So I've been playing Blood 2.

Let's say, to start, that I did not like it. The first game wasn't exactly a Sunday picnic, but even it had more decency and self-respect than this.

Now, I liked the first Blood. It wasn't perfect by any means, and it was still pretty damn dark, but it at least presented itself fairly genuinely. It tried to make a spooky atmosphere, provide gory gunplay, tell a dark and somewhat brooding story and basically give the player a good time on the dark side. Caleb was still an absurd construct, but one that you could at least respect as meaning the things he said, his jokes and references often coming across more like the muttered ramblings of a sinister crazy man than simple pop culture.

The Caleb of Blood 2 takes the same concepts and turns up the evil factor to 11. Whatever miniscule shred of justification Blood 1's Caleb had is shed. Pointlessness isn't merely a fault, but a theme. This Caleb is so trying, so dollar store that he may as well have been voiced by the writer and travel via rocket skates. This Caleb, for whatever strange mixture of internalized factors, I just cannot take seriously. Part of it may be that he can't seem to, either.

Blood 2 seems to see the world through a very dirty lens. Everyone in the game is presented as some combination of passively worthless or actively evil, either a stupid plebe whinging about their petty and ultimately meaningless day-to-day concerns or the freely volunteered and self-defeating admissions of misconduct on the part of CabalCo. There is no one to root for, because what's the point? Everyone's a whiny, ignorant loser whose life is going nowhere. Who the hell cares if a few get killed? Hell, let's kill all of them! What difference does it make other than that are a few idiots less in the world?

The plot and the characters who deliver it are treated effectively as unessential gibbering; everyone who has something to say about anything Caleb or the player might care about is dismissed as a deluded ditherer. The game is not merely incapable of having a story one can care about, but is actively working against it, trying its hardest to keep things in the sour spot of wanton, uncaring violence.

The fact that it's set in the quasi-realistic near-future makes it seem all the more a statement on our modern world, or something trying to look like a statement to lend itself cred, fraught with assumptions on the attitudes of the player. This games show us and expects from us the perspective of one severely depressed, someone so overwhelmed by disappointment and bitterness that they can no longer see anything of value in life, including-- indeed, especially-- their fellow human beings. The sheer amount of celebration the game heaps upon mass murder (particularly of innocent bystanders), intended as some kind of goad for Teh Hardcorez among the game-playing population who just want loads of violence out of their game, instead comes across as the resentful rant of someone who simply does not have the strength to go on, someone who has given up and no longer cares and just wants to watch the world burn. I can barely see the immature petulance of the self-assured gory shooter for the veneer what looks uncomfortably like homicidal depression. That's not what it actually is, at least as far as I can tell, but it looks too much like it for comfort or taste, and seeing it couched in fakey 90's Gamertude this way is just unpleasant on a number of levels.

That the game's visuals are composed of shite LithTech 3D graphics, and that the engine is horribly buggy and crashes continually, and that half of Caleb's lines are recycled wholesale from the first game, among other carelessnesses, only compounds the sense of apathy; one gets the sense that nobody who worked on this game cared about it, and that its nihilistic story and awful characters are expressions of their own feelings. There has been no recapturing of magic, no continuation of a saga; only a horrible, foul-smelling mess made out of whatever was left over from before.

En bref: Blood 2 is just a sack of old sacks.

Getting Quick and Dirty for PbP

So, focusing my attention on things unrelated to Gor and/or Gor accessories, I recently tried my hand at hacking together an RPG system that would work well in PbP. Because I seriously wanted to play some Black Crusade and PbP is how I game. The result of smashing bits of Toon, D6, Fate and Maid together resulted in something that... is actually a lot like Risus, which I shamefully admit I didn't know anything about at the time. That said, there's a couple differences, and I'd like to think they're good and legit differences, and either way I'm pretty pleased with the result.

Here's how it goes:

1. Define Beliefs and Goals (just like you'd do in Toon). Describe your character's looks while you're at it.
2. Take 18D6 (or whatever you think is fair for what you're doing) and just make up some abilities to put them in. Traits, skills, attributes, equipment, spells, whatevs. Just be descriptive about what it is and what it's good for.
3. Roll any remaining dice for your Hits.

Conflict res: for combat, two guys roll whatever ability makes sense in context, highest number wins, loser takes the difference as damage. Same goes for all other conflicts or tests, just with a situational DC and the damage part replaced with successfully fixing the life sustainer or requisitioning a heavy stubber or learning the Lord Inquisitor's mother's maiden name or whatever y'got.

That's it.

I've already gotten a bit of positive feedback on this, and I'm planning to use it in a Black Crusade PbP I'm trying to get together on RPGnet. If that pans out, I'll probably post more about how it's worked out and what could be done better.