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Viewing 1 - 6 out of 6 Blogs.
With the season of haunting upon us my memories always go back to what, in my humble opinion, is the best haunted house in the world... bar none. When I graduated high school I started working at Haunted Verdun Manor every Halloween and did that for several seasons. I introduced my best friend to it and he has worked there every season for the past 17 years. The owner, the late Lance Pope, was an effects genius. The vast majority of the costumes and masks he made himself. Instead of tearing it down after every season, he kept what he had and spent all year improving on it. His dream was to create a haunted house theme park and he succeeded. If any of you find yourselves in the Dallas/Fort Worth Texas area this Halloween season I HIGHLY suggest you check it out. I have no doubts that it will become the haunted house experience that you measure all others against (I know I do). http://www.thrillvania.com/
Tags: Haunted House Texas Verdun Manor
This is not a political blog... I just thought that this was a kinda neat video put together encouraging people to go vote no matter who you like. They ask that you send it to 5 people but I don't believe in chain letters so I figured that his was a great place to post it so several people would be able to see it. http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=5930083
With all this doom and gloom talk about Wall Street I just want to say that I am SO looking forward to my game on Saturday Night. Somehow when there is ice cold Mountain Dew to drink, bacon pizza to eat and the dice are hitting the table the worries of the world seem a little more distant. This is what escapism is all about! It is just like Dennis Leary says... Happiness comes in small doses! 
Warning... this is long and a bit of a rant. It is me expressing my frustration with the current batch of games on the market.
I was speaking last night to a friend of mine whom I just recently caught up with after 10 years of separation. We were talking about the good old days back when we played RPGs together in Dallas and we both expressed dissatisfaction with the current string of games on the market. He has a group that approached him about running a Mechwarrior/Battletech game and expressed interest in having a greater emphasis on mech combat. We both said the same thing… why not just play Battletech and leave the roleplaying out? Essentially all they really wanted was to play a co-op game against one person. Combat seems to have taken center stage in the heart of gamers and has lead to the demise of actual roleplaying. I believe that systems these days are too focused on Combat. For me the best actual roleplaying in a Dungeons & Dragons game was back in 2E AD&D when my group didn’t use minis or battlemaps. Everything was in our heads. It is my belief that when miniatures are used the game ceases being a roleplaying game and becomes a tactical miniature wargame. A roleplayer no longer thinks of their character as a thinking, breathing creature when there is a miniature on the board… instead the miniature is a playing piece and the player is looking at the board and planning moves for the greatest tactical advantage. I don’t think it could be clearer than when I tried to get a group to play World of Darkness. One player in particular created a mafia enforcer as justification to create a character that was totally focused on combat. When I started asking him questions to help him develop a background and discover his motivation for investigating the supernatural he was at a total loss. He honestly had never played in a game where character background was more than a single sentence describing what the character does for a living or where character motivation went beyond the immediate situation at hand. I felt bad for him because he seemed somewhat embarrassed when some of the other players gave me a much more complete character description, background and motivation. To him the character was nothing more than a series of stats designed to give him a mathematical advantage in combat but he never realized that he looked at a character that way until it was shown to him what roleplaying really is. I find this happening more and more with every group I play with. The RPGs I really loved were the once more in common with cooperative storytelling than the Clue boardgame. In my old WoD group the GM could just sit back and respond to whatever the players came up with. Our motivations and background defined what our characters were and gave us a never-ending source of plotlines. Because the characters were so well defined, the GM could throw in pretty much any situation he wanted to and have a fairly good idea of how it would be acted on. In this case he could guide the chronicle without appearing to do anything… it was our reactions to the event that created the plotline. So you may ask… What is the point to all of this? It is my opinion that games where the player adopts a role of a fictional character to tell a story are pretty much coming to an end. The games of today share more in common with the board game “Clue” than the games I loved. In Clue you adopt a role or Professor Plum, Ms. Scarlet, etc and you move the piece around the board with the purpose of solving a murder… just like you do in 3E and 4E D&D. However, in my opinion the background story of the Clue characters is unimportant in playing the game… just like in 3E and 4E D&D because ultimately the game is about moving around the board and being the first player to discover the identity of the killer.
First check out this link if you haven't already heard about McCain's running mate decision. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=5684098&page=1 Who does McCain think he is fooling??? McCain seems to think that in the less than 2 years she has been governor that she has developed the qualifications to be Vice President? Does he honestly think that if he dies that she’d be up to the task of being President? This is so obviously a bid for woman voters. Women should be offended at such a blatant attempt at their votes… that he thinks that women will vote for him just because he has a woman as a running mate. It shows how small minded he really is. It doesn't even make sense from a politically strategic point of view. He can no longer call Obama's lack of experience into question because his own VP-select has even less experience than Obama? Where was his political strategist??? This was the dumbest political move that I can remember. He's so obviously trying to split the voters... he figures that Obama is going to get all of the black votes so McCain figures that he can get all the women voters by nominating a woman for his VP.
Grrrrrrrrr....
Tags: Politics Government Govt Election
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