Beginner’s Guide Experience

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The Hype

I am breaking my own tradition and writing this blog post… while things are still fresh in my head instead of waiting until tomorrow morning…  or today if you are reading this.  Every now and then there is an immediate buzz about a game title, and this has lead me to be leery of this factor.  Sometimes the games are absolutely amazing, and other times they are pure hype. So when a brand new “art as game” title pops on the radar I get a little suspicious.  This is not normally the type of fare I go into, because I like things that explode and things to whack with big heavy swords.  That said when the word of The Beginner’s Guide started to circulate I got a bit curious.  When my friend finished playing it yesterday and wrote a lengthy blog post called pretentious I thought it might be worth checking out.   Especially knowing that it is a word he especially dislikes.  Granted when I sat down to watch a Let’s Play of the game, I had not read that blog post… or pretty much any other “review” of the game, other than the fact that there was simply a lot of buzz about it all of the sudden. So I went to YouTube and ultimately found a video by someone I have never seen before playing the game.

What I am left after watching the hour and a half long video… is some stuff I am not even sure if I can adequately put into words.  Hell to be truthful I am not really sure some of the emotions I am feeling actually even have proper names.  There are going to be spoilers involved with this post, so if you intend to play the game I highly suggest you stop reading.  I came into this play through like a blank slate, not really knowing what to expect other than the fact that this game came from the creator of The Stanley Parable which we had talked about a few times on AggroChat but I have never actually played myself.  After watching what is essentially an act of interactive fiction, I think you get out of it what you take into it.  Much like “The Box” from Dune, and the cave on Dagobah in Empire Strikes Back… it ultimately becomes a reflection of your own mental state.  Seeing the events unfold in front of me, I guess makes me realize how potentially broken I am inside.  I am sure someone could see the experience and immediately think “wtf is this crap”, but I guess I was in the right mindset for it to seep into my core.

The Terror

The narrator of the game is none other than the author, one Davey Wreden.  He tells a tale of a fellow game creator that he met at a Game Jam, and the unusual series of games that unfolded between the years of 2008 and 2011.  I have no idea who this Coda is or even at this point if it is a person that exists.  There are moments during the game play that you follow Davey down this course, descending into the deep interpreted meanings of these games.  Each game has a supposed point, and tells us a little bit about the Author.  As we reach the halfway point, there is a slow growing dread because I am scared that I know where this tale ends.  Each game seems progressively more alienating and more isolating…  like someone retreating into the dark cocoon of depression.  My terror at times was that we would find out at the end of this tale, that Coda had killed himself… and all that we were left with were this series of games that Davey was trying desperately to unravel.  That however is not at all what happens…  but instead in 2011 after Davey attempted to show the games to other people…  he simply broke off contact completely.  The final game is a series of frustrating puzzles that are either unwinnable or at the very least antagonistically set against the player.  After cheating your way through them with the help of the narrator you see a series of messages essentially telling Davey to never contact Coda again.

This game we are playing is supposedly a last ditch effort to get back on Codas good graces, to apologize publicly.  The thing is…  I don’t think there is a Coda.  I think this game is the tale of how one Davey Wreden reacted and internalized his struggle with his own fame brought on through the quirky success of Stanley Parable.  I think the game as a whole is essentially him working through is own issues, like he supposedly thought Coda was.  The problem there is… am I essentially doing the same thing he supposedly was by projecting myself and my own thought processes into the whole experience?  The truth is… we cannot help but do this.  There is no clinical distance that can keep us from doing this.  We imprint on the things we experience and we have to decode them through the only language we know… which is that of our own experiences.  So if you have never felt any of this alienation or crippling self doubt… then I feel like you could probably just let a game like this wash over you and not effect you in any way.  Unfortunately that is not the case for me.

The Stupor

Part of the reason why I am writing this while the experience is fresh, is that I hope to maybe be more honest about the experience.  I am by nature a creative person, and everything I do at least contains a part of me in it.  While I don’t blog in my own name, and have chosen to adopt a pen name of Belghast…  every post I write contains certain nuggets of myself that are more honest than I really mean them to be.  I am constantly beset with this desire to be liked and loved, and to find validation in the favor of others.  I find myself craving attention, but the problem is when I actually get it…  I don’t have a clue what to do with it.  This blog and the constant forward momentum, comes from a place that I don’t really understand.  Before blogging I was one of those people that would post all too long posts on forums.  Before that I was a devout IRC junkie and even managed to meet my wife that way.  I have this need to connect to people, even though I don’t really know how to.

I think in part this is why I find myself constantly trying to start new things, like segments on my blog, or lets plays…  only to abandon them when I get bored with them a few weeks to months later.  I am always dissatisfied with nearly everything I do, and nothing ever quite works the way I envision it working.  I’d love to say I don’t care about statistics and readership… but there are days I think to myself…  why am I doing any of this if no one is actually reading?  Then the very next day I sit down and the keyboard and keep writing.  I guess I do this because I have to, and I am not sure exactly how NOT to do it.  My world is arranged in a series of circles within circles, and the closer you get in the more I let people see of me.  However deep down at the center there is this place that no one gets to go, where I keep the parts of me that I think no one would like if they knew existed.  So there were levels in this game that maybe struck a deeper cord with me than others.  There was a level that as the player backed away from a stage, these walls kept slamming down in front of them… until at some point you simply couldn’t see the light of the stage any more.  This felt almost scarily familiar, and like all of those times that I needed to get away because I simply could not stand any more human stimuli in my life.  There have been so many times I have eaten my lunch in the silence of my car, just because I needed not to exist around others for the thirty minutes to an hour that it afforded me.

Final Thoughts

This post is ending to be far more personal than I intended it to be, but in truth the experience brought on by the game is more personal than I had expected it to be.  On AggroChat we have talked a lot about how games are generally bad at emotions, but this game…  has so many.  For some this experience might be liberating, but for me…  it was something else.  It has left me wallowing in my own faults and short comings.  Ultimately I saw myself in both Davey and Coda during this tale, because I think we are all a little bit of both of them.  Since finishing the Lets Play I have gone out to steam and purchased the game, and it will likely sit in my library unplayed.  I am not sure if I can really handle going through this experience a second time.   More than anything I wanted to purchase the game as a thank you for the experience, because even though I am a little off balance right now…  it is a rare experience that a game can cause that effect on anyone so when it does… it is well worth supporting.  Now I am going to spend the rest of my evening trying to get the thoughts out of my head that the game so firmly implanted there.

 

Mystara Monday: Expert Rules

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I had originally intended to continue on to the next of the B modules this week with a look at Module B6: The Veiled Society. As I worked on the post, however, it became clear that I was going to be talking about a very important step in the creation of Mystara out of order, and that we really needed to start moving chronologically if things are going to make sense. So instead we'll be looking at the Expert Rules Set this week, and the establishment of Karameikos as the core of the Known World setting that would become Mystara.

Mystara Monday: Expert Rules

We've already seen that the Basic Rules went through three major revisions in its history. The Expert Rules similarly have two distinct versions; the differences between them are mostly minor, though very important when it comes to the history of Mystara. The original Expert Rules were written by David "Zeb" Cook as an extension of Tom Moldvay's revision of the Basic Rules in 1981. In 1983, Frank Mentzer revised both rules sets and then continued into the Companion, Master, and Immortal rules (all of which we'll get to eventually). As with the Basic Rules, the Mentzer revision is what I have.

Mystara Monday: Expert Rules
With more beautiful Elmore art.

Instead of separate player and DM books, the Expert Rulebook is a single 64 page book. The first 20 pages are the player's section, including character advancement information up to level 14, new spells, and some new information related to wilderness adventures. The remainder of the book is the Dungeon Master's Section, and that's where the real magic is. The Expert rulebook is where rules for wilderness travel were introduced, along with rules for player strongholds and more in depth guidelines for running an ongoing campaign.

Strongholds were a major fascination for me when I got my hands on this book. Each class could build a stronghold of an appropriate type once they could afford it (and in most cases once they were a high enough level.) Fighters and clerics could build a castle, mages could build a tower, and thieves could build a hideout. Rules for construction times and costs were included in the DMs section, and I spent hours sketching out strongholds and figuring the costs involved in building them. Yes, even in the early days of tabletop gaming, player housing was absolutely a thing.

Wilderness travel was a huge addition to the rules, as the Basic Set and B module adventures tended to gloss over how the party went about getting to the dungeon they were invading. The Expert Rules introduce detailed rules for travel times, random encounters in the wilderness, and two and a half pages focused entirely on ocean travel. The X series modules took great advantage of that, as we'll see in coming weeks.

Most importantly, however, at least where Mystara is concerned is the map of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos and associated 'Sample Wilderness and Human Town' section. This section, added in the Mentzer revision, gives us our first look at Karameikos and a basic rundown of its towns and important persons. It's here that we first learn of Duke Stefan Karameikos, ruler of the Grand Duchy. It's here that we are introduced to the evil Baron Ludwig von Hendriks and his Black Eagle Barony (though it's not yet explained why Duke Stefan allows such a villain to prosper). And it's here that we are given details about the small town of Threshold, where adventurers come from.

Mystara Monday: Expert Rules
Also, it's ruled by a name level cleric. Don't mess with Threshold.

Among other things, the information about Threshold reveals that Bargle the Infamous took control of the ruins from the adventure in the Basic Rules while spying for the Black Eagle Barony. A page and a half of various interesting adventure hooks are also provided. For example, Ian, the blacksmith's son, has opened a museum where he displays taxidermied monster heads. "Many interesting bits of information can be found at the Museum of the Smith's son, Ian."

Along with the Expert Rulebook, the Expert Rules set also came with another set of dice (again, stolen from me twenty years ago) and a copy of the other contender for best known D&D adventure of all time, X1: The Isle of Dread. That's what we'll be looking at next week, where we'll visit the D&D equivalent of Skull Island and encounter so many dinosaurs. Also, evil mind control salamander guys. Seriously, they're the worst.

Mystara Monday: Expert Rules

by
I had originally intended to continue on to the next of the B modules this week with a look at Module B6: The Veiled Society. As I worked on the post, however, it became clear that I was going to be talking about a very important step in the creation of Mystara out of order, and that we really needed to start moving chronologically if things are going to make sense. So instead we'll be looking at the Expert Rules Set this week, and the establishment of Karameikos as the core of the Known World setting that would become Mystara.


We've already seen that the Basic Rules went through three major revisions in its history. The Expert Rules similarly have two distinct versions; the differences between them are mostly minor, though very important when it comes to the history of Mystara. The original Expert Rules were written by David "Zeb" Cook as an extension of Tom Moldvay's revision of the Basic Rules in 1981. In 1983, Frank Mentzer revised both rules sets and then continued into the Companion, Master, and Immortal rules (all of which we'll get to eventually). As with the Basic Rules, the Mentzer revision is what I have.

With more beautiful Elmore art.

Instead of separate player and DM books, the Expert Rulebook is a single 64 page book. The first 20 pages are the player's section, including character advancement information up to level 14, new spells, and some new information related to wilderness adventures. The remainder of the book is the Dungeon Master's Section, and that's where the real magic is. The Expert rulebook is where rules for wilderness travel were introduced, along with rules for player strongholds and more in depth guidelines for running an ongoing campaign.

Strongholds were a major fascination for me when I got my hands on this book. Each class could build a stronghold of an appropriate type once they could afford it (and in most cases once they were a high enough level.) Fighters and clerics could build a castle, mages could build a tower, and thieves could build a hideout. Rules for construction times and costs were included in the DMs section, and I spent hours sketching out strongholds and figuring the costs involved in building them. Yes, even in the early days of tabletop gaming, player housing was absolutely a thing.

Wilderness travel was a huge addition to the rules, as the Basic Set and B module adventures tended to gloss over how the party went about getting to the dungeon they were invading. The Expert Rules introduce detailed rules for travel times, random encounters in the wilderness, and two and a half pages focused entirely on ocean travel. The X series modules took great advantage of that, as we'll see in coming weeks.

Most importantly, however, at least where Mystara is concerned is the map of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos and associated 'Sample Wilderness and Human Town' section. This section, added in the Mentzer revision, gives us our first look at Karameikos and a basic rundown of its towns and important persons. It's here that we first learn of Duke Stefan Karameikos, ruler of the Grand Duchy. It's here that we are introduced to the evil Baron Ludwig von Hendriks and his Black Eagle Barony (though it's not yet explained why Duke Stefan allows such a villain to prosper). And it's here that we are given details about the small town of Threshold, where adventurers come from.

Also, it's ruled by a name level cleric. Don't mess with Threshold.

Among other things, the information about Threshold reveals that Bargle the Infamous took control of the ruins from the adventure in the Basic Rules while spying for the Black Eagle Barony. A page and a half of various interesting adventure hooks are also provided. For example, Ian, the blacksmith's son, has opened a museum where he displays taxidermied monster heads. "Many interesting bits of information can be found at the Museum of the Smith's son, Ian."

Along with the Expert Rulebook, the Expert Rules set also came with another set of dice (again, stolen from me twenty years ago) and a copy of the other contender for best known D&D adventure of all time, X1: The Isle of Dread. That's what we'll be looking at next week, where we'll visit the D&D equivalent of Skull Island and encounter so many dinosaurs. Also, evil mind control salamander guys. Seriously, they're the worst.

Ups and Downs

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This first week of Free-to-Play has certainly had its highs and lows.

Ups and Downs

This was relatively mild for Entity

On the one hand, it makes me positively giddy that there are so many people who want to play WildStar. On the other hand, all that interest has translated into some major problems for WildStar’s megaservers. After struggling for days with lag and queues on my main server, I finally gave up and rolled an alt on Entity-2.

Ups and Downs

It is worth making the switch

Entity-2 has been a pleasant surprise. It feels a bit like the game shortly before the F2P launch – there’s always people around but nowhere near the mob on Entity. One big difference from that time is that the low-level zones are bustling again now. There always seem to be people looking for groups to kill bounty board targets and the like. Dungeon and PvP queues are cross-server, and even as a DPS I’ve had really short (~5-10 min tops) queue times.

If you are new to WildStar or coming back as a free player without a lot of social ties I would strongly encourage you to choose Entity-2 or Jabbit-2. The play experience is much better there for now. If you have friends you want to keep in touch with you can always “account friend” them and you should still be able to chat. For veteran players, if the crowds are getting you down I would encourage you to transfer or roll an alt on the new servers as well. As a bonus, making some alts there will let you keep a few extra character slots when the servers get merged again!

It is hard to believe we’re only one week into this Drop. The congestion-based issues seem to be improving a bit every day, so hopefully soon they’ll be nothing but memory. With a little luck the revitalized crowds will still be around to see the game in its best light.


Ups and Downs