Where Worlds Collide

Karen Cravens has some responses to my earlier entry on her Gamehawk development weblog.

(To which I say “Harrumph, I just said that (in different words, granted) on GAMERS, you plagiarist.” Heh.)

That’s pretty much my intention… the Gamehawk forums (and so far, “forum” is the most general-purpose word I can come up with) are already mailing lists, they’ll be displayable in webboards (or blogs; the only real difference is display format), available via NNTP (technically they already are in the Firehawk version, if I turn it back on) and rss/Atom feeds. All that lacks in Gamehawk is, well, me testing it and getting it online. Which I should do instead of blogging.

Yes, on the surface the Group->Topic structure of the mailing list maps nicely onto the Weblog->Category structure of weblogs. But to muddy the waters a bit, for my Archive weblog I’ve used the Category for Chapters. I also notice a lot of bloggers have very large numbers of categories, and then archive all entries for each category on a single page. My use of categories on Where Worlds Collide is probably atypical, in that I’ve got a small list of very broad categories each covering what some people would put in completely different weblogs.

The only thing lacking is figuring out how to work the Wiki in easily. A Wiki’s fine for hierarchical stuff, but a blog is sequential. I’m inclined to make forum entries (posts, blog entries/comments, whatever) a special case for the Wiki… it knows that a given post is groupname/topicname/message-sequence, and it could refer to stuff that way just as easily. I’m inclined to say you could assign a WikiWord to a particular post, in addition. That way you can “name” chapters of the game, or whatever.

Wikis are a different hovercraft of eels. I actually think a Category field would be a good addition to the functionality of the Wiki; it would allow you specify whether a WikiWord was a piece of cultural background, a location, or a PC or NPC character sheet. Could you simply use the subject line (WithAllTheSpacesRemoved) as the WikiWord? What about duplicates? Should they be treated as followups? Or rejected?

On the other hand, you couldn’t edit them… could you? I suppose you could. You could opt to re-send the email (or not, for proofreading edits). The NNTP side would pose a slight problem, since the message-sequence wouldn’t (shouldn’t, mustn’t) change

I’d recommend the way the Dreamlyrics nntp server handles these; when the user updates an existing web post, the nntp interface treats it as a new post referencing the original, then deletes the original.

So users who had read the original post, then pick up the updated one see this:

Thread Start
+-Original Post
  +-Updated Post

While a user who didn’t perform an nntp post between the original posting and the update would see:

Thread Start
+-Updated Post

On the Kalyr wiki, some thoughts on Crime and Punishment in Kalyr.

Another gaming blog hits the Blogosphere. Gamethink is a group blog of gaming professionals, lead by Bruce Baugh.

Game WISH 95 talks morality:

How many colors do you like in your gaming? Do you prefer four-color games? Or should game morality be black and white or shades of grey, and if the latter, how many? Are “evil” characters acceptable? Does your preference depend on genre? Do your preferences affect the genres you like?

I’m going to talk about ‘Black and White’ versus ‘Shades of Grey’, simply because I don’t know what’s meant by ‘Four Colour Morality’ (I’m just not into the Superhero genre at all, either in comics or in gaming; I find too many of the tropes too ridiculous)

I live a strong sense of morality in games, but I strongly believe that it should come from the characters’ own motivations, not something hardwired into the setting.

I strongly dislike the idea, prevalent in some juvenile forms of hack-and-slash games, of crudely black and white settings, where one side is defined as good, and the other is defined as irredeemably evil, so that they can be slaughtered without mercy. To me, that’s not really morality at all, that’s complete amorality. There is no difference whatsoever between the black hats and the white hats when it comes down to the way they actually act. Evil orcs slaughter innocent elf children, so the elves are entitled to do the same back to the orcs. Such racial genocide has no place in any game I care to play in. Sadly, the mindset is all too common in the real world, but that’s another subject for another post.

I prefer ‘shades of grey’ games where players are occasionally forced to make difficult moral choices. It can still be a ‘good vs evil’ setting; anything from a group of angels in In Nomine to a band of allied soldiers fighting in World War two. The moral conflict can come from decisions on just how far the end justifies the means. Is it ever justified to harm innocents to prevent a greater evil? Even ‘PCs as monsters’ games can have some morality; the one and only time I’ve player Vampire all the PCs decided not to drain the mortals we’d just defeated, but only drink enough blood not to cause lasting harm.

My own campaign setting, Kalyr, is a world with multiple conflicts, with one or two pretty evil groups, but no group that’s unambiguously good. It’s occurred to me that the most recent one-shot convention scenario I’ve run could, with a few minor adjustments, be run from the other side. It featured a clash between the Kandar technology guild and a bunch of human revolutionaries. The difference between them is no more than the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter.

As for ‘Evil PCs’ games, I haven’t really played much in that vein. The only one I can think of was a demonic In Nomine game at GenCon UK back in 2000. But that game was played strictly for laughs, culminating in a gunfight with Tony Blair’s bodyguards at a village fete in Devon. A complete contrast to the intense morality play of the last Angelic In Nomime game I played, a couple of Stabcons ago.

To sum up, black-and-white, bad; shades of grey, good. Because that’s the way the real world is.

A big PBeM post this time, so big that I’ve had to split it into three when it came to updating the archives. The Funeral of Jaldaric covers the events of the evening, while To the City! covers the journey the next morning. I’ve doing this as a travelogue, since the players posting the most are playing characters warped in from Earth, who know next to nothing of Kalyr.

It’s interesting how its making me consider aspects of the economy and technology of my fictional world that I hadn’t previously paid much attention.

There is turmoil awaiting them in the city, as you can see in Tanala’s Nemesis.