Mothership at Kaiju

 Last night I went to the roleplaying session at Kaiju. I have to admit it has been quite awhile since I was in a bar, so that was a bit weird. The games were in a large back room. Overall it was a fun experience. I was able to chat with a variety of people.

The Mothership game is an indie roleplaying game centered around horror in space. I had never heard about it before but, as sometimes happens, a few days after signing up, I came across a reference to the creator on a blog I read sometimes. (Grognardia) 

So, basically in the center of the table were some pregen character sheets kind of strewn about. What this means is that the game master or the scenario writer had made up the characters before hand. This is because character creation even in fairly lightweight games can take a while particularly if people have trouble making up their mind about stuff. I didn't really think about it much. I just grabbed a sheet without looking at it and decided it was me. 

As you can see my guy is a brawn over brains security guy. This suited me in a way because despite having spent a lot of time reading roleplaying books, I actually have very little experience playing with other people. So, I figured this character would be easy to play. However as it turned out there was very little roleplaying in the sense of like acting out characters. Mostly we were engaged in pragmatic problem solving sort of gaming.

So the scenario is that you are on a deep space mission hauling freight and there is mysterious package on board that we are under strict instructions not to open. We awake from cryosleep to find various mysterious and horrible circumstance and have to deal with things.

There were five players and the GM (the sixth player didn't show). Basically this is a one-shot... meaning there is no continuity with previous sessions which is what is appropriate for the set up here. So, there was a guy with absolutely no experience of roleplaying who was a coworker of the GM. He did fine and was a productive part of the group but he felt a bit frustrated because he was having some really bad rolls with the dice on an android character that is supposed to be close to impervious to certain kinds of dangers. The next guy played the doctor on board. This guy was older than me and had a lot of experience playing role playing games. He said he had been playing since 7th grade. He participated but seemed to be taking a bit of a back seat role kind of letting the rest of us lead the way. Then there were two guys who came together. They played teamsters which as you would expect are space truckers who are responsible for the blue collar work aboard a space vessel. The guy immediately to my left kind of ended up being the leader of the group. He was the guy who was somewhat intense about wanting solve problems and like come up with plans. He seemed ok in that he wasn't trying to manage the other players or anything like that although he did offer suggestions. But like I say he did seem kind of intense and a bit anxious to "win" the scenario. He also made some suggestions to the GM about times that we would need to make a stress roll and stuff like that. But he also seemed to be fairly cool and didn't seem to want to argue or nitpick or anything like that. He seemed willing to roll with how the GM was handling things. There was however one issue where his character died and he was supposed to play another character. He seemed fine with this and was ready to roll with it. But then a little while later after we had already started to explore this branch... he remembered that his dead character had an ability that would allow him a second roll on the thing that had caused his death... he kind of posed this to the GM and the GM kind of let it slide and said he could take the extra roll and so the guy's character actually lived. I think the GM let it happen because we were all first time Mothership players, playing pregen characters, and so actually the GM kind of should have caught that re-roll ability. This player was the only one at the end who expressed some dissatisfaction with the way things had gone but it didn't really come across as blaming anybody including the GM. It was more like he was a bit dissatisfied with the writing of the scenario and there had been some issues with navigating the map which was a bit confusing. But like I say he didn't seem to really want to blame but kind of to talk about it in a constructive way. Then his partner or buddy (I couldn't tell) was the last player. He was on the quiet side especially compared to his friend but he definitely did participate and made some decisions and took some actions. For my part I did participate and did make some decisions and take actions. At one point I argued I should be given one of the limited stim packs to overcome cryo sleep sickness because I was the only one with combat training and a gun. I said, that's not a threat. It means I need to be in top condition to deal with threats. The doctor concurred and gave me one. Other than that, in the confrontation at the end I was able to use my combat skills so subdue the enemy.

The GM was interesting. He seemed to have plenty of experience in that kind of role but struggled a little bit with this session. He seemed to be harder on himself at the end than any of the players were but it had been noticeable that he was uncertain about some things. He attributed this to the fact that he had never run that particular scenario before.

Overall, I had a good time and am glad I went. There were a few issues in that noise was a bit of an issue because the metal chairs on the concrete floors made a lot of noise and there were four games going on in the same room. I also felt the leader player and the GM sometimes spoke too quietly but my hearing is also not 100%.

At the end of the day it is kind of hard to tell how we did on the "win/lose" side of things. We did succeed in some things but we failed to unravel the mystery of the package. But Mothership is supposed to be a tough game and you are not expected to succeed on all the objectives. The GM also went a bit easy on us. 

So, I definitely want to go back and last night at home I signed up for the next session. In that one I will be playing a D&D game. 

 

Update 18

 Well, feel it is time for a general gaming update. The last two posts were more general sorts of musings. So I want to write something a bit more directly gaming related.

I have been to the go club three times now. I seem to have fallen naturally into an every other week pattern. This last Sunday I met someone who had been at IUB shortly before I had. I am a bit unclear if our time there overlapped or not. At that time there were two go clubs. One met in the student union on Friday nights. That club was essentially these two old guys Don and Paul who played each other every week and discussed local politics plus whoever else showed up. Unfortunately, I guess the guy I met this last Sunday had a bit of a negative experience with them in that he felt they were unwilling to play him. So he started another club just down the street at the Asian Culture Center. I remember that at one time I was going to that club because I have memories of hanging out with the Korean guy who manned the desk there. But I don't remember much about that club. I do have distinct memories of a small tournament at that club. I believe it was a knockout and there were about 10 people or so. I seem to remember that I got a bit lucky because the two strongest players got paired in an early round so I ended up playing the winner in the final so I was able to get second place. Most of my memories of go in Bloomington though have to do with the Friday night club. I certainly didn't feel that Don and Paul were unwilling to play me although they definitely felt that the main item of business was playing each other I guess. Anyways, it was an interesting stroll down memory lane. Anyways, this fellow gave me four stones and whipped me. So I guess that is a happy thing because I am in the middle of the ladder at this club so there are stronger players to aim for and weaker players to help. I also played a couple of games with Jackie and I feel I might have been a bit hard on him. He wanted to play even the first time so we did but he resigned. And then we played on four stones and again he resigned because I was way ahead. I know it can be tough to be on the receiving end of that. I tried to find some teaching moments to give him some knowledge but unsure how helpful I was. Hopefully we can play more.

 I have continued to play over pro games. I can't remember whether I posted about this or not but I finished playing over all the supplemental games in Invincible and have made some good progress going through the John Fairbairn book about the games of Shuei. I have enjoyed it as usual with his books. It is still this thing that in some ways playing over these games is comforting for me and can help to settle my nerves or make me feel better. But basically I am playing over them fairly rapidly although stopping to read the comments. So sometimes I feel a bit blah about it in the sense that it is not really deep study. I am for the most part not calculating variations or really considering alternate moves. I suppose you could say this is lazy but I just feel in some ways I would likely just get bogged down if I tried to analyze the games. And like I said, I do it partly as a comfort thing. That being said, I have read in several different places that playing over pro games without analyzing, just playing over the games fairly quickly, is good for your go. I do feel I have internalized some things from this practice. So at the end of the day it suits me to do it this way so I will continue.

Other than that I haven't really been taking go too seriously. I have been doing a few problems in a couple of apps on my phone but that has been kind of a mixed bag. I have been solving some but also sometimes just guessing which I feel strongly is the wrong way to approach problems. I feel that is the problem with doing problems on the computer or phone. The temptation is much stronger to just click and see what happens. When doing problems in a book, I find it much easier to be disciplined. But books also have issues. One is the question of where the answers are placed. Because in some of my books they are placed on the back side of the page with the problem but the paper is too thin so the answer shows through. This has been a major problem with a series of books by Lee Chang Ho (or at least with his name and picture on them). The problems are great problems and there are a lot of them. But the books are just too inconvenient to use because of this issue. For other books sometimes the answers are printed all together at the back of the book, but then it is inconvenient to look at the answers particularly because you want to avoid seeing the answers to other problems. So that can require negotiation. And even if the paper is thick enough for the answers to be on the next page, if you do nine problems per page it is still necessary to somehow record your answers to prevent forgetting whether you actually got the right answer or not and there is not really a convenient way to do that for go problems.

On the role-playing front, the Nerd Louisville session is tomorrow night. So I am looking forward to that. On my own, I have been exploring the original Delta Green book as well as Call of Cthulu 7th edition. I also got a copy of the Basic Roleplaying system because of my interest in universal systems like GURPS. I decided to dip my toe into having Claude (the AI program) run a solo Delta Green adventure for me. I was able to use the Call of Cthulu book to make a character but right now it just exists in the chat with Claude. I intend to fill out a character sheet that I printed off the other day and then I will try to take a photo and post that. I was really resistant to using AI for solo play but somehow I guess I just kind of came around on it. I can't really point to a major shift in my beliefs or anything. I guess I just wanted to see how well it could do it.

Other than that I haven't really been doing a whole lot on the games front. I have been reading an anthology of short stories called "The Weird" edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. I am liking that a lot and I consider it background material for some of the role-playing stuff so it is "games-adjacent". But other than that not much. I brought a chess board and some chess books with me (most of my stuff is being shipped from Taiwan and won't arrive for awhile yet) and I have done some research about local chess clubs but for some reason haven't felt motivated to really pursue that. I also have kind of blown off Magic. I had planned to go to the Secrets of Strixhaven prerelease but I just didn't really feel like it when it was the day of. I have watched some Nick Button videos but haven't been playing either online or in person. I also brought my steam deck with me but just haven't really felt motivated to play video games, although sometimes I wish I had my desktop PC set up so I could play Age of Wonders 4. I did buy a book at Surface Noise detailing many different solitaire games played with regular playing cards but I have yet to actually try any of them.

So, overall gaming is continuing but for the most part it seems to be more of a simmer than a roiling boil. 

Creating Good or Value

 Today I got kind of excited about the idea of getting competitive about creating Good or Value. I was thinking about how in life it is really pretty open about how you create Good or Value and everybody does it in different ways. But I was also thinking that there are some principles. So I was sort of interested in some principles for this generalized notion of value. One thing I have kind of thought about a fair bit is that it seems like Good or Value comes about through coherence. What I mean is that you create Good or Value by making choices that add up. That goes for writing a novel or poem or whatever as well as in games where you create value in your position by making choices with your moves. But of course it also goes in life where we make value by making coherent choices over the course of time.

Then I was thinking that in a lot of ways the notion of value ultimately has to do with other people. At the end of the day, the notion of value I had was generating happiness for other people. That could be in a variety of ways. For some people it is just in terms of in the world immediately around them with the people that they encounter on a daily basis. For other people they generate value for other people by creating or performing. Unfortunately, there are people who create a great deal of value for people they don't know through art or performances or activities at a high level but who create a lot of suffering for the people around them in their daily lives. Even if you imagine yourself as a servant of a higher power, that work is done in the context of generating value for other people...

However, as an introvert, I feel there is a lot of value in maintaining my inner world in a healthy and harmonious way. But I kind of realize that at the end of the day, the real measure of that is how my practice of maintaining my inner organization benefits others in my interactions with them.

 But then I came back to the idea of competition. My whole life I have been attracted to competition and excellence, even though I have never really excelled at any of the competitive activities that I have engaged in. So part of me would really like to combine the idea of competition with the idea of generating value. But in some ways there seems to be a bit of a contradiction because competition easily slides into egoism and selfishness. So the trick is to somehow find a way of channeling competition into good for other people. One of the things I have thought about along these lines is the notion that by offering people good competition you encourage them to improve themselves. So in the sense that by being good yourself, you present a challenge to others to improve themselves.

But it seems to me there is some way that you can compete to create value, in the sense of like a subtle competition to generate happiness in the people around you. But I want to be clear that what I have in mind is different from people pleasing or pandering. And that is why it is subtle. The idea is not to curry favor with people but through your interaction with them to generate true good. To influence them for the good. Not in a manipulative way but in the sense of trying to generate true happiness for them. Sometimes this could involve resisting them somehow or rather resisting their negative impulses.

Then somehow I took a left turn and started to think about the idea of subtlety. That somehow there is something valuable about subtlety. But I always feel kind of conflicted about that because sometimes subtlety seems kind of exclusionary. But there seems to be something at some level where subtlety is beneficial in a way. But that is something I need to think about more

But then I was combining that with the idea of resistance and the idea of resistance was to value capture in many ways. Value capture is the notion that you try to measure and quantify value in a way that ultimately destroys true value and substitutes the measurement. This idea is from C. Thi Nguyen. So somehow the idea is to resist this value capture process.

And that brought me back to something I have been thinking a lot about lately and that is the notion of the weird. I mean this is in sort of like the whole Weird Tales kind of horror sort of mentality but also in the whole "Keep Austin Weird" kind of mentality. That somehow weirdness is a way of resisting value capture. And like how weirdness has both a horror dimension and like a beauty dimension.

So, for me in some ways I would like this blog to be a way of creating value for other people. Value that somehow comes out of my own inner weirdness. 

 

 

 

Adjusting the sliders

 One thing I feel I am getting more comfortable with in life is the idea of balance. I have a personality that runs to extremes and that often wants to make really definite decisions that have a clear directive behind them. But that pattern usually sets me up for failure, and somehow that failure feeds the cycle so I feel I have to make an even more definite and extremely forceful decision about how to be... ad nauseum...

 So basically I have kind of gradually gotten somewhat more comfortable with the idea that a lot of things in my life are not bad. In fact they are good. But, my tendency is to take them too far and then over-react to that fact and want to go to extremes.

So, I think there are just various dimensions of my life. Which is a good thing. So I feel I am starting to get a more definite handle on the fact that like a lot of things in life are more like sliders than they are like toggle switches. So one example is buying games stuff. Che Webster over on roleplay rescue blog had a post (that I can't seem to find right now) talking about this with respect to playing vs buying rpg books. Buying games stuff is good. It is a definite action that can support both publishers and games stores. And it is fun to collect. But there is definitely a sense in my own life where sometimes the buying stuff takes over and actual reading the books or playing the games or whatever takes the back burner. So, a lot of times when I realize that, I have this desire to over react and say I will never spend another penny on games until I have absolutely gotten max value out of each and every item I own. So, I think that never works and just sort of causes me to establish these rigid parameters that I inevitably fail at following. So the solution is just to adjust the slider instead. Not to beat myself up for spending money but also recognizing that there is a pattern of overspending. So just to try to nudge the slider back into the direction of other kinds of activities...  

Another aspect that I need to work on is the time alone vs time with others slider. I am an introvert. So I enjoy spending time alone. But there is also a sense in which I use that as a justification for not doing things that would be both pleasurable and good for me. That is because they would be outside of my comfort zone. So the solution is not to force myself to go to every single club and activity regardless of how I feel. But at the same time pushing out from my comfort zone is a must because there is a definite sense that when I allow it to the general pull of my personality is to slide into just staying home endlessly and letting my world get really small. So, I just feel this is tricky because it is hard to identify sometimes when the choice is avoidance and when it is self-care.

My new life back in US seems to have a lot of these sorts of issues kind of cropping up. And now that I am on my own, I am having to make decisions about this stuff on my own. So, I think there are some things coming about like "trusting myself" and like "being gentle with myself". It is necessary to recognize that I have very limited experience living on my own so I am bound to go a little overboard in some directions and need to correct course. The trick is to not beat myself up but rather to just recognize when an adjustment is needed and then to just do my best to do it without all the extremes of setting rigid rules for myself and stuff like that. 

The President of the Nerds

Well, I can safely say I met the president of the nerds! On Tuesday I went to Golden Keep Games a local game shop and met two cool people. One was the clerk at the shop who was quite nice and helpful and the other was the president of a local non-profit called Nerd Louisville. The objective of this non-profit is to promote gaming. So it was a very nice experience. I was a little hesitant to make the trip there because it was about an hour long trip by bus and I thought the shop might be disappointing. But overall it was a great experience and I really got to talk to these two people for good long while because it was early afternoon on a weekday and we were the only ones in the shop. Mostly Nelson and Tom were trading stories but we also talked about Austin, Texas where Nelson has spent some time. I got to ask some questions. Unfortunately the Delta Green game I was interested in has been discontinued but I got introduced to the Nerd Louisville website through a card. They run an event called slur your roll which is a set of roleplaying sessions that take place on the second and fourth sundays of each month. They take place at a bar but hopefully there will be no problem with just ordering a coke. The price of a ticket is $8 which seems reasonable although it could add up if I decide I like playing there. So I signed up for a session playing the game Mothership on the 26th. Overall it was a big success in terms of getting connected with the community.