RPG

Bad At Anniversaries

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Good Morning Folks. I am bad at realizing what time of the year it is… and that my blog and podcast anniversaries are approaching. As a result, last Friday, aka April 17th, was the 17th anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut. The left side of the above image is one of the earliest revisions of the site as saved by the Wayback Machine. Then, of course, on the right side, you have what the site looks like now. I’ve not made any really significant revisions to the look and feel of the site in a very long time, other than to shim in more artwork from Ammo as I commission something else. There was a point where I cared about readership, but honestly, at this point, I view this blog as a sort of outsider art project. You either care about me and what I have to say, or you don’t, and I can’t be much bothered to tailor my writing to follow whatever trends might be happening. Many of you have been with me through the death of animals, the loss of my spouse of thirty years, and now, as I am dealing with cancer. I’ve tried to be as honest as I can be with my thoughts and feelings as I went through all of it. Without really intending to, I somehow built a community of folks who care about me, and I appreciate that so much when things get low.

I also completely forgot to talk about the Anniversary of AggroCha,t the podcast that I started in 2014. This past weekend, we recorded episode 656, and started this nonsense back on April 13th of 2014. Listening to the early episodes makes me cringe super hard, but I think it is more about how different human beings many of us were back then. A lot of stuff had not happened that shook the core of both our gaming roots and, honestly, American civilization, and it shows. Folks have come and gone from the roster, but the original core of Me, Ash, and Kodra has remained pretty rock solid through all of it. It’s only gotten better as we added everyone that represents our current core of Ace, Ammo, Ashgar, Kodra, Tam, and Thalen. At this point, it is way more about hanging out together at a fixed time and talking about discussions that we don’t necessarily make time for at other moments than anything else. For both the blog and the podcast, they are not money-making ventures, nor have I ever wanted them to be. However, I am still pretty proud of us sticking with this for as long as we have.

In gaming terms this weekend, I wrapped up my 36th challenge out of 40 and think that I am going to wind down Path of Exile for the moment. Mirage League was a lot of fun, but I have more or less accomplished everything that I care to accomplish. At this point, I would only be moving forward with the acquisition of currency for the sake of acquiring currency. We should be getting news on the Path of Exile II league pretty soon, and next Tuesday is the drop for the Diablo IV Lord of Hatred expansion. While I have not fallen in love with Diablo IV in the same way as I did Diablo III, it should still be fun to poke around and play with the new Warlock class a bit. I think I have also reached a point where I have wound down my interest in Last Epoch as well. Those seasons are great for a week or two, but I quickly run out of things that I actually care to do, at least much faster than I do in a Path of Exile league. All of the ARPGs are in a pretty great state, and they all become somewhat interchangible for my joy at any given moment.

On a complete whim, over the weekend, I picked up Crimson Desert and started playing that. I am honestly not sure what I think of this game yet. Combat is mostly pretty fun, but movement and the pace of the game in general are a bit on the slow end. The world is gorgeous, and there is a lot of interesting stuff going on. I was not sure what sort of game to really consider this, but after playing, I think it is more akin to something like Dragon’s Dogma. If I had my druthers, it would perform exactly like The Witcher 3, but I do not get what I want most of the time. I am not entirely certain how much I am going to play it, because I have already had moments where the slow pace was a bit too plodding for me. I was also immediately annoyed when Steam popped up the “you should play this with a controller” message, but the game itself performs perfectly fine with a mouse and keyboard. There is a rumor that we are just about to get another expansion for The Witcher 3, and if that happens, it means I am going to drop whatever I am doing and play that.

I have a backlog of a lot of recent titles that I really need to get around to playing. Greedfall: The Dying World moved out of early access to its final release version in March, and as a result, I am now interested in playing that. Greedfall was a deeply imperfect game, but it was doing a lot of things that I really liked. I am also somewhat interested in diving into Star Wars Outlaws and the next part of the Final Fantasy VII reimaginging trilogy. There is also Death Stranding 2, which might honestly be the right sort of game for the weird time that I am going through. I played the first one at the height of COVID isolation, and as a result, it felt deeply poignant. Since I am similarly greatly limiting my exposure to other human beings due to the chemotherapy wrecking my immune system, it might produce similar results. I have more games than I can ever play. If I am being perfectly honest, I just have to figure out something that lands right and brings me joy since I have wound down my old reliable partner in Path of Exile.

Anyways… I have been writing this post for several hours now. I need getting distracted by either work or chemo brain, and figure I should wrap things up. What are you playing right now that is bringing you joy? Drop me a line and let me know.

On Strange Wings

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Good Morning Folks! This week you are getting a bit of a bonus post, because it is extremely rare that I talk about anything on Saturdays. Generally speaking I blog Monday through Friday and then only by happenstance on Sundays because that is when I post the new episode of AggroChat. Today is a bit of a unique situation because last night we had our semi-monthly pen and paper play group. We are playing an Indie RPG system called Public Access, which is effectively an urban horror/found footage type gameplay experience. If you are a junkie for SCPs, Cryptids, or even The Secret World MMORPG then this might be a system for you. What sets it apart from the traditional D&D style “Roll-play” systems is that most of the game is storytelling. We the players paint the scenes by adding in little details, and we the players narrated both our successes and failures… which allows for some interesting situations like having “do-overs”. For example my character has an ability called “Come With Me If You Want to Live” where if I fail a roll and am in Grave harm…. I can narrate my way out of the situation and turn a failure into explaining how I narrowly escaped certain death and also saved my entire party at the same time.

Trigger Warning, I played around with the Adobe Photoshop Generative filters a bit during this post so you will see some of my homegrown AI slop as a result.

This is a session being run by “The Librarian” and I am very new to this group of people, but have seemingly blended with the group pretty quickly. Two of us are entirely new, two are regulars from other RP outings… and collectively we have created this internet age Scooby Doo Gang in the process. I am playing a burned out punk that used to be a little skater kid and now has a band… but the band never quite took off. The thing we have in common is that we all once lived in the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico and all were latchkey kids during the 80s and 90s. There is a cable access channel that no on in the town seems to remember, but we all do… and met up on a message board devoted to it. Over the summer we all agreed to meet up and investigate the town from a rental house, and as a result a Corporate Lawyer type, a Professional Athlete, a Burned Out Punk, and a Cryptid/Conspiracy Theorist all combined powers to try and solve the deep mysteries in this town.

My character shocking to no one, drives a white panel van… which has become the focus of some of the adventures so far. One of the really interesting things about this setting is that splitting the party is not a bad thing. In fact it allows for some really interesting mechanics. Last night for example we had three different scenes taking place at the same time, and while there may only be one set of characters active at a time… it does not mean that the rest of the players out out of the action. There is this phase called “setting the scene” where each player sort of “yes ands” their way through adding details to flesh out the uncanny nature of a lot of the vistas that we come across. For example we were presented with a wood lot, and were asked to explain what makes it look more evil than it might be. The detail I threw in is that the wind had blown through the lot, overturning the root system of the trees and making it both hard to move across it and at the same time giving the appearance of intestinal shapes snaking around the ground. Each player adds a little flavor to the world so we are all effectively building the lore, because in truth there are zero right or wrong answers… and the story is not written, only a set of guidelines for the person running the adventure to follow.

The Athlete and I have sort of developed this weird buddy cop movie thing that we are doing, and we have tag teamed investigating the desert scene. Essentailly there are rumors of these creatures coming at night and carrying people and livestock away, and we are trying to investigate what is happening. I narrated that I remembered this little old lady at the crossroads selling tamales out of an igloo cooler, and wanting to go out there and check out if she was still selling them. When we got out there we instead were introduced to her relative who now has a proper food truck, and introduced us to a series of clues… one of which required us to come back the next day. We also found a key to a hotel room, and in the room was an igloo cooler with a huge bag of blood marked with the Zodiac Taurus symbol on it. That is the Zodiac sign of my character the Burned out Punk. Last night… was our second campaign in this setting so we returned to visit the food truck again and were treated to a surreal wedding photo album, which unlocked additional clues about the scene. However while looking at the photo album, time passed faster than it should have… which required us to make a decision. Shelter someone for the night at the crossroads… either in a sketchy museum, the hotel room we discovered previously… or hop in the van and make a break for town.

The Athelete and I opted to make a break back for town… which created our Night Move for the evening. There are Day Moves which have relatively minor consequences… but Night Moves can end up in the permanent loss of characters. Since I had an escape card in the form of my “Come With Me If You Want To Live” ability… I decided to make the roll which was my Composure of 1 + 2D6. One of the interesting things about this system is that it is the players that determine what MIGHT happen if they fail the roll. So I talked about envisioning scenes in Vampire movies where parties are trying to get away and they swoop down on the roof of the van, trying to rip into it. “The Librarian” said that it was worse than that… they would not only attack the Van, but if I failed they would wreck it forcing us to be stranded out their with them. In my head I was preparing a way to narrate our narrow escape, preferably without losing my beloved panel van, but rolled an 8 which modified by my Composure became a 9, which was enough to get us safely back to town. However the entire time we were driving we were being chased by an ever growing flock of shadows… and just before reaching town some of them painted a Taurus symbol… aka the symbol of my character on the roof of the van in blood.

So what is really interesting about the whole concept of solving these mysteries… is that you collect clues and the clues serve as bonuses to your rolls. However there is no fixed mystery to solve, no correct answer that you have to arrive at. Instead the players decided that 1) they are going to attempt to solve a mystery and then 2) the Guide leaves the room and the players brainstorm a story that could match all of the clues that they have gotten, each clue again giving you a slightly better chance at making the roll. The brainstorming session was great, and the story that we arrived at was that the Food Truck owners family was part of a cult, but we were not sure if they were willing participants or being mind controlled by something darker. The Deep Lake Devils, aka the shadows that were following us are the harbingers of something worse, and the cult collects the blood of each zodiac sign as part of a sacrifice designed to close certain locks or enchantments and keep something far worse from coming into our world. The scene at the hotel room was us interrupting one of those murders and we ended up getting the bag of blood… which they need to replace and my character just happens to be the correct Zodiac Sign. So we solved the first part of the mystery, that states that the Deep Lake Devils are not of terrestrial origin, but now we have to figure out how to either banish them or cut our own bargain with them in future play sessions.

If you are curious, there are a lot of actual plays posted on YouTube for this game setting. I purposefully have not watched any of them, because I really want this to be a fresh expeirence for me. It has been a very long time since I have done anything pen and paper realted, but this reminds me a bit to our high school days playing the storyteller/white wolf system and the way in which we ran it. We were playing with a bunch of folks who were not necessarily seasononed mechanical TTRPG players, so we largely ran it as a story that we were all weaving together. I love the freeform nature of Public Access and how it is a narrative expeirence that we are all partaking in, instead of something that we are having done to us. I also really love this group of folks that I am playing with, and look forward to doing other games and other systems with them in the future. We are all technically local but to make it easier on the constraits of lives and families and such, we are playing over Discord. At some point thought I think we should all get together for dinner or something.

Anyways. It was a really fun night, and I find myself looking forward to these semi-monthly sessions quite a bit. Have you played Public Access? Have you played any systems like this that are way more storytelling driven? Drop me a line below.

Atomfall, Hero Siege, and SurfBrand

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend I was all over the place when it came to gaming. First up I finished up leveling to 100, which completed the Gear Grinding Goals achievement. Hitting level 100 on a character is a weird place because you suddenly no longer care about taking deaths. Up until this point even when attempting to progress, there was always a subtle tension there in the background because losing experience feels bad in your late 90s. Getting to level 95 is trivial, and honestly it does not feel too terribly bad until level 98. However that level 98-100 stretch is pure tedium with you either needing a relatively immortal build, or a lot of luck to keep from taking a stray death. Weirdly Delve ends up being one of the safer players to level because there is a sweet spot in the 150-200 depth where the incoming damage is not too bad, but the experience gained is pretty stable. Dipping back into maps to fill back up your sulphite however… that is where the danger arrives.

I also completed the achievement for crafting using one of every Settlers of Kalguur rune allowing me to knock out 34 of 40 and matching what I got to last league. This means I have another tall totem pole in my hideout to go along with all of my stubby ones. Essentially I have been earning a Totem every league since Sanctum. I could probably push forward with trying to knock out 40 of 40… but I just have not had that level of drive. It also involves doing a lot of bossing content that I do not necessarily enjoy. I could in theory start running my mappers more often and if they get abducted there might be a chance of knocking out one of those objectives and getting achievement 35 for the league. I am pretty happy with where I am, and honestly… I was happy with 32 of 40 until I came back for the Phrecia event and thrived in it.

With no fear of death I did a few t17 maps, and a few other sundry things that I had been avoiding due to the danger of taking an experience loss. However I feel like I am probably “done” with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. Sure there are a lot of things I could tweak on it… and swap out various gear pieces for even better versions. However I feel like I am pretty happy with where I got and don’t have ton of drive to push it much further. That is the irony with dinging level 100… is that I also lose a lot of my drive to keep going. I am not enough of an “Economy Andy” to really appreciate trading for trades sake. For me it has always a means to an end, that I want to trade items to get currency to be able to do more things. However once I lose the push of levels… I just sort of lose my drive to keep playing that character.

Instead I spent a chunk of my weekend playing other games. On Saturday I dove into Atomfall, which is a Bethesda game by a company other than Bethesda. We saw this with Avowed where they created a perfectly cromulent Elder Scrolls game set in a different universe. However that made a lot of since given that it was from Obsidian, a company with a long history of working with Bethesda on games like Fallout New Vegas. Atomfall however comes from Rebellion games, the folks behind the Zombie Army and Sniper Elite series… and they do a shockingly good job of replicating the feel of a Fallout game. The setup is considerably different… instead of a Nuclear war decimating the planet, you are inside an exclusion zone where things are going haywire. However the trappings are much the same… roaming gangs of very British outlaws and spore infected Ghoul like Ferals both fill the roles of the normal antagonists of a Fallout title.

There are a lot of things that work differently. For example it is not nearly as “If you can see it, you can go there” as the Bethesda titles… but I also don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing. Everything that exists that you can travel to… exists for a reason, and as a result there are way fewer barren stretches with no reason for existing. There are similar crafting systems, but items break down into raw resources as soon as you loot them, rather than having to dump through the hoops of needing to salvage them as a separate step. Effectively… both Avowed and now Atomfall feel like Bethesda games that have been evolved past some of the busywork that some systems designer thought was really cool. The spirit of the game exists and it is close enough for me to effectively lump them into the broader Bethesda-like genre.

Sunday on a totally different whim I started playing Hero Siege, which feels very much like a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 more than anything else. It is doing some of the same things that Chronicon does, but feels much more polished. I started playing a Viking and have gone all in on this big earthquake smash thingy. So far it seems to be doing a good job of stunning enemies and also whitting down large groups because with a twohander I can hit everything at once. Large packs of purely ranged mobs though seem to be the bane of my existence, and as a result I have had to learn to dance around a bit in order to deal with them. I want to try this with a controller, because it seems like it would be the ideal game for SteamDeck. All in all though I am pretty pleased with what I have played of it.

However by the time Sunday evening rolled around… my brain worms had convinced me that rolling a brand new character in the Legacy of Phrecia event was a good idea. There is something about the fleeting nature of this event and having entirely new acendancy classes that we may never see again. As such I decided to roll a Shadow which I then turned into a Surfcaster and am going all in on Storm Brand of Indecision. For now I am largely patterning my build off this character that is sitting at level 99. Given that all of the brand nodes are nowhere near the Shadow starting position… most of my talents have just travelled across the tree to unlock the meat of what I needed. Now that I have all of those brand nodes and a few elemental nodes… I am now going back and fleshing out the build with what I pathed through previously. I have a six link Shavronne’s Wrapping sitting in my bank wanting on my 60s when I can actually equip it. The build I am loosely following uses Melding of the Flesh to achieve 90% elemental resistance to all, which is something I have never played with before and am interested in seeing it work.

Avowed Midpoint Thoughts

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Good Morning Folks! Last week I dipped my toes into Avowed, the new Elder-Scrolls-Like game from Obsidian… the studio that brought you Fallout New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, The Outer Worlds… and probably my favorite of the batch Tyranny which is criminally underrated. I was going to always play this game. Obsidian is a company known for some really big ideas but also quite a bit of jank that comes along with that. So far Avowed feels like a graduation to releasing a polished product on day one, and I think a lot of that comes from the fact that this game has a fairly limited scope. Essentially it is Elder Scrolls without all of the simulationalist stuff that sometimes gets in the way of playing the game.

It isn’t going to break any boundaries, but instead provides a competent semi-open-world adventure where you explore the setting of the Pillars of Eternity universe in a very familiar Bethesda-like package. The thing is however it sands off the rough edges and provides something a bit more straight forward and to the point. You can send gear to your camp from your inventory at any time as well as being able to break down items for resources in the field. There is an encumbrance system, but the only things that have any weight are your chest armor and your weapons… both of which you can manage pretty easily by the salvage and send to camp systems. Even when you are fully encumbered… you can still fast travel to the nearest camp or way point. Essentially Avowed comes out of the box configured in the manner that I spent hours modding Bethesda games to behave like.

If something exists and is lootable in the world… it is something that is worth looting. There are no cabinets full of empty bottles… that really serve no purpose rather than to potentially get a single coin from lugging them to a vendor. Vendors also do not have limited gold reserves so you do not have to play the game of selling to every vendor in a vicinity trying to empty your pack. Lockpicks exist, but they are simply a resource that is consumed and do not involve dealing with a fiddly mini-game… some of which are are just badly designed. My only real complaint is that lockpicks are rare enough that you will want to probably see if any vendors have them… because while they are super cheap… the bigger boxes consume three at a time to open.

Combat is pretty much what you would expect from an Elder Scrolls game, but I think it feels a bit more fluid and the ability upgrades a bit more enjoyable. I can charge into enemies which will break their ability to block attacks. I’m also a huge fan of when Fantasy games allow me to dual wield pistols which allow for an interesting game play of firing one hand at a time, while the other weapon is reloading. We are not going to talk about how impractical it is for you to be loading a pistol one-handed while you are firing the other pistol… but it is still extremely fun. Boss encounters are smart enough so that if you kill them while roaming the world, and you find a quest later asking you to kill that same thing… you just get to autocomplete the quest and get the rewards. Nacib for example is a spider in a dungeon near the start of the game… that later was a bounty mission allowing me to just get some fast credits when I finally found the bounty board.

I have no clue what the magic system feels like, because I am generally not a “finger wiggler” in these types of games… but I will say that when companions use those abilities it feels solid. Essentially you can let the companion AI do its own thing, or you can also specifically target a monster and pop open the action wheel and send a direct command for them to use one of their attacks. There are a number of environment puzzles in the game that involve freezing, shocking, or setting something on fire… and each of the companions can specifically fill one of these niches. There are also a number of grenades that you can carry around in your inventory allowing you to perform the same action so that you are never in a situation where you brought the wrong companion for the wrong mission.

At this point I have met three companions: Kai, Marius, and Giatta. I’ve met a fourth character that I think will be joining my band of adventurers in the next major story segment. Kai is essentially… what if Garrus was a Shark-man, because it is the same voice actor effectively doing the same sort of vocal treatment. Marius is your traditional non-trusting grump Dwarven character… that is also a wild tracker and scout voiced by the person who did Rathma in Diablo IV. Giatta is an Animancer which is sort of like a Necromancer but can also animate pretty much anything… voiced by the actor who did Ikora Rey in Destiny 2. The last companion Yatzli which I have not collected, is a wizard of some sort voiced by the Symmetra Actress from Overwatch.

One of the things that I find particularly cool is that essentially you can upgrade every weapon you find all the way to the maximum stats it can possibly have for its base item type. This means that as you start to find Unique weapons, it does not matter if you find it at the start of the game… it can be upgraded indefinitely and made useful all the way through the game. I found a flaming sword called the Last Light of Day and have now taken it up to Exceptional/Purple quality and will keep upgrading it all the way to Legendary as I find materials. Similarly unique armors often have specific stats on them that make them more useful than other pieces of gear, and you can keep upgrading those as well. Boots, Gloves, Rings, and Amulets are just stat sticks and are as useful at level 1 as they are at whatever the maximum level of the game happens to be. Essentially like I said before… a lot what I like about Avowed is it is the Bethesda model but with all of the bullshit removed from it.

At this point I am roughly half of the way through the game and have no clue what my played stats look like, because I am not playing it through Steam. This was available on Gamepass and I was able to install it through the Battle.net client, which I hope is a sign of similar functionality to come. According to the save game I am playing I am a little over 12 hours in… but save game playtime counts are somewhat squishy. This is probably going to end up being around a 30 hour game for me personally, which seems like a good size for this sort of adventure. Maybe not every game needs to be a 400 hour epic. My favorite Obsidian game is Tyranny which is maybe 8 hours for a single play-through? The world is rich and feels larger than it technically is… but that is mostly due to conscious design choices rather than just putting a bunch of empty space in the game and hoping you will be impressed by the sheer scale.

I’m off today, so pretty much my plan is to go hang out on the couch after I finish writing this post and continue my adventures in this weird world. I have to say… this is making me want to go back and play the Pillars of Eternity games so that I can have some context on a few of the elements that the characters are talking about. There is a lot of proper noun salad happening at the beginning of the game, but after awhile this lessons. There is clearly some fan service for those who do know this setting… but unfortunately I am not one of them. So far I have enjoyed the writing quite a bit, and have enjoyed hanging out with Not-Garrus who went from sexy-almost-birdman to sexy-sharkman. I think my favorite character is Giatta, but a lot of that is because she is a healer.

So far I would say that Avowed is a solid 8 out of 10 game experience for me. I think lowering the scope of the game helped it out quite a bit. There are going to be folks who consider this to be a bit basic, but I am having fun with it. Given how much has improved between this and when they released Outer Worlds, it makes me really look forward to Outer Worlds II. If they can keep knocking out games of this quality I will be exceptionally happy to keep playing them. I’ve always been a fan of Obsidian games and I think this is really the sort of thing they excel at. At least I have not seen any plot threads that sort of crash directly into a brick wall like they did in games like KOTOR II so if nothing else I think they have gotten better at controlling the scope of effort.