Had a fun evening that ran a little later than expected, doing something I haven't done in a long time.<\/p>\n
Or ever, depending on how you look at it.<\/p>\n
I did a group dungeon run in an MMO. Haven't done that in a long time.<\/p>\n
I did it with two of my kids, so… yeah. That's new.<\/p>\n
The vehicle for this bit of virtual heroic was a perennial game around our house: Pirate 101.<\/p>\n
Now, we've been playing stuff from Kingsisle Entertainment for quite some time – http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/2010\/04\/my-daughter-the-wizard\/<\/a>“>Kaylee played Wizard 101 for the first time back in 2010<\/a>, before she turned five. The game's in-house popularity comes and goes (personally, I enjoy it, and there's enough going on with the pop-culture jokes, storyline, and card-building combat system that I don't get bored), but it's installed on our machines far more than not (and it runs on everything but the tablets and chromebooks, which is nice).<\/p>\n A few weeks ago, Kaylee started making noises about how she missed playing Pirate101, which shares the same basic setting as Wizard101, but with different classes, and more tactical, turn- and grid-based combat system (sort of a big-pixel version of X-Com combat, with cool animations when it plays out), and I was getting a leeeeettle tired of Sean's obsession with Overwatch, so I stuck both Wizard 101 and Pirate 101 back on, and let the kids go to town.<\/p>\n  <\/p>\n
<\/p>\nSean enjoyed watching his sister rock the Pirate thing, but spent most of his own play time as Sean Bearhammer, young wizard.<\/p>\n…until a few days ago, when he decided he wanted to try out the Pirate side of the Spiral – where there's a bit more action in combat, and EVERYONE has a crew of cool anthropomorphic animals fighting on your side. Yeah. Hard to see why THAT was a draw.<\/p>\nIt took him a few days to really figure out the combat system (and I have to force myself not to watch him play, because he make sub optimal choices GAHHHhhhh…<\/i>), but by yesterday he was caught up to where Kaylee and I had gotten on our main guys, if not just a bit ahead.<\/p>\nSo, in lieu of regular bedtime activities, we teamed up (Sean as his combat-heavy Buccaneer, Kaylee as her magic-hurling Witchdoctor, and me playing a sort of support & tactics Privateer) and headed to a (if not THE) lost city of gold, where we fought a lot of dinosaurian bad guys and, a BIT too late into the evening, decided to take down the final dungeon.<\/p>\nSo… yeah. That was the evening – dungeon raiding with my kids for sweet loot and new skills.<\/p>\nIt was pretty great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Had a fun evening that ran a little later than expected, doing something I haven't done in a long time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[53,115,63,143],"class_list":["post-12381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actual-play","category-mmos","tag-gaming","tag-google","tag-kaylee","tag-sean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12381"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12388,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12381\/revisions\/12388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/s.blogcdn.com\/massively.joystiq.com\/media\/2012\/08\/pirate101-board.jpg\"){kind=link}
![https:\/\/edgecast.pirate101.com\/image\/free\/Pirate\/Images\/Slideshows\/combat3.jpg<\/a> "Resulting combat animations!")<\/p>\nSean enjoyed watching his sister rock the Pirate thing, but spent most of his own play time as Sean Bearhammer, young wizard.<\/p>\n…until a few days ago, when he decided he wanted to try out the Pirate side of the Spiral – where there's a bit more action in combat, and EVERYONE has a crew of cool anthropomorphic animals fighting on your side. Yeah. Hard to see why THAT was a draw.<\/p>\nIt took him a few days to really figure out the combat system (and I have to force myself not to watch him play, because he make sub optimal choices GAHHHhhhh…<\/i>), but by yesterday he was caught up to where Kaylee and I had gotten on our main guys, if not just a bit ahead.<\/p>\nSo, in lieu of regular bedtime activities, we teamed up (Sean as his combat-heavy Buccaneer, Kaylee as her magic-hurling Witchdoctor, and me playing a sort of support & tactics Privateer) and headed to a (if not THE) lost city of gold, where we fought a lot of dinosaurian bad guys and, a BIT too late into the evening, decided to take down the final dungeon.<\/p>\nSo… yeah. That was the evening – dungeon raiding with my kids for sweet loot and new skills.<\/p>\nIt was pretty great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Had a fun evening that ran a little later than expected, doing something I haven't done in a long time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[53,115,63,143],"class_list":["post-12381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actual-play","category-mmos","tag-gaming","tag-google","tag-kaylee","tag-sean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12381"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12388,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12381\/revisions\/12388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/edgecast.pirate101.com\/image\/free\/Pirate\/Images\/Slideshows\/combat3.jpg\"){kind=link}