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The Master of Disaster: Campaigning on the Side – 06

Due to various scheduling conflicts in the past month, my group and I haven’t been able to play much Dungeons & Dragons. I’m not unreasonable, I know that real life obligations come up and take priority in just about every situation. Normally in our small group of 3 players and myself, I’m able to treat these sessions as opportunities for the characters who are presently there to embark on some of their own personal quests and flesh out their backstories. But earlier this month when one of our players was out, I decided to try out a different role playing game with my group; A game I think they ultimately enjoyed more.

With a man down, I created a quick one-shot campaign in a game called Monster of the Week. Monster of the Week differs pretty drastically from D&D in some key ways, particularly in limiting the amount of things that the players and myself have to manage.

Really quickly, let’s breeze through the basics of Monster of the Week. First, the GM never rolls any dice, and the players only roll 2 six sided dice to determine everything. Secondly, everyone knows what success and failure look like because the numbers they roll have predetermined outcomes. For example, rolling a 7 to 9 for anything is considered a mixed success. A mixed success usually means that the players do what they want, but at a price. Sometimes that price is unwanted attention, a glitch in a magic spell, or damage, but it’s never an unknown outcome because the players get to choose which one of these complications I hoist upon them.

So with all of that in mind, I set my players off into a contemporary setting with the pretext that they were private investigators hired by the city to assist in finding a missing child. One of our characters was a spell-slinging wizard, while the other was a man who had to quell the dark monster inside him by eating everything he could all the time. They also decided they wanted to parade around town via unicycle and penny-farthing bicycle which was a nice touch.

What I really liked about Monster of the Week is how it’s a more role-playing focused game as opposed to a combat focused one. It encourages players to talk to NPCs and garner good relationships with them instead of trying to intimidate and fight their way through every situation because everyone is pretty squishy. And due to said squishy-ness along with the fact that this story took place in a modern town with laws and law enforcement, it made the players feel more grounded in the world and raised the stakes a little bit.

What I think my players enjoyed the most however, was the fact that everything is out in the open and easy to understand. They know that when they roll a 6 or below, that’s a failure, but they get an experience point. They know what questions they can ask me as the GM when they roll to investigate a mystery because they have a list to choose from. None of the mechanics are obscured from the players, they know the moves they can make and the consequences of each of them.

All things considered, I really enjoyed playing Monster of the Week and it was well received by everyone involved. I think we’re all looking forward to returning to it as soon as possible, or at least I know that I am.

Early Impressions: Pine

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After only a few hours with Pine, I came to appreciate its ambitious mechanics and intriguing story, but ultimately found it lifeless and repetitive. It’s unfortunate considering there are a lot of interesting ideas at play in Pine, but I just found that they weren’t fleshed out enough and resulted in a lot of meandering and fetch-quests.

From the outside looking in, Pine is an incredibly charming and colorful, third-person action game that gives off vibes of various Legend of Zelda games. You play as a boy who grew up in an isolated village atop a mountain, which goes about as well as you might think. The mountain collapses, and you plummet down into the unknown land below only to discover that it’s inhabited by various groups of anthropomorphic animals with their own societies and villages.

What Pine tries to do is make you play with these various settlements by maintaining your reputation with these factions in order to accomplish your goal of resettling your tribe somewhere else. Sadly, it sounds more interesting than it actually is. When you walk into a town, there are two points of interest that basically dictate everything about the faction and their attitudes. First are these signs that indicate how this settlement feels about every other tribe out there through a simple color scale: Green is good, white is neutral, and red is bad. It’s said that you could play these tribes against each other and watch them wage war with each other, but I haven’t gotten far enough to see that in action.

The second, and possibly most confusing thing you find by these settlements are things called “donation boxes.” As the name would imply, you can leave gifts for the settlement that you’re by to increase your standing with them. Maybe I haven’t gotten far enough to really see these in action, but a donation box seems to be the way you pay for your heinous crimes. Have you killed too many of a certain tribe or stolen their crops and resources? Just look at what kind of flowers and rocks they like, and dump enough in there until your bounty is paid. I feel like this box undermines the whole concept of having consequences for aligning with a certain faction, but maybe that changes as you get deeper into the game.

Another bit of strangeness comes from how desolate Pine‘s world feels. You’ll see a member of a tribe roaming around, picking up acorns and pine cones occasionally, but aside from that, I think I’ve only seen two types of wild animals. One was a predator, and the other was a mix between an elephant and a deer, and that was it.

“Empty” is kind of the one word summary of my time with Pine when I think about it. I find myself just going from one quest marker to the next, picking up crafting materials along the way, and never really being pushed to check out a distant landmark or curious rock formation.

What also hampers exploration is the stamina mechanic. In Pine, your stamina is always ticking down; Whether you’re fighting, holding your shield, running, jumping or walking, your stamina is being drained. This singular mechanic was probably more responsible for my lack of eagerness to explore than anything else.

I really hope some big change is on the horizon because as of right now, everything I’ve done has been some form of fetch quest that has me gathering enough wood or hay to craft something. Every quest has just been me ticking off a checklist in an effort to unlock a bigger checklist. For instance, I recently got to a point where I was tasked with stealing tokens from members of each tribe. That was after I had to collect ingredients for a potion, and after I had to find a watchtower and pick up the materials in it.

Pine isn’t a bad game, and I don’t want to give off that impression. I think the combat has a good feel to it, the world is stylized in a bright and colorful, almost cartoon-like fashion, and the faction control element is really interesting. But all of it feels very shallow at the moment. Maybe I’m on the cusp of the training wheels coming off the whole game, or maybe it never gets there. The only way I’ll find out is through playing more of it, and quite frankly, that’s the hardest part.

This article is based off of the Steam version of Pine, but it is also available on the Nintendo Switch.

The Master of Disaster: Finding the Balance – 05

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Since the inception of this feature, I’ve mainly used it as an outlet to talk about the various mishaps and shenanigans that cropped up during my role-playing adventures. This time however, I’d like to talk about my struggles in finding a way to balance a good game, with an engaging story.

Admittedly, I don’t have the broadest scope of experience running campaigns or writing stories in general, but I feel I can speak to it a bit. In fact, if it wasn’t for playing Dungeons & Dragons, I probably wouldn’t do much creative writing at all. I was inspired to give it a go from listening to shows like The Adventure Zone and Friends at the Table in terms of how the pace of my games should go.

The problem is that the people on those shows all know that while they’re playing for fun, there’s also a broader entertainment implication that’s tied to what they’re doing. They know that they’re performing not just for each other, but for thousands of listeners and viewers. That isn’t to imply that they’re adjusting their play to make the show progress, but the thought of an audience involved must have an effect on some of the moment to moment decision making.

That coupled with the ability to edit down long stretches of conversations about mechanics, rules and ability descriptions, makes the final consumable product seem like a faster flowing game in general. When in all actuality, I’m probably just not hearing those parts.

It was all of this that led to me mismanaging a lot of the early sessions in our campaign. I was trying to run a game as efficiently as what I would hear in an edited episode of a podcast and that just wasn’t feasible. We all were new to playing Dungeons & Dragons and we had to Google a lot of mechanics mid-game for clarity. They usually cut that part out of the podcasts.

What I loved about shows like The Adventure Zone and Friends at the Table was how gripping the story managed to be. The excellent craftsmanship of the story, the detailed and evocative descriptions, and the general understanding of the rules all made me feel like I was letting my players down constantly in comparison. It caused me a ton of anxiety every week while I did my preparations, even though I knew I was setting an impossible standard for myself as a first timer.

I was writing dozens upon dozens of pages of dialogue, lore, descriptions and quests to throw at my players, all of which were designed to illicit some sort of weighty impact, deliver on a joke, or inspire the players to act. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. But most of it felt rigid and rarely felt like it came up naturally.

After pages of stories and quests would go unused by my players, I initially felt a tinge of disappointment, often wondering what I did or didn’t do correctly to get them on the right track. Hours of my work were getting ignored and overlooked because I had a very particular on-ramp and set of circumstances that led up to them. I wasn’t angry, but I was getting frustrated. I was essentially building quest hooks into the way I assumed my party would do things. Steps 1 – 50 were ready, but I never thought about what if they never took that first step at all. I had to change things up.

So I did some research and consulted dozens of YouTube videos for some guidance. It became clear to me that I was over preparing to enormous degree, and it was leading to me railroading my players occasionally as well as get frustrated when things didn’t go as planned. I was trying to tell a story in D&D instead of letting my players tell theirs. So I decided to revamp everything.

I more or less threw out dozens of pages of story in an effort to craft something new and versatile. I stopped writing out individual lines of dialogue and quest progressions and stopped treating conversation as if my players were picking dialogue options in a video game. Instead of creating a perfect narrative, I built little pieces of lore that would tie together should the party pursue it. There’s a “story” should they happen to stumble on it or feel lost, that I can point them toward, but I just stopped writing everything like I was writing a book.

It’s been kind of liberating to let the players dictate the story and lead the charge, which arguably is how Dungeons & Dragons is supposed to be played. I’m not amazing at running games and I’ve made my fair share of mistakes in the process, but I’m having a lot more fun and experiencing a lot less stress because of my change in prep style. It’s also a lot of fun to not know what’s coming next.

I guess what I’m ultimately saying is that I learned how to not be as precious about everything I’ve made. If my players are reading this, relax, there’s still plenty of tailored content in there for you. But I’ve basically taken the coloring book approach, where I have the outline, but they’ll be the ones coloring it in.

Building a New Splinter Cell

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A YouTube channel named NoClip, recently released a documentary series about the rebooted Hitman games of the past few years. It highlighted developer IO Interactive and their separation from Square Enix, the way they designed their levels and AI patterns, as well as some other very interesting tidbits about their struggles and accomplishments. You should check it out. But it got me thinking about another stealth-action franchise that could use the same rebooting treatment that Hitman received. Of course I’m speaking of Splinter Cell.

Just like the Hitman franchise, Splinter Cell has had some really good entries in the series, and some not so great ones. Hitman eventually pivoted off of a divisive release in the form of Hitman Absolution, into the phenomenal Hitman 2016. Absolution was a fairly linear game that tried to follow in the steps of popular action games of the time, ultimately betraying the core conceit of what those games were traditionally like. Hitman 2016 threw linearity out the window and placed you into clockwork, systems driven levels that had dozens of way to approach them, with multiple objectives for you to complete, a bevy of disguises and weapons at your disposal, and plenty of over-the-top methods for you to dispatch your targets.

But it isn’t the only tried and true stealth-action franchise that made drastic changes to the formula. In a similar fashion, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain did something of a soft reboot in terms of its mechanics and play style, favoring an open world and systemic driven design as opposed to a more curated one. It wasn’t without it’s issues, but most people can agree that it was the best playing Metal Gear, despite having a middling story at best.

So I got to thinking, if Hitman and Metal Gear could reboot themselves so successfully, Splinter Cell should be able to as well. While it’s easy to say that Splinter Cell should just do the same thing those games did, it can’t. There are fundamental differences in the way those games play that just don’t translate perfectly. But if we were to cherry pick elements from either of those games to slot into a new Splinter Cell, I bet you’d come back with something pretty good.

In Hitman 2016, you’re infiltrating these massive and mostly public spaces, adopting the persona and disguise of whomever you need to be in order to gain access to some of the more guarded targets. You’re usually trying to get rid of some sleazy rich guy who’s throwing a party or staying at a hotel or something. There are more “public” spaces for you to occupy and plan around, making it feel more like a puzzle game than anything else.

In Metal Gear Solid V, you’re infiltrating various military installments spread throughout this massive open world, returning to your home base every so often to cash in your missions or progress the story. There isn’t a ton of variety in the way you actually approach these missions, but you’ve got a pretty impressive tool kit at your disposal, from a rocket powered arm that you can shoot into the faces of your enemies, to a dog that wields a knife in its mouth and will cut fools up at your behest.

Splinter Cell is different kind of game in those regards, striving to be a more grounded depiction of military efficacy than the other stealth-action franchises. That established ideology about what those games do makes it difficult to open up the floodgates and allow for more of the weird shenanigans that Metal Gear and Hitman allow for, and Sam Fisher as a protagonist isn’t exactly the “dressing up like a clown and sneaking into a birthday party” type of secret agent.

But despite all of that, here are some elements from both Metal Gear and Hitman that a new Splinter Cell should implement in a new entry.

LEVEL DESIGN

The star of the modern Hitman games is most certainly the levels that you play in. What Hitman 2016 doubled-down on were these clockwork levels that were massive sandboxes for you to explore, where NPCs had routines and goals for you to intercept and take advantage of. Almost every corner of the level provided you with some new opportunity, tool or costume for you to use to dispatch your targets. Along with that, the way the AI was scripted was such that no matter what you did or who you removed from the world, the game was able to pick it back up and make sure everything didn’t grind to a halt because you killed a particular NPC or were caught doing something.

I think that same philosophy can be applied to Splinter Cell in an extremely effective way. In Hitman, the levels all provide Agent 47 with opportunities to hide in plain sight, playing to his strengths while also providing you with a ton of variety in terms of settings and weaponry. Because Agent 47 is more focused on infiltration, the levels can be anything from an active movie studio, to the suburbs, or to a fashion show. That’s the beauty behind the core concept of Hitman.

Whereas Sam Fisher is more of a traditional spy, running military ops, sticking to the shadows and using his environment to help shield him from detection. Instead of the normal, shoot out the lights and sneak up behind a guy routine, a bigger and more complex level could afford you new opportunities to take when stalking your prey.

The problem is that Sam Fisher as a character has a pretty one-note arsenal. He’s a super effective spy who knows how to sneak around, shoot guns and climb obstacles, but he can never dress up like a hipster and pretends to be the drummer in a band so he can kill the lead singer. It’s what makes creating these more intricate levels so difficult, because nobody ever cares how Sam Fisher gets into an enemy base and kills everyone, because he’s on a mission to a dangerous place where there are rarely any civilians to worry about.

CHALLENGES

There are so many things that make Hitman levels so infinitely re-playable, but the challenges and missions have to be up there. Hitman encourages you to replay levels and approach them differently by rewarding you with experience for throwing a pair of scissors at your target’s head while dressed like a clown, or by pushing a loud speaker off the awning above them and crushing them. By completing these challenges, you’re rewarded with new outfits, starting points, and weapons you can use to flex your creativity. It’s a brilliant loop that consistently proves to be the voice in your head that says, “yeah that was cool, but how about this?”

In Splinter Cell though, you have maybe 3 or 4 ways to actually deal with your targets, and in reality you’re only going to either shoot them or strangle them. That’s kind of another big problem Splinter Cell runs into if it tries to adopt a more Hitman-like approach. How do you encourage your players to play differently, and what does that even look like? Sam Fisher doesn’t dress up in goofy outfits and he rarely hides in plain sight, so how do you make new challenges and missions within this limited tool set as well as what the audience expects from a Splinter Cell game? Without completely redefining what kind of character Sam Fisher is you get kind of locked into a box.

I personally wouldn’t mind seeing an all new Sam Fisher who gets tasked with taking down targets that aren’t purely enemy combatants, but I think people would lose their minds if he suddenly started dressing up as a waiter or something.

WEAPONRY

Some of the deadliest and most effective weapons in Hitman are often the most innocuous ones. I’ve killed more people with pasta cans, letter openers, and cheeseburgers than actual guns, because in Hitman, everything you can pick up becomes a deadly weapon. I’m willing to bet Sam Fisher is just as effective as Agent 47 when it comes to improvised weaponry, but I can’t really recall him ever exhibiting that beyond throwing a brick or a rock.

This issue seems far more surmountable than the previous ones considering that you can put plenty of flotsam and jetsam in the levels that Sam could throw at the heads of his enemies. Cinder-blocks, bottles and so on and so forth all would narratively fit in the self-serious tone of Splinter Cell. But that tone can be a little limiting in terms of what you can cram into a new Splinter Cell.

I want to see Sam Fisher try to play guitar poorly in an attempt to fool his target. Then, when he realizes that the target isn’t buying it, smashes it over their head. He might then say something like, “everyone’s a critic” and move to leave the level. But I sincerely doubt I’d ever see that.

TONE

Speaking of the self-seriousness of the franchise, we arrive at my last point. The tone of Splinter Cell, hell, the tone of all the Tom Clancy games are just so painfully self serious. That isn’t to say that striking a serious tone is a bad thing, but it is limiting if you’re trying to build out levels, opportunities and basically everything I’ve mentioned up until this point.

Even when you look at something like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, a game that also provided players a systems driven sandbox to skulk around in, that game still had levity built into it. By Metal Gear standards it was pretty serious, but you could still do some wild stuff in that game like making your horse poop on command that would lighten the mood.

I can’t really recall anything like that happening in the Splinter Cell franchise. Sam Fisher will make the occasional quip, but he’s never drowning his targets in the toilet they’re vomiting into like you can in Hitman or confusing enemy guards with 20 inflatable dummies of himself like you do in Metal Gear.

The Tom Clancy approach to things is to make bad military humor that is funny to maybe a handful of people out there. Like, there had to be one person out there who cracked up every time a character shouted the phrase, “shitballs!” in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, right?

Despite my personal preference for a lighter toned game, I just think that from a design perspective it has to be easier to create fun opportunities than just the standard military fare ones. I’d rather watch the ejector seat on a jet launch a man into the sun than see a guy just shoot a guy with a sniper rifle. It’s why I appreciate the Hitman games so much. Maybe Splinter Cell just isn’t the franchise for me anymore, but if I had my way, it would be a much different game in tone.

I desperately want a new Splinter Cell game, but as time goes on I get a little more cautious about what that game looks like. Between the need to change and the desire to stay true to the existing formulas, I’d have to imagine that part of why a new Splinter Cell hasn’t been announced is because the well of ideas that exists within those confines might be running dry. I just hope that if there ever is a new Splinter Cell game, whatever it turns out to be, it manages to keep me playing for as long as the Hitman reboots have.

The Master Of Disaster: Illiterate & Rich – 04

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I don’t have a great deal of experience with Dungeons & Dragons outside of playing a few one-shots, playing in a short campaign in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and of course DM-ing the campaign my friends and I are currently going through. But I’d like to focus in on that short campaign in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and talk about the time one of our players decided to take up the mantle of expert accountant at the cost of his literacy.

We had a particularly greedy dwarf barbarian in our party who was always quick to gather as much loot as he could possibly carry on his mostly naked body. It was a funny bit that worked well with the rest of us because our goals were a bit more altruistic and personal in nature. But not for our enterprising dwarf. No, he was motivated purely by shiny things.

I imagine this is what our dwarf looked like

It’s when we came across a chest of gold pieces that Gravy-Train (his name was a play on the Pokemon, Graveler, but I refused to call him that) found and decided that here in this enemy infested cave was the best place to count it all. Worried that we would all be caught off guard while Gravy was counting his pennies, he flippantly posited that his character was a money-whiz, and could count a vast amount of coins in mere seconds. I think our DM was willing to concede that point, but Gravy followed it up by saying that he didn’t know how to read, but could count really well.

Me being the scamp I was demanded that this was canon and he had to commit to it. I experienced no push back from anyone, and from there on, Gravy was illiterate but could count really well.

We ended up in a library packed with books that our now illiterate dwarf could not read. While I had hoped for some sort of Twilight Zone styled Sisyphean curse where he’d lament at the vast amounts of knowledge he could no longer consume, but Gravy-Train was unphased and went ahead and told us how many books were on the shelves as if that was some great piece of intelligence he had just dumped on us.

That run down mound of garbage on the far right? That’s Gravy-Train’s Bar

Later in the campaign, Gravy-Train began to split from the party in an effort to make some deals with the town banker or something. He wanted to buy the entirety of the town if memory serves, and started by buying out the old and run down tavern on the hill. The guy couldn’t read, but had already set his plan of owning an entire city into motion. It was an amazing moment when he finally revealed that to us.

It’s the little bits of character building that I’ve come to appreciate in my time with D&D. This story may seem fairly benign in the grand scheme of things, but it made his character more tangible and real, despite being hilarious. It’s because of this that I think I’ve been so taken with D&D. I want to have more of those moments in the game, both the funny and serious alike. After destroying their world, I was presented with the unique opportunity of putting my players into a setting where they can re-contextualize everything about themselves, and maybe put them in more situations that can bring out these character moments. That’s my hope at least.

But I do wonder if we would’ve ever taught him to read again though. I’m guessing we wouldn’t. It’s funnier if he never could read again.

Early Impressions: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order

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In lieu of an introduction that recounts the entirety of the Marvel renaissance over the past decade and how this title properly capitalizes on that zeitgeist, I’m just going to go ahead and say that I’m really enjoying Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order and what it brings to the table. It’s an imperfect game that doesn’t fully deliver on the power fantasy of playing as your favorite superheroes, but it sure is fun.

For those who don’t know, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is a 1 to 4 player cooperative brawler with a lot of RPG elements. You get to slip into the tights of several iconic heroes and take on just about every big time villain you can think of, in an effort to collect all of the Infinity Stones. The story is largely forgettable, mostly serving as very loose connecting threads between the different supervillain themed levels, but it has enough fan service to make the cut-scenes worth watching.

But that’s not why I came to Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order. I wanted to punch, kick, and magic blast my way through every enemy I could see. In this arena, Ultimate Alliance 3 excels. Each hero has their own unique light and heavy attacks along with 4 special abilities that can be upgraded to be more effective. The combat is repetitive yet fun, and adds enough variety by forcing you to block and dodge more than you’d expect from a brawler.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order encourages you to really consider your team build by offering buffs based on who and what kind of characters your active 4 is comprised of. Teams like The Guardians of The Galaxy, the 2012 movie Avengers, 4 of the Spider-Man characters and so on and so forth, get special bonuses when you use them together. But even when you split the team up and get less married to team composition, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order still rewards you with a portion of whatever active bonus you might be building towards.

For instance, having The Hulk and Thor on a team grants you half of the movie Avengers team bonuses, as well as a bonus for putting heavy-hitting characters together. All of the team compositions can be viewed in the menu which is extremely helpful considering you unlock new characters pretty quickly, and there’s something like 30 different team bonuses you can achieve.

The downside to all of this is that Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order only half explains most of its mechanics. Learning about proper team composition is fairly obvious, but finding out what category of moves your characters have access to and how those play together is kind of a mystery at first glance. There are just so many icons that each portray different abilities, or unity bonuses, or stat categories, that it’s genuinely overwhelming at first.

In addition to that, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order kind of forces you to try out your newly recruited superheroes by making them significantly higher level than the heroes you’re currently playing as. Normally I’d say that’s a good thing to encourage people to step out of their comfort zone, but in my experience it’s only led to me ignoring team bonuses in favor of who has the highest level. So now I have the iconic team of Thor, Deadpool, Dr. Strange and Ghost Rider all hovering around level 28, while Captain America, Spider-Gwen and so many others are so under powered that using them would be me handicapping myself.

This wouldn’t be as big of a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that the difficulty spikes are fairly brutal, and require you to have a fairly robust knowledge of these 30+ characters and their strengths in battle. Sometimes you need a lot of area-of-effect and crowd control characters. Sometimes you need a balance of bruisers and ranged characters. The problem is that unless you know how these characters play or figured out the myriad of icons and tokens that denote a specific hero’s style, you’re basically brute forcing your way through situations and experimenting via extensive trial and error..

I don’t want to paint the picture that I don’t like this game, because I genuinely am enjoying it despite the issues I’ve run into. The action is fun and simple without feeling overly repetitive which is a tight rope to walk when making a brawler. There’s a stun meter that acts like enemy armor, that once depleted will stagger an enemy and allow you to attack their health directly. It adds a simple extra layer of depth to the combat that manages to keep things interesting long enough for you to get to a boss battle. And that simple loop is made better by the wide variety of characters and moves you have at your disposal.

I did wish that my attacks felt a little more powerful though. It felt a little weird to watch The Avengers struggle against a bunch of convicts in a prison and then proceed to go fight Ultron or something. But it’s a video game, and you have to be able to deal with weird logic loopholes if you want to have fun sometimes.

Minor grievances aside, the biggest problems with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order are mostly of the technical variety. The camera is hilariously bad at times, getting locked up on some geometry, going in walls, or just zooming in and out in odd intervals in an attempt to be helpful. While the frame-rate has a tough time holding up when the action and particle effects start to kick up. The loading times are abysmally long and managed to actively keep me from completing more challenge missions considering the load to get into them was just about as long as the mission itself.

Even the AI and how the logic of the game treats them is strange. Most of the heroes at your disposal will require you to pick up red and blue orbs that represent health and energy respectively. Reasonably, the game only allows player controlled characters to pick these things up, but even if you’re filled up on health and pick up an orb, it doesn’t heal any of your teammates. It sounds like a silly thing to complain about, but it ultimately led to me favoring one character and praying that my team AI wouldn’t get themselves killed because I didn’t want to micromanage their health pickups.

I know it sounds like I’m really down on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, but honestly, I’m having a really good time with it. There are plenty of other things I could pick apart, but despite all of them I just want to keep playing it more. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is the perfect example of a game that does one thing so right, that all of the issues surrounding it don’t seem as bad.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is available exclusively on the Nintendo Switch.

The Master of Disaster: Burn it Down – 03

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Every month I step in here to tell you a little anecdote about my D&D adventures and the various mishaps that inevitably took place. Last time I told you all about a fairly simple puzzle the absolutely flummoxed my players. This time I’d like to tell you about when I destroyed the world. But before I can tell you that, I need to tell you about the circumstances that led up to the eventual destruction of everything they came to know and love.

I’ve been running a campaign for a few months now with my players, and since I embarked on this journey, I’ve kind of found a groove in how I like to run a game. I’m very fast and loose with the rules, I actively try to encourage my players to think outside the box, and above all, I want them to feel like they have full agency over the world they’re in. Simple enough, right?

When I started, I bought a module through Roll20, the app in which we use to play our wonderful fantasy adventure. I purchased, Waterdeep: The Dragon Heist, a module which looks like it could be a lot of fun in the hands of an experienced DM who has an understanding about the lore of the world. I am not that person. So when this module didn’t have answers to the questions my players were asking that were lore based, I decided instead of do research, I’d just write my own campaign.

What followed was a continued effort to carve out my own narrative and characters in the map of Waterdeep that was included with my purchase. This map ultimately came to represent the thing keeping my players from feeling agency. Most of my players never felt any attachment to the city itself, because there really weren’t many opportunities to explore it or uncover cool stuff in it. This undoubtedly falls on my shoulders for not properly getting them hooked on the city, but I had already mentally moved past Waterdeep, leading all of us to treat the map more like a screensaver until I moved them somewhere actually interesting.

So after months of planning and writing, I pulled the trigger. They were sucked through a portal and transported to a land of my own creation. A place that they thought was just a pocket dimension, but turned out to be their first stop on the upcoming grand journey they’d have.

I built the simple island with three goals in mind. First, I wanted them to be in an unfamiliar place, with its own lore and history. Second, I wanted to craft a place with its own politics, factions and problems. And lastly, I wanted them to feel invested in this world and approach it as an opportunity for a fresh start. The first two I think I managed pretty well. That third one though, didn’t play out how I had hoped.

See, the entire time they were there, I was juggling two story lines I wanted to pursue. Either this would be a pocket dimension they’d return from, or they were trapped here. I played coy and didn’t give them much insight into what the truth was, but since they were convinced this was just a vacation till they eventually returned home, they weren’t as invested as I would’ve liked.

Finally I made a decision on their fate after receiving a few compliments along with grievances from a few of my players. They liked the concept of this new world, but felt that there was nothing to do in it aside from leave. A fair point, I did kind of only write this section as a single path with three branching paths that eventually led to the same place. But it was one particular comment that pushed me over the edge. I was told that Waterdeep, the actual map of it, was imposing and kept them at a distance. They never felt compelled to pursue their own character motivated quests because they had no idea where to start.

That’s when I decided. Fuck Waterdeep, you’re done. I tantalized them with an orb that would surely bring them home, only for it to be just a crystal ball that shows you stuff. Guess what I showed them? I blew up that map in front of them, killed off every person they knew, and hurdled them 1000 years into the future. I basically wrote a short story that equates to, “And everything exploded.”

The reaction I got was kind of… not what I expected. In game, nobody said anything. It was just silence. After sitting there for what was the longest minute ever, I just kind of pressed forward with the session, not giving them much time to comprehend what just happened. That was my bad.

I gave them a boat, and sent them to the northeast to this massive new world I made for them. I’d put that picture in here, but as I’m writing this, I don’t know if we’ve made it there yet.

Which leads me to where we stand now. What awaits my players is a massive open world that has several settlements of varying sizes, with creature politics and behaviors that differ from what D&D lore might normally decree. These places have their individual quests ranging in severity and importance. Quests will take them from city to city. They’ll have tough choices to make, and they’ll have city faction reputations to deal with. They have bespoke story lines and quests I’ve generated for their specific characters, along with a main quest that might shed some light on why Waterdeep went kaput (aside from what I’ve just told you), and what happens now.

Outside of all of this, what I’ve actually done is give myself a massive amount of anxiety and intense deadlines to write quests that have longevity and are interesting along with make maps. Also I run this website, work, and have other hobbies. So what I’m saying is, don’t do what I’ve done and make your first time being a DM something worthy of an intervention.

Review: My Friend Pedro

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If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Spider-Man shot bullets instead of webs, then look no further than My Friend Pedro, a game about man, his guns, and his floating banana friend.

You take on the mantle of what has to be, the most potent killer of all time in My Friend Pedro, capable of slowing time, doing sick aerial stunts, riding motorcycles and using frying pans to overcome any and every threat. If that sounds cool, it’s because it is. My Friend Pedro arms you with not only the appropriate weaponry for dispatching your foes, but also puts you in situations where you’re encouraged to do more than just shoot everyone in sight.

Each level is broken up into rooms that more or less serve as tutorials for what’s to come. Say you’re dropping into a room with an enemy on either side of you at the bottom of it, that’s My Friend Pedro‘s way of telling you that you should consider splitting your aim to simultaneously obliterate both of them. Is that a frying pan in a room surrounded on all sides by bad guys? Just pump some bullets into it, and watch the ricochet take care of the rest. When things click in My Friend Pedro, it can lead to some of the most satisfying moments in video games.

But sometimes My Friend Pedro wants to fight with you and make things as convoluted as possible, requiring you to turn your hands into spiders capable of hitting all the right buttons at once. The default control scheme isn’t great, and often leads to your character coming out of slow motion at the wrong time, falling into a pit, or just getting shot in the dome. Every ounce of satisfaction you might feel, is prefaced by about nine moments of you sloppily fumbling through enemies and barely getting out alive.

You can press the left bumper to basically become invincible and dodge bullets by spinning around like you’re John Woo, but because of the default button placement along with some weird animation priority when you’re coming out of the spin, made it one of the least used moves in my arsenal. That is until the game would literally stop time as the final bullet that would kill me was rushing in my direction. That’s when My Friend Pedro will literally tell you that it’s time to dodge.

Oddly enough, for a side scrolling game, the camera sometimes serves as another obstacle. Often times the levels are just individual rooms of varying complexity, that are designed for you to conquer and move on to the next one. But that isn’t always the case, and these little shooting gallery puzzle rooms stretch out farther than the camera cares to show. The camera is zoomed in fairly close, which helps you navigate tight corridors more effectively and also see the dope shit you’re doing. But when you can’t see the wall of dudes with shotguns just on the other side of the room, and their flurry of bullets just keeps peppering you before you even know they’re there, it can be supremely frustrating.

But all of those grievances go away when you flawlessly erase a room without even getting touched. Every instance that I thought that maybe it was time to take a break, I’d do something outrageous, like skateboard through a window while doing a back flip, shooting two Uzis in separate directions. Or kicking a frying pan into the air, unloading ammo into it and watching one bullet hit an explosive next to a cluster of enemies. My Friend Pedro constantly puts you in situations where you could pull off awesome things, if you can manage to wrap your head around the controls long enough.

The biggest missteps My Friend Pedro takes are twofold though. Firstly, there’s a score they give you at the end of each level, ranking you from C to S ranks. Things like time and enemies killed are listed, but there’s literally no indication of what I could be doing better to obtain better rankings. I’m assuming the answer is just, “do cooler shit,” but some direction on that front couldn’t hurt.

Additionally, My Friend Pedro misses what might be my favorite feature of games like this, particularly Katana Zero, which is the ability to watch a full speed replay of the room or level you just went through. For all the slow motion coolness I pull off, I’d love to have seen what that looked like. It isn’t a deal breaker or anything, it just feels like a missed opportunity. They do cherry pick a moment from the level you can just export into a GIF which is nice, but you have no say in what moment it is.

All things considered, I enjoyed my time with My Friend Pedro. It was a short and sweet game that let me live out my wildest action movie dreams, albeit not as nimbly as I would have hoped for. There’s a lot less of me falling into holes and getting shot in the face in my imagination. But if you can deal with some often times floaty and loose controls, and really want to do some cool Matrix moves in a modern video game, My Friend Pedro is a pretty good compromise.

My Friend Pedro is currently available on Steam and the Nintendo Switch. This review is based off of the Steam version.

The Master of Disaster: Puzzle Masters – 02

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Puzzles are hard. Or at least they can be. This is story of one particular puzzle that I made for my players that absolutely flummoxed them for way longer than it should have. It’s this experience that has led me to make sure that my puzzles going forward, are no harder than those children’s toys where you put the right shape in the right hole.

The party was on the trail of a werewolf that had been terrorizing the outskirts of the city, wreaking havoc on local farms as well as businesses in the city by destroying their shipments.

The party had some leads which led them to a local police force that was able to give them some information on a mostly uncharted area of the wilderness. With this information, the party headed to a clearing that led to the entrance of a collapsed mine. Above the mine was a large flat piece of land that they surmised might have an entrance to the cave below.

This is where things got tricky. See, there was a small cottage up there, something they were very hesitant to investigate. Inside of the cottage were a few things. In front of them was a series of 5 large levers jutting out from the wall, all in the bottom position. There was also, and I quote “a tall dresser, a bed, a coat rack, and a long coffee table in the room, but no sign of any life.” The “puzzle” as it were, was that from left to right, the position of the levers corresponded to the height of items in the room.

It took these fools 30 minutes to figure this out. One of my players basically checked out during it, admitting defeat to my very complex word games. It was astounding to me. Once they figured it out, the door locked and the floor opened up. They were now in the mine and ready to continue their pursuit of the werewolf.

What I came away with, is that even the simplest puzzle, can flabbergast anyone. So much for my next brilliant puzzle idea where one person tells the truth and the other always lies.

The Master of Disaster: Introduction – 01

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In the past, I’ve written once or twice about Dungeons & Dragons and how what once was something I’d never touch, has quickly become one of my favorite activities. All of that still holds true, it’s just that in the past few months, I’ve gone from just playing the game, to running it. It took a while to find the rhythm and understand my players, their needs and play styles, but I think I’ve got the hang of it… mostly.

Let me start by saying that I’m having a blast running a campaign for my friends. They’re receptive to my ideas, they challenge me both in game and conceptually, and the whole thing has become an excuse to write more, which I will never turn down. There have definitely been some stumbles and screw-ups along the way, but how else are you gonna learn unless you get messy?

I wont go into every aspect of what I’ve been doing, instead I’ll quickly touch upon my weekly routine. First, I’ll look over the notes I’ve taken from a previous session and see how their actions have impacted the story thus far. Turns out, you can write all the scripts you want, but your players can totally bypass any of it. I’ve had pages of written dialogue and plot development that were just trivialized and passed thanks to an enterprising player of mine. It isn’t a bad thing, it just taught me to loosen the grip on my story, and not get so precious about the details.

Then, I’ll write up a summary of the previous session to post for my players when they inevitably don’t remember a thing from the last session.

After that, I go into planning mode. I look at where the players are in the story, what main quest they can do as well as what side quests are open to them. If the players are in between quests, I have to think of a way to introduce them to the stuff that’s available to them.

Unfortunately, because of how I started our campaign, I’m kind of locked into some things from the adventure module that I don’t really like. For context, I started by using the module, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, which was a little overwhelming for me as a first time DM. So after about three of four sessions of trying to pronounce names of NPCs and learning their history and motivations, all while trying to keep things moving briskly while being fun, I said “fuck it” and decided to go off book.

At this point, I’ve written about 200 pages worth of main and side stories, character bios, store inventories, and concepts that need to be fleshed out. Maybe in the grand scheme that isn’t a lot, but it feels hefty to me. More to the point though, because I used the Waterdeep book, now I’m stuck with the incomprehensibly poorly named gangs in the city, as well as a city map that’s way too gigantic and intimidating for my players.

After all of the writing and planning, now I have to do my least favorite part of making the maps. We use Roll20, a pretty awesome tool for people to play tabletop games online, but terrible for assholes like me who decide they want to craft bespoke maps for any and every interesting place my players might visit. But I do it, because it makes my players get a sense of place and scale while immersing them in my tapestry of words.

Lastly, on the day of the session, I panic all day, hoping that everything is in order and ready to go. I have to remember the voices of the NPCs they might see which is a fun vocal exercise, but in reality they all end up sounding vaguely the same anyway.

If I had my way, which I guess technically as DM I do, I’d level the entirety of Waterdeep and introduce them to a smaller, more well defined and manageable map to play in. I bit off more than I could chew at the beginning, and now I’m stuck with some of the bullshit from the book.

All things considered, I’m glad I went off book. Making my own characters and knowing them and their origins helps me have more valuable conversations with players. No longer do I have to worry if I gave something away or said something that character doesn’t really know. No longer do I have to feel bad for not knowing the long lineage of the Neverwinter family. Why? Cause they don’t fucking exist in my world anymore. They all died when a pack of gorillas rampaged through their home and ate them.

Going this route has been a lot of extra work, but it’s work that I love. I’ve never felt so creatively satisfied until I started writing and brainstorming for this campaign. I also get to play fast and loose with the rules that just makes the game more enjoyable for everyone. I’m not gonna make someone collect the core ingredients they need for a spell, cause that sounds super boring. I’m here to tell a tale of whimsy and adventure, not to orate a session of Rust.