Thalen

#Blaugust Day 19: Scattered

August 19, 2015 by Thalen

We've reached that point in Blaugust where it starts to get difficult. The stored up ideas have been used and we're dependent on new ones for our posts. Tamrielo may be able to come up with a couple hundred ideas in an hour, but my mind is not so fecund. Or maybe I just self-censor too much, I know that's a problem. As much as I say that this blog is for me, I'm always aware that I have an audience and that anything I post could theoretically be viewed by anyone and everyone in the world.

Damn you brain!

Last night was a pretty light one gaming-wise. I played a little Magic Duels, long enough to knock out the daily quests I had active. One was to win 2 duels with either a blue/green or a blue/red deck, so I tried out an artifact deck based on Kodra's recently talking about how awesome they were. I won both duels, but the deck never seemed to really click. The idea is supposed to be lots of cards that spawn artifacts (mostly 1/1 flying thopters) and benefit from artifacts being in play along with cards that buff artifact creatures. Despite something like a dozen or more cards in the deck that create the thopter tokens, I never put out a single token in either game. Just bad luck of the draw, I guess.

Three in the deck and I never drew one

Apart from that, I logged into Marvel Heroes for a bit and finished up getting Thing to level 60. With that done, I looked through my stable of characters to pick the next to run up. One problem I've found with the story rebalance is that any character that completed the story on normal prior to the rebalance still has all the story quests completed post rebalance. That means I've got a few characters such as Squirrel Girl and Storm who are between level 20 and 40 that I can't use the story to level. I'll just have to go with the old legendary quest / Midtown leveling method for them I guess. It works, but it gets tiresome fast.

I ended up pulling out Deadpool, who I got as my free hero for the anniversary celebration. He's supposed to be a lot of fun to play, and his synergy bonuses are +10% each to rare item find and special item find which are useful for pretty much any character, particularly the level 60s that I'm hunting end-game gear with. I ran him through the first chapter and liked him reasonably well. I'm playing him mostly shooty so far, with AoE bombs to deal with packs of minions. They did a good job with the humor and fourth-wall breaking of his voiced lines; hopefully they won't wear thin as the game goes on.

Seriously considering picking up this costume

Finally I went offline and read for a while. I'm about a third of the way through Choke and it's as disturbing and hilarious as I expected from Palahniuk. I imagine most of my readers have seen the movie version of Fight Club (if you haven't, you really should), but a lot of you probably haven't read the book. It's well worth your time even if you've seen the movie. In fact I'd say it's even more worth it if you've seen the movie, as the differences between the two make a fascinating study in how you go about adapting a story to a new medium in a way that takes advantage of that medium.

#Blaugust Day 18: Butterfly Knives

August 18, 2015 by Thalen

Last night was my regular raid night in Final Fantasy XIV. We started out by steamrolling through Alexander to get armor token drops for those of us who hadn't gotten ours this week. I ended up grabbing a bolt from each of the first two sections, and a lens and spring from the last two. Hopefully I'll be able to grab another lens next week and get a hat made, leaving me with just chest, pants and a bracelet to go for the bard job. I guess I need to hurry up and get the paladin job leveled up to 60 so I can gear it next. Tanks seem to be what we're shortest on in our free company, so I've been wanting to help fill that gap a bit.

After Alexander we moved on to make some attempts at Thok Ast Thok Extreme where the Primal Ravana dwells. Ravana is the first Primal we've faced in Final Fantasy XIV that's new for this game and he's pretty cool. He's a giant multilimbed insectoid with four glowing sword blades and is the patron of the Gnath beastmen, an insect hivemind.

He won't know what hit him

I don't think any of us were really expecting to defeat Ravana in a single night of attempts; he's widely considered the hardest Primal fight yet, and is fairly complicated with multiple stages and a pretty decent dps requirement to make it through a few of them. The hardest is the butterfly stage, where a number of butterflies start to fly into the arena and begin channeling a spell. Any butterfly that completes the channel dies and causes a sword to drop into the arena. The more swords that drop, the more stacks of a nasty defense debuff everyone in the party gets. This is immediately followed by a massive unavoidable attack; too many stacks of the debuff and you just won't survive. On our first try four swords dropped; way too many. The second time around we managed to only let one through.

Ultimately we managed to at least make it far enough in to experience all the fight mechanics, though not much further. He was at about half health on our best attempt, but then we botched handling his 'charge repeatedly across the arena' attack and all fell down.

All but our White Mage, Paragon, who attempted valiantly to avenge us

When we go back in next week, I think we have a decent shot at actually defeating him. He's tough, but his mechanics are managable and all the one-shot kills are sufficiently telegraphed to deal with if you're on your toes. If we can successfully down him we'll have finished the content that went in when Heavensward first went live. Of course, the madness that is Alexander Savage is out there now. That may be a ways in the future yet.

#Blaugust Day 17: Mystara Monday: The Beginning

August 17, 2015August 17, 2015 by Thalen

Many years ago, when I was but a lad, my best friend came into possession of the newly published Second Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. We were fascinated by the system and the concept, and I wanted my own copies. At Waldenbooks an employee suggested I might want to start with the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which would be an easier introduction to the game. I bought it, and the rest was history. It's because of that choice that instead of Faerun, Oerth or Krynn my favored game world, the one that I return to time and again, is Mystara.

#Blaugust Day 17: Mystara Monday: The Beginning

Mystara in its earliest form, from the D&D Expert Set

Over the years, I played and ran a lot of games of Dungeons & Dragons set in Mystara (originally just called The Known World) and I built up a large collection of adventure modules and supplements. I had come in at the perfect time, as TSR had recently begun to actively detail the setting through a series of Gazetteers that detailed each of the major nations of Mystara in turn. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor setting was incorporated as the distant past of Mystara, prior to a great nuclear apocalypse. The world was revealed as hollow, with ancient extinct civilization preserved within. The great airship Princess Ark crossed the world and even reached the moon (which is populated by samurai cat people). A worldwide calamity stripped Mystara of magic for a full week.

Eventually TSR decided to retire the Dungeons & Dragons rule set and only support Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. For a short period, Mystara continued to be supported and new AD&D supplements were released for it. After only a few however, Mystara was retired as well. It's mentioned every so often in newer editions, most recently in the 5th edition books as one of many campaign worlds that exist, but there hasn't been an official Mystara supplement published since 1995.

Every Monday I plan to bring out an item from my collection and show it off a bit. I'll talk about what it is, where it fits into the setting as a whole, and maybe tell a few stories about games past. Next week I'll be starting with the very first Dungeons & Dragons books I ever owned, the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules.

#Blaugust Day 16: Can You Go Back?

August 17, 2015 by Thalen

Yesterday my wife and I watched Mallrats, which she had never seen before. She's not seen any of Kevin Smith's stuff apart from Jersey Girl, in fact. We watched Clerks a while back, and she didn't hate it. She liked the salsa shark.

Watching Mallrats I felt like the seams were more visible than I remembered. The dialogue was more stilted than in my mind, and while it's still a pretty funny movie, it wasn't quite up to the memories I had of it. I find myself wondering how Chasing Amy holds up, particularly since I know it's often criticized for taking a very stereotypical view of lesbianism. Views on sexuality in our society have shifted a hell of a lot in 20 years time, and I suspect a lot of what was edgy in 1997 will seem almost quaint.

It makes me wonder just what it is that makes one thing seem dated and old, while something else from the same era remains fresh, or at least relatable. Clueless is just as much a product of the 90s as Mallrats, but I feel like Clueless holds up much better. Is it because it had higher production values? A better script? Maybe that it's so over the top in its 90s style that the aesthetic becomes almost fantastical?

Asimov's stories are decades old now, and often based on now-discredited science, but I can still reread them and enjoy them just as much if not more so than the first time. Preacher and Transmetropolitan both came out around the same time, and I loved them both back then, but now while Transmetropolitan still fires my imagination, Preacher makes me cringe a bit. Maybe it's simply that I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago. I've grown since then and my point of view is no longer the same.

That's entirely possible, Spider