Full Frontal Nerdity: Four Lives' Initiative

"Put the tape on erase

Rearrange a face

We always liked Picasso anyway"

 

Devo - Through Being Cool

 

 

Hard to believe Full Frontal Nerdity has run almost twenty years now. It was always Aaron Williams' parvum opus back in the days when print and webcomics were still at war. But, after Nodwick's end, Use Sword on Monster's mixed success as genre bender and PS238 getting bogged down in OceansUnmoving-overextended storylines having nothing to do with the school, FFN has defaulted to the most reliable fix for those of us who enjoy Williams' humorous take on game plots. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's been focusing more on such plots in recent years.

While the elements were always present, it took a long time for it to settle on its recognizable boilerplate: two panels on average of players sitting around the table, largely cut and pasted with cut-rate gradient backgrounds, and maybe one panel of new drawings. For once, that's not entirely bad. At its start, FFN aspired to much wider geek humor, from commenting on the latest gadgets to superhero movies to video games to largely failed attempts at introducing sitcomish extra characters to random goofiness.

It was also subtitled: "Four geeks. No lives. Roll for initiative."

 

At some point the writer seems to have decided people don't need to beat themselves up for putting some thought into their hobbies and unceremoniously dropped the self-deprecating subtitle. And, while random pop culture commentary still makes its appearance, it's been gradually perfecting the art of retelling an RP campaign three panels at a time, with most information conveyed as text with a few illustrations and copious reaction shots from participants. You only get the highlights reel of course, but speculation on how a particular campaign premise might play out when subjected to players' powermongering and narcissism makes for surprisingly entertaining reading as you watch the protagonists pervert each new plot twist into hilarious disaster.

While I'm sure COVID exhaustion and other pressures largely account for Nodwick.com's constriction toward FFN with its smaller format and lighter workload, it's also been replacing longer stories because it can accomodate medium-length plots with the same four stock characters in commedia dell'arte fashion without the need for lengthy exposition or development. The premises lacking full-scale stories' engagement prove quite entertaining as thought exercises, and this is to a large extent what draws people to RPGs as a concept in the first place: personally spinning a premise within the constraints of an artificial reality.

Scaramouche in Middle Earth. Sure, why the hell not? It's got initiative, it's got life, and it can be played by as many geeks as care to don the mask.