Let's go steal us a religious relic
It's been a while since I've updated. Thankfully, it's because I've been busy with productive pursuits - a lot of creative endeavors and work around the house.
This past weekend I stained/waterproofed my deck, which desperately needed it. Matt's parents had visited a couple of weeks before and pressure-washed the deck and bought supplies for the process, and we were waiting for enough dry days strung together before putting down stain. That day arrived on Saturday, where we were outside from about 11am to sunset - much longer than we expected it to take, but there was a lot of hand panting to be done to reach the parts where a roller couldn't go. The color we chose was Cordovan Blue (I think?), but right at the moment it doesn't look very blue - mostly dark brown, in fact. It looks good next to our house.
Thanks to hiring a landscaper this summer, and some effort on the part of Matt's parents, my home and garden are starting to look a lot better, but there is still a lot of brush to be hauled away, gutters to clean, trees to be cut back, and chimneys to be cleaned.
On Sunday, I hosted the first session of the tabletop RPG campaign I'm calling "LeverageCraft." I'm using the FantasyCraft rules, and a world I first designed when I was fifteen years old and coming up with adventures for an AD&D 2E rogue. The goal is to create a campaign that lends itself to Leverage-style capers. I've specifically set the campaign world up to accommodate this with campaign qualities that grant extra skill points and eliminate class and origin skills, with the goal of encouraging characters to cross-train. In Leverage even Parker can handle the "social tank" role once in a while, and even Sophie can handle complex hand-offs, so I thought it was important to have well-rounded characters.
We spent a large chunk of that session coming up with characters. I had taken to asking the players, "So, what Leverage character do you want to be?" and we sort of tried to cover all the roles: the mastermind, the hitter, the grifter, the thief, the "hacker" (as much as there is such a role in a fantasy setting). At last the brave adventurers were fully-fleshed out and ready to meet in a tavern set out. They were as follows:
* Matt: Brother Isidore, a human Priest/Mist Dancer, with the origin Gifted Templar
* _dragonwolf_: Ophelia, a Pech (halfling) Burglar with the Rogue specialty.
* Bernie: Cassius Thane, a human Mage/Alchemist with the origin Industrious Artisan
* laurion: Moxates, a human Soldier with the origin Stern Fighter
* natbudin: Daniel Gregorius, a human Sage with the origin Savvy Aristocrat.
Phoebe's Burglar is the closest to her inspiration - she is kind of like a halfling version of Parker, complete with an inability to filter anything she says - but most characters were more general. Nat's character sort of maps to a combination of Nate and Sophie, taking the Sage role and using his extra skill points and cross-training to give him a lot of Courtier abilities. Matt and Chad's characters, meanwhile, both have significant combat abilities, and Bernie is the closest thing we have to a Hardison, geeking around with medicine and magic.
Once we got started, I felt like it took me a little while to get my stride. I had copious notes in front of me, but getting used to switching rapidly from NPC to NPC, juggling the player's intentions, knowing when to roll dice and what to roll, etc, always takes me a while to get used to. I felt a lot more comfortable improvising at the end. There's always improvising, of course, because players never do what you expect them to do.
In particular my goal is to know the rules well enough that they don't get in the way of play, and I'd made some major strides towards that, but I still wasn't sure what do when Nat, for example, wanted to go around using his fearsome Sense Motive abilities on people just to get a read on them, not to tell if they were lying. Do I oppose it with Bluff in that case? I don't think so, since they're not lying. Do I roll with it, or do I say, "That's not how you use Sense Motive?" I dislike correcting the players like that, and I can't really argue that that's the incorrect use of that skill. But then, is it an opposed skill? What opposes it? (Matt and I couldn't agree if it should be Blend or Resolve). If it's not opposed, what's the DC based on? In the end it was resolved through more role-playing than "roll-playing." That's what you get when you play tabletops with LARPers, I guess.
This is also a largely combat-phobic group, so there was no combat in this session. There may not be much in the future, either - in general they've told me pretty clearly that there shouldn't be combat that we can't find a non-combat route around. I have a battle mat out at all times, nonetheless, because even though FC is less grid-dependent than d20 usually is, you do have to worry about flanking, 5-foot steps, etc, if combat breaks out.
Also, the last time I posted, I said I would follow up about my dieting goals. I did succeed in tracking my food for the month of August and about a week into September, but fell down hard after that. Of course, if I'm not tracking my food, I'm not paying sufficient attention to what goes in my mouth, so I stopped losing weight. I may have even gained some since I last weighed myself. *sigh* Practice, practice, I guess. I'll start tracking again today and see if I can beat my "record."
This past weekend I stained/waterproofed my deck, which desperately needed it. Matt's parents had visited a couple of weeks before and pressure-washed the deck and bought supplies for the process, and we were waiting for enough dry days strung together before putting down stain. That day arrived on Saturday, where we were outside from about 11am to sunset - much longer than we expected it to take, but there was a lot of hand panting to be done to reach the parts where a roller couldn't go. The color we chose was Cordovan Blue (I think?), but right at the moment it doesn't look very blue - mostly dark brown, in fact. It looks good next to our house.
Thanks to hiring a landscaper this summer, and some effort on the part of Matt's parents, my home and garden are starting to look a lot better, but there is still a lot of brush to be hauled away, gutters to clean, trees to be cut back, and chimneys to be cleaned.
On Sunday, I hosted the first session of the tabletop RPG campaign I'm calling "LeverageCraft." I'm using the FantasyCraft rules, and a world I first designed when I was fifteen years old and coming up with adventures for an AD&D 2E rogue. The goal is to create a campaign that lends itself to Leverage-style capers. I've specifically set the campaign world up to accommodate this with campaign qualities that grant extra skill points and eliminate class and origin skills, with the goal of encouraging characters to cross-train. In Leverage even Parker can handle the "social tank" role once in a while, and even Sophie can handle complex hand-offs, so I thought it was important to have well-rounded characters.
We spent a large chunk of that session coming up with characters. I had taken to asking the players, "So, what Leverage character do you want to be?" and we sort of tried to cover all the roles: the mastermind, the hitter, the grifter, the thief, the "hacker" (as much as there is such a role in a fantasy setting). At last the brave adventurers were fully-fleshed out and ready to meet in a tavern set out. They were as follows:
* Matt: Brother Isidore, a human Priest/Mist Dancer, with the origin Gifted Templar
* _dragonwolf_: Ophelia, a Pech (halfling) Burglar with the Rogue specialty.
* Bernie: Cassius Thane, a human Mage/Alchemist with the origin Industrious Artisan
* laurion: Moxates, a human Soldier with the origin Stern Fighter
* natbudin: Daniel Gregorius, a human Sage with the origin Savvy Aristocrat.
Phoebe's Burglar is the closest to her inspiration - she is kind of like a halfling version of Parker, complete with an inability to filter anything she says - but most characters were more general. Nat's character sort of maps to a combination of Nate and Sophie, taking the Sage role and using his extra skill points and cross-training to give him a lot of Courtier abilities. Matt and Chad's characters, meanwhile, both have significant combat abilities, and Bernie is the closest thing we have to a Hardison, geeking around with medicine and magic.
Once we got started, I felt like it took me a little while to get my stride. I had copious notes in front of me, but getting used to switching rapidly from NPC to NPC, juggling the player's intentions, knowing when to roll dice and what to roll, etc, always takes me a while to get used to. I felt a lot more comfortable improvising at the end. There's always improvising, of course, because players never do what you expect them to do.
In particular my goal is to know the rules well enough that they don't get in the way of play, and I'd made some major strides towards that, but I still wasn't sure what do when Nat, for example, wanted to go around using his fearsome Sense Motive abilities on people just to get a read on them, not to tell if they were lying. Do I oppose it with Bluff in that case? I don't think so, since they're not lying. Do I roll with it, or do I say, "That's not how you use Sense Motive?" I dislike correcting the players like that, and I can't really argue that that's the incorrect use of that skill. But then, is it an opposed skill? What opposes it? (Matt and I couldn't agree if it should be Blend or Resolve). If it's not opposed, what's the DC based on? In the end it was resolved through more role-playing than "roll-playing." That's what you get when you play tabletops with LARPers, I guess.
This is also a largely combat-phobic group, so there was no combat in this session. There may not be much in the future, either - in general they've told me pretty clearly that there shouldn't be combat that we can't find a non-combat route around. I have a battle mat out at all times, nonetheless, because even though FC is less grid-dependent than d20 usually is, you do have to worry about flanking, 5-foot steps, etc, if combat breaks out.
Also, the last time I posted, I said I would follow up about my dieting goals. I did succeed in tracking my food for the month of August and about a week into September, but fell down hard after that. Of course, if I'm not tracking my food, I'm not paying sufficient attention to what goes in my mouth, so I stopped losing weight. I may have even gained some since I last weighed myself. *sigh* Practice, practice, I guess. I'll start tracking again today and see if I can beat my "record."