More Game Design Advice

More game design suggestions/advice, courtesy of the BoardgameGeek forums, can be found here.

A Memoir

[Note: This is a fictional piece detailing a character background for a game.]

To the poor deputy of Heldren that finds this,

Mathing Monopoly

Courtesy of Business Insider, which presents an article detailing research on the statistics of Monopoly -- rather, the statistics of winning monopoly:

io9's Golden Rules of Worldbuilding

I find io9 to be a wonderful site about science fiction/fantasy in general.  They also provide great inspiration for stories, plots, and the such.  Occasionally, they discuss writing and developing fiction, and I found a rather old post of theirs establishing rules of worldbuilding.

Kickstarter: Red Aegis

On one of my incursions on the web, I stumbled across Red Aegis, which runs similar to a campaign I've been fleshing out for some time.  The concept is fairly simple -- build a world through RPG sessions, and take it through thousands of years in its history until the end of the civilization.  It's available for Pathfinder, and will hopefully expand into Fate, 13th Age, and Dungeon World as the campaign goes on.  It ends on Friday.  Check it out!

Mindtaking!

Per the BBC:

Turkey: Telepathy 'linked to deaths'
That's one explanation of the deaths of four workers at the defence giant Aselsan contained in a report presented to the PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to reports. All four deaths, within the space of 14 months during 2006 and 2007, were initially recorded as suicides. The men had been undergoing psychological treatment before they died but doubts persisted from their sceptical families, reports newspaper Today's Zaman. And last year the Inspection Board of the Prime Ministry launched a fresh probe.
Included in its report was a study by a neuropsychologist, Nevzat Tarhan, who asks prosecutors not to disregard the possibility of telepathy causing severe distress and headaches in the victims, giving them a tendency to kill themselves, reports Hurriyet Daily News. Brainwaves could have been sent from 1.5km (just under a mile) away, Hurriyet quotes Tarhan as saying. The report apparently doesn't offer a clear answer as to whether the deaths were murder or suicide but it's been submitted to the Ankara Chief Prosecutor's Office for further investigation.

That's right.  Neuropsychologists confirm, telepaths cause headaches and "distress" from 1.5km away, causing people to kill themselves.

In Case of Global Thermonuclear War...

Following up on my discussion of the Nukemap, a bit of history, courtesy of The Independent: Queen Elizabeth II wrote and gave the following speech in 1983 in the case of nuclear war.

The Nukemap is Updated!

In honor of the 8/6 anniversary of the drop of the first nuclear weapons, I have a nuke-themed worldbuilding aid.  A bit back, I mentioned an application that allowed you to map the damage and fallout resulting from nuclear explosions, called the Nukemap, in the context of a world-building aid.  The Nukemap has been updated, and now allows for multiple explosions, calculates airburst v surface burst weapons, allows you to see the damage at a particular location, estimates the windsock of fallout, and most importantly, has a link to the homework behind its estimate.  It can be found here, and there's even a 3D modeler should you use the Google Earth plugin.

EQ Next: The Holy Grails

Sony didn't just drop a trailer for this.  SOE posted a series of videos explaining precisely what made EQ next unique.  Here's a summary:

• Unlock classes that you can free-swap abilities/features from.
• Weapons add/change abilities.
• A fully destructible game world that's been fleshed out as deep as the core of the world.
• AI that creates public quest-type scenarios on the fly, with monsters that don't respawn, but instead seek out a specific type of environment.
• Large-scale "Rallying Calls" that work like a PQ on a larger scale, vary by server, and lead to a constantly evolving game world.

Follow the clickthrough for the videos.

A (MMO) Tree Falls In the Forest

This weekend, Bethesda rolled out 30 minutes of footage at Bethcon Quakecon. This was intended to be a massive reveal, with some of the first live video of The Elder Scrolls Online.  Here it is:

Watch live video from Bethesda on TwitchTV
Bethsoft was very proud of its MMO rendition of the Elder Scrolls series, which ultimately appears to match the visuals of Oblivion on a Low-Res machine (or a high-res mod pack for Morrowind), traditional ES gameplay, and multiple players.  Unfortunately, they were completely blown out of the water by an announcement out of left field by Sony Online Entertainment.

Board Game Design Pieces

While exploring a project I've been working on, I found a list of manufacturers for board game parts, cards, and dice on Boardgamegeek.  Two on the list particularly stand out: Rolco, whom I have used before and had great luck ordering very cheap, durable plastic 6mm tanks, and MeepleSource, which has a few board game bits I'm considering using.  The project I'm working on requires crown tokens, which I sadly wasn't able to find on any of the manufacturers listed.  I did, however, find replica dubloon coins on Rolco's site.

WoW, Now With More Microtransactions

Courtesy of MMO-Champion: Blizzard has microtransactions coming to WoW.