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[Possible Spoilers]

Anybody seen Bobcat Goldthwait's new(?)* movie, God Bless America? I saw it over the weekend, and it's probably my favorite thing I've seen this year (and remember, I'm a horror and comic nerd, so that means it beat out Avengers and Cabin in the Woods).

Possible Spoilers
The movie is about Frank (Joel "Bill's brother, even though he sounds exactly like Dan Ackroyd" Murray), a guy who is surrounded by awful people (ie, average Americans) and bombarded with stupidity (TV) to the point that he fantasizes about pulling a Charlie Whitman. When his life starts to completely fall apart, he decides to end it all, but at the last minute decides that first he'll take a particularly horrible reality TV star out first. After the deed is done, he's once again ready to blow his head off when a spunky young runaway convinces him that it would be wrong for him to kill himself when there are so many other horrible people who deserve to die. Hilarity ensues.

So kind of a cross between Falling Down, Natural Born Killers, Idiocracy, and Amazon Women on the Moon. Worth watching for Frank's rants alone (as well as the kid's ode to Alice Cooper), worth staying for the bloodshed and wackiness. The clips of TV shows, drive time radio, and just the overall horribleness of most people is also hilarious, but I'm not sure if it counts as parody since it's not really exaggerated--it's a pretty faithful depiction of American pop culture/life, just framed in a way that highlights how fucking stupid it all is.

I give it 17 thumbs up.


*or at least new-ish--the only place we've got that plays this kind of movie sometimes gets them long after they were actually released, and IMDB gives a 2011 release date.

"A girl is on the phone wanting to line up an abortion, and the guys are looking at a computer to find pornography, and they are also using drugs. It is all very tastefully done." - Ken Ham

http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2012/06/11/should-we-really-expect-anything-else/

Any words I can think of to describe how this makes me feel seem woefully inadequate.

http://juggalobook.com/

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Rites-exorcism-performed-ordained-minister-your-location-/390359310668

The Fortean Times article where I read about this also says that people sell spells on ebay, which has be torn between "it's wrong to take advantage of people too stupid to know any better" and "I could use a few extra bucks."

Anybody else planning on going this year?

I'll be running M-Force, Hobomancer, and a Muppet Robin Hood game and will be on 8 panels this year (current Hex schedule, which I think is final, is here for anyone interested).

Also, as of yesterday Crafty Games was still looking for a few people to help run games/work their booth. So if anyone here is fluent int Spycraft/Fantasycraft/Mistborn and might want to trade some time for badges/crash space/swag, let me know and I'll get you their GenCon guy's contact info.

I'm about to (re-)start working on a new edition of our M-Force game, which we're hoping to release later this year. It'll use the QAGS system, but as with most of our games there will be some tweaks. There's one bit in particular that I keep changing my mind about, so I'm posting the details here in hopes of getting some feedback.

I'll try to give all the basic info needed to keep the thread self-contained, but if anyone wants more details, you can download the QAGS Qik Start Rules for a more complete look at the system and go to http://www.kickmonsterbutt.com for more details on the game itself (there's a more or less usable* PDF version of the first edition in the downloads section).

*The layout was done in some ancient version of PageMaker that wasn't fully compatible with Windows XP, so weird shit happened when i made the PDF. Also, the layout of the first edition was shit to begin with.

The Basic System:
The basic QAGS systems has the following stats*:
Body, Brain, and Nerve--your typical core attributes (physical/mental/social)
Job--Overall "class" (Knight, Slacker, Magical Hobo, etc.)
Gimmick--The thing that makes you a special little snowflake. Acceptable Gimmicks depend on the game. For a "realistic" game Gimmicks are basically stupid human tricks (Always Find A Parking Space, Open Beer Bottles With Anything, etc.). More epic games might have Gimmicks like Psychic Powers or Last Son of Krypton or whatever.
Weakness--Your heroic flaw. Like Gimmick, available options depend on the game. Possibilities include things like Alcoholic, The Gods Hate You, Lycanthropy, etc.
Skills--Things you know a bit about, or aspects of your job you're really good at. So stuff like Poker, Horseback Riding, Firearms, and Star Wars Trivia are skills.

*Actually, there are a few others, buy they're kind of secondary: Health Points (lose them, you die), Yum Yums (bennies/Fate/Karma/Drama Points), Tag Line (something cool you'd say), WWPHITM? (Who Would Play Him/Her In The Movie?), and Dumb Fact (just what it sounds like).

Body, Brain, Nerve, Job, Gimmick, and Weakness are typically rated 6-16 for most games (in games with super-heroes and elves and shit they can go higher). Skills are rated +1 to +5. The basic is mechanic is to roll a d20 and try to roll as high as you can without going over the appropriate stat (or stat + Skill, if a skill is applicable). So if you've got a Job of "Cop" at 14, any roll less than 15 succeeds, the higher the better. If you've also got a "guns" skill of +3 and you're shooting, you want to roll under a 17.

In most games, a majority of rolls use Job or Gimmick. If those aren't applicable, you make a Default Roll using Body, Brain, or Nerve. If the action is something pretty much anyone can do to some extent (climbing a tree, using a computer, questioning a witness), you use the full number. If the action requires some level of training/knowledge to perform effectively (fighting, programming a computer, social engineering), you roll against half the appropriate stat. If the action has absolutely no chance of an untrained person succeeding (brain surgery, for instance), a default roll isn't allowed (obviously the last bit depends on the style/genre/tone of the game--Batman could probably make a default roll for brain surgery, depending on who's writing him).

M-Force Special Rule:
M-Force is a game about part-time monster hunters, so everyone has an extra job of "M-Forcer" in addition to their normal job.

M-Force will also add Flaws, which we've used in a couple of supplements. They're basically the opposite of Skills--you have a -1 to -5 penalty that's applied to the number you're rolling against. Things like "shitty aim" of "bad driver."

The Problem:
Obviously, since everyone has the job of "M-Forcer," we want there to be some room for variation. For example, an M-Force office may have a couple of agents who are really good at combat, one who knows a lot about monsters, a medic, and one agent who's good at dealing with the administrative side of things and maintaining community relations (like keeping the office on good terms with the local police and dealing with the press*).

*It occurs to me that now might be a good time to mention that in M-Force, everybody knows monsters exists. The hunters and the critters aren't working together to keep it a secret like in a lot of set-ups.

Anyway, in the first edition, we basically used different Job descriptions to differentiate the different types of agents. So you might be an "M-Force Combat Specialist" or an "M-Force Monster Researcher" or an "M-Force Community Relations Officer," etc. This works pretty well for deciding when a roll is required (the Monster Researcher can recognize some monsters that other agents would have to roll to identify) or whether to use an M-Forcer Job or a default roll (A M-Forcer Maritime Agent can operate a boat with a Job roll while a Community Relations Officer would have to make a default Body roll). The problem comes when you get to the stuff that everybody's trained to do. The M-Force Combat Specialist with a Job Number of 15 has exactly the same chance to hit a monster as the M-Force Librarian with a Job Number of 15. So basically I want to add some nuance.

Scheme #1: Just use Skills and Flaws.
This is the obvious idea, and it kind of works, but I don't really like it. Skills and Flaws are (at least in my mind) supposed to be more about defining what the character does when he's not saving the world, so I don't like mixing the job nuances in there.

Scheme #2: Add In A Special Kind of Skill
I think this is the rule I used in the current draft. Basically, the M-Forcer Job about 5 core job abilities (Monster Lore, Combat, Administration, etc.) with their own Skill Bonuses. You can also buy new abilities for non-core specialties (like Maritime Agent or Medic). I actually tried this in playtests, but it led to a few problems. First off, it required the M-Force Job range to drop down a bit (I think I maxed it out at 12), which makes it different from the 6-16 range that most QAGS players expect (since M-Force takes place in the same ficton as some of our other games, this can potentially cause actual mechanical as well as perceptual issues if M-Force characters mix with characters from Hobomancer or Fort High or something). Also, even with the lower job score, stacking an M-Force skill on top of a regular skill result in target numbers that are too high to be any fun.

Scheme #3: Let the Job Title dictate, with a bonus for specialties.
So, for example, a character with the Job of "M-Force Combat Specialist" would get a flat bonus on all combat-related abilities. This one could lead to the stacking problem, but my bigger concern is that it limits everybody to a single specialty, which leads us back to the original problem if, for example, you're playing the Key West office and everyone's a Maritime Agent. I'd like the option for players who are willing to spend the points to have multiple specialities.

Scheme #4: Skills that add to the degree of success rather than the chance of success.
As I mentioned before, the higher the successful roll, the better (in some cases, you're rolling against someone else or against a Difficulty Number set by the GM, and in all cases, the better the roll, the better the result). Under this plan, the modifier for the specialty adds to the effective roll rather than the chance to hit. So if you've got a Job of 12 and a Combat specialty of +3, you still need to roll a 12 or less to succeed, but once you succeed you add 3 to the roll. So if you roll an 11, your number is 14 for purposes of figuring out the effects of the roll (in this case, whether you hit the target and how much damage you cause).

Scheme #5: Something else, or some combination of these.

Any thoughts?

I live 30 minutes from nowhere. If anything happening, it's in nowhere, and most of my friends live in nowhere. Since I also work in nowhere and my shift ends at 3:30, I often find myself with 2 or 3 hours to kill in nowhere before people get off work or whatever event is going on that night starts. Since nowhere doesn't have a bookstore (well, there's a Books A Million, but anyone who's eve been to one knows they don't count), my options are limited, which results in me seeing a lot of movies that only mind-numbing boredom could cause a thinking human to pay money for. Yesterday I had some time to kill before our weekly game session (currently Star Wars, for the RPG geeks who care) and ended up seeing Ghost Rider 2 (despite the fact that I never saw the original, which I believe came out when I still lived in the civilized world).

After seeing it, I might need to see the first Ghost Rider. Not because the sequel is a good movie--it's objectively awful--but because it's a great Bad Nicolas Cage Movie, and therefore quite entertaining. My friend Andy has a theory that a movie's entertainment value is different from its quality, but that there is a relationship between the two: entertainment value increases the further quality moves in either direction. He usually uses The English Patient as his "ground zero." I haven't seen it, but according to Andy it's not particularly good, not particularly bad, and not the least bit entertaining. For a movie to really be entertaining, it has to be either very good (The Big Lebowski) or very bad (Immortals). I think this applies doubly to Nic Cage movies. Something like The Lord of War is kind of bland and forgettable, but put him in a great movie like Wild At Heart or something terrible like Drive Angry and you've got gold.

This all leads up to my Grand Unified Theory of Nicholas Cage, which is that Nic Cage is the tofu of actors, taking on the flavor of any movie you put him in. Cast him in something like Adaptation or Raising Arizona and he won't fuck it up and might even improve the overall film. Put him in Con Air, on the other hand, and you get exactly the kind of performance you deserve for making a movie like Con Air. I think the "Nic Cage as Tofu" theory is further supported by the fact that in most cases Nic Cage's character in nearly every movie is basically the same twitchy, awkwardly manic, slightly off-putting character. The only real variation from character to character is the frequency and extent of his (mostly ineffective) attempts to make the character seem cool and/or like a bad-ass.

Thoughts like these aren't reason I'm never invited to secret Illuminati meetings, but I think it's safe to say they're a contributing factor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFXXAuDK1Ao

"We have giant turbines that we're working on and we will have lots of zombies and we'll just sort of dangle brains in front of them and they will turn the giant turbines creating energy to lessen the dependence on foreign oil her in America today."

That's MY American Dream.

Since it is a Discordian Holiday, figure I should post a link here.

St. Zevon's Day

Anybody else doing the Reverb Gamers blog prompts that Atlas Games is putting up?

(I heard about it on Ryan Macklin's blog the other day. My responses are posted at  The Death Cookie).

A free holiday PDF from Hex:



As a special holiday gift for you, the role-players of the world, Hex Games has released its latest product, All-Stars: Vice Squad, for free. That's right: for zero dollars and zero cents, you can download 12 pages of full-color hilarity.

Over the years Paradigm City has been plagued by the worst of the worst--mad scientists, alien invaders, super-powered thugs, killer robots, gorilla gangsters, and more. As diverse as these villains are, they all have one thing in common: they are cooler than the Vice Squad. Led by Johnny Cigarette, the Vice Squad includes such D-list super-criminals as Timmy Too-Much-Bacon, Penny Slots, and Intra-Venus DeMilo. These hugely dysfunctional and (kinda sorta) super-powered individuals have joined together to revenge themselves on the world . . . or at least knock over the convenience store down the street and get some beef jerky, frozen burritos, and a few of those sandwiches that come in boxes.

This entirely free PDF gives you everything you need to insert the Vice Squad into your super-hero game, including stats of all seven Vice Squad members, plus their secret origins and backstories; the history of the Vice Squad's hidden crime lair, with descriptions of some of the notable holes on the mini-golf course; and Dumb Tables, including random allies, capers, and convenience store loot.

Though you can use these characters in any game world, with any system, the Vice Squad is designed for use with All-Stars, the game of low-budget superheroics, and the QAGS rules system. Depending on the power level of your PC group, the Vice Squad can be used as comic relief or as the heroes' (kinda sorta) archenemies. Or you can just use the Vice Squad as PCs. If you're honest with yourself, you know that's what you really want to do.

All-Stars—as well as the QAGS rulebook, Leopard Women of Venus, Edison Force, and more—can be purchased at www.hexgames.com and at the finer PDF sales sites. Vice Squad, as mentioned previously, costs no money at all.

For those who would like to sample QAGS before they buy it, the QAGS Qik Start Rules, which include everything you need to play, are available for download at www.hexgames.com, absolutely free (like Vice Squad.)

All-Stars: Vice Squad is written by Steve "All-Stars" Johnson, Leighton "Laser Ponies" Connor, Josh "J.I.N.G.O." Burnett, and Carter "Hobomancer" Newton, with a cover by Jeffrey Johnson.

Be Bad Guys. Have more fun!

http://ogres.wikia.com/wiki/The_Oggies/2011_Oggie_Award_winners

And of course I'm posting this because Hex Games won several of them:
Laser Ponies won the Gold for Game of the Year
Leopard Women of Venus won the Gold for ebook of the Year and Silver for New game of the Year
Our "On Fire" Rules won the Silver for Most Baffling Rule
And Hex artists swept the Artist of the Year category: Jeffrey Johnson (who's done art and covers for a bunch or our games) got the Golden Oggie, which means he beat a little girl, Katie Staffiera, who got the silver for her work on Laser Ponies (Katie was 8 when she did the Laser Ponies art).

Hex Games has just released Sindbad and the Sword of Kingship, a swashbuckling Arabian Nights adventure.

The world is of full of wonder--and danger--and Sindbad is about to find out just how full because, even on shore, he can't keep out of the way of adventure. Sindbad and the Sword of Kingship takes our hero and his crew first into the highest halls of power and then across the seas in quest of a singular treasure.

Sindbad and the Sword of Kingship is an adventure for Hex Games' The Adventures of Sindbad that uses the QAGS Second Edition rules. It includes colorful characters, magical artifacts, secrets of the Island of Mystery, and new sailing rules.


Sindbad and the Sword of Kingship—as well as the QAGS rulebook, The Adventures of Sindbad, Mountains of the Moon: Sindbad in East Africa, Sindbad and the Demon Pumpkin, and more—can be purchased in PDF form at www.hexgames.com and at the finer PDF sales sites for just $2.99.

For those who would like to sample QAGS before they buy it, the QAGS Qik Start Rules, which include everything you need to play Sindbad and the Sword of Kingship, are available for download at www.hexgames.com, absolutely free.

Sindbad and the Sword of Kingship is written by Hex's scholar of all things Arab and Arabian, Ian Engle, and illustrated by Joshua LH Burnett and Leighton Connor.

Live Bigger Legends. Have More Fun!

So, issue #2 of the Wonder Woman reboot introduces Eris as a bad guy:

Don't know jack about the site linked from, but nothing about it immediately screams "bullshit!" Anybody seen any corroboration that this is authentic?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db_P0wHsSz0&feature=share

One idea Hex references a lot in our game and panels is the concept of a "ficton" (in fact, we call the setting that many of our products--M-Force, Weird Times At Charles Fort High, Hobomancer, etc.--take place in "The Hex Ficton"). This is a word coined by Robert Heinlein that basically means "a fictional universe." The idea (at least as we represent it--I'm not sure that I've ever read his books, and my knowledge of the term is definitely second-hand, so we could be way off for all I know) is that every story takes place in a world with its own rules that differ from reality. Often these are obvious, like "magic works" or "man can travel through space." Sometimes, they're not so obvious. Even stories that seem to take place in "the real world" actually take place in alternate realities, but the "laws" of the world that differ from ours often have more to do with drama than science. The example we usually use is the world of action movies--bullets work different there than in our world, and most people can withstand a lot more physical punishment without going into shock or being rendered incapacitated by pain.

One day when we were discussing this, someone pointed out that porno movies also take place in their own ficton, a world where "pizza dude" and "plumber" are two of the most sought-after jobs in America. We of course put way too much thought into what factors could contribute to the creation of such a world and eventually came up with the idea of an Orgone Bomb being responsible. This was obviously a terrible game idea, which is why at some point (I think around 2006-2007) Some Damned Idiot decided it would be a challenge to actually try to write the game.

The draft sat around for a while and at some point we decided that we were actually going to finish it up and release the game. Fortunately we made several realizations that led us to scrap the game:

• In writing it, The Idiot came up with a background that worked as social commentary and secret history, but definitely didn't fit the "WOO-HOO! PORN!" tone of the original concept. This led to the idea of basically 3 different types of game using the background, each with a wildly different tone.
• The background kind of required rules for some things, and those rules ended up being a little creepy.
• We could never quite figure out what characters in the game would actually do.
• A new POTUS was elected which meant the game needed to be updated, and at the time it was unclear which of the three possible "settings" (if any) would fit (always a problem with near future games).
• We realized that not a single one of us was brave enough to risk the permanent mental scars that running the game at a convention for typical gamers could produce.

Since chances are good that the game will never be released, I'm posting it here for your horror, amusement, and derision.

So, some guy on my Google Plus feed posted this:


I tried really hard to explain to him that most of those data points are completely meaningless when divorced from context. He no understand, so I attempted to illustrate the point:

The comments section of this article has what has been described as a MAGICAL flame war. I haven't read them all, but so far they are living up to the hype.

http://jezebel.com/5837687/a-guy-jerked-off-to-me-in-the-subway-and-nypd-didnt-do-a-thing

Did anyone else do Ryan Macklin's Flash Game Design Challenge?

There's still about a day left (not sure of the official end time) if anyone wants to join in. (I meant to post this earlier when I was reminded about it, but the forums kept crapping out).

Here's my entry, There's A Body In The Trunk! (PDF format).

The All Games Considered podcast recorded one of the Hex panels (featuring me and QAGS co-creator Leighton Connor) at GenCon this year and posted it to their site earlier this week. It's about Action in RPGs and runs about an hour. Seemed like it might be something some of you would find interesting.

http://www.agcpodcast.info/2001/07/additional-content.html

Did you know that there's a game about a fantasy world that was created by Eris? Did you know that the Goddess's entire reason for creating the world was that she wanted some good cheese? It's true. The game is called Qerth, and it's available at all the usual PDF sites (or in print through www.hexgames.com). Here's a picture of the cover. See that cheese? Doesn't it look delicious?



Looking for fantasy gaming with a sense of panache? Or do you just want to slay the evil Panache and loot its corpse? Welcome to Qerth, (rhymes with "worth") where you can have your panache and slay it, too! Qerth is a magical place full of mysterious creatures, ancient wizards, haughty elves, surly dwarves, dimwitted soldiers, sneaky pickpockets, and humble cheese makers. You and your friends will take the part of a roving band of adventurers who kill things and take their stuff. This isn't simple armed robbery, but rather Grand, Epic Adventure! Boldly foray into the unknown with your trusty blade and your hearty comrades. A whole world of wonder is yours for the slaying and looting!

Please note that I co-wrote this game, so please recognize this for the shameless whoring that it is.