Check out this new Comedy Central show coming up. Kröd Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire. Is it possibly The Gamers: Dorkness Rising: The Series or Order of the Stick: The Series? Check it out and see! Thanks to Topless Robot for this news; I can’t get embedding a Comedy Central video to work so there’s a slightly different promo video to watch over there!
Wizards of the Coast has sent a cease-and-desist letter resulting in the closing of popular fan site “Ema’s Character Sheets.” As usual, they refuse to comment on that action or commit to actually delivering a fan site policy so that people might be able to operate safely.
Ema’s Character Sheets had loads of high quality character sheets for 3.5e, 4e, Star Wars, and other games. They had 4e power cards, too. You could even save your characters up on their server for a fee, and they had a character builder functionality. Which was all great, and has been running without comment for years, until WotC finally got their 4e Character Builder done, then it’s nap time for the competition.
The worst thing about all this is that Wizards is going after folks without even delivering the policies that should let people know if they’re “safe” or not. The GSL revamp, the fan site policy – all in limbo for months with nothing but statements like “Well, it’s not really that important” from Scott Rouse.
Sure, the data Ema’s site (and hundreds of other sites across the Internet) was using is Wizards IP. They certainly have the “legal right” to go after anyone so much as saying the words “Dungeons & Dragons” on their site. But the point of the gaming community is to let people use that IP to advance the game. Rouse says “Oh, you know, we only really care about pirate sites posting whole torrents of our books.” But that’s clearly a lie in the face of this action. And he crosses the line from honest company rep to corporate shill when he says things like “not one website has been sued because of a lack of policy” (emphasis mine). No, you don’t have to sue them, they close down when you C&D them because they can’t afford the lawyers you can, and they are risking their own personal money, time, and life while you get to hide behind incorporation and an organization.
So what was the problem with Ema’s? That they charged for storage? That they had a “software” component? That they used Wizards IP? No one knows, and so no one can avoid that. As one poster on ENWorld pointed out, “My avatar here is Wizards IP [it’s a pic of Tanis Half-Elven’s face from DragonLance]. Can they come after ENWorld?”
The answer, legally, is yes. Their IP is their IP in our insanely corp-friendly legal system. Whether it’s charged for or whatnot is immaterial except in whether the company decides in its own mind whether you’re worth the effort to crush or not. This is why people put out real licenses and policies to create an understanding with the community that has to use some of their IP to do anything meaningful.
So for everyone who’s been taking Wizards at its word, that “Oh, you’re safe unless you’re a pirate” – it’s not true any more. And until they deliver a revised GSL and fan site policy, you can’t know if you’ll be safe. But don’t worry, they’re working on it. Real hard. Because one day soon, they will change their ways and decide to value rather than just shit on you, the online gaming community. Seriously, they say they will! How could you not believe them?
[Thanks to ENWorld for breaking the news – here’s the whole long forum thread if you’re interested. I’ll note that ENWorld charges for community supporter accounts and has 4e character sheets and power cards for download too (including Forgottten Realms IP). And where do forums/wikis end and “software” begin? Not sure they are really all that far from Ema’s site on this one.]
The Kenzer & Co. Wild West game Aces & Eights has been keeping a low profile despite taking Origins RPG of the Year and the silver Best RPG ENNie. I got the game once it came onto my radar screen and was very impressed. But I’ve been wondering where the game’ll go – I hear zero buzz on it, and there’s only a couple products out so far.
But on the Kenzer forums, good news is heard – loads of new products! In fact, David Kenzer says “2009 is mostly about Aces & Eights product.” In the hopper are:
I can’t wait! I declare 2009 Year of the Western. It is really a very good game and the genre hasn’t gotten much love lately. I wish Kenzer and the game the best, and will try to corral some folks into playing it soon!
Smart people thinking complex thoughts. Do they hate you personally, or do they just want to ruin your life for their own abstract, probably atheistic reasons?
At least, that’s how the discussion seems to be framed sometimes whenever someone wants to think about RPGs at a level deeper than “Is my lucky d20 really lucky” or “But why *can’t* I kill the goblin children?” Seems like if anyone tries to talk about RP theory it brings the pro-tard forces out of the woods. “I just likey the fun! How dare you try to analyze it? Bulk Smash!”
If you agree with Bulk there, then you’ll hate the new International Journal of Role-Playing, which has just released its (free) first issue. It’s a pretty stock academic journal in format, and includes articles like “A Hermeneutical Approach to Role-Playing Analysis.” But if you like rubbing the occassional two brain cells together, you might like it!
In the same vein is the slightly older Push: New Thinking About Roleplaying. Volume 1 is available free in PDF and there’s allegedly a Volume 2 in the works. Less scholarly but still fun.
The Finns are heavily represented; for whatever reason they are all about the RP theory. Go Team Nordic!
All this isn’t really new. Even in other geek circles, there’s loads of books that do nothing but philosophize about things norms enjoy for fun. Take Star Wars On Trial, a collection of essays (David Brin stars) about the politics, gender bias, etc. etc. of Star Wars. Heck, books like that especially for Star Wars and Star Trek are a whole genre. Firefly can boast two essay collections, Finding Serenity and Serenity Found. Orson Scott Card weighs in! Heck, here’s a representative list of books in the “Smart Pop” series with serious essays on Angel, Buffy, Spiderman, the Matrix…
It’s rare in the RPG world, except for the marginalized FORGE/Edwards wonks, probably due the the “D&D Ghetto” effect. But I think it’s worth thinking about RPGs more critically and analyzing them at a level higher than “what about the probability distribution of 3d6”?
It’s not often that D&D news makes its way into the mainstream media. We had a bunch last year with the death of beloved curmudgeon E. Gary Gygax. What’s next?
Well, in this case, Hasbro getting told off in the Consumerist about making it impossible to get out of D&D Insider. Seems that it likes to get your credit card info and never let it go.
Luckily a brave blogger has figured out the right procedure to cancel and shared it. If the java.lang.RuntimeExceptions don’t thwart you that is.
That’s corporate SOP; try to hook customers on your crap and don’t let them get out. And the economy is making companies desperate to try this. At work, many of our suppliers are trying to crank up their maintenance fees up to double the previous year’s in order to make up for down sales, hoping they have you over a barrel, with too much money already invested in to be able to jump ship.
But it’s not too late! Those of you who’ve been decieved into thinking that 4e D&D is really Dungeons & Dragons but are slowly learning the horrible truth – escape now! You can only be a couple hundred dollars into it so far. Escape while you still can!
Lamentations of the Flame Princess is doing a great, in-depth many-part series on the Gygax book “Role-Playing Mastery.” I strongly recommend it.
I still have this book. I can’t say I like it. In fact, reading it was a bit of a watershed moment for me; it’s when I decided to bail on D&D. I came back eventually, with the launch of 3e, but basically reading the book made me think, “If this is what D&D is really about… I am going to try some of these other games I’ve heard about instead.”
It took a bit of playing other games and learning some other things to have the self-possession to say “Well, I’ll come back to D&D and play it how I want, instead.” LotFP links to a rpg.net review that about sums up my take. And in the non-Internet world, I didn’t know about the Gygax break with TSR, to me and other gamers in small town Texas, Gygax was D&D and his word was law. And now reading him hold forth at greater length than ever before about what D&D is/should be – I rejected it.
What Gygax presented as being the acme of roleplay – essentially, gamist group competition – was not what I wanted. I’ve done some RPGA over the years and those are always my least favorite RP experiences by far. There are loads of small details of advice in the book, some good, some bad, but its overall zeitgeist was that- rule mastery, overcoming challenges – this is the acme of role-playing mastery. I had even at that tender age started to value world realism, plot, character immersion… None of which were reflected at all in his screed. I reckon I figured you had to take it all or not, so I chose not.
I started obsessively collecting RPGs. You don’t even want to know how many I have. I wanted to do different things, and decried friends who wouldn’t play anything else as “D&D whores” stuck in the “D&D ghetto.”
Older and wiser, having learned much (I hesitate to call what I learned “role-playing mastery,” but IMO it was more worthwhile than what the book claimed under that rubric), I returned to play D&D. Though to be honest, I’d prefer for it to be about 30% of my gaming diet, and it’s much more than that. “I’m taking it back!”
So it all turned out all right. With perspective, I regained my appreciation of D&D and Gygax. Years later, after the rise of the Net, Gygax himself flamed me as “fatuous and jejeune” on his mailing list for daring to say… his game with lots of j’s in the name, I forget which one, there were a couple… was pretty derivative of D&D. Sure, I thought “Deal with it, you coke-snorting old hack,” but it was with fondness. (After looking up WTF “fatuous” and “jejeune” meant.)
I’ve been following the debate about the so-called “Rule of Cool.” It’s a “TV Tropes” concept extended to RPGs by the Chatty DM, (original post “The Rule of Cool” here, and clarification “The Rule of Cool Takes Flak” here). A number of people gave it drive-by disses, but I think the most on topic one is from 6d6 Fireball, with Rule of Cool – Only for Idiots and Of Coolness and Idiocy.
In short, the Rule of Cool states “The limit of the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its degree of coolness. Stated another way, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality so long as the result is wicked sweet and/or awesome. This applies to the audience in general, as there will naturally be a different threshold for each individual in the group.”
If you interpret it very loosely as “Hey, toss in some cool stuff to spice up your game” it’s fine. But the way it’s stated is setting up “cool” as being carte blanche to roll over realism/suspension of disbelief. “If it’s cool enough, it can be incoherent and it’s all good.” This naturally bugs the pretty large contingent of people that have suffered through movies, TV shows, or games that were intolerable because they followed this rule. For most people, there’s only so much incoherence that coolness can cover over, and also often people overestimate how cool their “cool things” are. Let’s use Mortal Kombat II (the film) as an example. MKI successfully used the Rule of Cool. It had cool, and though the plot was tenuous you knew what was going on at least. And as a movie based on a video game, you weren’t expecting a lot in the realism department. MKII tried to forgo any coherence at all, and simply crank up the CGI stunt/explosion factor to make up for it, and it sucked hard.
But most of the discussion about this ignores the fact that media (TV/film/comic/etc), and especially RPGs because of the social contract involved, really work off an agreed-upon level of realism. People expect the level of realism (versimilitude, for you pedants) to be constant throughout a work, generally. If you’re watching Naruto, you expect mystic ninja shit. If you’re watching The West Wing, you don’t. (There are exceptions for parodies, which derive humor from the sudden shift, or deliberate “reality gets weird” transitions like The Matrix.) And you get pissed off if that is violated.
Some people complain that “Oh, but I find political intrigue ‘cool.’ Sure, but the Rule of Cool, if you go read it and see all the examples on tvtropes.org, is very not about that. The “cool” it’s talking about is usually worded as “kewl” in polite circles.
Anyway, the point is that people expect a certain level of cool-to-realism that you should understand and not jack with. And it can vary from game to game/campaign to campaign.
As an RPG example, I love the game Feng Shui. It’s a game largely based on the Rule of Cool, and its system encourages cool, its characters are based around cool, etc. When you are playing Feng Shui, you are explicitly allowing “running up a stream of bullets and kicking you in your bitch ass face” as part of your worldview. And I have lots of fun doing that.
However, there are other games that are set up to be more realistic or “serious.” If you tried to run up a trail of arrows in Warhammer FRP, the only “cool” you’d get is a lengthy description of how your new groin wound drips a variety of interesting liquids. In my group’s current campaign, the Curse of the Crimson Throne, our gaming metaphor is reasonably simulationist, enough that though there are certainly “cool things” in it, small plotting problems and inconsistencies do get to me.
D&D presents a special problem. The vast majority of gamers are stuck in what I call the “D&D Ghetto.” It’s the only game they know, or the only game they’ve played, or the only game they can find a group to play. It is the alpha and omega of roleplaying and cannot be escaped. As a result, many different groups try to get their favorite jones – deep immersion, or gritty realism, or cinematic cool, or gamist challenge – using it. There’s a surprising amount of difference between many D&D players and groups’ styles. So realism junkies that love “sandbox” gaming see the Rule of Cool as a burning bag of poo that would run their game,and it is. (As it’s stated as a “rule,” and not a “hey if you want this kind of thing here’s what you can do…” it deserves the criticism.) If you take an existing game full of “Gygaxian naturalists” and ladle in a bunch of exploding ninjas, they are going to think you’re an assmaster.
In fact, I think the biggest failing of the Rule of Cool is it setting up plot/realism/consistency and cool as opposing pairs. They’re separate factors that different media have more or less of, and there are other factors. In a way, it’s just saying that “any medium, to be enjoyed, needs *something* enjoyable in it.” Maybe that’s “wrestling a panther under water, driving a motorcycle on top of a train and jumping out of a burning aircraft with a rocket launcher and somehow managing to turn around and blow up several missiles headed straight for his ally’s helicopter with it.” Maybe it’s a tight, coherent plot. Maybe it’s some hot ass babes. Maybe it’s compelling characters. Whatever. You can decide to work with some of these at the expense of others. But in general, people want/expect a certain level of it, based on their impressions going in. Trying to mess with the cool/disbelief ratio, either up or down, will get people upset with you.
So run a game with high Cool, or something else compelling – but know your group, and make sure people have aligned expecations about the tone of the game. I like high Cool and high realism in turn, as long as I’m in the right mode.
Like everyone else, I’ve been out of pocket for the holidays. But I’m back, and more gaming goodness is coming your way soon!
First, our gaming group will be running a short Savage Worlds campaign. One of our members (Bruce, our session scribe and Valash Not-Gurelle from our Curse of the Crimson Throne game) is having to travel on business most of the next couple months. As a result, weeks when he’s not in town you will not get a Crimson Throne session summary, but instead a “Empire of Ashes” summary, powered by Savage Worlds and run by Chuck. Exciting!
Second, I’m excited about the new RPG Superstar 2009 contest being held by Paizo, and I’ll be reporting on this year’s as I did on last year’s! And I’ve entered Round One with a wondrous item – let’s see how that goes.
Third, I’ve been reading a lot lately, and my curse from being a RPG geek for so long is that I always try to apply what I read to gaming, from the gaming-ready plots of World War Z to the world-building advice of Guns, Germs, and Steel… So I’m going to start installments of Books and Gaming (needs a better title). May as well fill the gap – AD&D 1e had a while bibliography of suggested reading. This has given way to “filmographies” for more recent games, or even “watch the TV show I’m based on” – or now with D&D 4e, whose inspiration is simply “touching myself while gold farming in World of Warcraft.”
Happy 2009 to all!
Posted in talk
Tagged contest, D&D, gaming resources, Pathfinder, RPG, rpg superstar 2009, savage worlds, superstar
Animals. In many games, the most basic foe. (Heck, in World of Warcraft it doesn’t matter what level you get to, there are mutated demon boars of EXACTLY YOUR LEVEL to kill!) But the real world is often more hardcore than your average fantasy realm. Take this new fun Cracked article on The Six Deadliest Creatures (That Can Fit In Your Shoe).
There’s the golden dart frog, which is so poisonous that Wikipedia claims chickens and dogs have died from contact with a paper towel on which one had walked. Now that’s an unfortunate trap for the party ranger; poisonous tracks!
Or the scorpion which is called, with no exaggeration, the Deathstalker. Lame overblown D&D 4e name? No, it’s a couple inches long and you’re quite likely to die of it. Imagine the giant variety!
And why has poison become so lame in D&D? It’s just a DC check for some stat damage. The Brazilian Wandering Spider’s venom not only causes pain and spasms, but gives you a huge rock-hard boner like a critical Viagra overdose while you go out (no, really!). Tell THAT to your next poisoned PC and they won’t be so blase about it any more.
Or, for more inspiration, 6 Endangered Species That Aren’t Endangered Enough. Here’s a ready-made scenario, the Slavemaker Ant! It fakes death to be carried into another ant nest, where it kills the queen, coats itself in her parts, and then the locals raise the eggs it raises! You could probably do the same thing with halflings.
Geek Related 