John Zeitler

Wednesday’s unpleasantness aside, I suppose I needed that time to relax. I did manage to reinstall my FIOS box, meaning I had access to both regular TV and a usable DVR… but no content recorded on it. I eventually went to bed at 7:30p after watching Jeopardy.

But anyway, there’s been a little bit going on in terms of games, both the video and tabletop persuasion. I picked up Blood Bowl Team Manager a week or so ago and have yet to give it a proper play through, but I’m hoping that if things progress the way I expect, that will change very soon. Beyond that, I’ve been involved in a couple of campaigns in various role playing games, ranging from Star Wars d20 to the indie and quirky Inspectres. That one came about from an online campaign I’ve been trying to get started, and the only reason it hasn’t started is because I’ve been too lazy/busy to send out the character creation rules. So, mark that as something I have to do tonight (yesterday by the time this post goes up).

As for video games… Well, money has been tight lately. Really, the Blood Bowl game was about the only real extravagance I allowed myself in October, and that was just on a lark. I want to eventually pick up the new Professor Layton game, and after playing the demo, Ace Combat may be my big purchase for November. Ultimately, though, I took a serious look at my backlog for the first time: I have over two hundred games that I have not completed, and only about a dozen of those are ones I’ve even started. Granted, I’m a collector, and having the games is just as important as playing them; at the same time, though, every game I’ve picked up, I’ve done so with the intent of playing it at some point. I took some time on Monday and compiled the list into a prioritized queue, giving me some amount of direction with it. First up on the list are a handful of games that are trivially easy to finish, namely Starfy, Prinny (I halted progress literally at the final boss about a year ago), and a run through Space Hulk on the PS1.

I may wind up taking a year or so off of buying games; there are a few things going on behind the scenes that will take up a fair amount of money, but really there’s just not that much coming out in the immediate future that really gets me going. There’s a bunch of games I’d like to have handy, but not in a compelling enough way to get me to pay full price for them– I can wait until they hit the bargain bin. That’s something that’s burned me badly in the past; a handful of games that I bought on launch day sat on my shelf collecting dust, getting marked down to greatest-hits prices or lower before I got around to firing them up. Granted, there are still some “political” purchases that I’ll want to make, to support a developer or series; and some games still get criminally small print runs, so buying on day one may be the only way to snag those titles. Even then, though, those titles are few and far between in the projected future, so I feel relatively comfortable not being on the bleeding edge for a while.

Besides, I’m having a hard time being home enough to play the games I do have.

So one of the things I’ve been doing, as part of my ongoing efforts to ruthlessly exterminate any and all free time I might have, is working on the Anime Heroes delve for the Tekkoshocon RPG room. This is sort of a big deal for me, as I tend to not really focus on combat in my own campaigns, but rather prefer to keep things on a more intellectual and RP-centric level. That doesn’t work so much when your players’ characters are modeled on Ash Ketchum, Toph Bei Fong, and Ichigo Kurosaki, three characters not exactly known for their inclination towards talking things through. So they have to fight it out, and I need to give them a decent shot at doing so.

To this end, I’ve been elbow-deep in the Dungeons and Dragons Compendium, which is a great resource for the average DM. There’s just a few hiccups, and that’s that, for the most part, there aren’t really a whole hell of a lot of variety of monsters available to players at Level 1. More immediately, getting data out of the compendium and into a workable sheet for use at the table is not exactly the easiest thing in the world, particularly if you need to adjust a monster’s level down a notch or two in order to make it a fair fight. (And yeah, there’s gonna be one encounter that just plain won’t be a fair fight, because what’s life without a little risk?) To date, I tried setting up an OpenOffice template for that purpose, arranging the carefully-constructed stat blocks and going from there.

The Cheshire Cat, in American McGee’s Alice, said: “There’s a nasty name for people who insist on doing things the hard way.” To that end, I snagged a couple of utilities that make life much, much easier.

The first is a bookmarklet found via NewbieDM that turns on editable mode within the browser window. Basically, once you find the monster you want in the DDI Compendium, right click it and view the frame in a new window or tab. Then, click the bookmarklet and start editing. In Firefox 4.0 you don’t get to see the insertion marker, so be sure you click before you start typing– or better yet, highlight only what you want to edit. It’s nondestructive, so you’re not twiddling bits on WOTC’s servers or anything. The only downside is that it doesn’t play well with javascript-heavy pages, which is why you want the monster in its own, disposable tab. Great, so you can alter monsters, but what about copying them to an encounter sheet?

That’s where the Pixlr Grabber add-on comes into play. Pixlr can specify a region of the browser window, and either save it to disk as a PNG or copy it to your clipboard. From there, you can paste it into your favorite word processor or page layout tool and arrange it as needed or desired. Make sure you do a test run to see how big/small the text needs to be.

Those should cut down a TON of the manual labor needed for me to get the encounters ready. At this point the hardest part is figuring out how to avoid sending my players against yet another kobold horde.

I’ll spare you all the boring minutae of how I’m handling the transition back into public transit, as they get a little squicky if you’re not into the thought of envisioning me naked. Honestly, I don’t blame you; I don’t even like to look at myself naked. Still, there’s something to be said for preparation beforehand, and that’s all I’ll say.

Let’s talk D&D, shall we? I picked up the last of the Essentials books this afternoon, and now I have a complete set of those. The DM kit and Monster Vault proved to be pretty valuable purchases in that if I want to start up a campaign amongst some friends, I can. That’s a pretty big if, but I’m getting sidetracked. The Essentials books seemed a little strange to me, because they’re shallow enough to be considered “starter” kits, but in-depth enough to warrant the thought that this was where 4th Edition was headed. WotC’s marketing of the books didn’t help that, either. For the longest time I resisted picking up the two “class” books, because I thought their content was more or less duplicating the three Player’s Handbooks I already own.

To a certain extent, it is, and then again, it’s also more constrictive. Each of the two class books– Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms– details the basics of a handful of the classes. Fallen Lands provides clerics, fighters, rogues and wizards, while Forgotten Kingdoms offers druids, paladins, rangers and warlocks. That’s where things get tricky, because of each of the classes offered, you’re provided a single buildout path. Your powers are mostly selected for you, your paragon path and epic destiny are also chosen, and it’s all very cut and dried. That’s great for a player just starting out, and each of the books offers a pretty good mix so that a new player can try something different without being overwhelmed, but overall the books aren’t as valuable for experienced players as the hardback Handbooks and (X) Power books. There’s also a handful of changes to the existing races and feats, and a crapton of ease-of-play charts and pointers. Most of the critical stuff in the books are available on the Insider service, and what’s not does sort of lend some value to the paperbound copies.

What I’ve found to be pretty damn worth the cost, though, are the other three core books: the Rules Compendium, the Dungeon Master’s Book, and the Monster Vault. Of these only the RC is available “standalone”; the other two are in the DM’s Kit and Monster Vault box, respectively. Honestly, though, those aren’t bad deals either. For me, one of the things preventing me from DMing effectively was a lack of miniatures or figures to place and block out encounters. Both of the boxes contain cardboard tokens for monsters and players, printed with nicely-detailed artwork. This is mostly because WotC discontinued the D&D Minis game, as (like me) nobody wanted to buy randomized miniatures if they really just wanted a dozen goblins for an encounter.

Right, the books. The RC is basically everything you need, at an absolute minimum, to play the game once you’ve got characters rolled up and a DM ready to go. It’s organized far better than the PHBs and DMG, everything is clear and concise without being terse… Think of it like this: if the Player’s Handbook is a boring ol’ human, then the Rules Compendium is an elf: just plain better, and it knows it. There’s some updated charts here for DCs and suchlike, which may be useful to some players, but for the clarifications and the ability to leave at least one or two hardcover books back on the shelf when you go to a game, it’s a steal at twice the price. Despite the fact that it’s not red, I can promise you you’re likely to find what you’re looking for in the book three times faster.

The DM’s book is less impressive in that it covers a lot of the fluff of the Points of Light setting, but it also goes into some of what makes a proper or thrilling adventure. DM guides and advice are a dime a dozen, but like the RC, the DM Book streamlines a lot of the tedious parts and makes it easier to quickly and efficiently find stuff. (A side note: it bothers me that there’s no real “Trap Manual”– basically, doing for traps, hazards, and dungeon features what the Monster Manual does for the flora and fauna of the world.) The DM’s Kit isn’t a bad deal, honestly, as it includes some dungeon tiles and a few handfuls of character and monster tokens as well as a short adventure to run. The main complaint I have with the DM’s Book, and this may just be a first-print issue or something, is that the cover isn’t made of the same paper or whatever as the other Essentials books. It looks and feels cheap and flimsy… but I’ll get to that in a bit.

Finally, the Monster Vault book is pretty much the Monster Manual, shrunk down and stripped of some of the cruft that served comparatively little purpose. While fewer monster illustrations sounds like a bad thing, the overall effect is that the illustrations now correspond to the tokens included in the kit, and there are in fact more monster listings for each monster type (so for example, under “Elf” there’s listings for Lv2 Scout, Lv2 Minion Hunter, Lv3 Guard, etc. etc. up to Lv13 Drow Arachnomancer). The standard amenities of list by level and so forth are included, but again the chief advantage is the compact size. Upon further inspection, the Monster Vault uses the same flimsy cover that the DM’s Book does, but it’s a thicker tome than the DMB, so it’s a bit harder to notice the cover’s cheapness.

So that brings me to the downside of the line, beyond the fact that two of the most useful elements are saddled with tokens that I realize not everyone might need or want. The Essentials line is bound in a softcover format, along the lines of a mass-market book. It’s roughly 10% or so larger than the standard manga page size (or roughly the same size as the oversized omnibus page size becoming more popular these days), and while it’s a very well-printed book, its binding… well, I just fear for the day when something happens to this book, and I fear that day may be unnecessarily soon. On the other hand, I defy you to find a nicer full-scale RPG manual for a Jackson; when the pages do start dropping out, it won’t be an arduous task to replace the thing entirely.

WotC’s been releasing more and more Dungeon Tiles sets and flogging their overpriced dice sets alongside the books, but overall between the Essentials, the new Red Box set (which, I kid you not, I saw at Target once, and when I went to get another copy later on, the clerks said they couldn’t keep it in stock), and just some general nice press here and there, I think they’re doing a damn good job of opening up the hobby to more and more mainstream people. It doesn’t hurt that the generation that’s taking the reins of the world now– mine– is on the whole more receptive to nerdery than peoples past, either. I’m really impressed with the concept behind the Essentials books, but I wish WotC had made it clearer on the “where do you go from here?” aspect.

Ciao, kiddies.

So, who wants to talk about depressing game mechanics!

Because, don’t tell anybody I said this, buuuuut I may be playing around with an idea for a semi-homebrew role-playing one-shot that fuses the World of Darkness with Persona. It’s still way in the early “John’s just playing with the idea” phase, but given the flexibility of the nWoD’s Storytelling System, I think it could work.

I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that, unless I spend more or less every non-working waking moment from here to the end of the year gaming, I won’t come anywhere near my stated goal of fifty game clears this year. In all honesty this has been a bad year in terms of gaming for me; not nearly as bad as last year, but then again I had sort of an excuse. This year I even made an effort to give myself extra gaming time, via the bus plan, and it still fell apart. So, don’t think for a moment that I hid a game clear notice or three from you over the course of September. I didn’t. Honest.

I’m also fairly confident that my plan to double-up my Gamerscore for the third year running is doomed to failure. Over five months I’ve only gained 900 points or so, meaning that in order to hit the double-up goal I need another 8500 in three months. Again, I’m not that broken up about it.

What have I been doing while I prepare to move? Well, reading a lot more RPG manuals. Even if I never get to play any of them, I’m still fascinated by the lore and the stories presented, and I’m hoping that soon I’ll be able to start up a D&D campaign. I’d tried doing so once before, and while it started out well, I didn’t have the time or focus needed to both compose and playtest a whole campaign before the session. This time I’ll likely be using pre-made modules and letting the role-playing tell the story, rather than the locations.

I’ve also come across a couple of board games that interested me, namely Lords of Vegas and Founding Fathers. Vegas seems a little complex, but a lot of fun, while Founding Fathers was borne of seeing a couple others play it and my own interest in politics after the whole West Wing thing. Incan Gold was also reprinted recently, so I grabbed that, as well– it’s a hell of a lot of fun, and it’s fast, too.

I’d packed away my consoles and games for them a long time ago; only the Wii and the 360 stayed active until last week. They’re both in storage right now, and so I only have the handhelds and the PC available should I desire video games. I’ve been tinkering with Team Fortress 2 off and on here the past few days, and Left 4 Dead 2 is downloading as we speak, but I’m also very happy with how Final Fantasy XIV has turned out. Not just that it runs well on my computer, which it does, but that it’s a great game in its own right. I’m sure other, older games have allowed crafting as a “main” career path through the game’s story, but I’m not sure how many of them basically made it so easy to actually raise your crafting skills without grinding zillions of monsters to buy expensive crafting materials. The levequest system basically provides you with materials and recipes needed, and you can repeat them as needed. More to the point, you actually get experience for doing so– not just skill points, but real honest-to-god XP. So it’s a great way to try something different without completely stalling advancement.

Oh, and the death penalty is no longer as draconian as it was in FF11; no experience loss or level-downs here. The end result is basically that exploration is encouraged, and mistakes are forgiven, instead of paranoia being rewarded and misfortune being punished. Come the change of the year I think I’ll be getting a PC to set up as a dedicated gaming box, instead of dual-booting Mahoro or the Stellvia.

Finally, just as an interesting aside, I may have a rather alarming personal project lined up for 2011: I might wind up strictly limiting the video game purchases, new and Reclamatory, to one or two a month for the year. Don’t hold me to it yet, and I’ll be laying out some very specific exceptions to this rule (chief among them Mega Man Legends 3 if you believe it’ll be out in ’11), but I think it’s worth taking a break on the collection front for a year and putting the resources towards a greater good. (Which reminds me that the rule would also limit me to a single miniature item per week, and a single battleforce box or other big-ticket box each month; paints and other consumable supplies wouldn’t count.) Again, just a thought.

Ciao, folks. Tomorrow’s entry may be late, just so you’re aware.

I was supposed to take part in a pretty interesting Guard vs. Orks mission tonight after work.

None of the Orks players showed up.

Kinda frustrated now.

So I’m off to bed early, in the midst of a rainstorm that is already lulling me to sleep. I saw that Games Workshop released condensed, rules-only versions of two codexes I’d been thinking about picking up– okay, specifically the Witch Hunters codex– but I already play two Imperial armies, and Chaos Space Marines don’t catch my attention all that well. I figure by the time I get around to starting the fourth faction, the Tau will have got their updated book; they already have an all-plastic path available so it’s just a matter of the rules update. We shall see.

I spent last night discovering that I was almost out of white spray paint for priming the Imperial Guard army. That said, however, I also found that the IG infantry sprues are easier to pre-prime before assembly than the Space Marines were; I’m going to guess that the same will hold for the Orks once I get around to putting those together.

Tonight is a night for Rock Band.

Opponent: “So, you’re a Mechanized Guard player. That implies you have a higher valuing of human life than the average Imperial Guard commander.”
Me: “Or it means I just like having a crapton of tanks on the board.”
Opponent: “…..”
Me: (huge grin)

Warhammer 40,000 has been around for the better part of two decades now, and its players are varied in their ages. Having just turned 30 myself, I’d have to guess that I’m about in the middle of the pack in terms of age, even though I’ve only been in the hobby for about a year, and only seriously playing for eight months or so. However, there’s something universal about the game that appeals to a wide range of folks, and even though the crowds I hang out with tend to skew a little bit older, once in a while, I’m not the newbie.

Roughly three or four months ago, I took part in a “new players” tournament, the second time I’d been playing, and the first time I’d brought out my Space Marines chapter, not even half-painted at the time, but at least colored almost in my team hues. At that time I met Luke, a kid of about eleven or twelve who was bringing out his Orks for the first time. (Due to his age, I’m going to use an alias for him.) He’d conviced his parents to let him participate in the tournament, and there was a little friction when he explained to his mother that the event would run five or six hours. I was matched against Luke in the first round, and as a result I overheard everything.

There’s a bit of a stereotype of gaming and comics shops being seedy joints in darkness where youths waste days at a time, accomplishing nothing and possibly using the shop as a cover for less wholesome activities than, for example, tabletop warfare. I can say with conviction that I have never encountered one of these kinds of shops in reality. My current haunt, Legions Games, is probably the most well-maintained shop I’ve seen, and the players and staff are to a man among the nicest people I’ve ever faced. So, I felt it necessary to step in and let Luke’s mom know that he was perfectly safe in the store, and that if there were any problems, he could use my phone to call her. It took a little more discussion, but eventually, she relented, and the match went on as scheduled.

I won that round, but if you think I went easy on him, you’re wrong. He put up a good fight, and the scenario was the standard Assault on Black Reach setup (Orks vs. Space Marines, pretty much a wash if all else is equal), so there weren’t any inherent advantages or disadvantages to either of us. We were learning our armies as well, and I had the slight tactical avantage of having played as the Orks before. The point being, we had a good match, and Luke was really enjoying himself. I came away with the thought burning through my brain: “Luke’s a good kid.”

Flash forward to last night, then. My Imperial Guard army’s been assembled for weeks now, and painting it up is a slow but steady process. I went to the shop last night to try to get a couple short games in for the escalation campaign, when Luke saw me and said hello. I hadn’t seen him since the new-player tournament. He was eager to get a game in before he had to go home, and so I obliged him. We set up, and I saw that he was playing Space Marines this time around… kind of a reversal for us, really. He hadn’t played against the Guard before, so I gave him a few tactical pointers here and there (“Are you sure you want to shoot those? This tank’s a far more dangerous target for you right now…”), but again, I didn’t go easy or let up at all. He didn’t either, though it still felt like he was getting used to his army and their style; the Space Marines are average at everything, really, so tactics for them boil down to “know your enemy’s weakness and exploit that”. Again, we had fun, and this time it came down to a draw– a very, very narrow draw, as he got luckier with some rolls than I did.

And again, as I was driving home, the thought came to me. “Luke’s a good kid.” He was polite, amicable, and a little on-edge but still okay– I think he was just nervous playing against older opponents, which can be intimidating to anyone. When his dad came to pick him up, the two of us were going over the battle, noting what we could have done better and what worked well for us. He also signed up for the escalation campaign, so we’ll likely be playing more often– but as allies, since we’re both on the Imperial side.

It can get a little discouraging at times when all you seem to hear about is gamers going nuts or people doing stupid things over their games. I’ve lost track of how many dumb crimes were committed over XBoxes, or cards, or other amusements. But, knowing that people like Luke are playing, and learning good sportsmanship and good thinking skills– that makes me smile every time. And if I have to lose a thousand matches to get more players like Luke into gaming, then I’ll lose a thousand, and a thousand more for good measure, because in the end, everyone wins.