Life and times of Jason since 2001
THE SUBURBAN DAD enters the stage.
Thus begins the slightly adapted version of DARK FORT, the solo/micro game that became MÖRK BORG. Grab a handful of dice, a pencil and paper and begin your perilous delve into DARK FORT LANE, a Grimdad Saga in the Pre-Apocalyptic Suburbs.
Can you complete all of the errands before you run out of patience? Or will your NEIGHBORS derail your efforts to return to your MAN CAVE to await the 7th Misery?
No regrets.
I have such a love/hate relationship with this card.
Love because it was the first gold card I owned and was for a while the only among my playgroup.
Hate because I traded a couple duals and other stuff I wasn’t playing with for it, having no idea what I was giving away for a trash card.
I was playing a white-blue counter weenie surprise deck that consistently cranked out turn 2 Serras thanks to a couple Mana Vault. The gold framed Tobias looked like a good fit to 1994 Jason.
I rotated those bareback Vaults and Tundras and slapped that bad boy Toby onto the concrete like I was about to end the game, and the ooohs and aahhhhs because a mythical Legends card hit the field was music to my ears.
“It’s like a fifth Serra Angel!” some would say.
And they’d be wrong. Oh so wrong. With “WAIT FOR ME!” as a rallying cry, Toby would sit on the battlefield like a lukewarm turd, maybe good for blocking, but otherwise just for show, a waste of a turn and a Vault now ticking away at my precious life.
I’d win. Usually. I’d picked up the art of “playing more than just one of any given card” and “trying to stick to a couple colors instead of three or four” and someone said something about a curve? Yeah, I’d read a Scrye or two.
But Tobias. Useless, golden Tobias.
So yeah, picking up a graded one is kinda a holy grail for me. And it’s only fitting that my first Legends and gold frame card is also my first graded card.
I’m a nerd. Shocking, I know.
So last year I made a game, A Novel Dungeon (https://serialprizes.itch.io/novel-dungeon), that is a fully diceless solo table-top RPG you can play with just a book, pencil, paper, and the rules.
It still uses randomization, but instead of dice it relies on the frequency of letters used in English.
There are a few different resources and frequencies floating around but I ran with numbers from a 2004 cryptography writing by Cornell Math Explorers Club.
So using the frequency of each letter, I assigned numbers to approximate the same odds you’d have rolling dice. In some cases this means fewer instances of a number in the table, but the letter frequency balances it out for the most part.
Does it hold up? Let’s see… I’ll take a blog on itch.io and use the d6 table to assign numbers to the letters in the first couple lines.
Not an exact 16.67% but you wouldn’t necessarily get that rolling a die either. And the more letters we include, the closer we get to an even distribution. It’s not an exact replica of rolling dice, but it’s close and still varies enough to be suitably random.
There are limits of course – with only 26 letters and E’s frequency alone being more than 12% you’d have to force a reroll to approximate a d10 and d20 may be a bridge too far, but you could utilize this system for most games that use d8 and under.
I’ve broken out the No Dice No Problem chart for d2-d10 into a bookmark for ease of use and to show how it’d work.
Now to keep playing with it a little more.
I found a game I made back in 1995. And as awful and embarrassingly bad as it is, it’s not so embarrassing that I’m not going to chronicle it forever on the Internets.
Being a colossal nerd I’ve been into colossally nerdy things, often well before being a nerd about said things was cool (See: comic books, role playing games, wearing glasses). Among those nerdy things I got into was gaming. And not video games, oh no, that’s too cool for Young Jason.
No, Young Jason was into tabletop gaming involving chits and hexmaps (Avalon Hill games), robot figures dueling a millennium into the future (Battletech), and, once the genre existed, trading card games like Magic: The Gathering (which pushed out my other nerdy pursuit at the time – baseball cards).
Of course, my nerdery didn’t end with playing these games. No, see, I was going to be the guy that invented the Next Great Thing in gaming. There are scraps of assorted ideas and games lying all over the place, but one I still happen to have in a dusty box on a shelf with a bunch of other games is my aborted attempt at creating my very own trading card game based on the comic book universe based on the heroic adventures of the incredibly originally named Jason Tenney and his amazing friend…s. Friends.
Read more at Blusterhouse.
Mario Kart Wii is coming April 27th and will feature wi-fi play for up to 12 players and rankings locally and internationally. I want. And I will rock.
