Monday, February 28, 2011

Facebook and Twitter Killing Blogs

A week ago NY Times published a story "Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter". This article cites surveys and anecdotal interviews showing how younger people are giving up blogging in favor of Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. I guess most of what these young internet migrants have to say to the world fits into 1-2 sentences. Or less:
"Kim Hou, a high school senior in San Francisco, said she quit blogging months ago, but acknowledged that she continued to post fashion photos on Tumblr. “It’s different from blogging because it’s easier to use,” she said. “With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that’s it.”"
No offense to any of you tweeters or fb'ers out there, but I personally cannot get into Twitter or Facebook much. As a matter of fact, I often find them depressing because they make a lot of the people I know seem a bit dull even when they're not. I mean, how much can one say in 140 characters? One little poop-pellet of mundane boringness, most likely. Unless you're a brilliant poet. I haven't friended any brilliant poets on Facebook yet. In the mean time, I don't care what my 3rd-grade friend had for lunch.

Another thing I don't like about Facebook is that I can't be anonymous there. Ironically, I feel like I can be much more anonymous on my blog. On Facebook I have to worry about a strange and uncomfortable mix of family, professional colleagues, and weird friends mingling around my posts. I really don't want my mom or co-workers reading about my frenzied alcohol-fueled nights of pretending I'm an elf. Here on Cyclopeatron only a few weird friends and Canadian strangers read my crap. I know this because I have Sitemeter. Is it healthy that I prefer babbling to strangers? Probably not... But I guess this is preferred by all you other geriatrics:
"While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent. "
I won't name names, but several blogs that I've enjoyed in the past have gone silent, but I still see the (ex-)bloggers posting all over FB (pictures of ferrets in one case, perhaps? ;) ). Too bad...

Boot Hill First Printing + Vintage Miniatures

A few weeks ago I made a lucky score on eBay. For $36 I got three 1970s Tactical Studies Rules books: Chainmail, D&D Blackmoor, and Boot Hill. They are all well-loved copies with writing in them which is something I prefer.

The most rare and remarkable of the three books is Boot Hill, which is a first printing from 1975. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that this is the third roleplaying game ever published, behind Dungeons & Dragons and Empire of the Petal Throne. This little brown book is pretty hard to find, especially with the tear-out reference sheets still intact. I have to admit that I've never been terribly interested in Boot Hill or any other historical games because wizards and weird science are my thing. This game looks like a lot of fun though, and I could see myself running a few weird west shoot outs in the near future.

I also picked up some early 1980s Boot Hill minis off eBay for $1. Cool!

Here are pictures of the artifacts...

CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE


Unlike most of the other little TSR books from the period, Boot Hill includes numerous ready-to-go maps, scenarios, and NPCs.:

Rare double-page tear-out reference sheet:

TSR Boot Hill minis c. 1983:



Friday, February 25, 2011

The Best Magic Sword Description Ever Written

"Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic, and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came.

Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it."

- Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924)

Thursday, February 24, 2011

John Thor vs. Satan

I kind of thought my Gamma World Mutants of Metal setting was slightly original. It turns out I was totally fooling myself. Troy Z. sent me a link to this footage of national treasure John Thor fighting Satan in the rare 1987 movie Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare:



Here are some awesome clips representing other aspects of Thor's career. Talk about 18 STR coupled with various mental mutations...

"Is this a band of heavy metal music? How about I do some metal bending?" he asks during a concert just before... bending metal:



A moustachioed Thor uses oral gas generation to explode a hot water bottle on the Merv Griffin show:

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Further Thoughts on Mouse Guard

In my Orccon 2011 recap a few days ago I mentioned that I played in a Mouse Guard game, and that I found the game to be frustratingly slow and I would not be inclined to play again. Somehow, within hours, my post found itself relayed on the Mouse Guard discussion forum, and the GM of the session chimed in on my comments. Out of respect for the GM, I thought I’d take a minute to better describe my impression of the session and of The Burning Wheel rule system on which Mouse Guard is based.

Facts about the game:
1. I did enjoy the game in several ways (see below).
2. The GM was skilled, experienced, and confident.
3. The GM was pleased with how the session went.
4. The players were all experienced gamers and were also satisfied with how the session went.
5. We played for 3-4 hours.
6. In this time we roleplayed three distinct situations: (1) freed a cart from mud, (2) unsuccessfully searched for a person in a town, (3) had an argument with a group of NPCs..

Soo... basically each situation in this game took, on average, over an hour to get through. Given that this was in line with the expectations of the GM and the players - i.e. the session wasn’t a dud, it was a good game - I think the root of my problem came down to the fact that Mouse Guard’s hyper-micro-management approach to roleplaying was not my personal cup of tea. I constantly work to speed up my games so players feel like they are stepping into exciting, fast-moving stories. I like old school and rules-light RPGs because they facilitate narrative speed, and, at their best, produce an imagination-fueled feeling of entrainment, momentum, and immersion that is unique to RPGs.

The Burning Wheel rule system takes a very different approach to roleplaying. It makes players deconstruct trivial tasks into long series of dice pool roles constructed by combinations of players’ Traits, Abilities, Skills, and various modifiers – all translated in the context of a list of Beliefs, Goals, and Instincts unique to each player. I admit that there was some fun in juggling numbers around to justify every few sentences of roleplaying. The feeling was a lot like playing a strategy eurogame – you have to choose from a small set of available actions (i.e. what Trait or Skill are you going to use and possibly burn) and then act on the outcome of the scaled dicepool and possibly accrue some future modifiers (Fate, Persona, Checks, etc.). Based on the dicepool outcome (failures ~80% of the time) the narrative changes direction for a few sentences from the GM, then you repeat. I like eurogames, so I did derive some enjoyment from this odd rpg/eurogame hybrid experience.

But the simple fact remains… It took well over an hour and ~20 dice pool roles to have a first-person roleplay argument with an opponent NPC. It was a weird microscopic dissection of a game moment that would be 5-10 minutes of free-form first-person roleplaying in a traditional RPG. While The Burning Wheel rule system is clever and novel, I think this snail-paced roleplaying would get old very quickly. Playing a “campaign” like this would be absolutely excruciating, in my opinion.

Another impression I was left with was that this rule system disrespects players in a strange kind of way. Instead of allowing players to roleplay their characters’ personalities however they feel is appropriate, players constantly strive to take actions that align with (or in some numerically optimal situations, contradict) their Beliefs, Goals, Instincts, and Nature as outlined on the characters sheet. The better one plays this game, the more Fate and Persona points are collected from the GM to modify dice pool roles. A major downside to this is that in most situations it is glaringly obvious what Ability or Skill (or whatever) is most optimal to use, so the game mechanic kind of plays the characters in an almost puppet-like way.

In sum, Mouse Guard is indeed a slow moving roleplaying game. It magnifies normally trivial roleplaying situations into long series of statistical number-crunching dicepools that determine the direction of the narrative and push PCs through situations like number-optimized puppets. I think of this game as a novel hybrid between eurogames and RPGs, and it has some entertaining merits in this respect. If I wanted to run an exciting adventure based on the Mouse Guard comic book, however, there is no way I would use these rules.

NOTE: I just want to thank the GM again for an excellent introduction to Mouse Guard and emphasize that this post is about game mechanics, not his GMing skills. As I said before, he's a skilled and confident GM.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Dave Arneson Poseur

I was looking at a picture taken of me this weekend when it dawned on me that Dave Arneson is not only a gaming inspiration but also a fashion icon...

Monday, February 21, 2011

Orccon 2011 Recap and Photos

This past weekend I attended Orccon, one of the big gaming cons in Southern California.

First of all, I want to thank everyone that played in my Gamma World and OD&D/Spelljammer games. There's nothing more satisfying for a DM than to see returning players and to hear cheers, laughs, and applause during and after a game. I was also flattered that my games were overbooked with alternates, although it was disappointing to have to turn people away from Gamma World.

So, yes... I attended the con on Saturday and spent about 15 hours gaming, with short breaks for pizza and beer.

For the morning session I played in a game of Mouse Guard. I like the comic and wanted to try the RPG out. I had fun, although we spent much of the session talking about rules as opposed to pretending we were mice. After playing for over 3 hours our team managed to (1) get a cart unstuck from the mud (I can't believe how many dice rolls this trivial task took, christ), (2) ask around town for a friend mouse (without finding him), and (3) have an argument with a group of NPC mice (again, at least an hour and 15-20 dice rolls to resolve this verbal confrontation with NPCs). The game mechanic was indeed clever in how it forced the players to produce a character-driven narrative. But at what cost? The slowness of the games was pretty frustrating, and I don't think it was all the GM's fault. Although I did have a good time, I think I'd have to be prodded a bit before trying out the Burning Wheel rule system again.

For the afternoon session I ran a game of first edition Gamma World. It was a follow up to my SoCal Minicon game from last summer, where the group played a troupe of mutated heavy metal musicians. In this session the group invaded a rusted out oil tanker that was swarming with mutated rat punk rockers. The players found the punk king, snorted his coke and smoked his weed, humiliated (and murdered) his band, turned the rat punks on to metal with the help of a muttonchopped rocker named Lemming, and defeated an evil psychic brain that had been lording over the rat punks. The game ended up being nasty, despicably violent, and riddled with drug abuse and poor life choices. The session had a happy ending, though, when the band's half-chimp triangle player awoke from a magic-induced coma to be reunited with his illegitimate robitussin-addicted son (I wanted to get in some edgy modern psycho-emotional roleplaying, you see). I'm always grateful to get a table full of awesome players like this. Super special thanks to player Troy Z. for presenting me with the original artwork he created depicting the climax of the previous session! Wow!

(Thanks to Louis Garcia for photos of the Gamma World session)

For the evening session I ran an OD&D / Spelljammer hybrid game with 3rd-5th level characters. You can CLICK HERE to read the basic scenario, so I won't repeat it in this post. For the first part of the session the players flew their rickety space tower around the outside of the asteroid, exploring possible entry points. They opted to enter through the nostril of a transplanted supergiant face on the dark side of the asteroid. They explored some of the interior of the asteroid and met one key personality who had been stuck on the rock for many years. Through a combination of luck and cleverness the players ended up doing fabulously, accomplishing their primary mission of uncovering some ancient starfaring navigation scrolls from the interior of the asteroid. There was a super cool close-call climax involving a furious vampire hobbit and dwarf tossing in space.

After the game the players seemed enthusiastic, which was gratifying. One guy who had never played OD&D before said he liked the creepy atmosphere and asked "what happens in the rest of the adventure". I didn't know what to say - the players saw less than 10% of the interior of this particular asteroid. There was no script or "adventure path" for this game - the story was made by the players and the dice. Great work, Team Xylbocx! Thanks again for the fun Saturday night!

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Gamma World: Mutants of Metal vs. Ratt Punx Pregens

Here are six pregenerated characters for Saturday's Gamma World game at Orccon. Of course, return players are welcome to bring their previous character sheets. In this session players have 3-4 hours to defeat a gaggle of mutated rodent punksters pushing addictive Robitussin juice onto post-apocalyptic children. This game might have some (robot) sex, (radioactive) drugs, and (aesthetic) violence in it. See you there.





Commentary on History of Gamma World

Here's a LINK to a long, funny, and well-illustrated commentary on the aesthetic evolution of Gamma World through its various editions. It was written by a German cartoonist named Jared von Heinmen. This article is well worth a few minutes to read. It is especially enlightening for people like me who never felt a particular compulsion to peruse post-1983 versions of GW.

kesher at the OD&D forum just brought this to my attention. I'm not sure when it was originally posted - presumably some time within the last year.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Orccon: Game Preregistration Full

This is just a quick note that all pre-regsitration slots have been filled for my February 19 Gamma World and OD&D/Spelljammer Orccon games. There are still three first-come first-served slots open for each game, however. If you want to join in these sessions I strongly recommend you plan ahead to sign-up in person immediately when you get to the con - the earlier the better.

You can still get a discount pre-registration for the con until Feb 14, I believe. CLICK HERE.

See y'all there!

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Follower Number is Poor Predictor of Blog Popularity

I have sometimes wondered about whether older blogs with large, established reader bases gain new readers faster than newer blogs. This is an important question because it gets to the heart of the issue about whether current post quality is more important than the momentum provided by historical post quality. Ideally, a good blog will attract readers based simply on the quantity and quality of its latest posts.

To make a long story short, the good news is that initial follower number is a poor predictor of how many followers will be gained over a subsequent period of time. This implies that a blog's current popularity is not determined by how many readers it has amassed in the past; readers will be gained based primarily on how good a blog is, not how big a blog is.

I came to this conclusion by looking at a dataset of 216 old school roleplaying game blogs. I plotted follower numbers as of 30 Sep 2010 against gain-of-follower numbers over the period between 30 Sep 2010 and 31 Jan 2011. While a simple linear regression shows a weak trend for larger blogs to gain followers faster, the r-squared value for the trend is very low (0.3575). If we remove the juggernaut blogs GROGNARDIA and Playing D&D With Porn Stars the r-squared value drops down to 0.2087. An r-squared value of 1 is a strong association; the low values we see here suggest a very very weak association. This is good news! Keep on blogging!


Note that if you don't look at the (weak) trendline, the plot is basically a cloud...

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

The Fastest Growing Old School RPG Blogs

Here's a list of 212 old schoolish roleplaying blogs ranked by the number of followers they gained between 16 December and 31 January. I am ranking the blogs using this system - as opposed to raw follower number - in order to determine which blogs are "hottest" without being biased by how long a blog has been around. My main motivation for making this list is to highlight the blogs that are currently attracting the most reader attention regardless of the blogs' age. Out of respect, I DID NOT list blogs with zero or negative growth this time. At the end of the list are blogs that I am now tracking, but did not have data for when I was making this list.

My usual blogometric caveats apply: (1) This list only has blogger.com blogs because follower numbers are not publicly available for WordPress blogs. (2) Yes, I know some blogs are missing. If your blog is on my big blog list as of today, it should be in the next ranking. If your blog is not on my list and you want to be included, please send me the link.

Although older and more well-established blogs tended to fill in most of the top spots this time, attention is due to some of the smaller and newer blogs making the top rankings, including Black Hole Diaries, Gorgonmilk, Rather Gamey, The City of Iron, and The Dump Stat. Keep up the good work, everyone - there's definitely an audience out there!


Blog Name
31-Jan
16-Dec
Change
619
561
58
783
726
57
103
57
46
36
0
36
213
177
36
171
136
35
214
181
33
32
0
32
141
112
29
201
172
29
235
208
27
288
261
27
119
94
25
28
3
25
39
15
24
34
10
24
343
320
23
77
54
23
155
133
22
111
90
21
212
191
21
126
105
21
416
396
20
122
103
19
170
152
18
65
48
17
219
202
17
188
171
17
180
164
16
180
164
16
106
90
16
91
75
16
152
137
15
30
15
15
52
37
15
44
29
15
98
83
15
14
0
14
109
95
14
34
20
14
122
108
14
83
70
13
52
39
13
31
18
13
190
177
13
196
183
13
142
129
13
39
26
13
94
81
13
115
103
12
89
77
12
256
244
12
33
21
12
124
112
12
88
76
12
109
98
11
61
50
11
36
25
11
84
73
11
80
69
11
74
63
11
147
136
11
133
122
11
60
49
11
111
100
11
90
79
11
113
102
11
24
13
11
96
85
11
86
76
10
227
217
10
25
15
10
133
123
10
53
43
10
33
23
10
151
141
10
55
45
10
20
10
10
87
77
10
54
44
10
65
55
10
240
231
9
45
36
9
63
54
9
74
65
9
43
35
8
32
24
8
80
72
8
95
87
8
69
61
8
35
27
8
67
59
8
57
49
8
25
17
8
131
123
8
49
41
8
157
149
8
74
66
8
50
43
7
28
21
7
34
27
7
65
58
7
105
98
7
49
42
7
129
122
7
53
46
7
30
23
7
52
45
7
137
130
7
77
70
7
47
41
6
22
16
6
134
128
6
28
22
6
54
48
6
18
12
6
19
13
6
45
39
6
85
79
6
34
28
6
56
50
6
154
148
6
13
7
6
110
104
6
49
43
6
69
63
6
42
37
5
49
44
5
12
7
5
34
29
5
12
7
5
15
10
5
35
30
5
128
123
5
56
51
5
20
15
5
34
30
4
37
33
4
46
42
4
82
78
4
105
101
4
45
41
4
39
35
4
22
18
4
49
45
4
113
110
3
12
9
3
52
49
3
48
45
3
22
19
3
25
22
3
46
43
3
44
41
3
23
20
3
25
22
3
132
129
3
71
68
3
69
66
3
32
29
3
47
44
3
119
116
3
61
58
3
76
73
3
16
14
2
59
57
2
38
36
2
25
23
2
93
91
2
22
20
2
6
4
2
22
20
2
15
13
2
6
4
2
37
35
2
23
21
2
84
82
2
38
36
2
54
52
2
46
44
2
28
26
2
39
37
2
46
44
2
36
34
2
48
47
1
33
32
1
35
34
1
13
12
1
13
12
1
13
12
1
18
17
1
1
0
1
23
22
1
46
45
1
11
10
1
24
23
1
11
10
1
10
9
1
34
33
1
39
38
1
31
30
1
51
50
1
11
10
1
17
16
1
7
6
1
42
41
1
4
3
1
16
15
1
8
7
1
13
12
1
10
9
1
26
25
1
34
33
1
20
19
1


To Be Included Next Time:
Forever Free Games