Convention

There are two things that I think need to post here because they need to be widely disseminated.

The first is the Back Up - The Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Project and of course, the Gentlemen's Auxiliary. Basically, it can be boiled down into the following pledge:

f your situation looks dangerous enough I can't help on my own, I will call over friends or, if it's a situation in which I think the cops would be on your side, I will call the cops. If you're being harassed by a guy, you can say so to me, even if you don't know me. I pledge I will distract him so you can get away, or I will tell him that he needs to leave, or whatever I can do to the best of my ability. I pledge that yes, actually, because you are a woman I will give you the benefit of the doubt. If you tell me that a guy just did something shitty to you I will not refuse to look at any evidence and tell you that I know him and he's a great guy and you must have been imagining things. I have great loyalty to my male friends but I will not allow that to blind me to the fact that none of us are saints and even my best friends can screw up and may need to be called on it. I pledge that I will walk you to your car if you don't feel safe walking alone at night, and then you can drive me to mine. Yes, even at Wiscon. I pledge that even if I don't know you, if there is a creepy guy following you around, you can say so, and I will not say to you go hide in your room; I will say to him go find another party, or if necessary, go home. I will come with you if you need to talk to the con organizers. I will not make you feel like your right to control over your own body is not a big deal.

The second one is the Con Anti-Harassment Project which I have yet to follow up on but probably will tonight during the wilds of my work. Conventions should be fun for everyone, not just the creep dude getting off on trying to "get with the ladies."

So keep this stuff in mind when you head out for Gen Con soon. I know I'm going to try my best to do what I can for the auxillary!

Voting for the ENnies

Hey there folks.

A friend of mine has something up for an ENnie again, she's particularly awesome. So go vote for it! Even if you haven't checked it out, I have an it's awesome and we all know whatever I say goes, right? Right?

It's called the Rose-Bride's Plight and it's up for Best Adventure.

The URL for voting is here. Go vote for other stuff too, but make sure you give that nod to the Rose-Bride's Plight! Hurry up, voting closes August 1st!

Dex Con

DexCon. What can I say about DexCon other than I love this place. It's where I get to see a lot of people I only get to see twice a year and hang out with them for several hours at a time.

The biggest thing I'm going to talk about here though is the CyberGen LARP that I run. Seriously, it's amazing amounts of fun. I don't know how this managed to get as big as it has over the past little bit but apparently people like it. We had 30 people doing stuff and the most I can remember about what happened was that things happened. I think there was a hospital break out. I think possibly a bus got tipped or something but ultimately it was awesome because the players made it so.

I might go into more detail later about Dex Con and the LARP but I just wanted to get that out there.

DCG - Alpha 3 - Project Updates

The good thing about this Alpha is that we haven't found a whole series of problems that requires me to print up a whole bunch of different cards. This is feeling to be closer and closer to an actual Beta set which means that I might just release it as Beta and then start working on making it better through general public Beta and then release it as a full game in a year or so of Beta testing, or a couple of months of solid beta testing.

That way we can make some extra cards and then start releasing the services that I think will make some money for us and the artists.

Changes made after Dex Con:

1. Combat rules have changed. I didn't like the whole "army" thing and made it like "magic" attacking. Except that instead of the player, you attack cards. Kind of like how they're doing it with planeswalkers.

2. Splitting up the Deck. I think I may go with a two deck format where you have 35 cards in each deck. That number is arbitrary, but it's what I'm going with right now. One deck is Effect Deck (placeholder name) which has nothing but fast effects. One deck is the Resource deck which is filled with everything else. When you want to draw a card you may draw a card from either deck. I may change the number of cards drawn, but right now that's what we've got.

3. Command skill. Changed what it does because there were no longer any teams. Now it allows you to draw look at X cards in the fast effect deck and use them for the combat.

4. Turns. I may have it so that turns are at the same time. More in an Allegiance style because the my turn, your turn didn't work out so well. First player again got way too much of an advantage. The other thing is that this will help with multiplayer games.

Origins

It's been a little behind but this is basically my run down of Origins.

First of all I love Origins. If given the choice between Origins and Gen Con I'll take Origins everytime. The people are friendlier, the gamers are a little bit more fun and you're able to get to see what people are developing because they have those games. Heck, that's what they're tryign to do. They're trying to sit down and come up with really interesting ways to get people to come to Origins.

The other one is the day pass. You can pay 3 bucks and show up and walk around the dealer's room for the whole day. This is great, if I lived in Columbus I would so show up every single day and play games. That's like 12 bucks for a full day of gaming for four days because you can hop from table to table and just play games all weekend. Best idea ever.

What's happening though is that for some reason Origins was a lot smaller this year. I can understand some reasons. The economy sucks, it's still too close to Gen Con in both location and time frame (though the time frame is getting better), no one has anything new to sell at Origins, etc. At the same time, I don't get it because to me Origins is a much better playing experience. I've had a great time at Origins and I have yet to have a great time running at Gen Con.

We still run at Gen Con. You need to be where all the people go, I just think we'd all be better served if more people went to Origins instead.

Multiple Projects

Doing a lot of things at once is both a blessing and a curse. When you get bored with one thing then you can move onto the next thing and so on and so forth. The problem happens when you've got too many projects on the go. You end up hoping from one to another with no end in sight.

Then what's worse, more and more get closer to getting finished and then they're all at the finish line.

Nothing is scarier then actually completing a project.

Alpha Version 3

The nice thing about Alphas is that you will find what's wrong with them pretty quickly and then need to fix them.

The bad news is that for a DCG/CCG that means you're either modifying a lot of cards, or making up new ones. I tend to go for the new ones, which is bad on me but I think makes it easier to test. I'm not above modifications, but wholesale changes need to be made ... well, wholesale.

Things are shaping up a bit more. I still need to make the game deadlier, right now it's really hard to attack anything or anyone which means that I think I need to give people attack abilities more often. That way you're not stuck with a bunch of people who sit there looking "pretty." I am toying with making attack a permanent stat, but then I think the game loses some of the strategy.

Decisions, decision, decisions.