A Window, A Light...

I had a dream that writer_lynn was running a small WoD game at a larger convention, and I brought my Mage character. (the Atol of the blog's name, incidentally) It was set in Prague, where he was by virtue of plot device. I came up with a plot where he had intended to fly to Edinburgh initially, but got on the wrong flight.

While there, I got into an arguement with someone who had issues with _lynn's professionalism at the venue, and she rolled dice to have her character attack me in game. I actually dreamnt she said "I hope you've got a high Medicine score!" and wasn't quite sure how to react when I broke the sacrosanct agreement by just refusing to take any damage and walked out.

So, I'm a giant nerd. I dreamnt all this in the 15 minutes between 7 and 7:15.

I had kind of an unusual weekend in that nothing really went as I expected it to, but things seemed to have worked out ok for me anyhow. I went into it totally disorganized and came out ship-shape. Moreover, as things were winding down last night, I managed to put together the last few bits that really make going into the work week manageable. A thanks to writer_lynn, who was at least able to let me know where I stand re: prestige, and now I get to dick around with assigning dots to, really, just whatever. 

I've been up and down the Cam version of WoD at this point, and I'm well aware of the points of view that I've heard expressed regarding the reset, experience for membership class, et al, ect, ect. It's not that other people are wrong, it's just that the doling out of post-reset experience makes me happy. I understand the reasons for having such high loadouts for experienced characters in the setting, and why MC grants exp at all, but I always really thought that the amount of experience points found on characters bordered on rediculous, not to mention the powergap, which was always monumental. That's mitigated somewhat now. My personal feelings are that experienced players do fine regardless, plus often know exactly what they want to do with their points anyhow. That the gulf is smaller between MCs is a boon because it rewards longevity in the organization over longevity in the setting less then it used to. Something about that seems right to me.

Smaller exp. totals is also more manageable from a ST side, as far as I can tell. In Mage, when you've got multiple multiple-Masters, there's very little you can's just 'Death 5/Life 5/Time 5/ect.' away. The power level becomes, I believe, almost exponential one-on-one, though just like always, multiple people are always going to be able to drag you down should they decide to. Ces't ca la vive. There's nothing different now from then, it's just a little easier, is all.

Got to visit Mt. Rainer yesterday. Cool, partially cloudy weather highlighted some pretty excellent views. We got to do a little walking, but most trails either seemed snowed at the beginning or, in one case, blocked partway through. The sign that indicated we ought to bring an ice axe was particularly telling.

I got a few shots of the trail and a view through the trees, making me glad I had brought my camera. Doing anything about it is going to have to wait, though, since I still need to flatten and reload my machine. The real issue with that is that I don't have hardly any of my software disks, so I'd want to have some of those mailed up, even. I should of thought ahead.

I wanted to put together a soundtrack and kind of get a sure feel for a character before bringing hm back in any capacity.
So far, this is what I've been thinking.

Boards of Canada - The Devil is in the Details.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMmuV2UnvpE&feature=PlayList&p=E02616C01C88C937&index=0
Boards of Canada - Under the Coke Sign
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhxrFsoao9k&feature=PlayList&p=838A92991524FD7C&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=25

Modest Mouse - Dark Center of the Universe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmRnfw0qBow

David Bowie - Andy Warhol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNYRw3HwhRQ
Bonus clip - Andy Warhol eats a hamburger.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdn6wrM1Hqw&feature=fvw

The Flaming Lips - In the Morning of the Magicians
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhHiQr2OdKE (I don't like this cover as much, but it has vocals.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvsT4AKGQR8 (I like this one a lot, but no vocals, obviously.)

Radiohead - Videotape
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kCKob1YKOU
Radiohead - How to Disappear Completely
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq9t2FFh6LA&feature=related
Bonus track - Defunct Hardware - Nude
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOswq2P-pAs

I always forget to do these. Does anyone have any tips for coordinating downtimes where multiple people are working together? Our cabal wants to do some research, throw a act together in an area we were told to stay out of, and compose a new CD. These are all kind of related, so I'm not sure if anyone has advise.

.... I want to like you, but if you keep this up, we'll never be friends. I want you to know that. I keep trying, it's just...these Contracts. They're destroying this relationship.

Ok, first of all, it's cold up here. I kind of want that to sink in, because I'm pretty sure it's roasting in the midwest right now. I don't really have much trouble with heat, but I don't miss temperatures so hot it just makes you want to sit around until evening. Brent and Val have this mini-AC unit which they hardly ever have to turn on, but even when they do, they turn it on for temperatures that we'd of just opened up the windows and turned the fan on for my Dad's house. So that's something.

Over here, besides looking for gainful employment and maybe combing Craigslist for roomies or something*, I've been combining my notes and working on gaming stuff. I spent about an hour looking into ghost rules for NWoD and finding them pretty good. I doubt we'll ever see a Wraith expansion for NWoD, but I'll try to deal.** I also spent, like, four fucking hours with the Changeling books again trying to puzzle out the mechanics to embody my character concepts for the Cam with Brent.

My disinterest for Contracts has found itself transformed into outright ire. What's up with that? One - I don't like their format. They're a bunch of individual paths, none of which simply scale up in scope, but offer a multitude of different abilities at scaling xp costs. So, if the only power I want is ***, then I have to buy * and ** before I can get it, nevermind that those are likely to actually be useless to me if I don't have the relevant Skill. The answer is to buy that skill up, but if it doesn't make a lot of sense to the concept, something's got to give. And either way, it kind of creates a cascading xp requirement that I like on one hand but the inefficiency of it I dislike on the other.

In addition, many contracts are a two-dicepool where one of those pools is Wyrd. Wyrd is just one pool because it goes up to ten, but it's the power stat, so it's hands down the most expensive ability on the list. Because you're not rolling dice, you're really forced to buy it up high if you want certain abilities to get past one success, which I feel is a real issue. OTOH, once it's up there, someone with a high Wyrd is really versitile in terms on Contracts, but it really favors high XP characters more then usual. At least in Mage, a focused younger Mage who picks his Rotes well is still going to be able to compete (or aid) the big boys with high Gnosis. So, that's thematic, it can go either way, I guess. You can either be mostly mundane and rely more on your skills and low-impact Contracts (Hearth is great for this) or just up your Wyrd and go batshit.

Still, if you don't have the XP to buy Contracts and Wyrd, you're looking at a prolonged period of time where you don't really actually do anything. Have fun being scenery again.

In addition, I was considering that I might not have the XP chops to pull off my first, favored character concept, so I decided to go with something low-key. Kind of an agrophobe who came out fairly rarely (which would explain if I didn't come to game often) who didn't need to be that powerful, but was a bit of an information broker and blackmarketeer who assisted his private eye partner. Autumn Court gets a neat Mantle that adds dice to Occult pulls/rolls revolving around Contracts. I don't like many of the Contracts, actually (I chalk this up to being a gaming curmudgeon a bit and decided to just roll with it), and figured I'd just take what I was given and look through the book to find out what Contracts had a fair number of Occult in the die pools.

Good God. Almost friggin' none. I need Summer 4 to get some, or 5's in the other seasonal courts. The only one that's going to apply to me, at least at first, is Autumn, which means I can summon a hailstorm. Which is neither in character nor of any goddamn interest to me at all. I had to have Brent look into the Summer Court book to find alternate Seasonal court Contracts before I found something thematic and Occult related in their Autumn alt.

Summer isn't vetted for play yet. OK. Great. So, I'm basically just going Fleeting Autumn 3, Hearth 2, Mantle 4, and just buying skills and merits, it looks like, on this one guys. What are the rules for mortal thaumaturgy in Changeling, because that's what I want.

Actually, here's what I'd of wanted over their power setup. Exalted style charmlists where the powers are tied to a concept and have pre-requisites but are paid for modularly because they're often unrelated. Problem - high XP characters are just going to buy record numbers of modular charms because they don't scale in XP. Not a problem in Exalted. Might be a problem in Cam Changeling because XP totals are so amazingly high.

Suggestion 2: Use Vampire magics as a template. Buy the Contract stat up from 1-5, but have powers purchased seperate, rated from 1-5, giving one power of the appropriate level to the character every time they increase the rank of their contract, but allow additional thematic powers to be purchased for a modular cost. This is my favorite suggestion because every time you want to come up with a new goddamn power, you don't have to make up four more just to justify creating a new contract, and you wouldn't feel obligated to add a whole new Contract list in every published splat. OTOH, it's a limited run that's already way, way past production, so it's not like these suggestions are useful now. They're just where I would have taken it. I just think this is, by far, the more elegant way to go. It also stops characters from having a bunch of grab-bag Contracts. You've just got the Corebook, plus a few others, so you can give the nod or stop seperate powers from being allowed into the Cam as they're released instead of having to ok or axe a whole Contract list.

Also, there arn't a lot of ass-beating Contracts. I guess this is on purpose, but I'd of liked a few more obviously helpful contracts for combat. I keep seeing all these, "Let's beat the Gentry's ass if they show back up again." in the books, but shit. They're better off just paying Mages or Vampires to do their ass-beating for them. Changeling gonna get his ass kicked.

*If you want to move up, now's a good time. I'm housetrained and I like doing laundry and dishes.
** Probably no Kindred of the East expansion either. That was a cultural artifact of when it appeared, no doubt.

Yesterday was fairly action packed, with us leaving around noon to go to the Seattle beer fest. It was kind of pricey, and I joked that my initial plan was just to drink beer until I got tanked, but the 10 tickets were quite enough to get a pretty hefty buzz by the end, even with me spending 3 at a time at the end for meads and other tasty drinks. I also finally got a good hot dog, which is nice. The event was really close to the Space Needle, and I took a few shots, so maybe they'll come out and whatnot.

Afterwards, Brent and Val went out to what sounds like a really decent Mexican place, and I hung out playing Rock Band (my strummin' arm was sore) and going over Mage character creation with a friend. Since the system is kind of new to her, I went over the mechanical issues instead of the character ones, since we already made is fairly clear that character and story come first. In my case, I really believe that because anything else really makes for a boring time. You can't talk about your pull for Mage Sight in character, and even if you could, the fact that you can hit three successes 75% of the time makes for fairly dry conversation.

"So, what do you do?"
"Oh, me? I'm a double master in Prime and Forces."
"Yeah.... that's great. But what I meant was, what do you do professionally?"
"I.... wizard?"
"....Ok. How much does that pay, anyhow?"
"Oh! Well! I've got Resources 4."
".... I'm going to go hang out with the Tremere. You have a nice time."

But seriously. Half the Matter rotes up to 3 require "Occult or Science" and just about all the others want Craft. And if you're going to be big into Matter and Forces, you could do worse then to study basic chemistry and physics in PC high school.

Other then that, no good leads yet, so I'm going to make that my new goal. I want 3 good leads by the end of the week. Is that possible? I don't know. I'll go out of my way to make it work though.

I had a good evening last night. Really unhealthy food, but hey, I was dying for something with chili on it for a long time. I don't know if you're been privy to this rant yet, but in short, if I order something with chili on it, chili needs to cover it. No lame cups of chili. Still, man, that chiliburger was massive. You know what that means.

Lunch tomorrow. Or, rather, today. I totally ate the rest of that burger, so it's healthy eating for the rest of the week right?

Oh snap. It's Friday. So let's reset that timer, shall we? ^_^
Still, I lost some muscle weight and gained some fat weight, so I shouldn't take that too far. Walking and various exercises should clear up some of the lost muscle weight. I'm not going to worry too much about having put on weight though. I'm more concerned about the sedentary lifestyle I'd been working on for several months. Activity is definitely increasing my energy level.

Anyhow, it was my first trip into the city, which was fun. I mean, there's a subtle difference between Seattle and St. Louis besides hills and trees, and it's heavily dependent on the area. The truth is, I like a lot of areas in downtown St. Louis and the like, but crossing the floating bridge but day and night was pretty.

I finally got around to ironing out Atol on the spreadsheet, spending the banked xp that I'd earned from games and the bump to MC 3. The results are really pretty stunning with just a few bumps. Still, I had a few things go from 3 to 4, and a level 3 Rote, so I'm going to need to ask around and do a little OOC legwork to make sure its kosher. Nothing seems off about it, and the only thing I did that might surprise anyone is totally forgoing the Fame merit at all, since part of the IC dialog I had last game revolved around how Atol was leaving on a musical pilgrimage of sorts because he couldn't get his sound right and his band never took off. (Several band members left, in game, so.)

I'm doing the NPCs for the Exalted game, and kind of like how straight-forward the Dragonblooded Charms are compared to Solar or, especially, Sidereal Charms. They have the smallest Essence pools, so over a long period, their Charms are designed to be as efficient as possible, so you see a lot of '1 Mote per X' costs in their Charm trees. Without looking harder at the overall mechanics, I think the DB book is one of the best and most flavorful.

After working with the Mage and Camarillia spreadsheets, though, I kind of wish someone had done the same thing for 1st Ed. Exalted but since there never was a LARP for Exalted, there's not a lot of call for it.

I'd gotten an invitation to go to a birthday party movie night, but it's a really confusing invitation, honestly. I know the person through someone else, and so she's really more of an acquaintance then anything else. I'd agreed to go because I had assumed there'd be people I knew attending, but I can't seem to find a guest list on her Facebook, which is primarily populated that I don't know well or don't live here anymore. Of all the outings I intend to attend before I go, this one as the potential to be the dullest or the weirdest, so I guess if things go poorly, I'll either excuse myself early or see if Matt is doing anything.

And then invite him. Because that's an easy way of making a party more interesting. 

I was also invited to go camping, but I think that got canceled and I think it'd also run dangerously close to interfering with my Saturday plans. Of which I wanted to be more prepared for, but much of the interesting stuff is located on a thumb drive in Edwardsville, which I just don't have the energy to drive out and get right now. Instead, I'm making sure my character logs are correct and reconciled with the character sheets I have, since I need to spend somewhere around 60 points for at least one by tomorrow. Father Collin is irritating, too, because I've just got the sheet and have to re-figure where I spent the points for him. In at least one place, I'm having trouble reconciling exp with stats, which means I need to do math.

I don't mind though. The only thing I'm irritated about is how I already loaned out my Mage book, so I have to settle for my back up .pdf, since I don't want to go out to Edwardsville today. Also, 60 xp is a lot, and it still goes fast. I'm sitting around with a little tally sheet that says "Needs: 1 dot of Fame. Needs: ??? "

I assume I need Rotes and Arcana, since I'm a magical wuss. I also need Skills, since Atol arguably a better Mysterium mage then a Free Council by virtue of what he's good at. That's why I love him so much, though. He's really pretty out of place, and magical society doesn't make much sense to him, but he still keeps trying. At some point, though, I'm assuming I'll want another primary, because I've been playing Atol for a while and what he does is fun but doing it all the time is starting to drag on a bit. I certainly don't plan on retiring him, because the growth of a young mage into something else is an interesting concept to me. He's gotten much more cynical as time goes on, but I haven't gotten to play much lately, so a little of that growth is lost.

So, some homework, then some writing today.

Addition: Sigh. Nothing like a ton of cutting and pasting. At least I don't have to do it from scratch.

I'm pretty stoked. My ticket is ordered for the 24th, and I should be arriving at Seattle airport at 9:35 pm there. I originally wanted to depart on the 26th, but tickets were ridiculously priced. Those couple of days seem like an issue now, but I probably won't notice the difference overall. My plan is still to quit on the 19th, but depending on how I feel, and how convenient things are, I might leave sooner. Since I'm not under contract, giving forewarning of my intentions to leave is a polite formality it doesn't hurt to abandon. It's not like I've not been screwed by my job before, eh? So, total freedom.

I'm penning my resignation letter. It's so hard! I'm of the opinion that a resignation letter is really a chance to delve into corporate art. The urge to write "While I am leaving the company, I'd like to thank you for your constant generosity as an employer. The raise in pay to a minimum wage hourly equivalent meant a lot to me as a worker, and I'll always treasure the $25 gas gift card I received as my Christmas bonus." is pretty overwhelming. I've been told that I'm the only person people know who will wait a week to leave a job because he's trying to decide just how he wants to quit. I'm not a creature of impulse, people. I play a blue Magic: the Gathering deck.

The one thing I'm going to miss about the area, besides the really great peeps has got to be the gaming. Not only has the Camarilla been really kind to me here, but I've got a really great personal gaming life as well. I kind of have to abandon the OWoD Vampire finale that's been brewing in the area, which is a drag and I was really hoping to get back into Mage in a big way here. The one really big upside is that Covington has a real reason to get back into the action again. As much as I loved him as a character, the reasons for him to stick around were really starting to dwindle because I can really only justify him being in the area for so long. Plus, as Violca's Humanity drops, he becomes increasingly uncomfortable around her. Ironically, it might be noted that his Humanity started off as lower then hers, not that the situation remained there for long. ^_^;

In addition, I'll be updating Atol's myspace more often, checking his mail account more frequently, and the news of his second record should be coming soon. I know I still haven't gotten my CD case to people, so I'll bring it on the 21st, and you might be able to expect me to upload everything to a website soon, depending. It's a lot of additional work and it's just for grins, so it's not really high on my priority list (somewhere around me playing an MMO, actually). I might update tonight if I think of anything clever, but I don't want to write a lot without a reason. Let's just see if anything comes up.

Man alive! It's actually pretty busy tonight, with one hospital call after another. I'm not really sure what's going around out there this Thursday, but if it's not sickness, these calls indicate injury. Remember- if it happens to be zombie bites and plague, aim for the brain and run, don't fight - don't risk a bite! 


On a totally different side note, my wrists have been acting really oddly lately. They don't hurt, but they're prone to popping and feel really stiff.  I'm wondering if there's something about the keyboard angle and desk/chair height that's doing something to them.