The Other Guys Not to Be Confused with The Good Guys

So far, my wife and I have been impressed and entertained by Fox Television's new series The Good Guys. We're suckers for a good action comedy cop show. I blame it on the television we grew up watching. From Starsky and Hutch to Sledgehammer, Gen X-ers watched a lot of cop shows that had light-hearted elements like Starsky and Hutch and C.H.I.P.S, or that were out and out comedies like Sledgehammer.

Comedy, cops, and action just seem natural.

This summer Adam McKay, the scribe who brought us the comedy masterpiece Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, brings us what may be the ultimate comedy, cops, and action film.

Samuel L. Jackson, Dwayne Johnson, Mark Wahlberg, Michael Keaton, and...Will Ferrell.

This looks like a fun summer film. Like "Ricky Bobby," this film isn't likely to win awards. But, also like "Ricky Bobby," it is likely to produce a lot of laughs.

Tangled: Disney's New Twist on Rapunzel

As critical as I am of the current trend of self-referential and ironic adaptations of classic fairy tales, Tangled looks fun. That said, the Zoolander reference was a bit much for me -- and is a perfect example of what I despise about "re-imaginings" of classic tales.

WizKids Announcing Star Trek Based Games

WizKids/NECA announced yesterday that they will be producing games based on Star Trek intellectual properties. Their license includes television shows and movies and the WizKids products will be available in "digital" as well as physical formats.

WizKids will be adding the Star Trek characters to their existing line of Heroclix collectible miniatures games, which makes this both good news and bad news.

The good news is that there will be some cool minis, hopefully including the space ships, for Star Trek characters. The bad news is that they will have those clunky 1.5" miniatures bases that are slightly too big for the standard 1" format of most role playing games.

Hey WizKids! I want to buy your figures, but I want to use them in my Savage Worlds and Traveller games. I don't care for your collectible miniature game rules sets, but I do like the figures. How about hooking a gamer up?

Dr. Who to Star in Fright Night

It appears that David Tennant will be staring as the clueless "horror-jockey" Peter Vincent in the upcoming remake of the gen-X cult favorite 1980s "Dracula Next Door" film Fright Night. There is little doubt that Tennant will be able to capture a bumbling, tired, worn down, and sympathetic late-night weekend horror movie host -- a role that was captured perfectly by Roddy McDowell in the original.

What remains to be seen is if modern audiences, whose Saturday evenings are tragically free of Bob Wilkinsesque entertainment, will fully appreciate the character. Where the late night weekend television of gen-X and earlier featured wonderful horror host fare like "Creature Features," Count Gore, Joe Bob Briggs, the modern television schedule tends to lack colorful characters like these. I say tends to, because there are still some local channels that feature horror hosts, but characters like these were once ubiquitous.

Roddy McDowell's Peter Vincent was the strongest component of the original Fright Night, McDowell's brilliant combination of Peter Cushing and Peter Sellers in the portrayal of the part is remembered long after the particulars of the movie's narrative. The scene where Peter Vincent learns that faith matters and that things that go bump in the night aren't best combated by jaded performers, is one of the classic scenes in horror.

I am looking forward to this remake, but I do wonder how the film will resonate with younger audiences.

Icons by Adamant Entertainment Available Today

When it comes to super hero game rules design, there are five names that are indicative of the highest quality -- and a deep work ethic. They are Greg Gorden, Ray Winninger, Jeff Grubb, Mike Selinker, and Steve Kenson. These are the designers who have created, or edited, the super hero games I play most often. George MacDonald, Steve Peterson, Bruce Harlick, Ray Greer, and Steven Long deserve mention for their work on Champions (the flag ship super hero RPG), but as important as that game is to the creation of the super hero RPG hobby I find myself playing other games more often.

Greg Gorden's rules set for DC Heroes -- especially after it was revised by Ray Winninger -- is what I consider to be the best super hero role playing game ever designed. It combines the effects based design philosophy of Champions with a focus on cinematic and quick play. Champions is a masterful game when it comes to character design, but it bogs down into a Star Fleet Battles variant when the players enter combat. DC Heroes allows for robust character design while allowing for abstract and narrative combat scenes that don't take up an entire evening. A descendant of his work on the Deadlands and Brave New World games systems can be seen in the Savage Worlds Necessary Evil setting.

Jeff Grubb's Marvel Super Heroes role playing game has a few flaws, like the fact that Captain America isn't a very effective character in those epic Avengers conflicts in the form the game has quantified him, but it is a quick playing game that is a wonderful introduction to the gaming hobby and that has enough source material to keep a gaming group playing for many years. The system is intuitive and its "Karma" system of experience ensures that players are encouraged to role play super heroes in a way that emulates the comics. In fact, Grubb's Karma system is one of the best uses of mechanics to influence play style ever invented.

Mike Selinker's Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game (aka Marvel SAGA) uses card driven mechanics to resolve situations. While still a system of random task resolution, this card driven system empowers players to decide how much effort they want to put into a particular action. It's an ingenious system that solves the "Captain America/Batman" problem relatively easily.

Then there is Steve Kenson. Steve did something I thought was essentially impossible. He took the d20 mechanics of 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons and transformed them into a workable super hero role playing game-- by workable, I mean excellent. His ability to cut to the core of the d20 mechanics and eliminate almost everything that was extraneous resulted in a super hero game that allowed the character design specificity of Champions with some of the free form play of DC Heroes. His 1st edition design work on Mutants and Masterminds is nothing short of brilliant. The second edition of the game is still very good, but it features the return of some of the "flab" that Kenson cut from d20 to make it M&M and tilts a little more into the Champions side of the DC/Champions equation. Combat mechanics become a little to specific for me in the 2nd edition -- but I blame the fans.

Any time one of these creators works on a new system, especially a super hero system, it is news worthy. Kenson is currently at work on a new edition of M&M and an M&M DC RPG, but is also the author of a free wheeling indie super hero RPG that just went live on RPGNOW today. This game, ICONS, is a more free form role playing game than the more granular M&M. Icons has a rules set influenced by the very popular FATE game system. Icons also features a graphic style similar to the work of Bruce Timm, and the animated super hero cartoons of the 90s, as well as the work of Mike Parobeck.

I'll have a formal review of Icons soon, but graduate work prevents it today.

I will say this though. If Kenson's name is listed under "designers," then the game is likely a winner.

Steve Jackson Games to Release OGRE 6th Edition Eventually

In 1977, Metagaming Concepts released the first game in their successful Microgames line of affordable war games -- it had a $2.95 cover price. The game had a reasonable print run of 8,000 copies and was a break out success that redefined the war gaming hobby by opening the door to new audiences of simulation game players. The game's second print run was 20,000. The game was among the first war games to have a science fiction theme, and it featured rules that were simple enough for someone who had never played a war game to pick up and play within minutes.

The game was titled OGRE and it was so successful a game that its sales fueled the development and growth of two hobby gaming corporations. The first company, Metagaming Concepts, fought hard to keep the intellectual property rights when the game's designer left the company to found his own company Steve Jackson Games. The lawsuit lasted for quite some time, but eventually the property followed its creator to its new home. By the time the game migrated over to Steve Jackson Games, it had sold approximately 70,000 copies (excluding the sales of its GEV expansion set).

It was the reliable sales of OGRE that provided the revenue which allowed Steve Jackson Games to publish their next runaway success -- a game so successful it made OGRE's sale look small by comparison. That game was Car Wars, but its story is a tale for another time. Today is a day to praise OGRE and to share our anticipation for the upcoming release of OGRE 6th Edition which should be released later this year.

The premise of OGRE is a simple one, but it is also one that captures the imagination. The OGRE referred to in the game is a cybernetic supertank that is attacking a human manned command center on a nuclear blasted battlefield. Inspired by Keith Laumer's Bolo series, Steve Jackson created a game where desperate -- and mortal -- defenders battle against the odds to preserve their fragile position against impossible odds. Though their forces significantly outnumber the OGRE, the supertank significantly outclasses them. The tone of the game can be readily seen in an article published in issue 9 of the venerable The Space Gamer magazine:

The command post was well guarded. It should have been. The hastily constructed, unlovely building was the nerve center for Paneuropean operations along a 700 kilometer section of front -- a front pressing steadily toward the largest Combine manufacturing center on the continent.

Therefore General DePaul had taken no chances. His command was located in the most defensible terrain available -- a battered chunk of gravel bounded on three sides by marsh and on the fourth by a river. The river was deep and wide; the swamp gluey and impassible. Nothing bigger than a rat could avoid detection by the icons scattered for 60 kilometers in every direction over land, swamp, and river surface. Even the air was finally secure; the enemy had expended at least 50 heavy missiles yesterday, leaving glowing holes over half the island, but none near the CP. The Combine's laser batteries had seen to that. Now that the jamscreen was up, nothing would get even that close. And scattered through the twilight were the bulky shapes of tanks and ground effect vehicles -- the elite 2033rd Armored, almost relaxed as they guarded a spot nothing could attack.

Inside the post, too, the mood was relaxed -- except at one monitor station, where a young lieutenant watched a computer map of the island. A light was blinking on the river. Orange: something was moving, out there where nothing should move. No heat. A stab at the keyboard called up a representation of the guardian unit...not that any should be out there, 30 kilometers away. None were. Whatever was out there was a stranger -- and it was actually in the river. A swimming animal? A man? Ridiculous.

The lieutenant spun a cursor, moving a dot of white light across the map and halting it on the orange spot with practiced ease. He hit another key, and an image appeared on the big screen...pitted ground, riverbank...and something else, something rising from the river like the conning tower of an old submarine, but he knew what it really was, he just couldn't place it...and then it moved. Not straight toward the camera icon, but almost. The lieutenant saw the "conning tower" cut a wake through the rushing water, bounce once, and begin to rise. A second before the whole shape was visible, he recognized it -- but for that second he was frozen. And so 30 men with their minds on other things were suddenly brought to heart-pounding alert, as the lieutenant's strangled gasp and the huge image on his screen gave the same warning...

OGRE!

Like the "Mayday!" on the Traveller role playing game box, this description has fired my imagination for years. The fear of the command post staff is palpable, but one can only truly understand their fear after playing the game. The OGRE is a killing machine that tears through defending infantry, ground effect vehicles, and heavy tanks alike. Sometimes one wonders if there is a way to stop the OGRE at all. Then one finds an "unbeatable" strategy that succeeds in defending a few command posts, only to find that the OGRE has adapted to the new strategies and once again exterminates those who stand in its way.

The original war game version of OGRE is a very strategically deep game, even more so when you add the Shockwave and GEV expansions, that has been printed in four "map and counter" editions and one Miniatures edition. The miniatures edition was printed in the 1990s and is a fun game, but I have always felt that it -- like the edition of Car Wars that came out at the beginning of this millennium -- was not the right direction for the game to go. I am certain the miniatures were profitable, and I believe that SJG should have made the miniatures game, but I think that SJG was wrong in thinking that the miniatures game had replaced the classic "map and counter" version of the game. It hadn't, not any more than Warhammer the role playing game replaced Warhammer the miniatures game. To be fair, SJG sold the games parallel in the 90s -- it wasn't until the early 00s that they marketed the miniatures game as a replacement. It just seems to me that OGRE's core strength is its accessibility, both in rules and in price point, and a miniatures game moves away from this strength.

OGRE has been on hiatus for a few years as SJG has focused the majority of their efforts on the wildly successful Munchkin card game. SJG has a history of focusing like a laser on their most successful titles while leaving less attention for other products.

But this year seems to be the year that SJG, after two years of excellent non-Munchkin offerings, is resurrecting the OGRE. The sixth edition of the game has components that fall somewhere between the map and counter game of old and the more recent miniatures game. This edition will feature "chipboard" playing pieces that the players construct for use in play. This is an approach that takes advantage of the cost savings of a "printed" rather than a "cast" product line, while having greater aesthetic appeal than looking at square counters bearing numbers.

I think it is the right direction for the game, and I hope that it is a successful venture for Steve Jackson Games.

I know that I am eagerly awaiting this edition and will proudly place it next to my OGRE/GEV boxed set, OGRE mini-game, OGRE Book (first and second editions), and OGRE Deluxe Edition (non-miniature) versions of the game.

If all goes well, I should be able to purchase and play the game at this year's GENCON -- though they don't include OGRE in their list of official releases yet.

Wargaming School Renaissance -- Victory Point Games

Regular readers of this blog are well aware of the fact that I collect and play role playing and board games. My collection of each is quite large and ranges from the original D&D White Box by TSR to the recently released Old School Renaissance White Box by Brave Halfling Publishing on the role playing side, and a copy of Milton Bradley's Dogfight to Bucephelous Games Dogfight on the board game side.

What readers may not be aware of is the fact that I am also a fan of simulation war games as well. My collection currently includes the full line of Squad Leader boxed sets -- the precursor to Advanced Squad Leader (of which I don't own any sets) -- and a nice collection of issues of Strategy and Tactics and World at War among other things. My introduction to this particular market within the gaming hobby came in the early 80s when a friend named Christian Hunt introduced me to Steve Jackson's excellent mini-game Ogre which featured an artificially intelligent supertank crushing a small defensive force of human soldiers. The game was great fun, and it used all the classic components associated with the traditional war game -- i.e. hexagon maps, small 1/2" counters (hand or die cut depending on the game), and a Combat Results Table (or CRT). That game, with its small and easy to learn rules set, deeply ingrained an appreciation for how fun war games can be and made it possible for me to try out more complex rules sets -- though I must admit that I've yet to try Drang Nach Osten.

The vast majority of war games are time consuming affairs that take up a good deal of table space and require either familiarity with the underlying systems of a series of games, or the patience and time to read a complex rules set. This is one of the reasons there have been so many wargamers who play these games solitaire over the years. It can be hard to find someone else who had the time, energy, and interest to pour through pages of rules and who also spent the time futzing around with them enough that the two (or more) of you could just get straight to playing without one player having to teach the other the basics of the systems etc.

This "intimidation gap," particularly acute in monsters like Drang Nach Osten, is one of the reasons that I believe that Metagaming's line of mini-games (which started with Ogre) were so successful. They provided small, approachable, quick, and playable games that in turn gave players a substantive and robust gaming experience. A game like Ogre initially appears to have little strategic depth, but one quickly learns otherwise. In a way, the mini-game was the Eurogame before there was a Eurogame.

Recently, I had been lamenting the lack of a vibrant "mini-game" community of manufacturers. I believed, wrongly as it turns out, that there were few if any publishers selling games that offered depth of wargame experience with the compactness and playability of a mini-game or a Euro-game. I knew of Eurogames like Neuroshima Hex which were Euro-style games that approached the war game experience. I was even familiar with the Euro-influenced Card Driven Strategy war games available on the market -- ranging from Command and Colors to Paths of Glory. I was looking for a company more akin to Metagaming back in its heyday or Steve Jackson Games during its early years.

I didn't believe they existed.

Then I saw an advertisement for a new Independent French War Game Magazine called BATTLES -- published in English. That's right, a French magazine. The first issue of BATTLES contained a nice, playable, and quick wargame -- in contrast to the comparably monster games of Strategy and Tactics -- that had excellent quality components. The game was beautiful by war game standards...not to mention the magazine. BATTLES is a graphically amazing magazine that covers the war game hobby as a whole, rather than focusing on "in house" games as some other war game magazines do. But enough about BATTLES, or rather not enough but I'll save some comments for posts regarding the magazine, I want to talk about an American company that I found out about because of BATTLES.

You read that series of sentences correctly. I found out about an excellent American (Southern Californian in fact) game company by reading a French war game magazine (published in English). Talk about the world being flat!

That game company is Victory Point Games and they operate out of Irvine, CA. The story of the game company's founding, and the Wild West nature of their product line/production schedule, are very reminiscent of all the qualities I admire about Metagaming and Steve Jackson. The company started as an extension of a college course, and has become something of a "community course" in game design. From their "About Us:"

Most great game ideas begin with an impassioned gamer thinking about a game and saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” That’s how the best game ideas occur – not from bottom-line watching bean counters, not from Sales or Marketing, not through scientific research – it is gamer passion that creates the best games.

Enter Alan Emrich, who was teaching various game-related subjects such as Game Design, Game Prototyping, and Game Project Management at The Art Institute of California: Orange County in 2007. An impassioned gamer himself, while teaching other impassioned gamers about the art, craft, and science of making games, he had one of those “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” moments. Although he had been ‘designing game designers’ among his students for some time, the notion arrived as a culmination of thoughts coalesced.

Just as some genius at Reese’s figured out one day, “Hey, what if put the chocolate and peanut butter together?,” Alan blended the ideas of Desktop Publishing (DTP) with his students’ game projects. The seed of an idea for Victory Point Games was planted.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if,” Alan reasoned, “I could desktop publish a few copies of some of my students’ better course project games? That way, when they graduate and go find jobs in the game industry, they’ll have a published title to their credit and a copy of it in their portfolios. That would certainly be a plus on their resume and at job interviews. What a great graduation gift I could give them!” This became a notion that he had to pursue.

A quick look through their website shows a deep catalog of games that appeal to the simulation gamer, with creations by well regarded creators like Jim Dunnigan, Joe Miranda, and Frank Chadwick, as well as light-hearted games that appeal to the casual gamer. Games like Forlorn Hope and Nemo's War address topics (space marines vs. aliens and Captain Nemo's world on the world's navies) that don't fit within the narrow confines of traditional wargaming.

What one will also find are blog entries discussing Victory Point Games' business model, and giving advice on how to design your own games the "victory point way."

These are games by gamers for gamers, but they aren't just games by gamers for "hardcore" gamers. These games are for both experienced and inexperienced gamers. You won't find any games that have "hundred" of die cut counters here. In fact, they have a whole line of games that feature no more than 20 counters used during play.

Everything about the company echoes Steve Jackson's early days -- before everything they made was Munchkin! Back in those days SJG produced games like One Page Bulge (which had one page of rules), Ogre, Car Wars, Undead, and Kung Fu 2100. The games were innovative and fun and made by people who obviously loved what they were doing. Add to this that SJG's house magazine The Space Gamer had a series of articles discussing the art of game design and you quickly see some parallels between the two entities.

Don't get me wrong. SJG is a great company. Their Frag Gold Edition is a wonderful, if overlooked by game stores, product. The same is true for their Revolution game -- and I am looking forward to owning copies of their new Zombie Dice and Cthulhu Dice games as well. In fact, I think that SJG has managed to recapture a bit of the creative spirit that was lost for a time as they focused on the best way to pay the bills. My point is that Victory Point Games behaves like SJG did when they were small and hungry.

Victory Point Games is indicative of a movement in wargaming similar to the "Old School Renaissance" movement in role playing.  It's a movement of gamers who want to break from the current fads of gaming and introduce the world to a robust and vital hobby.

I'm all for it.

I am very excited about Victory Point Games offerings, and am looking forward to reviewing them as I'm playing them.

Nuff Said: Shat My Dad Says

William Shatner...Nicole Sullivan...



I am almost bursting from the anticipation.

Nuff Said: The Stars Are Right -- CthuLegos

Who knew that you could use Legos in your regular Call of Cthulhu rpg sessions?

Hey Wizards of the Coast! What About Those of Us Who Have "Home Games?!"

I am glad that Wizards of the Coast is using their experiences running Magic: The Gathering events over the years to improve they way they run Dungeons and Dragons organized play. I even think that the D&D Encounters model, short adventures that can be run in two hours and tie into a larger campaign story, is an ideal structure to use in game store based play and to use in game store demos. It also gives me a sense that Hasbro is dedicated to promoting the hobby when they support endeavors like this -- that empower the hobby market and allow it to generate interest. I am certainly happy that they are making videos that show examples of what gaming really looks like:



What I am not excited about is that they seem to be limiting the D&D Encounters program to game stores alone and not offering the adventures (with their cool maps and supplies) to the gaming public at large -- after a delay to allow the game stores some exclusivity naturally.

You see...I am a bit of a completist. When I play a role playing game, I like to own all of the adventures and as many of the products for the game as I possibly can. This is especially true when the products come with well designed maps that I can use repeatedly.

By offering the Encounters adventures solely to the game store, Wizards is encouraging the eventual development of an underground market for these adventures and the merch that accompanies them. This is a bad thing, and ignores a potential revenue stream.

Not every gamer has 2 hours on a Wednesday that he/she can spend out of the house playing a game in a store. Some gamers are home bound and can only play in their own homes. They might be parents of small children. They might be married. They might have graduate school. They might have jobs that prevent them from going to stores during normal operating hours with any regularity.

What about these gamers Wizards?! What about those of us who would be willing to pay, and use, these products in our home games?

Sure, I'd be willing to wait 6 months -- or a year -- to wait for the whole Encounters storyline to be played out in the stores. This would give the stores a period of exclusivity that might encourage those who do have the time, but might not otherwise go to local stores (who are the lynchpin of the business) otherwise.

Thing is, I'd really like these to become available commercially at some point. Throw those of us who buy our stuff at FLGSs, but who are limited to gaming at home, a bone here!

We're the hobby too.

Fantasy Flight Games to Release "Space Hulk" Card Game

From the first publication of their flagship board game Twilight Imperium, Fantasy Flight Games have been succeeding at balancing the two most difficult tasks that game publishing companies face. There is often a tension between managing a company effectively -- actually treating the business as a business -- and the publication/creation of high quality games. If a company pays too much attention to making games that fit trends, and thus might sell well in the short term, they run the risk of alienating players due to the decreasing originality of their own products. If they ignore the financial aspects of the industry, they will slowly grind to a halt and fail to produce product that fans have eagerly awaited for years.

Fantasy Flight has done neither of these, much to their credit. They have a proper balance of pushing new creative envelopes in game design, and extending on great design ideas. A quick look at the history of the company shows that they have created some innovative games like Disk Wars and Twilight Imperium, but that they have been savvy enough to end a product line before it ended the company.

Ever since I first read that Fantasy Flight had been granted the license to create games based on Games Workshop intellectual properties, I have eagerly awaited each new entry produced by the company. Fantasy Flight have managed to release a nice balance of reprints/revisions of classic GW boxed games like Fury of Dracula and producing new games based on a previously used themes like their excellent Horus Heresy and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition games.

Last year, Games Workshop did a limited release of a revised edition of their classic Space Hulk tactical board game of Space Marines fighting sinister aliens. The new release, an update of the 1st edition of the game that ignored changes made during the second edition, was available for a very short time and is currently sells for somewhere between $100 and $150 on eBay (still fairly close to list price). $150 can seem a pretty steep price to pay for a tactical board game -- even one as high on replay value as Space Hulk -- and one sometimes finds oneself in the mood to play a game when there is no one available for a quick table top game or with more friends hanging out than the two required for Space Hulk. The movement rules in Space Hulk do allow for solo play, but the game is better with two players. For my money, I'll current play Dennis Sustare's Intruder over Space Hulk as a solitaire game -- it's more portable and plays quicker. This will likely change in the coming months.

Fantasy Flight Games has announced that they will be releasing a new cooperative card game, designed by Corey Konieczka, entitled Death Angel.

Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Card Game is a cooperative card game set in the grim darkness of Warhammer 40,000. Players must work together as an alien menace threatens to devour their hopes of survival. If all Space Marines perish, the players collectively lose. Likewise, if at least one of the surviving Space Marines completes the objective, the players all win!

Playable in under an hour, Death Angel takes 1-6 players straight into the action. Each player takes control of a combat team (or two combat teams if playing with less than four players). If playing solo, the single player controls three combat teams. Combat teams are made up of two unique Space Marines, each with their own flavor and style.

A quick playing cooperative card game that emulates the grim darkness of the 40k universe?

Yes please.

Is The Cup of Tears Already the Third Best Ninja Movie Ever Made?

Gary Shore's two-minute independently produced "trailer" The Cup of Tears has already led to him signing an agreement with Universal to direct a film based upon the trailer. The two-minute trailer combines Tibetan monks, Shaolin looking monks, Samurai, Ninjas, things that look like missiles shot in "bullet time," and space ships shooting at each other. Somehow it manages to do this with almost no similarity to Cowboy Bebop.

Looking at Shore's direction of the action sequences, I am almost tempted to say that this is the third best American made ninja movie ever produced.

The first two?

Ninja Assassin and Revenge of the Ninja

The lack of Sho Kosugi automatically removes Shore's film from the top two.

As for other films in the Top 10 American Produced ninja movies, they include in no particular order The Octogon, You Only Live Twice, American Ninja, The Challenge, and The Hunted.

I don't consider Kill Bill a ninja film. It is too much an amalgam of all that is awesome in Eastern action cinema.

Nuff Said -- Prince of Persia Trailer as Performed by Legos

Raise your hand if you made stop motion action figure/lego figure movies, or dreamed of doing so, as a kid?

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

Nuff Said: Empire Strikes Back (1950) -- In Glorious 3D

The Invisible Gorrilla and Games -- Mystery Stories

In 1999, Daniel Simons did an experiment involving a person in a gorilla suit and people in different colored clothes passing a basketball to one another. The experiment was designed to see how we look at things and demonstrate how our perceptions can fail us. The basic finding of the experiment is that we fail to observe a lot of things that are going on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing out on so much. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris have written a book called The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Two of the things the book focuses on are how are intuitions often mislead us and how our perceptions aren't as keen as we believe them to be.

"What does this have to do with games," you ask? Nothing and everything.

How many times have you been running a roleplaying game session in which you have laid clues for the players to discover which will help them to solve a mystery of some sort?

Sometimes the clues are embedded in your verbal descriptions of scenes and events, and sometimes they are placed on a battle mat for the players to find. The clues might even have been incorporated into dialogue role played out.

Of these times, how often have the players completely missed the clue due to focusing on other objects in your presentation?

Sometimes this can lead adventures into fun new directions. If the player's become convinced that the 12 year-old witness you were acting out in dialogue is so creepy that he must be a shapeshifted Goblin in disguise and the real reason the children of Vandomeer have been disappearing, it might be better to follow the player's lead and ignore the fact that you had placed several clues that it was the kind Cleric of Pelor who had been driven to despair after the death of his daughter and was looking for parts to construct a replacement. In a case like this, there is no reason to shoehorn the players into your planned story even though they missed your -- to you -- obvious clues. A good GM knows that the goal of play is to satisfy your player's desires and making their wild guesses into fact is a great way to achieve this goal.

Sadly, improper leaps to conclusions aren't the typical result of missed clues. The most common result is that the mystery grinds to a halt as the players "keep searching." In a game like D&D, or any other system where skill rolls determine the results of actions, this can amount to players "rolling again and again" or "taking 20" at each 5 foot square of a room with you having to notify them of what they did or didn't find. In a game that is looser and more "acted out," you have to decide whether to keep repeating the clues you have already shared or make up newer -- more obvious -- clues to give the players. Giving the players too obvious a clue after they failed to understand the initial clues can lead to some serious dissatisfaction by the players. They'll feel foolish for missing the initial clues, and railroaded by your new ultra-obvious clue.

Robin Laws' Gumshoe system tries to address these problems by having an underlying gaming assumption that the players will find the necessary clues automatically and lets them "spend points" in order to get more information from the clues. The system doesn't guarantee that the players will "solve" the mystery that you presented to them, it only means that they will actually find the clue, but it does increase the likelihood that their speculations might lead the adventure into another direction from what you originally planned.

In real life, it can be tragic when some real clue is missed or misinterpreted. In a roleplaying game missing a clue can bring a game to a boring halt, but misinterpreting a clue might lead to a better story. In real life, our intuitions deceive us and lead us into foolish actions, but in games our deceptive intuitions can lead us into entertaining experiences.

Sometimes you can exploit the deceptive intuitions of your players to assist you in constructing your adventures.

Do you have any stories where mysteries have bogged down or where deceptive intuitions have led to great adventures?

Green Ronin, Mutants and Masterminds, and DC Adventures

I have to admit that I was a little less than excited when I first heard that Green Ronin was releasing a DC Superheroes role playing game using their Mutants and Masterminds rules set. Mayfair's DC Heroes role playing game is my all-time favorite superhero system, and I loved the first edition of Mutants and Masterminds because it reflected so many design influences from that great game. The first edition of M&M was quick and streamlined and used "acting values, opposing values, and effects" to calculate power costs in a way very reminiscent of Greg Gorden's remarkable DC Heroes system. At the time, I was a fairly regular visitor to the Green Ronin boards and eagerly read discussions about a revised 2nd edition.

I quickly soured on those 2nd edition conversations as the system seemed to be migrating away from a DC Heroes influenced system into a Hero/Champions influenced system. Champions is a great game, but it can also intimidate new gamers and has certain exploits that hard core Hero gamers like to use. These kinds of exploits were being inserted into M&M and I wasn't as pleased as I had hoped. The game transformed from rules light to Champions light, and that was a step backwards in my opinion.

I still purchased all of the products. For all that I didn't like the mechanics of the game, the campaign advice and writing of Green Ronin products is among the best in the industry and I gladly support them. I merely had an "anti-granular" rules nag in the back of my mind every time I opened a text.

So when I read that Green Ronin was doing DC ala M&M, I have to admit that my fear was that it would be DC "Champions Light" and lack a fast and easy system that might appeal to new players -- one of the key reasons to acquire a license in the first place. This was particularly upsetting given Green Ronin's recently demonstrated commitment neophyte friendly games like their amazing Dragon Age and it's AGE System. In fact, I would love to see a DC AGE game.

My fears were somewhat allayed yesterday when I read a press release that Green Ronin was releasing a 3rd edition of Mutants and Masterminds. The key quote for me was "We worked to simplify some elements of the system and fix known issues, while retaining the flexibility and fast-paced play fans have enjoyed." If only they can accomplish what DC Heroes did so well, and M&M 2nd failed to do as well as M&M 1st, and present a system where Batman and Superman are able to adventure together in a manner where both are effective.

Whether I am ecstatic or not about the mechanics one thing is certain, I will be buying DC Adventures on day 1.

Fighting Fantasy and Fiend Folio Artist Russ Nicholson Starts Blog!

As readers know, I am a big fan of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and Russ Nicholson's art is one of the key reasons for that fandom. His dark and gritty line-work carefully balances grim imagery with humor and is indicative of the art typical of the British illustrators of White Wolf magazines in the 80s. Nicholson, and John Blanche, added a rough edged quality to the sleek and cartoony illustrations of the American "Basic" D&D artists Jeff Dee and Bill Willingham.

If you love Dark Creepers, Revenants, and the Githyanki, then Russ Nicholson is your man.

Axis of Awesome vs. Greyson97

Which is more remarkable?

Is the Axis of Awesome right in positing all pop songs use the same four chords? 



Does knowledge of a "mere 4 chords" explain Greyson97? 

Geekerati Gaming Archives Volume 1 -- Matt Forbeck Interview

In July of 2007, Geekerati Radio -- a podcast a few friends of mine and I ran for over two years -- had our first gaming related episode.  It was our ninth episode overall and it featured an interview with Freelance Game Designer extraordinaire Matt Forbeck.  Over the course of his career Matt has worked with most of the major game and toy companies -- from rpg games to toy design -- and has been nominated for 24 Origins awards and has won 13.  His game designs have included miniatures rules for starship combat, dark future science fiction roleplaying games, bleak counterculture superhero rpgs, and the list goes on.

You can tell by the interview why Matt is called the nicest man in the gaming industry.

Last year in September the Geekerati show petered to a halt as we never got the listenership to justify the effort we were putting into the show.  When you are interviewing Brandon Sanderson -- new author of the Wheel of Time series -- and you only get 4 "live" listeners (though the archive did quite well) it can be a bit disheartening.  When you add a full time work schedule, MBA courses, attempts at a regular rpg gaming hobby, and twin toddlers to the mix it was becoming difficult to justify the time.

I loved the experience, and my co-hosts are great friends, and would like to do it again.  But to do so will require some massive scheduling efforts and possibly some new co-hosts.  Bill Cunningham, our mad pulp bastard, is hard at work promoting his own awesome pulp publishing company, Eric Lytle is keeping California safe from toxic chemicals, and Shawna Benson is striving toward fame and fortune.

Let me know if you think I should give it a go again, and in the meantime I'll be sharing the archives with you.

Watch the (fake) The Day After Ragnarök Movie Trailer, then Buy the Book

YouTube creator "BloodRunsClear" has created a movie trailer for an imagined film based on Kenneth Hite's remarkable Savage Worlds game setting The Day After Ragnarök (DAR) by Atomic Overmind Press.

Kenneth Hite has long been respected as one of the most talented writers in the gaming hobby, and has been a long time advocate of the independent game publisher movement. His "Suppressed Transmission" column for the online version of Pyramid Magazine was a must read while it existed was a rich source of inspiration for game masters everywhere. Hite has the capacity to connect seemingly unrelated events/objects in ways that were an almost "how to" education in designing alternative histories/presents. Reading his column, I always wondered what would happen if Kenneth Hite took the talents he demonstrated in "Suppressed Transmission" and applied them to an rpg setting. With The Day After Ragnarök Hite answered that question and it is a magnificent amalgam of Pulp goodness. Let's just say it's a setting that is a post-WW II Norse Apocalypse as seen through Robert E. Howard's eyes. It's a world where both Doc Savage and Conan would be welcome, and where characters of classic noir films stand in the shadows.