Ask Me Anything: Falconloft

What are your favorite board games? For basketball, college, or pro, and who are your favorite teams?

@Windyridge

Up until a few years ago, if you'd asked me about board games, my answer would have been Axis & Allies (the original one, not the less good ones that they've released recently) or Afrika Corps (old, old Avalon Hill game). Over the past few years though I've gotten several Legacy games, starting with Risk, Pandemic (which immediately saw no play owing to no one wanting to escape reality by playing reality) and Seafall.

Seafall is a monster of a game, but so much fun. I can't adequately review it other than to say that it is full of twists that start with the very first game. It purports to be a game of economics and sail, but it is a lot more than just that.

As far as basketball goes, I have no clue. I haven't followed teams in years, I just like playing. The last team I went to watch were the Arkansas Razorbacks, but that's been a couple decades ago. I dislike the way players try to get around the rules and the extra rules and calls that result from that. They're doing their best to not actually play basketball, so I do my best to not actually watch.

Oooh, Overwatch...

Mains?

I main Moira & Pharah, can't play any of the tank characters worth a crap though I usually end up playing Moira like a tank and do really well.

Thoughts on OW2?

@witchdoctor

Junkrat, DVa, Lucio are my most played, though Ana and Reinhardt are seeing a lot of time lately. Junkrat is best tank, though. And best sniper. Here I am (role)playing Junkrat and doing things without a plan.

I'm not sure how I feel about OW2 yet as I haven't played the beta. The free-to-play thing was inevitable, as buy-to-play eventually doesn't generate cash for development. A lot of my opinion is going to depend on how egregious the cash store gets.

I do have to add one thing here: The new interaction voice lines are great. For instance, when a character ults and dies in the middle of it, the killing character has a voice line.
-- Soldier killing Pharah mid-ult says, "Sorry, you were yelling something?"
-- Cassidy killing Pharah says, "You know you just... hang there when you do that?"

Do the username and avatar mean anything?

The avatar looks like it could be an axis power regimental flag.

I heard once that there was a brand of beer available in Texas, I think it was Elephant Beer, or something. Somewhere around 20-25% alcohol. Does that sound legit?

Also, do you get tax deductions for ZZ Top tickets?

How many of the stereotypes for Texas/Texans "as seen on Tv" are actually pretty spot on?

Did your last birthday give you any special insights into the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?

@Adam

Kestrelstrommen is a bad translation of Falconloft that I used for an RPG once. I just liked the way it sounded. As far as the avator, I don't really remember. I think it's from Gears of War. It was one of the available options for my XBox profile and one of the only ones with a bird.

@Antiproduct

Almost all of the stereotypes for Texans happen, but they happen for a very small subset of Ranchers and Oilmen. The other 90% of us who live here? We're pretty normal.

As far as the sterotypes for Texas? There are a lot of big houses. The people who own them are almost never in them though. It takes a lot of work to afford those here, just like everywhere else. Most of them are cookie-cuuter stuff like you see everywhere else. The big old houses are almost always in the middle of a town now. Also, almost none of Texas is close to Dallas. Part of Dallas aren't even close to Dallas.

@bowlofspinach

Not really. XD Although I did decide that I had no time to waste with people who didn't want to get along. It's just easier, and not feeling the need to argue in chat or forums or elsewhere has lessened a lot of my stress.

@Qralloq

I've never heard of an Elephant beer from Texas, but there's so many craft breweries down here (there's 3 in just the city I live in and two more in the next city over) that it wouldn't surprise me if it did exist. Can you really call that beer at that point though, or is it a hops-flavored vodka after it's been distilled that much? I don't know, I'm not an expert.

I asked the lawyers that I work with if we could get tax deductions for ZZ Top tickets and after a lot of research, I was told to go ask an accountant.

The accountant told me that I could not because they are not considered 'theatre'.

It's not often that I see someone who admits to liking 4E, much less plays it. I found it to be an enjoyable game, and if they had called it anything but D&D, I would have been perfectly happy with it. I just don't feel that it was D&D. It was more a D&Desque tabletop MMO. Your thoughts?

@whtknt

I completely disagree with the MMO analogy. It's very telling that they managed to make an MMO out of D&D 3.5 but couldn't do it with 4e. I have yet to have anyone explain to me why it feels like an MMO. I really feel like this criticism found the early internet and exploded for no real reason and WotC was just too slow to pick up on it and explain things. However, the biggest concrete complaints I've heard about 4e (and I'm not claiming to have heard them all) are these:

I don't like the At-Will/Encounter/Daily setup.
Great. So don't uh... play D&D. It's always been there. (AD&D has encounter powers like the samurai's war cry.) It just wasn't explicitly called out until 4e. It's also in 5e, although they've renamed Encounter/Daily to short rest/long rest.

Every class feels the same.
Yes-ish. There was a big push for balance in 4e. Had 3.5 not been so screwed up that the strongest class choice was simply taking one level of everything, OR playing a caster (linear fighter, quadratic wizard was a fairly ubiquitous phrase at higher levels, and the Tier 1 classes were Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Archivist, and Artificer, while the magical melee classes like Crusader and Bard were at 3, and the non-magical classes never peeked out of the depths of Tier 4 and lower), and had fighters not been so royally screwed in any game with a GM who was awake, they might not have pushed for balance so hard. At any rate, a lot of what made a certain class fun in 3.5 was the fact that they were over-powered compared to other classes (and the baseline of the game) and when these were brought back in line there was much gnashing of teeth.

Why are we counting sqaures, not feet?
You were always counting squares. Every five feet was a square before and after. What 4e did was remove the rounding math and make moving go by faster.

4e wasn't RP-friendly.
I don't know about you but when I roleplay, I like to be able to roleplay. I don't need 5 charts and 15 paragraphs to tell me why I don't like the orc with the festering pustules on his nose. I'd rather be free to decide exactly how much that bothers (or doesn't bother) my character. I'm kind of glad they dropped all the tables that 3.5 had. No one really used them anyway.

4e did have it's bad points though. Primary among them were the HP imbalance between PCs and monsters (MM3 - which was an Essentials book - fixed that), The required roles (it was a good idea but cut down on what you could pick to play; if the party already had a Druid, you couldn't be a Psion), and the fact that powers didn't level up very well, often leaving you with a bad choice between keeping a power that had been good that you liked but that wasn't eally effective as much as it needed to be and a new power that didn't help you at all because you'd built in a different direction.

P.S. If you've been paying attention here, you know why I've mostly switched to 13th Age now.

Smiles. Do you think to make 4e characters that it takes longer to make 5e characters or just go back to 3.5 for characters?

@GeneCortess

It definitely takes longer to make characters in 4e because there are so many more options. You can kind of see the evolution of 4e into 5e if you look at the Essentials books because they were already paring down the options available. 3.5 makes the most... interesting characters, but it's horribly unbalanced in its sum.

13th Age is an amazing game, and I agree with a lot of points on 4e. I think Rob Heinsoo took it upon himself to upend what a lot of people had become accustomed to seeing in D&D. Unfortunately, people lacerated him for doing it, and there were some questionable business decisions from WotC.

Like most people who play TTRPGs, "borrowing" ideas for content is fairly commonplace. What are some sources for gaming inspiration that you've used over the years?

What TCGs have you played/do you play?

Also, you've run a bunch of interesting niche systems for me (and other people) on here. What's a system you never got the chance to play that you'd love to try (as player or GM)?

I like that one of your interests is to find ways and systems which lessen the need for a DM / increase the collaboration of players in the game. Which games have you run / which systems have you used that you find particularly memorable in that regard?