I’ve mentioned Roll20 in pastposts about how my group plays D&D, but I figure it deserves a post all its own.
Roll20 was a Kickstarter project back in 2012. It raised $39,651, well past its goal of $5,000.
Once funded the project team set out to create a free and simple way to play D&D and other roleplaying games online.
They created something that has been dubbed a virtual tabletop (VTT). D&D is normally played at a table, so when you play online everyone sits at their computers around the virtual tabletop.
What does that actually mean though?
First, Roll20 transmits your voice, video, and any typed messages you want to the other people you’re playing with. Continue reading →
Why the OOTS Forums? Because the forum rules there not only encourage people to be nice to each other, they demand it.
Blizzard’s forums are filled with petty disagreements and foul language. While it is an entire forum devoted to the game with many different sub-sections it’s actually quite difficult to find a thread worth posting in. Most of the threads are childish complaints of some kind followed up by a bunch of other posters making fun of the original poster.
Hearthpwn, Gamepedia, and Liquid Hearth are good for occasional visits, but I find the atmosphere there too heavily focused on “winning” instead of fooling around. While that approach to Hearthstone and really any game is legitimate, it’s not the way I play games.
OOTS has a nice aura of casual play that attracts me. But occasionally they have tournaments to spice things up!
There have been two OOTS Hearthstone tournaments before. I participated in the second one. Now I’m in the third one and providing my services as a stream commentator for the games when I am available.
If you’ve read my other posts on GVG since it came out you may have noticed my love affair with Mal’Ganis. That love affair has been actualized in my new Demon Warlock deck. It’s performed quite nicely in ranked play and I’m looking forward to using it in the tournament.
The tournament started yesterday. I’ll be streaming as many games of the tournament as I can on my Twitch account and uploading the replays to Youtube as well.
Here’s my decklist if you’re interested and I hope to see you on the stream!
Flame Imp x2
Voidwalker x2
Demonfire x2
Annoy-o-Tron x1
Explosive Sheep x1
Millhouse Manastorm x1
Mistress of Pain x2
Big Game Hunter x1
Harvest Golem x2
Mind Control Tech x1
Hellfire x2
Defender of Argus x2
Voidcaller x2
Doomguard x1
Faceless Manipulator x1
Sludge Belcher x2
Dread Infernal x2
Lord Jaraxxus x1
Mal’Ganis x1
A little preview of what my Hearthstone stream will look like.
So the big news earlier this week was that I have been working on a Heathstone stream, with a URL of http://www.twitch.tv/gocorral. I’ll be streaming tonight from 8-9PM Pacific time.
The current model is pictured above which I’ll be using to play tonight.
I tried to give the stream a consistent look with the game by taking all the extra pieces of the stream from Hearthstone.
The pack is a Hearthstone pack with the Hearthsteed on top.
The sign is taken from when the game is down for maintenance.
The Curse of Naxxramas art is taken from some of Blizzard’s own ads for Hearthstone.
The box surrounding the webcam image of my lovely face is taken from the main menu of the game.
I’m planning on streaming a playthrough of the new Naxxramas content once it is released. I’ll announce those streams as I get to them.
What is Hearthstone for the uninitiated? It’s an online card game put out by Blizzard, the same people who created Diablo and World of Warcraft.
Hearthstone is intended to be quite simple. They have an easy tutorial that teaches you how to play and each game takes about ten minutes or less.
If you’ve played any collectible card game before then its Hearthstone will be quite easy to pick up.
In the game your character is one of the main heroes from Blizzard’s Warcraft games.
Your hero has various spells, powers, minions, and weapons to help take out the opponent’s hero.
Both heroes start with 30 life which is slowly eaten up by the opponent’s hero and minions attacks through the game.
If you bring your opponent’s life down to zero then you win! There’s a celebratory image with ribbons and fireworks!
If your opponent wins then you can always play again.
I like the game a lot and would definitely suggest giving it a try. If you don’t like it, then you haven’t spent much time to learn that. If you do like it then we could play together!
There’s a game called Minecraft that you might’ve heard of.
In Minecraft you don’t really do anything except mine for cool minerals that you need to build things. Then you build things.
You can build pretty much anything in Minecraft.
Some people have built skyscrapers. A lot of people do pyramids. A few people build programs that can do basic math calculations. I saw one guy build a scale model of the Enterprise from Star Trek.
The article says that the Danish Geodata Agency recently released a map of Denmark for Minecraft.
I had to look up what the Danish Geodata Agency is. It’s apparently the land surveying part of the government in Denmark.
So they surveyed all that land and then turned it into a map for Minecraft.
Upon the maps release, some lovely Americans did what you can see above to the map.
They steered some dynamite carts into various Danish towns in the game and blew them up, planting American flags on the ruins.
The Danish Geodata Agency had this to say, “We consider that as a nature of playing Minecraft – elements are broken down and new are being created…We are very happy to see so many players around the world creating fancy nice things and have fun.”
Basically, they are totally cool with Americans pretending to blow up Denmark.
I think that’s pretty funny. I laughed my horse laugh.
