On the tail end of my Thanksgiving vacation, I decided I was going to make new tabs for my Android Netrunner game. For this tab setup, I wanted to divide the cards out by faction, but also by card type so that I could easy find cards that I was interested in. Continue reading New Netrunner Tabs
All posts by The Plaid Mentat
Metagaming in Role-Playing Games
The guys over at Gamerstable recently did an episode on Metagaming. To give a bit of an introduction, my definition of metagaming is: Using player knowledge to guide character action. For example, as a player, I know the enemy that my character is fighting is a werewolf (even though my character has never seen or heard of one) and I know that werewolves are weak to silver (even though my character doesn’t know this), and so my character attacks his enemy with a silver weapon. This is metagaming, and, in particular, it’s using player knowledge to gain an advantage that a character wouldn’t have.
The gamerstable crew was pretty critical of metagaming, and, I’ll admit, there are lots of ways that metagaming can be bad for a role-playing game. However, in my experience as a GM, I have found that metagaming can be a much more positive force on the game, so I want to talk about it a bit more here. Continue reading Metagaming in Role-Playing Games
Hacking My Blog
Starting on Black Friday and going solid through Cyber Monday (after which it slowed only a little), my blog has been getting hit by a distributed brute-force password attack. All weekend, I would get pings that WordPress had blocked yet another IP address, and I couldn’t help but be of two minds. On the one hand, I had to laugh a little – over two hundred IP addresses had been blocked, and I don’t believe they would be able to brute force a 150 bit password with four guesses each. On the other hand, it’s not the IP addresses that are blocked that you have to worry about; it’s the ones that weren’t and succeeded, or, worse, exploited some other vulnerability. Was the brute force password attempts just a distraction?
This gives rise to the question, “are my security measures enough?” Since I was thinking about them anyway, I went ahead and took the time to upgrade a few things that were lacking, and took a hard look at some of the other things I could do. Continue reading Hacking My Blog
Landlocked Lighthouse
I recently finished reading Landlocked Lighthouse, the recent thriller by Mixi J. Applebottom. Mixi and I have been friends for quite a while, so this one was pretty high on my reading list; when she was offering a free copy for signing up on her newsletter, just as I finished The Martian, it became a no-brainer.
One of my favorite types of horror is what I have described to my friends as “house horror”. As an introvert, my home is where I go to recharge and relax, as a result, stories about people feeling uncomfortable in their homes strikes a particular chord in me that really hits me (House of Leaves comes to mind, and if you remember that I also like epistolary, it was a double-whammy of amazingness). As a result, I love this kind of horror, and while I feel that Landlocked Lighthouse was more thriller and less horror, I still quite enjoyed it. Continue reading Landlocked Lighthouse
Quantum Voyage
Occasionally, Jessa and I find ourselves at our local Wal-Mart browsing their DVD shelves for something to watch. More often than not, we end up looking for something that fits our tastes (sci-fi or fantasy), but looks low budget and like it could be so terrible it’s good (or at least fun to watch). On past excursions, we’ve picked up Red (not to be confused with the big-budget action movie), Hansel and Grettel: Witch Hunters, and Jack the Giant Slayer. A few weeks ago, we picked up Quantum Voyage. The decision to buy this movie began with the fact that it had no Rotten Tomatoes entry… …And then it didn’t have an IMDB entry either… The final kicker was the “Wal-Mart exclusive” sticker – this movie had to be low budget enough for us to enjoy, especially with Dean Cain and Malcolm McDowell in it. Continue reading Quantum Voyage
The Big Game
Every year, those of us in the family who play Warhammer 40k get together at my Uncle’s Upholstery Shop in Austin, Colorado and play the big game. The goal is two-fold: to get together and spend some family time together, and to pull out all the stops and play Warhammer 40k, all day, with as many models as we want. In previous editions, this was called Apocalypse, for us, it’s the Thanksgiving Apocalypse. Continue reading The Big Game
Warhammer 40k is Basically Football, Part 3
The Game
Warhammer 40k and Football share the most similarity in their execution of the game. I think this is likely due to the fact that they are both attempting to simulate certain aspects of war itself. One similarity is that they both capture the tactical aspect – making a series of short-scoped decisions that get your closer to your goal while keeping your opponent away from theirs. Continue reading Warhammer 40k is Basically Football, Part 3
Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 2
The Community
Just as football is built on its community, so too is Warhammer 40k. In both cases, fans of both games spend at least as much time talking about the game as they do watching or playing it. The reason for this is that they both contain aspects that make great conversation: shared context, lore, and drama.
Shared Context
Shared context is what gives any two football fans in the U.S. the ability to talk about football with each other. There is a shared jargon, knowledge of how the game works, and familiarity with various teams. Each of these things allows a much simpler communication between fans and makes for better storytelling; if you’ve ever seen a football fan try to explain an awe-inspiring moment in a game to someone who doesn’t know the teams or the rules, you know what I mean. The same is true of Warhammer – a story about a unit failing their morale check on a critical turn is just as exciting to someone who plays Warhammer 40k as an interception in the last quarter of a football game is to someone who watches football. Continue reading Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 2
Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 1
Quite often, I end up explaining my hobbies to my friends and coworkers (though not often to my family, since they’re a lot of who I play with). Warhammer 40k and other miniature wargames I think are the hardest to explain since the hobby is so broad. It’s not just playing a game with miniature figures (which is actually a fraction of the time I spend with the hobby), so I’ve often tried to explain it more holistically. Ian and I hit on an explanation recently that I found entertaining – Warhammer 40k is basically football.
The Team
In football, you have your home team, or, more precisely, the team that you like to rout for. There are lots of things to distinguish a team: what city they herald from, their team colors, the temperament and fame of certain players or managers, their wins and losses each season, and their rivals. In Warhammer 40k, there are just as many things that may make up an army. For instance, an army us usually chosen from a faction, which can be loosely correlated to where the army heralds from, and describes what kind of alien they are. It sometimes, but not always, also comes with recommendations for what the team colors are. Continue reading Warhammer 40k Is Basically Football, Part 1
Michael Jackson – Smooth Criminal
I unabashedly love this video. Some may find it overly cheesy, but I find the choreography simply stunning, and the whole scene tells so many stories…