I enjoyed running it a lot, I hope the players enjoyed playing it as much. It’s hard work running 4e encounters, but it’s not totally stressful, just hard work. In a good way.
We got four characters rolled up and two encounters out of the way between about 7:30pm and 1:30am including some socialising, some talking to NPC’s and a tiny bit of travel.
Good times.
So, you’ve got 14 monsters in the encounter, say 10 Goblin Cutters, 3 Goblin Warriors and a Goblin Hexer. They’re all on your battle map along with your four or five PC’s.
You’ve done the work and you know the order your monsters are going in, but, how do you remember which Goblin Cutter is which? I wonder what the best way of identifying them is. There’s plenty of suggestions on the web about marking them with conditions (like marked, slowed, etc.) but nothing I can find using lazy-google-fu about just tracking which bloody one is which.
I might try sticking a small bit of paper underneath each one with a number on it for now.
Bubbles (our older cat) loves the sun. She’s got really thick fur but doesn’t let that stop her baking herself as often as she can. The deck is a real sun trap and as soon as the sun starts hitting it she’s out there, absorbing the rays. Sometimes she looks aware, sometimes she sits around and sometimes, she just flakes out. Fizz is the black cat in this picture, I think she’s making sure Bubbles (the ginger one) is ok. Click the picture for the full size version.
We’ve had loads of sun this weekend, and the cats always keep us company when we’re in the garden doing anything – so Bubbles has been really happy – but this shot just sums her up during the summer.
My advice is look away now if you’re not interested in reading the litany of DIY / Gardening activities that made up our weekend. I’ll even put a cut in for you so you don’t accidentally see boring photo’s of flowers, painted walls, borders and coat hooks.
Transformers 2 is hotting up.
I’ve had a hate / hate relationship with printers from the day I got a thermal printer for my ZX Spectrum and it has lasted throughout my entire computing career. There have been two highlights in that period, my Panasonic KXP1124i 24 pin dot matrix printer which I purchased around 1991 and my HP LaserJet 4L which I purchased sometime around 1993. Those printers served me well and they just worked (mostly), the LaserJet made it around 10 years. Every other printer I’ve dealt with on a home user level or at work has been painful and annoying. Printers see me coming, they refuse to work, they jam, they eat paper, they randomly drop words, they do everything in their power to make turning electricity into print as painful as possible.
I had the HP LaserJet 4L for an age, and it kept going and going. Eventually we sort of stopped needing a printer and it sat for a very long time unused. Then we got a very cheap Inkjet (I forget why) which was terrible, and refused to print more than a few test pages. We went back to using the LaserJet but it was showing it’s age. We got another one maybe two Inkjets, the last one was a Lexmark all-in-one, which seemed okay, but after only a few weeks the ink in the print heads dried up and caused issues. New cartridges worked for a very short time and then did the same thing, we relegated it to a scanner and then moved it upstairs. The LaserJet came back out – but now it had sat for a long time, and the cartridge was struggling, it gave off a pretty serious burning smell when used and the noise sounded like we were using small cats as paper, flattening them with the rollers.
We gave up on printing. Who needed it anyway? Spengler said print was dead in 1984 and I was beginning to believe him.
Then along came roleplaying and suddenly I need to print stuff again. Character sheets, maps, encounter tracking sheets. I wasn’t about to be thwarted again. I know a friend who’s technical opinion I trust very well likes HP printers and has had one without issue for a little while so I started looking at those. If I was to avoid having a 10 foot USB cable or buying a cabinet then it only made sense to get a wireless one. HP do quite a nice little all-in-one (the C4585) and we just got back with it – very impressed so far, I hope the ink cartridges hold out.
NB: If you own an HP C4585 and they suck, don’t tell me. I don’t care. It’s too late. I bought it already.
We’ve been playing D&D 4e for a few months now and it’s cool. When you roleplay in your late 30’s, there’s a lot of life that can get in the way, kids, work, a bunch of stuff, so just getting together once a week can be a challenge. But we’ve managed it mostly and our characters are coming along and we’re just setting off on another quest.
We’re also getting another player in the group but he can only play every other week, so rather than force him to miss out on some games we decided to run another game and alternate them. And I get to run it!
Which means I just spent a whole wad of cash I don’t have on a bunch of D&D rulebooks I’ll probably use 5% of, to match the other dozens of rulebooks I have that I’ve never used 😉
Grete removed all the dead / overgrown / weird / scary plants out of the little strip of soil in front of the window in the front garden last week. It sort of looked a lot tidier and then it suddenly looked a lot like it was empty so we popped into B&Q today and got some plants (not many). We got a few more bags of ground covering bark for the back garden borders as well to keep the weeds down. We bought short plants which will hopefully spread and cover the soil surface and flower during spring and early summer, assuming they survive long enough.
Here’s how it looked after being emptied –
And here’s how it looks now with the few plants in it –
Half the fun of playing online games, MMORPG’s specifically, are the patch messages, this is my favourite in a long time.
The broken pieces of the Bridge of Khazad-dûm were backwards, with the longer piece on the west side of the chasm and the shorter one on the east. They have now been reversed. This could cause people who logged out while standing on the broken bridge to log on in midair and plummet to their dooms. This should teach them not to log out on precarious bridges!
Fizz, the younger of our two cats, gets itchy ears. The vet gave us a bottle of gunk to squirt into them once a week which clears out any debris and alleviates the issue. We tried last night to inject said gunk into her ears – as you can imagine she’s not really very appreciative at the time. I don’t think it hurts and I’m pretty sure it’s not even that uncomfortable, but if you have to hold a cat down they just assume whatever you’re doing is bad for them. Which I guess is a pretty good assumption. We were on the sofa, fizz between us and Grete was holding her down. I got some gunk in one ear but the little blighter is bloody strong and she squirmed out from Grete’s grip.
In order to get some purchase and get herself off the sofa she used her back feet, claws out, and my body as a launch pad. So now I sport a pair of nice 6-inch scratches down my left side.
We managed to wrestle her back onto the sofa and do the other ear, and she then spent two hours sulking while we watched Quantum of Solace, before finally deciding we were done and allowing us to pet her again. Of course, she shredded Grete’s arm after the second squirt of gunk, because she doesn’t like to show any favouritism.
It’s interesting to me how different cats deal with this stuff in different ways – I guess some people just see animals as animals and when you discuss personality they shake their heads and roll their eys. But if you’ve owned pets or been in contact with animals for a while it’s completely obvious they have a personality of their own. Bubbles puts up a fight, but once she’s grabbed she sort of just accepts whatever you’re doing in the hope it finishes as quickly as possible, however it takes her about a day to forgive you. Fizz never gives up – she’s always fighting – and she’s built like a small dog, all muscle and anger, but she’s pretty much over the whole thing in an hour or so.
Oh and don’t tell Grete I’m blogging about the cats, I try and maintain and air of disinterest. Thanks 😉