Spirit of the Code - Stress & Consequences

When I played Spirit of the Century I felt that the conflicts were too long because of the way that Stress and Consequences worked. Since I didn't want the conflicts to take most of the session in Spirit of the Code I decided to use some of the faster conflict rules. I decided to make stress work like minion stress and had consequences reduce the amount of stress taken. Since I pre-ordered Starblazer Adventures and got the pdf, I basically am just taking their stress system.

The second question I worked on for stress and consequences is what different stress tracks I wanted. Eventually I boiled it down to three tracks: Physical, Digital, and Social. They each work pretty much how you would expect them to work, except for Physical. Because I wanted Physical combat to be the last resort and a sign that everything has sudden gotten serious, there is no Physical stress boxes. That means that every single requires that the character take a consequence (or more then one) or be taken out. I hope that this makes physical conflicts seem very dangerous and help make my players avoid them, which is something I want.

Anyway, those are my first thoughts on how Stress & Consequences should work in Spirit of the Code.

Spirit of the Code

I've decided to run a FATE adaption with my local group, which I'm colloquially calling Spirit of the Code. It is a mystery genre conversion which is set in the near future when Augmented Reality has completely taken over the digital world to the point that anyone could be plugged in all 24/7.

Right now I'm working on how character creation should work and I should have that done by next week when I plan on having my players create characters. I'll post the character phases and skill list when I have them done and put up the characters when they are made.

RideBack

Recently I've been watching some RideBack, an Anime series that is starting to come out in Japan. The show is about a young Ballet dance who suffers a bad injury and is unable to dance anymore, she then goes to collage with her best friend and joins the motorcycle club. However, in the futuristic setting motorcycles have been replaced with humanoid like robots that can change between cycle and mech forms.

It is a really interesting and unique way of presenting the story and I recommend that you at least check it out.

Defund NCCAM

There is a proposal at Change.gov (The website of The Barack Obama transition team) to Defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

I suggesting reading a little bit about it on this blog.

You can vote to defund NCCAM and help save $225 million dollars that are wasted researching completely useless pseudoscience.

I'm a Skeptic

Recently I've been starting to get into the Skeptical movement. It started off in my interest with the Skeptoid podcast. I then spread out my interest by reading a bunch of different blogs such as Respectful Insolence and Science-Based Medicine.

The various sites have helped improve my critical thinking skills and have shown me a bunch of ways I had already been mislead. I have also learned a great deal about science and evolution over the last couple of weeks because my travels have lead me to several different scientific sites. All in all it has been a very education week, maybe being off from school has made my desire to learn go off in different tangents.

Amazon Wish List

Because I have difficult to get right tastes in gifts, (i.e. People make mistakes when ordering for me) this year I am using the Amazon Wish Lists. I have looked at them several years ago and it could have been better then. Now however it have some really cool features.

The one I like the most is the Universal Wish List which allows you to add items from other websites to your Amazon Wish List. Then when someone purchases it they can mark it off your list, really cool. Now I can add some of the weird specialty stuff I like to my wish list. (Like Fudge Dice or Euro Board games)

50,000 words

Wow, It is Nov 30 and I have finally hit the 50,000 word mark of my novel! That means I have won NaNoWriMo! It has been one of the most intense writing I have ever done and probably one of the most rewarding. It feels strange looking back at all the work I have done and realizing that I have made a novel, almost. While I have 50,000 words over 12 chapters I am still not done with the story. It will probably be one more chapter and a least 1-2 thousand more words before I am done, probably ending the story unfinished so that I can later (maybe next NaNoWriMo) write a sequel to my novel.

Again, WOW, I almost can't believe I wrote 50,000 words.

Also I plan on spending a large portion of December editing my Novel and will hopefully get it self-published through Lulu before Christmas.