Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Bryant

Monday Mashup #5: Fantastic Four

August 18, 2003
11 Comments

Another Monday, another mashup. What’s the Wayback Machine got for us today, Sherman?

“Um, it’s something about ‘true believers,’ boss.”

Right! Time to mash up the Fantastic Four! The Fantastic Four are notable among superhero teams for a) being a family and b) being the most blatant example of Jack Kirby’s “use the elements as inspirations” rule ever. It’s kind of a difficult mashup in that the characters are key to the concept, so you’d almost need to use pregen PCs. Perhaps we’re talking convention games, here.

My mashup follows.

Continue ReadingMonday Mashup #5: Fantastic Four

With purpose

August 18, 2003
2 Comments

The first flash mob with purpose probably won’t be political after all. Rather, it’ll be hordes of people handing out free comics. At the least, it’ll be a noble attempt, although I have an image in my mind of a bunch of people giving comics to each other rather than to random strangers. Also, the organizer is doing a piss-poor job of keeping it secret, which will minimize impact.

Helpful hint to flash mob organizers: the minute you write anything about your mob on a public forum, the media probably knows.

Deaf dumb and blind kid

August 18, 2003
2 Comments

The first person who changed my life, I never met. He or she left some old SF paperbacks in a little villa on Green Turtle Cay, in the Bahamas — Perry Rhodans, as I recall — and I read them while I was ten or so and on vacation. They blew me away, far more so than the golf books. I haven’t stopped reading SF yet.

That’s why my dad’s friend Peter Olotka said “Hey, your son likes SF — he can share our room at Boskone if you like.” Dad said sure, and that was my first SF con. I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I more or less stopped going when I hit college.

That wasn’t permanent, though, because I went on a youth group trip to China a year or so before I hit college. That’s where I met Stefani. Afterwards, she introduced me to her friend Pearl.

In college, Pearl met Susan, who organized trips to SF cons, which is why I started going to those again. Susan introduced me to Randomness. Randomess introduced me to TinyMUD. (The original one, at CMU, thank you very much.)

I met Gretchen on TinyMUD, and roleplayed with her on Amber, which is why I figured it might be worth taking a shot at San Francisco. Bruce, god bless him for this at least, got me the job at Netcom a few months after I got out there. That was my entry into high-tech.

I also met Rich on TinyMUD, and he’s why I can call myself a professional writer.

Time passed. Ambar suggested I come work for Altavista, which is where I got into management. I would have gotten into management at the other job I was considering at the time, but I wouldn’t have had one of the world’s biggest Web sites on my resume, and that made a difference later on.

Finally, Jamie Wakefield, who I’ve never met, wrote incredible articles about a game. If I hadn’t read those, I wouldn’t have applied for (and gotten) the job I applied for most recently.

And here I am.

There are many other people who changed who I am, and some of the people who’ve sent my life bouncing in wild new directions overlap with that category. But those are the people who’ve changed my life in terms of pinball.

Flutterback

August 17, 2003
1 Comment

This entry exists solely for the sake of pinging Flutterby. The automatic Trackback RDF stuff doesn’t work yet, apparently — we’ll see if the discovery works better. (Answer: nope. Trying a manual ping…)

Testing again, now that Dan’s tinkered a little.

And one more time! (It worked.)

Triple Once

August 17, 2003
Leave a Comment

Pleasingly, Columbia just released the Once Upon A Time In China series on a two-DVD set for a mere twenty-five bucks or so. Each movie is on one side of a DVD, so there’s no quality compromise. Alas, they left out the commentary from their previous edition of Once Upon A Time In China I, but one can’t have everything and it was just a commentary from a Hong Kong film expert rather than anyone connected with the production.

The picture quality is great, blowing away my memories of the scratchy print I saw in the Towne lo these many years ago. And it’s three of Jet Li’s best flicks for $25. I can’t think of any reason other than having the single movie editions why a Hong Kong action movie fan wouldn’t want these.

Time limits exist

August 17, 2003
3 Comments

I’m linking to this fairly amusing article on the Texas Democrat walkout not because I am shocked and horrified by the thought that the Republicans may try to delay elections, since I’m not. I could care less if the Republicans want to delay primaries; I see no real reason why primaries should be part of the legal framework of American elections. If the real elections happen without the Republicans selecting a candidate, well, that has its own rewards.

I’m more interested in it because it holds the hint of a deadline. The Democrats get to come back when it’s too late for the feds to redistrict and still make the candidate filing deadline… whoops, for the primaries. Wouldn’t you just know it?

Sigh. Institutionalized two-party system. What fun.

Politics following art

August 16, 2003
Leave a Comment

I said something flippant early this week about West Wing setting unreasonable expectations for a Presidency. Stephen Kaye (nice new blog location and layout) noted that some people do ask why President Bartlett couldn’t be president, which actually doesn’t surprise me.

All this in preamble to today’s California recall news: Schwarzenegger asked Rob Lowe to join his campaign. Lowe is in fact a Democrat, and of course was a regular on West Wing. George Schultz and Warren Buffett are already on board the campaign.

This suddenly strikes me as a really well-financed and well-thought out attempt to nail down the middle of the political spectrum and take it away from both the Democrats and the Republicans. Schwarzenegger is running as a Republican, but that’s so pro forma it’s not even funny. Buffett has been criticizing Bush recently.

If Schwarzenegger stays Republican, it’s a good thing. It could help stop the party’s drift to the right. If he goes third party — which I’m starting to think could happen — it’s an interesting thing. The Reform Party is probably too damaged to serve as a useful vehicle, but it’s not as if Buffett couldn’t fund a serious third party effort.

If, of course, he’s putting together a vehicle for personal power, that’s a bad thing. Gonna be an interesting fall.

WISH #60

August 16, 2003
Leave a Comment

WISH 60 asks:

How do you use different frames of reference or mindsets in your games? In what ways do your characters or NPCs in games you GM think differently from the people around you? What sorts of things make them different (societal, mental, physical, etc.)? Do you feel that you’re successful in incorporating and showing the differences?

I was actually kind of taken aback by this question for a moment. Shifting mindsets is a really basic, low-level component of my gaming. I am, to borrow the r.g.frp.advocacy jargon, an immersive player. I don’t forget who I am — that path is not deeply healthy for me — but I like the experience of mentally filtering reactions through a different mindset.

My ideal roleplaying experience is for me, Bryant, to take in the descriptions of the GM and other players; to then filter that through a sort of perceptual level and translate it into what my character sees; and then to express the reaction in the character’s voice. I’m the one who defines the perceptions, and I construct the mental map from the perceptions to the character, which allows me to figure out the character’s responses without “being” the character.

Maybe that’s not immersive after all. It is in that the effect is the same, but the process doesn’t match what I hear people who call themselves immersive talking about.

In a way, come to think of it, it’s the flip side of the classic GM technique of describing with the characters in mind. When describing a threatening situation to a cowardly PC, you quietly play up the menace: “there are, I don’t know, you can’t count how many orcs.” When you’re describing the same thing to a paladin, you downplay it: “there are perhaps seven orcs, poorly equipped.” Same situation, no dictating what the players are feeling — but what they pick up on depends on who they are.

I do that for my PCs. I filter the descriptions of the world to match what I think their perceptions would be. In Rob’s UA game, if an NPC is talking about occult weirdness, Reese hears the stuff about ley lines and patterns because it fits into his worldview; I mentally screen out discussions of entropomancy because Reese really doesn’t get how it works.

Or, put a third way:

“blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah…”