Earlier this year, Wizards of the Coast, the owners of Dungeons & Dragons, bought D&D Beyond, the premiere and largest web store for the rules of D&D and they are now trialling a new version of the rules called One D&D; they are also planning to release a virtual table top solution and have a new movie in production. Also recently at a Hasbro earnings call, one of their executives stated that D&D was now a lifestyle brand and was under-monetised. This has created a sense of fear amongst 3rd party creators that WOTC will revise their intellectual property sharing agreements to the detriment of themselves and non-Dungeon Master players who have been identified as under spenders. Depending on where you look, this has created a lot of noise; I think there’s a lot of fear being generated, and it interests me to consider the issues in the context of the software industry practice. I think that software industry grew the open source models and the interaction by games vendors such as Wizards with software continues to inform good & bad practice, There's more overleaf ...
Class Wargames, a review
I read Richard Barbrook’s “Class Wargames” having played his referendum game. I was unprepared for two chapters on the history of the Situationist International. The book has been inspired by Guy Debord’s Game of War; I had assumed that Richard was fascinated by games for the same reason that managements are, that one learns quicker by doing than by listening but his enthusim and praxis comes from the tactics of the Situationist Intentional. He categorises the tactics as provocation, détournement, urbanism & participatory creativity and while it’s a bit difficult to see how war games is a tactic of urbanism, it’s clear to me how the others fit in by challenging the states monopoly of military knowledge and strategy, the revisiting of military history and the liberation effects of personal participation. Anyway everyone, or nearly everyone enjoys a good board or table top game.
The “Game of War” is simple, some might argue overly so and would seem a bit too like chess although Debord argued that it was good enough, or better than that. …
Meaningful Votes
Meaningful Votes is a role-playing game, written by Richard Barbrook, where player’s (or teams) represent parliamentary factions and replay the last 3 months in Parliament to see if a different outcome might have been possible. The factions have different power (ie. votes in Parliament) and the different goals i.e. different Parliamentary goals which are enforced by the scoring system. You can also win points through your rhetoric. At least some factions score higher if they are on the losing side of some votes. Heckling is encouraged.
We played this with Lewisham West and Penge CLP.
Richard suggested that people play a faction with whose views you disagree because the learning experience is better. I played the “Lexiter” faction and certainly clarified my ideas about who they are and what they represent, an alliance of rump Bennites and Blue Labour and that’s before we just consider the careerists & triangulators, who are frightened for their seats or for a majority. …
Capitalism and Creativity…yeah right
I stayed in the Hilton to take part in a fringe event called “The economic contribution and growth potential of the creative industries” with speakers from the CBI, UK Music and UKIE. The meeting was planned to be chaired by Tom Watson, but Sion Simon stood in for him.
Matt Fell from the CBI’s competitive markets division spoke first. He started by pointing out the bleeding obvious that creative is becoming digital; except it’s not! Most musicians make more money performing than they do through licensing their content. It’s industrial music and its parasitical lawyers, agents and accountants, and now it would seem commentators, lobbyists and analysts that need copyright and the corporate industrial cocoons. He also stated that there was a lack of government backing, absolutely look at the coalition’s abolition of the British Film Council and he called for strong intellectual property laws. I wanted to ask how they could be stronger! …
Adventures in Faerun with an Apple Mac
I finally got Neverwinternights running on my Mac using WINE. It is clear from the old Bioware forums that to get it working on recent i.e. Intel based Macs needs virtualisation technology. There are choices here, but I chose WINE since it seems to leave the game’s code ‘closer to the metal’ than alternatives. I also wanted it to be legally free.
There have been some rat holes in this project, but I started at http://winehq.org. This has lots of great resources including some “How To…” pages and a forum. The best advice at the time I started was to install from source, so I got introduced to git. I came to the conclusion, after being advised, that macports was a better way of installing and maintaining WINE on the MAC. (I also downloaded Porticus which is a GUI front end for macport and I had to upgrade my version of the Xcode developer package.) This conclusion was aided by the fact the game now works.
An article at arstecnica, called “Neverwinter Nights WINE Tutorial” states that the installer won’t work under WINE and my early experiments had found this to be true. The article suggests copying a good windows installation which I did via a DVD. The compressed folders are between 3.4 & 3.7 Gb, depending on how many saved games and add-on modules are in the folders. The ars article also recommends copying some of the Microsoft DLLs, but they used a W98 build as their source, I am using XP. I have not copied any of the DLLs onto my Mac.
It seems to be working OK.
In summary its a three step process,
- Install macports and porticus
- Install WINE
- Copy the NWN folder from a Windows Machine
The first comment is by me, and discusses how I got doh123’s Wineskin to work. DFL 22 April 2011. …
Spellcasting in Neverwinternights
I have over the last two days advanced my Mage into and up the Luskan Host Tower_in Neverwinter Nights. This is the first time I have played a Mage, as those of you who follow this thread know, and there are some interesting differences in playing one as opposed to a fighter type, in particular, Rimardo Domine is, much easier to defeat and the brazier entrapping Nymphithys much harder, For more, see Playing a Wizard. …
Work and Games
Back to my desk in the City after 10 days off, spent with family and friends. I am looking forward to work, but also getting back in touch with friends I havn’t seen in a while. After Xmas we went to the Aldershot Games Store and bought a couple of board games which we have been trying out over the last week. These include “Touch of Evil“, evil monster hunting in the American colonies, “Pirates Cove“, aarrr! and “the War on Terror“, which we havn’t played yet, described as Risk for cynics by the store people, who have always been really helpful. …
An afternoon in Faerun
Another afternoon in Faerun, this time wth my Druid who’s reached the ancient city of Undrentide. I really am unsure about Druids. They ought to be really buff, but I am having some difficulty with this one. He certainly is no match for the Golems in the City so I was going to have to get the Butler’s ring. Even this wasn’t that easy. However once I set Dorna up to help me open doors when I can’t, we got into the Butler’s chambers having run past the two Golems with enough time to talk to the Butler and retreive the ring before the Golems turned up to spoil the party. They were easy enough to deal with then. …
Little Big Adventure
I have been struggling to get VRDP from Virtual Box working on my home network, of which more maybe later, but I took a break to install one of the greatest games ever on the home machines with the help of my younger son. We finally found a copy of Little Big Adventure that’ll run on modern machines. This is hosted at LBA HQ. It runs native but recommends running under DosBox. So that is what I did… …
Shadohaunt
I finished Shadohaunt, a Neverwinter Nights module, over the weekend. I enjoyed it even if its a bit short but given it was well written, atmospheric and tightly driven I shouldn’t complain. Another goody is that all of Drogan’s students and Deekin are present so you can choose your travelling companion, an extra bonus if, like me, you have just used Vulcano’s Mischa Waymeet, the 4th henchman. …