Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I’ve very recently been lucky to land myself a place in two separate Apocalypse World games, as a player in one and the MC of the other.

The first one takes place in the small holding of Sludge Pump, an age-old water treatment plant that is now a fortified fountain with some hard-ass raiders inside it’s concrete walls. I’m taking on the role of CJ, a tough sumbitch gunlugger with an old west code of gunslinger’s honor. The two other primary players on the scene are a hocus named Dust and an angel named Key. Dust leads a rabble of filthy Armageddon-obsessed psychopaths, while Key does her best to keep folks alive while she plays at pulling the strings of internal power. So far, it’s set up to be something of a violent go at the game’s themes.

The game I’m actually MCing has been named “Graceland of the Wasteland” by the players, and it fits very well. I’ll go ahead and post one of the player’s basic notes here: Read more

Updated: Found his youtube account! I’m certain this is him. The name is the same as from the comment, and the worlds he uses are identical. I can’t believe he’s 35, though. Can’t be a lick over 12.

Okay folks. This is my personal gaming blog. You don’t have to agree with everything or even anything I say, but I imagine that if you’re reading any of this, you are in some way, shape, or form interesting in my words, and a decent enough human being to enjoy rational discourse.

This morning I woke up to find a rather nerd-ragey comment in my approval queue from this guy:

I didn’t read most of it, because I don’t speak Troll, but it’s pretty obvious from the first and last sentences that A) I don’t personally know this person and B) he has no internet social skills. Last time I left a comment that bad was when I was 14, on a local Dial-Up BBS in my hometown, spewing my trap about what is and isn’t “punk rock” – yeah, I still face-palm the memory of that one.

His comment was on this post of mine about D&D 4E. Take note that I didn’t say anything at all scathing about the game system in that post, and only voiced why it isn’t working for me. I even compliment its mechanical tightness and speak lamentations of my failing faith

I’ve decided to post his comment here for all to see and discuss, instead of letting it hide at the bottom of that post. This is an example of a mega-nerd gone bad, and succumbing to the very same blind nerd rage that he accuses me of no less than four times.

Below the cut is his post. I’ve bold-highlighted my favorite parts. Yes, he actually said that I was “like Akira,” and he actually called me a “turd burglar.” He keeps comparing 4E to 3E like that matters to me, although I get the feeling those are the only games he’s ever played. The funny part is that I loathe 3rd Edition, and don’t find Pathfinder any better, so I have no idea why he thinks these comparisons are so crucial in making his point. I’d laugh this off as a joke, but it’s a bit too specific to be intentional satire.

Hey Kid: This isn’t a WoW forum. Go somewhere else.

I warn ya: major lack of social graces follow, and that’s about as nice as I can state it. Enjoy. Read more

This past Gamestorm, Jake Richmond and I won second place in a design contest. The contest was a “Junk Drawer Design War” – the organizer brought six identical bins filled with identical parts, most of which were salvaged from other board games. Each team of contestants had an hour (or two? i don’t remember) to create a game based on some or all of the included parts. Teams could trade with other teams for more parts.

Our game was called Laser Mummies.

The following rules are those we came up with on the fly during the design contest. So, without Further ado… Read more

I end this week with a poetic little idea I just had:

Heavy Metal Bands,
Using Blossoms are Falling:
Duel of Verse – Throw horns!

I’m slowly falling out of love (again) with Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. My love affair with this game has been a tumultuous one, I admit. When I first perused the leaked PDF copies pre-release, I practically loathed it. It did not seem the game for me. When I finally got a chance to actually play it, I was wowed by the tightness of its combat mechanics, the interoperability of the team roles, and the constant awareness of all your available options. In recent times I fought a brief addiction to the process of character-building, very similar to a previous addiction I had when first introduced to 3rd Edition’s drastic rules changes.

But now I feel that fling coming to an end (again?). The big kicker for me this time are the jolting unnatural transitions between the game’s core modes of play. In no other tabletop game do the words “Okay, everyone, roll for initiative” make me cringe so deeply. The switchover from Talk-Time to Fight-Time is so drastic, sudden, and severe that it breaks me out of my imaginative reverie and reminds me that yes, I really am only here to grind mobs for XP.

Consider these transitions as if they were part of a Japanese video RPG. These games have three basic modes. In Exploration Mode you move Your Guy around a typically disproportionately-represented dungeon, town, or world map. Sometimes you interact with the scenery when exclamation points appear above Your Guy’s head. Sometimes you talk to other NPCs in the game setting, most of which just repeat the same lines of dialog every time you select the talk command. Read more

After some awesome demo sessions yesterday at Free RPG Day, I’ve updated the Quad rules a wee bit:

• Removed “Substance” mechanic. Health and such have been incorporated into the core Tiks mechanic.
• Improved the Degrees of Success mechanics. Now based on matching dice instead of subtracting lows.
• Updated examples to illustrate new changes

The new rules can be downloaded here.

Thanks to everyone who played in my games yesterday. I’m glad “Mecha-Taliban” and “Operation Hot Goblin” were such fun sessions!

I got this little fella in the mail today from a good friend in Atlanta. Thanks, Kathryn. He now joins Darth Tater and the Meth Monkey to cause rampant mischief in my domicile.

(I totally meant to post this Friday, but when saving it I forgot to set the auto-post time-thinger and only realized it today. Might as well add a few more notes to it, then.)

I was going to mention this last week but got side-tracked: the Alliterated Games Forums are down for an indefinite period of time. No one was using them, and they were just collecting spammers and bots. If I bring them back up in the future, it will likely be as part of…

The new website I’m putting together! The current AG website isn’t all that easy to update without me breaking things, so I’m setting up a content management suite to handle the basics. My first order of business is to get the basic game pages set up and an official newsfeed. After that, having a forum again would be nice, but it isn’t a major priority. I also want to set up a cart application, so folks can buy things directly from my website, without me having to handle fulfillment through Paypal.

Alpha Protocol continues to rock my knickers. I am only halfway through the game, and I’m already itching for a second play-through. My current style is the suave, stealthy master of the silent kill. My second play will be all BigGuns McDoucheBaggins, the no-questions-asked bullet-loving commando. I am looking forward to see more of the drastic changes in story and play I’ve already sipped with the handful of checkpoint replays I’ve experimented with in the game so far.

One thing about it that I really dig – and wish other games would pick up ASAP – is the Social Mission. A lot of Alpha Protocol’s game play involves hands-on espionage, sneaking into secret complexes and doing all that cool stealth-action spy stuff that makes movies like The Bourne Identity awesome. But almost as many game missions are purely social: you arrive on scene, meet a guy, try and make a deal of some sort, and hopefully walk away with a new ally or piece of information. The clothes you wear in these missions frequently makes a difference, so you should remember to switch out of that tactical armor before heading off to have dinner with the syndicate honcho, otherwise you might piss her off with your incredible social faux pas. I love this, and aside from Mass Effect 2 – which only has a small handful of missions like these – I’ve not seen it implemented in other mission-based games.

This coming weekend will be Free RPG Day! Every year I get excited about this one, as my favorite local game store Guardian Games always has a big shindig to celebrate. This year I’ll be running the new teaser adventure Final Sanction for the upcoming Deathwatch RPG from Fantasy Flight Games – the newest RPG in the Warhammer 40K product line. I’m not well-versed in the W40K universe, but this one looks nice – it’s the equivalent to me of the Starcraft storyline: Space Marines in massive suits of power armor fighting wave upon wave of infectious buglike monster hordes.

I leave you with a video for a song that’s been stuck in my head all morning:

Bold statement, that, yes? And I mean every syllable of it. Let me explain.

Despite mostly-mediocre or slightly-above-average reviews, I have fully immersed myself in this game over the last few days, and plan to keep that up for the next few to follow. After completing the first two “chapters” of the game, I am convinced that like Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Alpha Protocol is one of the best representations I’ve ever seen of core tabletop RPG concepts being implemented in a digital gaming format.

So far, I’m in love with this game, and want to tell you all about all of its awesome components, right there alongside all of its annoying and downright awful ones. But this isn’t a review. Don’t get me started on how I feel that most graded online game reviews are totally bunk. I’ll save that for a later time. No, this is more of an essay.

When asking gamers to declare “what defines a game as a RPG,” you’ll get a good variety of answers. Most console gamers will be quick to define a RPG as a game with a skill-based advancement system, where the internal mechanics of your character improve as you invest rewarded experience points into them. Many tabletop gamers will tell you that yes, advancement is fun or even crucial, but the ability to make choices for their characters is also pretty requisite. Without choice, you’re really only playing a limited combat-based board game with progressing development mechanics. Without choice, you’re not playing a role. Read more