Trip's Life (Recent episodes)
16 October 2017 - Monday
[ . . . ]
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15 October 2017 - Sunday
After two nights of staying up late and sleeping in a strange place, I
was not very energetic about getting up for a 9:00 game, but... gaming!
Also it was one of the two games I particularly wanted to play, Dungeon
World.
The original GM for this timeslot had to bail, I think for work doom, or
maybe because HALF THE FUCKING STATE IS BURNING DOWN, but the guy who played
the Queen in Friday's Monsterhearts
game (who is apparently a friend of Carl's) had volunteered to fill in despite
not having any of the original notes. Whatever, no one was that attached to the
scenario described on the schedule anyway!
We ended up with a smelly heap of pelts that claimed to be a human
barbarian and was all about killing things, a human thief who was all about
robbery, a dwarven cleric who was all about fighting (killing was okay, but the
conflict was the point), an elven fighter all about glory and honorable combat with
his monster-tooth weapon (played by the guy who played the Infernal in
Monsterhearts), and my human Blasted Wasteland druid, who was raised by
giant isopods.
In a four-hour session, we had enough time to make characters, build a
map from index cards, interact with the town a little bit, fight a couple
of skirmishes with frogpeople and then have a brief party, travel through a
trapped passageway, and have a fight with the evil wizard and his henchman.
With the usual amount of intraparty discord, but not much more.
Now that I've seen someone unconnected to me run DW, running well is
probably still beyond me, but perhaps I can run a session more smoothly. The
lessons I have learned here (which are also applicable to other
PbtA
games, most likely):
- When the GM asks someone a question, only that player answers..
- When the GM asks someone a question, they answer that question, not a
different question (and not with pages of detail, either).
- Use index cards to make the map (which is just the map form of the previous
two points).
- I need to run with the stock playbooks more (maybe a lot more) before I try
to get fancy with 3rd-party playbooks from the Internets.
- When everyone is piled together into one huge fight, it's okay to just go
around the table.
- I need to plan way less. A two-hour session only needs a handful of locations.
- It is okay for the figher/barbarian to just chop a major opponent in half.
Then, the final gaming slot of the con! I was not scheduled for this one
either, but Gaming on Demand is there for me. I didn't get a good pick this
time, though, and ended up playing Fiasco. The player of the
14/10 doggo from Golden
Sky Stories yesterday and the Witch from Monsterhearts
on Friday were there, but it still turned out only okay. Naturally, I blame
myself for not giving my character a strong enough motivation in the first
scene. The person she didn't like did get abandoned to the (surviving)
drug-maddened penguins as McMurdo Base was evacuated, though.
End of the con! Well, of the programming. I went to
Havana with Carl and Liralen
and some of their friends and ate Cuban tapas and seafood paella and listened
to them talk about gaming, then back to the hotel to listen to them talk about
gaming with different people. I think one of them was
the creator of Legend
of the Elements (he was cute!), and another told us about feminist
games including
Bluebeard’s Bride.
Eventually, people slept.
Make a comment!
14 October 2017 - Saturday
Unlike the GMs yesterday, the lady who ran Golden
Sky Stories was not well-prepared, and did not seem to really know the
system even before she added bits to it. But, we managed to have fun
anyway, because GSS is a game of adorable animal spirits. Our Cat was a
very good cat, who properly spent much time sleeping (especially in front
of the TV), our Tanuki was an adorable anime flibbertigibbet, and our Dog
was 14/10. I played a Birb, who was not as great, but we managed to help
Ikuko get a place on the middle school baseball team despite the Koshien
factor. Hurray!
I would like to play GSS with a GM who knows the rules sometime. Maybe
next year?
Also, if this is the bar for GMing, maybe I should try running something
next year. (Yes, I know that's a terrible idea.)
That game let out at 16:00, so I wandered around the dealers' room (took
about three minutes, because I browse slowly), looked in on the Emotional
Safety panel, and then finally went to
Le Cheval with Liralen and Carl. Clay
pot rice FTW!
I hadn't been smart enough to get into a scheduled game of Masks, but
the "Gaming on Demand" system offered a Masks game so I went for it, and my
card came up early enough that I was victorious!
Only 2/5 of the players had played before, and one of them waffled, so it
took us a while to make characters and we only had time for a very short
adventure, but it was good. Maybe not for my Delinquent, whose illusion powers
didn't work that well on the primitive Nazi robot, but she was able to mess up
Iron Flag's sidekick pretty well. It all ended in tears, though, when our Doomed
divinated what Iron Flag was going for and that it would help his great enemy,
so he rushed ahead to destroy it even though it was an important symbol of
interspecies amity from our Outsider's people, and then crushed Iron Flag's CPU
casing like a bug even though it caused our Newborn to learn the lesson that
humans are just fine with killing robots. Our Outsider came up with a plan to
thwart the mastermind, so if there had been a second session, it would have
been great.
For a PbtA
game, Masks has a lot of moves, but I think I could probably handle it.
BigBadCon by marithlizard (Fri Oct 20 11:02:22 2017)
Yes! You should totally run something next time! You would know the rules and be prepared with quirky NPCs and it would be fine!
Re: BigBadCon by Trip (Fri Oct 20 13:49:24 2017)
It would be terrible and everyone would hate me and post mean things on their blogs after the con!
Re: BigBadCon by marithlizard (Fri Oct 20 14:33:53 2017)
Would not! Also, I bet Liralen and/or Carl would be willing to be in your game, a known friendly player or two can help a lot.
Re: BigBadCon by Trip (Sat Oct 21 14:16:20 2017)
It doesn't work that way, it's whoever signs up on the website first. Carl is never in anyone's game, anyway.
Make a comment!
13 October 2017 - Friday
I had to ride a bus to another bus to BART to another BART to get to the
Walnut Creek Marriot, but I did arrive at
Big Bad Con in good time and with all
my tentacles intact!
The first part of my 10-hour gaming day was Carl's session of Blades in the Dark
(daring scoundrels in a haunted electropunk city where it's always night).
Besides my Whisper, we had a renegade Iruvian noble Slide, a demon-blooded
Cutter who was just there for the murdering, and a lugubrious Hound.
Perhaps because I have known the GM for 30 years, I was able to be
assertive and push for our crew to be a cult (the worshipers of the
Daughter of the Forgotten Sun) and our score to be retrieving the ghost of
the recently-shanked top gang leader of the district, whose body had fallen
into a canal so his ghost couldn't be rendered down for sweet, sweet
electricity. Despite none of us being able to roll for beans during the
information gathering phase, so that we had to rescue the Slide and the
Hound by running over a bunch of people with our goat cart, we managed to
fish up the ghost and even start winning its trust with some downtime
project clocks.
(Apparently the developers of both Blades and Apocalypse World
agree that Blades is PbtA,
so I have no standing to object, but the use of actions instead of moves
seems to me to put it out of the category. Whatever!)
Then, off to
Monsterhearts
2 ("the messy lives of teenage monsters")! We had the Witch, the Infernal, the Vampire, the Queen (Harmony, with
her minions Carol, Cadence, and Harper, and her outcast ex-minion Melody),
and my poor doomed Mortal in a rich town in Ohio(?) in 1989, where three of
their classmates have recently committed suicide. The GM was well-prepared
with many pictures and picture stands, color-coded sticky tabs for
strings (with matching scrunchies), and the seating chart with dead people
marked in red and missing people in blue. There wasn't a lot of plot, but there
was a mystery that was enough to set the PCs in motion, and from there we
were entirely capable of working out our own damnation. The Mortal's "true
love" was the Vampire, who was well-played as a fairly terrible, yet
alluring, person (the player made great vampire faces, she was awesome), and
by the end she had to throw herself on him to keep from blood-frenzying all
over everyone. This made him become his Darkest Self, so he carried her off
to chain her to
his bedpost for a while, until he snapped out of it and (in the epilogue)
turned her into a vampire to make it up to her. The Infernal sacrificed the
guy he was chasing to the demonic entity that lived in his parents' bedroom,
and made an alliance with the Queen to get a steady supply of unpopular
students. The Witch was involved with the witch-vampire conflict that was
sacrificing people and using magic to make it look like suicides, but came
out of it pretty okay when the witches won.
All the other players were really good, the Vampire and the Infernal particularly
so. The GM was also awesome. I feel that I let the side down! I should have
been more aggressive in pursuing the Vampire, I think, and also in freaking
out about the weird stuff that happened. Maybe next time.
Ten hours of gaming was not too much, but it's probably good that I
didn't stay up even later, given how hard it is to sleep in different
places.
Make a comment!
12 October 2017 - Thursday
Instead of packing for Big Bad
Con, I watched Deadpool. That is a
very silly and morally unedifying movie. Also it has Teenage Negasonic
Warhead. And Morena Baccarin!
Make a comment!
11 October 2017 - Wednesday
In this week's episode of 13th Age and Thai food, Brooks and Kelsey wrote up some
additional elven agents (a jotun-descended high elf commander and a wood
elf monk) investigating the lava-flooded ruins of Axis and we all ended up
in a pocket dimension that the Elf Queen had saved from the end of a
previous age. At the cliffhanger, the ghosts of dead elves interred in the
tree village all rose up to smite the interlopers.
Make a comment!
10 October 2017 - Tuesday
It is the annual Liralendinner at Chef Chu,
and public transit is not failing me!
Apparently Liralen has spent the past year playing Team Fortress 2
competitively, because she can do anything.
Christy has't made it in several years, so I did know that her hair is
almost entirely silver now! But I didn't get to talk to her, because
restaurants are loud and she was way over there.
But it was not as important to meet up with Liralen, because this year I am
definitely going to Big Bad Con!
Make a comment!
9 October 2017 - Monday
Today is
Columbus Indigenous Peoples Day (why has LA fixed this, but
not California overall?) so no work for Arcadia! Instead shopping and Avalon
and a flashback episode of Penny Dreadful that gives some hints
about how Vanessa is inevitably going to Make Them All Pay.
Make a comment!
8 October 2017 - Sunday
No
PAD&D5,
only Zuul.
I liked the first two volumes of Gotham Academy quite a lot,
but the third one was an anthology kind of thing, with a whole bunch of
different writers and artists, who were not quite as good.
I have pretty much decided to rewrite last year's
NaNoWriMo for this year, and
GA makes me want to make the school my main character goes to a
lot creepier and less welcoming. (Really, she needs to suffer a lot more, but
I'm not sure how to do it without making her parents unsympathetic.)
Make a comment!
7 October 2017 - Saturday
Like me, Marith didn't get quite all of her stuff out with the
movers, but she didn't manually move the rest before the cleaners came
to do the final cleaning, and they trashed some stuff that she really
liked. They also failed to clean some bits. There was a great wailing
and gnashing of teeth.
Eventually we made it to anime, though!
- Durarara!!x2 3.9: Still impelling everyone toward a
massive explosion of doom.
- Steven Universe 4.7-11: Wow, they successfully
humanized Onion! And then returned to the plot with augh!
I finally got around to reading
Unsong (Scott Alexander)
after Earl recommended it a week or two ago, and it is epically
Kabbalicious! With telepathic Biblical whale puns! Also, nothing is ever
a coincidence.
Defiance (Joel Shepherd), the fourth book in the "Spiral Wars"
series, continues to have the virtues and flaws of the previous books. One
group of aliens is shown to have a slightly more diverse culture than we had
previously seen. Also, the main character is becoming slightly less sympathetic
(or at least disturbingly cavalier about fusion weapons in proximity to
civilian populations), and Styx and her people are becoming more so. I wonder
if the long character arc is for them to switch completely? If so, it's going
to take a while, since the ratio of plot twists to action scenes is not very
high. Does the author think he's going to run out of ideas?
Make a comment!
6 October 2017 - Friday
While doing laundry, I watched Pacific Rim. Of course it
made the cube-square law cry, and the interface design was highly
questionable, but other than that I liked it pretty well. Bonus points
for non-romantic relationships! I even liked the monster designs. (Can I
have a bioluminescent tongue like a flower with a smaller tongue (also
bioluminescent) that extends from it?)
Make a comment!
5 October 2017 - Thursday
My big accomplishment today was getting a flu shot.
Avalon is doing well, although every place she works is full of
disorder. I blame capitalism. (I don't blame Avalon, the disorder is
pretty clearly pre-existing.)
I'm rethinking switching from Bonds to Flags.
I like Flags mostly because, even though players can argue whether any
particular action triggers the flag, there's at least no question that the
set of actions that trigger a flag exists and there are lots of actions
that definitely trigger it. Bonds are better because they connect to two
characters, but they aren't as actionable. What does it mean to
"resolve" a bond? Who can say? Maybe I just need to change the condition
for marking XP for a Bond to be "have you done anything about this Bond
in this session?". Maybe that's what it's supposed to be, and I just
don't understand it. Blugh.
Make a comment!
4 October 2017 - Wednesday
Brooks and Kelsey both bailed, but the rest of us played
13th Age anyway.
Anwë led Vaatu and Ktangs into the land of shadow and carnivorous plants
as a shortcut to the ruins of Axis, where she wanted to investigate the
howling void that used to be the Elf Queen. Unfortunately, the land of shadow
was full of drow explorers (probably using the same Green Blood powers as
Anwë although she doesn't know that yet) and some sort of
Crusader-oriented freaks, so we just had a couple of fight scenes and will have
to do the other stuff some other week.
I did not like
Provenance (Ann Leckie) as much as the "Ancillary" books,
perhaps because Ingray is not as engaging a narrator as Breq, or perhaps
because I am shallow and demand ever-more novelty. It is still quite a
fine book, though, and has strange cultures and also alien drama. And
spiderbots.
Gear for the Sorcerer (or Wizard) is pretty easy:
| You start with |
| ☑ dungeon rations |
| ☑ heavy leather coat (1 armor) |
| ☑ backpack |
| Choose a weapon: |
| ☐ a smallsword (hand, precise) |
| ☐ a ray pistol (hand, reach, near, piercing 1, reload) |
| ☐ a flame pistol(hand, reach, spread, blazing, dangerous, reload) |
| Choose 3: |
| ☐ several stone tablets of the ancients, covered in glyphs |
| ☐ an astrolabe and sextant |
| ☐ a long breathing tube |
| ☐ mystic hallucinogens (ingested, 3 doses) |
| ☐ bundle of iron darts (3 ammo) |
| ☐ 30' rope, knotted for climbing, with a weight on the end |
| ☐ a fine silver hand mirror |
| ☐ a humane trap and bait appealing to a variety of animals up to fox-sized (3 uses) |
| ☐ alchemical paste that produces a thick column of smoke when burned (3 uses) |
| ☐ books on a variety of topics (5 uses) |
|
Make a comment!
3 October 2017 - Tuesday
I have Pacific Rim from Netflix, but watching a movie
requires me to get my act together to start watching by 20:00, which I
often don't. So instead I watched
Penny Dreadful 2.1, which introduces a new threat, with
additional nudity and doom. Also the continuation of some stuff from
last season that will surely not upset anyone when it inevitably comes
to light.
The Alignments for the stock Wizard are:
Good
Use magic to directly aid another.
Neutral
Discover something about a magical mystery.
Evil
Use magic to cause terror and fear.
Someone longer-winded and less fluent in English converted the stock
playbooks to use Drive/Background instead of Alignment/Race,
and that one has the Drives:
Power Overwhelming
Uniquely destroy or drastically change something significant with magic
single handedly.
Esoteric Bliss
Willfully experiment with and dabble in magic despite grave consequences
to broaden your magical knowledge.
That Which Is Lost
Discover a hidden magical artifact, long lost arcane knowledge, or some
spell that no one has used in hundreds of years.
Of the two sets, I like the alignment ones better. They're more concise, more
likely to come up, and not as tied to scholarship/research.
| Drive Choose one: |
☐ Curiosity
Discover something about a magical mystery. |
☐ Responsibility
Use your magic to better someone's life. |
☐ Supremacy
Use your magic to cow and enslave those without. |
|
The racial and background abilities from the same two sources are:
Elf
Magic is as natural as breath to you. Detect Magic is a cantrip for you.
Human
Choose one cleric spell. You can cast it as if it were a wizard spell.
Hedge Wizard
You are self-taught, spending much of your time in seclusion with trial
and error in your quest for magical power. When using Ritual, choose two
of the options. These options may never be used by the GM as a
requirement.
Archmage Academy
Your skills took many years under the greatest minds and oldest tomes
collected, though you have little experience of the outside world. When
using Discern Realities, you may also ask for free "What hidden magical
nature exists?"
War Wizard
You were trained by brutal commanders, and your knack is on
the battlefield in the thick of combat. When you Cast A Spell in the
thick of battle, on a 12+ you strike fear into the hearts of lesser
enemies nearby who will cower, break rank, or take a defensive position.
The flavor text doesn't apply, and since the new Wizard doesn't have the
Ritual or Cast a Spell moves, or the Detect Magic spell, or other
spell-using classes, most of the abilities don't work either.
The one possible exception is the Archmage Academy
ability, although it would need to be carefully worded to avoid revealing
all the secrets. Time to make up more terrible stuff, I guess.
| Background Choose one: |
☐ Prodigy
You learned your first spell as a baby, or even before. Choose one more of your
starting spells to be the first spell you remember learning. It gains the same benefit as your first spell. |
☐ Apprentice
You were mentored by another mage, so you have some exposure to magic
other than your own. When you discern realities, add
this question to the list: "What here is magical?" |
☐ Hidden
You have had to hide your magic from those who do not understand. Your
spells do not produce any spectacle, such that they may not even seem
like magic, and where the effects are blatantly supernatural, they are
not obviously connected to you. |
|
Make a comment!
2 October 2017 - Monday
I meant to be useful today, but instead watched the last episode of
Penny Dreadful S1. I'm not sure about that
characterization, but that plot thread was wrapped up while another two
(at least) were opened.
Now that I'm caught up on daily blogging, I should write more WFDW.
I still need to address drives and backgrounds, gear, and advanced moves
for the Sorcerer (Wizard? still can't decide), and flags for everyone. And
then move on to other classes. Maybe I'll take a nap instead.
Oh, but Cavaliers
of Mars apparently has "flintlasers", so I can totally have black
powder ray guns. And maybe flame guns, because attacks with the
dangerous tag are best.
Make a comment!
1 October 2017 - Sunday
HAPPY HAPPY JUS-DAY!!
After assorted delays, we celebrated by taking Jus to
Morgan Hill Pumpkin Park
and Yuki Sushi. The same number of
people left the corn maze as entered, which is about the most you can
reasonably hope for, right?
Then I went home to see Avalon instead of going to Monkeycat Mountain
for unhealthy cake.
Avalon has to log off three hours earlier than would otherwise be the
case, because time zones are still inexplicably a thing, so I had time
to watch Penny Dreadful 7. Wait, was it Chandler who did
the thing? Why would that even work? I haz a confuze.
Make a comment!
30 September 2017 - Saturday
Not only did I get up early to go grocery shopping, I made it to
Marith's to help her pack some stuff into boxes for moving! Also she
showed me her Minecraft world, which is very pretty.
Then we went over to Monkeycat Mountain and had really good lamb
tagine and watched some anime.
- Durarara!!x2 3.8: Things are obviously spiraling in to
some kind of doomfilled conclusion, not just to the season but the
whole series.
- Steven Universe 4.1-6: More plot! More Connie! More
Beach City! With bonus meditation! And Pearl being adorably awesome,
or awesomely adorable! This is such a good show.
But after Ayse finished buying all the episodes on Netflix so we
could finish watching six episodes despite Dave's bootleg files being
corrupt, it was time to sleep.
Make a comment!
29 September 2017 - Friday
No Avalon, only lethargy. And laundry.
In The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (FC Yee), two characters from
The Journey to the West meet again in the modern Bay Area. One
of them is a Chinese-American high school girl, and the other is trouble.
Demons ensue. They are not the characters you would necessarily expect,
which is awesome, and it is a pretty entertaining book.
Make a comment!
28 September 2017 - Thursday
Somehow, I escaped Tumblr in time to watch
Jupiter Ascending. It's clearly in the same genre as
Guardians of the Galaxy, although the spaceships with
unattached parts remind me a little of Tenchi Muyo. I cannot
say it was a good movie on most axes (like plot, or worldbuilding), but it
was pretty to look at. Or maybe I'm just thinking of the female alien
overlord (played by Tuppence Middleton) and her smile. Surely it would be okay to give her half
of Earth?
Make a comment!
27 September 2017 - Wednesday
No
13th Age,
only scheduling conflicts. But on the other tentacle, Avalon!
Penny Dreadful 6 has more doom. Well, every episode has
doom, but this one has bonus character death.
Make a comment!
26 September 2017 - Tuesday
No Avalon! But it is because family, not because work.
Episode 5 of Penny Dreadful is a flashback to how Ives
Ruined Everything. Without denying women their sexual agency, I think it's
safe to say that [SPOILER]ing [SPOILER] is not often an ideal life
choice.
It occurs to me that my analysis of stock Wizard vs new Wizard
(Sorcerer?) neglects the faint possibility of characters leveling up. At
5th level, the Sorcerer has seven spells available at the start of each
day, and they don't necessarily risk them with each casting, while the
stock Wizard still has only two or three spells, and has to roll for
each casting. That's less similar, but I don't know whether it's a
problem. The Wizard can swap spells without too much difficulty, and
those spells are probably more powerful than the Sorcerer's, especially
in terms of damage. This is where playtesting would come in useful.
Make a comment!
25 September 2017 - Monday
Penny Dreadful 4. Wow, boysmooches. And not the ones I
would have expected, either.
Hey, look, advice
on making new DW
playbooks (from the creator of A Sundered
World, which is not perfect but actually exists, so is better than
anything I do). I am, naturally, doing everything wrong with the
Wizard, but will carry on.
Speaking of which, the way the Wizard is currently written, they start
each day with three spells that they can cast as often as they like, at
least until the GM starts exhausting or wounding spells for 6- rolls. In
comparison, the stock Wizard starts with two spells available, and risks
losing them every time they cast, but also gets cantrips (which may
or may not be risky when cast). I guess this is comparable?
Should I rename the class the Sorcerer? It's really not very
wizard-like, at least to people from D&D-land. Also if I use the new
stats, it's not based on Wisdom anymore.
Make a comment!
24 September 2017 - Sunday
Today, I suck! But at least I got to see Avalon.
I have no layout power, but the elements that go into a Weird Fantasy Dungeon
World playbook like the Wizard are these.
Name: The lists on stock DW playbooks are pretty
generic, for obvious reasons. How non-generic a list I want to make
depends on how much of the setting I want to pre-define, I guess. Or I
could leave it blank, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has
trouble coming up with names.
Look: Wizards aren't a standardized thing like in
Generic D&D-Land, so the hat and robes elements don't work as well. Also, I
am torn between wanting to add a Mutation field to this and wanting to have
only cute characters. Maybe if I choose the mutations very carefully...
Stats: Regardless of whether I stick with D&D stats
or switch to the personality-based stats, these are going to be pretty
much the same as in DW. Unless I get rid of the 3-18 scale, but not much
different even then.
Damage Die: I was thinking of giving the Fighter their
d10 only with their signature weapon, so I could give the Wizard a d6
with spells (since there aren't any spells that do do their own damage,
they all just let the Wizard deal their damage) and the usual d4
normally. Does that disadvantage the Wizard too much if they don't
happen to get a damage-dealing spell to start with?
Armor: Just a spot to write down the value that
comes from the choice of Gear.
Vigor: Base HP for a stock wizard is 4, so add half
of that to 6, and Vigor is 8+CON. Unless I use the new stats, in which
case it's 8+AGG
Health: 8+CON, or 8+TEN (no, not eighteen!). I seem
to be talking myself into the new stats.
Drive: The less D&D-compliant version of Alignment,
a choice of three things that get you XP at the end of the session if
you did them. Usually it's help people by doing your class thing, hurt
people by doing your class thing, or do your class thing for its own
sake.
Background: Everyone is human, so race is irrelevant.
And background, as used by those playbooks that use it, is generally
more about how you got to be the Whatever, not your original origins. It
still gives you a choice of two or three minor moves or modifiers to
other moves.
Bonds: I sort of want to use
flags
instead. The point in that article about flags not changing much is not a big
deal, flags can be swapped out when they aren't relevant any more. But it would
mean coming up with approximately ten jillion possible flags. (Only three or four
possible bonds for a character seems okay, but not only three or four flags.) I
suppose the flags don't have to be linked to any one character, though, so I
could have fewer than N times the number of playbooks and let players choose or
roll from the list. But I still need a list.
Starting Moves: Starting Spells,
Recieve a Spell, Take a Spell,
Push a Spell. That's probably enough.
Level: I don't see any reason to change the range
1-10. If I had ever run DW that far and seen how players react to
reaching level 10, perhaps I would, but that doesn't seem likely to ever
happen.
XP: I am thinking about increasing the amount of XP
it takes to level up, just because it seems like DW characters level up
really fast. On the other hand, that might be because I'm a terrible GM,
and also because when a big chunk of XP is awarded at the end of each
session, playing a whole bunch of little tiny sessions really boosts
that. So I don't know.
Load: Or rather, inventory, since we're switching from
enumbrance-limited to slot-limited. I'm not sure which, if any, new stat
would give you more inventory space, so maybe it's just a flat six slots
for each character. Or five to seven depending on the load rating in
DW?
Gear: Since having a damaging spell isn't
guaranteed, maybe a little more emphasis on weapons.
Advanced Moves: This is the hard part, or maybe
second hardest part after the spell list in the Wizard's case. A lot of
the stock Wizard advanced moves are about being the educated
smartypants, or about learning magic stuff, neither of which applies,
but some of them seem usable.
I meant to fill these in a lot more, but this is taking too long to
write. Perils of combining it with my normal blog, I guess. Maybe I should
break it out into its own blog like I did with Age of the
Black Sun a while fifteen fucking years
ago.
Ugh, I am a Oldz. And not a useful one, either.
Make a comment!
23 September 2017 - Saturday
I managed to get up and showered before the cleaners arrived today, so I
was able to shop at a reasonable hour and get home to sign up for more
indie games at Big Bad Con. Yay,
Golden
Sky Stories! (I will be awful at it, but at least it is a new
thing.)
Earl and Cat were not dead, so they came over and drank with Ken and
Ayse.
- Nirvana in Fire 24-25: Now that [SPOILER] has been disposed
of, the plotting and scheming can return to normal!
- Steven Universe 3.20-25: We tried to only watch five, since
that is how many we need to preview for Jus for the coming week, but
augh! That was not a place we could stop! Jus would explode if
that were the last one she got to see!
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22 September 2017 - Friday
I finally got around to watching Mad Max: Fury Road, which
I had to resubscribe to Netflix DVD service to see (there are a lot of
movies I am somewhat interested in, which are not streamable yet.) I
haven't seen the previous movies, only absorbed their essence through the
cultural miasma, so perhaps I was not ideally prepared to appreciate it,
but it didn't really grab me. I also didn't see any of the deep
sociological or psychological stuff that Tumblr found in the movie. So, I
think I fail at enlightened movie-watching. On the other hand, I did
wonder, based on the extreme redness of the world, whether it was actually
set on Barsoom, which is a thought I didn't see on Tumblr. (But Barsoom is
actually more hospitable.)
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21 September 2017 - Thursday
Avalon's new job is failing at letting her have more time in the evenings!
Hmph! Protest!
Instead I watched another Penny Dreadful, which the
good highly sketchy doctor's pigeons come home to roost.
Some people just don't have the mental fortitude to play god.
I picked up Akashic Record of Bastard Magic Instructor vol
1 (Hitsuji Tarou, Tsunemi Aosa, Kurone Mishima) because "Akashic Record" is
an obscure cool term, but alas it is not being used to good effect. It's
pretty much magic school anime crossed with Great Teacher
Onizuka. Okay, not quite, but not enough different to be very
interesting.
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