Progress!

Wow, I could have sworn I was crossing off the tasks on my list last night as I finished them, but apparently I wasn't. Other than that things worked out pretty well. I'll need to remember to take into account my housemates' work schedules when I'm allocating a week's tasks for myself, but even with forgetting that bryirfox would be home I still got everything done before the morning was over. I'm looking forward to doing it again tonight. I'm going to be doing MoreMU, Tribe, and another flash story tonight. I'll have more time to myself later in the week so I'll be stepping things up on the following nights.

I'm really looking forward to Thursday night, when I'll be doing a delve-style D&D session as a sort of practice/introduction session for any interested members of the inn campaign... even doing the combat test the other week gave me such an emotional boost. D&D's a big part of not just what I write about but the fact that I write at all. Running games as a 5th and 6th grader was an outlet for my storytelling impulses. In my high school years, when I had way more roleplaying games and supplements than people to play them with, they gave a framework for my internal storytelling.

I'll be blogging a lot more this week... with both task lists and game-related posts coming up, I'm going to be making a conscious choice to make sure there are some actual entries.

Tasks For Tuesday Night

• Write Jamie's Tale.
  
• Write some flash.
  
• Write Tribe.
  
• Write a D&D blog post that's been rattling around my head about alternate ways of defeating enemies.
  

Why beat a dead horse?

I've described the Inn Campaign as being story-heavy and roleplay-heavy, and I'm going to be playing around with things in order to try to encourage more of a narrative flow in the game even during battles. To this end, I've written a blog post on the Wizards of the Coast community site about the different ways an enemy, reduced to zero hit points, may be "defeated". It might be useful reading for anyone who doesn't see their characters as "fight to the death" types.

The TL;DR summary is that when I'm DMing and you reduce an enemy to 0 HP, your choices for what this means aren't normally limited to "dead" or "unconscious". The enemy can be disarmed, pinned to the wall, forced to concede your superiority... there are no skill checks or "called shot" penalties involved because the net result is the same as it always is when an enemy drops to 0 HP: it's out of the fight.

What happens after the fight can be different depending upon what state you leave an opponent in, but the immediate result is as tautological as long cat being long or (if you roll high enough on your Nature check to realize this) cave bears living in caves: defeated enemy is defeated.

D&D Reminders, or "Dminders", as they say.

Tomorrow at 9 PM (central time) I'll be hosting a D&D session for anybody in the group who wants a "practice run". It's going to be Delve-style, which means it will be largely the sort of contextless dungeoneering that I'm going to be eschewing in the campaign that starts in a week. But it should serve as a good immersion exercise for those less familiar with the 4E rules set or those who aren't sure how such would play out in the abstract.

If you're in the group and would like to participate, please comment below so I know what size/configuration to plan for. Also, if I don't have current Skype information for you (and I think there's only one or two members I don't have Skype information for), please Livejournal message me with it or comment below, if you don't mind the possibility of other people seeing it.