Gaming

I spent some time roleplaying with my nephew Sparky the last time he visited and again this weekend. He’s 12; it was an interesting experience. I gave octaNe (original) a try, on the principle that the mechanics wouldn’t be too complicated and it’d be good for him to get his feet wet with some storytelling techniques. However, I think I was wrong — he was pretty clearly looking for more structure while we were playing, although he certainly had fun. I’d been hoping that his experience with spy flicks (we were doing a James Bondian scenario) would be enough but it wasn’t really. Also, 12 year olds are not good at saying “Hm, I could do anything I want but I will restrict myself for the sake of the story.” Next time I’ll try D20 Modern or Feng Shui. ...

They build giant letters on mountaintops. Innocuous activity, but fraught with potential.

I’m very sad to hear that Hogshead Publishing is going out of business (original). It’s not that they’re bankrupt or any such; apparently it’s just not fun any more, and I can certainly understand that. Still a shame. Hogshead and its founder James Wallis have provided high quality gaming for the last decade. They started out as the holders of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG license. WFRPG has been an important alternative to D&D in the fantasy RPG genre in both mechanics and style. I believe the prestige class system in D&D 3E owes a lot to Warhammer’s career system, and the Warhammer world beats 7th Sea all hollow as far as alternate Europes go. ...

The d20 Modern System Reference Document is live and online as of — now. That’s concurrent with the official release date. Nice speedy work on WotC’s part.

So quiet lately. Any more comment please.

John Tynes just released Meta Action (original), an incomplete set of rules for running modern action with the D20 ruleset. At first glance it looks interesting enough. It retains hit points, since it’s intended to simulate action movies and thus can be less realistic, but more or less does away with classes. Your Charisma bonus is added to every roll, since action heros are good looking. Without revamping the combat system, though, I’m not sure the ruleset works. PCs are going to get hit all the time, particularly since you can pump skill points into your ranged or melee attack bonuses. A level 1 character with a 14 Charisma (say) can easily have a total of +7 to hit right off the bat. Even level 0 NPCs can be fairly deadly. Three goons with shotguns are terrifying. ...

I have moved over to spamprobe for all my spam filtering needs. It’s an implementation of Paul Graham’s Bayesian spam detection algorithm, which detects spam based on word frequency analysis. It requires some training before it works well; you have to feed it a collection of a couple of hundred good messages and a couple of hundred spam messages so that it can build a table of spam words. Or, alternatively, you can train it over time and put up with false negatives and positives for a little while. But once you get those few hundred messages classified, you’re golden. ...

Copplestone Casting (original) has several very cool lines of miniatures — the historicals would be great for pulp action. I particularly dig the Back of Beyond (original) line, which covers Central Asia in the 1920s. Read the Web pages at the link back there; the historical information rocks.

In a fit of automation, I have abused the excellent MTMacro plugin to create an tag. <amazon title=”Monster Manual II” asin=”0786928735”> would be blithely transformed into the appropriate link to Amazon. I do this, yes, because I’m too lazy to build affiliate links by hand each time. The macro code, for those even lazier than I: <MTMacroDefine name="Amazon" tag="amazon"> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/<MTMacroAttr name="asin">/unofficfengshuih/ref=nosim/"><MTMacroAttr name="title"></a> </MTMacroDefine> Mind you, I’m also too lazy to implement this in all the site templates, so until I get unlazy and do a bunch of editing, the feature’s pretty worthless.

The road signs are marked with secret codes which instruct the military where to go when it’s time for the coup. Quintessence of the Loon has more of the same.