Category: RPG

Gamer Migration

As noted in Google Minus, G+ shutting down hurts a large RPG community. Over the last few days, most have settled on a startup called MeWe as a replacement. Couple videos on the topic:

I've been trying it out, and it's not bad, it's a functional forum, except for: No public posts (which they're working on), and the very annoying chat popups (which you can disable from notifying you, but can't hide entirely). I don't know if it's going to survive very long, but they're ideologically motivated to privacy and not being Facebook, which is good.

It's unnerving, though, how fast everyone coalesced on this obscure service. There weren't a lot of other good options, though. Facebook is evil, Diaspora doesn't really support the kind of sharing and consistent timeline people need, old-style forums are, as I noted, run by shitty people.

Some people made really weird suggestions, like Youtube or Twitch, posting everything as a video and comments on it? Oh hell no.

Google Minus

Actually kind of a pain in the ass: G+ has been a somewhat decent forum for OSR gaming discussions. The alternatives now are:

  • Discord. Fine for small groups, in fact one of the best chat/voice systems around. But the public gaming discords are like a game shop full of drunk gamers, with every asshole shouting at you in text AND voice. Fuck those guys.
  • Reddit, which is still full of Nazis, and they've been redesigning the site to make it impossible to read or post text, just browse through meme images. Fuck those guys.
  • Web forums, which are generally run by actual Nazis (rpg dot net) or screaming children, see Discord.

So I guess the conversation part is over, back to isolated gaming blogs, sometimes linking to each other.

As for Google, I mean, it's not like anyone expected privacy posting to G+. It's a fucking spyware program from the spyware company.

Rules for the OSR (Old-School Renaissance)

Housekeeping note: I'm still too busy with programming on the new Perilar, and some other things, to get back to my tabletop and/or online chat games regularly, but I'll be moving all my RPG stuff over to this blog from Mark Rolls Dice, I'd like to have one site to maintain which I own.

So, start with basic principles. How do I run games.

I'm a caveman from the '70s and '80s, so my Old-School is literally old and from school, as noted in Five Games. The Old-School Renaissance is my frozen caveman ass being thawed out to do it again.

There's a bunch of guides to how to do this, but they're kind of bullshit. Matt Finch's Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming is close to my view, and has gameplay dialogue examples which can be read in funny voices, but it goes on too long about irrelevant stuff. Principia Apocrypha and a bunch of other bloviating diatribes just go on forever, I started to nod off, make a little hand-puppet with my hand and flap its mouth up and down.

Here's my OSR principles:

  1. Let the dice fall where they may. ( Knights of the Dinner Table's Law )
  2. Be excellent to each other. ( Bill & Ted's Law, the inverse of Wheaton's Law )
  3. The Referee is always right, but the players can choose to stay or leave.
  4. Rules are just recordings of what we've previously done. We can change them at any time.

Like the Three Laws of Robotics, each principle is tempered by the ones previous: The Referee can override new rules. But, be excellent to each other. But, don't cheat and take away risk.

Five Games (and then some)

The following challenge/meme on Fediverse is interesting:

"If you had to recommend someone play 5 games to really get a feel for you/your tastes, what five would you pick?"

Videogames:

  1. Ultima II (1982)
  2. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
  3. Alternate Reality: The City (Atari 800 version, 1985)
  4. Doom (1993)
  5. Elder Scrolls Online (2014)

Runners Up:

  1. Star Raiders (1979)
  2. Telengard (1982)
  3. Pitfall! (1982)
  4. Omega (1987)
  5. Llamatron (1992)

Tabletop:

  1. Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (ed. Eric Holmes, 1977)
  2. Ogre (1977)
  3. Gamma World (1978)
  4. Tunnels & Trolls (4th-5th Ed, 1977-1979)
  5. Rolemaster (1980)

Runners Up:

  1. Star Fleet Battles (1979)
  2. Champions (1981)
  3. Stormbringer (1st Ed, accept no substitutes, 1981)
  4. Call of Cthulhu (1981)
  5. Kult (1993)