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Weekend Entertainment Pursuits, Part I

June 30, 2008
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In the order I feel like talking about them.

On Sunday, I bought Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. This is my first guitar game! It is in a sense a trial run for Rock Band, or rather Rock Band 2, because I won’t play Rock Band on a console that doesn’t give me downloadable content and we only have a Wii at present. It seems prudent to find out if I like the genre before getting all ambitious.

Aerosmith rather than the main game because again, I’d feel cheated out of downloadable content and also I happen to dig the Aerosmith a lot. I’m from Boston. Suck it up.

So it’s cool! It took me like an hour to figure out that Easy mode is dead boring, which is why I was getting bored. I went off and tried Medium mode and that was much, much better. The game cleverly makes you play through the opening bands first at each venue, so you don’t get to wallow in Aerosmith immediately. This works for me.

The narrative is pretty clever; this is completely a game for fans. You start out at their first show, a high school venue, then move on to Max’s Kansas City (where you play the song that refers to playing at Max’s Kansas City), and so on. Between each venue, there’s a video with band members talking about how their careers were progressing and so forth. I, um, skipped those.

Other than that it’s a guitar game and I’m the last one to this particular party. I do find myself wishing the guitar was more prominent in the mix, but moving to Medium helped there as well. Fun. If the fun persists, there will be Rock Band 2 someday.

4e Character Sheet

June 30, 2008
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After too much time spent poring through forums for D&D 4e character sheets, I wound up with this one, which worked out great in play. The form-fillable version, by some new Adobe magic, allows you to save your filled out sheet. Handy.

The landscape one found here is also very nice — much more compact — but not form-fillable. Plus I really liked the power card holder on the previous one. Yeah, I assembled it. Rubber cement and scissors and all. It’s handy.

Oh, yeah. Five hour one shot, four combats, a smidge of RP. We were focused on system. It’s a quick little combat system. It feels like D&D to me; you’re rolling a 20 sider and doing damage. Certainly PCs are way more sturdy early on. Still and all, rolling d20s, rolling damage, all that fun stuff.

Combat was really mobile. Lots of shifting and hitting and movement. I kinda wanna play Sunless Citadel in 4e to compare and contrast. Maybe I’ll go write up Cian now.

The Branch Office

June 27, 2008
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This is just another one for the hopper.

The system and setting is Over the Edge, with a minor setting tweak; the D’Aubainnes are not quite as powerful in international terms as they are in vanilla OtE, so they need to worry more about maintaining a delicate balance between the USSR, China, and the United States.

The campaign framework: there’s a United States consulate located in The Edge. The D’Aubainnes are not currently allowing the United States to have an embassy in Freedom City, although Russia does have one. All PCs work for the consulate, whether they’re American citizens or local employees. Preferably mostly the former, I think. Obvious archetypes: the consul himself, who could be a bright young kid looking to make his name at State, or a cynical veteran, or someone being punished for a screwup elsewhere. The CIA rep under cover as an agricultural attache. The press attache/PR spokesman/cultural activity organizer. (“Hey, kids, wanna learn baseball?”) The US citizen who sought and was granted asylum in the consulate but can’t return to the States for complex legal reasons. The local working as a secretary.

PCs deal with the interesting and diverse problems that US citizens bring to them; I’d have a lot of room to drive stories. Also plenty of room for the PCs to drive their own stories. I’d expect plenty of espionage stuff. Mystic shit depends on the degree of player desire. Some horror, of course.

Influences are Charlie Wilson’s War, The Quiet American, etc.

OK, *mutter* World of Darkness

June 24, 2008
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Obscenity ahead. You have been warned. In order to provide a proper buffer, I give you this picture of a typical pastoral landscape in Warhammer 40K:

There. Now. Where was I about to be? Right.

Fucking World of Darkness! I was looking at jeffwik’s list of systems and thinking about my go-to systems, which led me to think about Adventure. I’ve run Adventure in the D20 version and it was fun cause I had great players. But the system was a bit of a hack and eminently prone to abuse, so why was I not going “Oh, yeah, the original version, yeah.”?

Well, because there’s this stunningly elegant skeleton in the middle of Storyteller. Dots are great, the attributes are great, every shuffle of the names of the attributes and skills and shit has been just fine. Skill plus attribute is the best system, because even if you’re mostly using Guns and Dexterity, hey, the ability to use Guns plus Intelligence is fun. Yes it is.

And then there’s this steaming pile of wacky complexity called the combat system, and I lose it entirely, because I hate it, and while various and sundry people at White Wolf have made great attempts at revising it — the Aeon version of the system is pretty OK! — it’s still just oh god my head hurts. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I get trapped in this every single time, too, I go “but the character creation system is great, how bad can combat be?” and it’s bad.

You roll! And then you maybe roll again, or maybe there’s soak, and you lose some dice for armor, or do you lose successes based on armor? Do you add Strength to your damage? Do you add Dexterity? Do you add an attribute sometimes, but not sometimes? Does it matter how much you succeed by? Can I dodge? Can I parry? Do I roll for dodge? What do I do with my dodge successes? FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!

I mean. I play Champions. For fun. Don’t get on my ass about complexity, it’s my breakfast cereal. This shit makes no fucking sense!

Fuck this noise. I’m rewriting it. I even have design goals. Look, here they are.

Continue ReadingOK, *mutter* World of Darkness

Wizards' GSL and Restraint of Trade

June 19, 2008
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This is the bit where yet another uninformed non-lawyer spouts off. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Wizards has released a license for third parties who want to publish 4e compatible work. It’s much more restrictive than the analogous license for 3e, which is Wizard’s right. One of the interesting sections is section 6, reproduced in full down below, but which in short says that once you publish a work using the new license, you cannot publish an OGL version of that work or of any works in the same product line.

I.e., Green Ronin has this popular and successful Freeport product line. They’ve published a generic book that describes Freeport, and they plan to publish system-specific books for a number of systems which contain stats and mechanics. So far they’ve done three of those; one for Savage Worlds, one for True20, and one for D20. The latter two are OGL products.

If Green Ronin wanted to do a 4e system book for Freeport, they could. But they’d have to stop publishing the True20 and D20 system books. And they’re not allowed, by the terms of the license, to go back and republish those even if they stop publishing the 4e book.

Ooof.

Now the uninformed question: does this constitute restraint of trade? (Oh, god, linking to Wikipedia in relation to legal questions. I’m going to hell. WINAL, as they say.) I note that Wikipedia claims that restraint of trade is generally applied to post-employment clauses in employment contracts and conditions on sale of business. The former is why it’s hard to enforce non-competes in California employment contracts, for example.

So probably not; but it’s an interesting question. My instinct is that Wizards would argue that the clause acts to protect their interest in their logo and brand — another clause sets standards of quality for licensed material, and allowing a third party to publish material in the same product line which does not fall under those quality standards perhaps risks brand dilution.

But yeah, not a lawyer.

Continue ReadingWizards' GSL and Restraint of Trade

I'm Not Gonna Run This

June 12, 2008
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But I did just shell out $4 for a PDF of Against The Giants so I could convert it to 4e.

Edit: the tournament characters included in the back of the book are named Gleep Wurp the Eyebiter, Cloyer Bulse the Magsman, Roaky Swerked, Frush O’Suggill, Fonkin Hoddypeak, Flerd Trantle, Redmod Dumple, Faffle Dwe’o-mercraeft, and Beek Gwenders of Croodle. So there’s my money’s worth.

On Gumshoe

June 3, 2008
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I owe Simon Rogers some conversation about Mutant City Blues, but I haven’t had time to play it yet. On a readthrough, however, I’m quite impressed — all the usual Gumshoe goodness, plus a creative implementation of superpowers, plus excellent material on running a police-oriented investigative game. The section on roleplaying police interrogations ought to be stapled in front of any police procedural game ever. Which, come to think of it, includes Dark Heresy.

Maybe next weekend I can ad hoc something with the back of the book adventure. Anyhow.

I’ve also been playing the Penny Arcade game. (Fine. On the Rain-Slicked Precipice of Darkness.) For the record, point and click adventure games are remarkably suitable for the Gumshoe engine. It’s the same investigative model — clues are there when you look for them. Less room for improv and branches, of course, but that’s why I love tabletop.

(Knowledge: Mimes.)

The fights in OtRSPoD are pretty pre-ordained as well. You need a bit of reflexes, but you can always run and start over, and death is no big deal, and the combat system is not hard. In fact, the fights are almost just a mechanic to time-delay the delivery of the story. Hm.

The Inquisitor’s Library

May 18, 2008
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The Dark Heresy game outlined here seems to be about to take off. In the interests of screwing around with new ways to manage information, I started a blog for this one rather than a wiki. We’ll see how it goes. I’m offering all the players posting access to the blog.

Redbelt

May 13, 2008
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Redbelt wound up being ultimately unsatisfying for me, which was all the more regrettable given that 95% of the movie rocked. Jeffwik noted last night that he’d never seen a Mamet movie which progressed towards an emotional climax in the way Redbelt attempts, and on reflection I think that’s exactly it. Mamet was working a bit outside his comfort zone, and almost nails it, but I’m not sure the guy knows how to do a story in which good guys win at the end.

Which is a pity, because he builds tension and despair about as well as anyone in the business. The story is positively claustrophobic, not in the scenery but in the way Chiwetel Ejiofor’s options contract and dwindle. He’s in a bad state, and then there’s a ray of hope, and then it vanishes hard. He’s the perfect actor for this, too — it’s another movie where he nails the tough determined moralist who suffers for his morals. See also Dirty Pretty Things. So you’ve got this foreboding, mannered atmosphere to work with.

About five minutes before the movie ended, I thought it was going to be another despairing Mamet ending, which would be OK by me. The moment when Ejiofor turns back was beautifully staged, too: silhouettes with no dialogue, just an action and a decision. That worked. And the culminating fight scene was unlikely, but on the margins of plausible. And again, it’s Mamet. One can accept some artifice in a Mamet movie.

But the last two beats fall flat. Perhaps one would have been all right. The fact that the two redemptive moments are identical, two separate people performing the same action — that was leaden for me. Yes, we get it. Ejiofor is noble and is recognized as such. Just… not twice.

Of course, this is the story equivalent of the repetitive overlapping Mamet dialogue I love, so perhaps I’m getting what I deserve. Still, it just broke my acceptance of the artificial world.

Which is a shame, because other than that it’s one of the best things he’s done in years. There’s the usual cast of Mamet regulars doing the things they do, plus Ejiofor, plus Tim Allen (who’s awesome). The aforementioned tension hooked me emotionally; I cared about the outcome. I’d even still recommend it. I just wanted the climax to match up with the rest of the movie.