This week I had the pleasure of running Lamentations of the Flame Princess again with a group of five wary but enthusiastic players. I ran, for the second time, the small adventure ‘A Stranger Storm” which was a layover part of a larger adventure that will remain unnamed at this time. Spoilers abound.
The first time I ran ASS (see that?) I had only two players, so they were very wary of fighting, especially since they were outnumbered by EVERYTHING, the Morris Dancers, the Merchants, the horses, and even the Inn staff if you count Nicole and both Innkeepers. They were extremely cautious and did not have a magic user or cleric with them to try to snuff out the changelings magically.
The second group from this week had 5 players: two fighters, a specialist, a pretty badass elf and an ancient cleric with terrible stats (a ‘zero’ as my players have started referring to characters that have no net stat bonuses). They were on the way to an abbey to ask the Abbess about some sort of magical box for their master when bad weather hit and a broken wheel brought them to the Incontinent Vicar where ruination ensued.
In both play-throughs, I think the moment the players realized that the insanity with the changelings was not going to let up but would continue unabated was when the second Nicole Gingerbottom arrived at the inn to make breakfast. This is when both groups of players started saying “we’re fucked,” which, when confronted with a LotFP “player-fucker” is the correct assumption.
The second group had shown the first Nicole the dead body of Doodles (the inn keeper) and Patrick Roktar in the common room, so she was near catatonic when the second arrived…. and then they showed the second one the bodies as well. As the merchants were trying to leave, I had one of the Nicoles change into the Elf and they fought and one of them (turned out to be the Changeling) went down in a single hit.
Eventually they made their way to the nearby village and met the local Priest (Father Naylor) who let in on the secret of the jewel in the changeling’s hearts. That’s that’s when the frustration and ‘we’re fucked’ became ‘we can make a lot of XP off this!’ and instead of wanting to get away from the changelings, they wanted to go straight at them! Matt had the quote of the night to Father Naylor with “You’re low fantasy, I’m HIGH fantasy.” He was playing the elf.
Given the knowledge about the jewels, when confronted with the duplicated knight on the road they just sat back and watched and then cleaned up the survivor. Afterwards slicing up all the bodies (horses and men) to get at the jewels. I wondered how long it would take someone to cut out a horse’s heart in the pouring rain.
So the bad part of ASS is coming next and we’ll see if the players can navigate the narrows of morality ahead. And what happened to the Morris Dancers?
Last Saturday, Mouth was in town and we dragged Dan and Amie into a 4-square of the old-school Chaos Warbands using 8th Edition rules and a mish mash of stuff from the two wonderful and awesome Realm of Chaos books.
For those that don’t know about these, they are absolutely essential to any gaming library, whether you play Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Warhammer 40K or none of them. You simply must own them both even if you have to pirate the PDF’s. Inside each are rules for the four major demons of the Warhammer world, plus rules to make your own, plus a kitchen sink of rules for all three of the systems listed above. These are both a MEGA supplement, one that these days would have had content split across 16-20 separate books.
What’s more, there’s a fucking GAME in these books that’s separate from all three games they supplement where you roll up a character and his warband and fight it out to get favor from the dark gods. I played this in college a bunch, probably 50 or so battles with multiple warbands and only one guy “won” the game with his champion becoming a minor daemon. The rest of us either got turned into spawn, or died in pools of blood and urea. And that was fun as shit.
My champion was one MAGROK ROCKSLIDE a chaos dwarf with FITS and a flail. Pretty weak to start except he was accompanied by a Dragon Ogre! After four battles, I ended up with a chaos weapon, four chaos spawn who gave people the evil eye, and eight beastmen. My spawn had 6 chaos attributes a piece and here is where the old Chaos warbands rules start to fray a bit. You can end up generating demon weapons, attributes, spawn inside other spawn that transform into other types of spawn longer than you end up playing out the fights! Now a bit of this is a ton of fun, and the randomness is one of the fantastic elements, but based on the recent play, there would need to be a cap on the amount of chaos attributes at least.
In addition to the chaos attributes, all entities in your warbands that get wounds have them applied individually. What this means is when you have a unit of beastmen or humans, you need to know which one has -1 toughness and which has a busted leg. This gets tedious as hell. More modern designs like Mordheim (which had it’s own terrible problems*) and Legends of the Old West, solve this issue by differentiating between Champions and minions. Minions are treated as a group and have less complex rolls associated with them.
Overall, it was a fun day of gaming. I only got four games in, and probably could have had a bunch more if I had just an hour or so more. I worked on an updated set for Mordheim ages ago (here is the PDF) and I think based on rumors of 9th Edition WFB being skirmish based, it may be a good time to rewrite them for 9th Edition in the coming year. Note, statements in the PDF are contradicted below. We learn stuff over the span of time…
Dragon Ogre vs Minotaur!
*Mordheim is a fantasy game with swords and stuff should have a focus on close combat, naturally , and yet, it’s sci fi brother with lasguns and bolters and stuff, Necromunda, has much, much better close combat rules. I wouldn’t say Mordheim’s close combat rules are bad, I’d say they are terrible.
This is going to be my LOOOOONG post for the week. For my bus ride to work, I got a “NEW” 3DS XL only to play Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate Edition. Now, this is an expensive bit of hardware at 200 bones plus 40 for the game, and I wanted to speak along such lines in case people were interested to see if it was worth it. TL/DR: it is.
This is actually a screen cap from my 3DS!
Many of us do light gaming on our iphones or androids when we are waiting around for other shit to happen. These mobile games are good, but casual, and frankly, most are a bit on the shite side. The few that rise to the top like Dream Quest, Ascension and King of Dragon Pass can only be played for so long before burnout sets in. Even if you check pockettactics.com a lot, you find that despite the THOUSANDS of games on the iphone, so few are any good or worth playing for more than a couple hours.
What’s amazing is that people try to adapt games that need a controller of some kind to the iphone form factor and expect users to use an on-screen pad or joystick plus buttons. Shamefully, I have bought some of these games: King of Fighters, Monster Hunter 3 and others. They are not bad games, but they are terrible to control and pretty much useless on the form factor. You’ll read favorable reviews of these games and the on-screen joypads, but let me tell you when you use the 3DS XL for similar games, the iphone fucking sucks in comparison.
Engineering
Being Nintendo, the engineering of the 3DS is top-fucking-drawer. Everything is responsive, button presses are crisp and they added this little NUB in the upper right of the lower piece that can be used to control a camera view in third person 3D games– which is absolutely perfect for games like Monster Hunter (or Dark Souls, or Skyrim, etc.). I didn’t use this at first and was sort of frustrated, then found it by accident and it was like a completely new experience that blew my ass off the whole bus.
Loading times, the bane of any system, are nearly non-existent on the new 3DS XL, which is not what I expected. The main issue with Monster Hunter is that you are in relatively small areas, sort of like the original Fable. The monsters run off and sometimes you fall into another area and you get a loading screen. If it’s slow, this is extremely frustrating. On the 3DXL, sometimes I find myself wishing they were slightly longer! While the game I’ve played on it was fully 3D, it’s not like it is pushing tons of polys, but what it does it does FAST.
Games
Let’s face it, as a geezer I’m not in the demographic to be playing 90% of the 3DS games currently out. I do enjoy a JRPG from time to time, but most of them are real… kiddie. Yet, most parents aren’t going to buy their kid a 200$ gaming system when those fuckin kids already have an iphone or ipod touch, so I have a feeling that the older generation X people that grew up on NES and SNES ARE the target audience for the new 3DS XL. For us though, there is only one game out currently, and that’s Monster Hunter 4. The basic question you have to ask yourself is whether or not Monster Hunter is worth 240$ in cold hard cash as there are, at present, no other games that really pique my interest at all. Since Nintendo is really it’s own hardware and software shop and don’t let too many people into the party, there’s never going to be a glut of games, but the games they do release, if you are in the target audience, are likely gold stars. So is MH4U worth it? Emphatically with about 25 hours into the game, I would say yes. Given that MH is a way of life in Japan, it doesn’t take long to figure out why it’s such a phenomenon.
MH is a cheeky ARPG game where you play a guy or girl that hunts various large monsters, skins them and make armor and weapons from their bodies (and foods). Essentially, there is a little exploration, quests, a bunch of item management and then a huge amount of boss battles after boss battles. These boss battles can take up to an hour to complete so it’s serious business when you start a mission vs a monster (or multiple monsters). Whats more, it’s local and online multiplayer, so you can hunt monsters together (which I haven’t tried yet).
Aesthetics
While this is not going to win any awards in pushing any type of edge for 3D graphics, and is fairly low polly, what the developers and artists DO with those pollys is gorgeous, much like Warcraft 3. The monsters are beautiful and highly characterized. The NPC’s you can’t get a really close look at but they look fine and the vistas are absolutely breathtaking in some places. If you do get the game, remember to look up on ever map!
What hooks you is the armor and weapon sets, which I’ll go into more in the item management area below. There are hundreds of combinations of armor based on the creatures you destroy and can craft and going from looking like a country bumpkin to a badass motherfucker with mothra wings and chitin legs is a very pleasurable experience. While stuff like Dark Souls and Skyrim are great RPG’s, they are also fucking dress up your doll games, and MH has that in spades. You like doing that? I do.
Gameplay
I was very much hoping MU was not a God of War/Kratos type game where you just have a wank at how badass you are and can pull any moves your character has at any time and the monsters eventually fall down. After Dark Souls, those types of games are unplayable to me and luckily, MU is not that shit at all. MU is a very tactical real time boss fight game that doesn’t eschew the cinematic parts of the fights, but it’s not about that stuff primarily. You have to really time your attacks, know your (very short) combos and use your items like traps and tranq bombs wisely or you will be chopped meats. There’s a lot to go into here but the core game is you, in third person view, going up against a monster that is 10X your size in some cases. You can’t pause, and you can’t use items while your weapons (and sheild if you have one) is out in most cases. You can jump on top of Monsters and hang on (like Dragon’s Dogma), find their weak spots and chop them off (like a tail) and run all over the place climbing up walls, dodging all over. Tactics, movement, placement of attacks all in real time can be quite challenging and fun.
The main adjustment you may have to make as a new player is that it’s not particularly hard, nothing like Dark Souls, but when you go after one of these big beasties, you have to go all in. You can’t just walk up to it and start whacking away and expect to kill it or even survive. The game forces you to take a very planned approach to your take down. Do you need a shock trap? Do you need to paintball it a lot because it runs a lot? What special damage types or effects does it generate that you need special armor/potions for? Can you take it alone or do you need help to draw aggro while you climb on it? Do you have weapons/damage types that can hurt it? there’s a lot going on with each of the monsters. Some even transform during fights into either a super mode or a weak and running away mode that you have to deal with. It truly engages the dexterity and the tactical brain in many of the same ways as Dark Souls and it’s FROM ilk.
In addition to the boss monsters, there are mook monsters and gather quests, but they are really easy (so far at least) even the annoying egg gathering quests. Fun filler when you want something not so intense for a bit. Soon you will be back to take down the big guys though.
Item Management As a former Diablo 2 Zyel and current Torchlight 2 player, I do enjoy light item management in my games. I’d say MU leans to the hardcore item management a bit rather than casual. Armor does a lot, augmenting skills and having slots for some sort of gems that I’m not sure about quite yet. There are a lot of options for armor and weapons in the game and of course the armor aesthetics are critical. Killing enough Gore Malgala to have a full set of armor is quite a feat.
Weapons are similar and I would describe your weapons set you choose as your ‘Class.’ So you can switch classes at any time, but then you’re going to need to build a suitable weapon from Monster Parts to match and that can take farming. From what I’ve seen, many players have their main weapon set that they are best at and a secondary for Multiplayer support or role specific. There are tons of different weapons in the game, and each type demands a specific style of gameplay. I run two weapons at once, despite lindybeige, and it’s very unique even beyond just constantly attacking in that you can power up your chi or whatever it is and then go into a sort of super mode and then go into a super mode on top of that if you play it right. While unique, the weapons are not complex with the exception I think of the Insect weapon where you have a big sword with a bug on it that you can send to attack or gather items from the monsters themselves.
Summation
The 3DS XL (new version) is an amazing piece of hardware that I’ve just scratched the surface on in terms of games. Monster Hunter 4, being THE game for the system above all others is quite simply a reason to buy a 3DS in the first place– likely, you may not need any other game for the system. The fact that it plays the old DS games like Disgaea and Advanced Wars no problem is another big bonus, because a lot of those games are cheap as shit these days.
I kickstarted this for the love of Feng Shui and the Zman/Daedelus Shadowfist. I got the beta-PDF early and just didn’t have time to go through it. Recently the real-deal PDF has come available and I’m just starting to crack open the rule system. I thought it would be near exactly the same, but there’s a lot more going on than before. The few of you that played with me years ago, it was all about the single action value– say you had Guns 17, that was pretty much your most important stat (a bit like Diablo 3’s failed design with only DPS making any difference at all) and while the game was never boring to play, there was no true difference in characters with a couple exceptions. Also the stunting sucked in retrospect, but at the time it was a really awesome new mechanic. The new version seems to have a ton more going on with each character archtype, of which there are TWENTY SIX.
Here’s a shot of the Big Bruiser. As soon as things settle down again, I’ll be grabbing people to play this either on Roll20 or IRL.
Deep inside the Referee book (now free) in the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Grind House edition, the author laments the use of stock monsters stating that they just aren’t scary or interesting and everyone knows what an Owl Bear is and can do and a Githianki isn’t frightening at all after you’ve fought hundreds. He encourages DM’s that ALL monsters in games should be original creations entire. The man put his money where his mouth is by creating the excellent Random Esoteric Creature Generator published by Goodman Games. What’s more, in the Referee book he describes at length how to USE monsters in game so they have a, well, monstrous effect and don’t become ZZzzzzz or just a combat challenge. This is why LoTFP hasn’t had a bestiary or monster manual equivalent these years past until very recently with Raphael Chandler’s Lusus Naturae. Reading only a handful of entries so far, I have been extremely impressed, much more so than his previous work for OSRIC, the Teratic Tome which every other creature had some sort of boobs on it…lots of cool stuff, but too many boob monsters, even for me!
This leads me to a tangent about how generally impressed I’ve been with two other very recent bestiaries, one for Numenera, which has TONS of amazing creatures and entities that could be used in any type of game regardless of Numenera’s very different system from D20, and the 13th Age bestiary which really fired up my desire to run the game once I got my hands on it last year. Both are inspirational tomes. While 13th Age’s monsters are pretty stock D&D in many cases, the USE and EFFECTS of them are very original and what an AD&D Bullette does and what a 13th Age Bullette does is quite surprising. Numenera has some basic stuff, but many, many of the creatures just go so far off the deep end your campaign will never come back– including a WEAPONIZED MEME.
Back to Lusus Naturae– each of the entries I read so far are worth at least a session of play, and some of them, an entire campaign. So if you are a hapless player in my LotFP or Numenera games– look out! (not so much 13th Age, since it’s gonzo fantasy and while I want the characters in real danger, they are super difficult to actually kill by design)
Because today, after 4 years, I beat Dark Souls. I think I bought it the week it came out, and it took me longer to finish it than it took FROM SOFTWARE to make Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne.
Shameful? I don’t think so. Dark Souls is a difficult game, but it’s a fun one. The fun keeps you coming back for more abuse, but when you get beat down pretty bad, or get stuck, or get into a farming rut (where the stuff you are trying to farm takes a lot of practice to git gud enough to beat consistently), you may need to take a break. I took a lot of them, some months at a time. Unlike Red Dead and Bayonetta (and a few others), I kept coming back to Dark Souls. It really is that good. I’ve heard complaints about the camera and the controls (and the difficulty) but frankly the controls are brilliant, the camera is just fine and the difficulty? Let me expand on that a bit.
First, the game takes skill in two ways. First you have to learn how to fight and if DS is your first FROM game, you are going to have to learn the fighting system. The core features is that you need to actually hit your opponent with your weapon (seems odd but watch any World of Warcraft or Diablo 3 video for the contrast) and a lot of the things that work in a normal fight work in DS, like keeping distance, feinting to draw out certain attacks, circling, parrying and blocking. Seems easy right? Except that your AI opponents are doing some of the same things! All of your moves take stamina, and that’s probably the strangest thing to get used to– when you move around or get hit or attack, you use stamina. If you block an attack that exceeds your stamina, you will get staggered– and usually fucked. Heavy attackers, like bosses, or groups of small attackers will chew through your stamina like crazy– and you have to figure out how to deal with it, either through the movements and blocking you do, or equipment because…
Secondly DS is an item management game, just like Torchlight or Skyrim. There are tons of items and weapon sets in the game and most can be upgraded, some to godlike heights. You need to know what type of weapons you want to use, how to use them (this takes a lot of practice) and then learn how to upgrade them. I ignored the item management portion until the last half of the game and I suffered for it.
Unless I get the DLC (likely) I won’t pile into DS again for a long time, so bear with me as I take a trip down memory lane for my own future enjoyment here. This has spoilers (just a few).
Bosses that were rough
Makes people cry.
The first bosses were pretty easy, nothing too crazy there. However, when I got to this guy and his fucking DOGS, who is just a mini-mid-boss, I had to take a break from the game for a long time. I just could not get past him. The combination of the dogs knocking your stamina down and the massive stamina damage that the Capra can dish out is brutal. As this is fairly early in the game, it was teaching you a lesson about what to prepare for later and how to deal with stamina issues like this. I ended up beating him when I was just showing Matt the game on a whim over Xmas break (probably in late 2012).
Yeah, shortly after the Capra is the Gaping Dragon, which is one of the scariest monsters in the game. I don’t think this would be a problem now since the thing is so big– but I had a lot of problems getting him dead. I used the sun bro to help and then it was off to Blighttown…
After that, I sort of got on a roll. Even though Havel and the Hydra and probably a bunch of bosses I can no longer remember took me a long time to beat, none of them were a huge problem. Queelag I did pull a summon in to help, but that was just to save time really. She was a cool enough fight to not mind and also, tits.
However, Andor Londo is where I’ve heard people say the game says “fuck you, welcome to Dark Souls!” and they’re right. There are two notorious parts to this beautiful cityscape. The first are some knight archers that you have to come at on ledges. Their bows are bows used to kill DRAGONS, so you go flying when hit to, you know, your death. This wasn’t even a boss and it made me want to eat my controller. After that, of course, is the most difficult boss in the game, which is actually two bosses. Smough and Ornstein.
Not too friendly
These guys are total dicks, and really this is a gateway to the game since the actual ‘plot’ starts after these two guys are beaten. You figure out (sort of) what you are supposed to be doing to beat the game except for just going around different areas after the bells of awakening have been rung. I had the sunbro AND another person help me with this fight, but I knew if I got stuck there, I would not finish the game, so sucked it up and farmed humanity from the rats in the sewers to run it as a human with FRIENDS.
After these dudes, I have to say the rest of the bosses were much easier, especially with the internet helping. Except, of course, for the last one. The final boss reminded me of the Capra Demon above in that he has completely relentless attacks, does massive damage and drains the shit out of your stamina bar. And then you die again and again and again. I think I was able to get past ALL of the knights guarding him without having to use an estus flask.
Here was my item Build at the end:
Black Armor Set – max upgrades on everything
Shield of Artorias – no upgrades (you need 34 STR to use it)
Black Knight Great Sword – max upgrades
Flame Stone Plate Ring
Ring of Steel Protection
While the boss fights are intense and ‘big events,’ in the game, Dark Souls is so much more about the exploration and the world you get to experience. It’s basically a huge undead prison with a lot of mean people nearby that want to fuck you up. The way the world map is set up is like some huge puzzlebox that you unfold during play, it’s quite amazing. I even enjoyed the worst area of the game, Blight town, quite a bit despite it’s insane difficulty working (slowly) through it. And if you ever get stuck there, remember, at the end there are TITS, so keep going. Though the story is explicitly sparse, there are some dramatic parts and some subplots going on. What happens to that preistess in the beginning? What happens to the first firekeeper? Who is that knight that you talk to early on? What is going on with SUNBRO!?? That said, with both Bloodborne and Darksouls 2 out already, I am not sad to finish DS1, since there is MORE mayhem to wade through.
PVP
I did fight about 20-30 people in PVP. Most of the fights were due to the Forest Covenant ring which summons you back to the forest when people show up there to kill them. I was probably invaded 5-8 times and won only a couple of those invasions. Most of the time there was a fire blast and I was killed in those situations. In the Forest, it was a bit more even but I still didn’t do great. I ran a SUPER tank build and a lot of times I would swing my sword and the other guy would not be expecting to get hit stunned and then would be lying down shortly after. I found the mutiplayer mechanisms, both invasions and helping people out to be extremely innovative and excellent. If you want to get invaded or help someone, you can, if not, it’s a single player game when you want it to be.
In the end, Dark Souls is a modern classic whose popularity keeps growing and growing for good reason, why would people play PVP in WOW or Guild Wars when they can PVP in Dark Souls? And even if you experience just a part of it, say up to the Gaping Dragon at least, you will have experienced one of the best video games ever made.
If you read a Bernard Cornwell novel, you’ll feel the need to run a gritty, medieval RPG. So you’ll go to reddit to ask the people there what to play, You will find that they are young and ill-informed and in many cases, cunts. They will recommend Dungeon World and FATE without reading the entirety of your question. You will ask yourself: are these really gritty or medieval? The answer will be no. This will remind you of an older game you’d long forgotten, and you will search on the internet and won’t remember the name, you will go to Half Price Books and look to see if anything there jogs your memory, but it won’t you will go on /TG and ask and though the people there are explicitly cunts, they will answer you with knowledge and thoughtfulness, albeit rudely and with disdain for your person, (Since you will likely be a summerfag or worse) They will tell you Runequest 6 and you will coerce your friends to play, they will complain about the long character creation and lack of options for character powers, and at the table, They will be shocked at the true horror of combat at the blood loss and fatigue and destruction of limbs and they will ask you to play more and playing more will remind you of Bernard Cornwell and you will need to read one of his novels.
