Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Lately I’ve been directing nothing short of a Furious Hellstorm of creative energy into a (relatively) new design project which I’m code-naming (and likely sticking with) “Forevergotten.” I’ve jammed out a whole slew of ideas, and now that I have gained enough of comfortable creative foundation, I want to share some of my notes. Some of this will likely be a bit rambly. Read more

My roommate passed this along to me from Gameinformer, and I just had to share. It’s worth a good 15 minutes of awesome laughter.

I’m running three games at this weekend’s Gamestorm convention. If you’re interested in signing up, click here.

I am currently running a game that meets once a month, sometimes a little more than that. Arranging these game sessions has been fairly taxing in the past, as sometimes one or more players (or even myself) will forget when the next session is, or instead won’t know all the details of their future schedule when we get to the part of the night wherein we set the date of our next gathering.

After much search, trial, and error, I’ve found a fantastic free online service that makes session-arrangement much less of a scheduling headache. It’s called Agree-a-Date. This service allows the scheduler to pick any number of dates and times he or she will be available, then have the other players pick out individually which of those offered time slots also work for them. Additionally, it includes an open-ended question and voting system, allowing easy polling of such things as “where we playing tonight?” and “what do you guys want to do for dinner?” and “who can pick up Steve this time?”

If you ever have similar problems getting our players to agree on a date for your next session, check this one out.

So far, Final Fantasy XIII has been an unexpected sine wave of fun for me. At first, I was truly wowed by the intensity of the visuals that the experience provided. I can not recall ever playing a game more graphically stunning in my life. It is truly at the cutting edge of the videl gaming medium in that regard.

I also enjoyed (and still do now, if not more so) the slow-but-steady incline in mechanical complexity of the gameplay. Where others decried its simplicity, I saw budding potential. I’m glad to see that now, several chapters in, I was right to stick out the slow advance of mechanics, as the top-down complexity of the combat system is a whole lot more satisfying to a strategist-type player, like myself. At least, I find it more satisfying than I ever found the combat mechanics of the previous iiterations in the series, save maybe for FFXII (my admitted favorite FF game so far). Read more

This past weekend, I finally made the official complete switch, fully translating the events, characters, and setting from my KnownWorld “Timiro Nights” campaign into the Burning Wheel game system. This particular campaign is relatively new (only a handful of sessions so far since inception), but it has been a consistent source of gaming joy for me since getting the group together. It’s been a while since I’ve had a group this responsive, and this eager to extend the game talk well into our downtime. I’m glad to say that so far, the conversion to the new rules has been a success. I’d like to take a few here and talk about the juicy technical bits behind that conversion, and my own ideas of how the Burning Wheel system should work. Read more