Monday, July 20, 2009

New Fiction is up!!!!

Well, I've put off posting the new ficiton long enough! It's as my wife said, "If you wait until you have everything done you want to get done you won't be posting the fiction for at least another month or longer."

Well, she's right! And since this fiction has been ready to go up for the past few months, I see no reason to delay it any longer just so I can be a perfectionist. Anyway! It's here! And it's up! You can follow the link below to find it and I think you will enjoy it. Book III wraps up the Episode: 10 Rebirth story line and ushers in a new age in Raptor Squad mythology. Questions are answered, new ones are asked and the teams heads in a different and exciting direction. The tension and drama are ramped up in this one folks, and the sparks begin to fly! Friendships are broken, people are betrayed and characters die! So! Enjoy the read and of course we would love to hear your feedback.

Raptorsquad.Net

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Walkin' & Talkin'

My wife Elfgirl and I went for a walk the other night around our neighborhood, and the following discussion transpired. I thought it was interesting and wanted to go ahead and post it here, and to me, this sums up the difference as to why I prefer D6 above all other systems I’ve played.

Enjoy

Me: You know what I don’t understand…you and your sister used to play old school D&D when you were young, where character deaths occurred like, every five minutes.

Elfgirl: True. In the Temple of Elemental Evil we went through a few characters each.

Me: Right. So now, when your characters die, or even get close to dying, you guys act like I just ran over your kitten with a lawn mower. What gives? Shouldn’t you guys be numb to TPK’s and character death by now?

Elfgirl: Well, it’s not the same.

Me: How so? And speed up, you’re lagging.

Elfgirl: Well, in old school D&D you really had no control over your character’s stats. They were randomly generated and you had whatever you rolled. You were basically “trapped” by whatever the dice came up. In D6 you can customize your character- put your D wherever you want and in what abilities you think the character will utilize the most.

Me: Ah…

Elfgirl: Yeah, it makes you more in tune and connected to your character. When you can craft your PC from the ground up, customizing what they are and what abilities and skills they have, it’s a greater investment as a player, rather than having some random rolls determine what your character is good at.

Me: So when your creation is threatened, it’s not just some character that was effectively thrust on you that you had little real control over creating (outside of a name), it’s more disconcerting.

Elfgirl: Right. We, as players, have invested a lot of time crafting our PC’s to be what we want, so when they take a beating or die, there is a greater sense of loss.

Me: Gotcha. Well that makes sense. Still, the game is pretty lethal, so at the end of the day, your PC’s, and by extension, you the players, need to start using your heads a little more and investing some time in studying your inventory and what you have and what you can use in certain situations. It’s not my job to remind you that you have a potion or scroll that would help you out of a bind, it’s YOUR job to remember these things, and if you don’t? Well, I see that as little different than taking an ill-advised course of action that results in a PC’s death. At the end of the day, in my game, as in life, ignorance is no excuse.


So!

An interesting discussion I thought.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Days of Future Past

Small update this time. Cleaned up the Links section and doctored up some code on various pages. Wow, in deleting some of the links from the site it appears the state of SWRPG websites is kinda depressing. No worries though, your pals here at RS will be around for quite a while.

The above sentence was written almost eight years ago.

Man how things have changed- and not necessarily for the better.

I’m not going to waste time reminiscing about how the SWRPG community used to be, suffice to say though, that it was a hell of a lot better than it is now-especially because there was a community. Now? Now I honestly can’t say that.

It’s sad really, to see sites wither away and die off. Hell, the laundry list of great sites that have disappeared goes on and on:

StarwarsRPG.net
Tales of the Lost Star Warriors
Jedi Sanctuary
SWRPG Reviewed Sites
Elrood Sector: Tales of the Freespirit
Servais Sector

Just to go to those pages and see 404 messages or placeholder pages makes my stomach churn.

Yeah, I know a lot of it is because people get older, responsibilities change and they lose interest. But that doesn’t make it any better.

Ultimately, I know Raptor Squad won’t last forever either. I’m sure, some day in the future I’ll fall prey to the ravages of real life (and have already in some cases) and the site will cease to be updated with new content.

But I can guarantee you this folks: As long as it’s within my power, the site isn’t going anywhere. And I have a few things to do before I hang it up for good. We’ve been going strong for over eight years and too much work and sweat and effort and cash has gone into this site for me to just shut it down and walk away.

I’m proud of what I’ve created, because I feel like it’s unique and special and not something you can see just anywhere, and to let it die off like some sites have would be a disservice not only to the community but to what the site stands for and the people who have worked hard to make it what it is.

So! We’ve still got some gas in the tank, still have a few destinations to hit before we wrap up this crazy wild trip, and I can keep going for a few hundred more miles at least (course’ every now and then I might need to pull off at a rest stop and take a break), hopefully you folks will sit tight and see where we take you.

I promise you it will be worth it.