Redwolf's Journal (continued)

 Last night finished out the main campaign in one D&D game. The Storm King is returned to his throne, the manipulating dragon attempting to unseat him is slain, and the heroes reached 11th level, I believe. Overall, I enjoyed the experience as a social game thing, even if online. The game itself I may be a little more critical of (woo, pessimism!). Technically, we had some issues here and there, bouncing between Discord and Roll20 before settling on the latter. Two of the players are in the same place, which complicates the "cleanness" of headset use and led to some poor audio and feedback at times. And the DM frequently complained about wrangling things in Roll20's interface, especially lighting. Coupled with a DM who didn't quite have the improvisational confidence to spin off from the published campaign much, I had the feeling the game wasn't all it could have been. I think characters were a bit more than their combat capabilities, but only a bit. I would h...

Hollow Knight is a good game. And I like it. It's a 2D action-platformer that performs well. It's got a certain stylistic charm mingled with the gothic darkness of a "Soulsborne" game. I wish there was a bit more interactivity and current story largely because the atmosphere and background lore seems interesting. It's also significantly larger than I expected. But, I'm probably not going to finish it. For all the good, of which there is a lot, the amount of backtracking has worn on me and I find repeating certain fights and jumping sections to be a bit above my frustration threshold. These are things that may not bother everyone equally. I encountered a number of trying boss fights and struggled through from being overwhelmed to learning and overcoming. I think what finally got me was the Traitor Lord fight. I consciously understand his move set, but I wasn't able to pull things together. It doesn't help that many of his attacks deal two hits of damag...

Our Monday night remote D&D game has been a little on the formulaic side. The DM is using an official campaign that seems to throw out a lot of small hooks for players to follow, but the connecting storyline seems to be threaded through the distant background (so far). It's also spread over so much of the Sword Coast it's arguably a bit silly. When someone asks you to travel for several weeks to deliver a message, for example, it kind of begs the question "why would we do that?" I sound critical, but it's been fun and a little bit liberating in a sense to do what feels like "classic" adventuring compared to other games in recent memory. Last night, we actually had what I would consider one of our first major bits of inter-party RP. It proved hilarious. As we've reached level 6, our party wizard (a necromancer ) seems to have decided it was time to discuss his vocation with the others. He went around one-on-one to the other party members with s...