Monday, July 18, 2011

Stat by stat, putting it together~

Stat by stat,
Putting it together
Power by power,
Only way to make a true monster.
Every little idea for a complication
Only satisfactory when it makes evil laughter.

Having just the concept is frustration
Gotta have the points make it real
Statting it all-
That's what counts.

Awful song parodies aside, they have it very right at times when it comes to finishing one campaign and starting another and you want to make both work right and impress and/or horrify your players.


Sorry for my lack of update in the last couple days, the review for Sincerely, petrified will be coming in the next couple days. I've been busy with things.

A large part is, on the day it was due I was invited to a play a friend of my family was starring in's opening night. I'm not normally very cultured but it sounded interesting. And I've been trying to be more social, I'm typically very bad with crowds.

Fortunately, there was a good amount of empty seats in a couple of the rows in front of us (we were nearly at the front.) so I was able to enjoy it, and it was very, very enjoyable. The play itself was a little known one called Chase Me Comrade, a comedy about a popular Russian ballet dancer who attempts to defect to the west with the aid of his socialite partner, the cold of a navy commander and her very suffering straight man fiance and a lot of hijinks ensue. 

You can read more here. I highly recommend it if you ever get the chance, though being a play, I imagine performers vary a lot, and despite the fact I've spent a lot of time in amateur theatre in my time, couldn't hope to judge how this would go for everyone, but it was extremely well done here. Every very long line (which there was many) was done without pause for breath, never was the audience paid attention to by the actors, despite attempts to gain it by people I know when their friends came on stage.

The day after I wasn't in much of a state either, that morning and took most of the day to get things together, though I still wasn't in much of a state for small text.
Today, I thought I at least should put some word out, I try to keep a minimum of three days between posts, ideally and want to stick to that. At the moment I'm riding a late night lack of sleep insanity high, and trying to finally shore up NPCs my players will regularly deal with in my upcoming game. A complicated task. There are tricks, which I'm trying, if two NPCs are lacking on their own, combining them into one here and there, and I only have so many details on my PCs to build off of, but given my goal, build a intricate web of unique characters, then have the PCs actions or lack thereof cause ripples in it with the as far as they know campaign goal of keeping it stable, that's something that takes a lot of work.

Add on further complications. Every NPC's personality has to harbour unique, terrible monsters the PCs may fight, that will not only threaten their lives but grant a lot of insight into the NPCs. They need set feelings for each other and varrious cliques the PCs might belong to.

Hell, since it's set in Japan, I'm even working on a list that will make sure I remember which honorific characters use and for who, so I can make sure they sound like different people. Something I've always felt was a large problem of mine as a GM, in my current game I just hide that verbal tics for my quirky miniboss squad of regular NPCs. I'm not satisfied with that.

Hopefully I'll be able to continue this lunacy and get a few more ideas. Once I either hit a dead end here or manage to somehow finish them for the moment, I'm very much looking forward to trying to detail those monsters inside them all, getting back to the starting song parody...

7 comments:

  1. Interesting post!

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  2. Since it's set in Japan, the possibilities for unique role language are endless. Then again, that requires that it's in Japanese...

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  3. I know where you come from. you're talking to a person that really should write down common speech tics for every character he has, PC or NPC.

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  4. Bad with crowds? That makes two of us.

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  5. Love it! Hit me back, alphabetalife.blogspot.com

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