It’s that time of year, again — time to take a look back at 2011, and see what you liked most about the Big Bad Blog.

How can we tell? We use a complex scoring system which tracks links back to the Big Bad Blog, comments made, and pageviews. Maybe not that complicated. However we came up with the list — and truth be told, even we are not entirely sure — this is it:

5: Google Plus: A first look

We received an early invitation to the new Social Network on the block, and dutifully gave our first impressions of it — and they were positive impressions, indeed.

While an update of those impressions are overdue — first impressions, while important, are not necessarily final opinions — this blogger still feels that Google Plus has the potential to be the best of the available networks, but it still has some way to go before it arrives there.

4: Character creation and alignment

The roleplaying area of the blog has taken a big backseat this year. While the generally haphazard update schedule has reduced the amount of content published, of all types, the roleplaying section has had to address a second deficiency: I stopped running my D&D game.

Most of the content I produced was the result of running a game myself — a weekly article was easy when I was introducing myself to the fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Running a game once a month was enough to provide ongoing monthly articles — ideas or actions would arise in planning or playing that were comment-worthy.

But a baby makes for little playing time, nevermind planning time, and the game only managed one session after Maggie’s birth in 2010 to prove itself to be too much work. It went on hiatus, and my impression now is that it is a permanent one.

Since then, I have been thinking about my next game, which will be of the more old skool D&D bent. Although actual game development has been minimal this year — maybe it will get off its feet in 2012 — I read something that triggered ideas about alignment, in terms of the next game, and voila. A popular D&D blog post.

If scheduling permits progress towards running this new game next year — by no means a necessity — we should see plenty of roleplaying goodness on the Big Bad Blog next year.

Otherwise? The 2012 edition might not have a roleplaying entry.

3: Bringing down the meme: Demotivationals

It seems that every year, I get excited about a meme. And then soon in the new year, I get tired of the meme and write about it.

In 2009/10 it was the FAIL meme. In 2010/11, it was the demotivational.

Next year? No idea. I sadly feel as though I’m not amused by any current memes — it could be the end of a Big Bad Blog tradition.

This particular blog entry makes me quite proud: the comments tend to be people stopping in to tell me that I’m unfunny or stupid. This, as you may be aware, is an indicator of blog excellence.

2: Because you’re all horny for Felicia Day

It has long been noted that Felicia Day nude, Felicia Day naked, and their ilk are popular search terms, when it comes to finding the Big Bad Blog, sending over 100 people our way on an average day.

The traffic from these search terms seemed to be spiking over the summer, when I saw this photo on Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr thingy. (I always call then “Tumblr thingies”. Calling it “so-and-so’s Tumblr” seems wrong. Calling it a “Tumblr blog”, also wrong. What to do?)

The forces of Google meant that I had to write something including that photo.

And the popularity of the search term guaranteed its place here.

1: Twitter to Facebook not working

Back in February, I noticed that my tweets had stopped automatically updating my Facebook page.

This was a concern — I disliked, and continue to dislike, interacting with Facebook directly. But I like all the people on Facebook (also known as “all the people”) to be able to follow me, if they so wish.

So … importation.

It had, for whatever reason, stopped working. So I did what one does in these situations, and starting to try to figure out how to fix it.

Once fixed, I figured that I would post the solution, as it was neither easy to find nor immediately evident. Mine was apparently well-indexed on Google, as it prompted plenty of re-tweets, Facebook likes and (for this blog) a healthy number of comments.

A bit boring, maybe, compared to previous year’s number ones, but it’s nice to be helpful sometimes.

We realize that you might be tired by now by the fact that the roleplaying section of the Big Bad Blog seems to do nothing but talk about the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

However, it is, for the moment, all we are playing.

Over the past four months, your blogger has had his first opportunity to play in the Fourth Edition as a PC, rather than a DM. Truth be told, this is the first real 4E experience for us. As a DM, we used the 4E mechanics for conflict resolution, but the game itself was imagined independent of the system.

For this new game, however, the DM has only ever played 4E – no other roleplaying experience was present. The adventure we have been playing was published by Wizards of the Coast. There are few to no house rules.

It is fourth edition in, pretty much, its purest form.

Which means that it is my duty as a blogger to give you my take on how the game feels from this side of the screen.

It can feel old school

In the introductory portion of the game, I was surprised by how light the mechanics felt. With a first-time DM and a relatively inexperienced group of players (aside from myself) feeling out the first few steps of a new game, I was expecting that all the annoying attributes of a combat-oriented mechanic bearing down on my play.

That did not happen at all.

Perhaps I should not be surprised. It is still a role playing game, and the introductory bits in which the players are meeting each other and feeling each other (and the NPCs) out is instinctively role-heavy. It’s hard for a mechanic to get in the way.

And as inexperienced as the group might be, they are pretty fantastic. The problems occur when the mechanics get heavy and the group’s inexperience shows as they have difficulty navigating the world of dice, bonuses, penalties, and so on. I probably should have expected this part of the game to go well.

But I was nervous. It went well, anyways. The group become a party, and some cohesion is slowly forming.

The introductory sessions felt like an old fashioned D&D game.

It can really bog down

In most games, there’s a point in the combat sequence where the fight is over, but the combat is ongoing. There is no longer any suspense about who is going to win. There is no longer any strategy that needs to be executed in order to win. It becomes a dice game.

Move around the table, rolling a d20, until (as a group) you have rolled 15 or better five times.

Boring, at least to me. Once upon a time it would not have been. I’m pretty sure I sat in my room alone rolling dice for an entire evening several times during my childhood. But I got over it, and it’s certainly not how I would choose to spend an afternoon with friends today.

It’s a dead period, with no roleplaying going on, little interaction between the players (we’re all intently looking at the board), and no movement in the story.

Roll.

Roll.

Roll.

Whether it’s the nature of 4E, the relative inexperience around the game table, or I had just forgot this part of the roleplaying game, I don’t know. But it bores the hell out of me.

On top of that is the never-ending dungeon which is a stack of fights, one on top of another. Thanks to the good designers of Wizards of the Coast, our group has now spent two entire sessions exploring this particular dungeon – by which I mean fighting zombies, goblins and zombie goblins (by which I mean rolling dice) – with nary a moment designed to flex those gaming muscles in which we play our roles.

I have come to enjoy the combat in fourth edition. It is interesting in and of itself (until it bogs down at the end), and I wish the bad guys would just do the decent thing and die (or surrender). But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

While I am willing to write this off as just being a poorly written adventure in this respect, it is hard to look at the structure of the game – the mix of encounter and daily powers, number of healing surges, and so on – and not imagine that the game designers did not anticipate this very situation.

It’s a super hero game

So the fourth edition has strengths and weaknesses, as any game does. But the strangest thing about it is that it is not a fantasy roleplaying game, but a super hero game.

This is not an original Big Bad Blog thought, but I have no idea where I read that previously or who should be credited with this observation.

The game works best when thought of as a superhero game in a fantasy context. It does not lend itself to a gritty style of fantasy. It is not your Tolkienesque high fantasy. As with any RPG, you could conceivably stuff it into one of those boxes, but it wasn’t made for it. It is decidedly not the Dungeons and Dragons I grew up with, where the PCs are a small band of adventurers doing the best they can in a fantastic and dangerous world.

No. We have super powers, every one of us. Even at first level, we have super powers. My character background does not read like any background I have written or read for and D&D game before – it reads more like a superhero origin story.

Here’s an Eladrin. He gets in a bit of trouble. Then a radioactive spider bit him, and now he’s suddenly Spidereladrin.

Not really – my character is much closer to Nightcrawler than he is to Spiderman, but he is a superhero (not an adventurer), as are the other members of his party. His history does read more like an origin story than a background, and his decisions are inherently coloured by the fact that he is otherworldly and special, rather than just a guy with a sword.

Again, this is neither good nor bad, but it is definitely different.

It is easy to see how old school D&D folk like me get very bent out of shape over this edition of the game. When I think of D&D – when I go out to play D&D – I get a certain set of expectations in my mind. These expectations are wide-ranging, but they certainly don’t involve a Marvel Superheroes story set against a Tolkien backdrop.

It’s like that scene in Return of the King (the movie version) where Legolas does his crazy elephant-slide thing. Legolas here is not the character from the books brought to life on the big screen, but instead some re-imagined super-powered version of the same.

And that’s what you get when you play 4E.

So whoever originally pointed this out, thank you. I’d probably be a lot more frustrated if you didn’t write about gaming.

Photo by your very own Mr. Topp. Available larger here.

It’s strange, having things that you love to do meet each other. For instance, it is well documented (via this very blog) that I enjoy both photography and Dungeons and Dragons quite a bit.

Instinctively, it is tempting to claim that while Dungeons and Dragons can provide much material to many types of artists — painters, sculptors, sketchers, and the like — there is not much material there for the photographer. Which is to say that toting a camera to a Dungeons and Dragons session nets one photographs of a group of people sitting around a table, rolling dice and eating Cheetos.

Not exactly the sort of material one puts out on their website.

But I forgot about the miniatures.

Truth be told, I have a tendency to do this. I have never been one to use minis much in my games. Whether it is a shortcoming of my own GMing, a consequence of my style as a GM, or just the nature of miniatures, I have always found that they get in the way of gameplay (rather than improving it).

In the 4E game we are currently playing — where I am a player, not the dungeon master — we are using minis extensively. It is interesting how much they improve 4E. Again, I am not sure whether this is a revelation or an indictment of the fourth edition of the game.

And, like toys, miniatures can make for excellent photography. Just before Christmas, we followed our game with a Christmas party, and I brought my camera to the game with that in mind. Little did I expect that my best photos of the night would not be from the party, but from the D&D.

Now I seriously need to invest in a macro lens. Because getting decent shots of minis with my 50mm is difficult.

Although when they come out right (see below), they really come out right.

One of the things that I am doing for the new year is creating a new game. This game is meant to be a throwback AD&D game, set in a sandbox world.

This is hard, because I am starting with an empty sandbox.

As a result, every day, something needs to be added to the sandbox. A new NPC, a new place, a new adventure theme, a little quirk that will appear in a random room in a dungeon. Anything to make the sandbox grow each day.

It is interesting to see the range of inspirations that are finding their way into the game — I’m pulling in things from everywhere: Gaming blogs (duh), non-gaming blogs, TV shows, movies. Books, magazines, newspaper articles. There is something in almost everything that can be stolen and placed (strategically) in the sandbox.

It’s also a slow project. When I write out a page in my notebook about a Dwarven armourer in the City of Bridges, I do not know how this character will become important — or if they will become important — during the game. I don’t even know if my characters will ever go to the City of Bridges. Hell, at the moment, I’m not even sure where the City of Bridges is. It’s just somewhere.

As a result, we are wondering how long it should take to build a sandbox.

Perhaps that should read: we are wondering how long it should take to build a sandbox when the builder has a baby. I think that my concentration is being sapped by alternate duties.

The players are going into the sandbox soon(ish), though, so I’d best get all the plastic shovels ready.

Image: Steve Zieser