Journal of an Emerald Magistrate

I've been coming up with lots of random game ideas, some old some new, most I know I will never get a chance to run.

First of all the Dragon Age game is going well, I'm not bred with it, I think the players are still interested. I'm just coming up with other shit I want to do.

Spycraft-several games actually. I really want to run that game I started a year ago again. It was fun. I would like to have at least Eel, Rhiannon and Karon in it still. Unfortunately wanting that means it will take that much longer to get it on cause they're not easily available to game. Also I want to run the phantasy star game I was planning a few years back that never happened. It was going to be pso inspired and I thought it would be fun. It would at least be fun for a while till people realized I was being really lazy and just following the games story, not that anyone paid attention to the story in pso...

Fantasycraft-I kinda wanna try my old fantasy setting with fc, draconic heritage would work for nedrein...sorta. I haven't actually played in the waters of my old setting in years so I wouldn't mind the opportunity.

Rifts-This is bizarre because I actually have two Rifts games I want to run in mind. First is an actual like role playing one, shocking for Rifts I know. But the main idea would be a group of characters out of Triax going to establish trade relations between the NGR and the Russian warlords, wacky hijinx ensue. The other one is a weird cross over game, just because I think it would run better in Rifts. Legend of the Five Rings, Third Day of Thunder, the thousand years of darkness may finally end as the thunders are born again into a greatly changed emerald empire. Scorpion clan mystic ninja vs kolat cyber ninja.,Crab clan bushiborgs, Unicorn clan power armor cavalry, aww yeah.

Hunter-Did you know that Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is like a thing now? There is a Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter(I'm reading this now) and Queen Victoria Demon Hunter. So this is almost more of a con game. Run using hunter from whitewolf in a gaslight setting play as various famous actual people as they battle the forces of darkness during the 19th century. Great as a con game because then it can be episodic with player pools specific to the location, because as awesome as Abe Lincoln the vampire hunter is, he really never left the continent. Hell I don't think he went very far west of the Mississippi even. This idea has plenty of potential though.

Exalted-I really want to run Autochthonian invasion. Always have since before I bought the damn book, even more after I did.

The semester finally ended, so I have free time again. I've missed free time.

I don't know what to say about that, it may be a sign of depression cause seriously I've lost interest with that game like five times so far. Finally got to the last disc though today and ya know what I learned, there's a fucking run button for when you're moving around outside combat. I played three discs(over a year) and never knew that before. That might have been in the manual, something our used copy did not come with, and it might even had been in faqs as those often have control sections but who looks at the control section of those when people bother putting them in? The gameplay is still kinda ok with a relatively flat story and array of voice actors. I went from absolutely hating the characters in disc one, to almost feeling for them in the middle discs to being tired with them now. Sad to say that over four discs I think I actually have more hours clocked on Mass Effect than I do on the massive four disc Lost Odyssey. The difference? One has a moving story and characters you give a flying fuck about with an interesting game design. Said game was also made by Bioware, which is a name that still means quality after all these years. Lost Odyssey was produced by Mistwalker and Microsoft. Which I'm not sure if Microsoft was ever involved in the development of an RPG before but the only other Mistwalker RPG I've played is Blue Dragon, another multi-disc edifice to a previous generation of games in the modern gaming market that lost my interest repeatedly. I hate to break it to you Japan, but more discs doesn't mean it is a better game, not anymore. Usually it means you've tossed in more cut scenes, you know, removing me from the actual game play.

Can't wait till I have the spare coin to pick Mass Effect 2 or Bioshock 2. I've heard some lackluster things about Mass Effect 2, but I suspect it is from people that didn't play the first one or from die hards that dislike that you don't navigate menus to kill things in it.

ok it isn't really funny, but you're gonna listen to me bitch about it anyway.

So it was raining the other day which got water in the car and a vast quantity of humidity both from damp air, water absorbed by the seats, exhalations etc. So the other day I went out to my car for something and thought odd, that layer of frost, with all the snow I wouldn't have thought there would be enough moisture in the air to frost. So yeah the inside of my car has a layer of frost. I'm currently, cause the weather is cooperating and giving me a warm day that it would naturally defrost, running my car while it sits still to defrost. I'll go check on it after I'm done with this post, I figure that will be a decent amount of time to start warming up.

So Karon got me Dragon Age for Christmas. You can also call it crack. In that horribly addictive way that Knights of the old Republic and just about every other Bioware RPG has been. Even more so though it grabs me in a way that few of their games of late have because it is an actual fantasy game. None of the silly jedi malarky or KOTOR2's pimp your lightsaber mechanic. Elves, dwarves, and humans kicking medieval butt.

Perhaps the one thing that gets me is the level of gore. I mean seriously I used to play a game by this company where I had a party of characters wielding paired lightsabers and tossing thermal detonators and there wasn't as much blood and meat chunks as this. I figure it either was the kotor weapons just vaporizing things or jedi must unconsciously create a telekinetic barrier to keep the blood and meat chunks out of their hair. In Dragon Age if you get into a fight with swords and axes at the end it looks like you were in a fight with swords and axes. Your armor gets pretty much covered in blood after a pitched fight against a half dozen or more enemies. I was a little shocked at first because in my mind this is quite a bit more graphic and realistic than the exploded in meat chunks as scorpion pulls a dudes spine out from my youth.

Story wise I dig it, I love the setting and kinda want to run a d&d game in it. It has a lot of really impressive details that it gives you from the organization of the major religion to racial slurs used by the different groups against each other. Elves call humans shemlon(translates as child race or some such) while humans call them knife-ears. Dwarves are somewhat analogous to a cross between klingons and the roman empire(pre-caesar). Humans are your fairly standard medieval european kingdom set up. Elves I find quite interesting in that they can be likened to the breakdown of medieval jewish demographics, the city elves live in ghettos like were established in many early cities to contain the unwanted members of society while the wood elves live like gypsies moving from place to place to avoid drawing attention to themselves whenever possible and trying to hold on to their ancient traditions.

Alright time to check my car.

during perhaps my most bored, depressed and disinterested semester since returning to college I am writing a paper in ed psych on motivational theory

gives me rage, so much rage at the moment.

Ok so the other day I answered my phone in my sleep, something I have done in the past. Now apparently I hit a series of buttons, which navigated some menus and turned on the security features on the phone. So the next time I tried using my phone it prompted me for a pin, something I never set, and when I failed to guess it randomly it locked me out and asked for a different code. A code that the manual told me my provider could get me. So I went to the At&T store, the problem I had was that Mike had not added me as a verified user on my phone, so I can't fix things that go wrong with it, only he the account holder can. So after I happened to see Mindi at my parents the other day, I gave her my phone to take to Mike to get fixed. Next day I got it back and it was fine, that was Friday.

So today we were doing presentations in class so, being courteous to my classmates I turned off my damn phone, see there's that rage again. When I turned my phone back on after class, it prompted me for the pin again. Oh joy of joys. I tried three different pins this time chosen at random. The options it isn't for the record are: the access code for my voicemail which seemed an obvious choice, the last 4 digits of my number, 1420, my birth year, mike's birth year, the day and month of either of our births. Now I'm back to the code that I don't have, and that I suspect they didn't give to Mike, I bet they just plugged it in and handed him back the phone. Not that I can check since I can't call him, phone being locked and all.

Now Mike said that he added me this time so I can go fix it, I'm not in the mood to drive to Fairview to find out otherwise though, so I'm waiting for dad to get home, as he knows Mike's social security number which is one of the things I have to have to prove I'm who I am not in order to get them to tell me how to fix my phone.

Oh yeah I'm still alive.

Now I realized a while ago that I was usually more awake late at night, see why I was willing to work overnight shift at steak n' shake for so long. Left to my own devices my sleep schedule tends to gravitate later and later. It's also why when I'm stressing about big papers it seems that I do best waiting to start writing until around midnight, my thinking just seems clearer in the wee bits of the AM. The problem there though is the fatigue factor that normally catches me around this part of the evening. Nothing like the big slowdown around 4 when you're hitting the conclusion of a paper to piss you off as it takes you the next hour and a half to get the wording right and it turns out to be the same as the way you did it first.

Whats my point you might ask? Well I tried something new today, knowing how much shit I had to do I took a nap, well rather I slept first. I stayed up for dinner, barely, so that I could eat it warm rather than reheated, and then fell asleep around 7 and got up a bit after midnight. I got up, shook off the dust, watched the second half of an episode of Lost with Karon and got cracking. Since then I've wrapped up two assignments and only have one left to go. Ok I did do my Chinese before bed but that was because I knew I wouldn't fucking care after I got up. The downside to this is it was too late to call anyone and compare with them to see if we had the same ideas on how to translate it, but hey I need to be able to stand on my own with that.

Okay also to clarify something from the other day. No Keith, I have no resentment to you about your wedding, you gave me over a years notice to save up money for yours so I was able to squirrel away what was needed. Will on the other hand told me in June I believe, sure I knew he had proposed to Mary, but that doesn't mean a wedding is coming in short order. Hell, I think those two dated for less time than Karon and I have been engaged even. The point is that when Will told me about his impending wedding I was nearly broke as I was on the fumes of my Spring semester loans, and to be clear, there have been a lot of financial issues this semester which is making my solvency questionable at this point. It's really sad when I actually get into a place where I wish I hadn't of gone back to school and stayed at Gamestop. I could have had my own store by now if I had stayed with the company, and if not I'd still have had a steady income that I could have worked a class schedule around. Not that Gamestop wasn't fun Adam, just ya know, retail hurts my soul.

Alright I just splurged 20 minutes on this I should get back to work.

without really trying even.

See I have the job, as far as I can tell from my emails I got, but as best I can tell I don't get told to do squat until they get my NDA(non disclosure agreement) on file. So I'm sorta chilling and waiting and going aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah until then.

P.S. Karon and I have been watching a lot of Stargate.

Didn't make a fuss about it cause well, I was tired.

Also yes I still suck and haven't sent in my resume or writing sample yet, it may be forthcoming though because now that I am home with no one to talk to and nothing to do I'm getting kinda twitchy.

Case in point, so Karon and I had been talking about redoing the cushions for the dining room chairs for a while, Karon had even gone so far as to acquire fabric and some padding. So a few hours ago in the midst of some twitchiness I randomly decided to check and see how hard it was to get the seats off the chairs. Turned out to be relatively easy actually as I had a screwdriver on the table even from my recent assembly of Karon's birthday desk chair. So with seat off I went looking for padding and then fabric, then stopped partly because I don't know how fancy Karon was gonna go with these. If she wants a zippered cover that can be opened and restuffed on a whim I can't go cutting willy nilly. Yet also if I try to cut the fabric in such a way to accommodate slipcases for all the seats I'll have to be especially careful in my cuttery.

Having sufficiently stymied myself I still felt the need, the need to do something, and that's when after playing catch with Ash for ten minutes I noticed as I went to fetch the ball as he "lost" it the spot of kitchen floor that was not like the rest. See when we launched the kitchen retiling we stopped at the fridge. I forget if there was an intent to inquire if it had rollers(it does by the way) or look into cleaning it out to move it easier, whatever the reason we had stopped just short of done. So with my nervous energy to burn I worked the fridge up over the lip of the new tile and then rolled it out and set about the floor in a flurry of sweeping, cleaning and productivity. I am now happy to say that the floor is done(well mostly there is still this narrow strip under the cabinets which is gonna take me cutting a bunch of tiles into inch wide slivers to cram into the gap but you can't bloody see it without getting on your knees).

I also mowed my lawn today and watered the garden, but that isn't nearly as awesome as the floor under the fridge matching the floor throughout the rest of the damn room. I think now though it is time for a tall glass of water and maybe some more Firefly.

Tomorrow I think I'm gonna go look for some padding Matt and I had in the basement for some project or other, the stuff Karon has seems kinda thin so I worry it will just compress down after a few months(not that the dining room chairs get a lot of use, but still).

I didn't think it was possible to displace an incident between me and Cubbie several years back as my least favorite cat moment. Good job, Ash.

The former champion: I was down visiting Karon at Darcy's place in Virginia and awoke with a cat on my head. In the moments of startlement as we both jostled awake Cubbie knicked my face, some bleeding and swearing resulted and I generally was annoyed with Cubbie for a long while, I've mostly forgiven him.

The new winner: So just now I was changing discs in the XBOX. I had just watched the original Transformers: the Movie(1986) and Ash was chilling on the pinball machine. I thought he looked like he could use some petting so I went over to say hi. I then noticed that well, he was sitting on the flat side of sharp object and not wanting him to hurt himself I scooped him up towards me so he wouldn't be injured. Unfortunately this sorta startled Ash and he really has bad claw control. So I've got a fun long slice in my top and bottom lip, the bottom one is more worrying as it is actually inside my mouth where all sorts of germs can breed. Bravo Ash, Bravo. I still love you, but we're fucking getting you safe paws.

or returning to it, however, you want to look at it. Suppose that is what happens when I take a summer off to vegetate after a semester of Chinese murdering me.

So, how about that Lost Odyssey. I went ahead and started playing it again, picked up my save file where I left off and was instantly reminded that I still never had figured out the combat system all the way. The problem therein might be the lack of a tutorial. A lot of games, and I mean a lot, have it worked in that the first fight or two of the game they kinda walk you through it. In Mass Effect for instance the first fight is really just a point and shoot, the second fight they tell you about the skill menu and how to issue commands to party members and change weapons, etc. Lost Odyssey actually starts with you in combat basically and doesn't tell you what the heck you are doing. Added to that we bought the game used so I don't even have a manual to fall back on which sorta adds to the frustration. Apparently there's a target reticle that you have to hold the right trigger to get an overlay to zoom in on, and then you have to snap release the trigger as it tightens in on the target point. Hold too long and you get just as bad a result as if you didn't bother pulling the trigger, which as far as I can tell costs you about 10% of your damage potential per attack. So once you figure out that particular hoop, if you time it just right to get a perfect you actually do 10% more than normal, so technically the bad result is actually 20% below prime damage. Get this though, even should you get a perfect, by some arcane reasoning the game can, and will, decide that you miss. Even more annoying still, it might let the enemy counterattack, something that as far as I can tell, you don't get to do ever. So perfect, as far as combat goes, is quite a bit less than what it sounds like actually.

Kaim, the protagonist, still really doesn't do anything for me. He's got a neat design, and he has great potential as an angsty immortal protagonist that is struggling to remember his past, instead though I just want to punch him in the nutsack. Out of the three people in my party he has the lamest voice actor, sounding more like some loser at an emo club rather than someone with any actual sorrow over his lost life. Added to this is the fact that his boss is an evil mccrazypants global domination guy, and Kaim knows he is, I really don't feel like he is all that likable of a person.

But wait the supporting cast might be good. Well I did say we have three characters so far in the group. Seth, another immortal, seems to do a lot of eves dropping and making meaningful glances at Kaim, she also, at least claims to be amnesiatic. Apparently it comes with being an immortal. I suspect she actually knows a lot more about Kaim's past than she is letting on. Jansen is the only mortal in the group, quite the fly in the ointment actually as he is working for the same boss as Kaim, but he is there to make sure the immortals stay amnesiatic, actually given a magical mcguffin that he is to use in the event that they start to remember things. Jansen is a likable enough comedic character that actually doesn't go ahead and zot either of them with the memory stealing bead and instead uses it to trick a guard into releasing the party from a jail cell on a boat.

Game play, it's a turn based rpg, so nothing really fancy goes on. Annoyingly in the first five hours of gameplay you get assaulted with not only a dungeon where you have to screw around with moving boxes, but also a highly annoying dodge the security patrol or have to start over dungeon. Two things that can really ruin a game experience in close succession to each other isn't a good way to win a player over, especially when I have more than 3 discs left of the game.

Character design is sorta interesting on the three characters I have, on some of the npc's I've met though it is downright scary. I have a new rule. Japan, you have lost the right to design female nobles that use magic in your games. Too often do women spellcasters seem to get stuck in cleavage revealing outfits with miniskirts and thigh high boots. It is definitely going too far when royals are still dressed at best in what might be swimwear, but what really looks like, as Karon put it, "So what, they had to go grab her from her job as a dominatrix to act queenly and she just tossed a half cape on across her shoulders?" Come on Japan, women wear clothes. Repeat after me "Women wear clothes." Maybe if you repeat that for a few months while beating your head against the wall we'll let you design women characters again. For now, sublet all projects that need it to the Canadians or some other rather prudish people so we get female characters that aren't falling out of their costumes.

The plot really isn't doing much yet, as you're stuck playing an amnesiac working for an evil proto-dictator. Graphically it is a really pretty game, but looks aren't everything and I'm really hoping it picks up soon.

Therein lies one of the biggest problems I have with the game I think. See it has this thousand years of dreams thing going on where periodically Kaim gets back a memory. Yet despite the impressive graphics and also despite the fact that most of the voice actors are pretty good all of the memories are presented as pages of text you have to read through. Pages of very poorly translated text that I really think lost a lot of there weight because of how they get stuck in at odd intervals and break up the flow of the game proper. Maybe if they actually were done as cut scenes, maybe if they only cropped up when the character rests at an inn or gets knocked out, as a few do, but when you get one while walking down a street for no good reason, it starts getting frustrating. Add to it that they generally aren't short, they average 12 or so screens of text, most of which is block paragraphs, and I really stop caring after a while. I get it, Kaim angsts. He angsts now, he angsted then, he's gonna angst later, stop making me read this drivel with him angsting. Can't he have a happy memory or two? Even the Vampire Hunter D books aren't this morose and he freaking has to deal with being immortal, murdering his own kind, and never actually being thanked by the people he is helping. I've started skipping the damn memory story things because I really don't care and that is just sad. I'm only six hours in and I have completely written off the main character. I even gave Cloud longer than that.

On table top gaming I decided to give 4th edition d&d another stab. I looked through the phb two and found a lot of it pretty good actually, but here's my problem and it is the same problem I had last year with 4th ed. We had 8 years of 2nd edition uninterrupted. 8 years with a working system that played well. Sure THAC0 was a little weird to explain, but you got used to it. In the past 8 years we have had 3 core rule updates. 3rd edition, the much vaunted improvement of 3.5 and 4th. 3.5 annoyed me with its glut of ancillary books that fleshed out classes and overwhelmed players with more feats and and prestige classes. It also annoyed me because it was a system where you really had to plan your character backwards. You needed to know what prestige class you were going for in seven levels and plan your character out ahead of time to get there. Part of the supposed reason for 3 and 4th ed was to clean house of all the weird rules supplements and streamline things, but you know what, 2nd really didn't have that many rules supplements, it had story supplements. It had one book for each class and one for each of the primary races. More to the point they were reasonably priced books. Now you get a barrage of $30 hard backs, some of which don't even break 200 pages. Seriously, you want me to pay $30 for 160 pages in hardback? If you soft-backed it you could easily drop the price $10 and yet you gouge me. And so here we are again, a year into 4th, they're on a phb 2 a monster manual 2, probably a dmg 2 is coming also (they did it in 3.5). Rebuilding the glut of books that people have to buy in record time. Wasn't the point of pen and paper rpg's that they were supposed to be kinda cheap compared to miniature games or ccgs. What happened here? Oh right, first it was bought out by Pokemon, then by Hasbro, great, way to fuck people over by not understanding the market that you're selling to.