Friday Night Lights

Great movie, but a purely horrid pastime to my gamer's mentality. I have friends who enjoy making that trek to the high school football field every weekend to "raise hell for the boys"--no lie, they really talk like that. Me and a similar-minded friend of mine were recently cajoled into joining them there.

Now as sports go, I dig baseball and maybe an occasional basketball game if its good. I absolutely abhor football, and have never really gotten it. So the opportunity was less prize-like for me than it would be for anyone else (I do seem to be in the minority here). Well it just so happens that my friend was not very impressed with our school's team, and we spent the evening making some pretty funny observations, to us anyway.

We discussed just how you would go about writing up football player class for 4E, and what sort of stats they would use in the game. Now all of that was widely open to speculation (a bit of a combo of athletics and acrobatics with a bit of endurance, perception, and insight thrown in when needed), and we never really worked out all of the math for attack rolls (though we do think that football gear should confer a +3 to AC with no penalties to skill or speed). What was really funny was when we got to talking about the powers they were using on the field.

We decided that only a handful of the players on the field were true characters, the rest are merely minions that work as extensions of their powers (advanced armor or +2 weapons maybe). So your Quarterback character (who is definitely a leader, with the unique ability to pause and restart initiative, favorably for his side) uses his "Throw it Hard" encounter power to launch the missile at a range of 5/10 while using a utility power to ignore the attempts of the enemies minions to overcome him. If he attacks successfully, he catches the ball (as a receiver minion) and can move his speed, if able.

Now we did about 10 of these during the course of the game, and it made the whole thing a lot more bearable. What was funny was when our football freak of a buddy joined in a little, calling the names of the powers they were using, like "Run Like Hell" when the Quarterback tried to move his speed rather than using his at-will ranged attack ("Pray it hits"). All in all, it was a pretty fun evening that I'm sure we could never replicate.

I, of course, tried to relate the fun we had to my wife when I got home that night. Some of you might be familiar with the way her face changed during that conversation: Immediate Reaction, Encounter power; "Disgusted Glare" .

God knows I love her, but the closest I can get her to rolling for initiative is the occassional game of Yahtzee.

VBMEW-01

The boy and my wife have each succumbed to the sandman's charms (him a bit slower than her), but I can't seem to let myself go down without a fight.

I blame the frantic nature of modern life; too often it seems that I try to make up "me time" at the expense of better sense. We are busy people and that leaves little room for obsess..err I mean hobbies. Its just hard to validate working on my setting or an adventure to a woman who still calls elves "those fairy critters". I get laughed at on a daily basis.

All of this leaves me squeezing my creative time into my alone time, which sadly interferes with my allotment of chores and other household duties. This all leads to a less-than-happy wife who's ire is fueled by my all-too-honest explanations. Let's just say I don't enjoy such casual lies; I reserve domestic dishonesties for a rainy day.

But I'll leave this for now--I've a race of evil elves to write up at the moment and am not helping my sad time constraint here--and share the only wisdom that thirty years on this clumsy rock has garnered me, sad and true. Wife is the husband's DM, and anything that pisses her off is a TPK waiting to happen!






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No real clue about this, but I've never had a blog before. (hope the wife doesn't read this)

VBMEW-01