Everything Bad Is Good for You Read Free

well be the tax form instructions you’d happily pay an accountant to decipher. Reading these words now, I have to slow myself down just to follow the syntax, but my ten-year-old self had so thoroughly internalized this arcana that I played hundreds of APBA games without having to consult the fine print. An 11 in the second column on the batter’s card? Obviously, obviously that means ignore the normal grade changes for the pitcher. It’d be crazy not to!
    The creators of APBA devised such an elaborate system for understandable reasons: they were pushing the limits of the dice-and-cards genre to accommodate the statistical complexity of baseball. This mathematical intricacy was not limited to baseball simulations, of course. Comparable games existed for most popular sports: basketball sims that let you call a zone defense or toss a last-minute three-point Hail Mary before the clock ran out; boxing games that let you replay Ali/Foreman without the rope-a-dope strategy. British football fans played games like Soccerboss and Wembley that let you manage entire franchises, trading players and maintaining the financial health of the virtual organization. A host of dice-based military simulations re-created historical battles or entire world wars with painstaking fidelity.
    Perhaps most famously, players of Dungeons & Dragons and its many imitators built elaborate fantasy narratives—all by rolling twenty-sided dice and consulting bewildering charts that accounted for a staggering number of variables. The three primary manuals for playing the game were more than five hundred pages long, with hundreds of lookup charts that players consulted as though they were reading from scripture. (By comparison, consulting the APBA charts was like reading the back of a cereal box.) Here’s the Player’s Handbook describing the process by which a sample character is created:
    Monte wants to create a new character. He rolls four six-sided dice (4d6) and gets 5, 4, 4, and 1. Ignoring the lowest die, he records the result on scratch paper, 13. He does this five more times and gets these six scores: 13, 10, 15, 12, 8, and 14. Monte decides to play a strong, tough Dwarven fighter. Now he assigns his rolls to abilities. Strength gets the highest score, 15. His character has a +2 Strength bonus that will serve him well in combat. Constitution gets the next highest score, 14. The Dwarf’s +2 Constitution racial ability adjustment [see Table 2-1: Racial Ability Adjustments, pg. 12] improves his Constitution score to 16, for a +3 bonus…. Monte has two bonus-range scores left (13 and 12) plus an average score (10). Dexterity gets the 13 (+1 bonus).
    And that’s merely defining the basic faculties for a character. Once you released your Dwarven fighter into the world, the calculations involved in determining the effects of his actions—attacking a specific creature with a specific weapon under specific circumstances with a specific squad of comrades fighting alongside you—would leave most kids weeping if you put the same charts on a math quiz.
    Which gets to the ultimate question of why a ten-year-old found any of this fun. For me, the embarrassing truth of the matter is that I did ultimately grow frustrated with my baseball simulation, but not for the reasons you might expect. It wasn’t that arcane language wore me down, or that I grew tired of switching columns on the Bases Empty chart, or that I decided that six hours was too long to spend alone in my room on a Saturday afternoon in July.
    No, I moved on from APBA because it wasn’t realistic enough.
    My list of complaints grew as my experience with APBA deepened. Playing hundreds of simulated games revealed the blind spots and strange skews of the simulation. APBA neglected the importance of whether your players were left-handed or right-handed, crucial to the strategy of baseball. The fielding talents of individual players were largely ignored. The