Super Saturday: Parallels

Ever notice how very similar the backstories are for Rom the Spaceknight and Beta Ray Bill? I must be a sucker for that theme, because I like them both.






(Pages from Rom #1, Bill Mantlo writer, Sal Buscema artist, 1979; and Thor #340, Walt Simonson writer/artist, 1983.)

Super Saturday: Rogue's First Kiss

Trivia Question: Who was Rogue's first kiss in Marvel publication history? Hint: It's the most awesome possible character, of course. (Scroll down to see who it is...) Hell yeah, it's ROM THE SPACEKNIGHT!!! (Fooled ya, maybe?)

This is Rom #32, which I believe is just Rogue's third appearance ever as a character. She first appeared in Avengers Annual #10 (August 1981), then Uncanny X-Men #158 (June 1982), and then here in Rom #32 (July 1982). Of course, the kiss doesn't really do anything because Rom's an alien cyborg -- although the follow-up panels give Rogue a stunned expression, with a caption that says it's her first experience with true decency, and, "She finds that she... likes it." Which leads Siskoid over at Blog of Geekery to conclude: "There you have it, folks: Rom is so The Man that one kiss from him turned Rogue to the Light Side of the Force." Man, I love me some Rom. (I mean, not in that sense. Not that there's anything wrong with it.) Big thanks to Siskoid for the Rom retrospective and scans. Edit: Fooled you again! Via the comments, poster Agent of W.E.R.Q., points out that Rogue actually did kiss someone in the earlier Avengers Annual -- Captain America, while unconscious, successfully stealing his powers. Mea culpa. Well, it was nice to think about!

Super Saturday: Thor Puzzler #5

Question: Exactly what is the relationship between Balder and Sif?

Answer: What I refer to as the "Reverse Skywalker".



(Pages from JIM/Thor #102, 144. Plot/writer Stan Lee. Penciler Jack Kirby. Dates 1964, 1967.)

Poll Results: Scrolls

The other week, after a series of posts regarding the origin of thieves' potentially risky use of magic scroll spells, I asked the question: "Does it make sense to transcribe scroll-spells to book-spells?" The results are pretty decisive -- even after pointing out that somatic components (AD&D-style) would probably be missing from the magic words on the scroll, 86% of voters chose "yes, it does make sense". So apparently that's a consensus for one less thing to tinker with in classic D&D.

Super Saturday: Thor Puzzler #4

So by now you should be aware that once, Thor could transform into his mortal secret identity of Don Blake (and back) by tapping his stick/hammer on the ground. But here's a question -- Can Don/Thor make this transformation if somebody else taps the cane nearby?

Answer: Yes.



And no.



(Pages from JIM/Thor #105, 138. Plot/writer Stan Lee. Penciler Jack Kirby. Dates 1964, 1967.)

Chi is for Charisma

A common question when people see one of my short character stat-blocks: "What is the X for?" Because they're looking at something like: "S17, I10, W13, D12, C15, X10". (For example, see my cut-down character sheets here.)

And my answer is (the title probably gave it away): "That's a Greek letter 'Chi' which is standing in for Charisma". From Wikipedia: "charisma (pl. charismata, adj. charismatic; from the Greek χαρισμα, meaning 'favor given' or 'gift of grace')" This being my minimally-clever way of having a one-character abbreviation for each ability (and dodging the two-"c" issue between constitution & charisma).

This week's edition of Delta's D&D Hotspot has been brought to you by the letter Chi.

Balanced Dice in Dragon Magazine

One of the most-viewed posts on this blog (currently #3 in all-time number of views) is the article on "Testing a Balanced Die", with a simple presentation of the well-known Pearson's Chi-Square Test. What I just recently found out is that this was anticipated by D.G. Weeks in a Dragon magazine article more than 25 years before: "Be thy die ill-wrought? Only those that pass the chi-square test can play" (Dragon #78, Oct-1983, p. 62-65). Somehow this escaped my attention all these years (I don't think that I had a physical copy of this issue back in the day).

Not much of a surprise that Weeks' procedure was equivalent to the one I presented (it's very much a standardized process from circa 1900, at the advent of modern statistics). One thing he did differently: Whereas I presented chi-square values at the 5% significance level, which is sort of customary (only 5% chance that an unbiased die accidentally exceeds the given values), he gave two numbers, at the 10% and 1% significance levels (saying that if it exceeds the first, then the die is maybe-possibly biased, and if it exceeds the second, then there is overwhelming evidence that it's biased). He also presented a listing of BASIC program code you could type in (at the time, it was fairly common in Dragon magazine) that would do the tabulations and calculations for you. In addition, it could categorize the data in case you were testing a hypothesis that a specific known face or group of faces was coming up more frequently.

See below for Weeks' presentation of testing a d8 for fairness (80 total rolls, per face E=10, SSE = 76; concludes that the die is unbiased; same conclusion as from my presentation: SSE < X*E = 14.067*10 = 140.67). Compare to my scratch paper included at the bottom here.



Weeks' table of critical values for X at the 10% and 1% significance levels: