Can't blog too busy reading

I just got back from the local book/music/hobby/Sprint® store with my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I will pause in my reading of it long enough to pass along the finest spoilers ever. The following spoilers were obtained from the US Government by my good friend Paul through judicious use of the Freedom of Information Act.

[Redacted] killed [Redacted] and [Redacted] [Redacted].
[Redacted] kills [Redacted].
[Redacted] is [Redacted].
[Redacted] isn't [Redacted]
[Redacted] dies.
[Redacted] marries [Redacted].

Really after that list of spoilers, I'm not sure why any of us would bother to read the book.

Insubstantial!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Cominius my Warlock has joined the ranks of Exuberance! For a small amount of context consider looking first here, and next here. In any event Exuberance is another of the Penny Arcade Alliance guilds on Dark Iron.

I really don’t have anything else to say at the moment, except I think my Voidwalker in the background makes this a pretty sweet picture. Also w00t for post 50.

Three Unrelated Topics

I’m going to go with reverse-chronological order for this post.

My main character on WoW is a mage on the Dark Iron server named Chipple. She is a member of a guild called the Fancy Lads. The Fancy Lads is one of twelve guilds that comprise the Penny Arcade Alliance; which for those who don’t know is a group of guilds made up of Penny Arcade fans and was originally founded by Penny Arcade co-creator Mike Krahulik. Now I have on any number of occasions been quite happy to have Chipple a member of the Fancy Lads as its members have proved to be both friendly and helpful, but tonight (technically yesterday since it is now after midnight) was the first time I really, really appreciated Chipple being a part of the PAA as a whole.

I was running Chipple around a zone called the Thousand Needles working on some quests when a level 70 orc hunter happened by and killed Chipple in one shot. I panned my camera around to see if I could get a look at what just killed me, and got to witness a level 70 night elf rogue (unguilded and I never did make note of his name) give this hunter a little payback. Happy with the outcome I released my spirit and ran my ghost back from the graveyard to my corpse so I could resurrect and continue on with my quests. Sadly upon reaching my corpse I found the orc hunter wasn’t alone, he had been joined by another orc hunter, a tauren druid, and a forsaken warrior. The helpful night elf rogue was already dead, and these three horde were battling it out with two level 70 members of the PAA guild Kung Foo Roostaz (a gnome rogue and a human mage). With three to two odds the horde prevailed, but then they didn’t leave the area, and with the resurrection of the original orc hunter outnumbered the two KFR members two to one; thus when any of us tried to resurrect the results were predictable - we died. This continued on for around five minutes before the horde finally mounted up and rode off, after waiting a bit longer to make sure they were gone I and the two KFRs resurrected and started the process of healing and reapplying useful buffs. Unfortunately the horde leaving was only a ruse and as they came sweeping back in Chipple was quickly killed, and outnumbered and not fully healed my two PAA companions soon followed suit.

Once again the these four horde camped the area making resurrecting pretty pointless. During this time a few other alliance players (with levels lower than Chipple’s) had the misfortune to wander into the area and found themselves dead and corpse camped right along with the rest of us. Well a call went out to the PAA as a whole regarding our plight and a raid group of 10 or so PAAers was put together (most of whom were level 70, Chipple being one of I think 2 or 3 characters who weren’t). Once enough of the raid group arrived to even out the number of level 70s on both sides we launched our counter attack and emerged most victorious. Granted Chipple and the handful of characters in their 30s in the raid group were pretty much only useful as a distraction, but every attack one of the horde spent killing one of us was an attack not being directed against one of the alliance characters that could actually hurt them. With the horde all dead, and the remainder of the raid group was summoned courtesy of a PAA warlock, we settled down for the revenge portion of the evening. For the 15 - 25 minutes worth of camping they inflicted upon Chipple and the two members of the KFR, we (well not so much Chipple, but I hung around to enjoy the show and act a decoy) returned the favor about two to three fold spending somewhere around 30 - 50 minutes camping them in return as well as the two or three other level 70 horde who showed up to try and help them. It was very therapeutic, although I did feel bad for the three or so low level horde players (levels ranging from 25-37) who had the bad luck of wandering into the area while all this was going on (that I felt bad for our raid group killing them is further proof that I probably shouldn’t be on a PvP server).

Moving on to topic number two. I went and watched the Transformers movie tonight (again technically yesterday). Seriously what a ridiculous movie, but I mean that in a very good way. I wouldn’t waste time thinking about the plot, while the basics are quite easy to understand, there are some holes big enough to drive Optimus Prime through. However this movie was just too damn much fun for that to matter at all. I started laughing pretty quickly once the movie commenced, and didn’t really stop while it was playing, and continued to laugh about the movie my entire walk home. I know it is cliché to say you were on the edge of your set, but I quite literally found myself perched there on more then one occasion during the movie.

When I first heard about the Transformers movie, I refused to get excited about it. I mean a live action adaptation of the cartoon that existed solely to sell the toys (I knew that fact even as a child watching those cartoons, but that hardly stopped me from loving them), how could that movie be anything but awful? Then I read some reviews for it and they were surprisingly good, and then a few friends went to see it and came back saying it was a pretty good movie, so I started to get a little excited about it. I have to say Transformers is as about as good as you could ever hope to get from a movie based on an 1980s cartoon; which amazingly enough turns out to be a remarkable fun movie. Who knew?

Finally I should say a few things about last Saturday. It was a very fun time, it certainly wasn’t what I expected, as the only role playing that took place the entire evening lasted from 11:30pm until midnight. The vast majority of our time was spent playing the Order of the Stick Adventure Game (probably from about 5:30pm - 10pm). The rest of the time was spent actually working on characters for the anything goes/chaos campaign Matt has been talking about running for something like 2+ years.

For your consideration I leave you with two pictures one is another screen shot of Chipple, the other is a picture of the actor Sarah Chalke who plays Dr. Elliot Reid on Scrubs. I do this because I think Chipple looks a bit like her.

Sweet Tradition

Hazzuh! It’s BESM day! In the cornucopia of geekiness that consists of my hobbies, role playing games are my favorite. If I’m posting about it that can only mean I’ve finished preparing for it (insert evil GM cackle). This could possibly be the final session of the campaign, although I suspect it is far more likely that it will take at least one (if not two) more session after this to wrap everything up. Honestly I find I’m horrible at estimating how many sessions are left, as I’ve been saying only 3-4 more sessions to go for the last 6+ months, but I can safely say the campaign has reached endgame.

Tradition is the reason I’m posting before this afternoon’s session. Well okay maybe superstition would be a more accurate word for it. I’ve just noticed that when I post about gaming before the actual event it tends to go very well. Where some gamers have lucky dice, I seem to have a lucky blog.

With the end of my current campaign rapidly approaching (probably), my thoughts naturally start turning to what I’m going to do next. Fortunately a fair amount of thought has already been put into this (way back in February, admittedly it’s been a bit ignored since then), and one of my players has been making increasingly serious noise about running something himself. I find this latter option pretty appealing, as I rarely get a chance to play, and since somebody has broken down and actually made a pass at creating a character for his hypothetical game I find I have little choice but to follow suit. Since I’ve had steampunk on the brain of late, and since his proposed game would be multi-genre madness, I’ve been thinking a steampunk mechanical genius would be quite fun to play. I’m also thinking this character will likely be female, which is an unusual choice for me (outside of MMORPGs); I blame the Girl Genius web comic (really for both the choice of gender and theme).

The above picture is by Niko Geyer and is one of several he did for Guardians of Order.

Before I go I would like to mention the Twins played a doubleheader against the White Socks yesterday (a rarity in MLB these days). They won both games (not an easy thing to do in a doubleheader), but looking at the scores (especially the first game) you might be tempted to think they opted to play football rather than baseball. Game one ended with the Twins winning 20-14 (a football score if I've ever seen one), and they won the second game 12-0 (admittedly that one would be a bit unusual for a football score but certainly possible).

Also it is Caturday so here is another lolcat I found posted on the Penny Arcade Alliance forum.

A Tale of Two Horde, or Why I Shouldn't be on a PvP Server

As my experience with WoW continues to accrue, I find it increasingly likely that I am a carebear. I enjoy the battlegrounds, but random world PvP is something else entirely. I initiated my first PvP on Sunday morning, and promptly felt guilty about it. I was using my warlock Cominius (level 24 at the time of this incident) and was headed out of Stonetalon Peak when I ran across a troll shaman named Granfalloon (level 23 at the time) fighting a Twilight Runner. I watched him finish his fight, and decided well why not, so I targeted him, sent my succubus, and rushed after her firing off my various afflictions. Granfalloon opted to make a run for it, made outside of Stonetalon Peak, and nearly got into Ghost Wolf form before I dropped him. Flush with victory I continued about my marry way, but that afternoon started to feel a little guilty that I ran him down when he obviously didn’t want to engage in any PvP activity. Later on that night I was back playing Cominius and I was surprised to see Granfalloon’s body still outside of Stonetalon Peak. Now I started to feel really guilty for killing him. Late Monday night I was again playing Cominius, Granfalloon’s body was still outside of Stonetalon Peak, and I was getting ready to swear off PvP forever as I kept thinking of wildly unlikely scenarios about how my killing this character had caused Granfalloon to give up WoW forever. Happily after work on Tuesday I found Granfalloon’s body gone, replaced by a skeleton (a tell-tale sign of a PC having died and revived at that spot).

However my second foray into initiating PvP didn’t cause me any guilt at all. That is probably because I strongly suspect my victim was either a bot or a gold farmer. While running Cominius around the Stonetalon Mountains I kept encountering this level 25 undead priest killing the stags found in between Mirkfallon Lake and Stonetalon Peak (I didn’t note his name). By Monday night I was pretty sure he was a bot, so I decided I might as well kill him. So I took my level 28 dwarven hunter (whom I was playing at the time I reached this decision) to the area I kept running into him at and sure enough there he was killing stags. I waited for him to finish the mob he was on, targeted him, ordered my pet to attack, and opened fire. I became more confident in my determination that he was a bot when he started attacking my pet instead of me. Between the level difference, and his poor choice of targets the combat was quickly decided in my favor.

On Tuesday night I was back on Cominius still plugging away at a few quests in the Stonetalon Mountains. Just as I was nearing completion and while in the middle of fighting a harpy, a tauren druid named Swifthoof jumped me. Not too surprisingly I pretty quickly died. Now I find the idea of attacking somebody while they are fighting a mob to be pretty bad form, but what really annoyed me about the whole situation was Swifthoof hid and waited for me to revive and then attacked and killed me again. The first time I can understand. We are opposing factions, and given a chance I certainly may have attacked him, but to engage in corpse camping means you are just being a jerk.

Contrast this to the actions of the level 31 Blood Elf paladin, Daloo, that Cominius ran into a bit later that evening. I had completed my quests and was running out of the Charred Vale back to Stonetalon Peak when I met up with Daloo heading the other way. Being five levels higher than my character I wanted nothing to do with her, and headed off to one side hoping she’d ignore me. In doing so I aggroed both a harpy and a basilisk; while my succubus grabbed and kept the attention of the harpy, the basilisk continued to attack my warlock. Now Daloo could have simply ignored me, she could have also attacked and killed me and I would have counted as an honorable kill, but Daloo attacked the basilisk and drew it off my warlock (and at her level easily killed it). Left with only the harpy to deal with my warlock quickly finished it off (honestly without the presence of a level 31 horde occupying my thoughts both mobs at once wouldn’t have been a big deal). Again at this point Daloo could have attacked me and racked up some easy honor, instead she waited to see what I’d do. I gave her a /bow and ran off counting my blessings.

I’m certainly not trying to say this is how all alliance/horde interactions should go. Dark Iron is a PvP server after all; of course the sides should fight each other. If Daloo had attacked me before I aggroed those mobs, I wouldn’t even be posting about it (nor would I have bothered to look up her name in the combat log). I also would have been fine with her attacking me after the mobs were dealt with, and again I probably wouldn't be posting about it had that happened. The same is true if Daloo had ignored me and continued on her way after I aggroed the mobs. I actually would have considered that hypothetical act a great kindness. If events had played out that way I might even have posted about it.

Well enough about WoW.

BESM on Saturday went very well. For the record the players weren’t boned (see previous post). The end of the campaign is actually in sight. That fact makes me both very happy, and very sad. We should game again this coming Saturday.

Harkening back to the peripheral references made to quantum physics in my last post I leave you with this amusing lolcat picture I found posted on the Penny Arcade Alliance forum.