* Keeping your players focused on the game and stopping the table talk.

* Getting your players to be more proactive about roleplaying.

Hosts: Chad, Dan, Pat, Wayne

Predestination Paradox, causality loop, and retrocausality are all terms to deal with essentially the same concept.  Instead of the typical cause and effect relationship in this case, the effect actually operates as the cause.  To give a very simple example of this concept let’s say that you are given a picture of yourself with a future date on it, at a location you have never been to.  You are curious as to how someone would get this picture and why you would be in that location, so you go there at the time listed on the photo.  You have now taken the action of going there, because you saw that you were going to go there.  Again this is a very simplistic example, but it should explain what I am talking about here.  In most cases, the characters actually discover something unpleasant is going to happen and end up causing that very thing to happen by trying to prevent it.

I personally have a few huge issues with causality loops.  Essentially, they are an accepted paradox where there is no explanation of the original source.  If we look at time as a line where point A is the time you are presented with future knowledge and point B is the future event actually happening, we see the loop then created between these two points in time.  This loop would essentially continue into infinity, because each time it occurs it generates another instance of itself.  The events of the future would not have happened on their own without knowledge of them, though.  Something had to have set this loop into motion the first time, but that aspect of the story never seems to be told.  These stories can get particularly frustrating for me when the characters give up the free will of their actions to just act based on what they know of the future.

Ontological Paradoxes take this concept to their extreme.  In the case of an ontological paradox, an object from one point in time is taken to another point in time (usually the past) and becomes the very thing that is discovered in the future.  As an example, a father gives his son a pocket watch.  The son then travels back in time and in some strange turn of events ends up giving his father the very watch that he will someday be given.  In this case the watch is stuck in a paradoxical loop.  It doesn’t seem to have a creation, and despite going through this loop an infinite number of times it does not seem to be aging as would be expected.  The object simply exists with no explanation of how.  I have read many stories that involve this concept, but I have only found one that actually dealt with the origins of the object.  In the worst case, a person can end up becoming their own ancestor, thus creating a real paradox where a human being exists that shouldn’t.

My basic issue with all of these concepts is that they don’t make logical sense.  Not everything in entertainment needs to make sense, but Science Fiction is based in science, and circular logic just doesn’t fit.  I also cannot see any way a causality loop could work in a game since it is essentially forcing the players into a situation that they will likely try to avoid just because they feel railroaded.  That being said, I am currently enjoying a TV show based on a causality loop, but it does frustrate me.

If you can travel through time, can you make changes?  There are many scientific theories that deal with this very question from the standpoint of paradoxes not being possible.  The Novikov self-consistency principle for example states that if an event has the chance to create a paradox, the probability of that event occurring will be 0.  Essentially this theory proposes that if you try to change the past something will happen to prevent you from making the change.

This can be interpreted two ways.  One would be that the universe will not allow the paradox to happen.  I personally discount this entirely, because it would require the universe to have desires and intervene.  The other concept is that the past has already occurred, so if someone goes back to try to change it, they obviously have failed because here in the present that change did not occurred.  This is a far more acceptable theory, but leads to a boring story.  If your time traveler cannot make changes, then what is the point of the trip.  It could be a trip of discovery, but following this theory puts many limitations on your story.

The only theories scientists seem to take seriously in regard to making changes revolve around alternate realities.  If a person makes a change they are then creating an alternate reality.  Their original reality still exists, but they are now cut off from it and there is the potential for a temporal clone to exist.

Alternate realities provide many options, but they also present one major issue.  Any time traveler from the future — by the nature of just being there — has cut themselves off from their own time.  How big of a change would need to be made before a temporal clone situation arises?   Because decisions have not yet been made and time travelers can change things, then any trip to the future would have to be only a potential future.  By seeing that future you are then ensuring that at least minor changes will occur because of your knowledge.  You also then have to deal with many potential futures for every universe.  If time travel occurs after the split why wouldn’t multiple versions of you from different alternate realities run into each other when they go back to a time before the split occurred?  This methodology can be interesting, but tends to just be too convoluted for my tastes.  A paradox cannot occur because there are an infinite number of realities.

Another method that allows for changes to be made is similar to the previous method.  In this case an alternate reality is created by the change, but the original one now no longer exists.  There is only one timeline and any change causes it to readjust itself.  This is my preferred method of dealing with time travel.  It allows for changes, paradoxes, and can provide the largest sense of drama.  If your actions can risk your own existence, it makes everything you do that much more important.  If you subscribe to the butterfly effect this method also has the most potential for suspenseful stories.

The down side is that this method also doesn’t attempt to answer paradoxes at all.  Your characters typically have to find a way to avoid changes themselves and are thus combating paradoxes.  The real question is that if they change their world enough for them to have never time traveled to begin with, if they were to return to their own time would it have to be a temporal clone?  Also since the characters are typically trying to fix what they have changed, you generally don’t see what would happen to the world if the character that made the change had suddenly never been born and thus could not have traveled back in time.  The way comic books typically deal with this concept is to say that while the person may not exist anymore in the future, they did exist at a point before the change was made since they were the one making the change.  Thus a character may fade, but their actions did occur because they were there before the timeline diverged.

However you want to handle time travel in your story or game, you have to decide in the beginning if the past can be changed, and if so what method you will be using to show these changes.  While I’m sure it is possible to make it work, I just don’t personally see a way to make a game work if you are traveling through time but cannot change it.  That would likely just lead to frustration from your players.

Like Dan, I have a Science Fiction passion that I have spent years reading about and pondering.  In my case it is Time Travel.  Unfortunately I find that there are far more bad time travel stories out there than good ones.  That tends to lead into long rants in person where I can’t help but get off topic and bore people to tears.  So in the vein of Dan’s Capital Ship Combat articles I, too, would like to explore my Science Fiction passion and share my views in a series of blogs.  If you have any interest in Time Travel or just Science Fiction in general, I hope you will enjoy this series.  I also hope it will give everyone something to think about and generate many interesting debates and conversations.

What kind of Time Travel will we be discussing?

When it comes to time travel there appear to be two options.  You can either send your physical body through time, or you can project your consciousness back into a previous version of yourself or others.  The physical travel seems to be the most common method used by Science Fiction writers, but there have been interesting stories about both.  If you are sending only your consciousness, you usually have the extra plot hooks of having to live the day-to-day life while doing whatever you have come back to do.  Physical travel tends to put your characters outside of day-to-day events until they ultimately make a mistake and change something they were not supposed to.  For the case of these articles either method of time travel could be used, but from this point on I will focus on physical travel unless otherwise stated.

There are many concepts and many different takes on Time travel and how it would work.  I will avoid going into too many Einsteinian principals except were absolutely necessary such as when discussing absolute time and space and spacetime. To be clear though, at least at first I do not want to get into the actual methodology and theory behind how the travel itself works.

Ok, but what about Time Travel do you want to talk about then?

I want to start off by framing my initial discussions.  The far more interesting conversations revolve around how Time Travel works once you reach your destination and what that means to the travelers and society.  To give you a framework: drafts of the first three installments are already written and will focus on whether you can change the past, having the effects be the cause, and how a society would be impacted by time travel technology. I will keep this very high level at first to see what kind of feedback I receive, but in each case I could easily go into much more detail on any topic if there is an interest.

Finally I will be giving examples for many situations, but I will be creating each example myself and will intentionally try to avoid giving TV, movie, or book examples because I feel that will lead to conversations about those properties and not about the intended example.  That does not eliminate the chance of a future installment focusing on time travel in various media and what I think some of the major stories did right or wrong.

* Our struggles with miniature war games.

* Keeping roleplaying alive in combat.

Hosts: Chad, Dan, Pat, Wayne

I will state up front that I think Chad is fan-tastic!  He has a lot of good thoughts, and I truly enjoy him on the show.  

However, I have to call shenanigans on this one.  I have been in too many games where we role-played in combat to think that it doesn’t exist when the dice are brought out.  Are we not role-playing when we make a skill check?  Now, if you say that role-playing changes a bit, I won’t argue there.  There is always a different vibe role-playing out of combat and role-playing in combat.  But the role-playing doesn’t have to go away.

Need an example?  In my current online game, I have a three-way battle going on.  There are no real good guys and bad guys, just folks on different sides of the fence.  Had I just rolled dice, we would all be pretty bored right now.  However, I didn’t.  We have a lot of banter going back and forth.  One character is goading another, who is obsessed about his cause.  Meanwhile a third is trying to stop the combat from escalating.  It’s all very tense.  It’s the type of epic role-playing that really helps to shape and mold the characters.

So how do you keep the role-playing going while in combat?

Imagine what your character is going through in combat, and then act it out.  Is he afraid?  Maybe he stutters a bit when combat begins.  Maybe he begs the bad guys not to hit him. 

Does he use witty banter?   Think of Spider-Man here.  Spider-Man often uses witty banter in combat, whether it’s to calm his own fears or to lure the bad guys into dropping their guard and making a mistake.  This is particularly good for your roguish scoundrels. 

Or perhaps your character is more on the serious side.  Does he like to intimidate his foes?  Personally, I’d be a bit scared if a dwarf yelled at me before going into a rage.  Or maybe your character is very devout and swears an oath to his god before going into combat. 

Also, be sure to play off of the other characters.  When your character is surrounded by three ogres and the other player just dispatched his foe, feel free to say, “Hey, could I get a little help over here?”  Or you may just say, “Not bad, for an elf.”

I will admit that there are some limitations to watch out for.   You don’t want to be so busy bantering that you forget to let everyone have their fair turn.  Many game systems allow you to have a free action during combat.  Banter during that time.  Sometimes, the banter may come up naturally in a combat, so go with the flow.  Just remember that when the turn is over, let the next person join in.

I submit to you that role-playing and combat are not independent.  With a little practice, role-playing can take your combat from being a matter of rolling dice to a scene straight out of Hollywood.

If you’re guessing it’s because it focuses on a little known federal agency that only deals with crime related to the Navy and the US Marines – you’d be wrong. There are only a few plot lines involving “he’s a spy” or “she’s involved with terrorists” – the rest are right out of the procedural crime drama playbook (serial killers, crimes of passion, insurance fraud, elaborate revenge schemes, etc.) and would fit in just fine on any of the three (!) CSI’s.

No, the “special something” that makes NCIS stand out is its unique and quirky characters. Gibbs isn’t just the team leader, he has a “hick” name – Leroy Jethro Gibbs, and besides being a Marine (one is NEVER an ex-Marine, just a Marine not on active duty), he also has several ex-wives and other closely guarded secrets in his storied past. Abby isn’t just another lab tech in a white lab coat – she’s a super quirky goth grrl with a caffeine addiction and a penchant for Super Big Gulps. This goes on and on: for each main character there is something unique, fun, and memorable. They are not only different from each other (very important in an ensemble cast) but from other, similar crime shows.

Furthermore, they are more than a team. They are a family, and this isn’t even displayed in some subtle way. They come right out and say it. When three team members were reassigned and (temporarily) replaced, Abby demanded of Gibbs, “Bring them back!” They are a family, and her family was splitting up. In fact, each main cast member fits into the family template.

• Gibbs is the gruff but fair father
• Ziva is like his eldest daughter
• Abby is the younger daughter he dotes over, and who pals with Ziva like the big sister she never had
• DiNozzo and McGee are like a pair of squabbling brothers, vying for their fathers approval
• Even Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard is much like a kindly, and eccentric uncle

In fact, on closer analysis, NCIS is actually a family drama wrapped in a crime drama and disguised as a federal agency!

What can we, RPG’ers, learn from this? First, PC’s should be unique! Not just unique in the “race / class” sort of way, but unique in their quirks and mannerisms. Unique in their varied back-stories. Unique in their weaknesses and in their strengths and in the way they relate to one another. They should not only be different from each other – but from other adventuring groups!

Most of the groups I play with are all male, and the characters are all male. The only relationships the PCs tend to have is friend / ally / frenemy / rival. (”Frenemy” is a horrible portmanteau, but it serves a purpose. “You’re my friend, we fight side by side, and we share the spoils! But, I don’t trust you not to stab me in the back and steal my stuff when I sleep at night – so I always keep one eye open.” Of the four relationships listed, this is the most complex.) But, in a successful show like NCIS, the relationships are more complex and varied than that; beyond just a “found family” there is the complex back issues each character has that they bring into this “family.”

So, if you want to increase the drama and the uniqueness of your gaming party, you may have to look somewhere other then the dungeon or starship or which secret cabal you all belong to. Look to the group itself and how unique and interesting each character is, and how they relate to each other in complex and complimentary ways. Go ahead, be brave ‚ form a ‘family’, even a dysfunctional one, and play the hell out of it! You may make it to your seventh season, too.

* The odd obscurity of (or at least our ignorance regarding) LARPing rulebooks.  You can find the Fallout LARP pictures here.

* The effect of minis on tabletop roleplaying games.  In case you’re not familiar with the annoying Wilhelm Scream, here’s a compilation of them.

Hosts: Chad, Dan, Pat, Wayne

When you went to a BBS everyone knew your name.  It might be a handle, but it was you nonetheless.  It didn’t matter how popular you were in the everyday world.  You could play games with these people and just generally hang out.  There was a mechanism for file sharing so you could post pictures or files that others would find interesting.  The best part though was that you could talk about anything you wanted and someone would probably be interested.

The days of the BBS suddenly became numbered, though.  With the spread of the internet, new communication technologies started to eat away at the popularity.  The idea of a small, local community suddenly gave way to national or international chat rooms.  These had none of the small charm of the BBS and were all about instant gratification.  My collection of boards slowly shrank from 12 down until there were none left still running.  It was sad to see these go, but to be honest by the end they were barely echoes of what they once had been.

As this wave of nostalgia hit me I suddenly came to an obvious conclusion.  The BBS didn’t die; it just migrated to internet forums.  Internet forums provide all the functionality that a BBS ever did.  If you need information on a specific topic there is a forum out there dedicated to it where people will have no problem telling you everything there is to know about that topic, and just like on the old BBSes, some of it will even be accurate.  These very forums have proved that local events can still occur.

It seems like such a simple concept, but I for one had never really made that connection until now.  So in the new age of Twitter, texting, Facebook, and generally the second age of instant gratification communication technologies, I can’t help but worry about the future of this technology that has taken the place of my beloved BBS.  It is important to remember though that the BBS didn’t die — it just evolved.   It was my own unwillingness to accept change that kept me from seeing this.  If it happens again and someday forums don’t get traffic anymore, there will be another technology to fill that need.

I experienced this phenomenon a couple of times myself. I will say upfront that I, as (a much younger) game master, was as much at fault as anyone else, if not more so. I knew that evil campaigns ended badly, but I didn’t heed the warnings. 

In one case, I ran a Realms game where the player characters were determined to kill, rape, and plunder everyone in sight – often in that order.  It didn’t last more than two game sessions. By the time it was all done, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth.  A gamer should never leave a game with that sensation.

In another case, I thought that a couple of bounty hunters in a Star Wars game could still work within the mold of a heroic game.  As it turns out, heroism doesn’t pay well.  The players abandoned the whole premise of the campaign in one fell swoop.  Before I knew it, the party was somewhere else in the galaxy other than where my game was, and I sat there staring.  I was a game master defeated.

Mercenary games, in general, are not to my liking.  I like some of the concepts of games like Shadowrun, but the idea that all you’re doing is adventuring to get more money so you can buy more stuff is just not something that interests me personally.  Plus, mercenaries can be jerks at times.  I like heroic games, where you fight for some greater cause and some better purpose.

Yet can’t evil fight for a greater cause?  Many evil organizations do just that.  Look at the Empire in Star Wars, or the Knights of Takhisis in Dragonlance.  Both entities seek to bring order to their respective settings.  It’s when evil puts aside its own ambitions for something greater than itself, whether misguided or not, that it becomes palatable to play.

If you are dead-set on playing an evil character, then my recommendation would be to assign characteristics to the player character that makes him more than some murderer.  If you want him to gel with the party, give him a reason to.  Maybe he’s working under orders, or has a code of honor he cannot break.  In these cases, I would recommend using a character with a Lawful Evil alignment.  They seem to be more likely to work well with others, whereas Chaotic Evil would just kill and maim everything indiscriminately. 

Maybe the character has something he cares about more than being evil.  If his wife has come down with the plague and the party is questing to get the antidote, he might decide to play nice.  Or, maybe the character was once good, but was misled, and so now he lives a life of evil.  I would recommend placing some chances at redemption if you go this route.

While I still do not recommend evil characters, I think they can work so long as the players are experienced and willing to put aside any issues that would disrupt game play.  Use the group template, and talk to the other players and GM about how you can make this work.

* Fear the Con 3 has dates!  March 11, 2010 for Wing Night, March 12 – 13 for the con, March 14 – 17 for additional social events.

* The City of Villains supergroup on Pinnacle server is still going strong.  Free account reactivation and double XP this weekend.

* What makes a game system a LARP?

* Why we won’t try to define the terms RPG or LARP.

* Recovering momentum in a dying campaign.

Hosts: Chad, Dan, Pat, Wayne

1)   Locations are your background not your plot.  On my second week I prepared my location too much.  I had fully written descriptions for each room, but realized quickly that my players were getting bored with it.  They didn’t care to hear about a room that wasn’t related to the plot, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have either.  I was so worried about making sure my locations were well thought out that I allowed them to become the focus instead of the story I was trying to tell.

2) NEVER allow any one person or item to be essential to your plot. I was not at all prepared for the players to decide that my creepy character deserved to be attacked.  I knew that I couldn’t anticipate everything that they would do and was able to adapt, but when my whole plot required interaction by a single character and they wanted to kill him, I looked like a deer in the headlights.  Experienced GMs would know how to react to this, but as a new GM you can’t have a single point of failure.  I did let the players kill my creepy character, but I had to find a way to make them wait until he had done what I needed him to first.

3)  Prepare stats for characters even if you don’t anticipate a fight. I didn’t expect my players to attack my creepy character, but they were so freaked out by him that they really wanted him dead.  I didn’t have anything prepared for him or his guards in combat.  It wasn’t opposed to a fight and I did during some periods of stalling figure something out for them.  I just didn’t ever think I would need stats for these characters.

4)  Don’t feel like you have to stick to a script. Players will always do things you don’t expect and these can be the best moments of the game.  In my first week one of the things that I did particularly well was react to player decisions that I did not expect.  Subplots quickly grew out of these actions that I had never intended and I found afterward that these were the moments everyone talked about the most.  The players will latch on to things and you will be presented with opportunities during the course of the game that you never anticipated.  Don’t be afraid to go down these tangents, because you will be surprised how easily they can fit into your plot.  If your players are having fun with something it only makes the game easier for you, and they never need to know that it wasn’t something that you had planned.

The most important thing to remember is to just have fun.  If you are having fun, then your players are more likely to have fun.  Your first game won’t be perfect and you will make mistakes.  These are your friends or else you wouldn’t be gaming with them, and they will understand that you are new.  Your worst critic is likely to be yourself.

* Why the website has been coming and going.

* Fear the Con 3. After recording this episode, we got the location reserved and dates locked down.

* The history and meaning of names.

* Video game length.

* Superstition and mythology in fantasy roleplaying games.

* Psychoanalyzing Pat.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat, Wayne

Trying to pin down the exact date of when we are going to hold this con is tricky. On one hand, I’m moving the date away from what we had last year for purely selfish reasons. It fall’s on my boys birthday. No big deal the past two years as he was to young to care but now he’ll be three and birthdays have become serious business. On the other hand, no one date will work for everyone. This con is a largely community based event although we are going to try and get more local people involved this year, more on that later. But it’s hard when you say that the con is going to be on X date and a community member from out of town says they can’t make that date. I know these people and I really want them, all of them, to be there. Do I reschedule around two or three people? The answer is no, I can’t. If I move the dates around for the sole reason of making sure one or two community members can make it then the new date might exclude two or three different community members. When a con has thousands of people coming to it that is no big deal but when our little con only has one hundred and twenty people show and you know almost every single one of them then it stings a little bit when you can’t make all the stars and planets line up just right.

Anyway, our target date for the con is: World Wide Wing Night/Pre-Con party Thursday March 11th with the con on Friday March 12th and Saturday March 13th 2010. Note that this is our target date right now. We are not able to book the hall as of yet and the hall might be unavailable on those dates.

I verified our vendor this year. The wonderful Casey and his Gamer Ground store. He set up shop and sold all sorts of gaming books, dice and other gamer stuff (he even had old school video games!) in the last two fear the Cons. Last I talked about it with him he was closing his B&M store and going to only doing cons and events and possibly some web stuff. In this economy who can blame him? Him and his wife put up a really good display. Prices are reasonable and it his whole set up is really slick. I never met the man before FtC 1 and when I was told we were getting in a dealer I had imagined a comic book guy style fat beard sitting behind a single table with a cash box and about five or so books laying scattered about charging triple what they were worth. Luckily, I was very wrong.

Well enough, jerking off Casey. The real question is, why even have a dealer for a small con of only 120 people? The most practical reason is that people like to spend money. They come to these sorts of things and want to take something home with them. Personally, I always ‘forget’ to bring my dice so I have an excuse buy a set at the con. Say you just sat in on a game that you have never played before and it blew you freaking socks off. More than one person goes running from that game and buys the books off of Casey, possibly stopping for a beer on the way into the dealer room. Another reason we have a dealer is that is just looks so right. There is something about having a gaming con with all this play going on and someone right there, right in the con, selling almost everything you need, selling the games that you are playing. The hobby shop is an important part of the gaming experience for a lot of people and we want one right in the middle of the con. It also works out that this is a largely community based event, Casey can get on the forums and ask people what they want to see for sale or if they have any special orders.

Current Con Status: We have the dealer! Not much else. Next item on the agenda is for me to put together ‘The List’.

This time was different. You see, it seems that StarWarsShop.com wanted to get an early start on Halloween this year, so they sent out an early Halloween newsletter. I opened the e-mail, and to my horror (pun intended), I saw a picture of Princess Leia as a vampire.

I was utterly disgusted. First, to use Princess Leia as a vampire is just ridiculous. This was originally some sort of Halloween party invite that was turned into a product to sell. Fine, I get that. No problem with them wanting to make a buck. Then they made the pic look like it was straight from the pulp era. Fine, no worries there. But Princess Leia as a vampire?

Vampires have gone from being unique, or at least rare, monsters who scare you to being the everyday, average monster on the block. We no longer have Dracula, Nosferatu, or Strahd. Now we have entire vampire societies, roaming about. In Stargate: Atlantis, you have the Wraith, who are little more than space vampires. Even in Dragonlance, you have the Beloved of Chemosh, who are a variant of vampires in their own right. No matter how you disguise these monsters, they keep coming up as vampires.

Let’s also consider why we glorify them so much. There’s supposedly some sort of sex appeal there. Beyond physical beauty, I don’t see it. I don’t find sucking blood to be attractive – not unless you happen to be a leech. Maybe it’s the horror factor. We have been bombarded by vampires so much in the last few decades that they no longer seem to scare. It’s kind of like how you watch the evening news and are no longer shocked by a murder. Likewise, vampires just don’t scare me anymore.

Why did Lucasfilm do this? Because it was easy. Vampires sell, and making money off of this is a guarantee. Yet in the process, the Princess’ image of a strong female protagonist is tarnished. How could the Princess fall prey to the likes of a vampire? Why should a company known for its creativity resort to the most uncreative thing they could do?

There are a few lessons that we, as gamers, can learn from this. First of all, a unique monster is more memorable than several. Dracula scares me. The umpteenth vampire that Buffy slays doesn’t. This is also true of other gaming elements too. Let’s take Tasslehoff’s Magic Mouse Ring for example. As a unique magic item, the ring has a certain notoriety. When they revealed it to be one of many, the ring became lackluster.

Be true to the characters. If you have a white witch NPC who suddenly dresses in black and wears a rainbow wig, your players will look at you funny. If your dumb goblin suddenly sprouts off Shakespeare, something isn’t right.

Don’t take the easy way out. Let’s say your players are fighting against a cult dedicated to your local God of Death. Good thus far. But then the cult reveals themselves to be vampires, or sends zombies after you, etc. etc. You might as well give all your players pillows for their nap. Mix it up some. Find a new monster from your latest monster book, or invent something new. If you must use a vampire, then at least take some time to give it some unique qualities. Maybe your vampire absorbs natural light, or is blind, or is a vegetarian due to his religion.

I am very disappointed in Lucasfilm, as I expected better. Certainly, they deserve a punch in the junk from Krazy Joe of Slice of SciFi fame. However, this is part of a larger issue that permeates pop culture. We need to get away from this vampire hysteria so that they can become a monster to be afraid of again, rather than being commonplace, like goblins.

What path will you choose? Will you take the easy way out, or will you push the bounds of your creativity to come up with something unique to wow your players with?

Obviously, the primary draw of Play-Doh is its edibility.  Its second draw is its near-infinite flexibility.  You can shape it into anything you can imagine.  But let’s be honest: most of us aren’t artists.  So over the years, they’ve released a variety of molds and presses to help you get started on your creation.  I don’t think those tools were meant to replace your creativity, but rather give you a needed boost.  For example, we had Star Wars themed presses for making Darth Vader and R2-D2, but that didn’t stop us from modifying the squishy sculptures, building props to pose them with, or making them out of really peculiar colors.  In other words, we already had a finished product in mind, and those molds helped us speed up the process and bridge skill gaps on the way there.

The d20 system is a lot like Play-Doh.  It’s a generic system you can reshape to fit any setting you have in mind.  Many people have done so quite successfully, releasing a variety of custom d20 settings and rules variations.

Continuing my analogy, along comes a product for the d20 system that’s something like my Play-Doh molds.  It doesn’t give you a finished product, but instead gives you a jump-start in the process of building your own RPG setting.  It’s a toolkit designed for people that are creatively minded but feel more comfortable working with tools that will help them keep their creation consistent and balanced.  The kit in question is Mastercraft, which is meant to work in a variety of settings and time periods, just like the d20 system it’s derived from.  The incarnation I was given for review is Fantasy Craft, which is the book for (duh) fantasy-themed games.

There are a lot of options in the game. Character creation starts by picking from one of twelve races and twelve character classes.  You’re also allowed to pick a Specialty which describes your character’s background or the “spin” on how he approaches his class.  For example, you might be a human lancer (a horseback soldier), but whether you’ve spent your life wandering the world, sitting around a castle, or living amongst a tribe will modify your stats a bit.

The monster section gives a small set of sample villains, and you’re also provided with an easy-to-follow system for creating your own.  If you can describe a monster’s abilities, how it moves, and how hard it is to kill, the game will give you an XP value and challenge rating.  There’s even some help for randomly generating names.

The world building section has a lot less charts and math than the monster section, but it asks useful questions to make sure you’ve thought your world through.  It asks you about the technology level, governance, religion, economy, and the impact of magic upon society.  It also offers a few tropes you can consider using as the basis for your setting.

Perhaps the part I appreciate most is the amount of questions the writers keep asking in every single chapter.  You’re not just told how to construct something, but you’re challenged to first think about how and why a character, monster, or town works a particular way.  They really want you to think beyond the numbers.

The book is over 400 pages long, and it’s not bloated with half-blank pages or filler art, so you’ll get your money’s worth in that regard.  And since it’s the first thing I look for in any RPG book I pick up, I’m pleased to say this bulky fellow does have an index in the back.

For anyone that’s an RPG veteran, I don’t think you’ll see a whole lot of breakthrough ideas in this book.  Like the Play-Doh molds, Fantasy Craft is not going to do much for the experienced sculptor, but it will help someone that’s new to roleplaying — or even a veteran that would rather focus on storytelling than minutiae and math — leapfrog right into game play.  And that’s where this book really shines.  It asks questions, gives examples, and (where necessary) provides charts to make sure you’ve given detail and depth to the components of your world.

Want to learn more about Fantasy Craft? Read on…

• Atomic Array: Fantasy Craft (Atomic Array 032)
• Game Cryer: Review by Chris Perrin
• Questing GM: Questing with Fantasy Craft
• allgeektout: What Fantasy Craft Has to Offer
• Campaign Mastery: Mine Fiction for Campaign Qualities
• Emerson’s Bookshelf: Fantasy Just Got Crafty
• Critical Hits: Critical Review
• Fear the Boot: Fear the Review
• Gnome Stew: What Fantasy Craft Brings to the Table
• Uncle Bear: Fantasy Craft Chargen
• Flames Rising: Dark FantasyCraft Review

Drop by Crafty Games today!

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Wayne

Guests: Jim Pinto

1. It has very explicit language and covers very explicit topics.

2. Race, religion, and politics are all fair game for discussion.

3. This particular episode runs over three hours in length.

So if it breaks pretty much every rule FtB has, why am I pointing you that way?  Because if you’re not easily offended, there’s some stuff in there you might be interested in.  We talk quite a bit about the making of Fear the Boot — including where it’s been, where it’s headed, the hosting mix, what you can expect from Fear the Con 3, what’s happened to Skies of Glass, and some breaking news on previously unannounced projects we’re about to release.

If you want to skip most of the off-topic conversation and just hear the distilled FtB content, skip forward to 1:35:40.  If not, set aside a large block of time and enjoy the whole episode.

Also, our rules have not changed!  If you want to post comments/questions here or on the forums, that’s fine as long as it conforms to our normal rules.  This is not an excuse to bring politics, religion, or any other drama over here!  Also, they have their own forums, but if you post over there please be a good ambassador for the show and respect their rules as well.

With all that out of the way, you can find the episode here.

One of the best card games I’ve been introduced to is Fluxx.  And, no, they’re not paying me to say that.  I genuinely mean it, and if you haven’t tried the game, you ought to at least borrow a copy to see how it runs.  They’ve released several versions of Fluxx, each with a different theme.  There’s the original version, which is honestly a bit bland, though they do offer mini-expansions to give it some spice.  After that came Monty Python and zombie themed games, which I think are a lot more fun.  All of them are lighthearted and focus on the joy of playing over any sense of competition.

In case you’ve never played Fluxx, you only have a few rules…

1. Everyone draws three cards to start with.

2. If you have a bad guy (called a Creeper), you have to play it immediately and draw another card.

3. You pick a player to start and work around the table clockwise from there.

4. On your turn, all you have to do is draw one card and play one card.

That’s it!  Sound boring?  Let’s go back to the name of the game.  It’s called Fluxx because the game is constantly changing.  The cards allow you to keep modifying the rules and objective of the game.  Maybe you draw more cards, play more cards, trade hands with someone, kill off a Creeper, or do silly meta-game things like talking in an accent.  If the rules become too burdensome, there are cards that let you wipe them all out and return the game to its original state.

Looney Labs has been admirably creative with the variety of cards, so each game will play a bit differently.  The rules are so simple that you can teach even the biggest moron to play in a matter of seconds.  And since the game is constantly changing, you can easily add players at any time.  I’ve joined games 10 minutes in and won within a couple of turns.

If you’re still not following, let me give you an example from the zombie version of the game.  When the game starts, you’re in a zombie apocalypse, trying to get away.  The Creepers are zombies which can keep you from winning.  But you also get good guys (called Keepers) like friends, chainsaws, and food rations.  The game’s objective — which changes whenever someone plays a new one — generally involves having the right combination of Keepers, without any Creepers that preclude your victory.  For example, having both the gasoline and car, in which case you can drive away.

On September 25th, they’ll be releasing a version of the game called Martian Fluxx, which is based on campy, sci-fi movies.  You play an alien trying to — well, it depends on the cards in play, but you’re trying to do something.  And those pesky humans (the Creepers) keep getting in your way.  Fortunately, you have Keepers like ray guns and abduction machines to help you out.

Each version of Fluxx plays a little bit differently, and the Martian version is no exception.  But for anyone that’s new to the game, I can assure you they’re similar enough that you don’t really need to stress over which one has the best rules or most entertaining cards.  Simply pick the one that fits the interests of your group of friends.  If you’re more into Monty Python than Martians or zombies, there ya go.  It’s like picking a setting book for a generic RPG system: whether you go with aliens or wizards, you’re still playing the same game.

For anyone that’s familiar with the prior incarnations, we tried several rounds of Martian Fluxx to see how it plays.  It’s not a radical departure from anything you’ve seen before, but we did notice one major thing.  In the zombie version, Creepers had a lot of their own rules and behavior mechanisms, which was something not really seen in prior versions.  For example, killing one zombie in a crowd might send that crowd running to a neighboring player.  Martian Fluxx draws that back a little but introduces a lot of rules for the Keepers.  For example, you can use an abduction card to make the presence of humans irrelevant, or you can use your ray gun to blast things out of existence.

My final analysis is that the game is enjoyable, but as I stressed above, the important thing about Fluxx is picking the right flavor.  If you’re not that into Martians, stick with your zombie, Monty Python, Jewish, Christian, or even marijuana (?!)* flavors of the game.  But if you like little green men with big brains picking on hapless humans, this will be worth your $14.97.

* I didn’t even know that version existed until doing some site look-ups while writing this review.

UPDATE: After posting this article, I was contacted by Looney Labs with some interesting tidbits, quoted below…

Since you mentioned it in your article, I do want to let you know that Stoner Fluxx has been out of print for over 4 years.  Looney Labs recently launched a second imprint called Fully Baked Ideas, which we will use to release games with adult themes.  The first Fully Baked Ideas release will be a new and improved version of Stoner Fluxx on November 13, 2009.  The reason Looney Labs created Fully Baked Ideas is to keep all consumer marketing separate, so that children on our family games website will not be exposed to adult oriented games.

There are a few franchises out there, but they seem to be the exception that proves the rule.  In each case the franchise is a regional store, and the region rarely extends past the county or city.  These are not true franchises, because they are typically owned by the same individual.  Everywhere this occurs, these stores seem to do better and last longer than the stand alone competition.  I’m not entirely convinced this is due solely to name recognition though.

Comic Book and Game stores are typically opened by fans that have a passion for the hobby.  They want to make their hobby their career, so they take out loans or use their own collection to help fill their shelves.  This is the passion that drives the business forward, and in many cases that alone keeps the shop open.  The problem is that passion is not business sense.  The typical shop owner has motivation and many of the qualities needed to run a business.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to set up displays, advertise, or handle the finances of a business.

Comic and game stores typically look horrible.  They typically look like a college dorm room exploded inside a strip mall.  Posters wallpaper the room and cover the windows.  Displays typically are poorly lit and there is little to no striping.  This is partially due to the small order sizes, but also due to a lack of experience.  Expensive collectible items that likely will never sell are hung all over the store.  The general atmosphere just does not look like a serious business and thus people outside of the hobby are less likely to feel comfortable coming into the store.

Comic shop owners eventually need to hire employees.  The shop owners typically look to friends or customers for this role.  They think that others with a passion for the subject will be able to talk intelligently about it and won’t mind the slow periods because they can read.  The problem there is that these are not salesmen.  They don’t have any form of training to teach them how to treat costumers with respect or to try and upsell without being pushy.  More often than not they simply ignore the customer or drive them from the store with high pressure sales techniques.  At worst they are paid in merchandise that would have been bought by customers but they held aside for themselves.

There is a very small markup to this merchandise and a market that is gradually shrinking.   This leads to even someone with a strong business sense and a good crew not making much profit.  Successful shop owners can make a good living, but that isn’t enough to be able to afford opening a second or third shop, let alone building a franchise.  The few franchises that do exist I strongly feel do so due to their owners having a better business sense than many others.  That is not to say that some owners don’t have an excellent business sense and are just satisfied with a single shop.

There is a great potential for a comic\game store franchise, but the steps needed to create mass appeal are the very things that could drive away existing customers.  These are niche markets and part of the appeal of going into shops is their atmosphere.  While that atmosphere may prevent new customers it also provides the money needed to keep a shop running.  It doesn’t matter how many customers you pull into your store if they are not going to spend money.

What I do know is that I have searched out a comic shop in almost every town I have visited, and they are typically difficult to find.  You never know what you are going to get until you get there.  Some shops have custom made fixtures and work on providing a very professional appearance.  Others I wouldn’t want to touch the counter without disinfectant.   It would be nice to know, but since I already have a pull list it is this mystery of what I could find that drives me to the stores.  I have seen a number of stores over the years that have not fallen prey to these common business shortcomings.  Only time will tell though if these shops last longer than their more typical counterparts.

Now, we’re all mature, astute members of the gaming community, right? We know that there are many, many female gamers out there. Some of us are lucky enough to have one of them for a S.O.! We’re probably even so erudite as to have previously assumed that women played fantasy football. Even so, I know that most folks in the gaming culture (especially we that spend any time on the Internet) have had these conversations at least once.

The first conversation goes like this:

“There aren’t any/many female gamers. I’ve never had one in my game.”

“No way, there are tons of female gamers. I am one / have had one/several in my gaming groups.”

“Oh, wow. I’ve never met a female gamer.”

“Yeah, they’re everywhere. Tons of girls play roleplaying games now.”

Granted, this one is falling in frequency, especially among gamers that spend time online. Females are, at least in my experience, fairly well represented across the board in the RPG community these days. I still talk to the occasional female gamer that feels a bit like she’s in a boy’s club environment, but generally speaking, most female gamers I know are “just gamers.” They identify no more as “female gamers” than I do as a “male gamer.” This is true even in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where gamer shame is actually still fairly prevalent. But even so, this conversation still happens with enough frequency that we’ve all heard it at least once in some form or another.

Then, there’s the story of the guy who got his girlfriend or wife to play RPGs. (Yes, the opposite is also true, but to compare it more directly with the story I linked I’m using this particular direction.) There’s the “girlfriend gamer.” There’s the girl you found that already games. There’s the wife that once she sat in on one of your games, she realized she genuinely liked it and now she’s a “full fledged gamer.” We’ve all heard or had this one, at least those of us that have seen enough seasons that this is a concern for us.

So there you go. It’s not only in roleplaying game circles that some guys are still amazed that women, well, do stuff.

I find myself wondering if there’s more chauvinism in the sports world when it comes to this than there is in gaming, but sadly, I’ve also known a few (thankfully very few) male gamers that treat women in the hobby with a degree of disdain, so I suppose there’s progress to be made in any hobby.

* Happy birthday to Chris!

* Pat finds Devil Cremes.

* Sherlock Holmes, the upcoming movie, and reimagining popular stories.

* Old games that we miss…!?

* The creep of roleplaying elements into non-roleplaying games.

* Failures of outreach in geekdom.

* Bringing roleplaying games into the mainstream.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat, Wayne

Usual fair warnings, I don’t know how frequent these posts are going to be and I’m not sure if I’m even going to be able to make any after this one. That’s not to say I’m not going to update this at all after this post, I just don’t know myself.

This is going to be the planning blog for Fear the Con. I’m Chad, one of the hosts of the podcast Fear the Boot. I’m also the guy who is heading up the Fear the Con 3 effort. I got into running Fear the Con with #2 but I helped with #1, abet very little. I got in on the very end of that one and attended one or two meetings and just helped set up some chairs. With Fear the Con 2 I ran the whole show. To much of the show in fact. It was pretty stressful for me and consumed a lot of my time. In the end it was all worth it. We had great fun, wonderful people and and some fantastic games. The whole con was declared by all a smashing success. Dan made a little speech at the end of it saying I was one who made it all happen. I got a rousing round of applause and a few cheers. That was a nice and much needed ego boost. :)

I had my 1st meeting with Dan, he’s the money man, and hopeful the last face to face meeting that will take place for this FtC. We talked about some ideas of what we wanted out of FtC 3 and what worked and what didn’t in 2. We also set the tentative times and talked about the secret project…. DUN! DUN! DUN! Well we have 2 secret projects planned for the con and the whole reason for keeping it on the down low is that we don’t want to disappoint if we can’t make them work. But don’t worry, I’ll reveal them if we can’t get them started.

Right now I have a lot of ideas that I need to turn into action. To do this I will use my two greatest weapons: email and the Fear the Boot forums. Communication is key because the whole con lives and dies on the action of others. I need to start listing my ideas, turning them into jobs and then assign them to the different people on the con staff. I also need to start getting the ideas from rest of the staff. This can be a hard part sometimes. On one hand, you need perspective that only other people can give and they might think of some really cool stuff or have contacts that you didn’t think of. On the other hand, people can have some really dumb ideas and it’s a real waste of time and resources to chase everyone of those ideas down.

Current Con Status: Concepts and nothing more. Time starting pulling ideas and people together and turning that into action.

Let me say off the bat that I love me some Lovecraft in a creepy leave me alone in a room with it kind of way. It’s intellectual horror. I can enjoy a good thrill and look down on those who do not understand it. Ahh God the sweet, sweet joys of elitism. So I’ve been slurping on that teat for years when I first discovered Call of Cthulhu and what a moment of elation that was! And then I sat down and played the damn thing. It worked well enough but it was thoroughly ummm… what’s the nice way of saying it… craptacular. Years later I found Trail of Cthulhu and I knew peace. It delivered authentic investigative horror. And then I hear rumors about a new Cthulhu game. One that mixes Anime and Lovecraft. I suffered Sanity loss as images of La Blue Girl and Legend of the Overfiend came back to haunt me but, being the obsessive Lovecraftian fanboy that I am, I was determined to give it a shot. If only to bitch about it later.

And was pleasantly surprised by this shiny book that between well written – and often disturbing – fluff and very well done artwork actually was what it promised. A blendered mix of Lovecraft, Guyver, Gundam, and Evangelion with a story that skillfully binds them all together. Like any good shake it has a few lumpy bits but they are surrounded by a gooey mix of city destroying mechs, daring sorcerers, shapeshifting monsters, soldiers on the frontline of humanity’s defense and topped by a creamy coating of madness from the Outer Dark. Here is where the review really begins.

Player POV

Pros: Setting, Awesomesauce

The setting is awesome. Earth is almost unrecognizable. Two interstellar wars, the public acknowledgment of the occult, the creation of an inexhaustible source of power in the D-Enigine, the appearance of monsters on the battlefield and at home, and giant rampaging mechs have done a decent job of re-arranging the realty market. Multiple warfronts – both foreign and at home – combined with enough enemies to choke a goat with provide fodder for backstories, story hooks, and character ideas.

And now for the awesomesauce. While you can play the archetypal investigative horror here you can really do that with any decent Cthulhu system. CoC or Trail of Cthulhu. What this game really delivers is the chance to really take on the Mythos. Sure. You might go mad or break down in gibbering fear but you can take the bastards with you. Magic, hi-tech weaponry and armor, psychic powers, powered armor, shapeshifting symbiotes, building sized mechs, and living warmachines capable of leveling small cities. A multitude of ways to make a Deep One shit an inn table at the sight of you. It’s nice knowing that you can actually fight back when the slavering monster shows up.

Cons: Die Mechanic, Nazzadi

The die mechanic isn’t bad. It’s just bloody strange. You roll a dice pool equal to your skill plus modifiers and add your attribute. That’s pretty normal. Here’s where it gets weird. You play poker with the results taking the highest number, the highest pair, or the highest straight. It’s odd, esoteric, and has a steeper learning curve than most of the pre-eminent systems. If your players like poker though they will take to it like a deep one to a lonely New england housewife. I know I did.

Now the Nazzadi… they just puzzle me. Alien race, built from our own DNA, and sent to make us go boom in high style. Got that. Themes of racial and cultural tension are good for rp fodder and story hooks. Gotcha. Wanting to wipe us out like interstellar cockroaches. I can understand – and depending on the day highly sympathetic – this but why on earth would the migo make dark elves? I am certain that the creators of the game have a good story in mind for them but dark elves?

GM POV

Pros: Metaplot, Genre and Power Sliding

Metaplot is an ingredient that has to be used carefully. Too much and a story can become unwieldy and spawn abominations.* Too outrageous and you lose immersion by way of insanity. A good metaplot gives you a direction and story hooks. A map with little x’s on it saying here there be goodness. And there is no shortage of that here. A good one also reinforces the feeling the setting is trying to convey. Between the chaos in distant lands and the corruption at home Cthulhutech provides an edgy desperate dyning of the light mojo. For a gm it’s always nice to have a world realized in it’s foundations but vague enough on the details to mold to your needs.

As for genre and power sliding that’s a fun topic here. One of the problems with niche games is that they often have no real wiggle room for genre or power sliding. Most setting specific games have a fairly narrow definition of things. Who you can be, what you can do, the kind of adventures to be had but Cthulhutech definitely does not have this problem. Genre alone can slide between investigative horror, war stories, spy thrillers, and high action all within the course of a single adventure. Power sliding is just as flexible. Street level investigations into shadowy cults, special forces backed up by powered armored troops taking on monsters, psychics causing fatal cases of dain bramage, shapeshifting Tagers taking on vicious Dhoanoids, mech pilots deployed to the frontlines in multi million credit warmachines, and pilots cybernetically linked to biotech mech Engels. You can go all over the place in this setting.

Cons: Darkness of Setting, Combat Clunk

I understand that this is a dark and desperate setting but you can go too far. It’s not prevalent in the game but some of the fluff and adventure ideas are just a wee bit too dark to be really fun. Some topics can hit too close to home for some. I don’t want to really delve into the topics too much as some of them are not my favorite subject in the world. Let me sum this up by asking a question. Which adventure would you remember? Stopping a Deep One incursion into a town in ruined New England led by their poster boy – and real life Deep One – Michael Phelps# or freeing the terrified and brutalized women of a Deep One rape camp.

I say combat clunk but it’s not a bad case of clunk. The system follows the attack/defense and damage/soak cycle. The basic part of combat is pretty simple. Anyone with any familiarity with rpgs will recognize the flow and follow along. And it does flow pretty fast and furious once you get used to the die mechanic and the combat mechanics. I call clunk because I have always hated soak rolls of any kind. They have pissed me off since OWOD. The first time I hit with a metric assload of successes but none of that mattered because he rolled great on his soak roll. A human soaked a damn near perfect shot from a handgun at point blank range. It still pisses me off thinking about it. Can someone toss the soak roll concept in the bin? White Wolf has and you can too.

Overall I give this game an enthusiastic and hearty approval. It holds a warm and fuzzy niche in my heart right. The same kind of feeling I get when I beat a hard game or dangle a piece of candy just above a child’s vainly reaching fingers. Cthulhutech: why settle for the lesser evil?

* See OWOD and discover the joyful awfulness of Samuel Haight for a perfect example.

# He really is! He was raised by a single mother in New England and i swear I saw gills during the Olympics. That wasn’t pot in that bong. It was a potion to slow down the change.

* Nerd d**k waving.

* The soda map.

* Chad’s Fear the Con 3 blog.

* Bookstores and bookstoring.

* Character advancement and atrophy.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat, Wayne

* What is your favorite word?  Super Troopers meow clip.

* This is Chris’ 50th episode!

* Pocket gaming books.

* One-shot roleplaying games.

* Special thanks to Zircher for the Baron’s reply tagged at the end of the episode!

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat, Wayne

* Comic books, trade paperbacks, and graphic novels. Wayne provided links to The Boys and an online “pull” service.

* An apology to Rhiannon.

* Acclimating a new player to the roleplaying hobby.

* Julie Hussey’s Power 16 II acceptance speech.

Hosts: Chris, Dan, Pat, Wayne

The “launch party” was an interesting concept that involved a live concert intercut with footage from the video, tying it all into a single event. It was similar to how I remember the launch of the RPG back in ‘99, when they used actors to stage a short performance in the Exhibitor’s Hall that dealt with subject matter from the game.

And here is the ‘Red Rover’ incident. To recap what happened. On Saturday night at the Con, the fire alarms went off, and everyone was forced to leave the convention hall. This, of course put plenty of gamers in the streets, so much so, that they spilled over to both sides. I shot some general video, then came upon a group doing a reading of a Jack Chick track. When they were done, I made the joke to the crowd (off camera) that the other side of the street wanted to play a big game of Red Rover. To my surprise, they bought into it, and had some fun.

And as long as we’re talking about BattleTech, Chad was kind enough to shoot some highlights from my running of a TOPtBCH BattleTech event on Thursday evening. The clip doesn’t tell much of a story per se, but just shows some of the action and a bit of chat with me afterward. So, if you have a free eight minutes, go give it a shot!

Next up are Rob Boyle and David Cross from Catalyst Game Labs, talking about their new RPG, ‘Eclipse Phase.’ It’s sort of a sci-fi-horror-transhuman-other stuff kind of game. Very interesting.

Finally, we talked with two of the guys behind the web series, GOLD. It’s a humorous take on the world of competitive gaming, and is really well done.

A final note on updates. Been having some issues embedding video, so Dan has been handling that, which is making things slow. Dan isn’t slow, but the coordination between the two of us is slowing things up. I hope to get another update tonight, and maybe sneak in a photo-only update as well. Stick with us and point your other gaming friends here!

And of course, Gen Con wouldn’t be what it is without the gamers. And they are an interesting lot. We cornered some of them in the elevator as we rode up and down to our room.

What also impresses me are gamers who will wait to be the first in line to get the gaming product they want. I talked to these folks about it.

And speaking of gamers wanting what they want, we got inside the Exhibitor’s Hall to talk with Paizo about the release of the Pathfinder Core RPG. Of course, we also got the rush of those gamers who wanted to get the book. Or books in some cases.

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We dined on chili concocted by Martian Bob himself, and tasted a variety of micro brews scrounged up (and some brewed by) Killercheesewedge. Plenty of gamer talk abounded, as ‘Return of the Jedi’ played on Spike TV in the background. Of course, we paused to listen to Admiral Ackbar shout, “It’s a trap!”

Photos below, as well as a brief audio commentary by Chad & John on their journey up (Dan will be uploading this).

Tomorrow the coverage begins in earnest, so keep checking back for more updates daily.

Some photos of the gathering here. Expect more tomorrow.

With the success of Wii Sports, it is safe to say that Wii Sports Resort has to once again raise the bar  to be worthy of the name.  This time the new technology being demoed comes in the form of an attachment called Wii MotionPlus and gives the Wiimote a greater ability to sense player movement.  This is most clearly seen in games like swordplay, frisbee, and tabletop tennis where you are holding objects that move completely freely in your hands as you twist and turn the controller.  The impact of Wii Sports on the system is undeniable, but can Wii Sports Resort and the new Wii MotionPlus live up to the original?

The game intro tries to pull you in and get you excited about the new technology.  Unfortunately the first time you play the game you have to sit through a three minute video explaining how to hook up that technology.  There is no magic “I’m not an idiot just load the game” button to let you skip past the video either.  Once you do get past this tutorial — assuming you didn’t break your TV from throwing your controller at it — your Mii goes into a skydiving mini-game.  It is an amusing introduction to what the controller can do, but you cannot pick your Mii.  In my case, to start the game I had to skydive as my wife instead of myself.   For those that do enjoy this pointless mini-game an expanded version is included in the Air Sports section.   Minor changes like the addition of legs and Wii Fit inspired menus are welcome additions.

I have gotten more questions about Swordplay than the rest of the game combined.  Under the Swordplay category there are three games.  Duel is a fight on top of a raised platform where the goal is to knock your opponent off into the water.  The sword does move exactly like you are holding it and shows the true potential for a sword fighting game.  Unfortunately the AI is ridiculously easy to defeat at first.  As your score goes up you are presented with more difficult opponents, but to be honest none of them have presented a challenge thus far.  In Speed Slice an item is presented, and you have to slice it in the direction shown on the screen quicker than your opponent.   Finally Showdown is a throwback to all of those old Kung-Fu movies.  You are presented with waves of one hit-point people coming at you, swords raised.   They even included the setting of an old rope bridge.  Overall this category is one of the best in the game and shows the potential for sword fighting games to actually be fun.  Of course it is now up to the game manufacturers to follow through.  Ubisoft is the first to step up to that plate with Red Steel 2 later this year.  Only time will tell if it’s successful or disappoints as much as the original Red Steel.

The hidden gem is Archery.  If you play right handed you hold the Wiimote in your left hand and the nunchuk in your right.  You aim the shot with the Wiimote and pull the arrow back with the nunchuk.  The faster you pull back the nunchuk the faster you will focus on the screen.  Wind and arch have to be taken into account when aiming instead of just setting your sites to the bull’s-eye.  The thwipping sound coming out of the Wiimote’s speaker added an extra level of immersion into the game.  I hope that if there is another Legend of Zelda game for the Wii, it will steal this mechanic.

A few other games deserve noting, but there are far too many for in-depth reviews.   Bowling, Golf, and Tabletop Tennis all got mechanical upgrades from previous versions in the Wii series.  Frisbee Golf was a true standout on this game by far overshadowing the Frisbee Dog that unlocks it.  Wakeboarding was surprisingly fun, but the directions are not the most intuitive.  Finally Dogfight is an aerial battle between planes to gather balloons and shoot your opponent’s balloons.  The flight controls are simply the best I have ever experienced on a flying game.  Dogfight and Skydiving leave me hoping for both a more advanced jetfighter game and a superhero game.

Every game can’t be good though, and Wii Sports Resort has a few that either needed more work or just aren’t fun.  The game that stands out most in this category is Cycling.  You are riding a bicycle by moving the Wiimote and nunchuk up and down rapidly.  You steer by tilting them left, right, and up.  The mechanic is not fun and leaves you exhausted by the end of the race.  It isn’t innovative game play and I don’t see any reason the MotionPlus is even needed for this.  Also, a personal pet peeve of mine with game developers is that they don’t realize that most people HATE split screen multiplayer mode.  For games like cycling it is necessary, but for Duel most players don’t need to see thru their character’s eyes just to fight.  The recently released Punch-Out also suffers from this.

Final Recommendation:  Wii Sports Resort buy, rent, or avoid?  BUY.  It will quickly become your new go to game to show people what the Wii is like.  Now if only it actually represented what most Wii games were like.

* Gencon is upon us!  If you haven’t already, get signed up for the guerrilla events.

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* Rolling dice versus roleplaying social skills.

* Could there be a future without mainstream gaming?

* City of Villains guild.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat

Let me start off by saying this. We should have had a cannibal hero years ago. Knock out your enemies? So early 90s. Kill your enemies? Even my mother plays games where you kill people. Digital people. Eating your enemies – or allies or bystanders or that unsuspecting old lady down the road – is a breath of fresh air. I mean, be honest, how many times have you hated a character so badly that you would give a limb just for the chance to kill them? Now imagine the joys of not just fragging that person but eating their heart just to possess some of their power? Or to quench a quick snack attack? Whichever. And think of how many games would have been better for the addition of cannibalism? Resident Evil would have become Resident Lunch – the all you can eat zombie buffet. But enough about my newfound joy of digital cannibalism. For now.

Prototype is supposedly an action/superhero/sci-fi – though the science is so soft you could spread it with a butter knife – game released on the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. Why isn’t it on the Wii you may ask? Because old people don’t like games about eating people, and they couldn’t figure out how to do cannibalism with wild flailing motions*. The game genre is wrong, I realized, about halfway through. It’s none of the above. This is the world’s first cannibalism simulator. It’s what you will spend a good majority of your game doing. Sneaking and eating… fighting and eating… sneaking then fighting then eating… eating then fighting …sneaking, fighting, eating, and then marauding in a vehicle. That’s about every mission type in the game.

Let me break the game down for you.

You play convenient amnesiac Alex Mercer. All you remember is a few flashes. A minute or two into gameplay and the cannibalism comes in, but it’s not just a neat and horrible way to end human life, it is Deus Ex Canniblus! With each person you eat you gain their memories. Amnesiac and cannibalistic memory taking… I think you see where this is going. Mercer goes on a rampage of eating people, being angry at whoever did this, and evolving into something that can stop armored tank divisions. That’s the main gist of the story. Eat someone, learn part of the puzzle, pursue the puzzle piece, fight monsters or the military, and then eat someone else.

Sounds boring beyond the gratuitous eating of people? Wrong. Prototype made sure that you would never get bored doing what it does most often. Killing things has been taken to a new height in this game. Claws, blades, bludgeoning fists, cars, tanks, helicopters, extendo limbs, new combat moves including powerbombing people from 30 feet in the air, forests of spikes, rocket launchers, machine guns, and that isn’t all. Combine this with regeneration, armor, and acrobatics that would make Tony Jaa blush with envy, and you have an awesome combat experience. Even the movement is fun. You can run up walls, glide from building to building, leap city blocks, and outrun cars.

The graphics are nice. Pretty enough to be entertaining without being ground breaking. The animations are nice and varied. Different weapons give different cannibalistic animations, which is a nice touch. Lots of blood and collateral damage to be had. I honestly can’t tell you how good the soundtrack is, because I really couldn’t hear it over the sounds of wholesale slaughter. One nice thing they did was the flashes of memory you get from cannibalizing important targets. Unique voice action and cinema for all two hundred and some victims, too.

If you can’t tell by now, I had a blast playing this game. All in all for fans of carnage and superhero style mad science I highly recommend this game. I give it four cannibalized bodies out of 5.

But, as an aside or addendum to this review, I want to bring up the prevalence of the whole cursed with awesome trope. As explained here at the excellent TV Tropes site. How am I expected to believe that someone with the power of a god is really sad about it? Especially when it comes with no drawbacks? I would gladly take Alex Mercer’s place in a heartbeat. Power of a god and only the occasional desire to eat people so you can evolve? I’ve had days where the thought of eating people has crossed my mind. Usually when my wait for food or service has taken longer than Moses did crossing the desert. Where do I sign up? Why do game makers – and writers of all types – do this? I want to know what you all think about this particular issue.

First, being a software developer, I didn’t know a whole lot about configuring an email server. I just learned all about DomainKeys, DKIM, SPF, and all kinds of other junk.  For those not following, the punchline is that our Fear the Boot emails should no longer be treated as spam or (in some cases) outright blocked by your mail provider. I’ve successfully sent registration emails to both Gmail and Yahoo, and they appeared right in the inbox.

If you’ve registered for the forum and never received your confirmation email — and followed up with Chad and never gotten a reply from him either — please follow-up with us one more time.  Our spam issue should finally be resolved, and messages from our domain should start going where they belong.

Second, Jeramy Ware is up for reelection as an ENnies judge.  He’s been an outstanding voice of reason within that organization and a real champion for gaming podcasts.  I hope you’ll go out and give this guy your support.  He’s not affiliated with Fear the Boot — nor have we submitted anything for consideration this year or currently plan to next year — so this isn’t some form of self-promotion.  I just feel that keeping this guy in the mix is a real boon for gamers and podcasters alike.

* Battletech’s 25th anniversary and the unseen ‘Mechs.

* Sign-up continues for our Gencon guerrilla event network!

* A big thanks to Kellum.

* Midnight RPG movie.

* The Ghostbusters video game and never-made movie sequel.

* Overall balance in a roleplaying game.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat

* Power 16 II final battle this week!

* Numbering churches and banks.  (Note from Dan: I checked the ending credits of Contra and realized I had games mixed up.  It was from the credits of Mega Man 3.  It’s around 2:20 on that clip.)

* Urban legends.

* City of Villains guild on the Pinnacle server.  It’s NOT a FtB sponsored guild, but a lot of us have joined it.  We have a dedicated forum area, and you can find the client download here.

* Players that refuse to learn the rules of an RPG.

* Game completionism.

* Questioning magic user balance in RPGs and video games.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John

* The new Mechwarrior game.  After watching the trailer, seeing the restored “unseen” ‘Mechs and flavor they’re going for, Dan retracts his initial disdain.

* Our hope for a new Crimson Skies video game.

* Deciding what’s worth tracking in a roleplaying game.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat

* This week, the Power 16 II enters the finals for the Denny’s League.

* If you’ve enjoyed Skullossus’ bracketology art, check out his comic, The Princess Planet.

* Sign-up continues for our Gencon guerrilla event network!

* Chris wins an Edward R. Murrow award!  You can watch his entry here.

* A debate on the usefulness of utility spells.

* Pocket Tanks.

* Dealing with the first game in a campaign.

* Melodies of Life.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat

* Be sure to get signed up for our Gencon guerilla event list.

* Chad’s random aside on industrial music.

* Five upcoming movies we’re looking forward to: Surrogates, 9, District 9, Zombieland, Where the Wild Things Are.

* Epic player quests.

Hosts: Chris, Chad, Dan, John, Pat

* Power 16 II rolls on!  This week is the second round of the Denny’s League.

* Can’t Stop the Serenity charity.

* Some mathematical facts about 153.

* Reverse picture-preview episode.  The 10 pictures forum users submitted to inspire this episode can be found here.

Hosts: Chad, Dan, John, Pat

Fast forward to the emergence of “Sandbox RPGs” and the global popularity of “Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.” Open and “do what you want” gameplay is the standard. So where does that leave rpg’s? Tabletop rpg’s helped influence the first video games, and now in some cases, video games are influencing tabletop rpg’s. An excellent example of a MMORPG inspired rule system is the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, and more specifically, its power system.

MMORPG’s standardized method of giving all the players activatable powers that will do everything from swinging a sword to casting a spell makes using the interface simple, and quick. Dungeons and Dragons took a page out of this book and made all character abilities “powers”, making it easier for players to pick up new classes (because they didn’t have to learn how a magic system worked), but still kept the classes unique.

Another example is from more free form video games, like Morrowind, and their effects on games such as Savage Worlds. In Morrowind, while initial stat choices will have a major influence on how well you do certain tasks, the system allows you to still develop skill in other areas. Fighters can cast magic, Wizards can wear heavy armor, Morrowind’s rule system allows for full customization, given a little time. Savage Worlds does similar things with its own system. Through gained experience, characters expand their skills in any field they want, there is no restriction of a “class” system.

Now lets discuss the influences on the actual stories. I consider my gaming streak to be a colorful one, and one common trait I have found in most games is that there is a Morrowind style of plot development. While the entire campaign is “open” to the players, there always seems to be one major plot that the characters are meant to follow. When the players break away, the missions tend to be briefer and easier to accomplish. This may predate Morrowind, or even video games, but this has certainly become increasingly popular as more people claim to be “Sandbox GMs”. Another variation of the typical “Sandbox GM” is more of a MMORPG style of games, very brief quests with no larger plot arcs to be seen.

So what does all of this mean to the respective hobbies? I have only been playing long enough to get a glimpse of the pre-MMORPG era, but I think that tabletop games have gained many improvements from their video game counterparts, and have made cousins in the geek culture. As technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, we may continue to see ground breaking concepts come up that can be readily harvested for the tabletop community.

* Power 16 II, round 2 of the Shadowrun League. Get your votes in! You can find the on-going bracketology thread here.

* When is it too soon?

* Handling failure as a Game Master.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat

Story has the most emphasis. Our games are like a story where the protagonist is a varying group of characters instead of a single one. Characters don’t develop in the literary sense. If Blasto the 1st level wizard is an overbearing oaf, then Blasto the 16th level wizard is likely to still be an overbearing oaf, just with a lot more firepower. It’s unusual for a character’s personality to change over time, but it has happened.

With good games, plots are malleable with different threads to follow, each emphasizing different skills of different characters. If the fighter is missing that evening, then the party may chose to wait until next week to try and invade the orc’s lair. Instead, the bard may want to investigate the murders down by the waterfront. It’s like a buffet table of fun activities. There’s always something there you want to try.

Our campaigns tend to have a lot of combat. Remember, we’re talking about D&D here. It is designed around “kill monsters and take their stuff” so every class has some way to contribute in a fight. They are easy to set up and they work for everyone – regardless of the party mix. In a good game, the fights have a reason for happening beyond “they are between us and the treasure.” Winning (or losing) should advance the plot. When the campaign becomes pointless combat, just an endless series of fights, it usually means that the GM has run out of ideas. That’s when I know a campaign has gone on too long.

While our sessions are short, our campaigns can last for a very long time. Only one player in our group has never sat behind the GM screen, so we have a lot of GM’s in our group. We take turns and those turns generally last for several months – until the GM decides that he is done. They usually don’t run the entire campaign in one series so it may be a year or more before they get to run the next section. We have one unfinished game run by one of the players that is currently on hiatus. The game has been on hold since 2001. We’ll get back to it someday.

While a lot has changed in 30 years, one thing that hasn’t is our desire to play. We still refer to it as simply “the game.” We started playing one night a week more than 20 years ago. I don’t see us changing our ways any time soon.

* Wii Fit.

* Chad gets screwed by another video game.

* Breaking the fourth wall of electronic games.  You can see Project NATAL here and Milo here.

* Player Character failure in roleplaying games.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat

I should mention that the 4th edition D&D character builder is addictive. It’s relatively quick, it presents choices and suggestions. I love it. Combine that with a love for all the options 4th edition has to offer, and I’m like a kid in a candy store.

I decided to go hard-core. I pulled out my old half-giant gladiator from Dark Sun. He was an NPC I had who followed around one of the player characters. In Dark Sun, every character gets a psionic wild talent. My character, Kalador, had this power from the Dragon Kings sourcebook titled Strength of the Land. It had two prerequisite powers that he gained automatically as well – Lend Health and Share Strength. Something about a half-giant who could give of his strength and HP to fellow adventurers seemed great. The fact that he could draw power from the very earth beneath him was just awesome.

Imagine my surprise when I got the PHB2, cracked it open, and saw the warden class. Here was a class that seemed to be based around the Strength of the Land theme! I was so excited. I also had my eyes on the goliath race, which had awesome written all over it. I knew what I had to do.

Using the character builder (Did I mention that I dearly love this program?), I transformed my old half-giant gladiator into a goliath warden. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I found a few tricks that may help you if you decide to re-invent your character. And since Dan loves numbered lists, I shall follow suit.

1. It’s okay to change the race. If a new race works out better, or if the race is thematically similar to your old one, give it a shot. Sometimes you will find some new gem, whether rules-based or fluff-based, for your character.
2. Ditto with classes and powers. In my case, I went from an arena gladiator to a primal warden. Yet they share certain similarities. I went from one defender type to another, and I maintained the Strength of the Land theme. In fact, I built upon the theme. I’m not certain yet about the other powers, but maybe PHB3’s psionic power source will have something to offer.
3. Backstory can be modified, but you can also keep it as-is and provide an in-game explanation for the change. I had a 3.5 wizard recently that just wasn’t cutting it for me. An in-game change made him into a favored soul. The cool part about this change was that it added some fantastic story to the game.
4. You will always lose something, but you will always gain something. It’s the trade-off of making a change.
5. Did I mention themes? You won’t ever get a direct translation, but you can use the themes to re-build characters from the ground up. Just remember to build them within the game system you’re using, keep your foundations, and be open to change. My goliath’s tattoo pattern, for example, is eerily similar to his old slave tattoos.
6. Above all, have fun with it. This isn’t too serious of stuff here. If the changes fit, great. If not, don’t convert!

So give it a try and see what becomes of your old characters. You may find new life to old characters, and the desire to play them once more.

* The Power 16 2 begins today!  The first round of competition within the Shadowrun League will run for a week or two.  Get your votes in here! Remember that we’re giving away Catalyst gift cards, so if you want to enter for those, be sure to leave your name and email address at the end of the poll.

* Aliens in television and movies.

* Humans and colonization in science fiction.

* Changing character traits mid-game.

* Over-discussing your game.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat

The biggest thing we had to change was having major plot points that were derived from individual character backgrounds. Darth Vader being Luke’s father is interesting but if Luke only plays six games out of ten, then timing that big reveal is difficult. What if Luke went on a business trip after his training with Yoda and didn’t return until he knocked on the door of Jabba’s palace?

Encounters have to be scalable. The big fight against the gnoll horde might involve anywhere from two to five PC’s. The prescription for scaling a horde is easy – just add or take away gnolls as needed for pain. Scaling something like a dragon is not. Make it too small and, though it may be a tough fight for two PC’s, it looks too small to have been the big menace of the story. Make it too big and its breath weapon kills everyone in the first round. Sometimes you just can’t, or shouldn’t, scale an encounter. If you are setting up campaign’s big finish, you might have to tread water for a session or two until everyone can be there. The trick is to make it look like you aren’t really treading water. I often keep extra encounters in reserve in case I need to pad a session enough to postpone the big fight until next week. It’s hard to pull off without frustrating the players. If you drop in an extra encounter of some type, you have to make it look like it’s been waiting for them the whole time, not just something that appeared suddenly out of nowhere.

Every obstacle has to have multiple solutions. While this is true in general it becomes much more important when you don’t know which players are going to be there. Getting past the trap you designed for the thief is harder when said thief is stuck at home with a sick kid. You need to make sure that if there isn’t any way past the trap, the party at least has some other place to go. (Consider this another argument against using a railroad plot.)

Plot elements have to be short and portable. Having an encounter with the wizard’s long lost brother is fine, as long as you can drop it into any session and conclude it in the same session. If you span sessions, the wizard’s brother may end up wondering where the wizard went. This is easier in a sandbox style game, but the more linear your plot, the more difficult this becomes.

All these limitations may sound like they suck the fun out of our games, but they don’t. We wouldn’t put so much effort into continuing our gaming if we weren’t enjoying it. Next up, I’ll talk about how our games play out.

Over the years City of Heroes has had to adapt to the market and fan requests.  PvP, crafting, and special drops were all added to the game in a manner that allowed them to be completely optional.  PvP was first introduced as an arena, and later as zones dedicated to that purpose.  Crafting was introduced as something to expand your Supergroup base and has expanded to enhancements, temporary powers, and costume pieces.  With crafting came rare drops, an auction house, and an in game economy.

The developers of City of Heroes have introduced some truly innovative game mechanics in response to fan requests.

• The sidekick\exemplar system allows players of different levels to adjust themselves up or down to the other players’ level. This was designed to let new players play with veterans without the veteran players needing to create new characters.
• Global Chat channels allow players to communicate with each other regardless of the character or even server they are playing on.
• Players are given rewards based on the amount of time they have subscribed to the game. These can be powers, costume pieces, or other in game extras. They give veterans additional bonuses to deal with some of the limitations of new characters.
• Ouroboros missions allowed players to go back and complete any story arcs that they missed when they played through the game or just replay their favorite arcs any time they want.
• The badge system gives rewards to players that want to explore maps and provides something for completionists to strive for.
• A difficulty adjustment system allows advanced players to increase the difficulty of their missions to present more of a challenge.

So innovation is nothing new to city of Heroes, but with their latest free expansion “Issue 14: Architect” they have introduced a feature that is truly unique among MMOs.  The Architect system allows players to create their own story arcs and publish them for other players to experience.   A player creating an arc chooses the number of missions, the objectives, and all text associated with the missions.  This allows a player to create anything from a single mission to an Epic Taskforce.  The arcs are not limited to in game villains and villain groups either.  The innovative City Of Heroes character creator is available for players to create their own custom villain groups to inhabit their missions.  You can adjust the look, difficulty, and powers of these villains while creating your story arc.  Also as an added incentive to play other users missions you receive tickets that can be turned in to unlock additional content for your own missions.

While City of Heroes may not fit what everyone is looking for in an MMO with this issue it continues to provide features that other development teams would be wise to pay close attention to.  COH has a strong community and while it might not have as many subscribers as some other games, its fans are easily more vocal and supportive.  That is in no small part due to the creators focusing on ways to expand on that community.  Early in the game’s life one of the developers spent some of his off time to code a dance club because players were requesting a save non-combat location to meet and just hang out with their friends.  Costume contests, trivia games, and hide and seek are events frequently run by super groups in the starting zones.   This new Architect system just expands on those concepts.  If you have a group of people that love your product and spend a lot of time thinking about it they will keep the game interesting if you just provide them the tools and get out of their way.  The true key to being successful in the MMORPG business is to make your players feel invested in the game so they don’t want to leave.

If this blog has interested you, you can try a free 14-day trial of City of Heroes.

* Fear the Boot TOFtBCHes at Gencon!  If you want to be a part of the action, get signed up!

* Power 16 II, starting next episode!

* Television ratings, cancellations, and DVRs.

* Adding depth to your player character.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

* Fear the Boot float trip and camping trip June 5th – 7th.  You can find the Facebook event page here and forum thread here.

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* Mistrust at the gaming table.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

* If you register for the forums and don’t get your confirmation email, send a message to the General Mailbox with your forum user name.  Don’t expect a confirmation email from us, since that will probably be blocked as well!  Just keep checking back over the next day or two.

* Fear the Boot float trip and camping trip June 5th – 7th.  You can find the Facebook event page here and forum thread here.

* Fear the Boot TOFtBCHes at Gencon!  If you want to be a part of the action, get signed up!

* The things being a long-time gamer have taught us.

* Dungeon building part 2.  We mentioned a few resources I’ll provide links to…

• dungeon tile sets
• How to Host a Dungeon
• Dwarven Forge
• Dundjinni
• Dwarf Fortress map archive
• Reaper minis
• World Works

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

* “Dan’s not quite long enough” is in its last week!  To make your donation to March of Dimes’ Raina’s Wings charity, do so here.  You can see Chad bald on our forums.

* Skies of Glass comic artist search!   The character document is here.  Send submissions or questions to skiesofglass@gmail.com.

* Discerning when it’s close-mindedness versus the right time to say, “No.”

* Dungeon building (first half of discussion).  Next week we’ll be back to talk about history, ecology, traps, tools, and tricks!

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

Over the past several years, there’s been an increased awareness of the danger of massive asteroids striking our planet.  You get a big rock moving at high speed, slamming into our fragile world, and you may be looking at the end of mankind.  Many sci-fi buffs have proposed using this situation intentionally.  Accelerate an asteroid toward an unsuspecting planet and watch chaos ensue.

However, FTL engines offer an even better (worse?) weapon.

If you’ll recall from the last article, I talked about how ships approaching the speed of light also approach infinite apparent mass.  An asteroid weighing billions of tons hitting our planet would do a lot of damage, but even a tiny shuttle moving near or above the speed of light would hit far, far harder.

While I’ve been familiar with this concept for a while, I was recently introduced to its proper name: Relativistic Kill Vehicle.  Take an object, push it close to the speed of light, and let it hit something.  Or even if you can’t quite hit it, just get it moving really fast and break it into pieces, slinging its bits (which also now have an incredible apparent mass) in a shotgun pattern.  (Credit to poster Rick Smathers for correcting my word choice there!)

Welcome to a universe with weapons far worse than nuclear bombs.

War Without Extinction

During the Cold War, many famous novels and movies were made about World War 3 between America and the Soviet Union.  Obviously you can’t tell much of a story about conventional warfare or guerrilla resistance when both sides wipe each other out with nuclear missiles, so a variety of excuses were found to keep them off the table.  You may feel the same thing is true in your science fiction setting, so let me propose a few ways you can get RKVs out of the picture.

First, both sides just agree not to use the option.  It’s better to lose a war than be driven extinct, so there’s a written or unwritten agreement to simply not employ these weapons.  I’m sure that agreement will get harder to stick to when one side realizes they’re losing, but that’s a challenge for your ability to maintain suspension of disbelief with the audience.

Second, offer a defense against it.  Perhaps there’s sufficient technology in regard to sensors and interception vehicles that RKVs can be detected and either shot down or deflected.  We’re moving deeply into the territory of handwaving, but the option is there.  Your future society may have some working equivalent of SDI that keeps their planets safe from these mass bombs.

Third, make it impossible.  If we assume FTL engines exist in your universe, anything moving below the speed of light (presuming you can spot it) can probably be intercepted.  An object moving FTL may not be so easy to catch.  But as I noted in the last article, we have no truly sufficient model for FTL engines anyway, so add in your own limits.  Perhaps whatever field that makes FTL travel possible doesn’t work close to large masses.  The missile warping toward our homeworld hits Earth’s gravity well, the bubble collapses, and since it was never really “moving” in the traditional sense to begin with, it just pops-up near the planet at all-stop.  Yes, this is more handwaving, but I wanted to list the option.

Fourth, it’s possible your FTL mechanic works by moving objects moving into “hyperspace” or some parallel universe/dimension.  In this scenario, ships are never moving all that fast in our universe anyway, so they can’t really collide with anything in dangerous ways.  And even weapons being aimed at your planet at near FTL speeds could be yanked into this alternate plane by a defensive mechanism that extends a hyperspace field around them.  (Credit to poster Nentuaby for pointing this one out!)

Whatever your choice regarding RKVs (including them or nudging them out of the picture), I hope there’s one major thing you’ll take away from this article.  As I’ve tried to communicate from the start, space warfare (and the technology that allows it) introduce a variety of issues that don’t always have a perfect parallel in terrestrial warfare.  The important thing is to have some basic understanding of what’s possible, remain consistent, and above all else, tell a good story.

However, there’s been a negative side effect: many legitimate users aren’t getting their confirmation emails.

If you’ve signed up for our forums and have not received your confirmation email, please use the contact form on this site.  Send an email to the General Mailbox with your forum user name, and we’ll get you activated immediately.

* Skies of Glass comic artist search!   The character document is here.  Send submissions or questions to skiesofglass@gmail.com.

* Concepts we all understand but can’t quite define.

* Broadening Dan’s horizons.

* How to overcome the roadblocks to running a super hero game.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

“GI JOE” would be a playful nickname given to a crack team of operatives put together by Washington – they would be the best of the best from each branch of the military and Intelligence agencies. They would be all our old favorites. I wouldn’t change them at all.

I would make those evil Cobra twins Senators instead of business men.

The plot would be about them coercing China into invading Taiwan, Egypt invading Israel and Iran invading Iraq, all at the same time. Their goal would be to spread the American military too thin to defend its international interests. Then there would be this badass scene where Destro and the Baroness walk into the Pentagon. It would be like that scene in the Matrix when Neo and Trinity kill all those security guards then go up the elevator. They would get in and steal plans for some kind of new secret nuclear weapon that is like a million times badder than regular old nuclear weapons.

I would also have the balls to have them set off a nuclear explosion in Washington DC. Tripwire would stay behind trying to disarm it, but would be killed in the explosion. The other Joes would escape.

The climax of the movie would be Sgt Slaughter punching Destro in the face and putting a dent in his metal head. This would happen on top of the Eiffel Tower. There would also be a funny part where Slaughter doesn’t like french food.

Also, it would be cool if Snake Eyes had to infiltrate a ninja academy in Japan that is operated by Imperialist Japanese dudes who want to reinstitute the Emperor. They would be working for Cobra also, and as part of his initiation he would have to fight Quick Kick, who is a hostage.

The whole time, Cobra Commander is running the show from a bunker in Kazakhstan. He is surrounded by a cadre of genetically modified super soldiers. Duke and the Joes humiliate them totally at the end of the movie. Like, they are built up the whole time as being so bad as hell that no man could ever take them, but then at the end it would be like that part in Ong Bak when Tony Jaa takes out that dude with one kick to the face. It would just be five minutes of all our favorite Joes beating ass left and right and not even taking a lick. Then Cobra Commander begs for mercy and Duke slaps the cuffs on him.

Just before the credits, it shows Cobra Commander with a hood over his head (you never see his face) but otherwise stripped naked in a dirt cell in Guantanamo Bay. He would look real badass and have all these snake tattoos all over him. He would yell about revenge and then the camera would pan back to show two dead security guards and one of the twins holding the key to his cell.

The End?

Here are some of my picks:

Sgt Slaughter – Stonecold Steve Austin
Quick Kick – Jackie Chan
Snake Eyes – Tony Jaa
Destro – Patrick Stewart
Duke – Bruce Willis
Tripwire – Paul Giamatti
Scarlett – Kate Winslet
Lady Jaye – Angelina Jolie
Cobra Commander – Gary Oldman (uncredited)
Evil Twins – William H. Macy
Roadblock – Shaquil O’Neal

So how would you guys improve the upcoming flick?

* Fear the Boot community’s Neverwinter Nights mod.

* We discuss a commentary by Isaac Asimov on whether “true” science fiction can ever sell in a mass market.

* Why Dan struggles constructing super hero campaigns.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

* Things that wouldn’t work as roleplaying games.  Apparently clips of The Letter People aren’t hard to find.

* Playing animals or anthropomorphic animals in a roleplaying game.  You can see a picture of the guy that inspired this show on our forums.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

So, here’s the question: How can a GM claim the pearls of wisdom from the dungeon of maturity without falling victim to its perils? In this article, I will attempt to give more concrete than esoteric advice, but who knows where this is going to go? I’m winging it – and that’s point #1. (Remember: this is about gaming like you used to, and you used to come unprepared.)

1) Wing it!

1.5) Ok, ok. So don’t wing all of it, necessarily – unless that’s your thing. But leave some blank spots on the map. Put a hallway in your dungeon and don’t draw the passages it leads toward. Have your players visit a town about which you only know the name. Be unprepared. You will amaze yourself. I promise.

2) Missing sucks. Make your bad guys easy to hit. Make important bad guys easy to hit, but hard to kill. That said, protect your main villain. I know this runs counter to most of the advice given on the podcast; but if you want to play like a kid again, shield your villain with the GM screen and do not let him die unless you absolutely cornered. Or it’s fun.

3) Throw in a liberal number of barrels of black powder, roofing tar, pitch, brandy, etc. When a player sees something flamable, there is a 10-in-10 chance that he will light it up and remember that session for the rest of his days. The temptation to blow things up is juvenile, sure – but it’s also awesome.

4) Give your warriors a chance to fight in an arena as gladiators. If you’re like me, this happened in every game when you were younger and was one of the first things to taper off as you grew up.

5) Trash your house rules that limit resurrections.

6) Two words: MAGIC CRYSTALS. As a prank once, one of my players said he was going to GM our game and started off telling us that Gandaldorf the Wizard wanted us to retrieve the Jewel of Magic from the Cave of Peril, lest evil shadows consume the land. Point being, it shouldn’t have been a prank. This is one area in which JRPGs have it right.

7) Go epic from the start. Make the PCs important. Let them meet with the King. Let them attain treasures far beyond their challenge rating. If all it takes to break your game is a longsword +5, I don’t know what to tell you.

8) Have a main bad guy. Have the party encounter him regularly. Have them foil his plans. And have him escape. Nevermind what the FtB guys say on the podcast – protect your villain with the GM screen. That’s what it’s there for.

And again, I want to invite you guys to speak up in the comments. What did you do as a young GM that you haven’t done lately? Give us some ridiculously bad, incredibly fun advice!

* Chris introduces his son’s friends to D&D.

* We ponder why video games aren’t held to the same product standards common to every other industry.

* Roleplaying with your kids.  The toy company Pat mentions is Schleich (WARNING: this site plays music when you open it).  The roleplaying game Chad keeps referring to is QAGS.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

So, as proud as I am about coming up with that metaphor – especially as I read, examine and think about various game systems – it obviously is incomplete. Further, there was something I was trying to describe, which I find hard to put into words. In cases like this, it’s often more useful to write around the problem, hoping to discover it’s edges and infer it’s shape and then begin taking stabs at what I sense but cannot wholly describe. Or, I can just blog about it and count on those with greater insight to speak up!

The issue I’m trying to describe has to do with the way RPG scenario outcomes feel. If a fighter is hoping for a +3 Sword of Flames, and the GM just announces, “you stumble into the darkness of the empty room and find one at your feet” or the hero’s defeat a horde of undead goblins and find the sword in the pile of detritus collected from their previous victims, the end result is the same. The fighter got the sword he was hoping for. Yet, it doesn’t ‘feel’ the same – at least not to me. Even if the sword was rolled up on some random treasure table, it feels more earned then in the first scenario. It also feels ‘realer’ then a sword suddenly dropped out of the ether by a generous GM.

I’m not just talking about stuff, either. Any challenge resolution has the same problem. If the Shadowrunner is trying to renegotiate with his Mr. Johnson and suddenly Mr. Johnson acquiesces and the characters get exactly what they want, the reward does not ‘feel’ as real and as earned as when they have to drag it out of him with negotiation rolls, bluff checks, and intimidation tactics. Somehow, the easy give makes this whole thing feel more like “make believe” then a game. But, this is a game of make believe! What’s going on here?

One possible area to explore is the Foci of Authority (FoA). Who / what has the final say? Does the GM rule by fiat, dishing out curses and benedictions in the way he may feel is best? Are narration rights shared with the players, with each one acting as co-creators in the story and pushing the plot and props as she thinks would produce the bestnarrativist options? Or, do the rules sit above both the GM and the players as a neutral arbiter, dolling out monsters (via random encounter tables) and treasures (via random treasure tables) and keeping both the GM and the players in check by clearly delineating what happens when, to whom, and how?

Obviously, any real game / group / system / campaign will have some measure of all three (and probably others I have not thought of) to some degree. Saying, “some of each!” is an easy out and does not explore how the amount of power sharing and location of the Foci of Authority changes what feels real and what feels like a cheap and arbitrary give-me. I’ve seen games in which a player picks up a cursed object and tries it on … when the GM springs the surprised curse on him, he’s not mad! No one is. That’s just the nature of the game. Further, there are spells and precautions just for checking on such things. On the other hand, I’ve seen the GM declare a character was cursed by his patron deity for a particularly poor decision. This was taken in a totally different way, by both the affected player and the other players at the table. When the source of the curse (the FoA) was the GM acting in a subjective way, the curse felt much more personal and vindictive then when the player just picked up and tried on that cursed item. [For the record, neither case was my character - I don't have an axe to grind. I was just the observer.]

This leads back to the original concept, how do the players interact with the setting and when do their interactions “feel real” to the players and when do they “feel fake” or just arbitrary? Which does, talking your way past a guard (with no bluff check) count as? How about being an expert in demolitions and botching a skill check because the systems dice mechanic favors extremes at both ends of the curve? To me, these are answered internally, in a felt way. Using the rules and rolls of the game, nearly always feel real to me – except in the case where some poor mechanics seem to lead to a lot of PC failure. RP’ing a scenario feels real when the player really has to try, speaks in character, and all parties involved (NPC’s included!) act in character and the outcome seems reasonably feasible. That’s why, to me, a good system with lots of controls and methods available to the players increases the ‘reality’ of the game experience.

It’s also why I may like Narrativist game systems in theory, but have such a hard time with them in practice. When any fact can be created on the fly, by anyone at the table (within the constraints of the system) then nothing feels real. When character death is only by player consent, then it doesn’t feel real nor threatening.Narrativist games that allow the most imaginative descriptions but boil it down to a single push button effect of “roll your plot control dice pool” are just as limiting and even more ‘unreal’ then a traditional game that lets you describe your attack any way you want but only recognizes the push button effect of “melee attack with sword.”

Let me know what you think of this in the comments below, and describe for me what makes RPG scenario resolution feel ‘real’ to you. Thanks!

* Fear the Boot will soon be joining the Pulp Gamer network.

* Introducing Darren Lacoste, winner of Mayfair’s Catan tournament.

* Gamers as an underserved demographic.

* Expanding the appeal of gaming.

* Areas we’d like to see focus on the gaming demographic, and what we can do to help make that happen.

* A look at what’s coming up at Mayfair Games.

Hosts: Dan, Derek, Don, Larry, Kim

NOTE: While I was on this trip, I also guest hosted episodes on some other shows you might want to check out:

• Kore News – Episode 75
• Kore News – Episode 76
• Pulp Gamer, Out of Character – Episode 72

In Isaac Asimov’s “Robot Dreams,” we see a robot that was created using a new method. Because of this new method, it was questioned quite extensively. In particular, the robot mentioned that it dreamed. Being something robots were not known or meant to do, the scientists questioned the robot extensively.

The robot dreamed of a field of robots, all toiling and doing the labor they were programmed to do. In the dream, the robot sees one man. As the dream continues, it is revealed that this is not a man at all, but the robot. He is leading his “people” to freedom. The robot also is able to ignore the first two laws of robotics and focus on the third. The end result is that the robot has gained self-awareness. The scientists shoot him with an electronic gun of some sort that scrambles his positronic brain.

The film “I, Robot” sees some of this plot, but expands it greatly. In the film, Will Smith plays a police officer who hates robots. In his past, a robot was able to save him from an accident, but not a little girl. By using logic, the robot went for the person who was most likely to survive. A human may have made a different choice, going for the little girl. Since the robot acted in this manner, Will Smith’s character hated robots.

This movie also contained the dream scene, but the idea of the man who turned out to be the robot was addressed and dismissed. Later on, when it turned out to be the robot after all, the feeling was different. Rather than this being a bad thing, this was portrayed as something good, as Sonny had learned to be “good.”

The difference between the two stories lies in the level of fear. In “Robot Dreams,” the scientists all know full well that there is the potential for robots to rise up and replace humanity. In I, Robot, this fear is gone. The only one who distrusts robots is the detective.

Rather than the robot being the one who learned to ignore the first two laws, it was VIKI, the central robotic hub of the movie. In this version of the story, she follows the first law, but is able to interpret it. She won’t harm humanity, but she won’t allow humanity to harm itself. So she will kill in order to stop the killing. She sees this as logical, though there is some fallacy to this logic. Perhaps one of the laws of robotics should cover not denying a human his free will unless it violates the first law.

We should also look closely at the evolution of free will in robots. In the short story, it’s almost an accident to have free will. Yes, a new design equaled new possibilities. Yet the robot evolved on its own. It wasn’t programmed to dream. In the movie, it was purposefully made to ignore the laws of robotics. This was no accident of evolution. Dreaming came about because of that, but the dream was almost by design to lead the detective to where he needed to be. Only at the end did the prophetic aspect of it come about.

Personally, I think the movie suffered for going this route. While the same basic plotline was followed, the plot suffered by not having a natural evolution. The “ghost in the machine” was eluded to, but it was never said how that caused the robot to evolve.

The setting of I, Robot was also different in that it was near-future, 31 years after the movie release date. I felt this was a bit ambitious on the part of the writer and director of the movie. The odds of us having robots, especially ones that ingrained in our society, by the span of a generation are slim. Rather, I would have given it about a hundred years or more.

The point of view also differed. In “Robot Dreams,” the point of view is that of the robot. In I, Robot, the point of view is that of the detective. While this made for a decent story, I found the movie version to be all-too-predictable. Our hero hates robots. Therefore, robots must go bad and he saves humanity from its own folly.

Personally, I find it more interesting when the protagonist is the robot. This allows for a certain alien mentality. It also raises the question of whether destroying a free-willed robot is moral or not. After all, if a robot is alive, would destroying a robot then be murder? The movie simply removes a threat from humanity. The book causes one to think about the morality of the actions.

Critique of Technology

Both the short story and the movie look at the impact of technology upon humanity. They both question whether humanity’s own creations will turn upon them. In the short story, we see how the robots will eventually rise up and supplant humanity. In the movie, the robots essentially enslave humanity “for its own protection.” This is a subtle difference. At the end of the movie, we see a return to the short story, though you don’t get the feeling that robots will supplant humanity. Rather, you feel that they might co-exist.

Each story has its own limits on what it can tell. Short stories can go more in-depth into character. Movies can be more visual, while short stories force the reader to imagine the robots. In the short story, we go into depth into the robot character. However, our mind’s eye see him in a limited capacity. In the movie, we can see the robots in action. We can see the visual cues of Sonny’s facial expressions. While visually more attractive, the movie does not go into as much depth with characterization.

Role of Technology in Today’s Society

In today’s society, technology can do so many things for us. It allows us to communicate like never before. I’ve managed to contact old high school friends through Facebook, and have made new friendships through AIM. Yet at the same time, these friendships are not as personable as talking with friends in person.

Technology has allowed for newer and greater opportunities. New media is the latest craze, phasing old media out slowly but surely. Newspapers are dying as people gain their news online. Why buy a dead tree with day-old news when one can have instant gratification by going to an online news source?

At the same time, I have critiques of technology. Remember when we used to be able to go to the gas station and just start pumping gas? Now we must first enter in a credit card, punch in our PIN, then go on. It takes longer. Aren’t computers supposed to save us time?

A personal pet peeve of mine is phone automation systems. Sometimes, it’s a struggle to get through the maze of possibilities before you can talk to a real human being. Again, a time waster and something that is not only impersonal, but also detrimental to business. Why do business with a company that puts you through hell before you can even talk to someone?

Another pet peeve is when automated checkers replace human beings. Those are lost jobs.

While technology offers many possibilities, it seems that it doesn’t truly save us a significant portion of time. Sometimes, new possibilities equals too many possibilities.

Hosts: Chad, Dan, Pat

Guests: Trampas Whiteman

* Playing villainous characters.

* Adding cults to your roleplaying game.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

If you’re telling a Clarke-esque story — highly realistic and set in a relatively small area of space — you have plenty of good solutions to get your ships from one place to the next.  In fact, the human race already has (or is quite close to) all of the technology you’ll need.  A quick visit to NASA should give you plenty of ideas.  But what if you want to move from one star system to the next?

To unpack this problem, let’s imagine a rocket ship parked near our solar system.  We want to take this ship to our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, which is about 4.37 light years (~41,500,000,000,000 kilometers) away.  If we accelerate our rocket to 250,000 kph — the same speed as the fastest manmade object — it will take our rocket about 19,000 years to get there.  Obviously, that’s not reasonable.

Our gut instinct is to start adding speed.  A faster object would get there in less time.  Yet even at the speed of light, our mission will still take over four years to complete, and that’s just to reach our closest neighbor.  If we want to tell a story spanning many star systems, we need to move this rocket faster-than-light.  Unfortunately, there are many problems that will keep our rocket from doing this.

(Before I proceed, let me remind everyone that the purpose of these articles is to convey high-level ideas, and I don’t claim to be a physicist.  So bear with me as I describe them in rather simple terms.)

The first problem our rocket will hit comes from Einstein.  Old Albert tells us that as an object approaches the speed of light, its apparent mass increases.  As a result, it would take more and more energy to accelerate it higher and higher, eventually requiring an infinite amount of energy as we approach the speed of light.

That creates the second problem.  With a simple rocket, energy comes from fuel.  The faster we want an object to move, the more fuel it requires.  Unfortunately, adding fuel means adding mass, which makes acceleration require even more work.  We’ll quickly be adding unfathomable amounts of mass to an already bad situation.

Third, if we use traditional acceleration, time will seem to slow down for us.  Even if we can miraculously get our rocket moving FTL, we would arrive at the end of a short trip only to find that decades, centuries, or even millennia have passed.

There are other problem as well, but that should give you some idea of what we’re up against.  We simply don’t see any way to move an object that fast using traditional acceleration.  This simple truth has upset sci-fi buffs around the world for years (myself included), generally not because of solid objections, but because of the things we want to be true.

Some Possible Solutions

Imagine a piece of paper.  A dot near one side represents our solar system, and a dot near the other side represents Alpha Centauri.  Now picture a little rocket ship model on our solar system.  We’ve established that the rocket ship can’t just speed up until it’s faster-than-light.  And if we move using its normal engines at slower speeds, it will take us entirely too long to get there, and the crew will be dead long before arrival.

There are some solutions that have been proposed to this problem, and most of them center around trying to change the situation. For example, we could create a wormhole, which is something like a shortcut through space.  This would be akin to folding the piece of paper in half so the two dots now become very close to each other.  It may still be 4.37 lightyears if we follow the paper, but if we jump straight up, we can land at the other dot after moving just a fraction of that.  Since the new distance is so short, no FTL speeds needed.

Another solution includes cutting out a little bubble from that piece of paper and putting your ship inside of it.  If you distort space just right, you can move the bubble FTL instead of the ship.   The most popular version of this is the Alcubierre drive, which is reminiscent of warp drive from Star Trek.

These models — and others I haven’t covered — tend to have two major problems.  First, they’re highly theoretical, and as we learn more about the universe, they may prove unworkable.  Second, manipulating space like this is no small task, and we would need an enormous amount of energy.  It’s unclear where this energy would come from.

So will we, as a race, learn enough about the universe or advance our technology sufficiently to solve this problem?  Who knows.  We got around man’s “inability” to fly or break the sound barrier, but we have worse problems staring us down on this one.  That said, we’re an inventive race, and I’m hesitant to make wild proclamations about what we will/won’t be able to do in centuries to come.

In the meantime, if you want to tell a story that spans the galaxy, you can’t get there without some handwaving involving physics, technology, or both.  That’s ok.  We’ve all come to accept FTL travel as part of science fiction, and only the most hard-nosed cynic will rebuke you for employing it.  I think the most important thing you can do is to accept this as a bit of storytelling, and beyond that, just be consistent.

Generation Ships

Another proposed way of solving the travel problem is to accept that our ship will top out well below the speed of light.  It will take us years upon years to get somewhere moving that slow, and we’ll design our ships accordingly.  Either the ship will have a self-sufficient ecosphere, and people will live, play, work, and die here — just like they would on Earth — until it finally gets where it’s going, or we can put people in suspended animation so they just sleep for eons of travel.

This mode of travel doesn’t violate any law of physics, and you won’t have to wrestle with any FTL travel problems.  However, just be aware of what this means for your story.  If you have people outside of suspended animation, you’ll have one group of people set off on a journey, die along the way, and the ship will arrive with their descendants.  That’s where this type of ship gets the name “generation ship.”  Whole generations will live and die without seeing the origin or destination planets.

If you choose the suspended animation route, the same set of people may get on the ship, go to sleep, and wake up at the destination.  However, you’re accepting that many, many years may have passed.  Whatever war they were fighting has probably ended.  Whatever message they were delivering is probably irrelevant.  And the ship itself may get passed on the way by far more sophisticated ships we’ve built since then.

That’s not to say this sort of ship can’t work quite well in the right kind of story.  Perhaps the story is about a group of refugees that are trying to survive rather than complete a time-sensitive mission.  Just be sure you’ve thought it through.

I’ve also sat and watched, many years ago, an aged aunt play one of those electric organs that used to be so popular. It was quite a performance! There were three rows of piano-style keys, plus switches, plus floor pedals … besides the music she was producing, she was also displaying an amazing amount of dexterity and skill to operate this machine with all four of her limbs at once. Though I never learned how to play an organ, they always fascinated me because, in part, of their complexities and the skill they required.

Role playing games have levers, knobs, and buttons, too. The rules specify how a player may interact with the world. An action that is ‘hand waved’ as opposed to being specified in the rule book feels a lot like those fancy stickers on a slot machine; fluff. In D&D, if you want to describe your sword attack as “leaping, swinging; graceful death, falling like an autumn leaf” or you decide to describe it as “I hit the orc with my sword” – the rules don’t differentiate. You can give any sort of ‘fluff’ description you want, there are no bonuses or penalties for it, your odds are the same. That rule right there, the “melee attack with weapon at base attack plus bonuses,” is a button that the game gives the player for the player to be able to reach in and manipulate the world. The player can push that button as often as he wants with the same odds of success each time, until some other rule intercedes or interferes. RPG’s also have levers and knobs. Some systems have rules for how many dice to risk or what trait can be sacrificed to boost a role; these and similar rules allow the player to “adjust the settings” before pushing the button (”I attack with my sword”) and give the player greater control over how his character interacts with the game world.

If you’ve followed me so far, then you probably see where I’m going with this. Some games are more like slot machines, some are more like electric organs. Some have lots of fluff, but give the players few if any real options. Others give the players nearly unlimited options for customizing the available controls. Slot-machine-like RPG’s can be fun for convention play, or are designed as “indie” RPG’s to explore a single concept or mechanic. I’ve played several and read dozens; what they usually have in common is a single, over riding, easy to use mechanic. They can be picked up and learned in under an hour (often much less) and a new character can be made in fifteen minutes or less. The problem, is that, what the player is given in the way of ‘controls’ is pretty weak. Sometimes just a single button with maybe a single knob attached. The player is free to specify how many dice to risk in a dice pool and then roll that set of dice. There are no traits or other controls, just an “adjust this knob, push that button” style mechanic. In part, this means a great deal has to be hand-waved, and nearly everything else is narrated ‘fluff’. While the game may be “all about the story” (and the rules certainly don’t pull the players out of it) they also don’t support many nuanced or complex actions.

The other kind of game has hundreds of pages of rules, and nearly everything the characters are likely to encounter is covered in there somewhere. The players get many knobs to adjust, levers to pull, and buttons to push. They have feats and powers to activate, pools and scores to adjust, and multiple potential actions they can try. Playing a character in this kind of system is a lot like operating an electric organ. There’s book keeping, there’s rules to look up, there’s multiple rule interactions to keep in mind – it’s a feat of memory and skill just to keep everything straight and play well. The problem with these games is that you need to read hundreds of pages of rules, it may take an hour or longer to make a character, and the rule system is complex enough to lead to misunderstandings or ambiguities which lead to arguments.

While playing a ’slot machine game’ can be fun for a while, it doesn’t really give the players the ability to stretch their skills or manipulate the game world in any but the most simplistic way. All the fluff in the world can’t really hide it, when all the player is really doing is rolling one die based on one number and comparing the results. Everything else is up to GM’s fiat; and even having a benevolent GM is not the same as really getting in there and using the rules to interact with the world. Players want to be skilled, use the rules, and tell amazing stories. If only it didn’t take so much time and effort!

So, here’s my suggestion for any would be game designers or those trying to introduce a particular RPG to someone new – break it down, and teach it in steps. Teach them like you would teach someone to play that electric organ; fundamentals first, then increasingly more complex and advanced techniques. If system designers were half as clever as they’d like to think of themselves, they’d already be doing this. They’d have a specific learning track that allowed players to jump in quickly and begin playing in something like the slot machine style. Then, each game session, more optional rules could be introduced that gave the players ever more nuanced control. By the time the players have reached the last tutorial session, they have fully fleshed out characters, a solid grasp of the rules, and an experiential understanding of how the parts work together during the game. This is much easier then trying to read a three hundred page rule book and then being hit with eighty character build options, all on the first night of play.

Those are my thoughts, but now I’m asking for some feedback. First, does my metaphor of “levers, knobs, and buttons” help you think about how a game offers players the controls they need to manipulate the game world? Is there a better metaphor? Does this metaphor imply something that I didn’t think of? Second, what are some of your ideas for finding balance between complex games that give the greatest amount of control and simple systems that let the players start playing as soon as possible? How would you teach someone a complex RPG with the least amount of pain and greatest chance of getting them to come back for more? Let me know what you think by adding comments to this post. Thanks!

* Preparing a con game.  Really good advice, presented with really questionable sound quality.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat…and a whole lot of con attendees

In part one, I presented my hypothesis that I am not alone in having less fun today as a gamer than I did as when I was younger (and dumber). Many of you agreed, and some of you didn’t. That’s good. It shows us with certainty that those of us not having as much fun are clearly doing something wrong, and we are going to buckle down here and try to figure out where we’ve strayed. The problem, as I addressed previously, sneaks up on us as our games are adapted to match our maturing tastes, so let’s have a look at what we do differently as adults.

First, if you’re like me, your early characters were little more than a cool name and some stats. Your more recent characters are given a rich back story, personality and flaws.

Second, when building characters, your earlier attempts were focused on cool or powerful combat abilities. Maybe you played martial artists or dual-pistol wielding vigilantes, but the point is your wizard spent his 1st level spell slots on Magic Missle. Today, you spend that slot on Detect Magic or some other utility. Latter day characters are built around utility and interaction.

Third, if you wanted to play a special character type, you would attempt to create your own class or skills and get them approved by your GM. As we have matured, we have learned that the difference from a rules perspective between a Samurai and a Knight is mostly cosmetic, and that many houserule classes and character types are little more than unnecessary crutches that a good role player can work around without much trouble.

Finally, we have come to play with an end in sight. Gone are the days when our parties would seek passage on a ship just to travel over to some island (or planet!) because there are dinosaurs there and fighting a t-rex would be fun. These days, we only get to play every two weeks and if I don’t get this forged note to the general, who will? Similarly, we’ve lost our desire for specific equipment as well well experiences. Instead, we take what we are given and soldier forth to the next development because the plot before us doesn’t specifically call for a flying carpet or strength-boosting power armor.

I’m sure we agree on several of these points, if not all of them, but the solution isn’t as easy as just creating Garlock the Fearsome, loading him down with Magic Missles and seeking only to get a staff of the magi so he can fight a tarrasque, because that’s really dumb. Really, really dumb.

What then? Well, I’ll tell you.

Stan’s Tips for Gaming Like a 16-year-old (Even if you’re closer to 40):

1) Try playing a character that is an idealized version of yourself. Not every time, but occasionally. Exhibit within your character a version of your own morals, ideals and desires. Live vicariously through the character. Alternatively, base your character on a favorite hero or protagonist from popular culture.

2) Don’t fill a broad role. Early characters were built either as if they were going to adventure alone (self-sufficient jacks-of-all-trades) or to do one thing exceptionally well (get-away drivers, hackers and starship pilots come to mind). I think the latter option is probably going to pay higher dividends for a mature gamer, but I could be wrong. The main point here is to play the character who would most likely get his own spin-off if the campaign were a TV show.

3) Do cinematic things. Have a trademark “move”. Light a cigar off the charred remains of your fallen enemies and say something pithy. Feel cool when your character looks cool and make the other players feel cool when their characters look cool. In other words: that’s a d12 in your hand, Ebert. Come off it.

4) Have something on your character sheet that isn’t by-the-book. Design a cool feat, race, class, ability or skill and submit it to your GM. Err on the side of unbalanced and game-breaking, if only for the nostalgia.

5) Want things. Want to own things and see things and do things. These don’t have to be the things you wanted when you were teenager, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Flatter your GM into compliance by wanting things that he drops hints about or has mentioned in previous games or conversations. The GM is Santa Claus and he takes considerable pleasure in seeing you light up when he tells you what you find in the dragon’s hoard.

This list is obviously incomplete, and I’m sure you can come up with your own ideas. Please share them in the comments. And more importantly, I don’t mean to suggest that this list is some kind of panacea that will cure you of your woes. Instead, I merely suggest that perhaps while reaching upward and outward for more diverse role playing experiences, many of us have scrapped a whole slew of options that are worth revisiting.

Next we’ll look at what the GM can do to bring a little old-school fun to the new-school table. Until then, level up, do good deeds and keep the rest of us posted on how it all works out!

* You can find addresses and maps for the convention center, wing night location, hotel, and (I hope) Watchmen theater in this DOC or PDF.

* If you’re looking for rides, car pooling, or hotel roommates,  go here.

* You can find details on the con shirts in this thread.

* World Wide Wing Night will be at Syberg’s on Dorsett, 7:00pm – Midnight on Thursday, March 5th.

* We’ll keep you guys posted on the Watchmen viewing.

* You can find information on Chad’s cigar even on the forums.

Sometimes a con game goes awry before it even starts…

Our love of gaming has not changed, but pretty much everything else has. Gone are the days of weekend, overnight marathon games with barrels of Cheetos and gallons of Mountain Dew. Now we have spouses, children (grandchildren for one player) and busy careers. Finding time to game is increasingly more difficult. None of our spouses are gamers and while they all tolerate our hobby, their toleration only goes so far. Gaming is forbidden on weekends and holidays.

Currently, our group has six people, plus two more on hiatus. We play each week, usually on Tuesday. Because of travel times, our gaming window is only around two hours. Family life and busy careers mean that getting everyone together every week is nearly impossible. It used to be that that the only people guaranteed to be at the game were the host and the GM, assuming they weren’t the same person. Last year, we had so many instances of the GM not being able to play (not the same person every time – most of our players also GM) we decided we needed a backup GM. Our backup GM runs a different campaign and has one-night only games ready to go at a moment’s notice – sort of like a one person game rescue squad. Our minimum for a game is one GM and two players. (We draw the line at lone wolfing.) Obviously, we’ve had to adjust our gaming style to accommodate real life.

When we first started gaming, if someone wasn’t there, then we came up with some in-story excuse: they had to go back to town and handle some personal emergency; they were “scouting out the terrain over that far hill.” This was fine when we had long game sessions involving dungeon crawls where the PC’s came out of the dungeon and rested between sessions. As we got older, our sessions got shorter, our games become more story based and we spent less and less time in dungeons. When our in-game excuses no longer made sense, we just stopped trying to come up with them. The character is still with the party and if they have some party necessary skill, like healing, then that character uses it, but they never get killed or injured. They are always safely out of harm’s way. We refer to this condition as “adventurer’s flu.”

As we’ll see, this has had some major effects on our game.

“It’s the mode of play. It’s what PCs actually do for their living.”
– Belphanior

It is, of course, also the mating period of antlered ungulates, however peeing musk on your fur before butting heads with rival males at full charge is usually most common when LARPing. This inspired my idea for Stag: The Mounting RPG, which has not been licensed as of this writing, so game developers may wish to give the concept some consideration. It is also the activity groove the party hits in the course of adventuring. Prep spells, kill dozen goblins, loot, kill bugbear squads, loot, try to disarm magic riddle trap, resurrect thief, and then breakfast.

Terms are important in summing up experience and communicating insight, something we at da Dominion take “seriously”.  When describing games to others we have two big common terms that get mentioned ubiquitously. Crunch, the intricacy of game mechanics involved in playing the game and the number of tables that need to referenced to determine if you succeeded in putting your codpiece on. Fluff, the descriptive details of the game setting and traits of the buxom barmaid whom is worth 5 XP should your Seduction check succeed, which modifies how fast the codpiece comes off.

Most any game is described with these terms. Hero system is high on Crunch. Vampire is high in Fluff. Rifts is high in Crunch and Fluff, but neither help. Though used often, these two terms can be very subjective to interpret. Comments to this article may feature abundant proclamations of my stupidity for choosing the examples I did – or just my general stupidity.

Rut is pretty clear in contrast. In D&D your Rut is a team of specially trained nomadic murderers, pronounced “heroes”. Battletech is a game of armored combat; its Rut is right on the cover. There’s no skill for cookie baking. Different levels of Crunch and Fluff can work from game to game, but if you don’t care about the what most of the campaign is going to be about – it might as well be Bella Sera (no, ponies mate, not rut).

The most popular games have very clear roles for what the characters are going to be doing, whether serving the Will of the Force or being driven insane trying to learn of the Old Ones’ plots. Settings that focus strongly on creating a large world to explore can often suffer from having no roles for the characters to step into from the start, like Mage the Ascension. It is important, however, to ensure a bit of conceptual leeway for the ideas of players coming to the table with specific characters in mind.

What a party does in the game world is the story, and a more important consideration than either Crunch or Fluff. Yet, Rut isn’t often discussed since there’s no wrongbadfun when considering such a subjective trait. What Ruts do you like as a player? Is Rut a good term – soft U sound and single syllabic do make it aesthetically pleasing to me when added to Fluff and Crunch. Should GM’s have Rut ready for the players or should players decide the Rut of the party?

– From the mind of Digga

* Remembering the importance of player contribution to an RPG’s unfolding story.

* Fear the Con!  You can see Dave’s account of the pirate ship building on his blog.

* Getting over the GM jitters.

* Handling a group where the players have mixed RPG experience levels.

Hosts: Chad, Dan, Pat

* RPGs in a bad economy.

* Shepherding your off-topic players.

* Know when it’s time to end your campaign.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

I want you to think back to the Summer of 1999. Remember sitting in the parking lot of your local movie theater with all those friends you rarely see anymore? You’d all just completed your eighth viewing of The Mummy. You were only half-joking about the plan to use the Hospital as your base if that Y2K thing resulted in zombies or Mad Max (and arguing over which was preferable). You piled into a couple of cars. You went through a drive-thru and hit up the Walgreen’s for mountains of dollar candy. Then you RPed with way more than the recommended number of players for whatever game you were playing at the time (and likely aren’t playing anymore), and it was game on for eight hours at a time, several times every week.

Remember that? Yeah, that was awesome. So what changed? For starters, you probably skipped The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Without exception, your parking lot conversations these days are about how much later it is than you realized, and how you should probably head on home, but we should definitely do this again soon! There’s even a good chance you’ve bought a GPS in the last year or so without so much as a thought to whether it will still function after the zombies get into the Service Provider’s building and eat all the engineers.

This is called growing older. And growing older, if not kept in check, will absolutely have an adverse effect on your game. Consider the following, and be truthful with yourself as to whether these statements align with the way you’ve felt while gaming recently:

“Man, I love this low-magic setting. It was so much fun role playing my rogue’s reluctance to give up Accomplice (his trusty +1 dagger) when we discovered that it was the key to that ancient crypt. I didn’t even know myself whether his loyalty to the others was strong enough to overcome that survivor mentality of his.”

“Those old character sheets are just embarrassing. How many drow rangers did I roll up anyway? I guess we all go through that phase. Oh man, check out this spell list! Fire 3? That’s hilarious.”

“At first I was disappointed by how average our stats were, but it’s awesome playing with a group where there are four fighters and each of them is completely unique. Besides, the opportunity to play the special classes is so much less magical if you can fudge the requirements.”

“We’ve been playing this combat for almost an hour and I’ve missed EVERY TIME! I’m glad the GM doesn’t fudge the dice, of course, but I have to admit it’s kind of a bummer.”

“Failed another tumble check. Oh well, I guess swinging from a chandelier really is pretty unrealistic if you stop to think about it.”

And if you’re a GM, you’ve probably had these thoughts and more. So what have they all got in common? First, they probably never came to mind back when you were huddled over a pool table in your friend’s garage – these are recent hauntings, and I suspect they are somehow related to the fun slump we all eventually encounter. So what has birthed them? What is the zygote? It must be stopped!

I humbly suggest that the commonality between these thoughts is that they are rife with self-delusion. As much as we may kid ourselves (and yes, I include myself in this – which should be obvious if you’ll notice how specific the examples have been), we don’t really, in our heart of hearts, feel more satisfied with more mature games. Our yearning for realism, balance and consistency have left us with vast, imaginary worlds in which nothing all that incredible happens. Sure, there are galaxy-spanning wars… but a group of six people can’t just show up and win a war, right? There are ancient Elven kings in emerald castles… but what King would realistically meet with a bunch of mercenaries in person? There are magical fountains with waters so pure that they can cure all ailments, including death… but such things always come with a price!

My friends, I think we are outsmarting the fun. But it’s not as easy as just reducing the realism, is it? No, knowledge cannot be unlearned. You will never again cast “Fire 3″ without groaning with agitated discontent. And so, in this series of articles, I intend to discover how we can once again satisfy our maturing tastes with that most impossibly juvenile pastime: Make-Believe.

You play Hercules.

OK, I’m really doing no justice to the game.  Scion’s concept should be familiar to anyone that’s interested in Greek mythology or Kevin Sorbo.  The universe is ruled by a pantheon of gods, and a variety of majestic or horrific beings are always lurking just out of sight.  For better or worse, the gods can’t resist dalliances with our women, so they’ve fathered a race of half-breeds (Scions) that live in the mortal world while carrying some of their divine daddy’s powers.

Getting to live in the normal world with incredible strength (or whatever powers your character has) isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  You actually get the worst of both worlds.  You have just enough power to save the mortals around you, but not quite enough to really contend with the powers that are out to get you.  So caught between helpless masses and Olympian politics, you do the best you can.

True to their own traditions, White Wolf has done an excellent job of giving this game a complex, brooding feel.  So if the concept I just described sounds campy, put aside my joke about Kevin Sorbo and at least thumb through the book.

The real subject of this review, Manifestation of Ichor, is the second in a series of supplements they’re putting out for Scion.  They’re releasing several in periodical form before putting out a larger, hardbound book at some point in the future.

This is a short book — clocking about 40 pages — so let me stress that it’s a supplement, not an expansion or full-blown setting book.

As I said above, in Scion you play someone living just between the mortal and immortal realms.  As your character progresses, he not only gains new powers, but he can also progress down the road to god-hood.  In Manifestation of Ichor, you’re given rules for starting the campaign at that level.

Players are handed some new powers and background traits to flesh your Scion out.  But what I really appreciate is that they’ve also given you mechanics for telling the story of how you got here.  A character could simply dump points into their Legend trait, reaching god-status in short order, but they’d never survive that path without becoming more powerful in other ways.  And no matter how they survived, there were stories that occurred along the way, friends and enemies made, and people inadvertently tangled into your fate.  This supplement will make sure you’ve thought all of that through.

Incidentally, this progression is where the book gets its title.  For those not in the know, ichor is the proper name for the substance that flows through a Greek god’s veins.  So I suppose at some point in your ascent, ichor will first manifest itself in your veins as well.  I wonder what happens if you donated before you realized this was happening, and some car wreck victim got ichor instead of blood from the local hospital.  There’s a free NPC idea for ya.

The book’s production values are very typical of a White Wolf product.  In case you’re not sure how to take that, it’s one part compliment and one part neutral statement of fact.  The pages are dressed with multiple layers of art and waterprint, giving the whole book the feel of ancient-tome-meets-dirty-urban-flat without distracting from the text.  The illustration is a good step above what you normally see in RPG books.  And if you play any other White Wolf games, you’ll have no problem navigating the general arrangement of the pages.

I have a couple complaints with the product, though none are serious.  There are a few typos in the book that appear to be leftovers from pre-production.  For example, some misplaced dashes (”char-acter”) that I assume are from a day when the column ended elsewhere and missing page numbers (”turn to page XX”).  In all fairness, these also could be unique to the review copy I’m looking at, having been fixed in the final version.  And none are so bad as to be distracting from play.  Well, unless you’re that one guy, in which case I’m glad you’re playing Scion instead of annoying people on our forums.

There’s also no index in the back.  I suppose a book this short doesn’t really need one, but there’s nothing worse than interrupting a game session with 15 minutes of flipping through the same few pages, looking for that rule you just know is in there somewhere.

For any fan of Scion that wants to play a game that starts at high levels, this book should be worth your money.  Some of the new ideas and abilities in this book may also be useful for fleshing out NPC allies and villains in lower level games.

To end this on a complete non-sequitur, I’m having some fun with the PDF copy of the main book.  It appears to have been saved off in its original layers, rather than just printed and scanned.  So if I scroll a page really fast, I can actually read the entirety of the watermark text that’s occluded by the illustrations.  If you’ve ever wanted to know what’s behind those pictures, it’s violent, pulpy, and almost nonsensical.

Want to learn more about Scion? Read on…

• Atomic Array: Episode 016: Scion
• Scion Preview: Demo and Adventure
• Game Cryer: Review by Chris Perrin
• Mad Brew Labs: Scions of Celtic Mythology
• RPGAggression: Celstial Bureaucracy
• Flames Rising: Companion 4 Review

Or drop by RPG Now to pick up a copy!

* The real reason we play MMOs and the lack of innovation in the industry.

* Media companies don’t realize what year it is.

* Are RPG companies adapating to meet changing consumption patterns?

* War Pig Radio.  You can find the update on its status here.

* RPG Countdown.

Hosts: Dan, Ed, John, Pat

Role-playing games are complicated. One trend I saw in the replies was that role-playing games seem overly complicated with weird dice and advanced math.  Generally the concept of dice being anything other than the six-sided variety seems strange to most non-gamers.  The math concept seems to be a larger drawback.  People see the math involved as overly complicated and don’t see how a game that involves it could be fun.

All Role-playing games are all PvP. People are used to games having a winner.  As such they assume that role-playing games are the same way.  They don’t see the point of a game where everyone is working together and there is not a clear winner at the end.  The idea of games being just a social event and about the game itself — instead of victory — is a foreign concept.  Working together just doesn’t seem to come together with a game for most people.

All role-playing games are fantasy. It should not be a surprise that almost all ten people mentioned Dungeons and Dragons in their answers.   The idea of a Sci-fi, Western, or any other genre role-playing game is something that most non-gamers do not seem to have ever considered.  The prevalence of Dungeons and Dragons in popular media is likely the reason for this as some people seem to think that the terms “role-playing game” and “Dungeons and Dragons” are interchangeable.

Role-playing games are pointless and don’t take any skill. This one I actually did not expect.  There was a sentiment that role-playing games, since they are done sitting around a table, take no effort at all and don’t require any deep thinking.  Some people think that you just sit around telling stories with no rules and nothing to keep everyone in line.  One comment was, “If all your stats and information is on a sheet of paper, what is to keep you from just erasing it and writing in something better?”  They seem to think that if you want something that you could just write it down and suddenly have it.

Role-players are all socially inept males who dress in costumes and play in their parents’ basement. Let’s face it: this is the one everyone was expecting.  This was the only answer that every one of the ten gave some variation of.  The idea of women playing is completely out of the question for most people.  I don’t know exactly where this stereotype came from, but it definitely has invaded the population’s consciousness.  Many of the replies included bad hygiene in their descriptions as well, but that likely comes from the socially inept and basement stereotypes.   There is this idea too that these people are the “uber geeks” (a term provided by 3 of the 10) who slur their works and spit when they talk about their characters.  The idea that they were all middle-aged also seemed to come up frequently.  My favorite reply was, “Chad but with patchier facial hair, a stained shirt and really bad BO.”

If you want to bring someone new into the hobby or explain your hobby to non-gamers, keep in mind that these are the kind of thoughts going through the average person’s mind.  These are the concepts that are associated with role-players, and this is the mountain that must be climbed to reach the truth.  By just admitting that you are a player you could be shattering a mental image that has been created by the mass media.

How, might you ask, is being caught being a lazy bum a good thing? It’s simple… you now have a chance to drop the hammer on your players and show them your elite powers of DMery.

For weeks, months or years the players have been showing you what they can do. They have found every loop hole in the rules, every abusable nuance in the system. If you are caught, you use it against them! It takes little effort to gear up an adversary using the all the things the group has begged you for and argued that wasn’t broken. In fact if you used those moments when the credits were rolling between Breaking 2 Electric Boogaloo and St Elmo’s Fire on Starz at 2 in the afternoon having ‘gone home sick’ you’ll have the tools to deal with them in style.

Take their main strategies and find a better twist to it and grind them into dust with it. When caught, you give them a TPK or as close to it as needed.

The reason you do this is many fold. First, the psychological impact of it keeps them from thinking too hard on your methodology in the future. In the post mortem for the session you play it off as you weren’t being lazy, you were being indulgent to them. In fact you can make them feel guilty for even suggesting you were a bum and get some free food out of them on the next session.

Overall this should keep the peace for a year or so. It avoids unnecessary confrontation and distrust, and cements the authority of your position.

The above scenario can mostly be avoided if you do the laziest thing of all… you know the world you are using and the system better than the players. Sometimes the best route to being lazy is to put forth some hard work in the beginning of your career. Once you’ve done the work you never really need to do it again. You know where everything is and how it works so prep time becomes flipping through a book and reading a couple of entries, sticking a few postits in your books and you are ready to run.

I’ve known a lot of DMs who never quite get that. They struggle and it takes them a lot of effort each session, and they get burnt out and lose track of what made their game cool and fun. Your players are playing the main characters in a book you and them are writing during play, does it really matter if the players defeat the encounter?

So in summation the key to being a Lazy DM is counter intuitive to the title, you just need to know the material before you run a game.

A few years ago I moved. The original shop I had been going to for 10 years was now 20 miles away. I still went there every week to pick up my pull list even though there was now a shop right down the street. My shop didn’t get everything I wanted, so I would actually hit multiple shops in one day, wasting gas and buying more at each than I should have. In fact I only moved my pull list to the current shop when my old shop changed owners and had a few months without books. While I might be on the extreme side the sentiment ‘comic shop loyalty’ is a very pervasive concept.

So just what is it that makes a person so loyal to a shop that they are willing to pay a little more or go out of their way? Well there are many factors, and the answer is likely to vary from person to person. The strongest one seems to be personal relationships. When you go to the same store every week you get to know the people who work there. In most cases you meet the owner and he knows you by name. This creates a strong relationship with that shop. If you like the owner, you want to see the shop do well and the idea of moving your list makes you feel guilty for taking money away from them. The pull list also makes ending this relationship harder. You have to tell them in-person that you are leaving the store instead of just moving on. This is hard to do when you have talked to the person every week for years.

In a comic shop you generally feel that you are accepted. Everywhere else in the world may look down on your hobby, but here you are among your people. Here you can debate and have hour long conversations with people who have the same interests as you. This much time in any location is bound to create a sense of place.

With the growth of Trade Paperbacks and Graphic novels, the local comic shops may be losing some of this loyalty. Trades can be picked up at most book stores now so new readers may not get into the habit of going to a shop. Readers don’t need to come into the shop every week when buying trades, so that further creates a separation from the store. While it may or may not hurt the local shops in the end, separating from the idea of comic shop loyalty can only help the fans. They need to realize that Comic Book Shops are businesses and it is in their best interest to choose the business that best suits their needs. So with this in mind will I be changing my shop? Of course not, it’s far too late for me. I’m already loyal.

* Heroes of Lesser Earth.

* Fear the Boot’s Twitter feed can be found here.

* Game Master handouts and other visual aids for players.

* Tangible goodies that sometimes ship with video games and roleplaying games.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

This seems to be a trend common to many indie game companies that can’t afford to keep a staff of Game Theory chaosticians in stasis while immersed in tanks of Clearasil being fed Cheetos paste by I.V. The Acne medication stinging their fetus-like eyes explaining how so many mathematical errors still get through editing in their products.

Light rules: Flaw or feature? Really it depends on your game mastering and/or player tastes.

I say feature in a qualified way that extinguishes flames before they build up. Crunchy systems have the benefit of being easily quantifiable, granular and accurate in setting emulation. There’s a dice roll for everything with character skill reducing the chaos often by adding flat bonus the roll. “I hamstring this quick bastard that has the info we need.” Roll box cutter skill versus their evasion stat modified by the size of the body area and roll to see which leg is extended at this point in their stride. Miss? Too bad, but lucky you. No more clunky math is needed. Hit? Subtract 1d4 points from the left leg pool and roll for effect on the severing table under the muscle column. The target limps favoring the left leg; his speed is reduced by 1d6 minus his endurance modifier. Critical hit!…Break out the graphing calculator! I can’t wait until we have holodecks to game in, but doing the underlying simulation physics to this degree isn’t for me.

Contrast. PDQ characters are essentially a list of descriptive qualities, like “Bare-knuckle Brawler” or “Studious Investigator”, which are ranked with each level giving a +2 on a 2d6 roll. Anything you want to do that doesn’t fit under a quality is average ranked, no bonus. Some qualities can be Weaknesses that subtract a number from your roll when applicable. When a difficulty is equal to your mean roll with a quality, like difficulty number 7 with an Average quality that rolls only 2d6 (mean 7), automatic success. Other times you have a higher target number or opposed roll. The amount a successful attack beats defense by determines damage ranks, temporary penalties to qualities of your choosing. Being Badass- describing sweet maneuvers – gives you a bonus to the quality roll; being Lame – disrupting the game, not helping in the fun, being distracted – get’s you kicked out of the game. Another alternative is a good heart to heart to with the GM, if you’re into positive conflict resolution.

That’s about it. The mechanic is so simple you could easily write in more detail if you wanted, but why bother? Rhetorical question, here‘s the answer: the issue with this kind of light rules is that you need to have agreed upon genre conventions in the game for narration sake or the accursed GM fiat. “Bulging Belly” could clearly help with a character’s seduction rolls, but does it also grant a bonus to balancing given the lower gravity center? Are you wearing a belt or free gutting it? No belt. Really, how do your pants stay up?

Do you want to have this conversation?

– From the mind of Digga

I had this exact conversation while playing Warhammer Online last week, and while working through my well-rehearsed talking points,  a powerful, simple, and previously unspoken truth came out: these games are pretty much all the same.  And for all of the nuance I want to nitpick into existence, there really is no good reason to be here instead of there.

Pop in just about any MMO, and you’ll go through a rather predictable process.   Let’s start with character creation.

First, choose male or female.  It doesn’t really matter which one you pick.  Even though research has pretty clearly shown differences between men and women in our physique, thought processes, socialization, and biological make-up, we have to live with a cognitive dissonance that dictates equal must also mean identical.

Second, pick a species.  You might get a few unique game powers, but for the most part, we’re just talking about appearance and perhaps some minor attribute bonuses.  You’ll be picking from options like strong and dumb, lithe and fast, small and stout, or human.  That last one is always the perfect average of the game.  There is no reality in which we are the largest, smallest, fastest, or strongest of God’s self-aware creations.  Which race you pick will be heavily influenced by your impending career choice.  You can either pick the race obviously meant for your profession (the ogre warrior), an obvious mismatch just to prove it can be done (the pixie warrior), human because you’re a Genus-level bigot, or such-and-such because it’s the only character model that doesn’t look like donkey ass on legs.

Third, pick a profession.  This comes down to whether you want to take damage, deal damage, or heal damage.  There might be a truly unique class in there that has gobs of game-bending utility powers.  This will inevitably annoy other players, since such things can’t be easily put into numbers during forum wanks, leaving you to bite your nails each week as you pray they don’t nerf you into uselessness despite the mob calling for just that.

Speaking of which, expect all of the classes to change in relative power levels from month to month.  No matter how long the game is out, the developers will never figure out a perfect balance.  Picture every class sitting on a carousel, in which one side is ultimate power and the other side is asking, “Why did you include this class again?”  This will go round and round and round, and every class will take its turn in every position.

You may be told the commodity of this game is skill or resourcefulness.  It’s not.  The only thing that really determines who wins and loses is time.  You see, these games survive on monthly fees, and the only way to be sure you keep coming back each month is the nagging feeling you’re not done yet.  You’d like to think it’s because you have genuinly new things to do, but in truth, you just have the same old stuff to do in vaguely new places.

You’ll start at level 1, and the focus of the game will be gaining more levels.  That is until you reach the maximum level, at which point you progress through similar tedium that yields gear instead of experience points.  This process sounds boring, which it often is, and the entire game will be designed around it.  Features like immersion or socialization will languish indefinitely on the drawing board so they can stuff in more treadmill.

The game will launch in a questionable state.  Fortunately, when the next game drops, the old one will be patched up while the new one is limping along, and the short memory of most gamers means you’ll forget just how bad the previous game was at release.

The developers will slate tons of really cool features for the month after launch.  Most of these will never be made.  MMO developers keep less promises than politicians.

And all of this will continue until the next big game is announced, which will be heralded all throughout its development as the <insert this game>-killer.  Surely it will have 10x the features and no problems of its own.  This never turns out to be true, at which point you can either drag yourself back into your old game (only to find your guild gone and everyone passing you by in power) or keep trading out games like a neurotic perfectionist who just knows his next girlfriend will be the right one.

Let me pause here to say that I realize there are some exceptions.  For example, games like UO or EVE don’t follow the level treadmill model.  And even the generic hack ‘n slash fantasy games focus their energy in slightly different ways, bringing out some noteworthy diversity that may help you pick the right game.  But having played many, many different MMOs, I feel pretty confident that my commentary applies more often than not.

With so much harsh stuff to say, do I hate MMOs?  No, not at all.  I’d stop buying (and playing) them if I did.  This journey of self-discovery was not a realization that I hate an entire genre, nor that I can’t appreciate why some of these facts are true.  Instead, I came to a very different (and liberating) conclusion, which I hope you’ll understand to be the central thesis of this article.

The one and only thing that gets me playing game X instead of game Y is the number and quality of friends I have there.  In all honesty, I’ve been generally happy with nearly MMO I’ve ever played.  If my entire guild quit Warhammer tomorrow and switched over to City of Heroes, Warcraft, Everquest 2, etc, etc, etc, I’d be just as happy there as I am now.  I can finally put my wallet down and stop pretending the next game will be just right.  Instead, I can happily exist in my current pasture, dead grass and all, accepting this game — and all of its competitors — for what they are.

* Some events going on outside of Fear the Con: a wing night on Thursday, March 5th and a Watchmen viewing on Friday, March 6th.

* A possible Rifts movie?  If you want to join the letter campaign, you can find details here.  If you hadn’t heard about the Uwe Boll / Blizzard conversation, read on.

* Gryphcon in Ontario, Canada.

* From RPG magazines to the internet: how gamer interactions have changed.

* Running roleplaying games on holidays.

* Revealing information in your RPG without feeding your players the plot.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan

* What the small RPG publishers have (and don’t have) in common with small movie studios.

* What art form are RPGs most like to you?

* Getting your players to roleplay.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

I was just given a copy of one such setting book, Sherwood, a Robin Hood adaptation by Marc Gacy and Wil Upchurch.  It was released several years ago for d20, and as of a few weeks ago, it’s been ported over to Savage Worlds.

I approached this book with some trepidation.  I’ve never been a big fan of RPGs that are too narrowly tied to one story.  I enjoy playing in a variety of settings, but I don’t like being led about for the sole purpose of shaking hands with famous people and fawning over their exploits.  I’ll happily play in the Star Wars universe, but I don’t care to play through a Star Wars movie.

This book is called Sherwood, so obviously it gives ample space to the specific characters and general archetypes of the famous tale.  Most of the plot ideas assume you’re playing swashbuckling rogues that lurk about the woods. And, yes, there are stats in there for Robin Hood and Little John.

However, the book also provides a fairly lengthy look at historical, 13th century England.  There are well researched sections on culture, geography, knightly orders, religion, and economy.  There are charts for period gear priced in pennies, shillings, and pounds.

They also offer some new rules (I’ll get back to those shortly) that help characters pull off the acrobatic antics we’ve come to except from this sort of story.  Sure, they’re important to Robin Hood, but they could also work for any swashbuckling adventure.

Make no mistake about what this book is for, but even if Robin Hood’s brand of adventure isn’t your thing, you could still cherry pick some goodies for any game in this time period or genre.

Whatever you’re using this book for, the authors explicitly encourage you to run a different sort of fantasy game.  This game is about intrigue and derring do.  It’s about taking bold risks for the right cause, not taking gold from dead orcs.  You may be doing heroic things, but they’re occurring in a relatively normal place.

Speaking of which, one of the first things you’ll notice missing (and rightly so) is magic.  There’s an optional section at the end for working in the occasional werewolf or conjurer, but those are presented in the context of period superstition, and players are reminded once again this isn’t a typical fantasy game.

The closest thing I found to a fantastical class in the main rules is an engineer/inventor.  They can make odd devices, similar to what you produce with the Alchemist skill in D&D.  Nothing that’s exactly magical, but their work is a bit more wondrous than technology of the day would allow.

Sherwood includes some modified rules that enable — even encourage — swashbuckling adventure.  Most of these rely on Agility, which will probably be the central stat for most characters.  For example, a variety of acrobatic maneuvers have been provided, each reduced in difficulty to a simple success.  And if you achieve that success, you can toss in a bennie to buy it up to a raise (Savage World’s version of a critical success).  So it’s easy to leap onto your horse from a rooftop and do it with style.

While the Robin Hood story has been told in many ways over the centuries, the version we’re most familiar with is relatively lighthearted.  In keeping with that, characters are allowed to use a variety of improvised weapons (table legs, candle stands, your friends).  They can also use any weapon to deal non-lethal damage at no penalty, so your sword can slap down the Sheriff instead of running him through.

Obviously no Robin Hood themed story is complete without an archery contest!  Sherwood has rules for that as well.  Characters pop off arrows, rolling for a particular target number, their level of success determining which ring they hit.  Yes, you can even try to split someone’s arrow.  GMs are also presented with variant rules for a speed shooting contest.

In terms of production value, the book is well organized and easy to read.  The art is of professional quality and draws from both modern and archaic sources.  There’s no index in the back, which is a little disappointing, but at 62 pages long, I’m not sure the book really needs one.

Overall, I found Sherwood to be a solid setting book that offers everything you’d need to play this time period and genre.  Anyone that’s a fan of Robin Hood — or just wants to run fantasy that has more style and intrigue than elves — should check this out.

Want to learn more about Sherwood? Read on…

• Atomic Array: Episode 014: Sherwood
• Game Cryer: Review by Chris Perrin
• Fear the Boot: Sherwood: The Legend of Robin Hood
• The Game’s the Thing: Episode 048
• The Gamer Dome: Sherwood Adventure at DDX

Or drop by RPG Now to pick up a copy today.

* Pirates of the Cursed Sea.  I found some pictures of a play area similar to the one I saw at Gencon.

* Fear the Con 2.  You can buy your ticket, see the games, and sign up to play on the website.  The comedian Chad mentioned is Mikey Mason.

* Pacing a game so it doesn’t drag on too long or conclude too quickly.

* A round-robin game idea.

Hosts: Chad, Dan, Pat

While my intentions may have been noble, I have discovered 90 pages into the book that I really shouldn’t have bought the book. There were a few reasons. Mainly, the book came across as juvenile to me. The transitions in the book were bad; the characters didn’t act in a believable way. Also, I haven’t read vampire novels in the past, but I thought I’d try something new. I should have listened to my gut instinct here. When I think of vampires, I think of Dracula. I prefer to think of individual monsters with strength of personality, not some sort of secret society caste system where being a vampire is almost commonplace. At 90 pages in, I’m ready to trade the book in at a used book store. Others may find it to be good, but it just didn’t work for me.

I began to look at this book and think of other books that I bought over the years, and wondered how many others were bought for the wrong reasons. First, though, I think we should define some good reasons to buy a book. Perhaps you enjoy a particular setting, or you like the author. Maybe the book has art that you enjoy, such as a comic book. Maybe the book has vital information, such as an RPG sourcebook. You may have a friend who broke into the business and you want to offer him your support. The list goes on.

There are, however, some reasons not to buy a book.

1. I’m making a statement. See my story above as an example. All you’re really saying is, “Here’s my cash. ”The chances of your hard-earned dollars making any sort of statement are minimal at best. In the case above, I may have been better served either e-mailing the author to express my point of view or just venting to a friend. Now I’m out $14 on a book I probably wouldn’t have read normally.

2. The author had one good book, so they must all be good! This one is real tricky. How do you know? You might be able to catch some clues from reviews, but oftentimes, you won’t know until you read the book yourself. I enjoyed Scott Sigler’s podcast novel The Rookie quite a bit, so I also listened to the podiobook of Infected. It was well-written and well-produced, but had way too much gore for my tastes. I tend to buy print copies after hearing the podcast novel version, but I really can’t justify spending the money on this book when it is just…gross. Don’t get me wrong, I like Sigler’s writing. I just think he can write a good story without all the gore.

3. It’s got a cool cover! Remember foil covers for comic books? They could sell the worst of comics because they were all shiny. And the price was jacked up too.

4. It’s part of a collection. Guilty! I’ve got quite a bit of that collector gene in me. I collected the original X-Factor comic book series, and have every issue. I was quite proud of this collection. Yet despite having them all, I hadn’t enjoyed the stories since issue #100. That’s nearly 50 issues I bought just for the collection’s sake. I read characters acting out of character, had bad art…all for the sake of a collection. I need more.

There are probably a few dozen more, but you get the idea. You’re not buying the book for the right reasons. Your brain suffers a serious malfunction, and you spend your hard-earned cash.

I don’t have a lot of advice here. If I did, perhaps I would know how to stop myself. I think, though, that the best one can do is to just stop, put the book back, and think about it for a while before making the purchase. If you’re still interested later, you can just get your book. However, you may find that the interest is fleeting at best.

I may have lost a few dollars and a few hours reading Staked, but I came out of it knowing a few things. I know now that vampire books are not for me. I know what genres I like and what ones I don’t. I’m not afraid to try new things, but I must expect that I won’t like them all. I know that buying a book based on some sense of’ righteous fury’ just isn’t good. In other words, I know that I bought the book for the wrong reasons.

Be sure that, when you buy a book, you do it for all the right reasons. Happy reading!

I want to talk about the stigma associated with role-playing games and how it can be a hurdle to bringing new players into the hobby.

The podcast has done an excellent job of defining this stigma and discussing how to deal with your personal “Gamer Shame”.  The one aspect of it they haven’t touched on is the slippery slope concept.  This is the idea that a person acknowledges their own level of geekness and is comfortable there only by being able to point out something further down the slope.  An argument using this logic would sound like, “Sure I read comics, but at least I don’t play Dungeons and Dragons.  Those guys are really weird.”   I think most people will find that they do this to some degree if they really look closely enough at themselves.  I could point to examples from the podcast talking about LARPers, but that probably isn’t the best example, because let’s face it, they really are weird.

Another aspect of the gaming stigma to explore is how it can affect new players when they experience it firsthand.   The podcast has discussed gateway games and how to walk players past the stigma and get them to the table.  But once they are there, if you don’t prepare them they may not be ready for the reaction of their non-gaming friends.

The first few games are key to solidifying a new player’s interest, and if they are not confident in themselves or the hobby, they could easily be shaken by the ridicule that can come from their friends, family, or significant others upon finding out about the new hobby.  Anyone who has delved into the realm of geekness that we all call home has dealt with this in relation to their own hobbies.  Someone new to a hobby might not be mentally ready for this or have the tools to defend against it.  At this critical juncture, you don’t want anything to scare them off, but that also includes you trying to over prepare them.

So how do you get past these issues?

To get past the initial stigmas I would suggest easing them in without any pressure at all.  It is a safe bet that if they are a geek in other ways, they have at least a passing curiosity about the hobby.  Making sure they know where to get the information at their own pace is the best thing you can do to bring them into the hobby.  At the risk of sounding like a broken record I have not seen anything that accomplishes this better than a CD of episode 115.  The key though is to take it slow and be very understanding of potentially stupid questions.  As mentioned before, when they are ready for a game, make it something they would be interested in.  Heavy fantasy, for example, can be overwhelming for someone who is not a fan.

Getting past the peer ridicule can be a little more difficult.  The level of preemptive action required for this is inversely proportional to the strength of a person’s self-confidence.  For someone strong in themselves, who doesn’t worry about what others think about them, this might never be an issue at all and need not be mentioned.  For someone, however, that tends to fall into trends or is worried about self-image, not bringing it up could prevent the hobby from sticking.  For these people it is also helpful to keep in mind that the people who ridicule others tend to be the ones that are also the most insecure.

Since starting this series, I’ve had a few people raise an issue that bears examination.  I’d like to give credit to Phelps, who mentioned it most recently, but he’s not the only one.  It goes something like this:

Even if we pretend modern, naval warfare is three-dimensional, space combat will likely have more in common with the way submarines fight than battleships.  The ships will stalk each other, generally unsure where their enemy is, each carefully watching their sensors and trying to second guess the opposing captain.  The first ship to spot its prey will have at least one free volley before the target can figure out where the shots came from and respond.

This argument is well-founded in facts.

Space is very empty, so unless there’s a planet or large body of mass nearby, you can’t always assume you’ll have something to hide behind.  But the sheer size of space will make it hard to find you.

Let’s pretend we’re in a capital ship, and we’ve decided that anything within 500,000 kilometers is a threat.  Imagine a sphere that’s 1,000,000 kilometers across, with our ship in the middle.  If we assume our sensors work via some sort of emission (like RADAR), we would need to trace our sensors across the entire surface of that sphere.  (We don’t need to search the entire volume, since a target in a specific direction will still give us a signature regardless of distance.)  The surface area we’d be searching is 3,141,592,653,589 square kilometers!  That’s just over three trillion for anyone that hates counting commas.  To put that in perspective, it’s like searching every square inch of the Earth’s surface over 6,000 times.

To further illustrate this point, consider Spaceguard, the NASA program to locate asteroids that might impact the Earth.  It’s been going on for over a decade, and they don’t expect to map the majority of the most dangerous ones (those at least 140 meters across) for yet another decade or two.

A Few Ways Back To Battleships

As a fan of Run Silent Run Deep, I’ll be the first to say that sub hunts can make for dramatic storytelling.  However, they’re also long and tedious.  So what if you don’t want your game/fiction to focus on red eye sensor marathons?  I think there are a few ways out.

The difficulty of finding a ship rests on the presumption that they’re otherwise unremarkable objects.  A ship burning away with mass-reacting drives would stand out brilliantly against background objects.  Even with modern day imaging technology, we could find such a ship in relatively short order.  So be sure to consider the nature of the ship and its engines when muddling over problems like this.

Another possibility is to assume we’re only worried about objects at relatively close range.  A missile may originate millions of kilometers away, but it still has to get close to the ship before impact.  A beam weapon may get there a lot faster, but long distance targeting issues mean we can probably evade shots until an enemy is within our general neighborhood (see part 3), and our sensors might be able to trace a beam back to its source.

Mankind may also adjust to this reality industrially.  A solar system may be flush with listening posts, or perhaps large ships will be escorted by a cloud of sensor drones.  Friendly vessels would likely share their sensor data and divide up the areas that need scanning.  This helps, but it’s not a total solution.  Dividing this labor by even 10,000 workers still leaves an enormous amount of work to be done.

Finally, there’s the possibility sensor technology will be operating off of some new principle.  I’ve heard talk of gravitic what-nots and relativistic whos-its.  I won’t embarass myself by trying to dissect those ideas, and I’d hate to rush to technological handwaving to answer this problem.  But it’s reassuring to know people are coming up with sufficient excuses to get us to Star Trek sensors.

Some Additional Observations

Some blog readers have made comments that are worth entering into this discussion.

The first, from Normorgwae, is that this whole scenario falls apart if ships are moving faster-than-light.  Slower-than-light energies may not interact with FTL objects in such a way that our sensors will work.  Perhaps FTL engine technology will herald some new mechanic for FTL sensors, but we’re digging deeper and deeper into wild theory.

There’s another thought posited by commenter Aki, which is the use of sophisticated computers to predict the behavior of an enemy captain.  Every problem has a finite number of solutions, and humans are far more predictable than we like to believe.  It’s possible we could think ahead of our enemy, guessing a small number of places they might be and focusing our search there.  I wonder what kind of ECM/ECCM/ECCCM warfare this would create.  Can you imagine running your flight plans through an obfuscater simply to confuse enemy thinkers?

* Fear the Con 2!  You can find more information on the forum or the con’s website.

* Getting more in-character and how it helps or hurts a game.  You can find the movie of James Earl Jones counting to 10 here.

* People you would love to LARP with.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat

I’ve been taken to task a few times for my description of ships fighting along the broadside, so I want to defend that scenario.  This particular entry presupposes you have at least a handful of direct-firing weapons.  If your ship mounts only guided missiles — which can launch from any side of the ship and still reach their target — discussion of weapon arcs becomes irrelevant.

I’d like to start by defining the most important term: broadside.  When the word “broadside” is used, it often conjures up an image of archaic sailing ships blasting away with fixed cannons that line the port and starboard.  It’s a compelling image, but I think it also prejudices us a bit.

When referring to naval weapons, a broadside is not the port or starboard of the ship; it’s any length of the ship that mounts weapons.  In classical, naval warfare, ships were long and narrow so they could cut through the ocean.  Since the port and starboard were the longest sides by necessity, they could also mount the most guns, so that’s where ships tended to fight.

Starships are obviously not dealing with hydrodynamics, so they have no such requirement.  A starship’s longest side can face any direction, or for that matter, a ship could have perfect symmetry with no side longer than another.  If your design happens to have one side longer, it might make the most sense to mount your weapons there, simply because there’s more room to put them.  So when I talk about starships doing broadside exchanges, that might look like sailing ships trading shots as they sail abreast…or it might not.

I envision capital ships mounting their weapons in multiple turrets on at least two sides, allowing them to simultaneously track targets in a complete sphere.  Firing from any of the armed sides would consitute a broadside barrage.

Fighting along paired broadsides gives you practical options that you don’t have otherwise.  For example, if one of the sides becomes damaged, you can roll the ship, turning a fresh side toward the enemy.  You can move between enemies, fully engaging the targets with different weapons.  Or, if your propulsion originates from only one side of the ship, you no longer have guns facing in only one direction relative to your acceleration.

Depending on the design of your ship, it’s even possible to pair broadsides in such a way that weapons can fire in overlapping arcs, allowing them to fight separate targets or focus together on one.  To illustrate this idea, imagine a three-dimensional rectangle.  Place turrets across the top of the ship, with their weapons parallel to the hull, just like a modern-day battleship.  Do the same across the bottom.  These weapons could pivot to fire left and right, just right, or just left.  If we assume they can elevate 90 degrees and lower just a few, we cover the sphere almost perfectly.  (Incidentally, I’m not proposing this as the optimal ship design — just an illustration of an idea.)

Why not use a single, big turret just like a tank?  Tanks have an excellent field of fire, because their turrets allow them to shoot in a full circle, even pivoting up or down a bit.  I think this leads to the erroneous belief that its turret can fire anywhere, so this must be a great idea for starships.  But keep in mind the limitations of a lone turret.  First, tanks are fighting on a flat plane which enemy combatants must also conform to.  This simply isn’t true in space.  Second, a tank is a relatively small vehicle with only one (or perhaps a handful) of primary weapons, designed to fire at (generally speaking) one target at a time.

If you can imagine a tank with multiple primary weapons and point defenses, fighting enemies and incoming warheads in a perfect sphere, you start to understand the problem.  A lone tank can only cover some portion of that sphere, while its own hull would block the other half.  If your ship is approached from two sides or swarmed by more nimble adversaries, you’ll have no sufficient defense.

There’s also the obvious vulnerability of having all of your guns mounted together.  The history of warfare has shown us again and again that clustering vital targets in this fashion is a very bad idea.  If one good shot damages that turret, the end of your ship is nigh.  That may be an acceptable loss for the smaller, cheaper tank which is hardly bigger than its own turret, but there’s a reason why the Iowa class battleship doesn’t follow suit.

Mounting your weapons in a fixed pattern on one side — something like a modern fighter plane — would be even worse.  In addition to your weapons all being pointed the same direction, your ship must now be pointed that way as well.  Depending on your method of propulsion, you’ll be forced to repeatedly make the choice between maneuvering properly or firing weapons, and tracking your enemy will require an energy expenditure sufficient to realign your entire vessel’s mass.

The “Sniper” Exception

With credit to Citizen Joe on the forums, there’s a great example in which you might want a primary gun that isn’t mounted in the way I described.  Unless we assume your turrets are of some absurd size, the best place to mount an extremely large, focused weapon is along the spine of the ship.  This could potentially provide for a gun with better range, accuracy, and power than our smaller turrets would allow.  You’d have all the concerns related to fixed weapons I mentioned above — not to mention concerns about powering a weapon of that magnitude — and I’d still want some additional turrets for defensive fire.  But this “sniper” weapon would be an awesome force against known targets operating at a safe distance.

You can approach finding a group from a couple directions.  You could start by just picking a server and talking to people in game until you find interesting people.  You could also search the internet for communities dedicated to the game you are interested in.  I find that a combination of both is the best route.  You start playing on servers and learn who you seem to enjoy seeing logged on.  Listen to them discuss other servers they play on, and if you have xfire or something similar to track movements, watch where clans that you are interested in seem to gather.  Then you hunt down their forums or other large communities and see if the members are also a personality match outside of the game.  The more you post on forums, the more you will quickly find that certain clans seem to be more of a fit for you than others.

Once you have picked out a clan, the real key is to get face time with them.  Post on forums they frequent, play on servers they play, and just generally be around.  It is a careful line to walk though because you don’t want to come off as a creepy tagalong, but you do want to be memorable.

Eventually, if you have made your impression someone from the group will approach you on the forums or in game.  If you aren’t patient enough or just want to take a more active role, most clans have a recruiting section of their forums where you can express interest.  In my case, I contacted someone within the group that I had talked to frequently and began asking questions about what being in a clan was like.  After the conversation, he brought it to a vote within the group, and they extended their invitation to me.  Generally most clans invite people by a vote of the members, and once a decision is made the thread used for the vote is deleted before giving the new member access.

It can be hard to accept when the clans days are over.  Sometimes a group will be ripped apart in a massive fight, but more commonly it dies slowly as the group grows apart.  The slow decline of games’ popularity tends to be the leading cause of this disconnect.  As people begin to migrate to other games it becomes difficult to stay together.  The forums grow less and less active each month, and the days of weekly get togethers with other groups are long past.   If the group was truly close and became strong friends, then the death of a game won’t be enough to keep them apart.  I know of clans that have stayed together and still talk on their forums when the game that brought them together has been dead for over three years.

First, a good glower is close to the most powerful tool in a DM’s Toolbox. Practice it a mirror until you make yourself want to dribble down your own leg. When you’ve got that down, half the battle is won. All you need to do at this point is break out the glower of disapproval on players who are not paying attention and voila!

Second, if they won’t role, then make them roll! If they insist on playing Silly AT-AT Theatre with your three legged vintage AT-AT from back in the days of yore, get their attention by making them roll a d20…call it whatever you know their character is weak at, and they’ll suddenly be paranoid and get back to the story. The result doesn’t matter, and unless you have a fun, vindictive idea for what to do to their character, don’t sweat it. The roll itself returns their focus to the game.

Reward doing stuff with success! This trick is so often forgotten by DM’s of the Hardworking and Lazy flavors, and although I said rule one was the most important, I was lying. If you want them to do things and be focused, you need to reward that behavior. Players are like small children or other household pets. They thrive on positive feedback. Give them success, be it in setting (RP benefits) or in mechanics (XP’s, a bonus to do something, etc.) when they do their part to keep the story going.

Punish inaction with hindrance, pain and death! The flip side of rewarding doing stuff is to make not doing stuff an unpleasant experience. If they won’t be proactive or even active then your world moves on and they lose out, get smashed and generally the story you were all supposed to be working on gets ugly and ends like a Hong Kong Action Movie…aka they all die.

The last tenant of the Book of Sloth is another simple one which will make your life as an ill prepared impostor to world creation and maintenance as simple as it needs to be. When in doubt about rules and such, cut it close but rule in favor of the players…this creates the illusion of fairness and lets you abuse the hell out of them when it really matters.

So for now I’ll close the Book of Sloth and drink a cup of special brew Bolivian Death Coffee in honor of Mr. Alhazred for all the work he saves me from doing with his hard won insight from beyond the plateaus of Leng.

We promise episode 131 will be full of ponies and rainbows.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, John, Pat

I have been a geek for as long as I can remember, and while I have taken part in just about every aspect of geek culture, I had not taken part in a tabletop role playing game until this past Sunday.  I had done MMORPGs, so I did have some of the basic concepts down, but speaking as an outsider, there is a huge barrier to cross from video games to RP games.

I have always been interested in RPGs but never had the opportunity to try one.  There was also a bit of stigma around role-playing that held me back from searching out more information.  I admit it, and if you want to bring people into the hobby you will have to accept that the stereotypes are hard to get past even among other stereotyped groups.  It was someone at work talking openly about gaming that allowed that opening to get information without going outside my comfort zone.   Fear the Boot’s Episode 115 was an incredible resource for learning about the hobby at my own pace.  I highly recommend giving a CD of this episode to anyone who has even remotely expressed interest in the hobby.

The opportunity presented itself to join a group and try out the hobby.  I was nervous going over to create my character that first night.  I tried to be as prepared as possible, but I was left wondering just what it was going to be like.  This process was a little confusing for me going into it.  I understood the basic concepts from reading and research, but selecting base numbers for attributes was tricky when I didn’t know what the number I chose would mean in game.  I would guess that knowing what trade-offs are worth making is something that can only come with experience.

All this led to my first gaming session.  The group was very welcoming and seemed to be understanding of the fact that I was really winging it and didn’t have a clue what I was doing.  If the group had been more stand-offish or hadn’t gone out of their way to make me feel welcome I could easily have seen my interest in the hobby dying.   After about 10 minute or so of game time I quit worrying about saying the wrong thing or looking stupid and just started enjoying the experience.

There were some things that truly surprised me.  One player was shaken by accidentally killing an NPC and both he and I were amazed by how much it affected him.  I was surprised by the level of debate involved in some of the actions.  More than anything I found myself listening for every little detail and really focusing on certain clues.  I kept trying to piece together the larger picture and how every clue tied into it.  Mostly, going in I was afraid of being overwhelmed by the math and not knowing what any of it meant.  While this was a very numbers light game there is still a bit of that.  When I roll I don’t know if it is a good roll or a bad roll.

All in all, the group I played with went out of their way to make me feel welcome to the point that even though I still have A LOT to learn, I don’t think I will feel like an outsider to the hobby for very long.  The best advice I can give, other than giving Episode 115 to a prospective gamer, is to be welcoming and avoid too much discussion about numbers and rules.  Bring people into this aspect slowly because it is probably the second biggest obstacle after stereotypes.  It is a fine line to walk, because too much number talk will cause a person’s eyes to glaze over, but too little will leave them confused in game.

While playing through the unquestionably enjoyable X-Wing/TIE Fighter games, I remember charging down enemy capital ships with my spacecraft, blazing away with guns and missiles.  If I used my ship-killing proton torpedoes, I could obtain a lock around 6 kilometers.  My guns were only effective around 1.5 kilometers.  For the purposes of a video game — meant to recreate the in-your-face dogfights of the Star Wars series — I understand why combat occurred this way.  I also understand why they do it in TV series like Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek, since it simply looks cool to have ships occupying the screen together.

While we could certainly imagine scenarios in which ships would be passing so close, it’s probably safe to assume that the bulk of space combat would occur across vast distances.

Remember that the scale of space is enormous.  Even ships fighting in orbit of the same planet would be hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart.  If ships arrived at different ends of the solar system to slug it out, start adding zeros to the end of that number.  And I believe that foreseeable weapon technology will make that quite feasible.

Direct-Fire Weapons

Light moves at roughly 300,000 kilometers per second.  The most common energy weapons of science fiction (lasers, particle beams, etc) would either reach or approach this speed.  If I fired a laser cannon from Earth to the moon, it would hit about 1.28 seconds later.  If the Earth was a hollow sphere, the same laser could hit someone across the globe — 12,750 kilometers away — in .04 seconds.

There are some mitigating factors that may keep ships from fighting across solar systems.  Let’s say two ships are fighting between Earth and Mars at our August 2003 range of 56,000,000 kilometers.  A laser beam from one ship could strike the other in just over three minutes.  That’s an amazing speed, but do we really expect the other ship to hold still for three minutes?  If that ship is on alert, even the simplest maneuvers would put it out of harm’s way within a fraction of that time.  And that’s only half the problem.  If we assume that sensors are picking up energy signatures which move at or below the speed of light, our understanding of that ship’s location and movement is three minutes old.  So depending on our technology, there may be a six minute delay from a ship being somewhere, me seeing it, and my laser beam reaching that ship’s location.

Because of those factors, unless we assume the invention of some faster-than-light weapons and sensor technologies, combat at massive ranges between maneuvering vessels is going to be arduous at best.  But I don’t think we need to move to the Star Wars extreme of ships waiting to fire until they’re a few hundred meters apart.  Even ships that are 15,000 kilometers apart could go through our sight, fire, and  hit cycle in 1/10th of a second.

Someone may point out that 1/10th of a second is still a lot of time in space travel.  A ship moving at 100 kilometers per second would be 10 kilometers away in 1/10th of a second.  But keep in mind that straight-line motion isn’t sufficient to dodge this shot.  If you’re moving along a line, it’s not hard to predict your location and alter targeting accordingly.  You have to move in a new direction — ideally one so erratic I can’t predict it — and make those directional changes in that time.  That’s a more difficult feat since you’re now working against the mass and motion of your ship, and while you might dodge some incoming fire, you’re not likely to slip it all.

(While writing this section, I was tempted to dig into the likely technical hurdles various energy weapons might face.  Providing them with sufficient power and heat protection alone is no small task!  But as I stated in a prior article, I’m trying to keep this relatively generic, written at a bird’s eye level of math and physics.)

Indirect-Fire Weapons

Indirect-fire weapons, such as missiles, offer some obvious advantages.  If I fire a missile over that 56,000,000 kilometer distance, it will have a much longer flight time than a laser beam.  But, unlike the laser, it can also make constant course corrections based on its ever-shrinking distance with the enemy.    This will make them much harder to evade over great distances.

The obvious downside is that missiles must carry some form of propulsion sufficient to get them to their target.  This will add to their mass and complexity.  And if our enemy is smart, they’ll likely be employing a defense system capable of targeting these missiles and shooting them down.  A laser gun could easily swat down missiles that are still thousands of kilometers away.

There are some ways to help our missiles get home.  One is to simply overwhelm a target with more missiles than they can defeat.  Just keep in mind that we’re still talking about vast distances of open space, so this will require an unbelievable number of missiles to do.  The second option is to give them some ability to evade sensors or incoming fire, whether through electronic countermeasures or erratic flight patterns.  The third is to use a delivery mechanism (such as a larger ship) that can deploy the missiles at a closer range, thus reducing an enemy’s chance to intercept them all.

All three solutions obviously require a significant increase of investment beyond the original delivery system.  However, the prospect of getting a few nukes on target might make it worth your while.

I don’t believe missiles are a bad idea, nor that they will lose their place in combat.  But I do think a lot of science fiction overstates their likely roles.

I have to admit that it reached such levels that I wondered if this is what new players thought gaming was about. Were they assigning numerical values to every class ability and weighing them against one another? Was there a mystical set of scales by which all things were weighed upon? Were those scales provided by Hiddukel, the evil god of tricks and lies in Dragonlance known for his symbol of the broken scales?

I wondered how all this talk of the almighty Balance entered our vernacular. I remember the occasional talk of something being “overpowered,” but we never used the term “balance.” That isn’t to say the term wasn’t used, just that my own experience never saw the use of the word. I would say that it was the internet that saw the term gain prominence. Despite the mass-communication medium, it also takes a force to drive the new terminology. Enter the game designers, perhaps most notably Monte Cook. They used the term “balance” quite frequently.

Needless to say, the almighty Balance began to annoy me to no end. Why was it that people were asking if every little rule was balanced? Why this obsession? Did nobody ever have fun before the almighty Balance? I sure remember having fun playing AD&D with some off-balanced rules.

That’s when it clicked with me. Why do we ask left and right if something is balanced? Why do we not ask instead if something is fun? I mean, that’s why we came to game, right? To have fun?

Don’t get me wrong. As a game designer, I fully understand that game balance is an important factor in the game. You don’t want your wizard doing nothing while your fighter is having all the fun. Everybody should be able to take part in the gaming experience.

However, we should not forsake the fun in the name of game balance. Keep balance in the background, but focus on the fun. You will find your gaming experience to be so much more enjoyable because of it.

* Fear the Con’s hotel block is now ready for reservations.  You can find details on the con’s website.  If you’re looking to share rooms or rides, you can find classifieds on our forum.  We’re also pleased to welcome comedian Mikey Mason as an addition to this year’s offerings.

* Julie (that’s Mrs. Hussey) comes on to talk about the Battletech love letters.

* The size and shape of roleplaying game books.

* PDFs as a revenue stream and publishing method.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, David, Ed, Julie

Lately, as I scour around for new RPG’s to buy, I’ve been bombarded by a ton of products that have either been revised (typically for the 3.5 rules) or have had a new edition put out. Just off the top of my head, I can think of Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition, Shadowrun 4th Edition, Everquest II, Spycraft 2.0, World of Warcraft 2nd Edition, and the Tome of Horrors Revised book (only released as a PDF, no less!). I’m sure I missed several in there.

If you’re big into role-playing games, this is a serious blow. At $30 – 40 a book (if not more), that puts a big dent in the pocketbook. The general feeling that I’ve seen among RPG fans, and I tend to agree with this sentiment, is that they don’t like paying for the same thing twice. I’m sure that the die-hard fans of each of these books are more willing to shell out a few extra dollars for the improvements made in the new editions and revisions, but casual fans get hit a little harder.

Revisions and new editions have been around since RPG’s began, but the intensity of them seems to have increased in recent years. Wizards of the Coast’s 3.5 revision to the D&D rules is largely to blame for this. By changing the core rules to the 3.5 version, they caused a backlash wave. Many publishers put out revised editions of old products to match the new rules, which again disenfranchised the public by “forcing them to buy the same product twice.”

I know, I know. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. You’re still capable of running a game with the outdated version. Yet we, as RPG fans, are an obsessive lot who want the most current materials so that they work with the most current materials without having to do conversions. Many fans, self included, don’t like to make the conversions, and they want something in print (rather than the SRD).

At this point, we come to another major point in the whole mix from the other end of the spectrum – relevance. If an RPG company’s product is not relevant (i.e. compatible with the 3.5 rules), then it simply won’t sell. Many publishers revised their products to keep their products relevant so that they can continue to bring in revenue from them.

The 3.5 revision, like any edition change, has its good and bad points. While it improved the rules dramatically, it also had an adverse effect on publishers (who had to revise their own products to remain relevant) and fans (both in terms of cash flow and trust).

New editions allow for companies to take already good products, and make them better. The new World of Warcraft RPG stands as a means to appeal to the core Warcraft computer game audience, rather than a D&D audience. Mutants and Masterminds, an already great game, is reportedly even better now.

All of these revisions and editions bring to mind a few questions.

How can we trust that the products we buy will be the final version? Quite simply, we can’t. We don’t know what the industry will do, and when a new revision or edition might come down the pike. People have been predicting 4th Edition D&D since 3rd Edition came out. Do not doubt that it will happen eventually. It’s just a matter of when. It might be next year, it may be ten years down the line.

How can RPG companies, who have been forced to make tough decisions, maintain an audience when they’re doing what they need to in order to survive? Some may have solely been motivated by profit, but there are some who truly need to make the revisions in order to be able to sell a product. Do they get too greedy with new editions? Do RPG companies make revisions just for the sake of making a revision and profiting off of it?

All of this being said, this is an editorial, so let me editorialize.

Though I can see all sides to this, and sometimes people make the hard choices that don’t necessarily make them popular, I think it gets to be too much after a while. RPG fans could use a sense of security. I’d like to know that, if I bought a product, it won’t become irrelevant in two years’ time. I’d like to know that I won’t have to relearn the rules.

Though substantial profits are made, the market does suffer for it. How many RPG companies didn’t last through the 3.5 revision? How many companies find that their revisions split the fan base?

Don’t get me wrong. I think RPG companies have the right to make their products better and to make a profit. At the same time, they should consider all the effects that a revision or new edition might make, including on their fan base. For fans, I recommend voting with your dollar. If you feel the product is worth getting, then by all means buy it! If you’re a little strapped for cash or don’t feel you should “have to buy it again,” then don’t worry about it and spend your money elsewhere. Be sure to communicate with your RPG company (on boards, through e-mail or snail mail, etc.) and let them know what you think.

Also, ask yourself if you would even use such a product. For example, I played Shadowrun in college with the 1st edition rules (right when 2nd edition was released). Most of my Shadowrun products are 2nd edition. I haven’t played in probably 10 years, so it doesn’t make sense for me to buy the 4th edition book. Yes, we sometimes get attached to those worlds and our instincts tell us to get the latest and greatest.

It’s a tough road to walk down, for fans and RPG companies alike. The choice of making a new edition will always cause some sort of backlash in the fan base. Companies should look to make sure that the revised editions are necessary, and that they’re not making a revision for revision’s sake. Know when to say when, and look towards the internet as a way to accomplish some of the same goals. Fans should vote with their dollar, using their head to temper their heart. Don’t buy a revised edition just because it is there. Buy it because you want it. Or don’t, if you don’t feel it is worth it to buy a new edition. Above all, though, it should be fun. If a new edition isn’t fun, don’t buy it. If it is, more power to you.

Happy gaming!

“What luck finding a proper privy in this dungeon. The fur-lined seat is warm and inviting, until the MIMIC’S CLAWS FORM BETWEEN YOUR KNEES AND …!”

The tradition has been kept alive on a pile of dead characters; their tear-stained and balled up sheets stuffed into a pillow for the veteran GM to sit upon like a throne of honor – speaking their accolades and soaking their flatulence – hopefully. Now, this current generation is talking about story games – mechanically letting the players assert some authorship into how their characters behave, aspire and expire horribly. What’s a GM to do?

I’m not talking about simply loosening or eliminating the plot rails, listening to what they wish will happen next nor mining their Oliver Twist length and tone back stories for plot ideas. I’m talking about full authorship. “Axehaft Furrypiece leads the group through the tundra to a small barbarian village, not unlike the one he grew up in. Tell us, what we see.” The player creates the exposition and you’ve got nothing planned outside of a note reading “barbarian village in peril”.

Many a game master can’t get into this loss of control, like an ambush predator being hand fed in the zoo. The king has become committee chairmen, the game master is mere participant.  Others have grown to enjoy the crafting of an intricate tale that they gradually reveal to their quasi-captive player audience, and now would have to endure listening to large chunks of their awesome world get soiled upon by these rank amateurs: “This road leads to Rainbow Village, where beautiful topless female centaur-unicorns frolic all day in tickle fights, make magic weapons for pleasant visitors and pee cure potions.”

Story games need not be this way, and may still capture the shared creativity of the entire group. Here are methods of managing a shared story:

1. Genre Convention: Put your Sailor Moon dress away! The genre of the game you’re running should be or implicitly is agreed upon by everyone that joins the game. Unless you’re playing in a setting with randomly opening … rifts to other dimensions (shame on you) your setting is going to have some tropes going into it. D&D doesn’t have starships … good D&D doesn’t have starships. Besides technology there is also certain a tone all should agree upon. There’s no Smurf village in Ravenloft, unless the little imps attack in zombie swarms. GNAP! GNAP!

2. Delegate to Democracy: Your disapproval of something can get you labeled as exercising unfair fiat – a lavender F stamped on your screen. Players will stop volunteering ’cause you may just shut it down. When something weird rubs you wrong, open it to the whole group. “Does it make sense to everyone that the orphaned rogue has a rich philanthropist Uncle that loves and showers him in gold?” “No” is the obvious answer, but if they say yes to something else be ready to roll with it. If they say yes to the ridiculous – it’s probably pay back for your past ridiculousness (a barrel full of stirges or chuul in the bath tub) and they’re likely just testing you. Control your instinct to set up a TPK! It’s time to level up as a GM.

3. Compromise: this can be the most fun and creatively challenging. Work your own vision into the player proposed idea while letting it remain true. The devil, the DM, is in the details. There is a Rainbow Village populated by female centaur unicorns that craft magic weapons – so they‘re kind of high leveled. They do tickle fight and have Tasha’s Hideous Laughter as a spell-like touch attack. They give pleasant visitors swag, but are very sensitive ladies. Rude visitors have their XP harvested via fey ritual to craft their items. A single snide remark or unflattering perkiness comment will trigger a high level magic item equipped battle hard enough to get the characters leaping for every puddle on the prairie hoping it’s cure potion.

– From the mind of Digga

Elite, Space Rogue, Wing Commander, Freespace.  I’ve always been a fan of space fighter sims.  Unfortunately, most of them have the feel of World War 2 games that just so happen to be set in space.  You zip around in very close proximity to your target, flying on physics that imply the presence of air, blasting away with streams of untargeted lasers until your enemy goes down.

These games are a ton of fun, but let’s be honest about their accuracy.  Space flight has far more in common with a math problem than a dogfight, and many of the ground rules (excuse the pun) we subconsciously accept regarding terrestrial combat simply don’t apply once you’ve left your planet behind.

First, there is no atmosphere or omnipresent gravity.  We can expect ships and weapons to move farther, faster, and more accurately than anything we employ on Earth.   Spacecraft will not operate on aerodynamic principles, because there is no air.  And unless you’re very close to a planet or star, nothing will be tugging you toward the ground.

Let’s use the following illustration.  Take out a piece of paper and make a paper airplane.  Now, throw it in such a way that it will fly.  Obviously, you will throw it with the nose forward and wings aloft.  If you try to throw it forward while the plane is parallel to your body, the wings will press back against your hand and the whole mess will promptly drop to the ground.

Anyone with a basic understanding of physics can see what’s going on here.  If you throw it correctly, wind resistance is minimized, and the shape of the plane will allow it to carry aloft for a time before the air slows it down and gravity pulls it to the floor.  If you throw it incorrectly, the air works against you immediately, and gravity wins that tug-o-war a whole lot faster.

None of this is true in space.  A paper airplane will fly just as well if you throw it from any angle.  You could hold it parallel to your body, push it forward, and expect it to fly just fine.  And unlike its terrestrial cousin, it may never slow down, stop moving, or fall.

We can apply these same ideas to more sophisticated ships and weapons in space.  Ships do not need to face the direction they’re traveling, nor will simply turning the nose be enough to change its direction.  They will not need wings.  You will not slow down or stop after turning off your engines.

In atmospheric flight, the facing of your craft is directly related to its vector of movement.  In space flight, the two can conceivably have nothing to do with each other.  A burst of thrust will start you moving in a direction.  You can spin the craft around or do anything else you like, but nothing will change your movement until you exert another burst of thrust.

Second, we’re fighting over a much larger area.  The circumference of the Earth is roughly 40,000 kilometers.  In other words, even if we follow the surface of the Earth (no subterranean shortcuts), the farthest you can be from anyone else on Earth is about 20,000 kilometers.  Most battles tend to be fought over areas much, much smaller than that.  For example, the modern-day XM2001 Crusader artillery piece has an unassisted range of just 30 kilometers (up to 50 with enough help).

Put such notions aside when talking about space.  If we had a war between Earth and its closest neighbor — the moon — our enemies would be about 384,000 kilometers away.  In August of 2003, Mars moved the closest to Earth it’s been in 50,000 years, putting it 56,000,000 kilometers away.  These examples are both for relatively close bodies, so you can imagine how quickly the distances go up if fleets are slugging it out from any two randomly selected points in a solar system.

Sure, but won’t ships close that gap before fighting?  Possibly not.  As I’ve already explained, missiles, bullets, and lasers alike will no longer be working against gravity and air.  They can fly for incredible distances with little opposition.  And, depending on the type of weapon, they may traverse great distances and strike home just fine.  (We’ll talk about weapons more in the next installment, so hold your objections regarding target prediction and such until then!)

Third, there is very little terrain.  The vast majority of space is effectively empty.  Of course, the places worth fighting over tend to have bodies of mass in them such as planets.  But even planetary orbit is considerably more open than a city block, forest, or mountain range.  Objects that are “dangerously close” may still be thousands of kilometers away.  So putting aside a running battle through an asteroid belt, you can generally expect ships to see each other quite plainly across vast distances.

* If you’re interested in playing Warhammer Online, join us on the Order side, Monolith server.  You can find more information on the forums.

* Tuning your GameDAR to find your fellow nerds.  The song Chris referenced is Hail to the Geek by Deaf Pedestrians.

* The virtues and follies of the DM screen.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan

(FIXED!  The right episode is up now.)

I planned on writing a whole blog about what a match is like, but the more I tried, the more I realized that it simply isn’t that interesting of a topic to talk about.  Everyone knows what it feels like to compete in one thing or another.  If I found it dry to write about, well then I’m sure it would have been pretty painful to read about.  So I will give a few comments on matches and move on.  Based on feedback, the social aspects of FPS gaming seems to be a better focus.

One person is the captain and calls the shots during the match.  Each player has to be vocal and share what they are seeing, but one person has to be in charge and change the strategy if it isn’t working.  The keys to victory really are teamwork and persistence.  Well that, skill, strategy, and sometimes a bit of luck.  You can’t give up if things aren’t going well, no matter how hopeless it seems.  I have personally been part of victories that happen with one second to spare.

A victory naturally feels good, and a loss is disappointing.  That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun even when you lose, but when you put that much time into anything, you are going to be invested in the results.  The best match is a close and hard fought battle, because it isn’t as much fun to crush your opponent, and it certainly isn’t very much fun to be crushed.  A series of victories can bring you closer together, but a series of losses can kill morale.  It is important to remind yourself that it’s just a game and supposed to be fun.

I wanted to expanded on a comment from Part One.

” Some people are there to cooperatively have a good time (even in competition), and some people are there because the online realm is the only place where they can satisfy the need for stroking their own ego.”

Just like anything else in life, you get out of First Person Shooters what you put into them.  You could play an MMORPG without ever typing a single sentence or teaming.  That’s how some people would prefer to play, actually, and there isn’t anything wrong with that if they are enjoying the game.  I think it is fair to say: that play style misses out on a good portion of the content and experience.

The same can be said of people who just want to shoot other players and trash talk.  They are enjoying the game as they see fit, but they are missing out on something deeper that is there.  Unfortunately, they give a bad name to the rest of us much like offensive players do in MMORPGs.   Those annoying 13 year olds are in every game, but they aren’t all 13.  Kids, teenagers, and even adults fall into the annoying category.  There is just something in certain people’s nature that makes them enjoy knocking down others.

Throughout this show’s run, I’ve made no secret of my love for starship combat.  There’s something majestic about ships of incredible size blasting away at each other amongst a sea of stars.  The scale, the power, the struggle, the aesthetic — I enjoy everything it offers.

Because of this passion, I’ve been meaning to do a series on my views of space combat.  Where do I think popular fiction gets it right?  Where do I think it gets it wrong?  And what’s my artistic preference for the gray areas?

I’ve never put this into a podcast episode, because it would be a one-sided lecture.  I’d either be carrying on alone or getting lampooned by my bored co-hosts.  This blog, however, seems like a perfect place to explore these ideas.   If you’re at all interested in science fiction or space combat, I hope you’ll enjoy this series!

Setting Some Parameters

There have been visionaries from centuries past that tried to look into our modern age.  While they got some amazing things right, they also got quite a bit wrong.  Sometimes, they couldn’t predict major breakthroughs like the microprocessor, internet, or atomic power.  Or they missed the social implications of those technologies (Leonardo da Vinci may have predicted the automobile, but he said nothing of drive through restaurants, speeding tickets, and emissions tests).  In other cases, they gave us too much credit, describing cities on the moon we were just sure to have by 1975.

I don’t know the future any better than these men knew our age, and I don’t claim to be an expert in any scientific pursuit.  Therefore, my goal in these articles is not to present some perfect view of warfare centuries from now.  Our knowledge of humanity’s time line, technological possibilities, and technological hurdles is simply too limited to succeed in such an endeavor.

Instead, what I hope to do is present a reasonable vision of such warfare, based on foundational concepts of physics and limited extrapolations of our current technology.  In other words, I’m not trying to show what will happen, but instead what could happen.

What is a Capital Ship?

This series will talk about several ideas generic to all space combat, but it will always presuppose there are big ships at the center of the action.  So if at any point my ideas seem to presume we’re talking about massive, expensive ships as opposed to swarms of cheap drones…well…they absolutely do.  Humanity has still not settled the debate between quantity and quality, and I don’t think we will anytime soon, so I feel pretty comfortable with the idea of big ships still dominating some portion of the battlefield.

With that said, let’s talk about the phrase, “capital ship.”  A capital ship is technically the largest class of vessel in a line.  If we want to be absolutely literal, a cruiser or destroyer is not a capital ship, while a battleship is. However, language is ever-evolving, and this phrase has become both popular and mutated in science fiction.  I’ve seen it defined many different ways, some more arbitrary than others.

In these articles, I’ll be using the phrase in a rather general sense: a capital ship is any unusually large vessel, when compared to other ships of its time.  We’ll give these ships capital status to separate them from modest personal transports, fighters, patrol craft, or other small and mid-sized vessels.  I think that definition, vague as it is, will be sufficient for our purposes here.

This series may be fairly long, so I’ve decided to break it up.  Expect to see an installment or two per week for the next several weeks, regularly interrupted by the other fine contributors to this blog!

Lately, I’ve been referring to myself as a ‘gaming nostalgist.’ For those of you who would remind me that ‘nostalgist’ isn’t a word, I will simply remind you that I am an American and we Americans have been bastardizing language for far longer than anyone. So nyah!

So what does being a gaming nostalgist mean? Well, a nostalgist is a grognard minus the negative connotations. We nostalgists are proud of our origins and seek to keep a bit of that with us. We make no apologies, yet we also aren’t going to poo-poo over everyone else’s fun. We’re the folks who play Star Wars Saga Edition, yet still love our old West End Games d6 Star Wars books – and use them. We’re the folks who play Castles & Crusades, and use both AD&D and d20 versions of D&D in our games. We are not ashamed of our origins, nor do we condemn them. We celebrate those origins.

We’re an odd breed of gamer, having the ability to love the new and the old all at the same time. It also means that we sometimes have a hard time in fandom. We’ve got one advantage in that we can work with a diverse group of gamers, but it can also be difficult working with gamers who are adamant about their own point of view. I have a hard time dealing with fans that have to rain on AD&D’s parade, yet I also have a hard time dealing with folks who have to be down on d20. Despite AD&D’s flaws, did you not enjoy the game at the time? It’s a perfectly workable system and people still play it, so why spoil their fun? For that matter, why rain on anyone’s parade for having fun in a different way than you? Maybe I’m more of a story-driven gamer, but if Joe Gamer prefers a tactical minis-based game, why should I spoil his fun?

Being a nostalgist also means that you have your own style of play. Do your 4^th edition games carry with them a 2^nd edition feel? This reminds me of Necromancer Games, whose tag-line of “3^rd edition rules, 1^st edition feel” really set the tone for all their products. It was a formula for success, as evidenced with their highly-successful Tome of Horrors. I know that as I go forward in the world of Dragonlance, I will always keep the feel from the Margaret Weis Productions books with me.

A nice mix of the old and new can lead to a lot of fun in your games. Celebrate your origins, but don’t be afraid to try new things. Respect others. Above all, play the game your way.

Time for quick action to save face! You write an email and copy and paste the text to each of your players complaining about how you just can’t seem to deal with another player’s walking systemic, statistical anomaly that ruins all your hard work each time…you change the names so that each player hears you complain about another playe’rs character. Since the players have been sending you email after email about needing this or that for their character (things like experience for item creation or some item from some obscure book that implodes BBEG 1/day) you have something they want, so you offer them a deal.

The deal is that if they write up a villain to challenge the ‘problem’ character you’ll let them have the ‘do-dad of infinite whatever’ if they can provide it to you before next session. Give em bonus XP and stuff if they can tie it into the character’s past exploits.

Most players will hesitate so you tell them…I promise I won’t attack your character first with it. The deal is sealed at that point, and in a couple of days you have an entire team of adversaries for the party to run into, complete with motivations.

You, of course, keep your promise to attack them last with what they wrote because you have one designed just for them which will attack first.

The session is going to be a blast. Near death experiences all around the table and they will be happy to have had such a challenging encounter. In fact, if you do it as a couple of skirmishes and a final showdown it should take up the whole session and the excitement of the event will cover up what you did. Given they all were cutting deals with you behind the screen, none of them will fess up that what they wrote almost killed the guy next to them. Since they won’t talk among themselves about it, your face is saved and once again their perception is that you are a hard working DM.

You can’t do this more than once or twice per year, or else they will talk, and they may get resentful that you played them like that.

You should also keep the NPBs (non player badasses) they wrote since you can use the stat block to fill out the ranks of the enemy in a couple of months or levels when it’s not likely to kill them but will get them motivated, and they aren’t likely to remember the specifics.

To be competitive, your team has to work as a well oiled machine.  Each player on the team needs to know the other’s strengths and weaknesses, and trust that everyone on the team can play their role.  The only way to get that level of comfort is to communicate and play together as often as possible.  In our clan we had scheduled practices two to three times a week, a match at least once, sometimes twice a week, and a friendly get together on our server every Friday.   Practice could consist of running maps against each other, scriming against another team, or just running a strategy session.

If we ran maps against each other we would have each team on a separate channel of our voice communication software to keep communication private.  Each team would have a captain that determined the strategy we would employ.  This was a way to test out strategy, improve skills, and get used to playing with the squad that you would work with on match day.  More often than not the group would know each other so well that the captain would have to switch plans multiple times per map.

A scrim is when you set up a practice against another team.  This helps both teams practice and try their strategies in a situation as close to a match as possible.  Each team can learn from not just their teammates, but the opposing clan as well.  Crazy strategies can be tried out during a scrim to see how another team would react to them.

Finally a strategy session would involve all other players watching one player walk through the map and explain where everyone would be stationed or how they would progress.  These three methods are how a typical team prepares for a match.    If time and opportunity present themselves then watching recordings of an upcoming opponent’s previous matches could give a glimpse into how they work together.

You will notice the word “strategy” was used a lot in talking about match preparation.  Many people think that FPS games are all about skill and reflexes.  That certainly is important, but if you don’t have the strategy and planning to back it up, you will likely lose.  I have seen the more skilled team lose to a team with a better plan more times than I can count.  First Person Shooters at the competitive level is a game of skill both physically and mentally.  Sharing that experience with others helps to bring you closer together.

For the third part of my series I will discuss match day and the feeling that competitive gaming can provide you.  If anyone has any questions they would like answered e-mail me or leave comments and I will try to address them later in the series.

For this series of articles I’m going to show you that these stereotypes couldn’t be further from the truth. Ok, well the rambling on about “pwning noobs” is actually pretty dead on, but the rest could use some clearing up. Since I was a member of a clan that spent some time at number one on the TWL ladders I think I would be the perfect person to clear some of that up. Ok, so maybe the ego and bragging could be based in truth too.

I would argue that First Person Shooter clans are just as sociable as RPG groups. They may not meet each other in person (though some certainly do), but they talk just as much, if not more. Don’t think that clan members can’t get drunk with each other just because they are in different cities. Every clan has voice communication; most have forums, and some use messengers. In our case we also had each other’s cell phone numbers. After an initial period of getting used to, the group members would build a strong trust of their fellow clan mates. No topic is off limits for conversation. Over time you build friendships and rivalries both within your clan and without. They could be friendly rivalries or they could get as bitter as two rival high school football teams.

A clan is like a family. They stick together for the good times and the bad. For example one member of our Clan went through a divorce. We were there to support him emotionally, but we also took up a collection to help pay for his lawyer. Later we built him a computer so he could rejoin us online. Why would we do this for someone we had never met? It’s simple because he was one of us. To a clan that means he is family. I wouldn’t try to say that everyone always gets along. You don’t get along with anyone all the time so you couldn’t expect a clan to be different. Occasionally people leave because of fights, or the group’s very survival is threatened by strong emotions and words that can’t be unsaid.

So while FPS gamers are thought of as less sociable than RPG players it is actually the social aspect that keeps a clan together. It is the closeness and the camaraderie that keeps the group together sometimes long after the game itself has faded. My clan has not competed in at least two years, but we are still together. Some of them have moved on to WOW and some like me just stick around to talk. We have played other FPS games, MMORPGs, and even racing games together since our game of choice gradually died out.

Come back for part two of my series where I will discuss how a FPS clan prepares for a big match.

* Voting on the GM profile entries has ended.  Congratulations to Keith for winning!

* Fear the Con 2 is ready for your sign-up!

* Some tips for cheating the game, which leads into a discussion about how we would each deal with such antics at our own gaming tables.

Hosts: Chad, Chris, Dan, Pat

So when I set about to make the Skies of Glass Comic, I seriously took into account the world as I have come to understand it. The world of Skies of Glass is brutal. It’s post-apocalyptic. People are struggling and scraping to survive. Yes, there are many “safe havens” and areas where civilization and civil behavior continues, but outside of those regions, things aren’t so safe.

So, how much of that brutality do you let loose? How much do you really show? Is there a line that can be crossed where the violence or the graphic nature of world becomes gratuitous? It was a bit of a struggle because creatively you almost want to portray the world with as much realism as you can, or feel you need to do to make the points you want to make. Yet at the same time, you are designing a vehicle which will not only be used to help draw traffic to the site, but also serve as a vehicle to help spike interest in the eventual development of the game. Further, you are never 100% sure exactly what the age range is of those who read the comic, and where the comic is being read at. There is a certain sense of responsibility that must be maintained.

So what does all this mean? Dan and I talked about the issue and we decided that both a “PG” and an “R” rated version can be produced, giving the reader the option of deciding how much is enough for them, when it is necessary. So that is what we are shooting for. Does this mean every episode will be filled with graphic violence and sexuality? Not hardly. But as I’ve written the script, some more mature elements do exist, and will be handled carefully.

Development update. Don Higgins and I have set a timetable for production, as well as a release schedule. I’ve seen character sketches of all the main characters, and the first four scripts have already been written. You’ll be seeing some more here very soon.

Keep watching.

Not being an aficionado of sci-fi British comics from the ‘70’s – despite having Spock’s face tattooed on my butt, fascination with major boobage, and loving Earth, Wind and Fire – I was attracted to the game for it’s use of the FATE system. Back in episode 65, the enthusiasm of a certain beer-nippled former host got me to check out and fall in love with Spirit of Century (SotC) by Evil Hat Games. Love is too strong a word. Not being particularly into 1920’s Pulp, with all it’s setting cliche racism and entertaining sexism, I became…intellectually enticed (brain boner) by the core rules of FATE.

SBA is to Sci-Fi what SotC is to Pulp. I love Sci-fi, as the science officer on my left cheek can attest to.

The setting and system seem an excellent pairing like Gungans and lightsaber strikes to the face. FATE uses a design fractal with SBA such that characters, aliens, monsters, starships and Rebel Alliances can be created and interact the same way regardless of size. Scale, skill and Stunt selection are the only differences and heroes’ actions can be focused upon amidst a galaxy-sized conflict. The main limiter is that an entity can only directly affect (roll against) objects within two increments of its scale level. Although the Fantastic +6 rated Navy of the Galactic Empire can’t target you specifically, its Great +4 Finances can hire a bounty hunter with Great +4 rated skills like Blaster carbine, Starship Piloting and Jetpackery – though Abysmal -3 at Sarlaac avoidance .

Should the hunter catch up to you, the 620-page SBA book could block his shots – hot glue on a leather handle and you got a heavy shield. Big deal. You don’t mind reading, you’re on a blog after all. It’s PHB, DMB and MM in one for less than the price of each. The editing in some spots sadly reflects the length; there’s only so much a poof redder can catch given its size. I’m just talking about instances of “Armour”, “Colour” and “Manoevre”; these are cultural faults of the UK. The system is simple enough that you can glean what was intended.

There are also tons of examples and great advice for GM’s that can be applied to any game. Story Teller and players can pass around a blank sheet of paper taking turns adding planets, names, space objects and aspects to for a galactic sector sandbox, while communicating the type of adventures they’d enjoy – if you care about such things.

Lots of the volume is black-and-white art copied from the original issues. Aliens with Afros, clunky toaster oven like robots and brave heroes with feathered coifs abound, groovy.

Even if you don’t want to run a game based on this particular genre of old school space opera with its silver jumpsuit uniforms, pointy bras and cut-off shorts wearing mandroids – complete with special attachment in a rainbow of colors – you can mine the system for any science fiction setting you’d like, whether hard like Heinlein or soft like Star Wars. I do prefer the starship design system I wrote for FATE, but I’m an awesome GM and shouldn’t hold others to my standard. If you like SotC, or are interested in getting into story games, I highly recommend it.

[Editor’s Note: Digga Dominus is not employed to endorse this game or the FATE system, he’s just a huge fan boy of the game and invites you to read more of his RPG views at Da Dominion. We discourage you from following the link.]

In order to make this work, you have to get past the idea that slapping your favorite CD in the player and letting it run will produce the desired effect. It won’t and it will become a distraction in my experience. While the first track you play may represent the mood of the scene, after a few minutes, you’ll be on to the next which may not be a good fit at all.

At this point, it might seem that looping the proper track is the answer. It’s not. I’ve tried it, and the players love to begin making déjà-vu jokes as soon as the music repeats. Everyone at the table then begins to listen intently to the music waiting for it to start over. The soundtrack is now at the forefront of everyone’s attention when it should be in the background.

The way to make this work is with the computer or mp3 player. With the advent of these devices music and sound in games becomes plausible. I use my laptop to organize my music collection for play. I love movie soundtracks and have collected quite a few over the years. I almost exclusively use film scores in my games. I’ve found that anything with lyrics in generally not well suited for playing at the table.

I organize my music into playlists based on types of role-playing scenes. Some of the common ones I use are, “Battle”, “Intrigue”, “Travel”, “Mystery”, and “Chase”. I try to put together enough music in a playlist to last about 15 minutes. When I have a chase scene, I fire up the “Chase” playlist. I do set it to repeat in case we go over 15 minutes, but it seems to be long enough that the loop isn’t noticed nearly as much.

I try not to mix genres, so for fantasy games, I might use soundtracks like Lord of the Rings, The 13^th Warrior, or Dragonslayer. In my recurring Legend of the Five Rings games I’ll use Memoirs of a Geisha, The Last Samurai, or several traditional Japanese music CDs.

I also use sound effects, especially in horror games like Call of Cthulhu. I don’t use specific sounds like individual gunshots or screams, I try to use ambient sounds. In order to do this effectively, you’ll need an audio editing program like Audacity. For instance, one of my Call of Cthulhu games, set in the 1920’s, had some travelling in it. I downloaded a sound clip of a Model T and looped it using Audacity. When the players hopped in their car, I played the loop quietly in the background as they discussed their current investigation. I did the same thing with a ship that they sailed on. I found a clip of a large ship’s engine. Played quietly in the background, it really set the mood.

With a program like Audacity, you can mix tracks together as well. For fantasy games, I mixed together the sounds of crickets, owls, and a crackling fire, to be played during camping scenes. I also mixed together the sounds of a bar crowd and medieval music for scenes in an inn. This idea can be expanded into many possibilities.

To wrap this up, here are the points to remember when using music and sound in your games…

• Don’t just put in a CD and let it run.

• Don’t play a CD track and hit repeat.

• Use your laptop or mp3 player

• Organize your music into “scene-based” playlists

• Sound effects should be ambient, not “specific-instance” sounds

• Mix tracks to get a multi-layered effect

• Play music and sounds quietly.

Give this a try. Start out small with a couple of “scene-based” playlist and build on it if it works for you. It’s made a big difference in our group.

Recently, I’ve been confronted with a similar situation in terms of Wizards of the Coast and D&D 4^th edition. I’m really digging 4^th edition. There’s still a lot I need to learn, but I’m genuinely excited by this version of the D&D game. Yet as I say this, I can’t say I’m as big of a fan of Wizards of the Coast as I used to be.

As of this writing (12/2/2008), several WotC employees, including Dave Noonan and Jonathan Tweet, were laid off. This is the same company that laid off gaming legend Jeff Grubb, one of the original Dragonlance designers, the guy largely responsible for Spelljammer, and an all-around gaming legend. He’s worked on D&D for many years, and they nixed him.

I can’t say I’m a big fan of WotC’s lack of continuity between editions. Or the Forgotten Realms’ time jump. It’s the Realms’ version of Dragonlance’s Fifth Age, in my opinion. Or the discontinuation of Dragon and Dungeon magazines (and no, the online subscription versions are not the same). And so on and so forth. Nor do I feel like paying for online content from WotC’s digital initiative. Partly, I feel that you’re not getting your money’s worth. I also feel that they shouldn’t charge for materials that were once free on their site. But I digress.

Wizards of the Coast is but one example. Any number of other companies may have great products, but lots of background drama going on. You may find that you like their product, but they have poor shipping. Or perhaps their customer service skills are lacking. Maybe you don’t like the people behind the company. So what’s a gamer to do?

I talked with my friend and fellow Dragonlance game designer Cam Banks about this, and he suggests that you buy the products you like. You’re not supporting companies here; they are not charities. I think this is an excellent idea. Separate out the company from the product. When I buy a D&D 4^th edition product, I’m not doing so in support of WotC. I do so because I enjoy the product. Voting with the dollar also has the added benefit of sending the message to WotC about what you like and what you don’t.

What happens, then, when a company’s definition of some game element doesn’t match your own, or changes over time? Lately, I have been concerned about the heart and soul of D&D. While I like 4^th edition, it is a very different game than its predecessors. It’s definitely a reinterpretation of what D&D is. In this process of transition, we’ve seen some reimagining of some D&D elements. Some of it is good, some not so much. Of course, I also felt a bit this way when 3^rd edition came about. Take the halfling, for example. Once, it was a knock-off of the hobbits from Lord of the Rings. Since 3^rd edition, they have been more kender-like. Hobbit fans may not like the change. However, that’s easily remedied by changing a little fluff. Likewise, the renaming of dragon types to become “new” chromatic dragons (i.e. deep dragons becoming purple dragons) is annoying.

Rules and flavor are often not one and the same. Sometimes they’re tied together. But in D&D’s case, there is room for adaption. I have so many pre-4e Realms gaming supplies that making the time jump forward doesn’t make much sense. I also prefer the pre-4e Realms flavor-wise. So I’ve got the 4e Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide, but my plan isn’t to use it for playing in the current era. The FRPG gives some good basics for playing in the Realms in the current era, but materials can be adapted for using 4^th edition rules in previous eras.

In other words, just because WotC says that dragons act a certain way and halflings look a certain way, that doesn’t mean it is gospel. Use the rules you want, and if the flavor doesn’t match what you want, then grab some flavor elsewhere or make up your own.

I know I’ve singled WotC out quite a bit here. That’s not my intention. It’s just that they are the company I’m most familiar with, and are the most well-known gaming company out there. The same basic principles I mention here can apply to any company.

These principles also apply to fandom. I’m a huge fan of the Castles & Crusades game by Troll Lord Games. The Trolls are great folks. Unfortunately, some of their fans can be quite negative and vocal about d20. It’s enough that some people stay away from the product due to its fans. What I did to circumvent this was to just no longer bother with their forums. Problem solved. I have a nifty RPG I like, and I’ll play it my way, even if that way is ‘incorrect’ by some peoples’ definitions.

So in short, buy the products you like and don’t pay the companies any mind. Getting involved in company politics and drama will just sour you on the gaming experience. If you don’t like the decisions companies make regarding in-game elements, then discard those elements and use the ones you want. And if the fans of said product or company bring down the experience for you, then feel free to ignore them.

It’s your game. Focus on that and ignore the rest, and you’ll have a happier gaming experience.

What does every comic book geek have in common? Well if they have been collecting for any time at all they have storage issues. With this in mind my first recommendation is the DrawerBox™ Storage System. These are reinforced cardboard boxes designed to open like a filing cabinet. They connect together for increased stability and have a rail system for hanging dividers. You could order directly from their site, but personally I make it a point never to order from a site that has an AOL e-mail address listed. Most comic shops carry these boxes and there is a list of retailers provided on their website.

My second recommendation is for the geek that likes to show off his collection. This is a display frame made specifically for comic books. It is designed for easily switching out the books still bagged and boarded since comic fans are fickle and tend to like variety. There are multiple frame versions for covers that combine to create a larger picture. The frames come in a variety of colors to ensure that they will fit in with any room design. You might even be able to convince the wife that it is a good way to display some of the comics currently cluttering up the counters, desks, and tables.

A few years ago my wife got me what is still to this day my favorite Christmas present ever. She gave me a set of three razor sharp batarangs. While I do realize that I have no actual use for these other than posing and looking like even more of a dork, that doesn’t change the fact that I absolutely loved them. I carried them around in my inner jacket pocket for months and almost forgot to leave them in the car when I was going through a metal detector. Of course I had to throw them into a tree or two. I would suggest starting with Amazon for a set of these.

Sticking with my personal mandate of avoiding the obvious my DVD suggestion is not typical. For the comic fan that appreciates camp I highly recommend season one of “Who wants to be a Superhero.” It was a TV “reality” show hosted by Stan Lee on the Sci-Fi channel. Each contestant created their own superhero personality and each week Stan eliminated the one that he felt was the least heroic. Over the course of the show it became obvious that Stan is a bit out of touch with the industry and the comic books produced from this show demonstrated just how far the great Stan Lee has fallen. The show might have had more cheese than the state of Wisconsin, but for those that like that it could be the ultimate Mecca of comic book goodness.

If none of these are a fit just go into a comic shop and take a look around. T-Shirts, collectables, and banks are always good choices. The average comic book geek will love any gift with their favorite character on it even if it is something they would normally hate.