ChrisTalbot.com

CyberBoard was mentioned to me last night, and I'd like to give it a try if at all possible. I noticed there was a Diplomacy add-in for it. Hmm...

I'm a little sleepy this morning, as I didn't get home until 11:45 last night. And then it took at least half an hour or more to get to sleep. I was still too wound up from two things -- drinking coffee in the evening and having a hell of a good time playing La Citta with some guys from the Toronto Area Boardgaming Society.

I joined TABS around the end of last week, and it was right after I sent an introductory message to the group that I noticed someone was looking for gamers in the Pickering area. Woo hoo! Lucky me. Gamers in my area. It turns out there was a small group of guys planning on getting together to play La Citta, and the host invited me to join.

So last night, we met up around 6:30 at David's house. I met David, and then I was introduced to both Chris and Xavier. Then Xavier broke out La Citta and we started learning the rules and playing. The game itself is similar to games like The Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, but it's a little more complicated and a lot more cutthroat. >:)

To use the old tried and true phrase: A good time was had by all.

And I can't wait to get together with these guys to play games again.

I'm just tired this morning. I hope whatever I wrote made sense.

Okay, this is just sickening. The Law pointed this out to me. There are three (count 'em -- three!) movies either being released or already released this year based on H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Check it out:

Steven Spielberg's film with Tom Cruise.

David Michael Latt's film with C. Thomas Howell.

Timothy Hines' film with a bunch of actors I don't know.

And it looks like the only one that tried to actually remain true to the original novel was the third one with all the unknowns.

Quite some time ago, I downloaded a variant for Zombies!!! that lets you play the game solo. I've been meaning to give it a try for quite some time. In fact, that's what I had intended to do on Sunday. Jacquie was sleeping. I was bored. I broke Zombies out and started to get set up. That's when Jacquie came downstairs and noticed I was going to play. She wanted in, so I nixed the solo variant test and the two of us shot up some zombies. She won. How typical.

So last night, she was starting to do some work on a correspondence course she's taking this summer and I set up the game in order to play the solo variant. It worked out well, and I managed to get through the game without getting killed. However, some things didn't sit well with me about the variant. I think it needs some polish, so I might take the gist of the variant and make my own changes.

Now as a gamer, I'm not superstitious about dice. I know there are a lot of gamers who are very superstitious about their dice out there, but I'm not one of them. I'll talk about luck and all that, and I'll occasionally say something like "the dice are against me," but I don't really believe it. Logically, luck in rolling dice is no more than randomness. At the end of my life, all of the dice rolling I've done will balance out, and I'll have made as many critical hits as I have critical misses. ;)

Anyway, with that in mind, my D&D session last night almost turned me superstitious. Apologies to Logan for telling this story, as it's his character at the centre of it ... but you have to admit that it's a story that needs to be told, man.

There is a spell in D&D called Phantasmal Killer. It's basically meant to be used to scare a living creature to death. Mechanically, a wizard casts it on a target, and the target must first make a Will save, and then a Fortitude save. If the target fails both, he just dies. If he makes the Will save, nothing happens. If he blows the Will save but makes the Fort save, he takes 3d6 points of damage.

Anyway, so two sessions ago, the party entered a room with two trolls. Mayhem ensued, and Rawl's fighter (Arjunan) started to get the shit kicked out of him. So Logan's wizard (Arkelos) primes up one of the two Phantasmal Killer spells he has memorized, chooses one of the trolls as his target and lets the spell fly. Now, Logan knows (but Arkelos doesn't) that trolls have a crappy Will save of only +3, but they have a +11 Fort save. More than likely, a troll will blow the Will save, make the Fort save and take damage. With some luck (note: randomness that ends up in a low roll), the troll will keel over from fright.

So I make the troll's Will save. Bad luck for Arkelos. I rolled a 20 on the die. Add in the +3, and the troll made it. So the troll takes no damage and we continue.

In the next round, Arkelos decides to try it again. He fires off his spell and I roll the troll's Will save. What do I get, but a 19? With the bonus, it's another successful save. Logan is flabbergasted, but even he knows it's possible.

Last night, the party (sans Rich/Kuruk, who was camping/being put out to stud) encounters a troll with two levels of fighter. He's a mean bastard, and Arjunan steps up to once again get his ass kicked. Arkelos once again has two Phantasmal Killer spells in memory.

His turn to act comes up, and Arkelos hurls the spell. I make the troll's Will save. A 20 turns up. Logan gives me this look that says, "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were cheating." Of course, he does know better, and I was not cheating.

Arjunan continues to fight and the troll continues to beat him to a bloody pulp. Arkelos' turn comes up again, and he hurls the second (and only remaining) Phantasmal Killer spell he has in memory. I roll for the troll's Will save, and ... no shit, I fuckin' swear I rolled another 20. I'm laughing too hard to actually say what I rolled, so I pick the die up as it is and turn the face-up result to Logan.

I believe the words that came out of Logan's mouth were something to the effect of "fuck you," but I could be wrong. Again, I was laughing too hard to really get his reaction.

So what the hell are the odds of that happening? At this point, I'm almost ready to say that Arkelos is cursed when it comes to using that spell ... or when it comes to using that spell on trolls. :)

Much to my dismay, Wyldstar had distributor problems last week and didn't get its weekly shipment of comic books. That has left me without Conan #17, which is kind of too bad. So instead, I wandered up to Worlds Collide and bought (finally) Preacher: Gone To Texas, the graphic novel that collects the first seven issues of Preacher. I've been meaning to buy that for years. It's an awesome book.

Also, I've been chatting a lot of war games on the Toronto War Gaming Meetup Group's forums, and I was itching to add a new game to my collection. Worlds Collide has had a copy of Guild of Blades' The Trojan War for a very long time, and I finally decided to drop the ten bucks on it. After reading through the rules, I have to say it looks like a lot of fun.

Sunday ended up being a gaming day. Jacquie and I played Zombies!!! in the afternoon, and then I ran my D&D session in the evening. Rich wasn't able to make it, and the group was just too weak without the fourth member of its party, so we cut things short and ended about 8:15. Then we just shot the shit for the rest of the evening.

Now that I've had some time to think about Batman Begins, I have to say I still think it was a good movie, but there were some things that did bother me ... over and above the action scenes, that is.

Colours changed so as not to spoil the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

Katie Holmes really is an untalented, little twit. While she doesn't come across as really annoying, I just don't think she can act worth a damn. In Batman Begins, she's really just there to be some kind of conscience for Bruce Wayne. Also, I can't buy her as a district attorney. Ain't happenin', dude.

One problem stuck out while I was watching the movie, but then I forgot about it for a couple of days. I was reminded of it when I read a review. What is it? It's this: So Ra's Al Ghul is using the microwave to instantly nuke water in Gotham City. Okay, cool. He's moving through the city, and water is vaporizing instantly. Sure, no problem. ... Wait. One problem. Humans are eighty percent water. Why aren't they vaporizing? Still, I can accept this as comic book logic, but not in real world logic.

I really liked how Christopher Nolan didn't kill off the two villains. The Scarecrow escaped. We didn't actually see Ra's Al Ghul die, so he could turn up again in a sequel.

It was quite the neat little thing that the various inmates of Arkham Asylum escaped near the climax of the film. Now there are all these wackos out there that could end up becoming supervillains. The little hint about The Joker at the end fits into this. The Joker could've been one of those inmates who escaped. And despite the fact some people don't want to see The Joker in the sequel, I sure as hell do. He's the coolest villain in the Batman comics, and he's the Batmeister's arch-nemesis. He has to make an appearance. I just hope Nolan doesn't kill him off like that dipshit Tim Burton did.

It's still the best Batman movie to be made yet, even with its little problems.

Oh yeah ... and still no voicemail on TalkBroadband. The alternate number they were supposed to connect me for me is also not functional. I'm not annoyed yet, but I'm heading in that general direction.

...and one DJ's purpose was to get Stompin' Tom Connors added to the Live 8 line-up. His methods have got him suspended, though.

Doug Brunell is a sick, sick man ... but he has awesome ideas. Like this one.

Okay, so I spent yesterday fiddling with TalkBroadband while I was working. It's actually pretty good. The call quality was, believe it or not, superior to my Bell landline. However, there seems to problems on Primus' end with managing new accounts properly. I have no voicemail, and the alternate number I requested is not in service.

The real test is in finding out how long it takes Primus to fix these problems.

Crossing my fingers...

Well, nearly a week and a half after placing my order, my Primus TalkBroadband gateway is here. After dinner, I set the thing up and made sure it was working. So far, so good ... although the voicemail service is down right now and I'm not sure if the alternate number is functional. I'll have to experiment with it a bit more tomorrow.

More details later ... when there are some.

For some time now, there's been an idea circulating throughout the gaming niche that the participation in roleplaying games is a form of art. It's not referring to the books themselves. It's referring to the act of playing. Since RPGs require the use of some acting, some drama and various other little bits and pieces that fall into artistic categories, I believe the argument is that what you are doing during gaming sessions is creating art.

It's a bizarre idea, and I don't think it's one that I agree with. I think RPGs can be more than just games, but I have a hard time defining them as art.

Jacquie and I saw Batman Begins yesterday, and I have to say I really liked it. It was definitely better than the first Tim Burton Batman flick from the late 1980s. Unfortunately, the movie was far from perfect. Christopher Nolan used very choppy and confusing camera work for the fight scenes, and that's something that kind of bugs me. I want to watch fight scenes, not try to keep track of what's going on. But that's really my only complaint.

As Steve and Rawl have already mentioned on their own blogs, the three of us met for coffee last night near Steve's place at Yonge and Sheppard. When Rawl picked me up and we headed out, he told me he wanted to stop in at Winners before going to the coffee shop. I haven't been in a Winners in years, so this was the first time in who knows how long.

To sum things up really quickly, going to Winners ended up costing me money. I snagged a half-decent poker chip set for $40 (regularly at least $70). So now I need to a game going. I've been wanting to have a Texas Hold'Em night for a very long time, and now that I've spent a bit of cash on chips, I have to make sure I have a poker night. I need to justify that expense.

I know The Law occasionally has what he refers to as "poker tournaments," even though one person who participates says it's not nearly so organized. They just play for fun. There currently isn't any money involved. I guess they just divvy up a certain value of chips and then play until someone wins all. I don't really know for sure. I don't know how poker tournaments are organized. I can only guess.

Anyway, any of my friends out there who read this interested in playing some poker? Maybe just for fun or for low stakes?

I've been keeping tabs on a few RPG.net threads discussing the idea of using Wushu for Star Wars. I think it would work well, and I'm considering lifting the idea and using it myself for a one-shot or short campaign sometime in the future (whenever the hell I have time to do so).

Anyway, one guy has already made it work. Check this and this out. That's exactly what a Star Wars campaign should be like.

Ever since Jacquie and I moved into our townhouse nearly two years ago (has it really been that long?), we've been kind of lax about meeting the neighbours. We've met and had brief discussions with our immediate neighbours, but we don't really know anybody else. Tonight, I expect that to change a little bit, as we'll be finally attending a condo meeting.

Woo hoo! ThunderCats is coming to DVD.

This is probably one of the more bizarre products I've heard of in awhile, but hey, it sounds interesting. Perfect for the porn surfer, I guess. ;)

Bell finally sent someone around to fix my phone line on Saturday morning. I went almost six days without a landline phone. I am not impressed.

There's nothing quite so calming as a barbecue and a beer.

It's going on four days since I lost my landline phone service. Bell is at the top of my shit list right now. Its so-called "customer service" reps are freakin' useless. I've spoken to three different people now -- one on Sunday night, one on Wednesday morning and one this morning. The guy I talked to this morning told me there's a technician strike going on and that I was shit out of luck (my words, not his). I don't care if there's a strike right now. Obviously there are people doing the technical and repair work. They just refuse to bump me up in their rotation, even though it's a guarantee I called in before anybody who would be getting technical service and support today.

And unfortunately, Primus' customer service told me the company is not serving my area for TalkBroadband -- and it seems to have the largest rollout. My cell phone is just about out of minutes. I think I'm out of options.

Very, very pissed off.

I'm not Dalton McGuinty's biggest fan, but I have to admire the new Ontario-wide anti-smoking law.

Very neat. CBC Radio 3 has launched a podcast.

I've been getting ever closer to completing my Wraith: The Oblivion collection. I still have several books to track down and buy, but I figure I should be able to complete the entire RPG line within the next couple of years. Some of the books have become quite rare, and they're nearly impossible to track down -- at a reasonable price, that is. Dark Reflections: Spectres tends to go for US$60 or more because of its rarity. Absurd, isn't it?

I know it's probably wrong for an IT/telecom journalist to come out and state they hate a company in the sectors they cover, but y'know what? After the shoddy customer service I've experienced from Bell Canada over the last few days, I've come to loathe the company.

Just because I want to vent, here's my story...

On Sunday night, the last call I was able to make or receive was at about 4:40 p.m. That's when Logan called me to tell me that he and Brian were dropping by early for the Mechamorphosis session. Somewhere between 4:40 and 5:30, my phone line went dead. Then a couple of hours later, it was up again, but I couldn't even really make out the dial tone through the really, really loud buzzing. It went completely dead again the next day.

Simply put, the line was fucked. Once the Mechamorphosis session was over, I trudged my way downstairs and called 310-BELL to discuss my problem with a Bell customer service representative. This used up about fifteen minutes of time on my cell phone (which is on Telus Mobility's service, not Bell Mobility's, I might add). Annoying, but a requirement, as I had no other way to call Bell.

I was told the earliest a technician could come around was Wednesday. I asked if it could be done before that, and I was told that nope, it wasn't possible. Fine. I would make do, for a few days.

This morning, I used my cell phone to pick up my landline voicemail messages. There was one waiting. Apparently someone from Bell came by yesterday (not today, but yesterday -- and nobody told me this!), did something outside and then left. He called my voicemail and left a message saying the problem was fixed. I only found out about the message because I called into my voicemail today from my cell phone, even though I had explicitly told the customer service person on Sunday to contact me via my cell. The jackass assumed I wasn't home, looked around, played with some wires outside and left, assuming the problem was fixed. The problem is not fixed, dammit! Our phone service is still dead!

I reamed out a Bell customer service person who told me that the earliest he could schedule another appointment was for the 11th! I told him that was unacceptable, because I work from home and require that phone line to be operational. And we freakin' pay for it to be operational! He said he would put in a rush service request, but there was no guarantee that it would be fixed before June 11th.

Man, this pisses me off to no end.

If it's not fixed today, Bell loses our business tomorrow. The telecom market isn't like it was even just a couple of years ago. We have other options. We could go completely cell phone, which isn't really the option I would prefer -- but it is an option, nevertheless; and Telus has always bent over backwards to make me a happy customer.

We can also sign up for a VoIP service. That would require some finagling inside the house, as the router is in the basement and we would want the ability to have phone service throughout the house. I'm a little leery of VoIP residential service because I would have to rely on my broadband Internet connection remaining stable. My Rogers high-speed service has been pretty good, but it does have its hiccups here and there. Another problem is that none of the residential VoIP service providers currently offering Ajax exchanges. The closest I can come is Oshawa, which would make calling Toronto a long distance call. I could go with a Toronto number, but then that would make us long distance to Jacquie's parents.

I'm already weighing my options. Unfortunately, none of the options are perfect. However, I'd rather have some service than no service, which is what I'm currently getting from Bell.

The news is out. Green Ronin will be releasing Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Edition in September. Does a two-year-old game really need a second edition? How about just errata and clarifications of rules included in future printings?

EDIT: Correction. Three years. It was released in 2002, not 2003.

I ran the second session of the Mechamorphosis campaign tonight. Everything was going okay -- not well, as I'm still trying to improve my GMing of a narrative-focused game -- until we started rolling dice. Then things went to shit. I'm not running this system again. It's utter crap.

Logan, Rich and Brian are trying to convince me that we should switch to Hero System, but the sheer complexity of character generation kind of puts me off. Not that I expect them to give up trying to convince me, of course. I think all three of them absolutely love the system, and they've accepted the idea that Mechamorphosis will run best with it.

We shall see what happens from here. The campaign might be dead ... or it might be going through a mechanics transition.

I've been in somewhat of an aggressive mood the last couple of days, and I've been picking arguments just for the sake of picking arguments. I seriously need to calm down. Otherwise, tomorrow night's gaming session is going to go really badly.

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes."

It seems that this is the one line from Revenge of the Sith that people have really latched onto. And the funniest thing is how ironic it is. "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" is an absolute itself. Does this mean Obi-Wan was a Sith Lord? ;)

I've changed my mind. I don't want Cartoon Action Hour. This review makes character creation seem more complicated than I would like.

On Sunday night, I'm supposed to run the second session of the Mechamorphosis campaign I started back in mid-March. I wish I could say I was looking forward to it, but I've really come to hate the system.

Character creation is time-consuming and not enjoyable, so making NPCs is a real bitch. The d20 ruleset in this incarnation is too gritty to properly pull off the feel of the old Transformers cartoon. My Mutants & Masterminds damage save modification didn't work at all. In fact, I think it made things even more lethal.

The oddities of scale really screw with my brain. Player characters currently range from the size of a big human to the size of a several-storey building, whereas the Autobots and Decepticons in the first season of the show really only came in three sizes -- normal-sized being the size of a house (Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream and most Tranformers), small being maybe twice the size of a human (Bumblebee), and tiny 'bots being about the size of a human (Rumble, Laserbeak, Ravage -- Soundwave's little guys). I have a hard time picturing a gigantic robot duking it out with a little pipsqueak robot and it being a fair fight. :-/

Basically, I'm just belly-aching about the game. I didn't enjoy it the last time out, and the only way I can see it being any fun for me is by scrapping the entire system, tossing the character builds out and porting everything to a system that is a lot lighter on rules and more heavy on the feel of after-school cartoons. If I could find a copy of Cartoon Action Hour, I'd probably look into porting it to that, as the game is designed to simulate after-school and Saturday morning cartoons. I haven't found a copy of it, and Amazon.ca seems to suggest it's out of print -- which I'm pretty sure is complete bullshit ... but whatever the case, Amazon doesn't have it.

Another potential idea would be Wushu, but it would probably need some modifications. At least character creation would be damn quick, though.