Neuromancer, by William Gibson, copyright 1984; Books on Tape,
1994. Read by Arthur Addison. It's been several years since I've re-
read Neuromancer, but I was surprised by how much impact listening
to it for the first time had: I think it recaptured a lot of the
newness of the experience of reading it for the first time.
Neuromancer is often credited as launching the cyberpunk genre;
although there were earlier books with similar themes Neuromancer
seems to have been the first to make a big impact on SF-reading
public. Books with a significant computer component often age
ungracefully, and there are a very few places in this book where I
wince a little, but on the whole it stands up well. Well worth reading
and re-reading.
An Unpardonable Crime, by Andrew Taylor, copyright 2004; Theia
Books, an imprint of Hyperion Books, 2004. This intriguing historical
crime novel includes a young Edgar Allan Poe in a supporting role and
a number of other, if less historical, interesting characters. Very
good. Taylor has a number of other books that I will now seek out.
The Towers of the Sunset, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr; Tor, 1993. This is,
I think, the second of Modesitt's Recluce in order of publication,
though not by the series' internal chronology. It tells of the
founding of Recluce, and contains some more interesting looks at the
magic of Recluce. Enjoyable non-psuedo-Medieval fantasy.
Hide & Seek, by Ian Rankin, copyright 1990; Otto Penzler
Books, 1994. I started reading the Rebus books later in the
series; it's interesting to see Rebus in the middle of his
career. Enjoyable Scottish police mystery.
The Intergral Trees, by Larry Niven; Del Rey/Ballantine, 1984.
World of Ptavvs, by Larry Niven; Del Rey/Ballantine, 1966.
I've been on a Niven kick lately, instigated by listening to The
Ringworld Throne a year or so ago (apparently prior to my
establishing this weblog) in a Books-on-Tape edition. One of my local
libraries has a few of his books on audio tape, and I've been working
my way through them, and through the libraries copies of his books and
through my copies when they turn up in random places in my pile of
boxes of books. So far, I've been pleased by how well they all re-
read.
Are Most Roleplaying Gamers Isolated?
On roleplaying forums on the Internet (such as rpg.net) there is an illusion that roleplaying
gamers are part of a community or collection of communities, with a
shared background and history. I'm not convinced that this is true for
the vast majority of roleplaying gamers. In fact, I suspect that the
vast majorigy of roleplaying gamers play with one group of friends or
a small number of groups and have little or no connection to other
roleplayers, and that people who read roleplaying magazines, go to
roleplaying conventions, or follow roleplaying forums on the internet
are a small minority. I wish I had some evidence about this one way or
another, but I suspect that gathering the data would be beyond the
abilities or will of almost everybody in the roleplaying game hobby.
There's a very interesting interview with Gary Gygax in issues nine and ten of OD&DITIES, a zine about Original D&D, with a
lot of details about the internals of TSR during Gygax's tenure that
make for fascinating reading for anyone interested in the corporate
history of the makers of D&D. I think it's a wonderful example of how
corporate America goes wrong.
Early GURPS vs. Later GURPS
Gurpsian, posting
at rpg.net, said that GURPS
Swashbucklers
(here actually refering to the original edition) defined GURPS for him
when it was originally released [1] and that GURPS Vehicles defined for him the
different road GURPS took in the later 1990s. I think that's an
insightful observation. I've travelled a way down the road that GURPS
Vehicles took and, although I admire it and CORPS VDS and others of
their ilk, I've decide that at this point in my life I don't have any
great interest in going any further along that road: if I want to
design vehicles for a game the crunchiest I'll get is BESM, and Fudge,
Risus, or Story Engine would probably do nicely for most things.
D&D Dislike
I went through a long period where I disliked D&D intensely; I think
this is a fairly common reaction. Why does it happen? I think it is
because “System Does Matter”: D&D imparts a particular tone or flavor to
a game that uses it, a flavor which some find unsatisfactory, and
those dissatisfied may over-react and reject the game entirely. For
instance, in my case I was irritated firstly by the artificial
distinction in AD&D between player characters and the other residents
of the shared imaginary world, a distinction rooted in the different
mechanical approaches to the two types of characters (PCs on the one
hand and monsters and NPCs and later zero-level humans on the other),
and secondly by coarse quantification of beings into classes and
levels, both things which I think tend to restrict the range of
actions and reactions that PCs take with regard to NPCs, forcing them
into an unsatisfactory subset of possibilites by the artifacts of the
D&D game mechanics. I entirely abandoned D&D (and Tunnels & Trolls as
well) for a long time. This was probably an over-reaction, but it did
prompt me to explore the alternatives, which was all to the good.
Eventually I got a grip and got over my D&D dislike. I've played (and
enjoyed) D&Dsince; many
of the things I disliked about D&D have been fixed in the most recent
versions, in an admirable example of applied RPG engineering, but
enough remain that I still prefer other games.
However, there is a valuable lesson in this: D&D, as market leader in
this field, makes a set of assumptions that are implicitly accepted
without any discussion, and in fact the vast majority of people
playing D&D lack any vocabulary for analyzing and discussing those
assumptions because D&D itself has no use for that vocabulary. Only
those dissatisfied with those assumptions find that they need that
vocabulary, and then they have to look outside D&D to find it. Due to
the insular nature of the
roleplaying hobby it may be that many of those dissatisfied players
never find an that vocabulary and the alternatives and end up dropping
out of the hobby. After all, how frustraing must it be to be
dissatisfied with something and not even have a useful vocabulary to
express that dissatisfaction?
It is for this reason that I think that the vocabulary and discussion that
rec.games.frp.advocacy produced in
its heyday and which the The Forge
has produced more recently is invaluable: the people involved in those
forums have taken the time to distill many of the most important terms
and ideas from a vast but largely ephemeral body of folklore and
present them in a lasting and organized fashion. Regardless of whether
individual elements such as r.g.f.a's “Three-fold Model” or the
Forge's “GNS” are useful, the terminology they've developed to
talk about these things is invaluable: it lets you figure out what you
want from roleplaying games.
The Ringworld Engineers, by Larry Niven; copyright 1980 by Larry
Niven; Books On Tape, 1998. Read by Connor O'Brien. Great fun to work
through this story again.
Mark Arsenault, president of Gold Rush Games, had some unhappy
observations on the health of the RPG industry in his post Changes in
the Air: A GRG Update for our Fans on the Gold Rush Games forums on
May 5th. One item in particular was the small sales size:
[T]he general consensus is that sales are down across the board (with
new product sales in the 200-800 unit range; very low compared to just
2 years ago)...
The market leaders, of course, are selling in larger quantities, but
even if these sales figures are only common among the second tier
companies it's still ominous. Why have sales declined like this? Ron
Edwards has argued in the
past that this is due to the myth that a successful game must be an
large rulebook supported by an ongoing stream of extensive support
materials. Others have suggested that part of the problem is the
supplement treadmill.
Sharpe's Escape, by Bernard Cornwell; HarperCollins, USA, 2004.
This volume of Sharpe's adventures takes place during the Bussaco
campaign in Portugal in 1810, starting at Bussaco, visiting Coimbra,
and ending along the Lines of Torres Vedras, near the Tagus River.
While it maintains the formula (another incompetent British officer
to plague Sharpe, another vicious enemy, another woman) the main
characters remain engaging and the historical background
fascinating. I enjoyed the homage to C.S. Forester. Overall, it was
another good episode in the Sharpe saga.
About
Lacking Natural Simplicity is one, not particularly flattering,
definition of sophisticated.
This blog chronicles my journey through our at times too complicated
and sophisticated world.
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