I have managed to scare my party completely off of going underground ever again (or so they say) after 5-6 sessions which took place over only a handful of game days but, due to various absences, took a few months to play out in real time. Almost every session, if there is any possibility that they think I might be trying to lure them into a cave, they will talk about how nerve-wracking that experience was. "It felt like we were down there forever!"
I don't mind having to come up with dungeons that are mostly above ground, though you can be sure I'll find a way to get them back down below somehow. At which point I'm going to try my hardest to make my caves more interesting, and this kind of info is just what I need. Thanks, Alexis.
"Frustrated but not bored" certainly matches how I was feeling during the exploration phase of that session. But I think it's reasonable for D&D rules, and on-the-fly DM decisions, to sometimes produce those emotions in the players. We committed ourselves, at least temporarily, to doggedly attempting something that we knew would be difficult given our characters' current capabilities. Alexis can't make us tramp up and down Hungarian hillsides all day in real life, but the game has been tuned so that attempting that action during play will make us feel a lot like how we'd feel in real life after a day of hard tramping with nothing (yet) gained. I appreciate that.
I liked the movie, but feel some of the elements didn’t gel together. Can’t put my finger on why.
Robert Redford plays Muir, a CIA field agent who handles defectors and informants. Brad Pitt plays his young protege, Bishop, who refuses to obey the principles of spy tradecraft.
The opening scene has Bishop getting captured by the Chinese during an unsanctioned / rogue rescue operation. Muir gets pulled in by CIA bigwigs to help them understand Bishop and how he thinks, so the movie spends most of its runtime detailing, through flashbacks, how Muir and Bishop came to work together, only to have a falling out.
I'm glad that The Dangerous Summer is more novella than novel: it's just as long as it needs to be and no longer. (James Michener's introduction tells us that Hemingway originally wrote some 120,000 words, which were cut to 70,000 for publication in Life magazine in 1960; the published version which I read is 45,000 words.
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Michener's introduction is interesting in its own right. Among other things, he makes it clear that we should go into the book expecting Hemingway to be partial to Antonio Ordóñez over his brother-in-law and rival, Luis Miguel Dominguín. It's possible to read the book against that interpretation, but I think Michener's reading holds up.
