VTD 11B

Three runs of 11B.

With the reordering of the B side of 2022 VTD, this moves from last part of five part story to penultimate.  I don’t think that did it any favors.

Friday 5:48PM

This was our usual group run, Epic, no special rules.  Since we had eight players, I played pathetic paladin.

The first room looked the same as 11A, but the puzzle had a different solution.  The group got it quick, though never articulated the solution clearly.

Room two was same setting, different monster.  We took it out in three rounds, dealing a bit more than 1000hp of damage.

Room three was same as 11A.  We took four rounds to get through both guards as barbarian did not steal the alarm.  We dealt 1500+ damage.

Room four looked the same as 11A, but the puzzle had a different solution.  The group did a good job figuring it out.

Room five was completely new.  Some comedy.  The gimmick of how to approach it was also amusing.  I think my main problem with it after the first time was that it was just lots of dice rolling that didn’t mean anything.  I kept asking if there was any way to actually fail the room.

Room six was just same as 11A with an extra time-wasting step of having the NPC we are trying to save who apparently became our friend from interacting in one room show up to remind us that our goal is to rescue her.  There’s a much easier way to solve this that I only remembered after this run.  I did most of the work as only I actually remember details from previous game sessions.  In fact, I think I know all of the rooms of the dungeon clips, but nobody cares.  Nobody cares.

Room seven was very similar to 11A and we had similar result as to when we first played 11A – we lost.  We ran out of time, but much of the party was about to die.  This room is just overstuffed, though they did lesson some of the mechanics later in the weekend.  It’s also a room you want to meta for, where the group was not well prepared for its mechanics.  We lost tons of actions, where the time taken to explain lost actions exacerbated the problem of reducing our damage output.  It looks like we only did four rounds of combat.  I estimate we were about 55% of the way to winning and 90% of the way to dying.

It was okay.  I didn’t like 11A that much, though I didn’t like most of the A side that much.  Where other B sides felt different, this didn’t.  It felt like doing all of the same things with the names on the jerseys changed, so it was kind of boring.  The brawl room was … novel, but I’m not a slapstick fan, so it didn’t matter as much to me.  The puzzles felt like doing puzzles we had done before, where one was exactly and the other two were basically the same exercises just with different outputs.

Saturday 12:24PM

Interest in B side is much lower this year.  A lot of it has to do with how expensive tickets are for basically doing the same things.  Certainly VTD2, VTD3, and VTD5 were vastly better for having more variance, Easter Eggs, and, for me and apparently only for me, not having the awful dice roller that reduces my fun generally and makes me not want to play a wizard at all.  So, we didn’t have core player.

We still had seven players.  Our theme run was a new format – Subprime.  Your build (outside of TEs) had to cost less than the price of a ticket.

Real build diversity happened.  I ran some uncommons just because they were cheaper than similar rares.  With dungeon knowledge, the bard ran an instrument I have never seen used because of a combination of its effect and cost.

I find trying to figure out cost rather more work than I want to do, but it was interesting to find out what ludicrous prices people are trying to sell junk for.  And, it was interesting how easy it was to get to $67 without running much in the way of good tokens.

We didn’t do much coordination of how to own the dungeon, so we only did Hardcore.

The one person who didn’t know the puzzles guessed room one entirely correctly.  With extra time because there was a bubble behind us, we got room four.  Room six was completed.

We defeated room two in two rounds.  Room three in three rounds.  Room seven in four rounds.

Now, my view is that Hardcore should be what it says it’s supposed to be – for veteran players with a few starter packs.  So, $68 builds with full dungeon knowledge should have been relatively easy.  I did end room seven with 1hp.  But, cleric could have healed me if I cared about living.

It was successful not just as a run but as an experience.  Well, sort of.  Some folks were very frustrated with the Zoom call quality, where I’m used to minor problems with VTD so didn’t think much of it.  It was the first time I ever ran Medallion of Magick.  If I were doing Bloodyish Nightmare, I wouldn’t likely run it as there’s an arguably more powerful rare in neck, but this was a cheap option.

I had a RPG session to switch to.  I spent a long time “playing” and talking to people in that game.  Got to bed late after a tiring day.

Sunday 8:00AM

Anti-Cabal run, as usual.  One different player as regular monk player is boycotting B side.

Only Nightmare as people don’t want to miss a bunch.  For this dungeon, that’s also likely the better difficulty if want to win.

I took 5 damage prior to room seven.  I didn’t even bother adjusting my HP in room seven for the continuous damage as it was impossible for it to deal enough to kill me in time, and I never got hit by the monsters that did damaging attacks.

Room seven took us five rounds to win, which was a bit easy, but that’s pretty typical for this run historically.

I ate two too large burritos as I suck at making burritos.  The ground pork with cumin, epazote, Mexican Oregano, salt, and some chili powder was fairly tasteless.  Tomato chunks were uneven.  Too little cheese in first one.  Too much sour cream, not enough guacamole as I used up too much of the guac in the two burritos I had Saturday morning when I cooked the meat.  Hot sauce helped, but I didn’t use enough.  I constantly put too much filling so that I can’t actually close my burritos, which means they end up being really, really big soft tacos.

Every time I think I can get burritos right, I don’t.  Well, in two days, I used up my eight tortillas, so I don’t need to worry about making any more.  Not sure the plan for using up sour cream.  I suppose I could bake something.  The pork was supposed to be done like my taco meat – browned, then simmered in salsa, but I forgot I didn’t have another jar of salsa.  I didn’t want to just unload a bunch of herbs and spices, even though I could have done that.  Still could with the leftover pork, but I might dump it in soup where I can just season the soup to taste.

And, I’m still bloated from those two burritos seven hours later.

Had CRUSH session at 11AM.  My character got on a plane.  My character got off a plane.  So, pretty much same session as the one before it.

Of my four RPG campaigns, my characters only do things of consequence in one of them.  It’s not fun.  This time, it was much more noticeable by everyone else, probably because it was two sessions in a row that my character did nothing.  Just nothing.  Use any of a multitude of super powers?  Nope.  Roll meaningful skill roll?  Nope.  Roll dice for something meaningless?  Nope.  Make any decisions for the party?  Nope.  Speak local language as a Linguistic Genius in either of two foreign countries where not everyone in the party speaks local language, including one language that nobody else speaks?  Nope.  In both sessions, my character boarded a plane, then got off a plane.

Not that this is a new problem.  In both campaigns, there are massive problems with players playing.  In the Saturday one, often nobody does anything that matters as bog down in minutia with rolls not corresponding to advancing any plot or subplot.  In Sunday one, two players play regularly, the rest of us sometimes have something to do.

Now, I could change characters to play someone who is into sneaking and investigating.  But, there’s a reason my character is terrible at the latter and isn’t terribly interested in the former – I’ve already played those campaigns.  I’ve never played a supers campaign before and want to lean into superhero tropes and embrace the genre, but it’s like we’re playing a World of Darkness game …  Well, Aberrant is a White Wolf game, so …??

It’s weird to me that most of the group is into the genre, yet we aren’t playing the genre, at least not the primary subgenre.

But, getting back to VTD 11B.  There were things I was interested in trying in additional runs even though the dungeon doesn’t interest me that much.  My runs were decent.  So, I’m not miserable and my thoughts are divided between productive activity and unproductive activity.

As 9A was my favorite VTD of this year, I’m hoping that the B reorganization of the narrative doesn’t make it worse.  I do want the rare completion token for 9B and may want to do four runs instead of three, where I’m only in two at the moment.  But, anyway, that’s a review for a month from now.

I had an idea for another blog post – whether it’s feasible to have truly episodic home play or not.  Maybe I’ll spew about that.

Four Seasons

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I had hamburgers for dinner.

So, why call this post Four Seasons?  I had a burger for lunch yesterday.

Now, to be fair, half of those burgers I made and I used the same seasonings on the meat – cumin, Northwoods Seasoning, salt, pepper, dried garlic, onion powder.  I also used naan for the bun both times, ate with pickles both times (once on the burger), and poured BBQ sauce over both.  Did have iceberg on second one.  If I had onion, which I would usually, I wouldn’t have bothered trying to put other crunch on them.

Friday’s burger was a black & blue, so blue cheese.  It was overwhelmingly blue cheesy.  I don’t like ketchup, but I had to have some as a counterpoint and an acid to cut through the cheese.  As usual, my fries were undercooked as “I want them very crunchy.” is interpreted by restaurants as “Cook them loss soggy than usual.” rather than actually cooking them correctly.  But, they were okay.  Ludicrous to spend $26 on burger and fries when I can just make a burger and forego fries, but it’s hard to find decent restaurants to get together with people that aren’t absurdly overpriced compared to just making things myself.

Saturday’s burger was at my favorite place to get a burger in the Bay Area, and I enjoyed it just fine.  Got the house salad rather than fries, as usual, as drowning vegetables in dressing is only screwed up when places use gross leaves rather than real lettuce.  Bacon cheeseburger, with some extra ranch dressing.

So, someone asked me not long ago what L5R character I’ve been wanting to play, and there isn’t one.  Oh, I came up with an idea for a character if it would fit a campaign.

But.  There are like an infinite number of possible characters I could play that would interest me, and it’s far more important to know what a campaign and a party is about first before deciding what I want to do, given that I’m not fixated on one idea and don’t want to have to change characters/concepts later to fit in.

But, this post isn’t about RPG play, even if it is yet another post about variety.

There’s a new Shadowfist league started up yesterday running on Lackey and Discord.  I’m chomping at the bit to … not play.  Not build decks.

I just want to give people ideas and discuss their decks because I have virtually zero interest in playing a CCG electronically.  I’d totally make some level of effort to play in person if people could be bothered.  I’d rather not drive North into freeway shootings land, though I suppose that’s not entirely fair given that we had a shooting to the South recently.  Driving South is fine, especially on a weekend.  North not as far is where I keep suggesting meeting up, but there isn’t enough interest.  Peninsula would be fine with me, but that makes less sense for person South of here (mostly East, actually) on a weekend, which is when play would make far more sense.

Anyway, nobody cares about my being deprived of simple joys in life.

Eight week league with a final set up I’d never do, but, since I’m not playing, doesn’t matter whether I’d do it that way.  Three alternative formats.  And, this is where my subconscious is more geniusy than my conscious as I didn’t know that when I started writing this post.  I thought there were four-ish.

There should be four.  Well, more than three, and I’ve heard somewhere that four is more than three.

In a previous league, there was Mystery Basket.  Organizer randomizes to get 12 different cards, have to use one of the cards for every 25 cards or more than 50% of 25 cards.  So, two at 62 card deck, three at 63 card deck.

The organizer mentioned that not rerolling White Ninja was questionable, given that can throw White Ninja into any deck and have it be a card that doesn’t really warp deck construction or suck to actually play.

The players who actually play don’t like the format.

Sure, people can just run cards they don’t want to run and just not play them or whatever.  A lot like our Bloodlines (VTES) draft where some people just ignored the cards in the boosters and used their constructed elements to do stuff.

I just can’t comprehend the lack of interest in being forced to be different.  Even I have a penchant for going to the same wells over and over even though I don’t want people to play the same things over and over.

From last Mystery Basket:

Your ingredients: Plasma Trooper; Student of the Bear; Armored In Life; The Prof’s Gambit; Dance of the Centipede; Shaolin Supplicants; Jet Pack; Safety Third!; Soul Maze; White Ninja; Jui Szu; Fire Horse.

There are way too many foundations here.  Foundations should be excluded.  Really anything with no resource requirement should be excluded.

But, there is one card in here that got me enthused … about deck ideas, anyway.

In particular, I wanted to run this with:

But, then, I got more interested in different Yakuza Enforcer possibilities.  Final Brawl is obvious.  Purists have some options.

There have been a number of times when I’ve thought about building decks around random cards.  Mystery Basket has a little bit of feel of cube, which is another way to force people to build decks differently.

It’s much easier for me to think about things I’m interested in trying just because large cardpool with my having built relatively few decks and with ‘fist having so few deck constraints.  B5 might have a had a good number of cards, but you have an ambassador, some victory condition in agenda/conflicts, other characters or fleets or combination of both, 3x Meditation, etc.

There’s a rather large difference between no minimum deck size and games with 50 or 60 card minimums.  Now, my 40 card decks don’t try to do one thing, that’s what 25 or 35 card decks are for.  So, once you get an idea, quickly run out of room.

Of course, thematic themes are a great way to build different decks.  Maybe could look to build a ‘fist deck for each of the four seasons …

Fresh Faire

So, I baked my first coffee cake.

The topping isn’t integrated well, but it’s not bad.  Better than the pecan pie that took me two years to make.  One of the ingredients is probably sweetened condensed milk, though the can didn’t have a label (pretty sure it was as I stacked the can on a labeled can of sweetened condensed milk, plus I’ve seen pictures and it has the right look).  That was a replacement for coconut milk when I realized what I had was coconut oil (extra virgin), which itself was a replacement for buttermilk since I never buy milk, buttermilk, sour cream, or half and half.  (I did include an equal amount of water to try not to throw moisture balance off.)

My Snake died.  The Chuda that is.  We were exploring a village, looked into a recent murder, came across a Kitsuki who was oddly uninterested in the murder, ended up following the Kitsuki into a trap at some ruined shrine.  Turned out he was a ronin masquerading as a Dragon.  We ended up in an even fight.

Even fights are harsh.

Now, if you are playing a supers system that is completely unlike, say, Aberrant, than an even fight can be epic and you get beat up and try to win the rematch or something weird happens like everyone gets teleported to another galaxy.  In “stuff gets killed” systems, I know this will sound weird, but PCs have a rather high probability of dying.

The party was turning the corner with a combination of Be the Mountain and Fires of Purity.  Guy we were after cast Maho spell and they all escaped.

So, tell me member of the blognoscenti, how does that make you feel?

Shrugworthy.

I tried to think what Kitayakei’s greatest achievement was.  What impact he had on the campaign narrative.

He didn’t die poor.  None.

Just as my interest in HoR4 has gone way down since my original character died because the new one hasn’t done anything important (other than almost die … twice), I can’t get that excited by losing a character who could have easily have been IR-4 and having to begin new life with a 40pt.er because Kitayakei pretty much just rolled dice sometimes and lacked any actual achievement (well, beyond getting a bunch of koku for offloading paper as all pious shugenja oriented to hunting maho-tsukai are known for).  I don’t even know if his efforts to seduce a Kuni Shugenja amounted to undying true love.

Someone might think his introduction in Snake Lands and activities there worthy of comment, except I don’t think his absence/his being replaced with some random non-Snake dude would have changed anything.  Most of the things that seemed important, he failed at.  It’s not like he had zero presence in the campaign, it’s just I could have been playing any random character, including the NPC yojimbo that also died in the session, and had as much impact.

Meanwhile, overlapping with a session way over time was the start of our new L5R home campaign.  It was weird to be trying to think of my new character in that game while simultaneously trying to think about what was lost by losing a character with a bunch of sessions under his belt and while being asked questions about a replacement character.

So, now that I’ve set the scene … oh, wait, I’m not done providing some context for what this post is actually about.

In today’s Denver CRUSH session, we once again had only two players.  So, part two of “Daniel” and Julio in Ciudad Juarez.  Part two of “Eclipse” and “Abyssal Jaguar” breaking up the cartel due to cartel connections to a super we are trying to stop and because, um, we superhero types look down on things like human trafficking.

Last session, Gho- …, um, Abyssal Jaguar did the work while Ar- … Eclipse just flew around keeping tabs on things.  This session, plan was the same to take down drug lab, but “Eclipse” botched yet another Stealth roll and a bunch of dudes shot at him with submachine guns.  Fortunately, unlike fragile losers like Arc Flash, Eclipse, who gets his powers from the heavenly Selene, has mastered the power of a field of force such that only a couple bullets impacted upon his lunar flesh.  Using his standard tactic of ramming his lunarly enhanced body into people to knock them out, Eclipse kept ramming while AJ did other, way less impressive, stuff like throw a forklift to block vehicles from leaving the lab.

La gravedad de la luna es demasiado poderosa para tus insignificantes balas.

There were other soliloquies in Spanish with an Italian accent on such weighty topics as how heavy the moon is in tons (8.1×10^19, if you Bing it).  For some reason, Abyssal Jaguar didn’t do his “usual” growling, didn’t even do his famed hyena laugh.

Okay, finally getting to the point.  No, not about how doing stuff is what gaming is about.

Something different.

That doesn’t sound so different.  But, rather than harangue everyone to try something new, the point of this post is to give examples of trying something new.

Chuda Kitayakei was one of the very few shugenja I’ve ever played and the only one for any significant time.  Yasuki Akarui is not some heavy weapons murderer build or some dueling expert, but an actual “try to play a courtier school the way it’s supposed to work” build (well, there was my Ide in that marriage campaign, but that was a very structured campaign).  The setting for the new campaign, which I’ll get into some other time, is a new one for me.  Eclipse, the aerial slamming due to his mighty force field super who totally never blasts people with lightning who loudly exclaims about all the cool powers he gets from the moon, is … a lot like characters I’ve played in convention one-shots and not at all like any campaign character I can recall.

My new Bloodspeaker Campaign character will probably be both a ronin, something I normally eschew with all of the eschewiness in eschewiland (except in that 20 Goblin Winter campaign), and something I’ll talk about later.  Akarui having a PC yojimbo is something I don’t recall doing before, probably because I don’t play shugenja hardly ever and because my “courtiers” are kind of better at combat/duels than my bushi are.

The continuing adventures of The World’s Kindest (to oppressed women?) is totally what we talked about for a long time but have only been doing because no one else has been available recently.

Sometimes doing something new isn’t icky.  Sometimes it’s a serviceable cake without the glaze the recipe called for.

 

NovemberCon?

And, lo, many a gaming thingie converged to produce … less than the sum of the parts?

True Dungeon 6C was on the schedule for ages.  Then, HoR4 decided to have Memories in Rokugan on the same weekend.  That did mean that my scheduled Saturday RPG was unlikely to happen, removing one conflict, as two-thirds of the people in that game play HoR4.  Then, weekly Sunday RPG.

But, then, various things happened to remove a number of conflicts.  Our group only had one 6C run, so it only conflicted with MiR.  My early Sunday run had no conflict with my Sunday RPG.  Due to not getting time off from work and availability of mods and my increasing ambivalence towards mods, I got my MiR stuff done early and wasn’t sufficiently motivated to try to get more mods in Saturday so had rest of Saturday free to do another TD run.

Thursday 5PM

So, 7PM CST slot.  Do Boiling Point and just not that excited.  The mod has no sense of place.  As much as there may have been an idea of the MiR mods being played in a particular order to establish why you are where you are, every mod should explain what the setup is more clearly.  I was still afflicted with Permanent Wound, so a high rank combat mod was going to be theoretically interesting, except I never took damage.  I got to enough favors to get rid of Permanent Wound … yeah?

So, I think the kharma system for HoR4 is vastly better than any other HoR.  I do think, though, that one of the things it causes – constantly putting out higher rank mods except for intro mods whenever new mods come out – is offputting.  It would be different, I guess, if mods consistently had options for playing low or high, but I’ve been told that’s not going to happen.

If you want to play the new mods rather than find tables to backfill older mods, you are stuck playing max level mods intended for the folks who have played everything.  Is this foreshadowing?

Friday 12PM

So, 2PM CST slot.  Keeping the Peace.  Though this mod was much better, with vastly more going on, there were two things that made it less appealing to me.  One, I’ll fail to mention.  The other was failure.  I don’t know if I’ve actually failed a mod prior to this in HoR4.  Feels like it, but it’s the only mod I see where I got only 3xp.

The party was way underpowered for a high rank combat mod.  The average rank was slight under 4.  One PC had Earth 2!?!  He died.  On top of that our combat tactics left a lot to be desired.  I’m still unclear on how people who play L5R a lot don’t understand probabilities, but they seem to enjoy blissful ignorance.  Our best fighter had nothing good to do in combat, which made even less sense for someone with a relevant advanced school.  Just too many assumptions for us to not be at a massive disadvantage vis-à-vis other tables.

As evidence, our friends played at another table and just ripped through a combat we had no chance of winning.

But, again, we had no chance of winning in part because combat tactics were atrocious.  Also, I got to thinking about some things.  For one thing, I’m not as worked up by failure as I once was as I have tons of XP unlike, say, HoR2 and HoR3 where I didn’t play every mod and had multiple characters bleeding off XP.

But, nobody cares about me.  I got to thinking about failure.  Failure has to be an option, otherwise success is meaningless.  Sure, in HoR play, you expect to have 4xp per mod and do advancement plans around that.  But, we should have failed.  Our table was insanely underpowered compared to the norm even to where if there was an option to play the mod low we should have failed.  Great tactics could have saved us.  Great die rolls could have saved us.  Great tactics is something I never see in L5R combat, so that’s irrelevant.  Then, the cost of failure was one fragile PC bit it and the rest of us lost like 1xp.  Oh no, time to ragequit.

This mod ran long.  I had no mod to play at 7PM CST due to lack of availability, so I was free to post comments on Discord about our experience.  I was exhausted after this mod.

Saturday

I go to Trader Joe’s.  Only two things drive me to TJ’s – cat treats and frozen naan.  Sure, I buy other stuff, like weird dips/sauces/condiments, but frozen naan superflexible, being possible for pizza, bread taco, sandwich, eaten straight, dipping bread, whatever.  Cat likes treats more than anything else and they run out.

No naan.

Also, my jicama was already going sour, which is so annoying as I hate cutting my own jicama both because of the skin/ends up being way too much/eventually goes sour and because I don’t eat nearly enough vegetables as I don’t like most of them.

Then to the pet store, which didn’t have the cat food I wanted.

This is boding well.

1236 CST

Our group’s only run as people got sick of three weekends of the same dungeon.  We go Epic with six.  I play ranged Templar with Druegar’s in neck.  Get to completely not forget to use Restore Power and Restore Spell since Templar doesn’t have those.  Unfortunately, I remembered to use Divine Intervention for a change.

That killed us.  While it didn’t take us six minutes to figure out what DI meant when the DM rolled me a “Do 100 damage” roll, when the horn went off, I was like “Wait, that’s not the 6 minute marker?  We are out of time?”  We probably wasted at least three minutes on talking about dealing max damage.  Time just flew as we only completed three rounds of combat.

Yet again, our group fails Epic because of poor play.  My takeaway is to never use DI again as even the die roll eats up time.  Maybe use it outside of combat for group heal.  We are just too slow and unfocused when we get to room 7’s.  We actually were doing really well up until that point.

As for 6C, boring.  I liked the guard tower option in rm1.  I did not like the rm6 puzzle.  It was just an exercise in process of elimination without requiring any actual thought.  Rest of the stuff was same old, same old.  Ranged Templar was okay, not a waste like Cavalier was.  Critted a bunch of times, though had to spend time healing in rm7 because Epic is actually hard for less than full groups.

624 CST

In a usually private double down.  Talk of Epic, but we sensibly go NM.  I was going to run Elf due to party composition, but one of the players didn’t show so I changed to Monk “for best damage build”.  I start the run averaging just under 100 damage a round doing nothing special with my melee weapons at range build.  We do puzzle in rm1 as people forgot it, where it was my like 10th time doing a boring and mediocre puzzle.  We succeed.  One thing that made this run better was Ranger did more damage than I did in rm7, so it wasn’t like totally unbalanced.

So, four player NM went well.  Is this foreshadowing?

Sunday

I go to normal grocery store, since TJ’s requires vastly more driving than this one.  I get my onion and broth for my planned parsnip soup.

1012 CST

Play Against Type NM DD run.  I make the comment at one point that I think the best balanced runs I do are themed DD NM runs.  Now, Play Against Type tends to be rough as people come up with some pretty sketchy builds, like my build.  I did Rogue for the first time ever.  Rogue that was afraid of puzzle boxes, that had no way to sneak attack as I didn’t even bother equipping a melee weapon and ran +1 Shuriken for my offense, and that never Flanked.

We succeeded, but there was a lot of Grunnel stuff going on.  Paladin got revived twice due to the well fed Grunnel.  Enjoyable but not as much my thing as winning through ridiculous levels of dungeon metagaming.

CRUSH

We only had three players, which was interesting as we have been talking about the idea of side quests.  Was this perfect?  No.  But, I thought it worked well.  I think it highlighted something important, but let’s stop to get into narrative.

We are hanging in Mexico City to deal with cartels, vampires, time travel, wrestling teleporting smoke animal making professor, and pieces of a statue.  Seismic disturbances turn into 60′ tall giant from Aztec mythology shouting about taking vengeance against Tezcatlipoca.  As I speak Nahuatl (as all my PCs are wont to do), I try to talk him down, but he attacks, and I blind him for two rounds.  Hauptmann Deutschland and Ghost Wolf try to knock him over but don’t.  I don’t just spam Strobe to keep him blinded but fly up to power up for the awful Max Power mechanic in true anime style … until he jumps up and crushes me in his hands (fortunately not Crush as that would be even worse).  We do some math, and it’s the case that his base damage is enough to put me one level away from dead, where he rolls additional damage but we handwave Max Power being used for soak, even though we didn’t even do that right as Max Power is trash, so that I’m exactly one health level from dead.  Showing that Arc Flash only fights to make team members look better, the other two take him down, largely through GW’s offense, though HD takes a kick right to the shield and takes zero damage.

Yup, Aberrant is a bad system.  Now, it’s a bad system in general.  But, as everyone says, it’s not intended for comic book play.  One person said something like “Aberrant isn’t really playing superheroes, it’s playing normal people with godlike powers.”  I agree with that.  A highly lethal system is the antithesis of a superhero system.  But, then, the biggest problem with the system seems to be that it’s easy to make a build that can’t be damaged by common attacks.  Sure, you can get around with cheese, but there’s some ability to counter things like mental attacks to get back to the invulnerable problem.

And, yet, my getting destroyed was fine, even positive in certain ways.  I mean it when I say that I make teammates look better.  Somebody has to get beat up, and it makes more sense for it to be the energy projector than for some tough dude to get one-shotted.

In the hospital, I explain Aztec stuff because I happen to be good at that sort of thing.  Actually, Quinametzin are pretty interesting.  Where some mythological stuff is hard to get info on, there’s some info on them, even if it’s terribly conflicted.  We just need Tzitzimitl to descend from space for other giant Aztec stuff to deal with.

Anyway, the side quest did what it was supposed to – action.  This is important.  I’ve played a lot of sessions with this GM and I tend to prefer his side adventures because they are about action.  I’m really tired of investigation stuff, but this is also supers, supers where my character is bad at investigation stuff (well, besides his ample brain and his Witsiness that never comes up).  We should be actioning constantly, except in those calm between typhoon sessions when you find out your significant other is an alien robot demon.  Not only was it actiony, but it did two other things.  One, it had the PCs actually interact with each other.  We don’t really interact much.  Both in combat, where Strobe to set up others to coordinate attacks makes tons of tactical sense, and outside of combat, we engaged with each other way more than usual.  Two, it still tied into the plot.  We are debating how to deal with a statue of an Aztec goddess, and some First Sun or maybe Second Sun or is it Third Sun or possibly Fourth Sun Aztec giant appears to add to the Azteciness of it all.

So, I’m adding soak to my character.  Oh, not to not get one shot into unconsciousness but to fight the system and not get one shot into dead.  I have the perfect thematic justification for learning Force Field to add to the defense, not that I particularly needed thematic justification.  I’d just rather not need to add another stereotypical energy projector power and continue the damage/soak arms race.  Not that I’m in a damage race.  I either murder normals or do 40% chance of one level of damage to anything of significance using the exact same Lightning Bolt because this is normal people with godlike power rather than superheroes.

I did start thinking about what my character would look like in Champions, not that we would switch to that.  More likely to go to Mutants and Masterminds if we got sick of the system.  My dislike of the system is growing, but some of that isn’t the system but due to not understanding just how badly it does mainstream supers and not keeping everyone within a tight band of damage/soak at the low end.

Eventually, I made parsnip soup.  Now, the recipe I saw was parsnip + carrot and was pretty simple.  I often throw out stems of broccoli and cauliflower, so I threw in broccoli and didn’t bother with the cauliflower.  Then, I overcomplicated by putting some cinnamon in.  Too much.  Learning experience.  The baby corn worked really well, having a crunch that my few parsnip deepfried chips didn’t add both because few and because I let them sit too long in my bowl until they got soft.  I’m agnostic on parsnips, having maybe less sense of them than radishes for my dishes.  The broccoli was good in the soup.

I’m thinking of eating with pasta shells.  Did add some parsley to try to combat the cinnamon.  Of course, I haven’t tried as a leftover, so the taste may have changed.

What does the soup have to do with anything?

Try stuff that’s different.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Action leads to results, where planning just leads to wondering where the time went.  Learn from the mistakes.  Seek other things that sound good.  Just keep adapting.  Gaming and cooking are at least not doing things that are horrible.

Nobody Expects The Spanish Chile Con Carne

The analogy should be obvious.

So, much like how I have essentially infinite honey and infinite vinegar to make agrodolce until the heat death of the universe, I have essentially infinite herbs and spices to try to use up.  The only spice I can actually run out of appears to be cumin.  Now, I keep wondering what happened to the bay leaves that I kept finding when I didn’t have a use for them to where I wonder if I should break down and get new bay leaves.

So, to use up a lot of ground beef, chili.  Or, as we monolinguals like to call it (when writing blog posts that are in theory about gaming), chile con carne.

So, why did I go Spanish?  Still had a lot of the Spanish paprika used in previous chili.  Also, because my life is ridiculous, had a jar of piquillo peppers and a little thing of diced pimientos (sure, that could be a lot of things, but, if you search diced pimientos, you will see exactly what they are).

Creating a gaming experience based on random crap you have lying around …

I picked up Tuala Morn because of good reviews and possible application for Celtic play and Atlantis: The Second Age because I’ve played it and liked it at Gen Con.

My last attempt at a RPG campaign overdid my trying to cram every possible Easter Egg into it, but the idea of riffing on prior material still seems worthwhile to me.

Suppose you were going to do Naishou Province L5R campaign.  Sure, there’s the mixing with “you are a brand new minor clan”, but something more differenter would be mashing up with my thought of an all hengeyokai (Hengoyokai) all of the time campaign.  Being out of the spotlantern at least some of the time is important for shapeshifters.

Olive oil (as opposed to grapeseed, sesame, or the always sitting around truffle oil), onions, fresh garlic.  Too much ground beef all at once so that it didn’t brown very well.  High fat content with too much olive oil already started out as too wet.  Piquillo, pimientos, sweet peppers.  The other “Spanish” thinking was to focus more on Spanish herbs and spices.  I’m sure there’s saffron around here somewhere, but I didn’t care enough.  Couldn’t avoid cumin, coriander, and nutmeg, but rosemary, parsley, oregano (well, Mexican Oregano because this stuff never gets used up), more cayenne than other spicy spices, lot of the Spanish hot paprika.  Black pepper, salt, garlic powder, red wine, lime juice, …

Other than using up stuff I never acquired in the first place to get rid of it, I’m inclined to use things I like.

I’m not into sci-fi, so I’ll avoid sci-fi elements, even if, for instance, Atlantis has some.  Feng Shui has plenty of sci-fi stuff, but my Feng Shui Tu Huo campaign focused on chi and magic and not so much tech.

I certainly own RPG books for things I’m not interested in running … because, um, it seemed like a good idea at the time and I’m all about making terrible decisions.

I don’t have any San Marzano Tomatoes on hand … to my knowledge.  (I was using things like olive oil for Asiany stir fries when there was a massive can of sesame oil somewhere else in the kitchen, so whatever.)  So, diced tomatoes and tomato paste because someday this tube of tomato paste will get used up and there was so much meat that I figured one can of tomatoes wouldn’t be enough tomatoiness and I *also* didn’t want to just cut open another can of tomatoes.  Though, before this very wet ingredient, put the cashews in.  Yup, not forced to use pecans for my “bean” texture.  Now, it is kind of wasteful to end up with soft cashews, where I probably should just go with cashews as a finisher along with the corn, as I have in the past.

Let’s say I retried Legend of the Burning Sands but decided I didn’t like the terribly underdeveloped jinn rules and wasn’t inclined to put some minimal effort in (and, yet, went to the effort of adapting R&K to Feng Shui).  I could take some totally coherent system used for Arabian themed stuff and … wait, what’s the totally coherent system that … wait, is there any RPG system that’s totally coherent?

I tasted the chile while it was cooking.  Sure, very oily, but I somehow think I’m a grease fan.  Definitely a slow burn that seemed attributable to the paprika mainly.  I put some in a bowl to go with mole, guacamole, and chips, tor- … [please stop].  The goal was to actually eat some guacamole but taste the chile, with the guac giving a cooling element.  It was okay, together.  Separately, not the best guac, and the chile was way too fruity.

What’s the worst game I’ve run in terms of a system mismatch?  It’s not like I’ve run a lot of RPG campaigns.  I can’t actually think of choosing a terrible system.  There’s a reason I own a lot of miscellaneous RPG systems.  GURPS would probably drive me nuts to run, even though two things:  one, I love a bunch of the GURPS supplements; two, I’ve read that it’s actually far smoother in play than it seems, gee, heard the same thing with Hero.

I haven’t had the chile purely on its own.  I did make a cheeseburger last night and fried some oven hash browns […], then dumped my chile [can’t you just call it chili?] over both … yup, frozen hash browns only partially crisped up with a bunch of wet chili dumped on top and not eaten immediately.  I’m amazed I haven’t given myself food poisoning (again) as the meat was old when I bought it, and it tastes sketchy.  But, I haven’t seemed to wreck myself with a check I can’t cash [what?].  Instead, my chili, I mean, chile cheeseburger and chile hash browns were bland.  I added some spicy BBQ sauce from a packet to, er, spice it up.

So, I don’t know what the chile is actually like straight.  Sadly, I still have more of the ground beef left to try to poison myself with, em, turn into like a curry kebab with that ancient jar of curry paste that still has some dregs remaining.

What would have happened if more of my RPG campaigns had lasted longer?  Would the Solomon Kane game have gotten more and more over the top?  The LBS game become too hard to track?  Other campaigns that didn’t go as well as those two actually get any better?  Gaki Mura find a new footing in a post-“gate to Gaki-do no longer next to the town you guys built” world?

Do I add something to the chile?  I don’t know.

If I run another game, do I season with __?  I don’t know.  I don’t seem to adjust well with RPG play, where I can imagine how to do some flavor shaping on this chile or, far more likely, just eat it with other stuff to mute the fruitiness.

Shock Therapy

VTD 6A was this past weekend.

I have another topic that probably doesn’t make sense to cram in, but I’ll still bring up the other gaming stuff I can think of.

Going to use CDT times for starts, so subtract two hours for my start times.

Friday

8:12PM, Can’t Touch This, B Side

Nightmare Double Down with minimum AC40 and minimum saves of 25 each, though there was some exceptioning.

There are True Dungeon classes I can’t even get to AC40.  I did a rogue build that got to 40, but its total damage bonus is … 1.  For comparison, I played fighter with +28 melee damage and Dave played druid with +28 spell damage.  Quite the stretch getting a second class to 40 that wasn’t a heavy armor class, caused my fighter AC to drop down to just 40.

We took push damage early, but we recovered and ultimately succeeded, though these sorts of builds give up damage output, so time is a huge consideration in the all important room.  Took us eight rounds in final combat.  We averaged at least 6.5 rounds of combat per combat room.

Pleasant.  Had time for some first thoughts.  First general takeaway from VTD 6A – funniest dungeon yet.  I was to find out later that it gets even funnier.

Saturday

Needed lettuce and some way to use up fresh Mexican red chilis, so go to the grocery store at 7AM.  While beef gotten expensive, get massive pack with the plan of chili since some folks put chilis in their chili.  Considered ground pork, but the package of ground beef very large and the package of ground pork small, so it didn’t seem to make sense.

10:12AM, Playing Against Type, B Side

Nightmare Double Down where I played poly-Wizard – sacrifice useless 1st level spells to become wuss elementals.  Had +32 poly damage, only two more than melee bonus.  Only +18 to hit …

Paladin ranged.  Elf Hammer.  Barbarian ranged.  Ranger healer.

Room 1:  “Ranger, Ranger, I took damage!”

I became all four elemental types.  Didn’t find out until much later how bad my choices were.  Averaged around six rounds per combat, not close to winning on last.  Ranger died before room 7 and Charm of Lamentation triggered!!  Missed only one healing spell.

I spent like half my time working on builds for next run as some people don’t like making decisions.  Then, had to rush out to next run.

12:12PM, Epic Short, A Side

… Epic.  Played cleric to use Druegar’s for first time.  So, we tend to struggle on Epic when it’s the core players.  To some degree, it’s doing things like playing with six in unfamiliar dungeons.

My build was unfocused and poor in saves, only being around +20.

First combat, I cast seven healing spells as we get chewed up.  Second combat, three characters die.  Third combat, three characters need to be rezzed.  Fourth combat, decapitated.  May have noticed (or probably not), totally forgot to use Divine Intervention.

Have to leave right away for …

Bloodspeaker Campaign

With most players late, we mostly deal with downtime actions.  My noble priest makes two Theology rolls and three … Commerce rolls as only mechanical activity for the day!

So tired at this point, but no nap as do things like work on Sunday’s builds.

Chili

Bit of oil, 3ish pounds of ground beef browned, onion, wet garlic, remaining Mexican chilis.  Cumin, nutmeg, salt, red wine (forgot to deglaze, just added), lime juice, cayenne pepper, crushed chili flakes, garlic powder, dried epazote, Spanish Paprika, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, Tunisian Harissa, pecans, finished with canned corn.  If I would have had cashews, would have used those instead of the pecans.  After waiting for it to simmer awhile, had a couple bowls, decided it needed more pecans, had a third bowl.

Spicy, Mexican chilis gave a smokiness.  As leftovers, spicy stuff can lose its kick and flavors can merge into one more boring uberflavor, but I’ve been liking it as leftovers, not even eating with something like tortilla chips.  Corn not as crunchy as other canned corn I’ve gotten, though.

Sunday

10:12AM, No Spellcaster, aka Anti-Cabal, B Side

Nightmare DD as usual.  Dwarf archer, again, for me.

First roll/slide, crit 20 for 105 damage.  Used Arrow of Ricochet, so 115 damage.  We averaged 4.4 rounds of combat.  Used a +2 Holy Arrow, four Arrows of Weal Wind in another fight.  A last Weal Wind in final fight.  Never actually needed the healing.  We are likely overpowered for NM on these runs, but I really like them.  They feel like effort.

Two things made this not as fun.  Very tired.  Had to clean up both ants getting into cat’s food and cat throw up.  But, at least, I wasn’t still working on builds going into next run.

12:12PM, Mixed Epic, B Side

New folks in our extended group and two people we don’t normally play with.  Potter and Beertram hadn’t seen B yet, so B yet again.

Epic, with nine.  I lent out a lot of stuff, including stuff I never use, like Boots of the East Wind.  Barbarian was getting 5th level off of Charming Set.

I play ranger to use Ralson’s for first time.  I use three more Arrows of Ricochet on this run.  In one room, I Quick Strike for 52, crit for 108, do a total of 322 damage by myself, and we still took push damage.  We averaged 3.4 rounds of combat.  I get half-decapitated and am the only corpse when the run ends.  Fitting, as I was mostly useless in last combat.  Barbarian really carried that fight, doing 617 damage by himself over four rounds.  I did get to waste money by reading two Scrolls Cure Moderate Wounds while chillin’ in a puzzle room.

Never did make an Animal Friend …

Denver CRUSH

I pretty quickly depart to jump into supers RPG.  Session had just started.

We escort fae princess back to her brother’s and manage not to kill Sentinel through our unique Medicine efforts.  Wyld Hunt gets summoned to go after her, but Sentinel flies at 300 km/hr, so he just zoomed, while I flew at only 120 km/hr as a really bad wingman.  Trilbee grappled Huntsman.  Ghost Wolf blasted him away to pick up his horn.  When Sentinel dropped Buttercup off and Venus had previously teleported to fae king’s court to give heads up on Buttercup being on the way, Sentinel went to retrieve the other two.  I got to party some with the fae, mostly dancing.  He returned with Trilbee and GW, where they left our faerie dragon companion sleeping with the horses (not a euphemism), so I flew back to see if Fido wanted to go with us or continue hanging out in her world.

Because of our successful mission, I mean, quest, we get Green Knight’s grandmother’s dead spirit released.  I get the Tripadvisor download from the fae on what the main things to check out in Faeworld are if we ever come back, and … get something else.  We still haven’t actually returned or, as I offered up, woken up from Green Knight’s team’s gas attack in our supercell(s) from which we have been fantasizing about fae.

Finish early, so I have some time for chili before …

5:48PM, Solo Wizard, A Side

Finally, just me, my five Eldritch tokens, seven legendary tokens, and a NPC to face the dread power of … Normal.

I mean, not just solo, solo Wizard.  Besides, I had some interest in seeing what Normal was like, and, more importantly, the rare completion token for this dungeon is awful, where the uncommon isn’t, so it was the conjunction of the 47 round things.

AC29 on Normal.  +24 to hit, +20 ranged damage.  +29 spell damage.  Success ass- …

Total damage the puzzles did to me on this run = 0.  Total damage monsters did to me on this run = 3.  Total damage I did to myself = 104.

I was trying to avoid casting Lightning Storm, but I committed the cardinal sin of wasting time in a serious combat, so the horn was going off when I MECed it to kill everything besides my animal friend.  Something got to dance on this run.

I never used Shadowskin, but I did first round Quicken Cat’s Grace for that precious +2 to hit and +2 AC and use my standard action for … wait for it … Horn of the Valkyrie!  The valkyrie did suck up 10 damage.  Yup, typical TD run – Shadowskin never used, Horn of the Valkyrie absorbs 50% of all successful monster melee attacks.

I healed myself for four before going into final combat without using any consumables so that I had 38 of 42 hit points.  If I hadn’t used Conserve in an earlier room, I would have had just enough HP to Alter the Lightning Storm …

Sure, lots of these references will mean nothing to folks who don’t Dungeon Truly.  But, multiple horns on the same day, multiple dances on the same day.

I enjoyed the solo run, with its funny ending.

I like some of the aspects of B side.  I only found out about one of the interesting features on the fourth run of B side.  But, I do like A better.  Not so much for the reason so many others prefer A.  I actually like the A side puzzle.  It’s different from other puzzles enough, which has been a problem with VTD puzzles recently.  It has more textural differences, as B side is a lot of just being in the woods.  You there, you are in the woods.  I am in the woods …  Oh, you just need to find that comic.

If I would have run elf instead of hu-man …  Another TD reference you will either get or not.

So, overall, dungeon kind of bland in places.  Transitions really needed work.  Lot of funny stuff.  A and B both have interesting features and non-trivial differences.  I have one specific meta play I really want to do, now.  I would change several of the combats in minor and/or major ways.  Epic was brutal.

Winner, winner chili dinner.  Maybe not as appealing to play three weekends as 5ABC but should be much better than 4ABC.

Very tiring weekend.  Would have been way less stressful if we had organized better ahead of time and if the cat had finished and digested all of her food.

Dungeons & Not Dungeons

True Dungeon weekend.

But, so much more gaming, so much more.

Friday

Was hoping to do solo TD run as I had two classes to try for 5B.  Someone else had ticket for weeks, so decided to play paladin in expected two-person run with bard.  Then, dwarf fighter jumped on run.

We did Nightmare.  I tweaked out of my NM solo build.

We did the Dalin side.

Room 2 had slight change that was overcome by my tech for room 7.  Having a high AC party due to my Guard on druid (switched out of bard to have more healing) meant second combat never saw us get hit.  Died in room 6.

Room 7 was almost impossible for the room to hurt my build given my understanding of how the mechanics worked.  Since the DM didn’t catch that there’s a BS rule at NM/Epic level play, my comrades died and I ground out the win in just enough time.

That was cool …

Next run – solo, Dalin’s side, NM, change paladin build back to solo mode.

Saw room 1 change, wasn’t good for me and we kind of glossed over it.

Room 2 was my first opportunity to one shot kill the monster.  After 17 rounds of combat, I hit pointed it.

Third combat – hit, “roll” a 1, I end combat.  Check that off the list.

Room 6, die again.  Pay death some small amount of gold to hang around and burn some “blues” to cover push damage and (pointlessly) be able to suck some damage in room 7 even though the math is that I should never take damage in room 7.

Room 7, try to “cheese” my victory.  Module decides I shouldn’t be trying to do interesting builds at high levels of play but should only max damage all of the time as boring people are wont to do, so I die on round 3.

That was not cool, but the real problem is that it also made the previous run not cool.  Just discouraged me the rest of the day as Pelor forbid! that people try to do interesting things at the level of play where people will have those interesting options available.

Terraforming Mars

So, Friday night is boardgame night, when we don’t cancel.  We didn’t cancel.

I had titanium corp, whatever that is.  I made some pretty heinous mistakes but snuck in a milestone of cities before the city corp.  I did give that corp two really juicy plays for no reason.  Seemed unclear who was going to win as awards were skewed to some players while I had lots of VPs from playing cards.

Final result:  winner 60 VPs, two of us tied for second with 59(!!), last place was 53.  Pretty satisfying game for the group.  Also, winner was someone who often doesn’t win our games even though she’s both a PhD and a practicing lawyer.

Tired.

Saturday

Sleep badly, get up early to feed cat, conk for a while, get up to work on TD builds for both usual group’s 10:12AM Pacific time run and …

8:12AM Pacific run.

Epic Double Down.  I did my bard build and Dave’s ranger build with obscene Fort save.

Taverns side.

Room 1 = 3 rounds.

Room 2 = 4 rounds.

Room 4 = Divine Intervention was used and player “rolled” a 20 …  2 rounds.  Not enough time for cleric to use other useful ability in this room.

Room 5 = 7 rounds.  Should have been six, but I did dumb thing of using physical attack rather than Sonic Dart on round 5.

Room 6, elf died.  Cleric rezzed in the 2021 style.

Room 7 = 6 rounds with little time left.  I did the cool action on round 1.  Monk did a lot of beatdown.  Monk did 151 on round 1 and ranger did another 80.  Monk did 99 for the kill.  I did 72 total damage in the combat, ignoring what my round 1 action did.

We did EDD right!

However, two party members died, so I provided a denouement poem (I lacked time to write up my poem ideas I was thinking about Friday night).

And, so this foe we did vanquish, and yet all I feel is eternal anguish.

10:12AM Pacific run.

No Spellcasters without Fiddy!  No one else had done one since the NS group is pretty locked up each dungeon.

Barbarian, Taverns, Nightmare because I’ve never done NS on Epic and don’t see a lot of point as TD is noticeably harder when you have no healing spells available.  Chugging potion after potion just to play at a higher difficulty level just seems dumb to me.

We are not the most collaborative group.

Room 1 = 3 rounds.

Room 2 = 3 rounds but fighter Double Strikes dwarf.

Room 4 = 4 rounds.

Room 5 = 5 rounds.

Room 6, we succeed.  Only took four runs before I was clear on solution.  I forgot to mention that on my first run I had a great answer to this puzzle, with one clue exception.  Still think my answer is a better puzzle answer than what it actually was, just change one of the clue lines.

Room 7 = 5 rounds.  I Fury on round 1 for 128.  I Fury on round 2 for … nothing as I “roll” a 1.  Round 3, I crit the old fashioned way for 128, monk stuns monster, rogue crits.  Miss.  Hit.

L5R

Jump into my home campaign.  We continue to investigate by going to a party.  I borrow some koku to buy a nice kimono with a subtle Phoenix theme to pay homage to how Snake Clan came from a Phoenix shugenja.

We go to a party, don’t do much, get warned out of party.  Next day, party place is missing all people, blood stains, some smashed porcelain (something we were checking out for possible zombie masks).  Session ends with us at dead end on pursuing those who killed everyone.

After session, PC has solo activity where it’s learned who did mass murder.

So, there’s a real fundamental problem with what happened in this session.  We had one lead, one.  We tried to follow lead.  We stopped following lead.  NPCs came in and ended our lead.  NPCs on our side!  So, we now have nothing to do, as far as I’m aware.

Strong GMing rule:  Do not have NPCs do things PCs want to do.  Of course, most people would say the rule is “Don’t have the NPCs overshadow the PCs.”, but I think that’s not always controllable in a natural way as events unfold.  Sure, avoid that, too.  But, don’t ever prevent PCs from doing something by having NPCs do it for them.  Well, to be even more airtight:  Don’t ever prevent PCs from doing the one thing that they want to do by having NPCs do it for them when the NPCs and PCs are on the same side.

I did get to send a bird with the word to a charming samurai-ko.  So much of what I do is just spin my wheels.  I roll dice for rolls that don’t seem to matter.  I have conversations that don’t seem to matter.

Rest

I was starving when got to L5R because had no time for food in the morning.  So, I had some chips and guac.  To use up some stuff, I went with homemade pizza for an actual meal.  Naan as the crust, ricotta, homemade pasta sauce (lot of ground beef), more ricotta, parmesan, pepperoni.  It was decent.  Too much toppings as a bunch fell off after I tacoed the naan.

Going out!?!

Aim to get to friend’s at 8PM as he’s in town for Father’s Day.

Since his brother is getting food or something, I play Star Realms with him, his sister, and his brother-in-law.

Usual attack left.  Played with some various cards I wasn’t familiar with, plus I don’t play the game so often that I know what the cards do by heart out of the base set.

First turn, I buy two Explorers.

When I win, my deck consists of 10 starting ships, 3 Blobs, and like 11 Trade Federation.  I regened like crazy, didn’t get much elite stuff, but I had a ton of consistency with three Patrol Cutters, et al.  I bought zero 1 cost ships, but some of that had to do with the agenda or whatever it is card we were using that allowed shuffling discard into draw deck for 1 money.

Then, two games of three-player VTES!!  Used their house rules of 150 card decks with 4cl and massive crypts with 8 starting uncontrolled, monoclan, communal deck of cards that could be played as if in hand.

I chose Lasombra because I don’t mind playing good cards in casual play, and I didn’t think about the format at all until after I won.  This format has the “Malk problem”, where stealth plus Conditioning murders decks without pool gain, bounce, wakes, or intercept.  I drew lots of Pulling Strings, but I also drew lots of bleed and some stealth and just kept bleeding at stealth.  I don’t think I played a master.  I started drawing a bunch of votes at the point I won.

Next game, chose Blood Brothers to make my game challenging.  I showed the true power of Mexico City with one Menor and three Mayor and Truman for that Torrance invasion.  I Walk of Cained twice to kill first prey and second prey scooped to move on to …

Traveller CCG!!

I played Safari.  Um, I was going to post a decklist, but I don’t want to get up to get cards at moment, so I guess I can do another post with details.

This game demonstrated something important about Traveller:  we play a lot of good games where decisions matter a lot.

Final result was 22 to 20 to 20.  Beowulf piracy VP deck almost bankrupted winner, while I did a good job of almost bankrupting myself.  I had awkward early draws, which could have been fixed by discarding more aggressively in first two rounds.  I didn’t use a card in play by choice that could have put me in a position to win the round before the game ended, though I would have likely gotten pirated out of the game if I had gotten 5 more VPs earlier.

I ended the game with 18 counters on Safari, when I could have had 19 by just making one different decision that cost me nothing to do.  Being two counters from another 3 VPs was interesting.  Empress Marava heroic action deck won, with lots of replenishment helping to fight off light piracy.

Got home really late (for a decrepit old man).  Couldn’t fall asleep easily because modern living hates restful sleep.

Sunday

10:12AM Pacific Fruit Ninja(!!) run.

Inaugural Fruit Ninja run.  Only damage that you inflict is slashing.  Everyone must go by a fruit name.

Blackberry Barbarian, Blueberry Bard, Durian Druid, Dragon Fruit Dwarf Fighter, Mandarin Monk, Papaya Paladin, Red Delicious Apple Rogue were guided by Plantain DM until we could get our treasure from Epilogue Elderberry.  Blackberry and Mandarin had not done VTD5, yet.

DM worked with us so that this worked really well.  Not a format for everyone.  Kind of disturbing at times.

The reason I wanted to play Durian was that I wanted to use polymorph potions to do slashing damage.  In two rooms, I became a brownie, well, in one of those rooms, I was a chocolate fruitcake.  In two rooms, a saluki shaped durian.

Nightmare, Dalin.  Epic would have been rough.  Durian did not run Charm of Spell Swapping and there’s no such thing as a Fruit Ninja Cleric, so ran out of healing and had half my spells be unusable.  Still, we may go Epic Fruit Ninja for reasons that may become clearer in a moment …

Room 2 = 2 rounds.  Mandarin did more than 200 damage.

Room 4 = 4 rounds.

Room 5 = 3 rounds.

Room 6, a bunch of help led to correct solution.

Room 7 = 2 rounds!!  One thing Fruit Ninja can do is slash to slaughter swiftly.  Monster only took an action because we lost Initiative.

Funny, not too much even though lots of weak puns.  Some really weird comments.

Welp, that was plenty of 5B True Dungeon for Dur-Ian.

Had to crash afterwards rather than try to go out for more gaming.  Finally cooked some Italian sausage I had bought a while back.  Was going to do sausage and cauliflower stir fry, but the cauliflower was too large, so I steamed that separately, tried to crisp up some pancetta by cooking low at first to render out some fat, onions, garlic, emptied pan to make room for sausage, deglazed with red wine though I questioned why I did that before browning sausage, poured back in pancetta and aromatics, finally remembered meant to include serrano pepper for touch of extra spice, dumped in spices (cumin, coriander, nutmeg, black pepper, paprika, cayenne red pepper), dumped in leftover hazelnuts (weird sweetened ones with like orange that were a gift for Christmas or something), added wet garlic.  Ate two together, cauliflower having been salted and peppered.

Turned out decent.  Better than a number of other random stir fries.  Better flavor profile than my homemade pasta sauce that was too sharp/acerbic and could have really used some cream or eviscerated mushrooms to mellow it out.

Flop Til You … Flop

Eventually, there is a V:TES tournament report. See Sunday for V:TES stuff if that’s all that matters to you {*weep*}.

Saturday

So, it’s ‘fisting day, as Daniel is in town and Merlin organizes play at his abode.  I’m not sure what time I’m supposed to show up, find out that I’m not supposed to show up for a couple more hours, bake a pie, find out I can show up earlier, don’t cool pie much and head out.

Pecan pie.

I love pie crust.  I just don’t like most pies.  I keep meaning to make a pistachio pie just to see what it’s like.  I hate most cooked fruit, which rules out fruit pies unless someone does the proper thing and jams the fruit or whatever so that it isn’t full of the disgusting pieces of fruit.

I also hate baking.

Do you know how tedious it is to sort cards?  To sleeve and unsleeve cards?  How much room it takes to lay out piles and piles of cards?  As I’m sure there’s a few CCGers left who read this, you very well might.

Baking is a mess.  Mixing bowls.  Whisking.  Melting butter before mixing it.  Flour getting all over the place.  Having to deal with sticky things.  Even worse, dense sticky things like 1/3 cup of honey.

Compare and contrast with taking a skillet and a cutting board and making single skillet lasagne.  Or, a pot and a cutting board and making chili (and recycling the empty cans for the tomatoes, beans, corn, whatever).  Sure, stir fry occasionally takes more than one receptacle of carbon based matter, especially if doing noodles.

So, it’s also seeing things happen.  Browning meat is visually pretty evocative (except when you flour the meat and make a huge mess of burnt flour and everything looks brownish white).  I can taste chili as I make it.  I can taste stir fry as I make it.  I can see the burger getting less pink (to some degree) and the cheese melting on top of it.

Mixing dough just looks like dough, though I suppose I can taste some of it if I really want to.  Then, you dump stuff into something and put it in an oven and hope it turns out.

I don’t like building other people’s decks.  I don’t mind playing them.  I just don’t like building them.  Closest was doing my take on Colin Riggs’ Honor the Elders deck.  I made it more Zip Gunny and, thus, victory was inevitable.

So, with baking, since I don’t know what I’m doing or what impact changing proportions has, I follow recipes.  The lasagne I just use bacon or pepperoni or whatever I want to use up and ditch the mozzarella for a cheese that won’t make me ill (my go to often is Mexican cheese blend).  Stir frying, I just fry stuff I like and toss the cashews in at the end so that they don’t get soft.

I made a pecan pie on New Year’s to use up a Trader Joe’s Pie Crust.  Yes, I did not make the pie crust for either of these pies because I’ve done that before and it was aggravated assault upon my will to prepare food.  I didn’t thaw it enough and had to reroll the crust a couple of times.  I used less brown sugar, less honey, and less maple syrup than the recipe.

It was okay the first day.  After that, just kind of vaguely pecany where the lack of sweetness killed my joie de vivre. My mother liked it fine, so there was that.

This time, I pretty much used the recipe levels of those three sweeteners, minus half a cup of whatever (I was looking at multiple recipes and approximating quantities).  Still a pecan pie that defeats the concept that pecan pies are overly sweet, but somewhat more sweetish.  Used the other Trader Joe’s Pie Crust (since the whole point was to use the box of them up).

So, on the one hand, baking is a miserable experience that involves dealing with measuring things rather than throwing in whatever is handy in quantities that seem plausible.  On the other, we have ludicrous amounts of flour, sugar, honey on hand (plus who knows how much vanilla extract). Quantities impossible to actually use up … unless I bake more often, as it’s frightening how much sugary substances go into baked goods.  Maybe go through a jar of honey in less than a decade.

I arrive and the group has just started a four player boardgame.  A game that will take hours.  As I have an immense tolerance for watching other people play games I don’t care about (and sometimes very little tolerance for watching people play games I do care about), I read the rules and interrupt with questions.

The pie cools.

Merlin goes to pick up Daniel, so we play a four player game of ‘fist.  An awful game won because multiple Monarchs come down when nobody else has gotten past putting foundations in play.  We start a three player game which has some semblance of balance.

Merlin and Daniel return with BBQ. We pick up the three player as nobody was all that fond of their position, I guess that means it might have been a good game.

Two groups of three.

I have a good number of decks on me, having gone through all of my decks that morning and having built recent decks due to the holiday plus the pre-baking period of the day.

Many of them are ineligible for play, either being boring or being not worthy of three-player ‘fist with people who are not bad at the game.

When concocting decks, one makes many decks of varying types, many that would never see play in the highest echelons of competition except when one feels like playing one.

When preparing food for others, one is not pleased well when it doesn’t turn out to be to one’s perceived tier.

Here’s the problem with many of my ‘fist decks.  One, they lack stoppage.  Two, they often lack speed.  Three, they lack hitters.  Four, they lack staple effects (Manchu All Over You! had no Killdeers).  Yup, if it wasn’t for that singular problem, every creation would be tasty as cherry pie minus the gross cherries.

Merlin, Tim, and I played various games while Miguel, Paul, and Daniel played a couple.  Finally, we switched out so that Daniel played with Merlin and me.

Played Manchu deck in four player, Architects in three player we picked up.

Then, Ascended in a game so bad my biggest character was an Academy Instructor.  An Iron Fists deck that won through the power of Fists of Iron – wthf?!?  I guess sometimes the world stops spinning.  Final game with Tim saw me try to control things with a “Fractured Soul” deck facing Lotus Unique Recursion and a Eunuch deck.  I had at one point or another Sir James Lamb, Evil Twin of The Emperor, Beaumains, Pi Yin, Pi Tui, Larcenous Misted to stop a Spear of Destiny, Tortured Memories Seven Evils, and … lost, of course, being outclassed by Eunuchs after I Discerning Fired Imperial Boon and The Dragon Throne (Chimpshack doesn’t have Imperial designator, but I also could have chosen Imperial Champion if TDT didn’t have Imperial).

Daniel game saw my Bush Pilot with a Muscle Car not do anything, saw my Wu Bin of Turtle Island get Never Surrender, saw me Thunder on Thunder five edges where I discarded my second one.  I had two Trade Centers in front of two FSSs a couple of times.  malloc() wrecked for a while, turning off Daniel’s Hand abilities.  Nomad Army did a little, came back, did more, got Material Transcendenced.  I played Sword of the Dragon King stupidly because I forgot which characters it prevents from intercepting (it gave +2 Fighting to Iron Jim Colson).

After midnight, we were done.  Take Daniel back to his hotel (pretty easy but had to think about how to get home efficiently from the hotel).  Get home with the remains of the pie.  Try sleeping four hours after my target bed time.

Even post-Saturday, I had thoughts about my ‘fisting.  Much like how I don’t bake like a bakemaster, baron von bake, I’m kind of not good at ‘fisting [sorry ladies].  I routinely make bad decisions and miss plays and don’t keep track of card text in play.

And, yet, for some reason people find my positions threatful, possibly even uberthreatful.  I think I know why.  See, because I don’t build decks like competitive players do, people think that my having 17 fighting in play from two characters and more than everyone else combined means that I can not blow it and win.  They don’t realize I won’t burn for power often enough to fuel putting out … some foundation characters because my deck doesn’t have any hitters left.  They may even think that I put characters in for some synergistic reason rather than “hey, that card seems cooler than this other card”.

If my Thursday night group sees decks with a dearth of characters and fighting, my decks see at least a dearth of the latter.  And, virtually no removal, no evasion, no engine.

So, I have power, fighting, and a site structure.  And, I know I’m doomed.  I usually only win against veteran players because no one else does and that’s not that common.  I think the thing that does work better for me is cheap.  I just don’t know how to make good use of hitters, so smaller dudes with weapons is far more likely for me to not get powerlocked out of the game.

Sunday

While up before 6AM, only start working on my V:TES tournament deck after six.  I know what I want to play, and this is where the next hours of the rest of my life are ruined.  For, you see, I metagame.  I just don’t metagame in any way that makes any actual sense.

I run lots of Swallowed by the Night in Obfuscate decks because I grow weary of close range beats.  I decided not to on Sunday because that would be boring.  Forestruggling alert.

I know that players in the hood tend to play the same sort of deck archetypes routinely.  Yet, I just assume that some people will refrain from playing same old, same old combat decks.  Huh?

I blithely cut Blithe Acceptance from my deck while relying upon five cards to get me out of combat.  Yup.

I figure six pool gain cards is fine and that I’ll have time to hunt. Maybe in a perfect world, a world of all bleed decks, such things are plausible.

I do not bake.  I throw the ingredients together and hope that magic makes them tasty, like a nice chocolate pie without too much chocolate and with a good amount of whip cream or something else that makes the chocolate less boring.

I finally get going in the fiercest water-falls-from-the-sky storm in the State where it never rains this side of 2019.  I arrive like half an hour early to a place that doesn’t open until 11AM.  I avoid falling water by sitting in a car.  I manage to mostly stay awake until just before 11AM.

10 players

R1:

Sean (Palla Grande Undue Influence) -> Brandon (Tupdog Rush/Bleed) -> Ian (Every Computer Hacking Deck Is Better With Babble, aka This Is Just Wrong And Crosswise) -> David A. (Valkyrie Vote) -> Eric (Tunnel Runner)

Eric gets a Tunnel Runner.  It eventually gets Veles Hunted.  Yup, that happened.

Sean plays Jost, who gets rushed by a Tupdog and Graverobbed.

Brandon bleeds me for a bunch and rushes my guys enough that I don’t bring out a third vampire for ages.

I could easily stop pretty much everything David does as I can generate one intercept easily enough and sit on Delaying Tactics forever waiting for a vote he calls that I actually don’t like.  But, very little that he does matters to me.  I did Babble Dolie so that Eric could block an early vote.

I eventually bring out Rodolfo who reduces some bleeds before I get ousted.

I don’t know how much time I have to get food, so I wait until the round ends.  I can’t decide whether to get food or not, though I discover that there’s a Burmese Street Food place around the corner that I hope to try some day.  Because I just want a snack and have too much food at home to go through, I end up eating nothing.  I’m so used to playing at Victory Point Café these days that I didn’t know how to manage food for the day.  Had to keep reminding myself as I was driving in that I wouldn’t be getting food and drink from VPC.

R2:

Eric -> Kenneth (Malk Royalty) -> Mark (Samedi rush) -> Sean -> Ian

Kenneth brings out Lucian.  Lucian gets rushed and Leandro doesn’t block/Obedience.  Leandro is hugely annoying … going on 20+ years.  Sean gets out dudes.  I get out dudes.  Sean bleeds at stealth.  I don’t have bounce, yet.  Mark is hale enough to beat down going forward.  Leandro Banishments Eric’s Ember, so I bleed out Eric with the help of Sean’s Club Illusion (Yorik went Anarch because people take forever to burn Revolts) and two bounces I had in hand to not get ousted by Sean who fell one action or one stealth short of getting me.  Kenneth is at 8 pool and Mark at 7.  I don’t mind bleeding Kenneth for a lot, then having Kenneth Parity Shift, Leandro Mark out of the game.  OTOH, I don’t mind having 2 VPs either, so I bleed for 8 with the help of Club Illusion.  Mark finished off Sean.  Mark doesn’t rush me successfully.  I bleed until he is ousted.

Ian 4 VPs, Mark 1 VP

Finals:

With both Brandon and Mark in the finals, I don’t expect to get to do anything.  I ensure that by not thinking through the seating.

Mark and Alex are low seeds.  I choose to be Mark’s predator, thus dooming myself to irrelevancy.  Brandon does the obvious and sits across from Mark.  David has different possibilities, but sits as Mark’s prey, which seemed like the prima facie choice.

So, here’s what I should have done.  I knew Mark and Brandon would opposite.  So, I go as Mark’s prey.  Brandon becomes my prey.  David has a less clear decision, where I’m not sure at all what he would have done, though I think he sits next to Mark in some way, maybe his prey.  Regardless, even if I’m still between two rush decks, Mark will likely go backwards first and … Brandon will just take out my guys and have no predator and easily win unless David votes him out, which is hard when Brandon doesn’t pay a lot for minions, won’t have a predator, can rush David wherever he is, and has Yawp Court in his deck.  It’s not like Mark will ignore me to put pressure on Brandon.

Alex (Goratrix BH) -> Brandon -> Ian -> Mark -> David

Alex never manages to do anything of significance, so Brandon has no predator.  David reduces Alex’s pool by a lot to where Alex is on the verge of ousterture for multiple rounds.  Brandon largely leaves me be because nothing I do really affects him besides reduce Mark’s pool and David’s Anarch Revolt (terrible idea with two rush decks at the table) is increasing my pool loss while my Blood Doll gets Washed.  My Claven gets beaten down by Mark.

I do have a turn of Sleep of Reason on a Tupdog and Conceal on Mark’s Ivory Bow, so I get to cycle cards.  Brandon Yawps one of the Valkyries down.  Mark starts beating down David’s dudettes to where Brandon becomes concerned and even encourages me to take actions.  Mark is low enough on pool to back rush again.  I eventually bring out a fourth minion just so that I can Eagle Sight block a Reanimated Corpse bleed and get my first Dodge out of my hand.  Earlier, Brandon thought I’d Dodge with an Escaped Mental Patient, so he Grappled.  Amazingly enough, EMP is not as good of a minion as a completely expendable Tupdog.

So, I’m sitting between two rush decks.  I have virtually no combat (did press against Brandon’s !Trem to reduce to zero blood).  So, the usual happens.  David ousts me crosstable with a vote.

Finally out of a game in which I really should never be able to do anything besides kingmake.

Turns out to be the correct enough play as David barely hangs on to win with 1.5 VPs as top seed.

I considered just never bringing anyone out in this game, but that wouldn’t have changed anything.  Brandon would bleed for a lot because the one thing Tupdogs needed was a good way to bleed.  Mark and Brandon wouldn’t fight until it was too late for it to matter to me or I was ousted.  David would have been crushed by rush.  Alex would have been a bit healthier until he fell over, unless by that point Brandon worked to rein in Mark.  I suppose Brandon might have tried using me to put pressure on Mark, but that’s essentially what happened, anyway.

I don’t think I played badly all day.  I didn’t play great nor did I try all that hard to rally tables against the table threats.  What made my day a fail was terrible metagaming.  Not only the sort of decks people play round here but their styles of play, which are rather predictable.  And, making a boring and suicidal choice of seating in the finals.

Thanks to Mark and Brandon for organizing.  Merlin for hosting and getting BBQ.  Players for playing.

The drive home was miserable and as dangerous as California roads get when water falls from the skies and white stuff impairs visibility.  If it would only rain some of the time, maybe everyone would be more used to driving when it’s wet and lane markers would be clearer at night.  OTOH, I did get to eat some leftovers, though no pie, when I got home.  Some day will finish that pie.