Sacrificing for the Pandemic and Thoughts on Onward

Spoiler warning on the movie Onward from Pixar. Watch for the label below.

Ah, COVID-19, how I hate you. For the past 2 years, I have been working hard on improving my D&D game, the one that happens in person every week at my house. And now, due to a global pandemic, we need to lower our risk of contracting or passing the contagion to other people so we do not overwhelm our healthcare infrastructure. I will leave off going into gory details on all of that as they have been discussed, ad nauseum, elsewhere. Anyway, being a responsible DM - and succumbing to the blandishments of the wife of one of my players - I decided that we need to practice good social distancing and have begun the process of moving my weekly game to an online format. It is not that I am not technically astute enough, I built the computer I am typing this on and set up my home network after all. No, it is that I have worked hard on my in-person game - better battle grid, tons of paper miniatures, and a growing collection of 3d printed terrain - and now I have to shift direction entirely and take my game online.

Fortunately, there is a fantastic new voice chat software called Discord (yes, I know, the strange dichotomy of choosing that exact name for a product that is supposed to let you communicate with your friends...) that also has some really good text chat features has taken care of most of my issues of bringing the game online. In days gone past, there were other voice chat softwares, but none as robust as Discord is. I am not sure if that is due to the software improving, or more to the fact that everyone's home bandwidth and computing power has increased exponentially in the past couple of decades. My other big issue is finding a bit of software we can use to play the game with. Yes, yes, I can use Discord and only Discord, make maps other places and pass files over Discord, but there are several good options out there, and I cannot pass up a chance to keep my game a tactical/visual experience. The issue with that, of course, is now I have to spend more time building my adventures in whichever application I decide to use beforehand (after paying for a subscription and teaching myself how to use said software), more than I have grown accustomed to over the past 2 years. On top of that, of course, is getting all of my players of varying degrees of technical knowledge online (do they have the right hardware? does everyone have headsets?) and using the right programs, and then teaching them how to use them all while learning them myself. Fun!

As usual, while writing this post, time got away from me, and we had our first session. We'll, not really a full session, more of a check to see if everyone can log in to Discord and make their various microphones and speakers behave. Heartened by getting everyone on, even our most Luddite of techno-phobes, we continued on and got everyone into Roll20, which I have settled on as the easiest and cheapest option. Yes, yes, if I wanted to shift my gaming empire (allow me my dreams, will you?) entirely online and saw myself gaming for the rest of my life online only, I probably would be looking towards Fantasy Grounds instead for a multitude of reasons. But honestly, I want to game online only until this pandemic is finished, and then I am dragging everyone back to playing person. This is a social game, and while I appreciate what technology offers today's gamers versus what the past offered us, I still prefer to play our little fantasy trips in person.

**SPOILER WARNING** Yep, here it is, finally, spoilers on Pixar's recent movie, Onward. **SPOILER WARNING**

I saw Onward with the family, and while I liked it a lot, I admit it is not the best we have seen from Pixar. Ignore the LGBQT froo-fra-rah concerning the gay cop (more on this in a moment), and go see it, if you have ever played a medieval fantasy role-playing game you will thank me for it. The gay cop character showed up for so short a time that even if you find that to be an issue, the character comes and goes so quickly that it is a very brief hiccup in the flow of the story, and the whole sad affair just does not make any sense to me why anyone is making a fuss over it.

But back to the movie. For me, deeper than just the story the creators are trying to tell, I think the movie is a fantastic example of what happens when you introduce modern technology into a world of fantasy magic - you lose something with the adoption of the new. This is what I have been harping on whenever my players bring up their desire to bring firearms into our D&D game, because you let the science and technology creep into your magical fantasy world, and suddenly your whole setting changes. Which becomes very clear in the movie. If you want technology and firearms in your RPG game, stop playing medieval fantasy and go for something either modern or sci-fi, there are plenty out there to choose from.

Beyond that, I really like the premise of the movie - fantasy world where magic is real gets technology and all the mythical creatures (which is all of them as there are apparently no humans) all become boring, non-magical, everyday people. No, I am not saying that I like to see magic disappear, but the setting intrigues me and what they do with it, the historic quest to get the Maguffin to finally spend some time with their dead dad, does please me. And I like the ending, how it does not matter that the protagonist does not get to talk to the dead father, but still feels accomplished for helping older brother get a few moments with the dear departed. It was a twist in an unusual direction and still tugged on your heart strings, just like Pixar has done in the past.

I know that you are not spoiling this movie for yourself and still reading, so encourage your friends to see it. They probably cannot see it in theaters due to COVID-19, but they can probably stream it online. Kinda makes you wonder what was keeping them from doing that before... oh wait, it is because Hollywood is full of greedy assholes and it is all about making money. Silly bastard me, I forgot.

This Blog is Not Dead!

I swear, neither I nor this blog are dead. No really, I swear, I have 4 drafts on blog posts that I have been working on (and mostly off) since my last post, but here we are with me making excuses. Sorry.

Anyway, in lieu of explaining what has been going in my life (one of the many drafts I have been "working" on does that), I had an idea for a double adventure that I wanted to put down before it escaped me. This is a two part adventure, as hinted at before, but instead of the same set of PCs for both, you have your players make two different sets of characters. The first half is pretty basic - party has to get the McGuffin to save the world/kingdom/town/whatever. Then the twist starts - these PCs are not going to live forever, so they are also tasked with hiding the McGuffin away to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. The party is provided a little bit of an extra budget from their local kingdom to supplement their recent earnings (hey, they just stormed their way to the McGuffin once, they should be loaded with dough, and the kindgom does not want to suffer that kind of inflationary spending) (on another note, Emily Dresner, aka Multiplexer, is back and posting new Dungeonomics blog posts, these are excellent reads), and they design a dungeon and stock it with traps and guardians. Then build it, and install the McGuffin at the end of it. Because you cannot simply destroy a McGuffin, now can you? So it must be locked away inside an "impossible" dungeon, obviously.

The party has fun, does something a little different from the usual "my character retires to great fame and fortune" at the end of the campaign, and then they move on to the second part of this two parter. But you do not tell the party this is the second part of a two parter, you just let them create new characters, still in the same campaign setting just a couple of generations later. Sometime during part two, the new party runs into a particularly nasty dungeon with, you guessed it, a McGuffin at the bottom of it. If this was the same party of characters, this would be intimately familiar to them, because as you guessed it, this is the dungeon the original party created. The players may recognize it, if they are really paying attention to it, but remember, this is several generations after it was completed, so even if the players took good notes, this is not exactly the dungeon they built. It has evolved, the guardians have changed, and changed the dungeon while they were at it. This new pack of PCs must overcome not only the nastiest protections the original party (and themselves, let us be honest) could come up with, but also do so without any knowledge of what the DM has changed in the meantime. Fun for the whole family!

Yes yes, this is just an excuse to get your current party to do the grunt work for your next campaign arc, but I like the continual world aspect of this game style. There is one big problem with this, and that is I have to come up with a dungeon making table, like in Pathfinder's version 1 Ultimate Campaign book, chapter 2, Downtime. They have a fantastic system of how your party can make their own buildings and organizations, and how much each part of those cost and how long it takes to build. I want that for the dungeon making part, as it makes it fun for the party - they have a budget they have to stay within, time constraints on how long to build it not to mention on how long to go acquire or construct whatever guardians they want to stock the dungeon with. A miniature game within the overarching game. I would say that I need to start working on that, among my many other half-started projects lying about my Google Drive folders, but I am pretty sure someone else has already done the work for the rest of us, I just have not spent the time on Google to find it. I will link it in when I find it.

Until next time, have fun!