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2007-12-13 : Mechaton rules questions?
Hey, if you're stopping by looking for answers about Mechaton's rules, welcome, and I'm at your service.

2007-08-24 : Poison'd errata and Q&A
1. The cruel fortune accursing is all wrong. All wrong!
2. Ask the player if her pirate is enduring duress.

Click in for the rest.

2008-01-11 : In a Wicked Age: Four Oracles
In a Wicked Age: Four Oracles.

Also check out the Oracles page at Abulafia. Dave's got the Four Oracles and the original AG&G Oracle, plus space for new "unofficial" oracles. I believe I'll be submitting some new unofficial oracles myself, come a day.

In a Wicked Age
sword & sorcery roleplaying

2008-05-06 : Fantasy lit and rpgs
Oh by the way, Eero Tuovinen is kicking Fantasy's butt on his blog, Game Design is about Structure. Two articles: Cultural subtext of modern fantasy gaming, followed by My hate-on for big swords.

If you ask me, he's doing a thorough and satisfying job.

2008-05-02 : I kill puppies for satan
When he was visiting the other day, Rob interviewed me for the Independent Insurgency about my first real game, kill puppies for satan. It was a fun interview, I like telling those stories. Give it a listen, it's episode 10.

2008-04-30 : Movies and TV
The Shield, Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Michael Clayton, maybe some more.

There may be spoilers. Avert your eyes.

1. I'm caught up on The Shield. It's kind of an uncomfortable feeling. For some reason I liked knowing that, out there in the world, there were people who'd seen the future.

Shane is a colossal cock-up. Vic too. My money's still on Ronny. He's more unlikeable the less he's opaque.

2. Dear Battlestar Galactica,

Who's a Cylon isn't a gripping mystery all by itself. When I know that there's one Cylon unaccounted for, trying to create suspense by casting suspicion on several characters doesn't work. That doesn't create suspense, it only tells me that it doesn't matter who the cylon is. If it could be any of them, it might as well be any of them, and I'm non-gripped.

Your friend, Vincent

3. Look, I already knew what was going on between Michael and Jan. I really didn't need to see it layed out, so uncharacteristically, in all its nakedness and filth. Generally The Office strikes such a sweet balance between making me laugh and making me cringe, but that episode was way too cringe-y.

On the plus side, when Rob was up we watched a couple episodes of Coupling, and while funny it showed just how unstudied The Office seems. Dinner at Michael and Jan's aside, what a good show.

4. Judd Apatow likes his characters and is good to them. The opposite of, oh, Alexander Payne, Neil LaBute, or Christopher Guest.

5. Oh yeah, The Office and Michael Clayton, what they reveal about suspense.

I watched a half dozen episodes of season 4 of The Office, then went back and watched the whole series from the start with Meg. Here we are in seasons 2 and 3, and I know full well what's coming between Pam and Jim in season 4, and the suspense is killing me anyway. Every barrier makes my heart sink, and I honestly fear that they'll never be okay.

In Michael Clayton, we see his car blow up in the first ten minutes. Nevertheless, when time catches up with that preview, and his car's about to blow up for real? Suspenseful anyway.

Why is that? Why is it that I can know what's going to happen, but not TRUST it?

2008-04-29 : GC08 - a Dirty Joke
Here are my caveman-dinosaur cartoons. The first five constitute my Game Chef 08 entry. The sixth, I didn't submit. Here's why I cut that one and not one of the others: I was perfectly happy dictating arenas of conflict to the designer, but I didn't want to dictate the reward cycle.

Now THAT's a joke with a target audience!

2008-04-23 : What does the protagonist want?
From Robin Laws' livejournal, Todd Alcott's livejournal. He talks about film. I'm posting this for my own future benefit, and I'm reading him about No Country for Old Men first.

2008-04-17 : IRON GAME CHEF
How could I not mention this here before today?

The Game Chef 2008 competition starts TOMORROW. Attention: TOMORROW.

This year it's called "Artists First!" Here's the deal. 30 or so artists submitted illustrations for rpgs that don't exist. That phase is done. Starting tomorrow, the design phase: choose an illustration set and design that game.

I submitted illustrations. They are VERY AWESOME and TOTALLY FUNNY. If you design a game using my illustrations, and I like it, and you decide to develop it post-contest, I promise additional illustrations, development help, promotion, and whatever else I can do for you. Lots of my fellow illustrators are promising the same.

It's an opportunity you'll be sad to miss. Join in!

Artists First! 2008 Game Chef

2008-04-14 : Interchangeable?
I say below that some rulesets are interchangeable. Is it true? I have this thing going on in my head when I say it, and it may be a poorly thought out thing, so here it is for examination:

They're functionally interchangeable. They may be aesthetically non-interchangeable.

I suspect that, in fact, I'm drawing a line there where none exists. That, come to examine them closely, every real aesthetic difference between rulesets is in fact a functional difference. That after all, underneath, nobody chooses one ruleset over another except for functional reasons.

Levi, I think this is related to your rules-as-toy thing.

Any thoughts?

2008-04-09 : Rules vs Vigorous Creative Agreement
I really dig the term vigorous creative agreement and I really dig Jim Henley's post about it. He sets me up (by association, not by name, and I don't hold it against him a bit, these are the circles I run in) to think that natural, emergent agreement is a poor substitute for functional formal rules. In fact I think the opposite.

Here's what I'd say: if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better.

(This goes along with my answer to Mo here about the Wicked Age's owe list, and maybe see also reward the winner, punish the loser.)

As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's - that's weak sauce. (*) No, what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject.

If you don't want that - and I believe you when you say you don't! (**) - then live negotiation and honest collaboration are a) just as good as, and b) a lot more flexible and robust than, whatever formal rules you'd use otherwise.

The challenge facing rpg designers is to create outcomes that every single person at the table would reject, yet are compelling enough that nobody actually does so. (***) If your game isn't doing that, like I say it's interchangeable with the most rudimentary functional game design, and probably not as fun as good freeform.

2008-04-06 : Demons are prowlin' everywhere, nowadays
Watched Sweeney Todd last night, the new Tim Burton one. I liked it fine.

While fightless, it's nevertheless Poison'd.

2008-04-01 : What I read on the plane
I read 3:10 to Yuma and other stories by Elmore Leonard, a collection of his Western short stories, on the way out, and I read No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy on the way back.

I preferred 3:10 to Yuma. I liked both quite a bit, but there's something just right about the size of Elmore Leonard's short stories. Each contains the right amount of setup for one single satisfying resolution. Straightforward but not simplistic and just big enough to contain a subtle twist.

They were interesting in contrast. Elmore Leonard wrote his in the fifties, and it shows in the morality of them. Not just in what's depicted, but in how the protagonists act, what they're capable of and what they're called to do. Cormac McCarthy, as we all know, creates a much uglier world, peopled by much uglier people. (Me, I figure that they live in the same world - Cormac McCarthy is documenting a change in fashion in fiction, not an uptick in real violence in the real world. That's how I figure it.)

3:10 to Yuma the movie doesn't follow the short story especially closely, and brings in elements from a couple of the other stories in the book, plus makes a bunch of stuff up outright. But I've never seen a movie more faithful to a book than No Country for Old Men. It's like, line for line almost, barely even elided.

As an aside, on the plane back they showed an episode of The Office (US), which I'd never seen an episode of before. It got me hooked. That's a funny show. It's like the mirror image of Pushing Daisies. It's built on moments of grace in the midst of awkward horribleness, vs Pushing Daisies' moments of awkward horribleness in the midst of grace.

The comments include SPOILERS LIKE CRAZY. Don't click in if you haven't read the books and seen the movies.