Links and Minifeatures 2008 03 04 Tuesday

Aging geeks like me have one more reminder of our mortality: E Gary Gygax has died.

It's become fashionable in gaming circles to bash his creation, but when you consider that D&D was the very first game of its type, it's amazing how good it was. His primary error (and that of the company that still publishes its successors) is sticking to the initial model despite later ideas making role-playing more enjoyable.

It's been over a decade since I last played anything D&D based. GURPS does a better job with any gaming milieu where you don't want magic. I happen to think the way Mage handles magic more than makes up for its lack of coherent indexing, when you want that play element. But the initial GURPS system didn't begin development until D&D was about 15 years old, and Mage is more recent still. Expecting the original first effort in the genre to be as good is like expecting Thomas Edison to have come up with the Blu-Ray DVD system. Later developers got to keep all the good ideas and start over with the stuff that didn't work out so well - but they all owe the EGG and his original partner Dave Arneson for coming up with the basic idea and a lot of the basic framework. So even though I stopped playing his products, he was still a contributor for a lot of fun I've had in role-playing games

(One news report headlined it as "Gary Gygax Fails Final Saving Throw", which I thought worth a chuckle, and if some people might think it was in questionable taste, I don't think he would have been one of them. Oh, and by the way, the copyright on my original three book boxed set was 1972, not 1974 like some news reports have been saying.)

Fed Chief: Mortgage Crisis to Continue

One of the suggestions Bernanke made was for mortgage and other financial companies to reduce the amount of the loan to provide relief to a struggling owner. "Principal reductions that restore some equity for the homeowner may be a relatively more effective means of avoiding delinquency and foreclosure," Bernanke said.

Bernanke acknowledged this idea might be a tough sell to lenders. Lenders, he said, are reluctant to write down principal. "They say that if they were to write down the principal and house prices were to fall further, they could feel pressured to write down principal again," Bernanke said.

I can give them a better idea: Stop the over-tightening of financing rules. I predicted back in 2005 that when the crash came, 100% financing was going to go away. Well, now that has happened, but 100% full documentation loans actually have a very good track record as far as repayment. Even stated income loans with down payments of 20% or more have a good track record - nobody is going to commit $100,000 of their own money that's going to be the first thing lost if they can't make the payments - and those are gone also. Going overboard on tightening just crashes the market because, as I wrote this morning, The Mortgage Loan Market Controls the Real Estate Market. Over-tighten mortgage rules, and you cause the bust to become worse. This whole lender cycle of over-loosening and then over-tightening mortgage rules does nothing but encourage boom and bust cycles. Because you know what happens when the market finally hits bottom? It's starts going up again, which means lenders will start loosening restrictions again which means that loosening will cause prices to spike upwards again - and we're off to the races. Again.