D&D Character Test

Just a quick post - maybe a longer post will appear later today.

I took a "Dungeons and Dragons Character Test" - essentially asking LOADS of questions about what I'm like, what I'd do in certain situations, etc. It then spat out a D&D race, class, alignment, level and stats as if I were a D&D character. I thought I'd share the results (and test link) with you guys.

My results:

Neutral Good Human Wizard (3rd Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength- 11
Dexterity- 13
Constitution- 10
Intelligence- 15
Wisdom- 13
Charisma- 11
Take the test here

Note that its quite a LONG multiple choice test. And it gives you some detailed results in terms of how close you were to other ones.
I was -21 points for Monk :3

Chime

Today, I bought a game off Steam cheaply. I played it for the last 30 minutes or so, and I figured I'd share my experience with you all.

The game is called Chime, and set me back merely $5 - quite cheap for a game. Cheap enough for you to think its an indie title. A thought which is entirely accurate. However, indie games does not always mean cheap and crap games. In fact, quite a lot of indie games reach levels of awesome that the AAA titles can never aspire to, simply because indie developers are more willing to take risks, and do something different than to make generic shooter #357.

I'm looking at YOU, Bungie.

But I digress. This was not to be a tirade defending indie games, this was to bring some attention to Chime. This game is great.

It is slightly confusing to play at first, because it has quite an odd idea behind it. It is a puzzle music game.

I'll let that sink in for a moment. Not a music action game like Beat Hazard, or a rhythm action game like Beatmania, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, DJ Max, etc. A music puzzler.

The idea behind the game is that you are given a large grid, and blocks to fill it. The block are different shapes and sizes, and your job is to arrange them as neatly and quickly as you can to form quads. A quad being a square that is 3x3 or more, or a rectangle of similar minimum size. As you make more quads, your coverage of the grid is increased, which will allow you to complete the level and move on once the timer runs out.

The interesting part here, is that each level is a song, and the amount of the song that you can actually hear is dependant on how much grid coverage you attain.

After a little bit, the square you place get stamped into the grid, and you can place new ones over the top - so if you mess up you can make the coverage work better. When the time runs out, 50% coverage will unlock a new level, while 100% coverage will give you a bonus of some kind. I've not obtained it in my short attempt yet, so I cannot say what happens. Mainly because I don't know.

It's like a demeted, awesome, musical game of tetris, and I love it. That is all.

My Back Hurts.

Well, it did, anyway.

Last Friday was my girlfriend's birthday, and so we spent the weekend together doing random-but-already-somewhat-planned-by-her-mother stuff. Friday consisted of work, followed by giving her presents, then getting takeaway pasta from a nearby place. Luckily they were good on the gluten-free thing, so weren't killing me via foodiness.

She was given a new car stereo for her birthday - with a huge (read scary) subwoofer in the boot. Hilariously enough, the subwoofer unclips and can be removed if we want to use the boot for, you know, holding things.

I gave her a trinket box with a dragon on top, and a large dragon figure. I forgot to take a photo of it, but that wouldn't do it justice anyway. Its a large red dragon, wrapped around a castle tower, wings spread out. The entire figure is taller than my head - it surprised me when it came out of its box!

On Saturday morning, we went and had a massage. This is why my back hurt - it was my first time having a massage, and the dude probably figured out quite quickly what my occupation is, considering the amount of time he spent doing ouchy related things to my back and neck. Eventually I caved in and got the guy to put less pressure on me - as good as it would have done, it was simply hurting too much.

The massage did wonders for my fingers though, which I've annihilated with years of gaming.

After that, we spent some time gaming, then went out to a French restaurant for dinner. It was alright.

Sunday was a lazy day, spent mostly on videogames, and in the pool, though we did spend some time beginning the cosplay outfits. Now I have cut material for my cape. Kinda scary really, now that its started. We also went to the Starlight Cinema that evening, to watch Tomorrow When the War Began. The film was average (admittedly not as horrible as I expected the book to movie conversion to be), though the cinema people megafailed us.

Mainly due to the fact that, somehow, they had managed to have the focus of the projector completely wrong. The ads were crystal clear, but the movie was blurry as all hell - it was almost like I'd taken my glasses off for the duration of the film, without the comfort of actually not wearing my glasses! Annoying!

Anyways, Happy Birthday Sarah!

Drunken Dwarves, Gritty Gunslingers, and Nondetectable Ninja

What do the three creatures in the title of this post have in common, apart from alliteration?

OK, they're all awesome. What ELSE do they have in common?

They're all in the advanced "add-on"s to Pathfinder, that's what. Today, the good people at Paizo released the free "playtest" version of the "Ultimate Combat" guide, which includes a bunch of new archetypes for existing character classes, as well as three new classes. I will talk briefly about this in a moment.

Lets start with the drunken dwarves though - they appear all the time in fantasy. Seriously, if you don't know about dwarves, then you probably shouldn't be reading this post, since it will reach levels of geek that you won't be able to handle, and I'd rather not have you injure yourself on my account.

Anyway, I've never played anything from the add-ons of Pathfinder - instead focusing on the core rules. This is due to being new to the whole tabletop thing, and I'd rather get used to it before trying to add crazy stuff into it.

I kind of regret this decision, because of the utterly insane and hilarious stuff that is in the add-ons. Including the aforementioned drunks.
In the Advanced Player's Guide, there is an archetype of the Monk class, called the "Drunken Master". If you are imagining the Jackie Chan film, mayhaps the drunken master attacks of that guy from Dead or Alive, you'd be right.

Once my current PF campaign is over, and Andrew relieves me of the GMing duties, I will be playing a Dwarven Drunken Master.
At level 19, the Drunken Master has the ability to breathe fire. On the condition that they have recently drunk some booze. A task which is likely to not be difficult for a dwarf.
And said fire deals ridiculous amounts of damage. 20d6, to be exact. For the layman here, take a regular dice, the one you use to play Monopoly. That is a d6 (named so for the fact that it is a die, and has 6 sides). Roll that 20 times. That is how many hit points of damage I have just dealt, by breathing fire.

Fire breathing dwarf - GO!

The new classes in the "Ultimate Combat" guide are the Gunslinger, Ninja and Samurai. Admittedly, I have not had much of an opportunity to read these properly, due to, you know, having a job, but I have had a brief glance (couldn't resist), and they seem hilarious.

Gunslingers have guns. In a fantasy world, this is rare and expensive. And not particularly reliable. The gun can, actually, if you fail badly enough EXPLODE on you. This does take multiple failures, but it can happen.
The gunslinger's main power comes through a mechanic called "Grit" - they earn grit daily, and expend it to perform special attacks. They also regenerate grit by being crazy buggers.

If a gunslinger decides to slide down a banister, shooting at enemies while facing certain death, and more importantly SUCCEEDS, they regain grit points which allow them to do more crazy things. So I imagine the gunslinger to be a fantasy based version of Dante, out of Devil May Cry.

As for ninjas, well, they're ninjas. What can I say? They share the ki pool mechanic of the Monk... and that's about all I've read. I had no time to look at the Samurai, but it could be interesting.

I suddenly want to play much more Pathfinder. Maybe I should kidnap Mark so that we can play...

PC resurgence?

I noticed something odd about this year.

Most of the games that I know about and really want to buy this year, are games that I want for the PC, and would never consider going for on a console.

This is quite strange - the last time I had many a PC game to look forward too is beyond my memory. Most likely it was in the dark ages before I had a console that still had games being developed for it!

Let's start with the most obvious one - Diablo 3 comes out this year. While there have been rumours of a console release (I cannot recall off the top of my head if they were confirmed or not), I was horrified. Diablo was released on console once. I played it for about 10 minutes, and trying to control it was like stabbing myself in the brain with a wiimote. Even though the closest thing to a wiimote in video game usage at the time was the Power Glove.
Even if the game is released on console, I'll be taking it on the PC thanks - a mouse just works so much better for this kind of game.

On a similar level as far as control scheme goes is Dragon Age 2. The first one had console releases, which I refused to even look at. It'd be like trying to play Baldur's Gate on a console (and I mean the original, top down RPGs, as opposed to the hack n slash fests that were the Dark Alliance games). Try to control, in a tactical manner, 4 characters in real time. It's not happening with that dual-shock, thats for sure!

And then there are the shooters. Some people find using a console much easier for shooting games. Left stick moves, right stick aims, trigger shoots. I think these people are insane - using WASD and mouse just feels more intuitive for an aiming mechanism (that is, until someone hands me a kinect and an FPS that works with it).

Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Duke Nukem Forever (assuming that Gearbox aren't rickrolling us by giving us a release date for DNF) and Bulletstorm are all games that fall into this category. AKA shooters that I am buying this year. For the PC.

In fact, the only game that I can think of right this moment that I would be buying for a console is Marvel vs Capcom 3. This would be a direct result of fighting games being utterly horrible on the PC, as well as controller and arcade sticks just working better for that style of game.

All of a sudden I'm glad I upgraded my PC...

PS: Just remembered another console game - Final Fantasy XIII-2. It had to be mentioned, because I needs MOAR FINAL FANTASY!

You can bang the drum, you can bang the drum...

Apart from the title of this blog being a reference to an awesome song by Hadouken!, it explains in a sentence the best part of a party I attended on Friday night.

First of all, I feel the need to point out that I fully expected party to be boring for me, due to it being the 21st birthday party of my girlfriend's best friend's sister. A person I have met a total of twice (including the aforementioned party). In formal clothing. In a golf club. With a total of 6 people in the room that I know. Only 2 of which I know much better than "you look familiar, I've met you haven't I?". That 2 being my girlfriend (obviously) and her mother.

We head to the party, and get bombarded with people serving random finger foods, none of which I could eat due to gluten-content. I had been told that a gluten-free meal had been sorted out for me for when dinner rolled around. My amazing optimism led me to believe that said meal would consist of chicken - of which I dislike intensely. Or even hate. Yes I do not like chicken. Yes I'm strange. I've heard it all before, don't bother telling me that there's something wrong with me.

So dinner rolls around, and surprise surprise, the gluten free meal was chicken covered in some kind of, apparently gluten-free spicy sauce.
Did I mention that I can't handle really hot foods?
Luckily this wasn't in the territory of "too hot", pretty much on the level of pepperoni I prefer on my pizza.

The kicker being that the alternate meal was an awesome looking steak - the gluten in that was likely the sauce. Annoying.

At any rate, once dinner (and poorly timed speeches and things were done - poorly timed because they interrupted dinner to do them), the "interactive entertainment" was brought out.

This was in the form of a small, seemingly African performing troupe appearing, with drums. Lots of drums. As in, a drum for each person at the party. This then turned into the performers playing drums, the crowd playing along with specific drum beats, some members of the crown being dragged into the group to do random tribal dancing, and then everyone being conga-lined out the the balcony to watch a guy play with fire.

Drums and fire, could this get any better? I think not!

The fire guy was amazing, he had a stick thing which was on fire at one end, which he twirled around his head and threw around and things. And then he lit his hand on fire (purposely) with this stick, and used said hand-fire to light the other end of the stick - which he then continued to twirl and tribal-dance with.

And as if it didn't look dangerous enough in itself, his tribal dress involved him wearing what can only be described as small fern-leaves. He was essentially wearing a tree, and playing with fire. Without burning himself, or anyone else. While people watched and bashed drums rhythmically.

This has got to be a highlight of my feeble existence.

Once this was over, it became a typical party, a DJ appeared and proceeded to play the latest "club hits", which were simply house remixes of the crap you hear on the radio. Including a remix of what can only be described as the WORST SONG EVER, with the most meaningless lyrics this side of Kesha...

I'm sorry for linking to that song by the way. Though I am not responsible if you are reduced to a gibbering heap on the floor by the horrendousness which is that song.

So when the party became "generic horrendous music" time, I only did what any sane person would do to survive the onslaught - drink. Lots.

Unfortunately, the mixture of drinks didn't agree with me, and I spent an hour or so later that night removing said drinks from my system.

On the whole though, drums and fire can make anything good.

Cosplay

This weekend, at some point, my girlfriend and I are going to plan how we're going to make our cosplay outfits for SMASH and Supanova - both being geek conventions that are held in Sydney (and in the case of Supanova, other cities too).

We have decided upon going as Suzaku and Euphemia from Code Geass. If you haven't seen Code Geass, stop reading, go watch all 50 or so episodes, and come back. I'm not going to make spoilers, its just that you're missing some awesome shit. Go on, get! Y'all come back when yer done, ye hear?

Now that you've spent the better part of three days marathoning anime (and what about that ending? Holy crap!), you know the extent of the outfit that is planned. Kinda.

I am going to be the second season version of Suzaku - which means I get to have an awesome cape. It also means I am doomed in terms of making an outfit.

Let's get one thing straight - I am artistically challenged. This extends to all form of creativity - drawing, painting, making the musics, and sewing. Well, my only real attempts at sewing were to alter an old grey trenchcoat I found to look vaguely like Anderson from Hellsing, and to put some finishing touches on a Maes Hughes outfit that my friend's mother did the bulk of the work on (for which I am eternally grateful). Also, don't read the text on that Hughes link if you haven't watched much of Full Metal Alchemist - spoilers abound.

The point is, this is the first time where I'll be hopefully doing the bulk of my own outfit. This means that it will likely look horrendous - due to a lack of skill and experience in this regard. I really hope it turns out, because we have a largish Code Geass group planned. Though, to be fair, 5 of the outfits are being made by one person. A single person who is actually talented at these things. Though I still feel this is cheating since I'm quite likely to fail, and the rest of the group will look so much better.

Hooray for optimism!