Yesterday, I wrote at painstaking length about why Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa sucks. Or, to be precise, I wrote at substantial and vituperative length about the parts of it that I think suck, almost all of which things it unimaginatively copied from earlier MMOs, things that I've seen done better. Plus, as it turns out, one whole new reason to hate it, namely a level of displayed contempt for its paying customers never before seen in the industry. So after all of that, it must have left you baffled, trying to imagine why I wrapped up by saying that I voluntarily paid full price for it and am going to pay $14.95 a month for it for as long as it lasts, even if (as I predict) this is "less than one year." But before I can explain that, first, I have to explain three things.

First: It's SF. One of which I mentioned in passing yesterday: despite Phil Foglio's famous observation roughly a quarter-century ago that (in gaming terms) there is no difference between science fiction and fantasy, I keep wishing devoutly for a science fiction MMO to play, a science fiction world to spend my spare time in instead of the same generic fantasy world that almost every MMO in the history of the industry has used. I prefer science fiction to fantasy in general, but my reasons go deeper than that. For one thing, it really is the same old world, only barely redressed. Different campaign settings, but the basic rules, races, character classes, economy, jargon, and setting have not changed since Gary Gygax wrote it all up as "Chainmail: Fantasy Supplement" way the hell back in 1971. See, here's the thing about that: I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1978. I could not possibly be more bored with the D&D universe, and could not be forced at gunpoint to play in one more D&D campaign, online or pen-and-paper, period. I got sick and tired of the D&D universe before half of you were born.

Nor does it improve my opinion of almost every MMO that one of the aspects of D&D they all rip off is that they are almost all, with so few exceptions as to be hardly note-worthy, set in a thinly redressed early medieval northern Europe. That is not merely a profoundly uninteresting time period for me, it's one I find actively unpleasant to be exposed to. (The real reason I dropped out of the SCA after too many years is that, after a certain amount of time, no amount of dressing up in funny clothes, getting drunk, and singing silly songs can make up for my sheer loathing for the idea of wanting to live in the 8th or 9th century.) So for the love of the Gods and all holy things, I pray almost daily for some 3D MMO universe that isn't set in some variation on the European dark ages. It's taken me years to come to terms with the fact that so many of you can only imagine a magical universe being set back then, to get it pounded through my head that since that's when all the fairy tales are set, that's what you all think of as the last magical time in human history. OK, OK. But if we have to play a fantasy game, can we just once in a rare while play in a world in which magic continued into the early industrial age, like Girl Genius? Or one in which it continued into the 1960s, like Lord Darcy? Or into the present, like Borderlands and War for the Oaks? Or into the far future, like Warhammer 40k?

Second: I hate getting personally shot at. That's a strange thing to say for someone who plays MMOs, but it's true: I pick my character class based on my ability to stay out of stabbity-stabbity range of rude people and nasty things that want to poke holes in me, at least as much as possible. That means one of two things, almost without exceptions: summoner, or sniper. Now, never ever ever in MMO history has any game done a summoner class as well as the Mastermind character class in City of Villains. That's one of the things that keeps me going, and that makes it so hard for me to consider going back over to the hero side of that game. But I've played a ton of MMOs, and no MMO, not even City of Whatever, not even my previous high-water mark for sniper action Neocron, has ever put snipers into the game so well. If you're going to send my character out to blow the enemy away, I can think of no better way to do it than with a really good rifle, a scope, a tall place to hide, a willingness to evacuate when the enemy figures out where am I, and a spot of patience. Heck, back when I was playing paintball, that's even how I played that. And even before getting to the specialty character class Sniper in Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, just with Firearms level 5 and an ordinary hunting rifle, I was having the time of my life blowing enemies away before they even knew where I was. More on that in a second. Because before I can give you any more about the good parts of RGTR, I can tell my personal stories with it a lot easier if I first explain a bit of the game's story, what the game's about.

Third: Here's their story. And I warn you, it's a bit of a cliché, itself, even beyond the requirements of the MMO genre. Don't judge it too harshly for being a cliché here, though. Focus groups and user surveys have made it clear that one of the things that keeps drawing people to the D&D ripoff games is that all they have to know is their character's species and character class and they instantly know everything they really need to know to get started. They know who they are, they know why they're there, they know who the enemy are, they know (well enough) why they have to kill the enemy, and they know how to act and how to talk while they're doing it. That's important in a roleplaying game, especially an online one. One of the things that really held back Anarchy Online is that, to understand who your character is and why you fight, you really do need to read an entire separately-published 330 page novel, game designer Ragnar Tørnquist's Prophet Without Honor. Which is, oddly enough, a very good book, but not one anybody other than AO purists has ever even heard of. City of Heroes suffers from some of the same problem on a lesser scale. Sure, it benefits from the fact that superheroes and supervillains need very little explanation, but to actually play in character and understand what's going on around you in that universe, you almost have to have read two whole separately-published novels' worth of backstory, or at the very least the roughly 30 or so page summary that's on the website. Most players just don't want to do that; they want to jump right in and play the game -- and yet still not feel lost and confused while they're doing it. So when I tell you up-front that the backstory all too closely resembles a dumbed-down version of Babylon 5 by way of Stargate the TV series, you may cringe, but sadly, it's an economic reality of the industry that it can't be too clever and still sell at all. So, to get things started, here's the cinematic trailer that you see when you launch the game, and that they use to advertise it:



Basically, before our race evolved sentience (and a few others), the only and original sentient race in our galaxy were a species called the Eloh. They set out to uplift other species as they evolved sentience, to teach them a skill we call Logos that would let them use the power of their minds to control the world and to control technology in powerful but environmentally friendly ways. But one faction of the Eloh, the Neph, have turned to evil, recruited an entire army that we call the Bane (mostly made up of an insectoid species called the Thrax) and are using them to exterminate the rest of the Eloh, and every member of the other three species that the Eloh intervened in: the Foreans, the Brann, and us. We only found out about this in time for our government to use Eloh technology to evacuate everybody the Foreans would take to the Forean homeworld before Earth got hit by a Bane shardship and rendered mostly uninhabitable, and probably mostly uninhabited. And the Foreans were only taking those who could help them fight their own fight against the Bane, soldiers and the Logos-receptive. There are in-game hints that maybe some people on Earth are still fighting, and we may go back to help them in some later expansion to the game, but for now we have to assume that the various military officers and recruits, and psi-sensitives, who evacuated to Foreas are all there is left of the human race, and that that few of us, unfortunately, is too many for the Bane. Join the Allied Free Sentients and fight, or the whole human race dies. (Yeah, I know. Elohim versus nephilim, how original. Bear with me here.)

Aside: One thing Richard Garriott and I have in common. Oh, and one more thing about the game world that will simplify my explanations to come: it will also help if you understand that Richard Garriott was born in 1961, and like me, he obviously grew up on a steady diet of murky, poorly lit, grubby, and morally ambiguous (at best) movies about the Vietnam War. It may be dressed up in microcircuitry, self-repairing armor, computers, heads-up-displays, anti-grav, and the occasional energy weapon, but the combat tactics of RGTR are pure Vietnam War. So are the characterizations and the combat psychology of the war, too. If you had any doubt of that, it goes away when you get to the main base for the human side, Foreas Base in Concordia Divide, and hear the loudspeaker system making sardonic announcements that are pure homage to that Vietnam-era classic TV show, the most popular TV show of his childhood and mine, M*A*S*H. (For example, "Attention, all personnel. Due to conditions beyond our control, we regret to announce that lunch is now being served.")

So, having explained all that, here's what's so cool about RGTR: It feels vividly, intensely real. The graphics are good. The character models range from okay to mostly good enough. The weapons tech and combat physics are very good. The sound effects are very, very good, far better than City of Heroes (which really only knows four noises: smack, bang, whoosh, and the grating of fingernails on a chalkboard). But what kept taking me into the game, that kept immersing me in it even against my will the whole time I was playing, was two things. First of all, the incredibly good use of 3D sound (this game begs to be played with headphones on and with a good 3D-capable sound card) makes the chaos of a Vietnam-like warzone really vivid. But even more than the sounds of the fighting, it's the amazingly good voice acting, something I've been begging for in MMOs since the genre began. I haven't heard voice acting this good, or sound effects this good either for that matter, since a "little" game called Starcraft. And I don't make that comparison lightly. In fact, I'll go further than that. Blizzard keeps saying over and over again that, no matter how much demand there is out there, they are probably never going to make World of Starcraft, a Starcraft MMO. And every time they say that, the world's vast Starcraft fan base, that vast majority of us who consider Starcraft to be the Casablanca of computer games, groan. Well, guess what? This game deserves to be called World of Starcraft. OK, the Eloh aren't the Protoss, and the Thrax aren't quite the Zerg, for all that comparisons to both could be fairly made. But boy, do you really end up feeling like you're surrounded by Terran Marines in this game!

Three examples, two short, one longer. The first short example: Very early, within minutes if you skip the tutorial, you get sent to a place the Foreans called Lower Eloh Creek. In an attempt to cut off Terran supply lines, the Thrax have airlifted in a ton of troops to a creek near Aria Das, one of the main drop-ship landing points. They were too badly surrounded to last long, but they held the ground well enough for their engineers to dig in, setting up fortifications, some kind of mineral extraction biotech facilities that keep self-repairing, and more importantly a series of bunkers for snipers that are uncomfortably close to Aria Das. You get sent in to help the troops on the front line clear the snipers out of that bunker. This is no small feat, not least of which because the determined Bane keep helicoptering in more Thrax troops, dropping fire teams wherever they can find a clear spot on the battlefield. Fortunately for you, there are also a ton of non-player-character Terran soldiers there, too, to help you. And as you're creeping along Eloh Creek, looking for a good spot to sneak up the bank on the Bane side to clear those bunkers, the air above you is constantly full of bullets and beams going both directions, and both banks echo with the angry shouts and pained yells of fighting men and women from both sides. And rotten game mechanics or not, I couldn't help feeling like I was really there. Honestly, the intensity of it and the realism of it can't be conveyed until you've played it with headphones on, even if you've seen gameplay demo video.

By the way, does it make me a bad person that I think it's endearing that the Terran forces already have an insulting ethnic name for the Thrax? They call every Thrax soldier "Crusty," and now, so do I.

The longer story: It's a bit later in my career, level 16ish, right after Ranger training and my first set of Stealth armor. About halfway between Foreas Base and Bane Forward Command, there's a bowl-shaped valley that's been fought over so long that no green thing lives there. One of the things that's disquieting our troops is a rumor that some humans have defected to the Bane. Fortunately, one of the research scientists in the area has read reports from us grunts about the Bane using cybernetic implants to reanimate Forean corpses, both as disposable ground troops and for psychological advantage like this. She wants proof, so she sends me to that spot on the front line, where at least a couple of times a day a popular sergeant shows up for the Bane, constantly coming back no matter how much worse for wear. This is that valley, as seen from a shallow creek bed that leads there from the Western Trenches waypoint:

( LJ-cut for image size, but seeing them will save me a ton of text description. )

That guy in the foreground of both pictures? That's me, Infamousbrad Hickson. (The last name "Hicks" was taken. As were "Brad" and "Bradley," more's the pity.) That tiny little figure in the center of the 2nd picture? That's a Thrax Infantry PFC who is about to have a really bad day. My armor gives me enough stealth, and that rocky outcropping gives me enough cover, that almost nobody on the valley floor can see me up there. I bring the gun up, check the targeting reticle in my HUD: about 60 yards, perfect for the lightning rifle I'm using. Breath, Aim, Slack, Shoot: 3 shots in, and the Thrax's personal force field is shredded, as is most of the Thrax. By the time Crusty has figured out where the shots are coming from, he has just barely enough time to fire one wild shot at me, mostly blocked by that rocky outcropping and way outside of his optimum firing range, or to run for cover, none of which is close enough to do him any good, before that 4th shot blows him to wherever dead Thrax go. If he even manages to hit, what gets past the cover of that rocky outcropping will be easily absorbed by my armor. Odds are, even other Thrax nearby won't see where the shot came from. So I move to another part of the top of the hill, pick another spot with a clear sight line to any solitary Thrax or small Thrax fire team trying to move up the valley. Periodically the Bane send in automated air cover to clear the valley floor. But it flies below my hilltop, and isn't looking up. So I switch the rifle from lightning to EMP. Breath, Aim, Slack, Shoot: six or 8 rounds later, while it's still struggling to find me, then climb above me, and before it can return fire, boom, one dead robot aircraft. Unfortunately for me, reanimated human soldiers' corpses (including eventually the guy I'm looking for) do appear on various spots along the hill, near enough to the top to see through my stealth. And are right on top of me. No problem: throw the rifle over my shoulder with my left hand, grab the pistol on my hip with my right hand, and blaze away. When the corpse falls, sneak down to where it is, pry the reanimation chip out of it, sneak back up to the top. And the whole time, keep my ears open for the random mortar shots that one or both sides periodically drop onto the hilltop. (As the old saying goes, "Incoming artillery has the right of way.") I'm having so much fun that I'm almost disappointed when one of the zombies does turn out to be Rotting Sal and it's time to go report in. But over the next couple of days, I come back a couple of more times to make Crusty's life miserable.

(Game mechanics note, about the mention of "cover" above: one of the things that RGTR does very, very well is factor in cover. The game instantly calculates what percentage of the target is visible to the shooter, and applies that percentage as a damage modifier. Sure, an accuracy modifier would be more realistic, but the randomness of that would make it a lot more frustrating to the players. It also gives substantial accuracy bonuses and damage bonuses for kneeling to steady the weapon, and for taking roughly a second to sight in before pulling the trigger the first time. I'm not going to say that there's never a time for spray-and-pray, suppressive fire, or blazing away from the hip. But if you have the forethought and skill to plan your shots like a sniper, it really pays off. However, the AI really is amazingly smart by computer-game standards, and NPCs will scramble for cover, or circle around to flank you to deny you cover.)

Third story: I'm at the hydroelectric plant in Concordia Divide, talking to an officer there. The hydro plant comes under frequent attack by anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen or so Bane at a time, usually no problem for the NPCs and turrets at all three force-field protected gates. But suddenly the siren goes off that tells me that one of the forcefields is down. I look up, and at the far end of the works from where I'm at sure enough the forcefield on that gate is down, and what looks remarkably like All The Bane In The World are pouring through. (This happens periodically, at least once a day or so.) Now, escape is an option for me. There's a teleporter pad 10 yards to my left, and another gate out onto the battlefield 5 yards behind me. But I also see at least two other player characters rushing toward the fight, and by good luck this happens to also be one of the times that the AFS are airlifting in NPC relief troops. So instead, I drop down behind a piece of equipment, about 50 or 60 yards from the far gate, and start sighting in. Standing head and shoulders above the other Bane is a Kael Private, a giant gorilla kind of thing, massively heavily armored and insanely deadly in hand to hand combat. I know it's going to make trouble for the troops at the gate, not a few of whom are using kinetic-kill rounds that are completely useless against a Kael. So I switch the rifle to laser, Breath, Aim, Slack, Shoot -- four shots later I hear cheering from the far side of the hydro plant as the Kael falls over. By this time, a Thrax Technician has deployed a Shield Drone, and now all of the Thrax down there are immune to most incoming fire. But I flip the rifle over to EMP again, sight in on the Shield Drone: 3 shots later, the battle tide turns in the AFS's favor again. Now, by now the Thrax have figured out that an awful lot of their troubles are coming from the far side of the plant, and I have a rough couple of minutes of sniper duels between me and a couple of Lightbender Private stealth snipers, picking them off as they try to find some place down there to flank me from and get in good shots. But we won. And the whole time, I felt like I really was there, in the middle of an immense army on an alien world, turning the tide for the human side, to the audible gratitude of my own side, against overwhelming odds, and won.

In conclusion? So here's the thing. When the 3-day free trial was over, I was determined to write a very negative review of this incredibly frustrating, horribly arrogant, and painfully unoriginal game and never look back. But those moments stuck with me, those moments where the insanely good over-the-top phenomenal quality voice acting and combat mechanics kept taking me there. And when push came to shove, even if it weren't a science fiction MMO in a field that needs more SF MMOs, I will pay good money for a game that's that vividly and intensely, and almost even exhaustingly, real.

I just finished up a 3-day free trial of NCsoft's newest MMO, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, or RGTR as it calls itself. Why do they put a big emphasis on those 1st two initials? For those of you who don't know him, Richard Garriott claims to have all but invented the modern Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, via his original D&D ripoff Ultima Online. It was itself then ripped off by a "little" game called Everquest, which was itself ripped off by Blizzard for its own annoyingly inescapable and completely uninnovative D&D ripoff, World of Warcraft. Ah, said Garriott, but this was going to be a bold new re-envisioning of what an MMO could be, starting from nothing, a blank slate, a tabula rasa. Hardly. I've been hopelessly spoiled by one of NCsoft's other products, City of Heroes, but Tabula Rasa keeps almost every feature from World of Warcraft that I hate except for the medieval fantasy setting.

Which means, by all rights, I ought to hate it. But I'm oddly ambivalent, even though the things that I hate about RGTR are things that I really, really hate, with the fiery passion of a thousand exploding suns. First of all, I hate how little control you have over your character's appearance. Just as in WoW, the armor that you're wearing dictates your character's appearance, and what armor you can wear is entirely dictated by your character class, so by level 15 at the latest, every single character looks exactly alike. Armor paint is theoretically available, but since you swap out armor for slightly upgraded versions of the same armor several times a day, hardly anybody bothers. This is less out of character than it might be, though, because unfortunately, it's an adaptation of one of my least favorite tropes in science fiction, military SF. Yes, I know that writers like Glenn Cook and David Weber have proven that there's a substantial market for the stuff, but I mostly can't stand it. But if you play RGTR, well, "you're in the Army now, soldier," and yeah, among other things that really does mean uniforms. (Technically, you're a rank that doesn't exist in modern militaries, a solitary specialist with wide latitude as to which officers you report to and what jobs you take. But you still wear a uniform and call officers "sir.")

The mission structure is ripped right out of every other MMO except for City of Heroes, too. Scattered around the various towns military bases are quest givers officers and tech specialists (and merchants) who bribe you with cash bonuses and priority access to equipment in exchange for quests missions. It is entirely up to you to find these (frequently hidden) contacts, and to figure out what order to do their missions in in order to unlock later missions from other contacts, and at what level. Never having really played World of Warcraft (or its fantasy predecessors or later rip-offs) I had never run into this "feature" until I played NCsoft's ill-fated and short-lived SF MMO Auto Assault, and in Auto Assault I hated this "you figure out the contacts' sequence" feature with a grim rage that I usually reserve for corrupt police officers.

And just like in WoW or every other MMO except CoH, the overwhelming majority of those missions are to go out into the wilderness battlefield, kill n enemy of a specific type, loot their bodies for specific trophies, and bring them back for a reward. Once in a very rare while, you get sent out to defeat a named enemy that you have to find on your own, hoping that when it "spawns" you do enough damage (alongside everybody else with the same mission) to get at least partial credit for and loot rights to the kill. Oh, and of course there are plenty of "fedex" missions where you just run and play contact tag, despite the fact that theoretically everybody has secure radios, and the occasional very annoying escort mission where you have to guide a very fragile non-player character (NPC) through hostile territory far above their level. All of these are features that I enthusiastically left behind when I joined the first truly innovative MMO, City of Heroes, and it blows my mind to see someone have the guts to claim that their MMO is innovative, designed all new from the ground up from a blank slate, and copy all of these loathsome clichés of the genre.

Hey, at least you're not killing rats or spiders or dogs. I guess it's innovative in that. And it prioritizes ranged weapons over melee, that's unusual for the genre, too. Oh, and it copied my least favorite feature from Neocron, while showing no evidence whatsoever that RG knows that there was an earlier (and famously unsuccessful) game with the same feature: click targeting instead of tab targeting. At least in RGTR it's less annoying than it was in Neocron; in RGTR the game will "lock onto" a target if you click and hold down the mouse button to sustain fire, rather than automatically missing if the cursor drifts off of the target as it did in Neocron. But my point remains: not really even one single innovative feature.

I went into the free trial wanting very much to give it the benefit of the doubt because I really desperately want there to be a good character-based (not vehicle-based or ship-based but character-based) science fiction MMO, but every couple of minutes I got yet another reminder of how many things I was going to hate about this game. The list goes on and on, all of them things I hate about almost every other MMO except City of Heroes. For example, all too often the "difficulty" comes from artificially annoying huge maps where there's only one narrow, and mostly invisible, path that goes from point A to point B, and part of the "fun challenge" is supposed to be finding that entirely non-obvious path ... while under recurring attack. The most common way to funnel you from attack to attack is via that over-used cliché of the MMO field, unclimbable vertical cliffs and box canyons. On the list of ways that City of Heroes has spoiled me is that for over a year now, they've been liberally giving out timed jetpacks to characters at level 5, after a couple of hours of play, that allow you to fly quickly over terrain that you find too boring or too annoying, with permanent vertical travel powers showing up as early as level 14, after typically one to two weeks of play. Anarchy Online was almost as generous, making a summonable jet car something available at level 20, if admittedly expensive enough a luxury that you probably needed help from your clan to finance one. World of Warcraft thinks that it's being generous letting you buy an "epic mount" that may be able to fly at level 40, after months (or for some people, years) of play at ground level. Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa also waits until level 40 to offer you a vehicle, some of which may be able to fly -- I say "may" because vehicles aren't implemented yet, and very few details have leaked out. Nope, you're supposed to walk everywhere, that's part of the fun. Supposed fun.

Oh, but wait. RGTR even then went on to find a whole new way to offend me, one that no MMO in history has had the guts to do: there is no official forum, no company-run web-based bulletin board system for the players to share information with each other, no single source of information on upcoming company plans, no single place for players to discuss upcoming features or wish list items, no single place to go to find out what's going on when bugs show up or when the servers are acting oddly or when the servers are down without warning. This despite the fact that the Tabula Rasa team hired away from Auto Assault and City of Heroes two of the best damned customer service reps I've ever seen, two people with extraordinary skill at managing official forums, "Nomad" and "CuppaJo." When asked repeatedly about this, CuppaJo eventually told one of the fan-sites that this is a totally non-negotiable issue with Richard Garriott: there will never, ever, at least not on his watch, ever be an officially sponsored forum for Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa.

No explanation has been given. But none is needed. We know how the entire rest of the MMO industry feels about the official forums: they hate them, and wish they'd never opened theirs. Official forums give whiners and complainers a single place to congregate, where their whines and complaints are the first thing potential customers see, scaring some of them off. Official forums also give the whiners and complainers a political forum to engage in what has been roundly mocked as "Poster versus Poster warfare," to lobby the developers stridently for changes that are bad for the game overall, but good for their particular characters. And this is a not unreasonable thing to worry about. Sony Online Entertainment has given the industry some really vivid examples of this. Sony's corporate management saw the people organizing petition drives on the website as evidence that the games were going to lose customers, and made the developers implement some painfully stupid changes in some of Sony's online games. Most vividly, almost everything that went wrong with Star Wars: Galaxies has been blamed on successful lobbying campaigns by inter-game guilds of hard-core PvP griefers and by organized legions of Mary-Sue wanna-be fanficcers, with their shared interest in their characters being unstoppable killing machines capable of conquering the entire universe single handed without breaking a sweat and thereby humiliating everybody who isn't them and earning the undying gratitude of the franchise's big-name characters.

Richard Garriott rather obviously thinks that these are the only actual uses of online forums. As his own employees, hired away from some highly successful official forums elsewhere in the NCsoft corporate empire, ought to be able to tell him, he is 100% full of crap on this one. There is a reason why every other massively multiplayer game company puts up with those potential drawbacks, and that is this. Not having an official forum tells your cash-paying customers, actual and potential, two things. "One: We don't care what we think. And two: we think we're so smart that we don't have to explain anything to you, you should just accept that we're always right." So unless you want your customers to think that you hold them in total contempt, it is necessary.

It takes phenomenal talent at managing online communities, and real work, to run an official forum that gets it right. It takes having official moderators who actually have the ear of the senior designers and senior developers. It takes those moderators having the good listening skills and the familiarity with how the game is actually played by real players to understand what the customers are trying to explain. And it takes phenomenal tact to say to people, "We will listen to you, and if you're right, we will give you what you're asking for. But if after having listened we still think you're wrong, we're going to do it our way, watch the game, and see what happens." Yes, I understand that Richard Garriott's own prior game was a bad example of this, one where mistakes he made based on listening to the online forums pleased nobody and resulted in a substantial drop-off of customer revenues. So okay, he doesn't have the talent to manage an official forum. But he has people who do, and already enough has gone wrong, and little enough explanation has gotten out to the customers, and the customers are frustrated enough at not being perceptibly heard, that I know that this decision is going to come back to bite them, hard. It will significantly surprise me if this game makes it to its first anniversary before meeting the same fate as NCsoft's last SF MMO and getting its plug permanently pulled.

Yep. Learned all of those reasons to hate it within three days, working my way up to a level 16 Ranger with the help of one very helpful fan-run help web page, TaRapedia.com. Which leaves me at something of a loss to explain why I just upgraded to a permanent, paying account. Which I just did.

Hmm. This has already gone on way, way too long. I'll explain later why I did it. Don't bother speculating, I don't want to spread it out across a dozen or twenty comment reply fragments. For now, stick to MMO theory, whether or not you hate the things I mentioned above as much as I do, and why or why not. Tomorrow: the unexpected reason why, despite all it has going against it, Tabula Rasa sucks a whole lot less than it has any right to. Save your comments about Tabula Rasa itself, and about anything you like about it, for that entry, please. Thank you!

Something in City of Villains has me reminiscing lately about something that I had a lot of fun with, quite a few years ago.

The Casablanca of computer games, the game that everybody knows every line of dialog from, is Blizzard's 1998 science fiction real time strategy game StarCraft. Like everybody else, I loved it, and still think it's probably the best designed, best-written computer game ever. And it was one of the first games to include, in the package price, unlimited play against other players over the Internet, through Blizzard's now-infamous (for out of control cheating) Battle.Net. But as much as I loved the game, I pretty much had to give up playing against other players after a couple of tries. Nobody would ever finish a game against me.

See, here's the deal: a real time strategy game is (normally) one where you start out with a tiny, almost completely defenseless force and a chunk of land with some resources; the other players start out with the same or the equivalent somewhere on the other side of the map. Your objective is to build up your economy, and your technology, to the point where you can sustain the army that goes over there and kicks their backside, while they race to do the same thing to you. There's a theoretical upper limit to the size of the armada you can produce, but there's a lot of variation within that, in the mix of units. But when most people play against each other, it never gets anywhere near that limit. Instead, what they do is what's called the "grunt rush," or specific to StarCraft, the "zergling rush." How that works is that you race to produce a single squad of maybe half a dozen or 8 of the weakest combat units in the game, completely un-upgraded in technology, and race them towards the other guy's resource gatherers. If you get there before he gets his 6 to 8 guys done and wreck his camp, the game is over. Usually one side successfully grunt rushes the other in about 20 minutes to half an hour.

I think that's no fun. And ironically, it also turns out not to be an inevitable feature of the game. In the same time that it takes to build a grunt rush, I can usually build, say, 3 guys and a couple of hardened passive defenses around my town. They won't do anything to him, but they run a pretty good chance of slaughtering his grunt rush. That leaves me having spent fewer resources up front, and having concentrated more on advancing the tech tree and the economy, which gives me a slight edge in the race from there to a full-sized armada. And what I discovered was that without a single exception any time that I tried, if I survived the grunt rush, the other player would deliberately crash the game, force the software client on his end to quit or disconnect, forcing a draw. I managed to find enough of them in online chat later to ask what that was all about, and it wasn't about their fear that I might win. It was because to play the game that I wanted to play it might take 2 or 3 hours. And by restricting the game to just grunt rushes, they could play 6 matches in that amount of time.

Yeah, but what they would never get to see doing that was what I thought was the most beautiful thing in the whole game: two fleets of 12 fully-upgraded Terran Battlecruisers, each followed by a 6-fighter squad of fully upgraded Wraith stealth interceptor escorts and with its own up-armored Science Vessel in low orbit overhead to provide long-range scanners. That was one of the configurations possible within the limit, with enough units left behind to provide basic defense around my base. And what was so beautiful about that was that it was slow, stately, and utterly relentless. There were only a few enemy configurations that could challenge it. It might take me 3 hours to get that fleet assembled, but once I did, I could just slowly and steadily advance it across the map, watching everything try fruitlessly to dent even one or two of those immense battlecruisers before getting completely demolished. If you knew it was going to be coming, there were configurations of units you could build that could swat it from the sky. But otherwise, it was a dauntless, dread-nought, unstoppable steamroller of remorseless mechanical beauty, every bit worth the wait.

And I thought of that a week or two ago when I realized why I keep going back to my (currently almost level 46) namesake character, the Infamous Brad, a roboticist mastermind with force fields, invisibility, and flight on the Virtue (unofficial roleplaying) server. Other people hate teaming with guys like me. We clutter up the fight with metric tons of clanking steel. And worse, it takes me about 90 seconds of setup time at the beginning of every mission before I can take one step or fire one shot, which is long even by mastermind standards. But once I get all six droids unpacked (3 monkey-sized battle drones with pulse laser fists, 2 protector bots that cast their own shields and repair other droids and throw stun grenades, and 1 immense plasma-cannon and flame-thrower equipped and multi-rocket launcher wearing assault bot), then reinforce them with two upgrades and three additional layers of force fields each, then protect myself with stealth and another layer of force field? I am, for the next five minutes, an almost completely unstoppable force of nature. Almost nothing heroic or villainous that is within 5 levels of me can do more than barely scratch one of the weakest drones. And the droids lay down so many overlapping fields of fire that everything in their way just withers. Then, 5 minutes later, I have to come to a complete stop and take another 20 or so seconds to recharge all of their force fields, while my whole team gets annoyed and (usually) goes ahead without me ... only to find out how much slower less safely things are going without that steamroller backing them up, until I catch up.

There are other archetypes and power combinations in City of Villains, each with its own "feel" to it, from the strategic planning followed by intense bursts of action you get from playing most stalker configurations, to the jump right in and whale on things all day feel of playing most brute designs, especially ones with the "invulnerability" defense, to the semi-suicidal do-or-die attitude of most successful dominators, to the constant ebb and flow of offense versus defense in many of the corrupter configurations and quite a few of the mastermind ones. But nothing I've tried yet, on either the hero side or the villain side, recaptures that glorious feeling of guiding stately fleets of battlecruisers in a slow moving dance of relentless destruction like my 'bots with their force fields do. (And when I'm up against an NPC faction that uses their own giant robots or battle mechs, like the police or the Council or the Malta Group, I've been known to yell as I tell my droids to initiate combat, "Oh, yeah! Red hot droid-on-droid action!" Giant mech battles for the win.)

I do wish I had more friends who played, even if only to chat online with while playing. And for those of you who do play, my global chat handle is still @InfamousBrad.

I'm feeling two contradictory urges: to do what people were bugging me to do, namely run another gaming campaign like I used to do years ago, and to not do so. You may remember that I tried to start a gaming campaign a bit over a year ago, only to get bogged down in the fact that I suck at GURPS and I really just don't have the story-telling chops to successfully convey a completely alien environment or to tell a truly classic western tale. What I did excel at, years ago, was running a game based in Phil satyrblade Brucato's Mage: The Ascension, 2nd edition. That's less surprising than it might be; I ran games well in it because no game (and few works of literature, if any) has meant as much to me as Mage 2ed did. None of them felt as plausible. None of them had anything like the richness and complexity, while keeping the rules nice and simple. And alone of the then-popular White Wolf games, it was the only one of the four where as soon as you joined a supernatural organization, your elders, leaders, or supervisors weren't trying to kill and eat you. On the contrary; in Mage 2ed, unlike almost every other game in history, even the lowest level starting character matters to the world.

Mage really was the ultimate conspiracy theory. For those of you unfamiliar, it goes like this: in truth, we call our collective awareness of how the universe works "consensus reality" because there's a broad consensus as to what sanity means and what perceptions are insane. But Brucato subtly twisted this idea into a definition of "consensus reality" that is just slightly skew. In Mage 2ed, you might as well call the laws of physics "consensus reality" because they only work because there is a consensus on them. That in a sense, every time a human being looks at or interacts with the world, especially when others are around, they're having a "conversation" with the world and each other about what will and won't work. If enough people think that something will work, and few enough people have strenuous objections as to why it shouldn't work, then it works. Brucato further speculated that as with all political consensus, a consensus reality could change over time. And how it changes is that there are certain people, awakened adepts, who can at some risk to themselves transcend the consensus and do things that are impossible. They have to have their own explanation for why something should work, but they can bend local reality to their own explanations. And if enough people see them do so, and they believe their explanations, and belief in those explanations spreads, then that explanation becomes part of the laws of physics.

In Mage 2ed, the reason that our histories are cluttered with hard-to-explain references to witches and trolls and miracles and saints and angels and dragons and vampires and demons and wizards and monsters is that at one time or another, there were at least local consensuses that these things were explanations of how the universe worked. But, in his history, there came a point in the late middle ages (I don't have my books, but I want to say he set it in the mid 1300s) where a group of philosopher mages took a good look at the world around them and said, in effect, never mind how the world works, how well does it work? And what they found was that wizards who were propping up various monarchies and who wanted people to believe in magic, and priests who were propping up other monarchies who wanted people to believe in the power of faith, had both created systems so complicated and elaborate that almost nobody could learn them. So the number of lesser mages and lesser saints who could intervene to make anything above stone age agriculture work was minimal. Worse, the scarcity of such lesser mages meant that political leaders who had the Pope on their side, or the Bishop, or some in-house wizard or alchemist, couldn't be toppled. And what talent was arising was being co-opted entirely into propping up monarchies, leaving the vast majority of the human race mired in poverty and at the mercy of every monstrous or demonic thing that ravaged the countryside.

So they went back to the classic Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plato and so forth, and set about the goal of making up a set of laws of physics so simple and self-explanatory that more than half of the people could learn to exploit them, if they worked. We now call it The Enlightenment. And by demonstrating their new "scientific" wonders, they got enough people to agree with them that they were able to impose the Scientific Paradigm on the entire civilized world. They then spent 500 years on various wars of conquest, internal and external, to bring all the frontiers of the world (and if possible, the whole solar system) into civilization and to eliminate every competing paradigm by "proving" them impossible. So that was who you were in Mage 2ed: a believer in one of those non-scientific paradigms who was an awakened adept, able to get away with temporarily making the world work according to your theories. There were two groups of renegade technomages, one made up of historically "disproven" theories that the governors of the Technocracy decided were undesirable and one made up of virtual reality fans who were distressed that the Technocracy had decided not to make VR available. Three, if you count the psychedelic underground, although their philosophical roots predate the Technocracy as such. There were also ceremonial magicians and martial artists and herbalist witches and Kali cultists and monotheistic miracle-workers and tribal shamans whose religious beliefs were under attack. Collectively, even though they hated each others' paradigms, they worked together against a common enemy under the banner of the Nine Traditions of magic.

I never had to explain to my players why the Nine Traditions were the good guys. Once in a rare while, though, I'd run into people like myself who could see both sides, or who considered the Technocracy to be the good guys. Nor is it surprising that I'd be one of them; the Technocracy's platform is traditional liberalism. There were enough of us that White Wolf did eventually release a set of player's guides to the Technocracy, so game masters could run Technocracy campaigns. But hardly any ever caught on, because White Wolf's ongoing development of their world made it clear that if the human race was going to survive, the Technocracy had to lose, no matter how unlikely that looked. And, in fact, that ended up being the official ending of that game universe: the Technocracy did finally win, and the world came to an end. Why? I never got around to reading the whole explanation, but I gather that by making it impossible for human beings to believe that they had souls, they killed all human souls. By seeking to make human governance simple and efficient, by seeking to render reality completely under control, they rendered it so dull and mechanical and miserable that nobody cared if they lived or died. By making it impossible for enough people to believe in God, they destroyed something that was propping up the underpinnings of reality itself. And while I don't necessarily agree that's what would happen if people altogether stopped believing in God or the soul or magic or miracles or faith, I'm willing to accept it as their editors' fiction.

But here's the part that fascinates me, and provides me an opportunity to run a gaming campaign that would interest me. In 1920, nobody could possibly have foreseen that. In particular, let's look at the time from around 1890 to 1920, which would have been 1920's recent past. If you look at things like the 1892 Columbian Exhibition, or the various World's Fairs from 1893 to 1904, you see tremendous interest in how the Wonders of Science were going to radically transform the world into a paradise, a utopia. But in World War I, people started to see some of the big downsides to scientific advance, like aerial bombardment of cities from zeppelins and poison gas and tanks and modern machine guns. So beginning in 1920, you start to see a rise in interest in religion and in the occult and in things like Freemasonry and secret societies even in the west, just at the point where missionaries and (more importantly) educators were following the explorers into every corner of the world to make sure that every child was brought into the modern age and given a modern scientific education.

What that means is that by setting a Mage 2ed Technocracy campaign in 1920, you've got the potential to tell every kind of pulp adventure story there is, really. H.P. Lovecraft and H. Rider Haggard both fit in. Indiana Jones' 1940 setting is almost anachronistic; his breed of tomb-robbing archaeologist is 20 years out of date. We now know that Lovecraft's alien cities at the south pole and in the Arabian desert and in the Australian outback aren't there, but in 1920 nobody knew that; maybe in 1920, they were still there? We now know that Arthur Conan Doyle's remote islands and African plateaus with preserved Jurassic ecosystems aren't there, but they didn't know that; maybe the reason we know that is that they were eliminated? And just in the White Wolf source books you can see that there are plenty of evil vampires, malevolent werewolves, evil ghosts, and other monsters to fight in 1920. Not to mention that the history of the period is full of bloody uprisings by martial arts societies and Kali cults and so forth. Heck, Doc Savage virtually is such a campaign. Do you remember the origin story for Doc Savage and his band of heroes? They were a World War I platoon who swore an oath to each other to continue to fight evil after the war; when they acquired the wealth to do so, they reformed the platoon and set out to do just that.

So here would be my premise. I'd want to get about 4 to 7 players, each one of which would be some kind of a technomage. In background, they would be people who met during World War I and who were recruited together. You can have, as coincidental magic, any technology up to around 1960, but you have to be able to explain it as cutting-edge, cranky, hard to keep operating 1920 technology. For example, you can't have a DC-3, but you can have a blimp with experimental outboard engines that has the flight characteristics, the speed and maneuverability and range, of a DC-3. But you have to make it operate at 1960s level, you have to make an arete roll and have enough spheres in, oh, let's say force and correspondence to do such magic. You can have hand-held machine pistols as good as an early model Uzi, but to keep them from jamming you have to make an arete roll and have enough spheres in force to do that kind of damage. You can have medicine and first aid up to Vietnam era standards, and body armor as good as from then, but you have to have enough levels in life magic and make an arete role to keep it working. You can have hand-held shortwave radios and have communications as good as the early satellite era, but you have enough levels in correspondence and mind to make it work better than 1920s shortwave radio and it requires an arete roll. And so on, and so forth. And I'll send you to city sewers and slums to root out vampiric human sacrifice cults, and to the Congo to hunt dinosaurs, and to India to battle Thugees, and into unexplored deserts and tundras to fight monsters from other dimensions and from outer space. (Oh, and I'd need to get back all of my Mage 2ed stuff, which seems to have all gone missing. Or replace it, probably by having to buy the downloads from RPGnow.com. *sigh*)

I pitched this idea before, and nowhere near enough people nibbled. They probably won't this time, either, which lets me off the hook. Because honestly, this is about the only idea I've had since the old Mage campaign that I think I could pull off and that could hold my interest.

What's the difference between a late 19th century gothic horror novel, a late 19th century gothic romance novel, and a late 19th century serious social novel? In the gothic horror novel, a mixture of upper and/or lower class decadent characters, trapped by awful cosmic forces and secrets man was not meant to know, has only the slightest chance to escape a Fate Worse than Death. In the gothic romance novel, the same characters, trapped by the tragic and unstoppable power of True Love, have not even the slightest chance to escape a Fate Worse than Death. In the "serious" social novel, the same characters are, due to the crushing and inevitable threats of "progress" and "development," already experiencing a Fate Worse than Death when the novel begins, and thus the Fate Worse than Death drags on longer.

Edward Gorey's poetry relentlessly and whimsically mocks the holy heck out of that whole gothic melange. So do Charles Addams' cartoons. And so, to my absolute delight, does a card game I only just discovered by Keith Baker, published by Atlas Games (of Lunch Money fame), called Gloom, which Baker openly admits was inspired by Gorey and Addams. My copy of Gloom, and the out of print and therefore a little harder to find Unhappy Houses expansion deck, just caught up with me today, and except for one tiny nitpick, it looks like it's everything I hoped it would be. I'm dying (tragically, poetically, of broken heart and consumption of course) to find some people to help me play this thing for the first time.

The basic premise of Gloom is that each player is responsible for their own Gothic horror, romance, or tragic social novel. Each of them starts with a "house" consisting of five stock characters, the kind of people that awful things happen to in gothic fiction. There's the the "mysterious manor" Hemlock Hall, with its family of decadent nobility and retainers suffering under a terrible curse. There's the "weird workshop" Castle Slogar, where a deranged but brilliant female mad scientist reanimates the corpses of her loved ones because she can't bear to let them go -- what, and stop tormenting them? There's the pathetically inadequate "sinister sideshow" Dark's Den of Deformity with its incompetent ringmaster and sadly unimpressive freaks. And there's the swampy "forbidding farm" Blackmoor Watch, whose aging matriarch means her inbred family of psychopaths no good and strangers even less. If you get the expansion, they add my personal favorite, the decadent Left Bank "cursed café" Le Canard Noir and its permanent collection of artisans, parasites, and hangers-on. Once each player picks one such family and spreads their cards out in front of him, they all draw a hand of five random events. From here on out, the object of play is to make your own characters' fate as tragic and awful as you can before playing an "untimely demise" card on them, which locks in their score. You also have happy event cards that you can play on the other players' characters to cheer them up or even give them happy endings. That's terrible from their point of view, because the readers of all gothic fiction know that happy endings for characters Simply Won't Do, they're evidence that the novel is frivolous and unimportant, that the author is an incompetent hack. Once one player runs completely out of characters, everybody totals up the accumulated misery of their own killed-off characters, and the one with the most totally miserable corpses wins.

The game mechanic for this is elegant, if a little bit flawed in execution. The cards are printed on heavy transparency plastic. You simply stack each event you play on a character on top of the character. The portrait and their name continue to show through, as do some of the scores and modifiers from previous events; only the modifiers that are currently visible count at any given time. The expansion adds the extra mechanic of a "house" card next to the 5 "character" cards, that has its own special class of events called "mysteries." Each house can only have one mystery going at a time, presumably giving your little gothic novel its title, such as (for example) Le Canard Noir and the Deadly Dress, or Hemlock Hall and the Sinister Surprise, or Castle Slogar and the Thing in the Attic. If you meet the special goal of the mystery, it adds extra misery points to your corpses and may give you other special abilities. My favorite so far is an explicit Gorey tribute, "and the Mournful Muse," where any pair of characters' deaths count for extra misery points if the titles of their demise cards rhyme. "Lord Wellington-Smythe ... fell from on high; Lady Wellington-Smythe ... choked on a pie." In addition to Gorey and Addams, the whole two deck set is just chock full of allusions to Poe, Lovecraft, Bulwer-Lytton, Machen, Chambers, DeFoe ... and those are just the ones that I "got." There's even a throw-away Scooby Doo joke.

My only real complaint with this is that I'm not crazy about the production quality. The cards are tiny; the typefaces tinier still. I think I may need an illuminated magnifier to play this in anything less than direct sunlight. And several of my cards arrived with the printing either incompletely fused to the plastic, or already flaking off. I'm going to have to write to Atlas Games and see if I can get them to exchange those cards, or else I'm going to have to pack a printout of what the smudged and incompletely readable cards are supposed to say with my deck and the rule sheet.

I got mine through Amazon.com, which has Gloom for about $20 plus shipping, and had (but all sellers have currently sold out of) Unhappy Houses for around $12.

By now most of you know that the subject of why there are so few science fiction (as opposed to D&D-ripoff fantasy) massively multiplayer online games out there is near and dear to my heart. Mark Jacobs is the co-founder of Mythic Entertainment, the company that developed Dark Age of Camelot and that has the Warhammer Online roleplaying game in development right now, and he just gave an interview to the GamaSutra.com website. One of the things he said kicked off a small argument over on Slashdot.com, and I think what he said and one of the responses on Slashdot were interesting. He said:

"Fantasy is easier than sci-fi. Want to know why? It’s simple. A gun. What’s a gun, a gun is impersonal. A gun can shoot somebody from across the room. A gun in the future should be able to shoot a room from a mile away. Part of the challenge we found with Imperator is how do you make a combat system based on lasers and energy weapons, compelling to an RPG audience."

More-or-less in response, Slashdotter "SmallFurryCreature" wrote:

Think of the classic sword fights you see in the movies, now think of the classic gunfight eh fights you see in the movies. Notice a difference? The sword fights, last! They take time. The hero spots the opponent, closes, parries, thrusts, dodges and finally makes the kill.

The gunfight is far faster, spot, shoot, kill.

While in real life a hit with a broadsword is probably as much an instant kill as a bullet in the head, movies have made us believe that sword fights last minutes while gunfights are over in a matter of seconds.

Now take a look at the various MMORPG's games. Because of the general lack of AI or anything approaching tactics let alone strategy most fights are about wearing down the enemies hitpoints slowly in a prolonged duel. No instant kills allowed. It just doesn't fit in the gameplay.

SWG offcourse had guns and believe me that after years of movies and books and other star wars games it came as something of a shock to find that stormtroopers do not die instantly if you hit them with a blaster shot. Neither two, nor three, nor five.

Now, here's the funny thing. I've run tabletop roleplaying games in worlds that had guns in them, in which one-hit incapacitation is pretty likely if you do get hit and one-hit perma-kills are not impossible. And that, realistically speaking, is how guns ought to work in a game like this: no "wearing down" somebody's armor or hit points, guns don't do that. Over 2/3 of all handgun shots, even at point blank range, completely miss the target. But virtually everybody who gets hit falls down and is out of the fight for a span of time ranging from "long enough for the other person to get away" up to "until after several weeks in the hospital, and they won't be as spry and nimble afterward as they were before." In my tabletop games, I dealt with this via the simple exigency of making it almost never the right thing to do to fire a killing shot, and seldom the right thing to do to fire a weapon in the first place. I ran my game worlds so that unless both sides were equally prepared, the first person to show a weapon usually forced the other person to retreat. Now, I got a little negative feedback over this when I took it too far; as anybody in my old Mage: The Ascension campaign will tell you, I got reminded once rather vividly that if you don't let people take out their frustrations violently every so often, it comes out in other ways.

But imagine a science fiction roleplaying game, played online, where there were almost no places where you could draw a weapon without getting in big, big trouble. Where once a weapon was fired, it was a matter of seconds before the cops were going to arrive in force. Where once the cops arrived, you could in theory shoot your way out past them ... and then not be able to turn around for the rest of that character's life without being ambushed by cops. But if you only showed a weapon, or at most only fired a shot that incapacitated the other player briefly, and you only did it in relatively lawless areas or at least in front of few or no witnesses, the cops wouldn't have time to deal with it. Imagine a game where all of the player versus player (and most player versus non-player) conflict was about who out-organized whom, who out-thought whom, who out-planned whom, who out-spent whom, who out-researched whom, so that if two sides showed up to fight over something it'd be obvious pretty quick that to actually pull the triggers would be suicidal ... and wouldn't change the outcome. Sure, some people who just want to blaze away at things for 3 minutes until they fall down would find that too frustrating ... but are we sure it wouldn't find a big enough audience to pay back the development costs and pay the server operating costs?

Another of Jacobs' objections seems easily dismissable, to me. He points out that you don't have to explain to someone what a fantasy creature is, as long as you stick pretty close to D&D, but if you create science fiction aliens and animals you have to explain to people what they are before they know how to react to them. Feh. This is one of the things I think City of Heroes/Villains does right. In CoH and CoV, you very nearly always only fight other people, and people can be made as varied as your development budget permits, certainly more easily than customizing a bazillion fantasy creatures who are all different shaped and who all move differently.

I do agree with one of the things that Jacobs said about SF MMOs, though. "I think that some day someone’s going to get it right. Nobody has yet – nobody’s even come close to getting it right. But when they do, then I think you’re going to see big numbers come out of sci-fi."

A local gaming shop brought in kukla_tko42's acting troupe Saturday afternoon. Riding on the release of Pirates of the Caribbean 2, they decided to declare a "Pirate Day" and fill the store up with pirates, while setting up demos of pirate-themed card games, board games, and so forth on every horizontal surface. As someone who's very, very seriously into Caribbean piracy of the period 1560 to 1800, I was cheerfully invited by Kukla to come along. I didn't so much get paid as fed, but what the heck -- pirates. Including pirate babes.

And, not having been inside a gaming shop in probably most of a year, I ended up buying a pirate-themed game myself. Having seen a demo of it, I might have been more tempted by the cardboard miniatures game Pirates of the Spanish Main, were it not for the fact that the store only had the latest expansion to it, "Pirates of Davy Jones' Curse," which celebrates the aspect of pirate lore that I hate the most -- the fantasy and magic aspect of it. And to be fair, Eris only knows when I'd ever actually get around to playing it, not least of which because it seems to take so long to play.

No, I ended up buying something sight unseen and without knowing anything of the game mechanics -- something I almost never do. That it was a Steve Jackson Games game didn't count in its favor or against it; I've had very mixed experiences with that brand. No, I admit that in a moment of weakness I bought it for the packaging, figuring that it was worth the asking price (minus the tiny discount I got as a performer) for yet more of Phil Foglio doing soft-pore corn. That's right, I bought SPANC: Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls. And it really is soft-pore; about the same level of risqué as his famous Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire series ever gets, if you're familiar with it. (And if you're not, for the love of God and all that's holy, get familiar with it. Good science fiction humor with a broad appeal is scarcer than hen's teeth, and yet even with that caveat, this is the funniest and most fun and most creative science fiction humor ever written, let alone drawn.) I did hear one fair complaint about the artwork: all, and I mean all, of the women have the same figure that Phil Foglio draws for all of his female characters, whether Dixie Null from What's New? with Phil and Dixie or Louisa Dem Five in Buck Godot or Agatha Clay in Girl Genius. If that bothers you, skip this game; there's no point in buying this game if the artwork is going to aggravate you.

That being said, to my pleasant surprise, it actually plays pretty well, too. The basic plot of the game is that each player represents a four-girl crew of felinid anthropomorphic space pirates. In their universe, each ship learns at more or less the same time about yet another fabulous treasure. To reach each treasure, they have to bypass four randomly drawn challenges, each one of which will employ either their skills at "piloting vehicles, carousing, using big guns, persuading by force" (space pirate skills), or else "intimidation, outdoor survival, swordfighting, persuading by charisma" (amazon skills), or else "sneaking, wearing black, using daggers and shuriken, climbing, disarming traps, persuading by fear" (ninja skills), or else "fashion sense, unarmed combat, persuading by sex appeal" (catgirl skills). So, for example, flying the ship through a scary asteroid field might require one of the crew to make a difficult Space Pirate skill roll (as opposed to cutting in line in a luxury starship's buffet, an easy Space Pirate roll). Or it might involve trying to sweet-talk some information or gizmo out of a small and stubborn child, a difficult Catgirl skill roll (or the same information or gizmo out of a group of teenage boys, a very easy Catgirl skill roll). Many challenges also grant extra treasure or they grant "Toys" which act as weapons to boost a crew member's skills. When only one ship reaches the treasure and nobody else does in their next turn, then a new caper of four challenges is dealt until somebody has ten treasures. One special Toy, a personal cheering section ("Poolboy") counts as a treasure, too. If two or more ships' crews reach the treasure in the same turn, they have a chance to Catfight, where each winner gets to try to steal a piece of loot from one of the other winning crews (if they use space piracy) or knock out one of their crew and make them draw a new one at random (amazon attack) or steal one of their toys (ninja attack) or steal one of their poolboys (catgirl attack). Then a new four-challenge caper gets dealt.

Considering that a single caper can win anywhere from two to six treasure (although in the early game it makes some sense to spend treasure on toys) and it only takes ten to win, once you know the rules a game hardly takes any time; four or five capers of four challenges each is enough to finish most games, and once you know the rules that's easily an hour or less. Action moves fast, because while there's some strategy to planning which of your team to use this turn and which toys to equip them with, it's not terribly hard to decide, and a single die roll on 2d6 settles every challenge. And a significant percentage of the fun, even once you've read all of the cards, is seeing the plot line of how a caper turns out, and narrating it as a story. "Okay, the Dread Pirate Roberta rolled a 6 and got everybody through the asteroid field. That's as far as anybody's made it yet, so what's the next challenge? Okay, next she has to sneak everybody past the Overfed Lions, an Amazon skill roll but an easy one. Want to let her continue and risk getting her knocked out of this caper, or pass to the next player and try again with a stronger Amazon next turn?"

As toy bonuses rack up, it is a little bit susceptible to the Iron Law of Distribution ("them that has, gets"), but with games going fast, it'll be your turn soon. And in the meantime, it's got a lot of the madcap zany feel of games like The Awful Green Things from Outer Space without that game's aggravating random imbalances. So in many ways, in addition to being an interesting strategy game, it does come off as a kind of randomly-dealt Phil Foglio SF farce every time. So I feel like it was absolutely worth it.

(P.S. As an aside, I got to glance at the piece of unmitigated crap that White Wolf is passing off as the latest edition of Mage: The Ascension and oh, my ghod, what an inexusable nuclear whale abortion it is. I declare the White Wolf fad officially done. Whoever the heck is writing their stuff these days has not even the slightest understanding of what it was that made their game universe's previous edition at all cool or interesting.)

After all these years, I finally find myself in the mood to GM a role-playing game again. I've had the urge from time to time ever since I got back to St. Louis, but one thing or another has stopped me. For one thing, to have room for it, I'd just about have to do it at somebody else's house. But the biggest thing has been that I couldn't come up with a campaign idea that people would actually want to play in. But last night one occurred to me. I think it'd be popular enough. And Lord knows, it practically writes itself.

The inspiration was Firefly, because I've been watching the DVDs again for the commentary tracks. But I don't actually want to run a Firefly RPG campaign, not least of which because I don't want to run into conflicts with Joss Whedon's ongoing exposition. I don't need to, though, because I've had my own idea for a semi-westernish science fiction game environment. Last night the pieces all fell into place in my mind, and I could run this one in my sleep with next to no prep time. I ran it past the_geoffrey, and he's interested in the idea, and semi-firmly offered the use of his gaming room. So if you're interested, let me know, and I'll start contacting the old gaming group from the Brad Davidian compound and start running it past them, too.

( Read more... )

Game time is likely to be from around 4pm to around 9pm (counting farbling around) on two Sunday afternoons per month; location is probably going to at least start out at the_geoffrey's place in Dutchtown. Spread the word to people who used to be in my games, and let me know if you're interested.



Additional notes, July 7th: ( Read more... )

Additional Notes, July 8th: ( Read more... )

Geoffrey was right and I was wrong. For the most part, CloverCon was a giant waste of my time and money. Many of its problems would have gone away if it hadn't been so incredibly tiny a convention, I grant. But ... well, look. It drew about 150, maybe 200 people? Now knock out the people I'll never see or that I would rather not see: the gamers who never leave the game room, the anime nerds who never leave the anime room, the LARPers, and children under the age of 12. What have you got left? At any given time, maybe 6 to 10 people. I could have had more fun, for a lot less money, with a lot lower boredom levels, on a lot more comfortable furniture, without sports programming on the TVs in hospitality, just by spending the same hours at Rivalz. For this I blew off all my weekend chores, screwed up my sleep schedule, and spent $35?

I'm not going to say nothing went right. Glen Cook had his booth set up, and I can count on Glen to have imported SF/fantasy that I would never see elsewhere. In particular, my really sweetest find (of the three books I bought) would be a British import, Time and the Gods by Lord Dunsany, a six-in-one anthology that is just absolutely mind-bogglingly amazingly wonderful. I wish I had found this ages ago! There are also two very talented, almost unbearably good-looking girls that I only see about once a year (at this con, go figure), and I got to do some catching up with them. And I got roped into playing "Statler and Waldorf" (with David S instead of my usual partner) to The kukla_tko42 Show the variety show, which was fun more often than it was not-fun.

Can I Get the LARP, LARP, LARP, SF and LARP Platter with a Little Less LARP, Please?

You know how Randy Mullholland feels about animé catgirls? That's a pale shadow to the simmering, seething annoyance and disgust that I hold for the Live Action Role Players (LARPers), because way, way too many of them assume that the con exists solely for them. They blithely thunder in herds from public con space to public con space, taking each over in turn, loudly driving out everybody who wants to hold a normal conversation. And it's a self-reinforcing vicious circle ... as they drive out other people, there becomes less and less to do other than the LARP, which drives out more and more people.

"So why not LARP, Brad?" I hear you ask. "If you can't beat them, join them." Well, at this point I play the part of Cranky Elderly Fan, again. See, we used to have this thing called Hall Costuming. It wasn't like hall costuming these days, it was actual persona play. We didn't dress up in replicas of movie or comic book costumes, we created our own science fiction and fantasy characters. We then spent much of the weekend interacting in an improvised version of in character, blithely hand-waving the fact that our characters were often from incompatible universes. So what? It was still better role-playing than a pickup LARP if for no other reason than that people had (a) gotten to pick their own characters, and (b) had spent enough time in their own character and around each others' characters that they could roleplay above the level of most over-simplified cliché. Oh, and there were a lot fewer Skill Challenges and an expectation of no combat; also giant plusses over the LARP. And how can I forget the most important difference? Oh yeah, did I mention that we weren't competing to win in the eyes of a set of judges who were handing out prizes? Sure, there was informal competition to be as cool as possible, as impressive as possible, but that was so much better than having to be judged against a couple of people's specific fantasy of how the weekend is supposed to turn out.

But damn, now at any con below about 500 people in attendence, for most of the weekend the LARPers just freaking pwn the con. Year before last, the Call of Cthulhu LARP at Archon was especially bad about this. The second, third, and fourth times that they came in to the Hospitality Room and overtly, explicitly chased out everybody who wasn't in the game, I had overtly rude people come up to me and ask, "Are you in the Cthulhu LARP?" Every time I answered, with increasing ill grace, "No, Call of Cthulhu is my real life."

As another annoyed friend said to me last night, "If it's going to be an all-gaming con, why not call it a gaming con and be done with it?"

At the polymunch, an old friend who was involved in the playtesting of an unsuccessful roleplaying game that I wrote asked me if I could find a copy of the section on Tarot in the appendix "How to Fake a Divination." Well, the only copy I could find was in Adobe Acrobat format, which was a pain to convert, and I'm not entirely clear on how well Semagic and LiveJournal are going to handle tables this size, but here goes nothing. ( Read more... )