RPG – Page 25 – MRAAKTAGON

New XCOM

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.

Diablo 3: what in gods name is the witchdoctor doing in the game?

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.

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.

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:

AD&D Hardback Reprints (AD&D was crap!)

gemma_arterton — This image has nothing to do with this post

Back in the day, we wee DM’s had all these hardback books for D&D (note this does not have the A in front of it) that we would carry around all over the place in case we needed to look up some arcane fact buried in the largely incomprehensible and inconsistent ruleset that was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. In our 6th grade brains, we thought we were actually playing AD&D, referencing the hardback books and even leaving the Basic D&D books at home from time to time. In reality, however, we were actually playing the Red Box/Blue box basic D&D using the AD&D Monster manual, Fiend Folio and a few tidbits (magic items, psionics (bleh), etc.) from the Players Handbook/Dungeon Masters guide chosen at will because, quite frankly, the AD&D ruleset was pretty much ass compared to basic, and PURE ASS compared to anything modern that was written to a good standard and actually thouroughly playtested. The version I started the game with (blue box) only went to level 3–hence the pathway at that time (before the red box set) was to go AD&D. There was no other choice if you wanted characters over level 3. Yet, even with these massive tomes, we still played with all the Basic D&D rules, literally glossing over the AD&D combat rules in the Dungeon Masters Guide, not just simply ignoring the nuances, but ignoring the entire fundamentals of the AD&D system.

So Wizards of the Coast has announced that it will reprint the old AD&D hardback books in 2012. Though this is an interesting use of the IP, and will go to support the Gygax Memorial fund (Lake Geneva needs a statue of the man somewhere!) what I personally hope it squashes is any nostalgic dreams that AD&D was a good system or even an understandable system, especially compared to the good old Basic D&D that we were actually playing back in the day which lives on in a lot of versions (Labyrinth Lord is my favorite of the bunch) .

D&D 5th edition announced, let the 4th edition nostalgia commence!

I haven’t played D&D seriously for well over 20 years and have no interest in the ‘generic’ fantasy RPG genre whatsoever, but the drama around the editions has been quite a show the last few years with Pathfinder, 3.5 and 4th edition vying for dwindling post-Lord of the Rings film RPG dollars while the 40+ crowd all want to publish their own take on the old school revival (=meh) to keep it all so 1978 real as their mid-life crisis output (Labyrinth Lord, etc.). While 4th edition is not my cup of tea from a setting side nor system side (your character cannot die in the game), I appreciate what the designers tried to do with the DM XP points system and changes, however abortive sometimes, are progess. However, after playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition over the break I am now certain THAT was the way D&D should have gone. Granted every single iteration of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has been better in setting, art, systems and tone than any of the generic fantasy stuff TSR, Paizo or Wizards has yet produced so what FF did with WFRP is to be expected as they had big shoulder pads with spikes to stand on.

Anyway– here is the announcement. Give me a three legged goblin, some nurgle sausages and chaos cultists ANY day of the week though…

FATE! first session

I got a chance to run a FATE-based game last night using the Dresden Files rules. Instead of going through the usual world-building session that would lead to an extensive campaign, we played a published one-off adventure so people could get the feel of the system. I chose “Night Fears” as it seemed the simplest both in the low power level of the characters and the fairly simple scenario of kids showing up to a purportedly haunted house to spend the night. Of course since there are Fae born characters and a ghost talking kid, the house IS haunted. My goals were to help the players to learn what the Fudge dice were for, how to use skills (the easy parts), and how to use fatepoints to invoke, tag, and asses Aspects. Also, since FATE has a pretty unique damage system, I wanted them to understand what Stress and consequences were. I’m a newb myself, so these were also things that I understood in the abstract, but didn’t know how they actually played out.

The characters, pregenerated high school students included a Faeborn trickster, a religious kid whose faith actually gives him some supernatural power, a kid who can see the past (a bit) by focusing in on an inanimate object and a normal girl who is just real sensitive to her surroundings. Nothing too powerful at all so there wasn’t going to be any running around with axes or gunplay. What’s cool about this scenario is that these characters start off incomplete without all their skills and aspects chosen and this really gave the players a chance to start to understand what aspects are and how they are derived. Night Fears has a section devoted to a series of questions to ask the group where the players themselves have a large hand in defining why exactly they are at the house and what they’re each doing there that night. After a half hour or so, turning the answers to these questions in to aspects became a breeze, and a lot of fun too. What the aspects actually DO was still a mystery at this point.

Because it was kids in a haunted house, I’d say 80% of the game play we got through was player on player interaction. Since they were trying to scare each other out of the house, they started doing attacks (social or mental) on each other via ghost stories or trying to freak the others out with tricks. This ended up causing consequences almost all around the table. Of course, the house itself slowly starts to do these things to the kids as well (of course!). Most of the characters took consequence aspects like ‘freaked out’ or ‘creeped out’ but one player took “huddled inside my sleeping bag” which forced him to walk around with his sleeping bag around him from that point on.

We didn’t get all that far, obviously the shit starts to go down the nearer it gets to midnight and I felt as a GM I wasn’t doing all that much (my NPC’s were not ‘active’ much during the session, but people had quite a bit of fun I think.

My main questions are: When does some sort of argument become an attack– there was a fight over a flashlight (verbal) and in Exalted, you can actually ‘win’ the fight via social combat and get the flashlight, but in FATE, it seemed like the players would be just laying on consequences/stress that didn’t specifically resolve the argument over the flashlight. Plus if you have social stress from the fight about the flashlight– should this carry over to a fight say– about going upstairs alone?

Environmental Aspects– these are aspects on the scene itself that can be invoked or tagged– but as a GM, if I invoke a scene aspect, who gets the Fate point? Who pays it? I’m still not totally clear on those bits.

All in all, a good time and not the usual Exalted 4-6 hour combat mega-bloodbaths I’m used to running (which are also good!).

SKYRIMMED!

delves — The Dark elves look far better in Skyrim than oblivion, though that hat doesn't match too good.

It’s finally out! Only a few hours in and it’s showing it’s quality in the combat, systems and graphics. The metacritic score speaks for itself at ninety SIX. While I liked Oblivion a lot, especially the Shivering Isles expansion (that just had excellent writing throughout) I felt Morrowind was the stronger game– though certainly not technically nor graphically– heck modders were able to make far better PC/NPC heads than Bethesda did back then, and by far better I really mean it, so my hope with Skyrim is that it tops Morrowind by far.

Here is a tweak guide for PC users: http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=27073178#item_27073178. Big thing is to increase the Field of View if you are running in the FPS view (which is good for finding the small stuff).

My main love so far is that you can SWIM IN THE FUCKING CREEKS! And I don’t mean just on the surface! Like Morrowind, you can go under the water and look around and, of course, find stuff. Otherwise, like Fallout, for as big as the Skyrim world is, there is a shocking amount of detail to the environments– not RAGE level, which is wonderment incarnate, but close.

You still can’t make a pretty girlface via the custom creator. In that this is no different than oblivion or fallout. All the girls you can make for each race are fug ugs.

D&D coloring book

Monster Brains posted GIANT scans of the 1979 D&D coloring book here. I had never seen this before as a kid and probably would have ignored it. Who would spend 10$ on a coloring book when you could spend $12 on a new hardback monster manual 2 or Oriental Adventures (I never owned the latter)? The art really quite good, but it’s not Tramp or anything like that. If you have kids, these are easily large enough to print out on 8 1/2 X 11 and set them to coloring like the slavemaster you are.

While never into the whole Old School revival (of D&D at least), this is a gem.

diablo 3 beta rant 2 – I PREFER ZERO HIT LAG

so i was wrong. the hit lag i have seen in the diablo 3 beta exists to some extent in diablo 2 single player offline. SOOOOO it’s not just the shitty new DRM that causes hit lag in diablo 3 beta, it’s ??? maybe just multiplayer code in general. how can i know this? i sparked up torchlight, ZERO HIT LAG. yep torchlight has zero hit lag! someone make me a fucking tshirt please that states, “I PREFER ZERO HIT LAG” so i can mail it to every employee working on diablo 3.

here’s a link to the video that compares all three gaymes.

but don’t take my FUCKING word for it, after you play diablo 3 beta play some torchlight. which gaym feels most solid?

now before you go and blow your WAD, i’m not saying torchlight is better then the diablo 3 beta because of this single issue, BUT torchlight does prove you can eliminate the HIT LAG.