Pen and Paper Birthday Adventures

My birthday is coming up in a few days and, to celebrate the big four zero, a few friends came over to play games. We started off with some League of Legends, in which the twenty-one year old in the group promptly crushed us senior gamers, and then transitioned to the cooperative game Torchlight II. Both of these endeavors were a ton of laughs and good times.

At the beginning of our get together, we spent a little time ogling the pictures for the next Everquest... er... Everquest Next. (https://www.everquestnext.com/)

After daydreams of old EQ raids, we started playing some LoL. I had never actually played a 1v1 against any of my friends in League of Legends, despite having played it countless hours and owning all of the champions. I knew that I would get crushed and that outcome was not a surprise, but still a great and fun experience.

Torchlight II is so fast paced and frantic that it is tough to really absorb the storyline in a multiplayer setting. You grab quests in World of Warcraft-esque click-accept-as-fast-as-you-can fashion and then continue on hacking and slashing. The game is attractive looking and it was just entertaining to spend time with friends, but I think that as a game, it wasn't very immersive in this format. We moved at breakneck speed and there wasn't time for reading quest text or even really making detailed and informed decisions about which skills might be best. Just keep pushing and clicking. We would have had an equal amount of fun playing Monopoly.

However, after about seven hours of digital gaming, my good friends indulged me in a little old fashion pen and paper gaming. In anticipation of this get together, I had invested about three hundred dollars in all of the latest core Dungeons and Dragons books, dice, and tools. A very expensive investment for one night of fun with little chance of using those books ever again (if my purchase of the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons books is any evidence. I think we played one time.) Forget the money, though. It was a blast.

I suspect that if you were trying to play on a budget, you could get away with buying the Player's Handbook, the Monster Manual, and then getting a one month subscription to the D&D online site that lets you build characters. (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Tool.aspx?x=dnd/4new/tool/characterbuilder) This tool, though a little buggy, is totally worth the ten bucks. Hell, if you really know the rules, this is the one and only thing you need to play in many situations -- well besides either dice or an app for your phone/computer that acts like dice.) Having the official Monster Manual is not essential, but I would definitely recommend it. If you don't really know the rules, you probably should have the Player's Handbook handy.

I spent roughy twelve hours rolling up characters this week in preparation for the get together. Why so much? Well, I hadn't played in ages, and I know from experience that it normally takes a long time to roll up characters by hand. So, I wanted to make sure that we had a bunch of pre-built characters ready to go before starting to play.

How many times have you and your friends gotten together to play D&D and then spent the next 6 hours creating characters on that first night, without killing a single kobold?

As this was likely the only time I'd play in the next decade, I wasn't going to let the entire evening be about rolling new characters. So, I made a slew of choices for my friends to pick from. Once I got good with the character builder tool, I was able to go a little faster. Still, as I wasn't familiar with the fourth edition classes, races, or any details of them there was a lot of reading to do to make every decision. You could have the character builder generate decent characters for you, but I really wanted that handcrafted feel.

Because I was perfectly aware that this was not an ongoing campaign, I decided that all loot and experience would be accelerated and that we'd level up after each major milestone of the night -- about once every two to three hours. We'd go back into the fancy online character builder, level up, have new loot assigned and equipped, and then print up brand new character sheets. Yes, we went through a fair amount of paper. Had we thought about it more carefully, it might have been easier to distribute PDF copies of the characters after each level up. However, it is so nice to have real paper sheets to write on during combat, encounters, and to take notes on about the adventure. By the end of the night we were printing two pages per sheet in landscape mode, just to save ink and make the stack of used paper smaller.

On the whole, I think this accelerated advancement was a good choice. It kept the game interesting and allowed players to continually do something they like to do: develop and improve their characters in dramatic fashions. We were leveling up and roughly the same rate you might in World of Warcraft, and for this occasion, I think it was perfect.  Even if this was going to be an ongoing campaign, I think I would still choose to advance the characters faster than traditional -- and if we reached some pinnacle of power, then simply start new characters and a new story.

In general, the latest edition of Dungeons and Dragons is better than older versions. There were a few gripes that I had. The indexing was horrible. If you wanted to know about a rule that you were certain you saw five minutes ago... good luck. Between the table of contents and the index, you might have to dig through three to five books and still not find it. It was easier to do a Google search about the rule. On the plus side, most of the new rules are much simpler and once you got the hang of it, you didn't need to consult tons of ridiculous charts and tables to do things. It was a more streamlined process than the D&D of yore. I won't say that the Dungeon Master's guide was worthless, because that would be mean, but really, if you've been a DM at any point in the last thirty years, you probably don't need to see it. They actually have two Dungeon Master's guides now. Complete waste of money in my opinion. They seem more like feeble attempts to pick gamer's pockets than to actually provide real value.

The new Monster Manual was, in many ways, superior to older versions. It gave tips on encounter groups and offered encounters by level that let me put together many impromptu ambushes. It lacked the detailed charts by terrain types and such that you might have found in the old Dungeon Master's guides from back in the day, but it was still functional and contained a lot of my old favorite monsters. For the new DM, it might be a little overwhelming to find monsters appropriate to the climate, geography, and setting that your adventurers were in. As an old hand, I wasn't hindered. I do think this was an oversight on the part of Wizards of the Coast.

We played until sunrise -- roughly twelve hours of hacking, slashing, and falling into pits that were completely avoidable. Laughing and giggling like teenage boys. The time was definitely well spent. Now I itch to play again, knowing how unlikely that is.

The most expensive game I've ever played (other than EQ)

I can't even recall how many EverQuest expansions I've purchased. I lost track somewhere around Omens of War, but I've paid full price for most of them and then when I four-boxed, I had to purchase new copies. Hands down, I've spend more money on EverQuest than any other game. With the years of monthly subscription and in-game purchases of XP potions, I'm going to guess conservatively at over $1000.

However, I have a new runner-up. As I mentioned recently, I purchased copies of Torchlight II for my two boys, but the router kept crashing. Since the router worked for every other game we've played (and between the three of us, we have play a fair number of games), I was upset.  I ensured the firmware was up-to-date and checked the settings, but the best I could do was get two players in a group for ten minutes before the router crashed. If I tried to join their game, it would crash instantly.

Since my boys really wanted to play together, and I was planning on playing with them once I finished my manuscript, I bought a replacement router--the same near top-of-the-line $180 router (an Apple Airport Extreme) I had previously. (Why the same brand? Because it had always worked flawlessly in the past and it had the nice feature where I could transfer settings effortlessly. Hindsight being what it is, I should have known I was making a mistake.) Well, that didn't fix the situation for my boys and they were unable to play the game over the Internet. I was empathetic, but also busy trying to finish revisions on my story, so I didn't have enough time to really dedicate myself to solving the problem.

So, this weekend rolls around and my manuscript is at the editor leaving me with far more time than I've had since August 1st when I buckled down to finish that novel. I have plenty of work to do around marketing and distribution for my book, but I wanted to take a little time off and play games with my kids. Determined to solve the networking issue without resorting to Tunngle, I pulled out old routers from the cabinet where all discarded and extra computer parts go, waiting for that glorious day that they can be reused.  I don't think any of those spare parts ever get reused, but this was their chance. Pushing aside SIMM chips, I started with a 90s-style single-purpose 10/100mb switch, figuring that it would at least allow local play. By the time, I walked upstairs, I realized the flaw in my plan: Of the three computers only two actually had ethernet ports--the other one was wi-fi only. 

Irritated, but not to be deterred, I dug further into my cabinet of discarded toys, only to come up with a cable bridge and two ethernet-only routers. I must have recycled or given away past wi-fi routers, or my wife has been slowly and clandestinely clearing out the cabinet like Tim Robbins. 

Already $240+tax into the game (one router and three copies), I decided to buy a new router. So, I put another $180+ dollars down. The three of us played flawlessly for over an hour before the Major League Gaming Starcraft II matches sucked in my older son. Not that I mind. I love watching MLG.

I'm not sure if there is a moral to this $420+tax story. Maybe, don't buy the same router you already own if it didn't work the first time. Or maybe, put a lock on your computer-parts cabinet. However, now we should be able to get in some good, quality family time beating up monsters in Torchlight II. It was fun, even on the normal difficulty setting to just march around and slaughter hordes of monsters. With the blood splatters turned off, it reminded me of the original Diablo more than Diablo III.

Networking woes of Torchlight II

My two sons have been playing Torchlight II (with the blood splats turned off) and are having a great time with the solo game. They've been begging to group up and play together, but the game's out-of-the-box multiplayer capabilities are useless. The first 4 times I tried to set them up for internet play our router crashed. I've never had that happen before with any other game, so I didn't realize what was happening initially.

Now, I'm going to have to dig out an old router and set up a lan game for them on the internal network that I can safely disable all the security on.

Despite the game's high entertainment value, I feel like the online play aspect was completely neglected. I believe the game uses UPnP exclusively for multiplayer without any other options for route traversal. I haven't researched the issue very long, but frankly, I expect modern games to work out of the box.

I give Torchlight II five stars for single player fun and zero stars for multiplayer. Once I have my book safely out the door, I plan to spend some quality time with my boys playing the game, but I really hope that we come up with a better multiplayer solution than hooking up to an old router.

City of Heroes, Guild Wars 2, Torchlight 2, and Pandas

So, I'm behind the times. I read today that City of Heroes is going away. At first I felt saddened by the news and then began examining why I hadn't logged in in ages, even though they went free to play some time ago. I bought the game to play with my friends and it initially had seized my imagination.

What I think eventually turned me away from the game were a few factors. First, they attempted to build group roles into characters rather than let people explore completely new sets of abilities and finding a way to work together. I think this is one of the more recent flaws with other games like World of Warcraft. Early games like Everquest didn't so much set out with the goals of having a character be a tank or healer or whichever. The characters were designed around an idea. Some point of imagination and the roles sprung up around those ideas. Part of the fun and enjoyment of those early MMOs was discovering the characters, getting caught up in their uniqueness and flaws and then making them work. Sure, the games could be horrifically unbalanced at times, but it wasn't about balance. It was about having our imaginations run wild. To have possibilities and to sometimes abuse them a little.

I have played a little Guild Wars 2 lately. Very little, since I'm spending nearly all of my "free" time  working on the sequel to Tritium Gambit. Still, a guy has to play a little, right? Unfortunately, the game might be pretty, but it runs far too slow on my laptop to be enjoyable. The only reason I haven't uninstalled it is because even if eight-frames-per-second is agonizing, at least I get to spend time talking to a friend on Skype. Should I get a new computer? Probably. First, I need to sell a whole crap load more books.

Related to Guild Wars 2 being a complete turd on my machine, a friend of mine pointed out how much fun Torchlight II has been for him. He and I had spent quite a few hours playing Diablo III and that was enough to get me to install the game. I haven't had time to play it yet, but the first hour or so that I experimented with it were excellent. I'd highly recommend to folks to at least download the free demo from Steam. The game was built on the Ogre rendering engine, which I think is a fantastic accomplishment. Runic has said they will release a Mac version of the game eventually and I'll be first in line to purchase it.

I still play World of Warcraft weekly with my dad and two sons. My boys are loving the Pandarians. I think this really breathes new life into the game for them. Personally, it didn't really stir enough emotion in me to want to commit any extra time to the game, but I do appreciate that it gives my kids new material to explore and enjoy. From what I can tell, the starting quests aren't as painful as the ones for the Worgen or Death Knights. Yes, yes. You did the starting quests for both the Worgen and the Death Knights in less than two hours. However, you aren't six-years-old, like my youngest, and you didn't need to have your (very patient) dad read all of the quests forty-billion times whenever you decided to delete your character and start over. Why would anybody delete their character and start over? Apparently, because that's what you do when you are six-years-old.