Resolutions: Dealing with Canon and Context

Canon is the past in the play. It establishes facts which have gone before. It doesn’t mean it can’t be retconned afterwards but for the most part it is immutable (or at least it should have immutable facts and mutable descriptors, the latter of which may be changed due to Context.

Context is the present in the play. It represents experiences more than facts and, due to the way we lay down memories, is probably more immediately mutable than Canon though if left, it can be harder to change because it forms part of our experience memory and not just written Canon (which is essentially the basis of ‘show, don’t tell’ – if someone visualises the experience they will have deeper connection to it rather than just having the story related to them).

Accepting is where you acknowledge and agree with the contributions from others to the Context settling it as Canon. This is most easily visualised when you try to reconcile the order of events taking place in a system which does not have a strict action-point (or similar) mechanic. In systems with Action Points or Strike Ranks, everything happens according to the time. To move the story along, it can be necessary to fudge the timings, e.g.

Zakary and Carey are two of the contestants in the Garhound contest and Zakary has caught up with Carey who is descending from the Storm Apple tree with a ripe Storm Apple. Though they are perhaps 4-5 SRs apart, the GM permits Zakary to assault Carey and steal the Storm Apple. Why? Because it will make for further flavour and discussion in the game. Who loses out? An NPC who wasn’t doing well in the race anyway.

In a more narrative game, it can mean just the end of discussing a scene. Not everyone needs to be entirely happy with the outcome, but there has to be a sense of mutual consent so that the game can continue.

Returning – negates the contribution to Context but also provides options which can be considered. This is reserved for when there is disagreement within the group as to the interpretation and outcome of a scene. This is most common when there has been a GM fiat about a character and the player disagrees with it. It behooves the player in this circumstance to not only make his grievance known but also to provide a suitable alternative. This may, dependiing on the detail, be returned to the player again or returned to the group as a whole for a better resolution, e.g.

It would have been entirely appropriate for other players to dispute the conflict between Zakary and Carey because there was an immediate gain for Zakary. Though he had no chance of winning the race, Storm Apples are a potent magical item. What convinced them ultimately was that it would have little effect on their characters and in no small part would give Carey, an annoying NPC, a harder time of it. They had agreement and the option was not returned.

It’s much harder to retcon against a dice roll because the randomising element is a central tenet of roleplaying. We use them to make the decisions for us and if we stop ‘trusting’ their decisions, we may as well switch to a fully narrative process (no bad thing in of itself).

Ransom

The idea of ransoming game material is definitely new and innovative. It’s being done rather successfully by Greg Stolze for his Reign supplements and there’s a Delta Green book ‘Targets of Opportunity’ which is being funded this way as well.

Shane Ivey wrote:

“If we collect enough “pledges” through Fundable.com to cover the various and high costs of manufacturing “Targets of Opportunity,” we’ll do it now. For each pledge, we’ll ship you a copy of the book by priority mail. (Or by airmail for fans outside the U.S., but the pledge needs to be higher to make up for the high cost of shipping.)

If this doesn’t work, we’ll hold off on it until we save up enough cash the old-fashioned way to release it. That would be … later.”

The 1000 copies of Targets of Opportunity will generate probably $35 000 of revenue. Take away fees for (6) writers and (1) artist and the cost of printing and it’s a small profit for the company.

Would I pledge? Yeah, except it’s DG material which puts it safely in the hands of kinnygraham. I’d only be tempted to read it if I got it.

Some naysayers describe it as a begging bowl. I disagree. Palladium did a begging bowl previously where they asked their fans to just send them money, old socks or whatever because you love them so much. For that you got very little. This is simply pre-pledging for a book, making a tiny profit and making sure that if 1000 copies are printed, then there are enough people out there to buy them.

I think it’s a good plan, though obviously with the names they have involved and the following they have with Delta Green (now the de-facto modern Cthulhu setting), it’s about a million times easier. Greg Stolze does his Reign supplements for $1000 a pop which he tends to meet quite quickly.

This idea really meets up with the ‘1000 fans‘ which I wrote a couple of months ago. 1000 fans buying $100 worth of books from you every year is a living, no? And what is $100? A main hardback book and 5 or so small booklets? As I said elsewhere – this isn’t about scamming $100 out of every fan you have but of working hard, getting good quality books out there and reaping some rewards. Obviously the RPG market is a tiny fraction of the music market but for some, it just might work (especially when you consider I’ve spent probably £200 (nearly $400) on RPG books* in the last six months.

*Maxx supplement, Saipan supplement, Sufficiently Advanced, Deathwatch 2000 Supplement, Reign, Thousand Suns, Psi World, Grimm, Dark Heresy, GURPS WW2, another GURPS WW2 booklet, Will To Power, Godlike GM screen and about $100 of PDFs just for starters…

23L Superhumans

Having some spare time yesterday evening I resurrected some of my notes for ‘superpowers’ in T23L. It wasn’t part of the plan to have 23L superhumans – though I was accused by Jeremy of writing my own ‘supers’ game when we published The 23rd Letter. We did have quasi-superhumans in the form of the Furies and the Terata but nothing was ever done with them.

Some of the thought process for the superhuman system was taken from the Amber system. I quite liked the way their stats were arranged:

  • Human – covering the full range of Human ability
  • Chaos – stronger than any human
  • Amber – stronger than both Chaos and Human
  • Ranked – allowing you to be a stronger Amber-ite, perhaps even the strongest.

For 23L/Supers, I envisaged a triple scale over and above the abilities of Humanity.

The 23rd Letter has a range of 1-7 for human endeavour. Given the media it is trying to emulate, I expanded this to 1-9 so that there could be some decent Batman/Captain America/peak of human ability in there. The rationale obviously was that someone with Strength of 1 would be weedy and weak whereas someone with Strength 9 would be sprouting muscles on their muscles!

I added a second level, Superhuman 1 (also called Basic) which covered the range from 11-19, inferring that even the weakest superhuman was still stronger than the strongest human. All individuals with Strength at Superhuman 1 would be of similar strength ability – the second digit giving you an idea of the amount they had ‘worked’ it. Someone with Strength 11 would probably be able to press a ton and could be thin and unmuscled. In comparison someone with Strength 19 would be heavily muscled or, at least, tremendously toned and should, in theory have better control over their strength.

I then added a third level, Superhuman 2 (also called Advanced) covering the range 21-29 and a fourth, Superhuman 3 (also called Master) for very high level supers.

This also extended to the Powers they would have. And even within powers there were powers that may not be available to all superhumans (essentially the first generation superhumans had access to some powers and could get very competent with them, later ‘model’ superhumans had access to better powers but didn’t have as much opportunity to become skilled with them). The Powers were in broad categories like ‘Flight’ or ‘Coordination’ or ‘Strength’. Each power would have a description of ‘Basic’, ‘Advanced’ or ‘Master’ and were meant to be built as packages, e.g.

  • Basic Flight – the character can fly up to 70 mph.
  • Advanced Flight – the character can fly at up to Mach 1. He also gains modifications to his body to better enable this, skin toughness and resistance to wind chill and friction. The player can buy Basic Coordination at half cost.
  • Master Flight – the character can fly at virtually unlimited speeds. He is resistance to the effects of this travel, gaining Basic Resistance for free. The player can buy Basic or Advanced Coordination at half cost.

Like in The 23rd Letter, the ‘powers’ were tied into the game world so that someone with Basic Strength (boosting them from Strength of 1-9 to Strength of 11-19 as well as other benefits) would be called Achilles-class. Someone with Advanced Strength would be Talos-class. A Master-Strength superhuman might be Heracles-class. A Heracles-class superhuman might have other benefits too, like being virtually impervious to harm.

This was the basis of the system of ‘More Than Human’ which was on the LateGaming site for years (since about 2001 when Jared put together the first edition of this web site) but now comes uncomfortably close to the as-yet-unreleased ‘Beyond Human’ touted by Eden (which will undoubtedly come to market around the time we release whatever this game turns out to be – if history (Zombi vs All Flesh Must be Eaten) is anything to go by.

I’ll post more on this later.

Mutants and Masterminds.

Every now and then, someone asks on the RPG.net forums…

What’s the best supers game?

and every time the Mutants and Masterminds people come out of the woodwork to tell us that M&M is not a d20 game. It doesn’t have levels, hit points or attacks of opportunity. Now…this last one is a D&D specific thing but Levels and Hit points are a staple of D&D games.

Mutants and Masterminds has ‘Power Level’ which affects the following:

  • Attack Bonus
  • Defense Bonus
  • Save Difficulty
  • Toughness Save
  • Fortitude, Reflex and Will Saves
  • Skill Rank
  • Ability Scores

It also tells you how many points you can spend on powers.

Also, on page 25…

As the heroes earn additional power points through adventuring, the GM
may wish to increase the campaign’s power level, allowing players to spend
some of their earned power points to improve traits already at the cam-
paign’s limit. Not raising the power level forces player characters to diversify,
improving their less powerful or effective traits, and acquiring new ones,
but it can make the players feel constrained and the heroes to start looking
the same if it isn’t raised occasionally. Increasing power level by one for
every 15 earned power points is a good rule of thumb, depending on how
quickly the GM wants the player characters to improve in overall power.

Hm, so it has levels, but they’re not used in the traditional way. You start out at a certain level and ideally fight foes of a similar level. It’s a bit like starting out making D&D characters at a certain level so you can play a particular scenario and then never really bothering about the XP thing. I dislike XP systems a lot.

As for Hit Points. It seems it’s true. There’s no Hit Points. There are ‘saves’ against damage ad things called ‘Damage Conditions’ but without buying the book, I’m unlikely to find out what they really mean.

I’m still not struck on the Feats but it has improved since M&M1e. For my money, however, I’m going to stick to trying to use Wild Talents.

Solo: The Hero’s Journey (Part 2)

mj: I do wonder how superheroes pay their way
aidan: Ever see ‘Dead Like Me’ ?
mj: one or two eps
aidan:They addressed that a bit.
mj: didn’t they all have to have full time jobs?
aidan: Pretty much 🙂
mj: See, that would suck…
aidan: shrug
aidan: But it’s realistic
aidan: In my character’s case, his wife probably earns a substantially larger wage.
mj: We know our Solo works at Borders. But wife is ‘generic lecturer’
aidan: Yes.
aidan: Let me pick a subject.
mj: I reckon we should attach the R-map as a graffle on the page as well. Thought is that when we add new material we can update. I’m going to want to add in stuff is all.
aidan: Yes.
aidan: Economics.
aidan: http://www.econ.lsa.umich.edu/econ/
aidan: She’s not tenured.
aidan: His daughter is in Kindergarten.
mj: What ages are you?
aidan: He’s 35, she’s 34, daughter is 5.
mj: what else do we need to cover? Siblings?? Living family? Best friend?
aidan: Yep. He has an older sister. Parents are both still alive.
aidan: Friends: he has a good relationship with the other staff at the store, but not much beyond normal colleagueship. His best friend moved to Los Angeles after college, to practice law. They were both law students. My character didn’t want to be a lawyer after going through law school. He got involved in the 1994 congressional elections toward the end of college. Which was how he met his wife.

Next, we give them all names…

225 days

SI 1995/3297, also known as “The Duration of Copyright and Rights in Performances Regulations 1995”, this UK law came into effect on January 1st 1996. At its most basic, it extended the copyright for any written work from 50 years after the author’s death, to 70 years. Any work which had already become public domain prior to 1st January 1996 remained public domain.

H. G. Wells died on the 13th August, 1946. All of his works thus missed becoming public domain in the UK by 225 days, and now remain copyright to his estate until 2016. Bizarrely, his works are public domain in the USA.

We’re currently investigating whether it is still feasible to publish War of the Worlds: Earth after learning of this curious quirk of legality.

Bigotry?

This post surprised me

But I think I’d have a real ethical problem role-playing in a world that was Christian-realist. – some dude on RPGnet

There are reasons why I find this odd.

Most gamers will play in a setting where some sort of religion is real. Think about it, this covers any fantasy setting which refers to gods from which player characters can draw magical power or where faith in a god has a direct effect (I’m thinking D&D, Runequest and Ars Magica here)

Ars Magica is certainly as “Christian-realist” as Testament. As are most of the World of Darkness settings.

As someone who would self-describe to humanism (note the lower case ‘h’), I don’t believe in any religions per se because I don’t believe in supernatural mumbo-jumbo that can’t be measured or experienced by me. I’m willing to subscribe to the doctrine of faith in science because a significant amount of science has been demonstrated to me first hand, I’ve practiced it’s lore and, perhaps the best reason of all, it is peer-reviewed.

Why would someone have problems with playing in a world that was Christian-realist?

Well, it has to be some deep seated bigotry there. Why else would someone have that reaction? Did someone persecute him? Or did he just look at the atrocities performed worldwide for the last two thousand years in the name of Christianity?

At it’s fundaments, Christianity isn’t a bad idea. It’s essentially ‘love god, and love other people’. It’s a social religion in that aspect. But like all good ideas, humans manage to fuck them up.

Testament, Creed and Rapture are all about how the GOOD people are gone. These are the people who lived their lives according to the tenets of ‘love god and love other people’. Chance are, these are not your common-or-garden Christians that you’ve come to know and resent. They’re not going to be holier than thou. They’re not going to be the sort who walk past a homeless person without giving up their coat or whatever. So in essence, the people who behave badly to others, Christian or not, are still on Earth.

It’s not a game about religion. It’s not a game saying that Christianity is right. It’s about saying that something has happened to the world and the truly good people have been taken from it (by God or aliens or whatever, it doesn’t matter). And it’s just the rest of us who are left behind. Someone in the thread mentioned a Left Behind RPG. I don’t really know what that is.

Superheroes can be dicks

Forget Iron Man.

PJ pointed me at the new Hancock trailer.
It’s true, Hancock has gone from being a “Wild Wild West” kind of camp nonsense movie to a movie I’d really like to see and a game I’d like to run. That said, Iron Man, much more than the Fantastic Four or Spider Man has always been a bit of a dick when he was Tony Stark – and I loved reading his stories for it.

(He also links to Superdickery)

Superheroes are often dicks.

In the first Watchtower game, there were really three ‘dick’ moments. None of these were bad on the part of the player and they made for some excellent role-playing moments but they represented times when the superhero did things that were unexpected.

  • Gavin’s first character, Atomic III, was a non-powered descendant of a dynasty of superheroes. He worked hard, he built himself some superpower-providing devices and he started doing what superheroes do – prowling around trying to find people to pummel. In the end this played out very well as he went a little power mad, fueled by his ‘power inadequacy’ where, even though he was the most powerful of the heroes due to his devices, it wasn’t enough. He ended up becoming a villain and threw a train at the player characters (one of whom were superstrong or supertough). Then he killed their healer. Ouch. Gavin has an amazing sense of comedy for these kinds of things.
  • Gavin’s second character, Wraith, was a cross between Batman and Hawkeye (but ten times cooler than Hawkeye). His actual power was the ability to be invisible and undetectable. He could sneak into places, collect evidence that was inadmissible in court and then when the criminal was acquitted, despite being guilty, Wraith would follow him home and thrash him into unconsciousness. On one absolute gem of a game, Wraith sneaked into a woman’s house (he suspected she was the supervillainess Malice) and then when nothing untoward happened (she got home, put away her groceries and sat down to watch TV), rather than sneaking out, he just turned off his power in the middle of her living room. He appeared, she freaked out and he admitted he was her creepy stalker. Turns out she was actually Malice. Go figure.
  • John Dean’s character, Ebony, discovered that his teleport skill also worked for time travel. Note to other GMs: I was a lot younger and lot stupider and had never really given unlimited time travel to players before. The ‘dick’ moments came when the player characters, after traveling into the past and modifying the future just….couldn’t….stop…..going….back to tweak things to their preference. Jade Dragon lost his restaurant, then got it back. Wraith discovered he was dating and co-habiting with Malice but had no memory of their many-month relationship. I think they all deserved to be ‘dicks’ but the biggest dick of the lot was the GM. Oops.

In the more recent WatchTower game, they all had their fair share of dickery though Paul’s character, Balance (the priest with uncanny matter shaping abilities) probably had more moments which, though caused for the most part by the possession and emotion control powers of the villain, were roleplayed brilliantly. Like when he completely blasted the whole team and caused their flesh to slough off. That was beautiful. Or when he sealed mind-controlled proto vampires in an underground tunnel (rather than seeing if they could be cured). He was decisive, let’s be honest.

I like flawed characters, especially in superhero games because they can be flawed in much more effective ways. If you’re a dick in a Zombi game, then no-one cares because you could just be left outside at some point and that would really ruin your picnic. If you’re a dick in The 23rd Letter, again, there’s a damage limitation as even psychics don’t get an easy break. It ain’t all fun being an Esper.

But in a Superhero game, you’re often the possessor of a unique ability (at least within your team) and that means you’ve pretty special. When you’re pissed off and do something about it, people notice.

We (Aidan and I) going to try playing a Superhero game online in the next couple of weeks. One player, one GM (for a while at any rate). I’ve asked Aidan to think of a character and some of the things he wants to do, or components of the world we will be playing in. I’d have asked him to do it in Wild Talents colour codes but, frankly, I’m not very keen on them and also he doesn’t have the book so it would be impenetrable to him. (It does make me want to create a ‘world builder’ for superhero games. I have it in my head how to do it (and it could be done in software too – a simple web form, oh yeah!))

I wonder about the playability of a world where there is one superbeing. And he’s the player character. Who are you foes? Do we spend more time looking at interpersonals? Do we add ‘reality’ while accepting that there is one guy in the world who can chew through steel? How does he live? How does he pay his way? Handouts?

I don’t know what Aidan will bring to the table but I’m excited about the opportunity to play a bit more.

Creed/Testament/Rapture – queries and comments

It’s always nice to get some kudos from people you respect and Balbinus on RPG.net has come through again with Creed/Testament/Rapture – queries and comments.

He has a few comments, mostly clarifications and does make me realise that the character sheet I provided for Creed was entirely inadequate. Or, if I meant something else I should have noted it by pre-filling in one of the sheets.

It puts me in the mood to work on something – like tidying up Creed and maybe even finishing the text for Rapture. I’ve already got so much on my plate (getting a new job, house stuff, kids, never mind working on War of the Worlds) that it should be the last thing on my mind. Ahem.

It was also cross-posted to TheRPGSite. I reckon I should hire Balbinus as my publicist.

Collaboration, writing and vision

This weekend I was busy with family duties but still managed to do a bit of work on WoTW:Earth. Most notably taking the draft ideas Aidan sent through and turning them into mechanics and flavour.

Collaboration is hard.

I’m very conscious that I’m an ignorant so-and-so with strong opinions and a jeadstrong way of doing things. One sure-fire way to motivate me into completing something is to provide me with something that is not the way I’d do it. This isn’t to say that it’s wrong or that my way is actually better, but just the fact that it’s different is enough for me to work on something to illustrate my way.

Am I bloody minded enough to expect mine will be used? I’d like to think not but I think that even after all these years, I find it hard to work with others. Case in point: the lifepath systems we’re building for WotW: Earth can be done in a number of ways. I received Aidan’s notes and I wrote mine out and sent them on and I did say and will continue to say that it’s a work in progress. I don’t know, however, whether my personality (my bloodymindedness) can be put down by soliciting comment and inviting co-work. I’d have to get Aidan to be honest here about whether I am an ogre to work with.

Writing is hard

Harking back to the post on Quality of Play that I made the other day – I need to be very enthused by a game before I’d write for it (which is why I guess I don’t get paid to write – though I’ve never solicited paid writing work nor been asked). When enthused (the Solo Play part), I tend to be quite prolific and productive with writing which is why Crucible Design only published three games and they were the games that I conceived and wrote.

The irony of course is that my most productive times were when I was busy. I worked a 9-5, had a girlfriend, had a weekly game (or two) and would often have to do additional work at the weekends for my job. But I managed to hammer out The 23rd Letter. The next most productive person was Colin who had the job, the girlfriend, the hobbies and managed to do some excellent work on the Projects for The 23rd Letter. Everyone else was either in full time education (and no, it is not more work) or unemployed and getting writing out of them was impossible.

Vision is easy

What it tells me is that it’s easy to have a vision about something. It’s easy to think up a soundbite of a concept and pitch it at a small group of friends. You can wow them with some names you thought up, maybe even some basic sketches that are a subsititute for ‘real work’. The ‘Ideas’ page for LateGaming is incredibly long and I know that perhaps only 10% of them will ever have any real work done on them (and yeah, you can ask and no, they’re not all my ideas).

What this means is that in over five years of ‘writing’, we produced three books and they were the brainchild of (and written by) one person. We had plans for other books and games but none of them were ever completed and few of them got anywhere beyond the most basic concepts. Fancy playing a pirates game? We intended to write one (about 5 years before 7th Sea came out). Cowboys? Check. Corporate Superspies? Check. Commercially-minded Superheroes? Check. But I think that natural selection weeded out the weaker ideas.

The conclusion to this is going to be ‘What about Qabal?’

What about Qabal

It’s just a little too big for me and I need to get back into the flow of writing, raise the bar in terms of production values for the next books I bring out and re-learn a lot of terms. I need to ask friends who do design work for a living to help me with the look of the books and help me visualise the whole process. And all of this before I put any more pen to paper.

At the moment, I have smaller fish to fry.

Archaeology

I spent a couple of hours in the attic of my parent’s house excavating some old books. I have a notion to sell some of them considering that I’ve not looked at them in a decade but as I continued to browse I don’t think I could find one that I would seriously get rid of. Games like “Chivalry and Sorcery” and “Bushido”. I know the last time I looked at this pile was around 1995 because the most recent game in the attic was Nightspawn by Palladium which was published in 1995. I moved out in 1996 and the books were put into storage (and to this day I’ve still not read Nightspawn).

More importantly were the other things I found. Games and stories I wrote nearly a decade before I put pen to paper for The 23rd Letter. Pictures I drew of “SuperTeams” from my superhero games. Maybe a photo or two of the notebooks I would bring with me to school (we’re talking about the 80s here) and spend my lunchtimes and free study classes writing game materials and stories in. All personal to me.

I’m going to bore the shit out of some of you by reproducing some of them here in a new category called “Archaeology” so you can avoid them if you like.

Quality of Play theory

Levi Kornelson came up with this theory and posted it on TheRPGSite:
 

  1. The text inspires “solo play”.
  2. Personal play creates group play.
  3. Group play feeds back into personal play and pushes more group play.

The punch-line is:

The quality of solo play often matters more
to actually getting a game
than the quality of group play.


Effectively your enthusiasm for a game when reading it, or when generating characters or when making plots is directly proportional to the pleasure you will have when playing it with others and has a much greater effect than the interactive play.

I’d have to agree. The games I have run for others I enjoyed thoroughly.

Is your enjoyment of the game influenced by the ‘solo play’ of others within the game? Of course it is. Other who do not enjoy the game will make their negative feelings plain and, correspondingly, the actions of the solo individual within the group dynamic have a much greater effect.

They weren’t kidding when they said that gaming was a social hobby (and not an anti-social one). It absolutely depends on the collaboration of individuals to make the best benefit for everyone.

One for the millennialists…

Mike Cane 2008 reports that NASA got it wrong and an asteroid that they reported to have a 1 in 45000 chance of hitting Earth actually has a 1 in 450 chance of hitting Earth. It took a 13 year old German schoolboy to validate the figures after NASA experts forgot to take into account the cloud of satellites which could cause the asteroid, called Apophis, to veer into Earth.

The date this is meant to happen is 2029. Now…here’s the math. In school, we had a class called Religious Education and one of the nuns who taught, Sister Mary-Jo, was one of the most progressive ‘persons of Religion’ I have ever met. She explained that the Bible was literal and also interpreted. That it was a historical document but not perhaps in the way it should be interpreted.

She believed that Jesus was real and God was real, that Jesus was born in some time around 3-6 BC and that he died on a cross, aged 33 and ascended to heaven.

If Apophis does hit Earth and cause the “End of Days”, in 2029, then it proves one thing. Chris De Burgh may have been right.

“And just before dawn at the paling of the sky,
The stranger returned and said “Now I must fly,
When two thousand years of your time has gone by,
This song will begin once again, to a baby’s cry…””

4 BC + 33 years + 2000 years = 2029 (or so, I’m not really clear on how to handle year 0)

I don’t know what’s more upsetting. That the world might end or that the Lord chose Chris de Burgh to be his prophet?

Of course, as a result I’ll have to tie this into my Prospero mini-setting…

[This is a hoax BTW. See NASA statement. But of course, to avoid world panic, they would say that…]

Mario Kart for the Wii

Last weekend we picked up Mario Kart for the Wii for a fiver after trading in two games that we neither liked nor played (Wabbit Wampage? Cars?) and I must say it was the best fun I’ve had since I bought the device (over a year ago) and discovered Wii Sports.

The game isn’t as ‘fast’ or ‘frenetic’ as playing the game in the Arcades (which was also a lot blurrier and more confusing) but it’s hard to beat for playability especially when the other racers are friends of yours (or friends of friends).

In addition to the single player ‘Win the Cups, unlock the racers’ game, you can have up to 4 players on one Wii (as long as you have enough controllers) and you can also play on the WFC network getting up to 8 human racers either from your friends list (requiring the sharing of a Kart friend code) or playing against the multitudes of people out there in the real world.

Races, battles and coin collecting games were all good fun. I’d played half a dozen games at the weekend which meant I wasn’t totally unprepared for the game and Paul showed me some tricks (like the jump boosts, firing backwards etc) while we waited for Lee to plug his Wii into his projector at home. Once in, selection of games was very easy and there was little or no latency in the service.

Last night I hooked up with Paul, Lee and Tanya to play Wii Karting. Lee and Tanya were at home in London on Lee’s Wii showing that two people can play online from one Wii. Two people or more playing on one 32″ TV is not the best experience and can be somewhat confusing so I applaud Lee’s idea of hooking up to a projector. It would make a difference. Paul and I were online from home – him in Mallusk, me in Bangor.

The ‘signpost’ communication method isn’t the best however with only a limited number of phrases available so it’s not taking advantage of the social vibe that the ‘Mii’ avatars could provide. Maybe at some point in the future they’ll provide voice chat but that’s in the future and not right now. I’m told tales that some enterprising folk are using their XBox systems as voice chat relays so they can play Mario Kart and laugh at each other. We were all Mac people so we fired up iChat (voice) and regaled each other with insults and guffaws as we dumped turtle shells, bombs and banana skins on the other racers. I reckon Skype voice would work just as well.

As for racing itself – it seems slow when watching someone playing but it gets very quick when in the race and you know you’re half a lap behind and every corner counts. The game balance is helped by the use of “weapons” like the banana skins I mentioned and homing turtle shells and other methods of wiping out other people. Every time you get hit, or stunned, or squashed or shrunken it slows you down and the sound effects are excellent.

The tracks also, range from odd to excellent and in fact none of them are bad in any way. There’s a lot of colour and some people may feel seasick with it (luckily I don’t suffer from that), there’s enough variety and obstacles to keep it from being a dry race and it seems to push the Wii in terms of what it is capable of.

Is it worth getting the wheel? I don’t know. I’ve played it with the wheel and with a third party half wheel and I think that it might be worthwhile not getting the wheel unless you want the whole experience.

All in all, it’s an excellent game and my interest in it is magnified by the potential for playing online against friends.

Sexuality (part 1)

A recent thread on TheRPGSite talks about sexuality and sexual and/or gender bias.

Art

Cheesecake art in fantasy is a real issue. I thought it was mostly gone but there’s heaps of the damn stuff out there. You know – the male characters are ripped with muscles, the female characters are showing cleavage. It’s because the target audience for the games are adolescent males.
e.g.

That cover made quite an impression on my adolescent psyche.

Evolution

Men evolved to hunt and kill things. Women evolved to raise the children. For whatever reasons in the past, its bot a recent thing. And arguably its unnatural – look at lion prides, the women do all the hard work and the men lie around and yawn impressively.

I don’t want this to get into an argument about capability: males and females should not be in competition in certain areas. Strength for example, some women will be stronger than some men but men can achieve a higher extreme of strength than women. On the flip side, men cannot give birth or sustain another life from their bodily secretions.

Content

RPG games tend to have a lot of combat. They tend not to have a lot of romance. The thread discussed homosexual relationships but it became apparent that for a lot of people, role-playing games are not where sexual elements are discussed. It’s just not a part of many games.

Her Indoors told me she likes the ‘girly’ novels she likes because they cover themes which she says fulfill a level of escapism and cover life events that she will never again experience. Falling in love for the first time, having an affair, having to choose between two suitors. These are the stories she enjoys. They’re certainly more believable or perhaps ‘down to earth’ than the stories I enjoy (interstellar wars fought by galaxy spanning empires? secret agents working to stop the encroach of extra-dimensional aliens?). Are there many games which cover this area? Only one that I can think of. A game of “Romantic Fantasy”. It still involves a lot of swords and struggles so I don’t know how it fits in with the whole ‘romance’ thing.

Is this the central reason why the hobby is dominated by young males? Because we like the fights, the power and the glory? It becomes our escapism – so should we not cater for their escapism?

Wouldn’t there be room for a game where we take our relationship maps and our GM-less story-driven games with conflict escalation and use them to model something other than fights in the playground?

The model of relationships. The first kiss. The first time you realised you liked someone. The first time you were jealous for the affections of another. The first time your heart was broken.

Fights in the Playground. Maybe that’s exactly what we should be modeling?

Raising the bar

I’m arrogant to believe that I can write and, to be honest, most of the time the feedback has been pretty good. I like writing, it’d be nice to do it for a living (and not the stressful but boring job at $BIG_COMPANY) but them’s the breaks. In my spare time I write a lot and only a small fraction of it makes it to the blog here.

I have noticed, however, that my layout and design skills need some exercise and possibly even some help. I can appreciate good design, I just have issues doing it myself. Part of this is inspiration and part of it is time (which I have less and less of) and skill (my photoshop skills are not legendary).

Looking at the character sheets I left for download earlier this week, they belie their age. They were done in 2000 or so and were definitely more ‘tell’ than ‘show’. That’s the first thing. They look like Civil Service Sickness Benefit forms. I was sent a character sheet recently that was 7 pages long and full colour. I’ve seen the pre-gen character sheets for Everway. I think I need to raise the bar considerably.

I also need an artist in general as PJ is now going to be too busy and I don’t know anyone else who knows how to hold a pen.