Mail Round-Up

I got a few items of interest in the ol' e-mail box recently. Stuart, one of the hoopy froods in my Tuesday night campaign, was sporting enough of a chap to warn me ahead of time that his sorcerer can now cast Limited Wish. That's pretty awesome, but it will not deter the machinations of the Infernal Legion! The Wild Coast will bow before its diabolic might! Muah hahahah! But seriously, this campaign has come a long way from the point where Fireball is the baddest spell on the block. I'm still not entirely used to that fact. But then some days I'm still not used to Elf no longer being a class.

Bill Brasky, Chief Ne'er-Do-Well over at Animalball Games, saw fit to challenge me to an online game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. He wrote in his challenge:

A simple gentleman's duel-- a game of rock, paper, scissors. Can you handle it, or is the power of Brasky intimidating you? I picked rock-- there! Are you satisfied? I actually told you what I picked? How can you refuse such a challenge?

For those of you not in the know, RPS is not merely a matter of randomly throwing scissor, paper, or rock. It is a deeply psychological game of bluff and counter bluff, akin in many ways to poker but starker in its simplicity. Brasky here offers the classic line of attack: telling your opponent your next move. It's unnerving to anyone not familiar with hardcore RPS play. Brasky is almost begging for me to go paper, so that can't possibily be the correct answer, can it? But then he's not going to be so obvious as to go scissors to counter a possible paper, is he? No, the correct answer is he's really throwing rock and has the monster balls to tell me that up front. So my correct move is paper, which I threw and thereby won the challenge. We'll see how we do in the rematch.

And finally Zachary from the excellent RPG Blog wrote in to ask me some Traveller questions. He referred to me as a "Traveller Guru", which was nice but leaves me feeling a tad ill at ease. I've been mucking around with Trav since only about 1999 or so, when the Classic Reprints started to come out. Lots of other folks on the Traveller Mailing List or Citizens of the Imperium have a better claim to the title Guru. There's plenty of hardcore old timers with 22 years of experience on me! And for the record Don McKinney is my Traveller Guru. Still, I'm always happy to help out where I can and did my level best to answers Zachary's questions. If you don't already read his blog I highly recommend it. He's a good guy with a level-headed view of the hobby.