A ramble that involves talking about video gaming

 So. Been a while, hasn't it? My silence has mostly been a lack of being able to report anything fruitful happening. So I've been playing my tabletop games and, when I'm not doing that, escaping through video games.

Which brings me to what I have been playing these past couple of months.

The time has mostly been spent on guilty pleasures. I was not familiar with My Time at Portia before discovering My Time at Sandrock. Both play out in the same world and has the same basic concept so I'll talk about them together. 

In short, these two games are Stardew Valley on drugs, but you're not a farmer, but rather a builder. You're given different commissions that you need to complete that increase in difficulty as you research better equipment. You have the same relationship dynamics with the people of the town as you do in Stardew. 

You can eventually win over some of the folk, make friends, get married and whatnot. I haven't really explored the relationship dynamics much as that's frankly not something I'm interested in. 

So, if that's not why I play, what is it that compels me to give these two games so much of my time? I think it's the sense of accomplishment. Like you're building things and the town begins to improve around you and you feel like you've had a hand in it. That and it's kinda cutesy... which I am not always drawn to but sometimes you just find these things that kinda suck in my attention.

While your character is a builder and not a farmer, there's quite a bit of farming options available in the games. You end up being very much a Jack-of-all-Trades. I dare say it has a little something for everyone be it combat, farming, building, relationships, etc.

My Time at Sandrock is still in Early Access. I finished the content available for it in thirty hours. It still has quite a ways to go before we're looking at a release date, I think. They say 2023, but I'm a little doubtful about that. Not because the game is poor or anything. Simply because its current content doesn't scratch the surface of My Time at Portia. They still have a long, long way to go to get the two on par in amount of content, IF that is what they're aiming for.

I've spent almost three-hundred hours on Medieval Dynasty and only recently felt like I've had my fill even though I'm not actually finished yet. I've babbled about it before, I believe. You start off with the clothes on your back and some food in your pocket. The castellan gives you permission to build a home anywhere and so you start off your journey to become a village elder. 

This game is a first/third-person village builder and manager. I would say the AI is still a little iffy. So if you're in it for the combat aspect it sometimes offers or want to really interact with the town folk, you might be disappointed. However, the managing aspect is rather solid.

There's a lot of 'make work' in this game, which is probably why I have so many hours invested into it. At the same time, it's one I can sit and play while idly watching a tv show or try to catch up with Critical Role (don't ask how that's going).

For the longest time, The Elder Scrolls: Online didn't work on my computer. It was an internet issue, that much I knew. And so I've been very annoyed at it and railing at it because technically it is supposed to work with the internet speed I have. It just didn't want to.

Until it suddenly did. I don't know why, but suddenly I can play this game. It wasn't because of the new PC (because it was giving me this issue with the old AND new PC). But for whatever reason, it is working now and so I've started playing it. I've heard that it's great fun to play ESO on multiplayer and I'm awaiting the opportunity to try it out. For now, I'm just happy the bloody thing works. 

As to gameplay, it's interesting. I'm still trying to figure it out. The world is big and I'm confused as to what I'm doing within it. But the game still deserves an honourable mention given that I have spent a couple of hours running around in it.

I've also tried a bit of Starwars: The Old Republic. I have done the tutorial homeworld bit and am now hitting level 14... and I'm not all that impressed yet. There's much about it that is impressive, don't get me wrong. The areas are pretty, Corusant is insanely impressive, but as quests go, it's very fetch quest centred. Not quite my bag. Combat is okay it's an Old Republic combat system, so there's not much to do but hit a button, wait, hit a button, wait. 

Then comes the "of course I played it" and some other honourable mentions. Grounded is a game I play at least two hours a week, sometimes more. I'm very excited to see what the story release will be. I'm not necessarily very good at the game, but it has all the elements of a survival game that I love so how can I not be rooting for it? 

I attempted Starbound. One would think that it would click with me but it hasn't. I'm still waiting to try it on multiplayer. Maybe with the guidance of a fan I'll be able to get it. But at the moment my character dies. A lot. And I don't see the point of it.

Then there is Raft which I started playing last night. Still trying to figure it out, so I don't have a lot to say about it yet. Looks pretty. The concept seems simple enough. The seagulls are annoying. As is the shark chomping on the boat (and me). But I need to play it a lot more before I can form an opinion on it.

 

Feedback on Game Over Gaming Cyberfestival - D&D game

So I did it. I faced my fears, drove all the way to Glentana and ran a D&D session with a group of awesome people who were so hungry and eager for a game that they even thought I was awesome. :-P

 

Not everything went according to plan. I think I might have mentioned it before somewhere that Game Over Gaming is still something that's in its infancy. So there were a number of logistical things that didn't quite go right, but everyone pitched in and made it awesome anyway. I also ended up dealing with my first migraine in years. It was so potent that I couldn't go into the main venue without my head wanting to explode.

With all that said, it went really well. Friendships were formed, dice were rolled, with a Natural 20 being one of them. Very very potent stuff. I also had some awesome friends who popped onto Twitch to say hi and roast me good and proper. Unfortunately, so good and proper that the stream died and never really recovered despite attempts to get it going. Even my mom got to watch. :)

I have been invited to DM at the next event which will be in October at a high school in George. This will allow for more people to attend. I'm also going to attempt to rope in another DM to so that we'll have two D&D tables as what happened with mine is that people started watching in on the sidelines. They had shunned the notion initially, but then got to see how much fun we were having and you got the feeling that there might have been a desire to join in. Also the whole word-of-mouth thing will probably secure us more people. So yeah. There are plans.

DM babble - The lead up to an interesting weekend.

 So if you follow my Twitter account, this information will not be new.

On 8 March, I got an interesting whatsapp message. An organiser to Game Over Gaming's April Convention was in need of a DM to run a D&D game at their convention. Their go-to DM moved his ass to Cape Town and so they were short... and probably desperate. Why? Because they contacted ME and asked ME to run a game. 

I was astounded, confused, flattered, and immediately anxiety ridden. I had a chat with Tabi and she asked me what was my hesitation and I said, truthfully fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of messing up. Just fear. 

Having that pointed out meant that my pride immediately demanded that I accept the challenge. 

So on 1 April, I'll be taking the (approximately) four-hour trip from Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha) to Glentana to meet up with the peeps at Game Over Gaming convention and run a D&D game on the Saturday, 2 April at 14:00 GMT+2. For this session, I expect six players ranging from absolute brand new to seasoned and have been given a maximum 5 hours to complete the one-shot I have prepared for them. And, to add to the fun, the session is going to be streamed on Twitch.

No pressure, right?

With but a few days to go, I can say I'm basically completely prepped, printed, and assembled. I'm also still terrified, but as someone who deals with permanent anxiety, I suppose one could say this is my default state. 

I figure I should break up my fears into conquerable challenges.

1. The trip to Glentana by myself.
2. Stranger danger
3. Spending the night in a place I don't know
4. Stranger danger 
5. D&D madness!
6. Why the hell is that camera doing pointed at me?
7. Stranger danger :-P
8. The second night on my own, tired and stressed, but relieved it's over.
9. Heading home by me onesy.

I know, I know, my brain is making this a much bigger thing than it is. Especially the stranger danger... But I also know that I can manage it. 

...I just need to remember to pack my courage along with my dice...

Life FYI, Gaming babble, Random babble

It's been over a month since I've last posted anything. Let's see what's happened. 

Life. 

Life did.

So since this isn't really a life blog, I won't go to deeply into it. It involves lawyers and affidavits; plumbing and electrical issues; car issues; and the ever increasing worry of not stretching my finances too far.

But that last one is a worry I know I share with millions of other people. So meh.

In response to life being a bastard, I've done my level best to dodge it by escaping into games and D&D. That's been going well. I spent nearly 80 hours on Icarus till I grew slightly weary of it, played some Valheim and Satisfactory as well. And of course Grounded - new patch! Yay! Baldur's Gate III is a game I've seen about 30 minutes of and it looked promising - I'm hoping to play more of it soon.

With D&D, I've been running two games of Dragon Heist, both going well. I'm running Wild Beyond the Witchlight with the Brits and... well they seem to be enjoying it. I'm still struggling with it. It's so whimsy yet so dark at the same time. I'll probably babble about it at some point solo. Give some kind of review for it.

And then there's the homebrew, every second Friday with the South Africans. That has been going really, really well. Better than I could have hoped for. We've finished a big section I never intended to become a big section (haha) and it was strong story wise and I managed to get one of my two challenging players on board with plans on roping the second one in better soon. I should probably babble about this one solo too.

So I guess I could say I'm okay. Not fantastic, not wonderful, not optimistic, energised, nor determined. But okay. I haven't been gnawing at my wrists yet, but the only time my hands don't shake from anxiety is when I'm sleeping (I think. This hasn't been observed :P).

And I think, given life at present, I can't ask for more than that. Well, I could, but *shrugs*.

Gaming babble: Icarus

 So the new PC arrived, the parts have been successfully assembled, and it runs like a dream. The most tedious part of the setup was/is waiting for games to download. I have horrifically slow internet and it's not unusual to wait between 10-20 hours for some games if not longer (I'm looking at you Elder Scrolls Online...).

So I downloaded Grounded because that would have been the first game I'd play with friends. I downloaded Valheim because that would be the second game I play with friends.

And then I downloaded Icarus.

The premise of Icarus is that you're a prospector sent down from the station onto a planet which somewhat failed terraforming and now requires you to wear a suit to survive. Each mission, or prospect, has its own goals (scanning areas, killing beasts, harvesting food) and has its own time limit in which you need to complete the task and get back to the spacestation before it loses contact with the area you're prospecting in.

The game is beautiful and challenging, and it's a game that I enjoy playing...

But there are some things to consider before buying it.

The game, while having been fully released, isn't exactly a fully finished product. Looking at the trailer to Icarus you see some very lofty promises, most of them kept, though the fauna in the game is a little... confusing. The trailer shows alien lifeforms. The game has deer, bears, wolves, boars, and rabbits. Hm... They're also still consistently updating the game. So it's not that the game has been made and left to be what it is, which is incomplete, but it's definitely still a work in progress. You also need a somewhat beastly PC to play the game. I've heard that it's really hard on some graphics cards, running them hot.

There's also something a youtuber pointed out (either Z1 or GameEdged, I can't remember) but essentially you have like thirty missions. Every mission starts you off with nothing. So you arrive on planet, build a base, build tools, do what you need to do, get back to your shuttle, blast off. And you have to do that for every mission. This can become tedious. I'm only three missions in and I can feel the bit of strain on the idea. Granted it has kept me occupied for over 10 hours so far, so just that makes it worth the reasonable price I paid for it. I think it just means that it's a game you'll play piecemeal as opposed to binging on it for several missions. That's going to tire you out.

So all-in-all Icarus is a mixed bag. It's gorgeous, but it has its flaws and riddles. I'm curious to see what the developers are going to do with it. I'm certainly enjoying it but I realise that it's not for everyone.

New Beginnings - kinda sorta

It has happened. It took over a year of advertisements, but I've managed to sell my Royal Enfield Classic 500.  

It's a little depressing. I paid so much for the motorcycle and, five years later, only managed to sell it for a fraction of the initial price. But I did end up selling it to a lady who is passionate about the motorcycle and is already working feverishly on it. So at least it's going to a good home.

I'm doing something epic with the funds received. After 6 years, I'm getting myself a new gaming PC.

I'm both excited and terrified at this venture. The last time I bought myself a gaming PC was just after those mofos cleaned out my house. Getting a computer was a matter of necessity to me and I had some funds available along with the insurance, but I was still rather limited. This time I wasn't as limited. The specs are insane, but again, it has to last another six or seven years before I'd even consider an upgrade let alone a new build altogether.

So what am I going to play on the new PC? I have a few ideas... I might babble about them as I play. Should give me something to write about.

DM Babble: Talk to your players... how that went.

 After ten sessions of my homebrew world with the South Africans, I decided to follow advice frequently dolled out and very rarely done.

"Talk to your players," the advice goes. "Find out what they like and don't like about the campaign you're running. Touch base with them and find out what expectations or desires they might have."

Now this sounds like sound advice, but these internet wise ones neglect with one crucial bit of reality.

Asking for critique is fucking terrifying! Especially when it's about things you've spent hours working on and have poured a lot of yourself into.

So with both these thoughts in mind, I went ahead and warned my players that I was going to ask them feedback at the end of the session. Fortunately with this group, it's a bunch of thoughtful, emotionally intelligent people which means I got a lot of constructive feedback and uplifting comments. Each had a different focus and there are some challenges that I need to overcome, but what I essentially got from the whole conversation was that they were enjoying themselves, that there are a few things that can make it better, but overall there was a general sense of being satisfied.

Yay.

Now comes the question: Would I recommend everyone doing this with their players?

Nope!

You know what players you have. Some of them are critical without really being considerate. Or they're selfish, pushing their desires at the cost of everyone else's. I'm fortunate that I have a group of older, more mature players. Not everyone has that. If you do have that, then go right ahead! Bask in the terror and be prepared to grow. But if you're dealing with miscreants, then don't expect to get much out of the exchange.

Not being terribly helpful, am I. Well, I guess it comes down to how well you know your crowd.

As part of my 'take it easy' drive, I only have one more session with these peeps this year (that I'm running). I'm optimistic that it'll go well. My anxiety isn't quite as high and even if I mess up, I know I have so many potentially cool things that could happen in future. So I'm optimistic.

DM Babble: Feel the burn

Just an update with no real message.

It's nearing December... and I'm pooped. This year has been insane, with lots of people drama (weren't I avoiding them?), work drama (ugh, work), law drama (I'm still waiting for the bill, eek), and just general mayhem.

To date, I've run 54 RPG sessions in 2021 (of which the majority was DnD). A little under half of those were sessions having to with my homebrew. 

Okay, so what's the point? The point is that I might have burnt myself out. The past couple of weeks have been rough creatively as well. Usually I'd be doing nanowrimo (see my previous posts about the joyous insanity) but I just couldn't get myself to do much of anything this year.

So instead of continuing this uphill run while on fire, I'm doing what I can to become unpooped. 

I've stopped running the homebrew with the Brits. I just realised it was a square peg in a round hole scenario (I might post about it later). I've been running Starforged with them, but that's not really working as spectacularly as I would have hoped. I might run something else with them in January. I've begun reading (and yes, prepping) The Wild beyond the Witchlight and it might be a much better fit. 

I'm halting the homebrew with the South Africans in December for the month just to take a break. It's been going really, really well, but I'm running on empty. And I found that it begins bleeding into the game. 

That leaves me with two groups of Dragon Heist. One might not play in December because they have social lives (weirdos), which leaves me with one group. And I love Dragon Heist, I've done it so many times that prep is a breeze, so I think that's going to be okay. 

I wouldn't have thought that 2021 was going to be 'worse' than 2020, but in some ways it has been and I find that I'm basically in disaster recovery mode. I've never had burnout. Been close, but I'm also aware that my depression mimics a lot of the symptoms. Now I know it is burnout. Even writing this post was somewhat exhausting. 

Hopefully I'll be able to report better things in January.

DM Babble: The dreaded metagaming

 A number of people have been talking about metagaming lately. Someone was even nice enough to give a definition of it stating that 'it's the player's real life knowledge that influences the character's decisions when the character wouldn't have had that knowledge at all'... or something like that. Close enough.

Some metagaming is to be expected, I think. If you sit at a table with decades worth of collective knowledge, it's impossible not to see a skeleton and reach for a bludgeoning weapon, or swear when you don't have one on hand. And mostly I'm okay with that. It means a bit more work on my end if I'm DM-ing to get monsters that have a few variations that the players haven't seen and mostly they appreciate the variety.

I'm also very guilty of this kind of meta-knowledge. And it's hard for me to switch off and go "my character wouldn't know this." I get so excited about knowing that I forget I'm supposed to not know.

But this is not the metagaming that I've been recently challenged with. What do you do with someone who actively reads the material prior to a session so as to gain maximum benefit?

I've asked a couple of people and most of the responses I've gotten is to "confront and kick out". Or to actively change the game so that it's different from the book. That's fine and well, but it's a lot of work to do for someone who is effectively cheating. Do I reward them with my additional time and effort by actively working against them? Or do I admit defeat and have them spoil the game? 

I'm currently running a game of intrigue. So the secrets aren't necessarily where the chest is hidden or where the secret passage leads. It's people who have very deep and dark secrets. It's having to interact and not know whether you're really encountering the truth. It means that if you spoil someone with additional knowledge, it's not limited to a room, but to the entire game, all the politics.

Couple of years ago I played a game of Dragon Heist with a group of people. One player innocently looked for pictures on google for a particular character they encountered in the game. She's an artist and I don't believe she meant any harm or went out to read up on anything. But, as these things go, wiki was able to supply her not only with the pictures she desired but the secrets I was keeping from the party. While she didn't say anything to the group, except for admitting to me that she fucked up, it tainted the game entirely. Because she couldn't switch off this meta-knowledge. And so every time they encountered that NPC, she would behave in a peculiar fashion, which made everyone suspicious and so they took the route of caution and were denied the direction of interest.

That is what I'm worried about with this particular game I'm running now. And that is why I don't know what to do about it. I enjoy the player's interactions, mostly. I have no qualm with the person and, while it's still very early to shift from 'acquaintance' to 'friend', the potential exists. But I also know he's not going to stop. And that is a problem I don't have a current solution for.

Gaming Babble: Some games I've been playing

Time flies. 

Granted, I have been keeping busy with D&D and such, but it's still pretty alarming. My country is still in some state of lock down, so I guess I could have called this Lock down list II or something. Anyhoo. Here are some games I've been playing.

Grounded

Yes, I kid you not. I'm still playing this game. I've talked about it multiple times, raved about it, bemoaned the lack of updates, and now I'm playing it on multiplayer which is loads of fun. We even have unofficial roles. One is the builder, one is the scientist, and I tend to play the scout/tank. Still shouting at the spiders, but the screaming has subsided somewhat. 

Green Hell

I have a love/hate relationship with this game. Mostly love though. You play Jake, a researcher, who has come to the Amazonian rain forest for a specific reason. It's another first-person survival game though the emphasis is a lot more on survival than on combat. This lists both the strength and weakness of the game. You learn to listen to your surroundings, avoiding predators and creepy crawlies, treating wounds with various bandages, building different kinds of armor and most likely a home base or bases. But you also have an enemy AI that's not quite up to snuff as compared to The Forest. It's still a very interesting game. The game has a story mode, a survival mode, and challenges. Green hell has a co-op multiplayer mode as well, which I haven't tried out yet, but would probably be fun too.

It also now has a free DLC prequel, Spirits of Amazonia, that's a bit of a mix of story, survival and largely exploration. Bit of a completionist trend though with the prequel, which isn't quite my taste, but I can still recommend trying out.

Medieval Dynasty

I've sunk a surprising amount of hours into this game, but it's difficult to really narrow down what it is.

 Medieval Dynasty is to some extent a first-person medieval town builder with some survival and a lot of crafting elements to it. You are a village leader who starts off on their own, building, crafting and completing quests until your settlement grows. You can marry, have a son, and build a dynasty. Each season is divided into three days wherein you can build, hunt, craft, farm, etc. 

At first the time feels too little as there is so much to do, but the more help you get in terms of villagers, the more it frees you up to do other things. It is a game that's more in the line of a simulation and I find it just generally relaxing. It's a great game to just switch your mind off in.

Valheim

I've clocked almost fifty hours in this game, so it deserves honorable mention. 

Valheim is a third person
survival-crafting game wherein you are a deceased viking dropped into the world of Valheim by Odin to kill monsters. The game is challenging, the art style is interesting, crafting is good and building is fun. It should have all the elements that pull me in, but I struggle a bit with it and haven't played it in months. Still, I'm sure I'll come back to it.

So what have you been playing?