10 by 10 room

Did you know Sweden has a new political party? The Pirate Party! The new political party is devoted to pursuing policy that favors file sharing, P2P and privacy. (Check out this interview with the founder to learn more.)

Real-world politics aside: consider some set of accomplished pirates (and/or their landlubber allies) earning a pardon from the Crown, beginning a respected life as a noble – and then beginning to forment political action to further legitimize and liberate pirate-like activities from Governmental supervision. As if the entire industry of piracy had a new political layer to keep it safe from the Government’s own Navy’s! What would you do with such a game of pirates at court? How would a pirate band act differently, in this more dynamic political context? To a band of self-interested anarchist bandits, would they necessarily care?

From RPGNet: Greg Stolze on How much money should Industry types make?. His vision is a bit negative on the traditional gaming / distribution model, but he’s upbeat on how gaming as a hobby will endure and remake itself. He outlines a 5-step process, and here’s step 2:

2) Mass FLGS extinction. Some of them get hit by the asteroid of “we have terrible customer service and a desperately fragmented consumer base” while some evolve into birds by ditching RPGs and concentrating on TCGs, minis, DVDs and computer games.

I will take any and all reports of industry-death with several grains of salt! But Greg has shown to be firmly interested in trying alternate distribution methods, as his frequent use of the Ransom Model.

It seems that Penny Arcade is conflicted about an MMORPG based on Warhammer, a long-time favorite of RPG fans.

Okay, conflicted isn’t quit the word. Never understimate the power of unconstrained narration.

Paul Czege [via Nathan P.]:

The way to figure out what you want to learn is to figure out what truly interests you in the media you consume. All this stuff about making the medicine go down is me thinking about how my games work well in retrospect of having created them. I didn’t conceive of My Life with Master out of consciously wanting a tool for teaching how to resolve being controlled via suppression of self-esteem. I just couldn’t stop thinking about a game in which the player characters were evil henchmen.

Ben Lehman in ‘Who’s your Unteacher?’:

“Well,” she said, “what do you want the system to do?”

“I want it to force the players into hard choices where their knight has to bargain with a demon.”

“Well,” she said, “why not just do that?”

“oh.” I said.

I have a few game concepts (for example, my Noir Cyberpunk Tarot Exalted idea) that I’ve been thinking about, on and off. These two posts actually helped me figured out what some of my major concepts (for me: the Trump Cards) were really talking about, and that’s pretty enlightening.

I don’t know how I missed it the first go-round, but Vincent Baker and Clinton R. Nixon where interviewing each other, and started talking about their dream roleplaying group…

Clinton: I’d like to play a game of Dogs in the Vineyard with Thomas Jefferson, Mae West, Wyatt Earp, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce. Twain’s the GM, of course. Jefferson’s all “the-what-the-what” when he finds out what happened in the western US. “A theocratic governorship? Nonsensical fantasy!” And we all laugh, and Mae’s character shoots someone in the face and then she winks at me across the table.

Vincent: We’re playing My Life with Master. It’s me, Jesus, Salvador Dali, and Christopher Robin Milne (as an adult), with Michael S. Miller GMing. Jesus gets really into it, he’s all like “yessss masssster” and rolling his eyes wildly, but Michael makes Salvador Dali cry. Christopher Robin Milne OWNS the horror revealed.

Me? Dust Devils with Johnny Cash and some of his friends.

John Kim, on Vincent Baker’s blog:

And you know, when I look at people’s reactions to Dogs in the Vineyard or even Kill Puppies For Satan, I don’t see many people offended—judging by the threads on RPGnet or such. Vincent may get a clueless email or two, but most people just don’t care. The recent games people have gotten up in arms about are games like Blue Rose and Wraeththu. Guess why?

Context: Dogs in the Vineyard presents a sort of backward highly patriarchal society, but this was okay because we players are supposed to be in a position to judge it. (And also, the rough historical analogue did have this kind of patriachy.)

On the other hand, Blue Rose presents the trope of romantic fantasy, depicting a lot more gender / sexual equality than most fantasy. And yes, on several major fora, Blue Rose is held up as some oppressive tract, crushing down on the rights of the heterosexual.

Interesting, that.

From Seth Ben-Ezra, I present to you the utmost in horrors: Aztecs with Nukes.

It is, in fact, a chilling article. The author plays through the evolution of a warlike race in the popular Civilization strategy game series, seeking the domination of the globe. But faced with the actual possibility of defeat, the game presents him with a terrible and tempting choice.

From 20×20room: Game design as Process. The picture says it all…

But do read the full article for clarification. I’ll definitely be keeping this model in mind for planning future games.

From BoingBoing: 19th Century Romanian Vampire Slaying Kit being sold on Ebay!

Yes, it’s a hoax, but more importantly IT’S FRIGGIN’ COOL.

What I want to know is: why isn’t this statted up for the World of Darkness yet?

From the White Wolf LJ: The Violence Is In Your Voice It points to a rather crunchy discussion of depicting gritty & colorful combat, which is probably of use if you’re a major WW player currently. I found the post itself interesting:

Somewhere, here and there, I think each of the World of Darkness developers has written an example of how to use the Storytelling combat system to fuel and inspire your narration of action rather than dictate it. The Storytelling combat system gives you some particulars, but it doesn’t usurp the Storyteller’s voice for what a particular fight should look, sound or feel like. Don’t let combat rolls and successes tell you what to do. It’s your story. The system works for you. You decide what the numbers mean. You decide what four successes of firearms damage looks like in this fight, tonight.

On one hand, there could be a valid criticism that this puts of onus of depicting a gritty combat onto the Storyteller’s narration, rather than in the results of the system. (And I’d be concerned that some of this is chalking it up to the GM’s discretion to gloss over the less helpful results of the system in order to get the gritty combat results in the story.)

That said, this is a clear statement of what you should be expecting and contributing when interacting with the WW system, and in that respect it’s really helpful. WoD combat relies on a steady hand from the Storyteller/moderator, and playing without such a role will result in more irregular results in your stories.

Also, consider: “You decide what four successes of firearms damage looks like in this fight, tonight.” This actually is true in lots of games; for example, is it really worth considering what a Strength 7 really means in Sorceror (or how much you can lift with a 7d6 in Dogs in the Vineyard)? It’s good not to get caught up in looking for real-world analogues that aren’t there, when what’s really needed is a group consensus about how story power is reflected in the fiction.