Those who know me well know that I have always been a fan of tabletop RPGs. I spent countless hours in my childhood playing games like D&D, Star Frontiers, Villains & Vigilantes, and Champions. Later, in college, I started playing again and that was my first flirtation with writing for games. I sold an NPC to Steve Jackson’s Pyramid magazine and though I never won, I did well in several open-calls. I thought for a while that writing for games was going to be my future, long before I was committed to writing fiction. Eventually, I fell out of gaming and got my first 9 to 5 job. For a while I was putting out an online gaming magazine called The Fireblade with a friend of mine, but eventually that fell to the wayside as I started taking fiction writing more seriously. It wasn’t until recent years that I rediscovered my love of gaming and realized the wealth of material available both from established companies and indie game developers. And this year, after creating some concepts for small gaming groups, I decided to try to put those ideas together as adventures and supplements.

For those familiar with D&D, they now have an online store called the DM’s Guild. Wizards of the Coast, who currently produces D&D, sells PDFs of older supplements there, but it’s also a marketplace for creators to put up their own creations and sell them. Figuring this would be the easiest route, I put together my first adventure and put it up for sale. Cavern of the Violator is a 5e D&D one-session adventure for low level characters centering around fungus and a strange disappearance, and was heavily influenced by the X-Files. It’s meant to be dropped into any campaign and I tried to give some tips to make it work for anyone. It’s currently for sale on DMsGuild.

That was only the beginning, though. After delving into the Warlock class, I wrote up Rykard’s Book of Patrons, an 87-page supplement with sample patrons for each of the official warlock subclasses, including optional rules and plot hooks. The goal was to create interesting patrons with their own backstories and personalities that players and DMs could either use as written or else make them a springboard for an original concept. The book also includes a new patron type, The Elemental, as well as a new patron category — Locations. Rykard’s Book of Patrons is currently on sale at DMsGuild for 7.95 with over 40,000 words of material (and lots of pretty pictures).

To celebrate the release of Rykard’s Book of Patrons, I dropped the price of Cavern of the Violator to $1.00. If you do check it out (or the patron book), I would appreciate it if you would leave a review and/or tell someone else about it if you like it.

Since I’m having so much fun, I’m sure there will be more game-related releases once I’ve worked them out. I can’t wait.

So, as expected, I jumped right into Mass Effect 2 after finishing the first game. It was just too tempting, and I wanted to see how my choices from the first game influenced the second. The way they handle this is pretty interesting, allowing you to import your character history while also allowing you to modify your character the way a new player would.

It had been something I was hoping for. I had started Mass Effect with the default appearance for Commander Shepard. Normally I spend a good deal of time crafting my characters and their appearances in RPGs, but for whatever reason, I just decided to not bother with ME1. I think I was intending just to try it out and then go back and create a better character. Only I never did.

ME2 gave me the chance to change all of that, but when fiddling with the appearances, I couldn’t find one that I really liked. Plus, I felt like I had gotten used to the way Shepard looked. The same thing applied to “class” choice. I was able to change it, but I felt that the guy I had been playing was a soldier and that should carry through. So I kept things mostly the same.

The gameplay, however, is very different. One of the biggest changes is that most of the buttons used in ME1 are different in ME2 with the exception of the buttons and triggers. But even the Start Menu has been reorganized so that I kept pushing left when I was meant to push right and so on. It was a little disorienting, especially after getting used to the gameplay of the first game.

Many other things are different. They ditched the overheating of weapons for clips which act like normal ammo. Weapons and upgrades are handled very differently. Armor, too.

But the story that I appreciated from the first game is still damned engrossing. The direction they take this game is fascinating and quickly had me hooked. A small spoiler – they jump the game 2 years into the future which adds a certain disorienting element to the game. I thought the opening was handled very well.

So it looks like I”ll be playing all the way through this one before tackling another game (aside from Red Dead Redemption, which I always keep on the side).

So far, so good…

One of the nice side effects of having a couple weeks off over the holidays was that I got to play video games for the first time in months. I have this habit of getting a new game, playing it a bit, then never getting around to finishing it. The last game I played all the way through was Uncharted 2, and mostly because it was so engrossing and entertaining that I could not put it down.

This time it was Mass Effect. I’m a fan of Bioware’s games and I had barely scratched the surface of the game and the scripted RPG elements seemed just what I was looking for. It was only the combat system that had given me pause because, frankly, I hated it. And I spent a lot of my time dying on silly encounters when what I really wanted to do was experience the story and interact with characters through dialogue and choices.

This time when I played, I checked out the settings and realized I had it set on regular difficulty. So, feeling like the combat system was getting in the way of enjoying the game, I set in on easy. And that was the right decision. I finished the game last night and had a great time doing it.

Most impressive for me, of course, was the story of the game. I know it’s no surprise to find well-written games these days, but it’s not hard to see why the game industry does so well and why games rival movies now in terms of entertainment dollars. I found myself wishing that we’d have more movies of a similar caliber instead of the constantly recycled Hollywood formula.

Normally I like to take a break between games like this. Like I would end up playing an RPG like Fallout instead or a shooter or something different. But I’m really tempted to just jump right into Mass Effect 2. I enjoyed the last game that much.

Of course there’s always Red Dead Redemption if I feel like a short break. I don’t know if I’ll ever get tired of that game.

What games are you enjoying and playing? What are the best written games that you’ve played?

My brother emailed me the other day to let me know that the first book in Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series was now available for the iPhone. For those who don’t know the books, they were gamebooks, set up in the choose-your-own-adventure style, but with roleplaying elements such as stats and battles that required the use of 2 six-sided dice. There were a slew of them at one time including the Fighting Fantasy books (also from Steve Jackson) and the Lone Wolf gamebooks from Joe Dever.

These books were more my brother’s thing than mine, but being into fantasy and RPGs, I read them, too. They were fun – a kind of interactive reading experience that you could play by yourself, and in the case of Sorcery! and Lone Wolf, you could create your own continuity. If you found, for example, a particular item in one book, that item might come into play in a future book. But only if you had found it before (though, of course, this depended on the honor system).

Putting something like this on the iPhone, to me, makes a lot of sense. The game aspects can be automated while the choose-your-own-adventure parts are maintained. Only the first of the books is up, but I suppose more will appear if sales are good.

But this isn’t the only content from my youth that is now reappearing on platforms like the iPhone and the iPad. Point and click adventure games are making a comeback, too. Ports of old games have been reappearing with great frequency for mobile platforms. Monkey Island made a lot of noise when it was released for the iPhone. And not too long ago I downloaded an old favorite – Broken Sword – for my phone as well. It makes sense – the iPhone, iPad and even the DS are touch devices and the point and click interface scales well on them (with a few tweaks).

What I wonder, though, is whether this is a purely nostalgic phenomenon (as many of the people who have iPhones remember these games and books fondly), or whether this is simply the recognition that there is an opportunity here. What I hope is that we see some new games being developed with the same interface. Or at least newer entries in series that have long lain dormant. A new Monkey Island game, for example.

Whatever the case may be, I’m holding out for King’s Quest 6. If that happens, I’ll be happy.

Would you pay money to play any of these games again? Or new ones?

The A.V. Club rounds up their picks for the best 15 video games of the decade (from 2000 on). I’m a big fan of several of their picks (Fallout 3, Rock Band, GTA) but I thought it was an unusual list. Picking out even 15 was a hard task, especially considering all the various console and PC games released in the last 10 years, but only one nod was given to Nintendo (and that was for a Game Boy Advance game). And as much as I love Fallout 3, I was surprised by its inclusion, maybe because I felt that the earlier Oblivion game from Bethesda maybe did a bit more right. But it’s a subjective thing, of course, and I would be hard pressed to pick out 15 games that I would call “the best” (though I may now be tempted to try).

I’m interested to hear what games you would put in the list.