Balders Gate 3 and the banging of the Bears

 If you are even just a mild video game player who pays at least a little attention to the media surrounding Balders Gate 3 and its sexual content, you will know that at least to some extant there is, well, sexual content. 

Like me maybe a couple months or so ago you saw a trailer for it where a strapping dude and a bear give each other "come hither" looks and seem to be about to do the deed. The short scene cuts to a squirrel in a tree holding a nut. Then he drops the nut. BTW that is not a euphemism. They don't show if the nut busts when it hits the ground. We never see the actual character to character contact, but when they cut away one is still a bear. I think. It's been a while since I saw that bit, because in the following months much more has come out about the game, and it sounds great. The use of current edition D&D mechanics, plus an old school turned base system. 

Anyway, there ya go. A D&D video game with sexual content. And what the hell, some of that has been part of my gaming experience, such as talked about in these more recent posts:

Post: Edit (blogger.com)

Post: Edit (blogger.com)

But outside the sexy stuff yeah, the game sounds good.  

I don't mind a little CGI boffing. And hell, the bear is a human druid, though not sure how much a diff it makes. If it looks like a bear, and smells like a bear, and drools like a bear it probably kisses and knocks boots like a bear. Those things will mess you up. Ever see Revenant? Or Grizzly Man?

I am guessing any dating and sexy time cut scenes will be a small percentage of that will probably be hours of long ass cinematics that are popular now. Its turn based, so a lot of that will need to be spaced out to build the story. 

I guess the real "bear in the room" though is the identity politics that seem to be heavy in the game. I mean, OK. My only gripe is that so many things have to "present day" us. It's like fantasy worlds or anything else needs to be a reflection of Los Angeles of San Francisco. Maybe it's just an aging straight white dude thing, but whatever happened to escapism? Creativity should be the main goal, but that has been toppled from the number one spot to inject present dayism. I mean, OK, fine. I still might play it (when it comes to XBOX). Because at least you have a choice as to how deep you want to indulge in the Alphabet Mafia stuff. It's not like Starfield, where you are forced to choose a pronoun in character creation. No choice in it. But it would not be a deal breaker for me. Though I think my next space game might be Outer Worlds, because so many people think its way better. 

Anyway, I do hope I get to play Baldurs Gate 3 eventually. I'm usually 3-5 years behind on my games (and more...I'm still playing GTA % here and there). And I look forward to the sexy time in it. With a humanoid. Probably. I can't predict how I'll feel in 3-5 years. 

Getting that dungeon crawl going

 

Around the time I posted last, I started a new job in healthcare. Previously my later-in-life health care career transition from a couple of decades of entertainment business management back in LA included a major regional hospital during the height of the pandemic, but the most recent gig is for a healthcare insurance plan company, and it includes some new perks. More money than I ever made since leaving my home city, and the biggest change of all was working from my home office most of the week. 

But despite this being a somewhat demanding position, I have managed to do a lot of gaming. OK, most of that gaming is video games on the weekend. I play Elder Scrolls Online a lot less, as it started to feel too unchallenging. I will pop in for an hour or two with my old pal T, who is still enchanted by the game and plays a lot of it. But I need variety in my games. I still have a Mad Max game and GTA 5 I dabble in on XBOX, plus I recently downloaded an old favorite side scroller, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild remains a favorite, and I also like to play a little Cuphead here and there on Nintendo Switch in handheld mode while taking a little break in the workday. Man, what a hard game!

My Roll20? Well, I have mentioned my besties "B&L" (currently on the other side of the country helping L's mom run her bar...I will see them in fall and Winter when they come back to town for a while) and also my Los Angeles homegirl "T" who has played in my games on and off since the early 90's. The three of them make up my current little group, playing every couple of weeks. A classic dungeon crawl campaign. 

This is for sure giving me experience in online dungeon creation. I do have a couple of purchased modular dungeon packs from Roll20 (about 5 bucks a pack). I built the first few levels of a dungeon for me very first little Roll20 campaign that went for about 15 sessions. So pretty much reusing that same dungeon, but will be always tweaking. I built the first 4 levels back then, though the party only got to level 2 back then (just like the current things I had about 7 or 8 session working towards the delve...little adventures on the road).  

As it's not exactly a huge labyrinth, I hope for us to more or less get to level 5 at some point, maybe by late summer? But historically I have always ended up getting fed up with a crawl and found a way for the characters to do other things. So it may not make it that far. 

But this little dungeon has a bit of history in my setting, going back decades. So I think I will talk it up a little more next post. 

Cheers

Nintendo Switch and Breath of the Wild part 1

 

A portable console? I never really felt I needed one. My early progression was Nintendo consoles (I had one about when Super Mario 3 came out in the early 90's), to Genesis, to PlayStation, to PlayStation 2, and on to being an XBOX guy with the 360 and now to the latest XBOX. . 

In recent years when away from home I was happy to play Poker on my iPhone or iPad when the moments were free. For about 10 years I have loved to play Governor of Poker, a great app. I started with 2, and they are on GOP 3 the last few years. In 2 you just played the computer AI, but 3 introduced playing with people from around the world. It actually seems to encourage trash talking and flirting. Fun for quick 10-minute breaks. 

And hell, I don't find the time to play on my consoles as much as I would like. It was the rare game that had me playing more than a couple hours a week. But there were great loves that had me going 6 hours a week or more. Final Fantasy 7. The Resident Evil games. Fallout 3. 

But in recent times I have been watching a lot of G4 and IGN and other video game related channels, content on Pluto TV streaming. Most of the programs are years old (besides G4 which is on a relaunch year, and just laid off most of their office and on camera people, including the odious FROSK), but I still like to watch. Nobody talks much about the Nintendo Switch lately, but it did come out half a decade ago. But the content on some of these channels is years old. And this year I have seen a lot of talk about Switch, albeit, again, from a few years ago. And some of these older bits included one of my current favorites, Scott the Woz. 

Scott does pretty funny little video game review and history skits, and I became a fan right away. And Every year since the Switch came out, he does a segment on it based on its existence up to that time. And this went a long way to perk my interest enough to nab my own Switch. 

So then came the long road the last several months of getting one. Yeah, I hemmed and hawed with myself. I'm not broke or anything, but with a couple games and a couple years of Best Buy Geek Squad replacement was well or 400 bucks. But I worked hard, at a hospital, during the height of the pandemic when most of my county sat home on their asses collecting fat Biden bonus Unemployment checks, and felt I needed to start rewarding myself.

Regular versions were around. But I wanted the OLED, which has a bigger screen and couple other nice upgrades. Better speakers and such. But the OLED had to be ordered. It is a popular version, there was a shortage due to pandemic demand and chip shortages (thanks again, Sleepy Joe!), and this was something I needed to impulse buy. I'm not going to wait a week and a half. 

This went on forever. But then it got a little better. Just a three- or four-day delay. I can have it by the weekend? Fuck yeah! I hit "buy." 

I was excited when it showed up. I wish I had done an unboxing video or something. But you can still watch one. 

Yeah, easy as pie. In less than a half hour I had a couple games downloaded. One was a scroller I had admired from afar for a couple years. It was Cuphead, a run and shoot side scroller that featured characters straight out of nightmarish old 1930's toons. It was originally a little indy game but got popular fast and you can find it in places like the XBOX game pass. And of course, in the Switch shop.

I got Cuphead to have a basic little game that does not need a big screen TV to enjoy (although it looks awesome on my 60 inch). This is what I would most likely play on a park bench or hotel room. But my epic game to enjoy at home would be the game most people buy the Switch to play. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Because I have a lot to say about this open world solo game, I'm going to do a part 2 about that in particular. But just a few words about the fun of the Switch console itself.

Less than half the size of my iPad, it seems weird to think of it as a console. But that is what it is. Unlike your iPhone or iPad, it is designed purely for gaming. And it seems a powerful little thing. 

The Switch surely gets the name for all the switching up you can do. First and foremost, the big feature is the portability of play, so out in the field you will play with the "joy Con" controller bits attached. 

When you slide the joy Cons in, you get a satisfying electronic "snap" sound. 

And when you want to play on the telly, you stick your console into the docking station where the HDMI cable goes to the TV. 

The dullest color pics I could find

When docked you stick your little joy Cons into the "grip, and viola you have a little controller. You can actually do this when not linked to the TV. The Switch unit has a kickstand so you can set it on a table.  The joy Con grip combo is fairly sturdy and does the job well, although if you desire the usual controller size that you are used to on other consoles you can actually get a variety of separate controllers. 

I may just get a basic controller if for no reason other than I play 90% of the time on my TV so far. I have travelled very little with it. I have used the console on its own usually kicking back on a Sunday to play Cuphead, a game that works well for a small screen. The joy Cons themselves have no battery, but the last a few hours when charged, and when attached to the console they are always charging. The Switch unit itself seems to hold a very good charge. 

Breath of the Wild? Well, it's a big, beautiful world in there. And such works best on a big screen. But I've had some moments with it off the big screen. You can get hundreds of games for Switch, but Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the big monkey in the room when it comes to this console. And I'll talk about my experience with it next post. 

Cheers. 

Roll20 - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

 

OK, maybe there is no real ugly, at least not as ugly as Eli Wallach. Though until the last few weeks my experience was hit and miss. The other year I did have my first campaign, around 12 sessions, with my friend and longtime player "T," and a couple of local guys (one I eventually met because he was a department manager at the hospital I worked at - luckily not MY department). It went well, and the guys did not have deep experience with the Roll20 experience, so my technical failings were no very pronounced. Hey, as long as we could talk and move tokens around without the system crashing I was happy. 

But that ended due to family and school schedules, and my attempts to get something going directly off the Roll20 forums was mixed at best. One try had a couple of knuckleheads who seemed like great guys at first. Then an hour in a dude who seemed to know what he was doing didn't even have a character sheet done up (I was yet to require digital versions of them) when we needed it. I should also mention that this fairly normal sounding guy insisted on being called "Morpheus," which is a thing that is awkward for me. Fucking Morpheus. Sheesh. 

Anyway, the other guy, when combat started, was hung up on the movement measuring. It was so odd. He was having measuring tool issues, and for some reason was refusing to just use the squares already present on the map. I didn't get the problem. I started wondering if these guys just made a hobby out of going into games and being idiots. 

My real-life name is "Orcsmasher." 
My characters name is Joe. 

My next attempt had a couple of ladies (one was trans, the other CIS, which is fine though I had all kinds of terms and such I had to learn so as not to use the wrong pronoun. God). Anyway, after a couple of games that seemed to go well it was announced to me that they just wanted to learn how to do a game for each other, and that was that. 

Another try had a lady want to team up with me to start a group on Roll20, but she was hella into D&D Beyond, which I have limited experience with (none at all). She wanted me to invest in it and tie it into my campaign pages and such. I was still learning the basics, so that did not appeal to me. So no go. 

Disappointing, and yeah, I guess kind of ugly for me. Not long after I was tapped locally by a group to run some face to face. That was going well, but then the host told everybody he had to move his sick mother in with them and we would suspend things indefinitely. That was several months ago, so I guess that is over. 

But I didn't mind so much. As I get older I get fed up schlepping every week to somebodies house across town with all my shit, and getting set up, and trying to get a narrative going in a home where visitors seemed to come and go constantly, for me disrupting the game. It kind of beat me hosting though. I really no longer value having people in my home that are not close friends of mine. 

Yeah, I just feel done with a regular face to face for D&D. But with my Roll20 horizons suddenly expanding I can see a life without running in front of a group. You see, we are now past game three, and it is going super well. Everybody has way more experience with Roll20 and D&D 5th ed. That was intimidating at first, but most seem willing to help as I am up front about my technical lackings. They like my game clearly, and they want it to continue. And my goal was to get noticeably more adept with the format each session, and that is happening. Whether its formatting images better, or learning to use the built-in turn counter, I learn something new every damn time. Its kind of exhilarating. 

So lets see. The good. Well, not having a table full of people staring at me for three hours is nice. And on a personal note being able to drink what I want and smoke what I want right at my game table is pretty awesome. And having a colorful map to move tokens around on is great. Searching google for maps and monster and character images is fun in itself. Making those into tokens and such.  And everybody gets to be home. Nothing like the comforts of your own crib. And if anybody needs to deal with family, or I can hear dishes clattering around (one of the most annoying sounds in the world to me), I can just ask them to mute until things calm down. 

And the resources are amazing. Besides some "DIY" you can buy various module packs, most with pre-made maps and tokens, and the majority of such things are fairly cheap. 

And man, no more miniatures. There was a time when I loved them. But I long since stopped painting, and I for sure don't want to buy more. Sooooo..goodbye mini's! I'm thinking of selling them all on Ebay. 

And looking in books and shuffling papers around? Not in my command center. Last session I attempted to be paper free. My notes and tokens and even the basic books are all available in my campaign. And when a character uses a skill or spell of their E-Sheet, it can post to the chat section so I can look at it. No more looking up spells in a book! I think by next game I will be totally paperless outside of some emergency notes like you often have in case players go off the rails. 

And wow, The Charactermancer. It's like magic. Using it helps keep you from forgetting anything for your character when creating it. It will remember for you. It won't let you forget a certain proficiency you might miss on your own. In a lot of ways its the greatest part of the format. 

OK, well, The Bad. It really comes down to learning to do things differently. The main thing I would say is not being able to see each other, you can miss things. Personally I am a fairly animated DM who gestures a lot and such. Thats gone, though there are ways to convey the same things with voice and how you describe a situation.

But I have learned that I rely on seeing the player a lot in face to face as far as when I ask a question of a player. In person you can often get an answer just by their expression and body language. But with just voice you need to be more clear and so do they. More needs to be verbalized. 

And of course there are technical issues, but I am surprised by how few of them there are. If you drop off the program its easy to jump back in. Its not like waiting for your XBOX to reboot. Anytime I have an issue I'm back in like 30 seconds. 

A month ago I would have said the selection of quality people from the forums is sketchy at best. But I put together this great current group almost entirely from the forums. It turned me around on it. Yeah, you have to hand pick from it, but it paid off now and it could again. But man, these folk are great. Into role-play, and engaged with the material, they have been a pleasure so far. I knew it was a good sign when I wanted to level them to 2nd after the first session, and the pretty much unanimously stated they would not mind be 1st for another game. Refreshing. 

And I suppose with the possibility of one wacky pandemic after another in the future, this is a good way to go in that regard. 

I know that another popular online format out there is Fantasy Grounds. I have no experience at all with it. I assume people have their preference. But I certainly would not like to put time into learning another thing. For the foreseeable future, and perhaps the rest of my future, Roll20 will be how I roll. 

Trade & Turpitude

 

GAME 2: "Roads Hold the Gold" - so, you are going to be a worker on the trade roads? Well, keep in mind, they still building the southern shire portion of The Great Tanmoorian Highway. For 20 years the queen been paving trade roads and promoting the highway. It's not all fine stone and slurry. When going south it won't be long past River Town that the paving stops and you start to see the kingdom's best road workers taking long lunches and holidays off where the pavement meets the country soil. Don't fool yourself. The Kingdom doesn't care where the pavement starts and stops. When it comes to the Southern Shires, it's profit that moves the maps..."

-Overheard from a seasoned caravan worker...

(above: campaign front page blurb for next weeks game)

So just like that I'm running a campaign again. 

After a handful of years working non-stop in health care, including a major regional hospital during the deepest parts of the pandemic, I decided to take a few months off from work. I live in a beautiful mountain area, known for plenty of outdoor activities. So I want to smell the roses, NOT have to get up early, be able to do some things during the week, and chill out. But this also makes me wish I had some extra gaming to do outside my XBOX. 

So on a lark I posted a "want to start campaign" comment in the Roll20 forums. I didn't have much hope. I have had only moderate success sourcing from the forum.  It's a place rife with Critical Role wonks and people who are looking for games where members are all into "alternative lifestyles" and require you to learn a list of ways they need to be referred to. Not that I'm biased against anybody. The first person to call me when I moved to a new city to see how I was doing was a transgender neighbor of mine. I'm good with anybody who is a good person. But the general populace of that particular forum are very particular about what they want in a game, and what they want you to refer to them as (and god help you if you get it wrong). 

I was clear about my background and how I go about DMing. Long and short of it, I eventually had 4 great sounding players wanting to be in a new campaign all within a week or two. It happed very fast. The first person I was contacted by was a gal (who I will call "M") who as it turned out was in my very same neck of the woods! Most of the rest are actually in different time zones. I rounded out the group by of course inviting my long time player and one of my best old friends, "T", to come in and play. Though not exactly a techie, T seems to enjoy the Roll20 stuff I did in the past. Once she gets up and running at game time she's loving it. 

My interactions with most of the folk in the days before the game made me hopeful. Flakes abound off of the forums. But man, everybody showed up. 

I ran Roll20 games very low rent in the past. Throw some maps up, move tokens around. Maybe a little jukebox music. But M was very helpful with some basic stuff. Helping me use scripts to set up a player welcome package which shows them the fillable character sheet right away. 

It had been awhile for both me and T in the format. The usual opening night technical issues slowing things down a bit. When T went into Roll20 she was confused to see herself still in the old campaign pages haha. 

Everybody had cool characters. Nothing too outlandish. I did expand on the material I was going to allow as far as characters (I still only own the PHB and Monster Manual. Oh, and the DMG which in 5th ed is next to useless. Summer reading material maybe). There was a shadow elf dude, a halfling druid with some dream connection thing, T ran a female dwarf, and there were two young commoners who decided they would be from the same local village. A male fighter and a female paladin. The paladin was outside the usual form you expect a paladin to take (at least in old school). Just simple townie clothing and a sword. No real deity. Just a connection to the cosmos. Maybe because she is, in part, one of those Assimer(sp) semi-angel people.

So there were no Cyborg Ninja Minotaurs, which was nice. But everybody had way more 5th ed experience than me (and also Roll20 experience, which is a little intimidating to a noob). But for their sake I had to start allowing going out in the weeds a bit with character gen.

I had this campaign idea for a long time, one where after a few games I would have the characters arrive at my D&D version of Runequest's Apple Lane, one of my favorite old modules. Get them all caught up in the pawnshop attack and eventually to The Rainbow Mounds. 

But I figured a caravan thing for the first couple of games. My style has evolved to where I like the first couple of sessions to just be "settle into our characters games," and caravan guard situation is kind of perfect for it. 

 I decided to focus on the trade season atmosphere for the entire campaign. Late fall where the last caravans of the year are getting in some last of the year travel. The towns and roads busy with profiteers. I can fit in flavor for this all over the place, in many situations. And make the characters want to earn more and more money by letting them see cool, expensive stuff to buy.

And while my urban city games might have a lot of Tarantino and action movie influences, I like to go with a David Lynchian vibe for the country. You know, everything looks nice and innocent, so the odd and terrifying things are all the more so. "Look at that lovely field of grain; oh shit, and Ankheg just popped up and ate that farmer!" 

That, and some things I was planning had me land on what I think is kind of a unique (if not clever) campaign name. "Trade and Turpitude." 

They all started in River Town, "the gateway to the southern shires." It's the next largest community after the main city, and in the decades of my game I have grown it bigger and bigger. 

The couple of commoner characters are on a quest to find a friend of theirs who ran away months ago based on dreams of a beautiful woman he felt was actually out there somewhere. So as they got to know the characters (the ones who were at the table anyway, The shadow elf lurker in a balcony nearby) they also inquired around about their friend. 

When I had the obligatory tavern fight go down, it was a table full of locals who were arguing over the towns bid to have the Queen of Tanmoor declare it a sister city to the capitol. A portrait of the queen was above the fireplace, and a single derogatory remark about her got the fight going. 

Even in campaigns where characters are never going to meet the queen, I like to get some lore in about her. Even minor mentions. This was an NPC in my game going back decades. She was around player characters since childhood (her father, the late King, tapped into player characters frequently for secret missions). Even my pal "T" has history with her. She has an old high level druid character who is Queen Libertines best friend going way back. 

Anyway, these days I like to have a tavern brawl act as one big, possibly growing creature, and I use a cartoon fight cloud to represent it. 

PC's can interact with it in various ways as it rolls around and endangers others. It will grow if others dive into the brawl, or it will shrink as parts of it are knocked out or brawlers removed from it. It always seems to get a hearty chuckle out of the players who see it for the first time. 

Caravan leader, Marge (who T's dwarf had already hooked up with) got the characters together to offer them a job. She took them to a secluded upper area to eat, drink, and makes some deals to work for her small caravan concern. 

I got my second chance to have another fight here. A mysterious figure who I won't go into in this post was at the bottom of the balcony area and started playing a spooky flute. There was a big stuffed bear up there with the characters (it just so happened the tavern map I sourced had it there!) and it very atmospherically (the wood and plater frame creaking and rubbing as a disembodied bear spirit was heard growling) animated to attack them.

 It was of course less deadly than a real full bear, but the characters were nicely freaked out by the sudden situation. Very out of place in a nice, busy inn. David Lynch, yo!

We ended the night with that crazy stuffed grizzly fight.

As I stayed on Roll20 to work on a few things, and hearing from some of the players seems to have us locked in for a second session next week. So far so good! I always figured that if you make it past a 1st session ionto a 2nd one then you know you have a campaign. If I do what I usually do, that is to try to top each previous game, it should be in the bag. 

But man. It's interesting how a group and a campaign can come out of almost nowhere in online formats. Sunday early Mary is doing some one shot thing with some of her regular players and I'm invited to join in for the day, so I'm going to get a chance to finally see Roll20 working from the players side of the screen. I feel not having done that is a major weakness in my own use of the format. The more I learn, the better I can be. 

Cheers

The True Enemy of Game Groups - Attrition

 

Player attrition. It happens. It happens to all of us who put a group together. No matter how long it lasts, it will eventually fall apart, either by losing players faster than they can be replaced, or the GM moves on and nobody else wants to take the mantle. 

It can start slow. A player or two has life events that make them busier. They still clearly want to be a part of things. But missing every 4th game will usually lead to missing one out of three, and soon its "sorry, I just can't play on a regular basis anymore because this and that."

Or maybe they just out and out have to quite without a slow bleed out. Its extra tragic when its one of your best players. 

Back in my teens and 20's we seemed to have long campaigns that saw little in the way of lost players. Mostly it was friends I was playing with though. This was most of my experience from childhood up until the late 90's. I played with friends I already had. That is what usually made up my groups. We played as friends. We had long campaigns that at some point just fell apart fast because two or more of us were getting hit by life stuff. Though it often started as only being able to play one day a month. Then longer and longer between games. Momentum loss is a great foe of regular groups. Go a couple of months without a game and that group is likely through. Though I should say that by the late 90's some campaigns I had with regular life friends might seem done for, then after 3 or 4 months a long since flaking friend who kind of helped slow things down will be all "hey, when are we going to play D&D/Call of Cthulhu/Champions again?" Uh..whenever you are available.

And even that is all good, really. In that case above I was indeed having infrequent games with about 3-4 players at the time, but those games were 6-8 hour affairs that let me throw in everything and the kitchen sink in that one day. Hell, in those long D&D games a character might level up twice in that single day. But that too finally had to end. And it was the last time I would have a group made up of real life, long time friends. 

So in later adulthood, well into the 2000's, it was less groups of my friends and it became maybe one longtime friend, and a handful of strangers. It was not just a huge dynamic shift in general, but now it was folks who were devoting time to strangers, away from their usual life. After decades in the workforce, and relationships/marriages, people just place more of a value on their leisure time. Often not even in a hugely conscious way. But there are important things in life. Sure, go to a forum like Dragonsfoot.net and you'll find a bunch of older people who seem to want D&D to be the be all and end all of life. But for most folk hitting or going beyond middle age free time gets sucked dry by a million things other than tabletop gaming. I'm personally not ready to retire from my professional life; and even if I did I'm not sure how much of that I would want to be spent on tabletop. 

Yeah. This. 

My longest group went from around 2009 to 2019, but that group saw a lot of players coming and going. The entire time the long-time host was always there, then there was my long time friend "T," and then players who stuck around for a couple years, and those that played for some months before a life thing got in the way. That dynamic kind of worked for me. There were enough people who stuck around here and there that lead to nice year long multi-genre campaigns with 4-5 players. That all ended when I moved out of my native city, though I often think about how I was fairly burnt out towards the end. For me running campaigns on a weeknight, running out of work at a fairly professional job and driving 15 minutes in rush hour traffic, wore me down. Getting to the hosts house, eating fast food as I drove, then slamming a couple beers and puffing a doob to get the day shrugged off so I could get into a fantasy mood wasn't all that conducive to a peaceful DM persona. All that week in and week out made me fairly easily annoyed by dumb player things during a game. And an annoyed DM is the last thing a party wants. 

In my new town I ran for a new group, started by my soon to be local besties (B and L, a younger couple who kind of adopted lonely old me because I didn't know anybody in town. I bring them up in every boardgame post I make because I mostly play with them and sometimes a couple others). But after several months they decided to take up a somewhat nomadic existence that only had them in town a few short months of the year and that group fell apart (I didn't mind, one of the other players, a female no less, was a cheat and I think on opiates or something). 

I then discovered Roll20 and did around a 12 game campaign with Los Angeles Bestie "T" and a couple of folks I met in the local game shop Facebook page (it was a couple games before I learned one of them worked at the same hospital I did). It was going really well, but one of the guys had a new baby that was taking up a lot of time, and the other guy was going back to school. They would still be able to play now and again, but with the precious momentum going the way of the dodo I more or less nixed things. 

Most recently, for a few months last year, I was tapped by yet another local couple, plus a couple other folk they found on local meetups. We had several games, and things were sailing along and all seemed to be having fun, but then the male host messaged us saying that his elderly mother had been found to have a severe illness and were having to move her in. We were going to be starting up again when the mom got settled in, but it has been awhile now so that may not be back.  

I certainly have long since learned to manage my expectations with game group longevity. And to be honest, I love to GM games, and often get into a zone where the hours just fly by. But it can also be a bit of a hassle, even with long since losing my habit of putting hours into game prep. Setting things up then being the center of attention for three or more hours has lost a certain amount of its luster. 

I forgot the battlemat..

So, with no current RPG group, and most of my boardgame pals out of town for months now, I think I'll be settling in for a Spring where the majority of my gaming will be on my XBOX. Grand Theft Auto 5, Elder Scrolls Online, and some other games new and old (Jedi Fallen Order, Dead Rising). It can be super relaxing to just let yourself get immersed in those worlds. Don't have to go anywhere. Don't have to set anything up. Don't have to worry about being down a player and cancelled sessions. Nothing to do but work on my carpel tunnel and zap my eyeballs from sitting too close to the big screen. 

But then again, I'll be chomping at the bit to run games before long. And even if something doesn't come up locally, "B and L" want to check out Roll20 gaming when they settle into where they are going for the summer (to manage a high-end RV park halfway across the country). If they got the internet for it, LA pal "T" will want to jump in, and the gaming will be on again. And the highway of gaming will be as it always has been, for me anyway. On again. Off again. On again. Off again. 

GTA5 - not love at first sight, but love did come

 

At some point after getting the newest model XBOX the other year, I picked up Grand Theft Auto 5. I had seen game play at friends' houses for years and knew I would try it sooner or later. I mean, I was long used to being years behind on my games.  But had gotten into playing with others online in other games, especially with my old friend "T." She had been a Skyrim nut for a handful of years, and I had suggested we try Elder Scrolls Online as a thing to do together, since I had been playing ES since the original Morrowind. Though we could still play together, little dungeon delves and fishing and such, she had been putting much more time into it on her own. She is now in guilds and in far off lands, while I sort of futz around when I play alone. Since she is playing ONLY ESO, and I like to diversify, we will never be anywhere near equals in that game. 

Imagine her as Valeria from the Conan movie. 
Now imagine this is me..

As I was trying to keep up with T for several months, GTA5 only got a little play here and there. Maybe an hour every weekend or so. Though much of it is intuitive, it is also hard at times for a noob. Driving was bad enough, but driving and shooting? Yeesh. Fairly early on there was a mission for main character Michael that had you chasing crooks on a big rig that had stolen his yacht (don't ask), and you drove your sports car on the equivalent of the 405 Freeway, shooting at dudes on the yacht who were trying to kill your buddy Franklin who had climbed aboard. Man, it was hard. Must have played out that mission a dozen times before being successful. 

I figured that even harder missions would follow, and that was intimidating. It may have kept me from playing it as much as ESO. But man, this game setting did appeal to me. So much of it was not just based on Los Angeles, but even parts of my home town Venice Beach (Vespucci Beach in the game), the side streets and alleyways, was spot on. Buildings I had been in and neighborhoods I grew up around were recreated, often in loving detail. My favorite was the Venice Canals, my birth place. Having a gunfight in my childhood neighborhood was mind blowing. 

And this familiarity with Los Santos/Angeles was super appealing to me. But what else to keep me involved? I mean, every time I got in a car to drive I ended up rear ending other cars, and accidentally running over pedestrians. You see, if you don't drive crazy, you are pretty much just stuck in traffic. The main reason I actually Left Los Sant...uh, left Los Angeles. So even just tooling around you are blowing street lights and driving on sidewalks. Otherwise its an LA traffic simulator. Yeah, fuck that mess. Then the cops chase you, and you crash and get out to run as bullets blast into your body. 

Yeah, a bit disappointing at first. But in the last couple of weekends I suddenly went from "meh" to "omigawd I love this shit". Here are some reasons why:

Maybe some 10 or 12 hours into it, I get it. Understanding has come to me. You see, you spend 10's of hours putzing around, driving and walking around nice areas, getting into occasional fist fights and gunfights and wondering what the hell is the point. Well, it finally dawned on me. As I started getting better at driving and other activities, I realized that the game has a grand plan. It is training you for what is to come. Basically, this is the prelude for you putting together your gang of bank robbers. The game is letting you fuck around so you can get familiar with just being alive. The physics of your world. It knows you will be a bad driver at first. It knows you will be bad at shooting people. And it wants you to get better by just plain experiencing the school of hard knocks in Los Santos. It knows that no setback is permanent. You die or get caught by cops, the just try again. 

When I turn the game off and go to bed I imagine
myself as that Mayhem insurance guy walking
away leaving this behind..

I started regularly going to the shooting range to be a better gunman. I started driving at high speeds around the city to be a better driver. I stopped worrying about being a better driver, and just drove at high speeds through the city. And suddenly I was exponentially better at that.  School of hard knocks.

 

Suddenly I could feel the improvement. Not just in my personal skill, but the game engine itself eases up on you, steadies you. A sort of smoothness starts setting in. 

The other night I was playing the main character, Michael. I decided to go down to "Santa Monica Beach" at the California Incline (his psychologist lives down there), and ran into a jogger lady. You know, one of those older, cut, kinda pretty but hard jogger ladies you see who are way serious about it. She challenged me to a race down the incline stairs to the beach, and though I was wearing a suit and dress shoes, I took her up on it. I was doing OK for a middle-aged guy dressed up, but I kept faltering. I clearly did not have the stamina to keep up. So another activity goal; do some jogging to get better at running. I'll probably need that for bigger missions later anyway. And to eventually beat that lady. Oh, sensible shoes probably don't hurt.

The boy from the hood character, Franklin, gets in a street race. All the other racers seem so much better than me. I try and try but just can't win it.  I keep crashing into poles or houses on tight corners. Then around the 6^th try I remember that Franklin has a special ability to go into "slow time" when driving. Boom, I win that race. Again, this will likely be important skills during a heist. The game is prepping you. School of hard knocks. 

OK, also, for whatever reason playing Tennis was unlocked. Michael's big Sunset Blvd house, surrounded by office buildings, has a tennis court. Wandering over to it, the choice to play is activated. Michael's alcoholic, cheating wife shows up to play. I quickly get my ass handed to me, while she chides me and insults my manhood. Ugh. My vow to get better at tennis happens. And there are other tennis courts around the city where I can play other people to get better on the side. And this isn't for nothing. I looked it up, and playing tennis makes your character all around stronger. Hell yeah. School of (kinda) hard knocks. 

Now that's my kind of hard knock school 😍

As an aside, an encounter happened to me playing Michael last week that just blew my mind. I was tooling around downtown, and saw a question mark in the courtyard of some big office building. I got out the car and walked over to see what was up, and some guy had a marijuana legalization table set up by the fountains. After his speech he gave me a doobie. And when I hit it I realized it was clearly sprinkled with some stronger drug, because ugly aliens suddenly appeared in the area. A ray gatling gun appeared in my hands. Suddenly here I am, in the heart of downtown, being charged by weird aliens as I gunned them down one by one with my Buck Rogers blaster. It blew my mind. This was truly when I knew I loved this game. Anything can happen. School of hard knocks.

They have mental powers. I have a Sci Fi
gatling gun. I like my odds.

But yeah, the improvement of mechanics and physics as you go along is something I always loved in games.  The Elder Scrolls seems to have lost that, but I remember loving it when it was present in Morrowind and Oblivion. But it is so obvious in GTA5. I can actually feel myself getting better as I do things. Yeah, the feeling has won me over. 

So Michael's old geek buddy Lester has a jewelry store heist in mind. We staked out the Rodeo Drive jewelry store and everything so far. But before the mission I think I need to maybe put a few more hours into practice to get prepared for the big time. More driving around the city. More time in the shooting range. And of course, more tennis and jogging. For the job. And of course to be able to beat my nagging, ball busting adulterous wife at tennis, and to win a race against that mouthy jogging bitch down by the beach. School of hard...well, you get the point. 

I predict I will be playing the campaign mode for a long time to come. Hell, I'll probably mostly be jogging and playing tennis around the city for the next month. Just driving around there are always nice things to look at as you level up your skill set..

And testosterone level

Cheers