Home Rules

I don’t know about you, but when my friends and I game we rarely play by the rules.  That sounds like cheating, but what I really mean is that we have our own set of house rules, or we take a couple of games and merge them together.  In essence, we make our own games up when we play.

Recently I took the old rules of Starfire and merged them with some rules from Silent Death, creating a hybrid Command & Conquer stellar empire game with a fast and fluid starship combat system.

Silent Death is a game from the old Iron Crown Enterprise.  The last I heard the company went out of business and then bought by a company in the United Kingdom.  I am sure that the Silent Death game met its doom many years ago.

I combined the complexity of Silent Death, with the ease and simplistic rules of Starfire.  Task Force Games is a long defunct game company that made many early strategic games such as StarFire and Starfleet Battles.

 

 

 

Combining the two makes for a fun and quick spaceship combat system.  Using the rules in Starfire III and some additional home cooked rules, my friends and I can continue the battles in a large galactic context.

 

News – Crushing Darkness: an Augmented Reality Trading Card Game!

News – Crushing Darkness: an Augmented Reality Trading Card Game!.

Saturday Gaming

For as long as I can remember, Saturday has been game day.  Over the years we have played so many kinds of games.  For a very long time we played MMOs such as Everquest, World of Warcraft, or the late great game City of Heroes (I really miss that game).  But my friends and I have also played strategic games such as Civilization IV, Masters of Orion II, and lesser known turn based games.  In the old days, we used to all get together and play board games such as Settlers of Catan, Gladiator, Axis & Allies, or many other classic games.

Even further back in time was the era of the Role-Playing games such as my own Phantasm Adventures, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or countless other great games.

These days I usually don’t have time to have friends over, but that doesn’t stop me from gaming.  Each Saturday we try to pick a game and play it either online or through a dedicated IP.

This week was something special because I got to do a little of everything.  I started the day out playing Hearthstone.  It is a fast little card game played online that reminds me of Magic the Gathering.

I started out loving the game, then I moved into my hating mood, but now I enjoy the game.  It has a learning curve and you need to play multiple decks to build up new cards.  When I first started playing I was losing most of the time, but now I think I am winning more than losing.

After playing Hearthstone for  a while, I moved on to playing Gladiator.  It is a very old game from Avalon Hill, but it is very fun.  Its old school and turns are slow and methodical.  The game is very tactical and you never know if you are going to win or lose until the very last turn.

After playing Gladiator for several hours, and having a bite to eat and stretching my legs, I sat down to play my favorite C&C game, Civilization IV.

In this game I was playing Boudica and was doing quite well until my friend said he didn’t like his civilization and his start.  So we restarted several times over the course of the night but each time something wasn’t quite right.  The last straw that broke the camel’s back was I forgot to turn on Raging Barbarians — we like that to keep the game vibrant.  In the end we agreed to break for the day and start tomorrow.

On Sundays we generally don’t game much, except for maybe an hour or two in the very early morning.

I look forward to next Saturday.  I really want to play some new games but waiting around until I get back from a trip to buy new games.

My Gaming History

I knew I was hooked on gaming ever since my brother came home from the store with an Avalon Hill board game called Starship Troopers. I am not sure what year that would be, but I would have to think it was the late 70s. It wasn’t until high school that I came across D&D; I remember pointedly each time I bought a brand new copy of the 1st edition set of AD&D — still to this day can I remember the smell of the binding, cracking open the Dungeon Master guide. It was only a few years later that I started constantly DMing and then writing my own adventures. During those formative years we use to play a different RPG every month, trying out dozens of games — Sadly after three moves I own only a small percentage of my original core rules booklets.

In 1980 I home published a little book called Phantasm Adventures. I typed all the pages up on a typewriter and photocopied and bound them. Perhaps 100 copies of this game exists, yet only recently I had people from Canada and England asked me if they could buy a copy for their RPG collections. I own one original copy of the game — the where about of the other 99 are a mystery to me.

It was during this time that Jeff Dee (the creator of many of the original art found in the 1st and 2nd edition D&D rules, and also the writer of Villains & Vigilantes), and later Jack Herman (co-author of V&V), both moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am unsure of the reasons he moved here, but I think it was a comic-drawing gig. The funny thing is I remember asking my mother if I could go down to this guy’s house and do some gaming, and my mom, always the worrisome type said no because it was in a rather unruly side of town (for Grand Rapids). So it wasn’t during the first alignment of the planets that I met Jeff Dee and started my game design career.

But the second time when again he posted a sign at a local hobby store looking for gamers a year later, I did finally get to meet him. It was here that I was introduced to V&V (the first super hero role-playing game). If I had to put a date, It was probably around 1984. Jeff Dee was the best GM I have ever played with — his campaigns were so imaginative, the stories were intricate, and best of all the battles were engaging. I remember always wanting to go to his house and game.

During this time, I also met up with Scott Bizzar (president of Fantasy Games Unlimited) and I pitched him a number of ideas on different full length gaming system including my little brown book called Phantasm Adventures. This was before the time of true word processing or very early on. If my memory serves me in 1984 the Lisa computer came out for Apple and that was the start of what I would call personal computing — although it would be another 15 years before I owned a Mac for a brief period of time. Alas, during this “StoneAge” everything had to be typed on either a typewriter or a bit later on my archaic Commodore-64 word processor.

It was in 1984 the I wrote my first adventure module for V&V called The Devil’s Domain. The adventure centered around a demonic figure trapped in another dimension trying to escape to Earth and a group of stalwart heroes trying to stop him. To this day I still get small royalty checks from the company every year.

In 1985 I released a compendium of super villains for V&V called Most Wanted III, having the prior two Most Wanted written by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman. This was another great production value module with artwork predominately done by Jeff Dee.

In 1986 I released my third and last V&V adventure called Return to the Devil’s Domain. By this time the franchise was seeing great growth but the overall production standards having slipped with shoddy artwork and poor editing.

In 1987 through 1988 I moved to Japan for a year. It was during the early part of my stay that I visited a bookstore and bought a Japanese game magazine called Game Graphix. On the back they put their address in English, I suppose because they thought it looked fantastical — as if a game’s magazine here would put their return address in elven, I guess. I wrote to the company and within a week I was sitting in their offices talking about games. The rest of the year saw the formulations of a dozen game books — I would write them in English, then present them to the editorial staff that would translate them into Japanese. It was during this time that I wrote and published Phantasm Adventures, Bloodbath, Bloodchant, and Multiverse.

in 1990 I was nearly considered for the producers position at Interplay, the maker of games like Fallout and Bard’s Tale. I was to work on a game called Castles. I flew out there and had serious talks with the president, but in the end I did not take the position.

When I returned to the states I continued to work on RPG designs for 10 years, working with every major publisher including TSR, Steve Jackson Games, Iron Crown Enterprises, and Different World Magazines. I still banged out expansions, modules, and map sets for the Japanese.

It was between 1987 and 1997 that I wrote such works as The Castle Guide and the Equipment Guide for 2nd edition AD&D. I also wrote a huge compendium for RoleMaster under the name of Heroes & Rogues. I also took a hand at editing for Hero Games, working on several super hero adventures for Champions. the Japanese continued to buy my creations including Advanced Phantasm Adventures. You can see more about this English version here:

Phantasm Adventures

It was during this period that I was on fire on creating home-brewed game systems, just as desktop publishing was taking off. I created a dozen RPG systems all seeing a very limited print but I became a center of gaming fury in Grand Rapids. At one point, I remember, I had 12 guys in my house playing one of the games. I created such systems as TED&D (pronounced Teddy like the bear) which stood for Troy’s Enhanced Doom & Death; Realms of Ardaan; and Star Traders.

I finally got to work at a computer game company when I accepted a position at Bethesda Softworks, the maker of Skyrim among other computer games. I was to work in the offices and also collaborate on Dagger Fall. My stay at the company was short lived as I discovered that working in the industry was not as glorious as it sounded.

After returning from Bethesda, I entered the “Dark Ages” of design, not producing anything of real quality for 10 years. It was a time of placid existence, without thought of worlds beyond ours — even my gaming dried up and I became lost in the world of gaming.

In 2007 I returned with several community mods for Civilization IV, a computer game of conquest from Firaxis. Although not a programmer, I did figure out how to make large modification to the rules. To this day, I still get people from all over the world emailing about how much they enjoyed my mod.

in 2010 I was contacted by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman about writing a new module for V&V; This project is in the works. It was during this year that I was also contacted by some of the original editorial staff of Game Graphix in Japan and they sought to release a new version of Advanced Phantasm Adventures. Sadly, this project keeps lapsing because of many outside factors.

In 2011, I started another design project called Iron Age. It was built off from my game rules system called Bloodbath, but a bit more complicated. It was also backed up by historical research, hoping to put players into a relatively real world environment of history. My hopes is that playing the game will spur the players to learn more about the culture and history during the Iron Age. The development continues, but slowly.

Pathfinder Card Game

I am very excited about a new product by Paizo called the Pathfinder Card Game.  This is the same company that makes the role-playing game of the same name.  The biggest determinate of this great game is the initial cost to buy it ranging from $55 to $100 depending on where you get it.

The best way for me to show you how to play is to let an expert such as Critical Reviews go through a scenario.

Where It All Started

Very few of us can remember the event that started a life long hobby.  I have been a gamer as far back as I can remember.  It was easily the mid 70s when I started playing board games.  Rolling dice and making decisions in games quickly became my regular past time.

Sometime in the mid 70s my older brother got into playing strategy games and we moved quickly from Risk, to advance home rules Risk, to Avalon Hill case games.  The first real game I can remember playing on the kitchen table was Starship Troopers, based on Robert Heinlein’s classic novel of a war between men and space bugs.

This game was the first real set of rules that I learned.  I am unsure exactly how many times my brother and I played this game. Perhaps no more than a dozen times. I had kept the box for years but recently it just fell apart and eventually was thrown away.

I quickly moved from Starship Troopers to Squad Leader and Ogre.  Both of these other games were great learners. SL was a rich complex set of rules with tiny variances that allowed for replay.  Ogre was simple, fast, and easy.

New Board Game Geeks Video

Another fantastic show featuring how to play Jurassic Terror.

Morgaard!!

Having great fun playing my Barbarian in Diablo 3.  He just dinged 20th level and has picked up a thieving follower who uses a bow and poison arrows.  That sword you see in the picture was a recent acquisition, Ultra Rare, and part of a stash in the Spider King’s treasure trove.

Morgaard had to kick some ass to take the sword, but now uses it to slay even more evil.

If you haven’t picked up Diablo III yet, I urge you to do so in the next few days as it is on sale right now.

Return to Diablo III

Every gamer has heard of Diablo.  It has been in the lexicon of gaming for nearly twenty years.  The original Diablo came out in 1996, followed by its sequel Diablo II in 2000.  Both games generated huge amounts of buzz and millions of players spent far too much time playing the game.  How many people can recall the late Friday night games that turned into Saturday afternoons?

For such a fantastic franchise, it was astounding that it would take 12 more years for Diablo III to arrive.  So much hype had been built up in the game that it was a gigantic release in 2012.  With it came a lot of baggage that didn’t sit well with gamers:

1. Internet Authentication
2. No Modding
3. Real Money Transfer
4. Horrible class abilities
5. Stilted Game Play
6. Dreadful story

I remember playing the game when it first came out.  I was a huge fan of Diablo I and Diablo II.  I spent 15 years playing the game and running mods for them in my basement for friends.  We carved up that demon more times than the Super Bowl.  So when I got my hands on the game, I was very disappointed.  All of the six reasons above kept me from buying it.

Then for two years Blizzard kept the price near $50, which again never made me all that interested.  Time and time again, I returned to the game hoping that bug fixes and tweaks to the game would change my mind.  Up until now, that never happened.

Finally some light at the end of the tunnel occurred in March of 2014 when it was announced that the debacle known as Real Money Exchange was going to be closed and that a super patch would restructure the game to allow for better loot without having to spend money on their auction.

The real problem with the entire idea of selling imaginary items was that the system never worked. Players had to spend hundreds of hours simply wading through a million monsters to find one item that they could not use but might sell for enough real money or ingame gold to allow them to buy a similar piece that could be used.

Aside from the horrible RMT was just the dreadful replayability of the game and the various levels of difficulty that strangled the game.  Much of this was changed with the Super Patch.

Most notable was the Loot 2.0 patch which changed the very nature of how magical items were collected.  Now it was possible to find decent items for the class you were playing or use those magic items to buy or craft items that were usable.

Another great change was finally lowering the price point of the game to $20 making it much more affordable for those like myself who seek quality gaming experience and cut rate pricing.

The game is 100 percent better than what it was. It is sad that two years had to go by.  In that time the game genre has moved on, overtaking the ground breaking experiences in the game that took 12 years to come out.  Many other games, like Path of Exiles, does just as well to satisfy the Diablo urge and nearly free.

There are a number of interesting aspects to the game that I will finally get to enjoy.  It is, of course, Diablo — the game that I got me through my early years of gaming.  Added to that is the ability to play either a male or female, new classes, a crafting system, a better story line, and hours and hours of monster hacking.

If you haven’t tried the game in a while, I offer you another trip down memory lane.

I will say that logging into their Battle.net can be a veritable chore. I am unsure if it is because of their security, but it took me hours to finally get registered and download the game.

Elder Scrolls Online

So I had the chance to play Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) today and although I found the game to be beautifully rendered and the controls to be well defined and easy to use, the overall game is completely hobbled by this antiquated idea of quests and forcing players through the game.

In recent years gaming has actually gone backwards in allowing players the freedom to explore. Gone are the days when you could simply grind your way through the game, exploring new lands and vistas, making enough money to fuel your next adventure.  ESO, among the others of recent years,  has turned all players into automated mannequins chasing dots on the map to fulfill orders of plucking X number of apples for predetermined cash payouts.

All gear is the same and all builds are essentially the same. Gone is the mystery of playing with character levels, skills, equipment, and different ways to move through the game. ESO predicates leveling on strict sets of quests, turning a fun game into a predetermined video story.

Why can’t players create their own stories?  Allow the world to be explored and manipulated, letting players set the markets for goods and services.  Provide paths to grow, balanced with the need of other players to help achieve the end.  Nothing is worse than to complete a long quest to see 7 other players standing around the static NPC gaining the same dull prize.

Where is the innovation of discovery and story creation.  If players wanted a prewritten story they could read books.  Computer games should allow players to invent their own stories, not read something that was hard coded in by a 22 year old game designer.

ESO also courts the same idea that all players are 10 years old.  When are game companies going to put on their big boy pants and treat gamers like adults?  This insipid innuendos of sex, drinking, drugs, and moral decisions is an abomination to 90% of all players — because we are all more than 15 years old.

Too bad ESO does not break the paradigm of current MMOs, striking off in new and exciting grounds.  It is just another pretty MMO to sap 15 dollars a month for two years, before going free to play and opening the doors for a new squad of trolls and assholes wanting to destroy and maim.

Aside from the gorgeous graphics and the great menu layout, the game does nothing to break new ground.  If you are tired of your old MMO and essentially wanting the same, try Elder Scrolls Online, you won’t be disappointed. If you want a break in the paradigm of other MMOs, this isn’t it.