D&D Session 2

This is a couple of months late, as session two of our three player (plus one GM) D&D adventure took place in May.  However, I've been busy and only just got around to reviewing the game I set up and ran.

My players started and remained level 2 throughout, the dungeon started with the group having to solve a simple pattern to visit a certain house (in a small four house village) there they heard about a third party none player character called "Bard", and suddenly they were confronted with "Bard" in a carriage to take the group to his country estate... I gave them the option of "The Easy Way" or "The Hard Way".

However, both options were for the group to be knocked unconscious and to awaken without any gear, two of the group woke in a large stone holding cell, which happened to have a dwarvish door, which could be opened by interpreting the magic runes, so the wizard in the group had to read magic and got the runes saying "I open when wet".  The group struggled with this, and in the end I had to intimate they could spit, or find any other body fluid, to touch the door with.

When it opened the stone unblocked the noise of the third party member being tortured, the free members burst down the door and a hand to hand fight ensued.

Upon beating the two goblins there, they had a dagger and all were free, they used candles to find their way to a store room where they found their gear had been picked over, but was present, but upon picking up their stuff the door behind them opened and two more goblins plus a goblin boss attack them.

The fight ends, when the boss drops, any remaining goblins ran away, or they were all killed.   In the event they concentrated fire on the boss and burned him down very fast, finding a set of keys, opening the door they found they were in a basement sort off, but two cells had been erected and inside was a trembling figure in one bed, and an Elf Wizard was in the other, she had a friend, an armoured Guinea pig, which would fight for her later.  The other figure though was Bard.

The real Bard, he had been duplicated, the group learn now that the creature in the carriage had actually been a doppleganger.

The elf is called "Eluna", along with Bard they join the party, and Bard explains, this is his mansion, bought for through all the concert ticket sales he's made being a... well a Bard.

He explains the evil cult took over and banished him here, but had sent a note just before for help, that was the note the group got at the beginning.

Leading the group into a corridor the group have to fight flesh eating worms in the dark, then they enter the old kitchens and fight a guard, and finally enter the main hall of the mansion, and there fight two twin swordsmen, who both had to die together, the doppleganger and the boss "Bolvier", the cult leader.

A great moment came when the Wizard in our party grasped she could do anything, and came up with using a belt knife to cut down a tapestry and having it float over the heat of one of the twin swordsmen and wrapping him up whilst they fought the other characters.  This was the first time the group benefited from any form of crowd control, and it was epic.

The session ended with the group taken into the mansion to relax and recoup with Bard, Eluna sets off to report her troubles to her Priestess bosses.

The third session was meant to happen last week, but one of our members, the youngest, was not being a very good girl, she was very annoying and not bothering to play Scrabble... And so because she couldn't be arsed to play Scrabble... She wasn't allowed to play D&D.... Despite her moaning "But D&D is the best game ever".... yeah, it would have been if you'd have applied yourself to Scrabble.

Pathfinder

There's not a log going on, save to say I've been reading and following the Pathfinder RPG game rules.  Which are essentially D&D v3.5 rules. Message ends.

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL/C# - Map Editor Updates

So, the Map Editor, I made a brief mention of progress on Tuesday's post, but I've refined a few things, and I'm ready to show you some screenshots of how things look...

Here we see a tile set being imported, and placed down, then I've laid a set of dividers, a divider is a none-crossable wall like structure, but it lets us use a single square as a wall, rather than using a blank gap.

So, hopefully you can see that we can enclose spaces without so much blank black squares.

Which then leads to more complex structures:

The next item I'm literally coding now is a door, which will go into places as highlighted in red here...

Supporting single spans, or double spans...

And of course, once all this is designed into the map editor it's going to be ported into the game itself to give us the basics of the Adventure loading & walk through.

D&D - Session 1

Last night, I had the pleasure of hosting my first D&D Fifth Edition game, now I did vastly simplify the rules and let lots of the detail slip, because not only was it my first time hosting, but it was my players first time playing.

So, we simplified the D20 use and the character sheets, but I kept the story rich and powerful, I'll relay the whole story below, with the options I gave people.

The adventure was in two parts, one needed no board and it constituted me taking the players together to a small village to get a task, the task was given by the inn keeper (a woman) to track down her son who had gone missing looking for treasure in the nearby mountains.

The party had to roll perception to spot a picture of the son, and note he wears a distinctive hat, and they could roll charisma with the inn keeper to negotiate their fee...

The party then had to move along the obvious path the guy took through the forest and to the foot of the mountains and the first dexterity and athletics tests were put to them, with a party of a rogue then two cloth wearers you could imagine the rogue would spring up the mountain side, but they rolled a 1... So fell flat on their arse, this made the other two more wary of climbing up, so they missed a surprise round here against a rat enemy in the entry way...

I had it scripted that there was a rat, if they killed the rat by getting up there quietly it could not run into the next room to alert the next enemy.  As it was they didn't surprise the rat, it saw them and ran off, and alerted the next enemy.

Meanwhile I had them see a fissure in the wall looking down on a grander room below, this was the end goal room, so the dungeon they were in was a simple four sided affair, but they can only see this room, so I ask for a perception/history check... They fail this...

So the elaborate story about the light below and foot prints in the thick dust was lost on them, all they got to be told about was a shabby carpet which looked like it might have once been grand.

Into the next room, it's a church like vault, rotten wooden pews line it and it's rubble at one end.  At this point I explained "light" for the wizard and they elect to light a coin and throw it to the back of the room, where they see the first enemy a cockatrice (vastly lowered in HP)... If they had not let the rat go, they would have faced four 1HP bats, not a 8HP cockatrice.

This thing takes a bite out of the rogue, it also takes a bite out the priest, but they subdue it and then I offered them a rest.

No-one searched the corpse, the rogue just opted to chop it up for meat, only to find it's bad meat and not for eating.

Next there's a set of rotten double doors, they peek around and the rogue uses slight of hand to spot a trap, which they avoid.

Unfortunately they left the light on the coin, now they're in the dark and I point this out, but the wizard fails to light the tip of their wand again and the rogue falls down a set of steps in the dark.

The Priest manages it down the stairs, only the wizard manages the stairs well, and so at the bottom of the stairs the wizard manages to light their wand again and they see two sets of doors, one left with a grill, and one dead a head.

The door to the left is an old cell, the priest opens the door, by bashing them with their club, the wizard lights a coin and throws it in, they see nothing save a pile of bones and old straw, so they leave the room alone.

If they had stepped in, they would face a short sword wielding skeleton... However, the wizard and priest both stop the rogue going in.

They instead try to peek through the closed double doors, and they managed with detect magic, to find out there's a flame skull beyond the doors...

They open it, and surprise it, gaining advantage, the wizard slows it, it hits the priest and hits the rogue, it also silences the priest, but they beat it down... Not before however it bloodies the rogue down to 8HP.

They heal up and rest here briefly, then search part of the room, and find an important story line item I invented the "Globe of life", filled with good green energy.

They history check on it and find this is a much fabled vial of pure life, it was what the flameskull was seeking to bring itself back to real life.  The priest tucks this away.

They move on, and enter the final room, which has two halves, the half with the rug they saw previously, and the half just in stone... In the corner is a prone bundle, which is the body of the inn keepers son.  The players didn't know this however, as they failed their checks on it... They know it's dead...

The rogue then did a detect traps and spotted a gargoyle about to pounce, they fought this down fast, and had it at 5HP, when it offered to parle.... But they refused and tried to kill it, getting it down to 1HP, where it slunk away... It would have told them to use the vial on the body... As it was however, they decided to use the vial on the body and it was the innkeepers son, it was a check someone did to see if it had a hat on did the trick...

He takes a breath and says "don't step on the rug"... So they didn't.

Not using the vial they would have faced him as a zombie and not been able to get home with him to get their reward.

However, they also open a treasure chest, this spawned the final boss, however, as they didn't stand on the rug she's only 1/4 her normal strength, and with the wizard using all their dailies she's burning and charred and the DOT takes her down on the third turn after opening the fight.

This was the end of the run, it worked out, the flameskull was the hardest enemy they faced, at no point were they close to a wipe.

Feedback

And in general feedback they decided the priest wanted more to do.

But each party member went away with 25 gold pieces each, some XP and a good grounding in the game mechanics.

Because the boss wasn't full strength they didn't get any special items, also because they didn't fight the skeleton the rogue missed out on a nice +1 short sword, and they didn't search a table in the flameskull room, so they missed 3 more gold pieces and some magic items for the priest and wizard.

But they missed this more through wanting to not take all night and getting to the end within two hours, so I may award them to the player character sheets with some story about adventures they've been on and add them some more skills, especially for the priest.

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL/C# - Map Editor

My previous post today said, what have I been doing, You could imagine, not a lot of code, I've not been able to think... But today, I've thrown myself into the development again, and set about sorting out a map editor of some use.

I simply have to do something to distract me from my grief.

So, we can select the size of map we're working on, either from the pre-set sizes, or just entering a number:

Then we can select the brush we're using to draw tiles:

Adding Tiles:

We see the mouse over a tile with the orange surround:

Painting the brush is by pressing "1" for the first brush, and I'm going to add 2, 3, 4, etc. so you can have up to 9 brushes selected, basically the numpad will be key, with the floor tile (or even a random set of tiles) being numpad 5, and the 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 and 9 keys being the corners and walls, letting you quickly build a room or space.

You can also clear a tile with Delete...

The development efforts on this may soon be renamed "Spirit of Dude Development"...

Dungeon Crawler - C++/SDL - VLOG 1

For Part Two, click here.

This is my first VLOG on the topic of my dungeon crawler... Sorry about the echo in the last couple of minutes, no idea how that happened:

My first (ever) VLOG about the development of my 2D Dungeon Crawling Game & supporting classes in C++ with SDL.

Sorry about the echo after around 11 minutes - I have no idea how that started to happen, and I will not let it happen again, it was not spotted until I had uploaded this.

For more information about this project, and other projects I'm working on, the best place to check out is my blog at http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.com

*Tutorials Used*

http://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/

*Libraries*

https://www.libsdl.org/

http://www.boost.org/

See my other videos for more information on using Boost.

*Pathfinding*

D&D Starter Set

When I was at college I remember briefly trying to play D&D... From a second edition manual, it was hard... The two guys setting up characters with me were baffled and the GM was no help.  A hopeless, pretty boring situation, as none of us had read the players manual and the GM hadn't got a grip on how to play, needless to say I never even touched a D20 let alone rolled anything.

At uni I remember the Student Union Bar one day hosted a Magic introduction, but Magic never appealed to me.

Years later I've been a World of Warcraft player, but the computer games never get to the exploitative and environment freedom D&D promises... Could I pull a brick out the wall in Stormwind and thrown it at someone?.. Nope, can I in D&D... Sure!

So it is that I've come full circle, and I've just ordered the Starter Set for D&D Fifth Edition...

God Help Me.

Confession Time - D&D

I've got a confession for you all... I have never played Dungeons & Dragons... There, I've said it, I hope we can move on after this.

Now I'm not including the online incarnation of the game, which I've played, and also blogged about...

I'm talking about the actual pen & paper, around a table, D&D...

I'm not sure where or why this passed me by, it is exactly my thing, but I think my trouble is I don't want to be a player, I think I want to try my hand at being the Games Master.

I dunno, I wonder if you can D&D via skype?... Anyone want to try?

EVE Expansion, Social Clicking and more DDO

It might actually be time for a me to return to Eve-Online, with ever more news being released about the next Expansion due out in May, May the 18th to be precise, my appetite has been whetted.

EVE Online | Tyrannis

Unfortunately, I sense some foreboding about the new features. Planetary Interaction, or PI as it's being called, looks awesome and it very well might be, however, I have a feeling it'll be the exclusive domain of 0.0 alliances, and out of the reach of anti-social high-sec miner spunk monkeys, like me.

I did however like the look of the new Scorpion. Having flown a Scorp in fleet engagements, I know how quickly they get made primary [everyones hates ECM], but I also know how ugly they are/were. So, I have a semi-stoked game boner for that little gem...

I have tonight however been doing three things... the first was play some "Social City" on Facebook and when I use the word play I do so in the loosest sense of the word, you know like you'd play with peeling paint... or... you'd be made to play with the kid from class who got the Chicken Pox first.

Here we see the burgeoning "Xel City" at level 3... a lot of clicks later... and you end up with this...

Erm..... Thrilling....

The next thing I did however, was more interesting, I played some more DDO. I made myself another Rank of level 1, and played a little more of the initial story line. This time stopping occultist baddy people hitting a crystal. For my efforts I got a nice pair of new bracers.


I have to say that I am over my initial downer about DDO, I'm coming to grip with the interface, after three good play sessions of about 2 hours each it is comming more naturally, however, I still have this nagging feeling that really it shouldn't have been up to me to change my needs from the game. It does seem to lack some basic information, access to quite what to do doesn't come easily. And I'd have to say some of that problem comes from information overload. There are a lot of NPC's, a lot of interactions to get used to and the tooltips lag terribly [even on an overclocked Quad Core CPU on 8GB of RAM with dual 8800 Graphics cards in SLi Mode????].

I did however come across some rather lush graphics, the lighting in DDO is done very well... the shadow stenciling however, is not... more about that in an up coming post.

The other thing I did was re-watch the Top Gear USA Special, there's something so heart warming watching a BBC crew being run out of "a hick town" in a hail of stones.

Grab the Dragon by the Horns

Well, I have to take a slice of Humble pie... I'm only going to put the pie onto my plate, I'm not actually going to eat it yet... the reason is, that after playing a good solid couple of hours of Dungeons and Dragons Online, I actually got something accomplished. And it didn't drive me insane doing it.

In short order, I finished a couple of instances, I made rank 2 of level 1, I got to grips with the interface and I played about with the graphics options.

First off, let me explain something which I think has an important bearing on where my opinion of DDO spawns; I've never played Dungeons and Dragons... I know, you're all gasping in horror and closing your Internet browser's of choice without a second glance... but, having never played Dungeons and Dragons as a table top game I only had a rudimentary idea of what to expect from the intellectual property of the online game. Unfortunately I have played other online multi-player role playing games, notably WoW.

So I have to take my cap in my hands and admit that I have come towards trying DDO from a WoW perspective, and let me tell you lovely folks out there... 'Coming at DDO from a WoW point of view is unfair, semi-unjust and may make you miss out on a title you enjoy'.

Having said that, I must make myself clear on one point, that I don't think it is unfair to come to any contemporary MMO offering and no expect to apply WoW metrics to evaluating it. Blizzard did so many things right to popularise the genre it's probably unfair on players to move the goal posts too far; whether this is stifling innovation in the development of new MMO's or just making titles older than WoW seem awkward I think is for a whole other post.

But, as unfair as it is to the makers of offerings other than WoW in the genre we have to admit that unlike any other title Blizzard have hit the spot and defined “the norm”. And not taking a pinch of Blizzard's “ways of working” is awkward to new players whom have only ever played wow. [Which sadly now-a-days is going to be the vast amount of PC based MMO players].

Anyway, onwards and upwards, I was pleasantly surprised, oh yes I was. I got into my first instance, I chose to play this on “normal”. When you begin instances in DDO you can choose to play them in one of five escalating levels of difficulty. From Solo, through to raid. I assume at this point that the levels of difficulty reflect the level of reward which will be made available at the end.

So, for my first instance I chose Normal, and in I went. I had to fight past the obligatory little mobs and I found a little puzzle of pulling levers to access new areas, all very fine, I was however quite interested in the proper puzzle room at the end of the instance, the idea of this was that you worked out how to get power from one central stone to those at each corner by moving the tiles on the ground to align them and allow the power to flow out from the centre. And I have to say, I really enjoyed this little mechanic, the first time I'd seen such a thing in an MMO [I think, certainly the first time I remembered it] and I got to work out the puzzle and feel like I'd achieved something.

The puzzle wasn't even the end of the instance, but it was fun. Something that other MMO's miss in spades is fun, WoW aims for grind to make you keep wanting to play, Runes of Magic aims for play time and breadth of experience to keep you wanting to play and other MMO's have other mechanisms for keeping you there in your seat. DDO however did it to me this evening by at least giving me something to work out...

Not that the experience was perfect, far from it, but I enjoyed this little aside.

One problem I came across was the lighting effects, if you are in a room with two lamps on a wall say, you will get yourself a nicely cast shadow from the closest lamp, if you them move towards the other lamp, suddenly as a mid point as you cross from being closer to one from the other, your shadow will suddenly flip [that's the best description for it] from the direction of the first lamp, to the new now closer one. It is a little jarring to the eye.

Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of the difficulty of decent stencil masking to make shadows work out, but in this case, I'd have rather had no shadow than a broken shadow.

That said the shadow stencil is quite good, reflecting well what your character is doing, it is just rather poor at deciding when to switch from one light source to the next, and there is only one shadow, where as between two light sources in the real world you'd expect to have two shadows... go look yourself outside between to lamps you'll see what I mean :)

But, tonight, was all-in-all, a decent experience, and I can't wait to have some more.

Welcome to Eberron

Right well, here we are at my second instalment of my progress with DDO. Downloading and installing the game, in both standard and high quality graphics, is actually relatively painless, indeed it took far less time and was more informative to the progress made than other titles and indeed the obligatory patching and data updating following install went on without a hitch on both platforms I tried.

The only glitch came with I starved the connected of bandwidth, throttling it down to below 100kpbs, I found the updates repeatedly stalled while downloading. But I can forgive their servers that, after all I caused the problem by watching too many Videos of Elmo on YouTube.

Once I logged in, I could select the world [I assume this is the same as realm] to visit, and previously visited realms are highlighted in bold. However, if like me you are on different machines between visits the different machines are not aware of what realms you've been on. As such I missed getting the same character twice for my time on the laptop and desktop PC's.

Creation of the characters went on without a hitch, however, when creating your character you get a few of the action animations being played. Immediately I was struck with how awkward some of these animations look. Characters will spin and swing clubs, dodge, parry and cast... but some of the moments are physical impossibilities. I don't like this much, it's a real turn off to me, I like to see natural looking [albeit cartoon-esp] movements. Not these strange efforts in DDO. Indeed I'd have to go so far to say they look amateurish.

However, after selecting my class, race, sub abilities and look I was ready to go, and after giving my character both a fore and surname, I was on a beach somewhere with a short bloke shouting at me.

Please Note - I added the speech bubble.

Now, this guy grates with me, his speech is voice acted by someone I want to punch, this whiny, adenoid dominated rat faced character is matched only by the most whiny adenoid dominated rat arsed voice acting. [Did I mention that the speech text is not bubbled and comes up in the most basic courier font?]

This is your welcome to DDO, this guy SHOUTING at you, showing how bad the 3D sound system is, because though you see the guy a head and slightly left of you the sound of his voice comes from way left and is VERY loud for someone stood so far away.

He proceeds to cajole you into moving about controls, however, there is a lot going on within the UI, if this is your first view of it then it can be quite daunting. You have an action bar at the bottom, which on default settings is hard to comprehend. You have a text/chat area with more of the bad font being used. You also have a mini-map but also a lot of crowding going on, the interface is not clean looking. It just looks to me like it has a lot of things to explain to me, or rather a lot of buttons I don't yet know about. And I'm not sure what clicking them is going to do. All of which leads to feeling that I'm in a rather cluttered user experience. And, with bars above others, and the position of things I have to just hope that I can change things around because to my untrained, but WoW Conditioned eye the interface in DDO does not appear to take ergonomics into account.

Now I suppose I have to draw on a point raised by Darren Love in the latest edition of SUWT. That is that with Blizzard's domination of the MMO Market with Warcraft, there are certain demands and requirements from a player of an MMO today, which are wants and needs influenced by Blizzard. One of these is a simple accessible learning curve and interface. And I'm afraid to say that though DDO's interface is visible, I don't feel like it is accessible.

Even simple things like popping up hints & tips, or tooltips seem sluggish. On the machines I'm running DDO on, I don't think it should feel sluggish... And these feelings about the UI don't even take into account actually achieving control of my character. I am solely commenting about the UI here. Actually taking control of your avatar feels even more alien.

For example, in World of Warcraft to attack you have to select the target and choose to attack [or you can auto attack with a different control]. In DDO you can stand and suddenly make your character punch air. I have been told that later this all makes sense, but right now to the total beginner it does not, I'm basically looking at an avatar whom is punching thin air and I can't seem to stop them doing it [again because in WOW you have to click something else to stop the auto-attack going on, not so in DDO].

I find this shift in my expectations hard to reconcile. I'm afraid to admit that Blizzard have me well trained, conditioned to jump to their tune... I am Pavlov's Dog for MMO control expectations. *Sobs*

However, I did play a little more of the game, I played through the introduction instance, more about that in my next DDO post.

Now, in other news, I have to blush somewhat. As you may gather from post number 1, Darren Love over at CommonSenseGamer was the inspiration for this blog, and today he has made mention of this my corner of the interwebs as his blog of the week.... I thank you Sir.

For now though, I'm about to take a weeks break from work, I'm going on Holiday! While I'm away I'm going to play some Total War Games... Those of you whom know me as “Lord Xelous” formerly of "The Lords Modding Collective" and “The Lordz Games Studio” will know how, and why, I love the Total War series.

DDO First Impressions

Oh for crying out loud, will I ever find an MMO I don't complain about? Probably not [throws rattle out of his pram], but that's not my fault games are just so bad.

And I think, DDO is going to be that way, I played the first little bit last night... and I wasn't impressed, first of all there are graphical glitches, like I set it to be 1280x1024 full screen mode, and all that did was cram the game into 1280x1024 pixels in the top left of my main screen as a window... So, not a good start there.

In the game itself the colour palette looked a little washed out, like everything was dusty, I'm not sure what was causing that appearance, but I'll persist in finding out.

Then, there's the game play itself... Okay, so I was level 1, I had the standard crappy starting mace in my hand and I was playing clueless. Ironically I immediately had to stop myself trying to use things in the "wow" style. You have to left click on things for activation and right click on things for passive selection in DDO, this is the opposite to WoW and Runes of Magic, and well, opposite to every other MMO I've played. I'm not sure if Turbine were just aiming to be different that the rest of the pack of MMO's out there, but the mechanic annoyed me greatly.

Then, the character animation and movement struck me, they were awkward, there are options to smooth the animation going on, so I'll have a play about with them tonight, but the actual movement was odd. Characters, NPC's especially, didn't seem to walk or run around, they seemed to glide while moving their legs. A most disconcerting effect. And very 1990.

Not something you'd expect in a game boasting "This Machine can run me in DirectX10, do you want me to?"... and you click Yes to be given appreciably nothing different... I'm going to run it in DirectX9 mode thoroughly for comparison...

Finally, the combat system, yes I was in a melee just swinging my beginner mace around wildly, but the text used to indicate damage, yes it floats off of things, but it's in the Courier Font... it looks like the system default... it was really off putting.

NPC speech was also presented like this, floating without a bubble, just loose text above their heads, it was hard to follow where the text began at times, and where it ended.

Overall, so far I'd day the game's pants, but I'll persist... I'm yet to interact with anyone else... well except one person called "Rox Rox" who simply ran up to everyone spawning in the first town and said "paladin" to them... "paladin".... "paladin"....