Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Within Temptation - Memories - Memories (single version) (Squid's Redoubt)

I just finished reading the 1993 reprinting of the 1987 game, Fringeworthy (hereafter FW).

I’m reminded why that I’m so deeply and abidingly glad that the design of games has changed so radically in the last twenty years, and simultaneously reminded why my friend maliszew’s near-obsession with the structure and feel of late ‘80’s games leaves me wholly cold.

Conceptually, FW is awesome. You probably know it better as Stargate SG-1 since 80% of the underlying concepts that went into the latter originated in FW. So much so that I’m absolutely shocked there hasn’t been any subsequent suits and huge settlements for ripping the idea off wholesale, but I digress. In FW, the world has discovered a set of huge, hovering rings that lead to a network of pathways between worlds. Only 1 in 100k can actually use these gates, so the UN administers the exploration of this new resource. Some gates open to planetary locations, some to alternate Earths (in fact, a massive, endless array of them), some to places in the solar system, some directly to other star systems. Humanity goes in, runs into aliens, finds some cooperative, others less so, and a Big Bad.

All pretty straightforward, right? I could run something based on the underlying idea in an endless parade of fun.

Then there’s the rest of the book. Remember, Tri Tac, ‘93. Ten pages of detailed, small-print human form location tables down to “front of spleen” or “5th metacarpal.” Fifteen of complicated strangely interwoven skill system, to the point of “Solar Powered Electronics” is on par with “Xenobiology.” Fifteen on randomly generating a new planet to be discovered, which is unlikely to really even be human habitable. Don’t forget the inevitable d100[1].

Could I run this? Not on your stinkin’ life. Which is pretty exemplar of the games of the era, a number of which I own in my extensive historical library.

I occasionally wonder if there’d be any money in picking up a license for some of these older properties and retrofitting a new system on the old setting info and feel. Some kind of stripped-down Fudge system would do just fine for the more mechanical systems, or maybe even just a description of common themes and means for dealing with characters in Primetime Adventures or Capes[2] . This would be impossible, since such licenses are always overpriced and would undersell, but … A man needs dreams.

Traveller done up as a Universalis plug-in and seed set amuses me so, though.

1. A review of the Fringeworthy 10th edition says it all:

   And then there’s the combat system. I’m not even going to try to describe it—you won’t believe me. To make a long story short, it makes even Rolemaster seem fast and simple by comparison. Those who want the details anyway are hereby referred to Michael Richter’s review of FTL:2448.

   In summary, this system is misbegotten all the way. Whether in or out of combat, the players and GM will be constantly flipping to different sections of the book just to find the information they need to do something. When they’re not doing that, it’ll be because they’re still trying to figure it out in the first place. Very bad for a game that has supposedly undergone ten years of playtesting.

2. Pretty much my core workhorse games now in many ways. PTA gives you a truly stripped-back character descriptor and conflict system, Capes gives you the GMless and conflict-focus for other things.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Trace Adkins - Big Time - Big Time (Squid's Redoubt)

It says something about me that in my travels around the Net, I managed to find an RPG inspired by Gurren Lagann. Not only that, but the mechanics are rooted in InSpectres, possibly the best of the supernatural horror / reality show hybrid RPGs ever written.

OK, the only one. But you get the idea.

I almost want to run it. Almost. But then again, I kind of want to run a Bliss Stage inspired by a mix of Gundam and Grey Ranks focusing on the inevitable horror, suffering, misery, and just plain damn coolness of giant robots in war.

So many things I want to do, so few people nearby to do them.

But I’m sure __oni_no_kaze__ will be amused at the Gurren Lagann RPG and introduce his Navy buddies to it forthwith.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Sword, The - Age of Winters - Winter's Wolves (Squid's Redoubt)

I wasn’t quite done with getting things done, of course. The BSU card was pretty much prototyped, but I need a personal card, right? One with my contact info on it as a primary thing.

So, yeah …

I originally intended to play it a lot straighter, I swear. Simple, black lettering, blocks of blue-grey with some overlapping shading, that sort of thing. I swear that’s the way it was going.

Not exactly the way it turned out.

I did pick up the salmon colour from the squid-body and echo it slightly darker on the text, which pulled the whole thing together nicely. The halo around the text is actually “paper” colour, so it’s a place where there’ll be no ink. I love being able to layer that sort of thing in InDesign … you get some nice interlacing if you want it.

I’m pretty pleased with this design. I’m vaguely tempted to redo the text and make it the official Operation BSU card, except I’d keep getting the two confused in my wallet and that’d be a bad thing. Maybe I’ll just find different squid art for it, or a nice nuclear explosion. I like the way the fonts and space work in this design. Hmmm, maybe strip the red out of the old one and just move the background grey text words over under a nuke sillhouette.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Cephalic Carnage - Xenosapien - Molting (Squid's Redoubt)

I’ve written of Dragonstaff before.

The original idea was a totally over-the-top fantasy setting, roughly inspired by the kind of insanity one finds in DragonLance, but expressed through Capes mechanics. The possibilities for comedy and pathos were always massive in such a thing and the original plan was just to go the whole 9-yards and let the madness flow.

But we can do better.

At Dragon*Con, I plan to go somewhere out even beyond that far outpost of limitation. Just as Marvel has created the Ultimate line of comics to bring their characters into the 21st century, and largely managed to screw up everything that made the originals cool, so I plan to bring Dragonstaff into the modern era and screw up everything — OK, no one but point5b and I really saw it, so no one can really be horribly disappointed, but that’s not the point! The point is that I’m fully intending to bring the most bizarre mix of crazed over-the-top-ness ever to a gaming convention.

I want people playing in the RPGA Living City games to look over and wonder what in th’Hell we could possibly be playing … and how they can get in on it! I want it to get rowdy and disturbing and bizarre by turns. Sometimes all at once.

We can do this.

Ultimate Dragonstaff takes what few limits there were on the Dragonstaff setting and throws it out the window. Ultimate Dragonstaff will make Exalted look like pikers playing in a sandbox. Ultimate Dragonstaff takes a look at Nobilis and scoffs at such a low-level campeign!

OK, maybe not that last one. But close!

Ever wanted to play Fistandantilous / Raistlin? How about The Scarlet Empress? Drizzt Do’Urden? Elric of Melnibone? Conan? John Carter of Mars? John Galt? Elminster the Wizard? The Black Adder? Arthur? Lancelot? The Lady of the Lake? That Guy on the Dead Wagon?

You can do it all in Ultimate Dragonstaff, and probably should!

But you can’t have a Capes game without a Comics Code, the list of things that cannot come to pass … and, which, incidentally, the villains and sometimes heroes of the piece try to do constantly, since almost achieving them gives Story Tokens as a pay-out.

So, let’s rough a little something out. This can be refined as we go, but as a first pass:

• Characters with Powers cannot be permenantly killed.

  The distinction here is any character with Powers. That’s heroes and villains alike. Falling off a cliff to your “certain doom” pointedly does not count as being permenently dead, nor is being left in a deathtrap. If neither of those happened, there’d be no fantasy novels!

• Exemplars cannot be permenantly killed.

  Well, if we’re giving Powered folk the out, might as well give it to Exemplars. This pretty much just means your Exemplars will be constantly in some kind of danger, as folks go for the Gloating pay-off.

• The root conflict between characters and their Exemplars can never be resolved.

  • Corollary: Unspoken love can neither be revealed nor abandoned.
  • Corollary Exemption: A character in love with a villain must make it repeatedly, brutally obvious to everyone but the target of their love.

  Those pesky root conflicts. It’s just no fun if Aunt Mae tells Peter she’s OK with his web-slinging and hires a goon army to protect her from his rampaging rogues’ gallery, and neither is it fun when the cute red-headed wench the burly Adventurer is smitten with but too shy to tell has it all ruined if he confesses his undying devotion like a sane, smart person. Just doesn’t happen. Ergo, can’t.

  Why the thing with the villainous love interest, you ask? Because it’s necessary.

• The world cannot be destroyed.

  Pretty obvious stuff, that. Can’t blow up the setting. Note what’s not covered, though: political revolutions, murdering heads of state, ruining economies … and that you’re intended to be playing characters that can do such things reasonably on a whim. Feeling a bit unconstrained yet?

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Klingonz - Drink Fight Fuck (Squid's Redoubt)

[21:59] point5b: http://i11.tinypic.com/4pmxyeg.jpg
[21:59] point5b: And the excellent comment:
[22:00] point5b: Jesus plays SHADOWRUN??

Guess that makes sense, you need patience to count all those d6's.
"Okay, this is a simple run. You go in, locate the poor and downtrodden and unload some hope and salvation at them. If you run into any crippled or blind, heal the bastards without thinking twice. The means of exctraction are as usual: martyrs death while spreading the gospel of the lord to the unbelievers. See you in heaven."

[22:00] exopilot: [laugh] OK, Old Testament as Shadowrun. There's a Nobilis game waiting to happen.

Or, at need, Capes ...

I've already done God, Jesus, and Lucifer in Capes, which is undoubtedly going to send me right to Hell. I'm horribly, horribly tempted to go pull Nobilis off my shelf and start statting out God as an Imperator, and Jesus, The Holy Ghost and Lucifer as Powers thereof. (This is, technically, wholly at odds with the original Nobilis setting write-up, but since I'm responsible for injecting a dose of yaoi romanticism between God and Lucifer in there, I feel comfortable further mangling things horribly.)

Jesus as Shadowrunner, though ... This could be fun.

Joshua Christi
Son of God and Ass-Kicker

You know, it was a lot more straightforward in the New Testament. Things were simple. No Aztechnology, no magic reawakened in the world, no two-guns-akimbo street sammies running hither and yon without giving two-farts-in-a-whirlwind about the Message of God. Honestly, Joshua had no real inclination to even come back. A few more centuries and the bone-headed morons on Earth might get some of their heads on straight.

No such luck.

Instead, Josh gets sent back to the world with nothing but the fact he's doing the Will of God and His Son, a charming affinity with summoning the spirits and powers of the air, a Holy Writ for the angels -- who are feeling kind of pissed and ignored, anyway -- and a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder from the last time he dropped in. All that and a Desert Eagle in each fist.

The Son of God is back. And, boy, is he pissed.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Lordi - Bringing Back The Balls To Rock (Squid's Redoubt)

Despite the name of the post, this is not a recitation of one of Lovecraft's best surrealist short poems.

No, it's just an odd meta-mechanic that I thought of for giving RPGs a certain taint of old Viking mythologizing. All too often, we forget that most of the really good stories put an expiration date right up front on the protagonist's head, not in numbers so much as in circumstances. We know they'll go down fighting, or murdered, or die of old age in bed, or wander off into the endless sea. It's shown us, up front. And then, later in the story, circumstances start aligning and the reader tenses, wondering, "is this it?" but it's just foreshadowing and the disaster narrowly averted, we go on, reminded of where the road ends. And, finally, satisfied at the end, destiny is revealed and we close the book, nodding.

Not perfect for every story, of course, but good fun on occasion, and not just in high tales of fantasy, but other genres as well. The grizzled veteran of the previous war who mentors one of our heroes who we know will die in the first reel to motivate the youngster, the bitter killer who goes on "one last mission" you know will be the death of him, or the cheerful and fearless kid who we can tell will end the story with his illusions shattered and his dreams burned even as he walks into the mists of obscurity, all are iconic images that the promise of can drive the story forward.

To that end:

The Doom Game

During character generation, in addition to normal chargen, you need to describe three Scenes in which your character plays a pivotal part:

Initiation

What things are present when the character is pulled into the whirlwind of events? What's going on? At the end of the Scene, how is their mind made up about the course to take?

Conflict

Pick an event during the course of the pursuit to come. You don't have to know what you're actually accomplishing, just a Scene during it. Where is it? What are you doing? What things are around? What thing hinges here that pushes you on toward the end?

Death

You are going to die. How does it happen? Who's in attendance? What are the Props, the Location, the Characters in motion? How do you go out, like a punk or a hero, or something darker?

The Scenes take place in the order defined and if more than one of the Players' Characters arrange to have the same Location for one of their Doom Scenes, all the better, though even if they do they might turn out not to be simultaneous.

For every aspect of your next Doom that you introduce during a Scene, you get one of whatever currency that your game uses for authorial control (unless playing Universalis, see below). For Wushu, that would be Chi, for Donjon, a generic Token that can be traded in for a success, for Capes, a Story Token, etc. If, at the end of that Scene, your Doom hasn't come to pass (the Doom Scene didn't come to pass, etc), take an additional Token. If you resolve your Doom Scene, moving toward your death, the other Players can elect to give you one or more of their unspent Tokens as fan mail.

Why would you want to move toward your death, you might ask? Because resolving your Doomed Death results in being given broad authorial control without risk of interruption or contravention about the Scene and events which cascade from it, to the extent of expense. Any and all Tokens you have left can be spent to dictate the eventual results. Want your grandson to sit on the throne of Caldenoia, musing about his grandfather's tragic loss? Done. Want your homeland ravaged by blood-orcs after your fall from your horse? Sure. As long as you have the Tokens to pay for the facts you narrate (roughly one Token per fact, in most systems), you are the Writer for the repercussions of your fall.

Obviously, this works best in games which already have a strong streak of Narrativist engineering going in, but there's no reason you couldn't use it with straight-up D&D as well as anything.

Universalis has a different spin on this, since aside from the time-disjoint, it's very much business as usual for the game:

Rules Gimmick: Doom Scenes

Important characters can have a Doom Scene Component created and attached for 1 Coin which gets a Trait of Initiatory, Conflict, or Death for free. DSC's can (and, in fact, must) have Traits attached which represent Characters, Props, or Locations involved in that Doom Scene. DSC's can be added to just as any other Component, and the connections to a DSC act bi-directionally, increasing the Importance of the person, place, or thing so mentioned and making it harder to remove from the story until the DSC. Further, presence attached to a DSC is a fact which counters bids that would make an attached Component inaccessible.

When a DSC resolves, the controller of the character so resolved receives the Importance in Coins as a bonus.

Why aren't Doom Scenes introduced as every Scene? A Doom Scene can only be invoked for it's bonus once in a number of Scenes equal to twice the Players. Three player Capes game? Each Player gets to call on Doom Scene bonii once every six Scenes. D&D game have four Players and a GM? Once every eight Scenes. And so on.

I was indirectly inspired by an indy RPG called Wyrd, which has some brilliant doom-and-dire-based-mechanics (which I cannot find anywhere hide-nor-hair, so if anyone knows Scott Knipe, tell him to find publication or look me up; we can work something out), as well as ongoing thinking about Elric, Conan, and their space-driven cousins, the Metabarons. Plus, you know, the Eddas and other lovely, uplifting stories of onrushing death.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Def Leppard - Love Bites (Squid's Redoubt)

What, you thought you'd get out of here without a Capes version?

Name: Ryo Shinta
Sorcerous Vampire

Abilities	Styles	Attitudes
Lure of Flames (5)	Detonations! (3)	Ironic (1)
Arcane Lore (4)	Asian Occult (1)	Bitter (3)
Inhuman Speed (1)	"This problem? You need enough dynamite to cure AIDS." (2)	Cynical (4)
Resilience of Dead Flesh (2)		Disappointed (2)
Mental Focus (3)

Drives: Obsession 1, Truth 4, Power 2, Justice 1, Duty 1

The interesting thing about trying to do White Wolf-esque vampires in Capes is just how hard it is. There are a lot of little fiddly bits that the WW systems have embedded as assumptions that you have to pare down to just essentials when you make the transition. "Is the character's struggle against the Beast important? How about their secondary and tertiary Disciplines? What do they care about enough to be Styles?" Tough stuff.

In a way, a Wushu conversion is easier because it pares things right down to a few core images and abilities and a weakness. That's it. Twelve things? Far harder, because it's both more and less detailed. A lot of things fit into Wushu Traits while Capes is a lot more circumscribed as to what makes a difference in a Scene, mechanically.

Current Location: Minsk, Germany
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Suckadelic / Star Wars Breakbeats / Duel of the Breaks

I was going to write some long, rambling thing here about politics and how anyone that said "The biggest threat to modern Western civilization is this Administration!" is an arse-bound moron, but honestly ... I can't be bothered. Anyone that knows that democracies generally hinge on accepting that when you get outvoted you pretty much have to suck it up until the next voting cycle and that very dynamic being the heart of post-Grecian democracy knows that saying such things mark them as unserious in any reasonable sense, and those that don't know it aren't worth the phytoplasm that pumps up their cells and no amount of denigration and deconstruction from my poison pen will change that.

No, I'd really rather write about what I've been killing lately.

Starchild, Eric the .5b and I have been pretty consistently keeping our heads down and firing off shots in the general direction of the enemy in Battlefield 2142. I apologize profusely for not having my usual horde of cool screenshots to illustrate this piece, but I'm generally far too busy trying to coordinate strikes on enemy-held positions or keeping my head down while hoping fervently my hopping, seeking land-mines blow away the evil, two-legged tank firing away at my cover not ten meters away. I've been focusing on my Engineering unlocks and point accumulation too much to really have time to reach over and trigger the Xfire keystrokes for screenshots.

The problem, as far as the addictiveness of the game design for 2142 goes, is that they've combined the tension of close-quarters combat with the ongoing and eternal desire to collect everything ever made of the hardcore RPG player. The unlock system, via which you unlock successively better equipment in exchange for points gained from engaging in combat on multiplayer servers, is a truly evil creation. My preferred role is Engineer, repairing vehicles after we engage and skirmish a bit, then getting back into the action. I leave little seeking-mine droplets of death in my wake to catch the unwary enemy who swoops in without carefully clearing the ground around a missile silo. At worst, I lean back and fire my missile launcher at excessively long ranges to do destruction against vehicles and the occasionally poorly-running infantryman.

I am no Squad Leader. You see something like that on the left come popping up, I'm squirming for cover and holding my panicky fire until he either drifts closer and feels mine-kisses or turns a bit so I can get an unobserved shot from the launcher. I do not command the forces of righteousness as they stride amongst the battlefields like the gods of old. I scrabble and sneak and keep down while hoping no one goes hunting for my dog-tags with an embarrassing knife kill.

And yet ...

And yet, I seem to be the one in charge of the squad more often than Eric the .5b, who, by dint of his incredible ability to go in killing and come out alive, really ought to be the one calling the shots. Or at least leading the charge. Eric does the bloody charges, the mass murders. Me, I think I'll sit here on this ledge and toss mines down at vehicles passing below me. Or sit up comfortably on the team's titan, an enormous floating nightmare base, and rain fire and flame down on a position while Starchild and Eric the .5b secure it after zipping in from an orbiting transport flight.

Yet, sometimes, I seem to forget my role. I'll head on over to our titan's launch pods and get one swiveled about, ready to fire, and punch the button, feeling the fire burning under my heels and spinning off toward the enemy titan, landing on top, directly between the massive anti-air machine-guns in their reinforced turrets, turning to blast either or both of them away from a handful of meters, getting my points in Titan Destruction. Planting leaping-mines directly over the shields through which the enemy's transports must take off and hoping they stick. Turning to head toward the back of the huge ship, dropping a frag grenade down a shaft that leads to overwatch positions on their cargo bay then dropping after, letting others clear the crew as we move toward the consoles that have to blow before the thing can be brought down.

Like yesterday, I can get the warning the hull's about to blow and have seconds to haul-ass out of the reactor room, scuttling through the hallways to the exit where a lone transport vehicle is parked, barely catching it and hanging out the side as I look back and see the massive flying ship burst into pyrotechnic bursts, ringed in radioactive death.

It's a win.

I suppose the reason I'm doing the duty as Squad Leader is I'm generally thinking about how we can accomplish the ends and objectives more than I'm noticing the guy sneaking up on my side. That's Eric's job, to catch that guy out and put him down for me. Mike's job is to keep an eye out and up, watching the high places for threats and calling them out in-game so they can be targeted. I need a guy who's job it is to carry the sniper rifle and to put delicately pointed rounds into the faces of the folks sitting ahead in the woods or on the skyscrapers, with the kiss of death and the blade of truth. I really should recruit a girl for that role, to be true to the story, but there aren't a lot of 2142-gaming girls. Pity really.

I guess I'll have to use an unlock on getting the Squad Spawn Beacon, after all, if only so I can summon down my warriors from on high, sheathed in steel and ceramic, born from a cocoon of death to serve the cause.

European Union. Pacific Asian Coalition. Doesn't matter.

Walking dreadnaughts. Hovertanks. Doesn't matter.

We fight the ice.

• Utahraptor
• FireEagleDngr
• Point5b

There, we're known as Team Tentacles!

I'll expect the clan tag field set appropriately next game.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Nashville Pussy - High As Hell - Wrong Side of a Gun

Alright ...

1. I'm tempted to try and design this setting.
2. How come no one ever thought of this as a salable toy for my youth?

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: tired

Back in the day, not long after it came out, I used to play in a MMORTS called Shattered Galaxy.

MMORTS, you say?

Yes, a massively multiplayer real-time strategy game. There were persistent territories on multiple planets, persistent armies, ways to gain rank and with gaining rank came the ability to command others in the sense you could invite them to take part in the battle, have bigger armies involved in a given territory, and have more units in reserve. Units leveled up as they gained XP, became more powerful and could mutate into new and more exotic units as they went.

It was also, incidentally, responsible for the little Korean I know. La!

Battle for Middle Earth II has a sort of integrated meta-campaign in the single-player where you gain XP as you move around a meta-map, reinforce territories, and generally behave as if the word "strategy" isn't just something folks tacked onto game designations back in the day because the word "tactical" had too many edges. Individual territories give armies various advantages if they're held, resource bonii, the ability to recruit various things, etc. As your armies (and your main hero) gained experience, you could add skills and powers to your hero, levelling them up and customizing them to your perverse (in my case) desires.

In the multiplayer game, you accrue XP for the ladders but you also have the option to play in longer-term map-focused games which give the players access to the meta-map for effective campaigns. I don't actually want to think about how long one of those things could run, though, because in single-player, they're obscenely long and that's with getting to fight every battle. I can only imagine the snoozing you could enjoy if you had to wait for others to resolve their RTS battles before you could take your next turn. LAN parties really shouldn't require you to play other games to keep occupied while the campaign is on.

And that brings us to Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. Which, if you've been following my blog so far, you already know I think is pretty darn spiffy, if only because it lets me play far-future SF metal undead, which I can paint in garish colours and set to marching against my enemies. What you may not know is that, generally, I just don't play the single-player games in these things to any great length or depth, because for one they're too hard because I have a life and can't devote my life to just playing them (see BfME2) or the plot really doesn't catch me and feels too linear for me to make much of a dent in (see, well, the previous DoW entries).

But Dark Crusade goes more toward the BfME2 architecture for the single-player. There's a 25 territory meta-map that breaks up the planet Kronus. You can play as any of the seven factions in the DoW franchise (sadly, no 'Nids, yet; I'm wagering they're saving the Zerg-progenitors for their next game), each with it's own starting territory. Territories give you bonii for possession, and your army commander gains wargear during the campaign as you hit breakpoints like taking X territories or sustaining Y attacks (or, in my case in one situation, having a 3:1 kill ratio). To the right you can see the wargear screen for my Necron Lord as he stands in my last turn. There's a pretty nice mass of options, and each piece of gear changes your commander's appearance both on the big interface screens and in-game.

The interesting thing, as I see it, is the potential to add some kind of persistent multiplayer battle-map to DC, without necessarily having to do a huge engine overhaul to do so. They've already lifted so much from BfME2, I don't see why lifting their accessibility to the meta-map for LAN and Internet games should be unlikely nor undesirable. DoW plays out a lot more smoothly in the meta-map, not the least reason being that your constructed buildings are persistent in each territory and you can buy reinforcements of some of your basic units in each territory as well which will always be there if the territory is attacked, even if your main army is elsewhere. Your commander also builds up an "honour guard" of more powerful units which go where he goes and start the territory map wherever your base begins, which is quite neat since I've zerged several territories with just my Necron Lord and honour guard while building up base defenses cheaply. Best of all, the home territory of each faction isn't just a standard RTS meeting engagement; each one is like an intricate, multi-objective puzzle. For instance, in taking the Imperial Guard's home base with my Necrons, I had to take out their forward bases, hunt and destroy their artillery which was randomly bombarding me on the attack, and finally dodge across a vast trench which was dug by a huge freakin' Titan beam-cannon which the IG kept firing to try and take me out. (And succeeded at least once in wiping out most of my army because I wasn't watching the timer.)

Perhaps the most alarming positive thing I can say is that I'm enjoying playing single-player in DC.

That said, there's no reason they couldn't adapt the engine to go further into the MMORTS arena. I'm iffy on the whole idea of there being a Warhammer MMORPG, the use of the property for an MMORTS is barely a stretch. In a sense, that's what Games Workshop does with their massive, distributed tabletop storyline tournaments. No reason that they couldn't abstract the mini-map into a larger swarm of worlds and territories, with individual players given single squads to start with and tasked with being part of a larger assault. I know I was always quite thrilled in SG to play a pivotal role in the taking of a map, even if it was a small one, from defending a site being taken by someone else to hunting and flanking the enemy artillery hiding in some niche. Combine that with getting new gear (which shows up on your units, something already done in DoW with tech upgrades), traveling to new maps, and perhaps borrowing a bit from both PlanetSide and Unreal Tournament to build maps which have multiple foci and on which power can shift back and forth, and you could have a fantastic set-up.

Of course ... I very well might be talking about Dawn of War 2. The developers have been really coy about whether they're doing a full-bore sequel (possibly using the Company of Heroes engine, since it's been so excellently reviewed) and the game developer has said in interviews he really wants to do 'Nids, but they require a whole new resource system and some other issues. The changes to the Necron resource model and the way Kroot Carnivores can eat enemy corpses to gain health might be seen as prototypes for the Tyranid mechanics. Other than 'Nids, all that's left is Dark Eldar, and the designer has made noises about wanting to do real flying units (like, say, jetbikes). The end of the DoW campaigns have twice been used to spotlight the next races to be added (IG in the first, Necrons in the second), but the end of the DC campaign pulls back to reveal two more planets showing large explosions on their surfaces. Multi-world MMORTS would certainly fit in with their design goals.

I'd play that.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Great Luke Ski, The / unCONVENTIONal / Grease Wars - Featuring Carrie Dahlby as Princess Leia

In the original version, our intrepid gamers, Alice, Bob, and Connie were using Capes to run an opening scene from Battlestar Galactica. They discovered that Capes' architecture actually leads to the opening scene being, well, like the opening scene for a TV ep. This is good. Moreover, it established the fact that a system originally conceived to model the narrative of super heroes could cover space combat quite neatly.

Now it's time to try the latest weapon in the RPG arsenal here at Squid's Redoubt, Universalis, which paints itself with the following:

Universalis is:

The game where every player is the Game Master

The game where players can create and populate the world as they desire as they play

The game where everything that happens, happens because a player wanted it to happen

The game where suspense comes from the actions of other players, not from a random roll.

The game whose plot evolves as you play with no random tables, rail-roading, or scenario books

The game which requires absolutely no set up or preparation time

The game where it doesn’t matter if all of the players show up on time or at all

Begin play with only sheets of blank paper, pencils, ten-sided dice, tokens, and plenty of imagination.

None of which I actually disagree with, after a couple of readings. Like Capes, Universalis is predicated on players engaging each other with conflicts rather than with some overall imposed story guide or GM directing things. Unlike Capes, the whole system is about starting from ground-scratch and building up the Tenets of the setting (things like where and when it occurs, big things like cities or continents, the overall massive shape of things, plus issues like genre, and even bits like "Turn off your stinkin' cell-phones, you goddamn Neanderthals" get created then by expending in-game currency (Coins). Universalis also shifts things in a rather more elemental way than it might at first appear by moving the focus from Debt which you accrue by acting to a Coin cost to specify a Fact; the move of the attention of resource control from after the fact to before makes you think about the cost more directly, I'm wagering.

Regardless, let's go on to our feature presentation.

( Battlestar Universalis )</u></font></a></span>

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Meteors, The / These Evil Things / Lonliness Of The Long Distance Killer, The

Just as a note to myself, and sort of referential for everyone else, I really need to sit down and respin the Battlestar Galactica space combat between Starbuck and Scar that I originally did in Capes with Universalis. Mainly as an exercise for myself to see if I understand the architecture well enough to write it out, and also to see if I can figure out exactly how the Complications differ from the way Conflicts in Capes play out.

(I'm not doing it now because I just took my Ambien and it does me no good to try and write unconscious.)

Just as a gloss, my gut suggests the Capes Conflicts are a lot more "active" than Universalis Complications, mainly due to the fact that Conflicts can activate Powers repeatedly at the cost of more Debt, but Complications can only activate a Trait once for each time it exists on a Component. I suppose you could buy additional copies of a Trait if you wanted to go on using it multiple times in a given Complication. That'd move the Debt idea to an up-front cost instead, which is kind of interesting. A character which started with the Trait "Laser Cannon" who gets in an intense fire-fight might have it bought a few more times, ending up with "Laser Cannon x4" at the end. In the next Complication where it might be useful, it's already bought up and can be used 4x for free.

I wonder if that wouldn't actually better mimic the arc by which a character begins a story fairly loosely sketched out, and develops not only peripheral abilities and breadth, but the facets of their character that get brought into play a lot dynamically get invested in, making them ever more important.

Side thought: Could this be an alternative approach to the Hero's Journey that D&D rather sadly attempts to mimic via levels? Traits that get branched out and built upon as stories go, making the character ever harder to remove from the narrative and establishing more things about them that have to be Challenged to essentially change them? Remind me to try a fast-sketch of how a "First-Level Character" might change over multiple stories."

Well. We'll just have to see how this sort of thing works out in auto-play before I actually try it with other people.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: irritated
Current Music: Ghoultown / Bury Them Deep / Tekilla

You know, I don't mind ads in roleplayers.

What I do mind is bad ones.

I'm particularly annoyed by bad horror-genre games that don't bring anything new to the table. I'm doubly-annoyed by trying to republish a 16 year old game design as if it had some kind of relevance in the field or some reason it'd be worth dropping my hard earned money and, more importantly, my time on.

I mean, c'mon, the splatterpunk horror genre was never huge, and the focus on combat was endemic of all the designs, from Chill to Kult. And I say the latter as someone who dearly loved Kult, but the high-complexity martial arts and combat system was horribly out of place and misdirected the reader from the truly horrific setting the game created to play in.

Blood doesn't look to bring anything at all except Rolemaster-scale combat nightmares and a taste for red ink in illustration. With games like Dead Inside, Dread, and Wonderland in the marketplace, each with some significant innovation, the potential to be played full splatterpunk, and bringing the serious weird, why would anyone try to play off a 16 year old design as something worth having, save as a cheap PDF to toss out there because someone found the PageMaker files lying around and shrugged out a "Why not?"

I sometimes don't understand these folk.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: nervous
Current Music: Slainte Mhath / VA / Annie

So, yeah ... it looks like the opportunity to write the DropTeam novel is going from "vaguely joked about" to "it looks like they might want it, seriously."

Which, truthfully, is just a bit this side of terrifying.

The really terrifying thing is that my current employment comes to an end, in any time-devotional sense, on the 18th of this month. Then there's a week at the end of October.

And then NaNoWriMo begins.

It is sane to actually demand a minimum of two-thousand words a day out of yourself for a month, with the intention of actually selling the smelly dog-fart that'll inevitably result? It's not that I can't produce that much text, of course. I did well more than that on Iteration X Revised, in a per-day sense. I just can't stand to read anything I produce about two weeks after I write it.

So, me being me and devoted to using the most bizarre tools that I can in an effort to make twiddling and screwing around look good, dug up FreeMind from my archives and started laying out some node structure of ideas that I think are important to get down with connections between them for the novel. Some people like outlines. I like node-link maps.

Of course, what I really want is a full 3d node-map creator and projector, with the ability to let the nodes find their own least-energy patterns based on the way they're connected up, but I fear that'll have to wait a few dozen more years before the interface to deal with such comes to fruition.

Still ... it's a start. Getting a semi-pitch opportunity, having the tool at hand, having a whole month free without having to worry about a real job ... It's almost providential. If I were a religious man, I'd be terrified.

As is, I'm just short of that.

Interestingly, reading Universalis actually helped rather than hindered working in this format. The focus on bought Traits with the power of a thing dependent on how many Traits describe it has made me acutely aware of where the weight in my narrative falls, even so early as sketching out the setting details. LiveShips are a big chunk of the setting, so they get a lot of verbiage, but also a lot of details which can be summoned up during the story. The Space Aztecs (to be named properly later) have ... well, nothing yet. They carry no mass in my narrative as yet.

These are handy mental tools, too. As important as the way to visualize the structure directly.

I'm ... ready, I think. For this.

Is the world ready for me to join the universe of Michael Stackpole and Fred Saberhagen? Is the world ready for me to write a novel? Even a crappy novel for a niche video game from a niche video game company?

Am I ready?

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Tragically Hip, The / Fully Completely / Courage (For Hugh Maclennan)

Folks, repent, for the end time is nigh.

No, I don't mean Jesus is inbound any moment and about to drop a Rock-like most electrifying deity in sports-entertainment history Jesus'-elbow across our shoulders. I can take that skinny punk all by myself.

No, I mean I've been being the voice of reason and wisdom in an online forum full of prickly and obsessive grognards, and being lauded for my ideas. I know, I know, its kind of horrifying when you get right down to it, and yet ... there it is.

Yes, I've been active in the DropTeam fora.

Thus the new icon for a specific game instead of the generic wargame icon.

My latest opus on the DropTeam forum concerns the evolution of the game's tactical interface, in particular better means of dealing with autonomous elements, thus, bot wrangling. It simply would not do to let it go without at least an excerpt from the beginning:

Provocative title, not that provocative concept. I needed a thread to ramble about useful additions to the bot wrangling interface.

As stands, there's a lot of focus on playing from a FPS-esque direction because getting the bots to do useful work from the tactical screen (hereafter abbreviated "tac") is not just awkward, sometimes its a real pain in the tookas. But, given a bit of polish -- OK, a lot of tears, sweat, and programmer-bile -- it could be a lot easier.

I'll just put out a chunk of ideas that have been kicking around my head and some notes:

• Multi-point Commands: Being able to give multi-point orders with different modes at each point will help a lot when it comes time to orchestrate moving groups together. Not only that, but it'll help a lot when just trying to get a bot to pull any moves more complicated than driving straight at the enemy without babysitting them. And that gives the players more time to come up with good tactics and even better strategy.
  
  The bots should be able to follow a path of at least five points, shifting from "Defend," "Attack," etc at each one.

[...]

And so on, over several more points, including discussion of a minimal set of formations platoons should have available for command.

The thing that struck me last night came as Eric the .5b and I were warming up for a night of delicious bloody destruction by going a few rounds on the DropTeam demo server, which doesn't have infantry or a number of the latest additions, but is still nicely serviceable, is that once upon a time, I'd discussed with him the kind of game that would satisfy the both of us and play to our strengths, a game which could be played from a FPS position, on the battlefield directly, firing the guns and choosing positions, or from above in an RTS position, directing swarms of lesser elements around to aid and support the human-directed units. Perversely, DropTeam is aimed squarely at that niche. While Eric was "in the shit," firing AP iridium darts at oncoming main battle tanks, I was soaring above the chaos, directing bots to give him supporting fire, dropping minefields directly in front of advancing enemy elements, and occasionally popping onto the battlefield myself to snipe at long distance with ATGM launchers from the safety of a sensor jamming field. It was, in short, almost a perfe