Post-Necronomicon Update

[jordangreywolf]

Work:
Work continues to be busy. Right now, I'm traveling roughly every other week (and when I travel, this often cuts into weekends). I've been having to take on a few duties from other people at the company, due to one leaving, and another being gone for long periods of time. The nature of the job continues to be that I hardly know what I'm going to be doing 3 weeks down the line, and sometimes I can't even be sure about next week. However, I find it far preferable my experience (from a couple of years ago now) to sitting around, sweating bullets about a lack of projects, wondering when I'm going to get cut. Having things to do is good.

Necronomicon:
For the most part, it went well. I ran 5 games, and only one of them (my second "Fallout: Wasteland Warfare" scenario on Friday evening) was a no-show. I am a bit annoyed at a tactic I have witnessed whereby when people are signing up for games--and you're NOT supposed to be able to do this--some persons will sign in a name on behalf of someone else (who may not necessarily ever show up). This was particularly annoying when for one game, I had not only a full roster, but the "standby" slots filled in, yet at first I only had one person at the table, and while he didn't outright admit it, his statements betrayed the fact that he was expecting those other people to be here, though they hadn't actually arrived at the convention yet (and of course, if they weren't here yet, they couldn't very well have signed in to play the game, since the sign-in sheet only goes out one hour before the game). Fortunately, I was able to recruit some gawking passersby to actually sit down and play.

On Friday, I ran my "Fallout: Wasteland Warfare" scenarios (or, at least, ONE of them) and my "streamline" efforts to overcome problems with the system were, I'm happy to say, successful. However, that's really only something in spite of a needlessly convoluted system. Simply put, the miniatures wargame is presented in a needlessly obtuse manner (obscure use of symbols and color-coding when simple WORDS and PHRASES would work a lot better, and be easier to look up in an index), and the RPG add-on is a kludge. It all LOOKS PRETTY, and the miniatures are wonderful, and it *can* be perfectly serviceable for RPG purposes, but I can say the same of any number of board games and war games that I could shoehorn in for RPG purposes.

On Saturday, I ran my "Rooby-Doo" adventures, using Savage Worlds rules. We played with a mash-up of "Scooby-Doo" cartoon tropes and Fallout weirdness, and had fun, but I think I've pretty much milked this joke for all it's worth.

On Sunday, I ran my one "Unstoppables" adventure, and I really think that was probably the BEST scenario I ran all weekend ... even though it's the one I think I had the least work put into. I really hammed up the parts, doing bad impersonations of the various simian and robot NPCs, and occasionally switching to "narrator voice," and encouraged the players to get in on the act with a bit of over-acting. The "Schtick" mechanic (basically like Adventure Cards, but tailored to each character) and the "Achievement Unlocked" mechanic (little silly "rewards" I'd give to players for checking off a number of "tropes") went over well -- and I think I may use versions of those mechanics for future games.

I'm still new to the new edition of Savage Worlds, but I think at this point I've pretty well settled on what I think are its benefits and its flaws. Fortunately, the changes are pretty mild for the most part. Improvements include generalizing the treatment of "Tests of Will" and "Tricks," as well as broadening the application of assisting rolls -- so I think the rules "flow" a lot better. They also took out the exception for Bennies where in the old rules you could spend Bennies on anything ... EXCEPT re-rolling damage. Now? Never mind that: Anything you can roll, a Benny will let you reroll it. A nice new addition is that you can even spend a Benny to get a new draw out of the Action Deck.

Gwendel and I had fun at the convention, and our extra time before and after the convention to check out some nice restaurants, take advantage of the hotel swimming pool, and even check out a tourist trap (Dinosaur World!) that we've gone by so many times but only finally this time actually visited. (It's basically a big collection of badly-sculpted concrete dinosaurs. I've seen garden statues at Lukas Nursery that are higher-quality than these things. No, I am NOT exaggerating. But it was still goofy fun.)

Oh, and I also got to meet my favorite Star Wars author again, and share my impressions of the books of his I've read over the past year, and express my gratitude for him continuing to write these things. I'm very much looking forward to his next work coming out in spring of next year.

Next year, the convention is shifting hotels again, and is actually going to happen earlier in the year. I hope that won't present problems for my ability to schedule vacation time for it, but I'll just have to do my best.

Pathfinder/Starfinder:
After a brief hiatus, Digital_Rampage's online Starfinder campaign has started up again. I happened to be at home on Sunday night, so I went ahead and signed in, but I had Digital_Rampage just assign me a pre-gen to play -- a skittermander operative. I'm really not terribly interested in the work and crunch that goes into trying to optimize a character in Pathfinder, but even more so with the added learning curve of a slightly-new system in Starfinder. However, the least I can do is join in when I can, I guess. One "innovation" of mine was to set up the laptop on the readout deck of the treadmill, so I could get in some of my steps while waiting my turn in combat and so forth. (To meet my goals, I have to put in about 90 to 120 minutes a day of dedicated walking, in addition to the normal walking I do in the course of a day. I've stuck with it a lot longer than I expected, but sometimes it's a real challenge -- so I might as well take advantage of a period of time when otherwise I would just be SITTING in one place, unable to do anything else for several hours.)

Goober_Chris's Pathfinder campaign is still ongoing, though I gather that it'll be wrapping up in one or two more sessions (or, in other words, sometime in December). My plans to run something after that have been pretty much vetoed by Digital_Rampage, and he's planning on running Starfinder. I'm sitting it out, and just playing host. So far, I've been kitbashing and painting up some minis for use for the game -- for PCs as well as adversaries. I finally got around to assembling some multi-part plastic/resin minis from an old Kickstarter for "Sedition Wars" from years ago, as several of them would be useful for such a setting.

Tidying Up:
Some of this has required that I do a lot of digging around in the garage to find things. "Oh, you're playing a space bear? Well, Jordan's got a mini for that." Yes, I do -- SOMEWHERE ... probably in the garage. So, I ended up spending quite a bit of time excavating the boxes and junk out there. (It turned out that it WAS NOT in the garage, but rather in a miniatures box sitting underneath the game table, in the "GM section" where I haven't been for quite some time.)

Out of my frustration over that whole episode, I ended up finally grabbing a bunch of stuff in the garage that I'd planned to "get rid of some day" (sell on Ebay, paint it up and give it away, fix it and give it away, etc.) and -- fine, life is too short for me to do this properly, so I'm just going to STUFF IT IN A BOX AND TAKE IT TO GOODWILL. I managed to fill up pretty much the entire interior of the car (had to fold the passenger seat forward) with such junk for a trip, and took some more boxes on another trip over the weekend. I still have a lot to go through yet. There's a ton of stuff out there that I probably should get rid of, but I've held onto for sentimental reasons. I'm going to have to make some more hard choices. It would be NICE if there was actually enough room in the garage for me to park at least one vehicle. I mean, in theory, if I could actually get the cracked garage door replaced and the bent tracks replaced and the burnt-out garage door opener replaced and so forth. It's a nice goal, anyway.

(Also, I've got a few bins of Koogrr's stuff still out here in my garage. I suppose I need to figure out what's to be done about that. I mean, it HAS been several years now.)

On the plus side, all my shuffling about of stuff in the garage seems to make my Fitbit thinking I'm burning a lot of calories. So I guess it counts as exercise?

Artwork:
I finished up some artwork for Pinnacle for some "gear cards." That actually took me quite a long time, since I had ... I dunno, 200+ illustrations to do or so, and I was traveling the whole time. Fortunately, I've got a smaller Wacom tablet that fits in my computer bag, so I can take it with me. At least I managed to do some "art" again. I haven't really gotten back to doodling/sketching, per se, and I don't have anything for show-and-tell. Maybe once I get my miniatures-painting queue out of the way, I can feel more free to devote my creative time to doing some drawings. I *do* have a lot of ideas, at least.

Also, I've been thinking about updating my "Ruins" structures for Minecraft, for the latest edition of Minecraft. It's been a year, at least, since I last did anything with that.

Comments

[tuftears]

Yay for work but hopefully they will find that happy medium between overworked and underworked!

Glad to hear you had some good times at Necronomicon! You do sound most pleased with the Unstoppable game.

Also yay various people running games, and that's an interesting strategy, exercising while waiting for your turn-- it'd be a lot harder to do if you were the GM, I bet.

(peers at miniatures curiously) Sounds like unloading the ones you're never going to get around to using is a solid plan!

And, yay potential future creative art! I haven't done much art in a while, Rafferty needs to get back in gear so I can do some stuff for Ironclaw or something.

[rowyn]

I feel you on the "garage door that's not useable" especially. I broke mine about a year ago and the only quote I've gotten on repairing it is more than a garage is worth to me. :/

Congrats on clearing some space, though! Managing miniatures so you can find and use them is so challenging.

And yay for Necronomicon going all overall!

[jordangreywolf]

If I could go back in time / visit an alternate me in an alternate timeline back-shifted several years / etc., I would be strongly inclined to dissuade myself from ever getting into miniatures. I'd also talk myself out of hoarding all that LARP equipment. ("If you move to Florida, YOU WILL NEVER HAVE A CHANCE TO USE IT AGAIN, BECAUSE IT WILL BE TOO HOT THERE! Oh, and walk every single day. And stop drinking soda. And...") Okay, who'm I kidding? I could be there a while.

Anyway, I have lots of fun crafting things, but I really should have focused on doing it for a game store, or for friends, or SOMETHING other than trying to hoard minis for every conceivable genre that I *might possibly* run a game for "some day."

I've been trying to institute a new "rule" for myself: If I get something, I need to have a specific use for it, and I need to know where I am going to put it. At the very least, I need that mini to be able to go into a nice, organized, labeled box, so that if there is ever a time I might actually need to grab that figure to use in a game, I can actually find it. It's of no use if the GM says, "Hey, do you happen to have a hydra?" and I know I DO have at least one painted up (actually a few), but I only know it is somewhere in the garage, and without enough precision that I'm likely to actually find and return with it in the next few minutes. (I mean, seriously ... I DON'T KNOW where I would find the hydra, and that's an example I just randomly drummed up just now. What's the point of even having one, then?)

I have friends helpfully suggest that I need to get such-and-such kitchen appliance. Before doing that, I need some place in the kitchen to PUT such a thing. And that I need a display case for putting player miniatures in, rather than putting them back away in boxes. Okay, it's mostly Digital_Rampage who keeps telling me that I need to get this or that. He's a lot better than I am at keeping his house un-cluttered, but at least a very small part of it is because a lot of his gaming stuff is occupying a shelving-unit's worth of space in my garage. (Seriously, though, he IS a lot better than I am at letting go of stuff.)

I was going to give away all the Pathfinder minis (the ones that are actually mine, anyway), to the players, but alas that campaign is officially on "hiatus" rather than truly OVER, so it's been deemed premature for me to divvy them out. (Huh. Given how much time is likely to pass, I could probably just promise everybody that I'll make them NEW minis. I've got more than enough minis in the box that I could work with, and I could try to make them reflect the PCs' current look. Maybe I should bring that up next time. It's probably a good direction to head in.)