Monthly Archives: July 2010

What I Learned From “The Witcher”

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During the start of my vacation, I got to do something I’ve been meaning to do for weeks – finish up “The Witcher.”1 I won’t go into a lengthy review – as always, there are plenty on the Internet – but the fact that I devoted over 41 hours to finishing the damn thing probably indicates that I enjoyed it on some level. I did learn a few things from it, which are things I do want to share.

A quick note – since this is an RPG, it’s hard to deconstruct some elements without skirting spoiler territory. I’ll try to keep it as vague as possible, but if you really hate spoilers, just bookmark this and come back after you’ve finished the main story.

Meaningful Choices Add To Replay. The Witcher is, in many ways, the best BioWare game that BioWare never made. It uses the Aurora toolkit as a basis, but even more than that, a lot of the tough, complex decision-making that I know from recent BioWare titles is present in this game. There were a number of times where I had to sit and think about what I wanted to do, either because I was engaged in the story or to decide what content I wanted to see. Plus, the advancement system is designed so that you can’t be awesome at everything – you have to make choices about what kind of character you want to be. So, while I don’t see myself investing another 41 hours into the game anytime soon, I currently plan to keep it on my hard drive, and possibly giving it another go at some point in the future because I want to see how the story evolves and how my play of the game changes when I make different choices.

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  1. For those that know and care about these things, it was the “Director’s Cut” edition from Steam. ↩

Needs Must – Issue #0

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After over twenty straight days of working, my vacation begins, so I finally have a chance to work on this blog a bit. Today was the character creation and worldbuilding session for my Icons game “Needs Must.” If you’re interested in following along, feel free to check out my Obsidian Portal page for the game. There are, however, a couple of interesting wrinkles that I’d like to share outside of the game itself.

Living In A Digital World

I’m doing the same thing with this game that I did with my Scion game – running everything from my laptop. It was a little awkward to roll dice and have relevant tables available at short notice without using a specific website designed for that purpose, but otherwise I really liked having everything available in one place. Icons, however, is not only more streamlined of a system, but requires that I, as Game Master, don’t roll dice, so it’s really simple to keep things organized. This time, I’m writing my GM notes for the session in a protected Obsidian Portal page, and I have WriteMonkey up on the left hand of the screen to write notes in (with transparency on so I can see my notes through it). On the right side I have the Icons PDF up for easy reference and access. It was a touch awkward referencing the tables for random creation for many of the players, but most of them had smartphones or laptops at the table, and so a few popped open their own copies of the PDF to reference when I wasn’t able to.

Can You Hear Me Now?

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