We went from the best snow we’ve had all season to NO snow in less than 6 hours here Tuesday and today it was 60 again–so there went any chance of snowboarding until next December without a 6+ hour drive.
That said, I did get some runs in here and there and went four times. Mostly, the snow was an icesheet barely covered by the machine made, graded snow from the night before, but there were two days where the snow was in the “OK for here” zone.
This was my year to go off some jumps and do some funboxes. Failed. I went off one jump and crashed and slammed my knees on the first funbox I tried. So, yeah– next year when hopefully Jack Frost won’t be such a cunter.
The new Marvel RPG is all the rage this week and it’s only out in PDF format so far. It’s very Fate-like, except it uses a bunch of the funny dice like D&D and is very abstract where stuff like Champions/Hero (and Exalted) are very precise and crunchy. While I find it completely impossible to imagine running an actual superhero RPG with my group, I like reading about the systems. I’m a bit of a Systems Addict actually so I stumble upon stuff of variable usefulness. Yesterday my stumbling came across a post about the Marvel RPG initiative system by one of the FATE creators, and apotheosis followed.
Initiative is a tough nut to crack in pen and paper RPG’s because of turn angst. Ideally you want something that rewards players who have spent some sort of resource for their speed, whether it’s in items or their character build or even gotten a good die roll, but as RPG’s have moved towards characters taking ‘actions’ or a ‘scene’ or in Marvel’s case: a ‘panel,’ rather than attacks (with or without the stunts we so love now since Feng Shui) you don’t want some characters dominating the combat scenarios by getting to take a turn more than other player’s characters because then those people without fast characters just sit there… and sit there.
This has typically been solved, unsatisfactorily in my opinion, by a ’round the table’ method where everyone rolls a die, maybe modified, and gets to go in that order, or someone on the player side goes first, then it goes around the table with the GM going last. In contrast to this method is the tick-based systems of Exalted and Champions, where a character’s actions determine how long it is until they can take another action. While this is the most realistic of the systems and fun when all the players (not necessarily the NPC’s) have the same action counts, woe is it to be the archer or a player with a high tick attack action– because you sit there waiting and waiting to take an action, only to take one and have to wait and wait again. While the tick systems are the most tactically deep, in practice, when you have outliers like someone too fast or too slow, it breaks down in play (i.e.: don’t play an archer in Exalted)
As this post discusses, the new Marvel RPG has a hand off mechanic where the player or NPC that takes and action gets to choose who the next actor in a fight is and this is simple and downright brilliant. There is tactical depth, the ability to team up attacks, the ability to out-manuver your opponents by making them take their turn before they want to, etc. What’s more, this could easily be tacked on to ALL non-tick-based initiative systems and looks to work just as well for social or physical conflicts. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay? Yes. FATE (Dresden, Bulldogs, Anglerre) in all the incarnations I know of? Yes. Even in OD&D this could work. Sure, some skills players have in each RPG may not work with this in some systems, but they could simply be adjusted since the ‘actor’s choice’ mechanic is so simple.
…other than because the end of Bioshock and Bioshocked 2 sucked. The inclusion of a robot George Washington put the final nail in that coffin for me. Other than looking insipidly steampunk stupid, it’s NOT a fitting testament to the one single person in American history that made all of this possible– i.e.: that we aren’t serfs to some milksop douche with peerage from an American crown. So you make a robot of the one good guy in American history that you have to shoot? Stupid cunts.
The new xcom is looking all sorts of awesome, but don’t take my word for it! The developers have been doing a mess of interviews these days on why and how they are developing the game. It’s homage as well as pushing the genre itself forward. Like Fighting games, we have had a huge resurgence of the genre due to Street Fighter IV and here’s hoping a similar thing happens with turn based tactical games. The days of Jagged Alliance and Temple of Elemental Evil being AA titles is long gone, but the craving is still there for something that isn’t indy, but isn’t AAA either.
I picked up both the first XCOM and XCOM: Apocalypse (my favorite in the series) off steam to give them a run through again in the next couple weeks. Though these stand the test of time pretty well, with the new game they may no longer NEED to.
Ah Shadowfist, I predicted after 2011, and that year’s kicking ass by me, that I would have it done to me in 2012 (and probably for a long time after). This weekend, I lost the right to call myself the big cheese as we were beaten in a heated final at Plattcon to Jim Sensenbrenner and a deck he made that morning (!?) (featuring a rather unique alternate power generation engine that I will go into once he releases his decklist). Due to my own laziness, I just used the same deck I won with last year and though I never got my meaty combo out in any of the games (big bruiser has to come out, and he only did once) I was still able to get into the final with the rest of the jank stuff in the deck.
The final had TWO Ascended-only decks in it which is a milestone for the faction, at least from what I’ve seen. They haven’t been competitive as a stand alone faction for over a decade now since their domination in the early days of the game. While Op Killdeer is still the best card in the game, it has to be saved for the absolutely most important moments or it’s just wasted on trifles. The rest of the faction (alone) typically does not have the punch through to win in the fast, power stealing, denial heavy environment these days. Yet, it warmed MY cockles to see the EASTERN KING hit the table in a tournament. The raw shock and awe to have a size 11 Golden Gunman ready to lay some beatings was awesome. The only answer the table had was a Neutron Bomb when he brought his huge fighting to bear on the Architect player. I’ve been collecting Eastern Kings for years now, but have yet to put him in a deck that worked so I think it’s about friggin time.
All told, it was a great tournament with a pretty good turnout (8 players) and a lot of intense and friendly Fist. Now I hope to actually get some games in to practice and even make a new deck before Gencon rolls around and I defend my other 2011 title.
There are three or four of us that played Tobal 2 back in the day and though we all live on other parts of the planet, every once in awhile we are near enough to pick up a controller and get in some beatings. Saturday was a time of such beatings with my brother, who, while schooled when he played any other character, beat my ass with EPON (the little dirty dishclout). Needless to say, Tobal 2 stands the test of time, even though the graphics we were once in awe of look old as the hills now, the fact that the game runs at 60 frames per second really keeps it playable. That said, I’d say now days, Tobal is all but forgotten, and with the exception of the Japan only Tobal M, nothing has moved on any type of sequel (nor will it). Tobal is a game series by ex Namco and Sega employees at a company called Dreamfactory who did something very different compared to their contemporaries–moving away from the 2-d plane in a 3d fighting game. It took Tekken and Virtua Fighter until their fourth incarnations to implement this and Tobal No. 1 had it in 1996! To be sure, MOST of what you get gameplay wise from Tobal can be found in Virtua Fighter 4/5 and if you are slumming it, the more recent Tekkens. I won’t hesitate to say that VF5 is a better game than Tobal 2 overall because VF5 is the has the overall best fighting game engine there is, but all ten of the remaining Tobal fans lament the one piece that modern 3d fighters should have mercilessly ripped from the mechanics– the grappling system.
Every time I pick up Tobal again, I’m simply amazed at how the grappling system works and how fun it is. In VF5, a character does a grapple and at the moment of the grab has imputed his or her ‘move’ to do on the opponent. The opponent must input a counter to the move extremely fast, almost to the point of anticipating the grab happening. This leads to what’s called ‘fuzzy’ grapple counters where you actually mash buttons and hope to get in the right inputs to do a counter, not precision pressing like the rest of the game. The move either lands or it doesn’t and then you get into what the frame advantage is for the grappler/grapplee, etc.
In Tobal, grapples happen and start with the grappler in control of the clinch who can either do low kicks, high punches, push or pull or throw one of two per-character grapple moves. As the grappled player, you can block high to low (and change up your blocks when needed) and if you time it right and guess the correct direction of pull, reverse the control of the grapple. In addition, whenever a grapple finisher happens, the opponent can counter that either leads to them controlling the grapple or getting out of it completely (again leading to who has frame advantage between the two players).
So what happened to Dreamfactory? After Ehrghiez God bless the Ring, which was actually in arcades, and the PS2 launch title Bouncer (a lackluster fighter and a graphically solid but mechanically poor beatemup IMO) as well as the dungeon crawl fighter Crimson Tears (also not all that great–and it’s one big sewer level —no joke), no Tobal 3 rose from the ashes, yet Dreamfactory has been putting out fighting games– the last one was in 2007 called Tough: Dark Fight (Japan only thank god) and man it looks like TOTAL SHIT. Rumors of a Toshinden rebirth by Dreamfactory are floating around, but that’s about it, like we needed any more toshinden ever.
The dude at fightersgeneration.com updated the Tobal character roster a year or so ago from a mess of files I had been collecting over the years, so if you want a walk down memory lane, check here. Note you can’t deep link in here because this is the last website in existence that still uses fucking FRAMES.
A great article on what order to watch the Star Wars series (or show it to your kids while you do something… ANYTHING else). Notable is that it completely cuts out episode 1. While I have little to no interest in seeing the prequels ever again, the author does note that this order makes Jedi a better film.
I’m shocked at how much exposure the kids these days get to Star Wars. It’s absolutely everywhere and the only explanation I can think of is total media blitz all the time. The last of the films came out in 2005– seven years ago. If I think about 1991, seven years after Return of The Jedi, while not totally forgotten, it’s not like it was top of mind. Now– it’s fucking EVERYWHERE.
I’m in the D3 beta. It’s great. My fears about how the game plays have been completely allayed. The monster hit lag is unfortunate, but not a ruiner. The real money auction house is delaying the game’s release, but that’s OK too. It should have no effect on players that choose not to use it and you can probably play through the game without even noticing the crafting parts and just pick up any items dropped on the ground FTW, let alone actually using the auction house. The character models aren’t that great, but the monsters look awesome (monsters don’t have a billion combinations of armor and weapons so it follows that there’s a lot more leeway with their design). However, the Witch doctor’s inclusion has me befuddled.
I liked the other black characters in Diablo 1 and 2. The magic user in the first game fit really well when he could have been just some generic pointy-hatted gandalf clone with a stupid beard, or some naked woman that said stupid stuff all the time. The paladin in D2 was another non-northern european character that was believable and fit in well. That said, I just don’t know where Blizzard is coming from with the Witch doctor. Essentially, the Witch doctor replaces the Necromancer from D2– he has many of the same powers and is the core choice for a person that wants to use a summoning character–so system wise, he’s important, but as fluff and the character model itself he is WAY out of place. Here are my issues in order of magnitude:
3) Aesthetically, the witchdoctor is a hunched over, quivering creature with some sort of strange shaking fit that happens to one of his arms. He himself looks like one of the creatures you will be fighting more than any of the other characters.
2) The setting for the Beta is in a very northern european looking region (Tristram); all the voices are some odd mix of welsh, scottish, irish and english thrown together in some sort of midlands pond scum. Given that you are in a remote village that had been plagued by demons and undead before, it’s difficult to imagine some creature looking as odd as the witchdoctor (almost naked as he is starting out) would be killed outright– let alone being let INSIDE the village
1) Given that said village is under attack at the outset of the game by waves of zombies and the witchdoctor himself raises zombies as one of his first powers in the game, it’s equally strange that a person like him, wearing a demon mask and raising zombies, would be allowed anywhere near the INSIDE of the village and almost certainly would simply be killed outright. Of course, since the dialog options are all the same for each character, the NPC’s accept the witchdoctor the same as if he were the barbarian or demon hunter, which makes the doctor’s instant acceptance after killing just a handful of zombies feel like a giant shoehorn sticking out of Diablo’s bright red arse.
I originally thought the Monk would stick out like a sore thumb in the game, just like he did in the (non-Blizzard) expansion to Diablo 1 back in the day, but the witchdoctor is a big carbuncle right on the face in comparison. I realize not all of D3 will happen in fantasy Northern Europe land and the witch doctor won’t look quite as ridiculous but as it stands, it’s a very strange choice for a character.
While having no plans to play the game, I still love peeking at the unfolding drama of the in-the-works ‘internet influenced’ version of D&D and seeing the 4th edition books hit the used-book store shelves in droves (you WILL be nostalgic for this edition I tell you).
The man behind Avadon the Black Fortess and the Geneforge series summed what should be the goal for the design up brilliantly:
I would go as far as removing the “doesn’t have an option which enables it to be” and replacing it with “isn’t,” because shit, I recently ran a FATE game where at least two of the players were barely coherent due to drink and it worked, while not 100% fine, very well; and I’ve run epic-combat heavy sessions of Exalted when players were absolutely OBLITERATED and they were fantastic. Unless you’re playing some vampire-erotic or MAGE or something awful like Twilight 2000 where you have to concentrate a lot all the time, you must expect players to drink heavily when playing an RPG– and not the SURGE and DEW of our youth. Being a player in an RPG, allows a lot of downtime during sessions– you’re not always doing stuff– and between doing stuff it’s perfectly understandable that drinking is happening; sometimes a lot.
That said, I think this internet edition, like the other versions since 2nd, are going to be about using miniatures on the table like Descent and not really an RPG proper. We rarely, if ever, used miniatures in our D&D games as kids and when I want to play with miniatures, I’ll play Warhammer or AT-43, and if I want to roleplay it’s just going to be a drawing on a dry erase board with no hexes, squares or any other crap to detract from the imaginings. Combat in RPG’s is just better when the distraction of little pieces of lead (well, now plastic) aren’t around.
