Bear Wiseman's Gathering of Geeks ft. James Edward Raggi IV (S02E02)

I saved the timeline!

One of the other participants in the game jam I joined produced a Game Boy adventure called OuttaTime. You can try it yourself in your browser here: https://jhample.itch.io/outta-time.

It’s a short game—only two levels—but given the jam was only a month long, that’s still quite an accomplishment. I finally completed the second level and this the game this morning:

The story line is that the Time Crystal has been shattered into six fragments, which you must reunite. Each level is split into two half levels, one half a dinosaur-infested past and the other a high-tech future. A simple press of the B button slides you between the two half levels. The trick is that the two half levels are similar but not identical, requiring carefully timed B presses where you jump in the past and land in the future or vice versa. Very cool.

My biggest concern with the game is the same problem I have playing any platformer on my phone: I have been unable to get used to virtual controls on the screen. The lack of the tactility of physical buttons throws me off.

Bro! Beowulf!

At last year’s Philly Zine Fest I bumped into a cool Temple University faculty member who recommended Maria Dahvana Headley’s newish (2020) translation of Beowulf to me. I had heard that she was a bit of a troublemaker, so I was already inclined toward checking out her take on ol' Bee Wolf at some point. Then my friend dropped this on me:

“She renders the initial Hwæt as 'bro!'”*

Sold, my dude, sold.

So here are my favorite lines from Headley’s version.

Old grudges recrudesce.

Bro, fate can fuck you up.

Any season is a season for blood, if you look at it in the right light.

not living, but living on in legend.

…through perilous passageways, places off-map, paths too slender for company, where sea monsters sang and cliffs called for suicides.

Meanwhile, Beowulf gave zero shits.

Living has killed us all.

Both he and his enemy had seen the edge of existence, tripped and fallen over it.

bro, nobody changes God’s mind.

now they were custodians of the bloody mud. [referring to the winners of a battle.]

He was our man, but every man dies.

  

*How to convey the proper tone and meaning of the first word of the poem, Hwæt, is a long-running problem among translators and adapters. Seamus Heaney's otherwise much-admired version stumbles out of the gate with a bloodless "So.", while Roy Liuzza's more scholarly translation manages to be both unimaginative yet strong with "Listen!" Tolkien opts for "Lo!", which I quite like. In grad school I vigorously argued for "Yo!" But since everything I know about the Anglo-Saxon language fits neatly into a single lecture suitable for undergrads, no one listened. Headley goes all-in with her choice of "bro!", turning the bleak landscape of Dark Ages Scandahoovia into a romping ground for braggy jocks.

Dennis Mize's Beowulf & Grendel (Ral 01-189) figured into my Beowulf slide deck back when I taught this stuff on the regular. The parallel poses helped me make the case that in some ways the two characters are apposite as well as opposite.

 

a pretty clever alternative to 3d printing

In the Star Fleet Battles facebook group there's a guy named Larry who has been using a laser cutter to make pretty decent looking flat minis. Dig it:

The hexagons are custom bases, presumably the two will be connected by some sort of dowel rod.

Jim Stevenson's Starship Schematics Database ought to be chock full of image files that could be used for this sort of thing.

And of course you could do flat upright D&D figures this way, rotating the view to the front or side rather than top. You'd just need good black and white art.

Joe Bob Briggs thoughts on Censorship and Physical Media

I tap my BFG 9000

So the other day I stumbled across a paper in arXive called "Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete." I don't know enough about either MtG or computer science to get more than 11% of the gist of the piece, but some of you might be interested in the cards needed to turn a game of Magic into a Turing Machine:

Of course, if you can use MtG as a Turing Machine, that leads me to ask the obvious question: Can you run Doom on it?

Opaque Mechanics

There are plenty of times when transparent mechanics are good for roleplaying games. For example, I generally like to give the dice chances for any escapade not encompassed by the rules. I also usually prefer single die throws over bunches of dice for a lot of resolutions mechanics because there are plenty of players who find it difficult and/or tiresome to estimate their chances of rolling a 14 or lower on 4d8 or whatever. Mechanical transparency is one of the key virtues of many universal resolution systems. (But not all such systems. James Bond 007 from Victory Games has a pretty robust universal mechanic but it baffled my high school rpg group.)

But I think that opaque mechanics have their uses as well. The other day I was re-reading White Box, a perfectly serviceable little retroclone that I briefly reviewed here. One of the mechanics I can’t make my mind up about is the default single saving throw mechanic. On the one hand, I generally believe that simpler is better where basic resolution mechanics are concerned. On the other hand, saving throws are one of those places where a little mechanical opacity adds to the frisson of the game.

There have been plenty of times when a situation calls for a saving throw and I say something super explicit like “44 points of fire damage, save versus breath weapon for half.” But other times, when I want to ratchet up the tension for an extra beat or when I am just feeling ornery, I say “I need you to make a saving throw.”  The inevitable response is “versus what?!?”, often as the player scans their charsheet to see what category they save best against. A single save system tidily eliminates that extra moment of terror in the face of the unknown; the momentary opacity of the mechanic serves my agenda of making the players fear for the lives of their precious PCs.

I think this issue is why, after all these years, I still prefer Dave Hargrave’s Arduin critical charts over later, arguably better crit charts. Dream Weaver Dave’s disordered charts flummox players who ask “Is high or low good?” before rolling on it. Additionally, the results are sometimes nonsensical, like the preposterously high chance of slicing off someone’s butt cheek. I don’t want a more organized, more realistic crit chart, as this semi-broken old junk from the dawn of the hobby does a superior job scaring the bejesus out of the players.

PS: You really want to scare some players via mechanical opacity? Put hit points in a black box. Track HP and damage secretly and only vaguely describe how wounded the PC feels.

Enter Era Four

There's a newly-formed gaming/education group at work and they recently hosted a game jam on itch.io. Although the organizers of the jam were mostly interested in video games, board games were also accepted. So I made a science fiction strategy boardgame thingy for 6-16 players and a referee.  Assuming it works as intended, it ought to make a decent convention game for cons with 4 or 5 hour slots.

You can download the board, components, and rules here.

New edition of Starmada! Huzzah!

So Daniel Kast's Starmada has a new, 30th anniversary edition out. You can get the pdf from WargameVault (the wargame store of the DriveThru people) or print, print-with-map-and-counters, or pdf from publisher Majestic Twelve Games. 

This is my favorite spaceship combat wargame. If you like hexed-based space combat with just enough complexity that running multiple ships is challenging but not overwhelming, then give it a shot.

Maybe the best part of the game is the ship construction system, which is a tad more complex than BattleTech* or Car Wars, but still easy enough that when I bought the Starmada Compendium (the 2nd print edition of the game) I immediately converted the ships in every other spaceship game I owned.

If you own a fleet or two of minis and the rules they're made for are too wonky for your tastes, consider Starmada. Or if you want to fight wars between factions in your own sci-fi universe.

*Does anyone even make their own mechs in BattleTech anymore? When I was a kid it was a common activity, with whole ass zines devoted to homemade mechs. 

Last Day of the Big Sale: Why YOU should publicize it!

A thing I need to do better

by Jon Hodgson

You know what rules? Sections of the dungeon where bigass party-wrecking monsters roam, but smaller places where the PCs can escape them.

James Raggi on Gaming, the OSR, the origins of LOTFP and his upcoming pr...

egghead reports research, weirdos pissed off

So if you haven't heard, last week a researcher named Dr. Clio Weisman published an article on Medium called "The Worst People You Have Never Met, or, What I Learned During A Four Year Academic Study of Online Harassment In The Dungeons & Dragons Community." It was up for about 14 hours before the author pulled it for reasons to which I am not privy. But it was preserved here, so you can read it for yourself. Becami Cusack archived the referenced audio clips here. I look forward to reading a formal, peer-reviewed version of her findings when they are published.

Apparently a few people think the article is some sort of hoax and Clio Weisman isn't real. These people must not have access to Google, as it is pretty easy to verify that she exists. And her other academic work isn't that hard to find confirm either, though you'll need access to specialized data bases to actually read the various pieces. Brian Yaksha, Olivia Hill, and Patrick Stuart have all confirmed talking to Dr. Weisman, though they aren't exactly fans of the article. Curiously, none of those three tweets complaining about Weisman and her piece bother to deny any of the allegations in it.

Dr. Weisman interviewed me for a couple of hours, several years ago. In addition to the Zak situation, we discussed her other research into bias. This was a topic of interest to me professionally, so she later sent me a draft version of an article she was working on. I assume I don't appear in her Medium article because my interview was boring compared to incestuous hate-mob she shines a light on. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about all the fuckos mentioned in the article, but since last week I've been going back and forth between sincerely hoping they get the help they need and sincerely hoping they rot in hell.

The other thing that some people are claiming is that Dr. Weisman has some undisclosed reason to slant her article. If she has any skin in the game, I have yet to see any evidence for it. As far as I can tell, she came to the project from outside the game scene and did her best to figure out what the hell was going on. Truth isn't always easy to determine in complex situations. That's why we have institutions like academia and the courts, to help us suss the truth out. These institutions are imperfect, but without evidence to the contrary, the people poo-pooing her work sound exactly like MAGA election deniers to me.

Some folks are probably going to give me the business in the comments. That's fine. Just expect to be asked some simple questions like, "Did you read the article?" and "Did you listen to the audio?"

updated Snail Quarter map for Dillhonker City campaign