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mrteapot's LiveJournal:
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| Thursday, June 19th, 2008 | | 8:33 pm |
Big in Italy Well, not big exactly, but played in Italy. The first playtest of my (award winning?!?) Game Chef game House of Masks has happened. And it was on a different continent altogether. In Italy specifically. Anyone who reads Italian or wishes to trudge through Babelfish generated Itanglish can read the promo page here. And it is scheduled to be played again, at some sort of gaming convention. The playtest report came back pretty positive, too. Which is good, as I had a slight dread the entire game would be entirely unfeasible in play. Reportedly, they had some trouble getting the hang of the conflict rules. But most players had only read an Italian translation of the Overview section, and my Italian contact thinks it might work better if they actually read the entire Conflict section, or at least some examples. This matches the sense that I got during our abortive playtest attempt (and when writing the game, too). The Aspect pairings seemed to each work differently, but each generated entertaining play in their own way. One group worked together well, and switched In and Out for tactical advantage. One group swapped In and Out when it was most entertaining to do so, but didn't work together to achieve their goals. The last pair never quite trusted each other, and sometimes worked together and sometimes tried hard to prevent switching. This pleases me, as that sounds to be in the spread of relationships I hoped the pairing would generate. If I were better at organizing people, we could have played at least once by now. Of course, that having a child born in there threw our schedules into whack for a little bit | | Friday, May 16th, 2008 | | 1:05 am |
Today is a really good day for me So I apparently won Game Chef this year. I guess I should really see about gathering people together and try actually playtesting the game. Luckily my schedule is pretty open for the next eleven weeks. | | 12:32 am |
We are back from the hospital, having doubled the number of our offspring while we were there. Everything there went according to plan, leaving us with a healthy newborn girl. (For those who need such details, Sophia Rose Wedig was born at 10:04 AM on 5/12/08, weighed 6 pounds 12 ounces and was 18 inches long.) If anything, having a planned C-section made this whole having a child thing seem like a breeze. Then again, I'm not the one who got my belly sliced open. Geeks that we are, Amber and I spent much of the time in the hospital playing D&D and games on our DSes. Specifically, I played Phoenix Wright and we both played Amber's Mother's Day present. Well, her Mother's Day present that doesn't scream and generate dirty diapers every couple of hours. To further cement my nerdly station, the card for Amber's Mother's Day present was a frame from the computer programming webcomic XKCD. Madeline is still just a bit too young to understand what is going on. Which is good, because it means she's still too young to be jealous of the new kid. Amber is recovering way better this time than she did the first time around. Which is also great. And my Family Medical Leave from work started Monday and lasts through the beginning of August. So I'll have plenty of time to hang out with my two (!) daughters. | | Monday, April 28th, 2008 | | 2:16 pm |
Game Chef complete My Game Chef game has been submitted. You can see the complete game in glorious unformatted .txt format, if you want. Maybe at some point I'll make a more readable version of the game. The horrible illness meant that got distracted from much participating in the social aspects of Game Chef this year (not that those seemed to be working well anyway). | | Saturday, April 19th, 2008 | | 10:24 am |
[Game Chef] House of Masks? I think I’ve settled on an idea for Game Chef. It uses the Horstman and Shoemaker sets of art, which also are apparently the most popular sets so far. Hopefully the crazy gameplay of my game will set it apart from everyone else with the same art. I feel like last year my game got lost in a shuffle of similar games, and fear this might happen again. ( long rough set of ideas ) | | Friday, April 18th, 2008 | | 10:46 am |
Game Chef So they have posted the final rules for Game Chef, and allowed the designers to see the art threads. Now I have to pick one (or two) sets of art and write a game about them. ( art examples and thoughts about each ) | | Thursday, April 17th, 2008 | | 6:07 pm |
So there are a few things that are taking up a lot of my attention currently: 1) The most important thing: Amber is going to give birth on May 12th. It's a planned C-section, so that date is pretty well certain. So we'll have another daughter in less than a month. I'm currently trying to get stuff sorted out with HR at work so that I can take the summer semester off. The school changed the FMLA policy: when Maddie was born, the first six weeks of your leave were paid, then you could have up to six more weeks unpaid. Now, that's reversed; six weeks unpaid then six weeks paid. I think this is doing the exact opposite of what the college wanted (discouraging employees from using FMLA) as it's just increasing the amount of time I'm taking off. When Maddie was born, I took six weeks. This time, it's the full twelve weeks. If the HR people will ever give me the forms to fill out. 2) Game Chef is starting up again this year. Tomorrow, actually. Or a few weeks ago, depending on how you look at things. This year, they had a bunch of artists make art for game that didn't exist, and now are having designers design those games. I'm greatly interested to see how this turns out, and will try to make and enter something. 3) Wizards of the coast is starting to put some really heavy amounts of mechanical info in their previews for 4th edition D&D. We played a playtest game using preview material a few weeks ago, which made me more interested in seeing the final game. Observant readers will notice that one of these things is not like the others, as in the grand Sesame Street tradition. So these things actually all sort of combine together in my mind, in that I think I want to organize some additional roleplaying over the summer. A 4th edition game would be the obvious thing to play, as it'll be the new toy on the market June 6th. Of course, Amazon won't deliver my copy until about June 12th, so the first month of my leave would be lost for this endeavor. And I feel like the only gaming I've done recently (since GMing Mutant City Blues in January) has been D&D. And I still have some weird indie games purchased at Origins last year that I want to play (Polaris, the Shab Al-Hiri Roach, etc.). My ideal outcome might be to run a 4th ed game ASAP and have a recurring night of some GMless game (like either of the above mentioned indie games). The GMless game shouldn't require a lot of prep time, so that wouldn't be a huge problem. And then we'd get to play 4th edition sooner, rather than waiting for campaigns to switch over when appropriate. Of course, it might be that being the parent of two children under two years of age is enough to keep me occupied, and so I won't have a chance for any more gaming anyway. We'll have to wait and see on that front. | | Saturday, April 12th, 2008 | | 11:14 am |
Since January, I've been GMing a solo D&D game for Amber, which has been fun and interesting. Other than a playtest of Mutant City Blues, this is the first significant GMing that I've done in a long time. Those two jobs GMing add up to me doing more GMing in the last six months than in the previous five years. Possibly ten years. ( D&D, reality revision and using in game events to motivate out of game action )This last week, Amber's PC travelled for the first time to one of the outer planes, specifically the 4th edition Elemental Chaos. There, another trick of the campaign came into play: different planes of existence use different rules. This (finally) gave me a chance to play Otherkind by Vince Baker. A game I'd wanted to play for a couple years, at least. ( Otherkind, simplification and a plot stolen from Doctor Who )Of course, now that I GMed some Otherkind, it has made me reluctant to go back and GM a 3rd edition D&D game. Especially as one of the upcoming adventures involves a mid to high level spellcaster, who is a pain to stat up. And then I'll need an appropriate set of stats for the demon queen, if it comes to that. And I really don't like the statblocks for any demons I've seen (too many useless Spell-like Abilities, innapropriate CRs, don't do anything especially cool or unique). Maybe I can set the big final fight on another plane of existence, and so use something else. | | Friday, April 11th, 2008 | | 12:52 am |
Mathematical Analysis of old Star Trek episodes Keeping up a trend of linking to charts and graphs and mathematical analysis of stuff I am interested in. Over here you can see a mathematical examination of the well known Star Trek cliche that the red shirted ensign on the Away Team always dies. Read that entry, then my conclusions, behind the cut. ( What This Tells Us ) | | Thursday, April 10th, 2008 | | 11:23 am |
Violence versus videogames The next time someone claims videogames cause violence, show them this graph:  (From here.) There are only three possible explanations: 1) Videogames decrease your chance of committing violent crime, probably via some form of catharsis. 2) There is no causal effect between videogames and violence. The drop in violence is do to other changes in fields like economics and law enforcement in the studied time frame. The most likely scenario, in my opinion. 3) Videogames do indeed increase your chance of committing violence, but do so to such a small degree that those other environmental factors play a much, much larger role. So any efforts to censor violent videogames would be better spent fighting poverty, improving education, improving law enforcement and other methods of preventing violent crimes. Actually, the ultimate conclusion of any of those scenarios is to not censor videogames but prevent violent crimes through means that actually, you know, work. That's my logical analysis of the data. Aesthetically, I love the fact that Doom is right there at the point where violent crime drops right off a cliff. | | Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 | | 5:39 pm |
Synaesthesia and 4th edition There are times that I'm very opposed to D&D, and times when I am big in support of it. Right now I'm still coasting along being very positive towards it, which looks to last at least through June, unless I can get a lot more indie gaming in at some point. ( pointless navel gazing, but isn't that what a blog is for? )In related news, Gary Gygax is dead. But you almost certainly knew that by now if you actually cared enough to read the above, as I don't imagine anyone who cares about my take on 4th edition D&D hasn't seen some other sort of nerd news site already. (The Wizards of the Coast website is in black for mourning.) I'm going to just go along with James Wallis on this: maybe now that Gygax is dead, he'll stop embarassing us with stuff like Lejendary Adventures and we can just pay attention to the good stuff that he did, like invent my favorite hobby and create the structures of modern gaming and modern fantasy. | | Monday, March 3rd, 2008 | | 3:04 pm |
| | Saturday, March 1st, 2008 | | 10:59 am |
So I am (almost) fully recovered from my illness, but we had to spend all day yesterday taking Madeline to the hospital. ( longish story )Maddie is reportedly doing much better today. I don't know: I've been at work all morning. But Amber says she is alert and eating and taking her medicine. | | Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 | | 6:53 pm |
Being sick is no fun. Having a sick one year old child is no fun. Being sick while having a one year old child who is also sick is somehow even less fun. ---- In other news: How did I survive the last decade without owning a copy of Then: The Earlier Years by They Might Be Giants? This album (or collection of albums) is seriously necessary for my continued survival. Related to that: Madeline appears to really like They Might Be Giants, which pleases me. She likes music in general, but the most surefire way to please her is to stick the They Might Be Giants educational children's DVD in the DVD player. And reportedly recognized the musical style of TMBG when played on the Disney Channel. Actually, there's something odd (and oddly cool) about how my favorite nerd rock band has metamorphed into being rock stars for kids. I read an interview with one of the members of TMBG who said that while they had been rock stars for twenty some years at that point, they had no clear plans for what to do when their popularity faded. Having your current generation of fans convert their offspring into your fans as well seems like a good way to maintain that rock star lifestyle for a good long while. ---- Our department at work keeps losing people. Most recently, the head of the department and the manager of Administrative Computing, both of whom have been here for about six months. Hiring to fill vacated positions seems to work like fighting a hydra: every time they hire for one position, two people quit for some reason. Which just makes things harder on those who remain, who are therefore more likely to quit. My job hasn't been as directly impacted as others have, as the vacancies are largely concentrated in the other section of the IT department. But it is weird, and worrying. The words "like rats from a sinking ship" come to mind. Apparently worried about morale, I have been given a coupon (an actual, physical coupon that must be turned in to be redeemed) good for half a day off. Not a whole day off, just a half-day. The analogy from someone else from one of my coworkers is that this is like giving someone half a bottle of whiskey as a gift. | | Thursday, February 21st, 2008 | | 7:21 pm |
Cut the Pie So you have some characters interacting in your game (I have no idea what the rest of the game looks like). you get to a point where two characters or two players want different things. To resolve these things, play goes like this:
- One of the two players declares two possible outcomes for the situation.
- The other one picks which outcome actually happens.
That's all. But I think this construction would be much more interesting in play than it is to describe. Now, if both players have equal authority and opposed goals, you might need a rule "You don't specify who gets what". So if two PCs are fighting over an ancient holy relic, you could say "One of us gets the idol, but they also are horribly scarred in the process, OR the idol is destroyed in the battle and no one gets it." But you can't say, like "I get the idol or you get horribly scarred" because that would leave a crappy choice for the second player. Possibly the rule could even be amended to be "you declare as many outcomes as there are characters in the conflict, but the other player decides who each outcome applies to." The thing that interests me here is that it would encourage mixed results in conflicts. Like a kid slicing a cake, you want to make the smaller half as big as possible, which pushes toward evenness in results. So you get pyrrhic or bittersweet victories or losses where you gain something. And those are good gaming material. The other situation where this would work is if the players aren't in any way confrontational. I can imagine a game like The Court of the Empress (or another game where one player's goal is to please the other player) that used a similar setup. The most benign of GM setups would be similar: the GM proposes two outcomes, and the player picks which one they want. Actually, with a GM and a torturous game (a la My Life With Master or Paranoia) the GM offering two horrible fates for your PC and you having to pick which one happens could also be really cool. (Cross-posted to Story Games though you'd have to be logged in to see the discussion on the idea.) | | Monday, February 18th, 2008 | | 4:43 pm |
Wii60! If you're following Amber's LJ, then you see that we have joined the ranks of the Wii60 movement. And that Bioshock is as awesome as expected. I'm not sure what to add beyond that. I really like Bioshock's Art Deco Objectivist dystopia. The story and gameplay are excellent, but what impresses me most is the environment you are in, which is so much more interesting and creative than your typical videogame litany of "fire level, ice level, water level, etc." | | Saturday, February 16th, 2008 | | 9:14 am |
Excellent reason for owning a crock pot #311,542 Around Christmas time, Amber complained that she hadn't ever had a proper fruitcake. This prompted buying an extremely cheap and disappointing grocery store fruitcake, which failed to satisfy this desire. And had weird green rubbery fruit things in it. So for Valentine's Day (well, the day afterward, when I had an afternoon off) I baked a fruitcake for Amber, utilizing the copious quantities of dried fruit that we have around the house. It was a variation on this recipe( EDIT: Fixed link: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_35301,00.html), with extra vanilla and added raspberry and cinnamon extract. And the candies replaced with mostly dried apricots, some prunes, dried apples, one dried pear and about half a cup of chopped almonds. This is, by itself, a good fruitcake, though it is not terribly authentic as it has not been soaked in rum for several months. But it becomes an amazingly good fruitcake when the homemade dulce de leche is added on top. This is where the crock pot comes in: dulce de leche requires hours of cooking at low heat, so a crock pot is the perfect tool for the job. All we did was put a can of sweetened condensed milk in a bit of water (we opened a hole with a can opener, to let out pressure, but no recipes I can find make any mention of this) and set the crock pot to "Low". The food's yumminess is way disproportionate to the effort involved in making it. The fruitcake's yumminess to effort ratio is much more proportionate, in that it is extremely yummy but required a lot of effort. Making the batter took me longer than expected, and in the process I broke a spatula, possibly burned out the motor on the food processor and generally made a mess. I am reminded why I prefer cooking to baking. The results, though, are worth it. | | Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 | | 7:53 pm |
The Problem is Right There in the Name Everybody's favorite Harvard-mathematician-turned-comedian/mu sician Tom Lehrer* has a line that goes "The problem with folk songs is that they are written by the people." My thinking is that this same logical construction can be more widely applied. One of the guys at Penny Arcade once observed, for example, that "The problem with multiplayer games is you have to play them with other people." Which is a familiar problem indeed. But currently my thinking is that "The problem with fanfic is that it is written by the fans." One wonders what would happen if professional novelists instead wrote fanfiction**. Oh wait, we don't have to wonder, we can instead read Stephen Brust's Firefly novel, My Own Kind of Freedom. *Mine anyway. And according to Wikipedia, he's voting for Obama. Which may be the only celebrity endorsement I care about. **Which is different than a professional novelist writing a licensed novel, if only because the impetus comes from personal love of the content rather than monetary concerns. | | Saturday, February 9th, 2008 | | 1:54 pm |
What have I been doing recently, such that I haven't posted anything here in two months? Playing videogames, working, raising a kid. Making up stuff for the solo gestalt D&D game for Amber. These all occupied the boring stretches of time that would normally be filled with posting here. The first one is the one I'm interested in here. Several videogames were received for that annual winter gift giving phenomenon. It's taken me quite a while to play through all of them, such that I could give my thoughts on them. ( Read more... )I think those are all the videogames we jointly received for Christmas. Now that I'm done with those, I'm trying to work my way through the stack of books we got for the same holiday. So far I've finished Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, and am working on Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. After that I've got another three or four books to read. But those will have to be detailed some other day. | | Thursday, December 20th, 2007 | | 9:59 am |
Wiimote hack At our work, we have an expensive and temperamental touchscreen whiteboard. It is a pain to work with, and cost us a bunch of money when it was bought (probably seven years ago or so). So this usage of a Wiimote seems really cool to me. It does the same thing, but projected onto any surface, not just onto a touchscreen. And for a whole lot cheaper: a Wiimote, an LED light and some wiring and that is pretty much it. It's a pretty cool video. |
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