Hopin

I'm hopin that Steph calls and tells me when to pick her up at the airport, because the only itinerary I have for her says she returns to St. Louis on August 7th. I'm pretty sure the plan was to get back sooner than that. -- Jeffg
posted by Jeff Gatlin at 6/25/2001 12:25:00 PM

Keepin It Simple

This is my K.I.S.S. version my journal. Note to friends: The absolute most important KEY to providing information of any kind on the Internet is readability. If people can't read what your writing, due to weird fonts, wacky backgrounds or whatever, then they won't really read it and thus why bother to publish on the net if no one wants to read it. Now if your worried I'm talking about you... well then your probably right, Fix It! If your pissed because I've got no right to tell you jack about how you do your own damn site, well good for you! Screw me! Sheesh who the hell do I think I am anyway! Feh!

*POP* It has happened. I have DM'd my first ever session of DnD. It was a blast. Quite a bit different from playing as you might imagine, as the perspective is from behind the scenes. But the fun is still there. Fun Rping the characters that the party meets and converses with, fun watching the party take the bait I have offered and fun being baffled that the character I am RPing keeps mentioning the note he got, claiming it was written by the party when they know they didn't write it, waving it around in the air blaming the note as the reason he was acting the way he was, and no one... no one in the party was asking what the note said! They were too busy questioning the poor kid, who was upset and slightly incoherent but very talkative. (They did finally get him to read the note).

I originally was going to run an adventure from a module in Dungeon magazine but I ended up running all original stuff. I've always had more fun making up my own stuff instead of adapting others. Still, I'm going to run the magazine module as part of the campaign just to see how that works against all original stuff. In many ways, this has been spiritually fullfilling. I've not lead a group of willing players thru a story of my own composition in quite some time (referring to my GameMaster days in GemStone III and HX) and I've missed it. My own fault for having a talent for coding and building systems, it drew me away from the jazz.

And with that I grow tired. I'll save the jazz and Roleplaying philosophical comparisons for another time (hey stop applauding). Laters, -Jeff

posted by Jeff Gatlin at 6/22/2001 01:52:00 AM

When The Internet Agrees

I saw Atlantas Friday night. It was pretty good, nothing super special, very formula but the story itself was at the very least not stereotypical for the Atlantis legend. I can say , however, that without even having seen Tomb Raider that it was much better. My friends who have seen it agree and the entire Internet (no link here, pick any site it's the same review) all agree it stinks.

Almost done preparing for my first DnD campaign. Why I have to create the whole world instead of using existing worlds I don't know, I guess it's just me. :) (In my case, world means places. Gods professions and other stuff like it are straight out of the core books). I am using one module from Dungeon magazine, adapting it into my city but the players won't come across it first session at least (can't entirely rule anything out though). ;)
posted by Jeff Gatlin at 6/18/2001 10:59:00 AM

Convenience or...

This morning at the local convenience store I noticed a display rack just under the cashier's counter. Items right next to the register are usually impulse buy items, things that people might suddenly remember they need. The items I saw grouped together on this rack were:

Condoms
Chapstick
Batteries
Calculators

I'll leave it up to you to fathom the related uses for these 'spur of the moment' purchase options. -Jeffg
posted by Jeff Gatlin at 6/13/2001 02:07:00 AM

To Dream the Light of Tomorrow

The week of mania is over. All and all things went pretty good. My game 'Race to the Top of Roa'ter Mountain' was well received. For those who missed it, 4 brave adventures (4 because 2 was boring, 6 was a bit slow and it was harder to get all the names on the mountain) must climb to the top of the mountain hopefully without getting knocked down by everyone's favorite nemesis, Roa'ters. Their only tools, a round spinny thing that comes up Climb (move up one), Loose Rocks (try to move up but scramble and get nowhere), Roa'ter Attack! (knocked down one) and Lore of the Lands (answer GS or DR trivia question [or trivial pursuit if you don't play either]). If you answered a question correctly you get an Acrobatic card that lets you use a Roa'ter Attack to vault up one instead of down. And it's just that simple, first one to the top wins! Several people played, even big D was in on a few.

The rest of the convention went well, it's definately better to get a room for the whole thing than driving back and forth like in previous years.

Now that we're on the flip side of crazy, I can start working on the good stuff. I've got some funky web stuff to complete and polish, a few new game things to solidify and I am likely about to become as DM as well as a GM as I take the plunge by hosting a DnD game (I'm currently playing in two run by MikeP.) I had never played a table top RPG before this year but it didn't take much for me to get drawn in.

Enough rattling, later. -Jeffg
posted by Jeff Gatlin at 6/12/2001 12:08:00 PM

It is almost here... Gah! *runs screaming*
posted by Jeff Gatlin at 6/04/2001 10:41:00 AM