10 by 10 room

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.

“You are all game designers working on the first draft of a new BigCo Games RPG, based on the setting involving the Void Ghost Rebellion against the cyber-gnostic theocracy, in an attempt to establish the Third Republic.” What a cyber-gnostic theocracy is or what happened to the first two republics—they are named to specifically to evoke a mood and inspire the other players’ creativity.

Chad is insane.

Chart explaining how Exalted Combos work:

I think it’s cool.

Folk were talking about possibly adding “roleplaying bonuses” to Dogs in the Vineyard”, but the consensus was that the Social Contract among players was where a problem was really at. DannyK’s interpretation:

The price of a stripped down, narratively driven system like the DitV system is that the system doesn’t provide as much protection against asshats. That’s common to a lot of Forge-baked games. You could narrate your character god-modding and killling everybody n Chicago in hand-to-hand combat in a PTA game, and there’s nothing but the contempt of your fellow players to stop you.

Does that make them bad games? Of course not. It just means you have to be careful who you play them with. “Will allow you to play with asshats” is not a very good design goal for an RPG.

But really, Brand reminds us:

Of course, this is the same with D&D.

GM: “The orc comes swinging his sword at you, what do you do?”

Player: “I tell him I like toast”—player pushes forward a natural 20 and grins.

GM: “The fuck?”

Player: “I like toast with a natural 20. That’s critical toast liking.”

GM: “Right… the orc ignores your toast liking and kills your ass. Go roll up a new character.”

Of course there’s still a need to put more structure onto the rules / pre-existing social contract, rather than straining the ad hoc social contract further. But dude: toast.

“6. If you’re touching a wall, everything counts for double.”

“In order to keep Ball from devolving into pure chaos, each game is assigned a Ball King (or Queen, these folks aren’t barbaric, you know).”—Chris describes a Strange Place, and takes that metaphor to NEW HEIGHTS.