Planet Irish Gaming

I’ve been an RPG  gamer (I mean Pen and Paper/Tabletop version not computer games)¹ for too many years to remember² and at varying intensities over the years. Right now I have a regular once a week game (online using G+ Hangouts), do a bit of designing and enter lots of nerdy/geek discussions on it. And today my intertubes have been filled with the news that, lo and behold, there is to be a new version of a game about dungeons and the occasional dragons including an article in the New York Times where they talk about “crowdsourcing” this version.

I shrug my shoulders and worry about something else. I have no issue with Dungeons and Dragons RPG or any of the editions – however it has been come something of a standard or emblem of the whole roleplaying hobby. People who don’t really know much, if anything, about roleplaying will have heard of Dungeons and Dragons. And certainly it’s one of the grandfathers of the hobby.

But you know, it’s not the entire hobby at all. It’s a large visible portion sure. But it was not what got me into the hobby. I do not own any books from the series (though I have on many occasions flicked through the Player’s Guide). I only ever played two campaigns of it but only after first playing and running other games for ten years.

I wonder how non-gamers see the hobby. Do they think we all play Elves and Dwarfs raiding dungeons for loot using miniatures on a hexed sheet? I’ve played vampires in the modern day and the ancient world, fought the evils of technology and then donned black suits to keep the aliens secret. Wielded magic entwined with philosophy and esoteric theory and created alien races in the depths of space. I’ve even ran games of gods and demons fighting over the world.

Yet Dungeons and Dragons still forms the outsiders perception of the hobby. It really is the tip of the ice-berg you know. From open-source story systems to systems using CCGs (collectable card games), drawings, cards or beads instead of dice. From linear stories that explore “sedate” human relationships to the pure freeform pleasure of story telling.

And lets not forget LARPs (Live Action Roleplaying) that combine something like Historical Re-enactments with roleplaying and story-telling. While it’s never really been my cup of tea, people do put a lot of effort into them and they are hugely popular.

Yet none of that or news from other non-Dungeons and Dragon’s games gets an article in the new New York Times.

¹Yea, terms here are a bit confusing seeing that computer game players seemed to have co-opted the traditional terms we use such as “gamer” and “RPG”.

²I think it’s about two decades now, my friends may have a more accurate accounting.

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Inspired by fictitious entry’s posts on maps and geomorphs and some of the maps done by Dyson Logos, I decided to try my hand at doing an RPG map.

Here it is:

There are lots of little mistakes, I should have left more space at the top to do the church more fully and I scaled the “portal” at the bottom much bigger then I intended and… But who cares really. Normally my art projects require several iterations, references pieces, building ideas, etc. I did this in one sitting. Pencil to pen, very little sketching or references. And that was fun. It’s great to be able to do just draw. My kids draw like that. My son will draw a line and I’ll ask him, “what are you drawing?”, “I don’t know yet”. Same with this map, I started with the church and worked down. It’s like a mini-story, dead-end here, secret passage that the cultists use there and so on.

Of course, not that map couldn’t be done up as a proper art project. You just have to look at someone like Fantastic Maps to see how beautiful maps can be.

I then saw this article about recently discovered 1,800 year old tunnels under a temple in Mexico. All I could think was, this would make a great idea for a dungeon map!

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So last week, I added my blog (well the roleplaying related posts at least) and my lost heroes dev blog to “RPG Blog Alliance”.

I saw a number of fellow bloggers/twitters joining up and thought I’d be in good company. But as of writing, it’s up to 131 members. That’s 131 blogs about roleplaying. 131 active blogs about roleplaying.

The feed is syndicated to twitter via @RPGBlogAlliance. And now my feed is constantly filled with new blog posts about roleplaying, from learning to GM to geomorph tiles to development blogs of new games. New content, all the feck’in time!

And there was me lamenting the decline of the roleplaying hobby. In just the last week, it’s gone from a manageable list of blog posts that I can read to avalanche of information I can’t digest in a timely manner, or at least before the next blog post comes in. That’s quite cool.

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Here’s Vin Diesel being cool about Dungeons and Dragons:

And, if you haven’t heard, a new Charity RPG Bundle to support Doctors Without Borders Pakistan Food Relief. Get nearly 700 dollars worth of RPG stuff for 25 dollars!  Some great stuff in the bundle: Don’t Rest Your Head, Exalted 2nd Edition (if you like Exalted that is), Icons, Starblazer’s Adventures, and on!

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I love table top gaming (and I assume roleplaying here), ever since my friends introduce me to it with game of White Wolf’s Werewolf: the Apocalypse, back somewhere in the 90s (I think). I’ve tried LARPs and I’ve even tried roleplaying online, but table top, with friends or even at a convention has always been more engaging for me.

It’s like playing the Wii. You can play games by yourself, but if you play with your friends it’s truly memorable.

Anyway, I came across this article via @fredhicks on twitter: The Designer Monologues » Blog Archive » Tabletopocalypse Now.

It’s not a matter of debate though. Anyone who has paid attention over the past two decades has seen the undeniable shrinking. There are far fewer dedicated speciality stores any more (current estimates place total numbers in the US at somewhere in the low-to-mid 2000s, according to ICV2, Diamond/Alliance distributors, and others). Fewer stores means fewer orders, as well as fewer social centers for the tabletop gaming community. Sales numbers are massively down from the 90s, much less the numbers seen during the ‘d20 explosion’ of the early 2000s.

I’ve seen clubs close (or merge with computer game clubs) and shelves in shops shrink. Yet Gaelcon starts this evening here in Ireland, it’s the biggest gaming con in Ireland. I haven’t gone in a few years (mostly due to awkward scheduling, and sadly it’s the same this year), but the excitement among Irish gamers is pretty evident if you go by twitter.  I think table top gaming will take a long time to die, but it’s being on that path for a long time already.

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For some reason I was thinking about the differences between Facebook and Twitter but within the scope of designing a roleplaying game. Yea, odd connections I know. That’s how my brain works and why I’m pretty much a scatter brain about things.

When designing or modifying a roleplaying system (for pen-and-paper here like DnD, not computer games), there are two levels. First is designing a game that’s playable, the second level is designing an experience. For example White Wolf’s Vampire games try to model and hence allow the players experience the Vampires’ losing grip on their humanity, via the humanity (WOD1.0) or morality trait. We insert restrictions and limitations into the system to help better focus the player’s experience and fun. Individual GMs and player groups additionally apply their own restrictions (to better focus the story-experience they want to use). Sometimes players grumble but most of the time it’s accepted and even seen as good.

With software and particularly social media websites, we look at features. What features does it have. Facebook has it all: status updates, photos, link sharing, privacy settings (debatable), filtering, “likes”, and so on. Twitter has a very small, strict subset of features: status updates, following, minimal privacy settings… But where Twitter wins out is the experience. And it does this, like in roleplaying game design, by inserting restrictions.

The big thing: 140 characters. Sometimes I use two tweets to say something, but I try to avoid that. If you can’t say it in 140 characters, post it somewhere else and link, or don’t post at all (it’s probably not worth it anyway). By restricting a tweet to 140 characters, you avoid over long and often boring posts but it also improves readership. Most people now skim through headlines or titles of posts in RSS/News Readers… but if the headlines are the posts, aren’t you skimming it by reading the full content?

I also love the way replies work compared to Facebook’s or even traditional commenting systems. You only see replies from people you follow. It allows conversations to generate as people see only people they know engaged in the discussion. I find reading comments from people I don’t know on a Facebook post on someone I only half know, annoying, in fact a bit of disincentive to comment. Or when you see a post from a band or a group and it already has 114 comments… why would I bother when my comment will be lost in the sea of existing comments. But if you feel (not necessarily think) that you’re first to reply, you’ll probably will then and if you see only your friends reply, you may reply or even reply to your friends. It’s restriction created by the interface but helps focus and improve the experience, much like explicit limitations of roleplaying games.

Which is why I think I don’t like Buzz (there goes my scatter brain making links out of no where). Leaving aside the privacy issues of Google Buzz’s launch, the second mistake was importing all your other feeds associated in some way with your Google account. Twitter works because of it’s restrictions, importing it into Buzz, it falls over. You lose all the wonderful reply experiences I describe above and copy over the disincentives of Facebook. It doesn’t even format them very well, long ‘RTs’ are cut off at the end. It’s not as obvious now because Buzz, at least among my circle of contacts, isn’t as busy or full as Facebook yet. Yet Buzz isn’t even as feature rich as Facebook, so it doesn’t even have that going for it. While I don’t mind using a single Google account to manage my Google Analytics for my websites, my email, my Google Reader, etc. importing all that into a single “social media” stream seems a bit creepy because I may not want them all publically associated with one person and there isn’t enough ways to control it. You either import you’re entire website feed, or twitter feed, or not at all. At least with Facebook there are apps that you can use to selectively import website posts and twitter feeds.

And even with what Buzz does import, the layout is strange. Buzz is trying to overlay a traditional but nice and clean interface over interfaces that work because they are non-traditional.

In my simple and uninformed opinion, Buzz should have been part of Google Reader, which already has social features I use (sharing items with friends with comments and likes). It shouldn’t have tried to auto-populate itself by importing all your other feeds or all your email contacts. It should have focused on figuring out how to improve the experience, even by restricting what it does. Shows us our friends in a different way.

Okay, that’s my ramble over for today.

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The big creative project I’ve been chipping away on for ages is finally online (though so much left to do). I chucked it up last night after (literally) months of procrastinating. It’s a roleplaying game, intended for pen and paper, though what I’ve put online is only the setting which is feck’in huge. Mostly because I’ve spent time doing a lot of reading of mythology for it.

It’s called Lost Heroes and I’ve talked about it a few times here. It’s going to be a fudge based game (Fudge was what FATE was originally based on). The setting itself is the modern day, except the “ancient” gods and pantheons didn’t go away. (I put ancient in quotes, only because some of these pantheons still, or now have resurrected, active religions). It includes Angels and Demons, the Norse Gods Aesir (Odin, Loki, Thor and so on and not the DC’s superhero Thor character, which is such a deviation from the original mythology), Celtic Gods (Lugh, Donn, Morrigan, etc.) and Greek Gods of Olympus (probably my favourite). Anyway you can go download it right now and read it for yourself. It’s certainly still needs work, but I am proud of it.

Now though I’m unsure what the next steps are. I’m currently still researching the system though I do have an older draft of it and tons of notes and ideas. But what do I do with what I have put online? (Suggestions on a postcard, or, you know, just comment below). I’ll probably submit it to a few choice communities but I don’t want to spam it around too much.

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As part of winning these custom dice, I have to do a review of them. However I haven’t gamed in months, certainly not since I received the dice. So instead I’m doing a “part 1” of the review now, which is, in a sense, a bit weird as it’s my design on the dice! Part 2 will come when I actually get to game.

My Fudge Dice

So in lieu of not actually gaming with them, I grabbed my big bag of dice and compared them to my other fudge dice. I bought a set of 16 dice from Grey Ghosts years ago. Comparing them physically the dice are all the same size. Of course my new dice are printed rather than engraved like my current fudge dice. Just rolling them randomly on the table together I notice no difference in them.

Visually there is certainly no problem in picking out pluses and minus when you roll a bunch together. In fact I think it’s easier, the pluses and minuses on the printed dice are bigger, check out the slightly fuzzy photo below:

I think though that my little Cthulhu icon on the blank side feels quite contracted on the dice compared to the other sides. But that may be an artefact of the design more so than the dice itself. However the quality of the print is impressive. The detail is quite vivid (though you may not be able to tell from my bad photography).

The original design, in case you've forgotten!

Certainly if you wanted to get some icon on a dice, this would be a be a great way to do it.

I’ve rubbed them and rolled them, and so far, none of the print has come off. So it seems quite sturdy. I have been keeping them in my big bag of dice these last few months and no damage to the print at all from being tossed about.

Overall I’m quite happy with them, hopefully they’ll prove to be my “lucky” dice. I think they’ll be kina cool too if I go to cons with them, though I’m generally not big into showing off my geek status. I managed to meet up with my roleplaying group and showed them the dice, which got a good “ah cool!” from everyone. So that’s a decent objective measure there.

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So I won a competition from dicecreator to get my own custom dice, which rocks. So I spent an afternoon working on the design. I’m sure you’ve seen my the Cthulhu-inspired image on the front of this webpage (and it doubles as my twitter icon) but if not, here it is again.

I thought this might make a cool face on one of the dice, so I went about re-working it a bit, using my trusty lightbox. I’m sure I could have done the re-work on the computer exclusively but I still like to use pencil and pens. It’s more satisfying somehow, at least for me.

I removed the background, filled in his wings which highlighted the tentacles much better. I was keeping in mind how it would look on a small dice.

I wanted “Fudge Dice”. Fudge dice has two faces with plus “+”, two with minus “-” and the final two blank. Keeping the Cthulhu theme, the minus and plus have to be tentacles!

I cheated though, I drew one half of a tentacle and then using my lightbox built up a minus and plus.

But, I won two customised dice and didn’t want to waste the opportunity with just one design! Using some themes from stuff I did for Lost Heroes RPG and the same technique as the tentacles, I came up with theses:

Now with my two designs, I sent them.

And I got the results in my hand right now:

I think they look rather cool myself!

(I’ll write up my initial impressions in another post)

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I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:

Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!

Anyway, he recently ran a competition and guess who won? Me!

So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.

So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.

I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!

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