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.
The Monday Mashup returns with Hitchcock’s Psycho. This is another one that almost has to be a one-shot, unless you wanted to make Norman Bates an ongoing master villain — which is an interesting idea, now that I think about it. But I’m going to be thinking one-shot. There’s an insane villain, obsessed by someone who doesn’t exist anymore, and there’s a lonely location.
Now, do you cast the PCs as Marion Crane and helpless prey, or do you cast ‘em as the post-death investigators? I’m inclined to think the latter, although that turns it into a police procedural… which is in and of itself interesting.
My approach follows.
Happily, Game WISH is back. Today’s question:
Talk about a few characters you had to stop playing before their stories felt finished. Where do you think they would have gone?
It’s kind of a hard question, because I don’t tend to think of characters in those terms — so when I say I’d like to play Paul or Clarice more, it’s not because I think their stories were unfinished per se. It’s because I want to find out what happens next. In Paul’s case, I’d like to see him leading an adult superhero team. I’d like to find out if he can continue to be the force for good he thinks he could be. And I like playing him. In Clarice’s case, well, she’s just fun to play. I guess her story is about done; I like thinking of her hanging out in 1850 training a bunch of little genetically engineered Ascended ninjas.
That said, Cian really deserves more play and he’s the only character who I really feel missed out on a full lifespan. I had to move to Boston in the middle of that campaign, and there was a lot of prophecy around Cian. I’d really like to know what happens to him, and I don’t have any idea, which is perhaps the most irksome part.
Mike Sullivan’s Magipunk concept is deeply cool and I want to play in it. GMs, take note.
I’m going to miss Monday Mashup this week (and be light on general on blogging). A family member is in the hospital with something fairly serious and I a) can’t focus on blogging and b) don’t have as much free time anyhow.
Not a lot of interesting new filings in White Wolf v. Sony this week. Lots of paperwork to get all the lawyers accepted in the court. The only real scrap of interest (and it’s only tangential) is the joint certification of interested persons, which lists those people who are either a) a party to the action or b) have a financial interest or other interest which could be substantially affected by the outcome of the case.
a) White Wolf, Inc.; White Wolf Publishing, Inc.; Nancy A. Collins; Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.; Lakeshore Entertainment Corp.; and Screen Gems, Inc.
b) Stewart and Stephen Wieck; Mark Rein•Hagen; Sony Corporation; and Subterranean Productions, LLC.
Fairly dull, but here’s Sony’s initial disclosures in White Wolf v. Sony. If you didn’t already know the basic argument Sony will be using, here it is:
To the extent any similarities exist between Plaintiffs’ works and Defendants’ Underworld movie, any such similarities concern material that is not original, not protectable expression, lies within the public domain, and/or constitutes unprotectable ideas or scenes a faire.
(I define scenes a faire here — “ideas that are inherent to the conventional telling of a given sort of story.”)
I should look up the cases Sony cites as precedent, but I’m lazy.
Let’s see. It looks like Sony will be using one Patricia Altner in some capacity during the trial, although apparently not as an expert witness. Maybe she was a consultant on the script? She wrote Vampire Readings: An Annotated Bibliography, which is an annotated bibliography of vampire material.
Oh, and I don’t mind posting this PDF because Sony politely obscured the home addresses of their people by saying “contact them through their lawyers.”