I've talked a bit about the design of this at my blog in these posts. In this video Bill and I have him make a character and get into a brawl. I'll use this thread to toss the ideas out to you guys.

The idea of the rules is to encourage teamwork. This is because in actual military and police special action teams, what makes them effective is less the individual abilities of a particular soldier, and more how well they all work together. The wounding rules are part of this. In the real world, if you get bashed, stabbed, shot or blown up, you're going to need some help.

For a realistic feel, people only have 5 possible states, essentially those of triage - the categories people are put into when the number of patients exceeds the medical facilities available.

Basically:

• Morgue - dead, or nearly so. Sometimes called "Expectant" if they're on the edge.
• Immediate - (treat within minutes) severely injured and will die soon without treatment
• Delayed - (treat within hours) serious injuries which won't kill the person in the next hour or so
• Minor - (treat within days) they can walk themselves out
• Unharmed - go away, stop bothering me

Medical treatment in a mass casualty situation ignores the Unharmed and Minor, gives a huge dose of morphine to the Morgue category, looks after the Immediate and when they have time get to the Delayed. Eventually someone will look after the Minor ones.

Conflict has named Immediate as KIA, Delayed as INC (since any wound that serious you are usually incapacitated), and Minor as WIA.

I am wondering about these terms. The KIA may confuse since it's not actually instant death (2-15 minutes if untreated), and INC isn't always incapacitated (can roll dice to ignore it for a bit). But the triage terms may be a bit abstract for most.

Most of the time game terms focus on what the character feels. They're treating the character as a lone individual. Using terms focusing on what must be done may - may - encourage teamwork a bit more. KIA etc focus on what the character experiences, Immediate etc focus on what must be done.

But as I said it's also a bit abstract; medical types want it to be abstract so they don't get overwhelmed by all the drama, but as gamers using our imaginations it's all abstract for us, maybe we want more evocative.

Thoughts?

Our own Dungeondelver does a regular livestream talking about old school gaming, it may interest some people. Today he had me as a guest, you guys can put a face to the nonsense posted here. It's on FB, but we use the tools we have. See here.

From 20th century Britain, Polari, the language of homosexual men.

   "One of the things that makes Polari so powerful is that it is simultaneously about disguise and identification," the artist Jez Dolan tells BBC Culture. "You would be hiding what you were talking about from people who didn't know it, but also if you were in a bar and you liked the look of somebody, you'd pop it into conversation and they'd either go 'ah' or they'd look blank and you'd be on your way."

[...] Baker believes Polari is a form of 'anti-language' – a term coined by the linguist Michael Halliday in 1978 that Baker defines as "a language used by people who are on the 'outside' of mainstream society". "It has its own vocabulary for elements that mainstream society is not interested in," he says. "Words relating to gay sex or evaluating male bodies – but it also demonstrates an alternative value system."

This "hiding in plain sight" and variations on the local language aspect would, I think, be key to how an alignment language would work. I don't see how it'd work separate from a system of deities, though. The church of Christ teaches Latin, or Greek; the Temple of Grolka the Mad would teach Chaotic Evil's cant. So you'd need 3 dieties in B/X, and 9 in AD&D1e.

The article's pretty interesting. Thoughts?

Some observations on (still) playing the way I've always played, and a stupid story, the sort you don't get just from optimising your character.

Stats shmats

I'm playing 2e because that's what the DM wanted, so we had some ridiculous system where we chose class and then rolled, I chose fighter and so had to roll 7d6 drop lowest for strength, 6d6 for con, 4d6 for charisma, that sort of thing.

I ended up with
Str 12, Dex 16, Con 13, Int 6, Wis 17, Cha 18

The DM suggested I swap some numbers around. I'm old school - you play what you roll. So we have Fabio, the Most Beautiful Fighter in the Cosmos.



He's charismatic with common sense but no academic knowledge, not that strong (the party's gnome illusionist with str 13 can beat him in an arm wrestle) but deft.

If you're really strong and tough then you're the warrior out there hewing and slaying, if you're cunning and charismatic then you're a leader. Fabio started with 4 men-at-arms, "Fabio and his Fingers, together we make fist!" Along the way 3 men-at-arms have died, one was slain early on, another was eaten by a bullette so we couldn't do anything, another was slain by trolls and Fabio paid for her to be resurrected so she became a henchman. Another man-at-arms became a henchman early on. Fabio's now level 5 and the henchman are level 3. Another 2 are still level 0, including Boche who was an original man-at-arms, he's never been knocked to 0HP and never failed a saving throw, bit of a lucky bastard but there you go. All are clad in plate mail with tower shields.

In combat if we're at range we open up with shortbows, so that's 10 attacks in the first round. On the approach of the enemy we drop bows and take up shields and form a shield wall (house rule, +1 to AC for each one on your side, so +2 in the middle and +1 on the flanks, lose your Dex bonus though - so great for men-at-arms, less great for high-Dex fighters). Each of the Fingers carries 2 holy water and 4 flasks of oil. A common tactic in dungeons is putting oil in a line in front of us, forming a shield wall across the 10ft corridor with 3 guys, the enemy approaches, they're about to enter melee and we light 'em up. If a warrior in the front rank falls, one of the 2 behind step up.

Rest of the party stands behind and supports as appropriate.

With 10 attacks in the first round, plate mail and tower shield (AC 1) and a shield wall (AC -1 for guys in the middle, AC 0 for guys on the flanks), most foes are dealt with fairly quickly, and we're not hurt too badly. It's different if we're surprised, but we try not to be surprised too often.

We came across a room with 7 sleeping trolls. Quietly rolled open flasks of oil in there. "Wake up!" Web spell. Light 'em up. Shield wall in entrance, survivors stagger out burning and screaming and are cut down. Tough fight, but result was 7 dead trolls, no dead party members.

In a game I DMed, the players came to a room with sarcophagi and mummies in them. One came out and they slew it after much trouble. The others they pinned the lids down by sitting on them, and the wizard got a rock drill to put a couple of holes in the lid, poured oil in and lit it up. What were his stats? His level? It didn't matter - this was something they could have done at first level.

Use your wits, work as a team and have a plan, and then your stats don't matter too much. People focus on stats because they think of their character as an individual, rather than as a member of a team with a plan.

Now, this stuff doesn't help you if you meet a wizard with charm person or the like. But that's another story.

Trollhead tavern

We came to a room of trolls drinking and fighting, two were just heads nailed to walls, their mates taunting them. We slew them, took the still-alive heads and cauterised the neck stumps to stop them regenerating. The DM wasn't sure if that would work, I said if not we'd just make iron boxes with spikes inside so that the troll grows back, is stabbed to death, grows back, is stabbed, etc, eternally. Since that was horrible the DM agreed the cauterising would work.

We went into Greyhawk and talked to a tavern-keeper, it's now the Troll's Head Tavern. Young men come there and have a few drinks, then make bets. You know that game where you put your hand on the table and stab the blade between each of the fingers increasingly fast? Or even better, your mate does it to your hand? Well, they do the same but with the troll heads, trying not to get bitten. And the trolls are always angry and snarling being taunted by all and sundry.

Trollhead Tavern, down through Viscera Lane past the corner where Big Rosie always hangs out. It's not the sort of tavern you'd take a fair maiden while courting her. But the ale is cheap and every night has a brawl, and the umberhulk pie is excellent.

Now all should go well, provided nobody ever has the bright idea of taking the heads down from the wall...

You don't get this kind of tactics, silliness and fun with systems that insist on optimal character builds. Roll 'em up, take what you get, use your wits to make the best of it. Don't take it too seriously. Bring snacks.

Emerging briefly from self-imposed exile to report that last week I went to Seattle for a fitness seminar, and while there met up with Raven S McCracken, authour of the famous World of Synnibar.

I had coffee and then lunch with him. When we arranged the meetup I said, "To recognise me, I'll be wearing blue jeans and a black jacket and cap, I'm 41, white and have short dark hair"
He replied, "I have a mohawk."
And you know what, he did.



We made a pair of characters for Synnibar 2, Gonzo and Mort, and duelled it out. After I realised that each hit did 20 points of damage and we each had 200 points and there are no critical hits, I could see it was going to take a while, and we started talking about other stuff.

If even half the things he told me are true, he's had an entertaining life to say the least. Gamed with Gary Gygax, worked for Boeing and after he stopped working snuck in there to use their computers to write his game, had his house burn down and reduced to nothing but his underpants, does martial arts, plays a mix of Beatles and Tool in his band at the Twilight Bar where last Friday a guy came in to punish his girlfriend, shot the bouncer in the leg, killed the girl and was in turn shot dead by the police, and so on.

We had coffee at the Westlake Starbucks, he gave me a copy of his game and signed it, plus some other stuff. Then he took me down to the Pike St Markets, there was a store just for cherries, and the fishmongers have lots and lots of salmon. We had lunch, I had salmon/potato patties with an avocado sauce which was all very nice.

When we met he asked me if I was here for an interiew with Microsoft. "No, I'm a personal trainer," he looked me up and down appraisingly, "and I'm here for a barbell seminar. Then Bill Silvey of dungeondelver.com pointed out your kickstarter, and I saw you were in Seattle, so..."
"Man, this is an amazing world that we can meet. It's so big, it's like 9,700 trillatons. I found that out when I was researching Synnibar."
"Trillatons?"
"Yeah, there are lots of ways to express it. Tera, whatever. I have a smattering of 40 different languages." He said something, "That was Kalahari Bushman."
"So what do you think of other generic systems like GURPS and Rifts?"
"Watered-down versions of Synnibar. Rifts is cool, though. You gotta keep it gonzo. Steve lost his passion, his biggest mistake was making Munchkin, a game separate from GURPS. This took the life and fun out of GURPS, since he was saying, here's roleplaying, and here's power-gaming, as if they're different things. Kevin's a great guy."
"Well, GURPS' latest edition was written by a particle physicist, after all. And this new edition of Synnibar?"
He pulled it out, and said as it thumped on and shook the table, "This is the SIMPLEST EVER." I flicked to a random page, you can be a bat-man and fly with your little bat-wings. There were diseases, under Ebola was Zombie Radiotropia. Radiation turns you into a zombie, excellent.

He has something he calls Constitution, you spend it in combat to hit harder or more often and the like. "Originally I had it as calories, but then one of my playtesters said, Raven, no."
One of his other playtesters goes the other way. "Dude, you don't have any rules for surprise when someone's sleeping."
"Okay I'll put a rule in."
"But it's different if a person's in light sleep compared to deep REM sleep, or third stage. So you need three different sleep surprise rules."
"Three level sleeping surprise?" Even Raven thought that was too much.

He says that he originally made his Synnibar rules on cards as an aid to memory, and you'd play your combat moves by playing cards.
"My buddy told me, that's how you should sell the rules! I said no, that's stupid, this is the pardigm," he gestured to his printout of the Synnibar 2 playtest rules. "Man, I had Magic cards on my hands 15 years early and didn't know it!"

He goes on to say that Peter Somethingorother came to Seattle broke and lived with him, came up with Magic cards, as his company expanded didn't hire his buddies, that as he climbed the ladder of success he kicked it away so nobody else could follow him. "Man, when Wizards took over Gencon, I'd paid $60,000 to have a stand there, he sold it out from under me! I only found out when I was already there. A guy tried to get me a room, the manager came back and told me, Peter has insisted you are not to have a stand anywhere within 7 blocks of Gencon. I hate that guy, he is my nemesis, I've let everyone know, next I see him he gets a broken nose. I never see him though."
"Perhaps that's why you find it difficult to meet up with him now. You wouldn't get a broken nose?"
"No, he's all of 5'5" and scrawny."

Gaming with Gygax, he says, happened down in Florida in the late 1970s when Raven was at university. "I made a wizard, and wanted to have a sword, Gary wouldn't let me. I said, but Gandalf had a sword! And isn't all this based on Tolkien anyway? He didn't like that. Then I saw his magic system and said, hey, Jack Vance Dying Earth, and quoted some of the book to him, he didn't like that either. He was maybe in his 40s then, greying and turning fat, he really wanted to control everything."
"Didn't he used to have groups of like 18 people? You have to stamp down hard with that many players."
"No there were only maybe 10 of us."
 
When his house burned down he lost all his old artwork and original handwritten manuscript for Synnibar. "Also my cash."
"Your cash? Not in the bank?"
"Naw man you can't trust banks, I had it in my walls."
"So how have you supported yourself since then?"
"Game writing, and also some other stuff. I worked for Microsoft for a while, velvet sweatshop."
Since Washington state has legalised it, I thought to ask, "Did cannabis play any part in the making of Synnibar?"
"Of course. But also it was fatigue. I used to work for Boeing, after I stopped I snuck in to use their computers, I couldn't afford one. My old boss winked at it, one day he found me there in the morning slumped over a computer and woke me up. Were you here all night? he asked, I said yeah man random tables!"

Down at the market we met Yakov (I think was his name), a guy of 50 or more wearing a beret and kilt, he called us into the Fedex where he was using the computer, they're making a medieval fantasy film in the woods around Seattle which he was very enthusiastic about, they don't give them the script until the day, he suspects they're writing it as they go. He also uses kettlebells for his workouts and has leaned out a lot, apparently. He was bearded and looked very kingly in the shots he showed us.

Raven also pointed out a guy playing a small piano organ in the street with some political stuff on the side about rewriting the constitution to say that only people can be legal persons, not those evil corporations. And then he took me to a game store in Pike Market. They had comics, old Star Wars figurines, board games, miniatures, and of course rpgs.

Raven then told me about how Eugene Roddenberry, son of the Star Trek creator, was playing Crypt, playing for like six hours and the Cryptmaster had had enough, "but he's Eugene Roddenberry, I can't turn him away!" so "I got one of my girls to unzip her cardigan and show some cleavage to entice him away so I could talk to him."
"Your girls?"
"Yeah at conventions I hire girls in bikinis and stuff, it attracts the gamers."
"Pimpin'."
"Hell yeah. Anyway Eugene wanted me to do a CCG for Star Trek. So I wrote it up and contacted him, he said, sorry dude I don't have the rights, call these guys at Viacom. I did, they wanted $250,000 for the rights, too rich. Now it's a few years on, I figure for the rights plus enough printing to make the price reasonable, I mean $50 is too much for a deck of cards, I need $532,000. I'll do that as my next Kickstarter project."
"Well there are millions of Trekkies."
"Sure, lots will buy it just to have it, I don't care, as long as some play it."

He agreed with my ordering of priorities, of what makes a game session fun,

• people
• snacks
• setting
• system

He was crazy, but not irrational. That is to say, his gaming enthusiasm like his dress sense is not restrained by shame or common sense. If he wants to wander around with a mohawk at 50 years old, he'll fucking well wander around with a mohawk, even if it means he can't get a job - because he'll make a job out of his hobbies of drinking, smoking weed and gaming. Owns a bar and a game company.

His wife's father is a fireman and she does taekwondo, so she's been trained all her life to deal with crisis situations, when the shooter came in she pushed Raven to the ground and shielded him with her body. He said, "She's a woman, and my wife! I must protect her!" so her wrestled to be on top, they were rolling around on the ground as the shooter shot his girlfriend to death. She said, "this is ridiculous!" and got up and started getting everyone out of the building until the cops came to blow the guy away.

The police write about the shootings here and here. At first I thought the woman had been killed, but apparently not. It was unclear from Raven's... er, explanation. He said, "the villain is a victim, and the victim is a villain." He said something about the woman being a gold-digger, and the guy an innocent pawn who'd tried to distance himself from her. But... the guy had had a baby with her, which, you know, suggests some degree of involvement. It's also unclear how bringing a firearm to confront her was expected to end well. Essentially they sounded like a bunch of depressingly loser lowlifes so I didn't want to hear the details and changed the topic.

I guess Raven is excited because like his house burning down this is the closest thing he's had to an actual adventurer's typical day :) He's writing a novel about his experience of the shooting, and will do a kickstarter for that, too.

That's all I remember for the moment, I wish I'd recorded it.

Those pining away for Firefly should know they are not alone, a bunch of fans got together and made a movie, all proceeds to charity. I've just received the DVD today.

Browncoats: Redemption



Game observation: on the DVD there's a little clip introducing the crew. It could be interesting and fun to have a game group watch this clip, create characters based on it, have a short campaign which I'd rip off from the movie, and then afterwards we could watch the movie to see how different it all is

A re-enactor and amateur historian rants about "warrior societies" here. He makes the point that in a "warrior society" most warriors will never have killed anyone at all, and if even if some have, they might be physically or mentally maimed.

Has anyone considered these things for their campaigns or characters?

You can fit the most dice in one space if they're d4s. It's been proven by science.
   Tetrahedral dice, which have four triangular sides, pack more densely than any other shape yet tested, according to research performed by a collaboration of New York University and Virginia Tech physicists.

The revelation is the result of a series of experiments that involved pouring tetrahedral dice into containers, shaking them, and adding more dice until the containers were completely filled. After adding water to measure the open space between the dice, the researchers confirmed that the tetrahedrons fill roughly 76% of the available space in a large container. Similar experiments with spheres typically only fill containers to about 64% of the total volume.

The researchers were able to get an inside view of the packed tetrahedral dice by imaging the containers with an MRI machine. The images are vital in helping them check and refine their die packing models.

The experiment, which is reported in the May 3 issue of Physical Review Letters, confirms recent calculations predicting efficient packing. Such packing problems are related to understanding many other problems including liquids seeping through soils, the flow of granular materials like sand and gravel, dense storage of information in digital memory, and even determining the best shapes for packaging consumer products like medicine tablets and candies.

Daan Frankel of the University of Cambridge discusses the tetrahedral packing experiment and related research in a Viewpoint article appearing in the current edition of APS Physics.