While playing Bookworm Adventures, when I noticed the word "snoino" I was able to quickly figure out how to turn it to my advantage.

So this past week I've been feeling general blahs, and vaguely under the weather... Since flying out of Ontario airport from Gen Con So-Cal, really. I went to work three days last week, got some writing done for the design doc, and dealt with a little customer request here or there. Thursday I went through the motions of attending chenoameg's holiday feast, and the people and food were amazing, and I was upgraded from "enh" to "all right".

Today, I started out kinda blah, went through a phase of really tired, napped partway through a rented movie I watched with friends, and then played some WoW.

After the raid was over (it only took 3:12 for MC! woo!) I suddenly realized I was hungry. And wasn't coughing. And... well... a cup of tea and some ramen w/ turkey later, I felt better than I have in a while.

Accomplishments while in the fog:

• bought a new microwave (the old one had earned the nickname 'sparky'), bought a new electric kettle, bought a big pile of new tea, threw out the old tea with expiration dates around the turn of the century...
• set up a new network adapter for my PC (wireless is a little less consistent, but the wire to the closet had gone to consistently completely dead - the wireless may only be a stopgap... I hope)
• went on three raids in three days (AQ40 (killed Skeram!), BWL (got boots and a trinket), and MC (um... 3:12!))...
• went to the optometrist, ordered new glasses (in a new style, for me!) and contact lenses (which will be a totally new experience). He says that Lasik is for people who aren't moving targets... hopefully in a year or so I can go back and get a new exam and discover that my prescription isn't changing. The glasses he measured are a few years old, and my astigmatism (I have astigmatism? I didn't even know!) rotated a little... We kinda let the Lasik conversation drop on the floor at some point during the conversation about glasses and contacts, though, so maybe he'd be willing to consult more about it. I dunno.

Also, I think I'm not going to continue the 365-day photo thing. I'm too far behind, and have missed many of the intervening days. If I were to do it, I'd start fresh from a new starting point. But... I need to change my lifestyle some to accommodate something like that. On bad days my life involves very few steps in the outdoors; house to car, car to work, work to car, car to house. Those are extremes, but they do occur.

In a bit I'll be going to the airport to fly to Ontario... California. From there I'll catch an airport shuttle to the Anaheim Convention Center, where I'll geek out for like four and a half days, at Gen Con So Cal.

Hey, yandros and lemurtanis, see ya soon!

In the intervening time, I will have only my phone for email and web browsing. If you need to contact me, phone me.

Well, not exactly... but I just ran the best possible courtroom drama D&D game I could have drummed up, I think, with the aid of a mechanic I whipped up. The players and the prosecutors were trying to steer the conversation in the courtroom either towards or away from the "inconvenient" facts that lead towards a PC conviction.

I modeled it after Minesweeper. But I used Scrabble tiles. I gave different players different levels of information about the rules of the minesweeper game (the Warforged got a card that said "on your turn, choose a direction, flip over the tile in that direction, and move the token onto it" while the Kalashtar got "This is a game of minesweeper. Vowels are zeroes, other letters' scores signify how many mines are adjacent. Anything with a 4 on it is beneficial to the party, while mines are detrimental. If you step on a zero, you may reveal up to four adjacent tiles.")

In a fit of quickness last night, I even wrote a program to help me set up the map of the board... I knew I had seven potential "mine" tiles (mines were K, J, X, Q, Z, and the two blanks), and was most restricted on "2" tiles (seven of those... though when I looked earlier I thought I only had six). So I had to be careful about the placement. In about an hour and a half I whipped up a quick little Java Program (requires Java 5, I think) to let me lay out the board and count up tiles.

Can you tell I'm impressed with myself? Or even surprised at myself?

Mmm... energy, and creativity. for once.

During the game itself we managed to wrap the mechanic in enough roleplay to really make the thing come together well. Only a couple glitches came up - one as I realized that I'd put two 4-point tiles next to each other (a W, marking a spot with 4 adjacent mines, and a Y, which is sometimes a vowel ;-) and didn't have time to set up the next "positive" reveal before they could pull it off... and the other as I realized that I hadn't really decided on an end condition for the game. I decided that 1) the Judge was getting convinced, and wanted to get on with it, and 2) had the ability to teleport the conversation marker at will. I didn't really come up with a good way for the players to discover where the "Y"s were; that would be an improvement in the future.

But really, a key attribute of this mechanic was that it was new to the players, used something familiar, but exercised their brain in figuring out the implications of this new weird system... By the end they had it pretty well worked out, and a second game using the same mechanic would be pretty straightforward, I believe.

...I really need to learn some patience. Antsiness waiting for other people to complete their turn makes board games, and even tabletop RPGs, much less enjoyable than it should be.

I play such "social" games less often because of this, and play online games more, since there's less downtime... except when I start to play with a group... DDO was all right, "before", because we were all getting experienced in the game at the same time, and accelerated about the same as we got further in...

Now, going back to get some newer friends into it, it feels painfully slow, and I alternate between zipping ahead and pissiing people off, or sitting around waiting for things to happen, staying back, and stewing. Had a bad night of it last night, and I know I need to get this impatience thing under control before next week's game.

If only there weren't "productive" feeling games that make waiting around feel inefficient.

(Edit: also, this impatience causes me to make tactical errors in games far too often)

Gen Con is good for reminding me what it was like to run with a posse back in the day.

It was amazing to see y'all, guys. Catch ya next year.

Oh, and the gaming was good too.

...is always a little stressful. Am I going to forget anything? Do I have all the books I need? Probably not... My dice? The right minis? Too many minis? The right clothes?

Also annoying: forgetting to cast Magic Circle against Evil before going into combat with a master Bard, and getting Dominated in the first round... being told to stand down for the entire fight means the run's over, go home. But at least it turned into more packing time :)

I was even looking at the spell on my list right beforehand, wondering "do I have time to get this off?" The answer, apparently, became 'no'.

There was actually a story hidden in that bullet list. I'm not sure that's how lj is supposed to be written.

Also, I should expand on "ran a game" sometime. I seem to be figuring this GMing thing out... At least I hope I am. I knew the direction I wanted the last run to go in, wrote up some quick stats for some folks, thought of how to present the situation, and made them work their way out of it.

I probably could have made them squirm a little more, but ... I'm still not very good at being "tough." One more thing to work on... this is kind of a situation where role-playing can act a little like therapy ;-)

We shall see... we shall see...

I try to make a sympathetic "Good Guy" character who's at odds with the party, and what do they do? They reason with him! Bah. :)