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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.
 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
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.)
 So a few weeks ago, I was poking through an old chest of junk from high school and found something I thought I'd long, long LONG since lost. That image to the right gives the suspense away, but I'll say it anyway:
The pink-box, 1980 copyright, got it for Christmas out of a Sears catalog, "red box" Dungeons and Dragons. The dice are gone (as is the crayon included to color in the numbers), and the spine of the book is cut through so I could put it in a ring binder, and the box is full of old maps and worlds and character sheets, but it's there. The expert rules, too, in all its weird, crazy, "dwarves, elves, and halflings are characters classes, like warriors and wizards" glory.
And I want to run it so, so bad.
Or at least something like it. For me, a romp down the OD&D lane would be one thick with nostalgia, but I understand that, while the rules are kind of light, not everyone would want to spend the time grokking them (and ignoring the stuff you know from more recent, if not really improved editions) just to smack some kobolds for 1d6 damage with an iron mace.
But... something like that, you know? I love me some Wicked Age, or Spirit of the Century, and I long for a good campaign using Heroquest rules, but while WIcked Age is lean and mean and good story-making fun, and Spirit is a hell of a fun romp and plenty rules crunchy, and Heroquest has a kind of all-in-one fantasy beauty to it, none of the games I'm playing right now scratch a particular itch that I can best sum up as "defined progression."
You know what I mean; that thing that D&D does, where you get a certain number of experience points, and then there's a ch-ching and you get a new skill or new trick or new something. Wicked Age characters change, but it's more story-like. Spirit of the Century characters... shift but, superhero-like, don't really level up. Dogs characters change all the time, but it's as a result of things that happen in the story, not because you got 1000 xp and became a Dog-Exorcist, Level 3, you know? There's no level-up chart for fixing 2 Dogs towns and then *ding!* Heroquest is more traditional, but is like Hero System or other point-based games in some ways -- little, incremental changes that you pretty much get by your own spending of points.
I want... I dunno. Burning Wheel would probably do it, with its skills and mega-crunch and life paths, but it's a big meaty system that Kate played once and didn't love, and I don't want to have to learn and then teach another huge, meaty system, anyway. I did that with DnD 3.0 and 3.5, and it burned me out to the point where I won't play those games anymore; they make me sad the way a failed, codependent relationship does.
So I want something with some structure to character progression, some smacking-kobold fun, that I don't have to spend a lot of brain power learning... so something I already kind of know, and like, and didn't burn out on.
Continue reading ""I kick it (old school) for 1d6+2 damage."" »
So I've mentioned this game a couple times on the site, but haven't really gotten into the game that much or talked about the sessions. Let's fix that.
A few months back, I went down to Lee and De's with Kate, and we cracked open my copy of In A Wicked Age -- a game designed to do Sword and Sorcery in the vein of Howard or Tanith Lee. There's a cool podcast interview with Vincent about the game, here.
The game basically let's you draw a few cards to define the elements of the setting, pick up some of those elements as PCs, some as NPCs or setting, get each of them pointing guns at each others heads (metaphorically) and then dumping them into a situation together.
Combat/conflict is about as complicated as any "roll initiative/roll defense/gain advantage for next round" game, and is basically perfectly designed to create a kind of an anthology of loosely connected short stories that involve many of the same characters (to a greater or lesser degree) in many sessions. Each session jumps to a new chapter... forward in time... backwards, sideways... whatever. It's pretty hot, and the rules cool and pretty easy to 'get'.
It hit the gaming community, and everyone promptly built like 300 million new oracles to use the system in different settings -- unlike Dogs, it's highly setting-independent as a system.
Anyway, we got to the game-starting, and I opened to that part of the book, and we did that stuff. Here's what the book said to do, and what we did.
Continue reading "In a Wicked Age" »
Not a ton to say, really. Kate might disagree, but it doesn't feel as though a lot's been going on with Gaming-stuff.
* No Galactic or Spirit of the Century. *sad panda*
* I led a Kara raid up through the Opera event on Wednesday. That was fun in a wacky way; more stress, but we had a weird group and ended up doing stuff like taking out Moroes and company with no priests, chain-traps, and a lot of shooting things in the face.
* One of the other Raids on a 'free' night fell through, which left me with nothing to do, so I hopped on Syncerus the Drood and chewed up Strangethorn Vale and Duskwallow Marsh for awhile, dinging both 40 (hellooooo Dire Bear form) and 41.
* I didn't really want to watch the Oscars, so I played during that while Kate watched and filed a bunch of her books on our now-full shelves. This led to FINALLY getting Kayti done with the huge Zul Farrak dungeon for which I've been gathering quests and prepatory gear for... three months? A long time. During the run I dinged 47, and turning in the (eight!) quests afterwards took her all through 47 tp 48. Tanking the run was fun, though the paladin threat generation isn't as easy as I recall (partly due to trigger-happy pug-teammates).
Grezzk's guild is struggling to recreate itself in an active-raiding mold. Consequently, raid schedules are in flux, the officer corp is in flux, the guild charter... you get the picture. Old officers unhappy with the changes are leaving, etc. etc.
Y'know what I'm doing about it? Nothing. I went to the (vent-based) meeting to vote on various changes, and offered my two cents and a reality check or two on some of the rules, but volunteer to be a raid leader? No. Volunteer to be an officer? No.
Thanks. I've done that. I have the t-shirt and the "die in a fire" emails from former guildmates.
I log on. I play. If I'm really lucky, I get in a group with some folks and we have a good time. If not, I still get to blow stuff up and mess with my little characters and play a game.
A second job (unpaid, that is) I do not need.
I'm really not going to be able to do the Galactic game justice with an Actual Play report.
First, we've had four sessions now and I haven't done a report yet. The first one was back in late November, and the details are a bit hazy.
Second, a ton of stuff has gone on, and inevitably, I'm going to forget some stuff.
Third, I want to talk a bit about the mechanics in the game, so that's going to color things a bit, and there's a lot of that to talk about.
I'm going to give a shot, though, because the game deserves the thought and discussion.
So let's start from the beginning.
In Session 0, we had too many players. That's all right, because (a) one guy wasn't going to be able to stay with us for the whole run and (b) with a few extra players, we were more likely to have enough people to play even if someone couldn't make a session.
These are the characters we came up with. We each also had to come up with one planet and one faction that's active in the setting, and you repeat that between each of your three quests, also, during the first session, every Captain comes up with their own cliffhanger for the first quest to start with. They also pick the world the quest will feature. The player on the left picks a faction that will be prevalent. The player on the right comes up with a central NPC for the quest.
So there is a lot of communal world-building going on throughout the game, which means that each game of Galactic is very different in tone, elements, and story than any OTHER game, despite the "main" story being the same. (Even the Scourge itself is different in each game.)
Now, on the surface, Galactic looks like the kind of game where no one can miss a session. The reason for that is the way character creation works. Everyone makes up a starship captain, and then we sort of 'meet' each captain in turn, and everyone else at the table (except the gm) makes a crew member for that captain. Captains and their ships can run the gamut from an officer of the Concordant Navy to the captain of a commercial cruise ship to the leader of a ragtag group of scavengers -- it's all good. Thing is, it seems like "if someone doesn't show, then that crewmember isn't there on every captain's scene, and so forth", but as long as you make the 'minimum' number of players (which might be three plus the GM, maybe, but which could work with just two players, short-term), you're good to go.
The basic background of the setting is that mankind, after creating the huge Galactic Republic, was wiped out by the mysterious Scourge. One colony ship escaped the genocide, and founded a new home on a nasty, brutish world at the end of nowhere. They finally returned to the stars, found out about their lost history, and are starting to explore and colonize back in the direction of the "Core" -- the home of the original Republic. On the way, they run into lots of alien races who were once part of the Republic (and who often revile or worship humanity, by turns), as well as the ruins and abandoned technology of their own ancestors.
And then the Scourge wakes up.
The game is about how these captains (working alone for the most part) try to stop the thing that no one could stop the last time. It's got a strong feel of the new Battlestar Galactica for me, both in the story tone and in the mechanics and interplay of crew and captains.
MECHANICS
This is basically how the conflict works out.
A scene opens with a captain. We set up what happens and we play. At some point in there -- maybe right away, maybe later -- we get to a point where either I or the Captain say that something happens that other one says "no" to, and that's where and when we go to the Conflict system.
The conflict system works like so: in true Firefly- or BSG-style, there's two sides to every conflict -- there's "what the conflict is ostensibly about" and "the relationship between the Captain and one of the crew that is either going to be strengthened by Trust or weakened by Doubt as a result of what happens." It's important to understand that Winning or Losing the Goal happens INDEPENDENTLY of the Trust/vs/Doubt thing with the crewmember. You can totally get your ass kicked in the epic space battle, but the crewmember who is "on the hook" for that scene could trust you more at the end, because of the WAY things happened. Or vice versa: you could kick ass and take names, but your actions fill the crewmember with Doubt.
Anyway:
1. You figure out what the Conflict is about, and which crewmember is 'on the hook'. (This is my term for it -- not the game's.)
2. Then, the Crew who are involved take the one dice that they get to contribute to the conflict (there are painful and dangerous ways to contribute more dice -- sometimes a LOT more dice -- using what I and the author call the "leaf on the wind" mechanic) and decide if that dice is going to help the Quest or the Crew side of the conflict.
3. Then, the GM decides where he is going to allocate his dice in the conflict -- is it mostly going toward weakening the crew's resolve, or to resisting the Goal of the quest? Maybe an even mix? The GM has a budget of dice he can use on each captain (plus any Doubt the crew has in the captain), so I can't just crush them every time with as many dice as I want.
4. Once the captain sees where the crew are putting their effort, and what forces are arrayed against him, he puts out his own dice, which can be quite numerous -- he has multi-dice 'archetypes' that can be brought to bear, as well as the ability to utilize any Trust that he's earned from any of his crew (like any captain, he can put the crew's Trust to use, though that puts that Trust at risk -- he can lose it). Finally, he can decide that whatever he's doing might put innocent bystanders at risk, and the bigger those potential Consequences are, the more extra dice he can bring in. They are BIG dice too, those Consequence dice, so they're very tempting.
When it's all said and done, the dice are all arrayed against each other, and there is rolling, and comparisons a lot like the old dice game "War", and narration of that round happens, and then folks might have lost, or they might 'give', or they might rally and go into another round and keep battling until the whole thing is resolved. At the end, the Captain has either won or lost their goal, and one of the crew members has either gained Doubt or Trust in the captain (and the same crewmember can totally have both Trust AND Doubt in the captain, over time, which is awesome.
Once that scene is done, we do it all again with the NEXT player; we switch to a new captain, everyone switches gears to playing a new character, and off we go.
So... that's kind of what happens in play.
STORY/GAME STRUCTURE
This is a very set kind of story arc. Each captain plays through three quests. A quest is over when the captain wins three conflicts having to do with that quest. Now... that might be three wins in a row, or 2 wins, then a loss, and then a win; or maybe five straight losses followed by three wins (which would be kind of cool). Doesn't matter -- at some point, they get the three wins, the quest is accomplished, and they move to the next, then the next. (Unless they die -- they CAN die, and there are provisions in place for that.)
Once the third quest is done, we move to the Last Big Quest, and at the end humanity is either saved or it's wiped out by the Scourge. The end.
Right now, we're about four sessions in, and pretty much everyone is done with their first quest.
Session 1 (Chris, Tim, Dave)
We started with Tim's Captain Nils, the captain of Isabel's Dream, which is ostensibly a cruise ship, but is also a neutral ground for diplomatic meetings and happens to be armed (definsively!) to the bloody teeth.
Tim had a great cliffhanger set up, and I was looking forward to it, but I also wanted to make sure we were 'getting our roleplay in.' Matt Wilson is a great game designer, but in playing his other 'big' game, Primetime Adventures, I'd noticed that players got wrapped up enough in the mechanics that they didn't... you know... "just roleplay" -- they only did with regards to the Conflict -- making for very focused, but very short scenes... maybe only a few lines of dialog and lots of narrative. That's partly Matt's playstyle (as I understand it), but I wanted to make sure that we were taking the time to roleplay just for the sake of roleplaying as well.
Also, this "who is the 'featured' crewmember" thing was kind of new to everyone, so I took a page from BSG and started the 'show' with a scene between the captain and the crewmember-of-note. In this case, that was Dave's college student, working as an assistant purser on the ship.
We opened the scene with Tim's captain briefing the purser on the seating arrangements for a big banquet that evening on the ship. This was an impromptu thing, but Tim really rose to the occasion, rattling off page after page of detailed "do's" and "DO NOTS" about everyone attending the party -- who couldn't sit next to who, and why, and which group's hated which other groups, or who needed special treatment, or practices, or food, or greetings -- while the harried and utterly overwhelmed purser trailed along in his wake, nodding and trying to take notes. The scene really illustrates how good Nils is at his role (which is largely an act) and how new to the whole thing Dave's purser is.
So now the cliffhanger, which is simply this:
During the banquet, as the Dream comes into orbit over the planet of R___, the mysterious black box in Captain Belinar's room (passed down for generations in his family in readiness for 'when the Scourge return') begins to beep. The captain is called to his suite, and he and a few select members of his crew enter. As soon as they do, the box emits every more beeps, and the ship shifts perceptibly. The helm hails the captain, and informs him they have just lost all steerage control, and the ship has moved into a landing pattern with the planet's surface.
There are a few seconds of silence, and the captain comments, "It's unfortunate that we're not atmosphere capable."
The goal for the conflict was "Get control of the ship away from the box, before we enter the atmosphere."
I'd love to give a play-by-play, but it's been months, so here were the key bits:
* Dave's neophyte-purser character was at some level mind-melded with the mysterious black box.
* Chris' security chief/ship's chaplain was a pain in the captain's tuchas.
* The captain kept the ship from entering orbit by cutting all the main power in the ship (including things like the gravity control) and using on-board nuclear missiles (!), fired at the planet (!!!) to introduce enough counter-momentum to get back into a shaky low-orbit.
* Dave's character, as a college-level historian, was shocked that the captain targeted the planet randomly to induce the right thrust for the ship, ignoring the fact that he was targeting key bits of the local ruins, such as the famed "Third Pylon", but the captain's plan paid off : the planet's highly damaging Acid Raid (which actually shouldn't have been falling during that phase of the planet's weather) damaged the missiles enough that they didn't damage anything of any importance on the uninhabited planet -- several didn't even fire.
We then switched to Dave's character, Allysande Daen, who's main goal is to track down her father, a former navy admiral, and find out what happened to him and What's Going On.
We join the crew making planet fall on Ando III, a cool-temperate planet with a vaguely oriental flavor, on which "Zeno", Daen's father's former XO, is living... in a well-heeled asylum.
Tim's crewmember Bosley, Daen's personal 'batman' is the crewmember on the hook. Chris is playing "Smoke" the stoner-mode mechanic who keeps Daen's "Heart of Darkness" working. Daen and Bosley are heading to the Asylum. Smoke is heading to the local bazaar to scrounge up some supplies.
Bosley, who knows Daen well, is quietly talking with her during the mechanized rickshaw ride to the asylum. They're discussing things like "Are you prepared to tell him how your career is doing?" (It isn't: she left the navy to pursue this personal quest.)
Dave's cliffhanger setup was the next bit:
Daen and Bosley walk into the public "sun room" where Zeno and a number of other patients are sitting around doing various sun-room activities. He looks up and recognizes her. She says "Hello, Commander. I'm looking for my father, and I was hoping you might be able to help me find him."
The old man nods and says "I was afraid of that." Then he and EVERY OTHER PATIENT IN THE ROOM pulls guns out from under their lap blankets and open fire.
The goal for the conflict is essentially "Win the firefight without killing Zeno."
((A word about conflict goals: they are best when they have interesting failure options built into them. "Survive the fight." is boring, but "Survive without killing Xeno" is cool: you can LOSE the conflict, but that could mean lots of things. Maybe you lose the firefight; or have to flee; or the police arrive and arrest everyone; or you win, but you shoot the one source of information you have... or a dozen other things. Setting up a good conflict WITH INTERESTING FAILURE OPTIONS is a key part of not just Galactic, but any game. Losing should be just as interesting, if not more so, than winning.))
So there's a gunfight. Meanwhile, Smoke is in the bazaar, and only a few seconds after the shots start in the asylum, some guys jump him in the bazaar and he's running for his life and shouting for help from the Captain as well. (His crew-dice were in on the side of winning the Crew conflict, not the Quest one -- how well she handled Smoke's problems would build Trust with Bosley. Bosley was ALSO in on the Crew conflict, not the quest.)
Again, I have only a few bullet points.
* The captain took a few bullets in this fight. Dice that get knocked out of a conflict stand the chance of being "impaired" - made unavailable for the rest of the quest. A LOT of Daen's "Warrior" archetype dice got impaired during the fight, so that's how that was narrated.
* Dave went to a lot of work to protect both Tim and Chris's dice from getting knocked out -- lots of shouted commands and shoving Bosley out of harm's way and suchlike.
* Some 'deep cover' agents from the organization that Daen is working with a lot showed up to help out (use of her Connections trait, which allows (or forces) rerolls)
* Dave ended up winning the conflict, and closes in on Zeno, who's run out of bullets. He agrees to talk, and then goes into a violent seizure (seizures being one of the "Scourge traits" in this version of the game.
And cut to the next guy.
Captain Argon Slash is docking his ship, the Legion, on "The Drift" -- a massive space-station in the middle of uninhabited space, comprised of hundreds if not thousands of different ships crushed, bound, and welded together. Each captain has his own 'flavor', and Slash's is a kind of mix between Firefly and an anime where the characters often make Super Deformed angry-faces. The crewmembers for this part of the quest are Sonja, Slash's ex-wife and the ship's negotiator; and Jake, who's sort of a young, crazy, gun-ho shootist (and Slash's fifth-cousin).
Slash, who collected crazy Solar Republic artifacts (and then tries to integrate them with his ship), has discovered a weird pyramidal object. He's not sure what it does, but he's heard a rumor that at the heart of the Drift are ships that date back as far as the Solar Republic -- ships that still WORK. His 'plan' is to find a way into the core of the gang-turf-controlled Drift and plug the device in... and just... see what happens.
Which is his approach to most ancient tech.
The three are heading toward a meeting with a contact on the Drift who controls the territory they need to get through when they're jumped by members of the neo-luddite, anti-expansion "Blue Sky" faction.
Slash holds them off -- thermal detonator in Jabba's Palace-style -- with a Mysterious Ancient Artifact (or two). Jake is waiting (and eager) for orders to shoot. Sonja is verbally sniping at everyone. The following verbal exchange takes place
Sonya: "Listen to the man -- I was once married to him, and I can assure you it's dangerous to get close to him."
Blue Sky: "Silence! We would hear nothing from someone who has succumbed to the sin of divorce!"
Sonya: "Excuse me?!?"
Blue Sky: "Quiet!"
Sonya: "All right, you rudimentary-lathe people have gone too far."
And that's when the shooting starts.
* Slash was pretty much conning the Blue Sky folks all the way through.
* Jake's crew dice where very hot -- he was shooting all over.
* Sonya was saved from 'knock out' by Argon's love of tech. She takes a shot and the chest and Slash cries out, running over to her and pawing at the hole in her clothing. She protests that she's fine -- and he reveals he was just checking to see if the armor weave that he put into her jacket (without her knowledge) held. It did! Slash is happy -- Sonya is pissed.
I put a LOT of dice against the Crew aspect on this fight, cuz I wanted Sonya to have Doubt in Slash, but the group banded together and held me off -- Sonya, although she doesn't *like* Argon very much, does *trust* him... at least she trusts his instincts with technology. (Ironically, it's turned out that Sonya is the only crewmember who DOES have trust in Argon... maybe the other's don't know him that well?)
The Blue Sky scatters, and Jake runs off after them, whooping and hollering. Sonya storms off back to the ship. Argon is left by himself.
Back to Captain Nils
The goal of this conflict was not very good on my part -- simply "Get Control of the Ship back from the Box." It was a FUNNY conflict, to be sure, but not a good one -- failure would have resulted in nothing much happening, which sucks. Luckily, they one.
What happened.
* The box used some kind of lightning on Chris' guy... then sort of mind-controlled him. Nils had to incapacitate him with some other ancient family-heirloom widget.
* Dave's character was the box-translator most of the way through this. ("No, no, using the blue lightning against the Reverend is BAD!")
* The box was receiving a signal from the planet, telling it to come down to the planet. The Signal is on U-space frequency ... ironically, from the just-saved-from-destruction Third Pylon!
* Nils is able to control the box by speaking commands to it in Trilatian. (The Solar Republic version of the /sudo command.)
And Allysande Daen...
With Zeno having seizures and possibly doing himself serious internal harm, SMOKE has to talk the Captain through dosing the man on something that will bring him out of the seizures and subdue him... without killing him. Luckily, Smoke is something of a 'pharmaceutical expert'.
* Smoke gives quick, professional medical advice and actually shouts at Allysande when she hesitates at one point.
* She trust him and follows his instructions.
* Bosley now really trusts her for her success and for supporting her crew. (Though I think we awarded Trust wrong here...)
... and that was the end of session one. I'll put another post up for Sessions 2 and 3 combined, and a third for Session Four, which is where we are now.
... or, to be fair, a Gaming-widow in general.
I've been giving my Google-calendar a workout for the last couple days, because although I am a gamer of many different colors and stripes, I have traveled down the road of life-imbalance quite a few times since the early 90s (oh, those early MUDs and MUSHes; oh those hours of Space Hulk and Battletech map creation), mid-90s, and far far more recently... and I'd just rather not go back there, thanks.
So: I raid in WoW (though I could wish for a little more progression-status and a little less farm-status -- I did my farming in my youth :P), and I have some alts I really enjoy, and I play LotRO, and a have a copy of Tabula Rasa winging its way to me for a practically criminal discount, and I have table top games I'm running and even more that I want to run, and then there's writing stuff, and reading stuff... the question before me is "how do I get enough time to 'blow stuff up', without ensuring that I have "ALL THE TIME YOU COULD EVER WANT, AND THEN SOME, YOU BASTARD"?
Ahem.
I'm not an expert, but these are the guidelines I'm working with right now.
1. Schedule my time. I don't mean just my play time, but just flat out schedule the Big Stuff that needs doing during the next week. Note: I use the word "needs" advisedly, and not without some irony; leveling my druid does not "need" doing... it's just one of those things I'd enjoy getting to do.
2. Kate and Kaylee first. The time I will, without fail, spend with My Girls during the week goes on the calendar first. Everything else bends to adapt. Non-negotiable. This is fairly easy for Kaylee-time, as Jackie and I already have a set schedule that pretty much ensures I see her every day (barring the off-weekend). Kate and I -- not habitually that detail-oriented -- are working on actually scheduling stuff, too: weekly date nights and the Regular Tuesday Night Activity (currently swing dancing). This also (happily) includes some activities like LotRO and watching geeky shows like Avatar, so... Win/Win!
3. Limited 'play commitments'. I have a limited amount of time to be online and playing stuff. Call it 15 to 20 hours a week. My guild has planned activities that take about 15 to 20 hours a week. I do ****NOT**** want to spend all my online time on those planned activities. Therefore, I need to strictly limit my raiding commitments. This basically boils down to (selfishly, very selfishly) signing up only for stuff *I* really want to do, and NOT signing up for things just to 'help folks out'. I've prioritized my time helping online-people out before, and it always means I spend too much time online with an exponentially decreasing amount of personal enjoyment. I play so *I* can have fun; bugger off, internets. This rule means I get to spend a good portion of 'me' time completely unstructured. I approve.
4. Vetoes Unless I am currently involved in some kind of group activity in which my sudden departure will result in screwing over a bunch of other people. (I'm GMing a game, a central player in a game, or in some kind of group, online), Kate (and, to a lesser degree, Kaylee) can ask me to drop what I'm doing. ((Emergencies, of COURSE, mean that I say "sorry guys, gotta go" and I f-ing GO. Duh. Obviously.)) Conversely, I reserve the right to go kill stuff instead of watching a third hour of Trading Spaces... or Little Einsteins.
There are unspoken parts of this, like the assumption that there will be lots of 'white space' on my calendar that will get filled in naturally with the "sand" of honey-dos, chores, random acts of laziness, and especially impromptu fun stuff involving either The Girls, or Games, or both.
But you have to lay out the Big Stuff first, before the whole area fills in with sand and leaves no room for them.
Or so it seems to me. I'll report back, maybe, on how it all works in practice.
Just a quickie.
MMO: WoW
Grezzk
This was kind of an exciting week with the guild, as we expanded our raid schedule a bit to accommodate more people.
Normally, we do the (10-man) Karazhan instance on the weekends (most of the real progress is on Saturday and Sunday for a couple hours, though we do sometimes get started with a drunken Friday night 'run' for laughs).
This last week, we ran a Kara raid on the weeknights as well. This is a pretty big deal, because you can't be saved to two instances at the same time, which means we had 20+ different people (or at least different characters) participating, and two runs means more gear upgrades for everyone. Both teams pretty much cleared the whole instance. (I believe the weekday team did it in three nights, and the weekend group did everything but Maiden in two runs and just decided to skip the Maiden of Virtue, as there was no benefit for anyone to doing the fight.)
That was cool, but even better was fielding a full 25-man group to take a shot a High King Maulgar (and his court of Ogres) on Friday night, followed by Gruul the Dragonkiller.
This was a pretty momentous thing. The last time we took a serious stab at that fight was in November, and we didn't really get enough people: we didn't actually even beat Maulgar, and we've had that fight pretty much worked out for awhile.
Now... this time... okay, the signs weren't great. We took maybe an hour to get started, and we have a LOT, and I mean a LOT of new people. The guy who usually magetanks Krosh Firehand was on his healer, so Lee was magetanking with Wyrmeyed. We had a new guy tanking Kiggler the Crazed who'd never done it before. We had a new guy who doesn't speak English very well tanking the Warlock. Probably half our healers were new. We brought a level 68 guy along just to fill out to 25 people. It was crazy.
So we fight through the trash to get to the High King, we explain the fight to the new people, and how complicated the five-simultaneous-pulls start is, and we say "go" and we go...
... and we one-shot it. Damn near perfect fight. After not doing it for months and then bringing a bunch of new people. That was cool. I was up around 900 damage-per-second, and another guy broke 1000 dps. Insane. In-sane.
So it's on to Gruuls. The Raid Leader announces that we're going to do three tries and be done with the fight, no matter how it's going. No building frustration: we have a lot of new people (we swapped in a 70 for the 68 at this point, with no hard feelings), and a brand new strategy to learn.
Let me explain what kills people in this fight. It's not really the Boss. Gruul is an incredibly big guy in a very big cavern, and he does this thing every so often where he smashes the ground. Again, this guy is BIG: when he smashes the ground, it jumps like a trampoline and everyone goes flying in the air in random directions. When you land, you are slowed... slowed... slowed, and six seconds after you land, you're frozen for a few seconds, and then SHATTERED. Everyone who's within 15 feet of you at that point will cause you (a lot of) damage, then you can move again, if you aren't dead. Around four people or so around you, and you stand a good chance of dying. If no one is close to you, you take no damage.
The problem is, even with a big room, there are 25 people in there. The chance of you landing too close to too many people is HIGH, and it's hard to get away when you're slowed. So we have a strategy now where everyone but the healers and the tanks run to the walls before the slam, so we don't fly around anywhere -- just the healers and tanks do. Less people flying around means less damage from the Shatter.
And it works. Damn it works. We did not get Gruul down, but we got him lower than we ever have in the past (again, with a lot of new people and no practice in two months). We had some bad luck where all our healers got silenced at a very bad point in the fight, so the tanks died... and on another attempt, sheer bad luck bounced all the healers and the tanks on top of each other, so the whole healing and tanking groups Shattered each other to death.
But that's just bad luck. We can beat bad luck. We totally have the damage-dealers we need (I broke 1000dps on one attempt, and another guy broke an unheard-of 1200) and we have the method we need to beat that bastard. It might even be this Friday night.
... when I will be on a plane to New York, which I'm very happy about... so I wish them luck.
ANYWAY: it was a very fun series of runs, and Grezzk got the last of the gear he can get from either of the instances (pretty much -- I've given up on getting the Wolfslayer Rifle or Nightbane's mail leggings, and that's okay) -- Curator in Karazhan dropped my Demon Hunter (Tier 4) shoulderguards and I got the matching gloves off High King Maulgaur, so not only are my stats pretty damn good, I *match* -- at this point, I'm going along on the runs to help the rest of the guild gear up and to have a good time (which it almost always is). My last two major equipment upgrades until we get past Gruul and start doing the later 25-man raids are going to come through Arena pvp.
Syncerus and Thienedera
I'm leveling up two Horde alts right now. Syncerus the tauren druid (the bearcat cow), and Thienedera the paladin. Last week, they got a lot of love. This week, I'm leaving them logged out in Inns to build up their rested rating for that lovely double XP bonus. I've seen the low and mid-game content already -- I'm not interested in dwelling on it this time, so I'm focusing on flying up to 70 as fast as I can with both of them. Thie is a little lower level than Syn at this point (she's on a PvP server for now, so I'm a little more cautious), but I expect they'll get a lot of playtime soon.
My grand scheme is to have one Damage dealer, one Tank, and one Healer at level 70 and reasonably well-geared by the time the next expansion hits. I don't have much interest in alts past that point.
Kayti
I have, really, one alliance character. I finally dusted off Kayti and took her for a spin this week, and it was a lot of fun. Spell casters are a total pain in the ass on a paladin, but if I avoid them it's a nice relaxing solo grind. I'm taking my time on her because there's stuff on the Alliance side of the mid-game that I HAVEN'T seen.
LotRO
Kate was available to play this week, so we got on Geiri and Tiranor. We had a lot of Fellowship quests to do, so I got on the Looking for Fellowship channel and asked around for some more people. A guy sent me a tell and pretty quick we were in a group with a bunch of guys who all know each other in real life and were all on voicechat.
Two hours later, all those Fellowship quests were done, Kate had gotten hooked up with some new crafted loot from one of the other players, and I had built up a pretty good start on a "DPS" set of equipment to put on when I'm not tanking -- something that will become a lot more useful when Book Twelve opens up new options for Guardians, and we had some new people in our Friends list. It was another good run with a random group of strangers -- in that arena, I believe LotRO is the Best MMO on the market, bar NONE.
Tabletop
No gaming this week, but here's what I having coming up:
Ongoing:
* Galactic: We still have a lot of game left to do there.
* Spirit of the Century: Need to get those sessions started up again.
Upcoming
* I have Savage Donjon Squad ready for our next pick-up game session.
* Once Galactic is done, I want to take a stab at Bliss Stage with Dave and De and whoever else I can get in.
* I have the pre-order copy of In a Wicked Age, a sword and sorcery bit of genius from the guy who did Dogs in the Vineyard. Totally new system. Totally new kind of Awesome.
* Don't think I've forgotten about our characters for Breaking the Ice, Kate. I haven't. Also, I have been challenged to play a Paranoia-set game using Breaking the Ice, and I don't intend to back down from that. That's a two-person game -- anyone out there want to learn a new game set in a familiar, crazy setting?
So, this part is going to be very sketchy. For more information on the characters, the setting, the worlds, and and the factions, check out the Galactic Playtest section of RandomWiki -- Denver Playtest Two.
Players involved were Tim, Chris, Dave, Jay, and Randy.
Continue reading "Galactic: characters and everything else" »
Then Isabel, seeing before all others that the Scourge would indeed be the end of Humanity, did gather up the faithful and lead them across the Wastelands and through many hardships and past many tempting oases, until they came to their new home. There, Isabel said they would be safe, and told the people to persevere, and was gone.
On the nasty, unpleasant world of Caliban, that is the story at the core of the 'origins' tales in most of the religions. There was a great and powerful kingdom/empire/shogunate, and then the Scourge came (why and how they came varies wildly), and the great prophet Isabel led the Chosen on a long trip and left them to fend for themselves in a rough and dangerous place that was, nonetheless, safe from the Scourge. The Chosen survived, and everyone else died. Noah's Ark, but with a LOT less water.
Time passes. Many many many generations of people live and die (often violently) on Caliban, which is a harsh world requiring harsh measures and harsher rules. The world is sparsely but widely settled, and its people are highly territorial, warring with all other territories both for survival and for the supposed evils "they" have committed since time immemorial. Mankind slowly becomes more civilized (or at least more technologically advanced) and, like Earth, people find a comfortable place in their lives for their religion -- maybe making it a central part of their lives... maybe not thinking about it at all.
About five generations ago, someone found a long lost ruins down near the almost-uninhabitable equator. In the ruins are some very very odd documents and... artifacts that contain references to the prophet Isabel.
Many references.
And a lot of math that people are only barely able to figure out -- math and information that seems to be showing the exact location of the great ship that Isabel brought her people to safety in... and that location is smack dab in The Reef.
The Reef... which is an asteroid belt on the outer edge of the solar system of which Caliban is a part.
Space-faring technology at that point in time amounted to a few unmanned rockets being fired into the outer atmosphere. (When fighting your neighbors and survival are your two main motivators for several millenna, a budding space program is not a big priority.)
People were, needless to say, a bit agitated.
Temporary treaties were signed. Much work is done in a surprisingly short period of time. Several territories send ships to the coordinates in the Reef.
They find Isabel's ship.
The five generations since then have seen a lot of change.
-=-
So, the basic legend seems to be true. There was a big ... empire? Federation? Something. A big human-founded republic that spanned thousands of worlds. Somewhere at the height of that, the Scourge came... or were created... or manifested... something. Isabel saw the writing on the wall, got together an enormous generation ship with all the best tech (much of which Caliban techs are still trying to reverse-engineer), and set out to get clear of the impending destruction of the human race.
She passed a lot of really nice, habitable planets and, for reasons unknown, picked arid, barely habitable Caliban to settle on. Humanity had to work so hard to survive in those first years that they lost -- or gave up -- pretty much any knowledge that didn't focus directly on making it to the next sunrise. Society fell apart, scattered, and slowly... very very slowly... rebuilt, and discovered where it had come from; the disaster it had avoided. There is a resurgence of faith, but also a massive drive to analyze all the old texts in light of this new information.
What does mankind do in a situation like that?
They head right back out to the stars, of course.
-=-
In the current time, there are many colonies spreading out from Caliban, funded by the still highly competitive, barely cordial Territories of the home world. Beyond the colonies are the Remnants --- hundreds, maybe thousands of worlds that were once part of the Solor Republic that was humanity at its finest. Left behind are ruins, lost technology, mysteries, and hundreds of Alien clans that still live on those worlds and who were, inexplicably, untouched by the Scourge that destroyed humanity. Some are neutral toward the last survivors of mankind; some worship them like returning gods; most of them shoot on sight (using technology far better than Caliban's), screaming in a rage. It has been well over two thousand years since they've seen a human, and still they remember the pain of when it all came crumbling down.
You play a ship's captain, sailing the void between worlds in search of... something. (What that is is different for everyone, isn't it?) You might be a captain in the Concordance Navy. You might be a smuggler, or entrepreneur, or merchant, or archaeologist, or scavenger, or one of the idle rich, or something else: no matter what, you're the Captain, and when things get rough, it's just you and your crew.
Things are about to get rough.
The Scourge is coming again.
Continue reading "So let's talk about Galactic." »
I was going to write up a post about the character/universe generation for the Galactic game from this weekend (a complete campaign I'm foolishly trying to cram into the space between here and mid-December), but I wanted to transfer everyone's notes up to the wiki first.
And reading their [censored] awful handwriting, I am now totally [censored] blind, so you'll have to wait for the update until I learn how to read braille.
I thought *my* handwriting was bad. Holy hell.
Anyway, the stuff I sacrificed my eyes to transcribe is on the wiki here.
So here's what's been going on.
Face to Face
Ran a murder mystery for the most recent Spirit of the Century game on Friday night. "Doctor Brightman is dead." Good stuff, for all that I suck at doing mysteries. It was "Margie's session," so I gave it a college try, anyway. There were investigations, autopsies, some wonderfully fun characterizations, a seance, and a whole lot of laughing. Present were Chris, Tim, Dave and Margie; again, I have to give a nod to Kate's observation that I run better games when I'm NOT close friends with everyone at the table -- we just generally focus more on the game and less on everything else.
Didn't even seem to get too sidetracked by having Kaylee around for the first part of the game.
This Thursday, it's Zombies at(e) my Homecoming Dance 2: The Revenge of the Hickey.
Online, not MMO
I'm going to be playing in (not running) a play-by-forum game of Galactic(!), using the ashcan edition that Matt did up for Gencon this year. That should be fun. No character information or even links yet -- we're juuuust getting rolling.
MMO
WoW
Grezzk is still level 70. I've actually being getting into some fun dungeon runs lately (there are only about... five or so in the later game that I haven't done even once, if you only count the five-mans). I'm not UBER geared or anything, but at this stage my 'effective level' is 108, taking my gear into account. (Taking gear into account, the maximum level in WoW is somewhere around 150, while perhaps 125 is as high as I'm likely to get with the Guild I'm part of.) Anyway, I'm still having a lot of fun with Grezzk.
Hit 45 on Kayti. Nothing terribly exciting to report on her. People keep stopping in mid-run to ask me what kind of weapon I'm using, cuz they can't figure out how a tanking paladin is topping the damage reports. I try to explain that the damage is all from the paladin abilities, and that I would do pretty much the same damage if i were naked, but no one seems to get it. Eh. In a few more levels, I can hurl an "Avenger's Shield" (think Captain America-esque energy contruct) at enemies to pull them, and tanking is going to get a LOT easier. Woot.
I tanked a run into Scarlet Monastery's Cathedral a few days ago and it went really smoothly. We obliterated everything and aside from one jackass who screwed up the boss-looting at the end, it was a great run.
There was one point where I TOTALLY "pulled a Hype" with her as well (which is a tactic that *I*, personally, have never seen work in WoW, that I used to do all the time in CoH). We were clearing out a big chapel area, one clump of guys at a time... like 3 or 4 guys at a time -- it was SAFE, but it wasn't particularly hard. About halfway through I told the other paladin "heal me, I want to try something" (I didn't really tell the priest ahead of time. oops :) and I just ran through a couple (or three :) clusters at once and pulled them all back to the group -- something like 8 to 10 guys. Got em all nice and pissed at me and the group just burned em down. I think most of them were JUST about out of mana when the fight ended.
The group's response: "That was fun. Do it again."
LotRO
Tyelaf is level 21. We (he tends to work with Tirawyn the Captain) have done most of the quests around the town of Bree, and now have two BIG GROUP things to deal with -- spying on the Witch King himself, and a foray into the Great Barrows that house the last ruler of Cardolan. Yikes. After that... folks need a lot of help in the Lone Lands, and a lot of that involves shooting Orcs, so I'm THERE.
Geiri remains my toughest character. I don't know if he's my FAVORITE, but he's definitely tied for first. At level 16 (17?) he's got considerably higher morale (read: health) than Tye, and he and Tiranor the elven hunter TEAR through quests that I recall being a pretty big pain in the tuchas with Tye. We were on last night for a few hours and finished up all the storyline in Ered Luin (the Blue Mountains and Celondim) and headed East through the Shire and into Bree, where we met up with Strider and continued to harass the kinda-sorta undead dwarf Skorgrim -- that dude HAS to be tired of seeing use show up and mess with his plans over and over. It's been like... well, for Tiranor, it's going on 600 years, now. (God I love how the time-instanced storyline in LotRO works.)
Downside to Geiri: he takes half a coon's age to kill anything on his own. However, this rarely comes up. :)
His personal bane: creban. Friggin' evil birds.
Oh, and elves that go running off of cliffs and break his damn ankles.
I haven't played Yarren much, but she's also wrapped up all the quests in the Shire and has headed to Bree to see what this "Strider" guy wants (something about heading into the Old Forest to look for some hobbits he's supposed to meet up with in Bree). She's also going to give up the plain-jane professions of farming and cooking. Poking at old scrolls and bits of lost lore from the Second Age is SO much more interesting (and likely to get her face melted off, but THAT'S FUN TOO.)
-----
And... that's about it.
From one of the game's author's a great tweak to the phases in SotC character generation to move away from a time-oriented series of phases and instead use a more organic series of questions to find answers for:
* Who are you?
* Who are you connected to?
* What's your big issue?
* What kind of situations do you see yourself being involved in?
it's very very good.
Don't get me wrong -- I love the phases of character creation in the standard Spirit of the Century rules, and I've used them both in a standard game and an Amber game with good success, but the phases themselves are pretty closely tied to the post-Great War setting. This tweak allows you to 'fit' character generation into virtually any setting with no problems at all -- it has all the Aspecty-goodness of SotC with some great flavor added from things like Primetime Adventures "issues" and even the old-school Amber questionnaires. Good stuff.
Caught up by the desire to play a little wacky horror roleplaying in the middle of the week, I got a few folks together, pulled out the pocket-sized campfire horror game Dead of Night, and we had ourselves some fun.
The players:
* Jay, in town from New York for the next few months -- catch his part in Pride and Prejudice next month at the Denver Performing Arts Center.
* Meera the Fierce
* Randy
The Concept:
* It is 1985
* You are in High School
* Heathers and Pretty in Pink meets Shawn of the Dead
The Main NPCS:
* Meridith, the Homecoming Queen
* Troy, the "captain awesome", knows-everyones-name, cool but cocky quarterback (played by James Marsden)
* Rick "the Hickey" - head linebacker, bully (played by Jake Busey)
* Sarah - salutatorian, on the field hockey varsity team, pretty, popular, and rumored to be pregnant (I said Julia Stiles was playing this part, but I was actually thinking of Erika Christensen. Huh.)
* Kinney(, Melvin) - an angry young man who's been threatening to burn down the school since sixth grade
* Bender - the stoner dude
My constraints for character creation:
* Tell me why you're NOT going to the Homecoming Dance
* Tell me about some kind of relationship you have with at least two of the NPCs above
Here's what we got:
* Meera: Alice ("don't call me Allison") - the smart, acidic, Scary Goth Chick. Sophomore. She's Troy's little sister and dated Kinney in Junior High until he got "too intense". She's not at the homecoming dance because... c'mon, look at her. Look at THEM -- it's obvious.
* Jay: Chris - the slightly stoned, visionary singer/guitarist/songwriter of Beefcake Express (not the band's actual name, which I can't remember, but it was close to that). Bender is the bass player, and Kinney is the drummer. In play, we also discovered he had a one-night 'thing' with the homecoming queen, and he still has a thing for her. He's a Junior. He's not at the homecoming dance because the class officers selected a clearly inferior cover band to play at the dance.
* Randy: Jason - the rebellion-through-kleptomania kid. He's a sophomore, and has a crush on Sarah. Rick the Hickey has selected him as a particular target for harassment, but Jason returns the favor by routinely stealing Rick's stuff. ((He really doesn't like Rick because he dated Sarah for a little while last year.)) He's not at the dance because he didn't have the guts to ask Sarah (who, because of her personal drama, is also not going). Also, as we find out with the first in-character line in the game, Jason always plays halflings.
What are they all doing during the Homecoming dance?
* They're in the basement at Alice's house, playing Call of Cthulu. Alice is GMing. Jason is playing a short british man.
Quote and other wackiness after the cut.
Continue reading "Zombies at(e) the Homecoming Dance" »
I actually had two points for my "serious gamer" post, but the thing was getting too long, so here's the rest of it.
Let me pick out the bits in the first post that had to do with my second point.
Player B can have an extremely productive 90 minutes online and then go to a movie with local friends.
Productive. Getting stuff done.
Cleaned up some old quests, and started collecting some materials I need for the next 'big' dungeon I want to do with her.
How did I know I'd need them? I looked up dungeon instances for the basic level I'm at, focusing on stuff that was higher level by a little bit, because (a) it's better rewards and (b) I'm a pretty good player, so I want to push myself.
Also, following some research on the "maintankadin" forums, I respecced her for a stronger tanking build, which cost me a ton of gold, but the results of which I liked.
I don't just research what there is to do -- I read about how to do it. Yeah, most of the posts are about playing at 70, and if I'm only level 40, that's not entirely relevant, but it does tell me what to aim for, what to expect, and most importantly, what I will be expected to do if I want to team up with other people.
... spent some time in the afternoon doing more work on game-prep for that face to face game, and reading up on LotRO quests and appropriate surnames for Men of Gondor.
Prep, prep, prep. I want the face to face game to come off well, and while I don't prep scenarios as such, I *do* prep by getting familiar with the rules. For this game coming up, I'm researching:
1. Half-life
2. Horror movies of the 80s
3. Mullets
And I'm looking up surnames of the Men of Gondor (note: they don't use them) because at level 15 your LotRO character can pick a surname, and with the server I'm on, it's important to me that it's accurate. I'm a fan-boy.
Kate and did a little LotRO stuff, which mostly amounted to us running around the Old Forest in fear for our very lives.
Why do I prep? Why do I look stuff up? Because eventually the shit is going to hit the fan in whatever game you're playing, and you want to continue to have fun -- not have a frustrating night.
That's the same reason I aim to do things that push my play ability. If my 'safe' play has more instances where I've pushed the limit and had to really work to succeed, then I'm ready for the times when I have to redline when I'm NOT expecting it.
Yes, we ran around all over, yes we scrambled -- the only time I didn't have fun was when I was defeated and had to retreat from some wild critters that really shouldn't have been that much of a challenge -- they WERE, because Kate and I got separated, which also shouldn't have happened.
Saturday, I was on my paladin and teamed up with another one. I tank on my paladin, and I've done a LOT of reading on how to do well as a tank on WoW, because it is a LOT different than tanking on City of Heroes.
1. You don't get any kind of front-loaded aggro. Most tanks in WoW only have a piddly little ranged attack -- some (most paladins) don't have any, and they have to build it by getting beat on for a good ten seconds. 2. Their aggro is FRAGILE. It is no challenge at all for a damage-dealing class to decide they want to pull the bad guy's aggro from me onto themselves... the CHALLENGE in play is to do as much damage as they can WITHOUT getting aggro. (You can run an aggro meter to tell you were you are in relation to the tank.)
In CoH, Tanks get a ranged taunt that affects up to five enemies at the same time, and, once you start hitting them, pretty much guarantees you will never lose their attention that fight.
The only thing like that in WoW is dynamite, and I can't MAKE dynamite.
So I was out with this other paladin, and while I'm still running up to the baddie, they throw off a holy smite -- a ranged spell they get, because of their build, that I don't have. Before you could say "What the..." I was running back the way I came, chasing the thing down as it went after the other character.
After the fight, I asked them to wait and let me build aggro on the mob first. "Five seconds," I said, "during which you can even hit them with your basic attack if you want, just don't use that Smite."
"Why worry about it?" They said. "I can tank these little guys."
Sure, but that's not the point.
There's something my football coach used to say. "You play like you practice." Only into my mid-thirties do I really start to understand that.
Continue reading "Playing to win" »
Okay. This is going to seem like it has a lot to do with MMO gaming, but at it's heart it's about gaming in general -- even just about social commitments as a whole.
In the MMO world (and in gaming in general, in a much less formalized/articulated way) there are two labels for players that can tossed around: "Casual" and "Hardcore".
Definitions of these two terms vary, but in a nutshell, the two might mean any or all of the following, depending on the speaker:
- Casual - Doesn't take the game that seriously. Doesn't play much (less than 20 hours a week, let's say). Isn't reliable in terms of showing up for planned activities. Automatically drops game-related activities if something 'better' comes up. Isn't a particularly good player. Isn't a particularly 'advanced' player (has good gear -- progresses through game content). Just isn't very serious about it. Might say they're showing up for something and just... won't. Has a life.
- Hardcore - Takes the game WAY TOO seriously. Plays more per week than they spend at work. Never misses, and usually organizes, planned game activities. Automatically drops other activities if something comes up in game. Is a 'leet' player with great gear, ultra-fast progression into end-game content, know the math of the game backwards and forwards, knows the Lore by heart. Is the attendance-nazi for in-game events. Lives the 'life' of a Basement Dwelling Virgin Troglodyte.
Clearly, the generalizations above are filled with statements from one side, talking about the OTHER side. In MMOs (and online forums in general) it's a lot more obvious, but it happens in face to face games, too. We all know the guy who keeps the spreadsheet of all the treasure accumulated at last weeks game -- who's got the best gear so far -- who the group has beaten, what the xp-per-session is, and who's missed the most sessions.
We also know the guy who says they'll show up to the game, doesn't for three weeks running, and when he does, arrives with his second six-pack of the day and proceeds to drunk (yes, "drunk", not "drink") his way through the game. The other players shake their head at this 'casual' person, the casual person wonders about those other five at the table who showed up on time, and clearly have no life.
So... which one are you?
Continue reading "Casual/Hardcore vs. the Serious Gamer" »
A mix of gaming this weekend.
((Blogging bitching: it really should be possible to just hit Ctrl-B in Moveabletype to Boldface something. It worked in 2.0 for pete's sake -- you mean to tell me you can't do it NOW?))
Tabletop
Played Spirit of the Century on Friday night. I pretty much went in with a scenario 'aimed' at two player characters who bailed out at the last moment, so I had to wing it.
Luckly, SotC is good at winging it. I had:
- The Daring Magpie - burglar and dilettante faceman, who has done a couple sessions already.
- Rami Samiti - East Indian psychic: ditto.
- Trent McCoy - new character for a player who's been at all the games -- a driver and 'gun man'.
- Beau Brass - a musician and smooth talker.
My basic method with these games is to 'focus' on one or two characters in each session -- specifically, I'll pick someone who's already been at the game a couple times, and make this 'their' session. I was going to game at the retired character for Trent's player, but he was, as I said, retired, so that indicated The Daring Magpie and/or Rami as the focal point.
Those two characters are different enough, and I'm lazy enough, that I didn't want to screw around with working out a story that featured both of them equally. Rami had a lot of stuff going on in "The Ape Soldier of Teyawasu", so that mean The Daring Magpie.
Therefore: social situations, schmoozing, and possibly some sneaking about and stealing stuff. Main focus: something both urban and urbane (based on player comment).
Then, if we have new players, I try to throw something in for them. Trents a drive and shooter. Beau is also new.
So... I opened with a car chase, moved to New York City for the main action (since we'd already 'done' L.A.), and set the whole thing around a music festival at the Woolworth Building, to give Beau some musical spotlight.
The heroes started out in mid-chase, trying to stop the bad guys from delivering something to NYC for Doctor Methuselah. They stop them, open the crate with the MacGuffin inside, and find a note from Doctor M himself that reads:
Hello Century Club,
If you're reading this, you've stopped my witless minions from delivering a key piece of equipment I require for my current project.
However, this puts you in a dilemma.
While the project in question would be a brilliant step forward for mankind, it also requires certain sacrifices you would likely find objectionable. You have, probably unknowingly, stopped that plan by acquiring the object in this box. Bravo.
However, the device that requires this object is already in place and will be activated on [date two days hence], regardless. Without this object in place, as a focus for the devices power, well over ninety percent of the population of Manhattan will perish.
So: Do you keep the object, foil my plans, but doom a city, or deliver the object and complete the device (and with it, my original plan)?
Either way, it is now your problem. Good luck, god speed, etc.
M
Then I just sat back and watched the fireworks.
We had a lot of digressions and such, simply because we hadn't played or seen each other in a month, but all in all it was a good session and lots of fun.
WoW
Grezzk joined the Scholomance Debate Team on the Farstriders server a few weeks back. Since then, I haven't done a LOT with the guild members, but the stuff I have done has been both fun and a good learning experience. I've also got a lot of good loot recently, but frankly that's been mostly all my own doing.
- Ran Mana Tombs, and tanked it with Tusker the wonder pig. Would like to do that again, as we didn't finish the last boss.
- Ran Auchenai Crypts with some of the SDT members. That went just fine, although the Tank... should play his other mains.
- Pet-tanked the Coilfang Underbog. A competent healer that knew how to watch my pet and keep him standing meant that we cleared this with no problems.
- Pet-tanked the Coilfang Slave Pens. Ditto here, though the healer was different. Tusker has tanked about a quarter of the high-level instances in the game now.
- Ran "The Mechanar" instance with the guildies, and got a really nice gun that, unfortunately, I need to get some better gear to go along with it before it will be as good as my bow, despite the fact that it has better stats -- basically, I'm just in better shape to use a bow right now than a gun.
- Ran the 25-man raid "Gruul's Lair." Big group, but a short instance -- just two big rooms with some trash mobs in between -- takes about an hour. We downed High King Maulgar and his 4 Boss-level buddies (think fighting Statesman, Back Alley Brawler, Synapse, Positron, and Numina, all at once), but couldn't quite take down Gruul himself -- the Guild hasn't been able to take him yet. Crazy fight. Crazy.
Heck, all the boss fights in WoW are crazy at some level. The easiest boss fights in WoW make the hardest boss fights in CoH look like a game of air hockey at Chuck E. Cheese... I have a lot to learn about most of those fights, but I didn't screw up too bad (except for siccing Tusker on the wrong boss at one point in the Maulgar fight and feeling like a moronic "huntard" when someone on vent said "Grezzk, where's your pet?"
Kayti the Paladin-tank
Got to level 43 with her, and continue to plow forward. I like tanking, and of the tank classes, I still like tanking with Paladins the best.
Syncerus the bear-cow
Played Syncerus the tauren (bull) druid (bear form!) with Lee's little priest for awhile on... Sunday? Saturday? Got about 3 levels and most of a fourth, cleared all my missions for the first low-level Dungeon in the game, and got a bunch of new gear and abilities. Druids are like CoH Kheldians, except the nature forms they take (Tank, Melee DPS, Healing, Ranged DPS) are actually AS GOOD AS their equivalent counterparts, with different mechanics for every form. Very challenging class.
Lord of the Rings Online
Tyelaf the Hunter joined the Council of the Secret Flame, an RPG.net-related Kinship. Good group of folks, and helpful. He's level 14.
Yarren Heatherfoot the hobbit burglar passed Tye as my highest level character, thanks to lots of Bounders-related misadventures with her cousin Tirra. I don't know that she's my favorite character -- I really like all of my characters on that server (Hunter, Burglar, Champion, GUARDIAN) -- but with the neat crowd-control ability and funny situational stuff, she and Tirra (who's also a burglar) are a LOT of fun to play.
Geiri the dwarf Guardian. Yeah. Stop me if you've heard this one -- I get in front and do a lot of shield-meet-goblin-face-bashing goodness, and Tiranor the Elf Hunter shoots things until they are very very dead. It's a match made in Valar. Although they are not our highest level pair, they are very likely our most deadly. Tiranor frequently kills stuff before it even gets to me. No oliphaunts, yet, but she's getting there.
Tabletop
Played a little Spirit of the Century this last weekend. It wasn't the session I'd dreamed up for the game I had to abort last week, since that would have been totally inappropriate for the group we'd assembled, but it was still fun. We had...
Mongols
Mob Mooks
Mysterious Vanishing Zeppelins
Mushrooms, Giant
Mushrooms, Glowing
A lost civilization of cannibals (sorry, ran out of M's)
... and a whole lot of fire.
Best of all, the most "turtle-up" player got drawn right into the middle of the story, which I think both startled and pleased him. He habitually makes people who are kind of distant from everyone else he's working with, and hard to socket in, and with very little work on my part (and thanks to a great idea from Randy) he was right in the middle of the whole story. It was ABOUT him, really, which was cool.
I think the best part was when he rescued the starlet of his favorite Radio program -- Esperanza Kittredge -- and she threw her arms around his neck and said 'get me out of here!'
And... see... he has this Aspect about how he loves this radio show...
And he has this OTHER aspect of "No one touches the Master of Shinanju!"
So I held up a Fate point and said "She's sobbing into your shoulder, and her voice is even more amazing than it is on the radio, but No One Touches the Master of Shinanju..."
And he could either take the Fate point and shove her rudely away, or
let her cling and instead pay ME a Fate point (and it's not like he had a ton at that point).
Does he comfort his idol, or stick with the hard line, elite attitude?
Bang, baby. :)
And he thought about it a bit, and paid me the point, and let her cling to him as he carried them away from the giant burning mushroom on the rope ladder dangling from the escaping zeppelin.
It was cool.
MMO stuff after the cut.
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Continue reading "Week in Review" »
It's a Spirit of the Century-palooza. First, we had a character generation shindig down at Lee and De's for Nine Princes in Pulp (Amber, with a thick layer of pulpy goodness), and now...
"The Century Club Presents..." is (a) a fictional pulp periodical that tells the heroic tales of the Century Club and (b) a pulp pick-up game using the Spirit of the Century system. That means a game influenced by the pulps -- serial adventures of the early Twentieth Century starring iconic characters like Doc Savage and The Shadow and echoed today in movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Rocketeer.
We're aiming for each session to be relatively self-contained, so that the players participating each session can change with no real problems. The characters are all affiliated with the Century Club, and this loose structure provides continuity, while allowing the freedom to create nearly any sort of adventure and include whomever shows up that week to play.
The idea here is to get a regularly scheduled game going for which the specific day of the weekend, the locale, the participants, and even the GM change as we go, depending on who can make it that week.
As of Sunday, we've got seven characters mostly made up, but WE NEED. MORE. POWER.
I'll be sending out another message today, organizing a "There's still time to SAVE THE WORLD!" get together for this weekend. The more players we have, the better the chance that there's always enough people to play. :)
So I went down to Lee and De's yesterday and, with Randy, Meera, and Kingsley, made up characters for a run of Spirit of the Century, in an Amber-that-never-quite-was.
Yeah. Amber.
An Amber with ray guns, planes that flap their own wings, clockwork-driven trump machines, a steam-driven monstrosity called Morgenstern, and growing fleets of zeppelins with Unicorn and Silver Rose emblems on the side.
The Great War is over, and things have changed.
Continue reading "Hell did not freeze over, but it did get a little brisk down there." »
Heroquest, Spring Fountain, this Friday ... umm soon. Woo? :)
Potentially running two face to face games this coming week while Aaron and Kate are at the Casa:
Ancient China. Wire-fu. Old, jealous gods. Young, jealous nobles: Xian Quan
And this other bit of wackiness:
The holiday season means a lot of things to a lot of people. For some it's the pristine beauty of a snow-crusted country evening, warmed by a comfortable helping of mulled wine. For others, it's the rat-race of an adrenaline-charged City Christmas, with eager shoppers in search of unique playthings to give to each other. To many, it means placing familiar objects lovingly on a tree, and gathering with family to forget the worries of an ailing world for a few days.
Christmas is not -- traditionally -- a time of high adventure and danger.
But there was a Christmas (not too long ago) when something extraordinary happened. When a handful of people came face to face with what they knew was the true magic of Christmas.
So they killed it.
This is their tale.
Just the thing for a post-holiday slump, no?
The nice thing is: all the participants are geeks, so if the game stories don't wrap up nice and neat, we can play in a group chat or something until it wraps up.
Or something... random thought, that. Anyway.
*goes off to write Bangs.
Stan, if you get this before you're off to Hackmaster, call me. We're attempting an uncancellation.
Prep for the Heroquest game has generated 105 emails in ten days, between me and five players.
Upside: very damn good characters, almost all of which are 100% ready to go before we sit down on Friday.
Friday: Played InSpectres, in which our heros (a hooker, an ex-mormon mechanic, a fringe-fringe-FRINGE scientist, and a cold-war MI-5 operative frozen in stasis since 1960) open a new franchise juuuuust off the Strip in Las Vegas... in an abandoned Elvis Wedding Chapel.
Then they saved a haunted zoo. Much fun.
Saturday: I mugged a few people and forced them to convert their d20 Living Jungle Characters over to "Heroquest: Malatra." Things went... confusingly, but I have some pretty high hopes for this marriage of Setting and System, once I work out all the kinks.
Sunday: Jackie was at the consortium playing ViD. Justin and I (at his request) made up a character for Paladin (a ranger-type on a mission from the Sword of Heaven Order) and played through the first encounter. Justin grasped the basic resolution mechanics as quickly as I could dredge them out of my rusty memory, and had a good time playing the guy in shining armor. Fun. (And more on that later.)
Dirty little gaming secret: I love undead.
Stumbling hordes of zombies, lightning-quick skeletons -- it's all good. Shawn of the Dead cannot get here fast enough. People say it's because I like using them as monsters in DnD, but that's just silly: there is no game or game system that cannot be improved with the inclusion of a shambling corpse.
So this weekend, I picked up Zombies, which I'd been meaning to do for awhile. Later, Justin and I talked Jackie into playing the game.
High points:
* Gameplay is pretty sweet and quite a bit of fun.
* Evocative of the genre.
* I want the expansion packs for the game (especially Mall Walkers, but the military-themed one might be fun for a little more Resident Evil-style ass-kicking).
Low Point: Due to (a) inexperience on the part of the players and (b) general maliciousness on the part of the same players, finishing the game took quite a bit longer than I'd have expected -- the final piece on the map went down about an hour in... I think it was about a total of 3 or 3.5 hours before someone finally won. Jackie had quite a bit of fun with it, but didn't end up finishing the game -- Randy played her spot until the end.
I'm going to mitigate that someone by acknowledging that it probably boils down to inexperience playing -- (a) I'm pretty sure we used a couple cards wrong and (b) as soon as the 'escape' tile came out on the map, we all tried to get to it, whether we had the firepower to make it or not. As I said, Randy eventually won, I think in part because he hadn't 'already' sacked some of the buildings in town for loot, so he decided to go do that, and came back to the helipad with a lot more Life and Bullet chits to play with.
That said, Justin probably could have won by simply accumulating 25 dead zombies... he was really close at one point, but blew it when he tried to make it to the helipad instead of picking off lone dead guys.
Good game, regardless. Makes me want to pick up All Flesh Must Be Eaten.
Plus, a HUGE bonus: ONE HUNDRED zombie mini-figs. [Insert evil laughter.]
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