Marsden is Here

Neverwinter last night was mostly 'hang on to the locomotive while the GM narrates', but we've missed two sessions and I decided to do away with the trap-laden dungeon crawl. The Word of Protection (now in the PCs possession, where it more or less wants to be) has both more direct and more subtle methods anyway.

The PCs received their rewards for this arc, and the players will be happy shopping over the coming week. I've decided to let them have a significant power boost so they can start facing off with some big opponents over the last few months of the campaign.

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This afternoon was the SAGA board games afternoon, which was well attended. I played one game of Ticket to Ride, one of Hunters & Gatherers and two of Pandemic (1 overrun by the black plague, 1 win). I was so engrossed in the games I forgot to take any photos despite deliberately taking my camera along.

This has left me a little peopled out.

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Finally located a photo of myself from the SteamPunk party in March, yay Jen.

( snip )

Hot Water
I may have been compulsively checking the temperatures at frequent intervals to see what's going on. I hope that running the electric pump which moves the water to/from the solar collector is a lot more efficient than heating the water directly by element because otherwise all I've done is moved a lot of night-rate energy usage to day-rate.

I de-legalised the system yesterday - legally required there's a hot/cold mixer near the tank which is supposed to make sure that the water reaching the tap isn't more than 50something degC. But on a low-pressure system like I have here a significant amount of the pressure at-the-tap (or shower head!) comes from adding in cold at that point to bring the temperature down. So the effective water pressure suddenly started sucking.

Easily resolved by adjusting the mixer to let more hot through :)

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NeverWinter
The party managed to trigger the whole complex into one big fight and made it through pretty much unscathed. I was very disappointed (but the players were happy). It didn't help that all the biggest spells I threw at them were countered by the Heroes Feast they'd eaten the previous session. I agree with a previous acquaintance that large-scale blanket immunities are as broken as Save-or-Die spells, and I think there will be some houseruling of spells going on before the next D&D campaign I run.

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Work-related angst
I have multiple substantial projects on the go but I've been dealing (or rather, not) with a fair amount of angst over the fact that nothing I'm doing is really directed at bringing in paying work. It's not that I don't think I could bring value to - well, pretty much anything - or that I don't believe in what the web can do for a business, it's that I don't believe I have any more right to try and sell (effectively) random strangers of this value that the religious proselytisers that turn up on my doorstep every so often.

It's the exact same reason I lurk in online forums rather than posting - I don't believe that my opinion is any less valid or weaker than anyone else's but it's my opinion and I have absolutely no interest in trying to convince anyone else of its validity or the wrongness of theirs (on the rare occasion I actually think someone is 'wrong' rather than holding a valid alternative viewpoint).

What I ought to do is line up a video to dub and then go and do the dishes or somesuch. Right after I make a pointless post :)

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An emotional afternoon yesterday didn't leave me in top for for gaming, and the session suffered. It was however a lesson in just how potent highish (11th) level casters can be against an army of mooks - who would have thought a large air elemental can hoover up and spit out 42 medium creatures a round? The opposing orc horde didn't get within 20' of the fortifications supported by the PCs, although some of that was due to me forgetting stuff. I also should have had a better idea of the visibility (or lack thereof) and used that - the fact it was night was sort of handwaved.

The hill giants soaked up a few fireballs, but the orc general being dropped to his death from 200' in the air pretty much ended things.

So D&D unstructured mass combats - it's not necessarily how many casters you have on your side (the orcs had a number of 5th level clerics), but who can cast the biggest spells soonest which makes the advantage. A more disciplined force might have pulled back and waited for the short-duration spells to expire before renewing the assault.

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Racky update - front lump is also a 'benign' tumour.

With the runny nose and the sneezing and the congested lungs (at least the chesty cough seems to have passed) and the interrupted sleep and the furry brain.

Today is going to be a day of not doing very much, and naps, and finding little reasons to be out in the sunshine and fresh air. I think it might be a good day to do some video capture.

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There have been 3 sessions of Neverwinter this year and they have all been good, which pleases me. Despite one-shotting a PC in the first session (those wyverns - nasty sting in the tail) which was resolved in a drama encouraging manner (heh heh heh....)

I'm willing to be be a little more railroady this year, to avoid slowdowns like were faced last year, but the players have taken the bit between their teeth and are forging ahead along the most obvious path. This lead to all 5 PCs + animal companion being teleported into a 10x10 cell buck naked at the beginning of last nights session.

Monks really come into their own when the PCs lose all their gear. Druids too (wildshaping into a form small & flexible enough to get out through the grill, invisible thanks to the sorceress). And wimpy little shadows are suddenly a real threat again when the party has no magic weapons or spell components and the cleric doesn't have his holy symbol for Turning (mass Cure Moderate Wounds was pretty effective though).

The party did eventually get their gear back, and have picked up an NPC. Found the portal room and instructions (untested) to teleport back to the surface, but not the artifact they are looking for. A Sepia Snake Sigil concealed in the inventory of a wizard's storeroom got the druid and cost the cleric 8 spell slots (split either side of a rest period) before it was dispelled (did I mention that all spells cost an extra slot to cast in this place?)

We also discovered that a Wand of Cure Moderate Wounds is of no use against the cursed wounds inflicted by a clay golem, because there's no way a 5th level caster (wand creator) could make the DC 26 caster level check).

I'm having fun, and I think the players are as well :D

Monday
Ran into a bit of a bottleneck at work, so took the afternoon off and spent some hours redesigning my own website
- it's not ready yet. Generating content is hard.
Had a small lotto win off the weekend's draw - enough to almost cover the cost of the previous three losing tickets :-/

Tuesday
Was very sleepy for some reason, but actually more awake at board games in the evening than I have been the past few weeks.

Wednesday
Everything ws going well until about 3pm, when I decided to clean up one little job before leaving work earlyish and getting game prep done. A frustrating hour & a half later ...

Thursday
Another posture assessment in the morning.
( comparative thermographs )

Did get some game prep done over lunch. Not enough really. However I think the session ran OK. There's only a few more sessions worth of NeverWinter this year, and only a few weeks left gaming at Uni.

Friday
I think I may have caught something - my appetite is lacking. Or maybe I'm just a bit depressed over various things.
There's plenty that needs done here at home, I'll get to it eventually.

To recap:

Monday: Colour of Magic & cat chunder.

Tuesday: SAGA AGM eventually managed to scrape together quorum, but then a lack of candidates and a UCSA double-booking snafu resulted in two of the committee positions and all the general business being put off until an SGM sometime in October.

Wednesday: Hosted board games for glissom and friends. Managed to come a close second-equal in Vinci.

Thursday: Work suddenly had multiple urgent jobs that had to be finished/perfect beofre I left for my long weekend. This resulted in a) mistakes and b) my leaving work an hour later than planned which was spent with the boss breathing down my neck. This in turn meant that I was unable to complete the prep I had planned for the nights game, and indeed I was sufficiently mind-fucked that I turned up to the holiday venue instead of the term-time venue.

Fortunately the residents were a) home and b) didn't rib me too mercilessly. The game ran OK once the party actually came to some agreement about what course of action they were going to take, and came up with a plan other than a frontal assault through the chaff.

Friday: Took the day off work to attend tatianitska and glissom's wedding. managed to sleep in by an hour, which was probably good for me but meant some chores I had planned didn't get done. Took photos, ate good food, chatted a bit to various people I don't see very often/haven't seen in over a decade.

Attended the impromtu BBQ at J & T's afterwards, a smaller affair. Left reasonably early to get to bed.

Saturday:
Slept in Failed to get up by two hours....
Short list:
Laundry
155 RS articles/email digests +links
Neverwinter Prep

(Gaming Tuesday Wednesday Thursday is really screwing with my schedule in a whole bunch of ways.)

Party

Slightly longer list for the weekend:
Lawns
Try to clean lounge ceiling
Kitchen floor
Blog Post
Process wedding photos

I have been having a very clumsy day. From repeatedly opening the wrong cupboards in the kitchen while sorting out breakfast/making lunch through losing my place on the keyboard to spilling dinner on the floor.

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Invoiced more than I had expected to this week so I spent up a little and purchased an extra G of RAM for the tablet this afternoon - I had only been going to price but it was cheaper than I expected. That said, I've overspent a little this week and hope I'm paid tonight.

With that out of the way the next treat is definitely a Freeview decoder - maybe even this month.

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NeverWinter went well last night I thought - the party successfully divided the opposition (if not quite in the way they anticipated) and captured the assasain they were after. Now the interrogation - under the supervision of the Church of Tyr so the possiblities for nastiness are ... limited :->

The game should rapidly progress to the next sub-act now. I have more than a little prep to do.

~~~
I wonder if I go to bed stupidly early I can convince myself to get up early and get something productive done?

Today
I'm losing the war against flu that I've been waging for the past few weeks. Not helped I'm sure by this week's early starts/late nights/long days.

I was meaning to take it easy today, but I wound up pushing through a full day at work to get the functionality I'd hoped to have in place yesterday done.

My eyes hurt - I need to find something to do with my evening which doesn't involve staring at text or a monitor. I suspect as usual that will turn out to be a very early night.

Tuesday
Although the campaign I was in has fallen over it was good to note 3 games running plus 6+ boardgamers (including myself) at SAGA.

With that campaign over and the Saturday game drawing to a close it's a good thing I've landed a place in zakzahn's upcoming D&D4 mini-campaign, or I'd be back to not playing at all.

Wednesday
It occurs to me that people who try to recreate their youth are missing the point. It's a lot less effort just to be young in the now, whatever your biological age. (And who really wants to repeat all those mistakes anyway?)

Of course this is coming from someone who spent far too much of his 20's feeling 40, and didn't otherwise have much of a youth worth recreating.

Tagged on to see Prince Caspian on Wednesday evening - led to a midnight bedtime. Watching the movie I just couldn't remember ever reading the book - perhaps I somehow missed it.

Thursday
Had a talking to at the Neverwinter group at the end of the session. It was a bit more one-sided that I'd planned -I'd also planned to have it at the start of the session when everyone was in a more equitable state of mind. The campaign has felt morassed for a while now, and a number of the players have spoken to me about issues they're having over the past couple of weeks. Looks like we'll be losing another player which is a great pity*. This time I will have to source a replacement.

They b-team did manage to recover all the bodies -although I started the session worried about another TPK. Once character opted for reincarnation over raising/resurrection and came back as ... an elf. So we now have two elves, a half-elf, a halfling and a token round-ear ( ;-p ).

And they know one of their most potent magical items has fallen into the hands of the bad guys. [Evil DM cackle]

*This is not a guilt trip. Quit it you :p

~~~
I'm very grateful to have a property with good drainage - except the top of the driveway/front of the garage which have subsided slightly at some point in the past.The area does drain into a hole in the garden but the soil reaches saturation too quickly. I now have plans to bury a large pipe with holes in the bottom from that point down alongside the driveway.

Even in Chch. But, still murk out there - not immediately where I am, but looking in either direction.

~~~
Entertaining session of Neverwinter last night despite being two players down, the remainder split up some loot, attempted to interrogate two corpses (limited by the fact that one made it's saving throw and I decided that the other was still affected by the pixie memory-loss arrows - Speak with Dead is not the wish/miracle level magic required to recover from those), and then went and slaughtered a small horde of goblins (Level 8 PCs vs (mostly) standard goblins - no challenge at all but fun for them to face insignificant opponents once in a while :D )

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Vistaprint (the outfit I get my 'business cards' from) are keen to inform me that they are having big promotions. They even sent me my own personal link so I can help my friends get discounts (and get further discounts for myself of course).

I think they are good value, if you have the time and mental fortitude to wade through all the attempts to upsell on the way through checkout :D

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Have to take the car back to the panelbeaters this afternoon - apparently they were waiting on a part and didn't put it in before giving the car back. Only the rear window-washer pump -I'm OK with that but they could have mentioned it earlier.

I had my 3-week posture assessment at chiro yesterday. I'm standing much better apparently - my shoulders and hips have pretty much evened up and I'm getting that straight line down the side.

Thermo has improved a little - still all blue down the bottom but the angry red of my upper back is receding.

I've been given a traction device (large solid semicircle of foam) to lie over backwards with my shoulders etc off the floor for 30 seconds longer each day until I reach 17 minutes, continue thereafter for 14 days, then add bungee (which I haven't been given yet so I don't know what that entails). This will require scheduling, unlike the rest of the exercises which I perform intermittently througout the day.

I also have a complimentary gift certificate for a checkup - which is to say discounted to $77 from the usual $225 (including x-rays). Probably only really useful if you also have a few K to spend on treatment if they find anything wrong. It expires 17 May, any takers?

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Came dangerously close to a TPK last night in Neverwinter as what should have been a challenging encounter turned into a very challenging encounter with the PCs widely spread out across the battlefield and unable to come to each others aid.

There was also some good roleplaying in the session, after two of the PCs failed will saves at the beginning and woke up in the morning opposed to the current goals of the party.