I still have my hands abundantly full with home, family, and work issues (I just spent all of a three day weekend working on house stuff), but most people reading this don't really need to know all about that. I promise more interesting stuff in the near future, but for now, here are a few bits and pieces of current personal events.
I finished "A Dance of Pairs" for Sorcerer, at least well enough for playtest. That was actually a couple of weeks ago. I don't need to run it until at least March 2008, so playtesting can wait for my life to settle down at bit.
I'm almost done with a major professional education course for work. It's actually a series of four sets of seven books each, and each book is roughly 175 pages, so it's a lot of material. I'm almost at the end of the second to last book, so there's only one full book to go. I expect to reach the end within the next three weeks. After I finish, I get to use the letters SCLA after my name in my work, and I get a trip to Las Vegas in October. It's a significant accomplishment, and means that I officially know a lot about the law as it relates to insurance. Frankly, I'd rather be doing my creative work, but I have to do some kind of coursework for my job, and this was a good one to take on.
I just finished "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson in my sparse pleasure reading time. I'd seen the Charlton Heston movie "The Omega Man", which is based on it, but the source material is almost always better than the movie, and this one is no exception, though I have to give Mr. Heston a lot of credit for bringing the character across very much like he is in the book. They changed the ending, as they almost always do for movies, and the original is always better. The Powers That Be in Hollywood just can't stand downer endings, but let's face it, sometimes it's the most powerful and emotionally correct ending for the story, and it'd be better left that way. "I Am Legend" was a pleasure to read. You'd think a story about the daily activities of the last man on earth wouldn't be all that interesting, but it truly does deserve classic status, and I might have to scare up more of Matheson's work.
I've been watching movies or TV when I've run out of energy for house cleaning (passive entertainment is easier than creative writing), so I have some reviews I want to do, but that's an entry for another day.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Twenty Four Hours Plus
My father-in-law had a sudden health issue over the weekend, which resulted in our sitting in the hospital emergency room for hours. The bottom line result is that we (myself, my wife, and her sister) were all awake for over twenty four hours straight. Not fun.
I understand that an ER must prioritize, and that a relatively stable situation (as his ultimately was) is a low priority from their perspective, but frankly, they didn't appear to be busy, and not much was happening. We were informed at about 7 AM that the doctor on call had been notified of the situation and would be there as soon as possible. As of shortly after 10 AM, six hours after we'd arrived, there was still no doctor available. One of the nurses told us that this particular doctor has been known to be slow to respond when he was on call. Eventually, with the situation stable and my father-in-law in the hands of the nurses, we all went home to rest, and the doctor called for more information at almost 12 noon, eight hours after we'd arrived.
Again, I understand that they have to prioritize, and our exhaustion didn't help our patience, but geez, that time frame seems more than a little ridiculous to me.
Between the house and family health issues (this isn't the only one, but this isn't the time to go into it), again, creativity will just have to wait.
I understand that an ER must prioritize, and that a relatively stable situation (as his ultimately was) is a low priority from their perspective, but frankly, they didn't appear to be busy, and not much was happening. We were informed at about 7 AM that the doctor on call had been notified of the situation and would be there as soon as possible. As of shortly after 10 AM, six hours after we'd arrived, there was still no doctor available. One of the nurses told us that this particular doctor has been known to be slow to respond when he was on call. Eventually, with the situation stable and my father-in-law in the hands of the nurses, we all went home to rest, and the doctor called for more information at almost 12 noon, eight hours after we'd arrived.
Again, I understand that they have to prioritize, and our exhaustion didn't help our patience, but geez, that time frame seems more than a little ridiculous to me.
Between the house and family health issues (this isn't the only one, but this isn't the time to go into it), again, creativity will just have to wait.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Making My House Boring and a Dream
As part of the staging process, we have to make our house more conventionally attractive. In a word, boring. :-)
I've packed away the little plush Cthulhu that was perched on a globe, ruling his own little world. I've packed away my books with more, um, colorful titles. I've packed away my funky gargoyle statues, and my demon skull with horns (nicknamed "Basil"). It's all gone away to our handy little storage area, not to be seen for at least several months.
One of the few concessions to our own taste is a fair amount of Asian flavor in the decor. Frankly, it'd be hard to clear it all out, and it's as close to conventional as we get on our own, so we're going with it.
It's amazing how much we've cleared out, and yet how much there is to go. This is going to take a while.
I had a strange dream last night. I was climbing a steep mountain alone at night, with no sign of people around anywhere. I eventually came to a road, which led to a school building. The school was all lit up, and there were parked cars surrounding it. I walked to the school and went in, finding that there was a high school girls' basketball game going on. Well, it was a girls' game, except for the fact that my friend Nathan was playing on one of the teams, and nobody seemed to question that a thirtysomething-year-old man was playing. After the game was over (I think Nate's team won, but not by much), I was having trouble finding my wallet, and hung around looking for it for a while, remembering that my wife would be mad as hell because I'd just lost my wallet recently (in dream world, not the real world), and doing it again wouldn't go over well. I think I found it eventually, though I don't remember for sure as I'm writing this. Then I left the school and went back down the mountain. The time of day had miraculously changed to daylight as I left the school. When I reached the bottom, I met my wife at a sort of carnival location, which didn't seem to be open. There were posters everywhere, and not one of them was in the English language. Several were in Russian, and others seemed to be in Chinese, though I couldn't know for sure. We were all by ourselves there, and I don't know why. Then I woke up. I'm not sure what any of it means, but the part where Nate was playing on a high school girls' basketball team cracked me up.
I've been crazybusy with packing up the house and a rough week at work, which is why I've been quiet on the blogging front lately. The only reason this got written is because I was doing it while watching "Lost" on TV. Hopefully it won't be so long until the next post, as I've got a lot going on right now.
I've packed away the little plush Cthulhu that was perched on a globe, ruling his own little world. I've packed away my books with more, um, colorful titles. I've packed away my funky gargoyle statues, and my demon skull with horns (nicknamed "Basil"). It's all gone away to our handy little storage area, not to be seen for at least several months.
One of the few concessions to our own taste is a fair amount of Asian flavor in the decor. Frankly, it'd be hard to clear it all out, and it's as close to conventional as we get on our own, so we're going with it.
It's amazing how much we've cleared out, and yet how much there is to go. This is going to take a while.
I had a strange dream last night. I was climbing a steep mountain alone at night, with no sign of people around anywhere. I eventually came to a road, which led to a school building. The school was all lit up, and there were parked cars surrounding it. I walked to the school and went in, finding that there was a high school girls' basketball game going on. Well, it was a girls' game, except for the fact that my friend Nathan was playing on one of the teams, and nobody seemed to question that a thirtysomething-year-old man was playing. After the game was over (I think Nate's team won, but not by much), I was having trouble finding my wallet, and hung around looking for it for a while, remembering that my wife would be mad as hell because I'd just lost my wallet recently (in dream world, not the real world), and doing it again wouldn't go over well. I think I found it eventually, though I don't remember for sure as I'm writing this. Then I left the school and went back down the mountain. The time of day had miraculously changed to daylight as I left the school. When I reached the bottom, I met my wife at a sort of carnival location, which didn't seem to be open. There were posters everywhere, and not one of them was in the English language. Several were in Russian, and others seemed to be in Chinese, though I couldn't know for sure. We were all by ourselves there, and I don't know why. Then I woke up. I'm not sure what any of it means, but the part where Nate was playing on a high school girls' basketball team cracked me up.
I've been crazybusy with packing up the house and a rough week at work, which is why I've been quiet on the blogging front lately. The only reason this got written is because I was doing it while watching "Lost" on TV. Hopefully it won't be so long until the next post, as I've got a lot going on right now.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Fluid the First
We used my new Fluid rules for the first time for last night's Firefly campaign session. As might be expected, results were mixed. On the positive side, the rules did what they were supposed to do, which was result in a very free-flowing story and simple conflict resolution. A lot happened in the session, though the effect was somewhat mitigated by the players being unfamiliar with the rules and therefore not 100% sure what they could and couldn't do. A couple of the players took the ball and ran with it, adding new NPCs and places, as I'd hoped. Others weren't as comfortable, and played more conservatively. No surprise there, since some of them hadn't played anything like this before. I found it particularly interesting that two of the players who'd never done anything like it before were the ones who did the most with it.
On the negative side, the card-based resolution got some mixed reviews. Several players suggested that having multiples of a card could outweigh a single higher card, as in poker. All of the players agreed that true poker-style hands were unlikely to work, since it's not unusual for someone in a conflict to have a three or four card hand. Strictly speaking, it seems to me as though that doesn't have to be a problem; it'd be easy to have the rule be that flushes and straights don't become available unless you have at least five cards (though that makes having five cards significantly better than having four). We agreed that we'll allow pairs, three-of-a-kind, and four-of-a-kind (in that order) to be better than a single ace during the next session and see how that works.
My original idea of having players not re-shuffle, but use one deck of standard playing cards for each character all of the way through to the end, didn't go over well. The idea was that all players would, in effect, have the same amount of good/bad cards in the long run, though there would be luck in the timing of when those cards came up. Most of the players felt that it was impractical to keep the same deck split between used/unused cards between sessions, and they'd prefer to just restart with each new session.
We also used "hero points" or "karma", or whatever you want to call it (I'll probably use "plot points"), which means that each player had a small pool of points they could use to get a re-draw, and a player could be rewarded with more points for contributing something especially fun. This got almost no use during this session, but that was largely because the players were drawing well and just not losing a lot of conflicts, so I'll want to continue some form of this for a while before abandoning the idea. I wanted to enable players to give each other points (like Prime Time Adventures' "fan mail"), rather than relying on the GM to do all of the rewarding for good play, and we worked out an arrangement we'll try in the next session. There will be more points available to the players than I'd originally intended, but they will be less powerful, enabling the player to gain more cards or value from the cards he has rather than a re-draw. I personally favor more cards, as I like the uncertainty involved in a player not knowing for sure whether or not another card will help. One of the other players (that's you, Nate) would prefer to be able to spend points and know that the result will help him, because he cared enough about this particular conflict to spend the resources on it. I can see both sides of it, as you'd hate to spend five hard-earned points only to get a poor draw on every card and have it mean nothing. But I like the drama of knowing that you have to beat the NPC's king with an ace or some kind of pair, and not knowing for sure whether or not you'll get it. It might be best to experiment with both versions and see what works best.
I wasn't surprised that we ended up talking about story structure after the session, since the system was specifically set up to enable the players to set up their own (or not), though I was surprised by some of the nature of that conversation. Strictly speaking, there was no less structure in this session than in most RPGs, but some of the players expressed concern that sessions with this system would be a little too free form, since you have no way to know what elements any given player might try to introduce (there is a mechanism that prevents them from adding anything they want, but I digress). I'm considering the idea of having a "spotlight character" for each session (or the spotlight might follow the player to a reasonable stopping point of some kind, transcending sessions), giving one particular character more control temporarily, and the others would go into each session knowing that they're either going to direct it or support someone else's direction. One of my original concerns before the game had been that everybody would want to pull the story in their personal direction. Then I realized that that might be okay, since that pull could generate drama, as long as the conflict didn't get personal and out-of-game. A larger problem would be if nobody wanted to take the lead, since there's not much that could be done to resolve that problem, but I think it'd be a rare group that would be quite that passive.
One question that emerged was "why not just play Prime Time Adventures?", especially since we're modeling the campaign after a TV show and I'm borrowing several concepts from PTA anyway. The answer is that I don't want to be restricted to PTA's structure. The actual model is intended to be a mosaic novel, not a TV show.
I'm also borrowing a lot from Sorcerer, so why not just use the Sorcerer system as it exists? That's a better question, because in spite of the use of cards, Sorcerer is more of an influence than PTA, especially in character generation. Still, Fluid uses cards instead of dice, uses a "hero point" system to allow those results to be modified, gives players much of the control over scene framing and narration, and adds more modifiers to the characters' functionality in conflicts. It's probably too much of a stretch to call it a Sorcerer variant, and I'm reluctant to give up some of those additional elements just so I can call it a variant.
There was very little combat (the only fight lasted a grand total of two rounds!), so we didn't get to test that aspect of the game as much as I would've liked. Also, we only got into one situation where multiple characters wished to act at the same time, and that turned out to be a moot point as things actually played out, so that still needs testing as well.
We agreed that the result was sufficiently successful that we'll try it again for the next session or two, with a few changes. I expect the next time to be better, since we'll all have a better handle on what to expect and how things will work. We ended the session by agreeing on how we'll start the next time, enabling everyone to show up prepared with some context-appropriate ideas, which should make a huge difference.
On the negative side, the card-based resolution got some mixed reviews. Several players suggested that having multiples of a card could outweigh a single higher card, as in poker. All of the players agreed that true poker-style hands were unlikely to work, since it's not unusual for someone in a conflict to have a three or four card hand. Strictly speaking, it seems to me as though that doesn't have to be a problem; it'd be easy to have the rule be that flushes and straights don't become available unless you have at least five cards (though that makes having five cards significantly better than having four). We agreed that we'll allow pairs, three-of-a-kind, and four-of-a-kind (in that order) to be better than a single ace during the next session and see how that works.
My original idea of having players not re-shuffle, but use one deck of standard playing cards for each character all of the way through to the end, didn't go over well. The idea was that all players would, in effect, have the same amount of good/bad cards in the long run, though there would be luck in the timing of when those cards came up. Most of the players felt that it was impractical to keep the same deck split between used/unused cards between sessions, and they'd prefer to just restart with each new session.
We also used "hero points" or "karma", or whatever you want to call it (I'll probably use "plot points"), which means that each player had a small pool of points they could use to get a re-draw, and a player could be rewarded with more points for contributing something especially fun. This got almost no use during this session, but that was largely because the players were drawing well and just not losing a lot of conflicts, so I'll want to continue some form of this for a while before abandoning the idea. I wanted to enable players to give each other points (like Prime Time Adventures' "fan mail"), rather than relying on the GM to do all of the rewarding for good play, and we worked out an arrangement we'll try in the next session. There will be more points available to the players than I'd originally intended, but they will be less powerful, enabling the player to gain more cards or value from the cards he has rather than a re-draw. I personally favor more cards, as I like the uncertainty involved in a player not knowing for sure whether or not another card will help. One of the other players (that's you, Nate) would prefer to be able to spend points and know that the result will help him, because he cared enough about this particular conflict to spend the resources on it. I can see both sides of it, as you'd hate to spend five hard-earned points only to get a poor draw on every card and have it mean nothing. But I like the drama of knowing that you have to beat the NPC's king with an ace or some kind of pair, and not knowing for sure whether or not you'll get it. It might be best to experiment with both versions and see what works best.
I wasn't surprised that we ended up talking about story structure after the session, since the system was specifically set up to enable the players to set up their own (or not), though I was surprised by some of the nature of that conversation. Strictly speaking, there was no less structure in this session than in most RPGs, but some of the players expressed concern that sessions with this system would be a little too free form, since you have no way to know what elements any given player might try to introduce (there is a mechanism that prevents them from adding anything they want, but I digress). I'm considering the idea of having a "spotlight character" for each session (or the spotlight might follow the player to a reasonable stopping point of some kind, transcending sessions), giving one particular character more control temporarily, and the others would go into each session knowing that they're either going to direct it or support someone else's direction. One of my original concerns before the game had been that everybody would want to pull the story in their personal direction. Then I realized that that might be okay, since that pull could generate drama, as long as the conflict didn't get personal and out-of-game. A larger problem would be if nobody wanted to take the lead, since there's not much that could be done to resolve that problem, but I think it'd be a rare group that would be quite that passive.
One question that emerged was "why not just play Prime Time Adventures?", especially since we're modeling the campaign after a TV show and I'm borrowing several concepts from PTA anyway. The answer is that I don't want to be restricted to PTA's structure. The actual model is intended to be a mosaic novel, not a TV show.
I'm also borrowing a lot from Sorcerer, so why not just use the Sorcerer system as it exists? That's a better question, because in spite of the use of cards, Sorcerer is more of an influence than PTA, especially in character generation. Still, Fluid uses cards instead of dice, uses a "hero point" system to allow those results to be modified, gives players much of the control over scene framing and narration, and adds more modifiers to the characters' functionality in conflicts. It's probably too much of a stretch to call it a Sorcerer variant, and I'm reluctant to give up some of those additional elements just so I can call it a variant.
There was very little combat (the only fight lasted a grand total of two rounds!), so we didn't get to test that aspect of the game as much as I would've liked. Also, we only got into one situation where multiple characters wished to act at the same time, and that turned out to be a moot point as things actually played out, so that still needs testing as well.
We agreed that the result was sufficiently successful that we'll try it again for the next session or two, with a few changes. I expect the next time to be better, since we'll all have a better handle on what to expect and how things will work. We ended the session by agreeing on how we'll start the next time, enabling everyone to show up prepared with some context-appropriate ideas, which should make a huge difference.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Happy Buddha Day!
Well, actually it was yesterday, but I was fighting through a minor computer problem last night and couldn't post this then. I hadn't known there was such an occasion until I saw it on a calendar and did a little research.
So, I went vegetarian for the day, didn't kill anything (as far as I know) and did some extra meditating and spiritual reading. It wasn't much, but it'll do. I don't think I could be a vegetarian permanently. My sandwich today (which included meat) tasted heavenly after only a single day without meat.
I've been very busy with "house stuff" of late, which is why I've been so quiet with the blog. I certainly have more that I'd like to say, but lack the time to say it. Meditation practice continues to be extremely beneficial to me, and I'll have a lot more about that another time.
This upcoming Sunday should be my first Firefly session running my own system (tentatively called Fluid), and I'm very excited about it. Creating my own game system has never especially been on my list of ambitions, but when it seemed to fall into place, I couldn't help but at least try it to see how well it works with real live people playing it. I'm mentally prepared for the heights of success or the most abject possible failure, and curiously, I'm fine with it either way. If it rocks, I've created something wonderful. If it stinks, I've gotten the concept out of my system, and I wasn't that attached to the idea of creating a system in the first place.
So what's so different about Fluid? I suppose the best way to say it is that traditional RPGs are based on their roots in wargaming in many respects. I took the approach that RPGs should be based on how fiction is created instead. It's not the first time somebody has played with that idea (Mike Miller's With Great Power and Prime Time Adventures are just two prior examples), but it might be the first time someone has tried to do something quite as free flowing as this, hence the name Fluid. The result is supposed to feel like an improvised verbal mosiac novel, like the "Wild Cards" books associated with George R. R. Martin. I'll have to post some commentary on the results afterward.
So, I went vegetarian for the day, didn't kill anything (as far as I know) and did some extra meditating and spiritual reading. It wasn't much, but it'll do. I don't think I could be a vegetarian permanently. My sandwich today (which included meat) tasted heavenly after only a single day without meat.
I've been very busy with "house stuff" of late, which is why I've been so quiet with the blog. I certainly have more that I'd like to say, but lack the time to say it. Meditation practice continues to be extremely beneficial to me, and I'll have a lot more about that another time.
This upcoming Sunday should be my first Firefly session running my own system (tentatively called Fluid), and I'm very excited about it. Creating my own game system has never especially been on my list of ambitions, but when it seemed to fall into place, I couldn't help but at least try it to see how well it works with real live people playing it. I'm mentally prepared for the heights of success or the most abject possible failure, and curiously, I'm fine with it either way. If it rocks, I've created something wonderful. If it stinks, I've gotten the concept out of my system, and I wasn't that attached to the idea of creating a system in the first place.
So what's so different about Fluid? I suppose the best way to say it is that traditional RPGs are based on their roots in wargaming in many respects. I took the approach that RPGs should be based on how fiction is created instead. It's not the first time somebody has played with that idea (Mike Miller's With Great Power and Prime Time Adventures are just two prior examples), but it might be the first time someone has tried to do something quite as free flowing as this, hence the name Fluid. The result is supposed to feel like an improvised verbal mosiac novel, like the "Wild Cards" books associated with George R. R. Martin. I'll have to post some commentary on the results afterward.
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