I sure did say a lot of mean things about Dominions 3 when I wrote about it last time. I finished on a positive note, to be sure, but if you didn’t read that last bit it might have looked like very mild hate mail rather than an admission of my affections. I won’t take those comments back (I still think they’re true, confirmed through further play), but I do have a few other thoughts to add. First of all, giving me a copy of this game for Christmas is both wonderful and somewhat mean. Secondly, I’m (not so) secretly in love with the game’s manual. Third… well, my third thought is that the game is far more captivating than I had realized that it would be from my time as a spectator.
Category Archives: Games
Dungeon-Starter: The Duke’s Men
Happy New Year!
Here’s an abbreviated dungeon-starter for Dungeon World, building somewhat on the material that I came up with for The Duke’s Men. Agenda, Goals, and Dungeon Moves are at the top as per usual. This is mostly focused on cultists and such, as the game itself was, but the basic storyline offered in my previous post could easily be altered to deal with any number of different kinds of threats.
The Duke’s Men: A DungeonWorld Adventure
A few days ago, I ran a game of DungeonWorld for two of my friends. It went so well, and ended up feeling so much like a classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure, that I thought I would share the basics of the game with you. It’s somewhere between an actual play and a scenario description. I’ll put up an honest-to-goodness Dungeon-starter soon, and with a little creativity you should have an easy time converting it into your own single- or double-episode game.
We didn’t look too closely at the backstories of our heroes, but please allow me to introduce you to the adventures of Kate the thief and Jonah the ranger (and Jonah’s wolfhound, Erasmus), the loyal representatives of Duke Blackforest. What follows should allow you to live out their adventures for yourself, or change things slightly and experience the adventure anew with other people.
A Time For Giving: Charities
While we should be nice and altruistic all the time, we are now hitting the Season of Giving (I don’t care that this comes from Western tradition. Anything that advocates charity is a good thing, so let’s just leave it be.) Since this here is a nerdy media blog I thought I’d give you all a hand and share some amazing game-related charities that are floating around. There are definitely some which I have missed as well as non-game charities which are amazing. But if you would like to give and have no idea where to throw your dollar, then here at least you can find a short list worthy of your consideration.
http://www.childsplaycharity.org/
https://www.humblebundle.com/ (you can choose for your money to go fully to charity, fully to game developers, or customize the spread yourself)
http://www.ablegamers.com/ Who are currently linked to a cool game bundle: http://www.wraithkal.info/bundle-in-a-box-ordinary-gamer/
http://www.callofdutyendowment.org/
Dominions 3, God of Time-Consumption, Awaits You
Remember how I mentioned that I would tell you about Dominions 3? Today is your lucky day. First off, here is what I said last time:
Dominions 3 looks like someone fell in love with Master of Magic and then decided that it wasn’t nearly complex enough. And that it needed more gods, wars, and magic. At a glance, it looks like something that will most appeal to a certain core of strategy lovers, but the concept is absolutely wonderful regardless of your interest in the genre. You play a god rushing to fill the gap left by the disappearance / death of The Old God, and you must expand to outdo all the other pretenders and secure your own position. It has territory based command and control, resource management, spell research, a military focus, and more numbers than you can shake a stick at. Several of my friends are very excited about it, and I’ll let you know more when I’ve played it for a bit. If it is more accessible than I anticipate, I will do my best to proselytize and spread the good word of the new god, Dominions 3.
That sounds pretty exciting, doesn’t it.
And Then You Die: A Good (Character) Death
Bye bye Boromir.
I love Boromir. I know I’m not the only one who does. And however much I like Boromir when he’s alive, there’s something that’s almost even more (tragically) appealing about him dead. This is less because I like his ruggedly handsome corpse, and more because of what Homer touched on thousands of years ago: in his death, because of how he died, Boromir becomes something more than he was in life. Boromir had what we might call a good death. Key to this, Boromir dies before he truly succumbs to the power of the Ring, and in his death he tries to make up for some of the mistakes that he has made previously. His act of self-sacrifice protecting the Ring-bearer is a fairly hefty weight in his favor on the scales of Judgement, making up for some of his earlier errors. Interestingly enough for such a perilous setting, he is also the only member of the Fellowship to die and stay dead.
It turns out that that single heroic death is pretty standard. Most stories, like most role-playing games, don’t have lots of character death. In reality, people engaging in the same activities that most adventurers and main characters pursue with wild abandon have a fairly high casualty rate. People are killed while fighting, they’re permanently injured, they get sick… and in many cases, their deaths and debilities feel meaningless. For every handful of people that die doing something we would idolize as heroic, far more are killed or injured in an almost banal fashion. Would we feel the same way about Boromir’s death if he had, I don’t know, been killed without having a chance to fight back? Stepped on a landmine? Slipped in the shower and broken his neck?
The Attraction of Games: Why?
This article is honestly me cheating a bit as I would have preferred to write a true analysis or something more comprehensive than a question, but I’m busy! So this is what you get. But don’t fret, I think this question is actually extremely interesting, and very important.
Why do we play games? I ask this because I recently got into a debate and one participant countered criticism about a game’s setup with, “I hear people play games for the story.” Now this very well may be true since many games have fun stories, but so do books and movies, and you don’t have to fight your way to the next bit of stories in those. You don’t have to spend hours jumping from one plot point to the next. So why do we turn to games for story when we have books and movies?
To me I think the answer is “participation.” Games allow you to participate in the story. But it is with this answer that I then begin to question certain games which don’t let me actively participate in the story, but instead just force me to do task after task that holds no real meaning in the overall narrative. Along this vein, should we forgive games with great stories for their bad gameplay? I could go on, but I actually wrote a bit about this previously in my article about games and art, but I think we can go further into this question.
Since I need to get going I’ll leave the floor open for you to counter, explain, extrapolate, divulge, or what-have-you in the comments below.
Dune by any other name: Twilight Imperium Rex
Pretty cover art? Check.
Fantasy Flight is good at making fun games, and their rehashing of the original Dune boardgame is no exception. Though they were unable to nab the necessary IP, they’ve cleverly injected the mechanics and flavor of the original Dune into the universe created for Twilight Imperium. But simply recreating an old game was not enough; they then streamlined and shaped it into something that you can pick up through one round of experimental play. The end result is a highly entertaining game with excellent group dynamics, one that introduces just enough complexity to give you lots of material to work with without overwhelming you with its intricacies.
Chiptunes: Beauty in Simplicity
I love chiptunes. I have met few other people who love chiptunes as much as me. Hell, I have met few other people who can even sit down and listen to chiptunes without getting annoyed. It is arguable that my love for chiptunes comes from nostalgia. It is true that some of my favorite games are old enough that their soundtracks are chiptunes (and I do listen to them recreationally). But I would argue that my love of the genre is more than just a fond looking back at simpler times.
Emotional Attachment in Games
This article comes a day late because… I’m not going to offer an excuse. You’re just going to have to live with the mystery.
I assume that most of us who have played games have at one point (at least) come across a non-playable character that we became attached to. But sometimes we don’t become attached to characters who the game makers want us to get attached to, and sometimes we get more attached than we are supposed to. While quality narrative can do wonders for making a character appealing, I have found that players often base their connections on the mechanics of the character instead (and this sometimes causes problems).
Fistful of Wits 