Last Week's Games: Roleplaying Games, Warhammer Quest, Skyrim

It’s been a while since my last blog post. There have been a few reasons for this: The main one is that I’ve been involved in a theatre project for the last three weeks which has taken up a lot of my spare time. Barely a week has gone by since September where I haven’t had to adjust my working patterns to accommodate one thing or another. Also, my mental health hasn’t been at its peak over the last month. It’s nobody’s fault, nothing’s happened, but in the small amount of quiet I’ve had over the last few weeks, I’ve found it difficult to keep my mind focussed enough to find something interesting and relevant to say.

I’ve been looking at new campaign ideas for Dungeons and Dragons, with the aim of putting together a framework for a whole campaign without getting bogged down in small details. The idea is that if I ever get the chance to run it, I’d develop it one session at a time out of the framework and ideas I’m writing now. However, I’d really like to play as well so I’ve been looking in to trying to find an online group, using mainly Roll20 as a source. This hasn’t been successful; timing often gets in the way but also there are so many people trying to join games on Roll20 it often feels like applying for a job. But I’ll keep trying and we’ll see how it goes.

Sadly, I lost a friend I knew through roleplaying games the week before last. Andy from the Black Country Role-Playing Society passed away in hospital; I don’t know any more than that and I would prefer not to ask. Andy was one of the first people I was in an RPG with; he was one of the players in Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv. He was also in the first game I ran as part of the group. After that, he ran another Pathfinder game: Council of Thieves, in which I played a couple of fighters (I had to change my first one after I learned about builds!) It was a good game to be a part of, and I was able to help Andy run it by occasionally looking up a rule to resolve a dispute or explain a ruling in ways that made sense. I had to leave the game eventually when life got in the way, but Andy remained a constant and committed presence in the group and I’m sure everyone there will miss him very much. I’m glad I got to see him a few weeks ago when I had the opportunity to return to the group; you never know when it’s going to be the last time.

Imagine five, six, seven of these spiders
firing off their webs at you...

With video games, I’ve been having problems with spiders. In Warhammer Quest, I’m fighting some high-level spiders – Venomous Gigantic Spiders, or something along those lines. The problem I’ve been having with these is the way their AI is programmed. They have two ways of attacking you – bites, which can poison you, or webs, which stop you from moving. Bites are the nastier of the two moves, but they will only do this if you move close enough to attack them. If not, they’ll keep firing their webs at you, with the result that whatever is left of your party can’t move or act in any way. This slows the game down to the point where I had to quit out of the dungeons and start again, and since they can take quite a while to clear, this isn’t fun!

Apparently those things either side of its mouth
are its sexual organs. Doesn't bear thinking about...

I’ve also started playing Skyrim again, as an Argonian Two-Handed Weapon fighter. I’ve learned a few things from my time with Dark Souls and I’m a lot better equipped to take on the game now. I like how the game is developing, but I don’t like the Frostbite Spiders. Horrible things. They’re huge. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve tried to play through Skyrim and I can’t remember how far I’ve got in the game before, but my character is at level 18 now and I’m enjoying it so far so hopefully I’ll be able to see it through to the end this time.

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: Pathfinder, Rhino Hero, Sonic Generations, Dragon Quest, New Super Mario Bros U

Seven deadly sins, seven ways to win...

Over the last weekend, I continued running Rise of the Runelords for my Pathfinder group. We are trying to maintain the game during lockdown by doing it as a video call; it worked well with some connection issues. Long-term readers of the blog will know that running a game online is nothing new, but when I’ve done it before, it’s how the game stared – not as a contingency plan for not being able to meet! The group completed their task in the Vault of Greed, and journeyed on to the Shimmering Veils of Pride where they encountered their own reflections in the mirrors! Not to put to fine a point of it, but there could have been no better time for me to not have to hand out their character sheets, as for perhaps the first time I had access to all their information and was able to run their characters. Unfortunately, I had to cut the battle short due to family illness, but we will hopefully pick it up again in the future.

There is talk of members of that group doing a game in the week as well; I’d like to be a part of that but we’re in discussions about that system to run and who will be running the game. I’ll see how it works out; I would prefer to play this time as I don’t get to play very often, but it depends on what the other lads want to do.

Spider monkeys. See what they did there...

Earlier in the week, Kirsty and I had a go with a board game that I’ve had for a while and not done anything with yet – Rhino Hero. This is a game about stacking cards to resemble a skyscraper and getting your hero to the highest point on the skyscraper without knocking the whole thing down. It’s aimed at younger people and is a good game; perhaps not with the depth of some of the other games that we play, but certainly the most dextrous and one of the better ones for spectacle. We had a great time building the towers and trying not to knock them down! Kirsty won both games that we played, and we’d be happy to show this to our friends when we’re out of lockdown and they can come around again!

Sonic Generations. It's a lot of fun!

One game I forgot to mention I’d played the previous week was Sonic Generations on the Xbox 360. I was inspired to play this partly by YouTube’s The Completionist, partly because I’d downloaded if for free off Games with Gold, and partly because I’d just finished Assassin’s Creed 2 and wanted something light-hearted and fun to play. I’ve enjoyed it so far, although I find it better in short bursts rather than prolonged sessions. If it were just a case of getting through the game, I might have beaten it by now already, but while the number of stages may appear to be small, there are a lot of challenge modes attached to each stage and that is taking a decent amount of time at this point! I’ve been playing Sonic for almost for as long as I’ve been playing video games and there’s little to surprise me now, but it’s a good fun game and one that I’m hoping to see through to the end.

You would not believe the faff I've got to go through
to get a screen grab from the Switch to my computer...

One game that I actually did see through to the end was Dragon Quest on the Nintendo Switch. I’d bought this a few months ago, played it for a few hours in November, and didn’t play it again for a while, mainly because knowing the time investment generally needed for RPGs, I waited until I had some time before committing to it! I don’t want to say much more than that right now because I’m hoping to get a review out either this week or next week.

Finally, I’ve been playing New Super Mario Bros U on the Wii U. As it’s been a while since I played it, and the levels I tried to play through last time were very difficult, I started a new save file. I may or may not see it through to the end but it’s a Super Mario game; they’ll always be fun while they last!

Last Week's Games: Pandemic, Pathfinder, Doom and Mordheim

I managed to make quite a bit of time for playing games this week! Unusually, I’m going to talk about the Hobby games first…

Let the madness begin...

A little on the nose, given what’s happening in the world right now (If you’re reading this after the fact, the world is currently in a state of confusion and panic over the Covid-19 virus) but Kirsty and I had a go with Pandemic over the weekend. Some people like this game more than others but when I’ve played it, I’ve enjoyed it. We certainly had a good time stamping out the diseases across the map – Kirsty was fortunate enough to choose the Medic, who could take out all the disease cubes on one section and is very good to have early in the game. We certainly made more use out of that than my ability – I’d drawn the Contingency Planner, who can pull an event card from the discard pile and use it again later. We beat the game, though on reflection we got some of the rules wrong. I’d forgotten that we were supposed to infect the cities after drawing an Epidemic card, and that we were only supposed to swap cards if we were in the city of the cards we were swapping. The latter, at least, would definitely have made a difference to the outcome of the game! We enjoyed it, nonetheless, and we’ll have another go soon.

Also, over the weekend, I continued with Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords. Currently they are trekking through the Vaults of Greed, and it was very satisfying to give them a dragon hoard to distribute, and to flatten one of my players with a trap – especially as he plays the kind of impulsive character that would be susceptible to triggering them! He was a little more cautious from then on. I then had a laugh with the Mephits, who seemed more at home playing in the bath than causing a threat, but I have a feeling the group enjoyed it a lot more than trying to fight them. We’re all still enjoying it but there is talk of pausing the campaign for a while and letting someone else have a go at running another game; we’ll see how that goes. I like running games, but I’ve not been able to play for a while!

I finally beat the Deimos Lab on Doom and I’m now at the Control centre. This is an interesting map, and I’m enjoying it, but the difficulty is bogging me down and I’m finding it hard to make any significant amount of progress. But Doom is the kind of game I can come back to whenever I like; the plot is very straightforward, and I don’t need to worry too much about remembering important points!

From humble beginnings...

Also, I made some progress with Mordheim: City of the Damned. With enough confidence in my Mercenary warband to tackle the fourth campaign mission on the bridge, I gave it a go and beat it quite easily (to be fair, my warband is vastly over-levelled now!) None of my men were put out of action, which is quite rare as even on my best day at least one of them usually drops. This is now the most progress I’ve ever made in the game; I came close with the Sisters of Sigmar but gave up after the fourth mission bugged out. It appears that I’m now in the second half of the game, so we’ll see how that goes. I had a go with another of the regular missions, but hubris got the better of me and some of my men ended up dropping to a rival Mercenary warband – usually the easiest faction to deal with.

Finally, I was pleased to be able to have some time in both Phoenix Games in Stourbridge and Warlords and Wizards in Netherton at different points in the week to paint a fresh squad of Chaos Space Marine Raptors. I haven’t quite finished them yet – got some finishing touches to put on their champion – but they’re looking alright, if somewhat different to the box art! I’m also carrying a small number of World Bearers around in hope of a game…

Last Week's Games: Pathfinder, Age of Empires, Hey! That's My Fish, Sushi Go

The key to First Edition Pathfinder
is to attack something that isn't the
player character's hit points...

I’ll start this week by mentioning something I forgot to tell you about last week: Pathfinder. A weekg ago I ran Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group, and we had a really good time. We’re quite high-level now, I think they’re all at level 11 which is high for a game that in all other times I’ve played it had been wrapped up long before we got to this sort of tier. The group had a fine time defeating The Scribbler, who had in the previous section managed to turn some of the group on each other and using their abilities to circumnavigate certain areas of the dungeon. “Forbiddance” spell denying you access to a certain room? No problem – burrow underneath it by having your Druid turn into an Earth Elemental and have the whole thing collapse out of the affected area. They also managed to dispatch an Ancient White Dragon with relative ease, although that probably has more to do with Ian’s Alchemist’s ability to fly onto his back and drop bombs on the dragon from above. There’s still a long way to go before we get to the end of this, but the other lads seem determined to see it through to the end! 

Not managed anything this huge yet...

I also had a go with a game that I downloaded on Chirstmas Day, according to my Steam records: Age of Empires. I owned this game a long time ago, but it appears to have been updated to run on modern computers and was a pleasure to play again. It’s a real-time strategy game that focuses on the pre-industrial eras of civilization, where society starts of as hunter-gatherers and ends up with huge armies taking over the world, or at least the parts of Central Europe we were familiar with at that point. I’ve played up to the end of the Egyptian campaign, which is more of a tutorial than anything else that introduces you to the game mechanics and win conditions. It’s been a great ride so far; I’ve enjoyed building up my armies, figuring out what I need to do to win and making the right moves at the right time – even if that generally involves turning it into a war of attrition, and waiting for the enemies to use up all of their resources before making my move! I usually enjoy strategy games and this one is no exception.

I also managed to play a couple of games with Kirsty: The first was our old favourite, Hey! That’s My Fish, where we battled our penguins for control of as many fish as possible. Known for its brutal simplicity and surprisingly competitive mechanics, we’re starting to get our heads around this game as we’re constantly watching each other’s penguins and our own, judging what would be the best move to make. I won, but it was close this time with only about five points in it!

A pleasure to play
after all this time!

The other game was a game I’d owned for a while and hadn’t got around to playing, which was Sushi Go. I bought this game for the third time at the UK Games Expo in 2017. The first time, I’d bought the game off Ebay – but it only had the cards, not the instructions, and I didn’t know how to play it at that point, so that was no use. The second time, I’d ordered it from Amazon, and when it arrived it turned out to be printed in Polish and Czech; I can read neither. I found it for sale with one of the stall holders at the Expo, who told me that this wasn’t uncommon; the bar code is the same whatever language it is printed in and the guys picking the list aren’t too careful about what they’re picking and for who! It is a “pick and pass” card game that’s supposed to represent a conveyer belt of sushi, where you pick the best card from the ones you’re given and pass the remaining cards around. With two players, it’s an interesting challenge, since you’ve got a decent idea of what will be coming when you pass the cards – it’s easier to plan a strategy! A fun game, in all.

Last Week's Games: Inivisible Inc. and Pathfinder 2e

A lovely art style...

Early in the week, I had a go with Invisible Inc. This is a game that’s very difficult to fit in to my usual form of punctuation! It is a turn-based strategy game with an emphasis on stealth and hacking, rather like the game I imagined Shadowrun to be. It looks gorgeous and I’ve enjoyed it so far, I’ve beaten the first two levels and I’m looking forward to finding the time to do the rest. The stealth element forces you to think about what you’re doing, rather than rushing in for a full-frontal attack, and the game has as a pretty good risk/reward element: You’re rewarded with exploring the levels for money that can be spent on upgrades and equipment, but this increases the level of alarm which potentially means more enemies. I’ve put it on the easiest difficulty setting for now because it’s a whole new system I’ve got to learn – XCOM it most certainly is not! But I can see myself getting a lot out of this game.

Yesterday I got together with my regular monthly role-playing group and had a go with the new edition of Pathfinder. Pathfinder was my first RPG, and while I often describe it as Dungeons and Dragons with the rules turned up to 11, I have fond memories of both running and playing it. The real draw, for me, was the quality of the published adventures, which provides an in-depth experience for groups that want it or a dungeon bash for those who prefer that style of game. They have engaging plots, fleshed out characters and a whole lot of detail for people to explore. Therefore, were you to ask me, I would suggest that Pathfinder provides a richer overall RPG experience than the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons – if only barely.

And lovely art.

With the new edition, I haven’t got the rule book yet. I created a Halfling Rogue out of an app for it, and while I didn’t always know how the stats and skills etc were calculated, it was certainly an easier task than anything I could have generated from the rules at this point! When I buy the rules, I will look in to it and see the ways in which what’s happening on the app matches up to what’s written in the rules. There are a few changes to the rules that I came across in the one-shot game we were playing, some that I liked more than others:

Initiative: Instead of having an initiative statistic calculated from your dexterity modifier, it’s now based on skill. You can use skills to affect your initiative rolls, I’m not sure yet how it is decided what skill to use but I would imagine it’s situational. I like this, as it makes a lot more sense to decide initiative based on how your character handles certain situations and means some characters may react at different times depending on their own capabilities that aren’t necessarily tied up in dexterity.

Actions: This was the most obvious change; you get three actions per turn which could be anything from a move to an attack to almost anything else you can think of. There are limitations – there are penalties for trying to attack more than once, and if you want to use a shield you have to use an action to raise it before it will affect your armour class, but it’s more representational of what happens when you fight.

Mage Armour: This was a funny one because it’s changed for better and for worse. When you cast it, it lasts until you next prepare your spells. But the difference it makes to your AC is +1 rather than +4. On the one hand, the more long-term affect will stop situations where you use a valuable spell slot to cast it, get in to one fight and not use it again for the rest of the day. On the other hand, the effect is nowhere near as good.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else it’s got to offer. That rule book is enormous, though. It might require a bit of trial and error as we’re going along!

Last Week's Games: Uncharted, Into the Breach, The Witness and Pathfinder

After the previous post’s self-serving revelation that I should be getting on with beating some of these games I’ve been buying had gone live, I went back to my Xbox 360 to try to reach the end of Army of Two; a game that you’ll remember I played over the summer. I knew I was up to the last bit and it shouldn’t have taken me too long, however I ran into a rather fundamental issue: My Xbox 360 broke.

What’s happening is the controller isn’t connecting to the console. (This is happening with both controllers we own. “Try a different controller” is the first thing that comes up on every bit of advice I looked up. I tried. It didn’t work.) It’s still turning the machine on, but not connecting to the point where I could control anything. I tried re-synching it; it didn’t work. I tried moving the console and controller around (this has happened before and carrying it around in my backpack apparently fixed it last time!) but still nothing happened. I looked up a YouTube video on how to get at the parts, got as far as taking the side panel off that gives you access to the hard drive, and gave up when I realised that even if I had the screwdrivers I was going to need in order to get at the motherboard, and even if I could access the correct part, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

So, my old Xbox 360 has gone in for repairs; I dropped it in this morning. From what I understand, if it’s a component part that can be replaced then it shouldn’t be too difficult to repair. If something’s gone wrong with the motherboard, they’re manufactured by machines at a micro level so there isn’t much that can be done. To be fair, I bought it in 2012, it was second-hand then and I’ve got a lot of use out of it since; it doesn’t owe me a lot. And it’s not like I’m short of video games to play!

It's well characterised, I'll give it that!

To that end, I decided to play a game that I’d bought for the PS4 nearly a year ago and hadn’t got around to playing yet: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. This is the first in a trilogy of games in Uncharted: The Nathan Drake collection. I’d seen some coverage of it, and it came across as, rather crassly: “Tomb Raider with a bloke.” And to begin with, that’s exactly what it is, though with a 7^th-gen design sensibility that made the game more like the later Tomb Raiders than the earlier ones. I’m enjoying it so far; the game is fun to play and while it doesn’t look particularly long (apparently, I’m roughly 40% of the way through having just beaten the first bit?) there’s a lot to do. I don’t know what, if anything, the PS4 remaster has done for the quality of the graphics or game but for me it’s all about whether I enjoy it, and at this point, I am.

Massive amounts of Vek and environmental
hazards make this a very difficult mission to beat.

I also played a couple of games on my laptop I hadn’t played in a while: Into the Breach, which I’ve talked about before, and The Witness, which I haven’t. Into the Breach is always a fun game; I really like how it can potentially only take about an hour to get to the final mission so that you’re not bogged down in an hours-long campaign, and I like that the final mission scales up with the rest of the game so it’s not as though you can level up and cheese your way to victory. I haven’t beaten it yet though, as either way it is very difficult. I came to within one turn the last time I tried, but all my mechs got destroyed before I could finish the mission.

These tree puzzles were easy, until they weren't...

The Witness is an odd puzzle game that is about exploring an island solving puzzles on computer screens, such as you might find in a puzzle book. I played it last year briefly during a time where I wasn’t doing the blog and came back to it now because I figured if I have 20 minutes dead time at work I could jump in and do a few puzzles, but I find myself oddly engrossed whenever I put it on and often find myself playing for a long time when I put it on. It’s a weird game, but there’s something quite satisfying about solving the puzzles. I’ve had to look up a guide to find out the conceit of some of the puzzles, but there has only been one so far where I had to look up the actual solution, and even when I found it, I couldn’t see how the clue fit the puzzle!

Fiendish.

Finally, I ran Pathfinder for the usual crew at the end of last month. I had a really good time with it this time; the problem with a lot of the battles in upper-level Pathfinder is the characters often have abilities which trump most of the monsters that you throw of at them. Action economy becomes an issue as well, especially with 5-6 player characters. However, at one point they come across a Forgefiend who can move through the walls and create very difficult environments for them to fight in. Also, it does a huge amount of damage by spewing molten slag out of its belly, which makes me sound quite vindictive, but the PCs have quite high defensive capabilities as well, so getting to a point where I do some damage to them isn’t all that common for me!

I am hoping to get the next edition of Pathfinder again quite soon, but for how often I play roleplaying games and the fact that I’ve got at least another year in Rise of the Runelords, I can’t justify spending the money on it currently. But we’ve got Christmas coming up, so you never know!

Let’s hope next week starts a bit better…

Last Week's Games: Crash, Rayman, Mordheim and Pathfinder

My face if I manage to 100% the game...

I began this week by playing a little more of Crash Bandicoot, trying to get some of the gems and relics. I wasn’t very successful! From what I understand, the game’s puzzle involves getting the coloured gems to open up some of the paths in the earlier levels in order to get all the crates. This is all well and good but in order to get the gem, you need to clear some of the most difficult levels in the game having smashed all of the crates and not dying even once. That is a pretty tall order, especially for a game I’ve already beaten, and while it would be lovely to get all the achievements, I have a feeling that will become more work than fun before too long. 

Haven't played any of the Murphy's Touch levels yet...

I carried on with Rayman: Legends on the Nintendo Switch; pick up and play games are a great boon to have in a busy life! It’s great that you can do a few levels at a time then switch (aha!) it off and not have to worry about it, and while few people would find the levels themselves a challenge, it tests me on the right level. I could probably get to the end of the game and only really make an effort on the boss battles, but of course the real challenge of the game comes from getting all the collectibles. This isn’t particularly difficult either but I will have some backtracking to do on those levels where I didn’t quite get enough Lums, or rescue all the Teensies!

Watch out, he'll batter you...

When I’ve had some time with my laptop I’ve come back to my old sparring partner, Mordheim: City of the Damned, where I’ve been trying to get my Nordland Ravagers warband up to the point where they could tackle the third campaign mission. This mainly involves my Ogre getting to level four before someone kills him, as I desperately need a soldier in the warband immune to the fear effects put upon by the Daemons I know are coming. But I’ve also taken some time out for him to train some skills, so it’s a slow process, during which one of my better henchmen lost one of his arms, and one of my better archers died altogether (to be replaced by someone that, I found out after the fact, only had one leg.) Still, I’ve always really enjoyed this game so I’m not complaining!

Will they ever beat him?

Finally on Sunday I carried on with Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords. It took us a while to organise this one, and some people have come and gone. This time we organised it with two of our characters missing, so Dave turned up with his friend Ross who created a polearm fighter. He also took the Big Game Hunter feat that is one of the campaign traits for the adventure path. This is an interesting one because I’d read the first adventure for this, Burnt Offerings, long before I’d read the rest of the campaign and while Big Game Hunter telegraphs the larger creatures that this feat is designed to deal with, I wouldn’t necessarily think to take it knowing what was coming in Burnt Offerings! It came in useful this time, as we are at the fourth section – Against the Giants – and the party made short work of four Stone Giants, two Lamias (who are designed in the adventure to be a lot harder than the ones that appear in the Bestiary,) and two Young Red Dragons.

It’s a testament to how enjoyable the Pathfinder adventure paths are that we’ve kept this going for two and a half years, but I’ve run into a problem with Against the Giants – Action Economy. Basically what this means is that while the monsters I’m running are pretty hard in their own right, I haven’t got enough actions with my monsters per turn to pose a threat to the party. To be fair, this might be due to the fact that I didn’t do a lot of preparation (or I might have had the Dragons come to assist the Lamias, that would have been interesting!) but it’s something I might need to think about for future sessions and campaigns.

Last Week's Games: Magic Labyrinth, Dark Souls, Into The Breach, Pathfinder

A busy week for me this week! While I played a lot of Horus Heresy: Legions, there’s not much more I can say about it without repeating myself, and I was fortunate enough to have time to play some other games this week:

A magical experience for the whole family.

Kirsty and I played a delightful little board game called The Magic Labyrinth. This game has you controlling little wizards though a grid-board; you roll a dice to find out how far you can move and aim for a randomly-generated magic symbol somewhere around the middle of the board. The challenge comes from the fact that there are walls built under the board, and if the ball bearing that is magnetically attached beneath the board to your wizard falls off because of one of these walls, you have to go back to the start and start again. The first wizard to collect five symbols is the winner. We played a couple of games and had a really nice time; it’s not a deep experience by any means but sometimes we don’t necessarily want to be micro-managing numbers, stats and fifteen different things going on the board, and in those situations games like the Magic Labyrinth are perfect.

A devastating boss fight for parts of your family
you don't get on with and want to punish.

I had a go with Dark Souls for the first time in a while. I’m stuck on the Bell Gargoyle boss monster, with my character having a very light dexterity build. I remember making this character in response to having tried to make a heavy fighter in an earlier play-through, and not having the speed to dodge the gargoyle’s attacks. I can usually beat the first gargoyle down to the point where the second one arrives, but once they start breathing fire, there’s not much I can do and I keep dying on top of the Parish. Nonetheless, it is fun to try, so I’ll keep at it, though I might need to look at a Wiki to find out what I’m missing!

A strategy game for members of your family
who haven't played them before.

On my laptop, I came back to a game I downloaded last year and played for a while: Into The Breach. This is a brilliant turn-based strategy game with rogue-like elements, where you control a team of three Mechs lead by a time traveller to battle the insect-like Vek on the remnants of Earth. There are a number of different time travellers and mech builds to unlock, and the maps are randomly generated so no two play-throughs are the same. In each battle, it is up to you to decide how you’re going to use the resources available to defeat the Vek. The key element of the game is the turn order – When the Mechs take their turn, they move then attack, while the Vek attack then move. The trick is that the Vek telegraph their attacks before their turn, meaning that you can focus your attacks on the one that’s threatening the most, making sure you kill them or eliminate their threat. The mechanics are simple enough and anybody should be able to have a go and enjoy it, but it has a surprising amount of depth. I’ve really enjoyed my time with it this week!

It all seems so long ago, when Goblins were
tearing families apart...

Finally, on Sunday I continued running Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group. Most of the session involved the Wizard character desperately trying to find somewhere to sleep so he could get all his spells back. Trouble is, the party were in a dungeon filled with Ogres and Giants, and I wasn’t about to let the party rest in an area if it wouldn’t make sense for them to do so. This meant that they had to manage their limited resources carefully as they tried to find somewhere to take a long rest, which resulted in some more-careful-than-usual planning and experimenting with different spells. The highlight of the session was when the Druid character used Fire Snake for the first time; a brutal spell that inflicts a huge amount of damage. As this is the highest level I think any of them have ever played (currently level 10,) they don’t get to use the big guns very often!

I’m back at work next week, so I’m expecting my time to be limited but I’ll do what I can!

Last Week's Games: Dungeon Master, Colonization, Murder in the Alps, Chainsaw Warrior, Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords

I started this week having a go with a game I haven’t played for a while: Dungeon Master. Some of you may remember I started playing this game back in April, and I didn’t get very far with it! This was partly due to the clunky nature of the game mechanics being a lot more work than fun in many cases, and also, looking back at the date stamp of the blogs I did last year, I discovered Eternal Crusade a couple of days later. I was a little better at the combat last time, and I understand how to work the spells now, but the latter still isn’t going very well. This could be because I’ve picked four heroes that don’t have a lot of mana about them; apparently spells are a crucial part of beating the later game so it might mean another re-start to pick a more balanced group of heroes!

Always more fun with a funny name...

Later in the week I tried Colonization again, and after a couple of hours of play I did what I always do whenever I play a 4X game – realise I’ve messed it up completely and will need to start again. I anticipated this and kept things fresh by entering my name as a famous person from the relevant country every time I do. England is the obvious one as I know some of the names, and I had the entire English Colony of America headed up by Rowan Atkinson at one point. In my current play-through that I’m almost certainly going to have to abandon, the Dutch are being led by Ruud van Nistelrooy. It’s completely useless but it’s fun to think about!

A murderer amongst you... but who is it?

I carried on with Murder in the Alps as and when I had the time, and ended up beating the third stage which I think wraps up the whole of the trilogy. Currently there is one other episode available and another four planned, according to the list of levels you can choose from, and I’m quite glad that I got to the end of an entire trilogy of levels – getting to the end of a story-based game on a mobile device is no mean feat – without having spent any money on it. I wonder if it’s worth doing a review at this point.

10/10 for style, though.

On Saturday I had a go with another Games Workshop licensed game: Chainsaw Warrior. I bought this in a Steam sale at some point and I didn’t pay a lot of money for it, which is for the best because it’s not that good of a game. It’s based on a board game that’s dungeon-bashing with cards, except that games have come on a long way since 1987 when it was released and it shows. The point of dungeon-bashing games is to go in with as good a chance of winning as possible; apart from selecting your equipment at the start of the game there’s almost nothing you can do to affect this and most of it relies on Random Chance. I know that with a Games Workshop game that’s like complaining that grass is green, but it doesn’t make for a hugely engaging experience. Thankfully it doesn’t last long!

I actually got to run a dragon. A proper dragon,
that fights and everything! My players killed it.

Finally on Sunday I carried on with Rise of the Runelords, with Dave, Victor, Morgan and some of their friends. I’ve been running this campaign for over two years now and I’m pleased that a solid core of the group that originally started it are happy to keep playing! Currently we’re at Fortress of the Stone Giants, and I’m really enjoying running this dungeon. What I’ve found with the current edition of the game is that when you have a group of players who know exactly what they’re doing when it comes to optimising their characters, it’s very difficult to frighten them with encounters they can easily beat. Some of the monsters I’ve been putting them up against - Deathwebs, Redcaps and modified Stone Giants – have been capable of doing them some serious harm, and I’ve been able to use terrain and traps to a good effect as well. The result is that it feels less of a grind for my players, and it’s a lot more fun for me.

Last Week's Games: Mordheim and Pathfinder

So here are the significant things that happened to me this week:

I spent a lot of time on Monday afternoon playing Mordheim: City of the Damned. You may remember that the last time I talked about this game, I’d failed the third Human Mercenaries campaign mission, and intended to return to it once I’d trained up my ogre to be a match for the Daemons I know are in the library. That was my mission for that session; to train the ogre to the point where he’d be good enough to take on the mission (roughly 4^th level.)

Slight problem with that: he died.

He can dish it out and take a punch...

After taking him into a few battles and levelling him up quite a bit, I then found myself against the Undead, who are a very messy faction to contend with. Most of them are not affected by fear, and they can do a brutal amount of damage before they fall. The vampires themselves cause terror, and that severely limits the effectiveness of your warriors against them. Unfortunately they have a habit of tying up your best warriors in combat and there’s not a lot you can do about it once you’re there. It was a ferocious pitched battle against the two factions, which I eventually won but not before their Crypt Horror tanked most of the health from my Ogre. I managed to drop the Crypt Horror in the end, but after that it fell to one of the ghouls to inflict one blow on my Ogre, which was enough to put him out of action and, when the time came to roll on the injury table, kill him.

I’ve got a new one now – I didn’t have enough money to pay for a higher-level Ogre, but I don’t mind training one up again. I don’t know whether I’ll train him enough to have another go at the campaign mission. I’m more likely to use the regular warriors in the warband for that, because of timing issues. The campaign missions take ages to get through, and I need to give myself enough time to do it, so if I get an evening with a couple of hours spare I’ll do it then – with or without the Ogre. I certainly can’t afford to take him on the mission at the moment, knowing that he will go down quite easily.

Then on Sunday I carried on running the Pathfinder game: Rise of the Runelords that I started two years ago. This is as long and as high-level as I’ve ever run a game of anything! The line-up of players and characters have changed over the years but the core of the group remains the same. We’re at the beginning of Chapter 4 (of 6,) Fortress of the Stone Giants, and the group enjoyed a battle for to save the town from marauding Giants, before investigating certain aspects of the town (trying to avoid spoilers here!)[1]

Great adventure path.

Pathfinder’s an odd game to run; it’s got a huge amount of depth to the rules but if you don’t know what you’re doing it can also get quite unwieldy. There’ve been a few times when I’ve been running it and playing it I’ve found myself thinking, “roll to hit and then do your maths homework.” Thankfully most of my players are familiar enough with the system to know that they at least need to be able to tell me what they want to do and how it’s going to work, otherwise they’ll slow the game down to a crawl.

Where Pathfinder stands out for me, though, is the quality of the adventures – it’s got the best long-form campaigns I’ve seen in eight years of roleplaying games, and it’s a pleasure to be able to run them. I’d even run the same adventure with a different group to see how differently they’d handle it – if I had time.

I’ve got a new game I’m about to try out, and I’m looking forward to telling you all about it next week…

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[1] By the way if you’ve gone through Rise of the Runelords and are wondering how we’ve only managed to get this far after two years, our group meets on a monthly basis.

Last Week's Games: Early August

Hi, it’s been a while since my last regular blog, so I thought I’d do an update for you with the games I’ve been playing over the last few weeks. This isn’t me ‘resuming normal service’ in the usual way; things are still very up in the air at the moment and I can’t give a timetable to a weekly blog for another couple of weeks at least, but I can give you an idea of what’s been happening. 

Mack the Knife. Also known as Stabby McGee.
Thanks Kirsty!

I’ve cheated a bit with playing new games over the last few weeks, as most of them were on the Capcom Arcade Classics Collection Volume 2. This was a disc I bought for the Playstation 2, I think I was still at University at the time so it would have been anything up to twelve years ago. I bought it mainly on the strength of the original Street Fighter which was featured on the disc, and didn’t touch any of the other games on there. That was a shame, as Street Fighter is arguably one of the weakest games on there,[1] and I missed out on some gems! A lot of them were old late 80s/early 90s arcade games, where the arcades where at their peak of featuring scrolling beat-em-ups you were never going to be able to beat without spending at least £10 on continues, but I’ve had a lot of fun with them. Kirsty and I got through Captain Commando, and there’ll be a Backlog Beatdown on that one soon!

Well that's a bit presumptuous. I don't remember being friends
with Susan and Brian. I'm sure they're very nice people.

Elsewhere I’ve been playing 8 Ball Pool on my Kindle Fire. This is a top-down pool game that is played against various people around the world, including at least two people I know! I’m doing reasonably well with it, I win about two thirds of my games, although I’d suggest that at least half of those are to do with the connection going on the other side of the match! Once you get past the novelty of playing pool on your tablet, it’s an unlock-fest really, and one that is not shy about advertising its micro transactions, but as long as you keep your wallet under control it’s possible to have a good time with games like this!

Also I’ve been trying to get through the original Castlevania on the WiiU. As anybody who has played this game will tell you, after a deceptively easy first level, the game becomes brutally difficult, and the only way I’m making any progress is to scum-save each part of the levels and hope for the best when I get to the boss. Thankfully, the structure of the WiiU allows you to do this, or I wouldn’t have a chance. I’ve always really enjoyed the Castlevania games, but apart from beating Super Castlevania IV in 1997, I’ve never beaten another one. Might be time to play through some more!

I haven’t had much time for hobby gaming over the summer holidays for various different reasons, but I’ve continued to run Pathfinder’s Rise of the Runelords for Dave, Victor, Morgan and some of their friends. I’ve also started to run Dungeons and Dragons again at the Black Country Role Playing Society, where I’m running the Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts path from the D&D Adventurer’s League. I had a starting line-up of players worryingly similar to the Falcon’s Hollow saga I ran years ago, but I should have some new players join up next week.

I should go to the Nashkel Mines next...

Perhaps as added inspiration I started a new campaign on Baldur’s Gate as a Sorcerer. I’ve played through probably the first third of the game many times, and have never been able to see it through quite until the end, however this time is different because I allowed Khalid and Jaheira, and certain other party members to be killed off and will recruit new party members as I’m going along. I almost never do this as canonically they both survive until the end of the game, but I thought I’d see how I get along with the core line-up!

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[1] Yes, I know it paved the way for the massive gaming entity that the Street Fighter Franchise eventually became, but the first game in the series just wasn’t there yet.

Last Week's Games: Split/Second, Eternal Crusade, X-Wing, Catan, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Pathfinder

Quite a bit to get through this week…

Get ready to blow stuff up!

My new game for this week was Split/Second, a racing game recommended by Metal Jesus in one of his Hidden Gems videos. It’s an arcade racing game with a TV show-like aesthetic, where you drive in various challenges to compete for enough credits to advance to the elite races – and hopefully the next episode! What I like about this is that this is purely an arcade racing game; there’s no micro-managing your vehicle, no sense of realism in the game. It’s just you against the cars and the environment.

Oh yes, the environment. The main gimmick of the game is that you can, once you’ve drifted enough and been on someone’s tail for long enough to build up your power meter, trigger certain parts of the environment to cause problems for your rivals. More often than not, these come in the form of explosions that throw them off the track, but there’s some fun ones as well. In one of the earlier tracks, triggering a certain point causes a digger to swing its shovel around that creates an obstacle. It works for a couple of reasons: Firstly, you can’t just press the button to ruin someone’s day; it needs precise timing and knowledge of the track in order to make it work effectively. Secondly, certain of these trigger points change the entire layout of the track, so chances are you won’t be racing on the same bit of track on the next lap!

I played Split/Second for a couple of hours and I was really enjoying it so I’ll definitely be playing some more!

I carried on with Eternal Crusade, there’s a live campaign running over the next few days where you have to win five battles for a large reward of Rogue Trader Credits. These are used to buy weapons and armour that affect the character aesthetically. They’re no better or worse than the equipment you can buy; they just look different. This is the Micro-Transaction element of the game; you can pay money for these things but since it wouldn’t increase my level of enjoyment of the gameplay, I certainly won’t be spending money on them! But if I can get enough RTC to get an upgrade for one of my guns, I might do that. Otherwise they’ll just sit there gathering e-dust!

I found myself with a little more time to be out and about than I normally do, and on Wednesday I went in to Warlords and Wizards and had a game of X Wing with my old friend Mason. I’ve known Mason a while and his collection of Imperial ships has grown in that time! I took on his force with my Trenchrunners, and had a run of good luck in the beginning of the game. However, the ferocious abilities of Quickdraw, as well as the support provided by a local shuttle, meant it was a very hard game that I eventually lost. Great fun though, cheers Mase!

Then on Friday I had a game of Catan with a couple of young lads who go to the shop. They’re getting quite in to it now and with that comes a certain amount of skill. I got off to what I thought was a good start by heading straight for the ports, but they managed to break up my Longest Road, and one of the lads won the game on at least three bought victory points. Well done!

All sorts of different roles...

We also had a quick game of One Night Ultimate Werewolf; I had the app on my Kindle Fire and we sat down for a four-player game. I was the Werewolf with one of the other lads, and I tried to bluff it to claim to be the seer; they saw through it eventually but time had run out by then and we all voted for the Troublemaker. Great fun!

Finally on Sunday I continued Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords with Dave, Victor, Morgan and Ian. For the first time, I’ve run a campaign all the way up to level 8, and the lads were happy to level up!

I’m expecting a quieter week next week, so see you then!

Last Week's Games: Assassin's Creed, Pathfinder

I decided when I came home late on Monday Evening to give Streets of Rage 2 one last hurrah, but I found that I wasn’t concentrating properly and making too many silly mistakes. So instead, I had a look at some of the bonus games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection: Space Harrier, Alien Syndrome and Tip Top. They are all very difficult early arcade games, and I didn’t really give them a lot of time engage me; it was just a way of winding down after a long and not very easy day. Realising I was getting nowhere, I moved on the following evening.

You can't see me...

I started playing Assassin’s Creed, of all things! I’ve had a bit of an on-off relationship with this game. The series itself has come under fire in recent years for releasing the same game over and over again with naught but a token effort to innovate, but having only ever played the first one, I haven’t really noticed that. The game is decent enough, and follows a core loop of the Master Assassin, Altair, researching and investigating a target for assassination in the Holy Land, before planning your attack and delivering the killing blow. It’s good at what it does but the gameplay is very repetitive, and not in a way that I find particularly enjoyable, so I play a bit at a time and then not touch it again for months, sometimes even years. Thankfully, this isn’t a game I feel the need to return to the start of for the sake of the plot, or we’d be here for a very long time.

During the last time I played, I manage to get the achievement points for surviving one hundred fights without dying. It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing; once your health bar gets to a certain point the fights are generally over before you take any significant amount of damage. So this would normally be of little significance but I came very close to messing it up! I started off in the city of Acre, and had forgotten that you’re supposed to blend in with the scholars in order to leave as most of the guards in the game will attack me unless I’m hiding. So I ran right through the guards, who promptly attacked. I tried to fight back, but I’d forgotten the controls too and it was taking me a while to get an attack pattern going, by which time I was surrounded by six or seven guards that I knew I hadn’t got a hope of beating. I ran off to avoid being killed, managed it, and got the achievement about half an hour later. I realised that the bulk of the work I’d put in for that would have been done years ago, and that if I got killed I’d have had to start all over again, so I was very grateful I’d had the sense to run from that fight!

Those kind of stories are what make the experience for me, but on a broader scale the game has a lot going for it. Graphically it’s gorgeous, and the level design is on point for a game of this size. I’ve progressed about half way through the game and I’m actually finding it a lot more enjoyable now that I’ve realised I am supposed to be killing the guards as well. When I played the game previously I was trying to do what an assassin would do, which is try to kill his intended target with as little collateral damage as possible. Then I read the achievement list and realised I was actually supposed to be assassinating the guards. I find the game a lot more fun having discovered this!

I also continued running Pathfinder for my friends Dave, Victor, Shane and Ian. I’ve been running Rise of the Runelords for them monthly for a year and I’m really enjoying how the campaign and the characters are setting up – particularly Victor, who’s played through the vast majority of the campaign before with a different system but is enjoying the different approach this group is taking. We should get another session in next month.