacy check; what do I do?” This is largely because the penalty for failing skill checks is quite high (you usually need two times more successes than failures).
• Especially towards the end of the adventure, fatigued players and DMs will resort to “saving throw versus box text” in order to move on to the next combat.

I tried to compensate for these problems by forcing a little extra role playing. Instead of announcing “You notice <the thing you notice>.” I handed the character pre-printed card describing what they noticed. At the top of each card, I put a warning that reading the card verbatim or showing it to other players would result in a -2 to all rolls for the rest of the encounter. My players loved the drama caused by the small rewards, and really ran with at.

In addition to the skill challenges are the nasty fights. Most LFR combats are not incredibly challenging. Many are downright easy. In the first combat of Inheritance, I managed to drop a leader and a defender on the same round before any of the monsters died. TPK is not fun for anyone, and while the last fight is partly avoidable, the fact is not inherently obvious and it would have killed the party.

The DM’s instructions suggest that a level 5, complexity 3 skill challenge can convince some of the enemies from attacking, but never really fleshes out how that would work. I knew my players would take that option if it seemed available, so I wrote one.

The fight turned out to be epic, and everyone played a role. The defenders and a striker kept the other monsters at bay, while the rest took turns aiding each other in what turned out to be a very difficult skill challenge. It ended up 7/3, with the next check (and some great RP) deciding victory or defeat. A very close die roll sealed the win.

Afterwards, everybody cheered. Even me.

My only regret is that the players succeeded in the first skill challenge. Their success kept them from meeting a very intriguing NPC, and I was excited to role-play his sadistic slow clap as the players emerged from the Forbidden Zones…

Notes

1. Körgeth’s solution to this problem is to repeat (often interrupting) the DM, in-character. DM: “you notice a trap door.” Me, pointing: “I’ve noticed a trap door!” Someone usually chuckles. ↩

Once in office, the president becomes acutely aware he is temporary stew ard of a permanent position. … Every day brings the president that much closer to the time he will turn on the TV to see someone else’s face burned in effigy outside a foreign embassy.

The moment, as you can imagine, is bittersweet.

A burning a photo of Obama at an Iranian protest.

Well said.

1. Ann Arbor, MI
2. Livonia, MI
3. Los Angeles, CA
4. Long Beach, CA
5. Austin, TX
6. Pentwater, MI
7. Cambria, CA
8. San Francisco, CA
9. Sonoma, CA
10. Pickford, MI

Happy new year!

My resolution: blog more, write more and lose weight. What’s yours?

Finally caught up to the real date!

It’s something I never understood about cities, and something I miss terribly about home.