Category: Gaming

General gaming comments

RPG Nostalgia

On June 23, 2016

I have written two blogs that have discussed my running a D&D campaign using the Fantasy Grounds virtual tabletop software. Dungeons and Dragons is arguably the first fantasy role playing game in the modern use of the term, and it is certainly the most popular. It was an easy choice for me to make as the game system to start using again as the FG software has a license for the D&D rules and there is a lot of already prepared adventures which greatly reduces my preparation time. My friends all played it as well, so it was simply a matter of learning the changes in. 5th edition (the game is pretty much completely changed from the older 1e and 2e we used to play but the concepts are the same).

I started with D&D when I started playing in high school as well, as most people did. For me, that was around 1980 and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (the first hardcover set of rules) was just being released around then (the first three rule books came out between. 1977 and 1980). The first game I played in was AD&D and the first rules I owned was the blue box rules for D&D as the game was actually split into two branches back then. I slowly acquired the three hard cover rule books and switched over the AD&D by the end of high school. This was a major purchase for me back then as I was paying for it with allowance money and extra cash from delivering newspapers.

Not long after I started CEGEP (community college, the Quebec system splits school into high school, CEGEP and then University), I fell in with a new group of gamers and I brought some of them into my long running campaign and that was AD&D at the time.

One of the most fundamental rules in D&D is the concept of classes. In D&D, at the very start of character creation, you choose a specialty. The basic classes are fighter, cleric (healer), magic user (fragile but lots of damage and utility) and thief (now called rogue). There are rules for playing two classes at once or starting with one and then switching to another, but most people picked one class and stuck with it. This fit many of the archetypes you can find in fantasy books, at least on the surface. Conan is known as a mighty fighter. Gandalf is dressed in wizard robes and casts spells and gives sage advice. Usually the main characters of a fantasy novel do not cast spells and if they do, it is just something on the side as a minor power.

However, this is really not what most of the novels portray. Conan actually spent most of his youth being a thief, climbing walls, picking locks and he never lost that even years later when he was a king and leading armies. The image of Gandalf as just a spell caster fails when you consider that he carried a sword and directly confronted the Balrog with his sword and he was written as fighting orcs with his sword (his ride to Helm’s Deep, for example). The concept of character classes and the other associated choices you made, like alignment, all worked well enough as game rules, but there was a certain hollowness in them. The modern versions of D&D have partially fixed this and have greatly deemphasized alignment to be more flavor than a hard rule to be followed with consequences, but 30 years ago these were deeply written into the rules.

One final thing that was present in the early D&D days is that there was not much published information about the world you were supposed to be playing in. There were scatterings of flavor that could be found in some spell names that were named after famous characters from the formative campaigns that Gary Gygax, one of the main creators of D&D, had run, but the world of Greyhawk that much of this had come from was not really published yet and the main rules were generic. The honest expectation of TSR (the company publishing the rules then) was that the Dungeon Master would just create their own world and adventures. Even today, most of the money comes from selling the rules books, not the published adventures.

During that time, there was no Internet as known today and obviously no online shopping. Almost all RPG products were sold in hobby stores and you made your choices by looking at products on racks in the store. One game system that had come out in 1977 and quickly gained a good reputation was a system called Runequest. I saw it in a store and looked through the rules quickly. There was a mention that the critical and fumble table was inspired by experience on the tourney fields of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and I was sold on the game. I actually cannot remember if I had joined the SCA by then (I joined in 1984), but I had certainly heard of it and that one fact was enough to draw me in.

I will go into a more detail about Runequest, and why is was different than D&D a little later on, but I want to address the current wave of nostalgia for older style RPG games. RPG games have been around in the market since the mid-1970’s and with the publication of the AD&D rules, were very available from 1980 onwards. That means that there is a player base stretching back 40 or more years. The usual pattern is playing during teen years and into college and then in person gaming going mainly dormant once people graduate, the playing groups scatter as employment begins and time becomes much more limited as careers start taking over and first babies start showing up. Some people keep playing along, but many stop playing. I was still actively playing RPG (first AD&D and then Champions) when I moved to New Jersey in the early 1990’s, but that was more of an accident because the SCA group of friends I was part of had a Sunday game that I joined. Once I moved away from NJ and started moving every two years, my RPG time was mostly buying the new editions of D&D and reading the rules and missing playing.

With the long time span of the games being available, many players are now in their 30’s and 40’s (I am about to hit 50). Many have teen age kids that are discovering the games themselves and as a fact of life, by then most people own houses, are more settled and their kids are old enough that they do not require so much time. Online games are fun enough, and games like Warcraft just climbed on the shoulders of the tabletop RPG before them, but there is something missing as compared to playing a more pure pencil and paper RPG.

You can start playing again, like I have, with the newer versions of the rules, but that does not quite capture the feeling of the original games that many of us now play. There was a huge schism and split back when the D&D rules moved from 3e to 3.5e to 4e. Wizards of the Coast (the new owners of the D&D rules) has decided to open up their game much more to the public and had created an Open Gaming License (OGL) that allowed people to create adventures and even rules using the D&D rules as a base. Many people moved over to a 3e clone called Pathfinder during that time, but the OGL actually allowed people to copy even the original D&D rules and create clones of those systems. There was a big movement then which has continued called Old School Revival and the whole thrust is to have games similar to the origins of the rules. Adventure modules are more raw and anyone you meet in the adventure is probably hostile and can be killed. The adventures tend to be classic dungeons that you enter that have traps and monsters in them.

The start of this movement goes back to the OGL and the edition split, but Kickstarter has been like adding nitro into the fuel for it. The main distribution for games that are part of this movement is the One BookShelf, mainly found on www.drivethrurpg.com and www.RPGnow.com . There, you can buy PDF copies of the rules and adventures to go with the rules.

Available at www.goodmangames.com

I mainly back board games on Kickstarter, but I also have backed two “nostalgia” games. The first is Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) 4th edition. The Kickstarter was to reprint and clean-up the existing 3e rules. DCC is not a pure OSR game in that it is not a clone of the D&D rules, but it is very similar to the original rules and it tries to copy the spirit of the way the games used to be played. The other Kickstarter I backed was a reprint of the classic Runequest rules, the same rules I played with 30 years ago. Once I receive the hardcover version of DCC (very delayed from the original promised date which seems to be a constant Kickstarter problem) I will do a review of it, my feeling about Runequest are below,

Runequest is a great variation of RPG rules. What made it very different than D&D 30 years ago (and what still is true) is the fact that there are no classes and that the game system is very tied to one world – Glorantha – which gives the rules a lot more flavor and depth. The system moved from a D20 basis that D&D had to a percentage based system, essentially a D100 which is nominally done via 2 D10 with one being the tens and another being the ones.

Unlike D&D, where you advance in levels and get better at hitting opponents and you hit points increase each level, Runequest has no levels and no experience points. Your Hit Points (how much damage a character can take) is determined by one of your attributes, your Constitution and your HP are spread through different locations of your body. Your armor absorbs damage instead of making you harder to hit. You can, potentially, increase your Constitution and thus your hit points, but you never have that many HP and you don’t get a bigger and bigger pool like D&D gives you.

To be clear, this is just flavor, in D&D you really do not take more damage, your increased HP represent your increased skill to avoid damage that would have killed someone less experienced, but the rule mechanics in Runequest are just more like what you would expect from real life.

You improve attributes by spending money and training. You improve skills by using them successfully which gives you a chance to get a better score. Every character can use battle magic and as you increase your Power attribute you can use more and more.

As the name says, as you grow in experience and power, your character will eventually undertake a quest to get their “rune” which represents their bond to their god and the magic of the world. A character with a rune is much more powerful and is called a Runelord. The game world is set up so that as adventurers increase in power, they start to be able to effect the world in greater and greater ways. It is in the lore of the world that experienced adventurers, like the player characters, were responsible for questing and recovering the dead Sun God early in the history of the game setting.

My group had fun for years playing in that world and using that system. The recent Kickstarter has resulted in a reprint of the rules and the original adventures and city settings that were published back then. All will be available in printed form from www.chaosium.com . I highly recommend that you give the system a try. If you are like me and need to run your game online as your friends are all scattered about, the rule sets for DCC and Runequest are available on Fantasy Grounds (www.fantasygrounds.com) . These are community supported rules (an official rule set for a later edition of Runequest is available) and there is little to no already prepared adventures you could purchase, but the VTT itself does support the games.

Dungeons and Dragons:Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game Review

By Michael

On June 9, 2016

In Board Game, Gaming, Review, RPG

This is a review of the board game version of Temple of Elemental Evil. There is an old module version for AD&D, the older pencil and paper RPG version, but this review is on the board game. The board game was released in 2015 along with the module Princes of the Apocalypse, an updated and new 5e take on the original Temple of Elemental Evil module. In an earlier post about business travel I mentioned www.meetup.com as a way to find an activity to pass time and this is a typical style of board game you may find at a meet-up.

This review is based on my playing experience with my teen age daughters, several sessions at the local board games meet-up (via www.meetup.com) and some solo play. The tldnr version of the review is that the game is good and fun and I recommend buying it (handy link at the bottom of the review).

(game in full swing)

Dungeons and Dragons:Temple of Elemental Evil (ToEE for the rest of this review) is a tile and miniatures dungeon exploration game using a cut-down version of the full D&D rules set. You can have up to 5 players with each player controlling a hero in one of five classes. Each hero is represented by their own plastic miniature and comes with a cardboard tile that lists the base abilities of the hero. The five classes are Fighter, Ranger, Cleric, Wizard and Rogue. The Ranger and the Wizard are represented by female miniatures and the cleric is somewhat indeterminate. The sex of the hero makes no difference in the game and all heroes are fully clothed and should be appropriate for people who dislike the stereotype of scantily clad females in the fantasy genre.

The miniatures (about 40 different ones counting the 5 heroes and all the monsters) are well done and detailed, but they are made of fairly soft and bendable plastic and my game arrived with two of them broken. They were easy to fix with a dab of modeling glue (anything that works well on plastic will be fine). I have seen pictures online where they have been painted up and for the most part they are in the same scale as is generally used in tabletop RPG playing, so the game is a fairly cheap source of miniatures if that is something you are looking for. The soft plastic can result in them bending a little (the doppelgänger monster seems to suffer the most from the problem) but they can be softened and reset using boiling water if you are so inclined.

(Hero miniatures, monsters, special monsters, detail)

I would rank the quality of the components to be pretty high. The tiles and many of the counters and tokens are well printed and thick. The colors are vibrant and they are well printed. The cards are good as well, but since Wizards of the Coast also does Magic the Gathering I would hope so. I used clear card protectors (actually illegal in Magic as small differences in the card back might be seen) so I could see the different card backs.

The storage in the box is so-so. The cards all do not fit once you put protectors on them and the miniatures basically are all tossed into a heap. You can put them back into their plastic baggies but that does not provide much protection. I bought extra bags to hold all the tokens.

ToEE is meant to be run as a campaign where the adventures are run in sequence and the characters you use have an opportunity to improve, but it does not have to be. There are 13 premade adventures. 3 of these are town adventures and 10 are dungeon adventures. Typically you have to either retrieve an item or make it to a specific tile or kill a specific monster to win. The game is a cooperative game, players cannot attack each other (with the exception of the very last adventure that introduces a traitor mechanic). You either win as a group or lose as a group. You lose if someone dies and there are no more resources left in the game to bring you back.

The game mechanics are pretty straightforward. Each turn is three phases which are basically your move, explore, and then run any villains or monsters that showed up and play out any encounters. During your turn, you can move and do one action. The move can be split up before and after your action.

The heroes all have the same statistic categories and these are shared with the monsters as well (not all of them, some like surge are heroes only). The base statistics are armor class or AC, Hit Points or HP, Speed, and Surge Value. Each hero card also has a special ability unique to that hero and lists what extra abilities the hero could have (represented by cards). Your AC is how hard you are to hit, the roll on a D20 (twenty sided die), including any modifiers, has to be greater than or equal to your AC for you to be hit or for you to hit a monster (monsters also have AC). Your HP (and monsters’ HP) are how much damage can be taken. When you go to zero you die. Speed is how many squares you can move each turn (each tile is divided up into a grid) and Surge Value is how many HP of damage you heal if you play a surge token (generally limited to 2 in total and used your next turn after you die). Surge tokens are the resource that bring players back after they die.

Each hero is modified by a choice of cards that the hero is equipped with. These are at-will, daily and utility action cards. The cards contain the rules for them. A typical at will card is a weapon or spell attack that will have an attack modifier, damage done, and perhaps other special rules written on the card. Some actions, like daily actions, can only be done once per game.

The goal of ToEE is to keep exploring. If you do not explore, you get an automatic encounter and almost all of them are bad and could damage your entire party. If you kill monsters, you can trade in 5 experience points worth of them to negate an encounter, but encounters are the built in clock to keep you pushing forward.

When you turn over a new tile, there are several consequences that could happen. Each dungeon tile has either a white or a black triangle. The triangles are used to indicate which edge is joined to the tile you just explored from and if there is an encounter created by the new tile. White triangle means no encounter, and black means there is an encounter.

There are symbols and sometimes names and other features on tiles. Unless the adventure you are playing says otherwise, name and special symbols such as cult symbols mean nothing. Little horse heads indicate monsters (0-3 per tile), Red X means place an upside down trap token there.

Monsters are chosen by drawing cards from the monster deck and the cards have the monster statistics and rules. Each monster also has a miniature to be placed on the game board. Most of the miniatures are well done with good detail and a few are quite large. They certainly add to the flavor and fun of playing the game. Each monster is played by the player that brought it into play and only activates during that player’s turn. The monster cards contain the rules on how to play the monster.

(monster card, hero equipment, encounter and treasure)

There is a lot of dice rolling in the game and there is only one D20 included with the game so I suggest that you toss a few more into the box if you have 3 or more players to speed the game up and reduce searching for where the die has gotten to. Like any game that relies on dice, players can get hot or cold streaks and that can swing the outcome of the game.

Each adventure takes about 45 minutes to play if you have three or more players plus about 5 minutes to set the game up. I was able to explain the basics to new players in about 5 minutes. With. A group of 5 brand new players, several that did not really get the mechanics for a few turns, we played an adventure in about 1.25 hours, but that is the longest we have gone. I played it twice in the regular board game meetup I go to and we won the first adventure and lost the second and the loss mainly was due to bad dice rolls and several very unfortunate encounters that was drawn. The bad dice rolls meant that we did not kill monsters and generate experience points that could be used to negate the encounters.

There is a story that goes with each adventure and the objectives tie to the story, but other than that the story is more flavor than anything else. The game can go for stretches of just killing monsters and gathering treasure.

I would not call it a very deep game, but there are tactical choices to be made. Depending on how well you did, additional (and harder or better) cards are added to the decks and 13 different adventures and 5 heroes to choose from does give it reasonable replay value.

I recommend the game and I think you get pretty good value for the money and most people that like fantasy games and don’t mind dice rolling would enjoy it. If you have a regular group you could play an adventure each session and your characters will advance and improve as you successfully complete each adventure. Because it is a fully cooperative game, it may also help when you have a mixed group with some competitive players and others that don’t play just to win.

Buy the game at Amazon.com

In the name of the ocelot – benefits of role playing

By Michael

On April 14, 2016

In Gaming, RPG

I wrote a while ago about starting the play D&D again after many years away from the game. I am using a virtual table top program called Fantasy Grounds (www.fantasygrounds.com) to play with Teamspeak running on my NAS in order to have the voice component (the company provides their own public Teamspeak server but I prefer to have a private server). My group has been playing pretty much every week for the past few months. It is a little rough with my time in Asia to make the games work but luckily I have a lot of control over my schedule.

The group I play in features three of my old friends from Montreal, including my cousin Mark who introduced me to the game when I was in high school. One is a friend I made when I started playing Magic. The final of five is my daughter Sarah who is 19 at the time of writing this blog. Sarah has heard me talk about roleplaying games (RPG) for all her life and she has been a gamer since she was a kid. She never really got a chance to play D&D except for one year in a boarding school where there was a gaming group. Since we have been back in the San Francisco area she has been unable to play. My friends were happy to include her in the group.

We are almost done with the Lost Mines of Phandelver and I have been very happy with both that module and Fantasy Grounds itself. The module is a good balance of a sandbox and a linear story and has memorable characters and a good story to run through. Fantasy Grounds is simply superior as a way to play the game if you need to play remotely. The automation makes combat much faster than what you would have sitting at a table playing with paper and dice and this is important when playing online as the social experience is different when sitting around a table.

Some of the features that makes Fantasy Grounds good are things like automating the Turn Undead feature for clerics. In open room the players were being attacked by almost three times their number in zombies and the cleric (Ed) raised his holy symbol high and turned the undead. It was very quick to target the zombies and resolve it all at once instead of saving throw after savings throw manually rolled. In combat, if a monster has a resistance to a certain amount of damage there it is automatically matched against what the characters are using against it.

Nothing is perfect, zombies do not automatically save when they go below zero from damage, Sleep spell is not automatically resolved and you need to be careful to target within the system or else you can waste a roll. You can draw on the map, but area of effect spells like Web do not trigger just because someone walks into where they are. There was one evening when the fantasy grounds server was down and we could not get the game up and running because we could not authenticate the licenses. However, the whole group is getting more familiar with the interface and the games run very smoothly now.

In fact, the games are running so smoothly using the VTT, that the immersion is very much like playing in the same room. We laugh laugh and joke and talk about our week at work or old war stories or whatever comes to mind. If someone can’t make it one week, I have the character sheet right there and I can easily run their character for them. It is a little dangerous to skip a session as something unfortunate like the rogue being used as a battering ram to open doors might happen, but at least it is easier to do and bookkeep compared to a pure paper game.

I often get questions from people that know. about RPG like D&D about why I like to play and what the benefit is. The only real answer is that they are social games and an excuse to get people together and talk and live through a story that they make together. This is nothing different than a regular poker game or golf game that brings friends together for the enjoyment of each other’s company.

Games can also be a good way to try out ideas or emotions that you will need to use outside the game in a safer environment. Corporate trainers use games all the time in training sessions. Games can teach real world examples much better than just showing a PowerPoint slide and lecturing. My favorite example is the beer game at the beginning of the book The Fifth Discipline in which the object is to react to external demand signals while running a factor that makes a specific brand of beer. The game teaches several important lessons about understanding demand drivers and how to react to them and playing the game teaches the lesson a lot better than just reading about it.

Same as well for the different team puzzle solving games that are the favorite of corporate trainers. One of the goals of such games is for participants to role play different roles, and that includes being the leader of the team. Often each participant will get their chance to assume command of the team, and the personal interaction to think through and solve the puzzle comes from how will the new leader can marshal team resources, including the ingenuity of the team members.

When playing D&D, the character classes alone lead to different roles. Some classes are better at physical combat and those will tend to be in front and the first to engage. Some are good at sneaking around and often tend to play the role of scout, sometimes indoors where one class is better and sometimes outdoors where another class can take over those duties. Other classes are best at a supporting role or are quite powerful but much less armored and thus need the stinger fighters to be in front of them to protect them.

Those are just the base attributes of the classes (fighter, wizard, cleric and thief being the main archetypes). D&D has different races, each with their own set personalities. You can play any gender you want for your characters, you are not restricted to playing a character of your actual gender. You get to invent the backstory for your character and react on the fly. You can even role play romance or other adult topics if your group wants to. My much older players are not really interested in such things, but pretty much any topic is open when playing. I always caution people that once you more into those areas you run a very high risk of offending a player, even if you are not trying to, so make absolutely sure you understand what your players want before you go down that path. I also caution people when playing in a group you do not know to tone down comments and stay away from religion and politics, but that is normal advice when doing any activity with strangers.

I recently had a reminder of how emotionally invested a player can get in to game. In a good game, there will be even more emotional investment. My daughter Sarah is playing a ranger in my game and she has an ocelot as an animal companion. Last week a monster called flaming skull casually launched a fireball at the group of party members away from the zombies they were fighting. I targeted everyone, and then Fantasy Grounds rolled the saves and then rolled damage (which was above average). Everyone saved except for the brave and cunning ocelot and the damage was enough for instant death to the poor cat.

The game speeds things up a lot, but by rolling saves it does remove a little of the sense of ownership you get when you have to save or die. It all happened very quickly, in the very first round of combat. No one had even seen a flaming skull as a monster (me included) and the party had already defeated large numbers of zombies in the recent past so no one was very concerned.

I also found out that Sarah has never lost a character that she was attached to before. All the rest of us are experienced and have lived through it, and an animal companion is easily replaceable now. However, the ocelot was well loved by the party and we forget playing online that Sarah is much younger than us (30 years younger in some cases) and the ocelot is a sign of our complete acceptance of her in the group. That and not sending her killer viruses for rolling record numbers of 1 in a row.

The ocelot had worked itself into the lore of the group. In a few encounters in earlier sessions, the player characters ran into a streak for bad luck but the ocelot hit over and over again and mowed the monsters they were fighting down. An encounter with a green dragon had gone south and Mark lost his magic user because he failed his save. The session before that the group had uncharacteristically not searched one room carefully and missed a Revivify scroll that could have saved him. I had the ocelot bound over to the party with the scroll tied around its neck (DM intervention) and Sarah basked in the glow from hero heroic cat. Sonny was so impressed with the ability of the ocelot to hit monsters that he started chanting “in the name of the ocelot” before key die rolls he had to make.

So Sarah was a little shocked that something went so south so fast. Just a normal encounter with some zombie. And suddenly the loyal ocelot was gone. It shook her pretty badly when it happened, especially since voice only does mean you miss the cues. She is a true gamer, once she rallied a little bit, the first two things she did was to ensure that I applied her save bonus to the animal companion and that it started off with full hit points for the first hit die. Even with her bonus the save was still missed and the ocelot did die. She was still a little shocked and only mechanically did the next round of combat and even ended up being the character that put the killing damage onto the flaming skull. We talked after the session and she agreed that the monster did the right thing. She is well along the normal path of grief, but the fact that there was grief shows the power of playing a RPG.

The ocelot itself can be replaced. It has brothers and sisters that will come to serve when the Ranger calls. I even have to double check the map to make sure the radius would have got everyone (I think it would have). I can do a DM intervention and save the loyal and fierce ocelot even though it dying and a sibling being called to serve is a good role playing story element. Sarah has gravitated towards that as the resolution.

The fact that we have stories like the ocelot and the fun and jokes around it is why I play D&D and why I like to DM. It is also why games and role playing for corporate training are good, but you need to watch the reaction of the people participating closely.

In the name of the ocelot I thank you for reading my blog this week and I hope you have similar stories to tell if we meet in person.

Player’s Handbook (Dungeons & Dragons)

Monster Manual (D&D Core Rulebook)

Dungeon Master’s Guide (D&D Core Rulebook)

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

Magic the Gathering – Planeswalking for fun

By Michael

On March 24, 2016

In Gaming, Magic the Gathering

Last week I did a top level blog on board games and I previously did one on Dungeons and Dragons. This week I will tackle something a lot more difficult, discussing the collectible card game Magic the Gathering. There is a link between MtG and D&D, both are owned by a company called Wizards of the Coast which is a subsidiary of Hasbro. For the rest of this blog I will just say Magic instead of Magic the Gathering as that is what most players call it. It was the original name for the game before it was decided that Magic could not be used as a trademark. It was also a “Deckmaster” game which is on the cards today but has not been used in any real way since almost the beginning of the game.

Magic has been described as one of the best games invented. It also is a tremendous profit center for Hasbro. I am not going to go into the origin story of the game, it has been told many times before and it is easy to find with a search. One of the key innovations was a random assortment of cards (15 in total) sold in a pack not much different than hockey cards (OK, baseball cards for my mainly American reading audience). Unlike a pack of playing cards, you did not get everything you needed to play in one pack and you did not know what was in the pack before you opened it. Today the game is going strong with both physical packs and digital packs being opened in record numbers. Even online, you still open a pack of 15 cards at the same retail price as the physical cards. The collectible nature of the game added an extra foundation to the game. WoTC still protects the original collectors be promising not to reprint certain cards.

Although I will not explain the origin of the game, I will cover the basics. Each player, and the game is usually played as a two person game, best 2 of 3, is considered to be a planeswalker. The game universe accepts that there is a multiverse and the planeswalkers can move from universe to universe. The energy source is mana and the mana comes from the land beneath you and it comes in 5 favors linked to the type of land plus “colorless” mana that does not come from the land. The colors of mana are white, blue, black, red and green and they are five points around a circle to represent the colors and the adjacent colors are allies with each other and the opposite colors are enemies. The land types are plains, islands, swamps, mountains and forests.

You use the lands you play from your hand to generate the mana you need to play other cards. The more mana a spell requires the more powerful the spell is (not always, there are better cards and worse cards printed but that rule normally works). You can only play one land a turn (all rules can be changed or broken) so powers ramp up over time and you also need the right color of mana for the spell you want to cast.

Spells are divided into a few basic categories. Creatures, sorceries, instants (faster sorceries), enchantments and artifacts. Since a main part of the game is that rules can be changed or broken by the text on any card you can only take that as a general guideline. A basic spell just needs one specific color mana plus any other color to cast. Some spells (called gold spells) require more than one color of mana to cast. Some spells resolve immediately and some stick around. Creatures are a good example of a basic spell that sticks around and can attack or defend in the future (all rules can be changed and creatures can die and can be resurrected). Each land type/color has a basic personality (search Mark Rosewater color pie if you want a detailed explanation of this).

Each player starts with 20 life and the game ends when someone goes to zero life or runs out of cards to draw. There are three typical ways to play. Constructed decks are at least 60 cards with no more than 4 of any one card except for lands (these have additional restrictions and rules an change based on cards played). Sealed deck is played with 40 card decks built. From a card pool you are given (normally sealed packs plus extra lands). Draft is also played with a minimum 40 card deck except that you choose the cards you play with by opening packs and choosing one card and then passing the remaining cards to your opponents.

This may all sound complicated, but WoTC has invested a lot of time and effort into teaching tools and apps. Just go to www.wizards.com to the Magic section and look for the PC or smartphones apps and you can quickly learn how to play.

The true genius of Magic is that the text on the card can modify any rule. Usually a card does not modified a standard rule, but they can. The mix of the randomness that comes from shuffling cards, the rules not being constant and the skill that each player brings creates a game that is not only just worth playing but a game I think that everyone should try at least once.

Just to give some examples:

Hockey cards (collectible)

Basic land types

Normal spells (including a foreign language card)

Non-standard lands, artifacts, and spells that require more than one mana color

Foil, mana color choices, land that makes no color mana, a card that contains two cards and a card that has been printed at different rarities over the years.

As can be seen from the pictures, the most prominent part of each card is the art. This was another decision made early in the game development. The art makes each card distinctive and easy to identify. I own several original art pieces that I purchased from the artists that created the art for the game.

The second major element of the game is the rules box below the art. This is where any additional rules or effect that the card has are described. The top and bottom is used to display the basic parts of the card that do not vary too much from card to card. These are the mana cost to play the card, the card name, the card type, and if a creature, the power and toughness of the creature. The rules text explains the rest of what you need to know about the card.

The cards and the game itself is fun, but the social scene around the game is another key part of the appeal. The game is so large and successful that WoTC runs a Pro Tour with a large structure around it. New cards are released on a regular basis and existing card are rotated out of standard play so the game is always changing. There is a large internet based community that is constantly refining new decks. As a physical game, you need to play in person against other players and that represents a social outlet and chance to meet new people. The game is global and published in many languages so even if you travel to China you can find players.

I enjoy the game because it is a good game. But I ended up loving the game because of the people I met and played with. When I started playing in my current town in the SF Bay Area, I quickly found a store and ended up with a good social network from the players in the store. One of the regular Magic players I met then is playing D&D with me now. When I moved to Singapore, there was a team-based tournament and I reached out on the Internet to find a teammate and to this day the guy I found (Gabriel) is a good friend. I traveled to NYC and met BDM (Brian David-Marshall) who was running the main store in NYC for Magic when I met him. BDM is a journalist and historian covering the game and the Pro Tour and when he traveled to Singapore he already knew me and met Gabriel. So he was able to sample local food recommended by a local. He has returned the favor to me in NYC several times.

Magic is a friendship game. Anyone that has been playing it for a while and goes to competitions quickly expands their social circle. Any city or town that has a hobby store that sells Magic will have a Friday Night Magic tournament (normally draft) and you can meet locals there. I have been in some small towns and still met Magic players. You can play online as well, so even if there are no local players, you can always find someone to play with. I met pros like Jake and John and just regular people that liked the game and everyone was always friendly.

One more ironic point. I bought Hasbro stock a few years ago under the theory that their dividends would cover what I spend playing Magic and it is now one of my absolute best performing stock.

So reach out and feel the mana in the land beneath you. Cast some spells, meet some people and enjoy yourself. Just be warned that the game is nicknamed cardboard crack and it can easily draw you deep within itself.

Board Games – New types of fun

By Michael

On March 17, 2016

In Gaming

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