The Bones

Writer and editor James Lowder, one of the many talented contributors to The Bones: Us and Our Dice, kindly gave us a few copies of the superhero anthology he mentions in his Bones essay. We thought we’d pass them on to you, dear readers.

At first, I thought I’d offer them to the next few people to buy The Bones, but I realized that I didn’t want to offer them up just to new buyers and forsake those of you who had already ordered the book or been gifted a copy over the holidays. So, how about this: You show us a picture of yourself with a copy of The Bones out in the world somewhere and we’ll hold a drawing. Five (5) of you who send in photos will be randomly selected to get a copy of the superhero fiction anthology, Path of the Bold, edited (and signed!) by James Lowder.

Path of the Bold collects fifteen superhero tales from the likes of Robert Weinberg, John Kovalic, Stewart Wieck, Dennis Detwiller, Lucien Soulban, Jesse Scoble, and more. Read a review here.

Here’s the deal:

You take a picture of yourself with The Bones and email it to us at service (at) gameplaywright (dot) net. Nothing bigger than 2-3 MB, please. This can be a picture of you with your computer screen showing the PDF edition of the book, this can be a picture of you with a copy of the book in a store somewhere, this can be a picture of you with a loaner. Whatever. We just want to see where some of the copies of the book ended up.

Only photos received by Monday, January 17th are eligible. (We are on Central Time here in the US, for the record.)

Contributors to The Bones are not eligible.

We’ll randomly select 5 photos. The senders of those photos get an email from us seeking an address where we can send them a copy of Path of the Bold. We’ll spring for shipping in the United States (Media Mail, most likely).

We may share some of the photos we get here on Gameplaywright, so don’t send something you wouldn’t want posted publicly.

Sound good? Then get out there and grab a shot of yourself with The Bones!

2010 is on its way out. You’ve played a lot of games this year. What sticks out? Not the titles—not just the titles—but the big wins and the bad beats. What do you recall from this year’s epic battles, risky bets, sly bargains, and other outré gaming maneuvers?

As a DM this year, I beheaded an Avenger PC in an ongoing D&D campaign that blended the Northlanders comic with The Lord of the Rings. That character was known for his deer-head mantle and it got cut away by an evil counterpart—an Avenger NPC worshipping a befouled vision of his same god. That battle ended, on an altar sinking into a volcano’s fiery mouth, with the heroic (and insane) PC dead, but the villainous Avenger met his end, too.

I also managed to make money playing Omaha High-Low for maybe the first time ever this year.

What about you?

What’s your game story for 2010?

// Share your answer here.

Today, on Twitter, Rob Donoghue (@RDonoghue) asked:

GMs: If you strongly object to dice fudging, do you equally strongly support data transparency, such as visible enemy stats & Powers?

After some dialogue, Tracy Hurley (@SarahDarkmagic) wrote:

To turn it around, why shouldn’t players fudge their own rolls so that they have more control over their own narratives?

All of which makes me want to zoom out a little bit and ask a survey question:

When do you fudge the dice? Why? Do you have predefined circumstances in which it’s legal to cheat? Do you go on instinct? Do you never fudge at all?

I imagine our answers will vary based on the games we play and why we play them—what we get out of play. That’s fine. Whenever the question of dice fudging comes up, I tend to think of D&D, the game in which I learned to fudge dice and became aware of why and when I did. Is it the lingua franca for this conversation?

// What’s your answer?

In this fascinating thread over at Story Games, a few Apocalypse World players are wrestling with one player’s actual-play issues and discussing some of the edges of the Apocalypse World GM’s job. (I think.)

In that thread, you’ll find some discussion of whether or not one GM’s approach to play is meant to be “part of GMing” Apocalypse World. One issue that has arisen is whether or not the habitual importation of GMing techniques learned from other games, and not endorsed by the game text, can lead to trouble (and a clash, it seems to me, of expectations with results) for GMs.

This forms an immediate question in my mind: If a technique is not a part of GMing Apocalypse World… what do you call it when a GM running a game of Apocalypse World uses that technique? Is it a custom MC move? Is it a hack of the game? Is the MC not quite running Apocalypse World at that point?

As someone who had a lot of trouble engaging the manuscript for Apocalypse World as a stand-alone text (I kept interpreting it as a meta-commentary and let the hype surrounding it influence my earliest readings), and as someone who has barely played and never GMed the game, I’m not qualified to say what you’d call it when a GM imports non-prescribed techniques into actual play of Apocalypse World. What do you think?

I heard about this via Boing Boing, which means you’ve probably already heard about it, but in case you haven’t, I’m mentioning it here, too: The Board Game Remix Kit.

You know what this is. You take the components of popular and ubiquitous games like Monopoly, Clue, and Scrabble and you reconstitute them into new games. I used to do this as a kid, when I couldn’t get people to play Monopoly or Clue with me I’d play with them by myself, concocting strange alternate games using the components in new ways. (Except my remixes were, in general, terrible—little more than excuses to play story-time with Clue’s prop pawns and make-believe mansion.)

While I haven’t seen the Board Game Remix Kit with my own eyes yet, Cory Doctorow sure seems to think these are great and fun remixes of the core components of these games. And the book boasts beloved authors like James Wallis, so count me in. I’m eager to see how far afield these remixes get from their original games.

This use of classic components to create new games of course reminds me of Cheapass Games, too.

I wonder if these board-game hacks might also be able to interact with this thread at Story Games about Etsy and hand-crafted game objects. Could you sell Cheapass-style games as hand-made rulebooks via Etsy, meant to interact with the pawns and dice you already own? What if you included specially crafted (or vintage) pieces and play parts, so that each game was unique? I’m just brainstorming here.

If you get a chance to get your hands on the Board Game Remix Kit book, cards, or app, come back here and let us know what you think, please?