Friday, November 16, 2007
Batman Meets Dostoyevsky
On The Net
Over at Again With Comics, they have a truly twisted mashup of Batman and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Counting Calories
On The Net
Over the last few years, a disturbing number of my gaming friends have come down with eating and weight related diseases: diabetes, gout, heart disease, hypertension and sleep apnea, among others (not to mention the weird outbreak of brain tumors).
It’s not hard to understand. Our hobby is a sedentary one, and for some reason encourages the eating of fast food and large amounts of unhealthy fast foods. If we were playing tennis or racquetball instead, we probably wouldn’t have these issues.
I recently found a website that may help us to make better choices, though. A Calorie Counter compares the offerings at various fast food restraurants and lets you sort their nutritional data for things like calories, fats and carbs.
I found it very interesting.
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Sunday, November 04, 2007
Halloween 2007 Game
Miniatures Games
Every year, I run a horror themed game on one of the weekends close to Halloween. This year’s scenario involved groups of monster hunters—a strike force from Zenda, a squad of WolfenJager and the Vatican Hit Team—who have descended on a central European town that has been overrun with monsters. To stop the infestation, the teams needed to find six books of spells that have been stashed throughout the town.
For this game, I used the Rippers miniatures rules from Pinnacle. They are uncomplicated and have and RPG feel (not surprising, considering they’re a subset of that company’s Savage Worlds RPG). You can find a free version of the basic rules, called Savage Showdown.
The game was run somewhat like an old school dungeon crawl. As the game master, I played all the monsters. The players moved through the town, entering and exploring buildings like rooms in a dungeons, fighting monsters and picking up useful items.
Each turn, there was a chance of a wandering monster appearing. These were pulled from a deck of monster cards, and then randomly assigned to a starting position. During the monster turn, I rolled a GW scatter die to determine the direction that they travelled. When the wandering monsters had a line of sight to a group of good guys, they rolled a skill check to determine if they noticed. If the good guys were spotted, the monsters would make a bee-line toward them.
As it turns out, the monster hunters had little difficulty in finding the books and destroying them. I had bad luck rolling for wandering monsters, and when they did arrive, they always seemed to head away from the players. In games past, the wandering monsters were very effective in slowing down the players and picking off the occasional figure. If the players did not move toward their goals quickly enough, the monsters would reach a critical mass and the players would have no chance.
This time, I just couldn’t get a break.
A modification that I’ll make in the future is to have an increasing chance of a wandering monster with each failed roll. My base has always been a 1-3 on a six sided die. In the future, if one doesn’t appear, on the next roll a monster will appear on a 1-4, then a 1-5, etc. Once a monster appears, the chance falls back to 50%.
A few notes on the terrain: All of the buildings, and the castle walls are home made from foam core. The town houses were coated with colored gesso; the half-timbers are balsa. The wood siding on the buildings is made from strips of cardboard, glued in rows. Roofs are either made from strips of cardboard, cut to resemble shingles, or from a plaster casting.
The castle walls are made from foam core, painted with black latex paint, into which sand was mixed. They then were drybrushed. The stone effect was made by randomly gluing rectangles of cardboard onto the surface before painting. The brick houses are made from foam core. I used Corel Photo Paint to make sheets of brick patterns, which were printed and glued to the surface.
The panes on the windows were made by cutting plastic canvas of the sort used for needlework.
Figures are from a large variety of manufacturers, including West Wind, Ral Parthal, Grenadier, Heritage, and a few others I can’t remember. I’ve been collecting them for twenty years now.
You can see more photos of the 2007 Halloween game in the gallery.
Please leave comments and questions below:
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Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The Future of Dungeons and Dragons
On The Shelves
YouTube has a series of videos of Wizards of the Coast’s GenCon unveiling of the future of Dungeons and Dragons. It seems that they’re going to try to merge the old-fashioned paper-and-pencil game with a new computer interface. It’ll be interesting to see if they actually can pull it off.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
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Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Google Docs Offer Collaboration Tools
Technology
Microsoft Office is expensive, and as a result, there are a lot of people trying to get by on half-baked applications like WordPad and Microsoft Works. Neither of these are good choices, especially if you need documents that play nicely and share with others.
One alternative is the online word processor / spreadsheet / presentation manager called Google Docs.
The editing tools in all of the applications are very basic, but where the program shines is in its sharing tools. The files are stored online at Google, so you can access them anywhere you have internet access. You can export your documents as Word files, RTF, OpenOffice and even pdf files (very useful if you don’t have a full version of Adobe Acrobat). You also can publish the document to the internet—Google will give you a unique url with which to find it—to your blog, or to another web page. Finally, Google Docs allows you to designate other people as collaborators, and they can work on editing and changing the document as well. Google Docs also keeps tracks of versions so you can go back to a previous version.
In all, I think that Google Docs has a great deal of potential use, both for business and hobbies. For wargamers in particular, it coudl make the creation of “group” rules sets more feasible.
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Thursday, September 27, 2007
Another Star Wars 300 Video
Random Nonsense
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