Saints Row

Life is short
so love the one you got
'cause you might get run over
or you might get

Shot

By me, mostly, playing Saints Row: The Third, where you will find my impressions on Tap-Repeatedly.

http://tap-repeatedly.com/2012/01/21/saints-row-the-third-no-longer-by-proxy/

I'd like to write a longer article at some point dealing just in particular with my feelings on how it handles male versus female characters, but there's still some things I need to see. In particular, there's a mission where the main character flirts with a woman (while he's disguised as another dude, the joke being that it's out of character for the original dude to do so). I wonder if I still do this if I'm playing as a woman, but I haven't gotten that far yet. Of course, I'm no stranger to flirting with women in games. But maybe, as a female, I'll disguise as a different character? Or maybe this is a situation where it's clearly written for the male default and just awkward with a woman? I need to play more of the game.

On Gettin Ladies... in Games

Critical Distance is running a "blogs of the round table" challenge for people who pontificate about games, and I thought I'd jump in, because it seems like good times. The topic this month is "Being Other." The idea is to discuss moments that a game made you feel like someone you are not.

You can view the other blogs here:

http://www.critical-distance.com/2012/01/16/bort-january-12-roundup/

At first when I saw the prompt, I thought, well, this doesn't really work for me. I'm a straight, white woman. When I have the opportunity in a game to create a woman, I do (though I don't always create a straight one). Most other games cast me as a straight, white man. This is rarely a profoundly embodied experience.

Except, well, okay. I kind of act differently when I'm roleplaying a straight man. I really should force myself to analyse this behavior.

If sexuality isn't part of the question, or, if there's no choice in the matter, then it's not really relevant. But if there's an opportunity for a romance in a game, and I'm playing as a man (white or otherwise), I have a tendency to play as the biggest possible sleazeball. I flirt constantly, with everyone. Can I sleep with every woman? Awesome. Do I just have to pick one? Well, okay, but she'd better put out. I am that jerk who is thinking about sex with girls while they are talking. I pick any dialog choice that I hope will lead me in to a relationship.

I guess this pattern behavior started with the Leisure Suit Larry series, which, I've always liked. The point of those games is generally to have as much sex as possible (though usually it only ends up being the one time, after a series of comical mishaps). It may also have something to do with something I've written about before: JRPGs that often stuck my male avatar with a milquetoast love interest I didn't much care for. Or maybe it's just really fun to roleplay as the suave, sophisticated James Bond guy who gets all the ladies. Maybe it's fun to imagine about that guy.

Or maybe I flirt for a nicer reason. If a game has more than one choice for a female love interest, that means the game has more than one woman in it. And the women are bound to have somewhat different personalities. It's an opportunity to see and talk to female characters, and see how they're written and portrayed. A little romance, maybe a little skin, is a nice bonus on top of that.

This is profoundly different from how I act and believe in real life. I wouldn't want to be manipulated in that way or treated like a number on a score card. But in a lot of video games, I would like to "score as many chicks" as possible. I don't know if this gives me any real insight at all in to how a straight man thinks. I do know that it's kind of perversely fun, though.

I've heard I'm not alone, and there are other women that do this when playing as a straight guy. So who else is with me? 

I have been told that "The Witcher" is probably the game for me in this regard. So I will play it soon and write some kind of trip report. Hopefully with sexy results.

...But I really am a straight woman, honest.

The World of D&D is Changing Again

Everyone's talking about it! Dungeons and Dragons made the New York Times today. They'll be making another edition.

I haven't written about tabletop gaming in a while, but I have mentioned in the past that... despite the contentious divide, I like Fourth Edition. I think it did a lot of things right.

I'd love to talk about this in the actual WotC group, but it's (unsurprisingly) having some technical issues. So, from the perspective of someone who has been running D&D4 home campaigns since, basically, it was introduced, here's what I like about D&D4 and here's where I find it lacking.

Stuff I Like!

• Tactical Combat. Mages and Fighter-types who generally level up together and are on the same keel together and can stand toe-to-toe together at all levels. Everyone being able to participate in most every situation.
• Streamlined monster creation. It's easy to modify the monsters. Useful because I want to run different kinds of encounters and creatures.
• Streamlined skills list. There's not much chance you'll pick a "bad" skill you'll never use, which was a big problem in 3.5. Plus many types of characters didn't have the skill points to get around.
• Nerfed multi-classing. This was stupid-broken in 3.5, and you had to take multiple classes just to get a basic character worth using. If one person was doing it, everyone at the table had to do it. Some people say "they like the options," but I'd rather have the options in-play as opposed to staring at six different books trying to optimize for a prestige class before play even begins.

Now, here's the stuff I don't really like. Oops! It turned out to be a long list.

• Streamlined skills list may be a little too streamlined. My current campaign is a nautical one with a boat, and pirates! I've always wanted to run a campaign like this, and based on yesterday's players vs pirates ship battle, it was a pretty good idea. But I've run in to a problem: no skill for sailing! I've had to settle for Nature, Perception, Athletics checks because I didn't think to house-rule in a sailing skill. I may still end up doing this later. At any rate, skills for Handle Animal, Sailing, and other professional skills need to return to the game in some capacity, because the ones I'm using don't feel right to me. And sometimes you need to know if, for example, your ship crashes in to the pirate ship, or if you manage to turn it about.
• While we're at it, more support for non-combat stuff in general. In my previous campaign, my players wanted to train a baby hippogriff. This is not actually the kind of thing that would be an uncommon occurance in a D&D game, but unsurprisingly, there's no rules for this kind of thing. I ended up having to poach from 3.5 to find any information on how someone would do this. I still have all my 3.5 books, but there's no reason this kind of flavor couldn't be in 4e.
• Skill Challenges. The 4e book would suggest using a Skill Challenge to do basically... anything that isn't combat, such as the aforementioned hippogriff training. "Run it as a skill challenge" is, I am sure, what the advice for training the 'griff would be. But skill challenges are... sort of wiggly. I ran two of them yesterday: one for keeping the boat steady during a magically-created storm, and one for researching the activities of a cult the group found a symbol for. They were fine. I think everyone had a good time. But since the group is currently level 3, I have two options for how to write a skill challenge: either write it at the top of the old sub-tier, where challenges are based on a group between levels 1-3, and thus really easy for a level 3 group, or, run the DCs at level 4-6, where the challenges are hard, and give XP appropriately. I chose the latter. Perhaps predictably, the group did not fail. After the (very early) skill challenge errata that happened for the original DMG, it's near-impossible for a group to fail a skill challenge. The DCs are too easy. Prior to the errata, it was nearly impossible to succeed, instead. These were never playtested, or at least, were playtested too little and not rigorously. Incidentally, even if skill challenges are a designed part of the game-as-written, it's sort of annoying that I always have to write them myself. The only other option is to search through years of D&D on-line magazines and other things to find the "correct" one, at which point I might discover it's at the wrong level for my group (sorry, you can't encounter a storm at sea until you are level 8 or 9).
• Level tiers. Sorry, I do like to start at the beginning, so I typically run in the Heroic Tier. The idea that everything magically jumps in to a new difficulty at level 11 is a little strange to me. There's no reason the progression needs these big leaps all at the same place like that.
• Points-of-Light is a pretty milquetoast and non-committal setting. I see that they're trying to just make the setting as accessible as possible, so people can get right in to the game, but the flavor of PoL is kind of weak. In my old campaign, I resolved this by... redoing a lot of it. I changed the gods to my own pantheon with more individual personal flavor, eliminated a few class/race opportunities, added some very basic politics, and never used "The Shadowfell." In my current campaign I'm running PoL basically as written. I still think the default gods and demons are bland, and I'm always looking for ways I can spice them up and make them more than just "good vs evil." I get that some people want that. But most D&D players are adults, and are not really interested in Saturday Morning Cartoon type villainy where evil is evil just because. It's more fun to write bad guys with some motivation, not just "they are evil because Shadowfell." Yes, it's more fun to write interesting villains even if my players are just going to chop them up. Yes, there's also a place - a big place - for stuff with no personality to just be chopped up. But you need both, I feel.
• Lots of weird and unfamiliar races and classes. I dunno; it feels like some of these were just added to sell splats. I get Tiefling and Dragonborn and think they're both pretty cool starting races. We have a Deva in our current group, which works out okay, except we're just roleplaying that he's a very mystical human instead (with a cool body tattoo. I picture him like one of the magic users in Fable II). The main problem with introducing a lot of brand-new races is a problem of lore. When I started my other 4th ed campaign, I had accounted for the possibility of gnomes and half-orcs coming in because I knew they would show up in a later book (PHB2 as it turns out). I hadn't accounted for the possibility of Goliaths, because...what? This was not a thing.
• Bizarre design philosophy in the published adventures. This is a long bullet point. I will discuss it later.

I think there's stuff I wouldn't change, that other, older gamers would say to "change back," like the discrepancy between power levels of different classes depending on level. 

I also don't like the idea of a stronger push for everything to be digital. I never really grabbed on to the idea of playing D&D on-line, and any campaign I played in that was that way didn't last for very long. I think it's more fun with people around a table, having a good time exploring a fantasy world together while socializing and having snacks. There's already a ton of games I can play on-line if I want the "sitting at home at my computer" experience and that is not why I play D&D.

I'm going to be watching these changes eagerly. I honestly hope to be involved in the playtests, because I have an eager group who I'm sure would enjoy breaking in to a new game. I guess we'll see how the updates come out over time and see how D&D will change from there. Whatever happens, 4th edition will still work fine for my campaign, but I think everyone house-rules it a little here and there.

Katawa Shoujo

Since I enjoyed "don't take it personally babe" last year, I thought I'd give another visual novel a try: Four Leaf Studio's Katawa Shoujo.

Here is my mini-review!

http://tap-repeatedly.com/2012/01/06/impressions-katawa-shoujo/

I Oughtta Get Angry

Yesterday a thing happened on Twitter. Vox Media is a new game news web site in development. They started their media blitz by talking about how they were all "handsome" and were then forced to answer the question "are there any women on your staff?"

So, well, no: this is a thing started by dudes who presumably all know each other and as these things sort of tend to go they probably hadn't really considered that a lack of diversity (race, gender, etc), would be a "thing." Turns out it was a thing, so they started asking on Facebook "hey, who are the best women who write about games?"

Related! Here's a list of some of the best game articles of 2011, as picked by Critical Distance and its readership. Look! Some women!

Worth commenting on: The bottom section, where women are talking about the culture of gaming, and how they often feel under-represented, has the majority of the female writers. Probably the easiest way to get noticed that you are a woman who writes about games is to write about how much this can suck. I think it's an important conversation to have, but I'm not entirely sure that this is fair, because women write cool shit about games all the time. Just this week I thought this was interesting and also this. Maybe women have a different style of writing, and when this same writing is being vetted by male editors it becomes more invisible. Or maybe:

Yeah, actually: that.

Also, there's this extra cool thing about being a woman where your appearance matters than if you're a man, where you'll get insulted and called "fat" on the internet by men (and other women) a lot more, and where it matters a lot more what you're wearing. As a bonus, if you're really a man but just pretend to be a woman, you can find some real success if you pretend you are, like, super-hot.

The Vox editors took the thread down after I guess they realized that making this a popularity vote ie "Shepard's Hair Color" wasn't necessarily the right thing to do, and they should have either accepted applications or just scouted for more writers themselves. Anyway, that's what institutionalized sexism looks like. Women already should've been considered (while we're at it, more diverse people in general). I think part of the problem here is, men tend to want to work with people that make them comfortable, and that generally means other men, that they already know, rather than also inviting someone not in their circle. If they reach outside of the circle merely to be inclusive, it rings of tokenism and is still hollow. If it's a popularity contest, it is hollow.

I oughtta get angry. But honestly, I hate being angry. I want to be positive, and write about games I like. So I'm not really angry. Just tired that these conversations need to keep happening, over and over again.