It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Feeling pretty traumatized. The Claremont/Davis Excalibur is good, and the Davis sans Claremont stuff is all kinds of fun if you like that kind of thing, which I do. But eventually Davis goes away and it becomes all fill in authors and lousy art and X-Men crossovers.
Conveniently, you can tell where the really horrendous stuff begins, because there are hologram covers. No kidding. I’ve never owned a comic with a hologram cover before. I feel kind of unclean.
WISH 34: Non-Standard Characters:
Do you prefer to build a character with a unique concept, or do you prefer a simple or more standard concept to start with?
I’m pretty prone to the unique concept. I like characters with an odd angle, or with weird hooks. The most “normal” character I’ve played in the last couple of years has been a half-orc barbarian, and even he was a trifle strange. He was on a quest to prove that half-orcs were a people, just like elves or dwarves or gnomes. Despite his unattractiveness, he might have wound up founding a church or something. I’m not the kind of guy who delights in bringing out the unique aspects of the standard character types, although I respect that tendency.
Mind you, I’m not the kind of person who plays mind flayer PCs. It’s useless to be offbeat if you don’t have the ability to interact with the rest of the PCs on a long term basis. Being weird is not a license to make other players unhappy. The oddities tend to be more psychological than physical, since those are easier to adjust for party viability.
Do you find that your preference correlates with a preference for elaborate initial backgrounds or with background development in play?
Maybe. I tend to be a Develop At Start kind of a guy. I want interesting things to happen to my characters on a psychological level during the campaign, but I have a pretty firm idea of what the character is going to start out as. In order to enjoy the journey, though, the point at which I started from has to be firm.
Since I almost always play wonky characters, I almost always have the personalities set when I start playing, since the personality is usually the biggest wonkiness.
If you?re a GM, do you find unique-concept characters easy or hard to GM for?
Easy. They come with built in hooks. I don’t really think unique-concept characters covers munchkins, because those aren’t character concepts, those are collections of numbers. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference, in my experience. If they can’t give you a rational story as to why the half-ogre (or insect spirit, or right hand man of Alex Able) is going to be able to interact with the party, they’re likely munchkins.
Come to think of it, it seems to me that player willingness to overcome the obstacles inherent to weird characters and party viability is a good way to distinguish between munchkins and people who just want something offbeat. In my book, munchkins are both those people who want their PCs to be uber death machines, and those people who want their PCs to get all the spotlight — and forcing the rest of the party to accomodate their strange quirks is a way to get lots of spotlight time. Being the best in the world at swordfighting is, when you get right down to it, just a specialized form of spotlight hogging.
What about playing alongside them?
Again, not a problem for me, given the comments above.
It’s almost like a bandwagon. Tony Blair said today that Blix will report to the Security Council again, on February 28th. Getting kinda chilly out there by yourself, Bush.
Planned Parenthood. This restriction affects some of the groups which have been working to fight STDs the longest.
Meanwhile, there are lawsuits pending in Iowa against InnerChange, an organization that received funds from Texas under Bush’s earlier faith-based initiatives. In fact, Bush has cited InnerChange as the kind of faith-based program he wants to fund as President. This isn’t necessarily proof that Bush intends to break down the wall between church and state, but even if he’s aghast at this sort of thing, it does tend to show that his faith-based initatives have failed to include proper controls in the past. Kevin Drum has the whole story.
Well, crap. US Airways lost my reservation. No Dundracon for me.
Damn it. I’m really pissed off but I don’t feel like ranting.
Japan has threatened to launch a preemptive strike on North Korea. This is pretty much right on the edge of violating the World War II surrender terms. Possibly those are obsolete and should be reconsidered anyhow, but I’d like to see that done under less frantic circumstances.
Man, I’m glad I don’t live in Northeast Asia right now.
Edit: Thanks to my anonymous commentor for correcting my geography.
Well, I’m of three or four minds about this. OK, so Mike Meyers has struck a deal to do what he’s calling “film sampling.” I.e., he’s gonna insert himself or other actors into old movies. Remixes. See also Kung Pow.
I want to see what Meyers does with this concept, cause I think he’s comedic gold, even after the last two Austin Powers flicks. But I hate the way the Variety story calls films “properties.” But I think that this sort of remixing will demonstrate the value of having more creative works in the public domain, since it’ll show what people can do given the right to edit. Except that Meyers isn’t gonna be working with public domain movies. And how the hell does this jibe with the whole ClearPlay issue? Are they really saying “It’s OK to screw with the director’s original vision as long as you own the rights to the movie.”?
Well, of course they are. Still, this move blows the hell out of comments like “There are those who would revise a film for what they claim to be benign reasons. But there are others who would alter for pornographic and obscene reasons. To allow one, it would seem you must allow the other.” That’s Jack Valenti talking, there.
You know, I think next Valentine’s Day I’m going to Paris. That’s just cool.
Nothing funner than slamming in a Movable Type upgrade first thing in the morning before I take off to sunny California. Looks immensely cool, though. Let me know if you see any problems. It’s worth installing, though, for a myriad of reasons readers won’t notice.
The above was egregious, but also tested the text formatting. As usual, let me know if anything breaks.
Edit: woo! Text formatting improvements — just work!
So here’s what happened.
About a month ago, I picked up the four phonebooks of Essential X-Men on a whim. For those unfamiliar, phonebooks are cheap black and white reprints of old comic books. It’s one of the few ways we see long runs of classic comics kept in print. These were the first umpteen issues of Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men, including the Phoenix Saga, and they are darned good. I’d never read ‘em before. The energy of the writing is very engaging, and the plotting is solid and fairly complex. This is the X-Men before they got weighed down with too much continuity. Fun.
After finishing ‘em, I had that completist impulse to go read all the X-Men. I quickly did what I always do when I get that urge; I read the rec.arts.comics.marvel.xbooks FAQ and remind myself of the hash they made of Jean Grey until the impulse goes away.
This time, I was reminded that Warren Ellis’ run on Excalibur represents one of the few significant big chunks of Ellis’ work I’ve never read. After a little more struggle, I convinced myself that it would be OK to read just the Ellis issues, and dropped over to EBay in hopes of finding ‘em. You never know.
That’s where it got bad. I searched on Excalibur, and found an absolutely complete run of every Excalibur-related comic in the world. I mean, everything — the Alan Moore Captain Britain Jasper’s Warp graphic novel, the Wisdom and Pryde mini, the whole damned thing. With no bids on it. And less than an hour to go in the auction, so I didn’t have time to sleep on it and think better of the idea in the morning.
There are now two boxes of Excalibur on my floor, and I’ve been reminded as I reread the FAQ while writing this entry that somewhere in the middle of it all there are gross Phoenix retcons. The Warren Ellis issues start around #85. Fortunately, most of the intervening stuff is Claremont and/or Alan Davis, but there’s a bunch of Scott Lobdell in there too.
If I don’t make it out alive, don’t send in a search party. The risk is too great.
