Blaugust – Page 37

On Fires, Part 3

August 31, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #31

Burning Wheel has probably the best skill system I’ve read as it relates to skill use and advancement. The basic premise is that you don’t get any better by doing things that are easy. Therefore, you’re encouraged to try things that might be somewhat difficult for your character, because that’s the only way you get better. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Burning Wheel rules are long and wordy.

To go along with this, the list of skills goes on for pages. There are the expected skills for weapons and fighting (sword, bow, armor training), an assortment of professional skills (blacksmith, haggling, dye manufacture), sorcery and sorcery-related skills (enchanting, summoning), social skills (intimidate, persuasion, falsehood), and some oddball ones like Strategy Games. There are also open-ended -wise skills that act as knowledge skills. Examples include things like Great Masters-wise, Dirty Secrets-wise, and Poacher-wise, in addition to things you might expect like Forest-wise, Noble-wise, and Tools-wise. (You can make appropriate ones up for your character and take them as non-lifepath skills.)

At low skill levels, you can advance with a few challenging skill tests and a few routine ones, but eventually the routine ones stop counting. If you never push yourself to do difficult tasks with a skill that you’re already somewhat good at, it will never get better. Burning Wheel lacks XP entirely, so this skill progression is how you get better. There are a few alternatives to trying things that you’re going to fail at, however. You can have someone else who is good at a skill teach you, which counts toward the number of skill tests you need to advance.

I’ll probably never actually play in this system, but I have talked to Tamrielo (who is my usual GM) about it. He likes the skill system and the fact that violence is rarely the right answer, but not so much all of the incredibly crunchy bits (that I haven’t actually talked about here). It’s a fun system to build characters in though, so I suspect I might just use it as inspiration for some future characters.

Blaugust Complete

Doing this for the second year was interesting. As mentioned, posting every day is a bit much for me, but this did help me get back into the swing of things. I think I’m in better shape to maintain the 3/week schedule I was in for most of last year. I think I fell into the trap Bel outlined last week, but he’s right, the “epic welcome back post” just doesn’t happen. It’s far more productive to just start writing.

Farewell to Blaugust!

August 31, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 31

It’s finally here, the day we’ve all been waiting for since August 1. Blaugust is ending today, and whether you’re a Blaugust “winner,” participant, or just a regular reader who’s been following me through this month, I wanted to say thank you. Some days were difficult but being part of this huge community of bloggers and readers has made it totally worthwhile.

So how did I do? Well I managed a post for each day so I guess I “win” Blaugust! I’ve had a regular readership of a few dozen loyal folks, with a few days where I got some extra attention. The day of my double post was my best, but there’s no way I will be attempting to post that frequently in the future. Honestly the only way I managed to get through the whole month with daily posts was by making a plan ahead of time with topics, writing prompts, and regular features like Screenie Saturday.

Writing the Shiphand Buddy series in particular was rewarding but also added quite a lot of work since I needed to research and run all of those missions many times in order to write the guides. All that hard work paid off though, since they were featured on WildStar Core!

Time for the money

At the beginning of the month I tried to take stock of my cash savings in WildStar and track it for the month. Unfortunately I got pretty lax about spending money midway through the month. Based on a couple high-cost items I bought, I’m guessing I made a total of around 150-200 plat over the course of the month. Sadly my cash-on-hand is only about 10p. The market has shifted dramatically since the beginning of August with the anticipation of F2P. On the flip side CREDD has gone up a bit in price over this month. Most of my money-making avenues are still functional but are just bringing in far less profit than they used to. Hopefully when the drop lands the combination of lots of new players and changes to gear will help me start churning out the plat again.

Some other game I play when I’m not being a space zombie

I set up my “What I’m Playing” posts in part to have an easy topic for the weekends, but also to try to encourage me to play more games. I succeeded at the first part but not so much at the second, since as the month progressed I played fewer and fewer. Partially that has been due to fatigue and stress, which make me want to stick with easy, familiar games. I may actually try to keep this feature, since it has been fun for me personally to be able to look back and see the record of what I’ve been up to all month.

Blaugust was also a nice experiment in adding some commentary about games other than WildStar here on Moonshine Mansion. I suspect I will continue this. The main focus of this blog will stay WildStar for certain, but I will happily sprinkle in posts about other games once in a while. With F2P coming soon I doubt I will be lacking for WildStar content to talk about for a long time.

At the beginning of the month, I said that all I hoped to get out of Blaugust was to get in the habit of posting more frequently. Since I managed a post every day I guess that was definitely a success. I absolutely do not plan to keep up the daily schedule moving forward, but I do have a lot more respect for the folks that post that often. My new goal is 2 posts per week, which is much more reasonable for my schedule. Thank you all again for taking this silly journey with me. And a very special thank you to Bel for all his hard work organizing this event, wrangling bloggers, tallying votes, and figuring out prizes.

Here’s to a very peaceful and relaxed September!

#Blaugust Day 31: Mystara Monday: Module B1 – In Search of the Unknown

August 31, 2015 by Thalen

Today for Mystara Monday, we'll have a look at the first of the B-series modules: In Search of the Unknown. Written by Mike Carr, it was first published in 1979 as an introductory module to be included in the first version of the Basic Rules. For reasons we'll see shortly it was replaced after about a year by Module B2: The Keep on the Borderlands.

#Blaugust Day 31: Mystara Monday: Module B1 - In Search of the Unknown

Here we see three adventures breaking one of the cardinal rules of dungeon-delving.

B1 is out of the ordinary in a number of ways. TSR had only just begun publishing adventure modules in 1978 and nearly all those released up to this point had been pre-existing tournament adventures. B1 was instead deliberately designed to be an introductory module both for the players and for the dungeon master. The first five pages consist almost entirely of advice for the new dungeon master regarding adventure preparation, the awarding of treasure and experience, and how to be an effective dungeon master.

In the back of the adventure a full 4 dozen pre-rolled characters are provided (although these consist simply of a name, class, and statline) including such luminaries as 'Eggo of the Holy Brotherhood', 'Trebbelos, Boy Magician', and 'Norrin the Barbarian'. Tables and rules for hiring retainers are included too; retainers were still an expected part of D&D at this point, although rather than poor nameless torchbearers and trap magnets B1 presents retainers as NPC adventurers who get a full share of treasure and experience and are mostly intended to fill out an under strength party if you have fewer than six players.

The art for B1 is mostly by David Sutherland, who provided a lot of art for D&D over the years. The copy I have is a later printing that uses a piece by DARLENE that reimagines the scene drawn by Sutherland for the original cover. In both cases, I really think those adventurers are going to regret going around poking at strange fungus.

Seriously, it's probably a shrieker. Quit messing with it.

The adventure itself is a classic two-level dungeon crawl through the Caverns of Quasqueton, presented as the stronghold of Rogahn the Fearless and Zelligar the Unknown, a pair of now deceased adventurers of some renown. The dungeon itself is a sort of build your own adventure kit. Maps of the dungeon are provided along with keyed descriptions of each room but monsters and treasure are each presented in separate lists and must be placed within the dungeon by the dungeon master. It was later decided that this method was overly hard on the GM, which led to B1 being replaced by B2. As far as I'm aware no future modules ever used this method, although some provided additional maps to be used to continue an adventure beyond its published limits.

B1 is one of the few B-series modules that I've never run in a game. In the B1-9 anthology that I used early on, it's represented only by the dungeon maps without even the room descriptions included. It's very much in keeping with the feel of early D&D adventures with strange and possibly PC-damaging features like magic pools, a rock that can permanently raise or lower player attributes, and many fine furnishings and statuary for the PCs to try to lug out and try to sell.

In the end, In Search of the Unknown isn't a bad module, but there's just nothing particularly special about it. In particular the decision to separate the monsters and treasures from the rooms means there aren't any particularly memorable encounters within the adventure. Some of the rooms are interesting, but the monsters are nothing special with no unique or named foes at all.

Next week we'll take a look at arguably the most famous D&D module ever written, B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. Prepare yourselves for adventure in the Caves of Chaos, and remember: 'Bree-yark' is Goblin for 'we surrender'.

Blaugust and Nephalem

August 31, 2015 by Belghast

Last Day of Blaugust

As the subheading says, it is in fact the last day of Blaugust and as such very soon I am going to begin tabulating the results. It has been an interesting month, but also a very quick one. It seems like just yesterday I was kicking off this challenge, and now we are staring at the finish line. It has also been interesting just how many people have participated in one way or another. Even if you did something as simple as retweet a Blaugust post, you are part of this and I thank you. In truth I was not really sure how the turn out for year two would end up looking. The biggest surprise honestly was just how many year one folks came back for this year. You’d think that they would have learned better by the time the second event rolled around. As I sift through the results it is going to be interesting to see just how many folks have completed both years at this point.

The big take away this year is that we have already reached a point where we are just too big to be planned somewhat “on the fly”. Up until July I was still questioning if I would actually go through with a second Blaugust. I was somewhat shocked at the number of people who were looking forward to it. So I pulled things together and we ended up with this year, that went significantly more smoothly than the first. As a result I think for the 2016 Blaugust I will be starting to pull things together about four months in advance. Folks offering to sponsor prizes was a brand new concept to me, and this year we had Anook and KingsIsle Entertainment both chipping in prizes. I greatly appreciate them both, but I am hoping if I start the wheels moving several months ahead I will be able to get a few more people to come on board. It would be awesome to get some game keys donated for a sort of “Blaugust Game Club” like our AggroChat Game Club. Where every Blaugust writer has the opportunity to play a specific game and write about it, because it is super interesting when you collect a bunch of opinions on the same title. I realize we are just how wrapping up, and folks are I am sure sick of it for the time being… but I am already thinking about how to make next year better.

Nephalem Ascended

Friday night when I got home from eating with friends I started a brand new Female Barbarian, and as of last around 8 pm I managed to hit 70 securing at least some of the Season 4 rewards. While I managed to get drug along for a handful of levels, this is still the fastest and most dedicated I have ever leveled in Diablo. In part a huge chunk of it has been that I have largely been leveling with my friend Grace, who keeps pushing me to go do content rather than just piddling around like I normally do. Pushing is the wrong word because she was not even insistent… she just gave me a reason to keep grouping up and doing interesting things. The other big change this season is that I pretty much completely ignored the story line. In Season 3 I attempted to level my way through the story, which is apparently the worst possible way to level these days. Instead I largely started adventure mode from the moment I created the character, and the result is as I leveled I tended to always have legendary weapons that I could craft for my character.

One of the big changes that came with Season 4 was the introduction of the “Season Journey” interface that serves as a way of unlocking the various rewards. Just for hitting level 70 on a seasonal character I unlocked the transmogrification pieces, but in order to get the Portrait Frame and the Pet I have to complete all four Chapters of the Season Journey. As of last night I have completed the first three and they were honestly all pretty easy. The final element that I needed was to defeat one of the major bosses on Master difficulty or harder. Since Belial is the fastest to get to on Adventure mode I popped over there and took him out with relative ease. Now I have to do some of the more grindy things like taking out each of the key masters on Torment difficulty. I also need to finally use the Kanai cube to extract a Legendary power, but I am trying to sort out what sort of power I want to keep. Honestly I feel like I need to read up on how exactly that process works before making any decisions surrounding getting powers from it. I know that once you do this you can choose at least one power as a permanent buff, and I have a few that are really nice.

I really did not spend much time playing Reaper of Souls, and as such I had never actually done a Rift of any sort until this weekend. Grace on the other hand is an expert at such things and as a result I spent some of my “post 70” time last night with her working on Rifts and then the Greater Rifts that follow. I have to say they are crazy amounts of fun, and I am trying to sort out how best to use my legendary gems. Right now I have two of them, and I need to run more Greater Rifts to power up the second one. The first one is now at level 6, but once again I think I need to do some research in how best to utilize them. The game is so much more intricate than I remember it being, and in truth I have never played Diablo 3 seriously. I am having a blast so I guess that is really all that matters. My hope is that tonight our Final Fantasy XIV raid can down Ravana Extreme… but after that… I hope to put in big ole dent in some of these Chapter IV objectives.