Independence Day
Miniature Troubles
Sometimes I have a pretty huge chip on my shoulder that I want to share here. I furiously begin writing down my ideas in some form of irrational prose. And then I scrap it because my entire point gets lost. Maddening!
Let me say plainly that all I want are plastic, pre-painted miniatures sold in a way that lets me buy what I want. I don’t want random monsters. I don’t want to paint them myself. I don’t want to use glass beads or cardboard tokens. No clever marketing gimmicks.
Reaper seems to be catching on. But Wizards of the Coast doesn’t seem to get it. They keep trying to somehow sell their miniatures as collectables. If you are going to make a table top role playing adventure game that (by the book) requires miniatures to play, don’t jerk me around!
Jeep
I took my car into the shop recently. Bad tie-rods. Check engine light. Bald tires. Worn out breaks. The works. But who cares about my car, let’s talk about the adventures I had in the Jeep. This is my dad’s Jeep, and he was nice enough to get sick on company time so that I could drive it to work while my car was being repaired to the tune of an all expenses paid trip to Disney World in beautiful Florida.
When I was learning to drive a stick, a Jeep almost killed me. And by “almost killed me”, I mean I let off the clutch too fast and the thing almost flipped over. I learned my lesson: Jeeps are not like normal cars. To a Jeep, many things are just suggestions. Curbs. Speed bumps. It’s own transmission. Logs. These things just serve as a mock leash that makes you think you might control the Jeep. A Jeep is not a car. Sounds exciting already doesn’t it?
I remember when I first sat in this particular Jeep, and I thought to myself, “This is kind of a nice Jeep.” It has rear speakers. And the roll bars are padded. And air conditioning. And a console for controlling the air vents that didn’t require you to manually push and pull giant knobs in the dash. Compared to older Jeeps, this was the Cadillac of Jeeps. But after having driven my Volkswagen New Beetle for nine years, I can say that this is still the driving equivalent of “roughing it”. I don’t mean it’s rough like you have to roll down your windows manually (which you do), but rough like you are pretty sure that those drain plugs are to let rain water out and not to let water in so it won’t float when you cross a six foot deep river … right? I’m not sure this Jeep has drain plugs since they would be hidden under the carpet. Which makes sense since it’s a pretty cushy Jeep with carpet and all those fancy extras.
Driving a Jeep is very fun though. There’s no mistaking that you are driving a gasoline powered internal combustion engine. You never wonder if the road is smooth or not, because even if it was, you wouldn’t notice. I can understand why my friends at work wanted to ride in the Jeep when we went to lunch. It makes the lunch trip an adventure! You get bounced around like you are off road. You can barely hear each other when accelerating. You sit up nice and high so you can look down on people who could never drive their way out of the Amazonian basin. Plus, it’s so unlike the typical car experience.
I have to admit that nothing really exciting happened to me while I was borrowing the Jeep. It was just different and interesting. How many cars can you drive that let you take the doors or roof off?
More Keep on the Shadowfell
Except this time, with a dice tower. It had an amazing impact on game play. Mostly because people had trouble seeing their results, or seeing the map over the giant tower. I’ll have to focus on making it smaller and easier to see the dice roll results.
I think it does a good job of actually removing the dice or the person as the problem. In my mind, that means rolls are more random and I didn’t see any long streaks of bad rolls. But, to others, it means the dice tower must be the problem when a bad roll happens. 🙂
I still maintain that it’s nothing more than a gimmick if you are a good dice roller. But we all get lazy, and we all have tables that are not ideal rolling surfaces. And those things, coupled with a D4, for example, are just asking for trouble. In the end, it’s just a die roll and the tower just gives you a better view of your own naval.
v2
I wasn’t really happy with the first one. You might think a dice tower is a dice tower is a dice tower, right?
WRONG.
The first one had two major problems. It was way too large, and the baffles inside were not tumbling the dice well. The size was easier to fix. In the second version, I made it a tad taller, but I made it much narrower and the dice catcher can flip up against the tower. As for the baffles inside, I made sure the new one had the baffles at a very steep forty five degree angle. I also added a third baffle. This has the dice fly out of the bottom of the tower spinning.
The dice feel more random than ever after going through this new tower. 🙂
Tower of Chaos!
We all have those nights. Your playing a game that involves dice and you just can’t seem to roll anything worthwhile. Is it the dice? Is it the black cat that crossed your path while you walked under a ladder after breaking a mirror? Did someone put your dice in their mouth to curse them? Or do you just need to learn 2 roll, noob?
Turns out that there is a thing called a Dice Tower. And I’m not talking about those monuments to boredom you build with your dice. It’s a dice randomizer. Toss the dice in the top and they bounce around and come out totally random.
I just had to make one. Since I’m cheap and the one I wanted costs way too much. Now, do I name it the Battle Box? Or maybe Eris-o-matic?
The end?
Finally.
A working computer. Just in time to wander back to Warhammer Online and see the guild I was in is totally dead.
But, Free Realms plays really well on it. :/
Darkest before the light
Still. Not. Fixed.
Three motherboards. Two CPUs. Two PSUs. Two sets of RAM. Three video cards. Not a working computer among those parts.
Until, I got some helps from a friend and found out that both sets of RAM were bad. Most likely damaged by my first motherboard.
Today I might get something of a working computer back. Luckily memory prices are rock bottom these days.
The trouble with computers
I save some money by building my own computer. Now I have a computer that won’t boot for some mysterious reason. And I’m without a bevy of replacement parts to even try replacing components to do some basic trouble shooting. Add to the the possability that my power supply might be killing replacement motherboards. Hooray!
The saving grace is how clean this photo makes my computer room look.
Revelation and Fallout
More RPG fun! This time, I get to play. And talk. And mostly crack jokes and complain. We made it to the end of combat, which makes the fight pretty fast for how many enemies and players there are. This is a homebrew setting on top of the Buffy game system, fashioned from sticks and some model glue by the GM, Stone. Tonight we used a battle mat to run combat … and combat seemed better. A revelation! Combat with miniatures is better?! Wah?
Obviously my big metal robot leanings have exposed me to miniatures combat from the first days of my RPG life. Battletech, Aerotech specifically, was my serious indoctrination into the hobby, and those games are seriously miniatures and map centric. And then I played a bit of Robotech, never using a map or a miniature. All those times I played both with and without maps and miniatures, and I never really looked into how combat unfolds in each. The maps make a large difference in how I see combat and my options.
Without the maps, combat is often randomly direct attacks between enemies and player characters. Lots of time and effort have to be expended by the GM keeping the scene straight and conveying it clearly to the players. Maybe that’s advanced play. And maybe if your games are combat light, it’s no big deal. I am seeing that a map and character markers are really valuable tools. Focusing fire, creating bottlenecks, flanking, and many other tactical options come into tangible view on the table. Even if the game system doesn’t specifically reward these maneouvers, it can help facilitate more teamwork. And in my specific game night of play, it can even help everyone get a quick look at the situation and decide what to do, because someone told a really funny joke and you weren’t paying attention. Now the GM doesn’t have to re-explain what just happened, or tell you which enemy is in sight or posing the greatest threat.
And why is this anything even close to a surprise for myself? Mostly because I used to consider maps as a crutch, or a distraction. Too “game-ist” or “simmulation-ist” maybe. In my eyes, table-top gaming was just a complex board-game and had no place in role playing games. Would people who want to play an RPG be ok if I whipped out a map, some miniatures, and started a game of Battletech in the middle of their game? My recent experiences with Fallout and D&D 4e seem to indicate that it will work fine. Would it work with every system? Probably not. But when it does, I think it’s a great way to enhance the combat in a game.