Experiments in Woolgathering

Another Origins is behind us. Lots of games, bad food and not much sleep – which is par for the course with a gaming con.

On the whole, I wouldn’t rate it as highly as last years, and apparently there were a lot of technical problems which we managed to elude by pre-registering.

So, what did I play, you ask? Aside from Wednesday night, which I wrote about in the previous post of course… (more…)

This year’s Origins started last night and of course we were there, and will be through Sunday (hence the part 1 on this post).

We were preregistered and had one game scheduled for the evening, so we picked up our badges and game tickets and then found a place to sit down and get organized. Then we down to the food court to grab some food and went back up to wait for our game which started at 7.

There was some confusion about whether the room was going to be available and where the game might be moved to, but that cleared up when someone opened the room for us.

So, we sat down to play “Eight Bars More” which was fantasy-set game using the Savage Worlds rules. The entire game was set in a bar at the end of a pub crawl. Characters were pregenerated and I, feeling perverse, chose the ‘Clueless Psychic Hottie’ for whom I chose a gender of female and the name Ashley.

I had great fun with the character and R admitted that I played her so well she was about ready to kill me. R is not a fan of bimbos.

We’ve got 4 games scheduled today, lasting until 2 am. Which a couple hours in there to cruise the vendor floor and spend lots of money on games. Now I must go pack up some food for the day and shower and so on.

More on Origins fun later!

Lately I’ve been thinking I would like to get into writing again. Not that I have ever written a lot, but I’ve done some here and there. Maybe what I really want to get into it more seriously.

So, anyhow, I’ve been looking over my copy of De Profundis which is not really an RPG in the proper sense. Essentially, the players take the roles of letter writers in a Lovecraftian setting. You are not seeking out things as one does in most RPGs, you are experiencing them, describing them.

Nominally the you have the choice to write letters set in the present day, wherein you write as yourself more or less, or in the 1920s, where you as a character who at least could be one of Lovecraft’s, if not one in actuality.

The author also strongly suggests you avoid e-mail and write hand-written letters. Of course my first thought here is that I can barely write clearly enough for me to read it, let alone someone else; and, truth be told, writing by hand is definitely different than typing something up on a computer where you can easily edit and rearrange. It forces you to think ahead, at least if you want to write something coherent. Because the game obviously revolves around writing, I understand why he recommends this – the difference between writing about horror and terror and conveying the experince of it are two different things.

So, obviously, I’d like to play this – else, why blather on about it here? I’m inclined to write the letters here in my blog, but follow the spirit of the author’s recommendation: no going back and editing, rearranging, etc. The second option is to do the same, but set up a new blog and invite a few others to play as well. Lastly, there’s finding someone to whom I’d send actual write hand written letters.

My dilemmas with how to play De Profundis aside, this is a game I would recommend. Obviously it’s something different and innovative, as well as demanding. The book is well written (as one might expect) – despite the author not being a native English speaker.

Unfortunately, the book is out of print, so it is hard to find, but not impossible. So, if you get a change, get it. It’s small 32 pages and cheap, around $7.

I set The Flanders Panel aside to read the Burning Wheel fantasy RPG books, so I’d have a clue when we made characters for the new game. By necessity, this is as much, if not more, a review of the system itself as a review of the book stylistically. (more…)

Well, the old group had a good run, a very good run in comparison to most groups, and now it’s sort of atrophied. One person doesn’t care what we do, one person doens’t want to RP at all and another can only RP if we don’t have to “make new characters too often”.

Not much enthusiasm there to say the least.

So, I started asking around and found a pair of couples who want to get in on some weekend RP. That gives us 5 players (in the RPG sense, since one ‘player’ ends up being the GM¹ [usually – there are games where that responsibility is spread throughout the participants]) which in my experience is a ideal number. The acceptable range is 3 to 6 in general I find, with 4 or 5 being the best. More than that and things bog down, less and it can be difficult to sustain momentum.

Anyhow, next comes the setting and system. Rachel definitely wants to use a ::high fantasy:: setting, and since she’s GMing first and everyone else seems to at least be willing to do fantasy that’s what we’re going to do.

We wrestled a while with whether to roll our own setting, use one from a novel, or use an existing RPG setting. We sort of split the difference between rolling our own and using one from a novel: we’re using a map from a board game, Elfenland and creating the setting from that. You can see the 1280×1024 version of this map here.

The system decision was actualy easier, and made first. We’d had the creator of The Burning Wheel, Luke Crane, give us a demo at Origins last year and were pretty impressed. Very cool system, in particular the combat and character creation aspects of it stood out.

So, the stage is set. We’re all getting together for the first time on ::February 6:: – and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the signing of the ::Treaty of Waitangi::.

¹ Game Master

I’ve been thinking about the parallels in two things lately: ::role-playing game:: systems and ::programming language::s.

In both areas there have been efforts to make universal or generic solutions. The write-once, run-anywhere mantra of Java and the similar message of .NET (which are really only the most successful of many attempts at software portability). In games we have systems like ::GURPS::, ::D20::, Unisystem, TriStat, and so on.

The problem is, and this is recognized to some extent in both camps, though moreso in programming I think (more on this in a bit though) is that when we take part in or participate in these activities, we do so (or should at least) with a particular end in mind. I.e. the goal is not ‘just to write code’ or ‘just to have fun’.

The former is self-evident I should think; we want our code to do something, even if it’s something trivially simple.

In the latter case, I don’t think as many people recognize this. However, if it weren’t true, why is there such a profusion of RPGs and RPG systems? I suggest that it’s because people want to RP in a particular way in a particular setting. I also think that few RPers really recognize this and this contributes a great deal to the ‘failure’ of games. On top of the fact that few RPers are aware of how they want to play, there’s no guarantee that all players in a given group even want the same type of play (consciously or otherwise).

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