After a time the Chicago game faded and the Lombard group moved on from Warhammer 40k. We experimented with a number of different games, trying D&D 3.5 one time, then Lord of the Rings the next, and so on. The one that finally caught hold was, of all things, the Star Wars Roleplaying Game (Revised Edition). Wizards of the Coast had the Star Wars license at the time, and they put out a new edition every time one of the new Star Wars prequels was released. So the original edition came out concurrent with Phantom Menace, revised with Attack of the Clones, and the saga edition with Revenge of the Sith.
It was a pretty sweet deal for them, since they were able to basically release the base game and all the supplements three times in span of ten years. The version that had the most support and was, for my money, the best overall, was the revised version. Appearing only two years after the original version, revised was to that game what D&D 3.5 was to 3.0, an enhancement and clarification of an already decent game. 2007's saga edition, on the other hand, was a test bed for D&D 4E, and therefore included some of the things that would become standard in 4E like Encounter Powers and fixed bonuses for skills without going all the way to include At-Wills, Dailies, or Healing Surges. Thus saga ended up being half fish and half fowl, neither one system or the other, and somehow worse than both.
Anyway, Luke ran a revised game in his customary style, with a large supporting cast that never overshadowed the PCs, and we went from level 1 to level 12 before the game came to a halt. Part of that was because Clay moved north to Wisconsin, though we carried on without him for at least a year. But the other reason was because of saga edition and, ultimately, D&D 4E.
Having not run a long term game since the Chicago game folded, by 2007 I was ready to get behind the screen again. And since saga edition had a free adventure path set right after Revenge of the Sith, I picked that up and started a game. Initially, it was a small table, with Luke, Morgan, my then-roommate Victor, and Matt. We played for the latter half of 2007 and the first half of 2008. It was okay, but I was rusty at GMing, and the game wasn't what I'd hoped for. Some of that was the fact that saga edition really doesn't work as well as I'd like, but some of it was me.
Then most of us went to Origins.
The funny thing was, I wasn't even at the game that turned out to be so important to my current gaming habits. You see, while I'm happy to hit the big RPGs with the rest of the team (Morgan and Luke that year) I also like to delve into miniatures and board gaming at cons too. So it's a pretty frequent state of affairs that at any given con event, I'm as likely to be off on my own rather than with the team. And that's what happened that year. I was off playing Babylon 5 Wars (and winning thank you very much) while Luke and Morgan ended up at an RPG (I'm not even sure what game) with Kevin and Jason. It was one of those odd coincidences, since there were four players at the table all from the suburbs of Chicago who had on their own driven five hours to game together in Columbus, Ohio.
The game must have gone well, because by the time it was over names and emails had been exchanged. And then we had a new group. A group that, starting in June 2008, was playing D&D 4E regularly. A week after 4E hit the stores, I was running it, and I've kept on running it for three and a half years now. That's the game that I'm bringing to an end just as D&D 5E is being playtested, which seems appropriate enough.
That wasn't the only game being played since then, of course. Luke started his own Star Wars Saga Edition game that's done alright despite the flaws in the system. Kevin ran a reasonably successful Thursday night game for a couple of years. When he moved to Maine, I replaced that game with a biweekly 4E game where I tweaked the rules and set it in a low magic setting to see how that changed things. (Answer: Not much.)
We played D&D Encounters, D&D Lair Assault, Gamma World, Mutants & Masterminds, Mage, Dark Heresy, Star Frontiers, Warhammer Fantasy, Pathfinder, and Black Crusade. Some were more successful than others, but I have fond memories of quite a few of those games. Throughout, we had new players and GMs, including Wisconsin Jon, Doug, Mike, Dave, Stuart, Linda, Yaro, Eric, Bal, and Phil. Indeed, despite some crossover, I've now got three separate gaming groups, Jason's Group, which meets in the city or to the far north, Games Plus, which meets at Games Plus, of course, and the Home Game, which usually meets at Matt's place. Trying to keep up with who's playing what with whom where can be a trial, but I persevere.
Looking ahead, I'm hoping to try some new things. I've signed up for the D&D 5E playtest, but so has the entire gaming world, so who knows when or even if I'll get my hands on the thing before it gets published in 2013. Once my big 4E game wraps up, I'm looking forward to trying out A Song of Ice and Fire, the second Game of Thrones RPG. This one focuses on building up a noble house, much the way that Ars Magica was about building a covenant. The rules are interesting, and I've always been pretty good at noble intrigue, so that should be right in my wheelhouse. I've also dug up my long owned but seldom used copy of the Amber Diceless Roleplay system which remains one of my dearest goals to run a long term game that doesn't devolve into mass player on player murder sprees. Here's hoping.
So that's where I am in my gaming life. It's been a long, strange trip, no less so in real life than in the game, when it comes right down to it.
Thanks for reading.
Showing posts with label Dungeons and Dragons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dungeons and Dragons. Show all posts
Friday, February 3, 2012
Thursday, February 2, 2012
WEP '12, Day 33 - Memoirs of a Gamer VIII: Full Circle
After my job picked up and moved to India without me, or more accurately, I read the writing on the wall and left her before he could leave me, I ended up moving back to Chicagoland. After a decade away, it was interesting to discover that things really hadn't changed all that much. The internet had come into being while I was away, it was Xbox vs Playstation instead of Nintendo vs Sega, but overall, I could go places I'd frequented while growing up and feel the same familiarity.
The gaming scene required a certain degree of adjustment, though. For one thing, I didn't even bother trying to join up with whatever game Joel may or may not have been involved in. I'd closed that book and had no interest in re-opening it. On the other hand, returning to Chicago meant that people like Luke and Drew became available once more, though Drew would be harder and harder to get involved as he got married and moved into the city and away from easy access out in the 'burbs.
Also, Clay had traveled north to Chicago within a month of my doing so. That wasn't too hard to figure, since he could read the same writing that I could. Indeed, Mick would leave Dallas to help set up a call center in India soon after my departure. We all knew that the Dallas tech support business was doomed, so we scattered before the storm of lay-offs hit.
As it turned out, Clay had friends that he'd met online in the area, in fact, he went to their wedding. Thus Morgan joined our group. And while my brother Anthony was with the Peace Corps in Romania during this period, my brother Matt was available as well. The thing was, I ended up with two distinct gaming groups, Lombard and Chicago.
The Lombard group included myself, Luke, Morgan, and Clay as the core. Paul from Champaign, my brother Matt, a friend of Morgan's named Shane, My grade school friend Ryan, and a random guy I met at Games Plus named John all tagged in and out, but for the most part it was the four of us. And for the first few years, what we played was Warhammer 40,000. I've spoken of the 40k universe recently, so I'll not go into depth here, but what was a break from my previous pattern was the fact that we weren't playing the roleplaying game. We were playing the miniatures game.
At its heart, regardless of the books, RPGs, video games, and everything else that's attached to the Warhammer universe, Warhammer 40k is a miniatures game first. It's about platoon to company scale engagements where each side has anywhere from twenty to a hundred guys on the board with a handful of vehicles in support. You move around, shoot each other, sometimes get into melee combat, and so on until one side or the other is wiped out or running for it. It's not a bad game, though there are a bunch of holes in the system. But what's prohibitive about the game nowadays is the price. Sixty dollars for a rulebook is on the high side compared to, say, forty dollars for a D&D Player's Handbook, but not insane. On the other hand, the prices for the miniatures started high and have inflated to insane. Back in the day, you could buy 10 metal minis for twenty dollars. Today, it can cost you as much as sixty for five plastic ones. Given that even the smallest tournament legal armies needs at least twenty minis, and some factions rely on lots of troops and can go over a hundred, you're looking at a minimum investment of three hundred dollars for a rulebook and the smallest army the game can support. And that's without painting them!
Needless to say, we were eventually priced out of the game entirely. Before that happened, though, we got a few good years of shooting and stabbings both among ourselves and at various tournaments where our vehicle heavy armies were ahead of the curve. It was a fun, if expensive, hobby.
But what 40K didn't provide was any real storytelling, despite our layering on home brewed campaign rules. For that, I turned to the Chicago group. Drew had some friends in the city who were running a D&D 3.0 game in the city proper, and Luke and I joined that one too. It was an inoffensive game, but also not a very memorable one. I can't tell you what character I ran, what modules we played, or anything in particular about it. After a time, I got Matt involved and even took over running the players through that first 3.0 Adventure Path that started with The Sunless Citadel, and I couldn't tell you anything about that one, either. Indeed, the most vivid memory I have of the Chicago game was watching a limo and a sports car get into a huge accident right before our eyes as we drove in for the game one night!
Eventually, the Chicago game wound down and people stopped trying to get it together, which was probably a mercy. A great game is better than a good game which is better than no game which is better than a bad game.
But probably the worst of all is a boring game, since the whole point of gaming in the first place is to enjoy one's self.
The gaming scene required a certain degree of adjustment, though. For one thing, I didn't even bother trying to join up with whatever game Joel may or may not have been involved in. I'd closed that book and had no interest in re-opening it. On the other hand, returning to Chicago meant that people like Luke and Drew became available once more, though Drew would be harder and harder to get involved as he got married and moved into the city and away from easy access out in the 'burbs.
Also, Clay had traveled north to Chicago within a month of my doing so. That wasn't too hard to figure, since he could read the same writing that I could. Indeed, Mick would leave Dallas to help set up a call center in India soon after my departure. We all knew that the Dallas tech support business was doomed, so we scattered before the storm of lay-offs hit.
As it turned out, Clay had friends that he'd met online in the area, in fact, he went to their wedding. Thus Morgan joined our group. And while my brother Anthony was with the Peace Corps in Romania during this period, my brother Matt was available as well. The thing was, I ended up with two distinct gaming groups, Lombard and Chicago.
The Lombard group included myself, Luke, Morgan, and Clay as the core. Paul from Champaign, my brother Matt, a friend of Morgan's named Shane, My grade school friend Ryan, and a random guy I met at Games Plus named John all tagged in and out, but for the most part it was the four of us. And for the first few years, what we played was Warhammer 40,000. I've spoken of the 40k universe recently, so I'll not go into depth here, but what was a break from my previous pattern was the fact that we weren't playing the roleplaying game. We were playing the miniatures game.
At its heart, regardless of the books, RPGs, video games, and everything else that's attached to the Warhammer universe, Warhammer 40k is a miniatures game first. It's about platoon to company scale engagements where each side has anywhere from twenty to a hundred guys on the board with a handful of vehicles in support. You move around, shoot each other, sometimes get into melee combat, and so on until one side or the other is wiped out or running for it. It's not a bad game, though there are a bunch of holes in the system. But what's prohibitive about the game nowadays is the price. Sixty dollars for a rulebook is on the high side compared to, say, forty dollars for a D&D Player's Handbook, but not insane. On the other hand, the prices for the miniatures started high and have inflated to insane. Back in the day, you could buy 10 metal minis for twenty dollars. Today, it can cost you as much as sixty for five plastic ones. Given that even the smallest tournament legal armies needs at least twenty minis, and some factions rely on lots of troops and can go over a hundred, you're looking at a minimum investment of three hundred dollars for a rulebook and the smallest army the game can support. And that's without painting them!
Needless to say, we were eventually priced out of the game entirely. Before that happened, though, we got a few good years of shooting and stabbings both among ourselves and at various tournaments where our vehicle heavy armies were ahead of the curve. It was a fun, if expensive, hobby.
But what 40K didn't provide was any real storytelling, despite our layering on home brewed campaign rules. For that, I turned to the Chicago group. Drew had some friends in the city who were running a D&D 3.0 game in the city proper, and Luke and I joined that one too. It was an inoffensive game, but also not a very memorable one. I can't tell you what character I ran, what modules we played, or anything in particular about it. After a time, I got Matt involved and even took over running the players through that first 3.0 Adventure Path that started with The Sunless Citadel, and I couldn't tell you anything about that one, either. Indeed, the most vivid memory I have of the Chicago game was watching a limo and a sports car get into a huge accident right before our eyes as we drove in for the game one night!
Eventually, the Chicago game wound down and people stopped trying to get it together, which was probably a mercy. A great game is better than a good game which is better than no game which is better than a bad game.
But probably the worst of all is a boring game, since the whole point of gaming in the first place is to enjoy one's self.
Monday, January 30, 2012
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.
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.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
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.)
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.)
Monday, January 23, 2012
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?
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?
Thursday, January 19, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, January 9, 2012
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?
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?
Sunday, January 8, 2012
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!
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!
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Write Everyday Project #6, Retro Gaming
So I started to make a long reply to a buddy's post about Deus Ex: Human Revolution when two things occurred to me. First of all, most of my reply didn't have anything to do with Deus Ex. It was about what I was playing. Secondly, that's what this blog is for these days: to unload my random thoughts on things. So here are some thoughts on my sixth new topic in six posts, what I've learned about retro PC gaming.
Over the weekend there was a big sale over at Good Old Games. You could get an escalating discount on the second generation D&D PC games, with the more you buy the bigger the discount. I ended up laying out $20 to get Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale I & II, and The Temple of Elemental Evil. I suspect that I wouldn't have been quite so eager to pick them up had I not played in that Pathfinder game over the weekend. But old school D&D is where my mind was at, so I grabbed the PC games based on the 2nd and 3rd editions of D&D.
What's interesting about these games, and indeed many games from the '90s and early to mid 2000s, is the depth of mod support for them. Temple of Elemental Evil, for example, is well known for the deplorable state it was released in. Most of those bugs have been squashed in the intervening eight years, and the Circle of Eight mod adds a bunch of nice features and fixes to the already patched and repaired Temple. I've got Circle of Eight installed and the game seems to be playing fine for me, which is a long way from the crashes and hassles I'd have had to deal with had I bought and played it in 2003. What's more, with the sale I ended up buying the game for $3 or so, rather than the $50 I'd have paid at release.
The story's similar for the Baldur's Gate games. Not that either Baldur's Gate was buggy and broken the way Temple of Elemental Evil was, mind you. But since both Baldur's Gates were excellent games in their own right, the mods for them have been focused less on repairing bugs than on adding content. This has culminated in the BiG World Project where the two games are merged into one huge game with a ridiculous 400+ hours of content! New quests, new characters, and the ability to walk from the game world of Baldur's Gate to the that of Baldur's Gate II and back is an amazing achievement.
(It's also a bitch and a half to install and, unlike the Circle of Eight mod which was pretty straightforward, I haven't managed a clean install of BiG World yet. But I'll keep trying.)
Another game that was derided for its buggy release and unimpressive features was Microprose's Birth of the Federation, a Star Trek themed 4X game that failed on it's own but now has a number of mods available, including one that add the Dominion to the game and another where you start in the Enterprise era and evolve until you're using ships from Star Trek: Nemesis.
When I look at the games I've played in the last couple of years, I find that the ones I've played the longest and enjoyed the most are all older games with strong mod support. Dominions III 2006, Civilization IV 2005, Sword of the Stars 2006, Birth of the Federation 1999, Master of Orion II 1996. On the other hand, a lot of the games that I've bought new in the same time frame have been disappointing. Starcraft II, Elemental, Civilization V...all of those games left me cold. What's more, I paid $50 a piece for all three, where as I could get all of the older games (excepting Dominions III whose pricing is insane) for $100 or less. Maybe a lot less.
Indeed, it's getting to the point that I'm becoming more and more reluctant to buy new games. Not only are new games far more expensive, but they're more likely to be broken with the "release now, patch later" mentality that infects so many software developers. And even if a game is released in perfect working order, it won't have the kind of mod support that can elevate a decent game into a great one.
There are exceptions, of course. The Mass Effect games have been pure win for me, and I don't regret paying full price for them. World of Warcraft gave me a couple good years of play, much of it with my brother, so that was worth it too. But then again, Mass Effect is a Bioware game, and as they proved with Baldur's Gate, Bioware puts out good games that work. And World of Warcraft is essentially heavily modded. After all, gamers who played WoW in 2004 will find the 2011 version literally unrecognizable.
If someone asks, "Have you played <Hot New Game>, yet?" the answer will almost certainly be "no." I'll probably be playing something five or more years old instead. Although Sword of the Stars II does come out next month, and The Old Republic is out in December...
So maybe not.
Over the weekend there was a big sale over at Good Old Games. You could get an escalating discount on the second generation D&D PC games, with the more you buy the bigger the discount. I ended up laying out $20 to get Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale I & II, and The Temple of Elemental Evil. I suspect that I wouldn't have been quite so eager to pick them up had I not played in that Pathfinder game over the weekend. But old school D&D is where my mind was at, so I grabbed the PC games based on the 2nd and 3rd editions of D&D.
What's interesting about these games, and indeed many games from the '90s and early to mid 2000s, is the depth of mod support for them. Temple of Elemental Evil, for example, is well known for the deplorable state it was released in. Most of those bugs have been squashed in the intervening eight years, and the Circle of Eight mod adds a bunch of nice features and fixes to the already patched and repaired Temple. I've got Circle of Eight installed and the game seems to be playing fine for me, which is a long way from the crashes and hassles I'd have had to deal with had I bought and played it in 2003. What's more, with the sale I ended up buying the game for $3 or so, rather than the $50 I'd have paid at release.
The story's similar for the Baldur's Gate games. Not that either Baldur's Gate was buggy and broken the way Temple of Elemental Evil was, mind you. But since both Baldur's Gates were excellent games in their own right, the mods for them have been focused less on repairing bugs than on adding content. This has culminated in the BiG World Project where the two games are merged into one huge game with a ridiculous 400+ hours of content! New quests, new characters, and the ability to walk from the game world of Baldur's Gate to the that of Baldur's Gate II and back is an amazing achievement.
(It's also a bitch and a half to install and, unlike the Circle of Eight mod which was pretty straightforward, I haven't managed a clean install of BiG World yet. But I'll keep trying.)
Another game that was derided for its buggy release and unimpressive features was Microprose's Birth of the Federation, a Star Trek themed 4X game that failed on it's own but now has a number of mods available, including one that add the Dominion to the game and another where you start in the Enterprise era and evolve until you're using ships from Star Trek: Nemesis.
When I look at the games I've played in the last couple of years, I find that the ones I've played the longest and enjoyed the most are all older games with strong mod support. Dominions III 2006, Civilization IV 2005, Sword of the Stars 2006, Birth of the Federation 1999, Master of Orion II 1996. On the other hand, a lot of the games that I've bought new in the same time frame have been disappointing. Starcraft II, Elemental, Civilization V...all of those games left me cold. What's more, I paid $50 a piece for all three, where as I could get all of the older games (excepting Dominions III whose pricing is insane) for $100 or less. Maybe a lot less.
Indeed, it's getting to the point that I'm becoming more and more reluctant to buy new games. Not only are new games far more expensive, but they're more likely to be broken with the "release now, patch later" mentality that infects so many software developers. And even if a game is released in perfect working order, it won't have the kind of mod support that can elevate a decent game into a great one.
There are exceptions, of course. The Mass Effect games have been pure win for me, and I don't regret paying full price for them. World of Warcraft gave me a couple good years of play, much of it with my brother, so that was worth it too. But then again, Mass Effect is a Bioware game, and as they proved with Baldur's Gate, Bioware puts out good games that work. And World of Warcraft is essentially heavily modded. After all, gamers who played WoW in 2004 will find the 2011 version literally unrecognizable.
If someone asks, "Have you played <Hot New Game>, yet?" the answer will almost certainly be "no." I'll probably be playing something five or more years old instead. Although Sword of the Stars II does come out next month, and The Old Republic is out in December...
So maybe not.
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