Danny’s PAX East 2011 Recap
Just over a week ago we returned from Boston and from my first PAX ever, which I’m very happy to say was incredibly fun for both myself and my wife from start to finish. Without a doubt the highlight of PAX East for me is much the same as other conventions like GenCon, and that’s meeting great people and getting to play games with people that I don’t normally have the opportunity to game with. However there are a few big differences that I noticed which really made PAX East stand out from the other conventions that I’ve been to.
First and foremost PAX East is very clearly a convention designed with gamers in mind, and this concept oozes through every aspect of the con that we experienced. The amount of open console and computer gaming is absolutely staggering, if you wanted to go to the con and do nothing but play console games you could do it and have a hell of a time while you’re at it. I’m talking about an entire hallway of rooms set up with hundreds and hundreds of TVs and computers alongside libraries of nearly every game you could wish for, all there simply for your entertainment and enjoyment!
Who Knew that Gamers like Playing Games?
As if the amount of electronic gaming was not enough, a section of the convention center main hall as large as the exhibit hall itself was willed with tables and dedicated to open tabletop gaming of all kinds. When we first arrived on Friday morning this area was mostly underutilized but through the rest of the convention the area was packed to the brim with thousands of gamers playing various card games, board games, and roleplaying games. It should be no surprise that this room became our designated meeting area, as several of us would stake out a table and sit down to gather friends through the next few hours as they inevitably walked by.
One of the best decisions made about this room, that I hope to see replicated at places like GenCon someday soon, is that a handful of local gaming shops had sales booths set up around the open gaming area. If that doesn’t sound good enough to you, the real icing of the set up is that these vendors often stayed open well beyond the exhibit hall closing which I’m sure only benefited them as gamers seemed incredibly eager to buy all kinds of Magic: The Gathering cards and various board games well into their evenings of frivolous gaming. It was at several of these booths that I did the majority of my shopping at PAX East. I finally purchased a copy of Fiasco to play with friends when Dave isn’t around (who likes gaming with him, anyway?), but the item that made me positively giddy as a school girl was the brand new, still unreleased, boxed set of Battletech from Catalyst Game Labs which I was very happy to get my hands on. A full review of that boxed set is coming very soon, oh yes!
The Exhibits, Let Me Show You Them!
Throughout the three days of PAX East I spent a lot of time around the exhibit hall, but as a matter of choice I decided not to spend any of that time waiting in line. Let me assure you that there were plenty of lines available for waiting, and almost as many that I would have been very eager to join, but I couldn’t allow myself to waste much time at the convention waiting to see a video of a game or play a few minutes of a game that I would inevitably see/play in the next few weeks anyway. The consistently biggest line definitely belonged to Star Wars: The Old Republic, which even had a waiting line during the hours the hall was open early exclusively for press.
The nice thing about not waiting in line to play The Old Republic is that there were still several places that you could watch those people who had waited in line playing the game, and several monitors playing awesome trailers and gameplay footage of the game. For the most part everyone that I know who watched the game at this booth is dying to play the game, and probably the best way for me to summarize it is that it looks like the ‘World of Warcraft’ of Star Wars MMOs. [Read the rest of this article]
That Almost Sucked
In retrospect, it should not surprise me that my procrastinatory tendencies extent to my DM planning sessions. Last week was a lovely off-week board gaming session with some Give Me The Brain (the original $2 “on pink card stock” version) and Cranium. The latter had been sitting unopened in our closet since Sarah and I got married in 2004. The purple Cranium clay was growing… something on it, so we drew pictures for the “sculpture” cards too. And somehow, a new week snuck up on me and I find myself with only a couple days to plan the party’s next adventures.
I’ve been mulling over in my head how I want the story to go first, because I want the story to drive the encounters I create. I’m sure there will come a day when I make up an excuse to use some cool monster I saw in a book in my campaign, but right now everything is supposed to Make Sense and be For A Reason. I’m certain this is going to come back to haunt me, but I haven’t put my finger on how or why yet. It may simply be that a little organized chaos spices things up. Some of the best battles we ever had were when my old DM would decide to wing it and roll on a random encounter table. I’m reasonably sure a lot of the things we fought over the years weren’t integral to the main story in some way. I think I’d like to provide a little foreshadowing for these encounters via side quests, just so the experience and setting feels cohesive. Then again, a random Owlbear ambush never hurt anybody.
A Brush With The Dark Side
This story-driven approach found me in a place I never thought I’d go. I was developing the character for this new major bad guy NPC, and he’s so full of Proper Villainy that his armor barely fits. I had mapped out what drives him and what he would do, and this led me to start thinking about how he might interact with the leader of the army the PCs had joined and I started coming up with all these story concepts and it was making me all giddy — but I was having a real problem coming up with how I was going to tie this in with the PCs. Technically, what I had in mind eventually made sense. However, there was a 15-step process that happened behind the scenes before the players even got remotely involved. It was at that point I realized the horrible truth: I was planning an adventure in which the PCs were not the main focus. I suppressed my urge to self-flagellate (in the interest of time, of course), and scrapped the idea in favor of something my players might give a crap about.
I don’t think the problem was that the story was bad. I think something marginally worth reading could have come out of this, had I taken the time to develop and write it. I think it just wasn’t right for D&D. I had similar problems as a player when coming up with character concepts. A few years back, I played a necromancer with a heart of gold. His name was Lionel Pureheart, and he wanted to use the black arts for the good of mankind. He’d let you speak with dead relatives, raise skeletons to help plow the fields, and reunite families with a beloved dead pet (at least, whatever parts were still available.) I still think he’s a funny idea, and I’m probably going to write some fiction about him at some point. In practice, he was unbelievably frustrating to play for various reasons. My DM found it appropriate to make the local populace flee in terror and/or attempt to lynch him whenever he would offer his services of Gentle Necromancy. This made sense, but it pointed to other “you need to work with your DM before you come up with this kind of thing” issues. That, and 3.5e wizards specializing in Necromancy don’t have much in the way of attack spells at low level. Or defense spells. They’re just sort of like goth punching bags. Lionel was a good idea. Just not for D&D, at least in that form.
It seems to me that a D&D adventure, when done well, is not a standard kind of story. Regular stories, once written, generally follow a timeline. They often don’t work right in D&D because the DM doesn’t have any idea what the players are going to do. They can kill somebody important to the plot. They can lose an important artifact. They can accidentally polymorph the royal family into weasels, throwing the country into civil war. They can all die, and nobody lives happily ever after. As DM, you can stop all of this from happening to preserve the story — but it’s always been my experience that you wind up with a bunch of grumpy players if they have no real impact on the world other than killing what you tell them to. Ever been in one of those campaigns where the world is incredibly detailed, the NPCs are the stars, the outcome of everything has been predetermined, and you would rather commit seppuku than play one more session of this? If I wanted that, I’d play World of Warcraft. Blizzard does, at least, make an effort to make the single-player experience seem like the PC’s actions have some effect on the world (especially with their new phasing tech that lets the world change only for that player when certain quests get completed.) However, the problem still exists. No player can ever be as big a badass as Thrall. Your PC never appears in any cutscenes. Some super-awesome NPC is doing all the cool stuff. That’s not the kind of D&D game I want to run.
Bullet Dodged, Another Bullet Please
This is all well and good, but now I have to figure out a better way to go. The first session with my new group was, admittedly, firmly on rails. I don’t know what I would have done if they decided to deviate from the plan, so I had a giant mixer-horde of cement zombies chase them back to camp. Effective, but ultimately lame — especially if used again. I have a decent idea of the major things I want to happen from using Dave The Game’s super-cool 5×5 method (the hype is real!). Thinking of things as an outline that you fill in as you go along makes the prospect of changing a future line-item to suit the game that is unfolding considerably less terrifying. At least, as compared to watching lots and lots of meticulous work unravelled by one PC inadvertently pulling the string that will bring it all down. I know it’s possible. I’ve been that player. I bear the scars of being repeatedly bludgeoned by a Dungeon Master’s Guide. (And, since I am using the Essentials paperback books, I do not know if I can produce “learning”-class impact force.)
At least I’m not quite as nervous as I was last time. Even when I dropped the ball, it sure seemed to me like we were having fun. I know I was. It’s good to know everything’s going to be OK even if you fail. Unless you’re a player, in which case you should have your DM come read this article. Damn, I’m good.
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Dawn Of The Carrot Colossus
Last Thursday, I took the reins of a brand new D&D group. As you may have noticed from last week’s column, I had some nerves going into this. There’s the “just like climbing the rope in speech class” pressure of getting up and performing in front of people, and I also felt it necessary to up my internal drama ante a little by thinking “you are personally responsible for everyone’s fun at this table they will probably want the next five hours of their lives back NO PRESSURE.”
– But I’m better now. Let’s go back to where this all started.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve sat behind a screen, but I haven’t done it much. My previous short forays into DMing were a strange experiment. Having been the resident lunatic of our party for some years, I wanted to switch gears and run a more serious plot full of intrigue and diabolical plots unravelling and players blasting each other in the face with roleplay like some sort of demented drama club/paintball hybrid. I discovered two things in those few weeks. First, that kind of plot takes a hell of a lot more planning and practice than what I gave it. Second, your players can and will tear apart your plot like wild dogs, and half-assed roleplay-heavy plots are extra juicy. So, it got a little insane. It made almost no sense by the time we were done, but we all had fun. I was, however disappointed that it didn’t turn out as I’d hoped.
Two weeks ago, I had a group. I had a date set. I had lots of things to include to our Social Contract. I did not have an adventure ready, nor much idea of how to set one up. I did, however, have at least a couple notions of what not to do from previous experience, and so I decided to try and come up with either a vague big idea with blanks to fill in or a small idea I could build on. I’m not sure which one actually happened. You see, I spent several evenings trying to come up with something I felt was cool enough to flesh out, and I basically locked up. I couldn’t think of anything, and I was worried it was going to be a disaster. Fortunately, as it frequently does, my subconscious bailed me out.
Redemption Of The Colossus
The idea for what to do came to me in a dream. Now, before I continue, you need to understand that Normal Things do not come to me in dreams. Let me give you an example. One night, I was dozing off peacefully in my wife’s arms when suddenly I sat bolt upright in bed. I had dreamt that I was looking at the back of a magazine, and it had an ad for the newest Castlevania game on it. I have poorly illustrated this ad for you:
That, dear readers, is a purple panther wearing a blood-red cape and a crucifix. In the background, you can see the evil vampire lord’s castle. I had no idea what the word “pleurisy” meant at the time, so I had to go look it up.
It was a dream in this vein that set this campaign in motion. We’d just been watching LOTR: The Return Of The King, and I was flying over Minas Tirith like one of the Nazgûl riding one of their winged… um…. whatever those things are called. Suddenly, a terrifying monster appeared!
It was, as any fool can plainly can see, a colossal 2000-foot-tall beast with the body of a T-Rex and the head of, well, a big slice of carrot cake from Bakers Square. Suddenly, the beast smashed it’s delicious, mountainous head into the helpless city! With each 10 trillion calorie blow, part of its head would remain, crushing and smothering those not hungry enough to escape. Each time it would bring its head to bear for another assault, the cake would regenerate itself, ensuring a considerably more mouth-watering version of Pompeii’s end for Minas Tirith.
The most wonderful part of all this for me, in retrospect, was that I was actually pretty scared while all this was happening. I have to admit, that would be a pretty terrible way to die. Even I have a threshold for the absurd, though, and it wasn’t long before I found myself sitting bolt upright in bed once again, struggling to free myself from my apnea mask so I could properly guffaw. This was such a wonderfully insane idea that I had to use it somehow, but I honestly couldn’t figure out any way for the PC’s to defeat the damned thing short of summoning the Tarrasque to come eat it (and, given my sordid history with the beast, I wanted to try something new.)
My Process, Or As I Like To Call It, “The VanirCo Adventure Shooter”
I decided to try and remove some of the more WTF parts, and eventually I arrived at the concept of having the PC’s deal with a whole town getting mysteriously buried inside a huge cement block. The most interesting way I could think of to do this was to erect giant walls of force around the town as a mold and then to have cement rain down in the middle until it all filled in. I’m assuming with this kind of power, somebody would then go in and smooth the top off, of course. I take pride in my work. Though I’m not very familiar with 4e, it was pretty clear to me that I was probably dancing far beyond the borders of what I could find in any sourcebook as far as plausible rules-backed reasons these things could happen. Then I remembered I was the DM, and I said screw it — this is the work of powers and artifacts whose inner workings are beyond the reach of mortals (probably), and it must surely work because here it is in my world. We shall see if I come to regret this decision.
Now, all I had to do was figure out why somebody would want to do this. Was it simply a weapon of mass destruction? Do I want to build giant, grisly sculptures for an evil dictator? Are these giant monoliths used in some secret ritual? What else do they do? I picked out a vague, terrifying reason and then set to work on introducing the PCs to it in the first session.
After all that, figuring out the setting and why everyone was together just sort of fell in my lap. I renewed my DDI subscription so my players could use the Character Builder, and started perusing the articles in Dragon. Literally one click later, I found Robert J. Schwalb’s article on the Last Legion. (DDI subscription required, sorry!) The short version is that the Legion is a mercenary army that goes around hunting monsters and other threats to civilization, and they’ll take anybody. Adventurers, convicted criminals trying to work off their debt to society — anybody. I fell in love with the whole idea, and decided it would be extremely fertile ground for my players to weave much cooler backstories than “I went into a bar and found some other dudes”. I was right. My players got extremely elaborate as to how and why they’re serving in the Last Legion, and I have so much to work with down the road for PC-specific side-quests that I don’t even know where to begin. Character-development quests were one of my very favorite things my previous DMs used to do, even for the other PCs. To this day, I remember those better than the main storylines of our campaigns, because they gave me a much stronger emotional attachment to what I was doing than merely saving the world. I want very much to give someone else that gift. NO PRESSURE.
As for the setting itself, I decided to go with the good ol’ Forgotten Realms. I did this for several reasons. One, damn near every D&D game I’ve ever played (tabletop or otherwise) has been set there, so I have some idea as to where things are. Granted, the whole “spellplague” thing has complicated things a little, but the way I see it I really don’t have to mess with that unless I really feel like it. Second (and most self-serving!), this sets me up to be able to try out new D&D stuff as it comes out without much modification, which makes my RPG-bloggin’ job a lot easier. Yes, I told my players this. I took 17 damage.
I decided to plop this whole mess down in the middle of the Sword Coast, and (on a suggestion from the Dragon article) to have the Last Legion looking for new recruits, licking its wounds after getting beaten by a tough enemy force. The first session was to be relatively simple: I put them in a small town a ways north of Waterdeep, they all get assigned to the same squad (and do their introductions), and sent to find some soldiers who went AWOL in town. PC’s are told these guys probably just got drunk and are hanging out in an inn, and that they should go round them up. They show up at the town only to find a gigantic cement block. Scary, right? Sure, it’s terrifying. It will shock every player at that table. But now what the hell are they supposed to do?
So, I did the only rational thing and made it crap out cement zombies.
Planning the combat encounter was surprisingly the easiest part of this whole process. I’d heard my fellow bloggers speak many times about reskinning creatures, so I cracked open the Monster Vault to the page on Grasping Zombies and I took all the undead out and let Bob the Dual Class Builder/Necromancer do his thing. However, I decided I didn’t want the zombies trying to kill the PC’s. Since they sort of appeared out of the walls of the big cement block, why not have them try to shove the PC’s in there to join the rest of the townsfolk? So, they always try to grab, and if successful, I let them slide a PC 4 squares. That seemed much scarier to me. The fact that I was messing with monster powers before even running one normal one was equally scary, but the number of ways a PC could avoid getting thrown in there (opposed grapple check, save vs forced movement into dangerous territory, and other players freeing them) seemed like it might make for an interesting encounter. Plus I could totally make some crap up if it went totally wrong. Great plan!
Game Night!!!!!
Soon, the big night had arrived, and I had 5 people looking at me as if I was supposed to do something amazing. So I did. We spent about a half hour going over a relatively standard Social Contract where we talked about important stuff like Pizza, and What To Do When People Don’t Show Up and Booze At The Table. I could tell it was a little irritating and/or uncomfortable to a couple of my players to have to formalize such seemingly trivial things, and I can definitely sympathize. I didn’t really want to do it either, except for when I’d look back to previous conflicts we’d had in other groups over the years, and having a pre-agreed-upon way to solve things would have been nice (which is how I sold it to our group). Fortunately, it was over fast and I have a bunch of very nice friends at my table, so there was pretty much no drama over anything on the list.
I paused for a few minutes to go put my son to bed, and upon my return we got started. I immediately proceeded to break the D&D world speed record for “Fastest Plot Retcon” by forgetting that I had changed the party’s role from “going to go to town to recruit people” to “going to find AWOL recruiting people in town” the night before. I handled this with all the grace you’ve all come to expect from me. And by that, I mean I said something to the effect of “OH GOD THAT DID NOT JUST HAPPEN. THIS HAPPENED INSTEAD.” I didn’t suffer any other major blowouts, but my players did trip me up a couple times. For instance, if you are going to let the PCs question one of your NPCs, it is a good idea to have some idea of what he might say other than what you had planned. Fortunately for me, our party takes good notes, because I absolutely do not remember most of what was coming out of my mouth during that exchange (though I did write down a name I sort of blurted out on the fly so I wouldn’t forget). I hope they don’t figure out they can change the course of the adventure by making crap up in the adventure log.
As it happened, our paladin and the sentinel’s pet dog did get slurped up into the cement during the fight. I decided to have it spit them out at a Dramatically Appropriate Moment, which came when our wizard used a fire spell with a blast radius. They came out cleaner than they started, which freaked several people out. Will there be more lasting effects? I’m not telling. Do I actually know the answer to this question? I’m not telling that either! I decided to end the fight after they’d destroyed the 5 cement zombies I sent for them by sending hundreds more cement zombies after them. They wisely retreated back to the Legion camp. Screaming the whole way. I decided to end the first session on a cliffhanger. They go back to camp, report that hundreds of cement zombies are chasing them, and they meet a cultist responsible for what happened to the town. He’s really sorry, and just as he starts to spill some of the larger beans about what’s happening, they hear the perimeter guards sounding their horns. The cement-zombie horde has come. (What’s the correct term for a group of cement-zombies? A mixer?)
As I said before, some of the stuff I’m doing is simply so I can try out new stuff. It was definitely not lost on me that the Legion is a place I could try out the new Soldiers of Fortune book by Matt James. It has some stuff in it about how to handle large-scale combat and how to make your militia more militia-y. Since there’s a whole mixer of cement-zombies coming, I’ll be reading up on that in-depth in the slightly-over-a-week I have to plan for the next session. I’ll be sure to report my findings here.
When it was all over, I am pleased to say everyone seemed to have a really good time. Personally, I was exhausted, but all I could think to myself is how much I’d missed playing D&D. There were a few bumpy spots, for sure, but I’d say any game where more than one person tells you they’re looking forward to the next game can’t be a total disaster. I think next time, I’m going to try to take it off the rails a little more and plan a few more places they can go in a relatively shallow depth. I’m also not sure if I sort of ruined the magic a little by telling one of my players how I reskinned a zombie. As exciting as it is for me to talk to other people and share this brand new thing I’m playing with, I don’t want to spoil anyone’s sense of immersion. That’s something I’ll likely need to watch in this column, as well. Although honestly, I’m not sure what effect the Carrot Cake Colossus is going to have on anyone’s suspension of disbelief.
(P.S. If you’re interested in reading a first-hand account from one of my players, my good friend Carson has posted such an account at his blog, Roleplaying Discussions.)
Visions Verbalized
Awhile back, talking about the littlest con, I said that you, as a game designer, need to be able to tell me who I am in your game, what I’m doing, and why. I said that’s your elevator pitch. If you can’t produce an elevator pitch, your idea isn’t solid enough. This is true in relative ways for expressions in other media—novels, movies, comic books, and so on—but we’re talking games here.
All games rely on this initial expression to become all they can be. A lack of focus at such an early stage leads, at least, to wasted work as designers realize a game’s scope needs narrowing. At worst, uncertain direction at the outset is a path of failure. Kitchen-sink design’s best results are like World of Synnibarr—wonderfully schizophrenic but ultimately playable only as a novelty experience.
Putting the point succinctly, goal-oriented production can’t occur smoothly without clear vision of the end. This little axiom is true no matter how small the design goal is.
Writing for D&D Insider requires that sort of directed attention. First contact for work on Dragon or Dungeon is, literally, the pitch. You have to sum up your idea neatly, showing you know your objective. Realizing that you’re pitching to one very busy man (Steve Winter) puts more pressure on you to home in on your design goals. Fortunately for you, you aren’t starting with a blank slate. Dungeons & Dragons, as a high-fantasy roleplaying game with a ton of history, provides a lot of context for the pitch. The problem in that framework is tightening your vision.
I actually learned the concept of the pitch long ago from the writer’s guidelines for GURPS. Back then, the proposal process required you to write the sell text you thought should appear on the back cover of the book you were proposing. The assumption was, rightly, that the ability to summarize a potential product’s contents clearly and succinctly shows you have needed focus. Doing it with attention-grabbing style shows you have skill.
Challenging your chops even further, try summing up your idea in one sentence. I call this the nanopitch. Back before Keith Baker’s Eberron existed, the Dungeons & Dragons setting contest, which Keith won, required this. Every entry had to have such a summary statement. Wizards of the Coast called this synopsis “core ethos” in fine Gygaxian style. The whole initial proposal had to fill one page or less.
For those of you who are interested, here is a paraphrasing of what I understand was Keith’s core ethos for Eberron.
Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Lord of the Rings meets film noir.
This statement takes understood media icons and genres, and then it turns them into a succinct, clear, and apt description of Eberron. I’m hooked. Tell me more, Mister Baker.
For contrast, here are my core ethos statements from my three proposal submissions, with world names added to differentiate them.
Ancentynsis: A millennium ago, the Tempest of Fallen Stars cast its Curse across the land, but civilization has risen again in a savage time of new legends.
Shining Lands: The Nine Furies covet the world and the Radiant Host has decreed that mortals must overcome this evil alone.
Durbith: Infernal powers secretly rule a dying world, and heroes must struggle against this mysterious doom and the sinister truth behind it.
Parts of these summaries sound like aspects of the 4e cosmology or other settings. That’s because these statements are too general, or because I worked and had influence on 4e. Through my current sensibilities, I see lots of other flaws in my proposals, but the weakest link is a core ethos that lacks the precision of Eberron’s.
Looking at my setting proposals, my core ethos statements are weaker than Keith’s is, for sure. All the core ethos statements I’ve seen, admitting I haven’t seen that many, are. Although the whole initial proposal for a setting in the contest could have been be one full page, and I wasn’t at Wizards at the time, I’m willing to bet that thousands of the over ten thousand proposals were eliminated right after the judge read the core ethos. I’d say that was especially true if your core ethos contained a semicolon or an em-dash, or any umlauts. But I digress.
If you’re designing a whole game, rather than a supplement for an existing game, writing a nanopitch, elevator pitch, and sell text works as a good trial. But these tests only do their job if readers besides you really understand your idea from what you’ve written. Submitting to this honest evaluation can tell you if you’ve centered your attention enough.
Games such as Fiasco don’t just appear out of someone’s fevered imagination. (Okay, they might, but let’s pretend they don’t.) Although I don’t know, I’m willing to say that Fiasco is likely an outgrowth of its designers knowing its genre and intended play style, at least in theory, from the start. Otherwise, it’s impossible to believe the game could represent its apparent intent so well. A finished game of Fiasco really feels like you just watched or help create a Coen Brothers movie. The game I played felt a lot like Burn After Reading, complete with a slough of corpses created in third-act carnage.
The best games, regardless of intent or media, live up to the elevator pitch ideal. Mage the Ascension, as an off-the-cuff example, isn’t merely a game about wizards and magic. It’s a game about a war for reality wherein consciousness is reality. Mages manipulate the world within the confines of consciousness, personal (enlightened or not) and collective. Left 4 Dead, for another instance, is furious survival horror that needs little other narrative detail. It’s intentionally visceral, allowing you to know the story and characters in the narrow context of desperate battle against long undead odds. Knowing details of the zombie infection doesn’t deepen the experience. It’s not the same as a zombie film or television show (or graphic novel), such as The Walking Dead, in which knowing and caring about the characters is required for a similar effect.
Some games fail in some way to live up to what seems to be their own core ethos, although this might not affect whether the game is fun. A schism might occur between expectations and options. Fallout: New Vegas is an illustration of the point. Fallout is about post-apocalyptic survival and science-fantasy action, but it has always had a measure of silliness with its 1950s World of the Future taken to the breaking point. To me, that made Fallout 3 more than acceptable in its idiosyncrasies. The hardcore mode on New Vegas is fun for various reasons, but it fails to fit in well with the expectations Fallout’s ethos sets forth. Put another way, in hardcore New Vegas I need to drink water or suffer penalties, and ammo has weight, but a human being I shoot in the face with a shotgun lives on to shoot back. It’s weird.
This break between ethos and expression can also occur when a game breaks from its normal modes into unexpected, sometimes jarring, territory. Matt Sernett described his experience with the Afro Samurai videogame in such terms, saying the boss fights frequently required play styles the game had yet to require. That makes those fights frustrating, because despite the fact that you’re supposed to be at least the second-best warrior in the Afro Samurai world, you have to learn new skills on the fly against the strongest opponent you’ve faced.
Fable 3’s designers made a similar mistake when they changed the emote system. Fable 2’s system wasn’t the best, but at least it didn’t try to force me to dance with shopkeepers to make friends or to burp when I wanted to make a rude gesture. (Fable 3 did better than earlier Fables, however, in how your actions influence those observing you.)
None of this is intended to suggest that a game shouldn’t break from its normal modes on occasion. Experimentation with the expectations your game has created or integrated just needs to be done carefully. For instance, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction contains a flashback that takes you out of hit-and-run stealth tactics and into a warzone. That said, the skills you learned earlier in the game still serve you well in this high-action scene.
Like Splinter Cell Conviction, countless games originate in existing intellectual property (IP), rather than creating a new one. More care has to be taken with existing IP. People coming to the game have expectations that the game designers can’t influence, much less control. Case in point, it was unexpected that the Dresden Files RPG allowed me to be anything other than a mage or human, like Harry. My reaction has little to do with the quality of the game, which is good, and everything to do with my own previous interaction with the Dresden Files IP.
This point brings me back to Matt Weise’s IP Verbs exercise, which my friend Wil Upchurch (formerly of Fantasy Flight Games) asked me to elaborate on. Matt Weise is a member of the of the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, and this is his idea, not mine. His IP verb exercise is mostly about living up to an audience’s expectations of an IP, since the IP itself already defines numerous aspects of the game. Matt described the premise fittingly when he brought up how many James Bond games are about shooting rather than the subtler aspects of the Bond IP.
With the exercise, you still need to answer the who and why questions of the elevator pitch to round out your game. An IP might define these or allow for some surprising twists, but the meat of the task is coming up with what the player does in the game.
Compelling in an exercise I’ve seen is a mock design teams use of The Wizard of Oz. That story is about Dorothy, the heroine, traveling the Yellow Brick Road, befriending creatures along the way to gain help and ultimately escape the Wicked Witch of the West and return home to Kansas. She does so without much intentional violence. Considering all this, the team came up with verbs such as befriend, cooperate, escape, explore, fly, help, oppose, seek, talk, travel, trick, and so on. They also paired the verbs with nouns form the IP, and they came up with and game about action subtler than typical video game fighting.
The team, led by Jeff McGann (Irrational Games) and Steve Graham (DSU game design faculty), decided that the player plays the flying monkeys, lackeys of the Wicked Witch of the West. You see, the monkeys are tired of serving the cruel sorceress, so they’re engaging in a secret revolt. Their aim is to help Dorothy make it to Oz, foiling their mistress and ultimately leading to her demise. The hitch: They have to do all their helping without anyone growing wise to their trickery, especially the witch. Mollifying the witch, if she grows suspicious, and faking out Dorothy and her friends are part of the plan. Success means, ding-dong, the witch is dead and, whaddya know, the monkeys are free. That’s what the team called The Monkey Business of Oz.
I’d play that game. The concept also lends itself to more than one media expression.
And that’s the point of sharpening your design skills by honing you ability to crystallize your concepts. Ideas come in droves. The skill and willingness to extract the gold from the raw ore is the real magic. Then comes the ability to communicate your intent with those who can help you produce your idea. If you can make them see the gold by incisively directing their attention with a good pitch, you’re well on your way.
Hell Bent For Leather
As I mentioned in last week’s article, I chose to play a Shaman in World of Warcraft because it reminded me a lot of my old favorite battle-cleric character Lumbar that I used to play in D&D years past. In truth, the similarities between these two characters didn’t end at class and poor hygiene. About midway through the campaign in which I played Lumbar, I got really sugared up one night and decided that it would be a lot of fun to take the corpses of all the monsters we defeated and turn them into clothes, furniture, and other useful household accessories. This eventually led to such finery as the LA-Z-ROC™ chair and a line of luxurious time-saving undergarments created from shambling mounds that freed adventurers from the shackles of having to wipe their own epic butts while in the field. At this point in the campaign, we had a nasty habit of dying frequently, and paying to be True Resurrected was getting to be a problem. Happily, our characters had begun to establish themselves in a town. So it was that I managed to talk our DM into letting Lumbar open up a shop in town selling his creations. It didn’t pay for everything, but it was certainly a good start, and it was a wonderful opportunity to be a little strange and enjoy roleplaying my beloved battle-cleric. After all, the Uthgardt use every part of the displacer beast.
When I created Lumbar’s massively-multiplayer shamanic counterpart Lumbertha, one of the first things my friends told me to do was to pick professions. I looked through the list and chose Skinning and Leatherworking based solely on Lumbar’s creative taxidermy business. I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t randomly turn quest mobs into a festive hat, but I got over it. Skinning was really easy. I just killed things and then skinned them as applicable. Leatherworking was tougher, and required a lot of time and resources. This was sort of a weird sticking point for me, as I had refused to play MMO games for years after seeing one of my friends playing Asheron’s Call and spending his nights making arrows to sell other players. “Why don’t you get a real job and earn real money?”, I remember taunting. As it turned out, leveling a profession was more fun than it first appeared. Well, to be honest, I’m not sure if “fun” is quite the right term. “Triggers a rabid need to progress” is probably a better term. I was very fortunate in that I accidentally picked two complementary professions (leatherworking is expensive enough even without the leather you need), and in that I could craft items usable by shamans.
As I was powerleveling Lumbertha so I could play with my already high-level friends (which I don’t recommend), I didn’t really try leveling my leatherworking skill until I was in my mid-60′s. This was not a particularly large amount of fun, because I had really only been playing a couple of months and didn’t have even remotely enough leather skinned (or gold to buy any). I eventually clawed my way up through needing the various kinds of leather vanilla WoW and Burning Crusade had to offer, and right before I quit playing about a year ago I got the itch to try and level my professions up to max. I hit the not-enough-resources wall once again, but as I had been questing pretty heavily from 70-80, I almost made it. Part of the problem was that I needed Frozen Orbs to make really good stuff, which at the time could only be obtained through running Heroic-difficulty dungeons – and I was rarely on at the same time as most of my guild. I didn’t know any good places to skin a lot of leather, I ran out of money, and eventually out of gas.
That all changed when Cataclysm came out. I leveled my way up to 85 and did all the new zones except for Vash’jir – which I avoided because water levels usually are intensely annoying to me. Once again, I was hitting the resource-wall trying to level my skills, and Googling the best places to farm savage leather was proving fruitless. (Apparently, I’d just missed them patching a bug that let you mass-kill a dozen bats, skinning them all, by mere days. I begrudgingly decided to quest in Vash’jir just to get some gold. In one of the early quests, I got bored waiting for something to respawn and starting killing off a bunch of nearby crabs. They didn’t give me much leather when I skinned them. To be honest, I still can’t figure out why crabs give leather and some dragons don’t. I mean, just say it out loud. “Crab leather.” It’s like instant cognitive dissonance. But, I digress. The crabs were giving off 2 or 3 scraps of savage leather each, and I can put together 5 of those to make a regular one. But they were plentiful, died fast, and respawned almost faster than I could keep up. Most importantly, they couldn’t really do much to me since I was higher level. So, I spent an hour and farmed about 50 pieces of leather. I was ecstatic. I started running around the zone seeing if there was something even better.
That’s when I found the eels.
There’s a quest in Vash’jir that pretty much declares eels to be evil. And by that, I mean it libels eels for a full two paragraphs before demanding you commit eel genocide in the name of all that’s good in the world. Listen, people. Eels are our friends. Eels are the caretakers of the sea, a vital part of every ecosystem, and Neptune’s dental floss. They are also delicious. I could not bear this indignity, so I decided to solve the problem the only way I knew how: I would kill every eel in the zone and skin it, then turn it into as much armor as I could to then sell on the Auction House. In this way, the honor and glory of eels would be properly spread through the Horde. Also, it did not hurt that the eels did not mind attacking me 2 or 3 at a time, just as ineffectually as their crabby neighbors, and then thoughtfully respawning (sometimes even before the first group was dead). So, over the next week or so, I refined my harvesting techniques. If eels were corn, I was now a combine. I found myself able to farm 7 or 8 full stacks of heavy savage leather per night (about 500-600 pieces of leather), and suddenly I found myself with two things: enough leather to learn a ton of recipes and make myself a decent set of PvP gear, and the beginnings of carpal tunnel syndrome from right-clicking eels for hours on end. Also, I wasn’t really excited about farming leather anymore. I love eels, but I was getting pretty tired of killing them en masse. I also found myself at skill level 525, the current maximum, way before I ever expected.
While it is nice to make myself nice gear, I was very surprised to find out I can sell the leather I skin for more than the items I can craft with it. I’m told by some of my WoW-veteran friends that it won’t be this way forever, as the cost of crafting materials is always insane for some time after an expansion comes out. Oh well. At least I can enchant my own bracers and leg armor. That +200 intellect was totally worth the 10 hours I spent right clicking on eels. Clearly, I only thought I was farming leather.
In truth, I was farming irony.
Thirty Days in Cataclysm
My name’s Mike and I’m an on-and-off World of Warcraft junkie. It’s not as bad as my hardcore Everquest addiction that left me with five novels of fan fiction, 9,600 hours of played time, and a wife. Over the past six years, I’ve played WoW heavily for a couple of months, then put it aside for six, only to return when Blizzard does something interesting. It’s a good way to play. It gives me the maximum rewards for the time I put in.
I hadn’t played WoW for about six months before Cataclysm came out but now that it has, about a month ago, I’ve put in a good deal of time into the new expansion and I liked what I got. Today I’m going to talk about I’ve seen over the past month, what I liked, what I didn’t, and where I plan to go. You might call this a review, but reviewing a game expansion with such a large amount of content isn’t really possible. So really it’s just my experiences so far.
For $40, Cataclysm gives you a whole lot of gaming with World of Warcraft. You can spend just about as much time as you’re willing to give it and get a lot of good entertainment for that time and for your dollar. It might not have the sort of cohesive story and gameplay with a game like Uncharted 2, but it holds up well. On the negative, while the large detailed quest line ties together a great story, it’s mainly a linear path through about 500 quests that follow the typical formula of “pick up 8 things, kill 12 people, hunt a boss, go to the next quest quest-giver” model we’ve seen for the past six years. Still, it’s a beautiful enjoyable ride for those who know how to live in moderation and find the right balance of effort and reward. [Read the rest of this article]
Shamanic Puberty
When I first started playing D&D with the people that would later become my Stupid Ranger cohorts back in ’03, I was at a loss as to what kind of character to make. All I really knew was that we needed a healer and that I wasn’t really feeling it. Nobody in the groups I’d played with previously really wanted the role. The term “healing bitch” was frequently utilized in reference to said player. I almost resigned myself to playing the standard mace-and-shield Generic Cleric™ when I started paying a little more attention to the spell domains in the 3.5e Player’s Handbook. Of special interest to me were “War” and “Strength”. Those did not sound particularly healing-bitchy to me. As a matter of fact, they sounded awesome. At that moment, an image popped into my head of a berserker warrior using the power of his god to spread goblin ketchup about the Forgotten Realms in his name. It hadn’t occured to me before that point that clerics could care more about kicking ass than healing ass. Thus was Lumbar, son of Uthgar the Battle-Father born, and holy crap was he fun to play.
Of course, such things were not without cost. Me doing more fighting and less healing meant, well, more people (myself including) running a little low on the HP. Also, this was the first time I ever tried roleplaying a bad stat roll, so poor Lumbar had a CON score of 8. We referred to it as his “delicate constitution”, and a frequent side effect of combat was that Lumbar would wake up afterward and ask if we had won. This worked for awhile, at least until about 10th level or so. I’m not sure if our DM was doing it on purpose or whether the monsters just started to get more bitey and kill-y, but Lumbar’s leanings toward rushing into battle without much strategy (or using all the tools Uthgar gave him) were starting to become a liability.
For me, changing Lumbar’s tactics turned into a really exciting opportunity to draw on his backstory and build his character. He started out as a warrior, exiled from his tribe until he passed a combat rite of manhood. Once he needed to change, I took this as him learning his place in the world and how to live up to his full potential. So it was he started being a better person. Less, alcohol and rage, more cuddling of puppies and taking care of wounded party members. My wife’s character in particular almost died of poisoning from a Drow arrow, and this was a turning point for Lumbar. By the end of the campaign, Lumbar still liked to smash things with his dire flail and roast some undead with Searing Light, but buffing the party and keeping everybody standing became a priority. I daresay we all started fighting as a team, and wound up saving the world.
Fast forward to 2008, when I started my World of Warcraft account. I didn’t really know what class to choose, but after reading up on them, I liked the Shaman’s versatility. And by that, I mean I liked the Shaman class’s ability to heal himself if he does something stupid (a trait I desired based on three decades of gaming experiences of doing stupid things and wanting not to die). I was told the best spec to level a shaman with was Enhancement, which involved a lot of close quarters combat and beating the hell out of things. This reminded me a lot of Lumbar. All of it. So I made an orc shaman named Lumbertha, after my beloved battle-cleric. Wrath of the Lich King had just come out, so I leveled her all the way up to 80.
Then, a funny thing happened. I started running dungeon instances with some of my friends. And I was almost always at the bottom of the damage charts. Or dead. Actually, I was dead a lot. Part of it was that I wasn’t playing as much as my friends, and didn’t have as good of gear as they did. But a large part of it was that I was simply having difficulty seeing what the hell I was doing in the middle of a gigantic battle with lots of spell effects going off and character models all mashed up on each other. My eyesight isn’t great but it’s far from terrible. I think I just lack the ability to process that much visual information at once. Consequently, I would frequently stand there and think I was swinging madly at a boss, but really I was too far away. And I wouldn’t do enough damage, and I wouldn’t know where I was or where to run, and occasionally I might pull a few adds and get everybody killed. My friends were a lot nicer than most pickup groups and did not immediately boot me from the party, but the end result was that I got really damned frustrated. That, and the spectre of having to run the Sons of Hodir quests for rep until I was old and grey just for the right to buy a shoulder enchantment eventually got me to quit the game.
As some of you may have noticed, many of your friends have disappeared due to the Cataclysm expansion coming out. As I had some fond memories of Azeroth and heard that some big giant dragon was going to go muss it up as if it were the emo-haircut of the world. So began my retreat from the outside world as well, several weeks before the expansion was released, and I reactivated my account. I immediately wanted to quit, to be honest. It was just as frustrating as I remembered, and now my gear was REALLY outdated so I couldn’t even do any instances. Fortunately, this problem was significantly alleviated by the worst items in the new zones being better than most of the very best items that Wrath of the Lich King had to offer. (Wow, glad I didn’t work real hard for those, huh?)
Then I decided to try something new. Since Enhancement wasn’t doing it for me, and it was now cheap to dual-spec your character, I decided to ditch it entirely and go with Elemental and Restoration. For those not familiar, Elemental is frying the crap out of enemies at range with lightning and fire, and Restoration is more support and healing-based. I leveled up to 85 as Elemental, and now I don’t have to see exactly how close I am to hit something. I press a button, and lightning shocks it in a delicate place. I am also much better armored. I enjoy this, as it keeps me from being dead.
Then, another funny thing happened. Some of my friends wanted to run an instance, and we didn’t have a healer. So I got talked into it. And I really liked it.
In all the time I’d played Lumbertha, I’d never even so much as turned on that spec for longer than it took to haphazardly dump a talent point into it. (Fortunately, by level 85, you just sort of fill it all in with only a point or two missing at the end.) And now here I was in instances I’d already run, focusing madly on keeping these little green bars from shrinking into nothingness. My heart was racing. My adrenaline was spiking. I hadn’t had this much excitement in a dungeon, well, ever. And once again, I am reminded of Lumbar’s journey into a better man (and combat-effective PC). Except this time, maybe the journey is into an experience playing WoW that doesn’t end in me ragequitting the game for a year. Given that a whole group of people is going to be depending on me to keep them from dying and the drama that usually results from such undertakings, I find this unlikely. But it’s fun for right now, and so I shall give it a try Until It Stops Being Fun.
Of course, the part of me that likes to roleplay can’t help but think Lumbertha’s character has come of age as well. Is healing the niche she was meant to fill? Or is she resigned to eternally farm Savage Leather until the next expansion? In the end, I suppose it doesn’t really matter, because I’ll be pretending to play her in the WoW TCG regardless of whether my account is active or not. And she’ll play happily with her Spirit Wolves until the cows come home or the enemy’s entrails make a happy face. Whichever comes first.
Vanir’s New Year’s Gaming Resolutions (2011 Edition)
Since the new year is almost upon us, I decided perhaps I should give a look to how I would like the entertainment portion of my life to function over the next year. This past year, aside from a few bright spots, has been kind of a giant bag of crap for me (especially for my gaming life), and I want 2011 to be a lot more fun. Like, 89K amusement units at the very least.
So, without further ado, here are my Gaming Resolutions for 2011.
- Play Alliance
For my entire WoW career, I’ve only played Horde (with a brief 20 minute moment of weakness as a Night Elf when our server was full). It was sort of fun to get caught up in the mock-jingoistic impulse to have a fictional enemy, and all my friends were playing Horde. So, I just sort of I wasn’t even crazy about putting together an Alliance-based deck in WoW TCG. I’ve never seen Ironforge or Stormwind (even to raid it). Considering that 99% of the joy I get out of playing WoW comes from the story and the lore, this seems dumb. There’s lots of new Worgen content to do, and I’ve always wanted to see what Gnomeregan looked like.Besides that, I really don’t like Garrosh Hellscream, and this is my way of rebelling against the new Warchief. - Play More Board Games
Since our regular D&D group has been broken up for awhile, game nights tend to be few and far between. It’s hard to get anybody to play a one-shot D&D adventure, and for some reason I’m finding it difficult to get people here excited about Gamma World. Board games have been filling the void, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of neat stuff I hadn’t seen before. SmallWorld and Ticket to Ride have been some big favorites, and I enjoyed Ascension the one time we played at lunch. I’m going to try and keep an ear out this year for new and cool stuff to try out. - Drafting
I love the WoW TCG so much. But I think we’ve drafted maybe once. When I tweeted this year about buying a box of boosters and hearing one of my followers lament about all the wasted drafting potential, it did strike me that I could have been getting some extra value out of this stuff. This could also let me get more into Magic: The Gathering, since I’m not sure I want to lay out the kind of money it takes to build a constructed deck right away. There’s always so many cards I almost consider a waste because they aren’t so good in a constructed format, and I keep reading about strategies for drafting and it makes my brain drool. There’s not much WoW TCG available in our area outside my circle of friends, but there is organized Magic all over the place. Might be time to check it out.
- Tabletop Roleplaying – FUTURE STYLE!
I find myself lamenting frequently that my gaming group broke up and I miss them and playing D&D so much, and yet I live in an age where doing such things remotely is not only possible but getting easier by the day. With stuff like the D&D Virtual Table, I don’t have much of an excuse. It is time to begin pestering people to play over the intertrons. Prepare yourselves.
- The Next Generation
My son will be 3 this year, and he already knows how to plug one of those TV-game joysticks in and turn it on. He knows what a joystick does and that a button fires your blasters. He is ready to begin his training, and I could not be more stoked. But I have to figure out what’s appropriate for him, both for content and for what he’ll find fun and reasonably challenging at his developmental level. If you’ve guessed that my column is going to have a lot of this subject in it next year, you get a cookie (redeemable at next year’s Roleplaying Therapy for the Severely Disturbed at Gen Con).
- Gaming Responsibly
This might sound a little weird, but I’ve taken a lot of steps this year to try and take a little better care of myself. One thing I find myself doing a lot is putting off bedtime until 2 or 3am because I’m having fun playing something. Then, the next day, I am useless. This is dumb. I can find a way to schedule my life and make time to do the stuff I want to do, even if it’s not as much as I’d like. There’s stuff that’s worth it, and stuff that isn’t, and I don’t need to collect 75 dragon scrotums on my way to level 85 all that badly.
- Have As Much Fun As Possible, And Don’t Be Afraid To Say Something
Over the years, I have played too many bad games to completion and stayed in obviously dysfunctional D&D campaigns for months after I should have left. I intend to stop doing things I don’t like, and to be honest with people when I’m not liking the situation. Life’s too damned short.
There you have it. I hope all of you have a safe and happy new year, and may your initiative rolls for 2011 be high!
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The Leg-Lamp of Vecna
I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me, Christmas just isn’t what it used to be. That is, a full month of anticipation slowly gaining steam into rabid impatience culminating in a berserk frenzy of presents-opening. Sure, I was pretty focused on the materialistic gains. But the holiday just felt special somehow. As I got older, and especially as I became more able to buy my own stuff, the jubilation at getting a bunch of new stuff subsided. Then came the year Mom left out cold french fries and water for Santa instead of milk and cookies. She wasn’t fooling anybody, though. We all knew it was my parents behind the presents on Christmas morning. Also, I was 20. Mom’s really into traditions.
That’s not the point. The point is, it feels like it all changed. I cringe when I hear Christmas music now, a result of having worked at a Radio Shack during the holidays in 1995. I hate seeing the Christmas decorations go up in department stores the day after Halloween. I love my family and my in-laws, but it’s stressful dragging your toddler to celebrate Christmas multiple times every year. I’m annoyed by the repeated festive shotgun blasts of joyous holiday messages on TV that just don’t feel realistic or sincere, and then I feel like a Dire Grinch. And nobody wants that. (Fun holiday fact: a Dire Grinch’s heart has to grow at least five sizes in one day before he starts performing good deeds. Also, he is one size class larger than a standard Grinch and his sled is pulled by a worg with an antler tied to its forehead.)
I’m fully aware of the fact that growing up ruined this just like everything else. It’s easy to enjoy Christmas when you don’t have to do anything except for flip out after you open the thing you totally wanted that you’ve been going on endlessly about since late August. It’s so easy to look at the world with scorn and sarcasm, and let all the stuff that annoys the crap out of you overshadow everything else, and I think that’s where my Christmas went. Crushed under the enormous pressure of a bunch of annoying crap, and turned to coal. And you thought it was naughty children that got that. Add one more bitter yule log to the fire.
I want my damned Christmas back. The one I enjoyed and looked forward to. I may not get that, but what I can do is use this red-and-green-hued mass hysteria to my advantage. There are two times of the year one is most likely to get presents: one’s birthday, and Christmas. Only during the latter are people prone to fits of needing to feel togetherness at all costs. This is when you can strike.
Now all you have to do is ask for games for Christmas, and talk people into playing them with you.
That’s right, my nefarious Christmas scheme is to get people together to play games. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because a couple years ago, I borrowed a Wii just so I could get my whole family together on Christmas to play Wii Bowling. It was the first time we’d played videogames together since I was a kid and we all played Time Pilot and Ladybug on the Colecovision. I’m not even remotely exaggerating when I say it was the very best Christmas I’d had since I was a kid. For those couple hours, it was fun again, and it was special because I knew I wouldn’t have this chance very often. This year, I got a Kinect, and I would like to engage in similar Christmas shenanigans. I’ve tried a couple times since then to pull this off again, but never to the same effect. I suppose this will be the unattainable goal I chase after instead of reliving the innocent joy of a child on Christmas. You gotta have one, right?
On a smaller scale, this is also a great excuse to play with my family. Specifically, the portion of it that lives in my house. My son’s only 2, and the games we play together may not make a particularly large amount of sense, but they’re still a lot of fun. Once he recovers from the initial shock of getting ten thousand Hot Wheels cars for Christmas from the grandparents, I don’t doubt his little imagination is going to invent several new kinds of racing. I cannot freaking wait until he’s old enough that one of us opens an Xbox game and we’re both giddy that we can play it together. And I’m not afraid to bust out some old-school Scrabble or Monopoly to play with relatives who don’t consider themselves Gamers (with a capital G). I’d kill to play games all day over Christmas break with my wife and kid. (And I wouldn’t regret it, even with faced with the electric chair!)
It’s always been odd to me (and a giant pain in my ass) that the Christmas season seems to nuke the crap out of everyone’s availability to play D&D with their friends. Especially since I had my regular group break up about a year ago due to people moving and other real-life obstacles, it hits me directly in the face how much I miss getting together with them too. I don’t care how many puppies save Christmas or how many sitcoms show me the “true” meaning of the season. I don’t care what kind of fake togetherness crap is being served in the fruitcake. I don’t even care if any games actually get played. I just want to have fun with the people I care about. It’s what a good Christmas means to me now.
God bless us, every one (giving us +1 to attack).
And rocks fall on any creepy uncles, killing them instantly. No save.
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Inquisition: The Cataclysm is Nigh
Our previous Gamma-tastic Inquisition had an incredible number of votes, sailing past the 700s. Our top mutant would be an Android Engineered Human (presumably a cyborg of some kind.) Then we’d have a Hypercognitive Telekinetic who could do all kinds of things with the power of his brain. After that, you’d have a Yeti Electrokinetic- maybe all that fur generates static shocks. The least popular mutant? The Seismic Hawkoid… which is the Gargoyle example in the book.
As many of you know (hell probably everyone), today was the launch of Blizzard’s latest World of Warcraft expansion: Cataclysm. More than mere increasing of the level cap with new races and new zones, this expansion rests on a new world shattering storyline that changed the look and feel of the game for all players, regardless of what version they currently play.
Old zones have been changed, new start areas for Gnomes and Trolls as well as thousands of new quests await current and returning players, irrespective of buying the expansion or not. Those that do obtain it get access to 2 new races: Goblins (Horde) and the Worgen (Alliance), new adventuring zones and an increased level cap to 85.
So our poll question for you is: [Read the rest of this article]
