Four Fox Ache: Common Player Problems

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Four Fox Ache: Common Player Problems: "I mentioned in my previous post that choosing the right players for a roleplaying game can be a real challenge. But even after you've found ..."

Musings of a Happy Game Master

It is a happy moment when the players in your role playing universe transcend the statistics on their character sheets and start actually playing the personality of their characters. And there is a greater satisfaction to the GM when the same players elevate to thinking, acting, and reacting as their characters would. Meta-gaming is so simple to do, that a GM often finds it hard to police with any consistency without detracting from the easy flow of dialogs that make up a good gaming session. The best GM's in my opinion should spend about 10% of the time as rules arbiters and the rest as storytellers. It's not an easy feat.
 But once the GM sees players embracing the roles they have chosen to play, there is a sense of success. The story has gone from a passive one-way storytelling event to an active collaborative experience.
 These experiences are highlighted by moments when gamers prove their commitment to character even over the safer route - when a meta-gaming solution stares them right in the face and says, "hey, this would really be a simpler route for everyone..." and the players choose to act their roles despite the consequences.

 Moments like this are probably rarer in gaming than they should be, but when they happen, I for one feel a sense of accomplishment, not only for myself, as a creator of a world that people feel comfortable in, but for the gaming community as a whole.

Many people play in games where the content is almost exclusively geared toward the players rather than the roles they are supposed to play, and for me, it seems a betrayal to the name of "role playing" to even consider those people in the same category.

I have to give serious kudos to my players for giving me moments of pause, and for their ability to take total strangers on a piece of paper and turn them into memorable characters in a grand work of shared fantasy.

Thanks for moments like this. It really makes all the time you don't see me putting into campaign material (some of which you will never see, or skirt through in moments) well worth it.

A Great Gamer Article

All new GM's or those considering becoming one should check out this very insightful article!

Top 5 Basic Things Scientists STILL Don't Understand - Part One

He may be a badass, but he's no scientist.

If Stargate SG-1 is any indication, scientists are half Indiana Jones, half Wizard, and half Einstein. It almost seems unfair to use 150 percent to try and encompass the awesomeness of these butt-kicking, reality-twisting human calculators with the ability to create stable wormholes and force fields with little more than a toaster oven and an alien corkscrew. They are like epic typhoons of awesome that can do anything they want, when they want (and that means YES, they could do it yesterday) and understand everything important there is to know in the same way we can find our way around the mall after we’ve been there a few dozen times. 

 But wait, you might say. It’s not fair to compare the real deal scientists with the hyperbolic sci-fi depiction of scientists. Certainly “real” scientists aren’t drawn in such a fashion. And then you see reruns of Steve Irwin cramming his fist into a crocodile’s love canal, the Mythbusters guys making jet packs and car catapults out of scraps, and Bill Nye explaining concepts that had you scratching your head in high school with such simplicity that even Fox or MSNBC viewers could understand without captions. And then you think, ok, they aren’t walking supercomputers with nerdy glasses, but they are pretty amazing folks anyways.

So, we begrudgingly ignore the lessons of SyFy programming and admit that scientists may not be superheroes, but surely, we think, they have this “science” thing down pat. With all the real world banter about string theory and quantum physics and they’ve figured out the basics out to at least a billion decimal places, and understand the concepts of life, the universe, and everything to a degree that they can make an intelligent conversation about any science topic, right?

Well, unfortunately, that’s not quite the case. In fact, some of things they are ignorant about make you wonder how we got past rocks and twigs and moved on to video games and personal computers. In the next few sections we will look over some of those areas where scientists are truly as clueless as you are.

5. Gravity

Gravity is something you learned about before you could even speak. The first time you went to grab that shiny toy and fell on your bottom, your howls of pain reminded the world that the force is not always with you.

 You’d think with something like the Law of Gravity being bandied about, that we had that whole gravity debate figured once and for all. The truth is that using the Law of Gravity to understand gravity is like using the speed laws in your local community to understand how a car works.

 Scientists have been pondering gravity since the days of Plato and all those other Greek hippies who had nothing better to do with their days than contemplate the universe and what lay under the skirt of their latest boy assistant. Yet in the same era when they figured out atomic freaking theory, they had little more to say about gravity than “it sucks.”

It was several hundred years later before people got the idea to actually figure out to do experiments about gravity, and even then, it was just a bunch of science geeks like Galileo playing with their balls in a tall slanted shaft big stone erection famous building called “The Tower of Pisa”.

 It was around a hundred years later that someone came up with the ground breaking idea to actually try and measure how gravity worked. Bear in mind that math had been in vogue for a few thousand years at this point, so you have to wonder why the scientific community had made an oversight that was akin to not noticing you are on fire. So surely, it didn’t take a genius to try and measure something that people have been aware of since people have been aware of being aware, right?

Did not invent gravity.

 Turns out that our “unremarkable” scientist with a number fetish was a genius… a brainy dude named Newton, and no, he didn’t invent those fig-filled cookies your grandmother serves as dessert, but instead, he invented calculus, because apparently 2000 years of numbers wasn’t enough numbers to put actual numbers on gravity. He described the first serious model of gravity and probably went on to design the cover for Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album, because why the heck not.

His model of gravity went unchallenged for almost three hundred years, because apparently fact checking is one of those things that the science community procrastinates about. Just be thankful we didn’t need fact-checking for creation of the internet or we’d still be using the telegraph to send porn and cat jokes to our friends.

You’d think that with three centuries to improve on math that it wouldn’t take a genius to put together a formula to accurately model gravity. We had gone from oxcarts to automobiles, surely a run of the mill number cruncher could figure out gravity.

That run-of-the-mill simpleton was an ex-patent clerk named Albert Effing Einstein.

Yes, it took the greatest mind of this era, Einstein to get even close. It’s like finding out that Iron Chef Morimoto invented the grilled cheese sandwich.

Einstein’s once-in-a-generation capability for number crunching came up with a set of formulas so complex that only six people in the world at the time understood them. Fortunately, his equations not only described the motions of our planets, but established a theory that was the definitive work - absolutely right and unquestionable, until just about every scientist currently in existence agreed that he got it (almost) totally wrong.

Most Many Some number of modern scientists now are absolutely certain somewhat sure shrugging and hoping that string theory (or more accurately, M-theory) is the right way once and for all (wink-wink) to describe what gravity really is, at least until the next big thing comes along.

Of course, even if we could believe that M-theory is the end of the road, the math used to prove it makes Einstein’s equations seem like the wall fodder in a slow preschool math class. So it is unlikely that aside from supercomputers that anyone will be fact checking the math in string theory within the next few centuries.

Oh, and on top of that, string theory is incomplete. It may be impossible to ever complete, assuming that it is going in the right direction. And amazingly, even if it is, string theory doesn’t describe gravity with any more certainty than your grandpa could describe Justin Bieber.

So as far as gravity goes, scientists are still grasping at strings - but it in the final measure, their efforts are still just theory after all.  

How to Make the Most of Your Anime Convention Experience

Aside from a few unfortunate changes by the editor, this is a good article for those considering going to an anime or comic book convention.  You should def. check it out!

Snowpoke Adventures!

Can you believe it? Snow in Texas?

If this isn't the geekiest/coolest snow-creation ever?!?



Enjoy the geeky splendor!

Minecraft - Worth a second look

If you are like me, the first time you saw Minecraft, the first thing you thought was, what the fuuuu....?
It's no surprise, given that the game makes Paper Mario look like Fallout 3 by comparison.

I downloaded it on the advice of a friend, and was almost ready to give him a serious tongue lashing. The "game" made no sense at all. I had nothing in my inventory, and I was wandering around in a landscape that looked like some cubist painter's nightmare gone wrong.

I gave up on it totally, and it was literally months later that a different friend told me about this awesome game he was playing where he chopped down trees with his bare fists like Chuck Norris and built a castle from stones he pilfered from a mountain he tore down to ground level.
I had to know, and NOW, what awesome game would allow you to do such epic acts of epicness.
I was absolutely floored when he said "Minecraft, where have you been, under a rock?"

Apparently, I had, because I didn't realize that the game I had dismissed only a few months before had become an internet sensation, and was one of the coolest things since sliced awesome on toast.

I dashed to my computer and started loading the amazingly small program. At his instructions, I hammered a few trees down with my fists, broke them into lumber, built a workbench, and started making tools that would quickly start me down the road to conquering my own blocky universe... well, that was until night fell.
He instructed me to tunnel a hidey-hole into the mountainside and with the dim light of a torch just outside my meager structure, I waited as hordes of zombies, skeletons, and weird lumpy aliens wandered around, looking for me!

Fast forward to a few weeks later and I was a Minecraft junkie. I had gone places and done things that my friends were scarcely aware you could do, like build transparent towers of glass and create elegant waterfall elevators that reached above the clouds. Additionally, I had figured out how to mod textures and the resolution of the game textures. Not satisfied with the amazing texture packs out there, I had to make my own, and had become a bit obsessive over making the textures look as real as I could.

In retrospect, I have to say that Minecraft is one of the most amazing games I have ever played, though I am not sure that "game" is quite an appropriate moniker for it.  I think "creativity engine" is probably more appropriate.  I find myself reminded of many happy childhood hours of time traveling adventures with Lego blocks, and the inner kid in me delights. However, Minecraft is hardly just a bunch of digital building blocks, it is a universe of unexplored possibilities!  And unlike the tedious dungeon grinds of World of Warcraft, Minecraft's unscripted world, simple as it is, truly engages me.