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30 août 2016

This is just GREAT!

This is just GREAT!

Originally shared by Meguey Baker

If only this was a real show about the real world.
http://www.ew.com/article/2015/07/29/key-and-peele-sportscenter-teachers
Choose : images and links in comments OR events and integrated hangout. BEEP!

Récursion infinie...

Récursion infinie...
j'ai interrompu ma lecture de Chuboo pour préparer un Night Witches. J'ai mis Night Witches sur pause pour lire Velvet Glove, pour voir si je ne ferais pas un one-shot d'abord. Et maintenant déboule la preview d'AW2. Est-ce que je descend au 4e niveau ? Bien sûr que je descend au 4e niveau. Inception.

Thomas et Eugénie sont dans un podcast... et c'est, comme je m'y attendais, très bien :)

Thomas et Eugénie sont dans un podcast... et c'est, comme je m'y attendais, très bien :)

Originally shared by Voix d'Altaride

Dans la série Atomistique, nous revenons avec Thomas Munier sur les quatre atomes qui composent le jeu de rôle selon sa terminologie : jeu esthétique, jeu social, jeu tactique et enfin jeu moral. Dans ce premier numéro, nous parlons avec Thomas et Eugénie…
http://www.cendrones.fr/atomistique-14-jeu-esthetique/

27 août 2016

!

!

Originally shared by Radio Rôliste

Pour fêter notre numéro 60 (toutes les occasions sont bonnes à prendre...), Radio Rôliste vous attend à la librairie Charybde !
On profitera du lieu pour interroger les libraires sur la présence de JDR dans leurs rayons, et pour vous présenter le JDR en tant qu'objet.
events/cf7vmlb1sk4ar26qsb24kvb5rig

20 août 2016

La suite : une version testable 😀


La suite : une version testable 😀

Originally shared by Dan Maruschak

RPG HUD Lower Third “Proof of Concept” preview

I've been working on a Hangouts app that provides an “RPG enhanced” lower third video-overlay. Rather than using a static image, it lets you have some interactive widgets that should prove useful during RPG play – the goal is to provide the functionality in Hangouts gaming that you might use note cards, tents, or play sheets for in normal tabletop play. It uses GoogleDocs spreadsheets as the basis for the display, so it can also maintain persisitent state, like for simple character sheets. You attach a “note” to the GoogleDoc cells to mark them as special interactable elements. I think I've got my “proof of concept” version functional enough that I'm ready to have some other people try it out.

My goal with this release is to figure out 1) if this basic idea is actually as useful as I hope it will be, and 2) what other widgets people would need to make it useful. My longer term plan is to combine this functionality with the dice-rolling features of my Dice in the Vineyard app to be a more full-featured RPG HUD.

Here's how to run it

Step 1 Sign up for my Google Group "beta-test-hangout-apps-for-rpgs" https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/beta-test-hangout-apps-for-rpgs (I don't send mail to this group, it's purely for access control to the app, because Google requires access control for pre-release apps)

Step 2 Start a video hangout with the classic interface so you can use apps. (Going to https://g.co/hangouts does that automatically. And when it starts you can just hit "cancel" when it prompts you to invite people if you just want to test it in a solo hangout).

Step 3 Add the app. In the left pane of the Hangouts window, the "..." button will let you "add apps". A window will pop up, and if you switch that to "Developer" in the tabs at the top you should hopefully see 'RPG HUD "lower third” preview' as an option. Click that, and then you might need to give it some permissions.

When it's running correctly you should be able to click the “List Files” button, which will scan for GoogleDocs spreadsheets that you own. Select the one you want to use in the selection box, hit the “Open” button, and it should load up the sheet and display a respresentation of it in the “control pane” where you can interact with it, and as a video overlay where it's purely visual. By default it will try to display the entire non-empty area of the spreadsheet over the lower third of your video feed. Of course you wouldn't want to display any old spreadsheet, the special RPG-friendly functionality of the tool comes in the form of “markup tags”:

In a GoogleDocs spreadsheet, you can right-click on a cell and select “Insert note” (or use the Insert menu) and you can type things into the note field. When this tool reads in your spreadsheet it looks for certain tags in a cell's notes to indicate whether the cells have special RPG HUD functionality:

Interaction tags:
RPGHUD-EDIT (a button which lets you edit the contents of the cell)
RPGHUD-INCRDECR (buttons to increase or decrease the number)
RPGHUD-CROSSOUT
RPGHUD-CHECKBOX-N (replace the N with a number, e.g. RPGHUD-CHECKBOX-5)

Display tags:
RPGHUD-CHECKBOX-N
RPGHUD-TOKENS-VERTICAL
RPGHUD-TOKENS-HORIZONTAL

Structure tags:
RPGHUD-TRANSPARENT (this cell, and any other cells that have the same background color, will be rendered with a transparent background on the video overlay)
RPGHUD-UPPERLEFT
RPGHUD-TOP
RPGHUD-LOWERLEFT
RPGHUD-LEFT
RPGHUD-BOTTOM
RPGHUD-UPPERRIGHT
RPGHUD-RIGHT
RPGHUD-LOWERRIGHT

For cells that are tagged as checkboxes, the app expects a hexadecimal number in the cell, where the bits correspond to which boxes are checked, e.g. 0x0 is all boxes clear, 0x1 is the first checkbox checked, etc.

By default the app will try to map the entire non-empty space of the spreadsheet to the lower third, but you can use the UPPERLEFT, etc., tags to manually specify an area of your sheet for the app to cover. For example, your spreadsheet might have an entire character sheet but you only want to display one section of it on the screen. You don't need to include all of the tags, just use the tags you need (e.g. you can fully specify the area by using two opposing corners). The app will analyze the height and width of your sheet and size and center it along the bottom of your video display, with a max height of 1/3 of the video. (Right now there aren't any tags to tell it to left- or right-align the whole thing, but you can achieve that effect by making a wide sheet with a lot of blank space.)

As long as they don't conflict with each other, you can include multiple tags on a single cell by putting them on separate lines within the note. For example, you can have RPGHUD-INCRDECR and RPGHUD-TOKENS-HORIZONTAL on a cell for a token display with pressable gain/lose buttons, like I've done in the screenshot.

The app doesn't understand images that you add to the spreadsheet via the “Insert” menu, but it can display images included in cells with the =IMAGE() formula (it only understands modes 1, 2, and 3, and mode 3 – which crops images – will probably look the best with the way the video overlay gets rendered). Because of some security restrictions on Hangouts apps I think you'll only be able to use images that are hosted somewhere that can be accessed via the https protocol. However, you can get that without too much trouble via things like Google Drive, Google Photos, dropbox, etc.

Some limitations:

Sometimes the app doesn't initialize the apis properly, I'm not 100% sure why yet. When this happens the message “api load error, please restart” will show up in the little box at the top. Reloading the app (via the little circle-arrow button above the control pane) usually fixes this problem for me.

Right now the app doesn't have a concept of spreadsheet content that can “overflow” from one cell into adjacent empty cells the way that the default google spreadsheet does – if you have wide or tall information you'll need to manually resize cells so it fits (also, you'll probably want to make good use of the “merge cells” functionality for nice looking displays). By default if you increase the font size in a cell it will look like googledocs has resized your row, but not in a way my app currently understands, so you'll need to manually resize your rows so the app can tell what height the cells should be.

Right now the app only loads data from the spreadsheet when you load, so if you make changes to the GoogleDoc while the app is running you'll need to tell the app to load the sheet again for those changes to show up. (Although changes you make in the app, like checking off checkboxes, are sent back to the sheet). Also, while spreadsheets can have multiple sub-sheets, this version of the app only reads the first one.

This is essentially pre-alpha software, so I fully expect there to be bugs. I'll try to keep this version stable, but if there are necessary bug-fixes or feature enhancements I might make small changes. I've only tried this on Chrome – I can't think of any reason it wouldn't work in other browsers, but I haven't tested for compatibility.

What kind of feedback am I looking for?

I'm open to anything you want to tell me, although as I said above my primary interest is figuring out “Is this basic idea sound?” and “What other features would you need in order for this to be useful for you?”. If you find bugs or make feature requests I might be able to address them in this version, but if they require extensive code changes they might just end up on the “to do” list for the more robust next version. Feel free to ask questions or comment here, plus me into a public or private post of your own, or e-mail me at dan.maruschak at gmail, or whatever's convenient for you.

(Please, no doom and gloom about Hangout apps no longer work or how they'll be gone eventually. Right now they do work as long as you start the Hangout with the correct interface, and it's entirely possible that they'll continue to be supported forever – Google is always cagey about what they will or won't do, sometimes they kill things people like, sometimes they keep them around. Until there's some definitive announcement I think it makes more sense to assume they'll continue to support the feature.)

I have something new for all your hunters:

Originally shared by Michael Sands

I have something new for all your hunters:

More Weirdness:
http://www.genericgames.co.nz/files/MotW_more_weirdness.pdf

Adds rules for "investigating weird cases" style games (X-Files, Fringe, etc).

New weird moves for your hunters, plus rules for creating mysteries with a weird phenomenon instead of a monster at the center.

It's brand new and not tested yet, but I wanted to share anyhow. Have fun!
http://www.genericgames.co.nz/files/MotW_more_weirdness.pdf

12 août 2016

Sharp analysis.

Sharp analysis.

Originally shared by Emily Care Boss

What do you love about tabletop freeform games?

Chances are good that if you're in my feeds, you've played one. Whether it's Fiasco, The Quiet Year, Microscope, Misericord(e), Swords without Master, Firebrands or what have you, these are (in my opinion) tabletop role playing games where the resolution of dramatic questions and problems, or events where the outcome is in question--is done by a variety of techniques that do not involve stats and die rolls that refer to them.

*Say and it happens - quintessentially demonstrated by Polaris, this is a staple in MonkeyDome descended games (like Swords without Master, Vast & Starlit). Should we think of this as player fiat?
*Token prompts - Quiet Year and Dream Askew use these, with contempt tokens and hard & soft moves that give you currency to spend on fictional outcomes later on. This is an underlying mechanic in the Apocalypse World engine that is married with a fictionally focused traditional mechanic system (stats, modifiers, die rolls, resolution) which hides how much player fiat/fictional positioning comes in. Fiasco allocates scene resolution and gives players dice as tone prompts.
*Fiction prompts (often questions) - Cards, questions, procedures that get the players asking themselves and others things that invest themselves and each other in the events as they play out. Itras By, Swords without Master, Heart of Bronze, The Sundered Land, Misericord(e)--which lifts the question mechanic from 1001 Nights--for examples. Games like Fiasco may have a currency that matches character outcomes with fictional prompts at the end of the game. I do this a ton in the Romance Trilogy for Breaking the Ice and Shooting the Moon particularly--though those games I see as more traditional in terms of using dice to provide fallout and outcomes. Probably needs more thought there since the systems don't function on a task-by-task or even scene-based conflict resoltion basis. More like long-term conflict resolution that feeds into overall game-wide outcomes.
*Voting - the fall-back resolution system in Microscope, the scene-ending resolution in King Wen's Tower. I imagine this is more used than I realize, but those are the games that come to mind.

This is by no means exhaustive!

What do you like about these games? How do you see them functioning? What other games would you group with these?

For J. Walton.

11 août 2016

Has my attention.

Has my attention.

Originally shared by Magpie Games

The Velvet Glove Notebook edition is now available on DriveThruRPG.

Can you dig it?

Velvet Glove is a PbtA game where you play a teenage girl in a gang on the streets of 1970’s America. Your life is full of drugs, crime, and sex—and all that excitement comes at a price....

The Notebook edition is a preview of the full game yet to come, with everything you need to play, including downloadable playbooks and a Move sheet.

Can you dig it?
http://drivethrurpg.com/product/190552/Velvet-Glove-Notebook-Edition?manufacturers_id=4353

#rpgaday

#rpgaday

9th Beyond the game, what's involved in an ideal session?
A worry-free mind. Time. Fellow players I can connect with. A good connection. A good mood. Energy. A quiet and non-distracting space where we may be noisy and distracting. Hidden, for shy gamers. Healthy snacks and air. Adequate preparation. The unexpected.

10th Largest in-game surprise you have experienced?
The next one. Always the next one.
 
11th Which gamer most affected the way you play?
I don't really know.


#rpgaday2016

10 août 2016

J'espère que Dan poursuivra le développement de ceci, ça a l'air vraiment très prometteur, intéressant et polyvalent.


J'espère que Dan poursuivra le développement de ceci, ça a l'air vraiment très prometteur, intéressant et polyvalent. Mais peut-être a-t-il besoin qu'on lui dise que cela serait vraiment chouette, d'encouragements ?

Originally shared by Dan Maruschak

I've made some progress on the coding project I've been working on, which is a Hangouts extension that uses GoogleDocs spreadsheets as the basis for a “lower third” with RPG-friendly functionality. The basic gist is that you'd create a sheet in GoogleDocs and would use the “note” feature in some cells to tag them with markup messages to get features like “represent this number with an array of checkboxes” or “display this number as a pile of tokens”. Then in Hangouts you'd be able to interact with those elements in the “control pane” that's over the right and it would also render them as an overlay onto the video. In the picture I'm working with a sheet I made for testing purposes, something that has a lot of functionality you might use in a Fate game: checkable stress boxes and a pile of chips for Fate points. Clicking the checkboxes or hitting the increment/decrement buttons on the Fate point section updates both the video display and the GoogleDoc it loaded from, so you could use it for persistent state stuff like character sheets.

I've got the basic functionality working in my proof-of-concept app, although I still foresee some challenges, such as whether users will have enough screen real estate to make it workable (the control pane is very narrow, and you don't have a ton of resolution to work with in the video overlay), or whether GoogleDocs provides enough control to make things sufficiently pretty. My longer term idea would be to integrate this together with the dice-roller functionality from my Dice in the Vineyard app to be a more full-featured RPG tool. (My working title is “RPG HUD” since it's trying to make it easier to keep the attention on the video displays rather than on a heavy virtual tabletop).

Let me know if you think this is something that would be useful for you, or if you have questions or suggestions. I think this would be a worthwhile thing, but I have a hard time gauging whether other people would be interested.

8 août 2016

#FirstSevenJobs

#FirstSevenJobs  

I knew, in theory, real student jobs were much more common and job mobilty much higher on your side of the ocean, but seeing it like this, personal and precise, is a completely different realization.

I am over 40 and I never had 7 real jobs.
My list goes:
- Cook
- Architect for a private practice
- Architect for a private practice
- Architect as a civil servant
- Architect as a civil servant
- Architect as a civil servant

in my head it rather goes like this:
- Architect
as the changes were all quite minor and the cook job was quite short lived.

and I have a rather high job mobility for someone who has the great luck to always have been employed (I always choose to change job).

I don't believe I know many people around here who had 7 or more different jobs. I believe we are really missing something, such richness of experience :/

I've released Will That Be All?, my LARP for 6-10 players about love and relationships between servants.

Originally shared by Graham W

I've released Will That Be All?, my LARP for 6-10 players about love and relationships between servants.

It's one of the most beautiful things I've written. It plays in three acts, each lasting about an hour, starting in the 1920s and ending with the threat of war in the 1930s. You play the servants and see how their feelings for each other grow and change.

Everything you need is in one deck of cards, including all the instructions and character sheets. Oh, and it's $15.

Please do share this! And I'm happy to answer any questions.

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/149064/Will-That-Be-All