Category Archives: Games

The Joy of Friends, Even Virtually

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For a few years now I have been gamemastering a tabletop role playing campaign of Space Opera, a game form the 80s with the most complex and poorly edited rule set I have ever seen but is loads of fun.

A year ago, several of the player moved north by a couple of states and out in-person games became virtual games hosted over Zoom. (Being that Space Opera has been out of print since the 80s there was no suitable on-line gaming app that really fit my needs, hence just a simple Zoom.)

The game has continued and it’s very nice every two weeks of so that we get to hang out, see each other, even if it on computer monitors, and game.

This past Saturday was the scheduled game night and all through the day I had been emotionally out of sorts. Not really depressed, just unmotivated and listless. Holiday plans meant that the session would be abbreviated but we needed to run it because I had left the players in a tight spot. (One of their crew had been kidnapped and the baddies were using threats to attempt to force the heroes into assassinating someone.)

I ran the game and my mood flew high. We laughed, we had fun, the dark turn of events for the characters provided strong motivation. By the end of the shortened session all of my listlessness had evaporated. It was not because of the game play it was because good friends are a major component of a happy life. Sometimes when we are crabby and out of sorts isolating ourselves is exactly the wrong prescription.

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Saturday’s Struggles

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This past Saturday, April 15th, was hardly the fun day I had hoped it to be.

All day the previous day and Saturday I had been dealing with arthritic pain in my toes. On the classic pain scale of 1 thru 10 I would report that it had been hovering around a 3 for both days. Painful, enough to be particularly aware of it, but so intense that I needed to take special actions because of it.

This past Saturday was also the next session of my tabletop roleplaying game, Space Opera, and I was looking for to the new adventure I had crafted for the players as I became more comfortable managing the game over zoom.

It started off well enough. True we were down one player, later I learned it was due to a mistake in the calendar, but we were having fun and all my pre-game work seemed to be on point.

But then the arthritic pain in my toes began spiking. What had been a fairly constant 3 suddenly climbed into the territory of 6 or 7 with bursts to 8. Tears welled in my eyes, and I found myself needed to stop and massages my toes in a vain attempt to relieve the agony. It became too constant to allow me to think coherently for more than a few minutes at a time. I was forced to end our game session two hours ahead of what I had hoped with the central murder-attempt mystery just unveiled, and deal exclusively the arthritis in my toes. (It’s in other joints as well but the toes are always the first to flare.)

I found some relief by elevating my feet and keeping the fluid pressure down. Between 4 hours of elevation and some ibuprofen around midnight the pain had subsided back to the usual constant 2. A background level I have learned to live with over the last ten years.

I am bitterly disappointed and ashamed that I could not provide the entertainment for my friends that I had worked and planned for and hope that next session will be much better.

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Movie Review: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

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This past Saturday the 25th I had the good fortune to see an advance screening of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a big budget cinematic adaptation of the tabletop role playing game. As a gamer for more than 40 years I had a keen interest in the film and when a fellow writer popped up with invites to the screening I had to attend.

There have been other attempts to leverage the game into popular media. From 1983 through 1985 saw the production and airing of an animated series Dungeons & Dragons with the three season clearly target for a younger audience. 2000 saw the release of a live-action film Dungeons & Dragons that was poorly received by both critics and audiences. (Though successful enough for two direct to Home Video sequels.) This production, Honor Among Thieves is boasts the most resources and well-known names to adapt the property.

The film, like most sessions of the game, is an ensemble piece, though more focus is given to Edgin (Chris Pine) a man who through tragedy has turned to thievery and Holga, (Michelle Rodriguez) his dangerous barbarian partner in crime. They assemble a team, Simon (Justice

Paramount Studios

Smith) a Sorcerer with self-esteem issues, Doric (Sophie Lillis) a tiefling druid desperate to save her people and wilderness from encroaching ecological devastation, Xenk (Rege-Jean Page) a paladin with ties to Edgin past before Edgin fall from grace. What starts as a heist, with a few side adventures to gather the materials required, transforms into a battle against a vast and evil conspiracy with thousands of live and the future in the hands of the thieves.

Each character has an arc of character development and with the story compressed to a single film none are particularly deep or complex. Honor Among Thieves is not a contemplative examination of the human condition but romp, an exercise in fun with just enough character to allow the actors to invest, engage, and embrace their roles. No third act twist is truly shocking or surprising, but the film isn’t relying on that approach. It expects, with reasonableness, that characters and the actors portrayals with keep the audience emotionally invested and not some amazing reveal to recontextualize the story.

The filmmaking is solid, competent, but not groundbreaking or visually stunning. For the most part, with the except of one shoot, the directors, Jonathan Goldstein a & John Francis Daley, avoid drawing attention to the VFX with ‘impossible’ camera moves and Barry Peterson’s cinematography is perfectly serviceable with decent compositions but never remarkable.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is a ‘popcorn movie,’ one meant to provide a short diversion from the grind of reality and give some thrills, laughs, and a touch of real emotion. In the matter the film succeeds. It is fun and worth the hair over two hours spent watching it.

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A Return to Role Play Gaming

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Saturday evening saw the return of my Space Opera RPG campaign as the players, and I reconvened on Zoom.

While during the heights of the pandemic many people took their role play games virtual with online tabletops given that Space Opera, a game system that has been out of print for nearly 40 years, has not dedicated online support system, we kept our game, once it restarted following vaccination, in person at my friend’s office. Sadly, my friend had moved away and the had to move to Zoom or simply stop. This weekend, after the prolonged chaos of moving, and missing a player who was unavailable, we resumed exactly where we had left off.

I had concerns about my ability to run a game in a virtual meeting space, but it turned out fine. Granted, the session ended earlier than I had wanted when I developed a sore throat but overall, it was a success.

In the words of Vision and The Scarlet Witch ‘This works.’

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My Strange Relationship with The Last of Us

 

A new prestige television series from the creator of the fantastic Chernobyl? You would think that I would be right there every Sunday evening, devouring the newest episodes.

The truth is that zombies of all stripes have worn rather thin for me, particularly the setting of the zombie apocalypse. Yes, I know that these are not technically zombies, they are not magically reanimated corpses but aggressive, disease-infected individuals. The cast looks

HBO

fantastic and there’s no doubt that the series is winning praise from both within and without of the genre communities. And yet I really am not interested in watching it. I never played the game. Games with prolonged story arcs are less appealing to me due to their intense commitment in time. I play first person shooters, never completing their ‘campaigns’ but simply enjoying the on-line matches against hyper-competent players who nearly always leave me beaten and broken.

So, it sounds like I have no relationship with TLOU, but that’s not accurate either.

Craig Mazin, the principal writer and showrunner, co-hosts a fantastic podcast on screenwriting called Scriptnotes. For Chernobyl he launched a companion podcast for the limited series to help illuminate the history and where the show explored fiction. The podcast was a success and helped promote the series and naturally HBO wanted another for The Last of Us.

So, without watching a single episode of the series, or having played the game one second, I am a devoted listener to the series’ companion podcast.

The podcast features Mazin, Druckman ho was the creative force behind the game and co-runs the series with Mazin, and the voice actor who first gave life to one the game’s and show’s principal characters, Joel. Episodes by episode they break down what happens, why they made the creative decisions that they did in staying true to the game or driving far afield from it, and expounding on, in their view, what makes foe compelling stories.

While I may not be interested in fungal zombies overrunning the world, I am thoroughly and utterly fascinated by the process by which that premise becomes so compelling to so many and the secrets of the story telling craft these men so clearly understand.

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I Failed My Players

 

Saturday Afternoon/Evening I ran my Space Opera TTRPG for my dear friends and sadly my brain betrayed me, and I achieved none of the tone or mood I has hoped for.

It was not a lack of preparation. I had worked my spreadsheets and gotten all the data collected I would I need, I wrote up an outline of the adventure, the characters, and the goals.

(A brief word on the spreadsheets. Space Opera from FGU came out in the 80s and is a very computation intensive game. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century I have crafted 9 spreadsheets to track the dates, the training, the distances traveled, the fuel used, and many other factors. I am quite proud of these sheets.)

However, when I got to the game, my brain failed completely. I was unable to sequence events properly and barely remained coherent as I ran the session. I ended the session early — was particularly disappointing as we had an unavoidable late start — and barely made it home awake.

I don’t know if it was a rejection, I received earlier in the week that had undermined my morale or a lack of good sleep due to apnea mask issues or some other factor, but it really hurt my weekend. Even more than the migraine I suffered the next day.

I shall have to make sure to not repeat this piss poor performance. I care too much for my players to want to ever have that happen again.

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A Space Opera Advantage

There is no doubt in my in mind that FGU’s role playing game Space Opera has one of the worst edited rulebooks from a major game company. Typos, contradictory rules, vital rules dispersed in various sections, and the lack of any index at all produce a set of rules that without ‘search’ when using the PDFs would make running the game quite challenging.

That said I do adore the game, its bold attempt to sweep in rule for nearly every conceivable SF setting, and its sheer naked ambition.

Recently, in the campaign I have been running since May 2019, I have come to appreciate another advantage to Space Opera, the lack of an experience point system for character abilities.

In Dungeons and Dragons players begin the game as low-level adventurers, dealing limited damage, easily killed, and marginally skilled. With each adventure the Dungeon Master awards Experience Points to the characters that advance their skills and capabilities, no adventure, no experience points, no advancement.

Space Opera using skill learning. Characters devote themselves to study and practice to become better at their skills and advance in capabilities from piloting to the sciences. As long as the character can continue their studies they can continue to advance.

This is an advantage when the real world collides with the role-playing world. Is a player in a D&D game misses one or more adventures, their character fails to gain experience points alongside their compatriots, falling behind in skills and toughness that may be fundamentally unfair. Real world responsibilities should always outweigh play. It is a mark of adulthood.

With Space Opera the missing player’s character, while not investigating the slave clone trade can continue to study and practice the skills they have committed themselves to advancing. When the player returns to the table, they suffer no in game penalty for attending to pressing real world duties. As long as the gamemaster is keeping careful track of the time passed, for which I have spreadsheets that have proven invaluable, and when the player is eligible to advance their skills, the system is fair to all players.

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Movie Review: Free Guy

 

Free Guy is the story of how a background non-player character, Guy, played with able comic chops by Ryan Reynolds, in an open-world video game, with decidedly strong Grand Theft Auto vibes, becomes self-aware while learning that his world is nothing but a sandbox for sociopathic players unleashing carnage and cruelty.

Free Guy is also the story of two brilliant computer/software geniuses, Mille, played by Killing Eve’s award-winning actor Jodie Comer, and Keys, played by Stranger Things’ Joe Keery, as they struggle to prove that the original code for the massively successful and profitable game that acts as Guy’s world, was stolen from them by cartoonishly villain Antwan, played by the brilliant Kiwi Taika Waititi.

The twin plotlines intersect when Millie’s avatar in the game world, Molotov Girl, intersects with Guy hurtling them on a collision course that ultimately will decide everyone’s, virtual and otherwise, fate.

The trailers and promotion sell Free Guy as an action/comedy and they much is very true. The tone and style of the humor is very much in keeping with Ryan’s Deadpool, though here toned down for a PG-13 rating, and with the gags referencing other properties held off until the film’s final act when we are reminded that Disney owns everything.

But, beyond the gags, jabs, and cameos from the real world of on-line game and streaming, Free Guy also has a theme that we are the architects of our lives and routines can be non-living. The movie doesn’t descend into full ‘message’ mode, but neither is it particularly subtle with its theme, striking instead the right balance between the two poles.

There are plenty of great visual gag and surprisingly cameos. (Do not visit IMDB before seeing this, let the surprise arrive and please you.) While Free Guy will never be counted among the great films of cinema’s canon it is fun, entertaining, and full or unironic heart making it well worth seeing. If you are vaccinated and comfortable heading out into public do see this in a theater.

Final observation, I do not know if this was an effect from the pandemic but two of the trailers before the movie, The House of Gucci and The Last Duel were both directed by Ridley Scott and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the same director pop up twice, as director, in the same trailer block.

Also remember that my SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

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The Return of In-Person Gaming

 

This Saturday for the first time since the pandemic sent the nation and the world into shut down, I am getting together with my friends for in-person role play gaming.

The game that I had been running when COVID-19 came along and upended everything was FGU’s Space Opera, a complex sci-fi game setting with tons and tons of complex calculations and table as it attempts to model nearly every kind of sci-fi setting you might want for you enjoyment.

I used to run campaigns of this way back in the 80s and they were very popular with my friends. It was a challenge getting back into the swing of Space Opera particularly finding that groove where I am willing to let the wild and free nature of such a setting run free, but I think I was getting there when the pandemic suspended the game.

In the interim I have lost one player and a dear friend to the disease and I have plans to give his character a fitting exit from the campaign to honor his own unique quirky nature.

I have also taken quite a bit of time creating spreadsheets to help me run this campaign. Back in the primitive 80s when personal computers were little more than stone knives and bear skins, I used a lot of notes, notebooks, and guestimates to run the game but now with laptops, iPads, and smartphone I have more options and I am quite proud of the Excel sheets I have crafted to manage skill learning, transit time, system generation, and time keeping.

Here’s my hand drawn and letter and thus hideous sector map for the current game. I am so looking forward to this weekend.

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Gaming on the Horizon

 

With the novel currently not taking up very many computational cycles now that I have dispatched it to the beta readers and with my gaming group gaining immunity as we get vaccinated, I am turning my thoughts to my Space Opera RPG that will soon resume.

This will be an intensely bitter-sweet. I look forward to hanging out with friends I have not gamed with in more than a year and picking up the campaign where we suspended it, (Rescuing the cousin of a constitutional monarch currently trapped on a post-apocalyptic fallen world.) but it will also be quite sad as the pandemic stole one of our members from us.

It has been a very long time since I have had to deal with the death of a friend and active member of my gaming campaign. While sadly in recent decades friends have passed, the march of time does that to us all, it hasn’t been since the early 80s that death took one of my friends that was actively gaming with us so unexpectedly. We will remember Craig and I will give his character a respectful exit from the story of my campaign.

On a more nuts and bolts level this will also be a chance for me to implement the spreadsheet tools I created last summer to help me manage my Space Opera Campaign.

FGU’s RPG Space Opera has a lot of detailed calculations and data that needs to be tracked for the characters and their vessel. During the pandemic I had a flash of inspiration on how to manage some of it with a continually updated spreadsheet and one the first worked I devised several more of other aspect of the game. I now have tools to track the progress of skill training and to compute to odds of skill advancement, distance between star systems along with travel times and fuel consumption, and current calendar dating.

I miss my friends and Craig I will miss forever.

 

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