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Beware the memage

  • Jan. 5th, 2008 at 9:07 AM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
(on edit: Seeing as it seems to have actually spread outside my FL... let's make this one public)

It's all [info]wimsey70's fault. We clearly have different genres of music, though. I think mine is sort of trippy dub, in the vein of Spiritualized or Boards of Canada.

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Welcome, Friends!

  • Oct. 29th, 2007 at 8:38 AM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
As of October 29, 2007, just about everything on this LJ is friends-only. However, I am totally easy - just drop a comment here if you'd like to be added.

The Friends-Only policy isn't principally because I'm posting lots of super-private emo stuff (although there is some of that). It's because I post lots of different kinds of things, and I like to use the Custom Groups functionality to manage who sees which posts. Right now, the categories of posts fall roughly into the following groups. Let me know which of these you'd like to see when you ask to be added, and I can put you in the right filters!

StoryGames: Gaming related posts. I principally write about weird-ass Dirty Hippie Story Games rather than "traditional" role-playing or adventure gaming.
SocialCircles: Posts about and for various social communities I belong to. This is more for "public"-level personal posts and the like. If we're LJ-friends-but-not-friend-friends this is your spot.
MippleCity: This is for stuff that's specifically relevant to Minneapolis.
OnlineFriends: We're friends. You care about my life and I trust you at least a little bit, but you're not in Minnesota.
LocalFriends: We're friends, and you're in Minnesota.
Family: You're part of my family or someone I'm very close to.
Political: Stuff specifically related to my various political or social causes. Feminism, GLBTQ issues, human rights, etc.
AdultsOnly: Stuff about sex, kink, and other "mature audiences" content.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you like it here!

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The End of An Era

  • Oct. 25th, 2007 at 1:32 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
This is it. As of Sunday, the days of Tigerbunny Design Bureau are over. I'm not moving on from here, but the new incarnation that I've been talking about will be revealed on Sunday. Most of the content will go friends-only, and my friends-list will get a haircut, so if you haven't chimed in on the check-in thread, you should!

Thank you to all of you who've dropped in and read my yammerings over the last 2 years!

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bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
In my fantasy world, this would be TRUE FACT.



xkcd wins the internet again.
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
Ye gods, how can I be Late To The Party (tm) after only 11 hours. Internet time is scary.

Go look. If you like what you see, you really oughtta buy one of Shaenon's books. She's this good A LOT.

Not So Emo

  • Aug. 14th, 2007 at 3:14 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
It's too true.

Distilled Essence of Science Fiction

  • Aug. 10th, 2007 at 10:20 AM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
The raw stuff. Plus, meta. All in under a hundred words.

By the way, subscribe to Brendan's feed. It's regularly this good.

Dorky music post

  • Aug. 7th, 2007 at 12:22 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
I have been on a music kick this last few days, suddenly feeling the need to listen to new things. (and re-listen to old things)

In the spirit of sharing, here's what has turned my crank in the last couple days - much of it new-to-me and courtesy of helpful suggestions from nice internet strangers. I hope somebody else gets some joy out of it. It's pretty much all downtempo/darkwave/dream/shoegazer stuff, so if that doesn't turn your crank, sorry.

I've been listening to:

Miranda Sex Garden
Auburn Lull
Stars of the Lid
Paik
Mahogany
Hammock (!)
Rumskib
Azure Ray (!)
Bright Channel (!!!)
Alcest
Lamb
Shiny Toy Guns
Tearwave

Got anything you think I should listen to?

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Is it just me?

  • Jun. 5th, 2007 at 2:40 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
Or is it just because school's getting out? Every forum I usually read seems to be particularly beset by acrimonious rehashes of old arguments. And me with huge files to load and reprocess, therefore excess web-browsing time at work. Oh internet, entertain me! Point me at something fun to read in 10-minute bursts!

Hey Look - Non-RPG content!

  • May. 30th, 2007 at 5:39 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
Way back when, I happened to mention how much I was looking forward to Manabi Straight!

What with one thing and another, I am seriously, seriously backlogged, so I haven't been keeping up very well with it. But I'm now more than half way through, and I have to say that it's in my personal pantheon of great shows. Not in that Totally Awesome! way, but in that "comfort food" way. It's sweet, pretty, and heartful. The voice acting is pretty darn solid. And it's all about the way one remarkable person can make everyone else around them that much more remarkable. This is one I will rewatch.

Right now, I'm on a binge:

Watching fansubbed

Manabi Straight! (up thru 8, made from love and win)
Darker Than Black (up to 5, liking but want some plot advancement)
Heroic Age (up to 3, teetering on the edge of abandonment)
Venus vs Virus (up thru 7, backlogged, will probably finish just because I ought to)
Lucky Star (up thru 3, it rocks, but only in fits and starts. Aya-chan is nailing Konata, though.)
Lovely Complex (up thru 4, yeah, formula, but just enough spin to be fun)
Kanon 2006 (I've waited on this one until I could watch with Kathy. Gorgeous!!! I wish we got a Nayuki ending this time, though.)

Watching on DVD

Shakugan no Shana (melonpan FTW)
Tsukuyomi Moon Phase (nekomimi mode, de~)

Getting tomorrow in the mail

Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu V1 Special Edition. Bouken deshou deshou!

Playing

Finally getting around to the Asumi route in Heart de Roommate. I expect weepage.
Just finished Narcissu Second Side yesterday. Eh. Main story is good, this is bleah. Pretty.

Oh yeah. And the first session of my D&D game was muchly fun. Hobgoblins were killed.

Back To The Dungeon: The (Social?) Contract

  • Apr. 24th, 2007 at 3:00 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
Well, I've got my group together. We've met, scheduled our first session for next month, and are now engaged in the pre-game feely-outy stage via the game Yahoo-group (don't know why I never did one of those before!). One thing that's cropped up is the suggestion of a "party charter" - a sort of statement-of-purpose and setting of rules for the group. I actually think this is a neat thing to do for a game that's tightly team-focused and mission-driven, the way a lot of D&D play is. Everybody comes to the game with a set of norms they've picked up - whether from other games or from general social expectations - and when they clash it can get ugly. I'm going to try to midwife the process of this group working it out as best I can - you can't force this stuff, but I'm glad somebody suggested it (not me!).

I've been brainstorming an outline of "stuff that might come up" that you might want to cover in such an agreement.

Party Charter Issues )
How have these sorts of things been handled in your games? Have there been problems when issues like this were or weren't discussed in advance?</p>
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
Okay, long thoughtful posts... check. Short, pithy linky? I can do that too.

Many is the time I've seriously considered the "Assess is a move-equivalent action" house-rule. I've never done it. Maybe I should.

Back To The Dungeon: Risk Management

  • Apr. 4th, 2007 at 2:04 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut

Another lesson from MIG rears its head. That game was plagued by a recurring social contract issue – differing levels of rules-savvy and risk tolerance among the group. We ranged from Kathy – who’s at best minimally competent with the rules, and likes to take wild risks in order to make things more exciting, secure in the expectation that I’ll generally make sure that stakes for any action are fun win/lose – to L, who’s an old hand D&D expert whose cleric was a melee powerhouse with carefully chosen feats and spells, but who is quite willing to make suboptimal decisions in service to character – to T, who’s fairly rules-knowledgeable (a bit of a rules-lawyer, even) and extremely risk-averse, preferring to avoid encounters entirely or win through superior planning and resource management and gets quite irked when other people deviate from The Plan.

If I “embrace the hack”, am I also embracing the far end of that spectrum? Risk-averse, rules-mastery-focused, optimization-centered? Am I asking for people like Kathy to be perpetually the “dead weight” at the table?

Well…. I don’t think so. I think that’s a particular manifestation of “hack” D&D – one that’s crunch-focused almost to the exclusion of everything else. I’ve certainly seen plenty of good, crunchy, challenge-driven D&D that didn’t demand perfect builds and perfect execution. Partly, that’s a matter of social contract, partly, of culture of play )I want a table full of people more in the moderate level of crunch-focus, and without T’s strong aversion to risk – willing to embrace the gamble as well as the crunch, but also willing – and this is crucial – to embrace stakes that are less extreme. Kathy’s reckless stunts are a lot more fun for the group if social contract accepts the notion she tends to assume: that the stakes of risk are rarely loss-of-character, but more frequently complications, embarrassment, temporary incapacity. On the other hand, she needs to accept the idea that every character must be designed to be able to reliably fulfill a needed role in the party – that a base level of rules-skill and optimization are every player’s responsibility, and that recklessness should be confined to lower-stakes situations.

So… I will need to select for people comfortable with the kind of game I plan to run. They need to be rules-comfortable, but not hardcore optimizers. On the other hand, they need to NOT be rules-averse – I’m not planning on running a talky-talky roleplaying-centric kind of game, so knowing how your Feats work and what your bonuses are is important. They need to be okay with fun taking precedence over “realism”, and they need to find Killing Things and Taking Their Stuff fun.

Back To The Dungeon: Prep Isn't Fun

  • Apr. 4th, 2007 at 8:54 AM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut

There’s just a few drawbacks to this whole D&D thing. The comments thread on my last post foreshadowed one of them, which I'll get to in a later post, but there's an even more basic one.

Here’s what I wrote as I was evaluating the MIG back in Spring ’06:

“One thing I've definitely learned in my last year of playing a fair bit of D&D is that while I can see the fun there, it's not really my fun - at least as GM. I like the worldbuilding and the nifties and all the color a whole lot. I find the work of providing a set of carefully balanced, challenging-but-not-too-hard fights with appropriately tailored cash & prizes to be a bit of a pain. I particularly find it a pain when exploration of setting, situation, and character are constantly getting pushed into the back seat in favor of the grail of challenge.

I feel kinda dorky when I'm engaged in heavy prep-work and use of technique not to make things dramatic, not to enrich exploration, not to push towards conflict, but to ensure that a steady diet of set-piece encounters get fed into the maw of the party. Actually playing the encounters? FUN. The amount of work that goes into providing them? Not Fun.”

At the time, that seemed like a solid evaluation. On reflection, though, I missed my own point. It wasn’t that the fighty being foreground wasn’t fun. It was the level of prep that was un-fun, plus the sense that the world-buildy, character-developy stuff was getting short shrift on account of the amount of work that went into prep )

The more I look at it, the more I feel that I can get a good experience as DM by relying much more on tailoring published adventures/encounters and by deemphasizing setting detail and “originality” in favor of a few carefully-chosen details and a strong reliance on the shared library of “D&D-isms” among the group.

That’s led to the first portion of my new idea: I’ll run a setting-light, vanilla-D&D game based almost exclusively on adapted modules and setpieces. The focus will be on hack, D&D nostalgia/celebration, and social bonding among players. Plot and setting will take distant back seats.

Back To The Dungeon: Why Go Back?

  • Apr. 3rd, 2007 at 1:30 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut

I mentioned in the last post that I’m trying to put together a new D&D group. Why go back to the dungeon? )

So I’m drifting back into the notion of playing a “trad”-ish game that I enjoy. There’s vanishingly few of them, but D&D has several things to recommend it.

Network effects: Everybody plays it. Non-gamers have heard of it. A lot of people in my social circles don’t play now, but they did when they were kids, and it has a bunch of nostalgia value.

Core Story: Everybody gets it. You pretend to be a dwarf. You go into a dungeon. You kill monsters and take their stuff. You level up and get new cool powers. You can love it or you can hate it, but you can’t say you don’t understand it.

Pretty coherent: D&D these days is much less “all things to all people”, drift until happy, handwave everything, messy incoherence. It has proper rules, and the rules mostly do what they say they do. It has a default playstyle that basically works, and the secondary agendas are resolutely left secondary in most of the WotC material. I don’t feel like I’m fighting against the game unless I try to foreground something that’s not rules-supported, and when I do foreground Kill/Take/Power Up, it is reliably fun and well-supported. I'm also getting neat hints of better support for situation creation from more and more of the stuff that's coming out.

Nostalgia: I really do love this stuff. Iconic monsters, classic dungeons, wacky magic. It’s in my geeky DNA.

Look! Content! Sort of....

  • Jan. 24th, 2007 at 8:57 AM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
This is really a lousy excuse for my first post in ages, but I have to.

Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight! has hooked me even harder than SHnY did. It's like.... Azumanga Daioh plus Paniponi Dash blendered with ufotable OTT wacky. And a seriously all-star cast, too. I hope it continues to be as good as Ep1.

SGL0: A library of concepts

  • Aug. 8th, 2006 at 5:10 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut

Things that I think of when I think of "Pulp Space Opera"

Planets with just one climate/terrain type: Jungle, Desert, Ice, Rock, City, Water
“Furry” aliens
“Head-Bump” aliens
Sexy aliens
“Chinese/Russian/Roman/Aztec/etc.” aliens/"lost colonies"
Space Pirates
Smugglers
Ancient superweapons
Berserkers
Planet Smashers
Fleet actions
Space fighters
Energy swords
Personal force fields
Telepaths
Asteroid fields
Lost planets
Nebulas
Colonists
Prison moons
Special Agents
Inflexible Computers
Killer Robots
Technomages
Alien Drugs
Space Monsters
Armored Marines
Mecha
Cloud Cities
Interstellar merchants
Con artists
“Your primitive human intellect…”
The Ancients
Grungy spaceports
Crime lords
Spaceliners
Hypno-beams
The Punishment Chamber
Hotshot pilots
Stowaways
Robinson Crusoe… IN SPACE!
Energy beings
Dimension X
Handwavium
"She can nae take anymore, captain!"
Falling out of your chair when the ship is hit

Add your own in comments...

Awww, I was hoping for Mesonychoteuthis

  • Jul. 18th, 2006 at 12:00 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut






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Not Afraid Anymore

  • May. 15th, 2006 at 1:34 PM
bitchy, not just say, heels, goplay, tigerskin, imouto, ur game sux, bouncy, ecchi, yuki, ryo, himitsu, sql, iwnay, asahina, bookslut
Done with the Afraid project, for now. Here are pdfs for PC, NPC, and Monster sheets, including the "handwritten" variant for PCs. Please use 'em and let me know if they work well or don't, and how.

At some point, I may go on to do some prep/tracking/etc sheets, especially for victims & slaves, but I think I need to play the game or at least see more AP accounts to get a real sense for what needs to be on those.

This has been fun! Thanks again to Vincent for the art.