review
Dragon Age RPG mini review
The other day I pent 4 or so hours playing through the introductory Dragon Age adventure The Dalish Curse. This gave me my first taste of the new Dragon Age RPG ruleset in play and over all my impressions were positive.
The stunt system was a fun way to make combat more dynamic, with out bogging down the rules. I’ll be especially interested in how they add new stunts as the box sets are released. I noticed even in our one session that people gravitated to the same stunts. Unfortunately the other day my dice weren’t in the mood to pair up, which made each time they did that much more exciting.
Otherwise the system was easy to pick up and didn’t seem overly intrusive in play. There was some discussion around the table on the Dragon Die and it’s place as the decider of success levels. Personally that didn’t bother me too much. If you succeed at a task, you succeed. The number of successes you have only matters occasionally. Using them in extended tests did seem a little cumbersome to me however. But as with all these things I’d just adjust how I used them so it didn’t get in the way.
I was playing a Dalish ranger type so didn’t have much to do with the magic system. there was quite a lot of discussion after the game on whether mages are ineffective. Reading through the rules I’m not sure it’s such a problem. The ability for people to turn aside a spell seems like a good one, especially going forward. Perhaps it could have been streamlined so that you have a Magic defence score rather than needing to do a roll every time to see if it gets through. But I’m sure that is the type of thing groups will house rule if they feel strongly about it.
I’d be a little reluctant to kick off any sort of campaign (even if I had the time) until I had a firm idea of when box set 2 will be out. I have a feeling that many of the gripes I’ve read in forums about the lack of setting info will be addressed in the up coming box sets. There are two releases already announced, the Blood in Fereldan adventure pack and the Dragon Age Game Master’s Kit. No release dates for these yet however.
All in all I liked the system and think it works well and has room to grow with the additions. If you have been looking for a light weight fantasy system then this might just be it. I’m planning on running an adventure at KapCon this month, so look out for the actual play report of that.
1st DragonAge review
By Game Informer. It’s of the PC version when Soph and I will both likely get the 360 version, but it’s very good! 70 hours sounds like quite the time sink… As far as I can tell this is the first review, but there will be more!
Whoa, it’s been busy – but I finished some games!
There’s been lots of stuff to blog about recently, but very little time! This post is the first to attempt to catch up on my blogging, links and the like.
Partly the lack of time is because I’ve finished two Xbox games this week – at last. Both Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV fell under my controllers mighty … yeah. GTA also marks another step towards getting one of my 2009 resolutions down - so now I just have to finish one of Rainbow 6: Vegas, Bioshock, Mass Effect or Call of Duty 4.
GTA 4 was a fantastic game – it only took me this long to finish because I kept dying in the final mission. I’ve written about it before here and my thoughts haven’t changed really. It’s probably the best realised storytelling experience in the history of video games. I started the DLC pack The Lost & The Damned today as well so I hope that lives up to the expectations of the full game.
Fallout 3 was excellent as well, although no where near the accomplishment of GTA IV. Bethesda did capture the Fallout feel, even if they didn’t manage the humour so well, but I’ll play a Fallout 4 from them, and I’ll definitely take a look at New Vegas when that comes out. I’m glad they resurected the series.
The main achievement was the size of the world I think – it felt both empty and full at the same time and walking though the wasteland was a genuinely scary experience at lower levels. I do wonder who the raiders raided all the time, but I guess the answer is ‘each other’. That said, the story began to lose momentum towards the end and the final few episodes are a bit of a railroad. The actual ending sucks as well – a total anticlimax. I’m told that’s changing with the Broken Steel DLC that came out yesterday.
I think both of these games have shown it’s possible to have genuinely deep gaming experiences on the console, even if the controls aren’t as complex and the inventory not as limitless (although Fallout has a pretty good inventory system).
Wedding Knight – scenario for A Song of Ice and Fire RPG
Green Ronin have just released their first adventure for the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, call Wedding Knight. I downloaded it today and was very happy that I did. As I’m likely to run it (at least in part) I won’t go into any detail but here are some initial impressions.
Firstly it is only 17 pages long, but they are really good quality. The adventure contains the main NPCs, a location and a well thought out number of plot hooks and potential events which all surround an imminent wedding between two houses.
The thing that really struck me was that as an adventure it was a quick easy read and I didn’t spend my whole time thinking about how much unneeded material there was. The NPCs were well fleshed out with good belivable back stories. The reasons given for why the PCs would even be there plausible and most importantly (for me at least) the writter wasn’t trying to tell me how to run the game or spoon feeding when each event would happen. This lack of rail roading meant that I would be able to slip this adventure in at any point that I felt I needed a week off, with out needing extensive re-writes before use.
Adventures at this length feel like they would take between 3-4 hours to play through, which is exactly the length I want my pre-written adventures to come in at. So I was really happy that I picked this up and I hope this is indicitive of things to come.
You can get the adventure through Green Ronin’s store for US$4.95.
Sydney geek shopping (or not)
So I was in Sydney this week for work and decided that I could do something along the lines of the Brisbane geek review I did last time I was there. Unfortunately, my trip to Sydney was a lot more geeky. In Sydney I just managed to hit The Tin Soldier before heading to the airport.
The Tine Soldier
The Tin Soldier brands itself as ‘Australian’s greatest games store’. I’m not sure that’s true but they are pretty good. I’m not sure if it started as a wargaming shop, but that’s certainly the emphasis. And unlike most wargaming shops it’s not all about the Warhammer and 40k minis. There’s a big range of historical minis here, including stacks of really impressive painted ones for sale. There’s a decent but not overwhelming selection of RPGs and a few board games and the like. It’s a nice open shop as well, and the staff are friendly and helpful.What is pretty impressive is the collection of military history books they have in the second room. It’s huge and seemed very comprehensive with lots of things ranging from popular stuff to the Osprey range to serious scholarly works.
I didn’t buy anything (pay day is next week) and it seemed slightly on the expensive side to me but I havent done an exact price comparison to be sure. Upon reflection I’m sure it’s not Australia’s best games shop, although it might be Australia’s best wargames shop and it’s almost definitely Australia’s best historical wargames shop. It is however the sort of gaming shop you’d want to live near – solid and dependable.
Legend of the Seeker – Good geeky fun
A few weeks ago a friend of mine sent a link to the trailer of a new fantasy show called Legend of the Seeker. I watched it and seeing as I’ve got a rather soft spot for cheesy fantasy decided to give the first episode a go.
The show is based on the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind and I think the first season roughly covers the events in the first book, Wizard’s First Rule (which was the original name for the series). Though I’m not sure about that as I haven’t read the books, and have to admit that the reports of them from friends of mine aren’t making me rush out to start.
It’s a pretty standard tale of the classic every-man, Richard Cypher, who finds is given a magic sword (the Sword of Truth), realises his destiny and heads off to save the world. Along for the ride is the rather lovely (if I do say so) Kahlan a Confessor who has the ability to control people and bend their will to her own and a wizard named Zed who was meant to train Richard in the ways of the Seeker, but got distracted with letting him have a ‘normal’ childhood. Now he must travel the world to fight the evil Darken Rahl, and of course his legions of soliders, who Richard is prophesied to kill.
It’s filmed in NZ so the scenery and back drops are all rather beautiful in a way now familiar to millions thanks to the Lord of the Rings trilogy and it sits in the space left vacant by Xena and Hercules, though with a higher budget and better special effects (well most of the time). It is produced by RenPics (the same people who produced those shows) and the similarities are certainly there. The writing isn’t likely to win any awards and it is rather heavy on the cheese at times, but like Xena strangely addictive. So it’s become something of a guilty pleasure of mine the last few weeks, buoyed along with a couple of good episodes which managed to break free of the standard Good vs Evil shtick.
The one thing that I certainly didn’t miss from Xena was the terrible accents forced on Kiwi actors for the American market. I understand that this is an American show but seeing as almost every one of the actors (except Bridget Regan the actor behind Kahlen) is either from New Zealand or Australia surely they could have just let the country bumpkin types keep their normal accents.
Regardless it is good to see another series being made in New Zealand and making use of some really great talent, so not every Kiwi actor has to do their stint on Shortland Street.
Watchmen – I watched them.
So last night I finally got to see Watchmen.
It was good – not great, but not horrible and certainly the best Alan Moore adaptation so far done. While totally overscored, the acting was pretty good, the look/design of the film was astonishingly loyal to the comic, as was the casting and direction. Most importantly, while the plot was shorn of side stories, it was also (with one fairly major exception) ripped almost entirely from the page.
But that’s a big part of the problem. When you film a book you are interpreting prose description visually – one of the reasons that the Lord of the Rings movies were so loved by so many people was because they managed to make our imaginations live on screen. the Watchmen film just took the pointers from a visual source and recreated them on screen. And ultimately that seems a little empty. Why bother to do that? I’ve already seen the comic and the illustration that accompanies the plot – I don’t really need to see it again, especially when there is so little reinterpretation of anything – themes, characters or story.
Where they did change things, there were mixed results. The comic is much less violent than the book. At least one major and brutal fight scene in the film is covered in four cells in the comic and the violence is largely implied. And from the evidence of the comic, Laurie doesn’t stab a gang member in the neck with his own knife and then use his body to shield herself from gun fire.
The violence in the comic is much more sparing and with the exception of Rorschach and the Comedian’s sections of the story, actually fairly tame. It’s two-fisted silver age superhero comic book stuff, not the sort of violence that came after Watchmen. And violence in the movie is graphic – to me, it seemed out of character for Nite Owl and most of the other characters. The violence was well done and fun to watch (in the fight scenes at least – Rorschach and the Comedian’s violence was largely horrifying), but it jarred with me thematically.
That leads me to another point. To me, Watchmen is largely a mediation on what the world would be like if people really had dressed up in costumes and fought crime. What sort of people would do something like that? And what effect could it have on the world, especially if some of them really did have super powers? Perhaps necessarily, the movie doesn’t delve into that, but there’s not a whole lot of mediation on the thematic themes of the story.
One thing I did really like about the movie was how much it made me appreciate the comic. I’m now three ‘chapters’ in to my reread and I’d never previosuly noticed how filmic some of the scene changes and the like in the original work were.
It also did manage to take a sprawling, complex and dense plot and par it back to essentials. The ending, as has been widely reported, has been changed. It needed to be because the original ending is reliant on pages and pages of foreshadowing and sie plotting that needed to be cut form the film, but the new ending is clever, well put together and thematically appropriate which was probably the biggest surprise of the whole evening.
Watchmen was a good action film based on vastly better material – as Ciaran said as we left ‘if it had to be done, I’m glad it was done like that’. I’m glad I saw it.
Dollhouse – Nick’s take
So the second episode of Dollhouse has aired and so I thought I’d offer my opinions on it. Overall, I’m jsut not that impressed. I find the premise slightly creepy, Dushku’s acting exactly what I feared it would be and it’s just not very Whedon.
This last point is particularly important – I understand it’s on purpose but I like the snappy dialogue and quips and without those it’s a substandard sci-fi thriller with a very pretty but slightly crap actress in the lead role.
I trust Joss so I’ll give it a few more weeks, especially given the first line in this week’s Onion A.V. Club episode review where the review says
the line [Dushku] was pushing on the show was that it really kicks into gear starting with the sixth episode, which is written by Joss Whedon.
But after six weeks if I don’t give a crap still, I’m gone until ‘teh interweb’ tells me I’m making a mistake.
Brisbane geek shopping
I’m in Brisbane for a day for work and thought I’d take a break this afternoon and check out a couple of geek-related shops: Ace Comics & Games and Pulp Fiction. This is the first of my travel related shop reviews – I’ll do them as I go to visit places but please note that they’re just impressions from (usually) a single visit. › Continue reading
Old School – a review of the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming
Like lots of people, I got my roleplaying start with the Red Box basic set for Dungeons & Dragons back at the ripe old age of 7 or 8. Weirdly enough, I never actually played a roleplaying game until high school, and then only once. I was at university before I took up the hobby in earnest with second edition AD&D and only really got into it with the advent of third edition in 2000.
In those early days I made up a lot of characters and read a lot of books. But that was the limit of my ‘old school’ gaming. So it was with some interest that I cam across the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming today. It’s a free, thirteen page download by Matthew Finch who wrote the Original D&D ‘retro-clone’ Swords & Wizardry and it goes into the differences between ‘modern’ gaming and ‘old school’ gaming.
I’d normally find this sort of thing slightly patronising and annoying, and indeed the Swords & Wizardry site has pretty strong elements of that, to whit:
To reawaken the hobbyist-gamer and put to rest the consumer-gamer, to break out of the miasma of RPG consumer-think, and to re-ignite the original wide-horizon view of fantasy roleplaying and its potential.
Blah.
But the PDF itself is actually a fairly fun and compelling read. It lays out different examples of play and how a modern game would run them and how an ‘old-school’ game would run them, with a modern game focusing on the skills and stats of the character sheet and the old school game focusing on the player’s imagination. One example searching a room – in the modern game the room is searched by a dice roll against the search skill and in the old-school game, it’s searched via role-play. As much as I hate to admit it, that’s been the way my modern games have gone sometimes and the Primer provided a quick way to reflect on that.
There are clearly some limitations to this – as Sophie would be quick to point out, a lot of the modern games she plays encourage exactly this sort of free-form roleplaying – yesterday’s 3:16 actual play is a case in point (it would be interesting to here how The Forge/Story Games crowd would react to being told that their games were really a return to the glory days of original Dungeons & Dragons!). But it’s clear what Finch is talking about here – old D&D versus new D&D – and so it’s silly to get too hung up on the limitations of his definitions.
I’m going to be playing in a first edition AD&D game on Australia Day for the first time in a long time and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m going to use the primer to get in the mood and frame of mind and hopefully it works!