Latest blog posts
Being about code
GitHub didn’t catch on because of Git. It may have helped, but it wasn’t the primary catalyst.
GitHub caught on because it’s about code. Sharing, finding, and contributing code.
Rubyforge and Sourceforge aren’t about code. They never were.
—defunkt’s Gist
GitHub has been described as a social networking site. I think this is true, except that its the code that is social rather than the people. And it really works.
Unmythic
I have discovered that a lot of the problems I have with many fantasy stories and games seems to stem from settings with very concrete backgrounds; All histories and science but no room for anything really mythic.
What do I actually mean by mythic? Stories, each one ages old, that explains something about the way things are in terms of heros and villians. These stories stand largely on their own, even if they are part of a greater mythic picture. And importantly myths conflict with each other. The best myths seem metaphorical, even when they contain some concrete truth.
This struck me while reading Open Grave, the D&D 4e undead book. D&D in particular has a very strong tradition of settings where the early history of the world is very well established. Given the sparseness of the D&D Points of Light implicit setting, the concreteness is unfortunate. Open Grave presents a very scientific explanation of undeath in the setting. The result is some very cool ideas, but none of the horror that I want to associate with undead.
In contrast, the Wheel of Time series of novels has done well at presenting both the explained histories that the people of the world knows, alongside the rumors and speculation of ordinary people of the world. Another example is Trail of Cthulhu’s chapters on the various Gods and Great Old Ones of the setting where multiple possibilities are presented for the keeper to consider.
Hellboy is another good example. The characters could realistically know about the myth and murky past of the world but it is generally shown rather than explained and is presented in a much more snapshot view. There are lots of snippets for the reader to see, but the bigger picture eludes them.
The Haunting: Terms
A follow-up to the recap of The Haunting about some of the terms and ideas mentioned there, and a couple of others from such sources as The Sons of Kyros. These are all simple techniques that can be applied to most RPGs and help things tick over more easily.
Consider Yes and Say Yes, or Roll The Dice
I learnt about this from the Sons of Kyros. Any time a player asks to try something, the GM should consider saying yes if it wont upset things. Additionally, if you choose not to say “Yes”, then you consider rolling the dice to determine the outcome.
Let It Ride
This is an idea from the Burning Wheel family of games. The idea is that every time you pick up the dice it should matter. You only roll once for any test and that result holds until circumstances change.
For example, you only make one Library Use test for a particular search, not one per every 4 hours. The result holds until the situation changes. This might be finding a new set of clues. Eg; Doing a search of a newspaper morgue for references to “21 Sheafe St” might fail. Later in the hall of records you discover it was once owned by one Walter Corbitt Esq. Time to hit the library again.
It is important to realize this goes both way; The players must accept failure and the GM must accept the success.
Failure
Both Mouse Guard and Trail of Cthulhu spend a lot of effort making failure not derail the story. Failure should create a new situation to be resolved rather than just cutting short the course of action.
Core Clues
Following from that view of failure, Trail of Cthulhu makes it possible to find every clue that is required to solve the scenario. Characters still need to actively hunt for the clues, but no dice are rolled. Secondary clues are subject to the normal resolution.
The Enmity Clause
A specific case of Say Yes, or Roll The Dice taken from Burning Wheel’s Circles subsystem. In a situation where the player wants to find a character thus far unknown. In Burning Wheel, you test your circles attribute; A failed roll results in finding the character, but for some reason the new character has enmity toward the PCs.
In our game, after some chaos in the basement that resulted in one character being shot in the back and another in the arm, the investigators went in search of a back street doctor to perform the necessary surgeries for them under the table. The Lawyer suggested that from his firms defense practices he would know someone suitable. I rolled either Law or Credit Rating for him, but he failed.
They still found the doctor, but he was immediately suspicious of the wounds and blackmailed them to keep quiet about the incident. I planned to have the character create more trouble, but things didn’t quite work out that way.
Beliefs
Beliefs are a small but important part of how characters are defined in Burning Wheel. These are generally a one or two sentence statement that motivates the character. This might be a goal, a motivation, something immediate. The key thing is that it be something that pushes your character forward.
Of the Burning Wheel ‘BITs’ — Beliefs, Instincts and Traits — they are easiest to extract for use in other games even without the mechanical rewards built up around them.
See Also:
- Say Yes or Roll the Dice at the Story Games codex.
- Luke and Thor Brainstorm Beliefs
- Enmity Clause discussion
- Thor explains Let it Ride
The Haunting
I ran the classic Call of Cthulhu scenario The Haunting with my D&D group over a two nights as an interlude in our usual Age of Worms epic campaign. I’ll skip over the story details because the haunting has been covered so many times already.
Rules-wise, I used the core Call of Cthulhu BRP rule set, summarized to a page cheat sheet for the players. Additionally I tried to apply concepts from Trail of Cthulhu and the Burning Wheel family of games. Ideas like Let It Ride and Core Clues I explicitly used. The general flavor of how Trail and Burning Wheel treat dice rolling and failure held for a lot of the game. My favorite ruling was quietly using the Enmity Clause when the players were effectively circling up a back alley doctor to help with their (self inflicted) gunshot wounds.
What rocked
Beliefs; We played a pickup style game. I made 7 pre-gens for 5 players, only one character outline was provided for me. Each character was bare bones attributes plus skills, and a weapon of some description. Instead of writing complex back story for each character matt and I cooked up 2 or 3 beliefs per character and I handed those out when players selected characters. The players did a great job of taking the general shapes of characters and fleshing them out. There was a lot of great drama and conflict in the party that really built things up once they action reached the house.
In addition to the Beliefs, I managed to restrain myself at the start of the game and give the characters a few minutes to role-play introductions and flesh out their characters in game. Worked great, I’m sure I’ll use this technique again.
The prop newspapers and photos I spent ages making worked great. They should hopefully be going up on Yog-Sothoth once they have had a final edit.
What could have been better
There were a couple of scenes where I lost hold of the BW/ToC ideas and slipped back into more traditional style and framed scenes poorly. In particular the Chapel of Contemplation scenes were very weak and full of whiffs.
The end of the scenario felt quite anti-climactic; I don’t know whether this was because it came after the confusion and drama that started with upstairs bedroom and continued down in the basement, or because its just not a very exciting final scene after all that has gone before it.
Comments, revisited
“No comments‽” was a common theme in the response to monday’s post a better blog. I did not intend to imply that I don’t value the opinions and thoughts of my audience. Rather that comments are a poor medium for discussion.
Firstly, commenting generally has a low barrier to entry. It is easy to belt out a hurried, flippant, or poorly considered response. By moving the comments off the site the barrier to entry is higher; The responder is more likely to invest time in the reply.
Related to this, the reply has a stronger attachment to the author’s identity, and “…they’re forced to defend their ideas on their own turf…It forces a level of consideration that, without fail, results in a higher quality exchange of ideas.”
Thirdly, comments are a ghetto filled with second class citizens. Your opinion is less valued than that of the post’s author. This is why I added the miscellany to my site. Every user has as much power there as I do, including the ability to edit their own and others words.
Two two
brehaut.net has reached another milestone today. I am calling the current state version 2.2; Although it is the fourth major version of the code-base, it is the second revision to the design I launched in December of 06. Since then we have created 235 pages in the miscellany with 3495 revisions!
The design and layout got a shakeup, and the blog is back in an active form (and the old archives are all but gone). The geeks among you may appreciate the changes to macro system on the wiki (syntax highlighting for all!).
So thank you for your contributions, critiques and suggestions.
A better blog
Some thoughts on a creating a better blog for myself from reading and studying sites I rate highly.
Why read a blog? I read blogs to follow one person’s attention, and to be directed to new ideas and gain new perspective on ideas I am already familiar with. Typically the focus of the blog will have a reasonable overlap with my own interests. I will also discover new things that I would not actively seek out myself.
Brevity is important. This is a lesson I learned from Twitter. I am happy to know about your lunch or trip to the zoo if I can digest it easily and move on. More detailed articles are better served by real pages or very focused blogs.
I have very little interest in comments. Sturgeon’s law applies doubly for blog comments. A communities social character is unavoidably tied to its technical details (see Group Enemy).
The only content I wish to see on my blog is interesting content. Pingbacks provide a possible solution here; If I am able to view a private report on posts that ping back, I can cherry-pick the most interesting and relevant responses for readers to see. No public commenting system would exist.
The design of writing interface is vital. Write and editing must be separate from posting. Quick, unedited thoughts should be discouraged by design. Software should warn about basic writing mistakes such as post length, double negation and passive voice.
See also
- Merlin Mann – Good Blogs
- Clay Shirky – Group Enemy
Caffine and coffee
A couple of weeks ago I decided to cut back my coffee / caffeine intake. More recently i was having a discussion about it with a friend from Timaru is a skilled barista, and he mentioned some relative levels of caffeine in coffee beverages. Presented here is some (internet) numbers associated with it.
These numbers assume an average cup size (around 8oz)
| Method | Caffeine content (mg) |
|---|---|
| Drip | 115–175 |
| Brewed (e.g. Plunger) | 80–135 |
| Espresso (2oz shot) | 100 |
| Evil (Instant) | 65–100 |
I was drinking up to two espresso and one filter coffee a day, which put me at around 300–400 mg a day — oops.
Some random (internet) facts
- Robusta beans (typically used in instant) contains 40-50% more caffeine than Arabica.
- Caffeine is the source of the bitterness in coffee.
- An excess of 5000 mg of caffeine is fatal, and is equivalent to around 40 strong cups of coffee in a short space of time.
- The upper limit for daily caffeine consumption is around 400 mg. You can get that in one drink with Starbuck’s stupidly large cups.
- Dave Shea mentions in his home roasting guide that darker roasts have less caffeine.
- I read somewhere (but can’t seem to find the source) that milk inhibits the intake of caffeine.
Links
(Possibly dubious sources)
