Dating tips from Merry Wives of Windsor

Merry Wives of Windsor was not a great play, but nonetheless was pretty funny.

Dating tips from Merry Wives of Windsor:

* Generally don't be John Falstaff
* Or a tongue-tied upper-class twit
* Or oblivious and pushy
* And the play suggests not being fat, French, or Welsh either, though I wouldn't agree with those!
* If you want to woo two people who are already friends with each other simultaneously, don't send an identical letter to both of them.
* If you love someone and they love you and you are married and living happily together, don't spy on them, harangue them, stalk them, and fly into massive fits of jealously.
* If you love someone and they love you and you are married and living happily together, don't spend lots of money bribing someone else to woo them.
* If you like someone, talk to them with actual words.
* If you like someone, don't kidnap them, nor kidnap a completely different person and marry THEM.
* If you like someone and they recoil from your touch and throw you in the Thames and beat you half to death and then ask you to go into the haunted woods at night wearing a large pair of horns on your head, there's probably a good reason and you shouldn't listen to common sense, you should totally trust them.

Dear people who kickstart,

Dear people who start a kickstarter project, I am really not an expert at this, so if you have expert advice you probably know better than me already. But as someone who occasionally sees links to cool-looking kickstarters, I can tell you what seems good to me.

On the front page, try to have some sort of prominent summary, ideally two sentences, saying WHAT IT IS and WHY IT'S COOL. Um, maybe that's supposed to be obvious. But seriously, "We have an awesome webcomic, we made an rpg boardgame of it" or "we made an isometric computer game with detailed wizard duels" or "I wrote about about vampires living in london" or "here's a gadget that makes your bike sound like a horse", all of those make me think "oh, cool, can I see more". Even if I've never heard of it before. And many other pitches would make me think "good luck, but not for me".

But I seem to see so many kickstarters that say "here is a brand new BRANDNAME which is exciting and ADJECTIVE and lets you experience ADJECTIVE and ADVERBITY and here's a video for more information". That's fine. Unless you want me to give you money, in which case it has the disadvantage that all that coy non-information doesn't make me think "Yes, THIS random twitter link is the one I must track down the backstory for" it makes me think "why was I here again? *back* "

I'm assured, videos are great for persuading people. But I assume that only applies if people watch them?

To me, a video is saying "Dear technocrats, busy people, people with full-time jobs, people with children, people with smartphones, people under 25 with short attention spans, people with disabilities, methodical people and googlebot, get out of here, we don't want your money or your interest." Fine, you can sell to whoever you want to sell to, but that's excluding a LOT of desirable market shares...

Random roleplaying snippets

Playstyle mismatch

http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/1878/strategies-for-dealing-with-turtle-or-roach-players

Other-player: My 2nd level Wizard casts a fireball, uses it as a rocket to propel themselves at the dragon and make a charge attack.

GM: That's so epic! Forget the dice roll! The charge rips right through the dragon's body, landing your wizard right next to the tied up princess.

Tactician: I take a defensive stance and ready an action to fire my bow.

GM: Ok. Now the dragon attacks you both.

Other Player: I swing my sword to cut a hole in the dragon's claw and then jump through at the last minute!

Tactician: My defensive stance gives me +2.

GM: Other player, you make it! Sorry Tact, your +2 doesn't cut it against the dragon.

This was an example of how, a player who's instinctive or most-enjoyed play style isn't matched by the GM's style, can get bored and lose interest.

But what I found interesting was that it wasn't a matter of one style being right and the other wrong. In this case, it was a tactician feeling neglected because the play only rewarded epic over-the-top-ness. But another game could have the exact reverse, the other player's gambit being met with "if you do that, the fireball just blows up in your face", and lots of detailed situations where mastery of your character's written abilities is rewarded.

The archetypes come from Robin Law's Good Gamemastering Guide (Power-gamer wants success; Butt-kicker wants to kick down the door and cut loose; the Tactician wants to do well on their own merit; the Method Actor, and a couple of others including a casual gamer who plays occasionally or for the first time and has different needs again.) It's interesting to see how those archetypes are similar to and different to other sets of archetypes often discussed.

But that it's definitely possible to have a game encompassing a fair breadth of different styles. But this example shows, sometimes people want things that are so different it's essentially impossible to cram in one without giving up the other (and that's fine if you recognise that).

The archetypal adventuring party

http://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/2p096p/difficulty_multiplier_5e/

Q: An Ogre has over twice the HP of four goblins combined and can kill a 2nd-level character in a single blow. A 4-character party of 2nd-levelers could easily take out 4 goblins in a single round, while a 1-round defeat of an Ogre is highly unlikely. But the encounter multiplier table lists four goblins together as a slightly harder challenge, why?

A: With the ogre, although he's big and tough he's tactically easy: Bigpecs McFighter can beat on him up close while Pewpew Van Fireball blasts him from range.

With the goblins, while Bigpecs is beating one down, the rest come in from behind and play pin-the-kidney-on-the-wizard. Requires some more tactical smarts to deal with the goblins effectively. (And that more attacks can give a greater chance of killing one PC.)

B: Thanks for naming two of my NPC characters! Let's fill out the rest of the party then: Tippytoe O'Stab and Friar Bandaid.