Tunnels of Doom

Last month I wondered what would happen with the release of a bunch of interesting new titles, but what I failed to mention when listing them all was that while all of them held some appeal, none were games I felt belonged on my “must buy on day one” list. The only game that really came close was Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, but frankly the rumors of 90-minute cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 and the huge question mark that was Alone in the Dark, I could have easily said that June looked like a completely unknown quantity.

There is a curious difference between months that have a few must-haves and months that have a lot higher number of could-be-cools. The must-have months end up feeling like they really test the limitations of a budget-conscious gamer while months like June actually end up being pretty breezy because with a lot of competition but no real demands on the budget, it’s fairly effortless to take a wait and see approach to the entire month’s offerings.

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Christmas 2006: I opened a gift from my wife, about the size of a book. Except, it rattled when shaken, and I was somewhat puzzled. To my delight, the package contained a box of miniatures, an Undead Blood Bowl team. Earlier that year, at a convention, I had stumbled across a sometimes difficult to find team booster pack for the Undead containing one each of the Undead types: A zombie, a skeleton, a wight, a ghoul and a mummy. The box contained three zombies, three skeletons and two each of the wights, ghouls and mummies which gave me a nice selection to start from. Before the end of the month I had them all primed and had begun painting.

I wanted to take my time with this team; before the Undead my only models were the Orcs and Humans that came with the boxed set and they were plastic. I had chosen the Orcs as my primary team and had managed to fill them out with a few extra models picked here and there from flea markets and bitz orders online. But they had been fairly hastily painted and I really wanted this team that I had specifically selected to look great. So I made slow early progress.

When we moved across town in the spring of 2007, our condo had a detached garage. At first I thought it was going to be great: I’d effectively have a dedicated area for painting and modeling. I even put a big gaming/work desk out there. The problem was, my focus shifted soon after we moved there. I worked a nasty grave shift for the first few months that left me with too little time with my wife to comfortably retreat to a man-cave when I wasn’t working or sleeping. By the time my schedule settled down I was absorbed in video games rather than tabletop games and the gaming area in the garage took on an out-of-sight, out-of-mind status.

In the last month, my focus shifted again. I started a Blood Bowl mini-league. A longer-form league is scheduled to start at the end of July, and it won’t accept unpainted teams. I was time to get serious about this team I had once been so excited about. So over the last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time hunched over our dining room table, plastic cup of water in front of me, jazz playing on the stereo, applying coat after coat of paint to more than a dozen figurines. This weekend I finally finished the first 13 models (of 17 total) plus a grim reaper-looking guy from the Warhammer Fantasy Battles line that serves as my Assistant Coach and a Harpy that is acting as my team’s Cheerleader. The significance of the 13 is that it is enough models to field a complete league-ready team.

Overall, I’m happy with the results. A few of the models are significantly better looking than some, and a couple I might like to go back and take another shot at. But individually I think the quality is a step above the first team I finished, the Orcs. And it only took me a year and a half.

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There was a point during the match where I could have pretty much ensured a tie. It was about midway through the first half of my Blood Bowl game for the quickie league I organized pitting my unpainted and untested human team (The Mungborough Misfits) against Dave’s orcs (Orktown Aggravators). One of my catchers had the ball with the second catcher pacing him down the sideline for protection. The only one of the Aggravators that offered any sort of obstacle was a lone, outnumbered linebacker who sat there just to give me a tackle zone to dodge out of. Instead I sent in reinforcements for the block and took him down, giving me nothing but open green to the end zone.

The distance was a bit more than I could cover in a single turn, even with the catcher’s eight movement points. So I pushed it (GFI). And I pushed it again, only this time I rolled the hated one. So I used a team re-roll, and I got another one. Granted, the odds were very low of hitting a one on two consecutive rolls (about 2.8% according to these 40K Leadership test odds) but what I didn’t even bother to consider was that I didn’t actually need to Go For It because there was no Orc, other than the one I’d already knocked over who had a very outside chance of influencing the play on the next turn, that could have caught me. And I had plenty of remaining safe moves to build a cage and ensure a score a turn later if I’d exercised a little patience. I fully blame my own miserable coaching skills, but a small part of me has reserved a sliver of contempt for my lack of experience with any type of team that wasn’t slow and strong.

The three teams I’ve played the most are Orcs, Dwarves and Undead. That includes opponents, but other than two matches using borrowed Elves, agility-based strategies have been laughable. Even those Elf teams were a little different because the name of the game in Elf vs. <insert bruiser team here> is avoidance. The humans, on the other hand, look on paper like they have some hitting ability as well. The truth is that the human team is supposedly well-rounded with no particular strength or weakness. The problem with that is the game actively punishes middle-of-the-road teams who have no specialization because so many other teams load their arrangement toward a particular strategy. It leaves the jack of all trades, master of none role as effectively limp: The humans for example aren’t quite strong enough to play a blocking-heavy game nor are they quite agile enough to play a speed or ball possession game [1].

All of which had me contemplating the role of humans in fantasy-based games. Whether the setting is futuristic or not, the division of races in most of these games usually has humans serving as the base-line and riffing on that main theme to create the flavor for the other beings. Call them Elves or call them Vulcans, they are still more elegant, refined and graceful with longer lifespans and more angular features than humans. I understand that as a fictional device it is necessary to provide a frame of reference for characters. Very few people can relate to a Gelatinous Cube player character, for example. But in so many of these cases humans are included in games or fiction seemingly to provide only for comparison’s sake. The interesting part is exploring the possibility of having special night vision or strength that no man could hope to wield.

So I have to ask, why are humans included at all? I have a human Blood Bowl team because it came with the boxed set and while the metal minis are significantly cooler than the plastic pieces that come with the box, I’m not sure I’d be inclined to spend $50 on a set when there are other, more interesting options. The question remains even for games like Oblivion or Shadowrun, why would you want to play a human? Unless the conflict between humanity and the other races is pivotal to the narrative (see Mass Effect), they strike me as far less interesting than the alternative. I wonder if there is merit to the idea of creating a world where humans are not the “standard” race or if, because of our nature, such a feat would actually be impossible.

1. This is actually a bit misleading for the purpose of the argument. Actually the thing is that humans aren’t adept enough at the agility game to be a true counter to a bruiser team nor are they quite hard-hitting enough to put the hurt on a lightning quick skill team like Skaven or Elves. Instead I presume they have their own strategy that involves a little from column A, and a little from column B. This is where my own poor coaching comes into play for not knowing where to draw the distinction, but my point, I think, stands.

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I took some time today to look at the aftermath of the D&D Fourth Edition release, mostly because I finally broke down and ordered the Player’s Handbook (after much hand-wringing) from Amazon. Dude, it was like $15 off the cover price.

Some of this greatly intrigues me, especially since a lot of what I read sounds like Wizards stepped directly into my head and picked out some of the stuff I was asking for. Tougher low-level characters. A more fluid approach to combat. Online tabletop role-playing. I can’t actually speak about the rules themselves yet since my book hasn’t arrived, but I’d be a liar if I said the things I was hearing weren’t stirring a bit of excitement in me for the chance to dive into an adventure.

I like the RPGnet review of the game as a good place to get a broad sense of the changes. Random Average lays out the influences behind some of the adjustments to core mechanics and sirtayls on Dragon Avenue rolls his eyes at the flamewars that erupt as people dissect the new edition. And then Dork Tower’s John Kovalic notes some strange decisions made in the Monster Manual, and decides to run with it.

Part of this intrigue is because, now that tabletop gaming is back in my forebrain, I’m interested in finding not necessarily a steady campaign to participate in but some willing folk to join for a run through a session or two. I also have some ideas for one-shots bubbling in the back of my mind, so goes my fascination with clattering dice (at the moment). In pursuit of this thought I did some digging on other settings and systems and found the free quickstart guide to Call of Cthulu. It was almost enough to make me regret my decision to buy D&D4e instead of the CoC core book. Which suggests there was some sort of internal debate between the two that didn’t exist. It just turns out that buying D&D prohibited me budget-wise from also picking up COC.

But man do I love the base system mapped out in the overview. It’s percentile-based for the most part, but the game also uses other polyhedral dice (bonus) and most delightful to me is the character advancement system which has skills improving as they get used. It’s elegantly handled and very attractive to someone like me who has always, like most role-players, loved advancing a character but personally I’ve always felt the abstraction was pretty hokey.

Some people collect role-playing games mostly to reverse engineer their mechanics and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. I’m not really that kind of guy, though I’ve toyed with plenty of different systems from Palladium’s d20-based concepts to the strict percentiles of DC Heroes through various D&D incarnations, Hero’s low-roll mechanics and more. I enjoy comparing them but my attraction to a particular game is either strictly mechanical (like GURPS) or, more frequently, primarily based on setting (Shadowrun). Which may be why I’m so fascinated by CoC’s impressively intuitive mechanics, because I was drawn to the game because of the setting and I found myself unexpectedly surprised by the rules.

Which brings me back to D&D and I wonder for a minute why I’m intrigued at all with the game. Part of it is the culture of games, it’s kind of like my day-one purchases of Halo sequels. I’m not a huge Halo fan but it matters to gamers so it matters to me. D&D is that way; if you want to guarantee you’ll find a game you can dive right into at a convention or with an impromptu gathering of gamer nerds, you better learn D&D. And like it or not, D&D is a force in the community so it merits attention.

It’s just good they keep making changes or I don’t know what we’d all have to fight about.

The very few readers here have been gradually warning me of mysterious error messages appearing when they try to access Tunnels of Doom. Unable to replicate the problem, I assumed it was either a user error or someone else’s responsibility until it became clear that my problem-free interaction with the site was in the minority.

I tried to pinpoint the original source of the issue but was unable to do so, although I did find enough evidence of a security breach to convince me that a simple link prune would not do the trick. So I essentially dumped the database and re-built the site from backups in a fresh, clean server location. Please, if you find your browser kicking back any further error messages, notify me as soon as you can. I have also re-submitted the site for review at Google and hopefully that will give a clearer picture of how effective my efforts have been.

In the meantime I also took the opportunity to do some housekeeping: I’ve re-visited all the old stories with the following goals:

1. Remove multiple categories for a more logical URL structure.
2. Prune older posts that no longer fit with the type of site Tunnels of Doom has evolved into.
3. Delete older posts that don’t meet the standards of quality I’d like to uphold.

Unfortunately that means it’s possible I’ve introduced some (or a lot) of link rot where old references now return 404s from deleted or moved entries. As a matter of fact, I believe the new URL structure will completely ruin any old links. I don’t know of many incoming links anyway, but if you have linked anywhere other than the home page, you may want to bear that in mind.

Thanks for the patience; now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I guess I figured there would be more gaming last week. I had some time off work, I had ample enthusiasm and somehow I ended up doing gaming related activities more than playing games. I recall now that this happens when you’re focused on tabletop gaming. A lot of time is spent building campaigns, painting, modeling, planning, organizing, preparing, reading, testing and generally doing everything besides actually playing so that the limited time available to play the games goes as smoothly as possible.

It’s certainly not un-enjoyable. I particularly enjoy the artistic satisfaction that comes from painting and modeling miniatures. And there is a certain part of my brain that finds the continual battle for proper organization to be unexpectedly soothing when you consider how much of a slob I am under other conditions. For example I spent a good portion of yesterday morning printing out various summaries for Blood Bowl rules and creating portable dugout templates and arranging them neatly in a binder with the LRB and copies of my team rosters. Would I ever happily spend that much time organizing my financial statements? Highly unlikely.

Speaking of Blood Bowl, I did get one match in against Thom, as an inaugural match for my brief time-based league, TRMBBL. Thom is starting a year-long league in August using the standard rules and I wanted to get in a short pre-season to give people a chance to fiddle with their rosters and get their teams up and painted before the real league began. Thus was born TRMBBL and the first match was Thom’s Cleaveland Browns versus my half-painted Deadmonton Dirtnaps. Both teams are bruisers (the Browns are Orcs, the Dirtnaps are Undead) so we expected a long slugfest. And we got one. Of course I rolled garbage all day long (viva the mighty 3 on 2D6) so I barely got any advancement at all other than the random MVP at the end.

I also didn’t execute very well. The final score was 1-0 in favor of the Browns, but I imagine I could have stopped the initial drive that resulted in the score if I’d been a bit more defensive minded. Granted I’d never played with the Undead before so I was sort of learning as I went, but getting into a position where a Skeleton has to dodge and push it twice on a Blitz just to attempt a two-die defender chooses block on the ball carrier who can score at will if any of those tough rolls goes south is poor planning. Very poor.

Still, it was good times and surrendering a couple of Fan Factor for pitting an unfinished team against a completely finished one was sufficient motivation to get some more paint on my guys. I even stopped at a game store after the match and picked up some white primer so I could finish priming my Necromunda gang and get my sweet Undead cheerleaders and assistant coach worked on. So despite the apparent dearth of game playing, I did a good amount of general gaming. I only wish desire and effort had some sort of positive effect on dice rolls.

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Greeкомпютриtings. Once upon a time, in our wee youth, Paul and I would spend many an hour passing the NES controller back and forth alternating lives or levels, or rolling with laughter in his room with a group of friends playing a tabletop RPG, or driving to a hobby shop for some Magic: The Gathering trading and gaming. As time has gone by the amount of spare time I can devote to gaming has decreased, but it’s still something I greatly enjoy. At some point I had to come to the realization that a) I was not a hardcore gamer b) I will likely never put in the time to be that great at any particular game and c) that’s OK.

Hence, the Occasional Gamer. Probably not limited to just games, as I have a weakness for all things geekery-related (and Mac related, as the name would indicate). So from time to time, as the urge strikes, I’ll offer up my thoughts on what has managed to grab my limited attention.

In the Parting Shot last week I mentioned a phenomenon I refer to as a gaming cycle. It’s where my interest in particular aspect of the gaming hobby, which I participate in on a pretty broad level, shifts from being my primary focus to make way for a different aspect that is taking its place. Last week I mentioned it mostly as a sort of trivial aside, describing the general method by which I approach a range of activities that fall under the same banner that holds a broad appeal.

But I noticed more sharply the shifting of the cycle during the week that followed as what has been a year-plus fixation on video games as my primary focus began to wane. Even as recently as last week I had assumed the new interest in tabletop style games was a minor priority re-alignment but over the course of this week I found myself leaning more toward activities that didn’t involve a controller. Not that I didn’t play any video games, but as I found myself wrapping up some of the last few games that had really commanded my attention recently I was putting less effort into finding something to replace them and focusing more on using the additional time to paint miniatures or research campaign settings.

Part of it is the typical doldrums of the occasional lull in highly anticipated video game titles. At the end of the last installment of $60 a Month I listed a number of upcoming games I was interested in. Re-reviewing those titles I realize that the only games I’m genuinely excited about are Space Invaders Extreme, Bionic Commando Rearmed and D&D 4th Edition. Even of those, I’m unlikely to buy Space Invaders for full retail price as it seems much more likely I’ll Goozex trade for it and Bionic Commando is a downloadable title. Which means my primary purchases for the month of June are likely to be, for the first time since I started $60 a Month, principally non-video games.

I view this as mostly academic. I don’t really mourn for gaming sub-genres or styles that aren’t really holding my interest very strongly for a period of time. History indicates they will come back around again but what I find interesting is the other thing I mentioned last week which was that I’d never had a means of cataloging my various phase shifts before. I wonder if, due to a forced introspection from a weekly activity log, a certain equilibrium might be achieved.

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Simon Parkin on Gamasutra writes a compelling dissection of modern game criticism and reviews in his piece PR’s Dirty Little Game With 11th Hour Reviews. He posits that the crowded online space of video game-oriented sites, also packed in by offline publications like EGM and the like which focus on reviews as pre-release buying guides is being played by publishers who rely on these information repositories to provide feedback on their accomplishments.

The discussion is nothing new—you can revisit the Jeff Gerstmann fiasco from last year if you wish to see it chronicled even more sharply—but Parkin suggests a new angle by framing the problem in the light of the persistent deadline rather than focusing on the industry’s unhealthy relationship with its own critics. He says:

…[T]here are simply too many websites about video games. The competition to be first to ‘print’ with a review, while always a consideration in magazine publishing, is exacerbated through the global competitive nature of the net. In this environment many gaming website publishers are willing to publish a final review even if it’s only based on very tentative impressions of a small portion of the game.

The hypothesis here of time-based competition that erodes the credibility of any and all reviews is as, if not more, intriguing than the one presented by Level Up’s N’Gai Croal saying the loosely defined problem is in the relationship between game sites and the publishers. What I think both writers are talking about is two sides of a broader concern over the general level of integrity in gaming-related media. There is an overwhelming glut of sources for video gaming news and most of them at least dabble in reviews (I see the mirror, I’m not ignoring it). But the majority operate under the assumption that the me-first mentality that was incubated in the pre-Internet era where magazines reigned supreme and scooping the competition meant, potentially, a significant newsstand sales boost.

With the proliferation of online news and review sites, the prevailing wisdom was transferred wholesale and the only thing that was adjusted at all was the timetable. Instead of a lead time of a month your carefully negotiated exclusivity deal earned you at best a day or two. When rapid updating came into vogue with blog-style enthusiast sites, that lead shrank to maybe hours as most blog posts, at least originally, were direct links to other sources. You start to factor in blogs that link to other blogs and the rise of syndication via RSS and Atom and eventually lead times are almost worthless yet still fought over as if they somehow mattered.

Supposedly even the hasty link blogs that do little aside from redirecting readers through their ad-supported feeds to the useful information can increase an original source’s pageviews that I guess make the Web go ’round, but I’ve encountered plenty of link rings that end up being self-referential with little clue where the source material might be found. In my very brief stint as a gaming site contributor I found that often the original material was only spoken of and not directly attributed; the destination content was the commentary on some obscure site that casually referenced without attribution some exclusive preview or trailer. Aside from being an obvious source for the rampant rumor mill that frustrates publishers and PR departments, it renders a lot of exclusivity deals essentially moot. At best you could say they foster community discussion and put the subject into the consciousness of the intended audience but that doesn’t really help the publications that act as delivery mechanisms and sell their souls for those kinds of deals, it only benefits the publishers who have all the power in the first place.

And none of this even addresses Parkin’s suggestion that maybe all this first-to-press coverage isn’t even particularly valuable to begin with. You can ask several game reviewers what their mission statement is in providing readers with reviews. They may have some sort of noble, reader-focused concept of providing a buying guide or acting as a stern warning to save thrifty gamers some cash. But that’s a red herring tossed out by entities that understand their livelihood depends on goodwill that exists between them and their readers. In truth they can’t possibly have anyone’s pocketbooks in the forefront of their mind when they’re getting all the games for free. If you eliminate the actual act of parting with money in exchange for entertainment the value prospect becomes purely hypothetical.

It’s easy to cast judgment from the mountain; Tunnels of Doom has certainly printed reviews and though the mission statement indicates a “different way” of handling them, it’s hardly unique or ground-breaking. Even Play Magazine recently published an issue without review scores to encapsulate the text. The truth is ToD has changed somewhat organically from early efforts away from the official one-post review. If you want to know what I think of a game you can check my weekly Gaming Weekend posts where I talk about the games I played. I found that was a more natural way of discussing games because your opinion can change wildly over time. My initial view of, say, Rock Band was overwhelmingly positive. Somewhere in the middle I got frustrated with some of the game’s missteps but you’ll find that there have been a huge number of weeks where the game shows up in the list of titles I’ve had spinning in the 360 and that speaks volumes to how good the game is, how much staying power it has and how easy it is to overlook the faults.

Could that have been summarized neatly? Sure, but not after a week. It took six months for those two sentences to shake out and there’s no way you can get that honest of a testimony about a game with a race-oriented review schedule. I may have been in the midst of my frustrations (many of which were actually addressed with a patch released about a month ago which highlights another point about games: Many are moving targets) and come across as being down on Rock Band. Meanwhile I may have raved about GTA IV, a game which gives a very strong first impression, but you’ll note I haven’t touched the thing in a few weeks. What does that really say about it? Can I give a definitive opinion on it even now? What if I pick it up again once I put down Overlord and find myself seriously hooked on it?

The biggest thing to take from all this is that gaming isn’t a speed-based pastime. Movies are typically under two hours and very rarely over three. The experience of a movie or a book is finite by nature. Games are less so and therefore you at best get impressions, even of narratively structured games, when you try to formulate opinions about them using techniques that were designed for less time-consuming media. What we need are less reviewers that are purporting to act as buyer’s guides and more critics who are trying to serve as commentators on the state of games as a whole and who can reflect on trends or at best identify gems that may be overlooked.

Some non-reviewers are already doing this and the gaming culture responds: Observe Tycho from Penny Arcade and Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation. Whether it’s Tycho’s obsession with complex game mechanics or Yahtzee’s hatred of quick time events, they both critique games more than they actually review them in the traditional sense of the word. But in doing so their opinion becomes even more valuable and as a result they serve the purpose run of the mill reviewers claim to serve. To a certain extent we can expect that some games are going to sell no matter what people say, and suggesting that reviewers are holding any sway is ridiculous to begin with, especially when you consider that the best reviews are reserved for the usual suspects anyway. Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out shortly: Does anyone honestly expect more than an almost imperceptible fraction of reviews to be sharply critical? Does anyone think that even if 100% of the reviews called it the biggest failure since E.T. that it wouldn’t still sell a million copies on the first day?

The integrity of gaming media is in shambles because in equal parts we’ve accepted what they’ve heaped upon us without question or concern and because that media has married itself to the industry it purports to discuss critically or impartially. Faced with an impossible task and an apathetic audience, it’s hardly a surprise we’re left with this farce of an industry.

The guys behind Penny Arcade and Player vs. Player got together to do a promotional thing for the soon-released Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition: They played through the advance copy module, “Keep on the Shadowfell,” and recorded it. Now they’re releasing the recordings as episodic podcasts and I just finished the first one.

The short version: It’s awesome and hilarious and you should listen to it right away.

The longer version is that it’s great podcasting in a general sense: Fans of D&D are going to get a nice insight into some of the 4th Edition changes while even people who aren’t interested in the nuts and bolts of the game can get a good sense of what a good role-playing session is like. It’s sometimes tough to explain to people who don’t play RPGs what makes it fun, and this is a great exercise because it captures that essence right away and it just so happens the PvP and PA guys are hilarious so it’s framed in a comedic backdrop that really pulls the whole thing together.

Plus the first episode includes the phrase “I’m just super-good at D&D” that had me in stitches so, yeah, it’s worth listening. As if that wasn’t enough, they’re also building an accompanying comic that chronicles the adventure and it’s pretty sweet in and of itself (though a bit context-less without having listened to the podcast).

As with most stuff the PA guys do, the language gets pretty rough so it’s maybe not for kids, but everyone else should make time to check this out.