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XLBS: Game Design, R.I.P Harold Ramis & Movie Chat!
March 2, 2014 by dignity
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@lloyd mate, you are a legend, definitely having you invited to my funeral lol. Also liking the sound of this epic moments gaming, fair more refreshing than playing power gamers and people who are more interested in whether a game is balanced. Certainly one marine in the midst of a whole group of necrons is far from balanced, but seeing him succeed against the odds is what made it great.
I have always had a thing for plasma weapons, I still laugh everytime time one of my models dies in a ball of plasma from his own gun!
Number one rule of army selection: If the model looks cool, it’s in the army. I may lose a lot of games but by god I look swish while doing it.
Great show guys, no better way of kicking off a Sunday morning.
Great weekender
Why not do a Robocop board game/ card game where Robocop is the ‘villain’. Who says you have to play the good guy? 2-6 players play criminals doing bad stuff, have to strike the balance of committing crimes and avoid being caught by the law, the more they do the more likely Robocop is going to show up, so either try to amass enough victory points (be it cash or whatever) to win, or get enough guns/tech/henchmen (or team up with other players) to be able to have a chance against fighting Robocop, or screw over the other players so Robocop will go after them instead of you. It could bring up different styles of playing whereby you could do the crimes yourself and get the cash, or hire henchmen to do it instead, ok it means you get less cash cause you got to pay em, but it means less chance ‘you’ get killed. there could be a ‘black market’ mechanic where you could buy stuff to help you on missions maybe, and there is a chance Robocop could raid it, and if you happen to be there it heightens your threat level? probably give the law an AI deck to see what they do each turn.
actually I think I might make a start on this…..
Id hate to have Robocop blow my balls off if I was playing that game you described.
All my armies in any game have always been picked by what figures I like, can’t stand power gaming.
I have two favourite moments in gaming one only happened last week in my first game of Bolt action. I advanced out of cover with a piat team and rolled two sixes to blow up a puma. They got completely destroyed the next turn but what a cool moment, can’t even remember if I won the game but remember that moment.
Other is when my 9 year old son destroyed me 7-0 in three turns on Dreadball. It was the first time I didn’t have to help him with any rules and I got such pleasure watching his face working out what to do next and watching him work out his tactics, job done another gamer made.
Thanks for starting my Sunday off right.. 😉
I have no issue with any reboot as long it’s done well. Speaking of which, I want what Lloyd is smoking lol. The original Robocop movie is truly great. The remake is a bland, ball-less, soulless, piece of film-making. The original had verve and imagination which is completely missing from the re-make. In 25 years time, no-one is going to remember the re-make like the original is remembered now.
Now to disagree with Warren lol. Within five miles of me there are five gaming clubs that meet every week with a large attendance. I have no local game stores. There’s a Travelling Man in the city centre which gives over a few shelves to mini-gaming, a store 20 miles away that carries very little stock, and a one 45 miles away that also has very little stock and primarily runs the business online. Gaming clubs are the lifeblood of our hobby, LGS’s can duplicate this, but they’re not necessary.
And to bring out the implication of that. I buy almost exclusively online. Mainly because I have to. Since I switched to buying online, the amount and the diversity of the games I buy has exploded in a way that never could have happened if I’d been tied to a LGS. The increasing diversity of mini-gaming requires an online model, rather than being stifled by it.
There is no easy answer to this unfortunately.
I too see the role of clubs dramatically increasing over the years.
It isn’t the case that the gaming clubs have replaced the LGSs in my local area. We’ve never had them. The situation I describe is the healthiest it’s ever been in terms of LGSs in my region. We’ve always had a strong presence in terms of GW stores. Our first opened in 1982 (I’m old!) and I’ve got four within 7 miles of me now. But those stores obviously only create and service demand for GW games. Without the diversity of the market that the internet has brought, we’d never have expanded outside that. The local TM, which is literally metres away from a GW store, primarily serves the thriving WM scene. It didn’t, however, create that scene. The internet did that.
Should check out warboar gaming in Bromley, stocks just about everything. You played the owner at the drop zone commander tournament @warzan
Will do, though I’ll have to order online lol
I really like the sound of this except I live in the US, where gaming clubs are extremely rare. The LGS is the lifeblood of recruitment here. Clubs are really hard to find (mostly because there aren’t many places for clubs to meet, but also because there’s a cultural expectation that play should be free – people don’t want to pay dues). I think it’s crap myself. I like the idea of a club much more than the idea of meeting at the LGS all the time, but that’s just what it is out here.
I’m lucky that there are close to a dozen different LGSes within driving distance for me, but if anything happens to significantly impact that ecosystem, I think most US gamers will just end up playing online videogames. I really don’t want to see that happen, but there just isn’t a very strong club culture out here.
My feeling is that if the ecosystem changes, and I think that’s still a big if at this stage, then what we’ll get is a concentration of gaming stores into fewer, larger companies. Much as what happened with supermarkets in the 80s, albeit on a much smaller scale.
I can’t imagine why any company would open brick & mortar retail franchises when they could just do online sales. For a manufacturer it makes sense because stores are a form of recruitment, but for an independent retailer the economies of scale just clearly favor online (as you’ve learned firsthand). This isn’t similar to supermarkets because it’s a niche market, and minis don’t spoil in transit like vegetables. Supermarkets consolidated because the stores themselves were still needed. The LGS can simply disappear, and be replaced by Wayland, The War Store, Miniature Market and all the other online retailers with better prices. There may well be just a few big stores, but I doubt they’ll have much of a physical presence if any.
I think the manufacturers are going to have to push for a club focused culture out here. If organized play starts to support club structures in some explicit way, it will encourage the formation of clubs or at the least, leagues. I think manufacturers pushing for organized play through leagues (by offering prize support or other bonuses but only to leagues) would be the first big step toward establishing a robust culture of gaming clubs in the US. I don’t see it happening on its own though. Most of us just gravitate to groups of friends we randomly happen upon at the LGS or at cons. Organizing gaming activity into clubs with dues and officers and whatnot just isn’t very common.
Without those clubs, I don’t know how recruitment would continue in the US in the absence of the LGS, and I don’t know how the LGS is going to survive long term in the face of online competition.
I didn’t mean to imply they would be B&M. Rather that they would be online. It wouldn’t work any other way.
Wayland has tabletop nation…
I agree. I think gaming clubs work better to socialize and promote actually playing games than independent store do. In my surroundings I see stores work very well for quick games like Magic, but they don’t work so well for time and space consuming wargames. The difficulty in forming a group is finding a large enough group of players playing the same games and of course finding a space to play.
Perhaps to combine the two, stores having space and clubs having members, we should think about a new formula. Something like event centers where people can meet, perhaps rent a gaming table in some way and where game studio’s or other interested parties could organize (sponsored) events.
Hmmm… maybe I’m just describing a pub where the pooltable is replaced with a gaming board.
Where I can I always support my FLGS, even to the extent that I’ll pay a few quid extra to get it from them rather than online. That could also be my childlike impatience though 😉
Thats a good thing, to many people sitting behind their desk buying online, just because its cheap for you, it doesn’t mean its good for the industry. I’d rather go and buy from a shop and have a social experience as well as getting some nice kit.
Aren’t most of the online retailers also bricks & mortar stores?
@warzan – remember that sometimes to much special effects is just way to much and can ruin a movie (like Jar Jar BINKS). Special effects should only be an add on to the movie, not the main and only feature.
Oh, and any info about the Inheritance?
I think a google hangout on that could be a great thing, to see where we are with it and where we go next.
What say you?
I say yes.
I still see your faces, in my memory, when you were talking about it on the Weekenders and the joy in your eyes was so easy to see.
Agreed, I want time manipulation added to 40k!!
On playing to win, I’m wary of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If the only purpose of playing is to win, then our hobby wouldn’t be much fun, but playing to win should be always be a part of the hobby.
Correct, I think our stance is more about how the ‘journey’ to that result, is more important than the result itself 🙂
Amen brother, preach it!
Hi Warren, if you want improv? You need to look up stargrunt II. trust me. Available for free download. There are even improv 40k variants for it. I hope you enjoy.
I agree completely, the most important thing to me is how good my army looks, regardless of how effective it is. For instance I’ve just started building a Tyranid army that will have no guns of any sort and just scythes and other close combat weapons, some will say I’ll just get shot to pieces, but I don’t care, as how good will it look with an entire swarm of nids charging across the battlefield, like warren said it’s the cinematic moments you remember and how much fun you had.
Agree with redben, the key is definitely balance between the drive to win and all the other things that make gaming cool. When I play a game I want to win, but that’s not all I want out of the encounter. It’s about winning using that really cool mini I’ve just bought, or bringing the game back from the brink etc, rather than winning because I’ve worked out some optimised army list.
Best game I ever played was with a guy I played regularly, him always fielding gobbos and me always fielding vampire counts. Neither of our armies worked very well because it was all about what we liked to field. But the most exciting game we ever played was when one weekend we decided to swap army books, rewrite each other’s armies and field our opponents faction against the other. In a way, we were min-maxing; we were actively dealing with the flaws we had seen in each other’s lists. But I tell you what, that chap did things with my vampire counts I would never have thought of and it really mixed up what had become a regular but slightly stale battle.
Sorry lads, couldn’t finish watching the XLBS this week, you lost me in the first five minutes. Having trouble dealing with death at the moment, my Dad died in my arms after falling off his roof at home, and Ghost Busters was on of the first films he took me and my brother to. It happened 6 months ago, but as I am a trained intensive care and accident and emergency nurse it really sucks ass I couldn’t save my own father. Haven’t got the stomach to watch people talk about death at the moment.
So so sorry to hear that mate 🙁
Caught me with my downguard as well. I lost my mother last Monday.
Guard down I meant
We all have someone close that passes away. Don’t beat yourself over it as the guys reminisce Harold Remus. @mattgro I hope and know you’ll overcome the grieving of your dad. I myself lost my dad a few years ago to cancer and even now I look at his picture and think of him. You’ll learn to move on and see your not to blame for his death no matter how trained you are in your profession. I really feel for you.
@warzan cant seem to load, anyone else having trouble?
Yep, the video froze and went green, lol! Try refreshing the page or turning the browser off and on again. 😀
@warzan I felt the same too when John Candy died; he and his movies have a special place in my childhood, just like with Ramis and Ghostbusters. They played a big part in our growing up – like with you and @lloyd, I and my sister grew up with referencing all the funny quotes. I suppose what’s great, is that they still live on in those movies and we’ll always have them to revisit whenever we want. Unless Judgement Day happens, with human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! 😀
If there was a continuation of the movies with new people, like you guys said from SNL, that could be good. But with other people playing the parts in a reboot, I don’t think it would work. We’d be watching them trying to be Egon and the rest, and it won’t and can’t be as good as the original. To make another one, they’d have to capture the magic and humour of the first film. And that’s a big twinkie :D. It might look amazing with new effects, but they’d have to do something really clever and original, and with a great cast and a memorable script. Something that keeps you wondering how it was done, without the stock answer of “it was done with CGI”. I still wonder about how the effect of the index cards flying out of the drawers in the library was made to this day (I suspect it must be an adaptation of a playing card dispenser…).
Plus, Dan Ackroyd is the force behind all the paranormal and scientific knowledge in the script. Who else would think of writing a “total protonic reversal” into a script? He would have to be involved to keep the tone of the original Ghostbusters movie to make sure it retains that level of geeky goodness.
@lloyd I can’t help laughing at people’s unexpected odd voices too. That was a great way to style it out – I’d have done the same thing! XD
I can’t wait to see stuff written by James for GW, it will be great to see what he gets to work on and create. Maybe he can urge them to bring back Blood Bowl? I’ve never played it but would love to see a reboot of that. 😀
I’ve built my minis to suit my own exploration of the fluff and to please myself, regardless of what rules restrictions there are, because I want to have fun with them, and enjoy the creative process of creating them in the first place.
People have to remember that they’re playing a game, and where 40K is concerned, it even says at the beginning of the rulebook that the rules are just a structure, that people should feel free to expand upon it themselves.
Creating an all army list to beat all other armies is boring to me. So you’ve beaten someone, so what? What about what happened in the game? What was the exciting bit? What was the crazy bit that happened? That’s what playing a game is all about. The aim is to have fun after all!
People shouldn’t feel limited by the rules set before them. The Rule of Cool should always be used, if a rule is to be always followed. If it’s cool, then you can do it in the game. For example: Can my squad steal umbrellas from a deserted department store and use them as parachutes to escape off the roof? Yes, yes they can. Roll a 6+ for a safe landing, lol.
If you realise that the games designers themselves are devising ways to go beyond the basic rules, such as all the expansions to your main game of choice, then you should see that there’s no reason not to have a go yourself and have fun with it. 🙂
Honestly, I think the reason that John Candy’s death hit me harder is because it felt so much more tragic. He made so many truly brilliant and sometimes very moving films that really highlighted his talent and emotional power. So many of his films established a strong emotional connection between his character and the audience (Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Only the Lonely, even Uncle Buck to a certain extent). He was very often the most human character in his films, the emotional keystone that the audience had to connect to. You felt something for him, a lot.
Ramis’s roles rarely had that same weight attached to them. He was a generous actor, he didn’t chew the scenery like Murray. He didn’t dominate a scene, but he could absolutely hold his own against anyone else on camera. He was the drummer that held the band together in an absolutely essential way. He wasn’t the front man. So even though he was brilliant, you didn’t establish the same emotional connection to his characters that you did to Murray’s or Martin’s or Candy’s, not because Ramis couldn’t do that, but because the characters weren’t written to do that. He gave that to other actors, which is a rare thing, and that kind of artistic generosity isn’t something that gets noticed as much as it should.
But it’s also why his death feels less emotional, because the kind of connections we feel with Buck Russel and Del Griffith just haven’t been established with Egon Spengler and Russel Ziskey.
I actually met John Candy a few times as he went to the same high school as me. He would pop into the class every now and then when he was in Toronto. The entire school was shaken when his mother called his teacher about the sad news. We where some of the first people to know of his death. Really wish I had met Harold Remus as well as he was a very talented writer.
One the most epic moments playing 40K was back during 3rd edition playing in a tournament when my vindicare assassin armed with an exitus rifle turbo penned a land raider completely destroying it! That move was the talk of the tournament over shadowing even who won the tournament!
Apart from the great stories to tell the best bit of gaming for fun is that you’re never short of an opponent. Simple as that, People want to play you.
I have always built my models with what looks really cool to me or how does it fit into my theme I have for them. I may not win but my army looks damn good while loosing 😛
It was so refreshing to hear some of the points of view on there. It all comes down to enjoying the hobby and its those moments you remember. Take the hobby back for the enjoyment of it again enjoying each aspect building, converting, painting and playing with a model that looks great and you have a bit of pride in. It doesn’t matter who is the winner or who is the loser if there were epic moments you enjoyed in the journey!
I have to say, ive moved away from 40k myself to fantasy (seen as GW is all i can play, despite me having 2 full warmahordes to play, lack of opponents is my issue), but watching the BoW how-to-play 40k with darrel and @warzan was what helped get me back into the hobby. Coverage of a game system i already spend too much money on rather than things i wish i could spend money on is great, I cant wait until it starts. And yes, go for a marine army, this is a ‘getting back into 40k’, which is to appeal the masses, so go for the army for the masses, and thats 4 4 4 marines.
Regarding the cost – I’d happily donate a painted unit in your chosen color scheme and I imagine I’m not alone. I’d love to see some minis I had painted going through the return to 40k series! (and if you pick gray knights doubly so – I’ve needed a reason to buy and paint a dreadknight forever)
Is there any way you might consider using something other than flowplayer. I am so tired of the green screen screw up everytime i sit to watch XLBS. I have to refresh the page several times every time i try to watch it.
Not my idea of a relaxing Sunday morning, sorry guys. Stopped watching it at 21.23 after my 2nd or 3rd greenscreen, so no idea what the rest of this XLBS is about.
That’s a pain in the Arse!, lets see if we can introduce a download link or something to give another option.
Download link would be great for me. Have a slow connection here but love watching in HD. I don’t have any problems with the current player but tend to pause and buffer a load then start watching.
Can be a pain if I rewind a bit then have to wait for it to buffer again 🙂
Can you see if you can find a solution for it to work on Android? its a bit frustrating to have the backstage content inaccessible on the tablet.
That is appreciated. Thx Warren.
I can’t agree more on the prospect of the journey over the win. I win a few times, but mainly I lose. I lose A LOT. I play lots of games and everyone at my FLGS knows me as the dude who just loses but I have fun doing it, and that’s the key.
Those moments where my battered and weathered German Soldiers manage to hold off waves of Russians as they poured over the careful defences and fought off my ambushes I had lain in place only to fight to a grinding draw.
The foolish Chaos Space Marine Raptor who lands, laughs and fires his plasma pistol before it explodes in his face meaning the entire drop was folly (this dud is essentially Starscream).
My lone Daemon Slayer in my Dwarf army who charged head long down the battlefield against Ogres, losing all of his Trollslayer kinsmen in the process. But he made them pay. He survived the whole thing and took down two units BY HIMSELF in his fury.
The smoking hulk of an Iron Dwarf Capital Ship in Uncharted Seas that, while surrounded by Orc Raiders refuses to die and continues to pump out broadsides reducing things to kindling as the crew cheer.
Narrative makes games – otherwise in my opinion you’re losing out. This is why I’ve put effort into making sure a story is told in the Mordheim Journals I’m writing at the moment. It breaths life and a sense of lingering purpose into something that could essentially have been a forgotten story.
I’m sure that we actually need a big mead hall, plenty of meat and beer and a few BoW-Skalds/Bards to stand there and regale us with stories from the tabletop.
BoW Ben
I’ve done a fair bit of competetive sports and after a while it becomes pretty obvious which people like the game and which people just like to win.
Game design is an art, there are in the field two schools of thought.
One focuses on providing tools to the players and help them create their own playing experience and the other focuses in giving the players a complete system to play with, or if you prefer it in other words playing experience .
The first one as you mentioned is indeed close to role-playing games, but as the role-playing games themselves it has a deeper root to us playing games as children, they are a set of rules that all participants in the game agree with, can be modified on occasion if the players agree and feel they should and new or modified rules can be easily inserted in the system.
Most old wargame systems were done in this way, the designer provided tools for the players to make their own gaming experience, some wargames even today do so, providing a frame and leaving the players to come up with forces, scenarios and so on.
The other school of thought is the one were the game designer is providing a complete experience to the player, this is more familiar to people who participate in organised games, like chess or football, the game provides everything the players need and two different players from other parts of the globe can say they play the same game, even if they never met each other before.
Most recent and prominent wargames follow the second school of thought.
For me the biggest flow of Games Workshop games is the double dipping on both schools, either abolish the points system which implies an organised game that requires of course a game balance, clear rules ectr ectr and provide fluff and suggestions, example scenarios complete with forces as it was in the early days or are provided in games like stargrunt and tomorrow’s war, or embrace the point system and support it with a rigid system that is well written and balanced, been in between and pulling the “its not for tournaments but for casual fun” card to hide both the bad game design and the indecisiveness of the game system does not work for me.
The net listing issue you describe is a side effect of this issue, a game with points, sets some expectations, balance is the biggest of them, as a rough example, one expects intuitively that something costing 20 will be roughly equal to two things costing 10, again intuitively humans try to find the best value for their resources, so if one can find a better value for those 20 points spend say an option that would give him 3 times the above mentioned 10, he will take it. In the information age we are in these details spread and optimization spreads fast and now the players must short out the indecisiveness of the game system, some want to play the narrative side of it and others want to play the organised side of it and both class because both schools are mutually exclusive but the game system include them both under the hood.
@ warzan
Gaming in the gaps works on both game philosophies, personally I believe as unintuitive as it may be, the second school of thought provides a more solid foundation and that works better for gaming in the gaps, but this is another discussion completely.
I’d kinda like to get back to that whole, ‘quest for epicness’ thing again. – Dreadball and Deadzone are pretty great at doing that.
My problem with 40k though, was eventually I just got fed up of getting, well, battered in a game. Eventually the epic moments for me, which I did have a few of (one very similar to Warrens example, except it was my Assault marine dude eking out a draw…), were just completely overshadowed by games where GW staffers turned up at the club to play with his 5 Demon Princes list and wiped out my Blood Angels without me causing a single casualty. Or an apocalypse game with a warhound titan just blatting everything. Or another ‘fun’ apocalypse game where outflanking Deathrolla battlewagons kill everything…
I’ve just become worn down 40k-wise by all that sort of thing and others I’ve rambled about in previous posts. – All of these weren’t directly internet forum based, but yeah, it sure didn’t help when I started reading them and ended up being able to recognise ‘Tau-dar’ 2-3 Riptide, allied Wraithknight net-lists.
So yeah, I mostly play mantic games now (and X Wing) because generally speaking, I just haven’t found that feeling I got in 40k now of “what is even the point of turning up to play this game?” So, I do think that there is a tipping point that did make me go from, “ok, probably lose, but it may still be EPIC’ to ‘urgh.’
Excellent Weekender and XLBS this week fellas. Loads of gaming content and discussion and the tangents (awesome as they are – the original RoboCop is my all time favourite movie so always happy to hear about it) saved for XLBS.
James M. Hewit is a class act. I wish him all the best at GW and gonna miss his presence here. For me Beasts Of War is always better, fresher, more interesting and more focussed when you guys have a guest in the studio. Looking forward to Seeing Dave again for FoW FTW and anyone else you’ve got lined up for the near future. And if you can get Stu back onboard anytime, that’d be awesome too.
As posted on the DBX kickstarter:
Any of you that are Beast of War subscribers will know that James M Hewitt will soon be departing mantic for other climes.
I would like to request a DBX miniature in his honour.
He has been the face of your campaign, here and on BOW and in my view is worthy of being recognised for that. As a leaving gift and thank you from all his fans please consider this idea.
I don’t think Robocop reboot was very violent – a lot of it was very low key violence, you don’t see much – the massive shoot out is done in night vision so you see almost nothing ha ha.
I agree it was perhaps superior to the original for the first two thirds of the movie but the final third act was pretty shoddy and lost the plot a bit. Robocop is NOT a cop by the end, he’s a vigilante who is not bound by the law, taking out whoever he damn well pleases. Michael Keaton’s character was very well written until the climax where he just behaves “because the script says I do” rather than what the character did. It was a boring climax as well which never helps, unlike the original ending which was very smartly written. Shame, because the Reboot is in so many ways superior to the original and is not reliant on violence to be a good movie – take the violence out of the original Robocop movie and it’s an irrelevant movie.
There is one problem in the Reboot movie, Detroit doesn’t seem at all like it NEEDS drone-cops… In the original movie you SEE why something has to be done, and why the police are being killed left right and centre. In the reboot, things look fine. An oversight by the movie makers. Not enough budget perhaps.
That funeral story had me in tears! So good.