Category Archives: Games

Man, I Miss Role-Play Gaming

Last year I launched a role-playing campaign of Fantasy Games Unlimited Space Opera, featuring the worst edited rule book in the history of professional RPGs. This was a return to basics for me as my most successful RPG campaign had been Space Opera ones back in the 1980s and this new campaign included players from those glorious times.

And then 2020 happened.

My novel launched at the start of America’s pandemic induced lock-down and the regular game session were suspended.

COVID-19 took a beloved friend from our circle of gamers.

And still we are restricted, desperately dodging the virus as best we can.

I so miss those twice a month sessions with my friends. Laughing, playing, and having a great time.

I suppose it is possible to have a zoom game, but it wouldn’t be the same.

This will pass but until it does there is little we can do but be smart, be safe, and try to survive.

 

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Fiction Reveals the Author

There’s often a huge cry from some quarters that that creatives need to keep their politics out of their arts. The arts are there for simple entertainment not any form a grandstanding.

Naturally this is an ignorant position. Art has the most lasting value when it speaks to values and that can’t be done without stepping on toes.

This is all very evident in movies, television, and literature but even in other matters of creativity the worldview and positions of the author or authors influences the art.

I run an in-person Role Playing Game, or at least I did before the pandemic shut everything down, of Space Opera a massive game from the very early 80s with an amazing detailed, if poorly edited, set of rules. In order to make the game flow quicker and easier once we can assemble to players again, I have been crafting spreadsheets to handle the more tedious and complex calculations the game often calls for. One the objectives were met I decided to expand the project and create a spreadsheet that would use the rules to automatically general star sectors and that has been an interesting experience. Certainly, my Microsoft Excel skills have been expanding but it has also revealed interesting biases of the game’s authors.

For example, a society in Space Opera is rated for its social strength on a scale from 1- 10, with a  1 signifying a society that has collapsed or is in collapse, the world of Mad Max both the original film and its sequels, while a 10 represents a society able to withstand nearly any serious shock with it institutions remaining functional and intact.

The gamemaster rolls a 10-sided die for the social strength and then modifies it based on the type of society and those modifiers express the authors’ biases.

“Open Societies” no modifier, it is whatever is rolled though the game’s heroic Terran Union no planet will score below a 5.

“Corporate Society” no modifiers, somehow you can have both corporate societies that are falling apart which seems illogical, without rule of law there cannot be corporation and societies rock solid and unshakable.

“Aristocratic Society” no modifiers, lord, ladies, kings and all that can be utterly stable withstanding any shock.

“Socialist Society” Max social strength 8, 9s and 10s must be re-generated. hmm socialist systems, without providing a real definition of that means find true stability impossible.

And in case you thought ‘Socialist’ means USSR because this game is a product of late 70s engineering.

“Communist Society” max social strength is 7 with result 8-10 re-rolled.

There buried in the rules in the modifiers are the authors’ political belief that open, capitalist societies are inherently more stable than other systems.

All art, even gaming,  is political.

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Quick Hits for July 23rd

No long form essay today just a few quick thoughts to kick off the morning.

 

Ladyhawke this film from 1985 doesn’t get the love that it deserves. A romantic fantasy directed by Richard Donner and starring Mathew Broderick, Rutger Hauer, and Michelle Pfeiffer this movie has it all, action, comedy, romance, and one of the best magical curses ever devised and yet it doesn’t get a tenth of the fan love and devotion as The Princess Bride. Both movies deserve to be in the Fan Cannon.

 

The year 2020 sucks. Not a new or shocking revelation but one I think constantly. I never expected that the year I debuted as a published novelist would be so terrible.

 

It’s hard getting people to leave reviews on Amazon. Please if you’ve read Vulcan’s Forge leave a review even if it is one star and you hated the book. Though of course I pleased that so far people seem to really like it and got what I was shooting for. Reviews raise visibility on the shopping sites and all of this year’s debut authors need the help.

 

Though it doesn’t look like I will return in in-person role play gaming before next year I have been hard at work on my Space Opera Campaign. I’ve been spending weekends working on Excel spreadsheet to do the tedious calculations that slow down the flow of play and last night I had an epiphany for solving a calculation that has been bugging me.

 

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How Did I Ever Run This Game in the 80s?

I have been a role play gamer since 1979 when my friend Jim, whom I met in Basic Training for the U.S. Navy, introduced me to AD&D. Very quickly I experimented with number of other RPG game systems in those early years when new game systems appeared like mushrooms after a moist summer evening. Fantasy Games Unlimited provided two of the system I played the most besides AD&D, Villains and Vigilantes, a comic book role playing game where with the right dice rolls a normal person’s punch could do more damage than a nuclear weapon, and Space Operaa game of high adventure among the stars that allowed everything from Star Trek style campaigns to Star Wars and everything in between.

Space Opera has three credited authors two fat core rule books, and apparently no editor. The rule books are riddled with typos, inconsistencies, and no logical organizational layout. Character creation can be a lengthy process taking hours to perform all the rolls, computations, and decisions in establishing your hero. In addition to all that the rules can get quite detailed in trying to model nearly every conceivable situation. Literally there are paragraphs devoted to performing a hand-off when one character has to pass an item to another character during combat or chaotic events.

Despite all this Space Opera turned out to be the sweet spot for my style as a game master. During the early to late 80s I ran a number of campaigns many of which are still fondly remembered. The wide-open setting, the rules that encompassed nearly every conceivable science-fiction trope, and the sheer imagination made this my favorite to run and a favorite among my players.

But, all the fiddly rules, calculations, and record keeping were a serious challenge. Space Opera, if you run as Lieutenant Saavik would, that is by the book, creates vast amounts of record keeping, some of which I kept up with, some of which I ignored, and some I fudged. Certainly, many of the detailed calculations I approximated rather than compute to their final precise answer.

Last year, after discovering I still had my original rulebooks and that all of the materials were available for purchase as PDFs online, I, at the urging of my players, launched  a new Space Opera campaign.

In the intervening decades I have become a little more focused on following game rules and of course that makes Space Opera quite a challenge. With the game decades out of print there is little, but not zero, fan support on the internet. When this game was published there was no internet and advanced players socialized through BBS. I have found a few data sheets that help turn the game into something more manageable and provide some assistance in the more detailed bits such as an excel spreadsheet for character creation.

Now I have turned my weak spreadsheet skills to the task and have started creating my own game aids. I have completed a worksheet for computing a character’s chance of advancing a level in a particular skill. One cell required an IF statement that was nested 18 times, but it works. Next up a ship’s log to record fuel use, maintenance requirements, and travel time computation. After that a campaign calendar to track these things for my players.

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4 Days until Release & Game Review: Thanos Rising

The novel Vulcan’s Forge will be unleased upon a world clamming for reading material in just 4 more days.

 

My sweetie-wife and I enjoy a good board game and last week I finally got a copy of a game that I had only played at conventions, Thanos Rising: Infinity Wara media tie-in game associated with Avengers: Infinity War.

Thanos Rising a cooperative game for 2 to 4 players who take on the roles of various teams of heroes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe in their bid to prevent the mad Titan Thanos from acquiring all six Infinity Stones and destroying half of all life in the universe.

Each turn a player rolls dice and assigns them towards heroes to recruit onto their team or to villains to damage and eventually eliminate. The players win if they eliminate 7 villains from Thanos’ forces while Thanos has three paths to victory.

  • acquire all six Infinity Stones.
  • eliminate an entire hero (player’s) team
  • eliminate 10 or more heroes

Media tie-in games have a terrible reputation as games that are poorly thought out, designed, and generally as cheap cash grabs riding the tails of something else’s greater popularity but that is not the case with Thanos Rising.this game is well balanced and challenging to play. My group of experiences board gamers is currently running a success rate of about 50% playing the game without enhancing its difficulty at all. All in all, this is a fun game and one that is well worth acquiring.

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I’m an Anti-Social Online Gamer

Years ago, as a reward to myself for complete a draft of a novel, I got my first Xbox which I eventually upgraded to an Xbox 360 and now I have an Xbox One because Microsoft doesn’t understand how numbers work.

I don’t do a ton of video game play. I rarely complete a full storyline for a game I play. I’d rather get my narrative fiction from novels, movies, and televisions and so the video games become short bursts of play on-line where the creativity of actual living opponents provides a much more interesting challenge that AI controlled bots.

However, the first thing I do when I log into a session of Call of Duty or some similar game is mute all of the other players. I have zero interest in trash talking and the vile personal insults that are casually hurled as part of ‘play.’ So, if you see me online, you’ll need to send a message if you want to interact and if that message is mere insults you will be blocked.

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My Personal Year in Review

Well we’re about to start another arbitrary cycle around our local star and that means it’s time to look back at what we’ve and answer for it. Wait, that didn’t come out right, it’s time for personal reflection and growth. Yeah, that sounds better.

Anyway, I have to say that this year has been a pretty good year for me.

Naturally, the biggest writing news is that Flame Tree Press purchased my novel Vulcan’s Forge with the publication set for March 28th, 2020. This was a joy and a surprise. Vulcan’s Forge, which languished on my former agent’s desk for a year unread, was a book I wrote entirely for myself. It was an experiment to see if I could sustain a cynical tone for an entire novel, and a labor for my love of film and the genre film noir in particular.  Blending it with science fiction and making constant references to movies throughout the book Vulcan’s Forge is in one manner my most personal work.

In other aspects of my writing life I managed a few interesting short stories and one of my previously published works A Canvas Dark and Deep has been selected for reprint in the anthology Twilight Words coming in spring 2020.

My goal for 2020 is to have my next novel, Do We Not Bleed?, written by my birthday in mid-May. A detailed outline is already produced, and I have high hopes for this piece.

2019 was also the year I fully committed to listening to Podcasts. I have a number of fun, informative, and challenging podcasts on regular rotation. One that has been most surprising in just how fully engaged I have become with it is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters.

Clearly with my love of movies screenwriting has always been a fascination with me. John August and Craig Mazin each week discus the business, craft, and art of screenwriting with many of the topics applicable to other forms of writing as well. They are also gamers, puzzle solvers, and entreatingly amusing people.

My day job continues to be good. I am so happy to be part of a vibrant strong union. Too many times before in my life I have been chewed up by petty bosses and it feels great having an organization at my back instead of being stabbed there.

IN gaming my sweetie-wife and I added Lords of Waterdeep to the regular rotation of our board and card game nights and it’s become very popular. In role play gaming I took a massive step into the past and began running a campaign of FGU’s Space Opera a game system I ran quite successfully for many years during the 1980s, PDFs of the rules are available at a quite reasonable price and it’s been fun, challenging, and amusing to engaged with the typo filled rulebook.

Here’s to looking to 2020 with hope, optimism, and confidence.

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Choice versus Ability: What RPGs Can Teach Us About Writing

The other day I listened to the episode of the podcast Scriptnotes  where the two hosts, Craig and John played the role-playing game Fiasco  with a fellow writer and it sparked some thoughts about story telling and how characters become compelling. John and Craig in addition to being successful screenwriters, show runner, novelists, and playwrights, are role-play gamers notably playing Dungeons and Dragons  the wellspring of all role-play gaming today so listening to them play Fiasco  a game that is entirely focused on storytelling with only extremely limited mechanics intrigued me, especially since I had thoroughly enjoyed the episode of the web series Tabletop  where I first learned of Fiasco.

In Dungeons and Dragons  characters have a well defined set of abilities, usually derived from a ‘class’ that defines the character profession, thief, wizard, warrior, and so one but in Fiasco  the only thing that defines a character is their relationships to the other characters of the game. There are not statistics for physical or mental abilities, no rule set for determining if a gunshot hits a target or misses, in short characters have no defined abilities whatsoever. A Fiasco character is defined by their choices and in fiction writing it is the same.

In fiction a character’s attempt at any action is not random determine by lucky or unlucky dice rolls but success is predetermined by the author compelled by the needs of the text. The character’s abilities are there to allow the possibility of success at any particular action but not to drive that action. What makes a character compelling is the choices that they make. If you can remove the character from the action and replace them with another person with a similar skill set and nothing changes then it is likely that your character is not very compelling. It is the choice that defines the character, it is in agonizing dilemmas where there are no good choices that forces a character to grow and confront their own true nature.  From quiet dramas such as The Remains of the Day  and Mr. Stevens choice to not speak up and tell Miss Kensington how he really feels to special effects spectaculars such as Captain America: Civil War  where Steve has to decide to confess to Tony Star the truth that he had kept secret the truth of Stark’s parents’ murder it is the choice that a character that makes them empathetic.

Abilities can be switched out, anyone can be an expert of some skill ort knowledge but only this particular person with this particular background and experience can be tortured with a specific choice and there you will find the compelling character.

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Convention Report: Kingdom-Con 10

Kingdom-Con is San Diego gaming convention and sadly this year, the tenth, is the final year as the organizer has decided to cease operation while he still loves doing it. Held in a hotel in Mission Valley Kingdom-Con.

While the convention boasts nearly every style of gaming available my sweetie-wife and Is tuck to the board game room where you can check out games from their library and play with other attendees, of which I am told there were in total about 1300.

Here’s a quick run down of the games we played.

Epic Roll:This game was terrible. The theme is adventurers in a D&D setting racing to the top level. It supports only three players, doesn’t understand its theme, (really Skeletons are a tougher monster than Mummies?) and the outcome is entirely luck driven.

Elder Sign:A game of adventurers desperately attempting to stop the rise of a great old god. It’s a dice game but with much more strategy than Epic Roll however I did not quite understand the rules when my Sweetie-wife and I tried it so the game was not a success. I’d like to give it another go with a better understanding of the mechanics.

 

Invader Zim: Doomsday Dice Game:My sweetie-wife and I played this just the two of us and while I enjoyed it she did not. Based upon the popular cartoon players either are working as Zim and Gir trying to destroy the Earth with an outlandish devise or the players are either Dib or Agent Darkbootie trying construct an equally outlandish device to shield the Earth.

 

Betrayal At The House on the Hill/Baldur’s Gate: Two variants of the same game mechanic but with different themes. Collectively players explore either an old Mansion or a fantasy town and its catacombs encountering events, gathering item, and uncovering Omens. Eventually enough omens trigger a ‘haunt’ and one player becomes the monster or villain and has their own victory condition while the other players as, a team, win by stopping the villain. This was decently fun.

Lords of WaterDeep: A worker placement game that takes place in a D&D setting with the players battling to become the power behind the secretive factions controlling the city of Waterdeep. My sweetie-wife and I played two games and I player a late night game with another attendee. I thoroughly enjoyed this game and find that the worker placement mechanic is quite fun.

Hogworts Battles:This is a massive game with seven sub-games. Set, obviously, in the Harry Potter books and movies, the players are the
young heroes cooperatively battling to stop the forces of evil from taking over the magical school Hogworts. Each sub-game is a year at Hogworts and gets progressively more difficult. We played 5 of the seven games, losing to the forces of darkness in year five. This was quite fun but the 5 years took about six hours to play out and had we won years 6 and 7 would have had to have been played the next day.

And finally

Thanos Rising:A cooperative dice game thematically set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each player leads one of four super hero teams, Avengers, The Guardians of the Galaxy, Wakanda, or Earth’s Sorcerers as they attempt to prevent the mad Titan Thanos from collecting all six Infinity Stones and killing half of all life in the Universe. A game with a simple mechanic Thanos Rising is a surprising tough game with a fair amount of tactical thought required. I lost about half the games I played in with the wins being mostly down to the wire affairs.

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