I Am Completely Serious

Cordelia stayed in all day, and we watched Clone Wars for most of that time. (There was a two hour break while I did my exercises and watched the recorded episode of Antiques Roadshow that was on the DVR). I kind of burned out on Clone Wars, so I'll be just as happy if we don't watch any today. Tomorrow is soon enough. We're in the middle of season two now.

Cordelia said something that led me to think that she was no longer going to be playing with the neighbor kids, but she refused to discuss it with me or Scott. Later on, she told me that they actually wanted to play with her yesterday but that she didn't know that until she checked her e-mail around seven. I don't know.

I worry that some day she'll be in real trouble and not be willing to talk to us about it. Scott thinks we must have done something to make her think she can't trust us, but I'm not so sure. I think it may simply be her temperament. It's going to make adolescence that much more difficult.

Scott is really stressed out. Work is being nasty, and some players are unhappy with the games he's been running. Cordelia not being willing to talk to us didn't help at all because it made him feel that he's failed.

He wants to figure out a way to run a LARP using FATE, but I responded badly to the idea because I understand my current system and really don't get FATE. He thinks there's a way to use FATE so that combat won't require a GM's intervention. I don't really have faith in that as a possibility. I think, no matter how simple the system, people will want a GM if there's the possibility of having one. Doing without a GM requires trusting that everybody understands the rules and will abide by them even if it gets their character in trouble.

Scott also suggested that we use the wrong scale for hit points, damage, etc. The current scale for normal human stamina (hit points) is 60 to 95. Non-humans usually get more, either because they're tougher or to reflect the likelihood that their vital organs aren't where a human's would be. Scott suggested scaling back to use a 0-10 scale instead of a 0-100 one. I didn't like the idea, mostly because I'm comfortable with the current one (I'm conservative about things like that). I did eventually suggest that 0-20 would be better than 0-10 because it would save me from using half points. I count most things by fives currently, so 0-20 would scale properly. I feel like the change is unnecessary, but Scott thinks it would help.

Scott is the one who ends up handling combat when we run LARPs. People come to him when they want to use special abilities or to ambush someone. That means he sees all the ways in which the game glitches. I'm not convinced that switching systems would help with the things he's not happy about-- Players who got their characters five minutes before the game began and who sat through a brief run through of the rules while they were reading their characters aren't going to remember all the bells and whistles of what their characters can do. They're not going to be fully comfortable with the combat rules and are going to take extra time trying to figure out what to do when a fight starts.