Alex Greene

So JMS of Murder, She Wrote fame just posted this Facebook post on the death of Lawrence "Larry" DiTillio, who wrote Ringworld along with the late Lynn Willis. JMS' Facebook post

It might look something like The Dispossessed and similar books by Ursula K LeGuin. And the Guardian article could well be wrong. It's people with a punk attitude disrupting the status quo who got change to happen. Only they don't always wear pink mohawks. Sometimes they look like a little old lady riding a bus and refusing to get up to let a white privileged man sit in her chair. The solution is not to "get privileged," as suggested (and as a hypnotist, boy am I familiar with the power of suggestion). The solution is to challenge the privileged, to disrupt, and to create the changes that the privileged cannot stop. Cyberpunk stories only look like tragedies because they're written that way. The punk attitude does lay the groundwork for change. It is disruptive, and powerful, and it can find its way to hurting the rich and powerful in places where they cannot stop to scratch. Point being, even if the punks are obliterated, dying on their feet rather than living on their knees, the damage is done. The rich and powerful are no longer unassailable; no longer invulnerable. And that may be the point of cyberpunk - to show the weaknesses of those impersonal sweeping powers. To show that maybe dogma is wrong, that the corporations are not gods, and that the earth does indeed move.

I just lost a member of my family on September 24th, then Carlos Ezquerra of 2000 AD on October 1st, and now Greg's passed. I'm finding it hard to process all of this. Greg's death has left me stunned and reeling. Rest easy, Greg. I am sorry we never got a chance to meet.

Agreed. Thanks so much for this discussion. I feel really optimistic for the future of Mythras.

I'm sold on this. I never thought this thread would reach two pages. I honestly thought it'd die a death, zero views, zero replies, sinking to the bottom. It was indeed a weird dream that I'd had, and I'm very interested, in the fullness of time, to see what turns up. And you do realise that if the next book offers social combat rules, I'll buy the book they appear in, sight unseen, virtually on the spot. That's brand loyalty for you.

Physical combat is presented as this entity whose goal is to kill some targets. Adventurers go in, they see the orcs or goblins, they get into slaughter. No quarter given; no quarter expected. It ends with dead and injured everywhere. That's it. The combat is its own sweet thing - kill or be killed. Slaughter, mark off hit points, narrate the cut and thrust, heal the injured afterwards. What if the combat has a purpose beyond "Hey ho, here's the bad guys, let's line up and roll initiative"? The bad guys come up and tell you that they've got a message - don't try and interfere with the Snake Cult operating out of the warehouse district. The combat ensues when they try and emphasise their point with a beatdown. Suddenly, your guys have combat with a purpose - stay alive and respond in kind, possibly even turn the tables on the bad guys and send them scurrying home to their snake temple with a note tied to their behinds reading "You're next" in explosive runes. The bigger picture is that combat with a purpose fits in with the narrative. Not even brute animals fight for no reason at all: they fight to defend their young and their nest, or they attack because they are hungry or pain from an infected wound has addled their brains, or because you are in their territory. Or because they are just plain stubborn and evil, like horses and camels, the evil jerks. Combat is currently presented in many roleplaying games in the style of a video game, where the scene is only completed, and victory is only assured, by the complete extinction of every single bad guy in the scene. But if there is a goal to the combat, it is possible to turn physical combat into a small subset of social combat. Combatants in social combat want something. The other guy, not necessarily a bad guy, wants something else that stops the protagonists getting what they want. If they can get it through charm, through deceit, through magic, through Oratory, through an entertaining interpretive dance routine or simply through trade, then that can be a better approach than going in with swords drawn all the time. And if the protagonists know what their goal is, they can achieve those goals with victory conditions other than complete annihilation of the other party; alternatives such as driving the antagonists off, buying them off, scaring them away, conning them into abandoning their posts or simply asking them nicely. That's where Resistance would come in. Each Resistance point is like one door to open between where things stand now and a victory for your side. Each Resistance point removed represents one more obstacle in the way of what you want removed, and the antagonist brought that much closer to seeing things your way. So it's all about stating what you want, and what you think the antagonists should do, and engaging in social or physical combat to achieve that goal, whether it's "I want to seduce the Duchess and her daughter" or "I want to stop the guard from alerting the castle to my presence, and the best way is to apply Palsy to his head."

Most of you who are still thinking of social combat as being like physical combat, with hit points and damage, are not thinking of the bigger picture. Social combat is about winning a person over, about making them see past the cognitive dissonance of doing something that could be counter to their natures, and getting what you want while ensuring that you give the other guy the bare minimum of what they want. So it is really like a gradual steering of the other guy towards consent, or to a state where they believe that you are telling the truth. So it's not so much "social hit points," maybe, and more "resistance points," which could easily be something like one-tenth your Willpower score. Each net success deducts one Resistance from the opponent. Critical Success, it's two Resistance points and they start to warm up to you. If they win, it's your Resistance that takes a hit; two points, if they score a crit. Special Effects could include Make Good First Impression, Wrap Them Around Your Little Finger and Compel Surrender (requires brandishing some sort of weapon at close range). These could have further effects, such as making your next social skill roll a grade easier, or making theirs a grade harder, and so on. Negotiation: You're trying to secure a deal that allows the nomads access through the lands that have just been bought up by your Rival's House. Your Rival does not want to honour a treaty that has allowed them access along that path for more than six thousand years. Ink on a page is worth more than spit in the hand. You have to win them over, by offering things the nomads can give: they already have their own laws and customs of offering gifts of hides and animal dung (it makes fields fertile) to farmers whose lands they must cross, so this House is no different to any other landowner to them. It doesn't matter that it is personal to you. Securing An Alliance: Your greatest Enemy lies before you, his armies broken and scattered, his resources gone. He awaits the sword stroke that will sever his head from his body, and his soul from all worldly concern. Instead, you offer him back his life. He still doesn't trust you, but he is reminded that the other option is always the sword. Fast Talk: "Honestly, Investigator, they literally just fell through a hole in my roof from the apartment above. I can show you the hole they fell through, and you can see it's fresh. I have never seen those bodies before in my life. And no, I still can't explain why my daggers are sticking out of their chests ... though ... I did get burgled, and my knives got stolen the other day. Would I lie to you?' Obtaining Access To A Grimoire: You know that the Chantry won't let you just walk in and read the Grimoire. They know they won't just let some Zorridan-come-Lately just walk in off the street and look at their greatest secrets. But the Chantry's janitor is always popping in and out of that sanctum sanctorum of theirs to polish the brass, and yes, they sold off the gold ten years ago and it's nothing but brass in there, so how about another drink and we can talk about taking off for the day and letting someone else go in wearing that tabard and work uniform? Here's a full day's pay to sweeten the deal. Make that two .. Seduction: This one, you're going to have to imagine for yourselves, you dirty stopouts.

Internal gyroscopic stabilisation could serve the function of the keel in spacecraft.

Like the combat rules are perfect for solo play, so too would social combat rules serve someone well in a situation where all he had to do was just abstract the process of winning over a crowd, or a stubborn guard and so on. And no, I literally cannot read minds. I just woke up from a dream, in total unawareness that someone else was putting the idea through its paces in real life.

So I woke up this morning imagining that we were going to get a new ruleset in the next iteration of Mythras Imperative, such that every character gains a Social Combat Style to go with the Combat Styles they learn. So somebody could learn Domination by Insinuation (Influence, Oratory) and someone else could practice Pillow Talk (Influence, Seduction) while yet another goes for Charismatically Creative (Sing, Dance, Oratory). Imagine the Special Effects of Social Combat - Compel Surrender, Make Good First Impression, Build Anticipation, Entice, Hypnotise, Terrify, Browbeat. Mic Drop. Wow The Crowds. Wrap Around Your Little Finger. I haven't dreamed of designing a game in ages.

I am wondering about the kind of career which would make Seduction a Professional skill, though, and while there is a glaringly obvious career, I was also thinking of Companions as in Firefly.

Entertainers could enjoy access to Acrobatics and Seduction. They're the most natural fit. As for Boating and Seafaring, I'm guessing that you'd have to have some sort of a Wet Navy / Coast Guard career type.

I think that, mechanical differences aside, the planet and city could happily fit into any suitable campaign you would like to run.

Their origins could be covered in each supplement, and include such possibilities as (1) They have always been here, because they have evolved in every single parallel in existence; (2) Their homeworld is unknown to them, and they have only appeared in this section of the Galaxy recently (in the last millennium); (3) They were transported here in ships which came from another galaxy (they were cargo); (4) as 3, but they are parasites who stay behind when their host vessels move on; (5) they came here from another parallel, brought here by Disruptors by accident; (6) they evolved here, and only in a few selected parallels.

So I'm involved in something right now, and it could get pretty intensive over the next few weeks, but I've been wondering what I can do for M-Space, possibly through the Mythras Gateway. A while back, I released a book, Castrobancla, the City of Aliens, for a certain well-known 2D6 space game. I have no current interest in retooling the whole book for M-Space, but some of the guest species from that book could do with being brought here. Having seen M-Space, I am wondering whether or not my Pelacur and Kubotaur would not find a better home in the M-Space universe, after all.

Oh, that's awful news. Sorry to hear that your universe died.

Have the Powers That Be considered retooling something like Mythras Imperative into a solo game system? A future project to consider.

Brilliant ongoing work.

Looking forward to tomorrow's releases. When you update M-Space, will this come through automatically on DriveThru?

Or we could just learn Spanish ...

The thing I love about a roleplaying game is the ability to tell stories in it. Some systems are explicitly built around storytelling: the Chronicles of Darkness and its satellite settings are billed as "The Storytelling System." I am finding Mythras better suited to general storytelling than an awful lot of contemporary roleplaying systems. I found myself wondering why this is so. I can think of a few things that stand out. Character Generation: Your characters are not constrained by class. Some farm boy could grow up to be a sorcerer, sure: or he might find a calling as a physician, alchemist or entertainer, and seek out adventure according to his skills and gifts. Connections: Your character is not alone. Unlike, say, Traveller, where your Travellers can leave all your Allies and Contacts behind with the next Jump out of the system, your connections are never far away in Mythras, because what is implied is that your Adventurers have to come back to their locus of operations if they are to advance with their people. Speaking of people ... Cults and Brotherhoods: Your characters really are not alone. There are Cult and Brotherhood memberships, as well as duties and responsibilities, to take care of. It looks as if half the time, the Adventurers are doing the classic dungeon crawling, and the rest of the time they're learning, reaching, advancing or deposing scheming Rivals, or warring against rival Brotherhoods out for the same goal as the Adventurers' faction. Those are the three that stand out. How about you? What makes Mythras outstanding for you?

Yeah, there is a font size adjusting option. Did you cut and paste the odd text?

I love Roman Antique for headings and captions. Main body text, not so much. Garamond's a bit small - smaller than Times New Roman characters at the same font size. I use Gentium, when I'm not using Times New Roman. If I'm writing a document that someone else will be editing, plain Times New Roman all the way, nothing else. As for displaying numbers, when I'm working on mathematical and numerical displays, would you believe SimSun does the most mathematical-looking number displays? It's for Chinese characters, but it really works for numbers.

Done and bought. Very nice it is, too. Chances are, I'll find a way of including a few Tasks in future supplements, including:- - Group Climb (Athletics-based Task); - Follow The Money (Bureaucracy); - Who's Foolin' Who? (Deceit); - Summoning Something (Or Sending It Back) (Invocation).