I am Destiny... If Not Yours, Then SOMEONE'S Personal Destiny
I'm Destiny!
Which Member of the Endless Are You?

Yeah! I like it.
The Wick Strikes Again!
I happened upon this on the RPGnet forums. Lo and behold it was by my boy, John Wick ranting about the Marvel Universe RPG:

The New Marvel RPG is ARSe
Okay, I just got it. I honestly don't know how ARSe it is, but it is pretty ARS.

(For those of you who don't know, the task resolution system is called the Action Resolution System. Otherwise known as "ARS." And you'd think -- you'd think -- that someone up at WotC would say, "Um... boys, do we really want to call our new game "arse?")

However, I open to page 7 and read this quote:

"You are about to play a new form of roleplaying game. It has no dice. It has no odds or percentages. There are only two charts. There is no board."

New, huh?
New?

Uh. No. Not new. Not unique. Not innovative.

I still have a lot of pages to go, but this isn't a good start.
And the reason I bought it was because I really liked the stones idea. Of course, Scott Knipe's WYRD did it first... and may do it better. Not sure. I'll find out soon.


Of course, later on he did apologize about wrongly accusing WOTC about this, because WOTC had nothing to do with the MURPG. In general though, many folks commented on the fact that it did reflect Marvel's tendency towards inaccurately hyping their products.

I eagerly await a more detailed commentary on the MURPG workings by John Wick. Ah, the price of brilliance...

Wolvie & His Skeleton
Tangentially-related to the MURPG: Wolverine has an adamantium skeleton right?

Er, no. Early on someone said things like:

If his skeleton's adamantium, how does his bone marrow create new blood cells?
If his skeleton's adamantium, why aren't his teeth the same color as his claws?


And so it became an adamantium-laced skeleton.

And, now back to your regularly scheduled blog programming.
Chaosium & HERO & so on
I go to several gaming sites regularly.

HERO Games' site is one of them. I'm a fan of the system, though I do wish they'd fix the rather complex characteristics for the characters. I liked Fuzion's approach towards the characteristics, but not the watered-down version of the powers system that can replicated weapons, armor, psionic powers, magic, etc. And my new Champions books are in! Huzzah! Next comes the Science Fiction HERO stuff, then hopefully the Fantasy Hero stuff. Then I'm set for my HERO Shadowrun & Rifts games.

I also go to the Fading Suns' website occasionally to get news on the setting and the game. I really feel like this game is SO appropriate for the Philippines. It's almost depressing to look at this game and the political dimensions involved and say... "Hey, this is OUR political / social structure."

Chaosium has seen better days. Its site is now mostly selling its products. I'm still quite fond of several Chaosium products - Call of Cthulhu and Runequest (which they don't carry anymore, alas). I do have Stormbringer tho.
MST3K and John Wick
I really enjoyed something I happened upon on www.rpg.net entitled MSTing John Wick.

For those of you who don't know, John Wick is a game designer who developed the rules and authored the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, and also authored the 7th Sea RPG. He also is strongly opinionated against the D&D 3rd Edition.

MST refers to Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K for short) a TV show that has its 3 hosts (currently a guy named Mike and two robots named Tom Servo and Crow) make fun of bad movies.

Here is where the two meet, and it's quite entertaining. What's being MiSTied is John Wick's rant on RPG.net about D&D3e.

Here's one of my favorite excerpts:
I was at the Berkeley show a few weeks ago, listening to everyone talk about it. The Hero guys told me, "Yeah. It's dressed up Hero." I heard the Chaosium guys say, "Yeah. It's just dressed up BRPS." I even heard someone say, "They just stole a bunch of ideas from Rolemaster."
Funny. No one said they stole anything from L5R or 7th Sea.

Tom: So, it bothers you because they stole from everybody except you?

(Maybe that's because there's nothing worth stealing from them? One never can tell.)
Its kinda like when every racial group in the world claimed the trade federation aliens in Episode One sounded like them. I heard Native Americans say it, I heard Chinese say it, I heard Japanese say it.
Funny. No one said they sounded Irish.

Mike: Because they didn't.

(Maybe that's because nobody wants to sound Irish? One never can tell.)
The fact of the matter is, D&D3 looks like a lot of different RPGs. There's just nothing new or innovative about it.

Tom: So it's okay for Shakespeare to steal everything he wrote, but not for Ryan Dancey.