Weekend

[lederhosen]

freyaw came to visit on her way back home, staying Friday night - we went shopping at Tin Soldier on Saturday and invested in gaming-related shinies before she flew out. Then I painted up a beastie for the evening game, which was rather fun.

The PCs' bodies had been stolen by toys, leaving them all with severe limitations of one sort or another: a sword-wielding jack-in-the-box, an understuffed ragdoll (the only party member with working thumbs), a wind-up monkey who couldn't walk without bashing her cymbals together, a wooden teddy-bear with no elbows or knees, an origami doll, and a glass unicorn. John's brother showed up and got to play a plush bunny, because that was where my gaze ended up when I was looking through the minis cabinet for ideas.

As they soon discovered, they weren't the *only* walking, talking toys, but they were the only ones who didn't seem to believe this was their natural state of affairs. They got enlisted by Prince Yuan the Bandit Prince to carry out a raid, either on the King's tax-collectors or on the toymaker's workshop, for vital supplies like needle, thread, and stuffing. And they got to meet a dragon! (Okay, it was a wooden dragon about three feet long, who had read enough books about *real* dragons to be very very angry about his situation in life, but still a dragon, and I'd painted up his model and made it all shiiiiny and stuff.)

It worked pretty well, I think. The group has a tendency to neglect teamwork - not that they're *selfish*, they just don't coordinate stuff - and giving them such disparate abilities meant they thought much more about working together. "I stand on the jack-in-the-box, he catapults me up onto the bed, you tie a string around my neck so I can haul himup, and the ragdoll lies down below the window so we can jump on him and cushion our fall" sort of stuff. I got to give them all horrific toy names; the unicorn was already seething about being a cutesy glass toy before he discovered he was called "Tinkle".

"I'm going to stand in the sunlight and try to focus it to set fire to something. Is it working?"

"You're sending pretty little rainbow motes of light dancing around the room."

"NOOOOOO!"

edward_dujean should be posting a summary, hopefully a bit less delayed than last time *nudge nudge*.


Looks like we're actually going to manage three or four games on consecutive weekends, which is practically unheard of.

Have been playing Knights of the Old Republic, after grabbing it from a bargain bin. On the whole, pretty enjoyable, but with some major frustrations. Quests that break when you do things in an order they hadn't expected, a lot of "trudge across three maps you've already explored to talk to somebody again" (doubly frustrating because the same company had solved that problem five years earlier, and triply with the number of people who seem to think 'somewhere in a vast featureless desert' is a good place to arrange a meeting). And the damn swoop racing... okay, minigames good for providing variety, but after the first couple of races these were just infuriating. If I want racing games that difficult I'll buy a racing game, not a turn-based CRPG, 'k? And having multiple NPCs talk about "upgrading your swoop bike", but not actually providing any way to do so, was just rubbing salt into the wound. Unskippable cutscenes also grate, especially when attached to things that are going to happen over and over.

But it had the things I really like in a CRPG. Decent characters, reasonable storyline, and some real choices, some of them quite complex. (What do you do when a court's assigned you to defend a man you know to be guilty?) Good enough that I'll probably track down KOTOR 2 one of these days, but it could've done with a bit more polish.