Yudhishthira’s Dice

As you can see, no Dog’s review yet.

My computer died, it ate the review, it made me cry.

Maybe someday I’ll rewrite it.

There’s a new gaming forum up, not just for RPGs but gaming in general. It’s focus is a feminist-oriented community for women who love gaming and men who want to network with and learn from said women.

It is The IRIS Network and I wish it well. If all my talk about sexism and inclusion turns your crank, you should check this one out.

So, for any of you who might possibly give a flip, if I were to convert Tribe 8 into a hippy game, which of the following would you be most interested in seeing?

1. Tribe 8 Burning Wheel
2. Tribe 8 TSOY
3. Tribe 8 Silhouette with Keys or Beliefs and Flags and Hippy Shit grafted on
4. Tribe 8 Conspiracy of Shadows
5. Tribe 8 Dogs in the Spiritual Development Land
6. Tribe 8 Other thing that Brand is obviously a tard for having not considered

So let me hear it. Especially, you know, if you actually play with me — because this may be the game we do later this year.

(Yes, I’m talking to you. I know you’re reading the damn blog, now comment!)

So there is this meme going about among my friends to do something creative every day this month and post it. I figure I’ll do the next worst thing and do a post to the blog every day, as I do creative stuff everyday for money and this is something that I enjoy in place of actually creating anything.

So today is cheat day, and my post is this deceleration.

However, be sure to check out Mo’s Relationship Builder Tool and my situation/relationship map that I built using it. That’s longer than most posts, and so counts for something in my cheating books.

Here is my top 10 list for RPGdom in 2006.

10. Agon – for bringing competition between players back to the table in a field that’s grown to be dominated by cooperation as the only model. While it doesn’t push as far as Burning Empires, it is the best step in this direction I’ve seen since Rune.

9. Story Games — A significant new gaming forum where I happened to spend a lot of time, have a lot of arguments, and learned more than a few things about RPGs and RPG design. I have to admit I’ve drifted a bit from the discussion recently, but it was a significant new force for the year.

8. Gender in RPG essays and posts — Jim, Neel, Malcolm, John Kim, Jessica Hammer, Mo, Matt Wilson and especially Peaseblossom have all done some amazing work in putting gender and sex issues back in the forefront of RPG theory discussion. The 20×20 Room and Storygames all had numerous powerful, and often controversial, posts on this subject.

7. Full Light, Full Steam and Ludanta Retero — A combo team! FLFS brings us back to Victoriana, but this time with a coherent system that does a lot of things I like. The pattern matching and protagonist reinforcement of the script system is awesome. It also goes well with the other Sci-Fi and Weird History stuff Josh has been working on: both Agora and Sons of Liberty’s playtests made it a year of the alternate past and future.

6. Hero’s Banner — For being the exact opposite of The Wounded Lion, a game I was working on. Hero’s Banner is a tight game about the things your character has to lose to become a hero, the roads not traveled, and the terrible human price of heroism.

5. Sin Aesthetics — Sure, I’m prejudiced. But in a year with a lot of quiet on a lot of blogs, Mo managed to bring the hammer out on a couple of topics that ended up becoming big. Her work on Push/Pull was cool, but I think her later work on sockets and payoffs is more important.

4. Game Chef — Not just because I know a lot of the finalists either. There were a lot of games done this year, and the contest worked wonderfully to give a lot of folks a chance to cut their chops and learn where they were solid and where they needed a lot of improvement in game design.

3. Spirit of the Century — the best Pulp game to date, full of the nifty and the fun. While its a bit thick to be a game that everyone can pickup, it works wonders as a pickup game so long as one person in the group actually knows the rules. The use of group character creation, novels, reliance on aspects to drive the game, and the FUDGE system make this one a champion.

2. The Great Pendragon Campaign — Massive, detailed, filled with love for both the game and the subject, and the culmination of many years of Pendragon writing and publishing. While it isn’t perfect for me, with my hippy gaming ways, it’s pretty damn close and has enough material for years of solid gaming.

1. Burning Empires — though it moves in a direction away from much of where I’m going in my personal games, this game is a solid step forward in game design. The way that the whole campaign of a game is structured, set up as a group, and ran with straightforward rules about competition really pushes the envelope on RPG as game. It’s also the start of a new movement away from the punk-rock roots of “indie” games — we’re now getting to the point where color glossy and art-filled no longer means “big name publisher” nor “little guy betting his shirt.”

Okay, so I’ve repeatedly turned off the option to require people to register before posting comments. Spam comes through from non-registered folks, but other people can’t comment without a name and password.

Does anyone have a clue what I’m doing wrong?

Edit: I think this may be fixed. Those of you that were having problems, can you try again?

The inemitable Levi Kornelsen has opened a new forum for the discussion of RPG craft and play, called GameCraft.

Normally I don’t post much about forums, due to my mixed relations with them. However I felt this one worth giving a shout out to due to its mission statement of being specifically focused on refining play. It’s not the place where you talk about theory, its not the place where you talk about Exalted canon NPCs, its the place where you talk about ways to make the actual games you actually play better.

It’s a noble goal, and I wish it well. Check it out, even if the other forums aren’t hitting your buttons this one may have a chance to give you something valuable.

Push Volume 1 is now on sale.

For those of you living under a rock, Push is the new journal of RPG esoterica, design, and theory that was put together by Jonathan Walton. The first volume has essays by the inimitable Emily Care Boss, Eero Tuovinen, and the badass John Kim, as well as games by Jonathan and Shreyas Sampat. It also has guest commentary by the cool kids: Moyra Turkington, Jessica Hammer, Annie Rush, Paul Tevis, and Victor “I’ll kill your gazebo” Gijsbers.

Oh, and me. But don’t let that stop you from checking it out.

(And you have no idea when writing “RPG esoterica” how badly I wanted to write “RPG erotica.”)

Right now Thomas is interviewing Mo over on his blog, Musings and Mental Meanderings. It’s quite an interesting read for those of you who may not have heard Mo’s gaming history.

I’d like to call special attention to her second reply where she talks about her experience with “soap” play live on stage — and the way that their blocked scenes resemble and do not resemble scene framing, scene targets, and that odd and illusive form of authorship in which people still create both character and story despite not being in directory control nor having final say over the shape of the story. It seems, to me, to point to a divide between authoring your character and authoring the story that has been under explored to this point. I know that it would explain a lot of why I can’t be comfortable playing in trad games while I can GM them with no problem — I am not a good author of character, only a good author of story. So when I can’t author the story in a moderately direct way, I choke. Mo, otoh, has a perfect background for authorship of character as primary and is used to indirectly pulling the story through character focus — which may be why she has a harder time GMing.

Anyway, my blathering speculations aside, it’s interesting stuff. Check it.

So here we are in our fancy WordPress digs.

Now, if someone could tell me how to make the gutter between the post and the sidebar a bit wider, I’d appreciate it. Also, any must have plugins or the like — let me hear about em.