Gather your sacred chalice, full to the brim with the holy water of your particular faith, and prepare yourself for a review of the sacrosanct traditions that power modern life. We might all worship at different altars, we might all give praise in different ways, we might all observe our rituals at different times, and we might even argue over the proper preparation of the self, but we all participate in the glorious act known as the Morning Routine and I am here to share with you the most holy rituals of my day-to-day.
Continue readingPandemic Reflections 18 Months In
I had the thought this morning that, if the pandemic got bad again and I was forced to work from home continuously or was partially furloughed again (with a corresponding return to actually life-sustaining unemployment benefits in the US), I am now in a position to really take advantage of the opportunity it would present. Which is a weird thought to have, given how royally fucked up my life has been as a result of the pandemic and the fact that I had similar thoughts during the initial furlough and work-from-home period.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 4
This week’s episode, so soon after the last one, was brought on by a crown breaking. Again. It’s fourth months old and has broken twice. In a minor way both times, thankfully, but it is still very frustrating that now I have to take more time out of my schedule to go to the dentist, my least favorite place I voluntarily visit at least twice a year. Growing up, my dentist didn’t believe in sensitive teeth, so every trip was miserable and I’ve formed a deep association between the dentist’s office and pain. As a result, even though my current dentist is wonderful and considerate and (mostly) excellent at their job, I still get unbelievably stressed every time I have to go there for something. Throw in that crown work generally takes a long time (especially if I’m gonna get it replaced this time, but we’ll see what the dentist recommends) and I just spend all of the time leading up to my appointments absolutely dreading them.
Continue readingDelving Into A New Dungeon
Post-Publication Edit: One of my friends on Twitter helpfully pointed out that one of the creators of this game, Adam K., has been involved in some awful controversies and, as these horrible things have shown, was apparently never a terribly nice person despite the persona he cultivated online. I can’t suggest buying the book at this point since I don’t think this guy should get any more money, but the other creator seems to be grappling with the failings of this system (e.g. the fantasy racism spread through the examples of how to use the rules and narrative guidelines in play) and his co-creator in a potentially healthy way (I’ll admit I’ve spent only an hour reading up on all this so there might be stuff I’ve missed), so I suggest getting fully informed before you make a decision.
As you’ll see below, I like the narrative style of the system and the light, story-centric rules, but those are common to most Powered by the Apocalypse games, not just Dungeon World, so I suggest you look elsewhere in that system if you want a fun game that doesn’t support someone whose actions are antithetical to my primary principles as a storyteller and GM.
Continue readingA Focus on Power Fantasies Ruins TTRPGs For Everyone
I saw someone post on Twitter that Dungeons and Dragons is all about power fantasies and, as a result, most people play characters that are like them in an effort to roleplay situations that make them, personally, feel powerful. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this idea and a WHOLE lot of thoughts about how it can play out in actual games. Part of the problem, of course, is that making any blanket statement based on your personal experiences shows your personal biases, privelege, and frequently overlooks the experiences of people who aren’t like you. I’m going to try to avoid making any such statements here by talking about my experiences specifically, but I will have to generalize a bit unless I’m going to write an entire novel. Which has a certain appeal, but this isn’t really the medium for discourse at length.
Continue readingPuzzles Are Fun
I’ve always enjoyed puzzles (had a puzzle party when I was 4, because I loved them so much), but they represent a sort of one-and-done amount of entertainment that has made it difficult to justify the cost. The introduction of local programs that allow you to change out your used puzzles for someone else’s used puzzles (usually with a small fee to support the local business coordinating these efforts since you’re not buying a new puzzle, or using a store credit system similar to buying and selling old video games) has made it easier for me to get my hands on new puzzles and they’ve formed the backbone of my non-electric entertainment over the past year.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 3
I’m actually not that sad right now (super tired, though), but I feel compelled to stick with the title. My time off messed up my sleep schedule since I didn’t make myself go to bed at the right time every night and my past few nights haven’t been much better thanks to anxiety and new video game enthusiasm. The two kind of feed into each other, so it’s no wonder I’ve had trouble the last few nights. Anyway, time to start the third installment of my favorite recurring series on this blog! This time, I’m going to talk about Koroks in Breath of the Wild.
Continue readingThree Hundred of the Most Occupied Hours of My Life
In my nightly video game time, I’ve been doing another run-through of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I’ll admit I’m not particularly interested in the game any more and I approach playing it the same way I approach playing Sudoku: I don’t expect to really get anything out of it other than a stretch to the non-artistic parts of my mind. I enjoy strategy and puzzle games for this specific reason, but a lot of the time I play them, it’s because I think I need some mental exercise or a monetary occupation rather than because I actually enjoy it.
Continue readingLiving Life In Compatability Mode
I’ve been using the same copy of Microsoft Office 2003 since I got it with the laptop I bought for myself that year. When I went to college, I would send the papers I wrote on my laptop to library computers to be printed. The library at my college had a much better budget than I did, though, so they had the latest microsoft office version, meaning I got so used to seeing “File Name [compatability mode]” at the top of all my documents that I eventually stopped noticing it unless I wound up editing a file started on the library computers on my personal laptop.
Continue readingPlaying At Righteous Wrath But Only Managing Indignant Pique
So, I finally beat (sorta) Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and started playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. P:K was a bit of a letdown because the alignment system actually factored pretty heavily into the decision-making process for running my kingdom and had some incredibly significant impacts on the “post-game wrap-up” storytelling of the playthrough I finished. I didn’t get the long ending, since my character was content to let things shake out the way they did and just be finished with the whole farce, but my freedom-loving chaos mage apparently was a terrible ruler despite promoting mercy above all else and created a police state using magical surveillance technology. Still not sure what that came from, though I do know some of my advisor meetings kinda glitched through the cutscenes because I was doing a lot of saving and loading to get good outcomes because I didn’t want to deal with that shit. Anyway. I finished that and started the next game.
Wrath of the Righteous starts out pretty intensely, with a decent helping of mystery and stakes that are amped up pretty much instantly, but that was a nice follow-up to the expanded character creator whose UI is… Well, parts of it are better, but not all of it. It’s difficult to get a full-picture of your character when creating them or leveling them up, information is hidden in weird places, and some choices aren’t terribly intuitive. The greater number of options is nice, but the fact that information like which attributes matter most for each class and class variation being hidden in different text windows makes trying to figure out where my points need to be spent a pain in the ass. Especially since some of the class variations change what your primary attribute is. But that’s mostly a problem for Pathfinder as a whole than something tied specifically to this game. They just don’t fix the problem in the game.
After all that, though, the improvements show up. Being able to rotate the camera is nice, though it is made necessary by the somewhat cluttered environment you find yourself in at all points of this game so far. Since things are only transparent in a small bubble around your character, you have to get used to rotating the camera on top of moving it around, zooming, and managing your party. It gets very onerous in large battles that involve multiple angles of approach, too. It is a necessary skill to learn, though, because an object being transparent doesn’t actually mean it isn’t there. Clicking in the wrong place (on the roof of a house that was rendered invisible by your party, for instance) can have nasty ramifications in battle because you think you’re attacking an enemy but really you’re sending your character through an entire mob of foes to be ruthlessly cut down as they walk to the nearest reachable point to the invisible roof you clicked on.
Camera gripes aside, I do enjoy the fact that being persuasive and having a high-charisma no longer feels absolutely necessary to the game. I still made a high-charisma character and didn’t change off it when I got the option to retrain them because I like playing that type of character, but I no longer feel like that’s my only good choice if I want to do everything. I could easily see myself playing a different class some time in the future. Maybe a fighter, barbarian, or something more melee-based than my usual style.
I’ll also say I’m a bit frustrated that so many characters seem to be good at rogue skills early on because I built my sorcerer to be good at those things as a fun build idea and it wound up being so incredibly redundant. Half the characters I got initially could do those things as well as, if not better than, my character could. And not one single character was smart until I got through the whole long introduction section and into the exploration section. I actually missed a bunch of stuff early on because none of my people had any of the knowledge skills. I even got a whole pile of magic items I couldn’t properly use because no one had a decent Arcana skill. Seems like a bit of an oversight to me, given the importance of magic items to this game.
Well, I’ve aired all of my grievances now, so I think I’ll wrap up. I’m a bit too early in the plot to really comment on that (I had some install troubles and started the game 72 hours after release, but I’m not sure I can blame the game for this one since one of my hard drives might be corrupting), but it seems interesting so far. Much more so than P:K’s was since that amounted to “become a king and find out who is fucking with your attempts to become a king!” It’s definitely worth playing and hopefully future patches will continue to iron out the problems. If nothing else, P:WotR is in a much better place at launch that P:K was. Solid progress.
Still, as the title suggestions, I’m not sure where “Wrath of the Righteous” enters into the equation. Sure, demons are bad and they shouldn’t be in our world, but that’s more of a “fighting off an invasion” type thing. Righteousness has nothing to do with fending off a murderous invasive species. So far, the only “Righteousness” I’ve seen is the kind that is Good twisted to commit acts of Evil that has me wondering how all these god-empowered assholes could still be granted powers by their gods when they’re torturing and executing people without trials.