As you know, I’m not a StarWars fan by any stretch of the imagination (or maybe I’m so much of a fan that I simply can’t accept what’s happened to the franchise), but I thought you might be interested in this. It’s a discussion of what’s wrong with the fight choreography in Lightsaber duels, and what could be done to fix it, from somebody who takes sword-fighting seriously. (His name is John Clements, and he says he’s a professional practicioner and researcher into Renaissance martial arts–which probably means Wendy’s heard of him.)
So this is how GMs do it…
Here’s a pretty funny
RPG Generator.
It lacks a “reload” button, which smacks of poor design, but fortunately all major browsers come equipped with one, so it’s no big deal.
Now that I’ve unleashed this, though, I’m suddenly overcome with a feeling of impending doom.
Cool Keyboard
Optimus keyboard has a little display built into every keyface, so that it can dynamically display what the key is being used for. Although this could conceivably have a practical purpose, in switching a keyboard between alphabets, of course what everybody actually is going to use it for is games (assuming they actually produce it).
Sunday’s obsession is becoming d20 Krawl
Since very few people were there on Sunday, I should explain what happened. Josh said that Doug was thinking of doing a D&D game with interchangable characters, and that got me thinking. We could distill D&D characters down to a character card and equipment cards, give it a console-ish feel and still have it be D&D.
So, I started obsessing. Since then I have made boards for a dungeon, determined the changes I will make to d20 to make this work, made character sheets (a page of feat/spell/special ability data has appeared as well) and gotten graphics for 50 equipment cards.
I hope to get the chance to run this next Sunday (August 21?). If anyone would like to get a jump on things, you can go to http://www.pathguy.com/cg35lite.htm and make a first level character. There are a few limitations:
1) Magic Users may not specialize
2) Clerics do not choose domains
3) Attacks of Opportunity will be used, but ony a very simplified version. Don’t get any feats or skills that ONLY affect attacks of opportunity. (Combat Reflexes comes to mind.)
Anything else that comes up we can work out at the game.
I’ll put a short description of the world in the extended entry.
A New Superhero RPG
Eric Burns writes a glowing review of a new Superhero RPG, Truth & Justice, so of course, being a sucker for that kind of thing, I went ahead and bought the PDF.
Ars Character Creation: Marcus of Bonisagus
I realize I’m posting this rather late, but you never know. Somebody might have a look at it and offer some feedback before tonight.
Continue reading “Ars Character Creation: Marcus of Bonisagus”
Gaming Summary, June 12, 2005
It’s a return trip to the Borderlands, with a considerably less full house than last time. Considerably less breaking and entering too, but at least we got in some property damage.
The Story of Fun and Xp
(I spent too much time writing this for a thread in the CoH Forums to see it scroll off the board…)
Fun was knifed in the back by his old pal Xp. Was a time when Fun and Xp were inseperable buddies, but then Xp realized that it was he that the players really wanted to hang out with–that tons of players would do the most dreadfully boring stuff, even hang around logged in but afk, if only they could still be in tight with Xp. And Xp started thinking Fun really wasn’t pulling his weight, and resentment started to build.
The more he read the boards, the higher the resentment grew, after all there were all these posters claiming Xp WAS Fun, that Statesman was a horrible tyrant and fool for trying to force people to hang out with that loser, Fun. If Fun was all that, why would Statesman have to do anything to give him a hand, let alone try to arrange it so people couldn’t just chill with Xp?
Badges were the last straw. No Xp for badges, what was up with that? Sure, there were some things that Fun always did without Xp–the player’s first travel power, seeing a new Zone for the first time, but this wasn’t like that. This was something that Fun got States to do deliberately to exclude Xp. After that, things were never the same. Sure, they both could be found together some of the time, particularly in some of the low-level missions and Task Forces; after all, they were co-workers, they couldn’t avoid eachother entirely, but Xp knew who his real friends were, the groupies who practically worshipped him, and he did his best to spend all his time with them and screw Fun and the horse he rode in on.
He started locking himself in Portal Corp missions, where Fun had difficulty negotiating the Portal more than once or twice, and doing them over and over and over with his fanbois. He let himself go. Once he had a certain pride, he wouldn’t pal around with just anyone–people had to be willing to take certain risks to be part of his posse, but now, anything went. He’d sit around all day with people who were doing literally nothing, just breathing and being the right level to Bridge.
Fun and States worried about him, but that just irritated him further. He was the star of the show, he was the man it all revolved around. They were nothing without him! Didn’t all his adoring fans flood the boards with threats to quit whenever States made the slightest move to try to reconcile the two?
And that’s the story.
Ars Character Creation – Antonio Dandolo
Hey All,
I thought I'd throw up the character concept on the blog that we were going through on email so that everyone can make fun of it! (Or at least anyone who actually reads this anyway….)
>'s are my original email
text are Paul's responses.
——-
I had a quick chat with Paul, so I thought I'd go through a bit of chargen online. I'll throw out some ideas which Paul may nix.
Here we go:
Antonio Dandolo
Grandson of sitting Doge Enrico Dandolo
Age 25
Gaming Summary, May 22, 2005
The first part of the evening was spent disucssing the set-up for Paul's upcoming Ars Magica campaign, and I think everyone is pretty excited about it (at least, I am). The rest of the evening was a NuNeng episode in which, it appears, not all that much happened, although it seemed like more at the time. Must have been all the bickering.
Tales of the Rambling Bumblers 