AskHoyle

Category: RPG

  • Nothing in Particular

    I don’t really have a topic in mind that I want to talk about. I have plenty on my mind, but I don’t think I’m ready to talk about that yet.

    I’m flying again, back to Atlanta for one night. I’m already regretting not making it two, but I made my decision some time ago and past-me must have had his reasons. I’m flying for business, slowly racking up points on JetBlue. I seem to hate them less than most others. Today so far the only annoyance is a TV that won’t work and also won’t turn off. It has some sort of seizure inducing flicker instead, presaging the chaotic heat death of the universe in a low res LCD. I won’t live that long, even if I succeed in uploading my consciousness to the cloud. Meanwhile to keep my meat brain from shorting the fuck out I’ve made good use of the snack menu as a sanity shield. Left neighbor’s is off, but right neighbor’s suffers the same fate… Passed my persuade check and that one is covered too now. Bonus: he suggested taking a picture and asking JetBlue for a voucher for my troubles. I’m sure my pull as a blogger will help… I have practically tens of readers.

    Flights are usually not stressful to me once I get to the gate. Prior to that I am a stress ball for more than a day. I lose track of time easily and being late for a plane has annoying consequences. Today was worse because I cut it close, arriving less than an hour before takeoff. Mostly because I decided to visit the Renaissance Faire to support my friend who had written a book they were showing. Also, to see some friends who were visiting and others working there. I arrived less than an hour before I had to leave, but it wasn’t my first trip this year so it was ok. It helped that I was in the RV and I just camped out in their parking lot after arriving last night, but I had some work to do when I woke up that delayed my entry.

    Before that was a mostly unhurried trip up from rural Pennsylvania, which I can confirm was a right good choice for William Penn. There I visited a couple of friends who I seem to see once a year on this same weekend, ever since they moved.

    Continuing my reverse chronology, that was but a short jaunt from the instigation of my travel: another game convention weekend. This one was Traveller Con USA, to distinguish it from the one in the UK, where the extra L comes from. It’s a small one, something around 65 people, but tightly focused on a single game. Three guesses what it’s called. As a small convention it’s easy to get to know people from year to year. As people arrived Thursday night our table at the bar was repeatedly extended amid flurries of good natured razzing. It’s like coming home to a house of 20 older brothers, each with stories to tell from the past year.

    Now that I’ve reached the end of the beginning I’ll return to the middle: the games. They’re all four hour slots, and there are two Friday, with 1 to 5 being open and unscheduled gaming and 7 to 11 the first scheduled one. Saturday has three slots and Sunday has one. Last year during the open slot I ran a pickup game of Scum and Villainy in a Traveller setting. This year I played in a game a friend ran wherein we were stranded in space and had to mine fuel to rescue ourselves before our life support ran out.

    I just realized I skipped the explanation of Traveller, but I’m pretty sure everyone reading this has been in proximity to me for more than a few hours, during which it is highly likely I’ve already explained it ad nauseum. If not, ask me sometime you have a few hours to spare. Maybe I’ll write about that specifically sometime.

    Throughout the day I was distracted by my need to finish planning the game I was running Saturday at 08:00. I had done 80% of the mental effort, that of creating the character concepts and their interrelationships, and 20% of the administrative work, which consists of making standees, character sheets and actually writing some stuff down. In the end the worry paid off, as it tends to, when and only when it’s directed towards productivity.

    Many people struggle with anxiety and worry, but it’s important to understand that it is perfectly healthy in moderation. My brain was trying to tell me something important. It wasn’t dangerous in any physical sense, but an RPG is a collaborative story, and the GM is the hub on which the spokes are attached. I don’t have to be the whole wheel, but we won’t roll if I don’t do my part. My brain was reminding me that I wasn’t done with my commitment to my players, and the worry was a result. It was right, in that if I hadn’t heeded the warning it wouldn’t have been nearly as good. So, thanks brain for making me spend the effort.

    I find thanking my brain helps a lot. It reminds me of my friend who thanks her dog when it barks in alarm at a noise outside. It’s a productive way to acknowledge the value of the signal, even when it’s not needed. Once acknowledged the dog and the anxiety are often silenced. The trick is to learn how to recognize whether our own intrusive thoughts are valuable in the moment.

    For example I could be stressed out right now, sitting in my sky chair. I could start with the simple understanding that gravity spends every waking moment trying to squash me into the Earth. I could wonder whether the engines are as functional as the TVs. I could think about hijackings or lightning. I could make myself miserable every moment of every day if I wanted to. Instead I work very hard not to choose that misery. It doesn’t always work, but it does more than it doesn’t, and since life is just a series of moments spending more of them unmiserable is winning.

    This bit here is Buddhism, or whatever you want to call it, since nothing he said wasn’t said by someone else at some point. I find it easier to hold on to when it’s labeled, but when held lightly it can be seen everywhere namelessly. So, lightly then and without labels I’ll continue.

    Some of you may be asking how. How to stop thinking the thoughts that make us miserable? Well you can’t stop, so step one is acknowledging THAT. That’s a hard thing to swallow, but it’s actually good news. It turns out our brains are a cacophony of voices, thoughts, ideas and distractions, and that’s OK. So step one is accepting that you’re a weird twisted temporary lump of goo powered by chaotic flickers of electrons. You’re ok.

    You have the thought, the impulse, the fear and… then what? What do you do next? Do you yell loudly at the barking dog in your head? Take a guess what effect that has. Chemically it’s a cocktail, but the brain bartender reaches for the cortisol first. Cortisol: The preferred cordial of fighters and flighters everywhere, guaranteed to get you out of a jam, in .04% of situations! Step right up everyone and chug the anti-rampaging-wild-boar drink, it goes great with confined spaces like airplane seats!

    On second thought, maybe try to save that drink for when you need it. If you have accidentally imbibed, it’s hard to step off the ride, but you sure can’t do it by drinking more. I find that looking at my body as though I wasn’t piloting it helps. Oh look! That guy is clenching his jaw, and tensing his fists and hey… It looks like he’s getting ready to fight a boar! The good news is that cortisol peaks only take about ninety seconds to clear out, but only if you don’t have another swig. So once I am aware of what I’m doing physically I just change that. Deep breath, unclench, de-boar. It turns out that changing the physical response usually short circuits the chemical cycle. And then I say thanks to my brain for practicing boar defense protocols, which could be really damn important some day. This too is Buddhism but that also doesn’t matter.

    Ok but what if there is a boar? Or really what if we don’t know whether or not there is? That’s when we have a conversation with ourselves. It helps to have a script, since cortisol is a hell of a drug.

    1. Is this real?
    2. Is this now?
    3. Is there anything I can do NOW to change this NOW, or have a measurable impact on a likely future NOW?

    So, first: Can I see, smell or touch a boar at this moment? Did someone I trust just inform me of any imminent boar attack? Did they sound serious, or did I just arrive at a game convention?

    Second: Is this a thing happening now, or is it just leftover boar tracks? Am I just remembering something? Am I simply listening to a story my brain made up? Maybe one it’s told me before? Would an objective observer, undosed by the bartender, scream at the movie screen that I should run for it?

    Third: What, in all seriousness, can I do at this moment to deal with the boar situation? Can I spend my time making a spear? Building an anti-boar fence? Buying an automatic anti-boar-invasion machine gun? Don’t answer that one.

    What about the plane crash, is there actually anything I can do? Yeah, turns out there is, and the flight crew instructs you about it every time you get on a plane. Do you listen? I do, and I count rows to the nearest exit. Plus, I keep my shoes on, my feet on the floor, my head back, and my seatbelt tight during takeoff and landing. That’s all I’ve figured out, feel free to let me know if you have other ideas. Once I’ve done all I can do I thank my brain for working to protect me and then I pull out my phone to write to you. Or read a book or listen to a podcast, or otherwise do anything else at all but pointlessly fuck up the next few hours of my life drinking cortisol cocktails. There are a million ways I could die today, the plane is just the one most likely to make the evening news.

    Behind me a child has a meltdown, because his sister closed the window thwarting his airborne boar defense. Ten minutes of screaming and sobbing later and he’s back to his video game. Pictures of boars are less scary when you can hit them with pictures of Spears. (Google capitalized that and I’m leaving it in, in support of her own famous meltdown. Rich beautiful young women are probably surrounded by hundreds of vipers and boars. We don’t often see them, but they do. I don’t blame her in the slightest. )

    Engines spooling down,
    Gravity begins to win,
    Probably safely.

    Quick apology,
    Sister forgives his outburst,
    Crisis averted.

    Still no sign of boar.

    H

  • Going to Orlando

    If I could figure out some artificial way to periodically limit my internet access, in a way that I couldn’t immediately hack, I think I’d do so. I’m on another plane, and though I’ve had a lot to say lately I haven’t been blogging, as you may have noticed.
    Mostly lately I’ve been busy learning about, buying, fixing, learning about, driving, learning about, fixing, and driving my new RV. It’s a 2004 Pleasure Way Plateau, which is a honking big Sprinter van. It’s “looking down on F350s” big. It’s “being able to see really well off of bridges and get slightly nervous at how high they are” big. It’s “gotta circle the parking lot to find two spaces in a row” big. It’s “I can see over traffic” big. It’s “better slow down early” big. It’s “I don’t think anyone would notice if I weren’t wearing pants” big.
    Really though it’s quite small as RVs go. I can just barely fit sideways on the bed in the back, but not quite comfortably. So I’ve slept lengthwise, or diagonally depending on how level I could get the thing with the Anderson levelers, which I totally didn’t invent. They are super clever though, a curved ramp with a matching chock. They only go up to about 4 inches though, and the site in Andrew Jackson State Park was significantly unlevel even with the levelers. I blame that for the coffeepocalypse, which is now in my autocorrect choices, and is the best thing to come out of that incident. French presses full of boiling water don’t like to balance on sloped propane stoves. Just in case anyone asks.
    I’ve been experimenting with using small amounts of power and water, less than is actually reasonable and available. I see it as a resource management game and though I can’t trade wood for sheep, I don’t like sharing my bed with sheep anyway, and I can’t eat a whole one before it goes bad. Managing the solar input, the battery charge level and depth of charge, the fresh tank, the gray water tank, the black water tank, the propane, the food, the wifi, the 4g, and the sanity of traveling alone is a whole new game. Mostly fun, coffeepocalypse aside.
    Yesterday after work I added my second Renogy 160 watt solar panel in parallel, feeding my Victron smart 100/30 MPPT into my Battleborn LiFePO4 100AH battery, none of which would have made much sense to me 6 weeks ago. In the interim I’ve learned about all these things.
    The Battleborn is really the star of the show, it’s a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery, which you already knew if you took chemistry and we’re paying attention. I’m not sure what advantages it has over lithium ion, but it’s what all the cool kids are using now. It replaced what was supposed to be a 100AH AGM, which is a lead acid deep cycle battery with fancy geometry. But by “deep cycle” they mean you can safely go down to 50% depth of charge (i.e. 50 amp hours) which means your battery is half as big as advertised. The LiFePO4 can be fully drained, especially since the Battleborn (brand) has a built in BMS (battery management system) which cuts off the charger if the voltage gets too high or low. This makes it a “drop in replacement” for a lead acid battery, supposedly. It has been good so far though I have heard several cautions around how the internal resistance is low (good) that it causes it to pull a lot of current to charge quickly (good) which might overload your wires (bad) potentially melting them (really really bad). So far I’ve been keeping an eye on the charge rates, and since my power converter and MPPT are both 30amp, I think I am ok. It also charges from the van’s alternator, and there’s some concern there. I may need to add a current limiter, or upgrade the wiring.
    The reason for that is that electrical power (watts) is the product of volts times amps. So if you need 700 watts to run your Instant Pot Mini Duo like I do, you need 700 divided by 12ish volts or 55 to 60 amps. In comparison if you pulled 60 amps on your 120 volt house you’d be talking 7200 watts, enough to power your whole house. Big amps need big fat expensive wires. So there’s a scaling factor that works against low voltage systems. This is why it generally makes sense to run higher voltages, such as the 24 volts which Tesla’s batteries supply.
    So let’s about Tesla batteries and why they are interesting. Or rather I’ll talk, or write, and you listen, or read, or not, if you’ve given up by now. Tesla seems to make the best battery module in the business. There are 15 modules in a model S comprising basically the whole floor of the vehicle, with seven to a side and one more up front. Enough of these cars have been scrapped that the used modules are available on the secondary market (eBay). If I recall correctly they are around 250 AH each, more than twice the rating of my Battleborn. They do have a built in BMS, but it’s proprietary and hasn’t been hacked yet. Also as mentioned it’s 24 volts and the van wants 12 to run most things, so I didn’t go that route. They also have built in liquid cooling and heating plumbing to interface directly with the vehicle’s corresponding systems, to keep the passengers comfortable. If it gets too hot or too cold the battery will either blow up or be ruined, so this is pretty important, and a good reason to go with the Battleborn instead. Still I am tempted to get a couple of them and run a 24v inverter so I can run the air conditioning off grid. I would have to dedicate a significant portion of the storage for that, which is another reason it hasn’t happened. Yet.
    Mostly my plan is to go places that aren’t so damn hot during the summer. So far that hasn’t worked out, since on our maiden voyage we (the van and I) visited NC and SC, both of which are Satan’s armpit in the summer. Still the trip was good overall, a great learning experience to get used to RV travel, and a generally leisurely journey. I can work from anywhere so I’m trying to do that.
    I took conference calls in the Shenandoah National Park, with a 50 mile view out my window. It’s cooler at higher elevations (3 degrees F per 100 ft , which is 1 degree C per something meters for those of you who live literally anywhere else). The 22 foot long van is plenty maneuverable to scramble up any sort of normal road.
    I drove a National Forest road in Uwharrie without issue, albeit slowly. There I hiked a 6.7 mile loop, encountering only 5 people all day. I returned to the RV, sweaty as hell (see: Satan’s armpit) and luxuriated in a cold shower in the “wet bath.” A wet bath means the floor next to the toilet has a drain in it, and the whole thing is meant to get wet. There’s a shower curtain (which was missing prior to my purchase) which keeps water off the vanity cabinets and GFI outlet. (GFI means it will probably not kill me if it gets wet, but it’s still best not to.)
    I wasn’t sure how I would feel about the shower. When I could I used the shower at the RV park and later at my parents’ place, both of which are significantly better than the one in the RV. The same can be said about the toilet, both my preference for and use of terrestrial facilities given the option. Still having the shower and the toilet give more options, and they work fine. By the way, the shower would be warm if I turned on the propane 6 gallon water heater but my thermodynamic objective was decidedly exothermic at the time. I felt so deliciously comfortable afterwards it made the whole day worth it.
    I’m not really in shape for hiking right now. Neither am I in shape for swimming. But I did both on this trip, and wasn’t horribly sore. Investment in exercise over the last few years has been very valuable. The past 8 months I haven’t really been very mobile though. We are what we repeatedly do, and I’m pretty sure I’m an internet.
    I’m in a strange relationship with the internet right now, codependent probably. I am hyper connected, gathering enormous amounts of knowledge about anything and everything, but also wasting hours on nothing.
    One recent focus has been dating sites. I’m newly single-ish, having seen the end of a nearly seven year relationship at the start of the year. So I’m more active in that respect, but due to the aforementioned travel and indecision I’ve not had any dates, per se. My life’s pretty atypical, so “per se” is the operative term.
    The RV scene seems pretty incompatible with dating so far. It’s mostly retirees or couples, and at least till now I’ve been unable or unmotivated to meet any of them. Ideally I think it would be cool to share an RV journey with a partner, but for now it’s a solo adventure. Honestly this is probably a good thing, or at least not a bad one. I think it’s good for me to take some time to figure out who I am again. People change in relationships, and I need to take some time to reset my level. Fortunately I have leveling blocks. Also a sweet app and corresponding Bluetooth sensor which can help with that. Or not.
    Anyway this need for reinvention is what spawned the name I gave the RV: Metamorphose. Specifically the directive form of the word, a command to myself to dissolve into goo and reemerge from my chrysalis with some shiny new wings. So far I’m not doing any flapping, but a shakedown cruise does not a Marco Polo make.
    I wonder how he would feel knowing his name became a game of aquatic tag? We can’t choose our legacy but we can try to live our lives with import. So far I feel like I have just been getting ready. Preschool prepares for elementary school which prepares for junior high, for high school, for college, for a career, for a house, for a … What now? Kids are a cheat code for a legacy, I think, provided you don’t totally fuck them up you know your influence will live on. But I’ve never been interested in having kids. I am interested in figuring out what the last half of my life will look like. I figure I’m about half way now, if I get pretty lucky I’ll double my current age. Maybe I’ll live longer, but that would be above average, and assumes I don’t get eaten by a Grue, which is no sure thing.
    So what am I getting ready for now? When I scratch my nails across this world, what sort of mark will I leave? I always figured I would invent something. No one knows who invented the wheel but they have impacted countless generations. I don’t need to be famous but I want to have mattered.
    The older I get the more I realize my brain is pretty special. Don’t get me wrong, I totally suck at a lot of things, but I’m also really really really good at some things. I once read a one page of summary of some self help book (my work used to subscribe to a service that provided them) and it said that if you work really hard you can get pretty OK at things you suck at. Or you can focus on being the best in the world at things you are good at. It’s probably important not to completely ignore things you’re bad at, since many of them facilitate aspects of success, such as public speaking and not being a fuck head. I’m still working on both of those.
    Mostly I’m good at understanding complex systems and troubleshooting what’s wrong with them. If my resume were one word it would be “Troubleshooter.” I’m glad to have found a position in IT that pays well, but if computers didn’t exist I would be fixing motorcycle engines or building factories. As it is, I play a lot of board games in my spare time. Mostly I enjoy learning new games. I love it when I unfold a new board and it starts as complete nonsense, with icons and words everywhere, and over the course of a few minutes explanation everything falls into place. It’s like learning a whole new language in 15 minutes. And then you use your new skill to fight your opponents to a bloodless victory.
    The other games I play a lot of are role playing games. I’ve talked about this before but not lately. I’ve always loved stories and I think I’m a good story teller… when I don’t perceive it as public speaking and get nervous. The difference is when I’m playing an RPG I don’t know how the story ends, and I’m not the only teller. Sessions run as a give and take, an improvisational melody. Really at its best it’s less a game than a performance, each of us performing for each other, playing off the energy of the group. The rules are there to guide the tone and help add some randomness via dice rolls. That way none of us know what will happen or how the story will end. This sense of adventure and discovery is one of my favorite feelings in the world. It’s why I hate to watch movie trailers. I want to be told a story without foreknowledge, as the author intended, even when I’m one of the authors.
    I’m always bothered when something is called an RPG that isn’t. Computer games are not RPGs, since there is a story to be discovered, not created. I suppose there are MMOs with some amount of speaking in character, but it’s not even close to the same experience. While dungeons and dragons is the most popular RPG by far, it is not representative of the landscape of tabletop RPGs. It can be a mechanism for telling a cool story, and if you have fun doing it don’t let me stop you, but I’ll never play it again given the option. D&D and Pathfinder are so focused on maximizing your character’s stats that the story is often lost. People hack and slash and kill the faceless goes and take their nonsensical loot, and pretend that’s interesting, when mostly it isn’t. Would you want to watch it as a movie? Probably not. Granted some movies suck too.
    My favorite games are those that leave players speechless. Or laughing until they can barely breathe. Or both. With people pulling impossible faces, or affecting personalities worthy of an Oscar. Or sacrificing themselves for the peasant everyone loved. Or betraying their Lord because of their own moral code. Or affixing scuba gear to a kobe cow to avoid robotic killer koi in a sewer escape, while stealing it from the Japanese emperor to make a meat cake for the wedding of Ian Anderson and Patty Hearst at the haunted Mansion at Disney world. (Naturally our spiritual advisor had plenty of hallucinogenic drug pills to scatter over the water to drug the unsuspecting koi.) I’m going to remember that scene forever, which is a lot more than I can say for SuperDude Punches Some Other LessSuper Dude Repeatedly Before Predictably Winning In The End Part IV. Not that I don’t enjoy that sort of thing sometimes too.
    I’ll be landing in Orlando soon, then off to the hotel to rest up in preparation for five straight days of gaming. This is an atypical year for me, as I’ve neither played very many games not followed any board game podcasts. In prior years I’ve frequently been the one to teach the newest games, or know which New Hotness was up my alley. This trip I really have no plans beyond learning Wingspan, because I heard it was good. I’m also back to flying solo. The past few cons I’ve had roommates that I knew and we spent a lot of time gaming together. This year I will know plenty of people I’m sure, but a few of my con friends won’t be attending. All my early convention experiences were this way so I’m sure I’ll manage.
    Really I do enjoy solo travel most of the time. I like being able to make my own decisions and travel at my own pace. Whether picking a board game or deciding when to stop on a hiking trail in the woods, or sitting on a thousand year old temple in India for an hour just because it felt like the thing to do, it always is calming to set my own pace and direction. The RV is a new mode, but the same idea. Point it and go, and stop when I feel like it, and see things as I am inspired to. Every con is different. They say you can never step in the same river twice, and I think accepting that everything changes is a real key to happiness, or at least freedom from anxiety.
    So, onward I go. Wish me luck.
    H

  • On the subject of languages in RPGs

    I wrote this as a letter to a podcast, but I’m posting it here to be able to share it elsewhere. (You should listen to the Happy Jack’s RPG podcast, because it is great.)

    ….

    Dear Jovial Jackholes
    On the subject of language in games, I’ll share with you a story from my Traveller campaign. It may be a bit long, but 90% of your show is emails and the other 10% is complaints about the length of emails, so either way: you’re welcome.
    In session 1, I knew the crew was going to need to purchase a starship, so I prepped a few used ones for them to choose from by rolling on the Mongoose tables covering age vs. flaws and quirks. Of the three floating in the shipyard they chose a 100 year old Free Trader with flawed sensors.
    Between sessions I wrote a backstory for the ship they chose, detailing its use as a colony jump-start ship. By supplying otherewise-illegal “anagathic” anti-aging drugs, the Imperium had given a crew of old folks an extra 30 years of life on a remote planet in exchange for their service building the infrastructure for a later, and much larger, colony ship. After the ship was mothballed, it was purchased by the Aslan, a race of cat people, and used for unknown purposes, before being sold off to the shipyard where the players found it for sale.
    In truth, I picked Aslan solely for the amusement of having a ship whose cleaning robots had failed due to excessive ingestion of cat fur. During character generation I had house-ruled having the players pick a minor advantage and disadvantage from the GURPS rules, so when one player picked “allergies” the die was cast. You take “allergies,” you get cat fur; it’s basically my duty as GM.
    Several sessions later the engineer decides to try to fix the flawed sensors, but rolled snake eyes. So, with the ship’s backstory in mind, this failure causes the sensors to suddenly switch into Aslan and look completely different. There was clearly more detail visble, but no one onboard could understand it. They then figure out how to switch the language back and forth but are otherwise stumped.
    Another few sessions went by and a friend of mine asked to join my game. I offered as an option an NPC who had just joined the ship, or he could generate a completely new character and we would figure out where he could join the crew. The player decided that the NPC sounded interesting, so we did random character generation with the NPC in mind as an objective.
    At this point all I knew about the NPC was that he was an expert in ancient languages, and his university sent him to investigate the writing on an artifact the crew had found. Of course the artifact had since been stolen but the crew assured the professor they could track it down again for a fee. So the linguist boarded as an NPC passenger but would became a PC two sessions later.
    My friend went through random character generation and came up with a character he thought would work. I agreed and was secretly amused that the language he had chosen for his area of study was Aslan, since the player had no knowledge of the ship’s history.
    The player joined the game and the professor offered to help with the sensors. Unfortunately for them he didn’t have the Sensors skill, but the engineer welded together a double-chair so he and the professor could cooperate. Together they slowly discovered that the sensors weren’t “flawed”, it’s just that they had been replaced by the Aslan with military-grade sensors, which didn’t work well with the default civilian software.
    Meanwhile, in real life I am friends with an actual scholar of ancient languages, so I asked him to help me understand how languages vary and how we could build an interesting story out of it.
    He explained to me that translations are not one-to-one. A word may work in 80% of cases, but you can’t rely on word for word translations in every case. Think about the word “green” and how it would translate to a matching color in any dual-language dictionary, but how that would fail when your spies report the enemy discussing “green troops.”. Even among humans, language affects the way we see and process color. The Himba tribe of Namibia has only 5 words for colors, and they have trouble distinguishing between blue and green, but they can easily distinguish between subtle shades of green which most of us cannot. (I encourage you to watch the fascinating BBC documentary called “Do you see what I see?” for more detail). Imagine how much more variable words could be in the mind of an alien or an orc.
    Specifically the most variable words (at least among earthly languages) are prepositions. My expert friend explained that in Hebrew he would say that “the chair is FROM my back” and to Germans “the clouds are ON the sky.” These subtle differences can lead to major misunderstandings.
    Also, context is very important and it’s not always clear that a subtext even exists without being a native speaker. Knowing every word in a passage is not sufficient, particularly when the speaker is being coy or subtle. What’s meant as a joke or play on words could have deadly consequences if interpreted literally.
    So, what does this mean for our starship crew? Literally years of enjoyment as I fed them extremely detailed sensor data through the cultural and linguistic filter of a race of cat people. Through this filter we got to explore how the Aslan see the universe. For example since they are predators their sensors show everything as either prey or larger predators.
    I play all my games online so I fed information to the player such as “There is a huge dog in orbit, but it seems to be limping and has a missing tooth”, and “The ship leaving dock looks like a delicious morsel”. Then the player interprets THAT and passes it along to the crew in character.
    Any time i wanted to make things difficult I could misapply a preposition, describing something as “through” rather than “behind”, or “with” instead of “near”. But overall they got a wealth of information from software that no other human civilian would ever see. They still haven’t figured out that this software is worth more to the Imperium than their entire ship.
    This highlights one feature of Traveller among game systems, which is the near-complete lack of D&D style character advancement. There is no leveling up, and skill points are added EXTREMELY slowly, if at all (depending on version). But that doesn’t make for a boring or static story! The characters still increase their power and ability to influence more significant aspects of the world, but they do it through gained knowledge, the development of influential contacts, and upgrades to their equipment and to their ship. And sometimes by hiring a linguist to interpret the dander-covered “flawed” sensor display on their discount starship.
    Keep up the good work
    -Hoyle
    PS : …and beer
    PPS: dick joke

  • This Thing I do for fun

    Today I am at a local four day gaming convention.  I rode the rails of a two hour D&D encounters game, a hack and slash preset adventure which many people enjoy but I found disappointing. It was a short session (only two hours) so I had time to kill.  Next up was a trip to the board game room, where I learned No Siesta, the La Granja dice game, which reminded me of Roll Through the Ages.  I taught Mike and Daniel and the game went quickly.

    Next was a much more interesting RPG run by a GM I had played with before.  Last time he ran a Scooby Doo vs. zombies game, so I had high hopes.  This was in the Feng Shui 2 system, and the theme was early 90s action movies.  I gravitated instantly to the Scrappy Kid sidekick, a nine year old girl I called Candy, because she likes candy.  When I snuck in the front door of a nightclub and encountered the boss in his office with a pile of money and drugs, it was clear what to do. Dodge.  He missed with his double Uzis, so I kicked the bag of cocaine into his face. He retreated, so I set fire to a pile of money and drugs, and roasted a marshmallow over it.  When he came back in full ninja gear I pulled the mask over his face and hit him in the crotch with a pink throwing star.  Then I stole his car and drove it into a C5 before parachuting it in front of the bus in which the president was being held hostage.  We took out the motorcycle ninjas and saved the world, like you do.

    (I had intended to write more, but I have been busy. This article has been sitting around for weeks now.)