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

January 25, 2017 Leave a comment

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.

2017-01-25 Geekout

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.

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RPGs, WW2, and Sci-Fi TV – Geekout 6

January 6, 2017 4 Comments

I am disappointed that the first prompt for the day only requires listing 2, but I can understand that for many people only 1 is obvious. Let’s jump in! Today’s prompt is Two Tabletop RPGs, Four Comic Book Characters Alive During WW2, and Six Sci-Fi Television Shows.

2017-01-06 Geekout

I’ll warn you in advance that I’m adding an honorable mentions list to my gaming question of the day, since I’ve got too many to name.

Two Tabletop RPGs

Well here’s one that I wish had a larger number. Yeah, plenty of people are going to name one obvious one and have trouble coming up with a second. That’s just that outside the RPG community, only one game has risen to the public’s mind as much as D&D.

Dungeons & Dragons

Considering that the Geekout prompts have already challenged me to name Two Dungeons and Dragons Character Classes, it seems like they made this one incredibly simple to get the first. Even people who’d forgotten the game existed would’ve been reminded five days ago.

As I mentioned in that post, I’ve been playing this game a looong time. My father got my playing D&D using the first edition advanced books. As years passed, my friends and I moved through Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition, Dungeons & Dragons v3.5, Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, and Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. Yes, I did play Pathfinder (a.k.a. D&D 3.75).

Here are some of my D&D books that were near enough to grab and take some quick photos. I grouped them roughly by edition, having the 3.0 and 3.5 together.

AdvancedDungeonsAndDragonsSecondEditionAdvancedDungeonsAndDragonsDungeonsAndDragonsThirdEditionDungeonsAndDragonsFourthEditionDungeonsAndDragonsFifthEdition

 

Exalted

While you might have thought that my favorite Tabletop RPG (based on the amount of D&D I’ve played) is D&D. It’s not. My favorite game is definitely Exalted. I’ve been playing in an infrequently played Exalted campaign for years now, and my group gets together to play whenever we’re in the same city.

My regular, weekly gaming session is currently an Abyssal Exalted game and the less frequently played one is a classic, Solar Exalted game.

Solar Campaign

In my solar campaign, I play a priest of the Unconquered Sun. As anyone who knows the game would expect, the character is a Zenith caste. He frees slaves, protects innocents, and tries to provide food and shelter to anyone and everyone he can. Driven primarily by compassion and conviction, he’s trying to carve out a better world than what exists today.

Abyssal Campaign

Surprisingly, this campaign has had a severe lack of combat considering we’re playing Abyssals, which are commonly known as Death Knights. We’ve been working behind the scenes and are establishing positions where we’re likely to behave more like you’d expect from creatures of darkness. Just hasn’t happened yet. We find it funny, because our “light-side” game involves much more killing than the “dark-side” one.

Honorable Mentions

  • Pathfinder – Often referred to as D&D 3.75, this game leveraged the D20 system based on Wizards of the Coast making it an open system for expansion. That means that when D&D went to 4th edition, the people who thought it had gone the wrong way we able to fall back to 3.75. My group was among those, and we enjoyed Pathfinder as it added new life and ideas to D&D 3.5.
  • Eclipse Phase – A game I’ve played once that seemed very interesting. It’s futuristic, and has some cool mechanics. I’ve got the book for it, and I’d like to use that to play the game more. It’s so hard to get games going (and finding the time to play them requires even more!)
  • GURPS –  I wanted to mention this one despite my not having played it. I know plenty of people who swear by this system. They tend to be the people who play way too many Steve Jackson games already. The name of this system is ridiculous. It’s the “Generic Universal RolePlaying System”, and yes, people do say “gurps” rather than spelling G-U-R-P-S.
  • Shadowrun – I’ve only played a little bit of Shadowrun, but it’s also a very cool roleplaying game. It is set in a fictional future society and combines technology and fantasy ideas. There are fantasy creatures like elves, dwarves, etc. in their world, and it’s on Earth still. It’s set in the future, so technology has advanced some. I’ve often laughed with people about how off the game is in its technology though. A challenge that anyone imagining the future will run into!

Four Comic Book Characters Alive During WW2

OK. This one is a little tough, since I know my comic book characters mostly through their cartoon, movie, and TV adaptations rather than the comics. I’m fairly certain that my selections here were alive during WW2 in the comic books, but I can’t say for certain.

Captain America

This one should be obvious, so I started here. This is kind of his thing, since he’s basically the character made to fight that war. With all of the movies about him, do I really need to say much more? No I’m not including his friend Bucky in the list.

Magneto

I’d guess he’s that old in the comics as well, since he’s been around for quite a long time, and he’s (as far as I know) often one of the older characters. In the films they certainly have him alive for WW2. In fact, it’s quite central to his character’s backstory in the films. He’s got the tattoo as a reminder of that time period.

Wolverine

Not sure how old Wolverine is to be honest, but given that he doesn’t really get much older, it’s not hard for him to have been there. At least in his origin movie, he was definitely there for WW2.

I liked this character a lot as a kid, despite the outfits from that period that I now laugh at. He’s interesting because the claws are nice, but his real power is just healing. On the surface that might seem super amazing, but keep in mind that is different from impervious. When Superman deflects a bullet, does it hurt? I doubt it. I’d guess that Wolverine feels every cut before it heals closed. Now that would build a not-so-light-side character over time.

Peggy Carter

And we’re back to the badass herself, Agent Peggy Carter! Yes, she’s probably more of a badass now than she was in the early comics, but she’s kicks some serious butt. Obviously around for the right time period, since she was in that time period with Cap.

Six Sci-Fi Television Shows

Well here’s a great one for me! I’ve watched so many sci-fi shows, so I’m going to lump franchises together. I’d have too many to list otherwise.

Star Trek

Is there a more iconic answer to this? I don’t think anything else could have come before Star Trek. Sure, Trek and Wars are often compare, but Wars is known for movies and Trek for TV. They may both cross over that, but traditionally that’s where each stood strongest.

My favorite of these would surprise many people. I’m a Deep Space Nine fan, which is not a common opinion. It bridged the Next Generation and Voyager gap nicely. So far no Star Trek series has been made that I did not enjoy. I’m not sure if I’m going to watch the upcoming one, since they’re planning to have it be streaming only and behind a subscription paywall. If I were watching their full lineup of shows, maybe, but I’m not and won’t be.

Firefly

This is a fantastic, wonderful show that probably could have and should have been one of the greatest shows ever made. Joss Whedon is known for doing ensemble casts well, and this show is a lot of the reason why he’s known for that. I’d watch the heck out of this show if it continued, but I don’t want it to continue anymore. More than anything else, I worry that this canceled-too-soon show will be made far worse if it were continued at this point.

I did not watch the show when it originally aired. To be honest, I didn’t get a good vibes from the marketing of the show during its airing. After it was cancelled, some people made sure I saw the show. I was hooked after watching the first episode. Yes, the 2 hour pilot that Fox didn’t air until the show had been marked for cancellation was so good that it along sold me on the show. Most shows take a few episodes before I’m really into them.

Anyway, if you want t good Firefly rant, I enjoy this video. The Firefly rant starts at 1:30.

Battlestar Galactica

I’m referring to the reimagined series here, not the original. I tried to watch that one, but just didn’t get into the original one. As you’d expect, fans disagree on which parts are good and bad, etc. Through the series, however, I believe the best part is the characters. I may not always agree with the directions a character took, but I love the characters in this story. And if you’re a board gamer, I’m a big fan of the board game based on this show. The more popular game, The Resistance, is pretty much based on a mechanic from this board game.

Stargate

Again I’m talking about multiple shows here. SG1, the original series, is a classic that is loved by the fans. Before the later-season cast changes, it’s one of the best shows you’ll find within the genre. No, the issues weren’t the cast changes themselves, but the show did start going off the rails a bit toward the end. I think they were just getting exhausted for ideas and still trying to keep the show going.

Teal’c, Daniel Jackson, Samantha Carter, Jack O’Neill, “Hammond of Texas”, and a wide variety of other enjoyable characters kept that show going strong for a long time. The concept itself is great, and it allowed the series to expand on the idea a few times.

I’ll probably bug some people here, but I did not like Atlantis. I watched it at the beginning, but it lost me very quickly. The show seemed to drift from science fiction into fantasy, and that’s not what I like in my Stargate. It just didn’t feel like Stargate anymore.

And for the show that got cancelled too early, Stargate: Universe, it only received two seasons of content, which in some ways seems deserved. The issue, however, is that the show was great right at the start, and didn’t hit its stride until it was nearing its cancelation. Yes, that happens a lot with shows, they get something going and just end. And yes, I’m a big fan of Nicholas Rush in the show.

I didn’t watch infinity, so I’ve not much to say on that point.

My favorite episode of Stargate is definitely the Groundhog Day Episode, “Window of Opportunity”, which features a Groundhog Day-like timeloop. In it, Jack starts each loop being asked a question by Daniel while he’s eating his bowl of Fruit Loops. The problem is that Jack didn’t hear the question the first time, so can never answer that question. The best part is after Daniel suggests that they can do anything, so they decide to go golfing through the Stargate. “Colonel O’Neill, what the hell are you doing?” “IN THE MIDDLE OF MY BACKSWING?!?!”

Sliders

This must be the least popular of the shows on this list, but Sliders did have quite a few seasons in the 90s. In this show, the main character invents a device that allows people to “slide” between dimensions. He and some others end up traveling together through dimensions as they try to find their way home. It’s a fun show that obviously gets off its rails quickly, but there are some good seasons at the beginning if you’re interested in some 90s nostalgia.

The Expanse

My wife suggested we watch this series. I agreed, since it sounded interesting. After watching a couple of episodes, she mentioned something about the books. Well, I’d not heard of the book series, so I started reading the books. They’re great! I’m currently reading the 6th book, which came out almost exactly a month ago. I’m not reading it quickly, usually a chapter at a time. I think the TV show did the books justice, and I’m really looking forward to what they do going forward.

If you’re interested, the first season of the show doesn’t follow the books exactly, but is mostly the first half of the first book. Looks like they’re pulling in characters earlier than they appear in the books, but this makes sense for a TV show where you need to meet characters sooner. Books can get away with that a little better.

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