So last night while driving back from the police station I heard a song on the radio that had a title that was something like "Doors" or "the Door" or something. It was made with just a guitar a bass and the artists voice. It could roughly be described as Rage Against the Machine meets Rumi.

Anyone out there have any idea what it might have been?

I just got the book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Black World by Trevor Paglen from the library and its very very fun. I definitely want a copy of this one.

http://www.fairgame-rpgs.com/comments.php?entry=173

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Something I'm tossing around.

Imagine that you have a game that can be easily applied to different settings.  I'm thinking of Dogs in the Vineyard, and Spirit of the Century here, offhand, but that's just my biases.  GURPS, maybe?  Somebody d20ish, possibly.  Heck, if people like the idea, I might do it for Perfect Century (though that's pretty likely about the same as doing it for SotC).

Now, imagine that you build a PDF form, fillable, that would contain the basic stuff for "an alternate setting".  So, if you filled in the form, you'd have guidelines anyone could use to run that setting with your rules.  You don't just whip this thing up, though; you discuss it with others openly, making them aware of what comes next as you do so, and use their input.

The next bit is that, form in-hand, you run a contest.  Free stuff or cash for the coolest alternate setting form submitted - give people a month to submit ideas, plant all the filled forms up on a host, and then judging is done by everyone, collectively (not sure how the votes would be aggregated, but I'd look at Game Chef and see what they do).

The game owner gains:
1) Interest and attention
2) Possibly some fun public discussion
3) A lasting game resource to direct everyone over to in the future, even if it ends up only being a smallish one.

It costs them: 
1) Some product or money
2) Time spent coordinating
3) Webhosting.

The Participants gain:
1) Chance to win something
2) The opportunity to advertise their ideas, their site if applicable, their name if desirable.

It costs them:
1) Time.
2) Some creative effort.

So....

Genius?  Idiotic?

I had an hour, and got bored.

Therefore:  A Spirit of the Century Character Sheet

Not sure if it's all that well-made, but hey.  You can fill it out;  you can save it filled out.

If anyone wants to see this adjusted a little, say how.

In an effort to get Dark of the Moon written and ready to run, we've recruited crash_mccormick. My theory was that he'd take over the writing the rules down job from mnemex. This is still the theory.

However, crash_mccormick noted that there's a lot of "needs more plots" in the first draft character sheets, and that generating these plots may generate either more mechanics or factors that influence how the mechanics work, so we set up a plot spreadsheet.

Each plot has a row to itself, and a column for every PC in the game. This way, we can see which PCs are attached to which plot. After some consideration, I'm using a four value system:

Y = Yes, the character is involved in the plot.

N = No, the character is not involved in the plot. This does not mean that the player can't choose to have the character join the plot, but that's something we can assume.

W = The character is involved in the plot, but this needs to be written into the character sheet.

P = Player's choice, and the character sheet should be written to make it more likely that the player will choose to attach the character to the plot.

There's also a column to list what mechanics we think we'll need for each plot. The fewer total number of mechanics needed for a game, the better.

But, what constitutes a plot? After some discussion, we concluded that a plot requires at least two sides, preferably with at least two people per side. If there's only one side, it's probably a goal, rather than a plot. In theory, something with three sides of one person each might be a plot -- but it might also collapse into a discussion.

If a character wants widgets, that's not a plot -- unless someone else is competing for the same widgets. Then, maybe it's a plot.

A stolen widget is not a plot by itself. It's a complication.

Something like "A pack of wild dogs attacks" is not a plot. It is a Game Event. It may be an optional game event. It may a game event with fixed timing or variable timing. But it is not a plot.

However, as crash_mccormick pointed out, Game Events use game time and player actions. As such, Game Events can force interactions, so they are plot adjacent.

Interactions are key. The whole point of having plots is to drive interactions.

Plots drive interactions. Conflicts drive interactions. Events drive interactions. Other things can, too.

All of this supports what rob_donoghue said to me at this year's Dreamation, that larps are basically about talking to people.

Well, they are about interacting with people, in any case. Much of that interaction in the Ghost Fu larp was in the form of tournament bouts. Oh, there were other things going on as well, and we had an entire back up plot to pull out of our back pockets if it had been needed. Hm. At least, we referred to it as a plot. I think it was a plot, but I am not sure if there were more than one side to it. Hm.

Currently, I have a list of 21 plots, plus a plot which is only broadly defined, e.g., "We should have a plot involving X elements." I can think of a couple more off the bat. We want to go through the character sheets and look for more plots. We currently have 56 characters for what is going to be at least a 12 hour larp, and may well be a full weekend larp. As with teaching a class or gming a tabletop game, it's better to have too much material on hand than too little.

So, back to the theory. We go through character sheets and fill in the plot matrix. This gives us the information about what mechanics we need.

Oh yes, and there are some names that need changing. This has to happen as soon as possible to minimize version control issues. I have a spreadsheet for that.

Then crash_mccormick does a draft of the rules, and we hopefully have a meeting to talk about and tweak those. At that point, it is my hope that a) the senses spreadsheet I've started can be completed, not necessarily by me and b) second drafts of the character sheets can be done.

Also, timeline and bluesheets need to be done, and items, abilities, and so on need to be nailed down. Ideally, we'd like pictures of all of the characters, and perhaps of the items, but that's not as critical.

I said management apologizes for the delay.

The television is on, but by an act of will you wrench your attention from its lidless eye. As you step into the room, or rather (you realize, glancing around) hall, the television shows a man in a suit jacket with no tie standing in front of a curtain. He shifts rhythmically from one foot to the other while an unseen mob chortles and cheers, then raises his right hand in a half-salute which he brings down abruptly. There's a musical sting, and the applause and laughter die down.

The man's name you don't remember, but you've seen him before, dozens of times, on magazine covers in supermarket checkout aisles and flipping channels in hotel rooms and maybe the television and radio waves of his voice and image, broadcast from every high place, have flown through the air and through the walls and through your skull and into your brain while you sleep. He filled in for Letterman for a week once, and he did some movies, and now he's doing a monologue to fill the time before the farm report and the predawn weather updates in an hour.

You're newly arrived in LA, and he's the first celebrity that you see, technically, though maybe it doesn't count since it's just television. He hasn't slept for days, that's obvious from his expression and the deep creases around his eyes that pancake makeup and bright lights aren't quite able to conceal. Age somewhere between thirty and seventy. As he makes his applause-stop-now gesture, he licks his thin lips and blinks twice in rapid succession, and you could almost mistake him for a giant lizard. A giant lizard that hates himself. His suit doesn't quite fit him, although it's clean and neatly pressed and he probably put it on just a few minutes prior to whenever the monologue was taped, which could have been anywhere from ten years ago to a few hours. Or maybe it's live, you can't tell. You only look at the screen for a few tenths of a second.

It's an old portable TV, with a boxy aesthetic that would have made you guess it was at least fifteen years old even if it wasn't held together with duct tape and stained with what you choose to believe is coffee. It's sitting on a counter, facing you as you step through the fire door and out the stairwell, pointed almost directly at your head and demanding worship. Or maybe you're just a little spacey from the head injury.

The counter twists around, blocking the hallway, but you soon realize this is because you are behind it, in a receptionist's place, or a security guard's checkpoint. Aiding you in this realization: the receptionist or security guard seated directly in front of you, facing the television set. His arms are folded behind his head, and his feet are up on the counter, and you can't be certain without walking around to look at his face, but his lack of motion and the gentle snoring suggest he's asleep.

Looking past the television, and the sleeping man, you can see that off to the right the hall continues, darkened and empty, with passages in different directions and hanging signs pointing to RADIOLOGY and CHI BALANCE and PEDIATRIC and divers others. To the left, there are some benches, a water fountain, restrooms, and four glass double-doors heading out to the parking lot.

On one of the benches a woman in a stained yellow jumpsuit sits, hunched over some kind of small handheld electronic device. Or, rather, she was hunched over a device. Sometime between your opening the door and your eye finally drifting leftwards, she glanced up, saw you, and started waving, eager to attract your attention.

You squint at her. She's definitely wearing a jumpsuit, yellow, which rings a small bell somewhere until you remember April O'Neil. Yes. She is wearing an April O'Neil costume, for some reason. No one would wear a belt like that if it weren't part of a costume, you are certain. It's actually not a bad costume; faux-April's hair is even dyed red and hours ago was doubtless styled properly. Lately however faux-April appears to have been rolling around in the street, to judge by her dirty jumpsuit and generally disheveled appearance. She's also waving at you like she knows you and was waiting for you, which, as far as you know, she doesn't and couldn't have been.

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/05/arden-experimen.html

Some of you may have been following the Arden project (reported in Nature and the Chronicle of Higher Education). I'm pleased to announce that the project has come to fruition. With generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, we have created a fun game environment and used it to conduct a month-long experiment. Our experimental question (kept secret up to now) was: Are fantasy game players economically "normal"? Or on the contrary, when they make themselves into elves and dwarves and hobbits, do they stop taking economic decisions seriously? We created two virtual worlds, one an exact copy of the other, except that in the experimental world the price of a simple healing potion was twice as high as in the control. If people are taking prices seriously in this fantasy environment, they should buy fewer of the potions when potions are more expensive.

At stake here is the entire idea of using virtual worlds as a Petri dish. If fantasy gamers behave in ways that violate our most basic assumptions of economic normalcy, then it makes no sense to use virtual worlds to study large-scale economic behavior. If, conversely, fantasy gamers seem to be normal economic agents, then perhaps some of the behavior in virtual worlds does indeed generalize to the real world. If so, then we can consider using virtual worlds to conduct controlled experiments at the macro scale of society, where our most pressing problems seem to live (natural resource management, intercultural mistrust, information security, disease).

The initial findings of the Arden experiment will be released during the International Communications Association meetings in Montreal next weekend. The session we're part of is this one:

"High Density Session: The Web 1.0, 2.0, and Beyond"
Time: Sat May 24, 3:00 - 4:15pm
Place: Le Centre Sheraton / Drummond West

Get more information about the meeting here.

In this format, eight presenters will each have 5 minutes to describe her or his work. Then we will go to our posters, pasted to nearby walls, where each of us will answer questions about the findings. I'll be standing at my poster; thus if you have a particular interest in the Arden project and its findings, please feel free to attend this session and see them first hand. Fresh off the internets, as it were.

I will collect comments from the ICA meeting and use them to revise the paper we're writing, before sending it off to a journal. This will occur sometime in June. At that time we will also release the paper as a Working Paper. An announcement about the paper will be made here.

John Wick,

Thank you for purchasing tickets on Ticketmaster.

You purchased 2 tickets to:

Tom Waits
Orpheum Theatre, Phoenix, AZ
Wed, Jun 18, 2008 08:00 PM 


Seat location: section SEC B, row 24, seats 5-4

Haven't given this journal a lot of love, so might as well drop a quick D&D report in.

It's worth noting that Stephen, as GM, is a big believer in "give the PCs a bunch of overpowered items, and then don't worry too much about what you throw at them. They'll figure out something. Eventually."

So, when we last left our heroes 14th level, they'd bugged out via Carnelian Cube from a fight in a against a 200ft diameter room with 12 orcish mages (ranging form at-level to above level), 12 orcish rogues, a couple of hundred fighters (including some seriously high level ones, and nobody below 5th level), and what looked like the orc king, much higher than party level and with insane armor and the ability to do 120 damage in a single attack sequence. Oh, and some giant crystal sphere that, it looked like, would magnify anything cast into it across whatever it was looking at -- in this case, the exterior battlefield, with the entire PC-allied army in it.

Having been pretty much creamed by the opposing force, the party -might- have considered running, or at least waiting, but it looked like the bad guys were about to take out the entire army -- plus we'd popped the "orc king" from a stupidly powerful chess set -- a one-use item that gave us a 20th level orcish marshal who also acted as a rod of rulership for orcs for 24 hours. So, we spent 7 rounds healing up, buffing up (we'd gone in unbuffed initially, for various reasons), and planning, including deciding to use two more chess pieces' one use ability -- the green queen (20th level sorcerer) and one of the knights (wait for it).

Since we couldn't use teleports to get into the uber-protected orc fortress, we used the aasimar cleric's 1/day Gate ability (gained from another overpowered item -- a soul sucking spear that at some time in the past, she sucked a balrog into, gaining a bunch of its abilities as long as she keeps the balrog in the spear), and ran back in.

To find the bad guys having just finished wiping out our army, in 7 rounds, after dropping a silence spell on them that knocked out pretty much their entire spellcasting power, and turtled up around their uber-powerful king.

We did a round of attacks, and dropped some spellcasters, and then out came the real surprise -- Beth(Vadania) activated the knight she was carrying. Whose one-use ability is to summon a squad of 20 orcish war mammoths, complete with barding and mounted warriors on top... Nothing says "you wish you could get out of the way...but you can't" like a squad of war mammoths.

The mammoths took care of pretty much the entire room except the king and his guards, who started making a hasty exit (while the dwarf peppered him with arrows. Brilliant Blade. Good spell). That's when the "transformed into an invisible balrog" cleric flew across the room and yanked open the door.

Well, the King couldn't quite pass up the "balrog" as a worthy foe, and attacked it, and despite the invisibility, dropped it (a 13th cleric not having that many hit points). Fortunately, in pre-game planning, I'd persuaded said cleric to pack a few Immediate "save someone from dying NOW please" spells -- Close Wounds and Delay Death -- so I suggested that perhaps after the first of three attacks took half her hit points, she might want to -cast- that Delay Death (so she only fell unconscious rather than dying or risking death). Then, a cohort cleric got her up again, at which point the second (or is that fourth) very amusing thing happened:

Sure in her current invulnerability to dying, she attempted to Disintegrate the king. The King's armor, it turned out, in addition to being enormously studly, also has a spell turning effect...even on Touch spells. Our cleric -also- had spell turning on her (from the orcish sorceress. We're not high level enough to cast it). So the spell bounced back and forth for a while, and...hit both people for full damage.

Now, a nice point here: Delay Death doesn't let you get killed by damage while its in effect. But Disintegrate, if it reduces you to 0, kills you outright -- not due to damage, but due to its own special "I'm a disintegrate, suckah" effect. So when Thorn (the cleric) made her save, and rolled exactly 15 damage, well, that was exactly as many hit points as she had...which was when I suggested that she use the other spell I'd suggested she pack -- close wounds, which at her level, heals 5+d8 damage...as an immediate effect that can save you from death. Missed her by -that- much...

Meanwhile, with the opposing forces (that weren't the opposing orc king) taken care of, Vadania decided to see if, with a magical spell magnifying artifact at her disposal, she couldn't do something about the "they annihilated our army while we were healing up" problem. She did have a wish scroll, but isn't high enough level to cast it without a chance of failure. After a bit of telepathic (party communication items; gotta love 'em) chat regarding lending her my lucksword, it occured to me that she -did- have a 20th level caster at her disposal -- the orc queen! So after hurredly working out a 22 word "undo the effects of all spells cast through this item in the last minute" wish, she made the queen cast it...and presto! Army got again! Stephen's comment: "If only you'd used one fewer word, or not specified punctuation, she could have added ", and free me" and then it would be all "eat meteor swarm, elf bitch". But it was not to be...

Fun times!

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2008/05/goodwill-recall.html

Today,  I come into find out & read  Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe & Lewis Kaye's article titled as "YOUR SECOND LIFE?  Goodwill and perfomativity of intellectual property in online digital gaming" from virtual law bibliography in Lawspot online.

www.yorku.ca/rcoombe/publications/YourSecondLife.pdf  (2006)

This article deals with the governance issue of VW(eg. SL), the key tool for argument is not an exclusive proprietary one such as IP or VP but -- to my delight-- an inclusive one, corporate goodwill.

With regard to this, I tell you I registered an article on SSRN recently.

Real Money Trading in MMORPG items from a Legal and Policy perspective

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1113327

It was originally presented at 13. Dec. 2004 in Future Game Seminar held by Korea Game Development & Promotion Institute.  By virtue of professor Yee Fen Lim and lawyer Nicholas Suzor's encouragement and assistance, I could published it in complete english version.

My article deals with the RMT issues of VW(eg. Lineage), and the key tool is Gwonri-geum(a korean legal concept similar to goodwill, strictly speaking, more akin to that of 'lease goodwill'  in England, Austrailia).

*Nic Suzor thankfully made a nice abstract of the article, you can read it here

My paper, same to that of Andew Herman at al, centers on the creation and management of goodwill, an intangible asset of considerable value to VW itself based on affective bonds between players, MMO platform operators, and their commodities in the marketplace. (Differences are, i approached in micro level with economic's support, while they did in macro level with communication & cultural studies)

I hope recalling these two goodwill be an international goodwill, then help in concluding a peace treaty between properties(IP v. VP), and carve out the identity of VW & its virtue.

http://www.faenation.com/2008/05/16/semappdfaeryball/

Southeastern Massachusetts Pagan Pride is holding a Faery Ball fundraiser on June 21st. The event is 18+ and features DJ and karaoke, and a costume contest for the best dressed Faeries. Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 on the door.

More futurist blather (from a somewhat more moderate position). This time, over on RPGnet.

Warning: Hella long.

It feels kind of good to be a Californian today.

Let's hope it sticks in November.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/10by10room/~3/291256023/the-madness-of-mission-six

http://10by10room.forgreatjustice.net/2008/05/15/the-madness-of-mission-six

“Indeed, video recovered later would show Peckmann running around the confined but maze-like station, downing emergency sedatives like a madman….pausing in a corner momentarily, only to throw back vitamin pills and give chase to his invisible demons.

— Threadless T-Shirt, “The Madness of Mission Six”

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/10by10room/~3/291251339/

http://10by10room.forgreatjustice.net/2008/05/15/how-to-seduce-1000-women-using-scrabble

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

Just stepping out of the shower, thinking about a project I've wanted to do for a very long time (and may get to do at GenCon this year), I had a sudden realization. I'm still pretty shaky on it, but I'm confident enough to write it down in public, just to see what other people think.

D&D is not the first roleplaying game.

Diplomacy is.

This guy is awesome.