Last night I and my players finished the first story arc in my first roleplaying campaign in 15 years. I’m very happy to have done it, and will run the second arc later this year. I want to review what worked and what didn’t in the first arc.
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My goals for 2011.
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I once again had eight goals for 2010, and it’s not too likely that any more of them will be accomplished before the end of the year.
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That’s right, a competition to do edits in Vim in a few keystrokes as possible. I haven’t even installed it yet and I’m sure it’ll eat large chunks of my time.
“The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who was listening to a British lawyer explain that Britons were so enlightened, they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, ‘Better for whom?’”
I came across this in Eugene Alexander Volokh’s “n Guilty Men”, which I was reading as a result of a longer post I was writing about the problems of dealing with allegations of rape; the question that the apocryphal Chinese professor is disingenuously raising (i.e. whether it’s really better for a society to err on the side of innocence in such matters) is quite central to issues arising out of trying to deal with rape, in evidentiary terms. I bit off a little too much in that post, which is why you’re not seeing it now.
There’s also the question of whether any kind of enforcement mechanism solves more problems than it causes, but rather than ponder that right now I’m instead pondering the injustice of my having to get up in the morning to play Twilight Imperium.
Chad Birch has written a fantastic dive into some of the guts of Pac-Man’s ghost behavior mechanics, and found it highly enjoyable and illuminating, despite not having played Pac-Man in years. Definitely worth reading. I’d previously read Susan Lammers’ interview with Toru Iwatani, which Birch refers to in his post and which I’m happy to see is available online.
If that’s not enough depth about Pac-Man for you, there’s also an entire “dossier”.
… SOWPODS lookups. I’ve been playing Bananagrams a lot again recently, and have found myself in need of an easy way to do those lookups. My physical copy of the combined word list is too unwieldy (and I tend to forget it), and oddly online lookups have proven very unreliable. But there’s an Android app for that, it turns out.
SOWPODS is the most inclusive word list, which is why I prefer it; otherwise it gets a little too arbitrary about what’s allowed (e.g. no “da” in OSPD, no “vid” in OSW).
I found this a surprisingly affecting, if unsubtle, casual game.
It’s not a good sign that despite discerning the correct course of action early on, I had trouble actually doing it—even symbolic letting go is problematic for me, apparently.
Probably a geeks-only taste, this, but I quite enjoy it: a play-through of Half-Life with a narration of Gordon Freeman’s thoughts. Silly, but fun. I think it’s worth going through from the beginning, but the episode I watched first, and which drew me in, was 29:
(The people I was out with today might enjoy Episode 11, too.)
This is a pretty cool platformer from PixelJam. It’s fairly brief, and while it’s no Dino Run, it’s still quite fun:
I played Team Fortress 2 for a while and had a lot of fun with it, which may be why I really like this video:
It’s way too short, but there’s quite a lot going on—it’s worth going through a few times paying attention to each character.
I’ve mostly ignored Christine O’Donnell up to this point, as it doesn’t surprise me much that a highly active group of Republican Christian paranoiacs could propel one of their own to a Senate candidacy. I also think that she has no chance of winning the seat and as such will fade back into obscurity—unlike, for example, Sarah Palin, who despite everything else seems to have an excellent sense of opportunistic timing. My feelings about O’Donnell were broadly similar to, although less developed than, those outlined in Chris Floyd’s “Circle Jerks: Delaware Distraction Obscures Oval Office Atrocities”.
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“8BITS” is a strange but pretty fun movie that seems to be about computer game characters fighting over the shift to better technologies. I think I missed a lot of the references, but I enjoyed it anyway. (I’m particularly confused by what’s driving the aesthetic of the main protagonist.)
One of the minor irritations in running my roleplaying campaign is that I can’t blog about a lot of it. Blogging about the things I find most interesting would give away too much to the players, who must perforce toil in ignorance. I’ll probably post some of the “encyclopedia entries” I’m working on for the world, but that’s much less dynamic than what arises out of game interactions.
I did recently come up with some ideas for opening game sessions that I think are worth sharing, however.
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One more loss would end my tournament. I had won the first game in this match, a long and drawn-out battle, and now in the second game I had reduced my opponent from 20 to six life and had six power on the board. I had more threats in my hand, and was sure he had only one card that would save him. I just had to hope he wouldn’t draw it.
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Near the start of July I mentioned the idea of keeping a “gratitude journal”. I’ve been doing that, more or less, since then.
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SteamBirds is a rather cool turn-based steampunk air combat Flash game. If that sounds like a weird combination to you, I’d have to agree. It’s very simple, and is extremely easy to get into, while not being actually easy. In addition, I came across it via a very interesting presentation on the Flash games industry by its creator Andy Moore.
Aptly-named Yankees blog It’s About the Money has an excellent post up about luck and competitive balance in the baseball post-season. One of its key points concerns how likely a given team is to win a particular series, and how that translates into their odds of winning the whole thing.
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I’m not a big fan of shopping, and more or less loathe the idea of it as an entertainment activity. That didn’t stop me from coming up with a scoring system for it, one which could conceivably be useful in restraining spending.
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The intelligence characteristic in roleplaying games is problematic. The advantages it confers are often mechanical—more spells, more languages—and it’s hard to have it work for players in ways that the physical characteristics do. A player checking against their strength score to break something is fine, but a player checking against their intelligence score to solve a puzzle—or a plot point, something my players have contemplated trying—just isn’t. Even less fine is a player requesting combat action suggestions on the basis that their character’s high intelligence would mean that they’d come up with something clever.
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This is old but good: a five-part animated tragedy set in the Mushroom Kingdom.
I was impressed by this article on marginal advantage by Sean Plott, who among other things is a high-level competitive Starcraft player. It discusses some more general points, suggesting that “a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance”, which I agree with, despite my long interest in Magic: The Gathering.
I also agree with his corollary that in a good competitive game, “the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible”. Notions of “weak” and “good” players here should be as diverse as possible.
I’m not sure how this applies to tennis, the game I’m currently most interested in, but the winner of the match is often not the player with superior strokes.