A Steaming Heap Of First Day Of School Blog Fodder

1. Today is the first day of school. It's just quietly working grownups and NO TV ON at our lovely little home. And kitties.

2. Speaking of the kitties, two of them have now been spoken for and will be leaving us today. We rescue, we foster and we facilitate responsible cat ownership. We are not cat ranchers. We'll be down to a mere five cats -- three resident adults and two foster-age kittens.

3. Yesterday, I did something I wish I would have thought workable three months ago. What has changed is that the esteemed younger son is behaving much more responsibly. I took note of his respectful tone of voice and his compliance with my reasonable requests to keep the TV volume down, and I was trying to think of a reward to recognize this positive change.

After I caught a glimpse of one of our kittens wandering across the living room floor, the brainstorm hit: I handed him my digital camera and gave him a short lesson in its basic use.

His first solo pictures were of course the kittens. I also gave him a bonus course on how to use iPhoto on my Mac to import and enhance the pictures he takes.

4. Pathfinder Society at the Squirrel: New season, new characters, new adventuresome fun. We are up to four tables and well over twenty players now. I'm playing a pacifistic goody-two-shoes cleric healer and having a blast.

I've also been toying with some additional fun to play character concepts for Society play.

• Mezzo d'Foppe, the fabulously flamboyant actor-bard / duelist / fashion plate.
• Lo Ping, a monkish mobile speed daemon / two fisted acrobat / master of chop-socky philosophy.
• Rob E. Slay, alchemist. Cooks up his extracts, bombs and mutagens like any PF alchemist. For (ahem!) flavor, add Profession (Barbecue Cooking). Occasionally he confuses his cooking and alchemical ingredients.
• Rogue, a half-educated transplant surgeon. He only learned how to remove organs with a knife, not put them back.
• Monty, a scarlet-clad Inquisitor with a penchant for comfort and stealth. Why stealth? because if he is using stealth, nobody expects him . . . .

One week WoW-Free

I'm feeling pretty good about that right now.

What an I doing these days with my play time?

• Working on my new RPG campaign. Write-ups, plotting and scheming.
• I called both my sibs for the first time in years.
• I'm playing and will (soon) be GMing at our weekly Central Valley Pathfinder Society games
• Enjoying Jameece's company for things like Next Food Network Star, MasterChef, Hell's Kitchen and of course Grey's Anatomy. I am not that crazy about Glee and Chopped.
• Facebook games like Galaxy Online 2 and Monster Backyard.
• Kittens! Kittens! Kittens!!! (see above pics for the cuteness. Mom-less 2-week old rescued strays, getting bottle-fed by Chief Kitteh Mommy Jameece, ably assisted by the younglings.)

Heard among the Pathfinders: Triple Players

These quotes are from three separate games: My Miresseia game on Saturday at Meetup and two separate Pathfinder Society `tables where I happened to overhear good ones on Sunday.

Bringing two swords to a gun fight, are you?

You make your bedroom acrobatics roll?

Do I get bonuses for flanking *and* tea bagging?

It's a blunt thrusting weapon

Striker? check. Meat shield? check. Healer? check. Let's do this

. . . Rambo vs. Preditor fanfiction . . .

You are now the keepers of the sacred pizza. Do not rub it.

New Spell: Tenser's Floating Poker Game

You guys might be in a relationship

At least is's not a lust monster or a rust monster, it's a dust monster!

I forgot my +1 swifter broom

Does it take double damage from vacuums? If so we might just suck enough for a bonus.

Rogue: "Now I'm going to get screwed."

Cleric "Nope, that was yesterday's game" (where aforementioned rogue wound up escaping the town watch by leaping into the joy house next door . . .)

Rogue: "I'm scouting ahead, not leaving the group."

We're following the paper trail (as party followed a trail of papers in Swift Prison)

"How do wimpy druids do 2d6 with clubs?"

"Shelliegh spell"

"Oh"

They say we are rootless wanderers . . . (after a druid's entangle spell)

Everybody's rolling good...even the bad guys

Neutralize, I mean, neuter him

Would the baron be mad if he bribed him?

Where is Admiral Akbar when you need him? (While the rogue searches for traps, of course)

Player: "I search the bedroll"

GM: "You find bugs"

Make sure you paint me gloriously

You fell prone on my sword, Get the hell off it!

Acrobatics check to get across the sewer?

Those damned Taldors, they think their shit does not stink.... (in a sewer)

Fight! Fight! A Derro and a Mite!

Get used to the word "fetid."

If you play RPGs . . .

You will want to go read THIS.

I have tried at least a few of these.

Thank you, Thomas, for pointing me at this list.

There is a time for everything . . .

. . . and the time for me to stop subscribing to World of Warcraft is now.

That's right. After just over five years, I'm hanging it up as a subscribing player. I'll still play occasionally, since now WoW has gone "free to play" to level 20. But my days of raiding and playing at level cap will end as of next month when my sub expires.

This is not a sudden decision; it's been coming on for the last few months. It's not because I cannot afford it.

Basically, I'm paying for a sub I am not using as much as I once did. I've logged into WoW maybe three times in the last week for maybe an hour or so each. Before this, I was spending in excess of 20 hours a week playing the game or reading up on the game or researching specs, raid strategies, gear, etc.

Now, with all I have going on, I have a different set of priorities.

There's also the fact that Jameece no longer plays. I really enjoyed playing WoW with her. However, she did not enjoy raiding, she hates PvP and is far more into the social element of the game. I like having her along for my adventures.

Finally, there are the changes that went in with the latest expansion. There's some awesome stuff in there . . . but when they dialed the difficulty up on normal mode raids, it hit a point where I could no longer keep up. My reflexes are not that good to start with, so I tend to stand in fire too much for the folks for whom this game is life. In the last expansion, I could keep up with the kids in terms of staying out of the bad stuff. I cannot do that anymore.

Even now that they dialed down the difficulty a bit on the previous tier's raids . . . I just don't have the time or inclination anymore.

Right now I am getting my game itch scratched through Facebook games like Backyard Monsters, Galaxy Online 2. I'm also active in the Central Valley Pathfinder Society, doing table top RPG at Fresno's most awesome game store, Crazy Squirrel Game Store.

I am not rage quitting and it is not goodbye forever. It's a sober recognition that now is the time to go do something else. After all, things change, people change, and under a different set of circumstances I could see myself going back to Azeroth.

More table quotes . . .

More stuff gamers say at the table -- Crypto-Fools edition

"Too bad the mage cannot cast Stone to Flesh and walk the statue lady over to the imprisoned madman."

"This statue brought to you by the letter 'I'"

"Oh great! One of those self-defined 'masters'"

"A big-ass crab! All I need is a big-ass salad to put it in!"

"So much for studying for your giant crab driver's license"

"With all the codes here we must be heading for the crypto-fools"

"It's Dokken, not Dorkin!" (Character name)

"I'll swing the dwarf at it."

(Sgt. Schultz voice) "I see no-think! nothink!"

"I'll cast light on his head!"

"We're doooooomed! Dooooooooomed I say!" (foeman casts Doom in the party)

"We're here to kil, er, help you!"

"Difficult terrain is fine. Non-ecludian geometry is NOT!"

"Skeletons! Don't use piercing weapons or you'll be boned!"

"Bring out your undead! *bell rings*"

"As the SAS says, 'He who derros, wins'"

"Is 'shit myself' a standard action?"

"Is 'run like a bitch' one of my class abilities?"

Heard Among The Pathfinders . . .

Table quotes from the last couple of weeks. If I did not get them exactly right, well, this is what my hasty notes say. The responsibility is all mine.

• " . . . from monk to chump."
• "BURN THE SEWER!" (During a run through the sewers of a big city after the presence of methane gas was mentioned, and the effects of same).
• "Are we going UP or DOWN Shit Creek? With or without a paddle?" (same game in the sewers).
• "Are you a fire mage or a flaming mage?"
• "Can I (a cleric) cast Bless on myself so I can piss holy water?"
• Player: "Listen check at door." GM: "Sounds like wood."
• Player 1: "I'm hearing voices again" (in a corridor); Player 2: "Take your medications to fix that."

Much fun was had at PFS on Sunday at the Squirrel.

Finding my Path in Fresno, Crazy Squirrels, Etc

After more than a year of not dropping dice around a table, I found a good group up here in Fresburg.

It's not my beloved Miresseia, and I'm not GMing. However, it's something I have long needed to do, and that's being just another player.

Our FLGS here, the one-and-only Crazy Squirrel Game Store, has become the nexus for a cell of Paizo Publishing's Pathfinder Society (PFS). PFS is organized play in the mold of the old RPGA -- adventures in a shared world with stringent rules about character creation, equipment and advancement to provide a uniform experience for players. Pathfinder Society uses the Pathfinder RPG rules -- think rationalized, streamlined D&D 3.5 with a lot more character creation options.

A quick example of the differences in terms of one class: the Wizard. In 3.5 wizards could have a familiar, with options as to which beastie you can have serving you. In PFRPG, "just a familiar" class feature is now called "Arcane Bond." A PFRPG wizard can have either a familiar OR a Bonded Object like an amulet, ring or staff that allows the casting of an additional known (not necessarily prepared) spell each day. Of course, you suffer penalties if your bonded object is not with you . . .

Every Sunday, about 20 of us gather in the CSGS game room, snag a couple tables and start playing our way through the shortish scenarios (3-4 hrs). Our GMs are awesome: Jack, Josh and James know their onions and are good at helping new players. I currently play Graylith, a generalist wizard with an risk-taking streak a mile wide, cat-like curiosity and who describes magical stuff in a techno-babble that would make a ST:TNG writer blush.

TL: DR -- I'm having fun.

CSGS Minicon . . .

The Free RPG Day mini-con at Crazy Squirrel was a blast. Jameece's boy decided not to go, which was disappointing . . . but I had a great time.

/rant

The first session featured a Pathfinder Society Organized Play session. Pathfinder is the true open successor to the best damn open edition of D&D ever: D&D 3.5. Sorry boys and girls, but D&D 4th Edition is now little more than a cash cow in the Hasbro farm alongside GI Joe and Strawberry Shortcake -- another brand to be milked, While every edition of a game changes a few things for the worse . . . . 4th Edition combined the elimination of some of the best races and classes in classic D&D with an insane number of basic rules changes and, in the change most galling to me, the licensing out of existence of any kind of 3rd party electronic tools. The D&D 4th edition system license basically forbids the creation of any sort of 3rd party character generation / maintenance software. Of course, Hasbro of the Coast just happens to have a licensed online tool that allows characters to be created for free but saving / maintaining the character data files requires a subscription to Dungeons and Dragons Insider at eight bucks or so a month. In another change, the core rulebooks are loaded with big type, huge illustrations, massive amounts of flavor text and a bare minimum of "crunchy" rules bits. This is a reversion to the classic RPG publishing paradigm TSR started in the 70s: put a bare minimum in the core books and sprinkle the crunch across dozens of supplements.

It's plain to me that the future of the hobby continues to lie in open gaming. At the mini con, there were exactly two D&D4e games -- and one specifically labeled as a "kid's game" at that . . . and counting my game, eight Pathfinder games. I checked the program of convention sponsored events (non OP) for this year's DunDraCon and there was more Pathfinder and D&D 3.x than 4.0 by a score of 21 to 12. In terms of organized play, the numbers at DDC were equal.

/end rant

Anyway, my PF OP game was a lot of fun. I went with a 1st level elven mage. I managed to expend my full spell load out (Thank Odinn for cantrips!), and avoid dying thanks to a great cleric.

For the second flight I ran an adventure in my own game world. One of the springtime traditions in one of my rural baronies is an annual paring back of the monster population to keep the baddies off the local farmers and blood the youth of the countryside. There were, of course, complications, like insane nihilistic druids, cute bunny rabbits the size Dobermans with an attitude to match, playful grenadier squirrels the size of gnomes and viscous weasels the size of couches . . . . fun times.

The third session was Traveller. I have not played or ran Trav is roughly forever. This was old-school Traveller, set in the Imperial Golden Age right after the Fifth Frontier War and before the Rebellion / Virus / TNE. Our ship mis-jumped in the aftermath of an assassination attempt with damaged drives and our only hope was another derelict vessel in a decaying orbit around a gas giant. Of course, between a stealth predator beast loose on the ship and a mad brain-in-a-jar mind-controlling some of us at bad times . . . it was a hoot. There was some good mature role playing all around in this one, and made the perfect end of the three course meal that was the games at this con.

The con was free of drama, personal issues, cheating and the other things that make gaming sometimes not-fun.

Crazy Squirrel is a rocking place to play for a lot of reasons. The game room has enough room, and more importantly, enough exits. Being there does not trigger my anxiety disorders. While they do charge to use the game room, they did not charge for Free RPG Day, you can pay or with canned goods when you do. Or, you can do as I did and buy a tee-shirt and not pay when wearing it. They have games to try out, wi-fi and snacks / drinks at reasonable prices.

I am looking forward to gaming there!

One Smokin Game . . .

One of the things I've been trying out while my main WoW account is unavailable is a freeware First Person Shooter game called Smokin Guns.

SG apparently started out as a mod for Quake 3 -- kind of like how Counter-Strike started out as a mod for Half-Life. Fortunately, you do not need Q3 to play it.

SG is, as you might gather from the name, set in the Old West. Desperadoes, six-shooters, dynamite, shotguns, rifles. Oh, and Gatling guns. too. No aliens, BFGs, weird power-ups, "gibs" or health potions. Like Counter-strike and Strike Force (the Unreal Tournament engine's answer to CS) , SG uses a realistic damage model that takes hit location into account. Hits to the vitals are usually fatal.

SG comes with a nice variety of maps, player models (and in a nice change from most futuristic shooters, the female models are fully clothed), weapons and scenarios. You can rob banks (or defend the bank from robbery), fight classic showdown duels or just deathmatch against humans or bots. The bots are great because they allows you to practice against AI opponents. As one might expect from an older game engine, SG runs very well on older hardware.

Like CS, this game has a "weapon buy" system -- players get cash for each kill, and a small amount of cash can be found on the maps in places like banks and saloons. In deathmatch games, weapons can be bought anytime. In my bot battles, I've gone for the Colt Peacemaker -- a slow-loading weapon that reminds me of the venerable "deagle" (Desert Eagle automatic) from CS. Any center-of-mass hit is a kill. Shotguns are lethal at close range, especially the sawed-off. The Sharps rifle with scope can ruin your whole day from a county away.

It's also Mac and Unix compatible, so this one's going on my Mac for WoW server maintenance Tuesdays.

Verdict: if you like good freeware FPS games or are are a fan of the Old West, give SG a try.

Daily Bloggery 2009-04-11: FOR THE HORDE!

I think I'll start this slow Saturday morning edition of "WTF's RichO Up To?" with last night's WoWing with Gwenny.

Last night was almost all PvP. We fought in two Wintergrasp PvP battles, won one and lost one (we almost always lose when defending it). These battles hand out massive amounts of honor points, which can be used as currency to buy decent PvP gear and gems. We lost the one battleground we fought in, then ran a huge raid in on the Alliance and took out their very heavily guarded NPC faction leaders in their capital cities. Not just "took out" the leaders -- we PWNED them. The throne room in Stormwind looked like Orgrimmar on a party night. That bit of PvP action won me the in-game Achievement FOR THE HORDE! and a Reins of the Black War Bear mount. Now my lone epic raptor mount isn't so lonesome anymore. We ended the evening by taking down Utgarde Pinnacle on Heroic mode. UP is one of the hardest of the heroic dungeons because one boss in there is a big challenge. Therein I scored Sovereign"s Belt off of King Ymon. I have one Green item left, rest are heroic blues or epic purples. Another week or two of this and I will be well and truly "geared" for VoA, Naxx and OS (Vault of Archeron, Naxxaramas and Obsidian Sanctum, three raid instances).

Health: SGLs are solid green 90-120 mg/dl. The smallish wound on my left leg is completelly healed, as is one of the two on my right. Drainage is way way down. I'm walking more, and next weekend, Gwenny and I are going to take a long walk for coffee, breakfast and maybe a bit of magick on Sunday morning.

Social.net: Serenity game @ Michelle's tomorrow, and D&D / Miresseia the weekend of the 26th, probably at Chez Iz. Next weekend and 5/2 are trips to Gwenny's, the lattere capped by a visit to my daughter in Berkeley. In both

Gwenny: This lady continues to delight and excite me. And on a slow Saturday, a "Reasons I Love Her" double-header. Reason 30-something I love her: I really appreciate the relative lack of drama in our relationship. In one particular prior of mine, intense drama had already began in earnest by the time we had reached this stage of the relationship. We may have WoW guild drama (and plenty of that, to be sure!), family drama, work dramas, etc. . . but between just us, minimal drama. Reason 30-something+1 is that she does not expect, demand, request or require that I freeze my old friends out of my life in favor of focussing on her. This was a major bone of contention in one of my priors. In fact, she encourages me to maintain my old connections.
Now my friends have a reason to love her, too.

GM's Day: The Hallmark Holiday for RPGers

Ways to celebrate: (some are quite silly)
Hug your local GM. GMs need this.
If you're in the mood, send some love the way of your Friendly Local Game Store.
Dress as your favorite NPC. Bonus points of that NPC is of the opposite sex. More bonus points of you name it "Jackson Gygax."
Create a stat block of your supervisor at work as a D&D encounter -- "Cube Mold, ECL 1" works for me. Bonus points for spamming it to the entire office.
Create a mundane but useful spell: "Divination: Bank Balance," "Summon Pizza and Beer," "Power Word: Sync iPod"
Translate the Harfleur speech from Henry V into Elder Futhark runes, or Elvish. Or Serenity-verse Chingrish. Or translate it back to the original operatic Klingon.
Translate the taunting of the Frenchman from Monty Python and the Holy Grail into, well, French. Or Elder Futhark. Or Elvish, etc.
Compose a Kingon Opera. Translate it to Elvish spoken with an ourtaaaageous accent-a.
Publish a Middle-earth version of Jane's Fighting Ships for each of the Ages.
Offer to "polish" your GM's dice ("Got some nasty crits, I mean scratches, on that d20...")
Wear a Gary Gygax mask when you enter your bank.
Wear a Drizzit mask when you go to the bank. Carry a pair of scimitars when you do.
Treat your associates at work like all of are characters in an old-school World of Darkness LARP and YOU are the Storyteller. Special bonus points for using a Malkavian Vampire NPC.
Take a picture of a gazebo. Make a fold up paper miniture of it. Create an stat block and encounter with it. Run said encounter.
Gazebo. Friends. Boffer weapons. Camera.
Attend a SCA event and ask one of the particpants where the Storyteller is. Be sure to not come out during daylight. Try to ghoul the royalty. Diabolize a herald.
Rationalize Star Wars space travel physics.
Create a lingusitically feasable fantasy language, complete with handwritten scripts with diacritics, spoken dialects including pidgins, offshoots, trade jargon, accents, and loan-words.
As above, except accounting for the invention of the printing press, electronic communications, mass culture, personal computing and the Internet.

@ DunDraCon . . .

My game is ready to roll. Just catching some breakfast before unleashing it on ten unsuspecting players.

I have a full table for the game, good news there. Not a lot of 3.5 games, methinks.

At least the hotel wifi seems to work; it didn't last year.

Quotes from around my game table . .

Herein are some of the better quotes from palyers at my various gaming session. Of course, without context theyre even better . . . .

"Where do find 'perception'?" (a character skill in the Cortex System . . .player blew the skill check)

"When centaurs fly!" (One of my players runs a Centaur cleric . . .)

'Guano, bat by choice" (discussing airdropped munitions and spell components)

"The platypus is what happened when Jesus set fire to the couch" (off topic discussion)

"Try to keep it in your fur" (addressed to the centaur)
"I'm covered with hair? So I'm turning into a Portagee?" (a bad reaction to alchemical mead after one player mentioned her very hairy ancestors earlier in the session)

"Behave or you're spell components!" (to a small animal)
"I want the damaged one with gills" (don;tt remember exactly what was involved here . . .)
"It's amazing what a little inbreeding will do" (off topic)
"'Grouper?' Sounds like college all over again" (some fish landed on the heroes' ship during a sea voyage, one was a large grouper)
"No self-respecting horse would piss Thulian small beer" (Thule, one of my game world's nations known for its Very Bad Beer)
"I just bit my bear in the butt" (a giant gummy bear was involved here . . .)
"We even have Warhammers, bitch!" (the party has some bad ass warhammers, a gift for rescuing a dwarven prince)
"It doesn't count until we have 40,000 warhammers" (gratuitous reference to a certain popular sci-fi miniatures game as followup to the previous remark)
"Keep your dress on, it's cold in here, Dren" (Dren is a sorcereress who uses her bare torso as an occasional tactical diversion . . .)

----------------
Listening to: Seanan McGuire - You Get The Tickets
via FoxyTunes

Xbox nailed to a tree...

Odinn and Yahweh not amused.

Wii are NOT amused!

Two words: Vagina Hero

Ceiling H. Cat, what next?

Got this from a colleague . . .New MMORPG

I've been outside. It's overrrated.

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of "now what?"

In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.

That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player's ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players' tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely "survive". What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.

Players are encouraged to focus on social interaction, which can be engaged in in a variety of ways. In fact it's extraordinarily difficult to solo anything whatsoever in Outside, apart from basic skill and knowledge accumulation quests. One of the major forms of social interaction in the game is based largely around the addition of new players to Outside, and is both complex and, in comparison to the storyline-driven romance quests of, say, Baldur's Gate or Mass Effect, they are immensely difficult. Dedicated players of Outside, however, report that the romance quests are among the most rewarding the game has to offer.

The game world is immense, perhaps unfeasibly so. The sheer amount of resources that went into development of the Outside environment is staggering to consider. Outside is a world of tremendous size, containing examples of every known real-world terrain type and inhabited by every known real-world animal. On the other hand it is somewhat lacking in the traditionally expected, more interesting, zones where the developers would be given the opportunity to show off their skills in varying the physics and graphics of the game. There are, for instance, no zones where gravity varies to any significant degree.

The respawn rate of objects and players is ridiculously slow. A dead player can expect to wait for years to respawn, and will be set back to zero assets and a tiny, nearly helpless form. Death is hardcore, and resurrection all but impossible. Outside is not a game for the QQers out there!

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game's social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

On the whole, Outside is overrated, and many gamers will find themselves forced by friends and family to play it against their will, but it still deserves a high rating. I give it 7/10, and look forward to improvements in future patches.

Cheers and Jeers: O:M edition

So sue me, Bill in Portland Maine, over on Daily Kos. Remember who writes your performance reviews . . .

1. Cheers to Blizzard Entertainment. WoW patch 2.4 is out; Blizz dedicated it to the late, great Gary Gygax. Without EGG, WoW and Diablo would not exist. This patch is nowhere as massive in impact as 2.3 was; at least they fixed several annoyances.

1a. Jeers to breaking my damned UI mods, as usual. I guess you can't make an omlet without breaking UI mods . . . bastards.

2. Cheers to Seanan McGuire. Her Bardic Blondeness is coming to town this weekend. I haven't seen her in more than a decade, and I'm looking forward to paying my respects in person to one of my favorite multi-talented artists. She should be your favorite too. Check out her LJ, website and music for reasons why.

3. Cheers to over a century of fearless journalism. My new favorite political magazine is The Nation. I've been on their mailing list since forever, when ex#2 and I used to subscribe to the dead-tree edition of this august journal of liberal opinion. These guys have been around since the 1860s fighting for the abolition of slavery and continue to cover Stuff That Matters (sorry, Slashdot) like elections campaigns and ongoing corruption without accepting a single dime of corporate money.

4. Cheers to filkerTom-foolery: I thought I was hallucinating when I read that Tom Smith, aka the world's fastest filker, is going to be part of the entertainment for Eschacon'08, the lefty blogger con organized by the influential Atrios in Philadelphia this weekend. I'd love to see his set list for his performance . . . .

5. Jeers to sports memes as workplace motivation. Every company seekd competitive advantage through incentivizing its workforce through a variety of means. I have no problems with most of the ways Management motivate us worker bees. I don't even mind those STUPID motivation posters. However, few things this side of the Veil-between-Worlds piss me off more than big time sports. I was raised in a sports-saturated household. There was always sports on TV or the damned radio, and to hell with me if I wanted to watch something mind-streching like Star Trek or listen to music. To this day, I cannot stand sports or TV. This time, it's March Madness, the 63-game marathon men's college basketball tournament. Pick one of the 64 teams (preferably one that stands a chance of winning) as an identity and rank those corporate metrics against them. Frankly, I couldn't care less weather Gonzanga (sounds a stripper's stage name) or UConn or Louisville wins the damned thing. Please. Make Them Stop!

6. Cheers to the Nurses of Kaiser South Sacramento. My wound care issues brings me in contact with a lot of nurses. When I moved south last year I figured I'd have to move my care (which I did) and I worried about continuity and quality of care. Pam, Connie and Valarie, the triumvirate that change the dressings and track the progress of my wounds throughly impress me.

You read the most interesting things in the strangest places . . .

1. I was perusing my email today and I ran across an ad for an update to a classic RPG system from the mid-to-late 80s -- Twilight:2000. The original T:2k was definitely a product of the Cold War. In this case of WW3, there was a slow-motion nuclear exchange, both battlefield and strategic. The game begins with a last-gasp NATO offensive cut off in Central Poland. Petrolium was a distant memory; the vehicles of what was left of NATO and the Warsaw Pact ran on alcohol (cue Leslie Fish tune here . . . ). The heroes were what I call "military sausage" -- survivors and remnants of units long destroyed in an operational sense, tossed together, fighting to stay alive and, hopefully, get home.

The updated edition will be Twilight:2013. What really caught my eye was the following bit of ad copy / color text:

"If a heroine dies in the forest and no one sees her fall, does her sacrifice matter?

Yes. If the world is worth saving. This is what we need."

That phrase brought tears to my eyes.

This put me in mind of another bit of gaming history I ran across a few years later. The same company that originally produced Twilight:2000, GDW, produced Traveller: The New Era (T:NE). Like T:2k, TNE was a post-holocaust RPG. Unlike T:2K, the holocaust was the result of the species of silicon-based lifeform that happened to run all the computers in Known Space mutating into a race of homocial maniacs. The virus (literally a computer virus) spread via radio from ship to ship to ground to ship . . . Gigadeaths galore, interstellar society collapses, the hammer falls, etc. TNE picks up the story 75 years later. One of the alien races in Charted Space recovefred more quickly than the rest and started sending out cautious feelers toward human-occupied space and made contact with a group of generally idealistic societies along the border between the old Empire and Earth-human space (several strains of humans in Traveller...). The renewed contacts sparked a renaissance, a New Dawn . . . then reality set in. There were forces Out There that liked things just the way they were, sans Renaissance -- Virus-infested starships (Darwinian selection, the smartest ones still lived) and dictators who ruled because they had all the available tech (harvesters, fuel, main battle tanks). The scions of the starry-eyed New Dawn gave way to the better-organized but still flawed Reformation Coalition.

I fell in love with the RC background. TNE hit the hobby at a time when the dominant meme in the hobby was "dark." White Wolf's World of Darkness games were just starting to come out, bringing a whole new breed of gamer into the hobby. Gone were the socially challenged science fiction / fantasy /military history geeks who entered the hobby when I did, to be replaced with black-clad lit / drama geeks who didn't know a guisarme from an arquebus, but did know how to tell a story. It was a generational change in gaming, and I was on the elder side of the gap. I knew a testudo from a tercio and the ins and outs of 20th century armored warfare, but I didn't know jack about Shelley, Dead Can Dance or modern gothic culture. The WoD eventually left its mark on me because I figured out how I could see the Light therein (namely, a silver Phoenix . . . VERY long story!). TNE was to me in those dark days a beacon of hope in a RPG-verse filled with despair.

To make a longer story short, most of my original Miresseia group got its start playing in my Traveller: The New Era game. The crew of the RCS Lez Zeppelin and the men. women, Schalli and Hivers of 3rd Squad, Second Platoon, Dagger Company (Meteoric Assault), 2nd Battalion (provisional), 1st Regiment Reformation Coalition Marine Corps, under the command of Wu "Kung Fu" Li, swiped nuclear weapons form madmen, freed captured Coalition personnel, protected the Secretary-General of the Coalition from assassins, blew pirates out of space, boarded and took down Virus-controlled ships and BattleMechs, and blew one incautious self-proclaimed Empress of All Known Space into dust bunnies.

The RC game was a hit at the Comic Grapevine every Sunday.

Now it looks like the new publisher of T:2k13 is going to go in that direction. The dark-theme games aren't anywhere as dominant now as they were in 1994 . . . and there have been two more generational changes (at least . . .) since: CCGs, CMGs and now MMORPGs. As committed as I am to other games at the moment, I'm not likely to run T:2k13.

Still, it's good to see hope return in this way.

2. Ever read something written by someone whose name you've only heard before, and you suddenly realize just how incredible a writer that person is? In perusing the various tributes to Gary Gygax out on the gaming Web today, I ran across the one posted to Ken Hite's LiveJournal. As with my discovery of Lois McMaster Bujold's Milesverse a decade ago, it was today with Ken Hite.

From Ken's March 4, 2008 LJ post:

But aside from the immense, irreducible professional debt I owe him, I also (and perhaps more importantly) owe him a huge amount of great, good fun. Not just in his co-invention of a game form and a hobby that has consumed thousands of delighted hours of my time, but in the exuberance of his ideas, expressed through his own inimitable vocatory blend of pastiche, pedantry, and pomp. For all that I point to Avram Davidson as my cynosure, it was Gary Gygax (along with his cousin of the soul, Robert E. Howard) who first showed me what you could do by putting history in a Really Big Waring Blender -- or perhaps a Waring-Waring-Cuisinart-Guisarme -- and setting it to "color."

And it was Gary Gygax' work that first pointed me at the works of Jack Vance, for which, again, no words -- not even Gary's words, redolent with pulpy fronds and antiqued thesaurus-hide -- can properly express my debt.

Gary, like all of us in the creative business, rolled his share of fumbles, but his hits were all natural 20s. Somewhere around Elysium's gaming tables, he and Fletcher Pratt are already arguing about flanking bonuses.

OMFG. On a stick. With habrenaro sauce (reader makes whimpering sounds of delight).

"Antiqued thesarus-hide" -- THAT captured EGG's writing style perfectly.

The last sentence of the first paragraph describes exactly how Miresseia was born.

And anyone who can draw the connection between EGG's work and that of Fletcher Pratt is a dangerous dangerous mind.

I...must...have...MORE!

The Tribues to Gary Gygax roll in . . .

1. Order of the Stick

2. Last night's SJ Games' Daily Illuminator

3. WotC's homepage

4. Penny Arcade

5. Something Positive