Tunnels of Doom

A large portion of the week was spent on the road, as they say. I was unplugged in most of the usual senses: I didn’t even check my email from Wednesday afternoon until Monday morning. That may be the longest I’ve gone without digital communication since high school. I did intersperse a few Twitter text messages in there; it’s not like I traveled back in time. But being away from it all meant, among other things, that my typical games were not accessible nor were the people I engage to play them.

I did squeeze in a game of Blood Bowl last Monday night, at a pizza parlor no less. It was a hasty ordeal organized in a clandestine manner with comically ancient technologies (telegram) but necessary if I wanted to retain my streak of league games. I didn’t win, but I did manage to draw a tie. So far the (undead) Spoilers seem to be slow out of the gate and only their tenacity to fill the available roster spots late in the second half allows games to be close. I need to get better at not playing “down” since I frequently lose the coin toss and give up an early touchdown; the best I’ve been able to do is identify a need for fewer squishy players I’m afraid of losing on defensive drives. Specifically I need to stop loading the defensive line with Regeneration-less ghouls. We’ll see how this week’s game pans out armed with that insight.

The one thing I did have on my travels was my DS filled exclusively with Etrian Odyssey II. If you want to understand why I continue to marvel at how engaged I am with this game, you must comprehend that I expected to be this enraptured by hard-hitting next gen titles like Grand Theft Auto IV and Mass Effect. What we’re comparing to, essentially, is a game that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Pentium (one) PC in 1996 that has transitional animation (that is, only the key frames) and consists almost exclusively of menus. I really have a hard time putting it down.

I reached the 2nd Strata over the weekend, playing on the plane and in the hotel room on mornings while I waited for my companions to wake from their sleep. The palate swap to autumn colors in this stage of the game was enough to force a tiny squeal of glee from deep in my chest. The unwitting passenger in the seat next to me was forced to glance at the screens and saw me almost slavering for the chance to unleash my mad cartography skillz on a new floor of the labyrinth. He immediately asked to be re-seated, and I barely noticed he was gone.

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The demise of E3 is regularly trumpeted as imminent, foregone or perhaps in some cases past tense. In any case some variant of it forges ahead roughly every 365 days so I presume that these discussions are moot. And while there appears to be a unanimity about the appropriate level of hype associated with the event, somewhere between rhetoric and action exists a sheet of ether made from what I call oppositium, whose sole purpose is to flip the outcome 180 degrees from the stated intent. So while journalists talk cool and lean back, nonchalantly saying “Oh, it’s just E3, no big,” what comes out of their mouths in a shrill, girlish squeal is “OhmygoshE3ohmygoshEEEeeeeThreeeeee!!”

No news that perforated my filter struck me as particularly noteworthy. There are going to be sequels to big franchise games, which I suppose qualifies as news similar to the way they throw the sunrise and sunset times and tide reports at the end of the weather forecast as though it were some kind of pertinent information. Also, I guess Xbox Live’s Dashboard is now designed by Apple and Nintendo? The revamp is… good? They spent the first couple of years excising the active user hostility from the first iteration, so this reset will be, um, new. And then there are the additional details about games we already anticipated which reinforce their imminent awesomeness. I don’t know, I felt a remarkable lack of interest in the press coverage considering the highlight of the show seemed to be a concert by The Who exclusively for media types which had, at best, a peripheral connection to Rock Band but unless Harmonix is prepared to send Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey over to my house to jam with me, this comes across as audience pandering; the ultimate schwag.

Meanwhile my actual gaming gets narrower in scope while the depth expands beyond the oceanic floor level, deep into the crevasses of near singular obsession. Whoever thought it was smart to put a lunatic OCD-targeted turn-based dungeon crawler on an easy-to-use hand held device that lists, among its key feature set, at-will clamshell hibernation mode—well, they didn’t take into consideration the impact it would have on my particular mind. Etrian Odyssey II goes with me everywhere. I steal moments between meal bites to search a wall for secret passages. I adjust inventories at red lights. In the time it has taken me to write this sentence, I’ve gained three experience levels.

EOII has a mechanic where enemies that are visible in the dungeon view (as glowing orbs; the graphical presentation of the 3D environment is more suggestive than representative), called FOEs, move through the dungeon in particular fashions. They may patrol a set course, or they may fly over areas you cannot pass. Or, in some cases, they may stand still or move very little but when you get within range they attempt to follow you and engage you in combat. FOEs are disastrously overpowered enemies. I accidentally read a spoiler that indicated there are at least 24 floors to the dungeon (probably more) and I’ve reached all of the fourth. However, my principal party members are hovering around level 17 and to date I’ve only been able to handle a singe FOE. Perhaps this indicates something about my choices in skill allotment as I advance, but I routinely handle the random encounter creatures at higher floors without even manual intervention (viva the L button Auto key) in less than a full turn. I suspect the FOEs are designed to be moving obstacles more than actual level-specific opposition.

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I mentioned last week that I was anticipating the arrival of my newest Goozex score, Etrian Odyssey II. I had been hankering for a dungeon crawler, something like a PC role-playing experience perhaps along the lines of Oblivion. Depth, you know? I don’t want to wander too far into a tangent already, but I keep trying these Japanese-style role-playing games and aside from the tactical ones, I find them insufferable. I guess I’m the one who changed and not the games (though my recent stint into FF VI suggests the games themselves are a bit different as well) and maybe it’s just that the “real-time battle systems” turn me off, perhaps explaining why the tactical variants aren’t as painful. But considering the fact that turn-based RPGs are outnumbered by real time variants something like 60 to 1, it strikes me as not surprising that I was feeling like it was a game type I wanted to re-connect with again.

Anyway, Etrian Odyssey II. I wish I knew where to start. The game itself has gotten pretty strong reviews, and yet it’s something that I suspect will fly far beneath most gamers’ radar. It works a lot like older PC dungeon crawlers. It’s turn-based, although the pace can be particularly brisk if you choose, so each step you take in the dungeon counts as a turn. Encounters are, for the most part, random although you do have a gauge that indicates the likelihood of an attack on the next turn. It’s not precise, but it does give a pretty good indicator of when to heal up if necessary. And there are a few enemies that are visible, usually boss-type creatures. These can occasionally be circumvented and usually avoided by judicious retreat. But a huge part of the game is the cartography, which is where most of the game’s DS functionality comes into play. Since it’s turn based you can avoid a Foe (the visible boss creatures) and mark your map to note its location for later. The mapping options are surprisingly robust all around, and enjoyable enough that they’ve somehow managed to make me go back to drawing maps by hand and I’m happy about it.

Aside from the turn-based aspect and mapping, there is also a clever class and advancement system: You earn experience for random encounters in keeping with the genre standards, but there is no accompanying financial reward. At least not directly and certainly not assuredly. Instead you get various trophies from certain critters you’ve vanquished, which can be sold for an almost universally paltry sum at the town shop. They then charge exorbitant prices for the goods you value. Meanwhile the experience points accumulate as you’d expect, and after a particular cache of them has been accumulated you level up. Except unlike most RPGs, the leveling process isn’t gifted, with automatic generosity in terms of extra HP, magic and attribute bonuses along with maybe some sort of tech tree. I mean, there is a tech tree unique to each class and you can choose how to progress within it, but you get either a skill or a single trait bonus. Each level.

Let me put it another way: In order for your Medic to earn the Revive skill, which brings a character back from 0 HP, you need no fewer than six level advancements which provide no additional bonuses to combat or defensive capabilities. It’s this kind of treatment of a player that gives the game its reputation for being punishing (check a few reviews to see what people think about it) but it feels so much to me like the older games that had little patience for sissy gamers who wanted to step into the game as a minor deity and exit the game as something analog to the champion of the universe.

There was a time when I spent a whole summer on a dungeon crawler, fighting and re-fighting my way through sections getting satisfaction from the minor victories. There is so much about those halcyon days that is captured in this game, and it is just what I wanted. The platform makes it compatible with my adult life, the anachronism makes it feel like something that maybe shouldn’t even exist in these times. I want to find the person responsible for this game and give them a hug. Of course I’d quickly end the embrace and clear my throat, offering a firm handshake instead. There are appearances to maintain, after all.

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Gamers will probably agree that there is no single perfect game. A few dedicated folks might pick chess or go or perhaps poker as the only game they care about, but gamers are sort of defined by their interest in the scope of games as a whole. Without that purview into games, the hobby loses some of its intrigue. What emerges, instead, is a contextually perfect game. This is the art of playing the right game at the right time, and it’s also about finding the ideal game for the individual gamer within a range of games that share mechanics or styles or themes.

I had a chance to play Ticket to Ride multiplayer on XBLA over the weekend with Doctor Mac. It was Saturday afternoon, my wife was sleeping off a headache and I was looking for something to pass the time. I had been playing a variety of demos and picking my way through GTA IV a little but I wasn’t really into it the way I had hoped I’d be. When Doctor Mac hopped online and asked if I was interested in playing something, I suggested TTR and before I knew it we had worked through seven games in a row. I’ve played the TTR board game many times, and I’ve owned most of the tabletop products at one time or another. I’ve also played a lot of the web-based PC version on Days of Wonder’s website, so this should have been just another TTR session. But for a lazy Saturday afternoon, with voice chat on my couch and a new player experiencing the game for the first time on the other end of the line, it was exactly what I was looking for in a game at that moment.

Perfection, I realized, also comes when elements of a game meet a particular gamer’s needs. I’ve spent plenty of time in the past few weeks talking about Blood Bowl and after last week’s matches I started thinking about why I’ve been so much more consistently intrigued by Blood Bowl than other Games Workshop titles. It’s not that I’m better at it than other games, I’m a consistently terrible BB player. And it isn’t that the game itself does any one thing so much better than other titles. What it comes down to is that it has the perfect confluence of complexity, strategy, mechanics and hobby elements to scratch my particular itch.

Take the other GW game that I’ve spent a lot of time with, Warhammer 40K. Thematically, I actually prefer 40K: As much as I enjoy a good fantasy setting, I gravitate toward Sci-Fi when given the choice. It’s why I’ve never been much interested in Warhammer Fantasy Battles or Lord of the Rings. But 40K, once you move past the wonderfully rich setting, is in fact just a game. And as a game I find it to be somewhat clunky. Matches take too long and the rules are by turns too abstract and yet can be too methodical. From a hobby perspective the armies are too large and tedious to put together and paint. The barrier to entry is too high. It’s not a bad game, and I’ve enjoyed almost all the time I’ve spent with both elements of the game (hobby and play). Yet when you compare 40K to Blood Bowl…

Blood Bowl, to me, is a more enjoyable game. It’s constraints in terms of playing field and available tactics add a level of elegance I don’t think a larger, more loosely constructed game like 40K can ever achieve. Most of the complaints I have with 40K can be addressed with skirmish-level games like Necromunda (which I also prefer to 40K) but at root Blood Bowl is a board game which I think reigns in some of the more tedious facets of tabletop miniatures gaming. There are no concessions for awkward line-of-sight rules or clumsy measurements to be made for movement. You have spaces on a board, and strictly defined character options that (mostly) avoid beardy customization. Yet there is a tremendous level of flexibility in Blood Bowl as you create your teams from a vast list and engage in the hobby aspect at exactly the level that fits my comfort zone. I find it overwhelming and dull to slop paint on dozens of 40K troops and then vehicles, special units and commanders. Yet I have just enough patience to crank my way through 15 or 16 Blood Bowl models.

The final element to gaming perfection is the mood-based context. There have been times when I’ll play a game I don’t really think is that great because it’s the right kind of game for my mood. A good example is Blacksite Area 51. I played the game several weeks ago (before trading it away) because I was in the mood for a military shooter. I’ve been slowly working my way through Jeanne D’Arc because while I actually like it, I don’t think it’s the best tactical turn-based RPG I’ve played, it’s what I have on hand and it fills that niche for me. The curse of the gamer of course is that occasionally you’ll find yourself wanting to play something that either you don’t have or that you can’t reasonably play right then. This weekend I found myself really wanting to play an old-school style dungeon crawler. A few friends have been playing Etrian Odyssey II on DS, but I had to wait until I could find a trader on Goozex since I don’t have the cash on hand to go pick it up. Fortunately, gaming desires lead to determination; I manipulated my way to the top of the trade list for EO II and got matched by the end of the weekend. Next week I should have the game and a full report.

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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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