2002-10-05 -

The Brief Return of Amber

It's been almost a week since I last wrote; I only wish I had more than just seven days additional age to show for it. I've been feeling very blah lately. I don't think it's SAD, because while grey skies don't do much for me, I really like a good rainstorm. We've surely had that.

I've been enjoying the chance to play in FairMer's Amber game again. Fletcher has been an enjoyable character, although he never quite clicked in the way I wanted him to. I seem to be all alone in thinking that given the basic premise of Amber, any person who became aware of his or her true power would become what normal Earth-people would consider a sociopath.

I'm going to try to make this the last Amber game I play in for a long time, and focus instead on starting the game Jill and I have been talking about. I'm really looking forward to a game not punctuated by a constant stream of questions about the basic rules of the universe. Even if we're running a superheroes game, I think people will have fewer questions about what it's like to be a superhero in an alternate Ann Arbor than they will about Pattern. And lord knows we're all tired of trying to make up working rules for magic.

You know what I'm really going to miss? My web pages for the game. I've written enough Perl scripts and tuned the backend SQL database to the point where the whole mess is like a Swiss watch in HTML 3.2. After the last session, it just becomes so much dross. I was thinking that maybe once I had my own web server running I could reuse the tools for other games, but they're really pretty specialized. And I'll never have any reason to use the idea that I recently had for keeping Fletcher's spellbook in a database and publishing pretty versions of it in text and html.

You know, now that I read all that, I wish I was like Mer. When she's not running a game, her creativity just expresses itself in other ways. When I'm not gaming, I'm just less creative.

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