Receipt Wars!

I've been thinking about you, Blog. Just because I'm not posting doesn't mean you're not in my mind!
I've also been going through old stuff, through my Google docs and my black book, looking at some of my old thoughts, and feeling like I need to come back to some of them. And one of my favorites was Receipt Wars!

I've always loved randomly generated things. I loved 1st edition D&D, at least the way that Dad ran it, because it always gave random characters that you had to almost decode to figure out what they were. I've played Rogue-like PC games where they just basically hand you a character and let you go see what you can do, and loved those as well. I've got lots of other thoughts for this along the way, including using names to generate minions for a war game.
So thinking about this, I was bored one day while working at the convenience store, and decided I'd try to amuse myself by coming up with a game. But I didn't have any dice to generate the random numbers with, and really didn't have much of anything else with me either. But, I did have a huge number of receipts, and lots of pennies if I wanted them. So, might as well use the resources that I have and see what I can get!
Randomly generated things from receipts seemed the next logical step. But what can you use from them to randomly generate things? Well, what things do each receipt have (since I wanted this to be usable outside just the convenience store I was in)? Each one has some record of the time that the purchase was made - some have two, one when it was started, one when it ended. Every one of them has a record of how much your purchases were. And how many items you purchased. Most receipts have numbers by each item to say what they are, but not all of them - fast food receipts, for instance. So that one's not usable. And, well, that's about it.
Out of all these, two of them are basically random, and one of them you can control - I'd rather they all be out of the player's control but I'll take what I can get. But they're all - except for the number of items - huge numbers, or irrationally arranged ones. So, what to do?
I don't know what to call the operation. I've called it weird things, like full sum, or digit total. But what I do is take all of the individual digits in the numbers in question and add them all together. Then keep doing that until you get a one-digit number, between 1 and 9. So, if you take a number, like $23.96. 9+6+3+2 = 20. Is that one digit? Nope, so do it again: 2+0 = 2. Is that one digit? Yes, so that's your answer. Another example: 21:36:45. 5+4+6+3+1+2 = 21. not one digit: 2+1 = 3. So the price number from this is 2, and the time number is 3.
But that doesn't make a character, or anything you can actually use. So what do we do? Assign logical titles to these numbers, in some way that you can use them to fight each other. Well, hm.
The stats that I ended up deciding on were Speed, Might, and Brain. But how to get those numbers?
Well, let's go over what each receipt has again: price, time, and number of items. Logically...
Price. Everyone's trying to keep how much money they spend down, and if you can spend less for the items that you're buying, people call that a smart purchase, or you're shopping smart. So the price number becomes Brain.
Time. You always want to get in and get out as fast as possible. Entire lanes in supermarkets are devoted to this cause. And you certainly don't want your shopping to take all day. So the faster it takes, the better. Time becomes Speed.
That leaves the number of items. Well, the more you have, the more bags you fill. The more bags you fill, the stronger you'd need to be to bring it all inside, or even out of the store! Number of items becomes Might.
But there's no stat for hardiness, for toughness, for constitution or wounds! How can you determine when your character-receipt thingie is taken out? And how do you take one out, anyway? That's where the pennies come in.
Each round, you choose one of your stats. Typically, the one that's the highest. Depending on which stat you pick, you're targeting another one of your opponent's stats, using a rock-paper-scissors type element wheel thing.
Attacking with Might: You batter your opponent senseless, reducing your target's Brain.
Attacking with Brain: You present a mystery, puzzle, or logical fallacy for your opponent to pause and ponder about, lowering your target's Speed.
Attacking with Speed: You run around really quickly, tiring out your opponent as they try to catch up, lowing your target's Might.
Once you've determined what stat you're using, and thus which one you're targeting, your opponent does the same. You know, in any order, it doesn't matter. Then, you both take six pennies and toss them on the table. Be gentle though, you know, because you don't want them to go everywhere, and you have to be able to tell yours and your opponent's apart, so be gentle, but make sure that they're random as possible. Then, count up the number of heads you get, and add that to your stat. The person who gets the highest number wins the round and gets to damage their target. But remember what number you did get, even if you lost, because if you're being targeted, you get to subtract your number from the winner's number, and that's how much your targeted stat is reduced by. If any one of your stats is reduced to zero or below, then you lose! The battle continues until there is only one receipt standing, because... There can be only one!

Basic rules:
Add all digits of the numbers until you get a number between 1-9.
Most recent timestamp = Speed
Number of items = Might
Final Price = Brain
Brain targets Speed
Speed targets Might
Might targets Brain
6 coins, count heads and add your chosen stat. Reduce loser's stat by difference of loser's and winner's totals.
First to get any to 0 loses.

Idle Thoughts

Been thinking about posting for a while now but I haven't gotten around to doing it. Why? Been busy! Ditching one job, gaining two more, along with dishes and holidays and children and a million other excuses not to blog.

I'm not even sure where this article came from - K was looking at something, and it linked to something else, which linked to something else - but it made me think. It's a neat little article, comparing looking at web pages ultimately to eating - not just web pages, but media in general - and creating something for other people to read to exercising. Which made me think, aw heck, why aren't I blogging? The idea of getting these ideas out there in a place where they might help other people is awesome, becoming a part of the new social media is fantastic. But I never know what to talk about.

This article is what I was reading that pointed to that one, so I think I'll start there. The amount of technology, no the level of technology, that we have now is incredible. The ability to read another person's social cues with a simple camera. Measuring heart rate without any physical contact. This is stuff I know I heard about when they were talking about 'project Natal' before it was Kinect and I thought it was fascinating then, but it seemed a little out of it. Doing all that stuff with an xbox? 'Come on, it's not even as powerful as your average computer,' I thought to myself. But apparently it is possible.

Along the same lines, augmented reality has fascinated me for a long time, too. I remember seeing a movie about a guy holding a little tablet and watching as zombies attack the town he drew on the table, helping to defend it by placing skittles on the board in different colors to produce different effects. Well, I found it again but the program isn't released yet, they say that there aren't any handhelds powerful enough to run it yet. But a quick search found a whole bunch of neat looking augmented reality apps for a cool phone like mine. I'm going to have to check some of them out.

All of this wraps around in my head to the comic I discovered the other day, A Girl and Her Fed. While it does take a while to get into that part, it covers quite a bit of augmented reality, and what a savvy group can do with it, which to me has been simply fascinating. The ghosts don't hurt much either. (Seriously, read the comic. It may seem slow going for a little while but it really picks up and it's kinda attached itself to my head, and to K's too. Really makes you look at Ben Franklin in a different light.)