Idle Thumbs 258: Change the Name to Game

[Chris]

  On 4/17/2016 at 3:03 AM, feelthedarkness said:

Tales can totally be fun, but I think you NEED to prep regular game players with that idea that it's a silly narrative generator, and skills don't positively affect outcome. I think on our first play (with a bunch of experience board game pals) I had like two boating skills, seafaring, and nautical navigation. i had some boat and sailing encounters and either they skills WEREN'T on the list, but stuff like bread making was, or they didn't do anything useful. I found it frustrating.

Yeah I was very clear about this up front and I think everyone had appropriate expectations.

[Gormongous]

  On 4/17/2016 at 3:03 AM, feelthedarkness said:

Tales can totally be fun, but I think you NEED to prep regular game players with that idea that it's a silly narrative generator, and skills don't positively affect outcome. I think on our first play (with a bunch of experience board game pals) I had like two boating skills, seafaring, and nautical navigation. i had some boat and sailing encounters and either they skills WEREN'T on the list, but stuff like bread making was, or they didn't do anything useful. I found it frustrating. 

 

Yeah, the two times I've played it, my non-gaming friends loved it because there was nothing for them to master, and it drove my gaming friends absolutely batty because there was nothing for them to master. One of the more hardcore of the latter spent two hours afterward on my couch, brainstorming ideas for how to fix the destiny/story endgame, which I also found to be the bigger weakness of the game (you're making a bet (with yourself?) about which of two (nebulous?) groupings of events you will overcome(?) in what proportions). A few of his ideas resembled some of Cbirdsong's document, so I think it's just a common impulse of many people, fixing parts of Tales of Arabian Nights.

[Chris]

  On 4/17/2016 at 7:11 AM, Gormongous said:

Yeah, the two times I've played it, my non-gaming friends loved it because there was nothing for them to master, and it drove my gaming friends absolutely batty because there was nothing for them to master. One of the more hardcore of the latter spent two hours afterward on my couch, brainstorming ideas for how to fix the destiny/story endgame, which I also found to be the bigger weakness of the game (you're making a bet (with yourself?) about which of two (nebulous?) groupings of events you will overcome(?) in what proportions). A few of his ideas resembled some of Cbirdsong's document, so I think it's just a common impulse of many people, fixing parts of Tales of Arabian Nights.

I've always just told people "You're technically supposed to pick your victory conditions but let's just say everyone needs 10 destiny and 10 story and call it a day."

[voxn]

I'm not sure if the lamentation over Dark Souls skills was rhetorical, but in case it wasn't:

 

skill at video games is almost entirely system mastery, and learning systems is about observation + experimentation -- things children naturally gravitate towards, but get increasingly dispensed with as you get older. If you want a really clear example of this, check out

of DS1. She plays like a child would; constantly experimenting, trying to understand everything, and absolutely crushes the game despite playing blind / barely able to control her character in early episodes. It's a great showcase of age having much less impact on your video game skill then mentality does.

[WickedCestus]

That's a really interesting video series. Really makes me think about the way I play games. 

[your name here]

It's been a while since we played, but our group usually plays with a short list of minor rules changes.

 

The only one I can recall right now is that the base game says that you can't win if you get gender swapped. We just ignore that rule, it doesn't make a whole lot of flavour sense, and it seems to make the experience more fun than having it be a really difficult to get rid of status that you have to worry about.

 

One of the things I really like about the game is how well the choice of source material matches the structure of the game. It's a game where a bunch of disjointed things happen, and they chose a story where a bunch of disjointed things happen, so it fits.

 

Until Dawn is another game that makes me feel this way. When David Cage made a game where any character could die and the story would keep going, it didn't really make any sense narratively. Like, they introduce this character, she encounters the protagonist, and then goes investigating and gets killed without contributing anything to the plot and nobody ever talks about her again. Until Dawn takes that same structure and applies it to a archetype that fits it, where any combination of characters dying adds up to a coherent story.

[Chris]

  On 4/18/2016 at 3:46 AM, voxn said:

I'm not sure if the lamentation over Dark Souls skills was rhetorical, but in case it wasn't:

 

skill at video games is almost entirely system mastery, and learning systems is about observation + experimentation -- things children naturally gravitate towards, but get increasingly dispensed with as you get older. If you want a really clear example of this, check out

of DS1. She plays like a child would; constantly experimenting, trying to understand everything, and absolutely crushes the game despite playing blind / barely able to control her character in early episodes. It's a great showcase of age having much less impact on your video game skill then mentality does.

I understand this for sure, and I think we sort of alluded to it, but the other part of being a child that helps enable this mentality is a surfeit of time. Nick and I streamed Dark Souls III yesterday, mainly with him playing, and after dedicating five-plus hours straight, he improved a huge amount. But realistically, most of the time I either don't have that much time to spare, or have to prioritize my free time alongside other non-video-game activities, and so there's just no way I'm going to be able to apply that kind of resolutely patient mentality.

[chummer]

fav video game music/rap crossover:

 

[Latrine]

  On 4/18/2016 at 10:49 PM, Chris said:

I understand this for sure, and I think we sort of alluded to it, but the other part of being a child that helps enable this mentality is a surfeit of time. Nick and I streamed Dark Souls III yesterday, mainly with him playing, and after dedicating five-plus hours straight, he improved a huge amount. But realistically, most of the time I either don't have that much time to spare, or have to prioritize my free time alongside other non-video-game activities, and so there's just no way I'm going to be able to apply that kind of resolutely patient mentality.

 

People who play Souls games are not just people who have the free time of a child and you don't need to play multiple hours straight to improve. In fact, you don't even need to really improve much to beat the Souls games, for example see 

. The Dark Souls games may take a while to play through, but they don't take ludicrously more time than other big single player RPGs.

 

I can understand that everyone chooses to spend their time differently, but I think there's only a small correlation between the amount of free time you have and whether you choose to fill it with a leisure activity that asks for a patient mindset. 

 

Also I'd say that once you get good at the Souls games, the skills are pretty transferable to new ones in the series. It's like learning a new game genre like FPS or RTS. Once you get over the initial learning curve you make steady progress like most other games. For me, making that initial investment to learn a new system has been worth it over just enjoying the convenience of the familiar.

[jennegatron]

omg jeff green's dark souls streams are the best things in the universe. a true master class in professional dark souls execution.

[Chris]

  On 4/19/2016 at 5:49 AM, Latrine said:

People who play Souls games are not just people who have the free time of a child and you don't need to play multiple hours straight to improve. In fact, you don't even need to really improve much to beat the Souls games, for example see 

. The Dark Souls games may take a while to play through, but they don't take ludicrously more time than other big single player RPGs.

 

I can understand that everyone chooses to spend their time differently, but I think there's only a small correlation between the amount of free time you have and whether you choose to fill it with a leisure activity that asks for a patient mindset. 

 

Also I'd say that once you get good at the Souls games, the skills are pretty transferable to new ones in the series. It's like learning a new game genre like FPS or RTS. Once you get over the initial learning curve you make steady progress like most other games. For me, making that initial investment to learn a new system has been worth it over just enjoying the convenience of the familiar.

It may be true that some people don't have to play multiple hours straight to improve, but I don't think I'm one of those people. Also, if they take as or more time than a big single-player RPG, they're basically already out for me when it comes to completion. There's just no other form of entertainment in my life I devote that amount of time to and I can't really figure out any way to allocate my time that would make that possible. I'm not making a value judgment, it's just a matter of pure practicality. I wish I had time to get good at games like this but I don't actually think it's possible given my realities. Those links you posted unfortunately make the time commitment seem even less feasible to me.

[thenexus6]

Is there video of Jake and Sean VR experience?

[Chris]

  On 4/19/2016 at 7:02 AM, thenexus6 said:

Is there video of Jake and Sean VR experience?

Yep:

[Salacious Snake]

I was going to gush about other stuff that Greg Costikyan has done, since he was brought up in the cast as a designer of Tales of the Arabian Nights, but it doesn't appear that he was involved in that game at all.

But man, he has done a lot of cool shit. His tabletop roleplaying designs were staples of my adolescence.

  

And for such a heavy hitter, he's like super ridiculously humble if you talk to him about this stuff.

Relatedly, seeing Warren Spector's name on Toon is another good "Oh shit, it's that guy" thing.

[Chris]

  On 4/19/2016 at 3:36 PM, Salacious Snake said:

I was going to gush about other stuff that Greg Costikyan has done, since he was brought up in the cast as a designer of Tales of the Arabian Nights, but it doesn't appear that he was involved in that game at all.

Weird! He's definitely credited as having worked as an editor on the first edition of the game in the credits in the rulebook.

[Salacious Snake]

You know, I think I may have just been looking at information from a recent edition.

Edit: yup, you're not crazy!

[Reyturner]

The Kay Plays series mentioned on the show (about the first time Souls player making he way through the game blind) got a good write up on Kotaku by Keza MacDonald. 

[Dewar]

My wife has started watching that series to try and understand why I like Dark Souls so much. It's been very entertaining to jump in and watch episodes here and there.

[root]

You guys mentioned the possibility of doing an all-singing, all-dancing binge stream of the completed works of Wizard Jams past and pending, and then immediately dismissed the idea.  Instead of doing that, maybe in the lead-up to wizard jam 2016 you might consider doing streams of games from previous wizard jams? (wizards jam??)

[Nick Breckon]

  On 4/22/2016 at 8:22 PM, root said:

You guys mentioned the possibility of doing an all-singing, all-dancing binge stream of the completed works of Wizard Jams past and pending, and then immediately dismissed the idea.  Instead of doing that, maybe in the lead-up to wizard jam 2016 you might consider doing streams of games from previous wizard jams? (wizards jam??)

 

We are actually planning on it! Sometime after the end of Wizard Jam 16. When we nail down a date/time we'll update this thread, and also announce it on the podcast.