News Archives: May 2005

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Aye-Aye

Merlin sent me a link to the pagan hierarchy (who looks down on who). Great fun, and in my experience just about too.

Went to see the latest Star Wars movie yesterday. Probably the best of the prequels. Partly for the stunning opening sequence. Partly because while the plot is hugely dodgy and the dialogue incredibly poor, at least they were barely given screen time. Claire marked it down for lack of cool costumes and aliens, which is probably fair. Still looked very poor compared to yesterday's excellent Doctor Who...

This morning was spent gardening, mainly dealing with the hedges. Then off to the zoo for the afternoon. Numerous babies and signs of babies soon to come. ("Look mummy, he's getting a piggy back.") But the high point for me was definitely the Aye-Aye. One of the world's rarest primates, a lemur about the size of a cat, with the face of a mangy, anorexic teddy bear, orange eyes, Spock ears, the bushiest tail in the world, and a hand like a Swiss army knife. I've seen them before - most notably at London zoo. There you go into a dark tunnel, with a window along one side. You stand there quietly, cursing under your breathe at the idiots who come in shouting "What's in here? I don't see nuffink! Let's go see the [insert animal name]." Eventually, there's five minutes peace and quiet, and a dark shape darts around the room on the other side of the glass, feeding before the next bunch of idiots scare it off.

Edinburgh's had a pair of Aye-Ayes since about Christmas. I'm very fond of them, partly cos they're weird, partly cos they're nervous and shy and hard to see. Every time we go to the zoo I sit and stare at their dull enclosure in the corner, sometimes making out the curve of a back or tail in their nest boxes. Normally, I'm the only one to spend much time watching them. Today, there was a small group in front of their window, mainly girls aged (I guess) about eight to twelve. Surprised, I went and peered over their shoulders, and there was an Aye-Aye, in full view. One of the girls very patiently explained how the keeper had put down food and enticed the lemurs out, by banging on the nest boxes... The Aye-Aye was standing in the middle of the cage, patiently using its middle finger to pull what looked like thick porridge out of an orange skin. I called Claire over, and she took some photos. We spent about ten minutes watching the Aye-Aye. After eating, it came over to examine a log, maybe two feet from us, then climbed up to the nest box where its mate slept, then climbed into its own box, with only a few inches of tail to show it existed at all.

Posted by graham @ 08:58 pm

Thursday, May 26, 2005

More New Role-Playing

In case you missed it, this is a follow on to yesterday's post. Reading it first might help.

Brief summary of the state so far :

Problem One : RPGs encourage "several main characters involved in conflict with outside forces" whereas much of the rest of fiction is based on "several main characters involved in conflict between them".

Problem Two : Players often can't make scheduled games because of other commitments.

Proposal One : Make choosing and completing goals central to character creation and experience. Goals are how you get cool skills. (With the intent that many goals should be the source of conflict between players.)

Proposal Two : Choose a setting that imposes a hard, real-time limit on games. In this case, I'm going for a dimensional rift that spits the PCs back out after a fixed amount of time.

And in case it helps :

Definition One : Skill : Anything that allows the PC/player to influence the NPC/game world/GM, whether for good or bad.

On to the new stuff...

Problem Three : GMs must be active participants in the creation of game worlds, players need not be.

AKA GMs need to work too hard. There's a couple of issues here. Firstly, if I have to do all the work of creating a storyline, interesting characters, twists and turns, setbacks and reversals, and all the players do is wander through the plot rolling dice and being entertained, what do I get out of it? Sure, being creative is fun in and of itself, but frankly there's more rewarding outlets for solo creativity than an RPG. The great strength of role-playing is that it is a group activity. Think about your favourite sessions - how many of them were great because a player or five were actively being imaginative? I'll guess most, if not all.

Secondly, who the hell has the time? As we get older, we get busy, and a complex campaign needs player input to be logistically possible. (This is one of the reasons I primarily run Gloranthan games - years of exposure mean that I know the setting well enough that I can run a vast range of games with little or no prep work.)

So Proposal Three : What's beyond the rift is another dimension. The rift doesn't always lead to the same place (although it can revert to an earlier area). The basic area is pretty formless, but can be shaped by intelligent minds. (Doing so is a skill, probably several.) Some areas the players will visit have already been shaped by other minds (see below), some not. To create a basis for scenarios, the dimension will contain macguffins that are desireable in this world, and the PCs will make allies and enemies on the far side, which will provide additional scenarios.

Proposal Four : The GM will typically play one NPC. Entities beyond the rift fall into three classes : Humans, Non-Humans, and Minions. The UN thinks it has found a unique rift. It is wrong. There are others, some more stable. They are controlled by private individuals, corporations, or single governments. These provide the Human opponents. Non-Humans are natives of the other dimension, typically much stronger than Humans, and with motives that are suitably alien. Minions, on the other hand, are to an extent unreal. They exist as extensions of the major NPC. Some are literally formed from the stuff of the other dimension. (And if the PCs can learn how...) Others have a real existence, but are followers/mooks.

Once again, comments very welcome!

Posted by graham @ 07:49 am

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

New Role-playing

Its been a while since I posted anything. Brief summary is BBQ : good, Germany : good, illness either side of Germany : bad. Don't hold your breath for the long version... Also, I doubt I'll bother filling in the books survey that was doing the rounds recently. I really have nothing interesting to say - I own a lot of books, last book read was "Lies, Inc" by Philip K Dick... Doesn't really inspire, does it? Perhaps more fun would be for others to answer the question "If you could recommend any one book I should read, what would it be and why?" I'll try to answer this question if anyone asks it on their blog, and will even try to get round to reading any books recommended here.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about role-playing, and why it sometimes doesn't work. Vaguely, this is leading up to the idea of developing a new system/setting that should encourage a better game. Since I'm never going to find the time to do it on my own, I thought I'd throw some thoughts out to the world at large, and see if something collaborative might be more inspirational. So, comments and contributions on the following are actively encouraged.

First off, the problems I'm trying to address. These, of course, reflect my own experience and biases. Your mileage will vary.

Problem one is the kind of stories most RPGs encourage. Consider a typical movie, tv show, book... You'll have a small number of major characters (four to six doesn't seem unreasonable) and the plot will typically centre on conflict and resolution between these characters. There are exceptions - mainly in the sub-genre of "Lord of the Rings rip-off". In RPGs, however, the number of characters are roughly the same, but the conflict is between these characters as a group and "the rest of the world" (in some sense), represented by the GM. This can lead to "us and them" conflicts, passive player participation in the GMs own storylines, and/or too much work for the GM. I find this is often damaging to the game - one side of the conflict is portrayed by a single person, while the other gets the attention of several people. Attempt anything more complex (three or four sided conflict, multiple conflicts running at once...) and the result is GM insanity.

Problem two is an age thing. As we get older, commitment to the weekly game session starts to waver. The GM becomes faced with either running with missing players, or struggling to find a date that suits everyone's schedules. If games were more episodic, this would be less of a problem. A missing player means an equally missing character. However, typically RPG sessions end for time reasons rather than plot reasons, at least in the open ended games I prefer. Games which end with a statement of "time to go home - I have work in the morning. We'll pick it up here next week" are common. Episodic games require either heavy plotting (more work for the GM) and players who won't get side-tracked (yeah, right). Or they need a definite time limit - three hours real time, the episode ends, even if you don't achieve everything...

Inspiration to solve these problems comes from freeforms. (Side note : these games are referred to as both "LARPs" and "freeforms". I prefer the latter, as it saves confusion with the rubber-sword brigade. Freeforms are the ones which use rock-paper-scissors to resolve conflict.) While freeform campaigns are as prone to problems as any other (and in my experience are often worse...) one off games work very well. (This may have something to do with the quality of people writing the freeforms I've played in - take a bow, guys...) I believe this is partly down to the natural time limits imposed - events happen to a schedule, the whole game ends after four hours or whatever - and partly due to conflict being entirely being between players - no such things as an "NPC" here.

So, proposals. Firstly, lets look at character generation. In most (all?) current RPGs, characters are defined by skills - by what they can do. Fair enough, so are the characters we are trying to emulate. Buffy can kick vampire ass, MacGuyver can build stuff out of junk, Spock can raise a sarcastic eye-brow. But typically, that's it. Oh, we're invited to write an interesting background, or to give our character a goal or three, but there's little support for doing so. HeroQuest, for instance, has a space on the character sheet for "goal", but the published scenarios largely concentrate on Greg's favourite red-head's goals, not our characters. So lets put "goals" at the centre of the game.

Lets use a build point system for character generation. Characters get a very small number of points to start with (enough for one or two weak skills) but get more for choosing goals and secrets. We'll include a list of example goals (with values) to get people started. The goals will be generic, and the GM will work with the players to add the details, working to set up conflicts with other players. Hopefully this will be fairly easy - two players choose "hunting for the macguffin" are obviously in conflict, as are the ones who choose "Dark secret : fathered illegitimate child" and "Dark secret : doesn't know who father is". For bonus points and extra interest, players can choose "unknown secret". This is something they don't even know about themselves. The GM can then use this to fill in the remaining gaps - so if no-one chose "Dark secret : fathered illegitimate child" this can become someone's "unknown secret".

Experience is tied to goals. Everytime you complete a goal (successfully or otherwise) or a secret becomes generally known, you get points to spend equal to that goal's value. You can spend these on new skills, subject to one rule - for every point spent on skills you must choose one point's worth of new goals and/or secrets.

Hopefully that takes care of the conflict problem, but what about episodes? Proposal two : The game always takes place somewhere that imposes a natural time limit. There's many examples of this - an embassay party, on board a ship travelling somewhere - but for reasons I'll come back to later, I want something a little more super-natural. So, a rift in space-time has been discovered, and access to it is controlled by the UN security council. The PCs are explorers, each representing a different country (built in conflict there...) At the start of each session, the assembled explorers pass through the rift, spend a short period on the far side, before being forceably returned to their starting point.

What's on the far side of the rift, and how do the PCs interact with it? That's for another time...

And once again, comments very much encouraged!

Posted by graham @ 09:47 am

Friday, May 6, 2005

Cary Again

Just heard from the vets. The blood tests are almost all negative. There's a slight elevation of one enzyme that might indicate a thyroid problem, but there's no other signs, and he's younger than normal for such a problem, so almost certainly not. There is definitely no problems with liver, kidneys, bone marrow, etc. We're to keep an eye on him for more frequent fits, signs of heart problems (lethargy mainly) or a swollen thyroid. But basically epilepsy looks to be the problem, and it shouldn't cause him any harm (beyond the attacks themselves). Broadly good news, I guess.

Posted by graham @ 12:22 pm

Thursday, May 5, 2005

Cary

I'm just back from the vets. Cary's blood test was complicated slightly by a vet who thought she could take him out of the box herself - he escaped and tried to hide under the table. They've shaved part of his front leg and taken blood from there. So far he's been cleared of diabetes - we should get the full results tomorrow evening. At the moment he's eating turkey treats and complaining about the bandage on his leg, but otherwise seems fine.

Posted by graham @ 08:54 am

Sunday, May 1, 2005

Updates

Cary probably suffers from epilepsy. He's got a blood test on Thursday to rule out a couple of other possibilities. There's little that can be done, but other than the slight distress should cause him no problems. Cisco, meanwhile, is probably allergic to fleas. Despite not seeing a flea on either cat for a long time, this means we need to be more religious about flea control. Naturally, this is a source of great distress to all concerned.

Edinburgh's Beltane festival (last night, of course) was very odd. Primarily, I was reminded of morris dancers, although possibly not for the obvious reason. Okay, topless, red-painted morris dancers. I doubt I'll bother going again, although Dave & Kai's binding ceremony was quite moving.

In case anyone doesn't know, next Saturday is my birthday BBQ. If you're reading this, its doubtless safe to assume you are invited. Current plan is to start the fire around 6, be ready to cook about 7. Bring yourself, pleasant company, booze and food. Don't worry about cards or presents. How this fits in with watching Doctor Who, I'm not sure, but I suspect we'll work something out...

Posted by graham @ 05:29 pm

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