Timewaster's Guide Archive

I've got a couple of game reviews I'm putting together.  Should get those turned in in the next day or two.

Painful conclusion, but I really really think it's the right one and we can help you with it!  You have a great story idea, just need to smooth some of that out.  Epic fantasy is hard to do 1st person because there is so much going on that your readers need a view into.  *cheers for you*

On another note, I'll have a bunch of Whispers out this weekend.  I'm going back and fixing stuff and will give you guys everything up to this point.  Then my suggestion is that we start putting in some writing practice exercise weeks.  I have a whole notebook of writing assignments from my creative writing classes and I don't think it would hurt any of us to try some of them and then read each other's assignments and talk about what works and what doesn't.  There are some basic issues with rounding characters, perspectives, etc that are happening in our books that I think can be smoothed out with some practice away from the novels that we love.  So my proposal would be that after we talk about Whispers I can give out an assignment.  Everyone turns their work into the group and we talk about all four on the following Wednesday.

Opinions?  Objections?  Anything?

~J

I'll get the sub out this afternoon.  Got pulled into the brother's wedding prep yesterday and now catching up.

You sure?  Cause I got yours all read.  I'm so sorry about last week, stupid work.  We were shifted to an emergency Plan B for a release and things kinda exploded.  The product goes live today, so I should be back to being around and not entirely insane...sorta...at least as close as I was before. 

I SHOULD be there, but there is a chance that work will be keeping me late tonight.  I'll update as soon as I know anything.

I think a lot of the favortism and such really depends on the maturity of your group and the couple involved as well as how long they've been gaming, either together or separately.  I play with a group that consists of three couple and two singles, all of us 30+ in age and most of the couples have been together at least 10 years.  The most experienced of us has been gaming for 20+ years and the least experienced 5+. 

I do notice the couples sitting together and they'll work on character concepts together sometimes, though often romantic interests are across the party, which leads to much amusement.  We have a very good grasp of IC vs OOC, thank you very much.  However when it comes to favortism it just doesn't exist.  Treasure is split between the party and the GMs, several of us take turns with various games, work hard to create appropriate encounters and rewards for everyone in the party.  As well the rules stay constant no matter who is doing something, stupid or not.  The current GM's wife, who was playing a high level wizard, put on a cloak without getting it identified first.  She expected a cloak of resistance and got a cloak of poison.  Instadeath.  The GM COULD have changed that for her, no one but him knew what the cloak was, but he'd already planned it and squashed her just as much as he would have done us.  Yeah, he took more jokes about sleeping on the couch for it, but the rules remained fair. 

Actually I didn't enjoy this game nearly as much.  Free was nice, sure, but if you compare it to any of it's pay for counter parts: BF2 and such the graphics are dated, the movement patterns and controls a pain in the butt and the sound...I had to turn off all of the sounds in order not to be bothered by the thing.  Not to mention it was SO laggy that I was kicked out of games consistently, sometimes before it even loaded up and that's on a T1 connection running on a high end gaming box.  For the sake of comparision:  http://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/warrock/review.html is my review on the game.

~Jena