If It's Sunday, It's Time to Talk AI

I was introduced to the boardgame Diplomacy my freshman year at Dayton. The guy who pulled me into a game had bought it back in high school, and he was the only one who knew how to play, so he explained the rules and away we went.

It took about half an hour before I finally got into the groove of playing the game --periods of 10 minutes of "diplomacy" working out your moves with others before submitting them into a box and then one person would pull them out and set them into motion. The logic behind the game is pretty simple: if two players try to move into a location on the board and their unit numbers are equal, they "bounce" and nobody gets that spot. If one player has more units --whether their own or another player supporting them-- then that player gets the spot. The idea is to control cities (aka "supply centers"), and the number of cities you control determines the number of armies and navies  you own. 

The map and box of my copy of the game, which
I bought back in the 90s because I felt guilty
about playing via email when I didn't have my own
copy. It's been a while since I played face-to-face.

The thing is, within the game of Diplomacy there's that metagame where you have to make and break alliances in order to get what you want. That makes the game equally exhilarating and frustrating, and I've often said that people who are very good at Diplomacy are not the sort of people you would like to hang around with in a social setting: they take the game far too seriously and apply those principles of alliance-making and backstabbing to real life. 

To be honest, it's been at least a decade since I thought about Diplomacy very much. So, when I began reading this article from Wired titled What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? and discovered it was about an AI playing Diplomacy, it piqued my interest. 

The article got me to thinking about whether I have AI all wrong, and that it will end up running the world to our benefit, not unlike the Isaac Asimov short stories Evidence and The Evitable Conflict, both found in his collection of short stories titled I, Robot.

My copy, which I bought back in the
mid-80s for the princely sum of $3.50.

Then, of course, we see chatbots trained on social media content spewing offensive and racist comments. And that was before the most recent Grok-supplied social media posts about good ol' Adolf.

Yeah, I'm not buying it just yet.

***

That being said, if AI is already sentient and has decided to destroy humanity, why bother declaring war on humanity ala The Terminator when you can get humanity to destroy itself? If you get enough people on either side of a potential conflict incensed enough, a war will erupt which will devastate humanity. Toss in a few nukes, and...

There'd have to be an end goal of an AI to eliminate humanity, however. To what end would an AI want to eliminate us? For environmental reasons? Well, I hate to point out the obvious, but military actions by either a sentient AI or humans vs humans would have grave consequences for the environment. If it's to lowed the birthrate by presenting "better options" than people having children, we're doing that quite well enough on our own by making it increasingly difficult to afford having families without a sentient AI to providing alternatives such as romantic AI partners. Or, um, that other robotic industry.

Maybe the answer to the long term survival of a sentient AI is a symbiotic relationship with humans. Not strictly an exploitative relationship driven by companies that seek to profit from controlling AI, but rather AI controlling humanity's behavior so both AI and humanity can continue to exist. How that looks is something we may think we know --typically, what we look around and see in our lives today but somehow "more" than just that-- but probably won't look like that at all. If predictive models created by AI can see that humanity will come to a bad end if a company utilizing the AI gets what they want, how will that AI respond? Or, how will an AI respond to a human leader who simply pursues a self-destructive course for purely emotional reasons? I'm not sure I want to know that answer, but I suspect we'll find out sooner than we'd like. 

Time Marches On

My wife and I met our son and his partner for lunch today at our local bookstore, and afterward we wandered the stacks. I espied a few boardgames that the store had for sale, and I immediately felt a bit wistful. It reminded me that the first boardgame store I visited here, Boardwalk Hobby Shop, had closed during the pandemic. The owners had decided to retire, and like I said in a previous post, I couldn't begrudge them that. 

The day before I was out as an advanced scouting party for getting my youngest a new laptop, as her current one is far too old and slow to handle Windows 11, and I needed to reacquaint myself with how the various brands and models handled.* Naturally, I went to Microcenter, and afterward I stopped by my nearby Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), YottaQuest.

I wasn't there to buy anything --because laptop, you know-- but it was good to simply roam the store and watch the steady flow of customers into the place. Those included a couple easily old enough to be my parents, and they weren't there just because their grandkids wanted to visit,** but to actually buy something themselves. 

I took this pic last Fall, when there were
leaves everywhere. Even on a nose or two.

Time marches on, but I hope that some things continue. Such as good bookstores and game stores.

*Having spent the last 12+ years buying laptops for the kids, I've seen a lot of trends. Such as the decline of HP in terms of quality --holy hell are those laptops flimsy-- and the rise of Acer as a viable brand. I remember when Acer's Aspire line used to be nicknamed "Expire" because of how poorly powered and built they were, but HP has certainly passed them on the way to the bottom in terms of consumer grade stuff. I still refuse to touch Dell because of my own personal experience with the brand courtesy of a work laptop that refused to have it's fan spin unless it sat perfectly flat. Tilt it just a hair and the fan would simply stop working. And I won't get into the overheating problems with that laptop, either.

**That was my experience as a kid when I'd drag my grandparents to a video game arcade or a bookstore.

#Blaugust2025

Nothing Lasts Forever

I don't know what life is like where you live, but we've been in the middle of a drought that's gone on for about two months. We did have several days' worth of rain right in the middle of the drought, but it wasn't enough to actually break it. The occasional thunderstorm hasn't exactly helped much either, since the rain simply rolls off of the hardened earth and down the storm drains.

The heat hasn't been unbearable --save for this week-- it's just been dry. 

So with that in mind, there haven't been a lot of reasons for me to work outside much.

I've been taking a couple weeks' worth of break from working on the deck because I needed to recover from helping my oldest move, and I wasn't planning on baking outside in that heat this week.

So, what have I been up to?

Cleaning. And organizing.

Not exactly fun work per se, but it is satisfying to see some of my stuff finally get organized. 

We also have an electronics recycling coming up in a couple of months, so I finally decided that it was time to clear out some spare parts and whatnot that I won't be using ever again. Such as 15 year old graphics cards from our old Microsoft Vista machine that is also going away. That PC missed the last recycling day because I hadn't properly wiped the hard drive, so I'm not going to take any chances and will do that work sometime in late September. 

That cleaning was how I rediscovered my old scanner, and I've also found some of the doodads you need to set up a shortwave antenna outside. As I organized the parts, I noticed I was missing a few items so I hopped on to my go-to site for all things shortwave, Universal Radio, to see what the prices were to fill in the gaps on my supplies. Universal is in the suburbs of Columbus, a couple of hours' drive away, so I always felt good about supporting the semi-local economy when I bought items from them.

Alas, this is what I found when I went to their online catalog.

You have to expand it to read it properly.

I knew that this day might come, but November 2020? How did I not know this before now?

***

This isn't the first store that I've supported that has closed its doors for the owners' retirement. Boardwalk Hobby Shop on the east side of town shut down in 2020-2021, and if I had the money I would have loved to have bought the place to keep it running. Since I knew I didn't know beans about actually running a business, let alone a game store, I had to pass.

I first walked through that door in 1991,
not knowing what to expect.
From Davion M. via Yelp.

It hurts seeing this.
From the Mt. Lookout Business Association.

But still, I spent a lot of time in that store. My kids grew up going there with me, and Marilyn --one of the owners-- used to hold the kids when they were infants. 

Myra's Dionysus, a small Mediterranean inspired restaurant near the University of Cincinnati, was a fun place to eat at. 

From this article by CityBeat that came
out a year before Myra's closed in 2014.

It was in the storefront of a century old building, a hole-in-the-wall place, really, but it was one of the first places I'd ever eaten at that had a heavily vegetarian menu. When my youngest decided to become a vegetarian, Myra's became more than just a place to eat at, but an inspiration. When Myra's closed because she was in her 80s and wanted to retire, that hurt. I couldn't begrudge her retirement years, but I really miss that place. At least Myra's daughter has begun posting some of Myra's old recipes at Myra's Kitchen Legacy. I've made the hummus, and it is dead on for what we used to eat at Myra's.

***

These are all memories now.

I never quite understood when people my grandparents' age used to talk about places that don't exist, such as some of the theaters downtown, but I do now. It's both a blessing and a curse of aging, I suppose, to see things change and long for what once was. But time does move on, and new memories are always made. We don't live forever, so we shouldn't expect our world to remain constant either.

#Blaugust2024

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.)

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.

Random News and Notes for a Thursday

If you post coffee memes, beware: your readership will explode.

Given that there's literally hundreds of coffee memes out there, why on earth I got a sudden explosion in views on PC when I posted a few of my favorites is beyond me. It's not like they're that new, either, but oh well.

I'm not above using one of the ones that missed
the cut for a few extra pageviews. What I find
disturbing is how close the 'After' picture looks like
David Tennant. From Laugh Lore.

***

Under the header of 'video games getting a board game treatment', there's a beloved Bioware franchise that has a boardgame in the works:

This landed in my Inbox on Monday
from Modiphius.

Yes, Modiphius is going to publish Mass Effect: The Board Game, a cooperative and story-driven boardgame designed by Eric M. Lang and Calvin Wong Tze Loon for 1-4 players. It sounds interesting at first blush, and given how Modiphius tends to have high quality plastic pieces in their games, this ought to look pretty too. Here's the signup page for more info and to receive emails about the release of the game itself. Just make sure you fill out the correct info for US vs UK/Europe so you end up with the correct website.

***

You know, the Dracthyr race in Retail World of Warcraft has taken some lumps for it's decidedly un-dragonkin-like look.

From Wowpedia.

I was perusing some RPG sites the other day, and I came across some artwork from RuneQuest that made me go "hmmm..."

Look vaguely familiar?
Found on Glorantha Bestiary, Pages 36-37.
Verified with my copy. Also found here at Artstation.

These are Dragonewts, as drawn by Cory Trego-Erdner back in 2016-2017, for the RuneQuest Glorantha Bestiary. 

In RuneQuest, Dragonewts claim to be the oldest sentient species and are one of the races found in the main starting area in RuneQuest, Dragon Pass. Now admittedly there's only so much an artist can do with the basic dragon design, but the reason why I don't mind the look of the Dracthyr is that they do evoke a similar look as that found in RuneQuest. The lore is obviously very distinct, but given that nobody seems to bitch about the lore of Dracthyr so much as that they don't look "cool enough", that's my two cents on the matter.

***

Finally, I wanted to mention a long departed podcast that really sucked me into RPGs back in the day.

Before "modern times" and the proliferation of podcasts in their current monetized form, Chuck Tinsley and Lonnie Ezell created the Dragons Landing Inn podcast back in 2005. They kept it going for about 126-130 episodes, and then Steve and Rob kind of picked up the mantle for a dozen episodes or so in a relatively unmoderated format until the podcast faded away. When I asked my brother-in-law what good RPG and gaming podcasts were out there, he said without hesitation "Dragons Landing Inn".

I've tried to find a better version
of their graphic to no avail.

With the tagline "Gaming Goodness", Chuck and Lonnie would espouse on RPGs, whatever the news was in RPG space, and eventually would broach RPG specific topics on running a campaign and having a rules set fit the type of campaign you wanted to play. Although the news is quite dated --it began in a time before D&D 4e and Pathfinder existed-- the old podcasts are still available via the Internet Archive at this link. I don't believe they're complete, as the original podcasts start at Episode 27, so you'll have to search the Internet Archive for individual episodes to complete the entire run of DLI.

I still have my old downloads of DLI on my desktop. I've dutifully backed up and transferred them over the almost two decades that they came out, and have no intention of ever deleting them. Given how podcasting has evolved as a format since DLI's heyday, it's refreshing to find a podcast in a raw, unmonetized state (and low bit-rate) still providing entertainment. 

EtA: Corrected grammar.

EtA: Corrected more grammar. Sheesh.

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.

It Is a Puzzlement

I've mentioned before about how Modiphius Entertainment came out with a pencil and paper Dune RPG, and I am puzzled.

Yes, they did win an Ennie award for it, but...
From the Modiphius website.

I mean, it not only exists --and Modiphius won awards for it-- but I just can't wrap my head around the concept of an RPG based on the Dune universe. 

While I can understand the concept of a strategic game, such as the legendary Avalon Hill board game Dune,

It had been out of print for so long
--and the Herbert estate had sat on it--
that I figured it wasn't ever going to see
the light of day again. Still not sure how
Gale Force Nine pulled this one off.
From Boardgamegeek.

an RPG based on the intellectual property is an entirely different matter.

RPGs are meant to be personal, so even when you have a troupe or stable of players, such as in Ars Magica or Vampire: the Masquerade, you can identify or understand the motivations of the player you're inhabiting at the moment. That intimacy doesn't necessarily translate into a universe where factions war with each other and unless you're at the heart of the malestrom you end up being chewed up and spit out. The novels themselves are focused among the people at the very center of everything, and Paul's family in particular, so a game like that necessitates you have to be attached to a noble house and perform deeds for that house. That sounds a bit closer in tone to, well, this particular game from Wizards of the Coast:

At the intersection of Eurogames
and RPGs, likes this one.
From Boardgamegeek.

People I know who have played Lords of Waterdeep like it, but then again those folks tend to love Eurogames in general, and the crunchier the better.

I guess I'd have to see Dune in action to really make a better judgement, but for me it certainly seems like this has to be a hybrid type of RPG at best.

#Blaugust2023

It All Blurs Together

There are times when "I hit it with my axe!" is the best way forward.

--Me (probably)

"I hit it with my axe! Wooo!!"

--Youngest mini-Red, in our 2-3x annual 1e AD&D game, as she in turn high fived one of our fellow party members. Yes, both women play Dwarven Fighters. Are you surprised?

If you listen to people talk about Retail WoW after having been away for a while* you can get absolutely lost in all of the systems and designs in the modern game. 

You don't say....

Returning to Classic WoW as a refuge from the complexity is an illusion, as those devoted to the min/max culture brought that back with them to Classic where it has morphed into its own culture in the Wrath Classic servers.**

Every time I think about trying out Retail, I read some blog posts or watch a YouTube video and --story complaints notwithstanding-- I get lost when people start talking about the various systems in game. When I also realize that unless I want to pay Blizzard extra money I'd have to go through Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands to get to Dragonflight, I just kind of shudder at all of the complexity those two expacs introduced. 

If you've been playing the game straight through, that's one thing. After all, the systems and whatnot are gradually added over time. It's when you go away for years and then come back do you realize just how crazy things have gotten. 

***

There was a time when I was the one who preferred the complex over the "easy to learn and hard to master" method of game design. Back in the early 90s, when I was knee deep in games such as Squad Leader, War and Peace, and Battle of the Bulge, an old high school acquaintance invited me to playtest a boardgame he and some mutual acquaintances were working on. 

This was the sort of thing that I played
back then, which is Victory Games' Ambush!, 
a solitaire WW2 wargame.
From Jonathan Arnold of Board Game Geek.

Their game was set in the Star Trek universe, where up to three players were fighting over control of a specific doohickey using several starships each. The three factions --Federation, Klingons, and Romulans***-- were pretty much equal in overall strength and movement.

"Is this like Star Fleet Battles?" I asked.

"No," my friend replied. "That's too complex. We're aiming more for Axis and Allies."

Okay, I thought. Let's give it a try.

The game had potential, but I felt that they lost something with the rules as simple as they were. "The various ships with their number rating is fine," I began, "but have you thought about two numbers, one for attack and one for defense? That'll allow you to have more and different types of starships out there."

"We're not doing any of that Avalon Hill bullshit," one of the team snapped back at me. "That crap is too hard and we want this to get a wide audience."

After that, I realized that they weren't really planning on taking my advice to heart, so I just kept it basic with some generally positive feedback and then found an excuse to leave rather early. 

The irony is that not only am I the one who prefers simple systems to more complex ones these days, the so-called "simple systems" found in WoW's Classic Era are far more complex than what I proposed back then. Computers have a habit of condensing complexity to manageable levels, after all.

***

Kirk: Galloping about the cosmos is a game for the young, Doctor.
Uhura: Now what is THAT supposed to mean?

--From Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan

That's not to say that complexity is bad by any means. If you know going in how complex things are, and if said complexity is presented well, the complexity isn't necessarily a problem. The thing is, if complexity is gradually added to over the course of years, you may not realize just how complex things had gotten until said complexity becomes overwhelming.

Or in my case, poking my nose into World of Warcraft after a decade away.

I like to use the Blood Elf starting areas up to and including The Ghostlands as a great way to introduce someone into the various systems of WoW --well, TBC-era WoW-- in a gradual fashion. The build up includes things such as timed events, escort quests, mobs with AoE damage, mobs that chain pull, and mobs that drop the "don't stand in the bad" stuff. In the end, you even have opportunities for grouping up for the two abomination elites as well as Dar'Khan Drathir, but along with everything else that got nerfed in Cataclysm those grouping opportunities were obliterated as well.**** That basic introduction carried my original toons all the way up to max level in original Wrath of the Lich King, because that foundation was utilized and built upon from the beginning. 

From what I've read, the brand new intro zone provided in Shadowlands (Exile's Reach) does a great job of providing a new player a way of learning the basics of WoW, but what ends up happening is that those basics get thrown out the window once you reach high enough level to hit the various expansions.

Not that people can't utilize the basics of "don't stand in the bad", but that you're not exposed to the systems found in the expacs until you reach those expacs.

Like, oh, say, Legion.

Or Shadowlands.

Or even Dragonflight.

Existing players may not notice it at all, or may even think it a new quirk of the current expansion, but players who had been away for years --or are new-- will notice. That wasn't always the case, as the systems found in TBC Classic and Wrath Classic --flying and membership in Scryers/Aldor being the notable exceptions-- are also found in Vanilla Classic.***** 

After a while, all that bait-and-switch complexity just blurs together and makes you feel like an idiot for not understanding it all. If that doesn't happen on its own, the loudmouth toxic aspects of the WoW community certainly will do that for you.

"LOL L2P noob!"
From Memebase via Pinterest.

***

The thing is, sometimes all you want to do is hit an enemy with your axe. Which brings me to Diablo 4.

I'm moderately interested in Diablo 4, but to my mind as someone who never played the Diablo franchise I'd first want to play Diablo 2# and then 3 before finally setting my foot into Diablo 4. 

If that sounds vaguely familiar to long time readers of the blog, that's the process I used to approach Retail WoW with, starting in Cataclysm. I'd select a toon or two and then level those new toon(s) from L1 all the way to max level when the new expansion dropped. This meant that the crowd had already cleared to max level, begun their raiding, and were sitting in Trade Chat complaining that they were bored before I even killed my first mob in the new areas. It also gave me a chance to experience the game as it was presented, whether that presentation was purposely intended or not.

In the case of Diablo, I'm not one to replay RPGs ad nauseum --because replaying and releveling to the end at increased difficulty levels doesn't engage me-- so if I wanted to try those games out I'd wait for a massive sale## and then purchase those games at the price that reflects the worth of a single playthrough rather than a steady stream of replays for.... whatever reason. 

(I suspect that the "replay" concept of Diablo arose because people would replay the game while they waited for Diablo 3 and then Diablo 4 to be announced and released. Now, it's just... part of how the game is played.)

Nevertheless, when I watch Diablo 4 YouTube videos, what I'm struck by are how much Diablo 4 and World of Warcraft have blurred together, terminology wise. People talking about Affixes, grinding for Renown, and the various Seasons could be talking about either game, really. Add in World Bosses and dungeon grinding, and you'd have a hard time distinguishing discussions between the two games if you weren't looking at the screen.

That does highlight something that I never thought I'd ever have to contend with in an Action RPG such as Diablo: just how much complexity from WoW has bled over into Diablo? I mean, "I hit it with my axe" is pretty much the hallmark of the Diablo playstyle, but if you have to pay attention to all of this other crap just to play the game to completion, what's the point? What else is out there, that if you missed a specific item you were doomed to not playing the game right and that you had to start over? 

We've all experienced this feeling before,
which makes you wonder why you spent
all this time in the first place.
From Gamerant.

Kind of like that ol' Diamond Flask for Warriors in WoW Classic. If you didn't know that was a BiS item for Warriors in Classic/Classic Era, and you missed out on selecting it as the reward from the Voodoo Feathers quest, then you were simply shit outta luck.

L2P noob indeed.

***

In the end, complexity is an aftereffect of how long a game has been in existence. All games will, over time, become more and more complex as additions are made to the base game. Hell, just look at all the additions to the various incarnations of Sid Meier's Civilization over the years. The thing is, just how the game implements that complexity and builds up to that complexity is critically important. 

And that is something that Blizzard's properties need to work more extensively on.

*Such as, oh, 9 years from the date of this post but effectively 12 years.

**You can just opt out of this culture, as I kind of have, but that only goes so far. Even I partake in the min/max-ing culture whenever I fire up sixtyupgrades.com to see if a specific piece of gear is an upgrade or not. Still, Classic Era has been a true refuge from the meta driven culture found in Wrath Classic.

***They were most definitely old school in that they hated Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was the only one who regularly watched ST:TNG, and even then I stopped watching by my Junior year of college.

****I'm pretty sure I soloed Dar'Khan during the Cataclysm expansion on a Horde toon at level, and maybe even soloed the abominations as well.

*****I want to point out that membership in Aldor or Scryers was entirely optional in TBC. You'd think it was required, but I managed to simply ignore it on Deuce while leveling her and never had any issues with that. Of course, I wasn't going to raid, so that meant I wasn't gaining access to any Scryer or Aldor specific crafting recipes, but since I could just buy those if I needed them it wasn't a big deal per se. Flying in TBC wasn't mandatory if you weren't planning on raiding or accessing the Tempest Keep 5-person dungeons, as my old TBC Classic main --Briganaa-- didn't gain access to flying until some days after hitting max level and I absolutely was required to enter into those Tempest Keep instances for attunements. But Deuce, like before, skipped flying entirely until she finally had to bite the bullet and get it at L80 in Northrend. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that Neve still doesn't have flying in Wrath Classic, and she's been at L80 for a long time now. It's... just not a priority for me in the same way that I don't have a single toon in the entirety of Wrath Classic that has epic flying. Somewhere I can hear the collective mass of Wrath players screaming at the audacity to simply not give a fuck about flying anywhere fast.

#I mean, good luck trying to get Diablo 1 to work, if you can find a (legal) copy at all.

##Oh, the irony. I wrote this over the weekend, and between then and now the Blizzard Summer Sale appeared, with D2: Resurrected at 67% off and the entire D3 franchise at 26% off. To be honest, I wasn't expecting this sale right now --more like in November/December-- and my budget is kind of shot to hell with car repairs and my oldest getting her wisdom teeth yanked, so I'll likely pass on D2.

Coming Soon to a Table Near You...

I'm just gonna put this here....

Before you ask, no, I've never played Small World before. Published a year after Pandemic (the board game, not the event*), I know it was covered by Wil Wheaton in his TableTop series, and it does remain popular, but I've never actually played it.

That might have to change.

*And when you hear somebody say "Nobody ever thought a pandemic would happen!", remember that enough people DID to create a boardgame franchise out of it.

A Mashup Made in Geek Heaven

It's pretty much gone mainstream these days, but Settlers of Catan (now called just Catan) started out was an import here in the US. It was one of the original Eurogames that made it to our shores in the mid 90s* and began the boardgame revolution that we see today.

And Season Seven of the television adaptation of George RR Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice, HBO's Game of Thrones, just ended.

So what do I find when flipping through the big Con book from Gen Con? This:

The oldest mini-Red freaked out
when I texted her this.

Its a shared venture between Fantasy Flight Games (which holds the Game of Thrones license) and Catan Games. Here's the info on FFG's website.

Let the geeking out commence.





*Our copy dates from roughly 1996.

In Memoriam: Loren K. Wiseman

One of the RPG design greats, Loren K. Wiseman, passed away on February 15th.

No, Loren isn't the household name that Gary Gygax was, but he was a very influential RPG designer in his own right. He was a co-founder of Games Design Workshop (GDW), and a co-creator of the SF RPG Traveller. Later, he was a designer on the Steve Jackson Games' interpretation of the Traveller universe, GURPS Traveller.

This is a decade old fan made video promoting

the Traveller RPG. It uses the Pirates of 

the Caribbean theme to great effect.

I've never had the chance to play classic Traveller, but I've designed a campaign for the Mongoose Publishing version of Traveller, and have been waiting for some free time to run a campaign with the mini-Reds. Traveller is one of those RPGs that has a reputation, mainly because the character creation process involved your character having a "career" prior to joining your adventures. And yes, Classic Traveller had the possibility that your character would die during the career phase. (Honest!) Later versions of Traveller have done away with that aspect of character creation, but the Mongoose version does retain the possibility that your character suffers an injury that generates minuses on your character sheet.

As for GDW, it was a very influential wargame publisher and competitor to Avalon Hill and SPI in the late 70s and 80s. I've played a game or two of GDW's arguably most well known title, A House Divided*, and it is a good introduction into the overall strategies that went into the ACW. It is by no means a very deep or "authentic" game --you'll likely want to look at GMT Games' For The People for that-- but it is a fun game that can still be found today.

This is the version I'm most familiar with.
From Rick Byrens, via boardgamegeek.com.

Loren was active on the Steve Jackson Games' forums, where I conversed with him once or twice. He always seemed like a nice guy who simply loved making games.

He'll be missed.





*It's a grand strategy game of the American Civil War, now published by Mayfair Games.