A-Z Action: G iz da Greenskinz!

Orcs are important.

They're so iconic to a fantasy setting that when they crop up in Sucker Punch, it's not even necessary to ever say the name. You see the gross-skinned dudes and recognize them immediately. I've written something in the neighborhood of seven different campaign worlds in the last sixteen or so years, and orcs have played a major part in nearly every one of them. The complexity of my orcish cultures has grown alongside my familiarity with the rules, exposure to fantasy literature, and desire for a deeper gameworld. I find them such a useful foil to other societies in a campaign, and so convenient when you need a knot of hardbodies to throw at the players, that I'm continually attempting to refine and revisit how their society functions in relation to the rest of the world.

My "first" campaign was actually a research project for a class in middle school. I taught myself and a few friends how to play DnD, and then we played a game, and I gave a presentation on it. I managed to make DnD homework, and thus subsidize purchasing both books and dice. It may remain my proudest moment. However, the campaign itself was fairly generic, albeit homebrewed. I focused on a Norse-inspired campaign in a chilly waste, spread the civilizations out, and generally made things violent and rough. In that setting, orcs were pretty well just orcs. I was still learning most of the themes that undergird DnD, and fantasy in general.

My next campaign was a much more involved affair, entirely crafted from the ground up. I wrote the gods, drew up the map, and created my own riffs on the races; I think there were twelve different elven races alone, along with three dwarven races and three half-undead races. Orcs still lived in the far north, and generally kept to themselves. When their population reached a certain critical mass, however, they embarked on a massive military campaign that swept southward, crushing any kingdom in their way. This violence was partially due to the connection I drew between the race and Orcus (c'mon, look at the names); for these orcs, slaughter was a holy rite. To represent these violent traits, I created an exhaustive list of special orc weapons, because this was 2e and weapons generally had separate damage values for creatures of different sizes. All orcish weapons were less effective against large creatures, but generally a half- to full-step more damaging against medium creatures. Orcs were basically vicious slaughtermongers, and the party had a pretty thrilling stand against an army of them...which ended when one of the players just Wished that there weren't any orcs. At that point, the party was shifted to a version of the campaign world prior to the creation of the race....aaand, we graduated and didn't do much more gaming.

I was busy with pushups and pledgeship during my first semester of college, and being sad over the fact that there were no women at my school during the second semester. There was a lot of Dashboard Confessional during these days, and no gaming. I did become pretty involved with Warcraft, though, and the presentation of orcs in that lore helped me to see the race in a different light. I'm pretty sure Warcraft had actually influenced my Orcus-orcs too, since I'd played quite a bit of WCII during high school. However, seeing the orcs tied into a noble culture that was simply distinct from humanity was as impactful for my thought process as Jack Faust and Lovecraft had been.

My next campaign actually had more than one continent (a first for me) and orcs were relatively isolated from the "main" civilizations of the gameworld. They shared their homeland with a vast gnollish slaver society and a jungle full of cannibalistic elves and one of my four kobold subspecies. I still kept the traditional orcish focus on violence and warfare, but flipped things and made them extremely sophisticated. Their culture was a combination of psuedo-fuedal Japan and Aztec myth, all placed in an ashen volcanic wasteland. They rocked obsidian katana and served the first daughter of the grinning locust god of fire and the regal queen of winter. I still feel this is one of my more fascinating approaches to orcdom, even though it never got much of a spotlight in a game mostly focused on...and I swear this is totally different than Tinderbox...a goblin slave rebellion in the largest established empire of the gameworld.

It really was different, I promise.

I've already discussed the orcish presence in Tinderbox, but what has me thinking about them now is that I started recently started playing Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. I've long loved the whole Warhammer universe (Fantasy and 40k), and have read many of the army codices...despite having never played the game. I did play Dawn of War and most of its expansions, and of course had HeroQuest as a young lad. The Man Known As Larkins and I were going to try playing some 40k using the starter set, but every attempt we've made to do any sort of gaming seems to trigger crises and obligations on a cosmic scale.

Even without a direct experience of the setting, though, I'm thoroughly enamored with its themes and concepts. The tone is much darker than most fantasy (save maybe Joe Abercrombie's First Law, or Martin's shit-hot series I shouldn't need to name), and it revels in that darkness. However, there are elements of extremely grim humor scattered throughout the world as well, especially with the Skaven and---as you'd hope I'd get to, given the general topic of this post---the orcs.

So I loaded up WAR to check out that free trial, and after making my obligatory run at the pet class (Squig Herder), I tried a Black Orc. And I love him. For those unfamiliar, orcs in Warhammer are markedly distinct from their representation in other settings. They reproduce by shedding spores, for instance, and have a Saiyan-esque ability to grow more powerful through conflict. They also, awesomely, grow bigger, which you can see in WAR by comparing a Black Orc (which are, canonically, the largest and strongest orcs in a community) to a Choppa (which are, creatively, orcs what cut things). Orcs have dense muscles, thick skin, and heavy bones...they're elephants amok with crudely-sharpened weapons. They fight each other, they fight other races, and if you were to stand one in front of the mirror, they would fight that.

And this just works for me. Despite my predilection for complexity, despite my almost pathological need to dig just that little bit deeper into backstory, I love orcs who are dumb as bricks and built like houses. My very favorite part of logging into WAR is getting to the character select screen, where all the characters are shown arrayed on a two-level platform. When you mouseover each character, they display some sort of animation. The Chosen of Chaos unleash a mighty roar if they're blade and shield wielders, or a more demure fist pump if they rock a two hander. The goblin Shaman leaps back away from the pointer as though terrified of your attention.

The Black Orc repeatedly smashes himself in the head with his sword. And it is the bright spot in my day.

MMO Adventures 3: Leaving Perfect World for DDO

The credit card was slippery in my sweaty fingers. My brow was moist with a feverish flush of heat. My finger hovered over the button…

My computer saved me from re-subscribing to WoW, however, by simply refusing to download the bastard. I tried for two days while visiting my girlfriend (Because, see, that meant I was off the computer, busy being a devoted boyfriend.) which is atop the week I spent at home trying first; it sounds like I’m describing efforts to conceive. However, after the second time it failed to function, I despaired. I had Perfect World, of course, and Perfect World’s not bad…but I can honestly say that if Perfect World has a story, I haven’t found it yet. Every time some apothecary tells me, completely seriously, that a giant dog had the wherewithal and drive to steal a crucial recipe…I just shake my head. Some of the quests are entertaining, though; I loved the guy who had nightmares of being killed by ambulatory cacti, despite the specific breed existing on the coast of a continent while he was standing inside a plant-free city at its center. I killed the cacti for him. I killed the turtles for some other dude, covering my roommate (Who is a tortoise, natch)’s eyes as I did so. I ground and ground and picked up iterative power increases and new abilities.

But ultimately, Perfect World is linear in a way I struggle to accept. It’s not even the linearity of the questing, the endless grind. It’s the fact that I have yet to find any uniqueness in character progression whatsoever. My Barbarian, for instance, can use all manner of polearms, one- and two-handed axes and hammers, and even paired hammers. Some of these weapons swing faster than others; for the uninitiated, this has an effect on your DPS (Damage Per Second). If one weapon deals 68-118 damage and has a swing speed of 1.9 seconds, and another deals 60-100 damage but has a swing speed of .8 seconds, the latter weapon provides better DPS. In other games, WoW for instance, swing speed really does matter. Certain classes and builds favor the quickest, nastiest weapons they can wield, because they’re dependent on abilities triggered off of critical hits (Basically, a really good result on the random number generation that determines if your attack is a success) or upon things that they apply, like poisons, with every hit. Other classes and builds prefer big, nasty, slow weapons with tremendous base and maximum damage; usually they’re going to employ a number of special abilities which ignore swing speed and inflict their damage based on the damage capacity of the weapon, such that what matters is how much damage your weapon is capable of.

In PW, though, none of that seemed to matter. If a weapon did more total DPS, you upgraded to it. It didn’t matter what the swing speed was, because the Barbarian really doesn’t care. The class is built off of a mana (and chi) energy pool, which runs out so quickly that you’re either spamming potions or just hitting stuff. Barbs also have a tiger form with totally different abilities, higher armor and speed but lower damage. In this form, though, your weapon swing speed seems to be utterly normalized, so your weapon again doesn’t matter. Even the existence of this tiger form provides few to no decisions. Are you tanking? Tiger form. Are you running somewhere? Tiger form. Do you want things to die faster? Manbeast form. It also think it’s a shame, a true shame, that every Barbarian turns into a white tiger…as you can’t actually make your character a white tiger-headed man. If I’m running around as a lion man, I want to turn into a lion; same for wolf and, for pantssake, Pandas.

PW has some amazing qualities, and it’s visually exceptional. Being able to totally recustomize your character’s appearance before each login was impressive as well.

But once I managed to log into DDO, I knew I wouldn’t be going back any time soon.

MMO Adventures 2: The Shaggening

Once Perfect World was running on my system, I set out to make a charac…wait, no. Before I jump into character creation, I should acknowledge two pernicious bugs that impair playing PW on a Mac running Crossover. The first is that the game client itself, upon launching, occasionally opens in a windowed mode. Perhaps there are humans who play MMOs in a tiny window (the window that appears is not resizeable, and is about 40% of the screen; I check my e-mail in larger windows), but I am not one. I need that full-screen action to fully click and stab all the monsters on screen. Once I log in, select a character, and play for a few moments, I can usually quit the game and when I open it back up it’ll play in full screen mode.

The second bug is something I actually do worry about. Whenever I open the game, it checks my version. It then, every time without fail, mentions that a new version is available and gives me patch options. Now, the first time I opened the game this worked fine. I said patch, hells yes and patching occurred and everything was fine. However, when I try to patch it now it automatically dies. This hasn’t prevented me from playing the game, but my fear is it very well could one day in the future. I’m assuming I can use the manual patch download option and transfer the patch into my bottle, but I’d prefer to be able to patch in the prescribed fashion instead.

Anyway, I managed to slither my way into the game proper. Perfect World has apparently unleashed a “Rising Tide” expansion; think Burning Crusade for WoW, only it costs nothing. It’s similar to BC, however, in that it provides a new environment which, Lorewise at least, was not accessible before. It also (and here’s the BC comparison) grants access to a sexy new race of entirely too pretty individuals, the Tideborn. Tideborn are basically elves (or Blood Elves, which are basically elves) with fins coming out of their skulls where ears should be. The classes available to Tideborn are Assassin and Psychic, and either gender can be a member of either class (this is distinct from some races, as you’ll see). When I sat down to make my first character, I want to stress that I remained strong. I did not roll a Psychic, despite that being a ranged, element-using, caster-based class; which is to say, right up my alley. I did not roll a pet class, despite always rolling a pet class. Instead, and after examining all of the race and class options available, I rolled a male Tideborn Assassin.

The character customization in PW is impressive, and equally impressive is how Aeria managed to work a certain amount of cash shop into it. I could alter the dimensions of my character’s head, eyes, lips, nose, arms, torso, legs, and so forth. I could alter his hair, its color, its texture (ever feel your human paladin needed some highlights?). I could reposition facial features. And, most important to me personally as a mulatto gamer, I could alter his skin color across an incredible range. I settled on a swarthy, milk-chocolate Tideborn fellow of svelte build and powerful thighs.

I want to stress that this customization is incredible; the only MMO I’ve played with a comprable level of flexibility is City of Heroes/Villains. While that game gets the nod in terms of clothing optimization and weird additions to your character at the start, since you’re designing a supe and their costume as opposed to playing a character who’ll constantly be up-gearing and gaining status on the basis of that equipment, I’m quite favorably impressed by PW’s character creation for Tideborn, Humans, and Winged Elves.

Why the list? Well, I’ll make an admission here: after playing the Tideborn up to level two, some control frustrations had me quitting out to Google for a solution. When I popped back in, my altaholism kicked in and I made a new character. One of the critical elements of PW is that each individual race has exclusive (and sole) access to two classes. The Tideborn provide Assassins (high-DPS melee) and Psychics (high-DPS ranged). Humans provide Blademasters (DPS/Tank melee classes) and Wizards (Wizards are wizards, eh?). Winged Elves can fly from level one, which surprised me as Aion made a huge deal out of eventually providing wings to characters, whereas PW does so at level one if you roll in this race; they can be either Archers (ranged high-DPS) or Priests (the healing class, with the buffs and restoration powers you’d expect).

Sexy? Sure. But there’s one more race, a race who has, unlike all the others, a limit to its classes based on the gender you select. A race I knew, going into this game, I was going to roll sooner or later. The race which my choosing Tideborn first was, not a snub, but an acknowledgment of the sexy of. I am no furry, even a slight tiny bit, but how’s a brother supposed to ignore the prospect of playing a big, angry tiger man? That’s what male Untamed represent, unless you’d rather be a Lion man (which is what I rolled), or a wolf or panda man. All male Untamed are Barbarians, which is the core tank class for the game. All female Untamed are sexy lady (honestly, all the PW ladies are scantily clad and 0 body fat) creatures, which can shew fox, bat, demon, and so forth in human form. The All Untamed have a WoW-Druid-esque shifting ability, which turns the males into white tigers and the females into foxes. These secondary forms provide passive benefits, and further learn skills that explore whatever the core class fails to obtain. The Barbarian, for instance, has increased defense and speed in his tiger form at the cost of reduced DPS. The Beastmaster (the foxy lady class) is the pet class, focused on debuffs and ranged combat while their tamed pets battle. Their fox form, however, is a melee-oriented class along the lines of your typical rogue or assassin.

So yes, by the time I’d logged into PW a second time I was already rolling a giant roaring beast man who remains my highest-level character to date. He stepped onto the scene with a big two-handed weapon, and he cut some plants to their roots because a strange lady told him to.

And it was good

MMO Adventures 1: The Not-Playing

I spent the last week in an MMO frenzy. I was ravenous to play something online, with rpg elements and a persistent story. The fact that I read WoW.com daily, and haven’t played WoW since 2008, probably has something to do with this. The fact that I read Massively.com on the daily as well does much to explain how this urge could come upon a man.

So I spent literally the entirety of last week engaged in a project to download and patch WoW. Spring Break was coming up, and as my college provides two whole weeks for that celebration, it seemed like a good time to jump back into the game and see how my Warlocks (I have three, one for each spec) were doing.

I managed to get WoW onto my computer, though it took approximately 30 hours to do so. I was using a free trial, just to be sure that I still enjoyed the gameplay, but after an evening I was confident that I’d like to spend my time grinding, skinning, mining, and engaging in all the other joyous repetitions WoW provides. My defunct account is licensed for the Burning Crusade already, which meant I could try a free trial of Wrath of the Lich King. I clicked yes to that…and thus broke everything.

Despite a night of searching, I’ve yet to find any way to just upgrade to Wrath from Burning Crusade; I have to re-download the entire client. Which, again, takes ages. My ten-day trial is already a third over, and I’d say I could just wait it out and then go back to playing BC; except I deleted the game in order to try downloading the new client. I have the DVDs for the original game and BC, but it doesn’t seem that they’re usable; I can’t install that much of the game first and then just pick up the Wrath expansion. That puts me in a position where I need to spend 40 dollars to get the expansion plus also pay the monthly subscription fee, as it doesn’t appear there’s a free month’s service included in the Wrath price.

I’m not complaining, really. WoW is awesome, it’s doing very well for itself, and I’m glad of it. I’m simply in a situation where 15 dollars is very different from 40, and already feels like a wild expenditure. Luckily, partway through my WoW travails Fallen Earth came to the Mac. I’d followed the recent columns about one player’s journey through the wastes of that post-apoc game, and it struck my fancy…mostly as a substitute for Borderlands, which my poor laboring Macbook could apparently run if not for the DRM on the game, which prevents my running it through Steam/Crossover Games. I live in a world where my great interest in games is unfortunately combined with a near-total inability to play any of them.

The Fallen Earth client was, unfortunately, a 4.9 gig download that died halfway through the process (this, too, took a day). I fell into a deep despair.

And then

Then I remembered I had installed a few free-to-play MMOs through Crossover. I played Last Chaos for a time, but it failed to grab me, largely do the catastrophic slowdown I suffered any time I went into town. I had also attempted to get Perfect World working, with no success…at the time. Well, whatever problem PW had, it’s functional now. That means I actually have the capacity to play an MMO, get my grind on, fill them bars, and otherwise experience the joys of playing an rpg on the internet.

Great Story, eh?