DDO: When the pirates upped their game

Posted on January 19, 2019 by

Bio Break

Guys, I know we all love loot at the end of a good D&D campaign, but even I have to admit that this might be ridiculous. Oh, I’m going to loot it all anyway, but still…

So there’s this thing that happens in DDO around level 10 or so when the game stops lobbing softballs at you and starts getting mean and tough. Long gone are the days of one-shotting kobolds in sewers and being lightly tickled by dungeon traps.

No, now the game makes even seasoned teams pay attention, because mobs get a whole degree more dangerous and traps can one-shot YOU. Our DDO group’s been working its way through the House D questlines — a first for me — and I’m pretty amazed at how resilient and deadly these pirates are compared to Yarryarr’s crew.

Since all of these quests are in instances, the devs have the luxury…

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The Seven Spires

Posted on January 19, 2019 by

Dyson's Dodecahedron

Raised by a talented Wizard-Noble of old Phalorm, the Seven Spires is a small ornate castle made of seven overlapping towers set on the edge of the Neverwinter woods.

The Seven Spires The Seven Spires

The small castle was used officially as a research space for the wizard-noble, but also served as an escape from court politics in the young war-based nation of Phalorm, and as a watch point over the growing orc menace in the region. Being fairly close to the settlement of Neverwinter, ties were maintained with that growing settlement and information about the movement of the orcs was exchanged.

The Seven Spires were unfortunately built on a dirt plain where bedrock was too deep to dig down to. In time this means the spires are doomed to slow collapse as the weight of the towers presses down and outwards on the foundations.

Whether or not Phalorm survives the orc hordes…

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Xbox: Goodbye or Hello?

Posted on January 19, 2019 by

VIRTUAL BASTION

For the past several years, my household has started off each new year with the same question:

Do we need a new console?

Some years this has meant, do we need to replace a dying but still useful console?, such as an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. (As far as our library goes, these consoles are still very useful.) Other years this has meant adding something new to the collection, like a Wii U (or Switch, which is still on hold for now). But this year the console question has revolved around our problem child, the Xbox One. 

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Another Post on Organizing Time

Posted on January 18, 2019 by

Erdrique's Blog

Like most gamers, the amount of time I have available to play DDO and to contribute to the DDO Community has varied over the years.  I have been playing DDO since April 2006 and since then I have played and contributed consistently but not at the same levels (measured in terms of game play logged and posts/time spent on blogging and other activities).  All of this can attributed to changes that have occurred in my personal and professional life.  This has made me reorganize my gaming schedule yet once again.

I wrote about this type of situation two other times (Blog 1 and Blog 2).  The main thing to remember when it comes to your schedule is to be flexible.  A few years ago I had what I thought of as the perfect game schedule.  During the workweek, I would log in into DDO for about 10 to…

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Year of the RPG: The Two Years

Posted on January 18, 2019 by

AmbiGaming

Everything else gets a sequel, why not Year of the RPG?

That’s right, friends. I had so much fun with Year of the RPG that I’m doing it again this year, but with a few tweaks based on what I’ve learned. For those of you who don’t remember, I deemed 2018 to be Year of the RPG here, and invited other folks to play along with me in a very loose adventuring party of sorts. I had a list of eight RPGs (most of which I got through or at least played), and was going to play through all of them before the end of the year.

Image result for yeah!

None of it went exactly according to plan. I had a loose idea of how people could collaborate, but because I didn’t want to be a task-master I decided to be very hands-off with how people would participate; I was well aware that…

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From the DM’s Chair: Approaching Adventure Modules, the introduction.

Posted on January 18, 2019 by

Shadowonthewall

Dungeons and Dragons is a truly free and unlimited past time of a hobby. It encourages storytelling, imagination and teaches interesting subjects to aspiring DMs such as the basics of world-building and even game mechanics and game designing tricks. However, for DMs, D&D also represents a herculean task of impossible measure: creating your own setting and adventure from scratch. For those creative members of our community overflowing with an abundance of world design ideas and epic long-scale plots, these overwhelming endeavours might well be an outlet for them, an enjoyed hobby to be refined and developed upon. For the past month, I’ve been doing just that: enjoying re-designing a setting of my own creation, whilst simultaneously juggling plotting a possible campaign for that world and ideas for my ongoing endeavours with the Dorvine campaign (which will hopefully be continued soon). However, not everyone enjoys world-building or, more importantly, not everyone…

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It’s been a long time

Posted on January 17, 2019 by

Anitcs ~ Pure Ascentions

I haven’t blogged in what close to 4 years now. It’s been a hectic time since my last post. My ongoing d&d group split and it’s been over a year since I have played any tabletop RPGs. I am back in school, yeah a 34 year old going back to school it’s been rough. I haven’t had much time for PC gaming in well a long while. I have tried to get back into it just to many responsibilities with my children and school and work.

I was doing some tabletop strategy gaming, like warhammer and a lot of blood bowl a few years back but my kids became toddlers and decided my miniatures were toys. It’s fine they had fun and that’s what those things were for.

I have mostly been writing content for possible campaigns. Reworking my old fairytale campaign to run smoother and be more consistent. I…

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Triple-A: down or up?

Posted on January 17, 2019 by

Later Levels

Late last year I published a post about the volume of sequels, spin-offs and remakes released since 2008. After classifying over 1,500 titles and analysing the data, I discovered that over half (59) of 2018’s top-100 titles were remakes and a much smaller number (12) were new IPs. It seems as though the video game industry is stuck on repeat: publishers like the low-risk approach of something which isn’t entirely new, while gamers enjoy the nostalgia that comes from playing something which feels familiar.

This finding was echoed in an article I read the following day on TechSpot entitled Is the next AAA-games crash imminent?, which noted three factors that could mean we’re heading for disaster: creativity, stagnation and gamer backlog. Just a couple of weeks later however I came across a piece on IGN explaining Why 2018 was the best year for video games; followed by…

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Gaming concentration

Posted on January 17, 2019 by

GamingSF

A few posts ago I was writing about a particular kind of focus regarding my gaming. I listened yesterday to a Mozilla podcast about a different kind of focus: issues with concentration while reading.

The podcast talks about reading and how the Internet-era and modern technology can interrupt the act of reading or even the desire to read traditional long-form texts such as novels. I’ve noticed this as a growing issue for my gaming hobby. My phone is usually near me while on my computer so any incoming alerts from texts, emails or other notifications can easily distract me and potentially breaking any immersion I might have in the game at that moment. Although I had most notifications switched down low or off completely on my old phone, I’ve just this week switched phones and it’ll take a while to calm down the storm of notifications that all the apps…

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Questing from January 7th to 10th

Posted on January 16, 2019 by

Erdrique's Blog

Just the previous weekend, this past week was also light in quest runs.  I kicked off the week by taking Garrrin (Level 24 Barbarian/Fury of the Wild) into the Harbor to knock out some favor runs.  I’m currently on a kick to just maximize all of my favor across all of characters.  It will slow me down in getting them leveled up but I don’t imagine it will take each character too long to fill in their blanks (of course I could be wrong on that).  In any case, I took him through Irestone Inlet (which I can’t believe he didn’t have on elite already) and Freshen the Air.  I was doing this while also playing during our digital table top game.  Speaking of the table top game, we moved over from using MapTools to Fantasy Grounds.  During this play session, I saw a lot of dialogue time…

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