UPDATE: I moved the compendium to googledocs. Ask me for editing permission if you would like to contribute: http://bit.ly/WoDu-resource-compendium
Here is my Compendium of World of Dungeons Resources, at least until the wiki at http://story-games.com/codex is back online.
It’s rough, it lacks attributions and I couldn’t clean it up as I saved it before the wiki went down, so it’s kind of hard to edit it now.
I hope you enjoy it.
MikiWiki
We’ve been working on a programmable Mikiwiki for awhile, now it is on Github.
The code is still quite messy, but we hope you will find your way. At its simplest, Mikiwiki supports simple wiki pages organized in a tree structure. Wiki pages can also embed other pages as components called Nuggets. These nuggets can be programmed in javascript from within the Mikiwiki itself. All Mikiwiki pages have a FORMAT. The standard format is MIKI, but you can invent new formats. A page with a new format will contain JSON data and its format page will have format ‘javascript’ or ‘template’ and will know how to render the JSON data.
If you have trouble sleeping, you can read more in our IEEE, ACM papers and Springer book.
Feel free to post your questions. All feedback, tips and advice are appreciated.
The Big List of GM-less games has now gone on Google Docs. I am trying an embed here. If it doesn’t visualize and you are reading via a feed reader, then click to the original post.
We have now got an incredible 230 games and I need advice on how to divide them up in taxonomies. The $$ column is ticked when a game has a commercial version.
Rotating GM between different sessions.
How do I define a session? It is a period of game-play that offers closure on a number of events. Therefore the GM has full control on the unfolding of those events and doesn’t have to negotiate them with other players.
Suggested GM-less play
The big list of GM-less games grew up to an unbelievable 113 entries. You might wish to check it out.
I spent several hours coming up with the ultimate list of GM-less RPGs and story games. Right now I am not drawing any distinctions between GM-less and GM-full, one protagonist vs. many GMs, rotating GM, PvP, etc. I might also have missed out some games. Please add a comment if you know of any game not in the list. I am also not organizing the games by genre or mechanics. If you have opinions about taxonomies and organization, please let me know and I will update the page.
A note on solitaire games: I am not considering Solitaire games to be GM-less in this specific context. Right now I am compiling a list that will allow designers to explore the dynamics of GM vs GM narration and mechanics in existing games. This is the personal hitch that this list is trying to scratch. Solitaire games are based on very different procedural assumptions, so I will leave them out, although technically they are GM-less.
Here is the list!
Rotating GM between different sessions.
How do I define a session? It is a period of game-play that offers closure on a number of events. Therefore the GM has full control on the unfolding of those events and doesn’t have to negotiate them with other players.
Suggested GM-less play
I just got my copy of Becoming Heroes directly from the authors at Transneptune Games here in Boulder, Colorado.
It’s amazing how it challenged many of my preconceptions about what should and shouldn’t work in a RPG and how the mechanics are designed to build escalating dramatic tension around conflicts. One of the most novel mechanics is the ability to modify another character’s sheet in certain ways when you win a conflict.. you don’t have an explicit damage system, but I never felt like I wasn’t risking anything, quite the opposite!
I am enjoying butchering Node.js these days.
I followed installation instructions to the letter and still stuff keeps not working.
The most common error is related to node.js not finding some module.
Get this node.js !
console.log(require.paths);
require.paths.push('/opt/local/lib/node');
console.log(require.paths);
Once again, it's ugly but it works.. just insert your node path in there. I guess eventually everything will get fixed but in the meantime I just need things to work so I can experiment with these technologies.
If you know a better way to do it, please let us know.
These days we are playing with serverside javascipt programming using node.js and coffeescript. Zappa looks like a promising web development framework, strongly based on the ruby-based Sinatra.
We installed it with the standard
npm install zappa --global but for some reason any time we tried to run it we got a big Cannot find module ‘coffee-script/lib/optparse’ error.
Anyway, we managed to do an ugly hack that got it to work.
1/ Find where npm installed your zappa module. In our case we found it via the error message: /opt/local/lib/node/.npm/zappa/0.1.5/package/bin/zappa
2/ Go there and open the package/lib/cli.js file
3/ Find the failing statement: OptionParser = require(‘coffee-script/lib/optparse’).OptionParser;
4/ Jam in the absolute path. In our case it was:
OptionParser = require(‘/opt/local/lib/node/.npm/coffee-script/active/package/lib/optparse’).OptionParser;
5/ Ugly as hell, but now it works!
It looks like node had trouble resolving the path of the coffeescript sub-library and this is the only way we could make it work.
Do you have a more elegant solution?
I just bought Sleep is Death, an awesome 2 player online story game. One player plays the GM role, while the other player is the protagonist. Every player has 30 seconds to interact and author his turn within the scene.
We are looking for more examples of online storytelling tools and we are hoping to learn from Sleep is Death and incorporate it as a tool in our MikiWiki..
Please let us know if you have any suggestions for more such games and tools!
I have been intrigued by the possibilities of wiki + story games for a long time.
Wikis can express powerful emergent properties that fit well with story games.
Does anybody know of any games that are played primarily by wiki and that are designed to explicitly leverage the nature of wikis? ‘Caravan’ by Emily Boss looks very promising, but I couldn’t find any real example of play.
We have also designed a wiki that can be programmed and evolved ‘from the inside’ by its users, so that as new mechanics get defined, they can be automated within the system, but I feel we need to learn more from actual play before releasing it to the community.
Any good pointer in this direction is highly appreciated!
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