Posts tagged with keywords "Books"
I love it when I receive books in the mail. I have an Amazon Wish list setup so that people who use TDO Mini Forms can show their appreciation and send me a book. So a book shaped parcel in the post doesn’t surprise me. I fill up with a sense of glee and excitement about what someone send me (the last time it was this excellent Dinosaur popup book). So when I found the parcel in the doorway as I got home, I wasn’t surprised.
It was only later, when I realised it wasn’t from Amazon, I got a bit perplexed. The package was from Leisure Games who sell roleplaying games. I had to take a moment, because I was quite proud of myself that I had not used my credit card in months and had cleared any debt left on it. For a moment I got a little worried, did someone go a little bit further than just my Amazon Wish List? I opened it and it was a copy of Noumenon, a game I was planning to get. A roleplaying game about some really weird, Philip K. Dick kind of stuff. For a brief moment it was quite disconcerting. But once I saw the receipt I realised that it was part of an order I had made last year, and were only now sending me a copy.
Certainly it was a fitting way to start Noumenon. I really like it. A strange game where players play Sarcophagi, humanoid-insects that were once human but no longer remember who they were. They wake up in the Silhouette Rouge, guided by the voice of Logos (the voice of the Universe). The Silhouette Rouge is a house with a fixed number of rooms. Some of the rooms are described by a short story, a little abstract and strange. Some are precise. I found myself swallowing this surreal metaphorical setting with joy. However it’s not a book I’d let my young daughter flick through: insects, blood, monsters and metaphors do not, a batgirl, make.
The system is elegant and, from my reading, appears delightful. I love when games keep in theme and break from the traditional approach. Instead of dice, you use dominoes, which have their own mythos about them. I love how they are used encourages the player group to work together.
It’s not specifically horror, a genre I like but am not enthused by. I can’t picture long-term stories and games based on horror themes. Great for short once-off, creepy stuff. Noumenon has horror, but it’s not specifically about horror except as a mechanism for change. I keep thinking of Don’t Rest Your Head, which is explicitly a horror game but one also set in a mad abstract world. Don’t Rest Your Head drives the players and their characters into madness. Noumenon allows the characters to explore and journey through the horrors like a dream that flows from nightmare to dream to eventual waking. A difference of taste.
My only problem really is I don’t think I could get my group to play it. They’d just look at me, with those, “you’re not serious are you?” faces. But then sometimes they surprise me. And surprises are good, like mysterious books in the post.
With the few indie games that have entered my bookshelf I noticed that there is a scale of player’s narrative power versus GM’s power. Power is probably not the right word, influence? At one end you have something like Universalis that gives all the players GM powers by removing the GM. Then you have something like Shadow of Yesterday gives quite a lot of power to the players to control when and how they enter conflict (conflict resolution) and how their character is pulled along (keys). Then Spirit of the Century where players can “tag” narrative details that they may think are in a scene or story. At the other end of the scale you have the traditional RPGs like White Wolf and D&D.
The belief it would seem is that the more narrative power a player has, the better the game or experience is because the player has more ability to control and determine that. I think thats not completely true. They offer different experiences along the scale certainly. I don’t believe any is lesser than the other and people will be certainly draw to certain points in that scale.
Of course I am speaking a little through my arse as I haven’t played SotC or SoY yet. Planning to but that really doesn’t count. Thankfully I have played Universalis a few times and it is definitely one of my favourite games. But I’d put myself preferring the opposite end of the scale. (Universalis works for me because it’s explicit in it’s power-sharing, you go in with no pre-conceptions about who controls what.)
Part of it this is that, as a player and GM, I prefer long-running games over one-shots or single-adventure games. Universalis works brilliant in a single session however my group has never really got into the idea of running Universalis over several sessions. Don’t get me wrong, you can do it with all games. Yet I think games that give more narrative power to the players give more punch in the short term than games that work better in the long term.
Maybe that’s not complete fair. In economics: all variables in the long term are flexible. Games at the restrictive end of the scale are just as flexible in terms of who has narrative power as games on the other end of the scale, if you talk about the long term. For me it’s about what being GM means. For me as a player and a GM, being GM means giving the players a good experience. Take the narrative powers away from the GM, the GM can no longer guarantee a good experience for the players, the players have to do it more themselves. Thinking about this in the short and long games, if you have a short game and you want everything up and running quickly without much input, then you should probably let the players do it for you. Let them grab what interests them and run with it. In the long term, as a GM you have more freedom. You can present a world to them and you can setup and guide the players as part of that world and see what takes hold over time with them. An engaging long-term story must be evolved from the fusion of players and GM, I think while a short-term game can be just lighting the fuse of the players and watching it explode.
Or perhaps it doesn’t matter and I’m simply getting older and preferring the way “things were done in my day”.
Does anyone else have difficulty separating the author from the book?
I prefer to know little or nothing about the author of a book before I start reading it. This equally applies to roleplaying books and it’s a roleplaying book that I’m having difficulty at the moment separating the creator (and his/her actions/opinions) from the writing. I don’t have a problem with dead authors. Once they are dead, everything about them is becomes simply “context” (historical).
The FudgeList has awoken and it got a bit heated there for a little bit. But I saw a comment from a writer on a blog about when the whole “Fudge is dead” debacle started. He hadn’t gotten involved in the list or this particular argument and had no idea what he was talking about yet he said something nasty about the Fudge community. It was only one line. However, all I could think was “asshole!” It’s a pity, because I would have bought one of his forthcoming books, now I won’t. I’ll probably never look at his work. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, but that opinion has tainted my perception of his him and his work. If I pick up a book of his, I’ll remember the comment. I could get over it and let it drop, but the problem is that it creates a barrier to overcome and therefore it makes reading one of his books effort. Why should I bother reading a book if it’s just going to be work instead of enjoyment?
I think Fred Hicks was right when he talked about prompting RPGs and always being positive. A single negative can lose you a customer and then the power of the internet is that if you hit the wrong person, it can have a much bigger impact then just one dropped potential sale.
It’s another reason why I find it hard to objectively read the work of friends. I see my friend’s personality in the work and it, well, becomes hard to separate my opinion of my friend from my opinion of his writing. It becomes especially difficulty if the writing is in a field of shared interest like roleplaying, because more than likely we’d have argued and discussed RPG design issues and I’ll see that shining through their work.
Which is perhaps why it’s a good idea for me to keep some distance from many of the RPG design forums like RPG.net, theForge and story-games. My perspective of people’s work will become tainted by my opinion of the them, not their work. (TBH I think it’s more than likely that I have a tendency to shy away from very large online communities), I guess also perhaps that’s why I’m quite closed about my writing and my ideas. Afraid they’ll judge me rather than the work itself.
Anyone else feel the same about books?
Among them three Fudge books!
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One feature… that is all that is missing from Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The ability to bookmark the position you last stopped reading. It’s simple really, it doesn’t even have to modify the file. If I’m going to use a big PDF book for gaming, I’d really like the ability to bookmark several pages for quick reference and also the ability to add notes. I think you might be able to do that on some PDFs if they give you permission.
There is simply something cool about having a hobby that requires you to use tools and to take care of those tools. I know roleplaying has ten-side dice and big fancy cool books, but it’s just not the same. I understand now how fishing can be enjoyable without actually catching anything. I found myself getting all “geeked-out” while lining up my drawing pencils and sharpening them just right; the point has to be sharp, but a long bit of the lead has to be exposed too. (Pictures and more after the jump) .
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I like my hardback and softback book. I like having a physical library of roleplaying books. But I just got paid and I want to buy a number of indie RPGs. I can’t get them all from the one website and in fact two of them are only avaliable in PDF. So I started to consider which ones I’d take as PDF… and ending up considering buying them all as PDF.
So what are people’s opinions of buying and reading PDFs as opposed to printed copies of books?
Personally, I’ve started to get used to reading long articles online, but I’m still turned off by reading whole novels and books… and I’ll never use a laptop in bed before I sleep either.
My mother-in-law works for a publisher in France, kid’s books mostly. She gets piles of free books for kids. During Christmas, Alice my daughter, was playing with the pile of books and came across a book entitled “De la petite taupe qui voulait savoir qui lui avait fait sur la tete”. She loved it.
The book is about a mole who happens to have someone poo on his head! He then goes asks each animal did they poo on his head and compares their poo with the poo on his head. When he finds out who did it, he has his little revenge.
Here’s a scan of when he questions a goat:
Brilliant. I think it’s originally German. I have found an English translation on Amazon.co.uk called “The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business”. I love these subversive children’s books. Alice gets a great kick out of it saying “Hey Goat!! Did you poo on my head?!?” “No, it wasn’t me!“. And then she pretends to take the poo of the page and plonk it on my head!
Little Update #1: I just noticed on the Amazon page for the book that it links to “The Gas We Pass: the Story of Farts”. Excellent!
Little Update #2: megglesmcgoo points out that:
Alice mentions that book in The vicar of Dibley
Over the holidays, I read a weak fantasy book called Prospero’s Children (by Jan Siegel published in 2000). It was one of the many second hand books I picked up before I left. It isn’t very good, well at least I didn’t think so. But the world and mythos it created screamed parallels with Mage the Awakening RPG (also see here, a previous post about it). In the book, there are the “Gifted”, mortals have inherited the gift from ancestors in Atlantis. Atlantis itself is the origin of all these gifted beings. They even use Atlantean language to cast magic.
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Before I went on holidays there were a number of posts about books and what to read. People seem to go after favourite authors or series. I don’t. I don’t like or take friends’ recommendations either. It’s the only reason I haven’t read Harry Potter yet. I don’t know why but when I pick up a book highly recommended by a friend, I find fault with it. I’m always disappointed. I seem to prefer to discover books by myself. I guess it’s about my expectations. Picking up a book where I only have the blurb and the front cover doesn’t set me up for a big fall.
Which is why, when I do a “book run”, I head out to second hand store shops and buy ten or twenty books in one go. If one sucks, I have another ten to go. I might base my choice on what the book claims to be about or I recognise the writer’s name. I guess I could go to a library but I do like to own books I like, even though I rarely (if ever these days) re-read a book.
Also buying second-hand prevents me going off an author. I know it sounds strange but if I buy a new book from an author I have thus far liked but the book is crap, it’ll turn me off that author (not completely but I’d be more inclined to look for something more “interesting” than their latest release, given a choice). However, if I pick up a second-hand copy and the book is crap, it doesn’t put me off the author. I’m much more forgiving. Anyway, I didn’t pay that much for them.
Though I do occasionally buy non-fiction books, these are nearly always based on reviews and recommendations (or based purely on the topic itself like “Access All Areas” about Urban Exploration).
Is there anyone else out there that has similar peculiar book habits?
