The Search for Novelty

I'm in one of -those- phases again. Ever so slightly manic, with grand plans of doing something new and different.

Well, it's a heckuva lot better than feeling blue and low and somewhat depressed, which was the overall mood for the last week or two. Hormones suck.

A gradual "I need to paint" mood has been building up and gathering momentum for the past few weeks, culminating in revisiting the Reaper Forums and several painting sites like Brush Thralls, the Games Workshop site, WorldWorksGames cardstock stuff, new mini companies - Rezolution looks quite interesting, Warmachine by Privateer Press has come up with a new Hordes game that also look pretty cool, I go into paroxysms of "IT MUST BE MINE" every time I stare at Rackham minis (never quite get around to buying 'em though)...

I also made myself finally visit Comics Mart again. (My discount card expired Apr 06 - shows you how long ago I last visited.) I caught up on my comics. Lucifer has finally ended its run. Picked up a whole bunch of Neverwhere comics, looks like that run is ending soon too. And realized I am missing a bunch of KoTD comics - intend to just go and order backissues from Kenzerco eventually, 106, 110-113.

But the real point is, they were having a Games Workshop SALE. Rofl. Finally. See, the new edition of Warhammer (again? 7th now, I hear) was about to come out the next day, and so suddenly all the old stuff was no longer of so much interest or value. The box set (with a bunch of plastic Orcs and Empire troops) was suddenly slashed from SGD 180 to 90 dollars. Better yet, blister packs and a few box sets (like a Space Wolf dreadnought) experienced the same slashed price, 90 to 45 dollars, and from 18 bucks a single figure (fucking insane pricing) to 5-9 dollars a single figure (somewhat more reasonable and more Reaper-like...)

And joy of joys, the LOTR minis were ALSO on sale. Finally. I had been drooling over the figs for ages, but just unwilling to put down that kind of moolah (plus copyright fee) for them. Now instead of $42 for a mounted and unmounted Gandalf, it was more like $20 - way more tolerable. Yea, I bought a bunch of stuff.

Adding to more lead in the house. And this guilty feeling of "OMG, I really really need to start painting again."

So this impetus pushed me to get really constructive stuff done instead of computer gaming the hours away.

See, I couldn't paint since my move because there was a bunch of crap in the way of the paint table. So I had to pack them up in order to make room. I did. Sounds simple when you just write it like that, but getting started and continuing with packing has to be one of the most agonizing things ever, for me anyhow.

I'm kinda thrilled. Apparently you don't really lose it even with not enough practice. I've also developed a new cunning way of painting, inspired by the world of cooking. It's something called misc-en-place, I think, or something equally Frenchy. The idea is that when you cook, you shouldn't be chopping up stuff as you're throwing it in the pan and cooking, you should get everything ready in small little bowls and dishes first - just like how the TV chefs cook.

So when you're painting, you shouldn't be brooding about what color to mix now and so on. I suspect that the master painters already do this - they have their colors all pre-mixed in the palette and they just pick it up and put it on, and having all the paint there also helps to switch colors and blend them. But I can't do this - I get too worried about all my paint drying off the palette (I'm also real stingy on my paints, hence why they dry so fast).

Then I saw this guy on the forums. He had these small little paint pots, and he premixed the colors in the paint pots as he painted a dragon. And suddenly it all became clear. I *ahem* made off with a couple of microtubes from the lab and premixed my colors - basecoat of green, two shades of darker green, and two highlight colors of lighter green. You could visually see the gradation of color, and then you could thin it to the correct consistency - and then stop worrying about it and just start applying paint. It was great. It utterly rocked.

I painted red to my satisfaction this way too. Really nice.

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So that's it for painting. Plan to continue. The other thing I was thinking about was solo roleplaying. Mythic, specifically. It's a remarkably simple system. See, the heart of Mythic is that when you are stuck, you ask a question. Pose it so that there's a yes/no answer. Did I manage to pull the treasure chest out of the well? Did I hit the serial killer with the flower vase?

Essentially, it's like tossing a coin for your chances. Except that 50/50 success is just Average Skill opposed by Average Difficulty. If you had Average Skill and were trying to do something Exceptionally difficult, then of course, your chances of failure are much higher than your chance of success, and Mythic incorporates all these different possibilities into one big chart, called the Fate Chart.

They add a twist by allowing Exceptional Success and Exceptional Failure on an extreme dice roll. So you could knock the guy out so well with the flower vase that he's killed in one hit, or miss so badly that you sploosh all the water out and then slip and fall so that you're at the serial killer's mercy.

The results are up to the players/GM. In this case, since we're solo roleplaying, there's not much argument about the results, just up to one's imagination.

An additional twist is to add randomness to scenes - on certain dice rolls, a random event that you roll for interposes itself, so that it mixes some unpredictability into the affair. This unpredictability, imo, is perfect for solo roleplay, otherwise it tends to turn into a narcissistic daydream or something and get boring very very fast.

I notice that this random event, being unable to predict your troops' movements, is also an essential component in solo wargaming rules from Two Hour Wargames. Complete control becomes boring.

However, I have encountered an interesting problem. I'm not sure if it's to do with the game design, or with me as a player or something else. I find that I can solo roleplay and start it for a day or two, after which I appear to run into a road block and then just...stop. I can't ever conclude. Tried it three or four times now.

Part of it is when I run into something that's not known by me. The context is uncertain, the world setting is not known, and suddenly I halt to figure it out and I don't seem able to figure it out and poof, that's it for that game. Random rolls to decide don't seem to work because I want it story-based and logical and twice now, it's the motivation of the antagonist that calls it to a halt. My protags are clear, but the antag is not, and when I have to stop and thinking about him or her, the story just grinds to nothingness.

Once it was a Dark Sun game where I read forward in the script and suddenly when I knew what was going to happen, I was less interested in bringing the characters through it - not to mention a combat that got bogged down and stopped being interesting to resolve.

Weird. Is it me? Imaginator's block? Or is it the system? Probably it's me. Just got to figure out how to get past it...