Month: September 2014

This post about MMO culture and how it shifted in Ultima Online reminded me of my time playing UO, specifically my very first day in the game.  This was before the Trammel/Felucca split, when you couldn’t play UO without being at risk of attack by PKs at pretty much any moment.  The Ultima series had been one of my all-time favorites for years, so the idea of playing a new online game set in Britannia was amazing to me.  A friend of mine had played previously and already had an account, but didn’t have a computer capable of running it at the time, so he ended up installing it on my PC.  I played way more than him, and ended up taking over the account before very long.  But I digress.

I started out in Ultima Online in the town of Moonglow.  I ran around a bit, killed some rabbits, harvested some reagents and so forth.  Eventually, my character started getting hungry.  Okay, I thought, I have rabbit meat, I have wood.  I will build a campfire and cook the meat so I can eat.  I sat down to cook my meat, and a few seconds later another player rode up and killed me.  I found at later that campfires exercised the camping skill of anyone near them, which meant their camping skill would go up, removing points from the skills they had maxed.  So build campfires was a common griefing tactic.  I didn’t know this, though.  I was a total noob just trying to cook some dinner.

Despite that, I kept playing.  When the Trammel/Felucca split happened, not too long later, I got out of PvP land immediately and never came back.  Not only did I no longer have to worry about PKs, all the new land opened up in the new world meant I could find a decent place to put a house.  If the split hadn’t happened when it did, I probably wouldn’t have played much longer.  Instead I stuck around for about a year.

Thinking back, I found myself wondering if I would keep playing now in the same situation of getting murdered so early in a game.  I’m not sure if I would.  Back then, UO was this amazing new thing, and pretty much the only game in town.  Now, I have more games available than I know what to do with.  I’m not likely to invest much time in a game that unfriendly to new players.  Better to find a place where I can learn and grow as a player without someone waiting to kill me and take my stuff at any moment.

Source: Thalen Speaks
The Days of Ultima Online

I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for a very long time.  After my best friend when I was a kid introduced me to it, I went on the hunt for books of my own.  This was in the late 80s, so there was actually a split between two separate sets of rules.  There was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and there was Dungeons & Dragons.  Two similar, but definitely different, sets of rules.  AD&D was the more complex of the two, and was where settings like Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance lived, while D&D used the setting of Mystara and was closer in tone to the original game, to the point of making Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor setting an integral part of the history of the world.

I was originally going to get a copy of the AD&D player’s guide, which was what my friend had, but was directed to D&D by the bookseller at Waldenbooks.  I ended up purchasing the Basic Set and a copy of In Search of Adventure, which collected most of the existing low level adventures released for D&D at the time.  That was just the beginning of a long love affair with the Mystara setting and everything connected to it.  Over the years I hunted down every publication I could related to Mystara, first buying them new as they came out and later searching eBay for out of print adventure modules and Gazetteers to complete the collection.  There are still a very few adventures I don’t have copies of, and my copy of the Immortals boxed set is missing the box, but I’ve very nearly got it all.

With the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons having come out, and looking like a pretty decent set of rules; much more in the vein of 3rd Edition and, yes, classic Dungeons & Dragons than 4th Edition was, I’m feeling the urge to run a game again.  If I do, I think it’ll be time to revisit Mystara.  Maybe I’ll finally send a party to meet the cat-people who live on the moon.  Not the moon you can see. The invisible one.

Source: Thalen Speaks
Dungeons & Dragons

As it turns out, Best Buy had a pretty good deal on a Sharp 50″ TV for Labor Day, so we now have a brand new television to replace the sad old one that died last night.  I need to get another HDMI cable for my PS3, so that get the full benefit with that, and at some point I should order a (sadly proprietary) Wii HDMI cable, but otherwise it’s all hooked up and performing nicely.  We did have to search through the menus to figure out how to turn down the motion smoothing.  I had seen people talk about how it made movies look like soap operas, but I’d underestimated how extreme the result was.  I found Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom while flipping through the channels and was amazed at how much weirdly smooth and bright everything was.  It looked like I was watching a stage reenactment of the movie somehow.  Happily, turning the feature down a couple of notches seems to have fixed the problem.

My other main pastime today was, again, Final Fantasy XIV.  Yesterday I reached the point in the storyline where I needed to run the Stone Vigil dungeon to continue the main questline, so today Belghast, Ashgar, Tamrielo, and I ran that dungeon and two others.  That got me caught up on my Grand Company hunt log and opened up more quests.  Apparently the next big group fight I have to look forward to / dread is Garuda.  The way everyone talks about it, it’s way more difficult than previous stuff.  We’ll see if that remains true; I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it’s a bit easier a year later than it was when they all ran it originally.

And finally, Blaugust has come to a close.  It’s been a lot of fun, and amazingly enough I managed to post every day throughout.  I’m not sure yet whether I’ll try to maintain the pace going forward or not.  I definitely feel like I need to post on a regular schedule if I don’t want to end up procrastinating, falling behind, and ultimately letting the blog lie fallow.  But something like 3 days a week or the like might be more realistic for me to maintain.  We’ll see.

Source: Thalen Speaks
New Television Acquired