Josh Roby's LiveJournal

Files sent to printer. It’s always a big and heart-stopping step when you send stuff out of your house and into the world. It becomes real (and starts incurring expenses), and there’s always the little voice in the back of your head screaming not to do it, keep your head down, don’t try or else you might fail. And I end up walking around all shaky and distracted for the rest of the day: was that a big mistake?

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Seth recently asked if the blog would explode when the tower hit full. The answer is yes: explode in awesomeness. I will also, I think, get to take a nap. I’ve been pounding away on this project like mad to get it to completion. Most recently, XML has saved my ass and made a lot of things lots easier. There’s nothing quite like laying out sixty pages by hitting an update button.

I’m presently looking at a launch date of August 1st. Fingers crossed…

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Progress…

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Dev Purkayastha has posted some thoughts on the Story Games Boston playtest of Agora. I’m really happy that SGB — folks who tend towards game designs that are very different than my own — are giving Agora a crack, because I get some fantastic differing perspectives on how my game works. It also shows me what I need to explain better for audiences that aren’t me, my friends, and my design partners.

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Early playtest feedback has been giving me a lot of good stuff to consider and mull over. One thing that I’ve been hearing a few times over, though, is a desire for a one-page cheat sheet for play procedures, which I can totally understand. Agora is a complex game, and the big picture of the beast would be a handy thing to have.

I took the six core procedures that players will encounter in a given turn and wrote quick bullet-point summaries of them. Then, with a little ghetto-hypertexting via text color, I came up with the following Agora Turn Guide:

At some point I’ll make an Incident Guide that handles Creating Incidents, Audience options, Burnout, and Fallout — but it’s my impression those aren’t critical right now, whereas the turn flow certainly is. The Turn Guide is in the playtest package, as well.

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

While browsing an art book at Barnes&Noble, I came across this awesome image, and happily was able to find it online as well. I have trouble articulating how much I love this image: it’s powerful and succinct and humorous all at once. It may be, in fact, my new favorite argument, since words have failed on this issue so many times.

Mirrored from robern.net.

Thanks to Saturday Morning Breakfast Comic

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

As the mighty Fred Hicks might say: “I wonder what this means…”

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

The local Los Angeles Strategicon was this last weekend. We attended (with little Prudence, her very first con!), and had a blast. I did not run the IPR booth at Gamex this time around, which was sort of awesome. It meant I had lots of time to just hang out, chat with friends, and play lots of games. I barely noticed not having a ‘home base’ to fall back to.

Friday night we checked in and all that and then I settled down to play Montsegur 1244, a structured freeform game which is getting a lot of play and buzz. I went into it expecting it to be not-my-thing, and I came out of it knowing that it was not-my-thing. Lack of strong character goals and a blindness to the parts of historical context that I really dig into were the big problems for me; I was also sort of an odd man out in our (randomly-generated) situation: everybody else was playing the sex-and-family bits of the situation, whereas I was the only one playing the religion part of the set. Which all sounds more negative than it really is — everybody else was having a blast, and it’s a nice little package of game-situation.

Saturday morning started off with In a Wicked Age, which Will calls, “The game I don’t like that I have fun with every time.” Which is pretty spot-on accurate. We played in God-Kings of War (best for cons) and ended with a giant naval battle determining the fate of an empire. Schweet.

Saturday afternoon I took the baby which Meghann had so kindly been entertaining while I was wicked-aging. She went off to play a Star Wars game; I played A New World: a Carcassonne game with Prudence strapped to my chest. The game is very neat and challengingly different than basic Carcassonne. After that was done, we all (myself, Meg, Paul, Ryan, Jesse, Will, James, Morgan… who am I forgetting?) sat down to a luxurious two-hour-long dinner slot, which allowed us to have a lot of casual social time. I really hope Strategicon retains the new schedule; I don’t mind getting to the morning game an hour earlier if it means dinner isn’t a big harried rush.

Saturday night I played in the Houses of the Blooded LARP, which I went in expecting it to be not-my-thing and was totally blown away by the awesome. John has devised a very, very slick conflict resolution system that is near-perfectly tuned to the LARP environment. It incorporates mechanics directly into the roleplay in a nearly seamless fashion. Yes, even combat — at the conclusion of the first (and only) duel of the night, John declared combat over and all the Vampire LARPers cheered because it was over so quickly and cleanly. The “private scenes” which are played out in public give the whole experience a great sense of pacing and introduce tons of information into the game constantly. Nobody walks around wondering where the action is — everybody walks around scheming on how to turn the action to their ends.

Sunday morning I had the baby again — I can’t recall what Meghann was playing — and so played Thurn and Taxis again with baby in the sleepy wrap. I love that thing; I don’t know how people raise babies without it.

Sunday afternoon saw me running the Agora playtest/preview, which succeeded on both fronts admirably — I got some good playtest feedback and also introduced the game in an engaging and entertaining manner. Thanks to Jesse, I even have an Actual Play recording of most of the game. Playtest feedback mostly centered around “selling” player actions, and will result in a couple new (small) procedures and some chunky Mastery player advice.

Sunday evening, my parents trekked out to the convention just to take the baby off our hands for a timeslot. While Meghann played Mouse Guard, I was able to just kick back with Ryan Macklin, who I don’t get to see often enough, chatting about game design but also just things-and-stuff. When they were done, Meghann returned spouting superlatives about Mouse Guard, so presumably there will be mice with capes and swords in our gaming future.

Monday morning I was literally the only RPG on the schedule, and so our game of Primetime Adventures had six players. We did a “Yes, and…” sort of series-building and came up with something truly spectacular. Running in perpetual syndicated reruns on TVLand, our show was “Trouble in PERL-dice,” a 60s-era sitcom-spoof (think F-Troop) about the Board of Directors of the international criminal organization PERL (pronounced ‘peril’). As the show was ostensibly in reruns, we played one episode out of a “marathon,” so started with the very end of one episode, including the “Next Time On…” segment. This allowed us to have a Next Time On list for the episode we played, and this worked marvelously. Our climax featured two flying aces in a dogfight using invisible planes — in other words, two guys in sitting position arcing and spinning around in the air. Fantastic stuff.

And then it was time for post-con Mongolian BBQ with almost the whole gang (Paul and Ryan understandably buggered off before then), completing a fantastic convention.

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

This shit doesn't happen here.

Dear Prudence,

This is what “beauty” was supposed to be back when you were born. I’m hoping, as you read this now some years hence, things have changed. I suspect, though, that less will have changed than I would hope. With any luck your mother and I will have shown you time and again that there are a thousand kinds of beauty in the world, and most of them — the best kinds — don’t need all this to qualify.

You will always be my beautiful daughter, and I don’t ever want you to lose sight of that.

— Dad

Mirrored from robern.net.

linky

Robert Downy Jr and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson. Iiiiiinteresting...

So today, President Obama made a statement about military commissions for detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan. You can, and should, read it here. It is three paragraphs long; it will take you five minutes to make yourself an educated citizen.

So let’s summarize, shall we? Paragraph One: Military commissions are lawful and effective instruments of justice when done right, and I invite you to check my record because I’ve always said this. Paragraph Two: We have some suspended but still pending military commissions in progress, and we’re going to get back to them but we’re going to do it right this time. Paragraph Three: Did I mention we’re going to do it right this time?

Let’s also note what isn’t mentioned in the statement: Guantanamo Bay. It doesn’t appear at all. He does not say, anywhere, that the military commissions will happen there. It might be because he’s dodging the whole issue of a facility that bears the collective revulsion of the world, and he’s trying to hide the fact that he’s using it from us. Or it might be because Guantanamo Bay is completely irrelevant to the subject of doing military commissions right, which was his point. Now, given that Guantanamo Bay is closing this year and Obama has a magnificent track record on not dodging issues, I lean towards the latter. But if you’d prefer to live in a conspiracy theory, by all means — believe that he’s lying to you. Probably because the Illuminati told him to do it.

So anyway, the nation’s news organizations got the same statement as you read above (because you did bother to read it, right?). They could have run this headline:

Obama Will Do Military Commissions Right

Or they could have gone with this:

Obama Revives Bush-Era Military Tribunals at Guantanamo

Guess which one they all picked?

The fact of the matter is that the news media isn’t biased towards liberals or conservatives, it’s biased towards getting your attention. Sadly, it’s perfectly happy to abandon the truth and imply as much as it possibly can as long as it makes you pay attention to them. So they will imply that Obama has lied to you, that he has gone back on his word, that he is just as bad as his predecessor, that he is a hypocrite, that he has no appreciation for the revulsion that we all have for Guantanamo Bay, and so on and so forth, unto infinity, as long as it wins your eyeballs.

The really pathetic thing is that so many people do pay attention, relying on news outlets to take the President’s statements, published on the internet and totally available to anybody who bothers to read it, and “translate” them to make them understandable to plebes like them. Come on — was there anything in that statement that you couldn’t understand? Do you really need somebody else to tell you what that means, especially when they’re going to throw in tons of implications with little-to-no bearing on reality, just so you’ll pay attention to them instead of the other news outlet, which is doing the exact same thing?

Mirrored from robern.net.

So everybody’s seen Star Trek by now, right? It was totally awesome, and really, just about everything that I would possibly want from a reboot of a very beloved franchise that I have spent a long time enjoying. Of course, you’ll notice I said “just about everything.” There’s one thing, and it’s not even a criticism of Star Trek so much as it’s that the movie fell into the same trope that a lot — scratch that — nearly every movie, novel, television show, or other media production made in the Western World falls into.

So does anybody remember Star Trek: Nemesis? I mean, I’m sorry for bringing it up and making you think about it, but if you will recall, that Star Trek movie featured a giant, scary, pointy-ended Romulan ship dedicated to the destruction of the Federation and cast the comparatively underpowered Enterprise as the only line of defense opposing it. Sound familiar? Yeah.

There’s just something, apparently, about the little guy standing up to the giant threat from beyond. And I’ll be the first to admit, this makes for a great story. Unfortunately, in recent years, it’s made for the great story, especially in Hollywood. Our hero is always inexperienced, overpowered, and outclassed, and yet somehow he comes out on top — and by somehow, I of course mean “by banding together his friends to outmaneuver and outmatch the overpowering threat.” Every. Single. Time. Every. Single. Story.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.

Hee!

Yay!

I spent a little less than an hour in Illustrator today, reminding myself I am not Daniel Solis. I did, however, end up with this, which I am rather fond of:

Mirrored from Kallisti Press.