SF and Gaming Blog

I’m not sure of the actual date because I no longer have the archives of the very early posts to hand. But I do remember that I posted the first actual game moves to the CompuServe RPGames forum in mid-May, 1996.

That means the online game has been running for ten years. Much longer than I’ve owned the kalyr.co.uk domain.

The old CompuServe forum is long since gone, and for long and complicated reasons I’m not going to go into the game has bifurcated into two parts, one of which runs on The Phoenyx, the other on Dreamlyrics.

There are currently about a dozen players in the two games, and at different times there have been over thirty different player characters. Sadly none of the first six from May 1996 are still playing, but I’ve still got one active PC who’s been playing since the first few months.

Being an online game, players are scattered all over the world; I’ve currently got players from Britain, the US, Canada, Germany and Israel. I’ve actually met just four of them face to face.

“In many ways, I’d say the divide between rules-lite and rules-heavy is how much help the game thinks you need to decide if a grenade launcher can open a locked door.”

Originally from a poster called “pawsplay” somewhere on RPG.net, quoted from the Fudge Mailing List.

After the of doom and gloom of last months Out of the Box, Ken Hite speculates on the likely future of the RPG hobby

One silver lining of the sclerotic distribution system is that more and more fans are apparently coming out to shows to buy products; likewise, the community-building powers of the Internet help drive convention attendance as friends who know each other only from forums or LiveJournal plan meetups at shows. I’m not sure what kind of hobby we’ll have in another ten years — hundreds of boutique “indie” games and a strong network of local conventions anchored by regular D&D tournaments? That sounds oddly familiar — maybe we’re heading back to the 1970s. But hopefully, with better hair.

Interesting that a lot of the new ‘indie’ games seem geared towards one-shots, typical of convention gaming, rather that the extended campaigns of yore.

Well, my booking for Stabcon at the end of June has just been confirmed, and the realisation that it’s only two months away means I need to start thinking whether or not I’m going to run anything. I’ve got one Fudge Kalyr game I ran several Gypsycons ago, and I’m also tempted to dig up “El Tigre and the Pyramid of Destruction”, which makes a great convention game. Alternatively there’s the Ümläüt Call of Cthulhu game I’ve had lurking sqamously in my head for the last few months.

I’m not sure about the DnD tournaments, though. After Gypsycon, I’ve come to the conclusion that DnD isn’t for me any more.

Update: Ken has posted a lengthy followup on his livejournal, closing with this quote:

The “better hair” thing is just the triumph of hope over experience.

If the age profile of Stabcon is anything to go by, Ken subscribes to the “Less is More” philosophy

Gypsycon 2006 was the eighth annual face-to-face meetup of the Dreamlyrics community, held at the teeming metropolis of Pidley, Cambridgshire, where just over a dozen people met up for four solid days of gaming. Although we only meet up once a year now, it’s the nearest thing I have to a regular gaming group. The format is to run day-long one-shots, typically running for up to ten hours in length. Usually there are two or three different games taking place each day.

Neil Marsden and the Chaos Spiky Bits

Friday’s game was a Neil Marsden’s Warhammer 40K game, the first time I’ve played in one of his Gypsycon games, although I’d heard very good reports of his games of previous years. The system wasn’t based on any GW mechanics, instead Neil adapted the very simple d6-based Powergame system.

While my mind has associated Warhammer 40K with the adolescent-targetted marketing of Games Workshop, which seemed to emphasise munchkinism, grossness and Chaos Spiky Bits, Neil managed to turn it into a more grown-up setting, with PCs as regular soldiers rather than Imperial Space Marines. It started out as a straightforward military SF game, but we eventually ran into genestealers, and finally chaos entities. We defeated the chaos monster with the help of the noble sacrifice of one PC, who jumped sword-first down the things throat saying “I know I’m going to die, but I’m going to take this thing with me!”.

Neil makes the players care about NPCs. A nice touch was when one of the NPC grunts died in a firefight, and he had another NPC grunt retrieve his last letter to his mother before we left his body.

Stonehenge! Where the Demons Dwell!

Saturday was an Ars Magica freeform, run by Andy Montgomery with a little help from Mark “L’Ange” Baker. This took the same general format as last year’s freeform, set around the seven-yearly Stonehenge Tribunal, but this time Andy had created his own scenario. Plot threads involved a murdered Jewish sorcerer, multiple disputed sources of Vis, questions about a missing mage from Anglesea who may or may not have been done away with by the covenant leader, the fate of some covenants that had fallen out of contact, and disturbing dreams about tortured faeries.

There were three phases of the game. First there were several hours of freeform information gathering, conspiring and deal-making. At the very end, my Covenant head collared me, most pissed off about me concealing my membership of an organisation called “The Seekers”, despite my protestations that I would have freely told him if only he had been bothered to ask!.

Then came the formal banquet, an in-character meal (Someone who shall be nameless commented that potatoes were anachronistic, to which I responded with ‘Just pretend it’s a turnip’). Finally we had the formal part of the tribunal, with votes on more than a dozen issues.

After the game, we had a debriefing, where HH revealed that he’d managed to conceal the fact that it was he who’d been torturing faeries with cold iron.

But I don’t have that many d6!

Sunday’s game was D&D, and reminded me why I generally don’t play DnD any more. When I roll 36d6 of damage, and my reaction is not “hey, kewl”, but “Oh bollocks, I’ve got to add up all those bloody numbers to find out whether or not I’ve managed to kill the thing”, then you can tell DnD isn’t the game for nowadays. Still, the other players seemed to enjoy it well enough; I think I’ve just grown out of number-heavy systems as a player.

Attack of the Unholy Moonbats

Monday was a modern-day conspiracy game run by Steve “Abbadon” Morley, a playtest of Steve’s own system, intended as a rules-lite system for realistic and deadly modern-day combat. The PCs were a group of British covert agents working for MI6. Our first mission was to eliminate an Al-Queda training camp in Pakistan; the premise behind this one was that Al-Queda had formed an unholy alliance with moonbat neo-Anarchists and was training the sort of idiots that fill out the ranks of the Animal Liberation Front as terrorists. Our heroic PCs slaughtered the whole lot of them. Then we were thrust immediately into another mission; a hostage situation at a pub in Newcastle. This time things didn’t quite go to plan. We did managed to rescue most of the hostages, and took some of the terrorists alive. Unfortunately we failed to spot that the terrorists had set up several webcams around the pub, and were webcasting the entire thing.

While our mission itself did go rather pear-shaped, we still managed to give Steve a lot of useful playtesting feedback!

The only trouble with Gypsycon is that we have to wait a whole year for the next one. Hopefully I’ll be running something next time.

Bankuei gives us a scary diagram that’s supposed to represent dysfunctional RPG play. While I’ve played and even GMed the odd one-shot that hasn’t quite come together, I’ve never encountered anything quite as as horrid as the things he seems to be describing here. I guess I’ve never been in any RPG group that’s imploded messily due to a clash of personalities or fundamental disagreement on direction. Model railway clubs, yes. Gaming groups, no. Anyone RPGed with an egotisic Wing Commander?

By comparison, previous posts gave us equivalent diagrams for “incoherent” and awesome high Forgeosity games. And he does need to make a contribution to the charity of his choice for the use of the word “Awesomeosity”.

Update: Amadán has some further thoughts on the subject

The long-awaited web-based front-end for The Phoenyx is now in Beta. The existing email system will remain unchanged, but the not only will the archives be a lot more user-friendly, but you’ll be able to post messages threough the web front-end as well. Hopefully this will be good news for the sorts of people that prefer web forums to mailing lists.

As I said, it’s still in beta format at the moment, so there are likely to be a few bugs, especially formatting glitches.

First, there’s a new Fudge Web Forum. The mere existence of such a thing is controversial to some people, who fear it will cannibalise traffic from the existing Fudge Mailing List. This is probably a justified fear, but I’m hoping that it will instead attract a new audience of the ranks of people that love webforums but loathe mailing lists. If this happens it might raise the overall profile of Fudge in the wider gamer community, which would be a Good Thing.

I do have to say that the big plus for web fora is their visibility to the wider world; mailing lists archives are often hard to find, and hard to follow to to lack of threading. I’ve posted to the new forum a few times, but I’ll probably pay more attention to the mailing list, because I find that form is more convenient to follow discussions.

Of course, the Phoenyx will soon have a webforum interface to the mailing lists; it’s ironic that the Fudge webforum appeared just before it was ready to go into beta test.

Perhaps more significantly, there’s this announcement on Carl Cravens’ blog

Now I’ve taken on the leadership task of coordinating a bottom-up rewrite of the Fudge core rules.

Why, oh, why would I add such a task to my already-full plate? It seems kind of insane. But in my recent four-part essay (which I should post here) about Fudge, Fudge Factor, the Fudge community, Fudge in the marketplace, and the future of all that, I call for just that thing… a bottom-up rewrite and embellishment of a document that has not changed in ten years, despite what Expanded and 10th Anniversary editions might imply. In short, to rewrite Fudge into what it should already be, taking into account ten years of accumulated wisdom from the Fudge community.

And I don’t believe in saying something should be done unless I’m willing to contribute to the effort. In this case, that turned out to be leading the project and (so far) 27 team members. Cat herders have it easy. But it needs done, and I’m fairly optimistic. It’s going to take some time… maybe a couple years, but I think it will work and will be worth it.

I’m one of those 27. I hope this project bears fruit and doesn’t fizzle out in a heap of disagreements.

There’s some debate on Fudge Mailing List and RPGNet about the pros and cons of Fudge. What makes it a great system, and what are it’s downsides?

What’s Great about Fudge

• The adjective-based trait ladder, which makes a character sheet comprehensible without any prior knowledge of the system. Swordfighting of Great is far more meaningful than Broadsword-16.
• The Fudge dice, which are a very elegant resolution mechanic. It manages to combine the ease-of-use of a dice pool with a decent bell-curve distribution. It also produces a range of results beyond simple ‘success’ or ‘fail’.
• The fact that the system is infinitely customisable, and is sufficiently modular that changing one aspect won’t break everything else. This makes at a great tool for worldbuilding GMs.
• The generally rules-light nature of the system. It produces free-flowing play which doesn’t get bogged down in unnecessary detail. It doesn’t take hours to run a barroom brawl. It also means you can create NPCs on the fly really quickly.
• The way the system is scaleable, both in power levels and realism levels. It doesn’t take either gritty realism or cinematic action as it’s baseline.

What’s Mediocre about Fudge

• The system is a bit granular, a necessary consequence of the adjective-based trait ladder.
• The troubled relationship between Attributes and Skills. It’s very much a sacred cow with a large section of the Fudge community that you don’t mechanically link Attributes with Skills, and the grainyness of the system makes it awkward anyway. The trouble is, you either find half of your attributes not really doing anything because they overlap with the skills, or you end up with a list of attributes that seems incomplete. Neither feels quite right.
• The downside of Fudge’s customisability; no two Fudge GMs run quite the same system. I’m not sure how big a problem this really is; how many people swap characters around between different GM’s games outside of tournament-style DnD?
• I find the implementation of Fudge most strongly promoted commercially, 5 Point Fudge, a rather bland flavour, with a character generation system that feels too strongly like training wheels for people used to DnD classes and levels.
• Fudge dice are not always easy to get hold of. My FLGS doesn’t stock them, although it does sell Fudge books.

I’ve never got into Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs like Ultima Online or Warcraft. Raph Koster’s lament explains why…

The most important thing in the world is slaying something that will be back the next day… before anyone else gets to slay it.

Nothing sleeps.

Nothing dreams.

There is art and beauty in the world, but you can’t be responsible for any of it.

There is no death; there is simply a failure to show up.

Because of this, there is also rarely any mourning.

I’ve heard some Ultima Online addicts claim that UO represents deep immersive roleplaying, but I’m not convinced. Give me human-moderated text-based games any day. Ones with actual stories and plotlines, where the actions of players within the game can make meaningful changes in the world.

Every so often a game comes along that renders every game published obselete.

It has the following characteristics.

1) Minimal system
2) Minimal to zero setting
3) Convinced that it’s revolutionnary
4) Bad attitude towards all previous RPGs
5) Sprinkled lightly with forgeite jargon.

The ultimate challenge! To be to gaming what Henry Cow was to music. Or the Lima N-gauge Deltic was to railway modelling. That game is SPULTURATORAH!

The dark narrativist game of gamist simulationism in ancient retro-future Babylon

Intro If you are a roleplayer, chances are you are an overweight spotty obsessive prat who rolls greasy dice and kills orcs. You are probably dumb, and the things you love and play are dumb. Everyone is immature and ugly and obsessive and only likes killing things.

That is, until you play SPULTURATORAH. You will then be a narrativist StoryEngager who will wow your players (also now called StoryEngagers) with epic storylike stories of storytelling.

No other game has ever been like SPULTURATORAH. The minimalist system is quite easy to grasp, yet hard for old-school spotty roleplayers to understand. You have to let things go to be a Narrativist. But your games will turn from dice-throwing hackfests into narrative Awesome.

Setting: It’s like a dark Frank Fazetta mixed with a Tetsuwan-Atomu style flair. Set in ancient Babylon. With flying cars and psychic armies. King Gilgamesh rules over everything with a cruel and controlling eye from his Levitating Darkness Throne at the Ziggurat of Ur.

The heroes must stop him. With Narrativism.

Read the whole thing. There really is a complete system there, complete with an attribute called “Ziggurat Barley”. (Link from Lumpley.com)