Grouping and Tales to be told

Monday evenings are my tabletop gaming evenings. Tonight half the group couldn’t make it. So the rest of us got to talking. Now all three of us play LOTRO, one is a kinmate. Therefore it wasn’t surprising that conversation turned to LOTRO and before long my captain friend was telling me all about when he and my champion friend were trying to duo this boss but my champ friend kept madly kiting not listening to a word he was being told about captain heals whilst my captain friend ran desperately trying to get a hit in; like something from the Keystone cops. It all ended in defeat but it made an excellent story, both of them giving it some.

At which point my champion friend remarked, ‘And that is what grouping and MMOs are all about. How many really memorable incidents do you remember when you’ve been solo, how many stories can you tell?’

And yes. Thinking back I can remember things that have happened during solo play that have been funny, that I could tell a story about, but, as I noted in my top LOTRO moments of 2009, the real biggies have all involved other people.

Now,  I’m a passionate advocate of solo play. It enables people who don’t have much time to dip in and out and enjoy content. You can play at your own pace and do what you want, when you want, go where you want. Sometimes all I want to do is potter about on my own.

But, ultimately, I’m coming to the conclusion that solo play in LOTRO for me, most of the time, is dull. Oh, some of the solo instances are fun but then they were designed for solo play. But the majority of the main quests, if you haven’t the focus of levelling up or similar, on their own do not have the same impact or draw as quests in single-player games such as Fallout 3 which I’ve just started to play. And so, I’m asking myself, why bother soloing these quests in LOTRO when I could be doing more interesting quests in a single-player game.

And in fact I’ve ground to a halt on both my level 65 characters. They’re both nearing the end of Book 9 and have skirmishes to do. I could log on now and do them, and finish some quests. But I can’t get motivated. My guardian with his herbalist is not half the fun as my guardian and a kinmate/s. And I don’t really want to kill yet more orcs.

I want to create stories. Tales to tell with friends about friends. So, maybe I’ll stick a post on the kin forum, but without that, for the moment, it’ll wait.

'And then, one after another, we all fell off....'

The Blind One makes me sick

I tanked the Blind One in Dar Narbugud for the first time tonight. Very exciting, yes. I got myself some tips from one of the kinship guardians;

use fray the edge, go in with sting and guardians ward, shield blow then taunt, threat stance is fine to start but go to block, stick on pledge if there are more than 3 corruptions at 40k and the Blind One begins an induction…gracious, I carefully wrote it all down word for word on a piece of torn envelope I had on my desk.

Then instructions in-Raid; watch out for darklings, keep moving; I’ll be told where to stand by the champ with me ( we use a guardian and champ combo standing on the central island in the first stages). Don’t pass on the eye.

But deja vu, again something wasn’t mentioned.

As said guardian and champion stand on an island with the Blind One in the centre of this gently pulsating membrane (don’t ask). Darklings spawn which you must avoid to stop yourself being sucked into a void (don’t ask). I found the best way to dodge them was to adjust the view point so I was looking down, directly onto this gently undulating surface, rising and falling, like the surface of a gigantic, organic ocean; up and down, up and down. And it made me sick. Seasick. I felt seasick.

You try searching for ‘Blind One seasick’ in the Codemasters forum. You’ll get nothing.

And what’s more, we usually take the Blind One down first time, but tonight it took us a second go. Subjecting me to even further nausea causation. Who would believe it!

At the end of it I had to go and make myself a cup of tea to settle my stomach. Next time I’ll be sure to have cake at the ready too.

My Cthuhloid claim to fame

Whilst we’re talking Call of  Cthulhu  (see post below), I now see fit to mention one of my proudest roleplaying moments.  In fact one of my proudest moments period. I am rarely one to boast of my own achievements (few as they are), but if one cannot crow from time to time on one’s own blog, well, well..pah!

So here goes:

You are reading the blog of Berath, the winner of  the Call of  Cthulhu UK National Tournament at Gencon Olympia 2003.

Indeed!

Unfortunately I never got my prize. I left before they were awarded without knowing I’d won. I was in contact with the judge who told me of my prize, for a while. His last e-mail to me informed me that he was sitting looking at my prize, at that moment, as it sat on his mantlepiece. I never heard from him again.

Cthulhu fhtagn!

It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been busy. First, a lot of thought is still going into scheduling for the new raid. Secondly, it’s my turn to run the game in my Monday tabletop roleplaying group. Three of us run games and we alternate between them. I’m running a Call of Cthulhu (CoC) game set in 1920’s London.

Briefly, CoC is based in the world of H.P. Lovecraft, an American author who wrote mainly in 1920’s-30’s. His works feature horror, alien worlds, cultists and ancient all-powerful Gods, brooding at the edges of reality, poised to destroy humanity; Yog-Soggoth, Shub-Niggurath, Nyarlathotep, how satisfactorily the names slip off the tongue….. Players play ordinary mortals; professors, society girls, journalists, who at the start are blissfully ignorant of the fragility of the world they see around them, but slowly become more horribly aware as they learn of things that ‘mankind is not mean to know’ and come to understand the truth. Often the end game is a ‘choice’ between the refuge of insanity, or death. I love it.

I’m using a published scenario, but I often find I need to change things. Most games run like a detective story with events unfolding and clues  leading the players through.  However players invariably do  what you don’t expect or miss the obvious (to you). Published scenarios  can’t cater for this so as the Keeper, you have to build in alternative ways of reaching particular points and prepare to be flexible.

I also like to emphasise the role-playing. My game is set in the 1920’s. So, I’ve got hold of contemporary magazines, brochures and maps for players to look through. They can decide where they might live , things they might buy. I have a Harrods brochure (cover feature; their winter slipper selection) for players to browse through, this also includes listings of shows that are playing and restaurants some of have dancing. A copy of the Vegetarian, which, as well providing an aid for  character development, contains recipes; for cutlets (main ingredient rice), fritters (main ingredient rice) and curry (main ingredient rice), addresses of boarding houses and, most importantly in a CoC campaign, lists of Sanatoriums where player characters might rest a while and attempt to recover some elements of their shattered sanity.

Throughout, I encourage player characters to live as normal people, with ordinary hopes and concerns,  and lives which they want to strive, fight, to maintain. And to make the contrast truly, rightly, terrible, between reality’s façade to which the ignorant prescribe and the darkness and dissolution which the player characters find, in actuality, lies behind.

Happy gaming!

Raid juggling

Our kinship is slowly moving towards the Mirkwood Raid. But we’re also still running Dar Narbugud. And we’re attempting to re-start Watcher raids. Whilst doing the turtle. 

Is this ambitious? In a word, yes. Is this overly ambitious? In three words, too damn right! We have a shortage of healing classes, we still have people getting radiance, we have people who can’t raid on various days, we have people who can only get on-line after 9pm. We are a casual kinship.

And I’m the one, undaunted by all practical considerations, trying to make it happen. I’ve been arranging the kinship raids from when we were  running the Rift back in May 2008. A scary length of time. We seem to have an unusual way of sorting our raids in that I am not the Raid Leader, perhaps more the Raid Administrator. I don’t go on every raid and in fact for many of the Raids I’ve arranged I can’t go on; it took me a while before I could go on my first Dar Narbugud run. However, this hasn’t proved too much of a problem since I’ve used the advice of the Raid Leaders re. class balance etc and followed tactics threads so I have an idea. And I mainly allocate places and arrange scheduling.

So, here I am, attempting to juggle 4 raids. I have to be honest, one of the balls may have to be dropped. Most likely it will be the Watcher. As per my previous post, I’d like to keep the Turtle on. And organising that has by and large been taken up by a kinmate.  The Watcher is nice in that, like the turtle,  it’s just one boss and can fit into an evening but, unlike the turtle, is a complex fight. It also only requires a middling amount of radiance. But at the moment, with us regularly running DN, it really counts as an extra. And many of the people eligible for it are only a step away from being ready for DN, which I want to continue because our current raiders are still getting use from it and we can feed new people in. We had someone new start last week and we have someone else new this week. So, focus on that.

Anyway, lets see if my ‘vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself’ does fall ‘on ‘th’other….’

How do you know if you don’t try.

Three cheers for the Turtle

We’re organising a kin run to the Turtle next week. We’ve managed these at least weekly since the beginning.

It is very easy to disparage Filikul. One boss, in one room in what is essentially a dps race. Very straightforward for us old hands. Boring even.

However, there are good points. Firstly, the loot drops are still good, weapons and tokens, and useful for people just hitting level 60 (alts or mains).

Secondly, it is the only top level raid that’s not radiance-gated and so is immediately accessible to everybody. For this reason, it’s good. This time it’s let me focus on some of our newest level 60+ members, to drag them along and give them a little bit of a raiding taster.  And to give them a chance to meet a few more people in the kinship; maybe even the old hands.

It’s actually been great speaking to them and getting them involved. They’d had assumed that raiding was beyond them, they were not geared up enough, they did not have the experience.  And now they have signed up, they want to know what they should bring, how they need to equip and trait.  It is their first Raid. They want advice on how to do well. It sort of reminds me of my first Raid run when it seemed like a door opening on a new World. Ahhh.

And Filikul can work as a learning raid.  Our kin has wiped in the past. You need to be able to output maximum dps, various classes have skills that need to be used at particular times, people need to watch when they have aggro, they need to come ready and prepared. All good stuff. It also requires adequate gear and traiting and so provides an opportunity for a bit of peer guidance to take place. And if mistakes are made, then the Raid only lasts a few minutes so very little is actually lost. In that way, the Turtle may even have an advantage over the Rift.

So three cheers for Nornuan. There is a point to him still.

My top LoTRO times of 2009

Alright, probably a bit later than everyone else, here are my top LoTRO moments of 2009 in no particular order (I’m always behind with the zeitgeist)

1. Getting my last crystal from the nightmare Hall of Mirrors. This ended my radiance grind that began in February and finally ended with this, in September, that finally allowed me to join the DN Raid and freed me up to start enjoying the game again. Many thanks to unwize, our burglar, and Kilrandir, one of our top notch minstrels who, at long last, helped me down that last boss. Huzzah.

2. Killing the Mistress in the DN Raid as part of a kin first. I’d never been at a kin first before so it was all doubly thrilling and it marked the completion of DN.

3. Our first real life kin meet in August. Yes, we all really exist (well some of us anyway) and now have photos on the kinship forum to prove it!

4. Connected to no. 3 in a way and not really a moment, more something on-going. It’s the way the kin seems to have moved beyond just playing in LoTRO.  We have our forum and a TS server but in 2009 we’ve started a Twitter group, started a group on Steam, had a secret Santa sweet swap and of course we have our blogs.

4. Flying to Sweden to holiday with a couple of kinmates. Over and above the kin meets (there was another at Christmas) people have been meeting up generally.

5. Finishing Volume 1 and getting my white horse for my guardian.

6. Discovering the Waterworks with a couple of kinmates. This was the first time there for all three of us. I think little beats exploring new areas with other people. The Waterworks remains one of my favourite areas of Moria (this one only just crept into 2009 but it was such a good one!).

7. Our 7 hour stint in Fornost. We did break for food.  (I’m not even sure this was last year, but again it’s a goodie so I’ve stuck it in). I really like the long multi-boss fellowship instances in S0A where you actually feel you are someplace. The only similar one since MoM is the Grand Stairs.

8. Tanking the Balrog on my guardian. This was the first time I had tanked a proper big Boss with him. Definitely had a case of pre-raid trepidation (which I still get!)

There were more good moments, but these are the ones I really remember.  Interesting to see a fair few are socially based and most of the rest relate to experiences that you can only get in a multi-player game, grouping with, helping and being helped by kinmates.

Bar room brawling in LOTRO

The Yule Festival is here. And with it come the same old quests as last year, collecting snow , berries, branches, all sorts of festive bits and bobs from various parts of Middle Earth to exchange for Festival Tokens. Fun, but we have seen them before. There is now a solo horse race, maybe because the competitive horse races always seemed to be breaking down in previous Festivals. Are they particularly hard to implement? But anyway, I haven’t tried this yet. There are also the usual dances; I ought to get more of these as at the moment I only have the elf and man dances for my hunter elf, Berathiela, who loves dancing (she isn’t very angsty, she doesn’t do emo, she just ain’t that kind of elf).

However, what is different is the Thorins Hall Bar Room Brawl or the Glorious Beer Fight. It takes place in the tavern. After you have found it you speak to Gisli Strongclub who gives you this; a huge Dwarven-club of Unimaginable Power. Marvellous! You stick this in your quickslot bar. And then, into the arena and the fight starts.

The goal is to glug down a pint of Glorious ale from the keg that appears from time to time on one of the bar room benches. The problem is, everyone else wants a pint too and they are in your way! So you get hold of your Dwarven-club of Unimaginable Power and you thrack them out of the way. Just as they are trying to thrack you. Bodies fly through the air, dwarves, men, elven maids in pretty dresses, mighty warriors, adorable hobbits. If you land outside the arena, you are out of the fight. If you last through and manage to grab a pint then you claim victory and come away with a Glorious Beer trophy, and some tokens of course. There are also deeds to complete and titles to get. Berathiela, predictably, took to this and, on her third go, was victorious. A Glorious Beer mug trophy for a  top Bar room brawl to take you back to your old D&D days.

Interlude: a break for coffee

Skirmishes, Mirkwood….Sometimes everything gets too much.  Sometimes simply all you want is a cup of coffee. From an automatic vending machine.

Here is a Japanese vending machine making me a cup of coffee at Worldcon 2007 in Toyko. You can watch it doing it. It has a camera filming inside so you can see. I took a video of the video of the machine making my drink. This way lies the future.

Unrelated random fact: vending machines kill more people than sharks each year. I can believe it.

The Lone Lands revamp

Every Tuesday evening a group of us go alting. These sessions are fun and relaxing and let us try out new classes. I have a lore-master. Currently we are all about level 30+; it was very easy and quick to level especially in a group. We were ridiculously over powered for most quests, unfortunately this meant that most mobs were dead before my poor little lore-master had had a chance to use his skills making them hard to keep track of and remember. We deliberately avoided the Lone Lands and Book 2 because of the promised revamp in SoM. This week we decided to give them a try.

Book 2 revisited starts off with with trips between Candaith by Weathertop and Saeradan’s cabin near Bree. There is now a direct horse route between the two. Very useful. Then the book absorbs quests given by Candaith directly referencing Radagast early on, and also the instance, Retake Weathertop which can now be done as a solo or as a group instance. This leads to a much more coherent feel.

After this we ended up at the Forsaken Inn. Here we encountered a bit of a hiccup. In order to continue with the book, we need to get to acquaintance with the new Eglain faction (I know this was mentioned in the notes but we’d forgotten). If we had played as I imagine an ordinary player would i.e. had done book 1, moved to the Lone Lands and started questing from the Forgotten Inn it would not have been a problem; it didn’t look as if you needed many quests to reach the required level. It just stopped us for the evening.

Anyway, no biggie. We did a bit more questing for rep and found a new quest hub. Next time we will finish off getting rep and move on to the second part of the book to meet Radagast and explore the changes around Agamaur.