Preparation

I am the Warden!!

As you can see, I've been hard at work and unintentionally forgot to post anything since Monday. Playtest night is tonight and I wanted to have an actual hard copy at the table. Enough changes have been made since the last Friday playtest that everyone has to re-build their characters, so the idea of having real paper to flip through seemed best.

Pop this pic on Photoshop and zoom in on the title page. I'll have all these uploaded here on Monday. Next step, the red pen of doom!!

(Kudos to a certain sneaky bugger who snapped this shot. Why do I still look like a skinny dweeb when I'm almost 200 pounds?!)

EDIT: Based on the latest playtesting session, there are a couple more changes I'm going to make before posting the latest draft. There will not be any uploads on Monday.

Death and Thugs

I am the Warden!!

One thing has become apparent in OS playtesting: it's fun to kill thugs! By the dozens too. Watching those 1-hit wonders drop like stones never seems too much for players. Every once in a while, a thug delivers a nasty punch or shoot a hero in the back for a couple of hits of damage. Nothing big, but enough to piss off that hero to cash in a nasty reaction or two. While thugs can be considered a success without any design revisions required, perhaps it's important to consider the role of thugs in the Optional System and how they impact the game as a whole.

Commence with non-analytical data!

Speak Out 3: The Power of Geek

I am the Warden and I am a geek!!

There's a healthy combination of events going on in today's post, one I had not planned on until just a few moments ago. It's the final day for Speak Out With Your Geek Out and it's the one year anniversary of a rather traumatic event. How do they both come together? Better than chocolate and peanut butter, as it turns out.

On September 17th of 2010, I was the victim of a terrifying car accident. Seeing as my lawyer will bust a nut when he finds out I'm posting about it online during the ongoing negotiations, I will keep the details to a minimum yet express the consequences of that fateful day as concisely and dramatically as I can. These are the facts. As I drove straight through an intersection on a busy highway nearly 20 minutes from home at 100 km/h, I was struck by an oncoming car attempting to make a left turn. The impact sent my car into an adjacent ditch, causing a calcaneus fracture to my right foot and a severe concussion. Once settled in the ditch, the car quickly caught fire. I got out of the car and dragged myself away before it become completely engulfed in flames. How exactly that happened is uncertain because I have no memory of the event.

But that's not what we're here to talk about today. We're going to talk about the other 364 days since playing Hollywood stuntman and how my passion for roleplaying games has helped pull me through these trying times.

Speak Out 2: You Got Spoked

I am the Warden!!

Apparently, Speak Out With Your Geek Out is a week-long blogasm or it's taking everyone a whole damn week to get through all our geeky love and we're just getting more and more inspired as we continue reading. Fair enough, let's add to that gargantuan list, shall we?

Monday's entry into the postarama expressed my mistrust of acceptance as a geek. Mistrust may be a bit of a strong word as it implies I'm waiting for people to lure me into a basement lit by only a single lightbulb hanging from a chain and forcing me to watch hours of baseball until I turn; let's call it uncertainty. It's given me pause for thought and implies either I have extremely serious social issues (which is definitely on the table) or there's another underlying reason for this response. Being the introvert I am coupled with months of therapy, I wanted to explore this further.

Cue the meditation cloud.

Coming Up Next

I am the Warden!!

One peaceful night's sleep and it's time to start pumping out OS goodness again. Yesterday was an incredibly productive day on five fronts. A proud moment, to be sure, but keeping that kind of momentum running for two days in a row has always been a challenge. I'm feeling confident about it this time, having spent training points on bumping up my Concentration and Typing skills to give me 3 uses of +2d6 trained dice.

(Oooh, I've been waiting for the day when I could finally making an Optional reference.)

Yesterday's upload of Optional: Playtest weighs in at 79 pages, only 9 pages less than what's on the actual Word file. It won't be long now before everything still in working phases will be ready enough to make it to the next step: PDF. That brings me to today's topic, an overview of everything listed as "In Progress" for Optional: Playtest.

The Sweat From My Brow: Version 0.5 Playtest Is Ready

I am the Warden!!

Finally, the last of numerous changes have been made and the Optional: Playtest PDF (Version 0.5) has been uploaded and added to the Optional Library on your left. It stands at 79 pages, so there's a good chance I'm going to keep these particular updates down to once a month. I may not have a life, but I have to expect the rest of you do before plopping another 80+ pages every month to start over from.

'Cause we ain't done yet...

Speak Out: The Good and the Bad

I am the Warden and I am a Geek!!

I've never been comfortable with all of this recent "tolerance" towards geeks. I grew up in the 90s where D&D remained a satanic ritual performed by scrawny weaklings were too much of a puss to shoot up their school like normal kids (their words, not mine). That's what I'm used to and honestly, I miss those days. When you did let it out that you played D&D, the look was a mixture of "Oh, you poor bastard" and "Jesus, get the fuck away from this guy." Now shows like The Big Bang Theory have made us... um, popular? See, I can't even say it without falling into disbelief. Just last month, I had a firefighter - a man who grew up on the high school football team - play his first RPG and loved it. My head still shakes over that.

Since I'm going to turn 40 in a couple of years, I'm going to start early on saying this. You kids don't know how lucky you have it now.

Speak Out With Your Geek Out! is a day to encourage those feeling excluded or misunderstood for their hobbies by society at large by regaling them with stories of triumph and understanding. To let you all know you are not alone and, while we may still operate on the fringes of society, we are many. Don't let our weight problems fool you, we can also be a highly active, motivated people. I'm posted this today because I was also a shy, geeky kid who's grown up to be a quiet, nerdy adult with a drawer for roleplaying shirts in his dresser.

I have two stories today, one spotlighting the tribulations of growing up with D&D and another highlighting the strengths of roleplaying. As any motivational speaker would, I'll start with the bad story.