I've been planning (and promising Morbus) to review Cranium for weeks. I was excited about playing the award-winning board game, which came highly recommended by friends and has celebrity endorsements from the likes of Julia Roberts and Naomi Judd. So, then, why no review? To play Cranium, you need at least two 2-player teams. Despite my best efforts at luring friends over with promises of spirits and baked goods, it took several weeks to round up four willing participants.
Let's talk about cards. Card gaming, in its current incarnation, is fairly new, having only been born in 1993 and exploding since. There are more card games than there are RPG's � and that's some trick. Since designing a card game is much cheaper than a board game or an RPG (way less production costs) and many of them are spin-offs of an existing license anyway, it's faster and cheaper to get them to market; which means lots of companies have dived in with both feet.
In the fall of 2000, I was hip-deep in an addiction to Diablo II. It was the sequel to a multi-million dollar seller a few years previous. At the same time, I was working for a web development firm in Denver, Colorado, called Breckenridge Communicatioins. At this company, my role was that of Senior Programmer, and my responsibilities were to fill the role of the ColdFusion & JavaScript developer. Through a series of mishaps, I blew a CPU and Motherboard, and lacked the necessary funds to replace them in a timely fashion. Since I had to resort to using a lowly Pentium II 300 in the meantime, I had to satisfy my Diablo II hunger in some other fashion.
If you LARP, sooner or later you're going to have to resort to in-game violence (or somebody else will) and you'll find yourself in the middle of a combat. Now what? In the real world, you poke or smack (and get poked or smacked by) your enemy until one of you either runs away, surrenders, or is rendered incapable of resisting. In a LARP, though, it's more complicated than that.
This discussion over dungeon construction became far too theoretical over practical. Where I had hoped to discuss nails and material weights I ended up talking gravitational waves. No, that's not the best analogy. I ended up talking zoning laws and building permits, the social side of dungeon construction. Truthfully, this is the side that no one wants to talk about, because it is the dreadful side. It is the bureaucratic side, the dull side, the side that is all regulation and not creative freedom.
We all have characters that we play in our weekly games, from D & D to Vampire. We also have active imaginations, or rather a mental picture of what our characters look like. But how many times have you found the right picture to encompass your character? Sure you have found a few pictures on the web that look "kewl" and are even close to representing your character, but are you willing to STEAL other peoples' artwork?
The situation stays the same. One minute you're bleeding to death. The next minute you're on your feet, thanking the Gamemaster that you didn't get snuffed. And as your bandages get pulled away, you stride confidently back into the world with a gleam in your eye and a smile on your face. Where you're immediately faced with the one villain you know you can't defeat.
I came home the other day, for some R&R, and noticing my "home" (in contrast to my "away") group was ready for my (violent if anything) Gaming, I thought I might get some ideas from my past campaigns of AD&D. So, there I was, flipping away at the folder of memories, where I keep stored all my characters and evil ideas (both tried-out and new), and I noticed something that made me think.
It's high time we move on to some manmade and dungeon-style basing, since that's where the juicy stuff often happens. (Whatever my attractions towards a drawn-out storyline, full of excitement and plot twists, rich with characterization, and replete with a host of colorful places, sometimes I just want to pretend to kill shit.)
What has happened to my attention span? When I was 5, I had a Nintendo Entertainment System with a handful of games and those same games could keep me busy for months, maybe even years. I could sit down, pop in Super Mario Bros. and play it over and over again, all day long. At the end of the day my eyes were burning, my head hurt and my thumb felt like it was going to fall off. What a blast... I miss it.
