New Box!

So, with Christine/Nox being diabetic, we tend to rack up the bonus points at the pharmacy (Shopper’s Drug Mart).  We were at the point where we could cash them in for up to $150 on a purchase.  But there was one problem.

We live in Canada.

How is this a problem?  Well, really, it isn’t.  But with our subsidised prescriptions it makes it much harder to spend $150+ at a pharmacy in one go.

It was then that a friend (who plays Ristan in our games) reminded us that Shopper’s Drug Mart has a photofinishing department.  See, on top of selling film and printing pictures, they sell digital cameras.

Our digicam is average, but we figured why not get a new one?  It’s $150 off, after all.

So we left last Thursday, to get a new camera and go out for some dinner.  After perusing the offerings, we decide on a shiny new 8 megapixel unit, a Kodak V803.

The lady takes the box out from under the counter.  It has a small tag on it saying “demo March 3rd”.  We ask about it, and she tells us that it just means it was on demo that day, and that there shouldn’t be any problems because of that.  If there is an issue, we can always exchange it.

Satisfied, we pay (New camera for $40!  Woot!) and go have dinner.

Upon arriving home, I begin going over our new toy, taking all the parts out and checking over the manual.  (Mostly to see if we need the AC adapter to charge, or if we can do so through USB.  AC it is.  Apparently cameras haven’t advanced to the point of MP3 players yet.)

As I’m going through the manual, I discover something interesting I want to try out, and reach for the camera.

…which isn’t there.

No camera came in the box.

And more than that, I had emptied the box without realising that there was no camera in it.

In any case, it suddenly became clear that we were the proud new owners of a $180 box.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very nice box.  A testament to the craftsmanship of the Kodak box factory.  But is it worth $180?  Well, that’s debatable.

Y’see, it seems that “demo” didn’t mean that it was a demo.  It meant that it IS the demo.  So, everything gets packed back into our new expensive box, and we head out to the store again.

After a laugh with the salespeople, we get our new camera (along with the 5 or 6 pictures people have taken with it while it was on demo!  Yay!) and go home.

We now have what we came for.  A $180 box, plus free bonus camera.

Pathfinder 7 – Garycon ’08

Holy crap.  It’s been way too long since the last post.  Stupid university projects and their… stupidness… yeah…

In any case, Garycon ’08 was last weekend.

Characters present:

• Nox, Changeling Swordsage
• Reza, Dwarf Cleric
• Thorbar, Dwarf Barbarian
• Ristan, Half-Elf Bard

Missing: Nonnie, Halfling Sorcerer.

We played a regular-length session.  Somehow, though, it felt like we just didn’t get as much done as normal.  And some of the things we did get done just didn’t feel as substantial.

In any case, as the game starts, Read more

Pathfinder 6 – Of death and helmets

Well, last weekend was the final session of Burnt Offerings, book 1 in Paizo’s Rise of the Runelords series. This wasn’t a long session, but it was still satisfying.

Present this week:

• Nox, Changeling Swordsage
• Nonnie, Halfling Sorcerer
• Reza, Dwarven Cleric
• Thorbar, Dwarven Barbarian

Missing was Ristan the Bard. His player works shifts. As such, she will be unable to attend every week for the whole game. We start around 2 pm, and usually go until around 7 or 8 pm. She will usually join us around 5 or 6 pm on her work days, it seems.

In any case, we started off right where we left off, lost hit points and all. We went south.

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So long, and thanks for all the weird fish-monsters

Bunyip, Squark, Sea Lion and so many more.

Gary Gygax, (co-)creator of D&D, is dead at 69.

I would have noted this yesterday, but my internet decided to die alongside him. Seriously, I got the post from Critical-Hits on my RSS feed, clicked it, and wasn’t able get to it.

The local gaming store, today, has a small memorial set up. They are also a wine- and beer-making store, and are brewing a special batch of beer, entitled Mordenkainen’s Under-Dark Lager (or something to that effect).

You will be missed.

“The Gygax is dead! Long live the Xagyg!”

Pathfinder 5 – Newbs ahoy!

Short adventure this week. Two friends express interest in joining us, however, so we invited them to do so. Due to this, we spent a fair while finalising characters (and leveling up from 3 to 5) before we played. Thus, I give you this week’s roster.

• Nox, NG female Changeling Swordsage
• Nonnie, CE male Halfling Sorcerer
• Reza, CG female Dwarven Cleric

and introducing

• Thorbar, CN male Dwarven Barbarian
• Ristan, CN male Half-Elf Bard (player female)

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Garfield – yes, seriously

Garfield is the worst comic strip out right now.

It’s weird. The jokes haven’t changed in 20 years. Garfield can’t make me laugh any more.

But if I go back and read books of those old comics, I can still get a chuckle sometimes. It’s like Jim Davis just stopped trying.

But that’s not the point of this post.

A while back, I found a group of people who had figured out how to make Garfield good again. It was simple, too.

Never let Garfield say anything.

Remove all his lines. Once this is done, Garfield becomes a vaguely surreal comic about a lonely man who talks to his asshole cat. And Garfield, somehow, comes across as even more of an ass without text to redeem him. It’s great.

For example (click for embiggening):

You can click here to find more of this type, but that still isn’t the point of this post.

Today, I was introduced to the greatest thing to ever happen to this comic.

I’ll let the author describe it.

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

Welcome, dear readers, to “garfield minus garfield”.

So.

Freaking.

Surreal.

It’s great. It made my list of comics to watch immediately.

Pathfinder 4 – Marathon session, marathon leveling

Oh, yeah. DM log. I should do that. 😀

So back on Sunday, we played our fourth session in the current Pathfinder game.

Characters present:

• Nox, the sex-changing, race-changing Changeling Swordsage
• Reza, the Dwarven Cleric, still getting used to this Cleric gig
• and Nonnie, the fast-talking, act-before-thinking Halfling Sorcerer

Still on the first adventure, we ended off last time after slaying the Quasit, and looting her tiny kingdom.

This time, however, we had a unique situation. Nobody had to work or go to school on Monday, due to it being Reading Week (Canada’s university spring break) as well as Louis Riel Day (Manitoba’s new February holiday).

So we did what any gaming group would do in that situation.

We gamed for as long as we could stand it!

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Awesoming up players and house rules in the CAB game and in the future

Ah, the Rule of Cool.

It’s been written about a number of times in the world of DMing blogs, and is one of my principles as a DM. It guides my play style, and (as you will see below) it guides my house rules.

The guidelines behind perpetrating this rule, however, are not laid out above, though people come out with new ways to do so every day.

Rather, the method for creating an atmosphere of cool was defined years ago, completely outside of the gaming arena. Three simple rules were laid out by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker magazine. Since then, they have been applied heavily in the marketing world, to explain why products succeed and fail. But they are useful in gaming as well.

The three rules are as follows, and are effective guidelines to use while attempting to “awesome up” your games.

• 1) The act of discovering cool causes cool to move on.

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Ramble and Request

What week-long hiatus? What are you talking about?

Well, obviously I’ve been busy with school this past week, so I haven’t had the time to write anything here. That said, I have the next week off for Reading Week (Canada’s university spring break), so I’ll try to get some posts done/started. I’ll also try to get the “Aboot” page up. Maybe I’ll hack myself a new theme. I did pretty good with ChattyDM’s.

At the moment, however, I have a bit of insomnia, so I’m doing a bit of an update here.

On the only topic I seem to post with regularity, we didn’t have a game last weekend, due to a recent loss of two players and the car of another getting vandalized. We are gaming tomorrow/today, however, so expect a writeup this week.

On the Pathfinder adventure, I’m still being pleasantly surprised by how little I’ve had to change. With the exception of the Quasit battle last time, pretty much everything has been playable as-is.

More on that after the next session.

Now, as for the request in the title, I’d love to do more posts like I did at the beginning of this blog. Variant rules are one of my favourite topics. (Statting creatures is always fun too.) But I need your help on this.

See, as it stands, I’m pretty satisfied with the state of the 3.5e rules, but I still love making variants and fixes for things. I could just make up random things, but that’s hardly motivating or fun. But it doesn’t have to get used in my own game to get me thinking about it.

So I want to hear from you. What do you want out of a game, that you need a house rule for? Have you tried a rule, and it didn’t quite work out, and you don’t know how to fix it? Have you been considering trying someone else’s house rule, but there’s something grating in the back of your mind about it?

Send these things to me, via email.  (You can get the email on the right side of the page, just under Ralph.)  I’ll post them here, and develop a fix for you. Think of me as Miss Lonelyhearts! Except for RPGs. And male.

Mr. Lonelydice?

Whatever.

This could also work with creature creation. Perhaps you’re not good at statting up the creatures your incredible fluff creates. Well, I’m a crunch-side DM, so if you have monster fluff that needs to be realised, I’d be happy to give it a shot.

And if anyone wants to buy me a beer for doing so, be my guest.

As long as that beer is whiskey. 😉

On a different note, it has come to my attention that I have a large reader to post ratio, especially considering post frequency. 15 people subscribed to my RSS feed (plus more who don’t use RSS). An average of 8 visits per day (and generally at least 6), even when there’s nothing new, which is often. Somewhere around 121 visitors who have seen the site at least twice (which is good enough by me). All with 14 posts (including this one) over three months.

For someone who merely intends to use this blog for a creative/crunch outlet and a log for our group’s games, that’s not too shabby.

So anyways, this week you can expect a few things. First, a DM log, of course. Next, we might be seeing player logs (though I don’t know if that should be plural) start up soon. You will definitely get a second post by myself this week. A book review, in fact.

Beyond that, it depends on what kind of response I get to this Lonelydice thing. If it’s sufficient, I can hopefully make this a regular feature.

Mr. Lonelydice… Yeah, I think I’ll go with that name. It’s weird. I like it.

Pathfinder 3 – In the Quasit’s lair

Sorry for the delay in posting. This week hasn’t been nearly as busy as last week, but an old friend of mine got into a disagreement with a bridge, and its good friend “the ice on the river” backed it up. She’s in the hospital, but is stable and doing well, thanks very much to passerby who stopped to help, especially to a firefighter friend of ours who happened to be there (they don’t know each other). Her sense of humour is still there, too. We all feel very lucky. Though I doubt she’ll ever read this blog, Lisa, we’re happy to have you here, and we’re all pulling for a full recovery.

But we did have a game this weekend. We were two players down, and will be for some time, for various reasons, but we played nonetheless.

This means our party is now down to three members:

• Nox, Changeling Swordsage who still has pink hair.
• Reza, Dwarven Cleric of Desna who is still getting used to this cleric thing, but is loving the Desna thing.
• and Nonnie, Halfling Psychopath… I mean Sorcerer. As you will see in the course of this writeup, Nonnie is definitely a method actor.

In any case, we started right where we left off, with the party about to head back down into the Glassworks’ basement and check out the smuggler’s tunnel that Tsuto’s notes had mentioned.

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