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Tag: Extra Life

The Intrigue

Published by Graham on October 21, 2017

Last weekend I was at IntrigueCon 2017. You can find my write-up about last year here. This year I didn’t sign up for any games in advance, which meant I had to play whatever had open seats. Of the four sessions I attended, three were variants on old-school D&D and one was a variant of Dungeon Crawl Classics called Mutant Crawl Classics (which doesn’t seem to have its own page on the website, though you can find the books in their store).

The thing that I noticed about playing Swords and Wizardry as well as getting to play Sftabhmonton, an OSR-type game that I mentioned last year, was that the potential of becoming a hero is always there, but low level characters are utterly disposable. MCC, in contrast, is unapologetic about being a meat grinder. What I really found intriguing about these different games I tried last weekend was the relative ease that a party can form and get going, without having a dedicated session for character building or establishing a plot. The rewards for most of the characters I played, though, was death.

Later editions of D&D lay out a clearer path to rewards, which can be good because I find very few adults with adult responsibilities are up for taking years upon years to finally get a shot at something that can be taken away in an instant by a snotty DM who jumps on you the one time you forget to specify every inch of the floor you are going to check with your trusty ten foot pole. We want to feel like out time is worth more than that. The older games, though, don’t hand out a reliable payoff. It is difficult in these retro versions of D&D to keep a single character alive. The increase in risk does mean an increase in reward, as a high level OSR-type character is actually something to be marvelled at, rather than some powerful hero who has spent a few dozen sessions with DMs who hand out levels and XP like candy (I have been one of those on more than one occasion, especially when running 4e campaigns).

Two of my four character sheets. I invested too much effort into making Tybalt a cat-type manimal; he died instantly at the start of the first encounter.

Whether or not it’s worth going old school instead of getting in on a D&D-brand game using the relatively newer rules really depends on what a player is looking for. A satisfying heroic romp through a complex story including a nice epilogue? Or an evolving story, that has to grow on its own because investing too much into making unique characters with well-written backstories is unreasonably risky in an old-school game? I can see the appeal of both, though I have to admit that the least satisfying end to a character is when a DM punishes me for not checking every square inch of the dungeon for fatal traps. The one time I forget to say that I check the ceiling, or the whole doorway rather than just the door, and it’s all over? Congratulations, you’re oh so clever, and that’s several hours of my life that I will never get back. If I am invested in the narrative I don’t want the game to actively interfere with my enjoyment of that narrative. It’s not to say that I want it to be free of challenge, but I want failures to mean something. Even if goals become achievable or the character dies I want to feel like there was a reason that it happened if I have spent time and effort in building up a character who is part of a story rather than just a game piece to move through a dungeon. In the longer games that I run I have to work on making a valid path that includes failure rather than softly ensuring that my players win all the time because that’s how I want the story to go.

But, for being able to sit down with no prior relationship to the DM or the other characters, and no intention of ever playing more than one session, I have to say that I really quite enjoyed the games I played and will be looking into running some for groups that aren’t going to meet weekly for several months. One such opportunity I hope to take advantage of is when I get together with my Extra Life team in November to play some games. If you have not already done so, please consider making a contribution on my page.

Alastair continues Full Steam Ahead next week with Half-Life Deathmatch: Source.

Remember, Remember

Published by Graham on November 5, 2016

I typically don’t see a film more than once during its time in the theatres. It has to be exceptional for me to go a second time before it’s available on home media. Going a third time is almost unheard of. There is only one film that I saw on the big screen three times. That film is V for Vendetta. With November 5 falling on a Saturday this year, I figured it would be a wasted opportunity to forgo talking about Guy Fawkes, V, and the meme that mask has come to represent.

Guy Fawkes was a terrorist before “terrorism” was a thing. It certainly wasn’t a good time to be a Roman Catholic in England in 1605. Now, 411 years later, we still have trouble figuring out which forms of resistance are acceptable and which forms are cures worse than the disease. The fact that Fawkes, Catesby, et. al. wanted to murder lots of people to facilitate the rise to power of their monarch of choice is conveniently ignored in V for Vendetta, especially in the film. That parliament is conveniently free from honourable members from such-and-such county, lords of wherever, and all the various staff and servants makes blowing it up less terrorist-y so that we can still identify with V. He is the liberal freedom fighter who kills a handful of neo-fascist collaborators with surgical precision. We can get on board with that, right? Just kill the ones who surely deserve it, with zero collateral damage. Doesn’t that make it easier to wear the mask of the man who would have committed an atrocity?

Sure, it makes it a better popcorn flick to be able to adopt Prothero’s slogan good guys win, bad guys lose, England prevails with a 180-degree turn to cast V as the good guy, the neo-fascists as the bad guys, and the secretly anti-Norsefire everyman as the true Englishman. But the anarchist V from the graphic novel has far fewer scruples than our 2006 superhero, and the real Guy Fawkes even fewer. The V of Moore’s graphic novels is more ambiguous, certainly doing more killing and destroying, but is acting in perfect accordance with his convictions whether we agree with them or not. The gunpowder plot conspirators cannot even claim that level of ideological purity, as we know that they would personally benefit from having a Catholic on the throne. So no matter how much I might deplore intrafaith persecution and violence, it is quite clear that I cannot even sympathize with Guy Fawkes (while still being glad the treason and plot failed.)  Nor can I endorse the unfettered anarchism of the graphic novel V any more than I can look back on la Terrueur and think of it as a great time for freedom. The mask which represents Guy Fawkes represents something far more troubling than the thought of an explosion destroying the British parliament. It represents rebellion unconstrained by the rules we have become very fond of in liberal democratic countries.

Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, and ideas are bulletproof. But resilient as they are, not all ideas are good ideas.

By the time we get to the film, V for Vendetta is thoroughly whitewashed and ready for North American liberal consumption. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, when the movie industry acquires the rights to Alan Moore’s graphic novels they invariably create something that makes him angrily scrub his name from the project. He doesn’t seem to like it when other people make the story palatable to western liberals who like ideas and a little bit of a gray scale when it comes to morality in fiction, but who also aren’t allergic to fun and being entertained. That’s not a criticism coming from me. I like what has been built to appeal to my tastes, and so in the case of both V for Vendetta and Watchmen I enjoyed the movies more than the graphic novels.

I remember how the film inspired me. I also remember the outrageous amount of money I paid to have one of those masks shipped to my house in time for the following Halloween, way before they became ubiquitous. I still have it somewhere. I wore it for a few subsequent Halloween seasons, but then I stopped feeling like it was a good symbol for me. At first it was an article of fandom costume, but then it became the face of Anonymous, which is something I’ve always had a lot of mixed feelings about. Before becoming the face of internet libertarianism, Anonymous emerged from 4chan as a malevolent force, engaging in the sort of mob harassment that we would expect from the alt-right movement today. For the same reasons I am wary of identifying too closely with Moore’s V, I am hesitant to wear the mask that represents something ambiguous at its best. A game cannot be played when the players do not consent to the rules, and the game where political power is based on mob harassment, explosions, and death is not one I am willing to play. I appreciate the art of both the film and the graphic novel, I might wear the mask again as a costume, but the mask is not an icon that can represent who I am.

This month I am participating in Mapvember 2016. Each day of this month I will be posting some old maps from campaigns I have run in the past as well as some originals. If you love grid maps as much as I do then you should be liking my Facebook page or following me on Twitter if you don’t already.

Also, it’s Extra Life day today (November 5, 2016). If you have not already done so, please consider supporting the effort to do something good through gaming.

 

Good Times With Bad Games

Published by Graham on May 28, 2016

Last week, to celebrate the conclusion of kitchen renovations, I had a dinner party featuring a game I had never played before. Seeing that the name of the game is “Top Trumps” and the theme is Marvel heroes, I came to the conclusion that it was time to make Captain America great again. As you should know by now, the Trump name means quality. So I had some people over. Smart people, who like to play card games. Nobody hosts a dinner party better than me, OK?

Top Trumps Tournament

Here is the gist of the game: you spin the wheel in the centre, and do one of three things: receive pegs, steal a peg, or play one of the “mini-games” named on the wheel. The game comes with an ambiguously worded reference sheet that provides some of the rules for each game. In general, the player whose turn it is chooses which “stat” is being played from four listed on each card, and (presumably) the highest number wins. The differences between the four mini-games are in how many players will participate and how many cards each will receive. The main game involved receiving enough pegs for the first player to fill the score board with nine, with the relative amount of pegs each player has determining how many cards they receive for the final battle (which plays out much like the “My Pack” mini-game but with more cards in play).

I said the rule sheet contains some of the rules because it does not address some common game states. Can a player keep calling the same victory condition and playing the same card, knowing it will keep on winning? The player is instructed to call the next stat from their “next card” but does not specify if cards can be played more than once in the same mini-game. Other things are also left unclear in the written rules: in a contest, does the debut year count up (newest wins), count down (oldest wins), or can it go either way at the discretion of the player calling the stat? What happens when players tie on a stat when playing with only one card left (the rules talk about how to resolve a draw with the next card). We ended up making up house rules left and right just to keep the game going. That’s not something you usually do in a finite game, but we did it because the alternative was to declare the game a failure and stop playing. That just wouldn’t do.

While it seems possible that there is a method to the madness when selecting which set of numbers will be used to determine the winner, the whole thing seems fairly arbitrary unless we completely missed something. If there is such thing as a winning strategy, it’s not clear unless one knows each deck of cards backwards and forwards and can therefore tell whether 46 is the highest possible number or if it is pathetic compared to other cards in the same deck.

Iron Fist and Galactus

There were several other design decisions that left my party baffled. For one thing, each deck has a different set of statistics that can be drawn from, such as the Avengers deck which included strength, ancient power, size, and technology. While each card featured nice artwork and neat little write-ups on each character, the numbers didn’t seem to correspond with any sort of logic based on what we know about the characters. I’m not knocking the Iron Fist, but the fact that he outclasses the devourer of worlds in every stat raises some questions such as “do these numbers actually mean anything?” If one tries to apply reasoning based on the character descriptions and/or portrayals in various media, it would be logical to assume that Galactus, whose biography reads more like that of an elder god than an ordinary person with extraordinary abilities, would be a fairly powerful adversary. Yet here he is, losing in every single category to a martial arts master. Captain America has the same strength rating as The Hulk. And then there is the Heroines deck:

Marvel Heroines

Debut year, OK. Intelligence, sure, but why does it only seem to go up to ten while the other ratings have much higher numbers? Oh, then we can explore their mysterious “dark side” of those weird and exotic creatures known as women(!) And then we have outfit. Yeah, while Marvel Knights contend with each other based on bravery and fighting skills we have contests between the heroines based on outfits. Which, as we can see, follow a distinct pattern. Squirrel Girl’s decidedly unsexy fursuit comes in at the lowest rating, far outclassed by a naked Storm whose “outfit” is entirely comprised by a conveniently placed cloud in the foreground. Sad.

Does any of this make me disappointed that I built a dinner party around this game? Absolutely not! From a game design perspective, the game was mediocre at best. It’s War with a few bells and whistles. But there is more to enjoying a game than balancing random chance with strategy. Getting a good group together, sharing good food, then playing a game we’re not the least bit shy about making fun of while we play it made all the difference. I will certainly play this game again, perhaps in the dying hours of this year’s Extra Life marathon when nobody is awake enough to take a game seriously if they tried. I had a lot of fun with this game, and what else could I have expected or asked for other than that?

By playing this game I learned that to be the Top Trumps Tournament Champion, one needs to be lucky on spins of the wheel and draws from the decks, exploit knowledge of a game that seems to defy all logic and reason, then know how to make the best judgement calls on what the heroines are wearing. Facts don’t matter, only having the winning numbers. I guess it does live up to the yuge expectations the name of the game set up for me.