The Great Hunt Continues!

So, Mike and I went out today for quite a bit longer than I was expecting. Anyway, I think we've found two good candidates. Which is good because the last 2 I posted about are already gone :).

The first house we're calling the Weird House, MLS 28032152. This is a really interesting house because of the whole 2nd living space in the basement. The spaces is hard to use, but has a lot of charm and character. Biggest benefit is that its only about 10 mins from South Lake Union, so its the closest house to work that I've looked at so far:



The second house is a Split-level house MLS 28053247. THis ia a very large house with a lot of bigger rooms. It has an enormouse garage (4 car) and a great yard. Its pretty far away, though, ending up all the way in Shoreline. Video below (less edited than other videos, but you'll have to live)



Once again, opinions welcome

House Hunting Videos

So, I went to 9 different houses yesterday evening. Mike and I were a little tired out by the end, but we found 2 winner houses, I think.

The first is MLS#28082816... It Redfin isn't pulling it up right now, but you can try looking it up if you want. This house is nice, with a great yard and a hottub. Video below



The Second is the so-called "View House" which has an incredible view out over east capitol hill and out to the cascades. This one is in the U-District very near university villiage. This one has a spa tub, very nice, but is sorta small, great location though. Video below



So which is the blog favorite?

House Buying is Hard

So, I've finally started the process... Its exciting but also crazy!

My agent is Tammy Hatch, and I'm going to look at some houses tonight. I've already got some pre-qualifications on loans, and I'm working with some loan ppl. Things move fairly fast, it seems. I started on sunday, so very fast. (So many people are working on sunday, its crazy!)

I also bought a video camera to help with the process see it here. This is because everything in life is enhanced with gadgetry. Everything.

Expect some video posts of possible houses, I think!

"The Will of The Sky People" and "My Soul to Keep"

I thought I'd talk about 2 recent games that I ran. Both of these went pretty well, though suffered from the same stunt platform problems that we've already discussed in this blog. (Both of these were run before the discussion)

The Will of the Sky People

As I told my players, this game arose from the idea that "Dirigible are really cool". This was mainly brought on by the super awesome web comic Girl Genius which has many awesome blimps and even castles on blimps. So cool. Anyway, I wanted some reason for everyone to be up in blimps. After all, there are really good reasons for people to build things on the ground: its much easier, and results in 100% less parachute-related commuting accidents. After thinking for a little while, I came up with the idea that there had been some sort of World War and the final stages of that war rendered the earth inhabitable. But then, how are people living? How can they create new blimps? What are they eating? Where do raw materials come from? Since I have Keith as a player, I knew I would need some kind of answer for these questions. And what is the best way for GMs to fiat away annoying questions like that? Magic! So, I invented some will mages with magic based on the will of the caster. The defiling of the earth then was easily explained away as the greatest of will mages casting a spell to destroy his enemies and having it backfire on him.

To start off, we had a quest given to us by the king of the sky nation (I forget its name) to go to the ground and use the will-enhancing machine that has caused the contagion to be released on the ground to reverse the badness. This was my first mistake. We had this awesome world of lashed together blimp society with sky divers retrieving material from the seas and will mages and cramped living quarters and not being able to see the sky because of the blimps balloons over head, and what did I do? I sent them to the earth. Also I gave the plot to an NPC (I had actually wanted a PC to play the will mage that could get them to the surface, but no one took me up on the offer). This was terrible. The game was good, but it would've been much better if I had had the players find some map to the machine that was up in the sky somewhere.

Anyway, after the players found the machine with much daring do and hooked the NPC up to it to remove the contagion, it was revealed that of course the will of everyone up in the sky was keeping the contagion around (they all believed in it so...). Well, what is a newly superpowered NPC to do? Start killing people until not enough believe, obviously. Some stunts later and the game was concluded.

I think everyone had a good time with this game, and the blimp setting was awesome, but there were some mistakes.

My Soul To Keep

This game was based off the super awesome xkcd comic, Nightmares. See it here:



This comic has the alt text of: "Well, *I* think I'm real. Look at me. Look at my face. Cut me and I'll bleed. What more do you want? Please don't go."

XKCD is extremely awesome, and this is one of the best strips in it. Especially that alt text. I mean, wow! Your dreams pleading with you for your very lives, asking that you never leave them, that you live with your dreams forever! Oh man.

For this game, I had the players create really really twisted characters. In particular I asked for characters that had one great dream but had no possibility of achieving it. The kind of thing that you want so badly that when you wake up you cry because it can never happen in real life. And they had to dream about it most nights. I also asked them to come up with how their characters are coping with the dreams. Do they try to spend all day asleep, spending every moment possible with the dream? Do they take speed or some other stimulant to prevent them from ever sleeping so they never have to feel the loss of the dream again?

From that starting point we got several characters. One guy who wanted to open a french restaurant but really wasn't good a cooking. One jazz musician who lost the ability to play music and his wife and child in the same night, a paraplegic who had fallen in love with a jock, and a man who had his girlfriend/fiancee killed in a car accident after arguing with her.

I started with having their dream people beg them not to kill them everynight. From there we learned that it might be possible to make the dream world into the real world. With some shared imagery of a clock towner that signaled the end of dreams, they set off to topple the tower. Instead they encountered the old dreamers, the ones that had made the current world from the previous dream world. They fought both in the dream world and in the real world (in the real world the old dreams had positions of power, which makes sense because they made the world)...

Eventually we concluded with some stunts of putting as much energy and joy into their dreams as possible.

This game went really well. I think we had some great characters with some very tragic plot lines. And even better was the feeling of hope and accomplishment we got. We started with characters in terrible positions and rebuilt them, and I think that was pretty good for our happiness levels.

They didn't bite on the more philosophical questions (if we're recreating the world what about people who end up in situations like ours), but it wasn't really necessary to get into that stuff.

The Art of Being a Nerd

I was just reading Tim's blog, when I came to this great article, which describes, in painstaking detail, the thought processes of a nerd. As a confessed member of that group, I had an intense desire to read it, and it was great. Its a little too late for me to get really excited about this topic, but I thought I would pass it along to others encase they missed it.

In roleplaying news, we've been trying some more character-focused roleplaying with immersion rather than stunt platform style games. I think its been working out fairly well, at least for me. I got to play a completely evil character last game, which is always fun. I think I've been hitting the evil a little hard recently, though, so I'm planning on a happiness and light character for the next time I get to play.

A brief glimpse into our last two games: 1. Steve ran a game of human diaspora with the earth being destroyed and us eventually discovering alien life. 2. Keith ran a game of Amber where we started with founding our own new Amber (I was this universe's Oberon)... That character was well an truely evil and sadistic (I really tried to give it that Oberon feel), which worked in some respects but I think in others it was a little too much, which is why I'm planning on going the other way in the future.

We've also gotten up to session 2 of my new Saturday game Devils of Royalty and Divinity, which I think is going well (though you would have to ask my players, really). Last session saw the creation of a new god of logrus and pattern and the promise of much havoc to come.

Inner Roleplaying & The Central Library

So my previous post has generated some amount of comments :). (And no, Tim, I never thought you were attacking persona :) ). I thought I'd respond in a post, and also include a game description for one of the games I'll be running at AmberCon NW

The thing that seemed to spark the most comment was the remarks I made about looking for a more inwards focused game. I think I'm not describing myself well with that description. I feel like the games we've been playing, while very fulfilling in terms of scope, epicness and plot, leave something to be desired when one considers internal character strife. But even that doesn't really describe the problem... Closer would be to say that when you're stunting on such a large scale, and with the persona system, character individualization becomes meaningless.

This of course begs the question, how could one setup mechanics or a game to make the differences between characters more important. Just asking that question, though, isn't that useful. We see differences all the time flavor and inform the stunts that occur in game. This might be the real issue: I feel like there is no interaction. We sit down at the table, and no one's characters talk. The GM gives several challenges to the players, and the players think of some awesome things to do and stories to tell. What doesn't happen is the players rarely interact in character, in meaningful ways.

So, what do we need to make this more apparent? Bliss Stage is a great example of a system that won't allow you to get away with that style of roleplaying. Every scene in Bliss Stage is interaction between characters, and it rocks. Now, I think you loose the epicness of the thing and also plot is extremely difficult to come by. So I think what I'm looking for is closer to a middle ground. Something as free and flexible as persona but requiring you to interact like Bliss Stage. This might be as simple as making fragments purchased through character interaction... I'm not sure of the details of that, but if you had to have some past scene roleplayed in order to take a fragment, that might work. Even going so far as having the other players take the roles of NPCs in that scene, a la Polaris... I worry that that won't get the characters together though, just have more roleplaying in the discovery of their own character. A slight modification of that idea would be to have the scenes only take place between PCs, but I think then the PCs have to have a history together for that to make sense.

Thoughts?

Anyway, I thought I'd also include the description of a game I'm running at AmberCon NW. I've already run it for the sunday crew, and it went very very well. I'm planning on running 3 games at this con, and I think I'm most excited about this one...

--- Game Description ---

Adventure / Heroic -- Non-Amber

To Leaders of the Houses of Literature

I hereby summon your representative to the Written Court. The Great
Scribe Jules Verne has petitioned me to engage a expedition to the
Central Library to bring the Librarian back from that most sacred place
and bring a new golden age to the world. I am commanding all of the
Houses to send a companion for Sir Verne to assist in this greatest of
quests. There will be much danger but also much reward, as those who
journey to the center of the world will have their names live forever
in the Word.

The High Wordsmith
Great Wordsmith of the House of Horror
Queen Mary Shelley

---

What if the world really did revolve around books? What if you could
journey to that fabled Central Library and see what it contained? What
if lived off of reading books? What if you gained magical powers from
reading the greatest of novels or becoming widely read? Journey to the
Central Library with Jules Verne and find out!

--- Setting ---

Set in a quasi-historical victorian setting. A world where reading
books provided sustenance and all the librarians are a little pudgy. A
fantastical world of literature and magic, all driven by the
imaginations of the Wordsmiths.

The system will be Persona, a very lightweight and fast system detailed
here:

Persona System


------------------

So if you think that sounds interesting, you should come to ACNW in Portland in November! Its the best con I go to all year!

The Dying of the Light

We played a great game last night. Ok, so I'm biased, especially since I ran the game, but I thought it went well in any case. But first things first; the title of the game was "The Dying of the Light". Which you should recognize as a quote from a famous poem, right?!? 4 intelligent players last night, and not one of them were familiar with Dylan Thomas' famous poem! Anyway, I will refrain from continuing to rail against my player's erudition.

The basic idea for the game was that we lived in the final stages of the universe. Somehow Humanity has survived the trillions of years necessary, and but a whisper remains of both the universe and the human civilization that spanned it. The sky is dark, because all of the stars have burned themselves out. The final members of humanity huddle in their Dyson Sphere huddled around the last stars. The remaining stars have been frozen in time, and strung in a line. The death of the old star is used to power the un-freezing of the next star, and we join the PCs at this change over.

Of course, given the title of the game, there was no way that star was actually starting up. And in fact, humanity gave all of their remaining stored energy (it was essentially a golden age post-singularity civilization, so the only thing you could lack for was energy) in a useless attempt to help the new star restart. Instead the PCs followed a crazy guy into the new star, armed with devices he claimed would transport them back in time to fix the issue (there was some evidence that the star had been sabotaged billions of years ago).

So they travel back, and emerge at the birth of the star they went into. As it turns out I had already made a big deal that the Final War had started right after the last star was born. So, of course, this star was that last star born and they emerged to see an entire dyson sphere of humanity watching the last starbirth. As they emerged from the star, the Final War between the nihilists and the continueists began. Giant planetoid warships rampaged across the stars. Also, the PCs gained the power to time travel in any way they wished.

Well... That was basically the setup for the game, I'm sure you can agree that it was quite epic. But that doesn't really give you the scale of things. Soon the villain of the piece (who I made the mistake of making understandable and a little sympathetic) was flying around in a literal Starship (with a star completely inside of it!) and causes galaxies to collide so that they would tear each other apart and deny their energy to the end times. After the PCs saved the milky way, we upped the ante to all the galaxies smashing together and eventually to trying to rob the big bang of its energy. This was great for the most part, extremely epic and awesome.

So, that was great, but I've begun to worry that we're getting into a rut of just stunt after stunt, without any real character interaction. Stunting is very good and fun, but I've begun to feel that our games are becoming just stunt strings with nothing else. There needs to be character interaction and acting-roleplaying, or at least my heart of hearts things that. I sorta think we've really explored the whole epic side of adventures, which I've had issues with in the past, but it may be time to turn the games inwards and see what kind of roleplaying will result from that.