Entries tagged with guidos

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: Office
Current Music: traffic

Entry tags:

guidos,
rpg

Waiting for files to delete today

So, Guido's Treasure wound up successfully last night. The trolls (scrag) fell over fairy quickly, the scrag shaman and the half-dragon troll proved a bit more difficult and inflicted serious damage before retreating into the swamp.

The party found the entrances to the dragon's lair and explored, eventually finding the hoard, which was more valuable than any they had looted previously - also mostly coinage and statues and statuettes of dragons. However there was also a Rod of Rulership (worth more than the rest of the hoard combined), which Oswin failed to convince the rest of the party was worthless.

So now I must settle on what to run next. I don't plan to begin the campaign until next year (just before Xmas is not a good time to be building momentum) but it normally takes me a month or two of prep and looking for players before I'm ready to start.

My sunday timeslot of course being the one where I am most picky about who I allow to play. I'm not sure about carrying over many of the players from Guido's - there have been some repetitive non-attendance (and notice of non-attendance) issues from otherwise good players, and one of them is just hard work.

It's a shame that

mrangel is headed offshore, assuming I could interest him in playing another of my games :D

Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Third Song [Disjecta Membra]

Entry tags:

The week that was

Guido's Treasure - on rematch the dragon hung around one round too long in combat and was taken down while fleeing - True Strike + Dragonbane arrow (the mage's rogue level allowing him to use a short bow) followed up by Dimenson Dooring cleric with True Seeing (without which the dragon's Darkness ability and Blur spell woudl have been more effective). Dragonfear was also taken out of the equation by the party making Heroes Feast a standard part of their daily routine. (A more cunning dragon might have waited more hours before coming back in case of day-long buffs, rather than just the shorter-term spells he had seen cast earlier).

This week the party takes on the tribe of trolls guarding the dragon's lair, and then the lair itself. The session may well conclude the campaign (and then what will I do with my Sunday nights?).
~~~

This week was mostly quiet on the crazy work front - almost ominously so. Outside the office only ~~one~~ two phone calls and a few emails.

This did leave a couple of my late-afternoons free to do such things as wash and vacumn the car.
~~~

Neverwinter (session by Cora) proved a bit anti-climactic, with the cure ceremony and the traitor's big reveal suffering a lot from my lack of NPC playability. Also the bad guy's carefully planned escape route was unexpectedly blocked by a halfling with a big floppy hat and his summoned heavy-hitter was blocked by a Protection from Evil (first time I've actually seen that aspect of the spell come into play), resulting in his eventual capture rather than escape, which means re-writing the next section somewhat.

The PCs managed to make themselves Oh So Welcome thereafter by charging into the main temple of Helm and accusing all the other priests there of treachery. The Paladin's diplomacy managed to save the day, but the faux-pax cost them precious time (and possibly clues).
~~~

Today I have
- houseworky things to do ~~(x6)(x4)(x3)~~(x1 - not going to get done)
- gardeny things to do ~~(x?)~~(limited to strategic weeding)
- visiting to do ~~(x1)~~
- invoicing to do ~~(x1)~~
- computery things to do (x?)(-3)

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: West End Girls [Pet Shop Boys]

Entry tags:

"If, When, Why, What"

A distinct lack of borad-gamers tonight. So I've been home a while. Nothing much on the Box, but I somehow caught Underworld: Evolution last night.

~~~
Had a marathon session of

shenya's game on Sunday - a nice little dungeon crawl - didn't finish until after 5 which left precious little time to organise anything before Guidos. Fortunately the party did actually spend the session looking for information on the dragon rather than taking off into the swamp to look for it at random.

Arthur finally reaches level 8!

I had previously lost all of Saturday to Civ II - including a lot of gardening that really needs done!

~~~
Except for the evening Monday was a bit of a wash - things just took constantly hours longer than they should have. Today was better work wise - blew off what I should have done in the morning to get a solid 6-hour day in at the office.

~~~
I'm also having one of those evenings where my eyes complain at doing anything involving the computer or deadtree media :(

Current Mood: listless
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Assassing [Marillion]

Entry tags:

In random order

Thought for... erm .. several days ago - By my own standards, I am not a perfectionist.

~~~
Neverwinter didn't happen last night. One player is in Ireland (fair excuse :D ), one let me know he had another engagement barely hours before the game, and another just didn't show.

Short-to-no-notice drop-outs make me grouchy.

Instead we dragged out the old SAGA copy of Talisman and played that for a few hours. I -almost- won, but

uaekiwi's Troll beat the last life token out of my Gladiator atop the Crown of Command.

~~~
Guido's Treasure wrapped up a short arc and now begins a Dragon hunt.

~~~

shenya's game is starting what will hopefully be a relatively simple dungeon crawl. Starting with a dragon.

~~~
Work week was OK.

~~~
My little niece (2? 3? yrs) was airlifted to hospital yesterday afternoon with a diabetes complication "ketosis" or some such. Was thisclose to being rushed up to Starship yesterday evening,but has apparently improved.

~~~
I am sitting alone in front of the computer picking at little computer/internet related tasks like the edges of a scab and slowly going stir-crazy. The edges of sanity-threating dvds curl out from the direction of the lounge to assault my senses when I pass by. Lacking any true blobbing-out options I may have to return to Civ II.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Only Time [Enya]

Entry tags:

My car also needs a good grooming on the inside.

However if I started that I would definitely be leaving late. It is at least cleaner on the outside, until we hit the first lot of roadworks.

~~~
No game last night - three players away. Played a couple of games of Munchkin instead - the first was very slow but the second far more active.

~~~
4:1 in the catch-up session of Guido's treasure on Wednesday - 4 PC fatalities to 1 of mine. The opposing heavy hitters worked even better than I had anticipated, at peak between them dishing out over 100 damage to one PC in a round.

The party is now a bit low on Fate points, but all survived to some degree. However they have to deal with a line of wagons mired in muck before the bad guys come back for more.

~~~
It's been a crazy-busy week. Next week doesn't look any less busy.

~~~
I wonder if I can tell my friends page to ignore anything with "auto-post" in the title for the next two weeks?

Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Take on Me [A-Ha]

Entry tags:

Let's hit this [overdue update]

Everything is so taking longer than it should this weekend...

( Last weekend - BoD and Gaming )

anarchangel has started a thread for the discussion of BoD here (I know, late to the party. I'll chip in when my head is less fuzzy. One of my hot-button topics, donchaknow :D).

( start of week - CSS and board games )

( Thursday - Neverwinter )

morag_windstar - this is your reminder to send me your character background so I can make use of it next session!

( Weekend to date )

Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Unholy War [Alice Cooper]

Entry tags:

An actual update....

Good turnaround - the insulation man visited to measure up the place for a quote on Friday, emailed the quote today and can start tomorrow. I'm looking forward to a warm house - confirmed that the stuff in the ceiling is a layer of compacted fluff of no insulating value at all.

Lit the fire yesterday, winter is here.

~~~
Weekend was quite productive - Saturday anyway. House cleaning, laundry, washed the car, banking and a bit of shopping. I now have a webcam 'cos someone has put -that- boss onto the idea of Skype conferences since we're all around the country. Hilarity is bound to ensue [sigh].

I do already have Skype of course. Hanging out to be able to get Skype-in in this country (or some other permanent voip number).

~~~
Note to self - need to top up cell phone.

~~~
Gaming on Sunday - inflicted an impromptu dungeon crawl on the DM in

shenya's game but it was good fun. Well, I thought so. In Guido's Treasure spent quite a bit of time on bookwork, shopping and planning followed by dropping some monstrous spiders on the PCs after they decided to take a week out just to hunt wraiths.

~~~
Cat had his annual checkup today. Might need dental, might not. I'm to keep an eye on how he's eating. He's lost weight again - 6.36 kg this year

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: Office
Current Music: Traffic

Entry tags:

"I has lunch break"

Quickly with the updating -

Work is good :D (Getting paid is also good!) I had a very busy weekend trying to get through a whole bunch of personal stuff that I suddenly don't have all the time in the world to get around to. I shall have to try and schedule a day (even half a day) in for "not-doing-anything!" somewhere.

Guido's Treasure - the party is facing a wily and powerful opponent who they should be able to deal with if they'd just co-ordinate. Not a whole lot of teamwork going on. Looks greatly like they might fail this one.

We're also at the levels where "save or die" really starts to kick in, and they are feeling the hurt.

Neverwinter - I'm 3 sessions behind but may manage to get some sort of bullet-point summary posted tonight or tomorrow (or not). At the beginning of last session we had "the talk" about why people were and were not enjoying the game, hopefully that will go some way to resolving the fun-sucking-arguments which keep occurring. The PC's can't really afford to waste time - every day that passes on the timeline is a day one or more opposing factions gains in strength (and they're unnecessarily afraid that they're outclassed already).

Picked up a cold at the party on Saturday [grumble].

Current Mood: apathetic
Current Location: Lair

Entry tags:

Other stuff from the weekend

That party - so far three people I know have mentioned that they knew someone there. Of those two were hit, one critically (now released).

Two degrees of separation, yadda yadda.

~~~
Purchased a new fridge on Saturday, delivered and installed on Sunday. I only meant to go pricing, but the right sale was on... Hopefully it will pay for itself in electricity savings fairly quickly. Four star, and a bit smaller than the old one which was probably 20+ years old and definately having issues.

It seems next to impossible to find a fridge-freezer with a decent sized freezer unit these days. Sacrificed fridge space (which we use less of anyway) to try and get one with similar dimensions but wasn't entirely successful.

~~~
Gaming last night was a bit of a wash - I didn't get the session moving to start with and we never picked up steam.

Current Mood: bored
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Two Months Off [Underworld]

Entry tags:

Weekend wrap up

[Grumble] Waiting on other people again. Two projects on the go which just require info in my inbox....
( saturday )
( sunday )

Current Mood: bored
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Days of No Trust [Magnum]

Entry tags:

A tale of two games

Sunday afternoon - D&D. You might recall that at the end of the previous session, Arthur was dead and things were looking grim for the PCs.

Well, two more died in the determined attempt to not leave Arthur's body behind. But one way and another all the bodies were retrieved and raised. We retreated to the surface for a while and came back with a plan which worked wonderfully. Hydra barely knew what hit it.

The Cone-of-Cold breathing Storm Giant which materialised at the end of the fight - that was a bit unexpected. Three weeks (two-session break) before we find out what happens.

Sunday evening - Guido's treasure. Thought I might be looking at a TPK when the Umber Hulk ambush was unleashed and the majority of the party failed their Saves vs Confusion. If someone with Dispel Magic hadn't rolled "act normally" it might have been. They survived, but failed to look around in the tunnels (which were of course threatening to collapse) for loot, and missed quite a valuable stash.

Then managed to scare the party into Plane-Shifting the heck out of there in panic - with a Silent Image backed up by a weakening area effect and a few critters with mirror image. Not to the Astral or Ethereal (which I had contigency plans for) either, no, they had to bugger off to Arboria.

A rest period and a regained spell later they decided that rather than return to the Isle which had been proving more dangerous than profitable they would pay a visit to Alfheim on returning to the Material plane. However Plane Shift has a 5-500 mile margin of error and 300-odd miles later they are definitely not in Elven lands.

I have two weeks to come up with a whole new set of plots to try and ensnare them with.

Current Location: Lair
Current Music: I finally found my way [KISS]

Entry tags:

guidos,
rpg

That was disappointing

All the dice in the room loved the PCs tonight.

They managed something like 6 crits against my big beastie in 3 rounds. My dice were cold.

Then when I was generating some random treasure the high numbers started turning up.

Never mind. I have a week to flesh out the potentially interesting encounter they have just stumbled on.

Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Brandy (you're a fine girl) [Looking Glass]

Entry tags:

Grey day, grey mood.

Frustrated with projects which are not progressing. Have a couple of gaming updates.

~~~
Guido's Treasure
A snippet from last session which I meant to post:

The bard triggered a fire trap (and failed his save).

A few minutes later the player remembered his necklace of fireballs (and was honest enough to mention it).

Necklace failed it's save - for 52 damage on 12d6 (not bad).

Bard - dead. Cleric - dead. Bard's cohort -8hp. Rogue - evaded .

I use a fate-point mechanic, so they were only "mostly-dead", but with both the healers down...

(Eventually they used the glove of identification to get the command word of the glove of healing so that the bard's cohort (revived by potion) could apply it repeatedly to the cleric).

Addition - meantime the Barb/Sorc was retrieving the mage, who had simultaneously managed to fall 40' through a hidden trapdoor and into a den of spitting cobras. Fortunately his familiar is a viper, so he could negotiate.

I was entertained by the whole affair

~~~
Supers
A rather dull session where one player failing to go to the other characters with information (and a lack of followup when he did eventually mention something) resulted in a lot of sitting around twiddling thumbs and two minor NPCs being brutally murdered.

Edged one of the other subplots back in a bit ahead of schedule because nothing else was happening. Didn't do so well with it either.

Eventually led the party by the nose to another nemesis confrontation, where they might have learnt some of the benefit of teamwork. We'll see.

Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Musclebound [Spandau Ballet]

Entry tags:

(no subject)

Saturday's party was more entertaining than expected, but I still left relatively early as planned.

Sunday was mostly spent trying to get tv/video capture cards to work. My new one causes a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL bluescreen whenever a program tries to use it. Windows being windows I can't manually change the IRQ assignment (although I have learnt how to enable that feature - during the next reinstall). Latest drivers don't help. I'm at a bit of a loss, particularly given that according to the box this card was "designed for Windows XP".

Sunday gaming we were down a player which was a bit unfortunate. The PCs charged into a situation which might be a bit much for them. I got to have fun with a spellcaster, a couple of heavy hitters and lots of mooks. We had to break the session mid-combat, and we're now on a two-week break for the Xmas/NY period.

Current Mood: bored
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Tell her about it [Billy Joel]

Entry tags:

Three days of gaming

Due to moving my supers game forward to monday for the week to accomodate a player who wasn't going to make it on Thursday, I had games Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

In the saturday game my character was finally (temporarily) reunited with his mount, and later we had two combats going simulataneously, with about half the party in each. Stupid sorceror almost got herself killed. We're currently investigating the problem which has caused the dwarves to close off their mithral mine, having restored the adamantine supply from the mountain elves.

On Sunday the party avoided some encounters and beat on others. Bit of a shame about the mage, who wasn't going to be a target until he dove for cover. What's a hunting dire wolf to do, when one of the herd reveals itself to be weak by falling over?

Various silly aspects of the module were noted.

niennahirilfea posted a write up of the monday (thursday) game here. The players are slowly getting the hang of this no-system thing, although one seems determined to be a hinderance as much as a help, generally sitting out of the action and deliberately doing nothing.

I think the session had a good mix of throwing powers around and situations which couldn't necessarily be easily resolved with application of super force. And now, the plot thickens....

Current Mood: evil
Current Location: Lair

Entry tags:

guidos,
rpg

PCs: crunchy and good with chlorine

Guido's Treasure
So the PCs determined they were around the corner from a dragon (green), and the dragon determined that there were PCs nearby. The PC's ummed and ahhed a bit before withdrawing, while the dragon buffed before setting off in pursuit. (The silence spell to cover the withdrawal was rather double-edged as the party then couldn't hear the dragon coming).

Dragon scored well on initiative, a couple of PCs got to scatter then the breath weapon went off. Somebody said "there's a lot of 6's there". (12d6, 5 6's, nothing else below 3, 52 damage total). Nobody made their saves.

2 PCs and 1 NPC down (dead (fate pointed)), 1 PC as good as down (especially since he then charged through the dragon's threat area - mmm, chewy - perfectly in character), bard and rogue left standing.

Rogue failed will save against a suggestion to "flee, prey" and would have been running away for the next 6 hours if the cleric hadn't later caught up with him and dispelled it.

The bard's player played his "get out of TPK free card" (which I had given him as a birthday present yesterday) to get time to heal the fallen then with some prompting cast his Glibness spell (+30 to Bluff) and talked the dragon into letting the party leave. The dragon has given them a 24 hour head start and accepted a magical cloak and [really powerful non-magic-radiating widget honest guv] in tribute.

He seriously could have just cast the glibness spell and talked the dragon into letting them leave without having to use the card - it's the textbook situation.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: All Revved up with no place to go [Meatloaf]

Entry tags:

Stuff

Today has had a lot of GDP project and a little paying work.

I seem to be able to focus well in the morning and evening, but am useless in the afternoon. OTOH, some days it's the other way around.

For the record, last Sunday the Guido's Treasure players handily dealt with a variety of challenges in a variety of interesting, amusing and stylish ways during what was a relatively uneventful ocean voyage :D

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Crash [Primitives]

Entry tags:

Overdue Update

Thursday: Broken Kingdoms
The PCs had to escape their imprisonment. Damn near had a TPK after one of them took himself out of the action early on. The new player shows some promise. Ran late.

Good writeup at http://niennahirilfea.livejournal.com/72178.html

Friday: Perversion party
Never really made the jump between drinkies with loud music in the background and party for me. Some good costumes and some good efforts (say he who never dresses up for these things). Pumpkined about midnight. Apparently there was some excitement with disruptive randoms later on.

Saturday: Everything
Helped

keenie and crew move in the am/early pm. Turned up at

slothphil's later for boardgame/bbq/drinkies/Munchkin. Pumpkined about midnight again.

Sunday: Guido's Treasure -> Isle of Dread
Party divested themselves of a campaigns accumulated valuables, manipulated the rare-coins market, bought stuff, and some partied. Next week - all aboard a merchant vessel for a bracing sea voyage.

Monday: Work
Spent most of the day shortlisting potential website CMSs, comng up to speed on streaming media technology and testing Clipstream. This evening I may watch TV (off chance there's anything on) or more likely keep playing with javascript/css slideshows.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Complaining cat

Entry tags:

Quick update

Over the worst of the plague, although I'm not sure that there isn't a second assault to be mounted on the head and airways. Took today easy hoping to be alert for gaming tonight - had to give in and take a nap late afternoon but fortunately awoke clear-headed enough to almost crush the PCs with some mostly-random ogres and then tickle them a bit with some not-at-all random goblins.

Hope to be upright and coherent for the GDP meeting tomorrow morning.

Current Mood: blah
Current Location: Lair
Current Music: Detonation Boulevard [SoM]

Entry tags:

Days and nights forever gone

Friday
GDP meeting. Guess who was elected Team Leader? This makes me Management, - apparently this means I get to do less work than everyone else if I do it right - knowing me this means I might only do as much work as everyone else :-/

Saturday
A good game Sat. afternoon - some glimmerings of potential from d. Spent much of the evening trying to get Flash to work on the tablet - the uninstaller worked fine..... Showed at the drinkies, caught up with a couple of people :)

Sunday
A very busy day - got everything on my list for the day done and shouted myself KFC for dinner. Had a fairly relaxed session of Guido's treasure - mostly roleplay and non-combat stuff. The rock-throwing contest with the giant children was most entertaining. Pcs came out much better off than I expected (both in the contest and the session overall).

Monday
Spent most of the day at CPI looing at resources for the GDP and trying to figure out the optimal times to hold meetings. Will go back in later to chat to the evening student on the team.

Cat is being a fussy bastiche.