#i feel like if players are rage quitting and going online to desperately ask for help catching a Rare bug.. maybe you should reconsider | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lichlairs · 4 years

Photo

Checkout our new post over at http://lichlair.com/the-curse-of-strahd-curse

The Curse of Strahd Curse

This article is going to be a little different from my normal articles and I think the first in perhaps a little anthology series depending on how things go. Get yourself a nice drink and a snack and get comfortable as I take you down the dark path of my personal experiences (as well as some of my friends’) with everyone’s favorite Gothic horror module.

Mild spoilers ahead!

For the night is dark and full of spoilers…

Four times.

That’s how many times I’ve tried to unsuccessfully make my way through this cursed module. In fact, CoS was, I think, the first official module I tried to play my way through but I still remember as if it was yesterday; I had joined the campaign late as a fill in player. The original group had already collected Ireena and were now on their way to the Winery after being turned away from their destination. At the time I still didn’t quite know what I was doing and had opted to simply play my first Paladin, who was predictably an Aasimar.

We got to the Winery, talked to the family, and saved the day… not too bad for my first session having joined. Second session comes and we make our way to Yester Hill. A couple of player characters die but nothing too out of the ordinary for this module. Session three DM never shows up. Everyone sort of just sits around as makes awkward small talk as we wait to see if he’ll show up but eventually we begin to filter out. Strike one.

Flash forward a handful of months later and I’m still intrigued by CoS and very much decided to finish it. In my desperation I turn to the interwebs and discover that there are various platforms from which you can find a group and play online. It took a couple of days but I did eventually find a paid Cursed of Strahd campaign that looked promising and decided to join and what do you know… this group is also just now headed towards Kresk. I bite my tongue to not spoil anything and just enjoy playing my cool shadow monk. After another couple of sessions we eventually fight the druids again and…the DM kicks everyone out of their server after arguing with one of the players… no refunds. Strike two.

Hello, darkness my old friend

Months pass, I meet some pretty great friends along the way and forget about this cursed module for a bit until someone in our little group expresses their interest in running Curse of Strahd. I have a couple of seconds of doubt but eventually do agree to join the campaign as I had recently freed up some of my time. After a few sessions it happens again. Strike three.

Flash forward once again to about two months ago when another friend informs me that he will be running the game for some people and very hopefully asks if I am free to join. Now, at this point I’m very much reluctant and doubtful on whether I will ever actually be able to play through the damn thing, so I sigh and do what any friend would do…I play an Ancestral Barbarian Orc. Long story short, by the time we’ve made it out of the Death House three players had already dropped and with them the campaign came to an end once again. Final strike.

Now, if you’ve read this far I’m sure you understand why I’m not exactly fully knowledgeable on the full Curse of Strahd Module (since I really don’t like reading ahead on things I’m playing through) but for the most part I did find the story interesting enough and was very much looking forward to progressing through it.

After four attempts at playing this module I have some ideas as to why it might be difficult for a player but having never tried to DM it myself, I’ve done my rounds and asked a few people who are knowledgeable in this module about their own personal experiences running it and here’s what they had to say:

The module’s strength is also its weakness. While most people love a good sandbox adventure, CoS takes it a little bit too far by making it very difficult for the DM to prepare anything. We asked some of our friends who have run the module and they told us that they basically had to have the entire thing prepared because there was no way to know when the players would simply decide to change directions at the drop of a hat.

This overwhelming amount of material confined to such a small sandbox can also feel a little directionless for both players and Dungeon Masters. With so many quests and missions appearing all over the map and no “guiding” NPC to rely on, there’s just too many things to do and too few ways in which to nudge players in the right direction.

Another big complain that I personally experienced and something that got brought up quite a bit when asking for feedback for this article was that CoS seems to be built specifically to make the players’ lives miserable. At lower levels, every encounter is skewed to be deadly to the extreme, this coupled with the fact that 5th edition has an inherent tendency for players to not want to run away from encounters, it makes it extremely easy for total party wipe outs to happen. Now, don’t misunderstand me, player character deaths are completely natural and can lead to some amazing in character moments… when death is meaningful. Unfortunately that’s something that gets stripped away very quickly when your party has cycled through an entire rotation of characters.

“You can’t just play the same character and ad a ‘the 3rd’ at the end of their name!“

For a module that everyone seems to claim as their favorite, there seems to be a lot of unhappy experiences surrounding it. At the end of the day, after writing this article I think I’ve personally officially come to terms with the fact that I will never play through the entirety of Curse of Strahd and you know what? I’m okay with that.

If you’ve read this far I’d like to thank you for checking out our first article in our anthology series. If you’d like to read similar content in the future or simply want to rage at our writer for bad mouthing your favorite vampire module let us know by dropping a message in our new forums. Don’t forget to follow us on our social media to never miss any of our daily articles.

#Anthology Series #CoS #Curse of Strahd #dnd #dnd5e #dungeons and dragons

1 note · View note

fantroll-purgatory · 6 years

Text

Parisa Marcon

(Here She Is… Troll Paris Hilton…)

I would die for troll Paris Hilton.

Universe: Beforus!

Name: Parisa Marcon

“Parisa” is just me messing with “Paris” because I’m really trying to nail this “Socialite celebrity” parallel. “Richie” is technically a valid troll name but… that’s in Poor Taste. “Marcon” comes from Guglielmo Marconi, the first person to use radio waves for communication! (Albeit experimentally)

Parisa’s also teeechnically a Persian given name, but that’s never stopped Homestuck before. It also means “Fairy-like” which fits the socialite aesthetic well.

Age: Roughly 7 Sweeps

Theme/Story: Parisa has more followers on Trollstagram than you will ever have. She has teal blooded reporters donning dive suits to try and get a glimpse of her in her hive for the tabloids. She has it all: Money, Power, Fame, Legions of Adoring Fans. And yet, only a few people really know the real Parisa who comes out when she’s in her hive. That’s exactly how she wants it.

I love this character concept so much.

Strife Specibus: Knucklekind

Parisa might be beautiful, but delicate she is not. She’s a well known quantity on the “people you don’t wanna start a fight with” list. More than one Beforan boutique has been ransacked by an angry violet blood and her desire for the latest style of shoes.

I love her and her violent streak. Mind is a lot about body & mind, action over feeling, so her being someone who speaks with her fists is beautiful. Though I DO think she could utilize shoekind too, as an alternate option. Just grab a shoe off the shelf and go ham.

Fetch Modus: Intonation

Parisa’s relatively simple modus is as such. It has two dials that tune the pitch wave of an object, which shows up on her interface. She’s gotta make the sample wave as close as possible or else the item will end up damaged. Parisa’s been known to spend HOURS trying to get something out in mint condition.

I love her…….. I love this like, neurotic tendency. Cares so much about those radio waves.

Blood color: Violet

Parisa’s certainly an eccentric. Whether she’s a Genius or Maniac depends on who you ask. She oscillates between being larger than life, incredibly aggressive and a reclusive hermit depending on how the tides go out. If she was more people oriented and in a system that was overall more overtly awful to people, she might have a bit more sympathy and desire to actively help out, but for the moment she considers her social media profiles enough of a gift to the masses to tide her over.

Symbol and meaning: Well-

AQUAZA, THE POLITIC

Trolltag: [AA] aestheticAbusion

“Aesthetic” is well, aesthetic. The overall look of something, often used to refer to a surface kind of interpretation when it comes to social media.“Abusion” literally means “Abuse of the truth”, as in “Deception”. And what is a false persona created to fool the masses into thinking you’re more image focused than you are if not that? She abuses the truth for the aesthetic. She did it for the vine.

I know I just keep complimenting everything, but godd this is so good. Her Facades.

Quirk: W// Likeeeeeeeeeeeeee, Parisa loves to hold you the word likeeeeeeeee because it lets her think about what she’s gonna say? With a bit of uptalk? And, like, bracketed by her symbol? //W

I love the idea of a mind character who uses the like quirk, since it’s so often portrayed as like a vapid and stupid thing when it really shouldn’t be.

Special Abilities (if any): As a seadweller, Parisa has all the requisite “I live in the ocean” powers, which culminate in a completely amphibious biology, unlike many trolls. She uses this to escape the paparazzi when they get too pushy for their own good.

Lusus: Parisa’s long suffering Lusus is a giant pufferfish that has been trying to get her not, like, pick fights right outside her hive for years now. She’s only just starting to learn her lesson now. But, now the Troll Paparazzi know where she lives, which is horrible. But they can’t really swim to the bottom of the ocean, which is nice.

I love the idea of Parisa’s lusus functioning a little bit like one of those big proximity mines. Get too close to Parisa and she’ll bounce you away. Bodyguard Balloonfish.

Interests: Social Media, Being Rich and Amazing, The Latest Shade of Violet Foundation, Waterproof Mascara, Brand Recognition, Antique Radio Repair, Astronomy and Telescope Specs, Opera,

V….violet foundation? This is a minor critique but reading that alarmed me. Ma’am, don’t cover your whole face in violet. LOL. But these are all good. Maybe on the note of brand recognition you could have her like merch design? Like, runs an online store where people can buy images of Her, the Perfect Idol. But that’s so exhaustiiiing so she doesn’t manage it herself in her downtime.

Maybe you could have her be interested in amateur radio? Like, her running a radio show on the side where she gets to talk about stuff as her Genuine Self while not revealing that it’s Her, Famous Star Parisa Marcon. Let her ramble about the stars and wiring and all the fun fiddly things she’s into.

Appearance: Parisa wears her hair long and wavy, in a way that flows just the right way both completely submerged and in dry air. Nobody knows what she puts in it. Nobody but herself, of course, and that’s a secret she’s taking to her grave. She does like to wear what’s IN, but she’s also SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER, and she’s trying to bring back this… retro chic look? Like, dresses with jeans underneath and converse were SO IN when she was a wriggler, why did they go out of style? So all her posts the past few months have been her trying to make it happen!

Oh god this is going to be terrible and fun.

Personality: Parisa is a shrewd, calculating businesswoman. She just doesn’t make the best decisions with all the information she’s gathered. The person she pretends to be isn’t really her- while she does love being shallow and frivolous and really can’t keep a lid on her anger when someone gets in her face- it’s a pretense, a decoy. While the public’s attention is on that girl who looks like her, the real her is busy getting what she really wants: some peace and damn quiet. She’ll look into her specially calibrated telescopes at the stars above and she sees a multitude of worlds just out there, waiting to be conquered. Waiting for someone like her, someone who knows exactly how to use her public image to her best benefit.

Parisa can be obsessive and single-minded, which drives her closest friends nuts. When a problem presents itself to her, she has to think of all possible ways to solve it, even if the most obvious solution is staring her right in the face. It’s not about the problem at all, it’s about the process, it’s about principle! She’ll take a hundred selfies adjusting minor levels of light, her expression, and the objects in the room around her until it resembles exactly what she’s looking for. She won’t do anything with the other ones. The pursuit of the correct solution is all that matters. She just doesn’t know what it is until she’s tried absolutely EVERYTHING.

I love this so much hjbjbh the just like, level of desire for that little nuanced control echoing both in herself and her efforts to manipulate mass media.

Title: Thief of Mind

Active Classes That Remain: Maid, Thief,

Passive Classes That Remain: Sylph

Parisa is an odd kind of Mind player. Mind players tend to be overtly brainy, or at least openly logic oriented. Parisa doesn’t appear to be one at first glance- she seems to go on pure emotion. She gets into fistfights over shoes for godsakes! But that kind of emotional flow is created and guided by an irrigation system of ruthless logic. She acts this way because that’s what the camera wants, it’s what the public wants to see and read in their magazines. She’s got a new girl to date every other week because the DRAMA of it all is exactly what they want to see. Who she is does not matter, all that matters is the image.

As a bonafide celebrity with the ability to basically do whatever she wants, Parisa acts as a Thief of Mind by stealing the public’s ability to reason through her many social media angles. She’s a classic force of personality- and that’s how she likes it. She takes their thoughts and views and makes them her own, and then uses those to create a simulacrum to better hide behind.

Thief inverts to Page of Heart, and Parisa certainly struggles with emotions all around her. As a celebrity, she’s passive exploiting the public’s love and adoration of her and her exploits to her own benefit. Given her choice of company, it’s no wonder she’s struggling to contain her more destructive emotions- Breath and Rage are quite the combination.

Thief of Mind is great for her. I’ve said it before, when we chatted about this character prior, but just the… actively stealing away people’s rationality and leaving behind only raw emotions to be exploited is such a Clever Celebrity thing.

Land: The Land of Idols and Censors

Parisa lands on a cyberpunk hellscape. Consorts huddle in churches dedicated to their favorite celebrities and artists, desperate for even a shred of recognition from these borderline gods. She sees an uncomfortable amount of herself in them, and she hates every second of seeing their too perfect faces, hearing their too perfect voices, and watching them perform every ineffable action. Are they even people?!

Any act of dissent against them is handled swiftly and violently. The Censors, agents of the Denizen, who created the Idols remove anyone who dares do anything but worship at the altars of popularity. Any information, any innovation is squashed immediately. This is a world of technological and ideological stagnation.

Parisa never thought she’d become an anti-hero, but when in Hellscape, you do as the Hellscape requires.

Good as always.

Dream Planet: Derse

Parisa is concerned with very few things: keeping her fanbase, keeping her power base, her best selfie angles, and keeping her real cards as close to her chest as possible. She struggles with letting people into her guarded psyche because she doesn’t want anyone there. She doesn’t want romance, she doesn’t really want friends, and she certainly doesn’t wanna have to rely on anyone to get what she wants.

Design:

Horns/hair: I wanted to keep her horns relatively simple. I wanted them to be close-ish-kindof to Peixes horns, mostly because of the headcanon that those are the beauty standard. Hers are a little off, but just enough to be unique and beautiful. And her hair is a nice swoopy look, of course.

Face: I edited both the eyes and mouth from fan-troll’s spritesheet, complete with violet makeup.

Dress/belt: When I was looking p early 2000s fashion, no sleeve dresses over jeans were really popular, so here’s a no-sleeve black dress with a gold belt.

Pants/shoes: The pants are edited from Karkat’s, and they’ve got a rip because that was also a common feature of early 2000s fashion. And, of course, there’s some really simple converse.

I Love Her!

-CD

#persephoneanmystery #parisa marcon #parisa #marcon #violetblood #review #redesign #cd review #submission

6 notes · View notes

casualarsonist · 6 years

Text

Watch_Dogs 2 review (PC)

I do play other games, you know.

I’m mid-way through a bunch of games, and finished others but just haven’t gotten my thoughts together about them. It’s just really easy for me to speak my mind about Ubisoft games, because there’s so damn many of them, I’ve played so damn many of them, and their features are all iterative, rather than innovative, so there’s always an established base for me to speak from. In saying that, my review of the first Watch Dogs was one of impressed incredulity - it’s a really decent game. If it was the only open-world game that Ubisoft had released, it would have been lauded. Its use of the digital hacker trope as a gameplay tool to manipulate the city’s infrastructure in real time, as well as to peer into the private lives of each citizen, and the lengths it went to construct a vast series of interpersonal interactions amongst the NPCs resulted in a believable and interesting gameworld, and some genuinely thrilling cat-and-mouse car chases through the city streets. Unfortunately it was at the tip of spear during an infamous period of graphical downgrading when Ubisoft would naively stir hype with technically unfeasible pre-release gameplay footage, and then inevitably get hit with backlash when the actual released version of the game was necessarily downgraded in terms of its looks in order.

I say ‘downgraded’ rather than ‘it looked worse’, because Watch Dogs has never looked ‘bad’. It’s not as swanky as the pre-release footage, but it still looks great, and it boggles my fucking mind when I try to consider how enslaved to the shareholders the people making the marketing decisions must be, how out-of-touch they’d have to be to fail to predict the backlash, or how dishonest they are if the backlash is some kind of considered collateral as long as the pre-orders rack up. In any case, the announcement of Watch Dogs 2 received a not-undue amount of skepticism in return. Given how deceitful the marketing of the first game was, I was shocked that there was much interest at all. But Ubisoft smartly chose a bold new style to contrast the drab and morose look of the previous game, and this strange, quirky, fun-looking experience did the trick and sparked interest. Instead of the Windy City, we were treated to sun-kissed San Francisco. Instead of the gruff, grumbly ‘brown-haired white male protagonist #375’ (I can’t recall his name), we had a collective of young, crazy, wise-cracking hackers. The foundation of the original Watch Dogs was solid enough for this to be enough of a change, and so it was that Watch Dogs 2 was released to a reasonable amount of praise.

For all intents and purposes, it’s much the same game, but it fits an era of Ubisoft releases I’m going to refer to as ‘Newbisoft’: that is, the era in which Ubi seemed to finally get that its output was repetitive shit, and started making the barest effort to disguise it. The collectibles have been scaled down and replaced with places of interest that one can photograph to accrue experience points. The ‘experience points’ have been replaced with ‘followers’ - ostensibly reflecting the rise of your hacker collective as you complete missions and tasks. Other busywork activities such as pointless races are still there, as are Assassin’s Creed’s loot chests in the form of money bags lying in protected areas patrolled by gang members or security forces, but in putting them within an area that one must sneak into, seeking them out feels more like a mission than it does mindless filler. The amount of cash needed to purchase the various weapons and vehicles is generally quite high, and this feeds a desire in the player to want to engage in this cash-grabbing - you’re not getting six useless reales at a time - so it’s less irritating in this way. But if you stop to think about it too long, it’s unmistakably the same old bag of tricks.

As for the game itself? Well...it’s okay. As an open-world Ubisoft game, it’s fine. It’s far too long, and if you’re anything like me and put off the story missions for fear of finishing the game and missing loads of content, you’ll quickly find out that the side missions aren’t actually side missions, but rather a near-endless series of tasks that you’re required to repeat four or five times before each matter is resolved. This pads out the play time by a dozen hours at least, and by the time you’ve finished the majority of them you might feel rather sick of the experience as a whole. Gameplay-wise it’s again similar to the first, although there seems to be a greater focus on gunplay than on setting and activating traps. This undermines the few unique elements of the series as a whole, as it’s simply more enjoyable to walk into an area and shoot anything that moves than it is to try and knock people out one at a time, only to have them wake up a few minutes later and shoot you in the back. Also, I, for one, didn’t mind the general seriousness of the first game. It gave the narrative a sort of singular focus that I felt impelled me onwards. Was it melodramatic? Yeah. Did I have a clue what was happening? Not really. But it contextualised the player’s exploration of the gritty ghetto areas, and construction sights, and grimy backalleys of Chicago, and resulted in a very evocative experience. Meanwhile, Watch Dogs 2 is all sun-shine and rainbows. Everything is in technicolour. All the characters are upbeat and exaggerated, and while I won’t fault the acting (except for the main character, who, amongst a band colourful of misfits, proves time and time again to be the most annoying and bland member), it feels like there are no stakes and no genuine repercussions for their actions. Their foggy mission-statement of dismantling the establishment and ending the reign of privacy-invading corporations is vague, and directly contradicted by the player’s actions in game as you peek into the secret lives of every single NPC you come across, or steal from their bank accounts, or hijack their cars, or run them down as they chat with friends. The characters are, by and large, as virtuous as can be, but in the course of completing your missions, the collateral damage is enormous. Watch Dogs 2 is a game that has crafted a story and characters that are at odds with the central conceit of the gameplay. This was not a problem with the first game, whose tale of rage-fueled vigilante justice was not opposed by the player’s in-game actions.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t get anything right, of course. As mentioned, the acting is generally great - the character of Josh, a brilliant hacker with Asperger’s, is particularly charming and well-performed. It also carries on the previous game’s commitment to crafting a believable world with hundreds of nuanced, varied, and entertaining interactions between the NPCs that populate the city. I’m going to go ahead and say that Ubisoft’s efforts with the Watch Dogs series are about on-par with Rockstar in terms of creating a believable world filled with interesting characters. Every single NPC has a story. Every single area of the world is filled with incredibly detailed locations. At one point I came across a group of people who were trying and failing to take a photo of themselves with a self-timing camera. I stood in front of them and aimed a selfie at all of us and they stopped what they were doing and started laughing - the woman who was so desperate to have their photo work threw her hands up and grumbled. These people weren’t planted anywhere particular - they were just standing in an innocuous place by the seaside. The moment stood out to me amongst the thousands of other people you see around, but I could’ve put a hundred hours into the game and missed them. Other people will swear at you for taking photos of them, or play up to the camera, but this one particular group lost in this massive city had this one specific reaction, and I’m still not sure where it was something uniquely programmed, or whether it was just a particularly smooth example of the established systems working together in surprising harmony.

The ability to interact with the city’s infrastructure only adds to the feeling of immersion. There’s plenty of joy to be found standing on a street corner during a rain shower and triggering the traffic lights, or causing cars to come to sharp stops or careen off the road. I found myself relying far less on the Watch Dogs ways of escaping danger though - blowing steam vents used to fill me with delight, but I found myself just hiding in alleyways far more often this time. The enemy AI is much more intelligent, no doubt, but the low-rise buildings of San Francisco offer less places to hide from helicopters, who quickly become the bane of your existence, and force you into long getaway chases from one end of the map to the other.

The online aspects of the game are back, and are still entertaining. Drop-in co-op modes are accessible, if a little underwhelming in terms of what they ask of you, and the Bounty Hunter mode that can sometimes trigger automatically if you or another human player has been wanted for long enough will send you fleeing from the law AND trying to outwit other players as they race around trying to blow the shit out of you. It’s an arseload of fun seeing what lengths other players will go to in order to escape - at one point I dove off a bridge after a player, plunging into the water below behind him, and as he slowly swam away I hijacked a fishing trawler and ran him down. The nature of the game’s systems allow for abject chaos, and this is never clearer than when indulging it with other players. However, this too suffers from feeling somewhat less satisfying than that of the previous game, particularly when it comes to the ‘hacking invasion’ mode. As with the car chases, the lack of verticality and relative sparsity of pedestrians mean that there are few places for a person to hide, so in a mode that requires you to blend in with your surroundings, the most effective tactic is often just to put as much space between you and the other player. Standing in groups of people rarely works because there are rarely groups of people to stand with. Finding a spot to crouch and using the cameras to spot the other person rarely works because there often isn’t a spot to crouch that isn’t exposed. Once again, the brighter, happier change of scenery has transformed the game for the worse.

And I think that cuts to the core of the issues with the Watch Dogs 2 - the changes are predominantly tonal, but the issues with the first game weren’t. Ubisoft fucked up because they pulled a bait-and-switch on the public, and because they milked their formula dry and sold it to an exhausted audience, not because the game wasn’t silly enough. Newbisoft’s Watch Dogs 2 is only new in spirit, and the changes they’ve made are, as always, iterative rather than innovative. It’s also one of the most unnecessarily draining games I’ve ever played in terms of the computing power required to run it to any reasonable standard. I had to rebuild my entire computer just to get it to run higher than 40fps. There’s no need for that, especially not for a game that is, to some extent, a glorified Saints Row. It could be a case of some rose-tinted hindsight, but I'd personally recommend the first game over this one, in terms of raw mood and action. It’s not perfect at all, but it’s darker and grittier and I think that kind of tone is better served by the gameplay. However, that’s not to say that this isn’t worth a play. If you’ve never played a Watch Dogs game before, then maybe this is the better place to start? It’s fun...at least for the first dozen hours, before it gets tedious. But then, can’t you say the same for nearly everything Ubisoft has ever released?

7.5 civilians killed out of 10

#ubisoft #watch_dogs 2 #open world #pc #hacker #cyberspace #san francisco #wrench #what the hell is the main character's name?#Marcus?#Retro?#I think so #aiden turner

0 notes