Where to begin?

I have a great number of things that I could post about today. This may actually mean that I will post regularly this week. :) Being in Everett most of last week for work, with longer than usual commutes on either end, was awesome for getting crocheting done, but made internet use a little more difficult.

So I guess we'll work through this logically, in order. :)

Friday night, Jeremy ran a one-shot of Amber for myself and three other friends. The main reason for the one-shot was so that I could play the game before going to AmberCon US in April. Yay for signing up for a convention based around a game and world that I knew NOTHING about. :)

Now I have read at least some of the novels that the game/world are based on now, so I was one step ahead of two of the other players. The third had played before, and knew what he was doing, so his character was sort of the guide for the rest of us. And the rest of us, we were silly. :) We decided that we would all play characters from or based out of existing fictional works, so we had Sailor Moon, a Sith lord, and Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks (yeah, that was me). :) Much silliness, of course, but it was a lot of fun.

The thing that I like most about Amber is that it's a diceless system. Meaning no rolling dice for combat! (Among other things.) The system is also set up to not dictate your character's social or mental abilities with numbers, so that the character's social and mental acumen are based on the player's actual ability in those areas. I like this lots, because a) I hate having to make a character dumb when she needs to be good at other stuff, and b) I hate the idea of rolling dice to see whether or not you can convince someone else of something (for example--replace with any social type roll).

I also went into this without having touched the game book, and that actually didn't bother me. Now granted, when I did get to look at the book, everything clicked better in my head. The "tell me what you want to be able to do and I'll help you make your character" system worked for this character creation, but I'll be very happy to make my next character on my own. And I'm really looking forward to getting to select my games for ACUS now. :)

On a slightly tangental note (though related in my brain): garlic fries sound like they would be made of awesome, but the reality is that they aren't. My car still smells like garlic, after a 10 minute drive with garlic fries in it. :(