TTRPG writeups: Madcap Redcap Recap #1

Redcaps is a casual game that I suggested to satisfy the roleplaying habit when people are unable to make sessions or aren’t feeling it but everyone else wants to play (the initial proposal went along the lines of “maybe make some madcap redcaps for a casual game for when people are missing”). Not everyone has to be present for every session, and anyone who has an idea can GM. There will probably be story arcs at some point because that’s just how I roll but they’re otherwise essentially a bunch of mostly improv one shots or short runs. The older boys were initially resistant because “Changeling is cringe” until 13yo’s Redcap character in Mercenaries made them all want to play Redcaps.

January ProgBlog #1: mediocre starts

I was intending on trying to get back into the swing of things in the first week of January (including my blogging schedule) with the intention of seeing what in the work schedule that I’d done up (and been vaguely reworking on the fly) needed changing up.

I didn’t end up doing the progblog and the work schedule really does need changing up.

Though most of what I suffer from is the complete inability to keep to anything resembling time, and the fact that I have to be interruptable because JJ is the one with the full time job with defined hours. So what I had was just stuff that needed to get done on what day, and just doing what I could when I could.

December ProgBlog #3: "Christmas holidays"

Yeh right like I ever take them.

I have seriously been moving like molasses and I really do need to actually change something, but because I’m me I’ll probably just burnout again, have to recover for a few days again during which I’ll relentlessly beat myself up over being an idiot again and that I really should have fixed it before it became this bad again, only to do exactly the same thing down the line again.

TTRPG writeups: WoD Modern 2 - Vampires #1

When the kids expressed interest in playing Vampire, I told them that I hated the subsystem. Mechanically it’s not any different from Changeling, it’s the lore that I don’t like (there’s nothing wrong with it per se, just not my style), and while you can be combat heavy with it (which given the insane strength and speed vampires have can be quite entertaining and occasionally interesting to manage), it’s generally geared towards more political intrigue which I am absolutely terrible at because I’m lucky if I have Wits 1.

November ProgBlog #4: railroading

I’m apparently that good at not being too obvious about railroading (unless I make it obvious like when I want to end a session, like I did on the weekend and had my players playfully accusing me of railroading when after a while I was like “YOU’RE GOING BACK TO THE FREEHOLD.”) that I can’t even railroad myself when I need to.

Weekend was busy again with gym events so once more not a lot got done. I worked a bit more on the dice system, and some notes, yesterday I got started on Gundry.

TTRPG writeups: WoD Modern 2 - Mercenaries #1

Mild content warning: occasional swearing and mild adult themes

We had a slight derailment right at the outset as S was unable to make the session. I only do character driven stories so players not being able to make sessions can make things fall apart, so normally we would just skip (I had previously tried to encourage the kids to make Redcaps that we could use in a casual drop-in/out filler game as a Redcap gang lends itself well to that, plus they could get any murderhobo/random dickishness/silly out, but the older boys had decided “Changeling is cringe”). However in this case seeing as it was early on, I managed to restructure stuff in my head (and later on in my notes) enough to postpone S to the next session.

TTRPG writeups: WoD Modern 2 - Mercenaries #0

System: World of Darkness (edition uncertain as the sourcebooks are all over the joint and also I fudge and homebrew a lot)

All players except S were in Modern 1. T reprised his character, the others wanted to try something else. They decided on being a mercenary group comprised of ex-military buddies, except that for some reason which I don’t think even they can explain, they all decided that they were going to be from different countries and not emigrate to one so that they could easily be army buddies -- (the character party is comprised of one Australian, one Greek, one British who seems to have retconned to Irish, and two Russians) I had done individual preludes with each player so we could all get a feel for the character, and decided to use a group prelude to bring them all together as well as give them the shared history and for them to figure out how they would work together as a team so they would have an easier time fitting together as a team (rather than having to work it out) in the actual game. The group prelude ended up turning into a 2-session mini-campaign because sometimes things like that just happen when I get ideas, so this prelude post is really, really long (I didn’t split it). Future writeups should (hopefully) be less long ^^;

November ProgBlog #2: distractions

There are many and some of them are just things I’ve decided to add on because I’m not very smart like that.

After WoDMod1 finished I started hacking on a dice system I’d written for AER two decades ago x_x when I was roleplaying a lot more. It mostly worked out fine when I was playtesting it with the friends I roleplayed with frequently back then because it was a fork of World of Darkness with a lot of my fudges and homebrew built in (it’s actually more or less the system I run now when we’re playing World of Darkness, just closer to the original than my fork so the children reading the sourcebooks know what’s going on).

November ProgBlog #1: legitimate reasons

I actually had them for the delay for once, and that was going out for birthday churros (not mine, but someone’s).

After that I was trying to render out some super quick and dirty walk cycles (which are literally just hands and feet approximating walking motions, no refinements or personality injected whatsoever, which partially accounts for the jerkiness and the other part is only vaguely remembering how to do looping gifs and animated gifs in general and couldn’t get the timing right when making the gif, I haven’t done one for game engines yet and I don’t use them at all for animations) and my computer crashed three times while rendering the first one (I’m a bit extra so I did three different views because of course I did).

October ProgBlog #4: "I just wanted a nice render..."

Late progblog is late again but that’s nothing new. This time was an interesting combination of I had to go in to work early and completely forgot to start (I’ll usually make a start on writing in the morning, pick at it throughout the day and then finish up at night when I get back from work and do super basic if any edits) and then because I’m really close, figured I’ll just get a render done to use as a cover image because I’ve been doing my usual doing a lot but nothing to show for it thing.