Pendragon Classic Returns

The RPG nostalgia tour continues with Chaosium bringing back another 1980s classic of the RPG genre, Pendragon Classic. 

I'd read through the original version once before, and yes, I'm a product of those old classic movies such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Prince Valiant.* Hell, I am still fond of the 1982 mini-series adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe on television.

The more I've delved into Pendragon the past few years, the more I've been impressed by Greg Stafford's adaptation of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur into an RPG that's designed to last 50+ years in a campaign setting. That concept alone is something that people who play D&D and its ilk would have trouble wrapping their heads around. 

For those people interested in old editions of RPGs, or for those interested in how the concept of the RPG was stretched far beyond what was originally envisioned by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, this might be something you'd be interested in.

I think I ought to finish up my RPG from the Past on Pendragon soon. Maybe in time once this is released...

*Independent television stations used to broadcast those movies --and many others-- on Saturday afternoon matinees. 

Does Romance Give you the Squick?

Well, it does for me.

Oh, not in real life. IRL, I'm a softie who enjoys romance. Not necessarily Romance novels, mind you,* but I meant the concept itself. Yes, yes, I know, somebody alert my wife.**

I also don't mind having romance in video games, because for me that's a personal choice. If you want to romance an NPC, go ahead. If you don't, you don't.

What I meant was romance in pencil-and-paper RPGs, although to a lesser extent romance between two players in an MMO as well.*** 

This was sparked by a video that popped up the other day concerning D&D and romance:

Yes, I follow Ginny Di's YouTube videos. No, I didn't get into her videos from Critical Role, but rather I stumbled on her channel when she progressed to other RPG topics. The algorithm looked at my viewing history and thought "You know, there's this woman who dyes her hair that you might find insightful..." and here I am. She does have some great and insightful comments on a variety of RPG topics, and between her, Pointy Hat, Stephanie Plays Games, Kelsey Dionne, Bob World Builder, and several other 20s and 30s content creators, I feel that our TTRPG hobby is in good hands for the future.****

***

I guess the reason why I watched Ginny's video was due to my own "experience" with romance in a D&D game.

If you've been around this blog for a while, you might recall I was part of a long-running D&D 3.0 campaign. As in a 20+ year old campaign. When our DM got together with us to hash out what the campaign would be about, there were a few ground rules we decided upon: low to mid level magic, use the Greek and Egyptian Pantheons for the campaign and world building, some roleplaying in character but not pure amateur thespian hour, and absolutely no romance. That last one was a hard no from us players, as we were all dating and/or married*****, and we really just wanted to focus on a campaign with no romantic escapades involved. We've had romantic subplots in our campaign back in college, and when it's involving people who are actually dating IRL who then break up, it gets really ugly really fast. Therefore, just keeping things platonic would make it easier for everybody.

We players figured that with the ground rules set, we were ready to play.

Things worked out okay for a while, and outside of us using IM to play (this was 2001-2 after all) things seemed to progress decently well. After a couple of years, however, our DM began trying to slip in romantic subplots. And the occasional Conan-esque nudity into the game. We all knew our DM, who was a bit of a horndog back in college, so we just figured it was him being him and we didn't take the rather obvious bait. 

We kind of kept things at bay until a new player joined the group for a few years. He was a coworker of the DM, and he wanted to play a Bard. 

You can see where this is going, right? 

Yeah, they both went there. The Bard started wanting to screw every woman he met, and this began to wear on us. This isn't what we wanted, and we definitely didn't ask for it, and it kept diverting us from the actual campaign. Then the DM started having NPCs hit on my character, and I began having to be more forceful in my nipping of those subplots in the bud. 

The rest of us began talking among ourselves about whether we need to take a stand with the DM, and then the problem solved itself: the new player had to stop playing, and just like that the division mostly evaporated.

Mostly.

The DM still would try to sneak in some opportunities for romance here and there, but we ignored them and kept the game focused on the campaign. In the last few months of our campaign before it ended, however, the DM began to ratchet up the opportunities and the PG-13 nature of those "encounters". I won't lie and say otherwise, but after 20 years we players had had enough. There were several other things that contributed to our decision to want to end the campaign, but one of the top complaints on our list was that the DM kept pushing the romance and sexual angles on us. 

I think it needs to be said that we're all adults, and we can handle adult themes.****** However, people have to buy into the concept of romance and shenanigans or you're risking a lot by trying to push it on people when they don't want it. I personally would have to be in the right frame of mind to accommodate an RPG campaign with romance, and I'll also freely admit that I am not an actor in that I would have issues separating the character(s) from the player(s). I probably could do it if I were in, say, a play or musical or something, but in a TTRPG? That'd be harder.

***

Okay, that's tabletop RPGs, but MMOs? 

Hoo boy. That's an entirely different kettle of fish.

If Asmongold's your dad, Nixxiom,

I'm a Jelly Doughnut.

Outside of occasionally being hit on by some oversexed player, I've never been in a romantic situation with another MMO player before. And you can't not realize that there's another player on the other end, which separates it from NPC romances, such as the companion romances in SWTOR. MMO RP romances are going to be with another character, and the specter of ERP (and Goldshire's Lion's Pride Inn) hovers over everything. 

There's this too. And yes, I've kept this from
an old Meme Monday just because.

 

Some people can make it work, but I'm almost completely certain that I can't. 

But if you (not me, for certain) want more detail about doing Romance RP in MMOs (yes, it's WoW but applicable in all of them), there's this:

I guess knowing my limitations is a good thing, and that I'm not planning on putting myself into a situation where they would get tested. If you can handle it, more power to you. I think I'll just go do my own thing instead and leave the romance in MMOs to y'all. 

Oh, and because I couldn't resist, here:

Now you'll never hear that old Sonny

and Cher song the same way.

*Although I have made some attempts to check out the genre, because the only way to know if you'll like it is to try it.

**Ironically enough, I think that between the two of us I'm the romantic one. That doesn't mean that I'm not as clueless as the next guy in trying to figure out if someone is hitting on me; actually my son --nicknamed "Mr. Oblivious" or "Captain Oblivious" due to his cluelessness about such things-- is a chip off the old block.

***Spouses and significant others who are playing the other toon you're romancing kind of get a pass on this, since you're obviously thinking of the other person who you're already romantically involved with.

****They don't need me to tell them that, but consider it just an observation that I'm happy the next generation has taken the reins from us older folks and run with it, in the same way that I'm proud my kids have engaged with the hobby over the years. For all of the "get offa my lawn!" sort of behavior from the old guard (who are as old or older than me), I just wanted to get it out there that I'm happy they're showing their love for the hobby and contributing to its overall success. And maybe this year I'll get a chance to run into one of them at Gen Con.

It also goes without saying that some of the Old Guard have opened their arms to the new generation of content creators. People like Matt Colville, Professor DM, and Baron de Ropp could have circled their collective wagons and been assholes toward the new blood, but they haven't. And our hobby is all the better for it.

*****The DM was married to one of the players, in fact.

******If you're NOT an adult, it goes without saying that parental guidance is strongly suggested. My oldest once attended an RPG game session in high school with some acquaintances, and ALL of the guys there tried to hit on her character (and by extension, her). She got really creeped out, and that was the end of THAT.

A Short Interlude

I was at our local independent bookstore the other day, perusing the YA stacks, when a teenaged couple stopped by.* The girl marched right up to the staff picks on the left, grabbed a book, and presented it to the boy. 

"That was fast," the boy said. 

"I know this place like the back of my hand," the girl announced confidently. 

I gave them some privacy and moved away with a little smile on my face. In the 1980s I would have said that about our local bookstore just a 5 minute bike ride away.

You know, I don't think reading is dead just yet. 

I've experienced this same feeling lately, watching teenage gamers at my local game store, or even watching YouTube videos put out by younger people so obviously invested in reading or tabletop gaming. When you need every bit of positivity a lot of these days, I take some comfort in that the next generation of geeks is ready to shoulder the load and teach the generation after them to love these pastimes. 

*I only got a cursory glance at them, so I couldn't tell if they were high school or college age for certain, but my guess was they were about 16 years old. Maybe 17.

Keeping that Sense of Mystery

I make a point to watch long standing developer Tim Cain's Cain on Games YouTube channel. He has decades of experience creating video games, and as a long time player/coder myself*, I really enjoy his insight into designing and creating games. Today, his post was a quick world building tip:

For those unwilling to watch a less than 10 minute video, the TL;DR is to give just enough worldbuilding to complete the game, but no more than that. In other words, leave a lot of mystery in your creation. 

This is something that it seems a lot of MMOs have issues with in their storytelling. 

Maybe it arises out of a realization that min/maxers will distill everything into a mathematical analysis and they have issues with anything resembling a sense of mystery, or that a subset of people have to know exactly everything about a game/world or they're not satisfied, but it certainly seems to be a trap that game developers fall into. It's not something about video games specifically, because tabletop games have this problem too, but I do tend to see it a lot in video games these days. Look at how the storytelling in games such as WoW or even in the average D&D or Pathfinder campaign books have progressed over time, and you'll find more and more that everything is spelled out for the player/DM. Everything is knowable.

You'll see this in book series too, where more of the world the protagonists inhabit is revealed with more mystery stripped away. 

That's not to say the reveal of a game world is bad, since you have to reveal a world as you progress in a story or game, but there's a fine line between revealing and oversharing.

Tim's point is to reveal just enough to tell the story, but no more than that. Maybe you, the author/developer, know more than the player ever will, but leaving a lot of mystery out there will not only fuel more stories in the future but allow player speculation to direct further development as well. 

One thing I've complained about with stories over the years, both in video games and in fiction, is the constant raising of stakes. It seems that many games/books/comics are engaged in a constant level of one-upmanship where the stakes in the current iteration absolutely have to be higher than the last iteration. The thing is, you can only dip into this well so often before it starts to become ridiculous. By leaving mystery in place in your work, you can avoid that one-upmanship trap by leaving a lot of mystery in your game so you have plenty to mine without constantly raising the stakes.

And maybe, just maybe, knowing when to walk away and say the game or story is complete --despite all that's left unsaid-- is good enough. (If only the suits knew this as well.)

*Okay, my coding this past several years has been limited to the occasional shell script, but once a coder always a coder.

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.

Did You Ever Anticipate THIS, Sir Terry?

For those who are fans of Sir Terry Pratchett, Modiphius Entertainment is going to be bringing an RPG based on Discworld to Kickstarter in October:

From the Kickstarter page.

Here's a link to the announcement on Modiphius' website, and here's the email I received via screencaps:

Okay, here's hoping that this works, but I'm going to put the links for a sign up for Kickstarter updates here, and signing up for the Quickstart Preview here.

Grooving to Those Elven Beats

Thursday night I was visiting my local game store, perusing the shelves,

The silver dragon has a few friends now!

when the Lofi music played over the speakers by the dragon began playing a familiar tune. "Hey, that sounds like Silvermoon City!" I thought. As I'd played Blood Elves the 3-4 years of my WoW career, I became quite familiar with that seven note theme.

Here's the original...

The music quickly moved on to something else, but when I got home afterward I hopped online to see if I could find the Lofi version that I just heard.

I think this is it.

My first thought was that Blizz had released more lofi beats in advance of their next Retail expansion, TWW*, but it was released by a third party instead. Lofi isn't the most difficult music style to emulate, but it does take skill (technical or whatever) to transcribe the score into something else. Yes yes, I know that generative AI and other software programs can assist in this, but it does also take critical listening to get the sound "just right", in the same way that writing fiction using generative AI doesn't really have a good voice (yet).

Anyhoo, I'm typically in my happy place when I'm perusing a game store, so hearing the strains of Silvermoon City just kind of made my evening.

***

Oh, and while I was there to peruse RPG materials, such as this:

I could not find this at Gen Con, as
the Kobold Press area looked like it was
completely wiped out by the end of Sunday.

I did discover that a game discontinued back in 2010 was making a comeback:

You can get the unpainted ones too if you want
to paint the minis yourself.
From Boardgamegeek.

Yes, Heroscape is hitting the stores after a 14 year hiatus. Well, I am surprised.

*The World Wound? No, that's a Pathfinder thing. The World Within? Sounds like a description of The Underdark from D&D. The War Within? Yeah, that's it, but everybody types TWW as if they were repeating corporate jargon: "Okay, we need to complete the prework for the CAB and then once that's done we need to focus on the RDT and weekly SDT, then on Monday we handle the DR issues in the DSR." (And yes, those are all real corporate acronyms.)

#Blaugust2024

Gen Con 2024: Forward Into the Past

If there's one thing about Gen Con, you're never sure what will attract your attention. To borrow an overused term, you think you do, but you don't.*

And 2024 certainly delivered on that premise.

My wife hadn't attended since 2015, so she was excited to go. We picked up my son and his partner at 7:30 and pointed our car west on I-74. Destination: Indianapolis.

We parked just outside of Lucas Oil Stadium and headed north a block or two to the Indianapolis Convention Center.

Yes, the Colts play here. Does it show?

Along the way, there was evidence that there was going to be a crowd inside.

Uh oh.

Yes, Gen Con was sold out all four days beforehand. According to the post-con press release, there were over 71,000 attendees throughout the entire con, and yeah, once you got inside the Convention Center you could tell.

I apologize for the blurry photo, but I was
in a hurry as I was being jostled along. But
hey, dice are dice and Chessex was everywhere.

(The rest of the report is after the jump break due to the sheer number of photos.)

What Might Have Been

This YouTube video was posted only this morning (my time), but...

The Baldur's Gate 3 music is kind of surprising.

They could have gone with, say, Elwynn Forest

and it would have been better in my opinion.

Yes, I realized that it was done in the same vein as Baldur's Gate 3, but I have to admit that this little 2 minute video underscores just what an RPG set in the Warcraft universe would look like.

The thing is, I'm not sure whether Blizzard could actually create a good CRPG based on WoW. What your character is --and is capable of-- in WoW is vastly different than in an RPG such as Baldur's Gate. You're practically a walking demigod in Retail WoW, whereas you'd have to scale back everything to you being pretty much a nobody in a Warcraft CRPG for it to work well.

I'm not trying to put my biases from Retail WoW here, it's more that I've played a few pencil-and-paper RPG campaigns where you start out as a big ol' hero and... Well, it just doesn't work well. It's much easier to build yourself up from zero to hero and have a satisfying campaign rather than essentially starting out as high level (or high society) and trying to figure out the world when you're already supposed to be an expert. When you start like that, the DM ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting as you get up to speed, and you frequently feel like you're watching the DM play with themselves for hours at a time. 

If Blizz were to swallow some humble pie and create a story that starts with a bunch of nobodies or lowbie types and follow an arc like in one of the Baldur's Gate, Pillars of Eternity, or Neverwinter Nights CRPGs, yeah, that'd work. Although knowing Blizz, they'd probably model it after one of the Divinity games but amp up the power scaling very very quickly.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

Friday Musings: The Missing 90's

The 90s were, for me, kind of a lost decade.

I graduated from college, got married, and we began having children all during the 90s. I had a series of jobs, which included a stint as a Salesmaker at Radio Shack*, and only settled into a relatively stable position midway through the decade. We bought a house right at the time we became a family, and the last two years of the decade were spent learning both how to be both a father and a homeowner.

Because I was so preoccupied, I kind of missed out on a lot of touchstones for people who were in their 20s back then. While I kept my interest in Metal and Alternative, I developed an interest in Celtic, Folk, and Jazz, so I missed out on the major musical trends of the decade.** 

Alice In Chains' Dirt was released 32 years ago. Yikes.

As was this version of the song Kilkelly, from the

album Music at Matt Molloy's.

Gaming kind of followed in its wake, with me becoming interested in Euro-style board games when they first began appearing here in the US in the mid-90s. 

We still have our copy of Settlers of Catan
that we purchased in 1996. It's certainly
seen better days, but it's been well loved.

Their appeal, promising short game times yet with just as much deep gameplay as longer titles such as Avalon Hill's Civilization and Games Workshop's Talisman drew me in. That my wife was also willing to play the games was a bonus, because she simply wasn't interested in RPGs.*** And to be honest, neither was I at the time.

***

It wasn't that I was over pencil and paper RPGs, it was more that I'd left my old game group behind when I graduated from college and I had no real group to replace it. RPGs no longer had the boom of the late 70s-early 80s --or even the "bad boy" image from the Satanic Panic-- to fuel interest in them. The game store I frequented had a bulletin board for game groups, but they were all (or mostly) out of the University of Cincinnati or Xavier University, comprised of college kids looking for groups. And I, being a grad in my 20s, wasn't really the target audience.

I'd largely moved on from D&D and spent a few years DMing a Middle-earth Role Playing campaign, but that fizzled out by the mid-90s. D&D itself was slowly being weighted down by the tons of settings that TSR was cranking out, and they'd even lost their position as the flagship RPG to some edgy upstart published by White Wolf named Vampire: the Masquerade. V:tM captured all of the vibes that had previously been AD&D's until the Columbine school shooting in 1999 brought goth subculture (including V:tM) under the harsh glare of the media spotlight. 

While AD&D 2e moved away from controversy,
even renaming Demons and Devils to something
tamer, Vampire: the Masquerade reveled in its
association with horror. This even rubbed off on
it's predecessor, Ars Magica, in it's 3rd Edition
incarnation. From Wikipedia.

So for me, pencil and paper RPGs were not really on my radar.

***

What about video games, you may ask?

Well, we puttered along with an old 486DX66 machine (originally a 386SX25 that I scrounged for replacement parts for incremental upgrades) that I kept running throughout most of the decade, but most of my games were used. There were a couple of used PC games stores around town, and for a few dollars I could own games that were 4-5 years old. Given that I'd fallen in love with GEnie and then USENET, I was fine that my games were aging relics of the early 90s while consoles such as Nintendo's N64 and the original Sony Playstation were running rings around my own PC. 

Ah, the original Master of Magic.
Not only was it a Fantasy version of the
Master of Orion gameplay found later in Age of
Wonders, but the artwork in the game manual
had a lot of BDSM in it. If my parents had
ever seen that manual, they would have had
a heart attack. From Wikipedia.

***

I guess it's only natural that I've become interested in games from the 90's, given that 1994 was 30 years ago and I feel there are huge gaps in my geek cultural knowledge that I need to fill. 

Why bother? After all, I'm only vaguely involved with pop culture these days; if the hottest artists of today (and no, not the Rolling Stones) were to pass me on the sidewalk, I'd have no idea who they were.**** 

I don't think that it's because I miss the culture of the 90's, but rather it's because I want to keep myself from sounding like my mom when she starts waxing about how much better things were in the 50s. The pull of myopia is strong, and I know that despite it being a pre-9/11 and pre-Vladimir Putin world, the 90's weren't all that. Although the 90s were supposedly an economic boom time in the US, we personally struggled to get by. I'm still not entirely sure how we managed to afford a house, much less three kids. There was also dealing with what felt like the perpetual disappointment of my parents, who expected better of their own children.

Maybe it's about putting some ghosts to rest. The 'what if' that can haunt you at night, wondering if the decisions you'd made 30 or 40 years ago were the right ones. I don't know if that's something you can ever be at peace about, and it's not like my own parents have ever confided in me about these sort of doubts, so I guess the best I can do is simply muddle through and hope for the best.

*Yes, that was the official name. Oh, I could write lots of posts about Rat Shack. I was fond of some parts of the job, especially when one of the local amateur radio enthusiasts or the electronics hobbyists came in, but far too many of my hours were spent dealing with people who didn't understand what a CD was or what a home computer was. Or they simply wanted the monthly free battery.

**To be fair, when I heard the boy bands at the end of the decade, I certainly didn't feel like I missed anything.

***I still blame her ex, the boyfriend before me, and a game group who introduced her to D&D immediately before that. I've made a couple of attempts to reintroduce her to the genre without success.

****I'm not sure what those celebrities would think of that, but I'd like to think that they'd at least be somewhat grateful that they don't have someone staring at them or otherwise bugging them.

It All Comes Back to Balance

With a few notable exceptions, tabletop RPGs are a cottage industry of sorts.

Sure, there's the 500 lb. gorillas known as Wizards of the Coast and Paizo*, but beyond that there's a lot of small operations out there. About the only "large" gaming operation not under Hasbro is the Embracer Group, which owns Asmodee, the French company that had been using Embracer's money to gobble up a lot of other gaming companies, such as Fantasy Flight, Z-Man, Catan Studio, and Exploding Kittens. Still, in tabletop RPGs Embracer really only owns the Star Wars RPG license (courtesy of buying Fantasy Flight) and hasn't exactly done a lot with it other than moving the property to Edge Studio.

Yes, the same (hated) holding company owns both Catan...

and Tomb Raider...

Yikes!!

This never gets old...

However, like I said, you're not going to find many rich tabletop RPG developers around**, so these companies are very often a passion project.

I was thinking about that when I noted that the latest Kickstarter for a Savage Worlds addition, the Science Fiction Companion, just ended.

From Kickstarter.com.

Savage Worlds is one of those universal roleplaying products that I ought to do an RPG From the Past on, but I was considering this Kickstarter as just one way that a small company can fund product releases that they're assured of people buying. If you set up your Kickstarter right --and also make sure you have your budget properly figured out-- you know you ought to at least break even on your product. 

GMT Games with their P500 program, which predates Kickstarter by at least a decade, is another game company that uses the crowdfunding model to create games that they know will have an audience and will break even when they release the game to the public.

***

For me, however, all of these small companies creating fantastic games and gaming products have one major drawback: I can't afford to buy all of them.

I'd love to, but I can't. I'm not made of money.

Additionally, I want to make sure that not only do the game companies get my money, but that I support the local game stores as well. 

This 20+' length silver dragon, named
Strategios Yottazar, takes up a good portion
of the wall at my FLGS.

Local game stores are kind of the forgotten person in this era of instant delivery. Sure, you may not technically need a Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) to obtain games or even find out about them, but they are a watering hole for the community. Some stores have places for organized play, and others --such as mine-- help to organize game nights at outside locations.

So how can I reconcile all of these conflicting desires? 

Pick and choose, I guess. 

I can't be there for everybody, and I can't afford to give everything to everybody either. Control what I can, and accept what I can't. 

***

Basically, that's what I've been doing when I've been playing video games lately. 

If I subscribed to all of the MMOs that I like and play, I'd have no money left. Therefore, I limit my subscriptions to two at maximum, keeping my subs within my budget. For the longest time, those two were World of Warcraft (the MMO that got me into the genre) and Star Wars: The Old Republic. When I stopped subscribing to WoW after Mists of Pandaria, I didn't pick up another MMO to replace it. I was seriously considering adding The Elder Scrolls Online in 2018, but Blizzard announced WoW Classic and I resubbed in 2019. 

While I'd love to give other MMOs such as LOTRO some love, I simply can't without giving up something else. And given that I spend most of my MMO time in WoW and SWTOR, it makes sense that I'd keep a subscription for each.

So when I see blog posts in multiple locations that subscription numbers for World of Warcraft that show volumes that just feel higher than I expect from game traffic I observe, I have to remember that people will hang onto subscriptions even when they're not actively playing because that's where their social network is. 

One thing that I do wonder about is whether Blizzard counts people purchasing Game Time*** as subscriptions. If they go based on the strict understanding that only recurring subs count in their numbers, I do not count as a subscriber and haven't since, oh, 2011 or so. My guess is that they do count me as a subscriber, even though I would argue otherwise. 

In an automatically recurring subscription such as that found in a wireless or streaming service, it's actually harder to unsubscribe as you have to be the initiator, whereas if you purchase Game Time on a month-to-month basis it's actually harder to remain subscribed since you have to initiate the purchase each time. Obviously Blizzard would prefer me to set up a recurring service since they know this, but I've resisted over the years since it has forced me to ask every couple of months "Am I having fun?" and "Is it worth it to keep playing?" 

At any rate, the conjectures about subscriber numbers are believable, although I am surprised they are not lower. I would have figured that Blizzard would have been happy to maintain these subscriber numbers and announce them at quarterly intervals, but perhaps the reason why they don't post sub numbers has less to do with saying just how many people play WoW but rather they don't want people to know just how much money they're getting from the Cash Shop.  

I guess we'll never know now, since Activision-Blizzard is but a small line item on the overall Microsoft balance sheet.

*Yes, WotC is by far the larger of the two, but Paizo wields a LOT of outsized influence in the gaming world because Pathfinder is still incredibly popular among people who prefer the D&D 3.x style of play. They've also led the way in moving away from the Wizards' led Open Gaming License that Wizards and Hasbro attempted to modify last year to make it much harder for anybody third party in D&D space to make any profit at all. You'd think that Corporate America would understand and learn from previous mistakes, but apparently institutional memory is very very short.

**I presume the truism about wine, that if you want to make a small fortune in wine begin with a large fortune, holds for game companies as well.

***I'm keeping this capitalized in the post as Blizzard does, not for any other reason.

Behind the Curve

My son informed me the other week that he'd finished Baldur's Gate 3.

Considering that after that first week's worth of excessive playing my time in BG3 had shrunk to practically nothing for a month, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I'm not into rushing into new content when an MMO expansion hits, but that initial week's worth playing BG3 gave me enough dopamine hits that I could understand the urge to keep playing.* When I realized I was eschewing work to play BG3, I had to dial it back for my own sanity. (And to keep my job, but that kind of goes without saying.)

My son didn't have those issues, since he was able to fit in most of BG3 before his current semester of grad school started, and more power to him for that. 

I'm not going to lie and say I was totally fine with all this; I felt a pang of jealousy at how he cruised through the game while I'm plodding along. It's not as if I'm savoring the game, either; at times it feels like when I was speed leveling that Draenei Shaman when TBC Classic came out: I'm constantly plotting my next move and trying to figure out how to progress further through the story.**

Yes, my MMO playing is at exactly the opposite inflection point from where I am playing a single player RPG. You could say that I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 like other people play World of Warcraft, and you'd not be wrong. 

***

It's the equivalent of reading a really exciting novel: the pages fly by and you want to get on to the next part just to see what happens. 

I get that, I really do, but I think that I need to be reminded of that from time to time that people who blitz through content aren't doing it "just to get it over with", but genuinely like the content so much that they're constantly turning that next page to find out what happens. 

I guess I get cynical about things when, like in TBC Classic, everybody was supposed to follow a playbook to get themselves raid ready as soon as possible. I thought it was only my guild that did that, because a few people I met out in Outland while leveling had completely different (and better) experiences with their guilds in terms of pacing and prepping for raids. However, on further reflection those better experiences had more to do with helping their own leveling Shamans to get leveled and not abandoning them to their fate when the Dark Portal opened. Those guilds, while more helpful to their Shamanistic (and Blood Knight) brethren, still had goals to achieve and raids to prep for; they were just a tad nicer about it, that's all. There were quite a few guilds raiding Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon while I was somewhere out in Terokkar Forest***, plodding away. 

A blast from the past, from June 18, 2021. If I were in
the "sweaty" raid, I'd have only a little over
two weeks to get to L70 and through the attunement
gauntlet. Our raid team was the one with the
"casual" reputation that I despised and started
raiding in the last week of July, 2021.

If I were in those guilds, I'd not have been abandoned, true, but I'd have also been pushed into the regimen all of those other guilds were doing. 

So why am I okay with it when I'm playing a video game such as Baldur's Gate 3?

***

As is typically the case, I believe it has to do with agency.

Typically, the way to get me to do something is to let me figure it out on my own and I'll likely end up doing what needs to be done. If I'm forced into doing something by some external force, then I'm going to drag my feet and refuse. Think of it of how people approach taxes: everybody in the US has to file their income tax by April 15th, and a lot of people will procrastinate until the last possible moment to do their taxes. I know people who do that on principle, complaining about their tax rates and whatnot, but I am one of those who simply don't like being told to do their taxes, especially if I'm given some sanctimonious bullshit like what I got as a kid when being told to eat my dinner "because it's good for you."

From Calvin and Hobbes.

Likewise, at work if I'm told I have to do something, I'm probably going to be one of the last people to actually get it finished. I would not do well in a highly regimented environment, such as the military. 

Hawkeye is my spirit animal.
From Imgflip (and M*A*S*H).

From that perspective, you can see why I clashed with progression raiding in an MMO format. When I joined the progression raid team, I did so willingly and pushed myself to get up to speed both gear wise and add-on wise. There weren't requirements for how exactly I went about getting my toon(s) ready for progression raiding; just that I get myself ready. And yes, I willingly went to SixtyUpgrades, Wowhead, and Icy Veins to see where my gaps were. It wasn't a directly communicated expectation, but rather something I did on my own to become a member of the raid team. 

It was only when TBC Classic came along and raid/guild leadership began making exact demands on the gear and process of getting raid ready did I rebel. The concept of raiding went from only being concerned with the end result ("raid ready") to trying to dictate how it should be done, and those demands weren't limited to my guild. Almost all of the actively raiding guilds on Myzrael-US were guilty of making the same demands on their members starting in TBC Classic, and whether their demands were cloaked in a velvet glove or not, the demands were pretty much the same iron fist: do it or you're not on the raid team. The lone exception that I was aware of was one guild who basically told its members to go do whatever for a month when TBC Classic dropped, and they circled back after that month to see where the guild stood before getting ready to raid. 

***

Okay, that's just raiding. Still, there's nothing that says you can't do whatever you want in an MMO in general. 

At it's core, that's correct. The design of an MMO is to allow a player to do a variety of activities without saying "you must conform". You could make the argument that modern MMOs have a ton of alternate activities designed with this player choice in mind.

This old chestnut highlights the player choice
the modern MMO has versus good ol' Classic.
Can't even recall who first made this meme.

The thing is, MMOs are not merely the sum of systems: there's a social element to them as well, and that is how the problems creep in. 

In any social endeavor, certain niceties are expected if you want to fit in. Just like proper social etiquette in real life, there's an MMO version of social etiquette when interacting with people. The Wil Wheaton saying "Don't be a dick" is just the bare minimum for social interactions; beyond that MMO interactions are a bit more complex. If you want to do group content in an MMO --especially in today's age-- you're expected to have done the "correct" things to maximize your output. What that entails varies between guilds and groups, but there's a measure of commonality driven by the knowledge that in the "group finder" MMO environment players are interchangeable: if you don't have the right specs/gear/systems settings, you can be painlessly replaced by someone else. And in a pre-group finder MMO, be prepared to submit for inspection if you want in on some group content.

Developers have attempted to circumvent such social restrictions with new ideas --LFR raids being the most notable-- but that's a technical solution for what is inherently a people problem. And when I play any group content in an MMO, I feel the social pressure. I never used to, but once you've crossed the Rubicon and been on the progression side of things, the veil of obscurity has been ripped away and you now see things from the lens of those who are judging whether you're good enough to join their raid team.

The best way to find good candidates for your organization is to create what I call positive encounters. Actions speak louder than words, so you need to ensure that these potential new members have some actions by which they can judge you. When you need a specific class, get your best group runners together and advertise that you need said class in order to do an instance. Once you get them in your group, don't mention recruitment. Just run that instance and do your job well. If they do well, tell them you hope to group again and then part ways. If they aren't in an organization, you may subtly mention that you are looking for their class. Do this enought times with enough people, and word will get around that you're a solid outfit. You can't buy better publicity than that and it creates more opportunities for you to use the soft sell. 

--The Guild Leader's Companion by Adam "Ferrel" Trzonkowski, Page 41.

The irony is that I thought this way before I bought The Guild Leader's Companion, because I'd be on guild runs in an instance and guild chat during the run would have a lot of commentary on any pugger's technique, both good and bad, and what their prospects were as a potential member of the raid team. I never saw it myself until I formally joined the progression guild immediately before TBC Classic, and there were plenty of times I wished I had remained ignorant and just enjoyed a dungeon run or a raid.

***

I guess that's where the irony creeps in. A single player game, such as an RPG, doesn't have that sort of social pressure. There's nobody looking over your shoulder, judging your gameplay, dropping comments and/or hints about how you could have done better. Nobody is pulling you into a Discord chat about how you could up your DPS a bit more so you could overcome that last fight more quickly. Nobody is telling you what extra gear pieces you should farm for. Nobody is suggesting a link in Wowhead to go check out to improve your gameplay. In a single player game, the only person you have to please is yourself. 

And Garrus. You ought to please
Garrus too. From Tumblr.

Because of that, I can focus as much or little of my time on the metagame without any recriminations.****

I haven't gone and pulled up walkthroughs or YouTube videos or gone to other websites that would cause spoilers in BG3, but the plotting does remain. I know that there's an optimal way of doing things --that's a drawback to any game, really-- but I don't seek it out. Most importantly, I don't have people telling me (or others in a chat I'm not part of) that I'm not playing it right in one form or another.

To a certain extent ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

Now, about that Arcane Tower in BG 3...

*Sort of. I still don't quite get people who took off for a week's worth of vacation when TBC Classic (and other WoW expacs) released, given that at least here in the US paid vacation isn't very copious to begin with, and if I told my wife I was going to burn a week's worth of my vacation time playing video games for upwards of 18 hours a day she'd have a conniption fit. If I were retired that'd be a different story, but I think I'd be expected to travel a lot, and I'm not as big on that these days either.

**For the record, yes, my character has been immersed in the other party members' backstories. Let's just say I was surprised at how easily certain relationships "progressed", which made me wonder if there was something I was missing out on in real life if fictional relationships moved at this sort of speed.

***The Terokkar Forest zone was exactly in the middle of the Outland leveling experience. So, while I was halfway through, I still had a ways to go.

****Unless you're streaming, I suppose, but I don't stream because I don't like having a peanut gallery watching my every move.

A Different Kind of Fun

On more than one occasion I've had ex-military personnel explain to me what it's like coming down from being on active duty. I'm not talking about whether you've seen combat, which is a whole other matter, but just the routine of military life. By far the biggest difference between military and civilian life, they've said, is dealing with the freedom to do whatever they want.* They're so used to having their lives planned out in detail that the concept of "eh, do whatever" becomes foreign to them. 

This isn't exactly a new phenomenon, given how monks' lives were planned out in meticulous detail back in the Middle Ages ("Hellooo, St. Benedict!"), but I was thinking about this tendency toward specific goals and rules as the crux of the difference between Classic and Retail World of Warcraft. 

Or, in an MMO versus an RPG, such as Baldur's Gate.

It's... not too far off, if I had about 30 fewer
pounds on me. Alas that this is about as "aged"
as I can make a toon without turning them gray.
And yes, Lucius is the name of my Cleric from
that now ended D&D 3e campaign, although this
fellow is a "I hit it with my sword" Fighter.

When I finally broke down and bought BG3 as part of the Winter Steam Sale --likely the last sale on that game for a while-- I started playing the first Baldur's Gate again and got as far as reaching Baldur's Gate itself. The siren's song of temptation finally proved to be too much for me, and so I created ol' Lucius above and started poking around. 

In the case of both games, there are obviously some differences --the different D&D rulesets notwithstanding**-- but in general there are timers involved in-game that keep you pushing forward. In the original Baldur's Gate they are more overt and party driven, such as having to get certain quests done or else party members will either leave or attack you. In other RPGs, such as The Witcher, if you try to collect quests and try to get everything good and ready before you "continue" a quest (such as what you'd do in an MMO), you might discover that the timer for that quest has already expired and you've got some NPC mad at you for dithering when they needed help.

The concept of just wandering around and doing whatever is pretty much lost on the player, as the story is paramount.

By comparison, Retail WoW is very forgiving. You can do quests (or not); you can do dailies, run dungeons, raid, etc., but there is very little that's actually required of a player when you play the game. And unlike an RPG, where once you kill enemies others don't respawn after a set timer, you can pretty much go ahead and deal with whatever whenever you want to.

The irony is that all of those items in-game in Retail WoW become "required" by the player base, who enforce a "correct" way of playing based on whatever the min-max numbers say, so it ends up that we, the players, turn a self-directed environment into a regimented game all by ourselves.

***

And, of course, that mentality has trickled down to WoW Classic, where I am resisting it's pull with all my might. 

I think it needs to be said, however, that after some sessions with Baldur's Gate 1 and 3, I've discovered that it is very freeing to login to WoW Classic Era and just, well, hang around without needing to actually do anything at all. Once you tell the collective min-max crowd to go piss off, playing an MMO such as Classic Era is, well, fun in a way that story driven MMOs and RPGs aren't. 

That's not to say I suddenly don't like RPGs, but it's a different kind of fun than that found in WoW Classic Era. Sure, Era can feel kind of empty in terms of "things to do", but sometimes that's exactly what you want out of a game. And sometimes you want to do some things here and there that you can't do in Classic/Classic Era but you find in Retail. Or another MMO. And then, you want a story that keeps you moving, and there's one of several RPGs to choose from.

It's all different, and that's okay. And I think I need to be reminded of that on a regular basis.

*A very distant second was dealing with all the rules. And the bureaucracy. If you thought academia or government had a ton of arcane rules and regulations and absurd bureaucracy, wait'll you meet the military. Of course, being in the private sector my whole life, I often say the same thing to people who bitch about "waste in government", and they're offended for some reason that capitalism hasn't wiped that waste out. I'm personally of the opinion that it's just a reflection on human nature, and you just have to live with it.

**I'm still having issues dealing with Short Rests that exist in the modern game. I'm so used to hoarding supplies such as healing potions that the concept of a Short Rest --where you can get a bunch of your hit points back twice in a day-- before you need what I'd term a "regular" or Long rest is confusing me. I try to figure out how to win an encounter without needing as many healing potions or spells as possible, but the encounters are designed for people to expect those "mini mass heals". 

What Drives You?

People play games for different reasons, and even those reasons may change over the course of your lifetime. 

When I was growing up, my family would have regular game nights. Those included some of the classics, such as Waterworks,

This was the version at our home,
which dates to 1972. I believe Mom still
has the game around somewhere. From eBay.

or Authors,

I should have this version around the
house somewhere. From eBay (again).

or Clue,

While I was unsuccessfully trying
to find my copy of Authors, I found
my circa 1980 version of Clue.

but they also included games that are no longer published, such as Scan.

This is circa 1970 or so.
From Rahmiano Anderson via
BoardGameGeek.

We also played card games such as UNO, Hearts, or Michigan Rummy, the former two of which received new life when I went away to college. However, those days of my youth were fueled by the desire to beat my dad at these games. It was partly a competitive streak in me, but Dad was easily the best player in the house, and so if I wanted to finally prove my worth (in my own mind) I had to beat him. 

As for chess... Let's not talk about chess. I only beat my dad once in chess despite years of trying, and my brother was on the chess team at his high school, so I kind of got used to losing at chess.

But still, it all fed into my primary motivation: Beat Dad.

The simple straightforward concept of "beat the other player" is not exactly new, and this is the basis of a lot of PvP video games today.*

It was only when I was a teen that I began to break out of the 'beat Dad' mentality and understand that there were other reasons for playing games. I wasn't giving up my quest to win, but that drive to win doesn't necessarily fit well into other types of games.

Some of that comes from learning RPGs. Sure, there's a "beat the Big Bad" component to RPGs, there's also the social element to those sorts of games. 

Back when I was a kid, we approached playing AD&D as if it was The Party versus The DM. Who became the DM in our campaigns rotated, but the resulting competition was always the same. The DM tried to kill us, and we tried to outwit the DM. 

The high point of any Party vs. DM competition was
ALWAYS The Tomb of Horrors. Let me just say that
of the two options above, there are no right answers.
IIRC, one will destroy you utterly, and the other
one will merely strip you of all your gear and clothing.
From TSR Hobbies via The Alexandrian.

Understanding the concept of a shared story or a shared plot with the DM not as an antagonist but rather a facilitator came about much later, but old habits do die hard. It was then, when I was an adult, that I finally realized that merely killing things and beating the DM wasn't nearly as much fun as a well crafted story that both we as players and the DM participated in. 

Sometimes it's part of a big story arc like what you'd find in a premade module, or sometimes it's something we purely make up as we go along. Or maybe it's something that we work on in creating a world together, but what I found to be the most fun is the story and my participation in it. Perhaps I'll never write a novel, but this is the closest I can come to actually doing just that.

Sure, I love puzzles, but I recognize that they're just that. The long term enjoyment, however, comes from the stories I participate in. Given my love of reading, I guess that's not that much of a surprise.

So... What drives you? What do you play for? 

*Despite complaints from players otherwise, I sure as hell go into Alterac Valley in WoW Classic wanting to win, and the constant losing in Battlegrounds by the Alliance during the Mists of Pandaria expansion just wore me down to where all I was feeling was anger. That was when I knew it was time to leave WoW.

Trial of Being the Champion

If there's one thing that irks me the most about RPGs and MMOs, it's that the power fantasy is kind of baked into the genres.

That's not to say that all I ever want to do is sit around at a virtual bar and get hit on by other players*, but rather that I want my RPG and MMO experience to be more than merely about getting more stuff. 

Given how Wall Street acts these days, Gordon
Gecko's pronouncement back in 1987 is
positively quaint. From Wall Street.

To what is probably the largest number of players**, the whole point of playing an MMO is to get the gear that shows off what you've accomplished. Most third party material is focused on all aspects of accomplishing just that: get the right gear for the class with the right specs and the right talents using the right rotation to kill the boss for the loot. If it's not explicitly that, the other aspect the majority of players are interested in is killing those bosses at ever increasing difficulty to show off your physical skills. 

Of course, the power fantasy is far more than the mere acquisition of loot and using said loot to defeat the bosses. It's also about having the game tell you how important or powerful you are. 

Okay, it could also be "mortals", but...

***

Having been a participant in --and a watcher of-- sports and sporting events, there's a lot of overlap between the stardom inherent in competitive sports and the power fantasy in RPGs/MMOs.*** In both environments, the better you get the more you're lauded by people, and you accumulate more hangers-on who want to bask in your reflected glory. After a while, you pretty much expect this adulation as par for the course.

But what is frequently missed in the RPG/MMO power fantasy is what happens when your skills diminish over time. Or when you screw up and those adoring fans turn on you. 

Just ask Bill Buckner about that one.****

In an RPG/MMO, you know you're the hero, so even if there's a setback you know that in the end there's a redemption path for you. Just look at the old quest chain in WoW's Burning Crusade expansion where you inadvertently assist Teron Gorefiend's return to power. Of course, you end up meeting him as a raid boss in Black Temple (I think) so you "correct" your mistake there. No harm, no foul.

But in life, such redemption stories rarely happen. You screw up badly at work, you find yourself reassigned if you're lucky, and out of a job if not. If you drop that game winning pass, you're the idiot who couldn't catch a damn ball; no matter if you've done it since time immemorial. 

And the boos come; both physical and virtual.

***

I guess I want more complexity to what RPGs and MMOs mean than just the power fantasy. "The line goes up" doesn't necessarily thrill me, when I'm at that point in my life when I counter with "yeah, but you can't take it with you". That's something I can't emphasize enough; when you're closer to the end of things than the beginning, you start looking around and thinking "just what am I going to do with all of this shit, anyway?" It's easy to want more things, but what the hell are you supposed to do with them when you've got them? Want even more things?

The problem is, the desire for more and more is baked into these games because that's what keeps people buying. The power fantasy is a psychological tool to purchase more.

But why can't there be, well, more to offer than just the power fantasy?

Well, Champion? What say you?

*In the right frame of mind, I'd be down for that. The thing is, I'm typically not in that frame of mind.

**If it's not the largest number, it tends to be the loudest voice in the community.

***Also in politics. There's a reason why narcissists flock to the political life.

****And for the record, that Bill Buckner forgave the fans who eviscerated him is far better than those fans deserved.