Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Russet worked the nights of the 24th and 25th, last night we had a big dinner at the observatory. Because of a snow fall and no weather warm enough to melt it, telescope close conditions were really tight and the telescope was closed most of the night because of snow on top of the dome.

We got two pre-prepared pork loins from the grocer, just bake and serve. I made an excellent sauce from PEPSI, plus brown sugar, ketchup, some spices, and the addition of some chipotle powder. Major hit. A second sauce, made of Guinness and cherries, did not work nearly as well. Also featured were two salads, lots of good home-made bread and European butter, and sweet potatoes. Dessert were my eggnog ice cream, my flourless chocolate cake covered in chocolate mousse, and Russet's co-worker made some mini-pies - apple cranberry - that were wonderful. A very yummy repast and no food comas afterward!

Afterwards we played a new(?) game called The Plot Thickens. It's a cooperative story-telling game with cards for People, Places, and Things. We played the science fiction edition, I also have the romance and detective editions, and you can combine the sets - it doesn't slow down the game, just gives you more descriptors to work with and expands the number of people who can play. The rules are identical between the three editions.

It was a lot of fun, and we ended up with a pretty screwy story. I started off with selecting the Cadet card as my persona (from three cards) and went with Spaceman Spiff from Calvin and Hobbs. I was flying around on with jet pack, having just left my quarters when I saw lava consuming the warehouse of the base! For every card you link into your story, from your hand you get a point that you can spend. Then when you incorporate a card that someone else has played up in front of them into your story thread, you get to move that point onto their card and it counts as a scoring point.

We had an undead electrical vampire (Russet), a space princess (Russet's co-worker), and a monster trainer (Dave). It was really weird. :)

The first round you introduce your character then play as many cards as you can, building your story. That earns you the initial points that on subsequent rounds you expand your story to tie to other people's starting story. Then the final round you still expand your story so that others can play on it and try to spend all your points on other's stories. I expect adding the romance and detective sets would be a blast, and can't wait to see/hear about people playing it at Escapade and ConStrict! (Russet will be at the former, hopefully both of us at the latter)

We had fun, just played a three-round intro game to get a feel for the rules with four people. Each expansion your scoring tokens are a different shape, so with all three expansions you could have a game of a dozen people! Keeping track of other people's stories could get really complicated, though.

I knew Ars Technica would have a write-up on the passing of Klaus and how much Catan means around the world.

Monopoly is/was held as a pinnacle of board games. I hate it with a deep and abiding loathing reserved for things that I deeply and abidingly loathe. It is a horrible game. This article quotes a statistic that says the average Monopoly set is played ONE POINT FIVE TIMES. Now THAT is a truly horrible game! It isn't FUN because you're constantly getting screwed, people are eliminated one by one. It is a runaway winner game: once someone gets certain properties and has hotels on them, game over.

There are house rules that can slow this down, but the progression is largely going to be the same.

Catan, and other games like it, brought cooperation into competitive board games. And you can feel like you're in the running until the very end, so you have a reason to pay attention to what's going on. In the case of Catan, you are encouraged to cooperate and trade resources with others in order to complete your personal goals. The infamous "I have wood for sheep" became a part of gaming vernacular because of Catan, in this case, someone wanting to trade wood for needed sheep.

I didn't hate Monopoly when I was young, but I never liked it. It just wasn't fun. Now, this was back in the '60s and '70s, Euro Games hadn't really been invented yet and we were stuck with what we had. As I grew older and experienced a wider panoply of games, I saw the flaws for what they were: eliminating players/zero-sum, and runaway leaders. And now, I don't know of any games that I own that have these characteristics. When I get a game like Monopoly, or someone gives me a set, I harvest the money and the pawns and consider keeping the board, all for repurposing for game designs that I work on. It never gets played.

Last year my middle niece got married, and their registry asked for board games. I looked at that list and said 'Nope, no way. They're getting some QUALITY intro board games from me!' And among them, I gave them Carcasonne, a brilliant tile-laying game about building castles and towns in medieval France. Every game is completely different, you play to the end and it's a lot of fun. You score points every turn, which helps you feel like you're accomplishing something. My nieces, sister, and parents already had a lot of experience playing Quirkle, a color/shape tile-laying game, where, again, you score points every turn and there are a couple of twists that can really boost your score! AND you draw tiles from a bag, which is cool.

Now, Catan itself, I'm not a huge fan of. Perhaps if I played it more some of the deeper strategies would sink in and I'd do better at it. But it's a good enough game and I have a couple of copies including some expansions that I bought when game stores went out of business. But socially, an infinitely better game than Monopoly. Everyone participates, even when it's not your turn: while only the turning player can make trades, you might have extra sheep you can offer up and better your own position while helping someone else.

Even if I'm not a huge fan of it, Catan is a great game and well worth people's time. It is not hideously complex, and it's a fast game to learn and play, it typically finishes in about an hour. When was the last time you were able to play multiple games of Monopoly in an evening and enjoy it?

RIP, Klaus. Ya done good and made a huge number of people happy.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/klaus-teuber-made-catan-and-it-changed-the-worlds-expectations-for-board-games/

The comments on this Ars article are excellent and a recommended read. You really get a feeling for how many people his game touched.

And one last comment. While Klaus did a great job, he is just one of the great game designers out there. Reiner Knitzia is right up there with an insane number of games to his credit, as is Friedman Frisch with the great game Power Grid. Both win awards. There are far more out there than I'll ever be able to name.

I have a band in the game, I can muster eight players. I have my main paid account, plus seven free-to-play accounts, which exist only to provide me with additional musicians. I can run all eight copies of the game on my 32 gig Asus gaming laptop. If I want, I can also run one of my wife's accounts for nine. And I'm planning on bringing that number up to 11 as I have some more complex songs that I want to play.

The way music works in-game is you find a MIDI version of a song you like, let's say Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick. You run a program called Maestro, or other similar programs, that converts it to a music format called ABC. ABC is a text file that breaks the tracks in the MIDI into a text representation, it's been around for ages - predating computers - and is a file format that can be read by the game and played by characters in-game! We have frequent band jams/dance parties, both spontaneous and planned. Tuesday night was planned.

If a MIDI cooperates, I can convert a song from MIDI to ABC in 5-10 minutes and preview it in a program called ABC Player, which takes as long as the song actually is. I also need to play it in-game, because the ABC Player isn't always 100% faithful to how it sounds in-game. That takes time, because you have to start up all the instances, load the players, start a party, invite everyone, load the correct instruments, tell them to load the song, then FINALLY you can start play! It takes some effort.

All that setup takes time, usually you do the MIDI/ABC conversion and preview of a whole bunch of songs, then fire up LOTRO, set up your band, and preview a whole bunch of songs in a private place. Make notes on changes that you need to do, and you're good. So that way you're only spending setup time once.

Last night we were playing in Bree, a famous town of the first book of Lord of the Rings and a major city in the game. We're down at South Gate, where we frequently play. One of the bands whom I regularly play with, led by Fersinda, we got in to playing as much Jethro Tull as we could, going back and forth. It was well after midnight, finally a friend announced we could play one more song each, then she had to leave. That was fine, I also needed to get to bed. I suggested to Fersinda that we each play Bouree, a wonderful instrumental based on a work by Bach. Fersinda's version is awesome! Mine I'd never played before in-game, I'd just made it last month.

So she player hers. I played mine. Mine was better than I expected, had some good points and was well-received. I used a harp in place of a piano and a special deluxe bassoon instead of a flute, and it sounded pretty good. And we realized we used the same MIDI to make our songs! Completely different ABCs, but same MIDIs.

And I think it was Fersinda suggested we should play them synchronized.

AND WE DID.

We had both split our songs in to four parts (four musicians), with different instrumentation. We grouped our bands together into something called a raid party, it allowed us to have all eight of us in one group and to start our songs simultaneously. We faced off several yards apart, which was my suggestion, to create a more pronounced stereo effect. She loaded up our musicians from her version on her computer, I did the same with my version from my computer, and did I a /playstart, which triggers our musicians to start playing simultaneously.

It was amazing.

The synchronization was perfect, and standing in the middle between the two bands was fantastic! You could spin your character around and the song swirled and was just incredible! I had dismissed the rest of my band, but brought back one so I could run around and listen because if you move a musician while they are playing, you break their playing and you can't re-enter a song.

The friend who was going to bed, Dreamy, then set up so she could record it - she's going to post it on a private YouTube channel! So we moved a little closer and did it a second time. It was so cool, I can't wait to hear the video! We're going to do it on a regular Friday night band jam at the Pony, one of the inns in Bree, but not this week.

Here is a Youtube recording of the album track of Tull:

My friend Rich is running an RPG set in Three Musketeers era France, only there's also some magic. We're using a rules system called Fortune's Fool, which is pretty neat. It's diceless: you use a tarot deck to resolve all events.

I've only gotten to play in it twice since he has the sheer temerity to run it 500 miles from where I live! But my wife Russet and I did get to play in it Saturday night. We had a tradition, once upon a time, while playing Champions, to write up mission reports after an evening's play, and we'd award XP since that became a record of the campaign that could be referred to. Even though Rich hasn't announced he'll give rewards for such things, I felt it incumbent upon me to write one up and really get in to the language. My character is a musketeer of de Tréville's troop and was assigned an investigation by he himself, so I thought the report fit the situation quite well.

It probably doesn't help that I've been reading Beethoven's letters.

For those of you who couldn't care less about such things, I've placed it all behind a cut.

( Read more... )

Perty darn spiff!

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/rpg_haiti.php

Talk about gobsmacked! Apparently Topps/Wizkids are CANCELING EVERY LINE except for HeroClix! I didn't like the feel when they merged with Topps, and now we know the results. So are the only games that we're going to see in the future HeroClix and sports stuff, and that's it? They made so many cool games, and now they're all gone?

*sigh*

And I really wonder what happened to my default picture of me in my Ren Fest garb.... IT'S A PLOT, I TELL YOU!

http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/11/wizkid-games-ma.html

I've played D&D before, somewhere I have most of the original white box set from the 70's. I've never much liked the game for a variety of reasons, my favorite game is Champions (superhero RPG), again, for a variety of reasons.

Well, the person who wrote this review has been playing and running for over 15 years, and he's written what seems to be a pretty fair first impression review of the system. It sounds like WotC has made two tremendous improvements in the game: first, the system has been smoothed out so that the different character classes are more uniform, second, and most important, they've made MAJOR improvements in the organization of the rule books. Everything the players need to know to run their characters is in the players handbook, everything the GM needs to know is in the GM guide. I've thought that D&D has been horribly organizaed since the beginning and always found this to be a major turn-off.

So congrats to D&Ders, sounds like you've got a lot of fun ahead. That doesn't mean that I'm running out to buy a copy and start running it, but if someone I knew started running it, I'd be more receptive to consider playing in a campaign.

http://www.gnomestew.com/specific-rpgs/a-gms-first-impressions-of-dnd-4e-looks-like-fun

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/07/1932233