It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
So a long long time ago, Ginger noticed that I occasionally wrote gaming entries, and I noticed her blog back, and got into her Game WISH, and so on.
A little while ago, I noticed Jim Henley looking for a group RPGblog.
I like talking about gaming. So here’s The 20’ by 20’ Room. I hope people enjoy what we all have to say.
This week’s Game WISH is about player-driven shifts:
What’s the biggest PC-driven shift you’ve ever experienced in a campaign? If you were a player, what made you feel like you could successfully change the GM’s world? If you were a GM, was this planned or something the PCs surprised you with?
Probably unsurprisingly, my example comes from a Feng Shui campaign. (Shifts in the world are built right into the background.) Brad was the GM; the PCs were Transformed Dragons who were not part of the Ascended. Ascended — think Illuminati, but with a ruling class made up of animals who had transformed into human form. Brad made it really clear from the beginning that he wanted to run a world-changing campaign, and we took him up on the offer by going back to the 1850s juncture and working to make demons part of society. The plan was to increase the ambient level of magic so that we could take our true draconic forms once again.
This had some unfortunate side effects, including making it possible for the Architects to take power in the future, but we hadn’t really figured out the real consequences of what we’d done before the game ended. It was a blast working on the grand scale, however.
As I mentioned, we felt we could do what we did because the GM told us so and we trusted him. Carl’s UN PEACE game also featured some pretty noticable shifts; in that case, he presented world-changing events as a consequence of our actions rather than as a reward. I.e., we found out pretty quickly that as five of the 400 superhumans in the world, we had to be careful what we did in order to avoid changing the world in ways we didn’t like.
Interesting contrast there, come to think of it. My followup question would be “Were your PC-driven shifts rewards, consequences, or both?”
Just in case anyone was wondering, there have been no updates in White Wolf v. Sony since the last time I posted. In theory, depositions were done by now, but I haven’t seen any signs of progress. The last court papers were filed on 11/5/2003 and there’s been nothing since then.
Chris Corrigan’s Maps and Territories is a translucently simple blog. Each entry contains a map, along with a bit of literature that relates to the map. Evocative and, for a map lover like me, irresistable.
Sure, spammers are scum of the earth, but the plight of the guy who made death threats kind of warms the cockles of my heart. Welcome to the real world, in which making death threats is not considered a normal element of discourse. I’ve been on the company’s of that sort of thing a little too often to feel sorry for Mr. Booker.
Did you ever read Usenet? Miss those newsreader days? Population: One is now available via NNTP. It is perhaps a bit quixotic of Dan to scrape weblogs rather than slurping up RSS feeds, but it’s a kind of quix I have to admire. The old diesel engine of blog syndication, as it were.
The North Korean crisis has been pretty quiet lately, at least until KEDO decided to halt the North Korean reactor project.
This is pressure on North Korea to come back to the negotiating table. We’re betting that North Korea won’t escalate as a result. The only levers we have are power, food, and military action. We’re not going to starve people, and even if we were so inclined, the UN is working on food aid. We’re not going to invade a nuclear power. That leaves cutting the nuclear power plant construction, which has the advantage of not making the North Korean situation any worse. It just blocks one method of making things better, so it’s about the most palatable pressure possible.
No telling how North Korea will react. That reaction will determine if applying pressure was in fact the best thing to do.
I almost passed on Intolerable Cruelty, but it’s been a long time since I missed a Coen Brothers flick and I figured I might as well watch George Clooney emanating suave for a couple of hours. The Coens didn’t write the movie, which means it’s not the pure hit of creative oddness I wanted, but it was still OK.
As Coen screwball comedies go, it’s no Hudsucker Proxy, and as Coen romantic comedies go, it’s no Raising Arizona. I don’t think it was trying to be a screwball comedy, really; there wasn’t any snappy dialogue in the classic screwball sense. It felt more like a casual exercise than anything else.
The acting was perfectly solid, Catherine Zeta-Jones was luscious, and Clooney was great. I didn’t dislike the movie. It just didn’t have the zing you expect from the Coens — no bite.
Jon Udell has a very good article about using Bayesian techniques to categorize blog postings. I think this is rather interesting, because I keep meaning to try Bayesian filtering on (alternately) Usenet and my mailing lists. The difference between me and Udell is that he went out and did it and got paid for writing about it.
Now that he’s pointed me at the right tools, I may try this on Usenet. Bwah hah ha.