Penny Arcade

And So It Begins, Part Four

Between the treacherous drifts of the Everwinter and my trip eastward, we haven’t really been in the office. With both of us in, the power rings have joined and the morning has largely been spent talking about crucial matters, like the effective range of javelins and the frequency with which an elder red dragon may issue gouts of crackling flame. It’s glee of such a concentrated sort that I must store it up, keep it, as (statistically speaking) human lives seem to trend away from glee.

Here, then, is the final strip of the series. I do wonder how long we can like the same things - my guess is “not especially long.” I can already feel myself pressed to become a more pure manifestation of myself, more absolute, so that the choices left to me are either the Camarilla or The Society For Creative Anachronism.

Virtually every site I read to keep up on things related to gaming had some variation on this story last week: according to the latest stats at Major Nelson’s blog, Gears of War 2 was “stagnating” at fourth place in terms of games played. I would say this is consistent with the sort of rapid-fire, rabble-rousing non-news that gluts these blogs in general.

Nevermind that there are no actual statistics for players, or how much of this play is co-operative, or local, or online. There’s no information about session length, or multiple ownership, or (in some cases) multiple platforms. If being fourth place constitutes a dark fate, how much more shameful, then, must Left 4 Dead’s meager showing at 7th place be? My assessment: very shameful. Particularly when you consider that only last week, Left 4 Dead was at 6th - the veritable catbird seat! No doubt Valve has been chastened as a result.

It’s utter cellulose - inert, useless Goddamned “information.” Why should I care what rank a game I like (or don’t like) is, particularly when the mechanism being used to determine this rank is opaque, let alone incomplete? Assuming these statistics are useful in any way, plenty of games don’t get the audiences they deserve. Resistance almost certainly has better concurrency than LittleBigPlanet - are you improved by this data? Is the universe?

(CW)TB out.

to the depth and breadth and height

The student has become the master

So I spent a huge chunk of the weekend working on my D&D adventure. Playing with Scott, Will and Tycho for the Podcasts really got me hooked on the game. Speaking of those podcasts I’m not exactly sure when they’ll be available online. I’ll let you know here though as soon as I find out. I will say that there is a point at which Jim is hanging upside down from a rope ladder, 20 ft off the ground casting spells in all directions. He was as usual, magnificent.

I’m really excited about my first atempt at filling the DM role. I think I’m lucky that the only two times I’ve played the game it’s been with professional DM’s from WOTC. Especially the second time I really paid close attention to how Chris Perkins ran the game. It also helps that everyone in my group will be new to D&D as well so we’ll sort of be learning together. As for the group, they’re all pretty excited I think. They got me their character descriptions over the weekend and I took some time to draw up each of their characters.

You can click for a larger version or hit my DA page for individual pics.

From left to right you’ve got Kiko our Human Warlord, Brad the Dragonborn Paladin, Travis the Warforged Fighter, and Alex the Gnoll Rogue.

Our first game should be this weekend and I’ll be sure and let you all know how it goes.

In other news, we have a new hoodie for sale in the store. I was messing around with some different styles and came up with a drawing of the CTS that I thought was pretty cool. It’s a very different take on the character and I think it made for a really unique hoodie. Hopefully you guys will like it too.