WEP '12, Day 31 - Old Republic Log XVI

Another guild run, another Log entry.

Last night, we did the Mandalorian Raiders Flashpoint.  It was a level 25 Flashpoint, and since I hadn't played since the last guild run the week before, I was only level 23, as was Morgan's Knight.  On the other hand, Matt's Trooper was 25 and Luke's Smuggler had made it to 27.  So we were a smidge underleveled for the Flashpoint, but managed to beat it nevertheless.

Granted, as an underleveled Tank, I died in every single boss battle except the final boss.  The first boss fight was a single bad-ass Mandalorian and his pet hounds.  I lasted until the boss himself was nearly down before I got dropped in that one.

The second boss fight was our bane, though.  That one consisted of an opposition Sith team of a Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, Bounty Hunter, and Imperial Agent.  We wiped three times before we finally managed to win on the fourth attempt.  In the end, the important part was figuring out the right order to kill them in.  The one that finally worked for us was Agent, Warrior, Inquisitor, Hunter, though your mileage may vary.

By comparison, the final boss fight was a cakewalk.  That one consisted of a single nasty Mandalorian who kept retreating to places where he was covered by sentry turrets.  We pretty much just chased him around, killed his turrets, and then killed him dead when he stood and fought rather than keep retreating.  And I didn't even die!

The lesson here is that I need to keep myself leveled up properly.  The next Flashpoint is a level 29, so I'll need to be at least 27 to even get in, and preferably 29.  Luckily I made it to 24 at the end of Mandalorian Raiders, and I've quested to 25 since then.  It's too soon to discuss the Nar Shaadda, but I'll answer the question I asked back in Log XIII.  Find out in the Spoiler section.

Kelynn, Level 25 Vanguard, Nar Shaadda
Tasia, Level 21 Sith Sorceress, Imperial Fleet
Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Corusucant
Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

SPOILERS follow.

Beware, for the story is SPOILED!

Right.  As you may or may not recall, I wondered what impact, if any, making the Dark Side choice had over the Light Side one at the end of the Coruscant missions for the Trooper.  At that time, I had gone in to rescue a Republic Senator who had been captured by one of the traitors I was hunting, Wraith.  I found the Senator, but he was rigged with explosives.  If I freed him, it would alert Wraith to my presence.  So I left him there, found Wraith and killed her, but she blew up the Senator before I could put her down.  My question was whether or not making that decision would impact the story.  I suspected that it would not, or that if it did that it would be a minor change where rather than facing Wraith solo as I did, she'd have guards or something.  Unfortunately, I'd have to level up a new Trooper to find out for myself, so I'd resigned myself to never knowing.

Except that Morgan has a Light Side Trooper and rescued the Senator....only to discover that doing so means that Wraith escapes and you never get to fight her at all!

That was pretty damn impressive to me.  They actually made realistic consequences to decisions we both made.  Morgan got to be the hero and save the Senator, but I got to kill the traitor I was looking for.  Just knowing that was possible has increased my appreciation for the game and made me want to get ahead in the Trooper storyline just to see how things play out in the end

Good job, game!

WEP '12, Day 30 - Memoirs of a Gamer VII: Dallas

Eventually, all things come to an end.  And as glorious as college was from a gaming standpoint, eventually you have to move on and get a real job.  This is what I did as well, taking my show on the road to Dallas where I got a job doing Tech Support.  Clay, who was heading south for the same job and had gotten me the interview in the first place, was heading there as well, but no one else was.  Thus, I ended up basically having to build a whole new group from scratch.

That worked out, though, because one assembled pretty easily.  There was Robert, one of my co-workers who went on to found Pen & Paper Games, and Anna, who knitted at every game but paid more attention than most of the other players.  I still have the dice bag she knitted me.  Clay, of course, and Jen who filled the awkward outsider role in the group.

I don't know why that is, but in every gaming group there's always someone who's the least comfortable at the table.  Sometimes it's overt, as it was with Jen and sometimes it's subtle, but somehow one person always gets marked out as the one who ends up the butt of the jokes or the one who exasperates the others.  Even at a table where everyone's known each other for years, there's always one player who seems to get singled out the most. I'm not sure why that should be, but I've seen enough games to know that it's true.

The final ingredient to our gamer stew was Mick  Mick was probably the best player I've ever had the privilege to GM for.  Sadly, when I talked to him last, he'd given up gaming after I left Dallas, which is the waste of a great gamer.  You see, my gamemastering style is mostly reactive.  I have some basic ideas of what's going on in the world, lay out some potential plot threads, then let the players go where they like.

(This, incidentally, becomes a problem in games like D&D 4E where you're expected to pre-build encounters and then just walk the players into them.  It's one of the reasons I've decided to bring my 4E game to a close.) 

Mick was the perfect player for a GM like myself.  His characters, especially his primary, Ivo the Blade, were always interesting and had a lot of ideas of what to do.  What's more the ideas, and the way his character interacted with people, were often offbeat and funny.  I can't stress how much more fun it is to play with someone who makes everyone else laugh than it is with someone who annoys everyone.  And certainly, it helped that Mick had strong supporting characters, too.  Robert's uptight cleric often played the foil to Ivo's antics, while Clay's amoral wizard butted heads with Anna's conscientious Ranger.  Mick may have been the spark, but it took all the players to grow it into a fire.  Even Jen, awkward as she often was at the table, added something to the mix with her airhead druid who could be relied upon by the gamemaster to do something silly because she wasn't paying attention and thus allow me to throw in more plot complications, which were, in turn, dealt with in an amusing fashion by the group.

It was like a weekly action comedy fantasy TV show that only we few got to participate in.  There were a lot of laughs, we had characters (both player controlled and even a couple of NPCs) who were memorable and amusing, and we even managed a halfway decent story along the way.  That was probably the best game I've ever been a part of, and I've never quite managed to recreate it in the decade plus since, much to my dismay.

My primary D&D game wasn't, however, the only game I played while down in Big D.  There was a D&D game that Robert ran, a short lived Babylon 5 game that I tried to run, a Star Trek game by Robert, even a spin-off D&D game that I ran for Mick and a few of my co-workers once a month or so.  Robert even had a home-brewed superhero game that we tried a couple of times.  All were more or less decent games, but the Saturday D&D game with Ivo, Ylin, Everett, Evan, and Deanna was the best of the lot, and probably the best I've ever done.

Thus, Dallas.  To me it's a city I'll always remember for the mild winters, the unbearably hot summers, and the sudden ferocious rain.  I can almost taste the steaks, smell the barbeque, position my hand just so to hold the insane "Lineman's Reward" cheeseburger from Ball's Hamburgers.  There was the weekly ritual of chanting "body count, body count" in the corner of Rich's Taphouse with the cluster of other ex-pat Bear's fans watching the Bears lose but tracking the score in the number of players injured on the other team.  They were heady days, and I remember them well.

But most of all, I remember the Saturday Game.

WEP '12, Day 29 - Sinning with a Solar Empire

It's the weekend, so my schedule is usually disrupted, so I tend to prefer to do something that takes up less brain space.  Therefore, I'm going to briefly discuss the game I'm playing right now, Sins of a Solar Empire.

Sins of a Solar Empire is a real time space 4X* game that moves slow enough to let you make real decisions but quick enough that you don't die of old age waiting for for fights to play out.  In that respect, I think it actually works better than the Sword of the Stars games that, while I enjoy the greater level of detail that the Sword games give me, the faster and flashier combat of Sins works for me.

There are significant compromises, though.  For one thing, you can't design your own ships.  All you can do is pick from the ship lists and put them out into the galaxy.  Secondly, research, while important, doesn't feel very revolutionary.  Most of the military upgrades are handy but not game changing.  For instance a 10% increase in laser damage is nice, but harder to feel the impact of rather than a brand new weapon or new class of ship that one might get in more traditional space 4X'ers.

Likewise, there's no ground combat.  You nuke enemy colones from orbit, then re-colonize the ruins and build the place up from scratch.  Who ever gets a colony ship to the recently nuked site first gets the planet, and after a few minutes the place will be easily rebuilt and as good as new.

Sounds like I don't like it much, right?  Wrong.  I do enjoy Sins of a Solar Empire when I'm not in the mood for something deep.  There's something satisfying about being able to build battleships and battlecruisers and carriers, naming them, surrounding them with a swarm of escort ships, then launching them into war.

So it's a fun game that I've mastered, and while I'm enjoying my victory, I'm pretty sure I won't play it again anytime soon.  Sins of a Solar Empire is amusing, but shallow.  I've got the game down and there isn't much else for me to do in the game right now.  The expansions, both of which I own, have added new wrinkles, but I've mastered those too.  All that's left is to play a game once in a while, and wait for the next expansion.

Which is fine.  Not every game ought to be Civilization IV or War in the East.  There's room for light strategy in my life, and Sins of a Solar Empire fills that market.

* = 4X games are called that because the general pattern to the game is eXploration, eXpansion, eXploitation, and eXtermination.  That is, you start off with limited territory and little idea of what's around you so you send units out to explore.  Once you have at least a partial lay of the land you expand out to grab more territory.  Then you build up your ability to exploit the resources of your new territory.  Finally, you use those resources to manufacture what you need to exterminate your opponents.

WEP '12, Day 28 - Black Crusading

So we played a game of Black Crusade today.  That's the fourth in the ongoing Fantasy Flight series of roleplaying games set in the venerable Warhammer 40k universe.  40k is basically fantasy in space with Space Marines for knights, psychic powers for magic, Space Elves, Space Dark Elves, Space Orks, Robot Undead, and so on.  For all that its origins are steeped in "fantasy with the serial numbers filed off" the universe itself has a fairly distinct feel that somehow works even better than the straight up fantasy version of the same setting, imaginitive named Warhammer Fantasy.  There's a certain bleakness and darkness to the 40k universe that just draws one in.

As I said, there are four versions of this game.  The first was Dark Heresy where in your characters are acolytes of an Imperial Inquisitor and hunt down threats to the Imperium.  The second was Rogue Trader in which you become the command crew of a miles long star cruiser and explore the fringes of unknown space, sometimes fighting, some times diplomacizing, and sometimes yes, trading.  The third was Deathwatch where you played Imperial Space Marines.  And finally, there's Black Crusade where, for the first time, you're playing the bad guys, a bunch of renegade Space Marines and human heretics.

For all that, the introductory adventure doesn't really emphasize your being evil.  Structurally, it's a dungeon crawl, and we didn't really act much differently than a Neutral/Unaligned D&D party might.  That's fine, though, since we've got a couple of players new to Warhammer at the table, so having the online intro adventure be something similar to traditional styles makes sense.  The fact that it seems pretty similar to Doug's aborted Star Frontiers game is pretty funny, though.

Like most percentile systems, you fail a lot in Black Crusade.  Most characters, especially beginning characters, can only get a few stats above 50%, so a Challenging roll that applies no modifier to the roll will probably be a failure unless it's falling into your particular specialty, and can still fail even then.  While it does give us room to grow, the specter of constant failure was a big reason that Star Frontiers didn't work out, so that's something to watch out for as we go forward with the game.  Fortunately that's mitigated somewhat by the Black Crusade characters being much more bad-ass than the Dark Heresy characters whose constant bungling killed that game for us a few years back.

However, the bad-assery of the Chaos Space Marine characters provides another problem.  You see, Doug's Chaos Marine has a Toughness of 8 and an Armor of 10.  That means he can shrug off 18 points of damage off every attack that hits hi, barring mitigating factors like the armor penetration of the weapon used to discomfort Doug's guy.  Considering that a basic laser pistol only does 1d10+2 damage, it requires some work to reasonably threaten Doug.  However, my own character, a Psyker, has a Toughness of 4 and Armor 2.  And, for that matter, only 8 Wounds (hit points).  That means that the damage roll of 19 that's required to so much ad inconvenience  Doug will kill me stone dead if it hits my character, or at least screw me up badly.  That's a problem that I'm working on trying to fix with advancement experience, but there's only so much I can do per level up.

For all that I still find the system less than it could be, the game itself was interesting, and we've got reasonably well defined characters.  Thus, I'm looking forward to our next game in a week.

WEP '12, Day 27 - Memoirs of a Gamer VI: College, Part 4

You know, I probably need to pick up the pace here, lest I leave the impression that the only good gaming one gets is in college.  So let's see if I can wrap Champaign up.

Once Luke's Werewolf game wrapped up, there were really two major games and a number of minor games that occupied the remainder of my college career.  The first major one was a Marvel Superheroes game that Luke started running to replace the Werewolf game.  Like the Werewolf game, it had a number of supporting characters for us to interact with.  Unlike the Werewolf game, though, this was because Luke had been working on his own superhero universe since grade school.

In Luke's creation, there's a large, multi-national superhero team called the Shock Troops who fill the Avengers/Justice League role as the premiere superheroes on earth.  Our characters started off as a local team in Chicago (naturally) and were sort of the New Warriors to the Shock Troops' Avengers.  That's where we started, anyway.  Over time, we became allies of the Shock Troops, with a couple of characters moving up to the big leagues and joining the Troops themselves.  The thing that was neat about the Shock Troops world was that it was so broad, and Luke had been working on it for so long, that it could accommodate all sorts of characters.  So besides our original team, we had a team made entirely of demi-humans (animal people), another of college age superheroes just getting started, and even our own super-villain team that engineered a break-out from super-jail.

The stories in the Marvel game were less a single long story like the Werewolf game had been, but rather, much like the comic books upon which they were based, about the characters themselves.  So they had their origin issues, their team-ups, the big adventures, and quieter moments.  Along the way we saved the world a few times, punched out Hitler, and generally had a good time with it.

That wasn't the only thing we played, though.  As I said, there were several smaller games that got some love during this era.  For instance, I ran a Cyberpunk 2020 game that had the gang as troubleshooters for mega-corp Biotechnica, right up until there was a hostile takeover which, as one might expect from Cyberpunk, involved a lot of murder and mayhem.  I also engaged in an ultimately futile attempt to get an Amber Diceless Roleplaying game going.  That one failed because you need everyone to be at least minimally familiar with the background material, and not enough of us had read the books.  And since Roger Zelazny's death and the gradual disappearance of his works from bookstore shelves, it may well be that I'll never reach the critical mass to get a real Amber game going, which is kind of sad.

While I was failing to run Amber, we somehow encountered a guy named Mike and his wife, the latter of whom was busy working on her dissertation, leaving the former with time for plenty of gaming.  Alas, once she finished up and got her Masters they moved to New York or thereabouts, so I've long since lost touch with him, but even so, Mike joined the group for a couple of years before vanishing into the wilds out East.  During that time, he introduced us to some of the more esoteric games, like Ars Magica and Kult.  Kult only went a session, as I recall...Clay scared Mike off with his gruesome character background, I suspect...but the Ars Magica game went on for quite awhile, even if it ended with our covenant failing miserably.

But Mike wasn't just a role-player.  He was also a wargamer, which was a rare and dying breed even then and is all but extinct nowadays.  Mike managed to get a bunch of us to play hexmap and cardboard counter games like Starfire and World in Flames.  The latter of which included one of my favorite gaming moments where Clay and I as France and the United Kingdom respectively managed to not only stall the German advance into France, but even managed to get a successful amphibious landing into Hamburg and force an Axis surrender in 1940!  That was pretty damn good.  granted when we played the re-match we had a stalemate by '42, but what can you do?  We still had our shining moment of glory.

And of course, for the last couple of years there was my D&D game.  This game provided the foundation for the D&D games I've run ever since, as it was the first time I ever got serious about world building.  It started with the Empire of Gallador, and spread out from there.  I tried to think of reasons why certain things would be where, and even got Clay to draw me a map to fill in.  It worked out pretty well, and when I felt I was ready, I started a campaign there.  The gang managed to go from levels 1 to 9 or so, and along the way we got most of a decent story in.   It wasn't my best DMing, that was yet to come, but it was still an important step forward in my gaming development.

WEP '12, Day 26 - Old Republic Log XV

Note: I recently realized that my longer titles made the sidebar navigation less useful, so at the risk of getting confused with "Wired Equivalent Privacy", I've gone back and shortened "Write Everyday Project" to "WEP".


It seems as if my "Memoirs of a Gamer" feature is running long, so let me step back for a moment to keep the Old Republic Log updated.

I haven't really played all that much, but I've nevertheless gotten Kelynn up to level 23.  That was mostly through going back to finish off old Heroics and the bounty of pulling off the Athiss Flashpoint with the Midnight Runners last Monday.  Still, it's progress, however desultory.

I also completed Taris which was....eh.  I mean, it was fun to revisit an important locale from The Old Republic and all, but the actual Trooper story there felt kind of blah.  I'll cover my feelings about that in detail in the Spoiler section after the portrait.

Speaking of which, I've discovered a flaw in my methodology.  You see, I try to put up a new portrait every Log, and to do that I need either new headgear or a new chest piece.  Except that with Orange customizable gear, it's pretty easy to just keep your old gear and never need a new helmet or chest piece!  Fortunately, I did fin a new chest piece during Athiss that was worth wearing, so that's reflected in Kelynn's new portrait.

Kelynn, Level 23 Vanguard, Republic Fleet
Tasia, Level 21 Sith Sorceress, Balmorra
Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant
Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

The SPOILERS are buried deep.

Some things, like SPOILERS, are best left forgotten.

The problem with Taris, and indeed with Balmora on the Sith side, is that your Class quest takes a backseat to what's going on planetside.  Okay, sure, dealing the Rakghouls is important and all, I just wish that my personal story meshed better.  I really felt like I was doing everything else except my assigned mission most of the time, in a way that wasn't true on Ord Mantell or Coruscant.

It also didn't help that the renegade Havoc troopers that you're chasing go from interesting characters to villainous caricatures when you meet them the second time.  Needles, the Havoc medic you run down on Taris, was a friendly and efficent guy when you worked with him on Ord Mantell.  By the time he reaches Taris, though, he's become Space Doctor Mengele, with a plan to infect whole planets with the Rakghoul virus.  This, it seems to me, is a gross over-reaction to the feelings of abandonment he felt from Havoc being left to die by the Republic Military.  It really undercuts the idea that maybe the deserters had a point when their response is "wipe out civilization throughout the galaxy."

So yeah, I was disappointed by the story lines on Taris, even if I did enjoy walking through the remains of the Endar Spire, the ship that you start on in Old Republic.  That was cool, but the rest of it?  Kind of blah. Here's hoping that things pick up once I hit Nar Shadda.

WEP '12, Day 25 - Memoirs of a Gamer V: College, Part III

Despite the way the last semester had ended and the continued frustrations of Joel's game, there were reasons for hope when I returned to U of I for my next semester.  Primarily, those reasons were Luke and Drew.  Two of my closer gamer buddies from Loyola had shown up in Champaign.  Luke and Drew were inseparable in high school the way that I had once been with Ryan, and they were both pretty decent gamers.  Drew, though, tried to do what the rest of us thought was impossible...he tried to be in a frat and be a gamer simultaneously.  It was an interesting contradiction, but eventually he slid away from his gamer roots into marriage and career, neither of which need be fatal to being a gamer, but do require you to make extra effort to stay in the game, which he no longer is.  Outside of the occasional video game, I doubt Drew's gamed in years.

But that was much later.  For now, I had found two new players for the game.  And, as it turned out, Paul had found another.  Clay was from southern Illinois and a computer guy that Paul had met at a pledge drive for the radio station, if I recall my origin stories correctly.  There was some weird coincidence about Clay knowing Luke's sister as well, so he ended up knowing more than one member of the group.

With a new and surprisingly stable crew in place, we resumed our regular Friday night games at W.I.L.L.  That was Paul's D&D game, and rather than take control of existing characters the way I had, the guys rolled up their new characters and on we went.  There were some good stories from those games, like Clay's character's habit of trying out magic items before we properly identified them, leading him to being victimized by both a Girdle of Femininity/Masculinity and a Necklace of Strangulation with a couple of weeks of each other.  Or the time that Paul had the main villain show up on the back of a giant red dragon with the intention of torching the town then flying away...except that since Paul also used a particularly vicious critical hit chart from Dragon Magazine, when I scored a critical  from our party's magic carpet I managed to chop his wing off and send them both plummeting to their doom in the middle of town.  Or...well, you get the idea.  Like pretty much every D&D game I'd ever played to that point, there wasn't so much a story to Paul's game as a series of unrelated events.  There were fun times, filled with derring-do and laughter, but rarely did they have any greater meaning besides providing us more loot and experience points to spend.

That changed as we started up a game sans Randy.  That way, we reasoned, we could play anytime rather than just Friday nights.  So Luke started GMing a game of Werewolf: The Apocalypse.  Werewolf, like Vampire before it, took a classic monster and made it the player character rather than the opposition.  What's more, each game in the series tried to address, or at least make you think about, some facet of the human condition.  In Vampire, for instance you're faced with the gradual degradation of your soul as you commit crimes to sustain yourself.  Mage covers the conflict between the traditional world of magic and legend and the world of science and technology.  An so on and so forth.  Werewolf casts your moon influenced shapeshifters in the role of eco-terrorists using whatever means you can to protect the last places of pure nature from the ever encroaching reach of civilization.

Well, that was the idea, anyway.  In truth, we didn't much care for that concept, and neither did Luke.  Instead we became a group of treasure hunters, tasked with hunting down a bunch of sacred artifacts from around the world before a mixed team of wizards, ninjas, vampires, a mad scientist, and evil werewolves got to them.  It was very modern day Indiana Jones....with werewolves.  And that was great.  Our characters were a diverse lot, ranging from my private detective gun wielding werewolf to the more traditional bruiser melee types that Clay and Drew ran, to Paul's spirit caller.  What's more, Luke introduced a number of NPCs to the group who each had distinctive personalities and were interesting to interact with, but weren't powerful enough to do more than back us up in fights.  That would be a pattern in Luke's games, the large cast but carefully balanced so that the players are the ones who make the decisions and are the decisive participants in combat, barring the occasional non-combat designed player character.

The thing that made the Werewolf game special was that rather than just stopping like most games do, Luke's game ended like a good novel or movie might.  We raced around the world collected around half of the artifacts, raced to Shangri-la, and fought an epic battle there against the opposing team with casualties on both sides that ended in a hard fought victory.  And then we stopped, and our characters went their separate ways.  Oh, we did try and pick the game up a while later, but just like Crusade after Babylon 5, the game petered out.  We'd told the story, and that was enough.

Perhaps that's why I look back on that one game as one of the high points of my gaming career.  We told a story from beginning, to middle, to end, and told it well.  And that's something to be proud of, even if it was only told among ourselves in cramped dorm rooms and student lounges.

WEP '12, Day 24 - Memoirs of a Gamer IV: College, Part 2

Wow, look at that title.  A year, a day, episode number, sub-episode number...it's a good thing that I'm doing this mostly for my own amusement and to develop better writing habits rather than for publication, because that's one whopper of a title.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.  When we left the story, I had completed my first year at the University of Illinois, and thanks to the romantic misadventures of Rob and Lucinda and Lucinda's New Boyfriend Whose Name I Have Long Since Forgotten, my U of I group was down to just three, me, Randy, and Paul.  That would need rectification, but before that I had summer break.  That meant going back home and back to Joel's game.

It occurs to me that I haven't really spoken as much as I should have about Joel's game, and how it ended.  As I intimated last time, Joel was what we like to call a Dick DM.  That is, he had a tendency to twist the rules in such a way as to benefit himself and against the players.  That's bad enough when another player is doing that, but when the Dungeon Master, who is entrusted with enforcing the rules does that...well things can get bad.  What really bothered me, however, wasn't that he bent the rules to make things harder on us as a group.  No, what bothered me was the blatant favoritism he showed toward his best friend, Matt.  When Matt's first character, an elven fighter/mage, died he was allowed to use some kind of home brewed point buy system to replace him.  That let Matt make a character who had 18s in his physical stats and 8s in his mental ones.  In a system where 18 is human maximum.  That'd have been bullshit even now, but back in Second Edition where the bonuses to stats were weighted toward the high end of the chart, it made Matt's new character "Deltar the Destroyer" ridiculously powerful.  Then Deltar got a Ring of Human Influence which gave him an 18 Charisma, giving him four 18s out of six stats.  Meanwhile, my character who had been rolled under the official rules had been counted fortunate to have a single 17, with everything else much lower.  Oddly enough all the best equipment happened to be just right for a human fighter, which was what Deltar happened to be.  The NPC female human mage just happened to fall in love with Deltar.  And so on and so forth.

This came to a head in January of 1993 where we were sent on a mission to save a deep gnome city from dark elves who were using some kind of huge lava creature to create earthquakes that would destroy it.  So in we went and fond ourselves facing a bunch of dark elves backed up by a balor.  A balor is a demon based on the Lord of the Rings' balrog.  Deltar has a pair of flying boots on and as he flew into battle, the dark elf high priestess casts Dispel Magic on the boots and causes him to fall.  How she could possibly know that it was the boots that was making him fly rather than his cloak, a ring, or just a Fly spell cast by our mage wasn't made clear, but that was just the kind of crap we'd come to expect from Joel.  What we didn't expect was what happened next.

Deltar fell.  He fell into a crevasse and got stuck there.  Well, okay, no problem.  Deltar's got maximum human strength, he can just climb out...

No, says Joel, it's too slippery.

Fine.  We lower him a rope and....

No, says Joel, the rope isn't long enough.

Mage cast Fly on him?  No, the winds are too strong.  Winds?  Underground?  Winds are too strong.  She casts Fly on one of us and we go get him?  No, winds.  Luke's cleric casts Stone Shape to give him some stairs to climb? No, it's magic stone warped by the earthquake monster.  What about...

No, Joel says, there's nothing you can do to get Deltar out.

With every idea to save Deltar blocked, we tried to fight the mob of high level dark elves and the way out of our league balor and, surprise surprise, we get our clocks cleaned.  TPK (Total Party Kill), except for Deltar in the crevasse.  Joel doesn't seem surprised at all and says that everything's gong to make sense next session.  So we show up for the next game and Joel has us roll up two new characters each.  Ah ha, we reason, we're making a new team to rescue the old team!  That's great!

Except that wasn't  it at all.

No, it turned out that Joel had just gotten his hands on the Menzoberranzan boxed set and wanted to play in the city of the dark elves.  Matt's new character was a dark elf, of course, and he had Deltar (who had been saved by the dark elves from the invinco-crevasse off screen) as his muscle.  Our old characters were dead and could not be raised from the dead.  Our new characters were Matt's dark elf's slaves, there to do his dirty work while Matt rose in rank as a dark elf noble.  How dirty was discovered when Matt ordered the female characters in the group to prostitute themselves to a dark elf noble he was currying favor with...

That was the end.  I never played another game with either Joel or Matt, and I can't look back at the game with anything but bitterness at the way that it ended.  The universe had always been weighted in Matt's favor at the expense of the rest of the players, but this was just too much.  I had thought that having played with Joel for nearly five years, all of it with the same character, would have earned me some respect.  But when Joel assassinated our characters so he could play into Matt's power fantasies, I realized that "respect" wasn't involved at all.  It was a lesson that every gamer has to learn eventually...a bad game is NOT better than no game at all.

So here's to Solban Hammergold, the first character I ever ran in a long campaign.  You deserved to be in a better game.

Tomorrow, I'll take us back to the U of I where better things await us.  (Sorry, Clay, I had to get this sordid tale off my chest first.  Tomorrow.)

WEP '12, Day 23 - Memoirs of a Gamer III: College, Part 1

With the chaos of the weekend resolved, we return to our look at my history as a gamer.

In the fall of 1991, I started my freshman year at the University of Illinois.  This was a traumatic break from my gaming groups, since none of my close gamer friends who were in my class or older had ended up at U of I, and of course I was leaving my brothers behind as well.  While I did make some new acquaintances in my roommates and among the crowd of students who gathered to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes in the dorm's lounge, none of them were gamers.

Fate intervened in my favor, however.   I had chosen to take archery as a physical education course, and by sheer happenstance I had a D&D themed button that I'd picked up at GenCon attached to my backpack's shoulder strap.  The people next to me, a couple by the name of Rob and Lucinda, noticed it and asked if I played.  We struck up a conversation, and after a couple of weeks of talking in class, they invited me to a D&D game they were playing.  Rob, you see, was getting some spending money working at a local McDonalds, and a regular customer came in one night wearing a D&D t-shirt, and they'd struck up a conversation.  That customer, Randy, ended up inviting Rob to the D&D game he was a player in that they played at W.I.L.L. the University of Illinois radio station.

It was there, past the deserted classrooms of Lincoln Hall, up in the W.I.L.L. control room that my new gaming group assembled.  Here you found Randy.  He was the overnight engineer at W.I.L.L. and it was his job to make sure the satellite feed was working and to put on the tapes of the local commercials between shows.  But since each show was fully broadcast by the satellite, there was only five minutes or so of actual W.I.L.L. commercial time each hour, generally at the end of the hour that made announcements about other W.I.L.L. shows and introduced the next one coming up.  So, while you needed to have an engineer on site to make sure that you had someone there to fix things in an emergency, that guy really only had about a half hour of work getting set up at the start of his shift, then another half hour at the end of it, and about five minutes every other hour.  So in all that empty time, we gamed.

There were five of us to start with.  Myself, Randy, Rob, and Lucinda were the players.  Paul was the DM.  We met every Friday night at 10:30 pm when Randy completed his set-up and played for hours.  Sometimes we'd even go until the end of Randy's shift at 6 am, and I'd stick around long enough to watch the W.I.L.L. morning crew start their show.  That mostly came later, though.  In those early days we usually "only" played until 3 or 4am.

Ah, the vitality of youth, where have you gone?

 It was quite a break from my earlier patterns of gaming.  In high school, I played with a lot of different groups whenever we could find the time.  Maybe I'd get in three hours of gaming at the club after school Wednesday afternoon, then a couple hours at a friend's place Thursday night.  Then four or five hours over the weekend with Joel's game, and another handful of hours with my brothers on Sunday.  Or maybe there was a marching band thing that weekend, or debate club, or chess club, or computer club, or my part-time job at Brown's Chicken and there'd be no games at all for a couple of weeks.

At U of I, it was different.  I played every Friday night without fail, and usually with the same people.  What was more, it was also the first time I played a character that I hadn't created for a long period of time.  I was stepping into the shows of a departed player who I never met and taking over his character, Sergio the Blade, a half-elf Fighter/Cleric of Sif, the Norse Goddess of Excellence in Battle (who was played by Jamie Alexander in Thor).  For all that Sergio wasn't "my" character, I still had fun playing him, even if he was often overshadowed by the more powerful and flamboyant characters in the game (as Clerics often are).  And I had, of course, played in plenty of convention games where you get a pre-made character and play it as written.

Indeed, back then you got one page of stats and another page full of your character's history, motivations, and what he or she felt about the other characters you were playing with.  Tournament games were decided by who the players and the DM voted had played the character the best, and it was the best role-players were the ones who got to advance and see how the rest of the story played out.  One of my proudest moments as a gamer was winning a tournament round of Marvel Super-Heroes at Winter Fantasy when I was 14 and getting to play in the second round and seeing the end of the story.  These days, tournaments aren't about the quality of your character depiction, but on your optimization and power gaming skills.  Granted, I have those too, but it still feels like a lot's been lost over the years.

So we gamed quite happily for a semester, and then winter break happened.  Heading back home for a month, I reconnected with a lot of the old crew.  Caleb was MIA, so I recruited Luke to take his place at Joel's table and we played two or three sessions before I headed back to Champaign.  And back to disaster.

You see, during winter break Rob and Lucinda had split up as a couple.  But neither was willing to give the game up to the other, so both kept showing up and playing, despite the fact that they couldn't stand to be in the same room as one another.  That made for some pretty uncomfortable games, as you can imagine.  It was the first time I'd seen a gaming group crippled by affairs of the heart, but it would not be the last.

Eventually, Lucinda upped the ante and brought her new boyfriend into the game, and after one session of PDAs to the face, Rob quit showing up.  And a session after that, so did Lucinda and the boyfriend, which led me to the unfortunate deduction that Lucinda had stuck around the game only to hurt Rob, and now that he was gone, she was happy to give it up.  Looking back on it, that may have been unfair to Lucinda, but at the time that's how I read it.

So that summer I was back in Chicago.  My regular gaming crew back at school was down to three members.  What was there to do?

WEP '12, Day 22 - Doom of the Brothers Harbaugh

It can't have happened before.  Two brothers, both head coaches of NFL teams, both playing in their respective Conference Finals with a trip to the Superbowl on the line both manage to lose the game on last minute field goals on the same day?  Impossible.

And yet, Head Coaches Jim Harbaugh of the San Francisco '49ers and John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Ravens managed to do just that.

There were differences, of course.  The '49ers lost to the New York Giants in overtime when the Giants kiced a game winning field goal.  The ravens lost when their field goal kicker blew a relatively easy (for a pro NFL kicker, not a schlub like me) 32 yard field goal that would have sent their game against the Patriots to overtime.

It had to be a pretty crushing day for Jack Harbaugh, watching both of his sons bow out of the playoffs within hours of each other.  It wasn't a picnic for me, either, since I'd been rooting for a Harbaugh vs Harbaugh rematch in the Superbowl.  (John and the Ravens prevailed when the brothers' teams played against each other during the regular season.)

Still, at least both games were exciting, coming down to final kicks to resolve the game.  You rarely get those kind of close games in the playoffs, and almost never on the same day, so there was that.  And we'll get to see a different rematch, a re-do of Superbowl XLII with the Giants vs the Patriots.

Of course to get there, we'll have to watch the agonizing spectacle of sports journalism running out of material three days into the two week gap between the Conference Finals and the Superbowl, and then hearing variations of the same stories for the rest of the fortnight.

It's just too bad we don't get Harbaugh vs Harbaugh.  That alone might have kept the sports guys busy an extra day or two.

WEP '12, Day 21 - Food, Wine, and Conversation...but Mostly Food

We take a break from the gamer memoirs to talk about the dinner I attended tonight.  We were celebrating my brother's wife's birthday at Roy's in Chicago.  Now I don't go to restaurants like Roy's very often, so I've decided to discuss the food of the place while the memory is still fresh.

Roy's is "Hawaiian Fusion."  Fusion cooking involves blending cooking styles from differing sources.  "Hawaiian Fusion" is mildly ironic since Hawaiian food is already a mix of styles from all over the world, but in fact references the idea of mixing traditional Hawaiian flavors with European style sauces and presentation.

I went with a three course Prix Fixe to try and keep costs down, and the first course was a Duck Confit & Mushroom Flatbread.  Given the expense of the meal, I'd sworn to myself to try at least a little of everything I'd ordered and was pleased to discover that I liked the dish pretty well, even though I normally dislike mushrooms.  The balsamic nitsume was a sweet and slightly tangy sauce that brought the dish together.

The main course was a grilled pork chop with fennel sauerkraut and mustard spatzle.  While the pork chop was excellent, with a smoky flavor and an excellent mustard seed demi-glace, the side dishes didn't do much for me, so I focused mainly on the pork.  That worked pretty well.

The dessert was a chocolate souffle with a marvelous hot chocolate sauce inside and a spoonful of vanilla ice cream on the side and a line of that raspberry sauce that most high end restaurants are serving with choclate desserts.  It's not a bad sauce, but there wasn't enough for the whole dessert, and it was soon lost in the mass of chocolate and vanilla.   I didn't mind, though, since the chocolate and ice cream worked perfectly without the sauce.

All in all it was an awesome, if expensive, meal.  I'm told that that the fish and shellfish were equally good, particularly the Butterfish.  If you're looking for great seafood and good everything else, Roy's is a pretty good choice.

WEP '12, Day 20 - Memoirs of a Gamer II: High School

High school brought with it a number of new opportunities in gaming.  I attended Loyola Academy, another Catholic school.  It was also an all boys school at the time.  My brother Matt would be a member of the last all male graduating class a few years later, but in my time there wasn't even a hint that all girls Marilac was going to close and get merged with Loyola.  Regardless of what that did to my chances to socialize with and date members of the opposite gender, the all boys nature of Loyola did allow for new horizons in gaming.

For one thing there was an officially sanctioned gaming club at Loyola.  I can't recall the actual name of the club, but it was pretty clever.  Strategic Simulations Association or some such.  In theory it was about honing our minds through tactical conflicts.  In practice, it was about letting the teacher in charge play his collection of  boardgames.

But you know what?  That was fine with me.

I got to play Cosmic Encounters, Succession Wars, Talisman, Fortress America, Shogun, Dungeonquest, and Axis & Allies.  Lots of Axis & Allies, which was our game of choice for most of a year.  Old favorites that I'd played in my younger days like Battletech and The Star Trek Combat Simulator got some love too, but mostly it was the big board games of the day that prevailed after school.

But that didn't mean I stopped roleplaying.  Quite the contrary, between friends I made in band and people from the club at school, my gaming circle grew into something pretty impressive.  We played a slew of the games of that era, albeit rarely for very long each.  There was a one shot Cyberpunk game, the time we used the Marvel Superheroes rules to do a big Aliens vs Predator game decades before the movie for it.  And then we topped it by throwing a bunch of superheroes into the fight, beating the Stormwatch vs Aliens comic by a few years too.  Vampire: The Masquerade came out and we used the rules to go on bloody rampages through Chicago, though Steve was still around at that point and actually ran a Vampire game that was as close as I ever got to playing it correctly.  There was the Mechwarrior game where we got stuck with a gamemaster controlled character who was better at everything than all of us and rode a better giant robot too, which was suck that turned into awesome when we found a loophole in the charging rules and managed to totally upstage him.  Another time we were playing D&D and the game sucked so bad that we started setting up and playing a board game in the middle of the game.

That last one was a pretty mean thing to do, and not what I'd do now...but we were high schoolers and cruelty came as easy as breathing back then.

Two major developments occurred in this era.  The first was that I reconnected with Jamie when he pulled my phone number out of somewhere and gave me a call.  It turned out that the D&D game he was playing in needed more players and he remembered that I played.  So after years of no contact, I ended up in the basement of someone I'd never met before on the word of a guy I hadn't seen in ages.  That's gamers for you.  The funny thing was, Jamie himself dropped out of the game pretty soon thereafter, and I never saw him again.  I stayed with the game.  It was my first long term campaign as a player.  People kept joining and leaving the game, but there was always a core group.  There was me, Matt (not my brother, a different one), and Caleb as the players with Joel as the DM.  I've given Joel a lot of shit over the years for being an asshole DM.  And, to be fair, much of it was deserved.  But it was in learning to overcome the ruthless crap and abuse that Joel threw our way that caused me to grow as a gamer.  Many of the power gaming skills that I use even today came from trying to survive Joel's game, so for that I am grateful.  Plus, you never forget your first real campaign, and Joel's was my first.

So thanks, Joel.

The second development was that I met Luke and Drew.  At the time, they were just other members of the Loyola gamer gang.  It wasn't until we all got to the University of Illinois together that we became a unit.  But the UIUC gang started at Loyola.  Now, granted, since by sheer happenstance Luke was the closest member of the gang to where I lived, he became my closest gaming friend.  Especially after Ryan transferred out of Loyola after Freshman year and Steve graduated a year ahead of me.  Luke was the only player to regularly play with me and my brothers in my home game.  The three of them formed the "Corsairian Empire" after conquering an evil town in the Forgotten Realms and rather than leave, they took over and started empire building.  It was a fun game, and some of my better gaming stories come from it.

So after four years of craziness, it was time to head to college, which is where we'll pick the tale up next.

WEP '12, Day 19 - Memoirs of a Gamer I: The Early Years

With the recent announcement of the fifth edition of D&D (or "D&D Next" as they prefer to call it) gamers have started to get nostalgic.  Far be it for me to buck that trend.  What follows, therefore, will be an examination of my career as a tabletop gamer.  Be warned, however, that I'm peering through the haze of nearly thirty years here.  I can't speak for the absolute accuracy of what I'm writing here, only that it is the best that I can remember.

My first RPG, like that of most gamers, was Dungeons & Dragons.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was in the vicinity of Dungeons & Dragons, as the game we played wasn't really D&D as most people play it now, or even played it then.  It was 1982, and I was nine years old.  The three of us, Jamie, Brett, and myself were all kids in the same grade school.  Brett lived at the end of the same block that I did, while Jamie lived a few blocks away, but well within biking distance.  Jamie had this shiny red box containing the Dungeons & Dragons: Basic Set.  Since it was Jamie's game, he was the Dungeon Master while Brett and I were the players.  I rolled up a thief, Brett made a Magic-User.  The enitirity of my very first role-playing game session is transcribed below, as best I can remember it:

Jamie: You're in a hallway.  There's an ogre there.  He swings at Jon.  Does a 17 hit your Armor Class?

Me: Umm....yes.


Jamie: He does 8 points of damage.


Me: I only have 3 hit points!


Jamie: Well, you're dead then.

Honestly, it's a miracle that I stayed with it over the years.

Despite the inauspicious beginning, I did keep at it.  Things got harder, though.  Jamie moved away, and Brett wasn't really into D&D.  What was worse was the fact that my mom got a job teaching at the brand new Creative Children's Academy, and as such I got to attend for free.  No one at CCA was interested in gaming, though, and I was too busy memorizing poetry and going over the details of World War II battles to do much of it myself.  However, by the next year my mom had quit CCA and gotten a job with the local newspaper, and I found myself enrolled in QUEST, the gifted program at St. Raymond's, a Catholic school.

That's where I met a couple of collaborators.  Ryan happened to be right in front of me in line on my first day of school.  This was less of a coincidence as it might seem since we had to line up by last name and his was right before mine alphabetically.  What was a coincidence was the fact that we were both new at St. Raymond's, and were both in QUEST.  For whatever weird reason, as then as now I wasn't really the most extroverted of people outside of certain situations where I was comfortable, I introduced myself to Ryan in line and we became friends. 

That was, as it turned out, a damn fine call.

Ryan and I were pretty much inseparable for the next five years or so, and a lot of my early gaming experiences were with him.  Together we explored Traveller, Battletech, Twilight: 2000, The Star Trek Combat Simulator, and Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game.  You may notice that there's a pretty heavy science fiction element to all that.  That's because Ryan was a big science fiction guy.  He read Dune and loved it and introduced me to Cyberpunk (the '80s literary movement...I'm the one who introduced him to the RPG, but that came later).  In fact, I think I've still got what's left of the paperback copy of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology that he gave me in a box in the garage.  Today he makes his living writing about space exploration in Washington DC.  I guess some things to come should have been pretty obvious, even back then.

But unlike Ryan's, my tastes were broader than just science fiction.  I read comic books and liked superheroes.  I also read some of the classic works of fantasy.  I can still remember reading the coverless and tattered copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that had been my mother's before she gave them to me.  To scratch the fantasy itch, I needed another collaborator, and that was Steve.  I looked up to Steve, both because he was physically taller than me, but also because he was a sixth grader when I was a mere fifth grader.  Looking back at it, it's amazing that one year of age was such a big deal back then, but it was. 

Steve was the guy who introduced me to things like Middle-Earth Roleplaying, Runequest, and a lot of the other fantasy games and concepts of the era.  He told me the time and channel that I could watch Doctor Who on, and even had a copy of the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game.  He was the cool guy who always seemed to have the answers, but for all that, we didn't actually play many games.  We talked about games, talked about fantasy stuff in general, watched movies and TV shows, but somehow never got around to playing very much.  That would change in high school, but in grade school and junior high?  Not so much. 

So while I was in awe of Steve's mostly unused collection of fantasy games, if I was going to actually play them, I would have to do it myself.  Fortunately, my parents had been kind enough to provide me with a couple of younger brothers, Anthony and Matthew.  So I drafted them as my players and started working out how to gamemaster.  My first gaming product wasn't even a full RPG, it was Man to Man, an expanded melee combat system for GURPS.  And I didn't buy it, I traded for it.  One of my fellow QUESTers, Jenny (who goes by Tina now), arranged a swap of my lunch for this other kid's copy of Man to Man that he didn't want.  That was great, but the more important piece of information that I got from the kid, Nathan was his name I think, was where he'd gotten it.  It turned out that he'd been in a local game store called Games Plus.  

Not too long afterwards, I was in the store myself.  I managed to get my mom to buy me a copy of the Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game, which I took home to play with my brothers.  As one might expect, it wasn't a very deep gaming experience.  Mostly, I picked out supervillains that we'd read about and my brothers would beat them up.  Not much to it, but it was still pretty fun.  It was my first gamemastering experience.  Eventually, I got my hands on the three books you needed to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (or First Edition as we refer to it now, despite it being the third version of the game), the Player's Handbook, Dungeonmaster's Guide, and the Monster Manual.  What's more, I also got a number of the classic modules, and soon Ant and Matt were running their characters, a magic-user and a paladin respectively, through The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, the Slavers series, Against the Giants, and eventually even The Tomb of Horrors.

Then I went to high school, and everything changed again.  Come back tomorrow to find out how.

WEP '12, Day 18 - SOPA/PIPA Blues

It seems almost mandatory on this, the day that Wikipedia and Rock, Paper, Shotgun among many other sites have gone dark in protest about SOPA/PIPA, to discuss the matter.  I just don't know what else there is to say about it that hasn't been said by people much more in the know and passionate about it.  Certainly the odds are that less than a dozen people will even read this post, and in all likelihood you've already been bombarded with a ton of SOPA/PIPA data, so my throwing around numbers and figures isn't going to convince you of anything.

I guess the only left for me is to examine what would happen around here if the bills pass as is.  Granted, the Obama Administration has already said they oppose the bills as they are, but that doesn't mean that the President wouldn't sign a version that addressed the specific 'net security concerns that the White House objected to.  Or, for that matter, that there even will be an Obama Administration by this time next year*.  What are the chances that Big Money Mitt's going to be willing to veto a bill that has so much corporate cash behind it?  Not too good, in my estimation.

So let's say that SOPA passes.  What happens next?  Will Blogger even still exist?  If you can shut down an entire webpage because of a single copyright complaint, wouldn't that mean Blogger would get smacked down almost instantly?  I know I've seen plenty of blogs that use copyrighted pictures in them.  Heck, I've got pics of movie posters in my various movie reviews.  Would that be enough to get Blogger shut down?  I don't know.  Even if they ignored the relatively benign poster pics that I've got up, what about the character portraits I've taken for my Old Republic characters?  Would EA try to pull the plug because of those?

What's worse, I've seen blogs on Blogger that are much more egregious vis a vis copyright infringement than my own feeble efforts.  I've seen blogs, for instance, that are nothing but links to downloads of anime and manga and Japanese video games.  So even if nothing I do is at all site-killing worthy, those blogs probably are.  So then Blogger has a choice.  They can either try to police what is purported millions of blogs, or they can just shut their doors.  I'm guessing it'll be the latter.  Same for LiveJournal or Facebook or Google+, or anywhere a person can get free and easy access to post whatever they want.  It's hard to imagine how those sites could possibly hire enough people to go through their content page by page day by day to ensure that there isn't a copyright violation that could get them IP Blocked until they remove it.  Especially since the law as written doesn't even require a court order.  Any big old corporation can just say "Hey, they're stealing my stuff" and BAM, your site is down until after you prove that isn't so.  Guilty until proven innocent, with corporate lawyers being the ones with their twitchy fingers on the trigger.

Now maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe the scenario I describe is overly pessimistic.  Maybe it will be intelligently applied and narrowly focused.  But given Congress' track record of late, are you willing to risk everything the internet is on the hope that they won't fuck it up?

Me neither.


* = Yes, I know, the new President gets inaugurated on January 20th, so even if Obama loses there will still be an Obama Administration on January 18th, 2013.  But you know what I mean.  Stop being so pedantic.

WEP '12, Day 17 - Old Republic Log XIV

And so we return to The Old Republic.  Things have progressed, albeit slowly.  Tasia is up to level 21 now, but she's stalled out on her Class Quest because the final monster on Balmorra is a pain in the ass for a healer build like the one Tasia's running.  I'm hoping to get some guild help from Matt or Luke to get the job done in the next couple of days.

Kelynn is keeping pace at 21 as well, having finally finished off Hammer Station last night with the rest of the guild.  It took us three tries to take out the end boss, but we got it done.  We got it done so quickly, in fact, that we also had time to blitz through the Fall of the Locust Heroic 4.  That one wiped us four times, but since you can use Medical Probes in Heroics, we were able to recover faster.  Considering that they've got dialogue and everything, the Heroics, especially the four player ones, really are mini dungeons, which is nice.


Finally, in a fit of either boredom or curiosity, I started a fourth character.  Leanra is a Chiss Imperial Agent.  She's only level 3, since I haven't put more than a couple of hours into her development, but she exists, giving me access to 3/4 of the characters, mechanically anyway.  Given how poorly my machine handles melee, I'm unlikely to try a Jedi Knight or Sith Warrior anytime soon.

Speaking of the mechanics, I think I enjoy the Trooper/Bounty Hunter mechanics best of all.  With a ranged focus and lots of good area of effect attacks, the Trooper gets me the most bang for my buck.  It's unfortunate that the Tank build of Vanguard, which is what Kelynn is, requires me to get so close to be effective.  Still, that does leave me the option of going with a full on shooty Bounty Hunter one of these days, and that could be fun.

Since both Tasia and Kelynn are rocking orange gear that you can upgrade as you go, neither of them have changed in any significant way.  So here's Leanra instead.

Tasia, Level 21 Sith Sorceress, Balmorra
Kelynn, Level 21 Vanguard, Taris
Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant
Leanra, Level 3 Imperial Agent, Hutta

WEP '12, Day 16 - Competitive TV Part 4, Next Iron Chef

Next Iron Chef is a show similar to Top Chef where a number of skilled chefs compete in cooking competitions with one or two chefs being eliminated every episode until there's a final winner.  The difference lies in the nature of the challenges and the stakes.  The challenges are almost universally individual ones, with the  team challenges that are Top Chef's bread and butter being once a season affairs on Next Iron Chef, if that.  Also, rather than a bunch of cooking products and a stack of cash, what's at stake on Next Iron Chef is a place on Iron Chef: America's cast as a new Iron Chef.

The odd thing is that I prefer the competition to become an Iron Chef, more than I do Iron Chef: America itself.  I suspect that's because there is so many fewer variables in Iron Chef: America than there are on Next Iron Chef.  On the regular Iron Chef, each contestant, usually one Iron Chef versus an outside challenger, is told in advance that the secret ingredient is one of four possibilities.  That allows each chef to have a pre-planned menu designed, making all about the final execution.  Iron Chef contestants also get a pair of sous chefs to help them with the cooking.  While that does allow for much more complex and artistic dishes, it also removes a lot of the spontaneity from the proceedings.

By comparison, Next Iron Chef is pretty diverse.  You get wacky ingredients, or strange locations, or odd restrictions, or sometimes more than one of the above.  I mean, really, who doesn't love watching persnickety Chopped judge Geoffrey Zakarian running for his life through a ballpark desperately trying to find some kind of ingredients to use before having to cook them on a grill set up in the bleachers?  No one.  It was hilarious.

What's more, the fourth season of  Next Iron Chef added a new wrinkle, the Secret Ingredient Showdown.  In  the first three seasons of the show, matters proceeded similarly to Top Chef, where you'd have a preliminary challenge, the winner of whom gets an advantage in the second challenge.  In the second challenge, the chef who did the worst is eliminated from the show.  Starting with season four, however, the first challenge determines who the two worst chefs are, and those two get a single, often wacky, ingredient to play with.  Best chef sticks around, worst goes home.  Also, the winner of the first challenge gets some kind of edge in the first challenge of the next episode.

The fourth season also added a subtitle: Next Iron Chef: Super Chefs.  In previous seasons, they'd usually included a reasonably well known chef, at least in TV Cooking circles.  Season two had Amanda Freitag, who also serves as a judge on Chopped.  Season three had Ming Tsai of Simply Ming fame.  Season four, however, went nuts with the idea.  Every single contestant either had their own cooking show either on Food Network, the Cooking Channel, or elsewhere, or else had at least appeared as a challenger on Iron Chef America.  TheFood Network raided their own pantry pretty heavily for this season, with Zakarian, Guarnascelli, and Samuelson from Chopped, Burrell, MacMillan, and Irvine from Worst Cooks in America among other shows, making it six out of ten contestants being regulars on their own network!  Still, like the Chopped All Stars competition before it, that ended up being a net positive as I for one found it fun to see people who are normally positioned as judges being on the other end of the judgments.

Thus, Next Iron Chef.  It's only on for a few weeks every year, so it becomes a rare televised pleasure.  If you happen to be watching Food Network in the autumn, you could do much worse than Next Iron Chef.


This concludes my Competitive TV series.  But wait, what about the frequently mentioned Chopped?  As it turns out, I wrote something about that show a few months ago and nothing's really changed.  Go read that installment, and I'll move on to other topics.  Thanks for reading.

WEP '12, Day 15 - Old Games

So I had a chance to play Star Frontiers this weekend.  That's the science fiction role-playing game from 1982 put out by TSR.  I have moderately fond memories of running games of Star Frontiers back in the day.  I've written in the past about the charm of retro gaming, but this weekend I got to see the flip side of that: old games.

Star Frontiers has not aged well.  Even with significant house rules by our GM, the game relies on a broken skill system based on percentile dice.  Like most percentile systems, you end up with most if not all of your skills below 50%.  In a system that doesn't have much in the combat system beside "hit him" or "shoot him" where most of your combat skills are below 50%...well, it lends itself to drawn out combats where the winner is whomever has the best guns and best armor.

That's what happened Saturday.  We scored a TPK (Total Party Kill) as we got overwhelmed by space pirates who had better weapons than we did.  The GM had overestimated our combat ability and actually beefed up the encounters, which killed us all.  But even if he'd played it straight, I'm not sure we'd have done much better over all, since the healing rules were so brutal.

And that's the problem with nostalgia games.  Because while sometimes you enjoy stepping back to simpler times, sometimes you step back too far and realize that yes, there have been major developments in game design over the last thirty years.

Star Frontiers fails for a modern audience in part because the system was always kind of clunky and harsh, but it also fails because, unlike Dungeons & Dragons, it was never popular enough to receive the gradual evolution of fan works, nor the sudden revelations of new editions.  Rather, the game got a few years of modules and supplements, then was abandoned.

That's the big difference, then.  The games I loved in my Retro Gaming all benefited from heavy modding.  Indeed, I prefer the Fall from Heaven mod to the base game of Civilization IV.  Star Frontiers never got that kind of work, and is thus consigned to the dustbin of history.  And the game store.

WEP '12, Day 14 - Competitive TV Part 3, Top Chef

Like Around the Horn, Top Chef is a show I've come to pretty late in the day.  Now in its ninth season with a number of spin off shows, Top Chef is a competitive cooking show where chefs compete with one another through a number of challenges.  One chef is eliminated every week until only three remain, then the final three fight it our for a big cash prize with other bennies.

It's kind of funny, because this season is the first I've seen from the very beginning and not just in reruns, and this is the season where they've changed things up.  This season they've introduced the "Last Chance Kitchen" where the eliminated chef competes with a previous eliminated chef, with the winner getting to compete against the next eliminated chef and so on until the end when the final winner gets another chance at the main competition.  The Last Chance Kitchen is available on the Bravo.com website.

The main show starts with a quick individual challenge where the winner often wins immunity from being eliminated in that episode.  Then there's a team challenge where the member of the losing team who did the worst as decided by the judges is eliminated from the show.

This show is interesting because failure of your teammates can lead to your demise.  The current Last Chance champion, Nyesha, got really screwed by the fact that they were doing a very rare Double Elimination, so she got eliminated because her partner Dakota screwed up.

They also focus more on other skills that a chef should have.  For example, when they do the Restaurant Wars challenge, the teams have to decorate and run a restaurant in 24 hours. So things like decor and speed of service come up in a way that you don't see in most other cooking shows, though you can see some of that on Hell's Kitchen.


Overall, then, I find TopChef to be pretty fun and, even though it's probably my least favorite of the three cooking shows I'm covering for the Competitive TV series.

WEP '12, Day 13 - Competitive TV Part 2, Around the Horn

Well, crap.  Looks like I hit Save instead of Publish last night.  Friday the 13th, indeed.

Despite this show being around since 2002, I've only started watching Around the Horn regularly in the last few years.  The show of "competitive banter" features a host, Tony Reali, and four sports journalists.  The journalists express their opinions of the major sports news of the day before, and Reali gives them points based on how clever and persuasive they were in their arguments.  Periodically, one of the competitors is booted from the show for being too far behind.  The last two standing have a one on one showdown, and the winner gets 25 seconds at the end of the show to say whatever they want, excepting what you can't say due to FCC regulations.

And that's it.  Unlike most of the shows I'll be discussing in this series, there's really no long term for Around the Horn.  There's no cash being passed around, except as salaries to the people on the show.  Being eliminated first just means you get less face time that episode.  They keep track of who's scored the most points, but that's just for bragging rights, and the current champion, Denver journalist Woody Paige, got his 71 points because he scored a 40 point bonus for being the only one on the show, and maybe on ESPN overall, to pick the Broncos to beat the Steelers last week.

As much as I enjoy the show for the competition, it also lets me see the top twelve topics in sports without having to sit through the usual Sports Center type hype show.  Plus you even get the occasional insightful point or funny line.  In truth, this isn't a show for everyone, but if you like banter and sports, you could do much worse than Around the Horn.

WEP '12, Day 12 - Competitive TV Part 1: The Amazing Race

It's come to my attention that the only TV I really go out of my way to make time for these days are competitive shows.  The Amazing Race, The Next Iron Chef, Around the Horn, Top Chef, and Chopped.  The astute among you will note that that's also three competitive cooking shows out of five.  Let's have a look at the shows in chronological order and see what I think of them and why you might like them.  We'll start with The Amazing Race.

The Amazing Race has been the gold standard of reality shows for quite some time.  Survivor may be both older and more popular, but The Amazing Race is simply better.  The show follows a number of teams of two in a race around the world.  Each team has a pre-existing relationship, be it friends, family, lovers, and so on.  Each episode usually represents a single leg of the race and, with some exceptions, the last team to arrive at that leg's destination  is eliminated from the race.  This goes on from episode to episode until, in the finale, there are three teams left.  The first team to reach the finish line splits one million dollars.

I'm a big fan of the show, even though I've missed around half of its nineteen seasons, as the show does two seasons a year.  For me, it represents the best of the competitive shows.  That's because that while a strong relationship with your partner or with your competitors can help, having a bad relationship doesn't mean you're doomed.  In other words, victory or defeat is purely about whether or not you make it over the finish line before the other teams.  There's no tribal councils, no alliances to vote people off, no votes from the audience at home.  Get across the line first and you win.  Get across the line last and you lose.  There's nothing in-between.  And that alone makes for a more interesting show to me.

With the show entering its twentieth season, I recently watched a copy of the first season on DVD.  The differences are instructive.  The show was harder back then.  The tasks you had to overcome were more challenging, and the clues as to how to get from place to place generally less clear cut.  Furthermore, the spreading of smartphones makes it a lot easier to just get your taxi driver to look up directions to a place you've never heard of, which was something you really couldn't do back in 2001 when the show debuted.

The show was more tactical, too.  In the first season there was a Fast Forward on every leg of the race except the last one.  The first team to get to a Fast Forward could use it to skip all tasks and go straight to the finish line of that leg.  But a team could only use the Fast Forward once in the race, so it was a big deal to decide to go for it.  Furthermore, if you went for it but another team beat you to it, you could end up even further behind, as the Fast Forward is usually well off the race route.  Nowadays, however, there's only one or two Fast Forwards in each race, so you might as well grab it when you can.  So the teams in the lead, who don't really need it, usually grab the Fast Forward and pad their leads, while the teams who are behind don't even bother since it's almost certainly gone by the time they get there.

The show has gotten better in some ways, though.  The inclusion of the U-Turn, a once or twice per race opportunity to force another team to go back and do another task before they can move on, allows teams to go on the offensive in a way that wasn't available in the early races.  The production values are better, and the fact that they've done this for 11 years shows in how they schedule tasks.  It isn't possible for a team to get an eleven hour lead like one team did in the first Race, and damned difficult for a team to get a full 24 hours behind the others the way one team did in that race too.

So even though I'm not sure the modern version of the race is particularly better than the 2001 version, I'll still be there when the show comes back next month for the twentieth season.

The world is waiting...

EDIT: It occurs to me that I've already discussed Chopped on this blog.  Things haven't changed such that the old entry is invalid, so you can read it here.

WEP '12, Day 11 - Old Republic Log XIII

Bah.  I was ready to pull another last minute posting tonight at 11:30 when the internet (and phone and cable, yay bundles!) went down for two hours.  Nevertheless, we press on despite all that WOW (the cable company, not the game) tries to do to slow us down.

Things have been busy, if low key, on the Old Republic front lately.  I've gotten Tasia to level 20, Kelynn to 19.  I also switched the Guildmaster status from Alia to Kelynn.   Our third guild attempt at Hammer Station ended in the same ignominious failure that the first two tries did, though we consoled ourselves by slaughtering every living thing in a Heroic 4 Mission on Coruscant.

Matt and I did another Heroic 4 by ourselves on Balmorra with our Sith.  My companion can actually tank pretty well now, so I provide the healing and tanking both, while his characters kill everything.  I realized that while my heals are all time based, the protective force field I can put on my allies is an instant cast, so whenever I need to emergency heal someone, I do the Static Shield, then my faster but smaller heal, then finally the slower bigger one.  Works pretty well.

Kelynn's looking more and more troopery all the time now.  The helmet helps, even though her eyepatch sticks through the helmet lens, which is pretty awful.  I dropped enough credits to get a decent looking helmet on Kelynn's companion, but since he can't wear the one Kel's got on and he can wear the one I bought, I left it on him.

I did finish Coruscant, so I'll do a brief story spoiler section after the portrait.

Tasia, Level 20 Sith Sorceress, Balmorra
Kelynn, Level 19 Vanguard, Taris
Alia, Level 12 Jedi Shadow, Coruscant

Coruscant SPOILERS follow.

Are you cleared for SPOILERS?

Right.  So following the betrayal of the rest of Havoc Squad, your first task is to cut off the supplies they're getting from the criminal underworld on Coruscant.  Surprise, surprise, that means blasting your way through the same three criminal organizations that every other Republic class is.  There's this bit where you're running down the guy who mentored Havoc Squad in the first place, and you discover that the last criminal gang has been co-opted by the Imperials, but other than that, it's pretty straight forward.

I did get an interesting choice at the very end, though.  I'd been infiltrating a small enemy space station and I came upon the captured Republic Senator who was nominally my mission objective.  He was strapped to a chair that was rigged with explosives.  I could rescue him, but doing so would set off an alarm and maybe allow Wraith, one of the traitors, to escape.  So I went Dark Side and left him in the bomb chair and went off to confront Wraith.  She immediately blows the chair and kills the guy, saying:

"Mission failed, Lieutenant."

To which I reply:

"You're the mission, Wraith."

We fight, and she dies.  I have to cover my ass with the general I'm taking orders from and I took a huge -180 affection hit from my law & order companion, but I got the job done.

The question I have now...and as it's a class quest, I'd have to get a new Trooper from level 1 to 19 to find out in play myself...is whether or not anything different happens if you free the Senator.  Are there guards?  Does she ambush you?  Or did I let Wraith blow a Senator to meat chunks for no reason than my own paranoia?  (And desire for Dark Side Points.)

It's enough to make one wonder.

WEP '12, Day 10 - Lesser Known Candidates Forum

This was going to be another Old Republic log, but I found something better.  This morning, I caught the tail end of the Lesser Known Democratic Presidential Candidates Forum.   Looking for it online, I found a link to the other side of the coin, the Lesser Known Republican Presidential Candidates Forum.  The latter is interesting too, considering that it has a guy whose solution to everything is to "contact orb soul spirit Jesus with Braingate."

But perhaps as one might expect, Republican fringers aren't as wacky as the Democratic ones.  In particular, the Democratic half includes an appearance by Vermin Supreme.  His solutions to the Zombie Apocalypse sounds pretty good to me, but the highlight of it was watching "Mr. Supreme," as the moderator called him, glitter-bomb Anti-Abortion crusader Randall Terry because Jesus told Vermin Supreme to turn Terry gay.  That's near the end of the Democratic video if you'd like to see that play out.

The thing about it is that by opening the forum to anyone who managed to get on the ballot but who hasn't been invited to any of the "real" debates, they pretty much neuter the ability of any of these guys to be taken seriously.  Republican John Davis, for example, who really doesn't say anything too different than, say, Michele Bachman or Rick Santorum, still gets tarred with the same wacky brush because he's sitting two seats away from "orb soul spirit Jesus" guy and next to "9/11 drone planes and tower rigged to blow" conspiracy guy.

It's interesting to me how many of these guys are single-issue.  Beside the aforementioned "orb soul spirit Jesus" and 9/11 Conspiracy guys, there was "attack Iran" guy and "hunt down the illegal immigrants" guy, and a 38 year old who's a Tea Party favorite on the Republican side.  The Democrats had a guy focused on Thorium nuclear reactors as a way to solve the oil crisis, a couple of highly religious guys, the anti-abortion guy, and of course, Vermin Supreme who isn't so much a single issue guy so much as an issue all to himself.

There are the occasional good points and even moments of near statesmanship, such as the guy in the Republican forum who said that he thought that the President had done has he'd thought was best but that his efforts simply hadn't worked.  But as reasonable as he sounds, it's hard to take the whole thing seriously when it's mixed in with a guy calling to "contact Jesus" for guidance.  And it's even worse on the Democratic side when you're sitting on the same podium with a guy in robes with a boot on his head, and, as it turns out, a handful of glitter in his pocket.

WEP '12, Day 9 - The Fate of Dungeons & Dragons

No sooner had I written up my treatise on why I was leaving Fourth Edition behind then, mere hours later, Wizards of the Coast announced the worst kept secret in gaming.  They're working on a Fifth Edition of the game.

The writing had been on the wall for a year or so.  Fourth Eidition products were coming out less frequently.  Most of the Fourth Edition design team had been let go and Mike Mearls promote to take over.  They brought back Monte Cook of Third Edition fame.  We all knew it would happen.

The thing is, it doesn't seem to be happening the way I thought it would.  My guess had been that they'd announce the new version at this year's GenCon, with an expected release date of Spring 2013, so that 4E would have lasted five years or so.

But no, the announcement of "D&D NExt" came today, with an explanation that starting in Spring 2012 there will be an extensive playtest period.  They swear that this time they'll listen to the playtesters.  We'll see, but I signed up to be notified by 'em anyhow.

So there it is.  If you consider Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to be First Edition, and I do, then there was 12 years between First and Second, eleven years between Second and Third, eight years between Third and Fourth, and now perhaps five to six years between Fourth and Fifth.  I think that suggests that Fourth Edition was the least successful of the modern D&D rulesets, which feels correct to me.

So, let's see how the playtest for Fifth works out, shall we?

WEP '12, Day 8 - Ending the Story

I was running my long running Fourth Edition D&D game when I came to the realization that it was time, maybe even long past time, to wrap the story up.  This particular campaign had been going for three and a half years now, with as many as six players and one DM, myself.  With some variance, the game has been played almost exclusively at my brother's dinner table.  Over those years, we've seen his daughter Julia grow from a screaming baby to a precocious four and a half year old who watches Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.  It's been awhile, in other words.

So why am I calling it a campaign?  Well there are, as with any major decision, several factors.  First of all, and the one that hit me hardest as the 23rd level party annihilated a 31st level monster without taking any significant damage, is that Fourth Edition D&D breaks down during Epic Level play.   It has become too hard to challenge them with published monsters.  They're regularly kicking the ass of creatures way above their level, and they're only 23rd level.  The game theoretically supports up to level 30, but I don't know that monsters exist that can threaten a 30th level party.  In a game I played in, we took a bunch of 30th level characters up against Orcus and we massacred him.  It wasn't even really close.

So the game itself is breaking down.  But what else?  Well, the second part is that with the mechanical aspects falling apart we have to turn to more roleplaying.  But that's hampered by the fact that the Fourth Edition universe lacks all verisimilitude.  It doesn't make sense how adventurers can do what they do, and there's no real attempt to impose some kind of rational universe.  For all that D&D 4E was criticized for being "video gamey" this is where the charge is most accurate.  Fourth Edition doesn't put forth a coherent world, and that makes roleplaying in it too hard.

Finally, I got a Christmas present from one of my players of the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG.  And I like it.  I think it could be just what I'm looking for, a low magic, rules light system that everyone can get a 10 hour briefing on the word via the HBO A Game of Thrones series.  Which you should go ahead and watch anyway, because it's worth it straight up, regardless of whether or not you're going to play the RPG.

So with reason to end it, and a successor named, I'm going to bring the campaign to an end next month and start anew with A Song of Ice and Fire.

The king is dead.  Long live the king!

EDIT: And I got this one in with less than a minute to spare.  We continue on, unbowed by time!

WEP '12, Day 7 - The Republican Primaries

And so, the inevitable politics post.

Has there ever been a less enthusiastic body politic than the current Republican electorate?  While united in their desire to replace President Obama, about the only thing else Republicans in the field seem to be able to agree on is how much they don't like the current crop of candidates.

Like kids on a Ferris Wheel, each of the prospective candidates has ridden to the top, then spun back down again.  First Bachman, then Perry, then Cain, then Gingrich, then Paul, and now Santorum.  The only exceptions seeming to be Romney who is the center of the wheel that the others rise and fall around, and Huntsman, who as a moderate in a party that no longer believes in moderation, never had a chance in the first place.

It seems like it will be Romney.  He "won" Iowa, though there's some debate about that.  He's going to run away with it in New Hampshire.  That will likely scrape off Huntsman.  He's ahead in South Carolina, where a significant Romney victory will probably do in Perry.  Paul always hangs in until the end, and Gingrich, who's been running with almost no money anyway since his campaigns' early defections in the beginning of the year, might stick around just to take shots at Mitt, whom he blames for his collapse in Iowa.  I'm guessing that unless Santorum does remarkably well in South Carolina, he'll kack it after a defeat in Florida, but there's room for error there yet.

And so, it'll be Romney.  Whom no one really likes.  The reason that no one's enthused about Romney is because no one knows who he really is or what he really believes in.  The Massachusetts Health Care bill Romney signed as Governor of Massachusetts is similar in most ways to the "ObamaCare" that Mitt swears is destroying the country.  Shockingly enough, when he was Governor of a left-leaning state he was willing to tolerate all those sticky social issues like Abortion and gay Marriage that he now, as he panders to a right leaning body politic, he says he abhors.  And so on, and so forth.

In short, one gets the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that Mitt will say whatever you want to hear just as long as he gets to be the guy to redecorate the Oval Office.  And indeed, maybe that very chameleon like ability of his to try to be all things to all people will let him beat President Obama in November.

But that doesn't mean that we'll have any idea what kind of a President we're going to get.