It's very trendy for indie RPGs to talk about protagonists at the moment. I have a big problem especially with Acts of Evil where minor characters who only react to PC actions are supposed to emerge as 'protagonists'. This term directly contradicts the common definition:

A protagonist is the chief figure in a drama whose actions are the primary focus of a story (Wikipedia)

Of course in literature or film there are protagonists. The entire story is written around them - from start to finish.

I played in a couple of playtests over the weekend and thought that both lacked enough GM direction. No, scratch that, enough GM aggression. Antagonism. Antipathy. Enmity.

Here is my new theory about layout.

Fundamentally, people are capable of reading text, as long as it is printed in a clear font at a reasonable size.

But show this text to a layout artist and they say: "That has really bad layout. Give me money and I will lay this out for you."

So we do.

The layout artist moves the margins a bit, talks about widows and orphans, changes the font and gives it back.

However, people would happily have read it as it was.

Merry Christmas guys!

\m/ -_- \m/

OK, given that everyone seems to have two pence on this topic... are game systems that involve traits bollocks?

Now a few of our games on here use them, but they also seem to cause ire in other people who swear off them. Is it because they're badly implemented? Poorly explained? Unworkable? Facilitate a type of play that jibes with some players? Or are they msunderstood? Tarred falsely by ignorants? Actually rather good? Capable of driving play that other systems cannot?

Discuss!

God, I hate Creative Commons.

A while ago, I was searching for images to use in my online dice roller program. All I wanted was polyhedron images. But everything I found was Creative Commons.

What's more, it was under the particularly nasty Non-Commercial, Share-Alike licence. So, for the privilege of using these tiny images, I'd have to share my source code and not make any money from it.

Bollocks.