One Monkey, One Typewriter

Chance Would Be A Fine Thing

2011-07-05T17:07:00.000+01:00

Visited London at the weekend to stay with gamer Mike. I got the double pleasure of playing his Tron lightcycle tabletop game, which is a real toy experience, and running a PULP game for Mike, Nick, Rob and Vicky.

They opted for Western style and we produced a slice of fairly moody frontier drama. The characters created weren't high toned enough for spaghetti Western, or silly enough for heroic Western, although Nick's Riverboat gambler did seem to fit into any of the above.

We elected, due to time restraints, to generate characters on the fly and that worked out very well indeed. I'm really happy with the fact that PULP is becoming the most invisible of all of our systems in terms of the dichotomy between support and absence.

On the way home with Justin had a big discussion about the way that No Dice is going and what we might like to do to plan for the future. I'm surprised to find that I am having difficulty viewing any level of corporate involvement as any kind of help at this stage. One day I would love to use what I've learned to design a game with a "proper" games company but I'm not sure that any of our current projects would benefit from the involvement of the wise and wonderful in the world of RP. After all we still have acres of niche to exploit getting PULP RP and the Core System into the homes of gamers everywhere mostly down to the failure of everyone else in the world to really fill the narrative void. This is down in no small part to a corporate model which believes such things to be, at best, too risky to be viable.

I'm also enjoying the Robin Hood act, being generous, being crazy, trying to claim the market with kindness. I'd say it hasn't paid off, except it's starting to. That's what's enormously encouraging. People are coming forth and saying that No Dice is "a good thing". I wouldn't want anything to interfere with that currently.

On Walkabout...

2011-06-29T14:22:00.000+01:00

I think I need to work out what to put in this blog a bit more carefully. I find that the topics I have covered recently tend to just reflect information I have given elsewhere more succinctly (or more thoroughly, whichever is appropriate).

The good thing about a blog should be the "random noodley" aspect and I think I've been altogether too organised about this. Also I have written enthusiastically and communicating ireful passion on things that, in reality were no more than minor irritations. (See D&D, Cards vs. Dice etc.)

I think when I can decide what needs to go here it will be a lot gentler than it has been.

I am also not committing to being "back" from walkabout in any significant way. Let's just see how many posts are forthcoming before we commit to that.

To be honest, I feel in the world of blogs I am a constant participant who is mostly ignored anyway. So I feel it makes very little difference whether I blog or not.

I only blog when it makes a difference to me. I would like my blog to be interactive and a forum for lively debate. Maybe I have been too definite in my opinions for that. Wishy washiness is something that blogs seem to be built for so commenters can be seen to be swaying the blogger one way or another.

Anyway, that's all there is for now.

The Year of the Gamer Beard

2011-01-02T14:04:00.000Z

What's struck me, particularly, this Christmas is how far the ideas of No Dice have come in 2010. It hasn't been the most glamorous of years for the endeavour although we have got out into the world and played the hell out of some games. We've just kept plugging away at it. Something curious is starting to emerge.

Back at the start of this whole No Dice mullarkey what we were essentially doing was formalising aspects of what Role Players the world over know as "free form role play" i.e. role play with few rules and not very much dice rolling. The problem I think most gamers had with that, if indeed they did have a problem with it, was that there wasn't very much to formalise.

This was true.

I think the further problem some of them may have had was that they believed that once it was done that would be it. There would be no more work to do. It would all peter out. I didn't believe that when I started and I'm amazed anyone should think that would be the case as of now.

The amount of narrative techniques we've mined out through just trying to make role playing more of an entertainment and less of a game has been staggering. I've spent my spare moments of the last few days grinding through archetypes and what not in an attempt to bring out the PULPiness of PULP. And that's just the beginning.

For this reason I have declared 2011 the year of the gamer beard because I imagine many theories will be unpacked in the next twelve months. I suppose I'd better go and get ready for that then.

D&D Cheats It's Way To The Top (Well, Nearly To The Top)*

2010-12-20T14:56:00.000Z

Today the halls of geekdom have rung with gleeful joy at the news that D&D hit the number 3 spot in Channel 4's 100 Greatest Toys list show. The ranking has been seen as an official endorsement of the popularity and quality of the entire field of Role Playing, a gold star in the annals of pen and paper role playing history.

Well, sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but this news, to me, seems to be an indication of only one thing: D&D players can rig an online vote.

I mean for the sake of fuck D&D beat the Wii! If that doesn't tell you everything then it bloody well should. The Wii is a stupidly named piece of technology that just about every adult and child in Japan, North America and Europe is at least aware of. In my work office I think every one of my colleagues has held a Wii controller in their hand. The number of people in my office who have ever even seen a d20? Oh, that would be me then.

Here's my prediction for the future glory of this ranking. It will serve only as a pyrrhic victory. What's even more damning than the fact that several people have expressed surprise at the ranking is that 100s more simply don't give a toss. The fact is, most people see RPGs as a creatively bankrupt haven for socially maladjusted geeks and this blatant vote rigging does nothing to change anyone's mind.

Here's my summary of the societal conversation going on here:

D&D Players: I think that we have empirically proven that D&D is the 3rd greatest toy in the world.
Everyone else: No, you haven't. (Goes back to playing with their Wii and talking about how Lego deserved the top spot.)

This isn't any kind of moral victory. It's a gigantic surge of all that is worst about meta/power gaming that demonstrates precisely the reason why most sensible human beings regard the hobby of role playing as something they would never get involved with.

D&D Players have just done the wider world of role playing a huge disservice and for once I am slightly ashamed to be a role player.

The problem is that D&D is where it all began and the entire hobby has got stuck in this D&D based cul-de-sac. D&D shouldn't be the core of an activity called Role Playing... I'm not sure the activity should have a core. In fact I'd go so far as to say that while D&D maintains it's stranglehold on the hobby it will never grow significantly. D&D should be an option of many equal options. Not the only game in town.

As usual I'm not saying there's anything wrong with D&D in and of itself. I personally find the whole thing stupefying and wouldn't play in a game unless you payed me a hefty sum of money. If you love it, though, you love it and that's mostly cool.

All I've noticed is that all the people who have written off my hobby as a refuge for weirdoes are now doing so just a little bit harder. The almost complete lack of acknowledgement of the weirdness of this result just tells me that people's brains are refusing to accept that role playing is a valid hobby at all.

D&D players have just made No Dice's mission a tiny bit harder. Thanks for nothing all those who voted.

* In my opinion. If your opinion differs you are both naive and wrong.**
** In my opinion.

The Happy Writer

2010-12-02T15:01:00.003Z

Way back in the mists of time (2006 actually) I wrote a pithy series of writing tutorials aimed at getting a chunk of writing just... you know... done. Hang the quality, hang the need for editing, hang everything, just get it done.

The series was, of course, occasioned by the advent of that year's Nanowrimo. People seemed, continue to seem, to view the production of 50k words of novel something of a burden and a trial. For myself it's only a burden and a trial if my other life commitments physically prevent me from partaking. The actual production of 50k words is a matter of sitting down and opening the floodgates until they're all finished. This year I had a bit of a sudden sprint to the finish slapping down 15k last Sunday to fall panting and exhausted at the finish line with something like a reasonable rough draft. I had another book to proof and put the final touches on, events to host and a regular life to live around this. Probably why I found it quite such a trial.

The point is that I at no point found the actual writing difficult. As I get older getting through the writing is the least difficult part in the production of work. I see questions from aspiring writers on Q&A sites like this asking which bell and whistle laden "writer's word processor" to use to keep track of what's going on. I use notepad. Just me and the words, baby, locked in a continual stream.

The use of notepad to draft a novel is, in some ways, the most hardcore possible way to write with a keyboard, or indeed in any way. You see a sheet of paper can only be so large, a dedicated word processor document quickly becomes unwieldy, with a text editor you just keep on writing, until you're done. No muss, no fuss. If you never find yourself in a position where you're not "in the groove" then any faffing around with notes and formatting and saving chapter files and so on and so forth is just time wasted.

Yet, curiously, in all the world I seem to be alone in this. I do not know of one other writer in the world who can just turn it on and write. Possibly my father, he always kept impeccable office hours and wrote everything in LocoScript which is quite a lot like a text editor. He never discussed how he wrote with us, he just did.

Now, unless I'm some kind of superhuman mutant I can't see why it would be that I can discipline myself to write "on tap" and no one else could. If I were going to look for obvious differences between me and almost every other living person who considers themselves to be some kind of writer I can see a few that may contribute:

Absence of illusions. I'm not doing what I'm doing to woo big publishers or to make the Times Bestseller List. I'm doing it because it's what I do.
Sense of fun. Because I have no illusions the business of writing stories and story games has become a fun hobby, I know of no other hobbyist writers, all writers I have ever encountered are limbering up for an encounter with the big leagues that likely will never come.
Lack of social pressure or cultural targets. Because I am purely in this to have a bit of fun I am not constrained to squash novels into a commercially viable length, or to worry about whether the thing I'm writing fits under a generic banner in a massive bookstore. I don't need to think about whether there's too much emotional content in an action story, or too much action in a love story. I tell the story the way I think it should be told and hang everyone else's opinion.

To summarise, I just don't actually care about the concerns others may have about whether my stuff "works". Hell if I could, should I put my mind to it, breeze through over half a million words in a year and still live a completely other life that has nothing to do with writing then it's not really much of a loss if something doesn't come off the way I planned. This year alone I've written two role playing systems and a novel.

One of the role playing systems is typeset and ready to roll Monday of next week in time for Christmas. The potential number of productions I could roll out next year is mind-boggling. I am creatively fecund, prolific and master of my own destiny thanks to POD services.

From a typesetting point of view, production of the role playing systems has proven so challenging that the idea of publishing a novel now seems like something I would undertake in a weekend. For me personally, the act of writing and producing works of fiction this way has been so immensely rewarding and personally satisfying I can't imagine having done things any other way.

If I have one complaint it is the common one that the world has not, thus far, seen fit to shower me with sufficient personal largesse for my efforts to dedicate my life to these projects full time. On the other hand, how many people discover the same things through the bitterly frustrating and unfair process of the traditional publishing markets? How many people are left twisted and broken in the ruins of their dreams and ambitions because they can't just let it go? Hey I haven't gained a bank balance that could buy me my own personal island, but I don't hate the thought of warming up the word processor (or notepad) and bashing out a couple of thousand words either.

If you are a writer, look at what you do and ask. Am I having fun? Is this really what I wanted? Am I pleasing myself or some impossible commercial dream state? What do I really want to get out of writing? How many people need to engage with my work before I am happy?

You may find that the answers to those questions lead you down a different path to the one you imagined. One with far fewer riches and launch parties but one with a great deal of personal achievement and a pleasant feeling of stability unattainable by many other methods.

Blogging On The Run... No Surprise There

2010-12-02T09:02:00.000Z

If you do happen to follow this blog then there's really no point in me telling you where I've been since the end of September as that should be blatantly obvious. Shadow Cities is out on Monday (and as it is, for the most part, a digital entity, the snow will find it hard to stop this) Nano is complete and the brain is therefore in a little pre-Christmas free fall. No bad thing there.

Over this past couple of years I've had ample opportunity to learn some things about the business of writing in the modern world. I'd already learned all the depressing stuff like how sending your manuscript to agents and hoping that it progressed from there to a publishing house to a book store to a career of bestselling blockbusterdom was a recipe for bitterness, anguish and disappointment. Yes, I'd learned all that stuff pretty well.

What I've learned in the following months that is now nearly two years is that becoming a happy self-publisher is maybe not as lucrative as stepping into the world of bestselling blockbuster authors but it a) can be more fun and b) is a hell of a lot more satisfying.

I look back over three years of Nano where I've got some good solid work done, most of a Levercastle novel, all of a Shadow Cities novel and, outside Nano three RP books contributed to and more than that besides and I realise that as a commercial writer these days there's no chance. No possibility in hell that you could produce that much. Even if you wrote it no big house would be in a position to publish it the way they want.

Anyway, I would like to promise more on this topic soon but who knows when I will next have an opportunity to sit at the keyboard like this? Hopefully soon. But that's always the case.

You turn your back for...

2010-09-29T09:02:00.000+01:00

...well, roundabout two and a half years, but still.

Re reading some of my really old blogs from '06 and thereabouts made me misty eyed for the days of impotent rage directed at the bad boys of publishing and the inert populace who sheep-like bought from them leaving hearty POD fare to be picked over by carrion crows. Well I decided to swiftly Google the state of play. What search term? There could be none other than "slush pile".

Within one page of results and minimal ferreting about I discover not one but three writing communities that offer an ostensibly fairer method of separating the pearls from the swine. So I'm going to stop mixing or indeed mangling metaphors and head off to ponder this new state of affairs.

Back In The Saddle

2010-09-23T00:14:00.000+01:00

So yes.

Been a while. A good while. Those of you who have been following the continuing saga of No Dice will know that I've been putting all my effort into what I shall now dub "No Dice Phase I". No Dice Phase I consists of: The Core Book, Random Encounters, Levercastle, Shadow Cities and PULP RP and represents a full cycle of work.

If No Dice has any BIG IDEAS trust me most of them are in this Phase I. Sure there are plenty more ideas in Dreamtime Stories and Marauders and so on. But these are all derived from the BIG IDEAS in Phase I.

No ideas are bigger in this phase than the ideas behind PULP RP, the last publication in the series which is what I am getting down to now.

So that's what I've been up to. The other main piece of news is that I have acquired an eBook, which has swiftly become a great boon. I have been able to catch up on my reading as I prefer PDFs to regular published books. It's been great. I shall soon be returning to my duties as a POD book reviewer as I've chewed through so many books in the last fortnight that I shall no longer feel horrendously guilty for not reviewing things people send me in a reasonable amount of time.

Currently submissions are closed. But when they are open, be assured, you will know.

I think that's all for now. I'd better go and see if Sue's Sim 3 is now working as it was having memory issues.

...And Let That Be The End Of The Matter!

2010-05-07T16:08:00.000+01:00

This Dice vs. Cards thing is now irritating me. Not because everyone keeps saying how much they wuv their dice and would marry them if they were not polyhedral lumps of plastic; although that is slightly creepy.

No, what's getting me is that people say that Cards = Dice and therefore Cards !> Dice. In the Core Book we went into some detail about why this was not the case but now I think about it we probably didn't get to the heart of the matter. All the things we say are true, cards are more versatile and excellent mnemonically to keep system in people's heads instead of forcing them to bookmark rules and charts or refer to their super secret GM Screen to remember what numeric value on what chart means what.

But this doesn't cut to the very greatest thing about cards, i.e. they save you time.

I have not run a session that ran longer than three and a half hours in at least a year. At the same time, no one leaves these sessions feeling short changed. This is not a usual state of affairs in the hobby of RP. Of course I did my hahasoamusing little experiment write up in yesterday's entry. Although intended to be sarcastic it does have a serious point behind it. My session plans have gone from being good for two to three weeks worth of play, doing four and a half hour's worth at a time, coming away from every session feeling we should have done more, to cramming a good deal of plot and action into three to four hours with space for a tea break in the middle. Where did all this time come from?

Some might reason that I had simply become a more efficient Host. Well, possibly, but I know some cracking Hosts who have been in the game far longer than I have who still have a problem keeping in the limits of a good six hour run.

Maybe it is a combination of elements, fair enough. But here's one thing I know for a fact. Rolling a dice isn't just more time-consuming compared to drawing a card, it has the potential to introduce a finger-pause in the action that threatens to deep-six your session. Now, I have noticed that this is certainly not the case when properly playing your game of choice on a tabletop. Board games and the like seem to take a throw of the dice in their stride, it's part of the fun, and I have enjoyed exactly that fun on more than one occasion myself.

No, where dice are the kiss of death is in the sofa-lounge scenario. There's something quite luxurious about loafing about on a sofa engaged in RP something that gets players into a rhythm and even seems to put them in something of a trance. Nothing shatters that concentration like everyone craning forward to see a dice roll. Now, if you were to display dice rolls on a television screen or similar so they were big enough to be read without people craning forward to see them then that might mitigate the problem; but why employ technology when a playing card is usually clear enough to be seen by someone just holding it aloft?

This is where I think the time gains are made. There is some time at the beginning of a session where people are settling into the game. In a way the game takes a while for everyone involved to become fully engaged in it. I believe that in the past when people have rolled a dice it almost jogs them out of the game. Having a tea break also has a similar effect but that happens maybe once in a session, dice rolling is supposed to be a more frequent event.

Now I come to think about it I remember when I used to run Over The Edge by the book, with dice pools and what have you, we used to swerve rolls wherever possible. In fact the habit of being a dice dodger was one that infected all the games I played (not necessarily Hosted, just partook of) before starting in on No Dice. Now I come to think about it I can remember a lot of times the Host of the game, and sometimes that was me, made a Host Fiat decision before allowing the rhythm to be upset by a randomiser check. Randomiser checks which were supposed to be common became a last resort.

Some gamers still wear the "we hardly ever roll dice" thing as a narrative badge of honour. I always felt it made the whole thing less fun if you were afraid of trusting the vagaries of chance. If you stick to the unforgiving mistress that is chance the story is likely to be a lot more dramatic for the players than it is if you are the Host who enforces most of the rules but is basically on the player's side. Choices become important. In a fudged game choices are not really choices, they're just scenery on the mystery tour which really only has one destination and outcome.

Host Fiat in such cases is evil. It should be used to decide whether a proposed player plan even has a chance of succeeding; it's not intended to replace the element of chance altogether. The problem is that when your arbitration mechanism is destructively intrusive it encourages destructively simple Host arbitration. The most effective arbitrary Hosts are the ones who sustain a healthy distance between themselves and the players, although I always find this overcooks the player experience, the game becomes one of [Insert Host Name Here]'s games which are unique and untouchable.

Unless it can be systemised and is approachable it needs work. At least, in my world it does. For these reasons:

discourages "fluffy Host syndrome"
encourages randomiser use
preserves fictive state
shortens game length
while increasing game quality

I say cards are indeed > dice. And that's all I have to say on the topic ever.

The Bloody End (of my NSHO).

Doing It For The Fans

2010-05-06T15:23:00.003+01:00

Long time, no blog, for reasons already expounded.

A mail from Matt today prompted me to reconsider the logic of the statement that content producers in various media love to gushingly proclaim: "We're doing this for the fans!"

Matt's mail addressed a perceived problem with the No Dice Core Book that people didn't like the introduction in length or content and it was putting people off the system. Maybe, maybe not. In my experience people are really good at making excuses for not doing this or that. We call people sheep because they resist and reject and reject and resist before, in some cases, running hell for leather towards some mediocre artefact because everyone else is doing it.

Digression! For example the number of moany twunts I've seen complaining that "Cards are not all that different from dice". Here's a simple experiment that proves the utter arsetwattery of such moans:

1) Sit on a sofa holding a D6.
2) Without leaning forward, to the side, employing the aid of any flat surface such as a table or the cover of your favourite "My Little Munchkin" Annual roll the dice to produce a satisfactory result.
3) Notice this is, at least, inconvenient.
4) Repeat the process, except this time hold a shuffled pack of cards in the hand of your choice. Draw rather than roll.
5) Now repeat with dice, but time how long it takes to roll the dice and read off the result.
6) Now repeat with cards and time how long it takes to make and read a draw.
7) Multiply the amount of time from 5 by 50. You will probably end up with an amount of time somewhere in the region of 20 minutes.
8) Multiply the amount of time from 6 by 50. You will probably end up with an amount of time somewhere in the region of 5 minutes.
9) Note how much time you save using a pack of cards.
10) Stop pretending that dice are the convenient randomiser of choice STFU and go away.

It certainly doesn't help that for everything on the good side of mediocre up there is 1000x as much stuff that slides off the grotesque hunchback of the distribution curve and leaves quality produce, or the stuff with potential, drowning in a sump of crap.

People have very strong filters for novelty, it's only necessity that pushes them beyond that. If I was a keen role player of the old school I would be put off No Dice because of its novelty. It's only because I find most role playing system books utterly unreadable, mired in pointless and restrictive micromangement details, filled with equations and charts that make most current role playing "statistics and probability for fun". People I role play with read the systems in order to hack them into something that requires far less effort. Those people are the kinds of people who will decide quite quickly that they've bought enough core books and they're going to do their own thing.

Many of these guys run the one system they could be bothered to finish reading through in pared down form, or just stick to homebrew, or homebrew something LIKE some system they skim read once but a hell of a lot lighter.

But I didn't get involved in No Dice to reach the other people, the people who play by the book, the people who are put off by the mere concept of reappraising their hobby. I believe that we wrote it for newbies and those who love role play as a form of narrative entertainment somehow sullied by arbitrary numeric systems that impede the development of plot.

We wrote No Dice for our friends. All the people who "get" No Dice are fans of it. All the people who just feel slightly nauseous reading the Introduction to the Core Book are not. So of course I'm "doing it for the fans". Who in their right mind would do it for the non-fans? Try and please a bunch of people who really couldn't care less if you died in a ditch? Who would do that?

So I guess like every other content producer and the rest of the gang I am obviously doing No Dice for the fans. Those people who want to whinge that they would love it more if we just changed the length and content of the introduction to sound like every other Role Playing System ever written can shove it up their anuses. If that is they can fit "it" up there with all the polyhedral dice, pencils, double sided character sheets, hex maps and rule expansions they've retained up there already.

Tortured anal retentive joke over I will mention that one of the projects for 2011 is the Core Book Redux. I've reread the Core Book and I can see a hell of a lot that's just plain wrong with it. However, I did not miss the absence of page after page after page of number crunch combat system.

(More To Follow.)

No Let Up

2010-03-17T15:47:00.000Z

So now tipped from writing Levercastle into editing Levercastle and writing up Shadow Cities. Not due to slave driving, just taking an opportunity to stay on a roll...

I realises this means that blogging time has been severely curtailed but I will be back when I'm done on these tasks.

In the meantime I was corresponding with Matt about a game he was writing and the problems of algorithmic thinking. That in game design Matt proceeds from A to B to C to D and then the players come along and immediately understand C from where they go to B loop back round to D and then finally pay lip service to A whilst really thinking the root of the problem is E through G.

Infuriating to a Host with a linear mindset they regard as logical.

I posted back to him:

The problem you face is not one of logic, it's one of algorithmic thinking.

In algorithmic thinking you have a problem e.g. fierce guard dog between you and open back window.

And a bottom line outcome: Make it through window unmolested.

As long as your algorithm produces the bottom line then you cannot be said to have proceeded in an illogical fashion. All that can be argued is that you reached your bottom line in an innefficient way. To return to the tea example getting someone else to make the tea in exchange for some kind of payment is efficient in the short term as you can do something else while person x makes the tea but inefficient in that it burns up resources you could have used to pay for something more useful.

In the end all players are trying to do is get the most efficiency out of their algorithmic thinking. You as Host may disagree as you see fit but players are entitled to their own reasoning if their solution gets to the bottom line in a way they can live with...

And that's all he wrote. Feel free to agree/disagree whatever in the notes.

Crawling Toward The Finish Line

2010-02-26T15:13:00.000Z

Back from Belper and keen to relay gory details but for now suffice to say that my favourite session of the weekend for general hilarity and mirth filled darkness has to have been OTE. Least favourite for running smoothly but certainly no slouch in the "fresh ideas" camp was Dreamtime which was intellectually stimulating whilst being a bit slow to play. Work is ongoing.

Other than that I am pounding the keys frantically on the home stretch with Levercastle which nearly has a magic system and does, in fact, have an Alchemy system which all the failed alchemists in my campaign may be pleased, or nervous, to hear.

For now though, arrivederci.

Not Dead, Just Sleeping

2010-02-09T15:23:00.000Z

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury I present for your consideration:

A week in the Canaries (hot, all inclusive bonanza, most restful) - just gone.
No Dice event this Saturday at Nottingham's Mondo Comico
Games Weekend from next Weds eve

Yup, I'll be back on track after all that...

See you soon!

Lulu First Run Toll

2010-01-25T15:43:00.000Z

It's inevitable, I have discovered. Just like going away entails leaving some small but irritatingly necessary item behind at home so printing with Lulu entails finding one glaring but ultimately trivial thing wrong with the first batch of published product.

With Random Encounters the problems are superficial but relevant to me (it probably won't make a lick of difference to anyone else):

1) Slight overcropping on the front cover, even though I was careful to keep within the software cover designer.
2) When I first published the book to review the PDF I made sure that the spine was consistent with the Core Book having title and authors at the top and a product number at the bottom. Apparently, somewhere in the multitude of republished editions that have followed the cover designer seems to have reset to the default. Title at the top of the spine account holder's name at the bottom. So the spines of the first eight copies of RE read "Random Encounters-Leo Stableford". That's rather embarrassing, there were four distinct authors of the volume and an illustrator (who was one of the four authors!) just having my name on the spine is wrong and makes me feel a bit awkward.

Obviously, I shall have to make sure both of these issues are remedied before any more are printed.

Missing By A Mile

2010-01-18T15:42:00.000Z

Recovering from a system bork I found this in my unpublished drafts. It's an article by a much more old-skool games designer than anyone I hang out with.

What I found amusing was the referencing of games designers pandering to rules lawyers. It has to be said that hitherto most successful games companies have made money by doing precisely this. It makes me wonder if we're going about this the right way or if we should be producing another 200 page rules supplement every week like some other games companies.

Oh well, guess we'll never be rich and we'll be considered wrong and foolish; at least we're happy not wasting our lives looking for a definitive decision on that rules quibble.

Connection Issues

2010-01-18T15:33:00.000Z

There comes a time when staring at the same old blog interface becomes... well, a little staid, tiresome, tedious.

It doesn't mean you love the blog any less, oh no, not at all. Just a blogger craves a bit of variety.

I know, I know a blog is for life not just for christmas but still, the tumblr interface promised something blogger seemed a little hesitant to deliver. Interconnectivity. The way I understand it I should be able to publish here, it will appear on my tumblr dashboard and I will be able to then reblog it there with an option to send a summary to Twitter.

The disadvantage of this is that I have less idea how many people are lurking on any of my blogs. The upside is that a blog is supposed to attract comments and as I hardly ever get comments lurkers are unimportant. It's not really how many people you have no idea are reading your stuff that's important, it's the people you do know are reading and commenting on what you write that's important.

I've been blogging somewhere since about 2004, my proper blog first blossomed into existence in 2006. Four years on and I have no idea how to garner comments from the wider world. I sometimes throw a sideways glance at more able blogger's like Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood and wipe away a tear of frustration. I think it's a holy grail to turn a blog into a discussion and I've never known anyone actually be able to bottle that particular species of lightning.

Anyway. I live in hopes that one day I will attract commentators to my blog and I think being more connected is definitely a step in the right direction. Although, obviously, nothing can be proven on this score.

2010: The Year We Got Busy

2010-01-13T15:25:00.001Z

I wish that the amusing implication of the post title was anywhere near accurate. No, a more literate version of the semantics is to be inferred.

The plans are afoot for a calendar littered knee deep with exciting and rewarding events. The problem is that none of them are planned. Unplanned events are the absolute worst kind. You know they are going to resolve into the flesh but until you have a time, or a place, or both they torture you with vagueness.

Among the highlights of a full summer programme are: New No Dice events at Nottingham's new game and comic shop where Justin and I are also almost certain to organise a bit of Heroscape. Especially seeing as WotC seem to have released the Scape freeze to produce a D&D themed Underdark expansion set, which looks pretty yummy.

We'll also be wanting to get out and about in the summer time as outdoor No Diceing last summer was a brilliant success. In addition we want to hit three conventions, our friends at Beer and Pretzels, IndieCon (our non-attendance at which was an epic fail for us last year) and GenCon (if there is one). It doesn't stop there: we want to organise our own massive shindig to tie in with the release of Levercastle.

Finally, myself and the Mrs want to slope off for a couple of holidays in amongst all that. And there's the ever present joy of the Belper games weekends!

2010 will be eventful for sure. But will I survive it?

P.S. Check out our new slimline podcast available from the link top right.

Britain Thinks: Wisdom of Crowds or Mob Rules?

2010-01-07T15:56:00.001Z

Have just decided to show some practical support for new internet site Britain Thinks which looks like it could be jolly good fun. At the moment the interface is a bit sparse, I imagine it's intended to be a sort of social networking site with an agenda of debate. Well, we have loads of social networking opportunities, but debates not so much. So they've opened the site with a number of debating tools.

Basically you can go to a topic, there's voting buttons and a neat flashy type widget that plays videos. Obviously the videos are all, or mostly, the starting content, mostly minute long soundbites, but I saw one sort of documentary style piece as well. Inevitably there's a comment box and lots of rating facilities and so on and so forth.

So you watch the videos, you read the comments, you vote on the voting panels and you do so having signed up for an account.

Initial thoughts?

Well, I'm a bit disturbed that for a substantial site, or at least a site that purports to be all about the substance of debate about everyday issues, it seems quite bitty. In my cursory inspection it seemed quite difficult to flit from clip to clip, the tumult of opinion seemed quite random. As someone who likes a good organised debate I was quite dismayed that there was nothing there to get your teeth into.

I have to say the site was only launched on Monday, as such it's probably a more technical achievement at present than an instant classic of web design. Things I would hope to see in the future:

I am a user, but I have no acces to edit my account profile! Oh noes!
There are other users but they have no visible public profiles.
The debate pages are designed cleanly from a graphic design POV but this masks an underlying incoherence in conceptual structure. Is this op ed Twitter where statements of length are to be frowned upon?
I think I would like to be able to aggregate debates and even run them from within the personal profile I don't yet have. This would help enormously with, my final point...
The content is grouped by topic and videos are star-rated but the arguments are not streamed like an essay, you just get assaulted by a little bit about this and then a little bit about that. The topics are huge and being banged around in an opinion pinball machine is weird. If topics had administrators who applied some sort of taxonomy to the issues this would help a bunch. For example in a debate about education comments could be labelled "teachers", "exams", "government", "parents", "students", "curriculum" so that you could watch streams of comments about one sub-topic.

Having said all that I think the idea of using the web as a speaker's corner is a great idea. Usually the forum for issues are controlled by government or some half-baked subset of functionality offered by a social networking site built, primarily, for other purposes.

I would love to see Britainthinks become something that gets referenced on the news when emotive news stories arise, I'd love to see its clips being used in Question Time and things like that. If the man on the street can vent a sophisticated opinion at home and be watched by people who are going to entertain his ideas seriously and respond in kind that's a great leap forward in net based political interaction.

I imagine it will also be a home for people to vent shocking stupidity and vile hate speech, but that's as important.

If you are reading this, and you're British I urge you to support this initiative, I think it's a winner. DISCLAIMER: In 2006 someone sent me an invite to link to their profile on something called "Facebook". I looked at the site, decided it was rubbish, it would never work, so I never accepted the invitation. My powers of prediction should be measured by that opinion...

2010 - Time To Regenerate

2010-01-03T13:00:00.000Z

After a fine New Year's gathering which saw me singing in the new year along with Monty Python's "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" NYD itself was all about Doctor Who. For me and 10m other viewers the regeneration of Tennant Who into Smith Who was essential viewing.

Number crunching ain't good for much but let's just take a look at this here and now. Total number of people who took active roles in Rage vs Robojoe 1 million. People watching Doctor Who, 10 million. Now admittedly they weren't charging any money we hadn't already paid for us to watch Doctor Who but still.

If you had told me in 2000 that in a decade I'd be joining 10m others to watch the new and much beloved Doctor Who morph into his youngest form yet. And then you had gone on to say that Doctor Who would become a bigger UK cultural touchstone than it had ever been and I would have told you you were crazy. If you'd have topped it off by saying that the head writer would be a cultural leader for the equal treatment of the gay lifestyle, that he would work these themes into a spin off set in Cardiff and that people would regularly discuss both series round the water cooler and well...

You have to admit, it sounds jolly unlikely.

I'd hate to be in a position where one of my characters had had such a patchy history. It's a matter of personal pride. I have a fairly harsh inner critic and if I finally hit the sweet spot after so long (not, obviously, that RTD et al were responsible for the whole of Doctor Who but you get the point) I would be tempted to reboot.

I don't mind any reboot that's been along so far. BSG was fine and ended so disappointingly that it could even do with another reboot to fix the disappointing end of this version. Star Trek as envisioned by Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman was wonderful. I can't, off the top of my head, think of a reboot that's done any harm.

Of course technically, if you're sticking strictly to canon, apparently, the Doctor only has one more regeneration left (because of burning one up but not actually regenerating during the 10th Doctor's tenure). Rather than cheating and giving him new regenerations wouldn't it be better to reset the whole thing and start again from scratch.

It's something that writing types do all the time, the old etch-a-sketch end of the world routine. I think a reader can accept a reboot more readily than, perhaps, a remake. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyhoo, that's all from me for the time being. Here's to a 2010 full of hope for the future. After all it might seem to many of us that the only way is up after the last few years!

The Avatar Effect

2009-12-31T10:18:00.000Z

Crikey, two comments, on topic on one of my posts. It must have been my crack about having no readers!

So in answer to the comments. Yeah, it was very pretty. But I'm one of those people who says "mmmm, pretty, but what does it *do*?" Also, while we're on the topic most reviews that swiftly descend into pontification on nature vs. tech begin by drooling verbally all over the visuals. It's pretty, I get it. But it's like someone blew umpteen million dollars on a script written by a pissy, horny, morbid fifteen year old boy. I'm sorry but that just starts to look like a waste of time from where I'm sitting.

I'm having yet another Mugatu moment as people debate the politics of this movie as if the whole thing weren't utterly ridiculous. What really burns me is that people have the nerve to criticise the story. As many have pointed out the story is an old one. That means that it should work, I think Cameron probably chose to do a rendition of this "Dances With Wolves" type story for precisely that reason.

When you get down to it the execution of the story was so ham-fisted it reached George Lucas levels of error. At one point I was actually wanting to get hold of a copy of the DVD when it comes out just to do a commentary that goes toe to toe with all the ridiculous BS in the script. That way at least you could get an attractive slide show to accompany a deconstruction of why the film suckety suck sucked.

Aside: Went to see Holmes despite reservations both grave and deep (in the end it was RD Jnr's current renaissance that convinced me) and it was awesome. The action sequences were far less obtrusive than I'd feared, the script was actually very... er... Sherlock Holmes-y to such an extent that it's one of the few films for which genuine spoilers exist so I'll shut up now.

Back to Avatar. If truth be told I really enjoyed the movie up to the moment where Colonel McScarryHead approached Mr. Avatar to propose a little military style double dealing.

For a lover of the narrative arts many movies are like slowly expiring disappointments. If the film gets off to a good start it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to get all the way to the finish line without breaking its ankle in a plot-hole pothole.

For me, that was the moment. You see, to identify with the protagonist in a movie I tend to listen to what the characters around him are saying and wonder if I'd ever react the same way. I was down with the Avatar right up until McScarryHead made his pitch because nothing I'd seen so far backed up the main character's reaction to the offer. The Colonel had never acted like he might not be a looney, Mr. Avatar had shown a love for legs but had never been given a reason to trust that McScarryHead could, in good faith, arrange an incredibly expensive spinal operation to restore the use of Mr. Avatar's legs.

I mean sure it was possible but I didn't feel it was any more probable than any of the other characters being able to wangle him a new set of knees. If we're going on pure spending power the Acme Corporate Greaseball character seemed to be the best connected for such purposes.

From there onwards I lost sympathy and it became a firework display.

Anyhow. I've been blogging more regularly for a month now. I think I'm hitting my stride. I think two or three a week might be the happy medium I've been striving for. I think staying away from X Factor and committing to the geek-athon might also be appropriate as people are commenting on the latter but seem not to care about the former (even though I get quite geeky about X Factor).

This blog, like all blog's exists to be a dialogue. That's my aim for it in 2010. See you all next year!

The Madness of Avatar

2009-12-29T16:06:00.000Z

So yesterday myself and the Mrs bought ourselves the right to an opinion about James Cameron's eco-epic. We eschewed 3D gimmickry and went for a much more aesthetically pleasing panavision 2D viewing. Maybe this coloured our opinion of the work but honestly? I mean... honestly?

There has been much written about the contradictions inherent in the evil corporate entities that make up the movie business making this hippy dippy wonderland fairy tale but I don't really buy into the dialog about anti-military this and that or anti-corporate whatever when the actual storytelling is just so piss poor it kind of renders the discussion pointless.

In fact most commentary sub-consciously acknowledges this by saying Avatar in the first sentence and then moving on to a discussion of tech vs. nature which has little to do with the ramshackle set up of the movie world.

I'm boggled that people have the stomach for this argument when the characters, human and alien alike, in Avatar behave in incomprehensible ways that betray the set-up that we're being asked to buy into.

Not the least of the questions is why the humans have such a huge chip on their shoulder about the aboriginal aliens anyway. I kept waiting for an explanation that never came. The statuesque, beautiful aliens seem to have no guile and a pretty laissez faire attitude towards the humans as long as the humans don't muck around near their world tree.

These Navi are the most reactive creatures I think I could imagine. They show no curiosity about the midgety pink things that have brought all their metal to a nonsensical base camp on the surface of this moon, Pandora. They are happy to exist knowing nothing of these invaders and they only rise to warfare when the aliens turn up in a flying napalm factory and fell their world tree in painful flame and fire.

So these dumb, fairly placid, aloof creatures are somehow turned into a threat with no actual evidence even fabricated. In Starship Troopers the overt storyline is that the insect aliens for no reason bomb earth with meteorites and occasion a war against humanity. You can understand humanity's position even if the implied secondary storyline is that the humans wandered into insect central with guns, assuming the insects were giant but not sentient and then learned that the stupid alien opponents were not so stupid.

You can understand how the conflict arose intuitively, even if it does make humanity look like a bunch of callous, shallow, territorial meatheads. Those bugs were dangerous and the political spin of their actions make you understand why meatheads like Johnny Rico would sign up for a tour of duty intutively. Sure, humanity might be wrong but it feels right.

In Avatar, on the other hand, I never ever felt that I understood why the majority of the humans would just naturally want to shoot at these aliens who clearly are intelligent and have their own culture and language. This coupled with the fact that even after we've torched their habitat the best they can resist with seems to be bows, arrows and giant birds and most people have got to come out feeling that there has to be another way.

I learned a few bits and pieces of backstory from the surrounding commentary on the movie, like apparently the earth is dying and apparently this stuff the corporation are mining "unobtanium" will solve humanity's problems somehow. Not only did I not get that unobtanium was supposed to be a room temperature superconductor, or any sense of earth's dire plight, but I couldn't really see how having the superconductor would help out with this plight in any event (talk about a phantom menace!).

Even given that I had received a full lesson in how humanity was suffering back on earth, pictures in 3D using the latest technological advances would have been nice, and how the use of room-temperature superconductors would solve this I still have a problem. If I'm a brain surgeon in need of a kidney transplant and the only acceptable donor is a high-school dropout with only one working kidney it is still not my right to commandeer that kidney to the dropout's detriment.

Even if some shenanigans had been arranged in the movie for the massacre of a few hundred blue aliens to be made somehow "legal" I think the resulting action would have had a polarising effect between those who believe humanity must be saved at any cost and those who believe some prices are just too high. Now that would have been an interesting movie.

As it is every stage of the story is telegraphed and all the characters even bemoan the fact that the endgame seemed inevitable. This is cold comfort when you know that depite apparently being opposed to the route taken every step of the way the characters all just did what they were told until the moment at which the plot told them to do the opposite. All sympathy lost. You can't understand why anyone's doing anything they're doing at any stage.

The movie also does an excellent job of kneecapping itself at some points. For example the time frame of the events in the movie are roughly three to four months. If the characters had been given more time, if the situation had dragged on, epically, for years then that would have just made the finer points of the storytelling a bit sloppy. As it was it just seemed utterly insane.

I could nitpick over the rights and wrongs of it for weeks but it comes down to this. I never understood why the "bad" guys were being so mean. I never understood why the "good" guys were being so passive. Therefore the whole thing just looked like pointlessly mean guys try to hand stupidly passive guys their ass and implausibly lose for reasons of plot.

I don't sympathise with anyone, I don't empathise with anyone, I find myself wondering about the wider implications of the plot and I start to realise my bottom hurts from sitting in the movie seat too long.

Suffice to say I won't be one of those who queues up to see this movie six or more times. I hope never to see it again. I don't understand how people can watch this and excuse it's glaring flaws and then say the Matrix Trilogy was overall irretrievably flawed and irredeemably terrible. I am of exactly the reverse opinion, Avatar is just dreck whereas the Matrix trilogy is hidelously flawed but has its heart in the right place. This is the right way to think about things and if you disagree with me you are wrong.

The luxury of having no readers.

A Christmas Miracle

2009-12-25T12:28:00.000Z

When our pretty but patently insane cat Otto first arrived in the lives of the Mrs and myself we were excited to rush out and buy her cat treats, catnip filled mice, a woolly boot and bell attached to a plastic rod with elastic and a scratching post. Some things were a big hit, the catnip mice and the plastic rod. Others were summarily ignored: the scratching post and the cat treats.

So imagine our surprise to open up a brand new scratching post on Christmas day. So, without too much hope we placed it on the floor only to watch Otto lark and frolic while attempting to savage the small rattling mouse attached to it with elastic. She continued in this for about the next ten minutes before returning to consider her Christmas bowl of cat milk. Maybe the walls in this house have just bought themselves some peace on earth and goodwill from Otto.

And isn't that the true meaning of Christmas?

Have a good one people!

An Author's Fear

2009-12-24T15:38:00.001Z

What if I write something so bad that that you could make a 70 minute documentary about how badly it was written and constructed.

Why... won't... you... DIE!

2009-12-23T15:43:00.000Z

The autopsy of the Rage vs. Robojoe incident continues with the entirely unsurprising conjecture that the whole thing was a viral scam. The glee with which the author of this piece by turns "exposes" the web of coincidence that panders to the most cynical view of the whole affair and then, knowing full well that the showboat piece has done its job, heartily retracts it is evident in every smug, calculated word.

I used to be of the opinion that a position of advocacy for the devil was a worthy cause indeed. However the devil's advocate game is not immune to being hijacked by banal thinkers who merely continue to operate within the rat runs of our everyday thought patterns. Dichotomous thinking has its place, if only people weren't so bad at it.

The central problem with Mr. Lyle's analysis is that it plays to some common presumptions in popular culture that don't help anything and force from others reactions that implicitly buy into these presumptions. As the task of Lyle's expose, as far as I can make out, is to promote his blog, and his way of thinking, it doesn't matter whether you buy in to the expose or wish to refute it the point is you've bought into the presumption that this information is in any meaningful sense relevant to anything.

Don't make the mistake that I'm trying to act above the whole gossipy nature of this entire story; if I were above that I wouldn't have been writing my X Factor pieces since I began my journal revivication programme. Gossip is good when applied to products, services and entertainment, I wholeheartedly endorse anyone's right to gossip about any aspect of the developing story. I, myself, had toyed with the idea that it was Sony BMG behind the whole incident and passed comments to that effect to co-workers and the Mrs.

The Mrs really is an excellent barometer of the likelihood, relevance and importance of such notions. She shrugged at my conjecture. This was my cue for how to treat my conspiracy theory. Essentially, even if all of Lyle's piece were true, so what? The facts are the facts, to quibble about how they came to be so is only important if it somehow forced a result that is a gross misrepresentation of reality as it stands.

When it comes to a pop music chart, a few pop music artists, a record label, a corporation and a million people participating in a retail battle orchestrated by both mass and social media reality in an essential sense is so thin on the ground as to be negligible. What smug commentary questioning the purity of the grassroots campaign fails to take into account is the question that if the whole thing was a set up who does that really make a difference to? The only people it really effects are the imagined ninja viral marketers who instigated the whole shebang at the grassroots level.

If the campaign was pure then the whole thing for two normal people who started a silly social networking scheme became a bit of a laugh and a lot of a headache (as the comments refuting Lyle's article indicate). If the campaign was a Sony masterminded viral advertising campaign then it remains a laugh for the ninjas but they also collect on a hefty pay day in exchange for a campaign well orchestrated.

The litmus test of the likelihood of the "RATMgate" conspiracy being an actual thing is to ask if the viral campaign would have been worth the money before the event. If I were speaking to a massive corporation from the position of egotism it would require to guarantee I could pull off this fake campaign coup I would want that corporation to reward me in proportion to my skills.

This isn't a Western or a gangster flick, all of this would have to be mediated via contracts and statements of expectation. The contract would have to guarantee the viral ninja some recompense even in the advent of the scam being uncovered by heroic reporters such as Mr. Lyle, or in the advent of the entire thing being an enormous flop.

Here's the sticking point. I don't for one second believe that Sony would buy into any such contract. What people fail to take into account about businesses it is that they have neither a sense of fun nor a sense of humour. They may well have coffers deep enough to throw money at speculative viral marketers willy nilly but I could throw a snowball and hit a couple of people with "a really neat idea for a viral marketing stunt".

Sony are far more likely to sit back and ask potential viral marketers to prove themselves before they'll even enter talks. The problem for the viral ninjas being that the execution of a successful viral stunt kind of lets the genie out of the bottle. The science of the viral meme is more akin to alchemy than Newtonian Physics, flash viral successes are usually found to have originated from the pan.

So overall common sense and intuition tells us that the campaign was genuine. This does not present people from using the spectre of some imagined corruption stemming from the idea that the whole thing was engineered exploiting this fear to gain attention.

I just find the whole thing quite manipulative and unhelpful. What we know is that radicalism doesn't help, conformity doesn't help, bickering over authenticity doesn't help, fear doesn't help, mud slinging doesn't help. The only way to gain a sense of clarity, it would seem, is to put the whole thing in a perspective that makes a kind of pragmatic sense. The whole thing was a jolly good laugh, it's funny, that's all that really matters, who cares why it came to be. If Sony engineered it that means the company is way cooler than I'd thought it was, so they should be proud to have brought us Christmas care of Rage. If not, then still good, it remains funny.

The only people who might feel aggrieved about being duped by a multi-national corporate entity are those who resent the fact that they can't afford a new car or a bigger house while the people at the top of the corporation have both. If they duped you then that tells you, as the dupee, why they have all that money. If you genuinely handed your money to them while they didn't lift a finger it also drops you a clue. If you choose to look at it this way they duped you either by doing something or doing nothing. In that frame of mind they dupe us all a hundred times a day.

From another perspective, stuff happens. Systems exist. Learn to game them and you will succeed, fail to game them, or refuse to participate and you won't reap what the people who accept those systems consider to be the rewards of participation. Really you have to ask yourself, what's more important? Having a good laugh about a song with naughty words in it invading a cultural institution? Or worrying that you're laughing while others are accumulating vast wealth from your laughter? I picked my answer.

Ho. Ho. Ho.

P.S. This is officially my last post about the Rage debacle.

Have yourself...

2009-12-22T15:51:00.001Z

Hey all!

After mammoth post yesterday, full of curmudgeon.

Today. Just... have a good day. I've been rushed off my feet shopping for Christmas. Now I'm chugging some soup and anticipating the office do... I suggest you all do as much of the same as you can. Soup's good for you.

Fate? Free Will? Facebook?

2009-12-21T15:36:00.001Z

Before we begin let's just hold in our minds that in the metropolitan area of London there are approx 13 million residents. There are 61 million people in the United Kingdom.

This week 1 million of those people were involved in a tussle over the number one selling song in the United Kingdom this week, the winner would be declared the number one song in the UK on Christmas Day.

I am attempting to provoke a Naked Lunch moment for those of you embroiled in the current "RATM vs. RoboJoe" = "Revolutionary Anger vs. Cow-Like Capitalism" frame of mind. By which I do not mean I am trying to convince you that insect/typewriter hybrids are organising meet-ups with mugwumps. Rather I am, in the strictest sense, trying to get the cultural diner to really appreciate what's on the end of the pop music fork.

As to the actual autopsy of the event within the context which it's been presented I'll leave that to the ever incisive Charlton Brooker. But beyond all the people bickering over the result and the fact that everyone was swelling Sony's coffers are those who wish to urinate on everyone's parade by pointing out that doing what your told because of Facebook is no better than being told what to do by X Factor.

To those meta-meta whiners I would urge you to go into the kitchen, slap on the kettle, and prepare yourself a nice hot cup of shut the fuck up. If you wanted to be more self-serving and pathetic you couldn't possibly have chosen a more irritating, ignorant, deluded and intensely stupefying way of doing it.

I know, I know you wanted to slap those smug Facebook-worshipping goons in the face and point out to them that there's nothing big or clever about organising yourself via a combination of virtual Walls and Twitter tweeting. This only says you have a problem with Facebook and Twitter. So many do, yet they continue to exist, learn to live in harmony or shoot yourselves.

If you wanted some perspective on the whole thing then you might have to go on a journey zooming out from the pop culture phenomenon that sparked the whole incident in the first place. Let's look at X Factor, and if we're going to examine that let's look at the face of X Factor Simon Cowell.

Is Simon Cowell Satan's cousin? No. He's a rich bloke and he got to be a rich bloke by playing a game called: What will pop music fans buy if I release it as a single? To those of you who think he is "ramming X Factor winners down our throat" because he loves pop for any aesthetic reason I refer you to his efforts to get pop music fans to listen to opera. In aesthetic terms Cowell would probably rather listen to La Traviata than either Killing In The Name or The Climb. He's a game player. Pop music is a game. Business is a game. Pandering to the market is a game with substantial cash rewards. People who moan about his vast wealth because it's aesthetically bankrupt are missing the point mostly because they're most dreadfully, awfully, evilly jealous of what he has managed to make out of what they consider to be mind-numbing anaesthetic for the idiotic masses.

I don't. The man's made money by winning a game. Not only that but pretending that his product sells to "the idiotic masses" leaves aside the fact that if you're using the words "masses" and "majority" as if they're equivalent are woefully misguided. The population of Britain set against the number of people buying the X Factor winner's single in any given year tells us that the majority of the people in Britain couldn't give a flying one. So the masses are not idiotic, or if they are it's not measurable by their music choice.

So, if we take the next step out, Robojoe's win. As I hope I have made clear I appreciate the game of the X Factor. Not every pop song it produces may be my cup of tea but I appreciate what it is and I think it's jolly good fun. However, even given the narrow margin by which he undersold RATM he undersold Alexandra by even more. All this does is prop up my earlier conclusion that a donkey won the X Factor this year. His appeal next to last year's strong winner is already waning. As a professional and hugely rich game player I believe Cowell knew Robojoe was going to be a One Hit Wonder the minute he won.

Robojoe's loss actually saves him from a worse fate. If he had won the rumours of chart-fixing would have been loud and unfounded. Unfounded or not he would be a pop artist trying his best to battle against a huge drift of ill-sentiment in the wider world. As it is he lost like he should have and the RATM contingent probably wish him no ill-will. Still doesn't mean his career's going to live any longer though.

Zooming out even further. So the two artists in this two horse race are signed to the same record label. The body of commentary upon this fact has grown too large already for me to add anything. So let's skip straight to the people who are doing the slow hand clap and berating the two halves of the "idiotic masses" for buying into the whole shebang.

All these people are saying, in an unpleasant pissy, moany, joy-annihilating fashion is that the whole "machine" by which these campaigns were mobilised are equally terrible, soulless and evil. So imagining that RATM are xenomorphs (AKA Aliens) and the X Factor are Ya'Qui (AKA Predators) who ever wins, we lose.

This presumes that our culture, the means by which we enjoy our culture and the aesthetic tastes of those who participate in that culture are rotten, decadent and necessarily a bad thing. It also, condescendingly, says that the one and only reason why people bought either song was because they were told to; the implication being that no one would listen to either song by choice.

To all thee the smacked-arse of face I congratulate you. You win at arguing on the internet and inherit all the bounty that goes with such a victory. You have successfully pointed out that there are 60 million people who didn't want to participate in this fight and the chances are the majority of them feel no love for the two songs involved. You and Simon Cowell can enjoy the opinion that both are a bit rubbish and not your choice of listening.

And finally, there's the rub. We live in a world where everyone with access to the internet has the means to understand certain things which go spectacularly not understood. Things like, in terms of the population of the UK one million isn't even a tenth. Things like, Simon Cowell is just a person, not evil and not stupid, capable of evil like the rest of us, but just a guy. Get over it. Not only that but he's undeniably clever enough to have more money than I'll probably ever see and if that's how we're living our lives then I guess I have to pay that the respect it's due.

On which final topic, if I am happy tonight, as I am, to go home on the bus, eat some Chicken Fajitas, watch a movie or two, go to bed, get up tomorrow and do it all again - if I am even able to do that using the tools society has provided to help me live my life - then I implicitly accept that this is the way we are doing things for now.

But that doesn't mean that I am necessarily robbed of my own free will. Maybe I do these things because I have entertained the ideas of those calling for revolution and decided that they're not for me. I am broadly satisfied with much of the way things are done and if I am not I don't like the proposed alternatives any more and am not sufficiently outraged to suggest my own.

I chose not to get involved in the Rage vs. Robojoe fight because I saw worth in both sides and just wanted to know who would win. But I don't reject either Facebookers or X Factor fans because there's room for us all under the sun and all the miserable whiny curmudgeons who want to tell me I've been brainwashed can stick it up their tinfoil hat wearing arses.

The Campbell Effect

2009-12-18T15:42:00.001Z

It's going to be an old-fashioned story post today mostly inspired by news that Neill Blomkamp isn't the only filmmaker from a country not traditionally known for its film industry who can attract the Hollywood buck with a showreel. The BBC carries an item about a Uruguayan filmmaker, Fede Alvarez, who has been courted by Hollywood after posting his SF short Ataque de Pánico! (Panic Attack!) on YouTube.

What's got my story senses tingling is not so much the news that the internet is putting people in touch with one another in ways hitherto unimaginable; after all Blomkamp's story tells us that. What's baking my noodle today is the number of people who've been complaining about its lack of a story.

It would be easy to rant about how this is a filmmaker's technical reel, not a story-based submission and in fact many have on YouTube and also on snarker's paradise Slashdot. However such a swift rebuttal fails to account for one important thing. People are showing, in a mystic, hippie, "wisdom of crowds" kind of a way that they're becoming fed up to the back teeth with hollow spectacle or narrative pretensions. They want the two combined.

The basic reason the two often fail to go hand in hand is that the more money goes into making a film the less experimental the producers feel like being with the story. Also, it seems, if a director is tagged as an "effects" director then a decent enough story and/or dialogue is seen as a bonus rather than something to shoot for.

The holy trinity of narrative, dialogue and effects rarely come together to the extent that when they do, such as in feature films like the original Matrix, it changes the way people even view the art of cinema. The best reviewers routinely look at the three together. Even movies like Pulp Fiction change the landscape because what I've lazily classified as "effects" really adds up to "visual language" which may or may not require the addition of special effects.

The sad fact is that examples of movies like Pulp Fiction and The Matrix are too few and far between and even then they always leave something to be desired. Some people find Pulp Fiction's dialogue to be too mannered. Some people find The Matrix's dialogue too much like a sophomoric philosophy essay. One thing seems to be agreed upon: Narrative can survive a lack of visual language or top notch dialogue for many but without coherent and satisfying narrative the other two elements are left out in the cold.

The big problem here for Hollywood is something I'm going to dub the Campbell effect, which I only wish was a reference to Bruce Campbell. The Campbell effect refers to anthropologist Joseph Campbell's Monomyth, the basis for all movies since Star Wars changed the game in the 70s.

What defeated conventional wisdom then was that Star Wars came across to someone with an ear for dialogue like a generic firework display, yet it captured the imagination of a generation. Harrison Ford was not alone in feeling Lucas could write dialogue, but it might be best not to subsequently attempt to perform that dialogue as speech spoken by a coherent sentient being. The surprise success of Star Wars in spite of hideous dialogue made Alec Guiness bitter and has been a constant irritation to writers of natural language from that day until The Phantom Menace nose-dived in the popular imagination and labelled the Star Wars saga a disappointment that had once held much promise.

So what's the issue? I don't know if I'm qualified to answer that question. Only two or three people on the planet have ever experienced my best narrative work to date and it isn't even finished yet. I think it's really good, not in an egotistical way, I'm surprised I wrote such a great narrative myself. I don't know that it's great, though. The writing needs more work and then, once finished I need people to read it and love it in order to know that I've hit the nail on the head.

So my opinion remains that of a consumer rather than a producer of content, and it is simply this: I think that in order to write an effective narrative you need more than a basic understanding of some 12 step plan for making "every great story ever written". What you need is an emotional depth enough to recognise what it is that qualifies as a sympathetic fulfilment of each of those steps in turn.

It's not enough to produce the convincing facade of a battle with the guardian of the threshhold between the known and the unknown. You need to understand the emotional landscape of your protagonist enough to tease out the true antagonist who stands at the threshhold of their internal landscape. You need to make the encounter happen in terms pregnant with meaning for that character. You need to make all parts of the story parts of the story's protagonist on an essential level.

That's not an easy job. It's the product of years of writing practice and not stylistic practice at that, it's a discipline of structural practice that is often suggested but rarely attempted. It also requires that the teacher of such practices has the emotional depth to recognise when a writer has missed that most vital of points. A reader can be such a teacher, I am proud enough to believe that the Mrs is actually such a reader, such an analyst of story that she can home in on emotional dithering and falsity and hold it to account. She would never claim to be a writer but she is the nemesis of the lazy storyteller.

That's why, to be truthful, I am so proud of Starfall. It's because she loves it so and she loves very few narratives to that degree. Her analysis always has the ring of truth and yet, after the fact, always seems so obvious.

In other news Rage are losing ground to Robojoe in such an elegantly narrated fashion that it shows up the publicity stunt that this whole staged "battle" really has been.

Until Monday make mine a robot destroying Uruguay whilst consuming a delicious Sunday roast with all the trimmings, all, of course, smothered in delicious chocolate.

P.S. Tweeter ElPared says Avatar "was like a koala crapped a rainbow in my brain!!!" best commentary evar!

Goths, Rage and Iron Man all With Chocolate

2009-12-17T15:26:00.000Z

Off to see Marilyn Manson at the Trent FM arena tonight. First time I've ever been to anything that could be described as a "stadium" gig. I'm expecting a show, Mrs is really looking forward to it as she's never seen Mazza in the emaciated goth flesh. We're going to see Lady Gaga at the arena next March and I'm unsure which will be the most bizarre experience.

Although people's enthusiasm for the RATM against X Factor battle seems to have waned somewhat I was buoyed up by the news that RATM got their performance on 5Live pulled midway when they went into full on sweary mode. It's good to encounter some insurgent and iconoclastic rock'n'roll shenanigans in a world where emotionally incontinent and utterly ridiculous rock'n'roll shananigans are the more common type.

The trailer for Iron Man 2 has spread like a Marvel-lous plague across the movie windows of the Intarweb. I have so far loved everything that I have seen from the shiny new Marvel Studios, although as that stands at Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk I suppose that's not really a big statement to make. Seeing as no one was very keen on allowing me to see Ray Stevenson dig in as The Punisher in Punisher: War Zone I might hate that. But I liked the Tom Jane one everyone else hated so what do I know?

Robert Downey Jr. put in an appearance on Graham Norton earlier in the week and he acquitted himself so admirably that it almost made me want to see the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes...

I think I am getting the idea of Twitter, I think. I guess the fact that I'm not sure indicates that I have some way to go yet. I have initiated my very own topic #withchocolate which came about through the usual "you had to be there" set of circumstances. Once I've been putting various topical things #withchocolate for a few days I'm sure anyone interested will get the idea.

If it ever becomes one of their "trending topics" then remember you saw it here first!

*ahem*

On which final topic it seems that Nottingham is currently all atwitter about the earlier snow flurries, in addition to the whole Iron Man, Rage twitterstorm. Although it has to be said that Trendsmap's geolocation algorithms seem to be a little out when tuned for the UK. I'm actually a little surprised there isn't more Twitter about Nottingham being allowed to represent the UK in a World Cup bid over Derby and Leicester... surprised, but not unhappy.

Until tomorrow mine's a snow-topped robot goth with chocolate!

Rage Still Trumping Robojoe

2009-12-16T15:29:00.000Z

So the plot thickens in the RATM vs. Robojoe Christmas Number One Face off. It seems the Machine won't just roll over and Robojoe is having to do some work to land the number one spot. At which point I ask... who cares?

As the feature article points out, Christmas number one has a history of being dull or being duffers. Bob the Builder was a yuletide chart topper, as was Mr. Blobby. This whole RATM vs. Robojoe thing has been about X Factor dominating the christmas charts. Why not? It's not like RATM will be number one for New Year, it's not like Marilyn Manson, or Metallica, or Airbourne are probably even going to see the singles charts next year.

I've decided to stay out of the whole thing. I don't mind X Factor, I think it can be fun. On the other hand I think giving a million pounds of record deal to Robojoe is a monumental waste of money. So meh. Not only that but when you look at the number of download sales you need to get to land a number one it starts to put things in a whole new perspective.

As does Trendsmap one of these composite applications (I refuse to say mash up about anything that doesn't layer pop and rock tracks together to form new tracks) that are apparently all the rage. It basically ties tweets to places. Nottingham is talking about cowell, glee, bits and rage. I quite like it but it does tell me that I'm possibly not the right audience for Twitter. There's barely anyone in Notts tweeting, so the network has failed to capture the imagination.

Maybe I should just admit defeat and get a f*c*b**k but I have a strong resistance to the idea for a variety of reasons.

Anyway. The wiki beckons. Until tomorrow then enjoy the snow where it's doing so...

Robojoe In Trouble

2009-12-15T15:11:00.000Z

I don't think anyone expected the Facebook renegades' wishes to actually resolve to anything. Now it's on the BBC as a top story. Of course Robojoe's version of "The Climb" gets released on CD tomorrow so things will probably even out then. But maybe...

Am I one of these angry people who rails against the X Factor ruining the music industry? No. Of course not. If Olly had won I'd be on Olly's side. Now I think this is the nicest way of telling Robojoe that winning the X Factor shouldn't go to his head. I stand by my opinion that I don't think he's a viable pop artist for this time. He's not a great performer so it doesn't matter how great his voice is.

Not that I even agree with that, necessarily. I think if I had to listen to a Robojoe album I'd be fit for slitting my wrists by track four or five.

I'm sorry but IMO pop should be fun. Moaning on in a ballady way is fine for a little pathos and all that but mostly I want to be exhilirated by musicians not depressed by them.

To a greater extent I only like the whole X Factor pop thing because I like its pop culture impact and all of this hoopla with people getting upset over nonsense and what-have-you. I also like to see if I can pick a winner, not a short term winner, but an act with real appeal that will last.

I don't think Robojoe's got the chops, to be frank.

Anyhoo, I'm off to work on the No Dice wiki until tomorrow mine's a basket of chocolate covered meerkats!

Yikes!

2009-12-14T16:00:00.000Z

So RoboJoe stole the show... *sigh* worst X Factor winner Evar! (relatively speaking, Leon Jackson was a massive anti-climax but he wasn't up against talent like Olly, Danyl and Stacey, he also wasn't following talent like Alexandra and JLS).

I've been creating a wiki for No Dice. This will replace the soon to be extinct No Dice Forums. Have a look around. There's already a bunch of stuff in System Hacks.

Also Random Encounters is out! The ideal Chrimbo gift! Buy one now! ;)

Have a good Monday!

Tweeting The Second Time Around

2009-12-11T15:42:00.000Z

I have to ask myself the question: Am I just not getting it or is Twitter, in fact, rubbish?

The first time round I didn't give the world of Tweeting a chance; so I'm back on with a Twitter feed that is on the public timeline and trying to get my head round all this "Trending Topics" nonsense. I even looked on here for a widget to put in the sidebar which would allow people to see my Tweets but there doesn't appear to be an "official" one so that quest came to a hasty end, in the first instance.

Still, I am determined not to be one of these people who showers scorn on something just because he doesn't really get it. I want to get it before I shower scorn on it because for the life of me I don't know why all these celebrities and whatnot think it's so amazing. I had a quick look at Charlie Brooker's feed and the massively tiled background photo, preponderance of profanity and surreal disconnection of an unnetworked feed sent me away underwhelemed.

Perhaps I will warm to it...

I think I'm "searchable" so why not look for me. After all that's the idea of this stuff, surely.

In other news: they're making a film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies cue mind-boggling at the intertextuality.

An underwhelming set of duets is planned for the X Factor Final. In the office the prevailing attitude is that nobody should win because they're all rubbish. As long as Robojoe fails to win I really don't mind. I think it may well be Olly, if it's not Robojoe. If it is Robojoe I predict a christmas number one and then almost certain obscurity as people fail to care. An unfortunate wastage of the X Factor prize fund. Who knows if he wins I may try to push "Killing In The Name Of" to number one for Christmas as the Facebook group wishes.

The only thing that's news-y about the revelation that most people won't pay extra for TV in HD is that the BBC thinks this is news. I remember watching the clarity and beauty of the clear digital image slack jawed when DVD was released. But HD only improves on DVD a tiny little bit, and is monstrously more pricey. Whoever thought people would pay premium for that is stupid and greedy. Like I said, big news, not.

It appears that now people can see how whichever government is in power at the time is apparently squandering taxpayer money at Where Does My Money Go dot org. 53bn on General Public Services, eh? That'll buy a lot of second homes and duck houses... Pardon my cynicism. How long before someone registers wheredoesmymoneyreallygo.org? I can picture a wonderful parody with coloured circles representing "Down the back of the sofa", "Government 'Sharp Exit In Case Of Coup' Fund" and so on and so forth. It's all very well being able to see how the government our wasting the sweat of our collective brows but if we don't like the size or number of coloured circles in a particular category what, exactly, are we supposed to do? Ask for a refund?

Meanwhile, the taxman is complaining that his old computers are stopping him pwning us for all the money we might possibly owe. So let's get this straight, shall we? The government wants to plunge us back into misery and gloom in 2010 by charging us more tax for everything and the taxman is moaning because he can't screw us for an even greater amount... It seems as if we never needed a website to answer the question about where our money went. The answer is quite obvious.

Well, as always it's up to the personal world to rescue me from such gloomy thoughts. There's bacon, sausage, Dreamtime Stories and a generally sociable weekend in my immediate future. It seems all my money goes on buying cuts of dead pig... yum.

Quiet Day Posting

2009-12-10T15:31:00.003Z

Not much to say today except I've been following with some amusement the fracas surrounding social networking behemoth facebook's updated privacy policy.

I find the best way not to accidentally share personal information you don't want to be seen by the world is not to publish it in a thinly veiled marketing database that spans the entire Western World. Today's top tip...

Who's Dreamland

2009-12-09T15:14:00.003Z

Just a quick one today... well, it'll be quick to read but might take up almost an hour of your time. Apparently the BBC have been hiding episodes of Doctor Who away on CBBC and BBC Two.

This probably comes as no surprise to many particularly if you're a huge Who fan or young enough to keep up with these things but to my mind an episode of Doctor Who is an episode of Doctor Who whether live action or animated. This episode is a computer animated adventure in which the Doctor gets into trouble in 1950s America.

I've only watched part one so far but intend to whack on the omnibus when I get home. British viewers can catch up with it here.

Of Monsters And Magnets

2009-12-08T08:40:00.003Z

Quick one today. I'm going to reclaim my lunch hour to get some Dreamtime Stories stuff done for this weekend's session. After all the harping on about how difficult magic is in RP this magic system seems to have sprung, unbidden, from my mind and is looking like making pretty cool RP.

The only thing I have a slight issue with is that each type of magic needs an associated circular geometric design. That's a lot of geometry.

Anyhow. It occurs to me that yesterday I said nothing about the Monster Magnet gig that I went to on Saturday. Quite by chance RP Matt got in touch and asked if anything was happening and news of a Monster Magnet gig piqued his interest. Sue graciously handed her +1 status over to Matt so Matt and I got in on the guest list.

The opening act was an instrumental metal group. They weren't bad but they weren't sufficiently beyond riffing to make their prog metal designs work. Monster Magnet were chuffing excellent. All you could imagine a psychedleic metal band confident in their abilities to be.

Mrs has an issue with the fact that they're mostly old enough to be her dad but hey, what I say is if you can raise hell then whyever not?

Just a mini-blast today because the allure of the dreamtime is calling. Enjoy Tuesday!

Travesties and Turnips

2009-12-07T15:15:00.007Z

Well, of course, the travesty came to pass and Danyl (sorry about the previous misspelling) was booted in favour of RoboJoe (I decided it was too confusing to call RoboJoe Oliver because of there being a talented Olly in the competition). The Mrs engaged in much hand wringing during the X Factor semi because of RoboJoe's technically impressive, though bland, performance. I pointed out that if technical perfection in the face of blandness was all we had to go on then Lucie Jones would never have left the competition.

I can't, on the other hand, fault the performance skills of any of the others. Penguin Girl - the nickname in this case is affectionate - Stacey is as game as anyone stepping on chairs in high heels in a display of unnecessary theatrics. If RoboJoe appeared in high heels it might make him less bland, he wouldn't even have to work everywhere.

Like Mugatu I feel a bit like I'm taking crazy pills with regards to RoboJoe. Can I be the only one who's noticed that his comments on every one of his performances is that he's taking on board the judge's comments and he will strive to be better on his next performance? He may as well have a string with a ring attached dangling from his back.

The reason the show is called The X Factor is because it is supposed to find personalities who have talent and are interesting. In an unusual, though not unexpected, move Louis Walsh has staked his claim for Jedward and if that doesn't show that personality means more than actual talent in some cases I don't know what does. Looking for my own favourites, just on the grounds of fresh originality and an edgier sound, Miss Frank on Google makes it look like the nascent girl band just about died when they lost to Danyl in week three of the X Factor. It was the first and last time I ever voted for an act the week they went out. From then on I've been helping out my favourite acts by staying out of it entirely.

The fact that they went out to someone who later turned out to be a semi-finalist counts for nothing. Personally I think the X Factor should be more like the Eurovision Song Contest with G. Public voting for the top three. People would, no doubt, argue that such a system would be "too complicated" for the chimps those in the know believe the X Factor audience to be but the current system doesn't seem to be too effective at wheat from chaff separation.

If you were to go on subsequent success and generation of "buzz" you'd believe JLS beat Alexandra last year. Weirdly the samples of Alexandra's album sound more like what I'd expect JLS's album would sound like whereas JLS's sound is far poppier than I thought it should from what I've heard. I will reserve judgement for a little sit down with spotify before I say for certain.

This week's Danyl disaster just goes to show that the first past the post system is too blunt a tool because flavour of the month one-hit wonders make it at the expense of class acts with a prospect of longetivity. Not all the time but often this is the case. Who, for example, gives two hoots about Leon Jackson at this stage? Or Shayne Ward? Despite enormous popularity Leona Lewis gives every indication that her pop career is a chore.

Anyway, turns out that Danyl is planning to gig in Reading. I lived in Reading for many years and I can't imagine that they have a venue large enough to hold the legions of fans who are likely to turn up should this event take place. I think everyone is making the mistake of underestimating this year's X Factor has-beens including the entrants themselves. It's gone unsaid that the field was unusually rich with talent and potential this year; most of the acts, given a fair wind and a different year, may even have won in previous years. Even in the final auditions some incredibly talented people were sent home without ceremony. All of this with the sole exception of Jedward who seem to have been overrated beyond all belief.

*Sigh*

The only other thing of interest to catch my eye this grimy Monday is The Turnip Prize; this seems like a worthwhile award in the world of modern art definitely deserving of more coverage, maybe even televising.

Relentlessly Upbeat Friday Post

2009-12-04T15:40:00.003Z

As promised today I will be relentlessly upbeat, despite the fact that there's really not all that much to be relentlessly upbeat about in the outside world at large. I think that's the way of the world. Everything in the wider world looks grim but personally people might be having quite a nice time.

For example, tonight I have pizza for tea and a small Montecristo cigarello to enjoy. Tomorrow is Monster Magnet at Rock City. Christmas is three weeks today.

Not everybody likes Christmas, the Mrs claims to hate it for example, but I always find it to be a pleasing punctuation mark on the year. Maybe I won't be so delighted by the festive season this year as I've decided to forego the usual extra long holiday from Christmas Eve through to the dawn of the New Year but as someone who likes the quiet I think it'll all be okay...

Maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist.

Of course one of the small pleasures of the weekend is The X Factor, which I refuse to term a guilty pleasure. It just is what it is. Also it's nice that of the final four there are no donkeys.

If I was going to be having a punt at who thegeneralpublic will be voting out this week I'd have to say I reckon it'll be Mr. Murs, or possibly, if travesty after travesty continues to occur on the weirdest X Factor I've ever seen then it might be Daniel.

Suffice to say I think that Stacey (Penguin Girl) and Oliver (That chap from South Shields who's so boring I can't even remember his name) are safe this week but if there was any justice in the world we would be saying goodbye to Oliver, he's the most tedious entrant this year by far. What makes the whole thing extra sad is that he seems not to have been to stage school but you wouldn't know it from the way he mugs through every song like he's about to hit the jazz hands with a side of spirit fingers for all it's worth.

Well, time, and Sunday evening shall tell.

Have a good weekend all!

2009: The Year Of Impotent Rage

2009-12-03T14:50:00.004Z

Not my impotent rage, if anything I have been less rage-filled in 2009 than any year since approximately 2002. So that's good. But just as "9" is just and upside down "6" so 2009 reverses the fortune of the 60s in a very weak attempt to make something out of the fact that two numbers look like each other upside down.

For "we" are no longer sticking it to "the man" and "the man" has responded by shafting us like good 'uns. From throwing a hissy fit about not scamming a bunch of undeserved dosh off the working stiff to proving that administrative incompetence was ongoing in sensitive situations to the trivial but still ridiculous nickel and diming to death in online games. Right across the spectrum of government and commerce wherever there could be said to be "the man" (not to be confused with Nicolas Cage who was the man for very different reasons on Tuesday) he was sticking it to "us" unashamedly and without consequence.

However the BBC might want to put a positive spin on it the infosphere continues to belt us in the face with a tirade of liberties taken by those in power and it turns out our response is "meh".

Of course Harold MacMillan could continue to tell us that "we've never had it so good" to this day. We might all be poor but in the last recession we the general kind of poverty didn't come with games consoles, the internet and TV on demand. We might have been robbed blind, offended by government incompetence and forced to pay for virtual grenades but there are still plenty more ways to remain distracted and anaesthetised.

Hmmm, starting to sound a bit ranty? Yes, probably.

I'm not ranting, because ranting implies angry and I'm just as apathetic as the rest of you. I know the government are corrupt incompetents and businessmen are greedy sociopaths and that there aint no such thing as a free MMO but I don't care to do anything about it.

Media provides us with any number of enterprising journos from the Mark Thomas school of publicised activism who will stage revealing prank after revealing prank but the media will also tell us, nothing gets done as a result. If people with the public ear, viewing figures in the millions and, in some cases, their own fan clubs can do nothing then why should we?

Exactly.

I could point out what I think Electronic Arts should have done to milk money out of punters in a clever and non-irritating way. I could make any number of suggestions about what needs to change in banking. I could harp on and on about how I would restructure the House of Commons. In the end so could you, everyone reading this has access to browsers, Google and Blogger.

But what we've learned is that a simple plea for Friends, Romans and Countrymen to lend their ears is drowned out in a sea of attention grabbers. Gil Scott-Heron was right, the revolution will not be televised but only because we'll be too busy playing Wii Sports to fit one in.

I was going to pontificate about whether to theme the blog for a bit nominating a "Star" of the week or some such inconsequential nonsense but I've already dripped on for long enough.

Don't be thoroughly depressed, it's nearly the weekend... I shall be relentlessly upbeat tomorrow, I promise.

How You Can Tell When Nothing Is Happening...

2009-12-02T15:09:00.003Z

The front page of the BBC website reserves significant space for Lily Allen's announcement that she's going to stop recording pop singles for a bit.

Is it just me or is she a prime example of unremarkable mediocrity? Not saying that I'm not but really, I don't expect people to care what I'm doing next with my career. I suppose if people didn't think she was, in some way, remarkable the BBC wouldn't put her onto the front page but I can't see it personally.

So I guess I'm asking if I'm missing something. She just seems like some upper middle class bint of no particular note to me. And let's get this straight I'm not asking if everybody else likes her, I don't care about that. I just can't understand why she's famous except that her dad is.

Nicolas Cage Is The Man

2009-12-01T14:50:00.003Z

I couldn't quite believe the news when I heard that none other than Nicolas Cage was set to switch on the Christmas lights in Bath a few weeks back. I mean... it wasn't anywhere near December, what were they doing switching on Christmas lights?

Seriously, though as this feature on the BBC website testifies Cage rolled up to plunge the plunger spurred on by no more than a handwritten note and a general love of Bath. Ian used to live in Bath and I can tell you it's a jolly nice place, pricey but then that's probably not high on Mr. Cage's list of concerns.

He probably appreciated the peace and quiet he enjoyed while popping out to the shops there as, even in a named appearance, only 8000 people turned out to see his appearance. If 8000 people turned up anywhere to see me I'd think it was quite a lot but if you're Nicolas Cage that must seem like a modest and reasonable amount.

I've long been of the opinion that Mr. Cage, while quite clearly mental, is a marvellous actor. He seems to enjoy that peculiar talent shared by few actors to always pick interesting roles even when they're not that well written. He also manages to emerge from the worst of these movies without the tarnish sticking to him. I hated the remake of Bangkok Dangerous, couldn't stomach Knowing and fell asleep during Windtalkers but still I count Cage's name as a bonus in a film. I am also unashamedly a fan of things other people hated him in like Ghost Rider, Next and National Treasure (both of them).

The fact that he would also turn up to switch on a quiet English city's Christmas lights just cements for me his status as 1) mad as a box of frogs and 2) quite definitely the man. I like to think that Mr. Cage would have pressed ahead with his illuminating engagement even if he had known that Brum nearly fell into a giant chasm in 2012-esque scenes of apocalyptic upheaval after JLS proved more popular than the council had imagined them to be. Sure these are just four UK lads with a couple of cheeky chart successes at the dawn of their career and Nicolas Cage is, well, Nicolas Cage but I would hope that his affection for Bath would have overridden his common sense even in that circumstance.

All we got here in Notts was that boxer chappie, whose name I can't even remember. The fact that Nicolas Cage did the honours in Bath lends me hope that one day we might even aspire to someone good, like Stephen Fry or... no... I can't think of anyone better to switch on my christmas lights than Stephen Fry. In fact, I can think of few people who would be top of my list to be a paragon of excellence in most social situations than Stephen Fry so I shall give up trying.

The only other thing to happen in the last 24 hours of note comes my way again via the BBC website and is a pretty sweet story about a steampunk art exhibit there are moving pictures and image galleries back there so well worth a look.

Personally I am mulling over radio play projects and getting my teeth well and truly stuck into Levercastle proper. So I shall ask, no doubt in vain, who you would like to switch on your Christmas lights... if anyone answers I shall write to Stephen Fry and ask him to come and do ours. As Mrs wants to buy a 99p pre-decorated fake tree it shouldn't take him too long if he's free.

Aaaaaaaand Breathe...

2009-11-30T08:06:00.005Z

I scraped the 50000 word target. And by scraped I mean I really barely managed it. It's been a busy month. I wanted to get a start on with an RP project called Dreamtime Stories and the episode I wanted to run is one of four between now and February. I didn't want to be cramming it in later so that only left me one option. In amongst that and the regular business of living finding time to squeeze out 50k was no mean feat.

I'm quite happy with the results, however bizarre they might be. The book's a kind of thought experiment I called "Things Everyone Should Know About Computers" and it blends history with opinion and some quasi-autobiographical stuff. In order to qualify it for Nano I changed the name of the narrator. Is this cheating? I don't think this falls outside of the scope of Nano, so I'm sticking with it.

Apart from this the Mrs and I have been spending a lot of time lounging on the sofa gripped, this year, by X Factor. Mrs Monkey is a musical kind of person and she loves to see singers in competition. I have come to be of the opinion that X Factor gets overly abused for being what it is. Nobody's pretending that the show is innovative or that the contestants can do any more than sing songs.

Lot's of people have come away from X Factor moaning that it dominates the music industry (by which they mean the charts) and that it disadvantages "proper" musicians. As the chief commentator on this subject was Calvin Harris author of the deathless pop ditty "I get all the girls" I think that's a bit rich.

Anyhow, that's old news now. It's just that as someone who doesn't really take part in pop music or charts or any of that kind of thing, someone who's more at home with an old Monster Magnet CD and a documentary about Metallica I can't see why people can't see the televised audition that is the X Factor as anything but a good thing. After all the process is kind of definitive. Rather than take a small risk on fifty maybes why not put all the budget behind one person whittled down from a field of twelve finalists? Say what you like about past winners but at least we know they can sing, some of them can even dance.

Contrast that with the days of Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the 80s when the fact Rick Astley could carry a tune was seen as a novelty. "A pop act who can sing! Who'd have thought?"

As you may be aware I work for a ticket agency that sells for most pop music events and one thing I'll tell you about last year's admirable runners up JLS those lads are grafters. The amount of touring and promotion they've done tells me they deserved their crack at success. One memorable performance the promoter wanted news of their next gig at a venue sent out via e-mail while they were busy performing the current date.

Anyhow. That's my X Factor rant over with... inconsequential as the whole thing is. Now it's time to slip on my shoes and head off to work.

Nanowrimo Bites

2009-11-24T08:47:00.003Z

I've been aware that I'm not here...

But it's November and November means Nanowrimo and Nanowrimo means 50000 words. I'm inching towards the end. It'll be a shame if I fail now as I've officially crossed the line into "so near, yet so far" territory.

This brief note just signals my intention to return soon. I think I'm going to attempt to make this a more bloggy blog. It's come to my attention that if people really want to know what I think about role playing there's a 200-page book available which can brief them on the finer points and a podcast along roughly once every three weeks to expand upon these points further.

So the blog really should say something else again. Maybe pull in a little more traffic by being hip and relevant. Well, by referencing the current pop culture buzzwords anyway.

So, in the spirit of times to come, and until December...

Jedward.

Okay so...

2009-09-10T14:56:00.004+01:00

It's definitely been a while but I think given that I had a wedding to help organise I can be forgiven. Also I fell victim to the usual August malaise that seems to affect everyone. Having said that we punted out a couple of podcasts and got some RP done even despite this.

It's only the poor old blog that seems to be suffering. I have to say that it hasn't really been a time for profound thought, or indeed even interesting thought. Mostly I've just been getting through stuff and ploughing ahead.

Mrs, myself, the doodler and another friend have all booked and paid for our places at the upcoming games weekend organised by a friend in the wilds of Derbyshire. The experience is unfailingly a complete escape from reality for a few days. I myself have never experienced the specially extended version of the weekend that goes from Wednesday night all the way through to Monday morning but I imagine the sense of reality dislocation is going to be the most intense it's ever been.

The good thing about that is that you come back to real life suffused with the feeling that you have actually experienced a Narnia-esque amount of time in a parallel dimension. The bad thing is that the reality shock sucks really really bad.

Still, the highs of such an experience are way in excess of the lows, so bring it on!

The cat has been to the vets for a little family unplanning and is staggering around the house with stiches in her side and one of those funny collars on. It has to stay there for ten days. It's quite upsetting because we're used to her leaping about the place full of beans and looking, well, like a cat. Now she's trying to be energetic, but also trying to ditch the collar and the stitches appear to have had more of an impact than she'd like to admit.

I'm looking forward to ten days time when she might start, once more, to look more like our cat.

We're having a board game session tonight followed by the Season 2 finale to our Over the Edge campaign on Saturday. So for the next five weeks life looks set to be fairly normal.

I guess I can cope with that.

The Glorious British Summer

2009-08-05T08:53:00.005+01:00

Well, after a week off resting it's taken me about two days back in the cut and thrust of every day life to feel like I need another holiday. The silly season is well underway now, dead buses in the morning and a general apathy in just about everyone.

Ironically we have been doing quite a bit of role playing at this time. Polishing off one off play testing, exploring a hack or two. Yup, no slackness here on that front. I'm starting to think that the time to compile all of our endeavours is not long off...

I can't help but notice the insistent rain. I wonder if this will drive people back to their PCs and hopefully help revive the forum.

Gamer Fatigue?

2009-07-22T20:32:00.002+01:00

I find myself wondering about the phenomenon known as "Gamer Fatigue". This is where some person in your gaming community announces that they are "taking a break from RP" and withdraws, mysteriously, into seclusion. To me this seems a bit like "taking a break from Movies" or "taking a break from TV". Gaming, to me, is a form of entertainment, not a chore.

I can understand when people say they're going to "take a break from the gym to concentrate on swimming". I guess I just never really regarded gaming as such an intensive pastime. This points the way to a further set of concepts within gaming I hadn't really thought about before. When I find a television drama, a novel or a computer game compelling it's often on the point of it giving me new ideas or insight into the construction of stories for others. Weirdly this means I often don't like playing in games as I can't really just rip off another Host. Gaming is virgin territory for many gimmicks.

This leads to two further notes. One, that I know other people take their gaming very seriously and look upon the opportunity to play a role as an actual creative enterprise. Some people, myself included, look on their character as a way to interact with the story environment, they are contributing a performance within the rules in order to keep the game going. The other note is that role playing games haven't yet progressed to the point where there is a startling bloom of innovation.

To deal with these points in reverse order. It seems that all the RP that has gone on since D&D has been much after the fashion of people taking pictures of moving objects with early movie cameras. Unlike the former activity, however, because it is not enormously expensive and doesn't have much in the way of toys people have largely ignored this innovation in entertainment (did I mention it also has few military applications). RP's not good for much except as a really cool form of entertainment. The problem is that innovation in the field has been restricted to new methods for number-juggling.

I love RP so much that when my partner didn't want to play I changed the hobby to make it suit her more, now I love it even more myself.

But this is weighty stuff. It also leads back to the former point.

I know a lot of people get "RP Burnout" at present. This is like the reverse of "cinema frustration" in which there are too few movies you want to see out when you fancy a visit to the pictures. RP Burnout is where you've role played so much you just can't take it any more. I think I experienced something similar with console games a while back. I'd just played so many of the damnable things I couldn't play any more or it felt like my brain would fall out. Also console games achieve nothing for the player whereas the benefits of socialisation and group interaction at least give RP a social dimension.

I imagine if you did anything enough then it would lead to a similar situation, if they did release enough movies that you could go all day every day for a month you would probably get sick of going to the movies (in fact at film festivals I believe this is what happens to some). However we roleplay once a week and occasional weekends. At the moment we're doing a little more because we're playtesting new adventures. I'd actually like to adopt a slightly less intensive posture after this testing phase.

But what I'm left with after considering these points is even more clarification of what players want out of the RP experience. I know that Mrs Monkey has been finding some of the experiences very hard of late. I think at the point where you feel guilty because you should have done more is precisely the time that you should start to do more.

I think what I need to get across to people that the RP is an entertainment. Levercastle tends to be treated as such. I think what also needs to happen is not only that the players say what they expect out of the experience but the Host needs to say what he can see happening bearing in mind the characters as presented. If people know what's coming up in a vague sense of the word then they can prepare accordingly.

I think that's actually mentioned in the Core Book but the fine tuning of the concept still seems to be a little off. Ho hum. Back to tinkering.

The Joker In The Pack

2009-07-09T08:49:00.008+01:00

No sooner do I lament the complete lack of anything that makes for a substantial post than KA-BLAM! something amazing socks me in the face; almost literally in this case.

When I was compiling the Core Book I tried to include everything I could think of at the time to make a sourcebook for the budding No Dicer. It is inevitable that things should be missed. Almost everything that's coming in the Random Encounters series is intended to be filled with examples of powerful things that you can do with No Dice principles. So in each adventure we're kind of expanding the toolkit of the prospective Host and also giving a concrete example of potential play.

Last night we play tested the Monster Action Thriller "The Creature of Black Lake" and got off to a rocky start. Basically an incident mentioned in the notes that's supposed to just happen resulted in the death of a player's character before the adventure had even started.

This was notable for several reasons but not least because that's really not supposed to happen. I know that people have been keen to discuss the idea of abitrary character death recently but this basically put someone out of the game in the first forty minutes.

Not only that but I experienced an incident of Host meltdown, a brief autopsy of the situation lead to the conclusion that the wires of communication were badly crossed and for a while there it all looked grim. You see, the whole point of No Dice is that it's supposed to help you sidestep these issues and keep going. If an adventure has a serious hole that relies on a certain series of incidents not happening then it's just not working.

A workable suggestion was put forward by Justin who suggested that when you hit the blind alley you as Host rewind the action to just before everything went pear and then re-explained the situation giving the player an out.

Like I say, this is workable but it's not really all that neat. It means that a player could take a one way trip up diarrhea drive and then like the Prince of Persia just rewind and do it again.

It was Sue who hit on the real answer. Which in a discussion that followed broadened out from a specific instance in that adventure to become a general principle that Core Book is sorely missing. Oh well, for the second edition I suppose.

But for those of you who don't want to wait n years for the 2nd ed here's the idea right now. Treasure this one, it's golden:

Creating NPCs is always a problem. 95% of NPCs are just cyphers of course. They are barkeeps, random wandering citizens and other reasonably easy to scope functionaries.

That other 5% are the important ones. Many of these, probably just over half, are villains and again there isn't really a problem with them. It's that last 2% that can leave the Host scratching their head.

These are the "major friendly NPCs". Don't be fooled, just because they're marked "friendly" doesn't mean they're always happy to see the players, it more or less just means they won't just try to kill the players on sight.

In the Core Book I got as far as advising people to avoid "infoblaster" NPCs who just know everything. And I also advised against making NPCs as powerful or more powerful than the player characters who were supposedly their allies.

Aside from that I just recommended a Host create "real" characters using the Player's Guide notes to make a fully rounded and realised character.

In some cases this might be fine. But in reality players don't really spend all that much time talking to NPCs just for fun. So a lot of the Host's fine character creation work goes by the wall.

Besides, once you've stopped the NPCs being more powerful when they're too friendly you've kind of left yourself in a bit of a bind.

The problem is sometimes you want characters to move the plot on. They are supposed to arrive, do something dramatic and then leave the players to deal with the fall out.

So how does one do this without making them villainous or too powerful? After all a constant parade of utter villainy keeps things busking along but really in a story based RP you want other types of encounter.

This was exactly the problem in Creature. I had an NPC who needed to rather aggressively insert himself into the party and provide useful plot information, in a guarded manner, for the remainder of the adventure (or at least until he died). I had written up notes for this character which were pretty light. I wanted to introduce him and then, in the playtest, develop him in some way into a fully realised character.

So when he came in to the action I kept him neutral. The only problem with this is that he was neutrally holding up the party's boat with AK47s. As I quickly discovered this kind of thing can be misinterpreted as open aggression. Funnily enough, had he gone in with open aggression the accidental adventure ruining bloodbath that resulted from my weak characterisation would have been averted. Then, of course, the players would have had to just follow along on rails.

On rails is not a good place for adventures to be.

So I needed to, rather than render the character neutral and hence weak, render him a little bit charming and crazy and hence allow characters to interact with him even though he was, technically, a bad dude.

This is a really exciting dramatic position, the guy's holding you hostage but he's quite willing to have a conversation with you about begonias (or whatever). As a player you feel you might be able to negotiate or something.

At the same time the Host has someone who can nudge the characters back on task if they look like they're about to commit suicide or whatever.

This guy's a great NPC, not too overpowering but not too floppy either. He's not going to interfere unless you need him too. He's a joy to have involved.

And hence was born the Joker.

You see Creature is not alone in needing a character like this. Every role play session could do with having a Joker to interact with the players, nudging, testing, exploring their characters.

The situation where the Joker is a guy who has technically taken the Players as hostages, but in a polite way, is just one possible scenario. Characters who have vast reserves of information they are unwilling to share, characters who offer money, or professional services desired by the players all of these are ideal Joker characters.

The secret is to always lay on the unthreatening manner on thick. This was my vital mistake last night. Neutrality won't cut it if an NPC has some power over the players. The character has to maintain their power over the character while entertaining the player.

I'm not saying that making them will be easy but there is a way to make it easier. Sue loves poker and she quickly put me on to the old poker trope of trying to find the sucker at the table. Essentially when you come up with an adventure design your job is to try to identify the Joker(s) at the table and then make them around their role in the story.

Some stories, Con of the Dead, Revelation Point, don't really need a Joker character. Then we return to the poker trope: if after ten minutes searching for the Joker in the scenario you still can't find them, it's you.

Yes, in some adventures it is the Host himself who takes this gently tormentative role for the players. Horror splatter scenarios are the most likely to feature these.

So from now on when I'm dealing up a new scenario I will be sure to use a deck comprised of 53 cards. The joker's going to become one of the most powerful tools in my arsenal.

NB: That last sentence was a dramatic article closer. You don't need to actually draw a card to know when to make the Joker NPC, you just kind of look for them after you've finished your notes.

Welcome To The Silly Season

2009-07-08T15:01:00.004+01:00

I've started to notice a significant drop off in vocal activity. It's about that time from late June until early September when people drop off the radar for weeks on end, it gets a shade too hot to be hitting the keyboard, people are motivated towards eating, drinking and otherwise gadding about doing frivolous things.

And what of we, the Hosts? The artists? The creatives? I know that Mrs Monkey is busy working on her female oriented RP epic. I'm knee deep in writing for RE Vol 1 and Justin's sketching away for the same volume.

So what is there to report?

Not much.

Welcome to the silly season.

I could tell you that I had had some vague thoughts about helping out the aspiring RP hacker, or that I'd suddenly found that names are really important in Over The Edge, or that I was slightly concerned about the amount of goodies we're thinking of introducing into RE Vol 1...

But none of it makes a full post.

Besides, in the case of item 2 I'd really rather you had to ponder that one yourself. Names? Over The Edge? Hmmmm.

Blinking Hot!

2009-07-02T08:46:00.002+01:00

I think the thing that annoys me most about this weather is that everywhere that's not air conditioned grinds to a sticky, sluggish halt. You breathe in apathy and breathe out lethargy. This, of course, discourages any kind of activity like sitting at a PC talking about role playing, or actually role playing.

The only thing I find myself particularly grateful for is that we have invented an RPG that can, if needs must, be played just about anywhere. Including in the cool air of an open sky evening as the sun sinks not slowly enough in the West.

This is an option I think we are going to have to look towards with keen interest as the stickiness quotient rises even further...

Group Musings

2009-06-25T14:54:00.003+01:00

A plaintive Twitter by one of the folk I am following lead me to consider the dynamics of the gaming group. Currently we have a core group of four on a weekly basis and one more every fortnight (we play our games on a biweekly basis, this being a happy medium between weekly Hosting madness and monthly Hosting doldrums). On a one off basis we number easily a dozen or more.

I don't think of any of the seven or eight people who don't come to every single game I play in to be any kind of slacker, or "not really part of the group", similarly I don't think of the hardcore four as being the "real group" or any of that nonsense. If you are a gamer reading this you may well be wondering how all this works. One thing having a gaming group is famed for is requiring a certain level of commitment.

I'm going to mention No Dice again, big surprise.

The fact is that one of the things that spurred me on to write down the No Dice way of doing things was that there are a lot of gamers who don't game any more because as they got older they lost the time required to be in a "proper" group.

I game on a weekly basis now but only because of an accident of scheduling. I game a lot more often that just the weekly session but only by being able to be flexible about who is there and who isn't.

Of course there are some things it's better to have everyone there for. No one likes to know their character is being NPCed without them. But No Dice was specifically designed to encourage "casual Role Playing". We are talking about one-off events and pushing one-off ideas because it's a feature of the system. One offs are awesome, a little taster of something that might be a little strong, strange or hard to sustain for a campaign.

We've also tried to foster campaign set ups where people drift in and out. We're working hard on allowing Hosts to cope with player characters who hardly ever meet, so if someone can't make it to a session then it's assumed their character is busily going about their life elsewhere.

All of these things have resulted in me having the largest group of gaming contacts I ever have, and it has also resulted in me gaming with a greater variety of people more often. It also has delighted me that people not traditionally attracted to the hobby have been open to getting involved because of the greater flexibility.

So as much as it does make me cringe to push the product again, if you're worried about maintaining a gaming group, or about starting one with many flaky members, then it might be you need to No Dice Up Your Life...

I can't believe I just said that.

Bye Bye Lulu

2009-06-16T23:05:00.003+01:00

Also to be posted on Lulu's Support Escalation forum.

Dear Lulu,

I've been a supporter and champion of your service for nearly five years now. So it saddens me to say it but this is the end of the road. I wish I were having some sort of momentary hissy fit, but it's gone beyond that. Way beyond.

To be honest the ins and outs of why the situation has ended up like this are too far in the past now for me to rehearse them again. Besides, it isn't really that there was some sort of problem that is what's lead to this.

It's the silence.

It's the inaction.

It's the fact that despite apologies and promises of improvement things seem to have got worse, not better.

I want you to appreciate the gravity of this situation. I have used your service to publish three books. They weren't books I wanted to push on people. They were books I wanted to be available to people if they wanted them. As it turns out hardly anyone did want them, but that wasn't ever the point.

The point was that when I had something I really wanted to push on people I knew at least one thing was taken care of. I would have a supplier for printed copies. It would print and supply, I knew the service and everything was okay.

That's a huge weight off the mind of someone trying to push a risky venture. If someone has gone to the effort of publishing novels to audition a service they want to know that service will be there for them when there might be more at stake. If someone's that concerned about the possibility of things going wrong you can see that they might be reluctant to turn away even when they do go wrong. So wrong. So very very wrong.

In the end I don't even want to do this. The thought of trying to get my money back off you and up sticks to a new and untried service fills me with apprehension, even fear.

You've actually managed to push someone beyond fear.

I realised that what you're doing isn't just sloppy, lazy, poorly organised, disrespectful and rude. It is all of those things. But more than that. It's wrong.

The people who are using your service are people who are not rich enough to pay a commercial printer to make print runs. The products you're producing are all, to some extent, labours of love. Even if people did write their text book to make money they spent the time to write the damned thing. They learned to use your file uploader. They worked out how to tell people about this book they wrote. They told people how to order it and they even expected that some people would buy it despite the ridiculous production costs and delivery fees.

They really have to love what they've done to expect people to pay over and above the going rate for whatever type of book it is they've written. You are dealing with projects that are highly personal to every person who writes and produces them here.

The apparent meltdown of your support services in the last couple of weeks just shows that somewhere along the line you've lost sight of that. The fact you had the brass balls to issue any kind of public apology for this and then continued for the next three working days to apparently do nothing to resolve these issues, and in fact allowed them to deepen and become more severe, just shows how lost you've become.

Your incompetence and failure would be serious enough if you weren't dealing with materials that people have poured tiny parts of their heart and soul into. The fact is that however unremarkable these products are in monetary terms every one of them is far more personal to their creators than a lot of other products which have made a lot more money.

Talking of which, every success story on your site however modest came from the ranks of those people. You didn't find them, they found you. Your recent actions communicate quite clearly that you don't care where your next success comes from, you don't want it, you don't need it. The chances are that it's just another loser who will never shift enough units to turn you a decent profit.

Usually, of course, you will be right about this. We all know that the successes are rare. Your company is built on a platform of giving people with the commitment to produce a print-ready file a shot at building a small business out of their efforts. These people come with nothing but hope and a work ethic. You have told them it's not too much to expect some sort of welcome. When you effectively spit in their faces this way it crushes them. It takes their dreams and rakes them through muck, mangles them and then shows the hideous wreckage of the basket they put their eggs in.

That kind of behaviour goes beyond disrespectful and edges into cruelty.

Maybe you are having problems. This is what you claim. Well, since you started having problems your communication channels seem to have closed further not opened. This is the time you need to be telling people what's going on not shutting them out.

If you want to come back on this and ask "What could we have done?" there is your answer. As long as things are not getting better you need to be telling people how they are getting worse.

As it is it looks like you just don't care about the hordes of people standing at your gates, clutching manuscripts, hoping to see them printed. Maybe they'll be lucky and see their dream realised but woe betide them if they have a single problem between ordering and postage because if they do all they will get for their enquiries about the situation is silence.

So for that reason as soon as possible I will be taking my projects away from Lulu and looking for some other similar service. I don't want to do it but I don't want to continue standing behind this betrayal of basic expectation any longer.

If you are wondering whether to feel ashamed. Go ahead. It would seem to me that you are way overdue.

Yours

Leo Stableford
Unanswered tickets: 00256706, 00257496, 00258566, 00261411

What Has Happened To Lulu?

2009-06-09T15:08:00.004+01:00

Thanks go to Charles Causley for the title of this entry. How a man who died in 2003 knew that we would experience difficulties with a recalcitrant POD publisher 6 years before they started to manifest I don't know.

What I do know is that I foolishly assumed that self-publishing three novels through Lulu.com would prepare me for the day that I wanted to do something "proper". I hold my hands up that I wasn't entirely prepared for some of the issues that arise from having a book with illustrations, even black and white and grayscale ones.

These technical issues are almost entirely down to me and trying to keep as much information in Justin's images as humanly possible. I was unaware that 98% of that information was completely useless and, further, somewhat incompatible with high speed POD printing presses.

So, I have no beef with Lulu regarding that side of things.

Between myself and a couple of geeky friends we have taken in the new requirement, rendered the documents to that standard and reissued the PDF a fourth time. According to the initial problem report there is now no way the problem that dogged the first three versions can reoccur.

The problem I am having is that Lulu are not very communicative. All the fixes I have applied have been the result of assiduous Googling. I submitted two trouble tickets asking for help and have heard nothing regarding either of them. I also received an offer of a specific breakdown of the errors the printer had rendering the publication. I received this five working days after the first problem had occurred.

Although in five working days I had managed to work out from the gnomic communiques issued thus far what I thought would be the best solution and applied it. Still, I felt that it might be useful to take a look at that report and perhaps anticipate any future issues should such exist. Maybe dash out another version before another failed run.

So I said "yes please".

Apparently I am expecting a mail sometime before about 11PM tonight from some kind of POD case worker to chat this over. I'm not really sure what they could do for me. I know that they've had one working day to attempt to print the outstanding books and mail them out and they haven't bothered. Not that I feel that I deserve preferential treatment for fixing badly formatted manuscripts, but I have no indication at all when or even if they will try to print the latest, untested version of the file any time soon.

It's possible they already have tried to do this and it's failed for some other reason. I wouldn't know, they have no protocol for releasing this information to me. I am a little confused as to what the turnaround between an attempted print and the issue of the error message is. In fact once you have uploaded and paid for a "project" to be printed and delivered by Lulu the work enters a limbo of vague information. There is no one to talk to, there is no way to check what's going on, if something does go wrong you're lucky to receive a seven word explanation of what it is and as for finding a solution it's down to yourself and Google.

I've been a long, long, long time champion of Lulu. I used to feel that their service was the future, that it's production model was going to win out and it was only a matter of time.

Technically this may still be true. But their communication protocols remind me of the very worst of old school bureaucracies, they're worse than most UK banks and that's saying something.

At present I don't believe there is a better alternative to Lulu, Amazon's CreateSpace was just two bound up in legalese upfront to even get through the front door. But would I *recommend* people use Lulu? Not unless, like us, they have no alternative and they are trying to get something started.

I am deeply disappointed with Lulu and only a few more days of poor communication and abysmal service stand between disappointment and hate.

Farewell Black Wednesday

2009-06-04T08:51:00.002+01:00

I don't know why exactly but yesterday was the most stupidly bad day for the Mrs and myself for quite some time. The front door on the house is not working and I'm the only person who can lock it so I had to spend my lunch hour coming home to make it lock so the Mrs could go to work which meant having to spend an extra half hour in work.

This wouldn't have been so bad but halfway through the day Lulu wrote to kindly inform me that there was an issue with transparency artefacts in some images in the Core Book and as a result they couldn't print or fulfil any orders yet. So I had to run home to spend a cheery evening print optimising all the pictures, re-inserting them into the document and then republishing the project on Lulu. I didn't know, at this stage, whether my remedies would work. The only benefit I received straight off the bat was that the PDF, previously an encumbering 47MB was now a sprightly 6MB.

Not that my travails were anything like as bad as those of the Mrs who had to put up with death threats at work. No, seriously. And came home early in the least good a mood as can possibly exist to find her rubbish other half frantically uploading new PDFs to Lulu because a few real people actually want their copuies of the actual book on actual paper with actual ink.

Thankfully Ian's order has shipped, and I guess this means the issues are over with. Although Lulu didn't actually get back to me at all even though I submitted a trouble ticket asking how long it might be before they attempted printing again. I tried mailing back to the address they mailed me from but the mail bounced.

Lulu is becoming a proper corporation that acts just like one too!

Bah.

Skills To Pay The Bills

2009-05-27T13:23:00.003+01:00

As a long time Scaper I am no stranger to the benefit that special abilities or skills bring to a board game. A large part of Scape tactics come about from selection of units with complementary skill sets or units that may give an edge if the luck of the d20 is with the unit commander. In a tabletop skirmish game skills are awesome. The basic version of Scape has no skills and it sucks like a nuclear powered Dyson. No, in a tabletop game skills are that all important edge that makes an extra bit of fun for participants.

So I imagine when Monsieur Gygax was thinking about D&D the idea of dropping skills from the units was anathema and I can understand the point of view. A wargame or similar with no unit-specific skill matrix is yawnsome.

To further expand on my Scape example a Scape figure has five major ratings, Attack, Defence, Range, Movement and Life. A skill gives some advantage that increases these ratings either permanently or given some random event or particular set of circumstances. There are angels with shields who automatically double their defence. Furious samurai who can add to their attack when they engage the enemy. Gorilla soldiers who can move twice as far while the cat suited secret agents are on the field.

The reason this increases the fun in wargames is that the game runs within very strict rules and the number of outcomes to a particular scenario, vast as they may be, are finite.

Now let's make a sideways move into role play.

My favourite skills system ever in a role playing game is the Over The Edge system, where you basically make up your own skills and get dice pools in them. There are skills that a lot of people might have like "fighting" and then skills that people might not choose like "make up artist". The joy of it being your character can be good at whatever you like.

Of course this case is all a matter of scope the number of situations that could arise in RP are vast compared to the number of situations that could come up in a skirmish game. The chances that a general amnesty could be called in a skirmish and that because it's christmas day the characters will engage in a pleasant game of footie are slim to fat. It's not part of the game's scope.

Set a scenario in a WWI trench on christmas day and watch what happens. Exactly.

The immediate reaction of the role play scenario creator to this problem is to start mucking about with "skill trees" and the like. I don't know why any human being starts thinking "I can taxonomically record every skill a human being could ever need" or even "other people will find rooting around in my taxonomy fun" or even "this hideous conglomeration of number soup will be the one thing that makes the game worth playing". I'm not sure anyone does think the last one. In fact I think that people probably don't even regard them as a necessary evil. They might get as far as necessary but evil?

Evil can mean a lot of things. When you're trying to play an RPG evil is anything that turns the game into a laborious time waster. So I think large skill trees certainly fit into that most of the time.

Note here I'm not talking about suggested skills. Having a vast array of contextualising information about the kinds of skills one might have is not a problem. Especially not if your skillcyclopaedia indicates the proper definition of all skills should be agreed between Host and Player before play commences. Remember the player wants the coolest persona that won't break the game and the Host wants to provide the most thrilling experience into which the characters fit like perfect players in the dramatic events of the story.

I've never met a player who wouldn't agree to prune the power to feel more like they fit in the world. Power gamers tend to be caught in a well intentioned attempt to cover all possible bases. Power Game characters tend to lean on their magic character stat though and this makes for a one-dimensional character most times.

I've never come across an RPG where the variety of skills available was particularly what made the game in fact I've never seen one where telling the player any finite number of skills is all the skills that exist is anything more than a massive bummer to the players.

If you want to give the players a menu of skills and say get on with it you're not Hosting properly. The skills a player may or may not need in the course of an adventure or campaign should always be a negotiation between player and Host and should never come off a list.

That's how I do it, that's how Over the Edge does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far.

Mixed Bag

2009-05-20T15:40:00.002+01:00

First off let me just point you in the direction of The No Dice Node which is the official No Dice forum. I've always loved a good forum ever since I was first on teh intarwebnet and it's always been a sad little ambition of mine to run one. So sad little ambition now realised.

I'm really pleased that we've got 5 real members (and the Google AdSense bot) on the roster. Admittedly Admins still outnumber real community members but, hey, everyone's got to start somewhere. We've already proven to be a lively bunch and once I've finished writing this I'm sloping off to reply to threads and maybe start a few of my own.

I've always wanted to have the exploits of myself and my colleagues be fully interactive and I always find people more able to witter away and keep in touch in a forum than commenting on blogs or podcast posts. So I hope some of you will join us in the node and see all that's super live in the Node.

Before I disappear one brief thought I felt it was worth setting down regards how I'm finding the transition between thinking of myself as a writer and thinking of myself as a game designer. When I was a writer it all seemed very lonely. Writers aren't supposed to be particularly interactive and writer's circles are seen as places of ego battering misery for the ascetic journeyman. Basically writers aren't really seen as "chatty".

I remember when I was trying to promote the cause of POD back in the day people generally regarded it as a station of hopeless but valiant calling. Nobody in POD circles sees themselves as a "joiner", well, except me.

I love people, I love seeing what lies within someone's imagination. I love to tell stories with people and being the designer of No Dice and its associated systems is already an awesome thing. I've met possibly 15-20 new gamers as a result of No Dice and all of them have been awesome human beings, every game that finished I was sad to see them go and hoped we'd hang out for a session again.

That's what I think the absolute difference between being in the gaming world and the pure writing world is. I am all about enabling the stories of others, writers feel they have story to tell that is theirs.

I am glad I've found my side of that fence.

Things Are Getting Desperate

2009-05-14T15:25:00.005+01:00

Only a couple of days to go until No Dice debuts at Beer & Pretzels. I'm really looking forward to taking some games out for a trundle. Justin, Mrs Monkey and myself had a war council last night and it all is looking quite exciting. I think it's fair to say that hopes are high for this enterprise. Sure we won't be filling a Global Stadium Tour any time soon but I hope people can get behind what we're trying to do here.

One thing that struck me in the paper-riffic character sheet production bonanza that took place yesterday was that we really do have a vast array of different rules and features that swap around in a dizzying number of ways to create an awesome powerhouse of role play variety.

It was part of the design all along that there would be a Vanilla system onto which features would be bolted as suited the needs of the scenario but I never expected there to be so many subtle shades. For example Con of the Dead is the exemplar of cheap and cheerful, four character records to a sheet of A4, 8 stats, a suit, a character name. Extremely efficient.

At the other end of the scale Marauders: Pirates of the Kamuri Kandam has 12 stats and a whole separate grid for fighting. Shadow Cities two meters for combat (ranged and melee and a huge wash of skill slots). Revelation Point, our slasher one off, employs a completely gimmicked system for making Slasher one offs where injuries are micromanaged and obssessed over much as they are in the genre they attempt to emulate.

Despite what could be a dizzying array of different rule sets the system remains, at heart, pretty simple. The scores on the sheets are only ever chucked in when needed. In fact there are sub variations of the rules for certain situations, the Marauders one off we're taking to B&P has almost no role play in it, well, very little that would require role play tests. In response I've stripped the 12 attribute skill grid out of the one off sheets and presented players with a character history and a fighting style.

Anyhow, all of this variety is intended to impress and I hope it does. After this piece of work we're looking forward to a launch party next week and then, well, the launch. A rest can't come soon enough to be honest.

Word of the week has been traction. What we're all really hoping is that this product will create some space for us to get some traction, buy a little time to do the work and get on with writing up the twelve books we've got planned so far (not counting anthologies of one offs). I predict a lot of hoarsely telling people that if they had a good time please to spread the word in the immediate future.

Oh well, off to think about fliers to hand out this weekend...

Frantic Preparation Abounds

2009-05-07T15:16:00.007+01:00

Those of you champing at the bit to get a copy of the Core Book will be pleased to hear that the final few bits and pieces are coming together nicely. We've had tentative conversations speculating about what kind of business it might do.

When I published my novels I knew how badly they would do. I am a very harsh reader and rarely read any novels unless they really grab my attention. I am apt to view my own work in the same light. Sure it's a good novel, I might think, but there are thousands of good novels that don't sell well.

But a game?

The scope of a game is different. If you're Harry Potter you can sell yourself to millions of people world wide, no role playing game will ever outsell you not even a Harry Potter RPG. But if you are an unknown but pretty decent novel you could go through a print run of 600 copies 550 of which will get remaindered and no one will ever know who the hell you were.

RPGs are far more narrow band. If an RPG is decent it will shift a few units no matter what. Or at least that's the way it seems. Of course if you write a rubbish RPG it fares about as well as the unknown decent novel. But there is some kind of meritocracy in the world of the RPG. Good stuff makes a mark, bad stuff makes a different kind of mark. The community is communicative and keen.

It's a world I understand. While I'd never really be able to sell a novel to someone without resorting to "it might give you an idea for an RPG session" I can tell every role player who ever lived that they need to look at No Dice.

In the latest podcast (#5 up this weekend) Justin talks about the appraisal of D&D 4e which states that it's a game that does an epic job of removing all the RP. Well No Dice is almost the polar opposite it's a Role Play tool that hacks the game down to a minimum.

Thus if people want to mix their game complexity with some RP fun it might be best to buy both. One's a game, the other supports you in Role Play, together they might just make beautiful musics... or they might just make a terrible hideous carnage filled mess.

The point is valid. I have always looked on No Dice as an addendum to crunchier systems because if I want crunch I can easily get myself stocked up. If I want to examine parts of the RP experience that don't involve crunch there's limited resource available. And what is there isn't terribly well organised.

So I'm keeping my phylanges crossed that people see things the way the No Dice Crew do. I guess we'll find out come June 1st and thereafter.

My own personal ambition that we've done something really good is when we sell around 1000 copies of the printed book. My target to know it wasn't a complete waste of time and energy is at a more conservative 50 copies.

There's a hell of a lot of legroom inbetween for stuff to evolve.

Fan Mail!

2009-04-23T14:19:00.002+01:00

Not just for me, of course but for the whole No Dice team. We received the mail yesterday afternoon from an early fan of the system. Apart from the obvious joy at having a fan at all we were all absolutely made up to have it be a fan of a type we had always intended this system for. A long time gamer, his wife and son are all champing at the bit to try a bit of No Dice, apparently.

This just about covers all the bases as far as we're concerned. We were trying to put a few ideas into RP which would encourage older gamers, gamers with less time, and also younger gamers. The latest podcast sees us all gush on somewhat about how great this all is and how fantastic everybody's being before we have one droplet of finished ink to show them.

I'm not quite sure how to conclude a piece of good news... oh. Like this.

Late to the TPK Party

2009-04-22T14:42:00.004+01:00

TPK in this instance standing for "Total Publisher Kill". The internet has been alive with commentary on the whole WotC removing PDFs of their product from sale debacle.

I just thought that I would add my tuppence in here. If I knew that I had sold 10 copies of No Dice and 100 more people were bothered enough to copy the PDFs then I would be extremely pleased. RPGs, like good stories, need to be spread wide to root down.

I think the bigger people are the more they forget about roots, on many levels. Of course we're those tree-hugging hippie types who want to give away our core book PDF but hey...

Post And Run

2009-04-15T08:44:00.003+01:00

Things are quiet on the journal front. Maybe this is because I hae been spending a lot of time chuntering away on the No Dice Podcast.

Lots of fascinating chat in there, and then I say some stuff too.

In other news. Have been gaming. A lot. Mostly No Dice of course. Had a couple of newly interested experimenters join us for a mammoth Marauders session on Saturday. In order to keep the continuity of the campaigners timeline I had to set the game four centuries further on in a steampunk setting. It was still pretty cool. Much martial arts was had by all.

Then their zeppelin crashed. Oh well.

Modern Storytelling

2009-03-30T09:25:00.004+01:00

I remember once Mike made a comparison between roleplaying and the ancient art of storytelling. He wasn't wrong either. Sure, the details have changed but a lot of what goes on (at least round our way) under the guise of role playing is actually group storytelling. What struck me at the time was that before the widespread adoption of the printing press, before radio, before television, these activities must have gone on. They must have because we still know ancient myths even though they could not be set down and widely distributed (to most people) until some time in the 19th Century.

Storytelling was, if anything, an orally transmitted and propagated cultural phenomenon in its old form. When you could read from a book, or listen to the radio, when you could go to the movies, watch television or play a computer game it looked like the ancient art of storytelling was redundant. It served no purpose. It was just a phase humanity went through before it got a next gen console.

I can't question what Mr. Gygax was thinking about when he invented D&D. It seems pretty obvious on one level. What he has ended up doing is paving the way for storytelling to come back. This is what I love about role playing books. They're not an attempt to replace a group activity involving people interacting. They're a support to that process. All the stories of the World of Darkness are just prologue to the player campaigns.

A weighty heritage for a hobby that has not thus far managed to cast off its geek-laden roots.

It's come to me recently, over and over, that there must have been a real hunger at some level of society for the return of group storytelling because the original roleplaying set up just doesn't seem like a terribly attractive proposition.

RPGs at their inception were games. You could win and you could lose. The roll of the dice was a core component in "beating" the dungeon adventure. Scores were vital. These trappings, the trappings of the competitive pursuit have proven almost impossible for the hobby to cast off so far. There just hasn't been anyone to reshape any part of it into a discrete entertainment experience.

So Justin and I are writing the manual but make no mistake this is something the people we knew were tending towards anyway. There are a few vital ingredients that we have had to bring in from the cold but the core of No Dice is the making available of a group storytelling experience to a culture that neglected and carelessly forgot how to engage in it. Not that I think modern story based role play is much like a storytelling experience of yore but the parts that are the same are vital, community, communication, sharing time as a group.

We were lucky enough at the weekend to have a complete role-play n00b join us for the preview event. I ran a hitherto notorious zombie romp called "Con of the Dead" which relies a little on the participants having some knowledge of SF television. Until now this has never been a problem in the groups I have encountered. Our n00b however, didn't watch any television particularly and so was in danger of missing many of the in-jokes.

The problem of being the Host is that even if people find their minds numb at the end of the day the tendency is to smile and nod and thank you because people realise how much work you must have done and feel that criticising it would be rude. So I asked our n00b how he liked the session and he said all the right things. After the session I asked Sue whether she got the same vibe.

This is the joy of Sue. People will tell her what they think even if it's that they thought my game sucked. Quite the reverse occurred in this case and we may have one more enthusiastic player to join in the fun of the non-Marauders week game. Justin wryly remarked that we'd have to monitor this "Pied Piper" effect closely. We already split off a monthly group to make a weekly one. Now it looks like we may end up splitting off the weekly one to make, er, two weekly groups if we're not careful.

As Justin rightly pointed out the real answer is to get people skilled up to take the No Dice approach out to the world. Then we don't have to keep catering for fresh addicts who want a gaming fix. Not that I mind trying to fill my life with gaming activities and introducing the hobby to new people but there are so many hours in a day, days in a week and so on and so forth.

Throwing GMs to the Wolf

2009-03-23T16:39:00.004Z

The always entertaining Everything2 throws up this node about White Wolf's World of Darkness. I have tended to enjoy the WoD games I've played but then I've always played WoD GMed by my friends Alex and Mike who are excellent GMs so maybe this doesn't say much. Even so, I have always liked the way there's some sort of conflict meter on the White Wolf Character Sheets I've seen. The sheets themselves tend to be a little crowded but the central theme-o-meter is always there, reminding you what kind of game you should be playing.

Whether you are playing exactly that kind of game is mostly up to the GM, sometimes there's a lot of the intended thematics in play, sometimes not so much but I don't think that's necessarily a fault. I'm not sure how White Wolf would feel about that. On the one hand any game designer would probably be happy to know that someone's playing their game and having a good time. On the other I know GMs and content creators cannot help but hand wring a bit when players and GMs wander away from "the point".

I expect a regular reader here would characterise me as someone who has a lot more time for White Wolf than D&D. On the surface one would be correct in that assumption. I certainly approve of White Wolf wanting to make the game about some epic theme. That's a step in the right direction. But I possess about as much White Wolf stuff as I do D&D stuff. My favourite role playing game ever, Over The Edge, was written by authors of much D&D material, I also have a copy of Feng Shui by one of the same guys, and an aging, unused copy of the D20 Modern Core Manual (good for a laugh occasionally). On the White Wolf tangential side I own a game called "Deliria" by a guy called Phil Brucato who worked on several White Wolf titles I didn't even buy that new like I did my copies of Feng Shui and OTE. So I have read more material by D&D style thinkers than White Wolf style thinkers.

My problem with White Wolf is that from what I have skimmed through in idle moments given access to friend's bookshelves is that they love rich detail and prescription, a veritable cornucopia of "what". When you get to the "how" it suddenly falls back on rolling dice and checking modifiers.

I suppose the news that I run into a problem when people suggest a dice roll is hardly surprising at this stage. But here's the unusual coda to that thought. I am getting a little tired of repeating that if you want to go and roll some dice, kill some uglies and hoist some phat lewt then for heaven's sake go do so. What I think I have a problem with is dressing that experience up like it's something else.

Not that it necessarily isn't something else in the hands of a skilled GM. But that leads us to the famous "forget the dice and sheet covered in numbers, let's role play" situation.

I haven't developed a White Wolf addiction for the reason that a trace amount of White Wolf concept will set my mind off like a tin of lighter fuel and a lit match tossed into a firework warehouse. I am used to having ideas. I've probably ignored a dozen sleeting through my brain since I started writing this (that's why I always seem a little tangential).

My aim is to help other people have ideas too and I don't like things that appear to be a help in that direction and are in truth just compendia of other people's ideas. I know that if I read a sourcebook I will have so many ideas that eventually one or two of them will probably have legs and walk on their own. Some people, though, only get one or two ideas from any given source material and unless those ideas are made to live then no more will be forthcoming.

A lot of conflict comes about because of communication breakdown and I think that the implication that White Wolf product will inevitably stoke your imagination if you just buy three more supplements is a little dishonest. I've not seen much evidence of the idea forging processes I learned in my time at university in the campaign writing advice sections of role playing games, I'm not singling White Wolf out for that at all, no role playing game has had these techniques, ever.

What I'm most concerned about is all this stuff about how these games are supposed to be a personal experience for the player wrestling with these deep issues of philosophy, psyche and spirituality. What if, as a player, I have no such experience? Have I "failed"? Or has my GM sold me out? Or has the game failed? What if I didn't engage with these things but I still had fun?

You won't find much prescription beyond the intended atmospheric milieu of any given No Dice experience. We test for indulgence, not for intellect. I always find myself hoping that catches on.

Tuesday Thoughts

2009-03-17T17:17:00.004Z

Wow, I thought I'd totally updated at the weekend. How wrong a man can be.

Interesting reader mail in from one of the Doodler's cohorts below, pointing out my shortcomings in estimating the impact of bow-based ranged combat. Archers are plenty quick on the draw if competent, apparently.

Been having a quiet couple of weeks. The high point of the last week was playing Mrs Monkey's Western scenario set in Australia. This was pretty awesome, plenty of Western atmosphere and plenty of opportunities to think over the mechanics of a ranged combat system. This has made me think that ranged combat is a matter of priorities, the actual act of firing a missile would appear to be trivial to anyone given sufficient practice (practice being key because it's even hard to fire a gun if you don't fire guns). So the question is, which part of being involved in ranged combat is non-trivial?

The only answer I can come up with is deciding best how your next "burst" of fire is to be employed. Are you going for the kill? Covering someone else's action? Trying to raise a bit of hell? Defending yourself?

Melee combat seems to be centred on a personal experience, ranged combat is more tactical and uses the environment to support its tactics. The trick to the design of these games seems to be in producing atmosphere and giving people a "feel" for the action hook. This is, of course, precisely what I've been aiming for all along, but sometimes the feeling is somewhat elusive.

Received some feedback concerned that if the players are heroes and heroes find it difficult to die where's the edge of your seat excitement? Where's the risk? In campaign play I have developed a technique of giving players cool toys, if they are not careful toys are removed, thus the hero lives, but the hero's advantage is transient. This seems to provide enough ups and downs.

In a one off the chance of a character dying should be communicated at the outset. If chances are high it would always be best to have something for dead characters to do in the remainder of the game.

Of course I have been sat in on story-based games where people liked to be involved at some level but because of the entertainment value of the actual story they didn't mind just sitting back and watching the action unfold. This is the "front seat/back seat" phenomenon that I've noted in the past where players like to vary their involvement depending upon their mood. If you have such a person in your one-off group you could give them some cannon-fodder, let them partake until bored and then kill them off allowing them to leave the circle or just watch the rest of the game.

Anyway, I'm wandering into a territory of talking about revolutionary ideas and I haven't the time or space to go into all that right now. I'll leave the discussion in "food for thought" mode and wander off. Promise I'll update more promptly next time.

D&D Characters

2009-03-09T15:18:00.005Z

I know, I know, I'm having a pop at D&D again. I'm going to reiterate that if D&D floats your boat then go for it. It's actually a highly sophisticated dungeon-crawl RPG and I'd prefer to think of people enjoying a D&D campaign than playing hours of WoW. But it's just not role playing. Well, not given any reasonable definition of the words "role" and "playing" when in the context of one another anyway.

This has never been made more apparent to me than in the unfortunate habit I have encountered in some gamers to create what I shall dub the "D&D Character". The D&D Character must satisfy the following brief to be considered thus:

Must have a fascinating instant impact or be unusual in some way for examples of class, race, occupation, alignment etc. This feature in a proper story would serve as a hook for the character. In a game where one has to start the adventure with a large degree of presumed incompetence could also explain this hilarious incapability away. For example, if you created a normal everyday hulking warrior with a big sword to kill things with his early incompetence is nothing short of embarrasing. However if Jongar the Allyrian is obsessed with cheese one could point to his failure to perform even the simple tasks of his trade as a being a byproduct of his unhealthy pecadillo.
Could have a detailed but largely tertiary back story; thus explaining the cheese obsession. Also it will probably dangle alluring plot hooks for a GM who hardly, if ever, finds a way to work these into the story which wouldn't involve shoehorning, long periods of not using dice or showboating from the player who invented the character. Of course in a story people mill about they come to the fore, they retreat, they circulate. If you had some support for group storytelling instead of a bunch of dice heavy combat rules... ahem.
Is designed to always have something to talk about in a one or two-dimensional manner. These are never deep things and are always topics of conversation that can be pulled out for a "character moment" at the drop of a hat e.g. having an imaginary friend, being a bit dodgy and a pointlessly pathological liar, having an obsession with some harmless and often incongruous topic such as toast or flower arranging... yes, yes, or cheese.

The symptom, as is so often the case, points to the disease. Generally speaking I've not met role players who weren't yearning for a part in a game that allowed them to feel like the hero properly. Sure there should be challenge and difficulty otherwise the game is dull but in the end the challenge and difficulty should arise from factors other than the character's blatant incompetence. It's a well worn trope of fiction that a character should be likeable and in heroes capability is likeable.

When you create a character who has to be lame until they've levelled up a few times you necessarily begin to be irritated by them during this process. Making them into a bit of a weirdo accomplishes the twin aims of poking fun at your pathetic character but also gives you a chance to vent your frustrations at a game which promises so much and delivers so little. The D&D character provides a way of letting off steam and having fun in a situation which, despite claims to the contrary, is short on opportunities to do either out of the box.

In fact this tendency also works against the player ever getting that moment in the sun. Even if a GM is adventurous and allows Jongar to encounter the evil master baker who grilled him like so many pieces of medium sliced white when he was naught but a boy the player's already made it quite plain that Jongar's a looney. If you were trying to run a semi-serious campaign Jongar's either got to be less of a looney or the whole encounter is going to end up on a Python-esque route perhaps not entirely inkeeping with the spirit of the game.

I have, on occasion known GMs to bemoan this very thing, when the game turns "silly". It's six of one half a dozen of the other. So Jongar's player is making a mockery of the serious plot, let's face it having to roll 2D6, 1D8 a D20 and a D4 every time Jongar swings his mighty broadsword also makes a mockery of the serious plot, just not in a fun way.

Just as attempting to introduce plot to a board game may be a bit of a morale killer so making merry quips within the "plot" framework is a counter morale boost.

So this dysfunction balances out nicely in that type of game. In a game that has a serious story potential, however, the dysfunction just collapses into broken.

D&D characters are no good in the long haul, five or six episodes and the character's all played out. They don't have subtlety, layers, aspects, they just have furry underpants and an obsession with toast. It all seemed so amusing at the beginning but now? Hmmm.

So next time I'm creating a character concept I will be sure to make sure there is definite dramatic complication in there. Now the story is real I want to be a real character within it. If that's what you've been yearning for in your campaigns, either as a GM or a player maybe it's time you tried to find a solution.

Convenience

2009-03-06T15:13:00.003Z

Gaming has tradititionally been a double-edged hobby. On the one hand you rarely, if ever, meet a weekend gamer, someone who isn't really into the hobby but just does it a bit. If you and another person share the hobby chances are you'll be able to sit down and have some sort of a basis for conversation.

You want to see an example of a hobby where being into it doesn't guarantee social connection look at music. Even if you manage to get two people who claim to love the same sort of music, or even the same band, you can't guarantee that they'd necessarily have much to say to one another. In the field of music people can like the same thing for entirely separate and even mutually incompatible reasons.

Likewise a lot of the really popular pastimes. I think this could explain why people are so slavishly addicted to watching sports. And what are sports and Monday Morning Quarterbacks but gamers by another stripe?

To return to role playing, it has never occurred to most gamers to ask why gaming isn't more popular, even though it inspires such passion from those involved. It stands to reason that if someone is so deeply into something that it owns a portion of their life there must be something to generally recommend it.

Well, I think that happens to be true. I don't know many people who wouldn't get a kick out of some form of role playing. Maybe you don't like a violent martial arts spectacular but a visit to a fairy-tale seaside town sounds awesome, maybe you're not really into slasher movies but a police procedural game would suit you down to the ground. I don't think there's any doubt that there's a role playing experience out there for everyone.

So where is everyone?

Well. This is the double edged part about it. As we get older we gamers realise that there is more to life than being relegated to a trestle table in the corner of some draughty town hall or community centre. There's more to the hobby than "stop having fun, it's time to role play" (yeah, I actually still hear this from time to time *sigh*).

Time to a working guy with a couple of week's holiday and a forty hour a week contract is precious. If a game's going to be uncomfortable then it's just not worth the time.

The final tweaks are hitting No Dice, I'm hoping to finish off the text typesetting at the weekend I also want to add in a couple of notes on this. Role playing is being held back because it's such an effort to make it convenient. Traditionally players have had to fit round the game. Hopefully with No Dice we can start to make people see that it should be the other way round.

The Ninja and the Cabin Boy

2009-02-27T15:40:00.003Z

To paraphrase a business studies aphorism there are no bad players, merely bad GMs. This is a perspective that many people on the inside of a poor GMing situation are blind to. It doesn't help that most games are not constructed to support an inexperienced GM. This makes it very easy to blame the game. It is true that the game is almost always partially at fault; GMs are supported in some tasks but not others and unless the GM has a natural ability they may not even realise this is the case. Players instinctively recognise how much work a GM will put into even the most tedious campaign in the world. What's perhaps less palatable is when a GM realises their failure in a game that's going well.

The campaign playtest of Marauders is under way now and I'm really enjoying it. So are all of the players most of the time. As is usual in such situations, or rather not unusual, there is some character tension as the characters have only just met. One of the characters, a ninja, has even threatened another of the characters, a cabin boy, that he may kill the cabin boy during his sleep.

The player portraying the cabin boy is, rightly, worried about the threat that has been made. The joy and curse of Role Play as a form of entertainment is that, in theory, if the ninja wants to kill the cabin boy then he is at liberty to try. After a lengthy discussion with the player who has carefully crafted this cabin boy character it comes to me that concerns for the life of the cabin boy are not because of another character's hostility towards him but rather because of my continuing failure to Host properly.

The fact is that players entering the role playing game have to feel a certain kind of safety. The safety one feels when watching a horror movie or other movie with extreme content might be comparable. One may feel unsettled or disturbed by an effective horror movie but in the end dedicated horror fans are fully of the understanding that it is just a movie. Similarly you might feel a cold creep at a particular game's atmosphere but you, personally, should not feel attacked.

Unlike watching a movie or playing a computer game against the computer an attack on your character by another character could be seen as a personal attack on you. After all computer bots and movie characters are unthinking, whereas another player is an actual person. In computer games allowing such attacks has a term - PvP - and areas where PvP are allowed are seen as distinct from those where such things are not allowed to occur. The fact that having your virtual avatar in a computer game harmed or killed has a pejorative term associated with it - to be pwn3d - just indicates how much of an attack it is.

The concept of being pwn3d in a computer game is an accepted part of the digital gamer's community. There are several factors that mitigate the pwnage. It's quite an involved process to get into a PvP game. You must boot up the machine, log in to the server, activate your character and choose to participate in a PvP match. There is a reassurance that all player avatars are roughly the same, or at least playing by the same rules. If you are pwn3d you have no one but yourself to blame. You volunteered. Besides the pwn3r is probably miles away, a faceless opponent known only by a community handle, they are a ghost, they can be made to fade away to nothing in the memory.

A fellow role player is in the same room with you, it's the nature of the hobby. If someone you know is putting threats of killing into the mouth of a character and the player is sat a few feet away from you that could be interpreted as a personal attack even if it is only meant as "authentic" role play. I can sympathise with both players on either side of such a difficult situation (giving benefit of the doubt that the threatener is only trying to be authentic).

So how does one deal with such a scenario?

Having a non PvP rule may work, if everyone agrees to it. Such a rule is mostly presumed in most RP situations anyway. The problem with making such a rule explicit is that if a player does want to be "authentic" threats their character may make toward another character start to ring hollow. Everyone in the room knows that should the threatener attempt to enact threats of vengeance they will have broken an important role play rule.

Even so I think the idea has merit. People should make plain whether they wish to be involved in a PvP situation or not before the game begins. This will allow latitude for aggressive authenticity between players who have opted into it.

There is, even there, one final objection from the player who wishes to play a moody aggressive sociopath: "But my character just wouldn't back down like that".

In my time acting there were actors who reported difficulty with lines because their interpretation of the character made the lines in question ring hollow or sound funny. Basically the script contained utterances that the actor did not consider to be "in character". The advice for such actors is the same as the advice to players who want carte blanche to be nasty to other players in the name of verisimilitude. If your interpretation of your character breaks the story then your interpretation is wrong and needs to be modified.

Being a good Host is about making sure everyone in the game is comfortable and happy. Being a good player means respecting other player's wishes not to be involved in inter-player aggro. There is always a spin you can put on a circumstance that will allow your character to remain wholly intact whilst still, essentially, being the character you wanted to play. Surely the price of having to do a little work is worth paying to ensure that you are gaming in a safe and comfortable environment.

Website At Last...

2009-02-24T15:29:00.004Z

So the domain kicked into life round about 11:30 AM. I know that of late visiting my journal has been like a game of internet orienteering but I'm really just sending you on to an actual website now, the journal continues to be here.

It would be really cool if you would go and have a look around. If you live within reach of Nottingham and you would like to attend one of the preview sessions for No Dice that would be even cooler. Directions on the site.

So without further ado the wonderful website may be found at *drum roll*

www.nodicerpg.com

The Doodler and myself have worked really hard on getting it looking nice, Mrs Monkey will be wanting some queries to deal with so we're all working super hard to get some traffic in at the moment.

So come on in and have a look around.

Time For The Morpheus Act

2009-02-19T19:29:00.003Z

So I was online today listening to the various RPG podcasts I enjoy and more specifically the stream at Warpig Radio and I was lead hence to Talisman Studios where I picked up a PDF of the basic rules for their Suzerain RPG for the grand price of nothing.

What attracted me to have a look at the site in the first place was the fact that the systems advertised therein use playing cards like a certain other RPG that is coming out in June *ahem*.

It never hurts to check out the competition.

And looking through this PDF it came to me that in many ways people have already seen the potential of the playing card. Hell, I now know of three RPGs that are entirely based around using playing cards as randomisers. As a whole section of the Core Book will explain cards are monumentally better at randomising than dice ever have been or ever will be. Cards rule.

Talisman haven't pushed this. Their site is not plastered with hyperbole about the effectiveness of cards as randomisers. The other systems I've seen didn't make much fuss about it either. It's almost like they're trying to shrug off their rejection of dice. They certainly don't describe themselves as "diceless" and yet they are, dice are not mentioned.

I even like the essential Suzerain mechanic.

But is Suzerain No Dice?

No way.

Which leads to the Morpheus bit.

If No Dice is not playing cards what is it? What is No Dice?

It occurred to me that the No Dice core book is like The Prince, or Hagakure or The Art of War. It's a treatise on dead ends that role-playing has ended up in, and how to get out of them. It's a plea for the hobby to broaden, deepen, to become something more, something new.

That's, in essence, why we're giving the Core Book away as a PDF. How the hell are we going to sell another product if we can't tell people how we feel about the way these games should be played?

The Suzerain rule book had some gorgeous art and a super keen playing card system, which rather shamefacedly takes up a single page of double column print, as if it's ashamed to be accessible. Furthermore the rest of the book is filled with skill charts and vague instructions on building characters with skills to take part in something, something I guess one would learn about in the other Suzerain books.

Suzerain is not No Dice.

No Dice would not do this. And by "this" I mean turn casual drive by readers off by having one neat idea surrounded by a bunch of dry and obscure ones. I also mean hint at some glorious campaign setting through teaser artwork and odd quasi-phlosophical mumblings and then not solidify any of it.

No Dice is more than the sum of its parts, to be sure. Because when I see parts of it in what has gone before I don't recognise any of what I'm so excited about in those places.

That's reassurance of a very real sort.

So what is No Dice?

No Dice cannot be explained, one has to experience it for oneself.

And the Morpheus act ends.

Prologue Time

2009-02-16T10:24:00.001Z

Well, it's games weekend week. So I currently feel like I'm already living through a prologue to the real business of the week. Leave aside the fact that the weekend brought an absolute avalanche of tasks into view for Mrs Monkey, the Doodler and myself to contend with. We started looking through the Nottingham What's On, moved on to the UK Roleplayers event calendar and ended up with a calendar packed chock full of stuff for us to do.

If half of the plans we're trying to put into operation are going to come off we're going to be heinously busy this year but that's what comes of starting a business with no money. You have to put in some kind of expense and all we've got to spend is time and energy.

The good news is that the website is up and searchable, I'm not handing out the domain name as yet because we haven't got all our tubes connected properly. Believe me once we have full web diversion and all that jazz I'll be ramming it all down your throat. I would tell you the site was searchable, but it's not because I just tried to search Google for it and it's not there.

Not that there's much point in worrying about all this until after the Games Weekend anyway. We won't even be available for comment sequestered in a huge old chapel building in Derbyshire.

Mrs, The Doodler and myself are all putting a lot of eggs and, ha ha, No Dice into this basket. We're hoping it all pays off.

Looking Ahead To Zero Hour

2009-02-11T15:20:00.002Z

Work to be done on the actual core "No Dice" book is all about the spit and polish now. I'm chewing my way through putting up our first lines of "No Dice" gear in the shop. The Doodler is frantically creating the illustrations for the book. I have to turn my attention to the website.

We're looking at a publishing date for the No Dice Core Book of 1st June 2009. First time in my life I have ever been nervous-excited about publishing a book.

Let's get one thing straight herrs and frauleins, this isn't just a book. I designed a game. And not just a game. An evolution. A revolution. A new type of social experience. I am expecting big things.

So, will I be hugely disappointed if it doesn't fly? I don't think the concept of disappointment does this justice. I will be shocked, surprised, gobsmacked, awestruck.

You see, I'm a writer ghost writing a product that is more the product of every good time I've enjoyed with every close friend I've ever had than it is of my brain in glorious isolation.

I'll be sticking some bells and whistles on it using my own talents, just as the Doodler will draw up associated images to make these words pop. In the end though No Dice is about helping people who never really had much time for ardent dice rolling during a storytelling experience get out those all important creases.

The whole thing is about helping a Host to Host and about turning the intensity dial up on the player's experience. If I'll say one thing for people who've been role playing hitherto it's that they have incredible powers of imagination.

That's the thing. Role Playing, as it stands, is hard. You have to be so in to what you're doing to make it fly sometimes, and when it's good it's great. Still, it would help if everyone had a chance to enjoy the peculiar specialness of the role playing experience.

No Dice is designed to reduce some of the brainwork that is currently de rigeur for GMs and Players. Playing No Dice should allow the hobby to become more accessible.

Yup, No Dice is a heady brew, to be sure.

The last closed Beta of the various systems is starting a week on Friday when the long-adored Games Weekend is due to commence. I have all manner of escapades planned for that event from the crunchiest to the lightest. We shall see how they all go over.

The current archetypes that need to be written, illustrated and then added to the catalogue are the aforementioned Martial Arts game, a cop game and a fairy tale game. I'm also rolling out something experimental to see how it plays.

Following that, it comes to me that the only thing that should really be done to fill the intervening time is to open the Betas up for a sort of "Final Run" leading up to the big launch. Actually now I come to think about it a launch *event* might even be appropriate... Hmmm.

Changing gears between creating and marketing, even when that means a bunch of RP events, is kind of bizarre. What I'm keen to avoid is huge costs in printing etc. when we've got no money coming in. Anything I spend now has to be recouped by donations and so on later. To date I've spent precisely no money on getting this ready to go. I was hoping to continue in that trend.

As that's probably not going to be possible (and I realise a few quid on ink and paper for character sheets and other stationery hardly breaks the bank) I guess it's time to draw attention to the "donate" link over on the right there. 'Nuff said.

Expect to see the website spring to some kind of life in fairly short order. I'll restrict specific discussion of any participatory events people may or may not be interested in news of to that forum.

New Readers

2009-02-09T21:09:00.003Z

So my analytics is telling me that we've got some new traffic coming in to the blog now. I just thought I'd leave a note to say "hi". Pull up a chair, enjoy the role play discussion and watch the developments unfold.

Curse of the Ranger

2009-01-31T12:16:00.004Z

Am now in the process of writing up example scenarios for the No Dice Core Rulebook and have shoved in the proto-No Dice haunted house game written by my partner, the hallmark of simplicity, excellence and entertainment (I've played it). Alongside this are a scenario that is almost as easy to run based on 70s slasher movies and a last, more challenging scenario.

In this last scenario I wanted to show how developed No Dice could become from it's incredibly simple beginnings. I've packaged up a martial arts scenario that is based upon a martial arts No Dice RPG that is currently in development. This is perfect actually because one project dovetails nicely into the next, the example scenario sticks to the basics and doesn't explain things like character generation, it comes with some pre-gens, but it is the system at heart.

One of the features of the martial arts system is that it needs to have some really cool fighting moves. It also needs to have a martial arts fighting system.

The martial arts fighting system has always been something of an RPG shibboleth. The number of people disappointed by clunky kung fu melee combat systems that I have met is, well, everyone. The point is that when you're rolling them dice and seeing them scores the action goes into slo-mo, and not in a funky, John Woo, doves 'n' gunfire way.

This is, of course, directly antithetical to the idea of martial arts entertainment. We want to be dazzled by the speed, not snoring over the maths. As this is precisely the kind of problem that No Dice was supposed to tackle I hunkered down and got on with it.

You'll see the results, in brief, in the Core Book and in more depth in the finished full game setting and system.

Whilst I was engaged in the generation of a new fracas management system I stopped to think about how these rules would translate, if at all, into ranged combat. The answer was quite simple, it wouldn't. The setting of the martial arts game is historic so gunfire was something of an event anyway. Coming to consider firing a bow and arrow, however, I wondered about how ranged combat worked at all.

Essentially, the action of firing ballistics (or throwing them) into a melee is a separate event from the melee itself. A suitable observer wishing to partake in this action would find themselves with much fewer opportunities to act as the speed of the combat should be blistering.

I was playtesting the combat system last night and neither fight would have lasted more than three or four minutes in real time. Time to maybe fire two arrows to any effect. Even then the fact of the arrows probably would have curtailed the combat.

So what is all this trying to combine the two. Gun fights and fist fights are essentially completely separate beings and mixing the two oddly inappropriate. This is the curse of the ranger. You might want to be the best bowman in all of Germany (or whatever) but that means you want to take three of the suckers down in one shot each whilst they're running toward you and then get your sword out to take down the other two. The ranged and the melee are essentially two different things.

When I do come to develop a proper ranged combat system it's going to be on that basis. Immediate melee danger must happen in a different time frame to shooting. Shooting a small number of people is probably just a role play event, like making a jump, or battering down a door with your shoulder. A gun battle, well, that's where the system comes in.

Until I, or someone else with the mind to, have time to think about it in depth, I guess we will all just have to be wary of the ranger's curse.

What's Wrong With D&D?

2009-01-27T15:43:00.004Z

So, the main text of No Dice Core is finished. It's all polish from here on in, yay! During the joyful task of editing I note that I have made a whiney comment about the most popular role playing game in history Dungeons & Dragons. It wasn't really relevant to what I was talking about so I took it out.

I wanted to start this post by explaining that I wasn't anti-D&D per se. Then I realised that actually I would rather bathe in a soup of cow pats and urine jelly cubes before playing a session of D&D. So I guess that does make me anti-D&D.

I am very careful in the introduction to No Dice to state that were it not for Gary Gygax and his dungeon crawling classic No Dice would probably not exist. No Dice disagrees with a combat heavy, quasi-board game approach to Role Playing, just because it was first doesn't make it right every time for every person.

I find it a bit strange that all RPGs to date have been somewhat infected by the D&D way of doing things. White Wolf tried to step away from the model but even they seem to have an obsession with numbers and dice that seems to hamper their rich, detailed worlds.

Also, my colleague the Doodler noted that although Storyteller games offer a huge wealth of setting detail the advice on how to actually role play is somewhat thin on the ground.

I wasn't entirely sure what I would put into the No Dice corebook when I first started thinking about it a year ago. What it has ended up being is a compendium advice on how to roleplay without dice. And actually not just without dice but without many of the trappings of "traditional" RP. The dice, in fact, is so emblematic of Role Playing that's why it became the target of this game's prohibition.

So, what's wrong with D&D? Nothing, if you like that sort of thing, but all those people who do are well catered for. I just wanted to cater for some new people, that's all.

Love In An RPG

2009-01-22T23:29:00.001Z

Despite the fact that your average RPG will be rife with jaunty skull splitting and base quests for filthy lucre the topic of affairs of the heart never really presents itself to go with the power fantasies and the fortune fantasies.

I don't anticipate that No Dice will be much different. Part of the core book, the seemingly interminable and yet incredibly useful part, is a guide for players and Hosts to the roles present in various dramatic situations. I'm using an off the shelf taxonomy of these situations and several of them deal with the topic of love.

It isn't entirely impossible that a Role Playing character could get involved in some sort of affair but it is extremely unlikely. Although No Dice does away with the need to be described entirely in terms of how effective you are at turning people's insides into outsides it's still not an effective tool for role playing a burgeoning romance.

I think the central problems inherent in the role playing of a romantic affair are two fold. Firstly you only have two choices of partner as a player, a non-player (and hence the GM) or another player.

If your entire group is made up of members of the same sex this could be awkward. However it's not inconceivable that a determined group could grit their teeth and try to rise above it.

Enter problem the second. It is nigh on impossible to role play a romance in a room with three or four other people sitting around like lemons. Part of the joy of role playing is that it's immersive and nothing un-immerses you like trying to ignore the mercenary, the thief and the hacker waiting for their turn in the spotlight whilst you exchange sweet nothings with your imaginary partner.

So I don't think No Dice will be the game to buck this trend. Given the circumstances this might not be such a bad thing.

So what is this "No Dice" thing anyhow?

2009-01-20T15:21:00.000Z

The very first thing the No Dice project is going to produce, sometime soon, is a Core Rulebook for a very different kind of roleplaying game. Traditionally RPGs have been the domain of a set lucky few.

I name those who role play as "lucky" because I believe that it has the potential to be the most fun of any activity human beings can engage in. Ever since I cracked this system it's been my aim to open the hobby up, to coax in a few more players and deliver a new kind of experience.

I want everyone who *could* be interested in role playing to start role playing. I want to introduce new avenues for old players and new worlds for new players. I'm not saying No Dice isn't going to be an ambitious project. No Dice is the first project I have ever started that I think is, in its own small way, important.

We live in a world of MMORPGs, of video entertainment on demand, of Facebook. Our communities are online and the advantages that gives a citizen of this world in opportunities to be culturally diverse and to understand other people, places and lifestyles are immense.

For all that, though, sometimes you just need to sit down, with a regular person in a room and chill out. Sure, you can play boardgames, you can engage in witty banter, you can hunker down to an enormous Dungeons & Dragons hack-a-thon, there are always options. I am adding another option, and I hope it will become a popular one.

In the No Dice Core Rule book I'm going to try to convey an approach to gaming that, while it is not new, has never really been written down. If we were going to get intellectual about this I would say that No Dice is an RPG that is also a philosophy regarding RPGs.

None of this is meant to be an intellectual burden so we'll leave it at that.

If I were you I might *not* be thinking: just who the hell are you to be telling me how to Role Play? If you are, wow, aggressive! Even if I didn't have anger management issues though I might wonder where all this new stuff is coming from.

I've read a bunch of role playing manuals. I love role playing manuals, particularly the ones that describe worlds and settings and characters; rules-heavy ones not so much, as you shall learn. I would rather read such a manual than any other type of book. Once I have read and taken in the manuals I tend to file them away, forget most of the rules and wonder whether anyone wants to play a game with that setting.

Not that things were always this way.

When I was getting towards nine years of age in the early eighties Dungeons & Dragons was just starting to show up on the radar as a hobby in the UK. Through various means I got hold of the rule books and the old style polyhedral dice which you had to colour in with a white crayon. I also looked at other systems like the old Middle Earth Role Playing game, Paranoia and minor paperback roleplaying games like Maelstrom and Monster Horrorshow.

If you asked me now about the rules to any of these games I wouldn't actually be able to tell you much. The Monster Horrorshow used a mechanic called "The Absolutely Anything Table" which, well, you can probably guess what it did.

Back then I was desperate to play one of these games but I couldn't find a group. Whenever I did find a group all they wanted to do was roll dice and move pieces around on maps. That wasn't the type of experience I wanted. I wanted to be a participant in a story. I wanted to play a role.

I know what you're thinking, and I did. I studied acting, I went to acting school but I didn't just do acting because at heart I wasn't an actor. I studied Drama & Education which teaches you a lot about improvisation and rolling with the punches. My study there wasn't meant to prepare me to teach drama or to educate actors. It was all about how to present a narrative illusion, techniques to help normal people engage in this kind of play for their entertainment.

And it didn't stop there.

I actually went to college to study media and made a few films but I'm not a film maker either. I've written novels, and will write more, but I'm not strictly speaking a novelist. I've designed out computer games (I am a programmer by day) but I don't want to make a computer game.

I am a role player, a story teller, someone who wanted to share a fiction game with the world. Those friends of mine who enjoy this pursuit number among them some people who would take an opportunity to role play like this before considering any other way of spending time.

Some of these friends have helped me enormously in the development of this very game. One of them is my wonderful partner, a woman who wouldn't play Dungeons & Dragons unless you paid her a hefty sum. She is the one that proved to me Role Playing as a hobby could have a broader appeal than it currently does. So in a way this book is kind of her fault.

I need to also thank Justin and John who have played a bunch of No Dice. In its earlier days I also played some much clunkier versions (back when there were some dice) with Mike, Nick, Kath, Owen, Dave, Kenton, Clive and a bunch of others. Special mentions go to JC; whose game weekends gave me a first crop of willing testers; and super story-based GM Alex who, while he has never partaken in early No Dice, has a healthy disrespect for crunch getting in the way of a role playing session (even so the lengths of his games are legendary but only because of their epic sweep).

These happy few would rather role play than watch a movie, they would rather role play than go out to a restaurant, or bungee jump, or engage in any other activity or distraction. These folk will roll a dice and play a board game but will freely admit they'd rather be role playing, with an emphasis on the "role".

The game me and my closest friends have been looking for has fewer rules than most other games. It helps the players play their character in situations as diverse as fighting, to finding the dirt on a politician, to having tea with the Queen. It introduces people to strange worlds filled with compelling detail. It would be a game that would be a head on collision between the imagination required to read a book and the freedom of thought allowed in a great movie. The world didn't have that kind of game exactly, many near misses but the cigar has gone unclaimed. So I'm taking my shot at inventing one.

Not to say I haven't played in exactly the kinds of game I enjoy taking part in but such games have never been formalised. Usually a story game is another kind of game that has been altered or "hacked" to make it rules lite. We all turn up, clutching our dice bags and we play the game the way we want to play it. Everyone rolls their dice a few times though, in supplication to the gods of role playing who demand such things.

No Dice is the product of a history in love with role playing, movies, acting, writing and, most of all, great stories. I hope you enjoy trying to tune in to No Dice and wish you exciting and engaging adventures with your players. So keep an eye on this blog and watch as a new Role Playing paradigm materialises before your eyes.

Quickly...

2009-01-18T22:08:00.001Z

Okay, so now I'm here and with "Donate" buttons and filthy lucre generating advertisements all over the shop I am itching to just get on with the business of telling you about the No Dice project. I haven't got much time this evening but I'll just put a few words down so that you can get the hang.

No Dice is a new RPG. More than that. It's a new *TYPE* of RPG. It's come about as a result of my own love of the hobby, of my fellow player's love for story based RPGs and our struggle to find something new that maximises the fun and minimises the dull. No Dice is the distillation of all our experiments.

I'm just revising the core rulebook for the system and once that's done I'm going to make up an edition and publish it through Lulu who have long been my self-publishing company of choice. I had a look at Amazon's Createspace and considered jumping ship but... well, Lulu is just plain better. It really is.

The Core Book for No Dice will be free to download, it will cost to have a printed copy but only paper and ink costs, no royalty, or if there is a royalty it will be donated to a charity of my choosing.

The core project will be entirely supported through donations, not that I need much, I can do this work for love and I fully intend to, but I can work for longer if I have more money in the bank.

Future No Dice spin offs, well, I will be charging for them. Real money. But that's because they're extras, sweat from my brow and all that. There will be some No Dice freebies but that's mostly because I want to produce No Dice rules for systems based on defunct TV shows that I don't have any IP rights to. They will be entirely free, I really am doing those for love.

So now you know the plan. You should be able to see it come together in the next few weeks as I begin to publish my core rulebook excerpts. So stick around if you love RPGs because this promises to be something very different.

Feet Under The Table

2009-01-18T17:24:00.000Z

This is kind of like buying a shop and getting the keys... The place is empty at the moment but you just want to make it your own and then open the doors. There's so much to do though. Customise the look, make sure you have the right links, set up the advertising bar...

I can taste the anticipation.

Oh, and let's not forget the product. I'll be putting excerpts from my first RPG product up here from the week after next. It's a roleplaying game but it's new. Very new. As I finished the first draft I realised there hasn't really been an RPG like this before.

So I have an original first product, which will run entirely on donations and advertising revenue and we'll see where we go from there. For now, I just want to make the place look good.

Welcome To My New Home

2009-01-11T17:03:00.000Z

This blog is what will become of what used to be www.leostableford.com. The domain is staying but the Wordpress site is going. The reasons for this will be covered in the closing posts on the wordpress journal. I hope this new site will be okay for my future readers!