I'm going to take you back in time several days and give you a nifty new job. You're in charge of the news at NBC, and you receive the package with the video footage mailed by Cho Seung-Hui, the guy who recently killed a large number of people at Virginia Tech. So do you put any of this on the air?
Well, there's no question that it's newsworthy. It's one of the biggest stories in the country right now, people are very interested in knowing why, and some of the answers to that question are in your hands at this very moment. Ratings will be good if you show it, and they say the public has a right to know.
On the other hand, by showing it, you're enabling him to achieve one of the main things he set out to do, which was to get his ideas out into the public eye on a national scale.
Apparently, just about everybody who runs television news would show it, because that's exactly what they did.
Now I'm going to give you a not-so-nifty job. You're a troubled individual with an agenda, and you don't much care whether you live or die anymore, but you've got something to say that you want the whole country to hear. You make a video of yourself stating your case, mail it to a major TV news outlet, and gather your guns and ammo. You can get on national television. All you need to do is kill enough people before they take you down or you have to kill yourself. After all, it worked for somebody else before.
The quality of the ideas is irrelevant as long as the troubled individual believes in them. I know that the people at NBC turned the footage over to the authorities first, as was appropriate, but they could've just broadcast a story about the contents without actually showing it. But hey, it wouldn't have been nearly as dramatic and visually interesting, which is true. Sleep well, those of you who made a decision to show the footage, because I'm sure you're going to have an incident to answer for down the line.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Brainstorm
I've had a couple of ideas all gel together over the last two weeks or so. I've never felt a need to design my own game system, and yet that's exactly what I now find myself doing. I'd read a couple of things that led me to question what I really want in a game system, and realized that what I've been doing for many years is bending existing systems into something workable for me, but not necessarily optimal for my purpose.
I started with an existing system, and thought I could get what I needed by modifying it only slightly. Then I thought what I had was a combination of three different systems, but realized that I was actually incorporating elements of several others as I continued beyond character generation and into how the players would function together. I won't really know how good or how original this is until I try it with some players, but I'm excited by what I have so far. My Firefly campaign group seems to be willing, and we can always go back to GURPS if it doesn't work out, so I should be finding out soon enough.
I started with an existing system, and thought I could get what I needed by modifying it only slightly. Then I thought what I had was a combination of three different systems, but realized that I was actually incorporating elements of several others as I continued beyond character generation and into how the players would function together. I won't really know how good or how original this is until I try it with some players, but I'm excited by what I have so far. My Firefly campaign group seems to be willing, and we can always go back to GURPS if it doesn't work out, so I should be finding out soon enough.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Lamps and More Lamps!
I dream of them now... Pairs of them, matching! Free standing lamps! Table lamps! Brass lamps! And I remember how it all started...
My wife and I plan to move, and she's introducing me to the concept of "staging". Apparently you can't just clean the place up and fix a few things to sell your house anymore; you have to market it. She's been doing her homework, as she usually does, and has learned that you can't expect people to use any imagination when they look at your home. You're supposed to remove anything distinctive and make the place look fairly bland so potential buyers can imagine themselves living in it. I'm willing to take her word for it, since she's usually right about these things.
And so she's been plotting out sufficiently bland furnishings to buy and uses for them once we've moved into the new place, so they're not a waste after they've served the initial purpose. She came home late last week with two new matching lamps and explained where she plans to put them during the staging process and where they're going to go in the new house we'll eventually buy. We don't really have room for them now, so they've been occupying space on our couch some of the time, and the kitchen table the rest of the time. It's mildly inconvenient, but no big deal.
Then early this week, we came home from work and there was a box on the porch, which turned out to be another lamp, and my wife was very angry about this. Why? Because there were supposed to be two of them. I asked her about what we were going to do with these lamps, and she did in fact have answers. A day or two later, the other lamp showed up. These new lamps went immediately to their designated positions, but the ones they replaced now occupy a small additional table in the living room that my wife assures me is temporary. We have a bit less room now, but again, it's not so much a problem as to be any real issue.
I was working on Good Friday, but my wife wasn't. I came home to find a new mat out in front of the door, so I knew she'd been shopping, and immediately realized that this was likely to be trouble. I came in the house and observed that the room had, in fact, been changed in several ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the ways in which the room was different was that there were several more lamps. There was a new free standing floor lamp by the temporary table, and two more new lamps in boxes on the couch, next to the first two additions that were still sitting there. There was a new small table near the front window, but that was the only new thing in the room other than more lamps. I didn't say a word, but looked at my wife, who looked a little defensive and said "Well, two of them are for Dad's place".
She claims that it's merely a coincidence that she's been finding all of these lamps that fit into her plans at a good price over a short period, and that she has a lot of other plans for the staging process. I'm going to have to take her word for it and hope that this isn't some unique form of insanity. At least our house will be well lit...
My wife and I plan to move, and she's introducing me to the concept of "staging". Apparently you can't just clean the place up and fix a few things to sell your house anymore; you have to market it. She's been doing her homework, as she usually does, and has learned that you can't expect people to use any imagination when they look at your home. You're supposed to remove anything distinctive and make the place look fairly bland so potential buyers can imagine themselves living in it. I'm willing to take her word for it, since she's usually right about these things.
And so she's been plotting out sufficiently bland furnishings to buy and uses for them once we've moved into the new place, so they're not a waste after they've served the initial purpose. She came home late last week with two new matching lamps and explained where she plans to put them during the staging process and where they're going to go in the new house we'll eventually buy. We don't really have room for them now, so they've been occupying space on our couch some of the time, and the kitchen table the rest of the time. It's mildly inconvenient, but no big deal.
Then early this week, we came home from work and there was a box on the porch, which turned out to be another lamp, and my wife was very angry about this. Why? Because there were supposed to be two of them. I asked her about what we were going to do with these lamps, and she did in fact have answers. A day or two later, the other lamp showed up. These new lamps went immediately to their designated positions, but the ones they replaced now occupy a small additional table in the living room that my wife assures me is temporary. We have a bit less room now, but again, it's not so much a problem as to be any real issue.
I was working on Good Friday, but my wife wasn't. I came home to find a new mat out in front of the door, so I knew she'd been shopping, and immediately realized that this was likely to be trouble. I came in the house and observed that the room had, in fact, been changed in several ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the ways in which the room was different was that there were several more lamps. There was a new free standing floor lamp by the temporary table, and two more new lamps in boxes on the couch, next to the first two additions that were still sitting there. There was a new small table near the front window, but that was the only new thing in the room other than more lamps. I didn't say a word, but looked at my wife, who looked a little defensive and said "Well, two of them are for Dad's place".
She claims that it's merely a coincidence that she's been finding all of these lamps that fit into her plans at a good price over a short period, and that she has a lot of other plans for the staging process. I'm going to have to take her word for it and hope that this isn't some unique form of insanity. At least our house will be well lit...
Monday, April 02, 2007
PoliCon
For those who don't already know what it is, PoliCon is a nifty idea. It started out as a birthday gift from one friend (Don Corcoran) to another (Joe Poli, thus PoliCon), and has become an annual event. It's been a little different every year, but essentially what happens is that Don contacts the best GMs and roleplayers he knows and puts them all in one place for a couple of days. Because it's invitational, the quality of GMing and playing tends to be a higher level than most conventions, and everybody wants to bring their best to the party. There are no bad GMs or players, because if there are, they probably won't be there next year. Tastes tend toward indie games, but there are no hard and fast rules about what the GMs can bring to the table.
I usually offer In Nomine (though last year it was GURPS Dimension Travel), and that's what I brought again this year. Unfortunately for me, the con was smaller than usual this year, which meant that more events failed to run, and mine was one of them. I'll probably shake things up next year and bring "Dance of Pairs" for Sorcerer. I suspect choosing In Nomine was part of the problem, in that I've run a lot of angels vs. demons scenarios for many of these same players before. It's not that they don't enjoy them; it's that something new has more appeal than something they've played before, even if they think it's likely to be good.
And so, I had the chance to try out Michael S. Miller's game in development, "By the Stars". I don't want to give too much detail here since the game is, after all, still being changed as playtesting progresses. In short, the most interesting thing about "By the Stars" is that there's no room in the game for wallflowers. If you try to sit on the sidelines, somebody is gonna grab you and pull you in. There's just no getting around it. One common problem with roleplaying games is what some people refer to as the "ten minutes of fun packed into four hours" problem. That is, in most RPGs, you spend a lot of time waiting for the good parts to happen. In "By the Stars", it's mostly good parts. The resolution mechanic is still a little rough (this is a game in development, after all), and when playing an RPG, I personally like to know more about what the other characters are doing than you can in "By the Stars". This is not a criticism of the game; it's simply a characteristic. It's almost more like a LARP than a conventional RPG. I look forward to trying it again some time.
In the last slot, I signed up for Liz Teichman's "Shadow of Yesterday" event. This is one of those indie systems that I've heard good things about, but never get to try because it's not being run a lot in the first place, and I'm usually GMing something else when someone is running it. Unfortunately, she started out by committing one of my cardinal sins of GMing, which is to have the players create their characters at the table. Unless character generation is ridiculously easy and a key part of the system you're playing, I strongly dislike when GMs do this. Anyway, after a slow start to the scenario itself as well, Liz brought her usual horror elements into the picture and things suddenly got a lot more interesting. I particularly enjoyed the ending, where each of the players had a tough choice to make for their character. Only one of the three who made the dangerous choice survived it, which is a Good Thing. It's not credibly dangerous if everybody survives it. As for the system itself, I don't think it brought anything of particular interest to the scenario. It could have been run with any decent system. It wouldn't be fair for me to comment on the setting itself, as I understand that Liz was bringing a lot of her own spin to the setting, so I can't give an informed opinion of what was the official setting and what was Liz' version of it.
I'd planned to do more playing this year than in past years, so in spite of being disappointed in not having the opportunity to run my own game, I can say that PoliCon was an appropriate start to my convention year in the sense that I did fulfill that part of my plan, and had a good time doing it. And naturally, it's giving me the itch to GM again. :-)
I usually offer In Nomine (though last year it was GURPS Dimension Travel), and that's what I brought again this year. Unfortunately for me, the con was smaller than usual this year, which meant that more events failed to run, and mine was one of them. I'll probably shake things up next year and bring "Dance of Pairs" for Sorcerer. I suspect choosing In Nomine was part of the problem, in that I've run a lot of angels vs. demons scenarios for many of these same players before. It's not that they don't enjoy them; it's that something new has more appeal than something they've played before, even if they think it's likely to be good.
And so, I had the chance to try out Michael S. Miller's game in development, "By the Stars". I don't want to give too much detail here since the game is, after all, still being changed as playtesting progresses. In short, the most interesting thing about "By the Stars" is that there's no room in the game for wallflowers. If you try to sit on the sidelines, somebody is gonna grab you and pull you in. There's just no getting around it. One common problem with roleplaying games is what some people refer to as the "ten minutes of fun packed into four hours" problem. That is, in most RPGs, you spend a lot of time waiting for the good parts to happen. In "By the Stars", it's mostly good parts. The resolution mechanic is still a little rough (this is a game in development, after all), and when playing an RPG, I personally like to know more about what the other characters are doing than you can in "By the Stars". This is not a criticism of the game; it's simply a characteristic. It's almost more like a LARP than a conventional RPG. I look forward to trying it again some time.
In the last slot, I signed up for Liz Teichman's "Shadow of Yesterday" event. This is one of those indie systems that I've heard good things about, but never get to try because it's not being run a lot in the first place, and I'm usually GMing something else when someone is running it. Unfortunately, she started out by committing one of my cardinal sins of GMing, which is to have the players create their characters at the table. Unless character generation is ridiculously easy and a key part of the system you're playing, I strongly dislike when GMs do this. Anyway, after a slow start to the scenario itself as well, Liz brought her usual horror elements into the picture and things suddenly got a lot more interesting. I particularly enjoyed the ending, where each of the players had a tough choice to make for their character. Only one of the three who made the dangerous choice survived it, which is a Good Thing. It's not credibly dangerous if everybody survives it. As for the system itself, I don't think it brought anything of particular interest to the scenario. It could have been run with any decent system. It wouldn't be fair for me to comment on the setting itself, as I understand that Liz was bringing a lot of her own spin to the setting, so I can't give an informed opinion of what was the official setting and what was Liz' version of it.
I'd planned to do more playing this year than in past years, so in spite of being disappointed in not having the opportunity to run my own game, I can say that PoliCon was an appropriate start to my convention year in the sense that I did fulfill that part of my plan, and had a good time doing it. And naturally, it's giving me the itch to GM again. :-)
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