The way we view a Bag of Holding…d20m

The great web comic d20 Monkey has a cartoon up on the Bag of Scolding which reminds me exactly how we treated the bags of holding in the old days.

i.e. Stuff all the things in that thing noaw!!!! Bags of Holding were fantastic little toys in the game world, not only because it meant we had somewhere to put the wheelbarrows pull of gold coins, but also because we could threaten to stuff NPCs into them.

Or stuff the portable hole into the bag of holding and tear time-space in half with a divide by zero error.

It makes me miss the silly and irreverent way we played roleplaying games. We were not critically interested in story, or character progression, or continuity; it was all about silly fun. Even better when other players were the butt of a joke.

Another I remember well was one character wishing that another character had never owned anything in his life. Ever. (boom, wish granted) The game world re-wrote itself instantaneously so that the wish was true. All the gear was borrowed, all the meals were charity, all the achievements were all on someone’s stolen nickle.

That would cause hell to the mental state of the poor character who now has nothing to their name, must have borrowed or stolen all they have. It sucked for the player but oh how we laughed. What bastards.

SimCity Extralife Perfection

Scott Johnson’s My Extralife comic is a mainstay of my webcomic reading. This great comic is a wonderfully dry observation on recent “always online” requirements.

As far as SimCity’s cluster-fail of how they handled the customer … well its been said that EA are not the best publisher or distributor when it comes to customer service, and I cannot disagree too much. No way in hell I’m buying a product when the vendor shows such plain disdain for their customers. That would be just rewarding them. The new Sim City might be the best version ever created, but I’ll wait for the next one. Or the one after that.

My Extralife – Mysterious Bravo Sir! Check out his archive for the old works, equally sharp.

 

Game of Thrones Season 3 Promo

I was trying to not get hyped up. Then I watched the new promo. As promo vids goes its not revolutionary, but I guess I’m a fan-boy. Not that I’m expecting Aussies to get the show straight away, we’ll wait for the data to curve around the world, maybe a week later, or even months later to free-to-air (makes me frustrated).

hey distribution companies I have a message from Australians who dislike most of the TV content here – both paid and free-to-air….I’m a fanboy, make it easy…

Thoughts about the film: Looper

I just saw and am still pondering the movie Looper. Spoilers below.

In terms of a premise for a time travel film it was great. The feint of time travel was used as a device, but was not given so much presence in the film as to be totally about time travel itself. The story was about people, and as a watcher of anything with sci-fi attached I was pleased to view a film where the sci-fi was front of mind, but also not dominating.

The plot would not have been much changed if the source of the feint was religious belief, or even just a conflict involving a far off place. The “future” served as a lever for believable passion and motivation.

The handling of time travel was exactly as I expected, it was an acknowledgement in the script that sometimes time paradoxes are created and unavoidable, there is not much which can be done. Scratch any nerd and you’ll find a preference for how time travel stories should auto-magically resolve themselves. In Looper we see several timelines (ie. when the Old Bruce first meets young Bruce), and that is a point of internal consistency in the story (or is that stories) as the film presented several different streams of time as a tool to explain the fact that causality is always not logical, nor is anything predetermined. I liked that.

In terms of production is was well put together. Given that the director was working with a rather big name in Bruce Willis and that the production was high quality and also high expected delivery – it was a great job well executed. A stand out was the beginning establishment of the film, where the viewer was either going to accept or reject the concepts outright, in Looper they were easy to accept.

The handling of old Bruce vs young Bruce was good too, with delicate touches about hair loss and the Willis squint being reproduced well. It cannot be easy to match two actors together, and both male leads did a great job. Gordon-Levit did most of the stretching but then that also makes sense as effects would sit better on him (I think).

Would I recommend the film? Yes, especially to a sci-fi fan. That said, I expect more than a few geeks to dislike it too, due to personal issues with the pace and staging of the film. This was a story driven film where action was certainly present, but it also needed moments of introspection and thought to carry the characters, and I can see some folks disliking that. This is also a film where a non-sci-fi person could see it. It is far more accessible than Primer, or most heavy stuff I like like Star Trek et al.

Could I pick holes in the story? Yup, if pushed, but then I can only think of one time travel film which didn’t have holes (does everyone love 12 Monkeys as much as I do?).

I do not want to pick holes in Looper as I enjoyed the film, so I won’t. It’s worth your cash.

Rating 4/5, maybe a bit higher, but I’d like to watch it again before I ramped it up more.

Related articles

• About Time: Time Travel Logic, Paradoxes and Looper… (them0vieblog.com)
• LOOPER – Every Mistake in 3-Minutes (geektyrant.com)
• Here’s Everything That Was Wrong With Looper (gizmodo.com.au)
• Looper (2012) (canadiancinephile.com)

Keep only 10 RPG books

Distractingly good blog questions: If you could only keep ten of your printed RPG books, which would you pick? Well darn it, that is hard.

Not so much picking 10 systems, that is easy. But 10 books is hard. Consider too that I’d also say none, as I am getting happier every season with using digital versions of RPG books.

I feel like the guys in the film High Fidelity – top 10 songs to ……

1. Ars 5e core book.
2. DeathWatch core book.
3. An ArM5e source book, but I cannot choose which as yet. Probably the Bestiary.
4. Ars 4e Grimoire, as it contains a stack of stuff that was great for its time, but failing that then probably the Ars 4e core book.
5. DnD 4e DMG. To be frank I think I’ll be able to buy a copy of any edition cheaply, so keeping a 3.x or any of the expansion books is probably a waste.
6. DnD 4e PHB.
7. Shadowrun core book. I have an edition from the late 90s and am keeping it for the flavour.
8. Cthulhu core rules.
9. GURPS core rules (I don’t care what edition).
10. Rifts core rules. Many folks hate Rifts, and in some part I understand that the system is a bit janky. That said it contains as much lore and fluff to make 10 great games in every book.

Vampire core rules almost made it except it would have been only because of the fun history, not the actual value of the system. Heroes Unlimited is darn good too, but there are many hero systems out there that can compete. I have an old Earthdawn copy somewhere, and a copy of Rus too – both read but never played.

via Untimately: Only Ten.

Magus Sym, the Bear

Sym is an NPC created for an Ars Magica game which stopped a little while ago. The output is from Meta-Creator so is a little idiosyncratic at times, but far better than writing the entire stat blocks by hand.

Sym’s stats could be used for any Bjornaer recently out of apprenticeship, with a focus on dangerously good mundane melee combat.

Thinking about gaming while away from the dice

It’s been a very slow period in tabletop gaming around my house. With the dnd regulars pausing while we have lives, families, and wonderful distractions – the gaming posts here have dried up proportionally too. It is hard to write about something when the creativity button is not getting pressed.

The dice are a great source of direct inspiration.

It got me thinking … that perhaps a side project is needed to tinker with. Create something odd, off side, or some such, so that I can keep my hand in as a tabletop gamer, and also to keep the creative part of my brain flowing.

I did find some old stuff that I could publish here as a view of what has come before:

• old NPCs and setting material from my last Ars Magica game I was trying to run. Now that the game is really dead, perhaps that might be sharable.
• a draft of a Death Watch based rpg game. It was the skeleton plot for an adhoc game, might be useful for somebody.
• the new character I’m pondering for another play-by-post game of Ars running on the Atlas Games forums. This is a little harder, as the character is unfinished, and I have some thoughts on directions, and contradictions with core rules. Hmm, perhaps that in itself.

Ok, now that I write it, I’ll scatter some punctuation into those things and post them – Ironboundtome ain’t dead yet.