/var/log/orava

We just came back from the first concert of Värttinä’s 25th anniversary Finnish tour, at a concert hall in Matinkylä. It was excellent; I’ve seen them live a few times before but this was the best so far. Great use of visual imagery and choreography to add to the music, without either becoming a distraction. It was also a lot of fun, with high energy. If I have a complaint, it’s that it would have been even better at a rock club – having to sit down all the time was a bit of a downer, they played a lot of fast numbers.

As always, they combined Finnish folk music (with Russian and Hungarian tweaks) to great effect. To anyone who thinks folk music is boring: go see these guys.

In general it’s been pretty quiet over here. Lots of small things happening, but nothing too report-worthy. Tempest the cat got some sort of urinary infection and I’ve been feeding him antibiotics for some days now; I’m not sure he understands why he’s suddenly getting private meals, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s also getting over the infection, it seems, though I’ll have go have him checked again after a few weeks. As always, Felina was expensive but well worth the cost.

First off, as everyone probably has heard by now, Gary Gygax died on Tuesday. What can I say… he pretty much created the roleplaying hobby as we know it. My earliest roleplaying was with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, back in 1980 or so. At that time, personal computers (let alone computer games) were virtually unknown – to us here in Finland, at least – so there was not much to compete for that mental space. Hell, it was pretty hard to even get pen & paper rpgs, I usually had to resort to photocopying tattered books borrowed from other people. I still remember how cool the whole concept seemed. Sure, our early games were simplistic hack & slash by current standards and the ruleset was horrible… but so what? We had tons of fun. I still rememer some meatgrinder adventures like Tomb of Horrors fondly. A lot of nostalgia, there.

So… even though the sorts of rpgs I nowadays like tend to diverge in many ways from what Gary created, and even though I think it’s way past time to get rid of some of the worst artifacts of his game (kill “alignment” already, for fuck’s sake, and kick out “levels” and “hit points” while you’re at it)… I can’t ignore the fact that D&D is ultimately responsible for most facets of my gaming hobby. Thanks, Gary. You did good.

A guy called Jari was our first GM and introduced us to the hobby. He was a pretty decent GM (for the times, at least), and was especially good with Paranoia. I still start grinning when I remember stuff like Das Bot: Nearly a Dozen Meters Beneath the Sea and Me and My Shadow, Mark 4. At some point I became interested in GMing, and it’s been what I’ve been doing ever since; first with AD&D, then with Rolemaster. I was pretty crappy as a GM… I’ve gotten better (mostly), and the players usually seemed to have fun, but I wasn’t all that good in retrospect. I guess very few people are naturally good GMs, it’s a long learning experience.

When computer games entered the equation I mostly forgot about pen & paper rpgs for a long, long time. Sure, I still had my AD&D and RM books, but didn’t do anything with them. Sometime much later, the LARP craze started, and I spend a long while with that, helping run a 10-year Vampire chronicle and playing in tons of games. It was great, I still have a fondness for LARPs though it’s been a long time since I was in one. During that time I tried starting up tabletop rpgs again once or twice, but it went nowhere due to various factors. I guess it was only after the worst LARP phase ended that I got seriously interested in tabletop rpg again.

Nowadays I’m very much into it, once again. I read and post a lot on rpg.net – it’s by far my favorite online community at the moment, due to excellent moderation and lots of cool & interesting people. I buy a lot of rpgs, partly with a collector mentality, since I simply like to read the things, see what people are doing with new rules ideas and settings. I run an Exalted game which is going pretty well, and play in a few other games myself. Things go round in circles. Will I still be interested in rpgs 10 years from now? Who knows. Probably, though. In some form.

Some may be wondering what that “Pathfinder” picture is doing up there. It’s actually a segue to get from “the creator of D&D” to “the current state of the art” (yeah, I know D&D 4e is coming soon, let’s not nitpick here). Pathfinder is Paizo’s new… magazine/adventure module thingy, and it’s really, really good. They are publishing adventure campaigns in six installments (one per month), as a linked series of adventures. The first one (Rise of the Runelords) has just finished, and the new sequence (Curse of the Crimson Throne) will ship the first installment this month. The writing and plotting is very good (for D&D, at least), the production values are excellent, and most importantly: Paizo really gets it with this “Internet” thing. They offer subscriptions, where you are shipped the “magazine” each month and you also get a “free” PDF of the issue downloadable online the moment it ships. They have a ton of web support material, their web store works great, and in general they combine traditional print and new PDF+web technologies in a very competent way. Oh, and I probably need to mention the production values again, just for emphasis; the art rocks and the whole thing is just slick.

I was so impressed with Pathfinder that I subscribed to it, even though I don’t play D&D and don’t intend to. Why? Partly because I simply like reading the stuff, partly because I like to support companies that are doing “smart” things (in my opinion, at least), and partly because I can maybe use some of this stuff with some other (better!) ruleset – Burning Wheel, Reign, whatever.

So, though the basic game is still the same “kill monsters, get loot and exp” at the core, it has come a long way. The plots are a lot more complex, the societies depicted are at least vaguely realistic instead of the bad ol’ “30x30 room with 3 red dragons” crap. D&D has evolved, and is evolving; probably because the core players have gotten both older and more sophisticated.

The pen&paper rpg hobby is a tiny niche one. The model railroad hobby is huge by comparison, and it’s still a niche hobby. Also, the field is extremely fragmented, and blessed/cursed by tons of excellent games, all competing for a very limited amount of customer cash. From a customer viewpoint it’s great, of course, but for companies… not so much.

What are the implications of this? First, don’t get into this business and expect to make lots of money. Ain’t gonna happen. You can make a living and reasonable profit if you’re good, but it’s hard going and you’re going against some extremely talented people. Second, companies and gaming will have to evolve – the traditional book publishing model, with huge minimum print runs etc, is extremely problematic for a hobby like this. Better use of new technologies, more hybrid use of pen&paper + computers, more PDF and print-on-demand publishing… there are options, and the smart guys out there are exploring them. Unlike some doom-mongers, I don’t believe the hobby is dying – far from it. I do believe that it is slowly changing, though, and that this change is a good thing.

We’ve come a long way from A Keep on the Borderlands. And that’s a wonderful thing.

Aperture Science
we do what we must
because we can

Since the Orange Box was released, everyone and their pet gerbil has been singing praise of Portal, a small puzzle game included with the set. It’s been getting so much praise, actually, that is has somewhat eclipsed the “main offering” of that box, Half-Life 2 Episode 2. Even Zero Punctuation had nothing bad to say about it – in fact, he actually praised the game and said he could find nothing to criticise about it. As anyone following that review series knows… that generally doesn’t happen. Ever.

Well, about a week ago I got the Orange Box, and… you know what? Everyone and their pet gerbil was right. Portal is an absolutely brilliant game. Janka grabbed it first, and even though she generally avoids “first person” games, she really liked this and played it through to the finish in two evenings of play. The same happened to me, after that. I’ve heard claims that this is playable in “about 3 hours”, but I’d take that with some grains of salt; I have quite a lot of experience with FPS games and it took me about 6 hours to finish this. While the beginning is easy, the difficulty ramps up quite a bit near the end and some of the puzzles had me scratching my head for quite a while. Managed to finish the game without resorting to external hints, though.

So what’s it about? You, as a young woman in an orange jumpsuit, wake up in a sterile lab environment. A computer voice guides you through an increasingly complex set of puzzles, aided by “portals” – local bi-directional wormhole thingies. It’s a first-person 3d physics puzzle game, with a neat twist from the “portals”. It’s a huge amount of fun. It’s also very polished, in true Valve fashion, and it’s obvious that a ton of playtesting went into this thing. It also (in Valve fashion) sports an interesting and slightly creepy backstory, and has oodles of pitch-black humor that has you laughing out loud at times. Oh, and the end credit sequence is the best ewah!

That’s the thing with Valve. Many other companies might have thrown this together quickly, since it’s just a small “side game”. Not Valve, they put just as much polish and effort into this as they put into Half-Life. And it shows. Also, the backstory makes the game a bit more than “just a puzzle game”, it makes it into the beginning of something potentially a lot more complex. Valve has now announced that they are working on Portal 2, a “big game” follow-up (this has been somewhat of a surprise hit for them). With any other company I’d be a bit apprehensive, but not that much here – Valve are responsible for some of the best computer gaming on the planet so far, they have my confidence.

To quote Yahtzee from ZP: “Portal’s great, and if you don’t think so you’re stupid.”

But there’s no sense crying over every mistake
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake
And the science gets done and you make a neat gun
For the people who are still alive