The Little Boys of Summer: Coda

So, we thought the Cabin Boy's baseball season was done last week. As it turns out, there was much more yet to come.

Last fall the Cabin Boy was invited to play on a travel ball team, pulled together by a couple of dads from his rec league. They played eight or nine tournaments over the winter, amassing a sub-.500 record but gaining phenomenal experience playing at a much higher level of competition than their regular rec league games. It really showed when ten of the thirteen boys drafted for the All Star squad came from the travel ball team.

Just before they headed to their All Star World Series last week, the travel team manager asked the families if they wanted the boys to play in a travel ball World Series as well; it would be the boys' last chance to play in a 6U tournament together, and the tournament offered a really special prize to the winners: a custom World Series ring for each boy on the team.

I'm sure by now you know where this is going.

The boys went on a 6-0 run, including playing their last four games over the course of eight hours on Sunday, and won their travel ball World Series. Perhaps the sweetest victory of those four games was the semi-final, when the boys beat dominated the best 6U travel team in southern California by ten runs.

All of the boys played their hearts and their guts out. As parents we were exhausted, and none of us had to swing a bat or run the bases or field a ball. The boys played through heat and through bumps and bruises; they kept the pedal down when they were ahead and battled back - in four different games - when they were behind. They played their game, and they showed - without contestation - they can play with anyone.

And their rings will be ordered this week.

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The Buccaneer is Out Again

The Cabin Girl has her dance recital - four performances - the Cabin Boy has his last All Star tournament - six games to win the whole thing - and the Captain's Mother is in town; needless to say, blogging goes on the back burner.

Depending on how the boys do, I'll be back by next Wednesday at the latest.

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The Little Boys of Summer

The Cabin Boy's All Star team won their district championship in dramatic fashion, coming from behind twice to win their final game and complete a 4-0 run through the tournament. The championship earns them a berth in the Southern California 6U 'World Series' later this month.

I'd say I'm proud of the Cabin Boy, but I'm always proud of him, and more importantly, it's inadequate to describe what I'm feeling. The first time he put on his uniform two years ago, he said, "I want to be a big hitter." Later he wanted to hit a home run, and to make All Stars. He set those goals for himself, and achieved them all, and pride doesn't even begin to cover the joy and excitement and awe in my heart today.

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A World Lit Only By Fire

So, there I was, busily typing away at a blog post on Tuesday morning, when the power abruptly went out.

And stayed out for the next twenty-two hours.

A main line blew up, and a four-block radius didn't have electricity while SCE crews worked through the night to fix it. They got it back on late yesterday morning, then it was off again for about four hours late last night while they made some additional repairs.

Our electrical supply is always a little dicey; we get blackouts pretty consistently with the first big rain every winter, but they are usually just long enough to be annoying. This one was prolonged enough that we loaded up the fridge with bags of ice to keep dairy products from turning, and necessitated some cooking of now-defrosted meat from the freezer once the power was back on the next day.

For the kids it was an adventure, of course. Coming home after the Cabin Boy's baseball game and the Cabin Girl's dance rehearsal, we lit candles and dug out our battery-powered lanterns - we live in earthquake country, so this stuff's always close at hand - so they could take their baths and get ready for bed.

Sitting in the candle-lit living room after the kids were down, I was reminded how quiet it gets when the power's down. The modem was out, so there was no wifi for the laptops or the iPad, and no television, of course. I could've dug out the portable DVD player or one of the iPods, but the stillness was a treat; it reminded me of my days as a park ranger in Mineral King, living in a barracks with propane lights and refrigerator, but nothing electrical that wasn't powered by batteries.

I soaked in the sensation of the room, of the constant motion of the shadows from the flickering candles, the strong scent of the burning wax, of the wavering waft of smoke from one candle that guttered out. I peeked outside and saw similar scenes in my neighbors' windows.

Without the distractions of our various media devices, my wife and I sat and talked for a solid hour. After she went to bad, I sat and read for awhile - by battery lantern, as my eyes aren't up to reading by candlelight.

Before electric lights and gas-lamps, the world was filled with shadows. Those big crystal chandeliers designed to suffuse a room with light were expensive and necessarily rare, and for most people it was the tiny light of candles and lamps that imperfectly kept back the darkness.

It was a good reminder that, when running a roleplaying game, the night is so much darker and quieter than the world we know. It would be hard to recognize friend from foe until they're close enough to manifest bad intention, and mistaken identity - or deliberate deception - is more likely in the shadows.

It's also a reminder of how people entertained themselves; they sang and told stories and gathered with friends. In the darkness, I considered calling a friend to see if he wanted to meet me at our local pub; remember, there's a reason 'you all begin in a tavern' makes perfect sense in many game-worlds.

For the Cabin Boy and Cabin Girl, the blackout was an adventure; for me, it was a reminder of what my world of adventure is really like.

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A Brief Hiatus

Despite my best efforts to sit down and write, I'm afraid other responsibilities are eating away my time for blogging at the moment. This spring is markedly different from last year: I'm an assistant coach for two baseball teams, my son's rec league team and his travel team, plus running a extra workout each week for three All-Star candidates and scouting all the teams we don't play until late in the season so we can draft out league's All-Star team by the end of April.

On top of that, I'm handling the process for incorporating my son's travel team as a 501(c)3, which includes paperwork for the Secretary of State, the Franchise Tax Board, and the IRS, drafting bylaws and a budget, creating a website, and lining up potential donors. With tournament fees, insurance, uniforms and other equipment, and promotions, it's costing the parents collectively over $10,000.00 a year for the boys to play, and our goal is to defray a significant portion of that through sponsorship.

I certainly haven't run out of things to blog about - in fact, my queue of half-written posts hovers right around fifty at the moment, including two new event tables, non-player character-specific Advantages and Secrets, and a 'village of Hommlet' for swashbucklers drawn from a Kids of Carcasonne game board. I'm really excited to put all of this out to y'all, but right now my personal free time is consumed by America's Pastime.

There may be a few sporadic posts here and there: I still want to get a couple of posts up for The Queen's Cavaliers, and if I finish something in a quiet moment, I won't hold off on posting it, but I also don't want to race to turn out crap just to keep a schedule. It's better to step back for a bit.

So, RBE is going deep and quiet probably until the end of April - hopefully the incorporation paperwork will be complete by then, All-Star selections will be made, and my extra workout each week will be replaced by someone else's actual practice.

Thanks for being patient, and I hope you'll continue to stick around.

I'll conclude with a quick (and true) anecdote from last week.

My son and I were on our way to the batting cages at his field to warm-up for his game that day, and he asked me, "Daddy, what's 'play ball'?"

"The two most beautiful words in the English language, son," I replied.

Thanks again.

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OSR v. osr: A Reply to Erik Tenkar

Yesterday, Erik Tenkar posed the question, how inclusive is the OSR? Is it specific to D&D, or is it a tent under which all 'old school games' - and there's a slippery phrase in itself - should be covered?

I normally steer clear of these discussions here as they don't really pertain to RBE - Backswords & Bucklers is really the only OSR game to receive regular mention - but it's something that I've addressed a number of times on different discussion forums, so please forgive me for indulging in a bit of meta today.

For my part, I make a distinction - and by no means does everyone agree with that distinction - between the O[ld] S[school] R[enaissance], which is publishing retro-clones of pre-3e D&D and associated adventure modules, settings, and supplements, and an o[ld] s[chool] r[enaissance], which is a general renewal of interest in playing games from roughly the first decade of the roleplaying game hobby.

The OSR began as an effort to get new 1e AD&D modules on gaming store shelves by using the d20 SRD to create a cloned 1e rulebook - OSRIC - that publishers could reference instead of AD&D, allowing them to skirt copyright issues. With hundreds of products released since OSRIC became available, returning beer money and pride of accomplishment to their creators, it proved to more successful at what it set out to do than I think most of the gamers who put it together imagined.

Soon, gamers decided to clone the other editions, for a mix of reasons - sometimes they simply liked the other TSR-era versions of D&D better, sometimes as a vanity thing, in my experience. Soon there were clones for just about all of the different versions of the D&D rules published by TSR - most prominently Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord - yet most of them weren't 'true' clones, in that the author's editorial voice was present to one degree or another, from everything to rules interpretations to adding house rules.

This is where I think it starts to get confusing for some people, I think. That inclusion of editorial voice led some gamers down the same path taken with Tékumel and Arduin, of making what was essentially campaign-specific versions of D&D. It was this 'wave' of the OSR that produced titles like AS&SH, ACKS, and LotFP as well as Carcosa.

Finally, there were those who decided to take the original rules and concepts in different directions - the OSR equivalent of Marvel's 'What If?' series - and thus they released 'clones' like Stars Without Number for sci-fi space adventures, Mutant Futures for post-apocalypse campaigns, and Flying Swordsmen for wuxia martial arts adventures.

One of the important features of all of these games is that, because they draw from the same root stock - D&D, and more specifically some variant of the SRD - they are often highly interchangeable with one another.

That, in a nutshell, is what the capital-O, capital-S, capital-R OSR is about.

At the same time this was occurring, and with some degree of mutual feedback and support, other gamers were noticing older games were still just as playable and just as fun as the stuff they could readily find on gaming-store shelves. Games like TFT and Chivalry & Sorcery popped up in discussion on rpg forums, as did Boot Hill or Champions, and with the help of second-hand retailers and eBay, they started finding their way into gamers' hands, and onto their tables, once again.

A few games never really went away. Fans of original, 'classic' Traveller were quietly humming along for years; their reprints were still available, supported by a ton of fan-created content that Marc Miller didn't attempt to stamp out the way TSR did. Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon received new editions, but remained close to their roots. GURPS was always there. Closer to home, Flashing Blades remained in print and En Garde and Maelstrom were republished, the latter with a new companion volume as well as adventures and supplements.

The presence of these games in online discussions began to grow. Awareness of availability went up. This was an old-school renaissance of a different sort, less publishing oriented and not fixated on D&D, but rather on digging up and playing older roleplaying games, discovering that once the dust was cleared away, they still held their shine. This lower case-o, lower case-s, lower case-r osr is also producing some clones of its own, like Legends of the Ancient World and Heroes & Other Worlds for TFT, FASERIP for MSH, and Classified for the James Bond RPG, but these are not OSR, which is a publishing effort specific to TSR-era D&D.

There are edge cases, as in all things. Is Castles & Crusades the first OSR retro-clone? Some say yes, others - including me - no. Is DCCRPG OSR? I don't know enough about it to have an opinion, but I know it's been argued both ways as well.

If I understand him correctly, Erik seems to argue that the OSR is the tent under which all these games fit. I think it's the other way 'round - that the OSR, the family of games with a shared D&D heritage, are part of a larger renaissance of interest in older roleplaying games. The OSR tends to get the most attention - or sucks the air out of the room, depending on your perspective - by virtue of the fact that it's derived from the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game™, but we cannot forget the games that kept chug-chug-chugging along through the long White Wolf and Whizbros night to those which enjoyed a true renaissance after being long forgotten by all but a handful of stalwart fans.

I suppose where I most disagree with Erik is that 'all roleplaying games are D&D.' I certainly won't argue that's the perception from many outside the hobby; I don't know that there's any advantage to us accepting or adopting that label for ourselves, when it tends to maginalise the broad range of subjects, genres, and games of which the hobby is actually comprised. Erik argues that D&D is to roleplaying games what Xerox is to photocopying or Kleenex is to tissue. I believe that's self-diminishing. I would say that D&D is more like what poker is to card games: arguably the best known and probably the most visible, but nothing like the only game in town.

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Okay, This Is Fun

Paul at Quickly, Quietly, Carefully put together a random pulp adventure name generator.

Here're my results -

• The Clouds Adept
• The Gods of Zamzig
• Chitterer in Shadow
• Crystal of the Lady-Hellion
• The Lurking Dimmet
• In the Acropolis of Zib
• The Three Kings
• The Aries Gulf
• A Fiend Shall be Born
• Vampire in the Pendulum
• The Thunder Mistress
• Dusk Into Middledon
• In the Keep of Nâl
• The Tentacle of Yim-qiz
• Beneath the Cimmerian Reaches
• Cult of the Gloomy Digon
• The Gold of Yimcthu
• The Mandible of Fanâlav
• The Citadel of the Giant
• Magenta Snake
• The Omega Gulf
• Atop the Moonlit Wasteland
• Hoard of Qulgarqizav
• Dragon-Killers of Dozul
• Out of the Cassiopeia-Gulf
• In the Citadel of Aaryim
• Steading of the Crocodile
• The Stranger of the Darkling Cave
• God of Copper
• The Call of Cthuxilqul
• The Imp of Brass
• The Dungeon of Yoza'ygg

This is just crying out to be paired with the PULP-O-MIZER.

Y'know, there're actually a few of those - The Gold of Ymicthu, Hoard of Qulgarqizav, God of Copper - that would make great rumors in my Flashing Blades campaign . . .

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Taking the Weekend Off

This week's blog-posts were a bit on the thin skeletal side, as I was slammed with a couple of non-gaming projects. Today I'm running The Cabin Boy's baseball practice, and this weekend his travel ball team has a tournament, so we're gonna be out of Dodge through Monday, which means, rather than scramble for some junk to post, I'm going to take a break and come back tanned, rested, and ready on Tuesday.

The tanned bit is no joke - looks likes it's going to be beautiful this weekend, with temps in the low eighties and clear skies. If you ever wonder why southern Californians put up with sprawl, it's because of mid-winter days like these.

As a teaser, next week will include sample characters from The Queen's Cavaliers - thanks, Caoimhe! - a new event table, a few gaming-related thoughts on my favorite attractions at Disneyland, and a review of the French graphic novel Belladone.

Have a great weekend.

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Paper or Plastic?

According to . . . somebody somewhere . . . first anniversaries are marked by paper (traditional) or plastic (modern) gifts.

I guess the book and the dice I got for Christmas will have to suffice.

Yep, it's time once again for a tedious, self-indulgent retrospective.

First, the numbers. According to Blogspot, RBE topped 52,000 pageviews in its first year, but I've learned that pageviews are functionally meaningless in aggregate, telling me next to nothing about whether or not I have an audience for what I'm writing. Random adware and Google image links bump up the numbers while having nothing at all to do with the content, and sometimes some oddball occurrence, like a link to one of my posts in a 'trouble ticket' at Big Purple, may draw eyes which really have no interest in the blog itself. The numbers for individual posts are a little more telling, and a typical post gets viewed about thirty to sixty times in its first full day and around a hundred times in a week, which is up from six months ago.

The top five RBE posts in terms of pageviews are as follows.

Random Encounters That Don't Suck
Frankengame
Grumbler
Using Mythic Game Master Emulator as a refereeing tool: two actual play examples
Lightly Armored Fighter

From my seat, it's a respectable list, and I can honestly say I'm glad they are among my most read posts.

Two series of posts, the first on the cape-and-sword endgame or 'domain play,' and the other on random encounters are probably the best things I've written this year, and they are certainly the posts I'm most proud of in my short time as a blogger.

I really appreciate the many comments I've received. Over eleven hundred comments were left on the blog, and even if you consider around half of those are my own replies, that's been very satisfying.

Okay, that's enough looking back. What's next? Well, the video feature Cinematic is done, replaced with The Pen and the Sword, with excerpts from cape-and-sword tales. There are presently forty posts in my draft queue, and I'm both happy and a little surprised that there remains so much to write about in the coming months. Looking back six months to my previous milestone post, my anticipated posts on criminal enterprise got bumped back - still a lot of research and brainstorming in progress on this one - but in the next week or so you can look forward to a tiny swashbucklers' ruritania, the village of Saint-Sidoine-aux-Puis, with the 'swashbuckling furnishings' idea morphing into a recurring feature with descriptions of standard rooms - a bedroom in a noble's townhouse, an armoury in a palace, and so on - to drop into your own campaigns.

It's been a good year, and since I haven't run out of things to say, I look forward to an even better one ahead. Thanks so much for hanging with.

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Yo Ho Ho!

Make merry, ye swabs.

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#7RPGS

By way of Tim Brannan at The Other Side, the seven roleplaying games I've most played or run. In no particular order -

1. Dungeons & Dragons: It's hard to avoid playing the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game, though it was far from my favorite, and like many others, it was my first - the Holmes blue box, then 1e AD&D, then 3e. I never played 2e, 3.5e, or 4e, and I'm unlikely to ever pick up D&D? Next!. D&D is the game I play because, well, everyone plays D&D at some point; recently, that's been one or two weekends a year, and that's about all the D&D I want or need. That's not to say that I don't care for D&D itself - there are actually a number of things I really like about the game - but rather that I'm just not a big fantasy guy. If I ever play this again regularly, it will be with my kids, and it will be a swashbuckling & sorcery campaign.

2. Metamorphosis Alpha: MA remains the perfect dungeon crawl roleplaying game, in my experience, way better than anything I ever did with D&D. Thanks to my parents, I grew up reading Robert A. Heinlein, and that included Orphans of the Sky, so the basic premise of MA resonated with me immediately. The real problem was that I could never find anyone else who was as deeply interested in the game as I was, so I was only able to run it sporadically. I did import much of the technology into my D&D games, however, 'cause sci-fantasy was more palatable to me than the bog-standard pseudo-medieval stuff most people were playing.

3. Boot Hill: I loved Westerns from the time I was a boy, thanks to my dad's influence - we spent a spring break when I was about eight visiting ghost towns and exploring old mines in the Mojave Desert - so I got my hands on 2e BH as soon as it was available. I think I like BH better now than I did then - and that's sayin' somethin', 'cause I played an awful lot of BH - because with more than three decades of experience behind me, I appreciate the lean rules of the game even more now than I did as a teenager. Two of my all-time favorite modules, for any roleplaying game, Mad Mesa and Burned Bush Wells, were published for BH.

4. Top Secret: Pretty much everything I run turns into a spy caper at some point, so TS was right in my wheelhouse. Beyond the genre, however, I really like a number of the rules in TS, such as secondary attribute scores and the way contacts work in the game - it's said by some that the rules tell you what a game is 'supposed to be' about, and together the contact rules and the deadly combat rules tell you that this is a game about investigation and manipulation rather than going in guns a-blazin'. The problem is, the first few modules kinda failed to sell that: Operation: Rapidstrike! and Lady in Distress were both commando missions used for convention tournament play, and the woefully misunderstood Operation: Sprechenhaltestelle, which came packaged in the box set, comes off like a dungeon crawl with Uzis rather than the excellent espionage sandbox it really is. TS really hit its stride with Operation: Fastpass, another of my favorite modules for any system. TS was really well supported, with a ton of Dragon articles and the Top Secret Companion. I'd play this again in a heartbeat.

5. Traveller: Years ago, I wrote that of all the roleplaying games I played, I had more good memories of playing Traveller than any other, and I think to some extent that still holds true. This is the only game where I play the house setting; I love Charted Space and the Third Imperium, in all their flat-space vastness. Traveller is the game that initiated my personal 'old school renaissance' - I was considering putting together a d20 Modern supplement similar to 1001 Characters, and when I was flipping through the pages, I thought, Wow, this really is a great game. A week or so later I had the reprints in my hands. Running the captain of a free trader looking to become a merchant prince is still one of my favorite roleplaying experiences.

6. d20 Modern: With my inclination toward historical and contemporary gaming in the real-world, this was my go-to game for many years, the only generic system I ever really liked.

7. Flashing Blades: *looks around the page* Well, yeah.

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Conservatives Defend Rights of Newtown Abortionist

Newtown, CT: Conservatives today are defending the rights of Connecticut abortionist Adam Lanza, 20, to access to the instruments used to terminate twenty-six (so far) post-term fetuses at an elementary school in Sandy Hook.

Said a conservative spokesman, "Medical instruments don't kill fetuses; abortionists do."



In the coming days, a gaggle of deluded degenerates will take to the airwaves to remind us that guns don't kill people, that people kill people, and that the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed no matter how horrifying and egregious the tragedy, up to and including the massacre of twenty kindergartners in their classroom.

Of the rights of twenty five- and six-year-olds, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to have playdates and go to birthday parties, to join soccer and baseball teams, to dance and sing, to build LEGO sets and, yes, to play games, to fall asleep in their parents' arms at night, of these these the disgusting reprobates determined to maintain our present culture of predictable barbarity which defines the United States of America as something other than a civilized nation will have nothing to say.

This is not a political blog, but today I'm reminded how trivial my hobbies are, and I cannot let twenty more murdered children pass unnoticed or unmourned.

As a commissioned national park ranger I lost two colleagues to line-of-duty shootings. My small town suffered through the loss of eight people in another massacre, at the salon next to where my wife and children get their hair cut, downstairs from the podiatrist who treats my daughter's feet, next to the restaurant we visit for 'taco Tuesdays' a couple of times a month.

My two children are in elementary school. And my wife teaches kindergarten.

America's gun culture fosters these tragedies. And no one with the power to do anything about it possesses the will to do so.

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Sweep!

There are many ballplayers.

But only a few become Giants.

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Blogger's Pissing Me Off

Well, apparently it's All Meta Week here at RBE!

Back when the new interface was introduced in the spring, I tried it out and reverted to the familiar one, figuring they were still working on getting the bugs out, particularly since the implementation was pushed back. I didn't dislike the new interface aesthetically - yeah, it's incredibly bland and kinda ugly, but so what? I don't go to my blog dashboard to be visually stimulated.

But I expected at least the same level of functionality.

With the old interface, my post list page included a list of all my tags/labels, so I could click on one and bring up all the relevant posts. Now, that feature is gone. Tags show with individual posts, but there is no list or cloud of tags on my post page, meaning I will probably need to locate a widget instead, further cluttering up the main page.

I miss being able to view posts from my post list page as well. Remember the little arrow? Click it and the post becomes visible, with links in the page actually active? I used that a lot, as opposed to preview, which is slower to open and doesn't include live links.

And I can't remember exactly how they were positioned before, but in the first eight or nine months I managed to click the Publish button instead of the Save button exactly once, With the new interface, it's now happened three times already.

Early on on expanded my composition window to full size for my desktop monitor, but it's annoyingly large when viewed on my laptop, and I can't shrink it down again, on either computer - neither dragging the corner nor double-clicking it allow me to make the window smaller.

Finally, my reading list disappears more often. It happened a couple of times with the old interface, but now it happens more frequently, and for longer times - the other day my reading list was gone for more than four hours that I know of.

All of this pales in comparison to the ultimate sin, of hitting Publish and have a post disappear altogether into the ether, never to be seen again. Fortunately, it was a Cinematic post with nothing but a YouTube link and easy to replicate - if it was anything else, I'd probably've ended up on Google's doorstep with a torch and a pitchfork in my hands.

And of course no amount of feedback sent ever merits a reply from our Masters at Google.

I've read other bloggers complaints about Blogger, but honestly I never encountered much in the way of problems before the new interface was implemented. I'm generally not someone who objects to change for the sake of change - I like new and improved as much as the next guy or gal, but if you promise new and improved, you'd better friggin' deliver the on improved.

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Commitment

This past August, I submitted an application to the RPG Bloggers Network, a blog syndicator. Blog aggregators or syndicators offer an opportunity for bloggers and readers to find one another, and shortly after I launched Really Bad Eggs, I submitted an application to RPG Blog Alliance, which promptly added RBE to its blog roll.

But the RPG Bloggers Network requires that a blogger must show at least three months of active posting, on rpg topics, to be considered for syndication. It was actually eight months after launch that I submitted an application to RPG Bloggers Network, on 20 August 2012. I received an automated reply the same day.

Thank you for your message. We have received it and will get back to you as quick as we can.

Technical issues and problems experienced by existing members generally take priority, and we will respond to these issues as soon as possible.

If you are submitting a new application for membership, it may take a couple weeks before someone gets back to you depending on application backlog and other mitigating factors.

We use FogBugz to keep track of our incoming email. You can check the status of your message at the following URL:

https://rpgbloggers.fogbugz.com/default.asp?898_hstelmbk1rfo50hm

You may want to save your case's tracking ticket: 898_hstelmbk1rfo50hm

Please reply to this message if there's anything else we can do for you.

Both the email and the website are clear on the "may take a couple of weeks" thing - since it's a safe bet that this is someone's hobby or sideline, I can totally understand turnaround taking some time. So I waited.

And waited.

Two weeks passed. Then a month. Then six weeks. Finally, on 17 October, nearly two months after submitting my application, I sent a follow-up email, asking for an update on the status of my application. By then I'd checked the RPG Bloggers Network site to see if RBE was added and I simply missed it, but no, none of my posts appeared in the blog queue.

And, once again, I waited.

Today, eight days later, still nothing at all in reply.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I'd pretty much forgotten about my application until a few weeks ago, when a post on theRPGsite regarding the delays of the "legendary" megadungeon Dwimmermount generated buzz around the blogosphere, and I was reminded of it again in a post by Eric Tenkar at Tenkar's Tavern listing Kickstarters he supported that didn't deliver.

Unfulfilled promises are a regrettable fact of life in what passes for the roleplaying game 'Industry,' and they are certainly not limited to the practitioner-publisher or dedicated hobbyist. At the same time, I think those who choose to offer a product or service to gamers take upon themselves the obligation to honor their commitments, in a timely fashion, or risk earning a reputation for failure and flakiness. Those who choose to put themselves and their work out there should not then claim, 'But I'm just a hobbyist!' as an excuse for a failure to deliver.

I've been approached about a half-dozen times now by different publishers with offers to contribute to or write supplements for different roleplaying games, and while I've been tempted a few times, I've said no in the end. Roleplaying games are my entertainment, and I don't want to turn my hobby into a business. I do this for fun, and saddling myself with deadlines and word counts has the potential to suck the fun out of it for me. I won't take the chance of disappointing others and tarnishing my own reputation in the process.

I admire those who take the plunge as publishers or website managers, but I respect those who deliver on their promises.

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Yes We Cain!

The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!

So much for getting anything gaming-related done last night.

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It's Made Out of Babies

"Finn, Jake, I made you something. It's . . . babies . . . full of . . . babies . . . the family sword. It's made out of . . . babies."



Actually, the family sword is made out of demon's blood. I love Adventure Time.

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Tour des Coeurs

I used to play a lot of Hearts with friends and co-workers. One night I was flipping through the notepad with which we kept score, comparing point totals from different games, and I noticed that one person who won one night might've had the highest point total another, or scored just a few more points than the winner in a third. When I looked more closely at not just the scores, but the differences in point totals, it reminded me of pro cycling, with a rider's performance reflected in how many seconds he is behind the leader.

And thus was born the Tour des Coeurs.

Each game of Hearts became a 'stage' in a race, with five or seven stages making up a 'tour' - later I added a 'grand tour' of twenty stages. Instead of tracking overall points, we tracked margins between racers - the leader's score for the stage was zero, and everyone else subtracted the leader's score from their own to determine how many seconds back they were on the stage. These margins would be added together after each stage to determine the overall leader of the tour.

What was interesting about it is that the strategy changed. Sure, everyone wanted to rack up stages wins - winning individual games of Hearts - but it was possible to take the overall tour lead without ever winning a stage by finishing with the smallest margin after each game. How points were dealt in a hand could be affected by the overall score; instead of simply dumping the queen of spades or a handful of hearts, giving them to a particular player - 'putting time into a rider' - became a goal to take or keep the overall lead. For the grand tour I introduced time bonuses for the first three places in each stage, so, frex, a first place finish also subtracted an additional twelve seconds - points - from the total.

The overall winner won the yellow jersey, while the winner of the most stages in the tour got the green jersey - usually the prizes were dinner and a beer, respectively.

The Tour des Coeurs proved to be a remarkable simulation, and soon a few narrative conventions took hold. Taking the queen of spades meant a rider 'went off the road' or 'slipped a chain'; taking a lot of points in a turn meant the rider 'cracked on a climb.' Shooting the moon was an 'attack,' and a player whose score was significantly lower than everyone else's in a game was 'off the front.'

Of course, all of these narratives arose post hoc - the ability to plan an attack at a particular point in the 'race' was limited, with no way to work with a team mate or make an alliance on the road to work together 'til the finish sprint to keep away from the peloton, as pro racers may do. There was none of the strategy and tactics which are the most exciting part of bike racing, except in hindsight.

Put another way, while the results told an interesting story of a bike race, the experience of playing it didn't feel like participating in a bike race.

Now let me tell you how I feel about story games.

Actually, I think I just did.

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A Short Break

I'm taking the week off to catch up on my wiki. Back on Sunday.

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Six Months in a Leaky Boat

Six months on, and a little self-indulgent reflection is on the menu.

First, a few numbers. The blog passed 20,000 hits in the last week of June, or about what Playing D&D with Pornstars gets on a slow Wednesday, I imagine. Most posts get between twenty-five and forty views in the first twenty-four hours, and between forty-five and eighty in the first week, and all kidding about Zak's blog aside, I'm pleased that there seems to be a regular cadre of readers who are - hopefully - getting something out of the blog.

Even more satisfying are the over six hundred comments. I'm never happier than when a post produces a dialog.

April's A to Z blogging challenge brought in around half of the site's hundred-plus followers. The hosts of the challenge recommended following blogs with less than a hundred followers to pump up their totals, and a lot of the bloggers who joined during that time were writers, not gamers. I admit I didn't reciprocate in very many cases; my blog roll is up around the three hundred max limit already, so there simply isn't room to add more. That said, I don't see followers as a measure of the blog's success or lack-thereof in the same way that comments are.

The most-often viewed post is "Grumbler," undoubtedly due to its inclusion in a thread at RPG.net. In fact, links on message boards, specifically RPG.net and theRPGsite, undoubtedly drive views of the blog, far, far more than the blog aggregator, RPGBA.

The experience of blogging reinforced something I already knew: I'm not a particularly good writer. Oh, I know how to turn a phrase, and I can, for the most part, organize my thoughts and present them, but getting the thoughts out of my head and onto the screen is an arduous struggle. I hoped that my alacrity with composition might improve a bit with trying to wite something every day, but it just hasn't happened; old habits not only die hard, they rise, ghoul-like, fastening their teeth and claws in me. As a result, I've pretty much settled into a routine of two substantive gaming commentary or content posts a week, two 'hey, take a look at this other thing that someone else is doing!' posts, and two 'features,' one of classic illustrators and one of swashbuckling videos.

Not too long ago, another gaming blogger posted that he doesn't like to simply post links to other blogs or websites. While I understand the impetus to add value by contributing additional commentary, I believe one of the most important functions the blogs provide is to share the many great gaming ideas floating around the intrewebs, so I'm happy to connect someone's else's work without adding a lot of blather to make it look like I'm working hard in bringing it to your attention.

One of the things about which I'm most proud on this site is "Cinematic," the weekly video clip featuring swashbuckling swordplay. When gamers talk about 'cinematic,' in my experience they're referring to over-the-top action. While that's certainly part of many cape-and-sword movies, I think it's important to recognize that movies like The Duellists and The Deluge also define 'cinematic' as well.

The one thing that's surprised me is that I still have stuff to write. When I first started this six months ago, I had about a dozen ideas for posts, and figured I'd wing it from there. As of this post, I have over twenty topics already in the queue in various states of completion, and easily another dozen broad topics outlined in my replacement notebook. Frex, once the endgame is series is done - probably next week, renovations permitting - I want to turn to the other end of the social spectrum with a look at swashbuckling rogues and criminal enterprise in the cape-and-sword game-world, build a Ruritania for Backswords and Bucklers, and list some swashbuckling furnishings, or, 'What can I do to the villain with the bed warmer the maid dropped when she fled the room?'

So, that's where things stand, six months on. I'd be remiss if I didn't end with a thank you to those who read regularly - or irregularly, for that matter - and especially for those of you who take the time to comment. Your feedback and questions are sincerely appreciated.

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