For Lack Of A Game

I have not played a game in two weeks! This is not for lack of wanting, but because two of my players have been busy and then also some of my other players are unreliable! [1] This would make me upset except that I have been filling the space with many other things!

I have been reading webcomics!

Some people binge on seasons of their television shows. [2] Pshaw! Child's Play! You ought to be binge-reading webcomics!

"Webcomics," scoffs the cinemaphile, "are the last resort of the failed artist, and are nothing more than the chortling playthings of insular dudebros who write about video games!"

That's mostly true! But not all of them. Nimona, for example, is about a shapeshifting girl who teams up with a supervillain to topple a heroic Institution that's not quite what it seems! Hemlock is about a witch with a checkered past in a darkly Scandinavian fairy-tale world! Hark, A Vagrant, for all two of you who haven't read this, is a fanciful retelling of history's most interesting stories, told in the silliest way possible! Nedroid is, like Seinfeld, a comic about nothing. Just kidding! It's about Beartato and Reginald the bird (?) and their adventures through silliness! I've been reading Kid With Experience, an autobiographical comic about the charming Jess Fink! I've been reading other things, too, that I can't remember! [3]

Nimona has a short temper for many things

I have been reading actual things!

Mother Night is a fantastic book, and it's odd reading Welcome To the Monkey House because it's all snippets of stories I'd read online "somewhere" and had completely forgotten about, because Kurt Vonnegut gets reprinted everywhere, endlessly, and for good reason. He's probably as good an author as America can ever produce and if somebody from another country said "what are Americans like, anyways, your television shows are all weird" then they should read some Vonnegut because we haven't changed from the 1960s nearly as much as we like and some of his stories are set much later than that anyways, thank you.

Also good is "FILM CRIT HULK," because when Hulk is talking about movies, Hulk is actually talking about stories, and stories are literally what every human being lives for. Hulk is talking about you and me and life itself, and when you can get past the stylization and unique voice you're finding a person who knows and loves very deeply and passionately. Reading Hulk is like being hugged in your brain. It's a blog, go read it now.

Girls Read Comics is fantastic, in that it got me to consider my previously-unconsidered views on the absurd sexism in comics! I'd never much liked the female superheros common in most Marvel or DC offerings, excepting Black Canary and Hawkwoman [4] in Justice League Unlimited- they were such weak and boring characters. They never did anything exciting or had interesting back stories and just kind of stood around in the back. Even Wonder Woman was like this! I wondered how anybody could be a fan of these women. And then, reading Girls Read Comics I realized that they were boring because their authors were sexist idiots and they always stood in the back because they were supposed to play second fiddle to the "important men" that stood in the foreground and suddenly everything clicked!

I've been playing games!

Tabletop games with my brother! It's pretty cool. My wife isn't as big a board game enthusiast and doesn't like playing them via computer so I'm usually about out of luck, but my brother is a big fan and he's here so we've been going all out.

We've played Darkest Night, which is a decent but flawed game I'll probably review in more fullness later. I want to like it, but it's slow and grinding and really, really random and there's just not enough meat on the game for me. There's a lot of bits and bobs but the game isn't delivering it for me.

A real surprise was Death Angel Space Hulk, which he picked out at random and it turned out to be great. You're Space Marines clearing out this half-wrecked spaceship that's full of vicious aliens, and you're marching ever onwards through corridors while blasting everything and doing your best not to die. It's complex at first but that's just because everything is symbols. It is smooth as hell in play and a really slick design.

Seriously, look at this! Onirim, you done good.

Onirim is a simple card game that is all about hand management and set collection. Your objective is to explore this dream realm and use a key to open doors, or to play three symbols of the same color in a row. Getting in the way are Nightmares, which can slow down or reverse your progress, and your own awful luck. You can pick through your deck using keys, but it's risky, as you're also thinning your deck at the same time. Works great as a solo game, probably alright for two players too. Did I mention it's beautiful? [5]

7 Wonders is a fun civilization building game. There's a dummy with two players, but I find that it actually adds to the depth. This is another one I'll be writing more about in the future, since it's a fairly big game. Smooth in play, slightly Byzantine scoring, great art. Only played one and a half times, so we'll see if it's got longevity.

Red Orchestra: Rising Storm isn't a board game but it is a video game about World War 2. The really cool part is that it's not a big and macho game where it's this big manly heroic thing, it's a really realistic game where you're scrabbling through foliage only to get shot by a guy you didn't see and then you respawn and next life you're machine-gunned down while you're running for cover and then next life you're pinned by machine gun fire and you can hear somebody running and you hope it's backup but nope! It's an IJA and he bayonets you and your squad leader! And for what? To lay claim to a bit of land in the middle of a bombed-out and ruined village on an island nobody's heard of. Really great stuff.

That's it, I guess!

This was really long but a lot of fun to write and it's nice to look back at what I've been doing and realize that I'm not completely wasting my time even if I'm not working on something or (some days) even leaving the house. Life is grand and everything is good.

Oh, hey, if you have any recommendations for good webcomics or board games, let me hear them, because I need to put more things in front of my eyeballs and inside my brain. Thank you very much, and goodnight!

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[1] If any of you are reading this, I mean that your attendance is unreliable in general. You are all very good at telling me that you won't be there, but it is unpredictable. This means that the net effect is that when I look at my calendar I can't predict when you'll be around and when you won't. You're all beautiful people.

[2] I do too, actually. Me and my wife would watch entire seasons of Futurama, Scrubs, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, True Blood (don't judge me), and on one particularly cozy afternoon/evening, Adventure Time. I guess you could call watching Band of Brothers or The Pacific "binging" but the goddamn episodes are like an hour long each and they're really emotionally draining. At least the Pacific is. If you're looking to join any part of the military that has anything to do with being anywhere near combat you should watch that show and then think about whether or not you'll be there. I'm not saying my experience was nearly as bad as that show, obviously, but for some people it probably was.

[3] There have been a lot, seriously! You don't have to read tripe like Penny Arcade or whatever Buckly's B^U comic is called. Real-life comics can be funny and sexy and highbrow and don't just have to be jokes about dicks and video games featuring talking heads or capes and neither do webcomics! (And if you like that sort of thing that's fine too, I'm just sayin' there's more out there)

[4] Black Canary was always so cool because she'd be off doing her own thing, in a normal-ass costume, beating up punks and showing up at random moments like "oh damn Black Canary, what are you doing here!" And then the Huntress is like "You should join the Justice League!" and Black Canary says "Nah, it'll just cramp my style," and then BC leaves, presumably to go kick more villains in the mouth. What a great character! And then Hawkgirl was neat because she was from ancient Egypt or whatever and she actively rebuked her wanna-be husband/lover because he was awful to her, and she didn't need him around for anything because she was with a dude who respected him. And she always wanted to smash things. She smashed the crap out of things like, all the time. Although now that I'm reading the webpage it turns out she was just a pawn of her husband and then she betrays everybody and then re-betrays everybody and I guess she isn't that cool in the later episodes. Well, bummer.

[5] Why are "dreams" such an underused concept for games and media, anyways? The only things I can think of that use it as a theme are Onirim, LSD Dream Simulator, and the role-playing game Lacuna. At least Inception got people thinking about that sort of thing, even if nothing really happened about it except that people talk about dreams-within-dreams sometimes if it comes up. That reminds me, I need to figure out lucid dreaming some day.

STATUS UPDATE

I haven't written in a small age so here's what I've been up to:

1. My brother and I have been hanging around the house, playing video games and watching things and running errands. We're both pretty laid-back dudes so it's been low intensity and that's kind of the way we like things. I think. It probably looks boring to other people but I don't come to your house and judge you, mannnn.
2. I played Dungeon World last Sunday; the party was a naked Samurai, a wannabe-pirate Unseelie Fae, and a Metamorph that looked and acted suspiciously like Kirby. Their goal was to return home to attempt to get the fairy some bushido training, but they got waylaid by assassin vine overgrowths and nearly got killed. They saved an old man, though, so that was good.
3. I've been reading about Fate and holy moly how have I not heard of this already? It's such an interesting system and the way it's fractal and sort of self-looping is really interesting. It makes me want to sit down and play with the system to see what comes out of it. The first thing I thought of was either a supers game or a game where everybody's working together on a vessel, like Aliens, Fury (which I haven't actually seen), or Star Trek. One of my players had been asking about that sort of thing for a while and it feels like Fate is uniquely suited to this endeavor, since the players can collaboratively design their characters and then come together to decide what skills and aspects the vehicle they're piloting would possess. The best part is that once they've decided what their vehicle is doing, they can each still act as their characters, creating aspects and granting bonuses that the vehicle will then directly use in its contest with other vehicles. You could probably make a battle-mech game out of this, and I just love that idea. 
4. I've been shifting back into biphasic sleep, which I know was some sort of fad-lifestyle thing for a while there but it turns out that that's just the sort of way I prefer to sleep when I don't have many external demands on my time. When I can live life on my own schedule, turns out I'd rather sleep in two three-to-four-hour bursts a day than do it in one solid chunk. I have a good friend who sleeps in like, twelve-hour marathon sleeps and I can't understand how anybody can manage that level of commitment to snoozin'.
5. My wife called; she's away for the next six months (and has been gone for one already) and due to her unique situations she can't call often, so the fact that she even got to talk to me for a couple of minutes really meant a lot to me. She's also been taking up most of my spare writing energy and willpower, so until I get used to her being gone this blog will probably remain slow. I'm still working on things in the background (as always) but a lot of my spare time is caught up in goofing around instead of focusing here. Sorry, I guess.

Mike Mearls, You Confuse Me

I really want to like the guy. He wrote Iron Heroes, which is one of my favorite reading materials just based on the fact that the guy wanted to take 3rd Edition D&D, where every character is assumed to have a base level of magic items to the point where everything they use and touch from spellbooks to longswords to arrows are swimming in magic, and then say "Nah, these guys don't need that." That's pretty bold, and it required some finangling to move 3e to a nearly no-magic world.

Needless to say, I loved it. It was really cool. The setting was interesting, the classes were both deep and broad, and the token system (while cumbersome seeming) promoted playing within your class, strategic decisions, and party interplay all in one, to varying degrees. 

But this article here confuses me. I understand the point he's making, but not the logic per se. According to the article (and the one from the next week, if you're interested, although they're only tangentially related to each other despite claims otherwise), D&D players have gotten a more sophisticated taste for gaming since the beginning of the hobby, and only increasing complexity can really satisfy a truly experienced gamer. The other argument present is that statistics that vary on choice are better than ones that are pre-defined.

And both of those arguments have merit, but they're not exactly true. What's true is to say that designers have a taste for increasing complexity, and that designers tire of pre-defined choices and dungeon tropes. Designers and players, while overlapping, are not the same. People in designer mode want for there to be lots of moving parts so they can really stretch their mental muscles and show off their creativity, and people in player mode want something to play. 

Static Rooms in Dungeons

Most of the time, my posts are kind of vague. Not this time.

You see, one of the things I do relentlessly is call in "reinforcements" from other rooms in any sort of pre-plotted dungeons when the PCs are crashing around and making noise. Sometimes I roll for it, but most of the time I use my brain cells to dictate what's going to happen.

The orcs in the next room over are gambling and arguing about stuff, so they might not notice the PCs walking about with torches, even in full armor. If you've ever gambled with people ever before, you'll know there's a certain level of loudness that goes with it, especially if you're playing for any sort of money. The orcs might not even notice if they're in the next room over, knocking over barrels and crates and ransacking the place. They'll definately notice if one of the PCs is knocking stuff over, or if they start arguing about stuff themselves, so out come the orcs from the next room.

The sounds of combat are even louder, though, so out comes the orcs from the next room down and, in a turn or two, the Ogre five or so feet down. At this point, the entire dungeon is full of screaming, grunting fighters, so just about everybody in the dungeon's about to come down and have some fun.


I don't know if that's the way you're supposed to make it work, but it's the way I like. It makes internal sense (keep it down or the whole dungeon's coming down.), and it splits the dungeon level into three basic parts: Infiltration, Fighting, and Exploration.

"Creature" by Nicole Cardiff

In the beginning of the level, you're infiltrating. The denizens are doing their everyday thing, like any other day. Ogres are eating muck or bullying little guys, Goblins are sharpening their shivs and watching their backs, and Demons are probably plotting or trying to contact wizards and bargain for their souls. Whatever. The point is, they're all on low alert and are easy to surprise. The PCs, since they know what they're getting into, can usually get the jump on the monsters. But they have to pick carefully where and when they pick a fight, because they can only use the element of surprise once. If they get caught, there's going to be enough noise and enough mess that they're not going to be able to sneak around easily any more.

After they either get caught or ambush somebody, generally the whole dungeon will start finding its way to the players. This can either result in the players having a fun hide-and-seek, cat and mouse style sneakabout, or it means that waves of monsters are pouring in from every angle until the players either kill them all, run away, or die in the attempt.

After that, they're free to look about and see what the nasties were hiding. This is also when the stationary or sneaky monsters get to play- the PCs are already hurt and low on health/supplies/ammo/whatever, but that's when Goblins and Slimes and stuff are more interesting. The players are going to want to complete the dungeon as fast as possible, since they can never be sure if there are monsters lurking and sneaking around, and they're not sure when the next level will come up and say hello. This is when they explore the rooms, deal with cartography, treasure, and the like.

This might not be the best way to do it, but it feels natural, somehow, to have it split up like that, and really makes the dungeon feel more alive than if each room is full of orcs who, apparently, can't hear the battlecries and death-screams of their buddies across the corridor.

Low-Level Play

What I am about to say will not shock anybody who's gamed with me over the past, what, ten years? But I must press on.

I love low level play in Dungeons and Dragons. There! I said it!

WOT?

Not for me are the bizarre tales of level 32 Fighters dual-wielding the Hammer of Thunderbolts and a +5 Sword of Dragon Slaying, tackling a squadron of githyanki pirates riding spider eaters, nor of level 25 Wizards reshaping the world as they see fit. There's nothing wrong with that game, of course, but it doesn't do it for me.

What I like are the tales of the little men. I have a copy of The Decameron, an interesting hodgepodge of stories told by a group of tale-spinners from the year 1348, full of tales of clever rogues, vengeance, and humor. The stories involve common men and women who find themselves in unusual situations and (generally) get the better of a more dull-witted rival through deception and cunning. It's a fascinating read, and extremely enjoyable. I recommend that you take a peek. It's worth every penny of the $7.95 I paid for it at Borders. Seriously. It's awesome.

It's the same way in roleplaying games. The story of how Napoleon conquered a good chunk of Europe is pretty interesting, and similarly with Alexander and Genghis Khan. Masterful conquerors, valiant warriors, and interesting people every one of them. But they're not interesting because they were powerful- what's interesting is what makes them tick.

For example, knowing that Alexander had an awful temper and was prone to hot-headedness is interesting- you can imagine what it'd be like to meet this warrior-king. We've all met fiery, passionate, driven people before, and we can relate. His megalomania and paranoia are interesting. Who hasn't felt like they ought to be the ruler of the known world? Who hasn't wondered if there aren't secret conspiracies amongst us? The fact that he conquered so much of the world is interesting, and the accounts of his battles are interesting, filled as they are with brilliant strategies and incredible insights.

But you'll notice that this is all historical. This actually happened, with regular people. Interesting, larger-than-life people, yes. But regular people nonetheless. Genghis Khan didn't have to have a magical sword, enchanted greaves, or a wand of fireballs to ravage the world with his hordes. He did it by being smarter, meaner, and tougher than anybody around him.

And that's how D&D should play. You can be the roughest, toughest, meanest motherslapper in town. Cool. But you're still going to need to be smart to get ahead. You can't lean on your magical weapons, armor, scrolls, potions, and staves to carry you through. You can't plow through an army of level 1 soldiers, because they're "merely" wearing plate mail, mounted on mundane horses, and wielding "boring" lances. That's insane, and that's just not right.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't get tougher, or that you should always face the same enemies in your games. I'm not saying you shouldn't progress, or that if you're playing a different way then you're wrong. I'm just saying that there's no reason that "mundane" is boring. There absolutely isn't. Nothing could be more exciting.

Derivative Demihumans

There's nothing inherently wrong with being derivative. It's popular for a reason, and that reason is that, somewhere, it has a deep and enduring meaning for people. Like elves, for example. People have long since believed that there's a fey people who live in the woods, who want almost nothing to do with us. Fairies, you know? There's something in the woods because it's dark and mysterious, and dark and mysterious places have dark and mysterious people.

And the same goes for dwarves. Caverns look like they're made by something, look how smooth and vast they are. They're dark and mysterious, so we can extrapolate what dwarves are: They're hard workers, since carving out a cave is hard work. They're somewhat stern, since it would take a good dozen dwarves a long time to carve something so elaborate and gigantic. And, of course, they're mysterious and want little to do with humans, since we almost never see them and certainly aren't invited into their homes.

Orcs, goblins, and all of that tie into the civilization vs savagery sort of theme that most games seem to work on. The civilized races are pretty, and friendly, and work together. The ugly guys are mean, and bloodthirsty, and they're too stupid to work together or work on anything other than domination.

Too ugly to farm?

Which kind of makes sense. If you've got a race of weak, "pretty" people, they'd have to be good at building walls and buildings and agriculture to get anywhere. If you're strong and hearty and good at battle, you probably don't have much time to build walls and stuff, since your culture is based around warfare, raiding, and constant seiges.

But what doesn't make sense is that despite the fact that even the pseudo-fairy elves have warfare, that orcs and goblins should have agrictulture. Even if we use the classic sense of the extremely Tolkien goblins, what in the hell do they eat when they're just running around caves? Surely there's not enough blind cave fish to feed a whole colony of insane, wretched beasts. Where are their underground mushroom farms? Where are their blind cave cows? Where are their trading routes, to trade with other wretched cave goblins? Everybody has both warfare and agriculture, even the historically insane Assyrians. You know, those guys who used to flay their enemies and put the skins on pillars, and stack human heads in piles hundreds high. Those guys had some regular joes who farmed dirt and forged chains and stuff.

Of course, you could make the argument that since the evil humanoids are nomadic, they don't need agriculture. That's what the Mongolians did, after all. But they also had horses. I don't pretend to be an expert on history, or agriculture, or anything of that sort, but it seems to me that a race of people whose primary habitat is "dark and smelly caves" isn't much of a nomad. Far be it from me to tell you how to run your game of course, but it's an interesting thought experiment.