Workin' and Gaming.

I feel kind of crummy today. It feels like someone has been punching me in the throat, and the rest of my body took notes because while it's my sinuses that are all screwed up, the rest of my body feels sore as well. It could be that I'm sick, but it's always hard for me to tell the difference between just kind of having a bad day and actually having taken ill. I've decided that I'll know if I'm in worse condition tomorrow then I am today. =(

I haven't been thinking critically about gaming for some time, and when one of the couples that participated in our Exalted game broke up, that really put another spoke in the wheels of my gaming. I always feel that's a drag and I've been having a bad time of it lately because my differing shift didn't make things easier, either. I do have a Mage game on Friday, though, and I've started playing Magic: the Gathering again.

Even before my cards were stolen several years ago, I had stopped playing seriously. The group that I had spent my high school years playing with basically disbanded for a wide number of reasons and I went to college, myself, where I actually spent the larger part of my time either studying or trying to study. A combination of broke-a-tude and no time makes this particular obsession untenable, so the theft was really just the final nail in that particular hobby coffin.

Ever since my schedule changed and I moved, I had been spending an increasing amount of time just sitting around in my wi-fi-less apartment not doing much of anything. Basically, I started playing to hang out with people. When I consider why I played in the first place, I recall the reasons were very much the same - it was easy to strike up aquaintences if you both play Magic; just ask if they want to play a game with you.

This weekend, er, well, Friday I spent some time doing RPG design work of a particularly Exalted bent. One of my loves in that game are weird Martial Arts styles*, and the only way for Sidereals to manifest original abilities is to create an entire style. More to the point, I had an idea of a gunslinging martial art and the one listed in Player's Guide is notoriously poor. When I compared it to others of its type, I winced because even though it had a lot of great flavor, it divided up a bunch of Charms that should have been bundled together and its effects were noth overcosted and underpowered compared to other charms.

I understand that firewands are potent weapons, so maybe they felt they had to curb the power of those charms, but honestly it wasn't an outstanding tree and firewands don't do anything a giant slab of metal with a molocule-wide edge isn't going to do to someone. I had a lot of fun writing some of the charms, including the charm names, but I'm about two or three charms from actually being done with it, so I'm not sure where I need to go with those.

* one of the things that raise my ire is part of their in-game meta-physics.