wudaweek
Man. Hopefully I can knock out a post before the moron chatter next door drives my brain into a radioactive puddle of goo.
Lessee, what's been up this week? Gen Con schedule has been posted for registration coming up soon. That's taken a lot of my time, because there's over 5200 events to choose from over four days of gaming, pretty much non-stop from 1am Thursday to 8 or 10pm Sunday. I still have to figure out how much face time I want to put in with the Publishers, too....
At work I've taken on a project or two that really eat up my time, but of course, there's no relief on my other duties while I'm dealing sweaty palms patients. No big, cause it means I get to mingle with people outside the department and it means that if we start seeing job cuts because the upper crust here has taken on a fiscal policy modelled after Bush's (spend, regardless of income), I have a bit more security than some of the other team members.
On the gaming front, SR4 has been hit or miss, and will continue to be all summer due to schedule conflicts. I'm out two weekends in May and every weekend in June, and I don't think anyone else can start early enough for my tastes for a midweek session. Wednesday saw the death of both characters in a late D&D session (that I'd rather not repeat). Unfortunately, nobody cared, in part because it was only the third session, and in part because of the prevailing attitude that these characters didn't matter becuase they're temporary.
The latter is pretty frustrating for a multitude of reasons. When the players don't care about their characters, they don't roleplay, and when they don't roleplay, I don't either. The game spirals down into a "let's get into some action" mentality and a contest to see who can hit harder. Advantage - DM on that one. Second, "fuck it, I'll just roll up a new one" is a pretty common reaction, so the characters get real brave, real fast. Really, though, except for the lack of RP it doesn't matter as much. Both players are pretty amiable toward testing rules and shit for me, and we've already come up with three valuable pieces of information for the future campaign.
1 - Action Points rock. I might tweak a few options from Unearthed Arcana, but that's for flavor. The mechanic is solid and it defintely gives the PCs a little extra oomph to set them apart from the rest of the world. I'd actually like to try a campaign where every person on the world was either an expert, warrior, or spellcaster (generic classes from UA) and all that set the PCs apart is their Action Points.
2 - For Gestalt Characters, Monster classes throw things off. The ability bonus at several levels combined with still progressing in a PC class gives them an unfair advantage. One fix I might try is that a gestalt monster advances in its monster class at every level, but only advances in a character class when it gets an extra Hit Die. For example, at levels 1-7 an aranea advances in its aranea class every level, but only advances as a fighter (or whatever) at level 1, level 3, and level 5 (I think those are when it gets extra hit dice), so at level 7 as a gestalt character, it's a level 7 aranea, level 3 fighter.
3 - Some players can play without alignment. Some can't. Some players pick an alignment that's close to their personal beliefs so they don't struggle much to play the character accurately. Some pick an alignment that fits the total concept of the character they're making. The latter are the ones more likely to dig on immersive role playing. Either way, it's a lot of fucking work to NOT use alignment at all. I was going to do that for Iorthim, but I've changed my mind. Until I find a good alternative (I don't like the taint/sanity system presented in Heroes of Horror for this group. We'd all giggle to much anytime someone's taint shifted.), we're using alignment, and N, CN, NE, CE, & LE are out. And I'm not talking the personal and national moral standards and beliefs that so many of us use to break the D&D alignment system down into an argument about what Batman's alignment is. I'm talking galactic/planar forces and energy. Capital G for good and alla that shit. Kind of kills a few plots I had in mind, but there's time to come up with something. In the meantime, standard alignment baby.
And those three points ran long. I'll spare you the remainder of the mad ramblings that have build up over the week and leave you with some interesting info about using color to describe characters.
Lessee, what's been up this week? Gen Con schedule has been posted for registration coming up soon. That's taken a lot of my time, because there's over 5200 events to choose from over four days of gaming, pretty much non-stop from 1am Thursday to 8 or 10pm Sunday. I still have to figure out how much face time I want to put in with the Publishers, too....
At work I've taken on a project or two that really eat up my time, but of course, there's no relief on my other duties while I'm dealing sweaty palms patients. No big, cause it means I get to mingle with people outside the department and it means that if we start seeing job cuts because the upper crust here has taken on a fiscal policy modelled after Bush's (spend, regardless of income), I have a bit more security than some of the other team members.
On the gaming front, SR4 has been hit or miss, and will continue to be all summer due to schedule conflicts. I'm out two weekends in May and every weekend in June, and I don't think anyone else can start early enough for my tastes for a midweek session. Wednesday saw the death of both characters in a late D&D session (that I'd rather not repeat). Unfortunately, nobody cared, in part because it was only the third session, and in part because of the prevailing attitude that these characters didn't matter becuase they're temporary.
The latter is pretty frustrating for a multitude of reasons. When the players don't care about their characters, they don't roleplay, and when they don't roleplay, I don't either. The game spirals down into a "let's get into some action" mentality and a contest to see who can hit harder. Advantage - DM on that one. Second, "fuck it, I'll just roll up a new one" is a pretty common reaction, so the characters get real brave, real fast. Really, though, except for the lack of RP it doesn't matter as much. Both players are pretty amiable toward testing rules and shit for me, and we've already come up with three valuable pieces of information for the future campaign.
1 - Action Points rock. I might tweak a few options from Unearthed Arcana, but that's for flavor. The mechanic is solid and it defintely gives the PCs a little extra oomph to set them apart from the rest of the world. I'd actually like to try a campaign where every person on the world was either an expert, warrior, or spellcaster (generic classes from UA) and all that set the PCs apart is their Action Points.
2 - For Gestalt Characters, Monster classes throw things off. The ability bonus at several levels combined with still progressing in a PC class gives them an unfair advantage. One fix I might try is that a gestalt monster advances in its monster class at every level, but only advances in a character class when it gets an extra Hit Die. For example, at levels 1-7 an aranea advances in its aranea class every level, but only advances as a fighter (or whatever) at level 1, level 3, and level 5 (I think those are when it gets extra hit dice), so at level 7 as a gestalt character, it's a level 7 aranea, level 3 fighter.
3 - Some players can play without alignment. Some can't. Some players pick an alignment that's close to their personal beliefs so they don't struggle much to play the character accurately. Some pick an alignment that fits the total concept of the character they're making. The latter are the ones more likely to dig on immersive role playing. Either way, it's a lot of fucking work to NOT use alignment at all. I was going to do that for Iorthim, but I've changed my mind. Until I find a good alternative (I don't like the taint/sanity system presented in Heroes of Horror for this group. We'd all giggle to much anytime someone's taint shifted.), we're using alignment, and N, CN, NE, CE, & LE are out. And I'm not talking the personal and national moral standards and beliefs that so many of us use to break the D&D alignment system down into an argument about what Batman's alignment is. I'm talking galactic/planar forces and energy. Capital G for good and alla that shit. Kind of kills a few plots I had in mind, but there's time to come up with something. In the meantime, standard alignment baby.
And those three points ran long. I'll spare you the remainder of the mad ramblings that have build up over the week and leave you with some interesting info about using color to describe characters.
posted by Amazing Shafeman at 9:23 AM
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