ironymaiden | Entries tagged with saltmarsh

a side-effect of the pandemic has been the perfect storm of boredom and acceptance of virtual meeting technology, which led to me participating in four different "tabletop" RP games across three groups. how's that going now?

in 2020, Friday game moved online. eventually we paused our kind of bleak Star Wars game and moved to playing Savage Worlds superheroes. then in 2021 we switched to a lethal D&D dungeon crawl when the GM got too busy, then picked up the Star Wars game again.

in 2020, the Friday group also started playing through Descent into Avernus on Tuesdays, via Roll20. I joined once I was done with school that November. we finished the complete campaign in late 2021.

in 2021 C and I started playing D&D on Saturdays via Roll20 with friends from college and others - a game played across four US time zones (and elevation from sea level to "high altitude" and corner to corner of the contiguous 48).

at approximately the same time in 2021 we started a FATE game (Trojan war era) with a completely different group of locals on Discord. near the end of the year we transitioned to D&D via Shard.

depending on how schedules lined up (tues and fri weekly, others every other weekish) I either had a steady 3 games a week or 2 a week alternating with 4.

in 2022: Tuesday transitioned to a game set in Savage Worlds' cyberpunk Interface Zero setting. my character for this is a blantant Murderbot rip-off and I love them and their seven itty bitty drones and their arm guns.

Friday Star Wars came to a natural close. the GM literally fulfilled my character bio that I had written in 2019: my character was an Empire war criminal, a True Believer weapons designer who was frozen in carbonite and thawed too late to join the rise of the First Order, looking for a way to Make the Galaxy Great Again... not that the party knew that. I'll remember this one for a long time; she was a full on support character (super badass at mechanics and computers) and hid or ran from combat unless it involved starship gunnery. her last scene was demoing the new technology she had developed to Admiral Thrawn. swoon (we may go back to these characters again someday, but I think she will have to be an NPC. others in the party have devoted themselves to the new republic, so yeah...)

some life stuff has happened to the Tues/Fri fam, so this week we played cyberpunk Tuesday and Friday and will be Friday-only going forward.

Wednesday game (gnome Wizard/Rogue librarian) is chugging along, as is Saturday game (Dwarf champion fighter using the Building Chatacter Gimli build). so three games, three groups, anywhere from 1 to 3 games a week.

Current Mood: excuse to use the meeple icon

had our first RPG session of the year tonight; it looks like we're going to solve our problems by talking with the undead instead of killing them all.

tried a shimmer ink sample with my largest/wettest pen and it started out kind of dry and clumpy. after i wrote a page it smoothed out, we'll see what happens after the pen has sat unused overnight...i may dump it or try diluting it with a standard ink. i'm very happy to have figured out that i can draw tiny orange corners on regular notebook pages to use as rocketbook beacons and that really opens up using my good pens every day for work stuff.

"the rideable duck seems to have taken up a hostile stance"

yesterday i had my first migraine in a while. it took me down at the end of the work day and i ended up missing Friday night game. (i fell asleep hard after having dinner, drugs, and two tiny cans of Coke Zero, and even after i woke computer screens were a no-go.)

i felt better this morning. we picked up breakfast from Hattie's and coffee while we walked the dog, then watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier while we ate. then we walked to the better grocery store, which had potted bulbs 3/$10 and got 3 clumps of narcissus and three clumps of tulips. we picked out ones that hadn't bloomed yet; originally i had intended to just sit them on the balcony, but they were all quite rootbound in their little plastic pots, so i ended up doing some impromptu gardening. dead cruft and moss cleaned out of the planters, geraniums trimmed back, dirt fluffed, bulbs planted in the open spaces.

i ran another errand (boots getting stretched, the left one needs a bit more, should be done next week) and picked up some beers and ciders. C had fallen fast asleep with the dog, i should have taken a picture. but that made it easy to go sit in a sunbeam on the balcony with my kindle and a cold beer.

this being a four-game week, we had a pretty frustrating dungeon crawl tonight - lots of traps and a fight that yielded nothing but decoy treasure. we did, however, find a magical vending machine with discount healing potions. it could move and seemed to have some intelligence and the poor thing was chained to the wall, so my character used her smith's tools to set it loose. (we ended there, we'll see how that plays out next time.)

this group is mostly educators and essential workers, so they're all qualified to get vaccinated...ranging from having both doses to fighting to schedule a first appointment. i'm really struggling to tamp down my feelings about being last to get my shots; we are healthy and mostly safe from exposure,* we should be last, still feels like shit.

*if you are going to get into the weeds on this, it would be nice to have living in an apartment building with interior hallways and elevators considered a risk factor since we definitely share air. but the state has come out specifically to say that it doesn't count as "congregate".

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Command Station
Current Music: C typing

another four-game week is complete. we had a really nice time tonight; C and i talked on the dog walk about what seemed to be working well with this group as compared to our Tuesday/Friday group (since those games are all D&D right now) and i think the big thing that came through is that playing early Saturday evening* after having rested all day just makes us better at being humans together. (also, i've come to appreciate using the video feature on Discord. seeing faces and being able to gesture is really useful in spite of zoom fatigue.)

since the largest cohort of the group is in Ohio, we talked briefly about Origins. it's been scheduled for late September this year. we...might be able to go? *star eyes*

*we have folks in each of the four major US time zones, and we wrap up around midnight Eastern, which is a pleasant 9pm for us.

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: Command Station

we had our first Saturday night session of D&D with our eight-person,* four-time-zone party. the DM and half the party are folks i played RPGs with in college and haven't seen since i moved to the west coast. it went surprisingly well both from a gaming standpoint and in terms of picking up like we never stopped hanging out.

it was interesting to see how other people use Roll20 + Discord.

this game (D&D): Discord video chat, Roll20 text chat and rolls.
Friday game (Savage Worlds): Discord audio, text chat, and rolls.
Tuesday game (D&D, same group as Friday): Discord audio and text chat, Roll20 rolls.

C and i have to train ourselves out of having side conversations in Discord chat, no one is looking at it. (and C has to figure out how to get Discord to recognize his camera.) the other thing is that in terms of using the character sheet, the Friday gamers are much more sophisticated, in terms of using the chat features and the GM tools the Saturday gamers know more. i'm really missing the money we put into the Friday game, where we have copies of all the sourcebooks for our GM and therefore available to everyone in the game. working with just the SRD (a limited free version of the rules) is limiting...but the Saturday gamers know tricks with having other players that own the books do character sheet updates. so it's hacky but workable.

this afternoon (after i finished fussing with my character sheet for the evening game) i added Fate die rolling to my Discord bot, Chewie. it's very basic right now (like it shows your default username instead of your server nickname when it attributes the roll) but it works and in the process fixed an existing bug Chewie had with commands. i need to look at the rulebook to think about what other Fate features it needs after i get the name thing right.

i started by looking at another Fate roller project on GitHub, but it didn't work as written. i know the guy advertised the project on Reddit, but i had to change enough things that i'm not sure that it worked before it was apparently abandoned. or maybe the discord.py library changed drastically between when it was first written and now.**

*our DM asked eight, expecting 30% or so to say no, but no one did.
**i don't know, though. there was a math function that had nothing to do with discord.py that didn't work. and they didn't know how to format line breaks. still, they saved me a ton of time finding the right formatting for displaying emojis for the dice and had a folder of the dice art itself. i should try to contribute back my changes.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Command Station
Current Music: C soothing the dog

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the girly who shall end all girls

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Entries tagged with saltmarsh

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it had a maker's mark written in Modron

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