A Fistful of Nerdery

For anyone following the blog for any length of time, you know that I've had a few ongoing projects simmering on the front burner for some time. I just wanted to catch you up on the latest.

• The podcast - after a number of delays based on illness keeping us out of the studio - is finally go! We recorded the "Zero Episode" last Friday and I spent most of the afternoon yesterday editing it. A little more to be done on that front, but it's starting to shape up. The plan is to get two more episodes "in the can" and one more complete and edited before we release. I will let you know when we "go live". 
• Blood Money - We've done two sessions of my online western game so far, and it's gone pretty well. As I've observed, playing with even a medium-crunch system slows things down quite a lot online (which is the conventional wisdom) but the overall experience was satisfying and perfectly captured a lot of RPG experiences I've had on the tabletop. The kinds of ridiculous goofiness you get in a not-serious RPG session with your buddies, amplified by the strange whims of the dice, seems to translate almost perfectly to the medium. Probably one or two more sessions, and then we move on to playing Ghostbusters, which may use Cortex Plus (I'm noodling with a hack) or FATE Core. 
• Chrome - It's worth noting for anyone out there who is considering doing some online gaming via Roll20 that I have had some technical issues getting the Google Hangouts app to work. As in, it wouldn't. At all. But that seems to have been solved by getting Chrome. All of the apps that wouldn't work on Firefox work perfectly on Chrome. Firefox is great for everything else, but you need to get Chrome to work with Google Hangouts.
• The Monday Men - I've actually started a second online group on alternate Mondays with the Blood Money game. This gives me an opportunity to do some gaming with a few other friends I hardly ever get a chance to play with - Steve, Mark, and Chris. Last night, I went online with Megan and Dave and Mark and we played a session of FIASCO that went very well. We used the "game board" I made with MS Excel (a pretty thing that shows all the elements for The Setup, which I then took a screenshot of and sent to the players, has all the necessary tables, and has a space where you can move around dice tokens to track the "score"), which worked pretty well -- although it works best if everyone has a large screen like I've got on my iMac. We played through a slightly-abbreviated game in two hours and had a good time, despite some technical issues. Next week, we plan to try again and this time include Steve and Chris. 

The Setup for last night's FIASCO.

I have also been chatting with another old friend who's been trying to get me to try D&D Online with him and some other old buddies I gamed with in Montreal. I would love to try to get those guys hooked up with a VTT game, which I think would satisfy them in ways that DDO can't. I'm not sure I can manage another regular game, unless we played something that was extremely open-architecture. Roll20 works well, but it takes a fair amount of effort to set things up initially.

Also, my wife would punch me. Hard.