My RPG to-do list

Here's what's on my RPG to-do list, and maybe some commentary on each part.

Legend of the Five Rings: Character history, ancestry, finish up my character sheet. I think this campaign is going to be fun. I got really pissed at how L5R divided up the UCI RPG Club, but I think the group here will be able to just have a fun RPG without getting too into it. I'm glad Chip is setting the game back in Rokugan's 'history' a bit, because nothing was more annoying than listening to the constant stream of clan news when people down South were really into the game. Imagine a bunch of college students pondering and debating the plotline of Days of Our Lives.

Demon: The Fallen: I need to do something to get 1 XP, because being 1 XP short of what I want to buy all the time is frustrating! (We get 5 XP a night, usually, and everything I've been buying costs multiples of 5.)

Exalted 2nd Edition, Solars and Lunars: I need to figure out a plot! A lot of my games stall at this point. I love my characters, I love the world, I just don't know what to do in that world. I don't want to let this one stall. I'm considering making it a face-to-face game...but it also sounds cool to do it online. Dunno.

Mage LARP: That's the problem I'm having here. The system and setting are ready to go, but I just don't know what to do as an overarching plot. LARPs are tricky. Too much handholding/railroading, and you're just running a tabletop session that's way too GM-time intensive. Too little handholding/railroading, and the players are just mulling about, chatting about nothing as they look for something to do.

I feel like I need to get some LARP going, though, partially because a lot of people are getting into the Vampire LARP in San Francisco. I'm constantly tempted to go join in, but...I just haven't been having fun with Vampire. I don't like the Mind's Eye Theater system, and I don't like the Vampire: The Masquerade setting. The STs could be doing a stellar job, but the burrs of the system and setting would just keep knocking me out of the fun zone. So I want to get my Mage LARP going, or do some kind of other LARP. Any kind of LARP, really, it doesn't matter to me much. Exalted, Nobilis, four-guys-locked-in-an-elevator, whatever, just something to show to the world that not all LARPs are huge, overarching political conflicts.
So, Mage...I just don't know what to do with it. I guess I really should just storyboard it out, like I would a tabletop game. This scene features this event, it approaches this conclusion...fight scene! Continue...
It'd be easier if I had my characters lined up, so I could base the plot off them, but I don't want to announce I'm getting this started and get 20 characters only to let it falter. I worry about time - if I'm going to have time to organize games while working, or organizing a business, or whatever I end up doing.

Ok, so here's what we've got as far as games for me - which are pretty much my whole schedule at this point.
Tuesday, 6-10: Zombies!
Thursday?, 7-10: Demon
Saturday, 4-7: Serenity

There's my D&D game, which was Thursdays, but I'm kinda tired of running it. It was fun while it lasted.
Doug's Sandstorm game was usually Wednesdays or Thursdays, but I'm gonna leave that in one or two more sessions. I don't really like my character or the group. I mean, it's not a bad group or a bad character, but neither one really makes me want to spend 3 hours a week there.

Games to be added:
Legend of the Five Rings
Exalted 2nd Edition
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

That's at least 6 games I'll be in...probably 1 per night. Pretty intense. I guess I could run one more game, just to make sure I'm gaming every night! Maybe a short game of something on my bookshelf. There are plenty of games I'd love to try...Mage: The Awakening, Rune, Nobilis...um, some others I'm forgetting. Oh well.

Oh, right, Hunter. 7th Sea, too. And Fireborn.

First Steps

Today, I took the first concrete steps toward opening a new game store. I arranged an appointment with a local real estate agent to look inside a property across the street, and I composed my membership application for GAMA. I'll send that in tomorrow. GAMA is the Game Manufacturer's Association, and they have a mentoring program specifically designed for people in my situation, who know what they want to do but are bewildered by the choices involved in getting there. I'll write a business plan, then secure funding: either my parents, or small business loans, if I feel confident enough about this. I'd like to get a retail job in the meantime...maybe at Stonestown, just for a few months of grinding to the next level.

Gen Con

By chance, I ended up near Gen Con Indy this year. 'The big one' for gamers, and it falls in my lap. It's only Thursday, but I'm going to have a good time. Take some photos, attend some seminars. If there's anything anyone wants, of course, let me know. Maybe in a year or two, some of us can make a real trip to the con.

Poker

Some time ago, I had some friends over. We had been drinking somewhat (just to give some background to the story) and were looking for a simple game to play, and one suggested we start playing Texas Hold 'Em Poker. I tried to sit through the rules, but got fed up and left the game. Acted like an ass, kinda, which is why I brought up the alcohol - and also why I've been thinking recently about why I have such a strong reaction against poker and other gambling games.
I think it's the competition. I play games to have fun with my friends, and gambling - even harmless gambling, like valueless poker chips - puts me in an antagonistic mood. Do you see people at these 'World Series of Poker' games talking to each other, laughing and having a good time of the game? It's all focused on the competition and the payoff. It angers me, because it corrupts our hobby and draws good potential players away, teaching them that the purpose of the game is to win, not to play.
That's how I roll, really. I'll play simple versions of blackjack and poker, and other games, but if chips come out, I'm out. I don't want to sit silent around the table, glaring at my opponents and trying to call their bluff. I want to laugh and have a good time. I do have some games where bluffing and hiding are part of the game, but in those games, the need to bluff is often tied to a specific opportunity or event - not the entire game. With poker, at least for me, there's no room to relax. Because I get into the competition. I get focused on the win. And I hate who I become.
We were playing a game of Twilight Imperium at a recent con, and one of the con staff gave me a TI3 poster as a prize for the winner. Immediately I became cutthroat - I was ready to pounce on a new player's undefended home system - and the game stopped being fun. (I miss that poster, too. While prizes are cool, I miss that the con just sprung it on me without warning, and I'm also annoyed that I didn't get anything special for running the game for 24 hours, while joe random who just stumbled upon the game walked away with an awesome prize.)
So, that's some explanation there, of how a person can love games of all kinds, but loathe competition and gambling. I hope my hobby never becomes mainstream.

The Job Hunt

FFG got back to me. They've got a little test, some ad copy for their website (hypothetically), which I think will be no problem. I just need some time alone to do that. Things are looking up...this will still require moving to Minnesota, I think, but as I said four posts ago, I'd rather go across the country to do what I love than get locked down at a bank or something hideously boring around here.
To some extent, I wonder if I would end up loving any job. If I'm just scared of finance and such because they sound boring. Then I realize that I volunteered to run two all-night games at a convention; that I'm playing FFG games for over 24 hours near-consecutively over the next few days. This is not a glitch or fad for me; this is not youthful immaturity. This is what I love.

Better days

Things went better today. I got less cranky when I got some sleep. Also, with the computer crisis averted (or at least forgotten), I didn't have that hanging over my head.

More later, perhaps? I hope to get to bed reasonably early tonight (although that just means, like, 2am.)

What a hassle, man

Yesterday was a bit of a hassle. It started off strong - a trip to the mall where I found some fun stuff for low prices.
When I got back home, I was tooling around on my friend's computer, and thinking about how he's been complaining about lots of little system quirks - his mouse locking up, computer crashing during games, network disconnecting and such. I know computers a bit better than him, so I decided to see if I could fix a few of these, mainly by downloading more current drivers for everything.
The problem was really Microsoft. His video card driver wanted the .Net framework to be installed, and to do that, I went and used Microsoft's automatic updates. I don't think he's updated his computer in...well, ever. So it installed like 60 security patches - that's good. But it also slipped in new versions of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.
Around that time, my friend came home, and...well, there were just little things out of place that he immediately picked up on. To start with, his favorites for IE went away. (After I got him to calm down and let me sit down at the computer, I found them tucked safely in a subfolder.) Windows gave him a popup about security. The icons of his media files changed. He had a bit less disk space. All these little things that are mostly meaningless and easily fixed, but drove him nuts because he had everything set up -just so-.
I mean, I don't blame him. It was my bad, I poked buttons I shouldn't have. What bothered me was that he'd freak out about easy things, and not give me a chance to fix them. Like the issue with his media icons changing. Easy fix - download a new icon you like, and change the file association.
The big issue was Windows Media Player 10. That installed, and he was used to WMP9. So I had to go hunting around the internet until I found a site that showed how to use the registry to roll back to WMP9 from 10. I think the skin still changed. I asked him why he wanted WMP9 so much, and it was just Microsoft vitriol - 'I know 9, but I don't know what 10 will do'. But, I got that taken care of.
Now I just have to hope that nothing else goes wrong. I think I got everything back the way it was. I'm just pissed at myself, the computer geek of sorts, messing up everything I didn't have a right to mess with. Really, all I did was update his system and close a ton of security holes, but I shouldn't have done it if he didn't want it.

Anyway, last night turned into an all-nighter. Not by choice, mind you. The computer is in the room where I sleep, so it's harder to politely excuse myself. For some reason, I've never been able to just tell this friend 'no, I don't want to watch X or stay up all night doing Y.' Maybe that's why I like hanging out with him, he challenges me. But he just leaves you with no gaps to break away from a conversation, even if that conversation is going on until 8am. I finally just laid down and went to slepe, because I was damned tired. I'm not a teenager anymore; I still pull all-nighters, but it's under the conditions of my choosing. Still, it's good training for when I run that all-night game at the convention on Friday. Maybe after that I can start going to bed at, like, midnight, and waking up earlier in the morning. I'd like that better.

Anime

For the next few weeks, I'm staying with a friend in Arizona. It's kind of like looking into myself, a few years ago. You see, he's really into anime. Posters on the walls, kitsch all over the place. I used to be the same way, but a few years ago I just gave it all up - right about the time I came back from Japan, actually.
Moods change, interests change, but anime I dropped like a brick. I think a lot of it was going to Japan, and realizing that Japan isn't anything special - just another group of humans trying to get by. And a lot of it was watching anime as it was broadcast on Japanese TV - the newest of the new releases - and realizing that it was the same shows I'd seen before, formulaic crap.
I know a lot of it is nostalgia, but I can't stand this modern crop of anime girls. Cutesy names and exaggerated expressions. One we watched today has a protagonist in third grade, and I just can't accept that. I was an idiot in third grade. Give me an adult character any day.
And the anime crowd is just creepier and creepier. Fetishes don't make you cute. Furries, boy-on-boy comics, pedophilia...I don't mind the fetish, but wearing it on your sleeve is annoying. For a lot of these people, their fetish is their personality. Look, if you don't want me to care that you're a furry, then develop a personality that doesn't center around that one point.

Mostly, I just wish this friend of mine would develop some interests outside of anime. I feel kind of bad about it, because I introduced him to anime a long time ago, and it's kind of taken him over. We used to watch stuff like The Cannonball Run, but now it's Magical Lyrical Nanoha or something like that. He spent a few hours just showing me AMVs and pictures he had on his computer. I just couldn't build up the nerve to tell him I just didn't frickin' care. Partially because I was once him - I could spend days just looking at art books and debating this character versus that. But some people grow up, expand their hobbies, keep anime as an interest but learn about new things. I think I've done that. And some people pay $50 on Ebay for a $2.50 doll from Japan. Sigh...you wouldn't have so many financial difficulties if you stopped buying all that useless kitsch.

Oh, one other mini-rant. Anime music videos. What a load of bull. There have been some good ones in the past - I've seen a beautiful tribute to Hayao Miyazaki done to The Mummer's Dance. But a lot of these are just stupid, and not funny. Look, it's the audio to the Fight Club trailer, but with Pokemon! Look, it's The Recruit, with Evangelion! I can't stand them. They're so awful. I think the big thing is that some signals got crossed, and people started thinking that combining the audio from The Fast and the Furious with some driving anime was real creativity. Now, I'm speaking as a person who did a few AMVs in the past, but it was something new and exciting then. I don't think I'd want to be a part of that scene now.

The one thing that watching anime is doing, though, is making me want to draw. In part it's realizing that I still have stories to tell, and a medium to tell them - I just need to put the effort in. Another part is realizing that I like my characters, personalities, and designs more than the new shows I'm seeing. I want to put my pencil to paper and see Beri staring back at me - I instantly know all about him, who he is, what he needs.

(And yeah, I'm starting to really regret giving the character a Mary Sue name. He was sort of a self-insertion character - a friend and I decided to talk about and draw what we'd be like in the Magic universe. But it kinda grates on me. Maybe I'll edit that out in a future strip or something. I do like my other characters - Paige and Kylie are favorites to write and draw, although I ought to give them more depth. I could do better if I could be hosed to script and storyboard my stuff beforehand, but that drains all the spontenaity out of drawing, and that's why I enjoy drawing in the first place.)

Oh, as an aside, I was thinking about why I dislike Collectable Card Games today. One thing that really gets me angry is when the rules change. Just in general. Like the way I lost the Comcast job - I did my part according to the rules, and they changed the rules. One of the things I hate about driving is that there's all these rules, and also all these situations that supercede them. Anyway, what keeps CCGs fresh for other people is a disaster for me. Constant infusions of new cards and new rules mean frustration. That's why I haven't played Magic in ten years - I have a deck, I know the rules, but I'm afraid of what I'll encounter from my opponent. Split cards? Immunity to damage? Phasing? Kicker? If I can't predict my opponent, I might as well be playing a brick wall.

As a closing, I should mention that I actually really like this unnamed friend quite a bit. He's a good guy, and we've been hanging around for years. I'm glad he's got a strong interest. It's just kind of frustrating nowadays that we're not exactly into the same things anymore. Well, on the upside, his parents have a huge DVD collection, so maybe I can catch up on some western movies while I'm here. I'm thinking of rewatching the whole Star Wars saga. And I'm going to get the Firefly box set for his parents - his dad's been talking about how he likes Cowboy Bebop, so I think he'll love Firefly.

Fantasy Flight

A few days ago, I put in a bunch of applications to a game company in Minnesota, Fantasy Flight Games. I'm really hoping it works out - I'm well-qualified for all four positions I applied to, and I think I showed real enthusiasm for games. It's rather refreshing, really. I've been spending all this time trying to fit into a hole I was never really made for. Marketing, economics, all that jazz, it's background noise - it's not what I want to do.
I suppose it sounds all emo, but sometimes I look in the mirror and I don't know who I am. I got my hair cut short to find a job. I read business books and magazines, I apply to jobs at companies I don't like or respect. All I really want to do is sit down and have fun, gather around a table with some friends and play a good game.
FFG has the right culture for me, and I'd love to work there. The big hurdle (besides getting hired) is that we'd need to move to Minnesota. That's fine by me. I have short roots - I moved to California with hardly a look back, went to Japan, moved to San Francisco - I keep the connections I cherish, but I have no regrets when I say goodbye. It'll be a challenge to move across the country, but no more of a challenge than trying to pay rent on a place in San Francisco. If this works out, I'm thinking I'll move out there for a few years. See what I can do, what kind of name I can make for myself. If that goes well, maybe move over to WotC, Sega, something closer to San Francisco.
I wish I felt worse about it, I really do - all my friends up here deserve that. But if I can land what is, essentially, my dream job, I think the good will outweigh the bad.

Entry Level

The name of the position:

Business Process Analyst (Entry Level)

And later on:

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Computer Science, Procurement, Supply Chain Management or related field of study with a minimum of 5 years related experience or equivalent. MBA is a preferred.
• Experience in supplier management, logistics, manufacturing, procurement or the direct business.

How the heck is that 'Entry Level'? 5 years experience means you already entered!

The Job Market

Sorry that there haven't been any picture posts lately - Picasa isn't working too well with this blog.

I think I'll start posting some things in this journal. I've been on the job market for some time with no success, so maybe I can give some advice, and maybe some warnings about how annoying it is to find a job these days.

I think I'm the perfect candidate. I earned an MBA last year, I'm a great worker, creative and enthusiastic. I've got a good resume. But I'm hardly getting nibbles.

I've only had two decent job opportunities, and lost them both.
The first was with Electronic Arts - the Spore marketing team for Maxis. Spore looks great, and I'd love to work on it. I love games. Absolutely perfect for the position. Nope.

The second was much more annoying, and I just lost it today. Comcast. They called me about a marketing internship. Here's how it went: I had two interviews that went great. Good stuff. Some paperwork, lots of good vibes. Then I submit my information for the background check, and everything goes on hold.

Why? Because I don't have a driver's license. Yep. Never mind that when I asked them to confirm the job description, the description they sent me didn't have anything about needing a driver's license. So they call me last Tuesday, and tell me I need my driver's license by Monday, or I lose the job.

Seriously, WTF? One week to go from zero to competent driver? Well, screw them, I pulled it off - I learned to drive - then botched one turn at the DMV and failed the drive test. No license, no job (even though I can do it tomorrow, they're not willing to wait for one day).

It ticks me off, but...really, whatever. It's their loss. I have a $150,000 education, and they were going to pay me $12/hr. I'm looking for a company I can stay with for decades, and they're willing to throw that away because I'm one day late.

So that's where I'm at. I graduated six months ago, and my prospects are zero. I'll keep this journal updated based on my progress...we'll see what I can do here.

- B

I updated Picasa, maybe this will take care of the problem and get me blogging again.

Edit: Le crap! Why isn't this working?

Picasa and Blogger aren't working very well. Blogger is forcing me to sign in each time I post, and keeps saving the posts as Drafts, so I have to go to Blogger.com and publish them directly there. And sometimes the pictures don't show up at all. I'll keep working on it.