codrus

Trying to unpack some waltz concepts and skills and get them out of my head. Also trying to figure out what I'm missing. Hopefully I can keep it out of my head for the rest of the weekend. I need to make room in there for some work that needs to get done. ;)

Items marked with an asterisk(*) are areas I feel I could use a lot more practice on. I'm not really marking any areas as "I totally got this" because I figure I'm still learning quite a bit. Even on the stuff I know conceptually quite well, I still make mistakes.

This is more a snapshot of my brain, so heavy on shorthand, and not long on explanation. Only somewhat edited. Some terminology is my own, but tried to use the class's where I could remember it.

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I've been making posts about my Waltz classes on Facebook, but this one got long enough I decided to post it to livejournal instead. For those people only on LJ, the short version is that for two months I've been going to waltz lessons + dances, both to learn how to dance and to have more social time that isn't game or work released. I usually make short posts to track my progress. Or tonight, a long one.

http://www.fridaynightwaltz.com/

I went into tonight with a few things in mind:
1. Leave my problems at the door. Standard dojo mindset.
2. Focus on the now, not what's happened before or any sort of long-term goals.
3. Go into class having done some preparation for today's material.
4. Be extra patient and helpful with the new folks.
5. Get out on the dance floor after class and dance as much as I could (practice/social/etc.).

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My current 4e game is stalled (a little), but I'm still hoping to revive it over summer long enough to give it some closure. But after that, I feel like I need to rest my fantasy GMing until I come up with an idea I'm really enthused about. I've got more ideas around modern or scifi or even some sort of political game.

Part of the problem is that when it comes to D&D style games, I've fallen into a rut. And to some extent, the genre does too. For me, it comes down to two main areas. (The rest of this post is sort of a meandering brainstorming. I'll try to digest this and order it at some point, time permitting.)
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So, this morning I hit my immediate weight goal of 180 lbs -- one of a few numerical measurements I can regularly and conveniently take. So, I'm back to goal setting! Realistically, I assess my goals regularly, but today is a major milestone!

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So, I tried the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode last night.

Good things: Really fun. It feels a bit like the survivor mode in later Halo games, but with some added mechanics. Sometimes, you have to defend a particular spot, sometimes you have to kill specific targets, etc.. Not nearly as compelling as the scenarios in single-player play, but it does mix up the formula a bit. Missions have a finite limit of 10 waves plus an evac, which I think is actually a bit more fun than an endless set of waves.

Bad things: As far as I can tell, there's no way to change the control layout on the Xbox so that I can map powers to the same buttons I use in single player. EXTREMELY AGGRAVATING. :)

Some classes definitely feel more effective at early levels than others. Soldiers seem to kick ass pretty hard. My vanguard is getting there, but still feels a little anemic. Slow recharge times on my powers (particularly after getting to a fast recharge in the campaign) is really painful.


Interesting things (good and bad):

The upgrade mechanic. You do missions to get cash, you spend cash on supply packages. A supply package is like a booster pack in old trading card games: 4 common items and some sort of uncommon item. You can also spend real-world cash (microsoft points) to buy boosters. So, I suppose, this is yet another way to monetize the game. I found it a little annoying that it took me 5 or 6 complete missions to get a weapon usable by a vanguard.

Readiness: Doing multiplayer missions increases your galaxy readiness, which affects your single-player games. I was pleased to see that it doesn't take a lot of missions to make progress there. RenegadeShep is gonna need all the help he can get! :)

I finished my first play through last night (ParagonShep). Wow, what a game. I can say, without any hyperbole, that this is the best CRPG I've ever played. With a couple of caveats:
-- The xbox version I'm playing has a few bugs and a few polish issues. Specifically, I've seen it crash when loading a new screen and I've seen a number of animation gaffes.
-- The experience of Mass Effect 3 is highly influenced by playing through ME1 and ME2.
-- All three games are on the action side of the continuum. People who do not like twitch games are probably not going to agree with me.

The strongest thing I can say was that I felt like Bioware really delivered on the concept of a trilogy. Decisions you made in the first game trickle down into the third game. Oh, some of them don't have as much of an effect as I would have liked, but some of them -- yikes!

On the whole, ME3 does a great job of pushing emotional buttons. Loss, despair, hope, love, sacrifice. All play big parts in Mass Effect 3. The terrible danger of the Reapers introduced in ME1 and talked about in ME2 is here...and it is pretty devastating. Not everyone is going to make it out of there in one piece. There's echoes of Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica in here but really, they've established their own universe with its own style and emotional resonance.

I still need to think about the ending. I know some people are disappointed by it -- I won't say more because there are pretty big spoilers here. But ultimately, I felt it was reasonably satisfying.

The missions are fun, but more than that, they have an urgency that wasn't there as consistently in earlier Mass Effects. A comment I made a few days ago is that the suicide mission at the end of Mass Effect 2 is now the new "normal". Many missions feel like they could go south at a moment's notice or that you have to move NOW NOW NOW. Or that when I choose a team member to go do something, that I might be sending them off to die. I give a lot of props to Jennifer Hale, the actress that plays the voice of female shepherd. Her energy level was high and she really sells the urgency (and the desperation) of the missions. And really, they just did amazing stuff with the engine and the missions. While there's always a certain amount of sameness to the bad guys you fight in these games, so many of the missions felt fresh.

The game mechanics are really really solid. They took some of the best ideas in ME1 and ME2 and mixed them together into a nice blend. Fewer mini-games makes the game play a lot faster too. "Streamlined" is a word I've used throughout the game to describe how Mass Effect 3. The dominoes are falling at this point, so slow mechanics have less of a place in the game. Beyond the fact that the mini games weren't that difficult, they also slowed the pace of the missions/story, taking away from the dramatic tension they were trying for in ME3.

I haven't tried multiplayer yet. I'm a little disappointed that you need to do multiplayer to get access to some of the endings. I need to figure out wants to play multiplayer so that I don't have to deal with internet morons.

Because I need to focus on other things for a little while, it is going to be a couple of weeks before I put a lot of time into RenegadeShep's story. And that's too bad. I really want to start it up now. And for me, that's the most telling thing about all three Mass Effect games -- the desire to start a new game right after the end of a game. In both the previous games, I played three full games at normal, hard and insane difficulty. And I'll probably do the same here.

The prospect of playing some of these missions on insane difficulty scares me. But that'll be my third play through. I'm more worried that RenegageShep's bad decisions in ME1 and ME2 are going to haunt me through my second game. I also find it interesting how the sense of desperation made me more willing to choose renegade options for ParagonShep. It felt natural that Shepherd was starting to lose it.

My progress over January and February. ( Read more... )

New game, based on the Cortex+ rules in Smallville and Leverage.

I've skimmed it pretty quickly, so this is a somewhat superficial look. I'll dig deeper in time.

My general take is that it looks really interesting. I'm not sure it is interesting enough to push it forward on the queue of games I want to run, but definitely worth idea mining.

Some quick notes:
- Every character performs differently depending on whether they are solo, with a buddy, or as part of a team. And, there are rules that both players and the GM can use to split up or bring a group back together. It feels reasonably organic, matches the comics, and allows various Marvel characters to shine in the appropriate scenes. (Captain America is sort of the ultimate team leader kinda guy, Wolverine is more of a loaner than the rest of the X-Men, etc.)

- Characters have milestones (which can either be personal or based on the event/story being played). When they act in ways defined by the milestones, they earn XP. It plows the same earth as 7th Sea backgrounds and aspects, but does so in different ways. The milestones they have defined feel real nice for creating more interesting stories than, say, a Champions psych lim.

- Characters in general feel like they aren't terribly complicated to write up. Fits pretty easily on a page. At the same time, they've done a reasonable job of providing enough variation in mechanics that characters with similar power sets can feel distinctive.

- While characters feel simple, the actual mechanics are definitely more complicated. Closer to Smallville than Leverage. GMs have a big pool of dice they use to feed all their powers...and lots of ways to both generate dice and spend dice. My eyes glazed over skimming over the rather extensive set of rules for things that can be done here. I'm not saying it is bad -- not quite -- but my experience the time I played Smallville is that it potentially gets encumbered by all these options. Leverage felt more focused, and I wonder whether a basic set of rules + bonus options would have been a better design.

- Stress system (how damage is inflicted) seems more streamlined than Smallville. And has some nice comic book goodness to it. For example, let's say hit you with a attack (physical stress). As in Smallville, that gives you a Physical Stress die that someone else can use against you. Eventually, that die might get stepped up by other attacks until you get knocked out. However, a nice comic-book mechanic is that you can spend plot points when stress is inflicted on you to turn that stress into a different kind of stress. So, the energy blast didn't hurt you as much as it made you REALLY angry. You still take stress, but the roleplaying effects is a little different.

- It is structured around a mini-campaign model. Pick an event, like the Civil War or something, and structure acts and milestones around it.

- Initial set of characters is interesting, but perhaps a little sparse. I'm sure they'll have a book planned to address that. The rules for generating new characters are some of the sparsest rules I've ever seen...and that's perhaps a strength. It is less about spending 'points' a la Champions and more about trying to match the comic characters. So yeah, some characters may end up a little tougher than others. But the mechanics are such that no one ends up completely indestructible because of this.

Outside of the potentially complicated dice pool usage, it looks like it would do a pretty respectable job of simulating comic book goodness, with good roleplaying possibilities.

So today I was feeling well enough (post-cold) to go to the gym. I really missed last week's workouts. On the other hand, last week gave me a little time to put in some research and actually *plan* a workout. As is often the case, I picked up a new book that I used to supplement existing knowledge.

Men's Health Big Book of Exercises

I mainly bought it for the variety of exercises for each muscle group, but it has some pretty comprehensive coverage of different things to put into a workout plan. I won't provide all the details here, but the rough sketch might be useful.

Warm up
Dynamic Stretches
Strength Training (5 exercises - 3 sets of each exercise. One day a week, two more exercises added)
Cardio Finish (4 minutes of intense interval training)
Static Stretch

The big differences between this workout and my previous workouts is likely going to be the biggest problem -- it adds about an extra 20 minutes to the workout. Almost all of that effort is in the stretches at the beginning and end of the workout.

I end up doing stretches for each major muscle group. The dynamic stretches are sufficiently energetic that some of them are things I was doing as strength workouts 3 months ago.

The nice thing about the plan is that it is flexible. On a 'resting' day -- a day after a strength workout -- I could still go to the gym and do just the warm up and cool down stretches. That's a nice workout to loosen up muscle groups and improve range of motion.

I have four different strength training workouts in two pairs. Effectively, alternating workouts that slightly emphasize different workouts. Two of the workouts are intended for the gym, the other two are intended for home. Both workouts actually use a fair amount of bodyweight exercises, but the home one is almost entirely that way.

Today, I wasn't 100%, so I skipped the extra biceps/triceps exercises and the cardio. And, after finishing the workout and stretches, I was feeling tired, but not really tight or sore. Sunday, I expect to do the full workout.

So, I'm not ready to drop a ton of money on a DSLR camera and lenses yet, but I'm definitely enjoying the photography thing a lot more. I need to find more excuses to go out on the weekends and shoot things, to build my skills.

I already posted this one to Facebook a month back, but the last time I went out shooting was my Caribbean cruise in January. Here's my mobile me gallery.

http://gallery.me.com/timcarroll#100020

All of that was shot with a Canon Powershot S100. I know little point and shoot cameras are going out of style (having their lunch eaten by cell phone cameras), but the S100 is a damn fine little camera. I probably did more than 2/3 of my shots in manual mode in an attempt to really internalize some things I read after my September vacation. I skipped manual mode only in situations where I needed to get shots quickly -- helicopter rides.

The good things about the Canon: I think the controls are pretty straightforward. I mean, I still want someone like Apple to build a pure camera with a better UI, but the S100 has two dials so you can separately control aperture and timing at the same time. Most of the special modes were easily accessible. It shoots RAW pretty quickly. Its size makes it easy to carry, and not particularly large even in the underwater enclosure.

The bad things about the Canon: It tries to do a little too much -- too many wacky special effects shooting modes. I'd rather get the best RAW shot possible and do the special effects on my computer. Trying to turn the camera into an entire tools chain feels a bit wrong for a point and shoot. Beyond that, it has limitations caused by the form factor -- limited optical zoom, and a lack of a view finder.

My goal for the camera is to try to get out twice a month and do some shooting, plus do some more real vacations with shooting opportunities. If and only if I stick with it, I'll consider a DSLR and using this as my backup/underwater/maximum portability camera.

On to what inspired me to write the post. Over the weekend, I set up a new Costco membership to take advantage of their photo printing capabilities. I still loathe fighting Costco parking, but I can't argue with their photography prices. I picked out three photos I liked and got 6 prints of them, three at 12"x18" and three in a poster size. Two of the photos were 4000x3000 from the new camera, the last was my favorite Hawaii shot from the September trip, taken with the old camera. 2500xsomething or another -- 5.5 megapixels? The posters for the new photos were 20"x30" and the one from the old camera was, uh, 16"x20" I think.

What I figured out:
20"x30" with a 4000x3000 photo is pushing the limits of the pixels, but only a little. I can see a bit of grain/fuzziness in the photos. At the same time, 20"x30" is goddamn huge. I won't need to print a lot of photos as posters, because there aren't many places I could use those prints. The 12"x18" shots are much cleaner, and are also a more appropriate size for framing.

I've got a set of about 10 vacation photos I like, so I'm going to get them printed and framed, and put them up in the house. I figure I'll put 3 or 4 on the stairs, and the rest throughout the rooms and corridor upstairs. The main room downstairs probably won't get photos -- I plan to put my new painting up sometime soon, and and then look for a couple of paintings to complement it.

The other thing I figured out is that the 20"x30" prints are cheap enough that if I was willing to put some time into making D&D battle maps in one of my drawing tools, it would be pretty cheap to print them. I wouldn't do that for every session, but for the big fights, it is an option.