Construction proceeds apace
On the closet project. The masonry is about half done, and they replaced our old fuses boxes with a shiny new one today. Friday the masonry guy will come back and finish the outer walls, and then next week they'll start the furring and drywall.
We will most likely be doing the painting ourselves, and possibly the closet fixtures as well. I have an idea for that, if I can find the components I'd need to execute it. It occurred to me that if I could find two or three more-or-less-matching tall, narrow shelving units at a used furniture place -- bookshelves, or maybe curio shelves/cabinets? -- I could put one in each corner of the new closet, and one in the middle (all along the same wall). I have an attachment for the electric drill which cuts circular holes -- it's intended for installing doorknobs, but I've used it to make supports for curtain rods and other assorted projects in the past. I could use that to cut holes in the sides of the shelves, and put those large wooden poles in the holes, and voila, a custom closet installation for a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand dollars. I shall have to start scoping out the used furniture places, as I doubt I'll find anything perfect immediately.
I finished the final scenes of "And Fear has Nothing Left to Mend" at last! However, it's still VERY rough, so i want to let it marinate for a few days before I attempt a second draft. And I absolutely HAVE to get those comments to Cornerofmadness this weekend (I haven't forgotten, I'm just a lazy slob.)
We are currently playing in three tabletop RPGs -- one generic fantasy campaign, one swashbucking pirate campaign, and one Weird West campaign that's supposed to be wrapping up soon -- it's only a stopgap until the Harry Potter game starts up again. They run on alternate weeks, so it's not as much as it sounds like. The guy running the Weird West campaign is not a great DM -- he puts a lot of effort into creating his setting, but he doesn't know how to steer the party in the direction of a story, and so we wind up doing a lot of talking to random NPCs, asking what turn out to be the wrong questions and getting nowhere. (And then finding out that the clues we've collected, which we thought were all relevant to one scenario, are actually from half a dozen different potential subplots. Which would explain why they contradict each other wildly.) The guy who runs the pirate game is much better, and so is the woman who runs the fantasy game.
Anyway, the guy who runs the Weird West game was until recently playing the fantasy game as well, where he ran a weirdly obstructionist character: and antisocial dwarf who was only interested in forging magical items, and didn't like any of the other characters. One of his character flaws was "Stubborn," and the guys seemed to interpret this as "Whatever the rest of the party wants to do, he wants to do something different, which, ideally, will get the party killed." Plus his idea of roleplaying was to mercilessly bait one of the elven characters in the party at every opportunity, even though there's no elf/dwarf animosity in this particular setting.
Aaaaanyway, a few games back, the party cleaned out an the ruin of an ancient dwarven temple which had been taken over by a band of rogue orcs. We found a bunch of loot, including a pair of gloves, and my character (a kitsune fighter/mage) did a detect magic. She rolled well enough to identify which items were magical -- and the gloves were among them -- but not well enough to tell what they did. No big deal; she could try again later, once she regained her power points. Like sensible adventurers, we set the magic items aside until we knew what they did... well, except for Antisocial Dwarf, who blithely appropriated the magic gloves and put them on.
The gloves, it turned out, where cursed. They were Gloves of Pacifism, and they made the wearer incapable of attacking or hurting anything, except in self-defense. Antisocial Dwarf's player was pissed, though he tried not to show it. None of us were at all sympathetic, since he'd completely brought it on himself. And as curses go, it was a very mild one. All he had to do if he wanted to join a fight was let an opponent hit him first. The DM told him exactly what he needed to do to have the gloves and the curse removed -- a difficult but not impossible fetch quest. But AD's player immediately started trying to rules-lawyer his way out of it, and dictate the way the curse worked, and etc.
That did not fly; the DM and her boyfriend (who co-DMs occasionally) put their feet down. Which sent AD's player into a sulk, and when the next game rolled around two weeks later, he was nowhere to be seen, without so much as a "Can't make it this week, sorry!" Since he'd missed several other games with short or no notice, after talking it over with the whole group, the DM contacted him to let him know that if this was going to continue, we couldn't hold his spot in the game open. To everyone's relief, he said he had too much else going on at the moment, and voluntarily dropped out. Last week a new player applied to take his place (he's someone who'd sat in on a one-shot game with us before, and we knew he was a good player) He's running a character who's much more fun and compatible with the rest of the party. Hopefully he'll like the game and stick around.
Rants Talk to me
We will most likely be doing the painting ourselves, and possibly the closet fixtures as well. I have an idea for that, if I can find the components I'd need to execute it. It occurred to me that if I could find two or three more-or-less-matching tall, narrow shelving units at a used furniture place -- bookshelves, or maybe curio shelves/cabinets? -- I could put one in each corner of the new closet, and one in the middle (all along the same wall). I have an attachment for the electric drill which cuts circular holes -- it's intended for installing doorknobs, but I've used it to make supports for curtain rods and other assorted projects in the past. I could use that to cut holes in the sides of the shelves, and put those large wooden poles in the holes, and voila, a custom closet installation for a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand dollars. I shall have to start scoping out the used furniture places, as I doubt I'll find anything perfect immediately.
I finished the final scenes of "And Fear has Nothing Left to Mend" at last! However, it's still VERY rough, so i want to let it marinate for a few days before I attempt a second draft. And I absolutely HAVE to get those comments to Cornerofmadness this weekend (I haven't forgotten, I'm just a lazy slob.)
We are currently playing in three tabletop RPGs -- one generic fantasy campaign, one swashbucking pirate campaign, and one Weird West campaign that's supposed to be wrapping up soon -- it's only a stopgap until the Harry Potter game starts up again. They run on alternate weeks, so it's not as much as it sounds like. The guy running the Weird West campaign is not a great DM -- he puts a lot of effort into creating his setting, but he doesn't know how to steer the party in the direction of a story, and so we wind up doing a lot of talking to random NPCs, asking what turn out to be the wrong questions and getting nowhere. (And then finding out that the clues we've collected, which we thought were all relevant to one scenario, are actually from half a dozen different potential subplots. Which would explain why they contradict each other wildly.) The guy who runs the pirate game is much better, and so is the woman who runs the fantasy game.
Anyway, the guy who runs the Weird West game was until recently playing the fantasy game as well, where he ran a weirdly obstructionist character: and antisocial dwarf who was only interested in forging magical items, and didn't like any of the other characters. One of his character flaws was "Stubborn," and the guys seemed to interpret this as "Whatever the rest of the party wants to do, he wants to do something different, which, ideally, will get the party killed." Plus his idea of roleplaying was to mercilessly bait one of the elven characters in the party at every opportunity, even though there's no elf/dwarf animosity in this particular setting.
Aaaaanyway, a few games back, the party cleaned out an the ruin of an ancient dwarven temple which had been taken over by a band of rogue orcs. We found a bunch of loot, including a pair of gloves, and my character (a kitsune fighter/mage) did a detect magic. She rolled well enough to identify which items were magical -- and the gloves were among them -- but not well enough to tell what they did. No big deal; she could try again later, once she regained her power points. Like sensible adventurers, we set the magic items aside until we knew what they did... well, except for Antisocial Dwarf, who blithely appropriated the magic gloves and put them on.
The gloves, it turned out, where cursed. They were Gloves of Pacifism, and they made the wearer incapable of attacking or hurting anything, except in self-defense. Antisocial Dwarf's player was pissed, though he tried not to show it. None of us were at all sympathetic, since he'd completely brought it on himself. And as curses go, it was a very mild one. All he had to do if he wanted to join a fight was let an opponent hit him first. The DM told him exactly what he needed to do to have the gloves and the curse removed -- a difficult but not impossible fetch quest. But AD's player immediately started trying to rules-lawyer his way out of it, and dictate the way the curse worked, and etc.
That did not fly; the DM and her boyfriend (who co-DMs occasionally) put their feet down. Which sent AD's player into a sulk, and when the next game rolled around two weeks later, he was nowhere to be seen, without so much as a "Can't make it this week, sorry!" Since he'd missed several other games with short or no notice, after talking it over with the whole group, the DM contacted him to let him know that if this was going to continue, we couldn't hold his spot in the game open. To everyone's relief, he said he had too much else going on at the moment, and voluntarily dropped out. Last week a new player applied to take his place (he's someone who'd sat in on a one-shot game with us before, and we knew he was a good player) He's running a character who's much more fun and compatible with the rest of the party. Hopefully he'll like the game and stick around.
Rants Talk to me