Gaming Weekend: Mundane Humanity Edition
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.
The List
- Blood Bowl – As mentioned I played a match with my human team against orcs. The final score was 0-1 and like I said above, I could have scored early on. Toward the end of the game I had four players in the Dead & Injured box but in another display of moronic coaching I forgot I had purchased an Apothecary so it’s possible I could have prevented at least some of the pain of putting significantly less than a full 11 players on the field for the last couple of drives. Despite the impression I may have given I didn’t find playing with the human team to be particularly unpleasant, but it made me long even more for a specialized ball handling/speed team. As much as I love pounding some fools with 5 STR Mummies, actually using the passing rules is kind of new and exciting. Also, scoring on anything other than accident is pretty fun.
Doing some additional research I’m sort of thinking ahead to my next team. I doubt I’ll worry about the plastic humans beyond what work has been done on them already (by Nik) but I would like a speedy, skill-based team to round out my options. So I started looking and I don’t have a lot of interest in Skaven which means I’m looking at Necromantic, Elven, Lizardmen or (if I sacrifice the speed aspect) Amazon. I don’t want to sacrifice speed and Necromantic teams are terribly similar to Undead which means I’d be interested in them solely for the Werewolves which isn’t sufficient for a full investment. Besides, if I wanted to I could pick up some extra Zombies and a handful of specialty models (Werewolves and Flesh Golems) and make a Necromantic variant of my existing Undead team. So I’m left with some kind of Elf variant or Lizardmen.
I don’t have any particular beef with playing an Elf team, except I just don’t care for most of the models. Actually I don’t mind the Dark Elves at all, but they’re closer to Humans in team construction under LRBv5 so I’m less interested. I loathe the Wood Elf models so those are out. My favorite Elf team (in terms of appearance) are the High Elves but of course I kind of like the team make-up of the regular Elves better. So it comes down to High Elves, Elves or Lizardmen. Lizardmen are interesting because they’re a fun combination of bruiser units (Saurus, Kroxigor) and speed/skill units (Skinks). That’s pretty attractive but I wonder if it’s too close to my comfort zone? They do seem like the team that would be the most fun to paint.
I’m content to keep these three teams in mind and just keep an eye out for a good deal on any of them but I suspect I’ll eventually end up with four main teams to choose from. - Catan Card Game – Two summers ago my wife and I spent the majority of our evenings locked in a struggle for dominance between our principalities with Catan card game. Like Catan Dice, the card game gives a lot of the flavor of the Settlers board game without actually trying to directly mimic the mechanics in a different format. In the base game—the one you play with two people and a single box—it typically plays out like the set-up phase of Settlers where people race for the best spot on the board, although in this case the goal is to get the couple of limited cards that can tip the game in your favor.
When you add the expansions in and allow each player to have their own custom-built deck, which is how most of our games ended up a couple years ago, the game becomes a sort of closed-system CCG, not unlike the early years of Magic: The Gathering with the whole rarity construct removed. However, since it had been such a long time since that summer, we decided to ease back into it with a round of the base game. It was incredibly close though Nik pulled out the win the turn before I might have clinched the victory. What I found partiuclarly intriguing is that despite the game being decidedly two-player adversarial, she plays with a weird version of feminine competitiveness. Which is to say, she shies heavily away from using overtly aggressive cards like the Black Knight and Arsonist, which force the opposing player to return cards to their hand (and therefore must spend the resources to play them a second time). There is a risk/reward element to those cards but she doesn’t use them because she feels they are “mean.”
To my sensibility, there is no ill feeling projected when I play a card or use an ability to gain an advantage in a game. I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, I’m merely playing the game as designed. If that results in someone else losing, to me that’s the nature of the inherent competition. But anecdotally I’ve noticed women seem more inclined to place additional social stigmas to obviously confrontational game mechanics as if the executor were making a personal attack. It’s possible that the differentiation isn’t gender-based but rooted instead in a particular breed of competitive person who prefers subterfuge or winning on merit rather than hinderance of opponents as morally superior; I suspect my wife falls squarely into both camps so the dividing line is harder to discern. - Grand Theft Auto IV – I worked my way through a few missions this week, still feeling the strange disconnect between appreciation for what the game is and accomplishes and a general malaise about my participation. I’m mostly convinced at this point that the crux of the issue I have with GTAIV is that the main character doesn’t flow with my interpretation of him when control is wrested from me during cutscenes and so forth. I want Niko to be more reluctant than he is, I want his conflict to be greater and I want more control over how he handles situations. San Andreas had a lot of options in terms of goofy physical adjustments, random side missions and cartoonish stories. IV narrows this focus to the betterment of the series but as they trimmed the fat they also nicked some of the choice in the game to the extent that, after something like Oblivion or even BioShock, this feels constrained.
- Rock Band – I was under the impression that the update which changed Band World Tour mode to be more forgiving allowed players to earn the 1,000,000 fan achievement without moving past the Medium difficulty. Yet in our band, The Most Gross, my wife and I are locked at 550,000 fans. I play Bass on Hard but she’s only comfortable with Guitar on Medium so until she either steps up (which I still think is too far of a step, though it is an improvement over GHII) or we figure out the secret to earning fans on a lower level, the World Tour mode has once again ground to a disappointing halt. I want to like this part of the game so much because the potential is there for it to be exactly what I want out of this game but problems persist and I’m disappointed to say that I think they may not be addressed, if they ever are, until a sequel is released.
Meanwhile, the pricey Guitar Hero III wireless guitar controller has decided to start acting flaky, not registering the button presses properly. Between that and the questionable strum bar on the Rock Band guitar, we’re left with a perfectly serviceable GHII wired controller and one of two less-than-ideal options for player 2. I realize these are unique peripherals which demand a particular physical interaction to use, but I’ve never broken a regular console controller in my life and I refuse to believe that when you stretch it out to the shape of a guitar I suddenly manage to decimate them all. - Mario Kart Wii – We visited my sister-in-law’s place for a barbecue and they had the Wii out. I played two or three races in Mario Kart. I will say that having played many Mario Kart games before, it felt familiar and comfortable, even with the oddly twisting steering mechanism of the Wiimote. But the overall depth of the game was noticeably absent even in those few courses. Blue shells still mostly break the game, as do the Bullet power-ups and while the mayhem is part of the charm, adding the awkward controls gives it even more of a sense of being arbitrary, as though the race was predetermined and like a child too young to know better, placed in front of an arcade machine in demo mode so he can “play” at no cost, you merely exercise the motions of play and observe idly as events unfold.
- Wii Sports – After Mario Kart was put away I got a chance to create a Mii and then spend some time playing a couple of Wii Sports games. A while back I tried Wii Sports and found it lacking. This time I enjoyed it more but I think it was a social element that made it finally “click.” Tennis is still too on-rails and abstracted for my taste, but a simple game like that if certainly worth playing for a half hour or so with a friend. I also got a chance to try bowling for a few games and, again, when I played with other humans I enjoyed myself much more than the game I played solo when everyone had vacated the immediate vicinity for a bit.
I still don’t see enough here to warrant anything near $250 for the system. The games are shallow fun at best and that’s rarely what I’m looking for from a console. I will retract some of my original disdain in light of the social experience Wii provides, but I submit that the breadth and depth of Rock Band more than compensates on competing systems.
Parting Shot
I spent some time doing a first pass on the new Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook. The game seems like a very light version of GW skirmish-level games these days. The integration of D&D Miniatures is probably another glaring clue, but I found it odd that things like basic attacks were practically archaic in the new version (why bother when you have effective Powers that can be used at-will in many cases?) and played like many of the attack options from something like Necromunda. The layout of the game is still role-playing familiar with the players managing a single model and an overseer still controls the antagonists. But aside from that any hints at non-combat role-playing are conspicuously absent from the PHB. Perhaps this has all fallen on the shoulders of the DM (I haven’t checked that book out just yet), but that seems to my mind to have relegated anything that might be construed as role-playing into little more than fluff and flavor text the kind you can see on even larger-scale wargames like 40K.
Which isn’t a complaint necessarily. D&D is free to be what it is, and most of my D&D games have been hack and slash micro-wargames for the most part anyway. Role-playing in its strictest sense has typically been reserved for different systems or more intriguing settings. But I thought it strange that as I read the PHB, I found myself becoming enthusiastic not for D&D, but for other role-playing systems. In particular I thought, “If this is essentially a miniatures game, why would I not play Warhammer Fantasy Role-playing game?”
I heard through the grapevine that a friend is starting just such a campaign, and I’d lie if I said I wasn’t intrigued. I’m sure Wizards of the Coast loses no sleep if I do or do not play D&D 4e: They already have my stipend. I wonder though how they might react if presented directly with evidence that they were merely facilitating a revival of interest in competing products.