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| Thursday, October 28, 2004 06:26 AM |
| Splunge |
 by Fëanor |
Last night, mouserobot, Vis Major, TrackerNeil, and I, along with some other lucky folks, got to see Peccable and Sarcasmo do a reading/presentation of their excellent, award-winning IF game Slouching Towards Bedlam over at the Kelly Writers House on the U Penn campus.
On the way there, Vis Major and I spotted a unique and geeky bit of graffiti. On the side of the bridge that leads over the street someone had written the number pi in chalk, worked out to twenty some decimal places.
Peccable and Sarcasmo did a fine job, of course. Also there was a fellow named Nick Montfort with a work-in-progress called Book and Volume that was loaded with great geek jokes. The third presenter was Emily Short, with her work Savoir-Faire, which had a lot of cool ideas in it, too. Afterwards the whole gang of us (minus TrackerNeil, who is very busy these days and had to run) went out for dinner to a rather fancy restaurant. I had a burger with a fried egg on top of it (anybody remember the "Good Morning Burger" from The Simpsons?), fries, and a beer, and followed that up with a piece of espresso cheesecake. This all seemed like a good idea until I woke up very early this morning with a horrible pain in my belly. And recently I haven't been getting enough sleep anyway, so now I'm pretty damn tired. Ugh.
I felt like I was being a little trashy ordering a Corona at the restaurant, what with everybody else purchasing beers with fancy/foreign names that came in big fancy glasses. But it is la cerveza mas fina.
Anyways, lately I've been getting back into Hero Quest, which you'll know already if you've read some of my recent posts, or if you know me in "real" life. I wrote up a more forgiving and generous starting quest than the one provided in the original quest book. And then I got really annoyed that we couldn't play with more than five players, realized that other people had already solved this problem by adding more characters, and started writing up stats for my own extra characters. Then I got really carried away and wrote up rules for an entire exprience point/leveling up system. Then I put together some more house rules for finding weapons on the bodies of your enemies. Dave totally egged me on, and even came up with a ton of new characters and house rules himself.
Peccable, however, pointed out that at this point I'm just rewriting D&D, which is silly, because, you know, other people already wrote D&D.
Still, there's something about the simplicity and physicality of Hero Quest that I really enjoy. Maybe I'll eventually give this D&D thing a try, but for now I'm sticking with my little kid's boardgame.
I think we're going to try my quest with some of my new rules tonight at game night, so we'll see how it goes. Hopefully I'm awake enough to be a decent evil wizard, and I won't keep forgetting monsters and doorways, like I did on game day. D'oh!
Btw, in case you're interested in the game, this is a really great resource. There's even a quest building application on here that I used to make my quest map, even though it was really built to make quests for a special computer-based version of the game. I think I mentioned this before, but I'm thinking of making my own quest builder using Java one of these days. It'll be more geared towards printing out the map and notes and using them to run a quest the old-fashioned way--on a board. Although, of course, I also still have grand plans for making a multi-player online version of the game...
Did I mention that I'm wearing my <geek></geek> shirt today? I love that it closes its tag. *snort* |
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