Hack and Slash is my guilty pleasure.

In the past my characters in PnP games had supporting roles and their skills were not necessarily combat oriented.

The first time I stepped out of this role was in Star Wars (D20). I play a Scoundrel/Jedi Guardian named Sharla Kel. Sharla can kick some major ass. She's got this nice feat called great cleave that means as long as I kill my current opponent in my two attack actions, I can move within a few steps to the next opponent and have two more actions. This feat just allows me to keep going until I fail to kill one. HOOOAH! The first time I REALLY used it, I was giggling maniacally the whole time! The GM thought I was enjoying the killing too much and gave me a darkside point. I tried explaining it was me laughing not my character, but he didn't care!

More recently we started playing AD&D. I decided to play a Swashbuckler. We are starting at 1st level and most of the group were hired on a ship. During our last gaming session the ship came under attack by 3 other ships. I had my character dive head long into battle screaming "AAARRRG!" I was making these awful rolls and missing everything. Here I am, a first level character taking on 5 to 6 opponents at a time! What is really funny about the whole situation is that my character came out without a scratch! Everyone else had arrows sticking out of them and I hadn't lost a single hit point!

I never thought I would enjoy this type of character but I'm loving every minute of it! I recommend everyone try to play a character that is opposite of what your normal comfort zone is. It certainly makes the game more interesting.

What is your stupidity score?

She's got the Friday night blues...

Friday nights at our house have meant gaming night for a long time. It’s the night I usually look forward to all week, the only night I get to talk to adults. Lately though it’s been a tense situation that I almost dread. It’s like there is this giant elephant in the room that everyone is staring at, but nobody wants to talk about.

Are you the type of person who will stick by your friends no matter what they do? I mean really think about that...no matter what? I’m not. Not even close. Neither is my husband Jaycen. We *are* the kind of friends that you can call to help get rid of the body...we wouldn’t even question it. What we will not forgive is hurting children.

Some people should never, ever have children. I’m not just talking about the abusers and molesters, I’m also talking about people who would have children and then get a divorce. When you have children you make a commitment to see that they grow up to be happy, well adjusted adults. You can’t do that if you rip apart their family. Children need a mom and dad ALL THE TIME, what they don’t need is to be shipped back and forth between the two. It’s unforgivable. It’s what one of the guys in the group did. His wife wasn’t a drug addict, she wasn’t abusive...I guess he just found her annoying or something. At any rate, I guess he found someone better, someone he was willing to destroy his family over.

Jaycen when he found out about this was devastated. He has really high expectations of his friends and I think he felt let down. Of the 6 people in our core group, he is the only one who has divorced parents. Most of the rest of the group seem to be able to see shades of gray in the situation. Jaycen only sees the black and white of two little boys experiencing the same horror he felt when his mom and dad sat him down and told him that daddy was moving out. He can’t forgive it and our friend is no longer our friend and is no longer welcome in our home. It would be different if this guy's wife was wanting a divorce...but she doesn’t. He just gave up. He moved on to his new young honey. This wasn’t a casual decision, it hurt to lose his friendship but somethings, you can’t let go.

Now, where does this leave the group? I’m not sure. We’ve been going through the motions lately, but the old camaraderie is gone. It has left both Jaycen and myself wondering if it’s worth it. We told the guys from the beginning that they could go and play with this other guy, but they kept coming to our house. Some of them have turned passive aggressive with us. It’s annoying. If they have a problem with how we handled the situation they should grow some balls and be men about it. They should talk it over with us instead of all the bullshit. I consider everyone of these guys family and I hope we can all get past this and move on because right now, it’s turned the best night of my week into something else.

Random thoughts on feminism and a recent AD&D experience

Okay, I'm not what you would call a feminist...actually, I'm more the antithesis. I believe in traditional family roles. Moms should stay home with the kids and make sure they grow up to be good patriotic citizens. They should only go forth into the workplace when there are no other alternatives, or if their earning potential is higher than their husband's. Dads can make fine stay at home parents as well...just different.
I believe having a parent at home IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR CHILDREN.

This idealism leads to a lot of sacrifices. (Yes, I know it's a shock, but some people actually choose to do the right thing for their children instead of what feels good) In our family it has for sure. We have one vehicle, a hand me down computer, no family vacations and only recently were we able to fit 'paid for TV' into our budget. The rewards are amazing though, I have three extremely well behaved, bright children. The oldest tested in the top 99% in the country on her standardized testing last year. My middle child has an extremely witty mind and comes out with stuff that leaves us all in stitches and my youngest is such an empathetic, loving little guy that you just want to squeeze him all day. These are my rewards and my paycheck. Some things are more important than who dies with the most stuff.

And, completely unrelated to my above preaching...

I had a brush with sexism in a recent game of AD&D. We all made up 1st level characters. Usually I play a cleric or druid but this time I decided to step out of the box and play a swashbuckler. All our characters were given jobs on a ship. The DM in a moment of genius, lets my character know that she is getting paid much less than all her male counter-parts. I was thrown for a loop.

What would a my character's response to that situation in that sort of time be? Acceptance? Anger? Weariness? I think I tried to throw out a little anger...but really...I was at a total loss. I hate it when the DM makes me think! I guess part of the problem was that I didn't take time to flesh out the character. I didn't come up with any backstory for her. I figured it would just come to me over time. I really need to stop doing that.

Urilia

For some reason I feel the need to write these massive posts as a sort of back story. I wanted to post about Urilia. Urilia is the UO server my husband and I have been developing FOREVER. This has been such a monkey on our backs for so long that I sometimes wondered if we'd ever finish.

Urilia's theme is Sumerian, we are taking a lot from Lovecraft's Necronomicon. This I suppose has no real bearing on anything, but I felt the need to mention it. The Urilia Text is part of the Necronomicon and where we got our name from (obviously).

My husband has a lot of experience GMing both PnP and UO. My experience is mainly with UO. I've only run a few PnP adventures and was a nervous wreck each time. I don't think anyone enjoyed it much.
We always thought we could make a server better than the other guys. We convinced our group of PnP gaming friends to join us in this and they are all involved and helping out.

What we found when we started was that what we were creating was pretty much the same as what everyone else had out there. We were trying to bring on people that could script for us, and they did not want to do things the way we wanted. I mean...Really they were doing all the work for free, why would they want to be bossed around while they did it? After going through about 5 or 6 scripter's who all left in a huff (see my definition of huff in my online gaming post) Jaycen (my husband)decided it was time to learn to script himself.

While teaching himself to script Jaycen spent a lot of time researching online games and what worked and didn't work. This is where he found a group of what he thinks of as heroes, top among them being Raph Koster. These guys are the ones who create all these games we play. They have wonderful insights on what works and doesn't and the psychology of the players. Jaycen studied their essays like text books and came up with a whole slew of ideas that I think, once implemented, will make Urilia one of the best shards out there.

One of his ideas is a ruler package. This script package will allow a person to be anointed king by a head priest of any religion. The person will have to be standing in one of the castles built on our map's seven cities. Now, here is the really cool part. Once you are king, you can persuade people to be your subjects and tax them. When they log on they will get a gump telling them what taxes are due and can choose to pay them or not. Of course if they don't pay them the King can send his tax collector! Now, why your ask would anyone voluntarily pay taxes? Because with the tax money collected the king can buy city improvements, like aqueducts. Aqueducts would make the citizens of that city much healthier, so while they stayed in good repair they would all get bonus hit points. Libraries would give extra intelligence.

Another cool idea is atomistic craftables. This one really excites me because I like to play crafter class characters almost as much as I like to play warriors. This would allow crafters to use any combination of raw materials to create their products. Each material would have set properties so you can mix and match to get the final product you want. Maybe you want something light that kills undead, or something durable and heavy. I think this makes the game so much more interesting for crafters instead of just clicking your way through gumps to make the same old same old.

Anyway, I'm not involved with any of the scripting. My job on the server is building. We are working on a fantastic map that was created by the nephew of one of our GMs. It is really a work of art.

I guess once all the building is done my job will be running quests and player relations. I can't trust any of the guys to handle people the way they need to be. They are all a bunch of sanctimonious jackasses, and I mean that in the most loving way.

Anyway, that is Urilia, the monkey on my back for the last 4 years.

Online Gaming

My online gaming experienced is limited to UO. I was first introduced to UO about 7 years ago. I watched a friend play on OSI and thought it looked like a playground for every smart mouthed, power tripping asshole on earth. Yay, a global village complete with every global village idiot! I thought the concept ingenious, but the final product laughable. I could not see spending the monthly fee to subject myself to the constant PKing and looting.

A few months later I was told about a free UO shard. I was assured that the player base was mature and the only assholes were the likeable kind I was used to. I decided to give it a try, after all I was only out the cost of the CD, no monthly fee. I was absolutely, positively sure that I would not enjoy it, after all I was an RP snob. I played the "real thing" with books and dice. I didn't even bother to think up a character name and called her Stacey. The shards name was Mytharria, it ran on the Fuse emulator. It was laggy as hell, crashed constantly and had plenty of time when the server was down completely. I fell in love with it. It was role-play like I had never experienced. You just can't get the immersion with PnP that you can online. I got my husband, Jaycen, to start playing and we had a blast. The shard didn't last though, we started in October and it was shut down by January.

Jaycen and I didn't look into any other free servers. We didn't play again until June when I got an email from DreamWeaver, a GM I had met on Mytharria. He was working with a guy who had created a new emulator called Pen-Ultima Online (POL). He told me how great it was, that it had hardly any lag and rarely crashed. He was going to recreate Mytharria using this emulator and invited me to come and help beta test. This is when Mytharria: Reborn came into being. I had a great time re-acquainting myself with my buddies from Mytharria and met a lot of great new people.

In September I was asked to become a GM. I had so much fun learning all the many commands and loved running quests, which was something I was never comfortable doing with PnP games. Shortly after I became a GM others on the staff, including the Head GM left for various reasons. By October I was the only staff presence on the server. I tried hard to get to know our players and run quests to suit their tastes. At the time we had around 20 players online at peak times. After a few weeks on my own I convinced DreamWeaver that I needed help and was allowed to make Jaycen a GM. We had a great time together, when one of us had an idea the other perfected it. We brought that 20 player peak to 50!

After much discussion among the staff we decided that we should switch to a class system. This change would require a complete character wipe. We decided if we were going to have to wipe all the characters anyway that we should modify the map and statics as well to make it interesting. We lost a few players from the change, but not many. The new Mytharria was named Mytharria: Dawn's Rising. Things progressed smoothly for a couple months, then some of the old staff came back. The old Head GM came back and lets just say we had radically different ideas about how a shard should be run. He seemed to step over me and back into his new position. Things came to a head and Jaycen and I left in a huff. (A huff sounds very similar to "Why don't you go fuck yourself?")

Jaycen and I joined several other free, or grey servers after this both as players and GM's. We never recaptured the 'glory days' that we had on Mytharria though, back when we called the shots. That is what prompted us to start our own server. This has been a big project that has spanned a few years. We are FINALLY open for beta, our server is called Urilia.

PnP Gaming

I first played a PnP game when I was 10 years old. My older brother and his friends decided to let me play AD&D with them. I still remember the first adventure.

We went into a dungeon to find a treasure. The way out collapsed and we were all trapped. It took me awhile to figure out that the ring I had found was a wishing ring. So, being helpful I wished the whole group safely out. Of course, I forgot about bringing the treasure along. What can I say, I as 10. I played with this group a few times during my pre-teen years. I can't say there was much role-playing going on. Mainly we went into dungeons and killed stuff to get the treasure.

When I was 15 I met Jaycen. He and his friends played role-playing games and he seemed embarrassed to tell me about it when I asked him what game they were going to play...He told me, "You know, it's kind of like Dungeons and Dragons". Imagine his shock when I told him that I used to play that! Soon he got me a character made up and I started playing with them. They introduced me to a wide variety of games I didn't even know existed. I guess I always thought that AD&D was the only game of it's kind. We played Vampire, Shadow Run and Cyberpunk back in those days.

Jaycen and I got married right out of high school. We still get together with "the guys" every Friday night and play. Currently we are playing Star Wars (d20) and AD&D. It is really great to see our friends weekly. Most of these guys we have known for 15 years or more.

About Me

I guess this is the part where I say a little bit about myself. I'm a 31 (god I hate saying that) year old woman. I'm married and have 3 great kids (I think as a parent you always have to put a great before the kids even if they drive you looney most of the time). I'm a stay at home mom, a room mother, a girl scout leader and a PTA volunteer...and oh yeah, I'm a complete gamer dork!