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Retro: Dark Forces Mac Attack

Lately, I’ve been on quite the Star Wars kick, so I’ve been keen to get back into playing the Jedi Knight games, which started with the original Dark Forces game. I can still remember when this game first came out. Of all the first-person shooters that came out around that time, including Doom, Hexen and Wolfenstein, this is the game that sucked me into shooters.

As I’m Mac-centric now, I loaded up Boxer and imported Dark Forces into it, and proceeded to shoot as many Stormtroopers in the face as I could (see above). I’m making many new Christmas memories, beating the snot out of the Imperials.

Sing along now: We wish you a Merry Christmas, and blaster shots in the faaaaaaaace!

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Tags: PC Games, Play, Retro by Teh Bagder
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Steam Holiday Sale Deals Under $10

Valve have kicked off the Steam Holiday Sale earlier this year than they did last year to capitalize of gifting games to other people. There’s a lot of great deals until January 3rd on games, as well as daily (well 40-hourly really so far) special deals that are majorly discounted. Expect those to change, and some of the more expensive games on Steam to be bought for a steal, particularly if the games have been out for a while.

Here’s a small selection of games that I’ve got that are available cheaply on Steam for under $10:

There are a ton of other great games up right now, so you should go and have a look at what there is there. There are a lot of newer games, heavily discounted, including Batman: Arkham Asylum for $33.49, but I’m more interested in the under $10 price range for games, being Scots and a miser.

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Tags: Deals, PC Games by Teh Bagder
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Star Wars Episode V.I: The Google Wave

I love West End Games’ Star Wars D6 game. It’s always been a firm favorite of mine, and I’ve got many fond memories of playing it with friends during high school. Most of the time I’d run the games, as I prefer to be a GM, but I’d also get a kick out of playing the game, particularly if it was run by my buddy Steve. Now that I’m getting back into roleplaying, I want to recapture how it felt to play those games. I’ve found a gaming group at Ohio State University, and have played a game of D20 Future with a couple of guys there, and I’m hoping to run some Star Wars with them. That won’t be until next year when some of the guys get back from Crimble break.

Luckily, I’ve started running a game via Google Wave, jumping on the bandwagon as many other gamers already have. There’s a slew of tools starting to become available for gameplay, including maps and dice rollers, so there’s a great deal of potential for Google Wave to work well for running games. There are already online tools to play games, but as I tend to like strong narrative-based games, and the group of players I’ve gather for this game are spread out throughout the country, Google Wave should be a good medium for running the game. It’s not without its technical issues, but I think those can be worked around.

We’re just about to run a Prelude, where all of the players get together and form the main party. As the game unfolds, I’ll post details here so that others can read what’s happening. That’s one of the benefits of Google Wave: everything gets archived, so you can have historical playback of gameplay so that you know exactly what’s gone on in the past. We’re still waiting for all of the players to choose characters and for us to start the Prelude proper, but it’s going to be fun when they do. It’s been years since I’ve really ran a game, but as we put all this together and get ready to play, I’m reminded of how much fun it is to not only play games, but to run them as a GM. I’ve always preferred being a GM to being a player. There’s more of a challenge in being a GM, and a lot more responsibility in shaping and directing the story so that everyone has a good time.

Why the heck has it taken me so long to get back to this? Oh, yeah. Life got in the way. Well, as Master Yoda says "Do, or do not. There is no try". I guess that also applies to roleplaying as well as developing awesome Force powers.

Check out this awesome article on the Millenium Falcon on the StarWars.com website. It’s where I snagged the above image from.

Yes, I know. I am such a Star Wars geek.

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Tags: Roleplaying, Tabletop by Teh Bagder
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Dungeons & Dragons Party Composition

In the past few days I’ve had a chance to look through some of the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Player’s Handbook. RPG rulebooks aren’t the type of thing that you can usually sit down and read through from cover to cover, although there are some good books out there that make it easy to do so. So far, it’s been an enjoyable read, apart from one major thing.

Party composition.

See, this is where my brain breaks, because I come from the school of thought of "Play what you want and we’ll work around it and have fun". D&D 4e consolidates a number of concepts presented in earlier editions but not fully coalesced and has you consider the combat roles of characters as one of four distinct roles. This is partly why D&D 4e gets labeled with being MMO-influenced, because the roles are very similar to the roles that you would find in an MMO. These roles are Leader, Striker, Defender and Controller. Each character class that we’re accustomed to falls into one or more of these roles during play, with each of them being better at one role more than another. Some are specific, but others can play multiple roles. A brief breakdown of the roles are:

  • Leaders are focused on support roles such as buffing and healing.
  • Strikers attack specific targets.
  • Defenders block attacks and take the brunt of combat.
  • Controllers attack multiple targets.

It’s easy to see where the comparison to MMO comes in: Tanks, DPS and Healers are standard roles in games. I’ve played in many games where we’ve had parties built around these concepts, either at party inception or simply through evolution of play. Even single player games, such as the original Baldur’s Gate games usually have these roles in play. So I’ve got no problem with these roles being in a game.

Where my brain breaks is designing a party based on these roles being a guiding principle of what characters are needed for a party. This is mostly because I’ve approached building a party from a narrative perspective, rather than a tactical perspective, which is what seems to be the case with the latest iteration of D&D.

That’s part of the reason why I’ve never really been deep into D&D in the past. Every group I ever saw play it used miniatures extensively. That seemed a lot at the time to cart around to people’s houses. I ended up settling on Rolemaster 2nd Edition, which was more in tune with the type of gaming that we wanted to play as it was highly narrative and allowed for great flexibility in character development beyond the structured class system of D&D. I’ve bought a lot of 3.0 and 3.5 stuff on clearance because I want to give D&D a chance. A lot of people are playing it, and if I want to get in some gaming, then i guess I need to play it too.

I guess I need to play a few games to see if my impressions are changed. More soon.

(Yes, I know the image in this post talks about 3.5, but it’s from an interesting article on the WOTC website regarding handling party composition.)

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Tags: Roleplaying, Tabletop by Teh Bagder
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Back To The Table

So, I’ve been absolutely horrible about updating this blog, chiefly because I’ve been swamped with family, school and work. It’s not going to get any better in the near future, as I’ve decided to fully pursue academia and head towards not only getting degrees, but actually becoming a professor eventually. Yeah, I know. I’m probably crazy. What do you mean you know that?

I’ve got the next three months off from any school work, as I transfer from Columbus State Community College with my Asssociate’s Degree to Ohio State University, where I’ll pursue my Bachelors. This gives me some down time to catch up with a lot of games unplayed for a while, as well as catching up on reading for pleasure, and getting back into tabletop gaming.

I’ve missed tabletop gaming. There’s just something about getting together with a bunch of other like-minded people, making up stuff as you go along and having fun. Last week I met up with a group of guys from the Ohio State tabletop club and played in a game of D20 Future. It was a great deal of fun to play in, although gameplay is suspended while the other guys end up heading home for Crimble. I can’t wait till I get back into that, and I’m planning on running a couple of games soon myself, now that I’m back on the horse.

I picked up the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons (including the PHB2) and I’ll be reading through that in the next few weeks. There’s a lot of hot debate as to how 4e changes things, and there are some things that strike me as not my cup of tea, but a lot of people are playing it now. If I’m going to want to play games, I’m going to want to play what others are playing, so like it or lump it I’m probably going to be playing some 4e. 4e still seems to be entrenched heavily in miniatures usage (no shock there), but there seems to be much more of a MMO PVP feel to it. Maybe reading it through will change my mind. I’ve never been a big D&Der, much preferring to play other game systems that are not level-based. There’s a whole essay involved there, so let’s ignore it.

I’ve started running a Star Wars d6 game via Google Wave. Oh, how I love that system by West End Games. It’s such a great system; it’s easy to pick up and play and brings the whole Star Wars feel to the table. I can remember playing some great games in the past with my regular gaming group back in Scotland, and I’m hoping to run the game a lot in the coming years. The kids are at the age where they can get into RPGs now, but there’s something about playing with a group of older players. Using Wave to play means finding ways to handle dice rolls, but it’s a promising medium for playing a non-immediate threaded game with multiple players. I may even post reports on the game here as a sort of summary of the story as it occurs.

Most of my computer gaming has been limited to my iPod Touch, as I’ve had little time to sit down and play for longer than a half hour at any time. I’ll have more time in the coming weeks, and I want to complete a lot of other games I’ve got going before I start any new ones. I recently picked up Left For Dead and Mass Effect during Steam sales. While I’ve yet to play L4D, I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours of Mass Effect and can heartily give it two thumbs up. I’m looking forward to plunging back into that, although I need to boot into Windows on my Mac to play it.

The kids convinced me to play some Rogue Galaxy on the PS2 the other night, and it took me a little while to get my bearings with the game because it had been a while since I had last played. I’m at 40 hours in, and only at Chapter 8, so I’ve still got a lot to do. I want to complete the game by the end of March so that I’ve got that out of the way. I also need to complete Tomb Raider: Legend, Psychonauts and Ratchet & Clank: Deadlocked on the PS2. I seem to have a bad habit of starting games and not finishing them. I need to fix that. Too many games, not enough time, and none of them will play themselves…

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Tags: PC Games, Tabletop by Teh Bagder
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