A long update...
Wow! It's been ages since I felt the need to vent in public. I've been kind of busy.
One of my Tuesday Night regulars recently posted on FaceBook that he'd like to play Mouse Guard. This reminded me that I'd also like to play Mouse Guard.
I've had a flick through both Burning Wheel and Burning Empires and the sheer volume of it just gives me the horrors. Fear the Boot's Luke summed it up when he said, 'It's not a complex game. There's just a heck of a lot to it.' I couldn't understand why I would want to fill valuable areas of my brain with a millionty rules and subrules when I can just play D&D or Serenity or Savage Worlds.
But Mouse Guard looked interesting and, as my mate has both the comic (collected into book form) and the RPG, I borrowed them and had a read.
I was totally blown away! It's like nothing I've ever read before and I've looked through dozens and dozens of RPG core books over the last thirty years.
Here is a game that removes fighting and killing as the central focus and means of gaining reward. It utilises mechanics that reward you for playing in character and moving the story forward. It uses mechanics that help the players and GM develop the plot and story together. It uses the same system of conflict resolution for everything. Wether you are fighting, chasing, addressing a crowd, arguing, leading whole armies into war or engaging in an ale brewing competition, it's equally tactical, unpredictable and exciting. In some ways it's as abstract as a board game, but at the same time, much more of a roleplaying game than an awful lot of it's peers.
Mouse Guard is apparently 'Burning Wheel light' and whilst the volume of Burning Wheel still makes me apprehensive, if it equally pivots on plot and character like this, then I'm seriously tempted to give it a try.
I've now dropped hard cash for both the RPG and the correctly titled 'Autumn 1152' trade hardback.
MG has also made me take a second look at Burning Empire and whilst I can take or leave the Iron Empire comics (nice, if uneven art and meh story) - the actual games mechanics sound like they're just as unconventional as Mouse Guard. You create your world as a group at the start of a campaign!!!
---
I mentioned a while back that I was reading Jack Vance's Lyonesse book 1: Suldrun's Garden.
It was great fun. It took ages to get going (chapter nine, I think) but when it did, it sort of exploded in a flurry of trolls, ogres, fairies and all manner of gubbins. It felt like quite an uneven read. In parts like a two-fisted pulp adventure in the vein of RE Howard and then in other parts like an Aesop fable or a Grimm fairy tale and then in others like a medieval history textbook.
I understand that Vance was one of the inspirations for the original D&D and reading it, it's easy to see. Though I now feel that it would be easier to run a Lyonesse game using Mouse Guard than it would D&D4!
Terrific fun though , and I want to read the other two now.
---
In February we bought a whole new bathroom suite. We've been planning on redoing the bathroom since we moved in. It had rotten pink furniture and 70's pine cladding! We took advantage of the B&Q bathroom sale and got a whole new white suite for half price.
Excellent.
What started out as a new suite, however quickly turned into totally replacing the rotten ceiling and rotten walls. We had to remove the old plaster and even use a power-chisel to remove the 1940's white tiles that were cemented to the wall.
We removed everything except the toilet pan and one tap. Elin and the kids wento down to stay with her parents whilst I lived with no shower or bath for a couple of weeks - tasty!
We replastered and Elin's Dad tiled and then we got the plumber in to fit the suite.
This is where it started to go wrong. The bath went in (actually it went in before the tiles), the shower went back up, the sink went in and the toilet pan went in. No problems.
Then I got a call in work from the plumber. The cistern workings were wrong. All of it. It was all wrong. They'd clearly given us the wrong cistern workings.
cue three seperate trips to B&Q and three individual B&Q staff members trying to fit the parts into the cistern on display to no avail. Cue three phone calls to the manufacturer (who dispatches the parts on behalf of B&Q) before finally talking to irrepressably cheerful Caroline. I described what we had and she deduced that we had old stock. It had been updated. She would send out a new inlet pipe with a much smaller ballcock.
But, I insisted, the plumber assures me that the syphon is wrong aswell. Not atall she assured me, that was definately the correct syphon. A quick search online assured me that this was actually the case.
The plumber came back and assembled it. He demonstrated that whilst it all fitted in now, it, in no way worked with the flush handle we had - the flush handle that was used on the display model in the shop.
This was yesterday. I'm going back to B&Q on Saturday with the cistern all assembled to demonstrate what's wrong and get a hnadle that works with it.
The annoying thing is, the handle will actually work but it's a cludge fix. The plumber is not happy with it and neither am I.
Ho hum.
Wayne
One of my Tuesday Night regulars recently posted on FaceBook that he'd like to play Mouse Guard. This reminded me that I'd also like to play Mouse Guard.
I've had a flick through both Burning Wheel and Burning Empires and the sheer volume of it just gives me the horrors. Fear the Boot's Luke summed it up when he said, 'It's not a complex game. There's just a heck of a lot to it.' I couldn't understand why I would want to fill valuable areas of my brain with a millionty rules and subrules when I can just play D&D or Serenity or Savage Worlds.
But Mouse Guard looked interesting and, as my mate has both the comic (collected into book form) and the RPG, I borrowed them and had a read.
I was totally blown away! It's like nothing I've ever read before and I've looked through dozens and dozens of RPG core books over the last thirty years.
Here is a game that removes fighting and killing as the central focus and means of gaining reward. It utilises mechanics that reward you for playing in character and moving the story forward. It uses mechanics that help the players and GM develop the plot and story together. It uses the same system of conflict resolution for everything. Wether you are fighting, chasing, addressing a crowd, arguing, leading whole armies into war or engaging in an ale brewing competition, it's equally tactical, unpredictable and exciting. In some ways it's as abstract as a board game, but at the same time, much more of a roleplaying game than an awful lot of it's peers.
Mouse Guard is apparently 'Burning Wheel light' and whilst the volume of Burning Wheel still makes me apprehensive, if it equally pivots on plot and character like this, then I'm seriously tempted to give it a try.
I've now dropped hard cash for both the RPG and the correctly titled 'Autumn 1152' trade hardback.
MG has also made me take a second look at Burning Empire and whilst I can take or leave the Iron Empire comics (nice, if uneven art and meh story) - the actual games mechanics sound like they're just as unconventional as Mouse Guard. You create your world as a group at the start of a campaign!!!
---
I mentioned a while back that I was reading Jack Vance's Lyonesse book 1: Suldrun's Garden.
It was great fun. It took ages to get going (chapter nine, I think) but when it did, it sort of exploded in a flurry of trolls, ogres, fairies and all manner of gubbins. It felt like quite an uneven read. In parts like a two-fisted pulp adventure in the vein of RE Howard and then in other parts like an Aesop fable or a Grimm fairy tale and then in others like a medieval history textbook.
I understand that Vance was one of the inspirations for the original D&D and reading it, it's easy to see. Though I now feel that it would be easier to run a Lyonesse game using Mouse Guard than it would D&D4!
Terrific fun though , and I want to read the other two now.
---
In February we bought a whole new bathroom suite. We've been planning on redoing the bathroom since we moved in. It had rotten pink furniture and 70's pine cladding! We took advantage of the B&Q bathroom sale and got a whole new white suite for half price.
Excellent.
What started out as a new suite, however quickly turned into totally replacing the rotten ceiling and rotten walls. We had to remove the old plaster and even use a power-chisel to remove the 1940's white tiles that were cemented to the wall.
We removed everything except the toilet pan and one tap. Elin and the kids wento down to stay with her parents whilst I lived with no shower or bath for a couple of weeks - tasty!
We replastered and Elin's Dad tiled and then we got the plumber in to fit the suite.
This is where it started to go wrong. The bath went in (actually it went in before the tiles), the shower went back up, the sink went in and the toilet pan went in. No problems.
Then I got a call in work from the plumber. The cistern workings were wrong. All of it. It was all wrong. They'd clearly given us the wrong cistern workings.
cue three seperate trips to B&Q and three individual B&Q staff members trying to fit the parts into the cistern on display to no avail. Cue three phone calls to the manufacturer (who dispatches the parts on behalf of B&Q) before finally talking to irrepressably cheerful Caroline. I described what we had and she deduced that we had old stock. It had been updated. She would send out a new inlet pipe with a much smaller ballcock.
But, I insisted, the plumber assures me that the syphon is wrong aswell. Not atall she assured me, that was definately the correct syphon. A quick search online assured me that this was actually the case.
The plumber came back and assembled it. He demonstrated that whilst it all fitted in now, it, in no way worked with the flush handle we had - the flush handle that was used on the display model in the shop.
This was yesterday. I'm going back to B&Q on Saturday with the cistern all assembled to demonstrate what's wrong and get a hnadle that works with it.
The annoying thing is, the handle will actually work but it's a cludge fix. The plumber is not happy with it and neither am I.
Ho hum.
Wayne