A Window, A Light...

To the great relief of everyone, I'm going to spend a few days away from the WIR process and stop spamming everyone's LJ feed in order to do literally every other thing I need to do. I checked the WIR off my to-do list, since the Core book was arduous enough, and I'm going to probably change the format radically for G-M:C because 9 posts regarding a thin volume of straightforward rules is downright goofy.

I spent the larger part of the evening drinking and playing Burning Wheel, and we're getting fairly close to finishing the arc. I don't know if we're going to finish the whole game, but we're approaching a big milestone. I've tried to write about the games before, and it's been difficult to know what to post. We've been playing for a long time now, off and on, and sometimes we're playing weekly and sometimes we play once a year. I've only ever played one character with these rules. We're over Skype. We're in different time zones, and we started playing with one extra person in a college-provided apartment several years ago. I've largely given up trying to dedicate a spot to it here, and I've been finding my meta-game writing a little lackluster. I'm only doing the WIR now because I said I was gonna.

Kay's doing stuff for GISHWHES, which means I'm on the team. It stands for "Greatest International Scavenger Hunt The World Has Ever Seen". It has a website. I'm not, like, particularly helpful but I'm doing a few of the things where somebody writes something. I kind of serve a logistical role, because a lot of the stuff is asking people about preposterous things and kind of making a scene. I really appreciate that kind of thing, but it terrifies me to actually do it. I'll write weird horoscopes or copy, but don't ask me to make phone calls - I'm terrible at it. (Ironically, from someone who's worked a lot of customer service.)

Also, I have no idea where my envelopes are. I haven't mailed my letters out and it's driving me nuts. If I can't find them by the end of the day, I'm just buying new ones.

The weekend was really productive for me. I didn't go out after all, since Saturday looked sporadically rainy, plus kind of chill. Even if it might make for some good photos, it's not really the weather I want to be tromping around in when I'm on the edge of a cold like I feel I am. Sleeping causes problems when I lay flat, so now my pillow is propped up with my cheaper comforter and, incidentally, I managed to get most of a nights sleep before work. The first thing I did on Saturday morning when I got up (after coffee) was write up a list of stuff I felt needed to get done, so the kitchen, bathroom, and house in general got pulled together over the course of the day.

Anyone checking my Facebook may recall my mop-related irritation, where I discovered that my roommate not only doesn't have a mop, but the swiffer floor thing she has doesn't have 1) batteries, 2) mats for cleaning, 3) cleaning solution. I settled for sweeping, but you can be sure I shook my fist to the heavens.

I managed to get an appreciable amount of Persona 3 time in, and I enjoy the time management issues in that adding a level of difficulty to the game that Atlus' grinding issue doesn't. Well, Atlus has a thing about random encounters and tough fights where the simplest solution is typically to level until the fights have more leeway. This is the opposite of my anti-grinding philosophy where I try to fight bosses well before the game assumes I am really qualified (except in FF Tactics, where my chief loves are the story and random battles, so I tend to crush fragile bosses beneath my booted heel). I got through Persona 2 and Digital Devil Summoners without too much trouble by exploiting the combat system, and it's basically the same in this one, so I'm not worried about my chances. Basically, I haven't been playing long, but I'm still having fun.

Fallout 3 still has a place on my roster, officially making it so that I've gotten way more out of the game then the person who bought it. My second playthrough was almost totally designed to get the Ninja perk just so that I could, and while specializing in Melee has been fun (and still pretty effective, all things considered), the Ninja perk really isn't as dramatic as the Death's Sprint one. When you've got maxed out gun perks combined with a Reservist's Rifle and you refill your VATS spectrum every time you off someone in the system, the air quickly becomes full of flying heads. I hesitate to imagine what that must look for those poor Enclave soldiers, when some goon in battered combat armor destroys an entire platoon of elite, power-armored troops from the neck up in the space of about a second. What finally stopped me wasn't the barrage of plasma they intended to send my way, but the fact that my rifle broke in mid-shot from a full repair.

I lacked the Exalted books I wanted to make full preperations for my next game, but I did get to play a small session of Burning Wheel over a combination of Skype and Cocinella. When we weren't drawing dongs on the whiteboard, that is. It is really gratifying to talk to friends I haven't seen in months or talk to in person. IM is good, but the tenor and type of conversation really changes. I wasn't in the same room as anyone, but it kind of felt like I was for a while.

My expenses for the last week consist primarily of utilities costs, which have gone up. Gas went up this month, which is basically what I've come to expect. I put off buying a table again, because I'm not comfortable spending when I've got other possible expenses coming up. I really think that my bed is going to be my next  purchase and I'm still not sure if I'm going to end up buying a new air mattress or if I'm going to end up buying the futon mattress. The air mattress is starting to show wear, since I'm not sure, but I don't think they're supposed to be used nightly for so long.

I thought I was going to maintain radio silence for longer, you know. And somehow my xanga gets all my good invective. I really am happy with some of my last entries, and my LJ posts are fairly muddled. The Free Council, for example, have been on my mind for a while now, and I eventually just clicked fuckin' "Post" so I could be free of that particular post, but it didn't really go anywhere. Maybe I should have just made a short one entitled, "EVERYONE! HEY! I AM INTERESTED IN THE FREE COUNCIL!" and then just see what people had to say.

"I'M IN UR HALLOW DEMOCRATIZING UR (WO)MANS!"

Yeah. Like that.

Brantai is planning on running a Burning Wheel game over here, and I always get fired the hell up for that. You know, and it's funny, because this game is really crunchy, and skipping over rules or aspects of character creation really are detrimental. It's not like just ignoring how much you're carrying in D&D, because a lot of this stuff is kind of ingrained in the system. I get really pumped about playing or running Exalted, and some of that is simply because Exalted is really kind of over-the-top in terms of your generic power level, and it gives you some abilities that you can really just use and do something incredible. I'm not saying "level a town at character creation", though with the application of some sorcery, you pretty much can. I'm saying that, specifically speaking, at character creation, there is an easy-to-get power for Solars that just lets you instantly steal whatever you want, totally undetected.

Swiping gold from the party Fighter has never been easier!

And, well, in Burning Wheel, you have to spend a significant portion of your starting income on footwear. As in, "Do you have some? Spend a resource point." That's the kind of thing you can ignore, but it reminds me of the small caveat that a Barbarian in D&D needed to spend two skill points to read a language s/he had, where nobody else had to. That's pretty specific, and it only comes up once, ever. But then, you see that, and you realize there's a majority of NPCs that just have no shoes at all, which is an interesting mental image.

Try to avoid all those rusted nails, everyone.