Category: Gaming

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.”

Jack Gulick is the man when it comes to stats and gaming. He also plays a lot of Amber; go figure. Anyhow, he followed up my earlier post about dice here and I wanted to make sure nobody who was interested missed it.

One of my rules of thumb for evaluating RPG combat systems is the number of times you have to roll to resolve an attempt to hit, on average. For example, in D&D, you have to roll twice — once to hit, and once for damage. In Vampire, you roll at least three and often four times — once to hit, maybe once to dodge, once for damage, and once for soak. In Feng Shui, you roll once — the roll to hit is also the roll for damage.

My assumption is that (assuming a standard combat system, rather than something more narrativist) fewer is better, because it make combat flow more quickly. There’s an orthagonal concern, which is getting the feel of combat right; for most games, you don’t want to say “roll 1d6 and if you get a 4 you hit, and if you get a 5 you hit and kill.” That’s quick and simple but most likely not satisfying.

However, I recently decided that this is too simplistic. While playing Mutants & Masterminds, I found myself getting all antsy about the combat system. Which is weird, because it’s simple: one roll to hit, one roll for defense.

But it’s a different person for each roll!

So, the addendum: you have to take information transfer into account. Go back to D&D. Roll to hit, tell your opponent what you rolled, roll for damage, tell your opponent what you rolled. Compare and contrast to M&M — roll to hit, tell your opponent what you rolled, tell your opponent what your Damage bonus is, your opponent rolls a Damage save, your opponent tells you if you did damage.

Same number of rolls, but you keep having to pass information back and forth. Feng Shui, the ruling champion of quick combat systems, is way simple: roll to hit, tell your opponent what you rolled, opponent tells you if you did damage. Hero is on par with D&D — roll to hit, tell your opponent what you rolled, roll for damage, tell your opponent what you rolled.

Of course, you really ought to figure in math complexity. It’s easier to do the math in Feng Shui than it is in Hero, and Hero is noticably more complex than D&D (since you’re counting BODY and STUN from the same roll, and adding a lot more dice).

The key observation, though, is that information transfer matters. I’ve heard more than one game designer talk about giving the defender a chance to roll to “involve him in the game” and so on, but I begin to think that’s a misguided concept.

More hot White Wolf vs. Sony action!

The plaintiff mandatory disclosures have been filed; I’m not going to further disseminate the PDF because, well, there are home addresses in there and I don’t see any reason to make ‘em more public than they already are. I’ll do a fuller transcription later if I have the chance. In the meantime, here’s a no doubt inadequate summary of the bits which are interesting to non-lawyerly me — i.e., what’s White Wolf asking for?

Everything Underworld to be recalled and destroyed. Damages for copyright infringement. Additional damages for $150,000 per copyrighted work infringed. (I haven’t gone back and counted, but that’s gotta add up to seven figures, if I recall correctly.) Damages in the amount of Sony’s sales, tripled. Plus, of course, the costs of the lawsuit.

I was gonna do a long review of Gamma World, but, well, here. I liked the design of the book much more than that guy, but his comments on the mechanics are right on target.

The community rules are both really inspiring and kind of disappointing. The idea of using PC stats to represent a group of people is great; I can’t remember where I first saw it (might have been Vampire, actually) but this is a really good implementation of it. Except that several of the stats have no game effect, and there’s no meat behind most of the ratings — no explication of what they mean.

I see, in Gamma World, a pretty stark example of the conflict between the relatively rules-loose style of White Wolf and the number crunching of D20. There’s more room for jazz in the Storyteller system, partially because the system is looser and partially because the expectations of the fans are different. D20 games need mechanics that interlock and function predictably. Gamma World doesn’t really have ‘em.

And it’s a shame, because it’s a really inspirational book. The updated background, involving a failed Singularity, is very good. It just needs a better ruleset.

On the topic of Unknown Armies writeups, here’s Unknown Armies: Kansas, another UA blog. As I understand it, their game is being played via the blog, which is an interesting idea. I’m really curious about the mechanics behind the curtain.

Anyhow, the writing is promising, and it’s set in Kansas.