Hail and roleplaying beginnings

Wow. I was woken up in the middle of night by the sound of large bits of hail being flung into my kitchen and bathroom windows by a howling South Easter. Then there was the thunder and lightning. It was quite the storm, and I’m really glad my windows held out!

Saturday I ran the first session of a Roleplaying for Beginners game. This was more of a meet and greet session than an actual game session: the players got to say hello to each other, and I explained a bit about what roleplaying is, followed by the very basics of the rules we’ll be using. Then came the fun part, and thankfully the portion that took up the bulk of our time: we decided on a vague story that we’ll be playing (secret, occult societies, possibly a bit Lovecraftian), and created the characters.

I think the afternoon went well: everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and all the players took part in each others’ character creation process, chipping in ideas for backstory and motivation. I’m glad that they were willing to collaborate like that. I’m looking forward to see how everyone plays together when the game starts in a week or two.

Registration and Mage

It’s been a long week. A big chunk of it was taken up with me worrying about my PhD reregistration, which I finally managed to hand in the forms for on Friday. After a short chat with the faculty they registered me for the year with little fuss. I hope that next year will be just as easy (and without the worrying).

And today I got to unwind a bit by DMing a role-playing game that I recently restarted after a good few months break. DMing has been a lot of fun, and somehow I’ve managed to build up about two sessions worth of content for me to use in the future. It seems I regularly underestimate how quickly we’ll play through what I’ve worked on, since the last few sessions have ended without us finishing off all the content I’d worked on.

Presented to the minister

The last week has been fairly busy. Tuesday I was at the Centre for High Performance Computing, where I presented a short video on my masters thesis to the Minister of Science and Technology, Mr Mosibudi Mangena. Tuesday was the CHPC’s official opening ceremony, and James and I had been asked to design a poster about visualisation in computer graphics, and a video of my masters work. We were, as far as I was aware, the only project not actually funded by the CHPC to be shown to the Minister. I suppose it was a kind of appetite whetting, just to show what the CHPC could potentially be doing.

Yesterday I finished my first stint as a DM for my roleplaying group. It was actually a lot more fun than I though it would be, especially once I got over trying to script a whole session of play. I found that just coming up with the characters, setting, and a general idea of things that could happen, and then improvising the rest on the day, worked much better for me in the long run. I think that I’d like to try  DMing again, maybe in the World of Darkness system. I have a yearning to do inflict a horror story on my friends, which I’ll hopefully get around to doing in a month or two.