B Side

VTD 7B was this past weekend.  I think I’ll get into something else eventually, but let me start there.

Friday, 8PM Central

Epic run with Andy’s wife playing for first time.  Very stressful as we weren’t sure which app we would be using for the run.

I did her ranger build, Dave’s polydruid build, and my monk Death Star build as the goal was all murder all of the time for maximum success.

We almost had maximum success.  Barbarian did get digested in room seven.

I was surprised how many changes there were from 7A back in January.  Room one seems to be upped for damage when inevitable backstab happened and in hit points, but that’s minor.  Room two was new puzzle which I thought was better than average.  Room four was Pillage! of course.  We lost, of course, since it’s just pushing a button over and over again to see if you hit a jackpot or not.  We didn’t play all that fast.  Room five, unfortunately, didn’t change.  I thought it would, as it’s boring.

Why is it boring?

Because somebody in a costume gesturing for a while then falling over when you kill them is far less interesting to me than watching pretty animation.  I also disliked this room even more in 7A because it meant the last two combats both lacked physical attacks.  Physical attacks matter for making AC matter.

Room six was different, but I didn’t realize it until halfway into the 12 minutes as I was making notes and figured it hadn’t changed.  Change was good, though the color step should have been dropped as people who didn’t know 7A’s solution had too many steps.

Room seven was different, and I was surprised as the highlight, pretty much the one highlight of 7A, was how cool room seven was.  We had done some metagaming for the original monster, well, I had.  I found this fight rather uninteresting, too busy, and we shouldn’t have won it.  But, we did.

Saturday, 12:24PM Central

We decided to do Purple Reign!  For the first time!  I created this format as I’ve created so many ideas that nobody uses.  Ultrarares only.  Sure, people’s UR Charms of Avarice distract from the pure beauty of the builds, but it’s okay (for those of us who don’t care about school colors).

On the one hand, the numbers didn’t look good.  On the other, I kept thinking to myself that I think I can do solo Nightmare if I plan it out right in the right dungeons, so a group of six players should be fine at Nightmare with pretty much any sort of expensive build.

While saves came up more than they did in 7A (in that Cube damage could be ignored with enough typed DR), they still didn’t actually matter.

Six players?  Jim’s air conditioning unit broke, so he had to not dungeoneer.

We had barbarian, bard, dwarf, fighter, ranger, rogue.

Now, maybe you know old D&D party philosophies or maybe you know True Dungeon.  Six person Nightmare with a format never played where you had zero resurrection effects and no cleric, no druid, and no paladin.  Dave cast his one heal spell to heal 5.  I cast two Sooth Wounds after barbarian took over 60 damage in room one to heal barbarian for mighty 26.

Now, one thing about difficulty level is that doing dungeons with known puzzle solutions is vastly easier.  We took no damage from any puzzle rooms, not even Pillage! room.  We never rolled a 20 – DM’s computer froze and we got technical knockout when he came back.  We did get 34 rolls of watching a spinning die on a screen not come up 20.  So thrilling.  So.

As we were healed three times in room seven by the monster, we were in great shape when we killed it.  Everyone lived.  We proved that Purple Reign is awesome as I took only one standard action in combat all run, and that was to Sonic Dart the round we killed the serpent.  I cast Soothe Wounds five times, remembering what it’s like to have Arcane Set and Crown of Expertise.

Interesting discoveries with Purple Reign builds:

To hit values aren’t hard.  I was coming up with better to hits than on my Epic builds with anything goes.  The damage values, though, were way lower.  Ioun Stone slots are far more important than Charm slots!  I kept not caring much about my last charm, but I always had uses for more ioun stones.  While my Nightshade’s +2 Throwing Daggers got use for like the first time ever, I totally forgot that rogue can only Sneak Attack once per room unless you have things like the legendary neck.

Ranger only did 60 damage a round.  No Fury for barbarian.

It was fun, and I was more into the room seven fight because we could get through it fast enough to clearly win.

Sunday, 10AM Central

Anti-Cabal with two non-regulars.  Only Nightmare, though I thought we could win Epic if we went fast enough.  Through first four rooms, I took zero damage.  I took 2 damage in room five.  I went from 88hp to 90hp at beginning of room seven when we rolled low on Initiative and my Charm of Timely Aid triggered, took some damage from chaos effects, got Mazed, blew Horn of Valkyrie in other plane, came back, failed Will save to gain 10hp, killed serpent.

Too easy but still fun.  The A-C runs tend to be too easy at NM.  But, funny stuff still happens, like Charm of Timely Aid.

In the end, I ended up liking 7B more than 7A.  Of course, my expectations were much lower.  Pillage! is trash, but we knew it would be.  Other puzzles were better than I expected.  I eventually was fine with 7B room seven combat.

Between stress on first run and stress on second run for non-play reasons, could have been more fun.

Not-TD

So, I’ve been thinking about RPG play.  How do I fit something into my “B Side” theme.

The B side often has fewer songs, but does it have worse songs?

I played Denver CRUSH after TD on Sunday.  Well, I played for a while.  At a certain point, I lost track of what was happening.  I felt like virtually nothing was accomplished.

Again, this seems so obvious to me as a player – I want stuff to get accomplished.  Investigating without resolution isn’t accomplishing anything.  Talking to people that don’t matter isn’t accomplishing anything.  Debating what to do is not accomplishing anything.

GM made the comment that we seemed to like investigating more than combat.  My problem with our combats is they are so often gratuitous and have predictable results.  In a supers game, the heroes should lose.  Often.  I keep saying this, but it’s still true – superheroes need to lose fights with supervillains so that supervillains are elevated in people’s minds in terms of how important they are.  In other genres, losing fights is bad, sometimes quite bad.  But, you don’t need to improve the reputations of most villains as the party won’t keep fighting them essentially forever as nobody really dies in superstories.

Now, at least the ones that feel like they are part of a story are often still fun because … RPGs are about stories.  Few of the combats, though, flow naturally, but that’s probably not the biggest problem, as many comic book fights are gratuitous.  It’s the lack of meaningful impact of the results when we win, since we always win, that is the problem.  Winning a fight doesn’t produce narrative content.

I played Iron Empire late Sunday night.  While I contributed to slowing things down more than necessary as I try to think like my characters, we did some stuff that accomplished something.  We failed.  But, it led to a story.  We tried to pursue some creature in the forest and we failed to catch up to it and ran into Forest Killers that we talked our way out of fighting.  Best part of this was that our non-courtier, non-Awareness 4 PC Intimidated Forest Killers.  As a ronin, I guess he understood how to deal with other ronin.

It could have been better, but give me games where things progress.  Give me memorable moments.

I rolled well on some rolls in CRUSH, but how did they matter?  They didn’t get us over a challenge.  They didn’t change my character’s narrative nor anyone else’s.

B.

Being.

Being engaged.  With the story.  Even if that story is more about someone else.

One of the things I dread about running again is that I dread making the mistakes GMs make that frustrate me as a player.  Now, GMs aren’t just story slaves.  The things I enjoy about being the GM are different from what the players in my games want – I like worldbuilding and coming up with interesting mechanics.

I’m not trying to bitch about the same things ad nauseam.  It always comes back to:  How can the game be more enjoyable?

I do work to make True Dungeon more enjoyable for me.  I do work to make CCGs more enjoyable.  I did work to make BattleTech.  I did work to make HeroQuest.

I’m willing to do more work for RPG play to make it more enjoyable, especially as a player as I know GMs have a lot of work and players have virtually none.

The B side has more songs.  Sometimes, songs on that side are as good as or better than the A side.