Scars of Mirrodin

I'd thought I was done buying new cards for Magic: The Gathering, but they keep dragging me back in...

Last weekend, one of my friends bought an entire box of cards for the current Magic set and held a tournament. Each player received six packs of cards and had a limited amount of time to put together a deck with them. The format was double elimination, each match best of three, which made for a long day. The tournament started at 5 PM and the last match finished at 4 AM.

When I opened my cards, it was obvious that one of my colors had to be red, but it wasn't so obvious what the other color should be. I only had six green cards total, and none of them were anything more than commons, so I put those aside without another thought. My best rares/uncommons were in white, but I had a serious problem with the mana curve in white, not having anything with a casting cost less than three. Black also had some good cards, but again, a serious problem with the mana curve, this time at the 3-4 casting cost level. Blue's rares/uncommons weren't as good as white, but had a much easier curve to work with. I'd attempted a three color deck for our last tournament and lost every game, so I wasn't going that direction again. And so red and blue it was.

I ultimately won two matches and lost two, for a total record of 5-4, finishing in fifth place of eleven players. Not too bad, considering that I often don't do well in this sort of format.

The friend who initiated the tournament apparently plans to continue having them whenever a new set comes out, and I enjoy the game enough to play when it happens. So it looks as though I'm back in after missing a year of cards.

Magic: The Obsession

We recently had a Magic: The Gathering session, which was the first in a long time. The occasion was that some of our younger generation of players are heading off to college or the military, and this was going to be the last time we'd have them around for quite a while.

I went a very unfortunate 2-6 for the occasion, in spite of bringing some of my better decks. Only one of the games was a blowout (most came down to the last four life points or so on both sides), but damn, I haven't done that badly in years. There are a couple of reasons for this. I think the main reason is that the level of competition has changed. The more casual (and therefore less formidable) players have largely dropped away, leaving the hardcore. No easy wins anymore.

So, I'll work the last cards I purchased a year or two ago into my decks and hope for better next time.

MEPACon Fall 2008

MEPACon always seems to involve mixed feelings for me, as I run at least one really good session each time, enjoy playing something new to me, play with some cool new people, and yet my GURPS events draw little or no interest. This time was no exception.

I arrived early enough to join Mike Sarno's first Tales of Peril game as a player. Tales of Peril is a 1930's pulp setting based on Daniel Bayn's Wushu. The mechanics encourage over-the-top action hero behavior. All of the players except for me were members of a high school roleplaying club attending their first convention. Much to my surprise, every one of the young players passed on the main character and chose supporting characters, leaving me playing the star. They were a fine group on the whole, taking advantage of the system's opportunities to add setting details and wild action, and a good time was had by all. It's a pity that they were just there for the day, as they didn't get to do more than get the slightest taste of the convention experience, but based on their reactions, I suspect we haven't seen the last of this bunch.

My scheduled Friday night GURPS Cabal game drew no interest at all, so I pitched in with one of my fellow MIBs to give him enough players to play a session of Munchkin Booty (the pirate iteration of the Munchkin card game). There's nothing special to say about it, other than that the non-MIB player seemed to really enjoy himself and that it was a nice chance to hang out with Steve Edelman and Erik Zane again.

There weren't any appealing Saturday morning events, and I wasn't scheduled to run anything again until Saturday afternoon, so I joined Mike Sarno's midnight session, playing a game involving a prison escape using the Engle Matrix rules. This wasn't a roleplaying game in the sense of the player having control over a particular character. The rules involve each participant focusing to some degree on one particular character, but proposing the occurrence of events in the story advancing that character's interests and choosing another player to serve as a referee regarding how likely it is that those events will occur. Others can counterargue the logic of the events if they like, then a die roll ultimately decides whether or not the proposed event becomes established as an official part of the story. Very rules light and story-oriented. I personally have a strong preference for stepping into the shoes of the character, so the one-step-removed style wouldn't be my preferred mode of play, but it was enjoyable enough, and I'd certainly play it again if the subject matter was interesting enough.

My Saturday afternoon In Nomine session ("Fear Itself") drew a full house of players, most of whom were familiar to me. I took a bit of a risk and allowed a seventh character when the scenario was written for six. The seventh character was originally an NPC, but I really didn't want to turn anybody away if I didn't have to, and the character had spent a lot of time hanging around with the PCs anyway the first time I'd run this one, so I took a chance. It did in fact slow the game down a bit, but not so much that the players minded. It was a lively session with a surprisingly textured finish that gave all of the characters and the Big Bad of the scenario a happy ending!

Saturday night's Sorcerer session ("A Dance of Pairs") was the most brutal I've run since I started running Sorcerer. The final toll for the PCs was one dead passer demon, one imprisoned sorcerer, one imprisoned passer demon (with the ability to feed his Need), one sorcerer confined to an insane asylum, one sorcerer free but spiritually broken, and one relatively happy passer demon (the one attached to the sorcerer confined as insane without actually being so). We were one of those noisy groups that draws attention from other tables due to all of the cheering and occasional yells of phrases that might have caused bystanders to call the police in a different setting. Very memorable session!

Afterward, I joined the traditional MEPACon midnight poker game for my first time. Three hours later I was effectively fifth place out of eight. Not an impressive showing by any means, but respectable enough.

My Sunday GURPS game (fantasy genre this time) again drew no player interest, freeing me to play Mike Sarno's Lovecraftian Engle Matrix session for a couple of hours, but I was seriously dragging from a lack of sleep and still had a two hour drive ahead of me, and so decided to drive home rather than play anything else.

Overall, a good time and a worthy trip. My sessions as a GM were either big successes or drew no players at all, as usual for me for MEPACon. I doubt I'll be back for the spring MEPACon if I'm going to GenCon next year, but there's a fair chance I'll return in the fall.

I think a change in tactics is due for next time, though. If I'm going to offer GURPS, I'm going to have to do it with a media tie-in or some other gimmick to grab player interest. GURPS Dollhouse might be an option by that time. Another alternative would be to run more than one In Nomine session, step up the indie games that have been working for me there, or return to what usually draws well at MEPACon, which is Call of Cthulhu. My roleplaying batteries have been recharged, and I have some fresh ideas that make me want to get back to writing new material for next year.

Mindfulness, Games, and a Rough Two Weeks

It's been a very rough last two weeks at work. Most of my work involves two car accidents with one or two people who've been hurt, with the occasional multi-car or serious accident, but for the last two weeks there's been a flurry of wild four and five car accidents with several people injured in each car. Some of this can be explained by recent bad weather, but in most cases it was just the driver responsible for the accident having an inexplicable lapse of attention. People must have their minds on other things. There is usually a brief run of claims like this in the spring when the weather improves. However, it's much earlier than would be usual for that, and I've never seen so many injuries (many of them serious) in such a short time. Hopefully this is just some weird blip and things will get back to our normal level of overload so I can dig out to some degree.

Some friends of mine occasionally host tournaments of the Magic: The Gathering card game for their friends, and did one this past weekend. I do well enough when we play with our own decks, but for some reason I'm no better than average when we play tournaments. I think I've finally figured out why. Tournament formats level the playing field, in that all of the players are operating with identical size pools of cards. There are some people in our circle of friends who've been playing the game longer than I have, but not many, so my card collection is larger than most of them. I've realized that I've come to rely on deck construction to win rather than actually being able to play the game well, so when the playing field is level, my results aren't very good. The embarrassing thing to admit is that my main problem is a simple lack of paying attention, which leads me back to the Buddhist idea of mindfulness. So not only can I enjoy the games as games, I can also use them as a sort of spiritual exercise by using them to cultivate awareness.

All of this ties together, believe it or not. After an initial period where I was tearing my hair out at work and rushing around, I made a decision to slow down. I didn't feel as though I could afford to do that, but I was finding that I had been rushing to the point where I was making mistakes and actually taking more time because I had to go back and fix things I'd done previously. I found a pace that still seemed to be workable, though it's still going to take at least a few days to bring my desk back to some level of order (assuming the work load goes back to normal, which I don't think I can count on). The key thing here is that it wasn't so much the working pace that mattered; it was more about paying increased attention to what I was doing and ultimately being more efficient.

I'd planned to focus on the concept of Right Speech this past week, but frankly, I've been doing a poor job of it due to stress. I become aware of saying things I probably shouldn't, but the words are coming out even as I realize there's a problem with them. The more aware I am of how/when I'm making mistakes, the more I find. It's funny and ironic that the more aware I become (and in essence the more progress I make), the more I feel like a complete newbie who doesn't know anything.

Black Friday Magic

In what's become something of a tradition, one of my friends hosted an all day session of the Magic: The Gathering card game on Black Friday, since none of us wanted to brave the jungles of retail. I spent some time this past week making sure I had a decent mix of decks (old vs. new, previously successful decks vs. experiments, etc.) to use for the occasion, so I didn't get a lot done other than that and work during that time.

I've finally figured out how to solve my "too many decks" problem by focusing on a few at a time in a rotation system, and must've done a good job of choosing my deck mix, as I won a lot this past Friday, especially with my newest decks. For the benefit of those who play the game, you'll understand that getting a 23/23 creature into play (and keeping it there) is a lot of fun. I've puzzled out a few new things about how the game works, and I'm starting to see results from that.

I have two problems associated with my recent Magic obsession. One problem is that I have ideas for new decks (associated with my new ideas about the game) that I can't actually implement right now. I own the cards to implement them, but I've packed away most of my Magic cards (except for working decks and new cards) preparatory to eventually moving, and it'd be a royal pain to dig them out. I've written some notes to remind myself of those ideas later, but they're still lurking around in the back of my mind, taking up head space because I can't follow through on them.

This leads into problem number two, which is that my RPG writing has slowed because my mind has been elsewhere. Now that the Black Friday session has been played, maybe I can fix that, since it's unlikely I'll play much Magic until the new year. I did spend some time on the characters for my newest In Nomine scenario during this long weekend, though it felt more like paperwork than creativity. Hopefully I'll have more positive things to talk about by next week.

Magic: The Obsession, Wedding Anniversary, and Other Stuff

The actual name of the game is Magic: The Gathering, but periodically it becomes an obsession for me, and this was one of those times. For those who may not know, this is a collectible card game representing a wizards' duel with cards in the same manner that chess represents two warring kings and their armies. The difference is that with Magic, you get to custom design your own army.

My wife has observed that I spend far more time in deck building than playing the game, and that's true. I used to buy a bunch of cards every time the newest expansion came out, then spend huge amounts of time making new decks and integrating the new cards into my existing decks. Then I realized that there weren't very many new cards making the cut into the existing decks, so I decreased the number of cards I was buying and decided that I would only integrate new cards into existing decks after each block of three expansions rather than after every expansion.

Even that has proven too unwieldy to continue, as I've spent far too much time this past week integrating new cards into a collection that's grown to over fifty working decks (not to mention the cards that haven't made it into decks for one reason or another). Considering that I usually play only about two dozen games a year with friends, it all seems ridiculous, and yet I don't want to stop buying a certain amount of new cards because building new decks with the new cards is half of the fun for me.

And so I've decided to change the new card integration process yet again. Without boring you with all of the details, it comes down to that I'll update the existing decks when I play with them, rather than when expansions come out. I'll set up a system to rotate through all existing decks so I won't spend so damn much time on this process in one shot.

I've recently finished the book "Broken Music", an autobiography from Sting. Considering that he's a songwriter known for his literate lyrics, it's not surprising that he does a fair job writing prose as well. I was hoping for some insights into the inner workings of the Police, which I didn't really get. Sting doesn't appear to have any more of a personal relationship with Andy Summers than you or I might have with any co-worker at the office, though he does speak highly of him as a professional. His personal and musical relationships with Stewart Copeland get some discussion, but there wasn't any information there that you couldn't have gotten from interviews from the Police era. What is interesting is that you learn more about what makes him tick as a human being. He grew up in some rough conditions, which might surprise those with a more highbrow impression of him. You can take the boy out of the neighborhood, but there's always some of the neighborhood in the boy afterward, and it comes through at times. The book is worth reading, even if you aren't a particular fan. If you are a fan, don't expect anything deep regarding the Police, but you can expect a better understanding of what makes their leader tick.

I also recently finished "Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman. I'd recommend it if you liked American Gods, though it's not as strong or as sprawling. It's a more personal story.

I'm currently reading "Ethics for the New Millenium" by the Dalai Lama. Inspiring stuff. Reading this, you can't help but see the logic of his approach and wonder why human beings have such a hard time getting along when we essentially agree about the things that really matter. Even before reading this book, I've never understood the common human tendency to insist on dictating to others how they should live their lives. I'm not that far into this book yet, and might have more to say about it after I finish.

I'm still overindulging with Netflix, and we've picked up a DVD collection of 50 classic horor films, so it's been movie week. More on that another time.

I've had the last week off, and my wife had Thursday and Friday to spend with me. We usually take vacation time for the week of our wedding anniversary. We felt as though we should do something special for it, but the fact is that neither of us could think of anything special that we really wanted to do, so for the most part we just rested and watched movies at home. We didn't even buy gifts for each other, though we did buy a new ring for her while we were on a day trip. It's been a relaxing week for me, but the work week calls, and I have no choice but to answer.

We're usually well stocked with Christmas and birthday gifts by now (we have a lot of fall and winter birthdays in the family), but that's not the case this year at all. For some reason, the effort put into preparation to move seems to have taken all of that kind of energy and left us disinclined to focus on that area of life. We didn't even do any special preparation for Halloween, which is normally a favorite holiday with us. We're not going to have any choice but to try to catch up in the next month or so, so it's probably going to be a busy November.

I usually get a lot of writing done during the vacation this time of year, but that wasn't the case this time, primarily due to the Magic obsession. It was my choice, so I can't complain. I hope to get back into writing mode along with my usual routine this upcoming week.

Creative Burst

"A Slice of Blackwoods" is entirely finished now, down to the last detail, except for a playtest and some tweaking that'll come out of that playtest. So I pulled out my "Dance of Pairs" notes and started piecing things together, then expanded a bit on what I had, and was surprised to see how close I am to being finished with that one as well. All I need to do is finish writing two player handouts, make the actual character sheets (I already have the character stats done) and go over everything to make sure all of the characters have enough "bangs" to keep events moving, and that one'll be ready for playtest as well.

Since I'm doing so much of my writing in bits and pieces away from home, and can't do the rest of "Dance of Pairs" anywhere but home, I started thinking ahead to what I wanted to do next. I decided to work on another In Nomine story (probably involving Eli, the missing archangel of creativity), and started looking through my books, but wasn't finding any inspiration. I gave up for the night, feeling a little discouraged.

I woke up uncharacteristically early the next day (Saturday), bursting with ideas that had nothing to do with Eli, and wrote everything down before I could forget it. Before I was done about an hour and a half later, I had notes for two different In Nomine scenarios, a quality short segment for TOON, and a much-improved version of an earlier long-form idea I'd had for TOON. So now I have more than enough to work with for a while.

I guess the archangel of creativity wasn't ready to have his story told yet, and decided that constructively distracting me was the best way to handle it. :-)

RPG Activity

I've re-started the home GURPS Firefly campaign, and it's going well. I ran the first season last year, and it was essentially about the characters coming together as a crew and getting to know each other. There were some nice elements, but we lacked the dangerous edge that River Tam's situation brought to the source material.

The start of our second season remedied that. In what was originally planned to be the first season finale, we had a player character death (sacrificing himself to save another) and the player crew wreaking havoc on an Alliance military ship in an attempt to rescue two kids who ultimately weren't even on that ship. The two kids had psi potential and had been taken involuntarily by two of the Blue Hands. They were actually on another ship, but the players didn't know that at the time.

The second session of season two completed the rescue after the crew found where the kids had actually been taken. But now they've got a huge target painted on their backs after these two incidents and we now have the edge I'd hoped would develop. The next few sessions should be lively.

On the convention front, this is going to be the leanest year I've had in ages. I had to cancel going to the private convention this month due to personal issues, and was unable to get the time away from work to go to DexCon in its entirety (though I'll still go Saturday/Sunday). I'm only running three games at GenCon. I'm skipping MEPACon in the spring, and probably in the fall as well. PoliCon is going to be the usual single day for me. Maybe next year will be more promising.

I'll be running "A Slice of Blackwoods" for GURPS Banestorm, "Controlling Interest" for GURPS Cabal, and "Rumspringa" for In Nomine at DexCon. I'll be running "A Slice of Blackwoods" for GURPS Banestorm, my old favorite "Lilim Faire" for In Nomine, and "Well Being" for Sorcerer for GenCon. I plan to run "Rumspringa" for In Nomine for PoliCon.

On the positive side, I won't need as much material this year as in years past. "A Slice of Blackwoods" is essentially done, though I'm still finishing some details of the character sheets such as personal equipment. Creatively, I'm working on "A Dance of Pairs" for Sorcerer, which is largely done except for actually statting out the characters, but that's easy to do with Sorcerer and I won't need it this year anyway. I plan to keep writing, because it's what I do, and a little inventory is a Good Thing. After "A Dance of Pairs", I'll most likely write the next installment of the GURPS Cabal series and another In Nomine scenario, but I'm also itching to write more Paranoia and would like to try out Mortal Coil as well. There's just never enough time to write everything I want to do.

Poker in the Eye II

Last week's feline situation overshadowed a minor accomplishment, that being my first poker victory with five other live players last Tuesday night. I can honestly say I've won more money than I've lost at poker, having played simply for fun my first time, losing $10 my second time, and winning $20 my third time. I don't think I'm quite ready for the World Poker Tour yet, though. :-)

I remain obsessed with the game at this point, playing the XBox version a little each night and having bought (and started to read) a book on it. I've never been much interested in gambling before, and that's not where the obsession lies, or I'd be playing more games with real people for money. I think it's that I've figured out where the skill lies, as opposed to being just who happens to draw the best cards, and now I'm trying to understand how to manipulate that to advantage, like any other game. It's a resource management game, really, with the resource being the chips. I'm too conservative by nature to be a real gambler, but I'm just enjoying the game for what it is right now.

On other fronts, my workload has become a bit more reasonable, and I've been working a lot of extra hours to try to clean house and create a situation where I don't mind my job so much on an ongoing basis.

Creative work is on the back burner for right now while I put in extra work time, learn poker, and get essentials done around the house. That said, I ran the first session of season two of my GURPS Firefly game this past Sunday, which went well, all in all. It felt good to be in the GM's chair again (which happened to be on the floor in this case), and the players seemed to enjoy the session. It didn't work out as I'd expected (with the PCs in prison), but we did have a surprising player character death, and it did end up with them having royally ticked off the most powerful government in the 'Verse, adding an element of true danger that's been missing from the campaign up to this point. I'd been getting burned out on Firefly, which was one reason for the hiatus, but now I'm excited about running it again for a while.

Poker in the Eye

I'm still spending far too much time with my XBox poker game, and I think I've learned enough to not embarrass myself playing with live human beings. I'll have to try it again soon. I'm beating the computer characters (even the highest level ones) on a regular basis, but real people are certain to be more challenging.

I tried the Fable game as well, and while it has entertainment value, I get more of the same sort of pleasure out of paper-&-pencil RPGs with live human beings. I'll still pull it out now and again, though.

I've broken out the GURPS Character Assistant and finished most of the characters for "A Slice of Blackwoods". I anticipate finishing them soon, then doing a little fine tuning, and might be finished with the whole thing within the next week or so.

I've been moved at work, and I'm now reporting to a new boss, but still doing the same thing I am now. We'll see how that goes as I get to know the new boss. On the bright side, the reason I've been moved is that there's been a minor reorganization that's supposed to lighten the workload a little. I'll believe that when I see it, but I want to believe it. :-) I've succeeded so far this year in my goal of doing a better job coping with the stress, but obviously it's far too early in the year to get excited about that, and a change in superiors is likely to be a minor additional stressor.