Starship Troopers Miniatures Game and the Perils of Licensing

I have a confession to make: I love Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

Whether its the serious Starship Troopers novelization proselytizing about taking responsibility toward a functioning society, or the tongue-in-cheek mockery of a militaristic dystopian future, both takes on it are equally pleasing to me.

That's why back in the ancient times of the early 2000's I got heavily into the Starship Troopers miniatures game from Mongoose Publishing. It had everything, beautiful bug miniatures based on the cheeseball movie, fantastic rules written by the illustrious Andy Chambers of ex-Games Workshop fame (who's wargaming genius was not being recognized by GW during their foray into a 4th edition of Warhammer 40k), and Starship Troopers fluff written by Mongoose publishing, which is a gaming company that only employs writers who really love the shit out of the stuff they write about. Unfortunately Mongoose has a bit of a "holding onto the license" issue, which I'll get to...

How Deck-builders won me over

Now, I'm not a complex man. Like any hot-blooded American I like red meat, cold beer, and boardgames that involve warriors battling it out for gold and glory. But I also like a little complexity to my warriors, and prefer a boardgame where the characters level up over the course of game. So you'd think games like Talisman would always fit the bill perfectly. In Talisman you travel around the map, battle monsters, pick up gold and magic items, gain Strength and Craft, and eventually make your way to the inner circle through the Valley of Fire. There you try and win the Crown of Command so you can rule the land of Talisman under an Iron Fist for the rest of time. What's not to like?

Now Ramond Cameron is a hobbyist who knows how to adventure. 3-D Talisman! Check Ray's stuff out here.

Batman: OCD Knightmare

There. Just completed 100% on Batman:Arkham Knight. Collected all 243 goddamn Riddler trophies, threw the last of the major criminals into GCPD lockup, and activated the full KNIGHTFALL ending cutscene.

Hopefully now I can try actually enjoying this game.

Let me explain what I mean. The Batman Arkham games are beautiful graphically, and have pretty good plotlines, and (except for the forced Batmobile-tank parts of Arkham Knight) have great combat and exploration mechanics.

They really make you feel like you can play as Batman, but that's only AFTER you've actually completed the game.

You gotta earn it, son.

1SMR: Bad Xmas Movies III

The Christmas movie marathon continues! This is turning out to be the longest holiday weekend ever. Here's some more one-sentence movie reviews: Xmas edition...

Elf - An abandoned child is kicked out of his adoptive sweatshop home and sent to live with his distant biological father when its determined that he can't work as quickly or as efficiently as the oppressed native workforce.
[8 bottles of spaghetti syrup out of 10]

Elvish upbringing grants Weapon Proficiency: Snowball and Resistance to Diabetes.

A Christmas Story - The classic movie that taught children everywhere the dangers of licking cold flagpoles and the value of a reliable firearm.
[9 eyes shot out of 10]

Ralphie was right to be terrified of the all-knowing and all-powerful Mall Santa Claus.

Love Actually - Sheriff Rick Grimes falls in love with his best friend's fiance and Professor Snape wants to cheat on his wife with a younger woman; in this British rom-com that's somehow considered a great date movie.
[4 washed-up rockers out of 10]

We can't save the people of Alexandria, but we can save...our Love.

1SMR: Bad Xmas Movies II

Its the official week of the Magic Baby Solstice, and that means more Xmas movies! Here's some more 1-sentence movie reviews (1SMR) for Xmas movies we watched this week.

Die Hard II: Die Harder - More explosions, meaner bad guys, porcelain guns, snowmobile chases, icicle-stabbings, and actual snow; this Die Hard is far superior over the original Die Hard as a Christmas movie, though no one will admit it because it lacks a Hans Gruber.
[9 Glock 7's (which costs more than you make in a month!) out of 10]

Way more Christmasy than any party at Nakatomi Plaza.

Gremlins - Watch a supernaturally cute creature cause the deaths of dozens of people and destroy an entire town on Christmas, only to safely go back home and not be held accountable in any way.
[7 Barbie RC Car Jumps out of 10]

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds...tee hee hee!

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation - Chevy Chase and Randy Quaid teach us the true meaning of Christmas, which involves kidnapping rich people so you can yell at them just because you failed to properly budget your finances.
[8 full sh*ters out of 10]

Hey, when its full, its full!

One-Sentence Movie Reviews: Bad Xmas movies

Yes I saw Star Wars. No I will not spoil it for you in any way, and not talking about a movie at all is the only way to ensure you don't spoil something.

But then there are other movies that you totally can spoil, because they're pieces of crap. And Christmas movies usually have a special level of crap-titude they can attain, because of the expectation that they always have to end in giant nauseating family get-togethers where everyone loves everyone else, or other such garbage.

Well, Mrs. Chainsword and I have a tradition where we watch a bunch of good Christmas movies on the weekend before and during Christmas, and have a great time getting drunk on spiked apple cider and eggnog while watching Die Hard, Gremlins, Elf, Scrooged, Christmas Story, and Christmas Vacation. However, last night we decided to try out a few other Christmas movies we haven't seen to see if they had what it takes to be added to the list.

Here's the Vorpal Chainsword's "One (run-on) sentence review" of these Christmas movies (all available on Netflix):

A Very Murray Christmas - A (Netflix Original) "Christmas show"-within-a-"Christmas show" where a crotchety Bill Murray laments about the irony of hating Christmas while having to put on a Christmas show, when a bunch of his actor-friends show up to spontaneously and burst into Christmas songs to cheer him up; bask in the glory of writers obviously patting themselves on the back for using the overused premise: "We're pretending to put on a show but we're actually putting on a show! Look at how clever we are!"  
[4 Bah-Humbugs out of 10.]

Writers: "Then we'll get George Clooney to show up, everyone loves George Clooney!"

Christmas with the Kranks - Watch Tim Allen's completely reasonable attempt to skip Christmas one year to save money backfire and cause his overbearing and judgmental neighbors to shame him and terrorize his wife for not participating in their money-grabbing pagan rituals, and eventually end up guilt-tripping him into having a last-minute Christmas party; please note that you're clearly expected to cheer for the witch-hunting neighbors.
[2 Bah-Humbugs out of 10]
 

The true meaning of Christmas is to just acquiesce to everyone else's demands. Ho. Ho. Ho.

Bad Santa - A accurate and enjoyable reality documentary which follows Billy Bob Thorton around during the Holidays.
[10 Bah-Humbugs out of 10]

Definitely added to the Best Christmas Movies list.

TV dramas always waste your time, Movie dramas rarely do

I like stories. I think everyone likes stories. The more stories you've heard, the more rounded and interesting of a person you become when encountering new things. To put it another way, a person that's read Aesop's Fables,  Grimm's Fairy-tales, and Dr. Seuss is going to be more interesting to talk to than a person who's only ever read Bernstein Bears books over and over. (Spoiler alert: All the BB stories are the same --> The cubs made a mess and don't want to clean it up. But they should, because of reasons. End of lesson).

There's no one right way to obtain stories. D&D players like to collectively create them sometimes, which is a practice I wholeheartedly endorse. But as adults, the primary way we get new stories to put in our brain-pans is by watching dramas on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, or Cable (is Cable still a thing?). However, recently I've come to realize that there are far too many drama shows I'm being told to watch, and everybody has a list of favorite shows that they say: "Hey man, you absolutely must watch this show! You'd love it!"

Say Breaking Bad one more time, motherf#$%r. Say it. I dare you.

Video Games: Quest Marker Overload

For some time now I've been feeling like I must be getting old. Its not because of my creaky joints, or lack of athletic ability (that's always been there), or even my curmudgeonly attitude toward kids-on-my-lawn (spoiler: I want them off of it). No, its been because video games just don't hold my attention like they once did. No matter how flashy and excited they seem to be, after just a couple hours I'm just not into it anymore. I've just started Batman Arkham Knight and already can tell I'm going to lose interest before too long. Lose interest? In BATMAN? Not possible, right? Well, rare is the new AAA game that comes out that I actually care enough about to finish. So what is wrong with me?

Wait, why are you VIDEO-calling an unmasked Barbara Gordon all the time while traipsing around the city, Batman? And she calls you "Bruce" regularly in the calls? How do you even still have a secret identity?

Turns out, I've decided I can take a smug look outward and say "Nothing is wrong with me, everything is wrong with the games designed these days!" (my walking cane raised angrily overhead). But its true. Game design these days focuses on two things that didn't exist in the past golden games of yesteryear: Quest Markers and Fast Travel.

Wil Wheaton's new RPG show: Titansgrave

As most of you know, Wil Wheaton is the host of the extremely well-crafted online boardgaming show, Tabletop. On Tabletop he plays boardgames with other famous nerd-types and it gets edited down into a manageable chunk that's conducive to online viewing. Plus they put in graphics and stuff in there in post-production to help explain the rules. Its a good show, especially if you want to learn the rules to a complex boardgame they feature before you play it yourself for the first time.

Today Wil Wheaton released the first episode of his new RPG show on Geek and Sundry, Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana. Now, the title of that campaign drips with RPG adventure, so kudos on that right off the bat. However, I'm nervous about how this show will eventually play out. I've watched a few 'Twitch'-style RPG game session-shows in the past (where everything is recorded and you just watch 2 straight hours of nerds playing D&D), and I feel like they don't present RPGs in the best light. Because, to be honest, watching other people play an RPG usually isn't that fun after a while, unless something really special is going on in that moment in the game, and it makes RPG games look boring (even though they most certainly aren't when you're playing them!) Because RPGs are by their nature very slow events for bystanders. Boardgames are also generally slow events, but the show TableTop is successful because the editors cut out all the slow bits, leaving just the good stuff for us to watch. But can the same be done with an RPG? Can you edit out the boring stuff that happens during an RPG session and yet still be able to impart the storyline completely?

Games I'd like to play

There's a thing about pen-and-paper RPGs -- They take A LOT OF TIME to play. Even a one-shot convention game is going to take 4 hours to complete, and that's if the DM has his shit together. (My one-shots usually take about 6 hours for the party to complete, because I do not.) When you are a teenager this amount of time doesn't really matter, because after school the alternative to gaming is staying at home and talking to your parents or doing chores (or play sportsball, but who wants to do that?) Neither of which are going to be able to compete with playing RPGs with your friends in the fun department. 

Ah, those were the days. All the time in the world.

However as adults we somehow have less time on our hands, even if we valiantly attempt to shirk our other responsibilities as much as humanly possible. So when we get to play RPGs we don't like to have our time wasted, and therefore end up playing the same RPG system over and over. Because why risk learning/teaching/trying some new RPG system you bought as a PDF when its already 7:30pm by the time everyone arrived and you need to be home by 9:30pm?

"What? You've got to go already? But we only just finished rolling stats... yeah, I guess I should get home too..."

Time Travel!

Whoa! I know you aren't going to believe this, but I just traveled in time! That's right, just after my last post on April 25, 2015, I got a call from my buddy Doc who wanted me to come down to Twin Pines Mall and film him testing out his new Time Machine. Of course I agreed and headed on over. But the next thing I knew we were running from Libyan terrorists, had an amazing adventure through time, and ended up two weeks into the future!

Death and Taxes...and D&D

So today I worked through the annual nightmare that most dreaded event of our cushy modern lives, calculating Taxes. Now, for most of the year, I'm a pretty laid back guy. Willing to go with the flow. But on tax day I feel like a crazy-eyed, long-bearded Libertarian survivalist who lives deep in the woods, sitting in his a fortified cabin on a pile of hoarded gold, and ranting about the overbearing government and their jack-booted reptilian tax-collectors.

Some days you just want to go full Swanson.

Last-minute adventure changes! What to do?

To the miniature and terrain-crafting DMs out there, when you are preparing materials for a big convention game you are scheduled to run, do you also tend to only have your best ideas a few days before you have to run it? That's what's happening to me right now. I'm planning on running a Back to the Future-themed rpg at ScanCon in a week and a half, however while working on it this weekend I decided to change the whole thing to something more awesome than I originally had in mind. A grand idea struck me like a bolt of lighting and now everything I've prepared so far feels so lackluster. Unfortunately, that doesn't leave me the time to paint miniatures/build terrain for this new game idea for all the things I want to do.

Damn you Creativity Juice! Why do you only act as Epic Muse at the last minute?!

Wizards (1977) - Review

A while back during some of my semi-bored internet surfing looking for stuff similar to the animated Heavy Metal movie (we all revisit that phase every once and a while), I came across talk about a movie that was 'inspired' and 'is the original' in the line of fantasy post-apocalyptic animated movies. This move was referred to as 'Wizards' by Ralph Bakshi, and a number of anonymous gamers and rpg-folks felt that it was a seminal film of that genre.

Now, I had never seen this movie. And as a person with a high level of self-importance and good amount of know-it-all-ism, I felt a bit of shame at that realization. I decided I needed to rectify that situation in case I'm ever at a party with Frank Mentzer and Joss Whedon and they randomly strike up a conversation about how they both love this mysterious 'fantasy-animation-origin' film I'm hearing about and I need a way to cut myself into their conversation. So I searched for an online version with Netflix and Amazon, but had no luck. Finally I just decided to take a chance and ordered the blu-ray of it, figuring it probably deserves a place next to Heavy Metal and Fire and Ice in my blu-ray collection if its so important.

So, how was it? ...Well, I watched the whole thing, so that's something I guess.

The Packers of Catan

Its happening. Nerdyness is becoming mainstream. There was a time not so long ago when even playing boardgames was considered either childish or geeky. Especially complex boardgames, which were viewed with suspicion by all red-blooded American sports bros. Now we have NFL players admitting to the press that they regularly play games of Settlers of Catan in the locker room. Not only that, but as those players play for the best* NFL team in America, and as true nerds, those Catan games are hyper-competitive.

Go Pack Go!

*Wisconsin man here. YMMV

Podcasting: Questions for Ask the Bastard!

The Vorpal Chainsword will soon be launching a new gaming-related Podcast, which we are currently in the process of generating and editing content for. But as fate would have it, we've just landed an interview for mid-next week with the Dungeon Bastard himself, Mr. Bill Cavalier!



While I will be doing the interview in just a few short days, and I want to ask him a thousand questions of my own, I've decided to spread the love and find out if any fans of the Bastard have any questions they'd like me to ask for them. Since he specializes in answering important D&D-related quandaries, this is a good opportunity to finally get a certified Dungeon Bastard answer to controversial topics, such as which polearm is best for tackling a horde of Vampire-Gibberlings, or whether Blink Dogs should be a standard playable race in D&D. Also: Anything related to Flumphs.

So let's hear 'em! Who's got a question for the Dungeon Bastard?

Nerds in Vegas

Las Vegas. The mere mention of the city will summon half-grins and bro-tacular high-fives from most of your muggle coworkers. Its a name that is synonymous with drinking too many oversized daiquiris and losing all your gold pieces. But there is a more interesting and rewarding Vegas behind the fist-bumps, penny slots, and poorly told lies about meeting up with strippers. A Vegas for the comic book collector, the Renaissance Faire enthusiast, and the D&D player. What I'm talking about is...

Nerd Vegas!

 

AD&D vs. D&D5: Class Prerequisites

Ever since the turn of the century in The Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand, Dungeons and Dragons (starting with 3rd Edition) has dropped the Class Ability Prerequisites that were so prolific in previous editions. They also took away racial restrictions for classes, so now Halflings could be Paladins and Dwarves can be Wizards. This was done all in the name of game re-balancing and a general movement in the industry towards "game balance." Now any shlump with all 6s and 8s could be a Paladin or a Ranger! Isn't that great?!

Tron 2.0 on Steam!

It finally happened! An excellent old-school PC game (a game you've likely never heard of) just got released on Steam and is now playable on all computers. This is one of my favorite PC games of all time, and I group it on my mental PC gaming mantle alongside Baulder's Gate, Thief, and Fallout. It is the only first-person action RPG that actually brings the Grid to life. That game is Tron 2.0.

Dark Dungeons: The Movie

Had movie night last night and watched the D&D-is-Satanic 1980's-Parody movie "Dark Dungeons" with a couple of buds. Its a brought-to-life adaptation of the old Jack Chick anti-RPG pamphlets handed out by concerned Churchgoers back in the 1980s. You know, the ones that promised you eternal damnation in hell if you dared to roll up an elven cleric under the watchful gaze of Jesus (who evidently hates Gamers, but loves Jocks). It was made by the crew who made "The Gamers: Dorkness Rising" via Kickstarter, so you know they take a firmly tongue-in-cheek approach to it.