DnD Next: Is it any good? Part 4

This week's entry focuses on the rules that relate to what happens at 2nd level, as this is what came up the most often during our session.

Wizard Feat: Sculpt Spells

This one caused some confusion amongst our Wizards, but once we'd worked it out we thought it was a pretty good rule. How it works is this:

"When you cast a spell that affects other creatures, you can choose a number of creatures equal to the spell’s level + 1. The chosen creatures automatically succeed on their saving throws against the spell, and they take no damage if they would normally take half damage from the spell."

Nice function but we struggled to find its application, since the whole point of casting spells that affect creatures is to do damage. Then we figured out that it's actually so that you can cast an Area-Of-Effect spell into a combat and avoid damaging your allies. This is a tactic I have seen employed in some coverage of video RPGs, where the player puts the Fighter forward to take on a horde of low-level monsters, and the Wizard casts an area-of-effect spell on the Fighter - who can take it - and kills the monsters surrounding him. It's not one I've ever seen put to use in a pen-and-paper RPG, and I've never been tempted to do it myself. I'm used to Warhammer and 40K where you can't usually deliberately target an attack of any kind at your own units, so it's never even occurred to me to try. Suddenly I'm now aware that it's a legitimate tactic to deliberately damage one of your allies for the greater good of further damaging the monsters surrounding him, and with this new rule Sculpt Spells, we might avoid even that. It's looking pretty good for Wizards!

Fighter Feat: Action Surge

I think this might have been a 4th Edition Feat at some point, where a fighter would get a bonus for burning an action point. As Action Points no longer exist in this edition of DnD, I guess Wizards had to come up with some way of making Fighters both interesting to play and having a reasonably large effect on Combat. I don't know about you, but when I've played Fighters in the past, they've rarely been the powerhouse of the party, instead taking the rather spongey role of soaking up as much damage as possible and keeping the heat of the Wizards and Rogues.

This new version of the feat Action Surge allows the players to take an additional action in one turn. There are a number of potential applications for this, not the least of them the notion that fighters can now attack twice in one turn. They can also use Hustle to close the distance between the enemies and follow it up with an attack, plus they can disengage if need be. I'm looking forward to seeing some creative use of this rule in future sessions!

Levelling up and Customisation

One problem that I have run into is that the beta rules as published don't allow for much customisation when it comes to levelling up. The players are on a track of feats and class features that they automatically get when levelling up, and there's no room for things like multiclassing and copying spell books (both were suggested to me during the session.)

I think this is more to do with the way the Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle adventure and rules were designed, rather than a flaw with the game, as I'm hoping the full game will allow you to do both of those things and much more. The problem is that this adventure was designed to be run at GenCon over a weekend, not an 8-week rotation at a roleplaying club. In terms of character design, taking a linear track in any kind of mid-long term environment is not going to entertain people for long.

It seems to me that what a lot of people are looking forward to seeing are the rules for character generation and the level-up progression. As they almost always take up the better part of just about every RPG rulebook I've ever read, I wasn't the slightest bit surprised to find that the part of the PDF that relates to the actual rules is about 10 pages long. What comes out of this remains to be seen but I can't imagine there won't be at least some space for customisation, given that this is what most people find the most interesting about their games - creating their own characters...

See you next time!

No Game New Year part 4: Progress with GTAV, an awful Blood Bowl competition and temptation...

Todays post may come across as a little negative but if it does it's not because of any ill feeling towards the challenge or anything like that, it's just that the balance of things that have happened this week won't necessarily come across too well when written down.

Temptation 1: Dust: Elysian Tail

So this week I had my first real temptation to jack it all in and buy a new game. You see, I've recently become a fan of TotalBiscuit, and in my quest to try and watch every single video the man has ever made (or at least, all of his WTF is... series,) I occasionally come across a game I want to try. This doesn't happen very often as TB is a PC gamer first and foremost, and I don't own a PC that even comes to within a country mile of being powerful enough to run most modern games, but sometimes he covers games that have come out on the Xbox360 as well, and depending on what he's said about the game, sometimes I feel compelled to give it a go.

The video I watched in this case was the one where he covers Dust: Elysian Tail. The game looked really good and I'd love to have a go with it. One of the great things about TotalBiscuit is that he often covers indie games. I love it when reviewers do this because there's tonnes of the things out there and I can't be bothered to trawl through all of them to find one that's any good. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to support indie developers. I think a lot of the time you get Triple-A games that have had huge development teams, massive production companies backing them and a large potential audience, and somewhere between the initial idea for the game and it's fourth or fifth iteration (I'm looking at you, Tony Hawks Pro Skater) they lose sight of what the game was trying to achieve in the first place. So if the indie developers have a small enough gig going on that they can maintain their vision for the game, AND make enough money to support themselves, I'm very happy to support them - if they come up with good games. If they don't, then I don't want to buy them, simple as that, so I'd like to thank TB and anybody else who covers indie games for being a part of the process of sorting out the good games from the bad ones.

By the way, just so we all know, I bought Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons on Total Biscuit's recommendation back in November, and Rad Raygun on the Happy Videogame Nerd's recommendation late last summer. I've finished both games so they probably won't come up again in this series. In the spirit of the challenge, I did not buy Dust: Elysian Tail, and I saved myself £9.99 (about $15). But I'll put that on the list of games I might buy next year, and see how it all looks then!

Grand Theft Auto Five

There isn't much I've got to say about this game in the rather major terms of storytelling and game mechanics that I've been talking about up until now, simply because I haven't had that much time with the game so there's not really all that much to say. The plot, as they say, is thickening, and I'm getting a lot more missions now that are conducive to the metaplot of the whole game now rather than 'filler.' It's a great, compelling story, but to be honest I'm at the point now where I'm looking forward to playing another game, and wondering what the next one is going to be. But I'm choosing to be hopeful that my victory over GTAV will be all the more sweeter for all of this.

That being said, there are still some aspects of the game that are fantastic and worth commenting on:

• For the longest time I didn't realise that you could reply to some of the emails that you are sent! I've already commented on how much Michaels issues resonate with me, and seeing the emails between Michael and his daughter Tracey were quite poignant for me because it reminds me that Michael's issues with his family aren't going away just because you're playing a game.
• I did, for the first time in a long time in any game, a bit of exploration that wasn't on the map, by which I mean there's no towns, missions, any reason for me to go there. I was, in fact, on my way to somewhere on the North side of the map (I forget the name of the town) and I tried to see if I could do it by driving an all-terrain vehicle up the mountain range blocking the most direct route. I didn't manage it in the end, but I'm determined to come back at some point and try again on a dirt bike. There's not many games in which I find entertainment by trying to traverse a difficult piece of ground! 
• Having now done several missions in a plane and/or helicopter, I have to say the flight mechanics of this game are superb and the best I've seen in any game in a long time. I don't really play air combat games anymore so this isn't saying much, but given that the controls for them the last time I tried (early 00's, at the latest) were either naff or overly complicated, it's nice to see that they're finally getting it right.

I don't remember playing much multiplayer, but the one time I did, I'm going to have to call out the douchebag who, on the Saving Ryan's Privates level, took it upon himself to climb into a tank, and destroy all the vehicles on the level so that nobody else could use them. Thanks for that, it was re-he-hearly good fun playing with you. Ass.

Blood Bowl

Oh dear Lord I've had a bad run of games this week. I took part in The Aerial Cup, and managed to lose every single game I played. This was partly due to my lack of tactical acumen, partly due to the fact that in any game where you can get screwed by the dice, you WILL get screwed by the dice, but mostly because the other teams were just better than me. Here's how it all went down:

I began by managing my team. The catcher Detlef Doolist went up to Level 3, and I gave him Diving Catch, which allows him to attempt a catch from both his square and all surrounding squares. Given how poorly this can turn out in games of Blood Bowl, I wanted to make sure he had as easy a time of this as possible. I also levelled up my other catcher, Dagonet Hupper, and gave him Sure Feet which allows him to re-roll Go For It rolls.

*Go For It: The last two possible squares of movement for any player are Go For It squares, where the player is expending a little more energy and taking a risk in making the manoeuvre. You have to make and pass a 'go for it' roll, or he will fall flat on his face and the turn will be over. I usually ignore it but twice last competition it was the difference between winning and losing so if I'm going to rely on it, I might as well give them a little something extra!*

Given that I rated my catchers and blitzers but didn't think much of my linemen, I signed a new player: Griswold the Angry. He was a Level 5 beast with Strip Ball (if you push the ball carrier he will drop the ball, whatever else happens) +1 armour and +1 strength, and sure hands. I also sacked Arnul the Beloved, as I had yet to use him and he wasn't doing me much good on the sidelines.

So, on to the games:

• Game 1 vs The gur'klash Murderers (Chaos) We got off to a promising start with my blitzer, Arnulf Ottman, benefitting from training and gaining +1 Strength for the match, but they had a Star Player, Grashnik Blackhoof (I think. My handwriting is bad to the point where even I can't read what I've written...) After a huge fight including several KOs from both sides and my other blitzer, Viscount Lutolf, suffering a  gouged eye, Chaos scored a well-deserved try. In the second half, the team busted through my appallingly leaky defence to score a second try. A good passing play from Arnulf Ottman to Detlef Doolist got the Nihilists a try, but it wasn't enough to save the game. No-Team Nihilists Lose, 1-2.
• Game 2 vs Da Spitgob Dribblerz (Goblins) There were no trys in the first half of the game, partly due to a scrappy set of passes from the goblins, and partly due to my linemen's complete inability to pick up a ball. In the second half, the goblins scored a point right before the end, we didn't manage to respond and Nihilists Lose, 1-0.
• Game 3 vs Noxious Nibblers (Skaven) Unfortunately for us, our training failed and the recently levelled-up Dagonet couldn't play. And if that wasn't bad enough, a pitch invasion knackered most of my team before the starting whistle had blown. The gutter runners got an early point - Christ, the Skaven are fast! We tried for a point near the end of the first half but the blitzer failed his Go For It roll. In the second half, the Skaven scored another easy, slippery try. Serange the Storyteller got in a late point, but it was purely to improve his stats as it was too little too late for his team. Nihilists lose, 2-1. Serange and Jek the Anti levelled up, and Block was given as a skill to both of them as this would in theory sort out a lot of what was going wrong with the dice.

Because of the way the competitions at this level work, we weren't out of the runnings yet, though our sponsors were not going to be happy:

• Playoffs: Noxious Nibblers This game got off to an absolutely appalling start when my throwers shoved a gutter runner into a clear path to the goal! They snuck another one in towards the end due to a mis-placed tackled. After one of my linemen narrowly escaped death, the gutter runners scored again. Enan the Applauder got one in after a huge fight, but with Skaven scoring again in the dying moments, we never had a chance. Nihilists Lose, 4-1.

However, Arne Rolf, one of my throwers, did win Best Passer of the game, so it can't be all that bad, can it? Well, let's hope it gets better for next time...

Thunderstone at Titan Games, 20/1/2014

It has been a long, long time since I've played this game. Usually when I play games with Dave, we try playing things that run a little faster than this. But it's also the game I have that supports up to five players, and one I thought would be good to play in a shop environment so I bought it to Titan games and played a game against Steve Hinnett.

It's been a while since I've posted about this so to summarise how it works: It's basically dungeon-bashing with cards. You attack monsters in a 'dungeon,' with penalties based on how deep into the dungeon you're going, with your cards that grant a certain amount of attack power. You can also visit the 'village' and spend the gold your cards give you to get more heroes, spells and items to improve your performance. The idea of the game is to get to the Thunderstone, and as soon as one player obtains it, the game is over - and the person with the most victory points wins.

I got off to a good start by drawing some hands powerful enough to overcome some low-level monsters at the start of the game, however we quite quickly became stuck at a Sphinx and a couple of Oozes. They both had a relatively large amount of hit points and the Sphinx can only be harmed by magic. Getting bogged down like this is nothing unusual in Thunderstone, and we had to spend a while building up our decks to the point where we could at least take out some of the Oozes. At this point I had two options: Build up a magical attack to take on the Sphinx myself, or wait for Steve to do it and build up a party of fighter-type heroes to follow up with some of the smaller monsters. The trouble is I never really decided which of these I wanted to do, with the result that I never really built up a powerful-enough attack to be much of a threat to the other monsters, and my magic was taking far too long to build up. Steve killed the Sphinx in the end and took a whopping 7 victory points from it.

We had to call time on the game because the shop was closing, so we took stock of what we had achieved up to that point. Steve had beaten me 19-14, largely due to the Sphinx, so well done to him for coming up with a game plan and sticking to it. Could I have pulled it back had the game gone on? Well, it's a possibility, but Steve had a huge amount of damage coming out by then, so the race would have been on.

Either way, we had a lot of fun playing it. It is a refreshing change from Magic The Gathering, where games are often won and lost on deck construction before you've even started playing. It is a balanced set of rules and cards, at least with two players, but one thing we've not been able to determine yet is how the game would play with more players. I suspect a larger level of resource-rush, because you'd have 3-5 people all going after the same resources which would be a lot more limiting, and of course there is always the possibility that this could de-rail the whole game, but we'd really like to check it out and see what happens.

Lets hope we can, in the not-too-distant future!

No Game New Year part 3: GTA 5 and a new Blood Bowl Season!

Hi there! A couple of things to talk about this week:

GTA 5

OK so I've been playing Grand Theft Auto 5 again for most of this week. It is as huge game and, as predicted, it is taking me a while! I'm around 55% of the way through the main game, and I'm up to level 6 in GTA Online.

From my previous write-ups, you might have picked up on the fact that I'm in two minds about a lot of the missions; wondering whether or not they were any good given that a lot of them are based around storytelling rather than free choice of how they are handled. Having now played through a lot of the game, there is one other factor that occurs to me, and that is variety.

Even though there is often only one way to complete a mission, every mission is different in some way to the one that you played previously. In fact, sometimes they are substantially different. It is quite rare in a game that I find myself saying "well I really should go to bed now, but I want to see what this next mission is; I'll just do one more." The variety of activities on offer here really makes for a much better game and as most of them can be wrapped up in 5-20 minutes of game time, you never really feel like you're stuck in a long section doing the same thing over and over again with no opportunity to take a break. So well done to Rockstar for that.

The cut-scenes, as I have described previously, are well done and actually capable of conveying some quite raw emotion. Often it's things that are to do with Trevor, as some of what he gets himself in to really makes you think "Whoa, I shouldn't be doing this..."

*SPOILER ALERT*

*One part that really made me quite sad was the mission where Michael and Trevor have to kill a guy on a plane, and pick up some files from the plane. You have to use a gun in a van to shoot down the plane as Michael, and then follow the plane on it's way down across half of the map with Trevor on a dirt bike. The thing is, when you're following the plane, the game patches you in to the radio chatter between air traffic control and the pilot of the plane you've just shot down. For about a minute and a half, you're speeding across the desert on a dirt bike, listening to the pilot as he's desperately trying to land the plane. You get the initial shock of being shot and subsequent recovery, the professional desperation as he tries to guide the plane to a landing strip, and the resignation in his voice when he realises there's no way he's going to make it and has no choice but to attempt an emergency landing in a field. This done, you approach the plane, kill the guy you were supposed to kill then board the plane to find the files. It then cuts to a scene where Trevor searches the cockpit to find the pilot - modelled as an older guy at least in his late 40s - dead from the impact of the crash. In typical Trevor style, he doesn't give the pilot a second thought, and this adds to the feeling of "the poor guy!" It's a rare game that can make me feel something like that about, well, not even a minor character really, more of a 'bit player.'*

This, combined with some of the other scenes where there characters have to look at the consequences of their actions, makes for quite an immersive experience. This is certainly more the case than pretty much any RPG I've played on the Xbox360 has done so far. I think it suggests that if it is possible to bridge the gap between video games and movies, GTA 5 is coming close to doing so.

Another few points:

• Great to hear Queen on the soundtrack! This should happen far more often.
• Thank heavens for the 'Quick Save' feature on the phone; it would have been incompetence of the highest order had saving been restricted to visiting your safe house (which can often trigger a mission.)
• I would love to say the stock markets are a nice feature in the game, but honestly I'm really not sure what I'm supposed to be doing with it.

Blood Bowl

Blood Bowl is a game I've owned for a while now, and by the standards of the Xbox360, it is very poor indeed. The graphics resemble a PS2/Xbox game, the gameplay could (and in fact does) work every bit as well on a hand-held console, the coding is poor (not that I would know about such things; it's something I've heard TotalBiscuit say,) and the dice mechanics take a lot of the skill out of the game.

The above comments are the bare-bones elements of the game, and sadly for the most part, Cyanide seemed content to leave it at that. For those of you who don't know, Blood Bowl is a strategy-sports board game originally published by Games Workshop, loosely based on their Warhammer mythos. You buy the game which includes the board, dice and a couple of 'teams,' you paint them yourself and build them however you want by buying new models for them - or build a different team entirely. Or at least, that was the case, though GW have now discontinued the so-called 'specialist' product line. Given all that, you would expect to see some customisation in how your team appears, or at least some variation in the colours, but there isn't. Your team either plays in red or blue. That's it. You don't even choose which colour. There is an online mode, but the asinine way in which it was handled means that there is no longer an online community to play it. Apart from the obligatory ranking system, there were no tournaments, no leagues, nothing to give the players anything more than they would have got it they'd have found some friends, bought the game, painted all the models and sorted the tournaments out for themselves. I understand that later versions were released on the PC and are now doing a little better, but I don't play games on the PC. I am therefore stuck with the 360 version - which had 1 DLC pack to add Dark Elves to the line-up and that was it - which is a substandard game to the point where it barely feels complete.

And do you know what? I absolutely love it.

I've been a fan of Warhammer and 40K for over half of my life, and sadly Blood Bowl had been and gone by the time I got in to it. The video game was therefore the only opportunity I was ever going to get to play it, and while it took me a while to get my head around it, soon I was winning matches, picking abilities for my players and really having some good fun with it. The campaign mode is basically a selection of competitions that you can enter, which as far as I can see is always a round-robin league followed by a knockout tournament. You have to have a certain number of points before some of the competitions can be accessed, and you have to go through the smaller tournaments before you can access the bigger ones. What is interesting is the way your team develops along the way, gaining Star Player Points (basically experience points,) new abilities, and even better attributes. And while the dice are used for this as well, the fact that you never really know what you're going to get until you've got it forces you to work with what you've got, rather than deliberately building an unstoppable set of abilities. Your players can grow old and have to retire, be injured which can reduce their attributes or give some other penalty, or get killed during the match and need to be replaced! Even without the potential level of customisation that game could have had, the storytelling potential of this game far outweighs any of the core mechanics and it is for that reason that even though I have owned the game for a year and a half, somehow I always seem to find time to go back to it.

I've never got to the end of the campaign though. This is largely because there isn't an end, but if I set a goal of participating and winning all the tournaments, I haven't done that yet. So, in the spirit of No Game New Year, now seems a good time to give it a go. This is likely to be an ongoing thing - I'll probably not do all of this at once, as the game can get a bit 'samey' watching the same thing happen over and over again. I might play through a competition once every couple of weeks, and see how it develops from there.

For a start, I should probably explain the block dice: Blood Bowl uses, for the most part, 6-sided dice, and this includes the dice to show what happens when you block (i.e. tackle another player.) If you choose to block a player, in most cases you roll 1 block dice and get 1 of the following results:

• Attacker Down - your player goes down which also forces a turnover (your turn ends.)
• Both down - both your player and your opponent's player goes down unless the Block skill is used. If your player goes down, it also forces a turnover.
• Pushed - the defending player gets pushed back by the attacking player
• Defender Stumbles - The defending player goes down unless he uses the Dodge skill
• Defender Down - The defending player goes down. This is the one you're usually looking for.

Some of the effects I will be describing here require you to understand the effects of the block dice, so I'll probably re-post this part whenever I talk about Blood Bowl.

So, here we go:

The Team

For the team I picked Humans. I would normally choose Chaos, as I love the style of beating everybody up with the score being a secondary consideration, but I play Chaos pretty much every time so I decided to go for Humans instead. In honour of the Challenge, I named the team The No-Game Nihilists. They consist of the following players:

Linemen: Ardtrui the Boss-eyed, Enan the Applauder, Seragne the Storyteller, Griswold the Punisher, Jek the Anti, Hector the Weeper, Arwod the Beloved and Woros the Mad.

Catchers: Dagonet Huppert, Detlef Doolist

Throwers: Arne Rolf, Gawain Rosulver

Blitzers: Viscount Lutolf, Arnulf Ottman

Ogre: Dur Head-Wrencher

The Clean Cup

This is always the first competition you enter. It is between four teams. The teams do a round robin league (every team plays every other team once) and then all of the teams are entered into the knockout stages at the end. The four teams were:

• No-Game Nihilists (Human, and also my team, so yay)
• Da Severed 'Eads (Orc)
• Noxious Nibblers (Skaven)
• Friends of the Wood (Wood Elves)

Once I had bought my team, I had no money left so I negotiated a sponsorship deal of 80% victories, 2 rankings and increasing my team value to 1150 (from 1000) by the end of the competition, for a further 21,000gp. I used this to buy a cheerleader and a 'fan factor' point.

Here were the results:

• Game 1 vs Da Severed 'Eads (Orc): An early try from Dagonet Huppert gave me the lead, but after this, the first half turned into a fight with neither side gaining the upper hand. The second half looked much the same way but the Orcs broke through and scored a try. It would have ended as a draw, but for a late try from a plucky lineman Griswold the Punisher, breaking through the Orc lines! Win for the Nihilists, 2-1. However, Thrower Gawain Rosulver picked up a smashed knee in the carnage, which will add +1 to any future injury rolls. Also, Orge Dur Head-Wrencher of all people levelled up, which was surprising as I don't remember using him very much in the game. I gave him Guard as a new ability, which allows him to assist other player's blocks even if there is another player in his tackle zone.
• Game 2 vs Noxious Nibblers (Skaven) Viscount Lutolf scored early on, and again after a brutal fight, meaning the Nihilists were 2-0 up going into the half. However, the second half was a stalemate, and neither side managed to score. Win for the Nihilists, 2-0, and incidentally the only point during the competition where the team managed to keep a clean sheet. Viscount Lutolf levelled up, and I gave him Tackle as his new ability, which effectively shuts down Dodge. I also bought an Apothecary, lest I get any more injuries...
• Game 3 vs Friends of the Wood (Wood Elves) You'd think, with such a rubbish team name, that this team wouldn't be any good. I've played Blood Bowl far too often to take Wood Elves lightly, but that didn't prepare me for the absolute pounding I got here. They scored quickly in the first half, and early in the second, and the only way I had a hope of pulling it back was to get 2 trys in about 6 turns. However, thanks to some appalling passing from my own team, it wasn't to be, and a final try from the Wood Elves sealed the deal with their only win of the competition. Nihilists Lose 0-3.

Still, it was enough to qualify, so:

• Playoff: vs Noxious Nibblers: This one didn't get off to a good start, as bribery had reduced the Movement Allowance of 2 of my players by 1 (down to 5.) However, we soon fought back, and Hector the Weeper got the first try. In the second half we looked to capitalise on our lead, but in doing so left the defence wide open and the Skaven scored. The game ended a draw, but in this round, it needed a winner. In an overtime that actually lasted longer than either half, and after most of the Skaven players were brutalised out of the game, Jek the Anti scored the final try - and he was one of the players who'd got bribed! This meant the game carried on a little longer (overtime goes on for a number of turns in a multiple of 4, and Jek scored at the beginning of the 25th turn so it had to run on to 28 before the game could end) but the Nihilists Won: 2-1. Detlef Doolist levelled up, which was a strange thing to happen as I don't actually remember him playing in the match. I gave him +1 movement; an ability would have been nice but the opportunity to increase an attribute is very rare and should not be ignored lightly!
• Final vs Da Severed 'Eads: This one started off well with an early try from Detlef Doolist, but after a massive srap, the Orcs scored just before the half. They pulled another one through early in the second half, and it all looked like it was going to the Orcs. Then, right at the last moment, a very risky pass play gave a Lineman the chance they needed to break through and score a try, forcing overtime. In the dying moments of this, Detlef scored another try and won the game for us. Nihilists win the match, 3-2 and are the winners of the Clean Cup.

We finished in the top position of the competition and are now 47/64 in the rankings. A good result, but one that will need some management if it is to be repeated. As you can tell from the scores, my defence was appallingly leaky, and it would be worth investing in some blocking skills for my Blitzers and Throwers (as they would usually play in the backfield.) Even my Linemen could benefit from this, as they are usually what has to be challenged in order to break through. But none of them are even close to levelling up yet, so we'll have to see what happens...

DnD Next: Is it any good? Part 3

Ado guys.

As we trek through the abandoned temple, two new rules came up this week that I wanted to tell you about:

Disengage

This is one of those situations where you have a new rule that's kind of a re-working of an old one, and it confused a lot of my players so I think it is worth mentioning. It basically concerns how you move out of combat without provoking an attack of opportunity. However, in order to explain the confusion, it is necessary to explain how combat worked in previous editions, and how it works now:

In Pathfinder and DnD 4th, you could usually take three actions: A Standard action, a Move action and a Swift/Minor action. Disengaging from combat - usually called a five-foot-step - was a Move action and could be done before or after your standard action, e.g. making an attack.

In this new edition of DnD, it doesn't work in quite the same way. You get a Move, and an Action. Move is just that - you move up to your maximum distance with all relevant regards for terrain, spell effects that affect movement etc. An Action is something you do in combat, which can either be an attack or some other action - like Disengage. So if you want to Disengage from your opponent, you have to do it instead of an attack.

The way the rule works is this: You move up to half your movement. If this takes you out of the reach of your opponent, they don't make an attack of opportunity against you.

Thinking about it, if you do this instead of making an attack but NOT instead of your move, that could potentially grant you 45ft (usually 9 squares) of uninterrupted movement. So, the rule is still useful, but its potential applications are different from the previous editions, where you would only be allowed to move 5ft. You might use it to beat a hasty retreat, or to reposition yourself at the other side of the battle.

That being said, I think I'm going to have to see it used more often before I can pass judgement on whether this rule is any good. It's certainly different from what I have been used to in the past!

Death

This came up a couple of times during the game last week and I actually got it wrong. Here's how:

In any RGP, falling to 0 hit points rarely kills you straight away. More likely you'll fall unconscious, and there's usually at least one mechanism in place to determine how much damage you can take before you actually die, and what you can do to prevent it. In the new edition of DnD, if you fall to 0 hit points, you fall unconscious, but any remaining damage still applies. If this takes you over your maximum hit points, you die. Which is fair enough, because lets be honest, any blow that can do that kind of damage to you would be pretty fierce! Otherwise, you just lie there until you either bleed out or stabilize - and this is the bit I got wrong, because I forgot to do it:

Each turn that you are at 0 hit points, you have to make a DC10 Constitution Saving Throw. If you pass 3 of them, you stabilize and are still alive. If you fail 3, you die. If you roll a Natural 20, you regain 1 hit point. If you roll a natural 1, you count as having failed 2 saving throws. I completely forgot to get my players to do this when they fell unconscious last session.

As it turned out it was unlikely to have made a difference either way, as in both situations the cleric got to them within one turn and cast Spare the Dying on them, which is a great little spell that revives an unconscious PC with one hit point. As he can do it as a cantrip (i.e. as many times as he likes,) then as long as he stays out of trouble, he can help the party if he needs to. And incidentally, I certainly like the idea of doing this as a spell, rather than relying on capricious dice rolls. I remember in 4th edition having to do it as a Heal check, and that could be the victim of some very poor rolling - though I never allowed that to result in character death if the players were doing the right things.

So that's what came up this week. Next week we're hoping to level up so we might be looking at some new powers and rules, let's see what happens there...

Magic The Gathering: Blue/White v Black.

I've decided to include my Magic: The Gathering games into the gaming blog, in case anybody is interested in hearing how my games went and also assessing my deck build. I played 2 games today in Titan Games, Stourbridge, and lost them both. Here's how it all went down:

My deck is Blue and White, and is built around the tactic of swarming the field with creatures and shutting down the opposing creatures. It was built as follows:

Mana:

• Island: 15
• Plains: 9

Creatures

• Coral Merfolk: 4
• Merfolk Spy: 1
• Air Servant: 2
• Seacoast Drake: 2
• Warden of Evos Isle: 2
• Messenger Drake: 1
• Wind Drake:1
• Seraph of Dawn: 3
• Serra Angel: 1
• Master of Diversion: 2
• Setessan Battle Priest: 2 (I managed to put these in without realising!)
• Deputy of Aquittals: 1

Other Spells

• Claustrophobia: 4
• Frost Breath: 4
• Riot Control: 1
• Spare from Evil: 1
• Show of Valour: 2

Artefacts

• Opaline Unicorn: 1
• Staff of the Mind Magus: 1
• Prowler's Helm: 1

Planeswalker: Venser the Sojourner.

The first thing to mention is that the games were one round each. The reason I've called it like that is because Steve used different decks for each game. They were both Black decks, but built slightly differently.

So, as I've mentioned, the tactic revolved around swarming the field with low-cost monsters, and doing as much as I could to make sure they were blocked as little as possible. It worked, but not quickly enough. My spells were getting through, but because they were low-powered attacks, they weren't hitting hard enough to stop Steve from building up an attack with his Black decks. But when it did work, it worked well, so I'm going to keep doing it.

I'm also going to change some of the deck:

I'm going to add 10 cards to it to bring it up to 72. This is because of my... thing with the numbers 4, 8 and 6, and 72 is the nearest legal limit of cards that divides into those three numbers. I've also swapped out both Setessan Battle Priest cards for two Scroll Thief cards, because their effect of allowing me to draw a card when they do battle damage is better conducive to my strategy. In addition to this I have added:

• Isperia's Skywatch: 2
• Opaline Unicorn: 1
• Darksteel Ingot: 1
• Celestial Flare: 1
• Solem Offering: 2
• Annul: 1
• Island: 1
• Show of Valour: 1
• Congregate: 1
• Archaeomancer: 1

We will see how this works out next time!

D&D Next: Is it any good? Part 2

Hi there.

A bit late with the blog this week, sorry about that, but I'm here now and I've got one or two new rules to discuss that came up in last week's session. But before we do that, here's a few contextual qualifications:

• This week we actually had 7 people playing. If you've read the adventure then you know that there are only 6 pre-gen characters, and might be wondering how I've managed it: I let the 7th player have the NPC with strict instructions on how that NPC was supposed to be run. I did that because of the context of the club: It's a social club and there are around 30 of us; the 7th player hadn't got a game for this rotation and between having an NPC and not playing, he was grateful for the opportunity to get involved!
• We're up to the 'Dungeon Crawl' part of the adventure so a lot of the new rules I'm going to discuss relates to what happens in combat.
• I tend to contrast the rules to Pathfinder and 4e because those are the systems that I am a) most used to and b) consider the most relevant to the discussion, Pathfinder being DnD's closest rival and 4e being the system that 5e is replacing.

So here's the first new rule for this week:

Critical Hits

Of course, this is nothing new. Pretty much every game system I have played so far has used some form of Critical Hit system, or at least a better than average result if a certain set of conditions are met (usually to do with the dice.)

This one functions well enough: You get a critical hit if you roll an unmodified, or 'natural' 20 on a D20. You then add one more of the same kind of dice you would normally roll when rolling for damage, add the numbers together and the result is the amount of damage you do. For example, if you were attacking with a short sword, you would normally roll 1D6 for damage. If you get a critical hit, you roll 2D6 and add them together.

Is this a good system? In principle, yes it is. Taking the 'bell curve' mechanics of dice into consideration, the average score on any number of dice other that 1 (provided you're rolling the same kind of dice) is this: n*s/2+n-1, where 'n' is the number of dice you're rolling and 's' is the number of sides of the dice. This means that you can expect to roll a slightly higher number on two of the same kind of dice than the maximum possible score on one of that kind of dice.

Or, taking the super-nerdyness out of it, it basically means that at Level 1 you can expect to do a little bit more damage off a critical hit than you would have done if you'd rolled the highest possible score off a regular hit. Which works well enough for me.

It's certainly a lot more straightforward than Pathfinder's system of critical hits, which is comprehensive to the point of being convoluted. To be fair, it has to be; there is a huge range of weapons involved with this game and it needed a system that could accommodate the nuances of all of them. But it's still a long-winded process. For a start, some of the weapons have a 'critical threat range,' meaning that some of them will score a critical hit on a roll of 19, and if I remember rightly I think one of them will even do this on a roll of 18. You write this down on your character sheet, but you've still got to remember to do it. And then there's the 'threat' system. Because you see, rolling a critical hit is not enough. Rolling a natural 20 or whatever you need only threatens a critical hit; you still need to confirm it by rolling to hit again. Thankfully, if you miss, you've still hit, just not with a critical.

This makes critical hits very hard to get off in Pathfinder, because you've effectively got to roll to hit twice. I understand why this needs to happen though: the effect of the critical hit is that the damage doubles, and sometimes even trebles depending on the weapon. Given the range of hit points you usually have to work with in Pathfinder, and the damage potential of some of the weapons and especially magic weapons, this should not happen lightly. But it still makes for a complicated procedure.

On the other hand, DnD 4th goes perhaps a little too far the other way. With that system, if you get a critical hit, you automatically do the maximum possible amount of damage. This might not seem like much, but combine this with some of the powers and you've got a potentially horrific amount of damage that can be applied. It has to happen this way because of the range of hit points that monsters etc tend to have in 4th; in order for critical hits to mean anything you have to be reasonably certain of a large amount of damage if they hit. But it does take some of the fun out of rolling the dice to see what happens when you score a critical hit. It works for the system, but nothing more.

So what we have here with Next is a nice kind of middle ground that works well enough at lower levels and I'm assuming will scale up well with upper levels of play, Or at least it would work well if the players hadn't rolled appallingly badly for damage both times it came up during the game.

Movement

Movement could cover all sorts of things really but there was one particular part of the process that caught our eye during the game: You can move both before and after your attack.

This is a rule that took me somewhat by surprise as it dispenses with the usual combination of Standard Action/Move Action/Minor Action or however they're articulated in the various games. Instead of that, you are allowed to move a certain distance and, as long as you don't go over it, it doesn't matter when in the turn you do it. You can do it before your action, after your action or even both. This effectively means that you can move, attack and then move again.

I didn't expect this to be deployed all that much because to do this would provoke an attack of opportunity, but we actually found it surprisingly useful for repositioning yourself if you manage to kill whatever you were attacking. Now that we're aware of this I expect to see it used a lot more!

Flanking (or lack thereof)

This seems an odd thing not to put in the game given how long we've all spent working it out before, but there is currently no provision in the rules for flanking. I expected this to be a part of the advantage system mentioned last week, but I have yet to find a rule that says so.

This is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it takes a lot out of the clever flanking tactics used in previous editions. On the other hand, we're not slowing the game down to a crawl as we try to work out whether our position gives rise to flanking or not. It's a peculiar change but one that I would welcome, since all it would usually do is give you a +2 bonus to hit. Rogues still have their sneak attack, but this applies when attacking any enemy adjacent to an ally, and when you have advantage.

The only way flanking would come in to it that I can see is by what the game is calling situational modifiers at the DM's discretion, where the DM might decide you have a better or worse chance to hit due to a situation beyond the player's control. But this applies to things like applying cover, and it never mentions flanking.

We will see where this takes us!

No Game New Year Part 2: Grand Theft Auto 5. This is going to take me a while...

Hi there.

So No Game New Year is going well so far in the sense that I haven't given in to temptation and bought a new game. Early days, I know. But it's rare that we get this far in to new year and I haven't so much as set foot in a game store! In terms of my progress with GTA 5, I wasn't expecting to have much time to play this week due to work/band/Dungeons and Dragons/girlfriend commitments, but an unexpected day off work on Wednesday (I was sick with a cold) meant that I had some time between sleeping and eating to go through the game and I'm up to roughly 28% so far.

Two major things to mention today, and the first is character development. I'm actually really impressed with how this is working out. Michael, Franklin and Trevor (I've now found all three) are their own characters. There is evidence of crime movie tropes within them, but they all have there own different ways of dealing with things and people, and it makes them a lot more believable than characters in video games might otherwise be.

This is quite hard to explain without giving away spoilers, but I think I can say with some certainty that Michael is the character I can most relate to at the moment. In terms of the decisions I've made that have affected the course of my life, I haven't always got it right, and now that I'm 28 I have to live with the consequences of those decisions. And while my personal issues aren't on quite the same level as Michael's problems, it does make me empathise with him. He's well aware of his faults on being too quick to anger, but is desperately trying to make things work with his family, only to have it all blow up in his face because in reality, the damage was done a long time before... and he is forced to follow the only option left open to him.

Contrast this with Trevor... if you've played the game, you'll know what I mean when I say he is at the same time the most and least likeable character in the entire game. Yes, he is an absolute badass. But at the same time, playing as him, or watching his cut scenes, actually makes me feel very uneasy. You've got no idea when he's talking seriously about something or is about to lose it completely and violently murder somebody, or both. He is clearly a very dangerous man, fitting for a GTA game, but not a comfortable or enjoyable character to play. I'll tell you what he's like: He's like the 'hard' people I knew at school, the violent aggressive gang of bullies that prided themselves on nothing but their opinion that they could beat up anybody in the whole school. The only method I had of dealing with those people was to avoid them if at all possible, and if our paths ever did have occasion to cross, I had to keep my head down, my mouth shut, and utter a silent prayer to a God I didn't believe in that they wouldn't decide to mess with me today. That's what it was like when we were all 15. Trevor looks to be around 45, and it looks much, much worse.

And if you're wondering why I'm going in to such depth about the characters... well, that's how good this game is. It actually makes you care about the characters involved. So yeah, well done for that.

My second point regards the missions. If you read last week's blog you'll recall I talked about the missions that, while good in their own way, lacked variety in the ways you might approach them. This didn't change all that much to begin with. Again, the missions worked well as set-pieces, and the Heist missions (of which I have done one) give a choice when planning them of a gung-ho or stealthy approach which was nice, but once you actually get to playing the game, it does sometimes feel like an elaborate game of Simon Says.

This got better once Trevor came in to it. Once this happened, I noticed a lot more of, shall we say, 'classic' GTA missions where far from running and gunning, you actually have to think about how you're going to do it. For example, the mission where you have to destroy the O'Neil farm is an absolute beauty. While I'm sure it's possible to rush the whole farm with the right combination of weapons and armour, I actually prefer sniper rifles, even if I am appalling at using them. The game really did make you think about what group of enemies would be best to take out first, what weapon to use, and whether another option is available to you. In the end, I took out the middle rank of guards first with the sniper rifle, the front two using stealth, and by the time I got to the house, there were few enough left to make running and gunning an impossible task so I got to do a bit of that as well. Now, this might have been the optimal way to do this mission, I don't know. But the crucial point here is that the game let me figure it out. It didn't keep flashing pop-up messages at me saying "Take these guys out with the rifle" or "Stealth-kill these guys." That made for a much more enjoyable experience. I would like to see more of this as the game progresses. As I said before, I am aware that some of the missions were designed as set-pieces and have to play out in a certain way. But it's good to have a little bit of choice in the matter.

I also noticed the 'Skip' button, where if you fail a mission three times you can choose to skip it. I've never deployed this, but I'm assuming it means that the game will continue as though you had finished the mission, even though you hadn't.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I can see why it has to exist. The storyline and character development have been by far the strongest point of the game so far and you wouldn't want to de-rail the whole thing because you got stuck. On the other hand it can take a lot of the challenge out of the game simply by giving you the chance to avoid it. And not in a clever, Metroid-Vania style 'cast-a-spell-that-turns-you-in-to-a-bat-and-allows-you-to-fly-over-the-fight-you-can't-do' way, because at least you have to find the spell that turns you in to a bat and you can give yourself a pat on the back for figuring out that particular strategy. No, this literally allows you to skip the bit you're on, like a level skip cheat on a Sega Megadrive/Genesis game, only this time you don't even need the cheat code.

Well, fair enough, if that's what it needs to keep the story going then that's what it needs. But I'm unlikely ever to use it myself. I'd be depriving myself of the immense satisfaction of either figuring out how to do a tricky mission, or getting past a tough part; that's where the game gets really good and I'm not going to throw it away!

A few additional points:

One of the things Rockstar don't really appreciate - and to be fair, they're not the only ones, I've seen quite a few games do this - is that not all of us have screens the size of classroom whiteboards. Mine is about 16 inches by 9, and due to the layout of my bedroom, this is not likely to change. While this rarely gives me a problem in playing the game, it does make the text a little difficult to read. Particularly in this game where messages come through the cell phone, I've really had to strain to read some of those text pieces. A bit bigger please, guys!

I've had a go with some of the mini-games as well, namely Tennis, Darts, and 'that' section of the strip club. They function well for what they are, but they are far too easy. Maybe it's because I've played Topspin on the old Xbox, which works in much the same way as the tennis game in GTA 5, but it was much too easy to beat the computer, and not that hard on Multiplayer either. Yeah I get it, they've made GTA 5, not a tennis game, but it takes some of the fun out of it knowing there's almost no challenge in there. Then again, maybe I'm just not playing the right people.

I also had a go with GTA Online and I'm liking that a lot better now that it's not just a free-for-all and there are actually some missions involved with it, as well as some more conventional multiplayer modes like death matches and team battles. I'm not awful at this, (I am in some other games) but I'm not great at it either. I think in some cases I have pissed off members of my team, not because I don't know what I am doing but simply that I'm not very good at doing it. But it's enjoyable enough, and probably as good as an online version of GTA is going to get.

We'll see how far next week takes us!

5/1/2014: Warhammer 40K: Chaos Space Marines vs Space Marines.

This match took place in Titan Games in Stourbridge between me and my opponent who is also called Matt. I had Chaos Space Marines, Matt had Space Marines, and we played a 1500 point game.

Now I'm going to say straight off the bat that this one ended in a draw due to time-out after the 3rd turn out of potentially 7 (the shop was closing.) Matt had the advantage on victory points and the game had the potential to turn into a complete bloodbath, but he's a really nice guy and was gracious enough to call it a draw. As the game did not have time to reach its conclusion, it won't be the usual blow-by-blow account. Instead, I'm going to comment on some of the new 6th edition codex rules that we came across, and how they affected the game.

This might just get even more nerdy than usual...

First of all, here was my army:

	Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
HQ	Chaos Lord	65	130	1498
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Axe of Blind Fury	35
	Veterans of the Long War	5
	Mark of Khorne	10
	Chaos Lord	65	135
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Jump Pack	15
	Lightning Claw (2)	30
	Mark of Slaanesh	10
Troops	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	284
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Rhino	35
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	237
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Space Marines (6)	88	191
	Lightning Claw (2)	30
	Close Combat Weapon (5)	10
	Plasma Gun	15
	Veterans of the Long War	6
	Icon of Excess	30
	Mark of Slaanesh	12
Fast Attack	Raptors (6)	112	164
	Meltagun (2)	20
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Melta Bombs	5
	Mark of Slaanesh (6)	12
Heavy Support	Chaos Defiler	195	200
	Havoc Launcher	5
	Chaos Vindicator	120	157
	Siege Shield	10
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Daemonic Possession	15

A curious amalgamation of Khorne and Slaanesh, but there is a reason for this: I don't really have one big army (or at least, not one that's any good,) so instead of that I have about 8 different small armies across Games Workshop's games. This is because I get fed up with painting the same thing over and over again, and want to move on to something new. This means I could start an army every 10 minutes, and about half of them would be Chaos. Having painted a few new pieces for my Khorne army, I found that I actually had enough of each army to form a reasonable force, so that's how I got it up to 1500 points.

So here's what we came across:

Space Marines: Combat Squads

The rule in the Space Marines Codex that allows full-strength Space Marine squads to split in to two squads was first introduced in 5th edition. It's still fundamentally the same rule but with one difference: You can now only do this at the start of the game before rolling for your Warlord Traits. This means you can now no longer do it once the game is underway.

If I remember rightly, this was more or less the case before anyway (A note here: When I played Space Marines in 5th Edition, I used Salamanders, who couldn't use the Combat Squad rules because it came under Ultramarines Chapter Tactics.) But the difference here is that now that the Warlord Traits can sometimes affect the way the army is deployed, the squads have to be split first if they are going to divide into combat squads. Which is fair enough. Matt actually forgot to do it, but I let him have it anyway; there's no point being a dick when we're just getting used to the new rules. But by the same token, I forgot to roll for my Gifts of Mutation at the start of the game and he let me have that. It's amazing what you can do with a kind word!

Chaos Space Marines: Daemonic Possession

This rule in the Chaos Space Marines Codex affects vehicles, and is nothing new, being in operation at least as far back as the 4th edition Codex. However, it now works slightly differently for the new edition of the game: You now have to roll 2+ on a dice to ignore Crew Shaken and Crew Stunned on the Vehicle Damage Table. As the table is now only applied on a penetrating hit, this will come up a lot less, which I'm presuming is the reason for the reduction in points from 20 to 15. It still reduces the Ballistic Skill of the relevant vehicle to 3.

There is also another nasty twist: If the vehicle is a transport unit, then you have to roll 1D6 when the unit embarks. If you get a 1, it eats one of the passengers that embarks on it. It can recover a hull point if it does this, but given the cost of even the most basic Chaos Space Marine, losing even one of them will hurt.

As you can see from my army list, Daemonic Possession affected both the Vindicator and the Defiler (the latter by default.) Did it help? No. Quite the reverse, actually. My Vindicator got shot a lot but the most Matt was able to do was glance it, so the benefit of the rule never actually applied. On the other hand, it did make my scatter launches less accurate, and I remember at least one occasion where the target Dreadnought was missed by 1 inch - the inch I wouldn't have lost if I hadn't put Daemonic Possession on it.

Ironically, the rule would have been better employed on the Rhino. This did get a Crew Stunned result, which wouldn't have bothered me except that the squad within can't then charge into combat. Removing the passengers from the Rhino would have left them in open ground with nowhere to go because the Rhino couldn't get out of their way (it was rather dense terrain!)

Chaos Space Marines: Champion of Chaos

The Challenge rule has been in Warhammer for some time and was bought to 40K in the 6th edition. It's quite a nice addition to the game and can make for some thematic battles. It's also a pretty good way of making sure your squad sticks around to take the combat in to multiple rounds; the challenge has no affect on the rest of the combat so assuming your guy survives and passes his leadership check, he can force the combat to carry on into the next turn. This is a good tactic when contesting an objective!

Of course, Chaos have their own spin on this: The Champion must issue and accept a challenge wherever possible, and if he wins, gets to roll on the Chaos Boon table (which I won't go in to for this game as it never came up.) Of course, there's nothing the Dark Gods like better than watching their champions go at it in single combat.

It's a good thematic rule but one that can lead to some trouble if you're not careful. Apart from anything else, the champion may very well end up entirely out of his depth if he happens to challenge, say, a Librarian, or an Eldar Exarch, or even an Ork Warboss. Also, even if he wins, it might not help matters all that much, because the efforts of the Champion would have been better spent on the actual combat.

In this particular case, my squad of 6 Chaos Space Marines was charged by a 5-strong squad of Vanguard Veterans armed to the teeth. I took one out in Overwatch - another good new rule, by the way - and then issued the challenge. As the squad was only 5 men strong, the Veteran Sergeant couldn't have refused even if he'd wanted to, and because my Champion had both the Mark of Slaanesh and a pair of Lightning Claws, he took the Sergeant out very quickly. The remaining Chaos Space Marines took out another Vanguard Veteran... and then the two remaining Vanguard Veterans killed 4 Chaos Space Marines, causing them to lose combat.

And no matter what happened in the challenge, surviving it won't protect you from Sweeping Advance...

Which brings me on to the final rule, which should have come up, but didn't:

The Icon of Excess

This is a new rule that you can only give to squads who have the Mark of Slaanesh. It gives the unit Feel No Pain, which isn't quite as good in 6th edition as it was in 5th, but still useful.

You'll see on the army list that I gave The Icon of Excess to the unit of Chaos Space Marines with the mark of Slaanesh, which was involved in the close combat mentioned above. Unfortunately I forgot to do it, which meant that some of the Chaos Marines who died could potentially have survived the onslaught of the two Vanguard Veterans. I'd still have failed the leadership check if I'd lost (I rolled 11) but if I'd made a couple of saves it wouldn't necessarily have come to that.

So, that's what I think of the new rules that came up in the game. As it's technically a draw but the match didn't reach the conclusion we were looking for, a re-match is on the cards, but some scheduling issues means that I have no idea when this is going to happen.

See you all next time!

No Game New Year: Grand Theft Auto Five

Right, I wasn't expecting to come back to this blog quite so soon but something's come up and for some unknown reason I'm really excited about it:

No Game New Year.

This is an idea put forward by Brian Castleberry and Norman Caruso, the latter known on YouTube as The Gaming Historian. I suppose it all ties in to the New Year's Resolution we're all allegedly doing, but this is something that I can do and I'm actually really interested in doing it.

The idea is that we - that is to say, everybody who is doing it - will buy no new video games this year. Instead of that, we will play through the ever-increasing backlog of games we have. We play our old games, and if we like them, we keep them. If not, we get rid of them, either selling them, exchanging them, or just giving them away if we can't do that. There are more rules to this, just to clarify the ways you can get around not buying any new games, so here's a link to the Facebook page where you can see what's going on:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/256949654464181/

There are, of course, benefits to this. It will, for example, save me some money. Not much money - I rarely buy a game on release, after all - but some money, that could perhaps better be spent elsewhere. But the main benefit to me, as far as I can tell, is that I've got about sixty Xbox 360 games, some of which I've had for nearly two years and never played, and even more that I've started, got about a tenth of the way through and never picked up again. This is as good a time or reason as any to give them a go.

So why am I doing a blog about this? Well, part of the deal is that we're all supposed to be updating our progress on what games we're playing, whether we're enjoying them and whether we're making a decision on whether to keep the games or move them on. I could do this on YouTube of course, but to be perfectly honest I prefer to write. And the camera on my phone is rubbish.

This is supposed to be happening every week, however I think I can almost guarantee that there are weeks when I'm just not going to be able to make an update, for whatever reason. The two most likely are either:

• Personal circumstances meaning that I won't have time/internet access to write a blog, or even play the game. I'll usually know if this is the case and let you know in advance.
• Because some of the games are quite long, it might be the case that I've got almost nothing to say about it. I won't want to blog just for its own sake, and if this happens I might just make do with a post on the Facebook site if it's all the same to you.

However one thing I will say is that I'm unlikely to move any of my games on. I bought them all for a reason, even if it was only to make up a special offer, and I won't get rid of any of them if I still think I could potentially get something out of them (or while there are still achievement points to be milked!)

So that's the pre-amble. Now, on to the first game I'm going to be playing:

Grand Theft Auto Five

I had this game for Christmas last year. I'm taking a somewhat cautious approach to playing it. I've seen quite a lot of coverage on it so I had an idea what to expect, but of late, I've not been too impressed with the series. Let me give you some background on this:

I've played and owned all of the 'core' games in the series, from the first GTA game all the way up to this one. Not the expansions though, by which I mean not GTA London, not any of the PSP spinoffs from the GTA3 canon, and none of the DLC for GTA4. In that time, I've seen it grow and develop and constantly try new things, which is great, as nobody wants to play the same game twice. However, with a creative team as innovative as Rockstar and Rockstar North, there are going to be times when it doesn't go quite as well as they'd hoped, and personally, I think GTA San Andreas was as good as the series ever got. I didn't like GTA4 very much. I'm not saying it was a bad game, it wasn't a bad game. But it didn't engage me on the same level that San Andreas did. I wasn't rushing home from work in order to play GTA4, as I did with San Andreas.

The reason I'm saying all this is that a lot of the comments I'm going to be making on GTA5 will be in comparison to the relevant parts of the rest of series.

So, is GTA5 any good?

Well, yes it is. It's a GTA game, it was never going to be bad. The controls work well enough, the graphics are perhaps not quite what I was expecting for the time it was released but then again, I have it on the Xbox360 which is coming to the end of its iteration. The gameplay is good fun and I'm enjoying it so far. From having played what the game is telling me is 14% of it, here's what I'm getting out of it so far:

By far the best innovation that the game has made is the three characters. I say this even though I have only reached 2 of them so far (I haven't got Trevor as a regularly playable character yet,) and being able to switch between the three of them at almost any point is an absolutely genius idea for an open-world game. Lots of games want to tell a story. Rockstar have taken it a step further and decided to tell three different stories that interlink with one another. Well, good on them, because I'm liking it so far.

This innovation alone is good, but the characters themselves are very well designed, written and acted. Not necessarily likeable, but that's not the point. They are... compelling. I can think of no better way to describe it, except to add that it is a massive step up from the previous game. Let me go through the previous games and tell you what I mean:

• There really wasn't any personality from the first two GTA games; your character was there to play the game and that was about it.
• There wasn't much personality from Claude from GTA3 either. (While the lead character is never referred to by name during the game, he does appear briefly in San Andreas where Catalina calls him Claude.) However, this wasn't the point. At that time, a 3D Open World game was a relatively new concept and a VERY big deal, and the aim was to make that into a good game. Others had tried before, some got nearer the mark than others, but in terms of making a fun game to play, Rockstar took the mark and pissed all over it with GTA3. In the end, all that alluded to Claude's personality is how the player played the game, or more accurately how ruthlessly the player completely the missions, how indiscriminately they killed pedestrians, how often they forced a 6-star wanted-rating killing spree just for the fun of it. It was left to the overblown caricatures of the supporting cast to provide the personality of the game, and in terms of the way it was handled, for the time it was pretty good.
• Tommy Vercetti from GTA Vice City was much better. Having some discernible back-story, a background as a mobster and having the added bonus of being an absolute badass breathed some much-needed life into the player character, and we could be reasonably confident we weren't just playing the same game with a different setting and skin. Even though Vercetti was pretty much an anti-hero in every sense, the fact that he had something to offer meant that I actually cared about all those missions I found myself doing, and I wanted him to win in the end, even if it was not necessarily for the right reasons. Sadly I never played the game to the end so I referred to Wikipedia for the back story. Cheating, I know...
• Carl Johnson from GTA Vice City was probably one of the most compelling and well-done characters in any game that I have played. He tries to be, and probably at some point was, a really nice guy, and tries to uphold an honourable ideal, if not a very good one. However, he is desperate to win the approval of his gang and peers, desperate to clear his name of murder (which is kind of ironic, given how many murders he does through the game) and is prepared to go to any lengths in order to do it. Because the game pretty much for the first time gave you some control over how this played out, this struck a balance between the personality of the character, and the personality of the player. This is actually quite hard to do, especially in a video game where there can only ever be a finite number of options, and Rockstar did it quite well here.
• Then we had Nico Bellic from GTA4. And he was DULL. Not fighting for anything other than a new life, he somehow manages to get caught up in crime. He rarely gets angry at anything and seems content to do as he is told. Now fair enough, I didn't play much of GTA4 so maybe this improves later on. But as an opening statement, Nico let the side down quite badly.
• Now, in GTA5, we've got Michael and Franklin, (again I haven't found Trevor yet) who have their own set of ideals, and their own set of problems. They've got friends (sort of,) allies, patrons and their own quite unique ways of responding to them. Any of them on their own might make for more of an interactive movie than a game, but the ability to switch between them I think gives a well-rounded experience, and I'm looking forward to see where the game takes this.

That's a good part of the game. Now for a... sort of middle of the road part, neither good nor bad. And that is the missions: (this section contains some spoilers)

The missions themselves are actually quite good. They're well-designed as set pieces, set up pretty well though the use of flowing cut scenes (starting the dialogue for the cut scene as the character approaches the relevant trigger, and cutting to the scene with almost no load time, is a stroke of absolute genius and one I expect to see used far more in the future with the new console generation,) and have good cinematic points that fit the story. I've had some fun playing them.

The problem is that there's really not much scope for doing the missions that I've done so far in any way other than the way the game wants you to do it. For example: The mission where Michael and Franklin have to save Jimmy from the people who have kidnapped him in the boat he was trying to sell can only be done by driving close enough to the truck to allow Franklin to climb onto the boat, shooting the crooks on the boat and then driving underneath the boom arm to rescue Jimmy. There is no other way to do it. You can't, for example, switch to Franklin as he gets on the boat and get Jimmy off once you've killed everyone on it. You can't cut the truck up to stop it getting away. You can't use any gun other than the pistol Michael has in the glove box, and you can't allow Jimmy to die and get the boat back. (Obviously this last one probably wouldn't happen anyway since I have a feeling Jimmy will become more relevant to the story later on, but from the dialogue running up to the chase, Michael seems more than prepared to let that happen.)

This particular mission is designed as a set piece so there's pretty much only one way it can be done, but the other missions aren't much better. Whether driving, escaping from the cops, or corridor shooting, there's usually only one way to do it, the exception being when you have to escape attention from the police as that does at least give you the whole map to do it in. Now, I understand that if it's important to the story, certain missions have to play out in a certain way. But remember in GTA3 where you're ordered to kill somebody, and you could either nick a car and run him over, drive-by shoot him or go back to your hideout to pick up one of the many weapons you'd amassed there and gun him down? Hell, you could even do it as a fist fight, if you wanted to. None of that so far is in GTA5. There's usually only one way to complete the mission, and if the game thinks you need a new weapon or piece of equipment, it will give it to you in the mission pre-amble. For example: quite early on in the game, Franklin gets involved in a gang shootout. There are more enemies than can be reasonably handled with the pistol, but one of the guys you shoot early on rather conveniently drops a shotgun. There's still, therefore, a lot of hand-holding going on, where the game is almost telling you what to do. This is something that I think let GTA4 down quite badly, as it was still explaining game mechanics to me 6 hours in to it, and thankfully, it's not quite as bad with this game. But I still found myself thinking "no reason to go to Ammunation to get more ammo for my gun before I do this next mission; if the game thinks I need it, it will drop a new gun for me with enough ammo to complete the mission." I don't think that should be happening in this day and age.

I've also come across some of what I think is called "Jank," which I understand to mean: "An inconvenient necessity to make the game work," and I suspect I will come across it more and more as the game goes on. Where I noticed it was the mission where Michael discovers his wife's affair with her tennis coach. When the coach runs out of the house, jumps in his car and drives away, Michael follows him in a pickup truck that certainly wasn't there before, and for no reason explained in the cut-scene, Franklin is suddenly in the truck with him. Both are necessary to complete the mission, (you'll see,) but their sudden appearance is rather weak given the detail of the rest of the game.

That having been said, I think the scoring system for the missions is a good idea. You can now get Bronze, Silver and Gold rankings upon completion of each mission depending on how well you did and whether you did certain things in the mission, even if it's not always clear what you have to do to get the top score. It's more carrot than stick, because it rewards you for doing missions well rather than punishing you for barely scraping through with your life, let alone the mission objectives (the latter usually being how I end up doing most missions in any GTA game to be honest.) The reward in the game is, as far as I can see, rather abstract. You either get a gold medal or you don't, and if you don't it doesn't appear to have an affect on the progress of the game. But it's nice that, for the first time, the game is telling you: "You aced that, well done," or "Yes, you could have done that better, and here's how:" Competitive players and speed runners will love it. If I pay any more attention to it than I already have it will be to unlock an Achievement to increase my Gamerscore.

I do have a couple more things to say but I've rattled on far too much already and it's time for me to go to bed. However, a couple of points I'm going to be looking out for next week:

• So that I am not playing the game through like homework, I will interject my progress through the main game with the occasional foray into GTA online. I've had a go with it already and it looks pretty good so far, though I suspect I have been the victim of people farming kills off me which made it less enjoyable than it might have been. More on that next week.
• I'll be interested to see how the story plays out in terms of how you can influence the environment around you. The best game I've seen for this so far is San Andreas, where you could participate in a turf war that made, apart from anything else, some areas of the city safer to visit than others. I haven't seen it in GTA5 yet but that doesn't mean I won't...

See you all soon!