Observations of the Fox

It's been over a fortnight since my last post. I'm running into that idea where "perfect is the enemy of good". I've been wanting to reveal the character design system that I've been developing, but getting the finer details just right has been a mammoth task.  At the moment, we follow a life path through stages. Each stage sets up something about the character, and builds their story with a sequence of random events. The base character generation pages are seven pages, the random life events are nine pages. and then we go through a worked set of examples where four players build their characters, and these characters will be used for the play examples through the rest of the rulebook. There's at least another sixteen pages coming (2 pages each for the various cultural groups, including their cultural values and stereotypes within their communities, how they relate to the other cultures, their available starting equipment, and a few other flavour elements)

Three to finish off with...  Day 29 - Awesome App Nope. Most apps I've played with have been distracting at the table, or have simply made an overly complex game, slightly less complex. So with this in mind, I can see that a lot of players like them for D&D because they reduce the labyrinthine systems to something vaguely manageable, or make the custom dice in FFG games more available. However, for most of the games that I've tended to play apps just limit the immersion. Maybe I'm just old school like that. Day 30 - Person you'd like to game with I'd love to game with one of the many celebrity gamers who claim that D&D is a great game. Vin Diesel, Hellen Mirren, Terry Crews, Joe Manganiello (my wife would want to be on that table too), Stephen Colbert, Deborah Ann Woll, Dame Judy Dench... I'd love to play something else with them to show that there are games so much better and more interesting out there. Day 31 - Game or Gamer you miss One of the first p

Day 27 - Marvelous Miniature Oooh...this is a tough one. I've got a few hundred miniatures (maybe a few thousand if you count the unpainted ones). Back in the day, I loved the miniatures produced by Rackham.  Even though they all had character and a distinctive look to them, this lady was one of my favourites. So annoyed they went bankrupt, but if you look hard enough you can still find some of them around . I'll need to dig through my boxes to see if I can find the copy of her that I painted. Day 28 - Great Gamer Gadget I love the idea of an initiative tower... I've been meaning to use one to see how good they are in practice. ...for games that use initiative that is.

Day 25 - Desirable Dice For a few years I had a thing for buying new dice sets for each game, and often new dice sets for specific characters. However, lately the clicky-clacky math-rocks haven't really done much for me. I think it was the moving house seven times in four years that did it.  Day 26 - Superb Screen I don't use screens. I prefer to keep my rolls in the open, and most of my working notes are in my head, because I tend to walk around the table and keep on my feet when I'm running a session. That said, I'm a woodwork teacher. A couple of years back I helped a student build a modular GM screen with a spot for dice, a clipped area to hold notes, and some small draws and storage areas for miniatures, pens, pencils, erasers, etc. Even helped him woodburn some designs on it. Here's the kind of thing we were going for... (from Elderwood Academy )

Day 23 - Peerless Player During the late 1990s, there were a particular group of players at game conventions in Sydney (and who regularly played at a variety of conventions across South Eastern Australia). I think I've mentioned them before on the blog, or at least alluded to them. They were generally known as "Big Name Gamers" (BNGs).  It seemed like everyone wanted to become a BNG, or at least get in the same social circles as the BNGs so that they could influence the local gaming scene, maybe work in one of the local gaming stores, maybe just set themselves up in the local network of favours and influence the led to work in the entertainment industry, theatre, or even political networks... there was a big black market in favours then, real world favours that were a deep iceberg, and the roleplaying community seemed to be one of the odd locations where the deep network protruded into the real world.  But were they actually good players? Not in my experience they weren&#

A quick trip to hospital, and some extra paperwork and bureaucracy at work have prevented me from keeping up with the regular posts...but that's just life... let's get back to our regularly scheduled programming. Day 21 - Classic Campaign Even though I've previously stated that I don't often used pre-published materials, one of my formative gaming experiences back in the early 1990s was playing "The Enemy Within" campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. It was dark, broody, atmospheric. It told a story, and it was so different to the chaos of almost every D&D set of adventures I had encountered at the time. One day I've love to revisit it. Just to see if the nostalgia is playing a bigger role in my memory, or if the campaign really was that good.  Day 22 - Notable Non-Player Character For many years I had an npc who was an old artificer with no legs. He would appear in various games no matter what system we were playing, or what setting it was. He w