SF and Gaming Blog

The Book of Ratings rates some classic D&D monsters. Take the entry for everyone’s favourite, the Gelatinous Cube:

Here we have yet another monster with no reason to exist in a dungeon-free ecosystem. It’s genetically adapted to graph paper, for God’s sake! Plus it conveniently fails to either digest or excrete metal, giving an adventurers a reason to kill it and scoop coins from its corpse. It’s like some sort of living, deadly, mall fountain

Somehow I get a vision of Crozier Rail employing these things as security guards.

I am privileged to be a player in David Edelstein’s message board game based on Steven King’s The Stand, running on the message boards of Dreamlyrics.

Currently the game has reached the stage where everyone is dying, and civilisation is collapsing. Despite all this doom and gloom, the last line of the most recent GM post I received. My character, Ivor Tregonning, decided to spend the last hours of civilisation reading usenet. But read the last paragraph!!

The newsgroups are now full of desperation, prayers, and raving. Someone is suggesting Britain should launch its nuclear warheads at America, in an act of dying vengeance. As lunatical as that sounds, a lot of people seem to think it’s a good idea. But most are just terrified and grief-stricken as the “American Flu” works its way through Britain, the Reaper’s swath cutting people down by the thousands, soon to be millions.

There are rumors the government has a vaccine. There are rumors spreading that all manner of things — high dosages of antibiotics, ultraviolet rays, crystals, freezing temperatures, heroin — will protect you from death by flu virus. There are rumors that China has detonated nuclear warheads over its own cities trying to burn away the epidemic. There are rumors that the Queen is already dead, and that Tony Blair and George Bush have been whisked away to a secret flu-free base in Antarctica.

And through it all, spambots continue posting messages about penis enlargement pills and a chance to help pilfer the coffers of third world nations with the help of former heads of state.

Yes, if a virus really did wipe out mankind, I can still imagine spammers send out their bottom feeding sales pitches right up to the bitter end. Spam and cockroaches will inherit the earth!

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 45: Accolades and Warm Fuzzies

Who are some gamers you admire and appreciate? Name three (or as many as you like) gamers you admire and/or appreciate right now, and explain why

First, Ash Haji, my very first GM in face to face gaming. I’ve played two very long campaigns run by him, “Vikings in Space”, an epic AD&D campaign that ran for something like five years, and another lengthy Gloranthan Runequest game. Both games folded when players dropped out, sadly in the second case I was the guilty party when I relocated to Manchester. Ash has an incredible imagination, and consistently conjured up incredible and exotic adventures, which remained challenging and entertaining even when the player characters reached munchkinoid power levels at the end of a five year campaign. I can still remember the fantasy city with a tube system run by earth elementals, with the player characters buying “all zones mooncards”.

Second, Maughn Matsuoka, my first on line GM. If Ash taught me much of what I know about face to face GMing, Maughn taught me all about online GMing. His GURPS Cyberpunk game “Hawaiian Vacation”, with it’s rich detailed background and roller coaster of a plot is for me the template of what a good game should be about. He routinely sent us detailed CAD drawings of the various locations our characters went to, including the infamous Frontier Hotel. He was always willing to give me advice when I started up my own game, and he was later to play two very different characters in that game to demonstrate that he’s as good a player as his is an GM.

Third, Jill Pincott, a.k.a. Gypsy, founder of Dreamlyrics. Jill was one of the sysops in the CompuServe role playing games forum, where played in the games mentioned above. When AOL closed the forum (in a messy way documented here), Jill and a few others created a brand new roleplaying site to replace it in the space of two weeks flat. Jill has a talent for community building, which has made Dreamlyrics such a great success. Not only that, she also hosts the annual Gypsycon, where more than two dozen gamers, mostly Dreamlyrics members, descend upon her house for the whole of the Easter weekend for four solid days (and sometimes nights) of solid gaming. Demonstrating that community building doesn’t stop at gaming, Gypsycon is responsible for three long term relationships (so far), including one upcoming wedding!

Of course, I can’t stop at just three.

If I had to pick just one player of the two dozen or so that have played in online games I’ve run, it would be Nicki Jett, currently playing the revolutuonary Hollis in my Kalyr game, and the cyborg Lizard in the space piracy game AEF, as well as two memorable characters in “Hawaiian Vacation”. A wonderful writer that gets under the skin of her characters, and has the talent for bringing out the best from the players around her.

Since most of my offline gaming nowadays is one shot convention style gaming, I’ll mention Steve “Abaddon” Morley and Mark “L’Ange” Baker as superlative gamesmasters. Steve runs games with seemingly no preparation, and conjures adventures almost out of thin air, the most extreme being something he called “Work in Progress”. There were no character sheets, and the PCs were dropped in a situation where we were in a bank, wearing ski masks and holding guns, and with no memories of how we got there. In total contrast, Mark Baker runs games with detailed, elaborate character backgrounds, loads of authentic looking player handouts, and frightening amounts of historical research, giving some very atmospheric games indeed. His In Nomine game run at last years summer Stabcon is typical, with some very strong imagery I ended up dreaming about that night.

Of course, I’ve got to mention Karen and Carl Cravens of phoenyx.net, who host one of my online games.

Honourable mentions, of course, to a host of other gamers, both on and offline; in no particular order, Michael Orton, Tony Cotterill, Derek Baker, Andy, David “Amadan” Edelstein, AJ Richardson, Marielle Harris, Hugh “War Dog” Foster, Pete Hat, Sasha, Sean “Pandemonium” Pagliarulo, Vince Togarelli and Maria “Fendahl” Whittaker, all of whom have excelled either as players, GMs, or generally cool people. Apologies to anyone I’ve missed!

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 44: Picking Games

How do you choose games to join or to run? What factors influence you: timing, people, system, genre, etc.? Do you weigh different factors for different kinds of games, e.g., online vs. tabletop vs. LARP? Is it a group decision or a decision you make on your own?

It’s a long time since I’ve played in a long-running face-to-face campaign; all my gaming nowadays is either PBeM, PBMB, or one-shot convention games.

At Gypsycon two weeks ago I didn’t get to personally choose the games I played in, but got allocated to games based on a best guess of my preferences derived from the PBMBs I play in. However, when I do get to choose the games, either on line games, or at larger public conventions, there are three factors that influence things:

First, if the game premise sounds sufficiently interesting, or is a game system or genre I’ve always wanted to play but never got round to it, or is game I’ve enjoyed a lot in the past. When I first started online gaming I joined a lot of games in systems or gameworlds I’d have sitting on my shelf but never actually played, such as Call of Cthulhu, Traveller and Castle Falkenstein. At conventions it’s been similar, with games like Hero Wars, In Nomine, Nobilis or GURPS Transhuman Space.

Second is the reputation of the GM. A convention game run by someone like Phil Masters or Mark “L’Ange” Baker, or a PBMB run by the likes of David Edelstein or Maughn Matsuoka is always going to get me interested, especially if it’s a genre or system that interests me anyway.

The third is when the GM headhunts me into his or her game, which is a common method of recuitment on online games, especially on forums like Dreamlyrics where there’s a limited pool of potential players. It’s also happened at conventions where I’ve been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a GM with an empty slot in his game has seen me wandering around not doing anything.

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 42: Reusing Characters

Do you ever reuse characters from game to game? When you reuse characters, what do you bring from game to game: a name and a personality, stats, or more? What kinds of characters do you reuse and why? If you GM, do you like to have players bring in existing characters? Why?

While I prefer to create a new character from scratch each time, I have reused one character, (the now infamous Karl Tolhurst). As I said in the previous Game WISH, I prefer characters that closely mesh with the world’s settings rather than generic archetype in generic worlds, so for most games that entails creating a specific character for the game world in question.

The one character I have reused had a lot of changes to his back story, taking him back two years earlier in his career, to a point before the tragedies that were a defining point of the original character concept. Arguably it’s not really the same character at all. I’m not going to rule out reusing a character in the future, but again I’ll rewrite the backstory and change aspects of the character to fit in with the new game.

As a GM, I’m not really bothered whether the players recycle old characters or not, as long as they either fit my world and can be modified until they will fit.

Perverse Access Memory: WISH 41: Coherence

I’ve got seriously behind on these.

How coherent do you expect a game world to be? Is a game world merely a stage for the characters, or does it have a life of its own? How deep does it need to be to satisfy you? How do you contribute as a player or GM to making the game world more coherent, if you do?

I place a lot of importance on coherence. To me, internal consistancy matters far more than adherence to genre tropes, one reason why I don’t particularly like either DnD-style generic fantasy or spandex’n capes superhero games.

My model for a game universe is definitely the book trilogy with 50 pages of appendices at the back rather than the generic Hollywood action movie with lots of kewl fight scenes but a backstory that doesn’t make sense (The Matrix, anyone?). I like game worlds with a lot of detail, that give the characters some sort of context in which they exist.

Saying that, the world has to be accessible. Even if there are several hundred pages of notes describing nations, locations, personalities, religions and so on, it should still be possible to summarise in a paragraph or two. There are some very rich fantasy worlds, such as Glorantha where the density of internal references is so great that newcomers to the world can easily feel intimidated by the amount of information they’re expected to assimilate. The publishers of Glorantha have countered this to some extent by focussing on just one culture within the wider world, at least for beginning scenarios.

My own world Kalyr suffers from this problem to some extent. I’ve tried running convention style scenarios focussing on just one organisation (The Karazthan, the secretive but powerful guild of technology), avoiding the need to dump a whole load of information on other guilds or organisations on the players heads. This approach seemed to me to be a success, if the game I ran at Gypsycon is anything to go by.

The Wandering Distraction Table, for things to interrupt your gaming session. All these are (allegedly) real incidents.

Some highlights:

18: Cat throws up on game supplies.
19: Cat scatters books, papers, dice, miniatures, etc. while being chased by other cat/room-mate/room-mate’s-boyfriend/phantom mice.

and this trio of related events

21: Host’s room-mate (who’s bedroom shares a thin wall with the gaming area) has loud and rowdy sex.
22: Room-mate’s-boyfriend crosses game space to bathroom while completely naked.
23: Room-mate crosses game space to bathroom wearing only a towel.

and finally:

40: Player who has left the table to get a drink decides to play with the Victorian hand-cranked centrifuge on the mantelpiece and gets hit by one of the rotating tube holders.

(Archived from a thread on Pyramid Online)