Saturday, August 30, 2003

I woke up early to play the Living Greyhawk adventure, "A Night in Birnham Woods."  This game was historic for several reasons, not the least of which being that it was led by my character, "Blast" Hesloshni.  And of course, it was an utter failure.

These sessions are always a hit or miss thing.  It's a lot like gym class in high school.  Team captains (usually, the most outspoken of the group) pick out the people they want on their team.  Only in this case, it's a game session that consists of up to six people.  Instead of judging you by your physical ability, people judge you by your level and class ("A 1st-level fighter? Uh, never mind...").

When I first started playing in the Living Greyhawk games, I was very shy -- hard to imagine, I know.  Nowadays, I'm quite pushy.  Choosing the people you will play with for the next four hours is a very tricky business and the initial group formation is the critical juncture.  So I've learned to try to weed out the people who wouldn't match my style of play as quickly as possible.

It rarely goes well.  In this case, we were playing a very early game and gamers are a lazy lot.  So we had just enough for three groups.  Levels forcibly separated the three groups.  We were the "mid-level" group, which is always a bad place to be.  High-level groups take on the toughest challenges and know what to expect.  Low-level groups have a much better time because the DMs are usually lenient.  But mid-level groups...well anything goes.  And anything did go.

There were no less than two clerics, two wizards, and one sorcerer in the group.  We had two elves, Blast included.  The dwarf was our cleric/tank.  That is very bad.

To elaborate, clerics are medics.  You do not want your medic on the front lines, likely to die, as there's no one to heal him if he goes under. The other cleric was...well, I'm not sure.

The DM didn't bother to have our characters introduce themselves to each other.  He did explain, however, that he was reading boxed text and to interrupt him was a very bad thing.  There was a lot of, "I have the power, you don't" thing going on.  There were also a lot of completely unrelated chats about things that didn't have anything to do with the game.  At one point, this turned into racially offensive talk that our DM thought was okay, "since you're all white."  Turns out one of the gamers was of mixed heritage and it was NOT okay.  Wasn't okay with me either, but at that point the hubcap from this car crash was still rolling down the street -- who was I to stop it?

If this were a normal adventure, we would have gotten along okay.  But it was not.  It was a murder mystery.  Since Living Greyhawk games are usually limited to 4-hour blocks, you HAVE TO FINISH in 4 hours.  HAVE. TO.  Screwing around discovering the mystery wasn't helping.  We did figure out the murders and make it to the end of the adventure, only to face off against two vampires.  These two vampires promptly beat the unliving crap out of our dwarven cleric, who ran away.  Then the rest of us ran away, because we ran out of time.  The end.

Cough.

Okay, so we then went to the Vivendi Universal Games (VUG) seminar, which was great fun.  They showed us Middle Earth Online (MOE) and The War of the Ring. Then I spoke with John Race, who was incredibly proud of the work they did on MOE. He as very polite and even gave me a compliment:

"You guys (MUD developers) are the equivalent of Lewis and Clark," he said.  "You did it all first.  And you left behind a trail of bodies that all these MMORPG developers see before them.  And what do they do?  They step over the corpses without looking down!"

He's right, I couldn't agree more.  I was excited to hear him agree with my perspective on MMORPG design.  I asked him about the possible NBC purchase and some of the team indicated "it's rumored VUG is not part of the sale." Damn, so much for my dream of transferring from GE to VUG!

Then we were off to "A Look Behind the Return of the King" run by the http://www.theOneRing.net.  Very cool stuff in a massive meeting room.  Mostly trailers and an analysis of what was in the trailer that only a fan can appreciate.

After that, we ran around the Dealers Room and I bought more Aliens, Predator, and Terminator comics than I should.  Amber picked up a really cool set of LOTR binders, a Frodo mug, and some other stuff I don't remember right now.  Mostly, I bought comics.  

Then we went to Steak and Ale with Jen and Loyce, coders (and former coders) on RetroMUD.  We had a blast and got slightly tipsy. And ate a lot of meat (yaaaay meat!).