Category: olmag

51:04 long & 49 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss major changes to the game, spend a lot of time with feedback, and discuss how Jewish someone has to be in England.

We took some during-the-show notes. If you have Google Wave you might be able to take a look at the Wave we created while recording. For those of you without, you can check out the Google Docs transcription

– The Weird Jews Livejournal group that Joshua joined
– The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution
– The Alas, A Blog entry about the New York Times piece on England and Jewishness
– Kat & Michael Miller’s Serial Homicide Unit
– The Starship Troopers and Robocop films
– Feedback from Doc Holaday, Luke Crane (sorta), Vincent Baker, Jj
– cat and man!
– We know who the game will always be about now!
– Larry Ellison
– Rutgers and Yale Universities
– Blackwater Worldwide
– Postmodernism
– On Mighty Thews, by Simon Carryer
– Frank Frazetta
– The Draconis Montreal convention

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Taffy Lewis’ Night Club” by Vangelis.

(EDIT: I’ve changed the header image that was originally on this post because it was NSFW. For posterity, in case someone is curious, you can find the original image here. Edit: No, Rob. That wasn’t the real image. That was for a completely… different project.)

52:24 long & 50.3 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), we talk about a few possible initial scenarios, and decide which one we want to explore first. There’s some good progress here from the absolute slaughter and misery we inflicted on each other in the prior episode.

Joshua’s homework and Rob’s notes during the show

– Joshua tries to let Rob off the hook for being lazy
– Vincent Baker gave us extremely helpful feedback on the forum
– We get more status by talking about Vincent’s input than we do from discussing Paul Beakley’s
– Joshua talks about a whispered Story Games thread between he and Alexandre (board name Kobayashi), who was a soldier in the Yugoslav Wars
– Joshua’s scenario idea is the refugee one
– In LIFELESS, you play…. (around 10:30)
– Simon C’s feedback, which brings up discussion of Vincent’s fiction-first posts
– Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and Crystal Express
– Requisite references to Dollhouse and Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
– We settle on the refugee thing, as at least the first “module”
– A mention of (and spoiler for) the film Silent Running
– Emily Care Boss’s Sign in Stranger
– We want to have the game to come with the scenario all set to go, like John Harper’s Lady Blackbird
– Our homework: each of us writes: a setup for the war, 6 characters, a relationship map, and the initiating technology that made it terrible
– No listener homework
– Working title: “Lifeless”
– We mention the comic book/game store we were about to head to in Northampton, MA: Modern Myths

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is from the same band and the same album. The song is called Sheena’s Got a Microwave Now, and I chose it because it’s the harrowing story of a love denied and interfered with by an insurmountable gap in technology.

55 seconds long, I don’t care how big

In this non-episode, Robert Bohl and Joshua A.C. Newman explain why they don’t have an episode this week. Suck it.

01:06:30 long & 63.8 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss possible structures for a session of play, talk about how to structure technological and interpersonal relationships, and talk a bit about how mechanics might work. Lots of meaty game design here.

Joshua‘s and Rob‘s homeworks

– Listener feedback: Paul Beakley, Nathan Wilson, Simon C, Doc Holaday
– The book Starfish by Peter Watts
– Discussion of how many players the game should service
– Initialization, a word to be used a lot in the game
– Drop initialization phase created NPC?
– Primetime Adventures
– Spotlight characters, scene order, and whether scenes are about players or characters
– Are there too many scenes? Can you run out of interesting stuff before you run out of time?
– The roles that PCs play in spotlight characters’ scenes when they’re not spotlight
– The Wire
– Introducing new NPCs and new tech, tying Currents to them
– Talking about the tech web
– Separate relationship maps on each character sheet to reflect different visions of relationships
– What am mechanics?
– Joshua = power, Rob = meaningfulness
– Joshua promises a diagram
– Mind control!
– Personality Anchors, and we argue over it
– Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
– Rob keeps talking about “spotlight scene” when he means “spotlight episode”
– Anchors and immunity
– Vincent Baker’s thread where he’s asking for critique on Apocalypse World
– What to call the co-GMs?
– Homework: write up what a scene might feel like, which we’re probably going to do on the forum
– No listener homework

Rob’s during-the-show notes

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is I Wish I Was a Boy by Angry Red Planet, provided by Podshow’s Podsafe Music Network.