Drupal 6.6, some RP ramble, FFX-2

Drupal 6.6, now. Had security updates and such. I really ought to automate the process of updating but I'm way too nervous about it to just not do it by hand. :P

Eventually I'll have to update everything to D7, anyway, I don't think the python route will be happening for a while longer since I'm lazytastic at figuring it out. Heh.

The other big thing was updating various modules like Views, Content Construction Kit, Date, etc... fortunately the people working on those seem to be working together to ensure their modules work right together, so that's nice.

Well, that's probably the most productive thing I've done in weeks, if you don't count my RPoL games...

(some ramble about them below)

Outcastes is kinda in a slow spot, but it's combat! And wow, I really chose a monster of a combat to do my first real Ex2 battle, haha. There's... let's see. 6 PCs. 4 ships (one belonging to the PCs, one recently captured by a PC) and 3 sides (attacking corsairs, Tya merchant ship and the PC's group, the Cobalt Alliance). There's the mortal crews of each, then there's the enemy captain and first mate (who are both essence users) and one or two lieutenants left (likely some HM or godblood with a charm or two, really).

I also had all sorts of artillery in there from Wonders of the Lost Age and Scroll of Kings. Ballistas, onagers, sailcutters, oh my! Having to remember all the stats for various weapons is hard so I always have something like 5-6 pdfs open at the same time. (I've even taken to just using the pdf version of Ex2 Core and freaking SEARCHING it for stuff, 'cause doing that by hand takes forever!)

The yacht has its hugeass concussive Essence cannon, which is probably going to get at least one more good shot in before the enemy captain's ship gets boarded. I'm not sure whether the PCs will succeed at defeating the corsairs outright, but it's certainly not impossible. If they did, I gave those guys some equipment people might like... of course, the first lieutenant who controlled the implosion bow kinda just blew himself up so his equipment is resting broken at the bottom of the sea, but the others could have stuff!

I'm actually having fun with the battle, just wish the rules weren't so unwieldy and didn't lead me to taking 3+ hours to figure out a single 6 tick summary post (heh!) All the points I have to remember, all the tick counting, and blah blah... I think Ex2 actually went the right direction in some ways, but also introduced more complexity in other ways. Lots of head hurting little rules to mash together.

But doing all this may help me create houserules for Ex2 to speed up combat, which would be great! I am probably the only one of my old group who really decided to embrace Ex2 after a while. I think it's because I tend towards lower power games than them, maybe? I haven't even seen whether Dreams of the First Age stuff is going to be worthy for me to make a game with (I do kind of cringe at high Ess stuff in general :P) But I don't think Ex2 is all that bad. It's just... different!

Five Coils game is currently split into three groups who have pretty different scenarios to get through. Since there's at least one person in my game who reads this I won't say what the other scenarios are, but it's pretty fun to mess with. The groups are only in 3s and 2s and I've found this can make for much faster and less cumbersome play. Not like the battle I described above (though, battle is sped up in that case by the fact I tend to have people summarize several actions at a time and then roll for them. Mostly cause a lot of the battle is just gonna be killing extras, which doesn't take much thought.)

Anyway, blah! That's all I've been up to other than angsting and weeping and generally being useless. This coming week I gotta try to get myself to do stuff. :x I hope I don't flake out.

P.S. Oh, I've been playing Final Fantasy X-2 a bit, which amuses me. Almost through Chapter 1. I love training in FFX-2... right now I have Yuna as my dark gunner, songstress and white mage, Rikku as thief, gunner, black mage and white mage backup, Paine as warrior, thief (oh god, her shorts! x.x) and black mage backup. Yuna may pick up warrior, maybe! (Seeing her wielding Tidus' sword is cool) but I'm holding off for Dark Knight for Paine, it's my favorite class for her.