A typical Thursday night at Polytropos HQ. At 9:45, I got back from yoga, and entered the apartment to find Suanna sitting on the futon with the laptop, checking email. I made myself a bowl of soup, sat down next to her, and turned on the TV so I could aimlessly channel surf while I scarfed down my late supper.

“This is one downside to “losing cable”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000160.html,” I mentioned offhandedly. “There’s not hardly any channels to surf through any more.”

And it’s true. Everybody has their guilty TV pleasure: that one type of show that can easily gobble up fifteen minutes of your time as you sit there, transfixed. My own particular weakness in this regard is infomercials — especially ones with snazzy hosts and “live” studio audiences. For others, it’s Animal Planet, soap operas in Spanish, or the infinite variations on home improvement reality TV on the Learning Channel. In any case, without cable, the chances of finding something sufficiently transfixing were suddenly quite slim.

I cycled up the channels, skipping past the sitcoms, pausing momentarily on the catastrophe du jour of _ER_, and soon found the numbers making leapfrog jumps from channel 26 to 34 to sixtysomething: the odd flotsam and jetsam that you get when you’re signed up for “bare-bones” cable. CSPAN was in there, of course, and some sort of local government meeting, and a NASA learning channel. Then we hit Channel 74.

Two people in skin-tight spandex were energetically wrestling on a colorful mat. But something didn’t seem quite right — they weren’t big and beefy like pro wrestlers. Then I caught a glimpse of something that it took at few seconds to process, simply because I didn’t expect to see it on broadcast television in the middle of prime time. One of the wrestlers was a buxom woman, you see, and she was completely topless. I think I was saying something to that effect to Suanna — “Huh. She’s not wearing a shirt.” — when the woman succeeded in pinning the man to the floor and, with a triumphant flourish, whisked off his spandex shorts, revealing, with nary a shadow or obscured camera angle, his unmentionables.

This is when I changed the channel.

“What channel _was_ that?” Suanna asked.

“Oh, I’m not telling _you_ ,” I joked. “You’ll get up in the middle of the night to watch that stuff while I’m sleeping.”

I just went to check up on ol’ Channel 74 again — purely for blog research purposes, you understand — and I saw . . . more wrestling. But with clothed, bulky guys this time — rednecks, in a ring fully stocked with assorted wooden furniture, the easier to bash each other’s heads with, I suppose. Not, however, any nekkidness. I guess it’s a wrestling channel.

How utterly bizarre.

UPDATE: Down in the comments, Greg clarifies what is (probably) going on here.

Most Polytropizing gets done on the trusty laptop, but it’s the desktop PC that’s a labor of love: a cobbled-together mishmash of parts acquired hither and yon, from 1 to 5 years old. (She’s got it where it counts, Kessel Run, you get the idea.) There was a brief scare today, as the second hard drive on the desktop crashed completely, after which point the main one decided to become invisible to the BIOS for a while. I yanked both hard drives out, in order to . . . I dunno, look at them sternly or something. The diciest moment was when I got the main drive working again while it was balanced precariously on the corner of the open computer case, and quickly backed up all the data that I hadn’t already to the laptop via wireless.

I originally suspected that both drives had gone kerfluffle and were making the Harsh Clicking Sound of Death. But now I’m not so sure. The second drive is definitely dead, but it was getting on in years to begin with, so I’m not surprised. I could have sworn I heard clicking from the newer drive as well, but now it’s behaving very nicely. I put everything back together and the whole computer is purring — even the front case fan has stopped being quite so noisy. It’s quiet: _too_ quiet. Perhaps the rest of the internal components were sufficiently frightened by the lightning extraction of the offending hard drive that they’ll be cowed into obedience for a while. Then again, they might be plotting _revolution_. I’ll be on my guard.

Ed Heil “picks up”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001450.html his ongoing discussion of RPGs and semiotics with a simple but important distinction:

The thing that distinguishes roleplaying games from, say, chess, wargaming, or Monopoly, is that in chess, wargaming, or Monopoly, you can imagine that what’s going on is really events in an imaginary world, you can talk about it that way, but those talked-about events in an imaginary world can’t reach out and mess with the game rules — the game proceeds according to the rules quite independently of those discussions about what’s happening in the imaginary world. In a role-playing game, the rule-bound game-play accepts input from the purely verbal world description. It’s designed to.

I love this distinction because it gets, in a nutshell, what makes story in RPGs so different from other types of games. Even in a computer RPG, you may experience the narrative, and even shape it to the extent that the game allows for multiple paths and endings, but your experience and perception of the narrative will never ever reflect back onto the game itself. A roleplaying game is the only type of game where story is more than frosting.

Ed ends with a couple of questions that I’ll pick up on here. An apology and a warning in advance: all of what follows is in Rambling Mode.

1) How do different RPGs differ in the way entities that have been posited verbally are clothed with game statistics? Is there any kind of typology of games according to how this is accomplished?

I’ll address only a subset of this question: how RPGs differ in handling ad-hoc modifications of rules. The first big distinction that leaps to mind is the extent to which player verbal input can _modify_ the game world or actively _shape_ it. In just about every RPG, there’s some sort of mechanism for modifying dice rolls based on lively description. If you roleplay your passionate speech beautifully, the GM gives you a +2 on your Diplomacy check. A colorful description of _how_ you attack the goblin gives you +1 on attack. The extent to which these thing can affect the game varies — in D&D it’s never more than a +2 bonus on a 20-sided die, so it’s pretty minor. _Sorcerer_ makes such modifiers so important that it’s hard to succeed in the game, mechanics-wise, without them.

In most games, player input is limited to modifying the world. Players have complete autonomy over the behavior of their characters, but none over anything else, except in minor situations. (Player: “Is the innkeeper there? I want to ask him something.” GM: “Sure, he’s there.”)

Then you have games where the players’ verbal input can actually create objects, situations, and even characters in the game world. The earliest example I can think of is the old James Bond RPG by Victory Games. In that game you had Hero Points, which you could spend to increase success or reduce failure in dice rolls. But you could also spend them to create situations beneficial for your character, like making sure there’s a convenient baseball bat in the trunk of the car, or that the storefront has a cloth awning to break your fall. The extreme of this type would be a game like _Donjon_, where player input is integral to the mechanics, not just a rule added to the side for rare situations. Even further along you have storytelling games like _Universalis_ or Ed’s own _Topos_, but at that point I’d say we’ve moved from RPGs to Something Else.

So I guess we could categorize player input in terms of Extent (modify vs. actively create) and Potency (side rule with minor effect on mechanics vs. happens all the time and integral to the game rules).

2) Does it always have to be the GM who is responsible for this, or can/should the players share in this power?

I assume Ed means the power to _adjudicate_ rules changes arising from verbal description, since obviously both the GM and the players can describe situations that require adjudication. To the extent that players share in this power, the distinction between them and the GM blurs; at the far end of that spectrum you have storytelling games like those mentioned above. Is there a point to a distinction between RPGs and STGs? I think so — they are, ultimately, very different experiences. In an RPG you, as a player, have a single role to focus on, and a sense of the rest of the game world being outside of your control. Sure, the guy who controls it may just be Bob who inhabits the next cubicle at work, but still, in a traditional RPG there’s a tension created from a dual sense of power and helplessness: I’m completely in control of my character, but _anything_ could happen. This tension is a valuable part of the roleplaying experience, and it is lost in a game like _Universalis_ where all the players have equal stake in adjudicating the game world. It is replaced by other tensions and advantages, to be sure, not least of which is a greater likelihood that the output of a game session will form a coherent, pleasing narrative.

There are lots of fruitful grey areas along the spectrum of player control. There’s “troupe-style” play — that’s the _Ars Magica_ term for it — where all players are co-GMs when it comes to establishing the basic setting, but in any given session only one person will be creating and running the adventure. (This is how the superhero game I’m currently involved with is run. Even my D&D game has two DMs trading off responsibilities.) There’s tools like “Storypath Cards”:http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_0800.html. And in a lot of gaming groups there’s an informal, unquantified dynamic whereby player suggestions can shape the game world, like when a player may briefly take the role of an NPC to lighten the burden on the GM and provide a bit of variety.

Intuitively, I prefer roleplaying games to storytelling games. I think it’s because the traditional players-and-GM framework creates clear expectations on both sides of the equation. In a storytelling game, where everyone’s on equal footing, the process is less like a game and more like co-writing, which, absent just the right mix of creative personalities, can be downright grueling. I also suspect that your average mix of players includes some people who crave storytelling power (the GM-types) and others who have less interest in worrying about the Big Story, and appreciate the narrow focus (and close identification) that comes of having to only worry about their character. Being co-responsible for the totality of a story seems to me to be much more difficult than either playing a single character or being a neutral arbiter for non-player characters and the rest of the setting.

So, getting back to the question — the players _can_ share in the GM’s power, but the more they do this, the more gameplay changes in significant ways, and it might not be everybody’s cup of tea. That level of input from players certainly should not be considered obligatory or integral to a traditional RPG.

Looking back over all this, I think I may have tangented off of Ed’s original points more than I intended. C’est la vie.

UPDATE: The previous sentence has proved entirely correct — I had a feeling I was tangenting, and I was. Ed comments down in the comments to this entry, and “here”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001454.html. I’ll pick up discussion down in the comments as well.

I have some very bad news. Many of you have commended me for my strong stand against Jai of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”:http://www.bravotv.com/Queer_Eye_for_the_Straight_Guy/ and my public calls for him to be removed from the show. Sometimes it’s hard to know just how one man can make a difference in the world, but when I first saw Jai I knew that someone had to speak out, and that I was going to be the one to do it. I feel that my campaign is really only getting off the ground, but now it looks as if it may be cut short all too soon. You see, I no longer have access to cable television, including Bravo, and so I’m no longer able to watch the show.

This is not particularly surprising, in that Polytropos HQ does not _pay_ for cable television. As I’ve noted, my long drama with the cable company ended in total victory, with HQ getting all the standard channels while only paying for the bare-bones “basic cable.” But now, it seems, some work order has made its way through the bureaucratic morass, and a switch somewhere has been thrown. It’s possible that the sudden loss of all but the broadcast channels is an anomaly that will reverse itself, but I doubt it.

I can count the reasons I will miss cable on two fingers: “Jon Stewart”:http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/thedailyshowwithjonstewart/ and Queer Eye. It’s a small deal in the greater scheme of things, but it does mean that this blog will have to cease providing a valuable public service. If you read this, and you live in Metro D.C., and you will be taping the show anyway, let me know if I can borrow said tapes, and I will continue the Jaiwatch in glorious bursts of passionate critique. But I don’t think I’m going to ask anyone to tape the show just for my sake, because that would be . . . what’s the word I’m looking for? . . . pathetic. (From the balcony: “Too late!” Just had to say it before Malcolm could put it in the comments.)

And so, for what may be the final Jaiwatch segment, I have a surefire test involving the Fab Five. Ladies, let’s say you’ve just met this guy at “Iota”:http://www.iotaclubandcafe.com/ and he’s positively _dreamy_, but you’re not sure if he’s a classy “metrosexual”:http://www.wordspy.com/words/metrosexual.asp or if he’s straight-up gay, as it were. You’re lookin’ for love tonight, not somebody to go shoe-shopping with, so it’s fairly important. How do you find out in no time flat with a minimum of fuss? Simple. Ask the gent this question:

“Who’s your favorite cast member of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?”

Then refer to the following chart:

|*response*|*meaning*|
|”What the f*** are you talking about?”|Not gay.|
|”Ted”|Definitely not gay.|
|”Kyan”|If pronounced ‘KAI-en’, not gay, otherwise inconclusive but tending towards gay.|
|”Thom”|Inconclusive, unless pronounced in any way that clearly distinguishes it from ‘Tom’, in which case, definitely gay.|
|”Jai”|Both gay and a poor judge of character.|
|”Carson”|Either a straight guy posing as a gay guy, or clinically insane, or both.|

It’s one of those persistent memes: “The Wizard of Oz is actually a political allegory about monetary reform and the gold standard.” I’ve often heard it without trusting it, but never really knew a whole lot about who first said it, what it meant exactly, or to what extent it was accurate. Steve Cook of Snarkout “comes to the rescue”:http://www.snarkout.org/archives/2003/11/16/, as is his wont, with an informative essay full of stuff you didn’t realize you were curious about until you read it. Good stuff.

You can now “view the cover of TIME Magazine”:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/coversearch from any week of its existence, including the obvious choice: that of your birthday. Hat tips to “Eve Tushnet”:http://eve-tushnet.blogspot.com/ and “Slacktivist”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/.

My natal TIME cover is “Jesus Christ Superstar Rocks Broadway”:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/0,16641,1101711025,00.html. The funny thing is that I have that Broadway soundtrack memorized backwards and forwards — as a kid it was one of the records from my parents’ collection that I listened to addictively. (The other big one was Don McLean’s _American Pie_, also, coincidentally, released in 1971.) JCS still holds up, as far as I’m concerned, though in general I’m neither a Webber nor a Sondheim fan, but someone who dislikes musicals. (“Sorry, Glen.”:http://www.engel-cox.org/iArchives/001353.html#001353 ) I don’t sing in the shower often, but when I do, as often as not I’m singing “Pilate’s Dream” or “King Herod’s Song.” That’s a little disturbing when you think about it, but not anywhere near as disturbing as “Jesus Christ Superstar: A Resurrection”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000018CA/102-6404086-5324915?v=glance, featuring Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls in the role of Jesus. My friend “Chad”:http://www.locustwind.com/blog/ lent me that CD once, but I have since forgiven him.

They’re doing a book tour for a new children’s book. We missed the concert but caught the tail end of the line and got them to sign the book for the baby-to-be. Plus we managed to get “this picture”:http://www.polytropos.org/mt-static/misc/tmbg.jpg. My life is complete.

This is a pretty surreal development, especially in light of my recent ramblings on dictators in exile. Apparently the emergency spending bill Bush signed on November 6—the infamous $87.5 billion—quietly included a $2 million bounty for the capture of Charles Taylor. The State Department spin is that the money isn’t an explicit call for Boba, IG-88, Bossk and the rest of the gang to hightail it to Calabar, Nigeria, where Taylor is cooling his heels. The bill vaguely refers to “rewards for an indictee of the Special Court for Sierra Leone”; Richard Boucher said that they were still deciding just how the money would be spent. But the Nigerian government is, understandably, a bit upset. They were never Taylor supporters, but agreed to host his exile because it was (presumably) the only way to get him to go quietly. The U.S. actively participated in the negotiations that led to that outcome, and now they appear to be going back on the deal in a way that impinges on another nation’s sovereignty.

Which puts me at two minds about it all. It would be a fine thing to see a corrupt dictator get his comeuppance, and while the Sierre Leone court will no doubt be an imperfect vehicle for justice, it’s something. Taylor also remains uniquely able to keep the conflict going in Liberia by meddling from afar; ending his exile would be good for the country as a whole. But what a dumb, bizarro way to go about it.

Ah—pardon me for researching while I’m writing, but the latest appears to be a bit of backpedaling over at State. So the money isn’t a bounty, it’s an “additional tool” for coaxing somebody, somehow, to do something about this whole Taylor thing. But not, apparently, by hiring someone to wrap up the guards in his wrist cords, vault over the outer wall with his jetpack, and stick CT’s carbon-freezed body into the hold of Slave One. So what is the money meant to do, then?

The plot thickens, albeit leavened with some sloppy reporting. This November 2 article in The Observer implies that the money-which-is-not-bounty-money is connected to our friends at Northbridge Services Group, Ltd.—more on them in a moment.

But Obasanjo will not find it easy to dissuade the US from financing an attempt to kidnap Taylor. In August, an Anglo-American mercenary company, Northbridge Services Group Ltd, was quoted on an American conservative website as offering to attempt to arrest Taylor.

As far as I can tell the conservative website in question is Crosswalk.com—here’s the actual article there. Why they’d want to cite that source, when the Northbridge connection is mentioned elsewhere, is beyond me. But the real sloppiness comes from this article on the World Socialist Web Site, which claims:

According to the British Observer newspaper, an Anglo-American mercenary outfit, Northbridge Services Group Ltd., was quoted on a far-right US website in August offering to arrest Taylor for the sum of $2 million.

It would be oh-so interesting if the $2 million figure really had been quoted by Northbridge and then made its way into the spending bill, because that would strongly imply that the U.S. planned to hire Northbridge to get Taylor. But neither the Observer article or the Crosswalk one actually mentions that specific number. It appears to be a conveniently inserted but unsubstantiated claim.

But that doesn’t mean that the situation doesn’t stink. Northbridge is a “private military company”—basically a mercenary outfit. They’re the newest face on Executive Outcomes, a PMC staffed largely by white South African ex-military types going entrepeneurial with martial skills honed while enforcing the apartheid regime. It’s not clear exactly how much overlap there is between the two companies, but EO was hip-deep in Sierre Leone’s civil strife in the 90’s, and now Northbridge is offering its services to apprehend those wanted by the Special Court. Heck, www.executiveoutcome.com takes you right to Northbridge’s website. Whether those South Africans are out of the picture or whether they’ve simply been airbrushed off the website and corporate image is, for me, the difference between an ethically ambiguous enterprise and a deplorable one. Since I have no way to know for sure, my basic take is that it stinks, and if it turns out that it’s actually true that the $2 million was earmarked (however informally) for Northbridge, it stinks to high heaven.

Thanks to those of you who alerted me to the fact that comments were down briefly. They weren’t the only thing — I wasn’t able to access Movable Type either. “Ed”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/ noted that it was probably a provider issue, and so I emailed “Myacen”:http://www.myacen.com/ and described the problem. They had it fixed in under twenty minutes. They were that fast when I was setting up the blog too. Myacen: highly recommended. All is well now.

A lot of independent roleplaying games are designed with a very narrow narrative scope in mind, much to their advantage. I’ve complained before that the use of a universal system like d20 turns out less than optimal games. Focusing on a genre or subgenre allows you to work in mechanics that reinforce the kinds of stories you want to tell. Games like Sorcerer and My Life With Master take this concept even further—the stories those games are designed to create are constrained tightly by setting, characters, even (and especially) theme.

Another example of this type of game is currently in the works. Ralpha Mazza, co-author of the excellent storytelling game Universalis, has released a playtest version of his new RPG, Robots & Rapiers. It’s a game of android Musketeers. Sort of. The game takes places in a realm called Auvernais, which is your basic Alexander Dumas / Court of the Sun King milieu, except that it’s inhabited entirely by robots who are programmed to believe that they really are the colorful characters they’re portraying. But a small number of robots (including, naturally, the player characters) are slowly becoming aware that they inhabit nothing more than a gigantic, ultra-immersive theme park designed to entertain the humans, who haven’t visited in a century because the planet Auvernais has been out of contact with the rest of the galaxy due to war. The robots keep up their roles in their fictional world because it’s what they’re programmed to do. The story of the game is the story of the characters gradually breaking free of their programming, attaining true sentience, and then deciding what to do about it.

It’s so wacky, and yet so clearly defined, that I suspect it’ll make a fine game. It incorporates some clever mechanics, especially the the counterbalanced traits of Role and Self-Awareness. Robots, it turns out, make great RPG characters, since the necessity of boiling down a personality into a bunch of quantifiable attributes isn’t near as egregious when you’re dealing with a mechanical entity in the first place. Definitely a game to watch—the current version is definitely a rough draft, but one full of potential.