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| I'm interpreting the punchline as "GURPS is awesome." |
New...ish? Blogs
Well, this week, added to the blogroll is Kromm's and PK's Live Journals, and those guys are pretty bigwigs in the community. Kromm's livejournal I've been following for a while, and it's a great way to get cryptic teasers on new GURPS stuff coming out. PK has a bunch of session recaps, characters, and personal minutiae, with a few stats here and there. I also asked Kendelyzer if he'd like to join and I think he did? But there's no new content, so it didn't present itself. The blog includes incredibly detailed session recaps in a very prose-ish manner, and some reflections on meta concepts like his experiences with GMing and organizing adventures and campaigns. It looks like a big bite to chew, but the content pulls me in, so I feel obliged to read it in depth some day.
All the Other Stuff
Rindis had a really cool review of the Thaumatology book. I'm daunted when it comes to reviewing large books because there's so much that you pick and choose, I feel like it's hard to give it a fair shake if I only like a book for chapters, as an example, 1,3, and 6, and would toss the rest. I mean, even if I love like a small section of a book and it really makes it worth the while to me, and I could care less for the other 90% of the content, it feels weird reviewing it, you know?
There was a bit of memetic kerfuffle about running away this week. I think Mailanka, Peter, and Douglas all had some feedback on the issue. I think it's interesting, because it is a big issue (theoretically, I've only run it in mind exercises.) I would like a dramatic situation where dramatically running away is the only reasonable way to survive but I can't think of a really good mechanical solution or addition to the conversation... I'd probably wax a little narrative in game or party kill would be eminent.
Other Thoughts and Self Reflection
My ranged combat and quirks post were both pretty popular. Feel kinda honored that the quirks one got so much traffic because, well, it's all opinions, and it's weird but, I don't think my opinions are worth much! Still getting a lot of comments here and there, which I greatly appreciate.
I've had players actually comment on my blog! I've been posting some of my planning notes like right out in the open because my players never actually read it before! I wonder if I need to be more careful about that? In any case, yay! I like my players, they are really enthused, and they got some good (platonic) chemistry I feel, that is going to help with the development of a plot. I like to build off of ideas that players have, and when I don't have a lot of players to explore all their thoughts out loud, it can sometimes get hard grokking the mood, but when you got 5 to 6 playing, coordinating, and talking together, I can hear what they understand, what they don't understand, what they like because it's fun, and what they like because it's cool, and what they don't like because it's boring, and what they don't like because it's icky, and that's great for me and a lot easier to work from and build off of!
Yes, I said 5 to 6, I have one player that is almost ready to start playing, and he definitely seems like a good addition to the group, and one really good/chaotic kinda player coming back. I like that player because he has a lot of initiative and is really good at creating his own fun and that makes it really easy to set up scaffolding around it. The challenge though is to keep from turning it into "The [NAME REDACTED] Show!" because he has so much initiative and can steal the spotlight from other characters at times.
Would it help if you knew I started reviewing Thaumatology last August and stalled out until a couple weeks ago? That review was a huge project, and it just overwhelmed me.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, much of the 'review' is just detailing what's in there. I figure boiling down what is in that book is still a valuable service, since that'll drive a lot of decisions on whether to get it. The part that might more properly be called a review (giving real opinions) is just the last three paragraphs.
Ah! Yeah, a thing of that magnitude probably takes a lot of work! I do my posts daily, and I think to date, the most harrowing review I've done in terms of breadth and volume of content crammed into one post generated over a matter of a single day is the one on Social Engineering. I have a self imposed challenge of one post a day which I've faithfully kept to for a little over half a year now. Though, I'm now relishing when the year is over because then I can focus on some probably much higher quality posts that might take a few days of work (reviews of long books, more detailed adventures, maybe a themed catalog of abilities/monsters instead of a one-off) instead of my "whatever kinda neat idea that's neither too long nor too short that was flopping around in my head, or the last questions my players asked me" approach.
DeleteThanks for reading!
My schedule has moved from 'whenever' to 'at least once a week' (it took a couple years for that to start working out), to 'every three or four days'. I'm still slightly behind on that last, and after a good month, have just run out of buffer again.
DeleteI'm not going to go to every day (eek!), because I tend to be a bit slow and deliberate, and a lot of my posts are huge and take a lot of work (take a peek into the ASL category...). I've been meaning to start working out some half-done GURPS ideas to get comments on, but other things keep crowding out the time to organize my thoughts enough to write them down.