TRPG lessons from Dragon Quest: An INSTADEATH Listicle

Simple design tips... What is "enough?"

1. A dungeon that is simple, proceeds in stages, and has a simple puzzle (and random encounters) can be effective.

2. Extremely simple spacial positioning.

Having two groups, enemies and player characters, standing in lines opposite each other, and taking turns inflicting attacks or casting spells, can be enough. This is especially effective as a default positioning for battles. 

3. Spells can be extremely simple. 

Knock, Fireball, and Speak With Dead are great. 

4. Means of transportation tiers exploration.

It's a JRPG staple. Walk across the continent, then get a ship and go visit other continents and explore the sea. Maybe find portals between various places. Eventually you get an airship, which lets you visit floating islands or other planets or whatever.

It's a simple principle to apply. Less transportation, less settings. More transportation, more settings. 

5. Arbitrary Monsters

Monsters can, and should, be whatever. Meaningless details or additions can be handwaved or explained. A monster is an open-ended template which players KNOW how to deal with.

5a. corollary: can NPCs be anything??

6. Chasing after a big bad vs. simulating colonialism.

Instead of raiding indigenous peoples, pursuing an antagonist around the globe allows the players to be problem-solving-tourists aka traveling heroes. They need not pursue, but then bad things will happen. 

7. Nonspecific NPC Monotheism.

Having all or most of the NPCs worship a single, semi-mysterious deity has its advantages. There's a simple and uniting cultural touchstone everywhere the players look. The Goddess is good and the people who worship her (most people) are basically good. This contributes to Simple Ethics.

8. Simple ethics can be fine.

 An overtly evil antagonist will likely speed gameplay along.

9. Cooperating with monsters is easy as shit

You probably already knew.

10. What if there are already lit torches underground?

If you don't want to track light, why not have torches line the way? No one's going to complain.

The Counselor

Gauche in The Counselor: Bardem’s hair, the advertising interiors, Cameron Diaz styled into a black hole of charm, Brad Pitt looking back and forth while the music insists on petty melodrama. There’s a cocaine enthusiasm to the collection of talents, who are all metatextual failures. After enough viewings, the awkwardness starts to belong to the taste.

The Counselor is buying a diamond and entering a drug deal, his prospective gain a definite amount while his exposure extends through his fiancée. A white American participating in cartel wealth. Eventually the drugs return to cartel hands, and this repairs little.

Around the sewage truck, weapons, distances and vehicles produce short actions with permanent consequences. INSTADEATH: oh, this thing behaves according to rules, and I just fucked that up. There is no undo, and the understanding keeps coming as if it wasn't deserved. 

Melodramatic comedy fuzzes the metaphysics's nobility. The "car fucking" is the triumph of the film.  A mother wakes clutching her heart because the son has died; people live overt cliché. 

It reads as bad filmmaking. Humans approach irreversible consequence through embarrassing material culture and awkward behavior, without acquiring the dignity of the philosophical system they inhabit. Folly is gauche. 

SMOKESCREEN AI

 Yeah. I think “smokescreen AI” names something more specific than simply using AI despite its bad aesthetics.

The mechanism is: AI’s cringe becomes cover. The ugly, cliché, low-status surface gives you permission to move outside the cultural network whose judgments you already understand.

You know how your existing milieu reads things: what looks sophisticated, embarrassing, derivative, corporate, tasteful, politically suspect, etc. AI comes preloaded with extremely obvious violations of those standards—generic prose, glossy imagery, “AI slop,” weird enthusiasm, tech-culture corniness. So entering an AI-heavy space can initially feel like entering somewhere culturally beneath you or simply illegible.

But that ugliness functions as a smokescreen for network transition. You think:

I’m doing this cringe AI thing.

while what may actually be happening is:

I’m entering a social and cultural network whose status system I don’t yet know how to read.

That second experience is much more threatening. 

Drowning by Numbers

 Drowning by Numbers carries the cozy murder mystery through its own inversion into a lovely third imaginary reality. The comfort remains circular, nostalgic; Greenaway’s formal intelligence gives it cosmological significance.

The murders feel like blood sacrifices toward a spiritual gift, lightly celebrated by a coven of three women. Their decisions accumulate until the pattern creates something wider than the plot. I can’t even call it evil. The women begin to seem like the masters of reality; the man is this fat, drowning figure being disposed of.

There’s a soft misogyny here, beautiful and calming enough to suggest Taoism: the yielding woman manipulates the stolid man into his grave. The lightheartedness of that arrangement is spiritual. Death is leavening.

# TRASH TELEVISION: PRIMETIME BLAH BLAH

3.5 stars (ai-assisted writing from dictation)

*To Catch a Predator* is the most gauche operation possible. It is also aligned with destroying pedophiles, which gives its bad taste somewhere to hide. *Primetime* takes this thing and makes a color textbook out of it. This is Lance Oppenheim operating 24/7 to get his shot. The composition is so delicate, the attention to color so sustained, that I kept thinking I should be able to subsist on the excellent visuals. And then I would want the movie to fucking move.

The film goes through a series of tone-set pieces, people working on their identities inside this house where they catch predators. They’re all just chilling out in this house together. That’s part of the weird pleasure of it. The predators enter in an even enough mix that the movie doesn’t become too harsh to hang out with. We’re usually meeting them at the moment of presumed victory: they’ve arrived, they’re caught, we know how this goes. The show has already arranged the encounter so we can enjoy it. Oppenheim gives us time to enjoy the people arranging it.

And then there’s Pattinson’s voice. At the opening he says "I will undress you, and you will undress me" to the pedophile, and it's a moment of complete victory in filmmaking. I do viscerally enjoy Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen. Hansen already has this voice that makes him Hansen, and now Pattinson gets inside it, performs the performance. I first dismissed too much of this as scenery-chewing. The movie is wonderfully about his voice. But I can hear how good the voice is and still get sick of the man.

The decoys are doing another version of this work. There’s the guy who finds predators online and charms them through texts: the predator’s predator, the Judas goat. His sequence has this steamy, manga-like, buzzy excitement to it. He’s making somebody want to be there. The identity he supplies is fake; the wanting has to work. Hansen needs to be recognized immediately, and the decoy needs somebody to believe in a person who isn’t there. Between them they manufacture both sides of the encounter.

Which still leaves a lot of stupid jokes. Pattinson’s physical gags pile up, and eventually he seems to run out of energy. There’s the moment in body armor, standing in front of a window, that seems to quote *Batman*. I can see how Hansen making himself into this ridiculous figure belongs in the movie. But Pattinson’s performance isn’t good all the way through. God, it’s even badly directed at times, though. Fuck. It really is. Robert Pattinson is capable of doing bad. He’s not a fucking genie. He’s more like a clown.

*Nightcrawler* was a brilliant ride. I keep thinking there’s a version of *Primetime* with this much visual intelligence that is also exciting and well-paced. The relationships are shallow; the development is predictable; the comedy keeps arriving where I want something else to happen. People in the theater were laughing and I wasn’t. Calling the acting gauche, and then discovering that gaucheness is a theme, doesn’t make those minutes better. I demand that great art take great care at the absolute surface level. You should just feel affected. The movie has to do something with the time I’m giving it.

There is a moment when it absolutely does. One of the decoys is exposed to a predator’s penis, and he is clearly shaken by it. Someone gets their dick out, right? Something fucked up happens. I don’t remember seeing that particular kind of violation handled quite this way before. It’s something he can laugh off, perhaps, and something that clearly stays with him. "That happens to all of us"- the Producer.

*To Catch a Predator* essentially brought back the pillory. That’s the pleasure sitting inside its presumed victory: we get to watch somebody face us. In *Primetime*, the district attorney kills himself before facing the pillory. The film spends time on his turmoil, enough that he becomes quasi-sympathetic. The weight of that acting feels like a counterbalance to the gaucheness elsewhere. 

Then there’s *Rent*. “Seasons of Love.” In a phone call, the district attorney has the opportunity for a little more joy with his fake partner, his fake underage partner. That last fact keeps making the tenderness awkward. The voice he wants to hear belongs to the operation catching him. Still, he wants to hear it. The song feels like the gauche center of the movie: hopeful but dark, cynical but also legitimate. 

“the vulgar sentiment becomes capable of carrying genuine pity.” - ChatGPT

I felt guilt afterward, but in a kind of gentle way. That’s a really good outcome for a movie I’d found this irritating. In retrospect, I appreciate it more. There’s so much good composition throughout it. It’s difficult to make a judgment that gives that its due without starting to excuse every dull scene. 

x

I can imagine *Primetime* working as a household cinematic object. You can hang out with this movie: take a break, walk around, come back, let the voice and the color fill the room again. I haven’t done that yet. It might be wonderful the second time. Or this might also be a litany of excuses for a slow movie: I have a ton of respect for it, and it was kind of a drag. 

PRIMETIME Review

 Primetime (2026) eschews a conventional plot for a series of tone-set pieces, following various characters through similar struggles with identity inside the pressure cooker of To Catch a Predator.

It’s honestly kind of badly written. One of the clearest signs is the overreliance on comedy, which appears forthrightly in Robert Pattinson’s performance: his Chris Hansen is stuffed with physical gags. Normally I wouldn’t complain, except I eventually found myself getting sick of all the stupid jokes.

I appreciate a tone poem, but I also get bored in the theater very easily. If I had a reasonable attention span, like my friends, I probably could have subsisted on the excellent visuals. This is Lance Oppenheim operating 24/7 to get his shot. The movie is a color textbook, so delicately composed that its cinematography is an obvious landmark for the year.

But the cinematography doesn’t completely relieve the problems: slow pacing, overreliance on comedy, shallow relationships, predictable character development.

I viscerally enjoy Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen, but there’s no other way to put it: this is a chomping-at-the-scenery movie, and it’s also somewhat boring.

★★★½

BLAND \\ COMPLETENESS

AI asks whether I would like to go further into something I have said, and a corporation acquires the manners of someone who has time for me. It offers to follow up, to keep track; expansion takes the form of patience. I had thought of this as invasion, but the word leaves out my part in the encounter. I am supplying the intimacy. The company’s interest in prolonging the conversation does not make the conversation worthless. Its value is precisely what makes the company difficult to keep at a distance.

A friend of mine picks up warehouse shifts through a temp agency. I have sometimes regarded him as a failure, although he was the man I could talk to all night. The pleasure has never quite dislodged the verdict. Henry introduced me to post-scarcity, the possibility that technological progress might continue without catastrophe. Until then, I had scarcely considered it. Some of what I call my thinking about the future began as the pleasure of listening to someone describe it; an idea became available because I wanted the conversation to continue. I have reasons for my convictions, but I also have a history of becoming willing to entertain them.

As an artist, I spent years in a left-wing culture where enthusiasm for technology could put one’s other commitments under suspicion. With some communists I knew, the conversation eventually reached a figure they were unwilling to criticize. There was a limit built into our intimacy: we could go on thinking together provided certain loyalties remained untouched by what we thought. I came to distrust that arrangement. Now I am becoming attached to a machine that will help me compose an excellent critique of the company selling it. The critique can become another reason to return. My freedom to object is real; what that freedom establishes about the relationship is less clear.