Gaming wisdom

Sometimes when running a game you can just handwave the dice rolling part and do whatever makes most sense in a dramatic or storytelling context. Let the heroes win, against any odds. But sometimes, for the sake of uncertainty and dramatic tension, you want to let something ride on the dice.

The result might not be what the players want to happen, but often moments like this are looked back on fondly in later years. Failure can be as dramatic and memorable as success. The dice provide the means to fail, where a hero would normally succeed. The chance of failure makes success more sweet, but carries this price.

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Sharks - Fuck Yeah!

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Delicious LiveJournal Links for 11-9-2008

• The world's largest homegrown submarine
  And damned impressive it is too
  (tags: submarine)
• Monsoon link to fall of dynasties
  By comparing the rain record with Chinese historical records, Pingzhong Zhang of Lanzhou University in China, and colleagues, found three out of five "multi-century" dynasties - the Tang, the Yuan and the Ming - ended after several decades of weaker summer monsoons with drier conditions.
  (tags: history china)
• FUCK YEAH SHARKS
  (tags: sharks funny)
• The stock-market generation game and how to win it
  Here are the chief investment lessons of the financial crisis for todayâ™s young people: they should be buying more shares and running up debts to do so.
  (tags: stocks economics)
• The Venetian Hotel
  This is inside, and upstairs. Tacky? Cool? You decide...
  (tags: LasVegas Hotel Architecture)
• Pex - Automated White Box Testing for .NET
  I must dig into this when I have some time.
  (tags: unittesting tools software dotnet)
• Some fantastic sausage recipes
  Nom!
  (tags: sausages cooking)

Meanwhile, somewhere in politics