Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: RPG cosmology
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I read an article in the guardian on Saturday morning about the fall of Ceacescu’s Romania in 1989. The article is a bit rambly, and like most attempts at opinion by journalists it fails to reach a proper conclusion. But it has this excellent passage in the middle, which struck me as a classic moment…
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I’ve played a few sci-fi and cyberpunk campaigns in my time, and DM’d some too, and I certainly enjoyed them, but I think there are some aspects of sci-fi as a genre – and Cyberpunk particularly – that encourage[1] a kind of criminal nihilistic campaigning which I don’t generally find enjoyable[2], particularly when I’m DMing.…
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In response to the recent stoush over Tolkien, race and conservatism, I did a little more research on Tolkien’s racial theories and their similarities to other eugenic and racial theories floating about in the interwar period. I don’t have my primary or secondary sources with me, because my Tolkien Bestiary is in a box in…
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In the interview linked to below, China Mieville claims that high fantasy is conservative, and that due to its prominence the fantasy genre in general is judged as conservative by critics. This seems pretty uncontroversial to me, but over at Monsters and Manuals this claim was disputed as a shallow interpretation of Tolkien and of…
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Our DM (who is so old-fashioned he doesn’ t even have a blog) is drip-feeding us information about the Feng Shui world, so I can’t say too much about where we are or what we are doing, but our characters have ended up in 2056 in a strange future “dystopia” controlled by a bunch of…
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A whole bunch of RPG bloggers have recently pointed to this post which compares the obsession with game mechanics in RPGs with the obsession on certain mechanical details in pornography (hereafter referred to as pr0n to escape the spammers). I think they are getting way too hung up on the pr0n=D&D thing. The argument is…
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Cruising the canals of Amsterdam over the weekend, I discussed my musings on virtual economies with my good friend (and WoWer) the good Dr. A. His response to my ideas about a virtual economy built on real money was to ask “why”? Good enough question, I suppose. Why would a company make a risky game…
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In explaining why I am considering a reconfiguration of D&D and the d20 system, I mentioned the key goal of making a single universal skill system the driver of the entire gaming process, so that it would cover skill resolution, combat, magic and saving throws. Under such a model there would be no process which…
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In discussion with the good Dr. A and Miss B. in Amsterdam (and we weren’t stoned) I conceived randomly of a kind of alternative or next stage business model for WoW gold farmers. I don’t know if the model itself is viable, but were it to become so it would represent a huge contribution of…
Compromise and Conceit 