During a recent D&D game I got to play in (it’s the wrap-up of another campaign that some of my friends used to play in years ago that needed another player to round things out as they try to bring it to an end this year), things went a little off the rails. I’ll claim some responsibility in starting the process since I decided to act in a situation that the other players didn’t seem inclined to and wound up preventing a bad guy from magically escaping. Sure, this meant that we got to show the entire city that they were being ruled by a terrifying Adult Red Dragon, but that also meant that we were stuck in a room with an angry Adult Red Dragon and a ton of bystanders who had no hope of surviving an attack from him. It was rough, seeing half of those people die as the party of intrepid adventurers tried to intervene against some of the named and known unsavory NPCs at the ball we were all attending, but we forced a dragon (the leader and ally of the aforementioned NPCs) to reveal himself and set up an interesting situation that we’d need to flee. Only, when it came time to run, the battle immediately turned sideways. This sudden shift was only made possible by a series of moments that, individually, seemed largely unremarkable, but ultimately ended with one of our group knocking the dragon unconscious before a Contingency spell zipped him away from us. Which, needless to say, really knocked the plot and session plans (current and future) asunder. I wound up talking to the DM afterwards (he is one of my dearest friends and a brother to me, along with being my longest-running tabletop game player), about how these kinds of things happen, the choices we make as GMs, and how to live with what happens after the fact (we wound up branching pretty far in our conversation, as we often do, since he’s also been around pretty much every time something similar happened to me).
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 26
Every so often, I get struck by the urge to go replay an old Legend of Zelda. Right now, I really want to go replay The Legend of Zelda: Wink Waker. It’s been a long time since I played through that game and it has been on my mind recently because I lent my younger sister my Wii U, which has a copy of the digital Wind Waker HD game installed on it. I could set up my Wii and play the GameCube version of the game if I really wanted to, rather than wait for my sister to be finished or bother her about getting my console back, but I currently don’t want to play it enough to actually act on the urge. I mean, I’d probably play the game in a couple months if no new games come up (which I already won’t happen) and I finish all the other gaming I’ve recently been putting off to play Palia (which is unlikely to happen, given just how much stuff I’ve still got on my to-play list), but I remember the game well enough that I’m not really feeling compelled to play it again. It’s only been a few years since I last played it, after all. It was part of the franchise replay I was doing with my ex-roommate back when we were living together, so I even have memories of playing the HD remake version with all of its quality-of-life changes (The Swift Sail is a game-changer for a focused player). In looking back on my memories of the game, though, I think I prefer the original version of the game.
Continue readingReopening Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Twenty Years Later
Content Warning for discussion of childhood trauma in the context of a retrospective about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. There’s also spoilers for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in there, too, but not super specific ones.
Continue readingTripping And Falling Back Into Palia
Well, I meant to spend a bunch of my free time last weekend getting through as much of Dragon Age: Origins as I could, since that is my book club assignment for the month of August (we’ve had to shuffle some things around a bit due to us both being busy). Instead of doing any amount of that, though, I wound up getting back into Palia again. Super heavily. Hours upon hours, most of which was spent blasting through quests, digging back into building and decorating my house, investigating all the fun new features that have been introduced since I last played in April, and spending some real-world money on the game so I could experience a little bit of video game-based gender euphoria (or at least as close as I can get to that, given to my general lack of feelings on the matter). It was a bit more than I probably should have spent, but I decided to just use my July video game budget and take the rest out of my “fun big purchase” account (which is slowly beginning to recover from buying my new gaming PC). Also, I played it for the first time on maximum settings and the game looks so much better when everything is dialed all the way up. It’s a really fun, gorgeous little game. Well, little for now. It has grown a lot in the year since I started playing and all signs point toward it continuing to grow. I’m not sure how fast that growth will happen given that my current sense of it is skewed by being away for four months, but it feels like it has been pretty fast.
Continue readingPlayer Characters As Rotten As Their Setting
Currently, my other Sunday group has completed our second session of the prologue I’m running for our game. This is my second group in my “The Rotten” setting and while I STILL don’t have a proper name for this group (I’m calling our prologue “The Rotten Haven” but that name is built from the setting name and the current focal point of the game rather than because it reflects the game in any way other than these sparse setting details), we’ve solidly landed our group in the game. While the characters all started out fairly neutral, the past two sessions have seen them take a sharp turn towards villainy and I’ve had to pivot my preparations from being focused on building out the evil side of the game to building out the good side of the game. Sure, there’s definitely some question as to whether or not each group is truly Good or Evil, but one side is engaged in behavior that is mostly morally good and the other side is doing things that are mostly morally bad. There’s nuance if the players want to dig into it, but considering that they decided to go the assassination route and a mixture of really good rolls on my part (I rolled a LOT of natural 20s last night, even given the huge number of dice I rolled) and bad rolls on their part meant that they got found out multiple times. As their decisions snowballed, I made sure to characterize their actions a bit, trying to illustrate what kind of people they had become as a result of their thus-far undefined past adventures and were becoming in the eyes of the citizens who once saw them as heroes. All of which culminated in them fighting a battle against all of the leadership of the rebellion they’d planned to assassinate, but all at once instead of being separated into manageable chunks.
Continue readingSaving My Inspiration For Later
It has been a long time since I was last struck by inspiration. Most of the time, when an idea “comes to me,” it’s the result of me chewing something over in the back of my mind for a long time before coming up with whatever thought or idea will form the center of what thing I’m going to produce. Poetry, short stories, a novel draft, all these blog posts… None of them are the result of inspiration even if I’ve often claimed to have been “inspired” by something. Even those times, I came up with an idea after thinking about some media or idea for a while. Which might sound a lot like inspiration, but I would define inspiration as something external that plops a fully-formed idea into your head. All of my “inspired by” ideas are a result of my internal processing coming up with an idea based on thinking about something else. It feels like quite a thin hair to split, which is why I haven’t written about this before and am somewhat hesitant to write about it not (mostly because it doesn’t much matter to me which side of the split hair you’re on since it’s all a part of the writing process and the only person the precise definition of this stuff matters to is the person doing the defining as a part of their process). Still, this feeling of actual, true inspiration is rare enough that I feel compelled to say something about it now that I’ve been on the receiving end of it for the first time since I set up an online D&D campaign back in 2019.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 25
Rather than complain about how tired and sad I am, or about how rough work has been this week, I figured I might as well turn my attention toward my favorite gaming franchise and not only avoid my blog becoming a dour place full of only my sourest feelings but also maybe even lift my own spirits. After all, there’s a new Legend of Zelda game coming out soon (Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom) and you get to play as Zelda in this one! Which is a pretty big deal, considering the only other protagonist we’ve even seen in a Legend of Zelda game is Link. Link’s been our only player character this whole time. Sure, the Hyrule Warriors games muddied the waters a bit, but those aren’t really the same thing since they’re even further from “canon” than even the handful of Capcom handheld games. Even if you moved to include them in this accounting of Legend of Zelda protagonists, Link is still the primary protagonist and all the other characters show up to support and fight alongside him, so that argument is iffy at best. All of which is to say that this is a pretty big deal. I know a lot of people are nervous about what looks like a departure from the norm (dungeons and puzzles and relatively clear progression) as the game touts its world being as open to exploration as your imagination allows and shows Zelda committing mostly indirect violence rather than ever truly dirtying her hands like Link does, but I think it’s almost always worth taking a relatively wild swing. Wild swings got us Breath of the Wild and, sure, they also got us Tears of the Kingdom (which was an enjoyable foul ball, but a foul ball all the same and I could probably make a good argument it for being less of a wild swing and more of an attempt to hit a home run again, which doesn’t really make sense in this metaphor but feels like an accurate description of what the game did), but I’m all for trying new things and desperate to play as Zelda, especially after they took the very gender-neutral Link of Breath of the Wild and solidly masculinized him in Tears of the Kingdom. Let’s move the men aside for a bit and let someone else have a turn at the game, you know?
Continue readingWhy I’m Still Struggling Along In Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
I’ve been steadily chipping away at Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth again and was planning to keep my thoughts to myself until I got further in the game (apparently ending the open world sections of chapter 9 just launches you into an open world section in chapter 10, unlike every other open-world section that got to have a break for some fun story time before heading back to the open world stuff again, which made me so frustrated that I turned my PlayStation off and stared at my ceiling in discontent for fifteen minutes). Instead, I’m writing this post because I saw someone writing about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth by saying that there might never be another game like it. This was meant as praise and had me wondering if the writer of that post had played the same game I did. As I chewed on this opinion, I realized I’d never really looked at reviews for the game, as it released or in the months since then, because I’d wanted to avoid being spoiled while I finished up some other games before diving into FF7: Rebirth. Uncertain, now, if my opinion was just me being curmudgeonly and unwilling to allow myself to appreciate the game, I decided to spend some time looking at reviews and discussions of the game. Which pretty much all broke down into people either loving or hating the open-world segments of the game, for good and bad reasons on both sides, and doing nothing but shouting down the people who disagreed with them. So, today, as I complained about the game to a friend, I decided I should actually talk about WHY this game doesn’t work for me, why I continue to push myself to play it, and why I feel so emotionally invested in all of this that I’m writing about it multiple times without even finishing it.
Continue readingGuardian-Teacher Conferences And First Adventures In The Magical Millennium
Though we were short a player, there were still enough people available to hold another session of The Magical Millennium. We picked up immediately where we left off last time, with a few notes about how most of the player characters present spent their afternoons and evenings before we launched into the two big events for the session: a guardian-teacher conference (like a parent-teacher conference but for legal guardians who want to avoid the topic of parents) to discuss the uncontrolled magic one of the player characters unknowingly cast on their unsuspecting dorm neighbor and the party’s first adventure in a city park that had an Awakened Bush problem! Everything went well, my players had a great time, and no one was knocked unconscious despite the irritable awakened plants landing two critical hits in a combat session that was almost prevented by good roleplaying (bad rolls and cascading failures are the only reason this didn’t even non-violently). I got to make up some random NPC names, accidentally create a really cool character, and start to trickle in a little bit of information about the retired adventuring party casting its shadow over the city and the player characters. After all, if one of the players is going to make their character the second child of one of the ex-adventurers who saved the world by sealing the rifts into the fiendish planes before they could consume the planet, I’m absolutely going to find a way to do something narratively fun with that. Why wouldn’t I?
Continue readingBurnout By Any Other Name Would Ache As Much
I am happy to report that I made it through a whole weekend without discovering some new wild and unprecedented thing happening in the world. Perhaps because I avoided social media as much as possible and have avoided going to look for what I might have missed, but perhaps because nothing significant and unprecedented happened! Maybe it was a normal weekend! Like any other! Just a totally average weekend that included the start of the summer Olympics as France showed off what it brings to the world. Which I didn’t watch, but heard was absolutely wild. I plan to go watch it at some point (even though I don’t really care much about the Olympic sporting events themselves) since the pageantry of it all seems incredible, but I avoided at the time so I could spend the entire weekend trying to recover from how absolutely exhausting and draining last week was. Which, of course, means that I got into work today and all of that resting immediately flew out the window, leaving me more burned out and stressed than I was last week. It is difficult to be the source of truth and knowledge for a project that a lot of people have strong opinions on when said people decide to insert themselves into said project and voice their opinions without asking to be caught up on where the project is at. It is a particularly futile brand of frustrating to spend an entire day explaining to people that you did, in fact, think of all the obvious things they’re suggesting, that you have returned to the basics multiple times, that you’ve done all the easy troubleshooting they suggested, and that your data is actually as conclusive as you’re saying even if they don’t understand it. Literally spent five hours today on that kind of work and made it exactly one iota of a step further than I was last week because of how much stuff I had to do so my coworkers could “just see it happen” themselves.
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