A fun list of five memorable events in MMORPG history. I don’t know why it’s so fascinating to me, but I just love stories of players and events in MMORPGs heading off in crazy directions the game creators never anticipated.
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Here’s a real blast from the past: the Dungeon Craft project, which aims to perfectly emulate the SSI “Gold Box” D&D games of the late 80s/early 90s. Judging by the screenshots, the graphics look a bit sharper but in general the look and feel is straight out of the original games.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s a cool project, and I always love to see people celebrating the great games of yesteryear. Many of those games are still as fun today as they were back then, despite outdated graphics. But I have to ask: are there really that many people interested in replaying the Gold Box games?
They were great RPGs back in the day—I spent a lot of time playing Pool of Radiance and Secret of the Silver Blades (and who could forget Curse of the Azure Bonds, with the memorably impractical chainmail armor depicted on its box cover?). But thinking back about those games, I’m really hard pressed to think of a way in which they were not completely surpassed, gameplay-wise, by later RPGs like Baldur’s Gate.
I recall the time last year that I sat down to replay, for the first time in well over a decade, the original Final Fantasy on the NES. That was my favorite game for the old Nintendo system and ever since encountering it in high school, I’ve kept it carefully placed on the pedestal of nostalgia as one of the greatest RPGs ever designed. But when I tried replaying it recently, I could scarcely go for five minutes before being overwhelmed by the tedium—endless, repetitive combats, over and over and over, just while traveling from one city to another. Somehow that was an acceptable part of the gaming experience when I was a kid, but these days… not so much. Revisiting classic games is most fun, I think, when the original game has never been built upon by succeeding generations of games—games in unusual genres or styles that were never replicated. But when a genre has been continually tweaked, evolved, and improved over the course of years, it’s sometimes rather painful to go back and try playing through the earliest iterations, no matter how nostalgic it feels.
That’s how I feel about the thought of reliving the SSI Gold Box games. They were a lot of fun back in the day. But would I want to sit down and replay an exact, unimproved recreation of one of them today? What do they have to offer that their grandchildren Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights can’t handily beat?
But hey, obviously somebody enjoys this, enough that they’re using Dungeon Craft to design their own Gold Box-style dungeon crawls. More power to them. (And I enjoyed Devil Whiskey, a modern recreation of the old Bard’s Tale games, so I’m not really one to complain.) Game on, then, wherever nostalgia may take you.
by I’ve been in a big-time Star Trek mood lately. I’ve discovered that an episode of Deep Space 9 is the perfect length to watch while feeding The Littlest Gamer at 4am in the morning, and thus have been progressing quickly through the series—I’m partway through season 4, and have recently upgraded my rating of the show from Not Bad to Pretty Awesome.
To complement my DS9 viewing, I’ve also been catching up on The Jefferies Tube podcast, which I neglected (along with all my other blog reading and podcast listening) during the Birth of The Littlest Gamer and the Flood of Family that followed. One of the recent podcast episodes focused on Star Trek RPGs, and I can’t resist adding some of my own thoughts.
I’ve owned each of the three Star Trek RPGs discussed in the podcast. (Well, almost: I owned FASA Trek and Decipher Trek, but the version of Prime Directive I owned was the first edition, not the (much better, going by the podcast’s description) GURPS version.) While I was not overly fond of Prime Directive, I like both the FASA and Decipher games—although I’ve played them a grand total of twice and once, respectively.
I like Star Trek. But despite enjoying the setting and finding the games themselves fairly interesting, I have never felt a strong desire to roleplay in the Star Trek universe. Judging by the fact that almost none of the numerous game publishers to acquire the Star Trek license has managed to keep the game alive for more than a few years, I suspect I’m not the only one who finds Trek a difficult gaming prospect. Why is this?
The podcast points out some of the big reasons that Trek is a tough setting to game in—it’s a setting where your character’s rank in Starfleet (or the equivalent alien organization) leads to the same difficulties that military-based games run into: somebody’s character is going to end up being the captain, and somebody else is going to have to play the ship’s counselor (or another sideline role). One of those is significantly more appealing to most gamers than the other. And the podcast notes that the massive amount of Star Trek canon material makes it hard for even the nerdiest gamemaster to run a game that can’t be sabotaged by a particularly knowledgeable Trekkie.
For me, the big problem is the very strict narrative structure that defines the Star Trek stories we love to watch on TV. In a typical Star Trek episode, the demands of the storyline define everything else about the show—the technology available to the characters, the outcomes of battles, who gets killed and who doesn’t, even the means by which the heroes eventually win in the end—it’s all tightly scripted to make sure the story works out in time (and usually with a nice moral lesson to boot). The high level of technology involved makes this especially important: in a Star Trek game, if Romulan Guard A gets lucky with a phaser shot in battle, a hero dies and the story comes to a screeching halt. In the TV show, by contrast, nobody dies unless it’s integral to the storyline. The heroes in a Star Trek TV episode often have their normal tools and skill rendered useless by narrative fiat (something that would infuriate most RPG players) to prepare the way for a clever technobabble solution at the very end, in just the nick of time. (And how to simulate that staple of Star Trek, the last-minute “I could try rerouting power through the polarized chronoton pulsator, which might give us just enough energy to return us to our own dimension!” solution?) That all makes for fun stories, but it’s hard to model in an RPG game, where players expect more freedom of activity and dislike any hint that the the gamemaster is manipulating everything to force them along a particular narrative channel.
I imagine this problem is not a complete game-killer, as plenty of people enjoy gaming in the Star Trek universe. But it bugs me enough that I’ve never tried to run a full Star Trek RPG campaign. I suspect that this might be the sort of situation that could be handled by certain indie roleplaying games that grant extra narrative power to the players and which are more like mutual storytelling sessions than traditional roleplaying games. But I’m an old-school dungeon-crawl gamer, and on top of that, I don’t think my wife would really want me heading off down yet another money-draining branch of this hobby.
So maybe Star Trek gaming just isn’t for me… although you can be sure that won’t stop me from plunking down my hard-earned cash for the next gorgeously-illustrated Star Trek roleplaying game that comes along. I love this hobby….
by While browsing the local bookstore the other day, I came across the Dungeon Survival Guide, a fairly new D&D release. (Yes, the wife and I periodically trade baby-care duties long enough to let each other take short sanity breaks at the local bookstore. Sooner or later the bookstore owner will realize that our book-buying money is now going entirely into the Baby Formula fund, and he’ll be less pleased to see us walk through the door.)
Where was I? Oh, yes: the Dungeon Survival Guide. Now this is a perfect idea for a D&D book, in my mind: a coffee-table style retrospective on 30+ years of great D&D dungeons. There are so many classic dungeons and modules in D&D’s history that you could easily fill a full-size book with lovingly nostalgic memories of them.
Unfortunately the actual Dungeon Survival Guide as published doesn’t seem to be quite what I would have hoped for it. But the idea is so fun, I just can’t let it go. Here’s what I would’ve done with this book had I been in charge of writing/editing it:
The last item is the most important—as much fun as it would be to read accounts from the dungeon creators and players, what I’d really want to see is the specific encounters and dungeon elements that separated these classic dungeons from the hundreds of non-classics. I suppose what I’m describing is closer to a “D&D greatest hits compendium,” with a bit of flavor commentary on the side. Surely there are enough noteworthy dungeon elements from D&D’s long and colored history to make one heck of a useful grab-bag book for DMs.
Maybe the Dungeon Survival Guide does some or all of those things. I don’t know because the money I might’ve spent on it went into this week’s supply of Pampers. But if not, maybe somebody else will come along one day and make the D&D Greatest Hits book that I’m looking for.
by I hate to do another “Wow, it sure has been a long time since I last posted!” post, but, well, it sure has been a long time since I last posted. What have I been up to over the last few months? The last several months have not been entirely devoid of gaming, but the bulk of my attention has gone into the care and feeding of this little 1HD creature:
Baby Gamer is shown here receiving the priceless gift of her first D&D rulebook. Unfortunately she responded to this gift by squirming around and sticking out her tongue—perhaps she inherited her father’s Rolemaster genes, or perhaps she’s just holding out for 4th edition. Either way, as soon as I can buy a set of giant-sized dice that she can’t easily ingest, we’ll have her rolling up a character.
That’s the long-term plan, at least. For the time being I’d be happy if she would just sleep for more than a few hours straight. Mommy and daddy are running dangerously low on Endurance points.
by If you grew up in southern California, you are painfully familiar with this series of television ads:
How many times–thousands, tens of thousands surely–were we subjected to these used-car-lot ads? Each ad was introduced with a frenzied cry of “It’s Cal Worthington and his dog Spot!”, followed by low-budget footage of somebody (presumbly Cal himself) awkwardly cavorting with a zoo animal that was never actually a dog. And the music that accompanied it… decades later, every word is still seared into my brain.
Oddly, these commercials always seemed to air at really inappropriate timeslots, such as during Thundercats and Duck Tales. I don’t know about most kids, but I certainly did not have any used-car purchasing power at that age. Cal Worthington at least provided me with my first lesson in marketing strategy: I quite clearly recall asking my dad once why somebody would create advertisements that seemed designed only to annoy and repel potential customers. Dad’s answer was “Well, you remember his name, don’t you?”
Oh, how I remember.
by The Jefferies Tube podcast has a great new episode reflecting on the Star Trek games and goodies at Origins 2007. Among other things, he talks about the Star Fleet Universe, the “alternate universe” Star Trek created by the Amarillo Design Bureau. Good stuff; give it a listen!
by Well, I’m back from the Origins Convention. I had a great time. I’m hoping to talk in detail about the different games I played as time allows this month. But here’s a quick rundown of the games I played at this year’s convention:
I can honestly say that I enjoyed them all–in fact, this was the first game convention I’ve attended (admittedly, I’ve not attended many) where none of the games or events I attended were duds. It helped greatly that I attended with a friend from my grad school days, one I’d not seen in several years.
It’s taken me about a week to recover from the gaming overdose I experienced over four days at Origins. But I’m already itching to get some gaming in this summer. So many games, so little time!
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What’s the first thing you notice about this image, from an upcoming game called Star Wars: The Force Unleashed?
The issue here is, of course, why sci-fi females seem to wear such impractical armor. And that’s a good question to ask. But I’d say that the most striking thing about this image is not the Star Wars equivalent of the chainmail bikini that our Jedi friend here is wearing. The real question was noted by this Metafilter commentor: are those some kind of nightstick lightsabers?
Allow me to quote liberally from his comment:
People, this needs to stop.
Back in Ye Olde Days, people did not sit around nailing swords to just about everything and calling them weapons. […]
Thus how it should be with lightsabers. Yeah, I know every saber is an expression of its user, but more and more these days that expression is “I am a dolt more impressed by flash than keeping to tried and true rules.” There are still a host of sword varieties out there that could be lightsaberified, from slightly curved katanas to monstrous zweihanders. Let’s see some more of those before we even hear the whirling whine of lightchucks, smell the ozone-laden tang of the lightmace, or shield our eyes from the horrible glare of the “I just duct-taped 40 lightsabers to my body” lightgrizzlybear encounter suit. A sword is fine. It’s all you really need. It’s a classic for a reason. Everything else is needless flash.
Well, except for the lightscythe that my alter-ego Darth Deathilicious has. That’s totally justified in her character history
How right you are, brother. (How do you use lightsaber nightsticks without chopping off your own arms?) In the original Star Wars trilogy, everybody seems quite content with the normal, longsword-style lightsaber. And that was really cool. But in the prequel trilogy, you can’t help but notice a weird sort of lightsaber arms race: first there’s Darth Maul’s dual-bladed lightsaber quarterstaff, then Anakin dual-wielding lightsabers, and Count Dooku dual-wielding stylish, curved-handled lightsabers. And then General Grievous wielding like forty million lightsabers at once. It’s all kinda cool… but there’s just something classier about those old-fashioned, ordinary lightsabers. This is where it’s at, my friends:
But I do like the mental image of Darth Deathilicious and her lightscythe. She sounds like a worthy companion to my own alter-ego, Darth Darkreaver Souldoom (fifty times more powerful than Mace Windu, and beloved by all the ladies; so awesome that he bucks the standard Darth naming scheme), who wields all of the lightsaber types mentioned above, but he also throws lightsaber shurikens.
I sure picked a bad day to stop writing Star Wars fanfiction.
by I’m still knee-deep in the Month of Weddings and Vacations, so not much gaming is going on beyond the occasional window of World of Warcraft. Writing on my WoAdWriMo adventure is coming along, albeit more slowly than I had hoped. It turns out actually writing an adventure that can be used by others–as opposed to just jotting some plot notes for myself down on a page and running a game on the fly–is not nearly as easy as I’d thought! Nevertheless, it’s been a fun writing challenge thus far.
At any rate, I’ll leave you with a NYT piece on Chinese gold farmers. Yeah, the gold-farmer situation has been covered pretty heavily already, but the article has some interesting angles I’d not yet seen before.
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