Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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  1. So… close… to goal of… finishing… volume of… Proust.

    Which reminds me that I should spend this precious naptime of my child’s reading, instead of frittering it away on the Internet.

  2. Recovering from last nights RPG experience. All newbie players; none had ever done tabletop RPG’ing before and only one had ever played computer games like Grand Theft Auto. 2 of 5 players, I think, decided the experience was not for them. I think the Rolemaster combat system is too cumbersome and need to go back to the drawing board on that one. Writing the story is fun; players wrecking it a little bit less so.

      • I find myself surprised of how much I like watching the NFL Red Zone channel.

        • They gave Orton a bye forever. Tebow! Tebow! Tebow!
          (My two favorite teams: The Kansas City Chiefs and anyone playing the Broncos.)

    • Hrm. I’ve been thinking about this. I think that maybe you should try the board game Descent with the remaining 3 players.

      • Munchkin might be a good idea, too, depening on their senses of humor and preference for fantasy vs. sci-fi.

        • Munchkin is a terrible idea. Munchkin is a poorly designed game made bearable by jokes. Being new to RPGs, your players won’t get the jokes, and are left with a poorly designed game.

          • The boardgame version of Munchkin fixes many of the problems with the card game.

            I don’t know that I’d consider it entry-entry level, though.

    • this is why I don’t tell GMs to write stories. Write fun characters, fun factions with goals, and let the players walk into the chaos.

      Also, it’s good to remember that Rolemaster Lvl 1 Characters are about as effective as most 16 year olds. Individually, they can readily be whupped by any competent storekeeper.

      Rolemaster combat system comes with all the bells and whistles. I generally found having a printout of your weapon’s table, and having the GM say “roll on this column, add +35” worked well.

      • Oh, they were all noobs — had never done RPG before. So, I had them on pretty tightly-clamped rails — take the dingus from Village A to Nobleman B in Distant Town C, by travelling a straight path, past obstacles X, Y, and Z. Obstacle X required combat. Obstacle Y required solving a puzzle — they didn’t solve it and I gave them a back door around obstacle Y. Obstacle Z required assessing a tactical scenario, and which if they figured it out, they could rescue the hostages taken by The Bad Guys and become Big Heroes. They needed coaching from my NPC stand-in to avoid inadvertently killing the hostages themselves and becoming criminals isntead (which might have been a lot of fun in subsequent games with more advanced players, but again, these are noobs).

        About halfway through, one of them asked me, “What’s the object of this game? How do we win?” (You rescue the hostages instead of killing them! But I didn’t tell her that.)

        Another one of the noobs (my wife, actually) fell deeply suspicious of every NPC they met and demanded astonishing levels of detail from me, which I take to be a good sign — it suggests that she was starting to really get into the scenario. On the other hand, this happened shortly after the second margarita took effect.

        • … having fraidy-cats in your party is much preferable to having combat mooks, or greedy sons-of-bitches. Hope you have at least someone who’s dedicated to figuring out what’s going on… I had a party of all fraidy-cats, and they were hell to do anything with (no hooks with the rest of the world, either).

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