This is my internet! [And some genre confusion]

Blogging content-lite today. First off, bits of the internet:

• We all (should) know that bookmarks (the electronic webbie versions) don’t belong saved and trapped on your local machine, awaiting the next hard drive format. Bookmarks need to get out there, meeting other bookmarks and new people to really flourish. I’ve been using del.icio.us to store and share my bookmarks for years and there’s evidence of other RPG bloggers doing the same. Just as many of us follow each other on twitter, isn’t it about time we perhaps start doing the same with del.icio.us? If your on del.icio.us or interested in finding out about it, leave a note, or you can find my list here.
• Collaboration just happens to be one of my favourite words and Newbie DM has recently announced the start of new collaborative project over here. The aim of the project is to collectively build a rich world that could see use as a setting for role-playing games. There are so many ways that they could go about doing this that I’m as interested in seeing how they do things as I am in seeing the end result. If interested in joining, you have until the 1st of April to sign up for the project.
  • I doubt I’ll have the time to contribute to this project, as, from what I can tell, it sounds as if it may consume a significant amount of time. However, I wonder if a low-effort, low entrance/exit barrier project could develop a usable world. See here for an example. Maybe an anonymous wiki? Thoughts?
• And this post here reminded me of this: At worldwide DnD game day 2K9, I was playing the invoker (I called her Mark, because my lazy tongue doesn’t like lots of syllables). I just happened to describe my attack on one turn as “I fire my (laser)beam of divine energy at the troglodyte… I fire it at his knee… his left knee”. Of course, I then proceeded to roll a critical hit. ^_^
• And then there’s the Broken Picture Telephone. As you might have guessed, it’s where I go to play the classic broken telephone game, but with pictures. Go look, go play, and look me up (username: jatori).

Now on to genre. I want to start something new (maybe online or with some of the people I have met here in Utrecht), but I can’t decide on what to play. Normally I make my choices based on system, but I think I want to try picking based on genre. But I need some help in picking it. Suggestions would be appreciated.

- jatori

[Academic] Antagonistic Players and Irrational Good Behaviour

There’s a well-known experiment in behaviourial economics called the ultimatum game. The game involves two players. The players are given $10 and one of the players (picked at random) gets to decide how to split the money between the two of them. The second player can then accept or reject the first player’s offer. If the second player accepts the offer, then both players walk away with the cash as divided by the first player. However, if the second player rejects the offer, then neither of the players gets any of the cash. If both players were absolutely rational, then the first player will offer the other player $1 (keeping $9 for himself) and the second player would accept what ever the first offered, because getting $1 is better than getting nothing at all.  However, in reality, this is not the case. Low offers ($2 or less) are generally rejected, because, as it turns out that most people would rather (irrationaly) punish what they perceive to be unfair offers (and thereby also deny themselves $1). Somewhat aware of this, most first players tend to offer deals closer to a 50:50 split.

Life is full of such irrational pro-social behaviour. Humans often do not choose the rational option, which would mean actively not maximizing immediate profits, but instead favour behaving in a perceived fair and honest fashion, which aids in developing good relationships with other irrational beings.

Alright, that’s perhaps not the best explanation of the ultimatum game and pro-social behaviour, but hopefully it will make the following clear enough:

In role playing game groups, one would expect to see the pro-social behaviour present in real life mirrored in the interactions of  and between the players. However, as is my experience, this is not the case. I’ve come across several players that do not display this pro-social behaviour, including everything from treasure division arguments to sinister betrayals of the rest of the party. Worst of all, this behaviour seems to be tolerated far more often within RP groups than it would be in real life. Or is it? Right now, I can only rely on primary sources of information on which to base my judgements, which may not be the best way to validate any potential hypothesis.

So, if anybody has any comments on these thoughts I have just spewed on to the internet, or suggestions on how I should proceed, or willingness to get involved with the investigation, feel free to leave a message in the comments.

- j

[Academic] Teamwork, Group Think, Committees, Group Polarization

At a rough guess, it looks like I’ll finally be finishing my thesis in about 5 years and 7 months. Sigh. Anyway, my research focuses on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Opressed (and, therefore, also Pedagogy of Hope) and social media (or web 2.0, or 3.0, or the semantic web, or whatever you want to call it). So, of course, a lot of my time is spent looking at various theories regarding how humans work together and interact in groups, both large and small.

As a side project, I’ve begun thinking about applying some of the theories I’ve uncovered to role playing groups.  As far as I can tell, the bulk of advice around interpersonal interactions at the gaming table are restricted to individual player types and personalities, rather than group interaction. Right now, I just want to find out if anybody would be interested in reading such material, as it would probably take a bit more effort to produce such articles (with proper referencing etc.). Also, would there be anybody interested in collaborating on such projects?

Let me know.

- jatori

Role Playing (Roleplaying? RPing?) – It’s Kinda Magical

As you may have noticed, I’ve been fiddling with the look and feel of the blog again. I’ll probably never be happy with the free options on WordPress (Note to self: Don’t be so cheap.), but at least this theme allows for author attribution, which was a big issue (for me) with the previous theme.

Anyway, we’ll be adding some other features to the blog (hopefully soon) to help manage the growing volume of content (beyond simple tags and categories… like cleaned up and organized tags and categories). Also, I’ve fallen in love with MSE and so will be tweaking our About Us page, using M:tG cards to tell a bit about ourselves. Here are few early drafts of the fantasy cards. Still a bit unsure about the artwork – perhaps I’ll pick up a sketchpad or browbeat my brother into producing something awesome.

Rolery 1

Rolery 2

TrashCondor

Jatori

Cease and desist in 30 seconds!

I created software which creates cards, and plays 30 seconds. (Actually 31 seconds, but hey…) The software is buggy, and far from perfect.

I have received a cease and desist email. I am not a lawyer, and there’s lots of technical jargon (class 28?), but it seems that the real issue is using the 30 seconds trademark. So I will cease… I think that the game has more to offer than that what the “physical” game does… but hey? It’s not my intellectual property or trademark.

Actually I have 7 days, and I’ll remove my facebook page tonight, as facebook is blocked at work…

/me is a sad panda… *sniff*

here i am

hello’s peeps, long time no write :p anyhoo just to let you guys know i’ve been quiet on this side as i’ve been writing over here, so stroll over and take a look……don’t worry though, i will still be posting here, i’ve just not been inspired of late.

pb

a race by any other name

Endraca (one of the newest contributors to tenletter) just posted her first blog entry.

She mentions that in my campaign that I started a little while ago I allowed virtually any feat/race/class that players wanted to throw at me. This is something many GMs consider a “Bad Idea” ™ but I feel that sometimes players should have the opportunity to really delve into the depths of creation and see what they can come up with. Even the fabled “Vow of Poverty” is fair game: as far as I’m concerned, if the player can truly bring his or her hero to life with the feat, then they deserve to do so – consequently, though, I purposefully expose the characters to the natural consequences of their actions (and feat/class choices).

Additionally I had (and have) every intention to allow no particular build to dominate the game. In fact up to now we’ve played around 7 sessions and the number of actual big fights or circumstances in which the right spell/power/damage-output could solve the problems at hand have barely added up to a handful of situations. The vast majority of the time characters had to deal with situations that are more roleplaying or introspection orientated.

That aside:

Characters started at 0XP. Yet I allowed even Level Adjusted races to be used. The way I did it was to specify that, for example, a drow (LA+2) would start as a “level 0 drow commoner”. All dice roles are at a -2 penalty and racial benefits are linearly distributed across the levels (this includes unusually high attribute benefits, skills, abilities, etc). These benefits increase when the character reaches 1000xp (where he or she would now be a level 1 drow commoner) and the dice penalty is reduced to -1. Finally at 3000xp the character would be a full drow and could take his/her first class levels.

In other words, in principle, players could play a Mindflayer from the start (with some stiff penalties to mostly everything).

How do you (dear readers) feel about this approach to level-adjusted races?

Introductions

We have had seven sessions of Trashcondor’s campaign already and I was encouraged to write about it and my character within the story.

When preparing for the campaign Trashcondor informed us that we can basically play any race and any class and we where given no specifications about the realm we will be playing in. Picking an exotic race was temping, which Griffin decided to do, though this had its consequences. He picked a half-giant, which has LA +1. His character started as a level 0 half giant with no class with only 2 gold.

In the planning of my character I was heavily influenced by the other campaign I am currently playing. There I had a wizard with more than the usual amount of spells and a cleric, I kept on forgetting what all the spells do, though the idea of spellcasting still interested me, especially because my characters tend to be too vain for melee combat. And lastly I decided on the personality of my char to be playful, but that can be the chocolate influencing that choice

What I ended up with is a human warlock teenager called Sami/Samantha. It still seemed a little bland especially because of the freedom we had with character creation, thus I decided her first two feats would be two abyssal heritage feats one of which is eyes of the abyss. This allows my character to have eyes that glow orange and purple (Trash allows me to pick a new colour for every new heritage feat).

Her story starts a year ago when she was still living at home, which was a small community, the only thing of prominence perhaps a church to Lathander. She is the daughter of one of the priests. She could never really see the point in attending sermons, which resulted in her either walking out or causing havoc for her entertainment. This saddened her father, who still had faith that Sami will one day understand the joy and fulfillment one can achieve by devoting yourself to a god. Sami’s interests was far from her home though, she was intrigued by the planes, the worlds the gods inhabited, as well as the worlds of other, less benign beings

When she walked out on sermons she would sneak into the private library of her father to read up on these topics, but there was little to find but she knew the church itself held a treasure of books, and the idea of forbidden ancient accounts excited her. She started making plans of getting into the restricted library of the church but to no success, getting caught by clergy members time and again, no matter how much she wanted it, she couldn’t execute a successful plan.

It is then that one night a being approached her, obviously from one of the lower planes. It offered her a deal; if she can get into the main library he will help her from there on to the restricted library. She then had a plan, she would be caught by her father after one of the sermons in his library and explain to him that she wanted to read more about the deeds of their god. This thrilled her father who took Sami into the church, knowing she isn’t allowed but believing this is what she needs to be able to gain faith. Though as soon as they were in the library, and passed the doors of the restricted archives everything seems to burst into flames and …all Sami can remember is a feeling of triumph, fire and she holding a book in her hands, running out of the ruins knowing she can never return home. She woke, finding herself without the book, oddly not distressed about the fact and forced to create a new life for herself. After the event her eyes started glowing orange, which obviously fascinated her as all the other changes that would follow.

- Endraca

[Report] Game Day 2009

Subcultures, Utrecht, proved to be a great (although a bit cramped) venue for Worldwide Dungeons and Dragons Game Day 2009. The eleven players were split into to two groups, one Dutch and one non-Dutch. I ended up playing at the non-Dutch table, along with 5 other players. The people were great to play with and we’ve promised to meet up at a later date to finish off the adventure… That’s right, we didn’t finish the adventure. A quick look around the internet will reveal that not finishing was not an uncommon event.

Not being able to finish a session off properly generally leaves me feeling a bit negative about the session (despite the fun actually had during play). Of course, there are a number of reasons why we didn’t complete the adventure in time: we totalled 6 players instead of the ideal 5; only 3 (excluding the GM) of the 7 people at the table were English natives, individuals and the venue had there own time constraints; player inexperience was also a factor; and so on and so on. However, I think the biggest fault lies in the actual design of the adventure. It would’ve been great if we could’ve punched through the first encounter in less than hour (I’ve seen one report on it stating that it took one group more than four hours). As I understood things, the adventure was meant to a) showcase some of the new features from the Player’s Handbook 2 and b) give potential new players a chance to try out the game (and hopefully get them hooked). I think WotC focused to much on reason A, rather than reason B. The adventure was created for level 11 characters, meaning that players were given a wall of text for their numerous powers. I think this was one of the primary reasons (especially for non-English natives) for the slow rate of play. There was simply too much information.What’s the point of showing off all the cool new features, when the players are unable to pick it out from the rest quickly? A low-level, say 3rd or 4th level, adventure would have been perfect – not too many or too few powers and abilities, giving enough scope to show off the cool newness without overloading the players.

Also, a difficult encounter does not automatically = fun. The first encounter should have been short and quick, giving each player chance to throw out two or three moves each before it was over. As it turned out, every one of us players had expended all of our encounter powers and some of our dailies (playing conservatively, of course, because this was only encounter 1) at least 5 rounds before the encounter was actually over. Not cool.

- jatori

More Politics and Gaming (Magic Edition)

Should I have made the creature type Helenzilla instead?

I recently stumbled across Magic Set Editor, or MSE for short. MSE allows you to create your own cards (and thus set)s for various popular trading card games, including Magic: the Gathering. Now, at last, I too can also create those lovely cards with the pretty pictures and funny ability and flavour text (and scathing political commentary or movie/TV spoilers).

- jatori