You’ve heard of Last Night on Earth.

ICv2 tells us that it’s the #3 board, card, or family game, if an unqualified statement like that can have any meaning at all.

Actual play, Last Night on Earth style. A ring of zombies closes in and takes down the last hero they needed to kill in order to win.

The game is a scenario-based contest between 1–2 zombie players on one hand and 1–4 hero players on the other. In a given scenario, the heroes might have to kill some quantity of zombies, dynamite their spawning pits, find the keys to the pickup truck and make good their escape, or whatever. There are always four hero characters (at the beginning, anyway), chosen from among eight. All scenarios apply time pressure with a turn countdown that moves toward either dusk or dawn.

As the game plays, zombies spawn and shamble toward the heroes. They can move through walls (that is, up through the floorboards and in through the windows), but advance slowly. They aren’t very good at fighting, but have the strength of numbers on their side.

Meanwhile, the heroes frantically ransack the buildings around the edges of the board looking for cards — items and events — that can help them. Depending on the scenario, once advantageously equipped (or when the zombies press them too grievously), they turn to the game-winning task at hand and sprint for the finish line.

// Nice summary. How is it?

A screenshot of Weathertop in Lord of the Rings Online, taken from actual play.Out of curiosity, ever since the first day I played LOTRO, back in August, I’ve been informally polling players in the game with a few questions. I’ve asked on open channels, I’ve asked the members of kinships and Fellowships, I’ve asked strangers and in-game friends. Most of the questions I ask are about people’s history with paper RPGs, but the question that gets ignored the least: “Why are you here? Why did you choose LOTRO?”

A lot of the people I talked to had strong, positive opinions about their choice of MMORPG. I was expecting most answers to somehow involve the global MMORPG superpower, World of Warcraft. Some answers did. But three of the answers I got the most often surprised me.

// 3 Reasons People Play LOTRO

The WGA has been sending e-mail updates to the membership on a more-or-less daily basis since the beginning of the writers’ strike. An update from about a month ago included this bit from the picket lines: 

[Y]esterday, a middle-aged man who had come all the way from Michigan with his wife and children showed up at Paramount studios for the day. But when he saw the writers, he told them he was a member of a mechanics union and has never crossed a picket line in his life. They refused to go in.

// Read more…

You’ve read the same kinds of opinions that I have regarding RPGs, especially D&D, versus MMORPGs. Specifically, I’m thinking about the opinions that say, “If all I wanted to do was walk a bunch of miniature figures through a dungeon, fighting and looting, I’d rather do it with a videogame and not worry about knowing all those rules. Let the computer do it.”

It’s a fair point, and you can imagine that I like it because it says people want to play paper RPGs because they get a degree of freedom out of them that CRPGs can’t match. (Yet.) That’s great. I want people to keep being attracted to RPGs, and the best way to do that is to attract attention to the thing do well and other games do not, as several commentators have said in the last couple of days.

But one of those things that RPGs should do well, they often don’t.

// Read more

I’ve been reading David Mamet’s book about the film industry, Bambi vs. Godzilla. In it, at one point, Mamet asserts:

Now, in psychoanalysis, there is no such thing as accident, no such thing as coincidence or mere happenstance. Neither is there in dramaturgy.

Although he’s no demigod, Mamet is also no idiot, especially when it comes to drama. His point is relatively obvious: No piece of fact exposed to the audience of a drama should be irrelevant. All signs must point to the story; elements that fall “off the spine” are a meaningless diversion that distract the viewer* from (a) the emotional connection to the protagonist that the writer is trying to establish, and (b) the sense of absorption in the story that the writer is trying to maintain.

// Continue reading…