So after last time, I finally had everything working right in week 11. I was running faster, getting stronger and dropping weight again. And I bought a much nicer car. Everything was good.
And then, week 12 hit. It started badly, with me not being able to do nearly as many push-ups as the week before. It was probably just fatigue, because I had been sleeping badly all week. But I panicked and figured the short workouts and long rests between were causing my muscles to atrophy. So I ended up having a huge binge day, eating around 900 calories over my maintenance level, to see if that might spur muscle growth.
Well, it spurred something, because I jumped up 3 pounds in 3 days and have been stuck there ever since. And the rest of my workouts for the week weren't much better. It was really hard to try to maintain my numbers on anything. So it seems as if my strength and endurance are slipping away. But on the other hand, the muscles look like they're getting bigger, so maybe next week I'll get back on track.
On the running side, Monday was my best pace so far, by a lot. But my other runs, coming after my leg workout days, I felt weak and slow. My calves, which had been feeling much stronger, seem to have lost their spring, especially my left. I'm wondering if it's partly because I bought a car wtih a stick shift and a tight clutch. I'm having to work that calf a lot more when I drive.
And of course, the big thing that's sticking in the back of my mind is that this is where I have traditionally run out of steam in the past. Three months usually ends up being my limit on workout/diet cycles like this. But less than halfway to my goals, I can't afford that this time. So I'm really hoping to maintain my motivation and discipline for at least another three months. We'll see.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Saturday, June 14, 2014
10 Weeks In
10 weeks in, and though my weight and body comp numbers remain pretty well stalled, my performance--run pace and numbers of reps in strength training--continues to improve.
I'm one mission away from the end of Season One of Zombies Run! and trying to decide if I want to buy Season Two right away or dawdle awhile with the side content I haven't tried yet, like Supply and Airdrop Missions. I did run a 5K Race Mission this week, which was both my longest and fastest run yet since starting this fitness cycle. I'm contemplating whether to attempt a 10K. I don't know if my legs will take it, but I kind of want to push myself and see.
Plus, the game itself really motivates me. I have pushed myself longer and harder since starting the game than I would have without it. And the proof of that is that three times since starting, I have done missions while away from home. When I was at my mother's house at the tail end of the injury, stranded at my ex-wife's house with car problems, and this past week, visiting my father in Eufaula. Normally, I would take such an event as an easy excuse to miss a run, but wanting to push on and hear more of the story, I made myself run there. So Zombies Run! has been a big win so far, well worth the money.
The other half of my plan is not working out so well. The new routine is difficult, because it consists of progressively harder exercises done at slow cadence with strict form, much different than my Army experience of "bust out as many reps as you can in two minutes" and "the only bad rep is the one they don't count." For some exercises, I feel frustratingly weak.
However, the routine itself is very short; it calls for only a couple of sets of mostly low reps. By the time I'm done, it almost feels as if I haven't worked out at all, although during the sets, I definitely feel the strain. But there's this weird tension between the program's two principles of "do low volume work at high intensity" and "don't work to failure and leave strength in the bank." I'm never sure if I'm working hard enough, or if pushing harder will be counter-productive.
Plus, the program advocates working each bodypart only one day a week, with a week's rest between, which goes against the conventional wisdom I've been taught for 25 years. So the workouts feel scanty and unfinished, and it seems as if I'm resting between training bouts way too much, which is not helping my motivation. And yet, I've been making progress on my reps. However, since I've just switched to a new style of training, that improvement may be due more to neuromuscular adaptation than actual strength increase. We'll have to see what happens in the next couple of weeks, once I've got this new slow style down.
I'm one mission away from the end of Season One of Zombies Run! and trying to decide if I want to buy Season Two right away or dawdle awhile with the side content I haven't tried yet, like Supply and Airdrop Missions. I did run a 5K Race Mission this week, which was both my longest and fastest run yet since starting this fitness cycle. I'm contemplating whether to attempt a 10K. I don't know if my legs will take it, but I kind of want to push myself and see.
Plus, the game itself really motivates me. I have pushed myself longer and harder since starting the game than I would have without it. And the proof of that is that three times since starting, I have done missions while away from home. When I was at my mother's house at the tail end of the injury, stranded at my ex-wife's house with car problems, and this past week, visiting my father in Eufaula. Normally, I would take such an event as an easy excuse to miss a run, but wanting to push on and hear more of the story, I made myself run there. So Zombies Run! has been a big win so far, well worth the money.
The other half of my plan is not working out so well. The new routine is difficult, because it consists of progressively harder exercises done at slow cadence with strict form, much different than my Army experience of "bust out as many reps as you can in two minutes" and "the only bad rep is the one they don't count." For some exercises, I feel frustratingly weak.
However, the routine itself is very short; it calls for only a couple of sets of mostly low reps. By the time I'm done, it almost feels as if I haven't worked out at all, although during the sets, I definitely feel the strain. But there's this weird tension between the program's two principles of "do low volume work at high intensity" and "don't work to failure and leave strength in the bank." I'm never sure if I'm working hard enough, or if pushing harder will be counter-productive.
Plus, the program advocates working each bodypart only one day a week, with a week's rest between, which goes against the conventional wisdom I've been taught for 25 years. So the workouts feel scanty and unfinished, and it seems as if I'm resting between training bouts way too much, which is not helping my motivation. And yet, I've been making progress on my reps. However, since I've just switched to a new style of training, that improvement may be due more to neuromuscular adaptation than actual strength increase. We'll have to see what happens in the next couple of weeks, once I've got this new slow style down.
Sunday, June 08, 2014
After 9 Weeks - Plateaus and Plummets
Something seriously weird is going on with this digital scale I splurged on. But first, an historical note: back in the day, when I would be on a diet & exercise cycle, I would sometimes hit plateaus where my weight wouldn't change for several days in a row. But I didn't sweat this, because A) weight by itself is not very meaningful, so even if my weight wasn't changing, that didn't mean my body wasn't and B) I was using an analog scale that wasn't very exact at the best of times.
But now I'm using this digital scale which measures down to the tenth of a pound and which also gives a fat/muscle measurement. I've mentioned before that the fat/muscle measurements aren't very precise. But here's the thing that's really giving me fits.
The scale keeps measuring me at exactly the same weight for several days in a row. In week 5/6, three days in a row. In week 7, 5 days in a row, followed by 2 days in a row at a different weight. In week 8, 2 days in a row, one small dip down, then back up to almost the previous weight for 5 days. A two-day dip, and now three days in a row. No matter how much or how little I eat or drink, what exercise I do or don't do, what time of day I weigh, I spend up to 5 days weighing exactly the same to within a tenth of a pound. It's almost as if the scale gets stuck on that number for a while.
And then there's the real anomaly. On Wednesday, after 5 days locked in at the same weight, I dropped three pounds overnight. I bounced back up almost immediately, but I can't think of any mechanism to explain it other than a bad reading. I ate normally the day before and didn't spend any extra time in the bathroom. I wasn't dehydrated. It's a mystery.
I'm thinking that I may need to do something radical if this plateau doesn't bust soon. I'm thinking at the end of Week 12, if I'm still not showing much progress, I'm going to up my calories and shift more emphasis to strength workouts. Try to pack on some muscle mass to up my metabolism. I have never in my life been especially muscular, partly because at the times I was working out the hardest, like now, I was also restricting calories to try to drop fat. It might be time to try another approach.
But now I'm using this digital scale which measures down to the tenth of a pound and which also gives a fat/muscle measurement. I've mentioned before that the fat/muscle measurements aren't very precise. But here's the thing that's really giving me fits.
The scale keeps measuring me at exactly the same weight for several days in a row. In week 5/6, three days in a row. In week 7, 5 days in a row, followed by 2 days in a row at a different weight. In week 8, 2 days in a row, one small dip down, then back up to almost the previous weight for 5 days. A two-day dip, and now three days in a row. No matter how much or how little I eat or drink, what exercise I do or don't do, what time of day I weigh, I spend up to 5 days weighing exactly the same to within a tenth of a pound. It's almost as if the scale gets stuck on that number for a while.
And then there's the real anomaly. On Wednesday, after 5 days locked in at the same weight, I dropped three pounds overnight. I bounced back up almost immediately, but I can't think of any mechanism to explain it other than a bad reading. I ate normally the day before and didn't spend any extra time in the bathroom. I wasn't dehydrated. It's a mystery.
I'm thinking that I may need to do something radical if this plateau doesn't bust soon. I'm thinking at the end of Week 12, if I'm still not showing much progress, I'm going to up my calories and shift more emphasis to strength workouts. Try to pack on some muscle mass to up my metabolism. I have never in my life been especially muscular, partly because at the times I was working out the hardest, like now, I was also restricting calories to try to drop fat. It might be time to try another approach.
Saturday, May 24, 2014
7 Weeks Down
So a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I didn't trust the results from my digital scale's bio-electric impedance body fat percentage. This week I decided to do something about it, so I got myself a tape measure and tried the U.S. Navy method of determining the body fat percentage.
And damned if it wasn't right there with the bio-electric impedance. The scale had been very slowly descending from 29-30 to 27-28, but it could fluctuate quite a bit depending on my hydration, and I hadn't been following a strict hydration routine for the first three weeks, so those early higher results were in doubt. Now they're less so.
The second big change is to alter my strength workouts. One thing that has been giving me a problem with motivation was that I put together my strength workouts based on what I had done in the past, but since I've done four or five dramatically different workouts during various phases over the past 17 years, my current workout was a set of random bits from here and there with no real focus. It has made me firmer and stronger, but any kind of workout would have done that, given how far out of shape I was. But I had no tangible goals and no firm results, and so my motivation to do each day's workout was approaching nil.
So I did what I usually do. I bought a workout book. I have a dozen of them, but unlike those, this one builds on what I've been doing and gives it a systematic approach with goals to work toward. So I'm looking forward to seeing if a more systematic approach will give me better focus and accelerate my progress.
Because I'm approaching a really tricky time. Usually these fitness phases last about three months, at which point, I've gotten into pretty good shape. My motivation and focus drops, and I quit for several months (or years, this last time). I have tried a couple of times to fool myself into continuing to focus (and reach a new level of fitness and strength) by changing up my workout, but that hasn't worked well. Usually, by that time, I was hitting a plateau, and without continued results, my interest waned.
And right now, including the baby steps I took before starting up the spreadsheet, I'm either just at or just over the two-month mark, and nowhere near my weight, muscle, or speed goals. Admittedly, I've never let myself go quite this far out of shape before since leaving the Army, but I'm not going to get where I want in another month.
So I've got to hope that starting this new workout approach (coming a month before my usual quitting time), plus the continued motivation of Zombies, Run!, will keep my interest locked in. I've also kept my diet nicely dialed in this time, and I think I'll be able to continue it as well.
I started out planning to do a sort of low-carb approach (which has worked well for me before), but I was kind of half-assing it, so after a week or so, I switched to the Slow Carb approach from Tim Ferriss's book, The Four Hour Body. But it just doesn't work for me. This is the third time I've tried it (though the first time I think I've given a real careful go), and I've never gotten the kind of incredible results he promises. So a couple of weeks ago, I went back to a more serious low-carb approach, only this time I'm having way more fun with it.
The times I've tried it before were when I was still married and living with my wife and her mother and grandmother. So I kind of had to separate myself from them at mealtimes, had to buy my own separate groceries, and often felt like I had to sneak my low-carb eating under the radar.
This time, I'm living alone, so I do all my own grocery shopping. I can buy exactly what I want, I do all my own cooking, and I don't have to worry about any comments from anyone about what I'm eating. I'm not losing weight super quickly--only about a pound and a half per week--but it's coming off steadily, and I'm not getting the kind of energy crashes and food cravings on overnight shifts that I used to. I used to hit the vending machines at work three or four times a night, eating chips and M&M's and cupcakes. I'm not doing any of that now.
The only problem I have now is deciding whether to start pushing my calories up to try to build muscle faster on this new strength regime. It may take me a couple of weeks to decide that for sure.
And damned if it wasn't right there with the bio-electric impedance. The scale had been very slowly descending from 29-30 to 27-28, but it could fluctuate quite a bit depending on my hydration, and I hadn't been following a strict hydration routine for the first three weeks, so those early higher results were in doubt. Now they're less so.
The second big change is to alter my strength workouts. One thing that has been giving me a problem with motivation was that I put together my strength workouts based on what I had done in the past, but since I've done four or five dramatically different workouts during various phases over the past 17 years, my current workout was a set of random bits from here and there with no real focus. It has made me firmer and stronger, but any kind of workout would have done that, given how far out of shape I was. But I had no tangible goals and no firm results, and so my motivation to do each day's workout was approaching nil.
So I did what I usually do. I bought a workout book. I have a dozen of them, but unlike those, this one builds on what I've been doing and gives it a systematic approach with goals to work toward. So I'm looking forward to seeing if a more systematic approach will give me better focus and accelerate my progress.
Because I'm approaching a really tricky time. Usually these fitness phases last about three months, at which point, I've gotten into pretty good shape. My motivation and focus drops, and I quit for several months (or years, this last time). I have tried a couple of times to fool myself into continuing to focus (and reach a new level of fitness and strength) by changing up my workout, but that hasn't worked well. Usually, by that time, I was hitting a plateau, and without continued results, my interest waned.
And right now, including the baby steps I took before starting up the spreadsheet, I'm either just at or just over the two-month mark, and nowhere near my weight, muscle, or speed goals. Admittedly, I've never let myself go quite this far out of shape before since leaving the Army, but I'm not going to get where I want in another month.
So I've got to hope that starting this new workout approach (coming a month before my usual quitting time), plus the continued motivation of Zombies, Run!, will keep my interest locked in. I've also kept my diet nicely dialed in this time, and I think I'll be able to continue it as well.
I started out planning to do a sort of low-carb approach (which has worked well for me before), but I was kind of half-assing it, so after a week or so, I switched to the Slow Carb approach from Tim Ferriss's book, The Four Hour Body. But it just doesn't work for me. This is the third time I've tried it (though the first time I think I've given a real careful go), and I've never gotten the kind of incredible results he promises. So a couple of weeks ago, I went back to a more serious low-carb approach, only this time I'm having way more fun with it.
The times I've tried it before were when I was still married and living with my wife and her mother and grandmother. So I kind of had to separate myself from them at mealtimes, had to buy my own separate groceries, and often felt like I had to sneak my low-carb eating under the radar.
This time, I'm living alone, so I do all my own grocery shopping. I can buy exactly what I want, I do all my own cooking, and I don't have to worry about any comments from anyone about what I'm eating. I'm not losing weight super quickly--only about a pound and a half per week--but it's coming off steadily, and I'm not getting the kind of energy crashes and food cravings on overnight shifts that I used to. I used to hit the vending machines at work three or four times a night, eating chips and M&M's and cupcakes. I'm not doing any of that now.
The only problem I have now is deciding whether to start pushing my calories up to try to build muscle faster on this new strength regime. It may take me a couple of weeks to decide that for sure.
Saturday, May 17, 2014
6 Weeks Down - Positive Reinforcement and Losing Motivation
I mentioned last week that it was hard to stay motivated when I didn't seem to be seeing results. This week was full of positive reinforcement, and yet I've ended up losing a bit of motivation.
First, I seem to have my diet mostly locked down with a good variety of stand-by foods that are easy to fix and that I like, mixed in with new recipes that I'm trying. The money I save off the food I'm cooking (instead of going out) seems to go right back out for kitchen gadgets (I finally bought a blender) or fitness crap or what have you, but I'm eating and feeling much better in general than I was last year.
Second, although the numbers barely seem to be moving, I did hit the 10 lbs lost mark this week (I've bumped back to 9, but fluctuations happen). Funny thing is, because most of the fat I've gained is visceral fat, packed in around the internal organs, I'm starting to see the first hints of definition in my abs, even though I'm still paunchy.
Third, I went out this week and ran into a woman I haven't seen in a long time. And while we talked, her hand touched my arm, and then she did that little fingertip dance along my arm, over my shoulder and across my chest and asked, "Have you been working out?" And then she let her fingers linger a couple of extra moments before taking them away.
That's what it's really all for, isn't it?
Unfortunately, as good as that all was, it seems to have done precisely the wrong things to my motivation. Instead of spurring me on to build on success, it seems to have given me a feeling of "Mission Accomplished." I've been working less hard this week and making excuses for skipping workouts. I mean, I did have some legitimate scheduling problems that forced me to skip a couple of workouts, and there were some emotional distractions this week, but I still blew too much off. I have to remind myself that I'm nowhere near my strength or speed or weight goals, so I need to keep pushing.
First, I seem to have my diet mostly locked down with a good variety of stand-by foods that are easy to fix and that I like, mixed in with new recipes that I'm trying. The money I save off the food I'm cooking (instead of going out) seems to go right back out for kitchen gadgets (I finally bought a blender) or fitness crap or what have you, but I'm eating and feeling much better in general than I was last year.
Second, although the numbers barely seem to be moving, I did hit the 10 lbs lost mark this week (I've bumped back to 9, but fluctuations happen). Funny thing is, because most of the fat I've gained is visceral fat, packed in around the internal organs, I'm starting to see the first hints of definition in my abs, even though I'm still paunchy.
Third, I went out this week and ran into a woman I haven't seen in a long time. And while we talked, her hand touched my arm, and then she did that little fingertip dance along my arm, over my shoulder and across my chest and asked, "Have you been working out?" And then she let her fingers linger a couple of extra moments before taking them away.
That's what it's really all for, isn't it?
Unfortunately, as good as that all was, it seems to have done precisely the wrong things to my motivation. Instead of spurring me on to build on success, it seems to have given me a feeling of "Mission Accomplished." I've been working less hard this week and making excuses for skipping workouts. I mean, I did have some legitimate scheduling problems that forced me to skip a couple of workouts, and there were some emotional distractions this week, but I still blew too much off. I have to remind myself that I'm nowhere near my strength or speed or weight goals, so I need to keep pushing.
Friday, May 09, 2014
Five Weeks In - Lies
My body, it lies. I've known this for years, yet sometimes I still fall for it.
I went for a run on Wednesday, and even though I had previously run continuously for over a mile and a half without stopping, this time my legs were burning like crazy and I slowed to a walk after a quarter-mile. After maybe 30 seconds of walking, I started running again and continued on for well over a mile before walking again.
Wonky physiological explanation follows: your muscle cells use several different stages of chemical reaction to store energy for muscular effort. I could throw around chemical names or acronyms like ATP and ADP and phosphocreatine, but the simple version is this:
You have a tiny amount of primary fuel available in your muscle cells for immediate action at maximum output, like a hard punch or jerk.
You have a slightly larger amount of stored fuel in your cells that requires a little breaking down first. This is available for hard sustained action, like a set of heavy bench presses. Without oxygen, though, you run out quickly, like within 30 seconds or so.
You have an even larger (but still small) amount of stored fuel in your cells that can be broken down with the help of oxygen. This fuel is called glycogen and is broken down when needed via a process called fast glycolosis. But there's only enough glycogen stored in your muscles for about 2 minutes of sustained activity, at which point the muscles start having to draw on blood glucose for energy and send chemical signals to your liver to convert stored glycogen to glucose for more energy.
And during this crucial switch-over, which for me usually happens right around the quarter-mile mark, your muscles scream that they are dying. They tell you that there's nothing left, and that you need to stop so they can rest a second and get their breath back, so to speak. One of the first things you learn when running for more than a couple of minutes is to recognize that signal for what it is--a desperate lie--and push through it until your muscles get the blood glucose working.
I've known about this effect for over twenty years, and yet I still fell for it on Wednesday. Why?
Because I wasn't thinking straight is the best answer I can give. I was distracted by the fact I had overslept, so I had only eaten about an hour before running, which made me wary of pushing myself too hard. My legs felt tight and tired from the workout I'd done the night before, and I had only a limited window of time before I needed to get to work. So my mind was everywhere except on my actual running, which means that when my muscles gave their fake danger signal, I listened and walked. And immediately regretted it.
I think my fancy new digital scale lies, too. Not about my weight, even though I'm not losing much. I expect that, because when you start working out the way I have been, you build more muscle as you burn off fat. Because muscle is denser than fat, you may get heavier briefly while actually getting trimmer. I've known this for years as well.
Which is why, to keep up my motivation, I splurged a little on a more expensive digital scale that uses bio-electric impedance to determine the relative percentages of fat and muscle tissue in your body. It is not an especially accurate method, but I figured that as long as the numbers were moving in the right direction, complete accuracy wasn't as important. It would just be an extra motivational factor to know that, even if my weight wasn't going down, positive changes were still happening.
The problem is, those percentages have barely budged in four weeks. I'm getting results in my workouts (reps going up, run times getting marginally faster), and I feel as if I'm getting smaller and firmer, but the percentages on the scale are just fluctuating up and down within a very narrow range. So what was supposed to encourage me is actually discouraging me a bit.
One problem I'm having, though, is that the scale has trouble giving a reading unless I wipe the sensors first with a wet cloth to improve the connection. So I'm wondering if the (very thin) layer of water between the soles of my feet and the scale is throwing off the results at all. It shouldn't--I just barely dampen the cloth--but I'm grasping at straws wondering why the numbers aren't moving.
I went for a run on Wednesday, and even though I had previously run continuously for over a mile and a half without stopping, this time my legs were burning like crazy and I slowed to a walk after a quarter-mile. After maybe 30 seconds of walking, I started running again and continued on for well over a mile before walking again.
Wonky physiological explanation follows: your muscle cells use several different stages of chemical reaction to store energy for muscular effort. I could throw around chemical names or acronyms like ATP and ADP and phosphocreatine, but the simple version is this:
You have a tiny amount of primary fuel available in your muscle cells for immediate action at maximum output, like a hard punch or jerk.
You have a slightly larger amount of stored fuel in your cells that requires a little breaking down first. This is available for hard sustained action, like a set of heavy bench presses. Without oxygen, though, you run out quickly, like within 30 seconds or so.
You have an even larger (but still small) amount of stored fuel in your cells that can be broken down with the help of oxygen. This fuel is called glycogen and is broken down when needed via a process called fast glycolosis. But there's only enough glycogen stored in your muscles for about 2 minutes of sustained activity, at which point the muscles start having to draw on blood glucose for energy and send chemical signals to your liver to convert stored glycogen to glucose for more energy.
And during this crucial switch-over, which for me usually happens right around the quarter-mile mark, your muscles scream that they are dying. They tell you that there's nothing left, and that you need to stop so they can rest a second and get their breath back, so to speak. One of the first things you learn when running for more than a couple of minutes is to recognize that signal for what it is--a desperate lie--and push through it until your muscles get the blood glucose working.
I've known about this effect for over twenty years, and yet I still fell for it on Wednesday. Why?
Because I wasn't thinking straight is the best answer I can give. I was distracted by the fact I had overslept, so I had only eaten about an hour before running, which made me wary of pushing myself too hard. My legs felt tight and tired from the workout I'd done the night before, and I had only a limited window of time before I needed to get to work. So my mind was everywhere except on my actual running, which means that when my muscles gave their fake danger signal, I listened and walked. And immediately regretted it.
I think my fancy new digital scale lies, too. Not about my weight, even though I'm not losing much. I expect that, because when you start working out the way I have been, you build more muscle as you burn off fat. Because muscle is denser than fat, you may get heavier briefly while actually getting trimmer. I've known this for years as well.
Which is why, to keep up my motivation, I splurged a little on a more expensive digital scale that uses bio-electric impedance to determine the relative percentages of fat and muscle tissue in your body. It is not an especially accurate method, but I figured that as long as the numbers were moving in the right direction, complete accuracy wasn't as important. It would just be an extra motivational factor to know that, even if my weight wasn't going down, positive changes were still happening.
The problem is, those percentages have barely budged in four weeks. I'm getting results in my workouts (reps going up, run times getting marginally faster), and I feel as if I'm getting smaller and firmer, but the percentages on the scale are just fluctuating up and down within a very narrow range. So what was supposed to encourage me is actually discouraging me a bit.
One problem I'm having, though, is that the scale has trouble giving a reading unless I wipe the sensors first with a wet cloth to improve the connection. So I'm wondering if the (very thin) layer of water between the soles of my feet and the scale is throwing off the results at all. It shouldn't--I just barely dampen the cloth--but I'm grasping at straws wondering why the numbers aren't moving.
Saturday, May 03, 2014
Four Weeks In
So after running five times in Week 1, I came down with a minor leg injury. Acute pain just below the knee that I first thought was pretty minor and could be run through. I laid off the running for several days but continued with boxing (okay, really just hitting a heavy bag) and strength workouts. Then I tried walking a zombie mission to strengthen the knee.
Turns out, it wasn't the knee. It was the shin muscle where it attaches just below the knee. After my power walk, I worked camera on the evening newscasts, three more hours on my feet, and the next day, I could barely walk. My calves and Achilles were tight and on fire, and the shin pain was worse than ever; basically, everything between my knees and feet hate me. I tried to keep up the boxing and strength work, but torquing my body on the cross punches also stressed the legs, and I was even getting acute pain when I planked for push-ups.
I ended up laying off training completely for another week, except for some stretching to get strength and flexibility back in my lower legs. I bought a set of Dr. Scholl's Custom Fit Orthotics to help with my overpronation problem. But the pain continued to persist for several days.
So going into this past week, the fourth week since I officially decided to shift things into gear, I was getting pretty discouraged, partly because of another new thing I was trying. When I get into a cycle like this, I tend to get a little obsessive, and being a little nerdy, I like looking at numbers. But in the past, I've found it was better not to track my progress too closely. I had to learn to ignore daily fluctuations in weight or off-days where I couldn't improve my speed or lifting reps or poundages. The body does not work in smooth predictable lines.
But now there is a wider array of ways to track everything, so I decided to take the advice of Timothy Ferriss and just load up on data. I signed up with myfitnesspal to track my diet, which keeps much closer track of what I'm doing than a simple written food log. Zombies, Run! gives me fairly detailed data on my runs. I splurged on one of those digital scales that tracks bodyfat and muscle percentages. That plus records of my workouts has all been going into spreadsheets.
So the problem, at the beginning of Week 4, having spent about 2 of those weeks getting minimal exercise because of the injury, was that my numbers weren't improving much. I was losing tiny bits of weight due to the diet, and my fat/muscle ratio had improved ever so slightly from the few strength workouts I had logged, but we were approaching a month in with very little progress to show. I had a moment where I wondered if I would really be able to push on with this, or just accept that I was getting older and couldn't get back to where I'd been ever again.
But this week has been really encouraging. The leg pain was gone almost entirely, and when I gave it another easy test run on Sunday, it felt good. More importantly, it still felt good the next day. My strength workout felt like I was starting over from scratch, but I'm hoping that it'll come back quickly. I made some tweaks to the diet based partly on the data I was seeing from myfitnesspal, and the numbers are starting to move in the right direction. My subsequent runs have been much better, and I'm now running almost two miles before dropping to a walk. It feels really good to actually be able to keep running when the voice in your ear says, "Keep running to get there before the zombies," instead of walking and just imagining a day when you might be able to run. I haven't turned the zombie chases back on yet, though. I still get twinges when I try to sprint, so I'm going to condition my legs for a least another week first.
The new plan going forward, at least for a few weeks: three days running/boxing (I don't always hit the bag before I run--I'm having trouble now with skin scraping off my knuckles, which may call for new gloves or wraps), two days of strength and conditioning work, one day of yoga for flexibility and stability, and one day of stretching. I have a long way to go still, but I'm running faster, getting stronger and most importantly, feeling better. And I'm even starting to cook again, so I'm eating better while saving some money on food.
Turns out, it wasn't the knee. It was the shin muscle where it attaches just below the knee. After my power walk, I worked camera on the evening newscasts, three more hours on my feet, and the next day, I could barely walk. My calves and Achilles were tight and on fire, and the shin pain was worse than ever; basically, everything between my knees and feet hate me. I tried to keep up the boxing and strength work, but torquing my body on the cross punches also stressed the legs, and I was even getting acute pain when I planked for push-ups.
I ended up laying off training completely for another week, except for some stretching to get strength and flexibility back in my lower legs. I bought a set of Dr. Scholl's Custom Fit Orthotics to help with my overpronation problem. But the pain continued to persist for several days.
So going into this past week, the fourth week since I officially decided to shift things into gear, I was getting pretty discouraged, partly because of another new thing I was trying. When I get into a cycle like this, I tend to get a little obsessive, and being a little nerdy, I like looking at numbers. But in the past, I've found it was better not to track my progress too closely. I had to learn to ignore daily fluctuations in weight or off-days where I couldn't improve my speed or lifting reps or poundages. The body does not work in smooth predictable lines.
But now there is a wider array of ways to track everything, so I decided to take the advice of Timothy Ferriss and just load up on data. I signed up with myfitnesspal to track my diet, which keeps much closer track of what I'm doing than a simple written food log. Zombies, Run! gives me fairly detailed data on my runs. I splurged on one of those digital scales that tracks bodyfat and muscle percentages. That plus records of my workouts has all been going into spreadsheets.
So the problem, at the beginning of Week 4, having spent about 2 of those weeks getting minimal exercise because of the injury, was that my numbers weren't improving much. I was losing tiny bits of weight due to the diet, and my fat/muscle ratio had improved ever so slightly from the few strength workouts I had logged, but we were approaching a month in with very little progress to show. I had a moment where I wondered if I would really be able to push on with this, or just accept that I was getting older and couldn't get back to where I'd been ever again.
But this week has been really encouraging. The leg pain was gone almost entirely, and when I gave it another easy test run on Sunday, it felt good. More importantly, it still felt good the next day. My strength workout felt like I was starting over from scratch, but I'm hoping that it'll come back quickly. I made some tweaks to the diet based partly on the data I was seeing from myfitnesspal, and the numbers are starting to move in the right direction. My subsequent runs have been much better, and I'm now running almost two miles before dropping to a walk. It feels really good to actually be able to keep running when the voice in your ear says, "Keep running to get there before the zombies," instead of walking and just imagining a day when you might be able to run. I haven't turned the zombie chases back on yet, though. I still get twinges when I try to sprint, so I'm going to condition my legs for a least another week first.
The new plan going forward, at least for a few weeks: three days running/boxing (I don't always hit the bag before I run--I'm having trouble now with skin scraping off my knuckles, which may call for new gloves or wraps), two days of strength and conditioning work, one day of yoga for flexibility and stability, and one day of stretching. I have a long way to go still, but I'm running faster, getting stronger and most importantly, feeling better. And I'm even starting to cook again, so I'm eating better while saving some money on food.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
One Week Later
I might as well track my progress here. On the one hand, it has been a successful week. I actually worked out and ran more than my original plan called for. However, I might have actually shot myself in the foot by deviating from the plan.
The original plan: 2 workout days, 3 run days, 2 rest days. The actual week: 2 workout days, 5 run days (I ran after my workout on Tuesday), 1 rest day.
The results: my weight, body fat percentage and muscle percentage all held pretty steady from the beginning of the week to the end. No improvement whatsoever. My running pace actually got worse over the week from muscle fatigue and joint pain. I did have slight improvements in number of reps on my workout, but that's more a function of my getting used to working out again rather than an actual increase in strength. The only really tangible positive: I don't get as out of breath climbing the steep driveway at my ex-wife's house as I did a couple of weeks ago.
The tentative plan for next week--an even split: 3 workout days, 3 run days, 1 rest day. The workout days will build muscular endurance without the strain on my joints that comes from running until I've gotten conditioned to running again (I hope). And as gradually as I'm building intensity in the workouts, I don't think I need 2 rest days yet.
I'm also looking at tracking my diet with myfitnesspal, but that's tough, because I tend to throw things in at random without measuring when I cook. So we'll see what happens there.
The original plan: 2 workout days, 3 run days, 2 rest days. The actual week: 2 workout days, 5 run days (I ran after my workout on Tuesday), 1 rest day.
The results: my weight, body fat percentage and muscle percentage all held pretty steady from the beginning of the week to the end. No improvement whatsoever. My running pace actually got worse over the week from muscle fatigue and joint pain. I did have slight improvements in number of reps on my workout, but that's more a function of my getting used to working out again rather than an actual increase in strength. The only really tangible positive: I don't get as out of breath climbing the steep driveway at my ex-wife's house as I did a couple of weeks ago.
The tentative plan for next week--an even split: 3 workout days, 3 run days, 1 rest day. The workout days will build muscular endurance without the strain on my joints that comes from running until I've gotten conditioned to running again (I hope). And as gradually as I'm building intensity in the workouts, I don't think I need 2 rest days yet.
I'm also looking at tracking my diet with myfitnesspal, but that's tough, because I tend to throw things in at random without measuring when I cook. So we'll see what happens there.
Sunday, April 06, 2014
Running Toward and Away
When I was a kid, I played a few sports, but I was never particularly athletic. Which is to say, I had the intelligence to pick up the rules and the physical coordination to pick up the basic skills quickly, but that ability to dig deep and push through pain, to thrive on the exertion and struggle, I never had that.
I always wanted, in an intellectual sense, to be fit, but I didn't want to pay the physical price of actually, you know, doing it. In fact, as Don Rumsfeld said, I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't realize that there was a whole level of really hard work you had to push through to get there. I just assumed that people who were really fit were just naturally that way, the way I was a naturally good speller for some reason. And since I wasn't naturally fit, I was just never going to be that way.
And then the Army happened, and I discovered whole new potentials within myself. I learned how to push through pain, and learned that I had it in me to carry heavy shit and run for miles and operate on very little sleep if I had to. The most important thing I learned in the Army was how to endure.
When I got out, I didn't want to give up being fit, but I also didn't miss the 5 a.m. PT calls. So I went in cycles, working out hard for three or four months to get in really good shape, then laying off for months or even a couple of years before buckling down and doing the hard work again.
And then the divorce happened, followed quickly by the Biggest Mistake of My Life (TM), which sent me into a downward spiral of depression and ennui. I was underemployed, which you would think would leave me plenty of time to work out, but I was suffering under such a weight of stress and guilt and self-imposed crazy deadlines on Hero Go Home that I could rarely bring myself to do it.
I tried a few times. I even wrote about it here (like when I bought the punching bag, or this time the year before that which ran into problems). But something--lack of progress or just lack of someone to notice whether I was following through or not--caused my efforts to peter out.
And then, when I got hired on at the station, I went from a part-time job where I was on my feet the whole time to a part-time job where I was sitting down all the time, and what little exercise I was getting disappeared. The last few months have seen me atrophy far beyond what I ever thought would happen.
All of which is a long way round to saying I'm trying again. I've had the rough outline of a plan for a while now and have been taking baby steps to make it happen. The thing that pushed everything into high gear this week? A game for my phone.
Well, not really a game in the traditional sense. Someone in my gaming group mentioned Zombies Run! so I decided to give it a look. And I think this was the piece I was missing.
Zombies Run! is a smartphone app that's half-game, half-fitness plan. You assume the role of Runner 5, survivor of a zombie outbreak, living in a small settlement surrounded by ghouls. You load a mission and as you run or walk or bike or whatever, it plays sound clips telling you the story, interspersed with music from your playlist.
Today, I ran the second mission, and my first using the full experience. With GPS tracking activated on your smart phone, it tracks your progress and average speed. And every now and then, it tells you there's a zombie horde on your tail. You have to run faster until they're evaded. Here's a pic of my run today.
The track of my speed is the blue area across the bottom. You see those two peaks? Zombie chases. I got away both times, although the second one was a close thing (it tells you how close the zombies are behind you, and they were really close right there at the end).
The right side recaps your run, describing the events of the mission alternating with graphs showing how quickly you ran during different songs. After the first zombie chase, I deliberately held my speed down so I'd have something in the tank for the next one. In fact, you can't really tell just from looking when I stopped running and started walking, because the speeds were almost the same.
So initial reports are, it's a success. I really think I'm going to stick with this, at least for a while, because I want to keep running missions. And because the way the missions are structured pushes me to work harder than I would without them, I don't see myself quitting for lack of progress. Especially since my distance, time and speed are being tracked, so I can actually see the progress happening with every run.
And I think the discipline of running three missions a week (my current goal) will help me stick to the strength training I currently have scheduled for two more days per week. So I'm hoping that in a couple of months, I'll be in much better condition. We'll see.
I always wanted, in an intellectual sense, to be fit, but I didn't want to pay the physical price of actually, you know, doing it. In fact, as Don Rumsfeld said, I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't realize that there was a whole level of really hard work you had to push through to get there. I just assumed that people who were really fit were just naturally that way, the way I was a naturally good speller for some reason. And since I wasn't naturally fit, I was just never going to be that way.
And then the Army happened, and I discovered whole new potentials within myself. I learned how to push through pain, and learned that I had it in me to carry heavy shit and run for miles and operate on very little sleep if I had to. The most important thing I learned in the Army was how to endure.
When I got out, I didn't want to give up being fit, but I also didn't miss the 5 a.m. PT calls. So I went in cycles, working out hard for three or four months to get in really good shape, then laying off for months or even a couple of years before buckling down and doing the hard work again.
And then the divorce happened, followed quickly by the Biggest Mistake of My Life (TM), which sent me into a downward spiral of depression and ennui. I was underemployed, which you would think would leave me plenty of time to work out, but I was suffering under such a weight of stress and guilt and self-imposed crazy deadlines on Hero Go Home that I could rarely bring myself to do it.
I tried a few times. I even wrote about it here (like when I bought the punching bag, or this time the year before that which ran into problems). But something--lack of progress or just lack of someone to notice whether I was following through or not--caused my efforts to peter out.
And then, when I got hired on at the station, I went from a part-time job where I was on my feet the whole time to a part-time job where I was sitting down all the time, and what little exercise I was getting disappeared. The last few months have seen me atrophy far beyond what I ever thought would happen.
All of which is a long way round to saying I'm trying again. I've had the rough outline of a plan for a while now and have been taking baby steps to make it happen. The thing that pushed everything into high gear this week? A game for my phone.
Well, not really a game in the traditional sense. Someone in my gaming group mentioned Zombies Run! so I decided to give it a look. And I think this was the piece I was missing.
Zombies Run! is a smartphone app that's half-game, half-fitness plan. You assume the role of Runner 5, survivor of a zombie outbreak, living in a small settlement surrounded by ghouls. You load a mission and as you run or walk or bike or whatever, it plays sound clips telling you the story, interspersed with music from your playlist.
Today, I ran the second mission, and my first using the full experience. With GPS tracking activated on your smart phone, it tracks your progress and average speed. And every now and then, it tells you there's a zombie horde on your tail. You have to run faster until they're evaded. Here's a pic of my run today.
The track of my speed is the blue area across the bottom. You see those two peaks? Zombie chases. I got away both times, although the second one was a close thing (it tells you how close the zombies are behind you, and they were really close right there at the end).
The right side recaps your run, describing the events of the mission alternating with graphs showing how quickly you ran during different songs. After the first zombie chase, I deliberately held my speed down so I'd have something in the tank for the next one. In fact, you can't really tell just from looking when I stopped running and started walking, because the speeds were almost the same.
So initial reports are, it's a success. I really think I'm going to stick with this, at least for a while, because I want to keep running missions. And because the way the missions are structured pushes me to work harder than I would without them, I don't see myself quitting for lack of progress. Especially since my distance, time and speed are being tracked, so I can actually see the progress happening with every run.
And I think the discipline of running three missions a week (my current goal) will help me stick to the strength training I currently have scheduled for two more days per week. So I'm hoping that in a couple of months, I'll be in much better condition. We'll see.
Friday, January 03, 2014
Revisiting Ethrus
So with a lot of changes going on at work and in life in general, I let pretty much everything get away from me at the end of last year. And one of the things I let get away was Christmas shopping. So it was pretty embarrassing when I ended up getting some really awesome gifts for Christmas and had nothing to give in return.
One of those gifts was a book put together by efamar, a member of our gaming group. She had taken a bunch of materials from our Atlantis game--notes to and from the game master, synopses of gaming sessions, our song parody lyrics and other ephemera related to the campaign--and assembled them into one companion volume. We all spent quite a bit of time at the Christmas party looking through the book and enjoying the memories.
So I decided to put together something similar for our follow-up campaign, a sword-and-planet fantasy set on the world of Ethrus Prime. However, as far as I knew, no one had made synopsis notes for that campaign the way naamah did for Atlantis. So I've been listening to the recordings of the campaign and was surprised to remember that the game almost ended prematurely.
The game ran for 61 weekly sessions, but along about weeks 14-16, frustration was setting in. We got caught up in a mystery with way too many elements and red herrings, so we had a lot of trouble deciding what to do and then how to do it. And layered on top of that frustration was the fact that we were in a unique world created just for this campaign, so it seemed that every time we would lay out a tentative course of action, the GM would shoot it down, saying something like, "That's not the way this culture works."
It came to a head in week 16, in which we were asked to kill a certain very powerful person, who lived in a citadel. We needed to come up with a plan to get into his palace to do the deed, but every idea we floated to get inside was met with, "No that won't work. He's a very powerful man in a very cut-throat society, so they have set things up to avoid precisely this kind of thing."
Which I can appreciate in a "Rules for Evil Overlords" sense, but it doesn't help the story any. We finally come up with a plan to get one of the group inside, but of course, it goes wrong, and so we're faced with no choice but a frontal assault to rescue him, which looks doomed to fail. At which point, the GM says something about an "ill-considered attack" on the fortress, and on the recording, you can hear all the energy go out of the group.
Because while the attack may be ill-considered, in the sense that it's almost certain to fail, it's not because we're rushing in without thinking. We've just spent around two hours at the table, trying to get some kind of clue to how to accomplish this mission, only to be cock-blocked at every turn. Frontal assault may be a supremely bad plan, but at this point, it feels like the only plan left.
And in a larger sense, I think we were frustrated because we were lost. We came up with a group of uniquely broken characters, which created a really interesting group dynamic, but left us without the kind of long-term goals that can be easily broken down into concrete steps. So we're flailing in the dark at this point, looking for the story path.
On the recording, people are talking about rolling up new characters, and doing a kind of post-mortem even before we've started the assault. The GM says he never expected us to take on this mission, but the players feel as if they had no other real choices. Everyone sounds resigned to the disaster ahead, and more importantly, no one sounds as if they're having any fun.
And then the GM mentions a sandstorm approaching. It a pretty obvious deus ex machina, but it gives us a fingerhold against which we can plan the assault and maybe get out of it alive. Suddenly, there's hope, and with hope comes energy and player involvement again. And somehow, the entire thing turns around so that we're able to run for 45 more weeks instead of giving up right there. It was a great save by the GM.
So looking back at both Atlantis and Ethrus and still planning on launching a new campaign of my own in the near future, I started thinking about why Atlantis seemed like such a unique experience, and I have a few thoughts that I'll go into next time.
One of those gifts was a book put together by efamar, a member of our gaming group. She had taken a bunch of materials from our Atlantis game--notes to and from the game master, synopses of gaming sessions, our song parody lyrics and other ephemera related to the campaign--and assembled them into one companion volume. We all spent quite a bit of time at the Christmas party looking through the book and enjoying the memories.
So I decided to put together something similar for our follow-up campaign, a sword-and-planet fantasy set on the world of Ethrus Prime. However, as far as I knew, no one had made synopsis notes for that campaign the way naamah did for Atlantis. So I've been listening to the recordings of the campaign and was surprised to remember that the game almost ended prematurely.
The game ran for 61 weekly sessions, but along about weeks 14-16, frustration was setting in. We got caught up in a mystery with way too many elements and red herrings, so we had a lot of trouble deciding what to do and then how to do it. And layered on top of that frustration was the fact that we were in a unique world created just for this campaign, so it seemed that every time we would lay out a tentative course of action, the GM would shoot it down, saying something like, "That's not the way this culture works."
It came to a head in week 16, in which we were asked to kill a certain very powerful person, who lived in a citadel. We needed to come up with a plan to get into his palace to do the deed, but every idea we floated to get inside was met with, "No that won't work. He's a very powerful man in a very cut-throat society, so they have set things up to avoid precisely this kind of thing."
Which I can appreciate in a "Rules for Evil Overlords" sense, but it doesn't help the story any. We finally come up with a plan to get one of the group inside, but of course, it goes wrong, and so we're faced with no choice but a frontal assault to rescue him, which looks doomed to fail. At which point, the GM says something about an "ill-considered attack" on the fortress, and on the recording, you can hear all the energy go out of the group.
Because while the attack may be ill-considered, in the sense that it's almost certain to fail, it's not because we're rushing in without thinking. We've just spent around two hours at the table, trying to get some kind of clue to how to accomplish this mission, only to be cock-blocked at every turn. Frontal assault may be a supremely bad plan, but at this point, it feels like the only plan left.
And in a larger sense, I think we were frustrated because we were lost. We came up with a group of uniquely broken characters, which created a really interesting group dynamic, but left us without the kind of long-term goals that can be easily broken down into concrete steps. So we're flailing in the dark at this point, looking for the story path.
On the recording, people are talking about rolling up new characters, and doing a kind of post-mortem even before we've started the assault. The GM says he never expected us to take on this mission, but the players feel as if they had no other real choices. Everyone sounds resigned to the disaster ahead, and more importantly, no one sounds as if they're having any fun.
And then the GM mentions a sandstorm approaching. It a pretty obvious deus ex machina, but it gives us a fingerhold against which we can plan the assault and maybe get out of it alive. Suddenly, there's hope, and with hope comes energy and player involvement again. And somehow, the entire thing turns around so that we're able to run for 45 more weeks instead of giving up right there. It was a great save by the GM.
So looking back at both Atlantis and Ethrus and still planning on launching a new campaign of my own in the near future, I started thinking about why Atlantis seemed like such a unique experience, and I have a few thoughts that I'll go into next time.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Fate Halloween Trial Run AAR
So, a late After Action Report on my test run with Fate Core. I ran a one-shot adventure that I found on-line, a convention scenario that said it could be run in three hours, including the choosing of characters. It was titled "Spirit of the Tentacle," and was a Cthulhu-themed adventure using the Spirit of the Century rules, built on an earlier iteration of Fate.
Prepping the adventure took a lot more work than expected. Fate Core defaults to much simpler characters than Spirit of the Century, with fewer aspects and skills. This appealed to me, not only because I've read complaints about Spirit of the Century that the vast number of aspects and skills made characters too hard to challenge, but also because my players, being unfamiliar with the game, would probably have an easier time with simpler, more focused characters. At the same time, the characters created for the adventure were more like parodies of pulp characters, goofier than I expected in a Cthulhu-style adventure.
So I spent some time rewriting origins and stripping down skills and aspects and bringing in some of the iconic characters from Spirit of the Century to replace guys like the Mexican masked midget wrestler.
Then there was the scenario itself, which had its own problems. There was what seemed like a neat action opening, except that--after I'd already declared I was running this scenario--I discovered it was a classic railroad, designed to funnel down to only one outcome, no matter what the players did, which I HATE. But I did what I could to make it interesting.
The adventure was supposed to run in four acts: the action opening, an investigative phase, a party where they meet the guy who gives them the MacGuffin to beat the monster, the big action finale. As it turned out, we spent more time discussing the rules than I expected at the beginning, and then the big action opening went WAY longer than I'd planned.
Part of it was players being unfamiliar with the game system. But a large part of it fell on me. I was simultaneously 1) unfamiliar with the rules myself, 2) being very lenient about what I was having the opposition do, because I didn't want to discourage the players, and 3) being even more extra-lenient because I felt bad about the railroading and didn't want the players to feel like they'd had their time wasted.
By the time we finished the opening scene, we had gone over two hours into a 2 1/2 window for playing the adventure (after the discussion of rules and character sheets was done). There was no way to finish the rest in our remaining time, and really, no one--including me--was very invested in finishing the story anyway. Not having had a hand in creating the characters, the players weren't very invested in them, either, and unable to play their aspects to the hilt because they didn't always know what they meant (one of my biggest problems with Fate, actually--aspects are not always written in a way that immediately tell you what they mean or how they should be played).
Looking back now, given the spooky nature of the game, I could have and should have played the opposition much harder (yes, sargon, you were absolutely right about this, and I wish I had taken your hints) and kept things moving. But we were all learning.
But this was all being done as preparation for starting my own game, one I've been wanting to run for almost four years now (looking at some of the documents I've put together for the game, I see that one of them was created in February of 2010). I'm really excited about the campaign background I've put together, but that's because it's set around a lot of things I love, that my friends may not be as enthusiastic about. I've finally sent out some background information to let people see a little of what I'm shooting for, but I haven't gotten any feedback yet.
If the game does come together, I'm hoping that the Fate Core system will work out well for me. If not, I can switch back to one of the other systems I've debated using, like Open d6 or Champions (I actually have character write-ups done for several of the NPC's in Champions 4th edition terms). But Fate has been especially good for me in terms of spurring my creativity and getting me to fill in the blanks on the campaign world in a way the other systems weren't. I'm hoping that will translate into a fun game at the table.
Prepping the adventure took a lot more work than expected. Fate Core defaults to much simpler characters than Spirit of the Century, with fewer aspects and skills. This appealed to me, not only because I've read complaints about Spirit of the Century that the vast number of aspects and skills made characters too hard to challenge, but also because my players, being unfamiliar with the game, would probably have an easier time with simpler, more focused characters. At the same time, the characters created for the adventure were more like parodies of pulp characters, goofier than I expected in a Cthulhu-style adventure.
So I spent some time rewriting origins and stripping down skills and aspects and bringing in some of the iconic characters from Spirit of the Century to replace guys like the Mexican masked midget wrestler.
Then there was the scenario itself, which had its own problems. There was what seemed like a neat action opening, except that--after I'd already declared I was running this scenario--I discovered it was a classic railroad, designed to funnel down to only one outcome, no matter what the players did, which I HATE. But I did what I could to make it interesting.
The adventure was supposed to run in four acts: the action opening, an investigative phase, a party where they meet the guy who gives them the MacGuffin to beat the monster, the big action finale. As it turned out, we spent more time discussing the rules than I expected at the beginning, and then the big action opening went WAY longer than I'd planned.
Part of it was players being unfamiliar with the game system. But a large part of it fell on me. I was simultaneously 1) unfamiliar with the rules myself, 2) being very lenient about what I was having the opposition do, because I didn't want to discourage the players, and 3) being even more extra-lenient because I felt bad about the railroading and didn't want the players to feel like they'd had their time wasted.
By the time we finished the opening scene, we had gone over two hours into a 2 1/2 window for playing the adventure (after the discussion of rules and character sheets was done). There was no way to finish the rest in our remaining time, and really, no one--including me--was very invested in finishing the story anyway. Not having had a hand in creating the characters, the players weren't very invested in them, either, and unable to play their aspects to the hilt because they didn't always know what they meant (one of my biggest problems with Fate, actually--aspects are not always written in a way that immediately tell you what they mean or how they should be played).
Looking back now, given the spooky nature of the game, I could have and should have played the opposition much harder (yes, sargon, you were absolutely right about this, and I wish I had taken your hints) and kept things moving. But we were all learning.
But this was all being done as preparation for starting my own game, one I've been wanting to run for almost four years now (looking at some of the documents I've put together for the game, I see that one of them was created in February of 2010). I'm really excited about the campaign background I've put together, but that's because it's set around a lot of things I love, that my friends may not be as enthusiastic about. I've finally sent out some background information to let people see a little of what I'm shooting for, but I haven't gotten any feedback yet.
If the game does come together, I'm hoping that the Fate Core system will work out well for me. If not, I can switch back to one of the other systems I've debated using, like Open d6 or Champions (I actually have character write-ups done for several of the NPC's in Champions 4th edition terms). But Fate has been especially good for me in terms of spurring my creativity and getting me to fill in the blanks on the campaign world in a way the other systems weren't. I'm hoping that will translate into a fun game at the table.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Some More Fate Dithering... Ignore If You Can
So I've got a tentative test run of a one-shot Fate adventure set for late October, possibly the 29th. But the more I dig into the system, the more I worry.
There's a lot I really like about Fate, in theory at least. The characters are fairly fast and simple to create. Task and combat resolution is really flexible, and for a non-tactical game, offers a lot of interesting and creative strategies. Although it's hard to imagine how it would actually play out, you can do "combat" on an intellectual or even social level. So that instead of inflicting physical wounds, you could inflict a Consequence on someone like "Humiliated in front of his peers" or "Revealed to be a fraud," which can be invoked to create an advantage against them.
But then there's that word, "Consequence." There is no real damage system in Fate, just as there are no statistics to form the basis of one. You have no Strength or Constitution score, and therefore no hit points against which to inflict damage. Instead, you inflict Consequences, which are basically negative aspects against a character. Ironically, this can create a combat that's more like the kinds of fights you see in books and movies, and I dare say more "realistic" than a more traditional hit point-based simulation. A character receiving a Consequence will have something like Fractured Rib or Cut Over the Eye, instead of saying, "Ouch, I lost 10 points." Although there's no fixed mechanical penalty in the rules for such conditions, the character is required to honor those consequences in further play.
That's a hard hurdle for me to get across, though. Although intellectually, I can see the value in such a system, I also see how it can be abused by players looking to exploit advantage over the table. I've played with a lot of power-gamers who would look for every exploit they could find in the rules to "beat" the Game-Master, or the scenario, and I can foresee lots of debates over the table from people looking to make a Severe Consequence not so severe, or looking to take a Consequence that's really no hindrance at all. And even people who aren't power-gamers could find it confusing not to have firm rules in place--"Okay, so I'm Groggy. What exactly does that mean in this fight?" Its fuzziness makes it flexible, but can also make it frustrating.
And then there's the issue of concession. Fate has rules for conceding a conflict, which, again, to me seems like a cool mechanic. Not every fight should end in a complete slaughter of your opponents. But there is a certain level of "heat of battle" that comes into play at the table, where players will make their characters fight until they drop. Not only that, but there are some players who hate the entire concept of surrender on either side. If their opponents surrender, the players will just kill them while they're helpless. Avoiding a fight by negotiation or allowing a helpless opponent to live is simply not in their gaming vocabulary.
But concession is a pretty big part of Fate, mostly as a way to allow the PC's to survive an encounter they're losing. Problem is, why should the NPC's accept a surrender or a negotiated cease-fire if the PC's would not? Once again, it's a mechanic I think is pretty cool, but I don't know how it would play at the table.
What else? Oh, there's also the mechanics that allow characters to change the game world by declaring new aspects on scenes and characters. On the one hand, I think it's a neat mechanic to allow collaboration at the table, and it's something I've actually done a few times in our non-Fate campaigns, where I've made a suggestion that some condition outside my character apply in the scene and the GM, not seeing a problem, agrees.
But it's hard enough keeping a campaign on track when players' actions so frequently try to push things somewhere else. In a campaign world like the one I'm setting up, which will have major secrets and revelations, how do you keep that under control if players can, on a whim, suddenly decide to declare a change that undoes a secret that they haven't yet learned? I suppose the answer is, "As the GM, you simply say 'no.'" But once again, I foresee arguments from players who say, "This is in the rules, and you let X do Y, so why not me?"
But this is why I want to playtest, to see if the problems I anticipate might be overblown, and to see if the fun factor overrides those concerns.
There's a lot I really like about Fate, in theory at least. The characters are fairly fast and simple to create. Task and combat resolution is really flexible, and for a non-tactical game, offers a lot of interesting and creative strategies. Although it's hard to imagine how it would actually play out, you can do "combat" on an intellectual or even social level. So that instead of inflicting physical wounds, you could inflict a Consequence on someone like "Humiliated in front of his peers" or "Revealed to be a fraud," which can be invoked to create an advantage against them.
But then there's that word, "Consequence." There is no real damage system in Fate, just as there are no statistics to form the basis of one. You have no Strength or Constitution score, and therefore no hit points against which to inflict damage. Instead, you inflict Consequences, which are basically negative aspects against a character. Ironically, this can create a combat that's more like the kinds of fights you see in books and movies, and I dare say more "realistic" than a more traditional hit point-based simulation. A character receiving a Consequence will have something like Fractured Rib or Cut Over the Eye, instead of saying, "Ouch, I lost 10 points." Although there's no fixed mechanical penalty in the rules for such conditions, the character is required to honor those consequences in further play.
That's a hard hurdle for me to get across, though. Although intellectually, I can see the value in such a system, I also see how it can be abused by players looking to exploit advantage over the table. I've played with a lot of power-gamers who would look for every exploit they could find in the rules to "beat" the Game-Master, or the scenario, and I can foresee lots of debates over the table from people looking to make a Severe Consequence not so severe, or looking to take a Consequence that's really no hindrance at all. And even people who aren't power-gamers could find it confusing not to have firm rules in place--"Okay, so I'm Groggy. What exactly does that mean in this fight?" Its fuzziness makes it flexible, but can also make it frustrating.
And then there's the issue of concession. Fate has rules for conceding a conflict, which, again, to me seems like a cool mechanic. Not every fight should end in a complete slaughter of your opponents. But there is a certain level of "heat of battle" that comes into play at the table, where players will make their characters fight until they drop. Not only that, but there are some players who hate the entire concept of surrender on either side. If their opponents surrender, the players will just kill them while they're helpless. Avoiding a fight by negotiation or allowing a helpless opponent to live is simply not in their gaming vocabulary.
But concession is a pretty big part of Fate, mostly as a way to allow the PC's to survive an encounter they're losing. Problem is, why should the NPC's accept a surrender or a negotiated cease-fire if the PC's would not? Once again, it's a mechanic I think is pretty cool, but I don't know how it would play at the table.
What else? Oh, there's also the mechanics that allow characters to change the game world by declaring new aspects on scenes and characters. On the one hand, I think it's a neat mechanic to allow collaboration at the table, and it's something I've actually done a few times in our non-Fate campaigns, where I've made a suggestion that some condition outside my character apply in the scene and the GM, not seeing a problem, agrees.
But it's hard enough keeping a campaign on track when players' actions so frequently try to push things somewhere else. In a campaign world like the one I'm setting up, which will have major secrets and revelations, how do you keep that under control if players can, on a whim, suddenly decide to declare a change that undoes a secret that they haven't yet learned? I suppose the answer is, "As the GM, you simply say 'no.'" But once again, I foresee arguments from players who say, "This is in the rules, and you let X do Y, so why not me?"
But this is why I want to playtest, to see if the problems I anticipate might be overblown, and to see if the fun factor overrides those concerns.
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Some More Thoughts About That Smeaton Character Sheet
So this is going to be some just off-the-top-of-my-head ramblings about the new character sheet vs. the old, with some digressions into general game design stuff. So happens that these old game materials I'm running across are things that came to light during the gradual clean-up that occurred during the Great Power-Down and was never finished. The end result was that the piles of stuff scattered around my house were more organized by common themes than before.
So along with the notes on the campaign world I ran across yesterday was Smeaton's original character sheet. I'm not going to include it here, because there's a lot of stuff. But if you compare it to the minimal Fate system character I posted last time, it's incredibly complex. Eight basic attributes, three derived attributes plus a damage modifier for Strength, 29 skills, and some gear. Oh, and his middle name was Hamish. I'd forgotten that.
So on the one hand, it looks as if the Fate character sheet could not possibly yield a character as complex as Smeaton was in the original game, with his 10 skills and 5 aspects. And to a certain extent, that's true, a I'll discuss in a moment. But when you look at what actually goes into playing a character, the Fate sheet has all the high points covered. It's a matter of emphasis. The old sheet, following the old-school game paradigm, lists a lot of skill percentages, but not much about Smeaton as a person. The focus of the character sheet is on mechanical resolution, with the role-playing side left entirely up to the player. This is a valid approach; I said at the time, and I still think that the Atlantis campaign was the best game I've ever played in.
But the skill resolution system was often very frustrating, with the entire party trying and failing to climb a twenty-foot rope in one session, and another character spending an entire combat locked in a futile struggle with a single minor enemy while everyone else was mowing through people to get the battle won. True, Fate Core's skills aren't as granular. If I take Fight in Fate Core, I am equally capable with fists and swords and knives and clubs, whereas in the Atlantis game, I had to take separate skills for all those. This does give a different flavor to combat, especially with the very different skill advancement system, but I don't think it's a game killer.
The emphasis in Fate is on role-playing, so that the mechanics of the game center on it. Therefore, aspects instead of attributes. Much of the game runs on Fate Points. You invoke aspects and spend Fate Points to get advantages, such as my trying to solve a mystery by invoking my "Ex-artilleryman" aspect to contact my old military buddies for information. On the other hand, I can also receive Fate Points by accepting a disadvantage based on my aspects, like being distracted in a fight by a cool piece of tech, which gets my "Hell of an Engineer" curiosity going.
But here's the thing that prompted me to write a follow-up. While there's no role-playing emphasis on the old sheet, one of the pivotal role-plating elements of Smeaton's character developed from the skill system, or more correctly, the skill buying system.
See, when making up our characters, we bought our skills using two pools of points. One pool was for Core Skills, the kinds of things all adventurers end up needing to do, and the kinds of things that aren't necessarily taught in a classroom. Fighting, listening, climbing, sneaking: these are all core skills, and there are never enough points to go around.
The other pool is Knowledge Skills, the kinds of things you CAN learn in a classroom (and which are far less useful in game terms). And in the four games I've played under this system, I've always ended up having more Knowledge Skill points than I can really spend, given the GM-imposed limits on how good a skill can be at the start. I end up buying a lot of skills that I never really use.
So in Smeaton's case, I ended up having some spare points and bought skill in the clarinet, for the hell of it. But this throwaway skill got me thinking of a justification, which is what led to Smeaton's love of poetry and eventually, his Secret Romantic aspect.
So although those points were wasted in terms of game effectiveness, they ended up being something like an aspect in Fate or a disadvantage in Champions: a means to ask questions about my character and deepen his personality.
So along with the notes on the campaign world I ran across yesterday was Smeaton's original character sheet. I'm not going to include it here, because there's a lot of stuff. But if you compare it to the minimal Fate system character I posted last time, it's incredibly complex. Eight basic attributes, three derived attributes plus a damage modifier for Strength, 29 skills, and some gear. Oh, and his middle name was Hamish. I'd forgotten that.
So on the one hand, it looks as if the Fate character sheet could not possibly yield a character as complex as Smeaton was in the original game, with his 10 skills and 5 aspects. And to a certain extent, that's true, a I'll discuss in a moment. But when you look at what actually goes into playing a character, the Fate sheet has all the high points covered. It's a matter of emphasis. The old sheet, following the old-school game paradigm, lists a lot of skill percentages, but not much about Smeaton as a person. The focus of the character sheet is on mechanical resolution, with the role-playing side left entirely up to the player. This is a valid approach; I said at the time, and I still think that the Atlantis campaign was the best game I've ever played in.
But the skill resolution system was often very frustrating, with the entire party trying and failing to climb a twenty-foot rope in one session, and another character spending an entire combat locked in a futile struggle with a single minor enemy while everyone else was mowing through people to get the battle won. True, Fate Core's skills aren't as granular. If I take Fight in Fate Core, I am equally capable with fists and swords and knives and clubs, whereas in the Atlantis game, I had to take separate skills for all those. This does give a different flavor to combat, especially with the very different skill advancement system, but I don't think it's a game killer.
The emphasis in Fate is on role-playing, so that the mechanics of the game center on it. Therefore, aspects instead of attributes. Much of the game runs on Fate Points. You invoke aspects and spend Fate Points to get advantages, such as my trying to solve a mystery by invoking my "Ex-artilleryman" aspect to contact my old military buddies for information. On the other hand, I can also receive Fate Points by accepting a disadvantage based on my aspects, like being distracted in a fight by a cool piece of tech, which gets my "Hell of an Engineer" curiosity going.
But here's the thing that prompted me to write a follow-up. While there's no role-playing emphasis on the old sheet, one of the pivotal role-plating elements of Smeaton's character developed from the skill system, or more correctly, the skill buying system.
See, when making up our characters, we bought our skills using two pools of points. One pool was for Core Skills, the kinds of things all adventurers end up needing to do, and the kinds of things that aren't necessarily taught in a classroom. Fighting, listening, climbing, sneaking: these are all core skills, and there are never enough points to go around.
The other pool is Knowledge Skills, the kinds of things you CAN learn in a classroom (and which are far less useful in game terms). And in the four games I've played under this system, I've always ended up having more Knowledge Skill points than I can really spend, given the GM-imposed limits on how good a skill can be at the start. I end up buying a lot of skills that I never really use.
So in Smeaton's case, I ended up having some spare points and bought skill in the clarinet, for the hell of it. But this throwaway skill got me thinking of a justification, which is what led to Smeaton's love of poetry and eventually, his Secret Romantic aspect.
So although those points were wasted in terms of game effectiveness, they ended up being something like an aspect in Fate or a disadvantage in Champions: a means to ask questions about my character and deepen his personality.
Playing with Fate
Found some more notes and sample character write-ups for my dieselpunk/pulp adventure campaign world. Still waffling on what system I want to use, but in the meantime, I decided to try adapting an old character to the Fate system to see how it would work.So here is Dougal Smeaton, my ex-military engineer from our Atlantean campaign. I followed the basic model from Fate Core, and not the model from Spirit of the Century (the pulp adventure game that first got me thinking about Fate) which loads up a lot more aspects and skills.
Dougal Smeaton
Aspects:
A hell of an engineer:
- Benefits: Knows how to design, build and repair machinery
- Hindrances: Thinks of things mechanically, has trouble believing in it if he can't understand how it works
Truth in the bottom of a glass
- Benefits: High tolerance for alcohol, knows a lot about whiskey and brewing, has unique insights
- Hindrances: Often drunk, bad reputation
Ex-artilleryman
- Benefits: knowledge of military customs and skills, experienced campaigner, military contacts
- Hindrances: bad memories of the war, sense of duty may lead him to put himself in danger
Secret Romantic
- Benefits: knowledge of poetry, loyalty, passion
- Hindrances: may do foolish or dangerous things for the woman he loves, trouble when secrets come to light
Two-Fisted
- Benefits: Strong, courageous, loves to fight
- Hindrances: may resort to violence when other approaches might be smarter
Skills:
Physique (Great +4)
Fight, Crafts (Good +3)
Shoot, Athletics, Contacts (Fair +2)
Notice, Provoke, Rapport, Language:
Atlantean (Average +1)
Stunts:
Grappler: +2 on Physique rolls when
grappling
Better Than New: when succeed with
style on repair, add a free situation aspect
Physical Stress: _ _ _ _
Mental Stress: _ _
This would be the sheet for Dougal as he was starting out. It carries all the bullet points of his personality in the aspects (the "Secret Romantic" aspect was one that didn't really exist when I first made up the character--it developed during play--but there is a mechanism in the rules to allow aspects to evolve to reflect the character as he develops). The high Physique skill reflects his large size and strength, and gives him extra physical stress boxes. "Crafts" would be the equivalent skill to "Engineering." In our game, Engineering might actually have been split out into a separate skill. If there were a lot of differentiation of skills, however (say, Fight being split into Boxing, Grappling, Sword, Knife, Spear, etc), then there might need to be a bigger skill pyramid to start, with 15 skills instead of 10.
By the end of the campaign, Dougal would have increased several skills, plus added a few. He would also have several Extras to represent things like his flaming sword Angfar and his companion, the beautiful Princess Leda.
On a normal character sheet, you wouldn't list out benefits and hindrances for aspects the way I did above, but I think it's helpful in this context to show some of the ways they could be interpreted during the game. Aspects not only reflect personality, but are also ways to give the character advantages or disadvantages throughout the game. One interesting mechanic is that you can use aspects to give you bonuses to rolls, after you've made the roll.
So, for instance, when Smeaton learned of Leda's vision that he would die protecting her from a demon, he still foolishly went up against it solo (compelling his Secret Romantic aspect and gaining a Fate point). But during the fight itself, he could have invoked both his Two-Fisted (loves to fight) and Secret Romantic (protecting the woman he loves) aspects to give him bonuses to his Fight rolls. He could have invoked those aspects to mitigate the effects of bad rolls or to reroll completely. On the other hand, because the opponent was so superior, he could have chosen to invoke those aspects only after really good rolls, enabling him to stack a lot of damage at once and defeat a superior opponent. It would be a gamble, but then, the whole fight was.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Not Doing What I Should
The long powerless hiatus sticks with me in terms of not getting done what I should be getting done. I need to finish my script for this year's radio show, and I need to get back to work on one of the novels I started a few months ago.
But instead, I'm still concentrating all my fire on building up this role-playing campaign world I started noodling with a few years ago. It's really taking shape and I'm getting really excited by the possibilities. But I'm still trying to decide on a rules system.
I've got basically five possibilities right now. I had been looking at FATE Core. I just finished reading through the system rules a couple of days ago, and while I think it looks like a fascinating and flexible system, the concepts are so counter to what any of us are used to playing that I'm scared to pull the trigger and run a playtest.
Then there's Hero System. I actually statted out some NPC's in Hero long ago, but the amount of work it would be to run the entire campaign in Hero just boggles my mind.
That's why I tried to write a stripped-down version of the Hero engine specifically for this game, but got bogged down trying to figure point costs for the radically different rules I was starting to develop. And in the end, it didn't look as if they would turn out to be that much less work.
Then there are the open-source game systems, Open d6 (which is based on a rule system first developed for West End Games James Bond series, and later adapted for Star Wars), and Action System, which is a weird second-generation spin-off of Fuzion, which was an amalgamation of R. Talsorian's system and Hero.
With the exception of FATE, they're all kind of old-school crunchy, which I like, but...
With the exception of Hero, I've never played any of them, so I'm uneasy about trying to build a campaign around them. It seems as if FATE would be easiest, followed by Open d6, probably, but I just don't know for sure. But it seems as if I'm getting close to the point where I need to start putting down some actual numbers instead of just brainstorming ideas.
And meanwhile, I need to break past my reluctance and get some actual work done.
But instead, I'm still concentrating all my fire on building up this role-playing campaign world I started noodling with a few years ago. It's really taking shape and I'm getting really excited by the possibilities. But I'm still trying to decide on a rules system.
I've got basically five possibilities right now. I had been looking at FATE Core. I just finished reading through the system rules a couple of days ago, and while I think it looks like a fascinating and flexible system, the concepts are so counter to what any of us are used to playing that I'm scared to pull the trigger and run a playtest.
Then there's Hero System. I actually statted out some NPC's in Hero long ago, but the amount of work it would be to run the entire campaign in Hero just boggles my mind.
That's why I tried to write a stripped-down version of the Hero engine specifically for this game, but got bogged down trying to figure point costs for the radically different rules I was starting to develop. And in the end, it didn't look as if they would turn out to be that much less work.
Then there are the open-source game systems, Open d6 (which is based on a rule system first developed for West End Games James Bond series, and later adapted for Star Wars), and Action System, which is a weird second-generation spin-off of Fuzion, which was an amalgamation of R. Talsorian's system and Hero.
With the exception of FATE, they're all kind of old-school crunchy, which I like, but...
With the exception of Hero, I've never played any of them, so I'm uneasy about trying to build a campaign around them. It seems as if FATE would be easiest, followed by Open d6, probably, but I just don't know for sure. But it seems as if I'm getting close to the point where I need to start putting down some actual numbers instead of just brainstorming ideas.
And meanwhile, I need to break past my reluctance and get some actual work done.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Return to Champions, Session 2
So we finished out the combat from last week's Champions session, which once again took a little longer than I anticipated. One problem: the scenario just had too many NPC's, or I should say, it was designed for a more gradual progression. Taking on a couple of enemies at a time [ETA: with the entire party working together] would have been more doable and probably progressed a little faster.
As it was, things degenerated into a huge brawl featuring everybody fighting at once almost immediately when the party got to the location. With 4 PC's, 5 super NPC's and a big pile of agents, it took a long time to work through the phases. If I hadn't held back most of the agents (with good in-game justification, though), things would have gotten unmanageable.
As it is, I think I calibrated the difficulty pretty well. People were flagging by the end of the long combat, but there was some genuine peril and triumph in there. Two of the supervillains ended up being pretty easy to beat, and the third, Ripper the Tank, proved himself to be durable and extremely strong. When he set up for a haymaker on one of the characters (a move designed to inflict maximum damage), the party got genuinely worried. But one of the other characters was able to come to the rescue just in the nick of time (which, I'll admit, I timed so that it would be possible).
But because Ripper's defenses were so high, he was able to last through several attacks with just three Stun left. It finally took a character pushing her attack so hard she actually did Stun damage to herself in order to penetrate his defenses and finally put him down, which proved pretty dramatic, I think.
All in all, a mostly fun two-session scenario, I think. However, as much as I still love Champions, I may be just about done with it. I used to think I would love to run Hero System for any genre--I've got the Fantasy Hero and Justice, Inc. and Ninja Hero and Super Agents game books, none of which I've actually played--but outside of superheroes, I'm thinking Champions is just too much work for too little reward. The Speed Chart and the rolling of tons of dice gives superhero combat a really unique flavor, though, so if I ever decided to run a Diggerverse campaign (unless I finally get off my ass and finish the stripped-down rules I was trying to write), Champions would be the choice, I think.
But for my pulp-era campaign, I'm currently leaning toward Fate, with a greater emphasis on role-playing and faster combat resolution. I will probably try putting something together for a test run in November, after I've gotten Halloween behind me.
As it was, things degenerated into a huge brawl featuring everybody fighting at once almost immediately when the party got to the location. With 4 PC's, 5 super NPC's and a big pile of agents, it took a long time to work through the phases. If I hadn't held back most of the agents (with good in-game justification, though), things would have gotten unmanageable.
As it is, I think I calibrated the difficulty pretty well. People were flagging by the end of the long combat, but there was some genuine peril and triumph in there. Two of the supervillains ended up being pretty easy to beat, and the third, Ripper the Tank, proved himself to be durable and extremely strong. When he set up for a haymaker on one of the characters (a move designed to inflict maximum damage), the party got genuinely worried. But one of the other characters was able to come to the rescue just in the nick of time (which, I'll admit, I timed so that it would be possible).
But because Ripper's defenses were so high, he was able to last through several attacks with just three Stun left. It finally took a character pushing her attack so hard she actually did Stun damage to herself in order to penetrate his defenses and finally put him down, which proved pretty dramatic, I think.
All in all, a mostly fun two-session scenario, I think. However, as much as I still love Champions, I may be just about done with it. I used to think I would love to run Hero System for any genre--I've got the Fantasy Hero and Justice, Inc. and Ninja Hero and Super Agents game books, none of which I've actually played--but outside of superheroes, I'm thinking Champions is just too much work for too little reward. The Speed Chart and the rolling of tons of dice gives superhero combat a really unique flavor, though, so if I ever decided to run a Diggerverse campaign (unless I finally get off my ass and finish the stripped-down rules I was trying to write), Champions would be the choice, I think.
But for my pulp-era campaign, I'm currently leaning toward Fate, with a greater emphasis on role-playing and faster combat resolution. I will probably try putting something together for a test run in November, after I've gotten Halloween behind me.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Back Behind the Screen
So a couple of weeks ago, in the final throes of no-power-having (which I'll write about pretty soon), I'm visiting some game friends in their house with lights, and efamar mentions that she would like to try Champions. I keep talking about it, and Sargon keeps talking about it, how complex yet fun it can be, and she just wants to know for herself.
And the thing is, I've been thinking about trying to gamemaster again for a few years now, but hadn't gotten the nerve for a few reasons. I'd been trying to put together a very large game world that was a little too ambitious, I had been trying to adapt the Champions design into something a little simpler (coming up with some similar approaches to the guys who did the Fuzion system) with not much success, and with Sargon already running our once-a-week game, I wasn't sure people would have time to fit a second game into their schedules.
But efamar wanted to try it, and jormungandr said he wanted to give it a go as well, and when efamar said that Sargon had expressed a wish to get to be a player instead of a GM at least once, I decided to give it a try.
But instead of trying to launch a big campaign in a new world, I decided to start small. One of the biggest hurdles to new Champions players is designing a new character. There are so many options and variations, and so much math, and that's only after you've wrapped your head around the concept of the effects-based system Champions uses. It can take hours to put together a good character--fun hours for a certain brand of game geek, admittedly--but it can be off-putting to new players.
So I decided to use a fairly small pre-generated adventure with the players using introductory characters from the 4th Edition Champions rulebook. The adventure was the classic "School Holiday" by Aaron Allston, published in The Space Gamer magazine in 1982 (later expanded into School of Hard Knocks for GURPS Supers). Because the adventure's NPC's were designed with 1st edition rules, however, I also used characters from either the rulebook or from Classic Enemies (4th Ed.), sometimes with slight changes to names and powers. I threw in a quick introductory Danger Room fight to get people used to the way combat works before throwing them into the big fight. I ended up getting way more into it than I expected to.
The actual night itself was fun, after a rocky start. A couple of players weren't in great moods coming in, and I don't know if the two-page quick-start rules I sent out were actually helpful at all in introducing concepts, so the Danger Room fight didn't go quite as quickly as I'd hoped.
When the PC's got to the hostage situation at the school, they leapt forward a lot more quickly than I'd expected and hit from two fronts, so the fight was a lot less self-contained than anticipated. The encounter was supposed to be pretty challenging, but doable as long as the characters took on a few enemies at a time. We ended up running out of time in the middle of the big fight, with one character alone against a few of the enemies in the final room (he tunnelled ahead) while the others were fighting against the rest upstairs.
I was a lot more out-of-practice behind the screen than I'd anticipated. The last time I gamemastered was in 1987, so we're looking at over 25 years. It was fun, but I had forgotten a lot of the rules on things like Flash Attacks and Entangles, so I spent more time consulting the rulebook than I prefer. But people said they enjoyed it, and we're planning on getting together perhaps week after next to finish out the encounter, and beyond that, who knows?
I'm getting the itch to pick up that old campaign I was designing, although I'm having trouble choosing a rules system. Part of me wants to stick with Champions, but putting together NPC's and things is really time-consuming. Another part of me is really curious about something rules-lite, like the Fate System. You don't get that satisfying crunch of improving skills and watching your numbers go up, but it seems like it could be really fast, fun and flexible, ideal for a group of people who wouldn't have a lot of time for either preparation or play. And I've downloaded a lot of d6 system stuff that I've never gotten to play, as well, so there's that.
And the thing is, I've been thinking about trying to gamemaster again for a few years now, but hadn't gotten the nerve for a few reasons. I'd been trying to put together a very large game world that was a little too ambitious, I had been trying to adapt the Champions design into something a little simpler (coming up with some similar approaches to the guys who did the Fuzion system) with not much success, and with Sargon already running our once-a-week game, I wasn't sure people would have time to fit a second game into their schedules.
But efamar wanted to try it, and jormungandr said he wanted to give it a go as well, and when efamar said that Sargon had expressed a wish to get to be a player instead of a GM at least once, I decided to give it a try.
But instead of trying to launch a big campaign in a new world, I decided to start small. One of the biggest hurdles to new Champions players is designing a new character. There are so many options and variations, and so much math, and that's only after you've wrapped your head around the concept of the effects-based system Champions uses. It can take hours to put together a good character--fun hours for a certain brand of game geek, admittedly--but it can be off-putting to new players.
So I decided to use a fairly small pre-generated adventure with the players using introductory characters from the 4th Edition Champions rulebook. The adventure was the classic "School Holiday" by Aaron Allston, published in The Space Gamer magazine in 1982 (later expanded into School of Hard Knocks for GURPS Supers). Because the adventure's NPC's were designed with 1st edition rules, however, I also used characters from either the rulebook or from Classic Enemies (4th Ed.), sometimes with slight changes to names and powers. I threw in a quick introductory Danger Room fight to get people used to the way combat works before throwing them into the big fight. I ended up getting way more into it than I expected to.
The actual night itself was fun, after a rocky start. A couple of players weren't in great moods coming in, and I don't know if the two-page quick-start rules I sent out were actually helpful at all in introducing concepts, so the Danger Room fight didn't go quite as quickly as I'd hoped.
When the PC's got to the hostage situation at the school, they leapt forward a lot more quickly than I'd expected and hit from two fronts, so the fight was a lot less self-contained than anticipated. The encounter was supposed to be pretty challenging, but doable as long as the characters took on a few enemies at a time. We ended up running out of time in the middle of the big fight, with one character alone against a few of the enemies in the final room (he tunnelled ahead) while the others were fighting against the rest upstairs.
I was a lot more out-of-practice behind the screen than I'd anticipated. The last time I gamemastered was in 1987, so we're looking at over 25 years. It was fun, but I had forgotten a lot of the rules on things like Flash Attacks and Entangles, so I spent more time consulting the rulebook than I prefer. But people said they enjoyed it, and we're planning on getting together perhaps week after next to finish out the encounter, and beyond that, who knows?
I'm getting the itch to pick up that old campaign I was designing, although I'm having trouble choosing a rules system. Part of me wants to stick with Champions, but putting together NPC's and things is really time-consuming. Another part of me is really curious about something rules-lite, like the Fate System. You don't get that satisfying crunch of improving skills and watching your numbers go up, but it seems like it could be really fast, fun and flexible, ideal for a group of people who wouldn't have a lot of time for either preparation or play. And I've downloaded a lot of d6 system stuff that I've never gotten to play, as well, so there's that.
Monday, May 06, 2013
A Very Late Look at DC Universe Online
I finally decided to take the plunge and give the now-free-to-play DC Universe Online a try.
Right up front, it's kind of a culture shock, because I've only ever played two MMO's, City of Heroes/Villains and Champions Online. Not only are both superhero MMO's, which have major differences from fantasy-based MMO's from what I hear, but both were designed by basically the same people, which means both games are very similar in their design philosophy, mission design, character design, power design, villain groups, etc.
But DCUO is a very different animal. It was designed to work as both a PC game and a console game, for one thing, so the control schemes and on-screen graphics owe a lot more to console games than other MMO's. There are key combos for special moves, and combo hit counters, and very simplified power controls.
But the game is absolutely gorgeous. The avatar costume designs are not as customizable as Champions or City of Heroes, but every available costume piece seems to work pretty well with every other available costume piece. The attention to detail in the visual design is incredible.
That's my first character, Mr Contingency, on a Gotham rooftop.
Of course, since this is a DC game, the two big locations are Gotham and Metropolis. And unlike the other games I've played, which had accelerated day/night cycles, DCUO has none. It is always night in Gotham, while in Metropolis, it is always day.
That's my second character, Ms Crush hovering over Metropolis, showing just how high you can fly and good the distance rendering is.
Jim Lee was supposedly deeply involved in the visual design of the game, which means everything has a lot of flair, but for an old-school fan like me, I don't always appreciate the Image-Comics-meets-DC aesthetic.
The DCUO website also brags about having missions written by DC star writers like Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman. However, while I think a lot of the missions are fun, there is one aspect to most of them that I'm starting to find tiresome bordering on ludicrous.
Missions are designed in arcs--you fight several linked missions in the open world, and then are sent to an instanced mission for the boss fight (if you don't know, "instanced" means the game creates a special map just for you and/or your team--you and another player could go through the same entrance at the same time, and if you aren't teamed up, end up fighting solo in separate "instances" of the same map).
But just about every boss mission, with only one or two exceptions, has you fighting other heroes. They might be hallucinations of the Batman family created by Scarecrow's fear gas, or illusions created by Dr. Psycho, or they may be robot duplicates, but usually they're just possessed and/or mind-controlled. In one, you fight the Teen Titans one by one, who are mind-controlled by Raven, who is in turn possessed by her evil demon-father Trigon. In another, you fight Aquaman, who is mind-controlled by the sorceress Circe. Robin is pheromonally controlled by Poison Ivy. Eclipso possesses the Spectre, Green Arrow and Green Lantern in turn. It gets pretty silly after a while.
Right up front, it's kind of a culture shock, because I've only ever played two MMO's, City of Heroes/Villains and Champions Online. Not only are both superhero MMO's, which have major differences from fantasy-based MMO's from what I hear, but both were designed by basically the same people, which means both games are very similar in their design philosophy, mission design, character design, power design, villain groups, etc.
But DCUO is a very different animal. It was designed to work as both a PC game and a console game, for one thing, so the control schemes and on-screen graphics owe a lot more to console games than other MMO's. There are key combos for special moves, and combo hit counters, and very simplified power controls.
But the game is absolutely gorgeous. The avatar costume designs are not as customizable as Champions or City of Heroes, but every available costume piece seems to work pretty well with every other available costume piece. The attention to detail in the visual design is incredible.
That's my first character, Mr Contingency, on a Gotham rooftop.
Of course, since this is a DC game, the two big locations are Gotham and Metropolis. And unlike the other games I've played, which had accelerated day/night cycles, DCUO has none. It is always night in Gotham, while in Metropolis, it is always day.
That's my second character, Ms Crush hovering over Metropolis, showing just how high you can fly and good the distance rendering is.
Jim Lee was supposedly deeply involved in the visual design of the game, which means everything has a lot of flair, but for an old-school fan like me, I don't always appreciate the Image-Comics-meets-DC aesthetic.
The DCUO website also brags about having missions written by DC star writers like Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman. However, while I think a lot of the missions are fun, there is one aspect to most of them that I'm starting to find tiresome bordering on ludicrous.
Missions are designed in arcs--you fight several linked missions in the open world, and then are sent to an instanced mission for the boss fight (if you don't know, "instanced" means the game creates a special map just for you and/or your team--you and another player could go through the same entrance at the same time, and if you aren't teamed up, end up fighting solo in separate "instances" of the same map).
But just about every boss mission, with only one or two exceptions, has you fighting other heroes. They might be hallucinations of the Batman family created by Scarecrow's fear gas, or illusions created by Dr. Psycho, or they may be robot duplicates, but usually they're just possessed and/or mind-controlled. In one, you fight the Teen Titans one by one, who are mind-controlled by Raven, who is in turn possessed by her evil demon-father Trigon. In another, you fight Aquaman, who is mind-controlled by the sorceress Circe. Robin is pheromonally controlled by Poison Ivy. Eclipso possesses the Spectre, Green Arrow and Green Lantern in turn. It gets pretty silly after a while.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
What I'm Doing During the Long Silence
I really should be going to bed right now, but I've been meaning to post something here for a week or more and never getting around to it, so here I am, getting around.
I'm trying to decide what to do with Hero Go Home, the website. I've committed to keeping it up for the rest of the year, but then, I'm not sure what I'll do with it. I've been trying to find a way to make money off of it, but it hasn't really been working. And when I look at it with both eyes open, I don't really see how it ever will work.
Which isn't to say that there's no way to make money on the Internet, or that I have no other ideas I'd like to try. But seriously, I'm having trouble translating ideas into action.
A big problem is that I do everything myself. I generate the written content, the graphic design, the illustrations. I format the ebooks and the print books, choose the fonts, design the covers and do the artwork. I produce the annual radio show: write the scripts, do some of the voices, do the sound effects and mixing. I produce the videos. I'm my own webmaster.
And the problems is not just that it takes a lot of time. I technically have "time" to do a lot more than I'm doing. What I'm lacking are the mental and emotional resources. It's hard to shift gears from movie reviewer to graphic designer to novelist over and over every day. And when I think about incorporating something new that has a learning curve, the amount of mental horsepower I have left for everything else nosedives.
Which brings me to my current situation. I have not written a word of fiction in about six months. One of the eventual goals for the site was to make more money off of a smaller audience by getting revenue streams from multiple books, and I figured I was good for one or two books a year. But it's like I broke something inside myself with the Run Digger Run experiment. I have several novel ideas that are kind of half-baked, but nothing I'm close to being able to write yet.
And the longer I go without writing, the more anxious I get about the moment I actually do start again. I'm not sure to break out of that right now.
I'm trying to decide what to do with Hero Go Home, the website. I've committed to keeping it up for the rest of the year, but then, I'm not sure what I'll do with it. I've been trying to find a way to make money off of it, but it hasn't really been working. And when I look at it with both eyes open, I don't really see how it ever will work.
Which isn't to say that there's no way to make money on the Internet, or that I have no other ideas I'd like to try. But seriously, I'm having trouble translating ideas into action.
A big problem is that I do everything myself. I generate the written content, the graphic design, the illustrations. I format the ebooks and the print books, choose the fonts, design the covers and do the artwork. I produce the annual radio show: write the scripts, do some of the voices, do the sound effects and mixing. I produce the videos. I'm my own webmaster.
And the problems is not just that it takes a lot of time. I technically have "time" to do a lot more than I'm doing. What I'm lacking are the mental and emotional resources. It's hard to shift gears from movie reviewer to graphic designer to novelist over and over every day. And when I think about incorporating something new that has a learning curve, the amount of mental horsepower I have left for everything else nosedives.
Which brings me to my current situation. I have not written a word of fiction in about six months. One of the eventual goals for the site was to make more money off of a smaller audience by getting revenue streams from multiple books, and I figured I was good for one or two books a year. But it's like I broke something inside myself with the Run Digger Run experiment. I have several novel ideas that are kind of half-baked, but nothing I'm close to being able to write yet.
And the longer I go without writing, the more anxious I get about the moment I actually do start again. I'm not sure to break out of that right now.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Goodbye Ethrus, Hello Superheroes
So our planetary romance campaign, Ethrus Prime, has finally ended, and I realize that--unlike Atlantis--I haven't really been posting updates of it here. Of course, since I moved Out of the Vault and Super Movie Mondays over to Hero Go Home, I've barely posted here at all in the last year. I posted a tutorial on how I created my character portrait, and then there were only a couple of other posts in the next couple of months.
Part of that is due to the exhaustion of trying to keep up with the daily serialization of Run, Digger, Run! But part of it was due to the game itself. It just wasn't as emotionally involving for me. And much of that is my fault for my choice of character.
Coming up with a character for this world was a bit of a challenge. It was a brand-new world, and quite extensively thought-out by the gamemaster, but I had trouble finding the kind of person I wanted to be within it. I had this idea that I wanted to be someone crazy who slowly goes sane, and so I came up with this idea: a guy who has had something done to his brain by a machine designed to fight a long-ago war. It overwrites people's brains with the memories and personalities and skillsets of loyal soldiers, therefore eliminating the need for recruiting and training and indoctrination. Grab a prisoner, stick him in the machine, and voila, instant soldier.
Problem was, a spy from the other side had infected the machine with a virus, another personality hidden in the code that would take over and defect to the other side, or perform sabotage among the enemy troops. The otehr problem was that the machine was old and defective, and so the job it had done was incomplete. Sunder (my character) was still himself, but he heard the voices of two other people in his head constantly. One was Torin, a trained sniper and assassin, a cold-blooded killer. The other was Amaris, a master spy who had the ability (like The Mentalist) to read people by their reactions, their tells. He could seduce women and fast-talk men, trained to infiltrate and persuade people to do exactly what he wanted.
Not a horrible concept, actually, and it produced some good moments in game. The problems were:
1) In an attempt to not seem like I was actually getting three characters for the price of one, with every Mary Sue skill in the book, I ended up buying almost all the skills for all three characters with one set of points, and advancing each character's skills separately. So for instance, Torin and Sunder had different pistol skills, and if Torin didn't make an appearance between skill advancements, his skills wouldn't advance. Buying all those skills meant all my skills were lower than I would have liked, and they never advanced as fast as everyone else.
2) Because I was unsure of the game world, I tried to dodge around it by giving Sunder amnesia. I planted hints as to what kind of background he probably had in my background document, but lots of it was left to the gamemaster. This might have worked out better if, in addition to having to create the entire game world from scratch, he hadn't also had another (more interesting) amnesiac character to fill in.
3) Although Amaris had one of my character's coolest moments in the game, he was not really a good choice for the game world. His conception as a con man/human lie detector might have worked well in a modern setting, but in the world of Ethrus, populated by a number of extremely paranoid non-human races that we mostly ended up interacting with, and in a party where more than one character had the mental ability to dominate a character and make him tell us the truth, he was basically pretty useless. Entertaining, but superfluous. It didn't help that the gamemaster and I had different conceptions of his reality (I posited him as a real person, like Torin, while Sargon insisted he was just code).
4) My character's main personality was paranoid and risk-averse, not the best choice for an adventuring party.
So to sum up, Sunder liked to run and hide a lot, Torin was a "master" sniper who was a worse shot than practically everyone else in the game (and falling behind all the time), and Amaris was as useful as a third nipple, plus nobody liked him. And yet, we ended up getting stuff done and having fun, and in the end, Sunder became a pretty interesting guy, I think.
Now it's time to move on to Orion Dusk, a futuristic superhero fighting space pirates in the asteroid belt, or something. I'm hoping I've done enough things differently that he'll be a better fit than Sunder, and yet, he's going to have his own issues. I'll leave those as a surprise to the people who'll be playing with him.
Oh yeah, and since I did this with Smeaton long ago, now that everything's over, I'll leave the members of the group with a couple of bits of Sunder trivia.
Back when I was first conceiving the character, I didn't know that it would be taking place on an alien world. I only knew "post-apocalyptic." So when I was coming up with my alternate personalities, I gave them more recognizably ethnic human names. Nicolai was going to be a spy/assassin, while Diego would be a historian/medic or healer.
Also, during the game, there was a physical tic I would use whenever I played the other personalities. Torin was on Sunder's left side, and Amaris was on his right. So if I would turn my head to left or right while "hearing voices," I was deliberately hearing one or the other of them specifically. And when their personalities would take over, I would tilt my head to that side--Torin to the left, and Amaris to the right. I'm not sure anyone ever consciously picked up on it, but I like to think it helped differentiate them. I know it gave me a crick in my neck sometimes.
Part of that is due to the exhaustion of trying to keep up with the daily serialization of Run, Digger, Run! But part of it was due to the game itself. It just wasn't as emotionally involving for me. And much of that is my fault for my choice of character.
Coming up with a character for this world was a bit of a challenge. It was a brand-new world, and quite extensively thought-out by the gamemaster, but I had trouble finding the kind of person I wanted to be within it. I had this idea that I wanted to be someone crazy who slowly goes sane, and so I came up with this idea: a guy who has had something done to his brain by a machine designed to fight a long-ago war. It overwrites people's brains with the memories and personalities and skillsets of loyal soldiers, therefore eliminating the need for recruiting and training and indoctrination. Grab a prisoner, stick him in the machine, and voila, instant soldier.
Problem was, a spy from the other side had infected the machine with a virus, another personality hidden in the code that would take over and defect to the other side, or perform sabotage among the enemy troops. The otehr problem was that the machine was old and defective, and so the job it had done was incomplete. Sunder (my character) was still himself, but he heard the voices of two other people in his head constantly. One was Torin, a trained sniper and assassin, a cold-blooded killer. The other was Amaris, a master spy who had the ability (like The Mentalist) to read people by their reactions, their tells. He could seduce women and fast-talk men, trained to infiltrate and persuade people to do exactly what he wanted.
Not a horrible concept, actually, and it produced some good moments in game. The problems were:
1) In an attempt to not seem like I was actually getting three characters for the price of one, with every Mary Sue skill in the book, I ended up buying almost all the skills for all three characters with one set of points, and advancing each character's skills separately. So for instance, Torin and Sunder had different pistol skills, and if Torin didn't make an appearance between skill advancements, his skills wouldn't advance. Buying all those skills meant all my skills were lower than I would have liked, and they never advanced as fast as everyone else.
2) Because I was unsure of the game world, I tried to dodge around it by giving Sunder amnesia. I planted hints as to what kind of background he probably had in my background document, but lots of it was left to the gamemaster. This might have worked out better if, in addition to having to create the entire game world from scratch, he hadn't also had another (more interesting) amnesiac character to fill in.
3) Although Amaris had one of my character's coolest moments in the game, he was not really a good choice for the game world. His conception as a con man/human lie detector might have worked well in a modern setting, but in the world of Ethrus, populated by a number of extremely paranoid non-human races that we mostly ended up interacting with, and in a party where more than one character had the mental ability to dominate a character and make him tell us the truth, he was basically pretty useless. Entertaining, but superfluous. It didn't help that the gamemaster and I had different conceptions of his reality (I posited him as a real person, like Torin, while Sargon insisted he was just code).
4) My character's main personality was paranoid and risk-averse, not the best choice for an adventuring party.
So to sum up, Sunder liked to run and hide a lot, Torin was a "master" sniper who was a worse shot than practically everyone else in the game (and falling behind all the time), and Amaris was as useful as a third nipple, plus nobody liked him. And yet, we ended up getting stuff done and having fun, and in the end, Sunder became a pretty interesting guy, I think.
Now it's time to move on to Orion Dusk, a futuristic superhero fighting space pirates in the asteroid belt, or something. I'm hoping I've done enough things differently that he'll be a better fit than Sunder, and yet, he's going to have his own issues. I'll leave those as a surprise to the people who'll be playing with him.
Oh yeah, and since I did this with Smeaton long ago, now that everything's over, I'll leave the members of the group with a couple of bits of Sunder trivia.
Back when I was first conceiving the character, I didn't know that it would be taking place on an alien world. I only knew "post-apocalyptic." So when I was coming up with my alternate personalities, I gave them more recognizably ethnic human names. Nicolai was going to be a spy/assassin, while Diego would be a historian/medic or healer.
Also, during the game, there was a physical tic I would use whenever I played the other personalities. Torin was on Sunder's left side, and Amaris was on his right. So if I would turn my head to left or right while "hearing voices," I was deliberately hearing one or the other of them specifically. And when their personalities would take over, I would tilt my head to that side--Torin to the left, and Amaris to the right. I'm not sure anyone ever consciously picked up on it, but I like to think it helped differentiate them. I know it gave me a crick in my neck sometimes.
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