Bartender Geek

Okay, so I've been vaguely hacking out a gaming system for tabletop RPGs. Why? Aren't there enough RPG systems in the world? What do I expect my system to do better?

Um. Nothing particularly. It's just fun to work out.

But I'm now getting to the point that I need to start bouncing ideas off of people. I mean, for one thing, it's no fun to write a system by yourself -- you have to show it to people eventually. And, anyway, I'm now getting to the point that I really need people to tell me what sucks about this.

( The first draft of an RPG system is behind the cut )

So, as all of you who play WoW know, different races dance differently. But have you ever wondered from where Blizzard actually GOT the specific dance moves?

Obviously, this fellow did. And did some research.

We were going over to visit a friend, Ben (vonbeck) and I, and Ben was driving. As we were driving over, we were talking about upgrading the main machine gun in his car, by replacing the projectiles with ones with lifting bodies, to give them longer range. They already had guidance fins, so they were extremely accurate at long-range, since they were steerable. But we weren't sure what the lifting body shape would do to armor penetration, so we were considering using discarding sabot penetrators in them.

Anyway, Ben didn't like driving on the roads, so he drove off the side of the elevated highway, plunged ten or twenty stories onto the roof of another building, drove off the building to a lower elevated highway, plunging another five stories, then drove off the edge of THAT highway to a ground level road which was just next to the home we were going to. I told Ben, "This is why your suspension is always shot." But we did save a lot of time.

Anyway, Scooby-Doo and Velma had gotten there before us, and Velma was telling Scooby that he had to break it off with Shaggy's girlfriend. But Scooby argued that Shaggy was totally ignoring her, because he was stoned all the time, and probably didn't even REMEMBER that he had a girlfriend -- certainly, that's how SHE felt about it. Velma said that he had to come clean, because Daphne and Fred were starting to get suspicious that SOMETHING was weird, and it would be better for Scooby to tell Shaggy what was going on, than for Shaggy to hear about it from someone else.

shanex was there, too.

And soon, deyo and mactavish showed up, and Ben showed off the shortcut that he'd taken, what with the driving off the side of the highways, that allowed us to get here before they did. mactavish didn't want to get sucked into the argument between Scooby and Velma, so she went inside to fix the washing machine that was broken. Unfortunately, although her General Repair skill was perfectly high enough to do this, she didn't have enough points of material to effect the repair. (Your Repair Kit can fix a certain number of hit points of damage, and, once it's used up, it's used up.) She thought, though, that in order to get the washing machine working, she didn't need to fix all the damage, and that really, if she fixed even two or five hit points, it would probably start running.

Now, since you can also loot Spare Parts from broken machinery, and Spare Parts are worth a certain number of Repair Points, just like Repair Kits, we looked around for broken machinery. So we decided to loot the washing machine for Spare Parts, which we'd then use to repair the washing machine, but it didn't work like that -- once you looted a machine, it changed from a Broken [whatever it is] to Junk, which is unrepairable, so that wouldn't work.

We looked around for other things that we could break and then loot, and we ended up smashing a tape measure, which we then looted for Spare Parts worth, like, about two Repair points, which mactavish used on the washing machine, but it wasn't enough to get the machine working, so we figured we'd have to go out and attack bandits and loot their cars and mecha for spare parts to fix the washing machine, which, frankly, is what we probably should have done in the first place.

Since it was just against bandits, I figured I didn't need to take direct control of the battle, and just sent my lance (that is what we call our team) out to fight the battle without me, which should have worked, but Juanita had turned into a lycanthrope and started attacking our side. We managed to win the battle, but we not only lost Juanita, but, like, two other lance members. Which shouldn't have happened -- really, we shouldn't have even taken a single hit. So I went back to the last save point, and, this time, I answered the door when the door-to-door saleslady came around, and when she tried to bite me, I was able to defeat the were-saleslady, although I eventually had to use my vampire powers to do it. THAT time, the battle went perfectly -- just a couple shots at the bandits' cars, and our lance won, and we managed to loot the cars for Spare Parts worth something like 45 Repair Points each, with which mactavish was easily able to repair the washing machine.

So, a while back, when Lis and I were at Costco, we saw a Hoyle Card Games thing. I looked at it, and decided to buy it.

It doesn't have all the games I'd like -- I like whist better than either bridge or spades, for instance, and this has the latter two and not the first one. And it only has five-card draw poker, largely because they have a separate Poker game with other variations. I don't care about Texas Hold-Em or Hi-Lo or any of those, but I'd really like five- and seven-card stud.

But it does have about twenty games, plus fifty Solitaries games. And I've been playing some of them quite a lot. Mostly, ones I'd never played before, so I'm using the computer to learn them. Gotta say, for a lot of the games, having the computer deal and score makes things very easy.

I've always liked gin rummy and poker, and those are both in. I've not played cribbage since I was a kid, but intend to get back to it; haven't yet. And then there are the games I'd never played. I can't figure out pinochle, but canasta is a lot of fun. Euchre is a pretty good game, too -- as far as four-hand pairs trick-taking games, it's even easier than whist. I still like whist better, but this one is almost as good.

But the reason I bought the game was that the box said that it had the game of Tarot. And that's one I've always wanted to learn.
( The game is also called Tarrocci )

For the situation in video games, and, to a lesser extent, in movies, where, when the big bad guy is beaten up and defeated, the whole base/lair/whatever starts blowing up and the hero has to escape:

"Load-bearing end-boss."

Let's see: in Kingdom of Loathing, both my multis ascended today. I started a second account the day I ascended my first character, and ran the first character as a hardcore Oxygenarian, and the second multi as softcore. The softcore character ascended for the first time a while back, and I reincarnated him softcore again, so I did a hardcore oxy ascension in EXACTLY the same amount of time that it took me to do two softcore ascensions.

In other news, my cousin Todd ripped half a tooth out of my mouth using a pair of pliers. 'Cause, see, that tooth had cracked longitudinally, and the outside half of it was wiggling around and lose, so Todd pulled that chunk of the tooth out, then snipped up the raggedy bits of the gums with a pair of scissors.

Okay, I probably should mention that Todd is a dentist, the pliers and scissors were both surgical steel and designed for this, and I did have Novocaine for it. I'm going back for a temporary filling on Friday, and I'll get a crown in a month, after Todd gets back from a friend's wedding in India. He's been prepping for the trip to India by eating a lot of curries, and watching Bollywood movies from Netflix.

I was just thinking about how to model "calm in emergencies, even though freaks out other times." And I got this image of a fun bit for a character. . .
( Read more... )

It's a Sierra-style point-and-click adventure. It's freeware -- they just ask that, if you like it, you tell all your friends. So I am.

It was written in AGS, which is a development environment for making Sierra-style point-and-click adventures, and has nearly professional production values. I mean, for 1998 or so. It was apparently a senior project at Yale. I hope it was for a writing class or something, because programming in AGS isn't very challenging from a technical point of view, but WRITING an adventure game IS very challenging. And they did a marvelous job -- plot, puzzles, jokes, voice actors, cartoony graphics, and all.

If you've got a PC, and speakers, and a fast enough net connection that you can reasonably download 117 MB, and enough disk space that you can reasonably store 117 MB, then I highly recommend it. It follows the adventures of a teenaged girl who, instead of being sent to Miss Pernilla's Institute for Unwifely Women (A Facility for Correctional Charm), is accidentally sent to the Amazonian rainforest to foil the plot of the evil Baron von Dusseldorf.

http://www.gregames.net/dusseldorf.zip