Dungeoneering 101

Have the rules for dungeon survival changed much over the years?

Read an article at CBR.com on “How to Survive an Old-Fashioned Dungeon,” by Jennifer Melzer, and it made me think of how my group is doing in the somewhat-old-fashioned Princes of the Apocalypse campaign.

So … let’s take look!

Carry a Light Whenever Possible

Old school, yes, this was essential. It still is — key races don’t have Darkvision (etc.). On the other hand, in my opinion, this quickly gets into logistical annoyance. How many torches are you carrying? How much longer will your torch last? How’s the lamp oil supply doing? Do you have to drop your torch to use your weapon? Did the torch get left behind when you fled? Is the DM keeping track of that stuff, or the players?

Speaking as a player, that was never fun. In our college homebrews, we just figured that “Continual Light batons” were SOP at the magic markets and left it at that. (We also called them “Continual Light begonias,” which was much funnier after a few beers.)

In PotA, between an early light-emitting artifact the party found (per the module) and light spells the party has, this has not been a real issue. Indeed, it’s often been the opposite, with my occasionally having to warn the party (before or after they are bushwhacked) that wandering down dark halls while brightly lit up will probably not help their Stealth rolls.

(Side note here: VTTs that manage lighting / vision, like Roll20, can be fussy and fiddly, but, damn, the effect is awesome.)

Never Separate the D&D Party

A general truism, even today. Technically speaking, encounters are scaled for the full party — splitting the party means you’re going to run into things you are not ranked up for. Similarly, challenges of various sorts are often keyed to abilities or knowledge that only a subset of the party has; if a different subset encounter them, frustration ensues.

That said, sometimes it makes logistical sense to split things up, especially if it’s to send someone on an errand back through already-cleared terrain. As a GM, I try to play it fairly: no intentional piling on a wandering warrior, but no pulling punches, either. Random encounters can be a thing, though they can also be more easily scaled down to fit the people who are off in another direction.

The worst part about a split party is that it makes keeping the multiple groups all engaged and interested a greater challenge. I’ve played as a player in games where a split meant sitting around, bored, for 45 minutes while the DM did side quest stuff with their favorite players. Not good show.

Create a Dungeon and Map As You Go

Wow. I remember when we had to do that. Always bringing graph paper to the game– “You said the room was left three squares and up four squares from the door?” Especially pre-battle maps, this was always a PitA, and a guarantee of error-filled “Wait, how can this room be here, that would overlap this other room” time-wastage.

Again, VTTs can solve this problem quite neatly. In Roll20, our party can easily see where on the level they’ve been, its contours, etc. It’s a bit of realism compromise that works.

Note that this is most important if you are playing on a grid (my preference). If you are doing “Theater of the Mind,” it’s a lot easier to abstract out this kind of stuff, even if the picture-is-a-thousand-words aspect of maps is more difficult to handle that way.

Don’t Underestimate the Dungeon’s Environment

Environmental challenges can make things interesting, and different from endless corridors and rooms. Different dungeons should have different feels. PotA has been good at this, aided thematically by the elemental cults involved, and the nodes have been particularly strong this way, leading to environments that are not just window dressing, but actual challenges in and of themselves. Fighting a melee in a wind that requires a STR save each round to avoid being pushed back, or exploring a realm of underground rivers and lakes and waterfalls exercises different mental muscles, and gives the DM different tools to make encounters more challenging than just adding more mooks.

Having the environment — breezes, smells, sounds, even tastes in the air — changing and giving clues (some legitimately misleading) can and should keep people on their toes.

Exercise Caution with Everything in the Dungeon

I’m not a believer, at all, in the Killer Dungeon. It quite quickly turns into Not-Fun, and for me, D&D is about story-telling, not body count. Tapping every floor tile, checking for traps at every door, getting killed by gold slime masquerading as a door knob … that’s just not my cuppa, as player or GM. Being hypercautious all the time slows the story down, and gets repetitive, and disasters meted out by such things then feel arbitrary and unfair.

That said, the occasional trap, deadfall, Mimic, etc., where it makes sense, can keep people on their toes. Complaisance should not necessarily kill, but some good woundings are reasonable.

PotA is pretty good here. There are a few puzzles, a few traps, but not so many that it becomes a drag. In fact, I might have asked that it be a bit more challenging — people, esp. our Rogue, sometimes are sometimes a bit blasé about scouting things out, and a few more traps might worth inserting.

Avoid Unnecessary Enemy Encounters

Define “unnecessary”.

I agree that full-dungeon sweeps aren’t necessary. They might not even be fun. But if the encounters (and their treasure) have been well designed, skipping some of them can also mean missing out on some fun things, even under the rubric of We’ve beaten the Big Bad in this zone, let’s get out of Dodge before our spell slots run out. And, again, if things have been written well, the treasure or other clues that drop from an encounter might be useful, or even necessary, later on in the campaign.

That said, not all enemy encounters need be combat, either. Trickery or even honest negotiation can be useful, and it’s up to the DM to figure out when this might actually make sense. Allied but rival factions might step aside; outnumbered mooks might surrender (and then maybe fight another day). Murder hoboes can be fun to play … for a while. But they make it hard to tell a good story.

PotA provides a lot of hooks here — distinctive costumes to wear, passwords, competitive enemy factions you can play against each other, and material pre-written that you can use if the party decides to bluff its way in rather than just leave pools of enemy blood on the floor. The players in my game have tended to under-utilize this option, sometimes to my frustration, but it’s good that possibility was considered.

Don’t Give the DM Ideas to Use Against You

We once had an informal rule at our table: if the player suggested an terrifying explanation for something that was worse than what the GM originally had in mind … it was off limits. For a while, at least.

The advantage of playing with a canned module is there’s not that kind of temptation.

In sum …

The article in question shows how much hasn’t changed in the world of FRPGs. Most of these rules still apply, as moderated by the quality of the DM, the module (as applicable), and the players. Some of the old school grinds — mapping things out, torch logistics, etc. — are easily (and, to my mind, properly) avoided. Others — don’t split the party! — are evergreen. A word to the wise is sufficient.

Game Review: For the Queen

An imaginative, prompt-driven, story-generating fun time

We needed to fill in for a Friday D&D night where we wouldn’t be at full strength. So …

I’ve played For the Queen a few times before — with actual cards and a table-top — and enjoyed it. In this case, with our band of friends, it was still easier to do in Roll20 on a VTT, and it so happens that the game has a Roll20 version.

The Basics

The game is GM-less (except for someone to kind of help with rules, VTT oddities, etc.), so everybody plays. That’s a bonus for me.

The group decides on a queen from a deck of pictures, all of them interesting and with possibilities just visually.

The story setting is literally this simple:

The land you live in has been at war for as long as any of you have been alive.
The Queen has decided to undertake a long and perilous journey to broker an alliance with a distant power.
The Queen has chosen all of you, and no one else, to be her retinue, and accompany her on this journey.
She chose you because she knows that you love her.

And that’s it. The setting, the war, the journey, the time period, the nature of the queen, the nature and roles of the characters, all come out from the players as, one at a time, they draw Prompt cards that ask questions. E.g.,

You were summoned to a private meeting with the Queen once. Why did you feel disappointed afterward?
What do you do for the Queen that no one else can do?
Who is this distant power you are travleing to, and why do they make you uneasy?

Other players can expand on those questions with suggestions or follow-ups. A player can also pass a card on if they can’t think of an answer … or they can use an X-Card option to delete a card (or answer) that is problematic or that they simply don’t want to see in the game.

Players can give their answers in whatever tone or voice they like (“Jason was really upset when …” or “I always look forward to …” or “Dear Diary …”). Most folk (in my limited experience) to third person.

The focus of most of the cards (explicitly or implicitly) is the character’s relationship with the Queen. We know the Queen has chosen you for this trip because she knows you love her. But … is she correct? Do you? Why? Why not? Is that feeling pragmatic? Romantic? Dutiful? A clever (or desperate) facade? How unalloyed is that love? What, if any, are its limits?

And how does each further answer given by someone else color what you think?

All that’s going to be tested, at the very end …

Play goes around the table, slowly building up and riffing off of each other’s answers and what facts (or opinions) have been established. This goes for 30-120 minutes until the game-ending card is drawn:

The Queen is under attack. Do you defend her?

At which point play proceeds around the table one more time, with all the players/characters each answering that question. It could be a description of a staunch defense. It could be a sketchy partial defense short of death. Heck, I’ve seen videos of games where one of the players was the attacker, taking their vengeance with a knife to the back.

I.e., just like everything else, the nature, and possibly the result, of the attack is dependent on the story being told. The aftermath may never be known (or may be discussed later over beers). But at that point the game is over.

Playing on a VTT

This game works very neatly in Roll20 (you can buy it from the Roll20 store) because it’s rules-light and functions on card decks — an instructions deck, a deck of queens to select from, and a deck of 46 prompts.

(You could, if you have a boxed set, actually recreate it in Roll20, but it might not be worth the effort.)

Roll20’s card deck mechanics can be a little wonky, but the pre-settings of the mechanics worked neatly for players drawing Prompt cards, and the GM can take care of the shuffling and bringing out and hiding the decks, which is really all you need.

The other advantage that Roll20 provides, to my mind, is a desktop to write down notes as people expand the mythos of their characters, the world, and the Queen.

Our Game

We ran in Roll20 with a group of five (was to be six, but someone was under the weather at the last moment).

I decided it would be more expeditious to simply pull the rules into a single handout, rather than walk through people reading each individual rule card. That’s a charming mechanism, and would work well getting a group of players used to talking aloud with card draws, but it seemed unnecessary. Plus I was busy tweaking some of the rule actions and notes (e.g., just asserting that the GM would flip three Queen cards and that the players could then choose).

The standard timing mechanism is to slide the “The Queen Is Under Attack” card into the Prompt deck manually — about halfway down for a 30 minute game, or lower down for something longer (as the canon established become more elaborate, the game slows down some). I used a suggestion I saw from the game’s creator and simply set a timer for the group-desired time (an hour). When the “The Queen Is Under Attack” card came up, I simply pulled it aside until the time went off (in retrospect, I should have just dealt it to myself to hold until then).

I had pre-randomized the players to establish play order, putting their names on the edges of the tabletop as a place to scribble notes. I also added a couple of areas for lore about The Queen and The Realm.

I made extensive use of those note areas, and, in fact, wrote the notes for most of the characters myself — because that’s me, and because I can type quickly and could do it while people were talking.

Though there was a lot of lore casting aspersions on the Queen (indeed, one of the players started off with a card that she’d planned an assassination attempt on her), only two of the characters ended up not really defending her. The exchequer whose dog the Queen had killed took advantage of the final attack to try and kill her, and the tax collector moved off to protect the treasure they were carrying. Two of the defenders were half-hearted, still wanting something from the Queen but not willing to lay down their lives if it came to it.

It having been established that the Queen knew black magic (which was how she had held off that first assassination attempt), it was only when the knight of the realm (me) assured her he’d give his life for her that she said, “Yep, that’s what I need for my spell, thanks, O Knight,” and drained said life. He willingly, if a bit disappointedly, fell back into the darkness of death, and as I was the last player around the table, we left it with a freeze frame of character reaction shots as her big spell to “smite her enemies” went off, Butch & Sundance-style.

Fun times!

I loved how the players, from the get-go, were willing to both lean into tweaking the story in unexpected ways (the Queen used magic to thwart the first attack! The Queen killed my dog! The Queen imprisoned Character J’s father because Character J is more beautiful than her own daughter. Oh, the Queen is blind — was that a cost of losing magic? Or was the cost her occasionally homicidal rages?) that everyone else could riff on for their own next card. Sometimes that was due to a suggestion, sometimes it came organically.

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Here’s the tabletop we ended with.

For the Queen 2022-11-11 — Click to embiggen.

The Verdict

This is a great pickup game that requires minimal prep (I did some, not for the campaign, but to smooth out the rules and make sure the tabletop was how I wanted it — again, that’s my kink). It could also be a targeted destination for an evening, scalable from a half to two hours (suggestion: take a break after an hour or so).

The game is designed for 2-6, and I suspect that the number of players will vary things a lot. More players create more hooks, but also make it take longer before things come back around to you, so each character is, in a sense, more shallow the more players there are around the table, unless you make the game longer. (Going over five also creates some group dynamic changes, letting some players fade more into the background.) Our five-for-an-hour worked well.

I can’t say how having someone who is not into RP (“I like to roll dice and hit things with my sword”) would affect the gameplay. It’s not necessary improv theater RP, but storytelling about a character, and since any prompt question can be answered centered around a dagger or fireball as easily as around any emotion, it should work out okay, especially with other players offering suggestions or questions to flesh things out.

The game is definitely replayable, as players define everything through the prompt questions. For example, you can really choose any setting. Our defaulting to vague Medieval fantasy is common, and a lot of the queen images support that — but this really could be set in a modern era (political, business), in space opera, among anthropomorphic woodland creatures, in the Old West, etc. For example, the queen might be the CEO, the journey a critical business trip to meet with execs from a third corporation, the players the business team she chose to bring along because she knows they are all fiercely loyal to her.

Indeed, Evil Hat, the company that produces the game, has put out an SRD that lets people come up with their own overarching story setting and prompt questions in distinctly different settings — because the setting is just a backdrop., the game being about exploring a relationship, a character, and a final decision.

In retrospect, this game sort of hit the sweet spot between the most recent games we’ve done on non-D&D nights: Fiasco (which seems much more demanding of the imagination and of live-RPing skills) and Killer Ratings (where the GM has to do more heavy lifting of the setting). For the Queen instead uses some occasionally gobsmacking questions to draw out that creativity, avoiding the heavy worldbuilding because the game is not about that, but about the characters building themselves through their relationship to the Queen. Very neatly done.

For the Queen deserves its very positive reputation.

Game Review: “Fiasco” (2nd Ed.)

Widely, and properly, lauded for RP improv and fun scenarios … but not always a hit.

Our regular Friday night D&D game needed a couple of fill-ins while a chunk of the folk were out of town. So, after last week’s Killer Ratings game, I thought we finally try Fiasco.

It didn’t work out great for us, but I think that was more on us than on the game. So let’s take a look.

The Game

Fiasco is a key — and one of the oldest — player in the “RPG as Improv with Light Rule Structure” games. It’s designed to give us the opportunity to play ordinary people with big ambitions and weak impulse control getting themselves into trouble and ending up in a likely very bad place … but with plenty of dark humor along the way. As many people have put it, it’s like playing a Coen Bros. movie in the time it would take to watch one.

The newest incarnation of the game has replaced stacks of dice and lookup tables with “engine” card sets, which seems to work well. You start out with a set of “playset” cards which are used to (a) establish the general parameters of the setting (a suburban town, a shopping mall, a D&D village), and (b) start building the relationships between the player’s characters. These include some key locations, maybe some objects, and definitely some needs that will drive things forward.

Once relationship et al. cards have been played down, you have a conversation around the table about what they all really mean. That Family Member relationship, is that biological, or adopted, or ritual? That Bully and Victim card — which person is which? Who’s actually jonesing for the WW2 pistol, and why? Start fleshing out those relationships to get things started — but allow for some discovery during the game, too. I wouldn’t necessary suggest keeping secrets (others can’t play to your story if you have it hidden), but new facets of the relationships, characters, and situation should come up during play.

Once the setting and players have been established, then we get two Acts of two spotlight Scenes per player each (so each character will end up in a spotlight Scene four times during the game, plus playing a supporting role in other Scenes). In a spotlight Scene, a player can either Establish the Scene (declare who’s there besides themselves, what’s the setting, and what are they trying to get out of it), or Resolve the scene (take a Scene devised by the other players involving their character, and determine as it goes along if it’s going to have a Positive or Negative Outcome). Scenes should last a few minutes, draw from the story set so far and the relationship elements on the board, and go from there.

Between the two Acts there is a Tilt, which brings in some new elements to make a hopefully already shaky outcome explode even more spectacularly.

At the end of Act Two, each player, based on the Outcome cards they have collected, get an Aftermath card of lesser or greater disaster, and narrates whatever happened to their character, short- or long-term.

The three playsets that come in the box (or at least my virtual box) are:

Poppleton Mall (fun and drama and maybe drug dealing and Satanism at a local shopping mall)
Tales from Suburbia (fun and drama in the burbs, with still more drug dealing and crime and infidelity simmering beneath the BBQ-friendly surface)
Dragonslayers (post-D&D quest adventurers back at the tavern, eyeing that gold they just picked up).

Playsets are not a one-and-done. Depending on the characters, the cards that come out, and the mix and imagination of the players, a given playset could be used many times — though not as an ongoing campaign, mind you (rarely, I sense, is there enough of the setting or the characters left standing after a game to make that viable).

The rules themselves are relatively simple, but was a little difficult to get a good feel for how the game actually worked without actually watching some play videos. Three I recommend:

The game also comes with a “Let’s Not” safety card, in case action starts going down directions that make any player a bit too uncomfortable.

Players are definitely urged to lean into the dark humor and risk-taking and ignoring of possibly bad consequences to decisions being made. While the story may be about the characters competing with each other (even ones that are allies), the game itself seems to almost be the players vs. the characters — trying to get folk into trouble, not in a mean way to other players, but in a way that would make a good film.

(The film model is useful in framing scenes, too. A scene should not be, “Bob goes to the store to buy milk,” because that’s boring. “Bill goes to the store to buy milk he’s gonna see Susan and decide to confront her about Pat” is a lot more interesting, and has the stakes built into it.)

Fiasco is deservedly famous for its groundbreaking use of the players and their character interactions to drive the story. It’s GMless, though “The Person with the Game” will probably need to help explain it and guide players through the first time.

Definitely something you should consider for your gaming group if you’ve not already, and if it’s a group that loves the RP part of RPGs.

The home page for the game can be found here, but it’s available in a lot of places, including as a VTT implementation on Roll20 …

Roll20 Implementation — Fiasco for VTT

The core game (with the three playsets mentioned above) runs $20 in the Roll20 Marketplace. Expansion sets of eight additional playsets are available for $35 (there is a Starter Bundle with a total of 11 playsets for $33).

As a card deck game, the Roll20 implementation should work well. It comes packaged with play mats (on the map level) for three, four, and five players (thought the spacing on the five player mat was pretty uneven).

You also get a deck for each playset, and then separate decks for Positive Outcome, Negative Outcome, and Aftermath cards.

The (tabletop-based) game rules get loaded into the Compendium (a manual step you have to take to include it), and there are some stub handouts in the Journal as an outline for differences in Roll20. Most of these have to do with the card-playing mechanics of the VTT. If you’ve not done card decks in Roll20, do some practicing beforehand to see how dealing, viewing, playing, and clearing cards actually works.

Fiasco Roll20 Journal — It’s not you, Fiasco. It’s me.

I actually wasn’t wowed by the rules breakout — Roll20’s compendium is not always easy to use, and their organization is not great — so I ended up copying the (limited rules) over into the Journal, broken out more logically (to me), cross-referenced, and basically supporting all the information I got from the rules and from watching gameplay videos. Took me a couple of hours, so not a huge hill to climb there for GMs who want to do similarly.

Within the bounds of Roll20’s cardplay mechanics, the game worked well. Those mechanics are sometimes a bit awkward, and limitations on what Players vs GMs can do meant I got a suggestion from a friend that I make everyone a GM. I didn’t (because I thought that would make for more potential mechanics chaos), and it didn’t bite us — but, then, we didn’t actually get a full game completed, so it may have been more of a problem later.

One element that a VTT lends itself to is scribbling notes on the board itself — character names, info about them, discovered motivations, what the cards mean in this context, etc. I highly encourage the practice.

I would also add a recommendation, if playing on a VTT, that if you don’t use video normally you find a way to do so for Fiasco. So much of the game is bound up in personal interaction that the additional “data channel” of facial expressions and the like are even more important. It can also help see if people are quiet because they are nodding off, not engaged, or just unsure what to say.

How did it go for us?

Not … as well as I would have liked. Here’s a capture of the tabletop when we got as far as we’d gotten.

One problem we had was that the game just ran too long. We took close to 3 hours to get to the end of Act One, which became problematic for our East Coast player. While I would expect (and was warned) that the game could run longer than usual the first time out, that seemed excessive. But I’m unsure that’s actually the game’s fault.

Did I talk too much, going through rules? Maybe.
The players struggled a bit with the whole Scenes mechanic: coming up with a scene idea in the first place, limiting (or not) the other players involved, identifying what they wanted (in a meaningful fashion). People tended to come up with mechanical scene ideas (“I want to get everyone together for dinner”) rather than the emotional stakes (“My family never ate together, and if I can just get my friends around the table it will all be great.”). (Again, framed another way, is the Scene worth a scene in a movie?)
Some Scenes ran on too long. If the goal is really a few minutes each, we had some that were several.
We had a bit of difficulty determining Positive vs Negative Outcomes, especially when a player was doing the Resolving, and went in wanting that result.
I have a sense that, even though we threw around a lot of great relationship ideas, we didn’t necessarily have a sufficient grounding in them by the time we started play, so that some of those encounters and ideas never paid off, and others got changed at the last moment.
We play on Friday nights, and that’s always a rough call — end of a long week and, again, one player off two time zones deeper into the night. that might have lowered the energy level for a game that really encourages energy.
Our group is mostly introverted and, to a large degree, conflict-averse. Not so pathologically that a game like Fiasco — which desires big characters and getting ourselves and each other into trouble — is impossible, but it is a bit more of a lift.

We played the Dragonslayers playset. I thought that would work well as we were doing this in lieu of D&D, but in retrospect I wonder if it added one more layer of worldbuilding that we needed to struggle through.

Ultimately, we ended up with a D&D party that was actually an offshoot of an evil cult, with a goal to raise an army of the undead for the edgelord type I was playing (we were an offshoot because, obviously, the cult didn’t want just any Tom, Dick, or Grimdar to be raising armies of the undead). I was supported in that goal (kind of?) by the cult’s recruiter/cheerleader (who had an unrequited love for me), an eager young hero recently joined to the cult, and a sorcerer and his apprentice and their one-charge-left staff of resurrection. So some real possibilities there.

And that said, we did come up with some good bits — flashbacks, and a dream sequence, all of which had some interesting elements to them. One player also made a good move and framed a scene, not as our sitting down to dinner, or doing a dress rehearsal for the forbidden ritual after dinner, but our post-dress rehearsal review around the table — which allowed us just to vamp ideas about what happened and our reaction to them.

As it was, we pulled the plug at the end of Act One, due to time and no immediate opportunity to finish the game over the weekend. Players did indicate they could see how this all (raising an army of the dead on behalf of one of the players) was going to play out very poorly for all concerned. So that was something.

Definitely want to try it again, though, maybe with one of the other playsets. With the holiday season coming up, we may get the opportunity.

Game Review: “One Last Fight”

Superrobotbear, 2-6 players, 2 hours, $10
I ran this as a one-night fill-in when my normal D&D campaign couldn’t run because of absent players. We’ve been playing in Roll20 as a Virtual Tabletop, so I wanted something that would use that. I also wanted something I was pretty sure would fit into one evening; picking a “short” D&D crawl was a recipe for it spilling into multiple weeks.

I ended up with One Last Fight, by Ethan Hudgins, released back in late 2019. Ethan describes the game as “A GM-less Card-Prompt RPG for 2 to 6 players,” and that’s pretty accurate. I purchased and ran this through Roll20, which seems like a much superior choice to buying PDFs and printing up your own copy of the game.

I say “I ran this,” but that’s not quite right. OLF is technically GM-less (I was GM as far as Roll20 was concerned, which was helpful with some card mechanics, and I knew the rules better than the players, but I tried to keep a distance regarding creatively guiding the game).

OLF’s premise is that a party of 2-6 is ending a long campaign/quest against their nemesis: slowly approaching where the nemesis is located, fighting their way in, then engaging in final battle. All of this is guided by a structured card deck built from separate decks for each phase of the approach. Twenty-five cards are dealt, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but the games generally seem to take a couple of hours.

There are really two games in OLF. One is a structure for conflict resolution. Character cards have simple combat attributes, bolstered by items/treasure acquired. Those attributes represent the number of dice to be rolled vs the challenges on the Adventure Cards. The Adventure Cards are flipped from the deck, and may force a solo challenge (which can be passed on to another player) or a group challenge (faced by each individually). These could be a bad guy, a group of opponents, a trap, a challenging situation, etc.

One Last Fight - character card — Character card with questions, special powers, and conflict attributes. This character has one each of the Key, Crown, and (through a treasure item) Magic attributes.

So if the conflict has Swords and Magic as vulnerabilities, and I have two Swords and one Magic, that gives me three dice, plus the free one I get, so I am rolling 4d6. If the conflict shows “4 4” as the difficulty, then on the individual dice I’m rolling (sums make no difference), I have to have two dice that have 4, 5, or 6 on them.

While many conflicts have the stake of losing life vs gaining treasure, quite a number have a different win/lose effect, sometimes being a matter of “this helps the party a lot” vs “this helps the party a little.”

Conflicts get hairier as the adventure progresses, until you finally get to the nemesis, the titular Last Battle, where it is kill or be killed.

Additional variation in play — beyond the randomizing of the built deck — come from the characters chosen: a variety of archetypes with both different strengths (conflict attributes) and various ways they can break the rules, from changing die rolls to providing assistance to other players.

But that brings us to the second system present in OLF, because, beyond a solid conflict mechanic, OLF is first and foremost about storytelling.

A game can be set (as a collaborative decision) in any setting — high or low fantasy, science fiction, the Old West, spies, comic books, named franchises or generic pastiches. The cards and actions are set as archetypes, without any particular setting in mind — a character’s description as being able to tell the future could be magic, it could be psionics, it could be the Force, or it could be a powerful computer. This gets determined by the group defining the setting, and by every card — nemesis, characters, gear, and adventure cards — having a series of questions that describe the present or fill in the past.

One Last Fight - nemesis cards — Some of the Nemesis cards. Collaboratively answering the questions help create the game setting.

Those questions may be answered by individuals drawing the cards, or by group efforts. And while the story built by those questions and answers don’t actually affect the mechanics, they can influence how the individuals play, and, when all is said and done, the create the story that players will remember long after they recall a given die roll.

It’s those questions and answers in the end that make OLF special, from “What does this statue ask of you” to “For whom in the group would you take an arrow? Why?” to “How did you allow this enemy to escape before?” to “What does the nemesis mutter as they cling to life?” You could play without that storytelling, but ultimately they are what, to me, makes the game what it is.

And even when you reach the end, and the Nemesis is defeated (one hopes), there are final questions — the inevitable (and often most dramatic) where does you character go from here? (Or, if your character died — quite possible — how are they remembered?)

The Good

Well done storytelling prompts.
Good conflict resolution mechanic.
Pretty easy rules.

The Bad

Storytelling and conflict resolution don’t really link together.
Roll20’s card deck mechanics can be irksome.
No physical printed version available; printing PDFs would be painful.
Very indie, so not a lot of info out there about it (by no means the game’s fault).

Overall, One Last Fight is a flexible and entertaining and imagination-stretching game, perfect for fill-in sessions or killing a couple of hours. The rules setup (at least in Roll20) was a bit sketchy and disorganized, but the gaps are easily filled in; the game’s rules are picked up pretty quickly in play. It’s available on Roll20 for $10, or on the author page for the PDF version (same price).

Vigorously recommended.

Do you want to know more?

Games I’m No Longer Playing

Yes, I know it would make more sense to blog about games I am playing, but … well, I’ve lazy.

These are both games I got hot and heavy into for several weeks before suddenly going cold turkey. I’ll explain that in a minute.

Roller Coaster Tycoon was meant to take over the builder itch from SimCity. As the name implies, and as memory may serve, it’s basically a Sim game around amusement park construction. Build it and the Sims will come, giving you money to build still more interesting rides. Build something the game suggests (a shop, a food joint, a ride, or a roller coaster), and you get bonus resources.

This can be a lot of fun, and it did keep me playing for quite a while, slowly expanding my theme park (Zany World!), building roller coasters (designing some of them myself), etc. It was all fun …

… until it wasn’t. Some things can be built with money that the Sims bring in. Other things — increasingly, the things that the game wants you to build next to be rewarded — require a special resource that only comes available when you level, when you achieve one of those requested buildings, or in small increments each day … or when you pay them cash money.

In other words, I hit the effective limits of the Free-to-Play model. To build the next thing would take me several days, and then a week, and then a week or two. Unless I wanted to pay them cash money. (Actually, Google Play Store money, but you get the idea.)

So I quite. Plans for redesigning parts of the park abandoned. Suggestion I open a second location never followed up on. I closed and locked the gates, like Willy Wonka, and never went back. Lots of fun, until suddenly it wasn’t.

Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes (again, not one of my games)

The other game I’ve been playing a lot of — until I wasn’t — was Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. In this game you are hanging out at a cantina, playing video game gladatorial combat with famous figures from the Galaxy — Rebels, Empire, Bounty Hunters, Scoundrels, Ewoks, Jawas, Droids, First Order, Republic, Separatist. You build the figures into teams of five, and then set them in combat against others. In some games you battle Light side vs Dark. In others you choose certain types (“This raid requires Clones!). In still others, you can mix and match for your optimal team.

The battles are turn-based, the characters (several dozen of them, most named characters from the various cartoons, movies, etc.) having multiple attacks and intrinsic powers, often with synergies with similar characters (e.g., when Admiral Akbar is the leader, he adds to the speed of Rebel allies). There are buffs, debuffs, all that kind of jazz. It’s good stuff. There’s a parallel space battle challenge that’s not quite as much fun, but still interesting.

I got up to Lvl 70 or so (out of 85), and had a lead stable of pretty powerful characters: Akbar (leader), Leia (blaster), Boba Fett (blaster, debuffer), an Imperial Guard (tank), and Luminara Unduli (healer, attacker). Other great characters included Lando Calrissian (massive AoE), Capt. Phasma (attack buff), and Darth Vader (Force crushes, lightsaber hijinx). And many more — I ran a less-focused advancement than some did.

It was a lot of fun, some great action, some good quality-of-life features, and I put a lot of hours into it (and more than most, being currently unemployed). Until, this week …

… I stopped.

As I had gotten to a level where the grind to advance characters further — to get the shards to advance the characters one way, to get the gear to advance them another way — hit that tipping point of going from reasonable fun to get characters further advanced to being … not. Where it stopped being fun and became work.

One of my favorite Twain / Tom Sawyer quotes. Something to remember when gaming.

And, of course, I was doing this 95% free-to-play. The game provides plenty, plenty of opportunities to spend cash money to buy credits, to buy additional characters, to buy stuff to advance characters. I had some Google Play credit to apply for minor strategic purchases, but it was pretty trivial vs. the concerted F2P effort.

And I hit that wall that so many F2P games have, where the fun turns into work, into “what a body is obliged to do,” as Tom Sawyer put it. And, so I’ve walked away.

Mind you, this is purely at the discretion of game publishers in both cases. They have offered a game for free, and I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure for free. And I can’t tell people they shouldn’t play them — I had a lot of fun with both. But both (like earlier Sim City experience), get to a point where playing for free, or for even small targeted purposes, stops being enough fun to warrant the effort. Because, after all, it is a game. When it stops being fun … stop playing.

In which we do something we haven’t done in far too long a time

Not our Torchlight 2 game, but you get the idea.

Margie and Kay and I actually played an online game together. Granted, it was “only ” Torchlight II, and it was played on our local LAN, but we haven’t done something like that in quite a while.

I’ve been on quite a Torchlight kick of late — probably a stress thing — and it occurred to me that we could actually do some playing all together on Sunday. So after we’d gotten it reinstalled on Margie’s machine, and Kay’s computer was through with its patches, we had at.

And it was fun. We were regular little murder hoboes, sweeping the countryside for anything with a label and cutting down anything our weapons and spells could attack. We swapped gear, watched each others’ backs, and had a blast. We ran through about 85% of the first batch of missions (through the Temple Steppes), and had to quit only when dinner arrived.

We’ll have to do it again some time.

Trying out “Elder Scrolls Online”

Not sure if it was beta traffic, or a tweak to our firewall, but we finally got on over the weekend to play in the final ESO open beta.

It was … hmmm. Okay. Nice graphics. Somewhat irritating interface. Nothing terribly new under the sun, and a lot of feel of button mashing, but some of that might just have been newness and ignorance.

The new character tutorial was okay. It was too easy to forget how to do things that flashed by (and some of the notifications flash by pretty quickly). At one point I leveled, but realized I’d forgotten how to do anything about it. It took a while to figure out.

Pay attention to the map. The map is your friend. Running around without the map makes you prone to running into dead ends, even in the open.

There appears to be a lot of crafting. Like, a lot of stuff you pick up that, when you examine it, is all about making meals and making other stuff. Meh.

Some nice bits to make you character feel “special” (how that will all work together with multiple characters was unclear).

We didn’t play through far enough to get a feel for how teaming works.

So … was it Incredibly Keen Enough to buy a subscription? Margie and I will need to talk.

So what am I playing these days?

Well, not a lot, but a few things I dabble in, more or less:

Ingress: Assuming that counts. I’m over half-way through L7 to the (current) L8 cap. It’s nice, fun, casual gameplay as I commute on the LTR to/from work, deal with some portals in range from my office desk, farm a portal up the street from my house, and try not to obsess.
LotRO: Not much. Margie and I occasionally get on and duo together, and I even ponied up (so to speak) and bought a horse, but I’m still not feeling the burn. Maybe part of it is because Margie knows so very well what she’s doing, and I’m a relative noob, but part of it remains the non-heroic drudgery and occasional glass cannon nature of LotRO gameplay. Though it remains beautiful and imaginative beyond belief, and I do enjoy playing with Margie per se.
WoW: Rarely, but occasionally. See “LotRO,” but with brighter colors and shallower story.
Torchlight II: This has been where most of my gameplay has gone of late. It’s all solo play, and non-cloud, but I’ve been enjoying running multiple alts through different bands of the game. In theory, Margie and I could set up LAN play to do this together …

I did some very limited beta work with Marvel Heroes, and found it modestly enjoyable (same Diablo style as Torchlight II, but with an immersion-breaking plethora of the same heroes running around). Anticipate trying it out more when it goes live, but not enthused enough to spend any money on it as of yet.

Striking a Blow for My Glasgwegian Brethren

Because, dagnabbit, while I was not going to spend all my free time on my business trip to Glasgow playing Ingress, I’d be darned if I didn’t burst at least one St Andrew’s Blue portal in honor of my St Patrick’s Green forebears and for the Glaswegian Enlightenment. And because I enjoy using the word “Glaswegian.”

Ingress: So, what’s worse than an endless war?

An endless guerrilla war …

So here’s the biggest complaint I have about Ingress at the moment — and it’s a complaint I see all over the boards, too.

One side’s won.

It’s a different side depending on what city you’re in. But in way too many cities, the give and take of war and raids and sniping and attacks and retreats and fighting another day has turned into a monochrome. Take, for example, Denver (click to embiggen).

2-4-2013 6-09-42 PM — Oh, I’m bluuuuuueee …

That’s a lot of blue.

The current gameplay in Ingress seems to have a tipping point that turns into a death spiral for game competition.

Let’s look at the Pros and Cons of being a city majority, and how that prevents the other side from turning the tide.

THE MAJORITY SIDE

Pros:

Because friendly portals give big drops of kit, everywhere is a farm for you. Resonators, Bursters, Shields for all!
Lots of portals means lots of links means lots of CF means lots of AP means lots of leveling.

Cons:

Large networks of portals decay over time. It’s difficult to keep them up. (But, then, why do you need to? It just provides additional stuff to do later.)
Large networks of portals are subject to attack anywhere. It’s difficult to defend every portal. (But, then, why do you need to? See below.)

THE MINORITY SIDE

Pros:

“A target-rich environment.”
Hacking nets you 100 AP per portal … great for L1 (climbing from 0-10,000), not so useful for L6 (climbing from 300,000 to 600,000).

Cons:

Enemy portals bite back when hacked, draining XM.
Enemy portals give nothing or very little in the way of kit drops.
Taking a portal and building anything is largely an effort in putting a big target on the map for folks wanting the AP of taking something down.

Bummer of a birthmark, Hal — The problem with liberating a portal.

The last “Con” is probably the biggest thing. The Majority Side is always looking for things to attack, because taking portals is a big part of what nets you AP. And, of course, they have very few opportunities to do so, because they have the majority of portals already. And, of course, all those friendly portals have given them massive arsenals to attack with and equipment to build with.

Result: build a Minority-color portal, and everyone on the Majority-color side is on it like scavengers on the Serengeti. If you build it, they will come.

Which means, of course, that the Minority side can never build up items, or links, or Control Fields. Which means they can’t really get the big AP rewards. Which means they can’t advance enough to take on the Majority side, take back enough of the portals to counter the advantages of the Majority side.

(Note, “The Majority Side” can be either Resistance or Enlightenment. In Denver, the Resistance — blue — has the unshakable upper hand. The Enlightenment — green — has the upper hand in other cities.)

Bele and Lokai — Ingress is balanced to the extent that it can be highly imbalanced in either direction

Why is this bad?

For the Majority side it’s bad because there’s little challenge. Going all piranha on the few Minority portals that pop up is all well and good, and the completionists will enjoy building a Tholian Web of links and CFs across the metro area. But there’s not a lot of interesting stuff there, except for OCD types and bullies.

Tholian Web — All Your Mind Units Are Belong To Us

Worse, as the Majority side continues to level, the number of portals that are accessible to low-level types (on either side, but let’s focus on the Minority side) become miniscule. Which means you’ve erected a barrier to new players entering the game (especially, but not solely, on the Minority side).

Now if you complain about this on the boards, you get some people coming up with the following suggestions, none of which resolve the problem for most players:

“If you are willing to get in a care and drive, you can find low-level portals out in the hinterlands to take over and level with.” Which assumes that any player worth their salt is going to get in a car and drive around to play the game. Which means disposable income, a lack of regard for the environment, and lots of free time. Oh, and dedication, beyond what a casual player is going to have.
“If you team up with higher level players, you can all cooperate to take things down.” This assumes that players of the game are all gregarious types who are going to join boards, participate in planning raids, and do all that kind of social stuff. (Or, if you’re not, it assumes you should quit.) It also assumes that there are higher level players around. (Which is where you get into the “Invite some higher level players to drive to your city and help clear things out” suggestion. Which can do a short, initial number on the Majority side, but is unlikely to change things around based on stockpiles, and is also not something you can or should count on as a fundamental game process).
“Wait until the Majority side gets bored and leaves the game. Then you can take back over.” Assuming that will actually ever happen, it’s a rather ugly meta way to succeed. And while you’re doing whole waiting thing, the Minority side is probably going to get bored and leave the game, too.

Solutions — Or maybe we could just have a table of eager young professionals, and one seasoned, mature executive, figure out an answer.

Which brings this all around to another major point: while Ingress as a whole is a positive experience for some of the Majority (OCD and Bullies) and some players as a whole (people who are willing to team, willing to dedicate lots of time to the game, willing to drive around a lot) — that’s not a recipe for a broadly successful game. It’s possible that’s enough to do whatever data farming Niantic and/or Google are looking to do, but it’s a recipe for Ingress never much leaving beta (or, upon leaving beta, not surviving over six months). And somehow, I think the Powers That Be want something a bit more robust.

So, what should Niantic do?

Well, there are any number of suggestions that have been made, many of them contradictory. A few of the biggies that appeal to me:

Change the Build/Destroy balance. Right now it’s a lot easier to build than to destroy. If it were easier to tear down portals, that would impact the Majority most.
Give some advantage (or less disadvantage) to the Minority. It’s been suggested, for example, that Enemy portals should drop more Bursters (offensive weapons) when hacked, or at least should drop at the same rate as Friendly portals.
Give some disadvantage (or less advantage) to the Majority: An NPC third faction, which tends to attack the Majority more often, is an obvious suggestion. Increasing drops to the Minority (or decreasing them for the Majority) is another. Having friendly portals actually suck XM away from you is another.

Of course, all of this has to be done with some care. You don’t want people to not want to succeed for fear of drawing major disadvantages. And ideally you want a system that oscillates between different factions being in the lead, rather than deteriorating to a Steady State / Trench Warfare. And you don’t want people to feel railroaded or too manipulated by the game masters.

I don't have all the answers — Wait, Google’s the one we’re trying to correct here.

But you (and by “you” I mean “Niantic”) need to do something. I’m seeing more and more folks on the boards sounding discouraged or frustrated at being stuck in a permanent Minority, at having anything they capture or build be immediately seized back. I’m currently playing guerrilla warfare — tackling only portals I can take with relative ease that also happen to have a large number of links and CFs hanging off of them, maximizing AP gained as well as visual impact on the Resistance. But that’s not something that everyone can do, and, at best, it’s a way of advancing me but not the overall Enlightenment cause. And, frankly, I don’t know how sustainable it is.

(Oh, yeah — I am doing the “team up with a newbie to help them advance” thing … but only because the newbie sleeps with me …)

William Haefeli - Friends With Benefits — “Oh, and PL MEH PLZ.”

(My wife, that is.)

(Ironically, viz the cartoon, I use my wife’s health and dental benefits. But I digress.)

I want Ingress to be a success. Truly. I would say, at the moment, this situation is the biggest challenge to it being so. If Niantic and Google can’t come up with a game with a robust variation in situation (one side winning, then the other, and back and forth) and keep it from becoming an endless stalemate … then Ingress will fail. At least as a game.

Ingress – Play thoughts after a month

“In the heart. In the head. I won’t stay dead. Next time I’ll do the same to you. I’ll kill you. And it goes on, the good old game of war, pawn against pawn! Stopping the bad guys! While somewhere, something sits back and laughs, and starts it all over again!” — James Kirk, “Day of the Dove”

I’ve been playing Ingress for a month now.* It’s been fun, even exciting. It’s gotten me walking even more on my lunch hours, helped me learn more about downtown Denver (and some of the ‘burbs), and introduced me to a new set of online comrades.

Day of the Dove - Kirk v Kang — Being locked in eternal warfare isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But, even as the game slowly makes its way through Google’s Beta process, I can see a problem, summed up, perhaps inadvertently, by one of the lead players in the Denver “Enlightened” community: “This game wasn’t designed to have a winner, just a constant ongoing battle.”

Yeah, that never ends well.

Because it never ends.

“[W]e’re a doomed ship, travelling forever between galaxies, filled with eternal bloodlust, eternal warfare.” — James Kirk, “Day of the Dove”

Granted, most MMOs, for example, never end. The world sometimes changes, but neither Horde nor the Alliance will ever triumph in World of Warcraft. And even if they did, there are plenty of other challenges and challengers out there.

But in WoW, the gameplay changes. Characters advance. New alts get brought on. Different races get played. Different mission tracks get followed.

But aside from a very basic leveling mechanism (that treats everyone the same), and the slow entry of additional portals into the game … there’s no real change going on in Ingress.** And that’s a problem.

Interminable wars with neither side able to win are, ultimately, meaningless and/or boring (cf. trench warfare of WWI, repeated taking/losing/retaking of hilltops in Korea, and ST:TOS eps “A Taste of Armageddon” and “Day of the Dove”). I can see that as, in not too long a time frame, a problem Ingress will face as it currently stands. How will Google/Niantic address that over time?

They could shake things up by having the rules/conditions change at various times, making the strategies and tactics necessary for success evolve to keep up. That might help a bit.
A bigger change might be new factions; a rumor has been circulating of an iOS version of the app, but that Apple players would be a separate set of factions (yellow and red?) competing against each other and the existing two factions. That would complicate the dynamic, some.
A third NPC faction would be a fine addition to the game at some point. By being a computer-based faction, Google could change behaviors to keep folks on their toes.

“Be a pawn, be a toy, be a good soldier that never questions orders.” — James Kirk, “Day of the Dove”

None of the above changes, though, alter the basic equation: I take your portal for myself, build it up, then you come back with friends and take my portal, and build it up for yourself. Rinse, repeat.

Day of the Dove - weapons — Creating some variety in the conflict would be helpful.

Another direction to explore might be some other method that (a) changes the dynamic between Enlightened and Resistance and (b) provides some milestone “success”/achievement/reward beyond incremental AP increases. The excitement — the value add — in current game mechanics really stops when portals are linked and a Control Field (CF) between three portals is created. At that point, besides adding more links from the same portal (often with more difficulty but no greater payoff) there’s no advantage to maintaining what’s there aside from “Yee-haw, look at all that Green/Blue on the map.” Nothing changes in the world if the Resistance takes back my portal, except, once it happens the hundredth time I just shrug and, yes, “Well, there’s something I can hack for some AP.” (Yes, the game as it stands actually incents the other side taking your portal, so that you can get credit when you take it back in turn.)***

So, yes, there could be some benefit to rewarding maintenance and preservation of things (maybe an incremental boost to AP each day for each portal, based on level, a person still has in place), as well as some actual in-game effects from having links and CFs built and maintained (perhaps increasing a portal’s strength when it’s linked to another portal, or when a CF is in place, or extra XM creation under a CF).

Or maybe you make it (more dangerously to player satisfaction) a negative — you forfeit (reduced over time) some of the AP you got from putting up a CF or link (or even a portal) when it gets taken down. Or maybe that zorches some of the XP you’re carrying (which might be trivial if you’re on the road, or might be a real bummer if you’re actually in the field trying to hack).

Day of the Dove - being watched — Ever have the feeling Google is watching you?

And whatever advantages (or costs), the game makers need to be sure that they also maintain a balance for players of all levels. Right now we have everything running around from L1s to L8s. It seems far too easy for newcomers to the game to feel like there’s little they can do — no portals they can possibly budge, but can only hack at slowly over time for the AP that activity gives. It feels — at least at the moment — like it’s far more expensive to tear down than to build up, given normal drop rates from hacks.

On one level, that’s the way it should be (it’s futile to build if it gets immediately destroyed), but it also creates a barrier to beginners, or even continue-ers (it’s futile to try to destroy if you’re too weak to do so).

“Out! We need no urging to hate humans. But for the present, only a fool fights in a burning house. Out!” — Kang, “Day of the Dove”

And does the game eventually going public change that any? I don’t think so. The last consideration mentioned probably isn’t one at all, as it’s true in its own way for all online games: it’s darn tough for someone who isn’t unemployed, or has a lot of free time on their hands, to compete. Especially if you’re not in an urban center, the current distribution of portals means playing the game means getting in your car and driving around (probably not the most climate-friendly sort of gameplay), hitting what you can in the local environs. Though Google/Niantic accept applications for more portals, that appears to be a fairly slow process, and remains most focused in urban area.

Day of the Dove - laughter — Like anyone else, Google wants happy customers.

Now, to be sure, Google’s point with Ingress is not to make the perfect game, by any means. They have some very pragmatic reasons for the game. But if they want that to be more than a short-duration series of data points, they will need to do something to keep people engaged and interested.

*That was actually a week and change ago. I’ve been pondering this post for a while.

**Yes, it’s beta. I know. I can only judge things by where they are right now. In beta.

***In some ways, it feels more like one of those Cold War / “Great Game” types of films, where the Station Chiefs for the opposing sides contest against each other, but with the understanding it that it should be kept gentlemanly and not put either side too far out of shape.

UPDATE: (Told you I’ve been pondering this for a while.) A few other thoughts:

The game needs to be both solo- and team-friendly. Right now there seems to be much more effectiveness in teams of players, in terms of resources (blasters, resonators, keys) available. That’s fine — for some. For others (cough), teaming is less likely because of other restrictions. That can make the growth curve a lot more difficult.
Team play needs some refinements.

That having been said, right now team play is rather crude. The person who does X gets all the credit for X. If Google wants to encourage team play, there should be some sort of bonus for it. E.g., anyone within the 30m sensor range of a portal gets some fraction of AP credit for events that occur regarding that portal (destroying things, deploying things, linking things), or perhaps only if they’ve done something against/with that portal (other than hacking) so far. That would encourage people to team up, and would also make it easier for higher level folks to mentor newbies.
Google continues to change some of the game parameters to meet what it thinks is competitive play. In the time I’ve been playing, we’ve seen a drastic reduction in key drops, a couple of trial changes in how XMP bursters do damage, and (since I stated this post) a reduction in burster range. In general, it’s made the game more difficult, in terms of taking over stuff — which might fit into some play balance problems elsewhere, but which I, in general, have found to make things less fun.
One could argue that the “variety” in the game comes from the metastory — all the clues and websites and this and that about what the portals really are and Niantic and Enlightened and Resistance and puzzles and all that. And … one would be wrong. Because, as far as the game is concerned, that’s all flavor text. Some folks are into the story and the puzzles. Some aren’t. I think Google wants both groups.
Victory! Which, frankly, gets kind of boring, if it lasts too long.

The biggest challenge seems to be when one side or the other gets a lock on territory — the majority or near totality of portals in an area. This is often accompanied by high-level portals being established as anchors, and “portal farms” that are milked for drops. The result is that attempts by the other side to take anything back tend to be short-lived — the majority group has the resources and a small number of targets to apply to them. The result is one side feeling completely outgunned, and the other side — well, frankly, getting bored (and thus doing counter-intuitive things like letting their portals decay so they can take them back again). This imbalance can change slowly (if people decide to switch sides — though they can do so only once), and can also be changed by broad changes in strategy by the “out” side, but it still seems to be something that could easily unbalance the game. (This is another area where a third faction — esp. an NPC faction that tended to go after the majority, would be of some advantage to the game.)

I am still having fun. But I can also see this, right now, very easily as a game that one day you just suddenly say, “Y’know the heck with it,” and either greatly cut back on playing or quit. And I don’t think that’s the model that Google is looking for.

“I’m going to Disneyland!”

Margie and I went to Downtown Disney in Anaheim last night as a “date night,” scheduling a very nice dinner at Catal for 8 so we could be on the balcony to see the fireworks at 9:30.

Margie’s been very funny about Ingress with me. On the one hand, she kind of mockingly pooh-poohs it as “marking territory” (when she’s polite) and derives great amusement at my being involved in it, she’s also been unexpectedly supportive of my doing it. So whenever we’ve gone out while here in SoCal this vacation, she’s driven so I can hack at passing portals (and has been known to swerve into a parking lot if they’re a bit too far from the roadway).

On Christmas, she indulged me in heading to my folks’ house by way of Glendora Ave., which had several portals between the freeway and downtown. I was just a fraction away from Level 4, and between going and coming back, I managed to level.

So last night we were at Downtown Disney. It should come as no particular surprise that Disneyland itself is full of portals, the majority of them player submitted, I assume. I would guess there are some players who work at the park, others who have annual passes, and the rest are vacationers and visitors passing by and adding another layer to their holiday experience.

Downtown Disney is open to the public, being a shopping / restaurant hub between the parks and the Disneyland hotel. And Margie appeared to have fun encouraging me to hack as I liked, and even standing by while I attacked and took a couple of the portals — the funny hat by the hotel, attacking the blue portal at the Rainforest Cafe, taking the portal at the fountain in front of the House of Blues, and struggling with the very powerful one centered on the trumpeter at the New Orleans restaurant there.

We even walked beyond the Disney Store (past the blue portal at the tram fountain) to the plaza between Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure. There was a whole series of green portals there which I was able to hack at for fun and prizes. And enough stray XM in the air to recharge me no matter what.

The best was that there was a portal right outside Catal, so I could sit there and hack at it every five minutes from our dinner table until it burned out. Then I took it over for the Enlightenment and netted many more AP.

I also chatted a bit on the Comms with the locals, including one guy who is moving out to Boulder in the summer. I told him there was a pretty vibrant Enlightened community in the Denver area, which he was happy to hear.

Villa Park, down by the Ralphs Market. The local home turf.

On the way home Margie took me (unrequested) by a post office we hadn’t gone by previously (the portal was mid-building, though, so we couldn’t hit it), and then by the Ralphs near her folks’ house, where I took back two of the portals that had been turned back to blue, and reinforcing the green ones that had been attacked. (Fortunately, the prowl car with two of Villa Park’s Finest decided we were not suspicious parked in the lot with the engine running.)

So I’m a third of the way through L4 now, which was unexpected, and I had fun, and I think Margie had fun (copious thanks be unto her). And, yeah, it’s just a game, but it’s a nice little add-on to what was already a very nice evening.

Exit the Heroes

I haven’t played City of Heroes since the announcement it was going down. It was too painful.

Tonight, around 10 or so, Margie said, “Do you want to play CoH, just one last time?” Or something like that.

And I hemmed. And hawed. And …

… well …

… um …

… yeah.

And so we thought about Rita and Runt — could we race up three levels, 47 to 50, in a couple of hours? (It would have been three hours, in fact.)

But … I wasn’t feeling scrappery.

Hamidon shows up in Atlas Park — Hamidon in Atlas Park

We got on instead as Positive Force and Ms. Crackle, a pair we’ve been comfortably pleased with, and were ready to go do some missions …

… when we discovered Victory had a big party going on at the big hill in the middle of Talos. Big party meaning “The Ghost Ship is stuck there, and there are at least three Monsters spawned at any given time, amidst some dozens of heroes fighting them off.” Yikes. And, yeah, fun. We played with them, and then swapped out with some other toons (Velorio, for me). It was lots of intense action fun … until Jade Spider appeared at the top of the hill, doing 1700 hp psychic attacks beyond the borders of the block, and wiping out pretty much everyone around. Repeatedly.

Hrm. Not fun.

We decided, eventually, to sign on with some of our 50s and see what was going on over on Champion. Nostalgia time.

On with Torchy and Hildy. And ended up on Talos Hill again, but only for a Rikti Invasion. Got on teams, and then league, and, when that was done, went Monster Hunting. Cleaned out two of them from Croatoa — Eochai and Jack in Irons (badges!). Back to Adamastor in Talos. Couldn’t find Lusca in IP. Took out the Kraken in Perez (oh, Perez — how long ago it was …). Heard about action in Atlas …

… which is where the GM / Devs were lobbing Arch-Villains and Monsters. We swapped out to Psi-clone and Amorpha, and spent a good hour and change taking on (with scores of our fellows — Atlas 1 and 2 were full up, and Atlas 3 was pretty busy) Drop Ships and Avatar of Hamadon and Lord Recluse and Seed of Hamadon and most of Recluse’ gang and the mad gods from the Shadow Shard and Babbage and … yeah, actual-real Hamidon showed up, too.

“Slip on that Wedding Ring, boys — use it or lose it!”

Eventually the GM had to move to another server. We did a bit more stuff (monster hunting on Monster Island in PI), hopped off to do this and that, but eventually …

… got back on with Psi-clone and Amorpha She had the Peregrine Island bank mission, so we decided to go out that way. Because they were our truest, bestest duo.

And, as the big red messages kept popping up about the 30 minute, 10 minute, 5 minute count-down, we did our damnedest for the people of Paragon City. We went toe-to-toe with Carnies and Malta, foiling a bank robbery, disarming bombs, and subduing and arresting miscreants.

And as we dashed to the next mission, in one final leap, the screen froze, Butch-and-Sundance-like, on Psi-clone and Amorpha, heroes together through time and memory.

-Fin-

The chunks of memory taken up by this game, over the last 7+ years, is amazing. Geography (every nook and cranny of the Hollows) … Opponents (when faced with mob X, target individual Y) … Group fun, PUG frustration (or exhilaration), friends, family … The Transcendence Trial (in the true meaning of the latter word) … SG leadership (and all the drama attendant thereto) … new rules, improving Quality of Life, added zones … events and arcs and stories and that huge Level 50 DING …

Many thanks to the Devs and all the creative talent behind the game. I was there from Issue 3, and never regretted a single dollar spent. It was a life-enriching experience and a pleasure.

Many thanks to the folks we teamed with here and now and there and again … Scott and Kevin and Lorne and Doyce and Kate and Stan and … many more I’m not remembering, I know.

Many thanks to Doyce, for hooking me on this particular opiate — I could quit any time, right? But I hated ending cold turkey. I appreciate the “first taste”, the companionship, and the encouragement.

Bye Bye 2 — Charity at Home is unamused by the final message (that locked up her machine).

And many thanks, of course, to my faithful duo partner, Margie. It sounds weird, but it’s non-trivial playing a game like this with your spouse. There are endless challenges, leadership quibbles, tactical considerations, and, of course (for us) figuring out all of that with multiple alts across multiple story threads and game issues. It was occasionally challenging, but also always engaging, which is just what makes for a great marriage. Whether it was a game or not.If not for her, I wouldn’t have played nearly as much. And, with her, playing was so much more than just a game.

You always remember your first car. Your first job. Your first SO. Your first house. Your first Doctor. Your first … well, you get the idea.

City of Heroes was my first MMORPG. And while it wasn’t (and won’t be) my last, it will always hold a very special, fundamental, place in my heart.

Looking for Another Game: Half-Life, er, Black Mesa Source

I used to be a big First Person Shooter game lover, once upon a time (before I started gaming with Margie, in fact), starting with Doom, then Quake, and culminating somewhere in Valve’s Half-Life series.

So when I was at loose ends re games, and Les shared this article on Google Plus, it looked like a great thing to try.

Some fans of the original Half-Life (1997, fergoshsakes) have created an remake of Half-Life called Black Mesa Source. Essentially they took the original plot and graphics, and recreated it all on a much more advanced (contemporary) graphics engine. What’s funny is that they matched what I remembered of the game, pretty much — until I looked at this:

Whoa. That’s some remarkable updated graphics. Funny the tricks the mind plays on you.

The game can be downloaded from here. It operates under Steam, though it doesn’t get updates through it or anything.

It’s pretty remarkable, and I’m having lots of good fun with the fear and (now that I’m up against soldiers) paranoia. Plus, I’ve quickly become used to “Oh, crap, they’re making sure I’m fully up on ammo and health … it’s all about to hit the fan, isn’t it?” moments. Plus, I’m remembering how much I hated the non-combat puzzles, but that’s (half-)life.

Still love that FPS game style. It’s not an MMO, by definition, but it’s a good way to kill time solo.

Kudos to Valve for not pitching a fit over this and letting folks enjoy it.

A WoW Weekend

This was our weekend to play around with World of Warcraft a bit, as a couple.

Margie’s key impression: “It’s Disney LotRO.”

Which has a lot of truth to it, except, of course, that given the order of release one should instead characterize LotRO as “Tolkien WoW”. That said, there are a lot of similarities between the two games in terms of engine and screen layout and mechanics and all. The art style in LotRO is a lot more realistic, and the Tolkien-based storyline lends a bit of panache to the proceedings, but …

(Margie is suggesting I give LotRO another try.)

So Les and I leveling up characters to 15 in two decent-length sessions were one thing. When Margie and I tried it, we ran into immediate problems with limits on Starter Edition (F2P) accounts. The main problem being: Starter Edition characters can’t initiate groups. So if you have two Starter Edition people playing, they have to play as solo characters running around together. Which makes mission completion more lengthy and complex, and creates real problems when you (virtually) turn around and you can see where the other person is.

Only the fact that we were in the same room made it feel viable.

I’m sure Blizzard has good reasons for the restrictions, given the attacks and hacks and exploits that Black Hats have had, but it did make it more difficult.

Also, we have problems in Panderia, with both of us phased separately on the same server, making it even less viable for us to play together.

That led to a decision Friday evening to go ahead and upgrade my account to a paid subscription — $20 gets the Battle Pack with a couple of expansions in it (handwaves specifics), and a month of play. With that, I could take on the “mentor” role that Les did for me, and we figured at a minimum we’d get $20 of entertainment for the two of us.

Well, one fly in the ointment. Blizzard / Battle.net immediately charges your card, but doesn’t immediately make you a subscribed member. They claim it can take up to 72 hours to validate that you aren’t an Evil Spammer or Despicable Gold Farmer or something.

So we spent Saturday and Sunday doing awkward paired solos, running a pair of humans up to 8 or 9, and then a pair of night elves up to 11. It was only on late Sunday night that I was able to invite Margie to a team (though some of the other features had kicked in before then).

Net-net, I had a good time, and I think (glances her way) that Margie did, too. The starter realms seem to be fairly linear in their quest paths, but it seems there is plenty to do after getting out from that. The biggest problem I see if we move forward is figuring out which of the very kind guild offers we’ve received from various friends to take advantage of.

Meanwhile, now that I’m a paying player, I’ve been able to formally invite Margie in (using a different email addy), which means that I can take advantage of those “recruitment bonuses” that Blizzard is offering. Which means rerolling the toons Margie was already playing, but that’s just a weekend’s worth.

So, for the moment, WoW seems to be on the play list. Still other games out there we want to try, however.

Looking for Another Game: More WoW Thoughts

So I’ve been playing more WoW (solo) whilst pining away for my wife who’s on a business trip. After Les duoed with me to 10 with a Pandaren, I did some solo play with different races (Gnomes, Dwarves, Draeni, Worgen, and Night Elves) in an array of classes (hunters, warriors, druids, rogues, paladins).

Each of the races I tried has its own starting zone, and its own story (apparently influenced greatly by which expansion set they came out with, or when they were last revamped by another expansion). The result are some very highly flavored starting zones that not only give you plenty of practice with the mechanics, but give you a strong story and sensibility for the race in question. The starter area missions don’t drift radically from the standard “go hunt/kill X things” / “go gather X items” / “go take a message to X over in the next town” types of things, but they do mix them up pretty well, tend to group the missions nicely (there are very few “jog 30 miles over there, find something, and bring it back to me” / “that was great, now go bring back three more” sorts of missions), and wrap them up in as much story text as you could want.

I haven’t gotten into any crafting/auctioning yet (is that actually available for F2P players?), but I’ve done the (borrowed pretty straightforwardly by LotRO) resource harvesting. Not so much my cuppa, but the money’s good.

The screen layout of trays gets pretty darned busy, especially since the tray icons are so small (and there are smaller ones beyond that).

Though non-instanced for the most part, I’ve not had significant problems with interminable waiting for things to respawn, so far at least (LotRO had more problems with that, as I recall).

I’ve resigned myself to having to loot, but at least there’s now an autoloot option in WoW. Though, unlike many other interface options, you have to turn it on for each alt.

Though I’ve not played with any of them, Les mentioned any number of helpful UI mods to help tailor the interface to the game. Definitely some room for research there, if this is the (a) way we go.

I like the WoW graphics, for the most part. I can understand folks wanting highly realistic stuff, but the more animated feel of WoW is fine by me. I’m less sanguine with the “everyone dresses almost exactly alike for the first Nteen levels because they take the same missions and get the same costume rewards” feel to the costuming (even at 15th level, Les and I looked like a brother-sister combo whose grandparents had bought them matching outfits for Christmas …). By the same token, it’s a shame when you find something you like, then have to change it because it’s obsoleted by newer, better loot you picked up.

Based on Les’ and my run through the training levels (through 15) on Panderia, I’d say the game certainly is duoable. Looking forward to see what Margie thinks of all this.

Looking for Another Game: World of Warcraft

Yeah, I know.

WoW has been sort of the EVERYBODY’S PLAYING IT, SO YOU SHOULD PLAY IT megalithic giant that people either love, or love to hate, or both. Maybe it’s still cool or maybe it’s not, but it still has 9 million subscribers or players or some metric that means a lot of people play it.

I dabbled briefly with WoW over at Lee and De’s house, oh, about seven years ago (while trying to decide if this new “City of Heroes” was thing was where I wanted to be, when I heard all these great rumors about “World of Warcraft”). Under Lee’s tutelage I rolled up a Tauran warrior and went hallooing off into the wilderness.

And, about an hour later, decided I’d had enough cross-country racing when I was in junior high, so I darned well didn’t need it for my MMORPG. Plus, kinda dull and boring missions. Plus weird stuff about being dead and either having to run (again) back, or wake in the graveyard and have something bad happen to your stuff, or something.

WoW became the online gaming Microsoft (or IBM or Apple, depending on your hi-tech era of Nine Hundred Pound Industry Gorillas), and I enjoyed making fun of it and not giving it a second thought.

Until Les, of Stupid Evil Bastard fame, offered, in my CoH Grieving, to introduce me to the game and escort me from first level.

So … WoW is free and pretty un-gimped up to Level 20. So, good for toying with.

And having someone experience to walk me through (chatting via Skype) worked out okay, though, to be honest, I think I could have figured most of it out. WoW uses a lot of industry standards (many of which, in fact, it probably set) in terms of interface and the like.

We rolled up a couple of Pandarens because, well, who wouldn’t? I played a Hunter, Les a Monk. My female Pandaren was nicely zaftig. Les opined his male one actually mirrored his own body structure.

And, y’know what? I had fun. The basics are pretty familiar, the intro zones in Pandaria are nicely laid out, with good stories. I like the graphics. It seems like they’ve filed off some of the dullness and grindiness that the game used to have for beginners. We played for a couple of hours, dinged to 6th level, and parked it (I had other plans), and I really enjoyed the mix of missions and activities. And the setting /story was also quite nice.

Too early to apply my checklist, but things look fairly promising.

I think I’d like to play some more. I don’t know if it’s The Game I’ll Be Playing, but I definitely want to play more (and get Margie trying it out, too).

Not sure if I should be thanking Les, or plotting some dark and bitter vengeance toward him … but I’ll settle for a thanks for the moment.

Looking for Other Games: Torchlight II

This isn’t really an MMO — though it does have the capability of being multi-player. Torchlight II is a Diablo-style isometric third person shooter, set in a fantasy realm. There’s a veneer of missions and story, but really it’s about going around and hacking / slashing / shooting / blowing up various bad guys Real Good. Plus you get a pet. The characters are somewhat customizable, and it’s generally fun. There’s a free demo that I’ve gotten multiple hours of playtime from, so you can certainly try things out. The networkable version requires all of $20.

I can see Margie and me buying copies of this and duoing up to just do mindless combat now and again. But it’s not what I’m looking for in a more interesting MMO.

Looking for Another Game: Dungeons & Dragons Online

So, our first serious look at something to replace CoH. DDO has been out for a while, and seems to be doing decently. It has a limited (to level 20, I believe) F2P model, with microtransactions galore.

Pros

Graphics appear competent.
If you know D&D 3.5, this is a simulation of it.
Quests, maps, all that, seem decently crafted, at least in the initial island area. (I’ve read things in the “real world” behave a bit differently).
Duoing seems possible, esp. with hirelings to fill in the party’s functional gaps. (The latter is what I’ve read.) It’s also a lot easier with both of us in the same room.
Having fun.

Cons

Two toons, but you can buy more.
Paper dolls limited to heads (facial expressions, a few scars, decent number of hairstyles and colors, skin colors, eye colors). Costumes determined by swag you pick up.
I can see that encumbrance is going to be an issue. Plus I can see it measuring weight, too, which is even worse.
If you don’t know D&D 3.5, there’s a lot conceptually here you’ll be floundering with.
The initial tutorial system doesn’t really help. For example, I’m a cleric. While I got some basic drill on “here’s how you hit things,” I got nothing on the spells I have, how they relate (or differ from) Wizard and Sorcerer spells, what (if any) components they take, cool-down periods or mana usage or anything like that. Feeling my way through, and I’m actually passingly familiar with the system.
Apparently the entire min-max / twinky / feats and multi-classing mess (or opportunity) that 3.5 was is possible here. That’s actually a pro, if you’re into that. But it’s a bit daunting checking out the boards and seeing, “Why, yes, of course you can do that, if you have the particular build here that I’ve taken.” That’s not necessarily different from some of the extremes of the CoH boards, to be sure, but for a noob, it’s not a positive thing.
Advancement seems slooooooow. Also, it seems easy for a duo to get out of sync.

I don’t feel like I can give it a grade yet against my checklist, but we’re both interested in playing after Margie gets back from her trip, so that’s good news.

Trying Champions Online again (Part 2)

Comments:

For all that the NCSoft launcher used to hang up on my machine while not in use, it did do a fabulous job of updating content while I was away. It seems really primative to have the CO launcher start off by saying, “Nope, can’t play now, gotta download N mb of updates first, sorry.”
Ran through the tutorial again, and, yeah, a lot of the side missions have been removed for some reason (to keep people from leveling up too fast?). And it still seems like there’s a lot of info that isn’t covered well.
The character creator has a tendency to let you pick things you can’t, and then not warn you before you try and save your character. Hilarity and “character creation failed” messages ensue, dropping you back to square 1.
While I like the UI assistance for finding where your next mission is, I find the ability to end up with many, many missions to be distracting (especially since they seem to age so quickly).
I like that you are not necessarily stuck on rails down a mission. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like there are too many directions to go — random new contacts pop up (while you still have a full tablet of missions), and often your missions send you to contacts (or back to contacts) offering you a few more missions. Option paralysis …
I’m already finding the uneven application of (sometimes dubious) humor to be irksome. Not that CoH was unrelentingly grim or serious (e.g., the names of the detective pairs in each of the zones), but its humor was a raised eyebrow or perhaps a wink while taking the drama seriously. CO does all but a fourth-wall breaking mugging for the camera. E.g., the cut scene meeting of all the criminal gangs in the West Side with the mystical Oriental villain being unable to pronounce “Millennium” …

force-of-will — Force of Will - a character I'm not playing because I'm stuck in F2P.

Travel powers are immediately available — but the fact you get slowed to a crawl if you draw any aggro makes anything except flight (and sometimes not even that) a royal pain in the ass. Which is a shame, because Superspeed is much more practical in Millennium City than in Paragon (or the Rogue Isles) … and the Acrobatics travel power is awesome, visually. (Margie is really disliking Superjump.)
Action is faster than in CoH, which is probably a good thing.
The userid/login security stuff is … not as friendly as it could be. Between Cryptic vs Perfect World IDs, and verifying computers, and all that (and, yes, I understand the whys and wherefores), Margie’s had a heck of a time getting in to even play. Which is not encouraging.
I like build-up powers, and spew-out powers. It’s a nice mechanic. I am seriously unfond of having to “block”. Really.
There seem to be a dozen different leveling mechanisms — powers pop in, attributes to powers can be added, new little extra powerlet stuff can be incremented. It all feels very nickel-and-dime … incrementing a few percentage points here and there with no real sense of major achievement when you level, just nudges and tweaks to what you have. And maybe part is the F2P (which doesn’t let me choose non-railroaded classes), but that would make things even worse.
On the other hand, it’s nice to be able to level without being at a trainer.
Sure seems like the population is a lot heavier. Which on the one hand is encouraging. And on the other hand makes going to hero-populated areas (Renaissance Center, the Power House) irksome.
Inventory slots. Multiple and different types of inventory slots. Yes, CoH had slots of various sorts … but if I was on a mission and was picking up stuff, or even being given temporary powers … it didn’t impact anything else I was doing. I’ve never liked inventory / encumbrance limits, in any system, and CO seems to have them a-plenty.
I do still like the graphics, though fading over range seems much more obvious than it was in CoH.

I’m finding CO moderately entertaining, but not gripping. Part of that may be because we’re struggling with the constraints of the F2P system. Perhaps it’s the rampant (voluntary) P2P in the streets (heroes? really?). I dunno.

I’m enjoying what I’m doing, but am I enjoying it as much as I’d like to? Or as I (cough) did with CoH? No … not really. And does that make me want to renew my subscription (and access all those other characters I had rolled)? Not … sure yet.