I presnted these options for my Mage's family history: Native, Refugees, Newly Arrived, Dozen generation

I presnted these options for my Mage's family history: Native, Refugees, Newly Arrived, Dozen generation

I was asked "So ... mages can't be here thorough coercion?"

I ask you, internet: Can these mages be here through coercion?

Last night, in Urban Shadows ...

Last night, in Urban Shadows ...

We were playing in a Revolutionary France analog.

The PCs:
The Revolutionary: Tainted radical republican grad student, lead the attack on the Bastille and lead to National Assembly to take the King's palace.

The Prophet: Forsaw the King's guard was going to blow the Bastille, and turned it into a living hellscape.

The Foreigner: From Florence, which has had a constitution and no king for 140 years. Wound up stealing a 40 gun frigate and attacking the palace, ensuring the revolutionaries didn't all die.

The Voice: Disembodied ghost of the ancient royal house of the lost kingdom of Bath, claiming that the Revolutionary is the rightful king. Also protects and promotes the Revolutionary, including pushing the Greatest Mind of the revolution off a 4-story window to ensure the Revolutionary became the centerpiece.

The General: a sergeant from the last war, helping to train the revolution. He and six soldiers survived the Bastille, becoming the nation's great heroes.

This was nuts.

I presnted these options for my Mage's race's: Human, Elf, Gnomekin

I presnted these options for my Mage's race's: Human, Elf, Gnomekin

I was asked "So ... mages can't be dwarves?"

I ask you, internet: Can these mages be dwarves?

I presnted these options for my Mage's gender: Fluid, Non-binary, Cis Woman, Genderqueer, Trans, Agender

I presnted these options for my Mage's gender: Fluid, Non-binary, Cis Woman, Genderqueer, Trans, Agender

I was asked "So ... mages can't be dudes?"

I ask you, internet: Can these mages be dudes?

To what extent should a character sheet walk you through creating a character?

To what extent should a character sheet walk you through creating a character?

Asking for completely selfish reasons. My answer is: it depends. But, let's hear some firmer ones.

On a commercial spaceship with weeks from point A to point B ...

On a commercial spaceship with weeks from point A to point B ...

What specialties do you need on the crew? What are people able to do that is not better to automate?

Asking for a friend.

Holy Shit is a history of profanity and cursing in the English language.

Holy Shit is a history of profanity and cursing in the English language. As such, it is also a pretty decent history of social mores in England.

I learned that until the 15th century, it was perfectly common for men to piss against walls inside.

What does this tell us about D&D, and other fantasy games?

Dear friends

Dear friends,

How have you made the world safer for your neighbors this week?

I've sent in some postcards on Gorsuch, celebrated keeping the ACA, written my members of congress on this and other issues.

There's a local county board debate coming up to, which I should be able to attend. In a couple weeks, there's a taxes march downtown that I should get to.

I continue to refer to the traitor in the oval as precisely that, and I don't know if that is a good act or not. I just don't know anymore. I do like to think we're about to see the end of an american presidency through legal action.

Love to you and yours! He will not divide us.

This is what happens when a trumped up real estate scam artist tries to threaten real politicians. Maybe.

Tell me about the games you are playing.

On budgets as moral documents.

On budgets as moral documents.

After doing the taxes this year, I was curious what those goodly chunk of our income goes to. Or, rather, where fake potus wants it to.

Here's the Trump budget, more or less:
War (DoD (46%!), Home Sec, State budget directed towards war): 50%
War research (DoE): 20%
Immediate Repercussions of war (VA): 6%

Health & Education (HHS, Ed): 9%
Protecting the needy (HUD, Labor, Justice): 6%
Preventing Future Wars (State): 2%

Some smaller concerns:
NASA: 1.4%
Agriculture, Commerce, Interior, Transportation, Treasury: each 1%
Saving the planet from environmental ruin (EPA): 0.4%
Small Business Administration: 0.06% (why this is in the document is beyond me)

To use the (poor) analogy to a household budget, if I spent half my budget on punching my neighbors, twenty percent on researching how to do it better, and only 2% on how to be friendly with my neighbors then I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have any friends.

Similarly, if I only spent 1% of my income on each on food, business expenses, interior decorating, and understanding and collecting money I'd be starving, impoverished, have barren walls, and not have any money.

This is a pretty barren document. Feel free to look through it and lemme know what you find. It doesn't seem to be written with a consistent style either, sometimes listing reductions as "savings", and sometimes as "reductions". Still, that's the least of the worries.

You've probably heard me talk about The Watch for the last, I dunno, year and more.

You've probably heard me talk about The Watch for the last, I dunno, year and more.

It is even better than the reviews may lead you to believe. This is a transformative game, and you have less than 12 hours to get in.

#JoinTheWatch

Originally shared by Kate Bullock

If you haven't backed it, you have less than 24 hours to Join The Watch and become a badass warrior woman. I love this game. It's soul food for my heart and I can't wait to walk around with my cards and my hardcover and lead people in a fight against the Shadow.

Please, back it. Send some love to games about women* and games about giving women the chance to be badass heroes!

JOIN THE WATCH
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/medeiros/the-watch-rpg

Some items I consider basic human rights, each discussed in six words or less:

Some items I consider basic human rights, each discussed in six words or less:
-- automatic optional taxes completed by IRS
-- national bank accounts for all
-- free health care for all
-- voting rights for all
-- minimum basic income for all
-- free wireless internet for all
-- free nexus 5's for all
-- unabridged right to travel
-- free universal state ID for all

What would you add to this list? What on hear does not seem like a basic human right?

With the overton window being radically shifted by the traitor in the Oval, here's a reminder of the minimum basic...

With the overton window being radically shifted by the traitor in the Oval, here's a reminder of the minimum basic income.

Originally shared by William Nichols

Just a reminder: Give Directly is doing the work to find out if a minimum basic income works.

You know, with science instead of rhetoric.

Here's a link: https://www.givedirectly.org/give-basic-income
https://www.givedirectly.org/give-basic-income#

Something brilliant happened in a Dungeon World game tonight:

Something brilliant happened in a Dungeon World game tonight:

The PCs offered to do a job for the local mayor in exchange for 10% of the government revenues for the next year.

The short term incentive is clear: we went out and took care of threats to the town. A ghost was bothering the town, so we took care of it. There are some pirates, and we'll deal with them, too.

What happens after that? What happens if this is extended? What occurs when other towns get murderhoboes of their own?

I'm headed to bed, but wanted to leave this here as food for thought for tomorrow.

Sometimes, I wish there was objective good and evil. And that I had a sense to recognize it.

Sometimes, I wish there was objective good and evil. And that I had a sense to recognize it.

Instead, I'm limited to thinking about things and asking others their perspective. So I'm wrong basically all the time, and so are you.

I wish morality was like a video game, with a karma score visible to others. Positive and negative scores assigned for each action.

Or, a deontologically true system where certain actions count as infinitely bad. Murder, lying, that sort of thing.

Maybe even a virtue system, accurately predicting if you will act like a shitheel or a good person when faced with difficulty.

I wish for something like this most of the time. But, Socrates taught me a long time ago that'd be pointless -- that we have to create our own morality or else it is meaningless. It'd also be a terribly efficient police state.

But hey, nothing wrong with wishing.

I'm a little bit proud of our court system today.

I want to tell you about a game.

I want to tell you about a game.

Yes, you!

Its called Endless Sky. It is open source and free and available on steam. Here is its webpage: https://endless-sky.github.io/

What it is: economic space exploration and exploitation on the numbers of running a small commercial spaceship. This is the closest game I know of to anything like the Solar Wind & Sail series.

There's a plot, and it continues to evolve as the game continues to be built. There are maybe half a dozen factions within human space, and about as many alien species.

The economy just radically changed to extend the mid game. The mid game is my favorite part, so I am replaying.

What's the mid game?

Well ...
Early game: You've got a big ole' loan, you buy and sell crap, and try to make ends meet. If you're lucky, you can get ahead of your loan and buy a better ship.

Mid game: You've got a better ship. You can participate in a fight, haul a bunch of cargo and pax, and take over disabled ships. You can pursue the plot pretty easily. You have to be careful and avoid direct entaglements, as decent pirate fleets can overwhelm you.

Late game: You have a flagship and battle fleet, and are a match for anything out there. Money ceases to matter much, as your economic needs are met by boarding pirates and selling off their stuff.

How'd they change it?
Well ...
Let's say you are attacked (oh no!) by pirates. PIRATES. And you manage to disable them before they destroy you (hooray!). In this game, you can take possession of their ship and sell it off.

Used to be: You'd get full new value for the ship. If you were in a shuttle worth 500k and managed to defeat a bad-guy shuttle worth 500k, now you have a million. You can probably upgrade to a better ship immediately! You need to pay for the "death benefits", but you can minimize this by having better weapons for your crew.

How it is now: Depreciation of assets! Plus, anything you steal is automatically fully deprecated to just 25% of the base value. So now, you'd have to take possession of FOUR shuttles to get the same wealth, plus during all this time your ship has been depreciating in value!

This means getting to the first upgraded ship is much harder. There is now an economic reason to do things other than anti-piracy activities, as the jobs and buying and selling can still produce reasonable wealth.

I've played through this game a few times. I've got one save game with all the best stuff -- best ships, weapons, engines, more money than god. But, what I love the most is the struggle as the early game turns into the mid game. When I'm not sure if I am netting any wealth.

You should play it, and tell me about your progress.

Dear friends

Dear friends,

How have you made the world safer for your neighbors this week?

I've done very little this week; called a house rep, sent out some post cards. I wore red on the Day Without Women, which hardly seems like political action.

We've been moving, but I'm not sure what to do next. I am very much open to suggestions and ideas.

Love to you and yours!

Would you read a book just because I told you to?

Would you read a book just because I told you to?

Its called Too Like The Lightning.

Stealing from the good ideas of Baz Stevens and Brandes Stoddard, and always from Dungeon World.

Stealing from the good ideas of Baz Stevens and Brandes Stoddard, and always from Dungeon World.

In Back and Spent Again, I've got something a lot like alignment for the player characters. Its an XP trigger move, chosen at the start of session.

I'd been struggling with these, as the triggers have been a bit too vague. They also use game terms that I shouldn't expect the players to know.

I'm thinking I can structure things a little b it differently, and maybe make everything a little less complicated while I'm at it.

This'll still be choose 1 from a list, and they'll match up to certain precepts. Maybe I can even have these as dualities?

The 8 I might use are: Magic, Civilization, Gods, Thievery, Nature, Individual, Oaths, Virtue.

For the Fighter, that might be:
-- Civilization: Mark XP when you endanger yourself for a group.
-- Individual: Mark XP when you accomplish a goal while acknowledging no help.
-- Oaths: Mark XP when you make an honest promise.

For the Cleric, maybe:
-- Gods: Mark XP when you endanger yourself for the Gods.
-- Civilization: Mark XP when you promote civilization.
-- Oaths: Mark XP when someone makes a promise to you.

For the Thief, maybe:
-- Thievery: Mark XP when a stolen secret gets you into trouble.
-- Individual: Mark XP when you take something that does not belong to you.
-- Civilization: Mark XP when you directly help a group in need.

For the Mage, maybe:
-- Magic: Mark XP when you endanger yourself for magic.
-- Civilization: Mark XP when you act on secrets to benefit a group.
-- Virtue: Mark XP when the high standard you hold yourself to gets you into trouble.

Something like that, anyway. This is rough, and I'm open to kind criticism.

Laptops.

Laptops.

We each have a chromebook, which is our de jure computer. So, for example, right now we've got a bunch of Weird Al stuff going on the chromecast -- broadcast from one of the chromebooks. I adore these things.

I also have a crappy windows laptop, which is pretty great for my ten year old video games (and Endless Sky, an open source space game, which doesn't take any real processor.)

Anyway, this shitty little windows laptop is now ~3 year old. I cracked the screen two years ago a bit, and it doesn't charge very fast.

We're moving, so it is time to get rid of things.

Suggestions for a replacement?

Back and Spent Again

Back and Spent Again

Ran the 2nd session of the "living campaign" last night. It worked out well. I gave them the same problems that were on the table last time. I didn't add any, because I'm generous like that.

Some issues and how to maybe resolve them:
-- Setup is taking too long. At current, players decide on classification and bonds with friends and communities both of theirs and of other players, during character creation. If I limit this to your own friend and you build up your knowledge of the others as game play continues, it may work out better.

-- not a single choice of theirs was originally on the privilege chart, and I cheated to make it happen. There are currently too many options, so it is too easy for no one at the table to hit any of the options. I want someone at the table to (almost) always hit at least one of the privilege conditions. I think I can make the options simpler on the MC facing, collapsing a bunch of the PC options. So, for example, we've decided the society they find themselves in is pro "half" creatures: halforc, halfelf, halfling. Its that sort of place, and I can probably do something similar with gender and history -- though I do worry.

-- Hierarchies. Give players narrative authority, and immediately they start talking about rigid structures, "the lord", "the nobles". They don't need my help to be oppressive!

Good things!
-- Had the first hard fail on the Adventure move! They decided to raid the house of the slum lord who was moving in, to steal all the valuables and generally make a mess. Because PCs are idiots. The dice came up double ones, and the player was gleeful. It was only through the Mage's magic that they were able to teleport home.

-- Nobody understands how fire works. Like holy crap.

#JoinTheWatch

#JoinTheWatch

Originally shared by Andrew Medeiros

The Watch funded this morning!! (does a little dance, is terrible at it). Now we wanna focus on getting you some amazing stretch goals, including a new backer pledge level that will let you transform a woman, non-binary femme, or genderqueer person in your life (or even you) into a soldier of The Watch in our supplement deck or NPC appendix. I'm very excited and hope we can make this add-on a reality!

If you can share the news with your circles one more time for us, we'd really appreciate the assist. I look forward to seeing you all when we #jointhewatchrpg

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/medeiros/the-watch-rpg/posts/1827489

PLEASE RESHARE THIS!

Originally shared by Camp Nerdly

PLEASE RESHARE THIS!

If you're on the fence about Nerdly this year, or have been delaying putting in an application, please consider doing so now.

We currently have room, and I would much rather you come if we have the space.

The sooner you put the information in, or look over the application, the sooner I can address any questions or concerns.

ALSO
If you put in an application, and listed your friend's name or the names of your (13 or older) children, check in with them to make sure they filled one out too. I need everybody's information to arrange activity schedules and chores.

I submitted a forked version of my game about fantasy adventurers, Back and Spent Again, to the Civic Games Contest.

I submitted a forked version of my game about fantasy adventurers, Back and Spent Again, to the Civic Games Contest.

I hope they like it! You should enter, too!

Took down a post, deciding it was a bad idea. Too obvious as to who it was about, and doing too little good.

Took down a post, deciding it was a bad idea. Too obvious as to who it was about, and doing too little good.

Nothing to do with those who commented.

BE FURIOUS

BE FURIOUS

... and know every part of this was in the campaign.

... and don't be surprised. This was all coming, and we knew it.

... and know that everyone who voted for him did so knowing full well he'd said so.

... and remind them of that, with as much patience and passion as you can muster.

... and be kind when you do so.

He will not divide us.

3% is now dubbed instead of with sub titles.

3% is now dubbed instead of with sub titles.

I am uncertain how I feel about this.

Dear friends

Dear friends,

How have you made the world safer for your neighbors this week?

In the last week or so I've done very little. Called our house rep about Sessions, publicized a couple of things, but nothing major. I've not yet submitted my game to the civic games contest, and am awaiting a friends read through.

In a few hours is our postcard party! If you're in the DC area and free around 3 to 6 pm and want to join, reach out!

Over the next week or so:
-- I don't have anything planned! Maybe the day without women, I dunno. I'm open to ideas, and hope some will come up at the postcard party.

Love to you and yours! He will not divide us!

Imma gonna submit Spent and Back Again: or, How Adventurers Pay The Rent to the civic games contest.

Imma gonna submit Spent and Back Again: or, How Adventurers Pay The Rent to the civic games contest.

I don't contribute to a lot of game contests, and dunno.

I've got things down to 10 pages, hooray. That's four playbooks.

Here's a question, though: Should the playbooks be more pregenned than regular apocalypse world playbooks?

So, for ex, as is for the fighter, you choose:
-- Race, Gender, History (these matter)
-- look, skin, face
-- 2 moves
-- Assign values to a weapon and other assets
-- describe someone you know, and assign bonds
-- describe a bar you visit, and assign credits

Should I assign some of these in a pregen fashion? Like, "Here's the bar, you've got two credit there. Everybody knows your name"

Or ... not? I dunno.

Back and Spent Again, or: How Adventurers Pay The Rent

Back and Spent Again, or: How Adventurers Pay The Rent

Open Question: Whose got ideas for character classes? These are hopefully ones that've been in or around D&D and its friends for decades

Character Classes!
I've got: wizard, paladin, fighter, thief, cleric, ranger, bard, barbarian.

That's 8! I could stand 4 more. Any ideas? If so, how is the suggested thematically different from the above? That is, what niche does it have the others do not?

ok.

It appears:
-- I am now maybe running an ongoing living RPG.
-- This is an RPG about the cycle of poverty.
-- The poverty has three fronts, the same as the PCs stats.
-- I think it is fun, despite monumentally unfair.

We had the following characters:
-- Amos the cleric, whose player said something like "I don't know why we'd choose that option, it helps only people that aren't us"
-- Radec the fighter, who aligned on zero of the privilege conditions and had a pretty bad time of it.
-- Xeno the mage, whose mentor was made of fire and named smoke.
-- Ford the thief, who hit all the privilege conditions. The rent due from Ford was almost zilch, and the player acted as such.

For next session -- and the beginning of each session -- they'll have to pay the rent. In addition, new problems will emerge in their community. They can deal with these, or not.

Last time, I did a couple of things wrong, owing to thinking in terms of one shots:
-- I didn't start them poor enough. I'll have to figure out how to resolve this. Maybe hard moves?
-- I let one of the players combat one of the sources of poverty. That means, on one of three axes, they basically don't need to pay rent. A hard move could open that front again.

Or, maybe its all OK and I should just roll with the punches.

Running.

Running.

I hadn't run for a couple of weeks. I'd be work stressed and sick and all sorts of reasons. It had been cold, too, so I couldn't go running outside.

I decided, hell or high water, I'd go running yesterday.

Got home, it was raining. So I went upstairs to the treadmill.

And oh my god. After five minutes, everything loosened up. I could feel the tension leave my back --- stress I didn't even know I had.

After ten, I could really run. After 15, I was managing my breath and thinking of little else.

After a half an hour, the world shifted. My game of solitaire largely forgotten, my breath focused.

Today, the problems of the office seem straight forward and immaterial. Everything gets the volume turned down after a good run.