A Window, A Light...

I've been playing Fallout 4 for a while, at this point, and I feel like I can say I've gotten a decent amount of milage out of it. I put about 40-something hours into it, largely dicking around, and, well, it's certainly a Fallout game. Everything that the Fallout 3+ franchise has been, has been too - with the addition of making buildings.

I really am thinking about what the game allows you to do - it expands the level cap out forever, but also hides a lot of rudimentary community building tools behind the Perk system which means that you're always choosing between being better at playing the game and being allowed to access the game. I've been a little disappointed by the lack of access to certain kinds of building materials - no glass, no windows, no metal grating - and the difficulty of accessing good places to build. Like, there are some good locations, and a lot of miserable, uninteresting locations which really makes me wonder why they're there.

So, I find myself trying to build a really cool base of operations and I'm really hampered by all of these invisible rules - tiles don't match up, it's difficult to build foundations and/or stair that connect to where you want floors to go, I can't tell at a glance who's assigned to what, or what has someone assigned, workshop management is a huge chore, moving food between settlements is a trial, land management is difficult, growing space is incredibly scarce, and so on. I devoted myself back to the grind, and the game stopped letting me save my files. I fixed/worked around that and the game ended up crashing and told me to update it.

I was just like, man, forget this for now. I'll come back to it with a much more reasonable focus, and hopefully after there have been some patches and DLC that include new building material. What I'm really hoping for is that this kind of community-building, world-building approach catches on even more with future games, whether it's this model or another one.

So, my friend The Jenna had an extra copy of To the Moon that she got from a Humble Indie Bundle a little while ago, and she passed it along to me. I kind of accepted it sight unseen because nobody else seemed interested and I was like, hey, free game. I played it for a little while before I Google'd it and discovered that it won a shitload of awards.

Let's see, actually. It was made in RPG Maker XP and, no shit, won Best indie RPG of 2011. Its reviews are generally excellent. It beat Portal 2, Catherine, and Xenoblade Chronicles for Best Story. It was nominated for significantly more.

Look, I played it. It took like, 3 hours. It was okay. It was only okay because it was so short, really. It wasn't great. It wasn't even especially good. It wasn't even really a game. The only way it was similar to an RPG is that it was made using RPG Maker. If the dialogue was written into a book, nobody would read it. To compare it to Portal 2 is an embarrassment.

Best Story? Really? Man, have you guys ever read any books at all? In 2011, is this the game that we all looked at and decided was going to represent the peak of our video game storytelling capacities for that year?

It was more like an interactive novella, and in that regards it served to pass a little time in a kind of unremarkable way. I'm not really hating on the game. I guess I'm hating on the player. 

Hey. I haven't been around for a while. I scrolled down pretty briefly to see what's been going on since I last posted, but I haven't really read any of the postings just yet. I'm eager to be getting around to it. I was on a few days ago, but only very briefly; I'd been thinking about posting but I came up dry when I sat down. I have a little while before work and I don't feel like starting up Silent Hill 4 just at the moment, so I'm hoping I feel up to it when I get back. I'll probably force myself to relax and try to get into it for maybe a half hour or so.

I've been trying to do several things at once, with a limited amount of success. Some of that stuff is coming together really well and some of it is lagging behind. I've had a website that's been up for quite a while and like a lot of personal sites, it's suffered from a lack up updates. It's got some of my old projects and some projects I worked with Brent a little on. It's not anything special, but I'm kind of starting to use it as a personal portal to work I'm doing that's stored somewhere on the web. Because of Google's document integration and stuff like that, it's easy to just transcribe a lot of my stuff to a place on the internet and access it from there. I guess what I'm saying is that even though it's a public site (and you can access stuff I'm doing there, which may or may not be interesting to you), it's largely something I'm using to keep myself organized.

https://sites.google.com/site/thanatos02us/ - There. That's where it's at. I'm leery at going through the effort to write code that makes an effective private website on my own domain until I really am adding a decent amount of content and links to the page, so Google sites it remains. I am extremely aware of how little work has been done on it, but that doesn't bother me. If I do something I'm proud of, it'll be linked there. Pathfinder wikis are probably going to be linked to from there. I have very limited physical space, but I've come to realize that I have an almost infinite amount of space on the internet that's even free. But just like a physical shelf and desktop, I have to organize it or I'll lose it and never find it again.

Pathfinder. I really want to run this game. Most of my friends have been very good at getting back to me. I live with one. One person had technical issues receiving my mail that we never adequately troubleshot, but we did find an acceptable workaround. One guy just never responded. I like him but if I can't reach him, I'm gonna drop him. I'll organize our meetup separately. That's nothing personal, but scheduling is tough enough. If I can't get people together even once, I'm not going to mess around with a gaming Wiki. First thing's really first on this. I've done a lot of work on the game in terms of planning, but I'm not going to start writing a dungeon without people to play in it.  

...................hm.

I want to talk about future plans, I suppose, but there's stuff I've been musing on and I want to see what it looks like when it gets written out as an idea in print, so I've been thinking about civilization building games. Namely, the Civilization series. I bought Civ 4 pretty recently, because I don't really treat myself often and Civ's a game with a lot of milage built into it. So I put about 24 hours into it over the last week, burnt myself out on it for a while, and it's idling for now.

In the meantime, I was playing a marathon-length game before and I hit that point in the game where I loaded up a bunch of ships with soldiers and a Settler and sent it overseas to colonize the new continent.

Civ 4 has Barbarians, just like the civs before it did, and unlike in 2, they can found cities before you ever land. They don't branch out, they're little city states, and if they take over your city, sometimes they'll sack it and sometimes they'll run it. All the barbarian states are the same color - black - and they don't seem to fight one another, and they're usually a technology level equal or a level lower to you. Declaring war is all  you can do with them, but they're named after real cultures, so you might end up fighting a war of attrition with a place like Polynesia, Ananazi, Cherokee, or Gaul. (The entry for Barbarian in Civ 4 on the Wikia says, "Barbarians cannot be bargained with or appeased: they must be destroyed - before they destroy you!")

I was sitting in my chair and, of course I was going to sack the cities because they kept sending troops to raze my township. (Wisely, really, since my plan was to take over the whole continent and, later, the whole globe.) There was no negotiating with them, and nobody gets mad when you raze a barbarian civilization from the globe because that's what you're expected to do. They can build no alliances and they have no representation. Man alive, colonization at work, eh?

I'm not like... mad about it or anything. Civ is a lot of fun, but there are methods of playing that are really good for winning the game that are terrible in real life. But there's nothing that you gain from being a nicer ruler, and there's no person to talk to about it, you govern in a vacuum.

Does it say anything about me personally that I play this game? Not much more than it would if I played Grand Theft Auto and shot someone in the pursuit of a mission, except that I'm a person who is playing that game. (IE, I don't consider it so disgusting that I've stopped, or anything.) There are also technological limitations to consider, plus I could just... not engage 'barbarian' cities, though they will continue to attack me. However, the creators of the game thought it was fine to create non-autonomous nation states that can act as a threat for a player, and chose to give those non-historical actors (for the intents and purposes of this game) names from real cultures. It doesn't mean the creators of the game are terrible, or anything, just that it doesn't read especially well from that perspective.

So, I'd looked into the G-M Chronicle and so far I've liked what I've seen, but it's probably going to call for fairly in-depth commentary. Not only does the PC I'm making today get the rules update treatment (to see what it's like to convert from the old system to the new, if one chooses to do that), but I'll probably want to comment a little on almost all the changes. This might be a good time to de-friend me for a little while if you haven't been okay with this.

( Read more... )

Remember, kids. It's boring-ass rules and not boring ass-rules. That's a totally different game. For those that don't know me really well, now is pretty much where I usually start regretting that I started this. We're past my scant commentary on gaming fiction and atmosphere and into the mechanics, the exceptions to normal rules, weapons charts, grappling rules, and all the rest. I'm gonna keep chugging through this, though, because there's some interesting stuff here; put on some tea and read under the cut.

( Read more... )

So, I managed to get through Chapters 2 and 3 and finally found time to write on them. These are basically obligatory chapters describing, in detail, what's going on with the character sheet. Because it's a dice pool system, you actually need to explain how you combine one with the other, in two separate chapters, and have it make sense rather than having an extremely dry but even-more-straightforward list of where character stats create derived values ala Dungeons & Dragons. (This latter bit being confusing in a different way to deeply grok, but easier to use in the event that you just have all the derived values written down before you start.)

Chapter 2 : Just check out those... Attributes!

I liked the art on the chapter intro and I liked the story. It set a tone pretty well but, once again, it has absolutely nothing to do with the chapter so, in the greater scheme of things, I felt it was somewhat wasted space. Could'a left it blank. OR, actually, just take all the pages you used and take the best of those beginning of chapter prompts, and write one last end-of-book longer fiction piece. Oh well.

Both chapters have a pretty similar format, in that they explain what attributes and skills are, how they're used in a dice pool system, and go through each one individually. I'm not going to do that, I'm just going to hit a brief overview of my system thoughts and point out anything that specifically comes to mind as noteable.

One of the things that I like had major ramifications for the gameline, which is the 3x3 chart of Mental, Physical, Social and Power, Finesse, Resistance. There are things that don't have certain traits, like ghosts and spirits, which just end up using Power, Finesse, Resistance though I don't think I've ever seen anything just use a Mental, Social, Physical. The 3x3 gives you a good shorthand for what you need to be rolling in abstract dice-pool situations. The writer also explains the 1-5 dot scale pretty well.

2's average and 1's below average while 3, 4, and 5 are above average to astounding. Attributes can go well above 5 if needed, but the lowest they can get is 0 in really unusual situations and generally inept behavior or capacities are typical modeled through Flaws or non-standard Merits. The unspoken implication for this is just that it's not really useful or interesting to get really detailed at how abysmal someone is at something. Attributes from 1 to 2 do just fine in modelling that spectrum.

Each Attribute (and Skills are demonstrated the same way) are modelled identically. There's the Attribute or Skills name and a really short fictional blurb involving the characters of either Martin, Becky, or Josh demonstrating the Attribute in action by example. You get a short explanation of what it is and how, if needed, it's different from other Attributes. Each one is given an explanation of a botch rolled on a chance die, a normal failure, a standard success, and exception successes, then each one is given an example of how equipment can be used to make a roll more likely to succeed and situations where rolling is more difficult (represented by bonus dice and dice subtracted from the dice pools).

On several pages, there's art that I consider to be stylish and evocative of the mood as presented in the chapter fiction, and all of the art pertains directly to the text in the book which is something I really appreciate since it gives an overall sense of mood; it helps present a unified experience that I rarely get from a gaming book.

One of the things that I noticed is that things that tend to go wrong in a dramatic failure aren't what I would call 'tame', but normal examples of failure in high-stakes environments. However, a dramatic failure only occurs when you're rolling a chance die (reduced to 0 dice on a dice pool roll), and then only if you roll a 1 on that die. You're really only going to be rolling a chance die when the situation is so abysmal that your negative modifiers from your situation are higher than your whole dice pool, which is attribute + skill + equipment - situational modifiers. And then, it's only one in ten times you'll botch the situation. The dramatic failures range from inconvenient to almost catastrophically bad, but there's a surprising amount of word count directed at an event that's generally going to be so unlikely as to basically never occur.

The only time I can really see this happening is in a generally low-point game where the ST really doubles down on making characters roll for a majority of situations and the character is placed in a situation that they have few, if any skill points in or it's a life or death situation and the character can't simply opt out. I think that I may have had someone roll a chance dice exactly once, and literally nothing came of it. (A 2-9 standard failure result.) That tends to imply that, even at fairly low experience levels, you're usually better off shooting for the brass ring than not shooting at all, ie, the game rewards playing it rather than trying to sit things out, if you're looking at the RAW.

I could talk about equipment modifiers, but that's better left for our next section to put it in the proper context.

I'm not going to talk about WoD Classic much, here, but both noticing things and rolling initiative used to be actual skills you'd have to specially designate to put points in, but abilities like Defense ratings (actively derived and listed on the character sheet), Health, resisting mental effects, reaction to surprise, and the above are functionally derived wholly from your Attributes. It used to be that a new player could try to build someone competent in combat and totally not realize that Awareness was critical for your basic initiative for combat, and that you could absolutely build a character who could fail to notice a barn in an empty field if you didn't take dump points in the right skill. In WoD, these are no longer skills you can totally avoid by accident (and which eat up precious scant skill points), but something you'll tend to have between 2 (minimum, if you're really unhappy) and 10 points in. (Though I imagine that between the small-medium-large attribute spread you have to take, you're more likely to roll between 4-5 dice.) I find this to be very satisfactory now that I think about it, though it used to bother me because I was always asking people to make Wits+Awareness rolls or whatever to react to combat or to notice shit.

Okay, I'm going to do Chapter 3 later and tag this in a bit. It's taking me longer than I expected. 

I've been meaning to finish Persona 1 since I just had the Playstation 1 disk and was dating Violet seriously. I don't mean that I've been meaning to start Persona. I mean that I've been meaning to finish my playthrough. I've started twice. It's not that great a game. I  have it. I'm slogging through it now. I'm getting fairly close. I suppose I've clocked about 30-40 hours off and on over the last year or two. I guess there's probably about 30 to go. It doesn't take up time in a normal, meaningful way; I play it when I'm sipping coffee and scrolling down tumblr or when I'm checking RPG.net to see if they have anything to say about WoD or Exalted (and that's about it, these days). I play it when I'm sitting on the toilet. Or I did. With the end approaching, I designate time, as if for a chore. It's on a list.

Persona's an interesting game that spawned an increasingly successful franchise almost despite itself. The characterization presented in the first game is weak, the graphics are uninspired (it's a fairly early Playstation title, so that's no surprise), and the plot is perfunctory - mostly a setup for random monster battles and dungeons that appear to be designed at random. The combats were initially weirdly balanced to the point that they appeared buggy. It was re-made as a PSP title with cleaned up graphics, fairly impressive video scenes, and cleaned up mechanics. It's a legacy title; it's what you buy to fill out your collection with the re-made Persona : IS and EP, which are significantly more worthwhile from a player's perspective. I'm slogging through the game to have beaten the entire collection (hopefully, at some point) and almost out of what I would consider respect for the series. But why respect, of all things?

Persona offered something that other games didn't offer and at a level of complexity that its future titles would not bother to model. It was one of the few games where it wasn't just possible to communicate with your enemies (simple as their AIs inevitably were), and not just expected, but mandatory. Talking to enemies convincingly renders their spell card unto you. When you have their spell card, you can either mash it up with another monster's spell card in order to create better personas (basically a spirit grafted to a character which renders bonuses, some weaknesses, higher stats, and a bevy of powers you can swap in and out) or, as long as you carry it and don't fuse it, they act as a get out of jail free card during fights. The monster you have a card for shows up, you talk to it and show it your card, and it recognizes your contract with it, then leaves - effectively allowing you to skip the fight.

Summoning new persona for new powers is complicated, involving a large chart full of signs for good matches, poor matches, normal and strange matches. There are a list of mythical beats and characters a mile long, each associated with one of the Major Arcana of the tarot. The personas have levels and improve with use, and at a max level you can trade them in for difficult to find items.

You can buy guns, bullets, melee weapons, and a whole set of armor (greaves, boots, helmets, and body pieces, and they're all expensive), spell items, healing items. You can gamble in a casino where you play the games your character sits at. People at diners will help you remember your objectives in the story. Your last two characters are recruited manually from a list of secret characters. There's an entire side quest that takes over from the main quest that you can undertake without ever touching the normal quest, with a totally different plot and character.

Basically, there's very little plot - it's the video game equivalent of a complicated RPG dungeon grind. People misunderstand what Persona is about - game one is hardly about the plot at all. It's literally a mashup of a ton of complicated, intermeshing mechanics where the goal of the game is actually to grind at a furious pace, building the biggest, most badass team you can while taking these brand-new, never seen before mechanics for a trial run. Once I realized the purpose - that the game is basically a huge Excel spreadsheet with graphics for people with a special brand of obsessive-compulsive focus, it made perfect sense to me. It's fun, just not the kind of fun you find in gaming much, anymore. It's practically a dead format that would have made much more sense on a PC during the early days of computer gaming.

It's close to both Persona 2 titles in how it plays where Persona 2 games are much more sophisticated in terms of plot and smoother mechanically (though they remain huge, intense grinds) and almost totally divorced from Personas 3 and 4. I find it to be a very interesting phenomenon.

Now. We're going to need to get to the grocery store, today and hopefully we'll manage to even see Pacific Rim. (I've heard good things from most people, I've heard reports that it was bad from friends of friends, but I'm ignoring that.) The upcoming days menu looks like steamed asparagus with poached egg and grated espresso-rind cheese served with either herbed roasted potatoes or buttered sweet corn, garlic hummus with rough-chopped parsley and roasted onions and pita chips, chicken and wild rice soup with parsley or kale, salad with tomato and half a turkey sandwich, and rajma masala served over jasmine rice.

I'm excited to let you know how the movie was. I also totally have to make it to the library. My books are a day over due.
Additionally, I'm killing time doing yard work until Katie gets home. Our mower is broken, so I'm literally weed whacking my overgrown backyard into submission foot by bloody foot. Wish me luck.

I've been wanting to run a game for a group for a while now, but I really haven't had the time. I don't really know if more time is going to open up in the future (though I imagine it would almost have to), and besides, I really don't know what to run, but I still think about it from time to time.

I don't really want to run anything where I'd feel like I want to kludge too many mechanics together to repair a game engine. There are certain games with aspects I'm very fond of that I really couldn't run without tweaking - Kindred of the East, for example, really can be problematic. All the classic WoD games run on a game engine you pretty much had to be there for when it was created to enjoy (especially if you were just playing WoD or never actually paid attention to the rules at all in the first place). Some were brilliant settings with terrible mechanics. (The beautiful Engel, which was badly translated to d20 during the boom without really any attention to mechanical rigor at all.) Some are just fucking difficult to run at all. (Wraith.)

Several years ago, I stopped buying new game lines. I already have a shitload of books, and I wanted to run or play the games I had to justify my old purchases. I've already played a lot of D&D, Ascension, and Exalted. I've run straight WoD, Changeling, and Mage : the Awakening. If I ran a game, I don't know what it would be, at this point. What, to my mind, is ready to be run that I own and haven't played yet? Maybe Vampire : the Dark Ages or Wraith. I don't know that I'm really prepared to run either of those games, to be honest. I wasn't 100% happy with how I did my Changeling and Awakening games, and I could always justify a new purchase with a new game plan...

My dad picked up Dark Souls for me around Christmas, which was really thoughtful of him because I haven't really bought anything like that for myself in well over a year, now and the last game we got as a household was Mass Effect 3 way back when it actually came out, and that was for Kay. Since Christmas, then, hardly a day has passed that I haven't played for at least an hour or so, and I've got some brief thoughts about it. These really aren't organized in any way, but I think that the game itself is pretty noteworthy, so here's what I've noticed.

When I first started playing, I was messing around with character creation, and I ended up opting for a female character model this time. There really isn't anything sexualizing about the armor in Dark Souls, and I really appreciate that. A character's sex is often impossible to even determine, and Inanna is currently swathed in un-sexy, badass plain chain links. 

The scale of the game is somewhat epic. Fighting more than one monster at a time is almost always dangerous, no matter how powerful you are, many monsters are downright huge, and both combats and environments are frequently precarious. The scale of the levels is huge, and they developers specifically worked on making levels with large differences of vertical height that you can see. The result is surprisingly immersive, and often visually impressive.

Equipment sticks with you a long time. Upgrading is often expensive, and differences of equipment are often differences of type rather than quality. Aside from occasional named pieces (which you will often forgo in exchange for your current weapon), you don't start with a longsword and then find another longsword that's simply better than the one you have. There are few merchants or smiths. They will sell you equipment, but it's a matter of availability - it's not qualitatively better or worse than the occasional drops from enemies (who tend to drop equipment that they personally wear, so their equipment value is predicated on what kind of enemy they actually are).

Dark Souls is 'hard'. I put it in quotes because the game can be technically difficult and bosses are especially tough, but the term 'Nintendo hard' is pretty applicable. Leveling up makes things easier, but problems are usually approachable as puzzles or patterns to recognize and solve. It's possible to lose what you've gained, but it's not that difficult to retrieve it. You will occasionally have to back track or re-do effort, but progress save points aren't unreasonably rare. Basically, yes, Dark Souls can be difficult, but it's not really that difficult.

It does remind me a little of a really old school Dungeons and Dragons game. The levels can be dangerous, there's a story but it's not constantly launched at you from every angle, it's fairly lonely - it's clear you're in a little inhabited and perilous area in a larger world, and the environment is a character. There's a depth of lore that's hidden from you, but comes out in the few characters you meet and item descriptions. Dark Souls is not a pandering game, but what it gives you is interesting and, to me, quite fun. I've spent about 55 hours on it so far - that's the difficulty speaking and the fact that the game feels very large, and I'm not given all that much direction on what I need to be doing or what all these zones on the map are for. There's a lot of exploration and doubling back, but the game is pretty enough that I rarely am bothered by it.

I might talk about it more if I feel like there's anything else to say. I unreservedly recommend it if what I said sounds attractive to you.