Shadows over Camelot ... old school vs. new school ... 5th ed craze

This whole 5th ed thing this week and the reactions from OSR people the 3.5 fans the causal D&D players and the 4e people has been interesting to look at. For me it has just continued the conversation I've been having with myself basically ya I know talking to myself, next I'll be on the street corner shouting about the end times. Seriously though it has had me reexamining just my own preference for what a game of D&D should mean, what I like and what I don't like.

Really old school D&D in terms of weak starting characters is actually quite well suited to 11 and 12 year olds. It teaches them many things about being leery of just rushing headlong in when perhaps a little caution is warranted, etc. its good for problem solving, etc. as well ... players get rewarded for avoiding conflict, for being creative and overcoming difficulties through guile, etc.

People complain about how low level characters are very weak in old school games, and I don't disagree there I have long said that myself. But having seen the other side of the coin where characters feel so powerful at low level that it doesn't reflect the genre but is rather more like a video game ... I also hear that too. I think more and more with D&D the only interest left with the game for me is nostalgia. The newer stuff is just too much like a video game and therefore ... for me anyway ... dull. Why actually not just go play WoW? One can argue as I have for years ... well anything face to face/tabletop is superior to video games right. I guess, if that is the only critera. Why not just play Monopoly then or a card game? That excuse only goes so far ... tabletop gaming should be good on its own. The games we choose to play go a long way towards making that a reality. Clearly a good group can make mediocre stuff fun and a bad group can take the best of games off a cliff.

For me though I've come to focus more and more on the social interactions within RPGs. What is it that is bringing us as a group into the game, what motivates us to want to play week after week. If we don't want good social interactions between characters, why the hell are we doing and RPG? Why don't we play 40K or Warmachine then? I guess that my take as someone who does mini games, board games and RPGs though. For the RPG only guys I guess that thought doesn't even register. To me the social interactions within D&D just aren't good due to the rules. If they are good it is because the players themselves have learned to role play their characters well. So what one might say. Well the big so what is ... what about a new player ... what about people who are playing a character outside of their comfort zone or something. Not having solid rules that facilitate good social interaction in the game means those people are going to get hung out to dry.

So more on the D&D as a cooperative board game concept. If we take that route then its ok that D&D isn't designed to maximize social interactions, its designed to provide a combo heavy, video game like, tactical miniatures game. Even here, being a mini game fan, 3.0-4e era D&D kinda suck as tactical skirmish games, the games are just too complex ... balanced in places way unbalanced in others. Also to me if they wanted to make a good tactical skirmish game, why didn't they just do that on the side? God I'd have loved to have seen that WoTC making a small skirmish game that could be used along side the RPG if people wanted. That would have been great. They didn't do that though, the smashed the MMO based 3.0 pen and paper game all together ... tactical skirmish boardgame stuff with an odd role playing game.

Along these lines I have long said that 4e was the most "honest" representation of what it was grid era D&D is. To me ... that version (at least pre-essentials I honestly haven't played essentials era 4e at all) plays better in terms of being a fun fantasy based tabletop game than did 3.0-Pathfinder stuff.

Ok to the Shadows Over Camelot part, if 3.0-4e are just going to be more like board games than RPGs I really wish they played more like an endless Shadows Over Camelot. That could be rather interesting, perhaps even more satisfying than the current versions of the game. Sadly they don't though. The newer versions of D&D are a matter of players combing books to find the most powerful combos and DMs focusing on encounters rather than story. Even there I'd say ok your going to make a board game/minis skirmish game ... so why not just boil the game down to Descent? Just an honest to goodness dungeon crawl/grid based combat miniatures centric board game where players kick down doors and slay monsters for loot. Done and done. Put out some minis, some tile sets, and focus 100% on good mini based combat.

Rather than talk about the minis and combat heavy stuff though my overall point and theme here is "why can't D&D play more like a good game of Shadows Over Camelot? Because Shadows ... for a board game anyway ... really creates great social interaction between players! For those who haven't played that game ... I highly recommend it.

Shadows is a cooperative board game. It can be a very fun, casual, experience ... the game is by no means a masterpiece of game design mechanically. Conceptually though I really like how it works. The group is playing as the knights of Camelot including King Aruthur. The kingdom is beset by barbarians, quests for the grail, Excalibur, Lancelot's armor all must be undertaken all while a hidden traitor operates in the midst of the group. Mechanically the game is rather simplistic, it involves D6s and cards with a board with pieces for various things. The point for me though is how the group interacts, how people pull together to overcome the challenge of the game. The game itself brings players together to choose how they'll overcome what the game is throwing at them. Granted even in shadows, combat is the only way .. in a matter of speaking. Knights have to go quest. I guess there is the option to stay at Camelot and draw card, so we'll call that one of the lone non-combat actions. So even in a board game, with mostly only combat to choose from, a better mechanic for creating social interaction and group decisions is had. Shadows has some actual RP elements to it in that there is the traitor in the midst of the group (though in the newbie games you can run the game without a traitor, not nearly as fun IMO). The traitor element of course isn't very typical for the D&D analogy, though as I think about it ... the DM would be facilitating that sort of stuff. So the DM side of things is the traitor stuff. But honestly anymore most games of D&D aren't even as good as a good game of Shadows Over Camelot. I say that, group not withstanding, as we all know a great group can take any game to amazing places, but the average gaming group isn't "great" and the poor guys stuck with gaming at stores, well they don't even get an "average" group to work with. The average group has the flaky guy who can't show up all the time, the grumpy guy who is going through a divorce, the power gamer guy, the girlfriend who is only half heartedly playing, the DM who just wants to tell her story and not be bothered with what players want, the stoner dude who is half baked when he shows up, the fanboy who despite not being the GM owns every book, module, etc. and has a penchant for correcting the DM every five minutes, etc. etc. so you plop that reality in the middle of a big, fat, miniatures, markers, tiles, several rulebook, complex system and expect these people to make stuff out of it, for 20 levels of play. Huh?? What?? Why!!! I'd love to see them scrap all this crap and start over, but we all know that won't happen. There are legions of loyal 3.0 era fans who have figured out how to make things with the current systems work and like it all just fine. To be honest it wouldn't be fair to those folks to just dump all this stuff in the trash. So what is WoTC to do? 4e is a boardgame style game now, love it, hate it, be indifferent to it ... that is the reality ... so from my perspective the best we can hope for is more board game style.

So overall ... realistically looking at where D&D has gone and where it could possibly go I think if they get things right 5th D&D will play more like a good game of Shadows Over Camelot and less like Descent. It certainly shouldn't play like a video game, nor should it play like a game of chess, or magic the gathering.

What D&D is in the post 3.0 era is more players coming up with powerful combos and focusing on that first and foremost. I feel this represents a serious break from what it is that makes D&D. If Bill and Jim have rediculously powered up characters and Betty and Jake have ho-hum run of the mill characters and you have an average DM who is just trying to hold things together. Just from the get go there might be some problems. To me that is sort of a design flaw. For some groups, with people who love math-hammering up their characters, pouring over books, tweaking, fiddiling, and sadly in some cases creating characters that are better than other players characters so they get ... what ... more attention ... feel superior? Ok ... umm ... I guess if that is what floats their boats. Sadly that last bit there though tears these systems in half IMO.

I'm sure the min-max types of folks love 3.0-4e era D&D ... because in that respect there is no real alternative to that kind of a game. However for casual players (which would include most new players) jumping into this mix can be quite a jarring experience. I've seen this in my own groups several times. I have never been one to play D&D at a store, in fact in all the years of D&D I've played I've never played a game in a store. I've played many games at gaming cons though. So I'm less well versed in public games, but I've never seen how the newer versions of D&D were very new player friendly. I cite as my prime example of this ... WoTCs decision to roll out the Essentials line.

To me though this bespeaks my point ... player characters themselves have become too complex and this complexity doesn't increase social interaction, it decreases it. There are far too many moving parts, that don't improve social interaction between characters, in fact these moving parts do more to divide the players to push them away from each other, towards over specialization, towards solo-combat monster type characters. How is that good for a game that is supposed to be about a group coming together to have fun? I know for sure some groups have great fun with 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder/4e. I myself had months and months of great fun with 4e. So I'm not saying it is impossible, we all found a way to make it work didn't we! To our great credit. But I think for everyone who has enjoyed these games many people have quickly burnt out, become disillusioned, bored, frustrated. You can see that online, you can see that in many groups with players choosing to drop the game, DMs giving up, etc. All of that can't be blamed on the game, that is people, that is modern internet age life. But a part of this stuff I think comes down to the games themselves. I think the decision to make very complex combats and move the rules for PCs entirely towards combat has flavored or colored the game in that direction. Sure DMs can house rule up stuff, they can add in things, make skill challenges ... erm ... more about actually using intellect and creativity vs. just rolling a D20. But even in Pathfinder and 3.5 the way the game is slanted towards combat, towards conflict as the first method to resolve things. That is what you get you get a game that is all about combat, and everything else is an afterthought.

It is so bad this is how the average D&D player I've encountered in my quest to find a new gaming group approaches the game. Kick down the door, attack, and ask questions later. Why? Years of 3.0-4e era gaming. Players get rewarded for that behavior and when a DM runs a game otherwise, in my opinion they are kinda being a dick. That isn't how the rules are truly written, the rules themselves slant heavily towards combat. Many might ask ... "well isn't that the point" ... and if they do they just prove my point. Certainly that has always been part of the game, you have always wanted to delve into that dungeon, slay the vile monsters, recover the wondrous treasure! Along the way though the game became so much more than that and then ... that so much more was lost.

That in my opinion happened somewhere towards the end of 2nd edition and things have never been the same. Does that make me an OSR guy? I don't know. I'm coming to grips with that ... perhaps ... but even there I don't play 1st edition, I don't know if I even like 1st edition anymore. Like I've said other than having an eventual plan to do some OSR stuff for my kids in a few years, I don't see much potential for that in my own gaming group. So its probably irrelevant.

I do empathize with those who have had angst regarding the newer versions of D&D. Having played alot of the new stuff and come to this point there are some very big structural problems with D&D anymore and I don't know if they can be overcome. WoTC has led many people down a different path and I just don't see how those people are going to want to come back. So if 5th edition is going to really "re-unite" even portions of the divergent D&D fanbase they are really going to have to smash together some odd and very conflicting game elements. While some are saying that is impossible ... I think Shadows Over Camelot to me shows that at least for a single session you can have at least some of these mixed elements together. Granted shadows is no true "grid style" miniature combat game. The player pieces in the game are simply markers to denote what activity the given player is engaged in. But I think there is a lesson to be learned from that game.

Who knows though its all idle conjecture at this point ... until we see some concrete details on what WoTC is planning who the hell knows ...

Time will tell ... something tells me that we are heading towards more of the same and even less sanity though ...

OSR is a SHAM!!

For the record I don't believe OSR is a sham its a wonderful movement that I dearly am glad for. But I see many people out there pounding their chests right now proclaiming victory in the name of all D&D ... solely on the basis of the OSR movement and for me that is record scratching ... "Whutcha talkin bout Willis" moment. By saying something like that though I'm trying to make a ... probably lame ... but I think somewhat relevant point. Why does this constant justification to exist need to be made by the OSR people. It seems to dominate much of the discourse in the OSR community and for the life of me I can't figure out why. To me the reasons OSR exist and will continue to exist are self evident. That said there is also this propensity to I think overblow the size and impact OSR is having, which I think undermines some credibility and diverts the discussion away from where it should be. Look people this blog is shitty ... lol ... I know it. It is a thought journal for me really, just a little place to toss out an idea or record something I'm thinking about, working on, doing with the game group.

I really have zero expectation that it will ever be all that interesting to very many people. But there are blogs out there where the authors/owners choose to really spend alot of time and effort on the content, and they start to have a stronger voice and develop a community around them. I think with that comes a little responsibility, especially in communities like the OSR community. I guess that is the nature of my long, rambling rant here. I sort of hope for the best from the OSR guys because I respect what they are trying to do.

To me the OSR movement was much more akin to say the Occupy movement as not. It was about OWNING ones own game. About returning to something that wasn't broken and didn't need to be fixed. It was a little bit about nostaliga, a little bit about small amateur game design, about blogging and podcasting and just having fun. OSR was a reaction to the grid ... I will say that again ... it was a reaction to the grid based 3.0-4e era versions of D&D (including Pathfinder).

The 5th edition frenzy today really has me a little non-plussed at some of the commentary form people regarding OSR. OSR is a movement towards 1st/basic edition D&D ... period. It is special and interesting and cool ... and really apparently full of itself. OSR is not singlehandedly responsible for the demise of 4e, and I don't care what anyone says OSR isn't the driving force behind new 5th ed. It does not have the vast numbers that people out there to warrant some of the rhetoric people are spouting right now. OSR defeated evil Hasbro ... huh? Ummm ... no. Sorry guys. Paizo has probably a 90% greater claim to that. Lets face it 3.0-4e era D&D just has some serious design flaws ... just because the OSR crowd has recognized that doesn't mean they are RESPONSIBLE for the demise of 4e ... lol. Yet some people are actually SAYING that ... it is silly.

To my knowledge the OSR community is a community of tens of thousands perhaps low hundreds of thousands ... VS ... what low millions for the 3.5/Pathfinder fans. So who is going to have more influence?

Beyond this ... and far, far more importantly in my mind. Individual self proclaimed OSR leaders are claiming some kind of design superiority based on their association with OSR?!?!? What??? To me I see the "indie" RPG scene as potentially a far better place to draw inspiration from as the game moves forward. If old school D&D was so vastly superior why were so many so willing to jump to new versions? Why did it take so long for OSR to begin? I personally think OSR came to be and thrived because of grid based D&D .. pretty much alone. Old School D&D is not a main stream cup of tea. The insane dungeon ecology of many of the Gygax era stuff is nostalgically fun, but very campy and even for a fantasy game ... so woefully unrealistic ... "why is the underground goblin empire next to the red dragon's lair ... under a lake of gray ooze ... with a Minotaur civilization living along its banks ... all in the area the size of a suburban mall."

That stuff was great fun when I was 12 back in the mid 80s but it isn't going to be fun for many adults these days. Its a great "he he" lets have some beers and relive 1984 for a night kinda experience, but it doesn't make for long standing, intellectually stimulating, deep RP kinda campaigns. I know D&D has mostly never been about that, but there has for a long time been at least an attempt at blending in some maturity and intellectually stimulating elements into the game. Some very challenging moral and ethical dilemmas, etc.

Much if not most, of OSR is campy "how do we use this ten foot pole to defeat the evil overlord" kinda stuff. Again, wonderful, delightful, hilarious, potentially dark and devious ... old school goodness. But it is just that. It is constrained by that era of game design, that style of game. Why constrain D&D? Why not instead look more to games like Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard. Of course not entirely and you couldn't really do that out loud ... game designers would have to be blending elements into the mix. I hope elements of basic/1st ed era return as well as elements from 2nd ed. I hope the preserve some of the good stuff from 3.0-4e era D&D as well. But I dearly hope that they look towards some of the really cutting edge RPGs in the indie/small press category as well. Above all I hope we can at least have a by the rules option to NOT USE THE GRID in 5th ed D&D.

I also hope that the OSR people can stop proclaiming victory over WoTC as theirs alone. The Paizo/3.5 guys have done a bigger part in terms of just not giving WoTC cash for a bad game and making due with what it was they like about D&D ... just like the OSR guys have. What about the third column of D&D dissent ... the guys like me ... who just stopped playing all together? I stopped giving WoTC money and I didn't have a chance and/or the inclination to get whole hog into OSR and tried as I might 3.0-Pathfinder D&D was just never for me. I did my 4e time and then left. So where does that leave the guys who still love D&D but feel dispossessed? Hopefully WoTC is looking to bring us back into the fold as well and if so I hope they aren't going to just stamp a brand on OSRs ass or Pathfinder-ize D&D (they couldn't we all know we won't see a simple return to OGL, I'm just saying ...). No 5th ed is a move in a new direction and we all need to keep things in perspective and watch the epeen and chest thumping.

D&D has been a sick old cancer ridden man with a bad heart and cataracts ... for a long time. Its time to pass the torch, not time to jump up and down about his demise. But micro-celebrities in the blog-o-sphere are going to likely do alot of "I told you so" high five crap. It is inevitable. I think all of us have been saying we see 4e on the way out for a long time. I could thump my chest a bit saying I predicted this over a year ago ... but that would be bogus because I follow many blogs, talk to a wide range of people in different towns, at cons, etc. etc. about gaming and just absorb what others are saying. Such is the nature of a constantly plugged in world. I'm looking at this as a moment when there is some opportunity to bridge some rifts and heal some wounds and I hope that the overall OSR community, the players of pathfinder, 3.0/3.5 ed guys, etc. will try to exert positive influence if indeed WoTC is going to be listening.

Again hope against hope I do that this is the ticket we've all been waiting for and so that is how I'm going to leave my mind on 5th ed for now. I would be shocked if we see the game out before next fall at the earliest and I wouldn't be half surprised to see it come in the spring or summer of 2013 (a Gencon 2013 launch would make sense).

Addendum to the original post (just because its too big to fit in the comments section):


I don't disagree about demographics mattering and I don't disagree with the point about amount spent vs. people who play. Though even there don't go too far with discounting numbers. You can be certain that Hasbro pays attention to the numbers not just who is spending right now. They are looking at market share, number of customers, etc. those guys might not be buying books but maybe they will chip in with some buddies for a group DDI account, maybe they'll buy some D&D special edition dice or whatnot, etc. Maybe they won't buy books but maybe they will buy a video game. So WoTC does make decisions as probably does Paizo based on numbers ... not just on who is spending today or next month. I don't want to over state that though nor suggest that how many people playing something vs. how many people buying it ... clearly I fully concede by far how many people are buying is the most important of the two. Obviously and if I overstated I was wrong.

A age old anecdote about the RPG industry that I've heard for years and heard industry folks at GAMA say in a tongue in cheek fashion "the average RPG consumer spends 0.00 per year on actually RPG materials." RPG fans have historically been cheap, pirates who are content to plunder their rules, or share a players handbook between five people.

One of my main points actually and I'm sorry I expressed it poorly, is that Pathfinder is selling alot more product than OSR, again if you don't give OSR the huge boost by including all small press/indie RPGs with OSR. I believe that the amount spent on Pathfinder alone is more than all of OSR, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't by a wide margin. Again we are not lumping small press RPGs or Indie RPGs with OSR. They are not part of OSR. Mouseguard, Dogs in the Vineyard, Fiasco, Dresden Files are not OSR. So all that activity while having impact probably on WoTCs sales (maybe I don't know what kind of crossover there is). Again NO CLUE if that is the case just posing a theory.

If that isn't the case though and someone can link something to disprove that statement ... then indeed my logic is flawed ... otherwise it still holds water.

Another thing I will admit, I say it constantly on this "blog" of mine. I'm not a pro/elite blogger. I sit, I type, I don't even edit. Its a one shot, spur of the moment thought journal for me basically. Just a way to put an idea out there and see what people think if anyone even responds. Its mostly just a cathartic exercise for me. I have a masters degree in public administration, I've taken some business and economics courses but I am by no means a stock analyst or economist.

My main reason for saying these things and/or posing the theory is I keep asking myself what are OSR people spending their money on? My experience with OSR is alot of free or very cheaply priced product with a few exceptions. My experience with OSR is also alot of second hand purchases. OSR people tend to spend alot on ebay, alot on old 1st ed. modules, etc. That = zero benefit or effect upon WoTC or Paizo. I will theorize again that the Paizo guys, are outspending both the OSR and the 4e fans these days. That was the main point.

Clearly and obviously demographics matter. The baby boomers have far more disposable wealth than any other population cohort right now. Working professionals of all generations have more to spend on games, etc. so if someone can market a product do you want to market them to people with money? Or 18-25 year olds who tend to not have anywhere near as much discretionary income? Business 101 does apply I don't disagree. If we really got into the issue, it would require proprietary info from Hasbro and Paizo and some sort of "industry" wide numbers for OSR. But again ... how many OSR people are there? I see some blogs, I see some podcasts. I see no local brick and mortar stores in my area (or many places at least in the Western US) that heavily cater to OSR. I do see those stores catering to Paizo folks and still selling D&D. I see D&D and Pathfinder for sale at Barnes and Noble, en mass on Amazon. I don't see as much OSR stuff though. That is my point. I see many people proclaiming how big OSR is and now how large their purchasing power is. Yet I don't see any data to support that? I do agree if you lump OSR in with ALL the small press RPG activity it is substantital but that is disingenious as the Indie-Small Press RPG scene is not about OSR really at all. Its about Cubicle 7, Evil Hat, IPR, Drive Through RPG, etc. certainly some OSR stuff is traded on those sites and on lulu. Again though unless each OSR fan is spending hundreds each year on PDFs ... they are in my opinion not even going to be close to the spending levels of Paizo fans. Who are buying their publications and now miniatures, etc. etc. in large quantities all over the place.

For example The Warstore, Miniature Market, just to name a few carry Paizo products. I don't see really any OSR products there though. So this big OSR puff up about how OSR is doing all things for the industry, controlling the hearts and minds of the most important fans, apparently selling vast untold millions in product. I'm just not seeing it? Where? Who is making these piles of cash? Perhaps ebay ... on the after market sales of 1st ed modules. If we lumped that in, perhaps we could call OSR a significant factor in terms of percentage of RPG sales.

I'm not saying OSR is insignificant, far from it, clearly intellectually OSR has been very, very important. When you have the likes of Mike Mearls talking about OSR as well as other noted and/or influentail game designers you can't discount that. OSR has made its mark. If in no other way than by simply proving that people can just return to the classic systems that weren't broken and didn't need to be fixed. People can use the OGL to publish new materials, people can buy 1st ed stuff and simply convert it, etc. etc

I get this and applaud it. I'm just saying if there is a flaw in my logic about the size of the OSR customer base ... then show me the data? I can't find it. OSR in my opinion based on what I readily admit to be anecdotal data mixed with making assumptions based on some other sources (for example look at the amazon sales figures for the sales of WoTC vs. Paizo core books, etc.).

My point isn't to troll or be argumentative my point is that I think things are getting blown out of perspective from the OSR community. There is oddly ... how or why I don't understand ... alot of ego there. From the little I've seen in the blogosphere and OSR podcasts even before this 5th ed announcement I hear much chest pounding and really arrogant "we are all important" kinda rhetoric. This week with the 5th ed announcement that kinda thing seemed to really get blown out of proportion.

To be fair I haven't been watching the Paizo boards or equivalent pathfinder blogs, etc. so perhaps its just as bad there. At least in the case of pathfinder I could see some justification for smugness. Even then though it really would be unjustified. I think the failure of 4e came more from mismanagement and market forces than anything else. D&D has been a property somewhat adrift for a few years now. After the initial launch of D&D and say the first 18 months or so of release ... things just started sliding down hill. Was that because of OSR or Pathfinder? No. That was the fault of WoTC alone. So taking credit for slaying the dragon in a case where it basically swallowed its own tongue .. is a little unjustified. That was my main point.

The larger issue is ... it is out of this kind of environment that WoTC hopes to "re-unite" people and win the hearts and minds of its very fractured customer base? How the hell are they going to do that and if they somehow manage to pull it off, it is something that not just the RPG industry should make note of but its something that academics and business leaders outside of the industry should watch closely ... it would really be a comeback for the ages. This wouldn't be an outright first, for other similar examples one can look to: Harley Davidson, Apple, don't laugh ... seriously ... Martha Stewart, Ford, Best Buy, etc. Those are examples of businesses with fragmented, actually hostile customer bases ... which managed to navigate the mine field and find a way to come back from it. Do I predict a great comeback of D&D ... sadly ... probably not. But it is possible if the right people do the right things in unison and they finally get and stay focused on the customers.

5th edition Dungeons and Dragons Announced ...

Well 2/3s of the blogs I follow I'm sure are alight with discussion about this, honestly I haven't checked any of that yet. I've only seen the WoTC site stuff and had some discussion with friends on our local game group board.

To me I've been burned by WoTC many times and have a deep seated pessimissim about the future of D&D. I have to be honest about that up front. That said though, in my heart of hearts, I deeply wish these guys would get things right and return the franchise to happier days. I think tabletop RPG needs a unifying force, a brilliant gateway to new players, something beckoning people to try it out. I think we all need a good old standby RPG again. So I hope that this time we are given a system that the disparate groups from OSR, to the 3.5/Pathfinder purists, to the 4e fanboys ... can all rally around. That might sound impossible and I admit I have said as much on more than one occasion, but really it isn't impossible. It is very possible. There are already murmurings of a multifaceted system where one can add or take away layers of complexity. If they do really end up going that direction fully and they try to really be accommodating to the different groups. The deep story RP people, the crunchy mini based, grid based, combat people .. allowing people to take out the RP stuff or take out the need for grid and long, complex combats ... and have the game still be whole somehow. Well, that would indeed be something at least worth looking at for anyone who has in the past enjoyed D&D ... wouldn't it?

I ran across this comment on the WoTC board and as far as 4e and Forgotten Realms. Just a quote from

"I agree with progenitus5... as a major fan of FR I was horrified at how alien the setting became. (I do understand the necessity to eliminate the metagame from this setting... but there again a big stick is more apt!) FR in previous editions was a beautiful entity - the gem of the RPG world. 4e changed the feel of this - something which completely summarises this edition. 4e felt out of touch... failing to capture the true essence of the DnD experience. That, for me, was the gamebreaker. Jbennett, January 9, 2012"

Just a quote from a random dude without spell check turned on ... lol. But honestly I think that captures what is wrong with the game from my perspective as well. I felt this way about D&D since 2nd ed. Even in 2nd ed much of the stuff that came out lacked the spirit of original D&D.

Most of the years of 3.0-4e has just felt ... off ... for me. There were flashes of fun with those systems. Hell for about six months we had 4e going well and really thought we'd found a new favorite game, that was short lived though and we hit that inveterate wall in the system then shortly thereafter got hit over the head with the brick that essentials was. Honestly I know many folks out there didn't feel this way about 3.0-3.5 because its most of the D&D some people have played. So that IS D&D for some people. For me I recall a odd mix of basic/1st and 2nd as my first experiences with D&D way back in the days ... and I had several years of that ... then I stopped playing D&D for probably 10 or 12 years and came back to it in my mid 20s a little while after getting back into mini wargames. We had a few very good years of 2nd ed at the end of its run in my old gaming group and then ... 3.0 came out and I personally never got my D&D mojo back. I am a huge fan of miniature war games

To me D&D is at its core a fantasy RP game and settings filled with a sense of darkness and foreboding yet mixed with elements of frivolity, humor and heroism. When this is all done in a very interesting way it just creates wonder and magic unlike almost any other game can. It is from that diverse cocktail of stuff that people have woven endlessly entertaining games for decades. I hope they find a way to bring that back more than anything else. D&D losing its way has really been nothing but a bad thing for all tabletop gaming ... I think these impacts have extended even beyond just the RPG side of tabletop gaming to the entire tabletop gaming community.

Addendum:

Ok having read more blogs, more online chatter, my biggest question is 5th edition still a grid based game? That is the biggest question I have right now. I don't see how they'll be able to break away from the grid in post 3.0 world. The grid has been the source of a majority of the problems with post 2nd ed D&D (many of the problems with D&D do in fact have their roots in the mid to late run 2nd ed stuff). The grid is constraining and I say this as a historical wargamer, a decades long fan of Games Workshp games, etc. I love minis, I even have a special nostalgia for minis based D&D. But the grid based versions of D&D have lacked that special something I think in large part due to the big derailing, game interrupting nature of grid based, very complex combats. Story and RP defacto have to take a back seat in a grid based, crunchy combat game. I do not believe it will be possible to please all the various groups ... the deeper RP/Story folks on the OSR side AND the crunchy grid/minis based combat guys on the 3.0-pathfinder-4e side ... all at once. Yet that is what is being said is the aim of 5th ed. So I'm deeply intrigued to see how this seemingly impossible task is going to be pulled off ... this is either going to be a really historic game ... or one of the biggest flops we've ever seen. The stakes are high in nerdland :)

Vampire Counts + Unbalanced look and feel + Resin = Meh

Ok ... I've seen some of the new Vampire counts stuff on the GW site, BoW, and around the net and some of it looks very beautiful and well done. Yet there are some things I'm seeing like ... Resin bat swarms ... but not NEW sculpts?!!?!! What??? WHY!!

GW is "finecasting" (I feel dirty just typing that) a bunch of the "classic" models. The old bat swarms, I'm sorry those to me are not "classic" they are an old sculpting style that isn't redeeming, interesting in a kitchy way or anything ... those should be plastic on one of the sprues they should come with the zombies or skelletons or whatever like ripper swarms do for the nids. Why on earth would they do that?? Expect people to pay 24 bucks for what looks like two swarm bases? What the hell?? Ya I know maybe 20 guys globally want some new ones to match their current army but ... seriously ... even then 24 bucks a swarm? Why would anyone use GW models for that. At that price I can buy pewter reaper swarms for 6.99 and they match the look and feel of the old range nicely ... so GW can hang when it comes to this price gouging BS! Lets not even talk about 53.00 for a resin black coach. Seriously? 53 bucks?? What the hell that is just obscene!!

It is a matter of the greed or mismanagement (or both) and lack of a long range planning GW seems to have these days. That to me seems the most striking difference between GW today and GW five or ten years ago. Today it almost seems like their strategy with miniature gaming is more lets make the quick buck, lets worry about this quarters profits, to where five and ten years ago they seemed content to have a methodical multi-year, long range plan. Certainly that is still there and the current economic environment has alot to do with things, but I have to wonder if the mass departure of all the old guard in terms of game designers doesn't have alot to do with this as well. From what I've heard there has been a power shift at GW over the past decade or so and now the game design folks are sort of seen as subservient to the demands from the MBAs and corporate executive folks ... and the creative content coming out of GW ... at least in my opinion is showing it. I think there are some strong similarities between what is going on with GW and what has gone on over at WoTC.

I really need to look at their annual shareholders report (though I don't know how much they have to disclose being in the UK) I'm curious to even see what percentage of their revenue comes from mini games anymore. The things they do just simply don't make sense. I get upset about this because GW really holds a dear and special place in my heart so even if I'm not playing many of their games these days, I still hope for them to succeed but in a way that strengthens the community, in a way that brings new people to the hobby. Driving the costs of minis up so high that it is laughable for parents to look into it as a hobby for their kids. Seriously at 60 bucks a video game, even a few a month, that is cheaper than being heavily into GW games by far. During my peak about six or seven years ago I was spending $500.00 a month on average with some months going up as high as $1000.00 or more and that was at a 20% discount without sales tax. I still wasn't able to keep up with all their releases. Now we know that the typical teenager isn't going to pull that off, but even buying a single army ... now is a $1000.00 prospect in many cases. Why?? Why on earth does it need to be that way? It doesn't. GW is unwilling to look for ways to make their game cheaper and more inclusive, they seem hell bent on shrinking their customer base and offering only models at the high end, more forgworld at really ludicrous prices (for the price of a single large Forgeworld model I can buy a legion of roman figs, an entire mantic horde army, etc. etc. there are even other options out there like the dreamcast titans, etc. that are IMO better done than the forgeworld stuff. All the eastern European resin knock off places have jumped into the action ... thanks to GWs insane pricing almost anyone can make money producing models for their games.

I don't care for myself anymore as I've just largely given up on ever playing GW games again (other than their historical systems which they don't even support anymore, perhaps some blood bowl, mordeheim or necromunda, etc.). The reason I care and my big worry is just that due to pricing being driven ever higher coupled with the fact that kids can much more easily access video games ... what is the future of tabletop mini games? GW has been the historical gateway for most young people to get into mini gaming. Outside of GW mini games are largely the pursuit of old men ... is it going to only become more so thanks to GWs lack of care?? One can only hope Mantic and Privateer Press can find a way to get minis back in the hands of young folks on the scale that GW has been able to.

I have been very frustrated that GW is only focused on the top of the market, but that said it has undoubtedly created alot of opportunity for other smaller companies to come in and gobble up little crumbs. So I spend my money on the high end with Warlord on historical stuff, and at the economy end with the host of companies like reaper, etc. etc. So who knows maybe the renaissance is just around the corner. Dark Eldar and even the Space Wolves (despite some blah stuff in there) were solid new releases and I really was sorely tempted to get back in, I bought the wolves codex and had plans for an army. Even with fantasy I really was hoping to get into that with the small group of locals who aren't store troll power gaming jerks ... but the rulebook is 100 bucks (nearly anyway) and selling people on a $1000.00 game ... its just a non-starter.


I guess the silver lining for me though is from Blood Angels, Tomb Kings, to Ogres, to Necrons and now this ... GW has had a string of releases that just absolutely failed to capture my imagination like they used to. So more and more I'm ebay'ing off my GW stuff and looking to historicals and non-GW games for my mini gaming hope.

Beer and Pretzels is bad? Who says??

I just happened across a post regarding the lack of sportsmanship in 40K these days and one of the posters opened up with the whole bashing "beer and pretzels" gamers and that to me is the epitome of what is wrong with gaming today. Lately I've been encountering the term "beer and pretzels" being used in a pejorative way more and more frequently and it is disturbing to me in the extreme.

To me I've always used the term to just mean casual fun. Its more of a good thing than a bad thing by far. But lately I see elitists tossing the term around like somehow they are not beer and pretzel gamers and I guess by virtue, superior.

HUH??? What??? Seriously??

My first reaction to this is, wow, we have alot of people living in some very fantastical mental places if they are thinking like that. Unless your a professional, and I mean just a handful of people ... maybe a few hundred globally (as far as tabletop goes, I'm not talking about video game designers, but even then that would expand this figure into the low thousands probably) of professional game designers ... you are beer and pretzels. I suppose store owners could be considered non-beer and pretzel gamers ... lol. You might be a tool, store troll, but guess what ... YOU ARE STILL ... beer and pretzels. Your not a professional. Oh you've won a trophy?? Even perhaps won a GT or something and been in white dwarf?? So?? Who gives two shits, seriously get a grip on reality already.

Gaming is, has been and hopefully always will be ... about ... fun. Simply idling away some leisure time with some sort of diverting passtime. Sports, despite the advent of "professional leagues" is in this same camp. Certainly you might have "pros" who fully earn a living doing something. There are some guys playing collectible card games, some video game players, who purportedly earn their entire living, again apparently a few of them even into the deep six figure range. Those guys could well make the argument that they are not casual gamers.

Anyone else though is by definition an amateur, and to me amateur = beer and pretzels. Calling ones self "elite," proclaiming superiority to all other gamers is well and good, being serious about gaming to the point of having a stick up ones arse ... ok ... but that doesn't make one better or non-amateur and those people are still beer and pretzel gamers. They might unfortunately lack the happy fun attitude about gaming, but they aren't non-amateur ... they are still casual gamers, even if they are obsessive about it they don't derive their livings from gaming.

Again tabletop gaming is under a huge assault right now, the barbarians are at the gates, ready to sack the capital. Video games are killing the tabletop star and have been for 15+ years. Tabletop gaming will never die so long as passionate people who enjoy spending their disposable incomes and portions of their leisure time pursuing it, but there is no need to hasten the decline by being tools and trolls.

The lifeblood of tabletop gaming for anyone who wants new games/products and new fun, interesting people to play the games with is the casual "beer and pretzels" player. Yet that player is all of us, the magic of gaming that pulled us in initially whether it was via D&D or Warhammer 40K or Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, whatever ... that magic and wonder is still there. As a father I'm seeing it again in the eyes of my children. I'm transported back to those wonderful days in the summer of 1984 when I was trading bubblegum baseball cards, fishing down in the river and idling away the hours with Red Box D&D. The wonder and excitement that gaming can provide for young people is still there. The wonder and excitement it can provide for us adults is there as well. But when people take games too seriously, when they become too competitive, they begin to kill that off. They change the equation. To me if one wants that kind of experience, playing golf, playing poker for cash stakes, video gaming also presents a far superior option for those who want competitive gaming. Hell just being a sports fan provides a far better white knuckle competitive kinda rush than can tabletop gaming, even at the "competitive" level.

Tabletop games to me really have little value for that. Ya ya ... I know about the competitive side .. back in the day I attended several GTs and big RTTs for 40K. I've played in a few CCG tournaments, board game tournaments, etc. and they were a little interesting and I don't begrudge people who enjoy that, who enjoy some competition mixed in with tabletop gaming. I actually applaud it. But it needs to know its place.

People who partake in it need to understand that their individual preference will never define tabletop gaming, it will never be mostly about competition. It can't be. The companies producing the minis, even collectible cards, have to be more mindful of what the "beer and pretzels" folks are doing than what the tourney folks are doing. Otherwise the bulk of their customers simply lose interest and go elsewhere ... because ... most people are just casual gamers looking for a diverting activity to engage in occasionally with friends and family. That is how its always been and how it always will be with tabletop gaming.

I am beer and pretzels, I'm proud of it and when I stop being beer and pretzels game guy its time for me to find another hobby ... anyone who thinks casual fun is bad for tabletop gaming needs to be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail ... LITERALLY.

Ghosts of D&D's Past, Present and Future articles ...

A little late for the xmas stuff ... I know ... but I happened upon these articles via a link from a friend on facebook. I am not an avid escapist reader, I should be probably as they have hit upon some very interesting topics lately. Normally they are a little more video game centric than suits my taste as a very casual video game fan. As for Gonzo ... well if D&D can be equated to a muppet character these days it would be Gonzo because one looks at D&D anymore and just wonders what the hell it is.

From the escapist ... interesting and right on really. The ghosts of D&D past, present and future. Really interesting discussion of the history of D&D in terms of the versions and why certain decisions were made, the effects they have had and where the franchise might be headed.




Past ...

Present ....

Future ...


All in all good articles and they have comments from the likes of Chris Pramas (Green Ronin) and Erik Mona (Paizo, Pathfinder) as well as many of the game designers involved directly in many of these decisions, so worth the read for sure.


I think these articles rightly point out that D&D perhaps has been morphing into something else since 1989 ... I agree with that. I think that what D&D has meant to many people is quite different and it largely depends on your generation. For some (me) its mostly 2nd edition experience, others recall 1st ed as "their" edition and yet others 3.0-3.5. Only the very new consider 4e the version that broke their RPG cherry and sadly for them that was a short lived romance. Who knows where D&D will go in the future but I do know I feel sorry for Mike Mearls. My prediction is 5th edition will ultimately be a terrible failure and that Hasbro will eventually just sell off D&D as all tabletop gaming continues to slide, inevitably towards small press and less and less fat profits.

"The result of this philosophy is that, perhaps more than ever before, gamers are playing different games than the official D&D coming out of the Wizards of the Coast. "What D&D faces now with different editions and old school versus new school, and 3.5 versus 4th edition, it's like the comic book conundrum," Mearls said in reference to the differences between Silver Age Captain America versus the plot of the recent Captain America film. "How do we get all these guys back together, so we actually have real communities, not just a bunch of separate smaller communities, that don't really interact in any way?""

Again I'll say ... I feel sorry for Mike Mearls taking over at WoTC because I don't think they'll ever "reunite" the divergent D&D "community" I think that that egg shall never be put back together again, not with the aid of all the kings men. I think D&D in some form or another is likely immortal, but I don't think you'll get the old timers who are happy to return to nostalgic 1st ed back in with the pen and paper WoW set who grew up on Pokemon and Magic the Gathering and have little remembrance of the days of Thaco. Beyond this so many loyalists were driven away with 4e either from the get go or later in the run (thanks essentials!). The people who liked 3.0-3.5 are happy with what Paizo is doing (or happy to just endlessly play with all that "glut" of stuff printed in the OGL days) that nothing WoTC does will get them back into the fold and the others mostly still just feel violated having bought in on 4e only to have the carpet yanked out half way through. I must admit I'm in this camp as well, having come back to give the "new" D&D a chance and chance it I did for a few years and for a time 4e united an odd mix of miniature wargamers and RPG fans in my group, but with the launch of essentials it just took an already bastardized game into a direction none of us really wanted to go so we dumped it and moved along (like many have apparently done) I think it almost goes without saying that 5th edition is going to have to be the best thing ever to win all these people back. In a way I wonder if this means 5th ed isn't perhaps years off, just to let the dust settle a bit more .. who knows.

Fat profits in gaming will come more and more ... as we all know its just damn common sense ... from video games and anyone in tabletop gaming, be it minis, pen and paper RPGs or board games is going to have to scramble for profits. I'd bet that Fantasy Flight Games continues to thrive, probably Paizo, probably Games Workshop (simply because they continue to license out their products FOR VIDEO GAMES ... lol). Lots of room for mom and pop and very small press folks. I think the digital age does nothing but help those little guys who can survive on hundreds of customers, not hundreds of thousands. The Old School Gaming Revolution (OSR) will continue to do well as us old timers will be waxing nostalgic for decades to come, Paizo will continue to keep Pathfinder fans happy and the bunkers of 3.5 guys will likely remain alive and well. It will be interesting to see what WoTC comes up with to try to win people back ... if they manage it ... it should go down in the annals of gaming history as a true stroke of genius.

To close I'll point out something that really stood out to me:

"The problem with developing such a game was, until this year, Atari held an exclusive license to produce all digital representations of D&D, and Atari had no interest in making games other than what was already in the pipeline. As of August 2011, the two parties have settled that dispute, and D&D is now free to either develop games itself, or hire other videogame developers to make the game WotC hopes will be as successful as Duels is for Magic."

With D&D free to be pimped out for more video games, I think we'll certainly see more titles on that front than we have in years past. If they want more revenue that is the easiest place to get it, and there are tons of studios out there happy to churn out more licensed content product. So I'm sure we'll see more mediocre D&D video games in the years to come. Based on the mediocre 4th edition replete with all its unnecessary, tacky, boring new stuff that got tacked on awkwardly to D&D.

Escapist Article on The Old Republic ... the first honest review?

Ok I just wanted to link an article and talk about The Old Republic as that has been the primary gaming activity I've been engaged in over the holidays, however, I have hope ... tonight we are playing some Apocalypse World and we have forays into historical mini gaming via old west, Zulus, and even Romans planned for late January and early February.

Anyway I've been playing alot of ToR ... team leveling with a friend and solo playing several other characters on the side. All in all its been fun, but if I wasn't home watching an infant alot I don't know if I'd be too happy spending all of this time glued to the PC. It has been every bit as fun as WoW ever was ... for what that is worth.

So the Escapist had a great article on it and really it struck a chord with me because this has been pretty much my experience with the game. If you are a video gamer or not this is sort of a geek cultural phenomena so perhaps just out of morbid curiosity one might want to take a look.
Anyway decent article and maybe the first honest media I've seen on the game so far, its pretty much just paid advert style reviews out there so far.

I generally agree with it ... I've had a hell of a lot of fun team leveling characters with Kyle ... by the way the game seems to be designed to team level. If you don't you miss out on alot of social points and it just gets pretty rough to solo, I know that is intentional to try to force players to be "social" with one an other. But its just that ... forced ... so to me its not meaningful.

I don't see myself playing this game for years on end like I did WoW ... I'm sure I have a few more months in me but beyond that I don't know ... I'm already feeling MMO fatigue again. The game is just too WoW like for my taste honestly. There are some bits here and there that are damn awesome but overall it is just a re-skinned, slightly updated, WoW. Anyway here is the article from yesterday from the escapist on it:

Escapist Article

I think this article hits on a few key points and they are to me. Awesome story plus an MMO might not be the match made in heaven that everyone thought it would be. I find myself more frustrated with standard MMO-ness because that crap is getting in the way of my story. Like you can easily race along on your cool class story stuff and then .. you get ahead of yourself and you can't continue because your too low level to keep going on it. So go kill 30 of these and 40 of those. The mobs are standing around walking in circles just like they were in WoW and you go out and mow them down ... yawn ... again and again. Ok come back now I can do more story ... woot!! Two segements of the story later ... back in the same spot. So the MMO-KoToR III blend is sort of leaving a bad taste in my mouth at times. At times its awesome. For me I think it makes me lose patience with the MMO format more quickly than I would in a WoW like game.

"Players often have the same companion or pet as other players in MMOs, but in The Old Republic these companions can be characters who participate in cut scenes and therefore have more heft to them than the typical henchman or meat shield does. Seeing ten people run by with a clone of "my" Imperial Agent's companion Kaliyo Djannis immediately breaks the illusion that I actually have a companion at all. Again, multiple players having the same companion in an MMO is a convention that The Old Republic's developers would have been hard-pressed to eliminate, but this time it seems strange."

That part right there can be applied to much in this game and it really hits at the core of this schizophrenic mash up of a game. Again it is not a bad MMO, not at all, and one could actually make a strong arguement that it is the BEST MMO of all time. I myself have touted the MMO model, I do like being able to again and again come back to a game and get many hours of play out of it and have a social atmosphere, etc. but I'm starting to see the big cracks in the dam on this generation of MMOs. I want the next generation and this isn't it. This is a logical, slight step past where all other MMOs have gone so far (well with the exception of Eve but ... wtf ... there is only room globally for one of those ... lol). I am not doom and gloom about it and I've enjoyed my time so far, and likely will enjoy leveling a character to 50. But this isn't the MMO-topia that I had hoped for ... but to be honest ... come on it was Bioware-EA ... that is like McDonalds and Wal-Mart teaming up, you know your going to get a commercially successful product but forget about astounding innovation. This was a licensed product made for the masses and along those lines is perhaps as good as it could have been reasonably expected to be.

So I don't disagree with this passage from the article:

"I mean none of these observations as criticisms of The Old Republic, which is reportedly the most expensive development project in the history of publisher Electronic Arts. It would be foolish to suggest that Bioware should have attempted or even had the financial resources to simultaneously challenge the status quo in MMO design on all fronts, and as I've tried to argue here the changes they did make stand to have wide-reaching repercussions we are just beginning to figure out."

In essence this game is what it should have been and what one should expect from a big, corporate product more McStarWars ...


Incidentally the image is from a Star Wars Themed Wedding Cake from prewife.com ... funny stuff huh :D

« Last Edit: Today at 01:37:07 PM by The Lord of Excess »

My early impressions of The Old Republic

My early impressions of The Old Republic:

Yes indeed it is much like a fast food style experience, bright and shiny and all the while ones mouth is telling them "hey this tastes pretty good" but somehow one always knows better. With fast food one knows that even if they haven't been reading about the horrors of the industry for years and about how terribly unhealthy it all is and how filled with chemical junk it all is, they still sort of intuitively know that it isn't the best thing they could probably be consuming. That is sort of the whole experience with most MMOs in a nutshell. This game is like a nice sack o' Burger King or McDonalds ... some might be all to willing and excited to nom nom nom at the trough, others might be looking on with disdain. I think I"m somewhere in the middle.


For full disclosure on my video game feeding habits I have to admit that years past I've been hardcore and half-assed with my MMOing, admittedly mostly half-assed. Life, kids, school, job ... all at various times were far more important than some life draining game of an MMO. But I cite this experience, many hundreds ... if not honestly ... thousands of hours spent idling away on an MMO. From Ultima Online to World of Warcraft to Warhammer Online ... even a brief stint on Star Wars Galaxies. I don't see that time as wasted as I'd have just been watching TV for most of it honestly and a good portion of that time was spent during late night baby tending, etc. and with five kids ... that is a healthy amount of time let me tell you!

So this experience gives me I think at least "seasoned consumer" status when it comes to MMOs and just so far 9 or so days in on The Old Republic ... I'm already hitting the wall. The game is mostly good, but its very, very WoW like. If you liked WoW then this might be a selling point. Its like WoW 2.0 Star Wars edition. But if you didn't like WoW then this probably isn't a bonus. I was mixed on it, I had some wonderful times with WoW and alot of sort of strung out heroin addict times where I would ask myself why I was even doing this to myself. I learned from that in terms of MMOs and just quit when I hit that point with any game. Games are not worth playing if they aren't entertaining, fun, rewarding somehow. Here is where I will segue back to Star Wars The Old Republic.

In my eyes what I saw as the main selling point of this game ... STORY ... much in the same fashion that say Knights of the Old Republic delivered, this game delivers. However in this format, the MMO format, a great deal of time passes between the cool story elements in the game. During this time your doing all manner of typical housekeeping sorts of things, crafting, walking in endlessly large mall like areas (early game, later on you get yourself essentially a spiffy golf cart of a speeder ... which makes things a little better but not much). So at least to me anyway the story sort of loses something because of this. An hour of real time or days even, might pass between climactic story moments, so much so that you might have even forgotten what the heck the given quest/story element was all about. At many points I find myself just hitting the good or bad response and space barring through all the talking, just to hurry up to get back to the grind, that next level, piece of gear, etc. awaits. That is the focus of an MMO not the story. At least for me that is what it inevitably breaks down to. What story there is they did a great job on.

To be fair I like many things about this game and I'll quickly go through them here. The companion system is great, in this game everyone is a "pet class" you get a buddy to trudge around with you keeping you from getting over your head even when your playing solo. The companions will do crafting for you, sell your vender items off and generally the companions you get are complimentary to your class. I love how crafting works, one just sends companions to do most of it all and its running in the background while one is playing the game, for the most part anyway. For me not having to stop constantly to just do the crafting as one did in other games. The crafting seems genuinely useful and it is possible if one keeps the crafting leveled up as they go to actually make usable items WHILE your leveling, as opposed to say WoW where it always seemed like crafting was neigh on useless except for that 3 or 4 items at end game. Another nice thing are the four player instances and being able to que up anywhere for PVP, etc. etc. but those things are just game mechanics and most of them have been done long ago in other games.

There is little innovation or newness here this is not a next generation game, this is the culmination of current generation MMOs linked to the Star Wars franchise. Many people are all frothy about that and already declaring this the best video game .. that is VIDEO GAME not just MMO .. of all time. I wouldn't even call this the best MMO of all time personally, let alone the best of any video game .. EVER. But such nonsense is likely to be expected with fanboys uniting and loads of promotional money being shelled out. I think everyone from penny arcade to zero punctuation has received fat "promotional" fees to pimp this game. There are almost no honest reviews of it that I can find, etc. Honestly I haven't played enough to give this thing a comprehensive review of any kind.

Thus far its good, but its average good. Its just another take on the WoW model. Expect to spend huge amounts of time leveling, I mean its not insanely grind heavy (as is evidenced by the large number of level 50 players in the game already) but for the average player who has something of a life, its going to take a good month or two of pretty heavy play to ding 50.

Right now much of the game is clearly incomplete, and by that I don't mean the zones or the quest lines or anything, but there are only 3 battle grounds, there are no brackets with PVP at all. So your facing off at lvl 10 against level 50s. They do balanced hitpoints but your talent trees and shear ability levels can't be balanced. So unless you are higher level and have a good handle on your class and what it can do in PVP expect to get automatically torn in half in BGs. The space battles are a ship on rails, old school arcade kinda feel. I like them personally, but they don't present long term replayability, so clearly they are going to have to do alot of work on the space stuff. I'm assuming that long term they'll offer a "fighter based" PVP option of some kind where you fly around and play in key battles or something along those lines, something with a little more complexity to it.

The game is very, very young and the first major patch hasn't even been released so I don't want to be unfair to it, its not a bad game at all and I don't feel like I've wasted my time or money on it ... but if you haven't already taken the plunge and are on the fence about it, unless you have some compelling reason to jump in now ... I'd wait a few months the game is undoubtedly only going to be tightened/cleaned up by then. My honest just off the cuff rating of the game is perhaps a 7.5 out of 10 with a ton of room for improvement which given the nature of MMOs is likely to come over the next year or two. I'm sure this thing is designed for a five year life cycle. But even there this is perhaps my biggest criticism, this game is World of Warcraft-esq and its supposed to last another five years?? I don't think so. At present rate I'll be very bored with this game and done with it, but February.

Who knows though the game is young and I'm sure they have many unforeseen things planned so maybe by next fall I could be giving the game a 9 out of 10 time will tell. But right now they have alot of kinks to work out and its lack of really ground breaking new features sort of has me a little sad. The companion system I think is the main new addition to MMOs and the legacy stuff has potential to be so as well ... beyond that ... this is WoW .. EQ all over again.

The Old Republic

This eve hundreds of thousands (if not over a million) of nerds will be installing (many have been playing for days) THE OLD REPUBLIC.

Thus the dawning of a new era is upon us ... sort of ... as much as can be so given we are talking about the launch of a new massive multiplayer online video game based upon a science fiction franchise which dates to the late 1970s. To further reduce the newness or ground breaking potential of this game is that itself, will be the second iteration of an MMO based upon the venerable Star Wars franchise which launched with a bang and went out with a whimper and still has seared rage into many for all time.

Yet I predict that The Old Republic will break new ground and set the standard for the future of not just MMOs but all video games. I have recently been experiencing many things with gaming, all gaming and seen more and more opportunity for tabletop gaming become diminished due to the utter proliferation of video games and internet based technology. I've gained new understanding for games and the place the hold for me and come to new realizations about games. These things are mostly bad for me from a nostalgia perspective, as I'd love to see tabletop gaming go on forever. It will for some people and for the world in general but likely not for me. The day will come soon that I probably won't be doing any tabletop gaming at all.

So much to say in such a short time, the wall of text that I am fond of. That alone, the fact that people are so unwilling to even read a few paragraphs anymore tips the hand a little. That is the issue I'm talking about here, with so much choice, so many distractions and only so much time ... can tabletop gamers handle yet another distraction this big?? For me ... probably not ... this might be enough to send tabletop gaming in my life into the 100 mile below the surface of the planet doomsday shelter ... for good.

Tabletop games are dying because people are too lazy, too busy and generally too distracted to engage in them. Learning cumbersome, less than perfect board, miniature and role playing game rules to play with impatient people who just want to get back to their video games and internet based devices is becoming more and more difficult for people like me. Lets not even talk about mini games really ... because assembling ... painting ... then learning said rules then running the stinking store troll power gamer gauntlet ... more and more people are simply saying no thank you.

Strangers in strange lands as it were, people like me cast adrift in the sea of gaming. People who don't have that long standing gaming group where everyone in the group has known each other since high school. One can scoff and think "well it doesn't apply to me so I don't care", oh but it does because bit by bit tabletop gaming is fraying at the edges and it is for this very reason. People are slowly being so heavily bombarded with choice via the internet and technology and there is such heavy overlap with tabletop gaming, and since tabletop gaming lives in that bubble of disposable time ... it is very susceptible to impact from video games and other similar net based diversions/time wasters/pass times.

I believe that the old republic will hasten this fraying a bit, that more people will forsake more face to face gaming in favor of just staying home and playing some Old Republic. Star Wars I think as much if not more so than World of Warcraft did, captures the imaginations of gamers. Particularly for the Gen X folks who have spent their entire lives living with some form of Star Wars. You couple just the numbers and common sense rhetoric with the Bioware (wildly popular game producer) and their deep pocket parent company Electronic Arts is doing in conjunction with Lucas Arts. Now yes Lucas has made some huge mistakes over the years, and no one seems to have anything but disdain for episodes 1-3 of the franchise, yet, there are few examples of more commercial success. The can put the Star Wars label on nearly anything and people will buy it and buy it in bulk. So what is going to happen when the take the formula that Blizzard used with WoW and mix it with the product line that geeks can never seem to get enough of ... fizzy lifting drink ... erm ... well an irresistible product that is going to do catastrophic harm to geeks all over the planet (likely myself included). Yes this harm will be self imposed by consenting, presumably intelligent, presumably responsible, adults (and their kids who will be along for the ride).

I have played The Old Republic for 3 or so days now ... I'm up to level 25 on a Sith Inquisitor (sorcerer, going heals). The game has all the fine points of wow, easy interface, Pavlovian reward system that has one salivating level after level, etc. etc. You get ships and lots of choice in the storyline which influences all sorts of things from your future choices to the kind of gear you can acquire to I believe even how you look (I swear as I get darker my Sith changes in appearance ... maybe its just me willing that to be the case). I see the writing on the wall for myself, I will fall down the rabbit hole again and this time, just based on being disillusionment with tabletop gaming in general, I don't know if I'll come back from it. Certainly I will do tabletop gaming with my kids as they grow that is a given, but I don't know, as more and more games like this and Skyrim are released its getting closer and closer to those elements of good tabletop gaming that I know and love. Ya ya ya ... but the social ... but the face to face ... but .. but. But the anti-social, borish, power gaming, jerk, flake, etc. etc. that goes along with tabletop gaming. For people like me who are looking for new people to game with that is what is encountered. With MMOs, you can just turn off general chat, don't play on PVP servers, etc. and then if you want to do stuff with other players online, look around and find them and everyone is a power gamer, everyone is a jerk so its par for the course and you don't have to sit across a table with them, you might have to listen to them squeaking and squawking in vent ... (until you get them booted from the guild on trumped up charges .. kidding .. kidding ... well ...).

I jest really I don't know if tabletop gaming can die for me and I know I've lamented about it here many times but that is what this place is, its a way to just put things out there, graffiti on the wall of the internet that might get read by someone on the train on their way to work or something. Its just my way to say things and maybe someone reads them, maybe not, I write it down for my own catharsis that is all. Just some observations by one random gamer geek in suburban northern Utah ...

We will see what The Old Republic does to tabletop gaming, again I don't predict tabletop gaming will die, this game isn't that big, the numbers will be big but it will still be small by comparison to games like Call of Duty or Madden 381 (or whatever number they are on) ... but it strikes at the core of tabletop gaming as much or more than any game that has come out in awhile. So it might have some measurable negative impact on the tabletop gaming industry and/or on ones own local gaming group ... only time will tell.

For those who are going to be partaking ... happy hunting and have a glorious time!

300 hours of Skyrim!

GREETINGS FROM SKYRIM!!

Erm ...

Well I feel like after 300 hours there I should be really be relocating to Skyrim. I mean I grew up, got married, bought several homes, became a prominent citizen and then idled away days patrolling the wilds with my uber-warrior-wife keeping the realm safe :) I'll share some screen shots of my game. It was a wild, fun ride, alot of vanilla and generic fantasy video game stuff but there were some little gems here and there. Some great dungeons and plot twist curves, etc. I feel like it was time well spent as far as gaming time goes.

If only real life could equate to this kinda thing eh? (KIDDING BTW ... this vanilla one dimensional while diverting for an evening would likely be a living hell that the Truman Show had nothing on :))

NO but in all seriousness Skyrim is a great solo-D&D emulator basically. Yet another title that WoTC should have come out with eons ago eh? This game is what I longed for decades ago as a kid. It is far from perfect, its very buggy and glitch ridden. However none of the bugs I encountered broke the game or prevented me from doing whatever it was I was doing. I have had a few crashes here and there but have yet to lose more than a few seconds of game time as a result. All in all its a really good game.

My biggest criticisms are as follows:

1) Zero story based interaction with followers

2) Too few factions ... yes for an elder scrolls game I was a little dissapointed at the lack of that many factions. With such a big game I'd have hoped for more.

3) End game is a little lackluster. Ok I know there will likely be alot of mods, DLC, etc. for this so the jury is out a bit on this one but at lvl 50 having done the core storyline stuff a few times now on different characters ... I wish there were some real end game challenges. There are none.

To go into detail on my biggest complaint though it is the interaction with followers/spouses. For those who played fallout 3, Dragon Age or Mass Effect stuff you might expect a game like Skyrim to take the relationships between followers down the same path in terms of unique storylines with the followers. Nope. Skyrim for as many leaps forward as it makes, is a dud in terms of storyline with followers. The overall storylines to me were well done and satisfying, just don't expect to find an able companion and have their story catch you up in unforseen things. That doesn't happen in skyrim at all. The marriage thing is also just a minor afterthought/footnote which produces nothing more than someone to hang out in your house and give you 100 gold a day from the "store" they open in your house. Again the store is nothing more than an added dialog option with said wife/husband (ya you can same sex marry if that is your thing or if yea be a girl you can have a husband, etc.).

The bugs, etc. to me are to be expected and I don't consider those all that bad. All in all my criticisms aside here, I would still rate this game like a 9.5 out of 10. It is the best game I've played in years. Limbo and Witcher included :)

First image here is a domestic disturbance when my first characters wife's boyfriend showed up at our home half way across the map, weeks of game time after we'd been married. Of course I flew into a jealous rage, killed him, then looted the corpse. She wouldn't talk to me for four days of game time, then went back to normal and never breathed a word about any of it again :)

The masks and other rare armor and weapons are the end game basically ... collecting armor and whatnot ... been there done that ... in a solo game like this there seems to be even less point than in an MMO ... sigh ...

Hey buddy can you help my game bug-clone he is fused into the ground somehow ...

Dystopian Wars - A breath of fresh, sea air!!

Beasts of War has done a nice primer on the game itself ...



Our gaming group has been playing for six to eight weeks now and we've really enjoyed it. There are some bits here and there in the rules that have frustrated some of the players, the way small aircraft work, the seeming wide variation in terms of usefulness of units (bang for the buck/points as it were) ... but all in all there is near universal positive views on the game in our group. We haven't done the land portion of the game yet and by no stretch have we seen every unit in the game in action. Between a five regular player group (with three or four other occasional players in the mix) we have probably around forty or so games under our belt as a group and no one has quit yet :) Always a good sign. We've been talking garage league/campaign perhaps ... we'll see. I still don't know if the game will stick for sure or not to be honest as we have a group that is horribly afflicted by ADD and just kinda flaky at times. It has been a good way to get people doing some actual mini gaming though and for that reason alone I'm pleased and feeling like the money I've spent so far has been worth it.

Here is a rough shot of the gaming table that I built for it ... I'll get some more up as I've also been in a major game room move (moving out the the more spacious garage).

Comfy Chair Games ... interesting range of minis

Comfy Chair Games

These guys seem to have quite an interesting range of post-apocalyptic/gang wars 28 MM figures.

What was perhaps even more interesting were their cool spider mechs!


THEN look at the bare pewter over on noted mini sculptor John Bear Ross's blog ... you'll see they seem to be some decent sculpts ...

Shadowsea ... it could have been so cool!!

Sadly it is an incomplete range and the guys making it seem to have ADD they are frittering off into other things and now I see Cavalcade is producing their stuff (likely meaning the game is about to die as Cavalcade seems to exclusively make money selling defunct ranges, like Ironwind Metals).

These guys did manage to make one of the coolest terrain pieces of all time (the Cthulhu temple) and the entire concept and feel of the game could have been really interesting, but they just didn't seem to produce a large enough range to make it worth buying in on. They had some really hit and miss sculpts, etc. as well.

Ah well I still am toying with the idea of buying the temple ... its pretty damn awesome looking actually ...

Antimatter games

http://www.antimatter-games.com/shadowsea/html/

Too much elitism in gaming? Me > You ... :(

Clearly this is going to be a rant but I do this blog almost exclusively for catharsis and as a mental place holder for myself.

That said here goes ... my take on the state of gaming in general and I have to say
I'm tired of elitism in gaming. I've noticed it creeping in over the past several years and its just gotten to the point that its really overwhelming those things that I once found dear and refreshing in gamers and most the gaming communities out there. I don't know if its 15 years of sustained internet influence, building up these micro celebrities and giving people forums to puff their chests out in, but all in all it really just recently hit me that this is the root of what is bothering me about gaming.

More and more I can visibly see the winners in gaming both literally and metaphorically feeling like somehow they have proven they are superior. Whether that is for the evening or permanently in the gaming community depends on the case. But my point is that isn't what drew me to gaming. If I wanted that then I would have stayed with sports, golf, etc. etc. To me tabletop games of all kinds aren't about winning or losing, they never have been. Its cliche to say but really and truly they are about playing the game and having fun. It is all just about having something to do while you socialize with some people with common interests. That is being lost in gaming today I believe.

For me I came to gaming in 2000 after being away from it since middle school. Sports, booze, school, graduate school, getting married ... all those things were what my life was about. Then in 2000 I had a decent job, was done for the time with school and finally had some disposable time and money to go out and use. I gravitated to gaming because of the inviting nature of gamers, the down to earth fun geekery that I encountered sold me. I started out with war gaming via the venerable Games Workshop Warhammer 40,000. I had some very fun times with a good group in Las Vegas. But as time passed more of the old guard from our group moved away and eventually so did I. So 40K's star faded. Then came RPGs and eventually Euro-board games. But what I've noticed over the past three to five years is a trend towards elitism even in those areas.

By this I mean more war gamers are now buying their armies pre-painted and its all about graphing out numbers breakdowns for statistical superiority with army lists. For RPGs its all this factional crap with D&D, there is the old school camp, the 3.5/Pathfinder camp and the 4e camp .. some crossover but mostly those people hate each other. The indie fans for a long time seemed like a bastion of hope for me, but now with the podcast and blog-o-sphere influence mostly all of those people seem like name dropping and specialized jargon is what they are after as a way to feel superior to other gamers.

Now board games ... well ... even that once hopeful area of light has now faded for me. More and more the same issues I have with say Games Workshop games has come to play with board games. Sites like boardgame geek have turned it into a contest to see who owns the most games, who has played the most, and you have ever increasing release schedules from game companies just churning out semi-collectible products (I'm looking at you FFG!). Its just not worth even trying to keep up anymore. My only hope here is to convert some non-gamers into a little fun board game group and hope that it stays that way. I'm really tired of board gaming with war gamers and actual board gamers ... its just not fun ... the entire concept of a social board game is lost on those people anymore.

So whats left? I know historical war gaming has long had its elite camps, hell the entire concept of it is a little elitist. That said ... historicals has sort of been the "outsider" gaming pass time. There are some crossovers but generally speaking with games that might not even have a points system and are entirely "gentleman's games" ... essentially just an excuse to paint toys soldiers and get them out and look at them and push them around in little interesting historical scenarios. Well maybe there is hope there yet. Who knows.

Other than that I'm wondering if my days of gaming with people other than my kids in general are numbered. Maybe I'll just go back to being one of those boring main stream sports fans again ... honestly there is less elitism and really probably no more boorish-jerkism (probably less per-capita). Besides sports are still more main stream than gaming so it makes for better water cooler talk.

I'm a geek, I always have been, but I went from a sports geek to being a game geek and now I'm sad that the negatives that seemed to plague my fellow sports fans has crept into gaming. I'm sure its in part due to just the growth in gaming. We are seeing a wider more diverse audience and we are no longer in the fledgling "community formation" stage, so those innocent friendly days of the past are long behind. I just miss those times and miss gaming with those kinds of people.

I made this post in no particular reaction to anything or anyone I just was surfing the net as usually and facebooking and had a little ah ha moment for myself. I really don't think many people read this blog. I will be the first to admit that its not of high quality or particular interest to anyone but me, but this was something I just felt like putting down in writing to perhaps see if anyone else out there felt like this at times.