Category Archives: Games

#184: Remembering Adam Keller

May 13, 2017 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #184, on the subject of Remembering Adam Keller.

Some of you know who Adam Keller is (that is a link to his Facebook profile). Indeed, some of you know him better than I, although I have known him for over a decade, having met him at Ubercon (I do not recall which number, but I’m betting on III), gamed with him online and at conventions, and exchanged visits to each other’s homes. Still, he was much closer to my second son Kyler and our perennial houseguest John, both of whom lived in his home for a while, probably more than once. I knew him, but never very well. But then, I know very few people very well.

However, I was notified of this, and ultimately found it on that Facebook profile (dated April 24th, 2017, posted by someone from Adam’s own personal account):

I regret to inform all of Adam’s friends and family that he passed away last night at 11:20 pm at home.

We are looking for any family members of Adam. If you are family or have contact information for family please call….

As we make arrangements for Adam I will post them here.

Thank you very much.

Digging through threads on that page I learned that he died of pneumonia. Co-workers say he was sick and in some pain for most of a week, but refused to go to a doctor. Some attributed this to his fear of the high co-pay on his (Lockheed) company employee health coverage policy, and so some blamed the Affordable Care Act. That is more than I know. I do know that many excellent company health care plans have been eviscerated to avoid the tax penalties of that law, and there are claims that it is discouraging people from obtaining needed medical care. If that is the case here it makes the event the more tragic, but it’s also not the point.

Adam was a gamer, and an outstanding one. He was a champion Hackmaster player (I understand he held a national title thrice) and ran the game at conventions, in some capacity on behalf of Kenzer & Company. It was while he was running a Hackmaster game at Ubercon that he heard me running a Multiverser game at the next table for Kyler, and became interested enough to inquire about it and test play it. He became an avid fan, player, and supporter, coming sometimes to company meetings, trying to advise us on our hopeless financial situation, and promoting the game to his gaming friends. He was one of the best power players I ever ran, and he has left behind a couple of characters who genuinely earned their superhero status and abilities through game play, whom I will seriously consider how to use as non-player characters in the future. I will not forget him.

Because I am the chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild, I am often asked whether I believe a particular departed individual is in heaven. I try not to speculate, but I realize that it matters to people, particularly in regard to those I have at least briefly known. The only person besides Jesus that I am completely certain will be in heaven is me, because I have that promise from God; for everyone else, there are some that it would shock me were they not there, and probably some that it would surprise me if they were, but I am not the one who makes those decisions. Regarding Adam, I can only say that I have insufficient information. He never talked about spiritual matters, but he was generally quiet and with me he rarely spoke about anything other than gaming.

(Just because people will ask, and some (notably Timothy and Anne Zahn) have asked, I am reasonably certain of Gary Gygax, and very sure of Dave Arneson.)

Multiverser gamer John Cross has several times said that he believes that when I created Multiverser, God revealed to me what heaven was going to be like: that we would leap from world to world becoming involved in adventures of all kinds forever. I deny it on every level. God revealed nothing to me; the concept of leaping between universes was not new with us, and most of how it worked came from Ed Jones, not me; it is not the heaven which I am eagerly anticipating. However, somehow I think if it were so, Adam would like that.

Rest in peace, friend, and whatever adventure you find beyond the grave, may God have mercy on you.

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Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Music, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#169: Do Web Logs Lower the Bar?

February 24, 2017 M.J. 2 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #169, on the subject of Do Web Logs Lower the Bar?.

I noticed something.

I don’t know whether any of you noticed it, and there is an aspect to it that causes me to hope you did not, to suspect some of you did, and to think that I ought not be calling it to the attention of the rest. But it is worth recognizing, I suppose, even if it is at my own expense to some degree.

What I noticed was that some of the web log posts I publish are not up the the same standard I would expect of my web pages.

Certainly it is the case that some of the web log subjects are what might be called transient. I was quite surprised to see in my stats recently that someone visited the page that covered the 2015 election results for New Jersey. I’m thinking it must have been a mistake. Yet at the time it was important information, even if in another year it won’t even tell you who is in the Assembly, because we’ll have had another election.

It is also the case that being an eclectic sort of web log it is going to have pages that do not appeal to everyone–indeed, probably there are no pages that appeal to everyone. I recently lost one of my Patreon supporters, and that saddens me, but he was the only person contributing as a time travel fan, and was not contributing enough to pay for one DVD per year; I’m sure he is disappointed that I haven’t done more time travel pages, but there has not been that much available to me and the budget has been particularly tight. With pages about law, politics, music, Bible, games, logic problems, and other miscellany, there will certainly be pages that any particular reader would not read. Yet that has always been true of the web site, and although the web log is not quite as conveniently divided into sections it does have navigation aids to help people find what they want.

What I mean, though, is that I don’t seem to apply the same standard to web log pages as I would to web pages.

I suppose that’s to be expected. As I think about it, I recognize that I put a lot more time and thought into articles I am writing for e-zines and web sites that are not my own. I expect more of myself, hold myself to a higher standard, when I am writing such pieces. For one thing, I can’t go back and edit them later–which on my own site I will only do for obvious errors, never for content. For another, something of mine published by someone else should represent the best that I can offer, both for my own reputation and for that of the publisher. If you’re reading my work at RPGNet, or the Christian Gamers Guild, or The Learning Fountain, or any of the many other sites for which I’ve written over the decades, you might not know any more about me than what you find there.

It’s also the case that, frankly, anyone can set up his own web site, fairly cheaply and easily, write his own articles, and publish them for the world to ignore. There is a limited number of opportunities for someone to write for someone else’s site, and to be asked to do so, or permitted to do so, is something of a recognition above the ordinary.

Of course, there are even fewer opportunities to write for print, and fewer now than there once were. Not that you can’t publish your own printed books and comics and magazines, but that those that exist are selective in what they will print, and so the bar is higher.

The web log system makes it quicker and easier to write and publish something. I suspect that there are many bloggers out there who open the software, start typing what they want to say, and hit publish, as if it were an e-mail. I maintain a higher standard than that–all of my web log posts are composed offline, and with the only exceptions being the “breaking news” sort (like the aforementioned election results page) they all get held at least overnight, usually several days, reread and edited and tweaked until I am happy with them. (As I write this, there are two web log posts awaiting publication which have been pending for two days, and I will review this one several times over the time that they go to press.) But even so, the standard of what I will publish as a web log post is considerably lower than that which I will publish as a web page.

In that sense, the web log becomes more like diary, something in which you compose your thoughts and then ignore them–except that this diary is open to the world. I think–I hope–all bloggers put more thought and care into their web log posts than they do into forum conversations and Tweets and Facebook posts. However, while I have read some web log posts that were excellent, I have also read a few that caused me to wonder whether the author was thinking. I try to keep some standard here, but I admit that sometimes I wonder whether I posted something because I thought it was worth posting or because I wanted to keep the blog living and active.

In any case, if you read something here and wonder why I bothered to post it, perhaps now you have a better idea of that.

Games, Logic and Reasoning

#167: Cybergame Timing

February 22, 2017 M.J. 2 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #167, on the subject of Cybergame Timing.

I’ve played a few games which I am calling “cybergames”. “Computer games” would suggest they are considerably bigger than they are. These are “Facebook games” and cellphone games. What usually happens is a close friend or family member will be playing a game and will “need” another player in order to get certain in-game benefits (a recruitment tool used by the game designers to get people who are playing to coerce their friends to play), so I will join the game and become involved, and then they will stop playing and I’ll realize, gradually, that I’m the only one I know playing this game, and eventually will realize that I’m wasting a lot of time on something that was supposed to be a way of interacting, in some small way, with this other person, and now is about interacting with a central processing unit somewhere. However, along the way, being a game designer and gamer from way back, I notice things about these games, and one of them has begun to bother me.

Many of these games have timed processes. That is, for example, you’ll say “build this here”, and it will tell you that it has started building it and the building will be complete in exactly this period of time, a countdown timer beginning. That sometimes limits what else you can do (or requires you to spend resources to do some other things you normally would be able to do “free”), but its primary function seems to be to induce you to return to continue playing the game later. The time units are often intuitively logical–for example, it is often the case that these will be twenty-four hours, or twelve or eight or six, fractions of a day. With the twenty-four hour unit, you think that means you can play the game once a day and hit the button to restart this for the next day–but therein lies the rub.

Assume that you are playing such a game, and there is one task that can be done every twenty-four hours–collect a specific resource. Let’s assume you are playing this game every morning before work and again twelve hours later in the evening after supper. Both of those times are going to have a bit of fluctuation to them, of course, and that’s part–but not all–of the problem. So at seven o’clock Monday evening you collect the resource, and that restarts the clock. Of course, there are other things to do in the game–you don’t just collect the resource, you do other game play things at the same time. So on Tuesday at seven the flag pops up to say that you can collect the resource. Odds are against the notion that you are simply waiting for that flag to appear and immediately hit the button, so it will be at least a few seconds–let’s say a minute–before you do. Sure, some days you are going to hit that resource in the same second, but those are the very rare ones. By the end of a week, you are going to have shifted the time that the twenty-four hour resource renews by several minutes–so the next Monday you come to play at seven, but the flag doesn’t appear until five after, or ten after, or some time after the hour. That’s not a problem–presumably you are playing the game for more than ten minutes at a shot, or it wouldn’t be much of a game. However, you can’t make that clock go backwards–by the next week it will be quarter after, or possibly half past, before the flag appears.

Probably it’s not a game that you play for half an hour, at least not every night. At some point, you give up waiting for that flag, and it “appears” in the program after you’ve shut down the game. When you restart the game at seven in the morning, there it is. And now you repeat the same process in the morning, until you have to quit the game and leave for work before the flag appears. You lose a day of resource generation, and it returns to an evening task.

Not a big deal? However, this same problem affects all tasks of length, whether twelve, eight, six, four, or even three hours: no matter how frequently you play the game during the day, eventually the task will be unfinished twenty minutes before you are going to bed, and you will have to choose whether to stay up and hit the button late or go to bed and pick it up in the morning. What seems like a game mechanic that pushes you toward a regular play schedule actually prevents a regular play schedule, because it shifts against the clock slightly each time.

The obvious solution to this problem is a game design correction: replace those seemingly intuitive chunks of turnover time with rather unintuitive shorter ones. Have the resource renew in twenty-three hours, eleven and a half, eight and two thirds, six and a three quarters, four and five sixths, three and seven eighths hours. This lets the player show at a regular time and find the task complete and waiting for replay. It avoids the frustration of having to wait until tomorrow morning simply because it’s not worth waiting another twenty minutes tonight. It’s a better game design.

Anyway, that’s my suggestion. I would probably find these games a bit less frustrating (and really, do you want your game to be frustrating?) if that were fixed.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Music, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#150: 2016 Retrospective

December 31, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #150, on the subject of 2016 Retrospective.

Periodically I try to look back over some period of time and review what I have published, and the end of the year is a good time to do this. Thus before the new year begins I am offering you a reminder of articles you might have seen–or might have missed–over the past twelve months. I am not going to recall them all. For one thing, that would be far too many, and it in some cases will be easier to point to another location where certain categories of articles are indexed (which will appear more obvious as we progress). For another, although we did this a year ago in web log post #34: Happy Old Year, we also did it late in March in #70: Writing Backwards and Forwards, when we had finished posting Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel. So we will begin with the last third of March, and will reference some articles through indices and other sources.

I have divided articles into the categories which I thought most appropriate to them. Many of these articles are reasonably in two or more categories–articles related to music often relate to writing, or Bible and theology; Bible and politics articles sometimes are nearly interchangeable. I, of course, think it is all worth reading; I hope you think it at least worth considering reading.

I should also explain those odd six-digit numbers for anyone for whom they are not obvious, because they are at least non-standard. They are YYMMDD, that is, year, month, and day of the date of publication of each article, each represented by two digits. Thus the first one which appears, 160325, represents this year 2016, the third month March, and the twenty-fifth day.

Let’s start with writings about writing.

There is quite a bit that should be in this category. After all, that previous retrospective post appeared as we finished posting that first novel, and we have since posted the second, all one hundred sixty-two chapters of which are indexed in their own website section, Old Verses New. If you’ve not read the novels, you have some catching up to do. I also published one more behind-the-writings post on that first novel, #71: Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One 160325, to cover notes unearthed in an old file on the hard drive.

Concurrent with the release of those second novel chapters there were again behind-the-writings posts, this time each covering nine consecutive chapters and hitting the web log every two weeks. Although they are all linked from that table-of-contents page, since they are web log posts I am listing them here: #74: Another Novel 160421; #78: Novel Fears 160506; #82: Novel Developments 160519; #86: Novel Conflicts 160602; #89: Novel Confrontations 160623; #91: Novel Mysteries 160707; #94: Novel Meetings 160721; #100: Novel Settling 160804; #104: Novel Learning 160818; #110: Character Redirects 160901;
#113: Character Movements 160916;
#116: Character Missions 160929;
#119: Character Projects 161013;
#122: Character Partings 161027; #128: Character Gatherings 161110; #134: Versers in Space 161124; #142: Characters Unite 161208; and #148: Characters Succeed 161222.

I have also added a Novel Support Section which at this point contains character sheets for several of the characters in the first novel and one in the second; also, if you have enjoyed reading the novels and have not seen #149: Toward the Third Novel 161223, it is a must-read.

Also on the subject of writing, I discussed what was required for someone to be identified as an “author” in, appropriately, #72: Being an Author 160410. I addressed #118: Dry Spells 161012 and how to deal with them, and gave some advice on #132: Writing Horror 161116. There was also one fun Multiverser story which had been at Dice Tales years ago which I revived here, #146: Chris and the Teleporting Spaceships 161220

I struggled with where on this list to put #120: Giving Offense 161014. It deals with political issues of sexuality and involves a bit of theological perspective, but ultimately is about the concept of tolerance and how we handle disagreements.

It should be mentioned that not everything I write is here at M. J. Young Net; I write a bit about writing in my Goodreads book reviews.

Of course, I also wrote a fair amount of Bible and Theology material.

Part of it was apologetic, that is, discussing the reasons for belief and answers to the arguments against it. In this category we have #73: Authenticity of the New Testament Accounts 160413, #76: Intelligent Simulation 160424 (specifically addressing an incongruity between denying the possibility of “Intelligent Design” while accepting that the universe might be the equivalent of a computer program), and #84: Man-made Religion 160527 (addressing the charge that the fact all religions are different proves none are true).

Other pages are more Bible or theology questions, such as #88: Sheep and Goats 160617, #90: Footnotes on Guidance 160625, #121: The Christian and the Law 161022, and #133: Your Sunday Best 161117 (on why people dress up for church).

#114: St. Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles 160917 is probably a bit of both, as it is a response to a criticism of Christian faith (specifically the Roman Catholic Church, but impacting all of us).

There was also a short miniseries of posts about the first chapter of Romans, the sin and punishment it presents, and how we as believers should respond. It appeared in four parts: #138: The Sin of Romans I 161204, #139: Immorality in Romans I 161205, #140: Societal Implications of Romans I 161206, and #141: The Solution to the Romans I Problem 161207.

Again, not everything I wrote is here. The Faith and Gaming series and related materials including some from The Way, the Truth, and the Dice are being republished at the Christian Gamers Guild; to date, twenty-six such articles have appeared, but more are on the way including one written recently (a rules set for what I think might be a Christian game) which I debated posting here but decided to give to them as fresh content. Meanwhile, the Chaplain’s Bible Study continues, having completed I & II Peter and now entering the last chapter of I John.

Again, some posts which are listed below as political are closely connected to principles of faith; after all, freedom of speech and freedom of religion are inextricably connected. Also, quite a few of the music posts are also Bible or theology posts, since I have been involved in Christian music for decades.

So Music will be the next subject.

Since it is something people ask musicians, I decided to give some thought and put some words to #75: Musical Influences 160423, the artists who have impacted my composing, arranging, and performances.

I also reached into my memories of being in radio, how it applies to being a musician and to being a writer, in #77: Radio Activity 160427.

I wrote a miniseries about ministry and music, what it means to be a minister and how different kinds of ministries integrate music. It began by saying not all Christian musicians are necessarily ministers in #95: Music Ministry Disconnect 160724, and then continued with #97: Ministry Calling 160728, #98: What Is a Minister? 160730, #99: Music Ministry of an Apostle 160803, #101: Prophetic Music Ministry 160808, #102: Music and the Evangelist Ministry 160812, #103: Music Ministry of the Pastor 160814, #106: The Teacher Music Ministry 160821, and
#107: Miscellaneous Music Ministries 160824. As something of an addendum, I posted #109: Simple Songs 160827, a discussion of why so many currently popular songs seem to be musically very basic, and why given their purpose that is an essential feature.

In related areas, I offered #111: A Partial History of the Audio Recording Industry 160903 explaining why recored companies are failing, #129: Eulogy for the Record Album 161111 discussing why this is becoming a lost art form, and #147: Traditional versus Contemporary Music 161221 on the perennial argument in churches about what kinds of songs are appropriate.

The lyrics to my song Free 161017 were added to the site, because it was referenced in one of the articles and I thought the readers should be able to find them if they wished.

There were quite a few articles about Law and Politics, although despite the fact that this was an “election year” (of course, there are elections every year, but this one was special), most of them were not really about that. By March the Presidential race had devolved into such utter nonsense that there was little chance of making sense of it, so I stopped writing about it after talking about Ridiculous Republicans and Dizzying Democrats.

Some were, of course. These included the self-explanatory titles #123: The 2016 Election in New Jersey 161104, #124: The 2016 New Jersey Public Questions 161105, #125: My Presidential Fears 161106, and #127: New Jersey 2016 Election Results 161109, and a few others including #126: Equity and Religion 161107 about an argument in Missouri concerning whether it should be legal to give state money to child care and preschool services affiliated with religious groups, and #131: The Fat Lady Sings 161114, #136: Recounting Nonsense 161128, and #143: A Geographical Look at the Election 161217, considering the aftermath of the election and the cries to change the outcome.

We had a number of pages connected to the new sexual revolution, including #79: Normal Promiscuity 160507, #83: Help! I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body! 160521, and #115: Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference 160926.

Other topics loosely under discrimination include #87: Spanish Ice Cream 160616 (about whether a well-known shop can refuse to take orders in languages other than English), #130: Economics and Racism 161112 (about how and why unemployment stimulates racist attitudes), and #135: What Racism Is 161127 (explaining why it is possible for blacks to have racist attitudes toward whites). Several with connections to law and economics include #105: Forced Philanthropy 160820 (taxing those with more to give to those with less), #108: The Value of Ostentation 160826 (arguing that the purchase of expensive baubles by the rich is good for the poor), #137: Conservative Penny-pinching 161023 (discussing spending cuts), and #145: The New Internet Tax Law 161219 (about how Colorado has gotten around the problem of charging sales tax on Internet purchases).

A few other topics were hit, including one on freedom of speech and religion called #144: Shutting Off the Jukebox 161218, one on scare tactics used to promote policy entitled #80: Environmental Blackmail 160508, and one in which court decisions in recent immigration cases seem likely to impact the future of legalized marijuana, called #96: Federal Non-enforcement 160727.

Of course Temporal Anomalies is a popular subject among the readers; the budget has been constraining of late, so we have not done the number of analyses we would like, but we did post a full analysis of Time Lapse 160402. We also reported on #85: Time Travel Coming on Television 160528, and tackled two related issues, #81: The Grandfather Paradox Problem 160515 and #117: The Prime Universe 160930.

We have a number of other posts that we’re categorizing as Logic/Miscellany, mostly because they otherwise defy categorization (or, perhaps, become categories with single items within them). #92: Electronic Tyranny 060708 is a response to someone’s suggestion that we need to break away from social media to get our lives back. #93: What Is a Friend? 060720 presents two concepts of the word, and my own preference on that. #112: Isn’t It Obvious? 160904 is really just a couple of real life problems with logical solutions. I also did a product review of an old washing machine that was once new, Notes on a Maytag Centennial Washing Machine 160424.

Although it does not involve much writing, with tongue planted firmly in cheek I offer Gazebos in the Wild, a Pinterest board which posts photographs with taxonomies attempting to capture and identify these dangerous wild creatures in their natural habitats. You would have to have heard the story of Eric and the Gazebo for that to be funny, I think.

Of course, I post on social media, but the interesting ones are on Patreon, and mostly because I include notes on projects still ahead and life issues impeding them. As 2017 arrives, I expect to continue writing and posting–I already have two drafts, one on music and the other on breaking bad habits. I invite your feedback.

Games

#146: Chris and the Teleporting Spaceships

December 20, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #146, on the subject of Chris and the Teleporting Spaceships.

I’ve told this story before; indeed, I wrote it up years ago for Dice Tales, and so I was reminded of it recently when I launched the Gazebos in the Wild Pinterest board in commemoration of that more famous Dice Tales story, Eric and the Gazebo. Alas, Dice Tales is long gone, and although Eric lives on as a meme among gamers, Chris is less familiar. So I thought it might be time to retell the tale.

I should also say that if any of my players remember any great stories of times in our games that need to be retold, they should drop me a note to remind me of them, and I’ll try to get them posted here.

It starts with Chris playing Multiverser as one of my original five test players. I was trying to test a lot of things about the game, like how well it adapted itself to other people’s material (we encourage referees to plagiarize settings and other materials for game play, simply because the game can devour world ideas and the books, movies, television shows, games, and other sources are free for you to use in your own home games), so I decided to have a “gather”, bringing the player characters together, in an old game I always loved, Metamorphosis Alpha. I had brought Chris there, and he had gathered a couple of followers by then, so he was something of a team.

It occurs to me that Tristan, at that time the youngest person ever to have played the game (I believe he was seven or eight), was one of the other original test players, and his character had attached himself to Chris’s. Since Multiverser is an “I game”, the characters and players have the same names; I’ll try to keep them straight for you.

The basic concept of Metamorphosis Alpha was that earth had sent a huge colony ship out toward what they hoped would be a suitable colony world. There were millions of people aboard, and facilities that imitated outdoor parks, huge apartment complexes, and much more. At some point the ship passed through an unanticipated cloud of an unknown type of radiation, killing millions of people and mutating many more, and the ship, now with only computer guidance, continued its trip through space, passing the original destination with no one at the helm. However, there were generations of humans, mutant humans, animals, mutant animals, plants, and mutant plants aboard, unaware that they were on a ship, forming new ecologies. If it sounds familiar, yes, Metamorphoses Alpha was the precursor to Gamma World, the original post-apocalyptic game, and introduced many of the concepts and mechanics that were found in early editions of that game. It was into this that I dropped my players.

Chris had also by this point learned and created a number of psionic skills, and was always looking to devise new ones. He was known to be a bit reckless sometimes in that regard, but the other players often gave him reason to exercise some caution.

I had decided to put an expiration date on the world, of sorts, or perhaps to create a problem that would require their ingenuity to solve. There was, at the top of the ship, an observation deck from which one could see space and some of the exterior of the ship, which would for the player characters explain where they were. To make it interesting, I positioned the ship (Starship Warden) in a place where it was headed directly toward one star, and near enough that it would be evident that they were on a collision course. They would have to figure out how to avoid this. Chris and Tristan were the players who reached the observation deck first, and Chris immediately recognized the problem and started considering how he might solve it. Not wanting to be rash, he decided to go away and come back the next day to try his idea once he had considered it.

What Chris wanted to do was teleport “the ship” forward to the other side of the star, so that it would bypass it completely. He wasn’t stupid about it, though–he decided to run a test. Taking his team, including Tristan, to the top deck, he prepared to test his idea by teleporting the ship forward ten feet. Tiny Tristan wrapped himself around tall Chris’ leg (he did this whenever Chris announced he was going to try something crazy and dangerous hoping to avoid being separated from him), and with a successful roll on the dice Chris moved the ship ten feet forward. It worked exactly as described: the ship shifted forward ten feet, but everything and everyone on it that was not part of it or securely attached to it was now ten feet aft of their previous positions. It was obvious that were he to teleport the ship to the other side of the star this way, he would leave himself and everyone else adrift in space here. It was time to return to the drawing board. It wasn’t a useless skill, and it was added to his character sheet, but it wasn’t the solution he needed here.

He came back the next day with a different idea. As Tristan again clung to his leg, he opened a huge portal in front of the ship (it really was huge–the Warden was, if I recall correctly, twenty-five miles in diameter and football shaped) with an exit portal ten feet beyond it. The ship began to pass into the portal and, as if it were a wormhole, to pass out ten feet away; everything and everyone aboard was similarly carried into the portal and out the other side, so it worked perfectly. He had his solution, and it was added to his character sheet.

The next day he implemented it.

Chris never asked–I’m not sure he has ever asked even since–but I wasn’t really cruel. I had figured that if anyone had taken sightings and done the math they would have figured out that they had a year before they would actually crash into the star–a year during which the ship would have gained momentum as gravity pulled it ever closer. He had no idea how far from the star he was, so when he said he wanted the portal to open on the other side, I asked for some notion of where on the other side, and the answer he gave led me to understand that it was not really, in astronomical terms, far at all–maybe inside one astronomical unit. So I let him teleport the ship to the other side of the star, but then informed him that he was really a lot closer to the star than he had been, and that gravity was slowing the ship’s forward momentum. In a panic, he teleported the ship again, a short hop, and then again, and then on the third attempt to move away from the star he botched and teleported the entire ship into the core of a planet. Everyone was dead, which of course in Multiverser means that all the player characters “verse out” and wind up in some other world. I don’t remember where he went, but he had some other wild adventures, and then I tested something else.

I had put a lot of time into pirating Blake’s 7, and figuring out how to put a verser into the episodes and remove Blake. I used this for two of my original test players, and Chris was one of them; he might have been the first one. He did very well for quite a while, until we got to an episode which seems to have something very like magic in it, a world in which there are ghosts on a planet who are tasked with teaching people lessons about fighting. It has a difficult set-up–I had to use three fast Federation ships under the command of Commander Travis to corner Chris with his back to this planet, and I had succeeded. In a moment I expected it would come to a direct combat confrontation, the ghosts would intervene, and Chris and Travis would find themselves on the planet being told by the ghosts what was expected of them. But Chris had not yet given up. He grabbed his character sheet, and said, “I know what I’m going to do. I know what I’m going to do.” He thumbed through to the psionic teleport skills, pointed to one of them, and said, “I’m going to do this.”

I may have cocked an eyebrow Spock-like; I do that sometimes. I asked if he was sure that’s what he wanted, and he was very confident. I asked him to describe the teleport target spot to me, and he gave me a position just to the other side of the three ships that had him trapped. I had him roll the dice.

“You succeeded,” I said.

“Yes!” he exclaimed.

“…and,” I continued, “you can see your ship adrift in space on the other side of the three Federation ships just before the vacuum of space kills you and all the members of your crew, and you leave for another world.

It was the wrong teleport spell, of course, but it was one of the most memorable moments in our games, and we have laughed about it for decades since then. I hope you enjoyed the story as much as we did.

Bible and Theology, Games, Music

#90: Footnotes on Guidance

June 25, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #90, on the subject of Footnotes on Guidance.

Recently I have encountered someone several times who appears to me to be struggling to find God’s direction. I could be wrong, and in any case we have no relationship which forms a basis for me either asking or advising. Yet I was considering what advice I might give, and a number of thoughts came to mind.

There is a significant chapter on Guidance in my book What Does God Expect? which is in the main a reworking of the earlier web page Objective and Subjective Christian Guidance. This present work does not touch on that significantly, and I still regard that an important part of finding God’s direction in our lives. This is rather a more informal collection of observations about that direction as we experience it.

The individual in question was suggesting an interest in a particular direction; I asked why, and was given a reason which seemed from my experience to be inconsistent with reality–that is, it was thought that this direction would make money, and I have been down that path many times and never profited financially from it. Since I take it as essentially a ministry direction (although not everyone would) I was a bit repelled by the reason. Yet as I contemplated it I realized that there were aspects to this I had not considered. One is that I have often pursued what I perceived as a ministry direction with the notion somewhere in mind that it might incidentally make money; I just had not listed it first on the expectations in most instances (although sometimes it may have been second or third). The other was more complicated, but I think, too, more important.

It seems to me that God sometimes directs my path by letting me see reasons for something which ultimately have little or nothing to do with why He sent me that direction. That’s not to say He lied to me; it’s more to say that I don’t get to know the plan, only my next task within it.

The example that springs to mind occurred when I was in college, having finished two years at Luther and started at Gordon. I had placed out of the first three terms of music theory and had not yet decided whether I should be a music major or a Biblical studies major. My career objectives were to become a Christian rock recording artist and performer, and I could see that either direction might be valuable. Yet at some point I came to the conclusion that a degree in Biblical studies would aid my career in Christian music more than a degree in music. I thought it might open doors, that people would be more interested in a Christian singer with a degree in Bible than a musician who happened to be Christian.

I am certainly not going to say that the degree in Biblical studies did not help my career as a musician. It has contributed significantly to the lyrics of my songs and “patter” in my stage presentation. However, that “career” has been at best spotty, and I do not think anyone ever asked me about my theological degrees (I got one from Luther also). Having a degree in Biblical studies did not do much for that career. It did, however, open the door for me to work at WNNN-FM, and gave me a solid foundation for the beginnings of my public teaching ministry there. That in turn, in a very odd way, began my notoriety as a Christian defender of role playing games, and the combination of my degrees and my role playing game connections brought me to the place of being Chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild, writing several books, and writing for many web sites including this web log. God was indeed preparing me for ministry; He just was not preparing me for that ministry.

Getting back to that young believer who appeared to be seeking God’s direction, I wrote a note suggesting a possible path, and after a week or so received no reply. I had written previously, a month ago, on a similar subject, and that had not progressed far, so it is possible that my correspondent had decided not to pursue anything I suggested and also decided not to tell me this. I am not offended; there is no obligation to me. However, that caused me to think of another observation: God often leads us where we had no desire to go.

It was 1997. I was struggling to get Multiverser into print and promote it. As part of that promotional effort, I polished up an unpublished article I had written almost a decade before, entitled Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons™ Addict, and found a space on the Internet to post it. It got a fair amount of attention, and I received an e-mail from a Reverend James Aubuchon, who together with two others had launched an organization named The Christian Role Playing Game Association. He was inviting me to join. I declined politely. I am not a joiner, I was on dial-up and needed to spend whatever time I had online to promote the game that was expected to make me if not rich at least solvent, and I wasn’t particularly interested in such a group. However, within a few weeks someone who was playing the game wrote to tell me that someone in that group was making negative statements about it, so I felt it necessary to join and address these (which were apparently entirely resolved before I got there). Once I was a member I began to become involved, I became interested, I got asked to do one thing and another and wound up temporarily stepping into the Chaplain’s office when it was vacated by the original Chaplain who felt that it was incumbent upon him to step into the Presidency when both the President and Vice President had resigned. Along the way the outgoing President changed the name to the Christian Gamers Guild. I don’t know what I did as Chaplain that first year, but apparently they liked me and when finally elections were held I was elected to continue as chaplain–and re-elected to the two-year position every even-numbered year since. It has opened doors for ministry in places I did not know existed, some of which in fact did not exist when I was in college. God has taken me on an unexpected path that caused me to think about issues no one else was addressing, write articles and books no one else was writing, and minister to people no one else was reaching. He did it by pushing me into a place I did not want to go.

So to any young believer seeking God’s direction, let me give this advice. God is going to lead you. He is not necessarily going to lead you where you think you are going, nor tell you the plan in advance, and sometimes He is going to open doors to possibilities you did not foresee and which you think are not where you want to go. If there is not a very good reason not to go there, take the open door, explore the possibility that does not sound like what you wanted or expected, because that’s often the way God is taking you to get you to places you never imagined going.

That, anyway, has been my experience, and while I have disappointments in my own hopes and expectations not having been realized, I ultimately must admit that what God has done with me has been very special, unique as far as I am aware, because I let Him take me where I did not intend to go and went for reasons that ultimately proved to have nothing to do with His plan.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

#72: Being an Author

April 10, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #72, on the subject of Being an Author.

One of my sons was in some sort of meeting or interview and was asked what his father did. “He’s an author,” was his reply.

I wasn’t present, so I don’t know what was said or done at that moment, but my son got the distinct impression of disdain, a sort of, “Right, he’s a layabout who does nothing and thinks that people should give him money for scribbing on paper, but what does he have to show for it?” My son, at least, felt that I was being insulted by the questioner’s attitude.

What strangers think of me is of no consequence, although I am concerned about the opinions of my readers and other fans (I am more than an author, being also a game designer and a musician and a Bible teacher). I am more concerned that one of my other sons seems at times to be of the opinion that I waste my time trying to succeed at such a career, that I should have a “real” job that makes enough money to support the family. He is not old enough to have known our lives when I was not making enough money to support the family working as a radio announcer, a microfilm technician, a drywall installer and painter, or a health insurance claims processor. I suppose perhaps there are people who claim to be authors who lack any skill or talent in the field, and I think everyone in creative fields faces some self-doubt, some uncertainty as to whether they are really “good enough” to do this. However, I think the notion that someone is not an author, or that this is a foolish idea, a flawed self-perception, is difficult to justify. I am an author; I might not be terribly successful at it, but there are good reasons why the latter is not a good measure of the former.

This is not really about whether or not I am an “author” so much as about what it takes to qualify for that title. For my part, I thought I would be a musician, and had the idea of being an author on a distant back burner–in college, circa 1977, I took a class entited Creative Writing: Fiction, and began work on a fantasy epic that quickly bogged down into trouble and wound up on that same distant back burner. Either the Lord or happenstance, depending on your viewpoint, landed me at WNNN-FM, a contemporary Christian radio station, first as a disc jockey/announcer, working my way up ultimately to program director, with a side job editing (and largely writing) the radio station newsletter. Along the way I developed a relationship with the associate editor of a local newspaper (The Elmer Times), which at some point published a couple of pieces of political satire I wrote, about 1983. I was published, but I was not yet thinking of myself as an author. I also started putting together some notes about the controversy over Dungeons & Dragons™, and somewhere around 1991 composed a draft of an article which I tried unsuccessfully to farm to a few Christian magazines, impeded perhaps by the fact that I didn’t actually subscribe to or regularly read any magazines.

Late in I think 1992 Ed Jones approached me about co-authoring his game idea, “Multiverse”, which was ultimately to become Multiverser™. I had been running original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ since 1980, and he had been playing in my game for perhaps a year (and I for a slightly shorter time in his) during which we had had discussed role playing games generally at length and I had become one of his Multiverser™ playtesters; he had read the unpublished article. In the spring of 1997 he withdrew from the project due to complications in his personal life and left me to finish the work and publish the game later that fall. I now had two books in print (the Referee’s Rules and The First Book of Worlds), but did not think of myself as an author so much as a game designer. I started half a dozen web sites (now all either gone or consolidated here as various sections of M. J. Young Net) primarily to promote the game; that defense of Dungeons & Dragons™ article I’d drafted a decade before became one of the founding works under the title Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons™ Addict, along with web sites on time travel, D&D, law and politics, and Bible. Still, the publication of Multiverser led to invitations to write for role playing game related web sites–starting with Gaming Outpost and extending to include articles at RPGNet, Places to Go, People to Be, The Forge, Roleplayingtips.com, and perhaps half a dozen others which no longer exist. I was also asked to become the Chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild, and contributed to their e-zine The Way, The Truth, and the Dice, and wrote a few articles mostly about such subjects as business, e-commerce, and morality in politics, which appeared on various sites around the web. Multiverser: The Second Book of Worlds went to print, confirming my authenticity as a game designer.

Sometime in 1998 Valdron Inc started discussing publishing a Multiverser comic book series, and since I was the in-house writer it fell to me to create the stories. I began these, working as if they were comic books, writing individual panels. I actually did not know that many authors who wrote books also wrote comic books and “illustrated novels”, but it was a short-lived endeavor–I wrote three issues, two episodes for each, and then the in-house artists said that there was no way that a comic could be produced on the kind of budget we had, and everything went onto that proverbial back burner, where it simmered. However, this one started to boil over, and after consulting with Valdron’s people I rewrote those episodes and created Multiverser‘s first novel–my first novel–Verse Three, Chapter One. Valdron put it into print, and we sold a few hardcover copies; I have no idea of the number. However, at this point I thought of myself as an author: I had a novel in print.

When I was in high school I worked stage crew (yeah, you probably guessed that, right?), as a sophomore for the junior class play. At one point one of the characters questions another about a book he’d written. It wasn’t a big deal, the author says; it only sold three hundred copies. I’d like to read it, the questioner continued; where can I get it? From me, the author responded; I have three hundred copies. In the trade there has long been what is disdainfully called “vanity press”, the ability to write your own book and have it printed for a few thousand dollars, receiving a few hundred copies which you then can sell entirely on your own. In the digital age that has become more complicated. It is now possible to go through companies like Lulu.com and print your book at very little cost, get an international standard book number (ISBN), and have it listed through Amazon and other retailers. That is not how those first four books went to press, but some might think they were “vanity press” anyway. Having been through law school, I undertook the necessary steps to create a corporation, sold stock, got the stockholders to elect a board of directors who in turn appointed corporate officers, and spearheaded the effort to publish and promote the Multiverser game system and supplements. I would say that none of us had a clue what we should do, but that’s not quite true–we all had a few clues, and we proceeded to stumble through the effort. It would be wrong to say that the company was entirely comprised of my friends and family. Many of the stockholders were family or friends, and most of the rest were friends of family or friends of friends, and of course it being a small company I ultimately met all of them, chatting with them at stockholder picnics and such. My next few books were closer to the “vanity press” sort. I wrote What Does God Expect? A Gospel-based Approach to Christian Conduct, and when Valdron decided they did not want to be more closely associated with Christian book publishing I asked people for ideas on getting it in print, and thus was introduced to Lulu.com. That was also the venue I used to release About the Fruit, and I have not quite completed the process of releasing a book entitled Do You Trust Me? due to a failure on my part to stick to the process. Valdron released a book version of what might be called the first season of the Game Ideas Unlimited series from Gaming Outpost; at the same time I did the same for the series entitled Faith and Gaming that had been published at the Christian Gamers Guild web site. Some time after that Blackwyrm Publishing approached me about permitting them to publish an expanded edition of Faith and Gaming, and thus one of my books is in print through a publishing house in which I hold no interest otherwise.

The question, then, is not really whether I am an author. Depending on how you count them I have between eight and ten books in print (two titles were published in two different editions); some of my online articles have been translated and printed in the French gaming magazine Joie de Role, and I was for quite a few years paid for regular contributions to TheExaminer.com. The question is at what point I became an author.

In this I am reminded that many authors struggle for many years. Steven King’s financial problems were so great that even after he was famous and made a television commercial for them, American Express would not authorize a card for him; he kept a day job as a teacher until he sold the movie rights to Christine, which is when the tide turned for him. Was he an author when his books were not bestsellers and he had to teach to support himself? J. K. Rowling struggled as a single mother, and reportedly received a mere six thousand pounds for the rights to the first printing of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; she is now reportedly wealthier than the Queen of England. Was she an author when she was writing the book that started it all–and if so, who knew?

I have always been a musician; I have never made much money at it. I have composed hundreds of songs, performed thousands times, been part of dozens of bands, choirs, combos, performing groups, and accompanist groups, and had some avid fans (in college some wanted to print Bach and Young T-shirts, but it was not so easy then). I have one album, Collision Of Worlds, on the market. Am I not a musician because I don’t make a living at it? There are thousands upon thousands of singers and instrumentalists who play bars and nightclubs, weddings and parties, who hold regular jobs; it is a joke in the music industry to say to a young musician, “Don’t quit your day job.” Are those not musicians, because they cannot support themselves doing what they love?

I am not an artist, but it is typical in the art world that painters and sculptors struggle for decades to make a name for themselves, to make a living creating artwork, only to die penniless–and then suddenly to have everything they ever created leap to new values. Were they not really artists during their lives, but became so the moment they died?

In the creative world, people create, and it is that aspect of creating that makes them authors–or poets, artists, musicians. Some authors eke out a living; some become incredibly wealthy; some spend more than they earn trying to become known. That is true in all the creative arts, including filmmaking–for every Robert Townsend Hollywood Shuffle success story there are dozens of good but failed independent films. Herman Melville was not well known prior to writing Moby Dick, despite having written for newspapers and magazines. Being an author is not primarily defined by commercial success; it is defined by creative product.

I should footnote this by mentioning that that first novel has now been released on the Internet, and the second is following it in serialized format beginning today. I am an author, even if I give away my product. Your support through Patreon and otherwise helps make it possible for me to publish and you to enjoy some of that. It does not change whether I am an author, only whether I am viewed as successful.

Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#70: Writing Backwards and Forwards

March 20, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #70, on the subject of Writing Backwards and Forwards.

When I was at TheExaminer, I eventually took to creating indices of articles previously published; when I moved everything here last summer, I included those indices, and finished one that covered the first half of 2015 (through July). On the last day of December I did a review piece indexing the rest of that year, as #34: Happy Old Year.

It may seem premature to do another index; it is not even falling on a logical date (although as I write this I am not completely certain on which day it is going to be published). However, some new “static” pages have made it to the web site, and quite a few more web log entries, and it seems to be a time of decision concerning what lies ahead. Thus this post will take a look at everything that has been published so far this year, and give some consideration to options going forward. You might find the informal index helpful; I do hope that you will read the latter part about the future of the site.

Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel

The most popular part of the web site is probably still the temporal anomalies pages. It certainly stimulates the most mail, and the five web log posts (including those in the previous index) addressing temporal issues received 30% of the blog post traffic. We added one static page since then, a temporal analysis of the movie 41. We also added post #56: Temporal Observations on the book Outlander, briefly considering its time travel elements of the first book in the series that has made it to cable television. We’d like to do more movies, and there are movies out there, but the budget at present does not pay for video copies.

This part of the site has been recognized oft by others (before it was a Sci-Fi Weekly Site of the Week it was an Event Horizon Hotspot), and the latest to do so is the new Time Travel Nexus, a promising effort to create a hub for all things time-travel related; we wish them well, and thank them for including links to our efforts here. They recently invited me to write time travel articles for them, although if I do it will have to be something different, and we have not yet determined quite what.

Legal/Political

By sheer number of posts, this is the biggest section of the web log. Although since the last of these indexing posts it has been running even with posts about writing and fiction, it has a significant head start, with half of the articles in that index connected to law or politics primarily. Some of these have religious or theological connections as well–that can’t be helped, as even the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights recognizes that the protection of your right to believe what you wish, express that belief, and gather with others who share that belief is both a religious and a political right, and cannot always be distinguished. (Anyone who says that religion and politics should always be kept separate misses this critical point, that they are really the same thing. It’s a bit like saying that philosophy and theology should be kept separate–the difference is not whether God is involved, but how much emphasis is placed on Him. So, too, politics is about religious beliefs in application.)

Trying to sort these into sub-categories is difficult. Several had to do with legal regulation of health care, several with discrimination, and we had articles on freedom of expression, government and constitutional issues, election matters. These twenty-seven articles together drew 35% of readers to the web log, but a substantial part of that–13%–went to the two articles about the X-Files discrimination flap. One article on this list has received not a single visit since it posted. Thus rather than attempt to make sense of them, I’ll just list them in the order they appeared, with a bit of explanation for each:

#36: Ligation Litigation, 160102: addressed a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital that would not permit the performance of a tubal ligation.
#41: Ted Cruz and the Birther Issue, 160116: addressed whether the Canadian-born son of an American woman is a “natural born Citizen”.
#42: Politicians and Statesmen, 160118: compared Republican voters to Democratic voters in terms of their concerns.
#48: Inequities in the Justice System, 160128: gave an account of the arrest and trial of someone who happened to be walking near a minor crime and was charged based on very poor evidence.
#49: Duchovny, Anderson, Sexism, and the Free Market, 160130: addresses the question of whether offering to pay the X-Files actor more than his co-starring actress reflects sexism in Hollywood.
#52: The X-Files Sexism Debate, 160203: responded to comments on the first post on the subject.
#54: Nudity as Free Speech, 160207: responds to one of my father’s last mailed clippings, about protestors using nudity to make a point.
#58: Acceptable Killing In Our Society, 160222: responds to comments on Facebook about abortion, and whether our society finds killing acceptable.
#60: Federalism and Elected Senators, 160229: discusses how United States Senators were chosen originally, how the seventeenth amendment changed that, and why some want to repeal it.
#62: Gender Issues and Seating Arrangements, 160302: discusses the lawsuit against Israel’s El Al airline for moving a female passenger when a male passenger raised religious objections to sitting beside her.
#63: Equal Protection When Boy Meets Girl, 160303: concerns Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s view that abortion should be an Equal Protection right, not a Privacy right.
#67: Dizzying Democrats, 160317: looks at the foolishness of the Democratic party primary process this year.
#68: Ridiculous Republicans, 160318: gives the same kind of attention to the nonsense that has dominated the Republican primary process.

Bible/Theology

As mentioned, some of the political posts are simultaneously religious or theological, and I won’t repeat those here. There is one post that is really about everything, about the very existence of this blog, but which I have decided to list as primarily in this category: #51: In Memoriam on Groundhog Day, 160202. This is a eulogy of sorts for my father, Cornelius Bryant Young, Jr., who is certainly the reason for the existence of the political materials, as he significantly supported my law school education and then regaled me with questions about whether Barrack Obama was a legitimate President. He is missed.

I also wrote #65: Being Married, which is not exactly my advice but my choice of the best advice I’ve received over several decades of marriage. I’m hoping some found it helpful.

It should be noted that five days a week I post a study of scripture, and on a sixth day I post another essentially religious/theological/devotional post, on the Christian Gamers Guild’s Chaplain’s Teaching List. That is far too many links to include here, but if you’re interested you can find the group through this explanatory page.

Game-related

There were a couple game-related posts in the previous index, this time two of them specifically about Multiverser. There was some discussion about some of its mechanics on a Facebook thread, and so I gave some explanations for how and why two aspects of the system work–the first, in #38: Multiverser Magic, 160112: addressing difficulties people expressed concerning its magic system, the second, in #40: Multiverser Cover Value, 160114: explaining the perhaps not as complicated as it seems way it determines the effect of armor.

There was also another game-related post, #44: The Feeling of Victory, 160121: which discussed a pinball game experience to illustrate a concept of fun game play.

The award-winning Dungeons & Dragons™ section of the site (most notably chosen as an old-school gem by Knights of the Dinner Table) continues to get occasional notice; someone recently asked to use part of the character creation materials for work they were doing on a different game, and someone asked if I had a copy of my house rules somewhere, in relation to some specific reference I made to them. Although I’m running a game currently, I don’t know that anything new will appear there. The good people at Places to Go, People to Be are continuing to unearth the lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles and translating for their French edition. Unfortunately, Je parle un tres petit peux de francais; I can’t read my own work there.

Logic and Reasoning

Periodically a topic arises that is really only about thinking about things. That came up a couple times in the past couple months. first, someone wrote an article about the severe environmental impact of using the universal serial bus (USB) power port in your car to charge your smartphone while you drive, and in #45: The Math of Charging Your Phone, 160122, we examined the math and found it at least a bit alarmist. Then when people around here were frantically stripping local grocery store shelves of all the ingredients for French Toast (milk, bread, and eggs) because of a severe weather forecast, we published #46: Blizzard Panic, 160124.

On Writing

I left this category for last for a couple of reasons, several of those reasons stemming from the fact that most of this connects to the free electronic publication of my book Verse Three, Chapter One: The First Multiverser Novel, and I just published the last installment of that to the site. You can find it fully indexed, every chapter with a one-line reminder (not a summary, just a quip that will recall the events of a chapter to those who have read it but hopefully not spoil it for those who have not), here. There have been about seventy-five chapters since the last of these posts, and that (like the Bible study posts) is too much to copy here when it is available there. That index also includes links to these web log posts, but since this is here to provide links to the posts, I’ll include them here, and then continue with the part about the future of the site.

#35: Quiet on the Novel Front, 160101: The eighth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 43 through 48.
#37: Character Diversity, 160108: The ninth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 49 through Chapter 54.
#39: Character Futures, 160113: The tenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 55 through 60.
#43: Novel Worlds, 160119: The eleventh behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 61 through 66.
#47: Character Routines, 160125: The twelfth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 67 through 72.
#50: Stories Progress, 160131: The thirteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 73 through 78.
#53: Character Battles, 160206: The fourteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 79 through 84.
#55: Stories Winding Down, 160212: The fifteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 85 through 90.
#57: Multiverse Variety, 160218: The sixteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 91 through 96.
#59: Verser Lives and Deaths, 160218: The seventeenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 97 through 102.
#61: World Transitions, 160301: The eighteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 103 through 108.
#64: Versers Gather, 160307: The nineteenth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 109 through 114.
#66: Character Quest, 160313: The twentieth behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 115 through 120.
#69: Novel Conclusion, 160319: The twenty-first and final behind-the-writings peek at Verse Three, Chapter One, Chapters 121 through 126.

The Future of the Site

I would like to be able to say that the future holds more of the same. There are still plenty of time travel movies to analyze; I have started work on the analysis of a film entitled Time Lapse, but it will take at least a few days I expect. This is a presidential election year and we have clowns to the left and jokers to the right, as the song said, and with the extreme and growing polarization of America there are plenty of hot issues, so there should be ample material for more political and legal columns. The first novel has run its course, but there are more books in the pipeline which could possibly appear here.

However, it unfortunately all comes down to money. My generous Patreon patrons are paying the hosting fees to keep this site alive, but I am a long way from meeting the costs of internet access and the other expenses of being here. Time travel movies cost money even when viewed on Netflix.

The second novel, Old Verses New, is finished–sort of. No artwork was ever done for it, and it is actually more difficult to promote articles on the Internet that do not have pictures (frustrating for someone who is a writer and musician but has no meaningful skill in the visual arts). More complicating, Valdron Inc invested some money into it, paying an outside editor to go through it, and they still hope to find a way to recoup their investment at least. I might have to buy their interest in it to be able to deliver it to you, and that again means more money.

So what can you do?

If you are not already a Patreon supporter, sign up. A monthly dollar from every reader of the site would not make me wealthy, and probably would not cover all the bills, but it would go a long way in that direction. Even a few more people giving five or ten dollars a month to keep me live would make a massive difference. I think Patreon also has a means of making a one-time gift, and that also helps.

Even if you can’t do that, you can promote the site. Whenever there is a new post or page here you think was worth a moment to read, take another moment to forward it–it is easy to do through most social media sites, some of which have buttons on the bottoms of the web log pages for quick posting, and in all cases I post new entries at Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and even MySpace, all of which have some way of easily sharing or recommending posts. Let people know if there’s a good political piece, or time travel article, or whatever it is. Increased readership means, among other things, an increased potential donor base–support to keep us alive here.

There are other ways to help. Several time travel fans have over the years provided DVD copies of movies, either from their own libraries or purchased and sent directly to me, all of which have been analyzed. I now also have the ability (thanks to a gifted piece of not-quite-obsolete discarded technology) to watch YouTu.be and Netflix videos on my old (not widescreen) television, and with some difficulty to watch other internet videos on borrowed Chromecast equipment (not as satisfactory–can’t pause or rewind without leaving the room to access the desktop). Links to (safe and legal) copies of theatrically-released time travel movies make it possible to cover them now, for as long as the money keeps me online. (Yes, even “free” videos cost money to see.) One reader very kindly gave me a Fandango gift card to see Terminator Genisys in the theatre, which was a great help and enabled me to do the quick temporal survey published here, although I had to obtain a copy of the DVD to do the full analysis web page (it is nigh impossible to take notes in a darkened movie theatre, and very difficult to get all the vital details from an audio recording).

You can also ask questions. I don’t check e-mail very often (seriously, people started using it like an instant messaging system, I have cut back to every three to six weeks) but I do check it and will continue to do so as long as the hosting service and internet access can be maintained; I interact through Facebook and (to a much lesser degree) the other social media sites mentioned, and often take a question from elsewhere to address here. That gives me material in which you, the readers, are interested. I do write about things which interest me, but I do so in the hope that they also interest you, and if I know which ones do that helps more.

So here’s to the future, whatever it may bring, and to the hope that you will help it bring more to M. J. Young Net and the mark Joseph “young” web log.

Games

#44: The Feeling of Victory

January 22, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #44, on the subject of The Feeling of Victory.

Moments ago I finished a game of computer pinball, and it was such an exciting finish–on the final ball I finished the extra point task list, crossed the two million mark, and lost the ball, all within a second, and I couldn’t help going, yes.

Don’t get me wrong. Two million is a paltry score, even by my standards. I have to break six or seven million just to get on my own leader board, and I think that my record score is up somewhere above fourteen. This wasn’t a particularly well-played game overall. It was just–

It illustrates something that every game designer and every role playing game referee needs to grasp. It is something inherent in Multiverser, something that I tried to capture in the novels. Some call it the “payoff”. It’s the feeling, perhaps the “rush”, you get when you do something special.

Note that you don’t have to win. You don’t even have to break even. You don’t have to have reached some pre-defined goal. At no point did I think that I wanted to reach two million–on throwaway games of pinball, I figure I did fine if I passed the million mark, and I’d done that. Nor did I give much thought to whether I was going to “complete the mission” by hitting all the intended targets. It was this juxtaposition, the unexpected success on both of those in-game milestones at the moment of defeat.

After all, let’s face it, you never “win” pinball. It’s not like Solitaire, where sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and if you know enough you can improve your odds. With pinball, you keep playing, and you keep winning, until suddenly you lose. You can count it a win if your particularly high losing score is high enough to put you on the leader board. Yet this unwinnable game has an appeal of its own, an appeal that comes from the small victories along the way, and particularly from the unexpected ones, the ones that come in under the wire, the ones that surprise. It’s fine for me to lose, as long as at some point I felt like I won–even if it’s the same moment.

It’s fine to run or design a game in which people lose. In Multiverser, player characters get killed all the time. Ron Edwards once wrote that the game had some of the best answers to the problem of character death, because we use it to advance the plot into the next adventure. You lost the round; get ready for the next round, because you get to keep playing, you’re just on a different board. The game you lost isn’t lost if you won something along the way, and the sting of defeat is considerably mitigated by the thrill of a victory gained at that same moment. People love their victories, but they also love their glorious defeats. Icarus may have crashed and burned, but for a moment there, he was flying.

Games

#40: Multiverser Cover Value

January 14, 2016 M.J. 2 Comments

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #40, on the subject of Multiverser Cover Value.

In a thread on Facebook on a completely different issue (an article I encountered on an effective non-lethal weapon) posters made some comments about the complexity of the Multiverser game system. I don’t happen to think it that complex, really (to create an Original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ character without limiting in advance what the player might want to be, the referee needs to have access to twelve of the thirteen hard-cover volumes), but they did tackle two of the more complicated areas: the spell system and the way to calculate cover value for armor. I promised to provide answers, and since I no longer have the Gaming Outpost forum for such things, the answers are going to land here. We previously addressed the issue of Multiverser magic; this entry will deal with the cover value problem.

This part of it was raised by one of the most experienced Multiverser referees out there, my own son Kyler:

While you’re talking about complicated math in multiverser, I’m surprised no one has brought up Cover. That was one of the first things I changed when I was trying to streamline the system.

The math for Cover can get ridiculously complicated when you’re wearing layers of armor. “Add this, divide that. Take into account material density.” I abandoned it in favor of a system that focused more on where you were hit and ascribed a damage value to each piece of armor.

I’m not saying that the Multiverser system’s way of dealing with it is bad. I’m just saying that it’s needlessly complex, basically no matter what we’re trying to do.

Ouch.

Well, in my defense, the rule book does say that calculating cover is a complicated bit of math–but at the same time, that you don’t have to do it generally, as once for any piece of armor is sufficient. Reading some of the other comments on the thread, I’ll note that if for Multiverser purposes you’ve calculated the “cover value” of five different pieces of armor, and you wear them all, your cover value is simply the sum of all the pieces you’re wearing, even if they cover the same body parts. So the math is only difficult when a particular piece of armor is created or acquired, and after that the only question is whether you’re wearing the same pieces or left something off.

So, what is the complication?

How well armor protects is based on two factors, one of which is also based on two factors. The one factor is how much of the body the armor covers. It is kind of the joke that people wear bullet proof vests but are easily killed by a shot to the head. That’s why combat and riot gear includes helmets. The system would be complicated indeed if we required the referee to work out how much protection was afforded to each part of the body, but we allow a sort of fiction here–if you’re wearing a bullet proof vest, you are that much harder to hit, and the “cover value” takes into account that blows against your torso are less likely to penetrate, even though your head is still vulnerable. In theory, someone can aim for an unprotected head, but they’d take a size penalty on the shot.

The second factor is how difficult it is to penetrate. We know from history that iron armor protects better than bronze armor, because iron weapons are more likely to penetrate bronze armor but not iron armor. It thus follows that a suit of white dwarf alloy (if such a thing could be obtained and worn) would protect better than a suit of aluminum. We cover this factor with a density number–nothing too scientific, just the application of a game concept of “density” extended to cover materials that have not yet been created. We also allow the issue of thickness, when it comes to armor–if you make your armor twice as thick, it’s more difficult to penetrate–but that particular factor is usually ignored because thicker armor of that sort is overly restrictive: armor that is twice as heavy is only twenty-five percent more protective.

So the system really comes down to these two factors:

How much of your body is covered by the armor?
How hard is it to penetrate the material covering it?

It’s not usually difficult. For example, let’s suppose someone gets a full suit of jointed full plate armor. The book suggests that such a suit covers ninety-five percent of the body–there are some slots for vision and air in the front of the visor, and a few small gaps where the metal comes together most of which open and close as the body moves. It would be made of a relatively hard metal, but that could be a softer one like bronze or a harder one like steel. Thus there’s a range of densities for hard metals, from 2@6 to 4@8. From there it’s simple to convert the values to “decimalized” numbers and multiply. If we’re looking at 95% coverage at 2@6 density, that comes to 26 x 0.95=24.7, which we round to 25, a 25 percentage point penalty on incoming attacks. If we have heavier denser metal, say a 4@8, that’s 48 x 0.95=45.6, again rounded to 46.

It looks complicated probably probably for two reasons. One is because of that table in the book that looks like this (you don’t have to read this table, it’s just here so you can see it):

That makes it look complicated–add this, subtract that, put it all together to get a number–but ultimately, all it’s really saying is, figure out how completely the wearer is covered. It tries to take into account things that should be considered–chain doesn’t really cover your entire body because it has little holes in it, and we’ve all read stories about the arrow or knife that went through the holes in the chain armor. Ultimately, though, all the referee really needs to do is decide what percentage of the body is covered–or conversely not covered–to get his basic “percent covered”. That’s all that that table is for.

The second complication arises, though, when players attempt to “game the system”. They’ll usually try to make armor thicker to get more protection out of it–and sure, a phone book is harder to penetrate than a manila envelope, so thickness does matter. It does not matter if the design uses layers–that is, if you’re wearing a chain shirt under solid breast and backplates, you get the full value of both. It’s only complicated if you make the material thicker, such as making the breastplate half an inch thick instead of a (standard) quarter inch. That requires a bit of math–but the thickness of the armor is not going to change, and wearing multiple layers of armor is simple addition, so you only have to do the complicated bit once.

After all, how many times does someone get a new suit of armor? A few minutes to work out how effective it is should not be that much of a problem.

The game also has rules for ablative armor–armor which protects by absorbing damage–but these rules in essence say that unless the ablative armor is also stated to provide cover value, it does not provide cover value and so isn’t part of this calculation at all. There can also be complications if someone is hiding behind a wall and someone else is destroying the wall, but that’s an attack on cover or structures, not at all about armor, so it’s not part of the usual “cover value” issue.

Or did I miss something?

mark Joseph "young"

Category Archives: Games

#184: Remembering Adam Keller

#169: Do Web Logs Lower the Bar?

#167: Cybergame Timing

#150: 2016 Retrospective

#146: Chris and the Teleporting Spaceships

#90: Footnotes on Guidance

#72: Being an Author

#70: Writing Backwards and Forwards

#44: The Feeling of Victory

#40: Multiverser Cover Value

A generalist: learning less and less about more and more, one day to know nothing about everything.