No party deaths

Last night we took the huge party of eight players from the town of Brindol to Rivenroar Castle. The party decided to head to two nearby towns to try to get more precise directions, which actually surprised me. I thought for sure they would bring the map of the Elsir Vale to the captive Hobgoblin and ask him to point out the location. If they had done that, I would have had them make a new Intimidate attempt, and if it was successful, he would have pointed them to the right area. Instead they came to the solution in a more clinical manner. It lets them avoid doing skill challenges to navigate the direct path through the woods, along the river. It lets them avoid running into wild animals (even though some would live in the mountains, I assume they would steer clear of people hiking the hills). It also took them a full two days, when the trip should be able to be done in 8 hours. With the second day ending in a huge fight that took most of the party's Daily powers, nearly half of all of their healing surges and left most of the party close to bloodied, not to mention about two hours of real time, we decided to take a breather after that, with the characters camping outside of the Castle ruins.

DMing after 2 sessions

So much for the idea of posting weekly about the experience of running a DnD campaign. Oh well. Tonight will be the third real session of my Scales of War group, so hopefully by now I've gotten enough of the hang of things to run it pretty smoothly. Last week things went pretty well. It started with the encounter with an Ogre and his two hobgoblin allies, and I added in two Blackblades to try to up the difficulty for the number of characters. So far, all eight players have shown up both times, and it seems like the turnout is going to be good again tonight. I re-worked 4 encounters to be an appropriate fit for a party of 8, so as long as we don't get too far into the dungeon this week, it should be tough battles.

If the party gets to the portal room then I'm really interested to see how this all goes. The first encounter: Bar Fight, was a huge number of enemies, but since so many were minions, and the party was so big the whole battle went by with barely an encounter power used. It was a good place for everyone to get used to their characters' powers, and gave us all a fairly good impression of how I would be at running battles. Overall, I feel like it went pretty well, but not great.

The second session flowed right after the first, with the Ogre encounter mentioned before. The combat went really smoothly - but a little too quickly. Between the characters rolling several critical hits and them using action points and even a few daily powers it was over much faster than I anticipated. I added two more monsters to battle, but they were coming around the back of the fight, and the fight was basically over before they got into it. We followed that up with some role-playing, where the party met with a Councilman who hired them to rescue the townsfolk. Since the party did well role-playing (and got some good rolls on Skill Challenges), they were also commissioned to retrieve some artifacts, with both of these quests being rewarded with their full monetary value. This took longer than I wanted it to, but I wanted to make sure the players had a chance to learn what they needed, so I kept dragging it on. After that, they interrogated a captive hobgoblin and learned that they need to go "North". We stopped around this point.

Tonight we begin the third part. If my players are reading this, then they should know that "North" is not going to cut it. If they press this guy and get a map of the area he can give the basic location. If they fail that challenge, or just don't try it, they will be running into a nature encounter. This was planned on being one bear, but for the larger party I'll be making it into two bears. After that, they have a bit of road to travel on, and then they will be at the entrance to Rivenroar. I'm guessing that the road and the bear will go by fast enough to let the players get into the catacombs, so I have the first room, and the three rooms off of it ready to go for tonight. I think the odds are good that one of the party members will not survive the night - right now I feel like eliminating a player if their character dies (with an option to fill-in later on).

DMing starts tonight

So tonight is supposed to be the big night where I first get a shot at killing a bunch of player characters. I'm not that crazed about killing PCs, really, but I don't mind doing it if it happens. I finished up with the input of the needed monsters from the Monster's Manual and pretty much all of the Player's Handbook, so I'm in good shape there. I decided to just add stuff I was interested in to the existing library, at least for now. As time goes on, I will probably resort to splitting out a Supplemental Module that contains both Monsters, Skills, Classes, Races from other sources, but the ones I really like I will incorporate into the Core versions that I have. As it stands now, I can see the Dragon rituals, the Star Pact powers, Warforged, Artificers and the non-named Scales of War monsters making it into my core. If I get ambitious, I'd love to allow playable Dopplegangers, Lycanthropes and some other monsters, but I think those would need some collaboration to get working right.

I've spent the last two nights fighting with Firewalls, trying to make sure that players will actually be able to connect to my campaign. It still didn't work last night, so I'm fairly well concerned about it tonight. It will be an adventure unto itself, no doubt. Hopefully, everyone can show up and get connected long enough to get characters rolled up, and if we're really lucky, maybe we can run a quick battle to make sure I know how these things work.

Up next week (assuming this week works!) - starting entering Siege at Bordrin's Watch into FG and updating the ruleset to 1.1.0 and the new parsers (now with rituals!). Fun fun.

Getting Ready to DM

I've been pretty quiet here for a while now, I'm just not that into recording my thoughts on the various games I've been playing: it takes too much time away from playing them! My biggest thing, game-wise, that I have going on now is getting ready to use Fantasy Grounds II to run a bunch of GWJers through Dungeon Magazine's Scales Of War Adventure Path. I've probably spent 15 hours on adding maps, story blocks, characters, monsters so far, and I'm not even done! I finally had a breakthrough in getting the parsers working, so I can start the painful data entry with tools, instead of trying to hand-do everything. Once I get a good part of the PHB and MM entered, I definitely want to get a bunch of stuff from the magazines entered, too; I just need to decide if I want a third (and fourth) Library, or a beefier set of two - I'm leaning towards two.

My plan is to actually keep some sort of a journal of what I did to DM this here, and update the Wiki with the story parts. It will be a lot of work, but I think it might be really fun, too.

Stack Pop

Bioshock is complete!

I really enjoyed the game, even if I felt there was a bit much after the pivotal moment. The game got almost shockingly easy in the later levels, it makes me wish (yet again) for more developers to put in a sliding scale for difficulty through the whole game. To this day I don't know any game that does that. Let me make your game go Easy mode for the first few levels, then make it more difficult when I want, then REALLY HARD or back to easy at any point. Great atmosphere the whole time, and just creepy enough to make me nervous, but not so much that I can't play. Up next? Either all-Gold in Mario Kart Wii or Overlord, maybe System Shock 2 (but that is terrifying!).

Objectivism in Bioshock

I have not read Ayn Rand, so my exposure to the notion of Objectivism is limited to other people's discussions of it with regard to Bioshock; the most excellent and engaging shooter from Ken (System Shock) Levine. In summary, I take Objectivism to be the notion of applying the purest following of Capitalist theory to one's life. Bioshock takes place in Rapture, an underwater city created by Andrew Ryan to be an objectivist utopia. [WARNING] I have not finished Bioshock yet, but I have had some story elements spoiled for me, and will be discussing those spoiled parts, and the parts of the game I have gotten to - parts that really impacted me when playing - in this post.[/WARNING]

The game opens on a plane crash in the ocean, from which you are apparently the only survivor. By a crazy coincidence, the flaming wreckage is near a small island that has a submarine that will transport you to Rapture. When you get there, things are in a state of utter disaster: people addicted to ADAM are running around, insane with their addiction, willing to kill for no provocation; and thumping around the city are huge, well armed and armored in scuba suits are "Big Daddies" protecting freaking "Little Sisters" who are harvesting the ADAM from corpses. As you explore, a radio voice named Atlas talks you around the place, and you draw the ire of Ryan, listening to tapes people have left behind to expose the story of the fall of Rapture. Ryan's dream is that people can accomplish whatever they are capable of, and no one has the right to slow them down or get in anyone's way. This is where the city started to get in trouble; as science made the breakthrough of genetic modification, but the first cost was to create these creepy girls, and the later costs were insanity. Being big believers in a free market, the citizens of Rapture made the market of ADAM very rich, with nothing to slow it down. Ryan seems to see the decline, but idealistically is unwilling to act against it. Yet at the same time, he has created a level of authoritarianism to keep his city intact, going as far as to execute criminals, and putting lethal security drones in place to kill trespassers and thieves.

I'm not clear on Atlas's reasons for hating Ryan initially, nor Ryan's reasons for wanting to capture and kill Atlas, but by helping Atlas, your character is put into Ryan's crosshairs. Sadly, the story element of your playing as Ryan's son was spoiled for me very early: before the Christmas break when I had planned on playing the game. The other major story element that was spoiled for me was the existence of the battle against Atlas at the end of the game. Considering your lineage, the Atlas battle makes sense, especially given the (unspoiled for me, anyway) murder of Atlas' family by Ryan, apparently in an effort to spite Atlas. At the point of the game that I'm at (hunting purified water and honey), I hate Andrew Ryan. The man sat back and watched as his creation, Rapture, fell apart around him, letting people suffer and die because the market willed it. I think of myself as a Libertarian who votes with the Democratic party because the civic freedoms of the party combined with the humanitarian leaning (or socialist leanings!) of the party are closer to what I want to see from humanity than the economic freedom at the cost of compassion and civic freedom that I see espoused by the Republican party. So far, Bioshock has soured me on the blind following of a free market that I would have liked to see when I was younger, and made me look at how important some level of control is. It's not often that a game makes me think about the shape of the world, let alone change my mind about a good way to run things.

May gaming summary.

There is a small chance of me posting more before the end of the month, but let's be realistic, this is the only post for May.

Gamefly sent me Call of Duty 4 for the 360. I did well enough on the tutorial mission for the game to recommend "Hardened" difficulty, but I went with "Normal" instead. Very glad I did that, since there were loads of sections on Normal that took me long enough to get past that I was almost ready to give up. I hear that was a common complaint about the game. I did start it back up on Veteran difficulty (looking for more Achievements), but that drove home the game's weaknesses: the AI scripting that is so typical of the Call of Duty series was driven home, the varying difficulty just meant that the AI shot faster, and took more bullets to die, while I took less. The game took some serious risks with the story, and I thought they paid out extremely well. So many of the moments in the game will go down as high points in recent year's gaming experiences, or at least some of the disturbing moments. The first mission involves killing sailors in their sleep for god's sake! The game was excellent, and anyone willing to be faced with a seriously adult game (no sex, but damn was it 'real' violence) should rent it without question. I don't think it is worth buying, but it is absolutely must-play.

Props for Gamefly on turnaround. I put CoD4 in the mail on a Tuesday, and got the replacement disc (Raving Rabbids 2) on Saturday. Not much time invested in RR2, but from what I've seen so far it feels like a bit of a turn-key game, lacking some of the joy of the first one, but all of the games are better tuned, and the "story" mode is put together in a much, much better way.

This month saw the release of Mario Kart Wii. I got it day one, of course. Reviews have been brutal towards it, and I'm getting pretty fed up with the bullshit bias. Two days after MKWii came out, was GTA4: probably the most hyped release in a year, and that includes Halo 3. There are arguments against Mario Kart, some design decision that I disagree with, and the usual Wii complaints, but it is a solid entry in the Mario Kart family. The frustrating part for me is the types of complaints people are spewing, especially considering the GTA4 reviews. Fawning over GTA's evolution, building upon previous versions, fixing some of the flaws of the older games, but maintaining the same base game play. Then Mario Kart deals with reviews that savage the game's adherence to the old formulas, compaints of only adding online play and motorcycles to the game. I don't understand people sometimes. The game is fun, they update the number of racers from 8 to 12, they put in motorcycles, they added air tricks, they removed snaking, they put in the best on-line on a Nintendo system so far. Nothing major, right? Oh, the game is very similar to the DS version of Mario Kart, like the biggest change is bikes and no snaking. Bikes are a significant change in game play. I'm not much of a fan so far, but they are cool. There is no more double dash action, which sucks. In a perfect world, I'd like to see bikes, karts and two-rider karts. The on-line works to a nearly XBox 360 level, without the voice. They even put in an ability to get the game-specific friend codes just through the Wii friend code interface. Big step in the right direction, Nintendo, keep it up.

In Burnout Paradise, I completed my final license, the Elite! Very satisfying, but it started to get tough at the end. I needed half a million points on three different Stunt Runs, which in theory is easy, since I nailed a 2.5 million stunt run. No way! it took me ages to pull those off. Good times, though, now I just hope to complete two sections of online challenges to get the last car unlocked, and hope to do it before they release the new set of challenges. Online for this game is going to explode with the new patch: Stunt Run, Marked Man, Road Rage and timed challenges.... I'm so psyched! I love that game.

I grabbed a bunch of Rock Band songs over the course of the month, missed the one McDonald's promotional song I wanted, but barely played Rock Band at all. When I finally booted it up, the number of songs I had that I had never played was crazy! I still have tons of fun playing that game, but it can be hard to pull out all of the fake plastic toys to rock out when it has such a high wake-the-family score.

I hope to either add more to this post, or toss in another one to close out the month, maybe with some Bioshock chit-chat. Anyway, see ya.