bruceb

Some of you don't know that the nice folks at Atlas Games recently released Wanton Role-Playing, the OGL version of the wonderful, simple, great rules for Robin Laws & Jonathan Tweet's rpg Over The Edge. But they did do this thing, and you can go get it for yourself.

Initial thoughts on rendering d20 material into WaRP, for mix-n-match OGL fun, now ensue.

#0. I'm going to have to think about magic. Since I never did like Vancian magic, I have no problem ditching the whole thing in favor of weird alternative magic systems, and such. But I don't expect to come up with any good conversion of the standard spells-per-day-by-level framework.

#1. Having a trait that reflects your character's having a particular class gives her access to the whole spread of class features. It's just that ones that are higher level in d20 are more difficult in WaRP. As a first take, levels 1-3 are easy/1 die, 4-6 are moderate/2 dice, 7-9 are hard/3 dice, 10-12 are really difficult/4 dice, 13-15 are nearly impossible/5 dice, and 16-20 are nearly impossible/6 dice. I'm not currently feeling any urge to adapt 3rd edition epic stuff, but I am open to argument.

#1a. The above scaling reflects a long-standing bias of mine toward the mid-range levels, where I think a lot of the best stuff takes place. If I were to write this up formal-like, I'd include alternatives to put the higher levels closer to hand and further away.

#1b. It seems in the spirit of WaRP or maybe just the spirit of how I like to play to allow some swapping, so that what was originally a level 18 class feature trades place with one that's usually level 6. If the GM okays it, and she generally should, I'd think, the player would just make a note that her character can do X easily but finds Y really difficult, or whatever is appropriate.

#2. I never did feel like the OTE combat system was right for the rest of the game, and I'd ditch it in favor of the standard mechanics and consequences measured in temporary loss of dice in relevant traits. Experience dice can stand in for hit points, soaking some of the damage that would otherwise hit traits.

#2a. I probably want to increase the basic pool of experience dice some.

#2b. I don't want to hose the detailed martial possibilities altogether. Zooming in and out of combat detail, depending on participants' interests, needs some consideration.

#3. In most cases, one (1) trait will be associated with a d20 character class. This can be either superior or side - I think it works either way, depending on the rest of the character. Prestige classes will usually be narrow, and may also often be technical. They'll generally be new traits bought in the course of play, but some make fine sense for starting characters. I don't feel like WaRP D&D should get hung up a lot on prerequisite details; just write the trait explanation and sign to include them.

And that's as far as inspiration took me tonight.

Been listening a fair amount to Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway lately. (I go on these kicks.) I've also been reading some of the commentary about it, by the band and by others. Two observations.

#1. Regular readers know my vast appreciation and admiration for Peter Gabriel's work. Keep that in mind that I say, wow, Mr. Gabriel comes across as rather awesomely un-self-aware about what he wrote. "This was 1974; it was pre-punk but I still thought we needed to base the story around a contemporary figure rather than a fantasy creation." and "Rael, the character around which 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway' revolves, was as far removed from fairyland as possible." and like that.

Um, right. We have a half-Puerto Rican guy with an English magical name, and a story that starts off with a magical-realist lamb, dives immediately into an extra-temporal realm, and...stays there, never returning from numinous liminal space at all. So, yeah. Pull the other one.

#2. As I read folks' effort to decipher Gabriel's story, I realized that they were missing something basic and that he apparently was missing the key word to explain. That word is "evocative".

Fans and critics spilled a lot of ink looking for a fixed set of symbols and allegorical references. They might use words like "surreal", but without remembering that surrealist and other reality-bending art doesn't have to map onto reality into a 1-to-1 one. They might have read Borges, but probably hadn't read Garcia Marquez and almost certainly hadn't read Eco. Nor had they read Gaiman, or even Bull.

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is a pretty typical urban fantasy. It's got some specific symbolism, a lot of use of mythology, and a fair amount of individualized evocation. It would have been stronger with either a hero more closely aligned to Gabriel's own internal life and therefore more strongly connected to the personal mythos, or with any explicit knowledge that he's been dropped into someone else's personal mythos. But it's not bad.

It just struck me how comfortably established the mental environment of urban fantasy has become in the last 30 years. Any work like this now would be grasped by its audience as an example of a sort of thing and then evaluated for what's distinctive about it within that context.

Makes you wonder what we're getting frustrated about now that'll seem just as obvious to the next generation.

I've got my big living room air conditioner/air filter actually cooling a bit this afternoon, for the first time this year. It made some loud clunking and clanging noises for a few seconds when I switched it from pure fan and filtering mode, then settled down to a steady grumble that reminded me of something. It dawned on me: when I lived near Laurelhurst Park, I got to regularly hear the different ways the flocks of ducks made noise while going about their routine. Mellow ducks keep up a quiet chatter with a lot of grumble in it. My air conditioner is imitating ducks. Or channeling them. Or maybe just evoking them.

This is a post about my health, and about two specific bits of progress measured via MMO.

An expansion back (in Wrath of the Lich King), World of Warcraft added the Argent Tournament. This was a place for characters of both Horde and Alliance to take on a variety of challenges to build up the expertise needed to face the Lich King and not get turned into mindless minions themselves. There was a new category of quests in the form of jousting. (See this video for a look at it in action.) And...I couldn't do it. It's not that the jousting interface was complicated, because it wasn't. But it took (and takes) quick judgments and responses that I simply couldn't muster. It may be the only thing about WoW that ever reduced me to real tears of frustration, and really hurt to know I had to entirely give up on.

(I did the quests that required no jousting. But that made a lot of stuff in practice forever off-limits to me. It was discouraging.)

In the current expansion, last year, they added a sor of sub-zone in the Firelands, the WoW multiverse's version of the elemental plane of fire. It had a lot of quests and some distinctive rewards. And...I couldn't do it. Because of the visuals, in this case. Black rock, lava, and fiery skies would plunge me into a migraine, often in just a few minutes, but in no case in longer than half an hour or so. (Here's a video guide to one of the quests, showing the environment well.) It didn't make me cry, but it made me feel frustrated and helpless again.

Let us step forward now to today, with me still in the midst of a long wretched unproductive just plain bad spell, and poking at WoW every so often for relief or at least distraction. Out of curiosity, figuring that I had nothing to lose since I was going to go take a nap anyway, I tried the Firelands opening quests, and got no migraine. And did a couple more quests, and didn't get a migraine. And did a couple more, and still didn't. I did the full day's quota with nary a twinge at all.

It's not uncommon for me to be baffled, but it's usually not such a happy experience.

Later in the afternoon, I had the same character up by the tournament area and I thought, why not give it a try? I'd done some of the no-jousting preliminary quests a while back just because, so it didn't take me long to get to the jousting part. And I did just fine at it, even at a particularly tough daily involving elite opponents. I wasn't quite undefeated, but I won a lot more than I lost, and I felt like I had some modicum of control.

Now, it's not like all the problems of recent weeks suddenly went away. But it is a very unexpected, very welcome gift of cheer and hope in the midst of all that, and makes waiting the rest out sure feel less like a burden.

You know how I often make a point of emphasizing that my judgements about this or that are contingent? It's so times like this won't be so embarrassing. Short form: I'm enjoying WoW at the moment and looking forward to the upcoming expansion pack. This will be long, so going behind a cut tag.


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I'm a sharing mood. Here are two bits from Something Wicked. They're very long, so they're going behind a cut tag.


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This is not the best picture I ever took, but it's my first try at capturing one of the pleasant experiences of living here. It's a very, very rainy Thursday in Seattle, and intermittently quite windy, too. A branch of the tree outside my living room got pressed up hard against the glass, pinning accumulated raindrops right there. 

This post owes a huge debt of thanks to Rob Donoghue in particular and various others for comments and suggestions in recent months.

The key to successful writing on the iPad, I find, is to know what it is you need, and what you're comfortable with. As a gaming writer and occasional fictioneer, I work with simple formatting - my text doesn't get fancy in layout until stages past me, and past editing for that matter. I use a few levels of heading and a fair amount of boldfacing and italicizing, but very little else. I don't need to manage footnotes/endnotes, for instance, nor do I have to be applying an existing style sheet. If you, Gentle Reader, do have those sorts of needs, what I describe here probably won't as well for you as it does for me, but you may find good leads anyhow.

And now, let us dive beneath the cut tag and explore the wonders of extended exposition.


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Someone beat the challenge. WoW-knowledgeable readers may have fun looking at his Armory entry. A little commentary ensues.

Kripparian is a troll hunter, and it's not surprising in the slightest to me that a character of that sort would be the first to do it. I think I commented earlier on the advantages any hunter gets, starting with the pet, a partially independent source of damage-dealing that can intercept targets and keep them busy while the hunter gathers loot, or makes a break for it, or whatever. 

In addition, each race in WoW has a few special abilities, and trolls' are super handy for Ironman purposes. They recover lost health 10% faster than other characters, and can continue to regenerate while in combat, whereas usually healing and mana recovery slow or stop while the character's fighting. Trolls get a bonus chance to make critical hits with thrown weapons and bows, which hunters use along with guns. (Dwarves get a racial bonus with the guns. Also very handy.) Movement-impairing effects - nets, burning tar, whatever - slow them for only 85% of the time that other characters would be affected. And they do extra damage against beasts, which  you do deal with a lot, at all levels.

Behind Kripparian, the leader board shows...a bunch more hunters. Not really surprising. :)

Personally, I'm having more fun with the pacifist challenge. (Chalana is up to level 16, and therefore has the cheetah-like travel form that's a bit slower than riding a horse or comparable mount, the cat form for stealth and speed, the bear form for resilience and endurance, and the aquatic form for puttering around underwater.) But the Ironman was fun to poke at, and I may yet give it another run just to see how I can do this time around.
 

I've been thinking more about that topic of "things a person of this sort wouldn't say/do" and "things that only a person of this sort would say/do". Bracketing examples:

When I started reading Clive Barker, I didn't know anything about him beyond the lil' bio blurbs. But I felt there was something kind of pervasively off in the way he wrote relationships - not the individuals in them so much as the ways they dealt with each other. It was not a surprise when I later learned that he's gay. 

By the time I read "The Women Men Don't See", on the other hand, I knew that James Tiptree Jr. was the pen name of Alice Sheldon. But wow. The narrator's voice in that struck me as pitch-perfect, and continues to do so. The way that guy trying to be decent and responsible in a situation he never gets to really understand...it works pretty flawlessly.

Anyone want to toss in other examples of getting the sense of characters unlike the author really right, or really not so right?