RPG Top 25

Over at RPG Blog II, Zachary is holding a vote for the top 25 RPGs.  While the inherent selection bias (the blog’s audience) will no doubt affect the final numbers, it’s an interesting thing to think about, and I’m looking forward to seeing the ranked results.  Not least because it might give me some more games to check out.

I was a little surprised to realize that I have, in fact, played more than 25 RPGs.  And that’s just the ones that I remember playing.  This would be the case even if I weren’t counting each edition of D&D (and their clones) and each World of Darkness book separately.  There are a lot of RPGs out there.

My list, after the jump.

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MMORPG Armageddon?

While catching up on the news this week, I came across an interesting tidbit at Virtual Worlds News:  Worlds.com has sued NCSoft, the publisher of such games as City of Heroes, Lineage II, and the ill-fated Tabula Rasa.  Worlds.com was one of the early developers of virtual worlds; WebWorld, their earliest, launched in 1994.  That’s practically prehistory for the WorldWide Web.

It turns out that, a decade or so ago, Worlds.com filed for two patents.  One of them was patent 7,181,690, “System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.”  The capsule version:  this is a patent on tracking the positions of avatars via a client-server method.

Which, incidentally, closely describes all of the variety of methods used in many modern MMORPGs, including the 900-lb. gorilla, World of Warcraft.

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ABD Reaches Milestone, Gains Action Point

We interrupt musings about guns in fantasy roleplaying games for this bit of vanity:  today marks six months since my first post here at A Butterfly Dreaming.

Since June 10, I’ve written 93 posts (94 including this one), averaging around 1,000 words each.  I’ve received 296 comments as of the time I’m writing this, or around 3 per post.  I’ve got 54 different tags and 15 categories.

And a hell of a lot more readers than I ever expected.

I’d like to thank you all for taking an interest and helping kick things off.  Here’s hoping you find the next six months equally intriguing or entertaining or whatever the case may be.  I’ve got some articles planned.

Back to the guns shortly.

Resource: Crime Library

Thought I’d share a site I sometimes use in planning my games.  Crime Library is devoted to murderers, gangsters, serial killers, terrorists, and spies, and all of their various crimes and operations.  Its tales are very detailed and well-researched — check out the feature on Sidney Reilly, the British spy thought to have inspired James Bond, for instance.

In addition to the features about individual criminals, there are articles about criminal psychology, organized crime, unsolved crimes, the police, and criminal investigation methods such as forensic toxicology.  The articles cover both contemporary and historical crimes, although there’s a significant bias toward the more modern.

Crime Library is of obvious use to anyone planning to run a game in, say, the Prohibition era, or a plot featuring a historic serial killer or spy.  Its stories can also serve as a source of plot inspiration in general, and many of them are simply fascinating to read.

CommentLuv

I heard from the Dice Bag that the author of the CommentLuv plugin is hosting a contest. To enter, all you need to do is post a relevant comment on any participating blog (including, as of this posting, this one). I presume that you may need to allow some scripts to function, too, if you use a Firefox addon like NoScript.

CommentLuv.com has details, including registration information.  From that site, in case you were curious:  “The prizes will range from cash via paypal to electronics such as noise-reducing headphones, memory cards, ipod speakers, and more.”

I really like the idea of CommentLuv, and I’ve been using it myself for some time.  (Although it cut out for a while after I accidentally changed something I shouldn’t have… oops.)  I know quite a few other blogs on the RPG Bloggers Network do, too.  Even if you’re not interested in the contest, give the site a look.

One other thing:  please don’t spam in an effort to win the contest.  For one thing, Akismet’ll probably catch it all anyway.  For another, you’ll just end up disqualified.  See the part about “relevant” comment, up there?  Yeah.