I could list other games, but then you would pick them apart for one reason or another. The point is that not every game will be a perfect match for every player. But oddly enough, people think that AD&D is the exception that doesn't have to follow the rule of pleasing everyone. My game has to be perfect, but your game doesn't. Screw that!
It's like Linux. No matter what example Linux distro I suggest, you'll find something imperfect about it to cause you to recommend Windows instead.
But I'll list some games anyway. Maybe I'm just a masochist.
My current game is Harnmaster (third edition). The rules are very simple, but well geared towards "gritty" fantasy campaigns. It works well for the world of Harn, as well as Middle Earth, but not so hot for high fantasy heroic campaigns.
Before that was Rolemaster. Otherwise known as Rollmonster. It's biggest flaw is the mass of charats and tables. But having actually run Rollmaster for ten years, the reputation surpasses the reality. But if it still scares you, try HARP, which is essentially Rolemaster without the charts. MERP (Middle Earth Roleplaying) is Rolemaster "lite", fully compatible with RM but much more accessible.
If you want simple easy rules that won't get in the way, check out Fudge (or Fate which is derived from it). Or if you want something grittier and more "simulationist", try GURPS or HERO. Also good are any of the (originally) Chaosium games: Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and Runequest.
AD&D is still good for the mindless dungeon crawl by a party of minmaxed munchkins. But if you want to go overboard in that area, check out Hackmaster. I personally dislike the game, but it's the epitome old school hack-n-slash.
A game I would NOT recommend is the current Decipher's Lord of the Rings. Despite its slick production, it's unfinished, full of errors, and horribly unbalanced. If you want to play in Middle Earth, stick to MERP (rolemaster-lite), HarnMaster or Runequest.
The rules are simple even with the tables. That's the point. "Roll the dice and look it up" is easy to do. The actual game may get bogged down with chart fumbling, but the mechanics themselves are simple.
Having studied economics a wee bit, the portrayal of economics in simulations games has always bugged me. Whether it's SimCity or Civilization, the economics are grossly wrong.
To be fair, modelling a somewhat accurate economic system in a game would take way too much processing power for the purposes of a game. You need to simplify stuff. But in most cases the simplification is towards a single actor model. Which is so completely wrong it's ludicrous.
The prime effect of this is the assumption that a autocratic government (e.i. the player) can completely and successfully control all aspects of an economy. Hah! In real life government is always a hindrance and impediment to the economy, because the government interfers in the most basic economic units: the voluntary and spontaneous transactions between individuals. These games can't even distribute resources without the autocrat's (your) help!
To be fair (again), a military game with a reasonable economic model would be bloody boring. All the player would be able to do would be to issue policies and hope that people paid attention.
What I think would be an interesting game would be to have the economy happen "underneath" the player's control. The actual economics happens despite the player, with national prosperity (and government revenues) dependent upon how well you manage to keep your hands out of the works. You don't get to set up trade rates or dictate production or any other hands-on economic activities that most games give you. Instead all you can do is tax/borrow to fund your expansionist military, and hope to heck production doesn't plummet because of it.
You are assuming that the death penalty is a punishment. It is not. It cannot be, look it up. It is instead an act of vengeance.
"Punish" implies that there is hope of rehabilitation. We reserve our death penalty for the most heinous of crimes, where we don't care about rehabilitation because we never want these people back in society to begin with.
Once at Magic Mountain (forget the name of the coaster), my brother lost his glasses at the top of the loop, and then they fell into his lap at the bottom. I saw it, it was weird. The glasses floated away from him, he reached out to grab them, then they stopped and come back (he missed his grab).
Rules easy enough to explain in five minutes so that the players don't need their own copies:
1) Runequest 2) HarnMaster 3) GURPS 4) FUDGE 5) FATE 6) HARP 7) Paranoia 8) Stormbringer 9) Call of Cthulhu 10) James Bond 007 11) BESM 12) MERP
Note that these rules aren't necessarily simplistic. Some may have complicated character creation rules, complicated combat rules, etc., but they all share one thing in common, and that's a cohesiveness in the rules. With any of the above games you can certainly get away handing out pre-generated characters with a five minute explanation.
You have to do this! Otherwise the very few times they roll perception/awareness will be an obvious giveaway that there's something odd about.
I roll dice every so often just to roll them. Occasionally I'll have my players roll against my roll. Along with awareness rolls every ten minutes. And the occasional willpower or psyche roll as well. It's not to keep them on their toes, but merely to camoflauge the genuine rolls.
Nah, you can get laid roleplaying. No problem. Your partner may end up overweight with acne and belonging to some strange coven, but you can still get laid. It's not as common as in the SCA(*), but it's still easily doable. I should know, I have an ex-girlfriend who's a heavy gamer. She'll screw anyone who'll buy her a pizza.
(*) "If you can't get laid in the SCA, you can't get laid at all."
That burning hatred wouldn't be because they used to threaten lawsuits against fans for publishing original adventures, would it? Or subsequently coming out with a license "graciously" allowing the publishing of orginal adventures, even though it was already completely legal? Or then threatening to sue fans publishing original adventures without using their new license?
You've all heard of the FSF's definition of "free". Well, to these guys, "free" means "we won't sue you... today."
AD&D is the McDonalds of roleplaying games. Sorry, that's not fair to McDonalds. Let me rephrase that. AD&D is the Windows of roleplaying games. People play AD&D (or d20) for the same reason people eat Big Macs or browse with Internet Explorer: they either don't know there's something better, or they're too lazy to switch.
Yes, I know AD&D is popular. But so Windows and McDonalds. The only d20 games that are in any way worthwhile are those that managed to sneak in a decent campaign to go with the crappy rules. So it still baffles me after twenty five years why people still play AD&D. Why? I gave second edition another chance, but it wasn't much of an improvement. I have third edition yet another chance, but it still lacks a fundamental quality.
The thing is, the right amount of sex will mark a movie as cutting edge without actually having to be cutting edge. You need a certain amount of quality, to be sure, or the target audience will reject it. But with enough sex you can slack off in other areas and let your brain cells sleep.
I was simply surprised to see Fleury take the flip side of the coin and seemingly distill the entire Open Source movement down to the profit motive, then dismiss those who don't embrace his particular ethos and business tactics as chumps.
Cheap lowbudget off-tv scifi movies have sex in them because that's part of the genre of cheap lowbudget off-tv scifi movies. I know someone who makes these movies, and they have a definite template they must follow if they're going to sell.
These movies are marketed as "cutting edge", and to the buyers of these movies, that means sex. Because if it didn't have sex they would be on broadcast television and thus not cutting edge.
I somehow got the impression that the submitter has spent a whole bunch of time on slashdot, but not much at all outside of his parent's basement. The number of people making money by *writing* Open Source Software is an extremely small number. Most of us do this as a hobby, and have a real paying job during the day. Sure, there's a lot of people who will talk about writing OSS, but in actuality they're writing something used internally to their company and never distributed, so calling it "Open Source" is stupid and misleading.
The article is spot on. Free Software has an inherent free rider problem attached to it. Why pay for the development of the dull and dreary stuff when you can wait until someone else does it first and get it for free? If the software isn't something people would work on for free, then the developers are not going to work on it period. The stuff they do work on for free is stuff that they themselves use. Like kernels, desktops, programming languages, webservers, etc.
That's why the Open Source Software you see is stuff that the authors themselves actually use themselves. In other words, 99% of Linux was developed by Linux users. Why would you expect it to be any other way?
Don't be a chump thinking that you can sell Open Source Software directly. You cannot. It's free as in beer. All of it. There are some business models that do promote the development of Open Source. They do this by selling something *else* instead. The problem is that these models aren't suitable for most businesses. People who think otherwise are delusional.
...but it seems we keep getting closer and closer to the world described in Stallman's visionary The Right To Read article.
Once again the ugly head of FSF Fanaticism intrudes where it doesn't belong.
Geez, you guys, get a freaking life already! This story has nothing to do with the right to read. Don't be silly. The bookseller isn't the customer. The lorry driver isn't the customer. The thief breaking in and stealing a book isn't the customer. Nothing in this story whatsoever affects the customer's right to read a book he has purchased. Hell, there ain't anything here that would even trivially inconvenience them!
And you guys wonder why the general public doesn't take you seriously...
You clearly still haven't read about it, or you would be much quieter.
I have read about it. My use of the word "kindergarten" was out of line, and I apologize. I attempted to use hyperbole as a debate tactice, but failed to realize that tactic is reserved for use by the left (cf. "gulag").
The Shah was certainly an evil man with a particularly nasty secret police. I am not denying that. I am only questioning whether he was worse than Saddam Hussein.
Do you think you can discount all of AI's history and work from that one comment? Do you like to use a single gaffe to discredit an entire organization?
When the organization does not apologize for the gaffe, chastise the gaffer, and in no way attempts to distance themselve from the gaffe, then indeed I do. Sheesh, even Durbin managed to feebleattempt at apology ("I'm sorry that some of think I should be sorry")!
Bush has no credibility either, by your standard... There is no republican party cheat sheet on the Shah's Iran.
Wait, I'm confused. Are you assuming I'm a Republican and a Bush supporter? Hah hah hah! Maybe in your little narrow worldview you think everything is divided neatly down the middle into lockstep groups, but that's not how life is. It's possible to dislike AI's Gitmo statement without also having voted for Bush. It's possible to view the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo as humane (despite lack of due process) without being a Republican. It's possible to view the US invasion of Iraq as wrong without being a Democrat or Green.
The terrorists' twisted social norms, of course. Do you have problem comprehending English?
It's our twisted social norms that bought about the situation.
While we certainly exaccerbated the situation in adminstrations past, that's still no excuse to strap a bomb to your chest and blow yourself up in a crowded mall.
We officially invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, based on what was known to be a lie.
Are you implying that there was no terrorism before the invasion? Are you saying that Al Qaeda wasn't a terrorist organization before the invasion? Are you saying no one ever strapped a bomb to the chest and pulled the cord on a crowded bus before the invasion?
Where do you get off declaring the entire Islamic world 'twisted' etc simply because of the actions of some reactionaries?
Now I know you can't comprehend English, because I said no such thing. You've passed beyond the veil of rationality and I must cease conversing with you because it has become pointless.
I am not claiming that the Shah had shit that didn't stink. He was pretty nasty. But was his regime worse than Saddam's?
As for Amnesty International, they don't have any credibility, so even if they told me that that the sun rose in the east this morning, I would seek independent verification.
I work for a company several magnitudes larger than Microsoft, and I can confirm that we're just a collection of a half million individuals stumbling about wondering who the fsck is in charge. I have four CEOs directly above me.
Slashdot Mirror
I could list other games, but then you would pick them apart for one reason or another. The point is that not every game will be a perfect match for every player. But oddly enough, people think that AD&D is the exception that doesn't have to follow the rule of pleasing everyone. My game has to be perfect, but your game doesn't. Screw that!
It's like Linux. No matter what example Linux distro I suggest, you'll find something imperfect about it to cause you to recommend Windows instead.
But I'll list some games anyway. Maybe I'm just a masochist.
My current game is Harnmaster (third edition). The rules are very simple, but well geared towards "gritty" fantasy campaigns. It works well for the world of Harn, as well as Middle Earth, but not so hot for high fantasy heroic campaigns.
Before that was Rolemaster. Otherwise known as Rollmonster. It's biggest flaw is the mass of charats and tables. But having actually run Rollmaster for ten years, the reputation surpasses the reality. But if it still scares you, try HARP, which is essentially Rolemaster without the charts. MERP (Middle Earth Roleplaying) is Rolemaster "lite", fully compatible with RM but much more accessible.
If you want simple easy rules that won't get in the way, check out Fudge (or Fate which is derived from it). Or if you want something grittier and more "simulationist", try GURPS or HERO. Also good are any of the (originally) Chaosium games: Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and Runequest.
AD&D is still good for the mindless dungeon crawl by a party of minmaxed munchkins. But if you want to go overboard in that area, check out Hackmaster. I personally dislike the game, but it's the epitome old school hack-n-slash.
A game I would NOT recommend is the current Decipher's Lord of the Rings. Despite its slick production, it's unfinished, full of errors, and horribly unbalanced. If you want to play in Middle Earth, stick to MERP (rolemaster-lite), HarnMaster or Runequest.
For many of us, the ease of gaming, particularly in d20, means less memorisation of rules and more real gaming.
Then why aren't you playing Fudge?
The rules are simple even with the tables. That's the point. "Roll the dice and look it up" is easy to do. The actual game may get bogged down with chart fumbling, but the mechanics themselves are simple.
Having studied economics a wee bit, the portrayal of economics in simulations games has always bugged me. Whether it's SimCity or Civilization, the economics are grossly wrong.
To be fair, modelling a somewhat accurate economic system in a game would take way too much processing power for the purposes of a game. You need to simplify stuff. But in most cases the simplification is towards a single actor model. Which is so completely wrong it's ludicrous.
The prime effect of this is the assumption that a autocratic government (e.i. the player) can completely and successfully control all aspects of an economy. Hah! In real life government is always a hindrance and impediment to the economy, because the government interfers in the most basic economic units: the voluntary and spontaneous transactions between individuals. These games can't even distribute resources without the autocrat's (your) help!
To be fair (again), a military game with a reasonable economic model would be bloody boring. All the player would be able to do would be to issue policies and hope that people paid attention.
What I think would be an interesting game would be to have the economy happen "underneath" the player's control. The actual economics happens despite the player, with national prosperity (and government revenues) dependent upon how well you manage to keep your hands out of the works. You don't get to set up trade rates or dictate production or any other hands-on economic activities that most games give you. Instead all you can do is tax/borrow to fund your expansionist military, and hope to heck production doesn't plummet because of it.
You are assuming that the death penalty is a punishment. It is not. It cannot be, look it up. It is instead an act of vengeance.
"Punish" implies that there is hope of rehabilitation. We reserve our death penalty for the most heinous of crimes, where we don't care about rehabilitation because we never want these people back in society to begin with.
Once at Magic Mountain (forget the name of the coaster), my brother lost his glasses at the top of the loop, and then they fell into his lap at the bottom. I saw it, it was weird. The glasses floated away from him, he reached out to grab them, then they stopped and come back (he missed his grab).
I stopped playing AD&D long before they started the "churn". There were lots of new modules and adventures, but new rules were rare and far between.
Rules easy enough to explain in five minutes so that the players don't need their own copies:
1) Runequest
2) HarnMaster
3) GURPS
4) FUDGE
5) FATE
6) HARP
7) Paranoia
8) Stormbringer
9) Call of Cthulhu
10) James Bond 007
11) BESM
12) MERP
Note that these rules aren't necessarily simplistic. Some may have complicated character creation rules, complicated combat rules, etc., but they all share one thing in common, and that's a cohesiveness in the rules. With any of the above games you can certainly get away handing out pre-generated characters with a five minute explanation.
You have to do this! Otherwise the very few times they roll perception/awareness will be an obvious giveaway that there's something odd about.
I roll dice every so often just to roll them. Occasionally I'll have my players roll against my roll. Along with awareness rolls every ten minutes. And the occasional willpower or psyche roll as well. It's not to keep them on their toes, but merely to camoflauge the genuine rolls.
Nah, you can get laid roleplaying. No problem. Your partner may end up overweight with acne and belonging to some strange coven, but you can still get laid. It's not as common as in the SCA(*), but it's still easily doable. I should know, I have an ex-girlfriend who's a heavy gamer. She'll screw anyone who'll buy her a pizza.
(*) "If you can't get laid in the SCA, you can't get laid at all."
Actually, for any decent game, the GM may need rules, but the players don't.
That burning hatred wouldn't be because they used to threaten lawsuits against fans for publishing original adventures, would it? Or subsequently coming out with a license "graciously" allowing the publishing of orginal adventures, even though it was already completely legal? Or then threatening to sue fans publishing original adventures without using their new license?
... today."
You've all heard of the FSF's definition of "free". Well, to these guys, "free" means "we won't sue you
AD&D is the McDonalds of roleplaying games. Sorry, that's not fair to McDonalds. Let me rephrase that. AD&D is the Windows of roleplaying games. People play AD&D (or d20) for the same reason people eat Big Macs or browse with Internet Explorer: they either don't know there's something better, or they're too lazy to switch.
Yes, I know AD&D is popular. But so Windows and McDonalds. The only d20 games that are in any way worthwhile are those that managed to sneak in a decent campaign to go with the crappy rules. So it still baffles me after twenty five years why people still play AD&D. Why? I gave second edition another chance, but it wasn't much of an improvement. I have third edition yet another chance, but it still lacks a fundamental quality.
The thing is, the right amount of sex will mark a movie as cutting edge without actually having to be cutting edge. You need a certain amount of quality, to be sure, or the target audience will reject it. But with enough sex you can slack off in other areas and let your brain cells sleep.
I was simply surprised to see Fleury take the flip side of the coin and seemingly distill the entire Open Source movement down to the profit motive, then dismiss those who don't embrace his particular ethos and business tactics as chumps.
Then you read his article completely wrong.
Cheap lowbudget off-tv scifi movies have sex in them because that's part of the genre of cheap lowbudget off-tv scifi movies. I know someone who makes these movies, and they have a definite template they must follow if they're going to sell.
These movies are marketed as "cutting edge", and to the buyers of these movies, that means sex. Because if it didn't have sex they would be on broadcast television and thus not cutting edge.
I somehow got the impression that the submitter has spent a whole bunch of time on slashdot, but not much at all outside of his parent's basement. The number of people making money by *writing* Open Source Software is an extremely small number. Most of us do this as a hobby, and have a real paying job during the day. Sure, there's a lot of people who will talk about writing OSS, but in actuality they're writing something used internally to their company and never distributed, so calling it "Open Source" is stupid and misleading.
The article is spot on. Free Software has an inherent free rider problem attached to it. Why pay for the development of the dull and dreary stuff when you can wait until someone else does it first and get it for free? If the software isn't something people would work on for free, then the developers are not going to work on it period. The stuff they do work on for free is stuff that they themselves use. Like kernels, desktops, programming languages, webservers, etc.
That's why the Open Source Software you see is stuff that the authors themselves actually use themselves. In other words, 99% of Linux was developed by Linux users. Why would you expect it to be any other way?
Don't be a chump thinking that you can sell Open Source Software directly. You cannot. It's free as in beer. All of it. There are some business models that do promote the development of Open Source. They do this by selling something *else* instead. The problem is that these models aren't suitable for most businesses. People who think otherwise are delusional.
No big deal. My cat knows the concept of zero too. And she lets me know that every time her food dish has zero kibbles in it.
...but it seems we keep getting closer and closer to the world described in Stallman's visionary The Right To Read article.
Once again the ugly head of FSF Fanaticism intrudes where it doesn't belong.
Geez, you guys, get a freaking life already! This story has nothing to do with the right to read. Don't be silly. The bookseller isn't the customer. The lorry driver isn't the customer. The thief breaking in and stealing a book isn't the customer. Nothing in this story whatsoever affects the customer's right to read a book he has purchased. Hell, there ain't anything here that would even trivially inconvenience them!
And you guys wonder why the general public doesn't take you seriously...
Dammit, I don't care how much this costs, I want my free wifi!!
</tanstaafl>
You clearly still haven't read about it, or you would be much quieter.
I have read about it. My use of the word "kindergarten" was out of line, and I apologize. I attempted to use hyperbole as a debate tactice, but failed to realize that tactic is reserved for use by the left (cf. "gulag").
The Shah was certainly an evil man with a particularly nasty secret police. I am not denying that. I am only questioning whether he was worse than Saddam Hussein.
Do you think you can discount all of AI's history and work from that one comment? Do you like to use a single gaffe to discredit an entire organization?
When the organization does not apologize for the gaffe, chastise the gaffer, and in no way attempts to distance themselve from the gaffe, then indeed I do. Sheesh, even Durbin managed to feebleattempt at apology ("I'm sorry that some of think I should be sorry")!
Bush has no credibility either, by your standard... There is no republican party cheat sheet on the Shah's Iran.
Wait, I'm confused. Are you assuming I'm a Republican and a Bush supporter? Hah hah hah! Maybe in your little narrow worldview you think everything is divided neatly down the middle into lockstep groups, but that's not how life is. It's possible to dislike AI's Gitmo statement without also having voted for Bush. It's possible to view the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo as humane (despite lack of due process) without being a Republican. It's possible to view the US invasion of Iraq as wrong without being a Democrat or Green.
Whose twisted social norms.
The terrorists' twisted social norms, of course. Do you have problem comprehending English?
It's our twisted social norms that bought about the situation.
While we certainly exaccerbated the situation in adminstrations past, that's still no excuse to strap a bomb to your chest and blow yourself up in a crowded mall.
We officially invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, based on what was known to be a lie.
Are you implying that there was no terrorism before the invasion? Are you saying that Al Qaeda wasn't a terrorist organization before the invasion? Are you saying no one ever strapped a bomb to the chest and pulled the cord on a crowded bus before the invasion?
Where do you get off declaring the entire Islamic world 'twisted' etc simply because of the actions of some reactionaries?
Now I know you can't comprehend English, because I said no such thing. You've passed beyond the veil of rationality and I must cease conversing with you because it has become pointless.
I am not claiming that the Shah had shit that didn't stink. He was pretty nasty. But was his regime worse than Saddam's?
As for Amnesty International, they don't have any credibility, so even if they told me that that the sun rose in the east this morning, I would seek independent verification.
I work for a company several magnitudes larger than Microsoft, and I can confirm that we're just a collection of a half million individuals stumbling about wondering who the fsck is in charge. I have four CEOs directly above me.
From your car?!?!?!