The Black Campbell

Okay — I moved my tablet from Vista to Win7.  Total time: 46 minutes start to finish for a full install of the 64-bit version.  All of the equipment is working fine, including the touch screen, which is now multi-touch enabled.  Seems to be working faster and well.

So far:  no problems.

UPDATE:  Other than Acrobat not transferring properly (of course it would be the expensive program!), everything is moved over and working.  We updated the Vista 64-bit desktop, as well…this was the “update”, not the cold install.  It’s taken almost 2.5 hours, and was a major pain to get it to start running in the first place — it didn’t like the anti-virus program.  It didn’t like this.  It didn’t like that.  But once it was running, it’s been smooth.  Waiting to see if all the programs and data were transferred as they’re supposed to be.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan apparently has a sequence where one of the basestar hybrids is having a geggy turn in which it implies the Colonies are in a trianary star system, or that they orbit three stars in close proximity.

Makes more sense to me, but your mileage may vary.

I write all my adventures on my computer.  I collect photos of gear, people, vehicles — anything to aid in setting the mood on games, be it faces for people’s character sheets (I find it helps people get into the feel of their character), to what your gun/car/spaceship looks like.  There’s PDF versions of game books.  Everything the GM needs to run a game.

But sometimes it’s simply impractical to bring all your crap with you.  Or someone steals your laptop.  Or you spill coffee in it.  Or the hard drive crashes catastrophically with much gnashing of teeth and Shakespearean drama.

At a time like that it’s nice to have backed up your data.  It’s also nice to be able to just bring everything you need with you in a pocket and use someone’s laptop at the game session (oh, come on — someone’s gonna have one!)  Hence my plug for memory sticks.

I bought a SanDisk 32gb Ultra Backup.  It’s about the size of a stick of gum (but thick — about as thick as my cell phone.)  Doesn’t matter what brand; I’m not shilling for one type or the other.  But 32gb!  I have everything from my writing, to my games stuff, to pictures and music on this thing.  And I still have space.  It’s more than enough that I could travel with this, plug it in to whatever machine I can lay my hands on, and either work, game, or what have you.

If you work with a nonstandard word processor, like I do (WordPerfect…it integrates pictures better than most word processors [although, to be fair, Word 2007 does a good job]) a stick this size has enough memory you could probably drop programs you need onto it, if you know the machine you’ll be using doesn’t have it.

I highly recommend one of these high-storage sticks or even a small external hard drive for the GM on the go.

I have been backing up my data for years.  I don’t know how much stuff, prior to 2005 I’ve lost because I didn’t keep sufficient backups of my files, but it’s a probably a metric buttload.  I’ve been pretty assiduous about the data — backing up files every two to three months.

Today, I’m backing up programs.  Stuff I either don’t want to lose settings to, like Trillian and Firefox, or programs I can’t find the disk for, like Acrobat Pro 8.  (Going to 9 would cost me, dearly…)

All of this is in preparation for the swap off of this cowpat Vista OS to Win7.  Normally, I’d just update the OS — apparently Windows 7 can do this without requiring you to reload most of your programs.  But my machine has 64-bit architecture, and the bright boys at HP decided to lobotomize my machine with 32-bit Vista.  I have to do a cold install of Win7 to get the 64-bit version.  (And having watched Deb’s 64-bit version of Vista…I would like speed like that.)

So, this weekend, the HP Tablet gets upgraded to Win7.  Stay tuned for updates on this.  (What could possibly go wrong..?)

UPDATE:  The transfer of Acrobat 8, WordPerfect, and Office 2007 was successful!

There’s always poker chips for giving out plot points.  This is apparently the suggestion for Deadlands.  For Battlestar Galactica, I intend to use the myriad of spent 5.7x28mm casings I have from my P90 and FiveSeven handgun (the platform for the colonials’ pistols.)

I tried it out last night for our Hollow Earth Expedition game (although it really should have been .45acp) and the players seemed to love it!

Most of the game systems I’ve enjoyed over the years have had a little fudge factor built into them to get the player around the cold, hard curve of probability.  Some of my players have the preternatural ability to roll crappy….all the time.  The one player it doesn’t matter if it’s dice, his HP scientific calculator programmed to do random rolls, or a dice program on his PDA…luck dumps in his pie.  Usually at the worst time.

My first encounter with “hero points” was the James Bond: 007 system from the early ’80s.  This allowed you to skew the result of a roll, or lower damage taken (in a system that could be especially deadly, I might add.)  DC Heroes, the Cortex system, Hollow Earth Expedition, Savage Worlds, and many others now utilize this “get out of death” feature.  Figuring out how to award and use them, however, is occasionally tricky for new players and GMs.

A few recent incidents in our play has given me a few new insights to awarding and using points.  So I’m passing the savings on to you, faithful (or feckless) readers…  (I’m going to just use the term “plot points, for simplicity sake.)

Player-awarded plot points:  a lot of GMs are iffy about ceding some power to the players.  I’m finding increasingly, it aids in the fun when players can say “he should get a point for that!” as they did last night.  A crusty old pilot character snapped off a completely period-appropriate, and totally sexist, comment to the female character.  Brilliantly done, I might add.  That was the response from everyone.  So I awarded a point.  When players think another player is worthy, it’s usually because what they did is worth the award.  (I rarely respond to a player saying “I deserve a plot point…”)

I award the points for good roleplaying on the spot.  And fantastic ideas they come up with.  Or setting appropriate maneuvers like “I want to leap off the wing of our Catalina and into the Amazon canoe, while shooting at the monster.  Can I do that?”  Hell, yes!

A bit more R-rated, I had a guy playing a playboy character who wanted to make sure his “equipment” was up to snuff.  Can I give a point to be well-hung?  Absolutely.  And I gave him a point last night for rescuing an Amazon at great risk to himself…all so he could help her onto a canoe, by grabbing her ass.  Appropriate for the character.  Have a point.  His girlfriend got pissed and cut him off for the night, causing him other troubles and making the group a bit less cohesive.  Point to her; completely in character.

In Battlestar Galactica, one player had a Cylon involved with another main character who spent most of his plot points to get her pregnant.  Why?  The Cylons are trying to breed.  Also, it’s giong to cause lots of trouble for both characters in the now to distant future.

Give points out liberally.  If the players think it’s a great idea, and you think it’s going to up the ante on fun, go for it.  It gets the players to use their flaws and character design for something other than beating up the monsters or bad guys, and make play more fun all around.  They should sped them liberally, too, to make the best of their character schitcks, be they something as shallow as “looking awesome.”

Another use I recently found for plot points.  Sometimes, there’s something in the script that really needs to happen.  You don’t want to railroad the characters, but you really want to now have to rewrite things on the fly.  Last weekend, I had a spy game going where the players were really short handed, had captured and questioned the major henchman, and had to stage a raid where they could only leave one guy to watch him.  It would have to be an NPC.  We all know where this is going — I need the baddie to escape and draw the players to the big final action sequence.

They know this, but they want to 1) knock him out, 2) coup de grace him, 3) formulate some other idea that will take 20 minutes of game time to plan/explain.  So I offered them all a plot point to just get on with it, leave him with the NPC, and let things proceed apace.  One of the player’s later responses:  the GM bribed us to let the bad guy get away.

Bribe them.  “It’s not railroading if they agree,” as Uncle Bear says.

Been a hectic and depressing couple of days for the Black Campbell.  Hopefully, it’ll get righted in the next day or so.  Updates for various things coming soonest.

In the meantime, if you’re visiting, feel feel to comment on things and make the place a bit more lively.  We’ve broken the 30 views a day — not bad for a new blog by a relatively unknown guy with not much to say!

The trailer….

Vltor is working on a re-release of the famed Bren Ten 10mm handgun that Sonny Crockett carried in the first season of Miami Vice.  For those shooting types out there, the Bren was an incredible shooting piece — the original 10mm platform, based on my favorite steel gun, the CZ-75.  Up until now, the closest you could get to one of these was the Tanfoglio Witness in .45acp or 10mm.

The new Bren will have a 15 round magazine (and will accept mags from the Tanfoglio), and has been re-engineered to improve the gun while keeping the look.

Vltor’s blog on the Bren Ten.

Saving my pennies, already…

UPDATE:  Well, I was.  The release date is now sometime this summer and apparently it’s going to be a very limited release through a company no one’s heard of… So I’ve said the hell with it and spend $250 to get the 10mm barrel/slide for the Tanfoglio, added a 20 lb recoil spring and a conefit guide rod.

I understand Vlotr’s reticence to put out vaporware, but they’ve had a year since they announced the production gun would premiere at SHOT Show 2010.  They could/should have had a single production gun for the show.

This started as a toss-off, but now one of my players has not only talked me into letting him play it, but he’ll be the “lead” in the serial:  Rowland Cabot (Brian Blessed) is a Welsh flying ace who finds his brain/mind transferred into the body of a gorilla by a mad scientist, thus becoming…

GORILLA ACE!

I am now very excited about this campaign…