Podcast Next Monday

Hey everyone!

Okay, cheerfulness done. Matt and myself had planned on recording in time to have a podcast up yesterday but well, guess who forgot the microphone. If you guessed Matt, you’re wrong, it was me. There is a downside and an upside to this. The obvious downside was there wasn’t a podcast for you all yesterday, the upside? I was able to order us another microphone so now we can get back to the old school way of each of us having a microphone each.

The benefit to that is we’ll sound much better, obviously. While we didn’t have pop filters for the upcoming episode, we have created some and we’ll be using them for the following one, which would be Episode 32. For the upcoming episode where we didn’t have pop filters we just stayed far enough back that it wasn’t an audio issue, but it did mean we had to speak up a bit more than usual, not a big thing. I plan on having Episode 31 out Monday the 21st. I could wait for Tuesday though, that way you have something to go along with your Avatar DVD. Also, a warning, once I edit down Episode 31, I expect it to be very close to an hour and a half long. In that episode we cover the Player’s Handbook 3.

While I don’t want to tell you what our verdict on the book as a whole is, nor whether or not we suggest you go buy it or not. It would almost be a breach of protocol if I said whether you should buy it or not buy it.I mean, if you like things like races and classes, such as githzerai and psionics, you’ll be biased. Me? I’m not a fan of the githzerai, but I might be fond of humans with bull heads.

We talk a lot between ourselves, not on the show so much, about our insatiable love for Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books. Well, they are making a pen and paper rpg based around this little set of books and guess what, if you go to their site and pre-order, you get an almost complete copy of the book in pdf form right friggin now. You will also get a PDF of the books when they are 100% done as well on top of your meaty paper based copies as well.

I know what you’re saying, “but they are so expensive”. You’re right, they are, and especially so when you consider the fact they are built off of a free game system. In the end, I look at it this way, I am paying for both real physical copies and the pdf copies along with supporting an author and the guys who spent god knows how long creating those books. Plus, you know, early access to the books, which means you could start playing whenever you want.

Anyway, I’ve talked enough as it is.

Have fun kids!

A Tale of Legends and Things

A full post again! Sorry folks… or folk, not sure exactly how many people actually read the blog posts but screw it, I’m still going to do them!

I went on a slump with the posts because I was attempting to find something that’d work well for my MMO needs. In short, this is what happened: I quit wow; I picked up Champions Online; Champions Online was great fun; Champions Online decided to start doing nightly maintenance and told me they hope I can play during different hours, since I gamed during their downtime; I quit Champions Online; I picked up Fallen Earth, going against everything I had said; Fallen Earth was great fun and I’m still playing.  That little string took a long time and well… more money than it should have.

Besides Fallen Earth I have picked up Brutal Legends and must say this is a grand game that is affectingly fun. It blends a lot of different game styles into it and at times, that really sucks. I generally don’t like the RTS style game moments the game has, even though it still handles very much like the action game it generally is during these moments, which makes it just that much harder to truly be strategic during these moments of the game. Most of my RTS fights have consisted of gathering up a few resource areas, building a bunch of grunts, and then just zerging towards the bad guys. This tactic seems to work more than it should too. All in all though, Brutal Legends is a fun game that I plan on completing. Not a lot of games have what it takes to truly grab onto my ADD like brain and keep it going, but then again, not a lot of games let me kill people with the power of metal either.

Borderlands, which I am going to get for PC, lands next week and boy howdy am I excited. I’ve always loved the desolate post apocalyptic stuff and that’s what Borderlands is, with a handful of Diablo style game play. I say Diablo because if I said something like Titan Quest, some would get it but many would snarl because I would be ignoring “the original” or something. But yes, Borderlands, it has a lot of what I want, about the only thing I could ask for is custom characters. I’m a sucker for character creation in games, and not just a little bit. Any game that has that ability in it instantly gets my attention. Oddly enough, my excitement for Dragon Age: Origins has gone downhill in a hurry here lately, even though they apparently have some magical machine in which you create characters.

We also ended up getting a new microphone for group recording here as well, so don’t expect anymore of staticy group crap we posted last time. I actually felt sort of bad posting that, seriously.

Have fun kids!

Quickie

Hey everyone,

Yeah, I’ve slumped in my posts here, and I apologize for that. Life has been.. intersting? Either way, I’ll get back on track with posting more, I swear! If any of our listeners play Fallen Earth, you can drop me a line, name is Sarantis in game. Maybe we’ll go kill some zombies together. I know I’d like that, I need more crafting materials.

I’m a MMO Whore

Lately I have been doing less and less World of Warcraft, for many reasons really. Mostly it is due to the 3.0 patch and what they did with badges. No longer were we doing runs in Naxx for gear so we could get everyone ready for Ulduar, and then the new ToC stuf, oh no, no no no no. It’s all about grinding out the daily heroic and then pumping the rest of the other heroics for their badges, or just doing the regular 5 man ToC over and over and over again. I undestand this is just a different type of grind, it is just not a fun grind I think. Due to this, I am withdrawing from WoW and moving on, once again.

I am currently playing Champions Online. A game I bought and honestly figured wouldn’t be as good as it currently is, which shows how much I look at where my money goes. I expected it to fall under the same spell as City of Heroes and get old very fast, but it didn’t, which is amazing. I’m really really enjoying myself. If you want to know my name shoot me an e-mail and I will let you know. Here is a hint, so far I have never seen another 1) Rat person 2) tunneling travel power user.

There is another MMO on the horizon, not even a week out from launch, that has my eye as well. It doesn’t just have my eye, it’s petting it and whispering sweet nothings into its ear. This one is Fallen Earth, a game where you can’t ride a mount forever and have to worry about how much gas is in your car. I know that doesn’t sound exciting, but come on, that’s fucking awesome. From the last video I saw they said that almost everything you can find in the game as far as weapons and armor goes is craftable, and honestly, it’s about time for that as well. This game has a lot of promise I think, and I’m tempted to get it too and try out the pre-launch stuff, but… I really shouldn’t, well… because…

DDO is now free… sort of… unless you want to truly play the game as it was meant to be played. Thinks like Warforged, Drow, and the Monk are kept from you unless you want to drop some money on them or pay for a monthly fee. Bah I say! I am currently installing it as I type this out to give it another go, but honestly I don’t expect anything truly grand out of it. Unless they flipped it upside down and made a whole new game out of it, like they did with Star Wars Galaxies, except that destroyed SWG, so we’d want the opposite of that. Granted, I’ll admit, that I only played during the beta, but it felt terribly broken and… shitty.  I was terribly sad to see D&D get such a bad MMO, it tore me up inside.

One game that isn’t an MMO that I will most definately be picking up Tuesday is Scribblenauts for the DS.  I don’t know what it is about this game that seems so appealing, maybe because I want my brain to explode from not being able to figure out a puzzle because I suck at spelling. I have seen a lot of the Vs. style videos this game has produced, and I think they are great. My favorite so far is the devil vs. a priest in a tank, which was a draw due to the fact the devil couldn’t hurt the tank and the priest didn’t want to bother with the devil, odd.

Tuesday I don’t plan on doing a lot besides spending money, having a few drinks with my Father, and recording for you people. Look at that, I’m filling my Father’s day with joy and going out of my way to give you my beautiful voice. Be grateful!

Have fun kids.

Ups and Downs of Video Gaming

Look at me, I’m posting more and more regularly, go me! On a side note I am terribly hungry and craving something made of sugars. It may have something to due with my last “I hunger for item X!” extravaganza, which was celery. I ate a lot of celery, I’m not talking about a few sticks, I’m talking about bags.For a little while now I have been eating a “heart” of celery a day, which means around 8 full stalks of celery umm… sticks? 
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Okay, that little line represents me getting bored and wandering around youtube and the internet in general, having this playing in the background almost the entire time. Everyone thinks that Felicia Day is the hottest thing that walks the set with The Guild, but I disagree. Okay, I jest, due to her nasty snarly attitutude I favor the little asian. I also find it horrifying that Felcia has 1.2 million followers…. ahem… Yes, I am one of them. Don’t you judge me! I also made a PB&J* (*Jam) during my stint away.

What I meant to post here was some of the things that video game companies have been doing here lately that either made me raise an eyebrow out of sheer awe or both of them out of “what the fuck is this!?”. We’ll start off with the good, cause I want you all back down at a working morale level when this is done. 

Firstly, I’ve only heard about it off and on but the game MAG for the ps3 is sounding rather cool, especially with the neato trailer. I’ve always been a fan of FPS games with vehicles and classes, in fact I’m addicted to them. I haven’t found a good one in years though, and am worried that this one might fall under the same fate. I’d rather hope it doesn’t, but well… I’d rather stay pessimistic, so that way the crushing blow won’t seem so … crushing? The idea of 128 vs 128 alone is enough to make ones head explode, but when I saw vehicles I can garauntee you I woke up the neighbors with my squeal of excitement.

Secondly, I’m not going to buy Halo 3: ODST but the little videothat Microsoft and Bungie put together was awesome and sad all at the same time, thus it being in the middle.  It is absolutely awesome to watch, and you realize that maybe a Halo movie could look cool and then you realize that it’s a video game that would get made into a movie and has such a low chance of success that you might as well start crying about it now, telling everyone how they’ll do it wrong. That won’t stop you though, you’ll buy your tickets a week in advance regardless.

Lastly, Darksiders was a game I was looking forward to, heavily. Getting to play one of the four horsemen of the apocolypse, all of them are role models for me after all, in a game that is all about killing things was right down my alley. Until I noticed the weapon unlock, and I fuckinghate that stuff. Giving away something that is suppose to be in the game as a pre-order bonus is a 100% sure fire way of getting under my skin, especially when it has the ability to drastically change how you play the game. Infamous did this as well, but I was unaware until after I picked it up. I make it a point to avoid games that do that sort of thing, so I won’t be picking up Darksiders anymore. I know my single copy won’t cripple the company or anything, but now that I know, it’ll eat away at me that I’m playing a gimped game. The only way to change my attitude on this is to have the weapon really just be a different skin for a weapon that War picks up. If that is all it is, then great! But I doubt that.
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I started reading webcomics…. I think I was done anyway? So um….

Have fun kids?

Celebrate it, louder

I turned 26 the day G.I.Joe hit theaters, and after watching it… not such a great birthday present. It was alright, but the more I think about it the more I loathe it and want it to burn, so I’ve stopped thinking about it… mostly.

I personally haven’t been up to much, besides the lame movie for my birthday I had the spark plugs and wires in my car replaced, joy! The auto shop also decided to leave it outside, unlocked, with the keys in it. Thanks guys, I will be talking to you in the morning, I’m looking forward to it. Actually, make that afternoon. I work nights for the most part so I sleep into the day, meaning that when their day is winding down and their in a bad mood already I’ll show up just starting mine in a very good mood. I prefer that one, otherwise rolls are reversed.

I have taken notice of a little site out there that Matt introduced to me, it’s called Uncrate, and it’s magnificent. It shows a lot of cool stuff, and really, it’s about time Star Wars went this route. Sadly though, this means they are running out of ideas and things are going to close up soon. Sometimes they have cool books, other times awesome machines, and well… sometimes things that are just weird, but in a manly way. I also found an article about machines that will break your brain.

I have been openly bugging Robert Bohl on twitter about hurrying up on misspent youth the game, and it has helped apparently. His author edition/tester edition is done. If you can get in a game with feedback to him in the next month, you should get in touch with him. You can do that through his site or stalk him on twitter. Okay, I don’t expect anyone to read this who isn’t already bugging him but meh, it’s worth a shot. Don’t say I never did anything for you now Rob! …. just in case you try to say that, but I don’t see him trying to say I never did anything for him.

Alright, I’m out! If you want to try and get in on a game, let me know and we’ll see what we can set up.

Have fun kids!

Lime Popping

I had my first margarita on tuesday, and it tasted like magic.

Something that I’ve had my eye on for awhile finally came out on the PSN, it’s about fat chicks.

Beyond that we have played our first game of Mutants and Masterminds, I have no idea how it went or whether the players liked it or not. Honestly, I do not care, what I care about is giving them sparkles of hope and then crushing them. If you think about it the same way that Gabe and Tycho from Penny-Arcade do, then I’m Tycho. I have been doing the … okay I can’t say I have been since so far we’ve only done one, but I planon doing our MnM sessions much like a tv show has episodes. This will let us drop the game at any moment so we can curl up to something we’re more familiar with.

This Saturday is one of our gaming nights, and we plan on doing things during the day beforehand. With the women folk and unborn fetus going on their own adventure, that leaves us men types to have a full day to ourselves. Right now one of the thoughts is for Lazertag, something I am all for, cause it involves guns, running, and possible injuries. While I expected some form of mild to moderate wound last time we did the tagging with lazers, we had none. I promise someone will get hurt this time, even if it means I have to jack someone in the soft part of the skull. And FYI, the inside layers of the skull are actually very tender in comparison to their more outwardly layers. What this means is I will find a way to punch the inside of someones head if no one at least sprains an ankle. If we do indeed shoot at each other we are going to run into a problem, we have an odd number of players, anyone have any good lazertag games we could do? Specifically ones with odd numbers.

I have become a fan of many podcasts now that I have a zune and a desire to listen to podcasts, in fact I find myself listening to one far more than the others, but it may be due to the fact one of the hosts is a horrible person…. and I love that.

OH! I said I’d talk about Dogs in the Vineyard last time didn’t I? What I will say is that out of the story games I’ve played so far, it is my favorite. It could be due to the fact it is far “crunchier” and more dice involved than the others. While there is no attack roll per say, it does feel a lot like playing poker or other card game with the person you are going against. One of you sets the stakes, the other matches, then they raise, the other matches, then they raise, etc etc until one player is out of dice. While this would normally mean defeat, in this game you can escalate things. Normally you are trying to talk to one another and figure things out, but then you can go to fists, then weapons, and guns… guns end badly for a lot of people, I think it’s the bullets.

The fact this system feels like a card game is very well suited for the time in which the game is generally set in, which is western times, when all they had were cards and guns. I won’t go deep into the why and how the game does what it does but what it is meant to do is make you think outside of your normal moral norms and probably make you feel like a monster afterwards. In this game, you are the law, period. You can walk into town and set fire to an orphange without having to explain yourself to anyone, except your fellow players that is. More than likely though your fellow players would be involved in finding a way to secure the doors and windows, then you’d all meet up for some tea and high five.

I’m not shitting.

That is a very likely scenario.

Honestly, I want to bring this into my own gaming circle, it was that much fun for me. Although honestly, I don’t think one of our players would be allowed to play, his wife would murder him.

Also, I want to play Misspent Youth next, someone tell Robert Bohl!

Digital Squire – For the Digital Player

Knowing that the iplay4e application exists for the iPhone, I started searching for a desktop application for use with the character builder data. A couple Google searches later and I find Asmor.com and his scripts. Originally looking for an app to use with Character Builder save files, I found much more, including an encounter planner, monster builder, and treasure generator. There are a few other tools on the site, but these were the  ones that caught my eye.

I got a chance to look at Digital Squire, a tool for use at the table by players. It allows a player to load their saved character file from the DDI Character Builder and track game information within the application, replacing a printed character sheet. Digital Squire has a built in dice roller, allowing you to do a quick roll, where you can type what you want the app to roll, or you can choose the die icon next to many of your characters stats and it will roll using your character’s modifier. The app also has the ability to track damage, healing, healing surges spent, powers expended, and short and extended rest.

When spending a healing surge it allows you to specify an additional modifier to be added in, easily taking into account any healing kicker from your party’s leader. Power’s that you have expended, automatically refresh after clicking the rest buttons, encounter powers after a short rest and encounter and daily powers after an extended rest.

The feature I found incredibly handy, was the tie in with the DDI Compendium. Once a character is loaded, the Compendium menu at the top allows you to quickly open the Compendium to your character’s class or race. There is an option to have the Compendium info open in an external browser or by default it tries to open the info in a window created by Digital Squire. I could not get the info to display in Digital Squire, but once I set it to open in browser, I was prompted to enter my DDI log-in for the web page and was seeing the entries in no time.

The tie in with the Compendium also works with equipment and powers, allowing you to quickly get the full description for any item, ritual, or power you have. The one thing I wish you could see in the program is your character’s feats, with the ability to look up in the Compendium.

In the Powers screen, you can see all of your powers broken out into At-Will, Encounter, Daily, Utility, and Extended. You can select a power and choose to use it, which brings up a dialog where you can pick what weapon or implement to use with the attack. From there, it will make an attack roll with your modifiers and display the results. The results show a break down of  attack and damage rolls, as well as show any misc. modifiers you may be able to add from class features. For example, I loaded a copy of a rogue for a player from the last DnD game I ran. When using a power it would roll the attack and damage for the standard power, but it would also list +3d8 once a round for sneak attack. I don’t like that it doesn’t roll this damage, I would rather it roll the damage and keep it separate to be added if needed, but it is nice to have these things shown as a reminder.

It will be a while before I get a chance to try this at the table, but I can see this being something I would use. Our current gaming setup involves players from out of state, so our setup includes several players with laptops out at the table. I think having the Character Builder open to make any permanent changes, like xp or new items, and Digital Squire open as my character sheet, I will enjoy not having to shuffle around several pages of character sheets and power cards.

As I look over more of the tools created by Asmor, I may post additional posts if they seem as handy as Digital Squire appears to be.

-Matt

Mutants and Me

Tonight I’ll be running my very first game of Mutants and Masterminds, overall we don’t plan on playing this game for long. I think that this is a game that the group of players I play with would instantly break if the game itself did not put stoppers in for basically everything. Which is why I have allowed my players to run free. I already have a bad guy made up as punishment if they end up going too far. I know the whole “bad guy as punishment” thing is bad practice, but I never said I was game for nice practices. As a good GM though I know which players to be the most worried about, so I have already thought of my own twists to toss out to let them know they’re pushing things too far.

Since this is a game for the short term I am going to try and basically build “episodes” rather than an overal story arc. Tonight I am trying to decide if I should go for my “Toyland” episode or my “Carnival” episode. Originally I planned on them being horribly comical but I find trying to put punchlines in everywhere overly trying and tiring for my brain. Instead I’m going to go for cliche and a moderate amount of comedy, but I expect that most of the comedy will come from the players and ecounters themselves.

In other news… I need a game! I am taking a break from raiding in WoW so I can get some other stuff done in life but still have time for a bit of gaming, and I want something other than WoW. I have played and beat both Prototype and Infamous so I am much in need of something new.

Well, I’m off to go watch Ghostbusters and work on things, wish me luck!

Have fun kids.

Psions and things

First of all, the psion is out over at the D&D site. I haven’t really looked over the psion much, and I’ll admit it. Mainly because when I did a quick glance and saw power points were still around I didn’t know what to feel. I almost felt ill at the idea of power points still existing. That is what made a psion a psion, or any psionic class honestly. I believe they could have easily gotten the psion feel the small handful of us knew and loved without going for power points again.

 Honestly, I find their new format for the classes 100% annoying as shit. Before you would get a pdf that looked very much like a class entry in any of the standard D&D books (except for it’s page size). Now instead of getting power names and descriptions, you only get the names of the powers and are forced to go to the online compendium to actual read the powers. I can understand why they increased the costs of Dragon honestly, but to then go and put that sort of crap into the articles is unacceptable. I get why they did it, it prevents people from having an account, downloading it, then spreading it out to the world since they’ll need login info to look at the powers and so forth. If they continue to do this, I will without a doubt cancel my subscription.

In lighter news Push came out on dvd, and I loved it. I have heard a lot of good things about it and it came through. I’ll admit that I am a junkie for that sort of thing though. People who can throw lightning, fly, ride in big robots, etc is all fine, but you show me a bunch of people than can move stuff with their mind and I generally scream and wet myself in joy. If anyone has any suggestions of other movies, books, etc that I should look into for my addiction, let me know!

Construction on Matt’s basement continues and thus we don’t have a solid place to record. I am going to attempt to see if he’ll let me help him on Saturday a bit, but I’m sure him and the county will have something to say about allowing me to use sharp objects and hammers.

The 4th of July came and went, and I also forgot to send out messages to all my friends on the following day that it was the 5th and that they should stay safe while they have fun. It’s hard to tell, but I’m one of those people that is on the recieving end of a long line of texts every holiday, stating that it is the holiday. I have decided to start sending out messages on random days about it being that day as well, but I doubt they’ll get the point.

The real reason for me bringing up the 4th was to point out while everyone else was out blowing stuff up and cuddling under the stars, I was stuck at a wedding. Granted this wedding had free beer and many old friends, so it was a good time. A total 3 of us decided we needed to make a pyramid from out beer glasses, so we did. A 3d one, so it was very large. The cleanup crew actually laughed when they got to our table, and called out their friends.

Have fun kids!

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