Ramblings about gaming

I’ve officially started recruiting people for my soon-to-be famous podcast. It has proven to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. It seems that people on the internet who are looking to play more RPGs are way more picky than they lead me to believe. My first attempt was a game of Dogs in the Vineyard by Vincent Baker. Some people didn’t like the premise of how religious it felt so I scrapped that plan and went on to create a Mutants and Masterminds game based on their Hero High setting. That did draw a little interest but is going slowly. Right now I have 2 people committed, but need 2-4 more to have an actual game. Along with time restrictions and holidays, and my birth-2-weeks coming up it seems to be on hold for a little while at least.

As far as home games go, I’ve been slacking off a lot. I haven’t actually come up with anything new for my real life players in a long, long time. I started a Star Wars adventure up, but one of my friends started talking to me about making his own as well, so I sidelined that project until further notice. I want to run Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but the 3 player limit to pieces is kind of a turn off. My other options include New World of Darkness, or get back into writing 4E adventures again, but there aren’t enough constant people showing up to make for a good group for that at all.

I picked up that Magic: the gathering Duals of the Planeswalkers game from steam the other day. My advice: If you want to play Magic, get into the actual game. If you want to just spend $10 ever on magic… don’t buy this game, wait for it to hit $5 or less on steam or in bargain bins, it’s totally not worth it. Yes, you get to play Magic for a cheap price, but there’s little to no deck customization, the game itself is SLOW, and it forces you to watch every bloody animation or frantically click “continue” just to keep the game going. You are given little to no time to react to “the stack” You HAVE TO react to the stack at specific times to get abilities to work at all. Example: in order to counter a spell, you have to wait for the spell to be shown to you (this would trigger your “I’ll counter this” reflex, but it won’t work) you have to click continue, then have 2 seconds to respond (where you can counter the spell). Example 2: I block with a regenerating creature. My initial response is to regenerate after damage has been added to the stack… but no, you’re not allowed, you have 1 second after you declare your regenerator as a blocker to click the card, click “activate ability” then it has the “regeneration bubble” that I NEVER liked in the actual Magic game itself.

I think that’s good for this blog entry

Thank you for reading.

Lord Xtheth

Random thoughts upon the dawn of a new blog

I’ve been considering writing my own blog for quite some time now. It has crossed my mind many times over the past couple of years since I joined ENworld, I just never had the push to write one until now.

A thought occurred to me however: What should I blog about? The quick answer I guess would be “anything I want”.

I will try to make this blog something I do regularly, as I am also trying to train myself to write more often, to get myself into more of a writing mood and break my writer’s block I’ve been in for a few months.

One of the major ideas I had for this blog was to make it a design journal. I’ve been writing adventures for various Role Playing Games for years now, and have wanted to get into it professionally for a couple if years. Writer’s block and money issues have prevented me from publishing anything thus far, but hopefully in the future this will change.

I’ve recently begun trying to teach myself the fundamentals of web design, which is proving to be slightly harder than I originally thought it would be. I’ve been considering getting a “web design for dummies” book even though there are free websites out there that essentially tell you the same thing, though the Dummies series does make for good reference material.

The Podcasting bug has hit me lately. I’ve gone through the steps to set up an actual play podcast much like the ones presented by Nerdbound and RPPR. I’ve actually begun a sort of team up with Nerdbound, and will be an official unofficial NB-esque podcast. Neil has been helping me out a lot with the initial set up of things as well as giving me pointers as to how I can get people interested in a podcast-based game session (which I found out is slightly more difficult than starting a normal session).

On the subject of podcasts, this last Sunday I participated in a pickup game of Trail of Cthulhu Ran by Nerdbound Neil. It was a very interesting system, very simple, easy to learn and didn’t take anything away from the whole Cthulhu experience that I’ve known and loved in other Cthulhu based game systems.

Well… there it is, I finally got around to writing my first Blog entry. Hopefully this will make me popular on the internet, and then I can get all that internet money!

Thank you for taking the time to read!

Lord Xtheth