Jonathan Coulton's undead anthem "Re: Your Brains" will lead off our gaming session tonight as our brave band of adventurers faces off against a horde of undead besieging the town of Barovia. But hey, it's not just the undead we're dealing with today: super hero gaming returns to the table as we get back to playing HeroCrack, err HeroClix while over at Uncle Bear the conversation's turned to sex ... and gaming?
Brains! Brains! Brains?
In the two weeks since the last session, the adventurers have holed up in the center of town, helping the surviving villagers improve their defenses and trying to figure out how things went so terribly wrong in the land of Castle Ravenloft. We did quite a bit of role-playing online, with Doneghal (cleric of Daern, god of protection and fortifications) tending to the defenses, Naru the Monk urging the party to find the source of the zombie infestation, and my own rogue, Pierce Haligarth dividing his time between learning the arcane arts and discussing the town's predicament with the son of the man who hired the adventurers in the first place (and who's corpse is now rotting in his own mansion).
Back in Spandex
We're currently experiencing one of our periodic revivals of HeroClix, a game we all love but just don't have nearly enough time to play. Evil Genius and I got in a game the other week, and that inspired some HeroClix pre-gaming among the group today.
Evil Genius kicked my ass with a well-designed Avengers team featuring Ultimate Thor which just slaughtered my haphazardly built Excalibur-inspired team. This time around I spent a little more time refining my teams. Excalibur now has a probability controller on hand who can help characters like Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler Phoenix with their super-senses roles. My other team is a re-mix of an earlier Will to Power team that makes use of a couple of different characters with Willpower and Perplex abilities to control the pace of the game and provide some much needed offensive or defensive boosts where needed.
I freely admit to being a less then stellar HeroClix strategist, which is why I found this article from TCG Player helpful: Countering Tournament Tactics. It talks about many of the tactics I've had trouble countering in the past (wild card teams, TK & clobber teams, etc.) and offers strategies on countering them.
Sex and D&D
Uncle Bear killed his forums, but that doesn't mean we've stopped having thoughtful conversations about gamings at the site. Berin's taking post suggestions, with one of the first tackling the subject of Sex and D&D". The thread's already spawned 14 responses debating the merits of adding some romance to the game. My comments are posted as "NukeHavoc". Also worth checking out is the discussion about "Roleplaying and the Public Domain" which asks (and answers) the question of why we don't see more RPGs based on public domain literature.