Wednesday, July 30, 2008

This Week

Best Sales Week of the Year. That was last week. The week before was in the top 3. In retrospect, the new Magic: Eventide release sales are way slower than I expected. I'm told Summer Magic releases are like that, but man. I know it will pick up later. Also not helping sales this week was the re-paving of the parking lot; half on Monday and half on Tuesday. I'm guessing sales are down about 20% from that. Luckily they finished before our evening rush.

Spamalamadingdong. The more tight it gets for game manufacturers, the higher the frequency of their emails. Some of these companies send me so much stuff that I've stopped opening the mail. I want to tell them "I'm sorry, but my level of interest in your company, based on my sales, doesn't allow me to spend the time to read these." If they called on the phone that often, nobody would think it was acceptable. If you want a guess at who they are, check out the companies that are down from a year ago on my Sunday post.

40K. I'm painting up my additional Apocalypse infantry squad while I await my Forge World order. I allow myself to order stuff if it will take a while, but I require that I paint what I have before something else arrives. After the squad and the Forge World Hellhound, I get to pick up the Hellhammers. I don't have the money anyway, so it's a good rule.

Traveller Character. I'm making a character for Fulminata's RPOL game. It's not quite as confusing as Mutants & Masterminds, but I couldn't have done it without the narrative in the book. My first attempt was flat out wrong. My second attempt was mostly right. My third attempt for someone else was WAY broken, but fixable. My fourth character was juuuuust right. One problem is that if you follow the flow-chart for generation, you only age when you bail out of a career. If it were software, many Traveller characters would be 18 year old supermen.

In case my computer blows up and Carbonite fails:

Petty Officer 3rd Class Rendell Farseer
Age: 42, 6 terms, 37,000 credits starting money
Str 5 (-1), Dex 7 (+0), End 6 (+0), Int 13 (+2), Edu 4 (-1), Soc 6 (+0)
Retirement Pay (Navy): 10,000 cr. Year.
Ships Shares: 3
Credits: 1,480
Skills: Computer 0, Deception 1, Drive: Wheeled 0, Engineer: Manoeuvre Drive 1, Engineer: Jump Drive 1, Engineer: Electronics 1, Engineer: Life Support 1, Engineer Power: 2, Flyer: Wing 1, Gun Combat: Energy Rifle 0, Gunner: Turrets 0, Mechanic 4, Pilot 1, Sensors 2, Survival 0, Tactics (Naval) 1, Vacc Suit 1, Zero-G 0.
Equipment:
Plasma Rifle
Auto pistol (210 cr.)
Dagger (10 cr.)
Flak Jacket (TL8) (300 cr)
Wafer Jack (TL12), Expert 2: Life Support software on wafer, Expert 2: Electronics software on wafer. (total 30,000 cr.)
Engineer Toolkit (1,000 cr)
Mechanical Toolkit (1,000 cr)

9 comments:

  1. Wow, you rolled really bad for your stats or had some really bad stuff happen during your career. Don't let him get in too many fights :)

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  2. He rolled below average overall on his stats, but the one 12 made them worth keeping (I'm letting people re-roll if they roll totally crappy stats).

    BTW, since this is my first time running something on RPOL (and my first time running anything for several years) I'm limiting participation to people I already know. That said, if I know you and you're interested in playing, there's still room for a couple more players.

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  3. Traveller is/was my favorite game.

    I remember playing it back when I was a teenager, and having all these middle-aged characters, and feeling funny about that. I got over it...

    Now however, seeing your 42 y.o character who has had a career (that he probably burnt out on) and is now ready to head off and adventure makes a *ton* of sense (being 42 myself).

    Good luck with the Traveller campaign. My favorite of the settings was MT, followed by T-GURPS, followed by classic.

    Fuliminata, you going to blog about it? I'd read it. Talk about a Traveller nerd...

    Speaking of which Gary, your campaign blog has sort of slowed down, eh?

    best -

    chris

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  4. So I'm guessing that after correcting for that flowchart problem, the character Gary and I worked on for me is not 30, but actually Methuselah.

    Shame.

    If we had stopped after the military career, he'd have been 38/42 and a lousy character with few skills, and two enemies.

    The Merchant career was essentially a waste of 4 years.

    If the LE career came first, he'd have done fine... that's when most of the good things came into play... in a 30+ year career.

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  5. You kept decent notes so we might be able to back-track. If you want to stop by and try again, I'm getting much better at this. ;)

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  6. I haven't decided if I'm going to blog about the campaign or not. I've set one up in case I need it for the campaign, or just decide to document it, but I'm pretty busy just trying to get it running right now.

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  7. I'd be happy to roll up a character. I have the core book and used to have all of the v1 books - now long gone :(

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  8. btw Fulminata (sorry to really threadbust here), where are you running your Traveller RPOL?

    Maybe I will run something like that too...

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  9. David, I sent you an email. Go ahead and roll up a character. If you have the time you might get together with Gary to do it. Everyone seems to be making the same mistakes the first time though, so he might be able to help you avoid that.

    librarian, I'm using rpol.net. I've never run anything there before, but I've been playing in a game there for several months now. There are things that I'd improve if I could, but it's adequate.

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