Category Archives: Blogs

Dream Project 1.5: The Fortress of Dreams

Blogs, Roleplaying, ,

This is a summary of my ongoing Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition game, played with some friends from college over the internet using MapTool and Teamspeak.

When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon who had taken over their town, heading north to the city of Decolay, which had been out of contact for years. When they arrived, in the midst of a thunderstorm, they found the city partly burned, with scattered fires and little signs of life.

The caravan was guarded by five people:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard
Donaar, dragonborn warlock, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, dwarven fighter, who was visiting family in town
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.

This is the second half of level one.
Continue reading Dream Project 1.5: The Fortress of Dreams →

Dream Project 1.0: The Flight from Zekleinenezzar

Blogs, Roleplaying, ,

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been running a mostly-weekly Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition game over the internet using MapTool and TeamSpeak. Generally, these tools have served us well, with the biggest problem being the voice chat; it makes conversation flow very awkward, with some people stumbling over other people’s sentences due to lag, and other people often unintelligible due to mic issues. MapTool is a bit clumsy, but it gets the job done.

For a while, I’ve wanted to run a tabletop game where the play shifted between a dark, gritty, waking struggle for survival and a wondrous, fanciful dream world that the player characters entered when they slept. This is not that campaign, but it uses the “dream world” motif that I’ve incorporated into several of my games. Below the fold, I’ll give a summary of the first part of the campaign for those who are interested.

Before then, however, I should discuss my current feelings on D&D4e. First, the combat system is a lot of fun and very slick, but it requires a lot of effort and attention to keep it from becoming a tactical strategy game. In the game so far, players basically just say “I’m using Scorching Burst” or “I’ll do a Deft Strike.” I much prefer a game where players describe their actions with more flavor and color, and often do actions that aren’t straight from their power list. I’ll work to encourage this in the future.

Second, I still don’t have a handle on Skill Challenges. They make sense on paper: a way to structure non-combat encounters to have the same randomness, flow, and structure as combat encounters. However, in practice they feel very clunky. Twice I’ve had a single character take lead on a major NPC conversation, and instead of having them make repeated Diplomacy checks, I’ve just roleplayed it out. Maybe I need to make the Skill Challenge mechanics more explicit; maybe I need to abandon them altogether.

Finally, the XP system feels slow. Ten encounters between levels is a lot. I’ll be giving double experience in 4e in the future, just to restore a sense of progression to the game.

Now, for the story so far. This is the first half of level 1.
Continue reading Dream Project 1.0: The Flight from Zekleinenezzar →

The Ending of Prince of Persia 2008

Blogs, Digital Games

I beat Prince of Persia 2008 last night, and I’m still thinking about it. This is a very well-crafted game. Although many folks derided it for being too easy, it’s actually not. The game is very challenging in places; it’s just not punishing. I found myself struggling at certain points, especially boss battles, and there was a genuine sense of accomplishment when I succeeded… without any frustration from having to endure cheap deaths or repeat long sections of the game. Additionally, this game has the best implementation of quick time events that I’ve seen. It’s always clear when you should expect one, and the button you need to press is either obvious from context or random for effect. The only annoyance I had with the system was when I came back to the game after a break and forgot what the “block” symbol meant, especially when it is so similar to the “grab” symbol.

But the most interesting thing for me about the game at the moment is the ending. There will be spoilers. Continue reading The Ending of Prince of Persia 2008 →

Always Down for that CO-OP Action

Blogs, Digital Games

This post is long overdue. At the beginning of the year, The 1UP Show was cancelled, which killed the best traditional games journalism work on the net. Shortly thereafter, several of the people who made The 1UP Show great, including my personal favorites Ryan O’Donnell and Jay Frechette, started a show called CO-OP.

It’s basically The 1UP Show, but in an apartment instead of a cube farm, and it’s complete with a catchy opening theme and charmingly tongue-in-cheek episode plotlines like “some team members are suspected of having nerd flu” or “let’s try out local restaurants.” CO-OP discusses the games they want to discuss, honestly, enthusiastically, and without any number ratings. If you want to know about interesting new games or decide whether to buy something, this is what you should look at. My only criticism is that they do not review every title that comes out ever.

Check out CO-OP and throw a little money their way with the Paypal link on their page. Their homegrown ads probably pay the bills, but they deserve all the help they can get.

Words (Active Sketch 03) by axcho

Blogs, Digital Games, ,

axcho pointed me to a game prototype of his that’s in the vein of my Silent Conversation. It’s called “Active Sketch 03: Words.” It uses text as an environment, but has a different game mechanic than Conversation. It’s very interesting, and definitely more “gamey” than my game. It’s easier to focus on earning points and increasing multipliers, and it gives the player more control over the speed in which the level is traversed.
Continue reading Words (Active Sketch 03) by axcho →

On Pixel Art and Design Decisions

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I got a comment from David that I’d like to highlight and address, because I believe it highlights a misconception folks have about pixel art and the style of my games. I’ll cut the comment for length, but try to retain the intent.

I’m a visual artist, so critiquing your visuals is all I feel arrogant enough to do. They were well executed and suited their purpose in “Bars of Black and White” and in Exploit (and in the “Majesty of Colors” they were exquisite), but in “Sugarcore” and “How to Raise a Dragon” they cause the games to suffer. In “How to Raise a Dragon”, the pixels are not a bad idea, but they are also sort of sloppy looking. They are used in lieu of more detailed graphics to avoid having to draw, right? They are probably better than the alternative, but the use of pixels should not become your crutch. Instead it should be used to artistic effect.

The art style in “Dragon” was definitely chosen for artistic effect, not to avoid making art. Continue reading On Pixel Art and Design Decisions →

Pushin’ Dis Thing

Blogs, Digital Games

My significant other’s a writer. She’s been writing short-short fiction lately, and she’s just posted a sublime piece of fanfic about Team Fortress 2.

“Doctor… it is almost time…” the Heavy said insistently. He looked around, but as usual, no one paid them any mind. He and the doctor were always together.

The doctor looked up at him in surprise. “Ve only have 50 seconds,” he said, also glancing around.

“Get behind me, doctor,” the Heavy urged.

Read the whole thing at A Nerd’s Haven. It’s SFW as long as you don’t read too closely.

GM Success

Blogs, Roleplaying, ,

This week I had one of those great GM moments. In my Promethean game, my players have been presented with a dilemma: they’ve found the workshop of a character who named himself Paracelsus, who was in search of an alchemical elixir called the Ascendance Formula. However, as the players were told by a mystical qashmal, his choices of ingredients were “not human enough.” Instead of turning human, Paracelsus was killed and his body split apart into a collection of monsters.

Clearly, I’m trying to set up a dilemma here. This formula could be a shortcut to mortality for the player characters, but it is very dangerous; not only could it kill you, but it can also create new monsters to make everyone’s life more difficult. As a GM, when you set up this sort of dilemma, you want to create inter-player tension and discussion. I think I succeeded. At the end of this week’s session, the player characters sat down and discussed the dilemma in detail, and they each had interesting perspectives.

One character, a loner soldier and sometimes thief, wanted nothing to do with the formula. Screw the alchemy, screw the existing monsters, just get the hell out of town. Another, a naive tinkerer with Tesla’s right hand, was all for trying the formula for himself. Build a cage around the experiment area, sure, shoot him before he turns into a monster, but he wanted to take the chance. Finally, the flighty con artist of the group had a brainstorm. The tinkerer can try the formula, and if it works (and maybe even if it doesn’t), the surviving party members can sell the formula to other Prometheans. With the promise of money, the soldier was won over, and a plan is in place… for now.

As a GM, I get the most amount of glee from when players are deliberating over these sorts of interesting choices. If the choice is easy, it’s not providing the players much (high-level) agency. Only when a decision is difficult — when there is no clear “right” alternative — are the players truly choosing their own path through the narrative. And if there’s inter-PC conflict in the decision process, then that just makes my job more of a success.

So for now, I’m feeling good about my campaign. We’ll see how next session goes.

The Tone Disconnect and the Groucho Solution

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It happens a lot in tabletop roleplaying games: you have a certain mood and tone planned for a campaign, and the players have other ideas. I’m running a Promethean campaign, and I planned for it to be dark, desperate, and gritty. The players are approaching it much more comically. It’s dark humor, which works with the setting, but it’s not how I planned it.

There are two classic responses to this issue. The first is the author-is-king approach: refuse to go along, chastise or punish the characters, and mold them to Your Story. This, of course, ends with an adversarial player-game master relationship and probably some grumpy folks in your house where they can break your stuff if they want. The second response is the players-are-god approach: let the players have the sort of fun that they want to, and adapt accordingly. This can end in a muddled mess, where adversaries planned to be scary and bad end up being too hard to kill and trying too hard to be funny.

I’m trying to reach a middle ground. I’ll present the players with the world more-or-less as it was originally intended. Vampire princes will be grumpy, monsters will be scary. The players, however, can be as cheery and carefree about it as they want. I’ll feed them straight-men for their jokes all day long, including burly bikers named Jim and long-suffering, maybe over-indulgent vamp princes. But when it comes to conflict, I’ll expect them to match their humor with actions.

In a sense, I’m turning my game into a Marx Brothers film. The players aren’t nearly as silly or disruptive as Groucho, but I’m going to aim for the same feel: NPCs will play it straight, but indulge the PCs their jokes and play around a bit. As in Duck Soup, it may all end with the walls shot to pieces and the characters wisecracking about it, but I’m going to try and enable silly, humorous play within a darker, more serious framework.