Tag Archives: Blaugust

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On Avatars

This might be kind of obvious because my progress on these ran to a screeching halt, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out what to write for Ashgar, who is the 4th member of the “adventuring group”.

Ashgar is me, in a lot of senses, so figuring out what to write feels like I’m trying to decide what my own character traits are, what faults I’m okay with a fictional version of myself having, and bragging about the things I’m good at. Introspection is hard, and also it runs into how private I am about my own life.

That said, I do still want to get this project advanced a bit, so I’ll be working on character profiles for my other characters. I’ll get to myself eventually, and hopefully that will also let me address some spots where I have personality type gaps. Fiction doesn’t have to perfectly mirror reality, after all.

Character Bios

On Kori

This one was one of the wild cards. This is the first one where the character design was done by someone else, as I was trying to find a character to fill a “mostly dragon, size large” role in the party.

Kori is another one who is not based on a previous RPG character of mine directly, but is very related to one. My sorcerer-turned-dragon (it’s a long story) from a previous D&D Campaign is her patron and also probably her dad. Neither of these is public knowledge in-setting.

The third member of the Order of the Silver Scale, Kori is the largest and most-imposing of the party members. She’s posing as a Dragonborn (she’s a dragon) and a Sorcerer (she’s a warlock, mostly). An extremely gifted ice mage, she mostly fights with things made from her own breath (daggers, etc) and a sword that seems to be made from non-melting ice. She’s also handy with improvised tools.

As for her personality, she has a good sense of humor; her dragon-like nature means that Tizak treats her with great respect. She is fond of straight-forward solutions to problems, and believes that dragons are better than everyone else.

It’s probably this belief that explains why she’s stuck walking around with an adventuring party. Her patron has sealed away her true form, and encouraged her to “learn more about the world”. Perhaps if she figures out that the “lesser races” aren’t, then she’ll be able to take to the sky with her real wings.

Character Bios

On Tariel

This is why you shouldn’t tell me that a character I’m asking you to draw is “too boring” or tempt me to explore the capabilities of Heroforge.

Tariel is not based on any existing character I have or have plans to play, and more grew out of the need to have something resembling a physical character in an otherwise all-caster party. He competed for this role with a kobold barbarian that may or may not exist in the future.

He is another member of the Order of the Silver Scale, and he’s a “Kitsune” according to his own words. Just because no other known kitsune have scales, four arms, spine ridges, or a dragon tail have not gotten in the way of this claim. I’m pretty sure he’s an Eastern-style dragon, but it’s a little unclear how he ended up in a setting where no one else has even heard of those.

Maybe it’s this.

Tariel is the Serious member of the party, which makes him a frequent target for practical jokes from Tizak. He fights using his staff (which can shrink/expand) and martial arts; it certainly adds a bit to hand-to-hand combat when you have more hands. He does prefer to avoid fights, and frequently ends up paired with Tizak for any situations needing a moderately delicate touch.

Tariel is with the group primarily to find out more about himself, and to do whatever good he can along the way. This also works for Tizak, who always wants to know why this particular individual seems very dragon-like and yet not at all like most dragons. This is in contrast to one of the other party members…

Character Bios

On Tizak

While it might have made sense to start with Ashgar, it turns out that’s basically describing an idealized version of myself and that’s hard. So here, have a Kobold.

Tizak is a Dragonscaled Kobold, servant/envoy of the blue dragon Zydroxa, although that’s not exactly a well-known piece of information. As he’s my character in a currently-running Pathfinder game, what he gets up to in his original setting is yet to be fully determined. Deeds so far include helping to found a settlement and working very hard to improve the opinion of kobolds and dragonkin among the other races.

In my setting, he’s the leader of an adventuring party called the Order of the Silver Scale. It is in this capacity that he’s gathered up a few other potentially notable individuals (one of whom might be a bear) and really, is still working on that whole “opinion of kobolds” thing. It’s a little pretentious that his party is named indirectly after a well-known dragon, but when the kobold is the one with the third-strongest claim to dragonkind, it fits pretty well. The “summoner” part of his abilities is also de-emphasized a bit here.

Images courtesy of Ammo

Ultimately Tizak is the go-getter of the group, the first to jump into danger. He’s not averse to making plans, but does not always wait to consider consequences before starting on a course of action. He’s also an actor and a musician, and enjoys exercising these skills to make money and also demonstrate that kobolds are good for more than just making traps.

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On Blaugust 2021

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The last post I made on this blog was for Blaugust in 2019, but my 2020 wasn’t exactly the best either mentally or physically. I know I’m in good company there.

Regardless, I’m basically going to be ignoring the blaugust prompts, and using this as an excuse to do some writing for my stable of massively underdeveloped characters. I plan to get Monday/Wednesday/Friday posts out for these, so that can be something to look forward to. In time, I would like to get back to using this as an expansion of thoughts from the podcast. But for now, writing for writing’s sake will have to do.

Uncategorized

On Weapon Variety

Warframe has a very large number of weapons. There are currently over 100 primary weapons, almost as many secondaries, and more melee weapons than I care to count. While it’s true that many of these are variations of each other (there are 4 versions of the basic Braton assault rifle for example) there’s still a relatively large number of unique weapons. Here are a few primaries that I like:

Vectis


The most standard weapon in this list, the Vectis is one of the first sniper rifles that you can get in the game. It only has one round so you have to like reloading, but does good damage with great critical stats and is capable of killing things from when you get it through some of the hardest content in the game. There is a somewhat difficult to get prime variant that does somewhat more damage and loads two rounds, but the normal one is still an amazing choice if what you want to do is kill enemies before they can even see you.

Supra


The Supra is a hand-held plasma minigun, and is my most-used weapon overall. In sharp contrast to the Vectis, this one’s for pointing at a group of enemies that you want to go away. A significant amount of travel time and spread make this unsuitable for anything longer than mid-range, but for anything in the same room this can clean up amazingly. This also has a mod that can make it give you energy, cause an AOE explosion, and boost your max energy slightly.

Quanta


There are a few cases of weapons that make it incredibly obvious that Digital Extremes worked on the Unreal Tournament series before making Dark Sector and Warframe. The Drakgoon bears a more than superficial similarity to the UT flak cannon (without the secondary fire, unfortunately). The Angstrum (which is a secondary weapon somehow) has a similar charge mechanic as the UT rocket launcher. Along these lines, the Quanta is a re-implementation of the shock rifle. Primary fire is a perfectly accurate continuous beam; secondary fire shoots floating cubes that explode when touched by enemies. If you shoot a cube before it blows up naturally, it does additional damage. This union of great AOE weapon and great single-target weapon is useful for just about anything.

Others


This is just scratching the surface. There are shotguns that shoot exploding shells. There’s a giant cannon that you’re going to probably blow yourself up with more often than the enemy. There’s an energy bow that shoots arrows that explode into a giant cloud that freezes and then blows up your enemies. There are several highly-effective normal bows. I’m not sure where this statement was going.

The giant variety of weapons on offer here is one of my favorite parts about the game. The variety in Warframes and their abilities is a close second; the combination ensures that many different playstyles are possible. If you tried Warframe forever ago, now might be a reasonable time to give it another shot.

P.S. You have one week to finish the FFV Four Job Fiesta. Get to it!

Meta

On Blaugust Reborn

Greetings! It is now the official start of the month of August, and this year Blaugust is back!

This space has been pretty unused for quite some time, but I’m hoping Blaugust helps me get back to regular posting a bit. Back when I was able to write posts during lunch at work, I was able to keep to a pretty consistent 3/week schedule, so I think for the month of August we’re going to try going back to that. This past year+ has been a little crazy for me personally, and I’m very gradually getting back into the swing of things. In the meantime, I’m still playing games and you can hear me on a weekly basis on Aggrochat.

Gaming, Tabletop

On Fires, Part 3

Blaugust Post #31

Burning Wheel has probably the best skill system I’ve read as it relates to skill use and advancement. The basic premise is that you don’t get any better by doing things that are easy. Therefore, you’re encouraged to try things that might be somewhat difficult for your character, because that’s the only way you get better. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but Burning Wheel rules are long and wordy.

To go along with this, the list of skills goes on for pages. There are the expected skills for weapons and fighting (sword, bow, armor training), an assortment of professional skills (blacksmith, haggling, dye manufacture), sorcery and sorcery-related skills (enchanting, summoning), social skills (intimidate, persuasion, falsehood), and some oddball ones like Strategy Games. There are also open-ended -wise skills that act as knowledge skills. Examples include things like Great Masters-wise, Dirty Secrets-wise, and Poacher-wise, in addition to things you might expect like Forest-wise, Noble-wise, and Tools-wise. (You can make appropriate ones up for your character and take them as non-lifepath skills.)

At low skill levels, you can advance with a few challenging skill tests and a few routine ones, but eventually the routine ones stop counting. If you never push yourself to do difficult tasks with a skill that you’re already somewhat good at, it will never get better. Burning Wheel lacks XP entirely, so this skill progression is how you get better. There are a few alternatives to trying things that you’re going to fail at, however. You can have someone else who is good at a skill teach you, which counts toward the number of skill tests you need to advance.

I’ll probably never actually play in this system, but I have talked to Tamrielo (who is my usual GM) about it. He likes the skill system and the fact that violence is rarely the right answer, but not so much all of the incredibly crunchy bits (that I haven’t actually talked about here). It’s a fun system to build characters in though, so I suspect I might just use it as inspiration for some future characters.

Blaugust Complete

Doing this for the second year was interesting. As mentioned, posting every day is a bit much for me, but this did help me get back into the swing of things. I think I’m in better shape to maintain the 3/week schedule I was in for most of last year. I think I fell into the trap Bel outlined last week, but he’s right, the “epic welcome back post” just doesn’t happen. It’s far more productive to just start writing.

Gaming

On Heavy Rainfall

Blaugust Post #22

This was supposed to be a post months ago, but it got written on paper and never typed up. I’ve since lost it.

Risk of rain is a mostly platformer with rogue-like elements. It’s (so far) my favorite example of such, although it’s quickly becoming a crowded genre (Spleunky, Rogue Legacy, and the recent Warlocks Vs. Shadows all qualify). I find Risk of Rain interesting largely because of the risk/reward mechanism of its time mechanic.

RoR

Drizzle

The primary goal of Risk of Rain is to get to the final level (which is always the UES Contact Light), beat the final boss, and leave the planet that you crashed on. This is accomplished by playing through a minimum of 5 other levels, finding and activating the teleporter in each level, and surviving through the wave of enemies that assault you when you do this. Enemies also spawn naturally over time, at a rate determined by what level you’re on, and how long you’ve been playing the current game. The largest difference in difficulty settings is how quickly this process occurs.

There are 12 characters, 11 of which must be unlocked, and 10 different stages, where which ones you visit are determined semi-randomly. Each of the first 4 levels will be one of 2 options, level 5 is always the Ancient Temple. After that, you can either start revisiting levels or move on to the end of the game. Along the way you will pick up a wide variety of items, mostly randomly determined. There are a few places to influence what items you get, as well as a really big way that you can eventually unlock.

RoR Golems

Rainstorm

One of the more interesting things about Risk of rain to me is the character variety. You start off with just the commando, who is fairly decent, but I find somewhat boring. The thing is, starting out, you’re going to die on the first level. You’re going to die on the first level probably more than once. Despite this, you can be making progress toward unlocking the other characters. Beating the three boss options on level 1 will unlock the enforcer. Collecting enough drones will eventually get you the engineer. Enough monster logs will get you the huntress, but there aren’t actually enough monster types until you get to the second level(s) consistently.

Then there are the ones that you won’t unlock by chance. The Sniper requires that you beat the game once, and the Mercenary that you do it 5 times. There are also a few that you need to find, which requires that you a) get the right level, and b) get the version that has that character. HAN-D is a bit easier (in a manner of speaking) because he’s in the final stage, and will therefore always be there if you can get that far.

RoR Trouble

Monsoon

The other interesting thing is the item selection. The longer you spend on a stage, the more money you have to open chests and get items, but the harder the enemies will be, making for a generally enjoyable risk/reward mechanism. Some items are better for some characters than others: Acrid tends to kill things while they’re clumped up, so the item that causes enemies to explode on death is amazing. The command attacks extremely quickly, and so gets more out of items like the ukulele or missiles.

Recently artifacts were added, and these let you modify the game in some ways, which can make things easier or harder, depending. One in particular, Command, allows you to choose what items you get (within the bounds of rarity). Glass cuts your health to only 10%, but makes you do significantly more damage.

RoR Artifact

Co-op doesn’t use Steamworks, so it’s a little iffy. Even so, this is one of the best small indie games I’ve experienced. It goes on sale for very few dollars pretty often, so take a look.

Gaming

On Illusion of Choice

1 Comment

Blaugust Post #15

After writing about the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, I had a strong urge to go back and play Mass Effect 3 all the way through again. Really, what this meant is that I had a strong urge to play the entire Mass Effect trilogy again, because the second and third games make really awkward assumptions if you don’t import a save file. Because I said I hadn’t, I’m playing as a Soldier, but I think I’ll probably play 2 and 3 as an Engineer (which is the other class I’ve never played through any of the games). My only regret so far is that playing as a Soldier makes Wrex largely redundant, and he’s probably my favorite party member.

Meeting Wrex

A Dirty Trick

I’ve heard it said that Mass Effect 1 is the best RPG in the series (even from people who don’t consider it the best game in the series), and while I don’t really agree, it’s certainly the most traditional. Your conversation options depend on the skill points you spend in Charm/Intimidate (and it’s also traditional enough that investing in both is a trap). Locked items and even how well you can shoot your weapon are also controlled by skill investments. You can equip a weapon that you have no skills for, but don’t expect to hit anything with it. None of this applies to the following games: Mass Effect 2 entirely limited weapons by class, and Mass Effect 3 went with a system where your class just determines how much weight you can carry (but all classes use all weapons equally well).

One of the other things is that Mass Effect 1 gives you the conversation wheel a lot more often than either of the following two games, creating the impression that is has more choices. Realistically, ME1 is playing a grand trick on its players, although you’re really only likely to notice it if you play the game more than once (or specifically replay a scene while giving different answers). In a lot of cases, multiple options on the wheel will lead to the exact same voiced line. It will almost always be a line generic enough to “fit” whatever summary the wheel presented, and the only difference is player interpretation.

It was the Mining Laser

Maybe Not so Dirty

Mass Effect 2 and 3 abandon this idea, in favor of just giving you the line, which generally makes conversations flow better. ME3 goes farther than ME2 in this sense, and also occasionally gives you a line based on your Paragon/Renegade scores. In the end of things, I’m not sure which is better. I personally prefer Mass Effect 2’s approach, where you only get a conversation branch for actual line differences. Appearances are important in games, and maybe some well-placed illusions are called for.