Well that was just adorable. Little Witch Academia is a short one-shot anime about a little girl that wants to follow in the footsteps of a performing witch. She gets herself into a prestigious academy for witches, where she she struggles to keep up academically. On top of her problems in class, she learns that the rest of witch culture has a very low opinion of her childhood idol. When a classmate accidentally unleashes a terrible menace from underneath the school, she gets a chance to prove herself and maybe redeem her hero a bit in the process. Good stuff.

So I made a subdomain for my silly RPG projects back in December, got in touch with several artists and talked them into doing some work for me, and figured I’d test the waters of self-publishing a game by funding my first project on Kickstarter. I put together a modest target value that would cover the costs of printing and shipping the actual books with enough margin to have a really skimpy art budget.

Turns out the modest target value was a bit low. Or the campaign length too long. Take your pick. Either way, not quite a quarter of the way through, we’re already over twice the target value. This means the art budget gets a lot more free and easy, but it also tickles a certain game-player nerve of mine. Kickstarter provides a chart showing your daily progress in dollars. Kicktraq.com makes crazy projections about where the project might end up landing. You see a little number ticking towards a target value and the lizard part of your brain that has been playing video games for the past thirty years wants to keep nudging that number up. And up. And up. You need to shift from “get bare funding” mode to “get product to backers” mode, but with the clock still ticking it’s so monstrously tempting to shift instead into “get even more funding” mode.

The dashboard interface for creators is vastly more enticing than the “discover new projects” interface they have for backers. You get a chart showing pledged dollars over time. You get a pie chart showing how much funding was referred from inside the Kickstarter site as opposed to other sources. You get a table showing which referrers resulting in how many pledge and how much was pledged in total. You get a listing of recent activity, showing individual backers joining in, comment postings, and pledge adjustments. Next thing you know you’re copying and pasting unfamiliar URLs into your browser and finding yourself reading through 21-page flame wars about your project. Eek.

Anyhow, I’m immensely pleased and somewhat conflicted about how this is all working out. I started out doubting that there’d be any support at all, that the campaign would flop and I’d just be crying in a corner overwhelmed by the market’s rejection of my game. Now I’m facing the very real prospect of shipping & handling logistics, quality assurance, and lots more artist collaboration.

With three separate game development ideas dancing around in my head lately, and one project under my belt, I’ve launched Burrowowing Owl Publications as a separate Internet entity. Enjoy responsibly.

(MediaFire link [PDF])

Back in March of this year, somebody posted the following to the Traditional Games forum on 4chan:

/tg/ I have a dream!

I want to make a parody tabletop RPG in which the players take on the role of cartoonishly awesome bimbos. I have no plans other than that the attributes spell SLUT (prelimanary idea: Strong, Limber, Uhmmm, and Titties) when put together and a slight inkling that it will play rather like KAMB with a high mortality rate.

Any suggestions?

(link to archived thread)

A lively discussion followed, with several ideas bounced back and forth, several of them awful but some showing a degree of promise. There was enough interest that additional threads sprung up in the following days and I started to participate in developing it on the 1d4chan.org wiki.  It’s important to remember that /tg/ collectively prides itself on the sometimes-faulty premise that “/tg/ gets shit done,” so once it became apparent that Braindead Bimbo Barbarians could become something actually playable, it was incumbent upon somebody to actually develop and finish it.

That somebody turned out to be me.  Between several rounds of public brainstorming on /tg/ and playtesting via IRC and my weekly D&D group, there were several month-long spells where the was no progress to be had.  The basic conceit stayed the same: a lighthearted adventure game about impractically-garbed women in a world of swords & sorcery. The name changed as we went along (the protagonists aren’t necessarily stupid), and there were a fair number of flame wars regarding gender roles in gaming, but work progressed sporadically.

Earlier this month I finally bit the bullet and had to make a decision. Should I get serious about commissioning original art, wade through stock art sites for legitimately-licenced material, and go through the paces of producing a proper published book (possibly funded through Indiegogo or Kickstarter)?  Or should I just dig up some found art, put together a layout, and publish it non-commercially in the the spirit of free use?  I chose the latter.

And so was born the first Burrowing Owl Publications release: Busty Barbarian Bimbos

BBB features an extremely math-lite conflict resolution system. All rolls are three six-sided dice compared against a player’s own stats. Any die showing a number equal to or lower than the stat in question is a success. Hard checks require three successes. Medium check require two. Easy checks require one.  Critical successes are to be had on two or more ones, critical failures on two or more sixes.  There are no modifiers to character stats or to die rolls, precluding the need for addition or subtraction.

Conflict is handled based on characters’ and creatures’ attitudes towards each other. A hostile dinosaur can be calmed down or an indifferent guard made helpful or friendly. Combat is only possible when one or more of the parties are hostile, allowing most situations to be defused through a protagonist’s social skills.  When things come to blows, there are no hit points (applying damage to a hit point pool is math), but a mildly innovative system by which stats can be disabled is used instead. To avoid incapacitation, heroines may risk their clothing in Wardrobe Malfunctions. Enemies benefit from Plot Armor that works similarly.

Character options are rather limited by the core conceit of the game: if you don’t want your character to be an aggressive, athletic, clever, or beautiful woman, this simply isn’t the right game for you right now. In addition to the four primary stats of Slap, Legs, Uhm, and Tits, a beginning character gets two Basic Abilities and one Advanced Ability that allow her special rules benefits or even access to spellcasting abilities. Through the Abilities system a character can mitigate the impact of her poorer stats or accentuate the advantages of her better stats.

Three methods of character creation are presented, two of which arrive at stats randomly, one of which promotes collaborative character creation among a playgroup.  Collaborative character creation results in a 2/3/4/5 stat spread, while the random methods ensure that high Slap, Legs, and Uhm stats will have a negative impact on the character’s final Tits score (sorry, you don’t get to be strong, athletic, clever, and gorgeous).

Busty Barbarian Bimbos is meant primarily for single-session, low-preptime use by groups of players that are comfortable with having fun with characters and situations that would be utterly ridiculous in most mainstream roleplaying games. Please enjoy responsibly.

(MediaFire link [PDF])

With thanks to several anonymous contributors, Dan, Erik, and Julian for playtesting duty, Viral of Viral Games for setting a good example, Ryan Macklin for inadvertently scaring me away from publishing this for money, and my wife for putting up with me.

If there’s one item on my November ballot that has rustled my jimmies, it has to be Santa Rosa’s Measure Q. Q proposes to take the seven-member city council, traditionally elected as at-large representatives of the entire city, and divvy them up into separate districts to represent the various neighborhoods and constituencies of various parts of town. They will continue to select a mayor from among themselves, and will continue to server four-year terms.

There are two leading arguments that I have seen put forward by the “no” camp here, both in the form of newspaper articles and push-polls I’ve received at home. Quoted from yesterday’s Press Democrat:

First of all, Measure Q takes away 85 percent of your current votes for members of the City Council. This stifles your political voice, not enhances it as proponents claim.

Second, you now have the ability to vote for all seven council members. If you vote for Measure Q (district elections), you will not be able to vote for six other council members. Consequently those six will no longer be accountable to you. This undermines your influence as a citizen, not enlarges it as the proponents claim.

The stickler in me that perks up whenever numbers come into play immediately sees this as a steaming pile of bullshit. If you reduce my ability to vote for city council members from 7 members to one member, that leaves me with a little over 14% of my number of voted-for council members. So your two arguments for me are that I only get 1/7th of the power and furthermore, in addition to that, I get my voting power reduced by 85%? That’s just repeating one argument twice. This may be nit-picking, but I don’t appreciate being spoken to with those kind of patronizing smokescreen tactics when I’m entrusted with legislative responsibility over my community at the polls.

The more substantial problem with this line of reasoning is that while a resident of Santa Rosa has normally been able to vote for candidates for all seven Council positions, the 2010 census shows my vote is competing with some 167,814 other opinions. So overall I have 7/167815ths of a say in who our representatives are. Split that up into districts as proposed by Measure Q and my voting power becomes, ostensibly, 1/23973rd. No change in the prima facia potency of my ballot. Instead of 7 extremely-watered-down votes, I get one somewhat-less-watered-down vote.

To get a little more practical, in 2008 there were eleven candidates running for four open positions. In 2010 there were seven candidates running for three open positions, some of whom also ran in 2008. In 2012 there are seven candidates contending for four open positions. It’s pretty clear that we don’t have a rough time scrounging up two or more candidates for every open position under the existing system. I consider that a good thing, your mileage may vary.

Trying to stay practical, different segments of the population vote at different rates. Elderly, educated white people are more likely to vote than younger minorities with less education. There are a thousand demographic divisions one could look at, but generally speaking the portions of the population most likely to vote, and thus more likely to see their interests reflected in the City Council Elections tend to be clustered in a section of town that can be broadly describes as the north-east quarter. Most of our Council members in recent decades hail from that area. People who live in the North-west are more likely to vote than their counterparts in the less affluent South-west, and would see their voting power decreased somewhat. Meanwhile everybody else that is already in the habit of casting a ballot will see their per-capita voting power increase.

Regarding the ancillary argument that district representation would lead to intra-Council division and strife, delaying projects that are in the whole city’s interest, it seems to me this has always been the case and likely always will be. Many cities use district representatives successfully, and there is little indication that at-large representation is of any benefit at all.

As somebody who doesn’t live in a bastion of high election participation, Measure Q appears to be in my self interest.

Full text of Measure Q (PDF)

Having successfully rage-quit my first ironman run through XCOM: Enemy Unknown (dear God, the casualties and missteps!) and completed a full run-through, I’m still looking forward to another run through this highly-addictive exercise in sado-masochism. A couple of things I’ve picked up, mostly the hard way:

Use satellites smarter. Every month you get a report card from the council. They summarize how many UFOs you intercepted, how many missions you took care of, and the panic levels of the various member nations. This is when you get your monthly infusion of cash money, and is when member nations that are fully-panicked will bow out of the X-Com project. As soon as you have the money to, build one or two extra satellites and make sure you will have uplink capacity for them by the next council report event.

Over the course of the month you may find yourself sorely tempted during abduction events (which force you to pick two countries to take a heavy hit to their panic level, along with a slight hit to that country’s whole continent). If you really need more engineers or scientists for a long-term project, you may have to let a country go into full panic temporarily. Don’t sweat it, you can fix it. Some missions reduce panic on a continental or global basis. Failing that, a day or two before the next council report just deploy a satellite to any fully-panicked country. Panic will immediately drop, plus you’ll get some amount of additional monthly income.

Satellites look expensive early on but more than pay for themselves. It just takes a little understanding of how monthly funding and panic levels work and a big dose of patience.

Speaking of patience, you can wait a while on a fair amount of the research tree if you are able to consistently employ patience. Eventually you’re going to have to put satellites over Brazil and Argentina for panic-reduction and money reasons, at which point you get a perk that makes interrogations and autopsies instantaneous. Think of all the man-hours you can save that could be put to better use developing high-end interceptors and weaponry.

Speaking of weaponry, there seems to be a trap hidden in the research tree. Beam weapons. I spent a lot of research time getting laser pistols, rifles, scatter guns, and heavy weapons, then spent a lot of resources building them during my first abortive attempt. It turns out that with a little application of caution and patience during tactical missions you can do fine with conventional weapons and some carapace armor until you gain access to plasma weapons. In the old X-Com: UFO Defense game you had to worry about ammunition eating away your resources, so plasma weapons were a luxury. Not the case with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Once you have a weapon its ammunition is free, so get yourself some decent armor, get working on your interceptor technology, and unlock some of the high-priority plot projects. Leave the beam weapons alone. Listen to Admiral Ackbar on this one.

Everything here has to do with patience, it turns out, and it seems the best way to keep your squad in one piece isn’t leveling up your experienced specialists (though that’s good) or optimizing your equipment (which is helpful), but rather to take advantage of an unadvertised feature of every trooper you have from the greenest panic-monkey rookie to your hardest motherfucking colonel. Their ears. If you don’t know where the next gaggle of aliens are lurking, you don’t have to rush an assault specialist in to get shot to pieces. You can dig into some cover, reload if the mood strikes you, set everybody to overwatch, and wait a turn or two. Somebody will hear something, and you’ll get an indication of which direction the bad-guys are.

Finally a word on snipers. They’re maddening. If you can get one into a good position, they can eat through aliens like nobody’s business. If you find yourself among a bunch of shipping containers and walls, it feels like you’ve got one or more hands tied behind your back. So get comfortable with the idea that your long-ranged assassin is going to spend a fair amount of time using a pistol. Yes, a pistol. Nobody else in my squads fires a pistol. Ever. There’s a sniper special ability that looks like a trap: do an additional two damage with pistols. Big whup. Two damage. Hell yes, it’s a big whup. Add two damage to the starting conventional pistol and you guarantee a kill against a sectoid or thin man that otherwise would have gone untouched because you had to move to line up your shot. My current approach with snipers is squad-sight for range, pistols for up close, and opportunist so I can manufacture some clean shots without taking a reaction-shot penalty.

Vigilo Confido.

Looking forward to the unlocking my preload of XCOM: Enemy Unknown this evening, my thoughts keep wandering to what exactly I intend for my approach to be early on. With a limited number of troopers available for each ground mission, one temptation will be to expand the number I can deploy by upgrading my base to allow for five- or six-man squads.  Depending on the other options available at the moment, compared to my budget, that will be a strong temptation indeed.

Developing some basic body armor and support capabilities in the form of decent medical kits will be another early priority, presuming that I find my troopers’ weapons to be sufficiently deadly. In the original X-Com the conventional armaments were laughable, so I’ll be sorely temped to research and manufacture laser weapons. I’m leaning toward the defensive, though, as a shoddy weapon in the hands of a veteran is preferable to an excellent weapon held by a panic-prone rookie. I hope.

As for those rookies, as soon as I’ve got a squad worth of veterans, there will be a rotation of fresh meat on every mission I can swing it for.  I know at some point a valuable, experienced lynchpin of my tactics is going to get himself poisoned or burned or blasted all to hell, and end up spending quality time in the hospital or pushing up daisies.  Just having one good sniper or heavy or support guy isn’t a good option; it’s a recipe for long-term disaster. So somebody’s going to have to ride the bench every mission.  Sometimes getting laid up with an injury will make this decision easy, but other times it’ll be painful. As rookies get promoted and find their role, their place in the rotation will shift.

Once I’ve got a stable of modestly-experienced troopers available, I figure I’ll go half-and-half with hard-bitten veterans and the lower ranks. Nobody is really expendable, but I’d much rather take the hard-nosed position of sending a corporal in first instead of  a major or colonel.

When I have enough experienced troopers to fill out two full squads, it is time to expand squad size. The 1994 X-Com saw enough Normandy Beach effect, with rookies dying in droves as they exited their Skyranger. No need to repeat that more than absolutely necessary.

Squad composition will go balanced for a while, with a Sniper, Support, Assault, and Heavy Weapons specialist in the mix whenever I have them available, swapping out the Assault and Heavy Weapons troopers for rookies more often than not. I expect a lot of Assault specialist casualties early on. For early play I hope that a barely-competent Heavy Weapons guy will get his job done more often than not; he’s for clearing out walls, right? I hope to get a Support specialist early on and keep him on a road of continuous improvement. This role strikes me as particularly conducive to my cautious-advance style of play from the old days.

In a couple days, with any luck, it’ll turn out this is a good approach. Unfortunately luck seems to swing both ways in the X-Com world.

The new Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game system has been out for a couple of weeks, so it’s high time we take a look at character creation options.  A striking feature of the process is that each player character has two starting careers, and can pick up more as his adventuring life runs on.  So which careers to pick?  Some appear to compliment each other nicely, but with all your skill and ability choices limited by per-career lists, you run a serious risk of making somebody that’s totally worthless in a scrap or completely helpless outside a fight.

To help mitigate this, the following technique can be applied to each career you are considering.  Plot out your careers on two axes, Urban vs. Wilderness and Combat vs. Skills.  If your GM wants to run a combat-intensive urban campaign, you would be well-served to lean towards a career combination that suits.  Such a character may be a boat-anchor in a wilderness skilled campaign.

The Procedure: Keep two running tallies, one for Urban, one for Combat.  Add five to the Urban tally for every starting ability, connection, or skill that is clearly urban, subtract five for those that are clearly not. Many don’t fit neatly, so don’t apply any number for those.  For abilities, connections, and skills available through advancement, add or subtract four for every ability or connection.  The values are ten for any skill capped at four, five for any skill capped at three, one for any skill capped at two.  Repeat for Combat but add five for each spell the career starts with (spellcasters are for killing stuff in this setting, mostly).

As and example, take the Alchemist’s Combat axis:

• +10 Combat for starting abilities
• +10 Combat for starting military skills.
• -10 Combat for starting occupational skills.
• +16 Combat for advancement abilities.
• -4 Combat for advancement connections.
• +12 Combat for advancement military skills.
• -61 Combat for advancement occupational skills.
• Total of -27 Combat. The Alchemist is mostly a skilled career.

Now for the Urban axis:

• +0 Urban for starting abilities.
• +5 Urban for starting skills.
• +4 Urban for advancement connections.
• +41 Urban for advancement skills
• Total of +50 Urban. There’s nothing inherently outdoorsy about being an Alchemist.

Contrast this with the Ranger:

• +10 Combat for starting abilities
• +10 Combat for starting military skills.
• -20 Combat for starting occupational skills.
• +36 Combat for advancement abilities
• +42 Combat for advancement military skills.
• -61 Combat for advancement occupational skills.
• -10 Urban for starting abilities.
• -10 Urban for starting skills.
• -32 Urban for advancement abilities.
• -39 Urban for advancement skills
• Total of 17 Combat. The Ranger has a lot of skills and a lot of fighting prowess
• Total of -91 Urban. This career is built for the wild places between cities.

Theoretically if you were to make a character that is an Alchemist/Ranger you add these scores together for a -10 Combat / -41 Urban character that is probably better suited for a wilderness campaign with a mix of fighting and skill play than for a combat-heavy urban campaign.

Of course, this is highly-generalized and a great deal of the point totals come from choices available to the character as he gains experience. An Alchemist/Ranger that keeps picking up skills from the Alchemist career has he advances is going to be much more urban, and depending on the abilities selected during advancement there’s a lot of room to become something of a walking calamity in combat.

Back in January of 2011 a show that held just about zero appeal to me aired. It had a dog-choking Japanese name that meant nothing to me, was clearly about a pink-haired magical girl and what looked like a cat with rabbit ears hanging out of its cat ears. Why on Earth would I watch such a thing, I thought. So I didn’t. Turns out I was missing out.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica isn’t your father’s magical girl fare. It’s not a lighthearted tale of some Mary-Sue heroine saving the world repeatedly with the power of love and friendship, though it takes careful pains to look like it is. Here we get the tale of Madoka, a first-year junior high student that is warned by a mysterious stranger not to accept any wishes granted by odd creatures, and definitely not to become a magical girl. What an odd thing to we warned about, as there’s no such thing as wish-granting creatures or magical girls so far as Madoka knows. Enter Kyubey, the aforementioned mutant-cat creature that, predictably, offers her a wish as payment for her becoming a magical girl.

What follows is a gritty, sometimes shocking story of hubris, betrayal, tragedy, loss, personal sacrifice, and perseverance. Clocking in at twelve half-hour episodes and of a unique visual style, I highly recommend giving this title a chance.

I’m not a big hardware guy. I use computers as a tool, sometimes for work, sometimes for hobbies, but I generally only get under the hood when something is wrong, and only then when whatever went wrong is seriously getting in my way.  Take the recent gallery outage for example.

I run an old Linux box with an unimpressive CPU, unremarkable storage and memory, in a seriously-oversized 4U rackmount chassis that I’ve had parked at my employer’s data center for the past half-dozen years.  Being not-particularly-inclined to fiddle with my operating system just for the heck of it, I let things get pretty seriously outdated, to the point where upgrading software like my WordPress install here was troublesome and required odd work-arounds. So I poked at it a bit, patching here and there, and at some point I managed to deny myself SSH terminal access. I could still get in via SCP (which is odd because SCP uses SSH to connect, but hey), so for the most part this didn’t matter to me.

I let it sit for a few months, taking a poke at it now and again when the mood struck me, but eventually I managed to totally screw it up to the point where I couldn’t connect via my https control panel (Webmin), SSH, nor SCP. I don’t let anybody else use any of the above, so nobody else was affected. People who wanted to use my gallery could, the handful of web robots and actual people that visit this blog could still do so as normal, and my Riddle of Steel wiki was functioning, so no harm, no foul.

Then I bit the bullet and opted for the nuclear option. In the back of my mind I was already concerned about disk usage and my decrepit old IDE drive, so I pulled the old 4u from its rack to pop a fresh disk in, install a modern operating system, and migrate the old data over. No problem, right? I’d have it done in an evening.  Of course not.

My first challenge was my server’s neighbors.  It turned out that the five servers above mine in the datacenter cabinet were not properly mounted. They weren’t even improperly mounted. They were just resting atop my box. Four little bolts in the face of my server were the only thing between them and plummeting to the floor. Oh, and one slightly-short CAT-5 cable that just about gave up the ghost as everything sagged.  A metal rack shelf and a couple of 4x4s later (I kid you not, the’re still there) my lazy neighbor’s equipment was reasonably secure again and I had my server out and ready to service.

This is when I realize for the first time in half a dozen years that my server has no CD drive. It had been a network install and never needed one before. But I didn’t have anything set up ready to serve a network install, so I’d have to cannibalize one from one of my retired desktop machines at home. Glorious. While I was was at it, I figured I would use the drive from the same machine. This will come back to haunt me later.

I finally get the CD drive and new HDD installed and promptly discover that the tray won’t open to take my freshly-burned install CD. Great.  Cue another pause in getting the gallery back up.  I cannibalize another drive from another retired machine, and lo this one opens and is bootable.  I get my install disk up and running, and 23% of the way through the process it declares I’ve got a corrupted file. Outstanding. I burn another install disk and get 11% in before getting the same error.  Two disks later it finally completes, I’ve got a simply LAMP server to migrate my data to. Or do I?

I power down, put in the old server’s HDD, and turn it back on. ATAPI errors out the butt. I fiddle with the jumper configurations, but they persist. Finally I discover that one of my ATA cables wasn’t set up correctly, and perhaps never had been. I get the sorted out and find out that my cannibalized HDD won’t boot, for reasons unknown.  Off to the store, get a new HDD, install the operating system from scratch, get the old HDD back into the picture, figure out how to mount it, and get the files copies over.

Then comes wrestling with the network configuration.  Linux likes to play coy about things like network interfaces and whether it’s got link on which port.  I get it up and running by DHCP on my office LAN to make sure I’ve got Apache and MySQL up configured properly, import the gallery database from backup, square away a couple of php.ini and virtualhost issues, and it’s time to re-rack the sucker.

There is currently a metal shelf and two 4×4′s where my box used to be, but there’s a convenient 4U opening elsewhere in the cabinet, so no problem there. I slide it in, secure it properly out of deference to the folks whose gear is below mine, and go to plug back into the switch.  The CAT5 cable I had left when I pulled the box is now gone. I grab a spare and plug it into the port I used to be on and see my link indicator light up. I fire up a console and manually enter my static IP information. Which is, naturally, kept in a different place than my DNS resolver information. Thanks, Linux.

I discover that I can’t ping out. Not by name, not by IP. I check for link. I check to make sure I’m connected to the port I used to be on. No good.  I double-check the syntax on /etc/network/interfaces and restart the network services. No good.  I check the records of which port I’m supposed to be on. The record says I’m supposed to be four ports off what what I had noted when I had removed my gear. I try that port. I get link. I reset my network. I still cannot ping. I try each of the other open ports on the switch in turn, getting link each time and finding myself unable to ping each time.  So I check for other loose cables. I find three in all, one of which I think was my old cable. I try it. No dice.  I try the others, and lo! what used to be port 10 is now port 2 and I’m back up and running.

I configured my DNS and hostname, buttoned down the cabinet, and popped the gallery link back up atop my blog.

The moral of the story here is that getting it to work is half the fun. If you can’t enjoy a process like the one described above, hire a professional.