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Not a lot of gaming going on, but what there was is worth a comment or two.
MMOs
My MMO time has been entirely Lord of the Rings Online time lately. Wrath of the Lich King is out, but I haven't picked it up largely because I don't really have anyone to play with and any urges I might have to hit the new level cap are curiously absent (or redirected to LotRO). Likewise, I haven't been playing WAR very much (or at all, since November 2nd), after a fiasco during a server transfer left me without my highest level Destruction character. Lee's in his mid-30s now and my highest is level 8, so there's not a lot of draw there. One or the other of those two games is going to stop getting my monthly subscription for awhile, I think.
But I've been having a great time in LotRO. With the Mines of Moria expansion (as a new expeditionary force of Durin's Folk reenters Khazad-dum to learn what happened to Balin... and perhaps mask and muddle the passage of the Fellowship) a raised level cap, new classes, and new epic battles (a new Raid instance that pits you and 11 of your kin against the Watcher that was driven into the deeps below the 21st Hall)... well, I'm a happy dwarf, cruising toward level 60 (57 right now) at an exTREMEly leisurely and enjoyable pace.
One of the best things they've added to the game have been at least a dozen small-group dungeons designed either for solo play or 3-person groups, and in both cases able to be completed in less than an hour, and sometimes in as little as 15 minutes. Gone are the days when you need at least five other people and five hours of play to work through a massive instance filled with crowds of "trash" monsters to get to the good fights -- LotRO's largely dumped those designs in favor of smaller areas with less trash that you and two (and in some cases only one) of your friends can tear through in 30 minutes for great rewards (and 3 or 4 boss fights). All I can say is "Kudos" and "Where do I sign up?"
I'm also working on getting my Captain leveled up into the range of the expansion, but most of my non-Geiri time has been chewed up on an quixotic series of character re-rolls I suckered myself into.
See, one of our friends got started on LotRO, so I thought I'm make up an alt to play along with him. I'm interested in both of the new classes in the expansion (the agility+medium armor warden and Words-Have-Power Runekeeper), but as he was already playing a warden, I opted for the Runekeeper. Only the elder races (elves and dwarves) really understand the power that words can have in Middle-earth, and given those two choices, I'm obviously going to make a dwarf. While poking around in the starting area and chuckling over the names of the Runekeeper abilities ("shocking words", "fiery rhetoric" or the threat-reducing "Master of Allusion"), I got to thinking about writers, writer-archetypes, dwarven stereotypes (drunk scotsmen) and bucking dwarven stereotypes (drunk RUSSIANS!) and found it very amusing to model the concept for the character off of a drunk, russian author I like. The name field wouldn't accept Bûkoskè, so I settled on another name.
And then some stupid part of my head whispered "you should try to get the "Undying" title."
"Pff," I said.
"A drunken, undying writer who can only create when he's sober and can only bear the horrors of battle when he's drunk?" It suggested.
"Whoa..." I was intrigued.
I was also distracted, and got my guy killed in the process.
So I deleted him, recreated the same guy again, and started over.
You see, to get the Undying title, you have to make it to level 20 without being defeated. At all. The best I've ever done is 13.
A week went by, with me cursing at bad luck, worse luck, and (to be fair) a couple really bone-headed moves on my part that got Attempts #1 through #6 killed, usually somewhere around level 13. In a way, it was a microcosm of the entire MMO experience: the joy of creation, the thrill of play, the disappointment when your plan and vision didn't pan out, the abandonment of the character, and wondering why I'd just wasted the last two days. It got to be a vicious circle; if I made a different guy, or gave up, then not only would I not get the title, but all the time I'd spent on the damned project was wasted as well. (Seriously: the average of my six attempts totaled six level 11.8 characters in about one week. In that same amount of time, our friend had got his warden to level 16.) This is the danger of having a character concept. :P
I rerolled one last time, declared (read: promised Kate) that This Was The Last Guy, No Matter What.
And I got to level 14. (Emyl the Undefeated)
And I got to level 17. (Emyl the Unscathed)
And, playing on a crappy wireless broadband connection in South Dakota, I got to level 20. (Emyl the Undying, Honourary Sheriff, Member of the Inn League, and (far more relevant) Sage of Fine Spirits)
A day or so later, I promptly pulled about a half-dozen goblins down on my head. BUT I GOT MY TITLE, DAMN IT.
Tabletop
Strange as it seems, I got a little tabletop gaming in while off in South Dakota. I sat down with my niece and nephew and played some Shadows. Malik (9) and Jadyn (5) were sleeping in the upstairs of their great-grandmother's house (where we'd all just spent a day having both Christmas lunch and dinner) when they were woken by a strange noise. Investigating, they discovered a goblin was stealing the pies from the sideboard down in the basement and tossing them through a small, green-glowing doorway under the stairs to a waiting partner. Malik grabbed a skillet and smacked the thief on the head and tossed him in the fireplace, while his sister threatened the other with a plastic pie knife ("childhood, red in tooth and claw"). Then it was time for lunch, so we didn't have time to crawl through that door-under-stair and see what was on the other side.
Best exchange?
Malik: "I have a pan, so you should grab a knife."
Jadyn: "Okay, I'm going to get one like that green one that momma has at home."
Malik: "That's PLASTIC!"
Jadyn: "Yeah, but it's the only one I'm allowed to use."
Malik: "Oh. Right. That's good."
Priceless. I'm looking forward to getting some other gaming going soon.
Hmm. Let's see what was going on.
In general
I haven't been feeling very well. I haven't been sleeping well or enough.
WoW
Syncerus is about half a level away from the level-cap, so that'll happen pretty quick; this week, I'd think. It has taken me about 240 hours less playtime to get him to this point than it did on Grezzk. Given how much time I spend playing, that works out to getting him to 70 roughly three months faster.
And what then? Well, I've been amassing a lot of "requires level 70" gear for Syn, so when he dings I should be able to step into some fairly significant upgrades.
For healing, I'm already wearing the about a quarter of the stuff that I'll take into end-game. I have a lot of the rest waiting in the bank -- when 70 hits I should be doing VERY well on the stats I need. I'm actually ALREADY at the 'ready for raiding' level on my mana and mana regen rates -- I need a bit more health (should come with the gear) and a bit more bonus to healing (ditto) for the entry-level raids... more than that to really walk in with the big boys to the big raids.
For tanking, I don't have quite as much of the gear I need, though oddly, what I *do* have is for all the slots I haven't been able to fill in as a healer -- weird luck there.
So what do I want to do?
I've REALLY enjoyed healing in pvp battlegrounds -- I know pvp well enough to know when my healing has turned the tide of a fight, and lemme tell you, that happens a LOT -- having that kind of influence on a fight is really cool. Plus, it's good practice -- after pvp, healing a five-man dungeon run is a piece of cake.
Tanking... is just that. Tanking. I've done that a lot (and I get a good "sword and board" tanking 'fix' with Geiri on LotRO), so that's all fine, but it's not new. Healing is new -- it's more than a new area in WoW, it's like playing an entirely new game. That said, I *do* have decent tanking skills, even in WoW, and I've tanked a fair amount of stuff in the end-game. Plus, as tanks are more in demand than healers (barely), being willing to tank kind of ensures I can get a group for whatever I need. As a bonus, if I get a tell like "we can take you if you can heal/dps -- we already have a tank", i can do that to.
I dunno. I like healing. We'll see when I hit 70, I guess. I'm out of 'rested' xp bonus right now, so that might take a few days to do. In the meantime, i'm going to hit Battlegrounds for more honor -- the battlemasters have a belt (and bear-form shoulderguards) I want...
Man I like playing this guy.
Grezzk
For the content my guild is doing (Working on Kaelthas in tier 5, hitting Mount Hyjal), there is very little stuff I can upgrade on Grezzk until the new expansion comes out. Syn is the main reason I log in right now -- I just run Grez for a little bit each night to earn gold.
LotRO
I can't get LotRO to run reliably on my (old, tired) desktop right now, and I didn't have a (either) LotRO-capable laptop home with me this weekend, so I haven't played.
Tabletop
The game day for Sunday was called due to lack of interest. Next weekend I'll miss the Colorado Springs one cuz I'll be at a company picnic up in the mountains (tries to make an excited face).
Looking forward to (a) the DnD game, where the group is about to hit an encounter that has caused a lot of other groups to wipe, and (b) playing some more In a Wicked Age with Lee and De.
Haven't done one of these in awhile, mostly because I'd been updating WoW and LotRO play stuff using Twitter. However, Twitter's API went completely kerflooey a month ago or so, which means that, since Twitter never updates in my feedreader anymore, I rarely think about it, and thus, never update it.
So, until I come up with another, better way to just give MMO character updates on the fly, here's everything going on with anything that could be considered gaming.
MMO: WoW
Grezzk
I mostly just log Grez on for raiding and running a few 'daily' (repeatable each day) quests for cash. My guild has finished off Vashj, and is the only Hordeside guild to have done so on my server (Farstriders). We're currently working on Kaelthas, the Blood elf 'prince', who is the other boss at the same Tier of difficulty as Vashj, and I'd expect he'll go down in the next week or so... this will ALSO be a boss kill that no one on the Horde side of our server has completed.
Grezzk is pretty well geared at this point, because I've been working on such things and I'm considered a 'contributing' member of the raid, but one recent 'gear ding' made me very happy: I just got the second piece of a four-piece 'set' of items available only to raiders hitting the high level of content that we are. (In wow-speak: The Tier Five two-piece set bonus for hunters.) Getting two pieces of that 'set' gives me a really awesome bonus ability: every time I hit something, I heal my pet for 15% of whatever my damage was.
Just... ponder that for a second. If you don't do wow, work it out for whatever game you DO play, where you have a pet. You're on CoH? Okay... you hit a bad guy for 100 points and your Jack Frost heals 15 points.
As an added bonus, the threat generated by that heal doesn't count toward me -- it counts as the pet healing itself, so it actually helps the pet hold aggro and tank for me when I'm soloing, which is AWESOME - I do so much damage now that it's really hard for my pet to really tank anything for more than a few seconds before my damage output convinces the target that I'm the (far) more serious threat.
Syncerus
Druids in WoW are a bit like Kheldians in CoH, only much, much better. Depending on the way I spec, I can play him as a Tank + backup Melee damage-dealer, a viable main healer, or a ranged damage-dealer (which I already have with Grezzk and have no intention of doing with Syn).
This kind of versatility has been a total joy to level with. I'm specced heavily into Tanking/melee, with a few good low-end abilities out of the healing tree. That, plus effort on my part to have both a good set of tanking gear and a good set of healing gear means that I can solo to my heart's content as an extremely viable 'big cat' form (with stealth, which makes things even more fun), and then join a five-man dungeon run as either the Tank, the Healer (I've actually healed as many runs as I've tanked), or even melee damage.
When I want a break, I just strap on my healing gear and join a PvP battleground and heal like crazy -- it's great practice for when a regular old PvE dungeon fight goes haywire and everyone (including me) starts taking damage... plus I earn a ton of Honor I'll be able to use at level 70 for some huge gear upgrades.
My goal is to get him to 70 as fast as possible (I'm at level 66, and it's taken me approximately half as much time as it took me on Grezzk), respec into full-on healing mode, and join in the Raiding fun with the rest of the guild. Once I hit 70, I think about a few serious runs of some end-game content will get me to the point where I can actually contribute well to even the toughest of the raids we're doing -- I already have about half the gear I need (8 items) to be a viable raid-level healer.
LotRO
Geiri and Tiranor ("Geiranor") have leveled up to 46-of-50 in Lord of the Rings, and we're well and truly into some interesting end-game content.
The progression of the storyline in the game has us to the point where the Fellowship is in Rivendell and is ready to leave on their great journey, but unable to leave because one of the Nine survived the attack at the Fords of Bruinen and is slinking around the Trollshaws and the Misty Mountains, spying on Rivendell. Gandalf surmises (rightly) that if the Fellowship set out while a Nazgul was around to report back to Moria, they'd all be dead inside a week.
So you have to eliminate that threat.
Yeah... we defeated a Nazgul, baby. (As part of a full team, but still.) Big epic fight in an old dwarf ruin in the Misty Mountains. The ground trembled and the walls shook, and when it was all said and done, the bastard went down. Pretty damn cool.
So we've four more levels to go to fifty, and I think something like seven more "books" of epic storyline to play through before Mines of Moria drops sometime later this year.
And we have a few alts we want to level. Kate took some time this week on her minstrel an rocketed up like 4 or 5 levels. It's NOT hard to find a big group willing to help you with your quests when you're a healer, I guess. WHO KNEW.
Tabletop
Why is that we can easily get five people to the table with short notice for a DnD game, but we can't get three together reliably for something like In a Wicked Age on even a monthly basis?
Eh.
4th edition is fun for what it's good at. I'm kind of eliding the roleplaying stuff at this point while we learn the rules a bit more, and that means we're doing a lot of fights, but the fights are fun.
in non-dnd news, Colorado Story Game is doing a gameday up at the Casa this coming weekend. I'll either be running IaWA or The Mountain Witch, probably. I'd like to do more In a Wicked Age with Lee and De and Kate... the In a Wuxia Age with Dave and Margie and Kate... and Spirit of the Century.
Yeah... more Spirit of the Century would be GOOD. I keep thinking that being able to put Aspects on the Scene is the perfect way to reflect the kind of subtle magic you see in the Lord of the Rings books.
Hmm.
As I mentioned, had a chance to play the first couple events in the sort of "DnD 4th Edition Lite" Keep on the Shadowfells. What you get with this game is basically a DnD Lite version of the rules (somewhat too light in a few places -- would have helped to know a few things that aren't mentioned in the 16 page rules booklet, but it worked out), 5 pregenned characters with all the math worked out and put on a nice, easy to read sheet and their first two level-ups already worked out, and an 80-page adventure... a pretty good one, at that.
Oh, and you get all the maps you'll need for any combat, so when I fight starts, you just lay out the map, drop down the tokens, and go at it.
Stuff I noticed about the game
1. In MSExcel-speak, 4e still tests as "True" for whatever value you assign to "Dungeons & Dragons." A lot of people have been busting on it, saying that it's all-combat, all the time, and there's no support for anything else, etc. etc. This has pretty much been true for every iteration of the game. The people saying such things are very silly. We haven't had a chance to do a skill challenge yet, but when we do, I expect good things.
2. You really do need mini's or good counters to play this thing. I need to get better wood discs than the ones I made -- smaller, and less splintery. Either pre-made, or I need to get a 3/4" dowel and get a MUCH finer-toothed blade for the saw.
3. Combat is a lot more interesting than it's been before, because...
3A. Everyone can contribute meaningfully to the fight, even/especially the (traditionally useless) first-level Wizard.
3B. Everyone can do a lot of crazy maneuvers and funky stuff. It's entirely possible for everyone to "Use their Nuke" and really do something awesome.
3C. We did not make full use of it, but I did see that classes are designed to have serious synergy in combat: the Cleric's maneuvers set up Paladin's maneuvers set up Fighter's maneuvers. You're really a TEAM now. Heaven help me when Margie and Kate start coordinating their respective 'battlefield control' abilities -- they started to get a handle on them by the middle of the second fight and suddenly my super-mobile Kobolds had a VERY difficult time moving around.
3D. The monsters are really a team too. I played stupidly with the Wyrmpriest in the second fight. I should have bombed guys with his acid bomb ability from long range for awhile first, THEN come in and drop his two AoE attacks once the battlefield set up.
3E. The monsters require so much less book-keeping than before.
3F. A lot of the crazy 3e complications are now much simpler.
3G. There's some better rules on building an encounter so that terrain, traps, conditions, etc., matter more--the scene is more interactive... there are many more ways to interact and use terrain.
4. On the other hand, while fights require more intelligence and imagination than prior editions' Rock-em Sock-em Robots combat system, fights last a long time.
5. There's a disconnect at the table, because most of use have played 3.0 and 3.5 before -- I've played a LOT, Dave and Margie and Jackie played quite a bit, and Kate's played less, but MUCH more recently -- so when a rule in 4.0 is different from 3.5, there was a bit of shock... sometimes it was "is that a new rule or a Doyce Houserule?" (disclaimer: I used no houserules) and stuff I remember from 3.5 that isnt' true anymore (Example: Standing up from being prone doesn't cause an Opportunity Attack -- in fact a LOT less stuff does, which makes it easier to deal with... but leaves veterans with the niggling suspicion that we're forgetting to do something.)
6. In previous editions, each class had a very different feel: if you were a 1st level Magic-User, you had to play the game very differently than a 1st level Fighter. This difference is FAR less pronounced now. Also, the classes that are "simple" versus "complicated" have changed. Paladins and clerics have a LOT of stuff on their sheets. Rogues LOOK simpler than that, but the way you apply what they can do during a fight is pretty advanced stuff.
7. There is pretty much no effort to make the mechanics hyper-realistic. Hit points are as much "morale" as they are "health", and that kind of logic is the only way some abilities make sense. I like it.
Stuff I noticed about the play
1. All the characters are awesome. I want to play a fully tank-specced dwarven fighter so much I can taste it. Similarly, I think a rogue with a rapier, a ranged weapon (vs. twin-blade) ranger, and a cleric would all be a ton of fun. There are really no classes that, when reading about them in the PHB, didn't sound fun and worth checking out.
2. Christ, but we are a persnickety, particular, optimizing bunch of nitwits. I mention this solely because Katherine played with us last night, running the rogue, and by the end of the night I felt positively terrible for her, because the nice nurturing adults just could. not. let. her. play. her. guy. and just do whatever she wanted, because there was a tactically better move to be made somewhere. We need to let her just 'go in and hit that guy' for awhile before we worry about shit like flanking and such. Let her GET flanked once or twice, and I guarantee she'll learn to do it herself.
3. Along the same lines: good lord we're terrified of taking an Opportunity Attack. Damn.
4. I was tired, and Kate was flat out exhausted -- really, we shouldn't have played, but I'm glad we did -- it would have been close to a month before we could have gotten these specific people to the table again, and it was nice to pull out all the dice and really beat on stuff.
What happened?
Oh, Margie's guy is friends with a sort of professional adventurer guy. Said guy is haring off on one of his wild adventures to find a Dragon's burial site. He'll be back in a month. It's been three month's and the guy's wife comes to margie and guilts her into going and looking for him. Said dwarf recruits several mutual acquaintances to come with. His drinking pal the mage. The paladin he knows from the warrior's guild. The cleric the paladin is tight with... and the rogue that the cleric has turned into a little "rehabilitation side-project."
Right. Oh, and when word gets out that the priest and paladin are headed for Winterhaven, a friend of theirs in the temple who researches such things drops in while they're packing and advises them to keep on the lookout for a death cult that was spotted heading that direction about a year ago. "You know, just in case. Sure it's nothing. Ta-ta."
Right.
So they're traveling to the town and about three days in and getting close to the town they get waylaid by bandits. Little lizardmen- kobolds. There is fighting. The slinger gets away and the others die.
The group gets to town and starts talking to folks, asking after the dwarf's buddy. Clues are had. The paladin approaches the Lord of the town and gets a promise of reward if they wipe out the kobolds that are harassing the town.
So they have to decide about what to do next: go down to the rumored dragon's graveyard to look for the missing guy, or head for the Kobold camp? (Or even head for the old abandoned keep from the fallen empire, up in the hills -- the one either haunted, or infested with goblins, or both.) They decide that the dwarf's buddy is the first priority.
They head south out of town and are ambushed by more kobolds -- a bit tougher group. The slinger had run back to camp and told such a tale of horror about the adventurers that some bigger guns were called out.
There was more fighting. A lot of "once per day" powers made an appearance, some of which healed the party for large amounts, others of which set large patches of foliage on fire. The group came out of the fight largely unscratched (thanks to healing) but with some of their bigger powers already used up for the day. They're a little shaky about if they should move on or rest up. *mutters about over-cautious heroes*
And that's when we called it for the night. I had a good time. I hope we play again.
At the same time? It made me really appreciate the kind of play we have with In a Wicked Age. Different (very), but also very good. I should always make sure to have a copy of that game with me when heading to someone's house.
As a side note: I'm rolling all my dice out in front of everyone. No fudging, so there's a good chance some folks are going to be making Death Saves at some point... heaven knows how many times I soft-pitched a fight in 3.5 to keep folks from dying (and the rogue still bit it like... what? Five times?)
So I've mentioned this game a couple times on the site, but haven't really gotten into the game that much or talked about the sessions. Let's fix that.
A few months back, I went down to Lee and De's with Kate, and we cracked open my copy of In A Wicked Age -- a game designed to do Sword and Sorcery in the vein of Howard or Tanith Lee. There's a cool podcast interview with Vincent about the game, here.
The game basically let's you draw a few cards to define the elements of the setting, pick up some of those elements as PCs, some as NPCs or setting, get each of them pointing guns at each others heads (metaphorically) and then dumping them into a situation together.
Combat/conflict is about as complicated as any "roll initiative/roll defense/gain advantage for next round" game, and is basically perfectly designed to create a kind of an anthology of loosely connected short stories that involve many of the same characters (to a greater or lesser degree) in many sessions. Each session jumps to a new chapter... forward in time... backwards, sideways... whatever. It's pretty hot, and the rules cool and pretty easy to 'get'.
It hit the gaming community, and everyone promptly built like 300 million new oracles to use the system in different settings -- unlike Dogs, it's highly setting-independent as a system.
Anyway, we got to the game-starting, and I opened to that part of the book, and we did that stuff. Here's what the book said to do, and what we did.
Continue reading "In a Wicked Age" »
... that's largely because there hasn't been a lot of gaming going on.
Sometime last month, Dave ran a session of Ill Met by Gaslight, and that was good.
A little while before that, I ran a session of In a Wicked Age down at Lee and De's, and that was good too.
I haven't run Spirit of the Century this year... maybe since last November.
I haven't run a session of Galactic since mid-December.
Which would leave me posting mostly about World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings online (which, unlike my local playerbase/social calendar, is always available). I don't really want to do that (though I may have a "WTB: PvE Hordeside Raiding Guild that won't Melt Down" post coming up at some point), so that has left me with not a lot to write at the moment.
In lieu of slew of WoW/LotRO-centric posts, I've installed two twitter feeds into the sidebar to let me natter on, in a constrained fashion, regarding whatever bit of digital-adventure minutia I'm currently obsessing over.
And seriously?
"Skilled Orc Hunter WTB: Hordeside raiding guild that won't melt down. Will transfer servers for new content and good group of players."
I'm really not going to be able to do the Galactic game justice with an Actual Play report.
First, we've had four sessions now and I haven't done a report yet. The first one was back in late November, and the details are a bit hazy.
Second, a ton of stuff has gone on, and inevitably, I'm going to forget some stuff.
Third, I want to talk a bit about the mechanics in the game, so that's going to color things a bit, and there's a lot of that to talk about.
I'm going to give a shot, though, because the game deserves the thought and discussion.
So let's start from the beginning.
In Session 0, we had too many players. That's all right, because (a) one guy wasn't going to be able to stay with us for the whole run and (b) with a few extra players, we were more likely to have enough people to play even if someone couldn't make a session.
These are the characters we came up with. We each also had to come up with one planet and one faction that's active in the setting, and you repeat that between each of your three quests, also, during the first session, every Captain comes up with their own cliffhanger for the first quest to start with. They also pick the world the quest will feature. The player on the left picks a faction that will be prevalent. The player on the right comes up with a central NPC for the quest.
So there is a lot of communal world-building going on throughout the game, which means that each game of Galactic is very different in tone, elements, and story than any OTHER game, despite the "main" story being the same. (Even the Scourge itself is different in each game.)
Now, on the surface, Galactic looks like the kind of game where no one can miss a session. The reason for that is the way character creation works. Everyone makes up a starship captain, and then we sort of 'meet' each captain in turn, and everyone else at the table (except the gm) makes a crew member for that captain. Captains and their ships can run the gamut from an officer of the Concordant Navy to the captain of a commercial cruise ship to the leader of a ragtag group of scavengers -- it's all good. Thing is, it seems like "if someone doesn't show, then that crewmember isn't there on every captain's scene, and so forth", but as long as you make the 'minimum' number of players (which might be three plus the GM, maybe, but which could work with just two players, short-term), you're good to go.
The basic background of the setting is that mankind, after creating the huge Galactic Republic, was wiped out by the mysterious Scourge. One colony ship escaped the genocide, and founded a new home on a nasty, brutish world at the end of nowhere. They finally returned to the stars, found out about their lost history, and are starting to explore and colonize back in the direction of the "Core" -- the home of the original Republic. On the way, they run into lots of alien races who were once part of the Republic (and who often revile or worship humanity, by turns), as well as the ruins and abandoned technology of their own ancestors.
And then the Scourge wakes up.
The game is about how these captains (working alone for the most part) try to stop the thing that no one could stop the last time. It's got a strong feel of the new Battlestar Galactica for me, both in the story tone and in the mechanics and interplay of crew and captains.
MECHANICS
This is basically how the conflict works out.
A scene opens with a captain. We set up what happens and we play. At some point in there -- maybe right away, maybe later -- we get to a point where either I or the Captain say that something happens that other one says "no" to, and that's where and when we go to the Conflict system.
The conflict system works like so: in true Firefly- or BSG-style, there's two sides to every conflict -- there's "what the conflict is ostensibly about" and "the relationship between the Captain and one of the crew that is either going to be strengthened by Trust or weakened by Doubt as a result of what happens." It's important to understand that Winning or Losing the Goal happens INDEPENDENTLY of the Trust/vs/Doubt thing with the crewmember. You can totally get your ass kicked in the epic space battle, but the crewmember who is "on the hook" for that scene could trust you more at the end, because of the WAY things happened. Or vice versa: you could kick ass and take names, but your actions fill the crewmember with Doubt.
Anyway:
1. You figure out what the Conflict is about, and which crewmember is 'on the hook'. (This is my term for it -- not the game's.)
2. Then, the Crew who are involved take the one dice that they get to contribute to the conflict (there are painful and dangerous ways to contribute more dice -- sometimes a LOT more dice -- using what I and the author call the "leaf on the wind" mechanic) and decide if that dice is going to help the Quest or the Crew side of the conflict.
3. Then, the GM decides where he is going to allocate his dice in the conflict -- is it mostly going toward weakening the crew's resolve, or to resisting the Goal of the quest? Maybe an even mix? The GM has a budget of dice he can use on each captain (plus any Doubt the crew has in the captain), so I can't just crush them every time with as many dice as I want.
4. Once the captain sees where the crew are putting their effort, and what forces are arrayed against him, he puts out his own dice, which can be quite numerous -- he has multi-dice 'archetypes' that can be brought to bear, as well as the ability to utilize any Trust that he's earned from any of his crew (like any captain, he can put the crew's Trust to use, though that puts that Trust at risk -- he can lose it). Finally, he can decide that whatever he's doing might put innocent bystanders at risk, and the bigger those potential Consequences are, the more extra dice he can bring in. They are BIG dice too, those Consequence dice, so they're very tempting.
When it's all said and done, the dice are all arrayed against each other, and there is rolling, and comparisons a lot like the old dice game "War", and narration of that round happens, and then folks might have lost, or they might 'give', or they might rally and go into another round and keep battling until the whole thing is resolved. At the end, the Captain has either won or lost their goal, and one of the crew members has either gained Doubt or Trust in the captain (and the same crewmember can totally have both Trust AND Doubt in the captain, over time, which is awesome.
Once that scene is done, we do it all again with the NEXT player; we switch to a new captain, everyone switches gears to playing a new character, and off we go.
So... that's kind of what happens in play.
STORY/GAME STRUCTURE
This is a very set kind of story arc. Each captain plays through three quests. A quest is over when the captain wins three conflicts having to do with that quest. Now... that might be three wins in a row, or 2 wins, then a loss, and then a win; or maybe five straight losses followed by three wins (which would be kind of cool). Doesn't matter -- at some point, they get the three wins, the quest is accomplished, and they move to the next, then the next. (Unless they die -- they CAN die, and there are provisions in place for that.)
Once the third quest is done, we move to the Last Big Quest, and at the end humanity is either saved or it's wiped out by the Scourge. The end.
Right now, we're about four sessions in, and pretty much everyone is done with their first quest.
Session 1 (Chris, Tim, Dave)
We started with Tim's Captain Nils, the captain of Isabel's Dream, which is ostensibly a cruise ship, but is also a neutral ground for diplomatic meetings and happens to be armed (definsively!) to the bloody teeth.
Tim had a great cliffhanger set up, and I was looking forward to it, but I also wanted to make sure we were 'getting our roleplay in.' Matt Wilson is a great game designer, but in playing his other 'big' game, Primetime Adventures, I'd noticed that players got wrapped up enough in the mechanics that they didn't... you know... "just roleplay" -- they only did with regards to the Conflict -- making for very focused, but very short scenes... maybe only a few lines of dialog and lots of narrative. That's partly Matt's playstyle (as I understand it), but I wanted to make sure that we were taking the time to roleplay just for the sake of roleplaying as well.
Also, this "who is the 'featured' crewmember" thing was kind of new to everyone, so I took a page from BSG and started the 'show' with a scene between the captain and the crewmember-of-note. In this case, that was Dave's college student, working as an assistant purser on the ship.
We opened the scene with Tim's captain briefing the purser on the seating arrangements for a big banquet that evening on the ship. This was an impromptu thing, but Tim really rose to the occasion, rattling off page after page of detailed "do's" and "DO NOTS" about everyone attending the party -- who couldn't sit next to who, and why, and which group's hated which other groups, or who needed special treatment, or practices, or food, or greetings -- while the harried and utterly overwhelmed purser trailed along in his wake, nodding and trying to take notes. The scene really illustrates how good Nils is at his role (which is largely an act) and how new to the whole thing Dave's purser is.
So now the cliffhanger, which is simply this:
During the banquet, as the Dream comes into orbit over the planet of R___, the mysterious black box in Captain Belinar's room (passed down for generations in his family in readiness for 'when the Scourge return') begins to beep. The captain is called to his suite, and he and a few select members of his crew enter. As soon as they do, the box emits every more beeps, and the ship shifts perceptibly. The helm hails the captain, and informs him they have just lost all steerage control, and the ship has moved into a landing pattern with the planet's surface.
There are a few seconds of silence, and the captain comments, "It's unfortunate that we're not atmosphere capable."
The goal for the conflict was "Get control of the ship away from the box, before we enter the atmosphere."
I'd love to give a play-by-play, but it's been months, so here were the key bits:
* Dave's neophyte-purser character was at some level mind-melded with the mysterious black box.
* Chris' security chief/ship's chaplain was a pain in the captain's tuchas.
* The captain kept the ship from entering orbit by cutting all the main power in the ship (including things like the gravity control) and using on-board nuclear missiles (!), fired at the planet (!!!) to introduce enough counter-momentum to get back into a shaky low-orbit.
* Dave's character, as a college-level historian, was shocked that the captain targeted the planet randomly to induce the right thrust for the ship, ignoring the fact that he was targeting key bits of the local ruins, such as the famed "Third Pylon", but the captain's plan paid off : the planet's highly damaging Acid Raid (which actually shouldn't have been falling during that phase of the planet's weather) damaged the missiles enough that they didn't damage anything of any importance on the uninhabited planet -- several didn't even fire.
We then switched to Dave's character, Allysande Daen, who's main goal is to track down her father, a former navy admiral, and find out what happened to him and What's Going On.
We join the crew making planet fall on Ando III, a cool-temperate planet with a vaguely oriental flavor, on which "Zeno", Daen's father's former XO, is living... in a well-heeled asylum.
Tim's crewmember Bosley, Daen's personal 'batman' is the crewmember on the hook. Chris is playing "Smoke" the stoner-mode mechanic who keeps Daen's "Heart of Darkness" working. Daen and Bosley are heading to the Asylum. Smoke is heading to the local bazaar to scrounge up some supplies.
Bosley, who knows Daen well, is quietly talking with her during the mechanized rickshaw ride to the asylum. They're discussing things like "Are you prepared to tell him how your career is doing?" (It isn't: she left the navy to pursue this personal quest.)
Dave's cliffhanger setup was the next bit:
Daen and Bosley walk into the public "sun room" where Zeno and a number of other patients are sitting around doing various sun-room activities. He looks up and recognizes her. She says "Hello, Commander. I'm looking for my father, and I was hoping you might be able to help me find him."
The old man nods and says "I was afraid of that." Then he and EVERY OTHER PATIENT IN THE ROOM pulls guns out from under their lap blankets and open fire.
The goal for the conflict is essentially "Win the firefight without killing Zeno."
((A word about conflict goals: they are best when they have interesting failure options built into them. "Survive the fight." is boring, but "Survive without killing Xeno" is cool: you can LOSE the conflict, but that could mean lots of things. Maybe you lose the firefight; or have to flee; or the police arrive and arrest everyone; or you win, but you shoot the one source of information you have... or a dozen other things. Setting up a good conflict WITH INTERESTING FAILURE OPTIONS is a key part of not just Galactic, but any game. Losing should be just as interesting, if not more so, than winning.))
So there's a gunfight. Meanwhile, Smoke is in the bazaar, and only a few seconds after the shots start in the asylum, some guys jump him in the bazaar and he's running for his life and shouting for help from the Captain as well. (His crew-dice were in on the side of winning the Crew conflict, not the Quest one -- how well she handled Smoke's problems would build Trust with Bosley. Bosley was ALSO in on the Crew conflict, not the quest.)
Again, I have only a few bullet points.
* The captain took a few bullets in this fight. Dice that get knocked out of a conflict stand the chance of being "impaired" - made unavailable for the rest of the quest. A LOT of Daen's "Warrior" archetype dice got impaired during the fight, so that's how that was narrated.
* Dave went to a lot of work to protect both Tim and Chris's dice from getting knocked out -- lots of shouted commands and shoving Bosley out of harm's way and suchlike.
* Some 'deep cover' agents from the organization that Daen is working with a lot showed up to help out (use of her Connections trait, which allows (or forces) rerolls)
* Dave ended up winning the conflict, and closes in on Zeno, who's run out of bullets. He agrees to talk, and then goes into a violent seizure (seizures being one of the "Scourge traits" in this version of the game.
And cut to the next guy.
Captain Argon Slash is docking his ship, the Legion, on "The Drift" -- a massive space-station in the middle of uninhabited space, comprised of hundreds if not thousands of different ships crushed, bound, and welded together. Each captain has his own 'flavor', and Slash's is a kind of mix between Firefly and an anime where the characters often make Super Deformed angry-faces. The crewmembers for this part of the quest are Sonja, Slash's ex-wife and the ship's negotiator; and Jake, who's sort of a young, crazy, gun-ho shootist (and Slash's fifth-cousin).
Slash, who collected crazy Solar Republic artifacts (and then tries to integrate them with his ship), has discovered a weird pyramidal object. He's not sure what it does, but he's heard a rumor that at the heart of the Drift are ships that date back as far as the Solar Republic -- ships that still WORK. His 'plan' is to find a way into the core of the gang-turf-controlled Drift and plug the device in... and just... see what happens.
Which is his approach to most ancient tech.
The three are heading toward a meeting with a contact on the Drift who controls the territory they need to get through when they're jumped by members of the neo-luddite, anti-expansion "Blue Sky" faction.
Slash holds them off -- thermal detonator in Jabba's Palace-style -- with a Mysterious Ancient Artifact (or two). Jake is waiting (and eager) for orders to shoot. Sonja is verbally sniping at everyone. The following verbal exchange takes place
Sonya: "Listen to the man -- I was once married to him, and I can assure you it's dangerous to get close to him."
Blue Sky: "Silence! We would hear nothing from someone who has succumbed to the sin of divorce!"
Sonya: "Excuse me?!?"
Blue Sky: "Quiet!"
Sonya: "All right, you rudimentary-lathe people have gone too far."
And that's when the shooting starts.
* Slash was pretty much conning the Blue Sky folks all the way through.
* Jake's crew dice where very hot -- he was shooting all over.
* Sonya was saved from 'knock out' by Argon's love of tech. She takes a shot and the chest and Slash cries out, running over to her and pawing at the hole in her clothing. She protests that she's fine -- and he reveals he was just checking to see if the armor weave that he put into her jacket (without her knowledge) held. It did! Slash is happy -- Sonya is pissed.
I put a LOT of dice against the Crew aspect on this fight, cuz I wanted Sonya to have Doubt in Slash, but the group banded together and held me off -- Sonya, although she doesn't *like* Argon very much, does *trust* him... at least she trusts his instincts with technology. (Ironically, it's turned out that Sonya is the only crewmember who DOES have trust in Argon... maybe the other's don't know him that well?)
The Blue Sky scatters, and Jake runs off after them, whooping and hollering. Sonya storms off back to the ship. Argon is left by himself.
Back to Captain Nils
The goal of this conflict was not very good on my part -- simply "Get Control of the Ship back from the Box." It was a FUNNY conflict, to be sure, but not a good one -- failure would have resulted in nothing much happening, which sucks. Luckily, they one.
What happened.
* The box used some kind of lightning on Chris' guy... then sort of mind-controlled him. Nils had to incapacitate him with some other ancient family-heirloom widget.
* Dave's character was the box-translator most of the way through this. ("No, no, using the blue lightning against the Reverend is BAD!")
* The box was receiving a signal from the planet, telling it to come down to the planet. The Signal is on U-space frequency ... ironically, from the just-saved-from-destruction Third Pylon!
* Nils is able to control the box by speaking commands to it in Trilatian. (The Solar Republic version of the /sudo command.)
And Allysande Daen...
With Zeno having seizures and possibly doing himself serious internal harm, SMOKE has to talk the Captain through dosing the man on something that will bring him out of the seizures and subdue him... without killing him. Luckily, Smoke is something of a 'pharmaceutical expert'.
* Smoke gives quick, professional medical advice and actually shouts at Allysande when she hesitates at one point.
* She trust him and follows his instructions.
* Bosley now really trusts her for her success and for supporting her crew. (Though I think we awarded Trust wrong here...)
... and that was the end of session one. I'll put another post up for Sessions 2 and 3 combined, and a third for Session Four, which is where we are now.
Tabletop
Got everyone together for the third installment of our Galactic semi-playtest this Sunday. Despite horrendous paint fumes and a cuddle-needy munchkin underfoot, we still got a lot done and... MAN I need to write up an actual play report for the whole three sessions so far.
This game delivers. Wow. Seriously. Unlike a lot of other games I really really like (Heroquest, Dogs in the Vineyard) Galactic is not the kind of game you can easily kitbash to work in some other genre. it's hard to explain, but it's designed very specifically to play several science fiction ship captains, with their crews, working independently to stop the destruction of humanity. It is really NOT the kind of game that twists and bends into some other genre very well.
However, the stories that you get OUT of the game will be very different, even with repeated replays, so in that way, it's different every time. It does one thing, but it does it very well. More later.
MMO: WoW
After a two-month break from progression raiding for the holidays, the guild I'm in has started fast-tracking some raiding work. To this end, the officers have been recruiting and we took our single, over-populated, weekend Karazhan team and split it into one weekend and one weekday Karazhan team, which lets us gear more people up, more quickly.
The challenge there is that we're then working with much leaner 'rosters' for both teams -- we no longer have the luxury that we had over the holidays of swapping people in and out to create the perfect team to annihilate whatever boss we were about to fight. If we don't have 'enough' priests to handle the undead guys in Fight B, then ... well, we have to deal. If we don't have "enough" rogues for the Aran fight? Tough. This has forced us to be a little more resourceful, coordinated, and willing to use some unconventional tactics to win what are sometimes ugly fights.
But win we have: three weeks running, both teams have had full clears of Karazhan from front to back. Cool.
Also: after our almost two month break from progression raiding, we took a brand new raid group back to Gruul's Lair. With a significant number of new raiders in key roles, the result might have been tough to handle, but instead we handed High King Maulgar a flawless, one-shot kill. Seven days later, the guild downed Gruul himself for the first time in the history of the guild, which is awesome. (I wasn't there to see it, but hopefully I'll be in on the next one.)
The most notable thing about our first Gruul kill is that they took him down much more quickly than a first-time guild would. We've recently adopted a new strategy that verified what many have suggested all along -- once we learned the fight, we would prove to have *more* than enough Damage, Healing, and Tanking to immediately start looking at the next challenge after Gruul.
In non-progression news: I'm leveling up a druid and a paladin. Grezzk is Damage, so one of these new guys will be a Tank, and the other will be a healer. Don't yet know which will be which, though.
MMO: LotRO
Hey: those folks who play LotRO and read this: we should set up a time to log in and do some stuff.
Just a quickie.
MMO: WoW
Grezzk
This was kind of an exciting week with the guild, as we expanded our raid schedule a bit to accommodate more people.
Normally, we do the (10-man) Karazhan instance on the weekends (most of the real progress is on Saturday and Sunday for a couple hours, though we do sometimes get started with a drunken Friday night 'run' for laughs).
This last week, we ran a Kara raid on the weeknights as well. This is a pretty big deal, because you can't be saved to two instances at the same time, which means we had 20+ different people (or at least different characters) participating, and two runs means more gear upgrades for everyone. Both teams pretty much cleared the whole instance. (I believe the weekday team did it in three nights, and the weekend group did everything but Maiden in two runs and just decided to skip the Maiden of Virtue, as there was no benefit for anyone to doing the fight.)
That was cool, but even better was fielding a full 25-man group to take a shot a High King Maulgar (and his court of Ogres) on Friday night, followed by Gruul the Dragonkiller.
This was a pretty momentous thing. The last time we took a serious stab at that fight was in November, and we didn't really get enough people: we didn't actually even beat Maulgar, and we've had that fight pretty much worked out for awhile.
Now... this time... okay, the signs weren't great. We took maybe an hour to get started, and we have a LOT, and I mean a LOT of new people. The guy who usually magetanks Krosh Firehand was on his healer, so Lee was magetanking with Wyrmeyed. We had a new guy tanking Kiggler the Crazed who'd never done it before. We had a new guy who doesn't speak English very well tanking the Warlock. Probably half our healers were new. We brought a level 68 guy along just to fill out to 25 people. It was crazy.
So we fight through the trash to get to the High King, we explain the fight to the new people, and how complicated the five-simultaneous-pulls start is, and we say "go" and we go...
... and we one-shot it. Damn near perfect fight. After not doing it for months and then bringing a bunch of new people. That was cool. I was up around 900 damage-per-second, and another guy broke 1000 dps. Insane. In-sane.
So it's on to Gruuls. The Raid Leader announces that we're going to do three tries and be done with the fight, no matter how it's going. No building frustration: we have a lot of new people (we swapped in a 70 for the 68 at this point, with no hard feelings), and a brand new strategy to learn.
Let me explain what kills people in this fight. It's not really the Boss. Gruul is an incredibly big guy in a very big cavern, and he does this thing every so often where he smashes the ground. Again, this guy is BIG: when he smashes the ground, it jumps like a trampoline and everyone goes flying in the air in random directions. When you land, you are slowed... slowed... slowed, and six seconds after you land, you're frozen for a few seconds, and then SHATTERED. Everyone who's within 15 feet of you at that point will cause you (a lot of) damage, then you can move again, if you aren't dead. Around four people or so around you, and you stand a good chance of dying. If no one is close to you, you take no damage.
The problem is, even with a big room, there are 25 people in there. The chance of you landing too close to too many people is HIGH, and it's hard to get away when you're slowed. So we have a strategy now where everyone but the healers and the tanks run to the walls before the slam, so we don't fly around anywhere -- just the healers and tanks do. Less people flying around means less damage from the Shatter.
And it works. Damn it works. We did not get Gruul down, but we got him lower than we ever have in the past (again, with a lot of new people and no practice in two months). We had some bad luck where all our healers got silenced at a very bad point in the fight, so the tanks died... and on another attempt, sheer bad luck bounced all the healers and the tanks on top of each other, so the whole healing and tanking groups Shattered each other to death.
But that's just bad luck. We can beat bad luck. We totally have the damage-dealers we need (I broke 1000dps on one attempt, and another guy broke an unheard-of 1200) and we have the method we need to beat that bastard. It might even be this Friday night.
... when I will be on a plane to New York, which I'm very happy about... so I wish them luck.
ANYWAY: it was a very fun series of runs, and Grezzk got the last of the gear he can get from either of the instances (pretty much -- I've given up on getting the Wolfslayer Rifle or Nightbane's mail leggings, and that's okay) -- Curator in Karazhan dropped my Demon Hunter (Tier 4) shoulderguards and I got the matching gloves off High King Maulgaur, so not only are my stats pretty damn good, I *match* -- at this point, I'm going along on the runs to help the rest of the guild gear up and to have a good time (which it almost always is). My last two major equipment upgrades until we get past Gruul and start doing the later 25-man raids are going to come through Arena pvp.
Syncerus and Thienedera
I'm leveling up two Horde alts right now. Syncerus the tauren druid (the bearcat cow), and Thienedera the paladin. Last week, they got a lot of love. This week, I'm leaving them logged out in Inns to build up their rested rating for that lovely double XP bonus. I've seen the low and mid-game content already -- I'm not interested in dwelling on it this time, so I'm focusing on flying up to 70 as fast as I can with both of them. Thie is a little lower level than Syn at this point (she's on a PvP server for now, so I'm a little more cautious), but I expect they'll get a lot of playtime soon.
My grand scheme is to have one Damage dealer, one Tank, and one Healer at level 70 and reasonably well-geared by the time the next expansion hits. I don't have much interest in alts past that point.
Kayti
I have, really, one alliance character. I finally dusted off Kayti and took her for a spin this week, and it was a lot of fun. Spell casters are a total pain in the ass on a paladin, but if I avoid them it's a nice relaxing solo grind. I'm taking my time on her because there's stuff on the Alliance side of the mid-game that I HAVEN'T seen.
LotRO
Kate was available to play this week, so we got on Geiri and Tiranor. We had a lot of Fellowship quests to do, so I got on the Looking for Fellowship channel and asked around for some more people. A guy sent me a tell and pretty quick we were in a group with a bunch of guys who all know each other in real life and were all on voicechat.
Two hours later, all those Fellowship quests were done, Kate had gotten hooked up with some new crafted loot from one of the other players, and I had built up a pretty good start on a "DPS" set of equipment to put on when I'm not tanking -- something that will become a lot more useful when Book Twelve opens up new options for Guardians, and we had some new people in our Friends list. It was another good run with a random group of strangers -- in that arena, I believe LotRO is the Best MMO on the market, bar NONE.
Tabletop
No gaming this week, but here's what I having coming up:
Ongoing:
* Galactic: We still have a lot of game left to do there.
* Spirit of the Century: Need to get those sessions started up again.
Upcoming
* I have Savage Donjon Squad ready for our next pick-up game session.
* Once Galactic is done, I want to take a stab at Bliss Stage with Dave and De and whoever else I can get in.
* I have the pre-order copy of In a Wicked Age, a sword and sorcery bit of genius from the guy who did Dogs in the Vineyard. Totally new system. Totally new kind of Awesome.
* Don't think I've forgotten about our characters for Breaking the Ice, Kate. I haven't. Also, I have been challenged to play a Paranoia-set game using Breaking the Ice, and I don't intend to back down from that. That's a two-person game -- anyone out there want to learn a new game set in a familiar, crazy setting?
 MMO - WoW
Grezzk - level 70 (effective level: 117)
Most of my time on Grezzk has been spent on (1) Kara runs (2) getting folks qualified for Karazhan runs and (3) getting together supplies for the Kara runs. Which isn't to say that they're terribly time consuming, just that that's all the time I've spent on him in the last couple weeks. Just a few updates:
Team Stuff:
I'm the default "caller" for the Infernal 'bombs' during the fight with Prince. Basically, while fighting the boss, these bombs fall out of the sky at regular intervals, flying in at and angle, change direction one time in the sky, then hit the ground. If they land near or on the team, the team probably wipes, and we all start over. The caller's job is to figure out where they're going to land, and get people out of the way. One of the members of the guild calls the fight "Grezzk vs. the Prince", due to the way the fight tends to play out -- everyone is doing their job, but it pretty much comes down to whether or not we can stay out of the Infernals long enough to kill the Prince. Some of it is just luck, unfortunately, but alot of it is good calling a group who follows instructions well, and quickly. It's a tricky thing to judge when you don't have anything else going on, which of course I do. As ranged DPS, I'm in a position where I can pan my camera around to watch for the Infernals as they fly in from the sky behind us, while still doing my primary job (kill the boss) and keeping my pet fighting and alive.
I've called the fights for about a month now, and we've been pretty successful. The raid leaders have been pretty vocal about my ability with the calling. Feels good.
Gear:
I've pulled in quite a lot of heroic badges commemorating boss kills, which you can then use to acquire some nice loot, so I've upgrade quite a lot of stuff (my new leggings aren't on yet, since I'm still waiting to get an enchant on them from a guy in the guild. I also got a really really sweet bow off that Prince fight last week, so right now my gear is pretty strong.
PvP:
There's really nothing I can 'buy' with honor from the battlegrounds right now that would be an upgrade for me as near as I can tell, so after I got a very nice ring, I've been giving them a pass for now.
HOWEVER, there is a very nice hunter's axe I can probably pick up with a few more weeks of doing arenas. The "noob" 3v3 team I was on kind of dissolved, but another guy got a 5v5 team started this week, featuring some pretty major DPS guys from our Kara runs. I like 5v5 a bit more because I'm not ALWAYS the "first kill priority" target in the bigger group. In our first series of matches, we won something like 8-of-12, and we were actually short a healer for that run, so that group looks really promising, and they're fun to chat in Vent with as we play. I like doing arena as a fun break from the typical activities in WoW -- it's fast, furious, and over quickly -- you can get your 10 matches in in about 20 minutes and have the rest of the week to do other stuff.
Fun:
Honestly, I think my favorite part of the raiding isn't the gear (whatever) or the boss fights (though they are fun), it's having everyone in Vent and talking while we play. It's a very laid back, fun, social kind of thing, and I'm less interested in being on Grezzk just to make some gold and do solo quests than I used to be, simply because I'd RATHER be doing something that involves running Ventrilo. I probably end up doing more Instance runs because of that, since it usually means having vent to chat on.
MMOs -- a social activity. Who'da thunk it.
Syncerus (level 31)
My tauren (minotaur) druid is a ton of fun, and that's reflected in the time I've spent on him -- I think I was level 22 or 24 about a week ago. For you CoH people, druids work a bit like a Kheldian. You can stay in your 'native' form and heal/cast damaging spells, shift into bear form to tank (or when you pull way more aggro than you meant to), and claw the crap out of stuff in a "cat" (read: lion) form when you want to sneak around and kill stuff super quick (read: scrapper). Basically, whatever mood I'm in, there's probably some way to scratch that itch with this character. Right now, all his talents are going into stuff that makes his Bear/Cat forms stronger, but I have a pretty decent set of "healer/caster" gear that I switch into when that sort of thing is called for -- I'm not sure what I'll be doing with him at level 70, but he'll be either a tank or a healer. (I already have a ranged DPS character, so as cool as the Moonkin (read: spellcasting, facemelting Owlbear form) is, that won't be what I do.
My current project with him is doing the quest chain to give him the 'water' form -- a kind of manatee -- cuz I need a lot of stranglekelp for my alchemy right now. I have a non-combat 'cheetah' form for hauling ass on land and let me tell you -- it actually makes gathering up herbs fun -- looking forward to the same ability underwater. :)
Herbalism aside, I'm not really stopping to smell the roses on Syn, though; I want to get him to 70 and join in all the big-reindeer games. Ultimately, I'd like to have one DPS, one CC/Tank, and one Healer available in the end game. Since I don't know whether Syn will be a tank or healer, my 'third' guy should probably be someone who can go either way as well -- that probably means Paladin, so I might be talking more about Theinedera in the future.
LotRO
Kate's been MIA for a couple weeks to get her company rolling and wrap up things in NYC, so I haven't really been on LotRO much. I did get a chance to play a bit with Dave and Margie's trial-characters last night, and I hope they decide to give the game a run; Dave geeks out on the lore like I do, and Margie seems to really enjoy the 'mini games' hidden within the crafting system and auction house, as well as the nuances of the skills and traits. They're both adaptive and smart (obviously) and have quickly figured out the changes to gameplay that you need for different quests.
I leveled my little armorsmith a bit with them -- one more level and he can actually wear the heavy armor he's been making for other people. Really do like that game, and I look forward to some more time spent there once things settle down for Kate and myself.
----
face to face
No joy in mudville. We were going to run another session of galactic on Sunday, but I've been sick (not really feeling better even today), so I called it off and took a long nap. Hopefully we'll get something going soon.
Didn't have any face to face RPG goodness going on this week (and yes, I know I have yet to deliver an actual play for Galactic -- it's just that it's going to be SO LONG... *whine*), so here's what went down in the world of Online Heroics.
MMOG: Lord of the Rings, Online
Tyelaf (hunter) and Tirawyn (captain) are level 25 and working with Radagast the Brown in investigating Things Gone Wrong in the eastern Lone Lands around the ruins of Ost Guruth. (the lands between Weathertop and the Trollshaws, for those soaking in lore-geekery). Throw in an encampment of Dourhand Dwarves, wights, more evil spiders than you can shake a flaming arrow at, and some sort of neeker breekers soaking in the waters of a swamp filled with the dead, and you've got some good times.
Geiri (guardian) and Tiranor (hunter) are in the North Downs past Trestlebridge (up the Green way from Bree a fair hike). They are also level 25, and the main thrust of the storyline in that region seems to be around a Ranger and a few organized Men who are trying to unite the free peoples of the North before the whole region falls to lawlessness and orc raiders out of Angmar. Baddies so far are mostly the aforementioned goblinkin, or are bestial in nature -- lots of wargs, maddened bears and wolves, et cetera.
When they aren't directly on the front lines, Geiri keeps working on the fine art of jewelcrafting -- gold necklaces, intricate silver rings and so forth. Interesting, fun, with lots of benefits for those wearing the finished products.
Aside from a weird disconnect in my head where it feels like Geiri and Tiranor should be the ones fighting the evil dwarves, while Tye and Tirawyn help unite the Men of the north... it's going pretty well.
Finnras (captain) is also in the Lone Lands, but a bit closer to the Forsaken Inn, so he can travel back to Bree and the Old Forest more easily when he's working with Tirathien (minstrel). He's closing in on level 20, which will give him access to a cooler man-at-arms, heavier armor, and... well... other stuff, but that's what I'm focusing on at the moment.
MMO: WoW
Grezzk had a pretty good week. Early on in the week, the hunter class boss decided to spend a night farming up the materials he needed to give (give!) me a couple nice if minor upgrades to my gear.
Me: Did I mention how much I appreciate this?
Him: Did I mention hos much you deserve it?
So that was a good feeling. The guild had a Karazhan run scheduled on Saturday, but I had some stuff to do, so I wasn't around for the first part. When I did get on, they had already taken out Attumen the Huntsman, Moroes, Maiden of Virtue, and were just starting on the Opera Event, which turned out to be Big Bad Wolf. The raid leader (who was that same hunter leader) got me into the group in his place (passing the leader rains to another guy) after that, and I stayed in for the rest of the run.
Result: total clear of all thirteen boss fights in about six hours, which is pretty awesome. I was in for... the Shade of Aran (1-shot), Chess, Curator (1-shot), Terestian Illhoof (1-shot, during which I disconnected and got logged back in in time for the last half of the fight), Prince Malchezzar (three attempts, due to some bad luck on the Infernal bombs), Netherspite (1-shot), and Nightbane (1-shot).
My personal performance was (I feel) pretty damn good. Aran went damn near flawlessly. Curator involves me a lot, since I'm pulling all the patrols prior to the boss, I did a LOT better on Netherspite and really kind of helped communicate the 'rotations' that have to happen during the fight, and Nightbane was okay -- I got killed just before the last phase, but I wasn't the only one, so I don't feel that bad.
Prince? On the Prince fight, which I've only done twice, they put me in charge of Calling Out the Infernal Bombs.
How to explain this fight? Basically, there's a big boss who knocks the tank all over, so he has to be fought with the tank's back against a wall to prevent that. It's a big open courtyard, and every minute or so, a big demonic stone golem thing drops out of the sky AT AN ANGLE and hits the ground. It doesn't MOVE, but it it sends out an Area Burst of fire that ticks for damage every second. The damage will kill you in three seconds, or one, if you're currently weakened by the Prince.
So it's one guy's job to watch them as they fall, figure out where they're going to hit, and tell everyone where to move BEFORE it lands.
And they change direction in mid-flight.
Sometimes twice.
And you have to keep FIGHTING while you're watching these things... while you have the camera swung around to look ABOVE and BEHIND you. The job always falls to a ranged DPS person, cuz healers and melee guys just can't do it.
And when the Prince gets down to about 33% health, they drop every 30 seconds, instead of every minute, so you start running out of places to stand that are safe.
I'm happy to say that our first two fails weren't due to my screw ups, but just bad luck on placement of the infernals or silly things like the tank getting bounced away from Prince and dying. I was kept on the Infernal calling for each try, being told by the raid leader "you're doing a good job, and you're getting better every time" and by the end I was moving people a lot more confidently. The third try was very clean.
Best of all, the loot off Prince included the hunter's Kara-level (tier four, if you speak WoW) helm, so I really felt like I EARNED that sucker -- it was very nice upgrade for me. (Picked up the Badge of Justice trinket, and I'll have the T4 pvp shoulders this week some time.)
Best of all is the feeling that I've gone from the noob guy on the teams to someone folks feel like they can count on to do well. "Grezzk is going to keep calling the Infernal drops" is worth a lot more to me than a shiny new helmet.
We were going to try to down Gruul on Sunday (we totally have the DPS, Tanking and healing for this fight, we just need to manage the Slams and Shatters better), but with the holidays, we just can't get 25 people on. It sucks, cuz I KNOW we're ready to beat that big bastard.
....
And that's it. Got another post coming up about Aggro and the fighting style in different games.
Tabletop
Sunday's Galactic session (which was the second gaming session, and the third session if you count chargen) was covered in Awesome. I promise to post an Actual play report on both sessions, combined, this week.
I wish I could write a book based on this setting. Great, great story.
MMOG: Lord of the Rings
Mostly working on some crafting skills in mid-week and then got on Geiri and Tiranor for some grouping goodness on Sunday night. That went reasonably well as a duo, but we tried to do a six-man quest on Weathertop THAT I HAVE SUCCESSFULLY TANKED BEFORE, and we got owned repeatedly. Huge repair bills. We had a PuG-healer who was SEVEN levels higher than the rest of us and he couldn't keep me standing against bosses that the healer on the last run had no problems with. I know why it was happening, and I also know why I don't want to run with that guy again. Moving on.
Really like the tanking ability Geiri has right now. I'm holding aggro pretty damn well, and am quite tough. Now if I could only tweak a few things about the interface that i don't like, I'd be really happy.
MMOG: WoW
Grezzk finally got the horrible "KILL FIVE SONS OF A GOD" quest chain done, which opened up a whole slew of new quests in the Blades Edge mountains, and made him the King of the Ogres (the ogres in Blades Edge don't aggro to you after that, and if you kill one, they say stuff like "Me so honored. Me killed by King!" -- it's funny).
I'm getting a lot better at the PvP battlegrounds with him. Last weekend in one match I got something like 97 kills in 14 minutes, 25 of which I dealt the killing blow for (which usually means I took them out one-on-one), and was defeated twice. One-on-one pvp fights pretty much used to mean I was dead -- these days, one on one means I'm down about 30% health, and 2 vs Me is still sometimes in my favor, depending on what classes the other two guys are. I hate shamans a lot. :)
Ran most of Kara on Friday and Saturday. Friday we one-shotted Attumen the Huntsman, Moroes, Curator, the Opera Event, and took out Aran in two or three tries. It was my first time fighting Aran, and it's a very very fun fight. "Hit him hard. Okay, no one move at all, or we all die. Now there's a Blizzard sweeping through the area... avoid it! Now don't move again or we all die! Now run to the edge of the room before he AoEs! Now Freeze again! Now kill the elementals he summ-- DON'T MOVE! BLIZZARD! KILL HIM! KILL HIM TIL HE DIES!" And win. It's fun. We did Chess and Maiden of Virtue and Prince and Netherspite the next day. Netherspite was a new fight for me. I suck at Netherspite. A small upgrade for me dropped in the Chess event, which was cool.
My personal bragging, however, was on the Moroes fight the first night. Moroes is one boss with four other Elite Ghost mini-boss adds.
How it usually works: You have two priests in the group, at least. They each use Shackle Undead on one of the adds, which keeps an undead mezzed the whole fight. One tank takes the other two adds, and one tank takes Moroes. We kill the two 'loose' adds, Kill Moroes, then take out the two shackled mobs. Getting to the shackled guys usually takes like 3 or four minutes, which means the priests have to be reshackled about three times per fight.
We didn't HAVE two priests. We had one... and me.
HUNTERS have Freeze Trap. it is pretty much the only thing besides Shackle that works on Undead. (Freeze Trap basically works on anything that can be mezzed at all, but it has Certain Downsides.)
The downsides:
- It lasts 20 seconds.
- It can only be cast every 30 seconds. (Yes, do that math -- that's not hunter friendly.)
Also:
- You don't cast it on a mob; you drop it on the floor and then lure your target over it by hitting the mob.
- Hitting the mob once it's trapped releases them, so make sure you stop hitting them when they're getting close to the trap.
And... yeah, so for that fight I had to keep one of the "Shackle guys" trapped for ... a long damn time. Normally hunters might have to 'chain trap' from one trap to a second one... maybe a third. This one was going to be more like five or six in a row.
...while continuing to do high damage to the group's current target.
So...
1. Drop a trap, which lasts for one minute, unused.
2. Wait 30 seconds until the skill is ready to use again.
3. Tell the tank to go. Hope he listens and doesn't wait so long your trap expires.
4. Tanks pull. Hit the mob and piss him off, lure him to us, and into the trap, seconds before it would have vanished from the floor.
5. Take two steps off to the side, drop another trap.
6. Send the pet after the main target and start shooting.
7. About 18 seconds later, the trap breaks and the mob comes after me, hits the second trap, and freezes. I have 10 seconds left on the skill before I can use it.
8. Move a few feet. Switch to the Group's Second Target and start shooting.
9. Drop the trap.
10. 10 seconds later, the mob gets loose and comes after me. He hits the third trap. I have 20 seconds left before my skill is ready, and the trap lasts 20 seconds,optimally.
11. Move toward the fight at an angle, while shooting.
12. Switch targets to Moroes and send pet.
13. Trapped Mob gets loose just as my skill is ready, but since I ran off a ways, I get it down before it reaches me. It is trapped (hopefully) for 20 seconds. I have 30 seconds before my skill is ready to go again.
14. Run all the way to the other end of the ballroom, shooting Moroes as I go. Turn back the way I came, keep shooting Moroes and watch my trapped mob.
15. Mob trap breaks. I switch to him and shoot him in the face. He comes after me down the long room.
16. Switch back to Moroes and continue shooting. Trap is still not ready.
17. He's halfway to me. Trap is still not ready.
18. Someone on Ventrillo says "umm... the Trapped Mob is loose." I say "He's just coming to me, I got him." (he is still controlled, because he's doing what I want)
19. Trap is ready. Drop it just as he gets to me. Freeze. 20 seconds on the trap. 30 seconds on the skill timer.
20. Run 10 seconds away from him (counting in my head) while shooting Moroes, and repeat.
21. Moroes dies just as my baddie hits the trap again.
22. Everyone kills my mob, which by this point in time, due to the shots I used to keep him angry at me, is already down to half health.
23. I break my arm patting myself on the back.
... and I'm very lucky none of the traps broke early... which happens.
Anyway, I was proud of that. I was either second or third DPS for most of the Kara stuff, except for Netherspite. All in all, a pretty good run. I didn't break anyone else's mezzes, I didn't send my pet onto any wrong targets, and I just generally didn't screw up -- after my second Kara run, where I was pretty unhappy with myself, this was a very good way for the run to go: uneventfully.
Aside: I'm just generally 'better' when things go pear-shaped, I guess. Seems like I screw up more in the controlled situations.
Case in Point: doing a heroic run of the Coilfang Slavepens, and the tank, mage, and healer die on a bad pull. There are two elites left to kill and it's me and a warlock. Either one of these elites can two-shot either one of us.
And we won. THAT was a good fight. :)
No face to face gaming this last weekend (pretty much everyone was gone or busy), but a fair bit of online stuff going on.
Play by Post Galactic
Captain Finnras of the Binturong is shaping up to be a great, interesting, fun character... that I'll probably never get a chance to really play.
Face to Face Galactic
Trying to use email to get done with the last bits of campaign generation, prior to our game this coming Sunday. Some silence from the players on this point, but at least one has really stepped up and given me a fun cliffhanger to start his story off with. Woooot.
Looking at the calendar, I feel a bit of mope. We get a game in this weekend, then I'm gone the weekend of the 30th, then we have the 7th and 14th weekends... one of which is probably iffy... so maybe we'll get three sessions in. Maybe. If only we had more TIME. Eh. A noble effort, either way, and maybe we'll get a chance to keep going after the holidays with the folks who aren't off to another acting gig in some other part of the country.
MMOG: WoW
Pretty much everything I've done on WoW in the last week has been Grezzk. It's not because I don't enjoy playing Kayti, or Theinedera (who I'd LOVE to level up with the speeded up leveling they put in), but Kayti's Alliance-side in a guild I don't know that well and who aren't my level, and Theinedera is on another server entirely (really should move her to Farstriders).
HEROICS
Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnance (fail), Shattered Halls, Steamvaults (twice), and Arcatraz.
GRUUL
We one-shot High King Maulgar, AND the guy that "the hunters" are assigned to (Kiggler the Crazed) dies so fast that we have time to switch targets and help the melee dps guys kill their first guy. That has never happened before (granted, it's only our third Maulgar kill, but whatever). The guild Hunter leader is VERY happy about this and personally compliments me on the damage I was putting out.
We don't beat Gruul the Dragonkiller, but MAN it feels like we COULD, if we could just figure out where NOT to be when he shatters us.
KARA, DAY ONE
We take down half the bosses. Attumen the Huntsman (an epic for Grezzk), Moroes, Maiden of Virtue, Curator... and the random "Opera" event, which was Wizard of Oz... so we actually beat Tinman, Dorothee, Lion, Strawman, and Toto all at once, and then Wicked Witch. They're all one-shot kills with no one dying. I am in for every part of this run. (10 people can be inside, but your group can actually be bigger than 10, with back-up people outside to swap in on certain fights where their skills are needed or they need gear -- they keep me in for everything, to teach me the instance. I *did* screw up one pull on the trash before Curator and wipe everyone, and died a few times early on as I figured out what was what, but otherwise it was good.)
At the end of the day, I go to repair my gear... and I notice that I have been given access to a guild-funded repair allowance.
*grin*
KARA, DAY TWO
We one-shot all but one boss (they have to do Nethersprite twice -- I wasn't in that fight), and I do well in everything I'm involved in -- we nine-man Prince, which was cool.
-=-
At the end of this week of stuff, Grezzk has a two-piece "Beast Lord" set from the Heroic runs (which helps me trap stuff better), THREE epic pieces of gear from Kara (when you're the worst-geared guy in the run, you want lots of stuff that no one else has an interest in), hundreds of gold worth of enchants and 'nice to haves' from the Guild Bank... and some personal compliments from the hunter leader and the Guild leader. A couple more heroic runs, and I'll have some more pretty gear from cashing in Heroic Dungeon badges.
Plus, as I already blogged, it really feels like he's part of the guild now. Especially when people can just BS on Ventrilo while we run instances.
It's been a good week. :)
MMOG: LotRO
I haven't done much with Tyelaf since the epic battle with the Cave Troll on top of Weathertop. He's level 23...
... and now, so is Gieri, my dwarven Guardian (tank!). This is where all my LotRO time has been going this week, and it shows -- I've gotten some really nice tanking "Deeds" completed that are increasing the amount of threat he generates, AND the number of enemies he can keep locked on him simultaneously. It's HARD to hold aggro in Lord of the Rings, and there's some assumption that any but the truly crazy/dedicated tanks are simply going to let some of the enemies hit other characters.
I aim to be one of the crazy tanks. No one gets hit but me. Dem's the rules. Generally, it works pretty well, though we have had a setback here and there. By and large, Geiri + Tiranor the hunter = EZ Mode. :)
Finally, Finnras, who is my 'third main' character. The captain is level 17.9, and will be the next person I work on catching up with the other two. Once Kate and I have a pile of people all the same level, we're going to play around with the team ups to see what different ones might be fun.
I was going to write up a post about the character/universe generation for the Galactic game from this weekend (a complete campaign I'm foolishly trying to cram into the space between here and mid-December), but I wanted to transfer everyone's notes up to the wiki first.
And reading their [censored] awful handwriting, I am now totally [censored] blind, so you'll have to wait for the update until I learn how to read braille.
I thought *my* handwriting was bad. Holy hell.
Anyway, the stuff I sacrificed my eyes to transcribe is on the wiki here.
Yes, I know it's not the end of the year yet, but since the holidays typical kill my gaming, I'm simply looking at the last 12 months, to take a look at what kind of face to face gaming I got done.
November, 2006
- A year ago, today, I ran the first/last game for the guys out in NYC. It was the "freebooters" scenario for Shadow of Yesterday.
- I also started up a play-by-post Mountain Witch game that sadly died of asphyxiation during the holiday doldrums. More sadly, in cleaning spam out of that forum last week, I accidentally deleted all the gaming-related posts. :(
December, 2006
- Nothing
January, 2007
- Got together with the locals and made up characters for a clockpunk Shadow of Yesterday game.
February, 2007
- Nothing.
March, 2007
- Nothing again -- I didn't even post weeks in review for these two months. Sheesh.
April, 2007
- After two months of a big fat nothing, I am *rabid* to play, and fly to Chicago for Forgecon Midwest. There, I get to play Heroquest, run a game of Shadow of Yesterday and the Mountain Witch, and playtest Galactic with Matt. After I get home...
- I start up the Primetime Adventures "Weird War Two" game, and had the pilot session.
- I run the second (and apparently last) session of the clockpunk game.
May, 2007
- Nothing. Scheduling people for games continues to be a nightmarish endeavor.
June, 2007
- Stealing from the very best, I pick up on the NYC crew's gaming plan, which is basically "have a huge group of players, and run a regular game for the first five who say they can attend." I start a Spirit of the Century game and sign up 13 other people. Only one has not played to this point -- most everyone has played at least two or three sessions, and EVEN I GOT TO PLAY ONCE! Success!
- I also start the Nine Princes in Pulp game this month.
- I get in the second episode of Primetime Adventures: Strange Allies -- "Djinn" -- it goes swimmingly awesome.
- Dave starts his Ill Met by Gaslight PTA game.
July, 2007
- Not one but TWO different FULL EPISODES of Spirit of the Century
- Another session of Nine Princes in Pulp -- unfortunately, pretty much the last one, as we've yet to get back to that.
- Dave runs PTA again.
August, 2007
- Spirit of the Century and the ever-rotating player pool wins again.
September, 2007
- Nothing in here. How odd.
October, 2007
- More Spirit of the Century: Two new episodes, both on Friday nights. How unusual. And lots of fun.
- A session of Dead of Night: "Zombies At(e) my Homecoming Dance" Still need one more session on that.
November, 2007
- Flying in the face of history (and sanity) I'm trying to start, play, and FINISH a short Galactic game during the months of November and December. Chargen is this Sunday. No other gaming is on the docket yet, because Galactic is going to take scheduling priority, but I do intend to get in some more Spirit of the Century and finish the Dead of Night game.
Analysis, after the cut...
Continue reading "Year in review" »
So here's what's been going on.
Face to Face
Ran a murder mystery for the most recent Spirit of the Century game on Friday night. "Doctor Brightman is dead." Good stuff, for all that I suck at doing mysteries. It was "Margie's session," so I gave it a college try, anyway. There were investigations, autopsies, some wonderfully fun characterizations, a seance, and a whole lot of laughing. Present were Chris, Tim, Dave and Margie; again, I have to give a nod to Kate's observation that I run better games when I'm NOT close friends with everyone at the table -- we just generally focus more on the game and less on everything else.
Didn't even seem to get too sidetracked by having Kaylee around for the first part of the game.
This Thursday, it's Zombies at(e) my Homecoming Dance 2: The Revenge of the Hickey.
Online, not MMO
I'm going to be playing in (not running) a play-by-forum game of Galactic(!), using the ashcan edition that Matt did up for Gencon this year. That should be fun. No character information or even links yet -- we're juuuust getting rolling.
MMO
WoW
Grezzk is still level 70. I've actually being getting into some fun dungeon runs lately (there are only about... five or so in the later game that I haven't done even once, if you only count the five-mans). I'm not UBER geared or anything, but at this stage my 'effective level' is 108, taking my gear into account. (Taking gear into account, the maximum level in WoW is somewhere around 150, while perhaps 125 is as high as I'm likely to get with the Guild I'm part of.) Anyway, I'm still having a lot of fun with Grezzk.
Hit 45 on Kayti. Nothing terribly exciting to report on her. People keep stopping in mid-run to ask me what kind of weapon I'm using, cuz they can't figure out how a tanking paladin is topping the damage reports. I try to explain that the damage is all from the paladin abilities, and that I would do pretty much the same damage if i were naked, but no one seems to get it. Eh. In a few more levels, I can hurl an "Avenger's Shield" (think Captain America-esque energy contruct) at enemies to pull them, and tanking is going to get a LOT easier. Woot.
I tanked a run into Scarlet Monastery's Cathedral a few days ago and it went really smoothly. We obliterated everything and aside from one jackass who screwed up the boss-looting at the end, it was a great run.
There was one point where I TOTALLY "pulled a Hype" with her as well (which is a tactic that *I*, personally, have never seen work in WoW, that I used to do all the time in CoH). We were clearing out a big chapel area, one clump of guys at a time... like 3 or 4 guys at a time -- it was SAFE, but it wasn't particularly hard. About halfway through I told the other paladin "heal me, I want to try something" (I didn't really tell the priest ahead of time. oops :) and I just ran through a couple (or three :) clusters at once and pulled them all back to the group -- something like 8 to 10 guys. Got em all nice and pissed at me and the group just burned em down. I think most of them were JUST about out of mana when the fight ended.
The group's response: "That was fun. Do it again."
LotRO
Tyelaf is level 21. We (he tends to work with Tirawyn the Captain) have done most of the quests around the town of Bree, and now have two BIG GROUP things to deal with -- spying on the Witch King himself, and a foray into the Great Barrows that house the last ruler of Cardolan. Yikes. After that... folks need a lot of help in the Lone Lands, and a lot of that involves shooting Orcs, so I'm THERE.
Geiri remains my toughest character. I don't know if he's my FAVORITE, but he's definitely tied for first. At level 16 (17?) he's got considerably higher morale (read: health) than Tye, and he and Tiranor the elven hunter TEAR through quests that I recall being a pretty big pain in the tuchas with Tye. We were on last night for a few hours and finished up all the storyline in Ered Luin (the Blue Mountains and Celondim) and headed East through the Shire and into Bree, where we met up with Strider and continued to harass the kinda-sorta undead dwarf Skorgrim -- that dude HAS to be tired of seeing use show up and mess with his plans over and over. It's been like... well, for Tiranor, it's going on 600 years, now. (God I love how the time-instanced storyline in LotRO works.)
Downside to Geiri: he takes half a coon's age to kill anything on his own. However, this rarely comes up. :)
His personal bane: creban. Friggin' evil birds.
Oh, and elves that go running off of cliffs and break his damn ankles.
I haven't played Yarren much, but she's also wrapped up all the quests in the Shire and has headed to Bree to see what this "Strider" guy wants (something about heading into the Old Forest to look for some hobbits he's supposed to meet up with in Bree). She's also going to give up the plain-jane professions of farming and cooking. Poking at old scrolls and bits of lost lore from the Second Age is SO much more interesting (and likely to get her face melted off, but THAT'S FUN TOO.)
-----
And... that's about it.
Caught up by the desire to play a little wacky horror roleplaying in the middle of the week, I got a few folks together, pulled out the pocket-sized campfire horror game Dead of Night, and we had ourselves some fun.
The players:
* Jay, in town from New York for the next few months -- catch his part in Pride and Prejudice next month at the Denver Performing Arts Center.
* Meera the Fierce
* Randy
The Concept:
* It is 1985
* You are in High School
* Heathers and Pretty in Pink meets Shawn of the Dead
The Main NPCS:
* Meridith, the Homecoming Queen
* Troy, the "captain awesome", knows-everyones-name, cool but cocky quarterback (played by James Marsden)
* Rick "the Hickey" - head linebacker, bully (played by Jake Busey)
* Sarah - salutatorian, on the field hockey varsity team, pretty, popular, and rumored to be pregnant (I said Julia Stiles was playing this part, but I was actually thinking of Erika Christensen. Huh.)
* Kinney(, Melvin) - an angry young man who's been threatening to burn down the school since sixth grade
* Bender - the stoner dude
My constraints for character creation:
* Tell me why you're NOT going to the Homecoming Dance
* Tell me about some kind of relationship you have with at least two of the NPCs above
Here's what we got:
* Meera: Alice ("don't call me Allison") - the smart, acidic, Scary Goth Chick. Sophomore. She's Troy's little sister and dated Kinney in Junior High until he got "too intense". She's not at the homecoming dance because... c'mon, look at her. Look at THEM -- it's obvious.
* Jay: Chris - the slightly stoned, visionary singer/guitarist/songwriter of Beefcake Express (not the band's actual name, which I can't remember, but it was close to that). Bender is the bass player, and Kinney is the drummer. In play, we also discovered he had a one-night 'thing' with the homecoming queen, and he still has a thing for her. He's a Junior. He's not at the homecoming dance because the class officers selected a clearly inferior cover band to play at the dance.
* Randy: Jason - the rebellion-through-kleptomania kid. He's a sophomore, and has a crush on Sarah. Rick the Hickey has selected him as a particular target for harassment, but Jason returns the favor by routinely stealing Rick's stuff. ((He really doesn't like Rick because he dated Sarah for a little while last year.)) He's not at the dance because he didn't have the guts to ask Sarah (who, because of her personal drama, is also not going). Also, as we find out with the first in-character line in the game, Jason always plays halflings.
What are they all doing during the Homecoming dance?
* They're in the basement at Alice's house, playing Call of Cthulu. Alice is GMing. Jason is playing a short british man.
Quote and other wackiness after the cut.
Continue reading "Zombies at(e) the Homecoming Dance" »
Last night, Kate and I were running around the edge of this orc camp up the Greenway a few miles from Bree. We're leaving, but one of the guards spots her and takes off after her. She ignores him, figuring (correctly) that she can outrun him and he'll give up the chase in a little bit.
Me? I stop.
"You stopped you shoot him, didn't you?"
"Yeah..."
But let me clarify.
It's not because I'm bloodthirsty or need the xp or anything.
I (a dyed in the wool Tolkien fanboy) am given the opportunity to plant an arrow fletching-deep into the back of a fleeing orc.
It is going to be a long, long, LONG time before that gets old.
I actually had two points for my "serious gamer" post, but the thing was getting too long, so here's the rest of it.
Let me pick out the bits in the first post that had to do with my second point.
Player B can have an extremely productive 90 minutes online and then go to a movie with local friends.
Productive. Getting stuff done.
Cleaned up some old quests, and started collecting some materials I need for the next 'big' dungeon I want to do with her.
How did I know I'd need them? I looked up dungeon instances for the basic level I'm at, focusing on stuff that was higher level by a little bit, because (a) it's better rewards and (b) I'm a pretty good player, so I want to push myself.
Also, following some research on the "maintankadin" forums, I respecced her for a stronger tanking build, which cost me a ton of gold, but the results of which I liked.
I don't just research what there is to do -- I read about how to do it. Yeah, most of the posts are about playing at 70, and if I'm only level 40, that's not entirely relevant, but it does tell me what to aim for, what to expect, and most importantly, what I will be expected to do if I want to team up with other people.
... spent some time in the afternoon doing more work on game-prep for that face to face game, and reading up on LotRO quests and appropriate surnames for Men of Gondor.
Prep, prep, prep. I want the face to face game to come off well, and while I don't prep scenarios as such, I *do* prep by getting familiar with the rules. For this game coming up, I'm researching:
1. Half-life
2. Horror movies of the 80s
3. Mullets
And I'm looking up surnames of the Men of Gondor (note: they don't use them) because at level 15 your LotRO character can pick a surname, and with the server I'm on, it's important to me that it's accurate. I'm a fan-boy.
Kate and did a little LotRO stuff, which mostly amounted to us running around the Old Forest in fear for our very lives.
Why do I prep? Why do I look stuff up? Because eventually the shit is going to hit the fan in whatever game you're playing, and you want to continue to have fun -- not have a frustrating night.
That's the same reason I aim to do things that push my play ability. If my 'safe' play has more instances where I've pushed the limit and had to really work to succeed, then I'm ready for the times when I have to redline when I'm NOT expecting it.
Yes, we ran around all over, yes we scrambled -- the only time I didn't have fun was when I was defeated and had to retreat from some wild critters that really shouldn't have been that much of a challenge -- they WERE, because Kate and I got separated, which also shouldn't have happened.
Saturday, I was on my paladin and teamed up with another one. I tank on my paladin, and I've done a LOT of reading on how to do well as a tank on WoW, because it is a LOT different than tanking on City of Heroes.
1. You don't get any kind of front-loaded aggro. Most tanks in WoW only have a piddly little ranged attack -- some (most paladins) don't have any, and they have to build it by getting beat on for a good ten seconds. 2. Their aggro is FRAGILE. It is no challenge at all for a damage-dealing class to decide they want to pull the bad guy's aggro from me onto themselves... the CHALLENGE in play is to do as much damage as they can WITHOUT getting aggro. (You can run an aggro meter to tell you were you are in relation to the tank.)
In CoH, Tanks get a ranged taunt that affects up to five enemies at the same time, and, once you start hitting them, pretty much guarantees you will never lose their attention that fight.
The only thing like that in WoW is dynamite, and I can't MAKE dynamite.
So I was out with this other paladin, and while I'm still running up to the baddie, they throw off a holy smite -- a ranged spell they get, because of their build, that I don't have. Before you could say "What the..." I was running back the way I came, chasing the thing down as it went after the other character.
After the fight, I asked them to wait and let me build aggro on the mob first. "Five seconds," I said, "during which you can even hit them with your basic attack if you want, just don't use that Smite."
"Why worry about it?" They said. "I can tank these little guys."
Sure, but that's not the point.
There's something my football coach used to say. "You play like you practice." Only into my mid-thirties do I really start to understand that.
Continue reading "Playing to win" »
A mix of gaming this weekend.
((Blogging bitching: it really should be possible to just hit Ctrl-B in Moveabletype to Boldface something. It worked in 2.0 for pete's sake -- you mean to tell me you can't do it NOW?))
Tabletop
Played Spirit of the Century on Friday night. I pretty much went in with a scenario 'aimed' at two player characters who bailed out at the last moment, so I had to wing it.
Luckly, SotC is good at winging it. I had:
- The Daring Magpie - burglar and dilettante faceman, who has done a couple sessions already.
- Rami Samiti - East Indian psychic: ditto.
- Trent McCoy - new character for a player who's been at all the games -- a driver and 'gun man'.
- Beau Brass - a musician and smooth talker.
My basic method with these games is to 'focus' on one or two characters in each session -- specifically, I'll pick someone who's already been at the game a couple times, and make this 'their' session. I was going to game at the retired character for Trent's player, but he was, as I said, retired, so that indicated The Daring Magpie and/or Rami as the focal point.
Those two characters are different enough, and I'm lazy enough, that I didn't want to screw around with working out a story that featured both of them equally. Rami had a lot of stuff going on in "The Ape Soldier of Teyawasu", so that mean The Daring Magpie.
Therefore: social situations, schmoozing, and possibly some sneaking about and stealing stuff. Main focus: something both urban and urbane (based on player comment).
Then, if we have new players, I try to throw something in for them. Trents a drive and shooter. Beau is also new.
So... I opened with a car chase, moved to New York City for the main action (since we'd already 'done' L.A.), and set the whole thing around a music festival at the Woolworth Building, to give Beau some musical spotlight.
The heroes started out in mid-chase, trying to stop the bad guys from delivering something to NYC for Doctor Methuselah. They stop them, open the crate with the MacGuffin inside, and find a note from Doctor M himself that reads:
Hello Century Club,
If you're reading this, you've stopped my witless minions from delivering a key piece of equipment I require for my current project.
However, this puts you in a dilemma.
While the project in question would be a brilliant step forward for mankind, it also requires certain sacrifices you would likely find objectionable. You have, probably unknowingly, stopped that plan by acquiring the object in this box. Bravo.
However, the device that requires this object is already in place and will be activated on [date two days hence], regardless. Without this object in place, as a focus for the devices power, well over ninety percent of the population of Manhattan will perish.
So: Do you keep the object, foil my plans, but doom a city, or deliver the object and complete the device (and with it, my original plan)?
Either way, it is now your problem. Good luck, god speed, etc.
M
Then I just sat back and watched the fireworks.
We had a lot of digressions and such, simply because we hadn't played or seen each other in a month, but all in all it was a good session and lots of fun.
WoW
Grezzk joined the Scholomance Debate Team on the Farstriders server a few weeks back. Since then, I haven't done a LOT with the guild members, but the stuff I have done has been both fun and a good learning experience. I've also got a lot of good loot recently, but frankly that's been mostly all my own doing.
- Ran Mana Tombs, and tanked it with Tusker the wonder pig. Would like to do that again, as we didn't finish the last boss.
- Ran Auchenai Crypts with some of the SDT members. That went just fine, although the Tank... should play his other mains.
- Pet-tanked the Coilfang Underbog. A competent healer that knew how to watch my pet and keep him standing meant that we cleared this with no problems.
- Pet-tanked the Coilfang Slave Pens. Ditto here, though the healer was different.
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