Egalité

In a newish blog, 10 by 10, they opine about the potential lack of balance in superhero games. I mean – Superman and Batman teamups? How does that work out? One can chew through steel, the other can…um…buy hotels with spare change…

All said, having either as an enemy would be A BAD THING®.

Anyway, on 10by 10 they have a video from a couple of very funny British comedians. So go look on this blog post and give 10 by 10 some trafficy goodness.

Of course, in my superhero games there’s plenty of opportunity to equalise power but if one guy wants to forego all of his points and just have “a BMX” and skill in riding it when everyone else is a son of Krypton, then you gotta give him what he wants and then TELL him that he can’t really be involved in the fight against Galactus’ heralds becaurse, frankly, tere isn’t a BMX jump that high.

Are you compelled to make allowances though? I say yes – because the time to make objections was during the character generation process. You should have spotted it then.

spam apam soam saom?

I get a lot of SPAM. Never mind the amount that gets grabbed by my ISPs filters (which are raised one level of strength every year or so), I commonly have 300 or so that make it past the ISP and into the Junk Mail filter of Mail. There’s 50 or so that make it past the filter too.

This is one that made it through. It’s advertising something….I don’t know what, but the filler text below it (designed to defeat filters) read as follows:

Suddenly I was daunted! After the first turn, the group will have found shelter from the zombies – and one of you will be dead.
Please, give me some feedback! Single zombies will go down with one or two shots, but there are rules for entire hordes as well. You are the captain of a squadron of Regs, Regulators that regularly patrol the city to keep order, eliminate Dreg criminals, and destroy Zombie invaders.
Any amount is appreciated. Even worse, the city is infested with the living dead, the Zombies, who have somehow found a second life due to the radiation of the nuclear-devastated wastelands which surround Anakron. Thanks to everyone for all their help making our site what it is today.
Among many, a young Squire came to the King’s aid. One of you, perhaps more then one of you, is a psychic with devastating and terrifying powers. In the meantime I hope that you enjoy Phantasy Star: Ragol’s Curse.
A timer such as a stopwatch or hourglass is also needed to play.
well only if you don’t die. Your characters are normal people, caught up in an abnormal struggle for survival.
Wires and pipes crisscross the sky, the only evidence of a futuristic setting, they hold up the city like the strings of a marionette.
The game’s set wherever you’re playing the game – and whatever you can see around you right now is allowed to be described as being in the game. After crashing to Earth, the UFO is transported away by sneaky FBI agents. You can design your own guns, cars are free form, and a number of optional rules are provided.
A timer such as a stopwatch or hourglass is also needed to play. The Master of Orion rpg includes material from all three Master of Orion games.
So, they asked me to run a game for them. This should prove useful to RPG designers by allowing them to split their mechanics up into bits.
The game supports GM-centered play and heavy Force usage, but without the black curtain.
I purposed the Adapt A Computer Game Into A Tabletop RPG challenge as an attempt to bridge this divide.
In Grey World, you will find both.
Quarters and pennies may be used as tokens in the RPG, or a pen and paper can be used to keep track of the various game components.
Combinations of directions and buttons appear on the screen in time to the music.
The Chosen, undead servants of a dark god, have walked the Earth for nearly a hundred years. United they can retake the Cabal that serves that god by force and regain their former position of power as the Cabal’s supreme leaders. It uses a dice pool system of resolution, a wound chart tracking how quickly you can run, and lets you push yourself to the limit – at the risk of turning on the other survivors.
Just select the ingredients you like and discard the ones you don’t. If anyone buys the infant bodysuit, please take a picture of your kid wearing it and post it to the forums. Its my hope to do this professionally sometime in the near future, so its your chance to help an aspiring author.
Things are always easier to do if you can split them up. There is no setting per say, but there are a few suggestions in the added work.
Exactly who is this criminal the guardsmen keep mistaking you for? but it might consume a lot of your time to play!
Never in here will specific RPGs be discussed at length; this is a column about RPG mechanics as a whole.
Roll the dice, make a choice.

I’ve read some of it before. Some of it is from here and a quick Google will turn up the rest.

Taken as a whole, as a genre mashup, it seems like this random spammer might have hit on something…

WotW: Earth – Here is the News

“At the corner of the bridge, too, I saw one of the common contrasts of that grotesque time–a sheet of paper flaunting against a thicket of the red weed, transfixed by a stick that kept it in place. It was the placard of the first newspaper to resume publication–the Daily Mail. I bought a copy for a blackened shilling I found in my pocket. Most of it was in blank, but the solitary compositor who did the thing had amused himself by making a grotesque scheme of advertisement stereo on the back page.”

In the weeks following invasion, the news organisations of the world were quick to find their feet. Not only are stalwarts like The Times, The Daily Telegraph or the Daily Mail recovering but there are a plethora of independent news-sheets making their rounds in London. Most of them carry sensationalist headlines and in many cases can be obtained for free from their various hawkers.

Telegrams, of course, provide our international news. While the Martians had decimated the telegraphic communication infrastructure in England, they had not seriously damaged the links across the Channel or the Irish Sea. News from Paris flooded in about their own invasion and soon after we heard reports from Dublin, Berlin, Geneva. It seems odd now to think that it was easier to get news to Paris than it was to get news from Manchester or Edinburgh, but that was the way it was until the lines were again restored, a process which would take months and not weeks.

In every town and district, you will find notice boards with entreaties, offers, wishes and promises. Everyone needs some sort of help, be it help to find someone, needing help to rebuild, not wanting to travel alone in these dark days. There is certainly no reason to be idle and perhaps even less so now than before – I wonder at the actual worth of my savings considering the world came so close to ruin. How much is this paper worth?

All said, a good wage can be had for a fast runner in these times. Better still if he had a bicycle, can handle a horse or has an encylcopaedic knowledge of the train timetables. Information now, much more than before the invasion, is a valuable commodity and with millions of people worldwide displaced or missing family members, News has become the new currency.

Writing elsewhere…

A few days ago, a d20 supplement author had a little kvetch about getting bad ratings on RPGnow. One of his reviews was very constructive, the second was written by someone new to Earth Languages. He was a little down and claims it almost made him quit writing.

As you can see by the thread, some of us volunteered to help Colin realise his setting idea (which wasn’t more than a page of background and 10 d20 D&D classes) into something that could be called a supplement. We’ve started working constructively on the product, tentatively titled Permafrost 2.

I don’t do d20-based stuff as a rule but I’m happy to be writing some fluff for it. You can see my current contributions on the thread (or leap to them directly here, here, here and here.

I’m enjoying writing prose for the sake of it. I’m still doing stuff for the other books on my menu (though I do need to do a bit more on Viride and WotW: Earth) and for stuff on the wiki. I finally found a game that I wanted to invent on my Faust book (a velum-coloured notebook with a cover that looks like an old edition of Goethe’s Faust). Reception has been pretty good so I’m going to continue to write while it’s still fun 🙂

1st Transatlantic Setting Design Challenge

This post on Story Games I find quite exciting. A month to design a game, using a previously published system? And the additional commitment of having to also be a judge.

As a commenter on that page put it:

“It’s the exact same situation as Game Chef or 24 hour RPG — feel free to draw on old material, but the contest is about writing and presenting new stuff, not dusting off your hoary old setting.”

I’d love to do this. But do I have the time?

Review (kinda): Zombies!!!

Tonight we didn’t play Zombi, which would make that the second week in a row. Instead, we played Zombies!!! which made a small amount of difference. Less plot, more frantic backstabbing.
This is therefore going to be a little review. We played Zombies with the expansions for the Army Camp, the Mall and the University but to be honest we played for 3 hours and didn’t get anywhere. The turns got a bit slow with 5 players but it was funny. The tiles dealt out a twisting map and the cards and dice rolls gave us plenty of opportunity to move, establish grandiose plans and in some cases, execute them. Paul managed a great combo, sadly depriving me of some excellent toys and leaving us neck and neck at the end before he scooped the victory from me (Bastard!).

It was an excellent filler for this week and the only issue is that you need a LOT of table space.

Differing Methods of Character Generation

Over the last few years I’ve come to appreciate different methods of character generation. I’m not especially keen on point allocation systems due to concerns that they are unrealistic because a) not everyone is equal and b) they’re prone to abuse by min-maxing. (I find the latter to be more evident in games where you have hundreds of points and points give traits which different advantages and yes I am pointing the fingers straight at Champions even more than anything here).

I did however opt for point allocation systems for all of my games so far (with some minor exceptions in the generations, most notable in Testament/Creed and Zombi).

I really don’t like random generation – even though my randomly generated character in kinnygraham’s Delta Green scored lowest in his stat rolls and yet is arguably the most stoic player character (the other two being dead and mad).

An idea which I love is mentioned today on Collective Endeavour. Character generation by interrogation – which fits in well with the “1984” theme of his game.

Which is best? Heck, I don’t know.

What I do know is that in the 20-odd years I’ve been a roleplayer I’ve spent far too much time generating characters (including hours and hours spent making characters for MERP for games that were never played).

We played Zombi at the local TTN meeting because it allowed us to have character generation done within 10 minutes of sitting down.

Amber! Now there’s a game. I never got to play it due to not having any players but I loved READING the character generation system even if, having never read the books, it was a bit beyond me.

My personal favourite was the generation system in HeroWars. I loved the idea of writing a short paragraph about a character and then underlining the bits that could be used as traits.

Rayden Kauppinnen was born in the Northern Reaches of Volyvia. He was apprenticed to Master-Jarl Tuppenijk and on his 19th birthday became a Journeyman in the Lore. During his Challenge of Certainty, he was given a Return Thread as a gratitude from the village of Chernetzy. These days he travels the roads as a Lore Mendicant with only his wits and a piebald pony with a stern temperament for company.

Oh….just writing that makes me want to play it…whatever the game is???

I, for one, welcome our human-faced fish overlords…

A Fathead (genus Psychrolutes) trawled during the NORFANZ expedition at a depth between 1013 m and 1340 m, on the Norfolk Ridge, north-west of New Zealand, June 2003 (AMS I.42771-001). Photo: K. Parkinson © Australian Museum. The scientists and crew on board the RV Tangaroa affectionately called this fish ‘Mr Blobby’. Note the parasitic copepod on Mr Blobby’s mouth.

Film Review: The Illusionist

I really enjoyed this movie. It showed all of the overt magic and illusion which we would associate with stage magery albeit with the benefit of camera tricks to make them seem all the more unreal.

Edward Norton plays the title role of ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, a cabinet-makers son who falls in love with a Duchess. There’s also a nastybad Crown Prince and a moral but compromised man in the middle. If I were a cynic I could say that you should watch The Princess Bride and get the same kind of plot with even more laughs but I was sufficiently immersed in the film that it dealt me a plot twist or two and that made it even more fun. Rufus Sewell plays the villain as he does so well and Paul Giamatti the protagonist of the tale as the unsure-of-himself Inspector Uhl.

This film, and The Prestige (which I have not yet seen), makes me want to work on Qabal even more though it’s apparent that Qabal is a different beast altogether. I’ve therefore resolved to use the “Feits and Tricks” rules from Qabal to have a go at emulating the feel of these movies. I think it could be a lot of fun.

The Illusionist had me thinking that Eisenheim was the villain of the piece at the start but halfway through I was enraptured. And by the end I was cheering, actually cheering. I may have disturbed other viewers in fact. It twists from a romance, to a thriller to a revenge story and back.

I’d better get my finger out, eh?

I need a concept artist

I hate the fact that I’m crap at drawing. I can describe stuff but I’m finding more and more that I want to find a concept artist. I want to have some images to post with the content I’m writing.

I’m nto quite at the stage where I’ll post something onto RPGnet and I’m not sure how it would work out with that most dreaded of things “payment”. I’d like to talk to someone about it and see what we can do….

“Immersion”

I like a lot of the roleplaying blogs that are out there. They’re straight-talking affairs and whether you agree or disagree with th definition of “swine” or whether you agree that “Wrongist” behaviour is simply not-on, they’re usually varied enough to give you something to read.

New to the blogroll is Malcolm Sheppard’s Shooting Dice blog which hits on immersion and alienation due to rules which I kinda agree on. Rules are necessary to reach the whole market but the kind of people who don’t pay attention to rules won’t care whether you have rules or not. However, people who like to have a rule for everything will be turned off by a game that just says “Roll 2d6 and get over 7, woohoo!”. Hey, it’d work….

Malcolm’s blog entry on immersion is very verbose and reads a little dry so you have to read it and then go away and digest it. It’s otherwise a cracker post. Go Malcolm!

It seems it’s a hot topic. There’s a thread on TheRPGSite about it as well (mine is post #87). I think that there’s a trend to label “in character” playing as “Immersionist” and now we have some backlash on that. I sense a lot of hostility in the Intarweb!

And isn’t there a lot of labelling? Gamist? Simulationist? Narritivist? Immersionist?

Work?

Ideas

At the moment we’re not taking unsolicited ideas. We’ve moved all of the current ideas to the wiki which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a much better place for them.
Rather than keep everything to ourselves, we post some of the interesting tidbits under the Game Design category.  See the sidebar for quick links to individual projects.

Writing

Again, we have a couple of writers beavering away 🙂 But if you really want to write for us, drop us an email. We’re not promising anything and for gods sake talk to us before sending anything.

Art

None of us can draw. This is the truth. We’re looking for artists.

Zombi Review

Jeff Rients writes about 5 old games he feels were overlooked. While I can agree with the ancient (James Bond, Lords of Creation) and the venerable (SpaceMaster) and perhaps even the weird (SenZar – though I always thought it was an internet joke-meme) I was shocked and surprised to see number 5 on his list was … ZOMBI. Go read and give appropriate linkage willya. Jeff’s blog is one of the blogs I read with my morning cereal and it was very cool to see something I wrote just there. I was interested in the “5 old games” article anyway and BOOM, he surprises me with this nugget!

He also liked the name “SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO” and sometimes I feel fortunate that I never completed the script for SpaceFleet HyperDimensional WarFortress 44 which I think was only mentioned in WildTalents 3 as:

“Taking SNCC to the stars, SF44 brings you the background for the Archon War. The rag- tag remnants of a hundred worlds now follow the banner of Earth to grind the Horde under their Meka-Tek heels. New rules include starship and zero-G combat. New races and new guns!”

Anyway, Thanks Jeff, for the review, the walk down memory lane and the description of LoC, which I’m going to chase in the IntarWebbage.

What makes a popular game?

This thread on Story Games reports an interesting statistic.

Dogs in the Vineyard has sold between a thousand and two thousand copies.
The sales figures for DnD aren’t ten times that, they’re more than a HUNDRED times that, and that was for the FIRST print run. More have gone into print since then.

The 23rd Letter has sold a few hundred copies worldwide and would have sold a lot more if we’d continued with the Key20 distribution a few years ago. We’re starting up distribution again though and working on some new materials.

Looking at TableTopNorth it would seem that straight RPGs are certainly on a par with wargames but it’s such a subjective point. Back in Slayers in my day the club was filled with tables and tables of RPGs even in the heyday of the card gamer. Slayers seems to be doing alright but gaming in general really seems to have retreated to the “dining room” brigade. Maybe that’s a consequence of age – after all I’m 34 now and hanging around in a “games club” does seem a little silly. Fun, but silly.

Face it – role-playing is a minority within a minority.

And people who play games other than D&D? That’s…um…

Minority to the power of 3…or maybe 4…