Month: March 2012

One matter that needs to be settled in every writing group is how to decide who to critique first each week.  I once had a group who decided this by a round of rock, paper, scissors.  The game could go on for five or six rounds sometimes, before we had an actual winner.  Some people enjoyed this.  I did not.

Another group critiqued in order of arrival.  That worked well when we weren’t meeting at anyone’s house, because no one was necessarily first.  That same group once chose according to whose birth date was closest to the current date.  A skype group I was in chose based on whose submission was up on a certain group member’s screen when it was time to start.

By far my favorite method, though, is the one used in my current group.  We roll a scatter die.

The arrow points to the first person, and then we proceed clockwise.  Simple, quick, fair and we get to roll a die.  Can’t ask for better than that.

This is Teddy, one of my two favorite miniatures.  He’s been done for a while, but I just recently put him on his base.

My other favorite mini has been half done for almost a year.  I’m hoping to have it done by the end of March.  I have a roleplaying game I’d like to use her in coming up.  She’s intimidating to work on, though, so it’s taking me a long time.

Hush little baby, don’t you scream,
Coach is gonna buy you a skaven team.
And if those filthy rats can’t score,
Coach is gonna buy you a Kroxigor.
And if some goblin fouls your lizard,
Coach is gonna buy you a freebooter wizard.
And if your wizard lost his scrolls,
Coach is gonna buy you some team rerolls.
And if those rerolls fail your player,
Coach is gonna buy you a dwarf troll slayer.
And if that dwarf–he don’t slay trolls,
Coach is gonna buy you some death that rolls.
And if that deathroller’s seen by the ref,
Coach is gonna buy you a halfling chef.
And if that chef don’t do the trick,
Coach is gonna buy you a pogo stick.
And if that looney jumps too far,
Coach is gonna buy you an ogre star.
And if great Morg-n-Thorg falls down,
You’ll still be the dirtiest player in town.

For Christmas, I bought Drew a video game on Xbox Live Arcade.  Then the game was unexpectedly on sale, so we had some Xbox points left over, so we browsed the indie games.  And that’s how we found Sequence.

Sequence is a rhythm RPG, which means that it’s an RPG whose battle system consists of a series of rhythm games.  I’m not a fan of rhythm games or party games in general, so I was skeptical.

But Sequence completely won me over.  It has all the elements of an awesome RPG–great characters, excellent voice acting, beautiful art,  a cool story, and snappy dialogue.  (I haven’t laughed that hard at video game dialogue…maybe ever.  It was the dialogue in the demo that first sold us on the game.)  And the combat both complex and fun, while still being one of the most innovative games I have ever played.  (As a plus, the difficulty settings make the game customizable, in case you’re bad at rhythm games, like me.  The system did a fantastic job of teaching me to play and then leveling with me.  If it doesn’t for you, you can change the difficulty at any time.)  It even landed the ending, which is always a worry with mystery-driven games.

I hear this game hasn’t been the smashing success I think it should have been, and I can only imagine that’s because it’s lingering in obscurity.  (I have no connection to this game–I just want to spread the word.)  It’s recently become available on Steam, and I hope that helps it out.  It’s also five bucks, so it’s hard to go wrong.

My backyard tulips are coming up.  I haven’t thought about them since last year.  Flowers without effort=magic.