Before the end of the day I should mention that it’s my birthday. Woohoo.
Last Friday I sent out an invite to join me at the Brickskeller on this Friday (my birthday, observed). If somehow, I know you and you read this blog, and I failed on have you on the invite list, please join me. Toss me an email to let me know you are coming, or just show up.
Happy Birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me….
From Fred Hicks livejournal:
I need a banner in my gaming area that says:
This is how I make you awesome.
I think if people kept that in mind while gaming it would definitely awesome up the experience.
On Friday, I was perusing livejournal of the creator of Story of the Century, Fred Hicks, and he had post about a game of SotC at DC Gameday in danger of being canceled and calling for interested players near Alexandria, VA. I’ve been wanting to actual play a game before trying to run SotC and while I was going to be running a game Nephilim Song in the evening, my morning was free.
I waffled a bit, you know gaming with random people, never sure what you’re going to get, but eventually signed up.
That night while prepping for Nephilim Song I made a character as an NPC that clicked and sadly I didn’t see her having a major role in the campaign unless I did some strong arming to bring her into the story where she didn’t belong. She was within striking range of pulp, so I wrote her up as a SotC character to use at the game.
The really odd part about the whole Gameday thing is where it was. Turns out they lost their original location and one of the participants offered up his work location, the work location happened to be the new location of the Motley Fool offices, and the person in question was Tom7, who I knew when I used to work at the Fool. It was a bit odd being back there.
But back to the game, I played Sashira the gypsy seeress with stolen eyes, well she didn’t have them anymore, because they were stolen. She had a history in the circus as a blind knife thrower and used her seer abilities to get around being blind. We did the novels and co-starring parts of character creation at the table. Sashira’s novel was Sashira Semper and the Escape from Death Island. You’d be surprised how many mystic rituals really benefit from the eyes of a true seer.
I was pretty happy with here especially since she was my first SotC character ever. I need to work on my aspect creation, I didn’t have much that could be generally compelled. I had stuff that could be used, social complications for begin a gypsy, circus performer, etc. and aspects that bad people would want to use her seer sight or her eyes for nefarious purposes, however since one of the other characters was an intelligent gorilla, he got the outsider compels. There were other things that I thought could be used for compels, but I think they were too vague to be used positively or negatively.
One of the other players did a write up for the game on his live journal. He liked my use of the I learned things in the circus to get on board a ship trying to exit. My favorite was the end where one of the other players tagged my aspect Seeress of the Gypsy to give me a vision of his success.
It was a fun game, though I do now see what some people complain about it being meta-gamy. I enjoyed it a lot and I still intend to run it, but sometimes the reaching for aspects felt unnatural. I thought in actual play there would be more maneuvers and declarations which would have flown better, but sometime the attempts to justify use of aspects was jarring to the action.
On the other hand I made an impassioned speech and got two minions to give up the fight. The thing that was really interesting is that no point during the game was deadly force used. I was throwing whatever happened to be around, I had daggers but It didn’t seem right to thrown them at people so I used my stunt which allowed me to use improvised weapons to throw debris lying around the dock. My companions used fists. So in the entire session no PC really used a deadly weapon. I tried to block the giant snake by throwing daggers, but that was about stopping the snake not damaging it.
Another thing I just realized was the players created the endgame in way usually not possible in traditional games. Our explorer made a declaration that temples like the one we were in have traps that destroy the whole temple. Gran’ok our intelligent gorilla took out the pillar bringing the ceiling down, blocking the bad guys in while we escaped.
All in all very fun. I would have liked to do something in the afternoon session, apparently there was a Truth and Justice game which I’ve heard interesting things about. However, as I mentioned, I was running that evening.
Perhaps next time.
Updated PRC 3.1.1: Initiative and Time Tokens with essentially all the changes that would have to be made to the Nephilim Song manuscript. There was also the minor functional change which changed bonus/penalties to the initiative check from +/- 1 to +/- 3.
Also managed to balloon it out to 6 pages. Go me.
The Montgomery County (Maryland) Police believe the law doesn’t apply to them.
The police of Montgomery County believe that speed limits are for little people, not big important people like them. Or to put it another way, they are above the rule of law at the very least with regards to speed limits, who knows about other crimes.
I think most rational people understand that when a police officer is responding to a call or if they somehow made the mistake of getting into a pursuit situation they are authorized to travel as quickly as they safely can to respond to that call. This is not in dispute or even a consideration. The question is why does the police officers believe the speed limit doesn’t apply to them when they aren’t on a call?
I’m generally in favor of unions and against speed cameras, but in this case I seem to be against the police union and siding with the speed cameras. The union has claimed that the county should be responsible for tickets issued by police officers ignoring the speed limits. Police sergeants have gone so far as refusing to check if an officer was responding to a call when the camera issued the ticket.
The chief directed lieutenants, not covered by the union, to investigate the matter and in the last 8 months 76 of the 224 tickets issued have been dismissed because the officer was responding to a call. Two thirds of the remaining 148 tickets have not been paid. The union advises its member that speed cameras issue citations to the owner of the vehicle not the driver, so they should not pay the tickets or set court dates.
The Fire Department has had no issue holding its firefighters responsible and making them pay their fines. It is the police who believe they should not be held to the same rules as the rest of us. That is a serious problem.
Sadly it is not limited to Montgomery County, there is an entire web site dedicated to police officers grousing about the injustice because they were issued tickets for traffic violations while they were off duty. This belief that they are above the law is dangerous in police officers, it represents a belief that they are an over-class with some right to oppress an under-class, rather than citizens like any other, attempting to keep order. It isn’t clear that these people should be police officers.
It seem more likely that they are nothing but bullies who wanted to continue the feeling of power as they became adults, rather than individuals with a desire to server their community and make it safer. I’m not so naive as to think all of our police are there or should be there because they have a desire to serve. We need to pay them and give them sufficient benefits so it is an attractive option to enough people. The union should be on the forefront of negotiating those things.
However, we can not negotiate about the rule of law.
I wrote a proposed rule change for Nephilim Song. The change involves dropping a lot of the beat and sequence mechanics and replaces them with a reaction token mechanic. It should allow combat to move quicker and be easier to manage.
The only real changes are to the initative roll, number of actions and the Grant Time and Steal Time talents.
The rule change is linked from the Nephilim Song page.
I posted a page describing Spirits of Place in the Nephilim Song universe.