Author: littlemute

Summing up the goal of the new D&D

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:

“If a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t have an option which enables it to be easily played by a moderately inebriated person who isn’t good at math, it is a failure.”

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.

SSX looking Sex, but can it make up for a NOSNOW winter?

We’ve had a mild, pleasant, Spring-like Winter this year in the midwest… and it’s fucking SUCKED!  I’ve been snowboarding only twice and both times it was an ICE SHEET at the top of the hill and a crappy draw at the bottom.   As soon as new snow is made, it either melts, adding to the ice sheet, or gets blasted away by eager beavers from the morning sessions (understandably).  I’ve really never seen conditions this bad.

Given that infinite sadness of a wasted winter where the meely brown grass mushes underfoot instead of two feet of snow, SSX, an infamous snowboarding game on the Xbox, is making it’s re-debut on the 360– and the demo is looking to hit next week.   I for one, out of simple dismay at Old Man Winter’s feeble offerings this year, getting it immediately.

Here’s a video to gaze at what snow COULD be like if Winter wasn’t such an awful asshole (and of course if the laws of gravity were different on planet earth)

Mangumific

Hipster cyclone that it was, the little hats and funny vests and fast hair everywhere couldn’t spoil the holy shit that was awesome of Jeff Magnum’s return to touring. Though it was the 1998 music set all over again, this time without the band (except for a couple people that joined in on a few songs), I was just awed at how much presence, sound and skill the man has with only a guitar and his voice. Hopefully the man will tour some more in the coming years and if so, it’s not to be missed.

The space piss is a golden, shimmering stream!

I am not a space kitty

I use the phrase “a cascade of space piss direct into [my/your/their] mouth” quite lavishly when describing just about every post-Master of Orion 2 4x space strategy game.   The phrase comes from an advertisement back in the day for Emperor of the Fading Suns that included the phrase “and urinate on them from a great height” which many, many 4x space strategy games have tried to do to ME ever since.

While computer games usually get this moniker applied by default (Sword of the Stars, Mankind, Master of Orion 3, etc.) I’ve especially used it in discourse regarding Twilight Imperium 3rd edition– a game I maintain a love/hate relationship with after getting it with a Barnes and Noble gift card, then selling it off, then buying it again for 20$ at a game swap and picking up the expansion against my better judgement.  I’ve played the third edition five times if I can remember right, and each time was fraught with disappointment proportional to the excitement around finally getting people to agree to play it. Twilight Imperium 3rd edition is a game that really should have been awesome (despite the space kitties)– coming from a publisher and designer of some of the best board games out there.   I was on the fence for many years there hoping that it would be good with more plays — but after playing Eclipse last night, there is no escape from the conclusion:  Twilight Imperium 3rd edition is a message to us earthlings of piss from space.

Eclipse, while superficially similar to Twilight Imperium in that it’s 4x, in space and uses hexes, is a game by some Finnish dude that was the rage at Essen and has rocketed, and I mean rocketed, to the top of the charts on Boardgamegeek.com (at position 7 last I checked)– not an easy task when amazing games like Princes of the Renaissance and Cosmic Encounter hover in the 80’s.  It’s essentially a combined area-control and worker placement game that looks a great deal like the random hex fighting strategy games (initially Kings and Things, then TI, Nexus Ops, Ventura and now Eclipse) that we know and love–and while Nexus Ops is the absolute KING of the Ameritrash style of this type of hex game, Eclipse takes the Euro crown.  Twilight Imperium adds a layer of (bullshit) role selection stolen from Puerto Rico on top of 2nd edition’s Ameritrash base– Eclipse was designed, ground up, to be a Euro game, and has a great deal more in common with Agricola than Nexus Ops.  And while all these Euro boardgamegeek snobs love it and hump it’s leg, not even my Ameritrash-centric brain can deny myself drinking vats of the Eclipse space piss after just my first play because someone came over the ridge with a giant fleet and DESTROYED ALL MY SHIT.  There’s nothing more ameritrash than that, and it’s glorious.

In similar space game news, the new Cosmic Encounter expansion: Cosmic Alliance is closing in on release shooting out all over the planet.  FF has published the rules and another preview so the time is nigh for it to hit the shelves.  After a perusal of the rules, there’s not much new there but 20 new aliens and an 8th player(!).  That brings the total number of aliens into the stratosphere– not quite to the Mayfair version level, but getting close.  A lot of the Mayfair aliens could only be used with Lucre, the worst addition to the game that hopefully we’ll never see in the FF edition.

Diablo 3 beta ruminations, and big update to Torchlight 2’s site

Someday, Torchlight 2 will come out and there will be the big dust up between Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2, during which we will all likely find that the mod-friendly, played-on-your-actual-computer Torchlight 2 will be a better experience long term, despite some of Diablo 3’s absolute awesomeness sprinkled around, but for now all we got is a new TL2 website.   However, there is new art all over the place for the classes on the TL2 site, so check it out.

Now, I’ve spanned two nights in the Diablo 3 beta finishing the hour and a half of gameplay twice, once with the Monk and once with the Demon Hunter (both Co-op with baurice!mastard).  While there is the hit lag still noted by maurice!bastard a month or so ago on youtube, and the lag is absolutely awful at times–lagging when you NEED IT NOT TO LAG MOST, much of the game itself is just great and a few set pieces in the beta areas are flat out awesome.  The swarming undead at a couple points is the game I most want to play, that and have some decent item management fun with crafting.  Aesthetically: D3 is top notch.

Here is an hour and thirty minutes of play from my first night into the fray with the mastard:

Oh the timing…

On the ferry to St. John

Getting the notification for the Diablo 3 beta while in the Virgin Islands (granted, for work and all) is quite a good bit of timing.  If I was to pick, karmically, when I was going to be in the 100k for the next beta key release, of COURSE it would have be where I was over 2K miles from my gaming rig and could only wince every time I looked at my personal email.  Needless to say, I wouldn’t trade it as VI is, for all it’s quirks, and amazing place on the planet–D3 was nice to come home to.  Unlike Starcraft 2, the D3 beta loaded FAST, within half and hour it was ready to roll.   I haven’t gotten in on it yet, but tonight!

Like I’ve said before:  Torchlight 2 is being made to be the game we all want to play while Diablo 3 is the game Blizzard wants to make and will let us play.  D3 will have to be played through once, but due to mods and all that madness, Torchlight 2 is the one I think will have the most longevity.

Epic 40K battle report

Part 1 of a 3 part series with each of the Epic rulesets (Epic40k, Epic Armageddon, NetEpic).  This one is with the ‘failed’ version from 1997: Epic 40K.   With reading, I think these are the best set of rules for Epic family, but we’ll see when we bust out the more recent rules which is the best on the table.  This is the first time I’ve busted out my 6mm stuff in over 15 years!