The Professional Gamer - March 4, 2019

Hello, friends! After a few weeks of either not having much time to enjoy myself, or just not having the energy to do much, I was able to have some fun this week. As is typical for yours truly, one of the things that I want to talk about is super new and shiny, and the other is a bit older. Also, I’d like to talk a bit about Mob Psycho 100, but given what happened last week, I’d like to wait a little longer before I start writing about it. Since I want to keep that more hush, let’s talk first about the old thing: a video game.

I’m not sure why, but I had a strong desire this week play an RTS game. Since it’s free-to-play now, I opted to install Starcraft II on my desktop and give it a whirl again. Back when it originally came out, I made a serious effort to finish the “Wings of Liberty” campaign, but got very frustrated with one of the later levels where I only had hero units to control and had a strict timer to get through the level. I’m hoping that I can figure it out this time, and not get so frustrated. The general campaign so far has been a lot of fun so far. I am taking my time, trying to play all of the missions, get lots of research and armory options, and just enjoy it. I’m maybe a quarter through “Wings of Liberty”. I haven’t looked at the missions list to get a clear idea of how many total missions there are. I’m just guessing based on the percent of total research points that I’ve earned.

Next, new thing, The Dragon Prince. This is a new animated series that is being produced for Netflix. The production staff includes some folks who have done a lot of work that I really admire. Namely Aaron Ehasz and Giancarlo Volpe, both veterans for Avatar: The Last Airbender. And I will say that Dragon Prince definitely hits me in the same places that Avatar does. There are a few occasions in the early episodes where the computer animation is a bit distracting, but the animators quickly find their feet. Where Avatar was fairly black and white in terms of conflict and interpersonal relationships, Dragon Prince seems to exist in a world with more gray. Or maybe, there is simply more nuance in the relationships between the characters. I burned through the first season during the week and have started with the second season this weekend.

Lastly, I’ve finished my first read-through of Hoard of the Dragon Queen, and I’m now ready to proceed to detailed reading with note taking and planning. I don’t have a specific plan to run this module yet, but given the relative dearth of details, I feel that I need to have things ready for my players. Like, I’m going to need a fair number of NPC’s to breath some life into the world, and I know that I’m not great at making these characters up on the spot. So, I really need to have some stuff ready to pull out on a moments notice.

And that’s it for this week. I want to talk about Mob Psycho next week, provided that we don’t have such a dramatic cliffhanger next time. Have a great week, and game on!