Matmos - Very large Green Triangles

This is a very cool video, and the music is great...Matmos is now on my "must get" list of music:



Matmos - Very Large Green Triangles from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.

September 30 Day D&D Challenge

Anthony Emmel of Polar Bear Dreams and Stranger Things proposed a "30 Days of D&D" idea for the month of September. The lineup looks like this:

Seems like it would be a fun list to run through, and I could use a theme to work from (until October when I may just do a new 31 days of horror series), so I shall make it so!

Amazing Blog Thursday: The Daily Bestiary

Continuing my occasional promos for blog sites I really like I give you The Daily Bestiary, where every week (and it does seem like almost daily!) Patch presents us with a monster taken from the Pathfinder Bestiaries (and occasionally a 3.5 source) with a discussion of what it does, why it is cool and interesting, and a plethora of ideas on how to turn a story around the beastie. It's easy to get addicted to his posts, and I imagine any D&Der could get something out of them, as well as any Pathfinder GM. Check out the latest entry on the amphibious Skum!

...and one more reason....

Tonight's session of Pathfinder consisted of about two hours of great role playing (in which the players befriended a slightly mad volcanic dragon while scouting the base of an active volcanic range in search of a mysterious temple) and two and a half hours of a single combat session involving a platoon of fire salamanders (30 fighters and 10 clerics) who intended to ambush them and enslave or otherwise do great harm to the party. The party consists of 9 13th-14th level adventurers with a heavy weight toward combat. It was a long but nearly sure massacre, though the gnome cleric perished during the fight only to be brought back later through the miracle of raising the dead (or something along those lines).

Still....when campaigns hit high level in D20 era 3.5/PF games, combats can often drag on excruciatingly. This was an issue with 4th edition, too....combats at any level could suck up time unexpectedly.

Now, in all fairness high level games I ran back in 1st and 2nd edition could be lengthy affairs, too...but not like this. And more over, I remember running games in which a half dozen level 12+ characters could face down 80 slaad and the combat still took maybe an hour.

I may need to run a test game o high level D&D 5E and see how it handles play at level 14+. Should be an interesting experiment on whether the system's bounded accuracy can smooth out the math madness of high level play from the last two editions.

Shifting from Pathfinder to D&D 5th Edition in 2014? Maybe...

As the D&D 5th edition public play test winds down (I'm going to start shying away from the whole "Next" reference since even WotC plans on removing it soon) I think I'll be spending more time messing with whatever the final September rules update looks like. I've been thinking about my choice of game going into the future, and while Pathfinder looms large, I concede that it's still a game which doesn't meet all of my own personal needs in a system.

What Pathfinder offers that I like is the following:

Established Player Base - I have more than twenty regular players and every Pathfinder group I run for averages 8-10 players in attendance. It's crazy popular (among players). Can D&D 5E win them over? This is really the main issue, as I see it.....if no one buys into the next D&D, then Pathfinder will stay whether I like it or not.

Metric Ton of Support Material - I can run any game I want within the limits of the D&D/D20 framework and Pathfinder provides the support. Pathfinder is well supported both by Paizo and OGL publishers. I sincerely hope the WotC guys realize that they need to have a decent product lineup next year.

Versatile and full of Verisimilitude - I have accepted long ago that I'm one of those guys who likes a little verisimilitude in my games. I also like a game system which can flex to my needs, and can handle all the kitchen sink nonsense I like to stick in my home grown campaigns. I shy away from game systems which are tethered too closely to one vision of fantasy, or one setting....I don't do published setting, I write them myself. Pathfinder is built for people like me, despite it's Golarion focus in the supplemental material...and Golarion itself is built to be pillaged for content in other settings, to be honest. For D&D 5E, it looks like Forgotten Realms will once again be the primary focus of campaign content, but I am confident the core rules will support my settings. I hope.

Tries to make the GM's life Easier in a 3.X edition - Pathfinder provides quick monster templates, quick NPC generators, loads of pre-crafted NPC stat blocks, and for people who are into it all the adventure paths and such. I personally find the effort to read and prep a published module to be worse than writing my own, but that's only because I try to scrape up premade stat blocks or use services like dinglesgames.com to help make the process easier. More below on the weaknesses of Pathfinder....so far, though, this is looking like an easier process across the board with 5E over Pathfinder and 3E combined. 5th is at least taking this hint from 4E in terms of "ease of access for DMs."

Pathfinder Mitigated Nit-Picky Rules - D&D 3E was notorious for (imo) things which were excessive in terms of a "rule for everything." I do not need to know what the alignment of a town is....though I might like to know what the town's actual rulership is like. I do not need seven hundred prestige classes; I have only seen maybe 20 prestige classes in action EVER, since 2000. A lot of 3.5 had nit-picky rules which could freeze up play quickly as people scrambled to remember how to do something right, or debate who's interpretation was correct. Pathfinder got rid of a lot of the really annoying little bits, or tried to consolidate them when possible....from synergies to skill rank calculation to grappling to stacking rules, PF tried to clear some of the clutter up and if not streamline it, at least make some of the outliers less problematic.

For 5E, I see far, far fewer nit-picky bits and this edition if anything seems to be trying hard to avoid that problem.

There are things Pathfinder does not do well for me. These aren't necessarily bad things, they just don't jive well with the restrictions of my time and energy:

Still Too Much Prep Time to Do It Right - D&D 4E did right for DMs. You could build monsters, NPCs and scenarios with some excellent guidelines and some very easy to understand procedures that were not tied to the same processes characters were designed by. This was a throwback to the old 1st and 2nd edition days, except with more structure. Pathfinder tries to do this, but it still pales in comparison; writing an adventure for Pathfinder takes no more or less time than any other edition, but properly statting it out is still excessive in the extreme if you don't try to find shortcuts...and in fact I hardly every bother to do so anymore. I mean....I helped my wife update her old swordmage from 4E to Pathfinder (making him an 11th level magus) and it still took about 3 hours to do this. Yikes.

5E so far shows no signs of this being a problem at all, with the caveat that we haven't really seen any details on customizing monsters or how to make NPCs (outside of making a PC and adding an N to the front).

Not Enough Iconic D&D - Pathfinder is mostly "D&D with a different name," but let's be honest, I like my beholders, mind flayers, displacer beasts, hook horrors, githyanki and grell. D&D 5th will obviously fix this matter, no questions asked. Yeah, yeah...I do use the unofficial Pathfinder conversions of those IP iconics....but I really like the simpler monster stat blocks of 5th.

Only Golarion - I actually do like reading about other campaign settings, even if I don't use them. Golarion is interesting, but it's the only supported setting now for Pathfinder and looks to remain such for the forseeable future. I like that D&D 5th will inevitably bring with it at least two or three additional settings that get supported, especially Ravenloft (I hope), Eberron or even Greyhawk.

Streamlined Rules - Pathfinder did try to consolidate and streamline some mechanics to 3rd edition, and did a great job of it by my accounting. However, it's still hampered by being 3rd edition, and that's a very demanding beast of a system. I am very proficient in running 3.X these days...or at least the PF version of such....but freely admit to wanting something simpler and a little less demanding of my mental fortitude. If I can avoid ever having another debate involving precise shot, or vital strike, or any other number of fiddly feats again...or combat maneuvers, or even whether or not a 12th level monk can wrestle a kraken down....ah, yeah that would be nice.

D&D 5th edition will fail miserably for me if it fails to do the following, though:

No Support Material Out the Gate - they need some modules, and they need enough content out soon to support all the campaigns that contain more than just the core iconic races. I've moved on long, long ago past the point where dwarves, elves and halflings are anything more than three out of many interesting potential choices for players and DMs.

No Skill System - Absence of a robust skill system, something which D&D has had since the mid-eighties, will make me a sad panda. I know there's a division between people on this....a surprising number of the new-school indie-drenched hip gamers frown on skills as limiting, just as much of the OSR community sees skill mechanics as counter-intuitive to Matt Finch's definition of what old school is. Somewhere in the middle of all this is myself and my players, who like skills and feel it adds to the depth of their characters.

So...a few thoughts on this. I think it mostly means that I may take some time to do some actual builds and discussions on what 5E's current playtest offers and how it compares and contrasts to what has come before. Time will tell!

Cool Blog Day: Dreams in the Lich House

I have on occasion stumbled across a great blog that I found very inspiring and want to point it out. Today's example is Dreams in the Lich House, in which Beedo discusses the ways and means of the apocalypse, with a dose of Cthulhu and something more, suitable for Gamma World, Mutant Future or hell, even Mutant Epoch (although he doesn't mention it specifically).

I'd love to run one of these games again someday, actually...what with post-apocalypse being my favorite genre and all. I really need to figure out an "alt game day" that I can run non-Pathfinder/D&D games on a semi-weekly basis. Hell....I need to stop complaining about my lack of variety in gaming these days and make it happen....hmmm.....maybe the wife would be up for a home-hosted weeknight of gaming....(she'd probably want to break out her copies Swords & Wizardry or BRP to run, too!)

After Action Report - Resident Evil: Revelations

I completed Resident Evil: Revelations unexpectedly last week. I don't know quite how that happened, I'm usually much better about pacing myself and dragging out games I enjoy for months, sometimes even years! Suddenly I'm done with RE:R, I'm almost done with the Ada campaign in RE6, and I'm slowly completing the DLC content in RE: Operation Raccoon City, at least when I can stomach the insane default difficulty level of the DLC. Yikes....I wonder when the next installment of the franchise will show up...probably around 2015-2016 on the next generation of consoles. Sigh.

Resident Evil: Revelations was unarguably closer in design, feel and intent to the classic RE titles (1 through 3 plus Code Veronica), although it's engine is clearly a build from RE 4 and 5. The PC version added in high res graphics and decent model designs, but the mere fact that this started as a 3DS title impresses me. This alone says volumes about what the 3DS can handle, and I'd pick one up, except no one seems to make mature games for the handheld. Likewise, the fact that RE:R was designed for a handheld means that it had a smaller design budget and specific considerations about how it would play, and as a consequence of this it's PC port is actually really damn good.

Seriously...because the game had to consider players holding a handheld title for short play sessions, it made the game's structure built around a digestible series of episodes, each of which doesn't take too long to complete, has (mostly) decent auto save points, and starts off each episode and session with a fun recap on the plot up to that point. This structure of convenience aimed at the handheld market actually makes the game equally accessible and friendly to the desktop PC (and console) gamer who maybe just wants to play a game for thirty minutes and feel like he accomplished something.

There are some games (especially some MMOs) where I don't even bother to log in because I only have 30 minutes and don't want to spend it traveling, on inventory management, or just trying to remember where I left off and why. RE:R has none of those issues, and is incredibly friendly to short-burst gaming.

RE:R is also built around a more traditional design and structure, one familiar to fans of the original games. There's a lot of locations and art assets that get re-used, although what's really going on is you're having most of your adventures on a spooky cruise liner, a remote mountain installation, and occasionally in flashbacks to a man-made floating wonder city called Terragrigia shortly before its about to be destroyed. You'll grow quite familiar with the weaving maze of corridors in the haunted ghost ship which Jill and her BSAA partner Parker must explore, even as Chris and his femme fatale buddy Jessica crawl around in the snowy mountains looking for other clues.

The game introduces a bunch of new characters to the RE storyline, and most of them live to the end. In fact I have to say this game did a great job of adding new and interesting faces to the RE canon; we get more of that in RE6, of course, but for whatever reason the characters introduced here in RE:R get more story time, more attention, more fun and cheesy lines and are just plain old more interesting because of this. If there's a RE7 in the near future, I would really like to see Parker Luciani, Jessica Sherawat and Clive O'Brien show up again (although admittedly, some are more likely to return than others, based on RE:R's ending sequence, which is fairly comprehensive in establishing where everyone ends up).

There's really only one character that I didn't see enough of, and she's mostly there as a unique and very persistent foe: Rachel, or more accurately Rachel Ooze. Rachel is pretty much spoken of only posthumously, and her real legacy lies with the Raid Mode events, but her persistent resurrected form haunts your protagonists throughout the game, and it would have been nice to have learned a bit more about her prior to her death and rebirth.

Rachel before...

...and after. FYI she's available in Raid Mode as a DLC pack,
and is my second favorite Raid Mode character after Jill

Not only does RE:R offer up a twelve chapter tale in the classic RE:R vein, filled to the brim with things you can click on to learn more cool story bits, find keys and otherwise deal with various puzzles and mysteries, but it also provides a robust after-game solo and multiplayer co-op feature called Raid Mode. The Raid Mode lets you revisit the many areas of the game (it's broken up into roughly eighteen maps), bringing in an array of different characters and costume options (many of which require unlocking over time.). You equip them with tricked out weaponry and proceed to tackle each level in Raid Mode like a mini-adventure, complete with an end goal to reach and an array of threats between you and that goal. This mode was originally conceived in brief way back in the bonus hidden level for Resident Evil 2, where you could play the curiously named Umbrella agent Hunk as he blasted his way through Raccoon City, and over the years this got revisited in various forms including Mercenary Mode from RE5 (and other titles). Raid Mode is similar, but with an emphasis on solo and co-op play it allows you to essentially play through the levels and maps of the original game in an endless array of mini missions, which turns out to be strangely compelling, and a lot of fun. With level up mechanics, weapon upgrading and collecting, alternate skins and characters and a large number of escalating maps, it's a really cool way to extend the life of RE:R beyond the single player campaign. I'll be playing Raid Mode for a long time to come; it's actually more fun than the Mercenaries Modes in RE6 (though to be fair I quite enjoy those as well).

So, long story short, here's RE:R in a nutshell:

Single Player Campaign takes about 10-14 hours, is very fun and feels very much like original-style RE

Raid Mode is a fun extra feature that actually plays out like an endless array of cool mini missions, and allows co-op gaming

RE:R's budget design aimed at handhelds translates into a very easy-in and easy-out style of gaming that prompted it to make good use of its resources to tell a fun, sometimes camp, other times tense and exciting survival horror tale that treats the Resident Evil universe right. I want future titles in the franchise that are more like Resident Evil: Revelations.

A+++

Magic World Survey

Zomben (alias the author behind Magic World) has a survey going to find out what people are interested in for future MW products. You can find the survey link here over at basicroleplaying.com. Make your voice heard! I of course am keen on a bestiary, GM book, player's guide, some more exotic PC race options, Gm screen and the books already announced.

Magic World....if I could ever break away from Pathfinder for a few minutes, I'd make MW and Runequest 6 in some combination my go-to games for the foreseeable future. The problem I have is moving from "active 8-10 player weekly Pathfinder groups" to regular MW or RQ6 sessions of similar size and interest. Some day....some day...!

One of the cooler pics that pops up on an image search for Magic World

The Bureau: X-COM Declassified

Despite Wally McChestyhigh's frequent appearances, I am enjoying The Bureau

The Bureau: X-COM Declassified

As this game got closer and closer to release, the general consensus in various game journalism circles moved from one of contempt, due to concerns that the franchise in returning was going to jump the shark, to hopeful curiosity. Thanks mainly to X-COM: Enemy Unknown defusing the concern about another X-COM title that was yet  another shooter instead of a tactical turn-based strategy game, interest in The Bureau turned to curiosity and interest at what it was actually trying to accomplish. More recent discussions actually made the game sound like it was actually offering something worth investigation. Green Man had a decent promotion going for it, so I bit.

Here's the deal about The Bureau: it's a cover-based third person perspective shooter. It's literally and definitively part of the game play style characterized by Gears of War. It also happens to be taking a remarkably heavy hint from Mass Effect and contains dialogue wheels, lengthy interludes of discussion, exposition and exploration, stuff you click on to get pieces of the story and clues, and even requires you to use a tiny portion of your brain on occasion to solve some story puzzles (albeit of minor nature so far, but that's way more effort than any other game of this generation usually commands).

When I started playing The Bureau the introductory level was basically non-stop gung ho action and despite the fact that I was enjoying it I was also getting a bit discouraged....my concern being that I would be once again facing a game where all talking is done with the guns, and the slow, quiet moments in between are all chopped out because teenagers can't stay focused, apparently. As it turns out, the introductory level concluded and the game then moved to the hub of the Bureau....and I suddenly spent twice as much time just talking to people and walking around checking things out as I previously had doing the old run and gun. It was refreshing...very refreshing.

Other details worth mentioning so far:

There is a tactical element. You have an easy-to-use combat wheel that lets you direct your squad mates, and you can set the game's difficulty to make this feature more or less important. I am not a big fan of tactical direction anymore (that interest burned out in the '90s) and so I have set the play level to "rookie" so I don't have to worry too much about what my cohorts are doing--most of the time, anyway.

The game's graphics are really impressive. Not in a "wow this is realistic" sort of way, although it does go for a distinctly appropriate celluloid-film grainy photorealism style with real-looking humans instead of cartoony people. Rather, the entire aesthetic of The Bureau is meant to invoke the look and feel of the early 60's, from the tech to architecture to dress styles. You can search hard to find anachronistic elements, or lazy art design, but you will search in vain. The graphic designers did a fantastic job here. Not only that, but the story writers (for there is a lot of story buried in the game waiting to be found) did an equally good job. It's a level of attention to detail that I haven't seen in a period title like this before, and it adds immensely to the sense of immersion the game offers.

The immersion is so good that I only spotted two bits so far that annoyed me: you can occasionally find tape reels which, when clicked, will play a recording, despite no tape player being present on which to spool the reels. With so much other attention to detail this seemed kind of odd. Second, the woman manning the Bureau's radio room has what seems to be an unusually hip, modern haircut. That's it so far after about four hours in. (EDIT: on second thought, her hair style looks a lot like the style Liz Taylor and other women of the time sometimes favored...I think it's the coloring that makes it look modern).

Finally, your character, Agent Carter, is clearly modeled after Robert Patrick's John Doggett from the last couple seasons of the X-Files. The character, conceptually, works really well here. Carter is a tough, no-nonsense former CIA agent with a past who gets recruited into the spanky new Bureau just in time for the Mosaic to come knocking at Earth's door. He's got just a tad more character then the usual protagonist we see fighting space aliens (the crew cut space marine dude), and between Carter and the President from SRIV it's this refreshing change in Who I Get to Play that makes these games more interesting despite the cliched alien infestation problem.

Obviously I've got a long way to go with the Bureau; I'm a father, and fully employed, so games take me weeks or even months to finish at times, waiting for that golden conjunction where interest, opportunity and free time converge simultaneously to allow me a chance to plow through this stuff. I suspect I'll keep the Bureau high on my list of "must finish" titles though, it's got all the bells and whistles in a game that I like (short of being a pure open sandbox title).

I reckon he were an alien, ayup

Saint's Row IV: When Sociopaths Rule

The last week or so has been a busy one for PC gaming. A slow summer punctuated by occasional gonzo sales from the online digital retailers has ended, more or less, and we're getting the early arrivals for the looming holiday season. I'll start talking about the big daddy of mayhem and madness, and then the rest over the next few days...

Saint's Row IV

First up is Saint's Row IV, the game in which almost anything goes, and which is also the culmination of a four-game cycle as well as a demonstration on how to start off as a clone of another game and end up as your own unique subgenre before the ride is over. Saint's Row IV is the epic-level content for the series, a game where you start off as president of the United States (after having spent the prior three games having your sociopathic character crawl up the ladder from guttersnipe ganger to gang lord, to criminal mastermind of a very successful marketing empire), and almost immediately aliens invade. You, naturally, proceed to kick serious ass....as the Saint's Row universe is one in which video game physics and realities are implicit, the default norm for SR protagonists is "nearly god like," but before SRIV is over you will have propelled yourself into the realm of super heroics, too.

I've plowed through the first several missions and a bunch of side quests in SRIV so far and the game is up to true form. About the only disappointment is that the core play area of the game is a virtual-reality simulation of Steelport, the city from SR3, which means the sandbox will look quite familiar (though the city has undergone some alien revisions). Despite this, the game is pure gold, and is loaded with new and classic SR-style content.

I figure the gonzo balls-to-the-wall madness of SRIV should be quite satisfying, and hold everyone over who's also waiting for GTAV. I can't decide if I care about GTAV or not. On the one hand it looks like it will tell not one but three interweaving tales of decadent and vile criminals, a subgenre I have been slowly growing to appreciate. On the other hand I disliked most prior GTA titles (except for Vice City). I don't know....SRIV is hard to beat in the realm of "open city crime sandbox games."

Do  the mascots get revenge for the endless abuse they have suffered at long last? I doubt it!