Just got back from Movie Night, where my friends and I shared pumpkin chocolate chip muffins I'd made, some uber-tasty gnocchi pasta and pesto flatbread pizzas, and general good times. After the D&D group scattered with the four winds, it's good to have regular chances to meet up for hangouts again.
Also, on the D&D note, I'm rather happy to be browsing through a copy of some of the new system reference books for the
Pathfinder d20 RPG. I really like the attitude the developers take when writing material for the game. It seems to carry on in the spirit of old D&D, making the game more polished and accessible, but without cheapening the gaming or storytelling experience. The rules are clean and well-designed, while still keeping them flexible and focused on storytelling. It's still got all the strategy and gameplay goodness, without that single-minded "Kill Monsters and Level Up" focus that 4th Edition D&D seems to have adopted. My love of games, good storytelling, and even my OCD is happy.
I love the attitude the designers take toward the game; there's a page in the GM Guide titled "Words Every GM Should Know", and is literally a text wall of hundreds of great archaic vocabulary words, like gallipot, hagigography, crepuscular, and mendicament. That, and there's volumes of info on the art of storytelling itself, numerous ideas for plots, twists, NPCs and their tics, last-minute escape plans for Villains, and plenty of extra game materials. The best part is the focus on providing GMs with tools to take their own ideas and make them into rules-kosher material.
I'm totally digging how they approach the rules material as well... like the Character Classes. Though well-balanced, they're more a series of archetypes used to build a character off of, rather than or some kind of predefined role to fit your character into. Rather than having hundreds of extra books detailing innumerably base and prestige classes to be able to fit your character idea into the rules, there are a handfull of base classes with a pool of skills and specialties you build your character with. For instance, fighters need not be limited to smashing things, and being hard to smash; the Fighter class covers intelligent swordsmen who use their surroundings to fight with guile, mounted champions who fight astride a gryphon they've hand-trained, or savage warriors who grapple, claw, and even bite their opponents. Other classes let you build blind crone oracles with powers over life and death, "hungry ghost monks" who steal the life energy of those they touch, rakish rogues who use bravado and an open reputation as a scoundrel to find success, or sorcerers who draw supernatural powers from living plants grafted to their bodies.
It's a great, flexible, solidly-built game system, and one of my favorite parts is that it was designed by members of the original TSR team (the guys behind D&D), who left after Wizards of the Coast bought them out. It's built as a remastering of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, and is pretty much reverse compatible with some minor changes to old material. It's good to see the spirit of the old-school Tabletop RPGs hasn't died out at all.
My crazy mother is on her second round of moth-catching tonight.
It has suddenly dawned on me that my life is not grounds of tragedy, but rather of high comedy. Of course, this kind of just happens sometimes, but I'm pretty sure I could make a wacky sitcom/novel/whatever out of this. It's just about as weird as what one finds in the books.
There are characters to be found everywhere you look, and some of us are lucky enough to be able to observe them in their natural habitats. Yet another part of the wonderful complexity that is life; even the most mundane places can be filled with unusual things, and situations that seem difficult or trying at one moment can funny the next. It's a tangled knot of feelings and experiences that run the gamut, and wherever you look you can find value in it. I love it.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16272721 times)