January 2017 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tale of Dice Games

January 31, 2017 by Belghast

It is bizarre to me how I went into Pax South thinking it would be largely about the Nintendo Switch for me… and it wound up becoming almost entirely about Tabletop gaming. More so it was the tale of dice games… and my experiences trying three different ones. There was King of Tokyo that I had never actually played, and while I found it enjoyable it wasn’t exactly the sort of game I was going to rush right out into the store and purchase. Then there was Dragon Dice… which sounded familiar at the time as a game that TSR once published… and it turns out that in fact it is the same game just self published by the creator now. The problem is that I looked in the general direction of the booth and got sucked in by an extremely motivated salesperson in the form of what I can only guess was the thirteen year old daughter of the creator. I sat down to play… and got Ashgar roped into doing the same. So we played and tried our best to wriggle out of the booth as soon and as politely as possible. It was bad… and not just in a general sense of not fun… but bad in a sense of whoever attacked first essentially put the other player on the ropes for the rest of the game and since attack and defense is out of the same dice roll… it made it extremely hard to ever recover. As a result we avoided anything else that was dice related like the plague… that is until while waiting in the hour and a half long Dauntless line I ended up getting into a random conversation with the folks I was standing shoulder to shoulder with as is the way of PAX. We started talking about our favorite games of the show so far, and one of these other folks mentioned Dice Throne. So before the night was up we wound up making our way over to the Dice Throne booth in the PAX Rising area, where unfortunately no one was giving demos at that moment. However they mentioned that in the tabletop area there was a completely different set up where folks had been playing nonstop. Little did I know that essentially this would be the last thing I played during my time at PAX and would eat up my last few hours.

I am of course swiping images left and right from the Dice Throne twitter and Kickstarter for the purpose of this post. The game itself is a weird mix of dice battling, action RPG and Magic the Gathering starter deck duels. Each player chooses a character to play from the current list of Barbarian, Moon Elf, Pyromancer and Shadow Thief… with Paladin and Monk playable at the show but ultimately stretch goals in the kickstarter. Each character comes with a unique play mat, card deck, five dice, and a sheet that describes their status effects that they can give to opponents and explains the chance of rolling a given symbol on the dice. What made the game addictive to me was the aspect that as you move through the session you can play cards on top of your playmat and upgrade your base abilities. Sometimes this is just a matter of making the abilities more efficient, or having a lower number of dice needed to trigger the effect. In the case of the game where I played the Shadow Thief… some of the cards actually served as two completely different abilities that you could then choose from. I personally only have experience with the Barbarian and Shadow Thief, but I think Ashgar and Paragon wound up playing Shadow Thief vs Paladin… in which I heard that the Paladin is completely brutal.

Regardless of the specific configuration the game is ultimately a game about duels… which admittedly is the part that makes me the most excited. I love tabletop games… but I don’t exactly have a wide circle of people that I can play them with locally. I mean I could branch out and just show up at a game shop and look for people to play… but that isn’t really my way. I am way too introverted to ever make that work. So instead I have limited opportunities usually one friend at a time to play things. Dice Throne is absolutely perfect for this situation because it creates a completely meaningful experience with only two players. In theory this game also works with any multiple of two, in that players can set up 2 vs 2 or 3 vs 3 scenarios and some of the cards would play perfectly into that situation. The reason Magic the Gathering comes into play as a reference for this game is that it is set up in a number of phases: Upkeep, Income and Draw, Main Phase 1, Offensive Roll Phase, Defensive Roll Phase, Main Phase 2, Discard Phase.

Players start out with 50 Health, 1 combat point or CP and 4 cards from their deck with the ultimate goal of reducing the other player down to 0 Health to win the match. Each round the players gain 1 CP during the income phase and draw one card, with the CP being spent to play the various cards they have in their hand. Each character plays a little different in that the Shadow Thief seemed to be all about hitting the 15 CP cap as soon as possible and then striking from the shadows with critical attacks that scale based on the current CP number. The Barbarian seemed to be about healing back lost health and avoiding taking damage by simply overhealing the incoming attack… all the while smashing with big attacks that can easily become unblockable. Barbarian absolutely was “my thing” but it also sounds like the super defensive Paladin might have been a good fit for me as well. Each round of attacks you roll your 5 dice and then take the symbols and numbers and try and make something with them. You are given two rounds of re-rolls as you attempt to hone in on the exact thing you need. There are also cards that shift your abilities so that you can make certain dice wild, or with “samsies” swap any dice to match any other dice. These however take the luck of the draw and the CP to play them when needed.

What I found most interesting is that essentially you are having to look at the symbols and the numbers to see what the best course of action is. All of the characters have something interesting that happens when you roll a small straight (4 numbers in sequence), and something interesting that happens when you roll a large straight (5 numbers in sequence). Then again there are other things that are super powerful that can play off of the other attacks. For example 2 swords and 2 “pow” symbols on the Barbarian gives you an attack that deals less damage… but becomes undefendable which when upgraded serves as an amazing way to finish off your opponent. The Shadow Thief allowed you to shift in and out of the shadows… allowing you to be essentially untargetable until you exit on the next round. Attacking from the shadows allowed you to roll an extra dice as you exited to deal a little bonus damage. Every hero has an ultimate attack that is essentially triggered by rolling five 6s, but in truth I found these pretty freaking hard to make work unless I had a wild card or two available in my hand. There is a lot more nuance that I feel like I cannot adequately cover after literally having only played two games. Suffice to say there is a lot of meat on these bones, and I am sure more than enough to start to develop even a bit of a meta game among players. I was not well suited for the Shadow Thief because the whole poke from the shadows thing is not really my deal. That said I know players that would absolutely excel at that game play style since essentially the Barbarian and the Shadow Thief are playing two completely different games. From what I understand each of the characters plays this way essentially with the Moon Elf focusing on dealing damage while defending for example.

The long and short of this is that as soon as I got back home on Sunday night I went out to the Kickstarter and backed the game. I was completely and thoroughly sold. As of this morning even though the page has not updated they have already hit the Paladin stretch goal so it will be included in the Champion version of the game. Next up is an upgrade to Linen Cards at $35k, Vacuum formed tray at $40k, Thicker Box at $45k and finally the inclusion of the Monk Hero at $65k. With 24 days to go they are already sitting at 200% of the original goal, and I have to think that Pax South is going to give them a lot of good exposure going forward. There was a pair of guys who had literally spent about twelve hours over the weekend playing the game… and wound up serving as surrogate coaches when we had so many people wanting to play the game in the Tabletop area. The rules are pretty simple and easy to pick up, and the game play while actually taking awhile to resolve itself… feels like it moves forward instead of stalling out. I have to say for something in prototype form… the game felt really damned polished. The cards and artwork all felt great… with the only complaint being sticker dice. However the first stretch goal was to upgrade to engraved dice so that will in theory no longer be a thing. I went with the $39 Champion edition which seems to be the point that the majority of backers are entering at, which in theory should give you access to all six characters and slightly nicer multi-tone dice. The base game will include four characters: Shadow Thief, Barbarian, Moon Elf and Pyromancer which sits at $29… so I felt that extra $10 was more than warranted even for the shot at two more characters. Dice Throne was definitely my tabletop game of the show… but in truth I think probably it was my game of the show as a whole. I highly suggest if you have the opportunity to check this out at any conventions between now and the projected November release date that you grab hold of it with both hands.

Kickstarter Link

Post Pax

January 30, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I finally got back to the real world after a detour into Paxville. What I mean by that is that Thursday through Sunday I was hanging out in San Antonio for Pax South. This marked the third year of attending for myself and the third year of the South branch of Pax as a whole. The only problem with this whole situation is that in my haste to pack I forgot to grab my laptop. This mean I was largely disconnected from the world during the entire show. I had every intent of getting up Friday morning and knocking out a blog post… and while I could have commandeered my wife’s laptop… I simply opted to roll with the whole disconnected thing. Sure I had my phone but the first rule of Pax is that internet rarely works at all from the vicinity of the convention. The first day we were coordinating over a slack channel, but that died during the evening… and from there we had to fall back on text messages that while slow eventually did arrive at their intended target.

I failed miserably at the whole meeting up with folks aspect this year… that is if you were not already in the group of people that I had the ability to text message. I know that MidahHiker was there, but it is sheer madness trying to find anyone in the crowd. I also know WallSavvy from Tequila Mockingbird my Destiny Clan was around… but he spent most of his time hanging out at the Overwatch tournament which was this giant ball of humanity… that ended up so packed that they made folks give up their seating to cram more people into the giant mosh pit that was the audience. I spent most of my time roaming around with Ashgar and Paragon… with occasional visits from Rae when she wasn’t off doing stuff with her brother or watching the Overwatch tourney herself. I also managed to connect with the Cosplay duo of Maovis and Exale… who brought his wife and super chill baby to meet me while I was standing in the hour and a half long line for Dauntless.

Speaking of lines… lets talk about what I didn’t get to play. The Nintendo Switch was the announcement that probably sold more tickets to Pax South than just about anything. However quite literally… if you were standing in line to play Zelda Breath of the Wild… then that was probably just about all you were going to do that day. When I first got to the convention I managed to enter in a trajectory that took me past the Nintendo Booth and it was this swirling quagmire of humanity that I got stuck in for about fifteen minutes until I could chart a course through it. Even on Friday the line reached out of the booth, around the corner and down two other booths lengths along a sheltered corner of the exhibition floor. I mocked up an image from the convention floor layout to attempt to show the line… it was double length next to the Nintendo Booth and then stretched along the entire length of the Nexon booth and was capped somewhere around the Rooster Teeth booth. There was supposedly a shorter line for Mario Kart and ARMS but I did not even attempt it… because time slowed to a standstill anytime you were near the Nintendo area. There were simply too many people for me to handle.

The show as a whole was significantly larger than the previous two years, with it moving into an entirely brand new area of the convention center. The only negative there is that I could no longer get up above the floor and take cool aerial shots. The weirdest part about this PAX experience is that the show as a whole consumes three floors of the convention center, with a fourth floor down at riverwalk level taken up usually by press appointment suites. I never actually left the main floor, because there was more than enough there for me to do both Friday and Saturday. I also spent a significant more time playing in the tabletop area this year than I had in past years. The other new thing that happened this year is that I gave up on parking and took Lyft into the convention both days. This made the whole experience so much more enjoyable because instead of getting up super early and trying to fight traffic in order to get one of the limited parking spots downtown… I chilled out in the hotel, ate a peaceful breakfast, and then hailed a rideshare. There was never a point where I waited more than five minutes, and the ride in itself was no more than 10 minutes…. so within 15 minutes I could be on the show floor pretty reliably. Three of the four trips were amazing… the final trip however the guy got lost a few times and wound up with a much bigger bill than I should have. I talked to Lyft however and they almost instantly sent me a refund for part of the cost, which was pretty damned cool. I am absolutely going this route in the future because it gives me the best of both worlds… easy access to the convention but a hotel with access to the various shopping areas for my wife to hang out in.

As far as the hotel goes… these images do not do it justice. I am used to having a bedroom of sorts with a sitting room attached, but largely in one big open floorplan. Instead of that we had literally three separate rooms. The living room was way deeper than the photo shows and had recliner, sofa with pull out bed, television, extra dressers, and a relatively comfy desk with a ton of plugins available from the top. The “kitchen” area was a full wet bar with cabinets below, sink, and microwave with a fully enclosed roomy bathroom to the left side of it. The bedroom had your normal fare but what I noticed is… my wife could be listening to the television in the livingroom area and I could be watching something completely different without any bleedover. They served a huge breakfast each morning where I largely chose sausage, eggs, breakfast potatos with country gravy. My wife however had a wider mix of things. They also served dinner each night so one night they had Taco fixings, and another night they apparently had something pasta oriented but I was not around for that one. All in all it was a great trip… and the icing on the cake is that we realized the massive Half Priced Books Dallas flagship store is less than a block off the route that we take home making it super easy to stop in and hit that during the trip. Over the next few days I plan on talking about individual games I played so I reserved today mostly as a sort of overview post.

Odd Remembrances

January 26, 2017 by Belghast

I am taking a break from packing and cleaning to knock out a blog post while eating dinner. I will of course embargo this so that it seems like I actually released it in the morning. However we all know what is happening… that I am making my way to Pax South. I have a whole bunch of anxiety about going to the convention once again, but in the grand scheme of things I think this will be a really good year. For the last couple years there has been the stress of having to make press appointments and attempt to be the surrogate of a publication at the convention. This time around I represent no one but myself… and of course the blog and podcast. I will also once again have my good friend Ashgar to roam around with, which should be awesome as well. I’ve made a pact to just go do things… rather than spend the entire convention walking around in circles looking for something to do like we managed to do last year. Tomorrow will of course be spent driving, and I am hoping I can remember to pack everything that needs to be packed. I made myself a Trello board in a vague attempt to keep track of things… and I already failed to get away from work with something so I am off to a grand start.

This is going to be a bit of an odd post, but earlier on twitter I happened to read a tweet from Matticus, to which a friend replied that he was “THEE Matticus”. Instantly the above clip went through my head, and it is something that I have found myself mimicking throughout the years. The problem being… no one has a damned clue what I am referencing. This is the point where I realize that the movies that were seemingly important to me growing up include some oddities. There is of course Star Wars and Indiana Jones… but also a lot of movies that have not really stood up to the test of time. Why they are special to me… is for an equally odd reason. I grew up without cable television, in fact the first time I had cable was in 1996 when I moved away from home and got an apartment at college. While I lived on the outskirts of my town… the cable refused to run down my driveway because it would have taken them just outside of the city limits. As a result I largely existed with over the air television… often watching excessive amounts of UHF stations because they seemed to have far more interesting broadcasting than the major networks. The other salvation however was the VHS tape… of which I had plenty both legitimate and with crudely scrawled labels on their spines.

One of my dads work buddies took it upon himself to help my predicament and it became a regular thing for us to send home a package of blank tapes, and at some point in the future receive a bundle of some of the most random movies. These all consisted of whatever happened to be currently playing on HBO during the block of time when he was recording something, and as such there are weird streaks of movies that all came out in the same one or two year period that stick out in my mind. The first of these is of course Romancing the Stone… which while an action flick probably would not have even made it on my radar were it not for the fact that it was one of the few action films we had, prior to the local video store closing the liquidating all of their movies. Of note this is the point where I picked up Alien, Aliens, and Predator. The truth is while I remember the plot well… the only line that sticks out of the whole movie is the “zee joan wilder?”, and even then largely because my cousin and I thought it was hilarious to quote it.

Another one of these movies that holds a special place in my heart is My Science Project, which is admittedly a pretty forgettable 80s science fiction film. It is this weird mix of a bunch of themes at the time crudely cemented together with a bad time travel plot line. In truth it was the time travel aspect that I liked the most, and even to this day I have an silly enjoyment of anything Fisher Stevens is in. Once again… this is not even a movie I probably would have rented but the fact that it mysteriously showed up on one of these recorded tapes meant that I watched it way more often than I probably should have. Rental movies were sort of a special occasion type thing, at least until I got into the middle school era. The first video rental place we had in town had a sort of shopping club buy in aspect to it, and the rentals were like $5 a piece… which was madness for 1984. I think the membership cost something silly like $100… but we had one even though we didn’t use it that often. I had a bad habit of renting the same movies over and over… like Ultraforce… which I was simply enamored with because of the flying motorcycle scene. The 80s really were a strange time.

Heavy Crowns

January 25, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve admittedly been pretty sporadic in my gameplay of Final Fantasy XIV since just shortly after the launch of Heavensward. For whatever reason the story this time never quite clicked in the same way that it did during A Realm Reborn. Additionally Alex never felt nearly as interesting as Coil… so it just felt like I was grasping at things to tie me to the game but struggling to find them. More than all of these I think the two dungeons per cycle business hurt the most, because it turned something that I used to love… Expert Roulette into a grind because there was always the dungeon you enjoyed… and the dungeon you disliked in every patch cycle. All of this said I have been poking my head in periodically and was at least aware of the mentor program. The idea being that Square would create a way to identify players who know lots about the game… which was an interesting theory. In practice it largely just means you have a Tank, DPS and Healer at the level cap. Also as I found out last night it apparently makes you feel like you need to run around barking orders and throwing shade on how bad you feel the rest of the party was doing. Even though I was attuned for it… I never actually ran the second of the 25 player raids called the Weeping City of Mhach. Collectively folks just call it the “Wiping City” and for good reason… because we died an awful lot but given that it was the first time myself or Grace had been in there… I thought we did largely okay.

The funniest part of the night was the Forgall fight… which involves becoming zombie but not going full zombie and avoiding some things while absolutely standing in others. In short it is the traditional insane dungeon fight that simply requires constant execution… and has mechanics that will straight wipe entire parties. It is a rarity that there are fights where you need to use the healer level three limit break… but during the course of this fight we used it at least twice… and there might have been a third time I didn’t realize. We were at a point where we had no tank and maybe three people total still up, and a bunch of us assumed we were wiping it out and running back. We were wrong… as the “Mentor” continued barking orders and telling people to rez this person or that person… during a contorted fight that felt like it took 20 minutes to finally beat. The truth is I had no clue what I was doing, but I finally got finished off by an actual fight mechanic as one of the attacks takes you to 1 hit point… and requires chain healing to keep the tank from instantly dying afterwards. We had maybe a single healer up at the time and I fell down hard… but just in time for another tank to get rezzed and pick it up. I feel like this was the sort of fight where we needed to play Yakety Sax … but slowed down to the point where it almost sounds like a funeral dirge.

The fight that I got the most enjoyment from however had to be Ozma… an encounter that I had heard about for awhile now. Largely I had heard about it being the group killer, in that it required a lot of moving parts that rarely got coordinated properly among the alliances. Thankfully I was on voice chat with my Free Company and they were able to give me enough of a heads up about what I should be doing. It also helps that early into the fight we lose the entire B alliance, giving me a run seeing the mechanics the first time and then allowing me to take that experience into the second smoother attempt. All in all we nailed it pretty well on the second go, and for the most part by the end of the encounter I learned everything that I needed to do to appropriately tank the fight. The reason we were running Wiping City however was to get me some gear… and unfortunately not a single tanky piece dropped. However I do feel confident enough to probably solo queue tank for the place and start soaking up more gear that way. The risk of playing FFXIV irregularly is that the game moves on without you… and I hit yet another wall with the latest patch. I was sitting at 220 from my last attempt to catch up… and this time around the first dungeon requires 230. There are of course a lot of more grindy ways to catch me up… but we were trying to take as many short cuts as possible.

Before disappearing and flaking out last time I had managed to put in some progress on the 235 weapon from Palace of the Dead and as I talked about yesterday our little run pushed me pretty far… but not quite over the tipping point. So last night once finishing the Wiping City, we broke up into a smaller group and did some Palace of the Dead and over the course of a few runs managed to get me to 39 weapon 32 armor. During all of the stuff I managed to accumulate enough Lore tombstones to upgrade my earrings to 230, and at some point during the evening Tam hooked me up with a set of 250 legs to replace my then lowest slot. I had enough cash accumulated to manage picking up the 250 ring as well since my next lowest slot was that. All together those four pieces of gear pushed me up to exactly 230 item level, and thus makes me viable for a lot more content including the dungeon that is blocking my quest progress. Unfortunately however I have had this patch cycle spoiled for me, because before I remembered to turn off player titles… I actually happened to be running Deep Dungeon with someone that was showing their new title off. Now I am not sure exactly how it is going to go down… but I know something is going to go down. Ultimately that is not necessarily going to ruin the impact, just a bit of a bummer to have it spoiled in a way that really should not have even been a thing. While I wouldn’t necessarily count myself as “caught up”, I am at least in a much better place than I was. I need to do a lot more palace of the dead so that I can pick up the next weapon… but that one requires 60 weapon/armor which is still a very very long ways away. My only revision of that content would be to make the end of sequence mini-boss drop one of whatever your lowest rank happens to be armor or weapon. Also of note… you can see that thanks to the new weapon I did some glamouring and am once more the Bunny Samurai.