Further not-a-lot
August 27th 2003 -
Further not-a-lot
Magnificent progress last night, just magnificent:
In my ragged defence, I was tired and went to bed early. I fully expect to make crap progress on the novel tonight as well, as I am playing D&D until midnight or thereabouts.
Guitar
More guitar practice last night. I have learned the pentatonic scale and have been given a wee bit of homework to learn to play it quickly. Fortunately, scales are fun and easy, and also wonderful distracting activities from editing novels.
Card games
I can’t stop thinking about card game mechanics. I’ve come up with a couple of new ideas for card games recently, none of them in any fit state for play-testing.
Game: Politics
The first revolves around politics – all cards are played face down, and can be used face down. The main aim of the game is to accumulate points, but one of the best ways of getting points is to reveal that another player was lying about what a card could do. I’m struggling with the mechanic of proof at the moment – working out how to say “This player was lying when they said this card could do that”.
Game: Fightin’ with magic
Pretty much all collectable card games around at the moment are duelling games that have monsters beating each other up. I thought it might be an interesting variation to have a card game based on the traditional old wizard’s duel – y’know, no proxy monsters, just people hitting each other. There are a bunch of games that do that – Firetop Mountain (a.k.a. Waving Hands) being an excellent example – but I thought it might be fun to try a varient of my own. I’m particularly touched by the transformation war that you see wizards doing in books and films (eg. Merlin in The Sword in the Stone, Morpheus’ battle in Hell in Sandman #4). And, of course, attempting to evoke the spirit of Mornington Crescent without having *quite* so complicated a rule-set. The mechanics of Armchair Cricket are appealing as a starting point.
Imaginary Reviews
I’ve also been thinking about reviewing some films that don’t exist (inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s Imaginary Book reviews). More on this if I can overcome the guilt of writing non-Lotus stuff (which, let’s face it, I seem to be doing fairly well with the weblog at the moment, not to mention Lorenzo’s journal in The Dragon Coast, which details our D&D sessions.