Travel-Logs: Thunderstorms

Posted on : 14-06-2010 | By : Brian | In : News

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Something that happens in New Orleans that you may not expect: daily thunderstorms. At least, that’s what happens in the summer. It’s advisable to carry an umbrella if you’re going to be out for any length of time in the afternoon, but luckily these storms tend to the short side, and can often just be waited out.

Currently, we’re on our way to the French Quarter, umbrella in tow, to find some dinner and shopping. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Off-Topic: Impending Travels

Posted on : 10-06-2010 | By : Brian | In : News, Off-Topic

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Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be doing some traveling. I’ll be heading down to New Orleans on Friday, staying there for a few days, and taking a road trip back to the homestead over the course of four days. The wife and I are really looking forward to it, but it does have some implications for this blog.

First, I may not be able to post as much game-related material during the trip. I have a few posts planned, and I will have a laptop (and my Android, from which I’m posting this very article), but I’m going to be doing a lot of sight-seeing.

Which brings me to the second thing. I’d like to blog this trip. Over the next two weeks, you’ll see some posts with the “Travel Log” prefix. If you’re only here for the gaming, feel free to ignore these posts. If you’d like to hear about my trip through the South, though, that’s what these posts will be there for.

Onward to adventure!

Review Miscellany

Posted on : 14-05-2010 | By : Brian | In : 4th Edition, D&D, Indie Games, Links, News, Reviews, Video Games

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I’ve been playing a lot of different games this week, and I’ve got some stuff coming up; I figured I’d give little capsule reviews of what I’ve been doing, and talk a little about some stuff that’s upcoming. In no particular order:

Dead Space: I’m possibly a bit late to the party on this one, but I picked up Dead Space for a really good price around Christmas and just now got around to playing it. I’m not finished with it yet, but I’m eight hours or so into it and I’m really enjoying it. The atmosphere is suitably creepy, and while it doesn’t really create fear (what video game does, really?), it does succeed in creating an awful lot of tension. The fact that the main character, Isaac Clarke, doesn’t speak is a little bit strange considering how much he gets spoken to, especially when you take into account that there’s a character in the game who is supposed to be personally important to Isaac. The game spins a good yarn, though, and the combat is pretty good.

The Humble Indie Bundle: This is a group of indie PC games, for which you can name any price you want, pay it, and get them all. You can choose how much of your money goes toward the developers, and how much goes toward Child’s Play. There are some worthwhile games in the bundle, and while I haven’t liked all of them, I like enough of them that I’m happy I paid for the bundle. Plus, it’s for charity. Go buy it.

Of the games in the bundle, I’ve played World of Goo, which is excellent (I own this on Wii, too). It’s got a great Tim Burton-esque aesthetic, and even has Danny Elfman-esque music, and the puzzling is very, very good. I’ve played about twenty minutes of Aquaria, and I really like what I’ve played. Simple controls but apparently deep gameplay, and the music and art style are fantastic. Gish is sort of a mixed bag; it’s got a really neat premise and some cool mechanics, but the controls are frequently fiddly and annoying, and I feel that the game gets in its own way a lot. Samorost 2 is a Flash-based adventure game that is visually very charming. The problem is that there are a lot of pixel hunts in the game, and some of the puzzles are a little obtuse. Worse, there are puzzles that you can bring almost to completion over the course of a few minutes, screw up one thing (without realizing that you’re doing anything wrong), and have to do the whole thing again, from the beginning. It is very short, though, so you should at least give it a try. The other two, Lugaru and Penumbra: Overture I have yet to spend any real time with.

D&D Encounters: I got to play in Encounters again, and had a blast. I’ve played two different characters so far, both from the Player’s Handbook 3. First I played a human monk, which was very satisfying. I like the monk class quite a lot; very mobile and capable of some pretty spectacular stuff on the battlefield. Flurry of blows is also one of my favorite striker damage-spikes because of its versatility. The second character I played was a longtooth shifter seeker, which was also a lot of fun. I didn’t do a whole lot of damage (I was using a javelin, meaning that all of my attacks dealt 1d6+4 damage, even encounters and dailies), but I really felt like I was effective at controlling the battlefield, and my daily power made a significant difference in how the encounter played out.

My Home Game: My friend Dean isn’t going to be able to DM his mini-campaign for a while, so the campaign I’m DMing is resuming. I’m very excited to get back into the DM’s seat, and I’ve got some stuff planned. I’ll be updating the wiki as we play, as usual, and I’ll probably post some of the more exciting encounters on this blog, for your own use. Game day is the 23rd, which is only a week away!

Noble Knight

Posted on : 08-05-2010 | By : Brian | In : Links, News

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Some of you may have noticed that the affiliate link to the right has changed. I’ve recently become an affiliate of Noble Knight Games. The benefit to you, the reader, of this change is that you can get a lot more from Noble Knight than you can from Funagain. Noble Knight carries board games, RPGs, miniatures, novels, and other things, and they deal in both new and used products. If you buy something from them, I’d appreciate it if you did it through this site; it won’t cost you anything but an extra click or two. Thanks in advance.

Knowledge Checks

Posted on : 28-04-2010 | By : Brian | In : News

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I just read this post on At-Will, and it got me thinking. The author comes at the subject of knowledge checks in D&D from a slightly different perspective than I do. There seems to be a general feeling that a knowledge check either propels the story forward (because you succeed, and get the knowledge you need), or throws a road block in the way of the story (because you failed, and didn’t know what you needed to). I don’t think it needs to be that binary.

There’s a school of thought in indie RPG design that says that failure should never be a dead end; it should always serve to make things interesting for the players, to complicate their lives, and to provide more fuel for the story. To an extent, this is already true of most skills in D&D. Think about it: when you’re trying to sneak past the guards and you fail your Stealth check, what happens? You get caught, meaning that you trigger a combat, skill challenge, role-playing scenario, chase scene, or any number of other exciting things. If you fail your Perception check when you’re keeping watch, you likely get ambushed. That’s exciting, too.

I think a lot of people tend to treat knowledge skills (by which I mean skills like Arcana, History, Religion, and other skills whose main purpose is to convey information and represent how learned you are in a field) as binary switches: you either know it, or you don’t. I think they can be a lot more interesting than that. What if, the next time your wizard makes an Arcana check to try to figure out what a set of magic sigils does and fails, rather than just saying, “You don’t know what they mean”, you instead tell the wizard what they mean, but change some of the important details? Suddenly things get interesting. The wizard knows something about the sigils, but that something is likely to get the party into trouble if he acts on it. If your players tend to meta-game (and really, who doesn’t, to some extent or another?), he may realize that his roll was pretty low, and he may think that some or all of that knowledge is suspect. Now he has a choice to make. To make that choice even more interesting, consider requiring knowledge checks for information that you were just going to give the players, so that you’re occasionally giving them good information for bad rolls. That way, they may be wary of the information gained from such a roll, but past experience may cause them to take a chance on it anyway.

Too cool for words . . .

Posted on : 28-04-2010 | By : Brian | In : News

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Go check this out. You won’t be sorry.

Looney Day

Posted on : 17-04-2010 | By : Brian | In : News

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I just got back from my FLGS where they were holding a special event: Looney Day. “What is Looney Day?”, you might be asking yourself. Looney Day is the day that Andrew Looney of Looney Labs comes to the store to talk, play games, and sign autographs. It was awesome.

I brought with me a copy of Fluxx and a copy of Zombie Fluxx to be signed, both of which Mr. Looney graciously signed for me. He also threw in an autographed promotional Andy Looney card, which went directly into my Fluxx deck.

When I first got there, Mr. Looney was explaining the rules for Are You the Traitor?, a party game about lying, table-talk, and reading people. Luckily, I had already played the game before, so he didn’t have to restart his rules explanation for me to sit in. It was a great game, with six players (my previous games have all been with four, and it’s definitely better with more players), and I even won the game.

Next, we broke out Monty Python Fluxx, and during this game Mr. Looney was actually playing four simultaneous games: Monty Python Fluxx, Chrononauts, Treehouse, and his upcoming super-secret game, which you’ll have to wait to find out any more about.

All in all, it was a really good time. Andrew Looney is a really nice guy, and is a lot of fun to play games with. He’s very animated when playing his games, and clearly loves what he does.

Zelda Devolution

Posted on : 16-02-2010 | By : Brian | In : News

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When I got my Nintendo DS two Christmases ago, I got The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass along with it. I loved every single minute of that game. Twice. It was, and is still, the yardstick by which I measure other DS games, and I doubt that I’ve enjoyed another DS game as much since. So, you can probably imagine that when The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks was announced, I was excited. Oh, yes I was.

I bought it with a Best Buy gift card over the holidays and started playing it immediately. At first, i really liked it; it was more of the same, which was exactly what I wanted. However, the more I play the game, the less enamored of it I become. Things that I found fun in Phantom Hourglass have analogs in Spirit Tracks that simply seem tedious, and where the former game seemed to have a lot of personality and charm and soul, the latter seems somehow soulless. That’s not to say it’s a bad game; mechanically, much of it is very sound, just as much as these same mechanics were good in Phantom Hourglass. The dungeons and temples, too, are well-constructed and enjoyable. But something is missing.

Long Time, No Write

Posted on : 09-02-2010 | By : Brian | In : D&D, Indie Games, Links, News, Video Games

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I’ve been pretty bad about keeping this blog current lately. I’ll make an effort to try not to do that anymore.

At any rate, I just thought I’d post quickly to let everyone know that I’m still alive, and also to talk about what’s been on my mind and what you can expect to see posted on this blog in the next couple of weeks. In no particular order:

1. Steam. I love me some Steam. Steam, for those who are unfamiliar, is a digital video game distribution platform on the PC. Over the holidays they had some killer deals and, as a result, experienced serious growth. Because of this growth (I assume) they’re offering more great deals than ever before. They used to always have a weekend deal, which the still do; now, though, they have mid-week madness, too. Good stuff. Some games that I’ve purchased since the holidays on Steam, some of which you might hear about in more detail later on: Dead Space, Far Cry 2, Freedom Force, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Torchlight, Medieval II: Total War. All for cheap (as in, not one of them was more than $10).

2. D&D, as always. Haven’t played for a while (the last time was in November, I think). I’ve got a game day scheduled for later this month, toward the end, and I’m pretty excited. We’ll probably be wrapping up the current adventure in that session, which will give a friend of mine a chance to step into the DM chair for a little while. Also, if you’ve noticed that the most recent session report is not yet up, you’re very astute. Here’s a cookie. It will be going up soon, don’t worry.

3. Indie RPGs. I recently donated to Haiti through DriveThruRPG and, as a result, got a coupon for a bunch of free RPG PDFs. I got some indie RPGs that I’ve been wanting for a while, including Don’t Rest Your Head, Chronica Feudalis, Full Light Full Steam, Beast Hunters, and 316. I’ve read all of DRYH and played it once (more on that in a future post), and I’m in the process of reading through both Chronica Feudalis and Full Light Full Steam. I’d also like very much to get my hands on a copy of the Mouseguard RPG, but that may not happen for a little while.

4. Other games. I got various and sundry video games for Christmas, some of which you will be hearing about. Expect to hear about Dragon Age: Origins, Left 4 Dead 2, Metroid Prime Trillogy, and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and possibly some others.

After

Posted on : 30-09-2009 | By : Brian | In : News

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tattoo

Yes, I now have a tattoo. Yes, it’s a very geeky one.