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Nov. 18th, 2017 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI didn't end up playing anything yesterday after I posted. Cordelia and Scott arrived not too long after I posted, and Cordelia and I bought lunch from the little cafeteria-ish thing that the hotel has for the convention. There were six options, and I took the one I thought least likely to make me sick and guessed wrong.
It may well not have been the food. I had a migraine by the time Scott and Cordelia sat down to play Star Trek: Five Year Mission (he was the GM, and she just decided that she was interested at the last minute. It made his convention). I had asked at the front desk at about 12:30 for them to call me when our room was ready. I went back at 3:30, and they told me it still wasn't but that they could give us a room with a king bed and an 'accessible bathroom.' I was so sick by then that I would have taken a closet just to get away from the lobby odors (mostly cleaning product stuff, I think). I did ask if she was sure no one else would need it it, and she said they had other such rooms still vacant.
I know I was looking bad because one of our friends spotted me a little before and asked me if I was okay and if I needed to go to her room to lie down. I rather suspect that the woman at the desk was alarmed by how I looked, too, because five minutes later I was in a room with no bothersome odors and gentle lights and a welcoming bed. Cordelia's rollaway is kind of wedged in because the accessible bathroom is several feet wider than the bathroom in the rooms we usually get.
Scott and Cordelia ended up going back home again after his game ended because she thought she'd left her social studies notebook there. They called me two or three times from home because they couldn't find it. I finally located it in Cordelia's backpack. It was inside her binder and not visible as a separate thing.
I didn't get as much sleep as I wanted, but I was in bed, with the lights off, for about nine hours. I was awake enough to run my game in the morning. I had four people pre-register, and three of them showed up. The one who didn't is a woman we know but really only see at UCon, so I'm a little worried that something's happened to her because she pretty reliably shows up for my RPGs.
One of the players said he was willing to run two characters, and I ran another as an npc, so there were five characters on the adventure. I didn't end up having them fight anything or make a vast number of dice rolls for anything. It was mostly just the characters interacting with each other and exploring the terrain. I think they had fun. The ending was weaker than I wanted it to be and about half an hour before the four hour time block ended. The game really wanted to be a campaign, I think.
I played a game of Microscope from 2:00 to 5:00. Scott and I had wanted to play a game together, but none of the things that interested us had two tickets left. He got a ticket for a Star Wars game, and I got some generics. There wasn't room in that game for me, so I tried some folks who just have a room with four tables and several would-be GMs capable of running multiple different games, depending on what interests the people who show up. They only take generics or play-all-weekend ribbons.
Scott's kind of jealous that I got to play Microscope as he's wanted to do it for a while. The Microscope game is a history building/world building game rather than strictly an RPG. Players take turns coming up with ideas for events and putting them into a timeline between two anchoring events. The game's meant to cover a longish span of time but also works better if the anchor events make sense as bracketing something. In this case, we started with the idea of going Space 1889-ish and throwing in a war between planets. The tech didn't end up being pertinent (though the idea that just about every planet and moon was did play a part). The game turned out to work well for me because I could pull real history and alter the details to make it have different potential hooks. I introduced a plague (which then got traced backward) and an alien religious schism that got traced forward.
The other players took those things in directions I never would have thought of, but that's kind of the point of the game. There were some things that ended up in the timeline that actually didn't make sense between the anchor points when combined with the other things that happened. If I was trying to write a novel, I'd change things to either excise those bits or to explain how they fit.
The game book is very thin and spends an inordinate number of pages on a part of the game that really doesn't merit it because it's kind of tacked on. That is the idea that players will sometimes role play scenes in order to figure out the answer to some specific question about why something happened or what happened next. It's not that the questions aren't interesting to discuss as much as that going into character either requires more set up than it's worth or ends up with the scene swallowing the rest of the game because the players aren't willing to end it.
Microscope is something that could go on for many, many hours because there are always more layers to dig into, more characters and events to introduce. In today's game, we just set a cap on how long we'd play by saying that each of the five of us would get one turn being the Lens (the player who decides which bit of the history to focus the round on. The Lens also gets to add more events than any other player that round).
I think that Microscope might be useful for planning a world for an RPG campaign, too, because it sidesteps the problem of a world coming entirely from the GM's imagination. Scott and I have problems with each other's games, sometimes, because we both know what twists the other is likely to put on certain things.
I tried to talk Cordelia into going to the hotel restaurant, which was only half full, at 5:30. She objected and tried to get me to come up with something else. By the time Scott got back from his game at about 6:15, she was willing to go to the restaurant, but it was packed to the point that Scott and I didn't consider it an option. It's really not a restaurant so much as a lounge/bar that also serves meals, so it's not very big. Most of the game sessions ended at 6:00, and the next games started at 7:00, so 6:15 was the worst possible time to try to get food.
My restrictions didn't help any. Scott and Cordelia ended up going for the cafeteria-ish stuff while I made some really terrible instant oatmeal (Scott bought these with an eye toward his dietary issues rather than mine, so my options were limited). Adding salt to the oatmeal (the idea of sugar was kind of repulsive at that point) let me eat about two thirds of it before I gave up. Scott had me taste Cordelia's mashed potatoes because she'd labeled them 'bland,' but I could clearly taste garlic when I tried a bite. It was a weird sort of garlic thing in as much as it was clearly there in mouthfeel and ghost of flavor but not really properly something that I could taste. Scott agreed that it was there once he tasted it. The whole thing was rather as if someone had taken out all of the good things about garlic and just left the parts that make me sick.
Scott and I have agreed that, next year, we will plan better. Me needing meat that's broiled, steamed, or poached that has nothing whatsoever on it but things I add myself is really a huge challenge. I'd have been good with a completely plain baked potato or baked sweet potato that I could add some things to as seemed safe to me (sweet potatoes are better, but baked potatoes tend to be easier to find at restaurants).
Of course, the nutritionist I saw earlier this week told me that I need to eat protein in the evenings because protein eaten at night is more efficiently converted to muscle mass than protein eaten at breakfast. That seems really strange to me and also not a thing that's likely to work well. Meat dishes are more likely to give me reflux and/or to taste terrible without the things that give me reflux. Telling me to mix ground turkey with rolled oats and then cook them in a pan with a little water somehow doesn't promise me anything that I'd actually choose to eat.
I just... If something's physically unpleasant to eat, I have to be really desperate to eat it.
I'm waiting for it to be the right time that I can take my bedtime medications. I'd like to sleep after that, but Scott's still out, and Cordelia wants the light on. I have a mask to put over my eyes, but it combines really poorly with the c-PAP headgear. I need to wear the mask under the headgear which means that I can't take it off without removing the headgear. That makes me vastly anxious because I can't check the time or look to see what made that noise that just woke me or... It tends to lead to me just not sleeping.
It may well not have been the food. I had a migraine by the time Scott and Cordelia sat down to play Star Trek: Five Year Mission (he was the GM, and she just decided that she was interested at the last minute. It made his convention). I had asked at the front desk at about 12:30 for them to call me when our room was ready. I went back at 3:30, and they told me it still wasn't but that they could give us a room with a king bed and an 'accessible bathroom.' I was so sick by then that I would have taken a closet just to get away from the lobby odors (mostly cleaning product stuff, I think). I did ask if she was sure no one else would need it it, and she said they had other such rooms still vacant.
I know I was looking bad because one of our friends spotted me a little before and asked me if I was okay and if I needed to go to her room to lie down. I rather suspect that the woman at the desk was alarmed by how I looked, too, because five minutes later I was in a room with no bothersome odors and gentle lights and a welcoming bed. Cordelia's rollaway is kind of wedged in because the accessible bathroom is several feet wider than the bathroom in the rooms we usually get.
Scott and Cordelia ended up going back home again after his game ended because she thought she'd left her social studies notebook there. They called me two or three times from home because they couldn't find it. I finally located it in Cordelia's backpack. It was inside her binder and not visible as a separate thing.
I didn't get as much sleep as I wanted, but I was in bed, with the lights off, for about nine hours. I was awake enough to run my game in the morning. I had four people pre-register, and three of them showed up. The one who didn't is a woman we know but really only see at UCon, so I'm a little worried that something's happened to her because she pretty reliably shows up for my RPGs.
One of the players said he was willing to run two characters, and I ran another as an npc, so there were five characters on the adventure. I didn't end up having them fight anything or make a vast number of dice rolls for anything. It was mostly just the characters interacting with each other and exploring the terrain. I think they had fun. The ending was weaker than I wanted it to be and about half an hour before the four hour time block ended. The game really wanted to be a campaign, I think.
I played a game of Microscope from 2:00 to 5:00. Scott and I had wanted to play a game together, but none of the things that interested us had two tickets left. He got a ticket for a Star Wars game, and I got some generics. There wasn't room in that game for me, so I tried some folks who just have a room with four tables and several would-be GMs capable of running multiple different games, depending on what interests the people who show up. They only take generics or play-all-weekend ribbons.
Scott's kind of jealous that I got to play Microscope as he's wanted to do it for a while. The Microscope game is a history building/world building game rather than strictly an RPG. Players take turns coming up with ideas for events and putting them into a timeline between two anchoring events. The game's meant to cover a longish span of time but also works better if the anchor events make sense as bracketing something. In this case, we started with the idea of going Space 1889-ish and throwing in a war between planets. The tech didn't end up being pertinent (though the idea that just about every planet and moon was did play a part). The game turned out to work well for me because I could pull real history and alter the details to make it have different potential hooks. I introduced a plague (which then got traced backward) and an alien religious schism that got traced forward.
The other players took those things in directions I never would have thought of, but that's kind of the point of the game. There were some things that ended up in the timeline that actually didn't make sense between the anchor points when combined with the other things that happened. If I was trying to write a novel, I'd change things to either excise those bits or to explain how they fit.
The game book is very thin and spends an inordinate number of pages on a part of the game that really doesn't merit it because it's kind of tacked on. That is the idea that players will sometimes role play scenes in order to figure out the answer to some specific question about why something happened or what happened next. It's not that the questions aren't interesting to discuss as much as that going into character either requires more set up than it's worth or ends up with the scene swallowing the rest of the game because the players aren't willing to end it.
Microscope is something that could go on for many, many hours because there are always more layers to dig into, more characters and events to introduce. In today's game, we just set a cap on how long we'd play by saying that each of the five of us would get one turn being the Lens (the player who decides which bit of the history to focus the round on. The Lens also gets to add more events than any other player that round).
I think that Microscope might be useful for planning a world for an RPG campaign, too, because it sidesteps the problem of a world coming entirely from the GM's imagination. Scott and I have problems with each other's games, sometimes, because we both know what twists the other is likely to put on certain things.
I tried to talk Cordelia into going to the hotel restaurant, which was only half full, at 5:30. She objected and tried to get me to come up with something else. By the time Scott got back from his game at about 6:15, she was willing to go to the restaurant, but it was packed to the point that Scott and I didn't consider it an option. It's really not a restaurant so much as a lounge/bar that also serves meals, so it's not very big. Most of the game sessions ended at 6:00, and the next games started at 7:00, so 6:15 was the worst possible time to try to get food.
My restrictions didn't help any. Scott and Cordelia ended up going for the cafeteria-ish stuff while I made some really terrible instant oatmeal (Scott bought these with an eye toward his dietary issues rather than mine, so my options were limited). Adding salt to the oatmeal (the idea of sugar was kind of repulsive at that point) let me eat about two thirds of it before I gave up. Scott had me taste Cordelia's mashed potatoes because she'd labeled them 'bland,' but I could clearly taste garlic when I tried a bite. It was a weird sort of garlic thing in as much as it was clearly there in mouthfeel and ghost of flavor but not really properly something that I could taste. Scott agreed that it was there once he tasted it. The whole thing was rather as if someone had taken out all of the good things about garlic and just left the parts that make me sick.
Scott and I have agreed that, next year, we will plan better. Me needing meat that's broiled, steamed, or poached that has nothing whatsoever on it but things I add myself is really a huge challenge. I'd have been good with a completely plain baked potato or baked sweet potato that I could add some things to as seemed safe to me (sweet potatoes are better, but baked potatoes tend to be easier to find at restaurants).
Of course, the nutritionist I saw earlier this week told me that I need to eat protein in the evenings because protein eaten at night is more efficiently converted to muscle mass than protein eaten at breakfast. That seems really strange to me and also not a thing that's likely to work well. Meat dishes are more likely to give me reflux and/or to taste terrible without the things that give me reflux. Telling me to mix ground turkey with rolled oats and then cook them in a pan with a little water somehow doesn't promise me anything that I'd actually choose to eat.
I just... If something's physically unpleasant to eat, I have to be really desperate to eat it.
I'm waiting for it to be the right time that I can take my bedtime medications. I'd like to sleep after that, but Scott's still out, and Cordelia wants the light on. I have a mask to put over my eyes, but it combines really poorly with the c-PAP headgear. I need to wear the mask under the headgear which means that I can't take it off without removing the headgear. That makes me vastly anxious because I can't check the time or look to see what made that noise that just woke me or... It tends to lead to me just not sleeping.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-19 09:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-11-22 07:09 pm (UTC)Trying to figure it out feels a lot like running full speed into a wall over and over and over.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-22 08:27 pm (UTC)I hope you'll be able to figure something out.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-19 12:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-11-22 07:09 pm (UTC)