Terminally Incoherent

KOTOR 2 uses an interesting plot device to explain why your battle scarred, world weary Jedi character has such meager stats and force powers at the beginning of the game. In the original there was no such excuse because you simply started as a oridinary, human being and only gained force powers after going through the training on Dantoine.

KOTOR 2 on the other hand insists that you were a Jedi once, and that you are actually one of the last of the living Jedi knights in the galaxy. So why the poor starting characteristics? It turns out that you were exiled from the order, and the Jedi Council somehow severed your connection to the force. Ha! Clever stuff. Unfortunately while it does make some sense on the surface, and does make for a good story (why did they do it and how?) I don’t totally buy this explanation. It’s not very consistent with what we know about the Star Wars universe. If the Jedi Council had this power all along and could elect to neuter a Jedi knight at a whim by severing him from the force why was it done to your character (a virtual nobody), and not to the big bad Sith Lords that threatened the galaxy in the past? Someone is probably going to say they were to powerful to be dealt with that way or that the Sith training includes techniques that help one protect himself from such an attack, and I guess it is an explanation of sorts. Still it has not been addressed in the game yet. I will suspend my judgment on this until I finish the game but I’m not entirely happy with the forceful force removal idea.

On the other hand, I kinda like the idea of a failed, broken Jedi character. If I remember correctly the D6 Star Wars rulebook we used way back when (long log ago, in a galaxy far far away) actually included something similar as a playable character archetype. I think it was dubbed as the “Fallen Jedi”. The fallen bit was not referring to falling to the Dark Side though. In fact it was about failing more about falling. A fallen Jedi was simply a washed out failure and a nobody. The rulebook had this great sketch of a unshaved, unkempt inebriated drunkard slouching on a bar stool, with a drink in one hand, gambling cards in the other, the lightsaber hilt sticking out of some odd pocket of his jacket.

The idea was simple - you were taught to be a Jedi but you were either never really good at it, or your personal opinions clashed with the Jedi code - or perhaps you somehow dishonored yourself. Either way, you have no affiliation with the Jedi Council anymore and your life went down the drain. Now you spend most of your time getting drunk trying to drown out the past. And if you are not drinking you hire yourself out to do odd jobs here and there in order to afford the booze. Even if you were semi competent at using force in the past, these days you are rarely sober enough to actually actually be able to concentrate.

Not so long ago, Shamus had an interesting discussion about the difficulties of running a Star Wars campaign when someone in the party insist on playing a Jedi. I think the washed out Jedi is the ideal archetype to stick into a more traditional party of smugglers and bounty hunters. He would have similar motivations and aspirations as the rest of his company - money, booze and loot. His social and political influence would be diminished since most of NPC’s would be able to tell he has no backing of the Council and essentially is no more than some hired gun with a toy lightsaber. Additional bonus is that this character could actually have a good excuse to dabble in the dark side powers.

But let me get back to KOTOR. The game did take a turn for the better after leaving the initial area, and the Telos Orbital Station section was actually fun and interesting. I liked how the game allowed you to either work for the corrupt Czherka Corporation, or against it by help out the Ichtorian planet restoration efforts. There were some interesting missions there, and I liked how they were all clustered in the relatively small area of the base. Since the same locales were reused, or previously blocked areas became available it made the base seem more dynamic and alive. It was much better than running in the endless corridors of the mining station fighting hordes nameless droids at the begining.

That said, the story I still makes me cringe at times. For example, nearly every time you board some kind of a ship or shuttle you either get shot down or locked out and end up trapped in the new area. When you start the game your ship is sealed off in a differed section of the station, and you need to run around for hours before you can unlock it. Then you reach the Telos Orbital Station, and your ship gets confiscated, and then stolen. So you board a shuttle to the planet surface, which gets shot down and you end up trapped on the semi-hospitable planet. Somehow you manage to find another shuttle on the surface, only to get shot down again, and ending up trapped in the polar region of the planet. WTF?

It seems repetitive, to the point that I’m now actually expecting it to happen every time I travel from one area to another. Furthermore the game seems to alternate between seemingly open ended game play mode and interludes of very linear progress and story exposition. Which I guess is ok. I’m once again at a point in the game where I can once again choose my own quests. I also did so many good deeds that my character’s portrait is actually glowing now.

The dialogs seem to be a bit glitchy in this game. Sometimes the game will randomly skip a spoken line and you notice it because they usually change the camera angle after a full stop. When a line is skipped you can still see the change in scenery, and it just quickly cuts away to the next scene/line. It doesn’t happen very often, but it is noticeable. Also, the timing is sometimes off when you talk with aliens that speak in their own language. It’s almost like that subtitle gag in which you hear a character speak in a foreign language for a full minute, only to see this lengthy tirade translated to a single word in the subtitles. This actually sometimes happen here - the subtitle says something like “I will think about this…” but the spoken part in the alien language seems to be going on and on and on. It’s a little bit silly.

As I progress through the game, combat starts to become more strategic and the behaviors/stances you set for the party members you are not currently controlling actually do matter. For example, on the surface of Telos there are big open areas with enemies scattered all over the place. I left all my characters in the aggressive stance only to watch them scatter in all directions and aggro just about every single enemy on the map. After that fiasco I tend to keep the old lady as a force support character, and whoever else I have in the party as ranged. This usually keeps them following my main character who is in aggressive stance and prevents them from doing to much aggro all around. When needed I can switch to these characters and give them direct commands. I just wish I could have more than 3 people traveling with me at a time - if for nothing else just to exploit all the different stances at the same time.

As characters go, there are few new faces at this point in the game. There is a Zabrak mechanic and an Echani fighter. While I don’t care either way for the former, the later seems interesting. While she was trained to shield her mind against the force, she seems to be genuinely interested in it. She also has interesting concepts on combat as a form of expression. If you ask her to train you she will insist that you both strip down to your underoos. Yes, this is a character that I can grow to like.

Despite all the complaining above, I’m actually enjoying this game. The story is slowly unfolding and the missions are interesting and not very repetitive, even if all but the most important NPC’s look the same using the 20-30 same models colorized in different ways. So far I haven’t been tempted to put it down which is a good sign.

Some time ago I came up with this “to ambitious for your own good” prop that could be used in essentially any setting. It could be an ancient artifact, weird piece of mysterious alien technology, magical arcana, mystical object and etc. Essentially it’s a toy you can safely lock away along with all the other game master/dungeon master/storyteller notes that you will never, ever get to use in any game session, or story.

Here is the idea - imagine a Rubik’s Cube like puzzle with a nasty twist. You can twist it, rotate it, and change the positon of the faces in some way. To solve it you must align them in some sort of a pattern. It’s important to make the pattern clear, and easy to grasp - such as for example the original Rubik’s cube goal - to make each face a solid color. Solving the puzzle will unlock something. Maybe there is a hidden message inside? Perhaps it triggers some bound spell or activates the artifact in some way. Or maybe the process of solving it teachers you the correct thinking you will need in order to understand some other, more powerful artifact.

Here is the twist: the puzzle is unsolvable. The “faces” are not well defined, and there is just no possible way to arrange the moving pieces in a way that that would produce the desired pattern. A smart character with a good grasp of math or science can figure this out mathematically - either on paper, or perhaps build a computer simulation. The pattern just can’t be produced. There is just no way to do it.

And yet, there is evidence that it was solved in the past. No notes on how it was achieved survived, but someone before did unlock the great mystery it hides, and lived to tell about it. You can find vague, cryptic hints, but no complete solution.

Why is that? Why can’t anyone solve it? Because the object you see is not the puzzle itself. It is just a 3 dimensional projection (ie. a “shadow”) of a 4 dimensional object. If you need a visual, it would be something like this:

This is actually a picture of a real sculpture at Penn State designed by a math professor to illustrate representation of 4d object in 3d. If you are unfamiliar with this, let me explain.

Consider a map of the world. It is a representation of the 3 dimensional globe, in 2 dimensions. Each location on earth can be found on the map, but their relative position in space is change, and altered. Now imagine a randomly generated state of Rubik’s Cube projected onto paper this way. The rules for rotating the faces are still the same, so when you move one piece, the whole picture shifts around in a weird way. In this representation, solving the puzzle is still possible? If you “unroll” the cube into the familiar cross like shape made out of squares, then yes. You can identify the faces and figure out how to manipulate it. But what if the cube is unrolled in a different way - for example, starting at a corner, and slicing it into triangular shapes? Can you still solve it then without knowing that in the 4D shape, a face is really a square, and not a triangle?

This is exactly what we are dealing with with our puzzle. It can’t be solved unless you recognize that it is merely a projection of the 4d object, reconstruct the object, and re-evaluate the goal. Of course we tend to think in 3 dimensions, and can’t really imagine 4d objects. But, we could mathematically figure out what would be the shape of a face, or segment, or component of our puzzle and what would be it’s relation to other pieces. Furthermore we can directly map it onto our “shadow”.

So there it is - that’s the concept. It’s ridiculously complex to even explain, few people will get it, and there is just no way to role-play solving the puzzle in a meaningful way. The only thing that the players could solve is the dimensionality issue, but I’m not sure how would introduce the problem in a way that would hint at it without giving it away. So I gave up on introducing it in a game. But I still think it is an interesting idea. If you want to use it, it’s under CC, Attribution, Non-Comercial, Share Alike, 3.0.

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

Anyone around here is into RPG? How about tabletop battle games? Collectible Card Games? If you are, check out the Nearby Gamers site. If you are not, you can still check it out for yet another cool use of the Google Maps API.

The site doesn’t look like much yet, but it combines two Web 2.0-ish concepts: maps and tagging. You simply create a profile, specify your location, and then type out all the games you play as a comma separated list. This list is used as a set of tags that can be searched. One feature I really like is tag redirection. For example, if you type in “Warhammer RPG”, “Warhammer Role Playing” or “WFRP” your tag will automatically be associated with the correct concept “Warhammer RPG”. I was quite impressed, especially since the engine was able to dissasociate it from concepts such as “Warhammer WFB” or “Warhammer 40k”. This prevents one of the biggest problem of tagging systems - fracturing of the tag-space caused by small differences in spelling.

I think this is a really cool way of finding gaming groups nearby. Of course we really need more people to sign up before it becomes actually useful. For example, I could not find any users in my immediate area. I had to hit the “zoom out” button 3 or 4 times to actually see any other map markers (closest were Jersey City and NYC).

If you ever played D&D (or any RPG game for that matter) and/or you are a fan of LOTR movies, go check out the DM of the Rings comic at the Twenty Sided blog. It is absolutely hilarious!

The author retells the story of LOTR as a D&D Campaign. As you would expect from a accurate depiction of a RPG play you see the player controlled hobbits complaining about their shitty stats, making Monty Python jokes, and discussing finer points of upgrading to PHP5 while in character…

The comic starts here with the first episode. You can use the links to navigate from there.

So far my favorite episode must be the Gates of Moria riddle. I swear, this has happened to me so many times it is not even funny! Every time the GM come up with The Riddle™ or The Impassable Obstacle™ we would usually come up with The Crazy Plan™ to circumvent it.

Hey, who said you can’t build a bridge over the impassable bottomless chasm? Especially if one of the characters on the team is a Dwarf Engineer…

If you don’t find this even mildly amusing, then you have never played real RPG games.

img © gamespy

Munchkins FTW!