Author: Scott

Categories
DnD Game Group Roleplaying

Gaming: 12-14-2007

We’ll shift to a new game this Friday. Kev has important stuff to worry about that will prevent him from prepping the Shadowrun game. Rather than cancel the session, we’ll shift to our backup game.

Our backup game is D&D. Fortunately, we decided on our backup quite a while ago, so I’m ready to roll. Here’s all the detail you need to know…

**Note: There are already some changes. Tomorrow night’s session will probably be more character research & design, while the following session will be the world building. Jennifer has to leave relatively early in the session– she’s attending a party and providing the video game system– so we’ll save the collaborative world building til next time. **

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Categories
Politics

Hilzoy is back!

She has a great post up today about acknowledging and appreciating the recent decline in violence in Iraq. Her article is great, but I’m particularly fond of her example beginning at fourth.

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Categories
Books

Green Rider and First Rider’s Call

Kristen Britain’s first book and its sequel.

I liked the first book, Green Rider. It’s a solid adventure story; the Green Riders remind me a bit of Valedemar’s Heralds, but in mostly good ways. The faded magic is an different backdrop. Particularly interesting is the main character Karigan; much like Tolkein’s hobbits, she often succeeds because of her friends and the gifts she’s been given. It’s interesting to see a fantasy hero so dependent on others for everything but mettle.

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Categories
Books

First in a long time

Since I have trouble reaching All Consuming [the books site that puts the little covers, “what I’m reading”, and “what I’ve read” in the sidebar], I may revive the books category on the site.

First, though, I’ve stumbled on two websites for book lovers:
Looky Book is a collection of children’s books with all the text and beautiful artwork. Scan through the pretty books to find a gift for your children and little friends.

Library thing. It looks so good, I’ll try it out…

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Categories
Game Group

Next Game: Friday December 14th

UPDATE: Medical emergencies intervened on the 7th. We’ll reschedule for the 14th.

We left off in mid fight, deep in the basement filled with bugs. We rejoined the three assault team members… and together the 9 of us are fighting off cockroaches of varying sizes.

Can everyone make it Friday?

Categories
Roleplaying

Interesting roleplaying bits

IC Punishment, OOC Reward, a good post about a common and tricky subject. I wonder how much this thought should apply to common things, like wounds.

West Marches: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. An interesting persistent world experiment. A cool setup for a game people can drop in and out of randomly. New: Part 4: Death and Danger.

Learning to explain failure brings attention to a common stumbling point.

Cool modern fantasy art.

DM’s Haven Generators page

DNA Phil’s blog. His post about what’s he’s learned over the years is particularly good.

Categories
Misc

Two great (very dark) stories

The Inheritance and The Grandmother.

Dark and twisted; they feel like Grimms fairy tales and are well written. Check them out.

Categories
Gift Coordination

Christmas 2007

Jennifer mentioned that she’d rather get an early start on shopping– so here’s what you need to start.

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Categories
Politics

Sebastian on torture

Sebastian has a good post, On Torture Hypotheticals–Conservative Perspective. I agree with him completely. Only if the government was perfect might it be trusted with selecting the perfect degree of force to extract information.

In the real world, innocent people are convicted and spend years in prison before their release. If months of trial and investigation can’t guarantee the right result, why should we trust someone acting in a moment, under pressure, to get it right?

The other red herring? Under the hypothetical, there’s still no reason for torture to be legal. The torturer will, in good conscience, extract the information… and immediately be pardoned for saving the lives of thousands. Despite being able to imagine such an extreme corner case [and despite the convenient assumption of perfect knowledge], I think we can keep laws against torture on the books.

—
A good discussion has sprung from Sebastian’s first post: here are further posts on the subject. Demand side Torture (by Publius), More on Torture Hypotheticals (by Sebastian), and Choose your own adventure (by Katherine).

Categories
Roleplaying

The Mountain Witch Trick

Cool way to collaboratively flesh out backgrounds, etc. (Stolen shamelessly from this Gamecraft thread🙂 Here’s a technique that’s been in use by loads of people, for a long damn time, which was put into print in the game The Mountain Witch:

Instead of mining a character background or world stuff for a figure suitable to some need in the game, tell a player that they see someone or react in some way to a feature, and then ask them why.

“A figure comes out of the sweathouse. It is a man from your past, a respected mentor. You move quickly to greet him. Who is he, Joe?”

“Joe, your character pauses at an unmarked grave by the side of the road for a moment, and bows his head before moving on. Why did he do that?”

Read the thread for some good discussion about when and how it works well.