But hold on, “all sorts” of fiction?  There’s one in particular that has never worked in my experience, and that is the Murder Mystery.  It’s incredibly hard to make a murder mystery work in an RPG.  If you go the Agatha Christie route, you need to come up with an outlandish murder scenario, an oddball cast of suspects, and then have the players roll well on their perception rolls to spot key details.  If you go the Colin Dexter route, you need to make a dense web of relations between a group of reasonably normal people, and have the players suss out a motive by exploring the whole social web.

Either way, you run into a problem of affordances: you know how, in a video game, some doors just are flat panels with no handles?  You know that you can’t open them, because they lack a handle and its affordances.  In an RPG, affordances are even more obvious, generally: the GM, in describing things, gives you the set of things you might need to know, or to twiddle, or to play with.  They can throw red herrings in there, but that just ameliorates the problem—fundamentally, they’ve still taken a number of things and raised them from the background.  A part of a mystery is often identifying what information to take out of the background.

Finally, mysteries are troublesome because of their intrinsically solitary method of solving—the information that solves the mystery can come from many sources, but the moment of eureka comes from one mind, and one mind alone.  One person synthesizes the information and then Knows How It Happened.  Who wants to play Dr. Watson to some other player’s Holmes?  To have everything explained, because either they as a player couldn’t put it together, or they as a player didn’t get enough information to put it together because they did not roll well enough on perception rolls?  Not I.

So, if you’ve run a successful murer mystery tabletop RPG, please, tell me how.

This means that other blogs here will also be down briefly: Kipilefti, Chiyaa, Oddletters.  Keep an eye on that Twitter account for updates and server status!

Connected: The character has relationships (positive and negative) with other significant characters in the situation.

Committed: The character has a stake in the outcome of the situation, and will stay to see it through.

Capable: The character has the capacity to affect change in the situation by taking decisive action.

Conflicted: The character has beliefs and goals that are in conflict. They must make choices about which are more important, and which must be abandoned or changed.

Also, Gregor Hutton has some great advice in 3:16:

PLAY, DON’T WORK
Play is fun, so embrace the kill-happy machismo [this particular point is specific to the game. –Kit] and play with it. It’s not work, right? You shouldn’t be stressing over this.

LIVE THE MOMENT
Each moment might be your character’s last, so don’t try and plan ahead. Events and dice rolls will throw you a curveball all the time. You’ll find that the bigger picture will take care of itself in play.

BE A TEAM PLAYER
Listen to your other players at least as much as you speak. Do share your ideas but learn to enjoy the contributions of others too.

DON’T TRY TO BE TOO CLEVER
If you spend all your time trying to be clever or bring in more twists and turns it’ll just be tiring. Instead, just go with the intuitive and obvious answers that pop into your head. Simple is best.

BE DIRECT
Trying to be subtle can be confusing, and trying to make a convoluted plan worse. Be straight to the heart of the matter.

BE OPEN
Be open minded and honest about how you feel. That’s the way.

Avatar has been dominating the airwaves and the conversations around me a lot.  It’s certainly good in many respects, and the amount of conversational fodder it has provided is one of those.  But the problems almost balance the good aspects.  It has a schizoid attitude towards and portrayal of the indigenous people, well-addressed in this review.  There are so many problems with it requiring a white, male, American soldier to make the indigenous people win that I don’t know where to start, but the short version is that all those things would be OK if they mattered to his ground-breaking plan.  But actually?  His plan was a non-plan.  I’ll avoid saying more for spoilers-sake, in case you care.

So why was it good?  I enjoyed watching it for much the same reasons I would enjoy looking at a painting.  It was, quite simply, visually stunning.  The story was thin, archetypal, problematic in terms of race-attitudes, but man was it pretty to look at.  But it was also good in terms of inspiration for secondary-creation: the conlang for the Na’vi was fabulous, and well-acted, and the world had many compelling features, inspiring me to some fun co-exobiology thoughts.  And the movie’s ecological message is not subtle, either, which I think is fabulous—no need to tread softly around such a message, just put it out there.

So, ultimately, the movie is good not for much in itself, besides the pretty, but it’s quite good for the topics it gets you thinking about and talking about, most clearly race/privilege, and the environment.  I’d recommend it.

Too many project ideas is a great state to be in, when you have the chance to work on them as much as you want.

Oh yeah: snow, twice, BEAUTIFUL.

(Since people keep asking: Google Wave is not, in and of itself, anything new.  It is, rather, a beautifully conceived [though not yet quite fully implemented!] melding of existing technologies.  The tag-line version is that it is a integration of wiki, IM, email, and collaborative document editing, with line-item threaded responses and real-time typing from other users visible.  Many people balk at this last point, but it’s (a) really surprisingly useful and makes communication a lot more like, well, real conversation, and (b) eventually going to be configurable.)

The pros are good pros for me, and the cons are cons that don’t bother me, but might be bad for other people. I like the speed, UI, option for on-screen (for general use) or slide-out (for intensive, or SSH, use) keyboard. I like the selection of apps (by which I mean that there’s a good, free, SSH app, and then other, very Google-oriented apps, and a Pandora app).

I like the battery life, I like the resolution, I like the camera. I like running six different apps at a time, and I still like the battery life.

I think that the shape of it is very male, it’s a little thicker than I’d like (for fitting in my erstwhile cell-phone pockets), and many of the apps seem buggier than I’ve seen on the iPhone—but they’ve yet to be destructive bugs. Mostly, the Twitter app I use complains that it needs to force-quit a lot, and then doesn’t, because, actually, it doesn’t need to.

This point is a slight win for the Droid over the iPhone: it can input extended latin characters quite easily, and — and … particularly, but it doesn’t have the fonts to display weirder Unicode, like ♆.

It can’t (yet) play arbitrary Flash embeds, so I can’t watch ZP on it. But it can catch YouTube links and redirect them to the YouTube app.

In the end: nerdy guy, yes. Anyone else, probably not. Price is completely equivalent to the iPhone, in terms of data plan as well.