random average

I know I just did a photo spread on Syncerus, but his gear situation changed for him rather abruptly last night, so... updates.

See, the guild got done with the 25-man raid-du-jour early, and folks wanted to do something else. A couple of the higher-end guys, (myself, one of the lead tanks and the Guild Leader included), have some fairly fresh-minted 70s we'd like to get geared up a bit, and basically that means "let's go run Karazhan", which is the first of the end-game 10-man dungeons.

The nice thing about Kara is that folks are really pretty familiar with it by now, and very little has to be explained before any big fight. Also, unlike the non-hardcore-mode five-man dungeons, there's still a really good reason for even the most HEAVILY-geared guys in the guild to want to come to Kara*, so it's actually REALLY easy for use to get enough people to do the run, and if you're just getting up to the point where you can do Kara, having a few heavy hitters with you is kinda nice.

(* - Each boss in Kara gives you a couple 'badges of justice' that can be used to acquire really good loot, even if you're heavily geared. There are 11 bosses in Kara, which means 22 badges in a few hours of play, which is easily just about the best effort-to-payoff ratio in the game.)

So, we'd started the Kara run the night before, and everyone wanted to finish; people started to assemble, and we had the craziest group: usually, we have two tanks, 3 healers (two if they're both heavily geared), and a mix of ranged and melee damage-dealers.

What did we get?

1 tank (the guild leader), four healers (one of which was me, and the other three HEAVILY over-geared), and five ranged DPS. No melee guys at all, other than the tank. So weird.

Since the healers in the group totally had healing covered, I just sat back and blasted away with my offensive spells (nature's wrath, insect swarm, moonfire, starfire, et cetera) and emergency healed when needed. My performance dps-wise was much better than when I came in the night before as a cat -- I'm USED to doing this as a ranged damage dealer -- melee was just a pain for me.

So. 11 bosses. Each one potentially dropping some gear I can use.

How much gear did I get?

14 pieces. No one else in the group really needed anything at all -- they were just there for the badges -- and the other two guys who actually needed gear were playing a paladin (platemail, please) and a warlock (cloth-only), so none of the stuff I wanted was anything they could use.

Four.teen. I got seven pieces that directly and instantly improved both my healing and spell damage by about 50%, and the other seven helped fill out (dare I say 'complete') almost all of my tankingbear- and cat-form sets.

And they look badass.

Here we have, as a review, Syn as he appeared when he was doing anything but healing/casting. Decent gear, but it looks bloody awful. The only consolation here is that, since this was the gear I used for either tanking as a bear or soloing my quests as a cat, I was always in either Dire bear or Cat form, and never saw it.

That was then, this is now.

Gone is the clown-like, mismatched armor. I'm sporting Heavy Clefthide chestpiece, leggings, and 'boots', plus some nice new gloves and shoulders (that for some reason aren't displayed in this shot).

With the exception of that crazy (but good) "I'm Batman" staff, he looks just like how I think a Tank should look: very little adornment - just heavy armor and a 'lets get to work' attitude. I really like it, and for all that I'm currently focusing on playing as a Healer/spellcaster, I do hope that I get a chance to do some tanking as well.

The catform set of equipment has significantly different stats than the tanking gear: forget about extra health, extra dodge, extra armor - focus on "I want to kill you in the face..." (or the back, I'm not choosy).

Obviously, the *attitude* of the gear is totally different also. Straps all over, lots of sharp points -- the damned EYES GLOW RED in the headgear -- the whole thing just screams "dangerous".

I love it -- almost makes me want to respec back to Feral damage-dealing to REALLY try it out, but as it stands, it'll be gathering a little dust in the vault while I work on healing -- it's too expensive right now to respec back and forth between the two. Doing the Cat & Bear thing is *fantastic* for soloing and doing daily quests, but I'll be honest and say that I'm not really good at playing melee dps in a raid. Tanking, yes, but melee damage? No. I don't know how the rogues do it.

I won't show the healer-gear set again, because although I got like 7 new pieces, it's all stuff that's concealed under the robe, so nothing looks different, until you look at new totals in my healing and mana regen and stuff like that... where there were HUGE boosts. Huge. At one point, I mentioned what my numbers had gotten up to, and the general consensus was that they weren't just "good numbers for a new guy", but just plain "good numbers."

Finally, the story.

We're getting close to the end of the night, and we've made it up to Netherspite, a sort of ethereal dragon.

Netherspite is an interesting fight that goes back and forth between two Phases.

In phase 1, one guy in the raid stands in a specific place, and whoever is standing there WILL BE the guy that the dragon attacks. Period. (There's also a spot one person can stand in to do massive healing, and another where you can do massive damage.)

In phase two, which is fairly short, Netherspite sort of just attacks anyone - totally random. As long as he doesn't go after you twice (which is just bad luck), you can surive that -- then you're back to phase 1.

But there's a catch. Whoever stood in those three magic spots in the LAST phase 1 cannot stand in the same spot in the NEXT phase 1. (And someone HAS to stand there and soak them up, or they buff the dragon and he kills you really dead.)

So you have to have two guys for each spot, and they take turns during each "Phase 1" being the guy who has to stand in the Spot.

So... there's this Tanking Spot, right? We need two guys for the tanking spot.

We have one tank.

The conversation went something like this:

"So... we need another tank."
"Right."
"Syn, did you bring your tanking gear?"
"Umm... no. It's not up to par for Kara, so I left it in the bank. All I have is my healing gear. For tanking, it's... not... good."
"Okay. Right. Doomas, You're going to be the second tank."
"What? I'm healing specced."
"Yeah, but you're a paladin. You have platemail. You have a shield. You can tank him."
"It's a bonus-to-healing shield! It's probably just paper mache with some LEDs in it to make it glow!"
"Nevertheless..."
"*sigh* alright, but I don't know how to do the tanking here."
"I'll explain."

And he did, and we started.

But... on that stand-in tank's second turn, he died. Right. I dunno what happened -- my job was to take my turn in the Super Healing Spot and, when not there, blast the hell out of the dragon, and when he went down, I was blasting away and trying not to die.

The next Phase 1 came around, and the Real Tank says:

"Okay guys, burn him down! We don't have another tank for the next Phase one!"

And we tried. We really really tried, but he just wasn't quite ready to drop.

So we go into the crazy-running-around-don't-die Phase Two, and the Real Tank says:

"We need another tank for this phase! I can't do it twice in a row. Someone step up!"

Right.

So I turn round, shift into bear form (which (at least) significantly bumps up my health and the protection bonus I get from my OH SO NOT A TANK healing gear, hit my Feral charge to get to the Tanking Spot and start hammering away with (few, oh so few) default Tanking Abilities that I have when I'm not specced for it.

I. Am tanking. Netherspite. I did NOT get the briefing on the little 'step in, step out' thing you have to do on the Tanking Spot to keep from getting squashed (though I'd seen it done many times on Grezzk), and I was NOT mentally prepared for that duty.

And I'm in healer gear.

But dammit, we needed a tank, and if there's something Druids do well, it's fill lots of different roles...

This is where everyone was really glad that we ended up bringing three overgeared healers. I liiiiiiiiiiived!

(And then I ran like a little pussy (cat) for the back wall during Phase 2 and healed myself like crazy.)

Netherspite died on the next Phase 1. There was much cheering.

All the gear upgrades were nice, yes. But that fight?

That is what I'm going to remember about Syn's first run in the haunted keep of Karazhan.

Posted by Doyce at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So my "second main" is now 70. Syncerus (so named because I made him look like a water buffalo in horn-style, face, and coloration, and because Stonestrider was already taken) is a tauren (read: tribal society of minotauresque humanoids) druid (read: shapeshifters and tree huggers).

It took approximately half as much time to get Syn to 70 as it took Grezzk -- a bit over 12 days. I don't know when I created him, but he's third on my login screen after Grezzk and... the character who sits in one of the major cities and checks prices of items for me on the auction house. Seriously, I have no idea who's in the 'created second' slot, but that's all I use them for. I think it's a rogue... so, yes, I put a rogue in charge of my money -- Margie would find that funny.

ANWAY, let's have a little Picture Pages fun with Syncerus.

This is Syncerus at the login screen, with the grassy plains, traditional tribal background you see behind all Tauren characters at login.

I really love tauren characters. The only real problem I have with them is that all characters move the same speed by default, which means that little characters like gnomes get animated with really fast little steps (and thus seem to move faster), and Tauren - as the biggest toons in the game - have a kind of slow, loping gait that feels slow. Luckily, I have a cheetah form and now a BIRD FORM, so the slow movement feel doesn't bother me much.

In addition to being a druid with a number of sexy animal forms I'm not going to show you, Syncerus is a herbalist (Tauren get a nice boost to this skill that carries through the game) and a skinner (very 'leave no part of the animal unused'), so the open plains of Nagrand are very... *tidy* after he come through on a hunting spree.

Anyway, that login screen is how Syn looks now, when he's in "healer mode". Let's look at the horrible way he looks when he's NOT all healing and stuff.

This is the gear Syncerus was wearing just as he dinged 70... kind of. Actually, I think I've already put on some level 70 gear, so even THIS outfit matches a bit more than the armored clown suit he usually had on.

This is the gear that Syn's now wearing when he's tanking (though you'll never see it, because he's busy being a DIRE BEAR RAWR), or being a claw-your-face kitty (which is how I run my normal quests.) It's slightly better looking than the old stuff, but only just barely.

I need about one more good night of battlegrounds (wherein, ironically, I heal) to get rid of those hideous green shoulders and replace them with... well, seriously the best shoulderguards for bear-tanking in the game. I'm still nowhere near where I need to be on my tanking stats to be able to tank a Raid of any kind -- there's a lot of little niggling bits I need to take care of, but I'm getting there.

Visually, I also have a little more leather to gather before I can make the leg armor that matches the tough-guy-armor that you see on his feet and chest and hands... it's a full set that's pretty much the definitive gear for tanks at his level, and also probably (mostly) won't be replaced before the new expansion comes out.

At that point, he'll pretty much match from head to hoof while tanking... the way he does when healing.

I have, shall we say, had a lot more luck (and been, I will be honest, more motivated) to gather pretty decent gear for his healer-mode equipment.

This is Syn wearing the shiny new gear that was waiting for his "healing mode" set, once he hit 70. The most visible pieces (the Shoulders and and the "robe") are also kind of the weakest -- pieces I picked up when I became "honored" with some key factions. They're nice, but I'll probably have better fairly soon. The best stuff I'm wearing is barely visible, if at all.

Underneath the robe I'm already wearing, I am not ashamed to admit, one of the better pieces of druidic healing gear in the game - though the name ("Pants of Living Growth") makes me smirk. My guild leader gave em to me, as well as that HUGE mace on my belt -- which is pretty much the best non-epic one-handed healer-weapon out there; I'll replace it, but not soon, unless I'm lucky.

The best pieces are the smallest. You see that little headpiece he's got on, sort of giving him a second set of horns? That particular head piece is roughly equivalent in 'power level' to the stuff that drops off Kael'thas Sunstrider, the boss that my guild is working to take down for the first time at this point (If you speak WoW-raiding, we're 6/6 SSC, 4/5 TK, 3/6 Hyjal). I got the piece through being a damned awesome healer in the pvp battlegrounds (seriously, we almost never lose a battleground), and I worked my gently-swishing, bovine tail off to get it, so people who want to bitch about 'welfare epics' can bite me - I know how much work raiding is, and I did just as much work in a damned PuG environment to get this single piece of gear. I also spent a lot of gold last night putting the best gems I could find into it. I sincerely doubt I'll replace that piece soon.

Anyway, I went from level 69 and generally able to handle healing the lower-level-60 dungeons, to this gear; at which point in time my mana pool (9500), bonus to healing (+1050) and mana regen rate (145 in-combat) all jumped to right about where they need to be for me to heal the first level 70 ten-man dungeon -- just a huge jump. I promptly went out and found a Shadow Labyrinth run to heal, and it went very well, even though almost all my talent points are still in Feral abilities, not Restoration (40/21 "feral swiftness" build).

I really, really, really hope I get a chance to go on a Karazhan run soon and see if I'm correct in my assessment.

Sometimes I wave to the Alliance guys in the battlegrounds while my teammates are beating the hell out of them (something I remember Lee doing with his healer on CoH, and now I know why). It's those little things that bring a smile to the bearcow's lips.

A fight in the battlegrounds against the same number of opponents is pretty much a toin coss -- unless one side has a healer. It's amazing how much of a difference even one person totally dedicated to healing makes in a fight.

I like doing PvP on Grez, but that's pretty much a soloist's game for me -- a blaster-vs-blaster situation where I'm just trying to get the other guy to 0 before he does the same to me.

With Syncerus, I hold the line.

----

And finally, the definitive picture of Syn.

As any MMO player knows, this is usually all I see of my character.

Look at those shoulder guards! Peripheral vision is for the WEAK!

Posted by Doyce at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hmm. Let's see what was going on.

In general
I haven't been feeling very well. I haven't been sleeping well or enough.

WoW
Syncerus is about half a level away from the level-cap, so that'll happen pretty quick; this week, I'd think. It has taken me about 240 hours less playtime to get him to this point than it did on Grezzk. Given how much time I spend playing, that works out to getting him to 70 roughly three months faster.

And what then? Well, I've been amassing a lot of "requires level 70" gear for Syn, so when he dings I should be able to step into some fairly significant upgrades.

For healing, I'm already wearing the about a quarter of the stuff that I'll take into end-game. I have a lot of the rest waiting in the bank -- when 70 hits I should be doing VERY well on the stats I need. I'm actually ALREADY at the 'ready for raiding' level on my mana and mana regen rates -- I need a bit more health (should come with the gear) and a bit more bonus to healing (ditto) for the entry-level raids... more than that to really walk in with the big boys to the big raids.

For tanking, I don't have quite as much of the gear I need, though oddly, what I *do* have is for all the slots I haven't been able to fill in as a healer -- weird luck there.

So what do I want to do?

I've REALLY enjoyed healing in pvp battlegrounds -- I know pvp well enough to know when my healing has turned the tide of a fight, and lemme tell you, that happens a LOT -- having that kind of influence on a fight is really cool. Plus, it's good practice -- after pvp, healing a five-man dungeon run is a piece of cake.

Tanking... is just that. Tanking. I've done that a lot (and I get a good "sword and board" tanking 'fix' with Geiri on LotRO), so that's all fine, but it's not new. Healing is new -- it's more than a new area in WoW, it's like playing an entirely new game. That said, I *do* have decent tanking skills, even in WoW, and I've tanked a fair amount of stuff in the end-game. Plus, as tanks are more in demand than healers (barely), being willing to tank kind of ensures I can get a group for whatever I need. As a bonus, if I get a tell like "we can take you if you can heal/dps -- we already have a tank", i can do that to.

I dunno. I like healing. We'll see when I hit 70, I guess. I'm out of 'rested' xp bonus right now, so that might take a few days to do. In the meantime, i'm going to hit Battlegrounds for more honor -- the battlemasters have a belt (and bear-form shoulderguards) I want...

Man I like playing this guy.

Grezzk
For the content my guild is doing (Working on Kaelthas in tier 5, hitting Mount Hyjal), there is very little stuff I can upgrade on Grezzk until the new expansion comes out. Syn is the main reason I log in right now -- I just run Grez for a little bit each night to earn gold.

LotRO
I can't get LotRO to run reliably on my (old, tired) desktop right now, and I didn't have a (either) LotRO-capable laptop home with me this weekend, so I haven't played.

Tabletop
The game day for Sunday was called due to lack of interest. Next weekend I'll miss the Colorado Springs one cuz I'll be at a company picnic up in the mountains (tries to make an excited face).

Looking forward to (a) the DnD game, where the group is about to hit an encounter that has caused a lot of other groups to wipe, and (b) playing some more In a Wicked Age with Lee and De.

Posted by Doyce at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today finds me pondering (once again) the way that my blogging "life" is currently divided and partitioned off.

Once upon a time, the split was pretty clear: gaming-related stuff went here, and anything that I wanted to write about that wasn't that went onto Average-Bear. This was done for a number of reasons, but none of them were really for compartmentalization as much as organization. The problem is basically that the organization of my gaming posts would suffer dramatically if they all had to be lumped under a single heading of "Gaming" on a blog that was supposed to handle everything -- the bloat from that one category would be hard to manage and the heading itself would be largely meaningless in terms of actually organizing anything -- I've over a dozen post categories on this gaming blog, and porting all that into another blog would, at best, make that combined blog a kind of "gaming, with a few tangents" blog that I'm not interested in doing.

But the problem is that, with my new 'main' blog, there are things that I *don't* want to blog about there, which aren't gaming-related either, and thus have nowhere to go.

Which brings me back to just having one big journal for everything, and the problems be damned...

Which brings me back to actually contemplating the problems and deciding that I can't just ignore them.

And nothing changes.

Not entirely sure what to do with that. Not sure there's much I actually can do about it.

But I think it's telling that I'm writing about all this on my gaming blog... a blog that actually nets quite a bit more traffic now than my 'neutered' main blog. What it tells me is that I'm doing something wrong.

I'm just not sure what.

Posted by Doyce at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Okay, not a patch, but people make the DnD = MMORPG comparison so much, I figured one more tired joke wouldn't hurt.

Actually, it's errata and updates for all three books, enough that I hope they correct this stuff in a second printing of the 4.0 rules.

They has completely overhauled the skill challenge system in the DMG errata. All skill challenges now end with 3 failures regardless of complexity, so Complexity 5 challenges are going to be very difficult. However, they also dropped the difficulty of all skill checks by 5 (which is something I was already doing, based on the number crunching geniuses at Story-Games... you know, they don't right many crunchy games, but those guys grok dice probabilities.

Anyway: all Easy skill checks are now difficulty 5 instead of 10. Moderate skill checks are now DC 10 instead of 15, and Hard checks are now DC 15 instead of 20. This still scales up with level.

Posted by Doyce at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Haven't done one of these in awhile, mostly because I'd been updating WoW and LotRO play stuff using Twitter. However, Twitter's API went completely kerflooey a month ago or so, which means that, since Twitter never updates in my feedreader anymore, I rarely think about it, and thus, never update it.

So, until I come up with another, better way to just give MMO character updates on the fly, here's everything going on with anything that could be considered gaming.

MMO: WoW

Grezzk
I mostly just log Grez on for raiding and running a few 'daily' (repeatable each day) quests for cash. My guild has finished off Vashj, and is the only Hordeside guild to have done so on my server (Farstriders). We're currently working on Kaelthas, the Blood elf 'prince', who is the other boss at the same Tier of difficulty as Vashj, and I'd expect he'll go down in the next week or so... this will ALSO be a boss kill that no one on the Horde side of our server has completed.

Grezzk is pretty well geared at this point, because I've been working on such things and I'm considered a 'contributing' member of the raid, but one recent 'gear ding' made me very happy: I just got the second piece of a four-piece 'set' of items available only to raiders hitting the high level of content that we are. (In wow-speak: The Tier Five two-piece set bonus for hunters.) Getting two pieces of that 'set' gives me a really awesome bonus ability: every time I hit something, I heal my pet for 15% of whatever my damage was.

Just... ponder that for a second. If you don't do wow, work it out for whatever game you DO play, where you have a pet. You're on CoH? Okay... you hit a bad guy for 100 points and your Jack Frost heals 15 points.

As an added bonus, the threat generated by that heal doesn't count toward me -- it counts as the pet healing itself, so it actually helps the pet hold aggro and tank for me when I'm soloing, which is AWESOME - I do so much damage now that it's really hard for my pet to really tank anything for more than a few seconds before my damage output convinces the target that I'm the (far) more serious threat.

Syncerus
Druids in WoW are a bit like Kheldians in CoH, only much, much better. Depending on the way I spec, I can play him as a Tank + backup Melee damage-dealer, a viable main healer, or a ranged damage-dealer (which I already have with Grezzk and have no intention of doing with Syn).

This kind of versatility has been a total joy to level with. I'm specced heavily into Tanking/melee, with a few good low-end abilities out of the healing tree. That, plus effort on my part to have both a good set of tanking gear and a good set of healing gear means that I can solo to my heart's content as an extremely viable 'big cat' form (with stealth, which makes things even more fun), and then join a five-man dungeon run as either the Tank, the Healer (I've actually healed as many runs as I've tanked), or even melee damage.

When I want a break, I just strap on my healing gear and join a PvP battleground and heal like crazy -- it's great practice for when a regular old PvE dungeon fight goes haywire and everyone (including me) starts taking damage... plus I earn a ton of Honor I'll be able to use at level 70 for some huge gear upgrades.

My goal is to get him to 70 as fast as possible (I'm at level 66, and it's taken me approximately half as much time as it took me on Grezzk), respec into full-on healing mode, and join in the Raiding fun with the rest of the guild. Once I hit 70, I think about a few serious runs of some end-game content will get me to the point where I can actually contribute well to even the toughest of the raids we're doing -- I already have about half the gear I need (8 items) to be a viable raid-level healer.

LotRO
Geiri and Tiranor ("Geiranor") have leveled up to 46-of-50 in Lord of the Rings, and we're well and truly into some interesting end-game content.

The progression of the storyline in the game has us to the point where the Fellowship is in Rivendell and is ready to leave on their great journey, but unable to leave because one of the Nine survived the attack at the Fords of Bruinen and is slinking around the Trollshaws and the Misty Mountains, spying on Rivendell. Gandalf surmises (rightly) that if the Fellowship set out while a Nazgul was around to report back to Moria, they'd all be dead inside a week.

So you have to eliminate that threat.

Yeah... we defeated a Nazgul, baby. (As part of a full team, but still.) Big epic fight in an old dwarf ruin in the Misty Mountains. The ground trembled and the walls shook, and when it was all said and done, the bastard went down. Pretty damn cool.

So we've four more levels to go to fifty, and I think something like seven more "books" of epic storyline to play through before Mines of Moria drops sometime later this year.

And we have a few alts we want to level. Kate took some time this week on her minstrel an rocketed up like 4 or 5 levels. It's NOT hard to find a big group willing to help you with your quests when you're a healer, I guess. WHO KNEW.

Tabletop
Why is that we can easily get five people to the table with short notice for a DnD game, but we can't get three together reliably for something like In a Wicked Age on even a monthly basis?

Eh.

4th edition is fun for what it's good at. I'm kind of eliding the roleplaying stuff at this point while we learn the rules a bit more, and that means we're doing a lot of fights, but the fights are fun.

in non-dnd news, Colorado Story Game is doing a gameday up at the Casa this coming weekend. I'll either be running IaWA or The Mountain Witch, probably. I'd like to do more In a Wicked Age with Lee and De and Kate... the In a Wuxia Age with Dave and Margie and Kate... and Spirit of the Century.

Yeah... more Spirit of the Century would be GOOD. I keep thinking that being able to put Aspects on the Scene is the perfect way to reflect the kind of subtle magic you see in the Lord of the Rings books.

Hmm.

Posted by Doyce at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm seriously thinking about this camera (thirty bucks, so... less than a tank of gas), plus Skype (free), for in-home video conferencing.

It'll be more and more useful as Kaylee gets older and I need some remote face-time, but for gaming? Yeah, I'm seriously thinking about this. Maybe just as a test run if enough people are interested enough to shell out for the camera.

Why? Mostly so I can play with more people without everyone bankrupting themselves for the gas money. :P

Posted by Doyce at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Interactive Way To Go

Posted by Doyce at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, there's this thing going on with my Gaming People where PTA isn't working for us. We've put Dave's current PTA game on hold for now, to try out In A Wicked Age in a completely different setting (both from the PTA game and from the IAWA default), with a view toward possibly using that for running the PTA game.

The problem is with conflicts. They just take fucking ages to work through. Fucking. Ages. It takes people out of the moment, it's frustrating, and the end result is usually NOT a satisfying 'thing', cuz we've already discussed the scene to death, so when the resolution finally comes, we already know what happened.

I said in a post a few months ago that PTA seemed to work well for us when we used the "car chase" rules, which let us break up the action more, and while that's true, that's not the problem.

The problem is that we're having the wrong conversation beforehand.

The one bright and shining scene I remember from one of our PTA games was when this girl that Randy's guy was sleeping with says "I love you..." as he was getting dressed and leaving the apartment, and put him on the spot. BANG. His Issue was something like "personal commitment" or something, so the conflict was clearly about him trying to get out of the room without pissing her off while remaining emotionally 'safe' from her. In that scene, PTA really sang. We were so jazzed at the end of that game session that we jabbered about it all for an hour.

And never managed to get back to that point again. Why? Well, because I thought, based on that scene, that the trick was for the GM to pose conflicts in a kind of series of "bang" events... and that's not why it worked.

It worked because it was about his Issue. The character's Issue -- and we constantly and consistently FORGET this -- is the whole POINT of the character AND the game... it's a game about TV Dramas, after all -- of COURSE it's about the Issue.

I re-realized this, reading something Matt wrote almost two years ago (emphases mine):

PTA probably adds some to the confusion, because the real Conflict has to do with the protagonist's Issue, and you have to do a little digging around to figure out how it factors into the playing of cards and stuff.

You're sneaking past guards. Your Issue is maybe "Insecurity", let's say. What's at stake, in terms of the conflict, is your Issue, not the guards; how does what happens in your sneakery affect your Issue? You get past them... they spot you... does not matter*. Either outcome could be either a win or a lose as far as your Issue is concerned.

No, you don't say, "if I win, I'm no longer insecure." You do say, "if I win, my character addresses his/her insecurity in a positive way."

Notice how the conflict of interest is clearly established, but nobody knows what will happen until the narration starts flying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's what we've screwed up pretty much 70 to 80% of the time in PTA. Dammit.

Makes me want to run it again, just to get it right.

[* - and the events that actual happen should be informed at least somewhat by plot-stuff that 'needs to happen' in that scene]

Posted by Doyce at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Ready for your next game of surrealist dream warriors.

Posted by Doyce at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I looked over the various gaming threads that had come out of discussions of Action Points and how they were used -- I agree and disagree in equal measures with what folks are saying, so I'm just writing down my thoughts on Action Points from my own point of view.

This essentially codifies the House Ruled Action Point system I've been using.

First, my thoughts:

1. Action Points are cool. I don't necessarily love how they're implemented in the game, because:
- 1a: They can only do one thing (take an additional Standard Action).
- 1b: That option is alternately kind of lame or potentially game breaking.

2. Due to (1b) and the risk of a game breaking series of Action Point expenditures (two or three rounds in a row of additional actions would kind of break things, yes), the game designers opted to:
- 2a: Heavily restrict the number of APs a player can have.
- 2b: Heavily restrict how often APs can be used.

I understand why they did that, but I think it simply treats the symptomatic problems of the system as implemented -- it doesn't fix what's busted.

3. Since Action Points, under the standard system are both (a) rare and (b) unstable in terms of payoff, they're rarely used by the players.
- 3a: Their primary purpose (allowing players to combat the unavoidable whiff-factor in a dice mechanic with no bell curve and roughly a 50/50 chance of success on any given roll) is alternately too weak or too powerful in practice.
- 3b: Their alternate purpose (as a way to make characters more awesome) is diluted.

Truly, they might just as easily not even be in the game: as written, they represent a lot of bookkeeping ("a new Action Point accrues every two encounters, but the total resets to 1 after each Extended Rest"? Really, Wizards of the Coast? Really?), for a rare and often anticlimactic pay-off.

They are, alternately, "too much" and "not enough", in my opinion.

So here's my hack. Changes and additions are italicized.

1. Your character starts with one Action Point. For the purposes of drifting as little as possible from the core rules, we'll retain the standard accrual rules I just made fun of:
- 1a. You gain a fresh Action Point every other encounter.
- 1b. Your current total of Action points resets to 1 after an Extended Rest.

2. You can use your Action Points for one of three things:
- 2a: Spend an AP to take an additional standard action. (Once per Encounter)
- 2b: Spend an AP to reroll a failed (or successful) d20 roll. (Once per Turn)
- 2c: Spend an AP to add +3 to (or subtract 3 from) a d20 roll. (Once per Turn)

Edit to Add: A natural 1 can't be rerolled, and always misses. Sometimes, you're just screwed, and that's awesome too.

3. At will, as a free action, you can cross off a Healing Surge and give yourself an Action Point, which can immediately be used in one of the ways listed under 2. Healing Surges reset per the normal rules.

The end result allows players to "push" by sacrificing some resources in a way that I already know I like a lot from playing lots of other games with similar options. (Vincent Baker uses a phrase "trading in your future for your present" and I like that term quite a lot.)

It's also relatively "trad gaming" in the options it presents: if I really wanted to hack it into some kind of Indie co-authored hippie craziness, I'd add a few Meta-options under #2, like spending an AP to let you add facts to the game fiction, a la Spirit of the Century.

Even without that option, I'd definitely consider a player who really wanted to take part in a scene and suggested paying an Action Point to conveniently show up, if it was remotely plausible.

Bones?

Posted by Doyce at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

A thought from Story-Games on how to achieve a certain amount of "success" with running an indie rpg with your friends, and that is this:

There is a minimum amount of creative enthusiasm that needs to brought to the table, socially, by all the players, to make the game work, and that creative enthusiasm needs to be directed toward the thing that the game you're playing does. It's what the Original Poster calls the Social Mandate.

In In a Wicked Age, the Social Mandate is the conflict between characters (and, to a lesser degree, the anthology of short stories that results from play). People need to be interested in and excited about the conflict of everyone's Best Interests and WANT to put that into play. Without that social fuel, the engine dies.

In My Life with Master the power dynamic between The Minion and The Master has to be interesting to the players on an authorial level *first*.

The Individual Wants vs. Community Needs problem in Dogs in the Vineyard has to be compelling to the players *first*.

The play of Trust against the backdrop of Dark Fates in a small group has to be interesting to the players or a Mountain Witch game chokes and dies.

To take it out of the indie realm (which is why I crossed the word out...

The challenge of smart tactical battle play and resource management has to be appealing to players for DnD (or Warhammer) to really sing. Yes, you can roleplay in the game, and have fun doing so, but if you're not into the kind of combat style that the game supports, you're roleplay will be spread between loooong stretches of your own boredom.

Posted by Doyce at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I noticed early on that LotRO's main conceit about their "Health Bar" really really works in DnD 4th with regards to healing.

Lord of the Rings refers to your 'health bar' as Morale -- so it's mostly representative of your will to continue the fight -- the rest of the game works in similar ways -- where death ='s 'retreat' and so forth. This makes 'healers' in Lord of the Rings (which is really quite a low-magic setting) make sense -- they are the minstrels with their uplifting songs (VERY Tolkein), the Captains with the rallying crys and bold words, and even the Lore Masters with their quietly whispered words (or sometimes taking your worries on their own shoulders to ease your burden).

That idea really works in 4th edition DnD, especially when you look at the Healing Surges everyone has (accessible in combat as Second Wind) and the names of the healing-type abilities for the Warlord (Captain), which indicate that they're really just boosting your will to continue the fight.

Mike Mearls was saying in an interview that it changes nothing in the game if a player wants to take all his mage spells and switch them to 'cold' damage instead of, say, fire; it's the kind of customization hacking he expects from players in the game as they make their character their own.

Then I thought: it would be a pretty simple thing indeed to hack the Cleric into a sort of lore-master and/or minstrel (or both, depending on which path you took at creation) simply by changing the names of the powers and changing their "implement" from a holy symbol to either a wizards staff or a musical instrument. Do that, drop Mages and Warlocks from the game (or leave them for the bad guys), and you're pretty much ready to play in Middle Earth in LotRO style.

So, to sum up...

- Drop Dragonborn and Tieflings. Duh.
- Elladrin are the elves of Lothlorien and Rivendell.
- Sylvan elves are the elves of Mirkwood.

- Fighters: unchanged. Depending on build, they are either Champions or Guardians.
- Rogues: rogues are more melee damage dealers than the LotRO Burglars, and their benefit to the group is slightly different, but it's still similar enough. Halfling rogues should favor trickster builds, probably, with the other type being more common with sylvan elves and the like.
- Rangers: virtually no changes.
- Warlord: call em Captains and you're done, though I think a lot of them would be multiclassed.
- Cleric: the 'sit-in-the-back' build (whatever the name) you tweak in Power names and Implements to be Minstrels, and the 'up-in-your-face' build you likewise tweak to be Loremasters.
- Warlocks: probably only bad guys -- infernal types serve Sauron entirely, I'd guess. Fey types work alright with the High elves, and Star-pact warlocks would make an interesting type of Loremaster, maybe.
- Mages: too overt to be anything but bad guys, really.

This would simulate LotRO pretty well, would work for a game setting like Midnight quite well, but still be too much magic for true Tolkein.

If you really wanted to be totally hardcore Tolkein, not LotRO, you remove Clerics and Mages. Healing would fall entirely to the use of Healing Surges and any Captains you had with you. Warlocks stay in the setting in very particular instances. Infernal Warlocks are bad guys, Fey Warlocks are the Elf Lords, and Star Pact Warlocks are Gandalf and Sauruman. (Keep the Ritual List, from which you'd likewise remove things like passwall and the Portal magic, but keep the 'rezzes' for when Frodo gets insta-gibbed a ringwraith on Weathertop. Only the various Warlocks would get such Rituals automatically -- anyone else would need a Feat to learn a few -- Aragorn did so.)

Posted by Doyce at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A staff writer on Massively.com writes a bit about how he really got into Age of Conan, and then stopped playing in favor of Guild Wars.

Now I know that AoC puts much higher graphic demands on your system and that Guild Wars has had years to eliminate the performance bugs that still plague the early days of AoC, but none of that mattered. Playing Guild Wars made something instantly apparent to me. Age of Conan is an enjoyable game with a great deal of potential but after a month of intensive play I'd gotten to the point where it just wasn't worth the consistent and mundane technical hassles involved in playing it. I wasn't angry, I wasn't frustrated, but at that moment in time I'd found something better to do and so I just stopped playing.

This is the problem I'm currently having with Lord of the Rings Online. My poor old desktop is five years old and, while it's pretty much tweaked out as far as the hardware will withstand, it can't get any better, and when I start up Lord of the Rings, the machine's old bones really start to show. Graphics issues. Lock-ups, some of them system-wide. Horrible horrible lag.

In order to combat this problem (which, rather than getting better over time and bug-fixing on LotRO's part, has gotten progressively worse as they add newer content and cooler graphics -- the problems aren't bugs, they're just the way things are), I've had to dial my game settings down to the lowest possible. The gorgeous LotRO panoramic views? I don't see much of them when I have my graphics set to "Low", to avoid lag -- I dial up to "high" to take screenshots, then back to "low" to actually, you know... move. I have a dual monitor system, but one of them is now simply taking up space on my desk, unplugged, because running both at the same time, with LotRO, causes heat problems on my video card, thanks to the strain that the game puts on my card. Don't even get me started about the hiccuping sound during any of the justly-vaunted cinematics within the game.

I love the game, I really do -- I think they're doing a fantastic job on it, and I acknowledge that the problems I'm having are largely due to trying to run the thing on an old, loyal golden retriever of a PC that really needs to be put out of his misery. Hell, Kate's laptop is only a few years old and IT struggles with all the rendering it has to do in a busy town.

But, you see... there's this thing. WoW doesn't cause me any of those problems. I might have a night of lag, due to a server issue, and when that happens I'm glad to be able to do something else, but that's a known server issue, easily fixed, not an inability of my Hardware to run the Software. When it comes down to it, I spent many evenings choosing to play WoW over LotRO this last month (even when LotRO can include Kate) because I knew that when I logged into WoW, the game would RUN.

I appreciate that games traditionally push the envelope of what PCs can accomplish -- more than any other kind of software, GAMES push hardware developers to climb to the next plateau, and that's great.

But if you want to really be a huge success? You need to remember that you can't be so cutting edge that the playerbase spends more time trying to balance on that cutting-knife-edge than they do ACTUALLY PLAYING YOUR GAME.

I mean, it's not just LotRO. I bought Tabula Rasa because the idea of a good Sci-fi MMO excited me -- and couldn't get the game to play, at all. I made it halfway through the tutorial before I gave up.

I have a copy of Age of Conan gathering dust in my office closet because if I deleted everything but the operating system off my PC, I still wouldn't have the harddrive space to INSTALL IT -- forget about whether or not my other system specs would be up to speed.

It doesn't matter if your game is awesome if people can't run it. WoW graphics are comic-book in style (On purpose - comic-book-style imagery has successfully sold for five decades - uncanny valley CGI? Not so much.) and requires what is now low-end hardware to run quite well. That's at least part of the reason they have retained 10 million active subscribers. Ten. Million. No one seems to know what it is they they're doing to enjoy the kind of grade-curve-breaking success, but I'll tell you what they aren't doing -- they aren't pushing the hardware envelope -- that is not, in any way, where they garner their win.

I had a great, really fun time playing Lord of the Rings last night. Kate and I led a group of heroes (total strangers) into the ruins of Fornost, the last, ruined, capitol of the Kingdom of the North, now thick with wights and orcs and wargs and their horrible leaders, bound to life by the morgul blades they wielded. We fought our first Nemesis-level foe, and defeated him only when Kate figured out that we had to light the old Kingdom's signal fires mounted on the rooftop where we faced him, in order to weaken him enough to win.

It was epic.

But you know what I enjoyed the most? It was the second night in a month where my PC hadn't locked up while playing the game.

"Not locking up" shouldn't be the thing I liked the best out of the whole night; that should be assumed.

My one regret of the evening shouldn't have been "the screenshot I took from the top of the tallest towers of Fornost was pretty boring, because I forgot to dial my graphics back up from the setting where I can play to the setting where it looks good."

Posted by Doyce at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)