Missing In Action

I'd like to apologize for being absent for so long one of the things I wanted to continue with this blog was to maintain a healthy and regular posting schedule.  However, after moving, shifting hours at my job, maintaining a social life and rekindling friendships with old college buddies I haven't had a whole lot of time.  To add a finishing touch I just recently enrolled in Grad school, so in addition to work I've had little to no time with which to get anything done and many of my hobbies have fallen by the wayside.  Even just opening up blogger to write this post I saw a number of posts on my blog roll that looked very intriguing but I had to keep myself from reading because time has become an extreme commodity.  It's not necessarily a bad thing, having limited time keeps you focused and you're more efficient with what little idle time you do have but I have regrettably not had any time to post nor have I even had time to write up a few drafts.  I haven't had time to translate ideas to paper and more recently I haven't had much time to think about my hobbies, D&D and roleplaying in general so the creative font has not been flowing.

On occasion something does inspire me and if I'm lucky I'm within decent range of a computer or notebook to get it written down and once or twice I have been able to flesh that out into a few paragraphs and even a full post.  I do not however want to go ahead and post them because I feel as though it will be akin to a drop of rain in the desert.  So here's what I'd like to do instead.  I plan on stockpiling posts, writing when I get the chance and keeping them as drafts to save for later when I can and do have time to blog.  Come December when this semester is over and work winds down a bit I'll have some serious time to get to work on my favorite creative outlets.  At that point I hope to post as frequently as I could before and I will have built up a small stock of posts over the coming months.

Essentially I don't have the time to keep blogging at the moment but if I do manage to scrape together any posts I'm going to save them for when I do have the time and attention to devote to this blog.  Likely around December.  I'd like to thank you all for reading and your input since I've started.  This wasn't something I was sure I'd be any good at or even joy but I definitely learned otherwise.  Hopefully I'll see you soon when winter is in full swing.  In the meantime I highly recommend perusing through my blog list in the bottom right, each one of the bloggers on there are chock-full of very insightful and creative work.

Player Chosen Ability Scores: Talent

Continuing my series on High and Low ability scores and how I used them in my games.  In addition to the four primary ability scores players could choose two ability scores that best reflected their character's quirks and virtues.    The most noteworthy aspect was that a low score was not necessarily a punishing score, instead a low score functioned in a complementary fashion to the boons of a high score.  In this series I'm going to take a look at each of these optional stats, how I want them to operate and how they were originally represented mechanically.  This time we're going to look at Talent.  Previous entries can be found here.

Talent
Sometimes you just have a knack for something, you have the good fortune to have a natural prowess with the things you know and for everything else you can easily get the hang of.  A talented character picks up on most things very quickly and can perform them adequately and often spectacularly.  An untalented character has to work much harder to keep up with others.

Trine and Cooperative Play (Wizard)

In the briefest windows in which I find free time I managed to sink another hour into a little game called Trine.  Trine is a platforming puzzler with the twist that you play as three characters in one and can rotate through them at will.  If you've ever played the Lost Vikings on the SNES/SEGA you'll be very familiar with the premise. The three characters represents your classic fantasy archetypes, Knight, Wizard and Thief.  Through a twist of fate and a magical mishap involving anartifact known as the Trine they have all been sealed into a single body.  This of course can lead to some fun tension and dialog but for the most part it leaves for a very satisfying cooperative single player experience.  Of course you can play with a friend on the same PC, or over the internet in the sequel but the game and its puzzles are obviously intended for a single player.

Tandem Monsters: Daigol and Ozmone

Two freak storms weekend after weekend knocking out power for miles around sure is making it difficult to maintain an regular update schedule.


One thing I've always found intriguing is monsters that work well in tandem, whose abilities complement each other (often in tactical ways) or a pair that mitigate the weaknesses of each other.  These can lead to some interesting and memorable encounters.  This time we're going to look at two monsters that are distinctly opposite and are quite capable of covering each others vulnerabilities.  In fact, the key to defeating them is to divide and conquer.

Demon's Souls Penetrator Sculpture by futantshadow

Disintegration with added Physics

Turns out that moving, changing work locations and hours took a lot more time than I expected to.  I haven't moved my laptop down yet either so I don't have my notes available so the posts I'll be tackling won't be especially substantive in game mechanics.  Instead here's a post I was considering in the A-Z Challenge for D and hopefully I'll be able to get a post out next Sunday as well.

Disintegration

Shock and Awe

I completed my first 5k run today so what better time to take up blogging again.  I'll be keeping it short for right now as I get back into the swing of things.  Today I'm going to talk about Shock and Awe which I was originally planning on tackling in the A-Z challenge but unfortunately had to cut due to time constraints.

Shock and Awe

The Spy reduces the Morale of common monsters/men and forces a morale check after performing any action that will shock, inspire fear, or awe their opponent.

A to Z Catchup: Z is for Zelda (The Legend of)

It would appear that after the very long and cram packed, but still very well done Avengers movie I have very little time left to write up a post.  That's ok though, since today is my last A-Z post I'd like to spend a little bit talking about what it's been like doing this challenge and where to go from here.

First off it struck me today that I wasted a perfectly good opportunity to talk about running an eXiles themed campaign in the Marvel Super Heroes RPG for the letter X.  Which is a shame since it's been a long while since I've blogged about my stints in Superheroic roleplaying systems and eXile is a perfect setting for people who want to play established characters without mucking around without the overbearing continuity (it also fits the murderous transient mould so many games devolve into which may or may not be a good thing.)

Onto the A-Z Challenge.  I had a lot of fun doing this, although I must say it was quite a challenge.  Trying to put out quality posts full of meaningful or at least interesting content takes a lot more effort than I was expecting.  Those first few posts were easy because I had them already worked out, I just need to transcribe it to a blog post, after that things got pretty difficult and down to the wire at times (like right now for instance!)  This difficulty was compounded by my new hours at work, a sleep schedule that witnesses the crack of dawn and numerous social obligations that soared into prominence.  In short it was hectic, it was draining, but coming home everyday and trying to think of a relevant topic and quickly hammering out the details was quite a rush and it was all the more fulfilling with all the comments and remarks that accompanied it.  So thank you all for that.

Now what to do from here?  First off, I'm taking a much needed break!  At least a week, possibly more.  Writing and design take a lot of inspiration to get going and I don't have as much as that flowing now that most of my day is spent working rather than idling and daydreaming.  On the bright side I will be able to devote more time and focus to individual posts, possibly even fleshing out a few ideas I touched on in the A-Z challenge (if you have any suggestions let me hear them.)

Then of course there is also the final topic.  The Legend of Zelda.  A wonderful eries that has stayed the same in many ways but its gameplay and especially its design has changed drastically between iterations and especially console generations.  In the future I'd like to take a look at Dungeon design in the Legend of Zelda series.  In fact, I'd like to replay though my collection starting all the way in the NES, analyzing key features and framework presented by the designer and how they can be applied or at least understood in our own games.  This is a design blog after all.  Of course, there are always fun little puzzles to examine and steal for our own games.  I plan on doing a series on analyzing other games as well, Etrian Odyssey immediately comes to mind, especially a detailed analysis of class structures and and their thematic components within the setting.

In the meantime I'm going to try and catch up my backlog of A-Z posts written by other people.  You all did splendidly and I regret not having enough time to browse through them all.  Thank you all for reading and stopping by and have a good night.