The Gaming Den

Posted: **Sun Mar 30, 2014 4:52 pm**

Minecraft is like Lego without Caltrops.

Posted: **Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:40 pm**

Tonight my friends are coming to my house along to play a one-off Lamentations of the Flame Princess game since one of my buds wanted to run it. I just looked at the rules from a free stripped down version from drivethrurpg. It's like, old school D&D made extra bland. On the plus side the stripped down version has none of the mind-scarring art that I saw on the somethingawful review of it in my research.

Pray for me.

Posted: **Thu Apr 03, 2014 1:59 am**

I pay dreamhost for webhosting. Partly because I am lazy. A few days ago, they unceremoniously dumped me to a new server, and all my stuff ended up broken. I decided that given that I was now stuck fixing it anyway, I would rather get an actual VPS with a group I trust, cheaper. (BetaForce, if you're curious). So I did that, redirected the domain, and started messing with getting Apache working (partial success).

Today, the domain has mysteriously reverted to Dreamhost, and and my wiki there has fixed itself.

Hmm.

Edit arg arg arg grammer

Posted: **Thu Apr 03, 2014 10:40 am**

erik wrote:Tonight my friends are coming to my house along to play a one-off Lamentations of the Flame Princess game since one of my buds wanted to run it. I just looked at the rules from a free stripped down version from drivethrurpg. It's like, old school D&D made extra bland. On the plus side the stripped down version has none of the mind-scarring art that I saw on the somethingawful review of it in my research.

Pray for me.

In The Trenches recap?

Game On,
fbmf

Posted: **Thu Apr 03, 2014 12:29 pm**

erik wrote:Tonight my friends are coming to my house along to play a one-off Lamentations of the Flame Princess game since one of my buds wanted to run it. I just looked at the rules from a free stripped down version from drivethrurpg. It's like, old school D&D made extra bland. On the plus side the stripped down version has none of the mind-scarring art that I saw on the somethingawful review of it in my research.

Pray for me.

Extra bland? How so? I've always thought the GM advice and the bits of implied setting give the game a pretty distinctive feel.

Posted: **Thu Apr 03, 2014 6:01 pm**

erik wrote:Tonight my friends are coming to my house along to play a one-off Lamentations of the Flame Princess game since one of my buds wanted to run it. I just looked at the rules from a free stripped down version from drivethrurpg. It's like, old school D&D made extra bland. On the plus side the stripped down version has none of the mind-scarring art that I saw on the somethingawful review of it in my research.

Pray for me.

That's kind of a weird sentiment to express. Partially because a big part of the uniqueness and implied flavor of LotFP comes from the art. So you're saying "If you take this game and remove the most distinctive feature, then the result is kind of bland."

Even then, Raggi tried to make, for example, the spells section more flavorful than the D&D default. Here's the writeup for Contact Other Plane.

LotFP wrote: The stars are repositories of all knowledge. By means of this spell, the Magic-User enters in communion with the star of his choice in order to
receive wisdom and information. The caster asks questions of the star, and the star answers. The stars resent such intrusions and give only brief answers to questions, and they often lie. All questions are answered with “yes,” “no,” “maybe,” “never,” “irrelevant,” or some other one-word answer.
The caster must concentrate on maintaining the spell in order to ask questions at the rate of one per round. A question is answered by the star during the same round. The caster may choose how many questions to ask, and which star to ask. The chart below gives a sample of possible stars, with the brightest stars being the most likely to answer truthfully, but others may be available as the Referee chooses. First roll on the table below to see if the star will give a truthful answer. Then roll to see if the caster is possessed by a psychic beast roaming the interstellar ether between the caster and the answering star. The caster may ask as many questions as he dares risk, although of course possession ends the spell immediately.
A character that becomes possessed will remain that way for the same number of weeks as the total number of questions asked.

And then there's the chart of the stars and their stats. Now, you could argue that this is a writeup that is not conducive to play, or that it's too verbose, or that the flavor is dumb, but I have no idea how can read LotFP and come away thinking that the game is bland.

Posted: **Thu Apr 03, 2014 6:13 pm**

I meant rules/classes are bland. Not the setting/fluff. There is very very little decision making in character creation with respect to rules.

I will say no more since this feels like an IMHO post already

I will do a recap later in trenches tonight if I can remain conscious. Tiring day so far

Posted: **Thu Apr 03, 2014 11:32 pm**

There is very little decision-making in character creation with respect to rules

That's true, but that's a general trait of OSR systems and in this context it's a feature, not a bug IMO.

Now, the thing that could have done with being a little more extensive is the skill system.

Posted: **Sat Apr 05, 2014 2:46 am**

I'M SICK OF THIS WEEK!

Ess has had to go to the hospital twice for some mysterious ailment that they can't figure out, and my car refused to start and needed to have the starter replaced. My son has finally started taking Adderall and it was a fight with my mom (and myself to a degree) over the whole ADHD thing.

I'm stressed, exhausted, broke, and needed to vent. Thank you.

Posted: **Sun Apr 06, 2014 5:32 am**

Ess is back in the hospital, this time overnight. They still don't know what's wrong. I'm... a mess.

Posted: **Sun Apr 06, 2014 6:09 am**

I don't have great wisdom to share but I hope everything turns out ok Maj.

Posted: **Thu Apr 10, 2014 5:37 pm**

Apparently I have offended the god of hard drives. I have a desktop sitting inactive because its hard drive is undergoing progressive failure and has become useless, and when my laptop began randomly crashing I ran the BIOS diagnostics to check if it might be overheating the hard drive spat out an error code that apparently translates to "totally fucked, I'm surprised you can even boot" and requires replacement.

Posted: **Thu Apr 10, 2014 6:22 pm**

Ess is home! A bit diabetic, but alive and home. Suck it, Death!

---

@name_here - That is like the shittiest thing ever (and I would know because that's happened to me at least twice). Can you order a new hard drive? Do you have a computer store that sells rebuilt computers?

Posted: **Thu Apr 10, 2014 6:49 pm**

The problem is that I'm kind of in college on a computer science track, finals are in three weeks, and there is stuff on that drive.

Good news is that apparently it might be possible to temporarily resucate it with system restore or reinstalling windows.

EDIT: happily, it turns out that crashing constantly appears to have been caused by a windows update installed this morning and System Restore seems to have rolled it back. My hard drive is presumably still fucked, but should hopefully last out the month.

EDIT2: Never mind. Let's see if CHKDISK helps

Posted: **Fri Apr 11, 2014 5:59 am**

Maj wrote:Ess is home! A bit diabetic, but alive and home. Suck it, Death!

Glad everything's (more or less) okay.

Posted: **Fri Apr 11, 2014 6:59 am**

name_here wrote:The problem is that I'm kind of in college on a computer science track, finals are in three weeks, and there is stuff on that drive.

Good news is that apparently it might be possible to temporarily resucate it with system restore or reinstalling windows.

EDIT: happily, it turns out that crashing constantly appears to have been caused by a windows update installed this morning and System Restore seems to have rolled it back. My hard drive is presumably still fucked, but should hopefully last out the month.

EDIT2: Never mind. Let's see if CHKDISK helps

If it boots, you can get data off of it. Buy a new drive, get an OS on it, and get your data off while you can. Yeah, it'll take you an afternoon, but it won't randomly fail on you during important stuff over the next few weeks (probably). Then drive a nail through the old drive, for spiting you.

Posted: **Fri Apr 11, 2014 1:46 pm**

It's a laptop, so that wouldn't be very practical. Fortunately, it turned out there were only three bad files. One of them was the hibernation file, which was probably why it kept crashing.

Posted: **Fri Apr 11, 2014 2:31 pm**

Still, I'd call this a good time for a backup.

Note to self - it's probably time to make a backup of my stuff too.

Posted: **Mon Apr 21, 2014 12:26 am**

Every now and then you get a good weekend.

So I attended easter cookouts two days in a row. Ate plenty of good food, played with kids, taught someone how to throw a frisbee super-far (they didn't need to know I came up with the method after watching Rurouni Kenshin), and it was generally sunny all weekend and, oh, more pleasant than a pound of peppermints all in all.

I think I needed it. The world had me a bit down lately.

Posted: **Mon Apr 21, 2014 3:15 am**

That's awesome, Maxus.

I had a good weekend, too... My brother is having serious problems eating and has been given a strange new diet by his doctor (the third to attempt to solve the problem). Ess is diabetic. And my sister-in-law-to-be is extremely picky. But despite this, I managed to procure and cook a delicious meal that everyone could eat, which made everyone especially happy because they didn't feel ostracized by their dietary struggles. My brother enjoyed it so much he even offered to buy the leftovers (I just gave them to him).

Posted: **Mon Apr 21, 2014 3:20 am**

TarkisFlux wrote: If it boots, you can get data off of it.

Must not make lame Predator reference...

Posted: **Mon Apr 21, 2014 4:19 am**

fbmf wrote:
TarkisFlux wrote: If it boots, you can get data off of it.
Must not make lame Predator reference...

Run! Go! Get to da computah repair shoppa!

I can't tell if my love of cracking painfully bad jokes makes me a masochist or a sadist.

Posted: **Wed Apr 23, 2014 7:28 pm**

So I have a job working for a property manager 'shopping pictures of rental houses so they can be posted. The company that does the house inspections takes the pictures... And I understand that they are not professional photographers, so expecting awesome images is unreasonable.

But whoever took this latest batch of images that I'm working on tipped the smartphone back so the perspective of all the images is batshit insane and the walls look like Vs. Worse, they didn't bother to go all the way into a room before taking the pictures, so there are door frames on either side of each image.

I can't fix that. If I crop out the door frames and fix the perspective, there's only a useless sliver of picture. It's utterly infuriating. I knew there were bad photographers in the world, but seriously... There's a screen on your phone! Look at what you're taking a picture of. ARGH!!!!!!!!

OK. I feel better. Thank you.

Posted: **Wed Apr 23, 2014 8:07 pm**

What's the title of that job? I could totally do it, and would love to. And really need a job that doesn't involve faking a smile while weird strangers ask me stupid questions all day.

Posted: **Wed Apr 23, 2014 8:25 pm**

Sorry, Prak. The job is called the-wife-of-the-ad-copyist-knows-how-to-use-photoshop-so-can-we-pay-her-to-edit-images-so-the-property-manager-doesn't-have-to-do-it-himself. I have the job because Ess has been freelance writing for years and pimping my 'shop skills off on the side.

I really like the job, actually, but the photographer was so bad on some of the last houses that looking at the pictures made me motion sick.

If you're interested in freelance work like that, try hitting up oDesk and making a profile.

The Gaming Den

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