Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Catching Up

The boiler engineer has just left. We've been without central heating and hot water since Thursday - the guy came out on Friday, but the holiday weekend meant no parts till today. After an hour and a half of fiddling, we have a working boiler again! I'm going to finish this post and then enjoy the luxury of a really hot, deep bath.

Some other stuff that caught my eye recently :

Steve Jackson Games' brush with US law enforcement has been deemed worthy of Trivial Pursuit.

Stolen from a few friends, then editted for politeness :

If you read this, even if i don't speak to you often, please post a memory of me. It can be anything you want, it can be good or bad, just so long as it happened.

Also doing the rounds again is the five question interview I mentioned before. If anyone wants to ask questions, leave them in the comments or e-mail me. In the meantime, I'm going to pick on the odd question others have been asked, just 'cos I fancy answering them...

Who would be in your ideal roleplaying group? (Dave asked Ben)

People I do not know! For me, an ideal role-playing group would be one where everyone (GM and players) was sparking off everyone else, moving the plot into interesting, exciting, unexpected, possibly amusing, new territories. I've occasionally seen games that get close, but they always collapse back into either too much reliance on rules, or the GM producing plot cos no one else is being interesting (or the GM is ego tripping). Perhaps the ideal is impossible...

B5 or SG-1 which do you think is best ? (Asked of Dave by someone I know not)

I'm picking on this 'cos the answer seems so bleeding obvious to me. Stargate was a decent film, but the TV series has added practically nothing, especially given the length of time its run. Like modern Star Trek, there's no character development, no depth, and plot development consists almost entirely of "new macguffin" or "new aliens with no depth". I've only seen about half of the episodes to date, and never felt I've missed anything. Contrast that with Babylon 5's characters that develop, change and surprise, and genuine story arcs where missing a few episodes left you struggling to catch up. B5 even managed an alien race that felt like something more than "humans with bumpy heads and limited emotional range".

In Stargate's defense, it is considerably more watchable than Star Trek...

What's your favorite RPG and why? (Kai asked Dave)

I have no favourite RPG, mainly cos I have no interest in rules. Rules have their uses - a certain randomness provides interest to games, numbers provide a framework for everyone to imagine their own abilities within the game. But any rule that takes more than a few seconds to apply is too complex, and getting in the way of the story. So systems have little appeal for me - if they're complex, I'll ignore the rules until they become simple, which leaves little room for simple ones to shine.

I do, however, favour settings, pretty much regardless of rules. Glorantha would be the obvious one (though I care little whether the rules used are Runequest, Heroquest, or rock-paper-scissors) but also Tekumel, Talislanta, and Sky Realms of Jorune. From which you can safely assume that mythic, weird, humourous settings appeal to me, preferably with enough room for interpretation, ambiguity, and surprises. I've got a certain nostalgia for both Middle Earth and the Warhammer world as portrayed in the old WFRP books - though I'm not convinced I'd find either nearly so interesting if I'd first encountered them now rather than as a kid.

The anti-thesis of all this is the sort of game which comes with books detailing "people of this type act and think like this". All those White Wolf clan books for example. I mean, I can see that you could (and should) play those games treating those as guidelines and stereotypes, but no one ever seems to, leading to dull, cliched characters populating dull, cliched games.

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