Work news, Gaming and Heresy, East Timor coup, Weird Sex

[tcpip]

Over the past few days work has been intense on lots of different levels. For starters, I have established a partnership with Create My Website where I pitch PHP/SQL web development to them and I help them with compliance standards. Then there's been a days serious research on a common sysadmin problem with a seriously workable application idea that could make life a lot easier for a lot of people. Three people - programmers - are seriously interested and a meeting today confirmed the technical and financial plausibility. I've also learned how very cool Ghost 8.0 Professional Edition is, especially compared to Ghost 9.0 and Ghost 2003 and how annoying IBM Think Pad notebooks can be. My classic IT glitch of the week was locking myself out of Samba after setting up an internal webserver for PHP scripting and setting up webserver level security settings.

Finished my review of Hero Wars. Some great ideas, some terrible execution. Next will be a review of Gary Gygax's Lejendary Adventures game which I picked up on special (one of the books is even signed by the great Gygax himself). I've also put up the initial call-for-players for a new campaign an Outbreak of Heresy, and completed a Scene 9, part B description for the Ten Thousand Islands play-by-email.

Most pleasant events of the week included dinner with Frans and Anitra with surpise dining guests Gin and Nina from East Timor, and severina_242 engaging on a massive repair job on my unmanageable hair. Speaking of East Timor, the Catholic Church has just forced the government to introduce compulsory religious education, and make abortions and voluntary prostitution criminal offenses. Well, freedom there didn't last there very long, did it?

Same as it ever was.Sexual hypocrisy and serious weirdness among the conservative right.

Comments

Error!

[octobrianaoz.livejournal.com]

Er, you need to fix the entry!

Re: Error!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Yes, just noticed it... Sorry!

[evil-genius.livejournal.com]

"Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('

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"Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a http://www.lejendary.com/">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]"


Shame shame shame!!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's past midnight here and I'm tired ;-)

[evil-genius.livejournal.com]

o.k. I let this one go.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I think I have a few quibbles with your HW review, though not as many as you might think. I certainly agree on the poor presentation and organisation, and could probably get into extended debates on the minutia of various rules. Well, I have, and did so during its playtest, and thats why I have a credit in the game (and you'd probably be surprised to find my voice was usually raised to tighten the gamist side of things. Greg Stafford can't do maths)

I think my biggest disagreement is on the absurd pedestal on which you place RuneQuest. I was a dedicated and fanatic RQ player, and have pretty much everything ever produced for RuneQuest in Glorantha (and a lot more besides). But I can definitely say that, though I loved its simulationist aspects, it really did fall very far short of the narrative goals set by the game world and this was a very well known and much complained about problem in RuneQuest/Glorantha fandom before we knew what narrativism was or had heard of Hero Wars. Everyone had a sort of solution (from home brewed RQ extensions to completely new systems to the drastic like running games using Pendragon rules), but none of them worked well or meshed well with plain old RuneQuest, and it was certainly widely accepted that RuneQuest was not really capable of running most of the stories about Glorantha that we knew from the literature.

I'd disagree with a few specific things as well. You said the runes had decreased in narrative importance, but they really haven't. In RuneQuest 2, they had almost no relevance to actual play. And its not really fair to pick on the poor group simple contest mechanic as being a poor simulation, simple contests are never intended for things that matter.

And I maintain that everyone, including you but also the game designers, misunderstand edges and trys to make a simulationist tool out of what was intended to be a narrativist one. Thus I deny both the rules and your criticisms thereof as being valid, so there.

But I think the biggest criticism is probably that you write off the rewrite you say it needs most unfairly. HeroQuest addressed several specific problems mentioned in your review, and on the whole was a much classier product (though I disagree with one or two specific issues in the revision, its definitely fixed several of the problems you mentioned. And Mysticism as written desperately needed removing, though that wasn't really the reason, which had more to do with changing Staffordian attitudes).

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I was hoping you'd reply to this one, so I could make ammendments before the final release so to speak...

Greg Stafford can't do maths

I suspected this was the case.

RE: RuneQuest. You're right in a way. One of the best things about HW is that one can run amazingly high-powered games without the system falling apart. With RQ you can't do that. Nevertheless, I will still claim that RQ is still, after all these yes, possibly the best game on the market (except it's not on the market, YKWIM).

RE: Runes. The first page of RQ says that acquiring a Rune is a the goal of the game. Their emphasis is pounded into you in the opening pages on - what is it called? - Rune Magic. Whereas in HW the goal of the game is, well, not really a goal but a situation - the end of the world. The Runes themselves don't make a descriptive appearance to p158, and that's as a commentary to the main text.

This is just meant to illustrate that I didn't get the same feel in HW as I did in RQ. In RQ the game was about the runes. In HW it's about the cataclysmic war.

(I still haven't decided what the Mimesis RPG is about, mind you)

RE: Edges etc. I agree with you that in general edges, like Action Points, are primarily narrativist, but they also must have some simulation importace as well otherwise the suspension of disbelief would be too great. Indeed, the examples I gave is how this suspension of disbelief challenges what is primarily a narrative tool.

RE: HeroQuest. Well, if your biggest criticism is my pre-emptive criticism of HQ then that's easily solved.... But really HQ should have been the first release...

RE: Mysticism. Yeah, I twitched when I read that Mysticism was gone. It wasn't well executed originally, but it deserved to stay in the game..

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

RuneQuest - it was a very good game, but best is always a matter of taste. RuneQuest worked very well for certain sorts of games, but was really quite limited in what that type was. Its skill system was rudimentary, its magic system idiocyncratic with some bad weak spots, etc. I loved it and played it for years, and it has glaring flaws in comparison to modern games. It was definitely the best designed game of its era, but that era was a long time ago!

Runes - yeah, it says things, but none of what it says has any real relevance. The extent of Runes to actual game play was pretty much that they gave one of the sorts of magic a funny name (and then changed their mine in later editions).

Edges - the thing is, edges should be written to be ignored most of the time. Assigning edges to most creatures at all misses the point.

Mysticism - the rules as written were absolutely awful, pretty much unworkable nonsense. They needed removing. For example most of the time mystic 'strikes' were actually the worst possible thing any character could do. While I think they should have been replaced with SOMETHING I respect Stafford reasons for not doing so (though I think they are somewhat misguided). But I would get into Gloranthan esoterica very quickly explaining what should have been done, so I'll stop.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

The Create My Website folks seem to share your taste for monk like minimalism in web sites. Can't say I think it will catch on much though, I'm afraid - but you do seem well matched.

These days my tendency is just to crush most website issues with the 10 ton truck of a heavyweight content management system like Plone, and subdue all remaining resistance with lots of CSS.
Pity its not so easy to convince clients that they don't need the graphical prettiness that the tables/imageready/javascript school of web design provides (at a terrible cost).

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

These days my tendency is just to crush most website issues with the 10 ton truck of a heavyweight content management system like Plone, and subdue all remaining resistance with lots of CSS.

Good point. That would work nicely in all situations.

Pity its not so easy to convince clients that they don't need the graphical prettiness that the tables/imageready/javascript school of web design provides (at a terrible cost).

I've found that a method is get them to agree that they want a compliant website, they want accessibility, they want it load fast etc and then say "well, it will have to be light on the graphics" and "you'll need text-based redundant options" etc. That way they learn how the system works at the same time.

You know what people are like. They just don't realise that a 1 meg attachment (consisting of a single page of text and an embedded picture embedded in MS-Word) is the equivalent of 100 pages of plain-vanilla text... It has to be shown to them.

But yes, I think I'll get on just fine with the createmywebsite folk.

[lardarsegreg.livejournal.com]

Wow, only half a page...

[elzia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, over here in ETAN/US we were really unsure as to waht to do about the response to the new laws, and also taking into account what we know about recent protest laws as well (like in Dili), and the protests in favor that seemed to come with the new catholic laws. We put out some sort of letter encouraging public debate but criticizing the new school laws specifically. grrr. well, that might be confusing, it was all second hand info from a conference call, but my point is, yeah, religious laws=not good.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

A person who has spent years engaging in East Timorese advocacy, learnt their language (albeit poorly), spent time there as a volunteer etc., I am really annoyed.

The unfortunate thing about countries that aren't used to democracy and human rights is that they are still prone to use power-based mechanisms.

I guess the main point is, that we always campaigned for an independent East Timor on the basis that it was about democracy and human rights. If that is no longer the case....

but...

[octobrianaoz.livejournal.com]

I heard that while they would include a compulsory curriculum for religious education, attendance is optional. But I heard that on HACK, so it may not be accurate.

Re: but...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I heard that while they would include a compulsory curriculum for religious education, attendance is optional.

Hmmm... That's not clear by the OCR pdf, but I can see how that fits in...

I'd like to see them include a cirriculum on Tetum animism! Heh, that would through the cat among the pigeons...

[zey.livejournal.com]

Speaking of East Timor, the Catholic Church has just forced the government to introduce compulsory religious education, and make abortions and voluntary prostitution criminal offenses.

Impressive. They've rolled over to Howard on the sea border for $5B (cheap now, let alone in 5-20 years as the oil price starts rising geometrically as oil supplies dry up). Now they've rolled over to the religious Right. Who can they surrender to next?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, Ramos-Horta always followed the US over Iraq, primarily I reckon so he could get votes to replace Kofi Annan. Now with regards to the oil matter yes, it's true that Timor is getting extra money for the joint-exploration area, but that's a minor part of the revenues. The real serious part is the Greater Sunrise disctrict where there's even more oil. In that region, ET is getting ahhh, 22% of the revenues and Australia 78%.

Who's next? Good question. I don't think you could get much further than abolishing the separation between church and state.

And please pardon my sarcasm, if any.

[castleclear.livejournal.com]

Organic model: What happens to a cell when all the barriers between the constituent parts break down?

Re: the "masters" at the top (of a burning tree), haven't they learned by now that Chains of Gold are just as effective at binding as Chains of Iron?

Greed is not the "root of all evil", per se; Fear is.
What is greed but fear of scarcity?

[Apologies if I'm lecturing at you, brother. This is not intended that way at all.]

Re: And please pardon my sarcasm, if any.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Of course, you are quite correct. What ET isn't realising is that they're actually in a position of strength. As a small country they can make a lot of noise and still remain strategically insignificant enough for powers-that-be to let them rant and rave. They could be very principled if they wanted to be!