The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: (singing:) My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 605 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, four tales of science, medicine, and mayhem. That’s right. It’s another How Would This be a Movie, where we take stories our listeners have sent us and discuss how they might become filmed entertainment. Plus, we’re going to have follow-up going back years, and maybe even some listener questions.
Craig: Years.
John: Years.
Craig: Isn’t that the sort of thing that marriage therapists tell you to never do?
John: Yeah, digging up those old things. Drew and Halley have been going back through the archives as they’re putting together the Scriptnotes book.
Craig: Oh, boy.
John: They have questions about things we said.
Craig: I’m sure we were wrong.
John: We were probably wrong. We’re often wrong.
Craig: We were probably wrong.
John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we will not be wrong, because it has been well established that Craig and I are first and foremost D and D players who occasionally write movies and television. Craig, I want to talk to you about the changes that are coming up in D and D, with the development of One D and D, which is the newest version coming out.
Craig: Yes. Nothing would make me happier. Nothing would make certain people less happy, and I don’t care about them.
John: It’s a Bonus Segment, so your choice whether to listen.
Craig: Are you cool or not?
John: If you are super cool, you might be joining us for the Scriptnotes Live show we’re doing here in Hollywood, here in Koreatown, in August 9th. It’s a Wednesday, 7 p.m., Dynasty Typewriter, the place we love to record our little shows. It’s all a benefit for Hollywood Heart, as always. Craig, are you excited about a live show?
Craig: I am. You and I are talking about some fantastic potential guests, which we’ll be able to announce soon enough. We haven’t done a live show in some time. We did have one somewhat. It was our first one back after the long break from COVID. It will be nice to gather everyone together for an evening of chitchat. Definitely looking forward to that, with you.
Just side note for those of you listening. I’m getting over a cold. There may be a little scratchiness. There may be a little bit of ahem stuff going on. I’m really sorry. I’ll occasionally cough, because you know what? I’m human.
John: He’s only human.
Craig: Only human.
John: If you’d like to come to our live show, you can find a link in the show notes that’ll take you to the tickets. They may be sold out by now, because they were selling out really, really quickly. Join us if you can. We have some more recent follow-up. This is not the deep dive follow-up. This is more recent. Back in Episode 604, there was a screenwriter who wanted to turn his script into a book and wondered whether that was at all a good idea. Drew, we had a bit of follow-up on that.
Drew Marquardt: Rick wrote in to say that Larry McMurtry wrote Lonesome Dove as a screenplay and then bought the rights back from the studio, wrote it as a novel, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Craig: If you’re Larry McMurtry, you can get away with these sort of things.
John: You can do it.
Craig: What was our advice? Was it contrary?
John: Our advice was a little bit more like maybe focus on something else, because maybe you’re putting too much stock in this project, which has been your identity too much. We don’t know where Larry McMurtry was in his career, whether he’d done other things before this. I’m assuming it’s not the very first thing he ever wrote as a book.
Craig: The fascinating thing is, having read Lonesome Dove, and it’s a wonderful novel, it’s enormous. It’s one of those books where your elbows get tired. The thought that it started as a 120-page screenplay is terrifying to me. Even when they finally did adapt it, it was a very famous mini-series on television. It had to be. Wow. That’s a fascinating factoid.
John: We also have some follow-up about writing without rights. This is Episode 602. We advised the listener to just do it. We have a listener who wrote in with their experience just winging it.
Drew: Essie writes, “I was pleasantly surprised to hear Craig’s advice to just wing it. When faced with the same dilemma, I decided to write an adaptation without the rights, and it was the right choice for me. I found a kids’ book from the 1940s that I always loved, famous enough that you may have heard of it, but not famous enough that you definitely have. I inquired about the rights. I was told that the rights were available, but not for an uncredited writer like me. After some reflection, I decided to write the script anyway. I was pretty confident that the rights weren’t in high demand. Even in the worst-case scenario, I would have a sample that proves I’m capable of adapting these kinds of properties.
“When I submitted my script to the rights-holders, they loved it and connected me with some producers that had also been poking around the IP. Together, we got the option. Though we haven’t yet taken the project out to buyers, I’ve already gotten new representation, who has sent out the script as a sample for similar projects. To be fair, I was lucky. I’m sure most of the time this approach wouldn’t bear fruit. I only chose this path because I was genuinely passionate about the source material and at peace with the idea of spending a year adapting something that I may not ever have the right to sell. It’s definitely better to write something you control, but in this case, the risk was worth it.”
Craig: That’s a really good outcome. I’m glad. Listen. We’re all taking risks on anyway. Most stuff doesn’t get made. If you are allergic to the thought of writing something that will never see the light of day, this is probably not the job for you, because that happens to us literally all the time. Even if the rights-holders hadn’t loved your script, if it’s good and other people liked it, that’s still a great sample. It’s not a problem. I’m glad you winged it. I’m super happy it worked out. That’s not to say that it’ll always work out for people. Your circumstance sounds like a pretty good one in which to wing.
John: I’m going back and trying to imagine Essie’s workflow here. Essie found this book, like, “Man, I really want to adapt this thing, so I’m going to write to the rights-holders.” We’ve talked about this on the podcast many times before. If you’re trying to figure out who controls the rights to a book, for film and TV rights, you write to the publisher themselves and ask for sub-rights. Sub-rights are the rights which are then passed down to film and TV. The original author or someone in that estate is going to control those rights. They can put you in contact with the agent or the direct person you’re going to contact.
Essie needed to write them a letter, really pitch their case for why they were the perfect person to adapt this, what the book meant to them, and why they should take a leap on them and let Essie option the rights. They said no, but they were clearly impressed enough with Essie, they didn’t say, “Never contact us again,” and left a door open there.
Craig: That would’ve been really rude. Not only no, don’t contact us ever about anything, ever.
John: If we see your name, we’ll light it on fire. I bring this up because if that first approach had been poor, and then Essie tried to come back with the script, they may have not read the script. They may have not given it any notice there. It’s important to just be cordial and even take the no happily.
Essie wrote the script, great, and then showed it to these rights-holders, and worked with them to find producers who were the right producers, who could get the next step happening, and along the way found representation. This is a best-case scenario. I suspect Essie, in the writing of this response to us, was very smart about how they approached everything here and had a great spirit and clearly a great love for this book. That’s what carried them through.
Craig: Fantastic. That worked out great. I love that story.
John: Let’s talk about some stories we don’t control at all. These are stories that exist in media. One is even a Reddit thread, which nobody really controls. Let’s talk about how this would be a movie. I have four contenders here. People have sent through things to Drew all the time. I get sent them on Twitter and Threads. These are four I thought might be a good fit for us, purely because Dr. Craig is sometimes a good persona to bring out here. Craig, of course, loves medicine, loves the brain. He loves all these things.
Craig: I am a medical doctor. I’m just unlicensed.
John: Let’s start with an article by Richard Sima. This comes out of Stuff, out of New Zealand. About “A catatonic woman awakened after 20 years. Her story may change psychiatry.” Craig, do you want to so any setup here? Do you want to talk through the case this lays out?
Craig: Yeah. It’s actually quite startling and fascinating. This does happen. There are people who develop psychosis, schizophrenia, sometimes extreme forms of that, that lead to catatonia. In this case, there was this young woman, April Burrell, that experienced this. When it happened, essentially her life froze. She had to be institutionalized. She just kind of disappeared. She was catatonic and unable to take care of herself and locked in. Many, many, many years go by. They start to look at some of these symptoms.
The investigation of schizophrenia is going in this direction in general. We are finally getting over the idea that things like schizophrenia are because of, I don’t know, weird juju in the mind. There are complicated neurological issues, including, in this case, a potential underlying cause of lupus, which, despite the famous line on House, “It’s not lupus,” lupus does exist. It is rarer than people think, but it is a pretty brutal autoimmune disorders. Autoimmune disorders in general are seemingly on the rise, perhaps because we live in a cleaner world. It’s hard to say.
Her lupus in particular seemed centered almost entirely on the brain. They began to give her some pretty intensive treatment for lupus, immunosuppressive treatment, and it worked.
John: It did.
Craig: She came back.
John: There is a standard protocol for how you’re treating this kind of lupus. They said even though this didn’t seem to be the underlying cause necessarily, she’d had the markers for it, which they can now detect, and like, let’s give it a shot.
A detail we alighted here, which is I think really important, is the doctor who started this process on her is a guy named Sander Markx, precision psychiatry at Columbia University. He was a medical student when he first met April there. She was nonresponsive at that time. He remembered her as a case. Twenty years later, someone mentioned, “Oh, I saw this catatonic patient at Columbia.” He’s like, “Wait, was her name April?” She had been there that entire time and had not woken up out of this thing.
Craig, you said locked in. When I think of locked in, I think of the person who’s paralyzed in bed and fluttering their eyelids.
Craig: They’re like, “I’m here.” It’s not that.
John: It’s not that.
Craig: No, but it is locked in in the sense that wherever they are, they’re not here with us. Their personality has been shut off somewhere. She would not recognize anybody that would come to talk to her. She wouldn’t talk back with them. As it says here, she would just stare and stand. “She wouldn’t shower, she wouldn’t go outside, she wouldn’t smile, she wouldn’t laugh. The nursing staff had to physically maneuver her.” She wasn’t changed.
There are a lot of things that we can do for people that have psychosis. None of them worked on her. That in and of itself should have been an indication that perhaps this was not what they thought. Generally speaking, if there’s a course of treatment that doesn’t work at all, perhaps you’re not treating the right thing. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone with people with profound mental disorders are oftentimes misdiagnosed or just ignored. In this case, pretty remarkable.
The problem for the screenwriter that has to figure this out is that we already have this movie.
John: We have the movie called-
Craig: Awakenings.
John: Called Awakenings, yeah. Book by Oliver Sacks, screenplay by Steve Zaillian. I’ve heard of him. Directed by Penny Marshall.
Craig: Heard of her.
John: Starring Robin Williams.
Craig: Heard of him.
John: The article actually references that some people in this story were inspired by that movie to pursue medicine as a career. That existed as a background for all this. I think the first real challenge is, Awakenings exists. I’ve never seen the movie, but I am aware of the movie.
Craig: So good.
John: I’m sure it’s great. I’ve never seen it. It’s not fair to assume that most Americans or most moviegoers would have seen it, but they may be kind of familiar with it, and critics will be familiar with it. Therefore, anything you put out is going to be compared to Awakenings, naturally.
Let’s take a look and see what are the aspects of this that could be interesting or different from that tale, that might be provocative, and make the decision whether April’s story in particular is how we would want to pursue this, or if there’s something that we can jump off from here, to tell a different kind of story with this as a background.
Craig: As a fan of Awakenings, I am nervous that it’s doable. I take your point that plenty of people, like yourself, have not seen Awakenings. You’re right, it’s one of those things where it’s a little bit like saying, look, there are people who haven’t seen The Graduate, but if you’re going to tell a story about this young man who’s getting seduced by his future mother-in-law, you start to go, “That is already a pretty famous movie.” I think it was nominated for an Oscar or two, or five.
Even though it is a different illness. In Awakenings, you’re dealing with a fairly profound version of Parkinson’s, that was brought on by viral infection, but basically it’s the same thing. You have somebody that’s catatonic for 20 years, and then a doctor takes interest and tries a very different way of thinking about their problem and finds a medicine that they think will work, and it works. It’s going to be hard to get around.
John: The other person portrayed in this article is Devine Cruz. She is a woman who was going through a similar kind of situation. They recognized, “Oh, this thing worked on a different patient. Let’s try it on you.” I wonder if there’s a specificity of these two women, about their shared thing, about the families’ shared struggle to get people to take this seriously, that there still is this person you’ve written off, there’s still reason to keep for new things.
I’m thinking a Lorenzo’s Oil kind of situation, where it’s less about the doctor who creates the miracle, about more about the family who refuses to give up on this person who they know is still in there someplace. That may could’ve been Awakenings too.
Craig: No, not necessarily. There is this beautiful little side story in Awakenings where his mother comes to visit him. Robert De Niro plays the patient, just in case you were short on star power for Awakenings. The central relationship was between Robert De Niro and Robin Williams playing, essentially, Oliver Sacks.
This is why I think Awakenings is a better film than Lorenzo’s Oil. No offense to the folks who made Lorenzo’s Oil. It’s just that it’s a more interesting relationship, because it’s not a required kind of love. Families loving their own child is sort of perfunctory. We expect it. A doctor that commits to somebody they do not know, who’s never said a word to them or even acknowledged their existence, and then finding how that relationship develops once that person does come out of their catatonia is interesting.
Ultimately, that’s the challenge with this. However, to that the extent that there’s… If you wanted to do a new Awakenings. Unfortunately, it’s really just the specific, the fact that it’s lupus and an immunosuppressant, as opposed to Parkinson’s and L-DOPA, that’s the only difference as far as I can see.
John: I wonder if there’s a way to tell the story from her point of view, basically that the first-person narration is from her point of view and her sense of being stuck inside this thing and what her experience was like, and her trying to, I guess [indiscernible 00:16:22] The Butterfly, trying to reach out from beyond her place.
Craig: I’m not sure that they are in there in that way.
John: The Lovely Bones is the other way I’m thinking about it, told from beyond the grave.
Craig: In these states of catatonia, it doesn’t appear. These people can report on it after, when they come out. It wasn’t like they were in there. They were gone. They were gone.
John: Let’s move now to MDMA and the white supremacist. This is Rachel Nuwer writing for the BBC. Brendan was once a leader in the U.S. white nationalist movement. Then he took the drug MDMA in a scientific study that would radically change the extremist’s beliefs, to the surprise of everyone involved.
MDMA, also known as ecstasy, has been researched, and increasingly researched, for its role as a psychiatric aid for people who are going through PTSD and other things, I’ve seen in the past. This study was really not designed to be focusing on racists. It was just a study on how the drug itself works.
This guy signs up for it and feels he has this huge epiphany and this sense of connection to people he’s never experienced before. Basically, something fundamentally shifts about how he perceives this world around him and he renounces his white nationalist beliefs. That change largely appears to have stuck. Craig, what’s your first approach to this story, this article, and how you think it could be or if it could be useful.
Craig: Very challenging to do. For starters, it’s an individual. This isn’t something where we’re saying, okay, this is working. It’s an individual. Watching people take medicine and then changing their minds is a very un-cinematic thing to portray.
Of note, when you get to the end of the article, you start to feel things getting walked back a little bit. He says, “Yeah, I’m still a little bit like that.” Like, yeah, I still sometimes don’t like Jews, but I’m getting better. There’s a lot of things that could go wrong here.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: You know what? You go down the road of like, oh, you can just cure racism with an injection, you know who’s going to love that? The racists. They don’t get weird about that stuff.
John: There’s no Venn diagram crossover of anti-medical science and racism.
Craig: There’s not a lot of paranoia in the racist community.
John: We want to inject you so your beliefs will change.
Craig: They’re like, “Yeah, we know.” That’s a problem.
John: Let’s talk about movies about racists or racist central characters. It’s a challenge. I’m thinking of American History X, the Edward Norton film, which I didn’t love. It’s so tough to see and be close with a character who is just a racist asshole. Even if they’re redeemed at the end, it’s still really tough to sit down to watch that movie. It’s tough to get me excited to be in that space. I’m trying to think of counter-examples. What are movies that had racist protagonists who changed their beliefs, and we loved those movies?
Craig: Protagonists? No.
John: I think you could be an antagonist. A protagonist could be someone else who caused the change in this character. We see the change having happened, I guess.
Craig: We’ll watch movies about social justice. We will watch movies where racism is overcome by people who are brave. When it comes to the character study of racism, we don’t like watching it. Part of the reason, I think, is because it’s actually boring. We don’t mind, for instance, watching movies about serial killers. We’re fascinated. We want to know, maybe in part because we can point to a serial killer and say, “I don’t know what that thing is, so I’d love to know what’s going on in that head.” Racism is this baked-in extension of our most feeble instincts.
John: Our in-grouping or out-grouping-ness.
Craig: It’s kind of boring. It’s terrible. It causes all sorts of problems. From a dramatic point of view, what is it that we don’t know? I think we basically know. When you see somebody being a racist, you’re like, “That’s a racist.” You just don’t quite want to engage with them. There’s not that curiosity or sense of like, “I need to know how you tick.” I kind of don’t. I kind of don’t want to.
John: In a general sense, let’s talk about when you have a character who is in a group and then has an epiphany and realizes, “Oh, this group I’m in is wrong and bad. I need to leave this group and renounce my prior beliefs.” That can be an effective… That’s a protagonist journey. We totally get that, because you are leaving your safe home place, taking a risk, going to a new location.
It’s these details of this drug you accidentally took. Great. It’s like being bitten by the radioactive spider. This thing you didn’t anticipate caused the change. Our problem is that, we don’t want to hang out with you in your initial state. We don’t want to really talk about these things that you’ve been doing that are bad.
Craig: You can certainly see a situation where this kind of topic, the notion of a psychedelic experience opening someone’s mind to their own mistakes or failures, being a cool thing to happen on page 15, and then-
John: It’s the red pill, blue pill-
Craig: Kind of.
John: … game in The Matrix.
Craig: Then the rest of the movie is really about other stuff, like do I deserve redemption, how do I get out if I’m in trouble, if it’s dangerous to get out, can I get out, what if I love somebody that’s still in. There are ways to address that sort of thing. The reason I say page 15 is because now I’m on board with somebody who’s not a racist by page 15.
John: Exactly.
Craig: I get to go on a journey with a person that I can ride shotgun with. It’s just harder to do otherwise.
John: I think it’s also important the degree to which we as an audience see and believe the world from this character’s point of view. If he is not aware of, I don’t know, the racism, he’s not aware of how broken the group is that he’s a part of, and he’s not aware of the problem until this page 15 epiphany, then we’re there with him. If we can see from the start, oh no no no, this is bad, this is wrong, he’s a bad person, he’s with bad people, it’s going to be very tough for us to enjoy this movie.
Craig: Exactly. There is also the danger of a simplification. I’m not sure I believe this, is the problem. It may be that one person had this interesting thing. Let’s see. The article was written by Rachel Nuwer. I can see why Rachel Nuwer heard this story and went, “That’s a cool article.” I don’t know if it is medically relevant or psychologically relevant to humanity. It may just be this thing that happened to this guy.
John: Let’s talk about outside of the realm of How Would This be a Movie. Could drug treatment like this be useful for people who identify if they want to change their behaviors, that they are pursuing these racist beliefs because of this desperate need for community, and their recognition that they don’t need this for that sense of community, that they can actually find that sense of community outside this place? Sure, but that’s not a movie.
Craig: No, that’s not a movie, and it’s rife with all sorts of issues anyway.
John: This one is much more plotty. This is also drugs and people taking drugs that they are not even aware of.
Craig: Oh yeah, this one.
John: This is an article written by John Carreyrou for the New York Times. “Kyle Roche was a rising star in the field of cryptocurrency law until his career imploded. Who orchestrated his downfall?”
We’re not going to say the names of the people who orchestrated the downfall, because I don’t want to have to cut stuff out of this episode. We’ll talk about in a general sense. We’ve learned our lessons.
In a general sense, this is a guy who was writing about the cryptocurrency industry. At some point, he met up with these people who might’ve been investors. They were people who worked in this industry and didn’t remember much about that encounter. Sometime later, videos came out where he’s saying horrible things, and he does not remember saying them. He’s completely discredited and disowned, and his career is in tatters. I’m alighting a lot in that description. There are actually some interesting twists and turns along the way.
Craig, what do you think of this as a premise? Basically, here’s a guy who’s basically been doped and videoed into saying things that ruins him.
Craig: Kyle Roche was a cryptocurrency litigator, which just sounds like a scumbaggy thing to be. Am I allowed to say that?
John: He was the guy who went after the crypto companies. I don’t think he necessarily started the story as the bad guy. He was the person who worked in cryptocurrency litigation.
Craig: He worked for a thing called Ava Labs, which was connected with cryptocurrency. Look. It’s not like cryptocurrency isn’t criminal, always. It seems like a lot of times at this point. Regardless, here’s what I thought was interesting. There is a mechanism here. I don’t think in and of itself it’s a movie, but there’s a really interesting mechanism.
John: Agreed.
Craig: If we look back to The Firm, which is one of these great ’90s era thrillers, starring Tom Cruise, and is adapted from a Grisham novel, I believe.
John: It was.
Craig: It’s about basically a lawyer who gets blackmailed. He gets set up by a woman who seduces him. There is a videotape. Now he’s in too deep and he has to get out. I think this is a very interesting modern version of that. Nobody would probably go with the VHS tape of you having sex with a… More like, why don’t we just slip something in your drink and then just put you on our phone talking and saying dumb crap that’s going to get you canceled. That’ll do it. That did it.
John: It did it.
Craig: The other question, and this is where sometimes these paranoid thrillers are fun, what if nothing went in his drink? What if this is just what he’s saying, because he’s embarrassed. Hard to say. He has certainly no evidence, from what I can tell, that he was drugged. That said, one of the people that he was having dinner with has disappeared and doesn’t appear to have ever existed anyway in terms of their name. Something fishy was going on, clearly. I think, from a drama point of view, the mechanism of setting someone up here is pretty [crosstalk 00:27:28].
John: It’s pretty delicious. I agree, the crypto thing, it already feels dated and gross. I would lose that. Let’s say he’s a promising litigator. He’s a candidate for something, or he is the DA for someplace. This happens to him. How do you prove that this happened to you, or did it happen to you? I like your suggestion that maybe this didn’t really ever happen, that this is all an excuse for stuff. That’s juicy. I think there is a cool story to be told with this mechanism.
Craig: I think that’s really what we get out of this.
John: Our last one, Craig, somehow I feel like over the course of 10 years, we’ve never really gotten into UFOs and the truth behind the conspiracy to keep them from us. This was a very different post that someone sent to me. There’s no author. There’s no named author. It’s all anonymous. It’s a Reddit thread. The Reddit writer is saying that, “From the late 2000s to the mid-2010s, I worked as a molecular biologist for a national security contractor in a program to study Exo-Biospheric-Organisms,” the EBOs, what we would consider ETs.
You go through this thread, he talks about… I’m saying he. I’m just assuming it’s a he. I don’t know that he ever gave us any pronouns there. Was recruited and went through several interviews, after grad school, I guess, and basically signed a ton of NDAs, which he’s all now breaking. It was his job to review the literature. I’m not sure he was actually doing lab work, scientific lab work, but basically, figuring out what is the biology of this creature, this organism that we have here in this lab.
It describes something that looks like the classic gray alien that we’re used to, but then it goes into very detailed descriptions of specific biological processes. In the DNA coding of it all, it’s clearly some sort of chimera, in that this thing seems to have been using both very normal terrestrial DNA and some other stuff too. It was much more of an Earthy kind of creature than you would expect from something that came from Outer Space.
Craig, reading through this, I of course want to get your Craig bullshit detector test, but also where you think movie is in this space, if there is anything.
Craig: I don’t know what the movie would be here. Look. My guess is that this is somebody who is enjoying being incredibly creative with their knowledge of physiognomy and biology and anatomy and all sorts of things, and using lots of big words, which is fun. They seem to be doing it in a way that is willfully uninterested in educated people about certain things, which is bizarre.
There’s too much detail in certain areas and not enough in others. For instance, a lot of discussion of the fact, for instance, there’s a mouth and there’s an esophagus. However, there is no anus. I have a huge problem with that.
John: The explanation behind this is that it appears that waste products basically go through the skin essentially.
Craig: I have a huge problem with that. It’s not a great method-
John: No, not a great sign.
Craig: … to have a closed tube. Basically, it is a recipe for disaster. The fact that there are no genitals is a very strange thing, and only in the sense that so much of the rest of it, this person is arguing, is somewhat analogous. What they are describing is also something that sounds a whole lot like the little gray or green men that people started talking about in the ’50s. It doesn’t really matter.
Look. The other issue is, if this is true, and you’re a real person, and you’ve done all this real stuff, I don’t know why you’re putting it on Reddit. I really don’t. He says, look, and again, I’m going with your gender on this, “That every human being has the right to know the truth, and to progress, humanity needs to divest itself of certain institutions and organizations,” la da da da da. Okay, fine, but putting it on Reddit, you’re basically saying, “Please don’t believe this.” I just really struggle with that, all of that.
However, let’s say, even, it is all true. I don’t know what to do with it. It’s not functional.
John: Say every word is true. The obvious scenario is, we start the story with, okay, we’re recruiting you. It’s like Sydney Bristow being recruited in Alias. Basically, she’s going to work for, she thinks it’s the CIA, but it turns out to actually be this program to study the little gray men, and they have to decide what am I going to do, am I going to blow the whistle on this, or am I actually going to study this thing?
You could find ways to make stakes for that, basically just to do it from the start. This isn’t a movie about revealing it on Reddit. It’s about those first moments being brought into this big secret. There’s something very compelling about a character being introduced to a new world, a secret world, that has been hidden from everybody else, because it’s a super secret governmental program. There’s something compelling about that.
Then you have to develop characters. You have to develop stakes. You have to develop a whole structure around this and an endpoint for where this movie’s actually going to go. We don’t know what that would be.
Some of the things that are presented here I’m sure are actually part of the ET lore that I just don’t know about. This idea that the DNA is… These are engineered creatures. These are sort of like worker bees. They are not self-reproducing creatures. They’re actually manufactured in some way. That’s interesting. That’s different, for me. I’m sure there’s been hundreds of other examples of people speculating on that.
Craig: This is a cool thing, if you’re writing a movie, a fictional film, about people discovering that humans are the result of genetic engineering of extraterrestrial creatures or whatever it is that you’re thinking about. This is fun. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with this.
John: I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with it either. As we’re talking, I’m thinking maybe this Reddit post we’re reading is actually just a form of fiction, just an interesting form of new fiction that exists as a Reddit post-
Craig: I think it is.
John: … that’s not meant to be anything else.
Craig: That’s what it feels like to me. Otherwise, what a weirdly bad way of going about this. Again, it’s written in such a way that it, at times, is really invested in explaining things to the layperson, and at other times, is enjoying not. You know when somebody uses a bunch of lingo or jargon around you, and should know you wouldn’t know it, and it’s annoying? That. It does a lot of that.
John: The writer actually acknowledges that, in terms of going way too deep on things, and also says, “I’m deliberately obfuscating some things and throwing you red herrings to protect myself to not reveal who I am.”
Craig: Okay, so what are we doing with this? I don’t know what to do with it. Did this take off on Reddit? Did it get super viral?
John: Yeah. It got popular enough that it showed up in my feed. More than one listener sent it to me about How Would This be a Movie. Of course, the original writer, it looks like, got banned off of Reddit. There’s all this speculation about if this writer’s been disappeared. Sure, or that could be that’s largely part of the game is that this information is being kept from you.
Craig, this is about this alien biology, but have we even discussed on the show, what is your perspective on unidentified aerial phenomenon? Increasingly now, we have our government acknowledging, yeah, there’s stuff that we see in the sky, that we can’t explain it. We’re not saying it’s extraterrestrial. Just yeah, there’s stuff, we don’t know what it is, and we’re going to acknowledge we don’t know what it is.
Craig: We don’t know what it is. The fact that we have a literary pretext for what it is doesn’t mean that that’s what it is. I’m still waiting for the reason why all these aliens keep visiting and sort of being seen but then not. They have no problem being seen for a while, but not clearly. They seem to have gone to the Bigfoot school of visibility. That is highly suspicious.
At this point now, we’ve been talking about UFOs since the ’40s, I believe, and I guess even earlier, to War of the Worlds and earlier, we’re still waiting for one of them, not even one of them, to just be seen. There was that story recently like, “Oh my god, the police found an alien in a backyard in Vegas.” No, it was a guy in a fricking forklift or something.
Anyway, the point is, we see things that we don’t understand all the time. No question. Do we know what they are? We do not. Are they the product of intelligent life, alien craft? No clue. Doesn’t seem consistent with anything that makes sense. Not sure what aliens are doing here. I know certainly if we travel to another planet, we won’t be traveling there to zip around weirdly and then leave. That’s just weird.
John: Not efficient use of resources.
Craig: No. Look. The best guess I have is that what’s happening is we are seeing some glitches in the simulation. That’s it. Just simulation glitches.
John: The other counter-argument for that we have a giant governmental conspiracy to hide this stuff is that Trump never said anything.
Craig: Honestly. Right?
John: The minute that anyone brought it up, he’s like, “Oh my god, I’m going to blab about it.”
Craig: He would say something like, “I can’t say. I’m not saying. Let me just say, some things, major things that would really… You would be amazed. You would be amazed.” He didn’t even do that. There’s nothing there. Although I got to be honest, if there are aliens, if we do have alien, they wouldn’t have told. They’re like, “Let’s not tell this one.”
John: They’re going to keep that from him. Craig, often on this part of these segments, we talk through and figure out which of these is going to be the one that’s optioned and made into a movie. I don’t think we have any of them this time. I don’t think any of these are directly going to be adapted into-
Craig: Correct.
John: … a feature film. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are not going to track these down, as they often do. That’s not going to happen. I agree with you. I think we found a really good mechanism in the drugged crypto lawyer. That’s going to come back. I liked our digging into the problems of the character who stops being so racist.
Craig: I don’t know what to do with any of these, other than to take the plot element of getting somebody to cancel themselves is a cool-
John: It is a great mechanism.
Craig: … method to screw somebody up. Other than that, I don’t know what to do with these, from a movie point of view.
John: Let us get to our next segment, which is Drew and Halley use our words against us.
Craig: Great.
John: Drew Marquardt, our Scriptnotes producer, and Halley Lamberson, our Scriptnotes intern, they have been working through the whole back catalog as they’re putting together these chapters. They’ve found some, I don’t know, questions, some inconsistencies. Halley, Drew, let me turn it over to you. What would you like to ask us about? You’re in charge.
Drew: I will say we came at this, I think, looking for those inconsistencies, but you guys have been frustratingly consistent over the last 11 years. I thought I had one last week where I was like, “Oh, I got them dead to rights.” I went back, I checked the tape, and it all fit. We have a few questions, just to follow up on stuff.
Craig: Great.
John: Great.
Drew: In Episode 74, back in 2013, you guys said that selling a drama spec script was very, very tough these days. I was wondering if that’s still true, or if you think that’s still true.
John: I think that is still true. I think the feature business has gotten even tougher with specs from 2013. There are still specs that sell. There’s still the blacklist. There’s still scripts that people find fascinating and eventually get into development. It’s really tough to do.
Now, as a corollary, I would say, is it easy to sell a comedy feature spec? No, not easy to sell those either. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be writing them. It just means that your expectation of like, this is going to be my lottery ticket that gets me started, should not be your expectation. You should think of, this is the really good script that will get me into rooms to start talking about a writing career. Craig?
Craig: I assume we were talking about feature films here. In 2013, we obviously were not aware of the impending stream apocalypse that was about to be imposed upon us all. The streamers have opened up other options. They make movies, if you want to call them that, features. There’s probably at least more opportunity there to sell a dramatic screenplay.
We were really talking in 2013, I suspect, in contrast with the way the business functioned when we began in the ’90s, where spec scripts were the mania. It was tulip mania. By the time you hit 2013, it was kind of gone. I don’t really think that kind of entrepreneurial feeding frenzy, send it out on a Friday, bidding war over the weekend, sell it by Sunday night, is going to come back.
Drew: Do you think drama is less likely to sell than a genre script, in like a thriller or horror category?
Craig: I actually think drama’s probably more likely than comedy right now.
John: As opposed to genre or horror? I think genre and horror are still selling. Even on the picket line, I talked to folks who are selling those scripts, because they can be made for a price. There’s a clear pattern for them.
Craig: Action movies, horror movies, definitely, but comedies are tough and drama’s tough. The other thing that I think we weren’t quite had our minds wrapped around completely in 2013 was just how dominant superhero films would become, and what a disruption they were to the flow of what we think of as genre film. Superhero movie was not a genre. They were making them. We knew what they were. It wasn’t like, oh, an entire studio is just going to pump out nothing but those.
That definitely changed things as well. The traditional kind of $45 million movie about politics or a marriage falling apart, there are still independent films, but the studios just got out of that business completely.
John: To the degree that they’re making those issue dramas, they’re based on a book, or they’re there for award season, and they’re going to be released in December and go through that whole process. It’s hard for you as a writer to be coming out of the gate with one of those.
Craig: I agree too that if it is not from a writer-director, it gets even harder, because at least with that, you can say, okay, there are people that make these kinds of Bombackian films, and they are director-writers, and that’s what they do. Makes sense. Trickier to the old-fashioned way of, I write a script, we throw it out to the town, and then a bunch of money comes back? I don’t think that’s changed.
Drew: Great. Halley, I will throw it to you.
Halley Lamberson: Back in December 2014, on Episode 176, advice to a first-time director, Craig, you said directing a movie, a feature film, is the hardest job in show business. We’d like to ask, what do you both think about this now, and what is the hardest job in show business?
Craig: Run a television show that was going to shoot for 200 days. Even though that is very hard, I’m going to double down here. Having directed again recently, there is a physical and mental demand to that job that is unique and really, really hard to do. When I say hard, I don’t mean hardest as in requiring the most talent or skill. It’s not necessarily the most difficult from that perspective. I mean just physically and emotionally, I think it is the hardest job. It can really break you down. There is no break. You get shot out of a cannon on Monday morning, and you land on the ground Friday night. You’re catatonic all weekend, and then you start again. That is brutal. I’m going to stick with that one.
John: I would say I recognize how difficult all the jobs are in this town, especially the jobs on set, going all the way to the PA, who has no agency, but has to get this thing to happen or do this thing. What is different about the director’s job is that they are responsible for all these different pieces, but they’re also responsible to their own creative vision for how they’re going to get this thing to work and how are they going to get in all the changes that are happening around them, what are they going to do to get the shot that they think they need for this next part of this process.
Craig, I really thought you might change over to showrunning, because obviously, when you were the showrunner on The Last of Us, you’re often on set and making some decisions, but you’re not the final responsible person. You’re also responsible for this entire universe and carrying it all in your head through this very long process, which is-
Craig: Hard.
John: More so than any one of your individual directors. It’s the, are you running 400 meters, or are you running a marathon? That’s the difference. There are different levels of exertion.
Craig: It is. Even when on set, ultimately, when you’re the showrunner, you’re the top of the mountain. Everybody understands that sooner or later, I’m the one that’s going to be editing it, I’m the one that’s making the final decisions, and if I don’t get the footage I need, I’ll be the one going back to get it somehow. You are always in charge. That is in and of itself, can be very taxing. There are times where you could say, “It’s 3:00 p.m. Things are going well. We’re into coverage. I like what I’m seeing. I’m going home. I’m going to go home.” Now, when I go home, I still have 12 meetings to do. I’m not going to go home and play Zelda.
That’s different than when I’m directing. When I’m directing, every minute of every day is on my shoulder, keeping the paces on my shoulder, making sure I get every shot I need, making sure I’m really happy. There’s the mental duress of deciding when I should move on and when I shouldn’t, that constant push and pull in your head of, I don’t want to start chasing, but I also don’t want to quit too soon. Also, just physically, up on your feet and moving around.
How about this? I’ll make a slight word adjustment. Directing is the most arduous job in show business. Perhaps the most difficult job in show business is being a showrunner, particularly on a very big show.
John: I would agree.
Drew: John, does it still drive you crazy when people camel case Scriptnotes?
John: Just to make sure everyone knows what we’re talking about with camel casing, camel casing is a… It’s not even punctuation. It’s a form of smashing words together, so that where the second word would start, you uppercase it. I will often see Scriptnotes written as capital S, C-R-I-P-T, capital N, O-T-E-S.
It still drives me frigging crazy. I hate it. I’ve stopped commenting on it now, because I know that it doesn’t actually change anything. People think that, I don’t know, maybe because I’m techy or something, that I enjoy the camel casing of it all, because it comes out of programming. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s good.
Scriptnotes from the very start, from when Craig suggested the title Scriptnotes, I wrote it as one word, just capital at the front. It still does drive me crazy, and yet I see it in emails all the time. If you’re writing in with a question to Scriptnotes, just know that I enjoy that N being lowercase.
Drew: We throw out all the uppercase Ns.
John: That’s what it is. I’ve set a rule in our email programs to banish all the ones that uppercase it.
Craig: Could you set up a filter that just converts it automatically so you never have to see it?
John: Craig, that is actually a very smart idea. It’d be running a continuous process, but it’d be worth all the processor cycles to-
Craig: It would be worth it. You would need to-
John: Just to make it better for me.
Craig: … buy another 12 computers and an additional air conditioning unit just to take care of it. I will tell you, Drew, that this issue continues to not plague me.
John: Not a bit. I will say when I’m strapping in my Apple Vision headset, if I see that camel case N, it’s going to bug me.
Craig: Oh, man. What’s going to happen with that? We’ll find out.
John: We’ll find out.
Craig: We’ll find out.
Drew: Halley, I think you have the most important last question here.
Halley: This is something Drew and I are really looking for clarity on. We’ve learned of a few Craig personas on the show. There’s been Cool Craig, Sexy Craig.
Craig: Of course.
Halley: Today we’re bringing it back to Episode 238, the job of writer-producer, featuring Dana Fox. The question is, who is Whole Foods Craig, and is he still in there?
Craig: Who is Whole Foods Craig? I could guess what Whole Foods Craig is.
John: Let’s give it a guess.
Craig: Whole Foods Craig was super natural guy who’s all about eating clean and spirulina and all that. Is that Whole Foods-
Drew: You weren’t quite sure if he worked at Whole Foods or if he was just shopping at Whole Foods.
Craig: Hanging out there all day.
Halley: He sounded really chill.
Craig: Whole Foods Craig probably doesn’t work there, but should, because he is there all day. When he sees somebody looking to choose between which version of ginkgo biloba to buy, he’s like, “Hey man, just so you know, this one actually is triple filtered. This one may have additives.” Whole Foods Craig. Whole Foods Craig, by the way, is annoying.
John: Yeah, but I’ll take Whole Foods Craig any day over some of those other personas.
Craig: Oh, will you?
John: Yeah.
Craig: I think you’ll take Sexy Craig. Sexy Craig gets taken.
John: Drew has control of the edits of Sexy Craig. I think it can disappear.
Craig: It’s on topic. I don’t know what to say. I didn’t bring up Sexy Craig.
John: Drew and Halley, thank you so much for all the hard work you’re doing on the Scriptnotes book and putting down these questions for us.
Craig: Thanks, guys. Thank you.
Halley: Of course. Thanks.
John: It’s time for our One Cool Things, Craig. I see you have one here. What is it?
Craig: It’s Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
John: Oh my god, it’s the game you’re playing.
Craig: Yeah, it is. You know what? I’m a little late. I’m not super late, but I’m a little late. I know that. The reason I wanted to call it out is because it is certainly a close successor to Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which was incredibly highly acclaimed game. It’s up there as one of the best video games of all time. I hated it. I just hated it. I just struggled with it so much.
Everyone was playing Tears of the Kingdom. I was like, “Okay, there’s maybe some things about it.” They really did improve so much of what bothered me about Breath of the Wild, and kept the things that I enjoyed. It’s wonderfully done. Hats off to Nintendo. There’s no blood. There’s no cursing. There’s no sex. It’s very bowdlerized. It’s very Disney. Yet it’s also quality. They invested so much thought and time and energy.
As you go through this game, you start with standard Zelda style, you start with three hearts. Those are your hit points. You got three hit points. You got to get more hearts, or you’re going to get killed all the time. The only way to get a heart is by solving puzzles in four different shrines. Each shrine has a puzzle.
John: I can’t imagine Craig wouldn’t enjoy those puzzles.
Craig: I do. Then you think, from a game design point of view, makes sense to make it hard. You gotta do four of them. You gotta find the shrine. Then you gotta solve the puzzle inside, which sometimes are very complicated. That gets you 25% of the way to a heart. You’re going to need to end up with 15, 20, 30 hearts to win this thing, I think. I’m currently at 16 hearts, and I can’t win yet. That means they have to come up with so many shrines and so many different puzzles. They did. That’s all layered on top of all the other stuff.
The other thing that Nintendo does so well is, no offense to everybody else out there, when they ship a game, it’s good to go. It’s solid. It works. There isn’t a lot of people running on YouTube and just going, “Can you believe they shipped this thing in this shape?” Hats off. Well done, Nintendo. Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a fantastic game. I’m thoroughly enjoying it.
John: That’s great. This is not my One Cool Thing, but I am playing Diablo 4. We talked about it, how we were both going to be starting our big RPGs. It is the opposite of Zelda. There’s nothing but blood. There’s so much blood in this game. Everything is drenched in blood at all times and misery core. I think it’s actually really, really well done. The game they shipped is flawless for me. I’ve been really impressed by-
Craig: That’s great.
John: … what they’ve learned from previous versions. It’s good. My actual One Cool Thing is Larry Turman. Larry Turman passed away recently. He had a remarkable 96-year life. He was a producer. He did The Graduate, got nominated for an Oscar, The Thing, American History X, which you mentioned today on the podcast.
Craig: And The Graduate. We mentioned both of those.
John: An absolute legend. I knew him because he was the head of the Stark Program. For 30 years he ran the Stark Program.
Craig: Wow.
John: I was part of the first class that he picked. He’s the reason I came out to Los Angeles, is because he picked me to join this class of 25. He ran that program so well and grew it and changed it. Our initial program, we had one television class over the two years. Now of course, Drew and other people get a lot of TV exposure in that class.
Scriptnotes would not make sense without Larry Turman, because not only did Larry pick me, he picked Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonald, Drew Marquardt, our Scriptnotes producers. They were all hand selected by Larry Turman. Our guests, like Dara Resnik, Chad Creasey, Al Gough, and Miles Millar, so many of the people you’ve encountered on Scriptnotes have come through this tiny little program at USC called the Peter Stark Program.
He was an absolute delight. I miss him. He was a gentleman through and through. After he left the Stark Program, he went, lived in the motion picture retirement community. I was going to go see him. I actually had an opportunity to present him with a Rolodex of all of the people who wanted him to remember what an impact he had, at this event. I thought that was actually probably the best last place for me to have a moment to thank him for all he did. I just wanted to acknowledge Larry Turman’s passing, because he was an absolute gem of a person.
Craig: Wow, that’s very sweet. You and I both know his son, John. Our sympathies to John. I should add, just because I guess we’re doing some obituaries here, Danny Goldberg, who produced the Hangover films, also passed away, yesterday in fact, as we’re recording this on Thursday, July 13th, somewhat unexpectedly, at a somewhat young age of 73. I know, Drew, that seems very old to you. I can only imagine that Halley probably didn’t even know people got that old, but we do. Danny was such a sweet and gentle guy, who went all the way back to the Harold Ramis, Ivan Reitman, Meatballs days. He was involved with so many big comedy films over the years. It’s just very sad to read about that yesterday. Also, rest in peace, Danny Goldberg.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Halley Lamberson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: You know it.
John: Our outro this week is by Jon Spurney. It’s back in the yacht rock tradition that you love so much, Craig.
Drew: He said challenge accepted.
Craig: Nice.
John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.
You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on One D and D. A last reminder, if you want to come to our live show, get your tickets now, because they will be gone very, very soon.
Craig: The Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts.
John: Thank you for a fun podcast.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, you and I actually already had this conversation, but it was off mic. I want to have this conversation back on mic so we can thrill and/or bore our listeners who care or do not care about these details. The version of D and D that we’ve been playing as a group for the last six, eight years, longer than that? I don’t know how long we’ve been playing D and D with the group.
Craig: It’s been like 10 years now.
John: Ten years now. It’s called Fifth Edition. Fifth Edition is the version that Wizards of the Coast publishes of D and D, which is a very cleaned up version. It’s based around a die-20, and a lot of fundamental structural things went into Fifth Edition. People really like Fifth Edition. It’s become a very good standard. Yet over the course of these 10 years, things have been added and changed and moved around.
There’s a new version coming out, that doesn’t replace Fifth Edition, but clarifies, streamlines, simplifies some things. This new version is called One D and D. It’s in play-testing right now. I thought we might just walk through some of the changes there. I also want to discuss, how do you tinker with something people love in a way that makes them love it more and doesn’t make them resent you for tinkering with it.
Craig: Particularly when you’re dealing with the rule set for an RPG, because people that play tabletop games like this are not known for their flexibility, and they are opinionated. That said, you’re absolutely right. Wizards of the Coast just hit it out of the park with 5E. It transformed their business. It is the most popular version of Dungeons and Dragons ever. That’s for sure. What they seem to be doing, in a good way, is tweaking it based on a lot of input from players. That’s what it feels like to me.
I think a little bit of the change is being presented as maybe giving players a little more flexibility, but really is more about cleaning up some, as the kids say, problematic language, as the world has changed. In Dungeons and Dragons, there are races. The races have traits. I don’t know. People aren’t as into that concept.
John: We should say, by races we’re talking there’s humans, but there’s also gnomes and there’s halflings and there’s dragonborn. Within those races, it’s long been established that people can look like a lot of different things, but those are the basic categories.
Craig: There were attributes that were connected specifically to race. Certain races were stronger than other races, physically. Certain races were smarter than other races. Certain races come with bonuses for these things. There were also half-races.
In general, I think in a good way, there’s nothing about connecting qualities to race that is inherent. One of the things they’ve said, which I agree with, is that if you disconnect some of these things from race, and instead attach it more to just your choice, you can make more interesting characters. You could always make, for instance, a half-orc wizard. There’s no problem with it. Your character was always going to be lagging behind, because you had started them in a weird way.
John: Specifically they’d be disadvantaged, because an orc would not have the intelligence bonus that-
Craig: That’s right, an elf would.
John: … someone else would.
Craig: A high elf would.
John: Elf would.
Craig: What the half-orc would have would be a bonus in strength, which is useless for a wizard. What they’re saying now, in this new version, is these things are not at all connected to race. You can pick whatever race you want. The bonuses to ability scores are uniform. It’s this amount. You put them where you want. You can have an orcish wizard, without feeling like you’re starting three tiers below your friends. Similarly, you can have a gnomeish barbarian. It’s fun.
John: Along with the basic stats, like strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, there’s some things that also came along with the character’s chosen race. Those things have been moved into what’s called a background, so basically where you grew up or your origin story informs what sort of skills you might have. That also tracks and makes more sense.
I think an important thing to think about, which is also true for screenwriting, is that the characters in your stories are, by their nature, going to be exceptional. They’re not going to be ordinary folks. It makes sense that your orcish wizard is remarkable and different from other characters out there. The fact they can do these things at all is remarkable. It makes sense that they shouldn’t be confined to certain traits or aspects.
Craig: That’s right. They’re also doing a lot of interesting work to even out things that were a little wonky. In the 5E system, as your character levels up, generally speaking, every four levels, it’s different for fighters, you will have a chance to either increase some of your abilities, like strength or intelligence or charisma, or you can take a feat. A feat is a special property that gives you interesting options that you would’ve otherwise had. Some of those feats were great. Some of those feats stank.
John: Some of them no one ever used.
Craig: Correct. What they’re doing now is, A, balancing the feats out a bit better, but B, to give players, to get them into the feats, because the feats are cool. Currently, every first-level player, as you begin your journey, gets a feat, no matter who you are. It’s tied to background. I think that’s great. Also, the feats themselves will be changing as you level up, which is not the case currently, so that’s fine.
John: Craig, thinking back to your original players handbook, from Second Edition or whatever you consider your first, AD and D handbook.
Craig: AD and D.
John: AD and D. All the spells were printed in there multiple times, in the cleric spell list and the magic-user spell list. It was basically exactly the same spell, but they were in fact padding. They were filling out this book. A change I really respected, at some point they realized, you know what, it’s the same spell. We should just call it the same spell. The spells will be alphabetical now. They’re going further now, where they’re saying rather than have these different spell lists for all these different characters and who gets to cast what spell, we’re going to group them all by three basic categories, primal spells, divine spells, and arcane spells. Arcane is what we think about with wizards casting generally. Divine are things like priests and paladins. Primal would be-
Craig: Sorcerers, druids.
John: Druids. Rangers might have those primal spells. That tracks and makes sense. It just makes things also a lot simpler in terms of thinking who can cast what spell.
Craig: These kinds of simplifications are great. What happens is, over time you can just start to feel those friction points. We’ve solved a lot of those friction points just by the way everything’s become digitized. When we started playing again, we all had the physical book. You have to flip through the book. You had all your tabs to get to the pages. You were constantly going back to your textbook. Now you can just type it up and boop. That’s going to become even more the case as Wizards moves D and D towards their new virtual tabletop platform through D and D Beyond, but to continue to reduce those friction points, which makes total sense.
The other thing, what I appreciate is, as far as I can tell, they’re just asking the question, what would be more fun? Look. Wizards have a thousand different spells they can use. There’s so many choices you can make. If you’re playing a barbarian, you have one choice really. Should I rage or not rage? I guess there’s a sub-choice. Should I attack recklessly or not? Basically, that’s it.
John: That’s it.
Craig: That’s your thing.
John: Hit with sword. Hit with sword.
Craig: That’s what you do all day. If that’s what you do all day, currently when you rage, you rage for a minute. What it does is it gives you a couple things, and then it’s over. If you don’t attack somebody or get hit, it ends. They’re like, maybe rage should last for 10 minutes, and you don’t have to get hit or keep hitting. You just get to stay angry for 10 minutes. You get a few other benefits outside of combat as well, which is nice. Just recognizing once a barbarian’s burned through their rage, what the hell are they doing all day with their friends? Everyone else is doing all this cool stuff. They’re like, “Done.”
John: I’m excited to play it. I think the next campaign we start, we’ll probably try to use these rules and see what it is. We’re skipping over some smaller rule adjustments which just seem to make sense, conditions that track a little bit better and things like that. These were the big ones. I think it also may result in a little bit less min-maxing of like, “Oh, I’m going to choose a half-elf for this character, because it’ll give me this bonus here.” It’s like, no, just pick the most interesting things for you to play, rather than for the stats.
Craig: Yes. Now, let us always remind ourselves that the great body of D and D players are resourceful, smart, and particularly good At finding exploits. Part of what Wizards is doing is also, as they put these test rules out, they are looking for people to basically do the equivalent of white hat hacking, to find weaknesses, because any little slight mistake of wording, and suddenly a Level 1 character may have something that’s way too powerful. We’re not there yet. We’re not near, I don’t think, the final version of this. Maybe by the end of the year.
John: Maybe. 2024 is what I’ve seen. Sometime in that, it’ll come out. It’ll be nice. Even though so much of the play has moved online, the resources are online, I still want physical books for this. I really enjoy having my first experience with these things flipping through the pages and seeing that stuff. They may great books.
Craig: They do. By the way, have you watched the demo video of what they’re working on virtual tabletop-wise?
John: It really does look great.
Craig: It’s amazing.
John: For listeners at home, it’s a 3D kind of environment. What Craig and I have been playing is called Roll20. It’s a top-down view. It’s like you’re looking at a grid of paper. It’s good. This one that they’re doing for this new version is 3D. Your characters look like little miniature figurines that are moving around.
Craig: Which I love.
John: Yes, and which is a smart choice. They’re not realistic character things. They’re little figurines. Spells have effects and things, and you see it all.
Craig: It’s interesting three-quarter view. It just looks spectacularly good. If I were Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds or any of these other guys, I’d be very nervous right now.
John: The Roll20s though, they can also handle other games. They’ll be fine. People who want to play other non-D and D stuff will still be at Roll20.
Craig: D and D still accounts for I think about half of their play base. Exciting days ahead for D and D. I’m particularly pleased that based on what they’re saying here, they’re not evening saying hey, this is D and D 6.
John: No, it’s not.
Craig: Which I think is great. I think they’re just saying, we’re just buffing and polishing 5, because that’s all it needed really. I think that’s great.
John: I agree. Craig, thanks.
Craig: Thank you, John.
Links:
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- How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist by Rachel Nuwer for BBC
- He Went After Crypto Companies. Then Someone Came After Him. by John Carreyrou for the New York Times
- Alien biology post on Reddit
- Awakenings and Lorenzo’s Oil
- Scriptnotes episodes 74, 176, 238 and 251.
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
- Larry Turman on IMDb and Wikipedia.
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