SF and Gaming Blog

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.

I’ve survived the first day of Gen Con UK, even if we made a complete mess of the GURPS Cliffhangers adventure. For once it was truly bad tactical decisions, not awful dice rolling which caused things like my character getting stuck inside a crashing plane. At least I didn’t completely miss the bad guys’ Zeppellin!

Don’t like the way the demo hall closes at 6pm, which means any in-progress games have to relocate if they haven’t finished by then. Fortunately there was a free table tonight in the CCG hall; probably by the weekend these tables will be filled with hordes of Magic:the Gathering players so such an option won’t be possible.

Full report on the rest of the con on Sunday – Tomorrow night I’m at the Pyramidian dinner at Belgo’s in Covent Garden.

Thanks to Eric Olsen for this one: The Alphabet Synthesis Machine – generate your own fictional alphabet, and download it as a true type font!

This week’s WISH from Turn of a Friendly Die

What’s the most fun you ever had creating something in a game that changed the game-world?

I think this has be the goth/doom-metal band Ümläüt, which has been a feature of not one, but two games. The first game was an on-line modern-day Call of Cthulhu adventure set in London, running on the late lamented CompuServe RPGAMES forum. My PC was Karl Tolhurst, guitarist of the band. The back-story in my character submission was that the band had split after lead singer Steve Leywood had run out of sanity and murdered another band member (who was also Karl’s lover), before killing himself.

The GM skillfully wove all this into her game background; NPC Steve Leywood’s occult obsessions had turned him to incorporate forbidden Cthuloud rituals into song lyrics and getting audiences to chant them. He was later to turn up as an undead thing, to murder another band member who the GM was using as an NPC in front of another PC in a different game thread. The Cthuloid rituals themselves may or may not have been responsible for the earthquake in Docklands that did terrible damage to the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

Ümläüt have their own spoof web page, which more than one person has mistaken for the web site of a real band – the fictitious murdered keyboard player turned up on the dead rock star site. There is also a recording of Ümläüt’s music, made by my brother. The GM refuses to listen to it.

The band has now resurfaced in another on-line game, Edge of Hell running on Dreamlyrics, touring the US slightly earlier in their own timeline. They’re currently stranded in California following several dates falling through due to incompetent management. This time four out of the five members are player characters, including Steve Leywood and one of his murder victims. Time will tell if history will repeat itself; this time the crowd chant of “Iä! Cthulhu F’Tagn!” resulted in a severe thunderstorm and a power failure that terminated the show.

Game WISH from Turn of a Friendly Die

This is my first attempt at answering one of these; since I can’t think of anything to say for the current WISH, so I’ll try and answer an older one.

Describe three systems you have gamed under: one you thought was good, one you thought was all right, and one you didn’t care for. What were the good points and the bad points of each system? Did the systems support their genre? Were they complex or simple? How easy were they to GM and play? Is there a system you’d really like to try that you haven’t? Which ones wouldn’t you try based on reading them?

Since so much of my gaming nowadays is either one-shot convention games, or internet-based PBeM/PBMB games, I tend to play a lot of different systems. System matters a lot less in on-line games, so I’ll concentrate on the FtF games. I realise the last ten games I’ve played have all been for different systems, working backwards we have Blue Planet, In Nomine, Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, 3rd Ed DnD, GURPS, Hero Wars, TORG, Fudge and Classic Traveller.

Good: GURPS
GURPS is unfairly maligned as an overcomplicated system that appeals only to anal-retentive simulationist gearheads, being too slow and cumbersome for most tastes. It’s not true; while the system is detailed, and strives towards realism, it only becomes over-complicated if you insist on using every possible optional rule, something I’ve never done as a GM, and haven’t seen done as a player. Most of the game’s complexity is in character generation rather than game-play; once you’ve generated characters, the actual gameplay runs smoothly. I’ve played a lot of GURPS both as a GM and as a player, concentrating on low fantasy, realistic modern-day or hard SF, genres for which GURPS excels. To me, it’s one of the few well-supported games that’s optimised towards more realistic lower-powered characters rather than towards highly cinematic action heroes. I’m not bothered by the fact that it breaks down at high power levels and can’t handle comic-book superheroes because I don’t care much for those genres.

In the good category I’d also mention Fudge, which is ideal for story-centric rules-light gaming, and Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing, the engine behind Runequest and Cthulhu, which has stood the test of time remarkably well.

All Right – d20
The best thing I can say about D&D 3rd Edition is that it’s a big improvement on what went before; they’ve cleaned up a lot of the inconsistencies and dumped most of the sillier rules. Having played quite a lot of 1st and 2nd ed. DnD over the years, I find 3rd ed an awful lot smoother in play. However, it still includes the sacred cows of DnD such as classes and levels, and the hard-to-rationalise way it treats and armour and damage – Armour doesn’t really represent armour, damage quite definitely doesn’t represent damage, and to try and rationalise what healing spells do makes my brain hurt. However, it’s a reasonable game at representing the tropes of heroic fantasy, though I don’t think d20 really works as a generic multi-genre system.

Bad – Deadlands
I sometimes think the designers of Deadlands have tried as hard as possible to make a game which is the polar opposite of my own tastes. Having played it a couple of times under different GMs it’s just about the only system I refuse to play any more because I can’t stand the mechanics. I find the system of dice and playing cards and poker chips far too intrusive, the card-based initiative system is very slow and cumbersome, and the dice mechanic awful beyond description. It uses a Byzantine dice-pool mechanism using polyhedral dice which leaves the player with absolutely no clue what the character’s actual abilities are. This may intentional in an attempt to frustrate min-maxers, in which case I must be a min-maxer because I found the system incredibly frustrating in play. Couple this with what I suspect to be far too high a chance of critical failures (although the impenetrability of the probabilities mean I have no idea if I just rolled badly, or the odds were stacked against me). I hate the way the number of actions per combat round is based on a roll using this idiotic dice mechanism, and the all-too-frequent critical failure means you end up sitting out the next hour while the other players have four or five actions.

There aren’t many systems I’d really like to play but haven’t, but there are quite a few systems I’ve played a couple of times but would like to play a bit more before judging them; Hero Wars is one example; a lot of intriguing ideas there, especially the very free-form magic system.

I advertise this site as “RPGs, Trains, Music”, but I realise while I’ve posted several lengthy railway and music-related pieces, I’ve had little to say recently about the world of roleplaying games. Perhaps it’s because much of my RPG-related writing is the actual games themselves, after all, I’m running three internet-based games, two on Dreamlyrics and one on The Phoenyx, as well as playing in a couple more.

I know roleplaying games are even more uncool than trains or listening to prog-rock, and I get enough flack for them. And if you think such things are too nerdy, what are you doing surfing the web? You should be down the pub, or playing football!

What are roleplaying games anyway? Those that know can skip this paragraph; those that were originally here for the trains or the prog-rock, read on. I would describe it as a cross between co-operative storytelling and wargaming; a group of players each take the part of one major character in the story, while one (called the Games Master) takes the part of minor characters, and controls the setting. Most games use a set of published rules that define character’s abilities, and some mechanisms for determining character success at doing things. Games can cover all sorts of fictional genres, with action-adventure themes always the most popular; published rules cover things Tolkein-style fantasy, 50s style science fiction, comic-book superheroes in spandex costumes, vampires battling against werewolves, or angels battling against demons.

So what attracts me to roleplaying games? Unlike a lot of gamers, I didn’t discover RPGS until my 20s. I was never the sterotypical teenage munchkin acting out his adolescent power fantasies. One thing that I really love is the worldbuilding aspect; there’s something about creating an entire imaginary world, with it’s peoples, places, cultures, religions and even languages. And persuading other people to explore this world with their equally imaginary characters, for me, makes it all worthwhile.

I love games with rich, detailed settings, a style of gaming which has gone out of fashion in recent years. My own Kalyr setting is a case in point; it’s been written up and developed over a period of many years. One of my favoutite settings is has to be Glorantha, developed over more than 25 years, originally the setting for Runequest, now the setting for a new game, Hero Wars.

At the moment, I’m not in any long-term campaigns since I moved away from my original group. All my gaming is either one-shot games at conventions, or internet-based, either email or message board.

Do you want to visit the wondrous land of Kalyr, and experience it’s wonders first hand, as opposed to just reading this tourist brochure? Experience adventure and mystery, meet members of strange alien races, play with arcane technology and mystic powers of the mind? Well, now is the time!

Both the Play-by-Web game at Dreamlyrics and the Play-by-Email game at The Phoenyx now have openings for new players. The two games both have roots (and some player characters) dating back to the game I started on the late lamented RPGAMES forum on Compuserve more than 6 years ago.

Character generation rules can be found here.