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Hi. Yes, I'm alive. There's been a bit of things that happened since my last post.
1. The wonderful new health issue is my neck and left shoulder. Two weeks ago, my shoulders were pretty sore, which is honestly fairly normal for me. I decided to take a hot shower that night to loosen them up. Ten minutes after the shower, my entire neck and shoulders painfully sieze up such that I can't move my neck at all without screaming pain. As in, "need to stuff sheets in my mouth to keep from screaming when I try to move my head to go to sleep". After a week off work, two trips to Med, including one orthopedic surgeon, and a referral to a chiropractor, I can now move my head mostly without pain and have a pain-free functional right shoulder, although I wake up every morning with the left terribad.
2. PAX East! That was this weekend, and I really enjoyed,it, as always. Going with friends also exponentially increases the fun of going. I'm going to break this down further:
2a. Concerts: VGO (excellent as always), Those Who Fight (new Final Fantasy Rock Opera, who were pretty good), and the Protomen (they give a good concert. I have some Issues with their 2nd album, though) on Friday. Saturday was Sam Hart (new, but charmingly adorkable), MC Frontalot, JoCo, and Paul and Storm. I enjoyed them all, even though my neck started aching from staying in one position too long.
2b. Video Games: I mostly like seeing the indie and smaller games at PAXEast than the AAA titles. I can see videos and coverage of the latter on RPS or Siliconera or RPGamer. I won't see the former anywhere else. Got to play alphas of God Forge (3d space shooter, with 4-player 2 team multiplayer: defend your team's carrier in space) and Secret Ponchos (western top-down multiplayer shooter. It's highly fun.), both of which have excellent titles. Also got to play Two Brothers, which is a delightfully retro action RPG supposedly coming out this summer. There was also a tablet RTS that was fun (although the title escapes me at the moment), a tablet Usagi Yojimbo game, and the delightful tablet game Nun Attack, which is about nuns who fight zombies/vampires/something? In AAA land, Remember Me looks promising, as does WotC's new Magic game (albeit a bit slow). The next Civ pack supposedly might have some XCOM characters.
2c. Board Games: Played Sentinels of the Multiverse, which is a comic-book style cooperative card game. Each player has a deck of cards with abilities for a hero. They play them against a villain who has their own deck and in an environment which has a deck. We played it Friday. By 2pm on Saturday, the house owned the main game, all 3 full expansions, and all 6 single deck expansions, and had spent enough money/played enough games to earn the points to get all the limited special edition alternate hero cards. Because Link and I are crazy like that.
2d. Tabletop Games: Picked up a copy of Kuro, a tabletop system that's a cross between cyberpunk and Japanese horror. It reminds me of Shadowrun, and I'm probably going to try running something using it. The company that put it out, Cubicle 7, also has a system for The Laundry (as in the Stross novels) and Doctor Who.
2e. Panels: I actually went to a bunch this year.
i. Storytime with Cliff Belszinski and the Penny Arcade Q&A: I always enjoy the keynote speakers. This year was no exception. I'd say I'm not a huge fan of the amount of dick jokes in the Q&A panel (mostly prompted or by the questioners), but I know what I'm getting into. So that was the same as every year too, except the fact that Tycho was in a Fruit Fucker costume due to a Kickstarter goal added a certain amount of surreality.
ii. The Future of RPGs: painful. It was advertised to have 90% wrongness in their predictions, but the wrongness started from their first principles. I was slightly horrified, as the panelists were the designers of Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, and Dogs in the Vineyard. The fact that I could contradict their assertions of fact with actual experiences in the last 6 months didn't help. On the upside, it convinced me I want to give a talk at Ides in a few weeks.
iii. Mastering Game Mechanics: by the hosts of the Geek Nights podcast. Excellently panel, and gave a good rundown of common mechanics found in games. Gave me some ideas for my next game writing projects.
iv. Pitch Your Game Idea: goddamned hilarious, as always. The panelists mock the ideas, and there are always some really, really terrible ones.
v. You Game Like A Girl: Tales of Trolls & White Knights: one of the best panels I've ever been to at PAX, hands down. The panelists knew their shit, were thoughtful, and admitted that some issues like booth babes were actually complex! Full of truth bombs and some deliciously satisfying smackdowns of Twitter and comment bullshit happening live. (Such as "Why are there no men on this panel?" "Because they're on all the other ones." And "There's a lot of sand in your vagina." "It's not sand, it's the misogyny.") It was great and needed and the people in the audience were also fantastic. Every person who got up to ask a question was thoughtful and relevant.
Once again, definitely going back for PAXEast 2014.
1. The wonderful new health issue is my neck and left shoulder. Two weeks ago, my shoulders were pretty sore, which is honestly fairly normal for me. I decided to take a hot shower that night to loosen them up. Ten minutes after the shower, my entire neck and shoulders painfully sieze up such that I can't move my neck at all without screaming pain. As in, "need to stuff sheets in my mouth to keep from screaming when I try to move my head to go to sleep". After a week off work, two trips to Med, including one orthopedic surgeon, and a referral to a chiropractor, I can now move my head mostly without pain and have a pain-free functional right shoulder, although I wake up every morning with the left terribad.
2. PAX East! That was this weekend, and I really enjoyed,it, as always. Going with friends also exponentially increases the fun of going. I'm going to break this down further:
2a. Concerts: VGO (excellent as always), Those Who Fight (new Final Fantasy Rock Opera, who were pretty good), and the Protomen (they give a good concert. I have some Issues with their 2nd album, though) on Friday. Saturday was Sam Hart (new, but charmingly adorkable), MC Frontalot, JoCo, and Paul and Storm. I enjoyed them all, even though my neck started aching from staying in one position too long.
2b. Video Games: I mostly like seeing the indie and smaller games at PAXEast than the AAA titles. I can see videos and coverage of the latter on RPS or Siliconera or RPGamer. I won't see the former anywhere else. Got to play alphas of God Forge (3d space shooter, with 4-player 2 team multiplayer: defend your team's carrier in space) and Secret Ponchos (western top-down multiplayer shooter. It's highly fun.), both of which have excellent titles. Also got to play Two Brothers, which is a delightfully retro action RPG supposedly coming out this summer. There was also a tablet RTS that was fun (although the title escapes me at the moment), a tablet Usagi Yojimbo game, and the delightful tablet game Nun Attack, which is about nuns who fight zombies/vampires/something? In AAA land, Remember Me looks promising, as does WotC's new Magic game (albeit a bit slow). The next Civ pack supposedly might have some XCOM characters.
2c. Board Games: Played Sentinels of the Multiverse, which is a comic-book style cooperative card game. Each player has a deck of cards with abilities for a hero. They play them against a villain who has their own deck and in an environment which has a deck. We played it Friday. By 2pm on Saturday, the house owned the main game, all 3 full expansions, and all 6 single deck expansions, and had spent enough money/played enough games to earn the points to get all the limited special edition alternate hero cards. Because Link and I are crazy like that.
2d. Tabletop Games: Picked up a copy of Kuro, a tabletop system that's a cross between cyberpunk and Japanese horror. It reminds me of Shadowrun, and I'm probably going to try running something using it. The company that put it out, Cubicle 7, also has a system for The Laundry (as in the Stross novels) and Doctor Who.
2e. Panels: I actually went to a bunch this year.
i. Storytime with Cliff Belszinski and the Penny Arcade Q&A: I always enjoy the keynote speakers. This year was no exception. I'd say I'm not a huge fan of the amount of dick jokes in the Q&A panel (mostly prompted or by the questioners), but I know what I'm getting into. So that was the same as every year too, except the fact that Tycho was in a Fruit Fucker costume due to a Kickstarter goal added a certain amount of surreality.
ii. The Future of RPGs: painful. It was advertised to have 90% wrongness in their predictions, but the wrongness started from their first principles. I was slightly horrified, as the panelists were the designers of Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World, and Dogs in the Vineyard. The fact that I could contradict their assertions of fact with actual experiences in the last 6 months didn't help. On the upside, it convinced me I want to give a talk at Ides in a few weeks.
iii. Mastering Game Mechanics: by the hosts of the Geek Nights podcast. Excellently panel, and gave a good rundown of common mechanics found in games. Gave me some ideas for my next game writing projects.
iv. Pitch Your Game Idea: goddamned hilarious, as always. The panelists mock the ideas, and there are always some really, really terrible ones.
v. You Game Like A Girl: Tales of Trolls & White Knights: one of the best panels I've ever been to at PAX, hands down. The panelists knew their shit, were thoughtful, and admitted that some issues like booth babes were actually complex! Full of truth bombs and some deliciously satisfying smackdowns of Twitter and comment bullshit happening live. (Such as "Why are there no men on this panel?" "Because they're on all the other ones." And "There's a lot of sand in your vagina." "It's not sand, it's the misogyny.") It was great and needed and the people in the audience were also fantastic. Every person who got up to ask a question was thoughtful and relevant.
Once again, definitely going back for PAXEast 2014.
(no subject)
I would be absolutely fascinated by more details on this, if you have them.
v. You Game Like A Girl: Tales of Trolls & White Knights: one of the best panels I've ever been to at PAX, hands down. The panelists knew their shit, were thoughtful, and admitted that some issues like booth babes were actually complex! Full of truth bombs and some deliciously satisfying smackdowns of Twitter and comment bullshit happening live. (Such as "Why are there no men on this panel?" "Because they're on all the other ones." And "There's a lot of sand in your vagina." "It's not sand, it's the misogyny.") It was great and needed and the people in the audience were also fantastic. Every person who got up to ask a question was thoughtful and relevant.
Holy shit, I would give so much to have been at that panel. It seems like most people don't want to hear it when it comes to misogyny in gaming. To be someplace where I could talk about it and not have to deal with the bullshit? Wow. ("It's not sand, it's the misogyny." Heh. Loved that.)
ETA: Ugh, White Wolf. Even their .pdf files are so expensive. They certainly don't follow the trend of offering them on the cheap in the hopes of getting people to buy the hard copies, like most gaming companies do. But I think that might be their POD model talking? But either way, it's frustrating. Not that it has anything to do with the rest of this; I just wanted to vent to a fellow gamer.
(no subject)
In any case, I should have known I'd be in for something after the first LARP joke. *eyeroll* And there were some good points about playing online, using g+ and Google Hangouts for it. (Oddly, they were saying they had problems with maps, when I'm pretty sure there was a link on Penny Arcade to Roll20.net, but I could be wrong about that.)
And then there was this question about writing and designing a tabletop collaboratively. And this is about where I wanted to either raise my hand and hijack the panel telling them they were wrong, or flip the table. Because it was apparently inconcievable that people could write together. And I thought maybe I'd heard them wrong, but the parts I know I heard disprove that. Because I wrote a system collaboratively with friends two months ago. And when the panelists are saying things like "well, your idea is your baby" and "I would never think to tell you [a panelist] what to do [with your system]" and "I don't think you could write a good system collaboratively", all I can think is "of course you can't, if you're that egotistical. Step 1: get over yourself."
(There was also "I don't know what you'd use to do it", and I was THIS CLOSE to raising my hand and saying "I've found Google Docs works fairly well. Wikis are also useful. And version control." I may have been writing games collaboratively for, oh, 8 years.)
And finally, they got to this breathless wonderment at Nordic LARPs, which are pretty cool and hella interactive and something my gaming group discussed in-depth at length about six months ago. So that suffered from the "welcome to six months ago" from me, which is probably unfair. But they were all "oh god, the LARPers are going to have us beat" and the gaming community I'm a part of has been designing these in-depth, home-brewed system LARPs for the last, uh, 30some odd years? And it's a bit christ almighty where have you been?! It was exceedingly frustrating. (And, like I said, probably indicative of privilege on my part.)
Although, I did like the part where they talked about how a GM is still useful and needed and probably shouldn't be excised from the tabletop. (Or else we'd all be playing things like Microscope.)
Like I said, I'm conflicted about it and frustrated with it.
Onto happier things!
Holy shit, I would give so much to have been at that panel.
They taped it. :)
(no subject)
I. Yes. That sounds like a very frustrating panel on designing games. Did they somehow manage to miss two of the biggest tools that collaborators use these days? And have used for YEARS now?
Though I think you may be lucky in your LARP group. The Chicago-area LARPers are a loose conglomeration of social cliques, for the most part, and information sharing can be difficult. There's a lot of competition, because C:DR, the big game around here for the past ridiculous number of years, is competitive to the nth degree. So I've never heard of Nordic LARPs, but honestly, it seems a lot like the style of games that a few of us already like. (My Vampire: The Requiem LARP has been steadily bleeding players due to the noncompetitive nature of the game. Also, it's only nominally VtR. It's really a Mage game, only you can't get people to play much Mage in Chicago. Vampire is where it's at.)
I keep looking at Microscope and pondering buying it, but I think I'm going to go and find the book in an actual store so I can read through it before I do.
And I will totally watch that recording later tonight. Thanks!
ETA: And now I'm looking at that roll20.net link and thinking of the fun I could have with it.
(no subject)
Yeah, I don't know about the collaboration thing. It was the most obvious thing, especially since they were waxing poetically about the wonderfulness of g+ and Google Hangouts and I just. What is this I don't even.
See, I am capable of recognizing my own privilege! :) My LARP community is something special. It's all homebrew. We can be competitive PvP players, but also cooperative PvE players, sometimes in the same game! And there's a lot of originality and playing with the medium and all sorts of things. And we talk about game design a lot. Like at minimum weekly a lot. :) So, like I said, I am probably being terribly unfair.
Microscope is interesting. I played it once. It's fun for a collaborative storytelling event, but it's not really good for scratching my "gaming" itch. I might be competitive and like risk. I also might like rolling dice. :)
re: roll20.net
Doesn't it look cool? I found it and have been trying to think of all the things I could do with it.
(no subject)
Also I feel kind of bad that I tried some indie RPGs at PAX last fall and then promptly forgot about them... But Indie RPGs are definitely the way to go at PAX. You get to talk to the actual developers and usually don't have to wait in huge lines :)
(no subject)
I really do enjoy getting to try out the indie games and talking with the developers. And yes! Short lines! :)
(no subject)
Clearly I should IM you more often (I'm usually invisible) and talk about these things with you. I would enjoy breaking your games and watching you fix them, honestly.
I am deeply, deeply jealous of your LARP group. I've met some original LARP groups, most of whom I will not discuss in a public setting in case they stumble across those posts. Actually, I won't discuss most of my games in a public setting for that same reason, which probably gives the impression I'm less of a nerdy gamer geek than I really am. (Or not, really.)
I love rolling dice! This would be why I have a carefully matched group of five or six sets of game dice, all in a similar color scheme, and with a matching dice bag. I'm that gamer.
roll20.net: I should really check it out and just play with uploading a campaign to it. Hrm.