Playing Against The Clock

Has this ever happened to you?

"Alright, that was a grueling encounter.  Let's camp out on this level of the tower, heal up and get all those big abilities we just used back because that next encounter's probably going to be the boss fight."

This attitude hadn't sunk into my D&D game until just recently, when one of the players switched to a wizard.  Now after using their daily spells, the party is ready to call it for the day/night to try and keep their biggest guns loaded.

It's a natural impulse for players:  the DM is throwing really hard stuff at us and possibly out to kill at least one of us to 'put the fear back in them' (which is so totally NOT what I was doing), so we should keep our hardest-hitting powers available as much as possible.

It's that moment when the warm, fuzzy immersion of roleplaying lifts and all that's left is the cold logic of character sheets, dice and statistics.  It's when DMs that care about story (or care obsessively about it, like I do) start casting about for anything to keep the party from gaming the system.

So what can you do to keep the action going?

The Bloody Cost of Victory

I just finished Dragon Age 2, dragging my version of the protagonist Hawke through nearly a full acre of blood and the mutilated bodies of my enemies.  DA2 finished with a much more epic (and perilous) ending than Dragon Age: Origins did, but it was an ending that I almost wasn't sure I wanted to see.

I had put DA2 down just as I got into the third act for a number of reasons; I was busy, I had blasted through the first two acts in a matter of days, and I was feeling just a little bit... disappointed by some of the changes that had been made.

In then end, I toughed it out and put an end to the madness in Kirkwall, unleashing a new kind of madness on the world as a result.  Wherever Bioware's going with the finale of the triology, it's going to be epic.

Join The Dark Side? ...Okay.

I love Star Wars.  It was the first real geeky thing I ever latched onto, and boy did I latch on like a mynock to a power coupling.

I read the books, devoured the comics, sunk way too much money into the collectible card game, and just overall obsessed about it the only way a young fanboy could.

When it came to Star Wars and video games, I managed to avoid most of the early flops until Bioware introduced Knights of the Old Republic and KOTOR 2.  Both were impressively robust yet accessible RPGs that really captured the epic feel of Star Wars, while still bringing unique additions to the overall universe such as the amnesiac Revan and the murderously-hilarious HK-47.

Now, Bioware's incredibly-ambitious MMO "Star Wars:  The Old Republic"  is going to get me to do something I've rarely done before:  play the bad guy.

Game Over

No big post tonight:  too much news going on.

September 11th was a strange day for me:  it was both a day of great sorrow, but also a day when I confirmed my life's calling to be a journalist.  No one I knew personally was killed in the attacks on New York, and since I was in college working at the TV station at the time I helped report on security measures being taken at the local nuclear plant.  It was my first real TV story, and I knocked it out of the park.

Are You Afraid of the Dark - Pt. 2

As I mentioned in the last column, some of the only actual gameplay in Minecraft is surviving the nightly spawning of zombies, spiders, skeleton archers and hissing bomb-snakes called Creepers.  Eventually (or way too damn soon, depending on how you look at it) the sun-cube will set, and monsters will spawn in the darkness.  If you're well-equipped and skilled you could try fending them off long enough to survive until morning, or you can build yourself a safe hidey-hole and wait for the sun to come back up.  This single mechanism, the need to survive, does an incredible job of prodding the player to build better and more effective structures as they play the game.

My first Minecraft character wasted no time building a fort and staying behind its wood-and-stone walls until daylight roasted everything that was still slithering outside, but that just wouldn't do for Captain Reynolds.  He'd want to grab the darkness by its jimmy-jams and ride it like it was a steel beast forged in the depths of Hades until it bleated for mercy.

But he'd also want to be smart about being foolhardy.  First, he'd need a weapon.

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

I paid to download Minecraft about a week ago, after watching several videos about just how nifty it is.  The indy sandbox game is very much like a "Lego" videogame made for adults:  you mine blocks, then craft things with them.  The game is still in beta, but has already had two million people pay to download it.

While there are no specific goals for the player to accomplish (other than achievements that were recently added to give the player a kind of guide to get started), the single- and multiplayer modes have a "survival" theme built in.  When the sun goes down, monsters spawn in dark places and try to kill you.  There are some monsters that can survive in the sunlight, but most burn into a crisp once the molten cube rises in the east, leaving behind stuff you can loot.

I played quite a lot my first week, and decided to start a new character in a new world just to see what I'd learned.  And since I'm a roleplaying geek, I'll play as if he were some explorer stranded on a rustic new world and trying to get by.

Welcome to Serenity, Captain Reynolds.

Raid Night

Tuesdays are raid night.

That's become one indelible imprint that playing World of Warcraft has made on my life.  On Tuesday morning the servers go down for maintenance, and then when they come back up and I get off work in the evening there are fresh bosses to down and a surge of players ready to take their stuff.

For raiders, the week starts on Tuesday.  Monday is a day for finishing up old business, knocking out a couple of dungeons, or getting mats like flasks and feasts ready to fuel the raid machine.  We watch Monday Night Football, or take the significant other out to eat, or do a few extra chores because from 7pm to 11pm on Tuesday...

It's raid night.