It is done. After quite a while of trying to make this one every-other-week game stick around, I have brought it to an end. The campaign/group that included both The Demigods of Daelen and The Magical Millennium has come to an end. Between my time off this past summer, general scheduling woes, and the slow withdrawal of half the players I’d tried to include in the campaign, there just wasn’t much left to keep alive. Especially considering how much we were probably going to struggle with getting the remaining folks together to play, a thing we wouldn’t be able to do if even one of them was missing. With only three players and the GM left, any single person missing makes it impossible to continue. We talked it over this past weekend, ironically with one of the remaining players arriving very late, and conluded that this was for the best right now. We might get the group back together in the future, when everyone’s schedule is more dependable and we’ve got more players to join us, but for now we are bringing it to an end. I’ll still have my The Rotten Labyrinth game on its every-other-weekend schedule, but now I am without one of my staple campaigns for the time being. We might yet get together for one-shots or to play games or hang out or whatever, but it won’t be on the structured, three-to-seven-Sunday-afternoon schedule we’ve been trying to maintain up to this point. It’ll be more ad hoc. Impulsive, even. Less regular. Which feels silly to say given how little this group has met. We couldn’t even get more than two people together on our play-Stardew-Valley-instead-of-D&D days.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
One Last Letter To Bring An End To Years Of Waiting
One of the most difficult things I’ve ever done was choose to cut off my biological family. Though I’m still in contact with two siblings and briefly reconnected with a single cousin (who stopped responding and fell silent at some point last year–or maybe the year prior, I really don’t remember), I haven’t exchanged more than pleasantries with any one else in years (barring one moment of connection with an uncle I thought would be cooler about everything than he eventually was and my multiple attempts to extend a hand to my parents in the hope that they’d be able to grow enough for me to build some kind of relationship with them). Only a few still try to keep in contact and while I absolutely could do more to stay in contact with my wider family, that’s not really something I want. I cut them all off, not just my parents. I would tell pretty much anyone that my primary reason for doing so was because I didn’t want to come between my parents and their siblings, or drive any kind of wedge into the family at large, but those are things I’m currently discussing with my therapist as a result of how reflexively I say them and how they all center the well-being of my parents and family rather than admit the truth, which is that I can’t just ignore the fact that they all bore witness to the abuses of my childhood in some capacity and chose to do nothing. Regardless of the reason behind it, I still made the choice to potentially never speak to any of them ever again. I didn’t do it as directly as I did with my parents and I didn’t go as nuclear as I did with my brother, but none of them know where I live and I haven’t responded to any of their attempts to draw information out of me despite knowing exactly what all that would mean. I did, after all, set a rule in place for what it would take to reestablish contact with any of them, like I did with my parents and pretty much anyone I’ve ever cut contact with. And like my parents and most of the other people I’ve cut contact with, I knew from the outset that it was incredibly unlikely that my rule would ever be satisfied.
Continue readingI’ve Finally Committed Myself To Watching A Let’s Play
Most of the time, I’m not really one to watch people play video games. I don’t really enjoy Let’s Plays, I don’t really enjoy watching most people stream, and I even have a bit of a hard time sitting around while other people play a game nearby. This is because I have a very firm grasp of game mechanics, how to succeed at most games, and am easily frustrated by what looks like, in my eyes, inefficiency. I don’t get really backseat driver-y with video games, but I can feel my blood pressure rise as someone scrolls past an item in their inventory that they’re looking for or that they know is worthless and yet won’t throw away. It is my own personal hell, to watch someone play a game I know how to do well when they are struggling because they either haven’t grasped a core mechanic as solidly as the game requires or because their level of general disorganization is making their life difficult. I feel physical pain whenever I watch someone play a video game that involves a degree of inventory management and they refuse to manage their inventory in any kind of sensible or logical way. My heart cannot take this vibes-based “do I keep this pile of junk I’m going to throw away in ten minutes?” type play because it inevitably leads to the player messing around in menus for ten minutes while they try to figure out what precious junk they’re going to keep this time only to toss it the instant they find a cool new gun or whatever. It’s easier to handle on YouTube, with Let’s Plays, since I can just skip forward past things that will be frustrating to me, but that’s not an option for stuff like streamed video games and most people don’t want “helpful tips” from their viewers. Which I would never provide unless solicited, of course. I’d rather be miserable than make someone play a game the way I want them to rather than the way they want to.
Continue readingKirby and the Fogotten Land + Star-Crossed World Was Short But A Lot Of Fun
I played through the Kirby and the Forgotten Land Switch 2 expansion/DLC finally. I thought I’d get it right around my birthday at the end of August, when it came out, and play it immediately, but I was super hooked on Final Fantasy 14 stuff then and had my friends over, so I didn’t really need something to do at the time. Now, though, as I’ve been taking a break from FF14, that made it into the number two spot on my list, right after beating Donkey Kong Bananza. It took a couple nights, maybe five to seven hours total, to get through all of the expansion and find out what was contained within that Star-Crossed World, but I had a fun time doing it. I was incredibly out of touch with the game and it took a few attempts to really get back into the swing of it since I’d forgotten how most of the power-up systems and abilities worked, but I quickly figured it out again. It also helped that one of the abilities is basically the most powerful one you can get and while the utility of the other abilities might make them more useful in the right circumstances, about ninety percent of the expansion involved me using the Morph Sword power. I did look into upgrading it, once I remembered how all the currencies worked, but it didn’t really need an upgrade and the only way to get some of those special currencies is to run the boss rush type tournament things again and again and that’s not exactly my idea of a fun time. Especially because I’m still pretty rusty at the game, even after beating the expansion, and would struggle to take on some of the more difficult fights I did back when I was at the height of my power towards the end of the core content.
Continue readingTaking A Break From Not Playing Final Fantasy 14 To Enjoy TEA Time
After barely playing Final Fantasy for a week (especially if you exclude the time I spent making alternate characters), I returned to it last night for a few weekly tasks and my weekly Ultimate Raid event. Our group had advanced through the first portion of The Epic of Alexander well enough that we started hitting the second portion, known as Limit Cut, that requires a huge amount of coordination and practice to execute well and doing it poorly will quickly get everyone killed. Last week, when we couldn’t do much practice due to weird lag and connectivity issues between literally everyone and the game’s servers, we turned instead to a simulator that lets you run mechanics with a group of other players in order to get the coordination down without having to fight your way through the whole thing every single time. That way, if you messed it up, it wouldn’t hurt as much to have to re-do it. We spent a bunch of time practicing it last week (as of writing this) and were still struggling to get through the mechanic since it requires a decent amount of situational aware, perfect execution, and consideration of where your allies are placed in relation to yourself. Now, the simulator isn’t a perfect recreation since some parts of the mechanic didn’t function properly and not accounting for the extra steps you needed to take could get you killed in the simulator while it wouldn’t hurt you at all in the real thing, so there was a little bit lost in translation when we finally made the jump from the simulator to the real thing yesterday (as of writing this), but we managed to get through the real thing much more easily than we did in the simulator.
Continue readingA Return To Form With The Rotten Labyrinth
As this slowly becomes my most-consistent Tabletop Group (it benefits from having 6 players and only needing 3 to actually play), The Rotten Labyrinth has returned to high-form with our second repeat session post-taking-a-break. We had it all this past week! There was a combat encounter that almost went very poorly and likely would have ended differently if not for a lucky crit by one of the players! We had a bevy of traps, some avoided and some carelessly tripped! We had our first instance of the party being split! We had a creative application of some magic based on something the party had learned previously! We had glorious treasure, plenty of close-calls, and a dedication to the party’s chosen mission the likes of which I had not seen before! Everything went exactly according to plan, by which I mean that the party alternated between fucking around and finding out, and driving towards what they thought was their best path forward! Unfortuately, the first floor of this labyrinth is a maze and they may have overestimated their ability to get where they want to go by moving in cardinal directions! They found some dead-ends, skipped some interesting paths forward, and flirted with multiple instances of learning something about the labyrinth without ever pursuing it further. All-in-all, it was a pretty fun session! The first one I’ve run in months that acually used almost the whole time set aside for us to play. Today, I’m very worn out from all that talking and game-running, but I’m excited to see where they go next now that they know simply walking (map) west and (map) south will not get them to their destination.
Continue readingI Cannot Sleep For The Imagined Sound Of Roof Work
My roof was mostly replaced today. There is a bit, the only stretch of roof actually visible to me, that remains only partly finished. It seems such a small thing to be left incomplete, like an afterthought or something forgotten rather than work deliberately left until later, but I am not privvy to the minds of these roofers. I could only begin to guess why anything happened the way it did today, and it would all be me grasping at figments of my imagination and incidental observations. I did not speak to them. They did not speak to me. I barely even observed their work, instead measuring their progress in the tromp of feet above me, the grinding hum of an air compressor somewhere out of sight, the staccato five-beat pattern of their nail guns, and the occasional appearance of a worker using my balcony as a staging ground for moving materials from the ground to the roof. This happened twice–my day interrupted by the expected knock at the door and an apologetic smile from a man who probably would have felt more comfortable climbing a ladder to use my balcony rather than being told to move through the apartment building, and I still do not understand why it had to happen this way. I didn’t mind the interruption. It wasn’t like I was doing any deep or focused work, distracted as I was by the constant noise of their activity and the rattle of my apartment building as an unknown number of men walked across my roof. It was just odd, this strange set of circumstances that led to me being home all day and my brief, wordless interactions with this poor, uncomfortable roofer. None of my neighbors interracted with the roofers at all. Only me. And even then, all I did was open a door for the roofer and then lock it behind him once he was finished passing sheets of plywood up to his coworkers. It was as distant a remove as could be possible when your roof is being replaced and your balcony is needed as a halfway point for passing materials up.
Continue readingMixed Emotions About Doing Different Activities Instead Of Final Fantasy 14
Not playing Final Fantasy 14 for a few days has been a weird experience. I wrote Monday’s post about taking a break from FF14 before I actually put it into effect. I stayed up pretty late on Sunday night to wrap up the Dawntrail expansion and solidified my decision to take a break betwen then and writing my blog post the following day during breaks at work. Then I left work early so I could participate in my Monday night Ultimate raid practice, spent a few hours making alternate characters on my now-open server to combat my anxiety, spent a few hours last night working on the final raid in the Alexander Savage raid series my group is doing, and then spent another hour and a half after that hanging out online and unlocking an activity that I was planning to do tonight. I haven’t really played all that much less than normal, at least looking at it on the basis of daily participation. I did, however, stop playing FF14 every night with time enough to still do other things before bed, which I didn’t used to do. And tonight I’m not actually doing the activity I unlocked because I was at work until my personal cut-off time (8:30pm, a time I will not work past except in the case of emergencies) and had to do my grocery shopping after that because my car is going to be trapped in my apartment’s underground garage for a few days while the parking lot is filled up by the roofing company that will be spending the next few days replacing the rooves of my apartment building and the one next door that shares a parking lot. So I got home super late, ate dinner late, showered late, and was too miserable and tired to want to hop online for thirty minutes or whatever. So I’m writing this instead.
Continue readingDonkey Kong Bananza Has A Lot Of Post-Game Appeal
I do not think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve been faked out about the actual end of the game as many times as Donkey Kong Banaza has done to me. There was the ending the game told me was coming from the very beginning, there was the ending I expected from not long after the start of the game, there was the ending after that which I didn’t really expect but thought was kind of fun, there was the ending immediately after that which was exciting and a little over-the-top (in a fun way that very much fit with the game up to that point) and now there’s a new ending I’ve yet to reach that might just be setup for the DLC? I don’t know. It’s impossible to tell what this ending might be other than a pretense in order to let you continue playing the game [this is exactly what it was]. I don’t really know. I’ve got more game left to play, after all, and the story for this part is thinner than ever so I can’t really guess at anything beyond the clearly stated reason everything is continuing to happen. It’s a wild, silly experience that hasn’t damped my fun at any point. The entire series of sequential endings was a joy. The only downside to all that was how much more time I spent playing the game before I finally went to bed. I did expect to be done with the game after a single night, though, so now I’ve clearly got at least a couple more nights of it to go yet. Then I can do the Kirby DLC and, after that, finally start Final Fantasy Tactics. Or whatever other game has come out that feels more urgent.
Continue readingWeird Anxiety Spikes Are Still Less Trouble Than My Depression Was
Two months into my current dose of antidepressants and I’m pleased to say that my old misery/constant depression has stayed consistently gone. I’ve had my ups and downs during this period, my sleepless weeks that make the whole world seem darker, but it has been a weight off my shoulders to not have to fight myself every step of the way. Well, mostly. I’m still fighting myself occasionally, in ways that I was only sort of prepared for, and that by only one weirdly intense interaction with someone and the constant refrain of people complaining about weird increases in anxiety. Turns out, one of the side effects I’m experiencing is irregular but intense anxiety spikes. My brain will pick one specific thing and get incredibly bent out of shape about it no matter what that that thing is or what I tell myself. The first one was about a weird experience I had in a discord server and how I should have responded, where I worked myself up like I haven’t in a decade despite my best efforts to calm down and work through it myself. The second one was about my birthday, though I didn’t recognize it for a strange anxiety spike given how negatively I normally feel about contemplating my birthday. Currently, I’m struggling to contain the anxiety I feel about knowing that the world population status on Final Fantasy 14 has changed as part of today’s update (the day I wrote this) and the intense feeling that I need to take this time to make alternate characters because there’s no telling when the world will close again or how long it will be until it opens up again in the future. I’ve had a couple other spikes here or there, but they were all easier to work through: things that took a few calming breathes or waiting a few minutes for my mind to calm down rather than the day or days that these other ones are taking.
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