Losing Games

Blaugust 2015 Day 25

Multitasking Experiment

I didn’t play any games last night. Instead I had a nap, caught up on some YouTube videos in my Watch Later queue, and went to bed at a half decent hour. Not terribly exciting, but at least I’m not off track on my multitasking experiment. In fact I started that a week ago and I feel like it’s gone pretty well. I only had one cheat day where I played Kerbal two nights in a row, and I managed to hit all three MMOs. I’m especially happy that I got a new hero made in Champions.

Losing Games

I saw the following message from Scopique earlier today regarding Legendary Encounters, the Aliens themed board game.

And I ask if he’d won yet, he hadn’t, and was he still enjoying the game, he was. Which made me realize that I have different expectations for board and video games.

I go into a video game expecting to win, and if I don’t I usually get frustrated after failing a couple of times. Often that will sour me on a game and I’ll stop playing it. Deus Ex and God of War both immediately spring to mind where I hit part of the game that I just couldn’t get past after several tries and I lost all interest in continuing.

I go into board games wanting to win, but I certainly don’t expect it. I still sometimes get frustrated, for example I’ve played the Escape from Dol Goldur quest in the Lord of the Rings card game about seven times and not won once, but even there that quest didn’t sour me on the game, I just moved on to playing other quests. I talk often about losing games of Golem Arcana while still having fun, and that’s not unique to that game. I have several board and card games that are quite brutal which I enjoy playing quite a bit, and I’m not quite sure why it’s such a different experience for me versus video games. It’s not the social aspect as I play quite a few board games solo.

Tempest

Blaugust 2015 Day 24

Sunday night I returned to my multitasking experiment and started up Champions. I logged into the six heroes, I had already created just to refresh my memory on what combinations of powers I had already played with before heading into the character creator and seeing what I could come up with for a new super hero.

Creating a new hero in Champions, and before it in City of Heroes, has always been a unique experience for me. My favorite heroes, the Blue Ram and Silver Hunter, have always come about because a specific part in the character creator caught my imagination. I started out by picking up some wind based powers, initially thinking I’d create a wizard type character. When I got into the costume creator though as I browsed through different masks and other parts, I happened upon some swept back hair and got the idea for a speedster. A pair of aviator’s goggles and leather jacket started to give me more of an idea on the hero’s background.

In City of Heroes, the last thing you do is name your hero. It was always the hardest part because not only was it difficult to come up with a name that was cool and fit the character concept, but you also had to come up with something that someone else was already using. More than once, I can remember scrapping a whole hero design because I just couldn’t find a name that I wanted that wasn’t in use. I’m so glad that Cryptic removed that issue by only requiring names to be unique per account. It’s so nice to not have to look up esoteric synonyms.

Thus after maybe 30 or 45 minutes, I had created the Tempest. A WW2 fighter pilot who vanished in a storm over Europe before reappearing in Millenium City, not having aged a day and with no memory of the lost time.

GameClient 2015-08-24 00-39-33-83

 

I took Tempest through the tutorial and first few levels. I had the impression that the starting experience was more changed than it really was from the Ravenswood articles that I’d skimmed on the Arcgames site. The tutorial Qularr invasion is now framed as a simulation of an historic event rather than a live event, and some of the side quests have been streamlined out. It was fun, but I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more to it. Completely a problem with my own expectations though and not the game.

GameClient 2015-08-23 23-30-59-26Past the tutorial, you’re dumped into the Powerhouse which avoids an old issue where you ended up in Millenium City first and needed to know where to go. Cryptic has also added some nice training videos, which are in-game cutscenes that explain some of Champions’ mechanics like charge-up powers and maintained powers, and tied the post-tutorial intro quest to watching them. That might sound onerous but they were all very short.

Once I got Tempest trained up and exited the Powerhouse, I was directed to Kodiak on the West Side of Millenium City, just like in the original game. I completed the first five or six missions that he gave me and not much seems to have changed there. It all felt very familiar and comfortable.

GameClient 2015-08-24 00-20-06-74

 

Jool Mission Planning – Lander Design

Blaugust 2015 Day 23

Last night should have been my return to my multitasking experiment, and playing anything other than KSP which is what I’d played on Wednesday. But I had just watched the latest trailer for The Martian again and was in a space mood that Star Trek Online doesn’t really fulfill as it is more science fantasy and hard science.

Instead I headed back into the Vehicle Assembly Building to work on the next stage of my Jool exploration mission. My previous design work had been all about building a craft which would take three Kerbals from Kerbin to Jool and allow for refueling at an automated refinery I’d already place at one of Jool’s moons. But I still needed to build a landing craft to take along. After all it would be a waste for three Kerbalnauts to spend years traveling out to Jool and not get a chance to plant flags on at least one of the moons.

I’m actually planning something more ambitious than that, which is called a Jool 5 expedition. Basically, landing on all five moons with a single mission. Something that was much more challenging before Squad added ISRU (in-situ resource utilization) equipment to the game, so now it’s possible to set up refueling locations.

Even knowing I can refuel though, I needed to design a lander that could handle landing and taking off from all five of Jool’s moons. Some like Bop and Pol are relatively easy. Both are small, low gravity satellites, and have no atmosphere. Vall is bigger but not too difficult. Laythe is more of a challenge. Its gravity is 0.8 that of Kerbin and has an atmosphere like Kerbin does which will help with landing since I can plan to use parachutes not burn a ton of fuel to land. The real challenge of the five will be Tylo. It also has a gravity 0.8 times Kerbin, but it has no atmosphere so the entire landing will require fuel, which means twice as much as will be needed for Laythe.

I had a basic stage for the Tylo descent, but was trying to put together an ascent module that would also work for Laythe and the other moons. This is my first design. To take off from Tylo I need better than 1.0 TWR (thrust to weight ratio) and at least 3070 delta-V. The only problem is I don’t like the look of the big tank sticking out.

KSP 2015-08-23 21-01-05-75

 

I started over and played around with some other ideas. The problem was that using more smaller tanks meant more weight for basically the same amount of fuel, which meant a bigger engine or more engines. Which is not horrible, but anything that could take off from Tylo would be way over engineered for the other moons. And I’m expecting to reuse the craft for Bop quite often after completing the exploration mission. I finally settled on the following design. Not only do I like the look of this craft better, it actually has better TWR and a 1 more meters per second in delta-V.

KSP 2015-08-23 21-01-45-48

 

So now that I have my landing craft, I need to revisit my exploration ship. The current ship uses nuclear engines which run on liquid fuel only, whereas the motor on my landing craft requires LFO (liquid fuel and oxidier). So I’ll need to add a tank to the ship to allow refueling of the lander after it leaves a moon an docks. That will of course mean I need to adjust the fuel and motors on the exploration ship as well. It’s a lot of planning but that’s part of the fun of the game for me.

Here’s the completed lander with the Tylo descent module.

KSP 2015-08-23 21-03-18-84

 

Online Boardgaming

lotr_octgn_02Blaugust 2015 Day 22

Last night I played Lord of the Rings: The Card Game by Fantasy Flight online with Wininoid using OCTGN. OCTGN is a platform for playing card games online, and LotR support is provided by another developer here.

We attempted to complete the second quest in the game which is Journey Along the Anduin. Winin used a full Tactics (red) deck which is very damage oriented, while I used a Spirit/Lore deck which was focused on questing and healing. In the quest, you start out facing a Hill Troll and have to defeat it to move onto the second of three stages. We got good cards and managed to complete quest progress on the first stage and defeat the Hill Troll pretty quickly. The second stage started out well but some bad cards both on our part and from the encounter deck, cost us one of Winin’s heroes (each player has three) and really hamstrung what we could do.

Eventually we lost the game. I’d like to say it was a close thing, and we might have been able to clear the second stage had we had another round or so, but there’s no way we’d have been able to complete the whole quest. This was the first time either of us had used OCTGN, so it was a little rough getting started. The UI for the application relies heavily on pop-up menus and shortcuts, which took a while to get used to, but by the end of the game we had a pretty good handle on it. But UI issues aside, the program worked well. I’m sure we’ll be using it for more games of LotR as well, definitely a rematch against Anduin after we tweak our decks, as other games like Android: Netrunner.

D&D Night

Blaugust 2015 Day 21

No gaming last night or tonight, the multitasking experiment will resume tomorrow. Instead last night was my regular D&D (5th edition) night with Scopique DMing and four others from Twitter in the party, he’s posted the recap for last night’s session if you’re curious about our latest shenanigans.

Virtual D&D is nearly as much fun as the regular kind. We use Google Hangouts for group video and voice along with Fantasy Grounds as our virtual tabletop. Honestly the only thing I really miss about physically getting together is getting to roll actual dice. Not that real dice treat me any better that virtual ones do.

My character for our current campaign is a Gnome Monk name Elrryn Leafwind. I generally don’t play melee characters in RPGs, but I decided I wanted to mix things up. Which is funny since after the first few sessions I realized that I had picked the melee version of a Wizard. The first two levels were not super fun, Elrryn wasn’t all that useful in a fight except as auxiliary damage. By level three Monk’s get Ki points and some of its first signature abilities. As an example, in one of the first sessions after making level three deflect missiles let Elrryn catch a crossbow bolt shot at him by a Kobold and then throw it back killing his attacker. One of the most bad-ass moments I’ve ever had for a character in an RPG.

Tonight’s plan is for some Lord of the Rings: The Card Game with Wininoid over OCTGN, which is an online card game client.

Jool Mission Planning

Jool Explorer 1Blaugust 2015 Day 20

Rather than suffer the vagaries of a d4, I loaded up Kerbal Space Program last night. It’s kind of cheating on my multitasking experiment as KSP has basically been my primary game since October. Regardless, I spent the evening in the Vehicle Assembly Building working on my first Kerballed mission to Jool, which is the second most remote planet in the Kerbol system and the only gas giant. This isn’t my first trip to Jool, I’ve sent dozens of satellites and probes to survey Jool’s five moons, but it will be the first time I send Kerbals.

In my current career game I have a life support mod installed, so unlike in the stock game, I actually have to make sure I send enough supplies along to keep my Kerbals fed for the duration of the trip, which will take about 2 years travel out, 3 or 4 more waiting on a return windows, and another 2 back. Which is why there are four supply canisters and two greenhouses for recycling.

The current weight of the ship is nearly 100 tons, so I’ll have to send it into orbit in at least two pieces, which I don’t mind doing as I’ve practiced rendezvous and docking quite a bit. I think I’ve managed to build everything into the ship I wanted for the primary craft. The next step is to figure out a small lander so I can actually put a Kerbal on one or more of Jool’s moons.

The trick with all of this is to try and keep the part count as low as possible. Large part counts of 150 or more cause the game to lag down massively on my machine. The game is still playable, but it’s not much fun. This is my only complaint with Kerbal Space Program. I would love to be able to build and assemble large space stations and interplanetary ships, but part count lag takes a lot of the fun out of the process.

Outage Hiccup

Blaugust 2015 Day 19

The second evening of my multitasking experiment started well enough, I launched Star Trek Online and hopped into the game. After handling my usual duty officer scheduling, I headed to the Delta Quadrant to finish a long pending mission to help out the Kobali. I think the Kobali ground zones have gotten tougher as I died several times trying to get to my goal. I ended up succeeding by making a run across the map so that I respawned on the other side after dying, it’s kind of cheap but I was feeling more goal oriented than exploratory. In the end it didn’t matter because shortly after that my game disconnected, which happens when your cable modem has an outage.

So that was the end of my gaming for the night. It was near midnight anyway, so I headed to bed early (for me). I briefly considered KSP or Champions but I wasn’t in a good jumping in point in either one. In KSP I’m at the point where I need to start planning a new mission, and that will take a while to do, and in Champions I want to roll a new hero to relearn the game. I could and have spent multiple hours in the costume creator trying to put together a name, costume, powers combination.

That puts me in an odd spot for tonight’s gaming. Do I pick STO back up since my time was cut short? Or roll on to one of the other games in the experiment. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, maybe I’ll roll a 1d4 to decide.

Back to Middle-Earth

Blaugust 2015 Day 18

I started my multitasking experiment last night by logging into LotRO. I had actually been in just the week before to make sure that all of my characters had recent activity so I wouldn’t lose names when the server merged closed, so I didn’t have to wait long on the patched. The game still takes a while to actually connect in, which is annoying and familiar, but pretty soon I was back at a camp in eastern Dunland.

Brynulf is a Hunter. At some point previously I had cleaned up his inventory and quest log, so all I really had to do to get him playable was re-select his specializations and reassign points to legacies on his Legendary Items. About fifteen minutes and I was set to resume some long forgotten quests. Even though there were some new abilities and the specialization tree had changed dramatically from what I remember, actually playing my Hunter was not too different. The biggest change was that focus points used to go away the moment your character moved, and they don’t now. Or at least not as quickly. I’m honestly not quite clear on that yet, I was more interested in playing than spending time studying. The same skill combos worked well, and I fell into my old combat patterns pretty quickly: generate focus, big double attack, focus attack, DoT, quick shot, melee to regenerate some focus, focus attack again, finish with melee if needed.

I completed a half dozen quests and moved down to what I think is the last quest hub in Dunland before moving into the region around Isengard. I’m excited to see it, but that’ll have to wait until tomorrow given the rules on my experiment. I’m not sure if I’ll do Star Trek, Champions, or Kerbal tonight. Probable STO or KSP, with Champions I want to start a new hero so my first play session will mostly just be in the character creator and I’m not quite in the right creative frame of mind for that.

Multitasking

Blaugust 2015 Day 17

I’ve been thinking more since my post on reconnecting about trying to get back to juggling multiple MMOs. I definitely don’t want to drop Star Trek Online, but my nostalgia for both LotR and Champions has stayed with me the last couple of days. That surprises me as I usually have an urge to catch up on a game and often don’t get more than five minutes into the game after updating the patcher. My problem though is how to actually switch between games. I’ve found two ways that work for me when I want to get something done. Either I have to do it everyday, like with Blaugust, or I have to focus on one thing until it’s done, which is how I completed all three Mass Effect games.

Since MMOs never finish so unless I want to pick concrete goals out that won’t work.  I also can’t try to rotate through all three MMOs on a daily basis, that seems like a good way to get nothing done in any of them. I could make a schedule and rotate through games, but that is probably will do a better job of sucking the fun out of playing than anything else. Instead I’ll leave myself open to playing whatever sounds good on a given night but limit myself to picking from the games that I haven’t play in the last 24 hours, until I’ve spent long enough in one game to finish a quest or level. So that way as I progress through Champions or LotRO, I can still pick up dailies in STO if I want to, but only if I’m actually playing other games.

And since there’s no time like the present, I’m going to pay a visit to Brynulf on Landroval and get my hunter ready to go adventuring.

Almost There

Blaugust 2015 Day 16

Guilt and Joy

About two or three Saturdays a month since March, I’ve been heading down to my local gaming store and playing Golem Arcana. Usually I feel a little guilty because I’m gone for about five hours and leaving my wife to deal with Thing 1 and Thing 2 solo. This weekend though, my dad was taking Ting 1 for the day, and Thing 2 is much easier to handle without his older brother winding him up. So I was able to have a nice guilt-free wargaming visit yesterday.

I got three games in, didn’t win any off them but they were still fun. Afterwards while we were packing up and chatting I realized that everyone was thrilled to be there and playing. It seemed like a stark contrast to what I usually see in MMO forums and chat.

So far the only downside to being part of an active group is that it has finally pulled me into using Facebook regularly. I’ve had an account for years but used it very little, like nearly never.

Blaugust Midpoint

August is now half gone, and while I’ve had a few days that were tough for me to get something written overall I’ve been totally happy with my writing. I have seen posts from some people that aren’t joining the event or have already dropped out. It’s understandable. I’ve certainly considered it myself a few times, especially when I sit down and think I’ve got nothing to say. But for me, that’s really the point of this. I start writing and after getting a few hundred words of drivel out of the way, something usually comes out that I didn’t realize that I’d been thinking about. I find that experience pretty cool.

So if you’re participating and worried you run out of steam now that we’re halfway through, I think you should look at it as a good thing. It’s a chance to see what happens when you sit down and just start typing. Even if you don’t actually post it.