Adding to the "To Be Read" Pile

I knew that Sir Terry Pratchett's novels were popular, but I underestimated just how popular they are.

As of 5:05 PM today.

This is kind of bonkers, but it also underscores the popularity of Discworld.

I never read any of Sir Terry's work, even though I was very much aware of it, because I've been a bit intimidated by it. I'm aware that there's a lot of puns and humor in the novels, and my concern was that I simply wouldn't get the humor in them. Kind of like watching Red Dwarf, I know there's humor there, but a lot of it simply flew over my head because it was so British that I didn't get the context.*

Or maybe trying to understand some of the Monty Python's Flying Circus social commentary, particularly with (then) current political and celebrity characters appearing as caricatures. To me, I simply had no grasp of the context at all, so it could have been humor surrounding Warren G. Harding and the Teapot Dome Scandal for all I knew. The Parrot Sketch? Sure, I got that one. The Ministry of Silly Walks? Yeah, because every country has a blasted bureaucracy. But a lot of Terry Gilliam's cartoons? Eh, not so much.**

But given Sir Terry's popularity, underscored by the support for the Discworld RPG, I think I might give the series a chance.

Yay, one more book (or is that set of books?) for the TBR pile.

*Before you ask, yes, I gave Red Dwarf a chance. My brother-in-law loved the show, which is how I was introduced to it.

**Although I did see a graphic of Edward Heath in a couple of them. I know him not because of The Beatles' Taxman song ("Uh oh, Mister Heath"), but because I attended a question and answer session with Mr. Heath when he was in Dayton for something or another back when I was in college. Let's just say that Mr. Heath does not suffer fools very well, and I'm glad I decided I wasn't going to ask him a question even though the opening was there.

Kind of a Busy Day in Crowdfunding Land

I guess Tuesdays are a good day to launch crowdfunding initiatives --in the same way that it used to be book and music release days*-- because two initiatives I'd been keeping an eye on dropped today.

The first, the Kickstarter campaign for Terry Pratchett's Discworld RPG, launched at Midnight Eastern Time, and has already blown way past it's abnormally precise goal of $130,549:**

As of 12:41 PM, EST.

To say that Sir Terry's novels are popular is kind of an understatement. While this Kickstarter covers editions in English, German, Spanish, and Polish, the French edition is being handled by Arkhane Asylum.

For the curious, the Discworld Quickstart Guide PDF is presently available from Modiphius (both the US and UK websites) for the low low price of.... FREE. The link is from the Kickstarter that takes you to the UK store, but when I went there it asked if I wanted to move to the US store instead.

At this current rate, I'd imagine that Modiphius is going to break the $1 Million barrier by tomorrow.

***

Long before I became aware of the Discworld RPG, I knew that Atlas Games was going to put together a crowdfunding campaign for a reworked version of the Ars Magica 5th Edition rules. 

To which I can loudly say: THANK GOODNESS!!

The more I dug into the 5th Edition of Ars Magica, the more I felt that while the rules were good the presentation was lacking. I didn't mention it in my RPG From the Past entry, because I was still working my way through the system, but you could tell that the game was written with an eye toward people who had played previous editions of the game. As I tend to be a person who rails against that self-limiting design and story in MMOs (looking at you, Retail WoW), I'm sensitized to that weakness in other things. The layout could be better, the art was closing in on 20 years old and hadn't aged as well as older editions, and in general the system needed some good ol' TLC.***

So when I found out about a year ago that Atlas Games was planning on creating a "Definitive Edition" that basically presented the same rules in a better format, I was on board. 

Then Atlas Games announced that Ars Magica's crowdfunding would include an Open License; a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This would allow players and creators to legally share and publish their own additions and modifications to Ars Magica, allowing people the same sort of creative outlet that other games such as Pathfinder, D&D (for the moment), and FATE to have. 

The Ars Magica Definitive Edition launched at Noon Eastern today on BackerKit, seeking a goal of $15,000. While not having the sizeable fanbase that Sir Terry's works has, Atlas Games saw their crowdfunding effort shatter that goal in a grand total of 3 minutes:

As of 1:32 PM, EST.

The Definitive Edition is definitely aiming toward the fans of the game with an elaborate slipcase cover that holds the Core Rulebook, a Reference Guide, a Storyguide Screen, and a Poster Map of Mythic Europe. The physical edition isn't cheap at $150, but a digital only version of the core rulebook is $40, and a bit more practical if you're trying to save money. 

Yes, the rules are exactly the same as that found in the current 5th Edition of Ars Magica, but the layout has been reworked and all of the "extra" rules scattered across all the supplements have been incorporated into this version of the Core Rulebook. Throw in the new artwork and layout, and...

Well, here's hoping that the reorganized 5th Edition Rules explain the game better, because if you want to grow the game you have to get people involved and up to speed on all the details. 

As for me, taking the Mythic Europe setting and the Ars Magica rules and creating a rules-lite version using, say, FATE, would be absolutely awesome. (As I've gotten older, I prefer a more free-wheeling type of game. Can't you tell?)

*I was informed by my wife that music releases have moved from Tuesday to Friday close to a decade ago, and given that she works at Target she ought to know this sort of thing. I'm not that plugged into music release dates anymore, since I rarely buy music when it first comes out (and I'd rather support smaller or local artists).

**Aha! Found it! That value is a conversion to US Dollars from a backing goal of £100,000.

***Tender Lovin' Care.

EtA: Added in the source of the $130,549 goal.

EtA: Helps if I include the link to the Backerkit project for Ars Magica Definitive Edition!

Meme Monday: Weekend Warrior Memes

I spent some time working on the deck the past few weekends, and that push has gotten me to thinking about people who tackle projects on the weekends and evenings for a variety of different reasons. And that, naturally, led me to memes about this...

When you've got a project, you don't think in
terms of "having the weekend off". From the NFL.

This was me last night, and I think it carried
over to today. Still, I'm not a morning person
per se, so this may be normal.
From @corporatebish and Cheezburger.

Okay, I'll admit it: I put this one here for the Knight
Rider GIF. From Yarn and Knight Rider (naturally!).

But the really bad part about being a Weekend
Warrior is that Mondays bring no comfort...
From Cheezburger.

And Here I Thought it was Lester's Imprint

A week ago this short video about Judy-Lynn del Rey from the PBS show American Masters was put on YouTube:

If you look at my bookshelf you'd see Del Rey books represented all over the place; many of my favorite SF&F authors wrote for Del Rey, so I thought I knew the imprint pretty well. 

Uh, nope.

I always thought it was Lester that was the dominant factor in the imprint, but it turns out it was his wife, Judy-Lynn, instead. Maybe Del Rey was called that because of Lester's name, but Judy-Lynn made it the force it was back in the 80s and early 90s. There were some novels that I ordinarily would have passed on but picked up back then because of that Del Rey imprint, such as Barbara Hambly's Those Who Hunt the Night. I don't think I can be blindly loyal to a publisher like that anymore, but I did enjoy those novels far more often than not.

Still, it's a fascinating bit of SF&F history about a woman who made her mark in genres I loved.

Meme Monday: 90s Memes

Yeah, I was on a 70s kick for a while, and I've some posts cooking that will result from that, but I've been listening to music from the late 90s the past few days. (Help! I have Fly by Sugar Ray in my head and I can't get it out!!) It seems that the tunes that I've been reminiscing about have been happier ones; I'm aware that it's the rose colored glasses effect, but the music took a darker turn after 9/11 in the same way that Grunge ushered in a more depressing tone in music after the late 80s' pop and hair metal. (Or it could be just Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, and Alice in Chains.)

So, here's some 90s memes for people who need to remember a time when the Internet was young (or felt young and innocent).

Yes, that is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
From Imgflip.

Ah yes, before viral videos, there was
Bob Saget showing us people doing stupid
things on their own video recordings.
From Imgflip and throwbacks.com.

Friends is 30 years old as of this fall. For reference,
seeing it on television now is like seeing Gilligan's Island
on television back in the mid-90s.
From odetoclassy.

I have this exact model of portable CD player.
It was part of a combo CD player, cassette adapter
for the car, and foam earphones that my parents
got me for Christmas one year. I used it all the time
to play CDs in the car during my commute from
the West Side of Cincinnati to the East Side where
I worked. No, I never had pants so large that I would
consider putting the player in there.
From TheGamer.

This is more of an 80s thing, but cassettes were
still going strong in the early 90s.
From The Daily Drawing comic.

And finally, one bonus 90s meme:

I laughed; I know, I'm a bad person.
And if you don't know who these two Olympians
are, well, Google "90s ice skating drama".
From Imgflip.

No FDIC Insurance for Your Guild Bank

Kurn posted an update on the Great Blizzard Bank Heist:

The short summary is that no new items were restored, and she provided commentary on the comments from her first video.

That Blizzard hasn't provided any communication on this issue isn't surprising to me, because a huge monolithic corporation --Bobby Kotick's version or Satya Nadella's-- has other things to worry about if the contract doesn't call for their explicit attention. Put another way, the people who lost items are too small in stature for Micro-Blizz to care*, and it also wouldn't shock me if Blizz never bothered with a proper restoration because that cost money (in terms of people and space).

The longer this has gone on, the more it seems to me that changes under the hood that led to the deletion of massive amounts of items from some guild banks was actually a data wipe; items that were no longer in the game or may have had some potential data corruption from years of activity were simply removed, and that was that. I've seen "database cleanups" that have had this sort of effect before, particularly on unstable databases. At those times, you have to do a manual dump of the database contents and potentially clean up the database by hand. It is by far a miserable task, but cleaning up a database like this is something that ought to be done. It will take a ton of time, but there also needs to be a full amount of transparency involved with the customers (us).

I'd actually respect Blizzard a lot more if they were up front about what they were doing instead of this whole "too bad, so sad" non-response after items were removed. If the answer to "fixing" the data meant removing all the items from a guild bank into a temporary guild bank and then putting items back into a rebuilt guild bank to fix any potential corruption, that should have been done.

***

Oh, and once again, a Season of Discovery rollout affected Classic Era. As of a week ago, all of our bars were reset, so you have to go back into every toon on settings and re-enable your action bars.

One of my WoW friends was in Blackwing Lair on Thursday night, and the drakes in there were massively bugged. They hadn't wiped to them in ages, and yet they kept wiping due to wonky drake behavior. I didn't get any real details other than "this crap sucks!", but let's say she's not a fan of SoD impacting Era's raids.

And some pull down menus, like that found on your toon to reset a dungeon, have that table's font and font size absolutely huge compared to the rest of the UI. Given that Blizz has implemented "some changes" into Era in the past few months, I'm not confident that this will ever get resolved.

*If you think that if you were a larger customer you'd get better customer service, well... Let's just say that some Fortune 500 companies are beginning to discover that Azure Cloud and AWS don't really give a crap about any special services for them, unlike when they might have gotten that extra service in the past from outsourcing firms that had their own datacenters. 

EtA: I meant to write action bars. Corrected.

All That's Past is Prologue

Sometimes I wonder if Blizzard's legacy of an RTS game developer has unduly influenced their World of Warcraft expansion design.

Oh, not that WoW is going to turn into an RTS, despite what a subset of the player base might want, but where --or more precisely who-- the emphasis is on in an expansion.

Compared to some RTS games, such as Age of Empires, Blizzard's RTS design incorporates leaders into a story and makes them the central part of the story the Warcraft and Starcraft games told. Sure, you're there as the player, but the story revolves around these central characters. 

From Starcraft Remastered, you can
see that the leaders are incorporated into the
mission design and not just cutscenes.
From resetera.

Not only did the polish and gameplay set Blizzard's RTS games apart, but the stories they told influenced their design of the Diablo games as an action RPG with a defined plot.*

From Diablo 2 Resurrected.
Screencap from Ars Technica.

Blizzard's second last RTS game, Warcraft III, went all in on the story and leaders, where more RPG elements were added into the RTS design than ever before, more tightly integrating the story with the RTS game itself. 

So Blizzard did something unexpected, they pivoted and created an MMO that doesn't have any of those central design tenets.

***

The release of Vanilla World of Warcraft was not only a departure from Blizzard's RTS core, but a change in design emphasis. Sure, there are faction leaders and other important personnel around throughout Azeroth, but the game design didn't revolve around them. There wasn't a main story in the same way that other Blizzard designs had, but a bunch of smaller stories that were strung together with quest chains. Instead of a tightly integrated story with an emphasis on the leaders as main characters, the player was the main character in a vast world with minimal emphasis on the heroics of the few people in charge.

I guess that wasn't bound to last, because a decentralized game world wasn't in Blizzard's DNA. 

It took a few expansions, but by Wrath of the Lich King WoW had pretty much returned to the Blizzard fold in that the leaders and a central story were tightly integrated into the game, and it's been that way ever since. This is what Blizzard is most familiar with developing, and your job as the player is to basically facilitate the story that the faction leaders are involved with. Like or hate the story, this is the pattern that formed in the Warcraft and Starcraft games, and that is what Blizzard knows best. 

People --myself included-- rail against the so-called lobby-based nature of Retail WoW, but when you consider it is the spiritual successor to the earlier RTS and ARPG games that built Blizzard's reputation, it's not a great surprise. When you throw in the lobby-based story found in shooter games such as Call of Duty, Blizzard is providing what they believe gamers expect out of a game. 

In the same manner that turn-based isometric RPGs are tightly integrated into Larian Studios' business, what we are seeing out of Retail WoW is in Blizzard's. It would take a monumental effort to break out of that design philosophy, and I'm not altogether sure it would be a good idea for Blizz at this point to do so. As much as I prefer Classic Era, Blizzard's fanbase doesn't expect that decentralized, non-story-driven design out of them. They expect lobby-based story beats with an emphasis on the faction leads and the other chief protagonists. If anything, the leveling process in the game world is the anachronism here: it's a nod to an era when Blizzard broke out of what they did best as a company to try something new with different design parameters, and Blizzard can't bring itself to shed that vestige of it's old MMO design. Instead, Blizzard uses the leveling process to move the story from the introductory phase to the "why" of group content at the end; it's not an end in itself, as it was in Vanilla WoW, but in service to the endgame, which is where the real story in Retail WoW begins.

No, I was NOT going to put that line from
South Park in here. If you want it, you can go
find it via a quick search. From YouTube.

It is kind of funny in its own way that the Retail WoW player base argues about details in expansions such as systems, whether the group content is any good, or the quality of the story, but they have simply accepted the larger design philosophy as-is. What you see out of Blizzard now is what you will get, because they have no incentive to try anything truly new. Even Season of Discovery isn't that new; it's just a reshuffling of the cards, as it were, but keeping the same basic design in place. Since Blizzard is now the "MMO and Action RPG developer" in Microsoft's stable**, they are most likely destined to stay in their lane and only work on those items. If you've a dev team that wants to try something new, don't expect to find yourself under the Blizzard arm of Microsoft Game Studios; you're better off going independent.

*Yes, I know, I'm not that fond of the plot in Diablo. There's a lot more "action" and a lot less "RPG" in the Diablo games. That doesn't mean there's no plot, however; "no plot" is more akin to playing Gauntlet than Diablo, despite the mechanics' similarities.

**Apologies to The Elder Scrolls Online, but Zenimax/Bethesda is known for first person RPGs, not MMOs. In my opinion, it wouldn't surprise me if ESO eventually gets moved under Blizzard because "they're the MMO developer" for Microsoft. Never mind the game world or the corporate culture; there's always a bean counter somewhere who wants things to align perfectly under their proper silos.