Duke Street Alley

forward_looking provides a whole lot of interesting reading about the future.

I've been observing different styles of gaming recently, from different people, different groups, and occasionally the same people in different groups. This is all in the realm of tabletop gaming, which along with LARP, is the area where styles have the most effect. In computer, card, or board games, you've really got the rules and that's that.

So anyway. I want some things in particular from my games, and I get impatient when I don't get them - which is why I've not often been a player. eng_monkey is the first gamemaster I've come across who actually runs a game that suits everything I like, and I can't praise his game highly enough. I'm trying to pin down those elements in some way that I can explain them to other people - and perhaps give players in my own games some insight into things. They're mostly things I don't like.

The first of these is joking. More specifically, I don't like out-of-character jokes. I blame Monty Python for a lot of these things, and it's not just because of the Coconut Incident. In-character jokes are great - An Armanan, a Taratto and an Elsaivi walk into a tavern... - but having your villains colour coded by black for irredeemable evil, red for "likes destruction" and purple for sexually frustrated... no, take it away, please. If someone in my worlds wears purple, they're wearing it because they like it, it has some significance to them, or the like. There is an in-world, in-character reason for every single thing that I describe in a game session. I tend to get frustrated when players assume that a character they've met is there for comic relief; I've never used such a character, and probably never will. In essence, you won't find me playing Paranoia.

Second, I don't like tying system to feel. I've stopped describing my games as D&D because people immediately assume that it's a casual, reality-lite, one-size-fits-all, dungeon-crawling, hack-and-slash game. It's bloody not. If I could run a practical game while not letting the players see the rules at all, I would, but that's more work than I have time for, and lacks the structure that allows me to adlib without breaking things. So I'm using "d20 Fantasy" as a description, or even just "fantasy campaign" when I can get away with it.

Something I do like: subtlety. I'm fairly sure that nobody I've run games for has ever picked up on even 25% of the motifs, themes, foreshadowing, and just plain detail work that goes into the game, and that's the way I like it. All that material is working there at the subconscious level, and if I do it right, I can plant suspiscions in the player's mind about a given situation by using triggers and motifs from previous experience. This does require the player to be paying attention, of course. I pay a lot of attention, and probably over-analyse as a player.

That's enough pacing and muttering for one day, I think. I might pick up on this again.

Reason number four billion, thirty two million, three thousand six hundred and ninety-seven why I love inannajones:

She doesn't mind me eating the excellent carbonara she made from the saucepan to save on washing up.

(The carbonara is reason number four billion, thirty two million, three thousand six hundred and ninety-six.)

Just saw Narnia trailer. Blown away. They seem to have it right; they didn't modernise it, set it in America, they have the accents right, they have the kids right, it all looks absolutely perfect. December?

Dublin needs some of these. Although I'd settle for any of the existing coffeeshops opening late.

bluedevi spent some time, years ago, making my original scrawled continental map into a very very pretty map of the Old Lands, the main arena of events in my campaign world. Many things have changed since then, though, and a new map was needed. This arrived in today's post, the oringal artist having spent months on the new version. It is gorgeous. There is nothing to compare to seeing something of your own depicted by someone else, and I've been very lucky in that regard, having inannajones drawing portraits, and bluedevi's cartography and calligraphy.

I'll take a picture of it for you all to see when I can look at it without gloating.

So today has been a day of free stuff, or very cheap, at least. Yesterday, someone phoned me from the company (Carphone Warehouse) where I bought a phone something over two years ago - I've been paying them for insurance ever since, despite never having made any claim on it. They were working with the actual phone company (O2), and offering me an upgrade deal. For €20 and a contract renewal with O2 for a year, I could get a new phone (Nokia 6610i) and a free MP3 player (Leadram 128Mb). And they'd courier it to me in work. So I agreed, and lo, it arrived around four this afternoon, and it was good. The phone is nice - nothing remarkable, except for general outsnazzing my old phone - and the MP3 player has been dubbed Meeces, which some people will understand. It's also a USB drive thingummy, which is good, because I had recently decided I need one.

And then I came home, since the Mortals game had been cancelled, and found a set of new cards from vistaprint.ie waiting for me. They're rather nice, full colour, and have my name and contact details and "dukestreet.org" on them, and will be useful. And they were free, and I only had to pay for shipping.

Hey, mooseloon! I didn't know fiddleheads were edible...

At what point does use of a motif become laziness in the writer?

Right. The wisteria in the back yard has had it; it's just not leafing. At this stage, there are leaves a-plenty on the front door one, and by the middle of summer, it will again be the coming-in-the-window, needs-trimming-every-month monster of last year. The backyard one hasn't even got buds yet. So, I need a creeper to replace it. I'm leaning toward virginia creeper myself, but I think that might be more of a wall than a pergola thing. Vines in the grape sense would be fantastic, but they haven't a hope of growing well outside a greenhouse. Any other recommendations?

We're looking into getting a Knowledge Base in work.

It'll need to be

• able to accept: plain text, html, code and images.
  
• installable with minimal hassle on a Windows server.
  
• accessed via the web - no client software, unless it's the Ajax kind.
  
• searchable.
  

Anything springing to mind? I'm looking at wikis, but none of the major ones seem to run on Windows without perl, python, or the like, which I don't want to get involved in. We do have Cold Fusion.

I could always roll my own, but that takes time...

The number of passwords I have to keep in my head for work is getting huge - at present around 25. The latest occurrence has a very very random username AND password. Anyone got any handy tricks for remembering these damn things that doesn't involve writing them down?

I am very slightly hungover. There is very little food in the house. It's wet and windy out there, and this makes me disinclined to go and do anything about the food. In any case, the garage across the road (nearest normal source of food) is closing down for a couple of days for renovations, and therefore has almost nothing on the shelves. I am also in a state where I want to do some writing, but can't seem to settle to it. Perhaps food would help with that.

I've been playing RPGs for 19 years. The vast majority of that time, I've been behind the screen. I like being behind the screen, and the few times I was in front of it, I didn't really enjoy it all that much. However, eng_monkey is running a game, and I'm playing in it. It's White Wolf's bucket-o-d10s system. We have no idea if it's going to go in the Mage direction, the Werewolf direction, or what - so far there's only a bare hint of the supernatural. And for the first time ever, playing really, really rocks. I'm well impressed.

inannajones is off to Finland for two weeks from today. I am issuing an antisocial warning for the first week of this, because it has been a very long time since I indulged in being a grouchy bastard for any length of time, and every bloke needs to do so on a regular basis. I will be in work the normal hours, but otherwise, if I don't definitely say I will be somewhere else, expect me to be in the study, with the door closed. Email may be answered. Phone calls will only be answered in an emergency. olethros and mirozacat are exempt from having their heads bitten off if they come in, everyone else should beware. Raaar, etc.

Well, I planted carrots and peas. The carrots are now coming up in pairs of thin grass-like leaves, and the peas are pushing up small clumps of leaves. This initial success pleases me, and so I planted some spring onions today, and also buried a Spanish onion that was starting to grow in the veg basket - more to see what happens than anything else. I have tomatoes, not for planting until a little later in the year, some very experimental gourd things, and lettuce, both also for a bit later.

For the peas, I'm wondering what kind of support they'll need. They're growing in pots by a wall, between two posts of the pergola, so I can run waxed string or wire back and forth in bars or a zig-zag pattern - I think that should do. My grandfather used to run parallel strings about a foot apart down a row of poles. They were bright orange when he put them up, and pale pink by autumn - the strings, that is, not the peas.

I also tidied up the jasmine in the corner, and went about training stray shoots back around the pergola post they're supposed to be climbing. The wisteria on the other house-side post is still looking rather miserable, though. We have two wisterias - the one in front of the house, on a north-west facing wall, is very very healthy, and tries to get in through the bedroom windows in summer. The one on the pergola, on a south-west corner, with a pole to climb, is a miserable specimen, which comes into leaf later, loses the leaves earlier, and never really gets all that green. We trimmed it back last year, having read that it's encouraged thus, but it doesn't seem to have done much. I'd blame the limited area of soil it has, but other plants take root in there regularly and thrive.

I like this gardening thing. This really shouldn't surprise me.

My first impressions of the new Doctor Who are over on Duke Street. And I think almost everyone on my friendslist who could watch it did, by the looks of things.

Last week, I was talking to a co-worker on the train, on the way into work, about the D&D games I'm running. She said she'd be interested in playing, and she knew at least one other person who would, so would I see about running a game in work? Nothing to lose, so I sent out a mail to the Dublin office, asking if anyone was interested. Lo and behold, six people are interested.

Still not quite believing it, I show them rulebooks, get them working on character concepts, get the initial dice rolled... and we end up with a gnome sorcerer, a gnome wizard, an elven wizard, and a halfing sorcerer, all completed, even with names (typically the most difficult aspect for newcomers) and two elven rangers (I think) to be generated on Monday. First game on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.

And there's a fair bit of individual interest; it's not just a going with the crowd thing. There are enquiries about names, the part of the world they'll be starting in, cultures, areas of origin for characters, and I even have a complete description of clothing for one character. It's pretty damn cool, and I'm looking forward to running the game.

I am very suspisciously awake this morning. My eyes opened at 06:30, and there was just no way I was going back to sleep. So I did some role-reversal stuff, and woke the cat. Now I'm breakfasted, she's breakfasted, I've read email, LJ, news... There's no point in leaving the house before 07:30, so I'm actually left wondering what to do. This never happens.

( What labels have you in gmail? )

I'll be interested to see if the list grows, or shrinks, or what. And yes, I am that organised about email. I pretty much have to be.

Right. I'm working up to doing some serious promotion on dukestreet.org - it's been around long enough for the search engines to pick up. What I'd like are links. Particularly links from sites that are not LJ. So if you run another blog, a newsletter, a review site, or what-have-you, I'd very much appreciate a link to dukestreet from it - where it's on-topic, of course. Don't feel compelled to add a link to it from your site about breeding angel fish, or the like.

However, I recognise that in the attention economy of the web, links are valuable. So if you'll link to my site, I'll write an article for it on a topic of your choice (within the topics covered by the site, of course) and link to yours in that, using any keywords you feel would be useful, and so on. If you add a link, and want an article, please comment below.

(While I'm doing dukestreet for fun, it's also part of an onging experiment to see how well a site can do by natural networking - I'm not doing anything to add it to search engines, not am I buying advertsing anywhere.)

There are a few political things I sort-of want to post about. But mainly what it comes down to is pointing at Bush, and asking, "Will someone explain to that idiot, again, about the separation of church and state?" When there's an international conference, and the US position is agreed on by one single other representative, and that's the Vatican, is this not a clear signal that there is something seriously wrong? While I disagree with many things that Bush is pushing (or that other elements of his administration are pushing), it's his extension into international politics of his own personal insistence on abstinence over contraception that I find to be most reprehensible.

Big Easy Players: Thursday 10th is the next game. I know I mentioned Thursday 3rd, but there's a concert on that day that inannajones and I are going to.

Hey, actual advance warning!

This is being a good week. Work is running smoothly. It's nice and cold. Practice last night was excellent. And there's a light dusting of snow this morning, with a more than fair chance of more over today and tomorrow. More falling as I write, mixed with hail...

Tonight is going to be a devoted DAoC night. mr_wombat, bastun_ie, ye going to be about?

Ghostweather Survey - in which I got to express my opinion of the "What colour of handbasket are you?" things. Tell them I sent you. Prizes, too.