Show us your ID!

This weekend I've had a very interesting gaming related experience.

My wife and I used to play Star Wars The Old Republic when it launched, but like with all games you can only play it for so long. So we quit. That's not the interesting thing by the way. Wait for it.

Recently we haven't been gaming all that much together, and we've missed it. Mostly it's been a combination of no MMO and pretty different tastes in other games.

Anyway, we decided to re-activate our SWTOR accounts, in order to game together. Now the easiest way to do this is to purchase some game time from Biowares online store. Except they have some kind of error going on with that, which meant that neither of us could complete the transaction. Lots of people have encountered this error, so it wasn't just us. Also, it was Sunday, so we couldn't nip down to the nearest Gamestop and pick up a couple of game time cards.

Back in our WoW days we often ordered our time cards from an online store on Åland – an island between Finland and Sweden that belongs to Finland. They have slightly different tax laws there, so some stuff is cheaper- but they were out of SWTOR time cards. The only remaining thing to do was to look around for another online store with cards in stock, and who delivered the time codes via email.

Eventually my wife found one. Fast2play.com. She ordered them, paid for them (payment guaranteed by Visa). And we started to wait. Here comes the interesting thing.

They sent her an email demanding to see a scan of her drivers license. Yeah, a copy of her ID card to complete strangers... Not!

She mailed them back demanding to know what for, and this is what they eventually said: Our security system has detected suspicious activity with your account!

Suspicious activity? Buying two time cards with a value of less than 50€? Using their own process? On an account a few hours old? Pardon my language, Ladies and Gentlemen, but that's utter BULLSHIT!

Finally the missus said, forget it, your service is unacceptable, refund our money asap!

What do they do? They – to our enormous surprise – actually send us the codes. Without seeing a copy of her drivers license. All this back and forth took several hours, one reply from them taking almost two hours to arrive, and it's content was pretty much: “please just send us your ID already”.

The codes came with a slightly snarky comment in the vein of “We already sent you your order, what are you whining about?”

Now I don't know if we were really unlucky, and Fast2play.com is an awesome business, but dammit, you don't give out that kind of info to strangers, that's the first thing we teach children about Internet Safety! We've ordered things like contact lenses and E-cigarette stuff that's been considerably more expensive than these measly game cards without any such hassle.

Imagine you want to buy the latest book from your favorite author. You enter the bookstore and pick one up. Then you think, “hang on, my friend is going to want one too, I'll get it for him now that I'm here”. You then go to the register to pay, but the clerk tells you that you queued suspiciously, and she's going to have to take a copy of you ID, and keep it. Would you still buy those books? Don't think so....

Use Fast2play at your own discretion, but in all honesty I can't recommend them. They were polite, but that's the only good thing I can say with a straight face.

Movie Night

So as you know, a couple of weeks ago, we were without internet. In a desperate effort to stave off the madness, the missus and I decided to watch a movie.

Looking around at what we had laying around that neither had seen, we decided on Robin Hood (2010). This film seemed to have everything going for it.

1. Directed by Ridley Scott, the man behind amazing classics like Alien, Gladiator and Blade Runner.
2. Russell Crowe as the kick ass protagonist.
3. A great supporting cast with luminaries such as Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow and Matthew Macfadyen.

Yet despite all this, the movie stunk to high heaven! We gave up after roughly an hour. It was all wrong. The timing, cinematography, dialog, everything.

I clung on to the hope it would improve with grim desperation, but finally I had to surrender to the inevitable. It should have been to medieval England what Gladiator was to Imperial Rome, but no. Lousy is all I can say. Avoid at all cost.

Instead we put on Priest (2011) a (sort of) post apocalyptic vampire slaying movie. It wasn't a great movie, but it was entertaining, and that was all that mattered. If dystopian wastelands, futuristic frontier stuff and vampires appeal to you, go for it!

With some time left we rounded off the evening with The First Men in the Moon (2010).

This is a remake of the 1964 H.G. Wells film of the same name, and boy did we like it. It had a wonderful whimsical atmosphere, almost like a Lovecraftian fairytale. Two men in 1909 go to the moon with the help of a sphere coated in Cavorite, a gravity nullifying substance invented by one of the main characters.

Well worth watching!

Details details

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about my experimental idea for running historical off shoot games from your main campaign.

Today, we're going to take a look at some useful tricks for running a game set sometime in the past.

Like with all projects the devil hides amongst the details, and historical gaming is no different.

Obviously there's no point in turning your campaign into a historical lecture, but you have to include enough vital facts and details to make the era come alive. Otherwise your Roman campaign is just “now but with togas”.

Most gamers will probably head to the armory first of all, and it's a good place to start. Find out what the major weapons of the time was, at least in general. What you find may surprise you. For example, the first pump action shotgun was designed in 1882, well in time to hunt Jack the Ripper with, should the need arise.

Naturally, the closer your game is to the present, the greater the availability of weaponry becomes. But assembling a list of the most popular firearms of the day, will be the first step in creating a good setting.

Next, look at clothes and fashion. This may seem as a bit of a lame thing to do, but it's vitally important unless every one in the world runs around in their birthday suits. Again, you don't need to go nuts here, but a couple of examples of what men and women wore amongst the lower, middle and upper classes should be enough. That's twelve pictures you have to hunt down and show the players. Not all that arduous eh?

Take a quick look at food and drink while your at it. This is not necessarily all that big of a deal, but as a reminder; any game set in pre Columbian Europe can not feature the humble potato. It has yet to cross the Atlantic. A small but important detail.

Next is transportation. What were people driving in, or were they driving anything at all? Again, a couple of the most prominent examples will do fine.

By now I'm sure your starting to get the idea. Thanks to the plethora of film and movies set in all kinds of cool eras, it's getting easier and easier to bring these times to life again.

Naturally it get's harder the farther back you go, but funnily enough, the same happen when you only go say, twenty years back. Take a look at a random X-files episode and look at what kind of technology is and isn't available. Remember that in 1993 cell phones were practically non existent and people actually faxed each other instead of using email. But keeping straight what happened when it's still so close is sometimes maddening.

Finally, I want to talk about the hardest detail; talking.

This is not something I enforce too rigidly in my games, as it gets very tedious after a while. Too many Prithy good Sirrah, and you will all be likely to try kill each other. I like to keep my players somewhat aware of their characters social standing at least. I don't want the Baronet of Whitlington to scream “Fuck you, I told you to waste that asshole”, when he could say “Damn you, I told you to kill that oaf” without spraining either his tongue or my ears.

That's it in a nutshell. With the easy availability of smart phones it's become very easy to quickly check years or events without holding up the game too much.

Now you just have to find a balance between what you feel your game needs and what your players will put up with!

Good gaming!

Damnation!

Not much of a post today, since I'm without internet, and have been all weekend.

You see, I ordered a new connection(?), and of course it didn't work. My ISP still haven't gotten off their behinds to fix it, so I'm writing this from work.

Regular updates next week. Hopefully...