Paizo has received a copy of the finalized Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box which will be available later this month. Here's a video of their unboxing preview -
Friday, October 7, 2011
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Steve Jobs has Passed
I don't often do death notices except for leaders in the gaming industry but I thought it would be appropriate to take one blog post to honor the achievements of Steve Jobs and mourn his passing. While I have not been a huge Apple customer, I have had some of their products over the years and been very impressed with their quality. While growing up, a friend of mine had one of the first MacIntosh computers and we played just about every game we could garner for it. Steve Jobs helped change the way we do many daily chores and how we thought about playing. He will be missed.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
"The Future Of Books: A Dystopian Timeline" - TechCrunch Article
A recent article over on TechCrunch.com got me thinking again about the pace of ePublishing and how far it's come in the ten years since I began doing so. While it has been the norm to produce material in PDF format, I wonder if getting some things out in more standard eBook formats would make some sense. I don't currently have any genre fiction for sale but there is some in the works that ties into the campaign setting I have waiting in the wings, Grymvald. I have to wonder, too, about the viability of game books with little to no artwork, text?books for games, out in similar formats, so that they can be more easily transported to game locations. At the least, having a copy of the same book that someone has purchased with the artwork in a format without it, something to take along to read on the train or over lunchhour, might make absorbing the material simpler between games.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Laptops and Tabletops
In a recent EN World discussion on the future of gaming and what role computers would play, I posted the following , , ,
I've been a laptop GM as long as I've been able to bring one to the table. Apps and programs capable of streamlining my game so I can focus on presenting the setting and NPCs to facilitate a more immersive experience are a boon to GMing and I love what they can do for me as tools of the trade. I'm also not adverse to players using laptops, netbooks, or other handheld devices provided they do not become a distraction, do not become a distraction any more so than typical table talk and or other distractions that have been part and parcel of friendly tabletop games since I began back in the early Seventies.
There's no need to think of the tools of today any differently than the tools of yesterday, and if a quick text from someone's father to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home from a game or from a spouse to let a player know their daughter's cough has subsided and the kid is sleeping soundly helps the player to relax and enjoy the evening of gaming, then I have no problem with it at all. So, too, if a player finds it easier to keep track of their character using a laptop, including spells and other setting information they have accumulated, I'm just as happy to accomodate that technological advance. They don't play their character 24/7, they don't really inhabit their skin, and there's no way they can do as efficient a job remembering all of the minutiae as they can if they use a journal, particularly one that is electronic.
However, I'd also caution that the players of today, old and young, can find juggling technology and diversions difficult, at first, and sometimes some parameters need to be set to ensure it is not a table-distraction, a distraction to all players, or even a crutch that causes players to bury themselves in the devices and not remain focused on the moment.
My current final playtest of Griffins & Grottos includes mostly players in their twenties (but some as old as fifty) who are all nearly as tech-savvy as myself (though I generally have the better equipment *wink*). Sometimes, with this group that includes some players I have known for years, there can be some new-shiny that steals focus from the game, but I have found it is just as often a low-tech interference as it is a high-tech distraction. In such cases, I find it is useful to adhere to an old standup comedy adage of calling out the obvious, and I don't mean in a bad way.
There was a standup comedian named Steve Mittleman, who some might remember from the movie Roxanne, who had a decidedly understated chin. When he lowered his head, his chin basically disappeared. You could draw a line as straight as a string from his nostrils to his sternum. Just like with a comedian who wore a loud tie or had some other outstanding feature, he knew that if he didn't call attention to it right away and dispose of the focus on it, it would remain a distraction the rest of his set.
The other night one player had a new miniature for use in the game he runs on the weekend, an ettin lich (which he was happy was released in time for him to use it, PFers take note), and another picked up the "chase" card deck for PF. Although the player with the deck wasn't necessarily obsessing over it, I could tell he was wondering how it would be useful to his other games and so I quickly recalled how one player who was away for a couple of weeks had left the in-game group and went "back to the inn" with a chance to collect a wandering gnome. This gnome, an NPC, had succombed to a poison trap that left his mind addled with an opiate. He was wandering the moors and realistically (as much as I dislike handwaving such things) the NPC was off and not going to be recovered but thinking on my feet I asked the player with the deck to break it out. We ran through the rules of how to use it quickly, made a few adjustments for the system to system disparities, and played out if the character who was headed back to town could capture the opium-addled gnome. As it turned out, she did not, but we had fun playing it out and by then we were immersed in the game-world and off to the races.
So, admittedly I am rambling, but I think my point is that I'm not sure a computer will ever manage to replace a GM in quite the way that I think necessary to create the same face-to-face game experience that we generally have week-to-week with our group, let alone any I have known over my near-forty years of gaming and despite my being happily open to using as much technology as I can muster for any game I play, when it can bring about an immersive tabletop roleplaying result.
Hell, I'm all for being tech-friendly but I'm also a steel-driving man and am not sure this John Henry is ready to be replaced by a machine, let alone thinking one could handle it at an impromtu level and produce even close to the same results. Not, at least, for a roleplaying game.
I've been a laptop GM as long as I've been able to bring one to the table. Apps and programs capable of streamlining my game so I can focus on presenting the setting and NPCs to facilitate a more immersive experience are a boon to GMing and I love what they can do for me as tools of the trade. I'm also not adverse to players using laptops, netbooks, or other handheld devices provided they do not become a distraction, do not become a distraction any more so than typical table talk and or other distractions that have been part and parcel of friendly tabletop games since I began back in the early Seventies.
There's no need to think of the tools of today any differently than the tools of yesterday, and if a quick text from someone's father to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home from a game or from a spouse to let a player know their daughter's cough has subsided and the kid is sleeping soundly helps the player to relax and enjoy the evening of gaming, then I have no problem with it at all. So, too, if a player finds it easier to keep track of their character using a laptop, including spells and other setting information they have accumulated, I'm just as happy to accomodate that technological advance. They don't play their character 24/7, they don't really inhabit their skin, and there's no way they can do as efficient a job remembering all of the minutiae as they can if they use a journal, particularly one that is electronic.
However, I'd also caution that the players of today, old and young, can find juggling technology and diversions difficult, at first, and sometimes some parameters need to be set to ensure it is not a table-distraction, a distraction to all players, or even a crutch that causes players to bury themselves in the devices and not remain focused on the moment.
My current final playtest of Griffins & Grottos includes mostly players in their twenties (but some as old as fifty) who are all nearly as tech-savvy as myself (though I generally have the better equipment *wink*). Sometimes, with this group that includes some players I have known for years, there can be some new-shiny that steals focus from the game, but I have found it is just as often a low-tech interference as it is a high-tech distraction. In such cases, I find it is useful to adhere to an old standup comedy adage of calling out the obvious, and I don't mean in a bad way.
There was a standup comedian named Steve Mittleman, who some might remember from the movie Roxanne, who had a decidedly understated chin. When he lowered his head, his chin basically disappeared. You could draw a line as straight as a string from his nostrils to his sternum. Just like with a comedian who wore a loud tie or had some other outstanding feature, he knew that if he didn't call attention to it right away and dispose of the focus on it, it would remain a distraction the rest of his set.
The other night one player had a new miniature for use in the game he runs on the weekend, an ettin lich (which he was happy was released in time for him to use it, PFers take note), and another picked up the "chase" card deck for PF. Although the player with the deck wasn't necessarily obsessing over it, I could tell he was wondering how it would be useful to his other games and so I quickly recalled how one player who was away for a couple of weeks had left the in-game group and went "back to the inn" with a chance to collect a wandering gnome. This gnome, an NPC, had succombed to a poison trap that left his mind addled with an opiate. He was wandering the moors and realistically (as much as I dislike handwaving such things) the NPC was off and not going to be recovered but thinking on my feet I asked the player with the deck to break it out. We ran through the rules of how to use it quickly, made a few adjustments for the system to system disparities, and played out if the character who was headed back to town could capture the opium-addled gnome. As it turned out, she did not, but we had fun playing it out and by then we were immersed in the game-world and off to the races.
So, admittedly I am rambling, but I think my point is that I'm not sure a computer will ever manage to replace a GM in quite the way that I think necessary to create the same face-to-face game experience that we generally have week-to-week with our group, let alone any I have known over my near-forty years of gaming and despite my being happily open to using as much technology as I can muster for any game I play, when it can bring about an immersive tabletop roleplaying result.
Hell, I'm all for being tech-friendly but I'm also a steel-driving man and am not sure this John Henry is ready to be replaced by a machine, let alone thinking one could handle it at an impromtu level and produce even close to the same results. Not, at least, for a roleplaying game.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Narrative Adventures and Limited IP Licensing
It's been discussed in a number of locations around the Internet at this point, so I thought it would be useful to write something a bit more official regarding a Limited IP Licensing Agreement (LILA) that will accompany each new Narrative Adventures release from Creative Mountain Games. One of the difficulties with having so many small companies working in relative isolation in the tabletop roleplaying market is that a lot of great adventure material gets little exposure to those fans of systems for which the adventures were NOT written. Taking a cue from Ryan Dancey and his genius move to create the Open Game License and movement, I decided the same idea could be utilized in a somewhat different way. The idea behind the OGL was to allow smaller companies to create products for a main system that the primary company would find marginally unprofitable. This, in turn, was also meant to drive the sale of the core rule books for the primary system.
The LILA is meant to allow outside creators to take some IP from an adventure (names of places, people, and items, for instance) and create statistical information compatible with their own system. The results are intended to drive sales of the original adventure for the first publisher, to increase the number of adventures available for the second publisher (and the fans of the system of the second publisher), and to drive sales of the second publisher's core rules system. This wouldn't simply apply to publishers, so fan conversions would also be encouraged (provided fans were careful not to cross IP boundaries of the systems in which they were working, of course). Publishers of the conversions would point toward where the adventures were available and publishers of the adventures would point toward where the conversions were available.
One obvious problem would be that fans could do creating and be competing with their system's publisher. But here the publisher would have some advantage in that they can more extensively use their own IP and marry it to the IP being used for the conversion. Plus, a system publisher would also be able to bring much to the table in regard to additional bells and whistles such as artwork, layout and tradedress features not available to fans. Furthermore, if a system publisher was going to go to the trouble of a conversion of another publisher's adventure, wouldn't the fans of the second publisher's system want to support that second publisher's efforts by purchasing the micro-PDF conversion? I believe this would be the case.
It should also be mentioned that an official conversion carries the strength of being mechanically more sound. Also noteworthy is that a conversion can be done in a weekend while a whole adventure can take weeks to produce. A small publisher benefits greatly by having more support material for their system, so doing a handful of conversions in one month might well trump putting out a handful of full adventures in a year. Most publishers would likely find some middle ground publishing both original adventures of their own as well as some conversions of adventures they find particularly compelling or easy to integrate to their system of choice.
I'm envisioning an eventual market where many small companies, some that make their own systems, are doing conversions back and forth under the aupices of LILAs, thus greatly increasing the variety of material available to their fans.
The LILA is meant to allow outside creators to take some IP from an adventure (names of places, people, and items, for instance) and create statistical information compatible with their own system. The results are intended to drive sales of the original adventure for the first publisher, to increase the number of adventures available for the second publisher (and the fans of the system of the second publisher), and to drive sales of the second publisher's core rules system. This wouldn't simply apply to publishers, so fan conversions would also be encouraged (provided fans were careful not to cross IP boundaries of the systems in which they were working, of course). Publishers of the conversions would point toward where the adventures were available and publishers of the adventures would point toward where the conversions were available.
One obvious problem would be that fans could do creating and be competing with their system's publisher. But here the publisher would have some advantage in that they can more extensively use their own IP and marry it to the IP being used for the conversion. Plus, a system publisher would also be able to bring much to the table in regard to additional bells and whistles such as artwork, layout and tradedress features not available to fans. Furthermore, if a system publisher was going to go to the trouble of a conversion of another publisher's adventure, wouldn't the fans of the second publisher's system want to support that second publisher's efforts by purchasing the micro-PDF conversion? I believe this would be the case.
It should also be mentioned that an official conversion carries the strength of being mechanically more sound. Also noteworthy is that a conversion can be done in a weekend while a whole adventure can take weeks to produce. A small publisher benefits greatly by having more support material for their system, so doing a handful of conversions in one month might well trump putting out a handful of full adventures in a year. Most publishers would likely find some middle ground publishing both original adventures of their own as well as some conversions of adventures they find particularly compelling or easy to integrate to their system of choice.
I'm envisioning an eventual market where many small companies, some that make their own systems, are doing conversions back and forth under the aupices of LILAs, thus greatly increasing the variety of material available to their fans.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
FLOWCHART: Navigating NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
The Excellent folks at SFSignal.com have created a flowchart for navigating NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books list which came out in August. It's got a few bugs, as people are quickly helping them fix, but all in all it's a very cool way to put the 100 in perspective. Check it out here.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Smells Like Teen Hobbies?
Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs have come up with a line of scents based on the various "races," "classes," and "alignments" used in typical tabletop roleplaying games. Here are the secent options and their "components" (from their website):
DWARF - Iron filings and chips of stone, Styrian Golding hops, and soot-covered leather.
ELF - Pale golden musk, honeycomb, amber, parma violet, hawthorne bark, aspen leaf, forest lily, life everlasting, white moss, and a hint of wild berry.
GNOME - An explosive blend of effervescent golden ginger and black peppercorn with sarsaparilla, gurjum balsam, nutmeg, gear lubricant, and smoke.
HALF-ELF - White sandalwood, beeswax, white tea leaf, oud, and a hint of sophisticated urban musk.
HALFLING - Porridge, kukui nuts, and pastry crumbs.
ORC - Field grey courgette musk, roughly cured leather, and vetiver.
CLERIC - Rose amber, frankincense, myrrh, champaca flower, Peru balsam, cistus, palisander, cananga, hyssop, and narcissus absolute.
FIGHTER - Leather, musk, blood, and steel.
MAGE - All mystique and thrumming power: gurjum balsam, Sumatran dragon's blood resin, olibanum, galangal, oleo gum resin, and frankincense.
PALADIN - Immaculate white musk, sweet frankincense, bourbon vanilla, white leather, and shining armor.
RANGER - Untamed wilderness: buckskin accord with Terebinth pine, Russian birch, black ironwood, elder bark, hay, armoise, juniper, patchouli, galangal root, Spanish moss, and cabreuva.
ROGUE - Soft, well-worn black leather, hemp, and rosin.
NEUTRAL - A flawless skin musk.
LAWFUL - Rigid oak, blue chamomile, rhubarb, and fig leaf.
CHAOTIC - A whirling mélange of multicolored musks with wasabi, rooibos, heliotrope, and mastic.
GOOD - Shimmering celestial musk with vanilla, white honey, acacia, and sugar cane.
EVIL - Smouldering opium tar, tobacco absolute, green tea, black plum, kush, ambergris accord, ambrette seed, and costus root.
DWARF - Iron filings and chips of stone, Styrian Golding hops, and soot-covered leather.
ELF - Pale golden musk, honeycomb, amber, parma violet, hawthorne bark, aspen leaf, forest lily, life everlasting, white moss, and a hint of wild berry.
GNOME - An explosive blend of effervescent golden ginger and black peppercorn with sarsaparilla, gurjum balsam, nutmeg, gear lubricant, and smoke.
HALF-ELF - White sandalwood, beeswax, white tea leaf, oud, and a hint of sophisticated urban musk.
HALFLING - Porridge, kukui nuts, and pastry crumbs.
ORC - Field grey courgette musk, roughly cured leather, and vetiver.
CLERIC - Rose amber, frankincense, myrrh, champaca flower, Peru balsam, cistus, palisander, cananga, hyssop, and narcissus absolute.
FIGHTER - Leather, musk, blood, and steel.
MAGE - All mystique and thrumming power: gurjum balsam, Sumatran dragon's blood resin, olibanum, galangal, oleo gum resin, and frankincense.
PALADIN - Immaculate white musk, sweet frankincense, bourbon vanilla, white leather, and shining armor.
RANGER - Untamed wilderness: buckskin accord with Terebinth pine, Russian birch, black ironwood, elder bark, hay, armoise, juniper, patchouli, galangal root, Spanish moss, and cabreuva.
ROGUE - Soft, well-worn black leather, hemp, and rosin.
NEUTRAL - A flawless skin musk.
LAWFUL - Rigid oak, blue chamomile, rhubarb, and fig leaf.
CHAOTIC - A whirling mélange of multicolored musks with wasabi, rooibos, heliotrope, and mastic.
GOOD - Shimmering celestial musk with vanilla, white honey, acacia, and sugar cane.
EVIL - Smouldering opium tar, tobacco absolute, green tea, black plum, kush, ambergris accord, ambrette seed, and costus root.
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