Max Covers 25-28

I know this blog has become a version of my daughter's Deviant Art page just devoted to her comic covers of our RPG adventures, but that's okay! Here are Issues 25-28, and #28 hasn't even been delivered yet in its paper form to our wonderful audience.

We are so excited about the upcoming adventures! Stay tuned!

Duckules!

Max Covers 17-24 And More

It seems like this blog is becoming a Deviant-Art-esque visual posting ground. It can't be helped, when The Girl keeps producing such incredible faux-comic covers like she does! We've loved seeing how her art has improved and evolved. Here are ten more samples!

New Max Magellan Covers and Pivotal RPG moments

Sometimes, certain adventures really help a "party" gel together. We've been playing this particular RPG with our friends for over a year, and the last two "episodes" have been particularly memorable. In Issue #15, traditional alliances were tested, characters spoke up in ways they hadn't before, and the characters (originally a rag-tag bunch) worked together cohesively. In Issue #16, one of our friends who has not been around for a while returned to play with us. We were curious as to how our GM would bring Ogre back, but he did it with a bang and we had a great time. To celebrate, here are four of the most current comic covers, as created by our talented daughter. You know they'll be memorable when discussing the subtitles results in ten minutes of laughing-until-we-cried.

Latest Max Magellan Covers & New Home Campaign!

First things first: my talented daughter has created three new covers for the RPG game we play with our friends in the west end of the city.

It's Family Day today, which made it a perfect time to launch our own Marvel Saga RPG. Hubby was the Game Master and wife, son, and daughter played the heroes on their inaugural adventure. Set at a fictional university, the protagonists had to battle Circuit Breaker, a power-hungry villain greedy for energy. The new team consists of:

• Miss Myst, a prank-loving student with the ability to become invisible and intangible
• Velocity, a physics professor with super speed
• Putty, a quiet janitor who possesses stretching elasticity powers

We had a great time playing together and look forward to playing more frequently, since we live together, making coordinating the games much easier! Our resident artist has agreed to create covers for this new campaign and we've had fun brainstorming the name of the new team.

Analysis of a Rage Quit

I have taken a break from Left4Dead because during one particularly heated game, I "rage-quit". According to Urban Dictionary, rage quitting is:

To stop playing a game out of an anger towards an event that transpired within the game 

 The four of us (husband, wife, son, daughter) were playing a scenario (my girl thinks it was "No Mercy", the hospital mission) and I kept failing at my task. After I was resurrected, again, I whipped off my headphones and declared, "That's it. I'm DONE." I quit Steam and left the other players to finish the game one person short.

Later that night, I thought long and hard about what had occurred. Was it really just anger? It turns out that there were a lot more feelings behind my rage-quit. It took distance from the event and some time for me to reflect before I realized what I was experiencing.

• I felt helpless and useless (because I believed the team was doing poorly because of me).
• I felt frustrated (because I knew what I had to do but I couldn't figure out how to do it successfully).
• I felt disappointed (because despite all the suggestions yelled during the heat of battle, I couldn't change things).

No one wants to feel useless and frustrated. Games are supposed to be challenging enough to be difficult yet still fun, and I wasn't feeling the fun. Since my self-imposed exile, the family has moved on from Easy Mode to Normal Mode and been quite successful. They occasionally mention that it would be enjoyable to have me play again, but until I can reconcile those other-than-anger negative emotions, it won't be good. 

Left for Dead - A New Stage for Our Family

I checked this blog, and back in 2011, my kids used to watch my husband play Left for Dead. Fast forward to now, 2015. The kids are now 15 and 12 and as a belated Christmas present, my husband bought all of us Left for Dead for our various computers and laptops so we could play together. This has been quite the experience. Here are a few observations of mine.

1) I stink at this!

On our four-person team, I am definitely the weakest chain in the link. The actual photo of the screen below is proof. I think my problem is that I have visual-spatial issues. I hate climbing ladders or maneuvering through doors. I'm always walking into things or getting stuck. Despite my poor performance, my family still likes playing with me.

Mrs Peeps died thrice

2) We all have our favourite characters to play.

In Left for Dead, I'm Louis, hubby is Bill, daughter is Zoey and son is Francis. In Left for Dead 2, I'm Ellis, hubby is Coach, daughter is Rochelle and son is Nick. Why do we always pick the same ones? My girl says she likes to use the female characters. My husband likes the dialogue from his characters - when he used to play with his friends, he'd use Nick. I tend to take whoever is left but I'm used to seeing and following the others, so it's become habit.

I'm dead and watching son & daughter play

Me, still dead. Father and son planning their attack.

3) We work well as a team - sometimes.

We talk to each other while in-game using our headphones. Hubby tends to be our de facto leader, since he's played the game before. We've gotten a lot better at not hurting each other. (The only stat that I can regularly claim to have the best results is "least amount of friendly fire attacks".) However, there are times where hubby gets really frustrated with us. The worst scenarios are the ones where we have to collect items, like filling a vehicle with a certain amount of cans of fuel before we can escape. We won that one just once, by the skin of our teeth, after three attempts. Other scenarios have ended with "let's just not do this one, otherwise we are all going to be very grumpy".

We learned to use melee weapons around things that explode.

4) We feel successful, even when not all of us survive until the end.

Most of the times I play, I do not live to see the end. However, there's a real sense of accomplishment when we finish the adventure and at least one of us makes it out alive. Here's a photo example below where only hubby survived, but we still ended with smiles on our faces.

How can one survivor be considered good? When it's L4D

The nicest thing happened last night, when it was just the three of them playing. (I had too much school work to do.) It turns out that they were supposed to get on a helicopter at the end of the adventure to escape and my son actually sacrificed himself and jumped out of the safety of the helicopter to be with his sister, even though it meant his character didn't live at the end. That level of empathy and compassion makes my mommy heart swell with pride and happiness.

Gaming Projects - RPG Covers 8-10

This is an Edited Cross-Post from Monday Molly Musings (January 5, 2015) about Christmas Vacation Projects

Project #3 = Daughter's Superhero RPG Covers

About once a month or so, we play a role-playing game with the Peer family at their house. I've written about it a lot more on my Family Gaming blog. Because it's a super-hero game, my artistic daughter had the brilliant idea to immortalize each of the RPG adventures in a pretend comic book cover recap. She pencils and I ink and then colour a scanned reproduction. I have to say that it's very relaxing to trace lines and colour pictures. These three covers took about two evenings to complete. You can see the other seven "issues" here and here.

Project #4 = Son's Minecraft Book Trailer

My children received some nice presents for Christmas, including some Minecraft mini-figures as well as the novel Descent into Overworld  by Liam O'Donnell. This book is special to us because we had a chance to be "beta-readers" before it was published. My son and I decided to make a mini-video promoting the book using our iPad's StoMo software. It took a bit longer than usual because we accidentally filmed upside down and used Windows Movie Maker instead of iMovie to assemble the final product. It took a half-day to finish.

(The embedded video was in the last post from January 2, 2015)

Our Holiday Game Project

Thank you Liam O'Donnell for giving us this awesome book for Christmas. This tiny promotional video is our way of showing our appreciation (and gives us a chance to play with the Minecraft mini-figures some of us got as presents)!