Miscellaneous Ramblings

Being a selection of random thoughts which individually do not justify a post, but which I shall share regardless.

Knowledge skills: Surfing the Savage Worlds forum led me to Clint Black’s comments on these, which are essentially that Knowledge skills shouldn’t be taken unless they are a prerequisite for an Edge, or you expect to use them in every session of play; otherwise, you should use Common Knowledge rolls. I checked through my stable of PCs, and discovered that my players are way ahead of me here; so I swapped Arion’s Knowledge (Astrogration) for Survival, which all scouts should have. (Admittedly Abishag the halfling rogue has Knowledge (Poisons), but he is a nasty piece of work and I can well imagine him using it every session.)

Campaign lifespan: I can see that in about two years’ time my current group of players will dissipate; some will have babies, some will go to university, others are thinking about emigrating. So, that’s the probable lifespan of the current campaign; call it another 40 sessions, by which time the core PCs will have reached Legendary rank. Towards late 2013, then, I need to start setting up a new campaign, possibly with new players. I keep aiming for multiple five-year campaign arcs in a single setting, but actually I’ve never managed more than three years without changing both, so maybe that should be the goal next time. What can I say, I’m fickle; I like experimenting, and I find low-level PCs easier to work with.

Solo activities: I’ve started a face-to-face RPG group again, by the simple expedition of advertising that I will be ready to run a 4-hour session every week at a specified time and place, that whoever turns up gets to play, and there are no hard feelings for anyone who doesn’t. With a weekly session as GM, and one every 2-3 weeks as a player, I’m getting my gaming fix without solo sessions, so those are shelved for now.

Painting figures: I just can’t get back into this. I’d rather buy prepainted ones and spend my time on other things. However, this is shifting me towards fantasy gaming, as SF prepaints are hard to find now that WotC and Rackham have stopped doing them. My wife is tolerant of my gaming habits, but draws the line at me paying someone else to paint figures for me, which rules that option out. Maybe a shift into Lego-compatible minifigures is called for; they are robust, about 40mm scale, and available in Halo, HM Armed Forces, and Dr Who flavours from my local Toys-Ya-Us.

Knifing the Baby

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" – Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Calm down; this is a Silicon Valley term, referring to cancelling someone’s pet project because it isn’t commercially viable.

I’ve been going through a savage "life laundry" over the last few months, trimming back possessions and activities to free up time and mental bandwidth. That has now reached this blog, and my gaming; expect a tighter focus on my favourites, and a shift away from sandbox play.

Savage Worlds fantasy will continue in one form or another; the Arioniad is not dead, only sleeping. (I’ll post a few tidyup notes to tuck it in before I leave it to its nap.)

Let’s see what happens, shall we?

No actual babies were harmed in the writing of this post.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Throttling Back

A bout of illness overlapping with some long hours and a long commute for a new assignment at work have forced me to trim back many other activities, including gaming.

The new low-bit diet means:

• If I don’t need it for the next session, I’m not doing it, whether it’s fun or not. (How long I can curb my enthusiasm for generating settings remains to be seen.)

• If I don’t need it for the current campaign, I’m not buying it, however wonderful it looks. (I still have stuff in the review pipeline from before I took that decision, mind.)

• I’m shifting towards plain ANSI text files for most of my records, so that I’m not reliant on specific software to edit or display them.

What you will see is a reduction in posts; I’m planning on All Things Zombie or another THW game each Monday, science fiction on Wednesdays, and fantasy on Fridays. Reviews will fall into whichever of those seems most logical at the time.

You’ll also see an increase in my use of published material, because everything I reuse is something I don’t need to make up; to use a movie analogy, in the past I’ve tended to be a Director-Producer-Screenwriter, but as I throttle back I’m only going to be a Director.

Obsidian Portal

I started to add a number of extra features to the blog for campaign tracking – setting info, characters, items, that sort of thing – and it occurred to me that I was simply duplicating the functionality of Obsidian Portal.

So, instead, I set up a free account there and created campaigns for Irongrave and Heart of the Scorpion.

This blog is therefore likely to shift away from session writeups and setting information, and towards reviews and campaign-agnostic materials.

Friendly Know-It-All

Last Saturday I my post referenced Richard Bartle’s player archetypes. I’ve since found a test to determine one’s orientation on a Kingdom of Loathing fansite. So naturally, I took it.

I came out with a high score in spades (Explorer) and almost as high in hearts (Socialiser), which according to the site makes me a “Friendly Know-it-All”.

That actually fits quite well. I’m more interested in understanding the game, and relaxing with friends, than I am in winning. Perhaps this explains my focus on the minutiae of the rules, and thus the didactic posts on this blog.

Mid-Course Corrections

Most of my regular gaming slots are being usurped by family and work for other things at the moment; so I need to refocus on what I can play while travelling, or during my lunch break.

The things that work well for this are generating background, Classic Traveller, and dungeon crawls, so you can expect to see more of those. CT is particularly good because of the lined-paper battlemat for combat.

Which brings me to another musing; at what point have I changed enough of CT that it isn’t CT any more? Currently I’ve replaced Book 1 with Savage Worlds, and I’m in the process of replacing much of Books 2 and 3 with Stars Without Number. I don’t use the Official Traveller Universe any more; haven’t done that for years. The only things that look likely to survive at this point are some of the background feel, and the random encounter tables.

It’s like William’s Axe, which I saw on display in a museum in Normandy; the handle and the head have both been replaced many times, so in what way is it still his axe?

What are the defining aspects of CT for you?

The Unexpected Popularity of Dungeon Generators

I’ve been looking at which posts are the most popular, and it turns out that one of the things readers of this blog are most interested in is the dungeon generator comparisons.

Now, while I play whatever I feel like, what I blog about may as well be what readers are interested in, so the comparisons will continue, and they shall now have their own category – so, if that’s what you’re looking for, you can go straight to them.

Saturday Night is not, as it turns out, Alright for Fighting

My grand plan for “Saturday Skirmish” posts has not survived contact with reality. This is partly because an unexpected (but not unpleasant) side-effect of both daughters being married is that they often turn up for supper on Saturday, and partly because when I do play, I will probably finish the game too late to write an After Action Report until the following day.

So, the Saturday Skirmish is turning into the Sunday Skirmish, the Sunday Sermon and the Thursday Thought are merged, and Saturday will become Savage Saturday, wherein I shall give free rein to my Savage Worlds passions – until something shinier comes along, anyway. (Get back on the shelf, Stars Without Number! Right now!)

-o0o-

In other news, Stars Without Number is easily the most popular game on the blog at the moment – at least, as measured by the number of visitors it gets to its posts. So, I have given the game its own category in the Rules section. I’m not actually playing it (yet), but this will make it easier to find the reviews.

Uncategorised

I’ve decided that while I like the elliptical paradox of having a category called Uncategorised, it indicates either that the blog isn’t tightly focussed enough, or that the categories are wrong. So over the next few days I will be messing with Uncategorised posts, and either moving them to a suitable category or deleting them.

It was tempting to leave the category “Uncategorised” and only have this post in it, but I resisted.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.