If the Gospels mashup didn’t quite satisfy your yen for Christian gaming, allow me to recommend the RPGnet thread dedicated to statting up Jesus. I must be in a mood this week or something.
Category: Gaming
Unduly influenced by Passion, for better or worse, this week’s Monday Mashup is going to be the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You can do it straight, as an evocation of faith; you can do it cynically, if you’re that kind of person; or you can say “Geeze, that’s too close to the line, I’m not gonna do this one.” I figure if it’s OK to express one’s faith by making a movie, though, it ought to be OK to do it in an RPG. (Also, I didn’t answer WISH 75, so this will have to do.)
WISH 76 asks:
A lot is made of the role of the GM in a game, but what is the role of the player?
I’m not really sure if I can answer that one, since so much depends on the game. The single most important trick to master can be summarized as “support interaction,” which covers a lot — sharing spotlight time, making your character sticky, and so on. Most other stuff depends on the game, I think.
Some games really are GM-driven, and I don’t actually have any problems with that. Sometimes I want to be a spectator. Not often, but sometimes. Some games, the role of the player is to be tactical opposition. Some games, the players help drive plot.
Idle question: is the GM playing the game as well? Shouldn’t we call him or her a player?
Credit to Joe Landsdale, Simon Green, and Green Ronin.
God of the Razor: domains are murder, knives, reflections.
God of Satin: domains are lust, seduction, hotels.
God of Twenties: domains are money, fraud, first impressions.
God of Tears: domains are regret, alcohol, and arguments.
They ride, like loas, except full-time until the horse dies. Sometimes it’s mutually agreeable, and sometimes not.
OK, now I know what that protective order was. Here’s the PDF. It’s just the procedure the parties need to use if they want to protect portions of their evidence from public view. Sony, for example, may not wish their script for Underworld 2 to be available just yet. Now they can introduce it into evidence without pesky people like me getting their hands on it.
Our mashup for the first of December (did you remember to say “rabbit” three times?) is Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. It’s all about man versus nature, with themes of ecological awareness and man competing with man as side dishes. Great book, even if there’s controversy about what exactly happened up there.
Not exactly breaking news, but there’s been nothing else in White Wolf v. Sony for a while, so here’s the only thing posted in the PACER docket since early this month:
11/26/03 AGREED PROTECTIVE ORDER approved by Judge J. Owen Forrester. (see order for specifics)(cc) (dfb)
Sadly for our curiosity, there is no actual order attached. Yeah, I’m pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel here. I have no idea what this could mean.
WISH 74 is all about dreams and hopes:
Name three or more supplements (or core books, for that matter) for existing game systems that you’d like to see. Why? What inspires your interest in these supplement? What existing supplements or materials are you using instead?
I’m not an Amber player anymore, but I’d still kind of like to see Rebma… no? OK, I’ll come up with three others.
First off is a two in one, since the reasons I want them are similar. I would like to see the promised Heresy RPG. The background was cool and the card art was superb and I like games that use the Christian mythos quite a bit. Heretical cyberpunk hit all my buttons. I want Anoch’s Mystick RPG for similar reasons; the cards hinted at a dense intricate background which played to my love for conspiracy.
Mind you, in both cases I expect I would have been disappointed. It’s unfair to expect game companies to live up to my inchoate dreams, and neither of the sourcebooks would have been 500 pages long.
In lieu of these sourcebooks, I hang around people who make up cool conspiratorial stuff and that scratches my itch. I also read Eco novels. It works out OK for me.
Second: Trinity. Lots more Trinity. Preferably written by me, but really, any Trinity would do. In particular, I really sorely wish I’d gotten to work on the full-size aliens supplement. I wanted to write the Coalition chapters so badly. (Pause for a moment of self-indulgence.)
Since the supplement probably isn’t happening any time soon, I make up my own Coalition material, which bears a certain resemblance to what might have been published.
Finally, I’d like to see a D20 Modern Fantasy supplement, adapting the D20 Modern rules to fantasy usage, preferably from WotC. I’m pretty sure that D20 Modern characters are a bit weaker than characters of equivalent level in D&D, but I like the D20 Modern approach to classes somewhat more than I like the D&D approach. So a supplement which presented a beefed up set of classes would be vastly appreciated. Alternatively, of course, I could just start everyone at third level. (Tip of the hat to Gamma World D20 Modern.)
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?”