(Being a series of quick game notes trying to account for the events of many sessions of playing through The Enemy Within using the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e rules.)

Session 27

Death on the Reik

• Wilhelm [Wizard] – I 55
• Wilfried [Forger] – I 53
• Larry [Mercenary] – I 48
• Gottlieb [Bounty Hunter] – I 43

Collecting themselves after the battle at the doctor’s house, they search the place. The guards from the castle are horribly decayed mutants, putrescent and foul.

Both the doctor and lady Margritte appear to have run off towards the castle at this point.

They collect rotgut from the still (10 bottles of which seem mildly magical, the rest are then used to clean the armour from the slain guards), letters between lady Margritte and the doctor regarding a special powder that she gave him which he uses to heal the citizens of their bizarre affliction…

The archetypal doh moment for me, specifically relating to MMORPG user interfaces, was from World of Warcraft. It was around the Cataclysm time I think, we’d been playing for years at that point and either my husband or I complained on voice chat with friends about the bag system. The complaint went along the lines that we were having to, yet again, empty a bag so we could then replace it with a new, larger one. The incredulous response was – just drag the new bag onto the old one and it gets replaced with all the contents still inside! Such a simple tip, one that we’ve never encountered in game, and that meant we had spent years juggling items into and out of bags each time any of our many alts got a bag upgrade.

Empty one of these bags item by item was needlessly painful …

A similar…

A post over at Going Commando about comparing raid runs six years apart had a reference to Shintar having changed the level of zoom she plays with noticeably from the first run to the second. Playing zoomed out more seems to be a common requirement of raids in several MMORPGs: I have noticed how far zoomed out my husband has World of Warcraft when raiding on the retail game. It can be quite jarring just how different the same game looks at the extreme ends of the zoom control, I often have thought it almost feels like I’m playing an real-time strategy game of some kind when I’m max zoomed out in WoW.

I normally play any MMO on a short-medium zoom level. It pays in most games to be actively observing around your character at least some-what, so I’ve never gotten used to playing in first-person or as zoomed…

I love using quick randomizers in play to make it so the game aspect of play is not just for the players – the randomizers make it so I’m playing an improv game of my own, incorporating the materials and ideas provided into the game.

I’ve made myself quite the collection of these – and while tables are the most common, they are the ones I use least. I’m much more into using dice and cards – devices that are both tactile and don’t require looking things up as I use them. I have cards for encounters, monsters, traps, “adventure modifiers”, patrons, rumours, treasures, dungeon geomorphs, villages, plots, mini quests, octopus adversaries, and more.

But the one I find I use the most in play when running fantasy RPGs is Evlyn Moreau’s “The Fabulous Pocket Guild”.

This is a wonderful deck of 132 miniature cards, each with an illustration of…