Sorry for the content gap over here. I have a couple of entries (“Needed: A Grandparent Clock”:http://www.polytropos.org/ella/archives/000246.html and “Smile Standards”:http://www.polytropos.org/ella/archives/000247.html) over on the “baby blog”:http://www.polytropos.org/ella/ that are broader in scope than the usual Ella-specific gushing. Go look at those while I figure out what to write about here.

From mid-November through the Christmas season, the best food in the universe is popcorn. Not just any popcorn, but those squat, decorated cylinders that contain equal parts of the cheese, butter, and caramel-flavored varieties. These popcorn tins are, in fact, perfect. You would _think_ that the perfect bin would be two-thirds full of cheese popcorn, with each of the others only taking up one-sixth of the volume. That would certainly be a more appropriate proportion considering the relative tastiness of the three types — but it is precisely the scarcity of the cheese popcorn that makes each fistful of it the more delicious, and in turn forces you to take some time to appreciate the subtleties of the other two. (This argument works equally well for the unwashed hordes who actually prefer caramel or butter to cheese.)

Suanna and I were making a return ‘n’ exchange run earlier today, a dreadfully tedious errand that took us to Toys R Us, among other places. But it was there, standing at the customer service counter, that I happened to glance at a pile of familiarly-sized cylinders decorated with pictures of the Hulk and Spider-Man. A sign in front of them read:

Popcorn Tins
Normally $7.50
Now only $.50

That’s not a typo. Look in the dictionary under “serendipity,” and you will see a picture of me holding a Spider-Man popcorn tin with a goofy smile on my face. If you believe in God, “serendipity” is too weak a word — you must resort to the far more sinewy “Providence.” And if you don’t believe in God, an event like the Popcorn Tin Unlooked-For will change your mind for a day.

Exercising a monumental degree of self-restraint, I only bought one tin. We’re driving back to D.C. in a few days, and there won’t be any spare room in the car. I can finish one tin between now and Monday easily, but not two — that’s as sad a commentary on the limitations of these mortal shells we inhabit as I can think of just now.

“Jim’s at his quotable best”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_01_04.html#004887. Again. This time on Iraq & WMD:

Saddam really was evil. And we really did get him. The costs of that deed include not just the dead and the maimed on our side, and the dead and the maimed on theirs, and the couple hundred billions of dollars from buildup through reconstruction. The costs include the Administration’s decision to motivate the American people by fear, to perpetrate an official farce (inspections) and to be less truthful about factual matters than one of the most tyrannical governments on earth.

Yes, it was too much to pay, and to continue to pay.

I’ve been a bad blogreader this month; between holiday travel and the new Polytropina, my browsing time has been cut way short. The result is that there’s only two additions to the ‘roll this month, and plans to subdivide it will be procrastinated yet again. I do have a whole passel of new blogs on my reading list, many thanks to trackbacks, so look for more additions next month.

* High marks for “The 20′ By 20’ Room”:http://www.20by20room.com/, a new group blog about roleplaying games. While its authors don’t have all the publishing credits that the folks at “Rock Scissors Blog”:http://rockscissorsblog.blogspot.com/ do, they have something more valuable: people who consistently post stuff. It’s all been well worth reading so far, too.

* I’ve always had one eye on “Pudding Time!”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/, the blog of Michael Hall, who also hosts “Ed’s blog”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/. Somewhere along the line it became one of those blogs I looked forward to reading. Time to ‘roll it.

* Removed from the blogroll: the aforementioned Rock Scissors (supplanted by 20×20), as well as “Salam Pax”:http://dearraed.blogspot.com/, who is still writing from an important place at an important time. Just not well. I’ll be happy to restore either of them when their frequency and/or quality return.

If you remember reading some comments under “this entry”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000238.html, not to mention seeing a blogroll update that no longer exists, don’t worry — you’re not insane. They were there and at some point yesterday afternoon the blog appears to have been rolled back a few hours. Very strange. I’ll replace the rogue entry today or tomorrow.

On with the gamer hat. Not only that, but the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game gamer hat. How’s _that_ for narrowing one’s audience?

It’s been a couple weeks since Jim Henley raised the issue at “The 20′ By 20′ Room”:http://www.20by20room.com/ of “the problem of time in Amber gaming”:http://www.20by20room.com/2003/12/amber_in_three_.html. His most recent experience with Amber is “my Amber game”:http://www.polytropos.org/web/amber.html, which is currently on hiatus — as a GM, I needed a break from the complexities and stresses of running an Amber game, some of which rose directly from the sort of timing problems that Jim describes. I’d like to say that I’ve spent the past several days mulling over this issue carefully, but all I’ve really been doing is _trying_ to mull, which has amounted to periodic bursts of “Time in Amber. Hmm. Yep. Still a problem.” I told myself I wouldn’t write any sort of response unless I had an actual _solution_, and in that I am only halfway successful, since I have a solution to offer, though one that’s spur-of-the-moment and quite possibly unworkable.

(I won’t be splicing in quotes from Jim’s essay, so if you’re still along for this ride, go read it and then come back.)

Last part first. As an addendum Jim describes what to my mind is a bigger problem than that of timeflow: the way that spotlight time gets divided into near-nothingness when you have 5-6 players plus a GM for a mere three hours of gaming. One germinal solution he offers is rewarding group play with experience points. In general, I think rewarding players with points — in other words, out and out bribery — is a good way to encourage harmonious play. In Amber, even the most dedicated narrativist will have a hard time turning down that extra point that will give her second rank in Psyche.

A tangent: in my Amber campaign before this one, we eventually dispensed of numbers altogether to the point where no one even bothered to bring rulebooks or character sheets to game night, because they weren’t needed. I was happy about this at the time, but after that, in Mike Jacobs’ game, I rediscovered as a player the value that a point-based game can have in encouraging campaign contributions. The prospect of additional character points was more than enough, for example, to inspire me to write a touch of “mediocre game fiction”:http://members.tripod.com/brandspace/valentine/wyvern.html for that campaign. When I started my current campaign, the on-hiatus one, I followed Mike’s lead and used points extensively, including a detailed “partial powers system”:http://www.polytropos.org/web/amber/amberpowers.html. Players got one point for showing up for a session, plus additional ones for campaign contributions and for metagame tasks like tracking spotlight time and jotting down memorable quotes. From my perspective, it’s worked very well.

So generally speaking, I like the idea of a point reward system. But how could we use it to tackle the thornier problem of timeflow? Jim is quite right that the natural actions of Amber players tend to favor the short-term actor, thus shrinking the time horizon and introducing all sorts of unlikelihoods and difficulties. But we can easily imagine an Ideal Amber Game where these problems never come up. In our ideal game, all the players engage in the same relative amounts of different types of spotlight time: short-term conversations with NPCs, middle-term activities like traveling through Shadow, and long-term ones like raising armies or instigating revolutions. Our ideal players aren’t necessarily all moving in the same type of time at the _same_ time, but, conveniently enough, they only choose to interact with other PCs when they’re both at the same place, chronologically speaking. In the ideal game, everything balances out in an intricate, chronometric pattern.

This will never happen in real life, of course, but the difference between the reality and something acceptably close to the ideal is often just a matter of one or two character choices. If an incentive (i.e. a point bribe) could nudge those players in the right (i.e. harmonious) direction, a lot of those timing problems might just resolve themselves.

Let’s take an example. A player (let’s call him Greg) is at a point where he can choose whether to spend the next ten minutes of spotlight time in a one-on-one conversation with an NPC, or raising an army over the next several days and weeks. Greg’s character, Caitlin, is a few days behind the bulk of the PCs in the timeline, and we know that Mike’s character, Alexandria is hoping to trump her to ask an important favor. Clearly, the army-raising would be the preferable course of action from the perspective of group timing. But unless Greg is unusually sensitive to group dynamics, there’s no particular reason why he would favor that option. Maybe he’s like Jim and generally prefers to spend his time engaging in nuanced conversations with NPCs, so all else being equal he’d choose that route.

If Greg could score a character point (or fraction of a point, depending on the scale of the game) by making the harmonious choice, it might be enough to tip the scales, and even make him happy to make the “right” decision. So then the question becomes: where does that point come from? At first I thought this was an idea-killer, since the path of the GM handing out ad-hoc bonus points is riddled with pitfalls. But then it hit me:

It’s your fellow players that hand out the points. The GM stays out of it. In our example, Mike could bribe Greg to take the course of action he preferred. After coming up with this idea I realized it probably owes something to Topos, “Ed Heil’s”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/ storytelling game, in the way it uses player buying power to create consensus.

Two considerations: where do the players get these points, and what exactly can they spend them on? For the first, I don’t think many players would want to give up their own experience points to another player just to encourage them down a particular path. But what if every second (or third or fourth, adjust as desired) character point you receive is instead a bribery point (needs a better name) that is useless to you but allows you to grant a character point (or fraction of a point, see above, yada yada) to somebody else. As for the second consideration — this is where I see this idea potentially falling apart. At first glance it seems like you could use them for all sorts of things, like getting someone to join your character for a scene or two, or encouraging them to spend their spotlight time in a particular way. But could you use them to encourage _any_ sort of behavior from another player or character? And if not, where do you draw the line? It is here that I punt.

Incidentally, Jim favors 6+ players in an Amber game, and is “a bit baffled”:http://www.20by20room.com/2003/12/amber_in_three__1.html that anyone could play it with the intimate group sizes that would tend to solve spotlight and timing questions by themselves. I tend to agree, though when you get up to six or seven players plus a GM, I can’t see a way around the problems with spotlight time. Maybe a side perk of player-player bribes is that they provide another reason to stay engaged during other players’ turns. But that is admittedly only a partial fix; barring a pair of telepaths to run things, I’d say the ideal size for an Amber group is 4-5 players plus a GM.

The worst thing you can say about the Black Rose, a new Irish pub in downtown Grand Rapids, is that it is very much of a type: the requisite “homey Irish pub” that you’ll find in many a new development or urban revitalization zone. The dim earthtones on the walls and the shelves stacked with fake antiques are designed to make the place feel like an old neighborhood joint, even though it’s only a year old, if that. But just as you start to get yourself worked up into a bout of cynicism—ambience painted on the walls and all that—you notice that the bartender makes a very good Black & Tan. And that—joy of joys!—they have Strongbow cider on tap. I have a hard enough time finding Strongbow in D.C., where we have places like the Brickskeller.

But this isn’t about the bar, it’s about the band. I’ve mentioned Craic Wisely before—one of their members, Jonathan, is a longtime friend. They play Irish folk music of the slam-your-flagon-on-the-table variety. It’s been plenty of fun to listen to their CD, but as you might expect with a band of this sort, the real pudding-proof comes from seeing them live, which I finally got a chance to do at the Black Rose this past Friday. Going in, I had a little bit of that trepidation that you always get when approaching a friend’s creative endeavor—what if it doesn’t measure up, and you have to pretend to be enjoying yourself?

This, um, wasn’t a problem. They oh so totally rocked. By the second song, there amid the faux-traditional decor, they had created something entirely genuine: a packed bar hanging on their every note. A handful of people were clearly there to see the band, but most were ordinary patrons who, instead of gabbing in the corners about whatever it was they were planning to gab about, had their attention fixed on the stage. Craic Wisely’s recipe is simple: play straight-up, high-energy traditional Irish music with a couple guitars, bass, drum, mandolin and accordion, and do it as if your life depended on every song. They succeeded in creating that feeling of ale-soaked conviviality that every pub in the world tries to capture and that is absolutely impossible to fake.

During one song, a drunk guy in a pink suit was doing an Irish jig in the middle of the floor. He was surrounded by a bunch of other guys in suits colored red, blue, green, and black. Mr. Black was a stocky young man of clear Irish descent, also drunk but holding his liquor with dignified calm as he nodded approvingly at his friend’s steps and missteps.

“Are you guys with a bachelor party or something?” asked Todd, CW’s frontman, after they finished the song and Mr. Pink swayed triumphantly.

“A funeral,” replied Mr. Black.

“Seriously?” said Todd.

“What do you expect? The guy was a fuckin’ Mick,” said Mr. Black proudly.

If Craic Wisely’s members strike you as a little clean-cut for an Irish bar band, you wouldn’t be too far from the truth. I know for a fact that Jonathan knows which end of a bottle of whiskey is up, but when the night’s gig is done, he doesn’t stumble off to piss in the Grand River and mumble about lost love—he goes home to a lovely wife and two darling children. The only one of them who looks at all likely to instigate a rousing bar brawl (something that would permanently cement their street cred) is Jason Herrick, who you can imagine flipping out if anyone should get between him and his bodhran. Still, their lack of obvious alcoholism aside, Craic Wisely can belt out songs about moonshine and sinking ships with the best of them. Shane MacGowan would be proud.

UPDATE: For some strange reason, the comments to this entry got deleted. I didn’t do it—at least not on purpose.

“Alas”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000180.html, there was no “gimli eowyn chocolate pudding.” There were lots of Tolkien-related searches, but not many of them were really funny. Many many searches for “return of the king sloth” or some variation of that, which I can only assume is referring to what Michael Thomas referred to as the “Mr. Potato ‘Sloth’ Head” leading the orc army at Pelennor Fields. Anyway, here’s some of the odd searches that led Web wanderers, by hook or by crook, to this site.

Department of Things to Ponder

why does art most often deal with rage?
responses unhesitating the past is surreal
are dominic monaghan and billy boyd still great friends
jesus christ superstar 2000 semiotics
do gamers participate in physical activity

Not Unusual But Proud That It Led Them Here Dept.

anapestic hexameter
500 000 kilowatts of p-funk power
good gravy interjection
cheesecake factory sucks

What To Get For the Man Who Has Everything Dept.

pictures of imported hondas with green neon lights
decal for girls that play paintball
nifty erotic story archives
strange nekkidness

Welcome to 2004, one and all. I have no sweeping, end-of-year/beginning-of-year statements to make about life, love, or the inexorable march of time at this point. Just a simple piece of advice:

Even if the New Year’s Eve party has a “county fair” theme, four corn dogs is four corn dogs too many.