Going West
April 7th, 2013Archival Characters for Longitudinal Studies
February 20th, 2013You’ll have heard of the Up Series of documentaries and you’ll have heard of D&D or the rest of this post will be me humming a song you don’t know. May be useful to have thought about subjective timelines (like, the name River Song will be meaningful to you).
The Pitch to Players: ever wondered what your character will be like when they get old or what they were like when they were young?
The Pitch to Characters: volunteering to let the Great Institute for Legacy Longitudinal Studies ‘archive you’ (whatever that means) over the course of your life provided you with crucial early funding, occasionally strange adventures and a sense of purpose. But all of that is now in the past, at least for some yous.
Explain Your Poor Grammar:
GILLS is an organization which can go into a d20 3.x world and provide both episodic and continuity narratives to the campaign. This is done by having players create the same character at different levels and considering those versions as fixed in time.
With 3.x d20, progressing a character is comparatively easy. Figure out what class you want to credit the level to, gain the pertinent class features and character improvements, if your total levels is a multiple of 6 gain a feat, if a multiple of 4 gain an attribute point. If you need to equip the character, there are formulas and random charts to determine appropriate gear.
Which means that if you are a player with a character concept, you can sit down and advance your seed notion to whatever level the GM says is appropriate. Or as a GM you can crank out an NPC. Like turning a knob from 0 to the final state. The GILLS idea adds more clicks on the knob.
Here’s an example: create a character, picking race, background, characteristics, give them a level in wizard. Equip them. Now record that character in indelible ink, just as they are. Decide what would change if you gave them five more levels, perhaps 2 in fighter and 3 in wizard. Advance them to that point, upgrading/replacing equipment. Record the character at six levels in indelible ink.
Now you have two instances of the same character at an earlier and later point in their career.
How Do The Characters Get Used:
The GM announces what level the next scenario requires, the players pull the version of their character of appropriate level out of the archive and duplicate it into a modifiable media, the scenario is played out, and the duplicate is discarded at the end of it.
That’s it. That’s all there is to it.
This Feels Complicated, Use More Words:
OK. Inside the game world, what’s going on is that a group of psionicists or possible elven sorcerers have found a crystal which can be made to resonate with the memories of a person, capturing a moment in time. Dwarven artificers or Gnome tinkers or possibly just supremely gifted Human master crafters can similar record perfect information about possessions allowing indefinite reproduction of gear. Oh, and there’s probably a deity of the afterlife involved here to make sure the moral component of the character is captured for replay.
The player plays duplicates of their own character in scenarios. The reference character the duplicates derive from has lived a long and full life and gone on to other realms. But the GILLS group deploys duplicates for a variety of reasons: to see what characters will do, in response to request from one entity or another, to defend the organization from threat, out of a sense of fairness to the characters who volunteered to be archived.
It gives the GM the freedom to decide ‘I want this adventure to be for 18th level characters’ followed by ‘I want this adventure to be for 3rd level characters’ without all the players having to make new characters. It means not having to track advancement in the stories, because all of the material advancement has been done in advance, outside of the story. The GM can also give the world continuity which the characters lack by having the things they do persist, even if the next instance of the character doesn’t necessary have any idea what they did.
That is, a character might appear in successive gameworld weeks at 6th level, 6th level, 12th level, 3rd level and the world around them would have moved forward while their sense of self would have refreshed, advanced, and then retreated (respectively).
As a player, it gives you the freedom to treat every story as a one-shot, because this is not your prime time line, this is a fork, a branch, an echo of your Real Character, but with all the familiarity of “ah, 9th level, this is when I have my first talking sword” that having a consistent character brings.
How Many Versions Should We Archive:
Right now, I’m thinking a good distribution is to make a version of the character at 1st level, at 13 levels and at 25 levels. That’s 3 versions, a level range of 24. Which means that it subdivides pretty well. You could go back and make versions with 7 and 19 levels and bisect the timeline and repeat that another time if you like.
But Characters are More Than Their Levels:
So true. I have an idea for a ‘character events’ mechanism where the GM decides how many notable things happened to the character between the snapshots and those are generated and applied to the versions after the event.
An example: “slew their first dragon” might apply to all the characters, might fall somewhere between 3 and 7th versions, so the players would be asked to come up with a way in which slaying the dragon changed their character. Did they gain notable loot? A certain reputation? A scar? An individual event might be “enchanted their first staff” and the GM might ask the player what it was, what the crafting process did to/for the character, and what the final fate of that staff was.
This would be used to give the party shared events which happen “offscreen” to reference and build character story on.
In this way, the characters can develop lives and an existence independent of any given game session, players can foreshadow later advancement by making choices during a session, and the book-keeping for continuity is minimized.
OK, dissect it.
okonomiyaki
December 15th, 2012
risk:legacy 3 envelopes opened.
November 25th, 2012
ginger spice cookies
November 3rd, 2012
cookies
Vlor World
November 3rd, 2012Again, with the book reading thing. Only this book I’m talking about non-chronologically because I read it some time ago but then I was cloistered for some cycles thereafter and unable to commemorate the aut of Review. Which is to say, this book is still shaping the way I think about things. It’s a compelling read, with footnoted digressions into some fun mathy bits.
What’s it about? It’s about aliens arriving and the monks who are the only ones who can even understand the threat, never mind deal with it. Sort of. It’s also about the dangers and rewards of separating the thinkers of a people from the unthinking. It’s about jocks vs. geeks. It’s about martial arts nerding. It’s a book you can read a couple different ways. I read it in a way which made it enjoyable for me.
It is slow going, as some of the pages are dense with concepts you’ll want to unpack and ponder and perhaps repack and put away, never to think about again, in some dark attic of the mind. Parts of it feel picaresque, parts of it are lyrical dialogue (and Dialogue), there’s some reasonably good action/fight scenes. Probably the most thought-provoking fiction I’ve read since Eco.
Who might like this book
- quantum realists
- avout
- the philosophically inclined, where ‘thinking about thinking’ is its own reward and rationale
- readers wanting post-Einsteinian science in their fiction
Who might not like this book
- readers who find Boy’s Adventure tiresome; there’s some of that vibe here, “dudes run off to have adventures”
- readers looking for braincandy they can just skim and feel like they got a 5-act story out of
- readers who need a neatly wrapped ending (but really if you need that, why are you still picking up books with the name Stephenson on them?)
- readers who resent neologisms; there’s a lot of them, some of them expies from English, but not entirely congruent
Size Matters
October 31st, 2012Shannon Prickett,
October 31, 2012
Rating: 2 out of 3
I read a book. It was called The Mongoliad Book 1 and I had originally heard about this story before it went live and while I liked the idea of serialized content even then, I didn’t think I had the time to commit to reading an ongoing saga, and I was right (though whether it was a self-fulfilling prophecy is out of scope for this blog and so I advise you to take your sniping on that topic to Facebook where I will continue to ignore it). So I had pretty much forgotten all about it, went on to read Anathem (which I apparently never blogged about).
But. Then I went to a con and I got a copy of The Mongoliad and I read it.
Supposing you’ve missed any & all hoopla about the book, it’s apparently a collaborative novel (something like the shared world anthologies which delighted me in my youth) of historical fiction where a group of badass “knights” confronts the threat of the Mongol Empire. There is lots of fighting. Because this book (reportedly) emerged from the experiences the writers had in researching the western (European) martial arts. ie, fighting with pointy sticks. So there’s a lot of fighting. Even when people aren’t fighting, they’re paying attention to their armor and armaments, physical, emotional and spiritual. Oh yes. There’s some of that in here, too.
It definitely does the job of introducing the premises and players and sets up one or more intriguing cliffhangers, depending upon whether your sympathies are with the Chinese slave, the Mongol warrior, the war-bastard Binder, the Paladin, the Crazy Istvan, or any of seemingly a dozen other sympathetic characters. Or the villains, or the forces of nature. So with many creators, we get many creations and there’s some tension around that where I’m wishing I knew whose hand was driving the plot at any given point so I could decide how dubious to be.
Because I’m judge-y like that.
Who might like this book
- People who enjoyed Thieves’ World, Wild Cards, To Reign in Hell, Liavek, The Forgotten Realms or any number of other books where different writers share creation tasks
- People who are interested in the kind of fighting you pretend to do in the SCA or D&D
- People who want to read about the time period where Mongolia was an empire
- People who run RPGs in fantasy settings where swords clang on shields
Who might not like this book
- People who need a single protagonist to identify with
- People not comfortable reading about the atrocities of war
- People who believe all knights were always chivalrous
- People who hate “party goes on a quest” storylines
How I converted Password Gorilla to KeePassX
October 31st, 2012- In PasswordGorilla, choose Password Gorilla -> Preferences -> Export tab
- Checked
- Include password field
- Include “Notes” field
- Unchecked
- Save as Unicode text file
- Then File -> Export to something .csv somewhere
- Then open a terminal session.
Do: awk -F, '{print "<password name=\"" $4 " at " $3 "\">" $5 ">/password>" }' YOUR-EXPORTED.csv | tee pgwallet.xml
- edit pgwallet.xml
- Make some hand edits to the file to conform to KWallet XML format (add the Wallet and Folder wrapping tags to the file)
- Look for any characters which KeePassX will complain about on import. & is one.
- If you try to import and it errors, run KeePassX from a terminal and re-try the action; read stderr
- Import in to KeePassX, telling it that it’s a KWallet XML dump.
- Go through the entries and cut the ‘USERNAME at’ string out of the Name field, paste it into Username, trim the ‘ at’ part off
- Save the db
- Delete the pgwallet.xml and YOUR-EXPORTED.csv files
Google Reader’s Killer Feature: Share
October 14th, 2012So I was digging around in my blog and I found this draft from May 17 of 2009. Wherein I talked about the thing which had won my heart in gReader. Somehow, I don’t have that feeling from sharing in gPlus. What am I doing wrong? What are they?
You say, “There’s a feature here I’m rather liking.”
You say, “Anyone who’s a gtalk contact who is also a reader user can share
posts out with their friendnet.”
You say, “Which is, I think, pretty awesome. Like passing out pointers like
we do here but passing by value rather than reference.”
Binder is not yet ready to pronounce it gReader’s killer feature, but that may
be a critical mass problem.
You say, “It fails the del.icio.us usefulness test, ie, would I use this
service if I were the only user? The answer for me is, well, maybe, but
only because I need to use some kind of aggregator, so if not gReader,
bloglines or feedburner or amphetadesk again or rss2html again or rss2imap
again.”
You say, “Or the Tbird feed reader, the Firefox feed reader, any of that.”
You say, “But passing articles back and forth with my one google talk friend
who uses reader has been fun so far.”
You say, “We have different but complementary tastes.”
You say, “He’s all Horror, Rational Skepticism, and Indie RPG.”
You say, “I’m All Money, All Political, All Gaming (All the time!)”
You say, “So we’re doing that collab filtering thing where the best of the
best gets filtered for us by our own personal neural network of friends
which knows what we like and hate and should know about.”
