Lunchtime Poll #19: My So-Called Life
What does gaming bring to your real life?
Gaming (both roleplaying and boardgames) provide me with “fun things” to do with friends. They are a good way to do something while friendship grows… though they’re also subject to taking the place of real friendships if you let them. Mostly, they’re like most hobbies– something to do with likeminded people.
IRE #16: The Revolutionary Document
Today, March 17th marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s completion of the first of his major papers that would revolutionize physics forever. So even with the recent Ides of March, I am choosing Einstein’s papers as the inspiration for the latest IRE.
Introduce something that changes all the rules, mid-game. For the best parallel, I prefer that it be something the PCs have been working on, with effects even more dramatic than their imaginations anticipate. In some games this is perfect– sci-fi in particular has very skilled character types (Engineers, Science Officers, etc.) that don’t do much more than “scan”.
In Li’s Lunchtime Poll #18: Not in Kansas, she asks:
What alternate-historical setting would you most like to play in, and why?
Wow, there are a number of great worlds I’d love to play in. One of the ones that has me intrigued is the Chronoplane Wars, The Empire of Time was particularly interesting.
I think it’ll work well because you can muck around with history without worrying about paradoxes– you can meet and negotiate with the big names of history. It’d also be cool as a conspiracy, since no one knows who runs the Intertemporal Agency… nor why people and missions are shunted around, why people have blocks– there is lots of room for internal politics.
In Lunchtime Poll #17: Long-Term, High-Yield, Li repeats Narrative Guy’s querstion:
“New games are popping up all of the time, yet they don’t stay around very long at all anymore. Magic: The Gathering has lasted 10 years…The White Wolf “storytelling” system reached its apex at about 4 years old…the (*shudder*) Pokemon game lasted maybe two years…what’s going to last?”
The games that are established are the ones that will stick around; long after D&D was obsolete, it was still the gateway RPG. More importantly, though– I don’t care which ones stick around. Once I buy a game, I’m rarely interested in a lot of supplements [Mage was a sad exception]; I can run the core game at my leisure.
Except that I’m really enjoying the new wave of indie games. I want to play them– and to play any significant proportion of them, the games I do play should be short. That works fine for me, for now at least.
I saw this meme on Blog, Jvstin Style and decided to do it as well.
What follows are lists of the Nebula and Hugo winners for best F/SF novel. The ones I’ve read are in bold.
This is what my blog list looks like at the moment, sans CSS & style tables. I took out a few of the largest blogs, just to amplify the subversion. Well, that’s what I think I was doing, anyway.
Lunchtime Poll #16: I Am a Jelly Doughnut
This one can be answered from a player or GM point of view.
How do you convey the feeling of being unable to speak the majority language in the area where the story is taking place?
Our IRE this time around keys off of some new revelations about those mysterious “hobbit sized” skeletons found on an Indonesian island last year. As mentioned in a previous blog entry, Carl Zimmer’s blog has a nice recap of the biology and the speculation thereof.
So what can you do with this?
Our 10th IRE has to do with the recent Academy Award Nominations. Glamour. Glitz. Stars. Awards. Campaigns for Awards. The usual madness.
What’s the most useful non-gaming source of information (book, website, etc.) you’ve ever found? And what makes it so darn useful?
Online, I have a few resources I use… for wildly different reasons. I like What a character.com for its Chraracter Actor pictures. I don’t visualize clearly enough to describe people, most of the time. This helps- or gives me a picture to pass around. Other goodies include the CIA World Factbook, for useful maps and facts. The last commonly used resource is a tarot spread, like the one from Web Tarot.org, since I don’t do readings at all well by hand, but still find them useful.
Offline, a good map of the city (for a modern day game) is ideal. The best maps are tourist ones– they include landmarks of note and help give you a clear idea of a place, plus they suggest names for further research and investigation.