lederhosen

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We celebrated Australia Day in the traditional fashion, by sleeping in followed by an afternoon of D&D.

( In which we are surprisingly efficient. )

Also:

"Petrochenko told Fast Company that the blogging service was planning between 10-50 new community sites by the end of 2012. These new community sites will offer organizers and admins highly detailed metrics and statistics on user activity that appear to be more detailed than Facebook. "

DO NOT WANT.

It is quite reasonable to have a 'barter' type skill that affects prices you get when buying and/or selling items.

If you do this, it's probably a good idea to balance it so that I can't make money just by standing in a shop, buying the merchandise, and selling it straight back to the owner for 20% more than it cost me.

At the end of our last D&D game, our party had been reduced to three after an unfortunate run-in with a will-o-wisp. On the bright side, Jordan had quite a lot of money and no known next of kin, so the survivors did quite well out of it. We also had a mysterious coded message taken from the bandits we'd fought earlier.

During downtime, my half-orc Alessandro managed to crack the code (he's brighter than he looks) and found it had directions to where the bandits had hidden their ill-gotten gains. We decided to stop in town to heal up and resupply before going back for the loot.

On the way to town we ran into a rather poorly-mannered halfling named Indra, and shortly afterwards met a bunch of nixies who asked for a donation towards the costs of maintaining the path through the swamp. Indra was VERY RUDE to the nixies and nearly got into a fight with them. Afterwards she told us that they'd used some sort of a charm spell on us, which was obvious nonsense - they were nice and it seemed entirely reasonable to give them some money.

In town we met Kauri and Drustos, two of the original founding members of the party - sadly due to a couple of deaths, only one of our party members knew them. We decided to go back and loot the treasure together, but first we had to deal with Kauri's embarrassing lunar problem.

The last time we had to deal with this issue, it required a very clever plan that involved putting the dwarf in an old sack smelling of rotting cabbages, whacking him with a stick until he turned into an otter, and then turning into an octopus to tow him across a river.

This time, we discovered that being competent and being liked in a town has advantages (I don't think we've ever been in that situation before). Since our heroes had previously saved the mayor's wife from slavers, he helped us with getting Kauri cured, and we set off back to the treasure.

Last time we'd been that way (before we realised the treasure was there) we'd met a hag, so we were expecting trouble. This time, her two sisters had shown up, all three of them standing around a cauldron stirring it.

Kauri and Meg (the two high-charisma members of the party) flattered the hags and told them we'd brought a gift of mithril... unfortunately we only had one gift, so we'd have to give it to the wisest of the three. They suggested that the hags all tell tales so that we could see who was wisest, and then we'd award the prize.

Kauri and Meg managed to drag this out for several hours while Alessandro excused himself and went off to the nearby riverbank to do a spot of digging. The message wasn't too specific about exactly where to find the treasure, but eventually he managed to unearth a large chest and stash it away in his magical haversack before returning to the group.

At that point we made our apologies to the hags and said we had to be going. Kauri said that we were unable to tell which was the wisest of them - they were all very clever - so we'd have to leave the prize with them and let the three of them agree on who deserved it.

That got us a VERY long head start...

It's a lovely feeling when we actually manage to do something competent and solve things by cunning instead of brute force. Not one I'm used to, alas!

Phineas Gage holding his crowbar.

He looks pretty well, considering.

So, I'm playing a cyberpunk CRPG, Shadowrun-y sort of thing, where I run around Future Urban Dystopia. In this game I get money and XP by doing mercenary jobs for fixers - carrying messages, negotiating deals, fighting yakuza, or using my neural implants to hack into the Global Matrix and steal data.

To get these jobs, obviously, I have to talk to a fixer. And if the job is across town, I probably want to call a taxi to save walking. Sometimes I can do these things in person, but often I have to telephone.

To do this, I have to find a bar, or a hotel, or whatever, that has a public payphone, and take the "can I use your phone?" dialogue option. That's right, in the cyberpunk future where I can get chipped up and have metal implants to strengthen my skeleton and additional memory storage inserted in my brain, there are no mobile phones.

The really weird thing is that this is a phone game. I got it from the app store, yes I did. When your sci-fi future game can't match the tech of the games platform used to play it, something is deeply deeply wrong!

Wishing you all a happy $FESTIVE_SEASON. Now off to tidy before guests arrive...

I was browsing through my friendly local gaming store yesterday, looking at the miniatures, and came across two (both NSFW) that caught my attention:

Bug Hunter

X'Stacy (limited edition, but perhaps not limited enough).

If you don't want to load them: the Bug Hunter is a woman who presumably hunts aliens. She's carrying a big gun, and wearing heavy armour that looks to be a mix of leather and solid metal plates. Unfortunately, it only comes up to her waist.

Er, did I say 'waist'? Sorry, I meant 'hips'. Her armour-pants are slung low enough that she's showing a lot of thong underneath. (Yes, apparently female alien-hunters wear thong undies.) On the top half of her body... okay, technically she DOES have a T-shirt, but since she's pulled it up to wipe her face, it's not covering anything.

I am intrigued by the setting that makes this outfit seem like a good idea. I can only assume that it's populated by ferocious monsters with extremely short legs that can't jump. Maybe hell-wombats?

"X'Stacy" is a Big Sword Chykk, who might look kinda fierce if she wasn't in extreme danger of tripping and falling over because HER PANTS ARE AROUND HER ANKLES. Also, if you have huge breasts that stick about about a handspan in front of the rest of your torso, perhaps it would make more sense to put the armour on the breasts first and not the other way around?

[Edit: Rey has suggested that they might be gaiters rather than pants round her ankles, and after looking again, I think she might be right. In which case, less risk of tripping over, but still just as ludicrous.]

The site allows users to tag figures so they can easily find the ones that interest them. X'Stacy's tags, and the number of other figures on the site with those tags:

female (79)
boobs (36)
topless (23)
breasts (26)
scantily (25)
clad (25)
nipples (7)
nipple (5)
sword (22)
chain (1)


I think it's great that virginal gamers can find scantily-clad women, but it seems wrong that these ladies should be lumped in with all the others who just forgot/couldn't afford/work in a profession that doesn't permit/have never heard of clothes. What this place needs is an 'impractical female armor' tag.

Edit: If your mind works like mine, you may have spent countless years thinking "how I would love to explore the socio-political implications of roleplaying a poledancer, if only I could find a suitable miniature for my character." Well, wait no longer! (Of course, if your mind works like mine, your response will be "no, it has to be a dwarvish poledancer".)

OTOH, sarcasm aside I actually quite like this one (work-safe). Though I'm puzzled as to why it would have been tagged 'scantily clad' - compared to much of the stuff you see in gaming, a strapless sleeveless dress is pretty demure.