Critical Role and Me: How Watching Inspired Me

I had heard about Geek & Sundry's Critical Role when it came out. The snippets I kept getting on it was Roleplaying and it kept showing people dressed up in costumes, so I thought it was something more akin to Larping. What also might have happened was that I confused both the Geek & Sundry show LARP and Critical Role. Additionally, it was this Twitch thing and I have some reservations about Twitch and it's "Big Brother" style "watching." Like... things on Twitch don't feel like a show, they feel like I'm spying on you while you do stuff.

It might not be a surprise to anyone if I reveal I first watched Critical Role because Wil Wheaton was going to be on it. After my love for Titansgrave and Wheaton as a GM, I thought it would be awesome to watch him as a character. So when I saw the tweet, I clicked the link and BAM, I was chromecasting it onto the TV!

So I put it on and I struggled just a smidge getting into it and then all of a sudden, things were moving forward and I was hooked into what was going on. I fell in love with the characters, the GM (I am an adoring fan of Matthew Mercer now), and the world! It made me feel great about some of the GMing I'd done and it made me really excited for continuing forward with RPGs.

While this was part 3 of an ongoing adventure, it was part 1 of Wheaton being part of the group. I would have to wait a week to see how things would end, and, well, the day came when I was going to see if the crew was able to complete their contract!

As I watched, I couldn't believe I was staying up so late, but each moment was so enthralling. My husband actually stayed to watch and we started lamenting our own RPG plight! The two of us came up with the idea that the two of us and our friend should take turns running our own RPGs.

One month, my husband would use two Saturdays to run his Marvel RPG. I would use two Saturdays the next month to run my Pathfinder (or Fantasy Age... haven't decided yet) RPG. Then the third month our friend would run his ShadowRun adventure for two Saturdays. We'd all get to be GMs and characters and we'd have time to work on our own RPG.

The reality behind the idea that was spawned was amazing! Now we're on our way to embarking on the most massive, dedicated activity the three of us have done since we used to do HeroQuest back in the day. Check back to see how things unfold.

Join Me at GenCon 2015

Apparently I'm out and about at GenCon this year! It didn't dawn on me until, well. . . right now, just how much I am going to be seriously out and about. I've usually been a wallflower, but something has pushed me into a more interactive role this year.

Not that I want to support people stalking me, but I figured I'd post some of my events so if you wanted to come play some games or whatever, you could find me. I know I have like, 2 or 3 fans, but maybe there are more of you. Is fans even the right term for my following based on hodge-podgeness?

First, I'm running some board games for ConTessa. They're a site that focuses primarily on RPG for women. They posted a while back that they were looking for people to run events (even board games), so that made me happy. I don't feel completely comfortable yet with RPG, but I'm growing in confidence every day, so being able to run a game or two for them was pretty great.

I tried to pick two games that would be kind of fun to add on RPG personas to; one Sci-Fi and one Medieval. I really love playing them, so we'll see how it goes! The room locations and registering can be found through the links! Hope to see you at the events!

Here are the events I'm running for ConTessa:

The Captain is Dead - Thursday, July 30 at 6PM
A cooperative game published by Game Crafter (it's seriously awesome) and was a Kickstarter designed by Joe Pierce and JT Smith. It's Sci-Fi, duh! Essentially, the captain is dead and you and the crew, that are left, have to try to get the Jump Core back online! Work together to keep the other systems up and running, while fighting aliens, blasting attacking ships, and collecting the resources to get the core going. Will you make it!



Sheriff of Nottingham - Thursday, July 30 at 8PM
I love this game. I thought it would be a great tabletop game for an RPG group, because you can really become your character. To learn more about this game, check out my review through International Geek Girl Pen Pals Club.




The opening ceremony for ConTessa is also going to be awesome, with guest speaker Margaret Weis (um... Dragonlace books... SQUEA!). So make sure you check that out if you haven't already signed up.

So those are the events I'm running. I've already made known that I will be participating in some Cosplay again this year. Last year I tried my hand at a Steampunk Nun. I loved it. This year I went with something a little different and went for a game character. I intend to be Felicia Day from Dead of Winter. Not only because, well. . . it's Felicia Day, Dead of Winter, and zombies, but I'm trying to become comfortable with Cosplay and while I am probably like 3 Felicia Days, it shouldn't really matter in the end. Why my body looks the way it does is seriously none of your concern and I am merely expressing my love of a game and a geek icon.

If you see someone looking kind of like that character, I will gladly stop for a picture with you. My husband has a funny addition to my costume that I can't wait to unveil. OMG LOVING IT! Sparky the Stunt Dog might also be making an appearance.

Besides all that, I do also have my educational seminars on creating a Middle School Tabletop Club and how to develop a game creation unit using Lucy Calkins. If you don't know. . . um. . . they charge a LOT of money for you just to have a plug, Wi-Fi, or even any kind of electricity. . . so I'm going old school with this. Probably a handout with some posters or something. I really am at a loss for how to approach it now that I have NO resources without dropping a couple hundred dollars. Broke teacher over here. . . lucky I have enough to even get to GenCon. Hopefully I can "borrow" a projector through my district, as there is a working plug in the room (thank goodness).

If you're a Trade Day badge holder, feel free to hunt me down. I've already gotten several e-mails from people wanting my stuff or attending another seminar and just wanting to know more about my stuff. I'll be honest. . . it's a bit conflicting for me. I mean. . . you told me you were more interested in other panels over mine, so please just send me your stuff. I would love to help, but at the same time, would kind of prefer to share what I'm doing in person.

I'm learning and growing, so whatever. Here are my events and eventually I'll get back to the people e-mailing me about my stuff. As of right now. . . I'm still creating the presentations.

Here are my Trade Day Educational Seminars:

How to Start a Tabletop Gaming Club for Middle Schoolers - Wednesday, July 29 at 10AM
OMG my baby project. Talk about something near and dear to my heart that I am excited to share. A serious success for me outside of curriculum and I'm going to have some good information to share, including how to really take your club beyond just a group that meets to play games, because in reality, that's what a district wants. . . a club that does something!

Developing a Tabletop Gaming Unit Using Calkins - Wednesday, July 29 at 1PM
 I referenced Calkins in the title, because I can't hand out materials from her unit and I didn't want people to come and expect to get tons of rubrics and things. BUT I do have original materials that accompanies Calkins and I have some really great tips and strategies for implementing a game unit using the framework of Calkins.

There it is! If you're wanting to touch base with me for any reason during GenCon. . . to talk about things or just meet, please let me know and hopefully we'll be able to bump into each other. I'm really looking forward to this year!

Confession: My anxiety this year purely stems from the way the buses are running. We chose a hotel we loved, which we knew was on the bus route. We really loved the bus last year, but this year there have been some very major and upsetting changes to the way things work.

Hopefully we'll actually be able to make it to GenCon, but you'll know if I did if you check out the above events!

Meet Me at the Table: Running a Middle School RPG Days 3-5

It's been a while since I updated, but we were still mostly focusing on Character Creation for the RPG and, like I seem to frequently mention, I have had a very busy week. Here's how our first week rounded out. I do have to say, it was really exhilarating and exhausting. If I could take a hippy moment, I have a tendency to be drained easily by the emotions of others, for better or worse. So I was overloading every day and practically shorting out. This time it was shorting out over the excitement of everything we'd been doing in the club, in my classes, and my own anxiety over wanting things to go well. It'll be great. So check out my overally animated reflection here.

Meet Me at the Table: Running a Middle School RPG Day 2

Here are the adventures of Day 2! We focused on alignments, modifiers, traits, and names.

Meet Me at the Table: Running a Middle School RPG Day 1

I promised my club kids that I would arrange to run an RPG for them. That day has finally come and I am chronicling my experiences.

Fiasco Session (4-3-2015)

For my husband's birthday, I arranged for us to play Fiasco with our friend, Jim, through Google+ Hangout. He had been wanting to play it and Friend Jim and I prepared to play by watching the Tabletop demos and psyching ourselves up for some intense acting. My husband was the most excited, because we're technically creating our own little movie scenarios. Both him and Friend Jim like these kind of Simple Plane/Fargo movies, so after looking through the book, they chose the Main Street & Willow Road scenario. Then we went through the process of rolling. (The dice were kept on the camera through Google+ Hangout.)

Suffice to say, this was a really enjoyable game and it was pretty easy to play through Google+ Hangout. I will say, sitting across from my husband, who was so committed to his role, was incredibly intense for me. At one point, when my character had his character held at gunpoint, he almost made me cry! I mean, I was seriously about to cry and had to keep stopping to take a moment, because my character was a bit more callous than myself. I guess my husband can feel confident that if he pleaded for his life, I would totally cave in and weep my silly little head off!

The unfolding of the game was really quite engaging. The setup of acts and how you don't really know how everything is going to pan out kept the enthusiasm up. I also loved the collaborative effort to create the scene and the story. I'll be honest, we spent a good many wasted minutes laughing our butts off and probably could have scaled back the amount of time the game took to play, but it was epic and beyond enjoyable. We're looking forward to more scenarios.

Bonus: No one had to do preparation before playing, so it didn't burden any of us before playing.

Here are the finalized notes from the game. We filled these into a Google Doc while we played. Our Friend Jim was adding quirky character bits as we went, since I was forced to do most of the talking and interacting. So it's not exactly a game play, but it's notes to see how we incorporated everything. I'll be happy to answer questions if you have any while reading. (Some language has been changed for mass consumption.... sadly, too much innuendo to be able to change it and stay clever.) Some of the notes, though, are not true to the character, but, again, are things that Friend Jim added.

Hawthorne Street & Bradley Road

[GENERAL]

OBJECT

->Untoward - Was it the cardigan, was it the fricking pie, was it something horrifying in Bill’s creepy secret room-- OH WELP GUESS WE WON’T FIND OUT BECAUSE MEL’S DEAD. Thanks for that, Betsy.

LOCATION

 ->Mansion on Hickory Terrace being sold by Bill, near Hawthorne St, not Bradley Rd.. None of these are near Main or Willow, because frack that crappy neighborhood.

WHAT A TWIST!

 -> Greed leads to killing

 -> Someone is not so innocent afterall. Oh Betsy, you little...

Sally Wright - the 6th grade girl who disappeared; member of the church

Mrs. Wright - Contacted by Mel; Lives in Bill’s neighborhood; Remarkably calm for having her daughter missing for a month; Possibly a Jon Benet Ramsey situation; Doesn’t know French; abuses Valium;  member of the church

Jessica Miller - Makes awesome coconut creme pies; pissed that Deacon Blackman rigged the last Bingo tourney; member of the church

Buffy - member of the church

Pastor Fredericks - Our pastor, loves Jessica Millers pie, Buffy is not amused

Detective Charles Jager - Awesomeville PD...okay so the town’s not called Awesomeville but most it’s the south and it’s Orsomville. Yeah. That’s gotta be it right? Shut up.

[Sarah Notecard - Betsy Flint (exaggerates, reasonable, kind of a tease, gives out personal information, into snacks (maybe also Jessica Millers pie, tapping Mrs. Wrights valium)); packing heat; doesn't want to see Mels package; knows a nice pie when shes sees one; quick trigger] Got her playground.

RELATIONSHIP

 ->Ray friends Real estate rivals

 ->Jim community church volunteers

NEED

 ->To get Respect! - From the TOWN by proving my convictions

The town needs to support the community through helping to fund the projects of the church. Give back so we can give to you blah blah bah

[Ray Notecard - Mr. Mel Jacobs, Esq. (nosy jerk, frequently drunk, photo aficionado, enjoys climaxes, soooo changeable, DOES know French, totes paranoid, practiced maybe not so practiced aspiring stalker/peeping tom; He’s a runner!; smoke)]

RELATIONSHIP

->Sarah friends Real estate rivals

->Jim crime corrupt official/local big shot

NEED

->Get the Truth

[Jim Notecard - Bill Ace Blackman, III (loves insertion, lives at the end of a five and a half minute hallway, loves sandwiches, perfect gentleman, charming, has an awesome face, Not a child-murdering son of a gun because that’s clearly something the dodgy Real Estate guy would be and not the rich jerk with the creepy torture dungeon)]

RELATIONSHIP

 ->Sarah community church volunteers

 ->Ray crime corrupt official/local big shot

Detective Charles Jager is friends with Bill and is going to help him clean out his room ASAP.

5 Fandom Friday: New Years Fandom Resolutions

There are resolutions I'd like to make in general, but I make resolutions throughout the year to myself as needed. So I thought it would be fun to do something a little different and try this new thing called 5 Fandom Friday, which is a frequent thing on a Google+ group I'm part of called Female Geek Bloggers.

So here are my 5 Fandom Friday: New Years Fandom Resolutions:

1. Play More Games

I am a tabletop gamer through and through. Cards, dice, boards, . . . you name it. . . I'll play it. So this year I'm participating in the 10x10 Challenge on BoardGameGeek. Play 10 games 10 times. I'm participating in the Hardcore and the Normal Challenges. Hardcore means I dedicate myself to a specific set of 10 games and the Normal Challenge is any 10 games as I want and I don't have to plan it out. I'm really quite excited about it and it'll be great. I want to make sure I record these in my blog.

2. Play Games with More People

Even though we're part of a gaming group, we don't get out much to game with them because we have a 4yo. We just can't afford to pay a sitter to go out and we don't live near anyone who would watch her for us for free or for a few hours or anything. We have to count on when my mom takes her.  So I'd like to make sure I'm playing more games with my kids in my Tabletop Club at school. Like, not sharing more games, but actually playing games with them. I'd also like to branch out independently to the local game shop and start some sort of women's game night for women gamers. It'll keep the men at home babysitting (hehe).

3. Meet My Reading Goal

I'm a literacy teacher for a middle school. I have to try to stay on top of what the kids are reading or what's popular. Sadly, I like books that challenge me a little more than YA Literature. So I cannot exclusively read YA. I also don't read exclusively Graphic Novels/Comic Books. I've taken to enjoying a few, but I really am a reader through and through. It's what I have my degree backgrounds in. It's what I love. So I'd like to make sure that I'm reading an equal amount of various materials. I have a 34 book goal on GoodReads. I read 39 in 2014 and my goal was 30, so here's hoping!

4. To Get To GenCon2015

It's going to take a lot of savings and lot of scraping and scrimping, but we are going to make it again to GenCon! This year our friend Jim is going to go with us, which will help things a little bit, I think. Either way, it's going to be awesome and we are going to make this work. If it means Ramen noodles for us every night, so be it. It'll help when our daughter is done with daycare and starts school with limited summer attendance.

5. Finally Fully Invest Myself in My GMing

Last year I had my first little foray into being a game master for Pathfinder. I created a sweet Google+ Pathfinder adventure using the Beginner Box and set things up with my husband and our friend (who lives in NC). I ended up crafting these additional adventures and while I feel I succeeded at the storyline, I was struggling with balancing the experience and items in order to keep my participants happy. So once things start to become a little less depressing around here, I'm hoping to start dedicating a little bit of time to getting back into that, so we can RPG with our friend a bit more over the summer.


And that's it! My First #5FandomFriday and My 5 Geeky Resolutions. 

A Very Gaming Christmas

We had an absolutely lovely Christmas this year. My daughter and I did Lego Advent Calendars. I got my husband two geeky ornaments, but other than that we didn't have to really make any holiday additions this year. If I'm being honest, it was a bit rough getting into the holiday this year for various reasons, so our decorating was a bit lackluster, but we had enough to make our home a cheery little place.

Christmas Eve we opened a few gifts from each other and made cookies for decorating on Christmas. Took my daughter to look at lights in the neighborhood and then it was time for bed. We set up and got things straightened out and then it was bed time. Shockingly, I was not woken up and when I came downstairs, my daughter had not ripped into any presents! Apparently Santa forgot to wrap two of her presents and she was busy playing with them.

We did some Santa present opening and then it was time to get ready for my mom to arrive. When my mom arrived, then it was PRESENT TIME! And it was epic! Friends and family had sent up gifts for us and then my mom, who always splurges at Christmas, had many gifts to share. I won't share all of it here, but I'll share our game haul, which was seriously EPIC!

Santa, though, gave our daughter the Toy Story: Land that Time Forgot toys (not ALL of them, but the primary ones). She loved  them and she got several other awesome gifts from her Meemaw. That kid is seriously spoiled and I'm at least glad to say it's not by us. Now to deal with the day-after being overly spoiled.

So here it is. . . our Family Gaming Christmas Haul!

For Our Daughter
Tales & Games: The Tortoise and the Hare
Robot Turtles
Banana Party

For My Husband
Tales & Games Three Little Pigs (technically for our daughter, but was given to daddy from her.)
Age of War
Mr. Jack
King of New York
Ca$h n' Gun$
Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar
7 Wonders: Babel
Machi Koro
Fortune & Glory
Elder Sign: Unseen Forces
Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm
Team Manager – The Card Game – Sudden Death
Senji
Dixit Odyssey

For Me
Paperback
Legendary: Dark City
Legendary: Fantastic Four
Dominion: Hinterlands
Sentinels of the Multiverse
Shadows over Camelot
Mage Wars
Maha Yodha
Pathfinder: The Rise of the Runelords RPG Adventure

Kickstarter Arrival on Christmas Eve
Diner
Pie Factory
Brew Crafters: The Travel Card Game
The Fittest
Isle of Trains
Easy Breezy Travel Agency


Some other awesome geeky items of note:
Bag of Holding Backpack
S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst
LG Wireless Samsung Blu-Ray DVD Player
Chromecast
A ton of comic books my husband got for me on my kindle.

A Game Master is Me!

I've talked in the past about my desire to return to a form of RPG play, especially after having fallen in love with Hero Quest and  how much I really enjoyed the Marvel RPG my husband tried to start last summer. Feeling sick and tired of having to wait on other people to offer up to run something or organize something, I purchased the Pathfinder Beginner Box and was eager to learn to play from the beginning.

What I didn't plan for was my husband telling me he wasn't going to GM and that in order to learn the game, I needed to be the GM. Holy crap! Can you say intimidating? I already have a million different commitments, so to commit to GMing was a huge deal to me. Granted, it was only for my husband and our friend Jim. That has its own set of drawbacks. The foremost being that friend Jim. . . lives 1,000 miles away.

See. . . I'm one to always fail forward. I will try and retool and try and retool and try. With everything I've been through in life, it'd be insane to not be one of those types of people. Sure, I get discouraged. Sure, I drop into bouts of depression, but I find a way to pull myself back to a place of productivity.

My first goal was to find a way to bridge the distance. My EUREKA moment was google+ hangout. Brilliant! The next was uploading pictures of the maps into google drive and make tiny paste-ables that could be moved around on the map. I shared this with my husband and friend Jim and tah-dah; we had a way to interact over the distance. Friend Jim ordered himself a new microphone and headset and we were set.

Then it was up to me to start getting organized. I uploaded their character sheets and player's guides and everything they needed to make their characters and prepare. I started to review the introductory adventure that came with the Beginner's Box.

We slated the 4-Day-Labor-Day-Weekend as our first weekend of campaigning. It was kind of a chance to do a Last Hurrah before I started back at school. Late nights... Dice rolling... Adventure!

The Beginner Box Adventure was Black Fang's Dunegon. If you play the card game, you might know who Black Fang is. This is a younger version of the same. He's been killing people and you are asked by the mayor to kill him.

I started the adventure at the entrance and stuck to the "script" as much as possible. Sadly, the initial adventure is a horrible thing to have when you're gaming with veteran RPG and DnD guys. They were pulling things out left and right (uh... get your mind out of the gutter) that I was like "wth! What is that and what are we rolling?" There was a great deal of looking up while playing. One of the big things that the Beginners Book did NOT present to me (please note I am speaking exclusively of the Game Masters Guide) was leveling up with XP. We had to look up a chart on Paizo's website.

Other issues involved not having enough information on monsters or the characters themselves. I get that I'm supposed to "know everything," but this is such a huge world and I'm new and the Beginner Box left me needing to ask so many questions. Revealed through playing with Veterans, but that's kind of frustrating if you're playing with all new people, because you don't realize how much you're missing out on. I had ordered the Core Rulebook and was overwhelmed with how massive it was and, really, note quite the tome of information I was hoping for. It lacked user-friendliness. So we a good deal of time using the Pathfinder Reference Document through Paizo.

We also, afterwards, realized we were rolling some things wrong or a certain skill didn't work a certain way or we read something wrong. It's not like you can stop the game and spend 2 hours reading up on all sorts of stuff. As it was, we started at 8PM and played until about 1:45AM.

There wasn't a whole lot of side story or history. I was a bit creative with sounds and voices. It was strange how much my husband and friend missed. They were, of course, also getting used to RPGing again. They weren't being brave enough with their investigation. They were playing too timid and missed some interesting things that I would have loved to try out (like the fountain). They weren't using Knowledge Skills or Perception checks to scout rooms. On the other hand, my husband was trying to tell me that I need to tell them when they should do a Perception Check or Knowledge Skill. I don't agree, because I think it gives things away. For example, they are terrible at looking for traps. I'm not going to announce that every time they walk into a room "hey, you need to do a perception check!" They SHOULD be doing that and if they're not, they have to deal with the consequences.

The first night went well enough, except when I didn't allow for the mayor to pay them their full fee after completing the quest. Instead of 1,000gp they were only paid 750gp with the final 250gp coming after a week of no deaths inflicted by dragons. Oh boy did that sour Jim and his character. Super bitter. What they didn't know is that it would play into something else I had brewing.

It was kind of like executing a lesson plan for school and it was pretty fun, but just like being a teacher... you have to know EVERYTHING!

Now where to go? The modules seem to require me to still do a lot of work, unlike the Beginner Box adventure, so I guess I'm going to have to add in some creativity of my own to write a test scenario adventure. We'll see what I come up with.