A Boy and His blog

The good get better but the bad get worse

2009-12-29T05:36:45Z

The Phantom Menace? It is, in fact, worse than you thought.

The Big Lebowski, on the other hand, is better than you think.

Stay Calm. Don't Panic, But...

2009-12-19T17:39:58Z

I think the pop music industry has been taken over by robots.

Or at least, that's how it sounds when you listen to certain specific radio stations. Every single song is so heavily Auto-Tuned that they sound more like duets between GLaDOS and Hal 9000 or something.

Come to think of it, evil AIs taking over the music industry is more or less the plot of Macross Plus. I guess the biggest difference there is that Sharon Apple's music doesn't suck.

And the lack of a superdimensional fortress, of course.

You know you're getting old...

2009-12-18T23:39:08Z

...when you're older than a 700 year old immortal time lord.

The blue line is the age of the actor playing Doctor Who , while the horizontal axis represents time by year (going from 1963 to 2014). The red line is the good Doctor's average age, which as you can see has been steadily declining as time progresses.

Christmas wishlist

2009-11-24T00:42:57Z

Did you know that you can add stuff that isn't on Amazon.com to an Amazon wish list? I didn't. Apparently you can, as you might notice when perusing my annual Christmas wish list, posted as always for the benefit of gift purchasers and family members.

The Forks of the Ohio River are Indeed Quite Bloody

2009-11-20T00:05:33Z

While at GaspCon, I did actually succeed in running one of my three games. (As they say on Discworld, "One out of three ain't bad," right?). I wasn't terribly surprised to see that it was Bloody Forks of the Ohio.

I had rewritten Bloody Forks as a Larp back during the summer, but this time I stuck very close to the original documentation. The characters as outlined in the original PDF have little background detail provided, though, so I made my own set of character sheets that were an amalgam of the LARP sheets and the tabletop PCs. Mostly, this means that the PCs I ran with were as written in the PDF, but with the background paragraph and info on other characters taken from the Larp sheets. I'm pretty happy with how the sheets turned out. (Each sheet that you see folds in half into a booklet. You print it double sided, then fold.)

I had six players sign up for the game, so it was a full table. After a brief discussion of the politics of the time period (and why conflict was basically inevitable), I offered the players a host of options. They could: play the British, play the French, or play a mixed group. They could also play a historically plausible game or the "gonzo" version, in which Marie and French Margaret know strange Seneca magics and Benjamin Franklin has a super science lightning gun. The group preferred the gonzo version, which in retrospect is good: I had six players, but only five non-gonzo PCs of either faction.

Initially the group preferred to go with a mixed group of French and British, which is the lazy GM's preferred solution, as I could sideline all the NPCs and just have PC on PC conflict. But when the PCs started being handed out, the first three characters picked were all British. And astoundingly, Ben Franklin and George Washington were not picked at all. Who wouldn't want to play a guy who can kill with a stare and make love like an eagle falling out of the sky? When I pointed this out, Washington and Franklin and the remaining British guy (Trent maybe?) all got picked, so we wound up with an all British group.

Which is awesome, as the British are great underdogs in the situation: Fort Necessity is shit, and they're outnumbered and outgunned by the French. That's a compelling dramatic situation, and compels the PCs into action.

Initially, the PCs plotted together briefly in Fort Necessity, but determined that they needed allies, food and supplies (as shown on the Fort Necessity sheet). They decided to split into three groups:

* Washington was going to go with French Margaret north up the river, sneak past Fort Duquesne and try to parley with the Delaware Chief Custologa. Washington didn't mention to anyone, but he also hoped French Margaret could deliver a love letter to Marie on the way, figuring that Margaret had contacts inside the fort.
* Ben Franklin and Half-King Tanacharison were to visit Christopher Gist's trading post and get supplies or food, and any other support they could get, then meet Washington at Custologa's town.
* Jacob Van Braam and William Trent were to reinforce Fort Necessity and train up Washington's "loose and idle" soldiers.

These three pairings basically stayed for the rest of the game, until the big finale, anyway. So then we cut back and forth between these three storylines for the rest of the session.

Act One:

Van Braam early on sent out scouts to watch the area around Fort Necessity. One of these men returned fairly quickly with a native woman, Raspberry Girl Mehowimi. This was a deliberate reuse of a subplot from the LARP, intended to spur some inactive PCs like Trent and Braam into action. Raspberry Girl had married a British deserter, Ignatius Jones, so now Trent and Braam had to decide what to do with her. Van Braam thought she might be a spy, and Trent thought she might be a bargaining chip with the local Delaware tribe. Occasionally here I had to poke Trent for response and action, as much discussion happened in Shawnee (which Trent can't speak) and the player tended to be a bit passive. A plan was discussed involving letting Raspberry Girl go to see what would happen, but eventually the plan was modified such that Van Braam would take her back. Trent didn't trust Van Braam, though, so he sent a soldier, Torrence Swiney, to follow Van Braam and the native girl. Van Braam is a frontier badass, though, so easily noticed and snuck around behind the soldier bumbling through the forest, beat him up and sent him back to Trent. The soldier naturally then reported to Trent that Van Braam was deserting the British military. So Trent sent a few dozen soldiers to capture Van Braam.

Meanwhile, Washington and French Margaret stopped at Fort Duquesne. Margaret went inside the fort, claiming to be offering food and supplies for trade but really trying to meet with her half-brothers Jumonville or de Villiers. Washington chose to hide on the banks of the river with the rest of the men they had brought with them. French Margaret met with Captain de Villiers, who became slightly suspicious of what was happening (he knew of Margaret's loyalty to Washington). So he promised that Jumonville would arrange a trade with her, while actually sending Jumonville out to scout the area for anyone with Margaret. Washington saw Jumonville and his thirty men sneaking out of the fort, and thought that they were perhaps deserters, so he approached them directly. There was some attempt at communication, but Washington doesn't speak English, Jumonville doesn't speak English. so after a failed attempt at cross-cultural bribery, Jumonville decided to just capture Washington and his men. So a fight broke out, which resulted in Washington captured and his men killed despite Washington rolling a big pile of dice.

In the third group, Franklin and Half-King visited Christopher Gist. Gist wanted to help the British, but needed to stay neutral to stay in business. I tried to emphasize that Franklin was a famous scientist, author and statesman (or, as he was summarized "the 18th century Batman"), in order to give Franklin some spotlight time. A good couple of rolls for trading and charming and they were able to remove the "needs food" status from Fort Necessity (I gave them a choice of food or supplies but not both). A worse roll for acquiring reinforcements got them a couple dozen volunteers from the trading post, but not enough to help much. Then Franklin and canoed north to meet Washington, and found him strangely not present at Custologa's town. On the canoe trip, Half-King kept trying to suggest strange inventions to Franklin, of the sort seen in modern warfare, and Franklin kept waving him off as a crazy native type that didn't know what he was talking about.

Act Two:

Van Braam brought Raspberry Girl back to Shingas the terrible's village. Van Braam tried to persuade Shingas to join the British side of the conflict, but Braam's tales of the British's weakness and having the European powers fight each other convinced Shingas to attack the British instead. (Shingas's secret love of Marie-amable may have been a factor, too.) So the Delaware took Van Braam captive and began to prepare for war. Van Braam challenged Shingas to a duel, which I went with because that's always cool to do. Van Braam, it turns out, has a ton of traits on his sheet relevant for fighting a duel against a native tribe leader, and so rolled a huge pile of dice and pounded Shingas into the ground. He forced Shingas into surrendering (note Shingas has the Key of the Coward), then cut off Shingas's ear and ate it. At that point, the delaware were sufficiently terrified of Van Braam (and he had enough leftover successes from the duel) that they would do anything he said. What he said was, naturally, "go attack Fort Duquesne". As Van Braam was leaving the Delaware village with a native army under his command, Trent's soldiers sent to capture Van Braam caught up with him. Seeing the army, they very wisely claimed that they were there to "make sure Van Braam was okay", and were sent back to Fort Necessity to mobilize the British troops there. (This was the section that was toughest to get Trent involved, but his player seemed to have fun regardless.)

Up north of Fort Duquesne, Franklin and Half-King tried to sway the Delaware chief Custologa to their side. Custologa was somewhat impressed by the agricultural science Franklin could share with them, but still did not trust Half-King. Half-King made the choice to abandon his goal of bringing the Delaware back under Iroquois control and instead focused on his hatred of the French and support of the British. Buying off his Key gained him enough of a bonus to succeed in his diplomatic roll with Custologa, which worked because he was able to promise the Delaware complete freedom and autonomy and equality with the Seneca in exchange for attacking the French. So a third army came marching in the direction of Fort Duquesne. (Here I probably should have thrown more action or conflict in somehow. This pair's plot never was quite as exciting or over-the-top as the other two. Maybe Franklin's French rival Thomas-Francois Dalibard might have been already present in Custologa Town, wooing the natives to the french side. Or bringing the Key of the Revolutionary in somehow?)

In which fort George Washington was being held captive. In the confusion when he was brought into the fort, French Margaret was able to find Marie-Amable and deliver the love letter. Though Marie and Margaret didn't like each other, the letter convinced Marie to work to free Washington. French Margaret had a plan to disguise Washington as a French officer, use Marie and Margaret's magic to disguise his face and then walk him right out the gate. The plan mostly worked, though Washington had reservations about appearing as a Frenchman ("Couldn't you steal some women's clothes for me to dress in instead?"). And as the plan proceeded, Washington became increasingly aware of the use of witchcraft to achieve the plan, which also made him uncomfortable. After all, the Salem witch trials were only a few decades past. Nonetheless, Washington was successfully disguised by magic and costuming to appear as a French officer, and managed to sneak out the fort's front gate... right as three armies converged on the fort with orders to kill the French officers.

Act Three:

The threefold assault on the fort began with a pounding by Franklin's lightning gun, which successfully punched a hole in the wall and set the largely wooden fort on fire. Then Van Braam had a team of archers start picking off any soldiers visible on the walls, while Trent stormed the gate and Half-King led Delaware warriors through the flaming hole in the fort walls. Washington, upon seeing the attack happen, smartly retreated back inside, where French Margaret dispelled the illusion magic, and used another spell to make Washington look like an intimidating warrior hero, in a fine British officer's uniform. Washington then sought out the French commander and managed to intimidate him into surrendering, despite the lack of shared language. When George Washington breaks out of prison and has a rapier at your throat, you surrender regardless of whether or not you understand what he says.

And to keep things roughly historical, Half-King's player decided to murder the surrendering French officer under Washington's supervision. Thus did the British win the Battle of Fort Duquesne in this alternate history.

I was pretty happy with the conclusion: everyone got to participate in the big climactic battle and rolled very well (spending all their resources to do so), and it came right at the end of the assigned time slot.

In general, I'm not totally sure that I was using the system right, and to some extent I went easy on the players. But everyone seemed to have a lot of fun (the two players I was concerned about turned out to just be particularly quiet, as far as I can tell). I was very pleased with how it turned out. Even if it was the only game I successfully GMed over the weekend, it was sufficiently successful to make up for the other failures.

Fuller GASPCon report

2009-11-18T00:21:17Z

Over the weekend, I attended Gaspcon, at the behest of Jason Godesky (who we played Polaris with some time ago. I had never done any gaming with GASP previously (though multiple groups of players I knew were involved). So I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Nonetheless I accepted responsibility for running three games at the con and went to see what would happen.

Gaspcon is basically the smallest con I've ever attended. There were a few dozen people there, mostly locals, so you kept seeing the same people in different games. The guy who played in my game then ran a game I played in, and we both played together in another game, along with people I saw or played with in other games. This is a sort of different feel than at larger cons (though it's surprising how you run into the same people over and over at Origins or the like). Everyone was very friendly: the event organizers seemed eager to see that I had a good time, and identified me early on as someone not normally associated with GASP.

I was supposed to run three games over the weekend: Executive Decision, Bloody Forks of the Ohio and Department Nine. Only one of these had enough players show up to play. But in the other two slots I played some other games, and it all worked out.

(It seemed like there were more indie games than there was demand for such at the con, so we often had three GMs at adjacent tables unhappy that their games didn't have enough players, which would then collapse into a single table with enough people.)

The games I played were:

The Fifth World, Jason's game set centuries after the apocalypse. It was very interesting how this game took familiar places and made them strange and wondrous. I liked this game more then I expected to. My cannibal guardsman from the tribe that lived at the point had moral dilemmas, joined the good tribe that worshiped the Incline, fought panthers in Oakland and helped explore the abandoned tunnels below Carnegie Mellon. That's all pretty neat.

Bloody Forks of the Ohio, the sole game I successfully GMed over the weekend. I plan a more in-depth discussion of that later (maybe tomorrow).

Mouse Guard, which was not entirely successful as a game. I still didn't have a handle on the rules by the end of the game, and the story and characters were particularly thin. It did not do anything to sell me on the game.

Don't Rest Your Head, in which I played a doctor throwing himself into his work so hard that he hadn't slept in weeks, and was hearing electronic devices whisper people's secrets. This was probably my favorite game of the con, even if my real-world sleep deprivation meant that my character wound up fairly passive and inconsequential for the last big set piece.

Finally, I played In a Wicked Age, using a homebrewed Oracle (basically a randomized situation/fictional element generator) based off of remaking local native american myths into fodder for swords and sorcery tales. And that worked pretty well, though the local aspect might have been played up more (maybe that was bad card luck). In contrast to Mouse Guard, this made me see why the internet loves the game so much.

Also this weekend, we saw The Men Who Stare at Goats (which I liked more than the average person is likely to) and attended a bonfire in celebration of four or so birthdays that occur in November. So I had a good weekend, basically.

Local convention, emphasis on the "local"

2009-11-17T00:18:54Z

This weekend I played five different roleplaying games. The settings of these were:

-Pittsburgh 1,000 years into its mythical past
-Pittsburgh, 250 years ago
-Pittsburgh, 400 years after the apocalypse
-A national forest just outside Pittsburgh, as seen from a mouse's perspective
-the Pittsburgh you only see in nightmares.

Notice a theme there?

Welcome to the WORLD OF TOMORROW!

2009-11-11T19:38:34Z

Before you go ranting about the 21st century's lack of flying cars again, keep in mind these basic facts:

There's a serious proposal to turn Houston into a domed city

Robot maids clean people's houses

Children's toys can read your thoughts and respond

Space tourism is becoming regular enough that the space hotel is already accepting reservations.

And a million other examples of science fiction becoming true. Like that massive information network that stores nearly all the data every recorded, and is instantly accessible from anywhere on the planet (you know, that internet you're on right now).

The world of tomorrow? It's here already.

[A Hatful of Rabbits]

2009-10-24T19:40:31Z

That was a bit incoherent. Probably because I was thinking as I was typing. Let's see if we can make it any clearer.

Here's the outline for the game:

To play the game, you will need the Major Arcana from a Tarot deck, and three to five people.

There are three roles that you will play in a given scene. After each scene, the roles will rotate around the table, meaning that everyone will play every role at some point in the game. The roles are:

The Magician, who roleplays out our aging stage magician PC who is on a quixotic quest for glory at the end of his life. Mechanically, the Magician player can call for conflicts and decides between options that The World presents. One person plays the Magician at a time, for one scene, then the role passes to the next player.

The World, which represents any minor NPCs in the scene, and is charge of background material. The World offers suggestions and feedback, encourages and guides narration from the Magician and the Arcana. If either the Arcana or the Magician calls for a conflict, then the World's job is to set stakes for the conflict. If you have four or five players, then multiple people play The World. In conflicts with multiple World players, they should talk with each other to decide what the most interesting/dramatic/complicated/heart-wrenching stakes would be for the conflict.

The Arcana, who plays the major NPC for the scene. The Arcana player plays the primary NPC for the scene, begins scenes by asking a difficult question about the magician, ends scenes once the question is answered, and calls for conflicts if appropriate. The NPCs introduced each demand something from the Magician in some way, often things that come at a cost to the magician.

At start of play, determine who is playing each role in the first scene. (You could mix the Magician, World and Judgment cards around to decide this randomly if you want; whoever gets Judgment starts as the Arcana, and the other two play the role shown on their card.)

Remove the Magician, the World and the Judgment cards from the arcana, then shuffle the rest and place it down. If you have four or five players, take two cards from the minor arcana (I like the look of the Two of Swords and Two of Pentacles from the Rider-Waite deck, but that's purely a visual aesthetic matter not based on divinatory meanings.) Place the Judgment card next to the deck.

Each scene, you will have one of these cards in front of you, which determines which role you will play in that scene. At the end of a scene, you pass your card to the player on your left. (??? Or otherwise redistribute the roles somehow?)

At the start of the scene, the Arcana player turns over the top card of the deck, which determines what sort of NPC they will be playing. Each card remaining in the deck of major arcana is tied to some sort of NPC and a category of questions to probe into. The Lovers card means that the Arcana player will play someone the Magician is romantically interested in, or that is interested in the Magician. And the Arcana player will as a difficult dramatic question about who the Magician loves, or about relationships, emotions and related matters. If the Arcana player draws The Hermit instead, then you have an NPC who does not want to b associated with the Magician, and is trying to avoid him for some reason, and the Arcana player's questions involve avoidance or secrets or mysteries (either detective or religious).

To start the scene, the Arcana player ask a difficult, probing question concerning the magician's character/motivation/goals/history/etc. That question acts as the frame for the scene: you keep playing that scene until the question has been answered. The Arcana player then describes the NPC they will be playing and sets the scene, which plays out until the Arcana player is satisfied that the question has been answered, or at least addressed. We need to know more about the Magician by the end of the scene than we did at the beginning.

The NPCs played by the Arcana player all want something from the Magician character. Intangibles like respect or love or peace of mind are probably better than tangible goods, and these things should cost the magician in some way. (Not sure on the viability here, but working on it.)

In a scene, either the Magician or the Arcana can call for a conflict. In this case, the World player(s) decide on a set of stakes, and offer the Magician a set of two options, using the "cut the pie" resolution system from House of Masks and this thread, that I don't want to go over right now.

Judgment

Once everyone has played each role at least once, then instead of drawing an Arcana card, the Arcana player can declare that this will be the last scene of the game. This should be done only after the Arcana player thinks that the story has played as much as it is going to: perhaps you reached a natural ending, or perhaps you are approaching the end of your available time. If there are no more facedown cards in the arcana deck, then you have reached the end of the game, and must play a Judgment scene. In that scene, the question is something along the lines of "Does the Magician find what he was looking for?" (I need to tweak that wording to get it just right.) It's the final resolution of the Magician's story, in which we discover is he is ultimately successful or not. And once that is finished, the story is done. There could be some different endgame mechanics for this scene, but I can't imagine why I'd need any.

I think the game would be playable in one three or four hour session, but that depends on scene length, really.

[A Hatful of Rabbits] rough sketch of some game mechanics

2009-10-21T22:02:58Z

I was recently lamenting the fact that, though my 2008 Game Chef entry won an award, I had never played it. (A group of Italians did, but that's a different matter.) The game as written required exactly six players to function, and social logistics are not my strong suit, so I never had the right number of people on hand.

Following said lament, Ross said that I should rewrite the game to work with fewer so that we could playtest it sometime. So I think that I will wrench out the "Cut the Pie" conflict system from that game and use it here, at least until I see some good reason not to do so. That will increase the chances of playtesting the game.

Other thoughts on the game: The game should focus on one, elderly protagonist, and be a character study in that one character. This is different from your usual RPG party of varying characters and personalities. And so that one player doesn't get the juiciest role, play of the main character will rotate around the table from scene to scene. Variances in how the character is played are because of growing amounts of senility.

Other roles rotate around the room as well. I think that the game consists of a series of scenes as the main magician PC encounters his friends and loved ones, and each scene is probing into the the magician's personality and motivations. At the start of one scene, one other player might decide to play the magician's ex-wife, and the player would ask the question "did you ever really love me?". Play continues in the scene until we know whether the magician did or did not love her, then we go on to another scene. Perhaps in the next scene, a different player is playing the magician's old booking agent, and the player asks "who are you trying to impress with this show?". Or the magician's doctor is in the scene, and his player asks "when did you know you were going to die?". Or a retirement home attendant asks "when did you first get the idea for this crazy scheme, to put on one last big show?".

I gotta get back to work now, so I guess I'll have to explain how those two bits integrate in a different post.

[A Hatful of Rabbits]

2009-10-21T21:23:37Z

I'm currently writing a roleplaying game for Nathan Paoletta's Two Games One Name RPG Design challenge. The idea of the challenge is that each participant is assigned a title for a game, that they have to design. But another participant was assigned the same title, and has to design a different game entirely. A set of optional binary restrictions are given to help the games diverge from one another.

(You ranked the titles in order of preference, so that you got a title that you wanted, and Nathan did his best to give everyone their first or second pick. It worked out pretty well, from what I can tell, though it had a chance of being an insoluble mathematical quagmire.)

I chose/was assigned the title "A Hatful of Rabbits", along with Graham Walmsley. We were given the additional choice of doing a game that was either "Suitable for children" or "suitable for the elderly". A couple emails went back and forth, and Graham got to do the kid's game, while I'm making the game for the elderly. Though initially I would have preferred to do the kid's game, I am growing more pleased with doing a game for the elderly. My kids won't be roleplaying for another few years yet, anyway.

So far, Graham has begun generating some interesting discussion about children's literature. And I'm thinking my game will likely be less for the elderly and more about being old. The premise of the game is that an elderly, possibly senile retired stage magician decides to have one more big moment of glory, and you the players start exploring his personality and motivations and personal connections. Hopefully, the game will turn into something fun and playable.

Game Chef time again

2009-08-31T19:13:29Z

As is by now becoming a tradition, I'm trying to make a game for the International Iron Game Chef competition. I've set up a separate blog for that purpose, so direct your RSS readers over to Blogspot if you want to follow my attempts. Or don't, if you're bored with the nitty gritty of designing a roleplaying game.

I'd encourage almost anyone to try designing a game. It's fun and easy. Or you could go over to the consolidated feed of Game Chef blogs and find a few to follow and comment on and see how they develop. Maybe someone will design a game that you love.

I feel like I wrote this post already once before

2009-08-24T22:47:23Z

The recently posted freeform Dark Sun game got me thinking about the relationship between a roleplaying game and its source material.

Now, all roleplaying games have source fictions that they draw from, just as all fictional works themselves take elements of prrevious fictions and repurpose them. Superman is an amalgamation of Hercules, Charles Atlas, baby Moses and Depression era science fiction. And my superhero PC is in turn an amalgamation of Superman, Spider-Man, Dr. Orpheus and Joe Biden (or whoever).

But what I'm thinking right now is about the games where they don't file the serial numbers off first: your Star Wars rpgs, or Middle Earth Roleplaying and the like. Games designed to emulate a specific work of preexisting fiction, rather than a genre.

My main thought at the moment is "choosing a system for a specific fiction is an act of interpretation". You have to decide what is important within that fiction, and how it will affect other aspects of the game. Same is true for designing a system to match a fiction.

go over here and read what people think Dragonlance is about. Note how for even a relatively uncomplicated piece of fantasy melodrama (no offense), you get a variety of answers that only barely relate to one another. And this isn't some experimental art novel full of ambiguity and metaphor designed to keep English majors busy. It's a set of mainstream fantasy novels, yet none of those posters quite agree on what Dragonlance means.

It's a bit like translating a novel, or adapting a book into a film: easy to get wrong, easy to focus on surface details and miss the genuine core of appeal in the fiction. And in adaptation you put a little of yourself into it: you choose a roleplaying system that reflects your priorities and your beliefs about what was important to you in the source fiction.

Here's another example: Star Wars.

There used to be a lame online joke that you could play Star Wars using any gaming system at all. And in some strange way, it's true, or nearly enough true to be interesting to consider. Star Wars is partly successful because every person has their own reasons to attach themselves to Star Wars: some like big explosions and exciting chase sequences. Some like the interpersonal relationships between the main cast. Some like the implied larger science fiction universe, and some like the underlying mythic narrative.

Each of those reasons for liking the same property suggests a different system for Star Wars. And whatever system you choose says something about how you're going to relate to Star Wars:

If you choose Feng Shui (as we did once), then you're saying the game will straddle the line between celebrating and satirizing the Star Wars movies, just as Feng Shui does with action movies in general, and that the game will have over-the-top action sequences (more liek the prequels than the Original Trilogy).

If you choose something weird, like My Life With Master, then you're choosing a more radical interpretation (or reinterpretation) of Star Wars. In a MLwM Star Wars game, you might be young Sith trying to build up enough Love to rebel against the Dark Side and throw the Emperor down a ventilation shaft. This would be a game that interpreted Star Wars as the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker: how he fell to the Dark Side due to a malicious mentor and eventually grew to love his estranged son enough to kill the Emperor and redeem himself.

A game like Dogs in The Vineyard is focused on having the characters face the consequences and limitations of their black and white morality, which works just fine for prequel era Jedi. The Jedi in the prequels constantly claim moral certainty, and constantly face the backlash from their own certainty. A Star Wars Dogs game would make this central, whereas other games tend to sideline those issues to varying degrees (including the various official licensed Star Wars rpgs).

None of those systems are the wrong game for Star Wars, but they each say something different about Luke Skywalker and company.

So then I'm thinking about the Dark Sun game I designed and the forthcoming 4e Dark Sun, and they both seem very distinct in how they approach the setting of Athas. (I haven't seen anything about 4e Dark Sun to speak of, but have seen enough 4th edition D&D to extrapolate.) The two games could be seen as complimentary, rather than competitive: one sees DS as big pulp adventure about defeating opponents in a focused D&D vein, while the other (my game) is about feel and setting fluff and not at all about overcoming obstacles, really.

"A camel is a horse designed by committee."

2009-08-24T20:38:57Z

If Intelligent Design advocates were really serious in their pseudo-scientific claims, they could deal with the attacks on their nonsense a little bit better. But since they are self-admittedly just trying to sneak religion into science, they miss some easy outs.

Take the dysteleological argument: that humans and every other species is designed really quite poorly. Our brains are so big and our hips so narrow (which relates with that bipedalism thing) that many of our children or mothers die during childbirth. Or how everyone gets back problems, or the retinal blindspot, or the appendix or all of the other built-in diseases and problems we suffer from. Would an perfect God design us so imperfectly?

If the ID advocates were more interested in the claim that we were designed by intelligent creators (instead of pushing monotheism on us), then they'd have an easy answer for this: Committees. ID as an almost scientific theory doesn't demand that only one intelligence designed us. Christianity demands that. ID doesn't demand a perfect creator, like the christian creation story does: all ID requires is a conscious creator. ID just speaks about intellect, not the number or nature thereof. And anyone who's been in a committee for any length of time knows what a committee's output looks like: awkward, with a variety of weird holes, half-measures, concessions, and compromises no one is really happy with. Come to think of it, anyone paying attention to the health care reform should know what an animal made by a committee looks like, too.

Maybe we still have an appendix because the appendix lobby was particularly strong at the beginning of human history. Maybe we have a blindspot as a special concession to the god of giant squids, who wanted something that they could do better than us. Or maybe I've been in yet another pointless Human Resources Web meeting all afternoon, then went reading more blogs about atheism again.

I accidentally designed a game

2009-08-22T21:51:14Z

Following the announcement that Wizards of the Coast would be coming out with Dark Sun for 4th edition D&D, I've been on a bit of a Dark Sun kick. so I was going back and reading DS stuff, which I never did in great depth in the 2nd edition days.

And while reading about the cycle of years being tied to the irregular cycles of Athas's two moons, my mind created an interesting game mechanic based off of the interesting, flavorful names of each year and the overlapping 7 and 11 year cycles of the moons. I didn't mean to: I was just enjoying the Dark Sun Campaig boxed set in anticipation of the 4e version next year.

But instead my mind seized on this cycle of years, threw in a bit of Guillotine and Johnathan Walton's Avatar: The Last Airbender game and got a game that is intimately tied to the Dark Sun setting, but otherwise is about as different from D&D as I can imagine.

It still needs work, including refining the list of associations of each Theme Card. And I probably need to explain the Theme Card cycle more clearly, and give lots of examples. But I think it might be serviceable and interesting to play. And it's only a few pages long, so you might as well read it, right? I call it "A World of Fire and Sand" after a line from the original campaign setting book, as I suck at writing titles.

I think the best use for the game might be as interludes in a regular D&D Dark Sun game, like as myths or bard songs or strange rumors that are told in between normal adventures of killings monsters in the desert wastes.

What weird indie game should I run at GASPcon?

2009-08-04T23:32:24Z

I ask of you, dear reader: What game should I run at a con I've never been to?

Background:

Jason (a guy we played Polaris with for a while) is trying to convince me to go run something at GASPcon (local con run by the Gaming Association of Southwestern Pennsylvania). He wants to have a bigger presence of small press/indie rpgs/story games/etc. That's a reasonable goal, in my mind, and so I'd like to support that plan.

Now, I've never attended this con before nor even a GASP meeting. But the con is right here in Pittsburgh, so the worst that happens is I waste a weekend and am out some admission fees if the con sucks. But it means I don't know what to expect of the con atmosphere or anything... looking at the GASP website, it seems like there is a lot of very traditional roleplaying happening at GASP, with Jason and maybe some others promoting the sort of weird indie games I'd be running. (GASP and the con do not appear to be terribly LARP-friendly, or I might run one.) I can't tell from reading the website if I still get my con attendance refunded if no players show up for a game I plan to run. I need to run at least two four hour sessions to get a GM refund.

On the other end of the equation, I have played a fair number of "story games" (or whatever the cool kids are calling them these days) but not a huge number. And I've GMed even fewer. Ideally, I'd want something easy to GM.

Mainly, I'm being indecisive and trying to gauge what people would actually be interested in seeing. Yeah, I know, you're unlikely to be at the con, but I really just want someone else's input to help make a decision.

Games I'd Consider Running:

Games I've Read But Not Played or Run:

The Shab-Al Hiri Roach, in which academics fight little bureaucratic squabbles and an ancient evil roach tries to destroy mankind, or something.

Don't Rest Your Head, about sleep deprivation, insanity and an alternate magical city that exists overtop of our everyday one. (Apparently someone else is running this already.)

Puppetland, about childlike hand puppets dealing with very real adult tragedies and horrors.

Games I have Played but not GMed:

Dogs in the Vineyard, Mormon cowboys struggle with the intersection between morality and theology.

Lacuna Part One: The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City, a surreal science fiction spy game involving exploration of the collective unconscious.

Polaris, a chivalric tragedy about immortal beings living in the frozen north and dealing with the destruction of their culture by demons. GMless, which means it's easier to run, though still hard to explain.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron munchausen is a game about being a wild, 18th century blowhard telling tall tales. Also GMless, and easier to explain to boot.

Games I have Actually Successfully GMed:

Executive Decision, in which the President and his advisors have to deal with a crisis situation. Has the advantages of having been run before, having been successful and having been easy to GM. At this point, the most likely game for me to run.

Bloody Forks of the Ohio, though I ran it heavily modified. George Washington faces off against French forces in a situation likely to cause the French and Indian War. Would it being local history help the game's popularity?

Otherkind (not sure if that link works... stupid web filter), about elves and the loss of magic and their complicated relationship with the world of man. I might just dump the elves and fantasy and use the core system to run something else, like you see in GHOST/ECHO. Maybe just run Ghost/Echo itself.

Unknown Armies Jailbreak, a scenario about convicted felons escaping out of jail and possibly into somewhere much worse. Is Unknown Armies really story-game-y enough, though?

Games I have failed Repeatedly to GM:

Any other Unknown Armies games.

Games I Wrote Myself and Therefore Are Unlikely to Attract Players:

House of Masks won an award in last year's Game Chef, but I've never gotten to play it myself. Six players play three characters with conflicting goals, using a unique number free conflict resolution system.

Department Nine, actually got playtested three or so times, and was a lot of fun. It's a science fiction/espionage/classical Greek tragedy/comedy game where you play agents of the mythological Fates, but are fighting against your own prophesied future.

I suppose I could run something else, too, if someone were to suggest a good idea. There are a ton of interesting games out there to run; this was mainly sticking to the ones I have on hand and have read thoroughly enough to consider them as options. I am currently leaning toward Executive Decision and one or two other games. What other games? Is there some compelling reason not to run Executive Decision? What game should I run?

mrteapot @ 2009-08-04T17:33:00

2009-08-04T21:51:55Z

The strange thing about running a series of regular LARPs is how the mind begins to look at everything as a potential seed for a future game.

Last night for work I attended a city councilwoman's community meeting talking about a nearby poorly designed intersection. And I spent the entire time watching the group dynamics of the situation, and considering how to run it as a LARP: more structured than the Bloody Forks of the Ohio July game, but less so than the Executive Decision May game. Several people play local residents with insane, contradictory demands, while the rest of the PCs play small time local officials trying to justify decisions they did not make and cannot change.

Or then I read an article in Newsweek about marijuana smugglers in the 1980s, and think about a game like that: they just scored a big score, and are throwing a huge bash, but fear government surveillance and potential undercover cops. One smuggler's wife thinks he's cheating on her, while he is trying to keep that a secret, and both want to keep their occupation secret from their young son...

Anyway, I begin to see where there is a disconnect between authors and normal people regarding the question "where do you get your ideas?" When you put your mind in the right setting, everything you encounter is a bit of narrative waiting for you to remold it into a story. Everyday people less often think in this way, I think, so they are surprised by the universal authorial answer of "everything I do is fodder for ideas" or the like.

"I don't know what you just said because I was thinking about Batman."

2009-07-29T20:16:20Z

This is what being an adult feels like every single day.

Origins!

2009-06-30T00:45:41Z

So we went to Origins, and I played a lot of games while Amber volunteered many hours. It was all good, in general.

Specific breakdown of my time there:

Wednesday

Delivered kids to babysitters, drove to Columbus, arrived in time for Amber's volunteering. I sweated a bit while talking to Special Services, fearing that they wouldn't accept my Media Center job as valid for the Educator's Hall Pass. But one of the two people at the registration said it was okay, so I didn't have to pay the terribly high onsite registration fee.

Then I spent a few hours going through the event registration line three times, getting into any interesting games that I could. This took extra long because of big crowds of people trying to sign up early and because the computers weren't working right. Some of the stuff was all full up, but others I was able to get into, and by the end of the con I was pleased with what I had paid.

First Game of the con was Continuum, which I've been trying to play for about a decade now. Continuum manages to have an internally consistent theory of time travel, but still be playable as a roleplaying game. That's a pretty amazing feat, in and of itself. There's a nigh-mythical sister game (Narcissit) that presents a different, contradictory and equally playable theory of time travel that functions in the same setting, making the feat even more impressive.

The scenario itself was very well designed as an introduction to the game, as it was entirely about your characters learning to think like time travellers rather than normal people. But there were a few flaws as presented: we spent the first hour of play making characters, then never used anything off my character sheet and minimal stuff from my sheet. So why not have pregen characters that tie into the adventure, like nearly everyone else at the con? Also a bit of NPCs hinting at puzzles and talking for the GM and refusing to answer questions for mysterious reasons that might get really annoying if sustained for a campaign, but were pretty minor in this instance.

Verdict: B+ A game I want to own, maybe play.

Thursday

With Great Power...: Sidekicks. I managed to play a thoroughly mundane (and somewhat dimwitted) investigative journalist in a superhero game. I think this is pretty cool, as it seems like the Lois Lane type character is as much a protagonist of some superhero stories as anyone with superpowers, and so deserves PC status just like anyone else. Lois Lane was gender swapped in this case, but the superheroes of the city all turned out to be superheroines with romantic interest in said journalist, so there you are. And With Great Power is the sort of superhero game where not having a single superpower on your sheet doesn't mean you're incapable of affecting the game, so I wasn't handicapped for playing a non-powered character at all.

Somehow, I felt more confused by the rules of With Great Power the second time playing than I did the first time. It wasn't con fatigue, either, as Thursday was early in the con and the previous game two years ago was the very end of the con. Anyway, the game was a lot of fun but I begin to see some flaws lurking beneath the surface of the game: noncombat scenes need something to get them more focused on the fiction and detail, among other things.

Verdict: C+ or maybe B-. Fun to play, but the game seems somewhat imperfect, and I seem to always pick the wrong trait to focus my character on.

Unknown Armies: Choking the Messenger

As I explained to the GM of this game: the protocol is "I look through the Origins events, and try to sign up for every single Unknown Armies game in there". This is the only game I got into legitimately, though thanks to Amber's assistance the GM of the other Unknown Armies game stopped by while I was playing this UA game and told me he could squeeze me into his other game. Score!

Anyway, in this game I again played an investigative journalist. Was this some sort of theme for the day? I tried to make him very different from the previous reporter, with some success. The scenario involved the PCs being witnessing a Senator's mysterious death and supposed to be investigating it. But we all wound up going off in different directions instead of working together, so it became very chaotic very quickly. And in the end my guy wound up accusing two of the other PCs of conspiracy and murder in the Washington Post, and lost an ear to a rogue sniper. My PC never found out much of the truth, but the other PCs did.

I think the secrets they did find (a cliomancer assassin and a loose nanotech virus) could have been fleshed out better, but I had a lot of fun. And somehow this scenario scored pretty low on the "percentage of character sheet used" rating... you'd think more of the character's psychological stimuli would figure into the game somehow.

Verdict: B Unknown Armies = Good. My PC was fun to play, but wound up mostly irrelevant by the end of the game.

And then some Dread. Some sort of post-apocalyptic game. But it seemed to me that there wasn't much plot to the game, nor much atmosphere. Most pulls were just to kill monsters without any accompanying narration, or to find very minor bits of equipment or information. Not compelling stuff, as far as I was concerned. My character was a fake doctor, though that never came up because everyone went for pulls rather than injuries. And this game also scored low on the "percentage of character sheet used", and I have no idea how I could have answered the sheet's questions such that it would have been more relevant. I wonder how the designers were imagining the stuff on there would be used.

In the end, most of the PCs were killed by mutant wolves or eaten by cannibal Mormon children. Actually, we had a cascade of deaths with the Mormon kids: we had like four guys alive, then one crashed trying to kill a cannibal. So as we rebuilt the tower back up to the appropriate height, another PC messed up and crashed the tower. And another. So finally I was the only one left alive, and had to rebuild the tower myself. I managed to rebuild it safely, but then had to make like seven pulls from the Jenga tower to escape the Mormons alive. And of course I crashed as I was laying down the very last block.

Verdict: C The last portion, where I was the only PC left alive, was tense. But I was basically playing Jenga after listening to a fairly dull story for three hours.

Did I play any Are You a Werewolf? that night? I don't recall, but I did play a decent amount over the course of the con. I think this is the night we stayed late and broke into Sean's car to get into the hotel... so yeah, there was some werewolf action here. One really good game where I did quite good as a wolf.

Friday

Friday I was supposed to play Tenra Bansho Zero, a ridiculously over-the-top Japanese fantasy game being released in English. But no one else showed up for the game, possibly because Origins had edited down the event description to be really lame sounding in the registration book. So I talked with the GM about the game and such, played out a brief scene to get a feel for it, and moved on. Verdict: Incomplete

Friday then meant wandering around the con, looking for stuff to do, realizing too late that I could have made it to some other stuff I had wanted to see, and possibly meeting other people finally showing up for the con? By this point my memories are jumbled and confusing, and I'm relying on my preplanned list of events to keep things organized in my memory.

Unknown Armies: Buried Secrets in the evening, which was the full game that Amber managed to get me into. And I'm glad she did, as it was one of the best games I played. Most of the PCs were New York state senators or their spouses (or in one case, the senator's lover), who started freaking out at minor things, dealing with surprising tragedies in their past and trying to figure out what that creepy guy with the scrapbook was up to. And in the end, we had a difficult moral choice to make, which always pleases me. My own PC was an event organizer at a high end conference center who just wanted to keep thing sunder control whenever people started freaking out. Then he started receiving cellphone calls from his dead brother, and things went south.

Verdict: A Todd Furler's games continue to please, year after year.

Then we went off to a late dinner, and some more Werewolf.

Saturday

Saturday was largely spent exploring the con, as my only event for the day was Ganakagok, which was the real surprise hit of the con. Amber had previously played Ganakagok while I was playing With Great Power... now I think I should have joined that table instead. Oh well, that's just one of many things I could have handled better over the course of the weekend.

Anyway, in Ganakagok, you play Inuit-like tribesmen in a frozen arctic that has never seen the sun. But dawn is coming, and it will change your civilization forever. So the game is all about what you hope the dawn will bring and what you fear the dawn will bring.

The game was slightly rushed, because of the large group (seven people) and the con setting, so each PC only got one conflict scene to focus on them, but most PCs showed up in other scenes. My character wound up with the last scene of all, so his conflict drew in everything previously done in the game and piled it into one epic conflict.

Ganakagok has a lot of neat things I like a lot out of indie games, including a neat little dice minigame for conflict resolution, a customized Tarot-like card deck used for inspiring scenes and determining stakes, and drawing and modifying a big relationship map as part of play.

My own PC turned out to be a ton of fun to play, as he became defined as a "temperamental Throat-Singer". "Temperamental" was fun to play, as he would one minute barge in all yelling at people and pushing and shoving to get his way, then the next minute be embarrassed or confused or afraid or the like. He wasn't very smart, either, and had a fear of the tribe spending too much time debating and not enough time acting (also fun to play out). He also was a gigantic hypocrite, and as another PC noted "you're very hard to argue in favor of". In the end, I managed to use every single thing on my sheet, and won my final conflict with just enough points to get a happy ending for me, the village and the island all. My happy ending involved exiling my wife and another female PC from the village for the crime of infidelity (infidelitous males like myself could stay, of course).

It sounds like "Inuits who prophesied the coming dawn" would be a narrow niche for PCs, but when you start considering the variety in their society, you could fulfill a variety of jobs in the tribe, and will have different descriptors and relationships, giving plenty of potential character variety.

Verdict: A+ It's kinda hard to explain what make Ganakagok so cool, but it did what it set out to do very well. This was the game I was least certain about going into the con, but most pleased with afterward.

One disappointing game of Werewolf later, it was time to drag Amber away from Midnight Paranoia and off to bed.

Sunday

Sunday involved playing a card game called Cutthroat Caverns, which was a lot of fun, and Redneck Life, which was less fun. But no genuine RPGs on Sunday. Just wandering the con, playing games and socializing.

So that was my convention, more or less. I mostly focused on games, because the rest is sort of a vague blur in my mind. Con time is a weird thing, as the con seemed extraordinarily long and also really, really short.

Other people doing my work for me

2009-06-22T20:46:26Z

I keep thinking about writing an entry about President Obama being the Nerd-In-Chief. But then I never do.

So now I see that Personal Computer stereotype and my personal hero, John Hodgman, has established the POTUS's geek credentials better than I could have, and funnier, too. I suppose this is why Hodgman gets to be famous for being a nerd, while I just am one.

mrteapot @ 2009-04-25T12:07:00

2009-04-25T16:55:46Z

I have a tendency, when watching something television or a movie that is not especially good, to construct theories or explanations that make that narrative into something grander. Something where there's a secret story ocurring in the backgrounds of the obvious story. Do other people do this? I don't know. But it helps a lot when you have a two year old picking a noticeable percentage of the television that you watch.

The most basic example of this involves Handy Manny, which you may not even realize exists unless there is a toddler in your vicinity. (You may have noticed me ranting about Handy Manny over on my LARP blog, too.) But I'll just say that the only logical explanation of the show is that the hardware clerk Kelly sabotages everything in town, so that Manny will have to go to her store for supplies, in hopes that he will eventually fall in love with her. It's a sick mental fantasy she has, and she really should just accept that this is the 21st century and a woman can ask a man out if she wants. But instead she sticks a rubber mouse inside the piano at the talent show, blames it on Mr. Lopart's cat and "just happens" to have brought piano wire and tuning keys to "juggle" them in the talent show. Juggling piano wire? Her explanation makes no sense to anyone who isn't a dimwitted anthropomorphic hammer. Thus, we have to conclude that what Kelly says is a lie, and in fact she sabotaged the piano. and everything else in Sheetrock Hills.

What, you don't watch Playhouse Disney? Well, would you prefer to hear my explanation for why Sylar appears to be guest starring in that newfangled Star Trek movie? See, the truth of the matter is that Sylar is Spock's illegitimate child. You know, from when they travelled back in time to save the whales. At some point in that time, Spock got a chance for some off-camera Rishathra and when the child grew up his weird alien human hybrid genetics made him into a superpoweed serial killer.

Zachary Quinto is about ten years too old for the theory to work perfectly. (He is also, I note from looking at the IMDB, from this here neck of the woods.) Perhaps his alien/human biology speeds up his aging, I don't know.

Finally, I think that the two new James Bond movies are tragedies, in dramatic terms. I honestly don't know if my last example is in the same sort of category as the first two. In those cases I as audience is creating new narratives in the media not intended by the authors. But in this case, I can't be sure if the authors intend for this to be true or not. Anyway, here goes:

Firstly, this is based off of Robin Laws's recent series of excellent posts concerning narrative "Turning Points" in stories, using Hamlet in particular as an example. Right now I'm especially concerned with this post talking about the difference between procedurals and dramas. You might want to read it for fuller context.

See, the James Bond movies have always had an overwhelmingly strong procedural bent. Bond doesn't change his personality much in response to the events of a movie. That's part of what makes Bond an iconic character, is the lack of an inner life. But in the two new movies, we see glimmers of Bond as a human being. But the movies are about the transformation of a human being into that iconic character, which is to say the death of his humanity. For example, in the first movie, he is upset at the death of various innocent women (arguably his motivation throughout the second film), but by the second he has femme fatales dying in his bed and doesn't seem to care at all.

It seems to me like the makers of the movies looked at Alan Moore's quote from 1986 "As our political and social consciousness continues to evolve... we begin to see that the overriding factor in James Bond's psychological makeup is his utter hatred and contempt for women". But instead of trying to change Bond to remove his misogyny, they embraced it and illustrated the transformation to the point where the death of a(nother) woman was little concern to Bond.

So the new movies have one procedural level, in which Bond is successful, but on the dramatic level Bond goes from empathic human being to soulless assassin. That doesn't exactly seem like a positive outcome to me, and sometimes it seems like the filmmakers agree.

I'd probably need to go back an watch both films more carefully before presenting this as a serious academic thesis. At this point it's just an idle fan theory, which may or may not align with all the facts of the movies. Heck, I haven't seen either movie since Solace was in theatres, so I could easily be misremembering them.

mrteapot @ 2009-02-28T13:45:00

2009-02-28T19:15:59Z

Last night we had the fourth annual First Friday Of Lent giant cavalcade of meat, in celebration of our apostatic nature. As always, the Green Forest restaurant provided us with sufficient quantities of cooked animals, on swords. The swords is a clear bonus.

Apparently others had gotten the idea to also celebrate their non-Catholic nature as well, since the restaurant was more crowded than in previous years. Did these other guys hear about and steal our idea? Were none of them Catholic, or were they all very bad Catholics?

Then tonight we have the February LARP tonight. And Ross and his girl came from out of town for the meatfest and the LARP. So we ate at Spice Island Tea House today for lunch, which was also delicious as always. And then tonight Sean and Sara are coming for the LARP as well. And they have threatened to bring the terrifyingly awful Dragonlance movie with them, in case the LARP goes short again. On Sunday we may finally finish Keep on the Shadowfell, so my time travelling cowboy wizard will finally catch up to regular campaign continuity.

So it's a good weekend, all in all. There'll be an after-LARP report on the blog for that sort of thing. I certainly hope it goes well.

LARP-A-Month blog

2009-02-02T22:37:46Z

I set up a separate blog over here to write about the monthly LARP project. We'll see how that turns out: it might just be a repository for the LARP documents as they get written. Hopefully it becomes something more, though. I plan to write a second post for it soon, as I forgot my notes on the February Larp(s).

The LARP from my perspective

2009-01-31T19:36:45Z

This is probably the last post about the LARP... until I start postig about the next one. But at least that'll be a new one.

LARP documents online

2009-01-30T01:40:58Z

Didn't make it to the Bank Robbery LARP? Did make it, but wanted to see what everyone else was told ahead of time? Want to run the game yourself, for some other people? Just want to see how these things go, so you know what to expect for the inevitable next game?

Then click this link to see everything I wrote for the LARP and get a fuller picture.