(no subject)
Had a lovely time last night with niquerio, lirelyn, orogeny_2000, and gizelnort playing Small World. I thought I had a nice non-aggression pact with lirelyn, until she started destroying my Mounted Hill Giants when it was too late to really do anything about it. Of course, she ended up winning.. I ended up staying up too late for the second night in a row because of that, but I ended up biking back to lirelyn's to pick up my laptop power cord which I had left, and then went to Espresso Royale and had a giant Iced Cafe Mocha, which did wonders.
I also had a pretty fun time with the D&D group last Sunday playing a session that ended up having no combat at all. It was also almost entirely improvised -- I had expected the group to basically march up to this guy's house, break in, and try to beat him up, but they ended up spending a considerable amount of time trying to locate and interrogate an informant before they broke in. There's a couple things I'm really enjoying -- altering the plot on the fly based on mistakes I make in describing things and things the players find important that I hadn't originally thought as important, and listening to the players' speculation about these things that I hadn't really thought about and figuring out which of their speculations (or something else entirely) makes the most sense in the light of the overall plot.
So I was also reading Barack Obama's speech and had (what I think is) an awesome idea for an Ars Magica campaign. If you aren't familiar with Ars Magica, basically the premise is that the players are a household of wizards in Medieval Europe. The campaign idea is basically to have the wizards meddle in the Crusades: What if the wizards decided to enforce peace in the Middle East? Normally wizards swear an oath not to interfere in Muggle affairs, but wizards seem to take the oath more or less seriously, and various clauses are more or less enforced. So the proper group of wizards could probably manage to argue that preventing implosion in the Middle East was more important than not meddling -- even though this sort of Prime Directive-like meddling prevention is precisely what the clause was designed to do. Could be dramatic! A time travel or prophecy component might make things interesting too -- especially if the wizards had decided to try to stop the Crusades as a result of a glimpse of the present day situation, ended up creating a monster far worse, and then had to decide whether it was better to try to continue to meddle or remove the interdiction and let events take their proper course.
Oh, yes: The garden has quite a bit of exciting stuff growing in it. We've already harvested some radishes and arugula, and the spinach and lettuce is getting close to be ready to start having some leaves chopped off!
I also had a pretty fun time with the D&D group last Sunday playing a session that ended up having no combat at all. It was also almost entirely improvised -- I had expected the group to basically march up to this guy's house, break in, and try to beat him up, but they ended up spending a considerable amount of time trying to locate and interrogate an informant before they broke in. There's a couple things I'm really enjoying -- altering the plot on the fly based on mistakes I make in describing things and things the players find important that I hadn't originally thought as important, and listening to the players' speculation about these things that I hadn't really thought about and figuring out which of their speculations (or something else entirely) makes the most sense in the light of the overall plot.
So I was also reading Barack Obama's speech and had (what I think is) an awesome idea for an Ars Magica campaign. If you aren't familiar with Ars Magica, basically the premise is that the players are a household of wizards in Medieval Europe. The campaign idea is basically to have the wizards meddle in the Crusades: What if the wizards decided to enforce peace in the Middle East? Normally wizards swear an oath not to interfere in Muggle affairs, but wizards seem to take the oath more or less seriously, and various clauses are more or less enforced. So the proper group of wizards could probably manage to argue that preventing implosion in the Middle East was more important than not meddling -- even though this sort of Prime Directive-like meddling prevention is precisely what the clause was designed to do. Could be dramatic! A time travel or prophecy component might make things interesting too -- especially if the wizards had decided to try to stop the Crusades as a result of a glimpse of the present day situation, ended up creating a monster far worse, and then had to decide whether it was better to try to continue to meddle or remove the interdiction and let events take their proper course.
Oh, yes: The garden has quite a bit of exciting stuff growing in it. We've already harvested some radishes and arugula, and the spinach and lettuce is getting close to be ready to start having some leaves chopped off!