"It's not just some arcade game you can start up on the spot, you know?" That comment on role-playing games has stuck with me ever since. I remember thinking in response, "Well, why not?"

The default assumption with the hobby, of course, is the everlasting campaign, taking place over years, often with at least three players and a GM meeting at regular intervals. That, indeed, is no arcade game to be started up and played because you and a friend or two have a couple of hours of free time.

On the other hand, once one gets past the default assumption there are in fact role-playing games that can be started up on the spot and played in one sitting. Breaking the Ice by Emily Care Boss was one. She's struck again with Shooting the Moon, in many ways a more elegant and streamlined offering.

Breaking the Ice is a game about two people going on three dates and falling for each other. Shooting the Moon, on the other hand, is about two Suitors competing for the affections of a Beloved. It is this competitive element that gives the game zest, and a well-defined and clean play procedure that enhances the fun of both the competition and the story.

Before I dive deeper into the substance, let me back up a little for the obligatory style review. I am not the best judge of layout and visual presentation, but the book looks fine to me. I really liked the illustrations by comic book artist Jenny Manley Lee, and the use of boxes to delineate differences between two and three player games and play examples worked well. At a little over 40 pages including illustrations the book is skinny and staple-bound, but seems sturdy enough and has survived abuse such as folding backwards.

Back to your regularly scheduled substance review: As you may have guessed, I have played and like Breaking the Ice. My motivations for buying the game had a lot to do with the "arcade RPG" impulse I mentioned at the beginning. Breaking the Ice could be played with two players, with no GM, and there was no prep or long-term commitment involved. Nevertheless, there were some shortfalls in the play experience that I feel have been satisfactorily resolved in Shooting the Moon.

The first of these is competitive and dramatic pressure. My impression from playing two games of Shooting the Moon was that the game is not truly competitive, despite its basic structure. Rather, the competitive frame drives the dramatic tension for a more satisfying story.

The spirit of competition, and the driving force of the story, come from the Hurdle rule. Players take turns being the Active Player, framing the scene and describing their Suitor's advances toward the Beloved. (Shooting the Moon can also be played with three players, with one player playing the Beloved, but both my games were two-player, Suitor-only games.) The player of the other Suitor, the Opponent, introduces the Hurdle when the chance presents itself, throwing a wrench into the Active Suitor's plans. The Active Suitor has a chance to respond, and the two roll against each other for the outcome of the scene and to gain--or keep the Active Player from gaining--points towards the goal.

For instance, one of my two games took place in the Beast Hunters setting, with two Chel'qhuri tribesmen competing to be chosen by a powerful woman in the tribe to breed with her. My Suitor, Thundercloud, staged a raid of a caravan by himself, hoping to prove his cunning and fierceness. The Opponent then narrated how Thundercloud was outnumbered by the unexpectedly well-trained caravan guard. In response I narrated the Beloved herself, Pineflower, coming to my Suitor's rescue. The players each try to take the story in their own direction, resulting in a lot of back-and-forth and unexpected twists and turns.

This, I felt, was the missing dash of spice in Breaking the Ice. Too often there the play devolved into "let's squeeze as many successes out of the dice as humanly possible" without regard to pacing or, more fundamentally, fun. The complete convergence of interest between the players toward a happy ending sometimes made the game lag, especially if the players were not honest about their preferences and desires. (There's got to be some kind of metaphor there.)

In Shooting the Moon, on the other hand, the back-and-forth between the players drove the conflicts and the story forward, with the clear and limited procedure for doing so helping the focus and pace of the scene. This point leads to the second great improvement in Shooting the Moon, namely the clear procedure.

Every scene in Shooting the Moon has a set procedure of scene framing, hurdle presentation, and resolution. Breaking the Ice had procedure, as well, but a turn in Breaking the Ice could be pretty much all over the place as players worked to maximize successes, something that, as mentioned above, could seriously harm the pace of the game.

In Shooting the Moon each scene can only be about one Hurdle, or central conflict, and once the Active Player makes three responses to the Hurdle the players must roll to resolve the scene. There can be two more steps to the process if the Active Player loses and wants another chance, but those steps, too, are finite.

The restrictions to the three responses by the Active Player, furthermore, help to keep the scene tightly focused around the three protagonists. Each response must involve an Attribute or Trait of the Suitor or Beloved, or flirtation between the Suitor and Beloved. This centers each crisis squarely around the characters, their interactions, and previous events in the story.

One example of this is from another game I played about a king and his best knight competing over a widowed noblewoman. The Hurdle thrown in King Artegal's way was that Sir Ciel was about to help Lady Ariannaid onto her horse. My first response was that Leland, Artegal's Person Trait and Ciel's rival, spoke to Ciel on the way, distracting him. (Suitor Trait) The second was that Artegal and Ariannaid brushed hands as he escorted her to her horse, making her blush. (Flirtation) The third response was that he knelt down and locked his hands together for her to use as a mount step, surprising onlookers. (Suitor Attribute: Dignifed, but humble to his friends) In this way, the rules provided for meaningful interactions and an interesting story.

The setup for the climactic scene similarly draws from the characters and preceding events for a dramatically appropriate setup. Each player narrates an element of the scene for each goal point that he or she gained during the earlier turns. Each scene element must involve Traits, Conflicts or Obstacle, flirtation, or a background description. (Not Attributes, however. The omission for the climactic scene serves to place more emphasis on closing the story by focusing on issues and preceding events.)

In the Chel'qhuri game mentioned earlier, the two Suitors were about to have a showdown with an enemy tribe to regain control of tribal lands. As part of the setup, I narrated my Suitor hiring mercenaries with the loot from the successful caravan raid at the beginning of the game. It was a small thing but gave quite a sense of closure, and was something I was unlikely to have come up with if I hadn't been racking my brain to make use of Suitor Traits.

Thus far I have compared and contrasted Shooting the Moon extensively to Breaking the Ice, but of course Shooting the Moon stands alone without the earlier game. It's just that comparing these two games by the same creator on a similar subject served to highlight what I felt were its two great strengths.

Something else I liked about Shooting the Moon was its system for collaborative character generation. It seemed to serve two seemingly conflicting purposes. First, it gave all the players a stake in all characters since everyone contributes to each character. This served to mitigate the competitive pressure, making it good-natured rather than heated, since these were all our characters in a sense.

Second and on the other hand, the chargen process itself was competitive at some stages. This was especially true of the Attributes stage, where in a two-person game players take turns modifying their own Suitor's Attributes and the other Suitor's. This was how my Chel'qhuri Suitor ended up with "Handsome but cheerless" and "Lowly of birth but discontent," while the other Suitor turned out to be "Surrounded by friends but mostly due to his birth" and "Blessed by ancestral gods but arrogant."

All this is not to say I have no bones to pick. The first is that the game is a little too random. The dice mechanic compares the highest die in opposed rolls rather than totals or successes. Since it uses six-sided dice, this means that a one-die difference statistically means little. This in itself may be a feature rather than a bug, but my complaint is that there is little the players can constructively do to manipulate those odds. The story that the players create in the process, as stated above, may be fun, but I felt there was little I could do to better my odds when it came to the outcome.

At least, that was my impression of the two-person games I played. A three-player game seems to have meatier options, leading me to conclude that this is the default for Shooting the Moon. I look forward to playing a three-person game and seeing how the tactical side of it differs from the two-way game.

Another and related complaint was the tiebreaker rule for the two-person game. If I correctly understand the grammatically incorrect instruction at the middle of page 21, it comes down to the two Suitors comparing just one die roll against each other, making it a completely random exercise that disregards the earlier tied roll or even the Active Player's negligent one-die advantage. This did nothing for my sense of tactical control over the outcome.

Overall, I found Shooting the Moon to be a simple and quick game with a lot of punch. Playing it can, really, be as easy as starting an arcade game, but with deeper results in terms of story--especially with the rules to support it. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a short, painfree playing experience with high returns. It makes for a decent one-on-one game, with some warts as mentioned above, but I suspect that it would truly shine as a three-person game, which I look forward to trying in the future.

Originally posted to Story Games.

So my friend Wishsong and I played a short adventure in the Transhuman Space setting. The protagonists were an uplifted (human intelligence) talking kitten, Miu, and a sentient AI implanted in Miu's head, Pacific War veteran Tien Ba Dinh. Transhuman Space as a Disney feature animation, in other words. The rulebook we used was Mythic Role Playing, and to test it out we went GM-less and prep-less. It was very entertaining, and the shortfalls and stresses in the experience were good food for thought, in particular regarding what constitutes a story game.

The way Mythic works, basically when a situation comes up and you have to decide what happens, you frame it as a question. Everyone decides on an acting rank and a difficulty rank. Then you match this up with the Fate Chart, which will give you a percentage where those two ranks meet. Roll 1d100 same as or under that number and the answer to the question is yes. Roll over and the answer is no. This is the fundamental way both GM emulation ("Does it rain?") and resolution ("Do I persuade her?") work.

The climactic next-to-last scene, in particular, really brought home to me what story games are about. Lieutenant Tien, the AI powering the implant in the kitten Miu's head, tries to resist his own programming in order to save Miu's life. His Will was Exceptional, but Wishsong and I decided that it is horrendously difficult for an AI to resist its programming. Being used to story games, I thought it was lame Miu might die just because Tien failed this check. Wishsong, whose gaming experience is much more traditional, seemed to be used to the phenomenon of the system fighting what the players wanted.

That made me realize what a story game meant to me: A game that supports what the participants think of as a good story, instead of imaginary probabilities potentially getting in the way of those story goals. If everyone has the same amount of fun whether the kitten lives or dies, there's no tension there; if not, a system that recognizes only physical odds can actually take away from the fun. Story games take away that tension by dealing directly with story elements.

What came after was really revelatory regarding a second important element in story games. Tien makes his check and briefly resists his program, warning Miu not to listen to him when he tells her to go to the subway station, and instead to find the police and ask for help. Then his program takes over and Tien tells Miu to hide from the police and go straight to the subway. Poor Miu is really confused, but decides to trust the first Tien. After a couple of other checks and events she finds safety. In the epilogue scene Tien, downloaded into a new bioshell (basically becoming a regular dude who doesn't live in a kitten's head), comes face-to-face with the now court-order-protected Miu for the first time. They do some explaining and forgiving, and the story ends with Miu falling asleep in Tien's lap.

I was pleased as punch with the outcome, and was a little surprised to learn that Wishsong had wanted a different one. He had wanted Miu to be sacrificed, feeling it would be an appropriate ending to show the harshness of the Transhuman Space setting. On the other hand I wanted Miu to live, erm... well, admittedly because of a desire not to see cute widdle critters get hurt, and also because I wanted to explore the meaning of sentience and free will with an AI fighting its program.

It occurred to me that Mythic had no real way to reconcile these conflicting visions, or to help us come up with something altogether different. Like most non-story games it didn't actually do drama, just logical probabilities. A story game would have systems in place to handle this kind of thing instead of leaving it to the kind of polite dissembling that social interaction is likely to involve. ("Damn, I want that furball to bite it but Eldir seems really attached to a non-existent talking kitten, so...")

That's basically what I came away about story games by playing a game that wasn't one. It was fun overall, but I felt I was fighting the system to achieve that fun and poor Wishsong didn't get his dead kitten... er, his creative vision didn't get a place in the story. A story game wouldn't have that tension between fun and system, and would have some way for conflicting visions to come out and be reconciled. I think it would be fun to try starting again at the same starting point with a different system and see how it goes.

A couple of other points that I came across in play were narration control and the nature of checks.

Since Mythic handles GM emulation it's possible to play GM-less, which we did and it worked okay. However, there was some awkwardness because neither of us had narration rights over NPCs or the outside world. We had to keep going back to the Fate Chart to frame the question and decide on the ranks, which was obviously much slower than someone just saying something. It wasn't necessarily the lack of GM that slowed things down, but that there was a void in narrative rights over non-PC things.

After the first session I suggested we take turns handling traditional GM duties, and if the other player wanted to object, or add something, or if the GM was unsure, we'd do the Fate Chart. This sped things up tremendously. And since we were both still players, the non-gamemastering player would pick up the NPCs that were interacting with the GM's PC. Overall I think I prefer games with better-defined participant roles. Not necessarily the traditional GM and players, but in the sense of knowing at all times who has narrative control over what.

Also, another difference I came to notice between Wishsong and me was the number of checks and what they handled. Being used to conflict resolution, I felt it a little odd to make multiple checks on a dramatic outcome that I felt was already settled, such as "Do they escape Vietnam?" "Will Miu live?" And so on. Wishsong, on the other hand, was used to task resolution and didn't see resolution as settling a dramatic outcome. For him the questions were more like, "Will Tien resist his programming?" "Can the police dogs find Miu?" etc. Mythic is a task-resolution system, so it supported his way better than mine.

I read this entry on the Atarashi Games site and was quite flattered that my review was linked by the game's official site! I'd been wondering why the Atarashi Games URL was appearing in my blog's referrer logs. I just wanted to clarify the contents of the post a bit, as some of the finer points seem to have been... lost. Starting with the title.

"Pan Mote" appears to be Babelfish's valiant attempt at "Panty" as rendered in Korean. "Ti" in Korean refers to a dust mote, and the fact that I stuck the Korean words for "Panty" and "Explosion" together seems to have confused Babelfish. The "agony" part was pretty funny, too, since it's far too strong a word for the Korean word--"Komin"--I used. The original title goes more like "Life and Travails of Schoolgirls - Panty Explosion." The gist of the review is as follows:

I start by stating that Panty Explosion, despite its title, really has nothing to do with pedophilia or fetishism in of itself. I then go on to outline the chargen rules, adding that I would prefer to use the Western zodiac instead of the birth-year animals, and that I'd go back to the traditional fire-water-wood-metal-earth elements.

Through this overview I point out that the rules are well-suited for creating well-rounded and believable schoolgirls, with the added depth of psychological horror that is all the more horrific because it reflects the oppression that schoolgirls live under. (While I've left my own schoolgirl days behind, the life of a Korean schoolgirl isn't all that different from that of a Japanese schoolgirl.)

Then I outline the resolution rules, saying that the system is excellent for recreating the vicious little rivalries and shifting alliances that are the staple of a schoolgirl's life. I also mention that I like how the rules support self-contained scenarios with a Big Bad apiece, and that it would probably make for clean, well-plotted stories that won't meander endlessly like more open-ended scenarios can. Finally, I end by saying that I would like to run a scenario with Korean schoolgirls.

Some comments follow, and a surprising number of those who commented (all male) thought that this was a rulebook for women to relive schoolday memories. I hasten to set them straight, pointing out that the creators and some of the playtesters were male. I asked (a little snidely) why these men seemed to think they could play aliens, elves, and bikini-clad Amazons, but not ordinary, everyday girls?

One of them replied to say that it would be hard to play the game with women who had been real live schoolgirls and could tell if the guys' portrayal of schoolgirls rang false. I conceded it was a fair enough reason. We agreed that it would be difficult but fun, as long as all involved were unafraid to give and take constructive criticism.

I also pointed out in my reply that a rulebook truly geared towards women would have a lot more sex in it than PE does. :D

So there's that, hopefully it's more readable than Babelfish's offering. As you can tell I like the rulebook a lot and plan on using it sometime. The one downside since posting the review is that, according to my referrer logs, my blog has started to appear in such search results as "panty," "Japanese schoolgirls," and "schoolgirl panty." It pisses me off, but I guess it can't be helped. At least it's amusing.

John Kim gave me the link to a new Spirit of the Century campaign page, Dragons of the Yellow Sea, and boy is that cool or what! I read His Majesty's Dragon and thought the idea of dragons in real life was cool, though the book didn't grab me otherwise. But the thought of dragons on Jejudo... that's just delicious. (And those sturdy, clever little island ponies? 'Yum' indeed for our scaled friends. ;)

John asked me about possible hooks and tropes for a Korean campaign set in the 1860's,  though he is wisely unconcerned with historical accuracy. This post far exceeded LiveJournal's max for comments, which is why I moved it here. You know what they say about being careful what you wish for...

Society

Class friction would be one interesting dimension for a Chosun campaign. (Image source here) There was the nobility, the Yangban, the commoners, or Sangnom (Yangin if you want to be polite), and the slaves, or Nobi (Jongnom to be insulting). Nobi are more akin to lifetime indentured servants than slaves in the antebellum South, since Korea had no plantation system and land ownership was closer to feudalism: The peasant farmers worked the lands and paid the landlord in addition to paying their own taxes.

In addition to taxes paid with rice or other commodities (by the nineteenth century paying in currency was fairly common as well), commoners also paid with labor, working on major state-run constructions like fortifications, and could be drafted into the army. These were all sources of widespread misery, as you can imagine: Overworked peasants dropped like flies from starvation and contagion. If you had money you could pay off the labor tax with cash, and the steady rise of rich commoners was another source of social pressure. Heck, some commoners were actually buying impoverished noble families' Jokbo (family records) to pass themselves off as nobility--effectively buying stature with cash.

The indentured servants, the Nobi, worked in the noble households and could be bought and sold. An individual or family could also have their free (common, or even noble) status stripped away and become Nobi, usually because they were associated with some major crime like treason. The archetypal story is one where a nobleman is accused of treason and is messily executed, then his entire family are slaughtered or sold into servitude. This status of servitude was hereditary, so this meant effective annihilation for the whole family.

So there are some interesting social pressures in regards to class. There's the traditional oppressive class system, perpetuated for, oh, easily a thousand years. There's also resentment building steadily against it, with the growing recognition of the horrible iniquities and the rise of some rich commoners. For the Yangban the new development is a source of alarm and righteous indignation; for the Yangin and especially the Nobi the old system is a source of growing resentment. The historical details are unimportant, but these kinds of opposing pressure could make for some really meaty conflicts. Korea had its share of peasant and slave uprisings, particularly when times were bad with famine and such. Maybe dragons played a role in such conflicts as well?

You could bring class into play in a number of ways, one of which is the issue of class and dragons. What class of people ride dragons? Many Yangban considered physical exertion beneath them. Chosun was a country that consistently looked down on martial pursuits in favor of scholarly ones, so soldiers, even noble ones (Mushin), were considered inferior to the bureaucrat scholars (Munshin). Still, "Yangban" does mean the "two Bans"--the Munban, which is the bureaucracy, and the Muban, which is the military. Overall I'd imagine the noble-born officers who passed the relevant state exam (the Mugua) would be the most likely candidates for dragon riders.

Of course, dragons can't be expected to give a fig for human conventions, so I can definitely imagine the pesky creatures choosing commoners or even some slave who was sweeping the yard or carrying loads. Or a bureaucrat who must now lower himself to officerhood. Or even--horror of horrors--a woman! It would actually be better if it were a commoner or slave woman. I can imagine many a noble lady fainting dead away at the idea of her daughter running around with men and engaging in sweaty physical exertion.

Women

The status of women was, well, pretty bad. They couldn't inherit, had no right to leave their husbands... hell, even remarriage was frowned upon for widows. This was worse for noblewomen because they were more tightly bound by repressive moral expectations. Common women had more leeway, but overall it was pretty severe.

At least if you were born noble it was unlikely you were illiterate, though your education was limited compared to noblemen. Hangul, the letters created for the Korean language, was (and is) immensely easier to learn than Hanja, the Chinese characters used by the elite, so women turned to Hangul for self-expression. The bureaucrat elite looked down on Hangul as Un-mun, the woman's letters, but many examples of Hangul literature by Chosun noblewomen survive and are highly regarded today.


Cultural themes

One recurring trope in comical Korean folklore is the plucky, worldly, clever commoner and the boorish, sheltered nobleman. That might be fun to work into the characters, kind of a two-man comedy routine coupled with social commentary.

Another recurring theme throughout history is that the central government is oppressive and uncaring of the people, so the people had damn well better rely on themselves if they want to get anything done. Yet reverence for the king's person was almost absolute unless he was really, really tyrannical. Mostly it was the Yangban who bore the brunt of resentment. The local government was sometimes good, sometimes bad, but the central government was almost always seen as corrupt and untrustworthy.

Yet another recurring theme is that the really good guys will become targets of the jealous Yangban, who will stop at nothing to discredit and ruin him. During the Japanese invasion navy commander Lee Sunshin was a hero to the people and to his men, so much so that he was arrested on unfounded charges, tortured, imprisoned, then cleared of charges, stripped of his rank, and set free. Then the war started going to hell and he was recalled to his post, where he proceeded to smash the Japanese into the sea and die heroically in battle.

This is a fairly typical hero's tale in the Chosun era; there's no stigma for a hero to be accused by the state, since there's no trust in government. If anything it adds to his heroic status, because he's made powerful people nervous. The hero's tale also doesn't end in revenge and bloodbath like it might in Japan. Yes, the hero was horribly wronged; no, he's not going to take revenge, rather he's going to prove his righteousness through heroism or cleverness, which will shame the person who wronged him. The hero will be triumphantly restored if it's a happy story, and die tragically or leave for greener pastures if it's a sad one. Either way it's society that will judge the villain, not the hero him/herself.

Weaponry

Korea never did share its neighbor's fetish for swords, though they were commonly used. (Korean swords share a superficial resemblance to the katana but were actually very different, and were used differently.) The weapon with the greatest hold on popular imagination was probably the bow. (On a probably unrelated but fun note, check out the Korean Olympic team's track record in archery.) Jumong, founder of the ancient kingdom of Goguryoh, is a prime example of a legendary marksman. So was Lee Sung-Kié, the founder of Chosun.

Archery from horeback was widely practiced, too. One advanced tactic was to whip around in the saddle and shoot backwards. Check out these hunters (image source here) from a Goguryoh grave. Archery from dragonback? The mind reels... in a good way...

Of course, there's no need to dispense with more modern weapons, either. Remember, gunpowder was a Chinese invention, and Korea also received a painful lesson on the power of firearms when the Japanese used them in their sixteenth-century invasion of the peninsula. Within years the Koreans were firing back with guns of their own.

Dragon folklore


Regarding the traditional affinity with water, the king of the sea was called Yong-Wang, the Dragon King. There was also an ancient king (Munmu-Wang in the 7th century, 30th king of Shilla and the first king to unite the peninsula if you want specifics) who had his remains buried at sea so he could rise as a dragon and protect the peninsula from the marauding Japanese. His watery grave is a rocky outcropping in the Eastern Sea (or the Japanese Sea as it's commonly known outside of Korea), about two hundred yards around. It's called Sujung-neng, Underwater Grave, or Dai-Wang-Am, the Great King's Rock.

Another important dragon in Korean mythology is Choyong. He's one of the seven sons of the dragon of the Eastern Sea, who became the retainer of a 9th century king. Heck, maybe he was even a progenitor of latter-day dragons. Evidently he lived in human form among humankind, though.

The king (Hun-gang-wang, 49th king of Shilla) gave Choyong a beautiful wife, so beautiful that Yokshin, the spirit of contagion, became enamored of her and took on man-form (one version of the story says Choyong's own likeness) to sleep with her. Choyong, coming home late at night, saw them lying together, but instead of getting angry he withdrew dancing and singing:

On a bright moonlit night in Seoul
I come late from carousing
In my marriage bed
I see four legs.
Two are mine
But what of the other two?
Once they were mine
But they were taken, so what can I do?

See what I mean about Korean stories not being big on revenge? :) Yokshin was shamed by Choyong's generosity and knelt before him, begging forgiveness. He swore he would never trespass on him again, and would run even at the sight of Choyong's face. This is how Choyong's likeness (image source here) became a ward against disease. Scholars say this stranger from the sea who rose high in court and showed such magnanimity in the face of his wife's adultery was actually a seafaring Arab or Persian merchant (possibly a doctor?), but either way it's a good story.

Japan

I notice I keep mentioning Japan, so here's a brief rundown on cultural attitudes: The Koreans traditionally thought of the Japanese as savages, pirates and marauders with no culture or history. (They were wrong, fatally so, but when have neighboring countries ever lacked for mutual prejudice?) With China, the font of all culture and civility (yeah right), as Korea's traditional patron, the defeat of China by Japan was a huge shock.

Also, the coastal dwellers in particular suffered from Japanese pirate attacks, so there was hostility going on in that direction, too. Then there was the invasion in the sixteenth century during which the whole country suffered. (Imjin Waeran, "the attack of the Puny People in the year 1592") One common derogatory term for Japanese is Jjokbari, "footpieces," regarding their distinctive footwear; another is Waenom, "puny bastard(s)," mocking their height.


Wow, that is one LONG post. I tried to tickle the imagination rather than give a history lesson--I'm note sure how well I succeeded.

This is a dice roller and combat phase manager for 7th Sea, translated from the original Korean. To use, open an mIRC client and load the script file into the Remote Scripts window. (Alt+R) The free version of mIRC seems to lose features as its trial period passes, so you might want to try uninstalling and re-downloading the program if the script does not work properly. (If you use mIRC a lot I think paying for a license is a very sound investment, personally.)

Use this mIRC client, with the script loaded, as a dicebot only. Connect to a server and enter a channel with a nick like "Dice" or "Dicebot" or something, then leave it alone. You don't need to type anything from this client, you don't even need to return to the window unless you want to load and unload scripts.

Then connect with another client (either a new mIRC window or a different IRC-compatible client) with a different nickname and to the same channel. This way you will be recognized as a distinct entity from the dicebot and will be able to roll the dice yourself. If your "real" persona, the one that's not a dicebot, is also an mIRC client, check to see if the script file isn't loaded to this client as well. If it is, unload it. Otherwise anyone other than you who tries to roll the dice will get double results from both you and the dicebot.

It might not make sense right now, but you'll see what I mean with some trial and error. :-)

Here's a rundown of the dice roller/phase manager's capabilities. All commands are case insensitive.

1. Rolling the dice

From a non-dicebot client, type something like

4k2

to signal that you'd like to roll 4 d10's and keep the 2 highest. The dicebot will give a result something like:

Loki's roll is 4d10(10+5,4,10+8,5) , the highest 2 dice are 2d10(18+15) = 33.

It handles exploding dice automatically, including dice exploding many times in a row.

If you roll and keep the same number of dice, you can simply type something like

3k

To handle non-exploding dice, put an exclamation point somewhere in the dice-rolling text. Something like:

!5k3

or

3k2!

and so on.

If you accidentally say that you'll keep more dice than you roll, the roll will be modified so that you keep all the dice you roll. So a 2k4 is the same thing as 2k2, or 2k.

To add modifiers, just put a space between the roll and the modifier, like so:

4k3 + 5

or

2k! -5

2. PC Initiative rolls

Initiative rolls are handled in the following format:

Ini N

or

Initiative N

Where N equals your Panache. So if my swordsman has a Panache of 3, for my initiative I would type

Ini 3

The dicebot will tell me which phases I will act, and stores those values. This only becomes really useful in conjunction with the phase management features, which follow.

3. Phase management (GM only)

To manage combat phases you must be recognized as a GM by the script. Doing this is really simple. Just type:

GM

(Yes, you have to trust your players not to be complete jerkoffs and keep taking your GM's crown away. Tough, eh?)

If you want to know who the GM for this channel is, type:

GM?

To roll initiaves for NPCs, the following format is used.

Ini N NPC's Name

Where N equals the NPC's Panache and the NPC's Name can be as many words as you like. Giovanni Villanova, Intelligence-Challenged Brutes, etc. You can also roll initiatives for as many NPCs as you like.

Once all the initiative rolls are in place, just type

phase

and the dicebot will respond with something like

Phase 6, acting character(s): Brute Squad(15),Inigo_Montoya(6).

The numbers in parentheses are the sum of the characters' remaining initiative dice, and so shows the order they act within the Phase. Each time the GM types "phase" the dicebot will automatically increment the phase number, telling you which characters act this phase. Once a Round is over the script will tell you so and all initiative rolls will be erased. (If you reroll initiative before a Round is over the previous initiative results will be overwritten, so be careful.)

To run to the end of the Round without seeing the rest of the phases in this Round (for instance, if everyone's last acting phase was Phase 4), just type

phase~

And the current Round will be over immediately.

Once combat is done the dicebot needs some way to know it. Type

End Combat

And all Phases and Rounds will be initialized. Else the script has no way of knowing the combat is done with and both Phases and Rounds continue for your next fight, so don't blame me. :P

Enjoy, and please tell me if there are any bugs or problems.