Author: Ravious

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[GW2] A Megaserver Divided

The megaserver, which is kind of like an underflow map in Guild Wars 2, has been rolled out across the game. I feel like I’ve had enough time with it to take a shot at talking about it, and so does Mrs. Ravious, whose opinion I will convey. We don’t agree.

I like it. With world boss runs and messing around with Orr, things are lively. It feels really fresh, and is hopping just like those first days of a new Living World update. It’s amazing how adding population to that same, old content can really change the feeling of it.  Continue reading [GW2] A Megaserver Divided

[RR] Two GM-Free Indies – A Hasty Review of Both

It was the worst of times. I had poured my heart and soul into starting a campaign for my group, and no one seemed invested. We had some fantastic times, but for whatever reason everybody seemed happy to just take from the GM. Perhaps it is just my current group. Perhaps it was the game choice. Perhaps it was me. Either way the table was not an imaginative crucible I had wanted it to be.

I started poking around and came upon two new GM-free games built around crucibles of imagination. Both games are virtual one shots. The first was Our Last Best Hope a game where the players go on an adventure to save mankind from a mankind-ending threat. The second was Microscope, which is a world-building game. I bought Our Last Best Hope in the latest Bundle of Holding, which has quit a few great indie games in their “humble” bundle. Continue reading [RR] Two GM-Free Indies – A Hasty Review of Both

[GW2] That Feature Pack

The household sounds were filled with sounds of enlightenment and confusion as Mrs. Ravious and I dug in to the Guild Wars 2 Feature Pack. Jeromai has the right of it. This feature pack shook things up. Hopefully all for the better, but time will have to tell on a lot of it. As Zubon warned us, most of our night was re-learning our characters.

Our first stop was the wardrobe. We ran through our bank and gear to fill our sticker book of skins, and I gained back about two dozen inventory slots. It was confusing at first with how some skins were working. The equipment was easier to understand because it remained an item even when the copy of the skin went into the wardrobe. Continue reading [GW2] That Feature Pack

[RR] Skills as Story

In the ramshackle of numbers we call a character sheet there is usually a place for skills. Skills are usually learned or honed abilities or knowledges. A bootlegger might have some really good driving skills. A mediator will have something like diplomacy. Of course, they are virtually worthless without the gamemaster (GM) presenting a challenge. There are many ways to incorporate a skill in to the story, and I am going to look at a few tools a GM can use to enliven a game with skills.

Skill Checks

Climbing checks have become legendary in my gaming group. We were in some sort of badlands, and we needed to climb some cliff faces. The problem was that none of us were great climbers, or if we had some inkling the dice hated us.

‘Climb check.’ Continue reading [RR] Skills as Story

[GW2] Wuv Downtime

I find it interesting to see what happens with the Ravious household when Guild Wars 2 is not pumping out updates every two weeks. This happened earlier during the winter holiday break, and now it is happening again as we wait one more week for the feature patch update (4/15).

First, I’m back to doing Tequatl. I have fun with that “raid”. I like how TTS does it. Zubon muses on the new event timetable that will be coming in a week. I know I am line generally with the comments in his post. With Tequatl, I’ve been on a timetable for quite a long time. Some nights Mrs. Ravious and I do world bosses, and we’ve headed to fan-made websites that use the Guild Wars 2 API to tell us where to head. For me the timetable is just incorporating something that I (and many others) have taken for granted anyway. Continue reading [GW2] Wuv Downtime

[RR] PDF Roleplaying

It seems like only a few years ago when Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition (D&D 3e) came out. I remember how almost everybody in our gaming group had the Player’s Handbook. A few of us had the Gamemaster’s Guide, and there was one or two Monster Manuals lying around. Now things are incredibly different.

Tabletop roleplaying has gone digital. Our gamemasters (GM’s), including myself, often have a laptop propped up for reference. Players learn the rules with free quickstart versions of the game. Most of us have printouts of abilities and spells, which stem from portions of pdf’s and other digital files. This is the tabletop of this century. Continue reading [RR] PDF Roleplaying

[RR] Scarlet Heroes

I apologize. This week has been a ruddy mess. I wanted to talk about print-on-demand publishing and digital books, but just couldn’t get it together. I kept going off on tangents. Combined with work, barometric headaches, and prepping to start my own campaign… well excuses.

Since I can’t share my grand thoughts, just yet, I will point you to a result of all the good things in tabletop roleplaying games this century: Scarlet Heroes.

Scarlet Heroes started as a Kickstarter where backers immediately received the draft for feedback and the necessary gratification. It then moved to digital / print-on-demand publishing, which is a smart move for any RPG book. And, it rounds out the how-to-do-it-this-century style with a free quickstart.

What is it? It’s a roleplaying game meant to be played with a single player, with or without a GM. It’s an overlay to old school Dungeons and Dragons so you can run that single player through old school modules meant for whole groups. It’s a way to create Dungeons and Dragons style adventures of legend for that single player. Plus it has a nifty setting. Can’t go wrong at least checking out the quickstart.

–Ravious

[GW2] The Wardrobe

In pre-launch days, the one system I disliked the most in Guild Wars 2-to-be was the transmutation system. Coming from Lord of the Rings Online, with its excellent wardrobe system, the design of the Guild Wars 2 transmutation stones felt like a step backwards in usability and a step forwards in the cash shop arena.

This system, I felt, directly went against the idea of Guild Wars 2 rewards. I felt I the cost of using cool skins, for say a week, was too high. At the base level, I had to overwrite a skin or make a new item. It cost inventory slots, or it cost gold. This is ignoring the transmutation stone to begin with.

Thankfully ArenaNet is finally creating a full wardrobe system. Continue reading [GW2] The Wardrobe

Magicite: A Good Walk Ruined

I’ve been on a roll with Steam early access games, but I still stick to my rule of thumb: read the discussion before buying. Magicite seemed good and fun. It is a rogue-like sidescroller with crafting and leveling aspects similar to Starbound or Terraria. It also has a bit of between-death progression I loved in Rogue Legacy. As a hint to the future, one achievement to unlock a race demands you beat the game in an hour. So far I am liking all the design on paper. So I buy it.

The game is in Early Access, but it is apparent right away that more love needs to go to crafting. It’s a nice system where you shift+click two things to combine them. Two sticks become an axe handle. Add another stick to an axe handle and it becomes a pick handle. The problem comes in two parts. The first is that this all occurs in the inventory, and it requires separate stacks of items. If I wanted to combine two sticks, I had to separate one stick from my stack of sticks. It is possible I was just doing it wrong. Continue reading Magicite: A Good Walk Ruined

[RR] Memorable Props

The best campaign I ever ran was using FATE, which is a system able to wrangle our group towards more roleplaying. One of the reasons it was so good, in my opinion as the GM of that show, was that each NPC was memorable. Okay, maybe not every single NPC that I threw under the bus (or that drove it), but I worked hard to make each situation memorable.

Coloring encounters will result in a stronger game as the table unifies in the vision of the encounter. Everybody is going to have some picture in their mind of what is going on, but it is so easy to gloss over the details and turn the encounter into a stark distillation. Players will also have different levels of imagination and stock in the game. It is part of the GM’s job to make sure encounters can be colorful.  Continue reading [RR] Memorable Props