Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in mrteapot's LiveJournal:

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Monday, June 29th, 2009
6:57 pm	Origins! So we went to Origins, and I played a lot of games while Amber volunteered many hours. It was all good, in general. Specific breakdown of my time there: ( Specific breakdown of my time there ) So that was my convention, more or less. I mostly focused on games, because the rest is sort of a vague blur in my mind. Con time is a weird thing, as the con seemed extraordinarily long and also really, really short. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
4:36 pm	Other people doing my work for me I keep thinking about writing an entry about President Obama being the Nerd-In-Chief. But then I never do. So now I see that Personal Computer stereotype and my personal hero, John Hodgman, has established the POTUS's geek credentials better than I could have, and funnier, too. I suppose this is why Hodgman gets to be famous for being a nerd, while I just am one. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
12:07 pm	I have a tendency, when watching something television or a movie that is not especially good, to construct theories or explanations that make that narrative into something grander. Something where there's a secret story ocurring in the backgrounds of the obvious story. Do other people do this? I don't know. But it helps a lot when you have a two year old picking a noticeable percentage of the television that you watch. ( Handy Manny, James Bond, Star Trek and Heroes. ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
1:45 pm	Last night we had the fourth annual First Friday Of Lent giant cavalcade of meat, in celebration of our apostatic nature. As always, the Green Forest restaurant provided us with sufficient quantities of cooked animals, on swords. The swords is a clear bonus. Apparently others had gotten the idea to also celebrate their non-Catholic nature as well, since the restaurant was more crowded than in previous years. Did these other guys hear about and steal our idea? Were none of them Catholic, or were they all very bad Catholics? Then tonight we have the February LARP tonight. And Ross and his girl came from out of town for the meatfest and the LARP. So we ate at Spice Island Tea House today for lunch, which was also delicious as always. And then tonight Sean and Sara are coming for the LARP as well. And they have threatened to bring the terrifyingly awful Dragonlance movie with them, in case the LARP goes short again. On Sunday we may finally finish Keep on the Shadowfell, so my time travelling cowboy wizard will finally catch up to regular campaign continuity. So it's a good weekend, all in all. There'll be an after-LARP report on the blog for that sort of thing. I certainly hope it goes well. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
5:12 pm	LARP-A-Month blog I set up a separate blog over here to write about the monthly LARP project. We'll see how that turns out: it might just be a repository for the LARP documents as they get written. Hopefully it becomes something more, though. I plan to write a second post for it soon, as I forgot my notes on the February Larp(s). (Comment on this)
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
2:33 pm	The LARP from my perspective ( What it looked like in my head ) This is probably the last post about the LARP... until I start postig about the next one. But at least that'll be a new one. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
8:38 pm	LARP documents online Didn't make it to the Bank Robbery LARP? Did make it, but wanted to see what everyone else was told ahead of time? Want to run the game yourself, for some other people? Just want to see how these things go, so you know what to expect for the inevitable next game? Then click this link to see everything I wrote for the LARP and get a fuller picture. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
8:34 pm	fixed sink After several days of having a busted sink, Amber and I managed to cut out the old drain and replace it with a new one. Which works! Yay! Now we can clean all our dishes! (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 26th, 2009
7:24 pm	LARP report The first of the Larp-A-Month events went off pretty well, or so it seemed to me. Everyone who has said anything to me about it said they had fun and looked forward to the next LARP. There was some panic when theadana and her guests were late because of some confusion (and my inability to directly contact her, now fixed). If they hadn't arrived, we might have had to rearrange who was playing who. But they arrived a bit late and we had the game. Which seemed to mostly work, though it went really, really fast. Not the hour or two that I expect from these things. More like half hour to forty-five minutes. Once people started getting shot, things quickly went in interesting directions and then quickly resolved themselves. As always, some totally unexpected stuff happened in the game (a robber deciding to take another robber hostage as he left the bank)band some expected stuff (the pregnant lady subplot worked perfectly for the involved characters) and some totally awesome stuff happened. And that's just the half or so of the game I was able to see happen: the downstairs portion of the game apparently had a bunch of other stuff happen. I'll try to post the complete character information in the next few days, if anyone is interested. If I were to run it again, some rewriting of the lead robber might help the game go on a bit longer. Or maybe it wouldn't extend anything, but would make the game more fun. I'll have to think some to figure out what I learned that can be usefully applied to the next LARP. And I will have to figure out what the next LARP is going to be about, too. And then schedule it and write it in the next couple weeks. If I can continue doing this well, it should be good. If anyone has constructive feedback on how to improve for the next game, I'd like to hear that, too. After the unexpectedly short LARP, we sat around and chatted and played Are You a Werewolf?, because it turned out that we had about fourteen people who all liked that game and rarely got to play. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
7:24 pm	LARP report The first of the Larp-A-Month events went off pretty well, or so it seemed to me. Everyone who has said anything to me about it said they had fun and looked forward to the next LARP. There was some panic when theadana and her guests were late because of some confusion (and my inability to directly contact her, now fixed). If they hadn't arrived, we might have had to rearrange who was playing who. But they arrived a bit late and we had the game. Which seemed to mostly work, though it went really, really fast. Not the hour or two that I expect from these things. More like half hour to forty-five minutes. Once people started getting shot, things quickly went in interesting directions and then quickly resolved themselves. I'll try to post the complete character information in the next few days, if anyone is interested. If I were to run it again, some rewriting of the lead robber might help the game go on a bit longer. Or maybe it wouldn't extend anything, but would make the game more fun. I'll have to think some to figure out what I learned that can be usefully applied to the next LARP. And I will have to figure out what the next LARP is going to be about, too. And then schedule it and write it in the next couple weeks. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
11:25 pm	Christmas wishlist For the benefit of my inlaws, Amber asked me to post here a link to my Amazon.com wishlist. Looking on Amazon for it, I find that there are 39 other Wedigs with wishlists posted. Now how many are my immediate family? Some of them might be but are unclear. Some are blindingly obvious. Who else has a wishlist consisting entirely of quilting stuff, some old Tom Baker era Doctor Who episodes and Babylon 5 Made-For-TV movies. Yeah, that is my mother all over. I love her weird collision of disparate hobbies. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
10:31 am	Making New Year's resolutions early. I've decided that I want to run more LARPs. Rather a lot more than I have been doing. Specifically, I'm going to aim for a rather ambitious goal of writing from the ground up and running a LARP per month throughout 2009. If I fall behind in writing, I may use prewriten LARPs from sources on the internet. Or include running old LARPs for new people (perhaps at Origins or GenCon). Or playtesting House of Masks in semi-LARP format. But the real difficulty here is in logistics, like finding a babysitter that doesn't want to also play in the LARP or a time all the attendees could make it to the game. Anyway, people in the Pittsburgh area should consider attending. People outside the Pittsburgh area should consider attending. People outside the Pittsburgh area should consider roleplaying my LARP NPC from the comfort of their own home. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
7:32 pm	Genre Redesign Challenge So since it's been a while since I did one of these things, I'm participating in the Genre Redesign Madness roleplaying game design challenge. I'm also very busy this week at work, so we'll see how much comes out of it. Anyway, you're supposed to take an existing genre and make it new and fresh and exciting somehow. My given genre is "Post-apocalypse", and I have until Sunday to get something written for it. Long, rambling thoughts and one or two glimmers of ideas after the cut. ( After the Apocalypse ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
4:31 pm	I didn't write a post talking about how great the election of Barack Obama is. Not because his election isn't great - it is, without qualification. But I'm just too lazy and if you're reading the internet you can find millions of other people (many more informed and better writers than I) talking about it. But it is the first time since I became politically active that my candidate for president actually won. So that's a new feeling. I like it. I also like Obama more and more all the time, and I like him a lot to begin with. What else happened recently? Illustrating my nerd tendencies, the only costumes I had for Halloween this year were to represent Dungeons and Dragons characters at their respective sessions. Neither was a typical LARP assemblage of quasi-medieval costumery, though: the two characters in question were a wandering cowboy wizard and a dwarf that "dresses like Rainbow Brite". There are photos of the former costume somewhere (pester scholarinexile, I suppose) but not the latter. Which means you can't see the awesomeness inherent in the ridiculousness of the outfit, but also spares me the embarrassment of you seeing the same. Maddy dressed as a princess, but did not Trick-Or-Treat. She was very good at handing out candy to other costumed kids, though. This is in contrast to the sugar-powered monstrosity she became after Halloween, as she often refuses to eat any food than candy, and does a lot of screaming. I suppose we are entering the Terrible Twos, though hopefully she'll be better once there's less leftover Halloween candy in the house. On Election Day, I managed to bust up my Nintendo DS, such that it doesn't work any more. This is especially annoying, as I had just started getting into the most recent Ace Attorney game. This wasn't the first time it's fallen hard on the floor. By my count, it's been through at least three bad falls and countless minor ones. These things are pretty sturdy, though: Up until now, the repeated injuries didn't impair any functionality, though it did look kinda dinged up. This time, though, the LCD on the bottom screen is visibly cracked, and it only shows white. The touch screen still works, which means the system is tantalizingly close to being useable for Ace Attorney: 90% of the time you just hit the "next page of text" button on the touch screen. But the other 10% of the game would be tricky or impossible without seeing what's on the bottom screen. I'll probably finish the game of Amber's DS (hooray for redundancy), but I'm going to need to figure out whether to get this one repaired (~$85, gone for several days at least), replaced with a refurbished model (~$97), buy a new one (~$130) or wait until the new DSi comes out in America and buy that (cost unknown, wait several months). Or I could import one from Japan (~$300, can't read Japanese) but that's well outside my price range. Being broke at the moment doesn't help this situation at all, of course. I suppose being broke rarely helps any situation. So all in all, life is still going on mostly as normal, despite a black man being elected president. Maybe America will finally ascend into Heaven on Inauguration Day? Re-election? His last day as President? (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
5:09 pm	Some Christians apparently don't read their Bible too closely Facing hard economic times, a group of Christians converged on Wall Street, to pray for a better economy. The problem here is the choosing to pray before a giant statue of a golden bull: What happened the last time someone tried this? Oh yeah: "27 Then he [Moses] said to them, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.' " 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died." (Exodus 32:27-28) The Christian god ain't down with praying to golden bulls in hard times, man. You'd think Christians would know that sort of thing. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
4:07 pm	Ignorance is Reportedly Bliss. I wouldn't know. Scientists Erase Specific Memories (in Mice) Haven't I seen this movie before? "Is there any risk of brain damage?" "Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage" (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
2:29 pm	My mind actually writes a lot more blog posts than I wind up typing. Largely, this is laziness on my part. I think of some interesting theory, but never put it into the computer. Luckily, Newsweek saved me the work in writing about the relationship between Sarah Palin's candidacy and the Discovery Channel. Now I just have to hope someone else can write for me about the analogy between stotting and hair metal, or an analysis of the similarity in comedic structure of The Muppet Show and The Daily Show. Or conspiracy theories about cartoons on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. Or I should write them myself. But, you know, laziness. (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 6th, 2008
9:26 am	Flashback Skill Challenge I like lots of things in Dogs in the Vineyard. It's an amazingly well made game. But one of the bestest things in there is the initiatory conflict. At the end of character creation, you go around and do a little flashback scene for each character, to see if they learned something at the Temple before leaving on their Dogs mission. This is a great technique, as it fleshes out a character who up until then was just words on the paper, gives everyone a spotlight bit and works as an introduction to the rules. It's excellent in many ways. It's also fairly easy to port over into other systems (see below). If anything, the biggest problem with the initatory conflict is that you only do it once, at start of play, and it delays getting to the actual Dogs village with problems to be solved. Cue me and Amber watching Season 3 of Lost on DVD in quick succession. Lost does a lot of cool things, too, but once again one thing in particular interests me. In this case, I'm intrigued by how each episode has a flashback focusing on one character and their life before they came to The Island. These flashbacks allow you to see the characters in a different setting than the survive-on-a-deserted-island-and-investigate-weird-conspiracies you get in the main storyline of the show. So you once again get greater character depth and focuses the spotlight on certain characters. (I think you can see where this is going.) Read an entry by gaming expert Robin Laws about directed scenes taking a character from playing piece to complete character and everything falls into place. At least in my mind it does. So here's what these three things added up to in my head: In the solo D&D campaign I'm GMing for Amber, every session includes a flashback to earlier in a focus PC's life. This flashback is a skill challenge, which each scene of the flashback lasting until a skill is rolled. The flashback starts out with a very general question (e.g., "When did you decide to become a wizard?") and Amber describes a scene leading up to the answer of the question. (In doing so, she's free to establish setting details and new NPCs and such.) We play until a check is made towards the skill challenge, then return to the present day. After playing in the present a sufficient amount we do another flashback, and another skill check towards the challenge. At the end of the challenge, the PC earns XP for the challenge and a minor bonus if they succeed. If they failed, they get a quest, which will give XP equal to the challenge's value when completed. So, like the Dogs initation, whether you succeed or fail doesn't invalidate or harm the character, but you get different results. I like the failure giving you a quest: failure gives you motivation to improve yourself. So far we've gotten to do this twice in the game (I forgot about it one time in the middle there, unfortunately). Each time it has been quite successful. The first time established a lot more about the PC's home town, which is good because they don't seem likely to spend a lot of time there. Amber made up parents and family units for the PCs, and killed nearly as many of them in surprising and tragic circumstances. And I got to introduce a Mysterious Mentor for the main PC. The second time we did a flashback, the "present day" part of the game was in a very dungeon crawly section. So the flashback offered a very nice counterpoint, in which we saw one PC as a rebellious teenager dealing with family melodrama. The additional roleplaying and characterization here helped keep the game from feeling to boardgamey, as it might have if it was just "hunt the bug monsters and zombies through the mines". I plan to keep milking this setup until it becomes tired. And, like unto later seasons of Lost, I can see a fair amount of variations on the flahsbacks to keep it interesting if it becomes cliched. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
2:16 pm	Political Content John McCain hates Dungeons and Dragons, apparently: "It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others." (bold added) Which is a total non sequitur in some sort of minor news story about whether or not one of McCain's POW stories was true (or his). But the important thing is this: McCain's campaign hates D&D. As far as I'm concerned, that's just one more reason to vote for the charismatic half-elf over here. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 4th, 2008
6:49 pm	I'm back at work after a bit less than three months. I can't decide if the transition is easier or harder because there's absolutely nothing to do here right now. In a couple of weeks the students will return and real work will begin. For some reason, offers of gaming with new people have been springing up out of the woodwork. Matthew (who has but never uses his LJ account) is trying to recruit me for his Friday night D&D group. And two people contacted me via Nearbygamers.com: one guy looking for playing cool independent RPGs, "Story Games" and the like, and an untold number of 18 year olds who haven't done any gaming at all, but want to play some D&D. Why couldn't these people have shown up in early June, when I had all my evenings free? (1 Comment |Comment on this)