Posts Tagged musings

Changing styles of roleplaying

Posted by Rockjaw in Personal, Roleplaying on May 6th, 2009

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition - Player's HandbookLast night I had my first encounter – pun intended – with Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Last week I played another session of Call of Cthulhu. Reflecting on both, it struck me that my roleplaying tastes have definitely reversed from my earliest days.

Back then, playing a game which heavily lent on figures, maps, counting out range squares and throwing around spectacular powers and feats with abandon – while rolling very, very high modified numbers – would probably have thrilled me no end.

By contrast, playing a game which heavily lent on talking, investigating, puzzling, finding clues, trying to put those clues together, and sweating over Library Use checks did, in fact, bore me to tears.

Hence, D&D 4E is about twenty years too late for me; and I first played CoC twenty years too early.

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Serenity now…

Posted by Rockjaw in Personal, Too Much Information on April 21st, 2009

Heck of a day, at least inside my skull. Small, not that significant concerns suddenly exploded into massive, panic-inducing nightmares as they’re connected to my immediate emigrating future. Resolved, now – but still, it’s the kind of thing that leads podcast co-hosts to mutter “I am never, ever leaving this country.”

Yeah, why am I doing that, anyway?

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Clues – revealed!

Posted by Rockjaw in Personal, Teaser, Too Much Information on April 7th, 2009

By sheer coincidence, this is my 250th published post. A nice bit of serendipity, because I have something good to say – well actually, a few things.

They’re not all connected, so sorry, the clues don’t add up to one big giant reveal! Here are the details though, by the clue:

“Stand by for action!”

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My life’s about to get a lot more crazy.

You probably don’t realise, but 2009 has been pretty sedate for me – which isn’t really my preferred mode of operation. I like to be busy, I like to be challenged, and while I have had stuff to do, I haven’t been rushed off my feet. Why? Well….

In November last year I visited the USA to interview for a job in an MMOG company based in California; those of you with good memories might remember that I told you I got the job. There was only one small detail; I had to get a visa, so that I could emigrate and legally accept the position. (Right now, I’m still a remote contractor and not employed full-time.)

With my wife being American, in theory, this was supposed to be an easy process. In reality, it took the best part of six months… and it’s not over yet. However, three weeks from today, I’ll be having my final visa interview, and not long after, I should be granted the visa itself. (Fingers very much crossed, although by this stage, we should be golden.)

Not long after that, I’ll be jetting Stateside to join colleagues and prepare for E3.

After that, in early June, I’ll be returning to the UK to wrap things up so we can ‘properly’ move, hopefully in time for a good ol’ July 4th barbecue.

So yeah: compared to my current routine of “sit around working remotely, occasionally going to the coffee shop and updating Twitter”, things are about to get a lot more mad. Which frankly, is awesome.

Hence: stand by for action.

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FPS by numbers

Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, Personal on October 12th, 2008

I finished Call of Duty 4 today, which was sort of surprising as I thought I had ages left to play through. Turns out ‘Act I’ was the longest of the three, so without even trying hard, I suddenly came to the end.

Probably took me about 10-12 hours to play, which I know these days is seen as “Too short” but for me it’s just right. (I like to finish stuff, and preferably not over a period of months and months – unless we’re talking some super-engrossing strategy game, and those don’t often appear on console.)

Overall experience? Pretty good, but I came away thinking it wasn’t the breakthrough FPS experience I thought it might well be, judging by some reviews. Perhaps that’s because it’s not that up-to-date (it did come out in 2007) but actually, I think it’s because I felt like I’d seen it all before:

  • The ‘hold off the bad guys for X amount of time’ mission
  • The ‘escape under heavy fire’ mission
  • The ‘fire on people from a flying thing’ mission
  • The ‘shoot from the back of a moving vehicle’ mission

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This side of the morning

Posted by Rockjaw in Personal, Too Much Information on September 21st, 2008

Although of course, it’s afternoon as I write this. (TTBM Points for anyone who can identify the subject title without Google.) Really hard to put things into words today, but I’m a writer, dammit, so I’m going to try my best. Read the rest of this entry »

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