Aquarionics

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It started slowly.

“I will not”, I said, “under any circumstances run an RPG”

And then, with the snowball set rolling, it sort of changed:

“I will not”, I repeated like a mantra, “under any circumstances run an RPG under GURPS”

So I stopped reading the GURPS basic set, and read Snow Crash instead.

“I will not”, I noted, with increasing exactness, “under any circumstances run a GURPS RPG set in a Snow Crash like world with a Metaverse I can put subquests in.”

At this point, almost admitting my doom, I opened a text file and wrote in it all the things I was not, under any circumstances, going to do with this idea. I’m still not going to do it, you understand, it’s just that I’m planning exactly what it is I’m not going to do.

Y’see, I started this RPG thing a while ago. My Aunty Ann returned from the states with a present for the 12 year old me. It was a large box containing a basic D&D manual (Original, TSR D&D. I’ve no idea of the rules edition), a board like something out of a Hasbro game, marked out with squares as a castle, and a series of cardboard figures for playing. Oh, and a full set of dice, which I’ve now lost.

Over the next few years I spend every-so-often trying to convince my friends to give this a go, and they refused. Eventually me, the older of my younger brothers, and his friend actually got to play this game, sat around my desk in my room.

It was fun. The amount of actual Role-playing being done was absolutely minimal (Having absolutely no idea about the game, we moved by the tried and tested method of rolling dice) and we played though the set adventure in a couple of hours. I seem to remember a second session where I tried to make it up as I went along, but that didn’t work. Anyway, we moved on, and what with one thing and another the set didn’t really get used again.

Over the last few years I’ve hung around with a lot of people who do Role Playing, spend several evenings in deep discussion over several jugs of ale over the best way to be evil to players without them stopping having fun, and how to run a game. Then a group of my friends started playing a game and I watched, then the Site they were using to play went offline for weeks without any warning or apology, and I wrote PFD4 in about three days flat. (PFD4 stands for “Point First D4”, proof positive that the set of dice I’ve had since I was 12 isn’t quite as lost as I sometimes assume). Now that game has been put on indefinite hold (GM and Real Life Stuff) I see a Great Void.

I’m not going to go anywhere near this. At all. Under Any Circumstances. I Will Not Run A Game.

Well, not until I have more of it worked out, anyway.

“I’m going to sing the doomed song now…” – Gir.

Interplaying around

Interplay, one of the Big Four independant publishers (Others being EA, Ubisoft & Atari. Gathering doesn’t quite make this list yet) recently shut down Black Isle Studios, creators of most of the best CRPGs of the last few years (This was because most of BIS’s most profitable licences – Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale & Planescape – are owned by Atari (Who once were Inforgrames, who cut a special deal for the remains of Hasbro Interactive, who own Wizards of the Coast, who bought TSR, who own the actual D&D Licences. Remember, Capitalism means there’s lots more options in the market-place, and isn’t that neat?).

They were working on Fallout 3, which was – as the others were – a post-nuclear RPG. They were one of the two companies – the other being Bioware – to rebuild the CRPG genre almost from scratch, and it’s really annoying they’ve been let go like this.

On the other hand:

For some reason, there has been a high amount of speculation about Black Isle Studios and intellectual property surrounding the Fallout license. My only guess is that the source of these rumors must be an employee/employees who recently departed Interplay.

[...]

Accordingly, if Interplay management had closed its most valuable development asset or chosen to abandon one of its most prized intellectual assets, the Company would have made an announcement.

As always, Interplay management is focused on delivering great, profitable games and maximum shareholder value.
A letter from Interplay

The killer is that last sentance, I feel. But anyway, the fact that Interplay have laid off the entire staff of BIS doesn’t mean that BIS is gone, oh no. In the same way that Disney laying off all it’s 2D Animators doesn’t mean that they’ve now given up on animation.

Doesn’t mean anything.

Just an awfully strong hint.

Misc

• AqWiki 0.3 delayed due to an authentication bug, no thanks to the zero people who followed the link on Thursday
• Examine the logo carefully, since that is the last use of the old Aquarionics logo. Two weeks of Other Things, then the new logo debuts.
• All moterists who think that it is appropriate to overtake on the inside, at the approach to a roundabout, at the top of a hill are to report to the bladesman for extremity removal. Even if the person you overtake is a cyclist.
• Starsky & Hutch not a good movie, but is still worth seeing.
• Steve Jackson Games have announced Gurps fourth edition

PFd4-II - The Perils of Supporting Rulesets

On not using licensed stuff

I’ve been asked if PFd4-II is going use any rulesets. The answer is no. Up until today, that was because I don’t really want to make it specific to any ruleset, because it means storing specific information about specific characters – INT, STR, DEX etc – and their equipment and what’s being worn and everything, and all of this has to be rewritten completely for every different ruleset.

Sod that for a game of tactical warfare.

My other stated reason for this was that I doubted that the various producers of rulesets would be terribly happy about an application that allowed you to play without the core rules books. I was then reminded that the D20 system is released under the OGL which might allow me to do this.

I checked the FAQs – it’s too early in the decade to wade though legal documents – and discovered:

Q: So what kinds of programs can I make with the OGL?
A: Anything. Character generators are popular, as are programs that help GMs keep track of their adventure. Random treasure generators are also fun.

Q: So I could make a game?
A: Sure. Remember though, you cannot use any Product Identity with the OGL or claim compatibility with anything. So you can’t say your game is a d20 System game or uses D&D rules or call it ‘Elminster’s Undermountain Crawl’.

Yay cool, I can use the rules to make a game. Except, hang on a second:

Q: Why can’t I use those things in my program?
A: No d20 System Product can include rules for character creation or applying experience. In exchange for using the d20 logo you are prohibited from making a product that replaces the core rulebooks. Covered Products supplement the core rulebooks; they may not replace them. That is why all Covered Products must state that they require the use of the core rules.

So, I can make a game with the D20 ruleset, but I can’t actually use the phrase “D20” to describe it. Therefore I’m not allowed to say “PFd4-II supports D20!” even if it does.

In fact, on top of this:

Q: What is different if I use the d20 System License?
A: [...] This includes the obvious examples of attacking in combat, saving throws, and skill checks, but also includes dice rolling for character ability scores and hit points and rolling for damage. Why? Because in the d20 System a higher number is almost always better. Rolling an 18 for strength is obviously a preferable outcome to rolling a 3. In any circumstance where one outcome is quantifiably better than another is considered by Wizards to be an indication of success or failure; the software cannot perform these kinds of operations without breaching the license.

This means if I want to use the D20 name, I can’t actually say “You: 19, Enemy: 5, You hit” unless I pay the license fee because that’s how D20 works, but if I didn’t say it was D20, I could show the working.

So that’s the other reason I’m staying clear of labeled rulesets, they make my brane hurtz.

Vampire: The Maskerade: Bloodlines. Plus: Python

(Too much punctuation in one title, perhaps?)

Aquarion returns from playing Bloodlines
Mandy_Away: good?
Aquarion: Sort of
Aquarion: The story is well done, the characters are very well done, and I'm enjoying it.
Aquarion: And it uses the HL2 engine, so it looks cool
Aquarion: OTOH, it runs like a dog (Even though HL2 - which is far more visually complicated - glides)
Aquarion: and there are occasional scripting glitches which are annoying.
Aquarion: (Like a bad-guy who crashes though the door, gun at the ready, and then stands up and still for a while because I'm hiding behind a box and he can't see me. Which just looks silly)
Aquarion: Oh, and the combat system is a bitch, but that may be because it tends to sink the frame-rate though the floor.
Aquarion: OTOH, I've been playing it for about six or so hours, apparently, which is a bit of a shock. So it must be bearable :-)

Talking of scripting, though, here is an example of Bloodlines' scripting:

## after the masquerade pop-up in the chopshop office
def OnMasqueradeEnd():
    if IsClan(FindPlayer(), "Nosferatu"):
        popup = Find("popup_24")
        popup.OpenWindow()
    else:
        popup = Find("popup_15")
        popup.OpenWindow()

    trig = Find("trig_popup_masquerade")
    trig.Enable()

Yup, Bloodlines' scripting is pure, 100% unadulterated Python code, so if it doesn't work, I can at least try to fix it...

Good Nights

I have, after close to three years of false starts, givings up, and save-game-destroying-hardware-crashes, Just completed the Original Campaign module for Neverwinter Nights.

Woo.

(Now I’ve just got the expansion packs, Bioware Premium Modules and top Fandom Modules to complete, and I’ll have completed all that’s worth completing in the NWN series… Just in time for Neverwinter Nights 2. Sylvain Jae, dual-KATANA! wielding Elven Fighter Hero for hire, fights on.)

(dual KATANA!s? Yeah, I know. A long running joke between me and LoneCat is the tendancy of first-time D&D role-players to choose a KATANA! as their first weapon. Thousands of Magic KATANA!, each of which has been “folded a MILLION times” and is the “SHARPST BLADE KNOWN TO M@N!”, so when I got the option of giving Sylvain dual KATANA!s, I failed to resist.

Sylvain Jae is elven, with long hair that covers his pointy ears. This is because he doesn’t have pointy ears, due to the fact that he wields dual KATANA!s and wasn’t always quite as good at this is as he is now.)

(Yes, the exclaimation point and capitalisation of KATANA! is really necessary.)

City of Fools

A couple of expositiony things to start with. The following takes place in City of Heroes, which has been taking up my free time for the last six months or so, give or take the three months when I didn’t play it because I didn’t think I had time.

I’ve created a new character, Pixelin. Pixelin’s biography:

Pixelin used to work happily at Santa’s grotto up in the North Pole, but one day an accident with an Embiggening Ray made him too tall to work in HQ (Pixelin is almost five feet tall). He was given a decent severance package, and allowed to keep his powers (Psychokinetics, to lift presents, and Mind powers, to tell if you have been naughty or nice). Lacking anything better to do, he’s come to Paragon city to fight crime, leaving a small lump of coal with every criminal he arrests. In his spare time he bitches about how he can’t find decent suits his size.

In game, Pixelin is a Controller of Natural origin. (COH divides heroes into Archtypes (Blaster, Scrapper, Tanker, Defender, Controller) of different Origins (Natural, Mutant, Magic etc.). Tankers are huge with lots of health doing moderate amounts of damage per attack. The Incredible Hulk, for example, is a Tanker. Scrappers have not quite so much health, but do more damage and have a “Regenerative powers” option. Wolverine is a Scrapper. Controllers can be felled by a tree falling 100 metres away, but can cause their enemies to attack each other, fall asleep, lift heavy objects (Enemies, for example) high in the air and then drop them. Professor Xavier is a Controller. So is Pixelin).

At the moment, Pixelin is Level 8. (Max is 50, I cleared 1-6 in about two to three hours. Raynebow is about L17) and I wanted to do some missions to clear some debt (When you die, you get Debt. Thereafter every point of XP you gain goes half to the debt and half to the level bar. Debt Bad) (Oh, Missions. At any point you have two options, you can either wander around the city beating up things, or you can get missions from your contacts and go beat up specific things). I got a couple of blasters and a tanker, and we went to one of the Blaster’s missions in the sewers.

We went in. We were slaughtered to a man. We respawned and went back. We had a Plan. Our tanker and one blaster went AFK for a while (Food break, smoke break, something like that), leaving our other blaster and me. Other blaster leaps into the nearest group of enemies, draws them back to us (Other two are still AFK), almost dies and then leaps out of the mission before she can. Me, being a controller, isn’t quite so lucky. Whilst I get two of them fighting each other, the other five gang up on me. Tanker and Blaster, not having people behind them, aren’t so lucky. I run, but I just die tired. I quit out. Life’s too short to play with morons.

I’ll go back in as Raynebow in a bit. Higher level players tend to be a lot more clueful, and at least Rayne can defend himself.

Attachments

• Pixelin

New Sims Thing

I cough, I splutter, I lay in bed all day.
I have Plague, I am dead, all people keep away.

Sim Developer

The Artists Who Would Be Known As Maxis Had They Not Been Absorbed Wholesale Into The Electronic Arts Brand From Which No Personality Can Ever Be Allowed To Escape (TAWWBKAMHTNBAWITEABFWNPCEBATE, for short) have announced, officially, that the next Sims 2 Expansion Pack will be Open For Business, where your Sims can run shops.

This brand new, suprise announcement comes three weeks after they started releasing screenshots and videos, previews and interviews, hints and explainations. Which leads to the question: Who the hell are they annouceing it to?

Oh No! Not More Zombies!

Zombies 5 is being shipped this week, causing players up and down the universe to get planning permission for a new great hall to lay the board out in.

Steamy

Interestingly, Darwinia and Rag Doll Kung Fu, both games that find themselves on the difficult end of the classification scale, have both made their way onto Steam (Which, for the record, I like. I like the fact that it means I don’t need to find my CDs to play Opposing Force again, I like that it patches things quietly, though I could live without it always being running, though I can fix that).

Second Life

The idea of Second Life appeals to me, though the program never has, exactly. Each time I try it, I see massive possibilities and wonderful things being done within a framework that makes my brain hurt (It does really cool things, like progressivly more detailed textures as it has time to load them up, and then is still slow and unwieldy). Sure it makes complicated things easy, but in doing so it seems everything simple is more difficult than it needs to be. And what’s with the fixed surname thing? Argh. I’m Jascain Switchblade on it, if anyone cares.

Other things

And there was… er… something else. Now, what was it?

Woooo Woooo

Sliding stealthily from the planes of unexistance back into the happy joy-filled world that we call reality. This is Radio Free Aquarionics. Hi there.

You may have noticed Aquarionics vanished for a little while. DNS hicup caused by the freak coincidence of a badly made gin and tonic, a small disposable sink and about four bottles of pure white sand.

Don’t ask, you really don’t want to know.

Livejournal syndicated readers? Don’t worry your pretty little heads about it. It was a complicated thing.

Bloglines syndicated readers? That was why we got a little red exclaimation point for a little while.

So, what has happened since we went off air? Well, we’re nearly nuking Iran, which isn’t good, but on the other hand we had a sucessful meet in Cambridge, where there was curry, geekery and stuff.

Ah, Cambridge. How I miss living in Cambridge. Land of Bridges, Cams, Kams, Reality Checkpoints, CB1…

And I was convinced to try something new. A New, Exciting thing. All my friends were trying it, and the first one was free, apparently, but I said “No”, for I am true and knew it would end up putting me on a slippery slope.

“But it’s fun” they claimed, their arms drifting around me, “And loads of people you know already do it.”

“And”, they added, knowing my weak points as they do so often, “You’ll have an excuse to go to Cambridge more often.”

So yeah, I’m going to be trying this LARP thing.

I am a weak, weak man.

Attachments

• Podcast of today's entry

GameCamp London 2008

I went to Gamecamp. It’s becoming quite common in reports of this event to wax lyrical about the location for a little while first, so I’ll do that. It was held at 3Rooms (I’m sixth from the left in that photo), which is a PR venue belonging to Sony’s PlayStation division. Effectively, it’s where they take journalists to demo new products.

It’s pretty.

Level 1 is white. It’s a large loft-style space, split into areas with screens and curtains and shelves, with textures and soft furnishings everywhere, bright splashes of colour, Huge Sony Bravia TVs everywhere (all with PS3s attached) sunken sofas, shelves full of interesting-looking tat, bright and airy and absolutely glorious.

Level 2 is black. It’s a dark bar with mirrored surfaces and a (non-alcoholic) bar, with a raised area surrounded by sofas and a coffee table with board games. There are huge jars of Jelly-Belly scattered around, and a large projection screen with a PS3 attached.

Level 3 is green. It’s is a roof garden with views over central London, wooden tables and chairs, sofas and plants. Relaxing and bright.

The entire building is exactly where I would live if I didn’t have limitations of money. I am not in any way kidding, it’s wonderful, and designed specifically for me.

Enough about the venue.

Reports about the event are around from mssrs Gillen and Curran, and are entirely accurate and worthwhile. It was an “Unconference” style thing, in the style of Foo & BarCamp and other such events. I ended up going to a session on “Indy tabletop RPG games are flourishing. We’re not competing with computer games. Really. We mean it. See? They don’t scare us with their billion dollar budgets. Not even a little” and another on how to play a russian card game called Durak. After that I kind of got distracted by Echochrome and Rock Band. I went to a session on “The Revolution” in which under-21 gamers got shot, the Wii didn’t, and mandatory installs did. The sessions I did go to were fun, and though them I’ve become more interested in indy roleplaying games – since that was the aim of my first session, that’s probably a good thing – including Dogs In The Vineyard, a game about Mormon cowboys. I should set one of these up at some point. Also there was the inventor of the game Baron Munchausen, which various people in Cambridge were playing while I was Maelfrothing a couple of weeks back. The entire event was wonderful, and I look forward to the next.

The (video) games that I played:

Echochrome, upon which I’ve splattered forth fanboyism before is quite good, but doesn’t live up to the idea. The controls are a little slow – often you’ll fail a level because you simply can’t rotate the screen fast enough – and imperfect (Sometimes you’ll connect up a ledge but it doesn’t connect because it needed to be connected at the edge 90^o instead). It may have been that the demo came from early code, though. Either way, since I have neither a PS3 or a PSP, it’s all distinctly academic.

Rock Band Rocks. There is little more I have to say. I spent more time on guitar than anything else, simply because there were two of them. Drumming is hard, singing is easy, YMMV. Guitar is the most polished of the experiences, fairly obviously, but the ability to declare both players as lead guitar fails on 90% of the library as it simply randomly assigns one to be the bass line if it only has one guitar track. I sang Creep, by Radiohead. I do that a lot.

GTA4 also rocks, but you possibly don’t need me to tell you that bit.