Despite initially to write ZERO entries, I ended up writing two submission to Game Chef.
Both are overly inspired by Coheed and Cambria. I AM A HACK.
Good news! Amidst Matt Wilson’s thread on Galactic, Joshua Newman has come up with with Weight Encumberance rules for Under the Bed, a fantasy storygame about the adventures of childhood toys.
Encumbrance in UtB is easy: if you’re Strong, you can carry everything! If you’re Weak, you can’t carry anything! If you don’t have either, you can carry 1.6 kilos of soft materials, or 2.2 kilos if it’s rigid. These are referred to as the Weight Index for that type of material. If you’re not sure which category something falls into, hire someone to be a GM for the duration of the argument. Throwing those materials is .67(Wi)9.8m^2/abs(45°-(angle thrown)). Your toy can deadlift 2.6Wi. If throwing a gun at Superman, he will inexplicably duck even though the bullets didn’t hurt him. If throwing a javelin (or javelin-like device, such as a gearshift), the distance is multiplied by 1.1. If you’ve converted UtB to GURPS, remember that 1 kilo is 2.2 pounds and 1 meter is 3 feet, 3.13 inches. Degrees remain the same. A hogshead is equal to 63 Imperial gallons Imperial, or 75.66 gallons US. When firing through more than 1.8 hogsheads of water (or similar liquids with a Viscosity Index of 1 — see card 37 for a table of Viscosity Indexes), the projectile will are you still reading this what’s wrong with you. Ricochet is negligible, multiplying its Damage Rating by .42 and multiplying its range by .995.
Chris points to SF0: An interface for San Francisco, halfway between an alternate-reality game and a larp and a situationist stunt and maybe something else. I’m going to bold his comment so taht you pay attention:
Now all we need is to combine progressive social action with myspace-like social whoring and we can begin to institute societal change for the better.
Meanwhile, Jane talks about “my so-called ubiquitous gaming” has an interesting itemization of the elements of “ubiquitous games”, including:
- It is a designed experience.
- It is embedded at least partially in everyday contexts and/or environments.
- It has a significant physical and material component.
- It is a distributed experience: distributed across multiple media, multiple platforms, multiple spaces.
Read them all!
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Now listening to: E. S. Posthumus. (You can listen to many of their tracks via their website, or get the CD at CD Baby.) It’s good stuff – it sounds polished and even a bit hollywood at times, but is quite compelling. It could certainly be a fitting soundtrack to an epic game of your choosing. Listen to the track “Tikal”; that’s going to be the opening theme for when I finally run a game of Galactic.
From ENWorld: A publisher looks for freelancers willing to work for 1c/word. Malcolm Sheppard (eyebeams) calls bullshit. Thank you, Malcolm!
My own hunch is that if a freelance deal is already paying this bad, why not just go DIY or pure amateur, at least until you can find someone willing to pay a fair wage? But I’ll admit I’ve got no experience freelancing myself, and merely don’t like seeing people screwed.
Paper Zombies! Politically Incorrect Games has put out a zombie-themed collection of its paper miniatures, available via PDF.
Game Chef 2006 is up and running, and it’s key theme is: TIME. Not in the abstract, but in terms of actual time in play. I think this is awesome, because that’s a huge real-world play input that should be considered as a primary design constraint. I think we’re going to get a lot of short-form storygames from this, and I think that’s cool.
A thread on the on the “Roleplayers of Color” mailing list was discussing the Wish lists for non-European cultural defaults for fantasy settings thread on Story-Games. Kynn Bartlett had a great idea for judging how to do this sort of fantasy right:
It has to be the myths OF THE CULTURES YOU’RE WRITING ABOUT, not the myths of OTHER PEOPLE ABOUT THEM.
A Mythic Africa has to be based on the myths people in Africa tell, not based on the myths that white-supremacist America has about Africa.
A Mythic Ancient Pueblo campaign (my current project) needs to be based in a frame of reference of that of the Southwest U.S. native peoples, not around that of European colonialism.
I really like this, because it’s a firm, commonsensical, practical grounding for enabling both cultural sensitivity AND remixing of various cultures into good gameplay. Wins all around!
Clay Shikry writes frequently about social software. Stewe Boyd comments on his latest:
In a nutshell, his thesis is that we have a moral responsibility
- those of us whose purpose is the development of social technologies -to explore the social contract between the users and owners of online interaction. More importantly, he calls us to a higher goal: to discover the most productive patterns for group self-moderation so that social tools can not only ‘work’ in a technological sense, but so that we can craft techniques that shape culture into positive channels.
Rather than spawning mobs, spawn ill people. Instead of weapons, have medicines. Instead of managing aggro, manage fever. Instead of armors, we have disinfectants.
Raph Koster suggests a MMORPG based only around healing, not violence. [Via BoingBoing]
(FYI, the title is the unofficial slogan of Chad Underkoffer’s Dead Inside.)