Free For All Invitations - The Stealthy Straw Man

Oh isn't it wonderful! Harper Voyager are accepting full manuscript unagented submissions for the first two weeks in October. They made the announcement in a press release on the 12th September. How amazing! That'll show the traditional publishing industry is ready to take risks and run the gauntlet! Yes, it will!

No.

It won't.

Let me tell you what would be a risk. Innovation. I've seen this particular dog and pony show at least twice before and it's just a bunch of disingenuous rubbish or blatant incompetence on the part of the organising publishing house. Why? Simple. If you announce this with two weeks to spare before the actual event then you will not be receiving new material you will be receiving material people are already sitting on. Either material that is currently in need of a good polish (and four weeks to polish with the aid of my manuscript tool would be pushing it, without polishing properly it is a nearly impossible task) or material which the author considers to be 'good to go' already.

The massive problem with the latter category is that this material isn't already with an agent for one of three reasons, 1. has already been rejected by dozens of agents, 2. was just about to go to an agent but author saw press release and decided to skip the middle man 3. just isn't. Only manuscripts in category 2 or 3 stand a chance of actually being decent and then only the same chance as that submitted to an agent i.e. apparently not much.

So Harper Voyager are proposing to allow the filth gates to groan open for two weeks and then to send some lowly peons to scrub through the fetid literary detritus and report back if they find the Hope Diamond in amongst the slurry. The peons, of course, probably won't. Then Harper Voyager can say: "See, agents are the only way". Or, if the Hope Diamond appears they can say: "Great, a sucker to bilk on a publishing deal because they're not represented by an agent".

I have also seen a scheme run by another publishing house in which they turned the preparation of 30k of opening into a six month event and delivered a full, tight requirements list for the type of material they would consider. Now, that's a plan.

This, this is just a meaningless and mean-spirited publicity stunt engineered by people who are either cynical or ignorant and are probably both. To attempt to save everybody a little bit of time and trouble: if you have just finished and you have an agent in mind, submit to the agent, if you have been rejected a number of times already there is probably a reason why. This is just a cruel chimera and you should direct your energies elsewhere.

Doing It For The Fans

 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.)

Fate? Free Will? Facebook?

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.

2009: The Year Of Impotent Rage

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.

The Ninja and the Cabin Boy

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.