Three Hams Inn

In the beginning there were the Minoans. Of course there was quite a bit before the Minoans, but that's where we'll start. The Minoans were elves and probably escaped to and settled Minoa from their legendary city of Atlantis when it went up like a Roman Candle somewhere around 25,000 years ago. The Peleponese were populated primarily by elves, both colonists from Minoa and natives who were also refugees from Atlantis. The Atheneians and Spartans were primarily elvish societies, but the lands surrounding the great elvish city-states of the Golden Age were dotted with populations of humans and halflings. The Hellots for example, were human, halfling and half-halfling. Over time, the elves and humans interbred on a limited basis and Greece became a society populated by elves (the Eupatrids), half-elves (mixed slave and freedmen), humans (primarily slaves, but some freedmen), halflings (slaves), and half-halflings (mixed slave and outcast). That sums up Classic-Age Greece.

We'll fast-forward to a couple of hundred years after the Pelopenisian wars and the resuling fall of Athens and Sparta. Alexander (a Half-Elf from half-elven parents, he was from Macedon, after all) has come and gone and his empire has been broken up. This brings us to the The Ptolomies. A mixture of elf and half-elf people who took over the southern and some of the near-eastern territories of Alexander's once great empire. They rule from Egypt and at this point in history, their empire is at its geographic and cultural peak. The native Egyptians, who are human, are no longer in charge of their once great nation. In fact the population is almost all half-elven with the ruling class being primarily of elven blood and the working class being primarily of human blood. Immigration and the slave has brought about some diversity of population with halflings and gnomes from the near-east settling in Egypt, first in Alexandria and then migrating up the Nile to points south. A very small population of dwarves and half-orcs have made their home here, or should I say had their home here forced upon them.

The Cathaginian empire to the west of Ptolomaic Egypt (or as you would know it, Aegyptus) is made up of the half-elven Phoenecians or Poini (POY-nee), famous for their seamanship and business accumen, and the halfling Numidians, famous for their cavalry skills. They are the mortal enemies of Rome. When you think of the Carthaginians as a Roman, think of them the United States thought of the Soviet Union of the 1980s, or even the Axis Powers of the 1930s and 1940s.

We'll rewind about 900 years to about 750 BCE and sketch the origins of Rome itself. The Romans were originally ruled by The Etruscans, who were elves. They were expatriot Greeks who had started a colony on the Adriatic Sea and brought with them some rather unusual customs and gods. They of course enslaved the local peoples (the Italians) and made them fight each other for their entertainment, till their fields, grow their grapes and olives and wheat, serve in their brothels, and generally mistreated them. The Italians were humans, with a few dwarves and halflings living in the more mountainous and wilder areas of Italia, respectively.

Enter Aeneas. A fugitve from the Fall of Troy who was, like all the Trojans, human. Unlike all humans, he was the son of a goddess. He founded a city called Alba Longa in about 1100 BCE. His descendents ruled that city for 400 years until the Romans marched on it and destroyed everything but the temples. From Aeneas' line descend Romulus and Remus.

Romulus and Remus founded Rome. They were humans brothers of divine descent (their mother bagged Mars). They grew up as shepherds and after defeating some local competion and acquiring followers they got into an argument over who was going to be king. Rather than argue, Romulus decided to go ahead and build. While Romulus built, Remus criticized. One day Remus decided that the wall was too short and demonstrated this by jumping over it (son of a god!). Romulus, fed up with his brother's bullshit, kills him with a shovel. To his credit, he feels bad about it and gives him a nice funeral. Romulus names the city after himself, declares himself king, sets up and army, declares 100 rich guys the nobility and calls them Patricians, the fathers of Rome, and immediately begins to attract a host of human and halfling criminals, exiles, escaped slaves, and refugees from the surrounding countryside. Behold! Rome, best and greatest!

There's more, and we'll get to it.

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The Race Problem
Posted under Today's Special by: Carl on 2/2/2010 4:45:06 PM

In AD&D you're given 7 playable races: Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Halfling, Half-Orc and Human. These don't really fit into any historical context. That leaves me with two options. One, I allow only human characters. Of course, if I head into this level of realism, I need to ditch 90% of the Monster Manual, too. Alternately, I can hand-wave their inclusion into the world, and so this is what I've opted to do.

The Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes, Halflings, Humans and Orcs are cousin races. The theory here being that they are all descended from Homo Australopithecus Afarensis. They just went in a different direction in their evolutionary progression from that point. Why? Well, why did the bodhidharma come out of the east? Because. Which is kind of how evolution works anyway. It's not really survival of the fittest. It's more like, survival of the survivors.

Let's now fast-forward a few million years, and assume the existence of actual gods and magic (apart from those actual gods). I'll even skip Lake Toba, or better yet, we'll take for granted that it happened and that all these descendents of Lucy somehow survived. That could even give us a "first age of man" kind of a thing if we wanted to explore that. The Drow went underground for a reason, right? Maybe that reason was the sky turning black and the Earth freezing for a thousand years or so. That would be a good reason for me to seek my fortunes elsewhere, had I the means. Aside from the obvious biological problems with living away from the sun, this neatly explains Deep Dwarves, Deep Gnomes, and Drow Elves. As to the sun issue? Abracadabra Alakazam! Magic, bitches! (Fantasy can be so easy sometimes!) However, this explaination opens up a discussion of why we can have Half-Elves and Half-Orcs, but not Half-Gnomes, Half-Dwarves and Half-Halflings?

Well, mister super-smart mouth DM? Where's your magic now?

I think the best way to approach this problem is to introduce those races. I'll just take the same track that Gygax and Arneson took with the other Halfs. That is to say, reduced racial characteristics from the demi-Human parent (partial infravision, reduced resistances to magic, etc.), slightly increased ability score maximums from the demi-human parent and slightly increased level limits and class selection (namely Cleric) to reflect the human parent. Thoughts on this? Anyone want to play a Half-Halfling? You can be a cleric/thief/magic user... :-)

This brings me to racial ability score maximums. For the most part, I'm OK with these with one exception. I'm going to remove the ability score limits based on sex. They may be representative, and they may not be, but they certainly aren't fair. Those are out. Also, I think Half-Orcs may have more of a strength limitation than I'd like, but I don't have the book with me right now.

At this point, I'm feeling pretty good about things, but here's where AD&D shows it's other face, the ugly face. Class and level restrictions based upon race are something that almost every DM I've known and pretty much every player hates. Why can Dwarves only get to 7th level as fighters? Why can't they be druids? I don't know the metagame answer. I suspect it's because only demi-humans and the halfs are allowed to multiclass. Because they can do this, they can achieve a very powerful character without having unlimited levels in all but one class (which is thief, for some reason). Humans may dual-class, but this is an entirely different deal, albiet with similar results. It smells like game balance, but is it fair? Again, I don't know. If you're reading this and have an opinion, please state it and include justification. Personally, I think that removing all the controls (unlimited levels, unlimited multi-classing for all races) would mean that no one would play a human and I think that makes for an unbalanced game. Why play some human schmuck when you could have 60' infravison and a 90% resistance to sleep and charm? There have to be some kind of limits to balance things out between the races, but are the ones in the Player's Handbook the right ones?

I'm going to retreat from the field for today. Tomorrow, I'll see about posting some information on how all these weird-ass races showed up in Rome, and a further justification for why I'm going to have have a "half" for every race.

Thanks for your time.

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The Decision
Posted under Today's Special by: Carl on 2/1/2010 6:46:16 PM

After my last post I rode home on my motorcycle thinking about where I was going to run this great game I had in mind.

Setting has never been a strong point of mine. In college, I ran a mish-mash of "official" D&D worlds with some bizarre additions of my own, like His Majesty El Vis, King of all Elves, complete with flare-legged white calf skin jumpsuit, cape and diamond treatments. He lived in Graceland, the Elvish capital city, of course. It was silly on-purpose. I drew heavily on Warner Brothers cartoons and popular, modern myth to color my world. I allowed werechickens. Gnomes carried firearms and monopolized the gem trade. Halflings lived for pie only. We had a lot of fun for a lot of years.

Why not continue? Well, for one neither I nor my players drink that much while we game anymore. Second, the world was ridiculous. There was no drama or serious tension to speak of, just a series of on-going inside jokes. Also, I haven't gamed with those guys for years and years. That campaign is gone. The memories live on, and when I see those guys now we laugh about it and how much fun we had and how much beer we drank. It was a special kind of Monte Hall meets Killer DM game.

Anyway, so I'm cranking through a tight left-hander, winding up my throttle and pushing the bike over hard when it came to me.

Rome.

My wife and I are Rome nerds (Nerdius Romanticus). I took some classes in college studying the rise and fall of Greece and Rome. I have meticulously detailed notebooks, maps and many historical and modern books on Rome. My wife has read as much, if not more on Rome than I have. We watch Gladiator and nitpick from pretty much the opening credits up through the point where Commodus is stabbed to death in the Colosseum (he was actually strangled to death in the bath by his favorite "wrestling" partner). However, we love the costumes and the sets. We own a Blu-Ray version of HBOs Rome series. We also enjoy nitpicking that one. Their depictions of the historical personages in there are so far off that they are laughable. Again, the costumes and the sets are awesome, as are the two somewhat fictional characters of Vorenus and Pullo, two legionaries who wind up running a Collegium -- a kind of Roman Thief's Guild.

So I've thrown myself at it and opted for 240 BCE. This is just after the First Punic War. Carthage has given Sicily to Rome as part of the peace agreement. Syracuse is still ruled by its own king. Rome has established its first state in Brundisium (the heel of the boot), and the Ptolemaic Empire is at it's geographical and cultural peak. It was an exciting period of history.

After setting a date, I started with money, of course. The price list in AD&D is a travesty, and coincidentally it's also the thing the players first ask for. After some quick research on Roman money, I settled on some not-so-historical coinage. The Sectertius was not actually introduced until after the Second Punic War, about 20 years later than my date, but I'm going to use it anyway as the "silver piece" even though it's bronze but it actually equates more to a "silver piece" in value. The Denarius was the actual "silver piece" and the Aureus was the "gold piece" but no one used Platinum, so the Aureus will be the top coin and take the place of the "platinum piece."

As Alexis has demonstrated, trying to be completely historical with your coinage is a real pain in the ass, especially in his campaign's period (early Renaissance). With Rome, I can rely on an actual Central Bank. At that period in history there was still a lot of barter going on in Rome, with many prices measured in "cows" and I'm not going to make my players suffer through that.

So, now comes an interesting issue. I have historical price lists from the period within which I'm setting the game. I'm pretty comfortable with how that's going to work out. What I'm struggling with now is the Gold Piece to Experience Point mechanic of AD&D. I think that the Sestertius is too small a coin to give an experience point for, so I'm leaning toward the Denarius for that job. The question now is that since the standard AD&D economy is so fucked up, how do I allot treasure? Maybe my price list will answer some of these questions for me.

I'll post more about this as the week rolls on. As a teaser, I'll tell you that converting AD&D Standard to Republican Rome was a pretty easy deal.

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Re-Learning the Game
Posted under Today's Special by: Carl on 1/27/2010 5:27:18 PM

When I was a freshman and sophmore in high school I rode the city bus to school and back. It was a long ride, just under 2 hours. In the morning I usually slept, but in the afternoon, I read. Since I had only two real interests in high school, sex and AD&D, and by law I was not allowed to practice or pursue the former on a city bus, I read my D&D books.

I remember specifically reading the index of the Dungeon Master's Guide, finding entries in there that interested me and then reading the text in that section. I learned a lot about the game doing this. I also remember reading all of the spell descriptions and committing them to memory as a personal challenge. I was not a very good student, but I was an AD&D trivia whiz. In my peer group that put me squarely in the middle. My friend were fairly mediocre students, too, but damn did we know that game well. One of my great "what-ifs" has been, "What if I had applied myself to my academics with the ferocity I applied myself to AD&D?" I'll turn 40 this year, and as I look back now, I can say without much doubt that I probably would have gone to an Ivy League college. I don't know that I'd be as happy as I am now, though. In fact, I wouldn't be me at all. Frankly, "what-ifs" are kind of stupid.

Back to the game. As I'm reading through the Player's Handbook again, I'm struck by insight and understanding that I never had before. Take movement, for instance. The inches-as-a-representation of movement thing is pretty cool. You can scale it for mode (combat, long-distance travel, creeping down a dungeon corridor), you can scale it for time (segements, rounds, turns, hours, days, weeks, etc), you can even scale it for encumberance (none, light, medium, etc.). It's pretty basic Algebra. I never really got this before. Previously, I never really questioned why someone was only allowed to move 12' in 6 seconds. It was just a game artifact, and I accepted it at face value. Now, I can see that combat in AD&D is a true abstraction. It's not supposed to be a simulation, or anything close to it. You can only move 12' in 6 seconds because you are assumed to be fighting for your life and under attack and so you're actively defending yourself while you're moving, hence 12' but understand that this is with your weapon and shield in defensive positions, carefully keeping an eye on your opponents, carefully choosing your footing and so forth. This is where the beauty of AD&D really begins to show. As a DM, I would allow someone to move faster, but there would be a penalty. You might trip. You will be more susecptible to attacks from opponents, you may not be ready to attack once you complete your movement. It's up to me, the DM, and having good judgement and the trust of my players I can adjudicate the circumstances. That's something distinctly missing from D&D 3.0 and onward.

I'm struck by the amount of latitude a DM is given in judging a game in AD&D. Every rule is in actuality a guideline. These guidelines are there to enable the players to explore and interact with their world through their characters. They are there to empower the DM to provide his players with a fulfilling experience. In later editions, they became boundaries from within which players were allowed to act on their environment and they became limitations on DMs to keep them from making bad judgement calls. What they did was turn D&D into Monopoly. The DM became the banker. That's great if you're trying to run a tournament game where you have untrained DMs running pre-packaged adventures for players they have never met. Reading the Player's Handbook again, and recalling my personal gaming experiences over the years tells me that that is not what D&D is supposed to be. It's a very personal game, shared between a few people who have between them an understanding and an agreement of the rules (or guidelines) of their game. It's like playing pretend with your friends as a kid. You be the cops. I'll be the robbers. Between us we'll agree that these are the rules for our game. When we play at home, the cops have to touch the robbers to catch them. When we play at school the cops only have to call out the robber's name. There was never supposed to be an "official" game of Cops and Robbers, and why would you want one? Half the fun of that game was deciding the rules before play, between rounds, improvising during play, and then the post-game evaluation of how it worked (after switching sides at least once). This sounds like a primative game of D&D to me.

The reality of doing this starting to smack me in the face. I'm missing a key component of a D&D game: a game setting. I'm tempted to bribe Alexis to put together a small chunk of Europe for me to get started. I also have some questions for him about running a game without alignments (something I've done for years, but not using AD&D rules). Alignments play a huge part in AD&D. Maybe I'll just give it a little more of think and then post on his blog.

How is your week?

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The Sickness
Posted under Today's Special by: Carl on 1/24/2010 12:00:56 PM

I've been exchanging email with a player of mine who moved to Portland recently. He started a game down there, and then started mining my blog for tips. Poor bastard.

Fortunately he discovered Alexis' blog through my repeated linking to it and has now begun to learn how to run a D&D game this isn't just a more complicated Choose Your Own Adventure story. Bravo to both of you.

He described a situation I've found myself in over and over. How do you get the players off the rails and into the sandbox?

I think the best way to do this is to take a look at the original sandbox. Go look at AD&D. He and I discussed this, and I counseled him to go purchase a set of the holy trinity of AD&D books and then read them cover-to-cover. I said that he'd probably learn more about role-playing games from them than anything he'd picked up from me or the other games he'd played up to this point. That game was designed to be a sandbox from the start.

The other thing he asked me, which is the same question I've struggled with for years and years is, "Which system do I use to run my game?"

The answer to this is tricky. I told him what I've posted here on more than one occasion. That it's not the system, but rather the people playing it. Every system has it's good and bad points. Some really are better than others, but in the end it all comes down to the people playing the game. Both the Dungeon Master and the players factor into this.

He wants to run a fantasy game. He's got the germ of an interesting world with a mysterious past, political conflict, and mystical people and places. He's imagined the possibilities. He's on his way. I recommended either AD&D or the Basic D&D Rules Cyclopedia, sometimes referred to as OSRIC, although the acronym's definition escapes me now.

In the process of doing this, I felt a compulsion (charm) to check out this great game I'd been counselling my friend to go and check out. I scanned my bookshelf and discovered the three volumes that I thought I'd set aside years ago were gone. The compulsion grew.

The next night I suggested to my lovely and talented wife that we go out to dinner, as it was a Friday, and as long as we were headed that way, why not stop over at Half Price Books for a little pre-dinner browse? I'm a sly one and she's a sucker for a used book store.

It wasn't until we stepped through the door of the place that she asked, "Why did you want to come here, anyway?" Oh-uh-yes-just-browsing-really-boy-do-I-love-a-bookstore. Why look there! A full set of AD&D books! And what a great price! I could get all three for less than $35! That's when she gave me The Look. Then she smiled and I bought the books and skipped out of the store feeling like I did on the day that I talked those kids out of that AD&D Player's Handbook they'd found in the bushes on the side of the road. I think I've told that story here. If not, I'll re-tell it on another day.

What does this mean? I don't know yet. That was Friday. Since then I've been reading the Player's Handbook. I think this is the first time I've read it from cover-to-cover, or even had a plan to do so. It was always more of a reference book to me before. I read only what I thought I needed to play whatever character I was playing, or understand which spells did what. When I finish this, I'll start on the DMG.

Do I want to run a Traveller game? Yes. Science Fiction was my first literary love. I live it every day in the job that I do and have more source material for "how this shit really works" than any fantasy game I could run, and maybe that's my problem. It's too real. And by too real, I mean boring.

All that aside, Dungeons and Dragons was my first taste of forbidden fruit. My school principal called it Devil Worship and my mother took that declaration very seriously. I was only 10 when I was introduced to it by Jimmy, the neighbor kid, and I knew if loving it was wrong, I didn't want to be right (I know, I know, but it's true). I love D&D. It is and always will be a part of me.

It is the sickness. And I love it.

So.

Anyone want to play a little D&D?

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Champions Online Endgame
Posted under Today's Special by: Carl on 1/18/2010 1:53:58 PM

Aero-Titan achieved 40th level yesterday.

It took me about 6 hours of gameplay to earn the experience necessary to transition from 39 to 40. I went to the grocery store, made egg sammiches for my wife and I for breakfast, prep'd a pot roast, threw it in the oven and set about working my way through the Monster Island and Lemuria quests in my queue. Just as I hit 40th level, the pot roast was done and my wife and I had a fine meal.

Woo hoo!

So what now? Well, there appears to be quite a bit of end game content. Super weapons and power enhancements await those who go to work for the UNTIL organization fighting super crime all over the globe. I signed up. We'll see where that takes me.

How was your weekend?

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Blog Guilt
Posted under Today's Special by: Carl on 1/8/2010 12:04:31 PM

The holidays have come and gone. I actually took two weeks off to do as little as possible, which included among other things, some beta testing time on Star Trek Online and a substantial amount of time getting the Aero-Titan to 37th level. He's 38 now, since my retcon at level 34 brought me into a level of power and capability that is now truly super-heroic and I can literally blast my way through missions that I previously struggled to complete without getting my dick knocked into the dirt a dozen times a session. I may hit level 40, the level cap, this week. I'll then start working on my PvP character and join the rest of my Super Group, the WildCards, in the televised arena death matches of the Champions Online universe. After that I'll be succumbing to alt-itis and playing a wide variety of super and not-so-super heroes.

The main reason for not blogging is that outside of my afformentioned muhmorpooguh, and a few rounds of the Sims 3 with my wife (we think of it as a combination reality show, sitcom, nite-time soap opera, softcore porno), I have done no gaming. None. Not even a board game. I logged into the T5 message boards and poked around, made a few posts. I actually loaded up my T5 program and stared at it for about 10 minutes before launching Champions Online one fine day.

I have to face the reality that my gaming group has disintigrated. My wild campaign changes are likely to blame. Learning new rules and adjusting to a new setting is difficult. I've asked a lot of my players and I think it was just too much. One of my (maybe) former players said to me over the holidays, "I really miss D&D. When are we going to play D&D again?" I responded that I would love to play D&D and was looking forward to seeing her run a game, thank-you-so-much-for-volunteering. That went over like a lead balloon.

I know what she wants. I was being obnoxiously obtuse, and for that I apologize to her. The bottom line is that I, as a game master/referee/dungeon master have no love for either Dungeons or Dragons anymore. None of the editions appeals to me. They're all fraught with problems. AD&D is, frankly, an unbalaced mess. Witness the rules gymnastics, rewrites and additions that my colleague Alexis has gone through to improve his game and overcome the problems in the AD&D rules in this fine blog he writes. The idea of going back to that system appeals to me for its nostalgia, but that's about it. I think that the morass of text that consititues 2nd Edition D&D needs no further criticism from me. 3.x edition is interesting, and I certainly have a lot of material for it, but once 7th level is attained, the game becomes almost unplayable. 4th edition hasn't even been a consideration for me. I consider it a brutal watering-down of the D&D meta-concept into a video game that is played on paper. The designers, in their haste to bring about something "hip" and "cool" for the "kids" released game that that is devoid of any D&D-ness that I would recognize aside from some spell names and the concept of a character class and levels.

T5 fits my ideal of a game that is well-designed and playable. So why isn't it working? Where are my players? Why aren't they clamoring to come over and explore the great undiscovered galaxay? I can blame myself only. I ran a few dud sessions that were poorly constructed with a heavy emphasis on rules discovery. In short, they were boring. I know this. Being boring is the unforgivable sin of role-playing game mastering. I just thought we could get past those awkward sessions, but it seems that it was too much. I have had a multi-session game fully-prepared and sitting on my desk for over two months now. I have a well-detailed hunk of galaxy waiting to be explored. I used to wonder if I'd ever run it for anyone. I'm not wondering so much anymore.

With my group as scattered as they are, players living 50 miles or more to the north and south of me, a player re-locating over 300 miles away to Portland, Oregon and my wife no longer interested in table top RPGs (or at least ones that I'm running), I've run out of players. And I'm not keen on the idea of finding new ones. What I'd like to do is find a regular group where I could play. Maybe re-charge my batteries and offer to run a session or two when that DM decides he or she needs a break. At this point this is all just noise in the wind. Work is extremely demanding at the moment and shows no signs of letting up until much later this year. The stress of the job is sapping my desire to do the legwork necessary to find a suitable group. It's a downward spiral.

Happy New Year everyone!

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Computerized D&D
Posted under Today's Special by: Carl on 12/16/2009 9:06:58 PM

Check this out.

Neat, huh? I mean, if I had $10,000 and a team of coders laying around I might be implementing a system like this, too. However, I don't have that kind of scratch.

But that's only one problem. Buy-in is steep, but that's only the first gate. The second gate is designing, coding and implementing the software necessary for this kind of thing. We've got a word in "the industry" for this sort of approach to a problem: Overkill. And for that reason, I probably wouldn't use this kind of system for D&D or any other RPG, even if it was handed to me on a platter. I can only imagine what kind of maintenance has to go into a project like that. Actually, I don't have to imagine. I work on millions of lines of code every day -- tens of thousands of it I wrote myself.

Sure, it's fun for a bunch of college kids with a college CompSci department R&D budget to do something like this, but how does the average gamer (if there even is such a thing) do something like this? Would it actually improve their game, or would they just be gold-plating a turd? I think you can guess at my answer.

I posit this: this guy did this with less than 5% of those other guys budget and resources. Consider that for a moment: one guy accomplished the same thing as that team of guys with the big-ass budget and all kinds of Microsoft support and he did it YEARS ago when even his own implementation would be considered expensive. Additionally, I think he did it better because his solution actually uses miniatures and dice.

I used to run my D&D games like he does. I projected my map onto a playing surface using a brand-new $300 digital light projector (they're cheaper now), implemented a fog-of-war and ran my games. I'm still trying to figure out how to do this with Traveller because the mapping requirements and the tactical game are different. I know what I'm going to use for hardware, though, and it's not going to be a Microsoft Surface unit. I'll just use one of these for my gaming surface. By the time I'm ready to implement that piece of hardware, the price should be less than 10% of a Surface unit. I won't need a lot of code to handle "touch" events on the screen, and I certainly won't need to implement the Surface API to write my software.

But it looks kind of cool, doesn't it?

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It Is Finished.
Posted under From the Grill by: Carl on 12/11/2009 8:15:40 PM

I've completed my T5 AstroSynthesis application. I spent about 12 hours on it a week ago, Sunday and wrapped it up.

Now all I have to do is make it pretty. And distributable. Of course, I'll need the T5 publisher's permission first, so I'll just send him a copy.

Now all we have to do is schedule a game.

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Thom Wants To Know When The Next Game Day Is
Posted under Today's Special by: Carl on 11/30/2009 2:01:02 PM

I told him I didn't know. Do you?

While thinking about the difficulties of scheduling sessions, and the bullshit I've posted so far about video conferencing and hanging it all up and juxtaposing that against Alexis' stuff about, "it's called a WORK of art, not a PLAY of art!" (pardon my brutal mis-quotation, Alexis, I'm going for effect) I thought of a few work-arounds for our situation.

The first one is, schedule a game and show up. Yes, this means you, reader. If I have not met you personally, and you read this blog and you would still like to play, let me know. We can arrange a meeting and go through an introduction and get to know each other a little. If you still want to play after all that, we'll figure something out. If you already play in the game and I do know you, and you still want to play, schedule the game and show up. I'll have something for you.

I don't want to fail to schedule a game because not enough people showed up. That's bullshit. If it's me and one other person, we can game. I'm throwing the party out the window here in the metaphysical sense. We have a player group that has enough characters that if even one person shows up, we can have a game.

So what happens to all the other (player) characters when their players aren't there? One simple answer is that they're in cold sleep. Another simple answer is that they're so busy attending their crew station on the ship that they were unable to participate directly in the day's adventure. We've discussed this in-person and on this blog. This will hurt continuity a bit among the players and will likely mean that when particular players aren't there, the session doesn't further their goals (which may be critical to the survival of the ship) or it may mean that the next time we all get together no one knows what the fuck is going on. That happens already, so I don't think this is going to hurt us more.

Do you want to game? Propose a date in the comments. I'll tell you whether I can make it happen or not. As of yesterday, I'm scheduled for non-gaming activities until December 19th. I have some events to attend (like the Child's Play Auction) but I will be happy to try and accommodate requests.

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