Pixelated Dreams.

        I dreamed that N and I were avatars in a MMO that seemed to be some sort of mix of science fiction and crime drama. We were in a car that sped up for no apparent reason and slid sideways into a large block of pixels, which I understood to be a department store. I zoomed out and saw that we were being targeted by a UFO. It was firing little yellow blurps of pixels at our car, each one accelerating it in the direction of the building.

        We jumped and rolled out of the car, N firing some sort of laser at the UFO and I summoned up something from the road below it with hundreds of slick purple tentacles. The UFO was held in place and N’s laser made short work of it. Neither of us was hurt, but the boxlike car was a total wreck. We had to walk to our destination, which was a flying building of sorts. We stepped into a column of light to be whisked up to the reception level.

        There was a part of my mind, while this low resolution madness was going on, that was monitoring the game mechanics in the background, determining how the game play and the character stats were interacting. I was trying to determine whether the outcome of the various encounters felt proper based on the mechanics. We re-ran the whole scenario in different modes, we survived in the Anime Mode, barely survived in the Heroic Science Mode and cleaned house in the Urban Fantasy Mode. We didn’t fare so well, died in the car wreck, in Gritty Realism mode and in Crime Drama mode. (Both of the last two modes looked pretty much the same except for the player stat restrictions.) All of the systems used the Spare Parts core, just with different limits on attributes and resources, and the character point meta abilities. (Lucky SOB and Cheat Death were two of the meta abilities in Crime Drama mode, for example.)

Ad astra per technica,

FF