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!