D&D Fight Club!

I got a sort of strange idea today, while I was out walking the dog. What if I used a combat oriented RPG (4e is what I would use, but that's just because it's my current obsession) to run a player vs. player combat league?

I'd probably set this up with multiple players on one team. I could see having each team be run by one player, operating several characters, but at least with 4e I could see that getting unweildy at higher levels. Making it one-player-per-team would also increase the "build the statistically perfect fighting machine" aspect of it, the kind of thing that dominates competetive play of games like Magic. Which is fine, but I like the idea of having a teamwork element to it.

Because that's really the whole point. The concept, in my mind, is "like sports, but with D&D," which strikes me as stupid but quite funny. I could never make this a regular game, but as a way to kill a couple of hours a week, supplemental to a regular game, it could be fun. Especially if I could get enough people together to have a bunch of teams, with rankings and feuds and maybe even playoffs.

I'd have to figure out a way to do leveling. The standard D&D "winning makes you more powerful" deal would require me to work up a system that kept one team from totally dominating everyone just by dint of superior level. Probably what I'd do would be to just have everyone level every week or so, and set up a 20 or 30 week "season," after which the whole thing would start over with new characters, and maybe some changes to player lineups, if desired.

The other logistical issue that occurs to me right now (there will be more, if I actually try to get this thing going) would be refereeing. We'd need some way to adjudicate and interpret rules, to fix issues on the fly and keep little disagreements from derailing the whole thing. But without monsters to run, I could see that job being crazy boring; I can't see anyone wanting to do just that, all the time. I certainly wouldn't.

The easiest thing would be to rotate the job through players who's teams aren't in the current match up, but that still has a certain element of conflict of interest involved. Probably not a big deal, as long as things stay casual. And the job could be made more interesting by giving that person the job of designing a map and tactical features. It might even work to throw in traps, or even a few monsters, as an additional hazard.

I could actually see doing something like this next year. I've got some people talking to me about putting together a roleplaying club, which, if we could get it going, would make it a lot easier to get enough people to put this together. And having a light but roleplaying related activity like this would give people a reason to actually show up to the meetings.

WoAdWriMo: A Declaration

I'm going to do Worldwide Adventure Writing Month this July.

I really, really want to say I'm going to be to busy. I want to hedge, say I'm not ready to commit, I want to wait to see how things are going to turn out. I'll be running a campaign then. I'll be busy. I don't want to completely commit to it, in public, until I'm sure that I can do it.

But that's what I did last year, and I never got around to it. I was never sure.

So screw "sure." I'm going to do it. Even if what I turn in ends up being mostly notes from my campaign, even if it ends up being ridiculous, even if it ends up driving me crazy, I'm still going to turn something in. This is a solemn, public vow, and I am going to hate myself for it come mid-July.

But what the heck. I did NaNoWriMo, right? How bad can it be?

Multi-DM Persistent World Campaign

Crazy idea: a sandbox game with no regular group, in the style of the West Marches but with the setting that powers it shared between multiple DMs.

This could just be on the design end: you have multiple people collaborating on a setting that one of them then uses to run a game. Co-operative worldbuiling. Or you could get fancier, and have each participating DM run their own player pool through the game.

Which could, in turn, run a couple of ways. You could have multiple independent games, seperated geographically or by convention, or you could have multiple DMs supporting the same player pool, with players switching back and forth between games. My personal situation better supports the former option, since I don't know many other DMs locally. But the second option could be interesting.

There big issues I've identified so far are time-keeping, DMing style, and griefing.

That last is also the least important; though I assume there's some potential for one DM to put way to powerful monsters in places they're not supposed to be, without warning for the players or the other DMs, a little thought put into who you invite into the project ought to keep the chance to a minimum. A bigger problem would be people doing that kind of thing accidentally, but that would happen even in a single-DM game.

Slightly bigger issue is time-keeping; if you put everyone on personal time, affected solely by in-game activities, as I tend to do in my normal games, then you could potentially end up with some groups way behind others, depending on how active the different DMs are. Then you get weirdness like dungeons that haven't been cleared out yet, but will be, so you can't go there because of what will happen, but hasn't. My solution would be to put everyone on universal time, perhaps locked to real-world time, and your character hangs around in taverns until you take them out on another adventure. (Which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a character to do.)

Finally, DM style. Part of the idea behind the set-up would be to produce an environment with greater depth and variety than one DM can provide, but this could go too far. And everyone involved would have to use a similar format in their world notes, and a similar level of rigor in applying those notes.

This could work, and it might be fun. It's not something that's likely to happen; I'm probably too distractible to pull something like that off. The vision I have in my head is of a game that keeps going for years, with different players and different DMs, but one persistent world. But at least in my case, it's more likely to stay just as an idea.

EDIT: Reposted because I just realized I misspelled the title. Why do I keep doing that?

Going All Web 2.0 On My Campaign

This post-all-the-campaign-notes-on-the-blog project is starting to give me ideas. Crazy ideas.

Build-a-campaign-on-a-blog ideas.

Jeff Rients is already kinda doing this, with his World of Cinder project, and to a certain extent with Beyond Vinland. But I was thinking, just do the same kind of thing I'm doing with Is This Fair? except post the material before the campaign runs, instead of after.

I'd have an incentive to do at least a little work on it every day, and occasional internet commentary from random internet people wandering through. There would be the possibility of players getting spoilers, but there would also be the possibility of the players actually knowing something about the campaign world before the game started.

And, of course, there's the possibility of collaborative campaign building, but things of that nature never quite seem to work out for me.

Mostly it'd be about incentive. Keep it small, make it part of my routine. Harness that statcounter addiction towards something productive.

Languages Filled With Lies

I need to get back on the conlanging wagon. I have one language-like thing that I made years ago, and I had fun with it, but it'd be nice to have something that was actually use-able. In roleplaying, fiction, and/or espionage.

I've been thinking that it'd be interesting to design a language as a creative expression of meaning. Perhaps with themes, in the manner of a novel. Natural languages encode information about cultures, and the people who use them. Could other information be expressed in a constructed language?

I can use language to make a point. Can I make a language that makes a point?

NaNoWriMo Scheduling

Considering doing National Novel Writing Month. Like I don't already have enough to do.

Mostly I'm trying to figure when I should do it. The time I actually finished it, I did in December, but conditions are different this year, so that may no longer be the best time. Might actually consider doing it in November; otherwise I'll probably wait until January.

The major consideration is when other people are available for the escapade. I have never done NaNoWriMo with other people; that is my plan for this time.

Then I just need to figure out what it's going to be about. But this is NaNoWriMo, so the "what" is less important than the "when."

Madness? This Is Facebook!

I just did something crazy. I just put up an open call for players on Facebook, of all places.

This is going to end badly.

But there is a small chance that it will end with me having a group. Or the beginnings of a group.

This will also probably involve horrible disaster, in addition to the group. But I'll have a group.

Is this worth intense disaster of a new and unusual variety? I suppose I will soon find out.

Continuity: Not My Strength

I want to run a campaign that grows. That I run more than one campaign in, with more than one group. That's a goal that I'm never likely to accomplish, being as distractable as I am. (See: blog archives.) But it's a goal.

The idea really came to me at the end of Is This Fair? Is It? We set up this nice little status quo, off in the future, for the characters. And it occurred to me that you could start a new campaign, with new characters, based off that status quo--say, with the old campaign's characters sending the new ones off on adventures. Or even just basing it in the city, with the old characters being background.

I'm not sure how likely this is to happen. I'd kind of rather not base another campaign off the Diamond Throne. (Though I could strip parts of that out, but it would still be obvious where it came from. The giants, and their reaction to said established status quo, would be somewhat key in any political intrigue resulting.)

But it'd be nice, sometime, to do that. Base a campaign on one that had come before. Not a sequel, exactly. Not with the same characters: that way lies madness. Probably not even with the same players. Maybe not even in the same area of the world, at least at the beginning. But I'd have something to draw on, an additional influence besides the stories and ephemeral junk I normally dump into a campaign. (A good campaign, anyhow.)

I think I could do something, with that kind of foundation. It'd be fun to try.

Novelty Gaming

Man, now I really want to run a sandbox game.

Get a big wilderness hex map, fill it with cool stuff, and be ready to add things as the players start moving around? Does that ever sound awesome. Throw in a few huge, nonsensical dungeons (one big dungeon with entrances all over the place! woohoo!) and I am totally sold.

I have never, ever done anything like this. Never run it, never played it. But I really, really want to try.

My Newest Fiction Adventure

Othar Tryggvassen has a Twitter. It's a mostly day-by-day account of his adventures as a professional hero. Full of lines like "Have noticed that Spooky is staring at me. Follows my every move. Unnerving. Ate some cheese."

I love stuff like this. Square Zero has something similar--the characters post in the comments section. Which is weird, especially if you've read Schism, the webcomic it's based on. (And which I wish would update. Hasn't in ages, but when it was updating I liked it a lot.) They'll often have these odd, extended arguments with people. I don't know if the author already knows these people, or if they're just random, but either way, it's cool.

Having characters interact directly with the fans of a production is cool. It's the sort of thing that works especially well with webcomics, and other web-based media. The reader space is less formal, and it's easier to get from a webcomic to whatever forum or blog you're using. Not a bad marketing technique, really. Especially when done on a social type site, like the Othar thing is.

But what would be really cool is if the character interaction system was the whole point. Say you had a blog, or a series of blogs, and they interacted with each other and with the audience. There could be some kind of plot, and it could even be set in some world other than mainline Earth, but you'd also have the audience interacting with the characters in more or less the same format that the characters interacted with each other. Be a bit like roleplaying.

I need to get on this.

WoAdWriMo: Best Name Ever

This is a bit late, but-- Worldwide Adventure Writing Month! It's awesome! Tell your friends!

I haven't quite decided that I'm going to do it, on account of having a lot of stuff that is to be happening this month. But, most of it is in the first half, and then I'll have a lot of (hypothetical) free time.

I've done National Novel Writing Month, so part of me says I should do it just on that account. So I can say I've done both, and because it can't be any harder. I hope.

I'm thinking that my somewhat misreading of Keep on the Borderlands might not be a bad place to start. Also, something desert themed. Probably do D&D, or maybe possibly d20 Modern/Future, because I have a decent idea of what works in those systems.

Not that I have any idea how to write an adventure. I've never actually run a published adventure, if you don't count three hours worth of Nightfang Spire which I subsequently abandoned because it was weird and incomprehensible and really not what anyone in the group was looking for. I've run a couple of decent campaigns, but I've never run anything remotely approximating an adventure, because it's unusual for me to work in such episodic terms.

Which is, oddly enough, why I think I should do this WoAdWriMo thing. Because I've never done anything much like it, and I don't think I'd be likely to for any reason other than a defined event like this.

Praise Be To Kord

I want to start a new religion. One where you worship whatever you want, as long as it comes from a roleplaying game, video game, or similar source.

I'd call it "video game polytheism," except that'd rule out Vecna and Pelor and all that gang. And I'd call it "RPG polytheism," except that'd rule out Mar and whatnot.

It'd mostly be an excuse to go "By the nine!" in casual conversation. Not that I need one.

I spend too much time thinking up ways to make people think I'm weird.

Thoughts on Superheroes

I'm thinking about building a superhero universe. Not like I don't already have enough going on, but I'd mostly be working on it in art class. Which has been going weirdly well this year. It's nice to have one area of my life where I have just flat out, easily measured improvement. (Hey, that figure doesn't look nearly as wonky as those older ones.)

I like superheroes. Hate the format they're published in, but I like the concept.

I hate the format for a lot of reasons, but the basic reason is the bizarre time dilation that it produces. Time advances in some ways but not in others. Or it advances at a different speed. You end up with series of issues that cover maybe a couple of weeks of time, but take years to publish. Technology and current events advance faster than plot. Some characters age, some don't, and it causes weird things to happen to their relationships.

But I like superheroes. I like superpowers. They have interesting metaphorical implications; they have interesting "hit you in the face!" implications.

Yet Another Random Project

I'm thinking of writing an adventure, module style, for publication in my school's literary magazine.

I would never do either of these things on their own. I have no need for "adventures." I don't keep my notes in that format, because it's not useful to me as a GM. I could see writing them if I was interested in getting into the game design industry, but I'm not, at the moment.

I'm also, generally, not interested in submitting things to the literary magazine. I have lots of things I could submit, drawings and short stories and even a vaguely novel-like object, but I don't want to submit any of them. My attitude is, basically, if it's good enough to get published, I want to get it published somewhere I'll actually get something for it. An actual magazine, something that at least pays copies and an actual credit, rather than a magazine where my work will be side by side with a bunch of moronic poems.

I also don't like the people who run the literary magazine, for various reasons. They're just not part of my tribe.

Ironically, it's that last point that gives me reason for wanting to submit an adventure. While I have no interest in letting them anywhere near any of my "actual" work, that means something to me, the idea of giving them something hideously geeky and incomprehensible fills me with glee. I like bothering people with my geekiness. I own a green wool cloak, and carry around D&D books in public even when I have no intention of reading them. There is no greater joy than the puzzled stranger.

Thus: the module gambit. Perfect opportunity to share the joy of the weird, and to confuse people who I don't like, without anyone getting angry at me.

I figure they can't legitimately reject it, especially if it's my only submission, because they're always freaking out about how they don't have enough submissions, and pulling stupid stunts to get people to submit. And they're willing to publish horrible poems about cheese, so they have no grounds on subject matter.

I'll write it for d20, probably D&D, because then I can just use the Hypertext SRD as reference for what I can and cannot use. Probably go kitchen sink golden age batshit on the whole project. Everything I can possibly think of that I think is awesome, but most normal people think is irredeemably weird.

Power Mad

I want to run for President, so I can bury "defend earth from the space frogs" in my campaign platform. Then, I'll be able to accuse my opponent of capitulating to the space frogs. Victory will be mine!