Sure, this is a great idea

Luther M. Siler

I still need to move the microphone, which is currently pinned back in that corner, but this is the setup I’m looking at right now, which my wife described as “whatever comes after ludicrous.” That’s a perfectly fair assessment; I have lost my mind, and being this close to that screen is going to blind me in short order, I think. The PS5 is going to end up to the left of all the dice on a little table; I will need to acquire a little table, however. And clearly I need some more Funko Pops.

The angle the primary monitor is at isn’t as ergonomically sound as I’d like either, but I’ve got plenty of room to move my body and my keyboard so I’m facing it directly when I’m typing; I don’t think this will lead to strain, but we’ll see.

And, just for scale, the previous secondary monitor was the size of the TweetDeck window that’s currently displayed on the TV. So, yeah. I’ve clearly lost my mind.

In which we escape

Luther M. Siler

Okay, well, if you’re gonna be picky about it, technically we didn’t escape. By, like, under a minute, I think, and I’m pretty sure I spent at least a minute saying “Wait, we didn’t win? Explain why we haven’t won,” before the final clue and the final win condition was made understandable.

Lemme back up.

My wife and I have done two escape rooms– one with a bunch of her college friends where we were not successful, and one just with the two of us where we were. She’s done a couple of others for work things as well. She got me the game pictured to the right for Christmas, and we finally pulled it out and played it tonight on her birthday. Not like we can go out to dinner or anything, right?

(I know the exact date of the last time I was in a restaurant, by the way, and we are closing in on the one-year anniversary of that date.)

Anyway, Escape Room in a Box: Flashback is exactly what it says it is, an escape room in a box. It’s a one-shot play, basically, but at basically a buck for every three minutes of play I figure the time is worth it. I would say you’re looking for between one to four players (there’s no reason you can’t play by yourself, frankly,) mostly because more than four are going to get in each other’s way. There are three of what they call “paths” but are basically separate puzzles, and then clues from all three are necessary to solve the final puzzle at the end. The final puzzle at the end is more or less what cost us the game; I thought you had to just put three physical things together, and I did, and then precious time was wasted convincing me that no, there was one more thing needed. Anyway, small teams could work on the three “paths” individually, but at some point you’re making it too easy– if three teams are working on the three paths simultaneously you’re more or less guaranteed that you’ll finish in a fraction of the time you’re allotted.

There’s a werewolf theme, but it’s not that important. It’s also technically a sequel to another game (prequel? Is that why the word “flashback” is in the title? Maybe.) but no knowledge of the other game was necessary at all. I do think we’ll end up picking it up, though, because if it’s of equivalent quality to this one it’ll be a good time. The puzzles themselves are also pretty refreshingly clear of anything that can be looked up or Googled; you’re not going to miss a clue because you’ve never seen a movie or didn’t know the date something happened or something like that and knowledge of trivia will not save you. There are maybe a couple of clues that could have been worded a little more clearly but that’s about it.

Oh, and you’ll need a freezer.

5/5 would play again, but I’d win immediately, so I’m actually never playing it again but you get what I mean.

In which here we go again

Luther M. Siler

Warning: video game nerd content higher than usual in this post. Please avoid if necessary.

So I’m playing through Nioh again. This game got months of dedicated play when it first came out, and improved my skills to the point that after I beat it I was able to go back and play through the entire Dark Souls/Bloodborne sequence and beat all four of them as well. Nioh is, to my estimation at least, easily the hardest of the five games. You may recall me devoting a post to the day I finally beat Yuki-Onna after literally respeccing my character twice and an unprecedented several months of attempts. And it turned out that the ninjutsu tree was absolutely necessary to get through the rest of the game– the bosses in this game are stupid hard, and I was only able to beat most of them by cheesing the shit out of them with shuriken and kunai. It’s not unfair to say that I didn’t beat a single boss after Yuki-Onna without at least a little bit of blatantly exploiting the game mechanics.

Well, this time ’round I’m using the goddamn odachi, because I’m a glutton for fucking punishment apparently, and I’m reaching the point in the game where I run into Yuki-Onna again and where I hit a wall. The kusarigama/ninjitsu combo I used to finally get past her is all fast burst damage and long-range stagger, and the odachi is … not either of those things. The complete opposite of those things in fact. I’ve managed to blow past three of the bosses in the early game– Hiro-Enma, Umi-Bozu and the Goddamned raven tengu— who gave me hell the first time through, so hopefully I can actually beat her for real this time.

We shall see. I’ve got shit to do this weekend, so I don’t have a lot of time for weeping and gnashing of teeth and throwing controllers. Somebody’s going down, dammit.

EDIT: Got ‘er. Took maybe 10 minutes, half a dozen attempts, and during that time she one-shotted me at least three times. This may be the greatest day of my life.

Adventures in dungeonmastering

Luther M. Siler

True fact: I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons off and on since I was in fifth grade and never once in that time have I actually been a Dungeon Master. Now, granted, my first outing was about as foolproof as it could get– my audience was my wife (inclined to forgive me any errors I might have made) and my son (who wouldn’t know the difference) and I was using a prewritten, off-the-shelf adventure that I only made a small handful of modifications to, but I still think I acquitted myself pretty well. I added a character who wasn’t in the original adventure to sort of guide them through everything and created a couple of encounters before everything got started to help them get their feet wet, and we were off to the races after that. The problem with D&D is that it takes so damn long– the adventure was two pages long as written in the sourcebook and the session took three and a half damn hours. The boy wants to play again tomorrow— he’s second level now, which is just unbelievably powerful, of course– and it’s going to be hard to convince him that Daddy is not going to have this kind of free time every single day for the rest of the winter.

The kid’s a frickin’ fiend with his dice, though– three natural 20s over the course of the session, which wasn’t super combat-heavy so that’s more impressive than it sounds, more than balancing out my wife’s two natural 1s, one of which left her flat on her back at the feet of a mimic that was doing its best to try and eat her face. I wasn’t super inclined to kill either of them, although I made sure the boy in particular knew that if he tried to pull anything particularly reckless or dumb during the session he was going to pay the price, and other than offhandedly suggesting that they kill everyone in the room during an early negotiating session with some gnomes he more or less did a decent job of reining in his more destructive impulses.

All in all, not a bad way to spend a Sunday. I look forward to doing this again.

RIP, Sarah Bird, the Griffon Lady

Luther M. Siler

It’s been kind of a rough week.

Yesterday was … day nine, I think, of this school year? And there were three fights, two of which involved at least one of my students and both of which I was involved in breaking up. They are the first fights of the year that I’m aware of; in general, this building seems substantially less violent than others I have worked in, but breaking up two hallway fights in the space of two class periods is not a situation I care to repeat anytime soon, and you can likely imagine the condition the kids were in by the end of the day. It was bloody miserable.

Today, the power went out for the back half of the day, throwing basically every aspect of the building into … well, not chaos, as honestly I feel like everyone involved dealt with the problem as well as could be hoped for, but we lost just about everything– wifi, phones, half of the toilets, a number of the sinks, all of the drinking fountains, and oh hey it turns out that every calculator in the world being solar powered isn’t a great thing if you deliberately picked the room with one window and all the light you have is from that one window and the one light wired to the emergency generator. So, no, not chaos, but a whole lot of scrambling was going on.

And then, during my team plan at the end of the day, while attempting to find an article about ILEARN testing that two of us thought was on the Tribune website somewhere, I discovered Sarah Bird passed away this weekend, and I found myself unexpectedly somewhat overcome with emotion and having to take a moment.

It’s funny, how the passing of relative strangers can hit us hard sometimes. I have been shopping at the Griffon for something in the neighborhood of thirty years– I don’t remember the two original stores, as I started playing D&D in fifth grade, which would have been somewhere around 1988. Virtually every RPG rulebook I own was purchased there, and a bunch of our board games, as after a while I developed a rule that anything that could be bought at the Griffon would be bought at the Griffon, and I probably grace their doors somewhere in the neighborhood of once or twice a year. I am not a regular customer, per se, but I am certainly a long-time customer, and the fact that the same two people had run the store for the entire time is sort of hard to miss.

I’ve had several pleasant conversations with both Ken and Sarah over the years– the Griffon is the kind of store where you don’t really just buy something and wander out– but I’m sure neither of them would recognize me, and to be completely honest I’m not sure I could have remembered their first names yesterday had you asked me, as they’ve been “the Griffon guy” and “the Griffon lady” since I was a little kid. I certainly didn’t know her last name, but I recognized their picture and the interior of the store before my brain had processed the headline on the website. I’ve never actually played anything there– my gaming group always had places to go– but it’s weird to have to explain to people how difficult it could be to be a geek thirty years ago when we damn near run the world nowadays. There was no Amazon, remember. If you were a young geek and you wanted dice or miniatures or wargaming models or whatever, it was just where you went, because nobody else bothered to carry that stuff. The Griffon was always a safe space where people like me were welcome, and the place still just sort of feels like home even though I don’t necessarily shop there terribly often.

Sarah is one of those people who had an effect on my life without me ever really thinking about it before now– if she and her husband had never opened that store, and I’d never gotten into roleplaying in fifth grade, my life could have been substantially different from what it is now. They don’t even know me, and it’s still true. All through high school and into college a lot of my friendships were people in my gaming group– not all of them, certainly, but my closest friends were all people I played D&D with. And the Griffon was a common thing for all of us, our little secret downtown that most of the other kids our age didn’t know about. It was (it is; as near as I can tell there are no plans to close the store) a genuinely special place, and that’s all due to Sarah and Ken.

She will be missed.