Buy Nothing Year is unfortunately not Pay Nothing Year, and Graig needs a haircut. So, in third person, Graig will be getting a haircut tonight of nights and following said haircut, charging on over to the Future Shop with the remainder of his Christmas Giftcard where they had better have Frisky Dingo in stock or there'll be hell to p.... Oh, it's not out until March 25th. Dang.
I'm just chomp, chomp, chomping at the bit to spend some money, even if it's just gift-card money, on DVDs. Of course, after Dingo one that'll be the end of it, at which point I don't know what I'll do. Going crazy between the end of March and 2009 wasn't really part of the plan.
Meanwhile, I've decided to GM series of campaigns for the gang. For those not hep to my D&D jive [Gygax RIP], it means I'll be running a role-playing game for the group of friends the wife and I occasionally play with. The "universe" within which we play has been in operations for about 20 years, and so it has a rich, complex history which is also accompanied by a compendium bible to keep things straight. This is serious business and, until now, I've felt most at ease with playing but leaving it at that. But with our last game, a situation occurred and inspiration hit, and I've constructed a spiraling 8-part game which will be teh mega-kool. Plotting out this epic is taking a lot of my brain power the past few days, and couple that with the fact that I have no idea how to actually run a game means I'm both plotting and learning at the same time (last night, it did three test fights using the DC Heroes volume 3 system to get used to the way hits and damage and things are measured. The results of which were: Deathstroke over Hawkman; shark beat polar bear; and Captain Marvel beat Lobo, and then beat Darkseid (for real, after Darkseid's omega-effect had a cataclysmic power failure). Yes, I am geek, full of ent, and proud.)
It's fun plotting this thing out, as it's not too far off from writing prose, in some respects, albeit, most dialogue is absent as that's what the players fill in, and plotting to leave the resolutions up to the gamers to decide. I'm having fun with that kind of story construction though, as I've managed to build in a resolution that is totally dependent on the characters' decisions and actions. Everything they do will affect the outcome of the story. It's like a multi-player Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. It's not quite getting back to writing as I've done it in the past, but it's actually proving very useful, and the manner with which I'm constructing this RPG campaign I could easily apply to any story I wish to tell, because I'm putting all the pieces on the table, flipping them face up and deciding what fits where without actually knowing what the full picture looks like.
I have to, in advance, figure out all the beats of the story, and how each chapter relates to the others, and then I need to figure out who the characters are that come into play and what role they play in the story, and then I need to figure out how the story will move around the players so that they're affecting change and not just doing what I want them to do. I was always so worried about running a campaign that was too linear and too restrictive, meaning point A meets point B resulting in point C. Thankfully, I'm much smarter than that.
Now I'm going to bug the wife to do some practice campaigns over the next few weeks before I run my first ever game in mid-April. I'm confident in my story but not my GMing skills so we'll see how it all plays out (pun unintended)
During Buy Nothing Year, solid entertainment doesn't come much cheaper (or rewarding) than this.
I'm just chomp, chomp, chomping at the bit to spend some money, even if it's just gift-card money, on DVDs. Of course, after Dingo one that'll be the end of it, at which point I don't know what I'll do. Going crazy between the end of March and 2009 wasn't really part of the plan.
Meanwhile, I've decided to GM series of campaigns for the gang. For those not hep to my D&D jive [Gygax RIP], it means I'll be running a role-playing game for the group of friends the wife and I occasionally play with. The "universe" within which we play has been in operations for about 20 years, and so it has a rich, complex history which is also accompanied by a compendium bible to keep things straight. This is serious business and, until now, I've felt most at ease with playing but leaving it at that. But with our last game, a situation occurred and inspiration hit, and I've constructed a spiraling 8-part game which will be teh mega-kool. Plotting out this epic is taking a lot of my brain power the past few days, and couple that with the fact that I have no idea how to actually run a game means I'm both plotting and learning at the same time (last night, it did three test fights using the DC Heroes volume 3 system to get used to the way hits and damage and things are measured. The results of which were: Deathstroke over Hawkman; shark beat polar bear; and Captain Marvel beat Lobo, and then beat Darkseid (for real, after Darkseid's omega-effect had a cataclysmic power failure). Yes, I am geek, full of ent, and proud.)
It's fun plotting this thing out, as it's not too far off from writing prose, in some respects, albeit, most dialogue is absent as that's what the players fill in, and plotting to leave the resolutions up to the gamers to decide. I'm having fun with that kind of story construction though, as I've managed to build in a resolution that is totally dependent on the characters' decisions and actions. Everything they do will affect the outcome of the story. It's like a multi-player Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. It's not quite getting back to writing as I've done it in the past, but it's actually proving very useful, and the manner with which I'm constructing this RPG campaign I could easily apply to any story I wish to tell, because I'm putting all the pieces on the table, flipping them face up and deciding what fits where without actually knowing what the full picture looks like.
I have to, in advance, figure out all the beats of the story, and how each chapter relates to the others, and then I need to figure out who the characters are that come into play and what role they play in the story, and then I need to figure out how the story will move around the players so that they're affecting change and not just doing what I want them to do. I was always so worried about running a campaign that was too linear and too restrictive, meaning point A meets point B resulting in point C. Thankfully, I'm much smarter than that.
Now I'm going to bug the wife to do some practice campaigns over the next few weeks before I run my first ever game in mid-April. I'm confident in my story but not my GMing skills so we'll see how it all plays out (pun unintended)
During Buy Nothing Year, solid entertainment doesn't come much cheaper (or rewarding) than this.