Hummingbirds and hohum gaming ...
We have a very optimistic hummingbird on the front property. He's simply a male who really, really wants to breed. Which, granted, is pretty much the definition of 'optimism' (and of 'male'), particularly when you're a member of a species noted for rampant antisocial behavior.
Like most ruby-throats, when he's not at the feeder he perches at a favored spot in a nearby tree: a spot that gives him a clear view of the feeder so he can instantly zoom down and kick the ass of any other hummingbird that dares to enter his territory ("my territory" = "anything I can see from where I happen to be". I think hummingbirds and merlins have a common ancestor not too far back)
Unlike most ruby-throats, this male doesn't try to kick feathered ass all the time. Only other male hummingbirds are body-slammed off the feeder and chased off with angry twitters. If the intruder is a female, this male zooms down and goes into a courtship flight. The female I see most often at his feeder simply ignores him, except to scold when he gets too close (obviously she's been to Certain Bars and learned to handle the persistent ones).
But, like most males, this little hummingbird's optimism remains undampened by feminine rejection, and he persists. At the very least, he's got the one feeder being regularly frequented by the nesting females on their incubation and feeding-trip breaks. So if one of them does happen to be in the mood, his tactics will pay off.
In other news ...
Yesterday was a loooong trip to southern Alabama for a gaming tournament, then a loooong trip back home. The friendship was fantastic, the tournament module was awful, the level of play fairly high, and the pickup game afterwards was far more fun. Plus, gaming at an ice cream parlor on a hot summer weekend is ... fabulous. After romping through that travesty of a tournament module, we all ordered ice cream sundaes and sat down for a just-for-fun pickup game with our favorite home characters. Even more fun, this time of higher caliber and with hot fudge!
IMO, it should have been ranked for levels 2-4, not 4-6. Both from the encounters and the loot. And the tactics, setups, traps, etc, all needed lots of reworking. They simply didn't make sense being where they were. The loot was also scaled to levels 2-4 and not 4-6.
From a player's point of view, it was a complete pansy pushover. Our slapped-together group of eight completed the module before the traditional call "ok you're halfway through, time for a break". And, we did it without a single point of damage. That's just wrong. Granted, we used good tactics, and all but one combat encounter was settled with spells or missile weapons, at range, before they ever closed into melee. But we had it easy because of bad writing, bad encounter selection, bad ... everything.
The GMs hated the module, but didn't have much choice in running it: of the six people we brought from our gaming groups, I and another had been actively involved in reviewing, reformatting, standardizing, cataloguing (etcetc) the tournament module library over the last 12-18 months. Three of the others were experienced GMs who'd themselves run several tournaments over the years in addition to playing in many more tournaments. Meaning, the hosts were hard put to FIND a module that none of us had been previously exposed to.
I have to give the hosts credit: they willingly played a truly awful, low-loot module, in order to allow out-of-state guests (us!) to be eligible to play. When they knew full well that the last two times we out-of-state guests had come to play, we'd beaten their home teams and gone home with the chapter prizes. They chose to accept crappier rewards in order to NOT to lock us out of playing, or to "protect" better prizes for their own local players.
I want to see a book, a class, a SOMETHING ... that will help people write good modules. How to write a plot. How to best utilize villains. How to select monsters and traps. How to *deploy* monsters and traps. How to determine if a puzzle is testing player's abilities to solve puzzles vs a player's abilities to meta-game and exposure to current fads? (I kid you not, one tournament I reviewed had a SUDOKU puzzle in it. You wanna talk meta-gaming???)
OK, enough complaining. There are kitties to pet, coffee beans to roast for tomorrow, and lots of chores on the do-list. Today is be-productive-day, to make up for taking yesterday off to game.
Like most ruby-throats, when he's not at the feeder he perches at a favored spot in a nearby tree: a spot that gives him a clear view of the feeder so he can instantly zoom down and kick the ass of any other hummingbird that dares to enter his territory ("my territory" = "anything I can see from where I happen to be". I think hummingbirds and merlins have a common ancestor not too far back)
Unlike most ruby-throats, this male doesn't try to kick feathered ass all the time. Only other male hummingbirds are body-slammed off the feeder and chased off with angry twitters. If the intruder is a female, this male zooms down and goes into a courtship flight. The female I see most often at his feeder simply ignores him, except to scold when he gets too close (obviously she's been to Certain Bars and learned to handle the persistent ones).
But, like most males, this little hummingbird's optimism remains undampened by feminine rejection, and he persists. At the very least, he's got the one feeder being regularly frequented by the nesting females on their incubation and feeding-trip breaks. So if one of them does happen to be in the mood, his tactics will pay off.
In other news ...
Yesterday was a loooong trip to southern Alabama for a gaming tournament, then a loooong trip back home. The friendship was fantastic, the tournament module was awful, the level of play fairly high, and the pickup game afterwards was far more fun. Plus, gaming at an ice cream parlor on a hot summer weekend is ... fabulous. After romping through that travesty of a tournament module, we all ordered ice cream sundaes and sat down for a just-for-fun pickup game with our favorite home characters. Even more fun, this time of higher caliber and with hot fudge!
IMO, it should have been ranked for levels 2-4, not 4-6. Both from the encounters and the loot. And the tactics, setups, traps, etc, all needed lots of reworking. They simply didn't make sense being where they were. The loot was also scaled to levels 2-4 and not 4-6.
From a player's point of view, it was a complete pansy pushover. Our slapped-together group of eight completed the module before the traditional call "ok you're halfway through, time for a break". And, we did it without a single point of damage. That's just wrong. Granted, we used good tactics, and all but one combat encounter was settled with spells or missile weapons, at range, before they ever closed into melee. But we had it easy because of bad writing, bad encounter selection, bad ... everything.
The GMs hated the module, but didn't have much choice in running it: of the six people we brought from our gaming groups, I and another had been actively involved in reviewing, reformatting, standardizing, cataloguing (etcetc) the tournament module library over the last 12-18 months. Three of the others were experienced GMs who'd themselves run several tournaments over the years in addition to playing in many more tournaments. Meaning, the hosts were hard put to FIND a module that none of us had been previously exposed to.
I have to give the hosts credit: they willingly played a truly awful, low-loot module, in order to allow out-of-state guests (us!) to be eligible to play. When they knew full well that the last two times we out-of-state guests had come to play, we'd beaten their home teams and gone home with the chapter prizes. They chose to accept crappier rewards in order to NOT to lock us out of playing, or to "protect" better prizes for their own local players.
I want to see a book, a class, a SOMETHING ... that will help people write good modules. How to write a plot. How to best utilize villains. How to select monsters and traps. How to *deploy* monsters and traps. How to determine if a puzzle is testing player's abilities to solve puzzles vs a player's abilities to meta-game and exposure to current fads? (I kid you not, one tournament I reviewed had a SUDOKU puzzle in it. You wanna talk meta-gaming???)
OK, enough complaining. There are kitties to pet, coffee beans to roast for tomorrow, and lots of chores on the do-list. Today is be-productive-day, to make up for taking yesterday off to game.