Dungeons and Dragons Part 1: "I am Domingo"

So, a couple weeks ago at the Haunted Game Cafe I met a group of three kids and we played a game of Catacombs (I was the Overlord). After the game they said they were interested in playing Dngeons and Dargons. So we agreed that next Saturday we would get together to create characters.

Theat day I went to the store and got a text saying that they weren't able to get a rids, so they wouldn't be able to come. I suggested that maybe we could meet somewhere else closer to them, and they said they were still looking, and maybe they could get a ride from someone else. In the meantime I went across the street to the mall to get some food. Wile I was there I got a text saying they had found someone else to take them, and were on their way. I finished my food and started walking back to the store, and while I was on my way (about 10 minutes after the text) saw that I had texts on my phone saying "Where are you" and "If you don't answer we are leaving." I had just assumed that they were much farther away than that, because they weren't able to come at all at first with no car (and the buses were running, so I assumed they were out of the bus service area as well). I texted him back saying "I am coming", but I spelled it wrong and the auto-correct corrected it to "I am Domingo". He said "what?" And I rushed back, and fortunately managed to get there before they left.

Anyway, with that resolved, we got into the actual character creation process. Only two of them were there but we started the process, and they made a warlock and a wizard. Some interesting things that happened were the following:

-They were well aware of how to exploit time inconsistency. When you determine your character's stats (strength, intelligence etc.) you have two choices. One choice is to roll dice, the other choice is to use a "point buy system" where you have a fixed number of points to allocate between the different stats. They chose the rolling method, knowing that if they really did roll poorly then there was no way I would actually be so mean and make them keep the poor rolls.

- It seemed like one of them wasn't interested as much in the fighting aspect. A few times during the session he asked if it was possible to negotiate with monsters rather than fight them, and even asked that question at the end when I set up a simple combat encounter not part of any actual adventure, just to show them how the combat worked.

- I am thinking that it may be a good idea to switch to a different role-playing game system. That is for a few reasons. First there are only three of them, and it seems likely that not all of them will be able to make it on any given day. The Dungeons and Dragons combat system is really designed for having at least four players to fill all the roles in the fight, and battles will likely be very tough with only two or three, especially since neither of the two characters they made had any healing or special defense abilities. 

- After this session I have been thinking about what to do for the actual adventure. One good source for adventure ideas, or ideas for things to put in the adventures, is the (real life) news, and I will tell you about what I have come up with when the time comes.

Crusade of Legends

Last weekend I participated in a new LARP called Crusade of Legends. It didn't have nearly as much fighting as most of the other LARPs, but it was interesting in its own way.

When I got there, I had originally planned on being an NPC (non-player character) - in other words, I would play the monsters. I hoped to learn more about the game before deciding which character class to be. However I soon discovered I didn't want to do that, as after about an hour and a half of playing an NPC, I had spent about an hour and 25 minutes of that time just waiting in the "NPC" camp waiting to be called out. So instead I decided to switch to being a player character, and I created a character - a "sorcerer" who combines magical powers with melee combat - and rejoined the game.

Next, I got caught up to speed on some of the events of the day. I had learned that I had just missed an enthralling speech by the governor about taxes, and that there were goblins threatening the town. Speaking of taxes, the governor also told me that I would have to pay a piece of silver in order to become a citizen, and only citizens were allowed to brandish weapons in the town. (The money system is 1 gold = 10 silver = 100 copper, and all new characters start off with 5 silver.) I asked what happens if I wasn't a citizen and a goblin attacked me, and he said in that case I would have to retreat and find a citizen who could defend me. So I decided to just pay the money to become a citizen, and continued on.

Soon there were rumors of intrigue going around. A group of adventurers had gone into a "white maze", and when they came out they refused to talk about what they had seen. Also, there were stories about a "lich king" that was threatening the village, and the governor as well as a select group of guards were planning on going there to negotiate. Also, there were apparently some "shades" that were planning on coming out at night, and only special "magical light" spells and weapons could harm them. Of course I didn't have that, being just a new character, so I wasn't able to participate in any of these battles.

I did go out in search of adventure for a little while - someone else had told me he found a mysterious gem - a component for certain kinds of powerful "formal magic" spells - lying on the ground. We searched around for more such components, but the search was fruitless - there were no more components, and we didn't run into any goblins or other monsters. As night fell, I went back into the tavern, to have dinner and drinks (not alcoholic ones, of course) and learn more about the events of the day. I heard the governor and treasurer talking about the town's finances - apparently they were in debt to the lord from whom they bought the land to set up the town. They were discussing a proposed tax of 2 copper per month per citizen, or a total of 4 silver per month for the total population of 20 citizens. Also, the captain of the guard needed guards for the night. He needed two guards in each of three shifts - 8:00 PM to midnight, midnight to 4:00 AM, and 4:00 AM to 8:00 AM, and was paying 2 silver, 6 silver, and 4 silver respectively for each of those shifts. I wasn't exactly sure how the town as going to get the total of 24 silver (actually, 36, because I think they ended up hiring three guards instead for each of the shifts) with only a total tax revenue of 4 silver, but apparently there is some other source of money I didn't know about. Also, I learned about a protection spell that could be cast on the tents and the tavern in order to allow us to sleep in peace - the way it worked was the spell could be cast at any time, and the protection would be in effect from 2:00 AM to 9:00 AM. I asked why they needed overnight guards if they had the protection spell, and he said that it was necessary because the enemy might have ways of dispelling the protection spell. Sitting outside in the cold for 4 hours overnight didn't really appeal to me, so I decided not to take the guard job.

Instead, I spent the night in the tavern listening for more information. I also found a deck of cards lying on the table, so I played a gambling game with a fellow patron (which I will talk about in another post). But I did get to see some interesting stuff going on. A "Grand Inquisitor" and her minions came into the tavern to find out what we knew about the "malediction" that was apparently sweeping the lands, but she also aroused some suspicion when she asked us not only about the malediction, but also about our respective fighting styles. Also, the governor temporarily kicked us out of the tavern without explanation for a meeting that was going on inside the tavern, and while we waited outside one of the other people kicked out tried to convince us to go back in, assert our rights, and demand an explanation. The meeting ended before we decided whether to do this, but we later learned through the grapevine that the topic of the meeting was fairly innocuous (something about a "traveler's guild" that wanted to set up shop) and not anyone plotting against us or anything (although we didn't really understand what was so secret about it).

Also, a couple interesting issues came up. Apparently, two priests had abandoned the god to which they originally worshiped and tried to switch to a different god for the purpose of getting the powers of the new god to help defend the town against the "lich king" and potentially other threats (I wasn't sure of the full details). However, after abandoning the first god, the priests discovered that they needed to make a "blood sacrifice" to gain the new god's power. Somewhat surprisingly, it was fairly easy for them to find people who were willing to be sacrificed*. However, they were later put on trial for murder, and the magistrate got together a vote of the town's citizens, who voted to change the law to allow for legal blood sacrifices (as long as the victim is willing, of course). This decision was not without controversy as some thought that blood sacrifices were inherently evil. Another in-game legal issue came up the next morning, when an orc charged into town brandishing a sword and demanding the return of a special glove (again, I was never sure what was so important about the glove). Some citizens quickly ambushed and killed the orc, and there was some discussion over whether or not that act was legal self-defense. The magistrate said that it was, but another citizen said that it wasn't, because, as he pointed out, the town laws define assault as "an action to harm" someone else. Thus, according to this definition, assault would require actual harm, so for instance if you swung your sword at someone and missed, it wouldn't be assault. Thus, the orc had not yet committed any crime, so it was not legal self-defense to kill him. Thus citizen said that if the magistrate meant for a situation like this to be self-defense, he should change the law to include something about "intent to harm" in the definition of assault.

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Overall, I thought that this game was very different than any of the other ones I have participated in. One negative about this game was that it seemed like I wasn't able to participate in most of the action - I observed a lot of interesting things (as I described above) but I didn't get to do much actual fighting, and I never got a chance to go into the maze, go to the negotiations with the lich king, participate in the discussions about finances or the traveler's guild, etc. In some sense this seems like just the nature of the game - you can't expect to just walk in and participate in high-level discussions about (in-game) politics in the way that you can just walk in, pick up a (foam) sword, and start fighting. I also noticed that most of the fights were very one-sided - any monsters that attacked us just died within moments, and never posed much of a threat. (This is in contrast to when I played Nero, where there were a lot more monsters that came in waves, so we really felt besieged and had to manage our resources well to defend ourselves.) In the car going back, I pointed that out, and was told that the point of the monsters was to advance the story, not really to pose a threat. I was told that it was a good idea to come back, because as I participate more "plots would develop around me" and I would get more of a chance to participate in the action.

I probably will go back, although I'm not sure exactly when. There was a lot of exciting stuff that happened, but whether this is a game that I want to stick with long-term really depends on whether the promised "plots" actually materialize, and how good they are. Also, I learned that there is a Nero gropu that is running an event March 23-25, and I will try to make it to that one. Nero seems like it might align more closely with what I want, because it has the "you're in character for the whole event" thing as well as lost of role-playing and story, but also has a lot more combat.

That's enough for this post, but I'll try to post more posts in the next couple days where I explain the gambling game I learned as well as more discussion of the legal issues mentioned above.

*In this game, if you die, you can easily get resurrected at a resurrection circle. On your third and subsequent deaths - and the deaths do accumulate from event to event - you have to draw a bead from a bag and risk getting permanently killed and having to make a new character, but the level of combat is low in this game so it is relatively easy to avoid getting killed if you are at risk. Also, it is possible, if you are a human character, to purchase a special power that allows you one "free" death per event.

Returning to the battlefield, part 2

This weekend I went to both Dagorhir and Amtgard. I had a pretty good time at Dagorhir, although unfortunately the "new angle on the action" had to be postponed due to technical difficulties.

My experience at Amtgard was far more mixed, however. The play-test had to be cancelled because the people who were supposed to be running the play-test were coming down from Wyoming, and it was too windy for them to make the drive down here (apparently part of the interstate was closed, because the wind was so powerful there was a risk of blowing cars off the road). Fortunately there wasn't much wind down in Fort Collins so we were able to do some fighting. Unfortunately there weren't that many people there, so all we could do was some ditch fighting (melee only). So that wasn't my favorite. Apparently this Amtgard group mostly doesn't like doing battlegames unless there are lots of people there, and they rarely get that many people except during the summer. But I did tell them about some of my ideas for some battlegames that you could do with fewer people, and they thought that my ideas could be good and that I should run for Champion so that I can put my ideas into practice (currently there is a bit of a "power vacuum" and they don't have any Champion at all).

I also got to look at some of the new 8.0 rule changes (even though I didn't get a chance to play with them) and there are lots that look interesting. Arrows are much less effective against armor, but archers also get lots of special arrows and powers (like "Reload", which lets them "go insubstantial" and go around the field unhindered to retrieve their spent arrows) that make up for that. Another big difference is that they are planning on removing most, if not all, of the abilities that require you to pretend not to notice things. For instance, in the current version there is a "Teleport" spell that allows you to move to somewhere else on the field, and you "cannot be noticed" while in transit. I strongly dislike these abilities for the following reasons:

1. There is too much room for interpretation regarding what is and is not permissible. (If you see someone teleport, and they are moving toward a game objective, are you allowed to go toward that game objective to defend it on the assumption that even though you didn't notice him, you could guess they are going for the objective? Or can you not go defend the objective at all?)

2. There is too much room for argument on whether a particular action was legal. (Did he go over there to get away from the teleporting guy, or because he was going to attack someone else?)

3. It's actually very difficult to behave exactly the same way as you would had you actually not noticed him. (If you hear someone behind you, you'll naturally start paying attention that direction just by instinct.)

4. It rarely leads to interesting game play. For me, at least, the interesting game play part of these types of "secret movement" mechanics is the guessing and keeping you on your toes: Where do you think he went? What could his plan be? how can you protect yourself from all the possibilities? But if you actually know where he went and just have to pretend not to, that whole "mind game" aspect is lost. The question becomes not "Can I anticipate what he will be doing" but rather "Can I justify doing what I want to do without reference to knowledge of where he is moving towards?"

In general the whole thing makes me think of those philosophical paradoxes about what it means to "intend" to do something (because you can't move somewhere for the purpose of responding to the teleport, but you can do it for some other reason). Which isn't necessarily what I want to think about in the heat of the action.

I'm really looking forward to Crusade of Legends next weekend. I think that they will do a lot more of the things that I actually like (with spellcasting and powers and such) and they are more story-based, so it's more likely there will be interesting things to write about on this blog.

Returning to the battlefield

I went to some LARP groups when I first moved out here, but I haven't been to any of the LARP groups recently, because the Amtgard group in Fort Collins tends not to do the battlegames that I like during the winte r(they just to melee only fighting, which is my least favorite part of the game) and the Dagorhir group meets on Sundays in Loveland, and Sundays are the one day the buses don't run. But I just learned that Dagorhir started doing practices in Fort Collins just a couple blocks away from the bus stop in downtown Fort Collins, so I started going there. I got to be an archer like I usually do, and it was a lot of fun. Also, the people there just generally seemed to be a lot nicer and more helpful than the people down in Loveland.

(One time, the people in Loveland told me that my arrows didn't pass the safety inspection, and the person in charge said that if I gave her my phone number, she would call me and we could set up a time for her to teach me how to make arrows. I knew there was a really good chance that she would forget to call me back, so I asked for her phone number, but she refused to give it to me, saying that she would just call me. Of course, she never did. And by the way, the person who had agreed to take me home that day left without me, so I had to take the $35 cab ride home. When I brought those same arrows to the people in Fort Collins they said they didn't know why the Loveland people didn't like them.)

On Sunday there was supposed to be another special event - a playtest for the upcoming 8.0 version of the Amtgard rules, up in Cheyenne, WY. I had contacted someone from the Fort Collins park who said he was going and he could take me there. On Sunday about an hour before we were supposed to go, he said that he had heard from the person in charge of the Fort Collins park that it was canceled because of the wind. I contacted the Cheyenne park through Facebook and learned it was not canceled. I then called the first berson back, and learned that he had no idea I even wanted to go to Cheyenne - the whole time he thought I had just wanted transportation to the Fort Collins park! As it turned out, not many people showed up to the playtest so they scheduled a new one for next Sunday - at the Fort Collins park.

There are also a few more LARP events coming up in the near future. One is "Crusade of Legends", a new LARP system that I have never played before, that is in the area near Boulder and Denver, and they have an event on March 10.. Another one is "Core LARP", which is somewhere to the north of here. They are supposed to have an event every month, but the one in February was canceled because of snow, and the one in March is supposedly being rescheduled tdue to scheduling conflicts at the site. At th ebeginning of April, the Dagorhir park in Loveland is having their "Season Opener", when supposedly there will be a lot of people there from all over the area. I will probably go to that one, and hopefully my experience before won't be repeated.

And one more thing - for my upcoming posts about LARPing I have something new in store. I won't provide any details as of yet, but I will tell you that there is a chance you will get a new angle on the action like you've never seen it before.

Pictures from Genghis Con

This picture was during the game of Zendo in which I was the "Master." Green stones indicate koans which have the Buddha-nature; red stones indicate those that don't. (The black card labeled "Zendo" is the koan that contains no pieces.) Can you figure out what the rule is?


As we've discussed before on this blog, dice superstitions are rampant in gaming circles. This "Dice Dungeon" is a prison used to punish dice that are rolling poorly. (It might actually work: after all, if you put poorly rolling dice in here, it is in fact true that when they come out, they will on average roll better in the future.)

On the other hand, when superstitions fail, one can always use more effective methods:

Genghis Con!

Last weekend I went to a gaming convention called "Genghis Con" in Aurora, CO. about 10 miles or so from Denver. Here are a few highlights:

1. The first game I played was called World of Warcraft: The Board Game - it is based on the computer game of the same name. There are two sides: one is the Alliance and one is the Horde. Each side has two to three characters (depending on the number of players) and you go around the board to fight monsters and complete quests. If everyone on the team sticks together they have a better chance of beating the quests, but they have to split the rewards, while if you split up you can complete more quests in a shorter period of time, but at higher risk. Most of the other players had played the game before, but with 2 characters on a side, so they were used to all sticking together (2 is about right for most quests, but 3 is overkill). So they all stuck together and ended up having to split all the quest rewards 3 ways, slowing their advancement. In contrast, I let my two teammates stick together but then went off my own way to pick off the weaker monsters by myself, enabling us to advance faster. We also got somewhat lucky when several good quest cards came up right next to each other on the map, so we didn't have to spend much time then running around the map. In the end the game came down to the final player-versus-player battle, which the Alliance won easily.

2. I participated in a couple play-tests of games in development. One was a collectible card game with mechanics similar to Magic: The Gathering, with the exceptions that (1) you can play any card face down and it gets revealed when it is involved in combat, so there is risk in attacking the opponent, and (2) the cards move around on a grid so you have to maneuver your creatures into position rather than just attacking the opponent. Another game was a similar Magic-like card game where, rather than having a "hand" of cards, you just play the top card of your deck each turn. Of course the thing is there are five ways to play each card - as a creature, an equipment (attaches to creatures and powers them up), a supporter (card that boosts all your other cards or has a special effect once a "war" happens), an order (instantaneous effect and is then discarded), or research (lets you use special powers of your other cards).

3. I learned a couple games that use "Icehouse pieces" - generic pyrmidal pieces that can be used for a variety of different games. One was "Homeworlds", a strategy game where you build up a fleet of spaceships to explore planets and eventually take over the opponent's homeworld. Another, and probably one of the most exciting games I played the whole convention, was "Zendo", a game of inductive logic. In this game "students" make "koans" (arrangements of pieces) and a "Master" tells them which ones have the "Buddha nature", and the goal is for the "students" to guess the secret rule that determine which ones have the Buddha nature. One of the other players was also a computer programmer, and he came up with the rule "the number of small pieces is exactly one greater than the number of medium pieces, and the number of medium pieces is exactly one greater than the number of large pieces" I was able to guess that trule and so it was my turn to be "Master", and I came up with a rule that everyone else thought was the best one of the night, although I don't want to tell you what it is in case I eventually play Zendo with anyone who is reading this.

3. There was an exhibitor's room where I bought some cool things, including a belt puch that I can use to hold spell balls in Amtgard, a football board game, and a couple games made by the same people who were doing the playtests mentioned above. I also took some funny pictures which I will show you in the next post.

4. The last game I played at the convention was called "Ascending Empires". This is a strategy game where you have to build and expand a space empire starting from your home planet and moving outward, while colonizing new planets so you can build research facilities on them. Different colored planets give you different kinds of technologies, such as improved defense, better starships, or increased actions. What is unique about this game is that you move your starships by flicking them across the board, so there is manual dexterity involved - you have to get it within an "orbit" of a planet to be able to go onto a planet, if you collide with an enemy ship they are both destroyed, to attack a ship to get points you have to land within a certain range of the enemy ship, etc. I was able to get the "battleship" technology and start wreaking havoc. The other teo players tried to make a plan to defeat me - one of them moved his ship away from the other one's research planet so it wouldn't be "blockaded", then the other one was goign to use it to research the battleship technology to even the odds. Fortunately for me my turn was between theirs, so I was able to bring in the battleship from across the board and blow up the key research facility before he could use it.

5. I also picked up a flyer or a new live action role playing game called "Crusade of Legends" that is in Aurora. I will see if I can try it out sometimes, but unfortunately, getting there isn't cheap. To get to the convention I had to spend $40 on an airport shuttle to the Denver airport, then $60 on a cab ride to the hotel, the cab had a complimentary shuttle back to the airport, then another $40 for the shuttle to go home. I think I have made my decision that I am going to start taking driving lessons soon - there are a lot of places where I would like to go but it is just much harder if I don't have a car.

My new home

So, I have finished up with everything for scvhool, I have deposited my thesis, and I am ready to start work on Monday. Here is what I have found so far:

Transportation

Transportatoin will be slightly more difficult here than in Champaign. I live in Fort Collins, then about 10 miles south of Fort Collins is downtown Loveland, and about 4 miles east of downtown Loveland is where I work. There is a bus system (Transfort) in Fort Collins, which I don't need ot use much because I can just bike everywhere in Fort Collins that I want to go usually. In order to get to work, I need to take the "Flex Bus" down to Loveland, then get on a COLT (City of Loveland Transit) bus to get to where I work. The last Flex Bus northbound from Loveland leaves at 7:12 PM, so I have some time to do stuff thereafter work. One problem with the bus system is that none of the buses run on Sundays (see below to find out why that is a problem). I did try riding my bike down all the way from Fort Collins to Loveland once, but I don't think it's something I will want to do very often. There is also a taxicab company (Denver Yellow Cab) here. According to here, it gets horrible reviews for customer service, but I have used it three times and so far have no problems, except that sometimes I get put on hold for a few minutes while calling for the cab. It is about $30 to go all the way from Loveland to Fort Collins.

Shopping

There is a major street (College Avenue) with all the usual chain stores like Target, Best Buy, Barnes + Noble, and so on. Another thing I have noticed here is that there seems to be a lot of outdoor stuff, camping, and hunting going around here, because I've seen several outdoor equipment stores including a dedicated archery store. Also I have seen lots of signs for gun shows - I wonder if those are geared toward hunters. Also, when I was in Loveland I saw the store Phoenix Nest, which sells Renaissance-style garb and they also do custom made leather products. I will probably be back there a few times to get stuff for live-action role playing (see below). Another store that is cool is in downtown Fort Collins, and it is called Science Toy Magic. It is a very small store but it is packed full of cool toys that demonstrate principles of science, and the guy who runs it does really fun demonstrations. A couple weeks ago I saw a sign indicating that they would get new toys in, so I went back to see the demonstration of the new toy, which was called the "Invisible High Bouncing Ball". The demonstration was okay, but it was a little hard to see what was going on. You can also watch this YouTube video here. Here's another thing which obviously won't affect me directly, because I am not going to use any illegal drugs, but might be interesting: I saw in the newspaper that Fort Collins is considering banning medical marijuana, and if you have been here you will understand why lots of Fort Collins residents complained that the ban would screw up their economy.

Gaming

There are two main game stores in Fort Collins: the Haunted Game Cafe and Gryphon Games and Comics. They all have things going on almost every night, including role-playing games, miniatures games, and board games. The Haunted Game Cafe has a shelf full of games you can borrow to play in the store., and they sell drinks and snacks there. Each of these stores is a little bit bigger than the ones in Champaign. I haven't played any role-playing games yet here so I don't know what the scene there is like. As far as miniatures go, it seems like I may be in luck. I like miniatures games because of the strategy and tactics, but I don't really like haveing to paint and maintain all the miniatures. At the Haunted Game Cafe, I saw a game called Malifaux, which is a miniatures game where each side only has a few miniatures (a starter army has about 5 miniatures, compared with several dozen for a game like Warhammer). One of the factions in the game has the ability to summon new units during a battle, which adds clever new strategies and tricks you can do. Back in Champaign, I looked into Malifaux and they advised against that faction because you have to have the additional miniatures for the extra units in order to be able to summon the extra units. I asked about that here, and they said they don't play that way here. When we came here before on our house finding trip we saw a game store called Duelist Kingdom in Loveland, but that store is closed now. Fortunately, it turned out that the reason it was closed was because it was bought out by a bigger game store called Grand Slam Games and Comics, but I have only been there once so far.

Live Action Role Playing

There is an Amtgard group in Fort Collins, which meets on Sundays, and one in Denver, which meets on Saturdays. I went to the one in Denver just to check it out. It was sizable - about 20 people showed up - but it was not nearly spectiacular enough to be worth the trip all the way up there on a regular basis (I had to take an airport shuttle from Fort Collins to the Denver airport, then another airport shuttle from the airport to the park). During the battlegame there I aplayed an archer, and about halfway through the game the person running the game pulled me aide and said "we have to talk about your arrows." For a second I thought I was doing something wrong, but the real problem was that I was so effective with the arrows he thought it was unfair for the other team. (Part of the reason was that the scenario had the opposing team transporting a torch between two locations, and they are required to stay near the torch. This made it so they were all in one place and easy to hit, and they were unable to chase me down.) I went to the group in Fort Collins, and I was originally planning to take the bus there but I forgot that the buses don't run on Sundays, so I had to take a cab. When I got there the people there said I must be really dedicated to the game in order to be willing to take a cab. There weren't a lot of people here that day so we didn't do a whole lot exciting (apparently the previous week was a big tournament, so everyone was tired from that, plus it's the first week of school). Additionally, I learned that there is a Belegarth group in Loveland that also meets on Sundays. That group has a "small" practice with 20-25 people each Sunday, and then ion the first Sunday of each month they have a "big battle" with 50-75 people.

Origins 2011: Part 4 - "Rules of the Game"

First of all, today I learned that John, the owner of one of the local game stores, read my previous posts. He didn't agree with my contention that necromancers are environmentally friendly, because "rather than letting the corpses return to the earth, they're just going to send out [the undead] to do more harm" and "no necromancer is going to raise skeletons to clean your house or something."

Second of all, another thing I did at Origins is the following. Last time, I mentioned that I didn't get a chance to tell the author of the Hero System books about what I thought about the quality of his writing, but this time, I did. Of course, he said that he "disagreed completely" that the writing was too wordy, and said that the reason for the wordy writing was that his customers demand detailed rules. I am under the opinion that the same information could have been provided in a more concise way.

Rather then talk more about the details of the Hero System, the rest of this post will be about a more general topic - how the differences of opinion between me and some of the other people I play with about the rules of various games reflect fundamentally different ways of looking at game rules.

Consider the following conversation that I had with another Amtgard player. (This was a long time ago, so some of the details like the names of the spells are probably incorrect, but the general idea was the same.)

Him: "There's a gray area in the rules with the 'Dimensional Portal' spell. If two people are both under its effects, can they cast spells at each other?"

Me: "Why? What's unclear about it? The spell says that it takes a player out of game. Under the definition of out of game, it says you can't be affected by anything. So it seems obvious that they can't affect each other."

Him: "Yes, but it's the same out-of-game area."

Me: "What do you mean, out-of-game area? The rules don't say anything about out-of-game areas. You're either out-of-game, or you're not."

Him: "But in Dungeons & Dragons, the 'Dimensional Portal' spell does work that way."

Me: "This game is not Dungeons & Dragons. The rules of Dungeons & Dragons have no force in Amtgard."

The cause of our disagreement was that I was looking at the rules as a self-contained set of information, while he was thinking of the rules as codifying some pre-existing conception of how he thought the game should operate (if you're both transported to the same other dimension, you should both be able to affect each other).

A similar thing happened when the new 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons came out a few years ago. I was reading some articles online discussing the new system and comparing it to the previous editions, and one of the most common complaints was that the new system "didn't make sense." For example, in the previous edition, fighters generally had only one or a few attacks that they had to keep using, while wizards had lots of spells that they could each use only a couple times per day and after those were done their powers were very weak. 4th edition balanced out the two classes by giving all classes some powers that they could use all the time, and some powers that were restricted to once per encounter or once per day. Lots of people didn't think this made sense because why would a fighter not be able to use a specific move once he had used it once earlier in the day? At first, I was really confused about why this would be a problem. I mean, true, maybe it isn't realistic. But I can't think of any criterion of realism that "I can magically throw a fireball, but only once per day" would pass, but "I can stab the dragon with a sword a certain way, but only once per day" would fail. And there are all sorts of physical phenomena that do happen in real life that are counterintuitive (have you ever watched MythBusters?) so I don't see why the fact that it doesn't fit with your intuitions about how fighting should work should be a problem. Again, this was a case where I understood what was going on because I just looked at the rules as a self-contained system, while others got bogged down because they tried to fit how the rules worked with their pre-existing conceptions of whoe combat should work.

Of course, sometimes things work out the other way around and my method of thinking is a hindrance. One example is some problems I was having with archery in Belegarth. There was a rule that you had to draw your bow back only half way when shooting at an opponent within 15 feet. (The issue is that if you shoot a target at full draw at close range, then the arrow will be going very fast, and is likely to hurt.) People were complaining that I was not following this rule, so I brought a tape measure so I could practice judging distance. This didn't completely help, so I came up with the idea like taking video and then going over it afterward so we can see what the distances were, and whether I was judging them correctly. They said that it wouldn't work because "there are too many variables." I was confused - I thought there was only one relevant variable: the distance to the target. At one point one of them tried to help me by asking me to stand in one place, then backing away and saying "okay, this is 15 feet." When I asked to measure to ensure that his judgement was accurate, he said that "it doesn't matter" whether it's accurate or not. This made me even more confused: how can it possibly not matter?

The problem here seemed to be that I was focusing on the particular rule about 15 feet, while what they probably had in mind was a more general concept about how to do Belegarth archery safely, which is why they thought there were "too many variables," and getting the distance right isn't the most important factor. It seems to me, though, that if the 15 foot rule isn't a good proxy for safety, then why is it in there at all? It would make more sense to say something like "The velocity at impact shouldn't be more than X feet per second," with X chosen appropriately. Then you could test to see what combination of draw distance and ranges given you that velocity (this would only need to be done once for each bow, before any battles).

Basically, I tend to interpret things based on what they say. If the game mentions 15 feet, I assume that they mean 15 feet. If they actually mean something else, then they should say something else.

Origins 2011: Part 3 - "Learning From the Masters"

Another thing I did at Origins was go to some seminars. I did this because the seminars are one thing you can only really get at gaming conventions, and lots of them are interesting. At Gencon I went to a seminar on balance in games that I really liked, so at Origins I signed up for two seminars that sounded interesting: "Making Magic Real" and "Internal Consistency." When I got to the seminars I found out they were about books and literature rather than games, but they were still interesting. The seminar on "Making Magic Real" was given by fantasy authors R.T. Kaelin and Jean Cade, and they talked about how good stories need to have limitations on the magic. I mentioned that games are good sources of ideas because games are all about setting up limitations - for example, in "Magic: The Gathering" you have to draw a random set of cards at the beginning and can only cast what is in your hand. They said this would be a good idea for a story - a mage who doesn't know what spells he is going to get each day. The seminar on "Internal Consistency" was given by science fiction author Timothy Zahn. He had a list of a series of ten plots from different stories and asked us to describe what was inconsistent about them. For example:

PLOT: A small, ragtag resistance force tries to overthrow a universally hated dictator.

PROBLEM: If the dictator is universally hated, why is the resistance force so small? (Perhaps most people are too afraid to rise up, but in order to project his power the dictator would need a police force and army, and those people at least would have to support him.)

PLOT: The last two humans on Earth seek shelter from the vampires.

PROBLEM: If there are only two more humans on Earth, where are all the vampires getting their blood to feed?

Overall, both seminars were fun to go to. One thing that was funny was during the "Internal Consistency" seminar when Zahn was talking about how writers can make their stories more consistent. One example he gave was the "Jurassic Park" movies and television shows, where the security system that is used to keep the dinosaurs in was very poorly designed - "even zoos have better systems for keeping animals penned in." He suggested that one thing writers can do to make their stories better is to do more research. For example, Zahn suggested, if you were writing a story like that you could "call up your local zoo and ask them to explain how to design an impenetrable system to keep animals in = and how that system could be beaten." Of course everyone in the room laughed, because we all had exactly the same reaction - that the response you would get is similar to what would happen if you wore this "Personal Electronics Vest" when going through airport security.

Origins 2011: Part 2: "Knights in Columbus"

As before, one of the fun things to do at Origins was the LARPs (Live Action Role Playing). The National Security Decision Making Game was running, although I didn't participate in it. Even though I liked it the first time because of the novelty, it seems like in order to get into it you have to be able to manipulate people, and that isn't a skill I am particularly good at. I did three different LARPs: “Nero”, which is a swordfighting game like the ones I've already talked about, “TerrorWerks”, a science-fiction adventure where you shoot enemies with Airsoft weapons (the enemies shoot back with Nerf guns), and “Rising Lash,” a game where you go through the dark, solving puzzles and fighting zombies. Nero was a three-part adventure where you were trying to rescue Lady Serenity, an adventurer who was kidnapped by an evil necromancer. (By the way, how come necromancers are almost always evil? I mean, all they're doing is recycling decomposed organic waste. It's environmentally friendly!) Anyway, in Part 1, we started out by going and fighting some orcs, who had a map saying where Lady Serenity was being held. The next two parts had us journey there, and in the third part we finally reached the evil lair. As you can see from the picture, the door was guarded by a magical Sudoku puzzle. Once we got in, our leader tried to negotiate for the prisoner's release by offering a magical item:

Leader: “I offer this magic ring worth 120 gold pieces for the girl!”
Boss: “There's no way that's worth that much.”
Leader: “Even if I were overstating its value by half, it would still be worth 60 gold pieces.”

I tried to point out the mathematical error but he didn't understand it. Anyway the boss tried to double-cross us but we got rid of the bad guys. Also, I volunteered as an NPC so I could see the adventure from the monster's eyes.

In TerrorWerks, we were soldiers trying to invade a robotics research facility where a bad guy has uploaded a virus to the central computer which reprogrammed the robots to be hostile. Our goal was to fight through the robots and get to the central computer to install the antivirus software. I played the engineer, and my special power was to unlock the doors – I had a kit with wires that I was supposed to connect between certain points on a grid to light up a bulb, and I also had a gun to defend myself. There were also computers that had information on them, such as that the big “super-robot” at the end has a control panel on the back that you could use to turn it off. When we got to the robot, one of the other players disabled it with a grenade while I ran around back to the control panel. The robot turned back on and no matter how many switches I flipped I couldn't turn it back off. When I tried to run back away from it I tripped over one of the poles holding up a wall and dropped my gun, but fortunately my teammates where there to back me up. Eventually we got rid of the evil robots, put the antivirus in, and got out.

Rising Lash was a relatively straightforward zombie game. We go through a series of rooms fighting zombies, and if you get hit you fall down. You can be healed by a doctor, but you get infected, reducing your combat capabilities. You can get rid of the infection with an antivirus (the biological kind this time, not the software kind) but there are a limited number of those. At the end of the scenario, if you survived without getting infected (or have an antivirus to heal you) then in the next scenario you level up and get extra powers. The scenario we did this time was pretty easy and pretty much we all got out alive.

By the way, if you are into video games you have probably heard about the so-called “freemium” business model. This is where the main game is free but you can spend real money for benefits in the game, such as in-game items. A lot of free-to-play MMORPGs use this model, and apparently some of the LARPs have caught on to the idea. For instance, in the zombie game if you buy one of their promotional T-shirts and wear it to the game you get extra armor. TerrorWerks also sells promotional “swag” and has a tiered reward system where one piece of swag gives you extra health, two pieces gives you a healing item, and so on.

Also, in keeping with the whole “being a hero and helping people” theme, there was a blood drive going on. There was an announcement on the PA systme that said they wanted as many people to donate as possible because there was a “critically fortunately I wasn't able to because I went to Vietnam last year.

Origins 2011: Part 1 - "A Hero's Journey"

Last week was the Origins gaming convention in Columbus, Ohio. I wrote about it last year on this blog, and I went again this year. The first interesting part of the adventure was getting there. I originally booked a combination flight/hotel deal on Travelocity. The flight was from Champaign, through Chicago, and then to Columbus. However, the day of the flight, I was informed that the flight from Champaign to Chicago had been cancelled, and they automatically rebooked me on a flight the next day. I looked online and found that if I took a Greyhound bus to Chicago, I could still make the flight from Chicago to Columbus, so I called Travelocity and asked them to book me back on the original flight. However they informed me that was impossible because the flight from Chicago to Columbus was also cancelled. I wasn't sure they understood what I wanted, because I looked online (if you put the airline and flight number into Google it will give you the status of the flight) and that flight was showing as on time. However, when I called American Airlines, they told me the same thing. Eventually I decided to just not use the outbound ticket and take a bus from Champaign to Columbus instead, and take the plane back. (I felt really stupid for booking the flight in the first place and not remembering that there was a bus, especially since I took the bus from Champaign to Columbus to get to my brother's graduation.) looked online to see if I could get a refund for the part of the ticket that I didn't use, and I actually found that for some airlines if you don't use the outbound portion of the ticket, they won't honor the return portion. So I had to call American Airlines to change the ticket. I called and was directed from phone number A to phone number B, then to number C, then back to A, then to B again, and finally after about half an hour of waiting they told me that they were able to change the ticket, and I wouldn't get a refund because it was booked through an external source, but it wouldn't cost me anything extra. (It would certainly have been annoying if they charged me extra for not using part of the ticket.) Anyway, it worked out and I ended up in Columbus the night I expected to. Also, it was a good thing I decided to take the bus because as it turned out, the flight the next day that they originally rebooked me on was also cancelled.

So here are a few things I learned. First of all, always check to see if there is a bus or train before booking a flight. Second, I wonder why sites like Travelocity don't also incorporate things like buses and trains into their tool - it seems like it would be useful to have a tool that figures out the best/cheapest way of getting from point A to point B whether that involves a bus, train, plane, or some combination. I guess it just doesn't come up that often. Third, always book directly through the airline if you can because it is easier to change your flight that way if necessary. Fourth, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the Champaign-Urbana airport has an average of 28% of its flights delayed and 6% cancelled, compared with the national average of 20% delayed and 3% cancelled. After I move to Colorado I will usually be using Denver International Airport, which is better at 18% delayed and 1.6% cancelled, which of course makes sense because the people who work at the secret underground base there wouldn't want their evil plans ruined by flight problems. Of course, if there really was an evil conspiracy going on there, information about it wouldn't stay posted on Wikipedia. Or maybe that's just what they want you to think, and it's a clever diversion. (Of course, I don't actually believe that there's a conspiracy or anything, I just thought it was funny.)

But that's just part of the adventure. Next time I will tell you about what happened after I got there!

Interesting Pictures: Gaming

Will you look into the world of gaming? Games show many things.


Things that are...



... things that were...



...and some things which have not yet come to pass.


I wonder what the "non-simplified" version of this game looks like?



Although gamers are not usually major consumers of personal hygiene products, this manufacturer has developed an innovative way to market to this under-served demographic.



A recent "Magic: The Gathering" card set focuses on the conflict between the artifact-based Mirrans (not shown) and the virulent Phyrexians (represented by the symbol on the box). Evidently, the City of Champaign public works department supports the Phyrexians.

More Interesting Stuff

A couple days ago I started the Weight Watchers diet program. Weight Watchers is cool because it is based on a point system, where each food has a point value based on the amount of fat, carbs, protein, and fiber, and you can eat whatever food you want provided you stay under the target point value depending on your weight and activity level.

I just finished my classes, so no more tests or exams ever! But I still have plenty of work to do because I have to write a paper for a conference which is due on July 6, and then I have to expand that paper into a thesis which is due on August 8.

Today in the mall in Champaign I found a stall selling "Power Balance" bracelets which are similar to the bracelets I mentioned in the previous post in that they work by the placebo effect. They cost about $30, but you can save a lot of money and buy functionally equivalent "placebo bands" here.

Another thing I am planning to do more often on this blog is to post links to other web sites which I find interesting. One interesting web site I found is Cheap Talk, a blog written by two economists. They have lots of discussions of economic theory applied to a variety of topics including game theory and ticket scalping. (Under the "game theory" tag if you scroll down you will see a post called "how to get bumped" about how to score free airline tickets, and below that is one about ticket prices in restaurants which is also interesting.)

I just got an email asking me to support Illinois athletics by switching my energy provider to "Fighting Illini Energy." One of the options that they say they offer is the ability to choose a plan that provides 50% or 100% of your energy from renewable energy sources. (What does that even mean? I mean, isn't electricity fungible? All of it goes from the power plants, onto the grid, and then into your home. I didn't even think it was possible to track a particular "unit" of electricity from the power plant to your home.)

The gaming club on Saturdays at UIUC is still going on over the summer. Since it is summer the building we normally play in - the English Building - was locked so we ad to go into the student unoin. The only problem was that the area of the student union we played in had a TV tuned to MTV, so whenever a song came on that any of the other players had heard before, they would all start singing along and making lots of noise, and they kept doing that even after I asked them to stop several times. Apparently they thought it was funny. I think what I will do next time is say something like "Let's say you had a friend who was in a wheelchair, and you kept taking the wheelchair away so he couldn't get around. Now maybe you might think it was funny but probably he wouldn't think it was funny. So just like some people have a hard time getting around without wheelchairs, I have a hard time playing games when everyone is making lots of noise. Maybe you might think it's funny to make lots of noise so I can't concentrate, but I don't think it is funny."

Gaming Convention Season, Part 2

Here are some more games I played:

Space Hulk:
In this game, there are two sides: the Space Marines and the Genestealers. The Space Marines are invading a spaceship that has been taken over by the evil alien Genestealers, and the goal of the Space Marines is to complete their mission before getting killed. The Space Marines have the advantage of ranged attacks and special abilities, but the Genestealers have the advantage of improved melee capability as well as numbers (new Genestealers come in every turn, but the starting Space Marines are all the Space Marines get). So the Space Marines have to be aggressive in getting to the objective, because they are going to lose a war of attrition. This tendency was even more pronounced given that we were playing by the wrong rules: we were spawning 50% more Genestealers per turn than we were supposed to, but we also made a mistake in how the Genestealers move that was equivalent to giving the Space Marines a one-turn head start. We played two rounds, once where my team was the Space Marines and once where my team was the Genestealers. As the Space Marines, we didn't realize this strategy and tried to advance carefully, but were soon overwhelmed. As the Genestealers, our opponents rusjed forward, taking advantage of their head start, and we managed to sneak in from the side and kill them but not until after they had destroyed one of the two objectives.

Rating: 8 out of 10. This game has significant strategy, and it is also fast-paced and exciting, and is designed to reward aggressive play. The one thing that isn't so good about this game is the pieces: some of the pieces break easily, often fall over, and are hard to fit on the board spaces.

Goblin Supremacy:
This is a card game in which players form a goblin army from cards that have goblins on them. There are three "ranks" of goblins, and the higher level goblins are worth more points but you have to have lower level goblins of the same type in order to play them. You can only have five goblins of each rank, but if your row is full you can "mutate" goblins by discarding cards, that transforms them into another goblin from your hand. The carsd have abilities that go off when they are played, when they get mutated, or when they are "activated" by spending "activation tokens." A significant element of the game is figuring out how to "combo" different abilities together and in what order to do things to maximize your cards - creating a sort of "Magic: The Gathering" like gameplay.

Rating: 7 out of 10. I liked the "Magic-like" gameplay, but the main problem with the game was that there were just *too many* decisions at each step - for instance, a typical turn might have you with 6 cards in hand, then deciding which 3 of them you want the least so you can discard them to activate a "zombie mutation" which lets you search through a 30+ card discard pile to decide which one card you want to mutate your guy into. This sometimes makes the game take a long time - I think we started playing this one at about 9:30 or 10:00 and had to end early when the room closed at midnight. Especially near the end of the game it gets slow, because what often ends up happening is that you keep finding ways to discard cards to draw cards so you can cycle through the deck to find the one card that fits in the few spots you have left.

Gaming Convention Season, Part 1

Here are some of the games I played at Winter War:

Dungeon Lord:
In this game, players play as lords of minions in a dungeon with lots of rooms. Each player selects a starting room, and then during each turn there are several phases. First, players get gold depending on how many rooms they control. Next, there is an auction where cards are turned up that represent minions to bid on, and players bid gold on the minions. After hiring minions players place them on the board, then they move the minions, then there is an action phase where minions can fight or bribe other players' minions to gain control of the rooms. At the end of the game whoever controls the most rooms wins.

Rating: 8 out of 10. The auction mechanics, where players can spend money on things like hiring minions, bidding for initiative order, buying extra actions, and bribing enemies, add significant strategy to each turn even when you are not in direct conflict with another player, and encourages players to pay attention to what everyone else is doing even if they are on the other side of the board.

Race for the White House:
In this game, players play the role of candidates in a presidential primary. They travel around the country, stopping in cities to pick up votes. There are event cards that turn up that do things like make certain issues (like defense, health care, etc.) "active issues", which means that candidates who have strong positions on those issues become able to pick up more votes, and give a chance for players to receive campaign contributions. By the time you get to election time, you figure out who has the most popular vote in each state, count up electoral votes using a ballot system similar to that used by the Democratic and Republican parties, and whoever gets 270 or more wins.

Rating: 4 out of 10. While I originally thought this game would be good because I have had good experiences with other election-based games like Campaign Manager 2008, I found that this game had a lot of unnecessary complexity. Having complex rules can be fun if it adds to the strategy, but in this case it didn't. For instance, some of the event cards make it so you have to cross-reference the issue on the card with your character's position rankings to find out whether you gain or lose votes and then you adjust the vote totals in the state you're in and each adjacent state. This is a complex process that takes several minutes to resolve each card, and dozens of cards come up over the course of the game. But the event cards are completely random and your positions on issues are fixed, so there's no way to plan for the event cards or respond to affect the outcome. And the parts that aren't random are largely non-interactive, with the main challenge being to remember how many votes your opponents have in each state.

Gaming Convention Season

Last weekend I went to Winter War, a 2-day gaming convention held in the Hawthorn Suites (they had this last year as well.) This weekend there was Metacon, a gaming convention held by the University of Illinois gaming club. Tomorrow I will post about what happened (It's really late tonight).

Star Wars As You've Never Seen It Before

This week I went to a new role-playing game being run at the game store. It is based on Star Wars, but with lots of funny twists and excitement to it.

The game began with us rolling up the stats for our characters. We started out by rolling for the basic stats like strength, dexterity, intelligence, and such, but in keeping with the science fiction aspect, one of the stats was "Robot Nature." According to the rulebook, you don't have to be a robot to have "robot nature" - the "robot nature" score is used for all sorts of "robotic tasks" like manual labor and standing guard, and "most supermarket customers have lots of robot nature themselves." Then we rolled for our race (human, robot, or one of many different types of aliens), character class, and also random starting equipment. As soon as we got to this point, we realized that the barriers between franchises had broken down - one character got a "tricorder", from Star Trek, and another got an "omni-tool", from the Mass Effect video game. A third character got a "Theopolis-class computo-face," described by the GM (gamemaster) as an "iPad with a built-in A.I.", or as we started calling it, an "AI-Pad." I got a "Grapple Rope Gauntlet" and a "Traveler's Guide to Koozebane" (a planet from the Muppet Show). Then we went onto our "Drama Rolls" and found out more facts that would lead to intra-party conflict: one of our members (a Jedi no less) had an Imperial bounty hunter's license, and two other party members (including me) had bounties previously placed on them by Jabba the Hutt.

Also, we looked at our special powers and under "psi-witch" (the "Jedi" character class) it said they had a special power of "1 pound mental force." I asked for clarification:

Me: "So 'one pound mental force', is that 'force' as in mass times acceleration?"
GM: "It means 'if there's an object that weighs one pound or less, you can use the Force to move it."
Another Player: "But in space, since there's no gravity, wouldn't everything have no weight at all, so you could throw a spaceship around with the force?"
GM: "We're using bad movie science, not real science."

But before we could start killing each other, we all learned we were part of a secret Rebel cell, and went to a busy cantina to get our first mission from our contact:

Contact: "We have to keep this on the down low, since this is a secret mission."
Me: "But if it's secret, why are we meeting in a busy cantina where everyone can hear us?
GM: "It's a role-playing game. You always meet in a bar."

Later we found our mission: we had to break into an Imperial research lab to rescue some civilians who were being held captive. We first needed a vehicle to get there, and we got one by stealing a hover-speeder, but we had to get a "station wagon style" one to hold all five of us. We made our way to the destination, but found the entrance was guarded:

GM: "You see four guys ... let's see ... they're an Imperial Death Squad, because I don't want to have to look up the armor rules. There's also a fifth guy that has a big weapon that looks like something a lowly intern at ILM* cooked up. - there's a big beer keg on his back and he is holding something that looks like a big tube with duct tape on it."

*Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects company that made the special effects for the Star Wars movies.

Anyway, we blasted the "beer keg" and it exploded and sprayed hot plasma everywhere - and since the Imperial Death Squad didn't have armor, they were defenseless against it, so they all got killed. With the initial guards taken out, we made our way into the interior of the facility. Our tricorder detected two rooms of interest - one with the civilians we were supposed to rescue, and one with "weird energy readings." We broke the cardinal rule of adventuring (YouTube link) and split up to investigate the two rooms. The "weird energy reading" room had a killer robot controlled by a mad scientist, but the Jedi used the Force to grab the remote control and turn the robot against its master. The other room was also weakly defended, so the guards in that room were dispatched and we returned victorious.

Some more news

1. The Lego robotics thing won't be starting until the 4th week in October, and will only be once a month on the 4th Sunday of each month. So there will be no more news about that until then.

2. I will be presenting my work at the CS Grad Expo on October 4. I will try to get some sort of picture up then.

3. We just submitted our annual report to the National Science Foundation. If you want to see it I can try to put it up here soon.

4. I have gone to several Magic card tournaments in the past few weeks. I have started to get better at the tournaments and I actually got in first place in one of tham (out of about 12 people or so). The only problem is that now whenever I play multiplayer (that is, games with more than 2 people) everyone gangs up on me because they assume that I will beat them if they don't. It is impossible to convince them otherwise even if there is a situation where, say, I have no creatures with any useful powers on the board but the person across from me is just one turn away from using his power that will make all his creatures indestructible for the rest of the game.

5. At Belegarth, I have identified several things that I need to get better at, and I have devised a plan for doing so, as follows. These plans have not been implemented yet but I will post again as I see how they come out.

PROBLEM: Sometimes I can't remember who is on my team. Asking the target is rarely useful because it simply alerts them that I am about to shoot them. Not asking is problematic because it sometimes results in me shooting people on my own team.

SOLUTION: Take photos of as many players as possible. Write a computer program that will do the following: (1) display a random selection of these images, each labeled as "red" or "blue", then (2) display images one after another and ask me to identify which is on which "team." This way I can practice team identification.

PROBLEM: I am supposed to only "half draw" the bow back when shooting from under 15 feet. However I sometimes have a hard time determining whether it is 15 feet.

SOLUTION: Tape a piece of tape near the side of my glasses, with two tick marks on it. The distance between the tick marks will be calibrated such that the apparent distance between the tick marks is equal to the apparent height of an average-height target at 15 feet. (The principle is similar to the principle described here, except that I don't need to know the exact range, just know whether it is more or less than 15 feet.)

PROBLEM: Different people have given me conflicting answers as to what exactly "half draw" means. Basically, the "draw length" is the distance between the nock (the place where the arrow is attached to the bowstring) and the front of the handle of the bow when you draw it. The maximum allowable draw length for full draw is 28 inches. The question is that even if you just put the arrow on the bow in the "neutral position" and don't draw it at all, the "draw length" is not zero; it is about 7 inches or so (because the bow is curved.) So does "half draw" mean 14 inches (halfway between 0 and 28) or 17.5 inches (halfway between 7 and 28). I have gotten both answers from different players, and sometimes they tell me one thing but when I have them demonstrate and measure it, it's clearly something else.

SOLUTION: Bring a tape measure to practice. Have as many archers as possible demosntrate where they think "half draw" is, and measure it. Take the average of all these measurements, then put a "half-draw mark" on the arrow at that location. Get the half-draw mark checked by a herald (that's like a referee). Additionally, in case I am playing and there is a different herald who disagrees with the first herald on where half-draw is, bring replacement tape so I can re-mark the arrows if necessary.

A new semester

So a new semester just started. A few cool things have been going on:

1. I signed up for two classes: "Adaptive + Multigrid Methods" with Luke Olson and "Finite Element Analysis" with Dan Tortorelli.

The class on Iterative+Multigrid Methods is about techniques for solving large systems of linear equations. Large systems of linear equations arise a lot from approximating a partial differential equation by a separate linear equation at each point on the mesh. "Iterative" means that you solve the equation by coming up with an approximate "guess" and then repeatedly improving the "guess" until you get close enough to the solution. "Multigrid" means that rather than just using one mesh, you have several different meshes of different sizes, and you use the solution to the coarser mesh (which can be computed faster) in order to get a better guess for the solution of the finer mesh.

The Finite Element Analysis class is in the mechanical engineering department, so most of the students are mechanical engineering students. It is interesting to learn more about how the mathematical techniques I am learning about are actually used to model physical systems, although one problem (from my perspective) is that since most of the students are not computer science students a lot of time is spent going over basic programming concepts that I've already seen over and over. For example today the professor spent most of the class just explaining how to write a program that reads input from a data file and puts it into a matrix.

2. As for my research, we have gotten to the point where we can produce reasonably good looking visualizations of the meshing process. Once I finish that part (probably in the next few weeks) I am planning on making a web page where I can put them up so you can look at them.

3. In Belegarth, last week there was the Numenor "Opener" to mark the start of the semester, where lots of people come, including some from other groups, and they do lots of different battles. One of the battles was a "Unit Battle," where the different "units" (units are groups of people that fight together and often have distinctive uniforms) all fight. For that battle I temporarily joined a unit called House Valdemar. During that battle the leader of that unit (who is also the owner of one of the game stores I play Magic at) was so impressed with my archery skills he asked me to join the unit. The way it works is that now I am a "petitioner", and after a couple months the members vote on whether to keep me in as a full fledged member. So I guess it's kind of like a fraternity (not that I would know).

4. I have volunteered to be an instuctor for a 4-H club activity that teaches kids how to build robots using Lego Mindstorms toys. The way this happened was that one of my classes is in the engineering building, so when I was getting out of class I saw a flyer up on the wall advertising this, and it sounded really cool. It's going to be an hour once a week for 6 weeks, and it probably going to start in a couple weeks or so (they haven't set up the schedule yet). I did check to make sure it will end before December so it won't interfere with our vacation plans.

Gencon

So I just got back from Gencon. There were a few cool things I did here. First, I did some of the same stuff I did at Origins, including some of the same LARPs, an exhibit hall where they were doing demos of games, and some rooms where there were board games set up that you can play. There were a few things I did that were different and worth talking about:

NSDM: They were running the NSDM (National Security Decision Making Game) here again. I played in it but this time it was a lot less exciting than the first two times. Part of it may be because this time there were three cells, so I only got to see about one third of what was going on. Another thing I found is that since so much is based on the actions of the players, it really can be exciting or dull depending on what the players do. While I am glad I participated in NSDM the first few times as it gave me plenty of ideas for blog posts and was really cool, I will probably not do it again. Part of the problem seems to be that in order to get things done in the game you have to be able to deceive and manipulate people, and that's not really my strong suit.

True Dungeon: This is a really cool LARP-like event that is run only at GenCon. When you go into the game, you are given a bag of 10 "treasure tokens" and then get sent into a "training area" where you choose which character class you want to play. You go in as a party, and it is based on Dungeons and Dragons except that instead of rolling dice, you do different physical challenges to do your thing - for example, fighters have to slide pucks on a shuffleboard to hit their opponents, wizards have to memorize a chart with various "planes" on it to cast their spells, and so on. During the game you can earn more treasure tokens by opening locked chests and completing certain challenges. At the end you get to keep your treasure tokens for future events. Some groups have been doing this for a while and have accumulated whole piles of treasure tokens. You go through a series of rooms, and you have exactly 12 minutes in each room, so it is pipelined so that there is one group in each room at a time. Sometimes there are puzzles in the rooms and sometimes there are monsters to fight. This was cool although expensive ($35 for one two-hour adventure if you pay in advance, or $40 if you pay at the door).

Seminars: Also at the convention there were seminars, usually given by game designers and publishers, where they revealed information on upcoming games and discussed different aspects of game design. I went to one of the seminars, entitled "The Myth of Game Balance." The presenters' thesis was that modern role-playing games are too focused on "game balance" - meaning the idea that all the characters should be roughly equal in power (or at least that everyone has an equal amount to contribute, even if they contribute in different ways) - and that that makes it harder to to tell good stories in role-playing games. Some examples they gave were:

- In RPGs, wizards are almost always physically weak and fragile compared to other types of characters. This is almost totally an invention of RPGs because wizards need a drawback to balance out their spellcasting ability - in fiction and literature, wizards are often also accomplished swordsmen.

- In superhero stories, different characters have vast differences in powers - e.g. Superman can do almost anything, while some minor characters have much more limited powers. If all characters are restricted to having roughly equal power then this type of story does not work.

- Games often have many rules and restrictions that keep certain powers from becoming too powerful and making sure characters are balanced - for instance, spellcasters might be limited to casting a certain number of times per day, or some games have complicated point systems that you use to calculate how much each power is worth. This can make it so players are more focused on the mechanics, and less on the story.

The presenters spent about the first 10-15 minutes laying out their ideas, and then the rest of the one hour seminar was discussion and questions from the audience. I asked him what he thought of the HERO System, because I thought that was a counterexample to his thesis - the HERO System does have a complicated point system to "balance" characters, but it is designed so you can make whatever kind of powers and characters you want, and can tell basically whatever story you want. (And if you want to have characters with differing power levels you can just give them different numbers of points.) He said that he had heard of that system but it just illustrated his problem because of all the complicated rules; he said that one time he had played a HERO game and the DM had created a character, and he had a bow as a weapon. However they had to rebuild the character as soon as they got into the first fight because the DM realized he had forgotten to give the bow a ranged attack, so he couldn't actually shoot arrows out of it.

Another idea I brought up was that focusing on the game mechanics doesn't have to detract from the story; it can actually add to it. I gave the example of an item from Dungeons and dragons (this is an actual item in one of the books, not something I made up) that tells you how many hit points a target has. He thought this was "silly" and didn't want to hear about it further. The point I wanted to make, though, is that such an artifact, despite having a power that involves the game rules (like hit points) so specifically, actually has a lot of story possibilities. Would it be possible to use the artifact to identify "future heroes" based on their hit point values, since in the game PCs (player characters) have different rules for determining how many hit points they start out with then NPCs? How much of the system would they be able to figure out using this information? How would people react to a device that could tell them this information? Would bad guys be able to use the device for nefarious purposes, or try to steal it?

Overall, though, it was a very interesting seminar and I will try to go to more seminars at future conventions. Also they told me about a funny book they published called "Qerth", a campaign setting for their "QAGS" (Quick A** Game System) that makes fun of Dungeons and Dragons. For example, some of the special powers include "Detect Player Character" (used for identifying other PCs in a busy tavern to meet at the beginning of the game), "Cheese Identification," and "Find And Remove Traps" (hint: think acronym). You can create characters with character classes such as "Murderer", "Rabbi", and "Troubadour," and then fight monsters such as the "Flesh-Eating Caruso", "Troglophile," and "Corner Barbarian" in an exciting afternoon of "Fantasy Adventure Gaming" (hint: see previous hint).