Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I stumbled across this site today: http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/ . It contains a great many little essays and references about roleplaying. Along the way, I found mention of Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering and briefly considered purchasing the PDF version. Yet it was a neutral review of said book that gave me pause. Three stars out of five, and the person said in part: In the beginning the author lays out a few types of players, like the powerplayer, the storyteller, etc. For the most part it pretty obvious (Power gamer likes to have a lot of power and story teller likes a good story... no, really?) After that, everything in this book pretty much boils down to "it depends".   For all that people say and argue about how best to run/play an RPG or what the different "types" of gamers are, it always seems to boil down so much more simply. Comparing degrees of "dramatist" versus "simulationist" may be useful in some cases, but t

Huh. That's... actually better than I would have thought. They worked the ten-minute episode format pretty well. http://www.adultswim.com/video/?episodeID=8a25059520b3d89e0120b49221340025 Edit: I have long been conflicted about how I saw Snake-Eyes, though I didn't think too hard on it back in the day. Naturally, he was "cool." Commando + Ninja + Black Costume with Mask + Mysterious Past + Tragic Disfigurement = of course this character seemed awesome to a kid back then. Heck, they even packaged him with a wolf in one incarnation. But even in the 80's, I think I resented the character some as being too... special or gimmicky. He was, I might say, the Drizzt Do'Urden of his day - the character so over-the-top-awesome that the target audience wished they could be him. If there were a popular G.I. Joe RPG back in the day, I bet there would have been a ton of special-forces-dude-with-ninja-training, just as there were a swarm of dual-wielding-good-emo-drow

I was walking back to work from my evening "lunch" break, and a fellow addressed me. In short order, he was telling me how 1) works for a living as a cook, 2) lives in a tent, and 3) was recently hit by a car. He made note of how the driver was a woman on her cell phone and didn't even seem to notice. I am increasingly frustrated by the number of people on the streets with their attention on their phones. Drivers, walkers, even people on bicycles. It doesn't inherently mean they're oblivious to their surroundings, but it sure seems like there's a connection. He went on to say he wasn't asking for money, but was hoping for something to eat. Funny how getting food usually requires money. Having been drawn in beyond being able to feign ignorance, and not being a completely heartless bastard, I gave him a little money. These encounters always leave me... unsettled, though. I'm always left wondering whether such a person's story was true. It wouldn

I don't often sweat security in real life. Oh, I weigh risk, there just isn't a lot of it most of the time. I lock the doors at home, sure. I usually don't bother with me truck, as there's little of value in it and I don't see much reason to worry about someone trying to hotwire and steal a 26-year-old pickup here. I run an updated anti-virus program and aggressively pounce on any signs of possible infection, but that happens rarely. And yet I just linked a Blizzard authenticator to my Battle.net account for WoW. I've heard tales of woe from people who've had their account stolen, including one coworker. In general, I suspect they were lax and opened their computers up in other areas, but some people swear they picked up a keylogger through an addon or addon-updating client. And I looked at my characters, which represent a good deal of time and effort, even if they are virtual. And for all that, I decided that $6.50 and the inconvenience of entering a numb

Construction crews just started working on the main road leading in town from home - a nice little stretch by an intersection that's getting a light put in as I understand. This is a mostly-unrelated precursor to the major improvement project sceduled (that probably won't begin in earnest 'til next year). Still having a chunk of the road down to one lane through most of the day is an inconvenience. Cars backed up in both directions. I left work just a little early yesterday, probably avoiding the worst of it, and it still added about 25 minutes to what's normally a 10-minute drive or less. @whee. Quick WoW note: The guild now has heroic Azjol'Nerub under its collective belt. Considering how we got stomped when we poked at it before, I was surprised. It's still not easy, but it's doable. Having an off-tank baiting the skirmishers are the beginning probably helped a lot. Anub'arak caused some deaths, but not a wipe. And speaking of belts, I got an upgrad

And my sinuses, apparently. Ugh, allergies. I don't even know if the sleepiness/spaciness is more due to the allergies or the allergy medicine. That stuff is supposed to be non-drowsy, but I'm never sure I believe such claims. The Shadowrun game progresses. Sometimes, it's slow, sometimes not quite so bad. Maybe I need to put bells on my character, as his turn was overlooking in the initiative order once and we spent a painful chunk of one session going nowhere because a pose of mine was missed. Thusfar, lots of dealing with HMHVV-infected people. They're dubbed "vampires" and "loup-garou" and "sasquatches," but I have trouble picturing them as such in fantasy terms. They're vampiric in a sense, but not dead - hence not undead. There's no known cure and the infected tend toward beastial mentally, but it's a retrovirus-style disease. In theory, there should be a way to undo it. So we've been pulling punches to some exten

Another subject came to mind last night as I considered my previous character retrospectives. Annoyingly, the thoughts aided in keeping me awake until rather later than I would have liked. Jhazza was, in many ways, my "main" character for the revamped FurryFaire with Mika retiring from active play. Daughter of Mika and Khett, she was ICly a deliberate effort of breeding the partly-demonic bloodline strong. With the displacer beast-like tentacles, her supernatural heritage was blatantly obvious. She was a fun character to play - intelligent, but highly favoring direct approaches and dangerously irreverent. She saw herself as a guardian and warrior, not a leader. Rather than being a caster like her mother, she took after her father's shapeshifting. I used Wild Path magic as a way to describe her adaptive and flexible nature, giving her the ability to gain temporary powers almost at will. She gained a lot of them permanently later - after a major ice/winter-related TP, f

So I'm in a transitional phase of sorts in both Guild Wars and World of Warcraft. In GW, I'm bringing up a ritualist in Factions. I just got max-armor-level armor this morning, so now there's the question of what runes to put on it. Which, in turn, begs the question of what sort of build I'm going with. And I can't decide. Ritualists are versatile, but no character is great without some degree of specialization. Item-builds? Well, those negate the benefits of the spiffy end-of-campaign staff I got. Spirit builds? The casting time and immobile nature doesn't seem ideal for our group play (it'd be better for situations where I could set up and start the fight myself). Restoration build? Well, it's supposedly good at healing, but things seem to move so fast, I'm not sure I could manually heal well. Offensive casting build? I love spells like Spirit Rift, but between casting time and time before it goes off, targets have often moved out of the area of

I stumbled across some gamemaster information for the old d6 Star Wars game in PDF form and glanced through it. I read one part where the GM is advised to get into and act out the roles of NPCs. There was an odd moment there as I consciously realized this is written strictly to tabletop-style games, online roleplaying basically didn't exist back then. Wow. It's amazing how just a little thing like that can send you marveling at how much things have changed over just the last fifteen-twenty years.

Major content patches always cause some issues. Servers were down for most of patch day. That's predictable. Anyone who expected otherwise hasn't been paying attention in the past or is new to it altogether. If things are pretty stable and mostly bug-free after 24-hours, that's good . Addons invariably take some time to get caught up and not cause problems. Coincidentally, it seems a couple websites out there have added security features that effectively killed WoWMatrix, which I had been using to keep track of all my addons and keep them updated. And I understand Questhelper is not going to be updated much more, if at all. A lot of changes, tweaks, and a fair bit of new stuff. Dual-specs are an exciting option, but I haven't found myself jumping on that as fast as I expected. I tell myself it's because I want time to get used to changes to my main specs while researching secondaries further (that and making sure the characters have enough gold). What didn'

WTF? It's just before 7:30 and I'm only up because of a phone call. A phone call that actually was for me, it seemed, but... wasn't. "I'm from Oxford International. We're calling because a Mark Sevale used you for a reference." O.o "When did you work with him at Earmark... or... Airmethod?" o.O I'm wracking my sleep-fogged brain, having been asleep and in a dream mere moments ago. Do I even know the person they're talking about? I've had friends occasionally list me as a reference, but the name simply isn't ringing any bells. The final nail in the coffin is when she says "he said he got an email reference from you yesterday." Well, I certainly remember I didn't give any references by email yesterday, so I start explaining that. "You're a network technician, or in network security?" Well, I explained that I was, but never at the places mentioned, and I hadn't given any references yesterday, a

It's not a science at all, but an art. In that, I mean what is right and wrong is subjective rather than absolute. I fully believe there is no universal "right way" to run a game, because different groups have different perspectives with different constraints. Usually a group will form some sort of consensus, a balance between styles, based on those within. There are many, many factors in running a game. Of late, I've been thinking about the expectation of reaction or pro-action of the player characters. On one extreme, you may have a game that's completely planned in advance and "on rails," where nothing the PCs do really changes anything. On the other extreme, one might see a completely open "sandbox" game, where the GM plans nothing in advance and merely faciliates and/or gauges reactions to what the PCs do. I think it's probably fair to say most games fall somewhere between those poles. I suspect many roleplayers' first experie

Where there's challenge in games, there's opportunity for frustration. And I have been frustrated in games like WoW by a failure of a boss to drop a specific item, or repeated wipes in an instance. Guild Wars takes the cake, though. The sheer futility of pushing on with a maximum death penalty, killing one or two more enemies before being smashed down in one hit is astounding. There are times, I actually hate the game. Whoever designed and approved the quest "An Unwelcome Guest" should be shot. I am not doing that fucking thing again. Ever. I better be satisfied with my ritualist, because I am not starting a new Factions character and going through that for the attribute points. Were I playing the campaign solo, I probably would have given up there and never come back to the game.

I am. But every now and then, I just have to get things done, usually because they're not getting done otherwise. So after hoping I wouldn't end up doing this entire hardware upgrade project for eight workstations at work, and watching nothing get done through all of last week, I felt compelled to go install the eight new hard drives this evening. Murphy's Law being ever-present, it took some doing to get the setup working right, but then I settled into a rhythm once I got it down and that's all done. Hurray me?

Poked on and off through the weekend. I managed to get in a number of Wintergrasp battles. PVP still isn't really my thing, but it's bearable, and an avenue to a hat upgrade for my priest (at least in her DPS incarnation). I've seen good and bad battles. I think I most enjoy settling in on a tower cannon and playing artillery, earning my priest the "Vehicular Gnomeslaughter" achievement. Heh. Learning experiences all around. It's blending together a little, but let me try to pick out any points of note. From the last few days... The Nexus was run with a couple non-guild warriors. I'm not real accustomed to such heavy use of melee DPS. Lost our healer on Korlug - probably due to an unfortunately-placed whirlwind, as those can down non-tanks almost instantly (and it still hurts on defense-heavy plate, too). I think one of the warriors whirlwinded himself and broke CC on one of the healer adds, but I don't know if that really changed the outcome any

What to say about certain characters? In some cases, it's been so long that it's hard to remember precisely what happened, or the order. I've been playing on MU*s for... 15 years or so? I was asked why I hadn't mentioned a couple characters in specific. It was simply a matter of what was on my mind at the time. Those two having been brought up, though, I can address them, too... Jade was a character I made... about the same time as Killian, I think. I wanted some variety from Sylvie, if I remember, and was tossing around an idea for an NPC in an offline game. The incarnations came to be at about the same time, though one was tailored more for the MUCK. In fact, I suppose Jade was my first Shirelander character - born in the Shire, albeit having learned her skills elsewhere. I sort of glossed over her parents, though I always sort of though of them as having died in a rather quiet way - perhaps a disease or simple health problems - while she was away. She lived fo

Managed a quick and clean run through heroic Utgarde Keep last night. It involved picking up a mage and a cat-form druid, as we were short on level 80 guildmates at the time. The druid commented right away about how he was grouping with good tanks tonight - that came so quickly after he joined that I can only assume he was looking at my Armory profile. That was a bit of an ego boost, and a reminder not to slack off. We moved forward at a good pace, with limited use of crowd control. For a while, I was asking myself if we'd somehow mistakenly not set the dungeon to heroic. I really only had one "oh shit" moment, when we pulled a geist pack rather poorly and one or two of them got over to pound on our healer. I don't like seeing anyone's life bar drop that low, especially the healer's. Nothing seemed complicated about the first two boss fights, really. Keleseth's skeletons weren't a big deal as far as I saw - I used my area abilities when I could. W

I'm amused by White Wolf at present. Exalted has always been just a little on the racy side. When you have a tale of neigh-immortal god-kings who fell from grace due to pride and abuse of power, hedonistic excesses are hard to ignore. They tend to keep sex from falling into the limelight in most of their books, but there's been a long-running joke of an adult "Sexxxalted" version/suppliment that could be made. For April Fools, they did it... sort of. They released a PDF "excerpt" of their not-really-existent book - free, or a dollar for the uncensored version. Cute idea (well, mature, but "cute" from a marketing standpoint). Now, in one of their official blog posts, it's been stated that they have have actually sold "nearly 1000 copies" and gone on to say "management's said that we get to make a real book if we sell 5,000+ copies." Doubly-cute, says I. Whether they're giving consumers what they want, or just milkin

Being in a small guild is a mixed blessing. On the up side, there's a sense of knowing all (or at least most) of the members. Support for one another is easy and usually good. Formalized rules of behavior and looting are usually unnecessary. Serious "drama" is much less likely with a smaller group of people. On the other hand, it exacerbates the issues of conflicting schedules, making it harder to get an appropriate group together to do things - in our case, we probably have enough people (though not always with characters of similar level) to run a dungeon together about every other day, a heroic once or maybe twice a week, and pretty much never a 10-man raid or more. It also makes class/role balance difficult, particularly when more than 90% of the characters are DPS classes. There are, at least, a couple of us who would like to see some of the 10-man content. We just barely got into Karazhan, Burning Crusade's "entry-level" raid, before Wrath of the

Ugh. Headache. Printer problems. Such a fun, fun morning. Edit: And for lunch, I got to drop much truck off to have a screw removed from a tire, and that patched up. @whee! Statuses... Statii? Guild Wars So we officially finished Prophecies (the core campaign) Sunday. The twist in the opposition wasn't surprising to me, since I'd looked up previously where I could get the Hundred Blades skill (back when I was playing a warrior). It was kind of neat to end up in a room with most major figures from the campaign congratulating us, but otherwise didn't seem that impressive. I expected more from what is apparently the last cut scene in the game than the party getting on a ship to leave the hellish island upon which they had fought the last few missions. At least they give you your choice of a pretty good selection of uniques for beating the campaign. So it looks like we'll be starting in on Factions , and with new characters to boot. I have to say, I was used to pl

Scattered roleplaying thoughts - always so much fun to deal with. But I've been pondering what's fun in RPGs. What happens that makes Campaign X an awesome experience to look forward to rather than just something to do every Saturday? In my thinking about it, I came upon some contradictory data in my own past, fun varying some depending on the group of players and such... One Shots Usually, I'm against single-shot games. This is especially true if character creation takes a long time (whether because of complex rules, or a dearth of ideas). Generally-speaking, I like to invest more in my character than can be done in one session. And yet, it can sometimes be quite fun, perhaps "liberating." We did a post-apocalyptic-future-western game a few weeks back with a new GM. The flow of the game was somewhat broken, and play stuttered, but it was fun. Why? Because those of us more experienced played with the theme, and because (in my opinion) we didn't take it t

I was so disappointed when I got up this morning and found the Blizzard website looking pretty much normal. Had they given up on their fun-loving attitude? A little more poking around showed the WoW Europe website had up some mount modifications , but that seemed lacking compared to past posts. Actually, it just took 'til later, but they still have showings for the day: World of Warcraft introduces PVP dance combat! , Starcraft 3 introduces shows how the Terrans can get their whole base working together , Diablo 3 previews the archivist class . I love how all the videos seem to end up with him being one-shotted, and some of the dialogue tree choices are great. They also livened things up a little on the forums by adding some RP-ness to everyone's posts . Guild Wars likes to do things both less and more spectacular - not quite as innovative on an idea level, but implimented in game as shown by Tashiro . And video using leaked Guild Wars 2 gameplay footage ... Really!