Post-Game
Yesterday was slightly frustrating. I went out to the M10 release--that's the new set of Magic cards, for those who aren't total geeks like me--and while my deck was not bad at all I lost 3/4 of my matches. Trouble is, every single game I played while I wasn't being scored, I won, but when the games counted I couldn't draw anything but land.
So I was pretty frustrated about that. Then when it was time for D&D I spent a good forty minutes fucking around with maptool, trying futilely to get it to connect. I vastly prefer maptool to gametable for aesthetics alone, but since I upgraded to Windows 7 I've been unable to get the bloody thing to act as a server, regardless of port forwarding and firewall settings. I had been using the mac as a server instead, and connecting to it using the Windows machine to run the games (there are various reasons that I don't just use the mac without the windows machine at all) but last night I couldn't make the Mac connect, even to the Windows machine on the local network. I tried rebooting both computers and the router, tried a fresh install, tried everything I could think of and it just refused to work.
In the end we ran using Gametable, and I'm going to talk to the others and find out if anyone particularly objects to Gametable from here on out. It's less pretty and offers less raw functionality, except that it actually WORKS.
We got through the battle on the streets of Caerwallis, which was a bit of a meat grinder for them--moreso than I recall it being the last time I ran it. All three assassins were in play at once, and the barbarian was dropped to -3hp at one point because he rushed ahead into the thick of things. Still, there wasn't any real danger of anyone getting killed. Redwynd's battery died around the end of the fight, but he's been through it before and knew the solution to the riddle/puzzle that was coming up next, so we continued a bit without him.
The puzzle went over pretty well. It wasn't solved instantly, but it wasn't something I needed to hand-hold them through, either. They did get it wrong on the first try but after that they knew what needed to be done.
Next week, they go up against the last battle in this adventure. I need to take a bit of time to redesign the final encounter--it worked well enough the first time but I'd like to make it more interesting. The original is a reskinned and tweaked grey dragon, but it doesn't really fit as well as I'd like, and it was early solo design. Nothing all that interesting happens when he becomes bloodied, and he really spends most of his time on clawclawbite. I can do better than that with his design now that I've been with the game for a year and worked with it to a greater extent than I had when I first assembled this adventure. So I'll put something together over the next couple days to fit my needs, and we'll see how it goes.
So I was pretty frustrated about that. Then when it was time for D&D I spent a good forty minutes fucking around with maptool, trying futilely to get it to connect. I vastly prefer maptool to gametable for aesthetics alone, but since I upgraded to Windows 7 I've been unable to get the bloody thing to act as a server, regardless of port forwarding and firewall settings. I had been using the mac as a server instead, and connecting to it using the Windows machine to run the games (there are various reasons that I don't just use the mac without the windows machine at all) but last night I couldn't make the Mac connect, even to the Windows machine on the local network. I tried rebooting both computers and the router, tried a fresh install, tried everything I could think of and it just refused to work.
In the end we ran using Gametable, and I'm going to talk to the others and find out if anyone particularly objects to Gametable from here on out. It's less pretty and offers less raw functionality, except that it actually WORKS.
We got through the battle on the streets of Caerwallis, which was a bit of a meat grinder for them--moreso than I recall it being the last time I ran it. All three assassins were in play at once, and the barbarian was dropped to -3hp at one point because he rushed ahead into the thick of things. Still, there wasn't any real danger of anyone getting killed. Redwynd's battery died around the end of the fight, but he's been through it before and knew the solution to the riddle/puzzle that was coming up next, so we continued a bit without him.
The puzzle went over pretty well. It wasn't solved instantly, but it wasn't something I needed to hand-hold them through, either. They did get it wrong on the first try but after that they knew what needed to be done.
Next week, they go up against the last battle in this adventure. I need to take a bit of time to redesign the final encounter--it worked well enough the first time but I'd like to make it more interesting. The original is a reskinned and tweaked grey dragon, but it doesn't really fit as well as I'd like, and it was early solo design. Nothing all that interesting happens when he becomes bloodied, and he really spends most of his time on clawclawbite. I can do better than that with his design now that I've been with the game for a year and worked with it to a greater extent than I had when I first assembled this adventure. So I'll put something together over the next couple days to fit my needs, and we'll see how it goes.