Relight

A late start to this April's blogging; all the more reason to get on with it.

Last Sunday we had Dungeons and Dragons. Matt hopped along to see the game in action as I've spoken to him at length about D&D but he's never actually seen the rules in motion. Unfortunately he saw little but the PCs travelling through a village, reading a book, and spending almost forty real-time minutes discussing how they would hide their arrows and quarrels from the town guard. Then he had to get home for dinner, but he didn't really miss much after that either.

Perhaps I was a little rusty after we missed two sessions but somewhere along the line the players' energy got diverted into joking around and not really paying attention to what was going on around them in the setting. I also did not have my complete notes at hand as I still haven't had my computer fixed by the thrice damned Crystech people. So the player reactions to the story were nothing like what I had expected. They didn't chase the assassin through the alley ways, across the streets, and over the waterfront rooftops, they didn't seem to pick up the clues as to the bigger picture of events in the world, and they were unmoved by the death of an NPC who was there to string them onto something else.

Staying on-subject with D&D, I got my hands on the Spell Compendium! Over one thousand spells and plenty of low-level ones that don't involve calling down acidic rain to decimate armies, or raising legions of skeletons to obey you, or turning yourself into a dire grue. One spell I really like the look of is balor nimbus which allows the spellcaster to ignite his body much like the fearsome and legendary balor fiends (for non-D&D players, imagine the Balrog from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings). As you can imagine, being on fire (the flames do not harm the spellcaster, nor do they burn up his clothing or equipment) gives you tremendous benefits if you are grappling. Of course, wizards would prefer to stay away from a grapple but igniting ones own body with a series of arcane words of power would surely do damage to your opponents' morale.

Other than that not much has been going on. Starting from next week it's the Easter break so I'll have two weeks holiday. I have to work for two of those days but to me that seems like a generous price for so much free time.

I'll be glad to be rid of work for a short while. It's just getting me frustrating at the moment. For example; this morning the staff room printer wasn't printing at all. Any document sent to it failed to print and became stuck in the printing queue. I cleared the printing queue, made sure the printer was set up correctly (shares, connections, etc.), turned it off for a minute, turned it back on, and tried to print a test page... but it didn't work. I tired to get it to work for a while before asking John (my colleague) if he had any ideas. He plodded down to the staff room, turned the printer on (I had left it turned off) and printed a test page. Voilà. It worked.

So how does that make me look to the members of staff who asked for my help? Incompetent. I had to ask John to get the printer to work and all he did was turn it on and print a test page, now the printer is working fine. He did exactly the same thing as I did with the exception of the printer working for him and not me. When this happens, how am I supposed to react? It's not just things like that. I'll be grateful to be out of this cupboard space for a fortnight.