5.5e

Catch it before he gets pressured to delete it! Freakin' hilarious. Super well played. Brilliant, even.

Exhausted

I'm exhausted. We're in the home stretch on closing on the house we're trying to sell, which is good. Work has been careening from one crisis to another, and I'm exhausted and incredibly frustrated with it over the last several months. That's actually the biggest reason why I'm frustrated, but home has also been frustrating with a lot going on, and little of it super pleasant. So I'm also not sleeping enough and I'm too stressed all of the time, and honestly, the week I just took off wasn't really what I needed or wanted. It was nice, don't get me wrong, but I needed some time to recharge me and it did not give me that at all. I'm absolutely, definitely missing that. I'm not looking forward to this weekend accomplishing it either, unfortunately. It's a pretty packed weekend, as far as that goes, what with the General Conference broadcast, a church cleaning assignment, a double date, etc. The only good thing is that I'll be able to sleep in, but I won't get to recharge. I'm desperately in need of a real recharge.

The sad thing when this kind of thing happens is that even fun things start to feel stressful. The double date tomorrow night? Should be fun, but it's stressful. The game I have to run tonight? Should be fun, but it's stressful, because I have too much going on and I'm already stressed out. I kind of wish it was the other campaign where I'm a player. I'm stressed out about even remembering where we were exactly and exactly how we left things.

Sigh.

On top of all of that, I'm frustrated once again with ENWorld. Specifically with Umbran, the absolute gamma mod who is the only one who ever does anything, and everything he does sucks. I don't know why I keep going back there, but I'm feeling very RPGish the last several months, and other than there and reddit, there aren't many good online places to talk RPGs. Then again, given how terrible those discussions are not to mention most of the people having them, maybe it's not worth trying. 

I was also really looking forward to reading the Paizo books Occult Adventures and Horror Adventures, but almost fifty pages into the former, I'm less so. It's very much a mechanics heavy textbook that reads like a book on accounting or statistics. The six classes, which I was also excited about, are very long and tedious to read; extremely mechanically oblique. I know PFRPG was (in)famous for being overly crunchy, but this is really over-the-top. I shouldn't have been too surprised; even something as simple as the base PHB fighter is at least twice as long as the 3.5 counterpart that it's supposed to be replacing, but mostly just because it offers more options rather than because it would be more difficult to run. All of these occult classes (so far; I haven't read all of them) are just complex to play. And I don't just mean, oh, hey, the kineticist has a big list of powers that are like spells but not, I mean actually the mechanics of how to use them are very complex. I really like the idea of a pseudo-horror "penny dreadful" but in fantasy feel, as a slightly different alternative tone to my "X-files" but in fantasy feel that I normally refer to, but I'm increasingly less likely to think that these occult rules are really what I'm looking for. I was really hoping for some more roleplaying hooks, but (and I shouldn't have been too surprised) this looks like it's really going to go hard into mechanics hooks instead.

In a barely related tangent, given the romanticism of the Gypsies and their supposed supernatural ties during the penny dreadful era, Roma is a word that bugs me. We're told, rather smugly, that Gypsy is an exonym and borderline offensive. This is flat-out untrue. Gypsy, of course, comes from Egyptian, and the reason the Gypsies were called that is because when they arrived in Europe in the Middle Ages, many of them literally told people that they were from Egypt. Many of them may have even believed it, even though they ultimately were almost certainly from the Punjab region of what is now northwestern India and Pakistan, and they crossed Sassanid Persia, settled for a time in Byzantine Anatolia, and only moved into Europe, especially the Balkans, after the Moslem conquest of Anatolia. Not only that; offensive? To whom? Many Gypsies still prefer that name and that's what they call themselves. This is very similar to how we're told that it's better to say "Native Americans" because Indian is offensive, and yet the federal government agency is still the Bureau of Indian Affairs and many, if not most, Indians prefer to call themselves Indians. Who exactly is offended and why?

Gypsies. Don't get the watered down crappy version of Strahd where they tone these guys down because of.... reasons.

Anyway, my Cult of Undeath does have some pseudo-Gypsies, and that's what I'll continue to call them and refer to them as. The idea that Gypsy is offensive is, in turn, offensive to me.

Also, AI, amirite? Those horses are hitched, but somehow they're standing beside the wagons rather than pulling them. Whiskey, tango, foxtrot.

UPDATE: For better or for worse, had a last minute cancellation of D&D last night. We were already kind of at the minimum number, with one of four players out, the fifth potential player who hasn't actually ever come yet incommunicado, and with one more last minute work-related cancelation, we were below critical mass to run the actual campaign. There was some brief talk of doing something else, but I decided that it would be better to just try again next week.

Feeling marginally less stressed so far today, although I didn't sleep well again, because I woke up, had to go the bathroom, and couldn't stop thinking about work-related stress. Sigh. Sometimes that's psychological, though. I think everything will be fine today, and then I can just do what I can to enjoy the weekend.