The Next Campaign, pt 3

I wanted a study of place and character. I’ve been working on a collaborative setting system for a while. It might not be the best fit for a generation ship setting, but I’m willing to try it out there.

I’ll also be working with my players on hashing out major systems for the ship. Things like engines, electrical generation, water reclamation, pharmacology, etc.. If each person has a job, they’ll have to work in some relevant department. What level of luxuries would they expect/desire? What would they do in their offtime?
 
I’d also want to have recurring settings whether it’s a central control center (bridge), a lounge, a library, or even one character’s luxurious quarters, I’d want settings that the players are familiar with and can interact with, should they so choose (the quarters would be best, obviously, since I could redress it to be anyone’s quarters.). 
 

The Next Campaign, pt 2

In the end, I decided to go with “other.”

The Ciaren Campaign was largely successful. I’ve found that after successful series, there’s often a few “off” games to compensate; players are used to the old series and their characters and are on some level reluctant to jump into something else. Good series are usually a combination of luck and collective excitement, which isn’t something that you can call up on a whim.

So my next series is going to be something very self-involved. It’s an experimental series that I don’t expect my players to really like. I think they’ll be more enthused about the one after this one.

I wanted to strip the next game down to some essentials. The New World of Darkness system is something that is very straightforward and lends itself to improvisation. Everyone is familiar with it, so there’s not a lot to learn. I’m not utilizing any supernatural elements so there won’t be any “powers” to memorize or worry about either; each player’s skills will be their powers.

I needed something different though. A mortals game about federal agents or mercenaries or whatever seemed like the only way to go—otherwise, why are they all together? I needed something that would be a slice of life, but provide some source of direction, unity, and urgency that a setting on Main Street, USA wouldn’t provide.

In terms of “ship in a bottle” settings, generation ships are nigh-unbeatable.

The characters are the members of an intermediate generation of a generation ship. They would have advanced technology, freedom, unity, etc., within an electronic cocoon of pipes, wires, and bulkheads. They would be members of a modestly-sized, self-contained section of a massive ship. They would have families, even spouses and children and want for nothing, except survival another day whenever problems arose.

I explained this in general terms to Richard, my roommate.

“So, what’s the hook?” He asked.

The Next Campaign, pt 1

So, I wrapped up my first DnD run, The Ciaren Campaign a few weeks ago. According to feedback, it went really well (note to self: make RPG feedback forms). As it often does, the end of one campaign leads to the beginning of another campaign. “What’s next?”

I’ve got three to four players right now. After talking it over with them, I cut the options down to a Shadowrun series, a Star Wars series, or the realization of a Star Trek series.

Now, Derek wants to run Shadowrun. When I asked what elements of Shadowrun he liked, so as to either narrow down what elements of Shadowrun I had to learn about or what elements of Star Trek or Star Wars I wanted to accentuate, he described Shadowrun to me. It was surprisingly helpful.

Collective Setting System: More Results

Nation A takes an active role in events outside of its border, and oh man, what borders! Nation A exists in the impassible, rocky Northlands. While known far and wide for the courage of both their peoples and ruling class, the concept of Nation A as a single community or culture is somewhat alien. Nation A sat on the sidelines for The Great War, securing protectorates and sending in support troops only for training purposes. This has made Nation A a powerful player in post war politics as they possess the neutrality to suggest changes and the power to back them up.

Despite a great number of economic assets, Nation B’s aggressive, determined drive to continue expanding has seen them ignore those opportunities. Nation B has impressive military honed by their victory in The Great War and supported from B-Keep, an impressive fortress structure to the West. However, their great drive for expansion has garnered them a wealthy, respected, and well-run nation, but garnered them no more land than any of their neighbors Most citizens are considered middle-class, Nation-B markets are prized for their quality goods and shrewd hagglers, and material wealth carefully managed from times now long forgotten. If the elitist rulers could ever change their dogma of constant expansion and facilitate these qualities, they would be the wealthiest nation in the area.

Nation C spent most of The Great War acting as a weapons supplier and getting rich off of it. Luckily, they supported the winning side and continue acting as a trade hub between kingdoms to this day. Despite their economic ties, history records them for the treachery of Diconsuior, where the founder of their line usurped an enemy’s lands through a blatant act of murder. Many in Nation D still call them traitors, though they appreciate the fruits of Nation C goods and arms too much to make an issue of it.

Only slightly younger than Nation B, Nation D is a powerful state with strict internal controls. They benefited most from The Great War, gaining an experienced navy and several new lands in the process. Nation D is known for its impartial class of Magistrates, who arbitrate disputes between citizens, as well as between different branches of the government.

Ultimately a minor player in The Great War, Nation E was the battleground for its first stages, years of considered stability and a focus on peace and prosperity with its borders saw it become a target for opportunistic enemies. Over the course of the war, Nation E gained back its losses, though the areas that saw the most fighting are still trying to fully recover.

Collective Setting System: War and Things Other Than War

War

Histories have both War and Peace cards. Peace cards give a base bonus, and then another bonus if there’s another nation at Peace in the same era. Border Wars are minor clashes that don’t necessarily need another participant.
 

The big history is The Great War cards. There are five of them (the number of nations the system was built for). The Great War cards are red on one side and blue on the other. Players play them with the color of their choice facing up. After all histories have been played, whichever color is most popular wins The Great War and receives the win bonuses (and penalties). Whichever side loses receives the loss penalties (and bonuses). There are some specials that can affect this.

Whatever era The Great War is played on will be the era that all other Great War cards are played on. If the first The Great War card is played on a nation’s Recent Era, then all other The Great War cards must also be placed on that era. A player playing a The Great War card may move a nation’s history card to another one of that nation’s eras in order to play a The Great War card, provided that nation doesn’t already have a history card in the other era (Again, if a nation has Histories on all of its eras, no more Histories can be played on it.). If the first The Great War card is played on a nation’s ancient era, then all other nations immediately get their own Ancient era.

If there are no opposing colors of The Great War at the end of play, no one wins The Great War and no bonuses (or penalties) are received. Cheaters.

Ideas for the Future

Template cards better. Putting bonuses for Holdings on the sides and templating Histories to make their eras clearer would be a marked improvement.

Specialization in the form of defense/offense for Power, trust/monetary for External, infrastructure/culture for Internal, etc, etc, would be something to add, possibly on Attitudes or Histories.

Collective Setting System: Your Types

Attitudes: Attitudes alter a nation’s maximum resource values. A nation can only have one attitude, and once it has an attitude, only a special card can change it.

A nation with a Neutral Attitude has the potential to support a much healthier economy, but they tend not to have much potential for expansion. To get a strong ecnomoy, the player needs Histories or Holdings.

Holdings: Holdings are the heart and soul of the system. They represent things the nation has or lacks that defines what it is. Holdings give a +1 bonus to one of a nation’s resources (sometimes +2) or give an equal penalty. Holdings can be played up or inverted; it’s the choice of the player who puts it down (though some cards can invert them later). A nation may have any number of holdings, though a player may not put a holding on a nation that would exceed its maximum and when a player puts an Attitude on a nation that would place a resource’s maximum below its current level, they must remove holdings from that nation to reduce that resource’s level to or below its maximum. Histories are not removed this way or do they face any play restrictions based on a nation’s resource maximum.

Histories: Histories, like holdings, can modify values, but they often have drawbacks as well. Like Holdings, they can be played inverted, which usually reverses their penalties and bonuses alike. Wars are an exception (see tomorrow’s post).

Specials: Do all manner of non-conventional things. They’re a miscellaneous card type that can do anything from invert cards (see above) to represent great heroes and swap histories.

Collective Setting System: The Basics

Before play begins, it needs to be established how many nations you’re building and how many players you have.  There should be at least five cards per nation, so the starting hand size should allow for that many cards, total plus however many more cards are needed to give each player an equal starting hand.

You can share starting hands, make some plans, discuss your intentions for each state, and determine starting player and order of play by mutual agreement. It would also be a good time to hammer out some names and talk about general aspects of the setting; its themes, environments, and moods. This isn’t a competitive game where one player is trying to make the strongest state. It’s supposed to be a fun semi-collaborative effort to produce surprising game world elements. By default, hands are concealed, direction of play is determined randomly, and the starting player is the storyteller for the game the world will be featured in.

Play it, don’t do it.

On each player’s turn, they may either play a card or draw a card, discard a non-history card, and then play a card. Cards are played on states (though some specials may affect other cards in play) and remain on them as long as that nation can support them.

History cards are a special case. Each state has two periods in its history; Distant History and Recent History (there is also an Ancient History Special card which can produce a third period). Once all states have a History card on them for each of their periods, play is over.

Looks kinda like this.

Lightning Round

Sometimes, a group of players will run out of cards. When a player has an empty hand at the beginning of their turn, instead of usual turn options, they draw three cards, play a History card if possible, then discard the rest.

The Lightning Round exists to keep things simple. There are only so many features of a nation that people can keep track of before they simply glaze over everything. The purpose of this system is to make memorable nations that players are familiar with, not large stats and piles of descriptions. The Lightning Round exists so that if players are having a hard time finding the History cards to finish up, they can search for one without having to pass a turn without doing anything.

With any luck, your results will look similar to:

Collective Setting System: Resources

As you probably noticed Monday, the states made with this system are mostly defined by five resources, described below.

Power works like a general military strength, though it measures both internal and external forces. A nation that’s well-defended can have a force that’s capable of withstanding an enemy’s marauding forces. While there’s no technical specialization, it’s assumed that nations with comparable skills (or total skills) will balance out when fighting with their strengths.

Wealth indicates the trade, material wealth, and the fruits of that wealth.

Size is only somewhat self-evident. It is size, but also size in relation to the other nations as well as quality of things within a nation's borders. A mile of productive farmland is worth more than twenty miles of monster-spewing deserts.

External is the nation’s relationships and esteem with other nations. Whether it’s an undeserved reputation or a history of valor, other nations will weigh the nation’s input and treat its peoples and rulers with respect.

Internal is the nation’s cohesiveness, interconnectedness, and order. A nation with a high internal rating has generally happy citizens, benevolent nobility, and can boast an overall culture of peace and justice.

Each resource starts at 0, with a default upper limit of 2 (Attitude cards can change this). Players use cards (mostly Histories and Holdings) to change these values either up or down, depending on the character of the state they’re building.

Collective Setting System: Results Speak

A few weeks ago, my roommate brought me to a game of munchkin with some of his friends. While there, I saw that they had the A Song of Fire and Ice roleplaying game. I flipped through it, half interested, until I came to the part labeled “House & Lands.” While it’s a system intended to help players find a nobility and home to be aligned with, it had a lot of what I needed for the collective setting project I was thinking of earlier.

We also played Munchkin, and that was fine too (but Pandemic would have been better.).

Using that as a basis, I made up some cards that players could use to define states/cities/planets[1] in a setting and played a few rounds with myself, patching up the rules as issues arose. The rules aren’t important. This isn’t a win/lose game; it’s a collaborative setting creation process, so refereeing isn’t as important as making things fit intuitively together and reigning in complications.

I’ll share the results of a brief ‘solitaire’ session and explain the mechanics throughout the rest of the week.

Spent to Cast: Ruminations

"Spent to Cast," aka Ogre Savant Ability, aka Sunburst, aka cards in the Shadowmoor/Eventide cycles including River's Grasp and Moonhold.  These cards care about the mana that was spent to cast them. Sunburst doesn't care what mana was spent so long as it's different and it provides one of two set effects related to that. That makes it different enough that it discussed in depth elsewhere.

Spent to Cast encourages splashing other colors. It usually requires mana of one color to cast, but gives a bonus if another color is spent. It's popular on instants and sorceries and when it's used on creatures, it often confers a one-time effect , even if that effect is just to keep the creature, in the case of the Simic, Azorious, and Rakdos implementations (where Spent to Cast acts like strange Evoke instead of a strange Kicker). This avoids memory issues in much the same way that Sunburst does with counters.

Cons

The spell taped to a creature issue sometimes results in cross-color abilities: Court Hussar has a very blue ETB effect, but has a white ability, one you only get to use if you pay white mana for it. While it's an interesting approach, it ends up being a blue card with vigilance, just like Azorius Herald is an unblockable white card and Crypt Champion is a black card with Double Strike. That particular approach to the color pie might not work in a core set.

Crypt Champion itself raises an interesting point; while Crypt Champions can't reanimate one another, these strange evoke creatures are very resistant to being cheated into play. This might discourage new players and even cause uncertainty when the appropriately colored mana is spent on an ability that puts them into play (Quicksilver Amulet or Birthing Pod). This is either an opportunity for education or a dangerous point of confusion.

Monday's Pitch: The Boxes Precinct

Fuck! This was supposed to go up last Monday. Bear with me, Blogger does this "I know you clicked, 'Post,' but I wanted to keep this blog our little secret forever," bullshit. It's saccharine and disturbing, Blogger! Quit it!

What about a story told from the perspective of the unused Magic cards that sit obsessively in long boxes? Not even the pauper-level cards, but the real, unusable, passed-over stinkers that aren't worth the cardboard they're printed on, along with a few overlooked gems put in for variety?

Imagine, a player's hunt for a particular, elusive card that they just know is in their collection anthropomorphized as one of these cards as a...noir/semi-noir detective. It spans from the long boxes to the utility pile, to the dregs of half-completed decks, and--the Valhalla for Magic cards--played, constructed decks.

A buddy-buddy cop format might also be cool, pairing something like Shauku's Minion with a planeswalker card like Jace, the Mindsculptor in a good/evil playable/unplayable combo only united by their common purpose in finding a missing card.

Monday's Pitch: Collaborative Star Trek

There is a collaborative board game based on the new Star Trek movie where you try to get a planet to join The Federation while averting a civil war, warding off Klingons, and...doing one more thing that I can't quite remember right now. I imagine it's a lot like Shadows Over Camelot, partially because I just got through playing several rounds of it, but also because it sounds like each of your objectives is analogous to the quests from SOC and you're trying to beat them all before time runs out, though ST: Expeditions[1] as an artificial time limit of 30 turns instead of just being designed to slowly push your head below water until you simply can't breathe anymore (like SOC and Pandemic).

But I was pawning through some cards from the terrible, terrible, terrible Star Trek CCG[2] and I was thinking about how the character development, mission accomplishment, dilemma overcoming, interpersonal relationships, and point-based victory (instead of defeat-based paradigm) is a great way to do Star Trek. Don't get me wrong, the ST CCG was [3], but it failed by being too thick with flavor and not enough with game. It was a game people enjoyed, but it just didn't play well. They had missions right. They had dilemmas right. They had winning with points via accomplishing Star Trek things instead of just destroying stuff. They had skills that drove the system; not just job skills and technical skills, but things like 'youth,' 'empathy,' and 'music'; humanitarian things[4] that made people who they were. Also, barbering[3].

The...guy in the prison

Mystery prisoner has Utah jail authorities stumped

Link to original story

PROVO, Utah (Reuters) - A mystery man arrested on minor charges more than three weeks ago remains behind bars in Utah while law enforcement officials try to determine his true identity, which he refuses to reveal.

The unidentified man, who has graying red hair, blue eyes and is believed to be in his late 30's, was arrested on July 1 for trespassing in a parking garage.

He was booked into jail on three misdemeanor charges and has thwarted any chance of release, with or without bail, by refusing to identify himself.  "This is really a strange case," said Lt. Dennis Harris with the Utah County Sheriff's Office. "He just doesn't want to be found."

"I've been trying to think from A to C why he would want to stay here...why he wouldn't give us information. Any information," Harris said, adding an enunciated, “Information.”

Monday's Pitch: Magic in Equilibrium

So, I was reading the introductory rulebook for Vampire: the Eternal Struggle. In addition to making me yearn for the quiet, succinct simplicity of the 182 page Magic: the Gathering Comprehensive Rules, it also brought up an interesting concept: hand equilibrium.

In Vampire:tES, if a player’s hand is below the maximum, they draw up. If it’s above, they discard down. Now, I don’t think this will work as a Magic: the Gathering format because of how delicately balanced Magic is. Many cards only work because hand size is this or you can only draw when that.

It’s interesting to contemplate something like Mindculling doing a strange riff on Wheel of Fortune. It’s cool, I like looting, even reverse looting. One of the things I want to do do in the Zombie CCG I occasionally work on is drawing cards related to a location’s size, then playing some of them and restocking the difference from your hand. Meanwhile, your opponent does the same, except they’re looking for Zombie cards to play against you.

Many Campaigns, One Character: Sample Character

I do like this MCOC idea, I figured I'd just make a character like this and start forcing him into whatever ill-fated campaign I'm playing this week (sorry in advance, those of you who realize that all of my PCs are suddenly named "Sam Kasser"). It might also serve as an example for those of you who are interested in making similar characters.

I usually shy away from the brawny member of a group, leaning for the thinker or diplomat, or the occasional leader or rogue. I did do that gun monkey for Shadowrun (Last I heard of him, he was waist deep in snow, hunting a sniper with a combat knife. Good times.). I think I’m going to go with Saio Ka’as, my Bothan Jedi from a short-lived Star Wars campaign a few years ago. I never got a lot of closure with him (or "middleture," or even the later part of the "openture"), but since Jedi are just sci-fi wizards, having him become a non-corporeal consciousness trying to relearn all that fleshy stuff isn't too far outside of...well, I guess all the words that make up that sentence.

Saio Ka’as

Stats

Level: Beginning

Character Background

Saio Ka’as was once a Bothan from an unnamed galaxy far, far away. His people were hirsute and cunning. Saio himself was a member of a religious order that could subtly manipulate reality and worked to bring peace and order to the galaxy (usually only bringing one at a time). Saio trained his entire life to be a diplomat and to settle political disputes peacefully. However, political treachery raised its head and plunged his world into chaos. Hunted and tempted by dark forces, he was forced into the depths of unexplored space. There, he discovered a doorway into the higher realms, long abandoned by a destroyed race. When the non-corporeal inhabitants tried to keep him out, his abilities forced them to choose between accepting him and destroying him. They decided to accept him, saving his life but fracturing his memories of what he was before.

When working in the corporeal world, Saio Ka'as will often be a rather hairy specimen of any non-furred race, though a friendly and outspoken one. He prefers to be skilled at swordsmanship, though he's been forgoing that lately in an attempt to 'relearn' a familiar skill and restore some of his memory. 

Any para-normal abilities he has will often bend toward the empathy: mind reading, psychometry, or general sensitivity. His tendency to see the good in people often leads him to over-empathize with decidedly amoral people and organizations. This usually only happens when he spends a very long time corporeal, causing him some concern over the true nature of his character.

Many Campaigns, One Character: Problems

Monday, I talked about having one character that could use a meta-stat to play through several campaigns. For busy roleplayers who don't have a lot of time to meet, but still want to try something new without making a whole new character to be wadded up and thrown away at the end of the session, it's a pretty good idea. 

However, it's not without its problems:

-Some players may take this as an opportunity not to roleplay. In my opinion, they probably weren’t roleplaying anyway. Perhaps a throwaway line about some people of the lower planes visiting their homes or even rumors of a long ago war with the physical might encourage them to keep their mouths shut about their true origins. Stopping others from doing so might actually be the point of some stories.

-Graduating experience might be hard for open-ended games. Aberrant, for example, has no upper limit; you just sort of realize you’re a quantum god one day, either because you’ve gotten that tenth dot of Quantum or because you used that experienced to buy enough ancillary powers to make The Martian Manhunter jealous. If you’re running a game, you should be able to estimate the maximum level of experience you want. If the converted power levels end up playing out more or less powerfully than anticipated, just to lower the cap for that game.

-Powergaming is easy here. Any player can probably crunch numbers on just which game gives the highest percentage move up the scale for an average game and ‘grind’ that. They might not even grind it with one storyteller, but instead have a profitable one-shot with someone else, then run a profitable one-shot for that someone else. Gaming more often isn’t a drawback of this system. In addition, the simple, numerical breakdown means that a party’s level can be averaged before a game so that no one person has an unfair advantage.

Monday's Pitch: Many Campaigns, One Character

Given that identity is just a set of Cogitoes Summing it up, a tenuous set of contiguous, self-aware thoughts, why not use that as a vehicle for self-aware roleplaying within self-aware roleplaying. The players’ characters are consciousnesses with some character and general faculty at fashioning ‘skins’ and operating them. The physical world is a mystery to them. Or rather, the physical worlds. The sum skills and talents of corporeal beings are no more than simple data that can be transmuted from one kind into another between skins.

They create skins that enable them to interact with various, lesser planes of physicality, either for exploration, curiosity, or even as part of a larger plan set in motion by some equally non-physical enemies. The more they act in the physical plane, the better they get at manipulating its ins and outs.

This is a setup for an adult roleplaying game. Not “nip-slips and beer” adult, “I can’t make it this Sunday because I have a baby” adult. The deal is that the characters are nothing more than personalities tied to a meta-experience level. Whenever the players make a character for another short-lived campaign, they convert that meta-experience into game experience for their characters. (For example, Dungeons and Dragons has a scale that goes up to 30 levels. If the characters are one third of the way up the meta-experience scale, their characters for a new DnD campaign would be Level 10. Alternatively, you could do it by experience points, which would make him one third of one million, so 300,000 XP and Level 23). Their characters are only vaguely aware of the setting, matching the general unfamiliarity of the players with a new setting. As time goes on, each will become more familiar with it (or the campaign will be canceled and they’ll start a new one).

This lets players play and level the same character across many different game systems and settings without having to worry too much about whether they’re going to be playing the same game next week or not.

Next: Problems

Monday's Pitch: Reward Players for Losing

So I was reading this and thinking about how some of the brightest minds of my generation were destroyed by the "pull the lever, get the pellet" sort of dull, non-initiative-driven interaction that public schools, video games, and even most employment train people for. They breed the type of interaction where it's good to win because winning is good.

However, it isn't always good.

Learning to lose has some merits. Put the box inside of a box and simply make a game that you win by losing. I don't mean that you spend four or twelve or twenty hours losing. No, that would suck. But when the game rails you into a bad spot (morally, play wise, etc.), you can lose on purpose and there's a new, 'better' route for the game to follow.

 

Is it just providing a different lever for players to pull? Yes. Does it say something different? Yes. In the end though, I admit that with the internet and strategy guides (both things I loathe about modern gaming: "Here's instructions for which buttons to push in our game to get a thing we made. The super-gaming guide is simply Tron 2 on a jump drive, but after every action scene you push a button on your controller and you get an achievement.") Anyway, since I'm already courting a Skinner Box analogy, I suggest The Watchmen Method; nothing you do matters anyway, so you might as well do what you want.

That is, individual victories, losses, and choices don't end the game; it just keeps trundling along, win or lose, generally worse if you lose, but you tend to eventually end up in a place where the challenges you face are ones you can beat or don't have to beat (cooperation, interaction, exploration, etc.). Whatever 'ending' there is to the game is a composite of a few large decisions with a lot of minor decisions affecting one another.

"Yes," you might say, "that's certainly personal and whatever and despite the fact that automatically generated end scenes would seem jarring when they're mathematically strung end to end and the fact that this game involves maybe people trying to do stuff and not succeeding, which isn't--generally speaking--something someone playing a game wants to experience, I'm going to focus on the trouble with how I can still pull the right set of levers to save an ersatz Aeris or whatever."

That might have been a good thing to ask about. Randomizing encounters is a good way to approach it. Sure, if a character gets less than twelve, but more than no hits in on the Elder Dragon Grestreyx, then dies to his fire-breath, then they will probably end up as a burn patient in a hospital that leads to a story that reveals his family's dark secret, but there's a smaller chance he'll emerge badly burned but recover quickly and be celebrated and loved by the community, beginning a path of heroism.

Will players be angry they can't job the system? Will they call it arbitrary and act like none of their decisions have any effect, even if you give them a nice option of skipping outcomes they've already experienced? Will they quit and play something else, despite the fact that no matter their options, they are still playing a video game and at the end of the day haven't made any consequential decisions at all? Yes. Yes, they will.

After all, once you learn to pull the lever, you get free pellets! If rising obesity rates in developed nations are any indication, folks love pellets!

Monday's Pitch: Humans Are Awesome

Every Monday, for as long as I feel like it, I'll pitch a new idea.

I've long loved my race. We're omnivorous, submersible, dexterous, and smart. We can [perceive a healthy portion of gamma wavelengths], [discern enough frequencies of compressed air] with enough skill to link a subset of those to [each person we meet], feel just about every inch of our body, perform a delicate chemical analysis of everything we put into [our mouth] and [dispersed in the air around us], discern our [physical orientation] and [acceleration] with none of those senses at all. We're silly adaptable, with [eyes that can see underwater], ears that get better when we're blind, and eyes that get better when we're deaf. The external genitalia aren't so great, and there's that crazy sleep thing, plus other stuff, but we can live in almost any environment our planet can cook up, heal wounds, adapt to viruses, communicate with each other in thousands of limitless different ways, identify patterns, reign in any number of voluntary biological functions, become stronger by using muscles, and train our reflexes. That's all before getting to the basics of empathy, unconscious ballistic trajectory calculation, and developing calluses.

It's probably because our planet is a teeming wasteland of life and water/heat systems just itching to devour everything else that sits around for too long. If there was life on other planets, I don' t think they'd visit us because A) We're covered in stuff, and B) We are the galaxy's Australia. Everything here can and will be eaten by something else, or buried and forgotten about. The exceptions to that rule are remarkable because of it.

Take away any one or two of these things and suddenly everything changes; tough, regenerating skin, short-term, unconscious audio recall, that thing where we can get each other pregnant without even having sex because of motile, haploid reproductive cells. Motile reproductive cells. Yeah, lots of things on Earth have these characteristics. Some even have them better (I've seen the heartbreaking YouTube videos of two-legged dogs; I know the score.), and in all likelihood, life forms on other planets have very similar paradigms; life thrives wherever it can, however it must.

But given so many sci-fi/fantasy settings where aliens are badass and humans get the twin advantages of being the protagonist and not being a two-dimensional race of caricatures, it would be nice to have a setting where we can explore the rightfully badass qualities of humanity in a sea of aliens who just don't have that bizarre, amped-up Terran biology in their corner.

Magic Formats, Part VII Finale

The Weepies

These formats technically exist and are just shy of being too pathetic to share.

Pack Wars is about trying to make a playable deck out of a booster pack. It’s fifteen cards with no rhyme or reason and I’m supposed to shuffle in seven basic lands and act that like the short unsatisfying game divorced almost entirely from my skills as a player is a thing that people do and that I should buy another pack and do it again. It isn’t. I shouldn’t. Fuck you.

Type 5 is Pack Wars, except you use more boosters and don’t bother shuffling in lands, you just open packs and start using spells as lands that tap for their converted mana cost. Irrationally, I’m not as offended by this much quicker hand to mouth model of opening booster packs. Perhaps I’ve transcended into some higher plane of unfamiliar ur-disgust.

Type 4/DC 10 are two ridiculous formats that only work in a well manicured environment. Mana is infinite, but you can only cast one spell per turn. I believe they are also singleton formats. Activated abilities can be activated infinitely. The only difference, I think, is that DC10 has a stated limit of setting X equal to 10, while Type 4 relies on more counterspells. I much prefer DC10. I don’t mean to dismiss this format out of hand, it’s just that it seems like it could be fun, but I certainly don’t have the cards to pull it off.

Landless is, according to the account I have, the result of two people trying to play Magic without any lands. They got a good compromise going, and I’m pretty interested. Like Type 5, Type 4, and DC 10, it’s a landless format, and like Type 5, you can play spells as lands. However, a spell played as a land only gives one mana of one of its colors. After it’s played as a land, that card can’t be used for anything else and acts like a non-basic land until it changes zones.