If it was my honest aim to quit gaming, I went about it wrong. Gaming constituted my sole source of regular, non-coworker socialization, and I failed to find a replacement for this (apparently important!) function. Attempting to do nothing but work has been... unpleasant, and
ultimately unsuccessful. My productivity has not increased, and I have had several unhealthy videogaming binges, which have been inferior to proper gaming on all fronts (solo activity not regulated/self-limited by social availability/norms, ultimately comparable in time expense).
Recognizing that gaming did serve a useful function, I am forced to reevaluate my decision. DMing is still an expensive proposition in terms of time and attention (but apparently I was going to continue thinking about it anyway unless it were superceded by another social activity, as evidenced by the last month or two of posts). It probably makes sense to both pick gaming back up (as casually as possible - open-table, low-consistency low-level slacker-mode DMing, or, god forbid, playing in someone else's game) and also to find another weekly-ish regular social activity. These may have to wait until after the upcoming work deadline in early August, as a practical matter, but the introspection has been had.
(On reflection, the utility of gaming as a social activity may be part
of what I enjoyed about running the first ACKS campaign in the
open-table style; in a fixed party, you see the same three to five
people every week, but the open table facilitates making new friends in
the social context that I'm most familiar with. I wonder if this is
part of what my father likes about Pathfinder Society.)
I find that I'm still angry about things, though. Things like domains, and thieves. I could probably take "ACKS minus the Campaigns chapter" with just a few spot-fixes as a satisfying game up until 8th level or so, but that's a hard sell to players (though better than the bait-and-switch "Get a domain, it'll be fun!" currently going on, I guess). ACKS' continued development also seems to be away from its slick, usably-abstracted B/X roots and off into what the forums jokingly call Advanced Adventurer Conqueror King, with more detail and more rules. It's getting fiddly, and I don't like it. Having realized this, I believe that I will be happier and run a more enjoyable game if I just stop paying attention to ACKS supplements and the patreon. The core almost stands alone, and the parts that don't work mostly do so because they are too complicated. They need simplification rather than expansion. The only supplement that fills a real hole in the core rules is Domains at War: Battles, because mass combat is one of the few emotional draws of domain play that ACKS has addressed well. Even DaW:B could probably stand a little simplification, but its central mechanics are solid and not substantially more complex than dungeoneering combat.
Showing posts with label Hiatus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hiatus. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Quality Links
I've been pretty busy between crunch at work and prep for my Midnight ACKS game, but there have been a number of really good posts that came up on my radar this week.
First off, Koewn's analysis of ACKS' stealth mechanics is fantastic. I was considering (am still considering, actually) an ACKS assassin that trades plate for something else, and this has reasonably convinced me that they don't need Naturally Stealthy (-1 to enemy surprise rolls) to be effective at sneaking at low levels. Honestly, reading his analysis, I'm pretty convinced that ACKS' stealth system is fine and we've just been Doing It Wrong; I actually kind of like that a 1st level thief is ~18% more likely to surprise a target than a common man. As Koewn points out, this is about on par with the incremental improvement in combat ability that fighters get, with a 1st-level fighter being better but not massively better than a common man. The question remains, though: what to give assassins? I'm thinking Poison Use (some combination of bonus to saves against poison, bonus to proficiency throws to produce poisons, no chance to poison self when using poison), but I haven't set on anything yet.
Second, Trilemma has a pair of solid posts on knowlege and preparation and DM-player bandwidth. The first is a good statement of the general philosophy behind his prior (excellent) posts on useful dungeon description and monstrous effects on terrain, as well as explaining the importance of intel in old-school gaming, the prevalence of monsters with crazy immunities, and (indirectly) why vancian casting was awesome. In a way, it explains a lot of the mechanical oddities of the Old School that fell by the wayside as cultural, playstyle elements of the Old School (which made those mechanical elements sensible) faded due to dilution, and in identifying those cultural elements provides a path forwards/backwards, depending on how you look at it.
Trilemma's second post, on bandwidth, is particularly relevant to me at the moment, as I am engaged in world creation and trying to get data to my players. It's also somewhat interesting because "the bandwidth problem" was something parts of my group have been talking about for years, but never thought to write down. I have the good fortune of having a player this campaign who really likes lore (at one point he explicitly asked me for more lore, and I was taken aback; not a problem I've ever had before!), but my approach is still mostly a combination of a (written lore), c (no lore), and d (players propose reasonable lore). Some but not many things are fixed (written lore), many things that aren't relevant to the game just don't exist (no lore), and if my players propose something that makes sense, it's on me to either find a good a reason it isn't true, or to adopt it. I imagine this is probably true of most campaigns, that they follow hybrid approaches. Still, interesting stuff to think about.
Finally, today from the Hill Cantons, two solid posts on building and running dynamic sandboxes [1, 2]! Since I'm running a dynamic sandbox at the moment, these are extraordinarily relevant to my interests. The first article discusses having a campaign news cycle and dynamic encounter tables, while the second focuses on his Chaos Index world engine and campaign-scale event charts. The campaign news cycle is probably not reasonable for a setting like Midnight, where news is sparse and literacy is sparser, but dynamic encounter tables are something I've been playing with lately. ckutalik proposes a "New Development" slot on one's random encounter tables, where something related to a world event or past PC actions shows up when rolled. I've been thinking about having an encounter queue instead - when the PCs take an action which generates Consequences, those consequences go in a queue. When you roll "queued encounter" on the table, you pick something sensible from the first couple of things in the queue and that's what they find. This means that consequences can linger in the queue for quite a while, but will probably find the PCs eventually. I've also considered having multiple queues on a per-area basis; failing to assassinate the duke might queue a squad of royal guards in his domains, and bounty hunters in each of several nearby domains. Things like that.
From the second post, I could see setting up a Shadow Index, where certain actions increase the grip of the Shadow on the world and that alters things cosmologically (again, ideally I think I'd want per-area or -domain indices, so that some places can be deeply shrouded while others are 'points of light'). I've been running some loosely-defined world engines for various plots that are afoot; when the players decide to engage the ghouls hunting the farmers of Ostergot, the mushroommen of the Monastery Caverns grow and multiply, and when they fight the mushroommen, the ghouls spread. Event charts are something I should consider; my plan currently is to use politics as the primary event-driving factor for the campaign, but the occasional natural disaster or similar would not be amiss. My thought is to set up a network of high-power NPCs who have various relations with each other, and in any given unit of time some may undertake actions (declaration of war, assassination, charm / domination, slander, ...) against others, the consequences of which trickle down to the PCs. Event tables would be a simpler way to handle this, though, with "assassination attempt on X by Y", "raiding of X's domains by Y", and "warfare of X against Y" as table items with fillable variables as sensible. Maybe I'll do that instead.
Anyway, good posts, well worth reading.
First off, Koewn's analysis of ACKS' stealth mechanics is fantastic. I was considering (am still considering, actually) an ACKS assassin that trades plate for something else, and this has reasonably convinced me that they don't need Naturally Stealthy (-1 to enemy surprise rolls) to be effective at sneaking at low levels. Honestly, reading his analysis, I'm pretty convinced that ACKS' stealth system is fine and we've just been Doing It Wrong; I actually kind of like that a 1st level thief is ~18% more likely to surprise a target than a common man. As Koewn points out, this is about on par with the incremental improvement in combat ability that fighters get, with a 1st-level fighter being better but not massively better than a common man. The question remains, though: what to give assassins? I'm thinking Poison Use (some combination of bonus to saves against poison, bonus to proficiency throws to produce poisons, no chance to poison self when using poison), but I haven't set on anything yet.
Second, Trilemma has a pair of solid posts on knowlege and preparation and DM-player bandwidth. The first is a good statement of the general philosophy behind his prior (excellent) posts on useful dungeon description and monstrous effects on terrain, as well as explaining the importance of intel in old-school gaming, the prevalence of monsters with crazy immunities, and (indirectly) why vancian casting was awesome. In a way, it explains a lot of the mechanical oddities of the Old School that fell by the wayside as cultural, playstyle elements of the Old School (which made those mechanical elements sensible) faded due to dilution, and in identifying those cultural elements provides a path forwards/backwards, depending on how you look at it.
Trilemma's second post, on bandwidth, is particularly relevant to me at the moment, as I am engaged in world creation and trying to get data to my players. It's also somewhat interesting because "the bandwidth problem" was something parts of my group have been talking about for years, but never thought to write down. I have the good fortune of having a player this campaign who really likes lore (at one point he explicitly asked me for more lore, and I was taken aback; not a problem I've ever had before!), but my approach is still mostly a combination of a (written lore), c (no lore), and d (players propose reasonable lore). Some but not many things are fixed (written lore), many things that aren't relevant to the game just don't exist (no lore), and if my players propose something that makes sense, it's on me to either find a good a reason it isn't true, or to adopt it. I imagine this is probably true of most campaigns, that they follow hybrid approaches. Still, interesting stuff to think about.
Finally, today from the Hill Cantons, two solid posts on building and running dynamic sandboxes [1, 2]! Since I'm running a dynamic sandbox at the moment, these are extraordinarily relevant to my interests. The first article discusses having a campaign news cycle and dynamic encounter tables, while the second focuses on his Chaos Index world engine and campaign-scale event charts. The campaign news cycle is probably not reasonable for a setting like Midnight, where news is sparse and literacy is sparser, but dynamic encounter tables are something I've been playing with lately. ckutalik proposes a "New Development" slot on one's random encounter tables, where something related to a world event or past PC actions shows up when rolled. I've been thinking about having an encounter queue instead - when the PCs take an action which generates Consequences, those consequences go in a queue. When you roll "queued encounter" on the table, you pick something sensible from the first couple of things in the queue and that's what they find. This means that consequences can linger in the queue for quite a while, but will probably find the PCs eventually. I've also considered having multiple queues on a per-area basis; failing to assassinate the duke might queue a squad of royal guards in his domains, and bounty hunters in each of several nearby domains. Things like that.
From the second post, I could see setting up a Shadow Index, where certain actions increase the grip of the Shadow on the world and that alters things cosmologically (again, ideally I think I'd want per-area or -domain indices, so that some places can be deeply shrouded while others are 'points of light'). I've been running some loosely-defined world engines for various plots that are afoot; when the players decide to engage the ghouls hunting the farmers of Ostergot, the mushroommen of the Monastery Caverns grow and multiply, and when they fight the mushroommen, the ghouls spread. Event charts are something I should consider; my plan currently is to use politics as the primary event-driving factor for the campaign, but the occasional natural disaster or similar would not be amiss. My thought is to set up a network of high-power NPCs who have various relations with each other, and in any given unit of time some may undertake actions (declaration of war, assassination, charm / domination, slander, ...) against others, the consequences of which trickle down to the PCs. Event tables would be a simpler way to handle this, though, with "assassination attempt on X by Y", "raiding of X's domains by Y", and "warfare of X against Y" as table items with fillable variables as sensible. Maybe I'll do that instead.
Anyway, good posts, well worth reading.
Thursday, June 5, 2014
// TODO
I have noticed a trend of late - I start a post, get halfway through, and then never finish it. So far:
- Post(s) of ACKSalted Deeds - In which I attempt to replace clerics with a NetHackian prayer system (also piety scores, vows, oaths, quests, curses, and smiting).
- Remaining threads, surviving enemies, and explanations of things left open at the end of the Shieldlands campaign
- Variant cleric spells
- Barbarians are coming!
- Curses as item creation mishaps table for ACKS
- Would a Warhammer By Any Other Name Strike So Deep?
- Misc notes on preparing one-shots for the coworkers
Monday, September 23, 2013
State of the Gamist, September 2013
Still kickin'. Had fun at DragonCon, but was also somewhat disappointed with the panels (almost to the point of writing rebuttal posts). Mostly done travelling for a while, but travel time expenditures have been replaced with girlfriend time expenditures (less billable, but more enjoyable). No gaming to speak of outside of Natural Selection 2 (at which I am bad) and Dwarf Fortress (at which I am less bad).
Spent some time this last week hunting typos in the final Domains at War: Campaigns draft, though (and was pleased by the fact that dwarven crossbow-cavalry ride mules). Then the Wilderlands bug bit me again, but upon further examination I realized (again) that the Wilderlands are just too big and inconsistent for my liking. Resolved to run an ACKS-ified Western Marches-esque game in the near* future instead ("civilization" being a place akin to Roman Germany or Roman Britain at Hadrian's Wall, with a wilderness of vikings and giants and naked berserker Celt-orcs to the north). Started design work on the Mother Of All ACKS Scripts to aid in this endeavour. Further updates forthcoming as actual work is completed.
"World creation, has begun..."
* Part of me knows that this is completely the wrong approach, and that I'm falling into the over-prep trap. So I guess I'll just have to set really aggressive deadlines for myself (or be contented with building an awesome tool and never actually using it to run a game).
Spent some time this last week hunting typos in the final Domains at War: Campaigns draft, though (and was pleased by the fact that dwarven crossbow-cavalry ride mules). Then the Wilderlands bug bit me again, but upon further examination I realized (again) that the Wilderlands are just too big and inconsistent for my liking. Resolved to run an ACKS-ified Western Marches-esque game in the near* future instead ("civilization" being a place akin to Roman Germany or Roman Britain at Hadrian's Wall, with a wilderness of vikings and giants and naked berserker Celt-orcs to the north). Started design work on the Mother Of All ACKS Scripts to aid in this endeavour. Further updates forthcoming as actual work is completed.
"World creation, has begun..."
* Part of me knows that this is completely the wrong approach, and that I'm falling into the over-prep trap. So I guess I'll just have to set really aggressive deadlines for myself (or be contented with building an awesome tool and never actually using it to run a game).
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Still Alive
News since last update:
- Foremost - going to DragonCon next weekend. If anybody still reads this and will be down there, let me know!
- Space Hulk - was down in Matt's neck of the woods for work the other week and we played two games of Rescue the CAT using the 1st edition rules. My dice rolled horrifically when I was playing humans; at one point I rolled 5 1's on 6d6 for flamer mortality (which let a bunch of bugs get through the firewall and into my dudes), followed by no 6s on 12d6 of overwatch fire. Matt did somewhat better as the humans, but I got one bug up behind his CAT-carrying sergeant, took him out in one attack, and the CAT broke on impact. Scenario probably winnable, but the north entrance near the CAT entry is concerning. We also debated whether 'twas better to have a sergeant carry the CAT or a flamerman; I believe we concluded sergeant, since you want your flamers firing and your carrier moving, so stacking both duties forces you to split that model's AP between conflicting purposes.
- Located a FLGS last weekend. Mostly a Warmahordes / MtG / Pathfinder shop, but supposedly they have two killer GMs already so maybe I'd fit into the RPG lineup nicely.
- Considering taking up minis wargaming; found a mint-condition copy of Dirtside II (with chits!) on Amazon for $5, so I snatched that up. Also gave Fast & Dirty 4 a read; there are parts of it which are better than Stargrunt, and parts which I do not much like. Review possibly forthcoming. I anticipate difficulty finding opponents for any GZG / generic system, though, and last I checked I have little aptitude for painting, so perhaps I should stick to ACKS.
- Went to DEFCON, had a good time, didn't get pwnt (that I know of)
- I have started reading dead trees again, most recently Time Enough for Love. I suspect book accumulation is some sort of nest-building behavior.
- .i ui mi cilre fi lo lojbo
- Have a bunch of non-gaming personal projects queued up
- Getting back in shape
- Building an OpenEEG (and learning enough EE to do it right and not toast myself)
- Couple of machine learning / AI things I want to look into, including a CUDA artificial neural network implementation (there are several of these already out there, but I need the practice)
- Software defined radio / listening to the parts of the EM spectrum I can't see
- wechall.net, overthewire.org, and other 'wargames'
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Work-Life Balance - Rather Tilted
Sorry about the lack of updates - work started, and then I went on a surprise week-long training excursion to a distant state. Went sort of like this:
My boss, on Monday: "There's a training thing in Elsewhere, but they're out of slots."
On Tuesday: "There's a training thing in Elsewhere, and a couple of slots opened up, but we're not sure if we can let you go because you're not really in the personnel system yet."
Wednesday morning: "Hey, are you packed and ready to go? Turns out they only have one slot, but you're here early, so it's yours if you have a suitcase in your car. You'd leave today, and it starts tomorrow morning at 8AM."
Being the old-school 'equipment, intel, and preparation for contingencies' person that I am, I did in fact have a loaded suitcase en car, right next to the MREs and sleeping bag. And so here I am, in Elsewhere, working lots of overtime, sleeping little, and learning many interesting things. The food, the folks, and the work are all good, though.
But not doing much gaming. One thing that came out of a facebook discussion is that I need to write a Thrassian Devourer class - a cleric variant with a special Contemplation-like ability to recover spell slots by eating the bodies of fallen foes, implemented mechanically with a combination of the spell point and divine power backends that Alex has been talking about on the fora.
Also, neat setting post from Edward at DM from Outremer. And Micah had a solid post last week on handling monster templates in ACKS by adding *s to their XP value. I guess if I can't actually post, I may as well aggregate.
My boss, on Monday: "There's a training thing in Elsewhere, but they're out of slots."
On Tuesday: "There's a training thing in Elsewhere, and a couple of slots opened up, but we're not sure if we can let you go because you're not really in the personnel system yet."
Wednesday morning: "Hey, are you packed and ready to go? Turns out they only have one slot, but you're here early, so it's yours if you have a suitcase in your car. You'd leave today, and it starts tomorrow morning at 8AM."
Being the old-school 'equipment, intel, and preparation for contingencies' person that I am, I did in fact have a loaded suitcase en car, right next to the MREs and sleeping bag. And so here I am, in Elsewhere, working lots of overtime, sleeping little, and learning many interesting things. The food, the folks, and the work are all good, though.
But not doing much gaming. One thing that came out of a facebook discussion is that I need to write a Thrassian Devourer class - a cleric variant with a special Contemplation-like ability to recover spell slots by eating the bodies of fallen foes, implemented mechanically with a combination of the spell point and divine power backends that Alex has been talking about on the fora.
Also, neat setting post from Edward at DM from Outremer. And Micah had a solid post last week on handling monster templates in ACKS by adding *s to their XP value. I guess if I can't actually post, I may as well aggregate.
Monday, March 11, 2013
No News is... No News
Well, midterms happened, and now it's spring break. No gaming for the last two weeks due to illness on various peoples' parts, and nobody's here this week, so not looking good for the immediate future either. Lack of posting has been due to lack of energy, not lack of ideas. Things kind of on the docket for when I get around to them:
- Dwarven Muleskinner class for ACKS - explorer meets venturer by way of Dwarf Fortress
- ACKS scripts - I wrote python scripts for automating annoying parts of ACKS (like settlement demand modifier generation) last month. I should clean them up and put them in a repo somewhere for public consumption.
- Traveller ships - the Traveller game that has been on sickleave recently has humans at TL10, which is insufficient for Jump 2. I've taken it upon myself to build a Jump 1 ship or two beyond Yachts and Fat Traders. Unfortunately, I'm bad at deckplans.
- ACKS Wilderlands - putting domains on the map and nobles in the domains
- Midnight - I was re-reading parts of Midnight the other day and realized that while it would be really cool to run with ACKS, it would also be very difficult, because a whole bunch of assumptions about economics are invalid in Midnight (and magic is kind of different too). Particularly troubling is providing PCs with a market and
replacementshenchmen, and the complete unavailability of high-power divine magic (ie, RL&L) looks liable to spike mortality. Sooo... I dunno. On the other hand, once Domains at War is out, ACKS would be really sweet for running a guerrilla campaign against the Shadow on the borders of the elven territories; Fantasy F*ckin' Vietnam meets Empire Strikes Back, Lord of the Rings, and Indiana Jones (when the PCs go hunting for power nexuses). - Custom treasure tables
- Stargrunt / Dirtside / Full Thrust - not really a creative project, but I want to play more GZG stuff. I guess I could build Vassal plugins... ?
Friday, February 22, 2013
Homework Hiatus
brb have to write a Russian History paper. No blogging or reddit until it's done; posts should resume Monday.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
But Soft, What Yonder Blog Doth Update?
Certainly not this one.
Kind of back from vacation, doing the Long Drive back to school. This one has been less inspiring than last iteration, since I've seen all of these place names before. Vacation yielded some interesting thoughts, though:
Finally, Alex is ramping up a Mutants and Masterminds campaign. Need to write a post on the inherent minmaxiness of point-buy systems...
So yeah, have posts to write, but no real fleshed-out bodies for them yet. I'll get around to it once things settle down.
Kind of back from vacation, doing the Long Drive back to school. This one has been less inspiring than last iteration, since I've seen all of these place names before. Vacation yielded some interesting thoughts, though:
- Hiking up hills in hot weather is unpleasant. I need to increase the probability of "heat wave" on my random encounters chart.
- We spent a lot of time swimming in rivers, since it was too hot to hike. Alpine rivers are cooold. Random river width: 3d6*10 feet at any given point. Smooth to taste. Also, where it's narrower, there are likely rapids. Finally, I'm kind of wondering if my region doesn't need many, many more minor rivers for increased realism...
- We also spent a significant amount of time in a local used bookstore, which had both books and a very friendly resident cat. I picked up a copy of A History of Warfare, and have gotten through the stone age. Now I want to run a Polynesian / Aztec ACKS game :( I also picked up another book there that might warrant its own post; I'll get there eventually.
- I stocked the hexes around Opportunity using the new lairs / hex guidelines, and even more than before, the question of "How does anyone survive in ACKSland?" is being asked. That merits its own post as well.
Finally, Alex is ramping up a Mutants and Masterminds campaign. Need to write a post on the inherent minmaxiness of point-buy systems...
So yeah, have posts to write, but no real fleshed-out bodies for them yet. I'll get around to it once things settle down.
Friday, May 4, 2012
Final Projects Week
That lovely moment at 3AM when you realize there are more things due in the next three days than were due in all of April, and that about 45% of your GPA for the semester will be decided in the next week. So I'm doing this, basically. Updates will resume probably next Friday or so.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Kernel Mode Engage
No material and no game this weekend. Must write kernel. Kernelkernelkernel. Probably no post tomorrow either, and possibly Wednesday; should be good for Friday. I apologize for this interruption.
Friday, September 16, 2011
On Hiatus... again...
Greetings, gentle readers. I apologize for the lack of updates; the semester got me, and then I ran a one-shot, and it went OK but was quite savage actually due both to system changes, a few miscalculations on my part, and some player mistakes, and then I got owned by the semester, and both of my laptops died. So now I've got Ubuntu running on this one, but I really don't have much to say other than "Hopefully Alex will run a game sometime soon, because I sure won't be..." :\
Thursday, August 11, 2011
On Hiatus...
No tabletops last weekend, between Tim being sick, Ythir's campaign ending, people being out of town, and moving. Not looking like a whole lot this weekend either... so it's back to videogames, theorycraft, and planning for me. Decent progress on all fronts, though.
My graphics card is doing poorly, so no TF2 for me. This is saddening, because I was getting to be pretty decent at it, but also good, because the pyro dreams were getting old. No Tribes or UT either, which is unfortunate... so I'm back to Kingdom of Loathing. Running my 8th hardcore ascension as an Accordion Thief to complete the Nemesis Quest ring for the trophy. I kind of hate Accordion Thief as a class; buffs are a pain to manage and expensive to boot. So far it's going well, though; I've just been playing like a Disco Bandit. There have been a ton of changes since I left in February; the Knob Goblin quest, the Liver of Steel quest (fewer hellions :( ), the Crypt, moon signs, no stat days during ronin / HC... most important to me, though, was the Valhalla update. It's letting me perm skills significantly more quickly and with much greater flexibility, so that's cool. Likewise, the replacements for lead-in gear and consumables are awesome. Compared to previous runs, I'm currently at the end of Day 2 where I was at the end of Day 5 on my previous fastest hardcore run. It's just nuts. My goal for this run was initially 10 days, but since my previous best was 10 days and I'm currently doing much better than that, I think I'm revising it down to 7 (which would also beat my previous best softcore run... I've picked up a bunch of skills, knowledge, and familiars since then, though. I think it's doable). After this run, I'm looking at picking up some +non-combat skills; that seems to be what's holding me back in a bunch of places. I also want to bank some karma in Moxie runs and then do a Turtle Tamer run to pick up Tao of the Terrapin, Hero on the Half Shell, and Shieldbutt to make further muscle runs more bearable. Then maybe a Seal Clubber run as to go basementing for a telescope...
But enough of that gibberish. I've also resumed work on the Starcraft -> Stargrunt conversion. Zerg morale seems to be the really hard part. I'm kind of considering stealing Warbard's rules for Kra'Vak morale; they would very much deliver a "Your zerglings have slipped the Overmind's leash and gone berserk" kind of effect. On the other hand, since the zerg seem likely to have the close-combat advantage (both in numbers and in terms of close-combat weapons per squad)... so giving them the ability to charge the enemy rather than retreating when normal men would fall back kind of plays into their hands. I guess playtests are the only way to determine what really works. I'm also lacking a good model for stimpacks or adrenal zerglings presently. Finally, squad composition in Starcraft is totally backwards compared to the expectations of Stargrunt; 12 marines with no support weapons, and a separate squad of 12 firebats? What is this madness!? So that's an issue to be overcome as well...
I've also been planning Wilderlands. I've found a Dungeon Crawl Classics module that fits well into the Wilderlands, and I think I'm going to run it. It's one I've played through before, so I have an idea of how it actually goes (though hopefully the party won't be so horribly overpowered this time... oh, True Sorcery Dabbler-stacking, you so broken...). It also ties in nicely with another module I want to steal inspiration from... and so a campaign is born. I think I'm moving away from the episodic and open-table focus and more towards the style of the Traveller game I ran last semester, where a fairly-fixed party of PCs travels and gets into trouble wherever they happen to end up. The issue, then, is long dungeoncrawls... I might cut out extraneous encounters to keep things moving. I guess I'm looking for a better balance between dungeon and wilderness than we had in Traveller; Traveller focused really heavily on the travel, and while dungeoncrawls did happen (er, "Ruin and/or derelict ship crawls"), they were played very loosely, had only 3ish fights in a dungeon tops, and did not dominate gameplay as dungeons do in D&D. So I guess I'm looking for a middle ground between the super-abstract dungeon and the super-detailed dungeon.
My graphics card is doing poorly, so no TF2 for me. This is saddening, because I was getting to be pretty decent at it, but also good, because the pyro dreams were getting old. No Tribes or UT either, which is unfortunate... so I'm back to Kingdom of Loathing. Running my 8th hardcore ascension as an Accordion Thief to complete the Nemesis Quest ring for the trophy. I kind of hate Accordion Thief as a class; buffs are a pain to manage and expensive to boot. So far it's going well, though; I've just been playing like a Disco Bandit. There have been a ton of changes since I left in February; the Knob Goblin quest, the Liver of Steel quest (fewer hellions :( ), the Crypt, moon signs, no stat days during ronin / HC... most important to me, though, was the Valhalla update. It's letting me perm skills significantly more quickly and with much greater flexibility, so that's cool. Likewise, the replacements for lead-in gear and consumables are awesome. Compared to previous runs, I'm currently at the end of Day 2 where I was at the end of Day 5 on my previous fastest hardcore run. It's just nuts. My goal for this run was initially 10 days, but since my previous best was 10 days and I'm currently doing much better than that, I think I'm revising it down to 7 (which would also beat my previous best softcore run... I've picked up a bunch of skills, knowledge, and familiars since then, though. I think it's doable). After this run, I'm looking at picking up some +non-combat skills; that seems to be what's holding me back in a bunch of places. I also want to bank some karma in Moxie runs and then do a Turtle Tamer run to pick up Tao of the Terrapin, Hero on the Half Shell, and Shieldbutt to make further muscle runs more bearable. Then maybe a Seal Clubber run as to go basementing for a telescope...
But enough of that gibberish. I've also resumed work on the Starcraft -> Stargrunt conversion. Zerg morale seems to be the really hard part. I'm kind of considering stealing Warbard's rules for Kra'Vak morale; they would very much deliver a "Your zerglings have slipped the Overmind's leash and gone berserk" kind of effect. On the other hand, since the zerg seem likely to have the close-combat advantage (both in numbers and in terms of close-combat weapons per squad)... so giving them the ability to charge the enemy rather than retreating when normal men would fall back kind of plays into their hands. I guess playtests are the only way to determine what really works. I'm also lacking a good model for stimpacks or adrenal zerglings presently. Finally, squad composition in Starcraft is totally backwards compared to the expectations of Stargrunt; 12 marines with no support weapons, and a separate squad of 12 firebats? What is this madness!? So that's an issue to be overcome as well...
I've also been planning Wilderlands. I've found a Dungeon Crawl Classics module that fits well into the Wilderlands, and I think I'm going to run it. It's one I've played through before, so I have an idea of how it actually goes (though hopefully the party won't be so horribly overpowered this time... oh, True Sorcery Dabbler-stacking, you so broken...). It also ties in nicely with another module I want to steal inspiration from... and so a campaign is born. I think I'm moving away from the episodic and open-table focus and more towards the style of the Traveller game I ran last semester, where a fairly-fixed party of PCs travels and gets into trouble wherever they happen to end up. The issue, then, is long dungeoncrawls... I might cut out extraneous encounters to keep things moving. I guess I'm looking for a better balance between dungeon and wilderness than we had in Traveller; Traveller focused really heavily on the travel, and while dungeoncrawls did happen (er, "Ruin and/or derelict ship crawls"), they were played very loosely, had only 3ish fights in a dungeon tops, and did not dominate gameplay as dungeons do in D&D. So I guess I'm looking for a middle ground between the super-abstract dungeon and the super-detailed dungeon.
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