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I’ll post this actual links this weekend, starting at midnight on Friday.

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.

Most of your examples are trite to say the least. For starters, video games are the great imitator. Comparing 4E to a video game (which it shares far LESS mechanics with video games than all previous versions) is like saying – Tennis is a Video Game just because of the Nintendo Wi. It’s beyond stupid. Even a stupid person doesn’t fall into such slogans. It’s indicative of the worst traits we see in gamers: arrogance and unfounded nerd rage.

TO make mattes worse, your downright pathetic examples have NOTHING to do with the system. Let’s see:
“Battle Mode in JRPGS and Combat Encounters in D&D 4E are virtually identical: immutable rules, everyone waiting their turn to act, numerically-set battle order sequences (initiative), repetitive animations (a limited array of prescribed actions), static positioning (characters just standing face-to-face whacking at each other). Sure D&D gives you some nifty, colorful, and mechanically diverse options, but when you break them down they are just combinations of hit point damage and status effects – and most “big bads” have status resistances so goddamned high that they might as well be immune (like every boss in ever JRPG ever).”
You’re beyond stupid. The core of 4E is an exceptions based system. Even a stupid person would know that the bulk of 4E is built on exceptions not on immutable rules. But then again you’re in unfounded Nerd Rage mode. If I were to make lame examples I’d say you’re like Akira!

The “limited array of battle actions” has gone off the deep end of stupidity. Every edition in existence provides a “limited array of battle actions” while 3E provided less than 4E. It’s impossible to tell the diffence between Kobolds and Goblins in 3E. They have one action which is a basic attack. That’s it. Full Round actions are the same as Standard Actions at lower level. You’ve generalized so much your entire point has become irrelevant

Charactes “Just standing Face to Face” have nothing to do with 4E. Once again that’s 3E because of the full round action and plethora of Opportunity Attacks. In 4E characters starting at level 1 are constantly moving. They spend Action Points to get multiple actions in a single round. Rangers and Rogues shift though battle stabbing and shooting. All at level 1. In 3E or Mathfinder characters will not do this at level 11, even though the math has fallen apart by then.

Once again your focus on “status immunities” is wrong when applied to 4E. 4E ended the “blanket immunities” list for “templates.” BTW, if you knew anything about computer programs, templates are closer to the was programs are written to process and load more quickly. However, templates in a Pencil and Paper game are unbearably slow. They add a host of useless shit (much like your blog) to the page space. A CR22 monster in 3E will have Cure Minor Wounds which cures 1hp. Why? Because it’s designed like a video game, not a Pencil and Paper game. A creature with 400+hp has an ability to heal 1hp because everything must be loaded into the page space. But you’re beyond stupid and cannot make this connection. Nor can you understand that at a minimum standard computers greatest advantage is real-time, where PnP is not. That’s why 4E uses Encounter as a time instead of 5 rounds. Using rounds simulates real-time and results in bean-counting – what video games do. But encou
nter time allows players and DMs to Roleplay – something you either hate or simply do not understand.

Here’s another gem:
“Like in JRPGs, the transitions between these modes in D&D 4E are so severe and obvious that they grate on me. Every time a GM tells me to Roll for Initiative, I shudder and snap out of the moment I was just in. Whenever combat pauses to allow the Big Bad his five-minute-long speech, the sickness grows inside me. When the GM narrates that the boss gets away despite us pumping his body with more bullets than exist in the state of Texas, just because he wants the should-be-dead villain to return later, I die a little inside.”

This is a fine example of unfounded Nerd Rage. Rolling initiative has been around since before you were born. Long Speeches are NOT part of the game mechanic. No where does the system FORCE DMs to give long speeches. In fact, if you’ve DMed or played any 3E modules (Such as Paizo’s Shackled City. Yes Paizo! The maker of your beloved Mathfinder.) you’d know that it was 3E modules that brought this about, not 4E mechanics. But I wouldn’t expect that from a hatemongering Nerd. You’ve gone so far off the deep end of stupidity this is beyond your capacity.

Finally, one last point – learn to read a fucking book!
“Cutscene Mode, then, equals the well-known Rule Zero.”

There is no Rule Zero in 4E. Read the DMG and you’ll find that the main focus of the book is to unfuck people like you who are all fucked up. Rule Zero was alive and well in 3E, not 4E. Read the DMG and there is absolutely no support for Rule Zero. There are “Three simple rules” but no Rule Zero. Everything you think you know is based on two things:
1)Jack
2)Shit

Now have fun being a turd burglar.

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:

First off, I want to let everyone know that the Cannibal Contagion pre-orders were put in the mail yesterday, as well as the special prize copies won during the GameStorm events. Expect them hopefully before the end of the week.

Second Update: I plan on having a new website up on the day after Zombie Day (see below). This new site will be a portal for Alliterated Games, leading to the forum, this blog, and pages on the various games.

Third Update: If you weren’t already aware, you should all attend “May of the Dead” Zombie Day at Guardian Games, on May 30th. It’s an all-day 11 AM to 10 PM (and later, for the adults and night owls) event. Events include: Two planned demos for my own newly-published survival RPG Cannibal Contagion, two separate 8-player prize tournaments of Left 4 Dead on the XBOX 360 (and all-day general playing of Left 4 Dead as well), two demos of the now out-of-print exclusive board game Last Night on Earth, some full-expansion tournaments of Zombies!!! the Board Game, six select zombie movies playing non-stop on the projector screen, a zombies-themed recurring D&D campaign, a zombies-themed demo scenario for the RPGA, some prize rounds of Zombie Flux, and multiple on-site zombie makeup artists – if you get made up as a zombie, you get a store-wide discount at the store for the day, and you are eligible for special prizes too!

I’m giving away free PDF copies of Cannibal Contagion to anyone who players in the demo sessions, as well. You should all come. It will be a grand affair indeed!

I’ll likely post an actual flier in the next week. But for now, mark your calendars, and come join the contagious fun.

And a surprise fourth update! I promise, I am still working on those GameStorm game reports. Life got unexpectedly chaotic these past few weeks, so suffice it to say I’ve been very distracted with other issues. The drafts grow a little every week, though, and I’ll be posting them when they’re perfect.

Head on over, register, and say hello!

While backing up the data from various private wikis I’d been using to work on my own game design, I ran across the prototypes of both the “BMF” core LARP rules system and the 2nd Edition Streetwise LARP rules from which the former were derived. These triggered long-dormant chunks of memory regarding plans and design goals, and I already can see ways to kickstart them back onto their journey to exist and become tangible things. It’s time to convert them all into Google Docs. Perhaps a near-future project will involve me finally getting the Streetwise LARP into print, possibly even for free…

Deleting all this data and cleaning up my server has worked as a sort of “sounding of the death knell” for a prior chapter of my life. It’s one more vestigial limb of my East Coast existence that I’ve now mostly managed to amputate. The Reality Merchants had some good times, and we met some amazing people through our events – hell, for a while, I was actually engaged to a woman I met in a, ahem, fairly “controversial” event that we organized. From all my time in Atlanta, I can honestly say that I have more wild and crazy memories from the Reality Merchants crew than from any other source or venue, however great they may have been.

My life has been forever marked by those people, and I plan on keeping those galleries online and operational for as long as I possibly can.

Next in the other of business: setting up a cart & commerce system on this site. Why? For pre-orders, silly…

I’ve been updating a crap-ton of stuff for Cannibal Contagion. I’m gonna wait a few more weeks before I post the new playtest update, as there are so many changes and additions that I think it deserves a bigger all-encompassing release. The Contagion and NPC rules have been drastically re-written, I’ve added a big mess o’ sample bad guys, and I’ve made allies easier to incorporate into the flow of the game. Slowly but surely, the game is falling into the perfect flow, and I’m very proud.

I’m totally in love with the stuff that Vero and Leo have been sending me. Here’s a sneak peek at a piece from the core rules, intended to introduce the section of the rules for running and arranging the game:

Fabulous! Every new pic they send me makes me all the more excited. So far, with spacers for full-page art, the game is quickly approaching my original mark of 125 pages, and there’s a small chance it might even be more.