So, we were playing Baldurs Gate 3 recently and came to a point where our Warlock PC could use his Speak with Animals ability to talk to a giant spider <shudder>. My long-honed bloggers instincts told me to take a screenshot, but that also meant looking at the screen, which my husband had already warned against “Errr, don’t watch this dialogue!”. Conversations are multi-player in that the non-active players can choose to “listen in”, and such evesdropping can occur at some distance so I wasn’t near and hadn’t seen the spiders properly up until this close up moment. I like this style of i ..read more

I wrote some years ago about being mostly, immune to MMO nostalgia: at the time I was talking about the trend for “classic” servers and playing older incarnations of still live MMORPG. Well, I realised last night as I played a session of Lord of the Rings Online, the first proper session since 2021, that I was feeling a whole lot of nostalgia for the game. This wasn’t me wanting to play an older version of a game as the term is so often used in MMO blogging circles; it was simply that comfortable feeling of being back in one of my favourite, and most played, MMORPGs. LOTRO does “lifestyle” co ..read more

The podcasts that I listen to while walking / commuting to University have been rather dominated by the Wizards of the Coast – Open Gaming License controversy of late (e.g. DM of None). For anyone not that connected with Dungeons & Dragons or tabletop roleplaying news, it’s that Wizards has attempted to preview a new “OGL” license that aims to replace / invalidate the prior versions. Legal matters are beyond this blog’s scope, but the community reaction has been very critical of this move, at least in the circles I frequent. On ice… Since this blog went on ice, my D&D module writing ha ..read more

The blog is coming out of deep freeze briefly for me to post a combined update on two issues. Firstly the gaming related one as my laptop was really struggling to run anything well by the time of my last post. I did get around to replacing the thermal paste in my 2014-era Alienware gaming laptop and it initially made a big difference to the performance. I hadn’t really noticed how bad it had gotten until a friend suggested I check the CPU stats and noticed it was throttling the CPU down to about 5% speed! Now it’s back to its happy and performant self, despite its venerable age this laptop has ..read more

Just a quick note to state the obvious, I’m on an extended hiatus from blogging and online gaming. Potentially life changing news came in late May – the long-desired exit plan from my country may, finally, be coming to fruition. I was already busy at the time winding up work contracts and the relatively short-notice nature means all hands to the wheel on that now. June was also a really busy time for us, travelling to see family and spend time with friends every weekend. I’m suffering for all the happy times now, as I have my second dose of COVID currently – whatever politicians say it hasn’t ..read more

There was a flurry of Dungeons & Dragons news last week (see Polygon.com summary), it came out just as I was ramping up to a frantic week of work so I was kind of distracted from absorbing any of it beyond the headlines. I’ve since done some catch up reading and listened to the relevant episode of the Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk podcast for some discussion on this deluge of updates. Here’s a collection of my thoughts on some of these headlines: Dragonlance I’ve seen a lot of excitement about the return of this classic 1980s D&D campaign setting on Twitter. I did actually read ..read more

Apparently I’ve had a Twitter account for gaming since Feb 2016, longer than I’d have remembered to be frank. I read Twitter fairly regularly to get my highly curated and ecclectic mix of gaming, ttrpg and language specific content (mostly German with a sprinkling of French and Spanish). So it’s with some consternation that I read various tweets and blog posts about the whole takeover controvery – and the significant number of “quitting Twitter” Tweets and posts. I read Roger’s excellent post on this and I have to say I agree with his take. Just quitting the platform makes me feel like I’m aba ..read more

I’m breaking radio silence to post about the World of Warcraft expansion announcement that I just watched live on YouTube: Dragonflight (offical site page). Regular posts won’t resume until mid-late May due to work commitments but a new expansion for a treasured MMO is worthy of coverage for posterity. So Dragonflight has been announced as the next expansion, with some key features so far listed: The Dracthyr race/class combo (new evoker class linked to and limited to the new Dracthyr race) The return of more traditional talent trees Dragonriding Profession revamp So far so good. I’ve always ..read more

Thinking back to what I wrote about adapting to a dual-stick controller previously, I was reminded of several examples of adaptation in another gaming context: tabletop roleplaying games. I’ve also written before about the forever nature of roleplaying rulesets and supplements in that they do not suffer from “hardware creep” (in printed or PDF forms at least). Unlike computer or console games they do not automatically become obsolete in the way due to the relentless march of computing power “progress”. We may move on from earlier editions of a game, or just change our focus to other things, bu ..read more

I find myself perplexed at how quickly days go by. I’m not sure if it’s the pandemic (ongoing/aftermath) or age or just being busier than ever. I was away last weekend so no post and suddenly it’s nearly two weeks since I wrote anything. Sadly this also applies to gaming, at least computer-based, I’ve barely played anything in the last two weeks. I managed to sneak a quick game of Everquest 2 to do some dailies, and I played one shortish session of Lost Ark. It’s two weeks and a day since I last managed to play Star Wars the Old Republic. Travel .. elsewhere! I’ve been busy with work – two 50 ..read more