Gaming

It’s document time in the ongoing White Wolf v. Sony saga. First off, here’s Mike Tinney’s deposition (original) as described here. At no extra charge, we’ll include Andrew Zaffron’s declaration (original). It covers more or less the same ground as did Mike Tinney, with a little additional commentary. Paragraph 8 is amusing. Moving on to new material, we have declarations from Len Wiseman (original) and Kevin Grevioux (original), two of the three guys who wrote the screenplay. (And of course Wiseman directed it.) Both note explicitly that “I had never heard of any of the Plaintiffs’ works before early in 2003, after the movie Underworld had been shot.” ...

Advanced D20, huh?

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.

Mike Sullivan’s Magipunk (original) concept is deeply cool and I want to play in it. GMs, take note.

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. ...

Fairly dull, but here’s Sony’s initial disclosures (original) 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.”) ...

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 (original) and I wanted to make sure nobody who was interested missed it.

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? ...

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. ...

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. ...