Scimons Random Thought Table

In my youth I was a drug dealer. It wasn’t so bad really, it did wonders for my social life (and skills) and made me a very good living for a young man. See I was more a low level dealer, supplying the goods from my boss who gave me a cut of the profits.

I tried to be moral about it, I never dealt in school, restricting my actions to evenings and weekends but even then I was generally rushed of my feet as I had a serious group of people who couldn’t get enough of the wide range of drugs I was selling. Now if you listen to the media you’d expect my clientèle to be bunch of hoodie wearing youths, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. They were a selection of people from 18 to 80 who would travel, often for miles to partake. It was generally quite social, everyone was very relaxed most of the time, once in a while someone would maybe take too much or lose control but it didn’t happen that often. I have to admit I did also join in, dipping into my own supply on a regular basis with little or no thought on it’s effects on my body or mind.

Of course you realise I’m talking about that extremely addictive debilitating drug Alcohol, which as an 18 year old barman I sold in copious qualities to fine upstanding members of the community. I mention this because yesterday there was a torrent of outrage about the ‘legal high’ Mephadrone which has been linked to the death of two teenagers. Personally I find the whole thing indicative of our cultures utterly screwed up attitude towards Drugs. I really don’t get why we don’t legalise and licence them. Yes, drug addiction is bad and I’d rather people didn’t get addicted, but it’s their choice to do so. Surely it’s better for someone who has a drug habit to buy their drug from a licensed dealer who is under legal restrictions over what and to whom he can sell?

Of course people then jump in and scream ‘Think of the children!‘, I am. Firstly, if a drug is social acceptable (to a point) the desire to take it is lessened. Also if it’s licensed and restricted you can’t sell it to children, well of course you can but if the enforcement of laws on selling to minors was more vigorous there would be less issues. And the point is at some point a child is no longer a child but an adult, at which point they need to be able to make and accept their own mistakes. The more you smother someone and try and protect them from life the more they will try and rebel.

One problem with our current stance on drugs is because of it’s illogic and confusion it is ignored by kids. Trying to demonise everything in sight merely makes us (I have to find myself in the group of adults now I guess) look stupid and makes anything we say on the matter worthless. We need a rational adult debate on the subject of drugs and how to handle them.

So I spent a good chunk of this weekend playing Civilization, please note that’s not Civilization which I firmly expect to spend a good chunk of… well October playing. I say a good chunk of my weekend but really much of the time spent playing would have been otherwise completely unproductive. I.E. I would have been asleep.

This brings up rule one of Civilization, don’t talk about… no wait wrong club… don’t even think about starting later than midday. Not if you want to get to bed at a reasonable time. Now I’d like to point out, for those in the know, that we were playing the Gibson Games Edition with no expansions. I’ve heard other versions play a little faster, but I’m not sure. I’d love to play a few more games to find out.

I love playing Board Games but for some reason they seem to be treated as second class citizens in the gaming fraternity. You know how it is, people will think of themselves as Roleplayers who sneer are Larpers who both sneer at Wargamers who all sneer at CCG’ers who don’t notice because they are trying to build a deck to beat Jund (ooo look my one bit of topical Magic knowledge). And then there are Board Games, the things you do when you’re not doing your main thing.

Actually that’s not fair, I can generally find a bunch of people for a game of Talisman on a Saturday. Though my position as hand dandy rule book can get a bit annoying (on Saturday while playing Civ there was a game of Talisman going on, and rather than employ the skills of literacy the players solved rules questions by shouting them at me… you know who you are). I think it’s getting together for a big game (like Civilization, Twilight Imperium or the World of Warcraft game) that’s hard to do. The thought of sitting around for 4-6 hours playing one board game seems to confuse people.

Personally I love it, I love the table banter and the focus a good long game can have. Thinking about it I think I know why for many people the idea of playing a game for 4 hours (or more) is hellish. Monopoly and Risk, both of these are games that people may well have played when they are young. They are also games with a pretty open ended structure, they can carry on for a very very long time. Add to this the fact that often one person (sometimes two people) will get in a dominant position and everyone else is basically screwed. I think this is mainly because both games are all about losing, in so far as the only way to win is to make everyone else lose. And once you’re losing it’s very hard to make a come back but the sensible player who is winning will consolidate and take there time to ensure they don’t lose to a bad random event. This means you end up playing a long game that’s extremely tedious for everyone but one person who had a great time.

Civ on the other hand is more balanced, even if a player gets a dominant position it won’t last that long and victory doesn’t depend on wiping out your opponents anyway. In fact the players who did best in our game on Saturday didn’t really get involved in conflicts, our Egyptian player spent most of the game just expanding his lands (and avoiding the occasional flood). Similarly I played a game of Risk I enjoyed last week, but that was the God War version and it has a limited number of turns to play in. One of my most recent favourite game is Chaos in the Old World and that has a ‘You all lose’ time limit that really focusses the attention.

I think my point here, to all those people who came up to us on Saturday night saying ‘Are you still playing the same game?’ in tones of incredulity. Yes we were, it was fun, you should give it a try.

Oh that and I may be a little bit tired now.

Note on the title: I meant to mention this, the last time I managed to get a game of Civ was sometime in the mid 90’s. Hence why it’s a blast from the past.

Last night I was playing Dawn of War, specifically the single player campaign in the First version. The one where you play the Blood Raven space marines kicking seven types of crud out of a bunch of Orks (and Ooo it’s just been revealed that there’s some Chaos guys). As I was playing it I got to thinking why I prefer the original Dawn of War games to the newer Dawn of War II. One major reason is that Dawn of War is one game, you can play the single player campaign mode (4 different types of them if you’ve got all the expansions) or the single player versus AI battles or multi-player on-line battles and it’s the same gameplay. OK in the first game you get a cut down tech tree for the first few missions but that’s fine.

In Dawn of War II on the other hand the single player campaign and multi player missions are very different. So if you’ve played through the campaign (with your teeny tiny squads of marines, one dreadnought and a distinct lack of tanks) you’ve learnt absolutely nothing about the multi player version of the game. Which I found a bit annoying. Plus I found the multi player a complete pain to play as unlike most RTS games it’s about keeping people alive as opposed to building huge armies and crushing all before you. Every time I played it I’d find the opponents bulding stuff way faster than me and kicking the crud out of which every units I wasn’t looking at.

One thing I find funny about the whole thing is one the reasons given for not having Tyranids in Dawn of War was that the Engine couldn’t cope with the unit sizes. But then when Dawn of War II came out the numbers of troops you can control dropped like a stone. Where’s my 5 units of marines, each 8 man strong tooled up with heavy weapons?

So for this reason I’ve gone back to playing Dawn of War. This by the way, is after I tried to play Mass Effect again, giving it the benefit of the doubt after the last hellish time I tried to run it on my PC. So I went and managed to find the patches (and that is an epic quest in of itself, go on, give it a try) got them installed, went out and started playing and lo and behold the game crashed.

This is why I’m not buying Mass Effect 2 unless it comes out for the PS3 and probably not even then. Only Dragon Age has stopped me from completely giving up on Bioware and the Return to Ostagar issues are not helping there. Of course at this rate I think I’m just going to wipe the PC, install Ubuntu and just get back into some coding in the evenings instead. Hmm apparently Dawn of War and Civilisation work on Cedega, anyone know about Steam?

Well I’ve got this idea in my head and I thought, unlike the normal fate of my ideas, I’d regurgitate it onto the intertubes to see how it progresses. It’s a idea for some variant rules for that wonderful, if sometimes slightly long, game Talisman. It should work with the 1st/2nd edition and the new 4th edition, I don’t have 3rd any more so can’t remember.

I’ve not tried these rules out yet, if anyone does please pop in a comment how it went. If anyone would like to give them a try again the comment box is just down. In fact any thoughts or other communication is always appreciated. Anyhoo, here it is.

Iron Man Talisman

Setup

Before playing reduce the Talisman deck to one card, if you are using the 4th edition Dungeon expansion remove the Talisman from the Dungeon Treasure Deck.

Play

Play proceeds as normal with the following rules modifications:

• If you die then you are out of the game.
• If you complete a Warlocks quest and someone has already got the Talisman they are Teleported to the Warlocks Cave along with you. You may encounter them as normal. If you beat them in Battle (or Psychic Combat if you are able to initiate it) you may take the Talisman as well as your normal reward for winning.
• The game has a Difficulty Level. The Difficulty Level starts at 0. Whenever a space tells you to draw cards add the Difficulty Level to the number of cards you have to draw.
• If you draw a Talisman from the Adventure deck (or other similar deck such as the Dungeon Deck) it is discarded and the Difficulty Level is increased by one. If a card or Space (other than the Warlocks Cave) instructs you to take a Talisman the Difficulty Level is increased by one.

Please note Talisman is copyright, trademark and all other kinds of stuff Games Workshop. I am in no way trying to infringe on this. Go buy a copy, it’s a great game, and you’ll be helping the economy.

This is not a follow up to my last post, that will be later. This is a quick test to see if the site is still suicidal.

Fingers Crossed.

Rob Donoghue and Ga Hanrahan (great guys one of whom I know the other I just read) have both posted about their ‘Gaming DNA’ the history of them and gaming. Recently I’ve been starting to realise that I’m fast approaching 40, something I don’t really feel, but I’m also fast approaching 38. See for me 2011 will be a bit of a milestone birthday, in Octoder 1981 my mother popped into a local toy shop. She asked for something for a bright kid who needed something a bit different. She left with a copy of Dungeons and Dragons, not Red Box, the one before it.

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Yahtzee on Torchlight. I played the demo and enjoyed it, but not enough to buy the game, and I missed it in the Steam sale when I might have got it. Of course the Steam sale was handily chosen to run during the time I know come to think of as the festive money sink time. Weee, it’s Christmas, I bet you didn’t want that money did you? Yay.

Anyway, that’s an aside, I’ve never been a huge computer gamer. (Stop laughing at the back there). I like playing games and I tend to get very into the odd game for a while. Like I’m currently very into Dragon Age. I was very into Champions Online and will probably be again in a bit but I’ve hit level 40 and I’m suffering from a dearth of people to play with. I’ve also got a game of Baldurs Gate II that I’d to get back to because that’s a laugh. But as times gone on I’ve given up on keeping up with the big new game. Mainly because I’ve not got as much time as I used to. Such is life I suppose, you can either be too skint to afford games or not have any time to play them.

Anyone fancy a game of Chez Geek? Or any of the other boards games in my (not as large as I’d like it to be) collection? Ooo yeah that’s a point, some of you older peeps may just recognise Fantasy Flights latest upcoming game. Yup they are redoing Horus Heresy. But in a much bigger box. Suffice to say… I wants one.

The car park at my office has gone from snow to ice, making it even more fun. Much of England is reacting as normal to the snow by grinding to a halt and blaming someone else. And my fingers have only just started to warm up, thanks mainly to the soup I’m eating. Mmmm soup.

The thing is, we’d best get used to it. Take a look at a map, Glasgow (where I’m currently based) is at the same latitude as Moscow and New Foundland. These are places that are generally known for being a bit chilly in the winter. Nay most of the time. But here in the UK it tends to be damp, damp is a great word to describe our weather. But not, freezing cold with tons of snow, well not normally. And for this we have to thank the Gulf Stream, which runs lots of lovely warm water up the side of the British Isles and keeps us from having to learn how to drive in snow (carefully, calmly and attentively for those thousands of Audi drivers out there). And the thing with the Gulf Stream, like much of the workings of the planet, we’re not completely sure how it works.

Did you know it turned off for 10 days in 2004? I didn’t. And the fun bit is no one is sure why, I don’t know about you but that worries me slightly. The UK is currently doing really well at proving we aren’t set up to cope with long term cold weather. right now the forecast is for things to warm up to a balmy 6-8C real soon now. But what about next year, heck what about next month?

Now when we need to blow the crap out of countries because they’ve not got WMD’s but we think they do, we can find money. When the banks dig a huge hole and then jump into it we can find money to bail them out. Meanwhile the infrastructure of the country is a wreck, and we’re told we’re all going to have to tighten our belts no matter who we vote for this year.

Tighten out belts and put two pairs of socks and a jumper on I think.

Well I’ve been playing Dragon Age : Origins a bit recently. Well as much as I can really, based on the fact it requires access to the TV. Am I the only person who turned off the persistant gore option after one two many conversations between people covered in blood!

I mean surely that would be part of your conversation? But no, your blood drenched ‘heroes’ wander up to people and have a chat and at no point to the people you are talking to react to the thick droplets of blood sprayed all over you. I found that weirder then people finishing an epic battle not covered in blood quite frankly.

Ho hum, back to the coding and stuff.