Author: xeyeti

Magic Missile!

| xeyeti

I’ll admit it: I’m a bit of a casual pencil-and-paper RPG fan. I think the emphasis there should be on the word casual, which admittedly describes my relationship with most things geeky: I enjoy them, sure, but I’m not a big fan of dressing up in costume and running around crazy at a convention. While I like (and even love with a passion) many geek things, I have always been…well, not a closet geek, exactly, but not someone who feels he has to shout about it.

I’ve only played actual Dungeons & Dragons twice in my life: once in high school, and once in college. It didn’t particularly grab me either time, but that could’ve been because of the game masters I had (they weren’t all that inventive). But in graduate school, a very good friend of mine (still one of the smartest, geekiest people I know) created his own game system and ran an inventive, clever, ribald game with a few friends that was absolutely fantastic. The gameplay was simple, the emphasis was on characterization and character interaction, and I got to be the son of the avatar of humanity and shove a flaming phallic symbol down a rampaging tiger monster’s throat. It was, y’know, awesome.

Over the past few years, I’ve been running a series of games using an old Star Wars RPG manual from the early ’80s. It’s a simple D6 system, but it allows you to do a whole heckuva lot of fun stuff with it. The students I’ve run the games with have all loved it (possibly because of the Star Wars connection), and it’s a perennial favorite with our Friday afternoon clubs each year.

But a few years ago, I had an idea: why not create a very new-user friendly, streamlined game system that anyone could play (and, possibly more importantly, anyone could run). To add an extra wrinkle, I wanted to create a game that could be used to teach pro-social skills to students with learning disabilities and Autism Spectrum disorders (the sort of students I work with every day in my capacity as a special education teacher). I started putting together a system, with character classes, a world, class-specific skills, and gameplay instructions. I also started working up several simple scenarios for players to do, trying to focus on the pro-social skills I mentioned earlier.

It’s been a slog at times, trying to come up with all the stuff for this. I’ve been playtesting the game with my students this summer, trying to figure out how to make the game accessible to first-time players but versatile enough that the whole game isn’t always “main characters beat up/kill bad guys.” I’ve included character classes like Diplomats and Merchants, neither of which can really fight, but that can do all sorts of great support actions to help out their teammates.

I’m hoping to eventually get it polished enough to try to sell to an educational game company. Anyone who has any experience of creating games like these or any words of advice, they’d be very welcome at this point.

Sketch a Day, Day 237

| xeyeti

20120724-111623.jpg

As I’m still two comics behind, I figured a quick sketch would be a good way to knock out some of the deficit. I did this one on actual paper! That doesn’t happen much anymore, though it’ll probably happen more next month when I’m visiting family (many of whom lack basic, fundamental things like wifi).

Embarrassment

| xeyeti

I was looking back through several of my posts from the past couple of months last night (insomnia is a curse, I tell ya). I noticed while cruising through my archives that I’ve made a considerable number of typos.

Now, this may not seem like a big deal; this is, after all, the Internet, where typos are just the natural order and cats “can has cheezburger.” But I worked as a writing consultant in graduate school, and I’ve always prided myself on using (mostly) proper and correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation in my writing, whether it’s for the Internet or a business letter.

Admittedly, part of the problem is that I’ve been doing most of my posting for the past four months on the iPad. And, while there are many things to recommend the iPad, the whole “typing on a touchscreen” thing ain’t one of ’em. I make a lot of mistakes, and I often miss said mistakes.

So, if you notice that some older posts have been edited and that the text below a comic suddenly is grammatically correct, it’s because I got annoyed and decided to make some corrections.

After all, it’s the Internet. If I couldn’t go back and rewrite history to suit my needs, what would be the point?

Delayed Reaction: The Wallflowers Debut

| xeyeti

I’m a big fan of all things Dylan. That includes both Bob and his son, Jakob. I got into the latter’s band, the Wallflowers, like pretty much every single other person in the world: the songs “6th Avenue Heartache” and “One Headlight” off their second album, the excellent Bringing Down the Horse. But then, unlike most people, I went ahead and stuck with them, picking up every album since then and even their debut, the self-title The Wallflowers.

When I first encountered the record, I wasn’t particularly impressed with it. it seemed too unfocused, too sloppy, too meandering to really have much of an impact on me. You could actually almost hear Jakob Dylan making an effort to say, “See? I’m not my dad, I’m my own man making my own music!” There are conscious stabs at making deep statements (“Hollywood” and “Somebody Else’s Money,” mostly), but mostly it’s just Dylan and his band trying to craft convincing American rock and roll.

Looking back at it now, I can see that they actually managed to succeed a little, despite the lack of critical praise or much public interest. As my brother mentioned when I was discussing the album with him yesterday, there are songs where you can hear the members of the band straining to play to the best of their ability, moments when they’re clearly just balls-to-the-wall tearing into a song and playing it as hard and as affectingly as possible. And those are some damn good moments, as it turns out: “Sugarfoot” remains the best song on the album, as far as I’m concerned. I was convinced of it the first time I heard the record, and I remain convinced to this day. But other tracks, such as “Sidewalk Annie,” “Ashes to Ashes,” and “After the Blackbird Sings,” are all just as strong. Jakbob Dylan may have still needed some polish on his lyrics and delivery, but the emotion was definitely there and the underlying structures were usually pretty solid.

Admittedly, some of the songs do run a bit long (looking at you again, “Hollywood” and “Somebody Else’s Money”), and some of them are rather repetitive (I love “Asleep at the Wheel,” but it gets old after about three minutes and then decides to run for another minute forty-eight after that), while others are just downright boring (“Honeybee” and “Be Your Own Girl”). But honestly, as albums go, it’s more killer than filler. Of the twelve songs on the album, I really only want to skip over four, and that’s better than a lot of debuts go.

Ultimately, The Wallflowers is a flawed but promising start. It’s interesting to think that, after this album tanked commercially, Dylan and his organist, Jaffe, ditched the rest of the group and got a new drummer, guitarist, and bass player for Wallflowers 2.0. This new incarnation, of course, went on to record Bringing Down the Horse, and the rest is history, as it were. But there’s still a part of me that wonders where the band could have gone if that first album had been more of a success…