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Champs Camp 2011, "I Need a Hero" will be held July 18-21 from 5:00 -8:30 each evening at Immanuel Baptist Church. It will be fore children ages 5 to sixth grade.
The camp is intended to team sports skills with the Bible Truths in a winning combination to enable elementary kids to be winners in life. Sports that will be utilized in this camp will be track, basketball, football, baseball, softball, soccer and cheerleading. Each child will choose two sports for the week.
Coaches from the Warren School District have volunteered their time to assist with this camp.
Schedule:5:00 - 5:30 -Prayer Time and Coaches Rally5:30 - 5:45 -Registration5:45 - 6:00 -Pre-game Warm-Up! (Music/Stretching)6:00 - 6:45 -Sport Track I6:45 - 7:00 -Half-Time Huddle (Introduce Bible Truth)7:00 - 7:45 -Sports Track II7:45 - 8:30 - Post-game Cool-Down! (Music/Devotion)
Spiritual Principles:
Day 1 - The Heart of a Hero!Day 2 - The Character of a Hero! Day 3 - The Reluctant Hero!Day 4 - The Hero Who Failed!
You can be a HERO!Sign-Up Today!
Immanuel Baptist ChurchpresentsCHAMPS SPORTS CAMP- 2011"I Need a HERO!"July 18-21 / 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.at the Lumberjack Indoor Multi-purpose FacilityAges: 5 years old to completed 6th grade(Choose from six sports: Football, Basketball, Baseball, Softball, Soccer and Cheerleading!)Sign-Up Today!Call Immanuel Baptist Church to get your registration form!870-226-5454
Immanuel Baptist ChurchpresentsCHAMPS SPORTS CAMP- 2011"I Need a HERO!"July 18-21 / 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.at the Lumberjack Indoor Multi-purpose FacilityAges: 5 years old to completed 6th grade(Choose from six sports: Football, Basketball, Baseball, Softball, Soccer and Cheerleading!)Sign-Up Today!Call Immanuel Baptist Church to get your registration form!870-226-5454
Source: paganism-new-age.blogspot.com
BY CHARLES MCEACHERN
With so many different RPGs on the market, it's common practice to compare them to one another. The thing is, comparing RPGs is tricky -- and, as a result, is often done poorly. It's easy to get caught up comparing individual features between two systems, when what you really want is something more holistic. The crucial thing you really need to know about an RPG is, of course, what sort of game you can play with it!
Some groups will have a pretty similar experience no matter what system they pick up. Some systems will feel different to different groups. Be that as it may, we can come up with some vocabulary that -- "in general terms" -- will tell us about the sort of play experience a certain game is designed to create. In the end, this should let us more effectively explore different play styles, as well as choose games appropriately once we've figured out which styles work for us.
The key ideas we'll be using are "crunch"/"smoothness" and "immersion"/"detachment". Let's quickly define these terms.
Crunchy/Smooth
Crunchy games use numbers to model the in-game world. They have a robust rules structure underlying play which allows a great variety of penalties, bonuses, spells, abilities, combat maneuvers, you name it. Unsurprisingly, they tend to have thick rulebooks to explain all of the nuance, and lots of boxes on the character sheets in order to show it off.
Crunchy games tend to feature characters defined on multiple levels. In Pathfinder, for example, a character's ability to find traps is based on their Wisdom modifier and their number of Perception ranks, but is also affected by whether or not the character is a rogue, and their choice of feats and traits. In GURPS, a character's accuracy with a sword depends on their Dexterity and their skill level in Broadsword, plus they may have fancy advantages like Weapon Master (which grants bonuses when using one specific weapon, such as Aragorn's Anduril). As a result, creating and advancing characters takes a lot of time. On the plus side, this means that players have a great deal of freedom in crafting their characters. Some of them will find this to be satisfying, and may even build characters that will never see play just for the sake of exploring synergies. The downside, of course, is that GMs sometimes become irritated when their five-hour creations are taken down in the first five minutes of combat.
Just as players have detailed control over their characters, GMs have detailed control over the environment. Difficulties for rolls can be fine-tuned to exactly where the GM wants them to be. Baddies can have exciting trademark moves -- PCs can be petrified by a gorgon or drained by a vampire. Those options exist within the rules, so there's no haggling or worrying about how best to do it.
The strength of crunchy games is that there are rules to handle whatever you want to do. The weakness is that you have to keep track of the rules. With that in mind, let's look at smooth games.
If crunchy games are high-tech office buildings with HDMI cables built into the walls and independent thermostats in every room, smooth games are log cabins. You lose all of the features, but what you gain is simplicity.
Smooth games hand-wave away basically all of the numbers. The rules have a few general structures, but don't explicitly handle weird corner cases. Character sheets are just a sketch of the character -- they can guide your play, but they certainly don't simulate anything in detail. Difficulties for rolls are coarsely assigned, if they exist at all.
Lasers & Feelings character sheet
At the intensely smooth level, you have games like Risus and Lasers & Feelings, where you can "easily" fit the character sheet on a quarter of a sheet of paper. Fate and World of Darkness fall at a more mainstream level, and are still pretty smooth. They have thick rulebooks, but they're mostly examples -- you can honestly fit the rules in a dozen pages or so, as they illustrate on Free RPG Day.
Immersive/Detatched
At the immersive end of the scale, play tends to focus on immersing the player in their character's experiences, often through detailed question-and-answer about the characters' surroundings. The line between player and character can even become blurred, as characters benefit a great deal from player skill -- actions are often resolved using a player's problem-solving skills or social savvy, rather than with dice and ability scores.
The process of searching a dungeon corridor for traps is a common and illustrative example of immersive play. A player may ask detailed descriptions about the walls, floor, and ceiling of the hallway, wary of scorch marks or blowdart-sized holes. They may pour water on the floor to look for deep cracks or a gradual incline. They may even carry ten-foot poles, used to check the floor for trap-triggering pressure plates.
The upsides of immersive play are fairly evident -- players feel close to in-game events, and player skill is rewarded. There are downsides as well, of course. The pace of play is slowed, significantly, compared to more detached games -- detailed discussion takes time! In addition, immersive games typically use dice for physical tests (swimming, climbing, kicking down doors) but not for social and mental tests (such as negotiations with NPCs or perception checks). Some folks object to this dichotomy, since physical and mental/social skills tend to be treated symmetrically in the rules as written.
Immersive play is traditionally associated with the old-school camp -- gamers who play old editions of D&D or retroclones inspired by them. In fact, this style of play is explicitly endorsed in the often-shared Quick Primer for Old School Gaming.
As far as I can tell, old-school D&D is conducive to immersive play because players interact minimally with dice. This is not to say that the original D&D was a smooth game -- a quick look at the to-hit tables and arbitrary-feeling level restrictions will show you that it's not -- but it's never imperative that the "players" be the ones to deal with the mechanics. Taking this idea to its logical extreme (the most immersive game possible) would probably mean handing all of the character sheets and dice to the GM, and having them handle "everything" behind the curtain. Players would be strictly role players, never interacting with the mechanical nitty-gritty. They wouldn't even need to know the rules of the game! There are quite a few games that could (in principle) be played this way, including BRP, World of Darkness, and even GURPS.
Detached play -- that is, play where the players are "zoomed out" from their characters -- is the opposite.
In detached play, immersion is deprioritized, allowing players to engage directly with the mechanics, such as through tactical combat with strict movement and action restrictions, or abilities which may optionally be applied to a character's rolls (think the attribute pools in Numenera or Power Attack in Pathfinder).
Detached games can also have actions available to the players (whereas in an archetypal immersive game you act exclusively asyour character).Games like Fate, Savage Worlds, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, and Edge of the Empire give players poker chips which they may spend as a resource of narrative control. These briefly blur the line between player and GM, allowing a player to add a new story detail or skew the odds of a roll.
Fate Core character sheet
Unsurprisingly The player/character divide is more pronounced in detached play than in immersive play, and that greater divide is mediated by dice. Rather than a player's social savvy, the success of a negotiation will depend on the number of skill ranks a player has invested in Diplomacy, or whether or not they consider this conversation important enough to spend a poker chip. Rather than a detailed back-and-forth about flagstones, a player will locate a trap based on their Burglary skill.
Playing in the detached style keeps the game moving faster, which in turn can emphasize the broader plot rather than becoming immersed in the scene at hand. A detached perspective also invites players to ask a question you're unlikely to see in an immersive game: "would it be good for the story if my character failed here?"
Bringing it Together
Now that we have these concepts fleshed out in the abstract, how do we apply them?
Well, I have some homework for you. Think of your favorite game. Where does it sit on the immersed/detached scale? Where does it sit on the crunchy/smooth scale? Now pick a game that falls somewhere completely different -- you can change one variable or both. Get your group together, and give it an honest try. Report back here with your experiences.
Here are some examples to get you started:
CRUNCHY AND DETACHED: Pathfinder. Loads of options for races, classes, spells, and abilities, including many that require direct player attention to the mechanics (such as Power Attack, a very common feat, as mentioned above).
CRUNCHY: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Like 3rd Edition/Pathfinder, this game still has plenty of mechanical heft behind its character creation. However, there's much less emphasis (at least judging from the basic set) on the sorts of feats and special abilities that break immersion.
CRUNCHY AND IMMERSIVE: GURPS. There's a lot of crunch here, to be sure, but there's no reason that the GM can't handle it all behind the curtain. Direct player involvement in the mechanics is rare.
DETACHED: Numenera. The game is smoother than you would expect from the size of the rulebook. The core action resolution mechanic demands that players engage in resource management.
NEUTRAL: Swords & Wizardry. This is one of the most well-respected retroclones. It's about as smooth as you can get, and about as immersive as you can get, while still keeping the Vancian magic system, which requires tracking a bunch of numbers level-by-level and doing resource management during play. Another option for this spot is Savage Worlds, a sort of GURPS-light with a few poker chips thrown in.
IMMERSIVE: Basic Role Playing. It's not smooth, but it's far less crunchy than the heavy hitters like Pathfinder or GURPS. If you wanted to literally have the GM handle all of the rolls behind their curtain, this would be a pretty easy system to do it in.
SMOOTH AND DETACHED: Fate. The heavy use of aspects allows Fate to be a robust universal system without much mechanical structure, but the poker chip economy is a crucial part of making this work, so play is unambiguously detached.
SMOOTH: Risus. This game is incredibly smooth, but I honestly have trouble assessing where it falls on the immersive/detached scale because it's so "goofy". I think you could really go either way with it.
SMOOTH AND IMMERSIVE: This one is the trickiest. There are loads of indie games, retroclones, and homebrews that try to hit the sweet spot here, but I have yet to be satisfied with any of them (which is why I'm building my own homebrew to put here). For now, check out Lasers & Feelings/Swords & Scrolls.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Charles is a Minneapolis-based physicist who likes to understand, redesign, and simplify things. He enjoys answering interesting questions, whether or not anyone else cares enough to ask them: Does this game still work without stunts? What happens if I grill these? Can I fix this with a hacksaw? From time to time, these projects end up on his blog, Cooking with Charles.
Jews in sports always is a soft spot for me.. that's another thing great about Israel - most of the athletes in local sports are Jews in sports (though the truth is I only follow Israeli sports very peripherally)...
ESPN has an article about an Orthodox Jew playing basketball for Northwestern. Aaron Liberman is a frshman, though he has yet to play due to suffering from shin splints. Right now his yarmulke, and his tzitzis that he plans to wear, is on the bench, due to his injury, but soon it will also be seen on the court.
I wonder how he will deal with the Shabbos and holiday issues that will surely crop up sooner or later. If I am not mistaken that is really what did in Tamir Goodman's bid for a successful Orthodox basketball college career. There is no word on how Northwestern is planning to accommodate Liberman on that issue, and it is most likely to do him in, one way or the other, as well. That's just the way it is, though I wish him success. In the meantime it will be fun watching him play ball.
From ESPN:
Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, begins at sundown Saturday. But there's already cause for celebration among Jewish basketball fans thanks to Aaron Liberman, a freshman walk-on at Northwestern who also happens to be an Orthodox Jew. He hasn't yet appeared in a game this season because of a nasty case of shin splints, but he's easy to spot on the bench: He's the one wearing a yarmulke.
When Liberman is eventually given medical clearance to make his Northwestern debut, which he expects will be "pretty soon," he plans to wear his yarmulke on the court. (Northwestern is making two versions for him -- purple and white for home games, and purple and black for the road.) That will make him only the second yarmulke-clad player in Division I basketball history. The first such player was Tamir Goodman, the much-hyped "Jewish Jordan," who played for Towson in 2000 and 2001. But disagreements with a new coach derailed Goodman's college basketball career early in his sophomore year, leaving Division I hard courts yarmulke-free until Liberman's arrival this season.
And get this: Liberman, who's 6-foot-10 and was fifth in the nation in blocked shots for Valley Torah High School in Los Angeles in 2011, also plans to wear tzitzit -- the specially knotted fringes or tassels worn by observant Jews -- on the court. The tzitzit will be underneath his base-layer undershirt, and the fringes will be tucked into his shorts. Goodman didn't wear tzitzit while at Towson, so Liberman almost certainly will be Division I's first tzitzit-clad player. Mazel tov!
Northwestern University
Northwestern center Aaron Liberman plans to be the second player ever to wear a yarmulke in a Division I game -- and the first to wear tzitzit, the knotted fringes or tassels worn by observant Jews.
Liberman -- a soft-spoken, very likable kid, at least during a phone interview -- is aware of his rarefied status in the narrow region where athletics and Jewish religious apparel intersect, but he shrugs it off as no big deal. "Everyone here has been great toward me, and nobody's said anything about the yarmulke," he says. "Everyone's cool with it. They just see me as one of the guys."
Although yarmulkes are seldom seen in big-time college hoops, they can routinely be found down in Division III. That's because of Yeshiva University, many of whose players cover their heads (as does their coach, Dr. Jonathan Halpert).
Elliot Steinmetz wore a yarmulke while playing for Yeshiva from 1999 through 2002. Today he runs the website Jewish Hoops America and coaches basketball for North Shore Hebrew Academy High School on Long Island. North Shore is part of the Yeshiva League (not to be confused with Yeshiva University), a group of about two dozen Jewish schools in the New York-New Jersey area, whose games feature lots and lots of yarmulkes.
"Not all the kids in our league are necessarily Orthodox, but they're required to wear yarmulkes to school, so most of the schools require the players to wear them on the court as well," Steinmetz explains. "A lot of schools have the yarmulkes made in school colors, or with a school logo or a little basketball icon. It's a team accessory, like a headband or whatever."
Some schools take it even further, like Beren Academy in Houston, which has the players' names and uniform numbers printed onto their yarmulkes. (As you may recall, Beren is the school that successfully lobbied to have a state tournament semifinal game postponed earlier this year because it had originally been scheduled for a Friday night, which is the Jewish Sabbath.)
Steinmetz says a 12th-grader currently playing for Beren, Zach Yoshor, is good enough to be getting looks from Ivy League schools and some other lower-level Division I programs. But that doesn't necessarily mean there'll be another Division I yarmulke on the court next year. "He wears a yarmulke now because he's playing for a Jewish school," Steinmetz says. "But I don't think he will in college."
Wondering about the practicalities of wearing a yarmulke on the court? It's pretty straightforward: You keep it pinned on with a hair clip or bobby pin, and you wash it like any other accessory. Or at least that's the usual routine -- but not for Steinmetz when he played.
"We won our league championship when I was in 11th grade, and I kept wearing the same yarmulke, even when it got kind of sweaty and gross," he recalls. "It was a superstitious thing, like a baseball player who wears the same cap all season long. Believe it or not, I still have it, this cruddy, disgusting yarmulke, along with the trophy and my jersey and some other mementos from that season."
Yarmulke sightings in other sports are rare but not unheard of. One example came on May 9, 2010, when Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen removed his cap while walking around in the dugout, revealing a Mets yarmulke. That led to some surreal banter in the Mets' broadcast booth between play-by-play man Gary Cohen (who is Jewish) and color commentator Keith Hernandez (who most assuredly is not):
Hernandez: Was that a Met yarmulke right there?
Cohen: That's exactly what that looked like.
Hernandez: How about that.
Cohen: It's a bit of a surprise.
Hernandez: Well, it's Sunday. [Painfully awkward pause follows.]
Cohen: Yeah?
Hernandez: Did you, did you go to temple today?
Cohen: Not on Sunday, Keith. Saturday.
Hernandez: Oh! Excuse me, I've got it wrong, don't I. I've gotta get my facts straight.
Cohen [laughing]: We'll have the course in comparative religion right after the game.
Hernandez: No no no, we don't have to. I had my catechism when I was young, please.
ESPN New York reporter Adam Rubin filled in the particulars on Warthen's headwear the following day (it's toward the bottom of this post):
"Yes, that was Dan Warthen spotted wearing a yarmulke in the dugout when he removed his Mets cap during Sunday's game. The pitching coach explained that [first baseman] Ike Davis had received Mets yarmulkes from a rabbi, and gave one to Warthen. Warthen, who is Jewish, forgot he had it on when he placed his cap on and went out for the game, he indicated."
The thing is, baseball players spend most of their time wearing caps, and football and hockey players wear helmets. So even if a player in these sports chose to wear a yarmulke, we'd rarely get a peek at it. (And besides, Steinmetz says, "Jews don't play football -- our moms don't let us.")
That brings us back to basketball. Although the sport was once dominated by Jews, and a Jew scored the first basket in NBA history, there's never been a yarmulke-clad player in the NBA. Would Liberman, the freshman at Northwestern, like to be the first?
"If I can get there, why not?" he says. "But I'm just taking it one step at a time for now."
Fair enough. For his part, Steinmetz says observant Jewish players have a tough mountain to climb. "You have to remember, when these Orthodox kids are in high school, like the ones I coach, they love basketball and some of them have real ability, but it's not the focus of their lives," he says. "They're mostly focused on their SATs and getting into a good college."
In other words, they're nice Jewish boys -- probably too nice to make it to the NBA. Oy, such a pity.
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