Supergiant And The Giants

If you're into video games, you may be aware of Hades.

It's the latest offering from Supergiant Games, who also brought you Bastion, Transistor and Pyre; I don't think it is controversial to say that they are well-received and generally pretty great games. They have 90%, 86% and 85% respective scores on Metacritic, which puts them far and away above most current new releases with the exception of Spelunky 2. Hades itself is sitting there with a score of 92%, which is pretty great, considering.

As of a couple years ago, Supergiant had 20 employees. There's a couple of documentaries about the process they went through making and releasing Hades in Early Access - you can find them in a youtube playlist here - and when you see how few people are actually working on the game, it gives you a real appreciation for the amount of assets each of them must have been responsible for. Everything you are looking at - all of the artwork - has been worked on by Jen Zee and Joanne Tran; all of the sound design (and the voice of the main character) was done by Darren Korb.

And they made a FANTASTIC game, that gives most games put together by bigger games companies an absolute run for their money. It's helped by attentive writing, a focus on the mechanisms that you'll be using constantly as you play the game, stellar voice acting and music, and a strong drive and focus on what the team wanted the game to be.

Just take a look at these three - the furies, Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone, as drawn by Jen Zee (as shared on her twitter).

In the documentary the team does talk about how it's busy, how meeting timetable and deadline is hard - but it never seems to be in an "I sleep in this office" kind of context. Of course, I admit that the documentary may have been misleading; but usually, that kind of stress is hard to hide in one-to-one interviews and candid photography.

Perhaps it is easier to avoid the crunch of having to put in sixty to seventy hour work weeks if there is no higher power to answer to; if the pressure of a release date is one that you set yourselves, to be within the scope of what you can accomplish as a team rather than what someone else believes you should be capable of - or any number of other reasons.

The fact is inescapable, though; crunch in the game industry is real, and a real problem. This article by Dean Takahashi for Venturebeat lays it out; 76% of game developers have crunch time regularly wherein the work hours exceed 40 a week, 13% stated they had done more than 70 hour a week crunch periods. And a significant proportion of them - 89% in fact - didn't actually get paid overtime. They got perks - food, additional holiday - but no additional pay. Some of them didn't get anything at all.

This is not a new problem. Here's an article from Kotaku on the topic from 2016. It talks about the reasons behind crunch, amongst other things.

Put simply, though; usually the developer will have a timeline of how a project is meant to go, they will have the capacity to take on freelancers to fill gaps, they will have the chance to cut content or extend their timeline if necessary to make sure the project gets finished to satisfaction...

...and that's great until you have an external pressures come in and hand down a bunch of extra work.

With some AAA games being as big as they are, it is easy to see how developing them would easily get out of hand. I can't even conceive of how much work it takes to make models look good, to allow for their customisation, to thread all the particular plotlines together, to get voice work done for all of those characters, to engine test, just... every aspect of making a game as big as, say, Red Dead Redemption 2 is beyond my scope of imagining. I know that Hades and RDR2 are totally different in terms of the scope of the game, but over 3,000 people worked on the latter - that's a lot of personnel to juggle.

The thing is, though - where it is so big, where it is being developed by Rockstar who seem to print money, you would think that such issues could be avoided. You would think that more people could be brought in, that an extension on a game deadline could be achieved, that the employees who are feeling the worst of the pressure could be compensated appropriately.

Instead, there were several parts of the game that were changed at the last minute, necessitating massively truncated development timetables and hundred-hour weeks from several staff. To get it all ready and finished in time for the date that had been laid down long before the measures were even conceived of being needed.

Several intersecting points of data, something has to give way, and as so often happens in the modern world - it is the person, the employee, the worker, that is forced to bear the load.

Don't think that Rockstar are alone in this, either.

How many games get put out and feel like they aren't finished? Lacking in features? Feeling kind of empty? Like you know there should be more to it, like you feel that you were promised more? Maybe you actually WERE promised more?

Fallout 76? Sea Of Thieves? No Man's Sky? Anthem?

There's a connection there, and I think you may be able to see what it is - even if each of those games suffered from different specific circumstances and problems.

No game developer wants to make a game that is bad, or unfinished. They want to put out a game that runs the way they envisage it, that people want to buy, play, tell their friends about. It's both the business model and professional pride. The people actually compiling the assets, writing the story, conceptualising game mechanics, animating effects - this is their art, this is their work. This ethos might not extend all the way to the top of that company's structure, however.

The game industry - which almost seems to be a whole separate entity to the actual making of the things that it sells - is fiercely, one might say savagely, competitive. It is catering to a market that can be highly fickle, that can decide a game is bad before it is even out of Alpha, and that has toxic elements that many distributors and developers are afraid of upsetting. After all, a significant swathe of the consumer base became muscle building and nutrition experts overnight after the release of Last Of Us 2 - it's amazing what you can do when you are upset at a video game.

Keeping them happy is obviously seen as more important than the health, safety and well-being of the people making the games that are being pushed.

So when we see games like Hades - like Carrion, like Stardew Valley, like countless other semi- or fully-indie games, developed by small teams and put out when they're ready, that are still good games... one has to ask: is it worth it?

Of course, if there were any labour laws that would truly protect the staff working for these companies, that would enshrine their rights and that would have to be accounted for by every step of the chain above them, things might be different. Then it wouldn't be about seeing the necks of the people actually doing the work as being the first, easiest sacrifice; then other measures might be taken. This, of course, is not a problem rooted in the game industry.

There might be something to be said about the purchasing public finding it less important for a game to come out on a concrete date - perhaps picked for marketing reasons rather than focusing on the amount of work that needs done. Maybe they might prefer a game to come out finished, of a high quality and without a staff that were abused and then fired to help it reach market.

I mean, Assassin's Creed Unity got shredded for not being finished; would it really have been worse if it was late?

I don't know. Maybe asking for understanding and empathy from both the management and the marketplace is a losing exercise. Maybe I'm just being sentimental.

Just a thought.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

No Games In My Politics

If you have spent much time on Twitter you will, at least once, come across a tweet that is either a mirror of, or a rebuttal of, this:

Well, I understand your grief, stranger whose name has been carefully edited out of the tweet!

See, in this day and age, politics seems to be everywhere. It almost seems like it has some kind of effect on every single part of everyday life! It seems inescapable. All we want to do is go to our minimum-wage job, pay our taxes and our unprotected rent, buy our food, and enjoy some nice, high-quality video games! In peace! With no politics!

So in order to help out people such as our heroic Twitter commentator above, I have put it upon myself to carefully select those games that don't contain politics, and those that do, so that the angry, angry people in their various and sundry communities can game without fear of the dread P-word rearing its ugly head.

And the first place we have to start is an unlikely avenue:

Sports Games.

Now I can see how these games might lure you in, with their seemingly totally apolitical mechanics - a fair fight between even numbers of players (sometimes not) on the field of dreams of your chosen discipline! But politics is insidious - it creeps in everywhere, and sports games are no exception!

Let's take, for example, the John Madden series as pictured above. Now it is inescapable that certain players are better than others. For every Drew Brees, there's some other schmoe whose name you don't know because he doesn't hold a throwing accuracy record. And how do we determine which teams have which players? Money, of course - and money is FULL of politics!

It isn't just money, either. There are some players that you simply can't have in your team because of politics, regardless of money! Because they did stupid political things, like kneeling when they're encouraged to by the troops that they're apparently disrespecting, or kill a seventeen year old in a car accident!

Despicable. Truly, the only safe way to avoid such things is to steer clear of the genre entirely.

And that's only the beginning. To keep with the action-packed theme, we now move onto:

Shooters.

How could there be anything even remotely approaching politics in a game about how you, the heroic Goodman, have to defeat endless faceless legions of the evil Badmans?

Well I hate to be the one to bring the bad news to this particular killfest, but sometimes, you need to work out who is the badman and who is the goodman. (Not this Goodman.) And unfortunately that almost always involves politics, somewhere. Even if it is as innocent as one side being called terrorists and one side being called counter-terrorists - well those are loaded terms! Why, it's only politics that tells you if someone is a terrorist or a brave freedom fighter. Just ask Rambo, who in Rambo III was helping the heroic, fearless Mujahideen of Afghanistan overthrow the evil Soviets, an action that will definitely not have had any consequences in the future.

Yes, it seems that any game that uses current and modern-day political factions is also accidentally a bit political; the kind of thing that would justify sending in some kind of counter-terrorist or SWAT unit varies from country to country, and isn't even a crime in some of them! The kind of guns you end up using, the legality of using them, the ethnic spread of the individuals you end up using them on - all political! Insidious, deceptively so! It worms its way into every single corner of gaming, truly poisonous.

So they are all to be avoided, as well. A shame. Well, at least we can have other genres, right? Something less on-the-rails and more exploratory!

Open-World Games.

There we go. Let's just roam around a world and do whatever we want, with literally no repercussions, no bad stuff, no prejudgements, and no politics!

Something like Red Dead Redemption 2, which definitely doesn't involve any kind of external pressures on the characters, which would come from a political situation in the local area.

Or GTAV, which absolutely doesn't riff constantly on the current political situation of the world, including private military contractors, the justice system, media, celebrity, capitalism, consumer culture, and so on.

Or Horizon Zero Dawn, which involves literally nothing about former power structures influencing new power structures, imperialism, climate change, and sexism.

...on second thoughts they all sound a little bit borderline, maybe let's go for something a little bit more narrative and a little less open.

RPGs.

Alas, we have fallen for another trap.

You see, in the picture above, I have utilised a game known as Final Fantasy 7 Remake. Now, one might think that such a group of people would be decidedly apolitical individuals, unwilling to taint a pure game experience with something as dangerously divisive as politics, but it turns out, they're the worst of the worst...

...they're AntiFascists!

Not only are they political, but they're the most offensive kind of political, the kind that doesn't make video games or insurance or financial products!

So regardless of the depth of the story or the characters, it unfortunately has to go on the pile - along with basically every other RPG, because almost all of them involve that dastardly politics at some point or other. Anything involving royalty, kings, empires? Sorry, politics! Anything involving a war? Sorry! War is inherently political! Religion, demons, angels? Also political! It just gets everywhere!

Yet another genre that just has to be discarded. It's just not worth the risk - who knows how damaging it could be to fire up Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, only to find out that one of the key parts of the game is to convince a royal court to trust you, when they inherently distrust your kind?

Enough of this nonsense, let's just engage in some instant action to take the edge off!

Fighting Games.

...except...

...well, there's two kinds of fighting game, right? There's the tournament, that you showed up to win, for whatever reason, maybe to defeat the head of the criminal syndicate that turned your old team-mate into a green lightning monster - or there's the walk-sideways punch-people kind of game, wherein you're clearly slapping the crap out of all these criminals or police officers or demons or whatever for a reason, which invariably involves...

...yep... politics. Somewhere along the line, there's awful, awful politics.

Who cares that Chun Li is a kick-ass lady with a brutal fighting style, fast and combo-efficient? She's part of Interpol - and Interpol has its own political agenda! So insidious! Making her a protagonist is pushing a political viewpoint, and I won't have that, no sir. Don't you worry, Twitter User In The First Picture, I'm looking out for you.

Which leads us toward the inevitable: if all of these genres, all of these blocks of games, aren't available to me because of politics... what CAN I play?

Well, good news for you, Fellow Gamer! I have isolated the one game that is GUARANTEED to have NO politics, and will absolutely not upset or offend your sensibilities!

...wait, what do you mean that isn't what you meant?

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Taking A Minute

I don't think I need to elucidate the ways in which we are currently experiencing... let's call it stress, as a people as a whole.

And what a year it has been, right? Like this whole virus has been simmering away while all sorts of other shit happens and then - well, then came the spikes. And now it's all that we have going on, because it has swept a hand across our expectations and our plans.

Which is odd for people like me who had problems with plans and expectations in the first place, but I digress.

A significant proportion of people have been told to stay home - either no-access or encouraged to stay there as much as is practical. Of course there's certain sectors where people still have to go out, and I have huge respect for them. And there's certain areas wherein people are just going out and doing whatever they want anyway, because there always is, but the less said about that...

So. A lot of people's social interactions and leisure time, significantly cut down. Folks stuck indoors.

And into this perfect storm of the UK going from "it will be fine" to "rationing is probable..."

...steps this little crew of goombas.

What timing.

Games. I talk about gaming a lot. How it can be a help, or a hindrance. In times like this, though - in times where people feel like they are cut off, need something to focus on that isn't the news or what is going on outside - what better time?

Especially something that rewards social play like Animal Crossing New Horizons does.

I haven't seen such an outpouring of people getting together, exchanging details, playing together, just generally having fun since the Summer of Pokemon Go. It's that, but inverted, but also kind of not. Because we're playing this - we're all doing this - and we're enjoying it, and we want everyone else to enjoy it too. For once we aren't yelling at each other about bad games or shitty takes. We're just having a nice time, which is what we all need.

It's a way to stay in touch, too. A way to be doing something other than staring at our navels and swapping text messages. I mean that's good, we should be messaging - but isn't it more fun if you can also send your friends a squid or a fruit they don't already have?

I mean, if you really need something to help handle stress that isn't so sunny or social... maybe you are more interested in what this chap has to say.

What a weekend.

Even more than that, though, we're seeing people pull together in online communities. People forming and joining groups, en masse. People livestreaming things. Bands streaming concerts - the Dropkick Murphys streamed an entire gig on St Patrick's Day. I was invited to a group called Concellation, which is where all the folks who regularly attend a bunch of conventions that are now cancelled hang out.

My RPG gamers are taking to online services like Roll20 and Discord, because we still want to roll the dice. We have so many means by which we can take the things we enjoy and move them online that we are almost spoiled for choice, and all we need is the will to do it.

Which is, in its way, really wholesome.

It's a time of uncertainty. That's the worst thing. The uncertainty. All of a sudden, people that don't usually struggle with anxiety or depression are almost being forced to experience the symptoms. All of a sudden, people that don't have conditions that would force them to be housebound are indeed housebound.

We're finding our way, though - and I admit to feeling a certain amount of relief... and maybe hope? ...that the solutions to a lot of the problems we face as nations rather than as individuals seem to lean heavily to the left of the spectrum.

Maybe some lessons will be learned. Maybe there will be the political drive and push to provide a safety net for people, despite it being an affront to conservative tendencies. Maybe people will remember that the solutions to these problems didn't come from letting people die en mass because they couldn't afford private care but by doing the best we could to provide for everyone.

Maybe I can hang onto that optimism, for a little while.

In the meantime: I have cherries to pick.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Readers Request: Poland, Dad Jokes, Kebabs, Wisdom

Sentient beings of all ages, it's time for another Readers Request - the first since July! We have several treats for you in this one, including about a quarter of the questions being submitted by one person who had consumed enough wine to intoxicate a rat with his breath?

So without further ado.

Best historical rant - This may be controversial, but here goes: The Prince, by Nicolo Machiavelli. Often cited as being a how-to guide for the budding tyrannical despot, it is also one of the most scorching and excoriating takedowns of tyranny that you can ever read, and may have had a hand in eventually unseating the Medicis.

Surprising Polish facts - Copernicus was Polish, and studied in Krakow. It is common to celebrate your Name Day in Poland, which is the Saint's Day of the Saint you were named after - which is a common thing as Poland is quite a religious country. It contains the last ancient forest in Europe which is the home of the European Bison.

The power of the pangolin and your own personal statement - Pangolins are wonderful beautiful creatures that deserve our care. The third Saturday in February is World Pangolin Day. I want these critters to be saved from their endangered status because god damn look at this little fucker what a BEAUTY (wait I've been asked this before too)

Lost skills you'd like to see come back? Either you personally or humans (of which you presumably belong) in general - My first instinct is to yell the words Critical Thinking or Empathy. I think, though, that maybe I am being facetious or illogical in thinking that either of those things was much more prevalent in the past than they are now. So let's go with the skill of knowing who to trust. (NASA over that guy you know who says the Earth is flat, e.g., or your family doctor over Suzanne from the MumsNet local page who says that vaccines cause homosexautism.)

What shows are you excited for this coming year? - Oh uh. I dunno. I haven't paid a lot of attention really. Masters Of The Universe? Picard? Next season of Dark Crystal?

Is global existential dread just a part of adulthood, and has it always been so? - Yes. It is my firm opinion that the human condition is centralised around insecurity, and existential dread is an extension of insecurity. The only way you are going to avoid such things is to either pay no attention to the world, or to have no awareness of anything. (I blog about this a lot.) (In fact I have been asked this one before I think?)

Various things John has wanted to set fire to over the years. - Parliament, myself, the US President, capitalism, the human race, myself, half of the villages and towns we come across in Pathfinder, myself, the human race, capitalism, elves, nazis, antivaxxers, chauvanists, homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, myself, capitalism, Michael Bay, the human race, Parliament, Tolkien, every building I can see, everything I can see, myself, whoever keeps signing off on the Anime live-action remakes, capitalism, the human race.

Favourite tabletop builds for various archetypes - Welder Cleric (offensive spells that can be fast-cast as healing abilities), Sword-And-Board Fighter (smack em with your shield), Rogue With Knives (seriously just rogues with knives), and one of my personal favourites, Combat-Centric Character With Psychological Issues In A Mostly Social Setting (because I like a challenge).

I read this as on the bog #mumofasevenyearold - I might be. You don't know.

The current political state of the world if it were a DnD campaign. - The world is falling to darkness. As hellfire sweeps continents and toxic taint seeps into the oceans, the dark powers ally with each other to take over one nation at a time, ruled by lords of deceit, greed and malice. This is not a quest to conquer a dungeon; this is not a quest to save a kingdom. This is a fight for the world, to prevent it from becoming the next level of the abyss.

Best "dad joke" - I bought some shoes from a drug dealer. I don't know what he laced them with but I've been tripping all day.

I've been told you shouldn't make dad jokes if you're not actually a father. Apparently it's a Faux-Pa - Included as a comment because frankly it's funny shit.

Favourite set of dice you've ever owned or come across - So rather than pick a set of dice that I own - if I play favourites the others will betray me - I will instead pick this set of dice that I would dearly love to own. Blacklight dice that, without a blacklight shining on them, just look like blank polyhedrons.

How can we divert course from dystopia to a utopian future? - I've been asked this one before - the answer is the same as last time.

You, the touch and the power -

Time to talk day 6 feb 2020 - Time To Talk Day is a day for us to start talking more about mental health and breaking down the taboos surrounding it. It is uncomfortable and it is upsetting but think about how much worse it is if someone is suffering? 123 people die by suicide every day on average - that is one every twelve minutes. Think about that. If even one of them can be solved by talking, then we should talk. That's what the day is for. We should ALSO talk about how government funding for mental health solutions seems to involve 100% awareness and precious little treatment, too.

Why Justin shouldn’t suggest topics when drunk - I mean he can if he wants.

Or me even - You're drunk?

Who is Justin? - Dave's not here man.

Is this his kebab? - A kebab? I'm hungry.

Irrespective of my previous answer can I eat it? - I want it. I want the kebab.

Why are the two old ladies talking about shoes in Cowes on the 22nd? - I don't know, I'm not privy to the secrets of the aged.

Is there always a bigger fish? - Almost always.

From your point of view are the Jedi a) evil, b) a bigger fish or c) a bunch of self destructive smack heads? - All three. The Jedi are just rubbish. One of the weaknesses of the prequels is having to include Jedi - like not just some smart guys hiding on moons and spreading their own personal wisdom but a bunch of dickheads in robes making poor decisions on an industrial scale. Why are they the protagonists?

Wisest things said by fictional characters - I present to you a selection, beginning with Granny Weatherwax from Carpe Jugulum.

"It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray."
"Nope."
"Pardon?"
"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
"It's a lot more complicated than that--"
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

In reality a self sustaining oligarchy is the only form of government the uk has had since at least 1568, discuss - The signing of the Treaty of Adrianople? I mean I agree but I fail to see how relevant -

I of course mean 1658 I’m embarrassed now - The death of Oliver Cromwell? ...oh okay.

Why I married Nicholas Wright - I mean he's a nice enough lad, isn't he?

The couple that ....... together stays together! - "Is Good". It's not to do with the things you do or don't do together - some people are inseperable to the point of creepiness, some people are fiercely independent. The important thing is, not only, that you accept each other for who you are - but that you are genuinely OKAY with each other being who you are. When you can accept each other without reservation, not because it is what you have to do, but because you are genuinely at peace with where you differ and where you overlap. That... is how you stay together. (I do however recommend gaming! It works!)

Can I get a rat drunk with just the power of wine breath? - Yes. I mean. Probably.

Best/worst/both pickup lines - "Are you a parking ticket? You got fine written all over you." Which is of course inviting the response: "Are you a parking ticket? You look like an expensive mistake that I'd rather not make."

Favourite quote and why. -

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain."

 Khalil Gibran, The Prophet. I don't want to lionise pain and suffering. I don't want to say that you can't hold wisdom unless you have suffered. At the same time - it is true, that without the context of what suffering actually is, you don't necessarily have the context to understand just how important it is to prevent or cure suffering. If you have never stared into the dark and known that you want your life to end, you can't grasp the full extent of what it is to save someone from the same. Without a crippling heartbreak, there is no You've Lost That Loving Feeling; without the darkest depression, there is no Black Hole Sun; without a plane crash, there is no Fire And Rain; without the tragedy of a painter at the mercy of his darkest demons, there is no Starry Night, and there is no Vincent. Would I rather be pain-free and have less context for, say, It Never Ends? Well yes - but if life is for poetry, if life means nothing without art, then I will take my enrichment where I find it. Especially given as the pain is a feature rather than a bug.

Favourite meme you've seen recently. - This one.

Studio Ghibli Netflix tie-in - ACCESS. Expanded audiences. YES. People can see some of my favourite animated movies that couldn't before, for whatever reasons. YES. And they started with two of my favourites (Castle In The Sky and Ocean Waves). YES.

That's it for this time, folks. Thank you for your contributions - something more personal next time. Thank you for joining me on this odyssey!

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Coming Out Of Left Field

Some of the best times you can have while playing RPGs is the really wild stuff that you can't plan for.

You know what I mean. That totally screwball idea, that thing that blindsides your GM from nowhere.

See we love it when everything goes to plan, right? We GMs love setting up a moment that goes off without a hitch, seeing the thing develop from point to point until the party are where you want them and the story point pops off. Sure, it's been a little bit hairy here and there - maybe there's been a couple of times where a little handholding was necessary, and perhaps some clues were missed...

...but you got to the bit you needed to get to, and you get to deliver the blow that you had up your sleeve the entire time. And hopefully the party enjoy - or at least appreciate - it.

The stuff of legend, though, is when you go so far off the beaten path that at least one person is helpless through laughter and half of the campaign notes suddenly seem bone-crushingly inadequate for what you are dealing with.

Two examples I will quote include when myself (a sickly but heavily-armoured cleric of Pelor) and my travelling companion (a dashing spellsword) got to the castle of the evil lich in a D&D 3.5 campaign, took one look at the front gates, and flew up onto the roof to go in through the top of the tower - getting the drop on the final boss of what was effectively a dungeon, and having to clean it out after he was dead...

...and the GM of that game pulling exactly the same trick in a Pathfinder game, going into an overrun guard bastion in the first campaign book through the roof. Dropping in, murdering the big bad, getting mythic power, and then liquidising the rest of the fell creatures present like a BlendTec commercial.

Most recently, this happened to me. I was the GM in the driving seat. I've been running a game of Eclipse Phase for a few months - you've probably seen a couple of my blog posts about it, but if not, look here and here, that will clue you in - and I have been typing up each session as a read-along that you can read here. Take a look - it's called Before The Devil Knows You're Dead.

This particular thing is some kind of murder mystery. The party are putting together some clues as to why someone was killed, and they discover that there's a lot more to it than random acts of violence - in fact they have a short list of other potential targets, and one of them correctly guessed the inciting agents within minutes of seeing the original crime scene (much to my combined joy and nervousness).

So they find out the identity of one of the other potential victims, and go to talk to her. One of the characters is highly social, and is also a genuine psychic. So I get ready to provide some snippets of information before the inevitable happens...

...and then the way it gets played out - the interview turns into a confession, which turns into the party smuggling the potential victim (who isn't so innocent herself) off of the habitat in a body bag assisted by octopoid gangsters, stealing her identity, and using it to accidentally incite a couple of stampedes before finally turning the murderer against a mob of gangsters, resulting in mutual destruction.

What started out as being some kind of Maltese Falcon sleuthing ended up like using a laser pointer to direct a cat into a pile of action figures.

And I had genuinely not really planned for that, at all.

But it did the job!

(Meme not technically accurate cos people totally got killed but:)

Fellow Game Masters - I know it's scary when the party go off the rails. I know. But sometimes it will actually add to the world you are making. For me, it produced another long-term NPC that I can use, and some long-term problems that I can bring back down the line. And even if it doesn't add anything - who cares? Sometimes, we're here to laugh like idiots at the dumb things we just did.

That's what the hobby is about, right?

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Best Of The SNES (Mana From Heaven)

Warning: nostalgia ahead.

So when I was still in school life was pretty simple. It didn't look that way but hey, I know better now. All the stuff I thought was important - well, it was important to me at the time, but in the grand scheme of things, wouldn't add up to much.

I have a lot of fond memories. Very few of them are school related. Perhaps fully half of them involve video games. I was that kind of kid. I personally had a Sega Megadrive, for a time; but as much as I may have defended it, the games that I really enjoyed were on the Super Nintendo.

Like, don't get me wrong. I got untold hours of fun out of the various Sonic games (hey, remember when the WORST one was the FIRST one?), the two Shining Force tactical RPGs, Gunstar Heroes, Rocket Knight and its sequel Sparkster, Soliel, Landstalker - it had a solid roster of titles to keep me busy.

The thing is, there were a specific set of games it didn't have; some of the best games ever made.

Like yeah, Mario Kart was groundbreaking. Super Mario World was exceptional. Super Metroid was one of the coolest games I ever played.

Really, though - mean the RPGs.

On one system, at around about the same time, you had Final Fantasy 6 (or 3), potentially one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made. Chrono Trigger, a triumph for game and narrative design and writing. Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, one of my favourite Zelda games, and maybe still my favourite - I haven't played Breath Of The Wild yet. (I know, bad show, John.) As well as these three titans, you had the third of Square's trio of classic RPGs, and one of the most fondly remembered games of the era:

Secret Of Mana.

Where my people at.

The game itself is a masterclass. It looks amazing - it pops off the screen, the colour choice and pixel art so very well done, and the addition of the Mode 7 rotating semi-3D map just made it feel like it was above and beyond. The combat was tactical but fast-moving, and rewarded good reflexes as much as forethought and planning.

It was more accessible than Final Fantasy, for a beginner. The ability to get the hell out of the way when the enemy swings for you is a godsend. The plot, likewise, is less twisty. That's a good way to put it, I think. Twisty. Only having three characters to worry about made it seem simpler, too, even if managing all three of them at once was probably harder than - say - Chrono Trigger's system.

I've played it... who knows how many times. Always on a borrowed Super Nintendo, until I discovered what ROMs were... and then, years after it came out, I made a rather startling discovery.

It turned out that Secret of Mana wasn't an original - or at least, not an individual outside of an existing franchise. No, it was part of an ongoing series of games, the first of which had come out two years previously. It was the Seiken Densetsu series, but the first one had been called - get this - Final Fantasy Adventure. It was officially a spin-off of Final Fantasy, coming out the same year as Final Fantasy 4 (aka Final Fantasy 2 in the US, yep, this gets confusing). Seiken Densetsu 1 even includes various staples of the Final Fantasy series, using sprites taken directly from the original Final Fantasy game (Mystic Quest Legend here), and featuring a chocobo that one has to ride at various points.

Here's the thing. Not only was I shocked to discover the existence of a prequel for the game I adored...

I found out it had a sequel.

This sequel was called Seiken Densetsu 3, and I coveted it so desperately that I - at one point - endeavoured to learn Japanese and travel to Japan to buy a copy. Because it didn't exist outside of Japan. This was at the point wherein local copies of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 had just absolutely spiked in price because of lack of accessibility, let alone this game, a game that had never left Japanese shores.

One day I discovered it had been codified as a game ROM. So, lacking any other way of playing this game that I desired so badly, I downloaded it on my buddy Matt's computer - and had to use a piece of software to split the ROM across three floppy discs, because this was before the days of affordable CD-writers or portable hard drives. Our entire lives were contained in 1.44 megabyte sized chunks.

I got it home. I fired it up.

I couldn't understand a damn thing because it was literally totally untranslated.

I played it anyway, and I loved it.

Two years separated these two games, take a look...

Look at the difference. It's astounding.

With six characters, each selectable as a main character and backup characters, and such an immense graphical overhaul, it was a huge improvement. The sound, too, was tweaked. The combat system was already pretty fantastic so that needed precious little adjustment, but the game included an actual day-night cycle, wherein enemies and NPCs would act differently depending on what time of day it was. There was even a day system, each day corresponding to a type of magic or element, strengthening that element on that day.

Hell, one of your main characters was a werewolf who was deadly at night.

Halfway through the nineties, here was this game, this pinnacle of the art of 2D pixel RPGs. Final Fantasy 7 was out two years later, as the Final Fantasy series took its step into 3D; Ocarina Of Time took the Zelda series the same way a year after that. It isn't a very controversial statement to imply that there wasn't a better 2D RPG released - not perhaps until the comeback of the genre currently occurring.

Access, though; access was the problem. As Super Nintendos got rarer, the games themselves became harder to find. As mentioned the prices had already spiked. I remember hearing at one point that a copy of Final Fantasy 6 was in CB Games on Union Street (callback) for about £80 - and that was in the nineties, given inflation that's almost £150 now.

That was for games that came out over here. Seiken Densetsu 3 was one of the ones that didn't. It became a unicorn - I could pine for Chrono Trigger, could dream of the day when I could by a cartridge and an old SNES to play Mario Kart again, but the Mana sequel was gone.

Throughout the years, though - the old games started coming back. Before people started shutting down the ROM sharing sites that were prolific among folks my age that grew up with 16 bit consoles, Final Fantasy 6 was released on the Playstation in 1999. A Link To The Past came to the Nintendo virtual console in the Wii era. A hard-to-get version of Chrono Trigger came out for the Playstation in 1999, but was circulated more widely for the DS in 2009, and was ported over to many mobile devices and PCs later. A mobile port of Secret Of Mana itself came out in 2009.

Seiken Densetsu 3 remained a unicorn, but spoiled with legal access to all the old RPGs that we had loved so much - and the release of the Mini Super Nintendo containing most of them - eased the swallowing of that bitter pill.

Until earlier this year I heard a rumour that someone had copyrighted the term Collection Of Mana.

Trying not to brick myself in sheer excitement, I casually ignored most of E3 2019 - I kind of hate it as a convention - but kept my ear to the ground for even a whisper of news about the unicorn maybe finally reaching our shores.

It was a week later that I got the news.

Isn't it gorgeous.

The collection of characters to the right is your three from Secret Of Mana - Randi, Primm and Popoi - and above the seed is Sumo and Fuji from Final Fantasy Adventure...and to the left, the six main characters from Seiken Densetsu 3. Angela the princess, Duran the swordsman, Hawkeye the thief, Riesz the amazon, Kevin the werewolf and Charlotte the priestess.

This means that not only does this collection contain Final Fantasy Adventure, the game that takes some Final Fantasy tropes and smashes them into a Zelda world overlay. Not only does this collection include the non-remastered non-3D Secret Of Mana - but it also includes Trials of Mana. Seiken Densetsu 3 itself. Translated and localised.

It happened. The unicorn arrived.

And that's the sad story about why a grown man saw an advert for a Switch game and had to stop himself from crying.

But I mean, if this crystalline moment of childhood happiness was condensed into a software form, and for over 24 years you couldn't have it because of ephermeral reasons - and then all of a sudden, it gets gently placed within your grasp... maybe you'd shed a tear, too.

I mean, it just goes to show, too - you give people access to a thing at a reasonable price, and even if they'd pirated or copied it previously, they will buy it.

After all, Game of Thrones still made money, right?

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

A Battle Most Royale

Society is a funny old thing.

It takes concepts, see - and it chews them up and it spins them around, and it mixes them, and remixes them, and spits them back out. It takes things and puts those things through various processes, until such a time as it can do something with it. Some parts of society take things from other parts. If you want a great example of this, listen to some blues, then listen to Elvis. Some things get appropriated, and some of those things get appropriated across cultures. (That's a different blog.)

Sometimes, shit gets turned around in such an awful way, that a thing created for a specific purpose leads to the total antithesis of that purpose.

Strap yourselves in.

1999, and Koushun Takami's first and only novel - penned after leaving his journalism job three years earlier - reaches the shelves. That novel is named Battle Royale.

Yes, that Battle Royale. The best-seller, that got turned into a Manga by Takami himself, that was then adapted into a movie in 2000, which also spawned a sequel in 2003.

A lot of folks will be aware of the story already. It is set in a dystopian alternate-history Japan, which won the second world war and became a brutal fascist dictatorship. The military runs a program wherein fifty students a year are kidnapped, dropped onto an island, and forced to fight - to kill each other until only one remains.

The reasons why? Well, that's what the novel is really about. You see - what Battle Experiment Number 68 is allegedly meant to do, is to act as an exercise to help the military and government understand survival training. What it is really for, is to highlight just how easy it is for the government to order people's deaths in cruel and unusual ways. It is a stark symbol of just how cruel such an organisation can be. Not just executing 49 teenagers a year - no, actually making teenagers that know each other execute each other. Horrible, when you think about it.

I think it is probable that Takami wanted this to be a warning. As much as it was an exploration of the psychology of people forced into an awful situation, it was also an indictment of the treatment of individuals under a fascist regime. The actual personal cost of measures and actions put in place to have wider repercussions. What brutality comes to mean, to those underneath its boot.

(Fun fact: the historical context of the phrase Battle Royale is a "battle fit for royalty" - and was usually a grand melee, fought between a large number of combatants, to entertain the powers that be. Take note.)

The next big stop on this road map is pretty obvious.

The Hunger Games was released in 2008, with sequels Catching Fire and Mockingbird following in 2009 and 2010 - each of which were made into movies in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 respectively. Author Suzanne Collins claims that she hadn't even heard of Battle Royale until after the book had gone to print, a claim that I am inclined to believe.

The setting is a science fiction dystopia named Panem, divided into thirteen districts that surround a central capitol. Each district (aside from the thirteenth for plot reasons) has two "tributes" picked as representatives - initially by lottery but anyone can volunteer - to compete in a 24-person grand melee, the winner (survivor) of which wins extra rations for their impoverished district.

Again, it is as much as demonstration of the capitol's power and callousness - and control over their citizenry - as it is a practical contest. It is a reminder of what can happen to the citizens of the districts if they were to ever rebel against the government - the games themselves were started after a rebellion that occurred 75 years before the events of the book.

(Fun fact: the phrase bread and circuses, to imply a shallow appeasement of the masses through exploitative entertainment, is from the Latin, panem et circenses. Great name for a dictatorship.)

The arc of the two Battle Royale movies isn't dissimilar to the Hunger Games story, in terms of the means by which the governments control their citizens forming the crucible in which the rebellion is forged. As much a warning to the dictators as to those dictated to. From the beginning, we are shown - this is not okay, this is how a society abuses you, and something that must be fought against. And at the end, we are shown - you will reap what you sow.

With its popularity - among a specific age bracket - it would only be a matter of time before the thematic of the Hunger Games would find itself represented in video game format. Sure enough, it happened.

The Minecraft Hunger Games servers first started up halfway through 2012. Minecraft being the runaway success of the decade, the Hunger Games mod attracted a significant player base - especially after several youtubers took up playing it.

In a game like Minecraft, there is no notion of realism. There's little to no backstory to the situation; there's no history of oppression, no knowledge that this isn't normal, and no true stakes for failure. The people you are killing and out-scavenging are still going to be your friends and colleagues later, probably.

So the warnings that ride with Battle Royale and Hunger Games just don't occur.

Which is why the game format - a grand melee with only one winner - appeals a lot... as several game releases over the following seven years demonstrate.

Minecraft Hunger Games was a modification of an existing game, as were the Battle Royale mods for Arma II and Arma III. More youtube activity, of course - Arma (severely propped up by DayZ) drew in a significant audience for just how wide and broad its gameplay could be. The player models were more realistic, of course - but then, it was still divided from the original concept by the lack of external context.

So the entire notion of battle royale gameplay was firmly cemented before the first dedicated game on the topic was released.

It plays a lot like Arma. Sure. It looks super generic. Sure. That's the point. It was coded by the same PlayerUnknown that made the Arma II Battle Royale mod. It was meant to capitalise on the demand for the gametype. X players drop in, kill X-1 of their competitors, and then achieve a winner winner chicken dinner or whatever it was. Teamwork became a big thing, too - pairs or fours.

It is a style of gameplay that appeals, of course. One can technically do very well without having to be exceptionally skilled. As long as you aren't one of the first however many to die, all you need do is land one of the last few kills, and you can be a winner - and winning against odds like that (or perceived odds like that) can be a huge motivator to try again.

The thing was, that when you have played through it about... a dozen times? That generic graphical outlay can be a real killer. When you see how other games in 2017 were released that actually looked great, and distinctive, and stood out from their peers - it couldn't compete.

Not when this showed up, anyway.

Yeah you knew it was coming, suck it up.

A game mode cobbled up and bolted onto an already existing game idea, one could easily call Fortnite's Battle Royale mode as a cheap cash-in. One would have to understand that basically every response to market demand is the same thing, so - you know, just another sin of Capitalism.

Very few people with access to the internet, or any media at all, are unaware of Fortnite - and almost always, they are aware of the Battle Royale mode. Free to play, if treated right and marketed well, can draw in a significant player base - and Fortnite succeeded by becoming meme-bait.

The graphical style is so different from PUBG, so outstanding and cartoonish, almost looking like original World of Warcraft in its proportions. The construction mechanic adds another layer, too; though perhaps the existence of vehicles in PUBG could have proven to be a competitive factor, that has since been countered by Fortnite's own addons and expansion material.

It once more drags the game away from the realistic, away from the dystopian stakes of its fictional forebears. It is a zany environment in which one is literally dropped out of the back of a bus into the battleground.

It saw a lot of derision from "serious" gamers, though. (How I hate typing that out, but it's true. That is how they see themselves.) Because kids enjoyed it, and because it was free to play, and you aren't a SRS GMR if you don't pay a shit ton of money for a game and it doesn't look super serious. So what would follow that kind of attitude?

Here we go, this is more my speed.

Apex Legends is much the same as the others, except for several key differences. One is that the players have several choices of character, each with their own special abilities and fantastic designs, much like Overwatch or similar games. It doesn't totally change playstyle, but slightly. Also - you are locked into three-person teams. The map size, compared to the other games previously featured, appears to be immense.

Thematically, there are differences too. Apex Legends is set up as a literal arena sport. No being forced, no threat of consequences. Those who participate are hoping to be - as the title implies - the apex of their art, the legends of their world.

This one is my personal favourite out of any of the other previously-listed games, it bears mention. It is probably obvious. I just love the individual character and weapon design, and its imagining as a professional tournament sport. Also, the technological aspect appeals - if someone dies then they can be reconstituted and brought back by in-game mechanic, rather than just being totally out of the game.

This brings us up to the present...and the original point of this blog.

We started with Battle Royale, 20 years ago - telling us that this is an awful thing to do to people, that they are victims of an abusive fascist state and this should never be allowed to happen in reality.

And then...

The full article is here. You can find another take on it here, and here.

I don't think I need to go into it any further than that, do I?

Fuck the human race, I want off this ride.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Bumper RPG Audience Participation Post

Soooo I game a lot.

Yes, video games, but the thing I really enjoy doing - my Thing, as it were - is roleplaying games. I've made plenty of posts in the past on the topic, so you could probably work this out about me.

Well, I decided to go all in today. I asked for questions, comments and anecdotes on the topic, and you didn't disappoint.

I will ALSO be providing links to some cool stuff - youtubers who do a great job of teaching on the topic, podcasts and actual-play posts. All put together either by people who are my friends or people I respect.

So with no further ado, and names removed to protect the innocent, we'll begin with the questions.

Does LARP also count? ;) - ...yes, I used to (and still in a limited fashion do) LARP. Though not the spongy-sword type. My knees just aren't up to it any more...

Which character that you've played/encountered do you most wish was real? - Well there's a few I've played that I am very glad were NOT real, and even more that I've encountered - Rotsnik the Murder Goblin being one of them. But in terms of who I most wish WAS real, hmm. Out of characters I have played I would say that Perdix, the cheeky and charming Fate/Time Mage, would be a true blessing to the world if he really existed. Out of other people's characters that I have encountered, that's a hard choice - but Brayla, a certain Alchemist of devil-may-care attitude and incredible skill, would be a brilliant person to meet at a pub.

Do you ever wish you'd taken the blue pill? - Never. I've had so many good times, learned so many useful skills and made so many good friends through the hobby that imagining my life without it is just impossible.

Do you take a little something of yourself into your characters? Or do you like to completely escape? - Depends on the character. Yonks ago I did a thing about traits I like seeing in RPG characters, and a couple of them are traits I think I have. I think it's a really hard thing to make a character that is nothing like you, too. Like, at the character sheet stage you can do it - but when it comes down to actually playing that character and judging what they would do in a situation, removing yourself from that decision-making process is really hard. It can be kind of liberating to play a character that is deliberately very unlike yourself, though. I mean, my Rogue Trader captain was a million miles away from me and he was one of my most enjoyable plays.

What is the most memorable encounter you have played through, and one that you have ran in a game? - Hah, okay. There's a few of these. There was the fight against a group of evil Magi who were trying to hatch a dragon egg at Glastonbury festival, while AC/DC played Thunderstruck. There was the fight wherein we had to kill our friend Patrick (who was the villain in his own story) in Carisbrooke Castle. There was the moment when myself and the spell-slinger did a dungeon backwards, and the follow-up when the DM of that game found the perfect opportunity to do the same thing in a totally different scenario. There was the time that we as an evil party ambushed a nominally good party, and slaughtered them, and then they reversed time with a Wish and ambushed US instead and made my flying mount vanish from underneath me and I fell a hundred and fifty feet to the deck... in terms of encounters that I've run myself, though. I remember someone meeting an alien entity when I ran Eclipse Phase - coming face to face with the creature (which had no facial features) and freezing... then it just turned and moved away. I was pleased with how that went. That and wrecking Mars with a space elevator cable and giving my party a minor phobia of the intro of a Thrice song.

If you could DM for a group of famous people, who would you choose for your group? - I know this one. Vin Diesel, The Rock, Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day and Kevin Smith. Usually I prefer to run for four but I am sure I can stretch to five with a mob like this. (The best thing is they all game and I know they do.)

Did you ever have a transition from playing a game "games master" to become story teller? Most of the games I've played with you running the story seems forefront. - I have done a blog about this as well, kinda. It just so happened that the vast majority of my formative RPG time happened in a period and with groups that primarily played games that were heavy on the narrative. World of Darkness specifically calls the person that is running the game the Storyteller, for that precise reason. I just like there to be a plot, you know? And I've never been the kind of gamer that finds the plot gets in the way of rolling dice and killing dudes. Just never happened. So I run the kind of games I like to play in.

Are there any systems or settings which appeal to you but you haven't yet played or run? (pretty open I know but legit curious 😅) - OH yeah. Feng Shui, Tales From The Loop, Over The Edge, Nobilis, Continuum. I've played Mechwarrior but only once and I've love to play it again. Shadowrun's more recent editions. Cyberpunk. Never played Cyberpunk, would love to. Numenera. Infinity. Quite a few!

Are there any things you've seen in media that you've wanted to(or have) introduced in your games? Possibly a bit of a cheat given that they're based on DnD but I loved the "Individual Magical Effect" from Goblins comic, and the portrayal/explanations for both alignment and attempted redemption in Order of the Stick. - Oh a lot of things. The magical effects from Goblins is one I actually use. The criminal underworld presented in John Wick is something I am planning to use at a later date. The notion of the Doomsday Clock is something I use in my games, but haven't had to actually make it tick for a long time.

To explain - the Doomsday Clock is something you can have when you have a group of players that you feel you may have to keep in line. If you feel they are acting out, or getting distracted, or generally being doofy beyond your capacity to deal, you add a tick to the Doomsday Clock. When it has ticked to thirteen - a Bad Thing happens. It can be useful less as a stick to beat your party with but more as a reminder that time at the table is limited and we want to make it a good time - and you can totally use it as an excuse to bring in that bad guy that you've wanted to use in the past three campaigns!

Have you ever TPK'd a party or been in one? And if not, why not! - I've been in more than one. My first real D&D game. We found a baby dragon. Then the mama found us. Then there was one in Vampire, wherein the car crashed and the world ended when we attacked the Prince. The last time I played Paranoia it was a TPK, but I think that has to happen. In truth, I don't think I've ever actually run a TPK. I don't often set up a scenario in which all my players will DEFINITELY die, there's almost always a way to live, and my players are often smart people. In fact the one game I set up and ran at Nine Worlds con in 2015 that was designed for my players to die in a dungeon - for purpose of having another party finding the dungeon half-completed later - the party actually succeeded, against all odds, and made it out alive. Maybe I'm just soft on my players, I just don't like killing PCs unless they have earned that bullet.

What the longest running game you've been in? - In terms of tabletop, that would be the "Quantum Leap" Pathfinder game, in which we ran six (it ended up being about eleven) different game modules, from Level 1, to Level 20 Mythic 10. And in each scenario we would appear in the world where we were meant to be, in new bodies (or sometimes old bodies), and do the job, before being snatched away by the powers that be. That ran for at least a year and a half, maybe two years, and it averaged out to once every two weeks. If we're talking online I've been RPing a single constant game world with my girlfriend since about 2012.

Whats the longest single continuous session you've done? - Hard to say. I know that back when we used to play Dark Ages Vampire and such there were some all-day sessions. Though I think the actual longest has to be the Epic Game Weekend in Colchester, wherein we put in two solid ten-hour days of RP back to back. Slightly ruined by drama but that was the game in which my lvl36 Cleric of Hades was blasted off his Nightmare and had the good grace to look surprised and dismayed before plummeting to the ground. (He lived.)

What do you do when a party does something completely unprecedented and you've not prepared for that scenario? - The last time this happened (and I can remember the last time this happened) I laughed helplessly for a solid thirty seconds, then asked for five minutes so I could go plan out what was going to happen next. Your players will NEVER think badly of you for doing this, in fact they will take the time to crow and preen about how they were able to throw a googly past God. They should take pride in the fact that they've sideswiped you so hard.

Are there any particular setting or systems you just won't play in? - System AND setting? MERPS - Middle Earth Role Playing System. The fucking table game. Yawn. Uh. I don't find Paranoia that fun, but I can be convinced. There's a lot of systems I would rather not play but would give a shot to anyway, precious few that are Hard No systems. The ways you can guarantee me not wanting to play the game: 1) random generic medieval fantasy boredom, 2) modern world coffee shop roleplay without any differentiating factor from a soap opera, and 3) a rule system so loose and fluffy that it is basically just seven friendly thoughts printed on candy floss.

How hard is it to keep track of the math and modifiers during high level games? - It can get pretty difficult, depending on the game one is playing in, the class of character one is playing, etc. Playing a Level 20 Mythic 10 Cleric of the Goddess of Death was actually relatively easy once I'd done all the maths to work out precisely how many dice I rolled to achieve certain things. But that's the benefit of planning things out beforehand. There is no shame in having a cheat sheet. Attacks with and without power attack, against your chosen foe, using different weapons - work it all out ahead of time, maybe with the player at the table that really enjoys maths (me), and then you aren't stuck in a Number-Based Anxiety Loop when asked to roll to hit the Aboleth Goddess later.

What do you think people can gain from roleplaying? Not any one specific system or game but generally. - Lots of things. Empathy for one thing - pretending to be someone else can make you sensitive to their needs and the way in which they see the world, which can lead to understanding that other people are different but still worthy of care and attention. Problem-solving and teamwork are two gimmies, too. You take a bunch of office folks on a team-building weekend and a table full of gamers and give them the same challenge - using these materials to cross this river then climb this wall - and I guarantee you that the gamers will work out how it is done before the team-building folks even agree on who is in charge. Mathematic competency is helped by working with numbers constantly and there being a reward for making those numbers work. Descriptiveness, imagination, communication, social skills - all things improved by regular guided RP. I think schools should offer it as an after-school or lunchtime club activity, advertise it heavily and even reward those particularly devoted to it. It can offer so much.

Why is it more popular with boys/men? - I don't actually know, but I could probably lay the blame for that at the feet of the kind of culture that embraced D&D back in the eighties. As many jokes were made about girls not being allowed at the table as were made about D&D players being afraid of sunlight and not washing. I think, though, these days it is a lot more evenly split - and I know this is only anecdotal evidence from one perspective but I think over half of the people who contributed questions and anecdotes to this blog weren't male. So who knows? I think they should be for everybody.

How do you balance the needs of players who prefer narrative vs those that are all about the conflict/battle bits? - Difficult, but - as a player grows and gets better at gaming in general, they start to want to expand their horizons more. So no combat monkey will be a combat monkey forever. Usually. It's not always difficult to include narrative AND conflict, though. Sometimes that conflict can drive the narrative and inform it. Sometimes the war you are fighting is the story that you are following. In the end, though, it can be very rewarding to play a character who is good at one thing that is stuck in a situation where doing that thing isn't the solution. I particularly enjoy playing characters who are very combative who are put in scenarios that simply can't be solved by fighting. It's a challenge - it lets me get my beak wet in terms of roleplaying characters put in situations that aren't their standard fare. Though in the end, if you have a player who wants to quit the game because they only want to do A and there's too much B - that's a conversation to have. Everyone wants to have a good time at the table, and being constantly dragged away from the situation that you want to be in is no fun, but always getting what you want is no fun either.

I think another interesting one is how to control a setting if the actions of one player is stressing out another... - So that's not so much a setting issue as it is a party issue. I know this has happened in games I have played in and run, wherein one player goes full kamikaze and is intent on taking everyone else with them, or gets bored and goes off and does something that is widely accepted as being a Bad Idea. The thing with being a group of four imaginative people with different characters and abilities is that disagreements as to how to handle something often happens, especially if those characters have different morality systems. It's for this reason that I don't often run games in which people play evil characters, not because it stops folks disagreeing, but because a good character will try and reason with their wayward team-mate, whereas an evil character may well just murder or cripple them. If it is a question of someone doing something deliberately at the table that really stresses someone else out, then that's a thing that needs to be talked about out of game. Again, we're all here for a good time, not to be slaved to someone else's power fantasy - and if we can't come to an agreement on how not to fuck with each other, then someone has to step away.

Maps or no maps? - Depends on the game and the needs of the players. A dungeon dive without a map is difficult, and a game wherein knowing the facing and positioning of the enemy in a combat situation is important can usually be benefited by having a map. I tend to like running minds-eye though, because that way we can get into fun descriptiveness of kung fu style wire stunts and how we do things in relation to our opposition, rather than desperately trying to work out how to move those last three feet so you can get a +2 on your attack roll.

Dice or LARP? - I prefer dice, if only for fact that I am far less physically capable than 99% of the characters I would end up playing at a LARP. Not just in terms of beating snot out of people with boffer weapons but in terms of being able to stand up for more than ten minutes without being in significant pain.

From questions, we move onto anecdotes and contributions.

I contribute this, just for shits and grins - This comic is great, you oughta read it.

My dice bag is a snake! I only have one set of dice, tho, lol - Your dice bag is adorable and I love it. See below.

The only new RPG thing I’ve done recently is write an actual play for the first time. If you could mention it for me I’d be grateful. At nearly 8000 words of effort now I would love to have some more readers! - Which I will gladly do. The game is SLA Industries, something I have played and enjoyed myself, purely on the basis of there being a weapon called a Boom Hammer. A sledgehammer with a socket for a shotgun shell and a pressure plate that sets it off when you hit someone with it. You can find the AP right over here. Go look, folks. Follow with me the adventures of ACU Puncture limited.

How about the time I spent months setting up a transition to 2E on exalted online and had to go to a funeral and when I got back you and the rest of the team completed the transition and sanctioning with 0 problems. - I'm gonna lay that at the feet of your superb planning, because I don't remember having a lot to do with it. In terms of online RP, though, it's always good to have a reliable team under you in a chat environment. Nothing worse than constantly thinking you have to check up on the people allegedly meant to be helping you out.

In one of my first games (with my brother's friends) the DM had set up a big mystery for us to solve. I still don't know all the specifics, because it became one of those games where no one could get time to get together after the initial meeting, BUT! We were interrogating some low-level minion and getting nowhere when I looked at my spell list, leaned over to show it to my brother, and asked 'I can cast this, right?'. MY brother said 'yes' so I said 'I cast Zone of Truth!' The DM just about flipped the table, and we found out info that should have taken us several sessions right then not 5 min after we started. (and I'm not making this up cause of that famous DnD game thing, this really happened) - I love shit like this. It's what we live for. In fairness, though - the DM should know that the spell Zone Of Truth exists. Like, it would be pointless me planning on something being a secret if one of you can literally just pluck the idea out of my NPC's brain. Like, why wouldn't I use the tools in my toolbox to achieve my goals? When you have to get REALLY clever is when you want information to be kept secret but the party have all sorts of ways of finding it out - how to increase mystery while you have spellcasters that can scry on distant locations and know if the people they are questioning are telling the truth. That'll work out your writing muscles a bit. It takes the greater person to hold their hands up and admit that the party got around their little scam, though. Like you know you are a good DM when the party sees clean through your bullshit smokescreen and hits the nail on the head, and you can just admit that they did it and move on with the game.

Here's a good one. Back when I LARPed V:tM and W:tA, we used to congregate in the basement of the WTC. one night, cops had been called about some rowdy dude in the other tower - but they zeroed in on us... We all started getting up to leave, except the dude who was supposed to be "dead" at that moment... we had to spend 20 mins explaining to the cops that he was just unwilling to break character, and then four dudes hadda carry him out XD - When we LARP'd vampire, one of the folks that showed up to the game brought along a realistic prop of their character's primary armament. This ended up being a problem, because their primary armament ended up being an MP5 with a laser sight. We're out in this park at like 10pm and these two police walk past, and I have this perfectly framed view of the guy in question arguing with someone else, while these two coppers clock the fact that he has what looks like a machine gun strapped to his chest... this was post-9/11 too.

I ran logistics for our LARP back 5 years or so ago. A friend of mine, who had been staffing, decided to play an event and call in all his backlogged production. I had to print up tags for 200 in-game "intoxicants". Took forever to get them all printed and cut, stamped and signed as legit. I deliver them, he goes into game and, within about 20 minutes, trades every single one of them to an NPC for in-game "drugs". >.< I was so freakin' mad. They then spent the rest of the event addicted to the in-game drugs and stealing everything that wasn't nailed down to fence for more drug money. I was actually in-game for that event, too, and we spent the entire event hiding every single bit of loot we acquired because they kept stealing everything. - Ugh. See, this is obnoxious. The idea of making someone put in the at-home work to make this scenario pan out... like, the amount of effort put in doesn't come close to equal to the payoff. I'd be mad too.

I would like to follow this little lot with a selection of links, to things that I think my gaming people will find good.

I'll start with a podcast that I really enjoy - Cosmic Crit. It's a Starfinder podcast, and Starfinder is one of the games I am really into at the moment. The players are neat people, the stories make me chuckle, and it's generally a good listen.

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about The Adventure Zone. It's longer, so there's more of a backlog to catch up on, but it's worth it. The McElroys are entertaining at the worst of times, and in this they are on fine form.

There's some folks on YouTube that deserve a look, too.

Satine Phoenix is involved in gaming on Twitch and has a lot of guests that are well worth a listen to. Also those ELF EARS I never thought I'd like something elf related but ELF EARS

Seth Skorkowsky will provide you with advice and anecdotes in his inimitable style. He's a funny guy who knows what he is doing.

Matthew Colville is someone I've only come into contact with relatively recently, but his three videos about politics are essential viewing for budding DMs.

And there you have it. One bumper crop of reader-contributed RPG content. Who'da thunk? It turned out pretty good. This is a topic I can hold forth about for aeons, so I'd best not dwell. Maybe once a month I can turn this blog into Dungeon Corner or something. I dunno.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading - if you contributed, thank you for your contribution - and if you're gaming this weekend, may the crits be ever in your favour!