A Series of Little Updates

It is lunch time which seems to be the only time I can find to write anymore.  It is strange because last night I had actually planned on getting a little writing done before the movie but I ended up reading my book instead.  This isn't the worst choice in the world I like that book.  I've started rereading all of the Drizzit books starting with Homeland and working my way up.  There is a whole cycle of later books I haven't read yet and I've read the Dark Elf Trilogy and the Icewind Dale trilogy twice now.  The thing is that I really honestly and truly enjoy these books and so here it goes.  It happened when I realized I had a choice I could keep reading the third game of thrones book or go to the store.  Off to the store I went.

The hero game is going pretty well.  I wanted to get a little more done with it on my three days off last week than I did but I made some decent progress none the less.  I started the actual process of typing the rules out and stuff like that.  Oh man is that not fun, but it is interesting.  I keep wanting to add layers of complexity to the game and sometimes I have to struggle to keep it simple.  For example I wanted to make it so that in order to fire at anything other than the closest enemy unit you needed to pass a moral check.  The idea behind it was you have a group of grunts/tanks/whatnot gaurding an objective.  You pop a whole in the line so that one of your squads of grunts can shoot at the objective.  Doesn't it stand to reason though that you might wanna shoot at all the people pointing guns at you.  Seemed like a good idea in that situation right?  Then I thought about all the other situations it could happen.  Then I thought about the guy keeping a superheavy tank near a squad of grunts so his other units could run around unmolested.  Ultimatly, I decided it was a silly rule and I dropped it.  Still, it had the potential to add interesting stratigic possibilities but it ended up just being fiddly and annoying.  It is going well though.  Tonight I plan on play testing with stats and stuff like that.  It will be an okay time.

On that note most of the heavy lifting design work is done so I am free to work on the hacking game now.  With netrunner being rereleased I wonder about it a little but I also don't really care.  I am doing something radically different than netrunner or anything else out there for that matter so whatever I do what I want.

Starting to design games is putting a wonderful cramp in my desire to buy games which is nice.  I've been eying both Virgin Queen and Here I Stand with a pretty high degree of envy.  Complex card driven war game for 5 players that takes 6 to 8 hours to play?  YES PLEASE!  The problem would be finding other people who wanna do that too on any sort of regular basis.  Mostly the game that takes up that sort of time slot is Twilight Imperium.  So yeah there is that.  There have been some other games too but I think it is best that I save my money for Leviathans and maybe making my players suck less at Super Dungeon EXPLORE!

Metacarpal syndrome has finally reared its ugly head.  When I talked about not getting enough done on my game during my days off this is a major reason why.  I ended up buying a wrist brace and it helps a lot.  So far it is only bad in my right hand but no reason to not get one for the left hand and to start wearing it.  In fact I wish I had them with my now.  Oh well soon I'll be carrying them with me in my backpack.

I've started to have Fridays off again.  The big deal with this is that as long as I keep it every other week I can start roleplaying again.  This excites me.  This REALLY excites me a lot.  For awhile I was thinking Shadowrun but Eclipse Phase is calling me.  The problem is that I dunno if the players are going to have an easy time grasping what can and can't be done in EP.  Though the ability to kill them stick them in new bodies, or to make copies of them and send them after themselves is potentially a lot of fun.  Though with the bi-weekly nature of the story we wouldn't be able to get very far.  There is always Mutants and Masterminds or one shots of random games.  Those are fun but I'd have to do character generation and that's annoying.  Oh well we will see.

Right now I have to go take the rest of the day by storm.