Joel's Scattered Thoughts

I pre-ordered Star Wars The Old Republic and gave it a try. It’s not a game for me.

If you enjoy the Star Wars universe, give this game a try. The NPCs struck me as very much like those in the movies. The scenery seems to match the movies as well. I don’t like the Star Wars characters so this did nothing for me.

This game heard theme-park MMO and decided that there is no need for you to make any decisions. There are dialogue options but they don’t make any practical difference. If you choose to kill an NPC, they disappear from the story. If you don’t choose to kill them, they run away, then they disappear from the story. The voiced and animated NPCs got annoying very quickly. If you’re going to emote at me for 5 minutes, at least have something more than “Kill ten rats” at the end of it.

Game play reminded me of vanilla WoW. The crafting, quests, and UI options felt like the designers played WoW back then and figured they could improve on it. They’ve ignored pretty much everything that’s developed since then. Companions were like stupider, more out of control escort NPCs.

I cancelled my subscription and I doubt I’ll play it again before my free month runs out. I deeply regret spending money on this. If you like Star Wars, give it a shot. I may re-up my subscription for a month in a year or two to see if anything’s changed.

David Morgan-Mar of Irregular Webcomic has a very interesting post on Designing Games. The points that he outlines highlight the difference between older and newer board games. I remember playing Risk with my brother and having him regularly roll sixes while I rolled ones and the frustration of having chance wipe me out. I am so glad that a lot of board games are moving away from the pure chance model while not getting into the pure strategy model. A lot of the rules that he outlines could be used in RPGs and to make a more interesting workplace.

The Vornheim PDF is on sale for $1.35 this week so I picked up a copy of the PDF. It was a lot of fun to read.

This is definitely an old-school, Weird rpg supplement. The whole thing feels like a city you’d find in a Conan story or a place where Leiber’s heroes would hang out. It’s decadent and old and full of thoroughly bizarre features.

Reading through the book made me laugh in a number of spots. It would be fun to work in the list of superstitions to make the world seem more alive.  “In the southeastern district, if a criminal is publicly executed and no-one laughs, everyone present will lose a family
member within the year. (The constabulary therefore goes to great lengths to devise humorous methods of execution.)”

This slim book is full of enough ideas to make any city come alive. It’s definitely worth buying (especially at the sale price).

Image via Wikipedia

I read Robert E. Howard’s Devil in Iron today. It reminded me of what’s interesting about the Weird approach to fantasy. The world feels tremendously rich, old, and bizarre. The logic feels tantalizingly just out of reach and completely unfathomable.

Old-school D&D seems to pull more inspiration from the weird fiction school, while newer editions use a more logical, structured approach to magic. In the older style, no matter how powerful your character gets, you will never match the mighty heroes of old.

The Best Things In Life Are Free – Gnome Stew, the Game Mastering Blog has some good suggestions for free RPGs.It looks as though you can find free versions of most RPG systems (except for 4e).  What’s missing in a lot of cases is the extra descriptive text, the fluff.

I’m particularly interested in reading up on FATE. It looks like an interesting system but I haven’t been able to wrap my head around it yet. Part of the problem is that I have the system as PDF and reading 2 column PDFs on screen is painful. Because of that I still haven’t finished reading through the Dresden Files RPG despite the evocative writing.

I’ve been playing Heroes of Neverwinter for a bit now and I think I’m done with it. The game itself is fun enough but it suffers from some serious limitations.

The biggest problem that I’ve run into is clerics with one low level healing spell at level 6.I’m not sure how they managed that, but it makes for a useless cleric. Since there’s no way to preview the abilities chosen, it’s a crapshoot. I’ve lost easy adventures because the cleric couldn’t heal.

There doesn’t seem to be much point to bringing a fighter or rogue along. Rogues are somewhat useful for the occasional locked chest / door but fighters are largely pointless. Best bet so far seems to be a mix of clerics and wizards depending on the adventure.

I think there’s a decent short tactical game in there but it’s just not appealing enough for me.

Image via Wikipedia

Fear the Boot’s latest episode referred back to a very old episode. Fear the Boot episode 115 provides a very basic audio introduction to Role Playing Games in just over an hour. This is an excellent way to introduce someone to RPGs as a hobby. I wish I’d had these when I formed my current group.

Jaimie and I picked up Rift when it was on sale on Steam last week. We got characters up to 17 and ran Realms of the Fae with two friends of ours.

Rift is clearly derived from World of Warcraft. There are plenty of differences, but it is WoW with differences. If you enjoy playing WoW but want a different story, different graphics, and a somewhat different take on classes, this is the game for you.

One of the things I like best about Rift is that there is a lot of flexibility in the classes. Rift has four roles – tank, healer, DPS, support – and most classes can do at least 3 if not all four. Having multiple specs is easy and you can vary your playstyle quite a bit within any one class.

The graphics are very pretty. Rift is more realistic and less cartoony than WoW.  There is a very clear feel to different zones and events.

The lore is well done. The philosophies of the two factions are so drastically opposed to each other that it’s not surprising that even when faced with the end of the world they are unwilling to unite. The world feels quite deep.

I’ve played rogue and warrior up to about 18. They feel very close to the WoW warrior and rogue, but they have their own twist to them. You could probably build a near-clone of a most WoW classes by choosing the appropriate souls, but there are still twists that make the Rift classes distinct. Despite the flexibility, not all classes and roles are equal, so you definitely want to choose an optimized build for tanking/healing/DPS/support.

The game was moderately unstable on my system with roughly a half-dozen crashes to the desktop over a week.  These were on loading screens, so they didn’t directly affect gameplay.

The bottom line for me is that I’ll probably keep playing Rift as long as the people I’m grouping with are playing it. It’s interesting but not particularly compelling because I’ve seen most of this in WoW. They’ve improved on WoW in a lot of ways, but obviously it doesn’t have the depth of community that WoW does. So far it’s my second favorite MMO.