Secret Antagonistic PCs

I'm against Role-Players making and running characters that are designed to have goals that conflict with the ordinary goals of the party. This includes "moles" and "possessed" characters. My main concern is that it's done too often; I'd be more surprised if some players had a character without a complicated issue that never really comes up in the game but prevents them from really helping.

Also:
It makes "Character information" and "Player information" much more difficult to segregate, in most situations, a player that was concerned about it could just ask for clarification: "Did you say that in character?", but a PC with a secret agenda can't ask that because it would be very suspicious. The information problem runs the other way too, the secret actions will require additional adjudication by the GM, which will almost inevitably be noticed by the other PCs, unless they are completely oblivious. (This is why I have never detected a hostile PC ever)

There are a lot of things that go unspoken in an RPG, a player doesn't say that he turns on light switches, or goes to bed, or whether he locks each door he closes, or whether he checks his watches, or does regular virus checks on his computer, etc. But each of these actions, and endless more, could reveal or betray a PC that's acting against the interests of the party. The GM is forced to RP the PCs on behalf of the antagonistic PC, who ends up essentially acting against brain-dead players, no GM can imagine all the nonsensical things a party of PCs will do, and he has an obvious incentive to not catch the secret PC in action: that would end the entire plot line, and could easily lead to the death of a PC, or even the entire campaign. Thus, the players feel cheated that their "implied" actions didn't actually happen. The GM can't ask what sort of precautions are being taken because, again, this creates obvious problems with information between player and character.

Note, I don't mind if a character develops in such a way that they must oppose the actions of the party, I'm against a character designed with that in mind.

Dominion: The First Two Turns

Dominion is a great game. The game plays like ascension, but has a more strategic element, since you don't get screwed by the changing cards available on the board. In Ascension, you basically make one decision: "Fight or Buy", and you try to focus on that build for the rest of the game. In Dominion, every turn requires quite a bit of thought, if you're trying to maximize your gains.

I've been thinking about the strategy of Dominion in terms of what to do in the first two turns.

First of all, the first two turns are interchangeable. If you buy card X in turn one and card Y turn two, your deck will be the exact same when you shuffle your 12 cards as if you bought card Y first and X second.

You want to start off with two cards that do something directly. No cards that simply help another card in the first two turns.

Village is a great card, but you're not going to get to use three actions in your third or fourth turn; you'll only have two action cards in your entire deck! Go with the Steward until you have some more action cards in your deck.

It's difficult to figure out the correct ratio between action cards that do things, and action cards that support playing more cards. A lot of it depends on how many cards give +2 actions.

If you can buy a gold or a Province, get it every time.

One last thing: Don't be afraid to buy silver in the first two turns. Your main goal in the game is to buy expensive things, and starting early works great.

EDIT:
I forgot the best part! This site has a random dominion starting generator. If you play Dominion, it makes for a lot of cool variety.

Banning Cards

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'll play some Magic: The Gathering every now and again. There's an interesting question in that game: how do you decide what cards to allow?

I would have three rules.

1. If a card dominates a format, where every deck is about the card, or has to be an aggressive counter to the card.
2. If a card is in every deck, regardless of what the deck is about.
3. The card makes games really boring, or makes you do a lot of work, disproportionate to its effect.

Rule number two is why I think Sol Ring should be banned in everything. Even a deck with a crazy amount of artifact hate would probably be better off running as many Sol Rings as are allowed. This is an obvious indicator that a card is too powerful.

The obvious counter argument: "If everyone has Sol Ring, it's all balanced. What's the harm?" The harm is that some people are going to draw Sol Ring, and get the huge benefits, and some won't. Every game will swing by a significant amount just by who's lucky enough to pull a Sol Ring in the early game.

List of Game Ideas

I've had a few ideas for games that I think would be cool, but I'd never fully develop. Here they are.

A RPG where the players build modestly powerful PCs, but then roll on a list of Famous/Epic items. They could get Excalibur, the Portal Gun, etc.

An Adventure game (Think King's Quest) where every problem can be solved by a crowbar, just like in real life! This could be a mod for an existing Adventure game, or a parody game built from the ground up.

Portal 2 got me thinking about how you could make a game where any role in a machine or organization can be held by any player. If you were the "commander", you'd want the system to work well, if you were in some other function, you may intentionally sabotaging that function for some reason or other. Ideally, people would only know who the commander was, the rest of the players would be anonymously fulfilling a function to further their own ends.

Obama's Hostages, Redux

I know I've already rephrased this two or three times already, but one more time.

Imagine Obama was a real Hostage Negotiator. He refuses to deal with the hostage takers, until the hostage takers harm one of the hostages, which makes Obama cave immediately. What do you think will happen in the next hostage crisis? The next hostage takers will know exactly what to do to make Obama give in, and just skip to harming the hostages for no reason.

Obama didn't just lose this crisis, he created a whole range of new artificial crises.

Negotiating With Terrorists

Game Theory gives us a simple lesson about negotiating with Terrorists: DON'T DO IT. Even if the Terrorist is demanding $2.50 and a coke in exchange for not annihilating Europe, you CANNOT give them anything. 

The incentive to negotiate is simple; you can forestall deaths or destruction for some smaller sacrifice. So why not negotiate, under any circumstances? Because of the next threat. If someone has to kill some hostages to get some concessions in negotiations, then those concessions have killed untold number of future hostages. You can save some people in the room, but you've encouraged future attacks for the rest of time.

This is why Obama's reasoning on the tax cuts is wrong. He directly invoked the hostage argument, then did the exact wrong thing. Obama said that you don't negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage may get hurt. This says that any time the Republicans want anything at all, they only need to tie the bill to some looming disaster. Instead of putting the hostages at risk this time, Obama has put two years of future bills under the same terrorist threat.

EDIT: Let me make this clear: by appeasing the Republicans,  Obama has ensured that Republicans will sabotage every necessary bill until the last moment. Once a bill's passage becomes an emergency measure, the Republicans will present a series of new demands. Obama will presumably surrender to whatever the Republicans want at that time. The Republicans will still pass the bill, so they will receive no political backlash.

Game Morality Systems

Lots of games try to model ethics, but I don't think any of them have really nailed it, mainly because ethics aren't formalized rules for most people.

The system I like the most is Mass Effect's Paragon/Renegade system, but it's not really a system of ethics so much as a scale of Friendliness/Politeness - Brusque/Selfish. It works really well with the game, since it still makes sense to follow the mission if you're really Renegade, where it wouldn't really work if you were Chaotic Evil. Games that let you be Evil, then still force you into the same story as someone that is Lawful Good, inevitably end up with characters politely ignoring the fact that you just killed someone just for the fun of it.

Everyone knows about the D&D system of Chaotic/Neutral/Lawful and Evil/Neutral/Good. I'll just mention that it's rather silly. It also has the dumbest philosophy of all time: Druidic True Neutral, whose practitioners will join whichever side is losing to help even the odds. Apparently the writers didn't realize that this philosophy will lead to the Druid only being able to rest when every single non-Neutral person is dead.

A much more obscure one is the system for In Nomine. It does a good job of summarizing "goodness" without being sectarian about it. It defines "good" as Selfless, and "evil" and Selfish. I think a lot of people would agree with that idea, at least in general terms. Of course, when people are being "Selfless" for a religion, they're generally not being selfless at all. Consider someone who gives a thousand dollars to a bank, only to withdraw it later with interest. Both the bank and the person get a benefit out of the arrangement, but no one's going to say our investor is being Selfless for giving the money to the bank, he only did it because he was expecting a larger return. In this same way, religious people aren't selfless, they're investors. When Mother Theresa went to the poor to teach them about Jesus,* she was simply investing time in this world with the expectation of greater returns in the next. When In Nomine says "Selfless", it only means selfless in this world.

*She didn't have the time to teach them about what food was like, you have to prioritize. Religion tells us that it's alright to let children die, so long as they've been converted to whichever sect you believe in.