I don't understand how fighters can be "boring"? They're up front fighting, which is the most exciting role for most people. They can be mechanically simple, but of course you role-play and make up your actions to be interesting.
And what I'm seeing as arguments from the "other side" is they only mean in tactical wargames without role-playing. As if they can't do anything that isn't listed as a specific rule and skill. That's not what RPGs are for!
A Fighter should be role-playing during fights, as players should at all times. Not looking at your dice, stats, feats, skills, magic powers, equipment. BE THERE. BE Ichi the Bushi, or whatever you named your "generic Level 1 Fighter". Describe what you're doing. Run up stairs to get a height advantage (or be able to fight a giant above the knees), or swing on a chandelier, or kick furniture at someone, or throw dirt, tactically de-advance into an ambush, etc. If you're fencing, you compare styles, observe the enemy's preferred moves, do a riposte against that. Don't be boring.
Then the Referee tells you what happens; that might involve your usual attack roll with a bonus, more damage, more defense, or just narrate what happens.
Non-fighters can do those things, too, but they mostly miss against any competent foe, and can't take a hit back, so it's fairly pointless. How often does a Thief get in position to get their backstab bonus & damage, the one mechanical chance they have to be effective in combat? Basically never. If they do, they die the next round because they stood up in melee.
Magic items also differentiate them. Only Fighters and Thieves can use most magic weapons, and in OD&D even the most simplistic +1 magic sword makes a pig farmer into a hero, and allows fighting ghosts and werewolves! And you'd never waste a sword on a Thief who can't hit.
You don't need giant stacks of rules & mechanics to be interesting! Even my SIX WORD RPG! is all you need, and your fighter will be effective if you role-play effectively.
As always, read Matt Finch's Primer, he says almost exactly what I'd say (esp. the Ninja example & Abstract Combat-Fu):
Flipboard embraces Mastodon: subhead "The news reading app is going all in on the Fediverse." so I don't have to say "don't forget fediverse"!
Wow. Early days of the iPad, Flipboard was the best news-reading app for a while. My 2010-11-11 review:
Perhaps the best app isn't a newspaper at all, though. Flipboard is an aggregator for items from Twitter accounts and lists, your own or various public ones. Since many blog writers now tweet about every new entry, they all show up in Flipboard. Navigation is trivially easy and obvious, and little space is wasted on anything but information.
I'm not entirely pleased by how it shows articles, though: You see the first few paragraphs, then a link to the original site, so they can collect their ad revenue. While I sympathize with the need for ads, I just want everything collected. However, it does have a "Read Later" action which sends an article to Instapaper, the ONLY one of these newspaper apps which does.
Still, I think this is pretty close to the ideal for a newspaper. If it had RSS support, and a clearer separation of old from new content, I'd be happy to junk all of the "newspapers" and RSS readers I use.
It did later get RSS, and for years it replaced newspapers. They kind of bit-rotted, and my use of social media changed, so I lost touch with them.
So today's announcement's a "OH YEAH, THOSE GUYS". They still had my old login but my password's gone, recovered & set a real password, and I'm back in. Looks just like it always did. Remove some junk sources, and it's a pretty normal newspaper again.
… There's an option to connect my Mastodon account, but right now it fails at Authorize! So far Mastodon doesn't show up in hashtag searches and such. They have their own Masto server at flipboard.social but I don't need that.
Troll (2022): Roar Uthaug, Norwegian director of generally mediocre fantasies, a disaster movie, a comedy-ish cop show, and the bad remake Tomb Raider, has turned in his kaiju movie! And… it's much much better than I expected. It's fairly linear, dumb miners wake up a massive mountain Troll, literally the King of Edvar Grieg's song In the Hall of the Mountain King as the use of a couple versions of the music and Dovrefjell location indicate. Paleontologist Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is scooped up as a civilian expert, and she coincidentally has the most adorably insane father (Gard B. Eidsvold) who taught her about Trolls. The government is in total denial about the nature of the beast, and only considers military action, except for one wacky plan. Nerd heroes like Siggi the very cute military hacker (Karoline Viktoria Sletteng Garvang), and friendly soldier (Mads Sjøgård Pettersen) figure out the solution half-assed, lot of running around antics and people dying underfoot, world is saved.
The romance subplot I expected doesn't go anywhere, Roar really misses a lot of conventional story beats, and often leaves us staring at conference or mess hall tables. The father is great, he's like a Dwarf driven mad by knowledge, and eventually we find out just how mad he has reason to be. The Troll itself is sad and pining for the fjords, with again really good motivation and mythical backstory. Hoo-wa soldiers do their jobs despite obvious court-martial ignoring of orders.
Moral of the story: Don't be a Christian, because Trolls can smell Christian blood.
Fluff, but a pretty good kaiju movie.
★★★★☆
Trollhunter (2010): By André Øvredal, who also made The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Halfway between Blair Witch and X-Files, student filmmakers follow around a creepy man (Otto Jespersen) in a van, who turns out to be a professional Troll hunter, learn horrible realities their government does not want them to know.
The Trolls, plural, here are managed wildlife, with fairly wide-scale knowledge and consequences in the Norwegian government. Much more thought has been put into how they live and function, and each one has its own style. No boring office work here, just dark woods with something much worse than bears.
Cheaply made, and really the kids are all kind of indistinguishable, but the writing, plot, and cinema verité style carry it.
Moral of the story: Don't be a Christian, because Trolls can smell Christian blood.
★★★★½
Stand Still Stay Silent aka SSSS (webcomic): wiki Trolls here are not giant monsters, but a plague that infects any animal life. Very small animals keep some original form and maybe a monster personality, but can be eaten by cats, which are immune to the plague; larger animals like people just turn into horrible gribbly masses of tentacles and parts, Shoggoths basically. Scandinavian old-timey pagan religion is the only real weapon against the Trolls.
90 years after the apocalypse, a crew of immune soldiers, psychic pagan wizards, cat, and a straggler or two get in a van and go scouting the old city. It's just non-stop horrors, with occasional beauty of nature (but inherently violent, evil nature) reclaiming civilization. Just a charming comic. Zero punches are pulled.
The "second adventure" of the webcomic contradicts this with tainted bears that have personalities, the main characters lose their personalities, and then COVID happened, the author went insane and became a Christian with apocalyptic Mark of the Beast paranoia "oh no they're gonna ban MY BIBLE" (says Christians just before banning every book except their Bible), and stopped the comic with Christianity saving everyone even tho it was explicitly useless nonsense before.
Moral of the story: Don't be a Christian, because Christians are Trolls.
★★★★☆ for the first adventure, ☆☆☆☆☆ for the second.
BONUS:
Trollies Radio Show Sing-A-Long (1992): This was on FORGOTTEN_VCR the other day, and it is nightmarish. Ripoff "troll" doll puppets sing bad covers of pop rock songs. The DJ Trollie [sic] isn't the worst thing ever, and the saxophone rock crab is great, amazing, but everything else is 30 minutes of child entertainment hell. Man has sinned against all the gods and this is our punishment.
Moral of the story: Don't have ears, because the Trollies will kill you with them.
★☆☆☆☆ yes is actually preferable to SSSS adventure 2.
I've so far on iOS bought "Myst (Legacy) for Mobile", "Riven (Legacy) for Mobile", "The Manhole: Masterpiece", and "realMyst" [sic capitalization]. On Mac, I played the original CDROM Mac Classic Myst, Riven, URU, and "realMyst Masterpiece" [sic capitalization], Obduction off Steam. Cyan got their pound o' flesh.
Myst (Legacy) & Riven (Legacy) has screen-by-screen tapping, it's extremely obscure what's going to happen when you do, and the low-rez screens compressed into the teeny OG iPhone size aren't great. But it's also the only version that has Riven! And it's basically playable. These are fine. Adequate. ★★★☆☆
The Manhole is super weird. It's for kids ("V is for VOID"), but you'll like it. Go experience it, it's $1.99 and maybe the best if most amateur, almost outsider art thing Cyan's ever done. You think Myst is perplexing, Manhole is 100x weirder and harder to navigate. ★★★★½ (down ½ for the tiny window & unlabelled tap areas; the content is ★★★★★)
realMyst has a pretty reasonable modern interface. You'll want to "invert look" (I just started it up for a screenshot, and couldn't get up the stairs until I flicked that switch). The graphics are fine for an early-00s 3D game, and honestly you don't need more than that. I'm not going to re-solve it, but I did so without cheats last time (sweet Cthulhu I hate the subway puzzle, and should've cheated that). ★★★★☆
Myst Mobile now, needs a pretty modern iPad, my Air works fine but got very hot. The graphics textures & grass and such are much better, early '10s quality but still not peak AAA quality. I can get better views from MineTest with shaders. I think realMyst has better lighting, or at least more consistent. Indoors in Myst Mobile I often couldn't see much of anything, at the same brightness settings that were usable in realMyst.
I picked the "randomize puzzles" option, and sure enough the puzzles are different from standard, but all solved the same way as OG, go read books and look up values in the library, planetarium, click buttons and do a little math, etc.
Movement is with a soft joystick, and drag the screen to rotate camera. realMyst's movement was much better.
The problem is the controls are all over the place. Doors are still sliders, rather than swinging open; 3D budget doesn't go that far, I guess. Some buttons you just tap (there's a new button to open the imager cave). Some switches you tap and they flip to the opposite state, some you have to pull all the way into position. Doors you tap on the handle… sometimes that works. The log cabin door was difficult to tap on, which you need to do at speed to reach SPOILER REDACTED. Knobs don't turn linearly, but sort of randomly spinning to a new value as you move your finger. The clock tower puzzle is an unbelievable pain in the ass, getting the levers to move all the way down and not release is very fussy, I bet most new players cannot get them to work. I hate literally every control that isn't a button.
The letter from Atrus to Catherine is missing, so you have no idea what the switches are for. If you know, the new CGI heads for Atrus, Cirrus, Achenar are super cheesy and plastic, like bobbleheads floating in space.
They have a camera, and as usual it only makes square, kinda shitty Polaroid photos even tho Polaroid's been dead for 20 years, but there's no journal, and they don't save in order!!! THE FUCK. I actually miss the shitty grainy, wrong-gamma, square photos & journal in URU's KI system.
They only give you access to the island first. So I opened all the Ages, and… can't go to them. It's $9.99 IAP, soon going up to $14.99. If you don't own any version of Myst, that's a good deal; if you've bought a new one every decade or so for the last 30 years, it's kind of bullshit, and I'm probably not inclined to pay for it.
★★★½☆
What I want is for them to remake Riven, maybe make peace with Ubisoft and remake Exile, Revelations, End of Ages, and URU? There's a fan-made "real URU" in progress, so at least that'll be playable again soon. Instead Cyan has Skyrim Disease, every new platform needs a new adaptation, but they never move forward. (Yes I've played Obduction; pain in the ass most tedious train simulator ever).
Screenshots are SPOILERS! (Soylent Green is PEOPLE!)
View (compare with RealMyst)
Island almost unlocked
I have no idea which pattern it is now
Fixed the clock tower
Atrus goofy floating bobblehead
View out the tower
CLUES. I misread one and had to go back.
Powering up
Learn to play piano
Raise the Titanic
Worst pirate you've ever heard of… but you HAVE heard of me!
So I like to watch videos of the games I play; maybe learn something, maybe just recognize "oh, I do that too". Parasocial but shared-ish experience.
The problem with a free, open source, often Linux-based game is, nobody has working sound. And they really don't have working mics on their broken dumpster-dived Thinkpads, or video editing software. So the MineTest youstubes are mostly divided into:
No audio, sub-5-minute, incoherent flailing around.
[CRACKLE DIGITAL SCREAM] FREE FRAPS quality audio/video, mostly children on PVP servers, and I like none of those things.
Germans. And I'm not usually one to pick on anyone's appearance, but… maybe leave the selfie cam off if you fill 90% of the view. From across the room.
Handful of good youstubers; some are non-English but I can muddle thru Spanish, a few words of Portuguese, or French.
There was another one, professionally done but rather boring where he just dug tunnels in his mine, laid down glass slab floors, and rarely came up to add to a kinda artsy tower, 100+ episodes… and it's gone. He's vanished, taken down his videos? And I'm drawing a blank on his name now so I can't even find out what happened.
If you have other suggestions, that are not 1-3, comment/tell me on fedi.
A summary of this #OGL thing I've been angry about on fediverse all week/month, and how it affects my plans.
So, Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro had been working on their "One D&D"/6E playtest/previews, which has been previously held in only moderate contempt here. And then they decided to update the license.
Since 2000, we've had the Open Game License (OGL) 1.0a, which lets you reuse anything else put under it, like the System Reference Document (SRD) of D&D 3.0; I used that in my Stone Halls & Serpent Men game, mainly to copy spells & monsters. This has allowed a massive ecosystem of vaguely-D&D-ish games to flourish, as well as used for very not-D&D games like Legend and OpenQuest, and Cepheus Engine.
2022-12-21, WotC announced a new OGL 1.1, with onerous financial terms on big earners, and no creative use outside books & ebooks. Nobody liked this, but we could keep using the 1.0a license, right? I started making plans to migrate off their SRD, but otherwise not super concerned. Future of OGL games is in some peril.
Saturday 2023-01-07, Basic Fantasy RPG started rewriting their books to get out from under the OGL, and go full CC-BY-SA. This is a pretty drastic solution, but legally the safest. It looks to me like BFRPG might be the new post-WotC "core OSR book".
Monday, the actual license was leaked, and it's a clusterfuck.
Registering with WotC, revocation of 1.0a licenses, WotC gets to moral-police you and shut down anything they don't like; screwed if you like weird horror, sex, drugs, or violence in your games.
The claim they can revoke the 1.0a license is the rough part. The original license was meant to be irrevokable, but that wasn't in the licenses it copied from (GPL, etc.), so it doesn't say that.
the money-grubbing pomposity of Hasbro and WotC trying to squeeze third-party produces to death — don't they make enough already? Could their insipid releases be the cause of their reduced revenues, or is it those nasty little third-party guys that have kept the hobby alive and growing? The new OGL 1.1.
Ryan Dancey, formerly of WotC and creator of the OGL, said:
Yeah my public opinion is that Hasbro does not have the power to deauthorize a version of the OGL. If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license. I am on record numerous places in email and blogs and interviews saying that the license could never be revoked.
Then WotC cancelled their livestream, while an angry mob gathered on Roll for Combat's livestream. Yes, Dr Frankenstein, the villagers are coming for you and your monster.
Paizo does not believe that the OGL 1.0a can be “deauthorized,” ever. While we are prepared to argue that point in a court of law if need be, we don’t want to have to do that, and we know that many of our fellow publishers are not in a position to do so.
We have no interest whatsoever in Wizards’ new OGL. Instead, we have a plan that we believe will irrevocably and unquestionably keep alive the spirit of the Open Game License. …
In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Legendary Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group. …
We’ll be there at your side. You can count on us not to go back on our word.
I'm slightly disappointed their promo image is their dumb Human Fighter "iconic" leading the charge, and not an Orc.
WELL THEN
So my retroclone is toast. I'd have to scrub a lot of monster & spell text to get rid of the SRD, and that's being done better by BFRPG. I can package some of what I wrote as a sourcebook for that. It's B/X-ish, not Holmes, but I'm adaptable, and I can fix some of the tone by making new species-as-class combinations and minor rules tweaks. Might be a good zine type thing.
My roguelike is based on my retroclone, but it's mostly naming issues, easily fixed. Fucking Hasbro claiming OGL doesn't cover videogames, I'll show them a pantomime.
I toyed with shifting to d100 and I can borrow more from OpenQuest than Legend and be legally safer, but I dunno if that's useful to anyone. Just play OpenQuest, delete all the divine & shaman nonsense, and throw 50% more zombies at everyone, and it's just like I'd done it!
My sword & planet game I'll keep working on, and either release as CC-BY-SA, or ORC, depending on how that looks.
However, it’s clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1.
[canned Big Bang Theory laff trak, meme face of Sheldon looking cross but robotic]
It has become clear that it is no longer possible to fully achieve all three goals while still staying true to our principles. So, here is what we are doing.
[paraphrasing]
Removing our principles.
Doubling down on extortion over non-book products and anything Pat Pulling would've objected to.
Especially with people doing the #dungeon23 challenge, it may be helpful for quickly drawing a dungeon, roguelike style.
I'm pondering doing a full wilderness + dungeon adventure again sometime soon, and I'll likely use Tilemap for it, but I sure won't be doing a room a day or anything like that!
OK, thinking about projects time, what I've done with my 3-year summer vacation (extended, 2022 edition).
Scheme for local problems, sysadmin tasks, just general dorking around on the computer: ?, best decision I've made in some time. In case it's not clear, Chez Scheme and Thunderchez.
Schemers in general are annoying but less annoying than LISPers, so if the LISP community pissed you off, Scheme's might be 50% less toxic. I still have to block some people in IRC because they won't STFU or tolerate anyone Doing Things in Unapproved Manner. You know what would be amazing? A language as technically awesome as Scheme, with Python's friendly community. Python the language is trash, tho.
Haunted Dungeon, Scheme roguelike. Needs at most weeks of work, and then I can take a day and grind out binaries for various platforms (UUUUuuuugh Windows & Linux suck so much to interact with; Mac does for different reasons), ship it. It ballooned past my original tiny roguelike design long ago, but it's still not that big.
Multiple small Scheme programs & games, once I do that ship day I may just make a bunch of binaries. None of these are amazing but some are nice. Don't ask a developer to praise their own software, you know?
New Perilar CRPG, also Scheme. I have this at like 60% functionality, map generation's beautiful, and fuck-all for story, it's fine, same shipping problems, so much I need to think about if I get it to a playable state. Or it may be a learning experience.
Little Atari 8-bit game. Dungeon crawler with no purpose but it's cute, was meant to be a ZX SpecNext game but that's still not shipped after 2 years so… It's now at like 30% done, but I have some vision for it.
Open world action-adventure game I've got a bit of design for (in my paper sketchpad! Not even on the computer!), it could either be Scheme or Atari 8-bit or whatever. I don't actually know of anything like this design, tho original Zelda & Metroid are the parents (I clearly don't understand genetics) of all such games. Needs so much mapping & writing before I even start, but all the technical side is easy for me.
Currently Atari stuff's in TurboBASIC-XL which is less bad than you'd think, but still really sucks compared to having a modern language; both Pascals and C's I have access to are less useful. I've been borderline to making a new language that compiles to 6502 ASM, but I know I'm lazy at tools-to-make-tools support.
One nice part with Atari 8-bits is, shipping is easy. Put it in an ATR file, with an Atari emulator as seen on archive.org. One click, any browser shows it. Down side is, can't really charge money for this. Beg for patreon support; which I need to be better about giving you goodies in return for your cash, my fine patrons. Shall I write thee a sonnet?
Update & reupload my iPhone stuff. Should I even bother with Castles? I liked the underlying game but the UI is unbelievably shit, I had no idea what I was doing and limited by iPhone 1 screen/UI constraints. But Perilar, and some utility stuff, and maybe patch Brigand to be paid-up-front instead of IAP and say "this is what you could've had!". And I have my 3D game which never got shipped, just shown as demos. Worth spending some time on this and then never looking at it again.
Tabletop RPGs. Fuck this third goddamned plague year, which has made playing & playtesting RPGs just a nightmare. Every online group I try flakes out so fast they may be composed entirely of microscopic black holes. So I have my "original dungeon game" retroclone, and my much nicer sword & planet game, and a couple tiny gamelets. And with Hasbro's sabre-rattling at the OGL and "One D&D", I'm inclined to just ship only the sword & planet game, and turn the rest into world books for it. But I'd like to test it more than once with other Humans and also not get infected with plague. So. State of that world is uncertain.
