2012 in Game Stuff

Realized Secret Santicore was really good.
Speculated what 5e should look like.
Wrote a GM questionnaire, people answered it.
Saw my players fight ice monkeys.
Realized A Book of Beasts by TH White was really good.
Wrote an essay about people who love rules. Made people who love rules mad. Angry mail. Trolls.
Wrote random tables.
Told RPG companies to hire more women. At least one of them listened.
Played Dwimmermount with James Maliszewski. Fun.
Moebius died.
Thrown off Story-Games.com.
Got GMed by Satine. Twice.
Wrote a called shot mechanic.
Jeff stopped running his Wessex campaign. Everyone angry.
Wrote a superhero story game. It passed the time.
Wrote a Chill hack for Call of Cthulu consisting of one rule. It worked really well.
Wrote an essay about people who need rules. Made people who need rules mad. Angry mail. Trolls.
Got hired by WOTC. Angry mail. Trolls.
Explained that, no, really, I got hired by WOTC. Angry mail. Trolls.
Discovered blogger's Batmanalytic feature:

Wrote a story game using playing cards. Fun enough.

Had International Anklebiter Illustrator Day.

Got interviewed on some podcasts.

Half-bird ranger died in the home game.

Found an excellent RPG-thing carrying case at the antique mall in Medina, Ohio.

Realized the One Page Dungeons this year were really good.

Explained how 'GM Fiat' actually works. Angry mail. Trolls.

Wrote alternate fighters, rangers and thieves for old-style D&Ds.

Played Burning Wheel, had fun, wrote about it. Angry mail. Trolls.

Had an idea about a couple story-games and their connection to wargames. Angry mail. Trolls.

Interviewed author of one of those games. He said the idea made sense to him.

Interviewed authors of the old Marvel Superheroes game and the new one simultaneously.

Talked with people about Sword & Sorcery vs Anime Sci Fantasy. Angry mail. trolls.

Hello? Gammarauders?

Made that:

One year anniversary of ConstantCon.
Ran a lot of FASERIP games on-line. World partially saved. Northwest Russia annihilated.
Hired by LOTFP to write an Alice-In-Wonderland thing.
Realized that was going to be awesome.
Invented a PCs-in-the-middle-of-a-mass-battle mechanic (refining Pendragon).
Invented a PCs-crawling-on-big-monsters mechanic (refining Scrap Princess).
Party druid wrote an article about sexual harassment. Roundly lauded by people who'd previously claimed our game group appearing in the media was "bad for women".
Said Google + was becoming the best forum for talking about games. Angry mail. Trolls.
Wrote some notes on Dungeon World. Angry mail. Trolls.
Won a prize for game thing I wrote.
Went to video game conference about it. Got interviewed a lot.
Saved some FLAILSNAILS PCs from imprisonment in Castle Amber.
DMed for a college game design class.
Thoroughly enjoyed Dungeon Crawl Classics.
Played 4e for charity (again).
Made that:

Invented a sci fi storygame specifically designed to work in G+ hangouts. Passed the time.
Made the RPG Speedcyclopedia.
Hacked Deities and Demigods so you could use it at the table.
Hacked Carcosa so I could use it at my table.
Wrote about my favorite Adrian Smith picture.
Made a Random Villain Generator. Dave abulafia'd it.
Players faced a maximum age maximum size blue dragon. Survived.
Played Night's Black Agent's with Kenneth Hite. Fun.
Made up Murdermaze G+ game. Fun.
Made up Warlords of Vornheim G+ game. More fun.
Ran Cthulhu on Christmas.
Played in Vertique, Hill Cantons, Trash Planet, Cocanha, The Vats of Mazarin, The Malicrux Sector, HUSK, Aggravaina, Scrap Princess' game wherever that is, NGR Kazakhstan, Castle Nicodemus, The Caves of Myrddin, and Outland.
GMed my players from the Horrible Ice Monkey Cave across the sea to the Cobalt Reach and the Fortress of Ferox the Incinerator.
Saw the Goblin King of Gaxen Kane hire a gang of G+ FLAILSNAILERS to hunt down my home group.

Most fun game to GM: Mmmmm...maybe this one?

This one had its charm, too.

Most fun game to GM on G+: Warlords of Vornheim. (Session 1, Joe's maxed out FLAILSNAILS wizard gets killed by a catapult crit in round 1.) Close second to Chill of Cthulhu.

Most fun game to be a player in in real life: NBA with Kenneth Hite or 4e with Satine.

Most fun game to be a player in on G+: It's very close, but Jeff's Wessex games or the Murdermaze games Scrap and Joey ran. Though it's a reallll close run thing with a lot of other games.

Badwrong Wheel--East

So we continued playing Burning Wheel incorrectly this week in the Exotic East.*

Click to enlarge my Exotic Burning Notes:

Burning Personae

A. Lady Oborozuki (young witch/acupuncturist) (Mandy Morbid)

B. Impetuous Lotus Peril (deluded noble) (Zak)

C. Eye-Shaking King (sad elf) (Cole)

D. Sagei Takahachi (loyal retainer) (Michael)

Burning Notes

E. (you have to imagine all of Wheelmaster Harald's dialogue in a...sort of...halting...but precise...eurovoice)

Harald: "So, in Burning Seas all of the seas are burning."

"That makes total burning sense."

"The clarity. It burns."

F. These are the experience point notes. Why did I put an "F" here? Who cares? I got xp for killing some ghosts. Like you care.

G. Oh, I defeated them with Calligraphy. In Burning Wheel you can bring in any skills that you can justify to add to your roles. (Or at least in Badwrong Wheel you can.) Anyway I patiently explained to these ghosts that their 300-year-old tragedy was totally like enshrined forever in the memory of the people of the land of rain and blossoms because the very ideogram we use for "tragedy" actually includes their family name. So they should totally stop psychically attacking me because I like understand their pain and aiding the Impetuous Lotus clan in spreading order and civilization to these benighted lands is totally getting their guy in the big house. I got an extra die and they totally bought it.

H. Shaking Eye King kept singing the song of predicting the weather, which in BW mechanics means he can actually decide the weather and he kept picking Torrential Downpour. At one point Takahachi was all

(gruff samurai voice) "Exalted Eye King, can you not make the weather more pleasant?"

SEK: (limp wafting drama-elf voice) "I do not control the weather, I merely predict it. I ask the season what it may bring."

Impetuous Lotus Peril: (Zoltar from G-Force voice) "Liar! I saw you picking!"

SEK: "I do not pick the weather, my player picks the weather, it is an extradiegetic mechanic allowing...."

ILP: "Silence elf! There is no significant difference between traditional role-playing game mechanics and those popularized in recent years which enable enhanced player control over the narrative! The Sublime Imperial Grandmaster of the Impetuous Lotus will have none of your divisive tribalism!"

Then we all laughed and smiled.

Because life is good and playing games wrong is really fun.

Burning Analysis:

Thus far the idea that everybody is a little bit the GM is totally holding true and one consequence of this is every player has to be careful not to spotlight-hog. It's pretty easy, at least so far, to have somebody do almost nothing for an hour--the whole ghost-fight was like just me and Cole. I mean, I'm sure some people are into just watching the theater-of-it kind of storygamingness but I think this particular campaign we here are playing with these people is going to be more fun the more people we can get into the mix at once.

Harald the Burnmaster stuck in the following rule from another game for the witch/acupuncturist which is a pretty decent fortunetelling mechanic, in his words:

"My augury rule is to give the prophet bonus dice to distribute on attempts to reach the stated prophecy on a successful prophecy"

_____

*Dear Eye of Pedantry: Yes, it's a terribly problematic phrase. We're all real broken up about.