Most people know me as a blogger about MMORPGs. But if you look at my avatar on my blog, that is actually an image which dates back to my previous activity on the Magic the Gathering Online forums. It is photoshopped from my avatar on those forums and a MtG card, and was given to me as a prize for winning a forum poll on who was the most helpful contributor to the forums. I have spent most of the 90's playing Magic the Gathering in paper form, and was a judge at one World Championship. So my background is as much collectible card games as it is about MMORPGs, only that the former is less well known.

I am telling all this because of Hearthstone. I am not in the closed beta and didn't have opportunity to try it yet. But I couldn't help but notice that there is a strong buzz around the game. I consider it extremely likely that Hearthstone will be Blizzards next big thing. While Wizards of the Coast more or less botched the implementation of the online version of Magic the Gathering, and many companies had mixed success with online collectible card games, I do believe that making a great online collectible card game is playing right to Blizzard strengths: Taking known concepts and polishing them to a great game.

Furthermore collectible card games work extremely well with another modern fashion: Free2Play games. Even Mojang is considering changing Scrolls to Free2Play. The collectible cards business model is well established since the 90's, and accepted by most people, although it always had a whiff of Pay2Win to it. It is a lot easier to make an online game from a franchise that always had people pay for more stuff, than to convert something that used to have a different business model into Free2Play (e.g. EA's new Dungeon Keeper which is Free2Play, and heavily criticized for it by the fans of the old game).

Assuming Hearthstone works well and is very profitable, what do you think will happen? As always other companies will try to clone the concept, or use it with some modification. Magic the Gathering spawned a multitude of similar games, and Hearthstone will probably do the same. Selling collectibles is inherently extremely profitable, just look at the success of Skylanders. A wave of games with collectible content may well be on the horizon. Maybe I will even get the MMORPG with collectible card elements I have been talking about for a decade.

Well, maybe he doesn't. But he *did* say "I’d be interested in what other veteran MMO players have to say about it". With it being a comment on Reddit saying:

The truth of the matter is, those of us that grew up on the hardcore MMOs, we’ve already done it. Most of us just don’t want to do it again. I don’t want to play a MMO that takes over a year to hit the level cap. I don’t want to play a MMO where I have to stand around for hours before I get to play. I don’t want to play a MMO where I can permanently lose everything I’ve done in the last few hours. I’ve already done that; I don’t want to do it again. The novelty of the MMO is gone. There are better ways to enjoy my time.

So what I have to say about this is that I understand the sentiment, and mostly think the same, but I believe there is a huge flaw in one part of it, namely "I don’t want to play a MMO that takes over a year to hit the level cap.". Because I would very much like to play a MMO that takes 10 years or more to hit the level cap.

Basically the flaw is not in the thinking of the Reddit commenter, but in the design of most MMORPGs since Everquest: There are two very distinctive phases, "Leveling up" and "End game". And quite often the end game has the more interesting content, e.g. being the only part of the MMO which is actually "MM", while the leveling phase is a badly disguised single-player game. But what if there was no end game? What if there was only leveling up, which took forever, but had all the interesting content in it?

Most people don't even understand the question, because they started playing with World of Warcraft or later games. I played Ultima Online and Everquest. And in 19 months of Everquest I never hit the level cap (because I played more than one character), but still loved the game. So for me a game where you don't hit the level cap appears very much possible, and possibly fun. But it *would* require major changes to the leveling up game.

I believe that MMORPGs have only tried the extremes of the options for the leveling game, either "forced grouping" or "soloing is optimal", and have failed up to now to explore the middle ground. I can imagine a leveling game where the xp bonus for grouping is balanced in a way that it makes up for the time lost to find a group, without being so high that soloing becomes impossible. Basically grouping should be advantageous, but soloing should be a viable option. And that would work best in a game where a player is *always* interested in experience points, because he never reaches the level cap.

To those who say that a game without a level cap is impossible, I would like to point out that nobody has ever hit the cap in EVE Online, and the game seems to work just fine. And for once that isn't linked to it being a game about treachery and PvP. Now I don't consider the EVE system a good model for a game without level cap, because advancement in EVE is in real time, even offline. I would very much prefer a game where the developers can gently nudge people towards content by playing with xp bonuses. For example Everquest had xp bonuses for under-utilized zones, which is a good idea. It is great to have the option between "high risk, high reward" and "slower, but safer" zones to play in.

So the game without a level cap would get around the "I don’t want to play a MMO that takes over a year to hit the level cap." issue, and if xp bonuses for grouping are balanced also around the "I don’t want to play a MMO where I have to stand around for hours before I get to play." issue. The "I don’t want to play a MMO where I can permanently lose everything I’ve done in the last few hours." issue is a bit more complicated. On the one side I would want a game to have an option for risk, and risk can't exist without loss. On the other side I wouldn't want original EQ-like "naked corpse runs", level loss, and the possibility of permanently losing all your gear. But again there are intermediate options, like death applying a penalty to future xp gains, with an option to have that penalty disappearing while offline.

Ultimately it comes down to "The novelty of the MMO is gone.". Because while it that is certainly true for the incremental minor improvements of today's MMORPGs, this isn't really an inherent feature of the genre. We *could* have a modern MMORPG with novelty, *and* having some of the advantages of the "old school" MMORPGs. It is just that nobody dares to make a game like that.

I've been playing a lot of Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign lately on my iPad. Some types of games work best with specific input devices, and match-3 games work great on touch screens. About the game itself there isn't much to say: Just like every other game of the Puzzle Quest series it combines some sort of match-3 puzzle combat with some sort of RPG game, only that in this case you play Marvel super-heroes instead of generic fantasy heroes. As the story in all Puzzle Quest games is weak and badly written, you might as well ignore the setting and just concentrate on the gameplay. But what makes this version of Puzzle Quest so different is the business model: It is a Free2Play game as opposed to all the buy-to-own previous versions.

What I think is important about Free2Play games is how much of it you can actually play for free, and how much of it you can play if you spend tens of dollars on it. Some games do have options to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on them, but I never do that, and so I am not much interested in what would be on offer. Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign can be played for free for some time, enough to tell you whether you like the game, but not forever. Unlike many other games there really isn't an option to grind instead of paying. Missions have a limited number of rewards, usually 4, and then you either can't play them any more, or you can play them for a token reward of 20 Iso-8 units, which really doesn't get you anywhere. So as you can't grind missions forever, at some point you might run into missions that are too hard for you unless you use money to increase your power. "Pay2Win" is unfortunately a very loaded term, but to some extent it applies here.

What annoys many people even more is that you can't play Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign for long without pause. If you take damage in a mission, which soon becomes inevitable, your heroes heal that damage in real time. So you either start the next mission with already weakened heroes, or wait until they are fit again. How annoying that is depends very much on your play style: If you play casually, a game here and there, that feature isn't stopping you much, especially since you get 4 health kits which regenerate with time. If you like to play the same game for hours, you're out of luck.

What I did was spend some money on this game, which allowed me to increase the size of my inventory for heroes, and get more different heroes of a half-decent level. That helps with the working around wounded heroes, as they heal while you play with the alts. And I don't mind paying for it, because it is basically added content: Different super-heroes have different abilities, so playing with different teams changes how the game plays. It is fun to look for the best combination of heroes to beat strong opponents. So I would say that in the "spend tens of dollars on the game" area, Marvel Puzzle Quest is quite enjoyable.

But if you are notoriously allergic against Pay2Win games, you'd better stay away from this. I haven't tried it, but it appears to me that you can buy both the "covers" you need to get and advance your super hero powers as well as the Iso-8 you need to level up. So it appears possible to buy yourself max-level super-heroes for real money without even needing to play the game. I am the kind of person who doesn't even understand why you'd want to do that, but the more competitively minded players appear to be affected a lot by that sort of feature.

Note that you can buy Puzzle Quest 2 on the iPad for $3.99 (which is less than what you'd spend on Marvel Puzzle Quest to make it enjoyable). You even get PvP multiplayer in the iOS version. So even if there are less heroes, and thus less variety than in the Marvel version, Puzzle Quest 2 might be the better option for some people.

We ended the previous session with a cliffhanger, the heroes having opened a door leading to a room with a mummy and possibly other monsters in it. So this time we jump right into the action, rolling for initiative. The effect from the cards of the Deck of Many Things comes up with the rogue card, allowing a player to dominate the mummy for one turn. So the group stays back, orders the mummy to come to them, and then all attack it. That works reasonably well, but it means the players are are grouped closely together. That turns out to be not ideal, as among the other monsters arriving is a floating, flaming skull that throws a fireball and burns everybody in the group. But otherwise the fight goes well, and is quickly finished. One nice move was the warrior using an action point for a second attack instead of moving into safety, and being rewarded with landing a critical hit for very impressive damage, killing an enemy.

Now this was already the third fight of the game day, and the players are running low on healing surges and daily powers. A discussion breaks out where to rest, with the wizard preferring to go back up to the temple, where Sir Oakley holds vigil. But when the group arrives there, they find they aren't the only adventurers in Gardmore Abbey: A group of five rival adventurers is in the temple, busy collecting the gold from the harpies that the players had left behind. And a tugging feeling from the cards in the players' possession shows that the rivals have already found cards of their own.

Now this is pure sandbox, a combination of an event determined by random card draws in the adventure module with the situation created by the decision of the players to leave the gold behind. I half expected the players to attack their rivals, but ultimately they don't. Instead they decide to leave the abbey complex and spend the night outside. And when they return to the temple, their rivals are gone. So they go back down into the catacombs and randomly decide which of two possible doors to open.

Behind the door they open is a heavy dragon-scale curtain, which somewhat negates their usual tactic of staying behind and firing into the room from outside. The wizard holds the curtain open with his summoned mage hand, and everybody rushes in for a fight with another mixed group of undead, ghasts and wraiths. The players are closely packed just inside the curtain, with the undead rushing them from all sides. But this time that works out better, as the monsters have no area attacks, and with so many undead so close the turn undead ability of the cleric becomes really powerful. At first the fight looks difficult, as the wraiths are insubstantial and only take half damage. But the radiant damage from the turn undead makes them vulnerable, and the turning makes some of them miss turns. Two of the wraiths are vortex wraiths, which explode on death, so the heroes end that encounter victorious but damaged. And as it was already midnight, we ended the session there.

I've been traveling a lot recently, and usually take my iPad with me. That turned out rather well, in spite of excessive European data roaming charges of up to 0.45€ per megabyte (used to be up to 1€) making the use of the 3G module nearly impossible. But it turns out that it is a good idea to have that 3G module anyway, because it comes with a GPS receiver (as opposed to guessing your location by the IP addresses of WiFi hotspots).  So if you are in a big city, you can usually find an app with an offline map for it, and then your iPad becomes a perfect city map: It doesn't just show you the map of the city, but also where you are and even which direction you are looking.

There are stll a lot of places that don't have free WiFi. Fortunately many games on the iPad work without an internet connection. And many media apps, from the Kindle app to the BBC iPlayer let you download content in advance, so you can read/watch it at the airport even without WiFi. And the battery life of an iPad beats a typical laptop by a huge margin. Not to mention how much less weight you lug around if your iPad is your laptop, your books, your magazines, your city maps, and your tour guides all at once.

Now I have an iPad 3, and Apple just announced the 5th generation called iPad Air. So I'm wondering whether I should upgrade, seeing how much I use it. Faster processor, lighter tablet, same battery life, sounds good to me. The only thing that annoys me is that I like to have a lot of memory: Currently 64 GB, and I'd go for a 128 GB model if available for the iPad Air. But Apple gives you only 16 GB in the base model, and then demands a full $100 more for just 16 GB more. If you compare that to the price of a 16 GB USB stick, Apple is clearly ripping us off here. There is a good reason why Apple makes it deliberately complicated to any form of external memory on an iPad, and doesn't allow you to just connect some USB stick to your device. People had some success with the camera connection kit, but that is rather limited for extending your iPads memory, and basically only works for photos and videos in the right format with strict naming conventions.

On the plus side the European Commission is working to make data roaming charges go away. They'll be lowered to 20 cents per MB in Europe in July 2014, and the commission is twisting arms to make them disappear completely. Once you have decent 3G everywhere, you can use more cloud storage and less physical storage. The future is looking bright for mobile computing. No wonder sales of standard PCs are down so much.

The two games are rather different in their game mechanics. Heroes of Neverwinter is a more tactical game which isn't unlike actual 4th edition D&D. Arena of War has a far stranger combat system, where you slingshot your hero against the monsters and damage is determined by how many times they bump around and into what obstacles. Part pinball, part Squids (another iOS RPG). But what the two D&D games have in common is that you don't play only your character(s). Instead you play your character and party members which are controlled by you, but are "borrowed" characters from other players.

And that really doesn't work very well for me: You can group with borrowed higher level characters, and your own character will barely have a contribution to the success of the adventure. In Arena of War you even just get random characters to play with you, which sometimes are much, much stronger than yours. But of course you can only level up your own character. Not much fun if leveling him up doesn't matter at all in view of his much stronger companions. There doesn't even appear to be any better reward if you do adventures with lower level companions.

Arena of War is further marred by an energy system where you run out of quest energy very quickly, and it takes hours or money to get it back. So while I do actually like the weird pinball combat system, I consider Arena of War nearly unplayable because of the social system and energy system. Hasbro really should take better care to whom they sell those D&D licenses.

There has been some interesting discussion of skill in MMORPGs in the blogosphere lately. Bhagpuss quite correctly states that even a supposedly "easy" game like World of Warcraft isn't all that obvious to play for a completely new player, and requires some skills: "you do need to be both literate and able to interpret poor or partial instructions because most MMOs require you not only to read a lot but also to read between the lines. A good sense of direction, a good visual memory and some better-than-basic map-reading skills are important, too.". Jeromai talks about the fact that games are repetitive, that repetition improves our skills, and that "flow" results from our skill level being matched by the challenge level of the game.

If you believe that a game is most fun if it meets your high skill level with a high challenge, then obviously games should be designed that the actions of a player in the game first increase his skill level, and then lead to a higher challenge. And in my opinion that is often exactly where MMORPGs fail: There are countless examples where a MMORPG gives a player a new, better piece of gear for an activity that did not require more than the most basic skills. If today you gather Timeless Coins in World of Warcraft, it is unlikely that the activity increases your skill level, because it is far too trivial for somebody who has already reached the level cap and thus more than proved that he possesses the basic skills. At the same time the activity rewards you with better gear, and better gear *decreases* any future challenge.

In the best case scenario the MMORPG has content which is too difficult for you, and doing the trivial task with the epic reward decreases that challenge towards the point where it fits your need. But as individual skill levels of player vary widely, the designers can't be sure of that. There must be as many cases where a player already has the gear which would make some challenge for him just right, and giving him additional epics for trivial tasks will just make that other challenge too easy for him. As it was often remarked that players have a tendency to "minmax the fun out of a game", you can't rely on players to use the easy-to-get epics only to adjust challenge levels for maximum fun. Quite often players will go for the best gear first, and worry about challenge later, when they have already overshot the target.

Where it gets really tricky is when the skill required isn't individual but requires a group of people to coordinate. So now you get 10 or more people with different individual skills and different gear, thus different individual challenge levels, trying to practice a collaborative challenge. That is obviously fraught with peril of things going wrong and causing guild drama. And the chance of all participants arriving at a common state of flow are slim, even if it *is* great if they get there ( everybody's best guild memories ). So ultimately, while there are moments in MMORPGs which are about skill and reaching flow, in general the genre isn't all that good at getting players there.

I don't really like watching real TV any more. Having to watch at a specific time, and then getting interrupted by advertising breaks isn't comfortable enough for me. And I also like to be able to watch several episodes of the same show one after another, instead of waiting a week for the next one. In consequence I have a huge collection of TV shows on DVD, which suit me a lot better than live TV. But as I watch most shows only once, a TV on demand service streamed from the internet would suit me even better. Unfortunately the majority of the TV on demand services decided to deny me access because I live in a different country. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, you name it, I haven't got it. Living in Belgium I have access to services like Belgacom TV, but that only has movies, and most of them in French or Dutch, not English.

The one notable exception from this is the BBC iPlayer for iOS. Not to be confused with the BBC iPlayer you can access via your browser, because that one only works if you live in the UK. The iOS version requires a subscription, which I picked up at a discount this summer for 50€ for a whole year, which is well worth it. Since then I have spent less time playing games, and more time watching TV on demand from the BBC.

Now the BBC iPlayer isn't perfect. The iOS version doesn't have subtitles, which is weird: The UK-only internet version of the iPlayer *does* have subtitles, but the international version doesn't. Not that I would want to deny the hearing impaired citizens of the UK their subtitles, but I suspect there are a lot more people that don't speak English natively outside the UK who would appreciate English subtitles for BBC programs. Especially if the program features speakers from UK regions with strong accents.

The other flaw of the BBC iPlayer is that the offer isn't complete. For example I was able to watch 19 episodes of Dalziel & Pascoe on the iPlayer, but there are another 27 episodes that aren't available. As the series stopped in 2007, and it is the later episodes that are mostly missing, it is hard to understand that selection. For some shows even very old episodes are available, I watched the very first Dr. Who from 1963, but for example for Top Gear the first seasons available are 6 and 8, in spite of that show being much more recent. (That is Top Gear UK. Top Gear USA is also on the iPlayer, but frankly it is a rather bad copy which lacks the personality of the original.)

Nevertheless overall the BBC iPlayer is very good, and good value for money. BBC series on DVD are comparatively expensive, because often one season only has between 3 and 6 episodes, and sells for about the same price as an US series with 12 to 24 episodes. And even if the DVDs are reasonably priced, e.g. a season of Top Gear for between 8 and 12£, getting access to 15 seasons for €50 for a year is much cheaper.

The BBC is making some good programs, with everything from cop shows to excellent documentaries on offer. But obviously on the BBC iPlayer you *only* get BBC programs. Thus I would be very much in the market for a TV on demand service which would let me watch American TV shows. Again my interests are wide, I like several of the show on Discovery or the History Channel, like Mythbusters, Pawn Stars, or Storage Wars, but also HBO programs like The Wire, or Boardwalk Empire, or many of the police procedural shows on other TV chains, e.g. CSI. $79 for an annual membership to Amazon Prime Instant Video? Sign me up! Except that Amazon won't let me do that. Nor apparently will anybody else. I would have to pretend to live in the USA and hope that some complicated deception using fake IP addresses would give me access, but as Amazon already knows where I live and getting a fake mailing address with credit card attached is probably illegal, I don't want to try. So the only thing I can do is waiting for the TV on demand services to expand their offering to different countries. Which apparently isn't a technical problem, but a legal one. So to borrow a phrase from Top Gear: "How hard can it be?"

Different editions of Dungeons & Dragons have different philosophies on how to structure adventures. Earlier editions worked with resources that regenerated very slowly, usually once per day, like spells. And hit points also regenerated slowly. That enabled a style of adventure where these resources were depleted by many small fights, basically what a MMORPG player would call trash mobs. 4th edition has less of those daily resources (daily powers & healing surges), and more resources that regenerate between fights after just 5 minutes of rest. That means that trash mobs are less viable, because players can beat them without using daily powers, and will only spend a minimum of healing surges between trash fights. So 4th edition fights tend to be more epic, which has both advantages and disadvantages.

One frequently cited disadvantage is that a single encounter can take an hour or more. But in practice it turns out that encounter duration is less a problem of the combat system, but more a problem of how well the encounters are run. You can shave off half of the time needed to run an encounter by simply preparing it well as a DM.

For my current campaign adventure I prepared battle maps for all adventures. The monsters are tokens, some of which came with the adventure, others with the monster vault. I keep track of initiative with little initiative "riders" placed on top of my DM screen. And I have a page prepared for each encounter on which I keep track of hit points and status effects. That works quite well once set up. But as I had one folder with all the maps, one box with all the tokens, one box with all the ini riders, and one folder with all the score keeping pages, the current adventure revealed a problem: With 33+ encounters in the adventure, it still takes a lot of time to get everything set up. Especially at the start of the adventure, where I had no idea where my players would be heading to, as the sandbox nature of the adventure gave them a lot of options.

But in the previous session my players descended into a dungeon. And we even stopped at the start of an encounter, just before rolling initiative. That means I have a much better idea of what will happen next. The players will most likely play through that encounter next, and after that they are likely to want to explore the dungeon further. So now I already sorted my prepared material in advance. The map, tokens, ini riders, score page, and any handouts I might want to show for one encounter are now in one transparent envelope. I haven't done those envelopes for every single encounter in the adventure yet, but I'm covered for those most likely to happen next. I'll do the others later.

Preparation takes time, and that isn't every DM's cup of tea. But we only play once or twice per month, which gives me a lot of weekends to prepare each session. And the time I spend preparing then results in less time spent during the session with boring administrative stuff, and more time spent actually playing and having fun. Even if I must say that Madness at Gardmore Abbey due to its size and structure takes more preparation time than other adventures, I still feel the time spent is well worth it.

I don't normally promote Kickstarter projects, because I am mainly interested in video games, and video game projects have a long tradition of being late, over budget, and coming out rather different than promised. But in the case of Slumber Stories I decided to make a difference, because this project is about sets of wooden dice. The project appears immediately realistic, needs just $,1000 CAD, and even the shipping cost are spelled out.

The principle of Slumber Stories is easy: You roll the dice and make up a story with the random pictures you rolled. As the name suggests that can be for bedtime stories, but you can also play this with your children during the day. You could even use the dice to help you create stories for roleplaying games. This looks like a wonderful toy, especially if you want to promote your children's creativity.

Just a short advice post for new bloggers, based on one of the dirty little secrets of gaming blogging: Most of your readers will read your blog from their work computers during office hours. When they are at home on their gaming computers, they'll rather play games than read about them. In consequence it is advised to keep your blog "safe for work": No sound, few graphics, and a color layout that looks sufficiently neutral to look like a serious website from a distance. Your readers will thank you for that!

There is currently some discussion on a list Syp compiled on what MMORPG the readers of Massively would recommend to others. The problem I have with that is that I wouldn't recommend any specific game to any specific person without knowing more about him. Has this "other" already played several MMORPGs or is he a complete newbie? What kind of game does he otherwise like? Preferably you'd make that other person do a Bartle Test and give your recommendation based on that.

I do think that not only were the number of responsed Syp got too small to be statistically significant, they also were not representative because of who was polled. A regular reader and commenter of Massively is already a lot more involved in these games than the average MMORPG player. And it appears to me that some people answered more the question of "what would you play" than "would would you recommend to somebody else".

In particular I don't think Syp's list gives good recommendation to new players. If somebody is new to the genre, he would probably be better off with a mass market game that offers a lot of hand-holding, like World of Warcraft. The Secret World which made the top of the list is already less suitable for newbies, and EVE Online on second place is probably the game you'd recommend to a newbie if you hated him and wanted him to stay well away from MMORPGs for the rest of his life.

What game would you recommend to somebody who has never played a MMORPG in his life?

The Nosy Gamer has an interesting post up pondering the question whether Star Citizen is a threat for EVE Online. He quotes somebody from CCP who appears to be not worried because "It's not a sandbox MMO". Now I am pretty sure that a good number of people play EVE because it is a sandbox MMO. All the stories that make the rounds in the MMO blogosphere about treachery and betrayal and scams in EVE Online only exist because EVE Online is a sandbox MMO. And thus a game like Star Citizen wouldn't be a good alternative to people who play EVE Online for the sandbox aspects.

But what about the famous 80% of players that never leave the safe part of the EVE galaxy? Isn't it likely that a good number of them are in fact not so much interested in the sandbox aspects of EVE, but rather play the game because they like playing a modern online version of Elite? If you play EVE because you haven't found another online game which allows you a career as interstellar merchant or fighter pilot, wouldn't you be rather tempted by Star Citizen?

I very much agree that EVE Online's unique selling point is being a sandbox MMO. I'm just not so sure that every EVE player plays that game only or mostly for that reason. It isn't as if you had the choice between all that many space-faring MMOs.

Without differences in opinion the blogosphere would be a rather dull place. And that includes the Newbie Blogger Initiative, because "how to blog" is as much a possible bone of contention as "how to play games". So while I very much respect other bloggers opinion on blogrolls, e.g. Syl's excellent post on that matter, I would like to state a differing opinion on this subject.

A blog is a living thing. The activity on it can wax and wane. The author of the blog might switch games and suddenly write a completely different type of blog posts (I certainly did that). And if you compare how frequently the average blogger updates his blogroll with how quickly blogs change, you will see that there is a possible problem: Your blogroll might direct people to dead blogs, and blogs that don't have much in common with yours any more. On the other side your blogroll might well miss active and relevant blogs, with the writers of those blogs being somewhat miffed that you didn't include them on your blogroll. And a blogroll, by being mostly static, can fail to point out the most important posts you've seen somewhere else.

For all of these reasons I have chosen a different link strategy for my blog: I don't have a blogroll, but instead I link directly to blog posts I consider relevant. That simultaneously gives me the opportunity to not just link, but also state my opinion on the other blogger's post. I consider that a more dynamic and alive form of connecting blogs with each other. But of course that is just my opinion, which isn't universally shared.

Imagine you have an open house party at your place: Friends bringing friends, and you end up on your sofa with a bunch of guys you barely know, discussing sports or whatever. The people on your sofa might root for different teams, and there might be some friendly banter about the strengths and weaknesses of certain players or what happened in some recent match. But if you are unlucky you get the obnoxious guy, who starts insulting you and your friends for supporting a different team, and whose behavior is becoming increasingly louder and impolite. At some point in time you need to step up, make use of your domestic authority, and kick that guy out from your sofa and your house.

A blog works just the same way. If you have a comments section, you will attract comments from people who disagree with you. If you think a bit about the psychology of that, you'll find that of course people who agree with you will rarely bother to express that, while the stronger somebody disagrees with you, the more likely he becomes to comment. So your comment section will always be biased against the opinion you expressed in your post. And if you try saying something balanced, you'll be attacked from both extremes. And all that is all right, and part of the normal discussion culture of the internet.

But sooner of later you'll get comments from "that guy", the obnoxious one looking for a fight, either with you or with somebody else commenting on your blog. He might be insulting, he might be trolling, he might be trying to derail your thread, and the better your arguments are to prove your point, the more aggressive he will become. And then you need to apply the sofa test: If the guy is behaving in a way where you'd have kicked him from your sofa and your house in real life, you need to kick him out of your comment section of your blog.

Of course that will cause howling about censorship and freedom of speech. But actually it is the aggressive troll who is impeding the freedom of speech of you and your other commenters. Once a comment thread goes down in a blaze of fire, any rational discussion of the subject becomes impossible. Only by imposing certain standards of polite discussion can you maintain a comment section of value.

Oh, and once you got a decent pagerank and popularity, you'll get comments advertising questionable websites and the like, with links, for everything from gold sellers to casinos. Don't think twice, delete those immediately!

Compared to today's social media, blogging is somewhat old school. There is still a whiff of outdated dot.com ideas attached to it, dreams of getting rich and famous by having a website. Today a new blogger has to ask himself why he really wants to write a blog. Who do you want to write for, and what do you hope to get out of it?

If you hope for getting money from blogging, I can only advise against the idea. My blog is over 10 years old and comparatively successful. 6 million visitors came to my blog over the years (the Sitemeter counter at the bottom of the page is stuck, apparently Sitemeter went under). But if I add up all the donations and freebies with some monetary value that I received over the years, I earned less than $100 per year from my blog. Sure, I never tried to optimize that. But even if I had, I wouldn't have made much more than twice that. I love receiving donations as a sign of appreciation. But I don't think you could ever make any substantial income from a gaming blog. Not unless you bundle useless advice into a pdf file and sell it as "gold guide" or something similarly fishy.

Maximizing the number of your readers is a different story. Whatever your underlying motivation is, in many cases you would prefer your blog to be read by as many people as possible, even if you don't want to monetize those "eyeballs". Just be careful with what exactly you do to increase the number of your readers. There are methods of search engine optimization that don't actually increase the number of real readers, even if they make some statistical counter or pagerank go up. Over the years I have found that the number of readers strongly correlates with the amount of content you offer. Write an interesting blog post every single day, and you'll get lots of regular readers. At this point I used to give advice about putting your blog posts in full on an RSS feed, as opposed to putting just a header and forcing people to visit your blog to read your posts. But observing my own feed reader count it appears that the demise of the Google Reader pretty much killed RSS as a technology. These days I share via Google+, and that one doesn't even give me the option of putting my full texts. Modern social media have problems with people writing more than one paragraph.

Ultimately you might want to reconsider the notion that you write your blogs for others. If you consider you writing to be a service for other people, you will in the long run get rather disappointed by how little recognition you can earn even with lots of hard work on your blog. One of the reasons we have such a thing as the Newbie Blogger Initiative is that without it encouragement for new bloggers is hard to come by. At the height of the popularity of this blog I had over 3,000 visitors a day, but not more than one "thank you" e-mail per month.

So over the years I found that a much better concept is the idea that you write your blog for yourself. There is a lot of value in writing a blog which is independent from the number of people who read it or who respond to it. For example writing regularly improves your writing skills, especially if you blog in English and that isn't your native language, like it is the case with me. Another positive effect is that your blog can serve as a sort of diary: I find it interesting sometimes to read what I thought about a game years ago; and these days I use my blog as a chronicle of my D&D campaign, bitterly regretting that I don't have a similar chronicle of the campaigns I played before. Finally even if there are only a few people listening, expressing your opinion always has a positive effect on your peace of mind. If you are lucky, you can even sometimes get an interesting discussion going about things you are passionate about.

So in summary, I still consider blogging to be a good thing. Just think about what your purpose is, and how to get there. The Newbie Blogger Initiative can provide lots of excellent advice for different purposes, there is no "one right way" to do it.

In the previous session the Favorites of Selune started exploring Gardmore Abbey. They had ignored the more obvious entrances and gone around the abbey and through the back entrance right in the great temple at the heart of the complex. As we had stopped there right at the end of a fight, this session started with the aftermath of the combat there.

Having slain the harpies and angels that attacked them, the heroes realize that something strange was going on in this place: Angels are supposed to be on the good side, and the harpies acted crazy too and pretended to be priests of Bahamut. Looking through the temple they find the rune of light sign from a card of the Deck of Many Things just fading, which leads them to a hidden compartment in the altar where they find a second card, the Rogue. There is a long discussion on how they think those cards work in combat, and who in consequence should be carrying them. In the end the rogue carries the Rogue card and the wizard takes the Gem card.

They also find the harpies lair, glittering of gold, as the harpies had hammered gold pieces into the cracks of the wall. The heroes don't take the time to remove the gold, but take the Dragonlance they found in the lair. That leads to a spot of meta-gaming where the players conclude that if they find a Dragonlance, there must be a dragon around the corner somewhere. [DM's note: Actually the adventure states "a rare level 9-10 weapon", and using the Compendium app on my iPad I had found that the list of rare weapons of that level was rather short. And then some of those weapons on the list were clearly evil and not likely to be found in a temple of Bahamut. The Dragonlance on the other hand, while technically from a different campaign world, fit perfectly with Bahamut.]

Meanwhile Sir Oakley has started praying in front of the altar of Bahamut, trying to purify the temple from the evil influence. But after a while he concludes that this wasn't working without the three sacred vessels that are missing from the altar. Thus he asks the heroes to find those sacred vessels while they are searching Gardmore Abbey. While Sir Oakley has no exact knowledge about the whereabouts of those sacred vessels, he is a descendant of the founder of the abbey and knows a lot about the general layout. Thus he is able to tell the group that there are two dungeons there: The catacombs under the temple, and the vaults with two entrances in the barracks and in the Hall of Glory.

At this point the curse of the sandbox adventure kicks in: There are too many options. The heroes are right in the central point of Gardmore Abbey. They could go north to spy on the orcs, east through another gate in the upper wall to look at the Feygrove below, south or west to the barracks and Hall of Glory with their vault entrances, or down from the temple into the catacombs, with even more options after taking a first encounter in each direction. Because this isn't the usual linear adventure, there isn't actually a "best option" here, but the order in which they do these things will have consequences, even if not all of those consequences are predictable by the players. After a long discussion the players decide to do a vote, and going down to the catacombs wins.

The first room of the catacombs is empty, except for signs of a recent combat. There are scorch marks from fireballs and magic missiles on the wall. And the undead-detecting mace of the priest detects undead residue on pieces of armor strewn over the floor. Apparently somebody fought a group of undead knights, phantoms in armor, not more than a day or two ago. [DM Note: That scene was difficult to describe well. Under different circumstances it would have been the players who would have fought the phantom knights. But the adventure has certain events that are determined by drawing cards, and by the order in which the players do the encounters, so this was supposed to be a scene where the players find the monsters already killed. Which is easy enough if the monsters are of flesh and blood, but not so easy if the monsters are insubstantial.] The room also has an altar of Bahamut with two eternal flames left and right. Praying to Bahamut makes those flames grow larger, but the group doesn't find out anything more about the function of this. There are two exits from the room, north or east.

So they continue through the door in the north, behind which the priest's mace has detected more undead. Fearing an ambush they pull open the door. This time I remember the Deck of Many Things, and the Rogue card is drawn, producing a glowing symbol of that card on the ground next to the card holder. The rogue of the group wins initiative and steps on the glowing symbol. There he finds out that this enables him to make an attack against will to dominate one creature for one round. So he uses it against one of the four skeletons behind the door. He succeeds, but before it is the turn of the skeletons the wizard throws a fireball into the room and incinerates the dominated skeleton and one other skeleton. It becomes clear that the four skeletons in view are just minions, and the group dispatches them quickly.

Then the harder part of the fight begins. There are four more skeletons, two of them "tanks", and the other two blazing skeletons throwing orbs of fire. The blazing skeletons throw their orbs at the fighter who is the first to enter the room, while the other two skeletons move to block the way. Soon the combat has a front row of the fighter and warlord of the group on one side, and the two tanking skeletons on the other, with the blazing skeletons a bit behind as artillery. So the rogue, who doesn't have room to act otherwise, decides to jump over the skeletons. With a good roll he even makes it right to the blazing skeletons. But then the priest uses his turn undead power and pushes the warrior skeletons back, trapping the rogue in a skeleton sandwich. That could have gone badly wrong, but fortunately the rogue has a better armor class than even the fighter, and there are two healers behind to keep him alive. And then the priest manages to disperse the skeletons with a second turn undead. A few rounds later the skeletons are down. Still, the fight was far from ideal, with a distinctive lack of coordination between the players and their powers getting in the way of each other.

Again there are two door, and the southern one appears to lead to the same room as the eastern exit of the previous room. So they decide to take that way, to leave nothing in their back. This leads directly to the next combat, as there is a mummy behind the door. Again the randomly chosen effect (out of only 2 cards at the moment) is the Rogue. But before we can roll initiative somebody remarks that it is getting late, and we decide to postpone the combat into the next session. Well, at least this makes the next session easier to prepare, presuming they'll stay in the catacombs.

The 2013 Newbie Blogger Initiative starts today, to promote new gaming blogs. More specifically the mission statement is:

• Find, visit, and promote new game bloggers.
• Create a friendly network of support.
• Increase survival of new bloggers.

I must admit at first I was chuckling at the last one, because it is quite funny if you take it literally. Survival of blogs might be a problem, but to the best of my knowledge there isn't a death spree among bloggers. Blogs die because their authors give up on them, not because their authors die. But then the phrase got me thinking: If I stopped blogging, would "Tobold" be dead? While gaming blogs are written by real people, they usually appear on their blogs and in the community as a virtual persona with an assumed pen name. And if that identity is not maintained, it could well be said to die off. And that might actually be a good thing, because it gives a blogger the opportunity to shed a skin in case of a failed effort and start something new under a new name.

If any new bloggers read this, my virtual name is Tobold, and I have been blogging about gaming for over 10 years. So, whatever else you might think of me or my blogging, I do have a rather solid claim on being good at this survival thing. There aren't many gaming blogs older than mine still active, even if mine is now less active than it was. So I was asked to support the Newbie Blogger Initiative and agreed to do so. I would like to dedicate a number of posts this month to tips for new bloggers, based on my long experience with gaming blogging. As always, these are my personal opinions and I don't claim them to be universal truths. And as I started this post with a consideration of virtual identity, here is my first advice for new bloggers:

Don't write under your own name, create a virtual identity for blogging.

The internet has a long memory, I can still find stuff I wrote 20 years ago. And I have not only written about games. I am a scientist, and I have written publications in scientific journals as well as a bunch of patents. Now imagine somebody is doing a Google search on my real name for some professional reason: Obviously I do want him to find the stuff I have written professionally. But Google sorts search results by popularity, and games are a lot more popular than hard science. So if I had written my blog under my real name, my professional identity would have been buried in the search results. It is much better that I wrote my gaming blog as "Tobold", and thus created a separate identity for a different part of my life. Now you might not be a scientist, but there are lots of other scenarios where somebody might search Google for your real name, for example a job application. And we still don't live in a society where being passionate about games is something people put on their CV. Human resources departments *do* search the internet for background information about candidates, and being labeled as somebody who "wastes a lot of time on games" can potentially be as deadly for you application as public photos on Facebook showing you drunk and half-naked.

Creating a virtual identity also has another advantage: You probably aren't totally sure at the start how this blogging thing is going to work out. It is totally possible that you experience some sort of stage fright, and are worried that people will react badly to your writing. But if you have a virtual identity, your blogging isn't connected to your real identity, but to your virtual one. Which, if everything goes catastrophically bad, can be easily discarded. You could even imagine having several subsequent attempts at blogging, each under a different identity. Blogging under a pen name is "safe", you can experiment without worry.

So here is a tip on creating a virtual identity: Choose your name wisely. You do want your blog to be the first search result if somebody searches for your pen name. Which means that "Legolas" probably isn't a good option. If you have problems coming up with a good name, there are a lot of fantasy name generators or similar applications on the internet or downloadable as app for your mobile device. Try to find one that isn't too hard to spell, and then do a Google search on it: Ideally you don't get any hits at all, or at least only a few obscure hits with nobody using that name already as his identity. And then you're off to a new (virtual) life.