One good thing I can say about moving; you always find interesting stuff!
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
A Response to Zak Sabbath
A while back Zak over at PD&DWPS posted this questionnaire. I decided it would be fun to fill out. If you were hoping for a flame war, too bad!
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
I Hit It With My Axe
NOTE: Mature content. Deal with it.
How have I not heard about this? Combining D&D with adult film actors should have caused the internet to implode, at the very least. Instead here I am stumbling across this by accident a year after the fact.
With the tag line and eponymous blog "Playing D&D with Porn Stars", one's mind starts to summon up images, but
don't get too excited, folks. It's not quite what you think... and that's one of the things I like about it!
How have I not heard about this? Combining D&D with adult film actors should have caused the internet to implode, at the very least. Instead here I am stumbling across this by accident a year after the fact.
With the tag line and eponymous blog "Playing D&D with Porn Stars", one's mind starts to summon up images, but
don't get too excited, folks. It's not quite what you think... and that's one of the things I like about it!
Monday, January 9, 2012
2011: The Year of No Gaming
The holidays are done, the gift-wrap has been shoveled into the garbage, and a new year has begun. Taking a look back on the previous year, it struck me how little I accomplished when it came to my nerdly career. My players logged a record low number of games this year; five.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Converting your Mega-Dungeon to Pathfinder
The Mega-Dungeon is the Moby Dick of dungeons, an unseemly gobstopper of woe
Greyhawk Ruins... Castle Whiterock... Rappan Athuk... World's Largest Dungeon...
Their names are legendary and their numbers are NOT Legion. Mega-dungeons are a rare breed in the world of RPGs. Bridging the organizational gap between the "boxed campaign setting" and the "linked adventure series", the mega-dungeon is a beast unlike any other. Hordes of monsters, sprawling maps, excessively harsh pitfalls and often nearly incomprehensible plots... if any!
Greyhawk Ruins... Castle Whiterock... Rappan Athuk... World's Largest Dungeon...
Their names are legendary and their numbers are NOT Legion. Mega-dungeons are a rare breed in the world of RPGs. Bridging the organizational gap between the "boxed campaign setting" and the "linked adventure series", the mega-dungeon is a beast unlike any other. Hordes of monsters, sprawling maps, excessively harsh pitfalls and often nearly incomprehensible plots... if any!
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Dungeon Siege III Review
While DS3 isn't really a true RPG, here's my 12 hour review (according to Steam I've spent that long playing DS III).
Visuals
To give credit where credit is due, while the visuals in this game are not groundbreaking in any way, they are very pretty. There is no lack of eye candy as you toodle aimlessly along following little glowing balls of light. Oh and cleavage. Lots of cleavage. Where's the Hot Coffee Mod when you need it?
The game uses an over-the-shoulder parallax view similar to that in other games, like Neverwinter Nights or World of Warcraft. This is the only option available, and while it gives you the choice between zooming in and out, you are still locked into one camera angle, limiting your ability to see or interact with things that aren't directly in front of you.
This viewpoint also inhibits you. When your character is running along a narrow mountain path or a dungeon corridor, for example, you may spend a great deal of time looking in your character's ear as the camera can't pass through solid objects like mountain walls. This can make tight quarters combat extremely frustrating as you waste time trying to finagle the camera around to a point where you can at least see who's killing you.
Movement
Getting around is a pain. You have two ways of moving your character; AWSD keys (where W is forward or ahead of your character's front facing) or by right-clicking and holding a spot on the screen. There is no run or jump, so you are basically trotting along at the same speed throughout the game. Yawn...
Additionally, there is no macro-map that will allow you to traverse large areas which you have already explored or cleared. Instead there are Causeways; inter-dimensional gates that allow you to travel between two set locations and - as far as I can tell - only at specific times.
There is a mini-map, which I find nearly useless for navigation. It's tiny, it toggles between two miniscule zoom modes, and is populated only with a few symbols for your character, companion and the nearest save point.
Combat
The combat in this game is pretty off. It was definitely crafted with console systems in mind. you can't select anything on the screen with the mouse, you have to somehow magically get your character to "notice" a particular enemy (a compass displays beneath the model's feet) and hope that it doesn't back out of range before you get an attack off.
And the enemies do just that. They will jump in and then back out while your character whacks away at the empty air. On top of this the characters' combat moves are scripted, so you are sometimes stuck executing the same two moves even though you haven't hit the key twice (or so it seems to me).
Some of these monsters can outrun you as well. This kind of monster is particularly dangerous as they can not only "steal" your attacks and move out of range, they serve as distraction units so that your wasted attacks can't be directed to nearby enemies.
There's another problem with monsters; some of the leaders can heal themselves. I've gone round and round with Palefang and even at 9th level I was unable to kill it: whack whack whack, run away and heal, then run back in and whack whack for over an hour while it's life total replenished itself. I am sorry, but this is stupid. This is a design flaw that effectively breaks the game for me. Infinitely recurring healing is a poor feature to put into a game villain.
Dialog
Remember Deus Ex 2? Remember those long conversations that you couldn't break out of until you arrived at the end of the tedious dialog tree? Well if that's your cup of tea then you're in luck. The game cuts jarringly from it's over-the-shoulder perspective to a face-to-face perspective, usually with some bad-CGI female with an impossibly huge rack.
There appear to be some camera problems with this interface too, as there are the occassional bizarre angles where you seem to be peering at the conversation through someone's armpit, or a secret camera.
At this point you proceed down the well-worn path of picking frequently useless dialog options (rarely you are presented with a response that will garner you greater influence with whomever your companion of the moment might be) which all lead to the same place: another sub-quest.
I don't get the impression at all that my selections of dialog have any influence on the course of the game, except for the fact that winning influence with a companion lets them blab on about how difficult and complicated their lives are. There's nothing pivotal here, just another mini-game within the game that adds more lines to your list of chores.
Oh and you really are locked into these dialogs. You can't escape out of them or break away until whomever you were talking to exits your field of vision and you are kicked back out to the bird's eye view, whereupon whomever you were talking to... has mysteriously disappeared! "Gee Martha, who was that masked man?"
"A friend, Clyde, just a friend..."
Character Building and Leveling
DSIII has an unusal leveling process. After a combat in which your character leveled up you are taken - after an inexplicably long pause during which you will run around waiting for the character screen to open - to a series of windows where you select from a variety of abilities and traits.
These abilities and traits grow slowly, and it's not always easy to see what impact they have on your character. Since I purchased DSIII through Steam I didn't get the manual that (I hope) comes with the boxed game.
Loot
If you've played previous versions of Dungeon Siege, you know that this game is all about chaotic mob combats and dropped loot! It's what makes life good! That hasn't changed here; you will continue to run around mopping up little piles of gold coins and more magic items than you ever dreamed existed.
Some of them you can even use.
The Verdict
Overall I'm not very impressed with Dungeon Siege 3. It doesn't compare favorably to it's predecessors. In fact I had more fun playing Dungeon Siege 1 in the run-up to this review than I did playing it's shinier, brand new cousin.
In a nutshell, this game gave me the impression that it was developed by 3 or 4 different groups of programmers without any form of contact between them. "OK we'll work on the console combat controls, group B will work on the leveling mechanics, group C will work on movement, and that guy in the back will handle dialog and story."
What I mean by this is there seems to be no correlation between the different elements of the game. While the whole thing works, it's far from seamless, and in RPGs the devil is always in the details. So the whole thing gives the impression at first of a series of mini-games all strung together.
There are too many problems with the game; it's jarring jumps from dialog to combat, it's inexplicable array of skills, abilities, traits and features which lack documentation, and it's fatally clumsy combat all serve to either limit your options or to make them incomprehensible. If the intention of Square Enix and Obsidian were to hit this one out of the park, they must have tried it using the directionless combat mechanic that hobbles gameplay in DS III.
Visuals
To give credit where credit is due, while the visuals in this game are not groundbreaking in any way, they are very pretty. There is no lack of eye candy as you toodle aimlessly along following little glowing balls of light. Oh and cleavage. Lots of cleavage. Where's the Hot Coffee Mod when you need it?
The game uses an over-the-shoulder parallax view similar to that in other games, like Neverwinter Nights or World of Warcraft. This is the only option available, and while it gives you the choice between zooming in and out, you are still locked into one camera angle, limiting your ability to see or interact with things that aren't directly in front of you.
This viewpoint also inhibits you. When your character is running along a narrow mountain path or a dungeon corridor, for example, you may spend a great deal of time looking in your character's ear as the camera can't pass through solid objects like mountain walls. This can make tight quarters combat extremely frustrating as you waste time trying to finagle the camera around to a point where you can at least see who's killing you.
Movement
Getting around is a pain. You have two ways of moving your character; AWSD keys (where W is forward or ahead of your character's front facing) or by right-clicking and holding a spot on the screen. There is no run or jump, so you are basically trotting along at the same speed throughout the game. Yawn...
Additionally, there is no macro-map that will allow you to traverse large areas which you have already explored or cleared. Instead there are Causeways; inter-dimensional gates that allow you to travel between two set locations and - as far as I can tell - only at specific times.
There is a mini-map, which I find nearly useless for navigation. It's tiny, it toggles between two miniscule zoom modes, and is populated only with a few symbols for your character, companion and the nearest save point.
Combat
The combat in this game is pretty off. It was definitely crafted with console systems in mind. you can't select anything on the screen with the mouse, you have to somehow magically get your character to "notice" a particular enemy (a compass displays beneath the model's feet) and hope that it doesn't back out of range before you get an attack off.
And the enemies do just that. They will jump in and then back out while your character whacks away at the empty air. On top of this the characters' combat moves are scripted, so you are sometimes stuck executing the same two moves even though you haven't hit the key twice (or so it seems to me).
Some of these monsters can outrun you as well. This kind of monster is particularly dangerous as they can not only "steal" your attacks and move out of range, they serve as distraction units so that your wasted attacks can't be directed to nearby enemies.
There's another problem with monsters; some of the leaders can heal themselves. I've gone round and round with Palefang and even at 9th level I was unable to kill it: whack whack whack, run away and heal, then run back in and whack whack for over an hour while it's life total replenished itself. I am sorry, but this is stupid. This is a design flaw that effectively breaks the game for me. Infinitely recurring healing is a poor feature to put into a game villain.
Dialog
Remember Deus Ex 2? Remember those long conversations that you couldn't break out of until you arrived at the end of the tedious dialog tree? Well if that's your cup of tea then you're in luck. The game cuts jarringly from it's over-the-shoulder perspective to a face-to-face perspective, usually with some bad-CGI female with an impossibly huge rack.
There appear to be some camera problems with this interface too, as there are the occassional bizarre angles where you seem to be peering at the conversation through someone's armpit, or a secret camera.
At this point you proceed down the well-worn path of picking frequently useless dialog options (rarely you are presented with a response that will garner you greater influence with whomever your companion of the moment might be) which all lead to the same place: another sub-quest.
I don't get the impression at all that my selections of dialog have any influence on the course of the game, except for the fact that winning influence with a companion lets them blab on about how difficult and complicated their lives are. There's nothing pivotal here, just another mini-game within the game that adds more lines to your list of chores.
Oh and you really are locked into these dialogs. You can't escape out of them or break away until whomever you were talking to exits your field of vision and you are kicked back out to the bird's eye view, whereupon whomever you were talking to... has mysteriously disappeared! "Gee Martha, who was that masked man?"
"A friend, Clyde, just a friend..."
Character Building and Leveling
DSIII has an unusal leveling process. After a combat in which your character leveled up you are taken - after an inexplicably long pause during which you will run around waiting for the character screen to open - to a series of windows where you select from a variety of abilities and traits.
These abilities and traits grow slowly, and it's not always easy to see what impact they have on your character. Since I purchased DSIII through Steam I didn't get the manual that (I hope) comes with the boxed game.
Loot
If you've played previous versions of Dungeon Siege, you know that this game is all about chaotic mob combats and dropped loot! It's what makes life good! That hasn't changed here; you will continue to run around mopping up little piles of gold coins and more magic items than you ever dreamed existed.
Some of them you can even use.
The Verdict
Overall I'm not very impressed with Dungeon Siege 3. It doesn't compare favorably to it's predecessors. In fact I had more fun playing Dungeon Siege 1 in the run-up to this review than I did playing it's shinier, brand new cousin.
In a nutshell, this game gave me the impression that it was developed by 3 or 4 different groups of programmers without any form of contact between them. "OK we'll work on the console combat controls, group B will work on the leveling mechanics, group C will work on movement, and that guy in the back will handle dialog and story."
What I mean by this is there seems to be no correlation between the different elements of the game. While the whole thing works, it's far from seamless, and in RPGs the devil is always in the details. So the whole thing gives the impression at first of a series of mini-games all strung together.
There are too many problems with the game; it's jarring jumps from dialog to combat, it's inexplicable array of skills, abilities, traits and features which lack documentation, and it's fatally clumsy combat all serve to either limit your options or to make them incomprehensible. If the intention of Square Enix and Obsidian were to hit this one out of the park, they must have tried it using the directionless combat mechanic that hobbles gameplay in DS III.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Happy Birthday Gene Wolfe!
It has come to my attention that today, May 7th, 2011, is the 80th birthday of Mr. Gene Wolfe. Mr. Wolfe is one of the finest American writers of all time, from the four-part Book of the New Sun to The Knight and The Wizard, from his short story anthologies to his quirky and unsettling novellas.
Mr. Wolfe will tell you things you do not want to hear. He will tell them to you in a friendly voice, and he will tell them to you in such a way that you do not fully understand just what it is you have been told until he is done. By that time, of course, it is far too late, and you will find yourself thoroughly trapped. You were warned!
(Notice! No jump here! Why? Because this is the most important thing you will ever read in your life. Really!)
If you are not familiar with Mr. Wolfe's work, then let me offer at once my sincerest condolences and state my utter and total envy. My condolences because your life up to this point has been a dreary, bland and facile existence lacking in any redeeming quality whatsoever. My envy because you exist in a state of pristine ignorance, like a small child who has never tasted chocolate, and a wide world of awe now awaits you.
My first contact with Mr. Wolfe's work was The Shadow of the Torturer (the first volume of his signature work, the Book of the New Sun), which I picked up from a used bookstore when I was in high school. After lumbering through the story to its finish, I was confused. I was not sure just what I'd been reading up to that point. I knew that I liked it... sort of. The story was intriguing, disturbing and exhilarating all at once, yet still carried a weight of solemnity to it.
I purchased the remaining 3 volumes of the Book of the New Sun and tore through them all, and upon completing the last word of the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last page in the last book... I was no less confused.
A year or so passed before I returned to the series for a re-reading (this is what we did in the era before TiVo and YouTube, we read things and then, when we ran out of things to read, we re-read them). Upon finishing the series a second time I felt somewhat wiser, but still confused.
In the ensuing two decades I have re-read the Book of the New Sun no less than 4 times, and each time I find something new, some new nuance or perspective, some cleverly revealed unspoken truth or hidden meaning buried within the chronicle of Severian's travels. The same is true of most of Mr. Wolfe's work; I find more value upon each re-reading. This is my testament and my promise.
Proceed therefore posthaste to your local library, bookstore or other vendor of literary thingamajigs - virtual or otherwise - and procure at once any or all of the marvelous tomes Mr. Wolfe has penned over the last six decades. They will change your life.
Remember, you were warned.
Mr. Wolfe will tell you things you do not want to hear. He will tell them to you in a friendly voice, and he will tell them to you in such a way that you do not fully understand just what it is you have been told until he is done. By that time, of course, it is far too late, and you will find yourself thoroughly trapped. You were warned!
(Notice! No jump here! Why? Because this is the most important thing you will ever read in your life. Really!)
If you are not familiar with Mr. Wolfe's work, then let me offer at once my sincerest condolences and state my utter and total envy. My condolences because your life up to this point has been a dreary, bland and facile existence lacking in any redeeming quality whatsoever. My envy because you exist in a state of pristine ignorance, like a small child who has never tasted chocolate, and a wide world of awe now awaits you.
My first contact with Mr. Wolfe's work was The Shadow of the Torturer (the first volume of his signature work, the Book of the New Sun), which I picked up from a used bookstore when I was in high school. After lumbering through the story to its finish, I was confused. I was not sure just what I'd been reading up to that point. I knew that I liked it... sort of. The story was intriguing, disturbing and exhilarating all at once, yet still carried a weight of solemnity to it.
I purchased the remaining 3 volumes of the Book of the New Sun and tore through them all, and upon completing the last word of the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last page in the last book... I was no less confused.
A year or so passed before I returned to the series for a re-reading (this is what we did in the era before TiVo and YouTube, we read things and then, when we ran out of things to read, we re-read them). Upon finishing the series a second time I felt somewhat wiser, but still confused.
In the ensuing two decades I have re-read the Book of the New Sun no less than 4 times, and each time I find something new, some new nuance or perspective, some cleverly revealed unspoken truth or hidden meaning buried within the chronicle of Severian's travels. The same is true of most of Mr. Wolfe's work; I find more value upon each re-reading. This is my testament and my promise.
Proceed therefore posthaste to your local library, bookstore or other vendor of literary thingamajigs - virtual or otherwise - and procure at once any or all of the marvelous tomes Mr. Wolfe has penned over the last six decades. They will change your life.
Remember, you were warned.
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