Games
The G is for 'game'
Spoofing that stupid “rpg consent form” helped me decide what I most dislike about it: it’s adversarial. It’s the exact opposite of friends and strangers coming together for a shared narrative fantasy experience, replacing it with an attempt to control the experience for others.
You don’t sit down with a group of friends and say, “you can’t say or do anything that bothers me, including but not limited to everything I’ve marked on this form”.
You don’t sign up for a 1920s Call Of Cthulhu game at a con and say, “you can’t discuss blood, gore, torture, police, claustrophobia, racism, sexism, kissing, hurting animals, forest fires, or thirst”.
About the only scenario where the overly-specific contents of this form could be useful is if you were a teenager who just moved to a new town and wanted to join an open game at the local hobby shop without getting eaten alive by a group of total assholes. Who would just use your answers as ammunition to make you run off in tears, so maybe not there, either.
So I inverted it.
Oh, Sweet Meteor Of Death,
Why Hast Thou Forsaken Us?
Anyone who thinks this is a good idea, please write on the board a thousand times:
Therapeutic Role-Play Is Not Gaming.
UPDATE!
Someone has responded with the treatment it deserves:
This is a DM-less narrative RPG. Before play commences, players need to have read and filled (anonymously) the RPG CONSENT FORM. If any items where ticked, then do not, I repeat DO NOT, play the RPG CONSENT FORM: THE FREEFORM RPG.
The object of the RPG CONSENT FORM: THE RPG is to create a romantic scene that tried to break from the normal tropes and cliches. Here is how to do this.
Baby's First Character Sheet
Just for fun, here’s the one-page PostScript character sheet I made for GURPS (3rd edition) back in the Eighties. This is good old-fashioned stone-knives-and-bearskins hand-written PostScript, because that’s just how we rolled in OSU-CIS.
PDF version (5.3KB), if you don’t feel like cutting and pasting.
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(Light\(1\)= 4 x ST)(Med\(2\)= 6 x ST)(Hvy\(3\)= 12 x ST)
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(T)(O)(T)(A)(L)4.07 .09 4.44 {X exch m s}for /X 2.3 def
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(Shamelessly swiped from an original that's \(C\)1988 Steve Jackson Games Inc.)
S end
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Not a pick-up line (2)
Unrelated to this picture, the DanMemo mobile game is currently running bonus drama vignettes related to each episode of season 2 as they air.
Some of the many side stories in the game are focused around the waitresses at Bell’s favorite pub. They might collectively be called, “Is It Wrong To Force Level 4 Adventurers To Wait Tables In A Dungeon Town Restaurant?”.
Pro tip: grabass == permadeath.
The Respun Marches
As vaguely promised, here’s what happens when I take the sector data for The Spinward Marches and run it through my scripts to create a completely new sector.
But first, a slight tweak: the Importance stat I mentioned ranges from
-3 to 5, which is sufficient for my basic goal of separating the wheat
from the chaff, but I decided it doesn’t have enough granularity to
truly spread the best systems around the sector, so I multiplied it
by another derived stat, Resource Units (“stuff to grab”), which
ranges from rather negative to quite positive. Avoiding zeroes for
both, the exact scoring method used was: ($ix + 4) * ($ru||1)
(yes, the Importance stat is called “ix”, or more precisely {Ix},
because Marc Miller apparently has an affection for chartjunk; there’s
also an (Ex), and a [Cx], and if he ever writes another version of
Traveller, I imagine it will have
Now, let’s respin The Spinward Marches, with data and PDFs courtesy of The Traveller Map!
Distributed Coolness
The Universe-As-Written is a terrible place to visit, and it probably doesn’t have catgirls.
A while back, as I was adding examples to PDF::Cairo, I made a
comment along the lines of “if I were
really going to revive sec2pdf”. Well, I’m not quite doing that
yet, but I did extend the example I wrote to do something related:
display the distribution of interesting systems in a starmap.
What happened is that I started reading the Giant Tome Of Tables that is Traveller 5.10, found the section on generating systems and sectors, dug out the dusty old scripts I wrote around the T20 rules, managed to successfully reset my password on the CotI forums, looked up the various debates about the available and abandoned systems, and realized something:
The problem isn’t the generators for a single world/system (despite the fact that many of them create nonsensical things like tiny rocks with no water or atmosphere that support a population of millions of bronze-age peasants in a police state…), it’s the fact that the rules to populate a region of space are pretty much “roll up a world in X% of the hexes on the map”, with some vaguely-handwaved suggested percentages (“rift = 3%, standard = 50%, cluster = 83%”).
Like most RPG systems, it’s not in the books because it’s good, it’s there because it’s easy to describe in terms of pencil, paper, and dice.
Genderology
In Traveller 5, you can identify as Goatse.
