Welcome to...

Right. So, in a fit of boredom I decided to start up a blog, and rather than try to dig up my old livejournal filled with old friends and memories, I thought I'd start fresh with this wonderfully free service. The title says it all, this blog will be filled with nothing special. I'm thinking of focusing this blog into talking about games, both of the tabletop and video variety, with occasional posts about movies, books, music, or other kinds of entertainment. Since I'm living the college student lifestyle, I lack the funds to regularly buy new games, go to the theater, etc. I'm not going to let that get in the way of posting though, so at least quite a few of my posts will be about older games. Not necessarily the classics (how many review of Final Fantasy VII do you really need anyway), but ones that I like (or hated so much I'll always remember them).

While I'm not locking myself into anything, I can imagine that I'll be posting around once a week. Upon occasion it'll happen more often than that, and really, when that's the case you should feel blessed.

This is my promise to the internet: I will avoid all forms of personal information, drama, and politics in my posts. Please note that this won't keep me from analysing whatever I'm playing (or viewing or whatnot) ad nauseum, just that my views won't taint this blog.

Ok then, should we get started? I thought that since I'll be gaming tonight, I'd talk about D&D fourth edition. (Warning, the website I just linked to plays irritating music). The game came out, what, two, three weeks ago? It seems that in a lot of gaming circles people are torn. One group feels that it is World of Warcraft played with dice, an insulting game that pigeonholes the players into defined rolls, then arbitrarily gives them powers whose entire existance promotes gamism (If you don't know what this means, count your lucky stars. In the world of pen and paper rpgs, there are some people who believe that games, and to a lesser extent players, fit into a model of either gamism, narrativism, or simulationism. This is called GNS theory, which isn't bad as a rule of thumb, but some people take it as a law of nature.) at its worst. The other group looks at it as an accessible game that will help get new players involved. I'm not going to say that the pro-fourth side isn't as fanatic, but I haven't ran into any that feel as extreme about it as the anti-fourth people.

As a disclaimer, I haven't played much D&D before. I've done some of the games (Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, that kinda thing), and a few one shot 3.5 edition games, but I'm probably not qualified to make any definitive statements about the game one way or another (yeah, like that'll stop me). I will say this, it's very refreshing having a chance to pick up every book for a game system. It can be pretty daunting to go into a game shop and see shelf after shelf of D&d 3.5 books staring at you. I mean, where do you start? The player's handbook does give some suggestions about which role each class has in the party (the four roles being striker, controller, defender, and leader). I've seen some fights break out on gaming forums about how much of a pain in the ass having to fill all these roles are, and if your party doesn't have at least one of each you may as well just stop. Really this just seems like arguing for the sake of argument. The roles seem to be a way to let players know what each of the classes are good at. To be honest, my group didn't notice that part of the player's handbook until we'd already started. As it turns out we had three strikers and a defender. Whoops.

Anyway, I just got called by my GM to come over for gaming, so I'll have a second parter to this up by next week.

-Andy