0018: Crash during bootup?*

To begin at the beginning is only logical, really.

I've neglected the bejeezus out of my LiveJournal lately, and I can't really offer any good reasons aside from "I didn't feel like updating." I suppose, when you get right down to it, that's enough, really.

Since I last posted, I've made progress with my druid in World of Warcraft. He's now a 30 Tauren Druid, and a Scout to boot. PVP is fun, but it can distract you from what's important for all but the endgame characters: levelling. The more you level, the tougher you become to gank, and the easier it is to gank others. Obviously, this isn't 100% accurate, but I think I convey my point just fine. I've not played Sluggy much at all, but he's a 30 Undead Warrior, so it's all good.

The guild that strieson started -- Clan Timberwolf -- is up to about 75 members. Quite a feat, since I was damned sure it would die off eventually. (I guess there IS something to advertising in the General Chat channel periodically.) I tip my hat to my buddy. He did what I thought was not possible. Now, to get the guild to evolve into a full raid endgame guild, on par with "corruption" and "The WarStomp Clan".

All that said, I'm down to two characters I play regularly, and only three total. Aside from the two above, I have created my human mage on the Dragonmaw PVP realm. Of Aricseles (on Scarlet Crusade) and Haydon (on Azjol-Nerub), I am sad to say that I realized I couldn't keep playing them, and deleted them. (I hate the paladin class in WoW. It just isn't what I want from a class that's supposed to be combat-oriented.)

Right. So. Non-WoW stuff, huh?

I've begun to reread the Chronicles of Narnia. I wish I still knew the original order that they were published in, since this seemed the "proper" way to read them, but I'll settle for the chronological method they have now. I forgot how much I love these stories. This was probably the first storybook world in which I spent considerable time out of my days daydreaming about being there with the protagonists. Even now, I get teary-eyed thinking of Narnia. There really IS something magical about that place.

That said, I'm picking up things that I never noticed when I read them in sixth grade (in '87-'88). Without TRYING to force a Christian allegory into it, I really get the feeling that Aslan is Christ. Knowing that C.S. Lewis was a Christian may have influenced this initially, but I really get that sense when I read them. I can still enjoy them as what they are just fine, but this adds a deeper level to me that I find profoundly fulfilling. Who knows, perhaps THAT is why I wished so to be with the heroes? :)

Other than that, I've been working, really, and letting my D&D campaign go to pot. That will take another post, though. Suffice to say that nyminal is going to be running a d20 game using the Traveller 20 rules, that is essentially Resident Evil on a space station, without being exactly that, and I'm looking forward to a change of pace.

In events with the two girls that I took a shine to, one of them is apparently pregnant, and is thus no longer someone I'd want to get involved with. (I'm not a heartless person, but if she's going to have a kid that belongs to another guy, I think it's best if she concentrates on raising the kid, and not worrying about dating. Oh, that's not really coming out how I want it to, but I hope that you get my point.) The other is very warm/cold, and since I cannot tell with any certainty, I'm not gonna beat myself up about it. We still flirt from time to time, but I think my chance to really get to know her is done. *shrug* That's okay, though. I'm fine, and have a new outlook as a result. *smile*

Work is just as bad as it always is. I hate it. I wish I'd realized that I'd hate this job when I thought it'd be a good idea to skip college to get Magic cards. Oh, the choices we make. I've asked to transfer out, but the place I was going to transfer might not be open to me after all, and I can't transfer until I get someone trained on Kronos, our time & attendance application. Also, I've learned that the Super K-Mart closing across the street may be our last chance to pull in customers before they shut us down for good. If this is remotely true, then I'm almost certainly not going to get out of there now. I'll be stuck there, closing the store that I helped open nine years ago.

At any rate, I think I've run through all my introspective-ness now, and have updated you on the major points of my life since the last update, which is the important bit anyway. :)

Oh! My brother, who lives in PA now, is working in Little Rock, AR for the next month. I got to hang out with him last Friday night and Saturday. It was a lot of fun, and I realized I do miss having him around. Ah, well, he's doing better than he was here, and absence does make the heart grow fonder.

Until later, folks, be good.

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* - This is a reference to my "Journal Reset" post from mid-July. :)

0019: The Campaign crashed.. not the journal

My Eberron campaign, which I started in January, finally crashed and burned two weeks ago this coming Sunday. Am I surprised? No. I could tell that my heart wasn't in it anymore. However, I think it's not as simple as the usual "Anthony got bored playing the game" excuse that has applied to many campaigns/games before. This is a broadly accurate way to describe it, however.

I've never run a D&D campaign for more than 20 sessions or so. It's not that I hate a long-running campaign, but I have no experience running -- or playing in -- a campaign that goes for months, or even years. I am sure that it would be very fun, if I could do it. DMs, at least those I know, tend to go with what they know. It doesn't help that our players, with the exception of nyminal, have never played in a long-running campaign either. So, with the precedent set, it should come as little surprise that, after six months, the game had worn out its interest to us. This may sound like I'm blaming my players, or the fact that I've never run/played a long campaign as the reason why this current campaign gave out. I'm not. Rather, I'm describing my -- and my players' -- mindset.

While I ran the adventures, I never really put the effort into them to make them truly memorable. Oh, I ran The Sunless Citadel interestingly enough, and did enough to fit it loosely into Sharn (it was part of UnderSharn, for those who wondered), but no NPC stood out. When I progressed to "Fallen Angel" from Dungeon #117, I had already lost one character. (The player was "tired" of playing a Warmage, which I'll concede is possible, since that class is best as an extra caster, rather than the main arcane player.) That adventure went rather well, in my opinion, with the players excited about how it ended. Sadly, I never utilized the hook implied with the statue, since the wealthy patron having the full statue would have definitely made things interesting later on.

I wanted to get out of Sharn, though. I wanted to run a lightning rail-riding, airship-flying, Xen'drik-exploring campaign, and showcase all that Eberron had to offer. I needn't have gotten so detailed, though. There was nothing really wrong with playing a game primarily in Sharn, aside from that not being the case originally. (And so some characters didn't really fit in with the city at all.) They were sent on a mission to the Mournland (Shadows of the Last War) to recover a schema for House Cannith. This is where things began to go awry.

While in the goblin nation of Darguun, the halfling barbarian died. The player, though the halfling was reincarnated as a halfling (yes, a deus ex machina), decided to retire the halfling. He brought in a shifter ranger who meshed better with the group, in general. However, at this point, half the group that had established itself in that first adventure was gone. Then, my brother left, and we were down to one player who'd kept the same character from the beginning. This player, mfsfreak, is the sort of player who enjoys the story, but sits quietly and attentively until called on to roll dice. There is nothing wrong with that style of play, but you can't hook a campaign on that sort of character.

To make things worse, I did something unforgivable: I let a character steal from another. The situation (the thief left alone with the group's valuables) left that kind of thing open, and I followed it logically, rather than stopping the game to find out why the hell he didn't tell me that's what his character was like from the get-go. As a result, strieson, who had invested his money so far to help the group at large, lost a considerable sum of money.

strieson was beside himself. When they left the Mournland, he was so obsessed with recovering SOME of his money, he was willing to loot the dead in the vast open graveyard that the Mournland is. (Imagine a place that's an affront to nature. The dead don't decompose, and no one heals naturally. This land was created suddenly, so those who died when it was created are still exposed to the air.) I had to threaten him with a Living Blasphemy (a spell with pseudo-sentient thought) before he'd leave. He wound up running from the spell, dealing with the Warforged denizens of the land, and killing his horses in the process.

I never ran another module, and this is another problem. They finished with Shadows of the Last War in probably mid-May. I should have had another adventure -- even a small side trek -- ready, just to keep them focused, but I instead decided that they needed in-game reasons for acquiring their prestige classes (the Shifter ranger wanted Eldeen Ranger, the quiet player's Monk/Cleric wanted Sacred Fist, and strieson's bard wanted Sublime Chord). strieson missed a couple of sessions in a row, because he had to help out his folks, and I *did* run a small side trek for the other two players left. It went well, and set up the prestige class quest that I wanted to do.

In retrospect, I think that's what killed the game.

Things happened on their trip north that caused some strife between House Lyrandar and strieson's bard, and my buddy's not the sort to let ANY-FREAKIN'-THING go. I began to worry that I'd gotten in over my head, and feared that I was messing up. Instead of just glossing over the trips the three had to take to disparate places across the continent (Eldeen Reaches, Arcanix in Aundair, and Flamekeep in Thrane), I played it out. Everyone got bored, because I wasn't even using random encounters to keep interest in at least rolling dice.

By now, even the quiet player was talking about changing his character. With that, no one in the campaign was the same as at campaign's inception, and the patron didn't even know anyone properly. To top it off, I may have overreacted on how the strife with House Lyrandar would affect things with that character, and strieson got tired of playing his character. (This isn't really as much of a surprise, since he's got the worst attention span -- character-wise -- of anyone in the group, but this time it was worse.) They had gotten hints that some villains were out east in Q'Barra, but that's also where the bard would have to go to learn of the prestige class he wanted. I'd already decided that the trip out there was a wild goose chase for the villains, so the biggest reason to go was to get the heroes out of Sharn, and get the bard his prestige class.

On the trip there, strieson decided he was done with the character. What? The reason they were going out there, mostly, was gone? I became very disheartened, thinking that my campaign was ruined. This became a self-fulfilling thought when I was so disgusted that I let the fact that it doesn't say "jungle" in the environments in the Monster Manuals (v3.5 and III, btw) that I said to hell with it. Throw the fact that I'd been getting annoyed with 3.5's "micromanagement" and increasingly crappy rulebooks (from Wizards of the Coast), not to mention a burgeoning desire to do something in the sci-fi genre as a change of pace, and you have all it takes to kill a game.

Of course, I had gotten where I never prepped for the game. I played World of Warcraft, and we spent a considerable part of each session talking about it (though we do have a cooldown period where we just chat and catch up with each other).

Now, we're doing something different, and I'm not running, so I have time to properly think of what I want to do next for a game. First consideration? Aim for a six-month "mini-campaign" from the start. Next? Plan out what I want to do ahead of time, stick with it, but be flexible. I'm actually thinking about running an adventure that was published 21 years ago, and featured a pair of twins (mage and warrior), a half-elf, a pair of barbarians, a dwarf, a noble knight, and a mischievous thief. I think it'd be interesting to see how folks play out that adventure as opposed to the way it's been most popularly chronicled. :)