Today was a far lazier and less productive day than I intended, starting with getting up at 11AM. Partly the full brunt of Melbourne’s heat is to blame, but I was also more than a little wrecked after running the first session of a shiny new D&D campaign yesterday.

There is an argument that it’s probably not smart to be running a roleplaying campaign given the time it takes away from voice over, but the benefits far outweigh the time spent. The biggest is getting to hang with people who are not just great friends, but tremendously creative players who bring a great deal to the table. It also gives me an outlet for playing with narrative that I don’t get anywhere else. And, because I’m running 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, it also scratches the grid-based combat fetish I have. (I continue to be addicted to Hero Academy)

I haven’t run a convention game in four years, but there’s a lot of similarities. While I had some stuff down on paper, the best scenes came out of the moment. I’m so glad I recorded the session too, because that moment drags you along at such a pace that a lot becomes a blur. Another similarity is, in the aftermath, creative and physical exhaustion. I’m finding some differences, too – my game of choice has always been Feng Shui, but I’m finding with 4th Edition D&D and the Eberron setting that it’s MUCH less work to make a game zip – there’s so much in the mechanics or the world details that you can zoom in on and draw real flavour out of. I’ve never run a successful ongoing campaign, but I’m really looking forward to this one, and I’m crossing fingers that it’s going to work out great. I’ll certainly be here until the lights go out.

Consider this a little heads-up that I might be talking more about roleplaying in the near future. Also, if you want to keep track of what’s happening with the campaign, we have an Obsidian Portal site (there’s an RSS feed on the front page too)

I promised a good friend a little while back that I’d explain why Deus Ex: Human Revolution is sitting in the corner, unlikely to ever be played again. Partly inspired by Patrick’s writing about Arkham City, and partly because I think there’s something deeper here, I decided to turn this into a blog post.

Now, if you’re planning on playing through the first Bioshock and/or Deus Ex, there are mild spoilers here. So you may want to turn back.

There are two things that have caused me to give up on games. One is difficulty, and that’s something I’d like to talk about in another post. The other is suspension of disbelief. Or more specifically, when the narrative is tampered with so that I feel my choices about my in-game character’s actions have been betrayed.

Bioshock was without a doubt a fantastic game. The opening sequence was amazing, and the game only got better as more layers of the onion were peeled away regarding life in Rapture. There was an interesting conflict between the warring factions inside the setting, and the environment itself was a beautifully mysterious marvel of man’s work that was now decaying from the heart out, and thoroughly rotten. As an Event Horizon man, I’m sold on that. My interpretation of the main character was a relatively blank slate, but one that was invested heavily in survival. Likely to be some mysteries involved, sure. But your actions are largely directed at Getting The Hell Out.

Not too long after finishing an extremely irritating fetch quest (they’re one of the reasons I don’t play World of Warcraft) you meet Sander Cohen, the genius sociopath artist, who instructs you to assassinate three people on the strength of his say-so. Um…

WTF?

There was no alternate choice – you had to kill those people, or the game wouldn’t progress. But the idea of killing three random people jarred so much with my perception of the main character that it snapped me right out of the game. Now, it turns out that, if I’d progressed further, I would have found out that the game was representing a mind control/coercion device via the fairly standard mechanic of quest goals – you either do what the quest tells you to, or you don’t progress in the game.

It’s an interesting idea, but I found it problematic for two reasons:

1) It’s a standard game mechanic. Which I’m imagining is what made it a compelling choice for the design team to subvert.

2) The game had an explicit moral choice in how you treated the Little Sisters. So making one moral choice explicit, and deciding that the player compulsion was implicit, hidden in a standard game mechanic – bugged me. Possibly because it made me feel dumb as a player.

So that inconsistency in the main character’s actions snapped me so far out of the game that I’ve never gone back. I win… I guess?

Back on Track

But this all started with talking about Deus Ex, so let’s get back to that. There’s a mission where, at the start, your pilot buddy and likely hookup Malik is trapped in your chopper after it’s shot down. For me, the mission came at a time when my inventory didn’t support a big firefight, and she died on my watch. Rather than backpedalling through save games to gear up and ‘win’ the fight, I thought that was an interesting choice for Adam Jensen – to lose the one last genuine human contact that was without an agenda, so I played on.

Not too long after, you end up in the headquarters of a cybernetic chop-and-steal gang you’ve crossed paths with in the past. Your friend Malik’s body is in one of their rooms, pretty clearly about to be harvested for implants. What does Adam Jensen say about this while he’s parlaying with the mob boss?

Not a goddamned fucking thing. He just goes on to the next mission.

And that was the point where I metaphorically threw the game out the window and have never come back. I got me Dead Spaces and Batman games to play, and I’d rather spend my evenings harvesting them for cheevs or going back to the Odyssey that is Red Dead Redemption before setting a single foot back in Deus Ex. The jarring punch to my suspension of disbelief was just too much. Like the fetch quest in Bioshock, that moment threw a harsh light on other things that really bugged me about the game, but going into them here will likely cloud my point.

So there you go. That’s why we can’t have nice things. Thanks for watching, and have an Ocean Marketing cookie (NSFW language, but rich veins of hilarity)