#if you put half this energy into promoting other games d&d would probably be dead by now

[filipfatalattractionrblog]

I really don't have patience to the whole way of thinking the whole argument is based on. I'm just going to leave here this video by Matt Colville about the book Ellusive Shift

The gits of it is - no one EVER knew how to play this fucking game, people had arguments before the official first edition, the white booklets era. Most people played based on their own interpretation, then arguet about it in zines. All the crunch in the AD&D onward was Gary Gygax's attempt to make the rule for everything because he grew greedy and wished to kill the competition that built careers on explaining his crappy rules better than he did (also, he made AD&D to screw Dave Arneson of his due money).

In any other context I would agree with the proposed argument, but in D&D calling in question anyone's merit as conversation participant because they didn't memorize the useless numbers for useless rule that is only in this game to appease people waxing nostalgic over Gary's horrible, spite and greed-fueled design, is not only anti-intelelctual, it is openly spitting i nthe face of the history of the hobby to declare yourself as only one who knows better. Fuck that.

I think an important part of the "D&D is easy to learn" argument is that a lot of those people don't actually know how to play D&D. They know they need to roll a d20 and add some numbers and sometimes they need to roll another type of die for damage. A part of it is the culture of basically fucking around and letting the GM sort it out. Players don't actually feel the need to learn the rules.

Now I don't think the above actually counts as knowing the rules. D&D is a relatively crunchy game that actually rewards system mastery and actually learning how to play D&D well, as in to make mechanically informed tactical decisions and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage, is actually a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. None of that is to say that you need to be a perfectly tuned CharOp machine to know how to play D&D. But to actually start to make the sorts of decisions D&D as a game rewards you kind of need to know the rules.

And like, a lot of people don't seem to know the rules. They know how to play D&D in the most abstract sense of knowing that they need to say things and sometimes the person scowling at them from behind the screen will ask them to roll a die. But that's hardly engaging with the mechanics of the game, like the actual game part.

And to paraphrase @prokopetz this also contributes to the impression that other games are hard to learn: because a lot of other games don't have the same culture of play of D&D so like instead of letting new players coast by with a shallow understanding of the rules and letting the GM do all the work, they ask players to start making mechanically informed decisions right away. Sure, it can suck for onboarding, but learning from your mistakes can often be a great way to learn.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

AU: have you ever considered an avengers-animorphs fusion?

[Contains spoilers only through Avengers (2012) and only oblique references to MCU events beyond that movie.]

Jake finds Cassie steadying, at a time when he could use a little steadiness.  She’s a soothing presence who offers shy smiles and subtly brilliant insights into the yeerks as she watches them all closely.  By contrast, most of the others are… overwhelming.  Rachel looks very much like her grandmother, managing to be even more brash and bold and trigger-happy as she paces the bridge pointing to read-outs of energy signatures and demanding that they go rescue a fellow agent named Tobias, immediately.  Ax cheerfully eats an entire box of pop-tarts in one sitting as he tells the SHIELD agents that andalites don’t normally behave this much like warring kaftids but that Alloran is clearly not himself right now.

Marco walks onto the bridge, looks around like he owns the place, and immediately starts ranting about how they’re all a load of idiots and SHIELD is lying to them.  Jake isn’t sure he even draws breath in between words.  Mid-cyberbabble, Marco suddenly spins around and falls silent.  For about half a second.

“Oh my god, you’re Rachel Berenson.” Marco practically throws himself across the table to shake her hand.  “I’m a huge fan, really.  I read all your magazine articles, I follow one hundred percent of your fashion advice, and I also love the way you turn into a human-bear-thing and rip your enemies’ heads off with your teeth.”  He’s still pumping her hand with what looks like genuine enthusiasm.  “Plus, unlike your fifth-cousin or great-uncle or whatnot Captain War-Prince Yeerk-Killer over there, you actually have a sense of humor—”

“My name is Jake,” Jake blurts.  They all turn to look at him.  “Just Jake is fine,” he mumbles.  “I’m not a real war-prince.  Not really.  It was all just propaganda at first, and then they only promoted me so that they wouldn’t have to court-martial me after I went on that stupid suicide mission to get my brother back.”  They’re all still staring.  “And anyway, the ‘Yeerk-Killer’ part is…”  Saying I don’t like it sounds like too childish a reason even in his own mind.  “It’s just something they called me.”

There’s ringing silence for several seconds.  And then Marco says, “Anyway, about this yeerk-helping dude who gave over all our intel.”

“Tobias is not working for the yeerks.”  There’s an edge of growl to Rachel’s voice, one that causes everyone else in the room to tense just slightly.  “He’s being controlled.  Involuntarily.”

Jake takes a moment, just one, to mourn the 1940s with an intensity that steals his breath away.  He misses everything he’s lost.  Like missing a limb.  Like missing home.  Like missing a brother.  Rachel is his only link to the past, and she’s a stranger; last Jake saw, his nephew Daniel was just a baby, and now Daniel’s own daughter is a grown woman while Daniel himself is dead twenty years back in a mysterious car accident.  Everything disappeared in the span of an instant.  Everyone died.  Only Jake is left.

And then Jake draws a deep breath and says, “Regardless of how they got it, the yeerks have key intel on our operation now.  And we need to get our shit together to figure out what to do about it.”  There’s no time for him to feel sorry for himself.

Rachel knows they don’t make a particularly inspiring picture, between Jake awkwardly standing around in full dress blues, Marco slumped against a computer console in a Demon Days t-shirt, Cassie in her green floral-print leggings and purple-and-grey leotard, and Ax striding back and forth across the helicarrier with whatever that cloak-thing is billowing behind him.  She’s not sure she trusts Ax, not when he’s freely admitted that he’s doing some kind of alien-magic-glamour-thing to appear human.  (Although, as he explained apologetically, he’s not nearly as good at it as his brother would be; from the way he tells it, Elfangor hung the moon, arranged the stars, and single-handedly invented the internet.)  She has no idea what to make of Jake, whose life story defined her entire childhood and who is proving to be just as much of a clueless idiot as the rest of them.  She actually likes Marco, not so much in spite of their verbal sparring but because of it, since she can tell that he enjoys getting a sharp comeback out of her almost as much as he enjoys scoring a hit himself.

“What’s a part-time CW melodrama actor even doing on this team?” Rachel asks him.  “I mean, take away those three Grammys you almost won, and—”

“I’m only the third-smartest person on the planet, head of R&D for the single biggest telecommunications contractor in the U.S., runner-up for a Nobel Prize thanks to my groundbreaking work in increasing accessibility for information technology, and…”  Marco pauses for dramatic effect.  “Fifteenth sexiest man alive for 2009, according to People magazine.”  He gives a tiny bow.  “Oh, and I build AI robots that help me save the planet from aliens, which is more than the fourteen men allegedly sexier than me can claim,” he adds as an afterthought.

“His ego’s only so big to compensate for his lack of height,” Rachel whispers loudly to Cassie.

“Whereas the biohacker who dosed herself with untested DNA-rewiring implants in order to avoid CDC oversight,” Marco drawls, “could never ever be accused of hubris.”

“Can we please get back to talking about how aliens are invading the planet?” Jake asks the room at large.

“I spoke to that other andalite,” Cassie says.

“Alloran,” Ax supplies.  “Looorrran.”

“No, actually.”  Cassie considers, choosing her words.  “There’s a yeerk controlling Alloran.  Calls itself Visser Three.  That yeerk is itself working for this other power, one called Crayak.  I don’t fully understand the nature of this Crayak person, but I did find out that he wants to use Rachel to…”  She pauses delicately.

“To let out my inner berserker, who will kill the rest of you?” Rachel suggests.

“You won’t let that happen,” Jake says stubbornly.

Rachel lets out a harsh laugh.  “This?”  She gestures to herself.  “This is Nice Rachel, and let’s be honest that I’m not that nice.  The other one?  Mean Rachel?  She might like all of you just fine, and she’ll still rip you all to shreds the first time you startle or annoy her.  Cassie can talk the other Rachel down sometimes, under the right circumstances, but the rest of you can kiss your butts goodbye if stuck in an enclosed little helicarrier with me when I get pissed off.”

“Anyway, we’ll keep Rachel nice and calm.”  Cassie offers a small smile.  “And leaving aside the fact that Crayak might be using this whole yeerk invasion as an opening play in some even bigger chess game, there’s still Visser Three’s stake in this all to consider.  Near as I can tell, his motivation is some mix of the usual—pride, greed, wrath—but this whole thing with wiping out the humans seems to have something to do with how much one of his fellow yeerks, Visser One if I’ve got the name right, happens to like this species.”

“You got all that from one conversation?” Jake sounds impressed.

“Please assure me you did not do anything… untoward to that host body,” Ax says.

“Nah.”  Marco’s tone is full of false brightness.  “Haven’t you heard?  Agent Werewolf here was a voluntary controller herself back in the wild days of her misspent youth.  I bet she and the ol’ visser cracked open a cold one and shot the shit about their glory days together, no thumb screws necessary.”

Rachel snarls, fiercely gratified to see Marco go dead white.  “That’s cute, coming from a war profiteering gunrunner.  You, what?  Followed daddy right into the rocket-making business, didn’t care if the rockets hit the wrong planet just as long as they performed perfectly?”  She shoves him in the chest; he stumbles back several feet.  “I know what you are.  I know it took one of your own bombs going off in your face for you even to think about giving a damn about what happened to them after you were done engineering them.  I know you have no right, no right to talk to Cassie like—”

“Rachel.”  Jake’s voice is quiet, but very firm.  “Rachel, put the scepter down.”

She swings around to point it at him, and wow.  She’s not sure when she even picked the thing up.  It’s heavy and hot in her hand, pulsing with her own raging heartbeat.

“I’ve acknowledged my past, and I’m learning to deal with it.”  Cassie faces Marco, but she’s speaking to Rachel as well, struggling to calm everyone down.  “Not knowing what I was doing at the time is no excuse for what I’ve done.  I let a yeerk into my brain, yes, even thought that I was saving a different host when I did so.  I’m the one who trusted them out of naïveté, and…”  Cassie draws herself up, looking around the room.  “I’m the reason so many of the U.S.’s enemies have the power to morph right now.  I’m no better than Seerow, in my own way.  If anyone here has a problem with that…”

“Then it can wait,” Jake finishes.  He’s looking at Ax, who stares at Cassie with something between anger and horror.

“Yes, Prince Jake,” Ax says.

Jake takes a breath.  “I’m not really a—”

“That title is not given out lightly.  Tlee.”  Ax smiles a little.  “Nor should it be set aside once given.”

Rachel finds she has lowered the scepter, set it back on the table.  That she’s breathing more normally, berserker kept at bay for the moment.  Cassie looks at her with a silent question, and Rachel nods.  She’s coming back to baseline, will be calm in a minute or two just as long as nothing else happens.

Which is, of course, when the goddamn helicarrier starts falling out of the sky.

Tobias rolls over, gasping for air, fighting down the desire to puke.  He’s back in control of his own body for now, which is good, even if he is pretty sure that things did not exactly go according to plan back there.  It probably wasn’t in the team’s response plan for him to get carried and then thrown across the room by Rachel—or rather, Rachel’s furry little problem—while Cassie rushed around dodging her and trying to make soothing noises.  The plan probably didn’t call for Odret 177 to take one look at the seven-foot-tall clawed-and-fanged version of Rachel and abandon Tobias’s body as a lost cause, even if that had worked out well.  The part where Marco had sprouted some kind of exoskeleton and gone to work on the helicarrier’s fried turbine, and where the andalite guy had dropped the human act in favor of using a massive dose of electricity to restart the engines… Well, that had gone okay as well.

With difficulty, Tobias shoves himself into a sitting position.  His entire body is shaking uncontrollably.  “Well,” he says hoarsely, “that was even worse than I expected it would be.”

“I know,” Cassie says, and she does.  She sits next to him, gently lowering his head to rest on her shoulder.  She knows what it is to have her mind overthrown, which is why she’s the one who’s here.

Then again.  Tobias’s eggs are still scrambled, but he’s starting to realize maybe Cassie is the only one available.  SHIELD is elbows-deep in the mess he just made.  Last he saw, Marco and Ax were still performing emergency repairs.  There’s every possibility Rachel hasn’t stopped rampaging.  After all, Jake had been the only one attempting to deal with her, and…  Well.  Tobias is sure he’s doing his best, and equally sure he’s getting his ass kicked.  Rachel will sometimes change back for Cassie, and she’d probably re-emerge if Ax managed to zap her unconscious.  Tobias, on the other hand… Rachel’s other self doesn’t hurt Tobias, but she doesn’t relax around him either.  Mostly she stuffs Tobias into a corner and then relentlessly scans for anything that could possibly hurt him, annihilating all threats with extreme prejudice.  And someone just hurt Tobias.

“How do we fight this?” Tobias asks Cassie.  “I don’t know what I’m doing.  I’m just some guy.”

“I think that’s true of all of us.”  Jake stands in the doorway.  He’s battered and rumpled-looking, but he’s still upright.  “Rachel’s gone.  Ripped a hole in the side of the ship and then…”  He winces.

“She’ll be fine.”  Cassie puts a hand on his arm.  “You all right?”

“Five by five.”  Jake looks from her to Tobias.  “You know how to fly?”

At that, in spite of the day he’s had, Tobias actually laughs.  “Yeah, man, I can pilot us.”

They commandeer a quinjet, mostly through the power of Jake “War-Prince” “Yeerk-Killer” “Captain America” Berenson’s legendary cussedness.  Although, as Tobias is figuring out, Jake’s not a particular fan of any of the nicknames the media has given him.  Understandable, really, since the guy clearly doesn’t revel in the spotlight like Marco or understand how to use it like Rachel and Cassie.

“Peregrine,” Tobias says on the tail of a sudden thought.

“What?” Jake says sharply.

“Peregrine.”  Tobias doesn’t look away from the quinjet’s viewscreen.  “That’s what your team called you, right?  Back during the war.”  He glances over long enough to smile.  “Don’t worry, I promise not to hold it against you.”

That name, unlike the Yeerk-Killer nonsense, seems to unlock something in Jake.  He chuckles, shaking his head.  “You jump out of one measly little airplane without a parachute one time, and you never live it down.”  He sits down next to Tobias, suddenly looking about 20 years younger.  “No one actually knows for sure that I achieved terminal velocity on the way down,” he confesses, “and no matter what the wiki pages of your web net might claim, the part where I destroyed a Panzer IV on the landing was purely accidental.  Anyway, why would you hold it against me?”

Tobias smiles.  “‘Cause peregrines kill red-tails.  My carnie nickname was Hawkeye, and they let me keep it as a call sign.”

“‘Carnie?’”  Jake frowns, confused.

“I ran away and joined the circus when I was thirteen.”  Tobias glances over long enough to raise his eyebrows and make it clear that no, he’s not joking.  “Got sick of being passed around from relative to relative, and by then I’d figured out I had skills that the performers could use.”

“What can you do, anyway?” Jake asks.

“Like I said, I’m a pilot.”

Cassie takes that opportunity to lean against his chair on the far side.  “He’s being modest.  If you think that Marco can do crazy things with flight tech, you haven’t seen anything.  Add to that Tobias’s affinity for birds—yes, even peregrine falcons, no matter how much he grumbles—and ‘pilot’ is an understatement.”

Jake’s mouth opens halfway.  “You talk… to birds?”

“I communicate with them.  Sort of.”  Tobias gives another smile, this one distinctly self-deprecating.  “My mom always claimed I was half-alien, if that explains it.  But, well, between the traumatic brain injury and…”  He sighs.  “Mostly just the fact that no one ever believed Mom because of the traumatic brain injury, I didn’t exactly give the idea much credence until I figured out about the birds.  Anyway, even if my dad is some kind of alien prince or whatever, he’s never bothered to send so much as a text message my way.”  He shakes his head, shaking off the impulse toward self-pity.  “Where the hell are we going, again?”

“You know that monument to his own ego that Marco was kind enough to build and then drop in the middle of Manhattan?”  Cassie raises her eyebrows.  “We’re pretty sure Visser Three is holed up there.”

Marco thinks he plays it off pretty well, all things considered.  After all, his team doesn’t have to know that he screams like a baby for over half his fall from the sky, and ultimately Dian gets the Mark VI armor to him in time to stop him from going splat on the ground.  He lands next to where the rest of the team (including Rachel’s smaller and nicer self) have congregated on a rooftop.  And by the time he slides the helmet off he’s barely breathing hard at all.

“So,” Rachel says, “I’m guessing the yeerks did, in fact, appropriate your giant phallus?”

“The EGS Tower is the single greatest zero-emissions energy source in the entire western hemisphere,” Marco says, only somewhat sulky.  “And anyway, not all of us can have our faces carved into Mount Rushmore.”

Jake cringes so sharply, body folding into itself as his entire face goes red, that Marco feels bad for having said it.

“Anyway.”  Marco shifts, still adjusting to the new armor, which forms a hard-shelled simian arachnid around his squishy human body.  “Our theory was right.  Visser Three tried to stick a yeerk in me, and this baby—”  He taps his cochlear implant.  “Fried it to death.  I told Visser Three the Animorphs were going to kick his ass, or at least that the rest of us would stand by and cheer as Rachel kicked his ass, he objected, and…”  Marco makes a gesture to approximate the part where he was thrown out a window.

“Animorphs?” Ax asks.  “Ah.  Niiii-morfs.”

“Sure,” Marco says.  “Between Bird Boy’s mind-melding, Rachel’s Dr. Jekyll act, the fact that you’re only human when you want to be, my own beautiful cyborg parts, the part where Cassie straight-up becomes a yeerk when she feels like it, and the way that questionable science transformed Jake into a walking action figure with Product of Mattel stamped on his perfectly-shaped plastic butt, I figured our little band of shapeshifters needed a proper name.”

“So, about this alien invasion…”  Jake looks around to be sure he has their attention, nods once.  “Tobias, gonna need you directing us from above, figuring out where the rest of us can be the most use.  Cassie, you’re the closest thing we have to an expert in yeerk tech, so get to work on the transmitter for that portal.  Ax, get her up there and then focus on shutting down those Bug fighter things as fast as you can generate the lightning to do it.  I’ll be on the ground trying to keep the human civilians separate from those hork-bajir-controllers.  Marco will keep to the air to try and draw the Blade ship’s attention.  Rachel…”  He gives a slight bow.  “You know what to do.”

She grins, showing all her teeth, which are rapidly multiplying.  She says something in response but it gets lost under the sound of her spine rippling and deforming to support limbs that have grown muscular and sprouted six-inch claws.  With a manic laugh she jumps, springing forty feet straight into the air to collide with a Bug fighter; the Bug fighter comes off worse.

Marco shifts his exoskeleton into place, brian implants controlling the four extra limbs attached to the armor.  “Dr. Fossey?” he says into the helmet, and hears his AI come online.  “All right,” he tells the group as a whole.  “Gonna go get some attention, bring the party to you.”

He takes off, but not before he hears Cassie sigh loudly and say, “I hate parties.”

Cassie waits until well after the battle is over, when they’re straggling in an uneven line down the street toward the shawarma that Marco promised to find them, before she dares reach out and very gently take Jake’s hand.  He looks over in surprise when she does, but also folds his scabbed and very dirty fingers around hers with a faint smile.

“If you don’t mind me asking…”  She glances up at him.  “Was that your first kiss since 1945?”  She phrases it that way since asking was that your first kiss outright would definitely be rude.

Jake clears his throat.  “Was… was that a kiss?”

She can see why he’d be uncertain.  He’d just fallen out of the sky, had come entirely too close for anyone’s comfort to getting smashed to pieces on the rubble before Rachel saved him, when Cassie had lunged at him with an uncharacteristic lack of caution and… Okay, she’s not sure how one could interpret it as anything but a kiss.  “I wanted it to be,” she says now.  “If you don’t, that’s all right.  So.  Was it your first since 1945?”

“I’m ninety-five, not dead,” Jake grumbles.

Which answers her question.  She’s not all that surprised; she knows his life story.  Knows that he managed to sneak his way into the Army in spite of being unable to make the cut for his high school’s sports teams, much less qualify for military service at age 19 after signing up for a experimental enhancement.  Knows that he went AWOL to rescue his older brother from yeerk hold, and that the surprising success of the mission gave the Army’s half-forgotten guinea pig an unexpected dose of legitimacy.  Knows that that same older brother was killed in action two years after that, leaving behind a wife who later founded SHIELD and a son who became Rachel’s father.  Knows that Jake himself was declared missing and presumed only a few months later, actually trapped in Arctic ice until he was discovered three short weeks ago.  There simply hasn’t been time.

She’s not sure if she should be more proud or worried that she just stole the first kiss of a national icon.  “I’m pretty sure you’re a decent human being,” she tells him.  She shifts her hand slightly to lace their fingers together.  “I’m pretty sure that decent human beings don’t turn into wolves and rip people’s throats out the way I do.  I’d probably still be refusing to take sides as the yeerks tore apart lives if Tobias hadn’t decided to spare my life in spite of all logic and in spite of direct orders.”

Jake is silent for a long time.  Finally he says, “World War II was only simple and heroic in the retelling.  The phrase Greatest Generation didn’t even come about until the late 1990s, well after most of the people who would have called bullshit were dead.  I just…”  He takes a breath, looking straight up.  “I just unleashed a nuclear weapon upon several thousand living beings, killed I don’t know how many.  The people who say that my hands are clean because I only kill aliens don’t deserve to call themselves human, much less Americans.”

“For pete’s sake, just kiss already!” Rachel calls loudly from behind them.  “You’re giving me a friggin’ toothache, and I’m already hangry.”

Ax realizes that the longer he spends on this strange little planet interacting with its strange little sentient species, the more he appreciates why his brother always enjoyed coming here.  Prince Jake might shy away from his title, but he also becomes the one to stop and check in on every member of his team after they are first seated at the food establishment, taking a moment to talk to each of them in spite of the way that he is himself swaying in exhaustion.  Rachel is a magnificent warrior and it was an honor to fight by her side, while Cassie defies every expectation through her undeniable competence.  Marco’s cheerful promise to introduce Ax to every food on a stick that Earth has to offer conceals a true offer of friendship at its core.  Ax went out drinking Tobias during the whole messy affair around his first landing on Earth; later, one of the SHIELD agents had started to explain Hawkeye’s role to Ax, and it’d felt right when Ax blurted out, “He’s a friend.”

This moment feels important, Ax concludes, and not just because of his fifth helping of delicious shaved meat products upon delightfully textured bread.  It feels like the start of something.  Rachel and Marco are bickering companionably about the exact nature of that alien portal, and you could almost miss the way that Tobias’s and Rachel’s legs tangle together as she curls her body halfway around him.  Jake looks ready to doze off, but pulls himself out of it every time he realizes what’s happening, while Cassie watches him with a gentle smile.

“So, you headed home after this?” Tobias asks.  He’s pale and bruised, but his appetite has proven to be healthy enough.

Ax considers.  “The Andalite Electorate will dispense justice to Alloran, both for his actions during the hork-bajir conflict and…”  He stops.  It doesn’t do to bad-mouth his own people when speaking to aliens.

“They don’t like that he got taken.”  Tobias smiles, bitter and tired.  “Their little Abomination is some seriously bad press, and they’re going to bring holy hell down on him for it.”

Ax sets down his pita and folds his hands on the tabletop.  They are strong and five-fingered and pale brown right now because he wishes them to be.  It is easy enough to manipulate the electricity that makes his shape take on different appearances, even if he will probably never have his brother’s gift for illusions.  “You’re not wrong,” he says at last.  “Once I believed… leeeve-ed.  That my people were without fault, that our causes were righteous.  Once I hungered for war.  Once I thought it to be nothing more than another driftball game with higher stakes and greater chance for glory.  Once I dreamed of that glory, dreamed of war.  Now…  Ow.  Wwwww.”

Tobias’s expression suggests that he knows perfectly well Ax is only playing around with mouth-sounds to buy himself time.

“Now I have few certainties,” Ax finally admits.

“You have us.”  Tobias doesn’t hesitate.  “For what we’re worth, that is.”  He glances around at where Cassie is giggling while Rachel flicks tomatoes into Marco’s hair.  She has one hand over her mouth to try and avoid making enough noise to rouse Jake, who is sleeping face-down in a blob of tabbouleh.

“You are all of you worth very much to me.”  Once again, the words feel right even as Ax says them.  “And I’d be honored to fight with you once again, should the need arise.”

[All my other AUs are housed here.]

[junker-town]

There’s nothing special about the Suns, which is why they’re succeeding

Phoenix is winning with an ordinary approach.

And that’s a really, really good thing.

Ten minutes into a press conference announcing his perennially dysfunctional franchise will hire its fifth head coach in the last four seasons, newly promoted Phoenix Suns general manager James Jones communicated his offseason plans about as clearly as one can.

“We need to add guys in their prime. We need to raise the floor of our team,” Jones said. “And you only do that with NBA players. Not prospects, but NBA players.”

As a rallying cry, “Raise the Floor” isn’t exactly “Trust The Process.” Still, it conveyed a specific message: we must walk before we can run, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Adding proven players wasn’t just a way for the Suns to avoid embarrassment. It’s the only way they could then take any next step.

That message didn’t break through in a summer where the Suns’ asset management ranged from adequate to baffling. It’s sure breaking through now as the Suns rise to the league’s third-best point differential in the very (very) early going of the 2019-20 season. They look like an actual basketball team, which is an incredible compliment given their recent past.

It’s difficult to find one specific reason for Phoenix’s surprising start. Outside of Aron Baynes turning into Splash Volcano, no Suns player has played well above their means. Their games aren’t really that exciting, unless effective screens and early rotations to the nail are your idea of appointment viewing. (Guilty.) One of their core young players is suspended until December, and the other is scoring and assisting less than he did last year. Their marquee free-agent signing is shooting 35 percent from the field.

But they’ve become a functional and possibly even good team precisely because they aren’t special. They’ve been bolstered not by top-level talent, but instead by the pristine positioning, floor spacing, and toughness from a crew of competent NBA role players. Or, as Jones put it, they’ve raised their floor.

“Aggressively competent” is how you’d describe recent additions like Baynes, Frank Kaminsky, Dario Saric, and Tyler Johnson. It’s how you’d describe Ricky Rubio at this stage of his career — consider that a good Jazz team let him walk to upgrade to Mike Conley. It’s how you’d describe 23-year-old rookie sharpshooter Cameron Johnson, selected way higher than anyone expected in the draft. It’s how you’d describe new coach Monty Williams, who slowly made the New Orleans Pelicans decent before they fired him to aim higher themselves.

The price for that aggressive competence wasn’t always ideal, but the total sum created a necessary baseline from which Phoenix is now building. The Suns’ early-season style of play is thoroughly unremarkable while also showing the power of executing a thoroughly unremarkable style of play effectively.

The Suns’ keep-it-simple ethos is most evident on defense. They do three things well and only three things well: pressure the ball, collectively pack the paint, and make second efforts if the first screen beats them.

Phoenix gets a lot of mileage out of being pains in the ass. Rubio is one of the NBA’s peskiest defensive point guards, but young wings Kelly Oubre and Mikal Bridges are also long and quick, while Saric never makes posting up pleasant. Even Booker, never known for his defensive energy, is blowing up dribble handoffs.

That ball pressure gets cranked up to 11 when backup point guard Jevon Carter enters. The days of the pitbull point guard defender that always seems to be in the opposing star’s grill are over, except in Phoenix, where Carter is relentless. Poor Tyus Jones needed 10 seconds just to get Memphis’ play going.

Ninety-four feetBall pressure is a life hack because it burns precious seconds off the shot clock, but you don’t see it much anymore for two reasons. One, it’s hard to defend physically without fouling. Two, it’s prone to backdoor cuts that ruin the system.

The Suns accept the first as a necessary tradeoff — they are dead last in the NBA in foul rate, which annoys Williams publicly, but probably not as much privately. They account for the second by aggressively rotating off perimeter players to pack the paint, especially when defending pick-and-rolls. The nail, which refers to a spot just above the free-throw line where an actual nail from the court’s structure peeks out, has become a second home for Suns perimeter defenders.

In theory, every NBA defensive scheme asks that help defender to stand on the nail to stop penetration. In practice, though, the nail defender is the one most stressed by the NBA’s spacing revolution. With the rise of the three-point shot and then the deep three-point shot, the nail defender is spread thin. It’s nearly impossible to plug rolls to the basket and also close out to their own man ready to fire from 27 feet. Worse, offenses have developed intricate tactics to distract that nail defender: switching two shooters along the three-point line, setting flare screens to delay closeouts, decoying a pick-and-roll to swing into another one, driving gaps instead of shooting, and many others I’m forgetting.

Phoenix’s early-season approach has vastly simplified those outcomes. Stopping dribble penetration is the only goal that matters, even at the expense of allowing spot-up three-pointers. That’s why you see Suns help defenders head to the nail before a pick-and-roll is even set, even if that may open up a shooter. They pre-rotate so they don’t have to rotate later.

That strategy works in concert with the Suns’ other core tenant: keep their big men by the basket and stay vertical rather than trying to swat shots. In this respect, Baynes has been an essential addition. The 32-year-old, 6’10, 260-pound center, acquired in a draft-day salary dump with the Celtics, is physically imposing, precise, and unconcerned with recognition or embarrassment — the role player’s holy trinity. He’s made an eight-year NBA career out of standing near the basket and putting his hands up.

With him patrolling the back line, Suns players can pressure their men and collectively pack the paint. They can also recover to the roller when the initial screen beats them and gain credit for a steal or deflection — impressive hustle to be sure, but also effort that only gets rewarded because Baynes held up the ball-handler.

The Suns’ offense has also benefited from simplifying the operation. Williams preaches an “0.5 system” in which every decision should happen in half a second or less. The concept isn’t new or even especially novel. Prior Suns coaches Earl Watson and Igor Kokoskov used similar terminology with far less success. But the Suns now have a roster of floor-raisers who can actually embody its principles.

Simply adding Rubio, an adequate floor general, has made a huge difference after not having anything remotely resembling one last year. Rubio is the guy who keeps the rest of the players focused and gets Phoenix into its sets early to maximize the time they have to score. This preseason possession showed both skills on display.

7 Plays Or Less - Random Observations.... 1. Want to see the impact Rubio's signing has on a team desperate for leadership? Watch him get to every player on the court after a bad transition D possession, that ended in Book/Ayton bickering. The result? Highlight of the game. pic.twitter.com/ZeDVbx26wf

— Seven Seconds Or Less Podcast (@7SOLpod) October 9, 2019

Rubio also takes a huge burden off Booker, who has responded by channeling more energy into defense and reading the floor. His scoring is down, but he’s getting better shots and moving the ball more effectively when a shot isn’t there. He’s launching more often within a normal flow of the offense and less often when the shot clock is winding down and he needs to bail the Suns out. Fifty-six of Booker’s buckets are assisted this season compared to just 36 last year, and more than 45 percent of his shots have come off one or zero dribbles this year, compared to just 34 percent last season.

He also can do less because Phoenix’s new collection of floor raisers follow two important offensive rules: keep moving, and never roll into the paint if someone else is already there. Kaminsky and Saric always seem to be zipping around somewhere, like flies attracted to light. Both run the equivalent of at least a full mile on offense while playing fewer than 28 minutes, according to NBA.com’s player tracking stats. Only one other player 6’10 or bigger has done that this year, and only nine did so last season.

That movement is contagious because it tilts the defense and facilitates more motion from other Suns players. The Suns have scored directly from a cut on 9.4 percent of their possessions this year, second-highest in the league behind the Zombie Warriors. Oubre, a player not exactly known for his decision-making, has been a major beneficiary, as Bright Side of the Sun’s Brendon Kleen noted.

Crucially, Phoenix doesn’t allows two players in the paint at the same time, which would only shrink the space for each. Instead, their bigs often hang on the perimeter to open the lane for their wings to cut through. Baynes’ remarkable mid-career transformation into a giant flamethrower is especially important: he’s taking nearly seven threes per 36 minutes while hitting 46 percent of them, which is astonishing. Nowadays, he sets screens, chills at the line as his guards drive, and waits for the opposing center to either help too much on the ball-handler or, hilariously, cede a wide open shot for a way better teammate in fear of his own shooting.

All of this is unremarkable, and that’s exactly the point. Protecting the paint? Good spacing? Proper positioning? Moving without the ball? These sound like prerequisites for NBA success, not bonuses. But the Suns haven’t taken any for granted, acquiring players who embody them and stressing a style of play that reinforces them. That’s a huge step considering how terribly they’ve built their rosters in the last decade.

Competence is not the same as brilliance, so don’t go printing those playoff tickets yet. In particular, I’m skeptical their defense will stay this elite once opponents realize their simple approach cedes open three-pointers. That’s already happening to some degree: the Suns are getting away with it largely because teams are only shooting 31 percent from downtown, which won’t happen over a full season.

In other ways, the Suns’ defense is getting a bit lucky. Opponent shot quality against Phoenix — which estimates the effective field goal percentage based on a model that considers the shot location and play context — is actually the fourth-worst in the league and more than five points higher than the actual effective field goal percentage the Suns are giving up. The incessant fouling will cost them more in the future, and it’s hard to see how they stop hacking when they are so physical with their ball pressure. Despite their pack-the-paint emphasis, the Suns also allow the sixth-highest percentage of shots at the rim, though they’ve effectively defended said shots so far.

But this is also the same organization whose owner brought live goats into his general manager’s office as a motivational ploy, only for them to shit everywhere in sight. Against that backdrop, competence will do just fine.