Carda here.

As an avid tabletop gamer, I’m often looking for new games I can get into, particularly games with a social aspect (which is usually competition, naturally).

Lately I’ve been feeling a bit of a pull to get into wargames. There’s a bit of a problem, though: every single popular wargame in existence has a ridiculous “entry fee”. Both Warhammer and Warmachine, the two “big name” wargames out there, charge a hundred bucks for a two-player starter set. A complete core rulebook is thirty bucks minimum, and individual army kits run anywhere from fifty bucks on up.

In case I forgot to mention, I’m married with three kids. Do I look like I’m made of cash?

Thankfully, I had a backup plan. Several years ago I discovered Brikwars. You build your units and terrain out of Lego, and play with reckless abandon. The game follows the Barbossa rule of “They’re more like guidelines than actual rules.”

A few days ago, Mike Rayhawk (the guy who created Brikwars, and a stellar artist who has worked for Lego more than once) tweeted a link to a Kickstarter project that was just starting up. It was for a new edition of a ten-year-old wargame-built-from-Lego called Mechaton. This new version is called Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Assault.

While the game is much more by-the-book than Brikwars, it caught my attention. The core rulebook will feature not only how to play, but also how to build the default models belonging to the game’s native setting. The best part is that players are free to go “off-script”, so to speak, by building models based on other settings (like your favorite anime, for example); the rules are setting-neutral.

Another interesting feature of the game is its damage system. Each unit has specific dice, denoted by color, for different subsystems, like armor, targeting, and weapons. Each subsystem is a separate sub-model that you attach to the base frame of your robot. When the robot takes damage, it loses one of its systems, and you remove that system from the model. This makes it fairly easy to gauge the state of the battlefield at a glance, without having to reference a stat card or score sheet.

The Kickstarter project still has a month to go as of this writing, and even though it’s already reached its original funding goal, there’s still plenty of room to keep funding. The creators have announced a plan to release the game under a Creative Commons license if the funding reaches $15k, and the individual rewards range from a PDF copy of the rules all the way up to a fully custom-built squad of units built around a particular strategy. The Lego models for the higher-tier rewards are built by Soren Roberts, a notable builder in the Lego community.

The game’s creators are slated to appear at this year’s PAX East, so if you have a chance to see the game in action there, I’d recommend it. My budget only gives me enough leeway to fund the game at the lowest reward tier, but that’s okay; I’ve got enough Lego stuff to build five or six armies for this game and Brikwars together. Although I might make an excuse to hit up the Lego store outside Disneyland in June, once my birthday has come and gone…

Because that’s just how I operate.

spacetimelegacy:

After discussing the idea of working together with the other ELB guys to create an adventure map, it was clear what the core idea of our map would be: the player would be “shrunk” to microscopic proportions, basically half a “pixel” in height. FlashMan came up with the basic idea, and I started doing some concept work from there.

We came to the agreement that half a pixel (if by “pixel” you mean one square of the 16x16 block textures Minecraft uses by default) was an ideal size to scale the player down to, because a 64x64x64 “block” made for a reasonable “mini-dungeon” themed around one of the game’s functional blocks. And I’m just going to add some more “quotes” here because this paragraph doesn’t have “enough” of them already.

But anyway.

Moving from there, we figured that setting the story of the map in a lab made the most sense, and then I suggested that perhaps the shrinking wasn’t the result of an active experiment, but rather an accident that occurred during a teleportation experiment.

Sending the player into the Nether a moderate distance and then back out into the normal world a considerable distance away from the start point worked well on paper, but I didn’t see much of a point in messing with the Nether if the player wasn’t going to spend any length of time there. I’ll probably use a long minecart ride instead.

Next up: Macro-sizing the world.

hayashireiko:

Important note: I have refrained from posting the real names, e-mail addresses and steam profiles of the winners.

I regrettably did not think to ask for their consent at the time of contest entries to make any of their information public as submissions were sent privately to my e-Mail address,…

hayashireiko:

A friendly reminder to anyone interested in my Unusual Hat naming contest — entries will no longer be accepted after 11:59 PM CST tonight. Winners will be posted to my blog as well as the Reddit thread tomorrow and prizes will be distributed immediately thereafter. Good luck to all who entered!

BreakMan here.

The year 2012 has finally arrived, and all of humanity is reeling in terror at what the ancient prophecies hold in store. For this year shall be like none other before it. This year, the land will be soaked in the blood of the unworthy.

Read More

FlashMan here! I spaced out and forgot to note it in the actual body text of the contest post, only putting it on the picture at the top of the post. Anyway, the contest’s deadline is Valentine’s Day (February 14th, 2012). Winners will be announced then.

Thanks to everyone who entered! Submissions are no longer being accepted; the contest winners will be posted to this blog tomorrow! Good luck to all of the participants!

Read More

Carda here.

Wizards of the Coast announced today that they’ve been hard at work on the next edition of Dungeons and Dragons, an edition that is intended to draw upon the design ideas from all previous iterations. In the wake of this announcement, I thought I’d put forth my own small wishlist of features that I believe would strengthen the game. (The following list is not representative of all the ELB Staff, just my own thoughts.)

1. Feats should no longer grant any sort of passive attack bonus. Fourth Edition has dozens of these “expertise” feats, all of which scream the exact same thing: “If you don’t pick me, you won’t be nearly as good.” Feats should be a choice or a specialization, not a basic necessity.

2. Most, if not all, skills should benefit from a choice of ability scores, not one specific one. The best example I can think of is Intimidate; that one can easily benefit from either Charisma or Strength. I dunno about you, but if I’m getting stared down by a big burly guy who can wield a sword the size of an oak tree, I don’t care HOW good his people skills are; I’d be pretty dang scared.

3. The next D&D needs to have a better digital presence than 4th Edition had. WotC didn’t do themselves any favors by promising the stars when 4th Edition was announced (Character Visualizer! 3D Virtual Tabletop!), then scaling back and giving us the moon (the original Character Builder and Adventure Tools), and then taking the moon back and making sure we paid our monthly fee for space shuttle rides (the online replacements). It didn’t help that the given reason for switching the Character Builder to an online version, making it accessible across a wider number of platforms, was belied by the fact that they used Silverlight, which excluded pretty much every single mobile platform from using the bloody thing. This time around they need to understand their limitations while making the tools accessible to everyone, everywhere. That means a toolset that lets me access my character from my desktop, my iPod touch, and my Kindle Fire android tablet.

4. While one of their stated goals is scalable complexity, I’d prefer if most of that complexity remained outside the realm of combat. I love digging into the books to find cool combinations of feats, powers, and such when I’m building a character. I hate poring over a twelve-page character sheet for the perfect power to use on my turn, especially in an ever-shifting combat encounter where the perfect power to use can change just because the tank went left instead of right.

5. Better third party support. Come on, WotC, I know you guys kinda screwed yourselves over when you wrote up the OGL, but the 4e GSL is such a mess that you’ve lost way too many third-party publishers to Pathfinder. The only 4th Edition books I have ever seen in my Friendly Local Game Stores have been first-party material; everything else is either online as PDF-only or print-on-demand.

6. PDFs. Yes, we understand that you don’t want to screw over the FLGSs by providing a cheaper digital alternative. The problem is, there IS no digital alternative, and some of us really do prefer carrying our library of D&D books around on a Kindle Fire rather than in a suitcase. By removing access to legal digital copies of the core rulebooks, you ended up punishing as many or more legitimate customers than you did actual pirates. Chris Dias, the designer of the modern-fantasy Amethyst setting, wrote a whole series of articles on piracy over on the Living Dice blog a while back, and he’s quite eloquent on the subject.

This is quite a short list, relatively speaking, but it’s a start. I just hope that as much thought is put into the support of the game as the ruleset itself.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve had a bit of an issue keeping our podcasts up to date recently. Even more recently, we’ve had trouble keeping them online, period.

So it’s our pleasure to announce that we’ve found ways to solve both problems: our YouTube channel! Carda’s been hard(ly) at work converting the podcast files to video format and uploading them to the channel, providing content for the channel in the process.

Who knows, maybe in the near future we’ll get over our (nonexistent) camera-shy natures and start recording the podcast in video format altogether!

Then again, let’s just take this one step at a time, like recording new material for starters…

Anyway, just hit the link above to be ported to the “ELB EX Podcast Lives!” playlist on YouTube. The first few episodes are already up for your enjoyment and the remainder of the ELB backlog should find its way there over the course of the weekend.

Carda here. In what appears to be a semi-annual tradition now, Valve has combined a massive sale with an achievement-laden contest of sorts. Generally speaking, it’s the latter of the two that I get interested in.

Unfortunately, this year, there were… problems.

First of all, the heavy, HEAVY reliance on coupons as a reward. Coupons? REALLY? I’d have taken the coal over the coupons at any point. This was repeatedly reinforced in the Steam Trading forums, as almost every offer I read explicitly stated “no coupons!”

In my opinion, it would have been better to eliminate the coupons entirely and use just coal. Crafting coal could have instead resulted in TF2 weapons/hats or the odd game. I’m sure coal would have been viewed as even more valuable in such a scenario.

Not that collecting coal for the end-of-sale drawing made much of a difference; according to what I read, the grand prize of every Steam game released to date went to someone who had completed exactly one holiday achievement for a single piece of coal. Because THAT sure doesn’t seem sketchy in the least.

Compounding the problem was Steam’s inability to keep their servers up and stable. The inventory servers, the trading system, and the forums all suffered from frequent and prolonged outages, most often right after 10 AM PST when the daily sale items changed over. So the ability to trade our coupons, games, and coal was severely hampered during the course of the sale. I sincerely hope that Valve prepares for the next sale by reinforcing these servers and systems to handle a much heavier traffic load than before, because they may start to lose some credibility if the situation isn’t resolved by the Summer Sale.

That said, I was able to buy (and trade for) several copies of some solid multiplayer titles, like Dungeon Defenders, Magicka, and Terraria. I’m hoping to get several of the ELB crew together for one of these games, possibly recorded so we can finally get some content in the YouTube channel. So we’ll see how that goes.

Here’s hoping your new year is enjoyable and full of life.