Discourse & Discord

“The Discourse”

I can't keep up with The Discourse. There's always something happening, and I mostly don't care. But I try to be a good person and also to not support shitty people, so I have to care a little.

I stopped using the "OSR" tag on this blog, because it has been associated with a lot of terrible people, and also it seemed unnecessary¹. This was an imperfect solution because "OSR" has a defined sensibility that it was useful to have a name for. (*DREAM is a cool group, but I think it's turning into something different—compare a game like Songbirds V2 with a game like Bastionland.)

Then Zedeck had a thread and pointed out that it was selfish to continue playing in the space but to disown the label. I still respect people who used to be "OSR" and then decided that it didn't actually describe the games they enjoy, or that it wasn't worth dealing with the people. But I'll try to use the "OSR" tag for my stuff where it seems relevant, and also to be a decent person.

Discord

Where is the OSR community now? As far as I engage with it: mostly Discord. Many Discord servers are runaway reactors of creativity. Unfortunately, they're also transient, and brief conversations get lost. Here's some things to come of them that I hope others might find useful.

Troika! Backgrounds Jam

I may never play Troika! proper, but it's an infectious idea. Similarly, I don't know if I'll ever sell my games, but itch.io seems to be where the cool games are these days. The Troika! Backgrounds Jam was apparently the push I needed to throw something together and put it on itch². The jam is over, but this clip of how-to seems worth keeping:

(Instructions from Jared Sinclair, used by permission.)

And here is my entry, loosely inspired by Dial H:

I went ahead and put Bloodring up there too:

Alternate Beholders

Something about a beholder demands an answer. "Dungeons and Dragons" is nominally about dragons, but you know you're really playing D&D when you see a beholder. The 5e Monster Manual has three or four variant beholders. The AD&D Monstrous Manual has twelve. Everyone wants to do their own take³.

So the OSR Discord server was brainstorming alternative "beholders": burning wheels of eyes, disco-laser robots, etc. And I had what I thought was a pretty good idea, and now a bona fide meme: An Octopus with Too Many Wands. Now that we've survived one in Spwack's game, I thought I'd take the opportunity to share the idea here for posterity. It's a great monster: it's weird, it's dangerous, it's intuitive, and it makes its own treasure.

(Art from Nate Treme, used by permission.)

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1 I call all the games I play "D&D" in speech, even things like Mothership. It's just easier sometimes.^back

2 Looking back at my blogging, I find I am unexpectedly motivated by challenges and competitions, even though I am not a competitive person by nature.^back

3 What I can find on short notice includes:

• The Panopticium
• The Lookyloo
• The Ones Left Behind
• Improved Beholders

But there are many many more, I'm sure.^back

Being Useful

Always feels good to help people with things. Sometimes this is just recommending resources, but sometimes I get to flex my slowly-dying engineer muscles. These are two things I got to help people with recently on some Discord chats, but Discord is temporary so I'm writing them down here for posterity.

RPS Mechanics in Play-by-Post Games

Image source: wikimedia.

Rock-paper-scissors only works in person because you can throw more-or-less simultaneously. In a play-by-post environment, someone has to go first. Here's how:

1. Alice generates a random number and appends it to her choice.
   Example: "paper04"
2. Alice takes a hash* of the result and shares it.
   Example: "md5:fbe1a7f5e0330c5cf5a986d40065a21e"
3. Bob shares his choice.
   Example: "scissors"
4. Alice shares her original string.
   Example: "paper04"
5. Bob checks the hash of the original string.

This is not a protocol focused on security. For example, given that the salt is a number 00-99, Bob could generate a rainbow table of all the possible checksums and guess Alice's answer before she revealed it.
It could be automated in some ways if you ran the forum, for example, a bot could automate the final check.

Weighted Selection from a Compact Table

It's common for a table in a book to be formatted like:

1-10. Very common result
11-15. Less common result
16-19. Slightly less common result
20. Very rare result

This is useful if you want to mimic a specific type of distribution given a flat input curve. The theory is that if you use this table a lot, then it will make the results feel more natural.
This presents a problem if you would like to automatically roll on the table in a spreadsheet. A naive way to do this is the format it like:

(A1) Very common result
(A2) Very common result
(A3) Very common result
. . .
(A20) Very rare result

But this is time-consuming and annoying to change. Using VLOOKUP, you can format it like:

(A1) 10 (B1) Very common result
(A2) 15 (B2) Less common result
(A3) 19 (B3) Slightly less common result
(A4) 20 (B4) Very rare result

And then roll as normal. There is a (rough) proof of concept here. There's a couple mistakes in it, but if you play around with it you can see how it works.
Cols A & B are the actual table, while Cols C & D are for illustrative purposes and aren't necessary for the table to function. Cols E & F show how an automated roller might function.
* = I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. If you search "md5 [term]" it will auto-suggest the md5sum of "[term]", which is neat. Wolfram Alpha also does this.

Anniversary and Crowdfunding Analysis

I apparently missed my one-year anniversary, but the blog's been slow recently. A lot has happened in the last half-year: I've graduated, I've moved (Boston to Buffalo), I've found employment. Unfortunately, I may not be gaming as much any more, but we'll see how that plays out long term.

Just because I wasn't blogging doesn't mean I haven't been busy, and one of the things I worked on was an analysis of Kickstarter data. Because it was for a class, it assumes a certain vocabulary, has some weird stylistic artifacts, and has some persistent errors that weren't severe enough to merit fixing at the time. Eventually I would like to revisit this more completely, but until then I may as well "publish" it:
The Paper
The Handout
The Presentation
I would like to dedicate this to Erik Tenkar, whose sharp coverage of Kickstarter campaigns made me to think that this might be a worthwhile project.

Looking back at this post, it's very much about myself. I can't be sure that I'll keep the blog up, but I do know that I've got at least a few more posts in me and that they'll be more gaming-related than this one.
Update: The dropbox links are all broken now, use this link instead.

Grab Bag and Ancient Rome

I got my Goodman Games Holiday Grab Bag today (the sale is ended now). It contained:

The top row is things I'm definitely keeping (most of the 4e stuff is alien to me).

• The Random Esoteric Creature Generator by James Edward Raggi IV
• In Search of Adventure ed. Ken Hart
• Points of Light by Robert Conley
• DM Campaign Record
• Age of Cthulhu 2: Madness in London Town by Rick Maffei
• DCC #58: The Forgotten Portal by Chris Doyle
• DCC #59: Mists of Madness by Harley Stroh
• DCC #60: Thrones of Punjar by Rick Maffei
• DCC #72: Beyond the Black Gate by Harley Stroh
• Wicked Fantasy Factory: A Fistful of Zinjas by Luke Johnson
• Monstercology: Orcs by Rick Maffei
• Master Dungeons: Dragora's Dungeon by Harley Stroh
• Master Dungeons: Curse of the Kingspire by Harley Stroh
• Azagar's Book of Rituals ed. Dwight Hulse, Aeryn Rudel, Harley Stroh
• Amethyst: Foundations by Chris Dias

Which I think is a pretty good pull, especially considering The Esoteric Random Creature Generator was not only on my wish list, but enormously discounted:

So About Ancient Rome . . .

I'm thinking of doing something for the Great Khan's latest contest. Initially, I was thinking of making some sort of itinerarium, but I don't think I'll be doing that anymore. But for the use of others, The Orbis Project is an amazing resource.
For the entry I'm considering now, here are two translations of Vitruvius' On Architecture:

• trans. Teubner (well-annotated)
• trans. Morgan (illustrated)

While I may or may not finish in time for the contest (13th January), I'm having a lot of fun with it, and I wish everyone else the same.

Scattered Thoughts

Notes from my summer activities and my first month of blogging. Mostly with at least half-hearted attempts to make them gaming-relevant.

Summer Reading:

 

The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength)

An exciting classic "science fiction" trilogy. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although at times the overt Christian themes were grating on my secular humanist upbringing. The villains in That Hideous Strength were particularly strong, and I hope my own games can have villains that good. I also took extensive notes on the language as I went, and eventually I'll share those somehow (hopefully without diluting the content of this blog).

The Long Earth by Stephen Baxter & Terry Pratchett

A grand exploration of infinity, with some bizarre characters. Reminded me that dinosaurs are awesome.

Railsea by China Miéville

Great world-building with good proportions of secrets, bizarre new things, and enough familiar things to stay grounded.

Doc Savage Stories

I got back to my pulp roots with some old Doc Savage books ("The Land of Always-Night", "Mad Mesa", "The Dust of Death", and "The Stone Man"). This directly inspired Pulp Materials.

Things in Museums:

My favorite part of visiting the UK is the museums. Here are some things I thought it worth making a note of when I saw them.

• A German "schwerdt" (which unhelpfully appears to mean sword) was 4-6' long, and was not used in heavy over-head swings, but for fencing. The technique was to keep your off-hand just under the hilt as a pivot, and to control the motion of it with your good hand from the pommel. (Pitt-Rivers Museum)
• War quoits (chakrams) are basically sharpened rings, thrown like Frisbees held from the inside. I imagine they'd just be like exotic throwing knives in a game. (Pitt-Rivers Museum)
• In Guyana, traditional duels involve each participant standing close to the other and pressing their shields together. The first to lose their footing loses the duel. (Pitt-Rivers Museum)
• Instead of a traditional knife-bayonet, some early pistols had a sort of mace-head attachment on the barrel. I wish I'd taken a picture of this. (Tower of London)
• Before the formalization of molar theory, molar equivalencies were found using a slide-rule with salts marked in the positions of their molar weights. (Museum of the History of Science)
• When Copernicus first proposed his heliocentric model, people started using it for its accuracy, while simultaneously denying the validity of its assumptions. Essentially, it was used as an empirical model, but its implications ignored. (Museum of the History of Science)

 

Old Music:

• Long John effected an escape wearing shoes with a heel in front and a heel behind. Consequently, he was very difficult to track.

A Month of Blogging:

In my eagerness to post, or general confusion, I seem to have missed some things.

Fire!Fire!

Quench bears are obviously inspired by Smokey Bear. I would have used an image, except that I couldn't for the life of me parse the Smokey Bear Act, and decided to err on the side of caution.

Snake Oil

I could not remember for the whole time I was composing that table that the name I was looking for was "patent medicine". If I revisit the table someday, I'll keep that in mind.

Spider Racial Track

The post was going to have an image, but I forgot it. I'm just editing it in now . . .

Pulp Materials

Somewhere between Fire!Fire! and here, I forgot how to make a table in Blogger. Maybe I did it directly in html? At any rate, the table isn't really big enough to justify its seclusion in a Google Doc.

Pub Names

Nonsensical pub names are apparently a long tradition--and just as old a complaint. From what I understand they are frequently mutations of older names that may have made more sense.

The Future:

Classes have started now, but it remains to be seen what effect this might have on this blog. On the one hand, I'll have less time to myself and more other work to be doing. But on the two hand, I'll probably actually get a game going, and be doing more directly involving gaming. As I have no set schedule for the blog anyway, I don't expect any of these changes will be noticed.