Keeping in Touch

I'm not the best at keeping in touch. Just ask my family.

Here you go, if you'd like to watch the splatterings that dribble out of my brain-holes sometimes.

https://twitter.com/noahms456

https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/noahms456

noahms456@pluspora.com

MeWe: https://mewe.com/i/noah.stevens

Patreon: patreon.com/Noahms456

I think that just about covers all the permutations. I have a DeviantArt thing, also, and of course a couple of MAME and MUGEN accounts, but hell I can't' even remember all the ones I've had anymore.

A ghost of me hangs out there and it would tell you something, but it's amnestic and too focused on videogames and RPGs

The Phylactery of Google Plus

So. They went and did it, the fools!

They announced the projected plug-pulling of the walking corpse that is Google Plus. A Golden Age has passed us.

Let me be pretty straight, here.  It's like someone is euthanasia-ing my favorite uncle after they starved him to death, put him in a coma, strangled him, with-held meds and treatment, saying WELL THERES NOTHING TO BE DONE FOR IT

Google killed Plus the way they killed Reader. By slow death, cranking back the best features, and general negligence. It's been a good run, but that RPG and war gaming part of me aches where the incoming vacuum will be.

Got an Anchor app on the phone, reinstalling mastodon and discord. Most of my favorite peeps on there I can find again. Not sure how this will play out but I guess I will double down on blogging and figure out how to stay in touch.

Dungeon Stocking Things - Moldvay

I'm always thinking of ways to get a machine to do my lame work for me. I've coded up lots of Tablesmith tables for easy-peasey pregeneration of dungeons, but many of them were based on Moldvay's pages in the old Basic Red Book of my youth.

Not to get too MATHY, but I was thinking about The Moldvay Stocking Procedure. It's interesting to me that many rooms in a dungeon were meant to be empty so that you could have a Wandering Monster bump into there but otherwise just sort of MOVE ALONG NOTHING TO SEE HERE. I can't recall the odds n such, but I've found that the one I coded into TableSmith (the same rolls as Moldvay I'm pretty sure) produces way too many traps, although I guess if you want to thrill the players and try their brainpower, that's one way.

If I made a grid like a tic-tac toe board (that is to say 9 boxes/rooms), I think I'd want 1 box to have a big angry sub-boss or boss monster, 2 or 3 to have monster occupants with treasure, 1 with an ouchy-non-deadly-trap, 1 with a kills-a-PC-or-henchman-or-hireling trap, 1 or 2 with hidden treasure (but still interactable scenery to find it), and 1 with some Special Scene Chewing Feature or Puzzle. Obviously, these are OSR conventions, here. Resource management is sometimes tedious but if done well then it adds an edge of tension.

That is to say:
1 Boss (difficult to win with combat but other solutions possible)
3 Planned Encounters
1 Resource Drain
1 Killer Trick
2 Hidden Treasures
1 Special Feature

So some rooms would APPEAR empty, but still have some minor loot, almost always. An entirely empty room would be suspicious, but the chance of incurring a wandering monster is not negligible, and the disposition of WM need not be combative, and it's not always easy to tell if the room is OCCUPIED by a monster or if it is just, like you, passing through...

I'll give this some more thought. My next project is using Tablesmith to generate dungeons from 1-9, fill in cool details, procedurally generated themes, and lay them out in double column mode as the Ancients did. Why? I don't know! Just to do it, I guess. I have a Tegel Manor-type Big House Crawl in mind for this month and we'll see if it goes over but like always, it's a bit iffy to do but fun to think about.

Much Ado For Errybuddy

I been thinking. I'm a zero-prep type. I find that if I prep very little for a session, I'm better able to savor that feeling of discovery and share in it. Also, if I'm running e.g. Barrowmaze or ASE then that GENERATOR lobe is free to get tone across. I noticed recently though that my freeing up of MY brain sometimes leaves players hanging because even if I'm coordinating the thing weird and wooly the way I like with eg Tablesmith, then the very nature of pseudorandom means it's likely a few people going to be bored. Generate 10 rooms. 8 have monsters. Some treasure. No traps. The thief is bored. Damage low. Irritable monsters. Cleric's bored. Etc.

I started recently to focus more on good stuff to build into games on top of the pseudorandom bones of it. So, fighters always going to get the opportunity to smash, intimidate, lift. Thieves to tinker and steal. MUs going to find weird artifacts, demons, etc. Clerics to persuade the ignorant and expand the influence of their God. Robots to hack and not feel emotions. I know who's probably going to make it thanks to FB so I know what I ought to present for them to have a crack at.

My way of thinking about this suggests that instead of generating A feature in e.g. Tablesmith, I ought to generate two or more features based on different classes, stats, or traits and mix it up so that it's not too repetitive in terms of who gets to play with it. Never one solution means nobody will be bored.

I guess these are sound design principles at the bottom i.e. Nothing new there. The important piece is to recognize the balance between shunting responsibility onto the machine system procedurally versus the need to keep players engaged by offering them a range of things to noodle with.

Maybe I'll tinker with the code later and devise some THERES ALSO THIS HERE charts

Maybe look into the 5-room dungeon thing since there's no way I'm able to get more rooms than that into a session

UNnatural Language Processing

I was reading about Natural Language Processing - i'm trying to learn how to noodle around with Python. Why? Well, I was going to use it to extract all sorts of cool words from the influences upon D&D, and create tables for Mythic GM Emulator. That's down the road, I think but I'm grokking the prinicples and it's not a bad way to learn.

I'm still mucking around with Python, but I did install it, read up on it, installed the Natural Language Toolkit, and a bunch of packages.

Meanwhile, I give you the 100 most common word-clusters/Noun-Phrases from all the prose stories that HPL wrote hisself. It looks like the most common non-stop words (that is, not included in the most frequently occuring English words) are: Time, Old, House, and Night. But Never and Strange are fairly close behind (time and old are far away more frequent). These were collected by software called KHCoder 3, and I got the corpus from GothicChic's pdf, converted to text. I will scrub the stopwords, maybe, but then all the fun stats change and you never know what you'll get that way.

old man old ones one night mr. ward great ones great race black stone such things first time other gods one thing charles ward dr. willett terrible old man old days old house young man joseph curwen other things nameless city other hand one day table of contents next day other side strange things young ward ancient house young men great old new england old woman one side old town old people unknown kadath old whateley million years old men earth's gods outside world many years old legends many things old folk old world cold waste same time old joseph curwen black man old sea randolph carter old tales bearded man dead city last night great abyss one man small hours one place sunset city human world old zadok two years ground floor open space old times dead man old bugs stone floor kind o other times human beings certain things the street mrs. ward old ephraim old keziah waking world town street other end water street great old ones land city outer world new city house of stone aout o white ship great cthulhu attic room black abyss one time great deal strange days next morning dark man two men other time new york

WHO KNOWS WHAT THE FUTURE MIGHT BRING? THE STARS ARE NEARLY RIGHT