Numenera RPG Night

So we've added another character to the odd group already gathered.  We now have a Doomed Jack who wields two weapons, he is mad because he's been shown all the ways he could possibly be killed in the future by various numenera objects that his is bound to encounter.  He also believes he has been shown a numenera that could bring about the end of the world and he has taken it as his mission to stop this.

He's an extra wrinkle to be thrown into the party, we'll see what havoc it wreaks.

Last night I brought the new party member into the group, we had run a one off the last time due to an absent person so the characters have some ret-conned history with each other.

They are going through the adventure from the main rulebook called the Beale of Boregal, so spoiler alert; if you haven't been through it yet, stop here.


They have tracked the source of the interruption of normal life to the aldeia of Embered Peaks.  The girl that they helped get healed told them someone named Boregal is there and is causing the problems and he is scared.  As they arrive in Embered Peaks they are shown the level of madness that has arrived here, probably due to Boregal.  There are several buildings on fire, nobody is trying to put them out, some are completely burned to the ground.  They see a number of people fighting each other and quite a few people talking to themselves or some other invisible thing.  Ripley, the mad nano who speaks with the dead, fits right in, she doesn't think anything is strange here.  The other two, Telus and Bashek, know something is definitely wrong here.  They ask one of the less crazy people where the town leaders are, they are told "Any that might still be alive would be in the magistrate's office in the center of town, it's the large circular building."  They made their way through town avoiding any troublesome citizens and find the large building the person told them about.  Inside is a slight man, in a robe who seems to be feverishly looking for something.

The group interupts him and asks who the town leader is to which he tells them, "The Magistrate is in charge, but he is very very busy."

"Where is he?"  Telus askes gruffly.

"He is in his office and not to be interrupted!" replied the young man, with only a slight hesitation at Telus' aggressive attitude.

Seeing the man motion towards a door behind a large desk Telus moved over swung it open, ignoring the man's protests.  The door opened into a semi-circular room with three other doors in it, the door immediately in front of the PCs was the grandest of the three so the group assumed that was where they wanted to go.  This was when an old friend of Telus and Bashek shows up, Corbyk had followed their trail of mayhem across half of the beyond on some mission of his own.  After asking the young man where the most obvious of the group, Telus, had gone he opened the door the other three had previously entered and greeted them.  He explained that he had tracked them to here and had already learned part of what they were doing and wanted to join them in their travels.

The group of four now split up one going to each side room to see what they might find and Telus attempting to find a way through the central door.  Telus realizing there were two locks that he didn't have a key or solution for returned to the young man, and aske him his name while dragging him into the room.  After learning the man's name was Chahil, Telus convinced him to unlock the large door.  The door opened into a fairly large office lined with bookshelves, a desk on one side and a conference table on the other.  The group spread out into the room. Telus walked into the center of the room, looked around and demanded Chahil show them where the Magistrate was.  In order to amplify his demand Telus stomped his foot and again demanded to be shown where the Magistrate was.  Apparently he had found the perfect place to stand and stomp as his foot came down on a button hidden in the floor and the floor beneath is feet opened up and dropped him into a darked pit with a circular set of stairs, he hit the stairs and then fell all the way down to the floor.

The rest of the group laughed a little and took the stairs down while Telus regained his feet and inspected some of the new dents in his shield and some of his body parts.  At the end of the stairs was a lit hallway that went to another door with a mirrored panel on one side of the door.  Again Telus forced Chahil to help them, fearing for his life the young man was more than happy to be of assistance.  Beyond the door was what appeared to be a strange mortuary, there was nearly a dozen bodies laid out on tables.  They all had a strange burn mark on their forehead.  Near the head of one of the bodies is a disheveled man, he is leaning over and appears to have whispered something in the corpse's ear and put his ear to the corpse's mouth.  Ripley was ecstatic, finally someone who saw the world as she did and talked to dead people.  When Telus walked up to the man to determine what he was doing, but before he could say anything, the man thanked him for coming and asked him if they were here to hinder or help him.  Telus told him they were here to help, two which the Magistrate asked him to grab a piece of equipment for him and then he started muttering something about how it's not working and something about wrong questions.  He then took the tool that Telus brought him and held it out to Corbyk and told him that he should just go cut him out since nothing's going to work.  The Magistrate then led the group down a hallway into a strange room that was half filled with numenera parts and was dominated by a soft spongy mass that seemed to be attached to the wall.

More of this story to follow

A note about Numenera and The Strange.

About three years ago I stumbled on a Kickstarter for an RPG called Numenera.  It seemed to be getting quite a bit of support and I was quickly growing tired once again of the D&D 3.5 rules.  I started to investigate the game and it sounded interesting, the idea of what our world would be like so far in the future plus the idea of having streamlined rules that promoted story, action and wild ideas. One of the selling points was the creator, Monte Cook.  I really wasn't familiar with him, but after seeing what types of materials he had generated in the past I decided to take a plunge and see what I would get.

The new game company kept it's backers up to date, showed some artwork, provided some short stories.  We all knew that work was being done and that the team had a schedule.

One year later the rulebook was delivered, it was well made, well written and provoked my imagination.  Now all I had to do was try and fit it into my rpg schedule, I was still playing d&d 3.5 with a group at a game store on thursdays and was running an epic storyline for my monthly Saturday group.  The d&d
group was set on only playing d&d so I wasn't able to get them to try something new and I had to finish my epic on Saturdays, so Numenera just had to wait.

A few months after they delivered the first pieces of the Numenera Campaign, MonteCookGames also announce another game, "The Strange".  The ruleset was to be mostly the same so I was already familiar with it and the setting and concepts drew me in.  Knowing that the new ( now one year old ) company was able to complete its projects I decided to back The Strange for a bit more than I did for Numenera.  The following August I had a nice collection of The Strange products on my doorstep.

A few months after that MonteCookGames started advertising for evangelist/demonstrators for both of their games.  I wasn't sure if it was something I wanted to do, the minor rewards sounded good and I had been looking for a way to game. ( I had left my d&d group by then )  So after thinking for it for a while I signed up to be part of their AssetTeam.  Since then I've run a couple of demos, with small turn outs but things went well. I am may be running a few demos as Capricon this year.

Now about three years later I get to run a full-time campaign, that meets mostly regularly and has some strange characters that I have recently posted about.  Hopefully more to follow on a more regular basis.

Something I was thinking about for my other hobby, RPG.

 My wonderful wife pulled together a nice week long trip to Florida that also included a three day cruise to the Bahamas.  I've been on one other cruise, a couple of years ago.  That cruise was also a short three day trip that left LA with a final stop at a Mexican port.  The thing I like about these cruises is the relative freedom, considering you're trapped in a floating hotel.

During our California cruise I found that I just enjoyed the relaxation, whether is was laying on a lounge chair by the pool or napping in the tiny shoebox room.  It was the feeling that it was my time for whatever I wanted, I could go visit the buffet nearly any time I was hungry or the pizza bar late at night.  For our Bahamas cruise we did a little bit more, we spent nearly the entire alotted time on the cruise line's private island ( probably about 2 square miles ).  We made sure to go to the shows they had in the evenings and again had a wonderful, relaxing, enjoyable time.

During this last cruise a thought occured to me.  Wouldn't an RPG cruise be fun?  Like a gaming convention only with real destinations.  Everyone could do the excursions during the day and then in the evening when it was time to relax just set up shop at a table in the buffet dining area and play some D&D or anything for a few hours.

If you've been on a cruise and are a gamer, has this ever occured to you?  Do you think it could work?

Numenera RPG

As I've seen from a lot of rpg gaming groups schedules are a lot of hit-or-miss.  My Monday night pulp savage worlds group has lost a player so we've switched to Numenera.
Numenera promotes the weird, but I don't know if I could expect what we got.

Going from most strange to least the players made a Mad nano who Consorts with the Dead.  She carries around her mother's shrunken head, because that's what they do in their Aldeia.  It is assumed that each daughter would kill their mother once they became of age.  Then they would venture out into the world to find a mate so that they in turn would have a daughter.  She is currently wandering the world looking for that mate.

The next is a Tough Glaive who Fuses Flesh with Steel, he is a member of a cult/religion whose member's main purpose in life is to become completely machine.  He is on his walk-about to see the world and gather parts to incorporate into his being.

The last is the most "normal" he is a Rugged Jack who Explores Dark places.  I have yet to hear a driving force behind his adventures other than to become rich.

Their first adventure had them visit Shadewalker Shanty and help the aldeia track the Shadewalker their aldeia is built around.  They had arrived shortly before the ancient numenera machine raised itself up and flew away.

More posts to follow about Numenera

note: In Numenera Aldeia is another term for a village in The Beyond.

What I've been doing

So fairly quickly I lost interest in Rift, I can't put my finger on why but I did.

We started playing The Secret World when it released July 2012 my wife and I played quite a bit together, even had a regular planned group that included another couple.  That is slowing down for me now as well only logging in for the short raid they have in the game, maybe I will get the urge to dive deeper into it again,..

I'm dabbling a little bit in Firefall but haven't been able to get my wife to try it.

So since I don't have much going on in the MMO/Computer game world I will probably be posting some things about my tabletop RPG hobby.

I've been GMing a weekly Savage Worlds pulp game recently, prior to that I was playing a little D&D 3.5 at the local game store.

Our pulp game is made up of a number of non-standard pulp "heroes".  We have a fugitive fortune teller from the middle east, a world war one veteran turned grocery store owner, a former assistant to Nikolai Tesla who is also an anti-government liberal, a precocious reporter for a local newspaper and recently we have added the secretary for a private detective that takes on cases that her boss doesn't have time for.

Rift update

Well, we're still playing.  Our tank/healer combo have reached lvl 48 and we're still rolling and having a blast.

We have been skipping the instances though, mostly because of my insecurity in being a tank and not knowing all the instances and boss fights or having gear that is good enough.

My tank is the Paladin variety, with a decent sized dose of Warlord.  I'm going to put together a Void Knight build and use some of the information I found here http://ciderhelm.com/?p=554 to do things right.

My wife has spent some extra time when I wasn't around doing warfronts, she has found them really fun.  I on the other hand will join her from time to time but find them frustrating.  Sometimes you end up in a wonderful raid group where everyone knows what they're doing and what the goal is.  Other times I end up in groups of people that seem to peel off from the main goal and have side skirmishes while the enemy is focusing on the goal of the warfront.  It feels like swimming against the current.

I like my wife

I really do ( actually love her completely).. so when I get a chance to play an MMO with her I take advantage of it.  Recently We've been playing together.  I coerced her into playing a healing cleric, and I'm playing a warrior tank.  Getting her to play the cleric didn't take much coercion, she likes to play healers in general.  When the game was first released her first character was a rogue, I think she was trying to relive her fun in WoW as a rogue, but then she got busy and I kept playing my chloromancer on a PVP server.

So when she got a chance to start playing again, she offered to come over to the PVP server and we started leveling together.  My previous projects of my chloromancer and my cleric tank have been put on hold for a bit and we've been having some fun.  So don't expect to see much about my cleric tanking here for a bit and since I'm re-visiting content ( still on defiant side ) I don't know how much I'll have to say.  Maybe I'll have some insight into warrior tanking or something but who knows.

One thing I did get a chance to do was heal with my cleric tank, I created a second role and healed through Iron Tomb when I was over leveled for it.  In doing so I found another annoyance with the new LFG system, I couldn't queue for IT at lvl 24.  I don't care if I was too high, I had a quest to go in there so I should be able to queue, shouldn't I?  Instead we had to create a group the old fashioned way and it came together quickly with a few people that were over level and one dps warrior at 18.  It was quick easy and enjoyable, and as a bonus I found my cleric a guild with the people I ran with.

Maybe something the RPG crowd would be interested in:
I stumbled on a link to an interesting project on kickstarter.com, any RPG or dice enthusiasts might be interested.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1764845067/dungeonmorph-dice-dungeon-geomorphs
They are creating sets of dungeon geomorph dice, 5 dice per set with 6 geomorphs per die.  It's a little expensive but if you're a dice fanatice like I am it might not be too much to own some unique dice.  Take a look, give them some pub help them get to their new goal of $17,000.  If they reach the goal they'll be "printing" 3 different sets of dice that you can choose from for your donation.

Well, I think my love affair with Rift may be in jeopardy

And here is why.

I was a WoW player, at least on and off.  I stopped playin WoW because the game had turned into a login/wait in queue, hope to find something to do with my main game.  I couldn't go out and play an alt and find something to do with my main when I saw someone looking for some help or wanting someone to do a particular instance.  When WoW added the LFD system they put a lot of incentive on using the system and really no reason to log in otherwise except for raids.

Well Rift seems to be going down the same road.  When they originally announced a LFG system that would not be the same as WoW I had hope that it might be a more freeform system like what Everquest put into their system around the Planes of Power days.  That system was just a refinement of the advertising to find a group.  Want I want in a LFG system is a way for me to be out leveling or harvesting with an alt yet be able to list my level 50.  At the very least I would have wanted to have a way for me to search for a lvl 50 group while out playing my lvl 23 character in stonefield.  On the positive side, Trion is keeping the LFD system on the same server initially.  Hopefully this will keep any sense of community from deteriorating, but when they stated this they added the caveat "for now" to their statements.

On top of this they are going to be dumbing down their expert dungeons and buffing the plaque rewards.  I don't know why they think they need to do this as they are giving buffs to equipment at the same time.  Like WoW did before they are taking away challenge when it wasn't needed.  I haven't been in a group yet where people weren't surprised by having a wipe or two.  Recovery is simple and as a group you get to learn from your mistakes.  What I want to know is, has there been an expert dungeon that has never been completed?  If there is no cost to making mistakes the game becomes a boring treadmill, just like WoW.

How are we "not in Azeroth anymore"?  as far as I'm concerned it's becoming the far east of Azeroth, just because it's not on your WoW map doesn't mean you're not in the same world.

I may be completely wrong, Trion may not nerf the experts as much as it sounds, the challenge may remain, but I am now questioning where I have placed my loyalty.

My first Tier 1 dungeons

Sorry for the slowdown in posts, I'm taking a class at night and it's taken away some of my time towards the end of the semester.  My job has also gotten a little busier as well so writing posts during downtime at work has been getting a little more difficult.  But here I am anyway with another post...

My chloromancer hit 50 sometime last week, finally.  And over last weekend I got a decent amount of time to play him and meet a few of my guildies who had already been 50 or even had a second character to 50.

We did a few T1 dungeons, we had a cleric MH, me as my chloro, a rogue dps and then we had a rogue and a warrior sharing tanking responsibilties.  The warrior was just getting into tanking and getting into T1s while the rogue had gone through the T1s at least once as DPS and within the week had started tanking.  I'm not sure if they really meant it or were just being nice, but my groupmates/guildies were very forthcoming with praise.  Saying that I was doing really good with my heals or that my cleansing was great and quick and the cleric never needed to cleanse or if I got out a timely combat rez I was told "great job".  It was a good feeling, I felt like I was really contributing to a team effort and that without me they might not have succeeded.

The T1s we visited were King's Breach, Lantern Hook and Foul Cascade.  None of the dungeons were completed without deaths but when there were deaths there was no finger-pointing or whining ( by me or anyone else ).  The fights we had problems with were approached like the puzzle they were.

Last month I posted a walk-through for normal King's Breach.  But in the expert version things are little different.  One of the nice things about the expert dungeons is the additional boss(es) that we didn't see in the normal dungeon.  It makes the instances at the same time familiar and new.  The changes for KBx, as the dungeon is abbreviated, is that the manticore boss becomes the manticore bossES. In normal there was a chance for either manticore, now you get both.  We also get an additional boss named Konstantin.  Strangely  I had been invited by a guildie the previous day to kill just Konstantin since his group earlier in the day had given up on him.

The instance was smooth, the only real problem we had was with the manticores.  The rogue tank had a strategy where he would try and get wedged into a particular tree trunk to avoid the knockbacks and the rest of the group could just stay at range.  We tried variations on that strat probably 4 times before someone else spoke up and said they had done it by having the whole group in the tree trunk.  We wiped once on that strat and the second try we got it right.  One trick the rogue tank used was to put his teleport beacon in the spot we were all stacked so that if he happened to get knocked back he was able to quickly return to the stack.... SUCCESS!!!

Konstantin, actually a very interesting fight.  Konstantin is in a crypt, this crypt has a metal floor with thousands of holes in it and the floor has a nice arc pattern to it.  When you start fighting him spikes come up through the holes in the floor, but only in parts of the pattern part of the time and then other parts of the pattern other times.  There isn't a set pattern to when they come up, all you get is a warning of puffs of air coming through the holes that are going to get spiked.  The first time I had done it the person teaching the fight told me to worry about the spikes first and dps when possible.  The spikes seemed to do about 3k damage, I had about 5k health, so two times getting hit with spikes without getting a heal was bad.  After two tries we got it done though.  The trick was that the spikes only did damage when they came up, so after they appeared you could move onto the spiked area without getting hurt.  This gave everyone a bit more time to DPS/heal and gave the fight a nice dance feel, like Heigan in Naxx.

A video I found on You Tube, not mine.

A different take on the Konstantin fight was what I saw the next day with the rogue tank.  He had the group stay outside of the crypt and he went in and pulled Konstantin out.  He kited him in front of the entrance and I guess there's a point where Konstantin enrages or something, but when that happened the rogue teleported either to his beacon or just straight ahead depending on which ability was on cooldown.  It made the fight more than easy for the rest of us as we didn't have to worry about spikes and the tank avoided extra damage.

Enough babbling for today, maybe Monday I'll have something put together about Lantern Hook and/or Foul Cascade.

Future Cleric tanking plans

As I said before there is some disagreement on the Rift forums and elsewhere with my presumption that shields are the lesser choice for tanking clerics.  My plan is to keep my non-shield spec for soloing and switching to a shield friendly spec for instances and rifts.  My cleric is 29 now and I've stuck with the game suggested combination of justicar/druid/shaman.  I'm going to try and show what my spec will end up looking like as I level up with both roles.

Lvl 20 http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00ran.AuMo0G.x.0c

Lvl 30 http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00ran.EuMo0eczo.xM.0c

Lvl 40 http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00ran.EuMooeckRR.xVbo.0c
By the time I reach level 38 I am required to start taking shield based talents to stay in Justicar, so by this I take it that I am supposed to have picked up a shield by this point.  None of the abilities post 37 ( Just Defense, Resplendent Embrace or Doctrine of Authority ) require a shield but they do seem to be survivability abilities that might be a mistake to skip, at least end game.  I held out and instead spent some points in my DPS trees to get to 40, assuming I would have to be shield spec'd by 50.  My extra points in Druid get me Fae Hammer to help with mana issues, I picked up Slumber to help with mob control

Lvl 50 http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00ran.EuRsqeekRR.xVoo.0c
So after 40 if I wanted to stay full Justicar, and I'm not saying that's the best choice, I need to take shield talents.  If I'm taking shield talents then it only makes sense to pick up a shield.  In some of my research I've seen specs that don't bring Justicar all the way up to 51, they stop at 38 and put points into Shaman and their third soul is Inquisitor.  I'll have to look at this once I get to that level.  Here is a link to a forum post about exactly this sort of spec ( http://knightsofshadow.org/forums/showthread.php?t=2584 ).

Let me know what you think or what you've found out, I'm always willing to listen.

Rift Cleric Tanking

I've started playing a cleric tank a little bit more.  I'm liking the soloability and of course the ability to tank an instance.  I've only done the first instance "Iron Tomb" on my cleric, but other than being a little squishy for the second half trash I've been going ok.  I like that I've been through the dungeon as DPS first, no responsibility other than pew pew and learning the instance.  Now that I have the responsibility of being the tank it's not so stressful.

The cleric Justicar soul gives you all the tools to tank, it works and IMO it works very well.  My other souls are the melee DPS cleric souls of Shaman and Druid, some of their early tree abilities benefit a tank with some endurance and damage reduction.  About halfway up the  tree there are a number of abilities that help with block or give you an ability when wielding a shield.  From what I've seen  the benefit to using the shield doesn't seem to outweigh the additional DPS, though perhaps when instancing the loss in DPS wouldn't hurt as much.

Cleric shields don't get as much armor or tanking stats as Warrior shields, they are also missing the spellpower that you would get in other caster off-hands.  It just seems that using a shield as a cleric is a net loss compared to other options.  Currently my tree is avoiding the shield talents and I just whip around a staff catching up to 5 mobs in my path with "Even Justice".  I've made sure to have the pure damage reduction 3% per point spent in the Justicar and the 3% for 3 points in Shaman.  Perhaps when my cleric gets to Deepstrike Mine I'll experiment with a different role using the shield and get some feedback from the healer to my survivability and from the DPS regarding my aggro control.

Has anyone else seen any discussions regarding this point?

P.S.  Vacation for me starts tomorrow, I'm going away so updates or comments may be sparse for a week or so.

King's Breach - Rift instance

I finally got into a group in King's Breach, the instance in Scarwood Reach.

  I was asked to DPS as they already had their healer, so I got a chance to learn how to play my warlock build.  The instance had the usual trash you would expect in an instance, easily gathered up and dps'd down.  I had my dominator soul second to my warlock soul all ready to squirrel things but there didn't seem to be any reason to CC. 

There are three boss locations in King's Breach, at the last spot you get to fight two bosses, one after the other.  Our tank seemed to know the instance so we moved fairly quickly and he was nice enough to give us a heads up for any special mechanics. 

We cleared out the trash from the first area, and after we had killed the last group the first boss came out to fight.  She was "Hunter Suleng", she seemed to be typical tank-n-spank with adds that spawned during the fight.  It seemed to be an easy fight, some of the trash that lead up to her probably hit harder.  In the same area as this boss is a life-bomb, you need to get three of them.  In this run the first life bomb was inaccessible, it seemed to be stuck behind a clip plane, though I hear that sometimes it is accessible. 

The second boss was Ravalos, he's a large crocodile that has a front cleave and a tail sweep.  On top of his melee attacks he puts a circle of some form of attack on the ground, you have to move out of it or you'll be asking your healer to heal when he shouldn't have to.  There's a decent amount of crocodile trash as well for those who have the butchering profession. 

We continued on through the area and ended up at the last boss fight location.  At this location you get one of two random bosses either Mondrach or Autoch, both of them are griffins, we got Autoch who's main annoyance is a charge ability.  Our tank had everyone stand in an alcove in a tree stump and he pulled the boss to us.  This kept the boss from charging anyone and made the fight relatively simple, I'm not sure if the additional damage to the group made healing any more difficult to the healer.  Following Autoch a Shadehorror Phantasm spawns in the same place he was standing.  He casts an AE void bolt so at the start the tank had us LoS the boss then we all started on him.  During the fight he spawns adds and at the same time becomes undamageable, the adds are elites but seemed to be easy enough.  It was a fun run, I'm sure it was made easier by the knowledgable tank.

I've actually enjoyed some PVP

I've got my chloromancer in Rift to lvl 34. I'm playing him on a PVP server, totally against my normal inclination.  From some of the posts I had read prior to launch I wanted to have a chance to play in that environment.  You know the one, where you're constantly on the lookout for your next assassin?  I know if my Bartle test had come up "killer" I would be looking at the zones as "target rich", but that's not me.  Instead I look around every corner and try and find some companionship while questing through the "kill x of y".
Apparently I made a bad choice with playing a mage on that server, some posts say that they are the worst to play in PVP.  I found this out when I stumbled upon what I guess was someone with Champion as their main soul and got thoroughly pwned.  I kept at it though, even attacking him first a couple of times, hoping to get a drop on him, but to no avail.  I soon gave up on trying to take him down, but it didn't discourage me from trying other PVP targets as I went about questing.
When I was 29 in Scarlet Gorge I spent a whole hour with my group trying to find our way to the "Fallen Cascade" instance which happens to be deep into enemy territory at the north point of Scarlet Gorge.  None of us knew for certain where the instance was nor how to get there, but we kept trying.  Eventually one of us prevailed through corpse hopping and we all benefitted from the teleport that group members get when any of their group enters an instance.  Sometimes this felt frustrating, but the pride in overcoming the challenge was worth the frustration.

All things considered I'm enjoying the PVP aspect in the game a little bit more than I have before.  I'll probably keep going with it and see what the end areas are like with both factions fighting over territory and quest hubs.

More Bartle

Well a couple days ago I managed to drum up a bunch of reads when I posted my blog URL into some WoW forum discussions on how to "fix" WoW.  In one of those forums I got one response of "I liked your post and agree with it".  It would have been nice to get a couple of comments on the blog itself, but I'll take what I can get.  I've done a little moving around of stuff around here, removed my WoW armory and moved TJ down into a lower link bracket since her stuff is now mostly about her pregnancy, congrats TJ!!!

I'm sure most people have seen or taken those personality tests, the ones that confirm in your mind what type of person you are.  I assumed there was one out there for Bartle's archetypes, so I did a search and found this one.
http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology

I found that according to their test I'm an Explorer being driven by achievement:
Description:
It's not so much the wandering around and poking about, but that euphoric eureka moment the Explorer strives for. The joys of discovery do not necessarily involve geography, real or virtual. They may derive from the mental road less traveled, the uncovering of esoteric or hidden knowledge and it's creative application. Explorers make great theory crafters. The most infinitesimal bit of newness can deliver the most delicious zing to an Explorer.

What did you test out to be?

What happened to WoW?

My previous post here: Rift - Why I think it will be a success , was about Rift and how they appear to have addressed Bartel's rpg gamer archetypes as shown here: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm.  In my opinion WoW started out appealing to those archetypes as well, but through changing their game they have actually taken away some of that appeal.
Explorers:
  What WoW did was to reduce the amount of exploration by changing the leveling curve in their game, now to level from 1 to end game takes significantly less time than in Vanilla or BC.  Also the addition of the dungeon finder removed some of the need to wander and find quests or just the need to wander when given a quest.  Another thing that removed the need to explore was the the addition of the quest helper, which now directs you to where you need to go to finish your quest instead of giving you more general direction in the quest text itself.  So explorers got short changed, their gameplay was nerfed. 
Achievers:
  WoW de-emphasized the Achiever by making everything more accessible to everyone.  What an achiever wants is a way to differentiate themself.  In recent years ( last 3 years ) Blizzard has tried to make the game easy enough for anyone to play all of the end game, setting expectations that all players will be able to be the best.  They did attempt to keep some achievment based content by providing a "Heroic" version of the content, sometimes the heroic version has been met with disdain as just more HP and more damage taken.  I was more happy in the "Burning Crusades" days when I had better players to look up to, I had the next raid tier to look forward to and knew I had a ladder to climb.  Any achiever needs to have goals, even if they didn't seem attainable at this instant.  Removing the incentive to work through the content reduced the achievement process.  Why should I work so hard on this content when in 2 months when the new content comes out I'll automatically be bumped to that level?
Socializers:
  When the dungeonfinder was added the need to socialize with other players was reduced.  Sure the people could chat with guildies and in trade channel and city channels, but is this the kind of socialization anyone really wants?  Since the people you're running with in instances are people you most likekly won't ever see again, in most groups not one word is spoken other than "I'm ready".  In my opinion dungeonfinder broke the server community, your socializer types will have a harder time finding people who just want to have conversations, especially new people.  They have also made the quests easier to do solo, even further reducing the need to talk with anyone else, and giving possible socializer friends a reason not to communicate with the socializer.
Killers:
  I'm not a PVPer so I can't make a whole lot of comment on this.  But most complaints I've seen has been based on balance and "Flavor of the Month" and how the player's favorite class no longer competes.  Anyone have any comments on this one?