(Updated to include bills paid on Wednesday.)

Okay, yeah, that’s a lot to spend in a week, but $1,100 of that was mortgage, power, and iPhone bills. Cut that out, and it’s about $200 for food, groceries, and gas. Which still seems like a lot.

I originally wrote, “I’d be in much better shape if I didn’t eat out as much.” But I only ate out three times this week, for a total expense of under $20. Much of the money went to those fence posts and $50 in gas this week.

I really hope my new truck isn’t going to cost me $50 in gas every week.

But at least I’ll know it.

Three Hearts and Three Lions cover

A friend of mine recommended this Poul Anderson fantasy novel, Three Hearts and Three Lions a while back. I’ve finally been working my way through it.

I’m not going to finish it.

It’s about a guy who wakes up in a fantasy world, and can mysteriously speak the language and ride a horse and fight (quite well!) in armor. And he’s trying to figure out how he got here, and why. So he’s talked to a nearby witch, who’s directed him to the nearest elven lord for advice. He’s attracted a dwarf and a shapeshifting girl as companions.

That’s it. I’m 1/3 of the way through the book, and that’s as far as we’ve gotten.

I don’t mean to be impatient, but at some point this ceases to be worth my time. There’s some fine writing, and some fine sequences, but the story’s dull as dirt. The characters are fun, but none have much stake in anything.

Worse, this is not a bland novel. Anderson was a strong writer, and this world comes alive at times. I find his use of phonetic dialect frustrating (I kid you not, this is an exact quote: “‘Tis naw so canny a steadin’ ye’re boon fawr.”), but it does add richness to his characters. And the protagonist was a smart engineer in his past life, so he’s constantly evaluating his surroundings to figure out the scientific implications (“He wondered what they used in place of steel. Aluminum alloys? Surely magic could extract aluminum from bauxite. Beryllium, magnesium, copper, nickel, chrominum, manganese—while doubltless correct, the idea of an elvish wizard with a spectroscope was funny enough to restore a balance in Holger.”).

But, ultimately, the book feels like no more than a neat idea and a richly-imagined medieval world. And I’m sorry, but I need a little more out of that in my novels right now.

(Writers: Does this describe your novel? What could you do to give the characters a more pressing problem to deal with?)

So, this one goes back on the shelves. A pity; I loved Anderson’s The High Crusade.

This is a tough one to explain.

A few days ago, the Chatty DM tweeted about the need for a revival of Car Wars. If you’re not familiar with it, Car Wars is a tabletop car duelling game from the 1980′s, in which you drive a gun-laden car around a post-apocalyptic arena or road, blowing up other cars. It’s Mad Max as a free-form board game.

I thoroughly agreed with him; as it happened, the same thought had crossed my mind a few days earlier, but I’d never gotten around to tweeting about it. Car Wars was a fun, gritty, action-oriented game with an easy-to-grasp world. You get to play a smelly, unkempt survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, driving around a turbocharged Camaro with a built-in flamethrower. What could be more fun than that?

So, yes, this struck me as a fun game to revive. Turns out Car Wars was developed by Steve Jackson Games, and the last revision was released 7 years ago to mediocre reviews.

Time for a revival. What next, then? I was tempted to write a blog post about how cool Car Wars is. I was tempted to write Steve Jackson Games and suggest an update.

Then I realized: Why not do it myself?

So I created a wiki page called AutoWar, and wrote up a simple game system.

You choose your car’s frame, armor, tires, weapons, etc. During each turn, everyone moves simultaneously, then everyone fires their weapons. The game uses standard 6-sided dice for its mechanics, so to attack you roll 3 dice and subtract distance and relative speed, hoping to roll higher than 3.

Then I tweeted about it. Within a day, several folks had jumped in and fleshed out several sections of the page.

Which inspired me to create graphics, and playtest the system. I worked up a simple scenario: one basic car versus two light cars on a highway. However, this step worried me. I threw the system together on a whim; would it work at all? I’m no experienced game designer.

To my great relief, I had a lot of fun playtesting it. The mechanics needed quite a bit of work, but the action moved quickly and felt exciting.

So I updated the page again. The game’s improving. It’s fun. It works. Now it needs some playtesting.

The most interesting thing about this game is that I’m leaving it open. Anyone can change it. I’ve posted it under a Creative Commons Attributeion ShareAlike license, so anyone can publish it. It’s a bit scary, but feels right somehow.

Check it out, fix whatever needs fixing, and try it out. Heck, tell me what you’d want available so you can playtest it.

Please! Play my game! :-)

It’s difficult to review Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go without resorting to reviewers’ favorite candy phrases: heart-wrenching, melancholy, tragic, and the one that I always shudder at, tour de force.

This is partly because of its deceit. For its first few chapters, it appears to be nothing more than a woman reminiscing about her childhood at an English boarding school. Moreover, the protagonist is nothing special, and spends much of her time second-guessing her (and others’) actions.

Then you begin to notice that something’s a little…off. Certain life details are conspicuously absent. Some normal things are never mentioned, while others are referenced in strange ways, and there are these strange euphemisms about donations and completing.

These are the two great strengths of Ishiguro’s novel:

1. The writing is delicately structured to intrigue and reveal, despite a narrator who is rather dull herself. One learns things about characters that the characters don’t realize themselves.
2. There’s a twist to this woman’s life and entire world that’s revealed slowly and naturally (another of Ishiguro’s impressive feats), and which adds several complex layers of meaning to her memories and worries. This drives the story forward even further.

Which makes Never Let Me Go even more difficult to review. Ishiguro’s subtle touch masks wonderful layers of intriguing complexity, and the twist really shouldn’t be revealed in a review like this. So what can I say?

After I finished the final page, I felt like my head had blossomed open like a flower, and I felt dazed for a few hours.

I can hardly think of higher praise.

Friday feels like a good day to record and analyze my expenditures from the past week, though perhaps I should wait until later in the day. Ah well.

Here, I lay my soul (and wallet) bare:

Saturday and Sunday were spent at GenCon, thus explaining the higher values then. I had to pay $50 for airport parking on Sunday. Urrrrg.

I bought groceries on Monday to stock up after GenCon, and had to buy a $40 badge for Anime USA on Tuesday since I’m going to be running a panel and they don’t give out free badges for that (<sigh>). I’ll be buying groceries tonight, thus the estimated $40 expenditure. Yes, I normally spend about $40 per week on groceries.

The total actually feels pretty reasonable to me. Subtract the unusual expenditures on Saturday ($20 in the exhibition hall and $40 for taxi rides) and Sunday ($50 for parking), and I spent about $120 this week on groceries, gas, and food, which includes essentially two weeks’ worth of groceries.

I’d like to be more frugal than this, but how can I be until I understand myself better? Which is the whole point of this exercise, after all.

So, a while ago, I noticed a Twitter RPG design competition. You had to pitch and describe a tabletop RPG system in 140 characters or less. A fun little challenge. I’d just been reading the Mouse Guard RPG system, where the main villains are tricky weasels, and they struck me as interesting characters. So, an RPG about weasels.

I’ve also been toying on-and-off with a dead simple RPG system, designed for play with non-RPG friends. It uses a straightforward roll-under D6 mechanic; if you’re attempting a dangerous vehicular stunt and have a Driving skill of 4, you roll a six-sided die and succeed if you roll 1, 2, 3, or 4.

So, weasels. Needed a few basic attributes for weasels. Standard role-playing attributes are mind-related (intelligence, wisdom), body-related (strength, constitution, dexterity), and social (charisma), plus hit points and such. But since I had very little space for flavor, these had to be very weaselly attributes. So I settled on Sneaky (mind), Vicious (body), Persuade (social), and Health.

Since I was using a six-sided die, each trait had to have only a few points, balanced in some way. This took a bit of fiddling; you want characters with at least one good skill that doesn’t make them useless in everything else. I ended up with requiring a total of 13 in all 4 traits.

How to handle combat? Simple: all hits do 1 point of damage, subtracted from Health. When you run out of Health, you fall unconscious or die or whatever makes sense for the situation.

Which lead to the following tweet:

Play intelligent weasels with other beasts in forest. 13 points in Sneaky, Vicious, Persuade, Health. Beat 1d6 to succeed; 1 damage per hit

Today, I discovered that it won the competition. Wow!

This was so cool that I opened up NeoOffice and typed up a one-page combined system explanation and character sheet. This led to an expansion of the system: for example, if you don’t make your die roll, you still succeed, but with a complication of your choice. I then created a quick page for the game on my Musaeum of Fantastic Wonders.

So, you can now download Weasels! as a one-page PDF, which contains a description of the weasels’ world, the mechanics of the system, and space for your weasel’s traits and attributes. Enjoy!

I’m trying to live within my means. This blog post is the first record of how much money I’m spending each week. I only started recording my purchases on Wednesday of last week, but even so, here are my purchases:

This is due mainly to $40 per day spent taking a taxi to and from GenCon, and buying lunch and dinner out every day from Thursday on. So it seems like a pretty reasonable amount.

As much fun as I had at GenCon, it was expensive. Here’s everything I spent, including prior purchases:

Seems amazingly expensive when I actually look at the final tally. And none of that was really avoidable, other than the $150 taxi fares if I’d reserved a convention hotel.

(Note: I haven’t forgotten about my previous plan to post about my finances and books! I’m just having trouble collecting the data. Should have something up here in a day or two. Meanwhile….)

While I was at GenCon, I went to a panel on higher-level adventure design. I noticed a disturbing trend: The DMs asking questions lacked a certain imagination.

They had great adventures. Neat stories. But they played the game completely by the book. If the book said that a good challenge for a party of X adventurers was Y monsters at Z level, they’d throw exactly Y monsters at exactly Z level at their players.

One person complained that one of his players claimed some way to defeat the most powerful creature in D&D 4th Edition, Orcus, with a 21st-level wizard (out of 30 levels) using a certain combination of abilities. And the D&D designers running the panel paused for a moment, then replied that the players aren’t going to face a demigod as a lone opponent in an empty room. Orcus will make sure they slog through half a dozen other tough enemies first, then halfway through the battle will teleport out for a bit, rest, and come back recharged with a new weapon.

The DMs in the audience spoke as though adding an extra monster halfway through a battle was an indication that the system was inadequate. Like a role-playing system has to spit out a precise number—size of enemy group, type of monster, whatever—for any given situation.

And, granted, there was a lot of self-selection going on there; confident DMs with no problems improvising a high-level situation probably didn’t attend that panel in the first place. But it was sad to see, in a fantasy game where everything’s made up anyway, people running it as though the rules are legally binding.

If the game’s not working, change it.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about throughput.

I think we all understand the concept: how much stuff can be forced through a particular channel at once. Humans have throughput limits, too.

I currently have a stack of books teetering next to the leather chair in my studio. This stack has towered over 2 feet high for months. When will I ever get through the pile? And what happens when I get a new book? How long will it take me to get to it?

Every week, I write a list of projects that I want to accomplish that week. I usually aim for 10 projects a week, but I rarely get through half of the list. From one perspective, that’s okay; at least I’m accomplishing things. But wouldn’t I be better off with more realistic estimates of my throughput?

Thanks to a few monetary gifts, I’ve had a lot of disposable income for the past few months. I, er, don’t any more. I need to be more responsible with my money, so I live within my means. How can I do so when I make those purchases privately?

So. I’m aiming to read one physical book a week, and will post a review of that book here when I’m done. Thus, you can expect a book review here every week (with a few exceptions; Saalon‘s gift of Neal Stephenson’s 960-page Anathem will take a few weeks). Next week’s book is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

I’m going to limit my list of weekly projects to five.

And, I’m going to keep detailed records of how much money I spend each week, and post the numbers here every week. Not every single expenditure, but weekly totals, and analysis of expensive days and key purchases. (It’ll be revealing to fully account for the monetary cost of GenCon.)

I believe this is the best way to push me to change. What do you think?

Role-playing games exist in a problematic black hole. Existing role-players play RPGs, but the hobby isn’t attracting a lot of new players (though D&D 4th Edition appears to be changing that somewhat).

So how to attract new players to the hobby?

Well, last Sunday, I had the chance to run a game of Dread, and it was a revelatory experience. It might be the answer, or at least point the way towards the answer.

Dread contains a very simple system: each player gets a sheet filled with about 9 probing questions about the person they’re going to play in that evening’s entertainment. These questions are usually intrusive, like “Who forgave you just before he died?” and ”What childhood toy do you still carry with you, and why?”

While the players are answering their questionnaires, the host (who runs the game) explains the situation in which the characters will be involved, and sets up a Jenga^TM tower. (For those unfamiliar, Jenga is a tower of wooden blocks, three blocks per level.) In our case, the characters were college students in the middle of a wilderness adventure in the Grand Canyon.

Once the players have filled out their questionnaires, they should have a good feel for the character they’re going to play, and the game begins. The host reveals the initial scene. In our case, the characters woke up in the middle of the night to the screams of their guide, and found him hauled several yards from his shredded tent, badly wounded and delirious.

The players then act out their characters. And here’s where the incredibly simple but remarkably effective system comes in. Whenever a character attempts something difficult–anything from leaping across joists in a burning building to staying calm in the face of a serial killer—the character must make a ”pull,” by removing a block from the Jenga tower and placing it on the top of the tower. If a player knocks over the tower, then that player’s character dies.

As you can imagine, characters die a lot in this game.

After a character’s death, the tower is set back up, and three blocks are immediately pulled for every dead character. And the game continues.

So, it’s a game of psychological stress and horror. The three sample stories included in the book cover a werewolf attack during a camping trip (the one we played on Sunday), space marines exploring an alien-infested starship hulk, and a horny-teen slasher film, all perfect for this system.

The Jenga mechanic provides several interesting advantages:

• You can explain the mechanic in about a minute, to anyone. Those who’ve never played an RPG in their life can get into it immediately.
• It creates a literary-style wave of rising tension, release, then more tension. Because blocks are pulled after each death, the tension increases on every iteration.
• The central tower, standing in the middle of the table, is a potent reminder of the deep trouble the players face. When a player makes a pull, conversation dies. Players hold their breath. There’s actual palpable tension.
• Because there are no numbers, the host has fewer distractions and can focus on the story.

I’ve never had as much fun as I did hosting that game. Everyone enjoyed themselves.