Why Any DM Not Using Google+ Groups is a Moron

No snark, no transvestite gamer-guy pictures. Not this time. Why? I know everybody loves that stuff. But not tonight. (Nope. No transvestites tonight. Except yours truly, but that's another story, and it was for a good cause.)

I just want to put out a quick bunch of links for all you die-hard geeks, the ones so indelibly marked with the geek-bug that you not only play tabletop RPG's, you make tabletop RPG's: you draw the maps and stat-out the NPC's. Yeah...you, the Dungeon Master, the Game Master, the Storyteller, whatever monicker you pick, you're that guy. Or, rather, this poor bastard:


"You Cheeto-fingered morons, that princess won't save herself."

So you're working on your story, laying out intricate plots and story hooks and detailed NPC's, knowing all the time that your players will only remember "that one time when we killed all those dudes and I got that badass sword from the old guy". It's a thankless job, hours and hours of prep work that ends in a feeling of coitus interruptus when your players totally ignore your OBVIOUS hooks and decide to go left instead of right.

Don't worry, brothers and sisters. I feel your pain. The cavalry is here:

• Maps: Did you ever waste an afternoon with a sheet of graph paper, a sharp #2 pencil, and the old 1st edition Monster Manual? Yeah, me too. I love maps. I love drawing maps. I want to draw badass maps. So I asked the wise gurus on Google+ to help. Map-Making in Games is a Google+ group full of people whose talent is only matched by their willingess to help stupid people like me. I posted a desperate plea for help, and had a page full of links within minutes. Literally minutes. If these folks can't help you, they'll quickly point you toward those who can.

• Worlds: Okay, you have your map, thanks to the badasses linked above. But what's a map if you can't provide any details. Your players want to know things like:

What's the climate like? History? Who's the king? What kind of money do they use? How much does a good hooker cost? How much does a bad hooker cost? Can I trade my +9 Holy Avenger sword for a good hooker?

 These are important questions that your players will probably want to have answered. Well, again, Google+ is the place to be:  World Building Group  This is a crowd who knows how to make shit up. Be it fiction, gaming, or just mental aerobics, damned near every post and link on this group is chock-full of hooks to get your creative gears turning.

Tordek, our quest is to find a hooker willing to service your ugly ass.
(please don't sue me, WotC)

• Last, a shameless plug for my favorite game system and favorite Google Group. I said in a recent post that Savage Worlds has ruined me on gaming, period. Lucky for me, there is a group on Google+ who feels the same way: Savage Worlds on Google Groups.

• Did I say last? No such luck, foolios. The only real way to end this list is with the group that keeps their priorities straight. If you don't spend all your money on gaming crap, that leaves more money for liquor and dwarven hookers. So, for all you drunken Dwarfophiles out there, this group is here to help:  Gaming on the Cheap. This is where you go to get the heads-up on free PDF's, good old rulesets that have gone the OGL route, tips and tricks for terrain...you name it. Be a cheap bastard and still run a kick-ass game.

Okay, dinner's ready and a cold Shiner Bock is sweating a nice condensation ring on my lame hand-drawn map, so I guess it's time to roll. Check out the links, make up cool shit, and try to not hate your players...unless your players are the Honey Boo-Boo family. Then hate 'em all you want.

Can't We All Get Along in 2013? (Don't taze me, bro...I'm just the messenger.)

I like RPG's. I like both CRUNCH and fluff and I like graph paper and pencils. I like goblins, and I like Wayne Reynolds. I won't go so far as to say that RPG's are my only diversion (there's always Xbox, and...did I mention Xbox?), but it's what I enjoy doing most.  There's only one small hangup with this otherwise blissful situation: I don't always like RPG people. And...it pains me to admit, I don't always like Xbox people, either. Or cosplayers.
Okay, I'll admit it: I'm a geek who often doesn't like other geeks. I get hives thinking about interacting with them, with people I should adore as my own chosen ones, people who are definitely US rather than THEM.
I'm not talking about the stereotype of Gamer Guy:


Credit: G4TV (for giving me oddly arousing nightmares)

Yeah, his type is present in both video gaming and tabletop gaming. Yes, we do have our share of obnoxious people in gaming: but take your ass out to a sports bar on Monday night to watch a ball game...the NFL fanbase has waaaaay more obnoxious, socially inept people than the RPG community could ever be blamed for. No, I'm not talking about just obnoxiosity quotient...I'm talking about what it means to be a geek.
To me, when you are a geek, you are totally into something; thus the verb geekin'. It's a state where you want to know details. Everybody knows Imperial Stormtroopers wear white armor; but the true geek knows why they don't wear standard Republic Commando armor, and why they aren't all clones of Jango Fett. The true geek can name you every Doctor Who, and when they played the iconic Doctor. The true geek not only likes Half Life 2, but she can rattle off Gabe Newell's curricula vitae. To me, being a geek is about a willingness to immerse yourself.
That's what I love about being a geek. That's what marks me as a proud member of the clan. But that's also what annoys me about my brethren and sistren:

Geek Rule #1

No detail is so small, nor any point so trivial, that we're not willing to form a seemingly random opinion about it...and argue that position for-fucking-ever.

 

I get it. I swear, I get it, I understand passion, and loving what you love so much that you're willing to defend it. Being a geek, by my above definition, puts you outside the mainstream: you are willing to delve into some subject way beyond the 'norm'. I get the defensiveness that comes with putting yourself out there on the lunatic fringe. But for Chrissakes, let's quit arguing about stupid stuff:

• D&D is stupid, and anyone who plays it sucks.
• 4th edition D&D is stupid (and evil), and anyone who plays it sucks (and is evil).
• Xbox rules, PS3 sucks, and Wii is retarded.
• PS3 rules, Xbox is full of rabid douchebags.
• Star Wars is awesome, but Star Trek is a bunch of idiots.
• Fantasy RPG's are all a bunch of LARPers, running around in the woods.
 

Please, for the sweet baby Jesus' sake: we're all in this together. Star Wars, Star Trek, Xbox, PS3, D&D and Savage Worlds and Doctor Who and BSG and Pathfinder.

 

We all share some mania for things that most of the world considers trivial.

 

While most of the people I know are out in the woods, hunting deer (and duck, and turkey, and anything else that moves), I'm upstairs playing Halo until 3AM. Hey, guess what? That PS3 guy is playing The Last of Us while his friends are out at Buffalo Wild Wings watching the Cowboys get pummeled (again). And that makes us brothers and sisters. That means we're kin. He's not some enemy.

D&D vs. Pathfinder people...people are still arguing this on message boards across the interwebs. Guess what, kids? To most of the world, both sides of this argument are stupid. Both groups are wasting their time playing trivial imaginary games, while they could be sitting on the couch watching Here Comes Honey Booboo like the rest of America. So quit arguing. The girl who really likes D&D 4th edition? Yeah, I hope one day she'll see the light and move on to Savage Worlds. But, until then? Welcome to the family, sister.

 

We're making progress, people. I promise. I'm 43 years old...I remember when science fiction, video games and Dungeons & Dragons got you beat up on a regular basis, when the opposite sex treated a d20 like it was an open, oozing leprosy sore. Thank you, Bill Gates, Wil Wheaton and The Big Bang Theory for making our passions at least a little more palatable to the rest of the world. And one day, I just know it, one day...we will overcome. The day will come when everyone in the world will know the name Malcom Reynolds, and nobody will remember what a Honey BooBoo even is.

But until then, quit arguing about stupid shit, and make 2013 a banner year for all of us.



Back to the Table Top, Fools.

Alright, I've been on an Xbox binge. Like I said previously, I loaded up on cheap games, and I spend all my free time playing these awesome cheap games. But all the Xboxery has been at the expense of my true love, and that's making up shit for table-top RPG games. And 2012 has seen my RPG relationships rocked to their very foundations by some serious adultery.

First some groundwork:
Back in the day, I dated a girl for many months, and she was a mixed bag. She was great when she was okay, but she was a righteous pain in the ass when she wasn't. In hindsight, her main problem is that she was All About Herself.  Then one day, I met another girl, and she was everything the other girl wasn't: she wasn't complicated, she didn't punish me for not reading her mind, and she went out of her way to make me happy. Once I got to know her, I couldn't ever (ever, ever, NEVER) go back to the first girl, even though all my friends assured me that Girl #1 was 'way hotter'. 

Here's where I tie the analogy together in a flash of brilliance:

Old and Ugly

Here's my  Bad Old Girlfriend, the standard of the industry, Dungeons & Dragons (tm). She's hot, sure, and she meets with the approval of the world at large. I can go anywhere, and somebody in the crowd at least has heard of good old D&D. That's been my go-to since 1980...love some Pathfinder, liked some Tunnels & Trolls back in the day, old school GDW Traveler was a junior high obsession...as far as I was concernced, D&D was the apotheosis of gaming.

New and Sweeeeet
 

But then I met my new honey: Savage Worlds. Better yet, let's call it SAVAGE WORLDS. It's the Linux of gaming, it's my kind and sweet new girlfriend of gaming, it's the be-all and end-all as far as I'm concerned. It's open-sourcey, in that the basic core rules are generalized. I don't mean 'generalized' like d20 was, where you had to buy a half-dozen setting specific books to play anything. I'm talking no-joke general, as in "if you have an idea, here is the basic rules framework to help you make a game of it". No joke.
I started reading it. I started buying some of the products (none of which are strictly necessary). And now I'm hooked. Hooked, I tell ya. Like Rush Limbaugh on Oxycontin, there's no looking back.

I ran an on again / off again 4th edition D&D campaign for the wife and kids. Mainly just a test bed for ideas and working out mechanics, but it was fun. Let me restate that: IT WAS FUN. But now I've gotten Savage Worlds stuck in my brain, and I can't go back to D&D. It feels restrictive. It feels burdensome. It feels like I'm wearing women's underwear, with no room for my junk.
It's a bad feeling.

Savage Worlds doesn't demand that I spend $300 bucks with every new edition. Savage Worlds doesn't tell what I can't do. Best of all, Savage Worlds doesn't tell me that she doesn't know if she really loves me, and then leaves me dangling for months, unable to committ but unable to move on with my life.

Sorry, that's called over-extending the analogy. Got stuck in the wheel-ruts of memory lane.

Upshot: Savage Worlds is cheaper than what you're playing now. Savage Worlds likes you for who you are. And Savage Worlds has an active, supportive community that really enjoys sharing ideas and news. Check Google+ for Savage Worlds, or go to Pinnacle's site. Hell, just Google it and be amazed at the love you'll receive from people who love gaming more than they love bitching about which edition is best.

Don't stay in a bitter, codependent relationship with your game. Move on, already. Savage Worlds is waiting for you, with open arms and a big plate of brownies. And beer.

                                                                 


Resolution 2013: Play Cheap (but good) Games

Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I loaded up on titles from the bargain bin at Gamestop, and had horrifying good luck. Now I'm screwed, because I not only bought the holiday glut of Big New Games, but now I have a ton of overlooked and underloved games as well. I need to take a week off of work just to wade through a few of them.
Now I won't presume to tell you what to buy...if you absolutely have to have the latest hot titles, who am I to talk you out of dropping sixty bucks? But I'm here to testify, there are a lot of good games that never got the credit they deserve, and they are all less than twenty bucks these days.

He plays D&D, too.

Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is my dark horse darling ju dour. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm a huge fan of Vin Diesel, and especially his Riddick movies, so I was really worried about even trying this. Movie tie-ins are almost axiomatically shitty, but this poor bastard was languishing in the remaindered rack for only eight bucks, so I figured it was worth a gamble.
Good move, that. The game play is tight, the stealth mechanics are solid, and you by God feel like Riddick when you play this game, sneaking around, dropping down on fools, and generally just kicking ass. Vin Diesel provides the voice talent, and that really adds some gravelly icing to the surprisingly good game-play cake. Sure, it can be over the top, and Riddick's surly baddassery gets a little laughable at times, but those are nitpicking complaints.



Thanks, IGN. I heart your mom.

Some game series are full of hard-core fans, and when you get hard-core fans, you always end up with a black sheep. An outcast. Unloved, just waiting for its chance to shine. So it is with the oft-overlooked Halo title, ODST.  Personally, I like Spartans just as much as the next guy. Or girl. But I've always had a soft spot for the ODST Helljumpers. For the uninitiated, Spartans are surgically enhanced super-soldier, huge badasses in the ultimate kung-fu space death armor. But the ODST are their gritty little brothers, regular guys with bad ass attitudes that take the fight to the enemy without high-tech enhancements. They drop into battle via one-man orbital drop pods, in a blatant rip from Heinlein's Starship Troopers (the awesome book, not the campy movie), and pretty much kick ass like if John Wayne starred in a Quentin Tarantino movie. And Nathan Fillion does voice work for a lead character (and serves as the character model, so it even looks like Mal Reynolds. *sigh*). Halo-roids got all butt-hurt about this one, mainly because there was no Master Chief, and it felt like a Halo 3 DLC pack rather than a stand-alone game. Fair enough. Regardless, it plays well, the story is okay (barring the weird side-story you pick up with comm messages) and you get to kill Covenant with the SMG a lot. One quirk that I truly did hate is the city of New Mombasa, Kenya. The waypoints are remarkably confusing, and you can spend a lot of time wandering around in circles, wondering where your next objective is. Try it in campaign co-op with a friend, it's cheap enough to buy two copies and still be ahead of the game.

Alright, my back hurts and we just opened the champagne (sans Dick Clark, even though he was kind of a creepy lich in his latter days). I want to go out on a limb and find some deep dirt, something most of you probably haven't even heard of: Section 8 Prejudice. It's on Xbox Live for download, cheap. Last I checked, we're talking fifteen bucks. For that price, you get a fun powered armor vs. bad guys game, a lame but playable campaign, a decent competitive mode, and a great horde-style survival mode. Fifteen bucks. Granted, nobody much is playing anymore, but you can fill in with bots. The whole gimmick of the game is this badass powered armor, and you drop in from high-altitude, near-orbit. You pick your drop zone and the animations coming in are wicked cool...then, when you land on/near an enemy and pick 'em off, it's a fine moment indeed. Controlling command posts allows you to build defenses, such as anti-air guns. That pretty much denies the enemy from being able to drop within their radius of fire. Cool strategy. Getting kills gets you points that you can use to air-drop turrets, mech armor, vehicles and other cool stuff. The game really shines with the random objectives that pop up in the middle of a match for big points: protect / kill the HVT, escort / destroy the convoy, recover / defend the junk, or (my favorite) wipe out the whole other team for big points. The 'victim' team has to avoid getting killed for two minutes, while the 'stalker' team tries to wipe them out in that same allotted time. Big fun, cheap price. This is probably the highest value of any of the games I've listed. You get a lot of shit for your fifteen bucks.

Like I said, it's after midnight, so happy New Years, and any of you Mayans out there can kiss my ass. It's 2013, despite three individual doomsday predictions in 2012 alone. Doomsayers be damned, ya'll go have fun with cheap games.

Bargain Bin Lovin'

Good Cheap Nazi-killin'...

Game Stop...damn you, Game Stop. I stopped by to pick up a WiiU game for the kid, and ended up pawing through the marked-down Xbox game bin. Five bucks for Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena? And what the hell is Turning Point: the Fall of Liberty? Who cares, it's only four bucks! I felt like Lindsay Lohan on Dollar Shots Night, determined to load up on everything because it's on sale! By the time I got home, I was loaded down with a bag full of three-to-eight year old games, some popular but aged, some equally aged but utterly obscure. I started off with obscure by popping in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.   It's standard shootie-killy fun, based on an intriguing premise: what if Winston Churchill's accident in 1931 left him dead, rather than just sporting a dashing limp? According to this game, Britain goes down as fast as France, and, before you know it, the Nazis (in my best Aldo Rayne voice, pronounced nazzzeeeez)are dropping troops in the Big Apple, of all places. By God, that idea alone is worth my four bucks.
How does it play? Comparisons first: it uses the Unreal engine, so the look is familiar. Think TimeShift, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Singularity, or any of that era. Yeah, facial animations are creepy and some of the physics get a little wonky, but the engine is more than up to the job of rendering Nazis to shoot. Invisible barriers keep you from going all open-world and exploring nooks and crannies, but you aren't here to explore, are you? Hell no, you're here to defend America from goose-steppin' Nazzzzeees, dammit.
Not a ton of plot to slow things down in this game. Basically, America stays isolationist as the Axis takes over the rest of the world. Dewey defeats Truman, for real this time. By the time 1953 rolls around, the Axis has dominated everything but the contiguous 48. America is happy with its head in the proverbial sand, until...well, here's where the game comes in.
You start right off with no real lead-in: Messerschmitts are bombing New York, and paratroopers are wafting down through Manhattan. You are an ironworker, the proverbial Regular Joe working thirty stories up, and having to navigate the narrow I-beams to get down to ground level. About halfway down, you find some of your first parachuting Nazis, and it all heats up after that. The story mostly consists of joining the thrown-together resistance and killing lots of Nazis. So you're asking, "What's the point? Sounds like the same old." Maybe. Just maybe. But the game only cost me FOUR BUCKS and I got to shoot Nazis in New York, suckers! Yeah, the story is a rail-road that never does any justice to the awesome basic premise, but...did I mention it was only four dollars? Verdict (or, in this case, VERDICKTEN): BUY, but not if it's more than five bucks.