How to Cure your Children of Wanting to Play MMO's

Answer? Let them play them. But make sure to

1. Be there with them.
2. Have them follow you and your guild members.
3. Give them enough rope to hang themselves.
4. Do everything you can to make their stay better, literally, that way they won't think you conspired against them, and on the surface, you didn't. You let the stress of the MMO and the Guild do it for you.
   

I got back on City of Heroes / City of Villians, though the latter wasn't part of the picture when I left, joining my friend Kevin in Virginia. After a few nights playing, my 10 year old daughter, Maria de Guadalupe, asked me if she could play with us. I realized the game came with a 14 day free trial so I said "Sure."

Now you might ask "Why is a father introducing his TEN YEAR OLD GIRL to the world of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games?!"

Here's why, and the result of the evening, in an e-mail I sent to my friend Kevin and my lovely Latin wife...

Last night was too much fun. And most of that was either

• Watching Maria become frustrated with MMO's or
• Watching my minions slay the enemy.

I genuinely wanted to give Maria de Guadalupe the chance - it was just like D&D, I just laid all that rope out there (the old adage of giving the D&D players enough rope to hang themselves and sitting back as the DM) and did nothing on my own part to make her time miserable, other than demonstrate how a team can be frustrated with another team member's ineptitude. After that, she, once again, got stuck on some stairs with enemies hitting her, and we risked ourselves to save her, and I'm sure she understood that. Nobody likes to watch their friends go through hardship because they did something wrong.

And, as I told you, when she wanted to watch her Spanish soap opera I reminded her that you and I had gone through a lot of trouble so she could play, and what were we going to do now that she's leaving? (Soap Opera: Not like the States, they last only 6 months a piece and this one is about an ugly girl who has the most beautiful personality and intellect, literally titled "The Ugly More Beautiful," or translated I would say "The most beautiful ugly girl." Sweet show, actually. Imagine an American Soap Opera that stars an ugly lead girl. The actress is kinda like Carrie-Ann Moss/Princess Leia: pretty only if you really truss her up, and they dressed her way down for this show - Like Carrie, she's the unbeautiful progeny of two other famous actors. Unlike Carrie, she can act very well, and has, up until winning the lead on this show, made a living in comedy shows.)

Anyway, so she got to feel

• "MMO's dictate when you can play them because of who you have to play them with."
• She got to feel "Pulls are bad."
• She got to feel "Not being able to navigate the world is bad."
• She got to feel "There are some real creeps out there." (Start area creeps trying to flirt with her father playing a girl character - she's 10, and she's a girl, she's not stupid, and she can read, and all she told me afterwards were there were some really bad people online.)
  

She also got plenty of good. She seemed to like seeing you, but she told me afterwards you didn't talk much. I told her "You weren't in the room with me, but you're right, he's kinda quiet. When he talks, it's usually interesting." That, she knows, is like her mother. She enjoyed our social RP before you joined us most of all, I think. I will never, ever show her Second Life. Actually she wouldn't like that either - too many creeps.

But... I'm glad. If she had liked it I would have kept playing with her and taught her how to be responsible concerning the time spent playing. Either way, as she likes her NDS and some PC games, I knew MMO's (as they are the future) were going to be in her life at some point, and I figured, opportunity knocking with her saying she wanted to play with us, there was no better chance to teach her the ins and outs.

Lastly, one day my 10 year old little girl will be reading Daddy's blog, and she won't mind coming across this. She knows I do lots of things like this to teach her about the world, rather than just try to tell her how it is.

Creativity Comes Easy

Reading an un-excellent blog attempting to talk about how Dungeons and Dragons relates to network engineers, I found one part interesting... the rest read like the guy was trying to impress his bosses by being geeky and using phrases like "forward-thinking." Gay, as we said in High School.

"Dungeons & Dragons, if you're not familiar with it, is a game where people tell a story and when there's a moment of indecision in the game, the players roll dice to determine what happens.

As ridiculous as this may seem - and I'll admit, it's pretty darn ridiculous - the use of dice and placing artificial limitations on the characters are the way that people help to improve the story. Because it's much harder for a group of people to get together and just tell the story without some sort of limitation.

Let's try a little thought experiment.

Tell a story right now. It can be about or on anything. It doesn't have to be a good story or even a long story. You don't even have to write it down."

I had no difficulty with this. My first impulse thought was "Oh, great! I can tell any story I want, I have many, and I can create something new, too..."

"Having difficulty?

Okay. Try telling a story about a talking dog and a troll that live together in a cave.

That's a little easier, isn't it?"

My next thought was "You just made (the task) - not interesting."

"The more limitations that are given - boundaries or obstacles - the more the brain works to be creative. You look to make the most of your boundaries; you look for ways to surpass the obstacles."

I thought this was interesting, that my mind gravitated towards a lack of obstacles, not clearly defined barriers. Clearly, I am too imaginative to be an engineer - put another way, just not the right mixture of intellect and creative thinking.

This tells me... that my brain doesn't work like (most or many) people do.

The Keel, the Sheer and the Rudder

I have been doing far too much reading on pre-cannon era ships...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_rig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Points_of_sail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broach_sailing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clew#Clew
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigantine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite_brig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat_building

Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 is great at confusing me. A two-masted, square sailed ship, from 100 to 150 tons traveling at 2mph. What?

First of all, strickly square sailed ships can't sail agains the wind, ever, unless they have oars. Secondly, that speed is abyssmal. But, as my Dungeon Master pointed out "While the metric might not make sense, we can rest assured it's balanced with the rest of the movement rates in the system."

What have I learned so far? I've learned that there is a lot of terminology I need to learn to play my next character.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Nevermind

Neverwinter Nights 2 appears to be a disaster. I'll show my concerns in three parts...

1) The frightening "Top 12 Bugs/Problems in Neverwinter Nights 2" concerning online play and persistent worlds yields such highlights as:

1. The DM Client crashes the server regularly. This makes it unplayable.
2. The server itself tends to crash "quite a lot."
   
3. There is no Linux server, nor will there ever be in all likely hood. Windows server hosting games is rare and expensive.
4. The Toolset crashes so regularly I read of several people giving up until it was patched. I gave up "The Movies" for being buggy with large films and have yet to "go back" a year later.
5. Disconnects while loading new zones: players experience this while changing zones. It's more than frustrating.
6. Connecting to new servers should be easier than this 5 step process that involves manually installing a 3rd party application and configuring ini files...
   
7. Network Use Spike: Random bandwidth killer times out players on the server.
   
8. As with NWN1, Hak Paks and server specific files are loaded after you create a character, which means you spend time doing that before the server unceremoniously dumps you.
9. Scripting commands give limited information about objects, some of which NWN1 had solved. You have to create a creature/destroy a creature to figure out the height of the ground, for example.
   
10. The large size of modules combined with the 2 gig RAM limit severely limits the current modules. A module might take up 600mb of memory but still hit this theoretical limit.
    
11. Builders updating the module make it next to impossible for players to rejoin, as it's not as simple as downloading the latest module file and finding out what files need updating is not automatic, let alone knowing where to put them. People are trying to make jury-rigged tools to circumvent this.
12. Graphics engine bogs down nearly any PC for no good reason at all.
    

2) The game itself sucks. Atari told Obsidian to, essentially, "release it now!" and rather than say "But, it's not done" Obsidian meekly replied "okay." The ending is a single image with text on it saying the dungeon collapsed and everyone was killed, while the game starts with 5 CGI intros of the distributor, developer, Wizards of the Coast, etc. The game is so rail-roaded XP is doled out by scripts, not by in-game calculations. Even so the ending is so woefully unbalanced you have to reload constantly because every encounter rates as "impossible." Why? Because the game wasn't finished, and now it's dying so quickly it never will be.

3) I've heard that folks are pleading with players to not Uninstall Neverwinter Nights (1), because that actually works and there are Persistent Worlds still out there for it. That's nuts.

Great Sunday

Dungeons and Dragons
My friend Dove proved again his ability to run a D&D game. He's not much on the creative side - he leaves an author's descriptions at the door, but he plays his NPCs accurately and well, complete with voices. Where he really shines is continuity and organization. His world always seems real because it is completely consistent. He has a perfect image of what's going on (even if he doesn't try to mimmick some Dickens and describe it all) and it shows when we play. He manages combat better than any DM I've played with, even Stan Lowman.

Stan's theory of combat was "when it gets so big I can't fit it all in my brain, I'll gloss over it." He'd use homebrew rules to "approximate" what happens when 40 enemies, en mass, do something. It'd be in keeping with the rules so we all went with it, besides which Stan was not a DM you questioned needlessly. He'd listen, but he was always in charge.

Dove, on the other hand, can handle 40 enemies in split groups coming at us from different angles, and keeps track of every single creature's stats & hitpoints - in part thanks to DM Genie (google that), a difficult program to use at first.

So Sunday was good.

GP2X
A GGB fan and Guild Wars fan-forum moderator, LordFu, found me on the GP2X forums I frequent. At the D&D game, my GP2X proved an able MP3 player, if not portable (no way to easily carry it while moving about), and two D&D players fell in love with it. Decker liked Neo Geo (Metal Slug) while Jakob liked the Genesis emulation.

On this handheld, there's something for everyone.

Oh, neat post I found: Visual Comparison of the GP2X and it's predacessor, the GP32.

You mean the Government can't manage our lives as well as we can?

This news article about FEMA's 1 billion in fraudulent relief aid payouts really speaks to a larger issue.

Oh, and as if D&D Online wasn't stupid enough because it lacks a Dungeon Master, now you can solo, too! Yes, I've played it. No, I don't like a D&D game that is basically "Hang out in bar, find PUG (pick up group) or your friends. Teleport to dungeon. Fight stuff. Go back to bar.

Where the hell is the rest of the world? Oh, they omitted it.

My Great Weekend

D&D that Wasn't
Well I came this close ][ to having fun at the big D&D game. I avoided the County Picnic because my wife backed out on attending it, and I didn't want to drive all the way there with four children alone, so I thought "Great, I can get to D&D on time."

Then 12:40 PM comes, and as I ready myself, my 13-month old walking, abstract-thinking baby boy latches onto me. I try to pawn him off on my lovely lady. He struggles to be free of her and cries. I try to sit down with him and distract him. He's onto my plot before I get halfway through it, and throws the toys down and latches onto me again. Every time I try to leave, Jose Francisco makes it abundantly apparent that - for whatever reason - he wants his Papa today.

My wife pushes me to go, but finally I tell her "What can I say? Sorry, 13-month old baby boy, daddy has a D&D game? This is why parents have no life." She chuckled, and told me to call the restaurant where the game was held to tell everyone I couldn't make it.

Jose & Diablo 2
So Jose Francisco had a Saturday full of Papa. Around 2 PM my wife told me to call my cousin, Paul, and and hour and a half later he was at my place, and we played Diablo 2 until 12:30 AM, with breaks for dinner and a baby boy, who sat with me or around me for a long time. It was odd, as much as he wanted me, he didn't seem to want me to be doing anything other than being at home with him in my lap. This was easily accomplished. Sometimes I let him have my mouse while I was in town.

Sunday was a lazy day. We went to Publix, I rediscovered the joys of Day of Defeat: Source (running on the Half-Life 2 engine), as well as how much I fail to understand what I'm supposed to do in Dystopia (same engine).

Jose Francisco, The Strong
That's a nickname his sisters gave him, independantly.

Jose Francisco and I spent time bashing things on both days. He has a will to conquer everything - whereas I don't care if someone else is better at something than me, I'm happy for them - Jose Francisco behaves more like my cousin, Paul, and his grandfather in Mexico (retired gynecologist and military commendant, separately), in that he has a will to dominate all things around him. Anything that presents itself saying "Ha ha, Jose Francisco, you can't climb me!" or "Look, I'm a toy soldier! Quick! Bash me with your other soldiers!"

Neverwinter Nights 2 to ship WITHOUT a DM client

Read it and weep.

Acronyms in this article:

• NWN = Neverwinter Nights
  
• DM = Dungeon Master
• OE = Obsidian Entertainment (the developer)
• OC = Original Content, as in NWN OC
• MCA & JE = initials of people who work at Obsidian
  
• NPC = Non-Player Character
  
• PW/DW = Persistent World / Dynamic World - types of multiplayer games for NWN; one runs continuously, the other keeps getting added onto but isn't "live" 24/7.
• FUD = Fucked Up Doctrine
• FALB = Fucking Acronym-Loving Blogger

Telnarius: Yep, but we're looking at the possiblity of the DM client not shipping with the game
David Beoulve: *minces lips*
David Beoulve: So, Kevin.
David Beoulve: Want to build Draco, release it and then... wander around wondering WTF people are doing?
David Beoulve: How about we cheat first, level up our chars, so's we can at least get around? How's that?
Telnarius: Man, Velas without a DM client. Velas: "Click 1 to get a snide remark" "Click 2 to get me to cast Death Touch on you"
David Beoulve: HA HA HA HA
Telnarius: Yeah now this player hit it
Telnarius: "With the DM Client's release postponed until after the game comes out, many single player gamers may breeze through the included campaign and then move on before NWN2 DMed gaming ever gets started. Without capturing a new player base early, DMed gaming for NWN2 may not be successful as NWN1"
David Beoulve: Sad but rather true.
Telnarius: I mean compare jumping into a NPC and playing it to scripting that NPC..not only in time but useability
David Beoulve: Well basically the whole world becomes static. Not only that, when things go wrong as people play -- and they will -- you can't do anything about it but log off and mess with the module, shut down the server, re-upload, restart the module, and hope a few people come back on. Or you can live with it.
Telnarius: Single-player folks in a game like this are like the extreme power guilds in MMOs. Play it, beat it, move on, who cares what happens to the game afterewards.
Telnarius: I mean without the DM client, it makes NWN2, not much above the idea of Oblivion, can play it, can use a toolset, but umm..what else?
David Beoulve: Ouch. That cuts, bud... but things generally do when they are true. True, it has multiplayer -- but you basically have an easy editor with MP and... nothing to do but beat on mobiles or each other.
Telnarius: Very much so, to delay the DM client, for what could be a couple months, would really hurt things. Download and play modules aren't going to hold attention, even with multiplayer. OC, well that's only good really one time through.
Telnarius: "Nice. One guy posted...
Cost of NWN2: $60.
Finding out that upgrades are need to play it: $250.
Realizing upgrades still are not enough, and buying a new computer: $2000.
Sitting back and watching it get played just as intended, then shelved after a month, priceless."