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.)

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.

Heard Among The Pathfinders-- Mists of Absalom Edition

More Things Gamers Say™ -- the responsibility for any misquotes is mine and mine alone. Just don't hit me over the head with a croewbar . . .

"I love all of God's creatures -- on a plate, with mashed potatoes!" -- a druid

"Anything will improve the look of Bazit's face -- like a chainmail shirt."

Player 1: "What's the plan? Knock down the door, kill them all and loot their bodies!"
Player 2, sympathetic, caring voice: "It's OK, I know all about PTSD, man . . ."

Player: "My will save? Zero"
GM: "Awesome!"

GM: "Your Int and Cha dropped to 6"
Player (Barbarian): "Not that big a hit."

"You should have asked him before he became an idiot"

"Begun the Prone Wars have . . ."

"Bazit, did you bring your giant tub of butter for that giant lobster?"

"Giggling and laughing is normal for a restroom."

"Go ahead, snake my day!"

"He told the plumber to snake the drains . . ."

"Meat shield! Door! Now!"

"I'm not giving you my crowbar! Let the monkey do it!"

"Now maybe he's a little more angry"

"What do the monkey people want?"

"I'm going to try to reason with him."

"You're going to get pummeled over the head with a crowbar . . ."

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" -- Clerical Errors edition

Last Sunday's installment of things best taken out of context from the PFS game. Errors are mine.

• "My clerical domain is 'The Office Pool'"
• "I'm fresh out of Smite Gnome spells!"
• Cleric: "Are you hurt?" Wizard: "No, just very sadly disappointed."
• "Show us on the miniature where the cleric touched you . . . " (touch attack by cleric, get your minds out of the gutter!)
• "I'm not that evil!"
• "I'm dropping the gnome in!"
• "It's Shit-take, King of the Mushrooms!" (fighting a fungus guy, spelling and emphasis intentional)
• "Elf is NOT 'The Other White Meat!'"
• "I'm going to smash that guy. Let me go prone first!" (Barbarian with a knack of maxing his damage by attacking things while he is prone)

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.

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!