another weirdo dream about a game

Last night I dreamed that my ol' game buddy Gopher invited my daughter and I to this sweet new LARP he was into.  Note that I'm confident that Gopher has never LARP'ed in his life.  Anyhoo, the deal with this LARP is that it's a dungeon exploration type affair set in a sprawling concrete and steel complex that has been seriously wired up.  Tiny cameras in every room, magnetic locks on some of the doors and wi-fi throughout the joint.

In addition to the usual costumery and props, every participant carries a smartphone of some sort.  Want to 'pick the lock' on one of the maglock doors?  You play a little lockpicking minigame on your iPhone or Droid or whatever.  Spell casting also worked through the smartphone.  Select light off of your spell list and remote controlled lights come on wherever you are at.  Cast clairvoyance and the phone shows you whatever the nearest hidden camera is picking up.

In the dream your phone also somehow tracked hit points.  You couldn't die in the middle of a fight, but after defeating the badguys you might get a text message telling you that you're dead.

last night I dreamed of chess

Specifically, I dreamed of a chess variant where the board consisted of sixteen numbered pieces like the little graphic to the right.  They're laid out four by four to make a standard chess board and the game plays out pretty much like regular chess.  The big difference is that at the end of each black move 2d20 are thrown.  The numbers rolled indicate which two sub-boards to swap in the array, transporting all the pieces on each.

No details in the dream indicated what to do when you rolled more than a 16 on either die, or how to resolve transporting a king into check.  Obviously you could roll a d16 to eliminate the former problem, but maybe a roll of 17 or better indicates that you should skip swapping boards. Maybe if the king finds itself in check the player could be allowed to rotate the sub-board 90 or 180 degrees to move him out of check, otherwise skip the swap as if you rolled a 17+.  Castling, the pawn's double move and en passant capture would probably all need to be scrapped in this variant.  Would a pawn that magically appeared in the last rank suddenly get a promotion?  That would certainly make things wild and wooly.

Being able to respond to white without the boards mutating seems like a tremendous advantage to black.

I don't recall every reading of a game exactly like this on the Chess Variants Pages, but it wouldn't surprise me to discover that it already exists.

damnedest dream I've had in a while

So I was at this high tone party in a refurbished brownstone.  It was the kind of upscale affair where celebrities were all over the place.  I distinctly remember the fashion wonk from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy sitting on the kitchen counter surrounded by a rapt audience of party-goers, expounding on his opinion that the brioche did not go with the wine.  Which is pretty weird, since after I woke up I had to go to Wikipedia to look up exactly what the hell brioche is.  Turns out it's bread.

Remember Pat Stevens?  She was a talk show hostess that Nora Dunn played on Saturday Night Live a few times in the eighties.  I always liked Nora Dunn.  Anyway, Pat Stevens walks up to me holding a frou-frou cocktail with an umbrella and starts gushing about all the wonderful people at the party, rattling off a long list of names.  I've never heard of any of these people, so I nod politely.

All of sudden these french doors fly open and in march this bunch of Hell's Angels, moving in diamond formation like the secret service use when surrounding the president.  And who is standing in the center of the formation?

I yell "Ronnie!  Aren't you dead?!" and he replies "I'm Dio, baby!  Dead don't matter to me!"  He then hands me this bar of silvery metal, maybe four inches across, eight or nine inches long, with a thickness of less than half an inch.  Inscribed on one side are Egyptian hieroglyphics in three colums, with these pre-Columbian glyphs done in relief in the spaces between the columns.  Kind of like this:

So I ask Dio what this is all about and he just smiles and says "Figure it out!"  That's when I woke up.

man, this dream I had

Last night I dreamt I was at a game convention at the Illini Union, in the rooms that the Conflict Simulation Society (RIP) used whenever the Foreign Language Building was unavailable. 4e had just been released at this convention and the open gaming room was full of people looking through their new core rules. About half the room was moaning and groaning, declaring the new edition a "dud" and a "rip-off". One oldster was going on about how he bought his first D&D set for ten bucks on '75 and he just dropped over a hundred bucks on "a thousand pages of crap". [Fun fact: this online inflation calculator indicates that ten 1975 dollars equals over forty bucks in 2007.] Meanwhile, many other people in the room were frantically rolling up new characters, preparing to play the moment they had a party up and running.

In my dream 4e wasn't even the big talk of the convention. Instead, the most popular item by far was a new computer game being played in a room full of laptops. It was a crappy little browser-based jobbie kinda like Urban Dead but with graphics like Ultima III or an old Intellivision game. In this game you started out as an extremely puny dungeon monster. My initial character was a rot grub. You wandered a huge dungeon inhabitied by other players' monsters, sneaking/fighting/negotiating for food, water, and treasure, building or locating a lair, and setting traps. The twist was that every time you leveled, you mutated into a new monster type. I was on the worm/serpent/wyrm track, so when I got to level 2 I turned into a small but poisonous snake. Another guy next to me was on the dragon track, and had leveled up to a stegosaurus, while a third dude had started as a "dungeon cow" and worked up to minotaur, then a D&D-style "iron bull" gorgon. Periodically, the server would generate a party of random AI adventurers who laid waste to the dungeon until the players teamed up to drive them off.

If anybody has heard of a game like this, with the "turn into a better monster" feature, please let me know. If it doesn't exist and you're a game programmer, please steal this idea!

The dream ended when I overheard someone in the hallway say "The MC for the Blogging and Gaming panel no-showed. Who can we get on such late notice?" That's when I knew I was dreaming and woke up.

my nerdiest recurring dream

I don't have recurring dreams often, but by far my nerdiest one is my Dungeon Masters Guide dream. Usually I'm at the old brick farmhouse where I grew up and I usually find a 1st edition DMG in my mom's desk. Sometimes those particulars vary, like finding the DMG in a game store run out of the basement of an otherwise abandoned building, or just lying on a table at a game convention. I open this newfound DMG to discover that its contents are radically different from my own copies. Not just "accidentally contains some pages of the Monster Manual" different. We're talking about new charts and rules and Gygaxian rants. In my dream the book always ends up being identified as the lost "original printing". Sometimes I'm told that but other times I just know. The actual contents of this mythical rulebook varies from episode to episode. Last night there was a chart full of lasers and other sci-fi weapons, the Social Level rules from Judges Guild's Ready Ref Sheets, and a lengthy amount of trashtalk aimed at outlining the 'clear inferiority' of Arduin. The last time I had this dream the book contained secret XP charts for the classes in the Players Handbook, with the implication being that the PHB charts are meant to fake out the players. Another time a new, utterly incomprehensible alignment system added a political dimension to your alignment, whereby your ranger could be Chaotic Good Republican or your thief could be Neutral Evil Libertarian. And one time this phantom DMG contained pages and pages of rules about whales.

I don't know what any of this means. I just felt like sharing.

a dream fragment

I was being haunted by the chiclewuecue (pronounced chick-luh-WAY-kay), an Aztec undead that can wear the form of your dead loved ones. This one took the form of Grandma Rients, at least until the skin melted off revealing the cadaverous, skull-faced horror underneath. The chiclewuecue can also manifest as an infestation of large spiders, or as the spooking of local animals. It can also incite children to violent acts, as when walking through a park all the kids playing ball started lobbing their footballs and baseballs and such at me. Fortunately, badass 70's Batman and Frank Zappa, Sorcerer Supreme, were on hand to help me. Frank was wearing a white leisure suit with a lime green silk shirt and magic shoes. They were Italian style shoes, with the zipper up the high ankle, but with huge wooden platform heels and soles and silver sequins. They were like the magic shoes the Wicked Witch would wear, if she were a pimp. I awoke wondering if Zappa also owned Dolemite's magic pimp cane.

weird dream

I was in this Big Brother style gameshow where a group of strangers lived together for weeks at a time. During the course of the week you scored points by playing stupid reality gameshow challenges. Then at the end of each week you spent those points buying yourself necessities and luxuries for the following week. Your points purchase things like use of the shower, better food, etc.

The catch was that you spent your points during a lightning round where you had to juggle a bunch of numbers fast. I froze up during the lightning round and failed to spend all my points. Over the previous week I had earned enough points for a comfy week, but I failed to purchase laundry priviledges or changes of clothes. Nor did I get any food. The result was I doomed to wearing the same set of filthy clothes all week. And for sustenance I would receive a glass of milk three times a day.

The idea of the show was to put people in situations like that to drive them to quit the game. No one was voted off, the game simply continued until only one person could stand to live under these annoying conditions.

a campaign concept inspired by a dream

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to your first day here at Time Patrol Academy. No doubt you have questions. Yes, Jenkins?"

"Sir, I understand why I'm holding a primer on temporal physics and why this six volume overview of history is sitting on my desk. These other two books, though, what gives? The Book of Revelations with Commentary? And the Necronomicon?"

"You need to understand, Jenkins, that St. John of Patmos and Abdul Al-Hazrad were among the first two scholars to observe temporal paradox in the field. As you'll soon discover in Temp Phys 101, too much paradox in any one time period triggers the apocalypse."

"Excuse me, sir?"

"You see, the apocalypse is a five dimensional discontinuity in the structure of the universe. Too much paradox can trigger the endtimes at any point along the spacetime continuum, erasing everything that happens after that point. St. John and Al-Hazrad did their best to describe the initial symptoms of the apocalypse, though they lacked the scientific training to understand much of what they saw. Still, things like the dead rising and blood dripping from the sky really do happen during the initial stages of most observed apocalypses. In fact zombie attacks are the primary hazard you'll have to endure while attempting to undo temporal paradoxes in the field."

Once Upon A Time

Dave Hoover and I went to a new con in Bloomington, IL.  It was a bunch of college kids starting a brand new event and we had decided to help out by running something for them in the first slot (Friday afternoon) of their new con.  Dave came up with the idea of co-GMing a D&D adventure for 12 players.  Sounded ambitious, but if Dave was up to the challenge I figured I ought to give it a shot.  I like stupid con games with gimmicks that you wouldn't necessarily pull in a regular campaign.

So we get to the con and the first thing that happens is that the two of us bump into my sister.  She lives in Bloomington and is something of a boardgamer these days so she decided to try this new con out.  She mentions in passing that she just came from the registration desk and that she saw that 35 people have signed up for our game.  Thirty five players?  She must be mistaken.  Jenn says she's not mistaken.  Turns out the first day of the con has a lot higher attendance than the staff expected and the con only scheduled 3 games in this slot, so the are just letting any number of players sign up for each game.  WTF?!?  We look up our location in the con program and head over to our table.  Turns out our 'table' is a large room with 3 dozen or more gamers all looking to play in our event!

Okay, now I'm pissed.  Our submission to this con clearly stated we would run for up to twelve.  Why is the front desk allowing all these extra sign-ups?  I leave Dave and Jenn with our 35 players and head over to con registration to get the downlow.  I could tell this whole thing was amateur hour before I even got to the desk.  There was plenty of open space available for a registration area, but these kids had squeezed their registration desk into a tiny sideroom, causing large numbers of eager registrants to pack themselves in to try to get to the desk.  I squoze past an array of teen angstgoths and cat-piss men, finally reaching the desk.

I was momentarily taken aback by the drop dead gorgeous blond co-ed working registration.  No wonder the room was so full of geeks!  Anyway, either my turn came around or the dorks clustered around the desk saw that I damn well meant business.  I asked the girl behind the table how many people had signed up for the D&D game this slot.  She asked me what room I was talking about.  Exasperated, I blurt out "listen, I don't remember the freakin' room number, just tell me how many people signed up for the D&D game!  There are only three games scheduled for right now, it can't be that damn hard to find!"  Some little Asian dude with a bad bowlhaircut, apparently also staff, puts his hand on my shoulder and mutters "Dude, just chill out" in a Southern California accent.

I'm a moody guy by nature and I've got buttons that can be pressed.  More buttons than most folk, I think.  I try to keep this in mind when dealing with the clueless, but man did this guy manage to hit two big buttons of mine.  First, if you ain't friend or family, you got no business laying a hand on me.  I let that one slide when the unwanted contact comes from naturally friendly, touchy-feely type people.  But this guy was looking for a world of hurt.  Clapping his hand on my shoulder the way he did looked like nothing less than an attempt to assert alpha male status over the situation.  I'm a foot taller and at least 150 pounds on this guy.  Bitch best know kung fu if he's gonna stir shit like that.  And then there's the "chill out" line.  If I'm working up a whole head of angry steam, the abso-fucking-lutely worst thing you can say to me is "chill".  Seriously.  It only makes me madder.  I just find t hat term so damn condescending.  "Dude, just chill out" translates in my brain as "I know you're mad, but I find that your anger is unjustified."  What angry person wants to be told they shou ldn't even be angry?

I do my best to control myself, which meant pulling this punk's hand off of my shoulder and then ignoring him.  So I turn back to the blond at the desk and ask "Is it true that you have allowed over thirty people to sign up for the D&D game DM'ed by Dave Hoover and Jeff Rients?"  She acknowledges that this is indeed the state of affairs.  "I put on the submission form that the game was for twelve."  Batting her big beautiful blue eyes she replies "Yes, I know."  I'm sputtering at this point "B-b-but you let more than twelve sign up anyway?"  She smiles sweetly, nods and makes a soft grunty "uh-huh" sound.  In retrospect I shoulda asked why they made that decision, but I guess at that point I was too mad to need any further information.  "Fuck it!  The game is cancelled!  I'm outta here!"

I stomped all the way back over to Dave and Jenn, where I angrily confirmed Jenn's story and announced that I would in no way put up with this shit.  I picked up my game stuff and was ready to head out the door when Dave grabbed my arm.  Not the best time in the world for him to do that, seeing as how I was still pissed at Mr. Fucking Chill Out, but Dave's a friend and just didn't want me to leave right away.  He pulled me over to a corner of the room and whispered "Listen, none of these players have anything to do with the con staff screwing things up.  Let's just figure out a plan so that everyone here can play a game.  It's all about the players, it's all about the game.  Right?  Right?"  Damn, he had me.  I don't want to leave these folks in the lurch just cause they're attending a con run by morons.  So we confab for a few minutes, toss our adventure completely out the window, and make plans for basically a wargame scenario.  Everybody present will make up a 1st level PC on the spot, and we'll put together some sort of skirmish style scenario in which half the room fights half the room.  3.5 char gen and a fight that large ought to eat up most of the 4 hours we have available.  So we start helping people with making characters and that's when I woke up.  Dreams are weird, aren't they?

Ahhh, so THAT'S the problem...

Turns out my whole problem with the video clip and mediaplayer was that Firefox and Windows Mediaplayer aren't on speaking terms, at least the way I have things set up at the present. The video clip in question ran fine once I fired Internet Explorer. My personal catchphrase these days has been "I blame Bush" but this time I'm going to blame Bill Gates.

I had the convention dream last night. This is a pretty regularly occurring dream for me. Several friends (this time Don McKinney and Jon Pedigo) and I are sitting at a table at Winter War playing a game. This time we're playing Star Fleet Battles. I end up giving up the game because I forgot to allocate a point of energy to my life support systems. Then I go hit the game vendors. The shelves are full of RPG products that don't actually exist. Also one of the vendors is selling photocopies of old stuff. I'm visiting all the vendors because I'm looking for one particular item. This time it's a decent copy of the MERP corebook.

Funny thing about this dream, whenever I have it I usually wake up thinking to myself "Yeah, I should play game A (this time SFB) and track down a copy of game B (this time MERP)." A nice, friendly game of SFB with guys as knowledgeable as Don and Jon would kinda hit the spot right now. The emphasis on tournament competition and a desire to be completely self-reliant when it comes to rules questions drove me away from the game. Just getting together with some non-spazzotron players and shooting each other to pieces would be a good way to waste an afternoon. Maybe I'll send Jon an email. And I've wanted a better copy of MERP for a long time. I hadn't searched for it on eBay in a while. Last time I did the Lord of the Rings movies were still going strong in the theatres. Talk about a sellers market. Yeesh.