Category: Other Games

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Sunday’s obsession is becoming d20 Krawl

Since very few people were there on Sunday, I should explain what happened. Josh said that Doug was thinking of doing a D&D game with interchangable characters, and that got me thinking. We could distill D&D characters down to a character card and equipment cards, give it a console-ish feel and still have it be D&D.

So, I started obsessing. Since then I have made boards for a dungeon, determined the changes I will make to d20 to make this work, made character sheets (a page of feat/spell/special ability data has appeared as well) and gotten graphics for 50 equipment cards.

I hope to get the chance to run this next Sunday (August 21?). If anyone would like to get a jump on things, you can go to http://www.pathguy.com/cg35lite.htm and make a first level character. There are a few limitations:

1) Magic Users may not specialize
2) Clerics do not choose domains
3) Attacks of Opportunity will be used, but ony a very simplified version. Don’t get any feats or skills that ONLY affect attacks of opportunity. (Combat Reflexes comes to mind.)

Anything else that comes up we can work out at the game.

I’ll put a short description of the world in the extended entry.

Continue reading “Sunday’s obsession is becoming d20 Krawl”

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The Story of Fun and Xp

(I spent too much time writing this for a thread in the CoH Forums to see it scroll off the board…)

Fun was knifed in the back by his old pal Xp. Was a time when Fun and Xp were inseperable buddies, but then Xp realized that it was he that the players really wanted to hang out with–that tons of players would do the most dreadfully boring stuff, even hang around logged in but afk, if only they could still be in tight with Xp. And Xp started thinking Fun really wasn’t pulling his weight, and resentment started to build.

The more he read the boards, the higher the resentment grew, after all there were all these posters claiming Xp WAS Fun, that Statesman was a horrible tyrant and fool for trying to force people to hang out with that loser, Fun. If Fun was all that, why would Statesman have to do anything to give him a hand, let alone try to arrange it so people couldn’t just chill with Xp?

Badges were the last straw. No Xp for badges, what was up with that? Sure, there were some things that Fun always did without Xp–the player’s first travel power, seeing a new Zone for the first time, but this wasn’t like that. This was something that Fun got States to do deliberately to exclude Xp. After that, things were never the same. Sure, they both could be found together some of the time, particularly in some of the low-level missions and Task Forces; after all, they were co-workers, they couldn’t avoid eachother entirely, but Xp knew who his real friends were, the groupies who practically worshipped him, and he did his best to spend all his time with them and screw Fun and the horse he rode in on.

He started locking himself in Portal Corp missions, where Fun had difficulty negotiating the Portal more than once or twice, and doing them over and over and over with his fanbois. He let himself go. Once he had a certain pride, he wouldn’t pal around with just anyone–people had to be willing to take certain risks to be part of his posse, but now, anything went. He’d sit around all day with people who were doing literally nothing, just breathing and being the right level to Bridge.

Fun and States worried about him, but that just irritated him further. He was the star of the show, he was the man it all revolved around. They were nothing without him! Didn’t all his adoring fans flood the boards with threats to quit whenever States made the slightest move to try to reconcile the two?

And that’s the story.

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We Belong Dead

Since Doug said that his favorite area/storyline in WoW was the Undead home area, I went back to my Undead Warlock, Malika, and kept at it. I got her up to level 6 last night, and it was pretty interesting. The class description did turn out to be more-or-less correct that Warlocks are a good solo class–at least in the first six levels, she didn’t die, and was able to accomplish all the beginning quests in a reasonable amount of time. Having the pet imp is a big boon, if you use him pretty ruthlessly (letting the enemies whale on him so that you can cast spells uninterrupted). I’d probably feel bad about it if I was a hunter, and my pet was a wolf or something, but a demonic imp that you can re-summon whenever he dies? No problem. According to the back-story, Warlocks are definitely evil, even if Undead aren’t necessarily so (the humans in the area that you have to fight are all aggressive anti-undead fanatics, so even a self-defence-only character could conceivably complete the quests that involve killing them) and it’s certainly… different trying to role-play an evil character. It may come easily to Doug and Scott, but I’ve almost always played nice characters, whatever their nominal alignment was. I’m trying to get into the spirit of things (heh) with Malika, but it’s not coming all that easily.

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A Good Day in Westfall

Well, I tried again last night, and had a much better time. After perusing the WoW forums for a little bit, and finding a relevant thread, I realised that a lot of people objected to people using the team invite if you haven’t spoken to their character first, either in a whisper or locally. There are people with similar feelings in CoH, but CoH gives you the Looking For Group flag and the unwritten rule that seems to have evolved in the community is that it’s rude to send a “blind” invite to someone without the LFG flag set, but it’s perfectly acceptable to do so for anyone who has it on. (Not that there aren’t people who violate that assumption in both directions: if you’re a defender you’re going to get blind invites no matter what your LFG flag says, and there are people who hate blind invites even when they’re looking for a team. I think the technical name for the latter is “pricks.”)
So, anyway, this time I tried to form a team and encourage RP by walking up to a level 16 Paladin and asking “Do you have any advice for a young Paladin?” This led to our teaming, speaking mostly in character, and joining with another team hunting the same area who also spoke mostly IC. It was much more fun, and I managed to hit level 14 before we broke up for the night. I’m hoping that this wasn’t a fluke, and that I’ve actually cracked the social code for how teaming works in WoW. We’ll see. I’ll probably try again tonight.

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Global Chat

CoH has just added a spiffy new feature: Global Chat. Now you can tell if your friends come online, even on a different server, and you can talk to them across servers. You can even make customized chat channels. Neat. My global “handle” is Mysterious_J. To initialize the global chat client the first time, type /chatbeta 1. This will create a handle for you, which is either your current character name or, if you have a CoH Forum name, the forum name. You can change it once. To add a global friend you type /friend @theirhandle and they’ll get a notice that you’re trying to add them as a friend, which they can accept or decline (to prevent griefers from friending you to find out whether you’re on, and as what alt, and following you around). To send a tell, type /t @theirhandle, message.

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World of Warcraft Thoughts

Well, I’m not cancelling just yet. Paladins turn out to be much more fun than Warriors (thanks to Paul for the suggestion), but…

*While levelling is pretty quick at the beginning, it seems to slow down much faster than in CoH and a lot less happens when you level. My Paladin is now level 13, but I don’t think I’ve gotten a new spell since level 10, nor been able to weild a new weapon or acquire better armor. So the only thing that seems to happen is stats get unnoticeably better (at least, I can’t tell any difference from having them go up by 1), and you get extra talent points, which again provide very small incremental benefits.

*There’s still very little customization: all stats for a class start the same and advance the same, and while in theory you can choose which spells to take, in practice you can afford to take them all (at least so far). That leaves talents, which so far you do have to pick and choose which ones you want, and magic stuff, which Paul tells me is eventually how characters end up being different.

*Finding people to team up with is hard I think I offered to just about everyone near my level fighting in the same area last night, and all I got was refusals. The one time I did team up with someone I regretted it, because he just charged off, wandering farther and farther from the area where I had quests, and every time I asked what he was up to he just said “kill stuff”

*It’s the rp server, but I hardly notice any rp going on, except people standing around the inn in Goldshire. Maybe it’s all on team chat so I can’t overhear it…

*Are there any trainers or a forge anywhere in the Westfall area? I can’t find them, but running back to Goldshire is a pain in the butt

*I briefly tried a Horde character (an Undead Warlock). Interesting to see the area they start out in…very reminiscent of the Playstation game Medieval. Ultimately too creepy for me, though. I don’t really like running around staring at my character’s exposed spine all the time…

*I also tried a Dwarf rogue briefly. I like the snowy area outside of Ironforge, but I’m not sure about the class. Hard to tell at 1st level, and I didn’t get to try any of the quests, because that’s the character who had the unfortunate choice of companions. I should have realized there was something bizarre about a 6th level character wanting to team with a just-materialized 1st level…

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Back in the Saddle Again

Back where a fiend is a fiend…

Yup, the splitter has apparently dried out, so I was back online last night, making up for lost time.

I actually ended up trashing the character (a Darkness power Scrapper named Dark Wednesday, whose backstory is that she's Wednesday Addams grown up as a vengeful vigilante) that got clobbered last time and re-starting as level 1 instead of paying off the experience debt. No, that's not the efficient way to do it, but I had been wanting to change the character's looks but hadn't bothered to restart because of the sunk costs. When I thought about it, though, pursuing a tedious mission (hunting 10 Circle of Thorns on the rooftops of King's Row) that would net half the usual experience seemed less fun than starting over and getting to fix the looks. One and a half fun hours later, I was back to level 5, and this time I know better than to pursue missions that will lead to King's Row before I'm level 6 or 7.

I also created YANC (yet another new character), this time an Energy Blaster: a very Maria-from-Metropolis-esque robot called Tin Lizzie. All I can say is, Wow, at low levels Blasters that do lots of knockback rock! Of course, the downside is if they keep missing and the baddie closes and stays close, it's time for a trip to the hospital. So remember, kids, always slot those Accuracy enhancements early! And let's be careful out there!

If anyone wants to join me, these new characters are on Champion. So the servers I'm usually are found on are Pinnacle (if Doug and/or Paul are around), Guardian (the Riverdale gang), Virtue (so far only Barbizon, and if I feel more like RPing), and now Champion (miscellaneous characters experimenting with power combinations).

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Woe

I just finished a tough mission in an office building in CoH, left the building, and found myself in the middle of a firefight between a bunch of folks way higher in level. Before I could even run, I got toasted by one of the baddies, and now my character has an experience debt to work off… just as I was about to start on that, though, a freakish downpour knocked out my cable modem connection. The Comcast techs think that some water got in a splitter somewhere, but they can't send anyone out to look at it until Friday morning. It might start working again as it dries out, but until then no CoH for me…

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Pool Party

In City of Heroes, sixth level is something of a milestone, since it's the first time that “Power Pools” become available. Initially you pick powers from your primary and secondary sets, which come from a list of those available for your class. Power Pools are available to all classes equally, and it's from these that you can eventually get such things as Flight and Teleport. You don't have to take any Power Pools, if you prefer to concentrate on getting the powers in your regular sets, but it allows extra flexibility.

RadStorm, MightyMidge, and Barbizon all hit 6th level recently, so got to choose from among the Power Pools. For RadStorm I chose Flight (which starts with the lowly Hover power–even slower than walking), and I'm really looking forward to true Flight. Even being able to hover up to the tops of buildings and look down on the city below is worth the price of admission. MightyMidge got Jumping, which will eventually let her leap tall buildings in a single bound. For now it just gives her a slight boost to her Jump, which I think will be useful, since it seems that the programmers actually bothered to give shorter characters smaller vertical leaps–or maybe I just stink at jumping, but it definitely seems like Midge has trouble clearing fences that the normal-sized characters just hop over. I suppose I could test that hypothesis by making a minimal size character… Finally, Barbizon took Fitness, which will eventually reduce the Endurance cost of all her powers; she's the only one of my characters that regularly runs out of End while fighting, due to the high Endurance cost of swinging that big old axe around.

I actually spent a fair amount of time last night on the Virtue server, just standing around talking in character, rather than going on missions. It was fun as a change of pace, but I don't think that I could do that for an entire night the way some of the rp-ers seemed to (or at least every time I wandered back to the central square it seemed like Cog Sprocket was still there, jawing away in character).

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Roleplaying in City of Heroes

Paul suggested to me that the “Virtue” server was the unofficial server for roleplayers, i.e. people who actually like to talk in character while playing and bother to make up origin stories, etc. so I headed on over and made up a character (a 7' tall Axe-wielding Barbie doll called Barbizon. Battle Cry: Cleavage? I'll show you cleavage!) and lo and behold, Paul spoke sooth. I was invited to team several times over the course of the evening (it was gym night, so I wasn't at the keyboard the whole time), and my teammates mostly did stay in character. One of the characters was a robot and somebody asked who made him (which at first I thought meant which RL player), but he had his whole back story worked out about his manufacturer and purpose. It was pretty cool, if you ask me. Certainly a change of pace from talking about aggro, rooting, mobs and the like.

I finished the night at 5th level. The Battle-Axe tanker has pretty slow attacks, and they take a lot of end, but it is very satisfying when they send the target flying backwards. Another thing I found out was that the server bleeps out (replaces with cartoon $^&%! symbols) God, but not Goddess.

I also had the misfortune to team up with someone who was either more of a newbie than me, very young, or just not too bright and ended up getting killed when she ignored my warning and jumped a bunch of guys much tougher than us. I got shot to pieces, and as my character was lying face down on the street I looked around and realized that she had run away and quit the team. You live and learn. Fortunately I was only 2nd level at the time, so there was no penalty for dying.