Obligatory Catchup Post

So I've not posted in aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages.

I blame sunspots. That and just having an absolute ton of stuff happening; a show to stage manage, Christmas, moving back and forth to uni, and exams. Exams still aren't quite over, but I've got something I really want to comment on so, I thought I'd try and catch everything up.

Of the three games I can actively play (without setting up a new account or whatever), WoW is far and away my most active one. I now have my 70 mage slowly grinding up money for her epic flying mount, a nearly-20 hunter on the same server to help grind money for same (as leveling is more fun than grinding primals), a 41 druid on a different server to play with friends at uni, and a level 5 priest I'll get to in a moment.

I've not played City of Heroes in a while. The random instances using the same tilesets over and over and the slowness of leveling all just kinda conspire against me enjoying plain old leveling. When I was regularly playing with a group it was fun, but doing task forces (or whatever the villainous equivalent is) requires the grinding 10 levels to get to the minimum level each time, even if I do get a couple of levels out of each one.

I still log into Kingdom of Loathing regularly, even if I don't play all of my turns to their maximum effectiveness. I still listen to every podca- sorry, mp3 recording of their radio show that gets updated on an rss feed (and did even when I wasn't actively playing), but I expect that I'll get the spark of interest again when I start doing things in their hardercore mode, bad moon.

Guild Wars, well, I've beaten it. Well Factions anyway. And doing anything else just seems... flat, there's no objective there, even though theoretically there's plenty I could do. There're the end-game raids, the pvp, and getting perfect weapons and armour. But two of three require other people, which in GW tends to be a bad idea unless you know who you're with already, and the third is grinding. Lots. And solo if you want to get all the loot that drops.

Of non-MMOs, I'm in Ravenholme in Half Life 2 (yes, the original, and yes, for the first time) so that needs progressing. My Team Fortress 2 stats are lacking, although the LAN party I'm at this weekend should remedy that to an extent, I'm at the final boss (maybe) of Phantom Hourglass, and although D&D has been on hold over the holidays, I'm going to try to tie the remainder of that up fairly quickly, as a) I wrote myself into quite the corner, and 2) I want to play!


The main reason for updating this post is that my girlfriend now plays WoW, as a blood elf warlock, hence the level 5 priest listed earlier. After a couple of hours, we've got to level 5, and done the first few quests in Falconwing Square. Of course, I've been doing a lot of thinking after she said she wanted to play a warlock, perhaps too much, but I'm thinking shadow priest + warlock will be good for leveling, and then can convert to a good 2v2 arena team at 70. Careful selection of professions later, and we can be swimming in gold when we get there as well. I actually also have arena talent choices partially planned out.

Conclusion: I plan things too much, especially when its to avoid doing productive things!

Sewers and Shifters

Our second session of D&D took place last night, albeit with a slightly different line-up of PCs, and now up to 6 PCs. Seeing as I'm running a from-the-book game, this means encounters are (should be) a bit simpler than they were originally planned to be.

That said, it was a cakewalk; the hardest part of the game was organising 6 people's worth of combat rounds, and trying to get them to agree how to spend their gold. The party encountered a warforged rogue, and a pair of shifter warriors. The warforged put up a bit of a fight, and lasted a fair while. The shifters on the other hand, managed to charge, and not a lot else before getting cut down.

However, unlike last week, this weeks encounter would perhaps have been a challenge to 4 PCs. Even still, it wouldn't've been much of one. One of the fighters in the party got dropped to -1, but after some patching up from the clerics still did perhaps the most damage of the whole party. Whereas, the 3 NPCs just had to rely on beating down. He was also the only one who took damage.

From the information I've heard about 4th edition D&D, this seems to be something the designers are thinking about: the different monster jobs seem to include a 'boosting other monsters' classing, so hopefully there's more teamwork than just trying to stab the same guy.

I haven't initiative-carded up the next few encounters from the module, so I think I may bump them up (for at least 4 to 7 PCs, depending on how many show up), just to see if the challenges can be more, well, challenging.

Of lack of dungeons or dragons

Last night I successfully ran my second D&D game. Well, mostly successfully anyway.

Last week saw a group of 9(!) first level adventurers in an inn called 'The Obvious Cliche', whereupon they were attacked by 4 CR1ish zombies. Oddly, they didn't get wiped out, despite their best attempts not to run away, but that game didn't really lead anywhere as I kinda hadn't planned ahead very well ;)

This week, I decided to mitigate my lack of DMing experience by running a game straight from a book. And so, my fearless(ish) group of 5 adventurers were set upon by a lone warforged on a bridge in Sharn. This was, supposedly, a CR1 encounter (ie, one designed to present a reasonable challenge to 4 level 1 characters). It got soundly kicked, although not before doing a not unreasonable amount of damage. I would, however, say that it was really a challenge.

Although they PCs took some damage, there was never any real chance of them losing. In my mind, a challenge would be facing an equivilent number of equivilent level characters/monsters, but then its a 50/50 chance that they'll get their asses kicked, considering that the encounter would be as powerful as the PCs. This seems a bit incongruous to me, but never mind.

Considering that I have 5 PCs, I may have to modify future encounters a little to boost up the difficulty, so that the extra PC doesn't become an easy ticket to victory, and so encounters are actually a challenge.

And two games in, no sign of a dungeon, and no sign of a dragon. I may have to bend the printed game to include some, none or more of the above :)