Thoughts on Reclamation

I'm not sure I've ever had multiple blog posts in one day. That's just crazy. But, alas.

I have been doing some Reclamation: CCG brainstorming. This post will undoubtedly bore and confuse anyone not familiar with the game. If that's you, I won't be hurt if you don't read it. :)

As I've mentioned previously, I was trying to figure out a way to add a certain amount of randomness to the game; or, more exactly, a certain amount of the unknown. Sometimes, in some games, when you attack an opponent, you already know the result of that battle, because there are no unknown effects. I am playing around with the idea of adding something called a blessings pile (name subject to change). This is a quick explanation of how it could work.

In addition to the normal game deck and area pile, each deck includes a blessings pile. This pile includes only cards of the blessings card type (and blessings cards can not be included in any other deck or pile). Blessings cards are used to affect conflicts throughout the game.

At the beginning of each conflict, each player draws the top card of his or her blessings pile and follows what it says. Each player only has one blessings pile, and thus all battles he or she participates in (whether playing Hell or Heaven at the time) use the same blessings pile. Each blessing card, in addition to game text, will contain a number (possibly referred to as the devotion number) that will be referred to on some cards.

Most of the blessings cards do not affect a particular player; instead, they usually affect characters that match certain criteria. For instance:

Each fighting character of mind > 3 is might +1.
Each fighting character carrying a weapon is might +1.
Each fighting character carrying a card of the opposite allegiance is might -1.
Each Hell character is might +1.

Other blessings cards will take effect at the end of that conflict:

The winner of this conflict may immediately draw 4 cards.
The loser of this conflict must immediately discard his or her hand.
The winner of this conflict may immediately discard an act from play.

And there will certainly be some unique blessings cards:

Reveal the next blessings card; X = that card's devotion number. Each fighting character with mind > X is might +X.
Wound each character in a front row.
Suspend the row penalty for this conflict.
Double the row penalty for this conflict.
Heal each character in a front row.

There will certainly be cards to manipulate the blessings pile. Some of the strategy with this pile will be trying to build a blessings pile that mostly helps both your Hell and Heaven sides. There will always be the potential for your blessings cards to help your opponent's characters more than your own in a particular conflict. In a battle (which is made up of multiple conflicts), each individual conflict would have blessings cards drawn that (usually) affect only those characters fighting in the current conflict.

In my head, this idea has already gone through a few phases. Originally, I had contemplated using "place holder" cards - cards that go face down in each spot in both of a player's character grids. So, every character in play would have a place holder card underneath it that may affect that character in some way. (Could kind of be looked at like that character's hidden issues or something... who knows.) The main problem with that, though, is that I current have wound cards going underneath each character. And that would just get too crowded.

Does this seem like a good or a bad idea? It may take playtesting to truly determine its playability, but I am curious if any of you have initial thoughts on this concept.

Less is More

So, we had another good fun week of volleyball last night. We had only four players, but decided to try and play anyway against a full team (they even had extras and were rotating in and out). It was a larger court than we normally played on, so the four of us had a lot of ground to cover. That being said, we came out, fell behind by like 5 points (in a game to 21), and then rallied and won the first game. Then, we made a similar comeback in the second game, and had an excellently close finish, winning that game like, 24-22 I think. The last game, though, we fell behind again and couldn't quite make the comeback. But, being 2 people short and winning 2 of the 3 games, I can't complain too much. It was a darn good workout. :)

I had posted previously about my web host's issues. It had not been displaying my site properly, then was down entirely. It was back up and fully functioning again for a little while, but now is completely down again. It seems the web host is not too dependable. Darn them!

I have some screen shots from Everquest and other such computer related things that I may be posting here. Why, you say? Cause, well, I dunno. But I think some of them are amusing or cool. So, haha. :)


LotD: E*Trade Commercial. I think it's pretty funny.

Version 1.1

I have had an initial read-through of The Lords of Sargoff, and have fixed some basic errors (though I am sure there are more) and added a little bit here and there (with the biggest addition being in chapter nine). The novel's page is updated with these new versions (I think each chapter had at least one minor change). (Have I gone over the legal limit for parentheses in one paragraph?)

LotD: Han in Carbonite Desk. I think that's pretty cool, but don't think my wife (or my checkbook) would allow it.

Reclaiming Randomization

I've looked over my Reclamation card game rules and have fixed a few things here and there. One thing I've always wanted to add is some kind of randomness factor, beyond the normal random order that you draw the cards. I think I've come up with one decent way to do it, but it kind of gets in the way of another part of the game (wounds). Who knows. The rules have already been rather tweaked and updated since the last time the game was playtested, but I hope to finish the tweaking, create a couple more decks and playtest it some more, with my Minnesota card players and possibly my brothers in Ohio, should I visit the region during the summer.

LotD: Read LotR online. The entire book texts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Why Are You Reading Such An Uninteresting Blog Entry?

It's odd that, while I'm rather excited to continue work on The Lords of Sargoff, I find myself more and more thinking about going back and doing work on Reclamation, my Bible-based collectible card game. I now have great interest in working on two rather large projects at the same time. Weird.

But, I'm going to try and focus on The Lords of Sargoff, but may do a little work here and there on Reclamation. This includes something I've worked on the last couple days, which is easily and quickly creating a new version of the cards in PDF version for printing, deck building and playtesting.

I also have the desire to work on a new website design, but I think I will put that off until I am able to host it on a better web host. My current host seems to not like it when I load a page that has 300 some card images on it. A few times of that, and it shuts the site down due to excessive bandwidth. It's usually down for less than 12 hours (as it is down right now). The next design of the site will be able to host everything I've done with writing (including a few short stories or short story fragments that haven't been made public before), and everything I've done with Reclamation. Ah, someday. :)

LotD: Brain Waves and Computer Games. Funky.

That's All, Folks!

Well, there it is. I decided to update the Lords of Sargoff page with all nineteen chapters, there in all its glory (or hopefully, at least, something that somewhat resembles a story of some sorts). After completing the rough draft last week, I've taken a little break from it, not doing much more than minor edits here and there. That will probably change soon. In the meantime, any comments or suggestions are more than welcome.

My Cooproductions website had not be functioning for many, many months now. It was written in ASP and was database driven, but it was not properly connecting to the database. I was not sure what the problem was, as I had not changed anything; it just, one day, stopped working. The page simply displayed programming errors. It was goofy. Then, a few weeks ago, the whole site went down (including the Lords of Sargoff page I had put there). It was down for several days, but then, suddenly, it went back up, and everything worked right. The whole site was back to its good ole self. Neato huh?

That being said, that site is rather out of date (last update, as shown on the front page, was on my birthday almost two years ago). But, the fact that my web host has somehow revived itself does bring me joy, and cause me desire to redesign the site. I wouldn't mind a place to more easily post my writings and other such things. I could do that on the site as it is now, but I always love redoing a website. I do sometime hope to pay for better hosting (it's currently hosted for free), probably on GoDaddy, and get a domain name. But that requires money, and thus, wifal permission. :) That being said, the hosting + domain name would be well under $100 a year total, so it's really not too shabby.

LotD: Trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. You don't really get to see all that much, but it is still neato and I am excited for the movie.

Roughly Finished

With currently one hundred and seventy one novel pages, I have finished the rough draft of The Lords of Sargoff. Now comes mass editing and tweaking. My wife is going to read through it and give me her input. Any input that anyone else has would be greatly appreciated. In its current form, there are no doubt numerous grammar issues and nonsensical or contradictory plot points. There are things that need to be explained or described more, and probably things that currently have too much description. I will also be thinking about names - the names of characters and places, and also the name of the book. It's quite possible the book name will stay, but who knows. At least some character names will be changing though. Ah, it's all in the fun of writing. Shall the tweaking begin.

In joyous celebration (or something like that), the Lord of Sargoff page has been updated with chapters 1-10. This include update versions of previously posted chapters (just minor updates, so no need to reread any of them at this point).

LotD: Marines Commercial - Chess. This was my favorite commercial while growing up. I was pretty happy to find it on YouTube. (On a side note, I may have a few other links to commercials as link of the days. You've been warned.) :)

The Lords Have Relocated

As my web host has apparently fallen off the face of the Earth (at least for now), I have moved the Lords of Sargoff page to my Yahoo! hosting. I have also added chapter seven to the new Lords of Sargoff page. Last night, I finished off chapter sixteen of what is (currently) a twenty chapter plan (just recently it was nineteen; one chapter got split in two). I believe a previous page count that I posted to this blog was inaccurate. At current count, the sixteen chapters equal about 158 novel pages. I may come up a little short for my 200 page goal for the rough draft, but that's rather okay. My goal, after I've had a chance for some major editing after the rough draft, is for it to be in the 250-300 page range.

LotD: Tate Publishing. A possible publisher for future Lords of Sargoff manuscript submissions.

Stopped, Stopped, Stopped, Rolling

The job hunt has been frustrating sometimes, as I haven't really gotten very much response from companies. It took me about a month to get my first interview for a job I had real interest in. But sometimes, life gives you a happy little surprise. :)

I am now back at FLS, full time. :D I am rather excited. I am not doing the same job, which was working as a Database Analyst, but I will be working ASP.NET, which is used with web programming. In my last week or so at Priority, I had started going over some of the basics, but they let me go before I could get very deep. But now I am learning on the job and being taught by a guy who has 5 years of ASP.NET experience, and really knows his stuff. I really think this is an excellent opportunity for me to learn more.

I am technically on a 30 day trial period, as my boss had to really push his boss (Mr. Owner) to give me the chance at this job. I basically have 30 days to learn as much as I can about ASP.NET and then finish off a list of six items that need to be fixed on one of our Internet Web applications (a website used for looking up information about people's voting history). I am rather confident that I will be able to pass this trial period with flying colors and have no problem turning this into a permanent position. My salary is currently the same as it was when I left FLS, but that will be re-evaluated after the 30 day period. I believe a raise will be in order. :) The first day on the job has already taught me a lot.

It's weird that I had to leave FLS, work somewhere else for 3 1/2 months, be let go, and be unemployed for a month in order to have this opportunity. Life is funky sometimes. But the big man upstairs knows what he's doing. I'm just along for the ride.

The web host that is hosting my little Lords of Sargoff page is having difficulty, it seems, and the page is down, as it has been for a day or two. If it goes another day or two without fixing itself, I will move it to the hosting I have available elsewhere (Yahoo!).

LotD: Ameriquest Commercial. You may have seen this commercial before, but it's one of my all-time favorites. I find it rather funny.

The Hidden Ones

The sixth chapter of The Lords of Sargoff has been posted. Enjoy! (Hopefully, at least.) :)

Short blog entry today. Aren't you lucky?

LotD: Orisinal. One of my FLS coworkers showed this site to me a couple years ago. It has some nifty little Flash games for some good time wasting. Some of the games are kind of dumb, but some are amusing.

Running, Running, Running, Stopped

Ah, the Patriots. Running along as the 18-0 powerhouse, on the edge of history. And then... Eli Manning somehow evaded a small army of Patriots defenders and threw the ball four miles down the field, to his receiver who caught it between his hands and his helmet. Shortly after, the Giants scored a touchdown, leaving little time for the Patriots to score. Game over. Ah well, it was a very good game, even if my team came up a little short.

Anyway, my car is back to its happy self. They replaced the alternator (and belt) and set us back several pretty pennies, but thus is life. I'm rather happy that the repair wasn't anything too big that we decided it wasn't worth doing. My car is old, but I don't want it to go yet.

I am looking forward to my job interview on Wednesday. It should be interesting. I haven't heard back from the recruiter concerning the job at the Beauty Institute, nor have I heard back from a recruiter who said there may be applicable positions available at US Bank. Darn then. But alas, we'll see what happens.

I will be posting the next Lords of Sargoff chapter within the next couple days, hopefully. I finished writing chapter fourteen, and now have only five more, and am currently at 176 novel-length pages. Whooah!

LotD: Origami X-Wing. Way too much work for me to do, but it is still nifty.

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling, Stopped

I am once again here to inform you of my adventures in Automobilia. Today, for lunch, Megan and I drove to Applebee's, as we had a gift card from the rewards program at Wells Fargo. It would have been a wonderful meal, I'm sure. However, as we were pulling into the parking lot, a bunch of dashboard lights turned on. The battery light. The anti-lock brake light. The emergency brake light. And some others. I lost power steering, and then the car shut off. It was pretty funky. When trying to start it, it would make a little noise and almost sound like it wanted to start, but nothing. Silly thing.

So, we called a friend of ours, who came to our rescue. We tried to jump the car, but with no success. It just made the same noises. So it has now been towed to our car place and will be looked at there. Hopefully it is not to expensive. Megan and I talked today that, should the bill be a certain amount, that it'd instead be time to go car shopping and say goodbye to my beloved cavalier. I hope that doesn't happen, but at 170,000 miles, it's not worth putting a lot of money into. So we'll see what they say.

LotD: Hunting Deer in Germany. This a little graphic, of the blood and guts variety. Who knows if it was a deer or something else.