Staying in Touch

With G+ on the way out, I've been looking at alternative channels for communication. My findings thus far are... disappointing. I joined MeWe to see what it offered and discovered it's more closely attuned to Facebook than G+. The lack of circles and group organization tools, plus the friend-approval process make it a much less useful platform for passively following people you're interested in. I've thought about digging into some of the RPG-focused Discord servers, but I'm less interested in chat than I am in thoughtful posts. I guess I need to update my RSS feeds.

My ulterior motive for this post is to create a repository for methods people can use to get in touch with me or find out what's up with PBE Games product releases. So, here's my current contact information on many platforms and how I intend to use it:

• This blog is still a good place to keep up with my gaming thoughts (woefully lacking lately) and PBE Games releases. I try to post an update on new products every month or so.
• I'm on MeWe and I'll be posting new PBE Games releases there as they happen. I'll also be posting updates on my YouTube channel (more on that below).
• You can find me on Twitter, which I also use to announce product releases. I sometimes post random humor and IT security news from time to time, and I'll be posting YouTube updates here too.
• I'm still on G+ and will be until the end.
• You can also use the PBE Games contact form to hit me up via email.
• PBE Games on DriveThruRPG is right here.

Finally, I've just started a YouTube channel that's going to feature me playing a variety of video games. I soft-launched this a week or so back, and I'm still working out some of the tech details, but, if you're interested in video games, I hope you'll take a peek. The first series I'm doing is a let's play of Minecraft Stoneblock, but I'm starting a let's play Path of Exile series when the Betrayal league launches.

So, I think that covers the bases. I'll keep this post pinned to my G+ profile and update it when/if things change.

Edit: See my Where to Find Me profile here: https://wheretofind.me/@mthomas768

What's Going On?

One of my extremely loyal fans (a.k.a. my gaming buddy Mike), mentioned that it's been almost a month since my last post. I've mostly been tied up with real-life stuff like work, and my free time's been divided between a bunch of random stuff like...

Save or DIE!

Saving throws are one of those subsystems that provoke a lot of discussion, sometimes heated discussion. One of the hot-button features of saving throws is the save or die mechanic. Some people like the risk-all nature of a deadly saving throw. Others, not so much. In my opinion the best save mechanic is the one that works for your table, but that's not the main point here.

Small Victories

Nothing to do with my usual gaming subject matter. I've been having on and off issues with my furnace / AC system. Occasionally the blower just doesn't start or cuts off, despite the fact that the thermostat says it should be running. I'd go in, pop the cover and it'd kick back on. It was so intermittent that I knew calling a tech out was useless, since it would work perfectly while they were here, then cut off 10 minutes after they left.

Coming home last night to an 85 degree house was the last straw. I decided to investigate. Cut the power at the main box and popped the cover off the main power switch. HA! The switch housing was cracked, because idiot installer had forced too-heavy gauge wire into the feed holes. A quick trip to Menard's for a new switch, and five minutes with a screwdriver later, all is back together. FLAWLESS VICTORY!

Sometimes I really miss working with actual, physical objects instead of digital data.

TiddlyWiki 5 - How Does This Work?

A few years ago, I wrote a two part tutorial on using TiddlyWiki (part 1 and part 2). Time marches on, and there's a new version of TiddlyWiki available in beta form, TiddlyWiki 5. I decided it was time to check it out, because it's pretty and modern and has a huge amount of functionality out of box. This post is an ongoing collection of summary notes about my experiences switching over to TW5 from classic. It'll be updated as I work through various features.

Oh 2014, You Joker!

I was planning to publish two products today, but 2014 had other plans, gifting me with a crashed hard drive in my main machine. Luckily I'm an anal-retentive IT guy, so I have backups and the drive is part of a RAID1 array. No data lost, just time and patience. If all goes well, tomorrow I'll have a chance to do something productive. Between the usual holiday stuff and playing a bit too much Don't Starve (an indie survival adventure PC game which is surprisingly addictive), my completed projects queue is getting short! Right now I have two more complete One Pages, and two more Dungeons in Blue Small Dungeons ready to roll, plus two more Dungeons in Blue geomorph packs mostly done. I'm also working on a couple new things, a series of mapping-oriented texture packs, and an in-depth reworking of Ground Rules, the hex-terrain generator I built a while back.

For now, I'm off to do some frog-hunting. So hungry...

Players Do Cool Things

This past weekend I ran my Daruna game. One of the best parts of this semi-annual event is not the game, it's the people. I've been gaming with some of these guys since the beginning, and since I'm officially old, that's a long time. In fact one of the players in this game is the person I first played D&D with way back in the 70s. He ran a dungeon adventure for my first-level party on the bus during a school field trip to the Smithsonian Museums in Washington DC. We killed a Balrog.

Stats and Such

This is just a reiteration of the method I use for describing items, creatures, and encounter details in a quasi system-free way. I use the Fate RPG ladder of difficulties to describe the attributes, skills, abilities, and features of whatever it is I'm talking about. The Fate ladder looks like this:

Value Descriptor
+6    Legendary
+5    Epic
+4    Superb
+3    Great
+2    Good
+1    Fair
 0    Average
-1    Mediocre
-2    Poor
-3    Terrible
-4    Abysmal

This is the same system as the one I used throughout my posts on my old blog, the RPG Dumping Ground, and it served me well. It's pretty easy to port various things described in this manner to other systems since the ladder provides both a numeric and descriptive reference.

TiddlyWiki - A Minor Tip

I use TiddlyWiki for pretty much all my campaign notes these days. The combination of hyper-linking and a single self-contained file (minus images), makes it a very useful tool for my style of GMing. I went so far as to write a couple of brief tutorials on using it in my old RPG Dumping Ground blog:

• TiddlyWiki Tutorial - Part I
• TiddlyWiki Tutorial - Part II

One of the things I mention in part two of the tutorials is transclusion, a feature that allows you to insert a tiddler within a tiddler. Today's tip is an extension of that feature.

DriveThru RPG

DriveThru RPG is offering a huge product bundle as a fund raiser to support rescue and recovery efforts in Christchurch, New Zealand following the major earthquake there. Check it out.

Introductions

Introduction posts are lame, but I guess they're necessary. How else are readers going to figure out what a blog is about? This is the third blog I've started writing. The other two, both inactive, were pretty specific; a fact that lead to their eventual end. The RPG Dumping Ground was an "RPG thing a day" project. The vast majority of the posts were descriptions of items, spells or encounters for pen and paper RPGs. Allods - A League Perspective was driven by a specific MMO, and is primarily game guides. Both blogs died when my interests moved away from the specific subject matter they were focused on.

This blog has a broader scope. I'm going to write primarily about games, both traditional RPGs (D&D and others) and computer games. I play both so why not? I will also diverge into other media from time to time: movies, books, TV, and social media are all potential fair game. Lastly I may write the occasional note about other things I do for entertainment, food, drink, enjoying the great outdoors and technology are all on the table.

Let me start with the main focus though. Here are the three or four things I'll be writing about most in the short term:

• Moria - A pen and paper D&D campaign I wrote about on the RPG Dumping Ground. The game is now over, but I'm going to write at least a wrap up article about it.
• Eve Online - An MMO focused on internet space ships. I've been playing this off and on for a couple years now.
• Minecraft - I've been sucked into this in a big way.
• Stars - A play-by-post RPG I'm running using a hybrid Traveller / FUDGE system.

I'm planning on a two to three articles a week pace, but how often I write will reflect what I have to write about, and that will be determined on what I'm doing. I will make heavy use of the label system in Blogger to keep various topics organized, so if you're only interested in one kind of articles, it should be fairly easy to stay on target. Hope you'll stick around.

The TL;DR version: Games and other stuff I find entertaining.