Enemy of Entropy

R.I.P. Robert Asprin

22 May 2008, 10:39 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under Reading.

I only encoun­tered him per­son­ally once, on a panel the first time I attended a con (Dragon Con, 1988 or so?). I thought he was an arro­gant jerk. I’ve heard from oth­ers that he could be quite nice, so maybe it was some kind of schtick. I did enjoy all the Thieves World books, despite their unre­lent­ing darkness.

He was sched­uled to be at Mar­Con this week­end, so it seems his death was sud­den and unex­pected. I wish the best to his fam­ily and friends.

TotD: Robin Laws on Roleplaying Games

10 April 2008, 11:22 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under RPGs, Thought of the Day.

I hadn’t ever thought of it this way, but I think the man is on to something.

“One of my pet the­o­ries about the pop­u­lar­ity of role­play­ing games goes like this. Role­play­ing is fan­tasy shop­ping for guys. That is, men would, as a group, be more inter­ested in shop­ping if a) it meant never hav­ing to leave the house and b) they were shop­ping for super-​​powers. In that case, the typ­i­cal role­play­ing rule­book is like a Nieman-​​Marcus cat­a­log for super-​​powers. Depend­ing on the game sys­tem and char­ac­ter type, these extra­or­di­nary abil­i­ties might be called feats, spells, schticks, dis­ci­plines, skills, high tech gear, psion­ics, or what­ever. For lack of a a bet­ter all-​​encompassing term, I refer to these things as crunchy bits.“
Robin D. Laws, Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering

Secrets of Good Game Mastering cover

MomoCon?

28 January 2008, 10:50 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Fun, Geekery, RPGs.

Any­body going to Momo­Con here in Atlanta? I’d never heard of it before today. It’s free, and may be in its sec­ond year (I’m not sure). It seems quite small, which could be nice. It’s local, which is a big plus for us. I’m unclear as to whether there’s any gam­ing hap­pen­ing or not, and there’s no men­tion of filk­ing that I can see.

Romance and Roleplaying

12 January 2008, 11:53 pm. 5 Comments. Filed under Family, Fun, Geekery, RPGs, Relationships.

Sam has talked about this sub­ject in sev­eral of his pod­casts, but I don’t think I’ve ever tried to address it. I may fail mis­er­ably, but I’ll try.

Sam and I had one of our twice-​​weekly “date nights” tonight. That means that from about 7pm ’til we go to bed, we do noth­ing but have fun with each other. The girl amuses her­self oth­er­wise, or goes out, and we do what­ever we like. Usu­ally, that means we spend some time gam­ing.
Read on…

Movie Overdose

31 December 2007, 8:42 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Family, Movies.

We’ve watched so many movies in the last few weeks that they’re all run­ning together. We just fin­ished The Trans­form­ers. Yes­ter­day was Baby­lon 5: A Call to Arms (we’d seen that before, of course) and Catch Me If You Can. Some day before that was Harry Pot­ter & the Pris­oner of Azk­a­ban as well as Gob­let of Fire. Sam watched Order of the Phoenix, but I haven’t seen it yet. He also watched Gods and Gen­er­als, but I couldn’t even pre­tend to be inter­ested, and the accents were too offen­sive to my ears. There’s been at least one sea­son, maybe more, of West Wing. We’ve still got Star­dust and some other stuff that Sam rented. My brain is explod­ing and I can’t remem­ber the rest, but I know there was more.

And what do I want to watch? Fire­fly. Which I can’t see, because Sam’s par­ents have our Fire­fly DVDs. Includ­ing Seren­ity. Bah.

Sam really, really loves movies. Can you tell? I love my man. I wish he had a movie-​​viewing buddy nearby so he could see stuff in the actual theater.

Sam’s last day off is tomor­row. It’s been so good to have him home! I’m ter­ri­bly spoiled all the time, but more than a week with him at home has been absolutely incredible.

 

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