Games Blog

BBC NEWS | Technology | Reprieve for Greek gamers
Now they’ve issued a “clarification” to the police telling them only to prosecute gamblers, and not any other type of gamer.

The new guidelines are being distributed to all police stations in Greece in an effort to reassure internet café owners and tourists.

“The installation and use of games in public or privately owned spaces with no connection to paid services, and their usage, will in no way incur debts by or on behalf of the user, the management or any third party,” say the guidelines.

Is this a Greek Tragedy, or a Greek Farce?

This week’s Game Wish from Turn of a Friendly Die

What do you think about cross-gender characters (i.e., men playing female characters and women playing male characters)? What about GMs playing them as NPCs?

I don’t think I do female characters very well. I try to avoid the obvious cliches, and end up playing characters that are effectively blokes in drag. As a player I prefer to play male characters, as a GM my female NPCs (at the moment in my PBeMs and PBMBs I seem to be playing as many female NPCs as male) tend to be a bit two-dimensional. You’ll have to ask my players how well they come over.

I have one or two memorable experiences of playing female PCs. There was the case in an on-line Call of Cthulhu game where I was led to believe that Karl Tolhurst (him again) had been magically sex-changed, and I started posting as ‘Karla’. Turned out that it was an experimental memory transfer gone wrong, and I was one one the GM’s NPCs who believed she was Karl, having access to his memories. I also played a female computer geek with no social skills in a convention game run by the same GM.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Greek net cafes face ruin
Looks any celebrations regarding the demise of the Greek ban on computer gaming were premature. The Taliban-like Greek government has now appealed against the court throwing out their insane law as unconstitutional, and are now using underhand tactics to enforce it – such as confiscating computers from cybercafes and then setting a trial date months into the future, by which time their victims will financally ruined whatever the outcome of the court case might turn out to be.

Game Over for Greek games ban.
Looks like the Greek supreme court has thrown this stupid law out as unconstitutional. At least someone’s got some sense. Thanks to AJ on Dreamlyrics for the link.

Let’s go back into the world of make-believe after all this political stuff in news.

Today’s Game Wish from Turn of a Friendly Die is about character backgrounds.

How do you like to build character backgrounds? Do you think they are important or not? Do you prefer to write an elaborate background, or fill in later? Do you find character quizzes like the one in the ADRPG or related exercises like the round of questions in Everway character development to be useful?

For a long-term campaign (including PBeMs and PBMBs), as a player I like to detail the character’s back-story as much as I can. As a GM I also prefer the players to detail the back-story; it both gives me plot hook ideas, and shows me that they have read the setting material and understand my game world. Karl Tolhurst of Umlaut is a classic example here.

Another good example would be Javin, my character in a long-running RuneQuest campaign a few years back. We used ‘Central Casting: Heroes of Legend’ to come up with the back-story of son of a boat-maker who took up river-piracy following the Lunar invasion of Pavis.

Yet another would be my first on-line character, a GURPS Cyberpunk techie who’d been framed for causing a rail disaster and was disowned by family and friends, who proved a wonderful case of an ordinary person caught up in a situation where he was way over his head.

This isn’t to say I’ve always developed the background in advance; I’ve had some good develop-in-play characters as well, although that’s not my preferred mode. I also occasionally find a character working out differently in play to how I’d envisaged him before the game started, especially personality-wise, which sometimes requires retrospective changes.

You want bizarre conspiracy theories? Which encompass Middle Earth and Celene Dion? Try this one on Dreamscribe, written by Neil Marsden.

This week’s WISH from Turn of a Friendly Die.

Sometimes in my games, I try to set a mood, only to have a joke or out-of-character chatter/commentary ruin it by going off on a tangent or breaking everyone into laughter, occasionally including me. I have pretty much given up on trying to get my players to be serious all the time – after all, when I’m on the other side of the screen, I’m not always serious either. Plus the game is a social, fun event, and people should not feel forced to be serious or in character all the time. (I’ll save that for LARPers)

That said, how do you keep the mood? And once lost, how do you try to bring everyone back? Can you? Is it even possible?

And what do you do with that one player who is always the first one to crack a joke and break up the tension you’ve built to so carefully, no matter how many times you’ve asked/warned him/her not to do that?

A difficult one. I’ve GMed a game where the out-of-game chatter took up more time than the actual game, which was very frustrating, to say the least. The last time I played with that group we got the OOC chatter out of the way first, only trouble was that took up two entire days before we started gaming! Not ideal.

The games I’ve GMed have tended not to be highly mood-intensive anyway, perhaps that’s my problem. A lot of the gaming I play is weekend-long sessions with people I only meet two or three times a year, where the purpose is as much social as gaming. And many games are ffairly light-hearted, comedy-style games in the first place.

One thing I have considered, though, is a pun box. Like a swearbox, but for puns. I hate bad puns.

Have you ever seen or met someone — in person, on TV, in a movie, or whatever — who made you think “Oh my goodness, that’s my character!” Who was it (if you know), and what were the similarities?

In a word, no. I don’t know whether that means I don’t watch enough TV and movies, or my characters aren’t well enough defined.

However, there is one player (who shall be nameless) in my Dreamlyrics message board game for whom all her characters remind me of Dr. Who’s assistant, Leela. “Can I kill him now, doctor?”.

According to this news.com article, the Greek government has banned all electronic and computer gaming of any kind, ostensibly as part of a law to outlaw gambing machines.

Not only does this mean that tourists risk heavy fines and even imprisonment for playing something as innocuous as a gameboy, presumably this makes it illegal to play in any PBeMs or message games from Greece.

I don’t know the background to this law, or much about Greek politics, but it seems to me that any politicians who could pass a law like this without any kind of public consultation is either too stupid or too evil to be allowed to remain in public office. Was this law passed as a result of some hysterical moral panic led by the Greek equivalent of the Daily Mail?

It may be that this law will eventually be struck down by the European Court of Human rights.

Let’s make Scott even more jealous.

Friday – I used up all my positive dice karma playing Ogre, in which I rolled so many sixes in the early part of the battle that the other poor guy didn’t stand a chance! First time I’ve ever played Ogre, which is Steve Jackson Games‘ wargame of futuristic tank combat

RPG of the day was a game of GURPS Transhuman Space game run by Phil Masters, in which I got the nerdish techie with no social skills called “Derek” (And that’s not the first time a convention GM has given me a character like that!)

Then there was the friday night Pyramidian dinner at Belgo Centraal in Covent Garden, arranged by Harvey Mills and attended by Phil Masters, Ken Hite, John B, Jan Hendriks, Constantine Thomas, Ian McDonald and myself. At least two people came armed with cameras, I’m worried that one or both might have scanners, so pictures of me might end up on the net. Great to meet Ken Hite, though lines like “Pre-industrial genocide is a lost art” preserve his scary reputation. (Have you read the introduction to Suppressed Transmission?)

I won’t say why I associate Belgo Centraal with the Jerry Springer Show, it’s a long story.

Saturday – Morning saw me play in the first ever game of Star Munchkin to be played in the UK. Much the same rules as Munchkin, and just as funny. This one is a parody of SF cliches rather than of Dungeons and Dragons, with monsters like Captain Quirk (who comes in peace), Bottle Bottle (who follows you around and whines), and Great Cthulhu himself. John Kovalic’s artwork is up to his usual standards. And I killed Bottle Bottle!

Finally I played in a demo game of Nobilis. Nobilis is an interesting RPGs, with PCs of god-like power, each representing a concept which can vary from “The Hunt”, “Spirals” (two examples from the game) to “Aircraft” or “Mauve”. Each PC represents the embodiment of that concept, and can do just about anything possible to something to which that concept applies. Probably not really to my taste in games, but very good for players that are good at improvising on the spot. Still, it’s fun for a change of pace.

To sum up? It’s larger than last year, with four floors rather than three. There were two irritating things; one was that the demo hall closed at 6pm because the demo areas were intermingled with the traders; this caused one game to have to hurriedly relocate. The second irritant was the somewhat overpriced catering. Overall, a good con, plenty of games, a good turnout of SJG’s Men In Black. Bumped into quite a few old friends from previous cons, such as Pyramidians Trotsky and Jo Ramsey, and Dreamlyrics members AJ and L’Ange.

Now I’ll have to read all the RPG stuff I’ve bought; Decipher‘s new Lord of the Rings RPG, The Kaiin Players Guide for the Dying Earth RPG, and finally Barbarian Adventures and Orlanth is Dead for Hero Wars.