Oh but I feel tired.
The lines about introverts needing time to recharge socially have been repeated so often as to sound like jokes, but that's where I am at. Stuff (sometimes multiple stuff) every single night last week. Trying to wind up Pirates while thinking through Cthulhu.
I had an idea on my RPG character, so once more, let me tell you about my character. Thark, the half-orc warlord, has been getting more devious and scheme-y lately simply because it is fun for me. And also, we've seen that we need lots of allies as we tend to burn our bridges or use them up eventually. He has also been drifting away from his adopted faith of Ramman a little bit - more and more, leaving that to the party paladin. (That paladin is on an absolutely Ozymandias-style progression, but that is his own story and is pretty fun.) Instead, Thark has been trusting more and more in his own strength and the magical weapon he got a long time ago - a weapon that he sold his soul to attain, to a fey princess. That deal has since changed, but the original provenance of the weapon - which always seems to come back to Thark - has never been established. It got me wondering, since it is a hungry, half-sentient blade. And Thark used to worship Ilneval, the Bloody Blade of the orc pantheon. I hinted at the truth of that in a flashback - though Thark tries to forget it, he was once trained to be a shaman's apprentice in the service of that god.
So I'm not sure if this is the way to go, especially given the rest of the party's losing struggles with temptation, but it seems to me that the hungry blade Kulkuzguur could be an artifact of Ilneval. It is a cleaver that constantly wants to eat or be bloodied - but this would give Thark's story a decidedly darker and more inevitable sort of direction. Right now he has to struggle against his upbringing and what's easy in order to be the (mostly) good warlord that he is. If the cleaver is an aspect of Ilneval, then Thark left the orcish homelands and struck out on his own only to come back to one of the same brutal deities that he was leaving behind.
I don't know. I can see the appeal of it, but after typing all that out I like the idea of Thark and Kulkguzduur being something new, an unusual fusion of flesh and steel and hunger. We're tripping over enough gods in the plot as it is! Too many gods!
I am trying to take stock of some things, because I have been feeling stressed lately. I have tried to change my approach a lot.
I already use podcasts to distract myself when I am doing boring tasks. But I've also found that I have to be a little careful with them, as they can distract me too much. Not just in terms of forgetting what I'm doing, but in going down unproductive avenues.
Specifically I was getting really into board game research, which isn't an inherent problem. I like board games. Many (though not all) of my friends like board games. So what's the problem?
The problem is that the process is basically this:
- Listen to overview of boardgame on podcast (easy, because the ones I was listening to had good production values)
- Cross-check vs other opinions (difficult, because board game opinions online are wide-ranging and often insanely intense)
- Find a video or other overview of the game being played if it's very board intensive
- Consider whether this game will appeal to enough of our group (going on in the background of previous steps)
- Look at game price tag
- so far: generally decide not to buy game
- otherwise: try to sell Jill on game
- If purchased, read through game, do practice run, then introduce to friends.
That ends up being a lot of steps and the chance of pay-off is not that high. Plus, even our friends who are into board games are into different types. So while I might always be interested in playing Mansions of Madness, that's pretty clearly not the case for all out friends. Further complicating that is the time investment required to really learn a new game and that our friends already own a lot of games where they've already invested that.
The take-home point isn't that we'll never get new games, but it was that spending that much time wasn't especially productive. Harvey, I think, enjoys the research side of it a lot and has a lot of games he hasn't got to play much or at all. So the better solution is generally to do game nights with him when feasible.
And the whole reason I started doing some of that in the first place was that I was feeling stressed about time and resources for my more traditional RPG campaigns. So more structured (out of the box) games like Descent seemed pretty appealing. But the more research I did, the more it seemed like people who had access to both preferred RPGs - and that this would especially be the case for our group. So, lots of time invested in an ultimately negative result.
But man, I really just wanted a thematic board game to play around Halloween.
Some of the reasons that RPPR works so well for me lately are:
- Listening to an RPG is entertaining in its own right
- Listening to an RPG can be extremely helpful in learning it
- It can also be helpful in seeing where people get confused by the rules
- They do a bunch of different systems, which helps me get a fix for seeing how mechanics affect play without trying the patience of my groups too much
So it's working better, I think. Last semester I got so stressed, so caught up in everything, that it seemed more reasonable to go to the hospital for tests than to get a weekend away. There were other factors - there was no way for me to know then that the hospital visit wouldn't find anything useful - but I've been trying hard to avoid that level of feeling boxed in. Getting out to Seattle for the holidays was a tremendous breath of fresh air and helped me get off to so much of a better start this year.
I've finally let go of a lot of stuff lately or taken the time to get it recycled properly. But there's still a lot more. So the house is still cluttered and there's still lots of projects. I've become better about focusing on a project and seeing it through, but I have not mastered that particular useful skill.
Yesterday (Sunday as of this writing) Rob and I made some beer and tried the old ciders. I was pretty apprehensive about them, but all three are (in my opinion) worth bottling. The back-up plan was that, if I had to dump them, to do so down the woodchuck hole. The woodchuck continues to vex me with its apparently superior brain.