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I really haven’t had a lot to say about the Iraqi insurgency. Or, if you prefer, rebellion. Or terrorism. Or uprising. Me, I’ve been thinking of it as “the Iraqi disaster,” but I must admit that’s a somewhat loaded term.

I think in retrospect I’m a little wary. There’s this great debating tactic: when someone posts about problems in Iraq, and says “this is the sort of thing I was worried about; this is the sort of thing that proves my point” you go over and say, at the top of your lungs, “Look! She’s happy that American soldiers are dying!” It’s not a great tactic because it convinces people. It’s a great tactic because it reinforces the convictions of the people who use it, and allows them to feel all morally superior.

Still. This is the sort of thing I was worried about, and it’s the sort of thing that proves my point. I wish I’d been wrong.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army has a fairly firm hold on Najaf. Najaf is a holy city, and if American troops attack it, the Mahdi Army will swell with recruits. The United States cannot afford to allow rebels to control a major Iraqi city. The wicket is more than a little sticky.

It wouldn’t matter if it was UN troops. The only armed force that could do anything about the problem without making the problem worse is an Iraqi armed force. Unfortunately, we don’t have the kind of credibility and authority in Iraq which would make it possible for us to convince a sizable Iraqi military effort in Najaf. Not that there was going to be any way to establish that kind of credibility.

The only likely path out of this is negotiations, and those are going to be difficult for entirely different reasons — mostly issues of face. Muqtada al-Sadr doesn’t have to back down, and Bush won’t.

The current casualty levels are high in relation to what we’ve seen over the course of the last year, but low on absolute terms. This is cold, but it is also true. It also doesn’t entirely matter, because the question is how longer we’ll be willing to watch a hundred Americans die every month with no exit strategy in sight.

Juan Cole is still the best place to go for analysis of the Iraqi situation. The Command Post has a conservative bias but that doesn’t keep them from posting both good and bad news.

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From an interview with Matt Wells of Gigablast:

“Another major feature of Gigablast is its ability to index Web pages almost instantly, Wells explains. The network machines give priority to query traffic, but when they’re not answering questions, they spend their time spidering the Web.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

His comments on the reasons for Google’s success are dead accurate, by the by. PageRank was not as important as size and freshness.

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Movable Type 3.0 beta testing starts this Monday, April 19th. You can apply to be a beta tester now.

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Mention Count: 2.

In Angel, characters have Drama Points, which can be used for a number of quasi-narrative purposes. PCs get either 10 or 20 at the start of the game, depending on how powerful they are otherwise. (Think of the difference between Angel or Buffy on the one hand and Xander or Wesley on the other hand.) They have five uses, as follows:

Heroic Feat, which gives you a +10 bonus on any one roll; I Think I’m OK, which instantly heals half the damage a character has taken to the point it’s used; Plot Twist, which creates a “lucky break” for the characters; Righteous Fury, which costs 2 Drama Points and gives a +5 bonus for all rolls for one fight; and Back From The Dead, which allows a character to come back from death.

You can get more Drama Points by trading in experience points or — more interestingly — acting in a number of ways which reinforce the genre. For example, self-sacrificing heroic actions earn Drama Points. The GM also has the option to give out Drama Points when he takes over narrative control of a situation. For example, if he narrates that a PC is knocked out without warning, said PC gets a few Drama Points in exchange.

Since Life and Death on Winter Hill is a short-term game, I don’t think it makes sense to hand out experience points. I’d cut out the middle-man and just grant 4 or 2 Drama Points per session, depending once more on the power level of the character.

What are the genre conventions I want to encourage? I do actively want this to take place in the Whedonverse, so I think giving out Drama Points for witty lines makes sense. Drama Points for angst doesn’t make as much sense. Loyalty, on the other hand, is fairly important. Perhaps 2 Drama Points every time someone makes a difficult decision involving loyalty? I’m not sure exactly how to codify that. Possibly Loyalty should be an disadvantage in character generation, much the same way as Honorable is in the base rules.

I’m also thinking about other ways to use Drama Points as narrative currency. I want to give players narrative control over NPCs, both because I like making players do my work for me and because I think I can leverage that control for more emotional involvement. (More on that in a later post.) It seems like you should be able to invent an NPC for 1 Drama Point, and take over long-term control of an NPC for something like 3-5 Drama Points.