So, You Guys Are In This Inn...

Welcome to the Adjective Animal...

So, yesterday I spent the day doing actual work to avoid blogging. Doing actual work to get out of doing fake work, what has become of me? Anyway, since I need to write about something to justify calling myself a writer, howsabout we talk about starting campaigns?

Getting a Fresh Eye On It.

Ugh, what year is it again?

Well, well, well. It's 2011! Did Santa bring you everything you wanted this year? New dice? Pathfinder books? A trip to the Mojave Wasteland, perhaps? It was a very nerdy Christmas at our house, with a lot of Ugly Dolls and plush Companion Cubes and giant squishy dice under the tree for The Kid, and new games and hardware for The Wife and I. There was a lot of eating and drinking between Christmas and New Years, including a White Elephant party we threw wherein I got a bacon scented car air freshener that smells like bac-os that were stored in an old boot for a year. Now it's the first day of the first week of the new year and, well, it's time to get a fresh eye on things.

I Want to Play This Game and Never Stop

This eagle is stunned by all the awesome

Like them or not, Muse has an awesome song called Knights of Cydonia, with an equally awesome video that you need to go watch right now. Go. Okay, back with us? Awesome, right? Yes, I know this is old news, just humor me here. I first got hip to this song through Guitar Hero III, and then to this hysterically campy video through some casual YouTube surfing. I watched, mouth agape, and in the silence I looked around at Jacko and Munin and Riff and Shade and everybody else and said, "We need to play this game, right now!" I do that a lot. I'll see some crazy thing like the Knights of Cydonia video or get really into a book (or series) and decide that I need to do some role-playing in that setting. So, let's talk about great and/or hilarious settings we want to play in, shall we?

Slow Burn

Welp, looks like my Saturdays are free again...

There is a very interesting conversation going on over at Penny-Arcade regarding the relationship between players and game masters. Specifically, how the vagaries of herding cats managing players while they run roughshod over your carefully crafted world can burn a GM out quicker than a dollar store light bulb. They pay too much time obsessing on red herrings, they don't take things seriously enough, they take things too seriously, they ignore plot, they don't respect the setting, they don't get it man, they, as Tycho puts it, dick around and eat pizza, and eventually the whole gaming experience for the game master can be summed up with this wisdom. It's true, players can shit up a game quicker than anything, and will do so at their earliest convenience. You know what though, that's their job.

NaNoWriMo

Indeed

Hello Gentle Readers. It's been a while. As usual, I don't really have a good excuse for my long absence, so I'll just jump right into it. Today we're going to play a little catch-up, and I'm going to get back on the horse Monday with some honest to God 'blogging. So, what's been going on at Journeyman HQ you ask? A fair amount, actually. I'm still working on AEGIS vs. SPIDER, for which I've found the perfect musical accompaniment, but slowly as that project has taken a back seat to some other, more pressing projects. 

Tuesday Filler: GTFO

Thanks for all your hard work! By the way, get the hell out...

So, a year ago today, I got laid the fuck off from Palladium Books. With one little phone call on a Monday Morning, I lost everything I'd wanted. I'd lost a job, I'd lost Robotech, and I'd lost my rudder. After a bit of heavy drinking and some beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth, I said "Fuck this" and set about forging a new direction for myself as a freelancer in the contracting and increasingly niche Trad Games industry. It hasn't been easy. It hasn't always been fun. It's been slower than I'd like. I've made some progress, though. Shall we see what the passing of a year has brought us Gentle Readers?

Gilding the Lily

You have got to be shitting me...

So, I've got this thing where I see wonder in relatively ordinary things. When you look around, you can find a lot to be amazed at in your surroundings. Little things like the fact that this computer I'm working on has more computing power than was used to put a man on the moon or build this beautiful thing, and big things like, well, the fact that we put a man on the goddamn moon. I've said it before, but if you look at something hard enough you can always find something about it that's fascinating. I find more beauty in the gaunt symmetry of a turbofan engine, and more terror in the simple thoughtless, workaday evils that we perpetrate on one another, than in a million horror movies or sci-fi epics. What drives me crazy is the tendency some writers and game designers have of embellishing something that is already perfectly awesome and, well, ruining it frankly.

Class Warfare or Why I Hate Class/Level Systems

Pass me a fresh character sheet.

I guess I don't really hate class/level systems per se, I just feel like I've, I don't know, outgrown them. See, it seems the older I get, the more inclined I am toward more open ended, customizable gaming experiences. More specifically, what I like is to be able to build characters that meet my character concept without being limited by another game designer's ideas as to what makes a character. I dislike being told what skills or abilities I can or cannot take just because someone thinks that a fighter/warrior/soldier/whatever should have to pay extra for the ability to, say, read.

The Old Ways are the Best Ways

Look at 'dat dragon...

Yes, another two weeks without a post. Yes I know. I know it's bullshit. Even more so that the last time I went on an unannounced two-week hiatus. Anyway, to give you a quick recap, since I got back from GenCon things have been pretty busy here at The Shop. I've had a flurry of rewrites for both Deathwatch and Rogue Trader, another Rogue Trader assignment that I'm not at liberty to discuss, and a bunch of other personal stuff. All of that combined reduced my desire and ability to make post, or even be online at all except in a bidness capacity. But now I'm back, I'm back and I want to talk about the evolution of RPGs through their different editions.

Gencon

Man, the costume contest was intense this year*

Okay, here it is finally. Now that I've been able to catch up on sleep and unpack everything that happened, here's my post about GenCon 2010. Let me preface this by saying that this is from my point of view, and I'm just some opinionated smartass with a 'blog. I am, in no way, objective or unbiased and I implore you not to assume in any way that this is real journalism. If I miss stuff here, it's because I missed stuff at GenCon, and I wasn't going to pretend that I was a really real reporter with a fedora and a little card that read "press" in my hatband. So, keeping that in mind and without further ado, here's my report!

Worst. Post. Evar.

The Magic Cards are over there, kid...

So, I had this awesome dream last night. No, not the one where I'm standing on a pyramid dressed as a sun god while naked women pelt me with little pickles. The other one. Right, the one where I buy an awesome old two-story brick corner store with a pressed-tin ceiling in Detroit and renovate it into a kick-ass game store. See, for the longest time, The Wife and I have dreamed of opening our own game store. Someplace cool with brick walls, book shelves that go on forever, plank wood floors, open gaming areas, and maybe an espresso machine in the corner. We have this dream because every time we can be bothered to go into an actual game store our reaction on leaving is always the same; Shit, we can do better than that...

Risk Assessment

I'll take min/maxing for fifty, Trebek!

Let's get this out of the way right off the bat, I love it when bad shit happens to characters. Your character, my character, it doesn't matter. When a cunning plan doesn't survive first contact, when a die roll goes bad, when you role-play yourself into a corner, whenever something unfortunate happens in game it warms the cockles of my stainless-steel heart. Why? Because that threat, that jeopardy, it makes me tingle all over. In my opinion, a game that doesn't punish as much as entertain, and doesn't have an element of risk, isn't much of a game at all.

The Devil is in the Details

Well, yeah. In this case it is.

Confession time. I'm a huge bibliophile, and I've got a pretty obsessive personality. This means that every so often I get into an author, really into an author, and then must devour all of their works as fast as I can until my eyes fall out. This happened a couple of years ago when I finally got around to reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a book about gay, Jewish comic book artists by Michael Chabon. It was a very good read, so I immediately glommed on to Chabon. This guy is awesome! I must have MORE! So I dug around and found a book called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh which is a book about gay...Jewish...college kids...wait a minute... Anyway, a book about Pittsburgh? A book about a city that may, in fact, be my very favorite city East of the Mississippi ever? Sign me the hell up! So off I went to the library and got big ol' stack of Chabon's books and took them eagerly home. The next day I trooped back to the library and, bitterly disappointed, dumped all those books back into the book drop? Why? Well, the reason lies at the heart of today's post.

Anatomy of a Con Game

Okay, you guys are here, this door is open but it's dark inside. Who's going first?

Hot damn, two updates in as many days! I might just make it in the high-stakes game of RPG blogging after all. What I need now is a montage of me typing, staring into space, drinking coffee, changing diapers, and doing push-ups or jumping jacks or something backed up by the A-Team theme. Anyway, I woke up this morning in a cold sweat with a terrible realization. Origins is twenty days away! Twenty! Know how much of the prep I have done for my games? None. Well, hell. This is pretty typical, for me at least. I'm a terrible procrastinator, why put off 'til tomorrow what you can do next week? So, I've got a lot of work to do. A lot. But I figured I could procrastinate just a little longer and make a post about what goes into a good con game.

A Very Special Episode: Freelancing is for Suckers

Am I doing this right?

Goddamn, it's been forever since I've updated here at the Gamewerks. It's not like I have a good excuse, 'cause I don't really. I mean, I've been busy with being Nervous McNewdad, my family came on up to visit, I started finishing my basement, and I'm still writing about Space Marines. Also, I need to get this writing sample done for Pinnacle and I should probably, you know, get my games ready for Origins. What I have been doing is doing entirely too much moping about and not enough writing. Remember how I said I was gonna write a novel this year? Yeeaaaaah... It's June already and I don't have word one written. Awesome. So, I'm going to start the week with something a little different. Yet again, it's a very special episode of MCGW.

I'm such a sucker

So, I admit, I'm easily led. I love attention whoring social networking as a way to get my name out and grow my brand, as it were. To that end, I'm trying something called Formspring, something new I was turned on to by comic guy and Twitterati David Gallaher. Formspring is apparently where you sign up so that strangers on the internet can badger you with a constant stream of inappropriate questions. You can find the link over there at the left, Gentle Readers. Feel free to ask me a question and I might even get around to answering you!

Mr. Mom

This isn't fiction, it's a goddamned documentary

So, last September when I got laid the hell off from Palladium, I'll admit I felt a little bleak. I hadn't lost a job since before The Wife and I were married way back in '02, when I got fired from selling Harleys because I liked motorcycles too much. Anyway, as I stood there in my hallway staring at my phone trying to process what had just happened, my brain shifted on down into survival gear. Well, to be honest, first it shifted into "crawl into a bottle of Wild Turkey and listen to a lot of Hank Williams" mode. Then, as I struggled through the five stages of grief and helped an Austin Nichols exec make a boat payment, and after I dealt with, "Fuck, I'm a freelancer again!", I had a little epiphany. I had a baby on the way, I was a writer, I work from home, I'm good at multi-tasking and staying work focused, I keep long hours, I'm not necessarily opposed to bodily functions...I was going to be Mr. Mom!

In Defense of Dwarves

Pretty much every dwarf ever is this guy.

Confession time. Dwarves are far and away my favorite demi-human race. Their industriousness, their pragmatism, their vitality, their sturdiness, and their acceptance of technology in fantasy settings appeals to me on a visceral level. Given the choice, I'll always play a dwarf character in any setting, save for maybe Shadowrun. Shadowrun's about the only game where I simply can't abide demi-humans, but that's not what we're talking about here. What we are talking about is A: how much I love dwarves, B: why they're awesome, and C: why so many gamers seem to miss the point.

A Question of Scale: Size Matters

Those AT-AT pilots have a hell of a penalty to hit, but if they do connect...

So, I'm taking a break from writing about eight kilometer long spacegoing cathedrals to pound out a blog post today because, well, I need a break from the aforementioned spacegoing cathedrals. I believe I've made it perfectly clear throughout our time together that I have some very specific ideas about game design, especially when it comes to realism or the illusion thereof. Since I play a lot of sci-fi games, and those mostly dealing with giant robots, powered suits, and other powerful vehicles of war, something I've always been concerned with is the question of scale. No, I'm not talking about weights and measures or a C minor or something. I'm talking about the fact that some things are bigger than you, and bigger things are invariably harder to kill and more deadly than things that are your size. Would you like to know more?

More Human Than Human: Body Modification in RPGs

Only .001 essence left? No sweat, I've got a Willpower of 6...

I tend to play mainly sci-fi or modern style games. I rarely play fantasy, as it holds little interest for me unless it's a setting like Iron Kingdoms where there's a fair amount of technology. Aside from my fetishistic love for technology and machines, one of the things I find most compelling about these games is the theme of human modification that runs through them. Think about it. Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Rifts, and a dozen other games like them all allow the player to make a Faustian bargain wherein they trade greater or lesser degrees of their humanity for some amount of power. Why? What would drive a person to graft machine parts to their body or submit to dehumanizing brain implants or accept a swift and painful death by narcotic overdose? That's the question I'm curious about, and what I want to talk about today.