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May 12th, 2008
roleplayers
[casiel]
 | 08:01 am - yet another D&D 3.5 question
Are there any Lizardfolk indigenous to the Silver Marches area?
I realize that cold climate is anathema to most reptiles, but was wondering if there's an existing exception to this rule for northern Faerun... other than the Ice Serpent (or other quasi- air elemental)?
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chadu
 | 05:54 am - Speed Racer Bingo
( Image behind the cut )
Made for the cartoon, but next time I see the movie, I may try this.
Updated to Add:
Perfect example of why you can't trust Roger Ebert's review of Speed Racer:
To us, this show was just filler between after-school reruns of "Gilligan's Island" and "The Munsters." We watched it because it was on, and it was in color.
Anybody who considered Speed Racer filler and The Munsters and freaking Gilligan's Island the meat...
I. Have. No. Words.
(If he'd said The Addams Family, Batman, or STar Trek, I might be able to agree mildly. But then, the latter two were definitely not in rerun when Ebert was a lad.)
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immlass
 | 01:12 am - Tweets
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
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May 11th, 2008
bruceb
 | 10:35 pm - Son of Play By Post Attempt: Spirit of the Revolution
Gonna take another run at this pbp thing with semi-official champions of the Russian Revolution.
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roleplayers
[paka]
 | 09:50 pm - Pendragon?
Okay, in the realm of games I've been fantasizing about running, I recently inherited some old "Pendragon" stuff. It looks like a cool game and I kinda want to run it, though I'm not really that interested in the whole James-Michener-follow-the-family-through-Arthurian-history angle.
I'd also kind of want to play with the setting within the limits of it being genero-early-Medieval-Britain, anywhere from 500 to 1000 CE. This makes Arthur's Britain an urbane country of the Carolingian Renaissance, a place where people travel from as far afield as the Ummayad/Abbasid empire and pagan Scandinavia. I figure the game could also tolerate a few more anachronisms, like books on veterinary medicine, or a Danelaw in northeastern England, that sort of thing.
Would anyone have any thoughts about Pendragon, and running the system? Up to and including the most important one, "do you find that gamers are actually interested in, and willing to play in, the fairly limited scope of Pendragon?
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chadu
| 09:18 pm - The One Downside of SPEED RACER
I now have an overwhelming urge to play Car Wars or in a GURPS Autoduel campaign.
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chadu
 | 05:56 pm - Speed Racer (No Spoilers, but read whole thing)
Speed Racer is a horrible film.
Speed Racer is a kinda lame movie.
Speed Racer is possibly the most perfect flick ever produced.
MACH-A-GO-GO!
In other words: I love it when people make movies just for me.
(Check my movies tag, and especially this post for my cinematic tastes.)
Lemme scroll back.
When my plans for the day fell apart, I hied myself to a matinee of Speed Racer. I had initially been worried by reviews I'd seen in my F-list, and was unwilling to risk the cash on a full price admission.
I. Was. Wrong. Spock.
Speed Racer the flick is a visual love-letter to the Speed Racer cartoon, created with thought, craft, and art.
It is better than the cartoon, without a single misstep against the cartoon. It improves upon awesome, becoming liquid awesome with xylitol.
True! One could even say FACT.
Indeed, I am not angry at those who didn't like the flick as much as I. Instead, I feel... pity.
Pity that they could not appreciate this summation and explication of a key piece of my childhood. De gustibus... and all that, but yet: I feel sad that the naysayers got little to nothing out of this masterpiece of flick-dom.
That being said, here is the calculus of viewing:
* If you have never seen the Speed Racer cartoon, or do not like it, give this movie a pass. See it if it's on cable and you have nothing better to do.
* If you have seen the Speed Racer cartoon, but do not like its silly or wacky bits, consider the local cheap theater or Drafthouse Cinema. If you're feeling generous, rent it.
* If you have seen the Speed Racer cartoon, and glory in its silly or wacky bits, matinee (if feeling cagey) or full price show.
Speed Racer has entered into my list of favorite films.
So there.
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roleplayers
[tacohunter]
 | 04:01 pm - the perfect recipe for a bad role-playing game
4 to 5 characters starting at very high level (20th+ level for D&D, 150+ starting xp for any White Wolf game)
give 1 million gp to each character for starting equipment and magic items
add 1 GM who insists on creating his own NPC to travel with the party
oh! and two of the players are ex'es who can't really tolerate each other in large doses
what am I missing?
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chadu
 | 12:02 pm - [s7s] Second Local Gamma Playtest for S7S
Yesterday, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) drivingblind and oletheros came over to the De-Luxe Apt in tha Sky-y-y, so I could run the second local S7S "gamma" playtest.
Short form: It went really well.
( details behind the cut )
Huzzah!
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immlass
 | 11:17 am - Recommend a song
I have an iTunes 50-song gift certificate. It can't be used to buy albums, but just single songs. Knowing my taste in music (my last.fm) or hell, just liking shit, what "singles" would you recommend I buy from iTunes?
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/punquinheads/pink/curious.gif) curious
Current Music: silence is golden
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rpgtheoryreview
| 02:25 pm - Weekly Review April 13th to April 19th
http://rpgtheoryreview.blogspot.com/2008/05/weekly-review-april-13th-to-april-19th.html This has been a slow week in RPG theory, but not without developments.
Beyond Yes and No
Tommi Brander talks about resolution and blocking, and different variants to these two methods. As he puts it, resolution is essentially affirming a contribution from a player, while blocking simply negates it. The remainder involve contributions in response: switching - negating and changing the situation, opening - negating and offering options, complicating - affirming and changing the situation, and building - affirming and offering options.
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rpgtheoryreview
| 02:17 pm - Weekly Review April 6th to April 12th
http://rpgtheoryreview.blogspot.com/2008/05/weekly-review-april-6th-to-april-12th.html This week has seen some activity in RPG theory, dealing with the general process and products of play.
Rules and Paradigm
Elliot Wilen separates out the means and process of playing RPGs into two categories for design. One is the system or rules of the game. The other is the paradigm of the game, which determines responsibilities and expectations. He suggests that most RPG design mixes these two, but paradigm becomes more prevalent as during play - becoming the foundation of how the game is actually played.
Meanwhile, Vincent Baker talks about where rules can bring something to play beyond what paradigm's understandings and agreements can. Specifically, he suggests that rules produce "the unwelcome and the unwanted", but well designed rules produce them in such as way to be compelling to the players.
Products of Playing
Adam Dray discusses the view of play as the product of the techniques, social agreements, and processes that make up the game. Later on, he expands on this idea pertaining to designer's intent and the products which players will enjoy. The result is a variety of possible outcomes of design, and possible ways to remedy those less desirable.
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eyebeams
 | 03:22 am
I declare Silat to be totally awesome.
The rest of this is notes from the seminar which you may or may not understand. I think I may have forgotten one or two things.
( Read more... )
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chadu
 | 02:29 am - My New Favorite Song
( Creepy Doll )
So I'm late to the JoCo party. Wanna fight about it?
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immlass
| 01:11 am - Tweets
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter
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gamers_of_color
[revena]
 | 09:27 pm - Skin color in D&D Insider
I was invited to a preview of D&D Insider content last month, and have been meaning to make a post here about the miniature builder application. I touched on skin color a teeny bit in the article I wrote for Cerise this month, but to both summarize and elaborate:
The miniature builder is based largely on slider bars, which means that there's a wide spectrum for things like height and weight.
I asked specifically about racial characteristics for human characters, and was shown an extremely varied color palette (all sorts of shades of brown, and also stuff like red in case your part-dragon or something). I was told that there's a wide variety of facial features to pick from, and that it would be possible to create a miniature that would reflect pretty much any ethnicity. I didn't personally see all of the options (the program was crashing, and it's really still very beta), but I saw a few different faces that were quite distinct from one another.
I also asked specifically about weight, since we have some fat acceptance activists on the Iris forums, and I knew they'd want to know. What I said was, "how fat can you get?" and either Youngs or Rouse (I didn't write it down, and I couldn't tell from my recording) said, "not fat enough, in my opinion." We then talked for a little while about how players might want to make a fat avatar, and Youngs and Rouse were both really interested in and thoughtful about the ways the miniature builder program could be tweaked and further developed to fit what players want. I was really heartened to see them taking a question like that so seriously, and I liked that everyone seemed really invested in keeping the applications in Insider constantly developing to meet players' expectations.
So, basically, I really liked what I saw of the miniature builder application, and I think it'll be quite possible for people to create characters of color and/or characters which look quite a lot like their players. Which is one good thing about the 4e release, in terms of race. Possibly the only one. :-P
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/thinking.gif) thoughtful
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rob_donoghue
 | 12:21 am - A random thought
Was well enough for dinner with folks, and a fine dinner it was, but a particular phrase came up, and I just want to plant a flag in it:
You can run off and live happily ever after, or you can save the day, but you can't do both.
It came up in the context of the lessons of some YA fiction, but I don't think that's the end of it.
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May 10th, 2008
amberley
| 09:10 pm - May brings Little Brothers
Cory Doctorow's book tour for his excellent new YA novel Little Brother about teen hackers vs. homeland security, is coming to Seattle May 17-20, Berkeley May 21st, and Los Altos and San Francisco May 22nd, along with other dates in other places. He's very interesting in person, even if xkcd may have been kidding about the red cape and goggles.
ETA: And now there's a way to donate copies of Little Brother to teachers and librarians. I've donated six copies, and since I have Amazon Prime, Amazon paid for the shipping. Very pleasing.
Current Music: Dar Williams: Teenagers, Kick Our Butts
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jimhenley
 | 11:41 pm - What Just Bit Me???
No worries: it was just the theater bug! Precipice is doing shows this month, and Gary has student performances for 45 mins before the professionals' play. The student performances are scene-length, with some side-coaching - in addition to being a reward for class work, it's also advertising for the workshops: whoever's in the audience for the student segment gets to see something of how the classes go. We warmed up with some exercises, mostly impulse-passing. (Make a "big" gesture - later combined with sounds - at the next person in the group, who repeats it with you and then passes it to the next person etc.) Because Gary kept coaching us to add energy, we were pretty damn loose and, dropping into sports-speak for a second, pumped by the time the "show" proper started. My scenes: Me and D. in, said the audience, a laundromat. Our job: to notice something about the other and react to it emotionally, using few words as late in the process as possible. In the first version of the scene, I noticed that D. had decided to wash the pants he'd worn into the laundromat. "Is that a problem??" he wanted to know. The scene ended when I noticed he'd decided to wash his underwear too . . . In the second take, D. noticed that I had an ear-hair. This gave me a chance to be embarrassed and annoyed with him and him a chance to wonder why I was so worked up about it. K., P. and I in, said the audience person, "a retirement home for clowns." (Gary: "Can you be more specific?") This was an "each of you begin the scene by noticing something about an object and reacting to it emotionally" scene. The procedure is, once one person has a strong reaction, the partner(s) react to that person. The verboten thing in these scenes is mere curiosity. Even though you may not know what the object is or why it's such a big deal, your character does, so you act that way. In this case, I put myself in a wheelchair (just a chair-chair in real life of course) and "noticed" that my parking brake was busted, but K. took focus when she noticed that her clown nose didn't squeak any more and began to cry. P. offered K. her own clown nose, which I think we can all agree was a very sweet thing to do. The scene ended when the consoled and now quite giddy K. jumped into my lap in the wheelchair and, as K. and I hugged for joy, I gestured to P. to hop on too. It was all keyed by K. going with the spontaneous impulse, but what we ended up with was a small vehicle containing an absurd number of clowns. Without even trying! Then we repeated a two-person scene exercise from this week's class: one person sits on the couch, discovers something about an object and has a strong emotional reaction. The second person enters the room with (pantomimed) shopping bags. The first person says something about their reaction to the returning shopper. The shopper MUST cross the room, set the bags down and say, "I got the groceries" as his first action and dialog. On Tuesday, and most of tonight, we perpetuated a very, um, gendered structure to this couch-sitting and grocery-bringing business: it was pretty much always the guy on the couch and the woman lugging home the shopping. So S. and I broke the pattern. She sat on the couch and discovered that we had the winning lottery ticket. I tossed the groceries on the counter and shared enthusiasm. There was hugging and jumping. There were other great scenes not involving me. Naturally, I'm not going to tell you about them. The entire evening was a blast, and was as much fun as I remember doing theater to be. I was happy with my energy level and my general range of motion - including what we call "changing level" (sitting, standing, flopping etc.). I think I can do a better job sometimes of really keying directly on my partner's moment-to-moment modulations. My classmates were impressive as heck! The ones I worked with made performing easy. The others were a huge pleasure to watch.
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roleplayers
[gatorclix]
 | 09:03 pm - Total Noob-ish Question
I have two sons (11&9) who are very much interested in fantasy. We actually have (and have played) the introductory, prepackaged D&D set that is out there. Now, however, we need some new adventures to play. Can anyone help me out by pointing me to some low level, fun and pre made adventures I can find to take the boys through?
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