The paper was rejected.
*head, desk*
That science paper I editted back at the beginning of July. The one I ripped apart at the seams and put back together in a completely different order, and then wrote that brilliant summary of what it was all about. Bleh.
I knew I shouldn't've gotten lazy with those tables. I haven't read through all of the reviewer comments yet, but the part I saw said that we hadn't clearly explained how we made our calculations. And yes, that's probably true. Is it my fault for letting it slip by without comment?
At this point I don't actually know. I really needed a lot more time with that thing to get it up to my best perfectionist standards. As the deadline loomed I had to lower them. I thought it was acceptable by the time I was done - but I guess it was not.
Maybe I should've calmly ignored my former-boss's constant comments about the journal's philosophy, back when it had that other Editor-in-Chief - who is dead and gone now and replaced by someone with a much different view. Former-boss said that the previous guy could see the core importance of a paper, and didn't fret so much about the "trivial" details. Therefore, I should edit the paper with that same approach - make sure our key points were clear. That's what I did.
But that past guy isn't there anymore. Maybe we shouldn't try to cling so hard to philosophies of the past. Maybe we should've paid more attention to the philosophy of the current gal.
*sigh* This is what happens when I don't speak up when I know I'm right. Former-boss is not an easy guy to want to argue with. He's the type that's larger than life, a well-respected member of the scientific community with a very distinguished career in his field. His very presence commands respect - and I respect him a great deal. He's a great guy, deeply cares about the Institute we work for and the directions it's going, cares about the students that come through here, and gets very impassioned about his own work. Ask him a simple question and he'll stand there and arm-wave about it with great enthusiasm for an hour or more. He's the kind of scientist that never truly retires because the research is his life and he will be doing it until the day he dies.
And he's also supposed to know how to publish papers by now. :p
I know he's going to be royally outraged, too. It's probably a good thing that he's in Germany right now, and will have had about a week to digest the news before he gets back here to try and talk to me about it.
They better not have complained about the English this time around. :p I'm still afraid to look. Maybe tomorrow.
2005/08/25
2005/08/21
More Roleplaying Rambles
Well, now I have three werewolves in play and potentially four vampires being created. One potential player withdrew, and then one of the others decided he wanted to play both a werewolf and a vampire. Such are the ways of the fluctuating pool of applicants.
For the werewolves, I'm trying to get all three of them hooked up into the same scene wherein they get to rescue Brightspot, the matriarch of the fallen caern. This will just be out in the woods somewhere. The idea is that they will take her back to their own caern, and then Brightspot will tell them all the foul deeds that have befallen her caern, and then the PCs will form a pack to go retake Brightspot's caern from the Wyrm.
That's the general outline so far. This will probably take at least a few months to fully play out. By that point, hopefully there will be enough werewolf PCs in the game that the entire pack can be them without any of my NPCs helping out.
I have nothing outlined beyond that point. The pack will have its overall mission, and hopefully they will figure out for themselves how exactly they want to go about it. For me, that will be when the fun really begins. ;) The fun part is the challenge of coming up with stuff on the spot, as I need it, and trying to keep it all consistent with whatever I made up before that point. The complexities tend to mushroom at an alarming rate, and it'll start snowballing forward for quite a wild ride.
I'm looking forward to getting the vampire side of things started too. Three of the players are excellent, and the fourth, although a bit annoying, is one that I know is good once he's actually playing. I don't think he means to be a stats munchkin. He just isn't used to creating characters as actual individual people, and I suspect he's becoming quite well enlightened on an entirely different style of roleplaying than he usually does.
In some ways I wish I had offered twice as many freebie points. The backstories I get deserve to have more points associated with them. The amount of screening I've been doing already ensures that those incapable of playing such high-powered characters will probably not make it all the way through chargen. So maybe I should've just allowed that to begin with.
It's kind of interesting also that all four of the characters are shaping up to be the bookworm type, who are more for digging up cool knowledge out of musty old tomes than killing things. I should probably make up a large, attractive library for them to stumble around in. ;) This is an interesting change of pace from the majority of werewolf applicants, who almost all wanted to play the warriors. For them, the plot is therefore going to include a lot more hack-n-slash.
I'd missed GMing without even really knowing it. There was a lot of Stargate running that I enjoyed immensely while it was going on - all of them related to writing the story and watching it unfold. (None of it related to the Stupid Player Tricks going on in the background.) Now I get to do it again, and this time I know that every single player in the game is good. All in all, I couldn't ask for a better starting group. This is going to be fun. :)
And now for an interlude ... My lentil chili recipe.
1 lb ground beef
1 large green pepper, diced
1 large can of diced tomatoes (or you can blanch, de-skin, and dice a couple fresh ones, but I find that much more of a hassle than just getting a can)
1 medium onion, diced
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup lentils, washed in cold water
1 can beef broth
1 can water
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon oregano
cayenne pepper
black pepper
In a gallon pot, crumble and brown the ground beef. Drain off excess fat (if you're anti-fat).
Dump the green pepper and onion into the pot and pan fry until they stop being crisp. Put the ground beef back in and add garlic. Stir. Dump in the tomatoes, beef broth, and water. Stir some more. Add lentils. Stir. Put in all the spices.
Let simmer for 40 minutes or until lentils are cooked. Add more water if it gets too thick.
:)
The chili powder I'm currently using is something local to Arizona. My boss brought some back for me the last time he went there. (He has a lot of business trips). Your mileage may vary depending on what brand you use, but I've had reasonably good results with Tones (the kind they sell at Sam's Club), and I suspect anything you order off of http://penzeys.com will be great.
I guess you can't technically call it "chili" the way I do it, but it tastes good and i like it. ;) I use lentils because I don't like most beans. Also, lentils don't require you to soak them overnight first. And to me it tastes quite good that way.
(For other dried beans: need to soak them overnight to get them softened up and ready to cook. Don't use the water you soaked them in because that's where the compounds go that give you gas.)
I usually eat the chili topped with extra-sharp cheddar, and served over white rice. I've also used my chili over baked potatoes with sour cream.
***
Two more weeks to Labor Day. I'm getting ready for it by not doing anything other than roleplaying. Trying to save up the inspirational energy for the one big run. Running my game is helping create it, too, so it works out well. ;)
In terms of food, at the moment I have a lot. I have half a pot of the chili mentioned above and about a third of a lasagna, both of which I made last weekend. That should keep me eating well through next week. I also have a small pot of clam chowder penne - which is where I take a can of Campbell's chunky clam chowder and turn it into a pasta sauce by adding some spices and other veggies.
I have enough ingredients to make other things too - a lot of it the type that's reasonably quick to do, like frozen burgers and sandwich components. (broiled Bubba burger + toasted Lenders plain bagel + cheddar + ketchup = really good.) And a wide assortment of junk food, mostly in the form of ramen noodles, that I will probably be eating during the actual weekend itself. That and Chinese takeout. But I figure if I eat large portions of healthy things in these next two weeks, it should work out well.
In some ways it's kind of interesting how my approach to roleplaying (GMing in particular) is a lot more organic than my approach to writing. At some point I ought to sit down and make some organized comparisons between the two. But not right now. Right now I've just had an ice cream sandwich and I feel a nap coming on ...
For the werewolves, I'm trying to get all three of them hooked up into the same scene wherein they get to rescue Brightspot, the matriarch of the fallen caern. This will just be out in the woods somewhere. The idea is that they will take her back to their own caern, and then Brightspot will tell them all the foul deeds that have befallen her caern, and then the PCs will form a pack to go retake Brightspot's caern from the Wyrm.
That's the general outline so far. This will probably take at least a few months to fully play out. By that point, hopefully there will be enough werewolf PCs in the game that the entire pack can be them without any of my NPCs helping out.
I have nothing outlined beyond that point. The pack will have its overall mission, and hopefully they will figure out for themselves how exactly they want to go about it. For me, that will be when the fun really begins. ;) The fun part is the challenge of coming up with stuff on the spot, as I need it, and trying to keep it all consistent with whatever I made up before that point. The complexities tend to mushroom at an alarming rate, and it'll start snowballing forward for quite a wild ride.
I'm looking forward to getting the vampire side of things started too. Three of the players are excellent, and the fourth, although a bit annoying, is one that I know is good once he's actually playing. I don't think he means to be a stats munchkin. He just isn't used to creating characters as actual individual people, and I suspect he's becoming quite well enlightened on an entirely different style of roleplaying than he usually does.
In some ways I wish I had offered twice as many freebie points. The backstories I get deserve to have more points associated with them. The amount of screening I've been doing already ensures that those incapable of playing such high-powered characters will probably not make it all the way through chargen. So maybe I should've just allowed that to begin with.
It's kind of interesting also that all four of the characters are shaping up to be the bookworm type, who are more for digging up cool knowledge out of musty old tomes than killing things. I should probably make up a large, attractive library for them to stumble around in. ;) This is an interesting change of pace from the majority of werewolf applicants, who almost all wanted to play the warriors. For them, the plot is therefore going to include a lot more hack-n-slash.
I'd missed GMing without even really knowing it. There was a lot of Stargate running that I enjoyed immensely while it was going on - all of them related to writing the story and watching it unfold. (None of it related to the Stupid Player Tricks going on in the background.) Now I get to do it again, and this time I know that every single player in the game is good. All in all, I couldn't ask for a better starting group. This is going to be fun. :)
And now for an interlude ... My lentil chili recipe.
1 lb ground beef
1 large green pepper, diced
1 large can of diced tomatoes (or you can blanch, de-skin, and dice a couple fresh ones, but I find that much more of a hassle than just getting a can)
1 medium onion, diced
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup lentils, washed in cold water
1 can beef broth
1 can water
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon oregano
cayenne pepper
black pepper
In a gallon pot, crumble and brown the ground beef. Drain off excess fat (if you're anti-fat).
Dump the green pepper and onion into the pot and pan fry until they stop being crisp. Put the ground beef back in and add garlic. Stir. Dump in the tomatoes, beef broth, and water. Stir some more. Add lentils. Stir. Put in all the spices.
Let simmer for 40 minutes or until lentils are cooked. Add more water if it gets too thick.
:)
The chili powder I'm currently using is something local to Arizona. My boss brought some back for me the last time he went there. (He has a lot of business trips). Your mileage may vary depending on what brand you use, but I've had reasonably good results with Tones (the kind they sell at Sam's Club), and I suspect anything you order off of http://penzeys.com will be great.
I guess you can't technically call it "chili" the way I do it, but it tastes good and i like it. ;) I use lentils because I don't like most beans. Also, lentils don't require you to soak them overnight first. And to me it tastes quite good that way.
(For other dried beans: need to soak them overnight to get them softened up and ready to cook. Don't use the water you soaked them in because that's where the compounds go that give you gas.)
I usually eat the chili topped with extra-sharp cheddar, and served over white rice. I've also used my chili over baked potatoes with sour cream.
***
Two more weeks to Labor Day. I'm getting ready for it by not doing anything other than roleplaying. Trying to save up the inspirational energy for the one big run. Running my game is helping create it, too, so it works out well. ;)
In terms of food, at the moment I have a lot. I have half a pot of the chili mentioned above and about a third of a lasagna, both of which I made last weekend. That should keep me eating well through next week. I also have a small pot of clam chowder penne - which is where I take a can of Campbell's chunky clam chowder and turn it into a pasta sauce by adding some spices and other veggies.
I have enough ingredients to make other things too - a lot of it the type that's reasonably quick to do, like frozen burgers and sandwich components. (broiled Bubba burger + toasted Lenders plain bagel + cheddar + ketchup = really good.) And a wide assortment of junk food, mostly in the form of ramen noodles, that I will probably be eating during the actual weekend itself. That and Chinese takeout. But I figure if I eat large portions of healthy things in these next two weeks, it should work out well.
In some ways it's kind of interesting how my approach to roleplaying (GMing in particular) is a lot more organic than my approach to writing. At some point I ought to sit down and make some organized comparisons between the two. But not right now. Right now I've just had an ice cream sandwich and I feel a nap coming on ...
2005/08/17
Heh
I saw that Robert had been afoot and left a bunch of encouraging posts to people. Then I thought, "darn. I didn't get one." Then I thought, "... maybe it's because you haven't posted anything, you dork." :p
(Does anyone else have arguments in the second person in their head? Or am I just strange that way?)
Anyway, so I thought maybe I should write something. Anything. :)
Unfortunately there's not much to report on the writing front. I haven't done a darn thing in relation to any novels. I've fiddled with my outline for the Labor Day novel a bit, but that's about it. Since Robert isn't going to officially enter, I'm not going to bother either. I'll still attempt to write it though. Still holding steady with the Stranger on a Bus idea.
My werewolf game has stalled out for the moment. One of my players (who is also my favorite GM) has vanished, and I don't want to continue until he gets a chance to post something. My other player doesn't seem to mind too much. Theoretically I'll have up to 5 more players, two of which are currently working on character generation (chargen), and three more of which claim to be interested and/or working on something but I have yet to see anything. Three of those are vampires, and two are werewolves.
I've been tinkering with the various plotlines in my mind for other creatures besides werewolves. There's still nothing obvious popping out as a main plot for the vampires, but I suspect I will have something by the time the first guy actually finishes something. Why?
Because he's currently being a major headache. :p He's not happy with the already-generous allotment of stat points and keeps trying to find loopholes into getting more of them. If I don't say no directly, he takes it as a yes. The published books say that there's a max of 7 flaw points, and at the moment he's managed to worm his way up to 15 so that he can buy stuff that he wasn't able to get because I refused to give him more stat points for writing a lengthy backstory.
Mind you, I did mention the possibility of more points for a good quality backstory. However, length and quality are not the same thing. His backstory, although quite lengthy, gave me almost nothing to work with, and in fact attempts to take the game focus and scope way, way way out of what I would enjoy running.
So I said no to that. Now he's trying to get creative with flaw points. Very creative. :p If I actually let him keep all of them, I would be able to come up with enough plots just to screw him on his flaws, and I won't need any external plots at all.
And to think I actually enjoyed running this guy in my freeform Stargate game. *sigh* I know he writes well, and once we start it should (hopefully) be all right, but good lord.
Aside from that, I'm kind of hoping that the other two promised vampires will be more enjoyable to work with. The two potential players are the GMs of another game in which I've signed on to help moderate. So far I haven't started helping with theirs yet. I'm slowly getting up to speed by reading through past threads (it's a very old game, been going almost 2 years now, with nearly 4800 posts). They also strongly recommended that I make a character to play in it as well, so I'm also working on that. I sent them a backstory this morning and haven't heard a response yet.
Meanwhile there's a third werewolf that's almost completed. Then he had visiting family arrive, so he won't be ready to start for at least another week. I'm hoping that by that point, the other two will have reached a point where it would make sense to introduce him.
Timing is an art form in an online game. Players are always popping in and out due to offline crises, or insufficient advanced planning for such things as school starting up. (I'm hoping I don't have any student-aged players; typically they join lots of games early in the semester before any homework sets in, and then suddenly realize that they need to quit everything.) So it's a bit of an art form trying to get the in-game timelines to line up right, so that characters can meet up for appropriate scenes without stalling out the entire game.
In the Stargate game, we pretty much just ignored time entirely. If two parties ran into each other, it didn't matter how much time elapsed for each of the separate groups. They still met up just fine as if they'd had the same amount of time. Also, we played through almost an entire out-of-game year without ever changing days or having anyone go to sleep. After a while people just kind of assumed that "a few days" had occurred between the beginning of the plotline and whenever they were at the time of posting. Even though there were no actual breaks anywhere, ever.
Then Robert mentioned wanting to play a werecat, which would require some slightly different plotlines than what would work for either the werewolves or the vampires. Fortunately, I have a couple that would actually work pretty well as solo plotlines. Now it's just a matter of seeing whether he can get ahold of the right books so he can make a character... unfortunately they're out of print, so once the stocks are gone, they're gone.
There's potential room down the road, too, for some of the other were-creatures - wererats, werespiders, and wereravens in particular. But that's something that would get set up after the vampires do. I need for the city to make sense as a consistent setting first, and that won't happen until after I have a few more vampire backstories to fiddle with. ;)
I really do like the story that's developing. It's very heavily based on the plots of Amulet I - one of the Fortress Launne novels I'm hoping to write in November. Both of the two key characters are going to be in the game - Edward Duchene (as the vampire prince) and Iorli (a werecat). Iorli wasn't originally going to get any screentime, just be a background element, but if I do end up running Robert, he's going to be featured pretty prominently.
Then the rest are additional events and characters that would've reasonably occurred in the same time period, even though they probably wouldn't fit as part of the same novel. (In particular there's a couple of powerful mages.) So the game is helping me think and plan what to do with all of that for the Nano.
There's a bunch of maintenance type things I'm kind of procrastinating as well. Namely, I need to convert it from a Werewolf game to a World of Darkness game that includes more than just werewolves. This would involve setting up more chargen info threads and figuring out how exactly I want to organize everything. I also need to revise my game ad to reflect the changing focus. But right now I'm too annoyed to look at any of it because I have to figure out how to rein in the problem vampire. *sigh*
Other things I'm doing ... playing lots of Diablo 2. The ladder season just reset last week, so everything is once more from scratch. I'm playing low level characters wearing crummy equipment again, and this time I don't have huge throngs of friends ready to donate handmedowns. I used to be a shameless items whore. I accepted anything from anyone, because I was too lazy to do the work to find my own. :p Now I'm the only one left playing so I have to find everything myself.
They also upgraded the software - and the latest version keeps causing my computer to crash. :p Hopefully they'll releaes another patch soon to fix that.
And finally, a friend passed along an interesting website - http://www.psipog.net. It's a fairly large, well-established community of psychics (except they call themselves "psionics"), with the purpose of helping each other learn how to do paranormal things. I read through the "newbies" section, and the intro PDF, and I really like their approach and view. It exactly matches mine. The paranormal abilities are not my religious beliefs. They're separate, and I have always looked at them with a fairly scientific perspective. But I always lump them in with my religious beliefs because it's easier than trying to explain this to others and come across as a nutcase. Now there's a whole site that declares it with confidence. I feel rather vindicated. And I feel like I've come full circle on yet another fairly important aspect of my life.
This has certainly been a year for those. Everything coming together from my first 30 years of being alive. The last puzzle pieces falling into place.
I read through the intro PDF and noted that I can already do most of it. Have been doing those things for decades. In a couple categories, it's almost more of a curse than a blessing to have abilities that I've had to learn how to deal with and turn off when necessary. The difference is that, now, I can finally look at all of it, and look at other people doing the same things, and not get all bent out of shape about whether or not I'm 'special' and 'different' from others. I no longer need to be 'the only one and the very best' in that category. I am no longer a unique cog looking for the one task and place in the Grand Machine of Life where I am uniquely suited to fit, and I am no longer trying to compete. There isn't just one spot. There are many. And even in that many, even if I'm not the very best at a particular thing, I am still uniquely suited to be me.
12 to 6 months ago I was finally understanding what it meant to not be different, what it means to be human, and that it is actually a good thing, not a bad thing, to be the same as everyone else and to not be an oddity. 6 months ago to now, I was coming to terms with the fact that I am an oddity, different from others, and always had been - just as I had suspected all along. Just not in the ways that I was expecting.
Now? Full circles. In all sorts of different paths, all coming together within a single year.
It makes life feel grand again.
(Does anyone else have arguments in the second person in their head? Or am I just strange that way?)
Anyway, so I thought maybe I should write something. Anything. :)
Unfortunately there's not much to report on the writing front. I haven't done a darn thing in relation to any novels. I've fiddled with my outline for the Labor Day novel a bit, but that's about it. Since Robert isn't going to officially enter, I'm not going to bother either. I'll still attempt to write it though. Still holding steady with the Stranger on a Bus idea.
My werewolf game has stalled out for the moment. One of my players (who is also my favorite GM) has vanished, and I don't want to continue until he gets a chance to post something. My other player doesn't seem to mind too much. Theoretically I'll have up to 5 more players, two of which are currently working on character generation (chargen), and three more of which claim to be interested and/or working on something but I have yet to see anything. Three of those are vampires, and two are werewolves.
I've been tinkering with the various plotlines in my mind for other creatures besides werewolves. There's still nothing obvious popping out as a main plot for the vampires, but I suspect I will have something by the time the first guy actually finishes something. Why?
Because he's currently being a major headache. :p He's not happy with the already-generous allotment of stat points and keeps trying to find loopholes into getting more of them. If I don't say no directly, he takes it as a yes. The published books say that there's a max of 7 flaw points, and at the moment he's managed to worm his way up to 15 so that he can buy stuff that he wasn't able to get because I refused to give him more stat points for writing a lengthy backstory.
Mind you, I did mention the possibility of more points for a good quality backstory. However, length and quality are not the same thing. His backstory, although quite lengthy, gave me almost nothing to work with, and in fact attempts to take the game focus and scope way, way way out of what I would enjoy running.
So I said no to that. Now he's trying to get creative with flaw points. Very creative. :p If I actually let him keep all of them, I would be able to come up with enough plots just to screw him on his flaws, and I won't need any external plots at all.
And to think I actually enjoyed running this guy in my freeform Stargate game. *sigh* I know he writes well, and once we start it should (hopefully) be all right, but good lord.
Aside from that, I'm kind of hoping that the other two promised vampires will be more enjoyable to work with. The two potential players are the GMs of another game in which I've signed on to help moderate. So far I haven't started helping with theirs yet. I'm slowly getting up to speed by reading through past threads (it's a very old game, been going almost 2 years now, with nearly 4800 posts). They also strongly recommended that I make a character to play in it as well, so I'm also working on that. I sent them a backstory this morning and haven't heard a response yet.
Meanwhile there's a third werewolf that's almost completed. Then he had visiting family arrive, so he won't be ready to start for at least another week. I'm hoping that by that point, the other two will have reached a point where it would make sense to introduce him.
Timing is an art form in an online game. Players are always popping in and out due to offline crises, or insufficient advanced planning for such things as school starting up. (I'm hoping I don't have any student-aged players; typically they join lots of games early in the semester before any homework sets in, and then suddenly realize that they need to quit everything.) So it's a bit of an art form trying to get the in-game timelines to line up right, so that characters can meet up for appropriate scenes without stalling out the entire game.
In the Stargate game, we pretty much just ignored time entirely. If two parties ran into each other, it didn't matter how much time elapsed for each of the separate groups. They still met up just fine as if they'd had the same amount of time. Also, we played through almost an entire out-of-game year without ever changing days or having anyone go to sleep. After a while people just kind of assumed that "a few days" had occurred between the beginning of the plotline and whenever they were at the time of posting. Even though there were no actual breaks anywhere, ever.
Then Robert mentioned wanting to play a werecat, which would require some slightly different plotlines than what would work for either the werewolves or the vampires. Fortunately, I have a couple that would actually work pretty well as solo plotlines. Now it's just a matter of seeing whether he can get ahold of the right books so he can make a character... unfortunately they're out of print, so once the stocks are gone, they're gone.
There's potential room down the road, too, for some of the other were-creatures - wererats, werespiders, and wereravens in particular. But that's something that would get set up after the vampires do. I need for the city to make sense as a consistent setting first, and that won't happen until after I have a few more vampire backstories to fiddle with. ;)
I really do like the story that's developing. It's very heavily based on the plots of Amulet I - one of the Fortress Launne novels I'm hoping to write in November. Both of the two key characters are going to be in the game - Edward Duchene (as the vampire prince) and Iorli (a werecat). Iorli wasn't originally going to get any screentime, just be a background element, but if I do end up running Robert, he's going to be featured pretty prominently.
Then the rest are additional events and characters that would've reasonably occurred in the same time period, even though they probably wouldn't fit as part of the same novel. (In particular there's a couple of powerful mages.) So the game is helping me think and plan what to do with all of that for the Nano.
There's a bunch of maintenance type things I'm kind of procrastinating as well. Namely, I need to convert it from a Werewolf game to a World of Darkness game that includes more than just werewolves. This would involve setting up more chargen info threads and figuring out how exactly I want to organize everything. I also need to revise my game ad to reflect the changing focus. But right now I'm too annoyed to look at any of it because I have to figure out how to rein in the problem vampire. *sigh*
Other things I'm doing ... playing lots of Diablo 2. The ladder season just reset last week, so everything is once more from scratch. I'm playing low level characters wearing crummy equipment again, and this time I don't have huge throngs of friends ready to donate handmedowns. I used to be a shameless items whore. I accepted anything from anyone, because I was too lazy to do the work to find my own. :p Now I'm the only one left playing so I have to find everything myself.
They also upgraded the software - and the latest version keeps causing my computer to crash. :p Hopefully they'll releaes another patch soon to fix that.
And finally, a friend passed along an interesting website - http://www.psipog.net. It's a fairly large, well-established community of psychics (except they call themselves "psionics"), with the purpose of helping each other learn how to do paranormal things. I read through the "newbies" section, and the intro PDF, and I really like their approach and view. It exactly matches mine. The paranormal abilities are not my religious beliefs. They're separate, and I have always looked at them with a fairly scientific perspective. But I always lump them in with my religious beliefs because it's easier than trying to explain this to others and come across as a nutcase. Now there's a whole site that declares it with confidence. I feel rather vindicated. And I feel like I've come full circle on yet another fairly important aspect of my life.
This has certainly been a year for those. Everything coming together from my first 30 years of being alive. The last puzzle pieces falling into place.
I read through the intro PDF and noted that I can already do most of it. Have been doing those things for decades. In a couple categories, it's almost more of a curse than a blessing to have abilities that I've had to learn how to deal with and turn off when necessary. The difference is that, now, I can finally look at all of it, and look at other people doing the same things, and not get all bent out of shape about whether or not I'm 'special' and 'different' from others. I no longer need to be 'the only one and the very best' in that category. I am no longer a unique cog looking for the one task and place in the Grand Machine of Life where I am uniquely suited to fit, and I am no longer trying to compete. There isn't just one spot. There are many. And even in that many, even if I'm not the very best at a particular thing, I am still uniquely suited to be me.
12 to 6 months ago I was finally understanding what it meant to not be different, what it means to be human, and that it is actually a good thing, not a bad thing, to be the same as everyone else and to not be an oddity. 6 months ago to now, I was coming to terms with the fact that I am an oddity, different from others, and always had been - just as I had suspected all along. Just not in the ways that I was expecting.
Now? Full circles. In all sorts of different paths, all coming together within a single year.
It makes life feel grand again.
2005/08/07
On roleplaying
So it's now a month later, and I'm finally making the beef barley soup I said I was going to make. It was a busy month. First the science paper, then the two cruises, then that new game I'm running.
The primary GM never did come back, so I finally moved the Dark Ages Werewolf plotline out of his game and into a new one. My players (all two of them :p) both wanted to continue, and I do have enough interest in the plot premise that I think I can do it. It's a fairly simple plot premise. Basically, a major caern has fallen to the Wyrm (the really evil bad guys), and the PCs are going to need to form a pack and win it back and restore it to its original pristine condition. Since the game is a play-by-post, though, this all by itself is enough material to keep the game going for at least a year - and that's not including how complex and interesting the character interactions will probably end up getting.
I'm planning to screen pretty heavily for good players, so there should hopefully be minimal morons in the game. The tome of submission guidelines alone should scare off the vast majority of people I don't want to play with. The ones who aren't scared off will be easy to spot because they won't have read the guidelines in the first place, and are therefore the bottom of the barrel. Hence, I'll end up with good players with good characters who interact with each other and develop intriguing and wonderful relationships.
That's the plan, anyway. This is going to take a while. Weeding the gems out of the muck requires a lot of patience. (Then when you're all done finding them and putting them into the game, they suddenly develop offline lives and stop playing. :p)
I'm also planning to take a serious left turn away from World of Darkness canon, now that the game is truly my own and I can do whatever I want with it. I've never much cared for a good chunk of the published material, though Werewolf bugs me a lot less than most. At this point I've decided that the manifestations of the Wyrm will resemble the Zerg from Starcraft. That should give me all sorts of bizarre creatures to describe for them to kill. :) Obviously, a good chunk of combat might end up being more freeformed than anything else, since there aren't exactly any published stats on zerglings.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in following along to the story, I'm planning to keep everything in public threads. It's here.
I love running play by posts. It means that I don't have to figure anything out until the last possible minute. ;) And even then, I have hours to think stuff up. I've never been a fast thinker and there's no way I could ever run something tabletop. I'm hoping I can run this game about like the last one I did (Stargate). It's a plot-directed game, in that the PCs have an actual end goal to work toward, but they can get there any way they want. Things that they do will have consequences in the setting and to each other. If the players are good, I'm mostly just sitting there as a referee, playing the bad guys based on the very simple motivations that they have (defend this desecrated caern :p). Any new setting detail that gets developed will be when a PC needs to ask a question about it, at which point I'll make stuff up on the spot. The trick is to keep it all consistent with whatever I've made up before that point, and the farther in the game goes, the more complex it'll get. Should be fun if it works. :)
It worked very well for Stargate for almost a year. Eventually that game ended, just before the conclusion, because the number of dorks reached my breaking point and I just couldn't take it anymore. There were also some other OOC issues with players who were formerly friends. Plus the fact that most of the best players had wandered off due to circumstances in Real Life. By the time I called it quits, I only had 4 players left, and they weren't positioned well to continue the plot. So I just ended up writing a bunch of fast-forward conclusions to get them to the end. Which they were pretty much there already anyway. If anyone is really bored and feels like reading the Stargate game, it's here [2009 Sep 26 - long gone now]. :p It's been deleted but not yet wiped from the rpol database. Despite all the OOC problems associated with the game, we wrote a lot of good stuff in there together.
I guess I should mention that Stargate worked best when there were around 10 active players going at any given time. I'm hoping I can build up the Werewolf game to be around that same size as well. I'm hoping that there's enough interest on rpol for a Dark Ages Werewolf game at all :p - I'm the only one, as far as I know, so they would at least all have to come to me.
Play by posts are nice in that you can have more players than you can in offline games. Offline, you have to deal with separate groups one at a time, while everyone else sits around waiting. Online, you can post for all of them at once. The dynamic is entirely different.
Slower, but no better or worse. You do have to have a lot of patience, as you don't often get a response to your post for quite a while. Sometimes your entire group is online at the same time, and then everyone can post pretty fast - which averages out around 10-20 minutes between each post. Most of the time, though, you have to wait a few hours or days.
I was in one game for a while, a Vampire, that had a meteoric life. The first two in-game days took us only three months to play - not because we were fast-forwarding through everything, but because we really were playing that fast. One GM, around 10 players, and at our peak we were doing 70-100 posts per day, every day, most of them between 10pm and 2am U.S. east coast time. For three months. And these were not one-liners, these were good quality posts. We were insane.
Needless to say we burnt out. That game sucked up most of my time outside of work, and *cough* some of my work hours as well. I was obsessed. The GM was obsessed. 5 months later it just wasn't going to work anymore. The GM had serious issues that came to a head, and I was the one taking the brunt of her venting because somehow we had become friends-like. It kind of died a slow, agonizing death for the following 5 months, until finally we just couldn't do it anymore. It never did come to an official end. The GM just stopped coming back. I still have the game on my sticky list, mainly because I haven't gotten around to archiving it yet, and at this point I still don't know whether I would want to finish playing out the plot. It's been over a year since it stopped. I know that several of the players still don't want to even think about that game again. But the ride, at least the first part, was fun while it lasted.
Hmmm. And here I thought I would just talk for a little bit about my roleplaying to indulge PoetMage's curiosity. :p Guess I can really work up a rant when I get going on something. Which parts did you most enjoy reading about? I can rant about that more than the other parts next time. ;)
In other news... August is looking like it'll be more quiet overall. I'm going to need all the time I can muster to work out Stranger on a Bus. Especially if I do cough up the $50 to enter it officially.
At the moment I have a very sparse plot outline for where it starts and where it ends. There's a bunch of possible scenes in the middle, and I have a list of locations that the bus will stop. I have no clue what exactly will happen at most of those stops, except that it will probably involve Alan (God in disguise) doing something incomprehensible. I've also decided that the bus driver, Ned, is going to drive the bus personally the whole way. He's going to inexplicably not need to sleep or rest, as well as inexplicably be scheduled by Greyhound to do all of that driving. He's not going to understand that at all, but that's okay, he doesn't need to.
I need to work out names for all the places, and maybe some of the minor characters. In my mind it sort of resembles a roleplaying game. I have two key characters (two PCs) with fairly straightforward motivations and abilities, the key obstacles to overcome and antagonists with motivations and abilities, some helper minor characters (friendly NPCs), a point A and a point B, and some vague setting info for the bus trip along the way. That's all you really need to start a roleplaying game. Not sure how well this'll work for a novel - especially a novel that's to be written in 3 days.
I think I can I think I can ...
I've read through the Survival Guide on the 3-Day Novel website too. There's actually a whole discussion thread buried in there, where you can get a play-by-play of a bunch of people doing it. Before, during, and after. I didn't read all of it, but got enough of a flavor that it looks like the crack version of Nano's cocaine. ;)
And now I'm enjoying my beef barley soup. It tastes pretty good already, straight after cooking it, and it'll be marvelous tomorrow. I always eat a bowl of my soup right after it's done, even knowing it isn't done done yet. Call it my personal soup-making tradition.
The primary GM never did come back, so I finally moved the Dark Ages Werewolf plotline out of his game and into a new one. My players (all two of them :p) both wanted to continue, and I do have enough interest in the plot premise that I think I can do it. It's a fairly simple plot premise. Basically, a major caern has fallen to the Wyrm (the really evil bad guys), and the PCs are going to need to form a pack and win it back and restore it to its original pristine condition. Since the game is a play-by-post, though, this all by itself is enough material to keep the game going for at least a year - and that's not including how complex and interesting the character interactions will probably end up getting.
I'm planning to screen pretty heavily for good players, so there should hopefully be minimal morons in the game. The tome of submission guidelines alone should scare off the vast majority of people I don't want to play with. The ones who aren't scared off will be easy to spot because they won't have read the guidelines in the first place, and are therefore the bottom of the barrel. Hence, I'll end up with good players with good characters who interact with each other and develop intriguing and wonderful relationships.
That's the plan, anyway. This is going to take a while. Weeding the gems out of the muck requires a lot of patience. (Then when you're all done finding them and putting them into the game, they suddenly develop offline lives and stop playing. :p)
I'm also planning to take a serious left turn away from World of Darkness canon, now that the game is truly my own and I can do whatever I want with it. I've never much cared for a good chunk of the published material, though Werewolf bugs me a lot less than most. At this point I've decided that the manifestations of the Wyrm will resemble the Zerg from Starcraft. That should give me all sorts of bizarre creatures to describe for them to kill. :) Obviously, a good chunk of combat might end up being more freeformed than anything else, since there aren't exactly any published stats on zerglings.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in following along to the story, I'm planning to keep everything in public threads. It's here.
I love running play by posts. It means that I don't have to figure anything out until the last possible minute. ;) And even then, I have hours to think stuff up. I've never been a fast thinker and there's no way I could ever run something tabletop. I'm hoping I can run this game about like the last one I did (Stargate). It's a plot-directed game, in that the PCs have an actual end goal to work toward, but they can get there any way they want. Things that they do will have consequences in the setting and to each other. If the players are good, I'm mostly just sitting there as a referee, playing the bad guys based on the very simple motivations that they have (defend this desecrated caern :p). Any new setting detail that gets developed will be when a PC needs to ask a question about it, at which point I'll make stuff up on the spot. The trick is to keep it all consistent with whatever I've made up before that point, and the farther in the game goes, the more complex it'll get. Should be fun if it works. :)
It worked very well for Stargate for almost a year. Eventually that game ended, just before the conclusion, because the number of dorks reached my breaking point and I just couldn't take it anymore. There were also some other OOC issues with players who were formerly friends. Plus the fact that most of the best players had wandered off due to circumstances in Real Life. By the time I called it quits, I only had 4 players left, and they weren't positioned well to continue the plot. So I just ended up writing a bunch of fast-forward conclusions to get them to the end. Which they were pretty much there already anyway. If anyone is really bored and feels like reading the Stargate game, it's here [2009 Sep 26 - long gone now]. :p It's been deleted but not yet wiped from the rpol database. Despite all the OOC problems associated with the game, we wrote a lot of good stuff in there together.
I guess I should mention that Stargate worked best when there were around 10 active players going at any given time. I'm hoping I can build up the Werewolf game to be around that same size as well. I'm hoping that there's enough interest on rpol for a Dark Ages Werewolf game at all :p - I'm the only one, as far as I know, so they would at least all have to come to me.
Play by posts are nice in that you can have more players than you can in offline games. Offline, you have to deal with separate groups one at a time, while everyone else sits around waiting. Online, you can post for all of them at once. The dynamic is entirely different.
Slower, but no better or worse. You do have to have a lot of patience, as you don't often get a response to your post for quite a while. Sometimes your entire group is online at the same time, and then everyone can post pretty fast - which averages out around 10-20 minutes between each post. Most of the time, though, you have to wait a few hours or days.
I was in one game for a while, a Vampire, that had a meteoric life. The first two in-game days took us only three months to play - not because we were fast-forwarding through everything, but because we really were playing that fast. One GM, around 10 players, and at our peak we were doing 70-100 posts per day, every day, most of them between 10pm and 2am U.S. east coast time. For three months. And these were not one-liners, these were good quality posts. We were insane.
Needless to say we burnt out. That game sucked up most of my time outside of work, and *cough* some of my work hours as well. I was obsessed. The GM was obsessed. 5 months later it just wasn't going to work anymore. The GM had serious issues that came to a head, and I was the one taking the brunt of her venting because somehow we had become friends-like. It kind of died a slow, agonizing death for the following 5 months, until finally we just couldn't do it anymore. It never did come to an official end. The GM just stopped coming back. I still have the game on my sticky list, mainly because I haven't gotten around to archiving it yet, and at this point I still don't know whether I would want to finish playing out the plot. It's been over a year since it stopped. I know that several of the players still don't want to even think about that game again. But the ride, at least the first part, was fun while it lasted.
Hmmm. And here I thought I would just talk for a little bit about my roleplaying to indulge PoetMage's curiosity. :p Guess I can really work up a rant when I get going on something. Which parts did you most enjoy reading about? I can rant about that more than the other parts next time. ;)
In other news... August is looking like it'll be more quiet overall. I'm going to need all the time I can muster to work out Stranger on a Bus. Especially if I do cough up the $50 to enter it officially.
At the moment I have a very sparse plot outline for where it starts and where it ends. There's a bunch of possible scenes in the middle, and I have a list of locations that the bus will stop. I have no clue what exactly will happen at most of those stops, except that it will probably involve Alan (God in disguise) doing something incomprehensible. I've also decided that the bus driver, Ned, is going to drive the bus personally the whole way. He's going to inexplicably not need to sleep or rest, as well as inexplicably be scheduled by Greyhound to do all of that driving. He's not going to understand that at all, but that's okay, he doesn't need to.
I need to work out names for all the places, and maybe some of the minor characters. In my mind it sort of resembles a roleplaying game. I have two key characters (two PCs) with fairly straightforward motivations and abilities, the key obstacles to overcome and antagonists with motivations and abilities, some helper minor characters (friendly NPCs), a point A and a point B, and some vague setting info for the bus trip along the way. That's all you really need to start a roleplaying game. Not sure how well this'll work for a novel - especially a novel that's to be written in 3 days.
I think I can I think I can ...
I've read through the Survival Guide on the 3-Day Novel website too. There's actually a whole discussion thread buried in there, where you can get a play-by-play of a bunch of people doing it. Before, during, and after. I didn't read all of it, but got enough of a flavor that it looks like the crack version of Nano's cocaine. ;)
And now I'm enjoying my beef barley soup. It tastes pretty good already, straight after cooking it, and it'll be marvelous tomorrow. I always eat a bowl of my soup right after it's done, even knowing it isn't done done yet. Call it my personal soup-making tradition.
2005/08/01
SFR: End!
SFFMuse Summer Fun Run: [ 39,518/60,000 | 61 days down | 0 days left ]
Uneditted roleplay: 11,867
Writing-heavy roleplay: 2232
Temple: 4555
Taint: 2442
Freewrites: 18,422
So close, and yet so far ... ;). I would've preferred to pass 40k but yesterday I drove for 5 hours, so that didn't happen.
Why did I drive 5 hours? I'm a dork. :p I went up to Macon (2.5 hours from Savannah) for dinner with my favorite GM. He was coming down from Nashville for work-related purposes in Atlanta. We'd never met offline before. As offline meetings go with online friends, we instantly had plenty of things to talk about - all the same things we would normally talk about online. Lots and lots of discussion of roleplaying games that we play together. It really doesn't matter that I didn't know what his physical appearance was before now - although he turned out to not even slightly resemble his online persona. That's not a big surprise either; I think it's more unusual when I meet someone who does manage to look the same.
And just as a note for anyone else attempting to meet online people and has never done it before: Always make sure the first meeting is in a public place with lots of people around. ;) My favorite GM and I met at a restaurant. Talking was a bit hard because it was loud in there, but it went well. I'll probably put him down as a stopping point in my trips to Indiana from now on, since I do drive through Nashville on the way up.
Anyhow, I wrote 8,421 freewrite words over the course of Saturday, and then a smattering of roleplay posts Sunday. Grand total: 39,518. All but the Saturday's freewrite words were counted with BBEdit, which is extremely lax about what it considers a separate word. (Yesterday's freewrite was counted with the Alphasmart's wordcounter which is more strict.) I'd rather use a more strict wordcounter but then I would have to fire up an actual word processor, and I like BBEdit better for everything else.
Uneditted roleplay: 11,867
Writing-heavy roleplay: 2232
Temple: 4555
Taint: 2442
Freewrites: 18,422
So close, and yet so far ... ;). I would've preferred to pass 40k but yesterday I drove for 5 hours, so that didn't happen.
Why did I drive 5 hours? I'm a dork. :p I went up to Macon (2.5 hours from Savannah) for dinner with my favorite GM. He was coming down from Nashville for work-related purposes in Atlanta. We'd never met offline before. As offline meetings go with online friends, we instantly had plenty of things to talk about - all the same things we would normally talk about online. Lots and lots of discussion of roleplaying games that we play together. It really doesn't matter that I didn't know what his physical appearance was before now - although he turned out to not even slightly resemble his online persona. That's not a big surprise either; I think it's more unusual when I meet someone who does manage to look the same.
And just as a note for anyone else attempting to meet online people and has never done it before: Always make sure the first meeting is in a public place with lots of people around. ;) My favorite GM and I met at a restaurant. Talking was a bit hard because it was loud in there, but it went well. I'll probably put him down as a stopping point in my trips to Indiana from now on, since I do drive through Nashville on the way up.
Anyhow, I wrote 8,421 freewrite words over the course of Saturday, and then a smattering of roleplay posts Sunday. Grand total: 39,518. All but the Saturday's freewrite words were counted with BBEdit, which is extremely lax about what it considers a separate word. (Yesterday's freewrite was counted with the Alphasmart's wordcounter which is more strict.) I'd rather use a more strict wordcounter but then I would have to fire up an actual word processor, and I like BBEdit better for everything else.
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