Where Worlds Collide

I haven’t participated in the Monday Mashup very much, but last week’s was based on one of my all-time favourite films, This Is Spinal Tap

To recap what Monday Mashup is about:

Every Monday, I pick a piece of popular media — a book, a movie, a TV show, or even an album. You pick a roleplaying world and talk about how you’d combine the two. Post on your blog or LiveJournal, and stick a pointer to your post in the comments here; if you don’t have a blog, then go ahead and abuse my comments section for your own pleasure.

There are two big themes in This is Spïnal Tap. The first is a band in decline, playing a style that’s gone out of fashion, and falling apart in the process. The second is a parody of every cliché in the book.

So let’s take a party of angst-ridden and stereotypically pretentious Vampire the Masquerade characters, and drop them into the first level a 3rd edition D&D dungeon. So they try and indulge in undead social climbing, when what they end up having to do is kill kobolds and take their stuff. Just like the film, it should end up in inter-party bickering.

If you want to really send things up, use a barely playable homebrew game system that parodies all the unplayable or pretentious game mechanics that were fashionable in the 1990s. Rename every commonly recognised game term, including ‘character’ and ‘player’. Use an impenetrably baroque die mechanic where character’s skill level has no bearing whatsoever on the chance of success. Make sure that the chance of a critical failure increases dramatically the higher the skill (like 1st edition VtM, but turned up to eleven). As well as several different types of dice, use playing cards, Tarot cards, poker chips and two full sets of chess pieces in ways that don’t really make any sense. And finally, credit the system to “S Gareth Wick”, an egotistical game designer notorious for flamewars on internet forums.

Andrew Ian Dodge reviews new ‘indie sensations’ Elefant, and finds both them and their generic indie support bands seriously wanting.

The gig was opened by two non-descript navel gazing bands (described as music for Guardinistas by Jon P), and then we were treated to Elefant. There is a great buzz about this lot as they are suppose to be the next big thing in indie-tinged pop world. Well from what we saw last night, don’t expect much, live at least.

Why does the British music scene contain so many tuneless indie strummers? Every edition of TV programmes like Later with Jools Holland seems to have a quota of whey-faced white guys with tuneless droning vocals accompanied by three-chord strummed guitar and a plodding rhythm. All of them seem to sound exactly the same. And all of them completely leave me cold.

Sometimes I believe that ‘indie’ is actually guilty of all the crimes prog-rock is only falsely accused of; of being totally self indulgent and boring. But unlike prog-rock, they are also totally lacking in any level of technical skill. Put someone like IQ, or Therion (complete with choir) on Later with Jools Holland and it would blow all these tuneless strummers away.

What is the appeal of this kind of band? Are there some deep subtleties that I’m just not hearing? Or is the appeal based on something other than the actual music?

I suspect it’s the latter. Some band’s popularity seems to be based on the sex appeal of the singer, or on how well they evoke a sense of adolescent angst. And for some, especially those overrated acts the music critics drool over, I guess the lyrics are far more important than the music. The fact that The Guardian’s chief music critic is a rabid Smiths fan points in this direction.

Since the music press has far too much influence in Britain, bands that can’t play or sing, but are somehow ‘symbolic of mans struggle against his socio-political environment’ will get attention, while other far better bands struggle to be heard. Many of these better bands might well find an audience if people were aware of their existence. Meanwhile, most of the bands who do get exposure inevitably crash and burn after a single album, simply because there’s no depth in anything they do; there just isn’t the musical or compositional talent there to sustain a career lasting more than a few months.

I’ve spent far too much time on BlogExplosion the past couple of weeks.

Amongst the sea of blogs of the kind cruelly parodied by The Ministry of Information, I have found one or three worth bookmarking. Three that are worth reading (to me at least) are the decidedly non-fundamentalist Alex Strikes Again, the very strange Praxis, who claims to be a time traveller from the future, and Ian MacAllen’s Imperfect Now, which has an interesting transport-related post proposing Cities without cars.

Not nearly enough prog rock blogs, though.

More RPG Memes! This one’s all over the RPG corner of the Blogosphere; I think I saw it first on Carl Cravens’ Journal. It comes from Matt Snyder, called the RPG Meme Bandwagon. It takes the form of 15 questions:

1. What is the first RPG you ever played?

D&D basic set. I actually GMed before I ever played.

2. What RPG do you currently play most often?

Over the past couple of years, I’ve played quite a bit of Fudge, GURPS, Storyteller, Castle Falkenstein, Hero Quest and Call of Cthulhu.

3. What is the best system you’ve played?

GURPS, provided you don’t use all the advanced combat rules. Fudge is a very close second, though.

4. What is the best system you’ve run?

Fudge. The fast-and-loose approach is a good match for my GM style

5. Would you consider yourself an: Elitist/ Min-Maxer/ Rules Lawyer?

Elitist, on the grounds I’m not one of the other two.

6. If you could recommend a new RPG which would you recommend? Why?

If you’ve got fifty quid burning a hole in your pocket, want plenty of crunchy rules and glossy presentation, go for GURPS 4th Edition. If you want something much more rules-light and wallet-light, try FATE, a ‘build’ of Fudge.

7. How often do you play?

Face to face gaming, only about three or four times a year at conventions. Online PBeM and PBmB gaming is a little more frequent.

8. What sort of characters do you play? Leader? Follower? Comic Relief? Roll-Player/ Role-Player?

Tend to be a follower rather than a leader. Sometimes I seem to play so many technicians with no social skills I worry about being typecast.

9. What is your favourite Genre for RPGs?

Anything with atmosphere and depth. I like realistic SF or ‘low fantasy’ where a rich setting gives context to the characters and adventures. Also horror under a GM good enough to build an atmosphere of terror.

10. What Genres have you played in?

Just about everything apart from supers. That genre just doesn’t appeal to me.

11. Do you prefer to play or GM? Do you do both?

Both. Given the choice, I prefer to GM, although I wouldn’t want to GM more than one game in a weekend-long convention.

12. Do you like religion in your games?

I’m into worldbuilding in a big way, and belief systems are an important part of any properly-developed world. I’m cautious when it comes to incorporating real-world religions into games with significant supernatural elements.

13. Do you have taboo subjects in your games or is everything “fair game”?

I don’t really like explicit sexual content in games, or really gross splatter-type violence. I’m also cautious with religious themes involving real-world religions.

14. Have you developed your own RPG before?

Not really, I’ve done some rules-tinkering in my time, but I’d rather spend my time building worlds than fiddling with game mechanics.

15. Have you ever been published in the Gaming Industry? If so…what?

No, unless you count writing a review on RPG.NET.

After the unfortunate demise of Docs Blog and the Game Dream meme (the entire site is sadly no more), a couple of new gaming memes have taken it’s place.

This one’s called “Lunchtime Poll” (although it’s evening over here), from Ravings of a Textual. Today’s simply asks:

What’s the strangest character you’ve ever played?

That has to be Bug. The game was a series of linked convention one-shots called “Guardians of Dimension”, played over three Gypsycons. The PCs were a team of interdimensional troubleshooters. Bug was the party’s scout, a 2″ long sentient insect. This party also included a troll, a telepathic horse and the personification of Murphy’s Law.

Bug had the advantage of being small enough to go where other party members could not. Bug’s disadvantage was an insect-like attention span, and not being very useful in combat. Had to stay well away from the baby kraken in the crashed spaceship we were exploring! The ability to speak with other insects turned out not to be terribly useful; Bug never met another insect who had anything meaningful or interesting to say.

Carl Cravens mentions the lengthy ‘What is Fudge’ discussion on the Fudge mailing list, and mentions the problems he’s been having with the system.

For me, it brings up something that’s been bugging me again. I’ve claimed Fudge as my “exclusive” system for the past several years… I run all my games with Fudge. Thing is, I haven’t had a lot of time to actually run games in the past ten years, so my hands-on experience has been lacking. The interesting part is that every time I get a hands-on experience, Fudge somehow comes up short for me.

There’s a lot of niggly little reasons, no one of which is really a big problem in itself. But despite its “toolbox” approach, there are some core bits of Fudge that are tightly locked together and it’s very difficult to tweak the system because some parameters can’t be changed without changing other parts of the system. And some of those tightly-locked pieces are what, to me, make Fudge what it is. If you remove or change them drastically, then it’s no longer Fudge

I realise that every time I’ve run Fudge, I’ve used a slightly different build. Sometimes I’ve used vanilla Fudge pretty much out of the box; other times I’ve run a very stripped-down version, inspired a bit by Castle Falkenstein, which merges attributes and broad skills into ‘abilities’, and drops gifts and faults altogether.

The one part of the system I haven’t ever changed is the part of Fudge Carl’s having problems with, the seven-level attribute scale and the Fudge dice. I have to agree with Carl, those are the very core of Fudge. I’ve always found they work tolerably well; but then my games have been modern-day or low fantasy. Carl’s trying to use Fudge for superheroes, a genre that’s never appealed much to me.

Anyway, here’s my thoughts for future games using my own Kalyr setting:

• No Attributes: I’d already eliminated those attributes that overlap too much with skills, such as Dexterity or Intelligence, now I’m taking this a step further and eliminating them altogether, making some narrowly-defined ones as skills, replacing others with gifts and faults, or talents
• In character generation, use a Traveller-style career system to determine skills. You stack together a series of Templates (need to think of a snappier name), which represent backgrounds, professions or talents. Each grants one level in six different skills. Talents fill the role of those attributes that grant skill bonuses in other systems; for example, take a talent ‘Agile’, and you get one skill level in any six skills that an agile person would be naturally good at. It’s not my intention to define every possible background, profession or talent; would-be players will be encouraged to define their own, subject to GM approval.
• Characters also have traits called Connections. Kalyr is a setting where social status and guild rank count an awful lot; so Connections represent your status with regard to the various powerful groups in the setting. They’re rated on the same Superb-Terrible scale as skills; this takes account both of rank within the group, and the power of the group.
• Gifts are much the same as vanilla Fudge; haven’t decided how many or whether they can be traded for Templates
• Faults are slightly different; they don’t give you anything extra at Chargen time, but instead grant Fudge Points every time they come up and inconvenience the character in play. You can take as many or as few as you like, according to character concept. In essence, they’re self-balancing, roleplay them and you get points for them; don’t, and you won’t.

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• Psionics still needs a bit of thought. My earlier attempt was more or less a straight conversion of the psionics rules from GURPS 3rd edition; each broad power group was bought in levels, and within each power you bought skills to make use of the power. GURPS 4th edition works in a completely different way; skills have gone, and each power is now it’s own advantage. In many ways this is a better idea, because for many powers the concept of ‘levels’ isn’t terribly useful; either you can do it or you can’t. I’m thinking along the lines of a gift for each ability, accompanied by skills the represent the ways the power can be used.

Sadly, the reality-based community has lost control of the world.

According to Francis Wheen, the values of the enlightenment are in full retreat in the face of religious fundamentalism, ivory-tower ideological nonsense, misty-eyed sentimental idiocy, and vacuous new-age twaddle. And if western civilisation is to survive, all of this nonsense needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Unlike the crusty conservatives who think the world went to pot somewhere about 1963, Wheen dates the downfall of rational civilisation to 1979, the two pivotal events being the Iranian revolution and the election of Margaret Thatcher. One saw the ugliest face of religious fundamentalism, a retreat into medieval barbarism. The other saw the economic policies dominated by wingnut ideologues that plunged the nation into deep recession, and the beginnings of politics where style and presentation was considered more important than substance, something which was to get even worse under Tony Blair

The whole book is a first-class rant; very little of today’s world escapes unscathed. For example, in the chapter ‘New Snake Oil, Old Bottles’, Wheen attacks new-age management gurus and all those ludicrous self-help books full of ‘Hallmark greeting card platitudes’. In ‘The Demolition Merchants of Reality’, he skewers the deconstructionism of the recently-deceased Jacques Derrida. Wheen suggests that once you start regarding history as being about ‘conflicting narratives’ rather being about what actually happened, it’s a slippery slope that ends with Holocaust denial.

And once these lunatics get their hands on science, well. A hilarious section tells of the hoax played by Alan Sokal, a physics professor who submitted a paper called ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. Although the article was complete and total nonsense, it was filled with enough quotations from various deconstructionist academics that they all completely fell for the hoax. Much egg on faces when Sokal revealed it was a hoax a week later.

The chapter ‘Candles in the Wind’ reminds us of the terrifying collective insanity that gripped Britain following the untimely death of Princess Diana.

On that Sunday afternoon I was telephoned by a neighbour, a ferociously conservative columnist on the Daily Mail: ‘I can’t bear any more of this, fancy a drink in the pub’. He had just been given a week’s holiday from the paper after informing the editor that he couldn’t participate in the national ululation and genuflection; having watched several hours of hyperbolic homage on TV, he was beginning to fear that he was the only sane person left in the country.

Then we have the next moment of collective insanity, the madness of the dotcom bubble, when everyone thought the normal rules of business no longer applied. We’re reminded of how investors gullibly wasted their money on ludicrous schemes like boo.com. Sadly he neglects the equally ridiculous Clickmango.com. I worked briefly for the software house that build this “woman’s health and beauty” site, and saw the deeply frightening database model. Where else would there be entities called ‘Horoscope’ and ‘Celebrity Endorsement’? Needless to say, the Mango went pear-shaped in a very short space of time.

Then there’s Enron. Part corporation, part religious cult, part confidence trickster’s shell game. In a fully reality-based world Enron could not have happened; but such was the scale of their hubris that money-worshipping politicians and financial analysts alike completely failed to see through them before the inevitable collapse.

The last half of the final chapter deals with the total failure of too much of the left to understand the world after the end of the cold war, and especially after 9/11. Wheen doesn’t have any kind worlds for the ‘Enemy of my enemy is my friend’ brigade, and the likes of Micheal Moore and particularly the loathsome Noam Chomsky, who appear to be prepared to side with nihilistic fanaticism rather than admit that an enemy that attacks the west is in fact an enemy against which we have to defend ourselves. Perhaps wisely, although supporting the overthrown of the Taliban, Wheen avoids getting into any discussion on the contentious issue of whether or not it was a good idea to invade Iraq.

Wheen’s final words reminds us what will happen if we allow mumbo-jumbo to prevail.

but those who refuse to learn from experience, and strive instead to discredit the rationalism that makes such enlightenment possible - whether they be holy warriors, anti-science relativists, economic fundamentalists, radical post-modernists, New Age mystics or latter-day Chicken Littles - are not only condemning themselves to repeat the past. They wish to consign us all to a life in darkness.

Altogether a brilliant rant, taking blunderbuss shots at the sacred cows of both left and right. An essential read for everyone who doesn’t like the direction the world is heading, and wants us to change course before it’s too late.

How not to pull a car out of a harbour. Not sure where or when this happened, but my guess is it’s somewhere in Scotland. (Link from Live From the Third Rail)

King Pot Noodle (as he is known) is introducing an N-gauge model of a North British Class 22 diesel-hydraulic. These short-lived locomotives are one of the few classes never represented in kit form in N. For a layout set in the West of England between 1958 and 1972, they’re pretty much essential. Slightly before my chosen period for British-outline modelling, but they’re part of my childhood (I was 11 years old when they last ones were withdrawn), so I’d be prepared to turn the clock back for the occasional operating session to justify running one.

I have to say I’m not terribly impressed by pictures of this model; the shape of the cab doesn’t seem right, with the slope of the windows at a bit too much of an angle. I’ll reserve final judgement until I see one in the flesh at the Warley show in two weeks time.

At least for retailers, Christmas starts with the great switching on of the Christmas lights, which is always supposed to be done by somebody vaguely famous. In most towns and cities, this honour tends to fall to whatever D-list celebrity is starring in this year’s Christmas Pantomime. Typically this is some fading glamour model or has-been comedian. In Cambridge this year, somebody noticed the official start of the high-street shopping orgy coincided with the night the UK tour of veteran 70s punks The Damned comes to the city. The ideal people! So they asked Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible to join the mayor and Father Christmas for the great switch-on.

But not everybody seems to think it’s such a good idea.
Some people are upset.

“It is not appropriate for Christmas,” said Reverend Stephen Leeke, of St Martin’s Church in Cambridge.

“They are a punk rock band with very doubtful lyrics.”

He added that the council had not given much thought to the decision to invite the band - whose songs include Anti Pope.

“They should admit they made a mistake,” he said.

Reverend Dr Peter Graves, of Wesley Methodist Church in Cambridge, said: “We should not give a major function over to a group that goes out of its way to deny what Christmas is about. “

Earth calling Reverends Leeke and Graves. All you achieve with statements like this is to make Christians look po-faced and silly. If you knew anything about popular culture or popular music, you would realise that The Damned are about as blasphemous as Spïnal Tap’s “Christmas with the Devil”.