Titansgrave: Chapter Two

Posted on By Wil

Here’s the second episode of Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana.

Join Aankia (Hank Green), Kiliel (Alison Haislip), Lemley (Laura Bailey), and S’Lethkk (Yuri Lowenthal) in the second installment of Titansgrave: Ashes of Valkana. When we last saw our heroes, the beer had been saved and celebrations had ensued. The Beer Baron, having made the last stop in his yearly delivery trip, asks the party to escort his caravan to his estate. Aankia, Kiliel, Lemley, and S’Lethkk find themselves surrounded not only by the rarest of beers, but also by a threat so ancient that it hasn’t been seen since the days of the Chaos Wars. How will our heroes handle themselves?

You should be able to embed, screencast, share, and all that stuff. I hope you like it!

Tabletop, Kingdom Builder, and Screwing Up the Rules

Posted on By Wil

There’s a new Tabletop today, with Paul Scheer, me, Yuri Lowenthal, and Tara Platt. We played a game called Kingdom Builder, and we had a lot of fun when we did it.

We also completely screwed up the rules. For I think the 10th time this season.

I am furious, I am embarrassed, and I need to put there here so I can just refer to it when this almost certainly happens again this season:

We had a producer whose primary job was to make sure we knew the rules to the games, and played correctly. I trusted this producer to be on top of these things, and I trusted this producer to ensure that we played the games properly.

For the first two seasons, this producer did a fantastic job. A couple mistakes got through, but it wasn’t a big deal. Everyone makes a mistake now and then, and the show has always been more about the fun of playing the games than anything else. But something happened in the third season. I don’t know if this producer was careless, overwhelmed, didn’t care as deeply as previous seasons, or just didn’t do the same amount of preparation that was done for the first two seasons. I don’t know why this producer failed to do the most important part of the job so many times this season, but I’m pretty fucking pissed off that the person I trusted to make sure we played the games correctly let me down. I trusted this producer so completely, I spent my time and my energy on other aspects of production, instead of diligently reviewing the rules before every game like I’d done the first two seasons. I feel really, really awful about this. I feel embarrassed by this.

We have a very ambitious production schedule. It’s grueling for all of us, but this season wasn’t any different than the previous two seasons. There is just no excuse for something so fundamental to the show to have been so completely screwed up almost half of the time this season. My trust and reliance was misplaced, I guess, and for that I am embarrassed, I am angry, and I am sorry.

Tabletop is more than just a show where we play games. Tabletop is where millions of people from all over the world go to see how games are played, and to discover new games. We have a responsibility to our audience, and we have let a lot of you down. This is even more infuriating to me this season, because this season was literally made possible by people reaching into their own pockets and trusting us with their money. We had a responsibility to take good care of that, and we didn’t.

Ultimately, I am the host and the face and the identity of Tabletop, so ultimately this falls on me. I take responsibility for these mistakes. I am the executive producer and creator, and it’s my responsibility to ensure that everyone is doing their job. It’s my responsibility to deliver the best show I can, and too many times this season I failed to do that.

To the developers whose games we’ve messed up: I am profoundly sorry. I sincerely hope that your sales aren’t hurt by our mistakes, and I sincerely hope you will accept my apologies.

If we do another season of Tabletop, I will ensure that this never happens again. If we do another season of Tabletop, I’m going to very carefully vet a couple of experts and producers to take on the responsibility of ensuring we’re playing games correctly, and I’ll spend even more of my own time getting up to speed on the rules for each game.

So all of that said, please know that Kingdom Builder is a really great game. We had a lot of fun when we played it,  even though we completely butchered the rules.

Games (still) Matter

Posted on By Wil

I’ve been playing a lot of video games for work (I can’t say exactly what, but I should be able to pretty soon), so in addition to being late to the party on Journey, I’m also late to the party on God of War (I know. I know.).

These games couldn’t be more different, but I loved them both for their own, very different reasons. Journey felt like a meditation, and I found myself actually feeling pretty emotional toward the end of it. It’s so beautiful, I’m going to play it again when I have time.

God of War is so intense, and so fast-paced, it’s not something I could play to relax or unwind the way I could with Journey, but holy crap is it fun to level up skills and beat up on the bad guys! In fact, I had so much fun playing it last night, I completely lost track of time and it was 4am when I finally realized that I should probably go to sleep.

And my thumb hurts in that video game controller pad way that I haven’t experienced since the old Sega Genesis days and their attendant marathon sessions of NHL 94.

Just a quick thing to think about and consider, because if this hasn’t occurred to me in a long time, maybe it hasn’t occurred to some of you who are reading this: video games are supposed to be fun and entertaining. Games can certainly be art, and games can and do run the whole range of experiences from simple narrative experiences like Dear Esther to complex experiences like Civilization to challenging team-based experiences like Destiny or WoW. Games can and do entertain us the way a movie or TV shows does, but I don’t think I would have stayed up until 4am watching movies last night.

I’ve said before that games matter, and I continue to believe that (whether they are tabletop or video games). I also continue to believe — and this is the point I am taking a very long time to make — that games are supposed to be fun, entertaining, distractions.

A lot of the oxygen in the world that supports video games has been taken out of the room in the last several months by dickwagons, and I know that I lost interest in spending lots of time playing games, and didn’t even want to identify myself as a gamer.

But when I spent some time actually playing some games, I remembered why I identified myself as a gamer in the first place. That’s something I’d forgotten about, and if you’ve forgotten about it, too, maybe this will inspire you to dust off a controller and dive back in.

TITANSGRAVE: The Old Chaotic Neutral

Posted on By Wil

So I really loved that Leonard Balsera came up with some cool beer names for the Beer Baron in episode one of Titansgrave.

It appears that the Internet agrees with me, and a lot of folks have asked me if we’re going to release a homebrew recipe for The Old Chaotic Neutral.

I would love to do that, but I’m not sure what style it will be … so maybe you can help me out?

[poll id=”2″]

I’ll leave this poll open for a few days, and get to work when a clear consensus emerges. If you have further ideas or thoughts, please let me know in comments.