Gaming Nostalgia – Dallas
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03/24/16
Month: March 2016
03/23/16
Civ5 AAR: Empires of the Smoky Skies, Part IIII
War and peace and smoky skies ~
By Brant Guillory, GrogDude
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Last session, the war against Pulias to our north came and went. And oh yeah, I’ve got spies that I needed to send.
Freakin’ Canadians
I guess I’m not building a road in that direction. And why the heck do we have archers in a steampunk scenario?
Not just any engineer, a great engineer!
Yeah, it’s not any funnier when we move it out of Africa.
03/21/16
Tracer Rounds: Tactics vs Logistics, the Walking Dead Differential Model
What do you see when you’re watching TV “operations”? ~
A friend of mine – who might eventually read this column and recognize himself and then furiously email with a string of “that’s not what I meant and you know it”s – was posting on social media about The Walking Dead. After the episode where they go room-to-room clearing the radar facility where they think Negan is holed up, he proclaimed “TWD is OAF”.
From the point of view of the room-clearing tactics, which our TWD heroes have perfected over several seasons, he’s probably right. It jives with everything I’ve seen, and the limited amount I was taught. (Remember that I was a tanker back in the ‘90s, before all the MOUT/FISH ops of the past 15 years; if we had to ‘clear’ a house it involved pancaking the place with 55 tons of rolling steel.) But the whole time I’m watching TWD my mind is usually back to the more practical matters.
Allow me to explain…
03/20/16
GrogHeads Reviews Knights of Pen and Paper 2
Lightweight RPG adventuring on your computer ~
Avery Abernethy, 20 March 2016
Knights of Pen and Paper 2 is a light and unique adaptation of a table-top Dungeons and Dragons game brought to the computer. The “players” sit across a table from a game master who describes the game. Quests take place, monsters appear and combat ensues. The game master describes the world situation and stylized enemies appear which must be slain by your party. The graphics are retro-cheesy 1990s style and the music uses every single aspect available of 8-bit sound cards memorable to those of us who played computer RPGs in the 1990s.
Combat is uber-simple. An initiative roll sets the order of action for everyone involved in the combat. Only one action can take place during a character’s turn. Character choice per combat round are either using a normal attack, using an item, casting an attack spell if you are a spell caster, using a special attack if you are a fighter type, or using a special character ability if you have one. Each character can do one of only six choices per combat round. There is no tricking, sneaking, or otherwise avoiding enemies. It is kill or be killed in this pixilated realm.
03/18/16
Classic Reviews: Barony
In the free-wheeling high-concept/questionable-execution years of the mid-90s, a lot of crazy role-playing ideas bubbled up. Better Games explored a few of them, and several of them in Barony ~
Brant Guillory, 18 March 2016
Better Games has disappeared, and with them, several extremely good ideas bound up in some horrid presentation.
There are three books in Barony. One develops characters and introduces players to the concepts of “Free-Style Role Play,” one walks GMs through developing scenarios, and the last one is an interesting work on dragon battles. Covers are colored cardstock, with black and white art. Line drawings abound. The cover is a loose slip-sheet similar to the older D&D modules, but it is plain paper, not cardstock, and so it is flimsy and does not stand on its own.
Better Games had a line of games that were all considered “Free-Style Role Play” that attacked several ideas that gamers had held onto more out of habit than necessity.