Buffy Villains, Periodic Table, and Dice Games – Geekout 22

I’ll get to set myself some fun restrictions today! Let’s talk about geeky stuff!

On today’s docket is Four Villains in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series), Six Elements from the Periodic Table, and Two Games that Require More Than Three Dice.

Time for geekiness! Let’s go!

Four Villains in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series)

Interestingly, I didn’t watch this full show until recently. I always knew of its existence, but didn’t ever watch it. Now I can say that it’s a great show.

Mayor Wilkins

One of the more fun villains, the mayor is a little crazy. He’s powerful and becoming more powerful. He’s not a vampire, but does team up with them, making things hard for Buffy. Being the mayor lets him do some terrible things as well. Power comes in many forms.

Spike

Probably the most well-known and everyone’s favorite villain, Spike is a vampire. He’s a complex vampire, so he’s far more interesting than he could otherwise be. Through this complexity, he’ll sometimes team up with Buffy. It would be super boring if he was just classic evil for no reason at all.

The Master

The first of Buffy’s supervillains, this first season antagonist tries to open a portal to hell in the town. Sunnydale being at the hellmouth means this centuries-old vampire can really try to usher in quite a bit of destruction.

Drusilla

Another vampire, she was introduced along with Spike; the two were in a relationship at the time. She’s a complicated one, and has a great deal of connection with Spike and Angel. I believe Angel (when he was evil) sired her in some horrible way. I forget the details. Either way, her connection to him creates for some dangers for the Buffy and the gang.

Six Elements from the Periodic Table

I want to do something interesting for this one, since there are way too many elements to be stuck with only six choices. My wife suggested I choose the first six elements or possibly doing a column. I was thinking maybe restricting to only those discovered in America or possible ones named after a person. I’ve thought of restricting to ones discovered in the 20th century only. Some other ideas I’ve had I’m not confident there are even six of, so I’ll be boring and do a column. I’ll go with the Noble Gases.

Helium

This is the first element that stars make! Stars are constantly crushing hydrogens together into helium, producing plenty of heat and light in the process. Thanks, Sol! I’m sure that we use this stuff for plenty of purposes, but everyone’s favorite is inflating balloons that will be lighter than the air around them.

Neon

Another of our gases, this one you may have seen in lighting. Neon lights sometimes actually have neon in them. If I’m not mistaken, most don’t anymore, since other gases are used instead. We still call them “neon lights” though.

Argon

If you’ve ever heard that Earth’s atmosphere is mostly Nitrogen and Oxygen, you’re well-informed about what makes up our air. The next element on that list is Argon. I forget what percentage it is, but it’s tiny; our air is mostly Oxygen and Nitrogen.

Krypton

Best known for being Superman’s weakness…. Just kidding! That’s Kyrptonite. Totally different element. I’d love to tell you something cool about Krypton, but, to be honest, I don’t remember much about it. All you get is my stupid joke, and I’m now onto the next one!

Xenon

Still not up-to-date enough on this stuff to give you more than a name here. I know it’s one of the noble gases, but I can’t think of where we use it. These are probably all used in lighting in some manner, but I can’t remember specifically.

Radon

This is a nice radioactive element that will mess you up if the levels of it are high. If you’ve bought a home recently, you likely had the house tested for levels of Radon. Even if you’re a non-smoker, this is a way that you can get lung cancer, if too much radon builds up in your home.

Two Games that Require More Than Three Dice

I’m going to say that games “require” dice that are intended to be rolled at the same time. I understand that you can re-use dice for plenty of games, and if you think I shouldn’t have that count, just pretend I named the games containing d20s from yesterday’s post.

Exalted

My current favorite roleplaying game is Exalted, and I wrote about my Exalted Campaigns in a previous post. The game is a dice-pooling game, which means that you roll large amounts of dice and are looking for threshold numbers of successes. For this reason, you “require” a lot of dice. I use 30 d10s when I play, but usually need somewhere between 10 and 20 of them at a time.

Can’t Stop

This is a press-your-luck dice game where you’ll roll four 6-sided dice on your turn, grouping them into pairs to and adding up the pips. In other words, if you rolled 2,3,4,5 on the dice, you could get one of the following sets: [5,9], [6,8], [7,7]. This is a press your luck game, so if any of those sets are unusable, you end your turn without making progress. You keep rolling until you either decide to stop, or get no valid results.

Wrap Up

Also, you’re welcome. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to remember the noble gases, which is why I didn’t feel bad when I wrote little about them. I slept through chemistry class, so give me a break, please.

Anyway, now that I’m done with that, let’s talk about the next post. In that post, I’ll be working with Comics, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy as my categories.