The poll in my post from earlier this week seems to be pointing me in the direction of AD&D for running convention games, at least certainly for running old tournament modules.  To be honest, I was kind of leaning in this direction anyway, but it’s nice to see some proof that it’s the right choice.  This brings my current gaming habits to an interesting point: B/X D&D for my home campaign, AD&D for conventions.  Something about that just feels right: the right tool for the right job.

This weekend I will be running the second half of A1 for a group using AD&D fairly by the book as a practice run.  I will still use simplified initiative and target-20, which I think will be the biggest divergences from the core rules as written.  Other house rules may sneak in from habit, but I suspect will be fairly trivial in nature.  Last weekend I spent some time transcribing the characters to character sheets.  I had the PHB and DMG on hand to fill in some details, and the whole experience just felt right.  Something about flipping between those specific charts, the smell of those books in the air, a #2 in my hand — it really hit all the right nostalgic notes for me.

Assuming this practice run goes well, this is how I will run those games at TotalCon next month.  I really like the idea of billing this as in recognition of WotC’s plan to reprint those books.  I see no reason to buy the reprints myself (I already have two copies of each book), but I like the idea of encouraging others to buy them, especially folks who may not have nor ever had copies.

In the long run, I think I’d still likely use B/X for intro style convention games, but in that case I’d probably still stick closer to the book as written than in my home campaign (when else do I get to play with race as class?)  For re-running old modules though, AD&D does seem like the right choice.  Hmm, I suppose the question is, can I imagine ever writing my own convention game for use with AD&D?  Actually, that might be the distinction, I much prefer to write for B/X than AD&D, but if something is already written for AD&D, I’ll just use that.

Or maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.  Maybe I just need to take this one convention at a time.

I made an interesting little discovery when Delta visited last week.  We were in my game room when Delta spotted my Holmes box set on the shelf, and he pulled it down to admire the artwork on the cover.  The box is in pretty good shape, and the range of colors on the cover kind of belie the moniker “blue box” it has earned.  Anyway, I pulled out the Moldvay boxes as well to compare and look at the difference in quality of those boxes, and conversation turned to the “Gateway to Adventure” sales pamphlet included in those boxes.

It’s a cute pamphlet to skim through, with nice full color images of the products that were available in 1981.  I mentioned to Delta that I really enjoyed the page on OD&D, which by that point was 6th edition and already being billed as a “Collector’s Edition”.  “What OD&D page?” he asked bewildered.  We flipped back and forth through the booklet, and could not find the page I was referring to.  I was sure I had not imagined it — but where was that ad?  I opened up the 2nd Moldvay basic box I own (yeah, I own two, don’t ask).  Sure enough, there was the same pamphlet, but this time with the OD&D ad.

The two booklets are identical in almost every respect except for page 9.  Here are the two page 9′s side by side:

OK, that’s not entirely true, there are two other minor differences.  The index page on the old booklet says “Collector’s Edition, Collector’s Edition Supplements” for page 9, while the new booklet says “New Releases”.  Page 10, the obverse, varies slightly in that the old booklet has a section at the bottom (about 25% of the page) listing “new releases” including the minigames, and the modules for boot hill, gamma world, and top secret as “coming in 1981″.  In the new booklet, this ad has been replaced with one for the RPGA, which is not surprising given that all those items now appear on page 9.  While both booklets are copyright 1980, and both have the date 1981 displayed prominently on the front cover, clearly one is slightly older than the other.

Delta and I both found this really fascinating.  Though we’re several years apart, Delta having cut his D&D teeth on Holmes and I on Moldvay, we have the shared experience of never having heard of OD&D until fairly recently.  We wondered if perhaps there wasn’t some kind of intentional effort over at TSR to cover up the existence of OD&D starting around 1981.  That sounds perhaps a bit more nefarious than I mean it.  I could imagine that TSR might think that OD&D was confusing to its audience, and wanted to steer them either towards basic D&D or AD&D.  Two different lines is confusing enough, a third only makes things worse.

I seem to recall in one of the Dragon magazine articles I read recently concerning the upcoming releases of AD&D and the basic set (Holmes), that while readers may be interested in AD&D as a second separate product from the game they were already playing, the basic set was meant strictly as an introduction to neophytes.  Dragon Magazine readers, being already familiar with D&D, were not the target audience and were actually being dissuaded from purchasing that product.

Perhaps these two booklets come from the Moldvay Basic and Expert sets respectively.  I certainly don’t trust that any of the boxed sets I own actually come with all the original pieces.  In fact, for my Holmes set I put the bits together myself, buying each part separately (the box, the book, B1, and the dice) and reassembling the set once I had collected them all.  I could imagine that once the Expert set was released, the combined Basic/Expert box sets were looked at as the replacement for the OD&D line.  What was once simply meant as an introductory set took on the purpose of its ancestor OD&D — that of being a simple toolkit for creating a custom home campaign as opposed to AD&D, which is clearly meant as a standard system which offered consistency likely born from desires of the tournament community.

I wonder if the folks at TSR had as clear a picture of the needs the two different products addressed.  From reading Gygax’s articles, I think at least he did, but whether he was able to communicate that to all his employees is less clear, and certainly I think they failed pretty hard at communicating it to the market.  As a kid I had no idea that the basic sets and AD&D were really different beasts.  I think a lot of us were in that same boat back then too.  Perhaps TSR as a company would have been better served by just picking one and running with it, though personally I’m kind of glad today they didn’t, as I appreciate both products for what they are.

Anyway, interesting food for thought.  I don’t know if the changes to this booklet are well known by the collector’s community, but if not I’m happy to provide further info or scans as desired.

With the recent purchase of an e-reader, I’ve found myself reading through the early Dragon Magazines as my pre-bed reading.  I’m up to about issue 30, so still in the late 70′s right around the publication of AD&D.  What I find is that I’m tending to skim through the articles about game mechanics while really reading carefully anything that mentions gamer culture of this time period.  My conclusion: wow, the convention scene of the late 70′s really was the life-blood of this hobby.

There is not a single issue I have read yet that does not include at least one, and often multiple articles about conventions.  And I’m not just talking here about a little blurb about what conventions are coming up, though those do exist.  Pages are devoted to describing how to run tournaments, play reports of past tournaments, descriptions of organization issues of conventions (looks like Origins ’79 almost didn’t happen), photos from conventions, etc.  Some have argued that a lot of what’s in AD&D was specifically a reaction to the tournament scene at these conventions, which I can definitely see.  That said, it’s not like the folks at TSR had some kind of inflated sense of what the point of the conventions were from the business side.  In issue #28, Gygax writes about his take on the manufacturer’s view of conventions.  Here’s a little blurb:

The goodwill generated from “showing the flag” is considerable. Still, considering that there are probably half a million game hobbyists, and perhaps no more than about 10,000 different gamers attending the major conventions, half of whom will be the biggest show, the overall portion of the market reached by exhibiting is 1% to 2% or so. Even if this “hard core” represents a disproportionate share of the market in dollar volume of their purchases, 2½% to 5% is not earthshaking. Yet, whenever TSR attends a convention, we must assume that the advertising and goodwill generated there will be considerable, and be prepared to write off a considerable sum as expense incurred advertising.

He goes on to do the math of the cost for a manufacturer to attend a convention, which sounds humorous to modern ears if you fail to account for inflation.  His point though is clearly to show that the cost out-weights the benefit in the perspective of raw sales.  Why do they attend?  Gygax attributes it mostly to the “good-will” factor mentioned above, plus the fact that ultimately the manufacturers are themselves gamers, and just love going.

In fact, GenCon pre-dates the creation of D&D by several years — the first GenCon was a little gathering in Gygax’s basement in 1967 (called GenCon 0), and D&D doesn’t hit the printing presses until 1974.  You might even say D&D may have never existed without GenCon, as according to this wikipedia article Gygax and Arneson first met at GenCon II.

In the early days, I’m sure the conventions were a major factor in the distribution of ideas and interest in this hobby.  Now with the internet that aspect may be lessened, but it does not change that the hobby is essentially a social one requiring that we all gather together at a common location.  Sure, some people, myself included, have had some success at playing over the internet, but I don’t think we’re at a point yet where it’s really a viable replacement.  And so the draw of the gaming convention remains high, in fact disproportionately to the growth of the industry.  Unfortunately I can’t find any good numbers or graphs showing the rise and decline of the gaming industry for comparison, but general wisdom is that the industry ‘aint what it used to be.  That said, check out this lovely attendance graph of GenCon over the years:

Sure, there was a lull starting around 1995, but it looks like since about 2006 we’ve been trending upwards again.  What’s my point here?  I guess ultimately I think conventions not only started out but continue to be the lifeblood of this hobby.  If nothing else, it forces a group of normally introverted folks to go out and mingle with other hobbyists, gets them bouncing ideas off each other, and keeps the whole thing vibrant.  Even if you yourself don’t go to conventions, I bet you game with someone that does, or read the blogs of someone who does (you’re doing that right now).  The internet is great at disseminating ideas, but the convention is where they are formed.

I sincerely hope that continues, even if the big companies change their faces or go away entirely.  I see folks like Kask and Mentzer trekking around to conventions these days and think yeah, that’s pretty much how I’d like to spend my retirement.  I hope it’s still there as an option when I’m ready for it.

The news about the 1st edition AD&D reprints has got me thinking once again about what system I use when running convention games.  For my home campaign, I run B/X D&D with 3 pages of house rules, several of which pull from OD&D and AD&D (race/class split, Paladins and Rangers, etc.)  I’m totally happy and comfortable running this system, however sometimes I wonder if it’s not a bit confusing or annoying looking to convention goers.  My convention descriptions often list the system as something kind of ham fisted, like:

B/X D&D with house rules including some AD&D-isms

The temptation is, at least for convention games, to switch to a more recognizable or at least by-the book appearing system, which would essentially be either OD&D or AD&D.  Ultimately this would have little effect on how I actually run the game, however in both there’s a chance that I overlook something unique to that system and get called on it during play.  There’s certainly something to be said for sticking with what I know.

OD&D has the benefit of being pretty close to what I want to play — I think B/X is closer to OD&D than AD&D.  Plus, given how open the text is, I’d say it’s pretty much expected that any DM of OD&D is going to have a fistful of house rules, so it’s probably not even worth mentioning that in the description.  The downside is that OD&D is probably the least recognizable version of D&D to your average convention attendee.  That said, I think there’s a certain glamor to a convention game that uses “the first ever printed rules.”

AD&D, on the other hand, is probably the most recognizable and used of the old school systems at conventions.  If I ran using AD&D, there’s a good chance several players would have a PHB in hand during play.  Plus, AD&D does have some expectation of house ruling, at least in as much as “we don’t use rule X” is a pretty common refrain, given AD&D’s tendency to define everything including the kitchen sink.  That said so much minutiae is included in these rules and so many players have devoted themselves to dissecting them, that there’s a good chance I get called on something during play.  Honestly I don’t mind being called on rulings during play, so long as the player respects my iron-fisted DMing style and my refusal to slow the game by pouring through the text.  Not every player is cool with that though, and what kind of players you get at a con game is definitely a crap shoot.  AD&D is especially attractive though when running old tournaments like the A-series, which were specifically written for that system.  There’s some cache I think in saying “we’re going to play this as it was played in 1979.”

Given that all this is so much logistical detail and will have little effect on how I actually run the game, the real question here is, what will attract the most players.  I’ve never really had a con game completely fill up, so butts in seats is what I’m after.  This sounds like a good excuse to use a poll.  So please let me know, if you were leafing through a convention brochure for a game to play, which system would most likely draw you to my game?

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Holy crap, WotC actually made a smart move and is reprinting the core AD&D 1e hardcovers:

http://wizards.com/dnd/Product.aspx?x=dnd%2Fproducts%2Fdndacc%2F02410000

That said, the pricing is a bit off at $35 per book (unless I’m reading that wrong, but at 112 pages I don’t think they’re combining the 3 into a single volume).  I just purchased extremely good copies of the 1st edition PHB, DMG, and MM (with the old covers) at GenCon’s auction last year for $18, $12, and $14 respectively.  On the other hand, looks like at least some of that money is going towards the Gygax Memorial Fund, which I think is a good thing.

All in all, I’d say this looks like a great first step.  Now, if they would just sell the old stuff in digital format…

For several months in my campaign, Bridgefaire, the largest free city known to the players, has been under siege by a huge horde of undead.  Last weekend we finally resolved that siege, via a huge game of Book of War, with author and special guest Delta helping me to control the attacking side while my players controlled the defense.  BigFella, a former player in the campaign and good friend, was also able to join us bringing the attackers side up to 3 and taking some very nice photos for us.

We used the 10 mm figures I’ve been hooked on painting recently, which had the benefit of being fast and enjoyable for me to paint.  I also quite like the fact that their height is a little more appropriate to the scale of Book of War: 1″ = 20′.  That said, the game is clearly written for larger figures, so we did have to do some interpretation.  I also made quite a bit of custom terrain, as you’ll see in the photos.  So, let’s get on with the battle report (picture intensive, be prepared for a potentially slow load!):

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In hopes of maybe getting a few less emails informing me of this news, I feel beholden to post that yes, I am aware that Wizards of the Coast has announced their intent to produce D&D 5.0.  This may surprise you, but no, I do not think that is pertinent news to my interests as expressed in this blog.  Frankly, about the best thing Wizard’s could do for me at this point is to change the name of their product.  Obviously they would never do that, there’s a huge amount of marketing power in that name, but at least it would clear up any confusion about what I’m referring to when I say that I play D&D.

I grant you, there’s some very nice sentiment in that article that clearly acknowledges the rift in the current fan base across the many editions:

We want a game that rises above differences of play styles, campaign settings, and editions, one that takes the fundamental essence of D&D and brings it to the forefront of the game. In short, we want a game that is as simple or complex as you please, its action focused on combat, intrigue, and exploration as you desire. We want a game that is unmistakably D&D, but one that can easily become your D&D, the game that you want to run and play.

As I said, it’s a lovely sentiment, but I have to ask one very important question: what’s in it for me?  I mean, seriously, I already have a game that’s my D&D, whose focus and complexity is exactly the level I prefer.  Even if you took every single piece of advice I gave on what would make the game more enjoyable for me personally (which I’m certain would not help your sales), why would I buy it?  I already own that game.

Over a year ago I used Delta’s Book of War to resolve a major battle taking place in my campaign: the Battle of Restenford.  Next weekend I’ll be doing it again, and for this one the author himself is coming up to help me run it.  Expect to see more details on that in the future.  I invited some of the players to come and control the defense, which they’re excited to do, but a bit nervous about facing off against the creator of the game.  Some practice games were proposed, and so this afternoon I had two guest over for a little Book of War action.

Two players showed up, and for the first game I had them play just using the basic rules, 200 points a piece, just to get a feel for the rules.  We actually made a fair number of mistakes along the way, and I took pretty poor pictures of it, so we’ll just skip the review of that game.  The major point of interest was that it ended with one player down to just one unit of three horse archers, while the other had two units of cavalry, one medium and one heavy.  It was turning into a very slow game of cat and mouse, and so the horse archer player decided to just concede.  I think with two units the other guy probably could have eventually cornered those darned horse archers, though it would have taken quite a few turns.

For our second game we added in all the rules, and played a bigger game of 1 vs 2.  I had 500 points and my two opponents had 250 points each.  We wanted to play with wizards, and after cruising through the rules I decided it would be amusing to do a little law vs. chaos theme.  Here’s the board after initial setup, and the opponent has started moving some units:

My forces in the fore-ground from left to right include: 4 hill giants, 10 goblin archers (cleverly disguised as skeletons), 9 medium orc infantry with an embedded rank-2 wizard, 10 more orc medium infantry, and finally 10 more goblin archers (again disguised as skeletons).  For my spell I took Control Weather in hopes of avoiding bright sun penalties on all the green skins, but the weather roll came up cloudy anyway.  Still, worth the extra points I thought to ensure dark skies.

My opponents’ forces from left to right include: 3 horse archers, 3 light cavalry, 3 heavy cavalry, another 3 heavy cavalry, 8 pikemen, 5 archers, a wizard with 3 heavy infantry entourage, 5 more archers, 3 medium cavalry, and finally 3 more medium cavalry.  Yeah, that’s a lot of little units, which I’m not sure was an intentional strategy, but it did work in their favor as we will see.  The terrain includes a section of rough in the middle surrounded by lots of hills.  Amusingly most of those terrain placements are my own, as my opponents kept rolling “open”.   They seemed disappointed by not getting to place terrain, but for an army with so many cavalry I think they should be pretty pleased.

Here now is the board after the end of my first round:

I’ve moved all my green skins forward slightly in a defensive posture around the wizard and to try and get into better range weapon firing position, though the right flank opponents remain well out of range.  On the far left some lucky rock throwing has killed one horse archer and routed the unit, which will vanish off the board next round.  Excellent result considering the -2 to their rolls due to range and indirect fire over the hills.  One of the heavy cavalry units has also lost a model from my wizard’s fireball wand, though no route there.

Above is the end of my opponents’ round 2.  The enemy horse archers are nearly off the board.  On the right the medium cavalry have pushed forward but were slowed a bit by the intervening hills.  My right-most unit of orc infantry have taken some losses from archer fire, but hold the line.  The light cavalry has impacted into my goblin archers on the left, but they hold as well.

My turn 2, and I rush the enemy.  Perhaps it would have been wiser to hold back and keep firing missile weapons.  My hope though was to get one hit in with my giants.  Sure they need 6′s against the heavy cavalry, but with damage 2 hits just one hit will take out a model, and with only 3 models in the unit I’m hoping for a quick route.  In fact, the dice are just not with me here, as I only take out one cavalry model on both fights on the right flank, and no routes there either.  My goblins show their mettle taking down one of the light cavalry models and wounding another, and a lucky shot of the fireball wand takes out another heavy cavalry model.  One remains, but he just refuses to run.

Now the fight is starting to turn.  On the right flank I’m just not getting the hits I need, and my green skins are starting to whither.  My wizard’s orcish guards have taken some losses from archers, but fortunately have not run.  The solo heavy cavalry model has joined the light cavalry in wiping out my goblin archers on the left, and they route.  My giants start taking a couple hits, though with 8 HD a piece, I’m not worried yet.

My giants are now seriously under fire.  There’s a full unit of 3 heavy cavalry in front, and 2 light and 1 heavy in the back.  That’s 12 attacks!  Not to mention the pikemen have joined in with some 1″ distant jabs at my poor giants.  They’ve taken 6 wounds are look like they’ll lose a model soon.  Most distressing though is their continued inability to inflict a single wound on the enemy!  My wizards’ guards continue to take losses, and the battles on the right flank are really getting bloody.  I’m losing models left and right, while my own attacks just never seem to land.

This is the last turn we play, which is mine.  My opponents unfortunately have to leave soon, and before I throw in the towel I want my last licks.  Despite this, and despite shifting focus to attack the easier targets of light cavalry, the giants continue to roll terribly and miss every attack.  My goblins on the right finally break, and my orcs are down to just 4 figures and keep missing their targets.  The right flank was a pretty well balanced battle, but the dice just don’t love me in this game, and it looks like I’m going down.  My wizard does land a fireball on some of the enemy wizard’s heavy infantry guards, but it’s too little to do any real harm.

It’s too bad we didn’t get to finish out the fight, and I think my opponents’ are the pretty clear winners here.  It was a lot of fun though, and definitely served the purpose of getting us all comfortable with the rules.  I came away with a list of questions for Delta, which I’d normally just email, but as Book of War is an officially published product perhaps it serves us all better to post them publicly here.  I’m sure Delta won’t mind, right?

1. How close to the edge of the board should starting units be placed?
2. When calculating morale, is it correct that the HD bonus is for the base HD of the unit, and not multiplied by the number of models?  (Meaning 4 models of 8 HD giants get a +8 modifier not a +32.)
3. When do routed units make their first move?  If it’s during the controlling player’s turn, can he choose to move his regular units first to get them out of the way of the fleeing units to avoid the panic they might cause?
4. I see you have moved the extra rank bonus to morale into the optional rules section — do you use that rule yourself?
5. Do horse archers get the same extra attack other cavalry units recieve (suspect the answer here is yes)?
6. Do only models in base contact get to fight?  Does corner contact count?  Say a unit 8 files wide attacks a unit only 3 files wide, how many attacks does he make?
7. What happens when a unit with an embedded wizard has to make a morale check and they fail?  Does the wizard flee with the rest of the unit?  What about his personal entourage?
8. Can a wizard’s wand be used when his unit is engaged in melee?  Can he cast spells while in melee?

Wow, OK, that was longer than I anticipated.  Delta, if you don’t want to answer these here, I’ll be happy to move this to a more private venue.

The current major quest in my campaign centers around regaining lost limbs.  The party is quite invested in the pursuit, which makes sense given that 3 of the 7 PCs are missing an appendage.  How did this come about?  Well, it’s this critical system I’m using.  The gist is that when a PC should normally die (0 hp), I instead give him a critical effect which is a set of die rolls on two tables, one for location and one for severity.  Lest you think I’m being soft, this only belays death for a moment, as anyone suffering from a critical that gets hit for more damage is immediately killed, and some of results on the critical chart also end in death anyway.  The severity boils down to three possibilities: broken, maimed, or severed.  Originally this was a d6 roll, but I’ve since changed it to a d8, reducing the likelihood of severed down to 1-in-8.

The thing is, severed is the only really lasting result.  Broken bones will heal in time, as will maiming (a result that requires some interpretation based on location) though the latter may leave scars.  Waiting weeks for these to heal was becoming a logistical pain in early testing, so I ruled that a Cure Light Wounds spell could be used to completely heal a break or maiming instead of healing hit points of damage (riffing off the idea that it could already cure paralysis according to the ghoul entry).  Anyway, this has worked pretty well and adds an interesting dimension to the lowly cure light wounds spell.  However it does not restore lost limbs, which means over time the party has accumulated a fair number of lost limbs, and they’ve been quite intent on finding a cure for it.  There’s no spell in the game that really applies to this, so I’ve invented a rather interesting adventure that involves a certain mage with a crazy idea about building parts of golems and fusing them to people.

That said, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve gone too far with this system.  Having all these characters running (or limping) around with missing limbs skews the visual of the party just a bit from what feels like a traditional D&D game to me. It seems inevitable that with this system no high level party could possibly exist without a fair number of prosthetics.  Which I grant you is actually kind of cool (look what it did for pirates), but still is also just a little off from what my inner 12-year-old wants in his D&D games.  Finally, one can’t help but wonder why a spell exists on the standard cleric spell list for bringing the dead back to life but they can’t reattach a missing digit.

One thought I’ve had is to latch onto cure serious wounds as I have cure light wounds.  In B/X it’s the only other cure spell, and it’s conveniently 4th level, one level lower than raise dead.  I’m thinking something like it can be used to re-attach a severed limb if cast within a few hours (much as raise dead is time limited in days since death), and obviously the limb must be available for reattachment.  It’s got a nice symmetry with the cure light use, and while it doesn’t completely eliminate the potential for limb loss it does at least allow for higher level parties who actually have all their limbs.

I think I’ll let that one simmer for a while.  Even if I do eventually adopt it, I don’t want to do anything to undermine the excitement of the current party’s quest.  Perhaps once that’s resolved I can re-evaluate if this is a ruling I’d like to introduce.

Here’s a little book binding project I finished recently that I thought I’d share.  Back in August I picked up a couple B/X books at the GenCon auction for about $4 a piece.  The covers were in pretty bad shape, but the pages were in good condition and certainly usable.  My idea was to pull off the covers and then bind the two text blocks together as a single volume.  Finally, here is the result.

The pages are stitched together as two very large signatures.  I thought about breaking the pages apart and inter-mixing each section as the book suggest, but to do so I’d have to cut up the pages and then I wouldn’t be able to stitch the binding.  I could have gone with a perfect binding, but I’ve never tried that and from what I read such bindings are pretty crappy.  I’d rather have a book with a good solid saddle stitch that I know will last.

For the cover, I tried something new.  I cut up some pieces from the red book’s cover, which was in better shape than the blue, pasted them to the binder board, and then cut holes in the binding cloth to let the title and picture show through.  I’d say the end effect is OK, but not great.  You may notice this resulted in some air bubbles in the glue in the bottom right corner.  Also, I had to cut the pieces pretty close to the edge to get anything usable (those covers were really beat up), and as such I think the overall look is a little cramped.

Still, the book serves well, and I quite enjoy having a single volume to reference while playing rather than flipping back and forth between two books.  I’m starting to memorize where certain sections are too, making it easy to quickly flip to the right area during play, which really is the most important bit.  I find I’ve even stopped using the MM in favor of looking up the monsters in this book, which is good as we saw from the gray ooze article yesterday there are certainly some differences between the two editions.  I was previously using the MM before simply because it was easier to locate the right stats quickly than juggle the two books, but apparently just having them bound in a single volume makes it easy enough to not want to switch to the other book.  One less thing to have in my stack of books is only a good thing in my mind.