One of my favorite parts of my The Magical Millennium campaign is that all of my players are willing to go all-in on roleplaying in a way that I can rarely predict. Sometimes people escalate when I didn’t expect to provoke a response or wind up digging into something I assumed was going to be passed over quickly, and I absolutely love the feeling of needing to scramble in order to continue the scene without breaking stride. This last session, as the party started the Lock-In they’d been planning as they dealt with the local emergency in the background (they all kept their cell phones since the barrier around the Hellmouth broke and while all the parents absolutely agreed that keeping all of their burgeoning adventurer children under close supervision by much more powerful adventurers and trained educators was a great idea, they still wanted to be able to get ahold of them if something else happened. Which means these teens also have access to outside information and that’s definitely never going to come up even a little bit), I got to see my players in fine form.
Continue readingRomancing My Least Favorite Character in Dragon Age: Inquisition
I actually had a really difficult time deciding what kind of character to play when I started up Dragon Age: Inquisition. I knew I didn’t want to be a Human, since I’d played a human in both the previous games, and I knew I wanted to be a mage which meant I wasn’t going to play a Dwarf, but I couldn’t decide between playing a Qunari or an Elf. I’d been having a lot of fun learning more and more about the Qunari in my replays of the first two Dragon Age games and, since I’ve apparently never spent much time or energy trying to learn about them in previous play-throughs, thought it might be fun to play through this (currently) final game with a Qunari lens over the whole experience. I was interested to see how the general residents of Thedas responded to my character, to be a giant woman, and to see how those who knew about the Qun responded to my character, a mage who had grown up outside the Qun and absolutely not let herself be collared and leashed in the way that most other Qunari mages were. On the other hand, knowing what I know now about how Inquisition can end and how Veilguard starts, I thought it might be fun to play an Elf and finally go through the romance sequence for Solas. I’d started a playthrough as an Elf, once, and thought it was pretty interesting to see how everyone reacted to an Elven Inquisitor, but I’d never actually romanced Solas before. I tried to flirt with him a bunch once, but I was playing a Human woman and he was not interested. Plus, Elven women are pretty fun! They’ve got the most flirt options and, personally, I’m interested in flirting with as many companions as possible! That said, since I’d be playing an Elven woman and absolutely won’t be playing through Dragon Age: Inquisition again any time soon, I knew that this was my one shot to actually romance Solas and see what its all about before Veilguard made it clear to me.
Continue readingEvery Time I Think Things Are Calming Down, A Rich Asshole Shows Up To Ruin Something
Every time I think the internet is going to calm down and I can maybe figure out some kind of plan for what I’m going to do once I’ve gotten enough sleep for complex thought and proper long-term planning, a new bit of bullshit breaks. To be completely honest, I figured that the guy running Automattic, that owns WordPress .com and Tumblr, and who also runs the WordPress Foundation (which owns and maintains the trademarks on WordPress and does some oversight on the open-source WordPress project), was at least some kind of asshole give the way that WordPress and Tumblr are doing their damnedest to sell user data to shitty plagiarism machines, but I really underestimated how much of an asshole he is. Turns out he’s allegedly trying to extort another company that he recently called out, threatening that he’d go “scorched earth” if they didn’t give in to his demands for changes to their business model or some kind of financial support. Reading some of these exchanges is absolutely wild and I’m really not sure how to feel about all of this, considering my plan to leave WordPress .com was to set up the open-source WordPress .org software on a different host. I’d even begun to do a bit of research about what hosts I could turn to, when the time came to make the change, and have bookmarked the research some of my friends on Cohost did for their own purposes. Now, I’m not as certain.
Continue readingStrong First Impressions In Echoes of Wisdom
After a few days of delay spent finishing Unicorn Overlord, I’ve finally started to dig into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. While I’ve been mildly excited about it for a while, I purposefully kept my expectations lowered because there’s been just so much interesting fan art for what a Zelda-As-Protagonist video game might look like that any actual implementation of the concept would probably fall short. It was promising that, rather than go with the stylized but fairly proportional look of the two most recent main-line Legend of Zelda games, Echoes of Wisdom was adopting the more cartoony style that was used for the Link’s Awakening remake. I appreciate a game that isn’t trying to take itself too seriously and Echoes of Wisdom’s fairly simple but still highly detailed art has made for a refreshing look at a brand new game. I half-expected to only ever see that art style in future remakes of games from that era (by which I mean all the LoZ games that originally came out on a GameBoy of some kind), so I’m glad to see that they’re continuing to work with the look that they’ve established for that category of Legend of Zelda game on the Switch. In fact, the only issue I have with the visuals of this game (please keep in mind that I’m still not very far into the game, so there might be something up ahead that changes this opinion of mine) is that the game lags pretty heavily when you’re in “busy” towns with water features. I know that they want to make these games look nice, but they absolutely didn’t need to all-in on the water like they did. I’m not entirely sure that this was a “sacrifice performance on the altar of visual splendor” decision, but it sure is starting to feel like they’re expecting these games to be played on a console that’s more powerful than the seven-year-old Nintendo Switch. I’m not really one to dig too deeply into rumors of the Switch 2 or pass around conspiracy theories about making bad games to keep a franchise fresh in everyone’s mind, but I’m starting to feel like ignoring what seems like a bunch of stuff planned for a more powerful console that just hasn’t materialized would be more foolish than contemplating the idea that some new console has been held back for a couple years now.
Continue readingWrapping Up The Prologue To The Rotten Haven
In one hell of a turn-around that I saw coming thanks to the character creation process for the prologue to my “The Rotten” campaign, my little group of evil player characters killed the entire leadership of the rebellion–and a huge chunk of the town besides–despite having landed in a situation they were incredibly lucky to escape from. You see, they’d decided to take up with the maligned Lord Besk, chief necromancer in charge of maintaining the barriers around this Haven (a city made safe from the undead creatures that walked the fading remnants of the material plane by those very barriers), because he and the city council he had wrapped around his finger were willing to pay them. This turn-around, necessary because their plan to slowly assassinate individual targets one at a time fell apart almost immediately due to bad rolls, was so complete and thorough that it instantly wrapped up our prologue and set the stage for the game that will take place in the shadow of the city they’d destroyed. And, you know, underneath the heel of the Great Lich they’d helped create since that’s what Besk was up to this whole time. That and somehow controlling the massive nightwalkers that had introduced The Rot to the world and were slowly draining everything of its life. Thanks to all that, I get to keep all their PCs around as generals and trusted lieutenants for Great Lich Besk and sprinkle them into the campaign in appropriate places! Sure, I’ve got a ton of work to get them from level one to whatever level the player characters will be ready for that kind of challenge, but there’s no denying how nice it is to have the later parts of the campaign already fleshed out.
Continue readingWringing All The Fun Out Of Unicorn Overlord
In what seemed like the longest conclusion to a mission-based video game I’ve ever played, I finished Unicorn Overlord. I enjoyed the mechanical challenges posed by the last few missions, as the maps grew longer and the fights within each map more numerous, but each one of those missions felt like it just kept spawning a new mission behind it, despite me being certain that each one must finally be the final mission. It wasn’t bad writing or anything, just a sort of endless series of gotcha moments parading as unexpected twists that were things I absolutely expected given the form of the narrative. There were no surprises for me in any part of this ending other than the realization right at the end that there absolutely must be multiple endings to the game. Which makes a lot of sense in retrospect, given how early you can fight the final mission and how, with the right abilities and weapons, you can just cheese your way through most battles, but it just so happens that I lucked my way into the “best” ending since I did literally everything the game had to offer. I wish that had taken less than ninety hours of gaming time to get that far (with the usual caveat that some of that time was me letting the game run while I did other things because I apparently can’t focus on one thing at a time anymore), but I did it all and only have a few small things left to do, like getting alternate endings, viewing the relationship conversations for all the remaining companions, and fighting a bunch of the same enemy that showed up on my map.
Continue readingThe Weight of Sleep Deprivation
As of writing this, it has been about three months since I’ve felt well-rested. July of this year, coming off a vacation, started roughly since I was struggling to get my sleep schedule under control and, in a preview of the what would wind up being the entire month of September (and an unknown amount of October), had just returned from a vacation that was nice but not terribly restful since I kept having back pain due to the mattress I was sleeping on. The stress from that first week of July just picked up from there due to work deadlines and the amount of heavy labor I had to do to meet those deadline at my job. Plus, the back pain I had over my vacation faded a bit, but never entirely went away before it start slowly growing worse and worse until August started and I realized I needed to replace my mattress. It peaked two weeks later when I woke up with such severe lower back pain that I was afraid I’d permanently damaged my spine, prompting me to go out immediately in search of a new mattress. While I was able to reduce the severity of the pain I was dealing with by putting my futon mattress on top of my old, bad mattress, it didn’t really do much more than allow me to not feel like I was breaking my back by going to bed. Then, after an exhausting month of never enough sleep, I settled down for my first night on my new mattress and then started my birthday after barely six hours of sleep due to incredible and debilitating back pain. Since then, I’ve struggled to get even an average of five hours of sleep a night thanks to similar (but not the same) back pain that has shifted around my back over the entire month of September. Now, as October starts, my only hope for relief is the physical therapy appointment I have set up the day before this post goes up.
Continue readingWrapping Up Dragon Age 2
As you might have guessed while reading yesterday’s post, I’ve finished Dragon Age 2. I had a decent time with it. I genuinely enjoyed the storytelling within it, working my way through the tragedies that befell the Hawke family, and it felt fun to shift Hawke’s personality a bit as more and more stuff happened to them. I went from an aggressive, confident Hawke in Act One to a somewhat aggressive but mostly confident and diplomatic Hawk in Act Two and then an aggressive and quick to strike Hawke in Act 3, all reflecting what had been going on in their life over the total of seven years that the game covers. After all, Hawke learned the lesson that sometimes you need to strike first and ask questions never when someone rouses your suspicions. It’s not like you can see your mother turned into some unholy abomination and perversion of the magic you value so much in your own life without learning that maybe some people just don’t need to be alive anymore. The only time I really felt like the game failed me–or at least fell short of allowing me to take the actions I wanted to as part of roleplaying my character–was at the start of Act 3 when Meredith implies that Hawke’s mother’s death was Hawke’s fault. If I could have pointed out that she was explicitly charged with handling rogue mages or just, you know, struck her down for suggesting Hawke was at fault for what happened to Hawke’s mother, I’d have been much happier. Other than that, I felt like the game did a pretty good job of letting me direct my Hawke freely while still steering the game toward the tragic. I mean, I was definitely leaning into it most of the time, so take my satisfaction with a grain of salt, but I still think the game did a pretty good job of allowing for player choice within a much more contained narrative than we’ve seen in in Dragon Age: Origins or Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Continue readingDragon Age 2: Legacy Doesn’t Pass The Test Of Time
I realized over the weekend that I was about to start the final mission in Dragon Age 2 and immediately stopped what I was doing so I could do the final narrative DLC first. It was a close call, that, but it wouldn’t have been too bad since I am still compulsively quick saving every few minutes, so I could have easily gone back to do the DLC if I’d accidentally pushed past the point of no return in the main game. All of which feels like an appropriately hurried start to Dragon Age 2: Legacy since it’s a bit of an odd duck of a DLC. Not only was it the hardest thing I’ve done in Dragon Age 2, but it felt somehow both much more direct (mechanically) than most of Dragon Age 2 and much less direct (informationally) than the rest of the game. I know I’m not as clear on all the details since my sleep-deprived brain has been letting go of some of the short-term memory stuff that isn’t super important, but it really feels strange that the entire premise of this DLC was that my character’s father was press-ganged into maintaining a bunch of magical barriers for the Grey Wardens and that now she was needed by a couple factions because of her blood-relation to the guy who made the barriers. The primary faction was a group of darkspawn-tainted people who all wanted my character’s blood in order to disable those barriers so the guy trapped within them could be set free and my character chased them down into the prison such that she got trapped as well, all of which meant that this guy, Corypheus (the main villain of Dragon Age: Inquisition), had to get let free so I could leave as well. There’s no relevance to any other plot, no attachment to the broader world, nothing but some guys attacked me, Hawke, the Champion of Kirkwall, so I had to go on a little vacation to hunt them down and murder them, thereby unleashing an ancient horror on the world that was so great that it spawned an entire video game.
Continue readingIntroducing New Tension Into The Magical Millennium
After months of slowly building (which is the unfortunate reality of running a game for a group that meets every other week), I finally introduced the first piece of narrative tension in my D&D campaign, The Magical Millennium. I built some tables, set up some ideas, hinted at what is to come, rolled some dice, and stayed true to the design sentiment that my players and I agreed on for this campaign. Now, finally, after months of slice-of-life roleplaying with some intermittent bits of modern-fantasy and danger being packed in around that, I’ve finally introduced the first bit of high fantasy tension. What began as a simple job to help (and protect, if need be) an herbalist pick herbs in the area north of the city–close but not too close to the massive barrier that sealed off the hellmouth that threatened to plunge this area into death and chaos back at the start of the titular Magical Millennium–turned into a quick hike back to safety when the barrier cracked and a moment of intense danger when something came blasting out of that barrier to land in front of the party. Casual herb collection and a nice hike through the woods as the group failed to address the inter-party tension was all but forgotten as the booming crack of the barrier flooded the area with infernal energy and the woman they were helping directed them all to follow her down a faster path back to the parking lot. Once they reached safety, after ploughing their way through a Hook Horror (half-dead from being blasted out of hell but more than capable of killing any of them but the barbarian in a single turn), they were debriefed by the emergency response groups, sent home, and eventually collected back up for the planned lock-in that had added “make sure the young adventurers don’t do anything stupid” to its program for the evening. All in all, it was a great session and while I think I could have run it better if I’d been better rested, I’m happy with how it turned out.
Continue reading