Penny Arcade

It’s sorta like when World of Warcraft introduced Eternium Ore; it was like, hey.  Don’t paint yourself into a corner here.  You gotta make a bunch more mystical ores!  You don’t want to get to Forever-ite until you absolutely have to.

What the hell are you gonna do after Doom Eternal?  Or Halo Infinity?!  You taunt the Gods with this kind of shit; Duke Nukem “Forever” was probably a headstone.  And now you’ve built a gigantic mouse trap and you’re laying down in it.  Unless…  the entire purpose is for these games to constitute final, indefinitely expanded, canonical products which exist parallel to the traditional industry…?  To transmute these brands into undying services?  That would…  hmm.

Hmm.

Hey!  We’re back on what is commonly known as our bullshit, specifically in a streaming context.  We’ve had or will have rad shit all day, from our Technomancer’s ASMR Coding Stream at 8am PDT to Livescream horror with the Design Team at 12, but schedules have once again allowed us to deliver our full phalanx for Dadfuckers, Inc.!  Which mean Ryan Harman as horny-ass dad Tommy No-Chill, Joshua Price as a slightly older and potentially wiser Tommy, and then the rest of the cast rendered verbally by my good friend Kris Straub and I.  In particular, I have a languid vampire man you might be nourished by.  Maybe leave some time open this afternoon, around 2pm PDT?

(CW)TB out.

I should emphasize for those of you reading this from out of town that University Bookstore is actually a very specific bookstore, and not more of a general concept as it might first appear.  But!  It’s all true:  At 5pm pn August 18th, I will be doing a reading at the aforementioned University Bookstore (this one) of my “if Shel Silverstein was your Dungeon Master” book of poetry Lexcalibur.  We’ll also have a small allotment of the physical book available there, if that’s something you missed out on last time.  There’s also a Facebook event?  Do you want that? I was told to link it.

I hope to see you there!

(CW)TB

Obviously, there has to be a way to digest the dSports you haven’t consumed; some mechanism by which we may obtain chelated versions of these prized materials for easy absorption.  That’s DiceCenter.

(There wasn’t enough room in this one to give another shoutout to Goldenboy, unfortunately.  We love that dude.)

The streaming schedule next week is pretty goofed up because of yet another Top Secret project. It’s not a Project based on the classic TSR roleplaying game Top Secret, unfortunately; such is the bewildered and dilapidated state of our world.  But Monday’s packed with all the classics, and we’ll have Ryan Josh, Kris and Myself on deck for Dadfuckers, Inc.  Vitally, Wednesday’s good - for it marks the return of Acquisitions Incorporated: The “C” Team.

Season Two is like a self-contained trilogy, and it’s designed to be easy to catch up with, because each of the three arcs has their own recap video.  Book One, Plans Within Plans, is distilled here.  The recap for Book Two, Promise, just dropped and is available here:

They’re animations executed by Kris Straub, who you may know better as K’thriss Drow’b - a Drow gentleman you may know from your local mist shroud.  This time around, he gets the unique perspective of Ryan Hartman’s Dragonborn Narcissist, Donaar Blit’zen.  Which means, among other things, that it’s pretty Goddamn funny.  Get these two vids under your belt, and you’ll be ready on Wednesday when 4pm PDT rolls around.

I CHANGED MY MIND about what we’re gonna stream.  We are gonna play Madden 19 (?!?) and Dead Cells instead.  Stillaround 2pm PDT, though!  That part is the same.

(CW)TB out.

I feel confident that the dSports league I inevitably found will suffer the same grim setbacks shared by every other attempt to yoke incredibly competitive young men toward some decorous, public expression.  Don’t these violent sociopaths know I’m trying to establish dominion?!?

Hey, have you heard about KeyForge: Call Of The Archons?  It’s from Fantasy Flight, which is calling it a “Unique Game.”  Like, as a genre.  I’ll get into the peculiarities of that in a second.  What it means functionally is that every deck of cards you buy is different.

I think the gameplay looks quite fascinating.  There’s no “mana” of any kind, rather, each time your turn comes around you simply choose a color and can play all cards of that color.  Of course they have a name for these colors, it’s like “Houses” or some shit, but they more or less map onto the concept of Mana Type.  You’re not trying to kill your opponent - rather, you’re trying to generate an in-game material and build a certain number of keys with it.  Wait!  That’s why it’s called KeyForge!!!  You know the material in question is magical as hell because the name starts with one of those weird letters that is an A, but is also an E.

It’s by Richard Garfield, who is… you know…  The Magic Guy, though I also think of him as the Robo Rally Guy and potentially even the Vampire Guy.  We might also, for the purposes of this discussion, call him the “Spectromancer Guy” because it’s a) something else he worked on, but b) also includes some KeyForgey lane based/spatial concepts about where cards are laid plus involves your “deck” being drawn outside of your control from a superset of cards.

So every deck you’d buy in the store its own name and its own leader and its own card back and there aren’t any more like it.  There’s a very specific type of computer generated uniqueness that isn’t especially unique in feel, and that’s the vibe I’m getting from the leader cards. This type of algorithmic stuff is all over gaming right now, in part because they don’t have to manage the physicality of these ideas.  That’s the advantage of the digital space!  Printing this game out seems like a very novel decision.

I will absolutely grab a deck or two, and if I end up liking it, I’ll grab as many as… three more.  At this point, the people I’d be playing the game with would almost certainly institute a “sleeving and deckbuilding is okay” policy, at which point… it would become a collectible card game with ten dollar booster packs…?

I’m glad they’re trying it.  But it does seem like a weird thing to try.

(CW)TB out.

Michael was headed to some primeval forest, and I was headed to Spokane, so we put together a couple strips furthering the whole “dSports” concept because we can’t stop thinking about it.  Then we sat down to write Monday’s strip and it’s all we wanted to write about.  So there are a couple more strips on this theme, not bound into any particular storyline or anything, simply premised thus: that we live in a world nourished by something called “dSports,” and even the drama surrounding this form of entertainment is sufficient to sustain a man.  It also allowed us to engage in some Wish Fulfillment, because even after the expansion for some reason Seattle still doesn’t won’t have an OWL team.

It’s every couple years an idea seizes me like this, from Penny Arcade to Child’s Play to Acquisitions Incorporated to Strip Search to the Eyrewood or Automata.  I’ve thought about these fuckin’ dSports as hard as I have about any of those other things.  That’s an indication to me that I need to take it seriously.

I’ve been back to Spokane three times in one month.  I don’t even have the energy right now to model it as a post apocalyptic hellscape.  The first time was because my stepfather was in poor health.  Poorer than I knew, certainly: he died four hours after I got there.

He used to fish with grenades in Vietnam; he went there as a mechanic and started flying sorties because they needed pilots.  He says bullets would go straight through the floor and still have enough juice to go right through your leg.  He had to leave the .50 cal once because his best friend was killed in the cockpit and he had to land the fucking helicopter.

This is the type of motherfucker this man is: he apologized to me for dying.

(CW)TB out.