Posted ByPaul on April 26, 2002 at 15:50:00:
In Reply to: Re: The Fifth Element. There will always be confusion. posted byArbiter on April 26, 2002 at 13:42:41:
Thank you Arbiter. I shall start again.
OK, this is the story of the Fifth Element.
Jim, the original poster on this forum, found a few years ago a site called 'www.worldrps.com'. He explained it was really good, and told me about it, so I went. We have since played as per the rules of this site, as it made playing so much better. If you just played through 'luck', there was certainly no enjoyment to be had from the game.
I emailed someone on the board of directors with some of my own strategies I had used for repeated success against Jim, but not only were they ignored, I also never received a reply, so stopped caring about www.worldrps.com.
Then, as both Jim and I were bored, we decided to solve the problems of dynamite, as suggested on the site.
We worked long and hard, trying all sorts of different things that would be able to balance the game. What could beat paper and ascissors, but be destroyed by rock and dynamite, or whatever other combinations of victory/loss? Eventually, we worked it out. Homotoboggan. The Fifth Element. (Note: A homotoboggan is not an actual thing. It was a word created by Jim originally to make I-Spy games more intereswting and varied)
When my brother eventually got around to designing his own website, the glorious www.cakeinmilk.com, he asked me write some articles for it, which I did. I wrote a piece called Immature Games, about what I and my friends got up to when we were bored. This was received fantastically, spurring me on to write two sequels.
In Immature Games 2, I wrote about TFE, and hoping I'd be able to interest www.worldrps.com in this development, I emailed them, only to get a letter back telling me that they would try and close the site down for 'preaching such blasphemous treachery'. This alone was enough to encourage Jim to write on to this board, and in an insulting way.
This all seemed like a joke, especially with such comments as 'The legal Affairs Committee has also been in touch and as part of the injunction against the "Cake in Milk" website they were forced by law to post our preliminary complaint which can be viewed via the following link:
www.cakeinmilk.com'
When the person who posted that letter didn't, in fact, have to post it at all. So the idea was that no one took it seriously.
Also, add to the fact that Jim then went on to possibly insult various people in his next post before consulting myself, who had brought the whole thing to worldrps.com's attention, may have left a negative impact upon all the possibly unrelated people who thought we took this thing so seriously.
It was then that Jim brought me in to the debate, and only having half-heard all of the debate and not realising that Jim had infact insulted the very people we were trying tell about our variant. I of course stood up for our creation and Jim, and perhaps also joined in on the 'joke'. With Jim's 'expert' advice on what to put in the message because it 'would be funny', I posted the message from what is known as 'Paul Jim' because the & sign didn't work. The Prophets thing was entirely a joke, and the Gods were not supposed to be us, but Homotoboggan and Dynamite, the elements we had 'created'.
The smaller discussions were used as a series of analogies, which is where the 'dog' comment came from. Dave Childs suggested that he might prefer playing with a stick over a PlayStation2, if he had his dog with him, and I merely concluded that analogy. After all, he had insulted my friend.
I tried to be as civil as I could be, even though it seemed that the game we had spent so long perfecting was doomed to be 'blasphemous treachery' by the people who had inspired us and who would be the only other people on the net to find it interesting.
Rules for TFE can be found by going to www.cakeinmilk.com and clicking on the article link in the April 23rd entry.
Thank you for listening. I apologise for those that have been insulted previously on this thread, and hope there can be some kind of acceptance between RPS and its offshoot of TFE.
Paul Donovan.