Florida was a blast. Joe, Lorian, Mason and myself flew out to visit Doug for a few days in Gainesville. I can't report much on the town because, well, we didn't really see much of it. What we did do was eat food and play games, so it counts as a great vacation in my book.
The travel itself was largely uneventful for me, though the other three had a grand olde time getting out there. I did have a stopover at SFO, arriving at 9:55pm, to discover (on an empty stomach) that pretty much everything closes at 10pm. Fortunately, Subway stays open 24/7 and was happy to provide me with some belly-filler.
Oh, but what about the visit? Ah yes, games galore. Joe brought a Wii and 360, and I packed the Guitar Hero gear (Doug already has a PS2 available). A good deal of fun was had with Wii Sports, with a surprising amount of time being spent on golf. Doug and Mason also had a showdown in boxing. They went balls-out from the get go, wearing themselves out before they even finished with the pre-match tutorial.
The 360 didn't get as much love, but Lorian got a chance to try out Viva Pinata. There was some rocking-out with Guitar Hero 2, of course, as the coop mode is still a hit any time we gather. It was Doug's first time, but he got the hang of the basics pretty quick, and I didn't even have to give him the usual follow-up lecture about the different timing needs of the left- and right-hands. Also, Joe still loves to pick the songs I hate (good music, just unpleasant to play): "Rock This Town" and "Psychobilly Freakout".
I saved the best for last -- we also prepped for D&D3 and Serenity (system based on Firefly) one-shots. Presented in the order we played...
Doug DMed the D&D3 game, with a basic premise along the lines of "You've gone to Mexico to avoid the cops. What now?" Our initial briefing stated that our characters shouldn't mind running with a bad crowd, so a bad crowd we were. Balancing the mixed motives of the party proved interesting, but I think we fared pretty well. Sure, there were a few opposed rolls in the party, but only a few, and it was a lot of fun figuring out how to get the party to work. Mason and I played the "muscle" (neither with a positive str mod), Lorian the brains, and Joe the clever. I find it interesting that, IC, Joe's character and my own got along (possibly) the best, despite nearly-diametrically-opposed alignments. Then again, maybe that's just what he wanted me to think. I was playing LE, and I think Joe was playing CN, but it's impossible to be sure -- really, he could have been any non-lawful, as he kept it pretty close to the chest.
Oh, yes, and then there was the Serenity game. Joe assumed the role of GM, and the mission was a "simple" smash-and-grab. I say "simple" because, well, you know it never is. Doug played muscle/medic, with Mason playing the doctor-proper who'd somehow avoided the Hippocratic oath. Lorian played the sneaky-talky (well, mostly sneaky), and Mike^2 (wait, he was on the trip? Nope, I'm getting to that!) played our trusty captain and hacker extrordinaire. I doubled up on the part-time muscle with Doug, as well as ship's cook and resident tick-tick-boom. The real fun here was having Mike^2 telecommute in. Using iChatAV went mostly without issue (one spout of problems that turned out to be our fault, and a video freeze-up later on that we never fully identified, but suspect was the result of another application causing problems on Mason's laptop). A bit of fine-tuning is needed if we're going to do this again in the future, but it was certainly very cool from our end (out in Florida). Mike^2 was only present via video-uplink in-game as well, so it worked great, but I'd like to see how well this works for less-contrived gaming scenarios as well. I've already been conferring w/ Mike^2 on how to iron out the kinks on his end.
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Well, the one that was our fault was easy to fix by making sure I'm only logged on in one place.
I'm less sure about the other, but next time I'll just make sure I quit Chicken of the VNC before we start.
My laptop's trackpad button has been a bit flaky (physically; it works fine but it feels like it's "catching" on something occasionally -- ok, that's a bad description but I'm not sure how to give a good one without showing you) since I got back, so I may need to confer with you at some point. For now, I hope that goes away.
I think the "muscle" in the D & D game was pretty effective, lack of strength bonus notwithstanding.
Sounds like a good trip. Hopefully I'll be able to make it out at some point (maybe if that proposed August trip materializes).
I'm curious about the Serenity RPG, I just re-watched all of Firefly last week with Vanessa (who hadn't seen it) and am in a Serenity kind of mood.
And I agree, "Psychobilly Freakout" is highly unpleasant to play. Also "Institutionalized".
Mason - Yuppers. On being the "muscle", especially, though do you realize I could count on one hand the total damage I did? Of course, if you gave me half credit for all sneak attack damage I facilitated with flanking, I'd be teh hugeness.
So, yeah, my job was flanking bonuses, as well as playing the executioner and performing the coup de grace.
AG - Ouch. I'd forgotten about "Institutionalized", but I felt it in my hands by the time I was done reading the song title. That, and I haven't even cleared it on Expert yet. ><
As far as the Serenity rules go, they're pretty damn simple. I like the simplification profided by the general/specialized skills, allowing a simple means to acquire a lot of decent-level general knowledge or very focused specifics. The rolling mechanic is also very simple, but I think it's a bit lack-luster when it comes to very-high standard deviations.
There are some probabilistic oddities in the dice mechanics that really bug me. For all except the final point spent in a stat, the marginal gain in the expectation is fixed and the deviation slowly gets worse, but that last point is signicantly better in both regards (adding a D2 to the roll instead of kicking the base die up a notch).
"Coup de grace! Coup de grace! Coup de grace!"
The flanking facilitation was much appreciated... even with my critical fumble, I dished out a good bit of damage between my various turns swinging at things.
That's one thing I've grown to like about rolling a monk -- whenever someone asks, "am I flanking?", you get to be the answer.
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