Have you ever pondered the nature of nostalgia, and thought about what might make the list of future trends to be remembered fondly?
And would you have put the cartoons of the 1980s on that list? You know the ones, the half-hour commercials for action figures and playsets that intertwined bouts of frenetic adrenalin-pumping action with a bolted-on afterthought of a positive message, making for a sort of four-color Frankenstein morality play?
Yeah, I wouldn't have either.
When you think SMOGging, you think long diatribes about the state of the industries, the well-being of individual companies, the ways in which specific games play... in other words, you tend to think length, as in these people tend to have a lot to say.
For that reason, you tend NOT to think of Twitter.
But interestingly, there's been some talk going on there, generally centered on #philipjreed which has import on the future of gaming. Like for instance, where people have been buying their games and whether print or PDF is preferred. And a little bit on what effect this will have on the production of future games. And the hobby in general.
More than once, I joked that 3rd edition GURPS had more published supplements than Talisman. And let's face it, 3e GURPS had a shmupload of worldbooks, with occasional supplements in between on how to handle different genres and settings in more general terms
But these days, it's a while between publication of hardbound books for Steve Jackson Games' flagship system, as the team is normally publishing either a) PDFs of smaller GURPS supplements or b) Munchkin expansions. They've chosen to reserve the physical production for those general genre books, the ones that would have narrowly escaped between the previous generation's worldbooks, and it shows in their presentation. The latest, GURPS Low-Tech, is out now, and I wish it had arrived sooner.
You might look at this and think, "Really? Hasn't this thing been out for a whole year now?" Well, yes, but that doesn't mean it's not worth scrutiny. The year it's had to gain traction in the marketplace is, in fact, why it is worth scrutiny.
Here I will only mention The Campaign I'm running briefly, to say that I'm thinking about stuff to run after the "first season" concludes. And my fancy turned briefly to TORG, a game made more interesting with the inclusion of a thing called a "drama deck."
And it happened a few nights ago that I was scanning cards from Freemarket. There's not yet a way to buy new cards or decks if something happens.
The two thoughts collided, and realizations started cascading. I had to write them down. Or type them. Or something.
The campaign has run through its second session and, by my reckoning, its first adventure. I see where some rough edges are, and I can act to fix them. Another issue popped up in that second session, though, and it exacerbated a problem I'd left for myself.
So I figured, why not cash in on the experience here? The knowledge might benefit someone else.
A small gathering I attended on Saturday, combined with some of the concerns the players had when creating characters for the current HERO campaign, has me wondering if there's an epidemic condition out there.
