We haven't gamed in three weeks, and I'm starting to consider doing some kind of on-line gaming again just to fill in the gaps.

I'm working on Rose, Thorn, and Mist: Elves of the Bloodwood, a 3E product on elves. Starting to wonder if I should post each chapter or chapter section to a wiki or blog to invite commentary and critique. It's a fairly big project (currently at 30k words and I expect that will double or more).

What I'd like to have is an editor or co-author who knows the 3E system ridiculously well. When I was writing for athas.org I left most of the system stuff to other members of the team, which worked very well from my perspective. It allowed me to concentrate on the development--prose and mechanical-ideas--and someone else to fix/balance the mechanics where and if necessary.

I'm almost tempted to release it as just setting material and ignore mechanics entirely, but I do have some spiffy mechanical stuff developed that I don't want to lose. It would be kind of weird to release a product that has only SOME mechanics.

I'll go back to being stuck on the material for Changelings, now. Had a perfect idea for it some time back that I don't recall, but swear I wrote down, yet can't find. Peachy.

ORX has a page on BoardGameGeek. I don't have a membership there, but if anyone who has played does, stop by and add your opinions, rating, and etc. to the page.

I've been thinking this for a while, but playing a wizard in 3.5 is really...boring. Half the time in fights, I'm left wondering what I can do or reduced to firing my crossbow/stabbing with my dagger/running the fuck away, because my spells are not helpful, or I've already used them all up.

I'm 7th level right now, would be 8th but a zombie ate my character last game and Raise Dead eats a level. Even now, there isn't much I can do. Especially when our cleric is our tank: 4 attacks a round when he casts Spiritual weapon.

I've been thinking of multi-classing just so I have other things to do, quite possibly into monk, though fighter is a good possibility as well. I'll need to anyways at some point, because my wizard's Intelligence score caps his spells at 5th level (and, IIRC, five from each level).

This is just not enough to do much with when you're in multiple combats per session and/or game day. Especially when half your spells are defensive spells. It's very much: "use once, stand around looking stupid".

I'm thinking wizards really need magic items in order to function effectively in an adventure. Yet in most D&D games I play in their actual appearance is rare. Would it kill DMs to hand out combat-oriented scrolls and spellbooks, even a potion or two, more than once every few adventures, especially when the game is combat heavy?

I think so far I have 1 Scroll of Invisibility (5 mins), 1 Mask of Winters (still no idea what it does), and 1 Wand of Spider-climb. Oh, and a magic dagger (last resort, ie: fuck, I'm in combat). At 7th level.

I think I'll be enchanting the shit out of my crossbow as soon as I can. Or maybe cheating: I've noticed the cleric has been making multiple cure potions every game, though I don't think he's following the game rules to do it (hasn't lost XP, gold, or spent the necessary time), and the DM hasn't called him on it.

Just realized GenCon is this week. That bites.

Our trip I'd been saving for, to the V:tES nationals in Atlanta, was canceled because the finances of a couple of the guys changed and one of them had to drop out of the trip entirely.

So not even enough time for me to say, "Oh, then I'll go to GenCon instead."

And that's pretty much it for the big gaming vacation things for the year. No vacation this year.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is awesome. Awesome enough I rented it after playing the demo and am going to play the crazy out of it until I have to bring it back in a week-and-a-half. In fact, I should probably play it a little less than I am and do something else for a bit.

I also checked out a demo of Killzone 2 and it has also made me want to rent it so I can play it on my friend's PS3.

I must be in FPS mode. It's the only game type I've been consistently enjoying for quite a while now. I've been sighing and shrugging at CRPGs, and I haven't been enjoying stealth games like Assassin's Creed or RTS games for a bit. Arcade games have been rather fun, too, lately.

So the kids are out of school for the summer as of yesterday...and Jen and I stayed up waaaay too late last night. I was up until around 7am. Oops. Then I had a doctor's appointment at 1pm. Gah. Add to this that Rainman had a friend stay the night, and so they were all up ridiculously early. Still feeling a little tired, honestly. Going to have to go to bed early tonight.

Based on a review from Kobold Quarterly, I ordered Secrets of Pact Magic and Villains of Pact Magic from Radiance House, because I like the subject matter, and figured I could plunder it for both our 3.5 game and our Sorcerer game. I also received The Spider God's Bride and Other Tales of Sword and Sorcery from Xoth.net Publishing, which arrived a few days ago.

I have plenty of game-related reading in store for me in the near future.

Also, having a great discussion about Sorcerer over on the Forge (starting here). It's ridiculous how much I had blanked about play in the years since I'd last played in a game, but it is starting to come back, and (as usual for everyone, I swear) I'm still finding out new things about the rules as well.

That conversation made me realize something that made me kick myself. Remember back in the old days when the GM rolled all the dice so that you could concentrate on just playing your character? That's...Sorcerer!

The players just play their characters, that's their only job, and the GM deals with their dice -- not in terms of "rolling everything for you", but the same idea: he keeps track of what you need to roll when and lets you know. That's his job, not judging what dice you should get.

See what I mean? He doesn't give you dice, you don't earn them from him, he handles the dice so you can concentrate on playing, not whoring for bonus dice. That's a huge thing.

I know that I'd been viewing the system for a while as a "earn those dice with narrative chops (the GM decides if your chops earn you dice)", both because that's what the book makes it sound like (having been written pre-Big Theory and struggling to convey ideas that hadn't been formulated yet) and because of my highly Gamist leanings which make me look at the system as something to be utilized to win challenges.

...

...and my sink broke. Blondie went down into the basement to get a towel from the dryer, and shouted upstairs, "The pawice arere!" Which made no sense, so I went to see what was going on, and she says, "Wook! It's weaking!" Water is pouring through the ceiling from the kitchen floor above...Jen's doing the dishes, draining the sink...turns out the drain seal broke.

All fixed now, but bleh. Stinky dishwater everywhere.

Yay! Sorcerer next week! Here's some things I need to do to prep:

- Write out a big ol' relationship map for the players.
- Print out a list of common northlander names (first and last) for reference.
- Print out the names of some Enochian spirits and various symbols.
- Finish the simple sorcerers, demons, and regular folks write-ups.
- Print out the tables from the core book for player reference.
- Print out What is Sorcery? and What is Humanity? for our game.
- Purchase another copy of the core book for the players ASAP.
- Print out better character sheets(?) (ours are streaked and oogy).
- Print out and fill in some demon sheets.
- Solidify (ie: write down) NPC desires and plots.

What am I forgetting?

Well, no Forge Midwest for me unless someone makes an offer out of the blue (and no one has in the last week, so I don't expect it to suddenly happen). After running the numbers, the cost is just too prohibitive if I have to pay for the gas and a room entirely on my own. Also, a solitary six hour drive is meh (though I'd deal with it if I could afford the trip). So color me an incredibly sad monkey--I was really looking forward to going this year! Sighs.

Also, this is ridiculous. I just spent, what was it, two-three weeks being sick? Now I'm sick again.

You know that feeling you get right before you really get hit with a cold/flu? That sort of sore-achy feeling, where you still feel fine, other than feeling a bit stiff or your joints feeling tight? That's how I started feeling last night.

I slept until 3pm today, but it wasn't good sleep, since I kept waking up all night long. I feel run-down and achy today, and am thinking of just going back to bed...which I did; just woke up. Still feel crunky. Bit of a cough, runny nose. Yay for Spring colds?

Here's my entry for the S7S Logo Remix contest for the Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies RPG. Honestly, this was oodles of fun to do.

I've also popped it up on my dA account, where it looks slightly crisper for some reason. Click the pic to jump there:



The first time I looked at the logo silhouette, I thought TENTACLES! And went the obvious place from there. Tried to give it some of the same elements as the CoC 6th Ed. cover, though I deliberately "mixed it up" a little bit.

Sadly, I couldn't find the cover fonts Chaosium utilizes and so made due with what I have in my personal collection. I think it turned out well.

I also used some names pulled from the S7S wiki for the names on the cover (I hope no one minds), scrounged around LJ a bit looking for Chad's middle initial, and took some liberties with a couple minor details.

No one from the local group can come with me to Forge Midwest this year, as everyone has plans for the weekend or has to work--Matt was on board, but couldn't once he checked the date.

I'd still like to find someone else from Minnesota who wants to ride share down there, and I really need to find someone to room with, or someone local with an open couch who wouldn't mind my crashing there Friday and Saturday night. Renting a room for only me is just too expensive even with the reduced convention rate.

Well, if anyone knows anyone, feel free to point them my direction.

Over on the Forge, Ron made a statement that hit me like a lightning bolt:

...jumping into immensely consequential, resource-eating mechanics without any in-the-moment investment in the fictional events. Play needs to permit that investment to develop and grow. We don’t have scenes in order to have conflicts, we have conflicts in order to make scenes consequential. So the scenes, including content, have to be in progress first before the conflicts become recognized.

I realized from this that a whole lot of issues regarding how/what/why conflict resolution versus task resolution are tidied up just by understanding you do that thing above there first just to find out what you're rolling for.

Other than that, which deserves its own post, it also described part of what ORX has been missing. In ORX, the mechanics are all there, and most of what you do or what you're supposed to do and what it should look like, but I've always felt that a big chunk of "How To Play" was missing...or maybe not missing, but only poorly or incompletely described. Like I was writing around "what play looks like" instead of just writing "what play looks like".

Honestly, I always felt that section three of the book--the How To Play section--was the worst written part. That it was me beating around the bush trying to show the reader a pheasant rather than just showing a pheasant, and I think that's because I didn't know what the pheasant was supposed to look like in concrete detail. Or so to speak.

"It's a bird with wings and feathers and it flies and it's probably brown. Here, let me show you...{beat, beat, beat}...well, the darn thing won't come out, but hopefully you get the idea."

So there's this whole section of the book I've just never been happy with as the writer because it has always felt that something was missing, that it wasn't clear enough, that it wasn't complete enough, but that I also never could put into words the part that was missing.

There's this whole "story part" that's a core part of play, but only vaguely indicated. Something that arises if all the players know what they're doing, but if you don't, isn't going to happen. Which I think gave rise to a number of the sessions I ran that I was fundamentally unhappy with as expressions of the game (even if other folks liked them well enough).

And THAT was enough to put me off playing my own game until I could figure out what was causing that to happen and describe how to make the right thing happen: it was all about setting the stage to allow a story to occur, and providing the necessary tools to make it a good story.

Then someone posted something about "flux", I don't recall exactly, and the word and some ideas used in the Mythic GM Emulator crashed together into these notes:

What my orc wants is in Flux. These are story threads. They can be complex or simple.

Lists of things the orc wants. As background, or developed in play. Things he hasn't gotten are listed as in Flux.

Negative conflict resolution affects one of the things in Flux.

Or, alternately, affects one of the things he has Attained and removes it/threatens it.

That's where I happen to be at right now, along with some progress on the Random Adventure Generator/Oracle. Clearly I need to detail this so it makes more sense to someone other than me, but this is a decent step towards making the story portion sing and helping others know what is supposed to be done at the start of an ORX game and how that makes the rest of the game happen.

On reflection, in a way, this has ended up being a progression of what I was doing with the setting bible in At the Dawn, much the same way ORX was a system-progression of what I was trying to do with PGE.

Note: the music listed on this post is my MOST FAVORITE SONG EVER!!!!!!!!! I once drove my sister absolutely insane by listening to it for four hours non-stop (I would have kept listening to it, too, but she snapped and did something I don't recall to the radio and made me a sad monkey--I took solace in having annoyed her so much).

Yay! Root canal is finished! Last day today. Only took an hour. Since I use the local dental college, my dentist this time was a very nice Muslim girl from Somalia. Didn't have much of a chance to chat, since there were metal things in my mouth the whole time.

And I barely freaked out about the needle.

On the way home, I was able to drive about 30mph the whole way. Visibility was about 50'-60'. Nearly wrapped the van around a lamppost and then a tree, just trying to turn the corners in town. And the snow shows no signs of stopping...we've already gotten back what melted the last couple days.

I'd say "I'm not going out tonight", but it's game night. So I'm hoping we're still playing.

Everyone bored by the wank?

Me too.

So, moving on from the LJ drama, some gaming crap: our group hasn't met for three weeks. The host has been ill, so we missed the last two weeks. I missed last night because I needed sleep, so I called and canceled this time.

I'd been up all night, drove to the dentist and had the third and unfortunately not final part of my root canal. Which took three boring and sadly increasingly uncomfortable hours. Then I had a doctor's appointment afterwards. I was finally able to actually go to sleep around 3:30pm and slept until almost 9pm.

I'd really be far more interested in writing gaming material if I were gaming. The writing picked back up when I was playing, and has dropped off again now. Blah. That also means we've played just the one game of Sorcerer. I have a bunch of prep going to waste, and at this point I'm going to need to do a refresher to remember it.

Well, I've got video games for the moment. Off to play more FFIII.

Empty Room Syndrome is a debilitation that affects both writers and game masters. I'm writing about it because I have run into it twice in the last couple nights of gaming, and more than a couple of times in drafts of my own writing, and figured I'm not alone it dealing with it.

ERS is the situation of a set-piece taking place in a room (or really, anywhere), where the room is described such that the only thing in the room are the few central pieces of the set-piece with essentially blank spaces all around it. The feeling of such a piece is rather like one is looking at a low-budget childrens' play: perhaps the scene is interesting, but still cardboard and a fairly obvious plot device.

( Read more... )

Buildings and rooms are not just big, empty spaces with stuff in them. They have things happening in and around them all the time. When you have empty floor space, there needs to be a reason for it because even, "The rest of the room is oddly clean and bare of decoration" is a detail--spoken or unspoken.

As a response to some feminist critiques of the drow, I present the following counter-theory: rather than being a misogynistic attack on women that says women can only rule with power and evil and exist as sex objects, I think the design of the drow matriarchy is a scathing social critique of certain vocal elements in (mainly) second-wave feminism (the recent historical and currently prevalent form better-defined-as "reactionary").

( ...the drow matriarchy and gender feminists... )

But that's fine, socially castrate me. I don't really have to say these things when women and long-time scholars-and-feminists have already said the same things (and worse!) long before me.

Leading to the next common argument, which would be for the reactionary feminists to not only drider-fy me, but to Other the women who have written this critique...thus ultimately behaving exactly as described above and as similarly described in this other book also written by a woman and feminist about this very same behavior in the movement.

As one of the reviewers states, paraphrased: Gender feminists use the stigma of the label of 'anti-feminist' for political gain, ultimately hurting mainstream feminism. An excellent summary of the above points.

Oh, humanity; even your attempts to be noble are ignoble.

( ...tangentially related question... )

Any of my Grammar-nazi friends played this card game?

I've been reading over various information about Carcosa recently, a supplement for retro-clones of OD&D. (If that sounds like gibberish to you, it is. You'll be far more interested in the discussion of morality further on down in this post, this part here is all about gaming.)

I've read the entirety of both the Grognardia review of Carcosa, by James in four parts, and the response to that review, by Geoffrey in three parts. I have to say they both make excellent points, and in some cases I side with James, and in others with Geoffrey.

( ...sorcerers... )

( ...moving on to the morality part... )

I'm not able to game tonight, as the usual host is sick, so instead I'm going to write about gaming. Specifically, I'm going to write about the issues I'm running into regarding environmental penalties and maps in eXpendable, and possible solutions I've been juggling.

One of the important bits of the eXpendable ruleset is that players can shift penalties (wounds) their characters would otherwise take into the surrounding environment instead, causing things to blow up, shut down, and otherwise screw things up for everyone around them, friend and enemy alike. It should even be possible to use Environmental penalties to your advantage, by shooting out the right computer system, breaking steam lines, wiping out data, sealing off bulkheads, and etc (at least that's my vision of how they would work).

Unfortunately, I don't have the details of this worked out exactly: how much damage can you shift off in total over the course of a battle or of a game? Does the GM set up in advance the various things in the environment that can take damage and thus cause penalties? What effects do Environmental damage cause and in what situations?

To the first question, it seems there's a built-in cap to damage shifting in that Environmental penalties don't go away when you are in or moving through that area, and eventually there's so many penalties you can't even move through an area or have a fart's chance in the wind of making any successful rolls there (whereas you can heal and those do go away -- then again, successful Tech rolls might remove Environmental penalties the same way Stamina damage can be healed).

I had considered one possibility to be each transferred penalty affects Tech, Smarts, or Clarity at the player's option (I'd like to have it affect Stamina or Movement as well, but that really seems to overlap with the normal penalties that accrue in combat). These transferred penalties become bonus dice rolled against a character attempting an action that requires the affected attribute while in that area (or while attempting to interact with an affected system, etc).

Another idea is that Environment penalties are penalties that affect everything that happens in that area, no matter what the roll happens to be. It's simple, but perhaps too simple, and doesn't allow one to use Environment penalties tactically as I'd wanted.

One problem is that I feel the need to come up with a way to fairly decide what becomes a "local" penalty and what becomes a "broad" penalty -- things that only affect the single area and things that affect the entire scenario area. Maybe you can pay local penalties down by making them broad penalties? So you can decide a 5-die local penalty to Tech that only affects you in that area becomes a 1-die broad penalty to Tech that affects everyone everywhere?

Another possibility is to handle Environmental penalties the way ORX handles dice, and give those penalty dice to the GM to distribute on a one-time basis as he sees fit, so that avoiding injury now means things get tougher later. I like this solution, but it is so similar to what I've done before that I'm not sure I want to go that route. I'm trying to do something different with eXpendable (then again, if what you have works, why change it?).

The other issue is how to deal with mapping in the game: straight-up D&D-style architectural plans (ie: "dungeon maps") for everything? Or a more story-oriented mapping approach, where things are connected by the demands of story and established connections in the fiction, similar to how one "mapped" in text-based computer games like Zork, or how the viewer of a television show knows where things are in that show's setting.

For example, think Star Trek: bridge is "up there", engineering is "down there", there are corridors, the med bay, storage containers, jeffries tubes, etc, and they exist in relation to each other as needed within certain established constraints, but no one notices if suddenly there's a room on Deck Five that we've never heard of before because it could have always been there but never came up before.

So the reason I don't like D&D-style mapping in this instance is because it creates problems in regards to the Smarts attribute should the player roll successfully regarding the layout of the area or some hitherto unknown room or feature. Changing an existing map is a pain in the ass if every square foot is mapped out, not so much when you can drop things in.

Plus, is the GM going to map out and write down and attribute every possible thing that could take hits in each area? Honestly, that would solve a problem regarding how to cap Environmental penalties in an area -- some areas just wouldn't let you shrug off your hits -- but that ends up being a lot of extra work without a guarantee those areas will be used or what to do with those area once the players start messing around with Smarts rolls.

More thoughts on all this later.

Two very quick notes on two games I like and would like to run, mainly reminders for myself:

3:16 -- Gregor put a lot of great ideas and thoughts into his game, but I'm not sure how to DO half of it. The book needs more text describing the complete experience and methodology of play, rather than off-hand comments about possibilities.

In A Wicked Age -- the Oracles Vincent developed are awesome, but the Oracles found at Abulafia don't seem to grasp the nature of the standard IAWA oracles, instead providing Color while failing Situation. Also, it occurs to me that any decent RPG setting should lend itself to conversion into an Oracle, or rather, that should be a design goal of setting.

I know, I'm sick of D&D. I am. But that's what the group played last night, so that's what I played. Put together a 3.5 edition LN half-orc wizard who is much stronger than he is smart. He wields a heavy crossbow and a dagger. No combat spells (other than defensive ones): mainly utility spells (read magic, mage hand, etc).

In fact, he's much more everything else than he is smart -- it's just the way the dice fell, and I couldn't swing rolls around to make it any different (though I could have made him significantly less smart). So, he has the highest INT he could have.

We're teaching the DM from our Cthulhu game how to play 3E, as the last edition he played was basic D&D, so a chunk of the game was spent with he and I deciding on and rolling up characters (everyone else has another day they game together on, so they came forewarned and prepared). Not really a big deal, we all had fun.

It was an interesting game. We're the Chosen -- marked by fate, literally with a tattoo -- who will save the world from the Dark Lord who has arisen from his imprisonment, raised his mighty generals from death, and assaulted the civilized lands with a massive army of goblinoids.

That part is pretty bog-standard. What's interesting is that I didn't bother giving my guy a personality or background, since it never came up or appeared to matter. The game was entirely combat, and "role-playing" (ie: acting/immersion) was rare to absent.

Our characters were helping to defend the city they were in from siege, cutting down ropes, pushing down ladders, and killing goblin skirmishers who made it over the wall. My wizard used his crossbow and dagger more than his spells: a clever Daze and a wasted Shield spell were the only ones he used all evening. There were also a couple of amusingly failed Spot checks (personally, I think I would have sent the failing players out of the room before revealing the information).

It was also interesting in that I ended up being the rules-lawyer for the group, flipping through the book for information, reminding folks (inc. the DM) what rules to apply where and how to apply them (such as injury and unconsciousness), checking and reporting on spell descriptions, etc.

I'm not sure how the whole "Chosen" thing is going to work out with the necessary threat of dying that makes D&D...well, D&D. Getting whacked kind of makes you non-Chosen, right? Guess we'll see. But at least I'm on the other side of the DM's screen.