Texas Sheet Cake and Dusty Trails
Aug. 9th, 2020 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueCelebrated my friend Molly's birthday via a Zoom party, which probably would have happened even without a pandemic because she moved to Florida last year, and most of her family is in Massachusetts. (Her mom set up the party.) I made a Texas sheet cake to eat a piece of during the call, because that cake is what you make for parties if you are Texan (that or tres leches), but in honor of Florida, I improved a chocolate orange frosting instead of chocolate pecan. Still used toasted pecans to write out "Molly," though. Pecans were going to get in there somehow.
The weirdest thing is that the cookbook I was using, which is a great cake book, The United States of Cake, had a measurement error on the amount of flour, where it gave the amount in cups and the conversion to ounces, but those were two different amounts; somebody did math wrong. So I was like, hmm, which one is right and which one is the typo? And then I was like "wait a minute, neither of those are right, they're both differently wrong, that's the wrong amount of flour both ways."
But then every recipe I pulled up online to confirm what I remembered (correctly) about the flour had a conversion error in another of its measurements. Not the same other measurement; it wasn't one wrong recipe or one wrong conversion copied across multiple websites. They were each separately wrong in the same way about different items.
It's a mess. I appreciate the (new) impulse to present recipes bilingually (bi-mathily?) but it seems like it's being done with false confidence by people who have only actively used one or the other system.
Otherwise I did a lot of sweeping and dusting and shaking out of rugs. The cleanliness situation in the house is still not great. It's old and a lot of people live there, so dust is a constant. I was striped gray afterword in the places where dust stuck to my sweat, and I smelled like desolation and had to shower off. This is why I do not usually venture into those rooms and stick to my bases and beachheads. But sometimes I like to be able to look through a doorway and see a floor, which requires these occasional feints.
Played and won Waterworks on normal difficulty, which is a free browser game about a Polish medieval town's water distribution system. Simple and charming.
Suspect the RPG group I meet with on Monday nights is about to fall apart because the original host has gotten cranky about not wanting to share GM duties and not wanting to play dice-based systems anymore, which I'm fine with (I did used to do improv theatre professionally, and am a writer/director) but which several of the other players don't enjoy. Any time they bring it up, the GM re-explains why it's purer to game without dice or a system, as if the problem is they don't understand what's happening. It's exhausting to watch such a predictable and cliche failure from someone of his age/gender/income/ethnicity/orientation/profession. I am not interested in stepping in and rescuing him, partly because I doubt he'd listen to me either.
The difficulty of "pure" roleplaying (or what I'd call table-read larping) is that the person running it has to be an excellent director who is able to constantly draw the shyer people back into the game, and create clear objectives and forward movement and endpoints. It takes a lot of social skills that are compensated for when you have initiative systems and hit points. There's been some hubristic flying without a net in a situation where there is already the barrier of Zoom and the lack of social lubricants like shared snack food.
It seems like we're reaching the point where I'm either going to need to intervene or let it crash, and I'm probably going to go with crash (and possibly resurrect later). I could step in with my own campaign, which for whatever reason everybody would be willing to compromise on, but which I suspended because I have more important projects right now. Part of why I'm fine with plodding along in somebody else's fumble is because I'm grateful to not have to do it myself at the moment. I don't know. I'll have to think about whether there are systems I could bring in that lend themselves more to web conferences. (Really, I'll have to ask my indie RPG creator buddies what they're seeing.)
The weirdest thing is that the cookbook I was using, which is a great cake book, The United States of Cake, had a measurement error on the amount of flour, where it gave the amount in cups and the conversion to ounces, but those were two different amounts; somebody did math wrong. So I was like, hmm, which one is right and which one is the typo? And then I was like "wait a minute, neither of those are right, they're both differently wrong, that's the wrong amount of flour both ways."
But then every recipe I pulled up online to confirm what I remembered (correctly) about the flour had a conversion error in another of its measurements. Not the same other measurement; it wasn't one wrong recipe or one wrong conversion copied across multiple websites. They were each separately wrong in the same way about different items.
It's a mess. I appreciate the (new) impulse to present recipes bilingually (bi-mathily?) but it seems like it's being done with false confidence by people who have only actively used one or the other system.
Otherwise I did a lot of sweeping and dusting and shaking out of rugs. The cleanliness situation in the house is still not great. It's old and a lot of people live there, so dust is a constant. I was striped gray afterword in the places where dust stuck to my sweat, and I smelled like desolation and had to shower off. This is why I do not usually venture into those rooms and stick to my bases and beachheads. But sometimes I like to be able to look through a doorway and see a floor, which requires these occasional feints.
Played and won Waterworks on normal difficulty, which is a free browser game about a Polish medieval town's water distribution system. Simple and charming.
Suspect the RPG group I meet with on Monday nights is about to fall apart because the original host has gotten cranky about not wanting to share GM duties and not wanting to play dice-based systems anymore, which I'm fine with (I did used to do improv theatre professionally, and am a writer/director) but which several of the other players don't enjoy. Any time they bring it up, the GM re-explains why it's purer to game without dice or a system, as if the problem is they don't understand what's happening. It's exhausting to watch such a predictable and cliche failure from someone of his age/gender/income/ethnicity/orientation/profession. I am not interested in stepping in and rescuing him, partly because I doubt he'd listen to me either.
The difficulty of "pure" roleplaying (or what I'd call table-read larping) is that the person running it has to be an excellent director who is able to constantly draw the shyer people back into the game, and create clear objectives and forward movement and endpoints. It takes a lot of social skills that are compensated for when you have initiative systems and hit points. There's been some hubristic flying without a net in a situation where there is already the barrier of Zoom and the lack of social lubricants like shared snack food.
It seems like we're reaching the point where I'm either going to need to intervene or let it crash, and I'm probably going to go with crash (and possibly resurrect later). I could step in with my own campaign, which for whatever reason everybody would be willing to compromise on, but which I suspended because I have more important projects right now. Part of why I'm fine with plodding along in somebody else's fumble is because I'm grateful to not have to do it myself at the moment. I don't know. I'll have to think about whether there are systems I could bring in that lend themselves more to web conferences. (Really, I'll have to ask my indie RPG creator buddies what they're seeing.)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-10 01:06 pm (UTC)The difficulty of "pure" roleplaying (or what I'd call table-read larping) is that the person running it has to be an excellent director who is able to constantly draw the shyer people back into the game, and create clear objectives and forward movement and endpoints. It takes a lot of social skills that are compensated for when you have initiative systems and hit points. There's been some hubristic flying without a net in a situation where there is already the barrier of Zoom and the lack of social lubricants like shared snack food.
I've definitely noticed this. I'm in two games, both with really great GMs; the D&D game is no problem to involve everyone, but I've watched the GM for the Star Trek one work extra to include me 'cause I'm the shyest. (Or sometimes one of the other players is, but you can tell that they all knew each other before.) I found that too when I was running D&D games with my kids, many of whom didn't want to play at all or felt very self-conscious.
I'm not really a stats person—ironically, that's one thing an online environment makes massively easier for me with D&D—so I appreciate the really good storytellers.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-08-10 10:02 pm (UTC)Part of why I've been reluctant to run is because I think most RPGs are very hard to gamemaster once the group gets bigger than 5 people, and when you add Zoom to that, it totally breaks down. I'm talking like this is my opinion, which it is, but it's what most tabletop designers say about their own games. Tabletop RPGs are made with an assumption that you're playing with a small group, in person, and the mechanics are designed accordingly.
D&D, a system I don't love in most circumstances, has some mechanisms that smooth this problem over, like the initiative system (everybody gets the same number of turns) and the focus on point-based combat (most of the time, what you have your character do has the immediate effect of adding or subtracting points from a total that moves things forward). However, even with D&D, you can see where it strains with a group this big - stuff like how rarely we can do rogue-focused missions, and how often a combat is resolved much more quickly than the DM thought it would be, or in contrast suddenly kills a player character (because the monster manual guidelines for monster difficulty break down when you get above 5 player characters).
Zoom adds the extra complication that you can't have more than one person talking at once - no side conversations - and the DM can't use eye contact and body language to shift the spotlight to different players. It becomes very easy, in a large group with no turn-based initiative system or countdown, for one or two people to dominate the conversation while everyone else either tunes out or feels left out. It's a challenge for that NOT to happen. And the people who will be the talkers are the people most willing to interrupt or derail.
I've been chatting with RPG designers on twitter to figure out whether there are any systems they think would be suited for large zoom groups. And there's kind of a hole in the market, because stuff you'd run for big groups (like conventions or business meetings or classrooms) is kind of assumed to be one-offs, or has a big group of game runners, like a LARP - and again, is stuff where you can split off into smaller groups and side conversations. (You may have already noticed my in-person gamerunner desire to constantly split the party as a kludge for the game mechanics.) Nobody is designing with the assumption that a local friend group of the same 8 or 10 people will be able to meet up weekly for months or years; that's unusual.
But here are the systems that have been suggested as potentially workable in a 9-person zoom:
SF:
Love. Die. Remember (mechas/gundams. says it's for four players but people I trust say it works with 9)
Lasers and Feelings (spaceship crew, simple mechanics)
Strange Gravity (spaceship crew, I've heard very good things about it, but I'm not sure how to make the cards work with zoom, maybe photos?)
HORROR:
Murderous Ghosts (horror, lots of player death)
Psi-Run (psychics being pursued by a sinister org)
Die Laughing (humor horror)
This Discord Has Ghosts in It (haunted house, specifically written for online play; I'm impressed with it)
OTHER:
Mission Accomplished! (team of super spies, satirical, involves d6 rolls, runs well with a group our size)
Primetime Adventures (producers of your favorite tv show, would accommodate anime)
Metrofinal (gods in the apocalypse)
Ghost Court (courtroom drama lawyer/trial stuff, but supernatural)
I'm not seeing a fantasy system that I think would work better than D&D for our current situation.
I've also thought through custom-building a system in which we are either a group of students at an alchemy school or are park rangers in fairyland, which is obviously work and so I don't want to do it unless people are really enthusiastic about it. As a designer, the mechanics that I think are probably critical for large-group zooms are:
1. initiative or turn system
2. focus on episodic problem solving where the players are dispatched (by headquarters, by a teacher) to resolve a situation by the end of the session. By that point, they have succeeded or failed, and this has ramifications. In other words, the opposite of cliffhangers - extremely clear sense that if this task isn't done by the end of tonight, it counts as a failure.
3. Resulting character advancement (or devolution) before the next session
(These three mechanics combined make it matter whether you showed up and what you did, require participation in the session, and disincentivise tuning out)
other mechanics that I think could be interesting opportunities that I have to think about more:
4. given that we don't have side talk at the table, incorporating zoom (or discord) stuff like being able to chat or share images - there could be some character powers or limitations that involve having to express something via gifs, for instance, or being able to find a song lyric or piece of research - use of the online environment
5. given how big our group is, a mechanism where for each individual mission/session, you're assigned a partner and you work in concert with that partner in a prescribed way (like one of you is deciding the what and the other one the how, or one is focused on attack and one is focused on defending) so you get to use your character in different ways, or unlock "combos"