BRB, Gonna Hurl

I seem to have inadvertently found another good reason for why some people would solo in an MMO.

Throat got raspy a day or two ago and woke up today with it feeling like it had been sandpapered over and welded shut. While trying to figure out what would go down without too much agony (settled on soup, still hurt,) the body confused chills began while the objective thermometer reading announced cheerfully that I had ramped up to official fever temperatures.

I hope it’s just a cold or flu. Dengue fever has been going around these parts lately. The good news is that the fever is not in that range, nor am I feeling joint/muscle pains or have a rash (yet, *damps down paranoia*)

But I haven’t felt this woozy or nauseated in a long time.

Killing 40 Ascalonian mobs for the daily has become an extreme endurance challenge. I don’t know if it’s just general nausea getting to me, sitting upright and focusing on reading words on a screen, or if my FOV motion sickness sensitivity has increased from the illness, but I can’t last 10 minutes in game without feeling not-good-at-all and having to close the client before I throw up all over the keyboard.

This, as you might expect, has put a severe crimp in any last minute plans to group up or crank out a few more molten facility runs before it goes away permanently.

Somehow, I doubt it is appropriate to tell a group “AFK indefinitely, gonna try not to hurl and then crawl into bed to recover.”

Nor is WvW appealing – the thought of putting on a headset makes my skull ache.

So it’s been solo farming and solo map exploration in small pieces. Very small pieces. The computer has been going on for 15 minute chunks, and then getting switched right off again to attempt another four hours of sleep. It’s just that one needs to do -something- in between all the nap times or be even more bored out of one’s skull than one already is.

Hopefully the fever breaks soon. Hate the head clouded fog that comes with raised temperatures. I’ve a post or two more in the works, but y’all are just gonna have to wait for a bit.

Tabletop Fiasco @ Geek and Sundry

I may be the last person in the world to find out about this. If so, my only excuse is a quote from a Tripod song:

If there’s four levels of cool
Then I’m at Level 3.
It goes freakishly cool people first
Cool people next, then there’s me….
And then my mum.

- I Always Get Into Stuff, Tripod

But anyway, Wil Wheaton apparently does a webshow on Tabletop games over at Geek & Sundry, and besides a rollicking round of Munchkin with Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh and Steve Jackson (which was pretty fun to watch too,) there is a truly spectacular example of the Fiasco RPG, which is a must-see.

Fiasco is basically a tabletop roleplaying game that is centered around generating a good narrative/story based on well-laid plans going horribly awry for a number of characters. It’s recreating the plot of any Coen Brothers movie or heist film in a very entertaining, consensus storytelling fashion. (They do a better overview and explanation of the game than I can in the video, so feel free to just skip this and watch.)

 

I’ve owned the Fiasco pdf for a good number of years now, mostly because I developed a habit of collecting RPG systems in my youth and it got cheaper and easier on the storage space to hoard them digitally instead. It’s a thick 135 page tome that I’ve never managed to read from cover to cover, but was impressed by how its design and mechanics help to build up and prompt ideas for the players.

Characters must end up linked to each other via Relationships of some kind, there are a number of Needs involved (the prime rule of storytelling, what a character wants and what he is willing to do to get it) and some Locations and Objects to create a setting and have some key Macguffins to focus on.

Sadly, I lack friends with the patience to sit at a table for two to three hours and tell a collaborative story, and try as I might, haven’t gotten around to figuring out how a game of solo Fiasco or writing with Fiasco might work. I keep stalling at the setup as my brain fries trying to develop three or four interrelated characters at once.

Still, the show’s pretty good inspiration for yet another attempt at it some time.

And even if you have no interest in tabletop roleplaying games (or ad lib acting or writing stories) whatsoever, you should just watch the Fiasco videos above because it’s one of the best movies that was never made.

10/10 Project: Mabinogi

This is starting to become a pattern.

Went to the website – selected the “old fashioned” way download because I am old fashioned and like my setup files as one big chunk.

Downloaded it at a speedy 1.4MB/sec.

Double-clicked it to install and received this intriguing error:

But but… I haven’t even selected a path for you to install the program to!

One quick Google search reveals that this is not an uncommon problem.

Fuck you, Mabinogi.

Now I really wanted to delete this and end the post here, but this is starting to turn into a series of blog haikus about shit I can’t install.

So I gritted my teeth, and clicked on the big obvious button to get their propietary downloader, which insisted I sign my soul away and agree to downloading Pando Media Booster (something I earlier spent time scrubbing my computer free of, thanks to LOTRO and Aion), which sped up my download speed to oh… a blazing 300-400 kb/sec.

If you were paying attention, I downloaded 3x as fast from the direct download earlier.

Queerly enough, the direct download was a mere 2 gb, and the identically named setup file that this downloader downloaded was 2.5 gb.

On double-clicking this one, the hard disk ground a bit but absolutely nothing happened.

No, I lied. Task Manager showed that the 2.5 gb MabinogiSetup133R.exe file was taking up a dinky 392k of memory.

Feeling very weirded out, I ended the process and did my best to delete all the exe files – something that took a little while as Windows insisted one of them was “in use” at the time.

You know, it’s not as if I downloaded this from a possibly contaminated torrent here. This is straight off the official website…

Official conclusion from me:

Mabinogi may also be a good game, but I’ll never know. It’s a good thing I added a baker’s dozen worth of MMOs to try, because I’m running out of them fast even before hitting character creation.

Now please excuse me while I go and scrub my computer off and run it through several gazillion virus scans because I’m paranoid and hate this type of weird behavior from exe files.