Chaotek Thoughts

I was recently invited to play the Alternity roleplaying game with a new group.  I knew the GM of the game, as he has been playing in my regular D&D game for the last year, but I didn’t know any of the players until I showed up to game.  In many ways, this is a little nerve-wracking.  I get introverted when around people I don’t know well, and there would be no save harbor at the game since I wouldn’t know any of the players.  And yet, I was more nervous about the roleplaying style.  There are many different types of gamers, and I would put myself solidly in the middle of the pack.  I hate dungeon crawling, but also would make a terrible LARP gamer.

 So I expected the game to be a little slow at first, as you don’t want to look like a fool.  It’s kind of like showing up for a job interview at McDonalds wearing a tuxedo.  While the tux is appropriate at an opera house, you’d be overdoing it at a fast food joint.  As the first game session started, my expectations were proven incorrect as the players immediately started playing in-character.  Accents and voices were used, which is not something I can do well at all, but it immediately set the bar as to what was expected in this gaming group.

 The second session, with a much larger group (most of the group didn’t make the first game), made me reset to my original plan—sit back and wait.  However even this plan was deflected as I spent the first hour of the game as an active participant while the new players finished their characters and waited to get involved.  Therefore I was forced to put my cards on the table first.

 Overall, the experience went very well.  I think the group fits my general style of gaming, and sets the bar a little above my comfort level—which has its benefits as well.  Its interesting to see how other people game, so I can pull some of those experiences back to my normal gaming group to improve that game as well.

This site is now live on Wordpress, having converted from b2evolution.  While there wasn’t anything specifically wrong with b2evolution, my recent experiences with a few sites using WordPress has shown me how much easier WordPress is to use.  I have my old theme back, since the b2evo version of the theme was broken by an application update awhile back.

I used a conversion script to convert.  It was half successful.  While it did import users and posts, it did not import any category or tags, requiring a lot of rework.  The real problem with the script is that roughly 1/3 of the posts got truncated.  This required a manual check of every post, which took far longer than I would have liked.

Overall, I’m not sure how much time the conversion script really saved me, because copying all of the posts manually might have been easier becaus e it would not have required all of the rework and double-checking.

I’ve never been a DC comics fan, and have primarily been drawn towards the traditional Marvel Knights. Last year I read the Batman War Games trade paperbacks and became interested in the Batman family. This was good timing, as the death of Batman gave me an opportunity to start fresh with the Batman Reborn line of comics. Since I have very little exposure to Batman’s universe, this gave me an opportunity to start reading the comics without the overhead of decades of lore.

The two Batman titled comics I am reading are Batman and Batman & Robin. While the stories in both leave something to be desired, especially in Batman & Robin. While I don’t really like the plot in the comics, it’s the side-plots that I really like. The relationships between the Batman family are what attracts me, as you now have a happier Batman and a dark Robin. Damien is hilarious, even though that is not the character’s intent. I especially loved the crossover of Robin in the Batgirl comic.

By far, my favorite comic in the line (and perhaps favorite comic overall right now) is Batgirl. I liked Stephanie Brown as Robin, and it was a shame that her stint as Robin was just used as a premise to kick off the War Games story. So it’s good to see her in a new comic as Batgirl. The comic is still dark, but at the same time is very witty and fun. In many ways, she reminds me of Spiderman, where nothing seems to go her way but she is able to push through anyways. Especially good is the relationship between Batgirl, Oracle, Batman and Robin; where she is very much treated the outcast but she manages to keep mostly upbeat about it.

I hope that when Bruce Wayne shows back up to be Batman once again, Stephanie doesn’t get sidelined again.

Late night TV has not been this entertaining for me in a long time.  It’s comedy gold at NBC’s expense.  I’ve never much of a fan of late night talk shows, especially since getting a DVR, but I’ve enjoyed the last week quite a bit.  I’ve never been a fan of Conan, but he’s doing a great job considering his situation.  The jokes are hilarious, mocking NBC over and over, reminding me of when Howard Stern worked for WNBC.

I think that NBC caused this problem from the start.  After David Letterman’s defection back when Leno took the helm of the Tonight Show, NBC became very paranoid that it would happen again.  They decided to retire Jay Leno while he was on top, and didn’t want to retire.  All because they were afraid of Conan leaving and becoming the competition.  While I liked Leno a lot more than Conan at the time, I believe that Conan should get to keep the Tonight Show as is, in its current timeslot.

It is ridiculous to blame Conan for NBC’s woes, considering the ratings failure of NBC as a whole.  Late night TV is dependent on people watching the news, which is dependent on the prime time schedule.  As has been publicized for the past months, the poor primetime performance of NBC (including the Jay Leno Show) has been hurting local evening news.  NBC is acting like changing the late night lineup will somehow save the network, but they should be looking to primetime first.  NBC has cancelled good show after good show, and even the good shows that they keep seem to barely get renewed.

They say that any publicity is good publicity, proven as I’m watching late night TV when I haven’t in years, but this publicity is going to be a problem down the road.  It’s polarizing NBC’s audience, suggesting that they choose between Conan and Leno (perhaps permanently).  I’m not going to solve the problem, NBC hasn’t called yet, but however it turns out it has been great TV (especially because it’s at NBC’s expense)!

I helped setup a website this week, check it out: http://www.desertwheel.com/

The site uses WordPress, which I am strongly debating moving this site to. While I don’t have any significant issues with b2evolution, I really like the ease of use that WordPress offers.

I have cancelled my subscription to Champions Online. I liked the game, but I haven’t been playing it in the last month or two. The problem that I have with the game is that character changing decisions are too permanent. Unlike WoW, where you can relatively easily change your character build (talents), it is much more difficult to do so in Champions Online. Basically, you have to deeply pre-plan your character to be successful. Sure, you could do this in WoW as well, but I don’t think that you would be punished quite as much for a poor decision like Champions does. What broke my motivation to play was that I had leveled up a character quite a ways, and I decided to change the character to try a new build. I’d tried a lower level version of the build, which seemed quite fun to play. In order to rebuild my character, I was forced to sell everything I owned in game in order to afford the massively expensive rebuild. But when I got done, the character was impossible to play, having changed from a combat monster into a glass cannon. I now couldn’t afford to return back to my original build, thereby trashing my main character.

Sure, WoW doesn’t currently offer the ability to change your character so extremely. You can’t change character class, though there are rumors that might be coming. However the option was given to me to be able to do so and it bit my hand. While I wasn’t high enough level to recreate my original character build with a new character, it sure did crush my motivation to play.

Secondly, the graphics in the game are disappointing. While I can understand that they are trying to replicate the feel of a comic book drawing, which I can appreciate, you are setup from the beginning for a massive let-down. What I mean is that you start off in perhaps the most powerful character builder I’ve seen to date, able to customize everything to the smallest detail. The graphics in the character builder are quality 3-D modeling, so you are given the impression that this is what the game looks like. Then the game starts, and the comic graphics replace the 3-D modeled character you just got done building…

My final issue with the game is the lack of an open world feel. The game is setup with regions which are not attached to one another. One thing that I like about WoW is that you feel like you are in a “real” world (vaguely but you do) where you can wander around. However the zones were like maps in a console game, where you move from one box-canyon to the next box-canyon. The idea of using instances for the entire game, where a limited number of people could be in a given zone at a time, seems like a good idea for performance reasons (especially compared to racial cities in WoW). However in practice it doesn’t encourage the feeling of a real world environment. You almost never run into the same people twice, which doesn’t encourage groups to form or even casual friendships because its unlikely you’ll ever see a person again.

It’s not all bad though, as there are aspects of Champions which I feel are superior to other MMOs that I have played (namely WoW). Built into the game is a mission assistance mechanism similar to how the QuestHelper addon in WoW works. It’s easy to use, and helps new users get right into the action without just wandering around not knowing what to do.

I think that if the game is still going strong in a year or so, which is debatable giving the publisher’s spotty history in MMOs, I might pick it up again. Despite my above complaints, I really enjoyed playing the game when I did. Hopefully by then, I will be able to play without feeling penalized or feel like there is a real community of players around me. I’ll stick with X-Box for now, but I already miss playing an MMO…

I just wanted to give a shout out to Josh Clayton at Spiffy Life for an easy to use utility which saved me time and effort. I needed to look inside some “encrypted” content in a theme for a friend’s site because the theme was behaving poorly and this page made it very easy. Thanks a lot!

By the way, sure it was mildly difficult to get the data decrypted, but what was the point. You want to protect a couple spam links on the bottom of the theme to “pay for the theme.” For one, it wasn’t really tough to break, and two its part of the license of using the free theme. If you really wanted cash, you’d spend more effort on finding people who broke your license than trying to maintain some spam links.

Attack of the Show

I am currently working on finishing the campaign log for a recently ended Dark Sun game I ran. As I’m writing it, I’m reminded that this campaign included one of my favorite moments as a dungeon master. This moment was a massive plot twist, that had caught the players completely by surprise.

In the game, the heroes learned that there was an artifact called the Chrono Rod, which could allow them to travel in time. The group planned to travel back in time, and kill Rajaat, the man most responsible for the post-apocalyptic setting of Dark Sun. The group was fired up to activate the rod and do this great deed. To activate the rod, the rod had to be placed in the hand of a certain statue. As the rod was activated, the group was ready to charge through the portal to kill Rajaat. Well, it didn’t quite go that way. Time had taken its toll on prophesy, and what the rod really did was awaken a champion of Rajaat who was still very loyal to his master. Instead of stopping Rajaat in the past, they were now looking at the possibility of bringing Rajaat back into the current world so that he could finish the job.

There was a moment as the champion of Rajaat was awakening, where I was looking at the players and you could see the brimming excitement suddenly get crushed by the reality of what was really occurring. This might sound a little sadistic, but the point is that the game completely changed direction in an instant. Sure, the players were pissed, though not at me. They were fired up by the situation.

What makes the story one of my favorites is that the players had become so deeply invested in the story. This wasn’t a plot twist, it was a reality twist. As a game master, the most you can hope for is to develop a plot deep enough that the players immerse themselves in the story–and this game was a great example. It is a rare game where I get that kind of energy from the players, making the experience of this campaign one of my best experiences behind the DM screen.

Now, I don’t expect that every campaign should have such a big plot twist. But I definitely encourage other game masters to develop stories and worlds which draw in players. In other games it’s been a reoccurring villain that the players hate with a passion, or an NPC that the players love to interact with. I’m specifically referencing the difference between an in-character reaction and a player reaction. If the players are not invested in the story, then you’re not much better than a video game. The goal of role playing is to develop stories and characters which allow the gamers to suspend their disbelief and feel like a part of that world.

I’ve noticed that my PCs and party NPCs more often than not tend to be be anti-heroes, rather than heroes.  Some of my favorite characters in games have been patriotic necromancers, vigilantes, addicts, grey Jedi, and a plethora of characters who barely have a handle on their sanity.  For the most part, these characters do not result in intra-party conflicts–despite their evil leanings.  The characters are always loyal to the party, and have an “ends justify the means” mentality.  The characters are always shades of grey (more like a Christmas light in a dark gymnasium).

I don’t think it’s because I’m incapable of playing a truly heroic character, because I have.  However when I do, the games tend to be less enjoyable.  Sure, this might be because I feel constrained by the limitations of being a “good guy.”  However that seems too simple to explain the entire story.

When making a character, I want the character to be interesting.  Interesting might include the shininess of being a little tasteless, but it also includes conflict.  I’m talking about internal conflict and external conflict.  It’s hard to play a conflicted character when you’re toeing the line of goodliness.  To me, a righteous character shouldn’t be conflicted by wanting to do something and not being able to because it’s bad–dark thoughts are just as evil as dark deeds.  The only conflict I come up with for truly good characters is being a lawful stupid paladin, which means your conflict is being a cop for other player characters.

Outside of gaming, some of my favorite characters are anti-heroes, my favorite comics include Punisher, Ghost Rider, Deadpool, Iron Man, Wolverine, etc.  I’m not a fan of true heroes like Superman or Captain America, not that I dislike them but I just don’t enjoy the stories as much because there is far less conflict.

I think the best way for me to play a good character, is to be faced with an enemy who is the dark mirror.  It has been said that heroes are defined by their villains.  Without a truly vile villain to measure up to, I don’t think I have the ability to play a completely heroic character.  Maybe I just have an unfair standard for my heroes…