game-y, with an invitation

[jazzfish]

Unrelated to anything: one of the baby seagulls has taken an actual flight!

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My copy of Nobilis 3e arrived today. It is beautiful, as expected. It's no Great White Book, also as expected, but it has its own charm. ("Accessibility" and "playability" being charming in their own way.)

Maybe you got to play the game back when it was a little pink book printed on demand by Pharos Press. Or maybe you got to play it when it was this huge coffee-table book, lavish and elegant, made by Hogshead Publishing, Ltd. and later distributed by Guardians of Order before they decided to stop sending out money and books and stuff and just lurk like a serpent, coiled around the dark heart of the world.

I heard that’s what happened to them! I might be wrong. If you’ve been to the heart of the world then you would probably know.

(Compare with the cold rushing brilliance of "At the Shore" [scroll down to the 'spoiler' button and click it to show], the intro-fic from the GWB, luckily preserved at the end of the new edition.)

So, that was a cool and unexpected interruption to the day.

Edit: Somehow 3e is actually TALLER than the GWB, and about half a centimeter too tall to fit on my bookshelves. DAMMIT NOBILIS.

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In other role-playing news, last week I got my copy of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple (and the supplement, The Book of Letters). Do is a storytelling game, in the most literal sense: the players write a collaborative story about how their pilgrims help people and get in (and out of) trouble. Depending on how much they do of the former versus the latter, at the end of the story they're either celebrated as heroes or driven off by an angry mob. It's reminiscent of first-season Avatar crossed with The Little Prince.

It also seems perfectly designed for play-by-internet. Would any of you, o readers, be interested in such a thing? I'm thinking it would work well as a DW/LJ community: a sticky-post at the top containing the list of characters, the story-seed letter, and the story so far, and one post for each player's turn. I may have an automated web-based solution for the drawing of stones and such, or I may have to handle that manually; either way, I'm up for it. Any potential interest?

(The rules as presented at the link above are a draft, and were tweaked somewhat for the final version. I can certainly provide a summary of the actual rules. Naturally I also encourage everyone to spend the $10 on the PDF, or $25 for the PDF + very pretty hard copy.)

Comments

[notyourwendy]

Going on record as wanting in!

[jazzfish]

Excellent. :)

[rbandrews]

You know I'm in. Once I write the thing.

[jazzfish]

Wasn't sure if you were wanting to play or not. Awesome!

[silmaril]

I played Nobilis in the GWB stage. It worked... all right... as a play-by-e-mail game. (However, our Game Master would have bitten our Noble heads right off for calling him anything close to a "Hollyhock God.") The game petered out, because of scheduling issues between players, and that is something I still regret to this day. It was good.

[desfido]

... I thought I just submitted this. Apparently I didn't.

Anyway, I'd be in, I think; main controlling factor would be how fast/often we were expected to do things, and what times of day.

[jazzfish]

Timing and speed are a good question. I was thinking on the nature of 'at least one turn per day,' but not everyone has time to refresh DW all day. Time of day is pretty flexible: it's either you do your turn by yourself, or you contribute suggestions to someone else's turn.

Thoughts?

[desfido]

Bah, I've changed my email workflow recently, and what with Friday-ness & weekend & all that, I managed to miss this.

Did you mean one person's turn per day, or one turn per person per day? While I think the latter would be preferred in principle, the former may be more practical.

Since everyone else can potentially be interacting on any given Pilgrim's turn (based on my reading of the rules), it seems like it'd be nice if folks could have time to hash out the one sentence in comments (or whatever) without having to worry too much about timing issues (which, given that there seems likely to be at least three timezones involved, seems fairly likely to come up). While there may be problems for a given person regardless, it seems more likely that things can be done w/o too much burden of trying to sync to other peoples schedules if there's only one turn to worry about per day.

Maybe I'm worrying too much about trying to give folks time & opportunity to interact on a given turn. But since I'm mostly likely to really only have time in the 9p-2a & 7a-10a range (and not the whole of either block), I'm just really thinking about how I'd prefer things for my own convenience. I completely understand if it's decided that things should be otherwise for a better overall experience for folks, & would be happy to give it an attempt regardless on how things are decided.

& maybe it'd be better if it was done somewhat more synchronously, and everyone just tried to coordinate a given block of one to three hours & do the whole game at once (assuming the estimates of time for play given are accurate)? I dunno.

[mikailborg.livejournal.com]

I'm very curious, and most interested. The more time I spend as GM, the less interested I am in the dice and the more in the narrative.

[jazzfish]

Excellent! I shall keep you posted as it develops.

I highly recommend checking out the independent RPG "scene" for more narrative-focused games. I've found that I no longer have the patience (or time?) to wade through a 250pp 8x11 book to learn a new setting or a new mechanical system, and indie games tend to come in digest-sized volumes. Plus in my experience they have less emphasis on number-crunching and more on the awesome stories you can tell.

(I have no useful advice on where to start with the indie scene. I got into it by accident: I stumbled across the Indie Press Revolution booth at Origins several years ago and picked up a couple of things that looked interesting.)

[mikailborg.livejournal.com]

Also, I followed the link to Nobilis 3e and it sounds surprisingly interesting. Based on what I'm reading so far, it almost sounds like a good framework to hang a (don't laugh) Doctor Who campaign on. What do you say to someone who's dithering on adding this game to their library?

[jazzfish]

STOP DITHERING AND BUY IT. Or at least check out the free preview.

More specifically, I don't know how well it'll translate into another genre: it's very very much its own thing. (The best comparison I can think of is In Nomine, only you're all starting out Word-bound, and instead of the two sides there are seven, plus the REAL enemy that you're all at least nominally united against.) It could work for a Timelords game... hm. I'd certainly be interested to hear how it goes!

(I don't know if there's going to be a non-limited-edition physical release of 3e or not. I do know that the GWB goes for around $100 on eBay, which is kind of outrageous... but it /is/ a work of art.)

[mikailborg.livejournal.com]

I've gotten to the point where I almost prefer my gaming materials as ePubs and PDFs. Easy to manipulate during the game on my laptop, I can print out parts for player reference, and each digital copy is one less thing to pack in banker's boxes every time I have to move.

Yeah, I think I'll be picking up the $20 version (PDF for the laptop and ePub for iOS).

[bitbug.livejournal.com]

I pledged for the DO kickstarter as well. What a beautiful book.

[jazzfish]

I thought I saw your name on that list! And yeah, it's very nicely done.