Category: Gaming

General gaming comments

Board Games – New types of fun

On March 17, 2016

I was the president of my high school and my college’s war gaming clubs. So it should be no surprise that I like board games, and the fact that I play D&D and Magic the Gathering as well makes this extend to table top games in general.

There was a time in the 80’s and into the 90’s that it was thought that board games were a dying breed. Sales stagnated and went down and video games seemed to be the replacement. There were not that many new games sold in the USA and the old standbys like Monopoly, Clue and Life were rarely played. Even games like Risk which are more involved than many other games only had a basic level of popularity. All the popular games relied on dice and being random.

In fact, while the then mainstream games were dying out, other games were growing in the background. Dungeons and Dragons is a good example. It started out in a small crowd that liked miniature war games and then hit critical mass and started be played all over the country. Magic the Gathering was release in 1993 and was an immediate hit and has grown in popularity every year since. My war gaming interest introduced me to Diplomacy which I still think is one of the best games I ever played and probably has the most total hours of game play for me in a board game (D&D and MtG best it but are not board games).

Diplomacy was actually a template for the games that would come over to the USA and restart board game playing. They are generally called Euro games or German games. These games tended to have a few distinct features, and one of these was that they did not use dice to control movement or to resolve a game element. They were not a random chase across a board. They also tended to be symmetrical in that each player started off with the same resources. A lot of the games were around gathering resources and building something, not a direct competition to attack and take out the other player. Chess is a good example of the symmetrical start and the non-random game except it is much more combative than the wave of games that came from Europe. These games were competitive, but you generally were not attacking the other player.

One example is Settlers of Catan (which is now just called Catan). This a very typical “German” game right down to as little as possible text on the board or the cards being used in order to increase international appeal. The game uses tiles which are either randomly drawn and placed or placed in a specific manner to make the game as fair as possible for all players. The quality of the components is high compared to the usual American family board game. The rules are simple enough, but allow for deep strategy. The game is a resource gathering and building game, and you can target other players (move the robber to get them) but it also allows for trading between players which rewards social interaction. Last time I played, my 13 year old daughter won the game.

Similar games in component quality and abstraction moved over from Europe to the USA (Puerto Rico and Ticket to Ride are two other examples) and interest in board games grew. The Internet made it easier to discuss the games with other players (www.boardgamegeeks.com is a famous and popular site for this). New designers in the USA and Europe still faced pretty large obstacles in getting a game out. The developer either had to front the large cost of ordering the initial games to be sold, or they had to interest a game company with no past sales to attract them. That problem has recently been solved by crowd funding sites like Kickstarter.com. As crowd funding grew more acceptable and popular, designers could launch a campaign online and raise the funds needed to do the first printing.

Kickstarter not only helped many new Euro Games get started, it also helped to fund a whole new generation of card and miniature based games. I recently started buying games there starting with a superhero card game called Emergents Genesis and I have since bought several others. Also, companies like Fantasy Flight games published quite a few hits without using Kickstarter like Arkham Horror (Call of Cthulhu based) and Star Wars: X-Wing (a miniatures based space combat game using the ships from the Star Wars movies). Game sales grew and grew over the last 10 years and it is now a popular pastime again.

The availability of better and more interesting games is good, and Kickstarter and similar sites are helping fund new games, but it still does not solve the one basic issue of playing board games. – you need a few people to all be available at the same time and place. There are two solutions to that problem plus other options as well. If you play a very established game like Magic the Gathering, it is pretty easy to find a specialty store that will have players plus Wizards of the Coast has an organized play network including a professional tour. MtG is worthy of a blog in and of itself, and I will do one soon.

Very often the same stores that sell MtG and offer play space for it also sell and offer play space for board games. One other increasingly popular option is board game café’s which are coffee shops built around offering play space for games (including supplying compiles of some games) and building a group of players that love games and are there to play. One final option is www.meetup.com which very often has groups of board game enthusiasts who meet several times a month at different public places.

These type of meet-ups are good for someone who travels a lot to strange cities and has lots of nights alone. It is a good way to meet locals and get some games in against new opponents. Maybe even get to play some new games. I have stopped in local stores to play MtG for years when traveling on business and I plan on starting to stop by some board game cafes in the near future.

I’ll list some different games at the bottom of this blog in case you are curious After reading about it. I will be doing game reviews as well like I have been doing book reviews and I have a large stack of games I will be playing through. One thing that is very different from the old games I played are the quality of the components today. The Cthulhu Wars game has detailed game pieces larger than an average banana and the Arcadia Quest figures are also very detailed and in a fun style. Pandemic is a fully cooperative game where the players try to beat the game, not each other and everyone wins or no one wins. If you want a social gathering game that is quick to learn and play, the card game Fluxx where the rules are constantly changing is quite good.

Enjoy the pictures and I even did an unboxing video for Cthulhu Wars. I will try and figure out how to get it onto YouKu so that readers in China can see it.

Games I recommend

Catan 5th Edition

This is a classic example of a Euro or German Game

Cthulhu Wars

This game is a big commitment in terms of cost, but the playing pieces are amazing and the game play is very deep.

Emergents – Genesis SW

This is the deck building game that got me into Kickstarter. A friend helped to design it and market it. Not a video game even though that is the category.

Arcadia Quest Board Game

A fun RPG game in board game form. Nice game pieces.

Fluxx 5.0 Card Game

Card game where the rules are constantly changing

Pandemic Board Game

Cooperative game – you all win or you all lose.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens X-Wing Miniatures Game Core Set

Play out the small ship space battles from the movies (many expansions)

Diplomacy

Strategy game where the art of a well timed backstab is key to victory

Ticket To Ride

Another classic Euro game

Eve Online – My pirate empire

By Michael

On February 18, 2016

In Eve Online, Gaming, MMO

https://zkillboard.com/character/258455591/

Shocking news, for years I was a hardened criminal, leading a large, organized gang of fellow criminals. So wanted that if I stepped into more civilized areas of the Galaxy, I was almost immediately hunted down by local law enforcement. I ran a large extortion racket and also murdered and plundered for no reason other than to see the world burn.

Luckily for me, all of this was inside a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) called Eve Online. The very first link that starts this entry is a link to a killboard. Eve is a harsh game and if anyone that already plays Eve happens upon this post, killboard stats are almost required to show that what I am saying is not complete BS. To give you an idea of what the game is like, most Eve players will see my 95% success ratio and think that I suck. They will look at what ships I was flying when I was blown up and make fun of me.

To take a big step back, a MMO is a type of computer game where you are playing with many other people at the same time. Probably the first successful game of that type was Ultima Online. The first one that really took off and made a lot of money for its creators was Everquest. And probably the biggest and most famous game of that type is World of Warcraft. Most of the games of this type are fantasy based, but there are a few science fiction ones like a star wars game.

Eve Online is very different that most other MMO games. The differences are what appealed to me the most, but it does take a certain mindset and type of player to make it enjoyable. Eve is very much a sandbox style game where the economy is in the hands of the players as much as possible (and every year CCP, the company that is behind Eve, adds even more player control to the economy). It is one giant shared universe (there actually are two universes, one main one and one just for China). Most MMO divide their games into different “instances” and you tend to play on one server and only interact with the other players on your server. You are all playing the same story and what you do in your subsection of the story does not effect the other players. Not so for Eve, since it is all one universe, what happens at any one place effects everyone. If you go to the main trade hub and buy up all of one component, it will not be available to anyone else until players restock it.

Eve is also much harsher than other games in that the base game in Eve is focused on player vs. player combat with real consequences. In many other MMO, if you die you just respawn somewhere else and do not lose much or any of your equipment. In Eve, if you ship is blown up, then it is gone and all the equipment attached to it is either destroyed or attached to your wreck and you can only recover it if you or your side controls the battlefield. Otherwise it gets looted by the winner.

These main elements – player controlled sandbox, one shared universe and game focus on PVP with consequences are what both make Eve very interesting to play and very hard to play at the same time. If you make a mistake, you can lose everything you may have worked months to accumulate. Since there are many areas of the shared universe where there is no law enforcement at all, you either need to be extremely careful or very strong (usually as part of an organized group) or you will die and lose all of your assets. People can scam you. Players can steal from you. All is allowed in the game.

I have not played the game seriously with lots of time in it for several years. I played pretty steady for almost 5 years, but once I moved to China it became a lot more difficult to coordinate time zones and the Great Firewall. Plus Eve is the type of game that can take up a lot of time and I was spending that time on work and now I am spending my free time on other hobbies. Even so, I keep an eye on what changes in the game and did rejoin to play for a little while last year.

The game is so open ended, that it can be hard to explain it fully. What I’ll try and do is give a brief summary of my “career” in Eve and use that as an example of some of the things you can do.

I started a character called Myrdin Potter in 2006 (I think) and my original idea was to be an industrialist/trading character. I played solo for quite a while, running through the automated content available and slowly learning the game. I was approached quite often by people trying to get me to join their player groups (called corporations) but wanted to develop my character more before making a real commitment. I finally was approached by the Ceo of a corporation called Diplomatic Disruption and I joined them.

The game immediately changed for the better. Everyone has a different personality but Eve Online is meant to be played as part of a group. So I encourage anyone who wants to try to join a corporation sooner rather than later.

Our group did asteroid mining together and also ran the automated missions which are two ways to earn ISK, the games currency. Then another corporation declared war on us and what was a safe and well patrolled area by local law enforcement became a war zone for us. We were inexperienced and easy targets. However, I had chosen my corporation wisely and we pulled together as a team and learned how to fight. The combat against enemy went from us losing to us winning and killing them. The war ended and now I had the thrill of combat as part of my game play.

As I was living in Singapore at the time, I had a lot of hours where I did not overlap with others in my corporation and spent a lot of that time going into low security areas looking for trouble. Eve has three main security areas – High, low and 0.0. High security has space cops that will attack you if you attack other players. Low security has no cops, but if you attack other players your security rating is reduced. Eventually you cannot enter high security again. Finally, 0.0 has no security at all and there are no consequences to PVP other than the results of the PvP itself.

While looking for trouble, I ran into a small corporation that was mainly Greek players that were pirates. They chased me all over the place trying to kill me and we chatted in “local” as they chased me. Eventually we made a truce and I started flying with them hunting down other players.

Things snowballed from there. My corporation formally joined with theirs first as allies and then eventually as part of an Alliance. We were able to broker some living space in 0.0 and I tried living out there for a while. 0.0 is the area with the most content and gameplay possibilities but your assets are always at risk from other alliances that can come and take your space away. The group that had given us living space was pretty weak and not long after we were out there another group came and defeated us time and time again and kicked us out of the area and I return to low sec. The game design is quite good in that some systems have a resource that you get via “moon mining” and some locations are quite valuable. That make other groups want them which leads to conflict.

At this point, our Alliance (which was called Chain of Chaos) went to war with another pirate group over a system called Antem. After a long, several month effort we defeated them and drove them away. Moving to Antem was a big change as it was connected to the main grouping of low security systems and it had decent moon mining resources in the area. We eventually ran into another low sec Alliance called Rooks and Kings (search for their videos on youtube) and had many epic fights against them (their video don’t show when we beat them).

I then spent years controlling that space, first as the number 2 in the Alliance and finally running the whole thing. I went from being a soldier to being a fleet commander with several hundred other players depending me to make the right choices and give the right commands in combat. My skills that allowed me to rise up in my finance career worked well in the game and commanding fleets helped me to think quicker and make decisions faster.

I had years of fun in the game and still recommend it. Some days, when I am lying sleepless and jet lagged my pirate blood starts boiling and I want to go back to ruling space fairly but with an iron fist and a gang of blood thirsty pilots on my voice chat and waiting to kill whatever I pointed them at. I not only fought, I also mined and built ships, from the smallest all the way up to capital ships. I ran space stations and moon mined. I hunted and killed other players and I destroyed other corporations, often costing them years of investment.

Game play examples:

I think the easiest way to see what the game is like is via these two videos. The first captures the immersion you can get while playing the game (these videos are all on Youtube. For readers in China, search for Eve Online in Youku and you can find the same videos):

“I was there”

This second one is a good proxy for what fleet combat is like:

Retribution Trailer

And as a bonus video, one celebrating the sandbox nature of Eve Online

Butterfly Effect

And one more showing my Alliance beating Rooks and Kings in small gang PvP

3D printers are not ready for prime time

By Michael

On February 4, 2016

In 3D Printing, Gaming, Hobbies, RPG

The news quite often mentions 3d Printers. 3D printer companies were the darlings of the stock market not too long ago. Mainstream press is full of little interest stories of the latest thing to be printed out. Technology websites and social networks have many mentions of the “Maker” movement and that movement includes 3D printing and printers.

I am somewhere in the “tech” scene or at least in a few smaller segments. You can tell that by a few things), but having the username “michael” on the an old school computer technology site (Anandtech) is a good sign of how long I have been involved. I have seen mentions of 3D printers for years and occasionally checked prices to buy a printer, but they were always well over $1,000 which seemed too much to me.

One day I noticed this campaign on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1679800548/dragonlocktm-28mm-scale-dungeon-gaming-terrain/

The Kickstarter ended a while ago, you can find the products for sale here:

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/166074/DRAGONLOCK-Dungeon-Starter-Set

For those of you too lazy to click the first link, it is plastic terrain used when playing a roleplaying game to build up a dungeon. If you are not familiar with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons, the players often use 28mm scale miniatures to more easily run the fights that happen within the game rules. I guess you can say they are the
dolls the players use but the players tend to be men so they would at least claim action figures.

If the miniatures are the dolls, then products like Dragonlock are the dollhouses. I have played in a couple of games where the DM had very nice hand drawn maps that were drawn to scale and I have played in a couple of games with folding cardboard terrain, but I had only seen the full out plastic modeled dungeons in pictures from conventions. The existing products are interesting in theory but quite expensive and hard to use because you never seem to have exactly the right combination of pieces to build what you want. A set that is meant to be 3D printed solves those two problems. The cost per piece is small and you can custom print what you need.

I signed up for the Kickstarter and then started researching the current state of the 3D printer market. I quickly discovered two things. There were a fair number of printers below $1,000 today and that reviews on them were all over the map.

I will save myself typing a long description of the different printers out there. Here is a fairly representative list with examples from owners actually using the printers:

http://fatdragongames.proboards.com/board/24/3d-printers

I selected the Wanhao Duplicator I3 V2. I mainly selected it for two reasons. The first is the cost (it was under $300 for me) and the other was the strong user community that could be found in a Google Group. The brand was recommended to me by my friend Gabriel who runs a small drone business in Singapore called Sensory Robotics (www.sensoryrobotics.com ). I had asked him for an inexpensive printer that would meet the specifications needed and he said if I was willing to tinker the Wanhao printers were popular. I was able to find them direct from the manufacturer via Taobao in China for just under $300 shipping included (they are between $350 and $400 in the USA) so I decided to give them a try. The Wanhao I3 is basically a pre-built open source kit printer. It really is not much different in price than buying parts and assembling it yourself, and the design itself is somewhat well tested.

Before I pulled the trigger and bought the Wanhao, I looked through Amazon.com and read the message boards of many of the more popular printer brands. I was quite surprised at the results. For a product that had been sold to consumers for several years and had made it into popular press, reviews were surprisingly bad every printer brand out there.

I am not talking the occasional disappointed buyer on a crusade, I am talking about bad review after bad review. Even even the Printerbot Simple that is recommended by the Fat Dragon, the company that made the Dragonlock pieces, has quite a few bad reviews on Amazon and in the Dragonlock boards. Some printers appear to pretty much never work. Some printers use proprietary printing materials that are much more expensive than standard printing materials. All the printers I researched had very disappointed customers.

Why so much disappointment? Let me explain a little how 3D printers work and what easily goes wrong with each step.

The first is that all of the consumer level printers (under $1,000 and meant to be used at home) are made by smaller companies. The bigger companies that make printers for commercial use all have quite expensive models that are far out of reach of the average consumer. A cottage industry sprung up around some of the older technology that was open sourced by larger commercial companies, and lots of little start-up, mainly of pretty young entrepreneurs were created. Kickstarter still sees 3D printer designs show up on a semi regular basis and two years ago they were very popular on the crowdfunding sites. So that means lots of people with little or no real manufacturing experience started modifying designs or trying new but pretty much untested designs out on the public. Full of Open Source circuit boards and designs that sort of worked but that really were not close to optimal and often had serious flaws.

Before I get to some of the flaws of my particular printer, let me give an overview of the printers and what is done to make a 3D print.

The first thing you need is an actual object to print. This comes in the form of a computer aided design (CAD) file. Typically this is in an .STL format. You can find these files on various internet sites or you can create them yourselves. Many of the people making the files are new to CAD, are using free and not so powerful CAD programs, and probably do not have a lot of 3D printing experience. That means you get a lot of files that very honestly are not set up well to be printed in the first place.

You load the computer design into a program called a slicer. 3D printing is done layer by layer, and a slicer takes the CAD file and slices it into as many thin layers as you have instructed the printer to use. It then generates a series of commands that tells the printer what to do to actually print the device (generally in the form of a printer language called GCODE) and saves that file. A popular free slicer is called Cura. A more powerful but costly program is called Simplify 3D.

Right away, you may have ruined your print. The programs need to have the exact right settings or the code they write does not work. Some files are not well set up to print but an experienced user of the slicer can either change the orientation, break the object into smaller and easier to print. None of this is well documented and the documentation that does exist is written using terms that someone new to 3D printing is unlikely to understand. You even need to measure the diameter of the filament and input it into the slicer program. I hope you have a digital caliper.

Once you have the file ready to print, you then are faced with the printer itself. 3D printers work by melting plastic and depositing it in thin layers. The printer head (the part that melts and deposits the plastic) needs to move in all three dimensions in a consistent and controlled manner. The surface needs to be flat and level to the printhead and the starting distance between the print head and the surface needs to be small but not zero. The basic way of setting the distance is using a piece of paper to slide under the print head and go by feel. If you are a beginner, you have no real idea what it is suppsoed to feel like. The surface must have something to help the first few layers of plastic stick. The print head will move in at least two and maybe three dimensions on rods, gliding on bearings or moved by what essentially are large screws, The file with the instructions needs to be read from a memory card or the computer needs to maintain a good connection for what might be 24 hours or even more.

The rods I mentioned about are often held in place by just a little set screw. Shipping the printer has a good chance of working a rod loose or maybe even bending it. The electronics and cabling are so so on average and shipping may jostle a connection loose.

The standard advice for the printer I bought is to take the extruder assembly apart and replace the gear that moves the plastic filament through it with another one. While you are at it, rotate the heating block to give more clearance when it is at the top. Before you print one item, you have already taken the printer apart. I guess I should mention that the wiring in the older models is defective and can cause a fire. Plus it has been determined that the main circuit board does not properly ground the electricity running through it and it causes temperature readings to swing by about 10 degrees when the heater switches on and off. The suggested fix is to solder a wire from one place on the board to another.

I wish that these types of issues are only from a cheaper kit based one like the Wanhao I bought. However, I would be lying if I said that. I could not find one printer aimed at consumers that did not have a large number of design issues and frustrated users.

Now if you ask me if I like the printer I bought, the answer would be yes. Once I learned and worked through some things, I actually was able (very quickly) to print out the Dragonlock pieces with no issues at all and other files as well. A 3D printer is a fun thing to have and my kids like it and want me to print more things for them. However, these are not even close to being a consumer product. Be prepared to spend time scouring the internet for training tips, to be watching youtube videos showing you how to use your computer and software, and generally spending a lot of extra effort to make the device that you paid for work.

Here are a few pictures of what I have been able to do with my printer. A well known space ship, some Dragonlock pieces (painted and unpainted) and the printer itself.

Playing Dungeons and Dragons again – online this time

By Michael

On January 28, 2016

In Gaming, RPG

I was a big war gamer when I was in my teens and when I was in college. Even when I started in the SCA I made time to play role playing games, driving down to the game that our group had every Sunday. I was even the president of the war games club in high school and CEGEP (community college in Quebec that is different than the USA in that it is required and part of the normal university track).

Other than the very first campaign I played in (my cousin Mark introduced me the his friends that were playing and I started with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1e), I almost always was the Dungeon Master. I played the classic modules, wrote my own modules and even made the trek to Lake Geneva to go to GenCon. I moved my group to Runequest and Champions, but we still played D&D every once and a while. The NJ gaming group also played D&D and I introduced Champions to them.

The influence of my very early days playing D&D still can be seen on my today as the first paladin I played was called Myrdin the Just (old Andre Norton book that had Myrddin in it and I thought two d’s was a waste and dropped one. Yes, I now know that it is for the th sound in Welsh and that character was Merlin but I did not know that then and Google did not exist). So if you know me in the SCA as Sir Myrdin the Just or online games as Myrdin Potter, you can still see the name that I used to play D&D when I was 13 or 14.

Once I left New Jersey for California and then onwards and outwards, I stopped playing D&D. The closest I got was Magic the Gathering and playing Eve Online. I bought the base rulebooks each edition as it came out and always hoped to find a gaming group, but there never seemed to be time. I still was in touch with my old college gaming group and that grew even stronger once we were all on Facebook. I had been tracking the different online tools to play D&D in the background and had bought the 5e books in the hope of getting a group together but it never seemed to work. My daughter Sarah had played 3.5e with classmates when she was in school in Connecticut and was game to join in but I had no other local friends that were interested and my time split between the USA and China made it difficult.

Then I saw a notice that Fantasy Grounds, one of the two main virtual tabletop programs had managed to get an official license to use 5e D&D. I had been looking a little more at Roll20 as an option as it is web-based, but having the official license and materials for 5e D&D swung me over to Fantasy Grounds (www.fantasygrounds.com and www.roll20.net ).

A few basic things to know for Fantasy Grounds:

1) Native Windows only. It works on Macs via WINE but a little more finicky
2) There is a potentially steep upfront cost. There is a free demo, but that only works for all the players if the game master buys the Ultimate License which is $150 (discounted sometimes) otherwise each player needs a full license which is $40 each or Steam has a 4 for the cost of 3 price. They have a subscription option as well and the ultimate license is $10 a month so you could try it for $10.
3) Other than a recent (and large) holiday sale, the official WoTC content is at list price and there are no discounts if you already own the physical books. The new open gaming license for 5e will make this a lot better as almost all will be included for free, but the modules will still cost the GM the list price. If you want the complete Players Handbook, then you need to buy it at list price.
4) It uses a client server approach so you often need to be able to forward ports for your router or use a VPN to allow players to connect if you happen to be in a hotel room. This is for the GM only and the game passes graphics over to the players so if you have limited bandwidth to upload it could go slowly.
5) The user interface is really bad. It works and as you learn it more and more it gets better but there is no real demo or user manual so be prepared to watch YouTube videos or join and learn from experienced players.
6) Windows are bounded by the master game window, so you are restricted to one screen. There is a way to sign on twice as the GM and as a player so you can have one screen display what the players see and another for your GM screen, but be prepared to always be moving things around to find what you need.

With all the caveats above, it really does a great job of allowing online play. A few other things to remember. It is a virtual table top program. Many things are automated but it does not have an AI built in. So the Adam is going to be moving tokens around and handling combat choices.

Here is what Fantasy Grounds does well:

1) Excellent character creation. With the PHB bought, you can drag and drop a lot of the content into your character sheet. It is not dynamic in that you cannot toggle things off and on and you need to pay attention the the bonuses ultimately set, but once the character sheet is set up properly it is very interactive
2) There is a combat tracker sheet that is very useful for running encounters. It tracks hit points and the dice rolling is smart enough that if you target a creature it will calculate if the creature is hit or not and even does critical damage for you. Initiatives are automatically calculated.
3) Spell effects are well handled and again pretty much drag and drop. There is no graphical effect (no fireball exploding) on the screen but the combat tracker is updated with the correct effect that automatically apply. For example, if a character is Blessed, then attack rolls include the additional d4 automatically
4) There is a party sheet that handles treasure and XP awards quite easily
5) The WoTC modules that you can buy all have player and DM maps. The player maps have “fog of war” via a mask mode which lets you slowly reveal (manually) what the players explore.
6) The pre-made modules I bought all have nicely hyperlinked pins in each room and within the actual text for the modules. Text that is in a box which traditionally to be read out loud can also easily be clicked and appear in the chat window
7) The chat window allows you to type in the different game languages. Characters that can read that language see it in English while everyone else sees it in the language script. You can also type private messages to players

Fantasy Grounds does not come with a voice or video option. You need to use a third party application for that. You could just type everything into the chat window, but that is much less interesting than using voice. I do not find that video is needed but some people find it makes a huge difference.

The basic choices are Skype or Google Hangouts which support multiple video and audio chats, Teamspeak, Ventrillo, and Mumble for audio only (you could even do a conference call into a free conference call system). I decided to use Teamspeak as I could run a free server that supported up to 32 people on my NAS (most of the NAS systems out there that have a decent processor and run Linux can run Teamspeak. Not easy but not super hard to set up). There is a Fantasy Grounds Teamspeak server that many players use as well in case you do not want to set something up yourself. There is a Windows and Mac version of the server if you want to do that. Fantasy Grounds is not terribly intensive to run on your computer, but you might as well put the Teamspeak server on a different computer if you can.

I was able to round up 5 players for my new campaign. Three were from my original gaming group when I grew up in Montreal. One I had met in California via Magic the Gathering. Plus my daughter. I paid for the Ultimate license (was on sale) to minimize the out of pocket spending by the others, but all but my daughter ended up buying the full license anyways. I am planning on running one of the more advanced campaigns that Wizards has released (all have been converted to Fantasy Grounds format). For the very first adventure, I decided to go with the Lost Mine of Phandelver. This is the adventure that comes with the introductory rules and I thought it was best because I have not ran a game in decades and most of my players were pretty rusty as well without 5e experience.

We went through a pretty steep learning curve. I tried to connect with everyone before we played our first session so they could roll up their characters and the process was very slow. Took quite a while to figure out how to enter the scores we rolled properly into the attribute box and we did not realize that the character sheets were not fully dynamic so if you changed races you needed to double check the ability scores as it does not seem to cleanly add and remove ability score modifiers once the first one has been applied. Otherwise the process is very drag and drop from the Player’s Handbook. Drag and drop your race, chosen class, background, equipment etc. and the character sheet is populated. The character sheet calculates all the modifiers from your ability scores and displays it in an easy manner. The final result is automatically used by the program in combat or when saving throws or other checks are being made.

I have included some screenshots of Fantasy Grounds to give a flavor of what it looks like, but to be honest once we started to understand more and more how it worked, the mechanics of it faded into the background and gaming took over. Other than the occasional reminder to target before attacking and the need to retread spells and check rules occasionally, it is what it is supposed to be, a table top. Tokens replace miniatures but otherwise the game plays very much like pencil and paper role playing does.

With Teamspeak and the table top set, we have been gaming. That means creating new stories and laughing and worrying together. Spectacular bad luck in rolling fumbles and near party death situations to the players pulling off a cunning plan and mowing down the monsters like grass with the players a turbo charged lawn mower. Lost Mines is a classic style adventure with a fleshed out town with an immediate threat plus rumors and adventure hooks. You can have multiple rooms in Teamspeak so I can either use the chat window in Fantasy Grounds or grab the player and drag into a new room when I need to to to only them.

So now I am DMing again and playing with friends I rarely get to see in person. My daughter is getting to play in an experienced group. Distance playing actually removes barriers of age and sex that sometimes crop up in live games. So even easier to play in a group. And now she is part of the stories my friends can tell. Like the rogue (really want to say thief but they changed the name for 5e) starting that gaming session twice in a row with a fumble resulting in him tumbling through a door and falling flat on his face in front of the enemy. The over confident Fighter playing on a big screen in front of his kids, managing to get himself surrounded and cut-off by bugbears and almost killed while the Ranger rolls so many 1’s in a row to confound all sense of probability.

We even have the fun of the Cleric who just happens to be a PhD in Chemistry quickly sourcing a picture of the particular flask mentioned in the adventure so we can all see what it would look like (and correcting my pronunciation at the same time). The 5e rules even added many of the house rules that became popular during AD&D to make up for the fact that low level Wizards get so few spells and are so weak in combat that they do not have so much to do. Not that the extra cantrips and such make a difference as our Wizard likes to fire his whole arsenal at the first Kobold that shows up which makes the boss fights much harder. To be fair, I am just teasing a little because it actually has worked out fine as killing the early encounters quickly means many less alarms were sounded. It just is another example of how seamless the experience has been, normal teasing and joking comes naturally.

Overall, I would say that it has been a success. My gaming group is up and running again and we get about 3 hours of gaming in every week. We are getting better and better at using the software which automates some of the game mechanics, but enough detail is shown on the screen such that we can follow the flow of what happens which either reminds us of the rules or teaches us the rules. Which is the last point that I will bring up, Fantasy Ground does not teach you how to play D&D. There is no tutorial built in for D&D. You need to learn the same was as someone playing with pencil and paper – read the rules and hopefully find experienced players. Fantasy Grounds helps in two ways. The first is that it automates a lot of the dice rolls and spell resolutions. The second is that the community forums do give you a chance to find game master who is looking for players or where you can list yourself as new and looking to learn how to play and hopefully someone will contact you. A lot easier than asking around in your high school like I had to ages ago. It is even easier and less expensive to play because WoTC just made the 5e an OGL product so Fantasy Grounds released a new version with most of the content you had to pay for before for free as part of the two paid licenses.

I will also make a comment on the 5e rules. This is a little dangerous because D&D has what are often called “edition” wars and the biggest of these was the move from 3 (and 3.5) to 4. WoTC had decided to make an open gaming license for 3e (and 3.5e which essentially was a tweak and fix on some issues with the original 3e rules). There was a pretty big change from 1e (which I learned) and 2e to 3e. For example, the whole way that armor class is determined changed (AC is how hard something is to hit). In the AD&D I learned, -10 was the best AC you could have and 10 was the worst and there were tables that told you the number you needed to roll on a d20 (20 sided die) and that was simplified into a concept of To Hit AC 0 or THAC0. 3e did away with that and instead the higher the AC was, the harder it was to hit with no maximum. AC became the raw number, before any modifiers, you needed to roll on a d20. The move from 1e to 3e also changed the focus from killing monsters to a more story and character based approach. Finally WoTC (owned by Hasbro, btw) also introduced an Open Gaming License which allowed outsiders to freely use the 3e rules.

The short summary of the edition wars which went from older gamers grumping at newer gamers about how much better the old style games were to a complete fracturing of the market as 3e then 3.5e and the 4e which did not have an open license. A company called Paizo created a 3.5e “clone” called Pathfinder and that game actually surpassed D&D in market share and mind share for almost 7 years. It was another version of D&D but not being released by WoTC (or TSR who WoTC bought and which was the original D&D owner). These edition wars were raging right when Warcraft Online and similar games were setting the standards for the industry and pencil and paper games were fading in relevance. I missed the full brunt of the edition wars because I was not playing D&D at that time, but it was all over the gaming websites I kept up with. The edition wars really fractured the marketplace and made it much harder to find a gaming group to play in. Plus gamers can get really, really attached to the rules they favor and refuse to play anything else.

I would say I am more of an “old school” D&D player because of how I started. After a while DMing 5e, I can say that I like it a lot so far. I had not liked all the sub rules which referred to sub rules for 3.5e because it just looked like an arms race where the goal was to find the best rules to sprinkle into your character. 5e has a fair amount of customization of the different character classes, but at least that is well contained so far. Wizards of the Coast just released an updated open gaming license for 5e so I expect that other VTT can provide much better support than they have been previously.

I will do more posts over time on both Fantasy Grounds and D&D, but I think this is enough for now. If you are hankering to relive your old RPG days, the newer online tools let you do what was impossible not too long ago. Look for posts on my long time foray into online roleplaying via Eve Online and discussions on Runequest and Champions.

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Update – The friendly developers at Fantasy Grounds say that their 30 day trial membership is the best way to try out their program and that the recent release of the 5e rules as an Open License has allowed them to add even more functionality without the need to buy the source materials (I still recommend the Players Handbook). I have been using PureVPN with a dedicated ip option to GM from hotel rooms.

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Character sheet – views of a few of the tabs