I guess I haven't written about last Saturday's gaming. First of all it's one of Cal's home games so I try to drive there early. There are just *so* many Bear fans that the entrances to Berkeley are all backed up. I leave at 11:00 and get to Shannon's by 12:00, then I have to find parking. But eventually I get to Shannon's place with my ice cream cake that I bought for an office party but everybody was full with the main ice cream cake I bought.

Dropping off my things, I took a walk to get mail from my PO Box in Berkeley, which I hadn't checked in a while. I stopped at Gypsy's and got their Pollo con Pesto which is just heavenly. I used to get fried rice and potstickers from Mandarin House but they stopped serving potstickers so I haven't been there since. There's also Yokohama Station which I haven't been to in a while. I loved their fried pork chops with noodles.

In any case I got back and chat a bit with Shannon and Kimberly. I'm not the greatest conversationalist so I mostly to them talk. Kimberly is totally hooked on Castle Marrach, which is a MUD that Shannon's company has developed. They say it's not a MUD but really it is. Just because people can't hack and kill creatures doesn't mean it's not a MUD. MUDs are not a genre, they're a way of doing things. Text adventures with multiple users in a controlled environment.

Looking up Skotos on the Internet I see that they have the skotos.net domain now. Now, I have a problem with some of the TLD usage. NET should be for ISPs and other network providers, which Skotos is not. ORG should be for non-profits, which has grown to include personal web sites of people who don't have companies and that's another abuse. Too much commercialism in the domain registration system.

Back to my story. Eventually Eric and Dave Pick and Dave Woo showed up. Pick was going to run GURPS but he had a "short" conference call at 15:00 so we played Wizwar to pass the time. Eric won. But the call dragged on for over an hour and after that we decided to barbeque and then play Star Trek. Barbeque was good, and as usual we goot too much food, although this time it wasn't as over the top as the last two times.

Chris showed up about then, long time no see. Chris only can come over every other week since he has a LARP to run. We joked a bit about him avoiding Dave's GURPS game, which he admittedly was. Hey how come he can duck Dave's game while the rest of us are stuck with it? It's not like we don't like Dave's GMing, just that this last endless adventure was really *bad*. I hope he wasn't really pleased that he stretched it out for five weeks, because to the rest of us it was a rather linear and pointless adventure. Fortunately, since I try to run one-night adventures, even if it's a bad one it's only for one week. Next week is a totally new possibility for a bad run.

Which brings me to my adventure, a nice simple linear plot that everyone figured out 5 minutes after meeting the possessed Starfleet officers. Then it was another hour of making fun of the aliens and trying not to piss them off. There was *no* conflict in this episode because everyone behaved themselves and they were actually ahead of the aliens in getting to the adventure goal. Still, it's one of those episodes where we see if the players can maintain a Starfleet attitude, which everyone did, surprisingly even Pick.

So that was episode 303. Next up is another keystone adventure, and hopefully this time they'll actually do the adventure rather than ignore it. I know that Eric and Shannon would be just fine if I reused the adventure that Dave ignored, but I do need to write a story about it (one where the characters do actually go into the Neutral Zone) so I doubt I'll ever run it.