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Old School meets New School

I’ve recently started playing a D&D 4e campaign. We’re going to be playing online using a web based tabletop in combination with Google+ Hangouts. Old school pen & paper gaming meets new school online gaming.

We played through a test encounter last week and I have to admit that the combination of the bare bones tabletop provided by the fine folks at Roll20.net with the video chat of the hangout made it feel like we were all sitting around a big table throwing dice. The Roll20 site basically provides you the tabletop map and a dice roller. It’s up to the players and GM to figure out what they need to roll and when so everyone has their character sheets and the books handy just like you do around a physical table.

It took us about 3 hours to get through a single encounter but a lot of that was figuring out the software and learning our new characters. I figure we’ll get faster over time but remembering some of my past pen & paper experiences it wasn’t unusual for us to only get through a single encounter in a session then so maybe not.

Pakts Dabagars - Gnome Warlock
Pakts Dabagars – Gnome Warlock

Still, I’m looking forward to getting into the adventure. I’ve written a backstory for my character – that’s his picture there in the post. Instead of adding it as a post here I think I’m going to create a page for it and just post it there. Maybe I’ll add a sub-domain with a blog to journal all of his adventures if I have the time.

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Miscellaneous Madness Theoretical Thoughts

Weekend – Open Beta Version

Lately I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed in EQ2. There are so many different things I want to do that I find myself paralyzed by choice.

This weekend I decided that what I needed was a change of scenery and since both Champions Online and Fallen Earth had open “betas” I figured I’d give them look. I plan on writing a more detailed post on each of them later but here’s my one line review.

Champions: City of Heroes 2.0 or maybe CoX evolved and that’s not a bad thing.

Fallen Earth: The love child of Fallout 3 and Eve with a crafting system that I find very compelling.

More later – the iPhone is ok for short posts but not so much for longer writing.

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Unknown Ululations

Learn 2 Play!

Yesterday in my Twitter feed (@sisca if you want to follow me) and I saw this from @spouseaggro:

Silly Far-Stretched Comparison of the Week: “..Free Realms looks and feels like an overly cutesy, yet still grindy, version of WoW..”

To be clear this was a quote from some blogger and not the opinion of the fine folks over at Spouse Aggro

That got me thinking and then this morning I was reading through the comments over on Broken Toys post about the game and it kind of congealed.

For all of you out there that are trying to compare this to WoW – or whatever your favorite flavor of the month is – I just have one thing to say…

LEARN 2 PLAY!

You know like you did when you were a kid.

No, really. Put your achiever, must get to max level and get the uber gear mindset back on the shelf and just go out and learn how to play again.

I’ve got 2 young nieces, 7 & 9, their parents don’t really like them watching TV and they tend to regulate how much time and what they can do on the computer. They don’t seem to mind that much though because they have more dolls and horses and such than you can shake a stick at. They even have a small tent setup in an otherwise unusable area of their house that is filled with these dolls and such that they call their cloud castle. They spend hours playing together, making up stories or acting out stories from their books. They also spend time competing, racing each other, playing soccer etc.

I can see them playing Free Realms now and jumping from job to job, game to game, achiever to explorer to socializer.

If you really think that this is just a “overly cutesy, yet still grindy, version of WoW” then this game is not for you! This game is only for the truly hardcore PLAYer’s that really understand how to go into a world and make it their own and to do so for nothing more than the FUN of it.

Categories
Unknown Ululations

Bountiful Harvest

Just after Thanksgiving I decided that my next EQ2 goal was to get Sisca and Acsis to 75. This would open up almost all of the game to me and put 80 well within reach. Last weekend Sisca, Acsis and Lore all managed to hit the target as well as ding their 100th AA. So, Sunday evening I was casting about for something new to focus on and for some strange reason I decided that I just had to start in on the quest for the Cloak of the Harvesters.

I knew that this was a long quest that involved harvesting in every tier but I actually enjoy harvesting and, being 75, only tier 8 would have me harvesting in zones with agro mobs. How hard can it be, right?

It started off simply enough, go to any tier 1 zone and bring me back 10 or so of multiple items from the various nodes. This took me longer than I thought it would mainly because shrubs were almost non-existent – right, who’d a thunk it since it wasn’t that long ago that you could zone into T1 or T2 and find nothing but shrubs up. Next up was T2, I had Acsis port us over to Antonica and we were able to complete everything but the fishing without even getting out of site of the spires.

Next up T3 and this is where it started to get complicated. He wanted you to harvest equal quantities of the same items from both Thundering Steppes and Nek Forest. TS was no big deal, I know several good harvesting spots for all of the various nodes there but Nek has never been one of my favorite zones so I haven’t spent a ton of time there. Still I managed to find an area that I could run back and forth through and get most of the harvests, except for dens. T4 was a repeat of T3 except he wanted stuff from Zek and Enchanted Lands. Again, easy enough and, being 75, I went deeper in to both zones to leave the easier to get to harvest for the lower levels.

For T5 it was off to Rivervale and Feerot. Much like Nek Forest, Feerot has never been one of my favorite zones so I decided to put that off. I know Rivervale, I’ve harvested in Rivervale even when it was still green, this should be a snap. Two hours later I was finished with everything except DENS. In that entire time I had seen maybe 10 dens tops and you didn’t just need 20 or so of the pelts but also 20 or so of EACH type of meat from the dens. Frustrated, I gave it up for the night and started thinking about finding something else to focus on.

Categories
Miscellaneous Madness

Danger…Fallout!

This week is my birthday and Lore got me the collectors edition of Fallout 3. I still consider the original 2 some of the best games ever and I have high hopes that this one will carry on that tradition.

Last night I was torn between attempting the newest D.I.R.T.Y. quests and playing Fallout…Fallout won and I have to say that so far it’s done a pretty good job of bringing the classic series into the modern world.

The first half an hour or so was basically a combination tutorial/character creation session which was pretty cool but I’m hoping there is a way to bypass parts of that since it’s really only entertaining once. I don’t think it will be a spoiler to say that you actually get to start in The Vault in this one and after the tutorial part and the  initial quests that have you leave the vault I spent the rest of the night in the first town you come to.

This is where I can really see shades of the original games. After 3 hours of running around exploring town, talking to people and picking up a bunch of quests I already have what appear to be conflicting quests and I know that choosing one side is going to have an impact on how the story progresses.

So far my only complaint is the first person perspective and the real time combat. I’m getting used to the first person part – though I still don’t like running around either armed or with my fists up like I’m about to punch everyone – but I think the combat might take me a while. I need to play around with the VATS (paused slow motion Action Point based system) to figure out if I can make it come closer to duplicating the strategic turn based combat of the originals.

I’ve seen a couple of complaints about the lock picking and hacking mini-games but I find them entertaining. I find it interesting that they managed to give them appropriately different feels. The lock picking is a slightly twitchy while the hacking is a more mental exercise though neither is overly difficult. It’s true that as an RPG it should be about the characters skills and not mine but I find it a bit more immersive to participate in these activities and I can see that it would be easy enough to tweak the difficulty of the mini-game to make it easier for more skilled characters – I’m not sure it works this way I can just see how it could be made to.

I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those games that takes me forever to finish though since I’ve got about 4 hours in already and I haven’t even left the first city.

Categories
Unknown Ululations

Saving Soles, My Foot

Last night saw the culmination of about 3 nights of work with the Legendary – Golden Efreeti Boots <Link/Image coming soon>. The quest was titled “Saving Soles” but with all the running around in Lavastorm I have to wonder whose “soles” were being saved ’cause it darn sure wasn’t mine.
Oh, and Note to SoE: Lavastorm could use an Everfrost style revamp. The first trip through there was entertaining, the fifth trip to the docks and back was fingernails on a chalk board irritating. Luckily for us we had out leveled the zone or it would have taken hours just to complete a single step of the quest, and that’s without killing whatever needed to be killed for that step.
Anyway, Sisca, Acsis and Lore are proud owners of GEB’s and now we’ll move on to finishing off the Crown of King Tranix quest line. Either that or we’ll take a break from slaughtering greys in Lavastorm to make the push to 70. Though I have to guess that since they put phase 2 of the D.I.R.T.Y. quests in we might spend the rest of the week distracted by that.
By the way I’m trying a new system for posting using Google Docs so we’ll see how this works out.
Categories
Miscellaneous Madness Raving Rants

Gaming, Interrupted

Last Wednesday SoE surprised everyone with the rollout of GU48 in EQ2. We knew it was coming but everyone figured it would either be later in the week what with Fan Faire taking everyone’s time and energy the previous weekend. This update added a ton of content that Lore and I were looking forward to so Comcast deciding to help us celebrate the release by having our internet connection drop off was NOT appreciated.

 

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Unknown Ululations

A cast of 1000’s

If I’m going to start posting more about my adventures in the various games I guess I should give a quick rundown of my various characters.

Everquest 1:

Bjoern – Level 30ish Dwarven Berserker created to play with the Tuesday night Nostagia group. No last name yet but I’m thinking of something like Ta’Rock.

 

Soaridor – Level 53 Drakin Mage created to check out the new race and, due to the increased speed of leveling, ended up joining the Friday night Nostalgia group. Currently replaced by Sisca but I may start alternating depending on the needs of the group.

 

Sisca Mainacier – Level 56 Human Monk, this was my original character in EQ, created back in October of 1999. I recently moved him over from The Tribunal when Nostalgia was working on Vox/Naggy. While I thought the tactic we came up with for Mage pulling Naggy was cool – basically the druid would cast her translocate spell on Soaridor and I’d run in and aggro the lair and get them to just outside then accept the TL to clear agro then gate back to the where I had bound just outside the throne room – I thought having a monk around would be more efficient. Besides, Sisca was still 51 since I’d held him there for the express purpose of pulling Vox. Got him to 56 so far but after the trip to Old Sebilis last week I’m thinking that depending on who’s available and where we go Soaridor’s DPS might be more beneficial at times so I may start platooning them.

Categories
Unknown Ululations

The WoW is gone.

Last night I spent some time making sure all of my various alt’s in WoW have emptied their mailboxes in preparation for canceling my account.

Around May I started to get bored, as did Lore I think, and we sort of put the group on hold for awhile. Both Lore and I have hunters that are at 67 and the temptation is there to make that last push to 70 but she said she just couldn’t muster the energy and she has a much higher tolerance for these things than I do – every time I consider it my head starts hurting.

So today it ends.

I may be back at some point but I have to say that nothing I’ve seen coming out of WotLK is making me think that will be what brings me back.

Categories
Miscellaneous Madness

Do you know where yours is…


Towel Day :: A tribute to Douglas Adams (1952-2001)