While checking out Google+, I stumbled upon this apparently “hot” item: it was a picture that merely said “To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens…” This statement annoyed me for a few reason. Let’s break it down real quick and see why it’s shit like this that is the Internet equivalent of pollution. Continue reading
I’ve begun hosting a Shadowrun table top RPG campaign with some of my coworkers. I think I may start chronicling their adventures here, and hopefully I’ll remember to do so freshly after each session, because sometimes you just get amazing or hilarious things that happen, but also there’s some great insight into how different gamers play games. I think the allowing players to use their own imaginations as the limits to what they can do inside a game gives a great view of how people want to play games and what types of things they enjoy experimenting with.
Example: our hacker decided to get into the speaker system at the grocery store they were in and start blaring Brittany Spears. Both hilarious and insightful. Hilarious because, well, that should be fairly obvious. Gun shots and knives being used everywhere and suddenly “Hit Me Baby One More Time” start playing at loud volumes. But also insightful, because the speakers system might not be something accessible in a video game because it doesn’t hold any real usefulness on its own, unless the developers decide to allow you to do something useful with it. Using your own imagination and desire though, you may want to do random useless stuff, just to have fun and be yourself. And really, gaming is all about having fun. This can be through combat simulations, storytelling, or any number of other factors, but the bottom line is that your player is enjoying themselves and having fun by the end of it.
We only played a sample battle with some pre-made characters, and next week is just going over character creation. I’ll try to remember to recap the character creation process afterward, and then starting the week after that we should get into the good stuff. Keep an eye out for it!
PS: Random story from a much earlier campaign of Shadowrun I used to run. Two parts to it, but first a little background. Memory is a bit hazy, but I recall us having two humans, an elf, and either a troll or an ork. The elf is playing a Face, which is someone that relies more heavily on social actions and persuasion to get things done, while everyone else was pretty much combat-oriented in some way. They were captured for various reasons and starting off in a prison, with two guards; a human and a troll.
Part one of this story is that the Face, being female and deciding that breasts are great distractions for male prison guards, attempted to take off her shirt while handcuffed. Being a little tricky, but definitely not difficult, I made her role some dice with a low success threshold, meaning the feat should’ve been simple to accomplish. She critically failed, meaning she ended up doing it all wrong and nearly choking herself to death on her own shirt. Good news though! It distracted the guards long enough for the others to knock them out.
Part two is that the human and the ork/troll dressed up as guards using the outfits of the ones they knocked out, and attempted to escort the other two players out of the prison as though they were transferring them to a different cell block. They both had abysmal social skills, but the human had one higher than the ork/troll so he was chosen to bluff his way past three separate guard points. He critically succeeds on everyone roll, with one of the guard checkpoints actually glitching in their opposition roll, making his success all the better. He never rolled that well consecutively again, thankfully, but that fluke still managed to save them a crap ton of time and energy that would have otherwise been spent fighting well-armed prison guards and trying to escape the prison.
More of these stories to come, hopefully, from my new campaign and group!
So, Mass Effect 3 is getting some free DLC (DownLoadable Content) that is supposed to give you a bit more insight into what happens after the final choice you make in the game. It’s not there to rewrite the ending, give you more choices, anything like that: you’ll just receive a bit more information on what happens to everyone after the big event. At least, this is what I understand to be the case. I think it’s nice to see game developers responding directly to their player base, and so readily. They weren’t at all shy about going, “here’s an optional download to give you a bit more, because you felt it was missing to make the game more complete.” That’s pretty kick-ass of them. And if it’s anything like how X-Men Legends and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance do it, you’ll get quick cut scenes depicting/narrating how each of your choices impacts the galaxy after you “save” it, which I wouldn’t mind.
Also, I read up on the Shepard Indoctrination theory, and it’s actually become quite more coherent and believable. Assuming that even the “toughest” person can break under enough pressure, it would make sense for at least some indoctrination to occur to Shepard over the years he’s been at war with the Reapers. But I find it doubtful he would be affected to the degree this theory says he would be, because it borders on almost full control. Plus, the ending doesn’t really make sense if he’s indoctrinated to such a degree. So, I’m going to stick with thinking Shepard isn’t indoctrinated, though the theory points out some other really good issues with the ending. I’ll grab the DLC when it hits this summer and see if it actually improves the ending any.
So, I finally beat Mass Effect 3. I had heard a bunch of bad things about it and expected and abrupt ending, but kept hopes high that it wouldn’t disappoint. And it was a decent ending; not a great, or even a really good, ending. But decent. A lot of people are upset for various reasons, and I’d like to respond with why these things don’t necessarily upset me. Then I’ll go on to the things that do upset me. As a reminder, there are spoilers in the rest of this post, so don’t read ahead if you don’t want to spoil the ending.
Not So Bad – Things I don’t think people should be bitching about
Pretty Bad – More people should bitch about this stuff instead