Topic: What madness has this year driven you to do?

[Lono]

So - super sh*tty year - instead of meeting with two billionaire investors I had lined up for my new start ups - I lost my amazing 15 year old cat - had my work hours severely cut - and my father passed away.

I was having a hard time of it and remembered how much I enjoyed watching/playing SFB at my board gaming club back as a youth - so I decided to take serious board gaming back up again after 30+ years.

I will not deny this involved a bit of retail therapy - and a partial decent into collecting madness.

Here is the result (so far):

https://boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/empirecollector

If you are on BGG add me as a buddy and hit me up anytime.

Sooo…   fellow members -  what madness did this year of the plague drive you towards?

[Panzergranate]

Well I was diagnose with Parkinson's Disease on 12th February 2020. I have it in my left hand.

Then this Covid 19 pandemic happened a few weeks later!!

I restored to back to running three 1970's classic 2 stroke barn find motorcycles (two for somebody else) during the spring / summer UK lockdown.

[Lono]

Nice!

So sorry to hear about your diagnosis - but I am envious of your most productive use of your time!

I had intended to get better at chess - and pick up speed cubing this year - but since my work had several rounds of layoffs - they - of course - want everyone who's left to pick up the slack.

Now I just need to win the lottery so I have time to get some game on. I have become obsessed with Memoir 44 for some reason - and look forward to taking some of its WWII scenarios for a test drive soon.

[Nemesis]

I've been lucky overall.  My job is classified as essential and the only time I've missed is this week where the workload is so low that I asked for the week off without pay rather than commute on public transit with nothing to do all week.  No one I know personally has gotten it that I know of though the husband of one of my coworkers died or it. 

[Lono]

Nemesis,

That sounds like you have been blessed so far - I am very glad to hear it!

My wife works for telecom so her lucrative contracting gig was actually extended by a year due to the extra work.

I am super high risk due to my blood pressure meds (which increase ace2 receptors in my body) - and I was in and out of the hospital for all of 2019 with breathing issues - so I am particularly paranoid.

(although years of suffering from irrational OCD have well-prepared me for this whole thing)

I feel like I have been sacrificing my mental and physical health somewhat to keep up with work - however - I have been in a much better working environment (in general) working from home.

I am very optimistic about 2021 - but man did this year sucker punch me out of nowhere.

[Nemesis]

As I said lucky.  The worst I can complain of is boredom and cabin fever.  Eagerly looking forward to the end of this.  Hope you are early getting a good vaccine. 

[Panzergranate]

I'm just relieved that I have Parkinson's and not Motor Neuron Disease (a living death trapped in a immobilised body!!).

In the UK, scientists have noticed that MND sufferers all have one thing in common, they're all athletes or fitness fanatics. Apparently something they do triggers MND in some people. There are government scientists looking into it, the BBC reported last month.

[FPF-DieHard]

The madness of 2020 has gotten me to try to revive SFC as a viable game

[Panzergranate]

It always has been a viable game!1 It makes Star Trek Legacy look like a sucky kid's arcade game.....

I'm working on the issues with models that run perfectly fine on the original SFC 1 not working properly on the GOG Windows 10 compatible version of SFC 1.

It appears that models created using Milk Shape seem to be the ones with texture attachment problems. I'll have a list of old models that don't work with GOG SFC 1.

Anything made by Andrull & Cleeve work perfectly fine with no issues.

 

[Nemesis]

SFC is a viable game.  It just doesn't have a viable OS to run on.

[d4v1ks]

SFC is a viable game.  It just doesn't have a viable OS to run on.

Heresy! 

[GotAFarmYet?]

I saw Car Wars on your list many does that bring back memories!
I bought it when it first came out might still have that edition laying around some where

As for the rest, I hope this Year will go better than Last

[Lono]

Yeah - Car Wars was my jam back in the day! 

I kinda bounced off of DND but got super into the Champions and Traveler RPGs back in the 80s.

I just recently picked up the Star Trek Duel sets from way back yonder on Ebay - that's some quality nostalgia gaming..

[Lono]

Two years in now - I think maybe I should stop?

https://geekgroup.app/users/empirecollector/insights/collection/worth

[Nemesis]

Yeah - Car Wars was my jam back in the day! 

I kinda bounced off of DND but got super into the Champions and Traveler RPGs back in the 80s.

I just recently picked up the Star Trek Duel sets from way back yonder on Ebay - that's some quality nostalgia gaming..

Couldn't get anyone to play Traveller with me but did have a character created that with GM approval and cooperation on the back ground could have had fun with things that could throw the other players for a loop.   

My Marvel Superheroes character drove the other players a bit crazy especially after the GM started adjusting the strength of defenses based on the nature of attacks and my character (Darkling) was elected leader (which he didn't campaign for).  They even threatened to hang him right after he saved the entire group and they left him alone in the collapsing underground lair of the villain. 

My gaming group ranges from hundred to thousands of miles away and others who by their actions make their company unwanted.  Unlikely to find another I'm afraid.  No windows systems so computer gaming is pretty much out.

My employer is shutting down at the end of July so my lucky streak has ended.  It'll be hard to find another job at my age and I'm really not ready to retire. 

[Lono]

Nice!  I loved RPGs - especially Champions - but I have similarly found that keeping a RPG group up has a lot of challenges.

Recently, however, I have been using meetup.com to find a lot of younger groups in my area to game with - and their enthusiasm is starting to rub off on me again.

I'm sorry to hear about your job situation - I was about to pivot into a whole new career when Covid came and knee-capped my plans. I am now facing the strange proposition of ageism as I look for new opportunities - however - I am encouraged that the job market is much better than it was in 2008 and 2001 - previous times when I have been displaced.

Good luck on finding a new job and maybe an additional group of gamers - at least we've survived this far. My goal now is to optimize for health again so as to enjoy all sorts of gaming well into retirement (if such a thing exists for me).

[Lono]

Three years in now - Help!

https://geekgroup.app/users/empirecollector/insights/collection/worth

[Panzergranate]

I re-joined my old wargaming club, the South Dorset Military Society, after a 20 year absence. That was back in June 2022. Since then, at club meetings I've played several SFB games, a few English Civil War battles, taken part in a American Civil War tournament, played a few WW2 battles and played in a 2 day massive Napoleonic's 15mm. Borodino wargame versus the Worthing Wargaming Club.

[Nemesis]

I'm playing around with the Traveller rules (hard to get legitimate up to date copies locally) designing my own setting, designing ships, creating adventure ideas and background characters.  Still no group but even just working with things to implement my ideas is fun.

One of the things I didn't like was the space prospecting rules.  The most common asteroid size is 1 million tons (Traveller ship tons which is about 14 metric tons).  1 ton asteroids are as rare as asteroids in the 100s of kilometers.  I ran two groups of characters (1 of them twice) through the rules and the group I ran through twice each time found 2 asteroids with wealth in the trillion credit region.  The 2nd hit up to about 850 billion.  Both of these were in weeks.  I'm reworking this to make the 1 ton asteroid the most common and that most really large asteroids will have already been prospected and if valuable claimed if there is an active belt industry.

The Scavenger/Belter class has serious issues, they can't roll the skill to pilot the one ship designed for them.  They can't roll the sensor skill for prospecting, the gunner skill to operate the laser drill for mining the Profession (Belter) skill doesn't have a definition as to what it covers.  Oddly though they can't pilot the ship they can get astrogation which is useless for any type of ship they can pilot as they can't have jump drive.  The newest edition of the ship removes the mining drones and puts a much smaller laser drill on a 4 ton craft to do the mining.  The ship mounted laser drill ONLY EXISTS for this mining so why would they make another one that is smaller and less useful?  The ship one is still in the new rules.  The jump net which could make mining even iron ore moderately profitable (and pay your ship mortgage) isn't on the ship and no mention is made of it being a common retrofit, it is even CHEAP compared to most things on the ship.

Now I don't have the current edition core rule book with the class in it just the prior edition (I have the current edition High Guard book with ship design though).

The world rolling rules don't allow for any planet that would really qualify as a super Earth.  Back when the original game was designed that would be acceptable as no exoplanets let alone super Earths had been detected, now they have.  The updates should reflect that.  You can roll a planet with one guy on it and a Class A Starport?  So I plan on revising those rules based on the 1980s Scout book to roll entire solar systems not just the inhabited world and whether there are asteroids and gas giants which is all that is in the most recent rules I have access to.  There are no rules for atmosphere types on none habitable worlds either.  No moons.

Odd that a game this old hasn't had more modernization.  At least computers are now assumed to have negligible tonnage rather than taking tons of space as in the early editions.

[Panzergranate]

I played two games of Traveller, at my local SDMS wargaming club, back in the 1980's. In both games, I became a collateral casualty after another (impetuous dumbass) player set off a booby trap. In one, I was attempting to rescue them as the booby trap detonated. In both instances, it was the same player who set off the booby trap, killing himself and me, plus seriously wounding a few other players. The moral of the tale is (A) don't wear a red shirt when in a scavenger party and (B) don't stand next to another player whose character is wearing a red shirt.

[Nemesis]

Traveller is notorious for the ease of death.

I understand that they have a robots book that allows you to do a lot of deadly stuff by remote, lose assets not characters.

[Panzergranate]

We the big Christmas SDMS club game is on Sunday 10th December and it's a wild west all against all shoot out. I don't know what rules it'll be played under, but I usually survive 3/4's of the way through these sort of games.

I've had my son staying for a few weeks and we played Panzergranate WW2 in 20mm. with a friend at the local wargaming café venue, on a couple of Sunday afternoons.

Panzergranate WW2 makes Rapid Fire look crap & slow, plus is more technically accurate regarding anti-tank weapons.

I also played a big SDMS club Black Powder Napoleonic French versus the Austrians, in November, with the visiting guest Worthing Wargames Club. I was on the heavily outnumbered Austrian side.

[Lono]

Awesome! Glad you are both getting some game on again in the real world!

I think my buying frenzy is finally at an end and, with my health somewhat improved, I should finally be able to get to some game meets again.

(Now just need to win the lottery so I can have the time to properly dive into my extensive book\board game\video game collections.)

Thankfully I will soon be able to use the majority of my "shelf of shame" as a lending library for gifted kids through the non-profit I run on the side.