The first shot is from a few weeks ago, taken a few hundred miles northeast of the Shire, in the easternmost reaches of the north downs. It's one of the passes into the mountains that leads (after quite a lot of winding and ambushes and scary dragon kin) into the southernmost reaches of Angmar, the Witch King's seat of power. The statues framing the pass look a lot like Nazgul to me. The dark trail on the ground marks the passage of a massive army that went through not too long ago (now occupying the valley of Dol Dinen to the south).

Rivendell. What more do you need to say? In this shot, Geiri pauses on the steep, steep path leading down into Imladris to take in The Last Homely House. At this point in the game's timeline, the Fellowship is resting up after all the misadventures that got the hobbits there from the Shire; Gandalf and Elrond are in deep council; Aragorn ponders the reforging of Narsil; Boromir remains as far from Elrond as he can; Gloin hasn't arrived yet, nor has Legolas; Frodo mopes; Samwise worries about him; Bilbo spends his time in the Hall of Flame, telling riddles... and Merry and Pippin smoke barrels of Old Toby don't pay much attention to anyone else.

Geiri and Tiranor, somewhere in the inhospitable reaches between the northern Shire and Lake Evendim.

Geiri, at Tinundir -- Dunedain-held ruins along the shores of Evendim, at sunset.

Geiri, facing off against one of the bestial gauradan, LotRO's nod to werewolves while staying true to Tolkein. They're very beast-like in movement and appearance (I had to work at getting a screenshot that showed me their human face under the wolf head for several minutes and numerous fights), and their tribal areas are very cool. I particularly like their facial characteristics; that lantern jaw and heavy brow really sets them apart from other Men.

In this shot, I'm doing what I usually do: smashing my shield into the bad guy's face until Tiranor gets a couple arrows into them and they decide to have a lie-down.

And that's it, for now. I tried to get a shot that captured us on our (new!) horses, riding through frozen Forochel, with the northern lights in the sky and our breath coming out in white puffs, but I never quite got it all in a good shot at the same time, so that will have to wait.

I'll have some screenies from LotRO soon as well, because they are much prettier. WoW is much more comic-book style, but pretty in it's own way... or maybe I'm just a nerd.

This image is from a Karazhan run that, judging from the gear I'm wearing and who I'm grouped with, was probably about 2 or 3 months ago. First, I like this picture because it's kind of a heroic action shot: Grezzk has just released an arrow at Prince Malcheezar, Octan's water elemental is blasting an ice bolt over my head at the target... it's cool.

Second, it's a pretty good shot of my customized user interface in action. I've tweaked the look of the game a lot from the default (thanks to Blizzard making the UI pretty much open-source for developers to mess with at will and release addons for). If you click on the picture above, it links to the Flickr page where I've made a bunch of notes on the elements in the picture, just because I've never done that before, and it was pretty fun to do.

Next...

Whoops. I killed Dr. Boom.

Who's Dr. Boom? Officially, he's a guy you're supposed to kill in this one quest in Netherstorm -- a mad goblin who specializes in making exploding robots or something. The thing is, the guy has like like a million-zillion hit points, so in the quest you get some special bombs that you can chuck at him if you can get close enough -- hit him with like four of them and he goes down. Unofficially, his stupidly high health and the fact that he never aggros on you -- just surrounds himself with bombs -- means that ranged DPS like mages and hunters can use him to test out new shot rotations with a DPS-meter running to see what options do more damage, without worrying about (a) killing your target or (b) dying.

I had cause to use him for that purpose last weekend.

Turns out, you will eventually have to worry about (a).

I mean, I did my job, and I didn't screw up (too much: I saved that for my second run), and I filled a role that needed filled and did the damage that needed to be done. But that was it. I wasn't posting chart-topping numbers, I wasn't three-times higher than the next higher damage-class, and I wasn't doing as much damage as all the other teammates put together.

Eventually, I manage all those things in Karazhan and Heroic-level dungeon teams, but not that time. I was the new guy. I was decently geared for entry-level, but that was it.

And that stage... being the new guy with "good-enough" but not actually "good" gear, and not knowing what I was doing and actually gimping my performance simply because I was focusing so hard on just not screwing up? That stage was a LONG, LONG TIME AGO.

Note that I say "was" a long time ago. As of last night, I'm back in that same place again. I'm the guy with "good enough, but not *good*" gear -- the one who needs to learn the fights before he relaxes enough to really open the throttle up -- the one who died about 2/3rds of the way through every boss fight. I did the job I was brought in to do, but it wasn't A+... it was ... maybe a B-, maybe a C. "Shows promise, needs to focus" writes the teacher in my new class -- not nearly as 'easy' as my old class.

A friend from my old guild who convinced me to join him in this new guild told me that he really wanted me to come in and just blow the doors off some of the cockier members of the guild. That didn't happen last night.

But it will.

I like this new pond. It's a lot bigger.

Playing Grezzk, I've been working on the new event in World of Warcraft -- the introduction of the Shattered Sun Offensive and all the heroic behind the scenes effort (read: repeatable quests) that go into it -- as you complete quests, you and all the other folks doing those quests on the server help the 'progress' of the war effort move along -- over time, you gain a foothold on the island, then expand it, get logistical support, et cetera, et cetera.

I've really enjoyed being part of the Offensive. This can be shown numerically, because the quests themselves pay pretty well and advance your reputation with the Shattered Sun faction -- in the short time since this faction was introduced, I've gone from 500 gold to the almsot 5200 I need to get an epic-speed flying mount and because Exalted with the faction weeks ago... all without trying... just ENJOYING my small part in the war effort. Good stuff.

But I'm kind of done with that. I enjoy my alt characters a lot, but at the same time I like playing GREZZ: I've got more play-time on him AT level 70 than the play time I have on all his other 69 levels combined (a tribute both to the character and to the piles of stuff there is to do in the end game), and there is a lot more stuff to see in the game that I haven't yet -- 'end game' stuff that no one will run come Halloween/Thanksgiving when the new expansion comes out. There are seven 25-man dungeons in the end-game, and I've seen one of them. I'd really like to fix that.

I was in a guild that was gearing up to hit that content really hard, and it melted down. Scholomance Debate Team went from a really quirky family to a truly poisonous environment in a matter of weeks. In Lee's words, "it was like dating a really pretty, smart, sexy girl for six months... and then finding out that she was in a mental institution for the three years just before she met you... and then escaped."

When all the happened, I just didn't have time to deal with it; I wasn't an officer or a class lead, and frankly between Kate moving out here and looking for a new job, I just had more important stuff to think about.

So I moved into a casual guild of people I knew who were thinking about doing a little more raiding then they had been. What they were moving up and in to was stuff I'd already done a bunch, but it was still fun to see it again through new eyes. I wasn't sure it was the right fit for what I wanted, but the GL talked to me about what he wanted to do in the future, and convinced me to stay. That was just before the wedding.

While I was off getting married, the guild leader quit the game during a firestorm of a guild meltdown that I'm pretty glad I missed.

Right. Guildless again. Farstriders is a small server (note: still 5 times higher population than the average CoH server), and there are really only about three guilds who are doing the content I'd like to see, and they're all kind of 'hardcore' raiding guilds; to use an amateur-sports analogy, I was playing with my friends, out in the park, on weekends. These guys are trying to win their division the sponsored league play.

But seriously? It's that or doing a paid transfer to another, much bigger server and looking for a 'responsible, but casual' guild that would take in a stranger.

So I'm basically trying out for one of the local Big Names this week. It's a series of job interviews all over again.

Honestly? I'm pretty excited.

And in the meantime, i get to play Lord of the Rings with Kate, one which we've really picked out our 'mains' and started some serious exploration of the higher-end areas. People want us to get to Rivendell in time to give Aragorn a message! We've seen Angmar! (Well, we snuck into the southernmost passes leading into angmar and saw a really terrifyingly big dragon go by overhead.)

Pretty heady stuff for a steadfast dwarven guardian and his adorable elven hunting companion. (It's my blog, so she's his companion. :)

Sometime last month, Dave ran a session of Ill Met by Gaslight, and that was good.

A little while before that, I ran a session of In a Wicked Age down at Lee and De's, and that was good too.

I haven't run Spirit of the Century this year... maybe since last November.

I haven't run a session of Galactic since mid-December.

Which would leave me posting mostly about World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings online (which, unlike my local playerbase/social calendar, is always available). I don't really want to do that (though I may have a "WTB: PvE Hordeside Raiding Guild that won't Melt Down" post coming up at some point), so that has left me with not a lot to write at the moment.

In lieu of slew of WoW/LotRO-centric posts, I've installed two twitter feeds into the sidebar to let me natter on, in a constrained fashion, regarding whatever bit of digital-adventure minutia I'm currently obsessing over.

And seriously?

"Skilled Orc Hunter WTB: Hordeside raiding guild that won't melt down. Will transfer servers for new content and good group of players."

I blame [this misunderstanding on] what came later. When I designed My Life with Master, my play style was characterized by fluid scenes involving multiple player characters, a natural enjoyment of roleplay and dialogue without any particular hurry to use the resolution mechanics, and no particular concern for equitable apportionment of screen time. To my great frustration, it has subsequently become characterized by formalized stakes-setting, abrupt usage of resolution mechanics, and narration at the expense of roleplay.

Does that boldface thing sound like some of the less-successful Primetime Adventures play? Hmm...

So there's this thing I always find myself apologizing for on the Story Games forums, and it boils down to something like this:

"Here's some Actual Play that I wanted to share with everyone. It's going to be long, although there's only a few conflicts: we got through about five scenes in the five hours we played -- we just don't play as fast as everyone seems to."

Why did I bother apologizing for something like that? We had a good time with our five hours -- we did some cool stuff and had fun, right? However, I'd been reading so much on the ways that various folks ran their games (and I mean THEIR games -- games THEY wrote) that I wanted to at least try for the kind of style envisioned by person who wrote the game.

What did that mean? Well, based on what I had interpreted to be the case, the idea was to cut into the action, drive straight for whatever the current conflict might be, get there, engage the conflict mechanics as soon as logically possible, figure out what happened, and then narrate it. Then immediately cut to the next scene.

Hmm. Damn, it doesn't even sound viable when I describe it like that. Often it wasn't, although using PTA's rule of "skip anything that would bore the audience" works better.

Result? Usually, Epic Fail.

So lately, I've kind of let that go, a little bit at a time. De helped with this in one of her comments on this blog: "So we play slow? So what, we have fun," and lately I've come to a better place for MYSELF in gaming, where I *still* focus on the next drama- or conflict-laden scene, and still try to get to a point of conflict IN that scene, but I get there with more roleplaying, less narrating, and let more of the CONFLICT be roleplay, with the system itself used to determine the final 'what happened?'

There was a really good example of this in the second-to-last Primetime Adventures game I ran -- so much so that I really started to feel like I was "getting" that game (ironically, but simply letting go and not TRYING to "get" it.)

So, is it stupid be kind of relieved and "cleared" to find out that most of my concern over playing the game wrong stems from incorrect assumptions on my part about how it's being played by others, from the beginning? I hope not: I will feel that way, regardless.

These crazy new games, they talk a lot about the Story and how to get to it -- something I already know, but was sloppy about in the past. They've helped with that. However, all that very specific language about the story made it seem as though the story itself, and the creation of it also had to be parsed out and diced and sliced in the same very specific way, or all the advice would be useless. USELESS!

And it's not that way; it's like writing advice. Yes, it's often good and useful and helpful, but if you try to observe and follow every single bit of good advice all at once, being careful not to forget anything and to get all the words exactly right in the first draft...

... it's going to fucking suck. I mean, it's going to godawful unreadable shit. There will be a gem here and there, and you'll cling to those gems and analyze the HELL out of them, because they are undeniably BETTER than what you were doing before, but the net result is worse.

You can't do it that way. You write. You keep those other new things in mind, and let them all gradually sink in over a great deal of time, or you incorporate one thing at a time until you don't think about it anymore, then add the next thing.

Why do you do it that way? Because if you can write at all, you already know how to write in a way that makes you happy, and that is the important thing you have to hold on to no. matter. what.

The same is true of play. I got all excited for a while about how I could be doing things better, and lost track of the fact that what I was doing already makes me pretty goddamn happy. So I let all those little guides and hints sit to the side, and I'm slowly working them in, a little at a time, and I'm not worrying about the fact that I'm doing it 'wrong', according to what I'd thought I'd read.

And just about the time I got completely comfortable with being wrong, I find out I was okay, all along.

Life is funny that way.

Nobilis is also getting a reprint by Eos Press. The reprint will be revised and twice as thick as the 2nd edition, due to resizing the book to 8.5" x 11"; will contain new art, a new visual style, and content from The Game of Powers Live-action RP rules. (Which is ironic, since I always thought the rules in Game of Powers worked better for TTRPGs than the main rulebook's more LARPish rules.)

* No Galactic or Spirit of the Century. *sad panda*

* I led a Kara raid up through the Opera event on Wednesday. That was fun in a wacky way; more stress, but we had a weird group and ended up doing stuff like taking out Moroes and company with no priests, chain-traps, and a lot of shooting things in the face.

* One of the other Raids on a 'free' night fell through, which left me with nothing to do, so I hopped on Syncerus the Drood and chewed up Strangethorn Vale and Duskwallow Marsh for awhile, dinging both 40 (hellooooo Dire Bear form) and 41.

* I didn't really want to watch the Oscars, so I played during that while Kate watched and filed a bunch of her books on our now-full shelves. This led to FINALLY getting Kayti done with the huge Zul Farrak dungeon for which I've been gathering quests and prepatory gear for... three months? A long time. During the run I dinged 47, and turning in the (eight!) quests afterwards took her all through 47 tp 48. Tanking the run was fun, though the paladin threat generation isn't as easy as I recall (partly due to trigger-happy pug-teammates).

Grezzk's guild is struggling to recreate itself in an active-raiding mold. Consequently, raid schedules are in flux, the officer corp is in flux, the guild charter... you get the picture. Old officers unhappy with the changes are leaving, etc. etc.

Y'know what I'm doing about it? Nothing. I went to the (vent-based) meeting to vote on various changes, and offered my two cents and a reality check or two on some of the rules, but volunteer to be a raid leader? No. Volunteer to be an officer? No.

Thanks. I've done that. I have the t-shirt and the "die in a fire" emails from former guildmates.

I log on. I play. If I'm really lucky, I get in a group with some folks and we have a good time. If not, I still get to blow stuff up and mess with my little characters and play a game.

A second job (unpaid, that is) I do not need.

First, we've had four sessions now and I haven't done a report yet. The first one was back in late November, and the details are a bit hazy.

Second, a ton of stuff has gone on, and inevitably, I'm going to forget some stuff.

Third, I want to talk a bit about the mechanics in the game, so that's going to color things a bit, and there's a lot of that to talk about.

I'm going to give a shot, though, because the game deserves the thought and discussion.

So let's start from the beginning.

In Session 0, we had too many players. That's all right, because (a) one guy wasn't going to be able to stay with us for the whole run and (b) with a few extra players, we were more likely to have enough people to play even if someone couldn't make a session.

These are the characters we came up with. We each also had to come up with one planet and one faction that's active in the setting, and you repeat that between each of your three quests, also, during the first session, every Captain comes up with their own cliffhanger for the first quest to start with. They also pick the world the quest will feature. The player on the left picks a faction that will be prevalent. The player on the right comes up with a central NPC for the quest.

So there is a lot of communal world-building going on throughout the game, which means that each game of Galactic is very different in tone, elements, and story than any OTHER game, despite the "main" story being the same. (Even the Scourge itself is different in each game.)

Now, on the surface, Galactic looks like the kind of game where no one can miss a session. The reason for that is the way character creation works. Everyone makes up a starship captain, and then we sort of 'meet' each captain in turn, and everyone else at the table (except the gm) makes a crew member for that captain. Captains and their ships can run the gamut from an officer of the Concordant Navy to the captain of a commercial cruise ship to the leader of a ragtag group of scavengers -- it's all good. Thing is, it seems like "if someone doesn't show, then that crewmember isn't there on every captain's scene, and so forth", but as long as you make the 'minimum' number of players (which might be three plus the GM, maybe, but which could work with just two players, short-term), you're good to go.

The basic background of the setting is that mankind, after creating the huge Galactic Republic, was wiped out by the mysterious Scourge. One colony ship escaped the genocide, and founded a new home on a nasty, brutish world at the end of nowhere. They finally returned to the stars, found out about their lost history, and are starting to explore and colonize back in the direction of the "Core" -- the home of the original Republic. On the way, they run into lots of alien races who were once part of the Republic (and who often revile or worship humanity, by turns), as well as the ruins and abandoned technology of their own ancestors.

And then the Scourge wakes up.

The game is about how these captains (working alone for the most part) try to stop the thing that no one could stop the last time. It's got a strong feel of the new Battlestar Galactica for me, both in the story tone and in the mechanics and interplay of crew and captains.

MECHANICS

This is basically how the conflict works out.

A scene opens with a captain. We set up what happens and we play. At some point in there -- maybe right away, maybe later -- we get to a point where either I or the Captain say that something happens that other one says "no" to, and that's where and when we go to the Conflict system.

The conflict system works like so: in true Firefly- or BSG-style, there's two sides to every conflict -- there's "what the conflict is ostensibly about" and "the relationship between the Captain and one of the crew that is either going to be strengthened by Trust or weakened by Doubt as a result of what happens." It's important to understand that Winning or Losing the Goal happens INDEPENDENTLY of the Trust/vs/Doubt thing with the crewmember. You can totally get your ass kicked in the epic space battle, but the crewmember who is "on the hook" for that scene could trust you more at the end, because of the WAY things happened. Or vice versa: you could kick ass and take names, but your actions fill the crewmember with Doubt.

Anyway:

1. You figure out what the Conflict is about, and which crewmember is 'on the hook'. (This is my term for it -- not the game's.)

2. Then, the Crew who are involved take the one dice that they get to contribute to the conflict (there are painful and dangerous ways to contribute more dice -- sometimes a LOT more dice -- using what I and the author call the "leaf on the wind" mechanic) and decide if that dice is going to help the Quest or the Crew side of the conflict.

3. Then, the GM decides where he is going to allocate his dice in the conflict -- is it mostly going toward weakening the crew's resolve, or to resisting the Goal of the quest? Maybe an even mix? The GM has a budget of dice he can use on each captain (plus any Doubt the crew has in the captain), so I can't just crush them every time with as many dice as I want.

4. Once the captain sees where the crew are putting their effort, and what forces are arrayed against him, he puts out his own dice, which can be quite numerous -- he has multi-dice 'archetypes' that can be brought to bear, as well as the ability to utilize any Trust that he's earned from any of his crew (like any captain, he can put the crew's Trust to use, though that puts that Trust at risk -- he can lose it). Finally, he can decide that whatever he's doing might put innocent bystanders at risk, and the bigger those potential Consequences are, the more extra dice he can bring in. They are BIG dice too, those Consequence dice, so they're very tempting.

When it's all said and done, the dice are all arrayed against each other, and there is rolling, and comparisons a lot like the old dice game "War", and narration of that round happens, and then folks might have lost, or they might 'give', or they might rally and go into another round and keep battling until the whole thing is resolved. At the end, the Captain has either won or lost their goal, and one of the crew members has either gained Doubt or Trust in the captain (and the same crewmember can totally have both Trust AND Doubt in the captain, over time, which is awesome.

Once that scene is done, we do it all again with the NEXT player; we switch to a new captain, everyone switches gears to playing a new character, and off we go.

So... that's kind of what happens in play.

STORY/GAME STRUCTURE

This is a very set kind of story arc. Each captain plays through three quests. A quest is over when the captain wins three conflicts having to do with that quest. Now... that might be three wins in a row, or 2 wins, then a loss, and then a win; or maybe five straight losses followed by three wins (which would be kind of cool). Doesn't matter -- at some point, they get the three wins, the quest is accomplished, and they move to the next, then the next. (Unless they die -- they CAN die, and there are provisions in place for that.)

Once the third quest is done, we move to the Last Big Quest, and at the end humanity is either saved or it's wiped out by the Scourge. The end.

Right now, we're about four sessions in, and pretty much everyone is done with their first quest.

Session 1 (Chris, Tim, Dave)

We started with Tim's Captain Nils, the captain of Isabel's Dream, which is ostensibly a cruise ship, but is also a neutral ground for diplomatic meetings and happens to be armed (definsively!) to the bloody teeth.

Tim had a great cliffhanger set up, and I was looking forward to it, but I also wanted to make sure we were 'getting our roleplay in.' Matt Wilson is a great game designer, but in playing his other 'big' game, Primetime Adventures, I'd noticed that players got wrapped up enough in the mechanics that they didn't... you know... "just roleplay" -- they only did with regards to the Conflict -- making for very focused, but very short scenes... maybe only a few lines of dialog and lots of narrative. That's partly Matt's playstyle (as I understand it), but I wanted to make sure that we were taking the time to roleplay just for the sake of roleplaying as well.

Also, this "who is the 'featured' crewmember" thing was kind of new to everyone, so I took a page from BSG and started the 'show' with a scene between the captain and the crewmember-of-note. In this case, that was Dave's college student, working as an assistant purser on the ship.

We opened the scene with Tim's captain briefing the purser on the seating arrangements for a big banquet that evening on the ship. This was an impromptu thing, but Tim really rose to the occasion, rattling off page after page of detailed "do's" and "DO NOTS" about everyone attending the party -- who couldn't sit next to who, and why, and which group's hated which other groups, or who needed special treatment, or practices, or food, or greetings -- while the harried and utterly overwhelmed purser trailed along in his wake, nodding and trying to take notes. The scene really illustrates how good Nils is at his role (which is largely an act) and how new to the whole thing Dave's purser is.

So now the cliffhanger, which is simply this:

During the banquet, as the Dream comes into orbit over the planet of R___, the mysterious black box in Captain Belinar's room (passed down for generations in his family in readiness for 'when the Scourge return') begins to beep. The captain is called to his suite, and he and a few select members of his crew enter. As soon as they do, the box emits every more beeps, and the ship shifts perceptibly. The helm hails the captain, and informs him they have just lost all steerage control, and the ship has moved into a landing pattern with the planet's surface.

There are a few seconds of silence, and the captain comments, "It's unfortunate that we're not atmosphere capable."

The goal for the conflict was "Get control of the ship away from the box, before we enter the atmosphere."

I'd love to give a play-by-play, but it's been months, so here were the key bits:
* Dave's neophyte-purser character was at some level mind-melded with the mysterious black box.
* Chris' security chief/ship's chaplain was a pain in the captain's tuchas.
* The captain kept the ship from entering orbit by cutting all the main power in the ship (including things like the gravity control) and using on-board nuclear missiles (!), fired at the planet (!!!) to introduce enough counter-momentum to get back into a shaky low-orbit.
* Dave's character, as a college-level historian, was shocked that the captain targeted the planet randomly to induce the right thrust for the ship, ignoring the fact that he was targeting key bits of the local ruins, such as the famed "Third Pylon", but the captain's plan paid off : the planet's highly damaging Acid Raid (which actually shouldn't have been falling during that phase of the planet's weather) damaged the missiles enough that they didn't damage anything of any importance on the uninhabited planet -- several didn't even fire.

We then switched to Dave's character, Allysande Daen, who's main goal is to track down her father, a former navy admiral, and find out what happened to him and What's Going On.

We join the crew making planet fall on Ando III, a cool-temperate planet with a vaguely oriental flavor, on which "Zeno", Daen's father's former XO, is living... in a well-heeled asylum.

Tim's crewmember Bosley, Daen's personal 'batman' is the crewmember on the hook. Chris is playing "Smoke" the stoner-mode mechanic who keeps Daen's "Heart of Darkness" working. Daen and Bosley are heading to the Asylum. Smoke is heading to the local bazaar to scrounge up some supplies.

Bosley, who knows Daen well, is quietly talking with her during the mechanized rickshaw ride to the asylum. They're discussing things like "Are you prepared to tell him how your career is doing?" (It isn't: she left the navy to pursue this personal quest.)

Dave's cliffhanger setup was the next bit:

Daen and Bosley walk into the public "sun room" where Zeno and a number of other patients are sitting around doing various sun-room activities. He looks up and recognizes her. She says "Hello, Commander. I'm looking for my father, and I was hoping you might be able to help me find him."

The old man nods and says "I was afraid of that." Then he and EVERY OTHER PATIENT IN THE ROOM pulls guns out from under their lap blankets and open fire.

The goal for the conflict is essentially "Win the firefight without killing Zeno."

((A word about conflict goals: they are best when they have interesting failure options built into them. "Survive the fight." is boring, but "Survive without killing Xeno" is cool: you can LOSE the conflict, but that could mean lots of things. Maybe you lose the firefight; or have to flee; or the police arrive and arrest everyone; or you win, but you shoot the one source of information you have... or a dozen other things. Setting up a good conflict WITH INTERESTING FAILURE OPTIONS is a key part of not just Galactic, but any game. Losing should be just as interesting, if not more so, than winning.))

So there's a gunfight. Meanwhile, Smoke is in the bazaar, and only a few seconds after the shots start in the asylum, some guys jump him in the bazaar and he's running for his life and shouting for help from the Captain as well. (His crew-dice were in on the side of winning the Crew conflict, not the Quest one -- how well she handled Smoke's problems would build Trust with Bosley. Bosley was ALSO in on the Crew conflict, not the quest.)

Again, I have only a few bullet points.
* The captain took a few bullets in this fight. Dice that get knocked out of a conflict stand the chance of being "impaired" - made unavailable for the rest of the quest. A LOT of Daen's "Warrior" archetype dice got impaired during the fight, so that's how that was narrated.
* Dave went to a lot of work to protect both Tim and Chris's dice from getting knocked out -- lots of shouted commands and shoving Bosley out of harm's way and suchlike.
* Some 'deep cover' agents from the organization that Daen is working with a lot showed up to help out (use of her Connections trait, which allows (or forces) rerolls)
* Dave ended up winning the conflict, and closes in on Zeno, who's run out of bullets. He agrees to talk, and then goes into a violent seizure (seizures being one of the "Scourge traits" in this version of the game.

And cut to the next guy.

Captain Argon Slash is docking his ship, the Legion, on "The Drift" -- a massive space-station in the middle of uninhabited space, comprised of hundreds if not thousands of different ships crushed, bound, and welded together. Each captain has his own 'flavor', and Slash's is a kind of mix between Firefly and an anime where the characters often make Super Deformed angry-faces. The crewmembers for this part of the quest are Sonja, Slash's ex-wife and the ship's negotiator; and Jake, who's sort of a young, crazy, gun-ho shootist (and Slash's fifth-cousin).

Slash, who collected crazy Solar Republic artifacts (and then tries to integrate them with his ship), has discovered a weird pyramidal object. He's not sure what it does, but he's heard a rumor that at the heart of the Drift are ships that date back as far as the Solar Republic -- ships that still WORK. His 'plan' is to find a way into the core of the gang-turf-controlled Drift and plug the device in... and just... see what happens.

Which is his approach to most ancient tech.

The three are heading toward a meeting with a contact on the Drift who controls the territory they need to get through when they're jumped by members of the neo-luddite, anti-expansion "Blue Sky" faction.

Slash holds them off -- thermal detonator in Jabba's Palace-style -- with a Mysterious Ancient Artifact (or two). Jake is waiting (and eager) for orders to shoot. Sonja is verbally sniping at everyone. The following verbal exchange takes place

Sonya: "Listen to the man -- I was once married to him, and I can assure you it's dangerous to get close to him."
Blue Sky: "Silence! We would hear nothing from someone who has succumbed to the sin of divorce!"
Sonya: "Excuse me?!?"
Blue Sky: "Quiet!"
Sonya: "All right, you rudimentary-lathe people have gone too far."

And that's when the shooting starts.

* Slash was pretty much conning the Blue Sky folks all the way through.
* Jake's crew dice where very hot -- he was shooting all over.
* Sonya was saved from 'knock out' by Argon's love of tech. She takes a shot and the chest and Slash cries out, running over to her and pawing at the hole in her clothing. She protests that she's fine -- and he reveals he was just checking to see if the armor weave that he put into her jacket (without her knowledge) held. It did! Slash is happy -- Sonya is pissed.

I put a LOT of dice against the Crew aspect on this fight, cuz I wanted Sonya to have Doubt in Slash, but the group banded together and held me off -- Sonya, although she doesn't *like* Argon very much, does *trust* him... at least she trusts his instincts with technology. (Ironically, it's turned out that Sonya is the only crewmember who DOES have trust in Argon... maybe the other's don't know him that well?)

The Blue Sky scatters, and Jake runs off after them, whooping and hollering. Sonya storms off back to the ship. Argon is left by himself.

Back to Captain Nils

The goal of this conflict was not very good on my part -- simply "Get Control of the Ship back from the Box." It was a FUNNY conflict, to be sure, but not a good one -- failure would have resulted in nothing much happening, which sucks. Luckily, they one.

What happened.
* The box used some kind of lightning on Chris' guy... then sort of mind-controlled him. Nils had to incapacitate him with some other ancient family-heirloom widget.
* Dave's character was the box-translator most of the way through this. ("No, no, using the blue lightning against the Reverend is BAD!")
* The box was receiving a signal from the planet, telling it to come down to the planet. The Signal is on U-space frequency ... ironically, from the just-saved-from-destruction Third Pylon!
* Nils is able to control the box by speaking commands to it in Trilatian. (The Solar Republic version of the /sudo command.)

And Allysande Daen...
With Zeno having seizures and possibly doing himself serious internal harm, SMOKE has to talk the Captain through dosing the man on something that will bring him out of the seizures and subdue him... without killing him. Luckily, Smoke is something of a 'pharmaceutical expert'.
* Smoke gives quick, professional medical advice and actually shouts at Allysande when she hesitates at one point.
* She trust him and follows his instructions.
* Bosley now really trusts her for her success and for supporting her crew. (Though I think we awarded Trust wrong here...)

... and that was the end of session one. I'll put another post up for Sessions 2 and 3 combined, and a third for Session Four, which is where we are now.

I've been giving my Google-calendar a workout for the last couple days, because although I am a gamer of many different colors and stripes, I have traveled down the road of life-imbalance quite a few times since the early 90s (oh, those early MUDs and MUSHes; oh those hours of Space Hulk and Battletech map creation), mid-90s, and far far more recently... and I'd just rather not go back there, thanks.

So: I raid in WoW (though I could wish for a little more progression-status and a little less farm-status -- I did my farming in my youth :P), and I have some alts I really enjoy, and I play LotRO, and a have a copy of Tabula Rasa winging its way to me for a practically criminal discount, and I have table top games I'm running and even more that I want to run, and then there's writing stuff, and reading stuff... the question before me is "how do I get enough time to 'blow stuff up', without ensuring that I have "ALL THE TIME YOU COULD EVER WANT, AND THEN SOME, YOU BASTARD"?

Ahem.

I'm not an expert, but these are the guidelines I'm working with right now.

1. Schedule my time. I don't mean just my play time, but just flat out schedule the Big Stuff that needs doing during the next week. Note: I use the word "needs" advisedly, and not without some irony; leveling my druid does not "need" doing... it's just one of those things I'd enjoy getting to do.

2. Kate and Kaylee first. The time I will, without fail, spend with My Girls during the week goes on the calendar first. Everything else bends to adapt. Non-negotiable. This is fairly easy for Kaylee-time, as Jackie and I already have a set schedule that pretty much ensures I see her every day (barring the off-weekend). Kate and I -- not habitually that detail-oriented -- are working on actually scheduling stuff, too: weekly date nights and the Regular Tuesday Night Activity (currently swing dancing). This also (happily) includes some activities like LotRO and watching geeky shows like Avatar, so... Win/Win!

3. Limited 'play commitments'. I have a limited amount of time to be online and playing stuff. Call it 15 to 20 hours a week. My guild has planned activities that take about 15 to 20 hours a week. I do ****NOT**** want to spend all my online time on those planned activities. Therefore, I need to strictly limit my raiding commitments. This basically boils down to (selfishly, very selfishly) signing up only for stuff *I* really want to do, and NOT signing up for things just to 'help folks out'. I've prioritized my time helping online-people out before, and it always means I spend too much time online with an exponentially decreasing amount of personal enjoyment. I play so *I* can have fun; bugger off, internets. This rule means I get to spend a good portion of 'me' time completely unstructured. I approve.

4. Vetoes Unless I am currently involved in some kind of group activity in which my sudden departure will result in screwing over a bunch of other people. (I'm GMing a game, a central player in a game, or in some kind of group, online), Kate (and, to a lesser degree, Kaylee) can ask me to drop what I'm doing. ((Emergencies, of COURSE, mean that I say "sorry guys, gotta go" and I f-ing GO. Duh. Obviously.)) Conversely, I reserve the right to go kill stuff instead of watching a third hour of Trading Spaces... or Little Einsteins.

There are unspoken parts of this, like the assumption that there will be lots of 'white space' on my calendar that will get filled in naturally with the "sand" of honey-dos, chores, random acts of laziness, and especially impromptu fun stuff involving either The Girls, or Games, or both.

But you have to lay out the Big Stuff first, before the whole area fills in with sand and leaves no room for them.

Or so it seems to me. I'll report back, maybe, on how it all works in practice.

Example: In World of Warcraft, a character's hearthstone has a one hour cooldown. Once you use it to teleport back to your 'home' location, the stone cannot be used again for an hour.

Global Cooldown: n. MMO-related. A period of wait time before any spell, ability or power can be used after ANY OTHER spell, ability, or power has been used.

Example 1: In World of Warcraft, any attack power triggers the 'global cooldown'. At the moment that an attack power occurs, all other special abilities become unavailable for 1.5 seconds. This is to prevent players from stacking up skill uses at an unrealistic or game-breaking rate.

Example 2: In City of Heroes and Lord of the Rings online, the Global Cooldown is actually 'front loaded' into each power -- there is a (often uninterruptible) delay between activating an attack and that attack actually happening. The end result is the same as WoWs global cooldown, but allows players to queue their next attack while the current attack is still 'going'.

Global Cooldown: n. Doyce-related. A period of time during which I need to decompress at the end of the day. Cooldown times vary, depending on what has been happening that day. Cooldowns often include use of an MMO, but might also involve reading, watching videos, or various other activities; however, many people adopt specific activities that they prefer, and are reluctant to change.

Failure to observe the the Global Cooldown can be game-breaking.

Global Cooldowns (as defined here) are strongly affected by who else is in your adventuring party, as other players can aid the GCD, extend the time required, or even interrupt the GCD unknowingly, resulting in a number of system errors.

Communicating with the other members of your team about the GCD is highly recommended, especially when you have recently added a new member to your party.

Responsibilities: * Contribute to the written development of Blizzard Entertainment’s intellectual properties. * Write copy text for use by other Blizzard Entertainment teams. * Write technical information for game manuals. * Author original short stories that showcase Blizzard Entertainment’s rich and diverse intellectual properties. * Contribute in the research, gathering, and documentation of source materials from Blizzard Entertainment’s intellectual properties. * Work with business partners in the development of our intellectual properties through the creation of ancillary products * Perform editing tasks when needed by creative development. * Perform other duties that may be assigned by creative development management and producers.

Requirements:
* 2+ years of industry or related industry experience as a writer
* Successfully published writing work, preferably in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres
* Working knowledge and understanding of technical writing and editing
* Excellent written and oral business communication skills
* Working knowledge of Blizzard Entertainment’s intellectual properties, and a vast knowledge of current successful intellectual properties in today’s popular culture
* Ability to work and thrive in a team environment
* Ability to produce writing without constant supervision
* Excellent organizational skills and ability to work well under deadlines

Pluses:

* Experience creating and running pen and paper RPG campaigns and/or live-action RPGs
* Experience in playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games, especially World of Warcraft
* Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
* Experience in designing and playing computer games (finally, my years buildings and running those text-based MMOs, written in LISP, pays off!)

Could this possibly be for real?

This is a full-time position in Irvine, California.

Ahh, there it is. The sting of verisimilitude.

This game delivers. Wow. Seriously. Unlike a lot of other games I really really like (Heroquest, Dogs in the Vineyard) Galactic is not the kind of game you can easily kitbash to work in some other genre. it's hard to explain, but it's designed very specifically to play several science fiction ship captains, with their crews, working independently to stop the destruction of humanity. It is really NOT the kind of game that twists and bends into some other genre very well.

However, the stories that you get OUT of the game will be very different, even with repeated replays, so in that way, it's different every time. It does one thing, but it does it very well. More later.

MMO: WoW
After a two-month break from progression raiding for the holidays, the guild I'm in has started fast-tracking some raiding work. To this end, the officers have been recruiting and we took our single, over-populated, weekend Karazhan team and split it into one weekend and one weekday Karazhan team, which lets us gear more people up, more quickly.

The challenge there is that we're then working with much leaner 'rosters' for both teams -- we no longer have the luxury that we had over the holidays of swapping people in and out to create the perfect team to annihilate whatever boss we were about to fight. If we don't have 'enough' priests to handle the undead guys in Fight B, then ... well, we have to deal. If we don't have "enough" rogues for the Aran fight? Tough. This has forced us to be a little more resourceful, coordinated, and willing to use some unconventional tactics to win what are sometimes ugly fights.

But win we have: three weeks running, both teams have had full clears of Karazhan from front to back. Cool.

Also: after our almost two month break from progression raiding, we took a brand new raid group back to Gruul's Lair. With a significant number of new raiders in key roles, the result might have been tough to handle, but instead we handed High King Maulgar a flawless, one-shot kill. Seven days later, the guild downed Gruul himself for the first time in the history of the guild, which is awesome. (I wasn't there to see it, but hopefully I'll be in on the next one.)

The most notable thing about our first Gruul kill is that they took him down much more quickly than a first-time guild would. We've recently adopted a new strategy that verified what many have suggested all along -- once we learned the fight, we would prove to have *more* than enough Damage, Healing, and Tanking to immediately start looking at the next challenge after Gruul.

In non-progression news: I'm leveling up a druid and a paladin. Grezzk is Damage, so one of these new guys will be a Tank, and the other will be a healer. Don't yet know which will be which, though.

MMO: LotRO
Hey: those folks who play LotRO and read this: we should set up a time to log in and do some stuff.