Continue reading »]]> Yesterday I heard two very interesting comments made in podcasts.

One of them is from the the Necessary Evil podcast from the Wharton Hall Gamers.  FYI the Wharton Hall Gamers are very difficult to find if you’re searching for them specifically.  Google is coming up with almost nothing on them.   If you have iTunes then you can find their podcasts that way which is the only way I could come up with to find them specifically.  Just search for Wharton Hall.

You can hit RGPMP3.com and their podcasts are listed there, just not by the group’s name so if you don’t know they’re the ones who did Necessary Evil,  Savaged Delta Green or Sundered Skies casts then you won’t know it till you download and listen.

The other comment was from one of the players at Flagons and Dragons who don’t typically record actual play apparently but they did record about an hour of the opening Gamma World 4E game play using the adventure from the book.

Anyway, back to the first comment, one of the Wharton Hall Gamers said something like, “Savage Worlds is really just a string of encounters isn’t it then?” With the implication that with other systems that wasn’t the case.

Where’as I’ve found it quite the opposite and have even tried to dissect why that might be.  With Savage Worlds the combats while serviceable aren’t of a high complexity or option level.  They provide the necessary physical risk for a storyline but aren’t necessarily the main course.  I still believe that light systems help promote roleplaying rather than ‘a string of encounters’.

Gamma World 4E while its a light version of Dungeons and Dragons 4E is not what one would consider a light system in terms of combat.  Each character has different options they can do a list of powers, pushes, stuns, dazes, slides, buffs, etc.

And yet the Flagons and Dragons player while playing Gamma World said something like, “This is nice, we’ve been playing for like 40 minutes and not rolled a single dice.  Just like the old days.”  The old days I’m taking to mean back with Dungeons and Dragons 1st and 2nd editions, or possible Traveler or even Gamma World 1.

What does any of this mean you ask?  I don’t know, you tell me.  I just find it interesting that one group using the same system, Savage Worlds, I’ve used gets a “series of encounters” where I had an entire session that didn’t have a single combat encounter.   And another using essentially the same system, Wizard’s 4E system, that I’ve used is pleasently surprised that there are actual non-combat encounters when I’ve had several sessions with an hour or two blocks of roleplaying interspersed with combat encounters.

So while I’ll stand by my stance that the game system helps promote one way or the other it does fall to the players and the GM, especially the GM as always, to help facilitate the swings one way or the other.

In a complete side note, if someone from the Wharton Hall Gamers happens to read this far down, here’s a tip, have the GM go through and skim the rules right before the session.  I keep finding myself going “But that’s not rig…” as you have the same discussions each session on shaken, raises, recovery etc.  But at least it’s entertaining yeah?  Seriously it is entertaining.  And informational, I need to find me some Big Turk…

Continue reading »]]> As I get asked from time to time I thought I’d post this here.  After a lot of trial and error, mostly error I’ve come up with a listenable quality on the podcast recordings.

I use a Blue Snowball USB mic which is mounted in the ceiling facing down at our gaming table centered roughly.  I use the default cardoid pattern, number 1, which works fairly well.  I feed the mic to a laptop running Windows XP and into Audacity to do the recording with Mic levels set at 1.0 (max).

Once the recording is done I export it as a wav file, typically about about 2gbs for 6 hours of recording give or take.   The wav I bring into Adobe Soundbooth.  I run three passes on the audio file.  The first is I use the Lower Peaks under Volume effects to drop the spikes down.  I then boost the audio by 30% and 0.5 db using the boost volume effect although I’ve modified it from the preset.   Next I run it through the Remove Noise filter with a 30/30 setting, sliders 1/3 of the way over from the left on both aggressiveness and loudness.   These could probably be tweaked better but they give what is to me an acceptable quality.

This is then exported as a wav, opened in Goldwave and saved without making any changes.  The problem is Soundbooth does ‘something’ to wav files that causes Audacity to break when it tries to open them.  And I like using Audacity for post editing rather than soundbooth.  Sometimes simple is far better.

Once it’s back in Audacity I save it as a project and then simply listen to it and cut out the non-gaming bits and any significant stretches of silence.  Because frankly I list to gaming podcasts to hear the gaming stuff and I’m assuming most other people do too.   This clean up can easily cut an hour or even two for really sidetracked sessions that the listeners don’t want to hear (per a poll I ran here a long while back when I first started) as a general rule.

Once it’s cleaned up, I export the final cleaned up recording as another wav file and then back into Soundbooth where I stick on the opening monologue and music and then export as a mp3 using 48kbs and Stereo.

And that’s essentially the process of creating the audio file.  It’s taken a lot of crappy recordings, FWIW I do have the raw source files for all but one podcast so I could try to clean them all up this way but at this point that’s roughly somewhere between 150 and 200 hours of raw listening that would be needed, add at least another 2 hours per session for the clean up process in terms of processing and saving and transfering and well, it’s not going to happen.  You’re stuck with crappy earlier recordings.

Continue reading »]]> I just downloaded a series of podcasts of a group of gamers. And at this point I am dumbfounded, appalled and literally amazed at this strange thing I’ve come across.

Frankly I cannot for the life of me understand how this GM has ANY players much less the same people coming back.  The sessions are done over VoIP so it seems unlikely that the players are actual RL friends with the guy which is the only thing I can even remotely come up with as a reason they continue.  That they were long time friends.  But then typically someone wouldn’t treat their friends this badly or one typically doesn’t have any friends.

I simply do not understand how someone can act that way toward even strangers or people you don’t like.  Honestly it was that bad. And to act that way to your players?  Appalling.

The sad thing it’s a singular podcast series about a system I’m interested in but even though I forced myelf several times not to delete them during their the character creation session, I could do so no longer after a mere 15 minutes of their first actual session.

I will at this time offer this heartfelt sentiment to the players putting up with this behavior, “People seriously there are GM’s out there who appreciate their players, or at least don’t constantly belittle and denigrate them.  Best of luck in finding one of them.”

Continue reading »]]> Just a quick tip if you’re a podcaster and people make loud clicking noises by constantly fidgeting with things that might be laying around.  i.e. dice, pencils, chips, magnets etc. then try adding a pop filter to your paraphernalia.

I got the idea from a couple of places on the web, here’s a link to another set of instructions with pictures, not that I’m sure pictures are necessary.

Go to your favorite Wal-Mart, Hobby Lobby, Michaels Crafts or any sewing type store and pick up a cheap Embroidery Loop.   Now take a pair of your wife’s knee-highs, or your own, I make no judgements here, and slide the knee high over the inner circle of the loop.   Stretch the fabric a bit and then tie a knot on each side close to the hoop, essentially you’re trapping the inner loop inside the hose.

Now slip the outer loop down over the hose and tighten the screw down.  Snip off the excess hose, you should have a little knot on each side.

Now get a heavy piece of copper wire (or alumnum or a coat hanger snipped up or whatever) and make a hook in one end.  Hook the screw on the embroidery loop and then twist it tight like a bread tie locking the wire into the hoop so it doesn’t shift around.

Get a binder clip and hook the other end of the wire through the clip and twist it up.

What you should end up with is a embroidery hoop with two layers of panty hose material with a flexible piece of wire sticking out of one side with a clamp on the end.

Bend the wire as needed so that you can clamp the clamp onto your microphone and position the hoop between the mic and your speakers.

What this does is help reduce the high ‘clicks and pops’ that I’ve had issues with up till now.  And it costs you like $2, less if you steal one of your wives hose without her being the wiser.

Or you could buy one from amazon or some other place for $15.  $1.50 or $15?  Not a hard decision to make.

I just added one in front of my mic which is now located directly above the gaming table and the clicks that were ear popping before when played back are now not so annoying that I’ll go to the trouble of deleting all of them from the podcasts like I had been doing.

Continue reading »]]> Looks like I goofed with Episode 17, Part 1 and uploaded Part 3 as that file instead.  The issue has been corrected so if you were really confused and want to hear the real Part 1 then re-download the file in Itunes, click the play button in the post about 17/1 or re-pull the file through the feed.

You wouldn’t want to miss the pre-game warmup where we talk about gay chicken now would you?  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Continue reading »]]> Mine wife was asking me how many people listen to our podcast to which I said, “I dunno.” but I resolved to look into it.  A few days later I remembered to do so.  As it turns out you cannot get stats from Apple.  They don’t offer those for love or money.

I can always download my web traffic logs and parse them (Episode 10 Part 1 has been pulled 355 times since it went up 3 days ago for instance) but that’s a chore and I only get 9 log files from my isp (www.1and1.com) which auto recycle when they hit around 40megs.  Right now that only let’s me go back about 3 months. And the time frame between them is shrinking the last one only lasted a week before it was archived and the oldest one deleted to start a new one.

In an effort to get some easier stats to view and some more long term stats I’ve invoked the stats option on my blubrry plugin which is what I use to show them in posts here and auto submit them to itunes.  For easy podcasting through wordpress blubrry does a great job by the way.

I’m not sure what using their redirect might change and what that might screw up so you 355 people that are listening to my podcast please let me know if you run into any problems.  I’ll be deleting it and resubscribing from time to time in the next few days to check but if it breaks let me know.

I’ve also noted that itunes was only showing the last 10 podcasts.  Not very new listener friendly.  I’ve made some changes that should make it possible to pull all the casts going back to the first one from either the podcast feed or through itunes or from you ipod/iphone (open itunes on the phone and search podcasts for key our cars) directly.  If you’re a new listener and started somewhere in the middle, again my apologies for the quality of the first couple of episodes.  Recording casts is a learning experience.

Continue reading »]]> The new and upcoming podcasts are only two parters.  Generally I’ve cut the session recordings up at natural breakpoints by either RP time or combats and they’ve come to about an hour to an hour and a half per.  The last two sessions 8 and 9 (podcast 7 and 8 ) though have ended up being in two parts each about two and a half hours each.

I don’t really have a reason to cut them up at all, my initial thought was release them over time to give people something to look forward to but really the post work necessary means I end up getting each of the sessions cleaned up and have my wife (Elisssa) record the intro that delaying publishing any of them would be pointless.

Honestly who wouldn’t prefer to download the entire Penny Arcade podcasts at one time rather than 30 minutes  a week?

Another reason to keep them chopped in blocks is to make it easier for people to skip ahead without missing a lot.  If they want to jump to the end of the current battle, it’s not a hard thing to do.  If the recrding was 5 hours long with 4 battles in it, then it might be a little more difficult to skip the parts you in particular didn’t want to listen to.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> I’m going to be trying some different processing techniques on the current podcast in production.  For one thing I’ve tried to remove silence gaps that are longer than a 5′ish seconds.  This cuts down on the time you have to listen to ‘nothing’ and file size etc.  Although I don’t have any bandwidth restrictions on my hosting I do have a finite amount of drive space. Â  At some point I’ll probably have to whack older podcasts but that shouldn’t be for awhile.

I’ve also run volume equalization on the sound files such that everyone should be the same volume regardless of where they are in relation to the mic.  This may have a detrimental effect of enhancing background chatter in some locations but we’ll see how it goes.

The podcast files are ready, I just need to schedule some time with my announcer to do the recap and lead in for me and then put some public domain back beat under her.

My molding efforts are steadily showing fruition.  I’ve run easily 20-30 moldings, with Laura’s help, of the ones I own and the bags of pieces are growing at a steady rate.  Since I really want all the pieces to be color matching I’m not going to even consider painting until I have way more than I need for what I want to do with them.

I may start considering my basing options though in the near future.  I am going to be going with low walls for viewing purposes which will also help with the obvious (to me) seaming issues with the fieldstone.  I may try to come up with a technique to help minimize that as well using some kind of filler materials here and there to break up the horizontal seams.  I’m also going with a more modular approach than the one posted on Hirst’s web site for flexibility’s sake at the cost of set up time.

In regards to the painting, I’ve been perusing various other people’s efforts in painting and IMO too many of them are following Hirst’s color schemes to the letter and as a result they all look identical.  And, again my opinion only, those colors are hard to get realistic especially if they’re the only coloring you apply.  The color values are too separated and garish and too bright.  Part of the problem is I believe that the molds overly emphasize the texture. I do though realize that roughness to scale would be invisible at standard viewing ranges much like it is now if you stand and look at a brick wall from 100 feet away but I think a more subtle color scheme would work better and then use washes to highlight the texture could look better.

I aspire to this kind of coloring/shading (images pulled from this thread where you should go look if you have any artistic appreciation.  Absolutely gorgeous game board in the making for HeroQuest):

Not this (Image from Hirst Arts) :

In other news I see I’ve surpassed a quarter million unique visitors since this site initially went live with this inaugural post on April 21st, 2007.

Continue reading »]]> Episode 3, part 3 of the Key Our Cars group’s 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons podcast gameplay session.  Our merciful group finds a group of people being handled very badly by some Hobgoblins and decide to interfere.  Biminey lies dead at the end but all is not as it seems…

Subscribe to the feed – http://www.keyourcars.com/feed/podcast/

Also available through iTunes.

Continue reading »]]> Just wanted to post a quick review of the SnowBall microphone by Blue.  You can find them on Amazon or Newegg if you’re interested. Â  Right now it’s cheaper at Amazon.

It’s a USB mic so you’ll need a PC of some kind to use it and you won’t be able to feed the input through a mixer or anything like that.

Previously I was using the mic on a Logitech Pro 9000 webcam as my mic.  If you’ve listened to the podcast you can tell the quality isn’t all that and that’s after extensive cleanup and tweaking.

I think you’ll find the next podcast release to be significantly better in quality with everyone audible and without overload.  Probably doesn’t hurt that I parked the mic in front of me on the gaming table and put Temple at the far end of the table.

I’m not an audiophile, I don’t really know cardioid patterns or impedance or pickup sensitivity.  I do know that the recording with this mic is very acceptable to me and although I cringe at the price, its worth it IMO.

D

Continue reading »]]> Working on the recording I made.  The quality leaves quite a bit to be desired.  Lots of clipping from too much volume on the recording. Â  Some of the players are…. loud. One in particular.  This causes a clipped distortion that personally I find annoying.  I’m iffy on releasing it since there’s not much I can do to clean it up.

Ohhh if I only had better hardware to do the recording….  If only….

Continue reading »]]> I’ve added a poll over -> there.  If you have any preference on the question let me know.  Granted that option four is unlikely to ever happen but I’d still like to know general preferences. Â  Even minimal editing of a podcast requires someone to listen to it all over again, take notes of what needs to be cut out then cut it out or edit in realtime while listening.  And that’s several hours of your life you won’t be getting back.

So anyway, if you have any input, make your voice heard and click one of the radio buttons.

Tossing it up raw like most of them is of course the fast easy way to go.

Continue reading »]]> You can find the KOC Podcast on iTunes now. Be sure and tell all your cool RPG friends…   Feel free to rate it down on the quality of the recording, that’s a work in progress.  It is my first one after all and I haven’t spent any money on hardware but using what I have laying around the house.

For the curious I’m using an old craptop, a Dell Latittude P4 single core with 256megs of ram under XP and using the mic from a Logitech 9000 webcam, recording through Audacity, then transferring to my file server where I can run Adobe Soundbooth against it to do clean up.

Anyway sound levels, snap crackle and pop, breath pops etc. are a problem but it’s still listenable too in my opinion.  Yours may vary and you’re welcome to it.

Continue reading »]]> SPOILER ALERT!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN’T LISTENED TO THE 10/16/09 #8 PA PODCAST AND PLAN TO –

Edit: i have since learned that was in fact the end of this series of podcasts so Aoefel’s death isn’t nearly as gruntling to me.

I will make a prediction that Aoefel will return as a warforged. The ambershards will take his remains from the acid and convert him to a warforged revenant. That’s what I’d do and it makes perfect plausible sense.

I listened to the latest episode of the Penny Arcade Podcasts last night. I thought it was pretty funny in a lot of ways, quite possibly to me the most LOL episode yet. My wife and I have been listening to DnD podcasts a few times a week for a little bit after putting the kids to bed and before going to sleep and all in all it’s pretty enjoyable way to spend an hour or so.

I was talking to her last night about Al’s death and thought it would make a reasonable blog post. Frankly I didn’t like it for a number of reasons and I’m harsh, note the byline of this site for goodness sake. I strongly believe that killing Al in that fashion, unrecoverable, hearkens me back to losing a corpse in EQ due to bugs with lava flows and losing a corpse in EQ meant you lost all your gear.

I would like to state up front that I could be wrong in my “What was he thinking?!” in regards to Chris Perkin’s because obviously we don’t know what happens next. So bear in mind I’m only basing my reaction on what I know happened so far.

When Whil aka Aeofel rolled that 18 to climb out of the pit I would have immediately retcon’ed the DC of the pit to a 15. No one knew what it was and it would have made for a good story. That would have been a instant reaction / no brainer move on my part. If he’d of rolled a crap roll, I’d of had him roll a Perception roll with a non-announced DC of 1 for him to notice where the acid was shallow due to bones or rocks or whatever and given him a place to stand and given him quarter or half damage per round rather than 12 damage per round. For a character that apparently has only 26 hit points (???) that was already wounded to inflict 12 points a round…??? That would have made for a good story too, the avenger trapped with his feet and calves slowly dissolving in the acid as his friends struggled to break someone free to go rescue him while the remaining two finished up the bad guys? Epic storyline.

And I would have done that as a reward for his roleplaying. An Avenger is a single target focused class. They pick a single enemy and attack it until it’s dead. Hell without buying a feat they can’t even shift the target of their Oath of Enmity which is their very schtick. The character was behaving exactly as it should have been doing, any other actions would have been OOC. You don’t punish that kind of play.

In addition I’m a very strong believer in not letting the dice force the story. Random is too random for a good story. Certainly the dice influence, flavor and nudge the stories I try to tell as a DM, most certainly they do. But I never let the dice dictate the story. And making a character’s permanent death hinge on a single die roll at fairly bad odds? I would guess he had less than a 25% chance at making that roll. That should have never happened.

Other reasons I’d of worked some way around it -

Aeofel is a very well developed, enjoyable and obviously loved character of the player. You don’t permadeath that kind of character. With the exception to fit storyline reasons at the end of a campaign storyline. That last I have done, several times.

The conditions of their play time/session time. The players and DM have all traveled to some central location to play this game which is a one off game with months between sessions. You don’t kill off one of the characters after 4 hours of game play in such a session by letting a single random die roll do it.

The permanency of the death. His corpse was dissolved by acid in the middle of a bad guy infested stronghold. There’s simply no plausible way to get that corpse back for a raise dead ritual before it’s dissolved into its component parts.

Now if Chris has some plan in mind, maybe he wanted Aoefel dead so he can bring him back in some fashion, perhaps a cyborg undead given the obvious artificer nature of the bad guy? Then I can forgive him some of this although a cyborg Aeofel would be directly ripping me off. Been there and done.

I would like to say in closing that I really like Chris Perkin’s. I think he’s a very good DM especially after he’s gotten used to his players, even in the first PA podcasts with complete unknown’s he was good and now with the third podcast they really gel as a group. I also want to say that it’s not Aoefel’s death that I strenuously object too (although killing a player in the middle of a game session under these session circumstances is bad), it’s the apparent permanency of it that bothers.

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