Last Week's Games: Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Injustice 2

This week I was delighted to return to the Black Country Roleplaying Society. I had to stop going for a while due to childcare issues, but currently neither Kirsty nor I are going to work in the usual sense so it’s not the issue it very often can be. The lockdown situation has caused a lot of restrictions on a great many aspects of life, but ironically in this case it’s freed me up a little.

This is what my character
will look like eventually...
or something like it.

So, it was a pleasure to be welcomed back, and I joined a Dungeons and Dragons game with the Odyssey of the Dragonlords setting. While the published player’s guide is quite insistent that it’s not based in Ancient Greece, that’s clearly where it’s drawn some of its inspiration. I created a female human ranger called Halia with the intention of making her into an Amazon later down the line; this happens at level three. At character creation, I like to roll up random personality traits, ideals, bonds and flaws from the Player’s Handbook, and also the background information from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything – this creates some instant background for the character which is surprisingly easy to tie into a motivation for becoming an adventurer. In this case, Halia was raised in a conclave, but at some point, was wrongly accused by an adventurer of a smuggling and assault, and did a year’s time before escaping with the assistance of another adventurer. This means she is wanted in one of the key cities of the game. Also, since I put charisma as her dump stat (currently at 9) I decided that during her incarceration she was badly burned on the side of her face and now has burn scars that she hides with her hair when she isn’t fighting. She’s also quiet, withdrawn and overeats (I rolled up a surprisingly high weight for her) so there’s some personal issues there, which I’m hoping will be addressed and maybe even resolved during the campaign. As for the adventure itself, it took a while to get going, but we ended up hunting a giant boar which had the potential to wipe any one of the party members if it managed to connect an attack. Unfortunately, it suffers from a problem that 5^th edition very often runs in to – action economy. As it’s only one giant boss monster against five characters, chances are we’ll drop it before it has a chance to do any significant damage, which we did at very little harm to us since when it managed to connect an attack, our Dungeon Master rolled spectacularly low on his damage roll. But we levelled up to second level, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

These provided more of a threat than the boss...

I ran into the same problem when I ran Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords over the weekend. We’re in the fifth chapter out of six, and the dungeons in the adventure should be terrifying my players, but as they’re almost all hysterically overpowered, very little is presenting a challenge for them anymore. Yesterday, they fought what was supposed to be the hardest boss in the dungeon, but because of a combination fire snakes and some disgusting fighter feats, they dropped the boss in two turns and wrapped up the entire combat in three. I speak no exaggeration when I say the party have done more damage to themselves than I ever have!

In video games, I had a go with Injustice 2 on the PS4. It’s a fighting game featuring some DC Superheroes, a couple of Netherrealm’s characters, and whatever other major properties they license. I played the original game on the Xbox 360 and I really liked it; this version has more mechanics and strategies added – not necessarily a good thing for me because I’m awful at it – but I did note one of the most crucial improvements I’ve ever seen in a fighting game: The tutorial and training modes offer the option to view a training video to give a much better idea of what those moves and combos are supposed to look like, and give a better idea of the required timing! They require very fast presses though – I’m not sure how quickly I’ll get there.

Last Week's Games: Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order, Diablo, Super Kirby Clash

I didn’t get a huge amount of time to play games last week, but that’s OK since I didn’t talk about many of the games I’d played the week before either, since I went off on one about luck vs skill. So, here’s what I’ve been up to the last couple of weeks:

He looks a bit like a young Domhall
Gleeson, funnily enough...

I bought a few new games for the PS4 and played Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order. This is an interesting game set in between the Clone Wars[1] and the Galactic Civil War[2], where you play a young former Padawan[3] initially trying to hide from the empire, but early in the game joins up with a former Jedi trying to re-build the Jedi Order. As this story pre-dates the original films where this hasn’t happened, I can guess it’s not going to work out quite the way they’d hoped, but in the meantime we’ve got a solid character action game that has often been called the Dark Souls of Star Wars. I can sort of see what they mean, although the setting is Star Wars rather than the grim-dark gothic fantasy of the Dark Souls games – it’s challenging with a priority around parrying attacks. But there’s other influences here that are well worth keeping an eye on: 3D Zelda-like puzzle dungeons, Uncharted-style platforming and Ubisoft collect-o-thons. All this set to the Star Wars background is pretty good if you like that kind of thing, and even if you don’t, it doesn’t seem like a bad place to start. I look forward to seeing where it’s going!

The dungeon changes each
time you play...

On my laptop I’ve been playing Diablo. I bought this game a long time ago and I remember enjoying it but never reaching to the end, nor do I have any idea how far I got originally! I re-bought it on GOG at some point last year (even if I knew where the original disc was, I doubt I could get it to run on a laptop built nearly 20 years later, so I went for a version that I could entertain a reasonable expectation that it would work!) with the Hellfire expansion. Apparently, this puts more dungeons into the game – extra content is always welcome! But the other addition to the game is the Monk, who expands the roster of playable characters. I ignored this and played as the Sorcerer, and had a fine old time bashing the first four levels of the dungeon. It took me a while to remember that games this old didn’t necessarily have an autosave feature, so there have been a few times when I’ve had to replay substantial sections of the game for forgetting to save it, but other than that it’s been a pleasure casting spells at tougher enemies, hitting weaker ones with my staff, and managing my resources. The Sorcerer is a tough class to play because he doesn’t have a lot of close combat ability and can find himself overwhelmed in tougher boss situations – I’d long gone past the Butcher before I finally had the staying power to beat him. This is counterbalanced by the fact that he has a lot of area-of-effect spells so large numbers of enemies aren’t the threat they might otherwise be. Let’s see if I can overcome the finnicky mid-90s interface to get to the end of the game this time!

It's cute, if nothing else!

A while ago Kirsty got me Super Kirby Clash on the Nintendo Switch, and I had a go with it for a while last week while Jessie was around. This is a game where you play as one of four difference kinds of class (fighter, defender, alchemist and wizard) of whatever Kirby is supposed to be, fighting a large boss-like monster. It’s essentially a mobile game on the switch and the fighting works well enough though I have a feeling I’ll hit a wall where it will be necessary for me to pay money to progress any further (it was a free-to-play game.) It plays OK, and I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn’t got Super Smash Bros Ultimate in the Switch as well – a better game that handles in much the same way.

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[1] Episodes 1-3

[2] Episodes 4-6

[3] Learner Jedi 

Last Month's Painting: Space Hulk Genestealers, Chaos Space Marine Raptors, Haarken Worldclaimer

Gribble Gribble Gribble...

If you caught last month’s blog, you’ll remember that in June I’d begun painting some Space Hulk Genestealers. Here they are all finished; it’s not a great quality picture but you should be able to see I’d put on the top highlight of the carapace, the teeth, the tongues, the claws and the base. I doubt it’s the best you’ll ever see it done – I’ve not done Tyranids a great many times before this – but they’re good enough to do the job!

Let's see how these get on
in the game...

After that, I bought one more box of Chaos Space Marine Raptors to add to my 500pt Black Legion force. I’ve been banging these out since late last year and got into a kind of rhythm in painting them. I’ve quite enjoyed painting black Chaos Space Marines again; it means that the undercoat is generally all you need to do for the armour with just a bit of Abbadon Black to tidy up any splodges afterwards – I use dry brushing to do the top highlight on the gold trimmings, which is an effective but imprecise technique. I made a careless blunder the first time I painted a squad of these Raptors – I didn’t realise what the tops of the jump packs were supposed to match the armour and painted them silver. But I don’t like going back to correct models once I’ve finished them; I have far too many of the things to justify over-correcting my work! So, I just ran with it, and now the whole army looks like that. If it looks like you meant it, you’ll generally get away with it.

This time, I wasn’t quite as pleased with the special effects painting as I normally am. You can make out the plasma gun in the picture; I usually paint it neater than that. I wasn’t particularly pleased with the Power Sword either; I try to build this up from layers of green and light grey and then white at the top. It works, but not well, and even for this pretty tough technique, I didn’t make a very good job of it. Also, the Champion has the helmet of a Space Marine beneath his feet. Whenever I get this (and it’s happened five times so far!) I try to paint them as a different Space Marine chapter, to bring the idea across that the Black Legion have been battling Space Marines for millennia and have fought them all. You can’t really tell from the picture but that was supposed to be a Dark Angels helmet.

Death to the Iron Hands!

To complete the army I painted Haarken Worldclaimer (and incidentally, when saying that name I put a glottal stop in between the two “A”s and until someone tells me what that extra A is supposed to add to the pronunciation I’m going to keep doing it no matter how annoying it gets.) This was painted similarly to the rest of the army, with a couple of exceptions: The two weapons had an extra top-highlight of Runefang Steel and a bit of Stormhost Silver – I don’t usually do this with Black Legion as I want the Gold to be the brightest colour. The odd purple skull at the back was Screamer Purple with a highlight of Sigmarite, and the bright runes on the Helspear were build up from red to orange in the same way I would normally do the eyes. The blur on the photo makes it look a lot better than it is! I decided to paint the dead Space Marine from the Iron Hands chapter – partly because I haven’t forgotten being brutalised by them in the summer of 2014 and I want revenge, and partly because as the Raven Guard use black helmets as well, I needed something else to distinguish them. As the dead Space Marine has his hands, I decided to paint the Iron Hand’s Iron Hands, er, Iron.

That’s where I’m going to leave that army for now; until I know how the update to the rules of Warhammer 40K is going to affect the points values I won’t be adding anything new. But I’ve still got plenty to paint, and I should be finished with some more Space Hulk Terminators by next month!

Last Week's Games: Speculating on the merits of luck vs skill in tabletop games.

I found myself thinking about luck vs skill when it comes to hobby games, in the light of some of the things that have been happening in my house and in the wider gaming community. The argument is as old as games themselves but for those of you who might not know: In almost every game you play, there is an element of luck. Traditionally this is done through dice or cards, and lately certain games have mobile apps that can handle a lot of the random number generation those items provide. The games that are reliant on luck – Snakes and Ladders, for example – are usually easy enough to play, but they’re often less engaging in the long term (or even to the end of the game!) because the players never really feel like they’re in control of what’s going on. On the other hand, games that rely entirely on skill – Chess is probably the most obvious example – are potentially more engaging but as the player base is highly skilled, it also has a higher barrier for entry which makes the game hard to access in any enjoyable way. 

This came up in the news this week where I noticed that SteamForged games are bringing their support of their game Guild Ball to an end – a game that’s been going for six years that I meant 

Apparently these two are called
Ox and Shark. I never knew.

to try at some point but never got around to giving it a go. Since I never played the game, I’m going mainly on what they’ve said in their blog that covers it, but a lot of the problem was that Guild Ball relies almost entirely on the skill of their players to play the game. To echo the article, this created a situation where you would win your first game – the ones that the developers showed you how to play – and lose your next hundred, as you faced off against player after player who had been playing the game a lot longer than you, knew exactly what they were doing and what they needed to do to win. There was nothing in between; no lower class of players that would happily have a casual game you could just enjoy. You learned to play, and then you were in with the big boys who would show no mercy. A high barrier to… not necessarily entry, but to play on any level that might be engaging or fun, doesn’t create a sustainable business model, and sadly now it’s reached the point where the creators of Guild Ball are calling it a day on what was otherwise an excellent game. 

The most obvious basis for comparison is Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl – a game far more reliant on luck, but with a loyal fanbase, if not necessarily indefinite support. But I’ve never played the tabletop version of it either. 

Presumably some forest, or other. One that's Enchanted.

The game I’ve been playing is The Enchanted Forest with Jessie and Kirsty. This game relies almost entirely on luck and won Game of the Year in 1982, though from what I understand that wasn’t a great year for board games. As I said last week, it’s not a particularly well-designed game, we can’t really play it to the conclusion written into the rules as Jessie gets fed up with it before then once the initial novelty has worn off. But it’s easy for her to play, she’s even getting the hang of moving pieces on their movement squares, and understands what she needs to do to win – even if she hasn’t quite worked out that you’re not supposed to share that information with the rest of us. This game is nearly 40 years old and still being printed to this day, not many games can say that, and the ones that can is mainly due to the fact that their barrier for entry is far more broad than those games that rely on skill.

Backlog Beatdown: Being Arcane with Arcania

First, let me say that these notes refer to the PlayStation 4 version of Arcania. If you’re considering playing this game on a different platform, you may have a different experience to me, which is just as well really, because my experience of this game wasn’t great.

This is quite early on in the game when you're fighting
your enemies off with a... what is that? A stick?

Arcania is part of a series of games called Gothic, a collection of fantasy-themed Roleplaying games with perhaps a darker tone in terms of its design than the usual affair. You play as a nameless hero, who after having his village destroyed by a horde of enemies, vows to take revenge. This takes him on a quest across the lands to find the truth behind the attack, and the malevolent forces controlling it all. Nothing, of course, that we haven’t seen before.

One thing unique to this version of Arcania I certainly haven’t seen in any RPG since the 5^th generation of consoles is a game with no cutscenes. I thought this was deliberate at first, and quite liked it – a game that drops you straight into the action without faffing about with exposition, in medias res, and what appeared to be a nightmare sequence, no less? That was a great way to get into the game, and I was looking forward to seeing where it was going. Alarm bells started to ring, however, when I’d got past the first area of the game (basically a 1-2 hour tutorial,) to find the hero in a different area entirely with some hints that his home had been destroyed with nothing in between. I finished the set of caves that formed the dungeon and found the hero on a different island altogether. Nothing set this up; nothing explained what exactly happened and why. I surmised that there probably were cutscenes in the game at some point but for some reason hadn’t got as far as the PS4 port. A quick glance on Youtube confirmed my theory – I have an incomplete game here.

These wasp-like creatures are a
pain in the bum...

Nonetheless, I kept going, wanting to at least get to the end of the game and finish what I started. The game is… OK. It’s a pretty standard role-playing game that reminded me of a grim-dark version of Fable more than anything else. You can develop your character in fighting, ranged combat and magic, and while there is some overlap in how your invested skill points develop your character’s attributes, you’ll have to stick to one build or another if you want to maximise your stats; spreading them out across the board makes for a balanced but less-than-spectacular character! The quests are one fetch quest after another, or kill a certain monster, or number of monsters. The combat is functional at best but not at the standard you might expect for a 7^th generation game; there’s very little feedback so you don’t always know you’ve been hit until your health bar is ticking down, the enemies barely react to being hit either, and the game has an odd habit of glitching enemies behind you – presumably as an error macro to being caught in the scenery. It’s the jankiest game I think I’ve ever played.

The set-up to this quest is absolutely ridiculous,
but the beast provides an interesting challenge.

I did enjoy some of what Arcania had to offer – the game is quite linear, so there was no wandering around becoming hopelessly lost and confused, and while the combat was a bit wonky in places, at least the challenge of the game was at the right level. The graphics are OK, if a little, er, “Bioware” in terms of the faces, and some of the monsters were fresh designs on a western RPG setting that can get quite stale. The sound was alright, even if the nameless hero sounded like an absolute wazzock and the voice acting for the rest of the cast is only marginally better than PS1-era games. The music score was suitably epic, and one of the better parts of the game’s presentation.

Ultimately though, I played Arcania to its story conclusion and found very little to recommend. If you like RPGs there are far better ones than this, and if you don’t, then this certainly won’t change your mind – even overlooking all the faff that comes with the PS4 version. A very poor game.

Final Score: 1/5. Nah.

Last Week's Games: Not Tonight and Enchanted Forest

This week I’ve played a new game on my Switch: Not Tonight. I’ve been playing it for a while now; it’s left me with a few things to say, and be warned: some are political…

Here we manage a guest list
and a regular line...

It’s a difficult game to describe, but if you could imagine a point between Papers Please and Brexit: The Game, that’s about where we are. In a version of the UK that had left the EU by 2018, a second-generation European immigrant has been confined to poor living conditions and has been forced to take a job as a bouncer in order to raise the £2500 per month needed to prevent him from being deported. You take jobs from some venues in the local area (beginning in the South West of England,) and the aim of the game is to manage the queue to get in to allow a certain number of people into the venue in roughly four hours of game time. You’ll be checking people’s ID – against their age to begin with, but the game soon escalates with guestlists, fake IDs, prejudice against people from certain countries, and the pressing need to keep on top of your own finances. This results in you having to micro-manage two queues and dealing with a horribly short time limit to get everything done – but get it done you must, or you will lose the game.

Even the title screen is sneering at Brexit...

Not Tonight is an odd game. The mechanics work well enough and make for an interesting and engaging experience. But beyond that, it seems to have a lot to say as an art form – or at least, how the developers thought a post-Brexit Britain might look like. As a British-born European on the edge of being deported, you’re treated with the upmost contempt from higher authorities than you, regular contempt from your bosses who are relying on you to make their night work (even the more friendly ones can’t resist a bit of Euro-baiting condescension,) a certain amount of grudging respect from people who are waiting in line to get in to their chosen venue, and the only people who treat you as equals are the other European people who are in a similar situation. It’s not without a sense of humour: even if Britain had left the EU as soon as the referendum result came in, the earliest it could have done so would have been roughly half-way through 2018, not at the beginning of it when the game starts, and even the most capricious racist is unlikely to be as open about it as the game suggests, so it’s obviously not meant to be taken too seriously. The problem for me is that as I sit on the pro-EU side of this situation, and I’m genuinely concerned for what Brexit is going to mean for my future for reasons I’m not going to go in to now,[1] some of the intended humour was lost on me. In a way, playing Not Tonight was a bleaker experience than Papers Please, as at least I’m a long way from the political situation the latter was purporting to represent. But ultimately, it is an uncommon experience that I’m glad I’ve had. Let’s hope I can see it through to the end!

The treasure is under the trees - who will find it first?

Beyond that, I’ve been on a bit of a painting kick – mainly because I’ve started a new painting section to the blog that I run alongside this, and I wanted to be able to say I’d painted something in the month of July! (Here’s the first edition, erroneously titled Last Week’s Painting.) For that reason, I spent a lot of my free time last week painting rather than playing games, but I did have a go with Enchanted Forest, a game about hunting for fairy-tale treasures in the titular forest. It’s OK – it appeals to my daughter because she likes fairy tales and treasure hunting, but the mechanics aren’t particularly well-designed, and it can get very one-sided towards the end of the game. Nonetheless, we enjoyed it while it lasts and will probably play it again.

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[1] Mainly because trying to explain my concerns to people who voted leave has the same general effect as trying to headbutt a rhinoceros to death.