Weeks ...

Aug. 16th, 2006 11:54 pm
shannon_a: (games)
[personal profile] shannon_a
Haven't been writing here much lately. That's mainly because I have a gazillion other things I'm working on, with the ones taking up most of my free time lately being Gone Gaming (I've got 4 articles either done or partway done again) and my new RPGnet A Brief History of Game.

The latter, which is a set of histories of RPG companies is very interesting, but also hugely time consuming because of the researchign requirements. But I love writing based on research, putting together puzzle pieces. I should drop it back to monthly off of the silly semi-monthly schedule I originally planned, but I'm concerned about having months with "less interesting" very short articles (and on never getting to much of the industry at that slow pace). We'll see. I might be feeling a bit tired on this right now because I've been simultaneously writing and editing the next three pieces (Paizo, Chaosium, Issaries), and those will all be done around this weekend.



Speaking of this weekend: time to finish up my next Knucklebones piece, which is due at the end of the month and also to write up something for another upcoming HeroQuest book.



Went to EndGame tonight, though I was mostly exhausted. I feel like I've been low-grade sick since last Friday or so because I've been fatigued and had troubles concentrating. Hopefully that will soon pass.

I enjoyed myself, though I was so tired that I was mainly in the push-the-pieces-around-the-board mode. Which gave me a second place in Tempus, a second place in No Thanks!, a second place in No Thanks!, a first place in Seismic, and a I-didn't-win in Treasures and Traps. Not bad for methodical piece pusshing. I was surprised when I marked my plays in BGG to see that I didn't rate a single game I played tonight a 7 or better. It was 6, 6 [x2], 6, 4.

(After a second play, Tempus seemed even less interesting, though that might be the fatigue.)



I finished up my Stormbringer campaign this last Saturday. Or at least what we're calling "Act I", though I have no good plans for when I'm going to restart. My original plan was to mostly run out of modules, and I went through the paltry number of SB5 modules. So next week we're dungeon-kicking it old school: AD&D1 into The Temple of Elemental Evil. Now that's playing out of modules.

This came out of the RPGnet Gaming Index project, which has been reminding me of all of the things I have that I could run if I wanted to, straight out of a module. If the dungeon delving doesn't totally bore us we're going to play T1-4/A1-4/GDQ1-7. We'll see.

Other things on my list of possibilities: the 21-adventure Grand Tour for Traveller, any number of Call of Cthulhu adventures, and maybe Ars Magica, Toon, and/or Paranoia.

(By the by, I've been catching up my AP Log of the game at RPGnet. I should be done by mid-next-week at the latest.)

Date: 2006-08-17 01:56 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] viktor-haag.livejournal.com
After a second play, Tempus seemed even less interesting, though that might be the fatigue.

I certainly hope it was the fatigue, Shannon! I rather liked Tempus despite the fact that I got absolutely hammered for making at least one, possibly two, boneheaded decisions during our first play of the game.

(Moral of the story: (a) when the rules tell you that "you may not build a city adjacent to another city", pay attention, dammit, and (b) when you're holding a couple fortification cards and a few similar terrain cards, your city is going to be much more defensible than the three guys sitting there ready to build it.)

I'm looking forward to playing it again, but it did seem to suspiciously pong of the endgame difficulties I have noted about other Martin Wallace affairs: the resources that naturally accrue to players through the pace of the game overwhelm their ability to maintain a defensible position. This makes his endgames (a) rushed, (b) random, and (c) susceptible to kingmaking. The "half-full" guy in me says that the smart player should realise this and play tactically rather than strategically, and also should rely heavily on meta-game diplomacy and negotiation to safeguard his position. The "half empty" guy in me says it sucks to be in the running for two and a half hours, and then make one or two small miscalculations in the final twenty minutes only to be gleefully gutted by another player and shoved into last place. This has happened on more than one occasion (and not just to me) with Martin Wallace designs, and I can't say I care for that aspect of his games. At all.

But in other aspects, his games are among the best gamer-games available.

Date: 2006-08-17 10:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] viktor-haag.livejournal.com
That's extremely encouraging news. Hopefully, the next time we play Tempus we'll see similar time reductions. If the game moves more quickly, then I can be more forgiving about the "Wallace-style" ending! 8)

Date: 2006-08-17 03:02 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dougo.livejournal.com
Welcome to Hommlet! I hear some things are afoot down at the moathouse...

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  12345
6 789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 9th, 2025 03:41 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios