F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Action is character.†A few years ago a friend of mine came up with the theory that we often play our polar opposites in games. The players under scrutiny here were myself and himself and our characters were a honourable charismatic paladin and a sneaky cutthroat backstabbing rogue. I disagreed at…
Category: Commentary
r-Maps (and being ahead of the curve)
There’s a lot of talk of relationship maps. I’ve been playing with the idea of an r-map for gaming for use as a player aid for a while. It really started to surface when playing superhero games in order to try and keep up with the number of NPCs and subplots that were going on….
More on sexism and racism in games.
More on New Horizons the game that is going to put racism and sexism into every pulp game. I’m going to have to buy it because … Alexandria2000 writes: Or if they ARE mentioned, it’s in a stereotypical way that makes my teeth ache. So hell yeah, gimme a chance to inject a little reality…
sometimes you have to wear your work clothes to the doctor
SXSW covers “Confessions of Superhero” which shows the strange and seedy world of superhero lookalikes… We see Joe McQueen demolished by the heat inside his colossal Hulk costume — on a record 106-degree day, it’s a brutal 130 degrees inside the emerald-tinged mass of foam … Superman chugs milk right from the jug; Wonder Woman…
Systems
A posting on RPGnet asks us to describe our homebrew systems. I ended up describing mine thusly. Maths-easy 2d6 comedy with either a manga/anime/mecha or zombie holocaust backdrop Qualitative success using 0-3d10 to create a crunchy yet narrative system which can be considered both rules-lite and “a gun game” with a backdrop of psychic powers…
A picture is worth a thousand words. Literally.
It’s always been a frustration to me that I can’t draw. Jared and I have debated this a few times during my forays to Paris. Nightfall had the advantage of having DavA, Chippy and Stuart. Lucky bastards. I need artists for WotW, I need an artist to help me with the imagery for Viride and…
Insulting the conservatives
Morfedel writes: “I think its because my conservatives watch Fox news because they (and I) feel that many other news media are liberally slanted. And of course, when you do that as a retreat from “other news sources,” then your news source you do watch is attacked, it comes off as an attack against you…
Unborn Ghosts
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia….
Live for the moment
Last Monday, a friend of mine found out they had cancer after a couple of months of complaining about an upset stomach. Five days later, she found out it was inoperable. And she died this morning, a mere 6 days later.
Zombie Links
This isn’t a link blog, but these are very fun. Zombie World News “ZombieWorldNews.com is , as far as we can tell, a departure from other Zombie sites. Instead of the reader being a spectator, we hope to draw you in through a dynamic, ever changing scenario, that you can just read and enjoy, or…
Captain America and other patriots
From onegoodmove we have Stephen Colbert on the tragic death of Captain America One of my friends, Gav, mentioned the Civil War storyline. Cap represents the forces of liberty and Iron man is a defense contractor. I can’t help but think that there’s a writer in Marvel’s hallowed halls who’s sick of the current government…
Local Boy living the dream…
BBC News Northern Ireland writes: A man accused of a stealing underwear from a shop in a knifepoint raid believed he was a female elf at the time, Belfast Crown Court has heard. He told defence counsel Anthony Cinnamond that within his small social circle he had been participating in a game known as Shadowrun….
Watching the box last night…
and The Ordinary Boys came on the box. I was amazingly struck by the similarity between Samuel Preston and the late great Troy Tempest. The difference being that Troy Tempest could probably survive a comedy game show without crying off.
Episode Two – 26th October 2000
At 9 am, the doors to the conference room open and a motley crew of individuals file in. At the head of the table sits Jack White, the marble-faced CEO of WatchTower New York. Clockwise around the table we see Father Julian Devon (later to be known as Balance), Jason also known as INDIGO and…
All the games I’ve played (and GM’d)
I commented to Matt the other day that the last time I actually *played* in a game was when he ran the original WatchTower game in 1998. This got me to thinking that although I’ve read a lot of games, and I’ve played in a lot of campaigns, I haven’t really played lots of games. …
Do women look for more depth?
Inanna Jones writes a bit about this sexism thing here on the IrishGaming livejournal: So generalising remark: women look for more depth. I disagree with Inannajones. I think both men and women look for depth. The depth is just in different seas. There is a group of guys who look for cheesecake art. They like…
Shakespeare at least had Viola.
Apparently, I’m exercising the power and privilege of my gender by criticising the idea that we should actually de-cliché a cliché in order to make everyone feel secure about themselves. (Question: if a cliché is de-fanged, doesn’t it become meaningless?) The author goes on to criticise my statistics because the sample size is not representative…
So I had to go ask some women….
The Bitter Guy calls this a really retarded response. Fair enough. It probably is retarded to point at something that’s fucking stupid and say that’s fucking stupid especially when the stupid thing is something that is “pro feminisim”. Yes. Terrifyingly stupid. I do have to wonder however as I’ve brought this up with just about…
More on sexism (plus registration and comments)
I’ve turned off registration for comments because it should be off. Bit of a mea culpa there. I am enjoying the discussion on sexism in RPGs which has been continued on thedeadone.net and Mary’s blog. I wrote: “Some game companies are currently trying to market cute and fluffly and romance and “social†games to women…