Musings of the Wombat Warlord

Game Changers

2012-01-27T23:10:00.000-05:00

Scheduling concerns, moving players, and other circumstances have spelled the end of my Birthright campaign, for which I am terribly sad. However, it has ended on a victory note for the players, and the whole experience gave me valuable insight on the setting and what makes a good story within it. It has taught me a few poignant lessons.

Firstly, when presented with the ability to explore every corner of the map, as it were, players will generally take it. This is especially true when that map will change, metaphorically, through the progression of domain turns or scene changes. Birthright had the benefit of being the game I have run where I was able to utilize the most descriptive scenes and vivid explanations. However, it sometimes caused the segments to drag when some of the players wanted to explore every aspect of the scene.

Second, SIFRP is very well suited for intrigue-based games, but when you have an aspect of play that is adventure-themed, it breaks down in usefulness. Don't get me wrong, it's still one of my favorite systems, but the sheer lethality of characters with high combat skills means fights are generally over with a quickness. It is difficult to challenge the heroes without introducing an ever-more-powerful array of monstrous badasses. I'm pretty sure Caterina, the group's swordmistress, was angling towards being able to beat the Gorgon in a fight.

Lastly, the magic system suffered from being both too specific and too vague. I chalk this down to my relative inexperience in gamemastering SIFRP to the same extent I have other systems, so when it came to ad hoc rulings I often found myself straining. The player utilizing the system was also far more interested in the visual/story elements than the raw mechanics, so maybe it didn't get the workout that it needed.

On the other hand, I've been having an opportunity to play with Pathfinder of late, and I found that while I am still not hot on the system (they fixed a lot of 3.5 D&D issues but did not even attempt to resolve how grossly overpowered casters are in comparison to... well, everyone else in the upper levels), they do one thing with amazing detail.

Their core setting design is really cool.

Sure, it's very obviously a lot of transplant cultures on a world that is strongly hinted at to have once been Earth, but they make a great grab-bag of mini-settings within the larger world. This sounds like the idea of Forgotten Realms, and I've tried to draw the parallels in my mind, but I find myself considering Pathfinder's Golarion setting vastly superior. I think this is solely because I don't have to even think about the wretchedness of constant setting reboots and the presence of author-insert NPCs from numerous books over the last two decades.

The production value of the setting guide, the Inner Sea World Guide, is super impressive. Fourth edition D&D books are usually pretty spartan and utilitarian for the sake of clarity and efficient/cheap production. Every page of the Pathfinder books is richly colored, with gorgeous fonts and artwork. They're pleasant to read, if a little weighty. The Monkey King dropped off his copy of the core rulebook for me to read the other day, and referred to it (quite accurately) as the Pathfinder Brick.

Quite a pretty brick though, and nice to read.

I was unfair.

2011-12-19T18:33:00.000-05:00

It occurs to me that I might have been unfair in my intense reflexive dislike of The Old Republic. Anything that is mega-hyped instantly gets that reaction from me, and it's a bad, close-minded sort of reaction to have. While I'm still not terribly convinced that I want to group with strangers again, this isn't a TOR-specific problem; MMO players from all games tend to be fairly sociopathic and bigoted.

Getting out of the starting area for the Empire was a welcome change. The choices in my quests became a lot more compelling, less a matter of cartoonish villainy versus saccharine goody-ness and more a genuine choice on how I want to proceed with the disposal of enemies of the Empire. MUCH better. I like being able to still be Light-side (because I don't like wanton slaughter for no reason) while still being pragmatic and practical (execute the right traitors as opposed to everyone who could be one).

I am sad that I haven't gotten the option to force choke a bitch yet though. Perhaps I don't really have that ability.

Aside from some painful balance issues (the current iteration of the Sith Juggernaut, ostensibly a tank, is woefully inadequate to even do his own at-level quests), and rather weak PvP (queue at level 10, get stuck with level 40s; sure you get equalized HP, but they still have ~30 more talent points than you!) that is focused around stuns, roots, and total lockdowns, the game definitely has staying power in the tumultuous MMO market.

I expect to enjoy it and stay subscribed for a while, but I'm a fickle beast. I just need to find time to play on multiple servers with the people that asked me to play with them. I already have my tanky Sith Juggernaut. Perhaps I'll try a bounty hunter next.

(Can you tell I just watched the Robot Chicken Star Wars specials recently?)

Yikes, December already?

2011-12-17T12:39:00.000-05:00

The holidays are never a good time for gaming. Especially as you get older, and you have all those family obligations and such.

So as a general update, the Birthright session's last game of the big chapter keeps getting pushed back due to scheduling conflicts, but this coming Monday should spell the end of Aeronos. The prideful unicorn awnshegh whose loathing of arrogant maidens who seek to tame him has turned the beast into a murderer. Numerous villages throughout southern Roesone and the Erebannien have felt the wrath of Aeronos, and it's up to the players to put a stop to it on behalf of both Marlae Roesone and the Elf-Queen Liliene Swordwraith of Aerenwe.

Planescape has been on hold since October because my schedule is crap and trying to get the gang together in one place has been tough. I'm hoping to bring that back with the coming of the new year.

Another side project I'm working on is a science-fantasy hack of SIFRP, as I've alluded to in a previous entry. I got some interested nibbles from my online gaming group, so I'm in the process of developing a setting and modifying some rules. The system of magic I utilized for Birthright, while good for that setting, doesn't seem appropriate here. The mixture of magic and technology might come off as slightly bizarre, but that's the fun behind these settings. They're sort of designed to be a bit absurd (quick, man the blaster turrets and get our priest up from below decks to shield us from dragonfire!).

That's half the fun!

On a computer gaming note, I started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic last night. I've put in about 10 hours so far, and I hate to be That Guy, but there are some things that are fundamentally wrong with the way they make players deal with each other.

I started out as a Smuggler and ran through a good portion of the starter area on my own. The quests are fairly basic, nothing to write home about. I found it a bit tedious to listen to the dialogue after a while, but I can't really complain about there being a, you know, reason that I'm going to kill ten rat-Separatists.

The choice quests are interesting, but Bioware seems to have fallen into the trap that they did in the Old Republic console RPGs. My dark side choices are almost invariably, "Let's kill him!" or "I snap this puppy's neck! Muahahaha!" rather than having any sort of insidious or manipulative undertones. It makes being a dark side character sort of lame.

This led to my first nerdrage moment of my play experience; my groupmates, random people I picked up while questing, forced me to stand by while they murdered an NPC I set out to save.

I got credit for my light-side choice. Okay. That's fine. But going back to the NPC for him to cackle madly at my evil nature... yeah. I don't want to group with any people anymore. What's the point of an MMO where I loathe the other players I group with for making my choices for me?

I'll get over it, but it was among the most irritating MMO experiences I've had, which are crowned by my brief hour-long dalliance with Rift. It's not driven me away from trying TOR yet, but it sure discouraged me from grouping with anyone else. I'm sure they had a reason for building it this way, but I'm darned if I can figure out what that reason was.

The Academy

2011-10-11T21:51:00.002-04:00

This one is heavy on the anecdotes, but it was on my mind and I wonder if such a theme would be successful or brutally mocked by players in the current day and age.

About ten years ago, I ran a Dungeons and Dragons campaign for the group I was DMing for at the time, and it was of a decidedly different scope from the games I had run up until that point. In my halcyon days of gaming, I was big on the world-saving plots, the huge Lord of the Rings style wars and battles, and big enemies that were unmistakably evil. This campaign was short lived, but different and very much enjoyed by the group at the time.

I wonder if it would have the same effect these days without generating too many obligatory pop culture jokes, though.

The characters were students at a grand magical academy in the city of Ravenstar, which was recognized as the center of wizardry in my homebrew campaign setting. It was a magic-infused citadel of learning and academics in an otherwise war-torn and grim world. The players christened it the "mage game" due to the arcane focus of their players. All of them played characters who had some degree of magical training, with a single "exception" played by my friend Dan (he instead opted to play the guard of the academy who always wanted to study magic, but whose family couldn't afford to sponsor his enrollment; he eventually learned magic secretly through the other students/players).

Together, the players (anywhere from sixteen to twenty in age) had adventures between classes and nipped off to explore ruins on the nearby Isle of Crows at the behest of dubious instructors. This might sound familiar to you. I didn't even know those books existed at the time (I think only Philosopher's Stone was written at the time?).

Anyway, if you've at least moused over those links, you'll notice the thematic parallels. Unintended, but good luck getting such a game past players these days without getting the incessant jokes about both Dalaran or Harry Potter.

I think 4th Edition D&D lends itself very well to the concept, though, and if I had more time to run games I might try to spark that campaign again. In particular, the division of roles and power sources makes a balanced party possible while still being arcane in origin.

What would a campaign like this need to call on the themes properly? Aside from a giant spiked d20 thrown at the heads of people who make "You're a wizard, Harry!" jokes whenever people ask who someone is?

Well, the theme wasn't intended to be childish, but it certainly did have hallmarks of various school-setting TV shows and anime, which I was pretty big into at the time (yes, I had an anime phase; I am sorry). I was also a college student, so of course...

That's right, I used a cat meme. Bite me.

At the time, I only alluded to the individual courses the players had available to them; they were based off of the schools of magic and magic item categories from 3rd Edition D&D. That wouldn't really work so cleanly in the current edition iteration, but I'd want to be more specific anyway.

In a hypothetical new incarnation of the concept, the players would choose courses at the academy that suit their skills and powers. The courses, and their success therein, would act as a form of alternate advancement for the players through the course of the campaign, in the form of boons. Haven't really plotted out what they'd be yet, but it's something to fiddle with in my free time.

Part of me thinks the game was received so well due to the setting details and not so much the theme of the campaign. There was a creepy island of ruins and towers that the instructors wouldn't tell anyone about and forbade students from venturing there. It's the allure of doing that which you are forbidden from doing that seemed to drive the players there time and again to go dungeon-romping after they bribed the ferryman.

This could be the nostalgia filter coloring my vision, though. I suppose such a campaign would need to be presented to the right players to be successful.

A Challenge!

2011-09-25T03:03:00.002-04:00

So. I was called out.

Harbinger has goaded me into putting out more about the magic system that I've been utilizing, the same one that we worked on a while back. There are a few reasons for its current incarnation, which I shall preface here. One, the group I am working with enjoys things that are elegant and rules-lite, so I have opted to keep things fairly simple. Two, I simply hadn't had much iteration time to work on it, and I really just see what I can do from session to session to improve and take notes. Three, I want to be sure I have a much stronger basis for suggesting and implementing a change before I present it to the players, who have by now become so entrenched in their roles that any shift would be highly disruptive.

The basic skeleton system, SIFRP, only tangentially mentions magic in its core rules (in fact to say that it has no real rules for it aside from a few Qualities). As Harbinger rightfully points out, utilizing existing Abilities for the casting of magic poses some issues. Any schiester with a high Deception could purchase a Quality and instantly become an extremely-talented illusionist (or whatever) with no downtime or real barrier to entry aside from said purchase. It was necessary to create a Wizardry and a Piety Ability for arcane and divine casters, respectively.

Creating a spell requires that the player and Narrator determine the following attributes of the spell:

Complexity
Category
Qualities

A spell's Complexity determines the number of Qualities and the Composure/Health cost of the spell, as well as how difficult it is to cast. There are four tiers of Complexity; Simple, Intermediate, Advanced, and Master level spells. Generally, casting a spell is a Challenging action (beat 9 or higher on your Wizardry dice), but Master level spells are Formidable (12). Failing to successfully cast an Advanced or Master spell can still drain your Composure, but these spells have the potential to be extremely powerful in order to offset the risk (however minor) of failure.

Categories allow the player to determine the effect. These include Banes, Boons, Conjurations, Control, Divination, Force, Recovery, Thorns, and Wracks. Most of these are fairly self-explanatory in general purpose (Wracks are your standard attack spells, by the way), but the player and Narrator work together to determine the precise intended effect. This requires a bit more Narrator involvement, but the player tailors their spells to fit the character, which is way more interesting than "I cast Magic Missile." No offense, 4th Edition.

The player then chooses the spell's Qualities. All relevant spells have the Close Range Quality by default (since it is so necessary to the very nature of the spells, it would be kind of a jerk move to require that a Simple spell's only Quality be devoted to that). However, based on Complexity, the player has access to things like Long Range, Explosive (to affect adjacent targets), Legion (to affect units), Piercing, or Vicious.

Put it all together, and you've shat out a spell. I say shat because it's not terribly complicated, is open to a lot of abuse if you throw together a team of munchkin players, etc. But I'm playing with responsible folks who are more interested in story than power, so I feel less obliged to bind the system in enough duct tape (edge case rules) to prevent leaky pipes.

This cuts down on a bit of variety at the same time it endows creative flexibility. If a new, cool kind of spell concept is thought up by a player that is not contained within one of the categories (which I tried very hard to make comprehensive without being cumbersome), I have to ad hoc the rules until I can draw one up. It also draws out the creation of the spellcasting character in question, unless the player knows well in advance that they'll want to play a caster and plan accordingly.

Ultimately, it still has flaws. I'm not convinced it's the best even for the rules-lite team for which I am running this game. But it's serviceable. It will get some more work though as I develop (on the side) another conversion using this system; a science fantasy setup that gives me the double whammy of not only incorporating technology into the system (and advanced tech at that), but also sorcery and reworking the team-character generation aspect (functionally, the group's vastcraft).

My work is never done. Of course, if I stopped making more work for myself... ;)

The Wheel Turns

2011-09-17T11:10:00.000-04:00

Been a couple weeks since I've posted, but here's the dilly.

- Birthright continues to go well. After a stupendous end to the tournament's jousting competition, where the player character jouster faced down a seriously badass knight from the nearby militaristic realm of Ghoere in a magnificent six lances passes before finally unhorsing him, the players are ready to turn their eye to more domestic affairs. Their actions in the tournament, from relinquishing the arms of defeated knights without demanding ransom (as is their right), as well as maintaining a very firm neutrality in the intra-Anuire politics and scheming, have dramatically increased their reputation amongst the neighboring domains.

- Planescape prepares to play its third session today. In it, the players will learn just how odd the influx of transients to Sigil really is, learn more about the factions to which they need to tiptoe around or join, and unlock a larger plot that they may pursue alongside their personal aims.

Birthright in particular has created a quandary. The sessions do not flow quite as I originally suspected (run one adventure session with a domain session attached to the end) as the games are somewhat short due to our respective time constraints, as well as a desire to "explore the whole map" before it changes.

What this has caused is the domain management system, which was systemically imported and adapted from the 2nd Edition D&D version (don't cringe, it still works pretty well!), does not get the limelight it deserves. It feels... unwieldy compared to the streamlined nature of the base system we are using, and I find myself wondering if the players really grok it. It's complicated, for sure, but the base SIFRP system has its own flaws.

The problem with SIFRP's realm management is that it is not prepared to work on the scales that Birthright can (and by all rights, in a classical campaign, should) rise to, at least in its basic form. The difference between a mere few points and its next highest category of implied ownership can be staggering. For example, the difference between 51-60 Lands score (the whole of the North, of which House Stark were the wards), and 61-70 (the entirety of the Seven Kingdoms) is so vast that either the acquisition of Glory at that stage of the game needs to slow to a crawl, or some serious liberties need to be taken with the system.

When Harbinger and I originally kicked around ideas for the conversion, his arguments ultimately swayed me to use the 2nd Edition D&D domain management. It does have a greater degree of granularity, and its advancement was measurable and had an immediate impact on your domain. This is not the case in SIFRP, even though it is leaner and easier to understand.

I have thought about considering a switch, but the flaws of each approach have left me in doubt. I will need to decide eventually, however, and while the game is still in "beta" form, I still feel obligated to deliver an excellent experience.

And so the indecision continues...

The Power of Scripture

2011-08-11T18:20:00.000-04:00

The fourth character (now no longer the last, as we've added a fifth player!) was easily the hardest of the lot to design a schtick for, and that's no mean feat. I had to take into account all aspects of this character and the player, who is a newcomer to a Wombat-based game, but shares tons of the same qualities and personality bits with most of the people I know. The end result is, I think, going to be a lot of fun to play with.

So the concept of the character is that he was a storm god from a forgotten Prime world. Emphasis on the was here; through some catastrophe, either world destruction or religious purge, his entire worshiper base was destroyed and he has absolutely no interest in going through the demanding job a second time. This recently-depowered individual still has a nascent spark of the divine within him, however, and this manifests in the form of Scriptures.

Scriptures are Supernal glyphs that appear upon the flesh of the character. Each lesson learned, each task undertaken, and each significant decision made may grant the character a new Scripture. Scriptures have both a passive bonus and a category, and will take the place of certain magic item categories (he could feasibly wear, say, an arm slot item, but an arm slot Scripture is probably better for him if he has one available).

These Scriptures come in one of four categories, and as long as he is currently wearing a majority of Scriptures that share the same category, he gains a special bonus.

Heroism - Attacks grant temporary hit points equal to the number of currently worn Heroism Scriptures.
Revelation - Gain a bonus to Perception/Insight and to-hit rolls against opponents with concealment equal to number of currently worn Revelation Scriptures.
Humility - Gain a bonus to Fortitude and Will defense equal to the number of currently worn Humility Scriptures.
Death - Enemies in close burst 5 take necrotic damage equal to the number of Death Scriptures worn each time the character spends a healing surge.

So what exactly is a Scripture? What does one look like?

Well, kinda like this (for the curious, this is a letter from the Alphabet of the Magi font, which look awesome):

This particular glyph is the Scripture of Loss. It is a reminder of two things; the tragedy that led to the extermination of an entire culture and the subsequent loss of the magnificent power that the character once commanded. How he intends to interpret the Scripture is, of course, entirely up to his alignment and personality.

The Scripture of Loss grants 3 temporary hit points to the wearer every time an ally within 20 squares is forced to spend a healing surge.

The character can wear up to five Scriptures, which can optionally replace the slots for Arms, Neck, Belt, Boots, and Head. They may not necessarily appear on those spots, at the wearer's discretion.

One more character to go! This one has the most insidious of the perks, whose nature is so vile and violent and yet whose presence is inescapable...

The Eye of Araun-Darum

2011-08-08T19:08:00.000-04:00

Another player schtick for the upcoming Planescape game!

This particular character is a dwarf from a heretofore unknown Prime world, a place with two suns. Araun, the brighter of the two, scorches the world by day, while Darum, the dimmer and more distant one, casts a muted glow over the landscape by night. While the cultures and nations of this world are left to the imagination, the backstory of the dwarf tells of a place where back-breaking labor and brutal murders are commonplace.

The object from the backstory that transported the character (named Rend) to the planes was an amulet. I decided to run with this and will make it the object of interest that the player keeps track of and determines its benefit. The Eye of Araun-Darum is an egg-shaped chunk of polished amber held in a black iron setting. It glows with a faint light when held, and this light can be coaxed into something brighter if the owner concentrates. Its power, however, comes from the actions of the wielder.

Rend's choices throughout his waking hours apply counters to the Eye. Actions of Force empower Araun's light, causing the Eye to glow brightly and cause Rend's offensive actions to sear his enemies with scorching radiant power. Actions of Skill empower Darum's light, muting the glow and enhancing Rend's ability to perform actions such as skill checks (duh). As Rend gains power and understanding of the Eye, these benefits may be transformed; Araun's light may provide temporary hit points rather than radiant damage, while Darum's light could enhance movement speed and provide damage resistance.

Naturally, the problem is determining what type of benefit a particular action provides, as well as the magnitude.

It should go without saying that violent choices cause Araun to flare. Attacks made (even unsuccessfully), Intimidate skill checks, and most things that are done with the intent to cause direct harm to others are actions of Force, and thus provide a single counter. Subtle choices, misdirection, or passive decisions are considered actions of Skill, likewise providing an encounter. The effect chosen for the Eye scales in power based on how many counters are currently on the Eye. This counter resets after an extended rest or an encounter, depending on the exact effect. For example, if the Eye is charged with 3 Force, Araun's light causes 3 radiant damage on any of Rend's attacks. If it is charged with 3 Skill, he gains a +3 bonus to skill checks.

At the outset, the Eye can only have 3 Force and 3 Skill counters on it at any given time. This number will increase as Rend discovers more about the Eye, as can the number of counters gained from a particular action. The net effect is that as Rend becomes weary from the efforts of the day, the Eye grants him resilience, ferocity, or competence.

There are other, more story-based events that will transpire based off of how many times Rend chooses Force over Skill, or vice versa. Additional qualities of the Eye may be unlocked, and eventually Rend may come to understand the true nature of the eye and how it managed to transport him to the planes.

The Shadow Mote

2011-08-05T18:23:00.000-04:00

Cyrill is but a shade of his former self. No, really. He's a shade of a person, a duplicate kept around for convenience and assistance. Why hire help when you can create it?

Unfortunately, Cyrill was forced to take drastic measures and kill his creator. Dissolution was not his destiny, however; he now lives in the Outer Planes, spawn of the multiversal fabric, walking the Great Wheel and still as clueless as any berk fresh from the prime. To his credit, though, he's not going to be alone for long.

Continuing from my previous post's topic, the Shadow Mote is Cyrill's personal advancement/plot device perk. It is a small sphere of perfect blackness that seems content to follow him everywhere he goes. But the Shadow Mote has a dark side, and that is its ever-growing hunger. Always seeming drawn to locations of darkness or the shadows of others, the observant will find it slowly drawing the dimness into itself. Stay around it too long, and you may feel tired.

The Shadow Mote grows, but in exchange for its growth it requires sustenance. Acting as an orb implement, the Mote boosts Cyrill's nethermancy powers when needed, but each use of this very tempting benefit increases its hunger. It will actively seek more and more darkness to consume, but this only delays the inevitable. Unless Cyrill sacrifices a bit of himself at the end of an extended rest, the Mote will continue to become hungrier, the ultimate side-effect of which... well, I won't spoil it.

Cyrill won't begin play with this object, but it will be introduced fairly early within the first session. It is part implement, part familiar, and all mystery. Possessed of no detectable intelligence, it still has the passive ability to allow Cyrill to draw upon it to change his spells. These take the form of Metamagic Augments which are, to the veteran gamer, reminiscent of the feats that players once used in 3rd edition.

The first Metamagic Augment that the Shadow Mote will supply is the Extending Augment. Cyrill may increase the range on any Ranged spell by 2 squares for the simple, innocuous price of adding 1d4 Hunger to the Shadow Mote. If the Shadow Mote gets Peckish, it may begin to reduce healing received within its vicinity. If it gets downright Ravenous, it may begin to wander around the area randomly devouring small animals, sucking up healing surges, and generally being an entropic nuisance.

The better the Augment used (Maximizing, etc.), the more Hunger is added. Consequently, the more Hunger is present, the stronger the effect of the Augment and the more Hunger is generated. It will be a precarious balancing act; Cyrill may well be able to turn the tide of a losing battle, at the risk of losing control of the unpredictable Mote.

Hunger can be satiated. Cyrill may, at the end of an extended rest, choose to sacrifice healing surges available until the next extended rest to reduce the Shadow Mote's Hunger by 1d6. Certain story-based advancements and enemy encounters may raise or lower the level of its Hunger as well.

What is the true nature of the Shadow Mote? The DM knows, of course, but he's not telling.

Just the (Arti)facts, Ma'am

2011-08-04T22:20:00.000-04:00

So for my upcoming 4th edition Planescape game, I'm trying something out.

The players are going whole hog into the theme of the setting. The backstories they've written (which unfortunately can't be linked to at their present location) are very unique and contain tons of private setting information. I am blessed with the ability to game with fellow game designers sometimes, as I get professional-level work from something as simple as written backgrounds.

In reading them, I was given some great ideas. Some of the mechanics of 4th edition can be a little stale if you've seen them a billion times, so to mix things up everyone's getting a schtick. Of the three characters presently made, these are manifesting as objects, pieces of themselves, or strange mysteries that are integral parts of what defines them.

Simplest to explain, while also being the least disruptive to reveal (since the players check this blog!) is the cogwheel matrix of N+1, the modron artificer. The backstory of this particular character relates to an event known as the clockplague, an insidious infection that ravaged several cogs of the machine-plane of Mechanus, from where the modrons hail. The living construct bodies of the modrons are very much mechanical, and I wanted N+1's unique advancement track to reflect this.

N+1's player will have the ability to adapt his internal structure based off of cogwheels. The mathematical precision with which these components are machined means something very different for a living construct than it does to a common piece of clockwork. Some may increase N+1's accuracy in combat, while others improve reaction or movement speed. A silver cog might grant the modron better ability to counteract the baatezu (lawful fiends, or devils), while a cold-wrought iron one would do the same for tanar'ri (chaotic fiends, or demons). Combinations of particular cogwheels act like set bonuses, granted increased effects when used all at the same time.

Naturally, this required a lot of legwork on my part, but this is basically how N+1 gets to tailor-fit his character to the situation he expects to get involved in. N+1 gets to solve little puzzles of his own between sessions or during times that are not his active turn in order to discover new cogwheel combinations, or receive them through adventure completion. Cogwheels can be rotated as he pleases during extended rests.

N+1 has three cogwheel anchors (Rule of Three, anyone?) in which he may place the cogwheels, laid out in a triangular pattern where the teeth interlock. The ascendant cog (top of the triangle) controls higher functions, improves motor skills or precision, and increases arcane potency. The dorsal cog (right of the triangle, closest to N+1's back panel) augments existing functionality, providing benefits when in certain situations or against certain opponents. The anterior cog (left of the triangle, closest to N+1's front panel) affects vision, boosts defenses, and absorbs damage.

For example, N+1 will begin play with the Bronze Motor Cogwheel, the Bronze Dorsal Cogwheel, and the Bronze Anterior Cogwheel. Alone, these do nothing; I did not want to start him off with three magic items, as it were. But together, they form a set, which increases his AC by +1 while kept in that configuration.

Of course, this may crash and burn horribly or be just annoying to keep up with. But if I know N+1's player, and hand him a metal box at the gaming table full of tiny cogwheels which he can mix and match and keep as visual reference for what he has, he will be happy as a wombat in a grub farm.

Now, to finish polishing up the Shadow Mote and its Hunger/Satiation balancing track...

Spelling it Out

2011-07-15T23:26:00.000-04:00

I promised Harbinger I would poast moar spells.

So the current setup (and it only works because I know the players well; your average person would abuse the hell out of the system) allows players in my Birthright SIFRP game to create their own magic based off of some relatively simplistic formulas. I didn't want a hideous pile of spell-bloat by converting every single wizard and cleric spell from 2nd edition into its SIFRP counterpart. Down that path lies madness.

The group's arcane caster in the playtest campaign is a Rjurik witch. She has a familiarity with MMO gameplay and created her spells based off of concepts introduced in that sort of medium; direct healing, buffing, crowd-control, and direct damage spells (you could argue that these concepts are intrinsic in spell design anyway, but it's the means through which the player was able to relate, so hush).

Since the culture is very much based on Norse stuff, her spells took that sort of bent. She does rune castings when she is concerned, and went through the effort of naming her spells Scandinavian things. For example, we'll go with a simple utility spell that she uses for rune casting.

Nutidhistorien (Simple, Divination versus Challenging, Long Range)

As a simple spell, it costs her a minimal amount of Composure to cast. Her Wizardry ability test includes any bonus dice from the Divination specialty (of which she has none) and requires her to beat a 9 (a challenging test). At long range, she can use it out to 100 yards without an increase to the difficulty. Through her rune casting, she can use this spell in conjunction to ask the Narrator one question about an event that has transpired within the last week. Subsequent castings can be done, but will sap Composure quickly.

The benefit to this method is customization. The player was able to use some basic effect templates and make a pile of spells to fit most of the circumstances she felt she might encounter. She is limited in number of spells based on her Wizardry ability, but at the same time she does not need to create spells to do mundane (or simple arcane) things.

This system has obvious glaring weaknesses. It's terribly imbalanced and suffers from Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards syndrome. A powerful wizard can utterly annihilate a massive pile of enemies while a character with Fighting 5 (in the SIFRP, the equivalent of Jaime Lannister) is still hacking through his second opponent.

I left myself a way out, of course, by telling the players that it's still very much a beta system and that large swaths of things were subject to change. Ultimately, I think I am going to have to junk the system and go with something more inspired by Mage. I find my categories are either too restrictive or not diverse enough (depending how I analyze it).

On the plus side, the current setup created some awesome theater in the last couple game sessions. The Rjurik witch was very heavily responsible for how well they did in the field battle (her endurance-boosting spell on a few units of soldiers gave them the extra health they needed to avoid being disorganized (for the uninitiated, that's falling to zero health in a field battle; getting hit again routs you or potentially destroys the unit entirely). Descriptively, it's nice for the player's invented visual effects to see the light of day; preventing your foes' advance by encircling them in a ring of illusory fire is pretty cool.

The system needs a lot of work. But it'll get there.

Vassal-ine

2011-07-11T23:07:00.000-04:00

Tonight was session 8 of the Birthright campaign. It was a solid night of roleplay with maybe four or five tests made to gain information or persuade people. Four plots threads were advanced, a new one introduced, and a great big setup was made in preparation for the huge tournament that the players spent most of the realm's income on in order to make a good impression with the nation of Anuire.

It's not often you can create a game where the players directly report to a bigger, badder person. In this case, the liege of the Countess and her court is a duchess named Eriene Mierelen, whose somewhat ruthless reputation is well known. In a typical type of fantasy game, you can expect even the most discerning player to immediately plot the dropkicking of this NPC.

Being the vassal of an NPC when you have tangible assets at stake tempers the players a bit, but gives them so many other avenues of advancement. Particularly in the system I am utilizing, intrigue, espionage, and assassination are all perfectly viable forms of getting ahead as opposed to marching one-party-against-the-world and blitzing the Duchess's fortress in the time-honored tradition of adventurers everywhere.

I think this is a massive strength of games that give the players, you know, real things to toy with that aren't physical equipment. SIFRP has completely overtaken 4th Edition D&D as my favorite system for this reason alone. It has created a means for the players to band together during the creation process (collaboration on their domain's properties), a continued reason to remain together (they all have a vested interest in the domain's advancement), and even a leash to keep them from going way off the rails (ditch your realm at your own risk).

At least as far as I go, systems that have collaborative processes for character creation are just superior to others. Why did I wait so long to make the transition?

Whee!

2011-06-20T23:44:00.000-04:00

Wow, I've been terrible about updating this. Sorry!

Tonight I ran my first field battle in the Birthright campaign after a few weeks of unfortunate scheduling mishaps. Here is where the strengths of the Song of Ice & Fire RPG come into play. Even at its most basic level, the warfare rules are absolutely awesome. I was able to explain them to four newcomers as we went along, walked them through each step as it came time for it, and ran an awesome battle against a force of goblins. Though more could have gotten done, I think it still progressed far faster than I expected it to, and presented the scene better than any other system I could have utilized.

SIFRP has given me something that crunchier rule sets have denied me for a long time. The rules are fine enough to provide explanations for most situations that I would want to run, but the conflict resolution mechanic is so simple, so effective, that I want to hug it. It allows me to craft truly epic cinematic scenes that my players can really get into without worrying about things like, "Crap, how are we going to do this on a grid map?" Robert J. Schwalb, if you're reading this somehow, ya did good and I want to shake your hand.

Having good theater in a game is so rare and so precious. Having a system support such theater so well is even rarer. It's downright delectable, being able to take a huge field battle and have functions built right in, seamlessly, to allow the heroes attached to units to engage enemy champions and vanquish them in the same battle round, and go back to the zoomed-out view without breaking stride. I wonder if even the designers realized how elegant it was when they penned it.

Still riding high on the fun-tsunami from tonight's session. Epic warfare at its finest, without needing to tack on another hackneyed house rule set that I spend days agonizing over the specifics of before using it.

Good times.

Wombat Warlord: Minigame Slut

2011-05-22T20:51:00.000-04:00

So I spent all the time I had available (which sadly wasn't much) playing The Witcher 2 since it came out. I am a big fan of this game because it does a lot of things right.

It's a notable improvement over the first game in the series (still a pretty good game once they gave out the Enhanced Edition all free-like), due to supremely better localization to the U.S. and tying together the storyline a bit more. The aspects of being a witcher are far more integrated into your play experience rather than feeling tacked on; alchemy, swordplay, and signs all make much more sense in application. In addition to a very slick interface and a playability that lends itself very well to the use of a gamepad.

This all has nothing to do with the title of the blog entry. I just like pimping the aspects of games that I like.

Witcher 2 takes the minigame concepts that were loosely utilized in the first game and gave them an upgrade. They are ridiculously simple to understand and play, but each has an aspect of challenge that I enjoy. Fist fighting and dice poker are still around, though the former has been very heavily revamped and has become awesome. I mean, it's a very simple "press the right buttons before you miss the chance", but the animations and the action are hilarious. They could serve to make it a bit more difficult, but I've spent about two of my total 10 hours of gameplay just beating up people in the game world as it lets me.

The game has also added a stealth minigame in certain sections where it makes sense, allowing you to creep along, extinguish light sources, and stun the crap out of guards. Reminds me a lot of the old Thief games, and that's a great thing. I love me some stealth gameplay.

Finally, there is the arm-wrestling. This is pretty hard to pull off, because of the controller oversensitivity. It's a lot harder than it looks. You can overcompensate really easily, so this is actually the most frustrating of the minigames.

I spend more time playing these quicktime events than I do advancing the actual plot. I've only just killed the kayran (link spoils the fight a bit), and had a grand old time getting my face murdered in that fight.

Sorry, I need to get back. I was writing this between playing Witcher 2 minigames, and I shouldn't keep them waiting. Can you tell I like them?

The Third Session Slump

2011-05-19T22:11:00.000-04:00

I'd been meaning to write about this last week, but Life got in the way. It's been weighing on my mind since the session of Birthright that I ran the week before this one, because of a repeating phenomenon that doesn't seem restricted to the games I run in particular.

I speak of the Third Session Slump. While it may not be the actual third session of a campaign, that's usually the time when the excitement for the new shiny thing crests and the game can either stand on its own, or fall into decay as so many campaigns do. Symptoms of the third session slump include previously exuberant players who are now silent throughout the session, a bevy of plots that go unchased despite all the clues left on the table from last game, and a general sense of ho-hum from the people at the table (virtual or otherwise).

It's a natural side effect of euphoria fall-off, and most of the games I've run have survived it. Still, the fact that it exists at all has led to some observations. First, players will lose sight of what's happening between games. They have become justifiably spoiled by things like quest logs in video games, because they're so damn convenient. I can't remember the last time anyone kept an actual journal of events (I think Harbinger does out of habit).

Second, too many things to do. The Rule of Three doesn't work so great anymore (the practice of giving players three things to do at any given time; solve a puzzle three ways, have three active jobs to do, etc.). It always felt like such a reliable method too...

In light of the last (fourth) session this past Monday though, I've resolved to do something a bit video gamey and create a "quest log" on the website I use to track the gameplay. I think the reception to it was good so far; it's something the players are familiar with due to their other gaming experience, even if the very formulaic setup of the concept would chafe purist gamers.

Fortunately, the game survived the Third Session Slump and energy was high again for the fourth session. Birthright endured its rite of passage and was found worthy by the group. Not every game does that.

Hi, I'm a Dragonborn Vampire.

2011-05-04T21:54:00.001-04:00

I picked up Heroes of Shadow recently for completeness's sake.

Its contents made me cringe.

It would be pointless to rehash an Essentials argument that so many of my erstwhile colleagues and friends have already undertaken. Suffice it to say, I stand with many others when I feel it wasn't necessary to simplify an already pleasantly simple system even further. Harbinger put it best to me when he said that it makes little sense to try to surreptitiously "patch" rulebooks in the way that they have with Essentials. And I'll leave it at that.

If the title didn't give it away, Heroes of Shadow introduces the Vampire, a Shadow-source striker class. In and of itself, that twanged my D&D player funny bone in an unpleasant way. In particular, the various races they've included and how they would undertake vampirism, which in this book is very much the blood-drinking Strahd von Zarovich types (the book even mentions Vistani and other Ravenlofty stuff), starts to become... well a stretch.

Dragonborn vampires, okay, sure. Thri-kreen vampires, bwuuuuh I guess they eat people anyway, so fine. Shardmind vampires. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but a class based around a biological function such as drinking breaks down in believability when you consider the bizarre variety of stuff they've begun to introduce as races without really stating outright that it's forbidden (though they've not been shy about doing this with alignments and classes again, circa the blackguard striker-paladin).

Sure, there's the Gamma World style of creation where part of the fun is going "How improbable is this?" Then you dive into the game and revel in the silliness.

I felt like a curmudgeon, shaking my fist and grumbling as I read the book. Essentials? In my D&D? More likely than you think, but it still makes me feel really old.

And no, you cannot play a shardmind vampire in my next D&D game.

Experience Punts: The Fading Impact of Combat

2011-04-25T18:41:00.000-04:00

I had way too much fun watching Game of Thrones this Sunday. This was why.

There is a satisfaction when you beat down someone who really, really deserves it. However, I think the mass-killing we tend to perform in games, no matter their medium, waters down the joy of delivering a really stinging blow to an enemy. After you've waded through the fields of bodies left behind in your quest to collect ten whatevers, you just sorta roll your eyes at the next batch of bad guys. They're tiresome. They are in your way. They aren't even a challenge. They are a pacing mechanic designed to slow you down and distract you with pretty particle effects and pad your playtime.

Even the so-called pinnacle of combat challenge, end-game raiding, does little to entice me. I've beaten most of the Warcraft raid bosses released for Cataclysm already, and the ones I haven't provide no allure for me. I'm not interested in hard modes, which are aggravating slogs where you are expected to stack classes for the fight and where one second of bad latency or a fatfingered ability wastes upwards of twenty minutes while your group wipes up, runs back, rebuffs, and goes over what went wrong.

Couple weeks ago, I beat the Cho'gall encounter, one of the supposedly harder fights in the game (though give it another patch, and the Stop Having Fun Guys will denigrate the accomplishment even more). I didn't feel fulfilled. I felt tired and annoyed. It's not even that difficult of a fight, mechanically or strategically, and I realized it's because I'm sick of killing literally tens of thousands of creatures in my quest for glory. I've become desensitized to fantasy combat in a really sad sorta way. Going back for subsequent kills, it wasn't, "Sweet, we get to kill Cho'gall again!" it was, "Ugh, we have to kill Cho'gall again? Meh."

I think this has been building for some time, and it's why I'm turning my gaming interests more towards puzzle games and intrigue-based RPGs where combat is somewhat rarer. When I get into a fight, I want it to be a big deal. I don't want to be faced with death in every engagement, but I want the fighting to matter. I want it to be significant and challenging as opposed to tedious and routine. MMOs just aren't doing that for me anymore. A battle needs to have story importance (that's actually played up, instead of used as a vehicle to point you towards MOAR EPIX) rather than being a wandering monster encounter.

Sure, these guys deserve it. But I suppose we slap so many enemies so frequently in our gaming that the rush of combat just sorta... fades away.

Random Thoughts

2011-04-19T17:51:00.001-04:00

First, a Birthright update.

The maiden voyage session went off very well. I feel I managed to get the players immersed in the world and that my descriptive details were not wasted. Every aspect of the session was eagerly devoured and I chewed the scenery with all the zeal of Tim Curry and Brian Blessed. But one thing nagged me all night long that didn't even see the light of day that session.

The magic system sucks. Royally sucks.

I knew that going in, but the previous day when I was plotting out the spells with the group's resident spellcaster, I realized just how deficient the layout ended up. It bothered me all night. I cut a corner due to haste and it is going to impact the very first spell that is cast. Fortunately, that's what iteration is for. I need to gut most of it and start over.

On a more work-related note, it's interesting to actually work alongside veteran developers that came from other large game companies. Stories are swapped, with haggard, hollow voices reminiscent of Vietnam War veterans sharing their accounts of being pinned down under fire with no support. Everyone has a scar from the crushing despair of unrealistic deadlines and foolish design choices made by those with greater power than the soldiers they command.

It was a little refreshing, actually, to know that my experiences with smaller indy companies were truly not unique. I mean, you know that such is the case, but you don't know it until you actually hear it from people who were There when It went down.

As such, I was rallied by the despair of others. The industry sucks sometimes, and the fact that other people also have to wade through the same quagmire of suck made me feel a bit better about myself. Sadistic, no?

The Experiment Begins

2011-04-12T00:17:00.000-04:00

Tonight marked the creation session for my Birthright conversion beta test. I was pleased to see the group go with a reasonably well-constructed spread of concepts, cultures, and ability focuses. This four-person team was chosen from among individuals, who remain anonymous, with interests and talent focuses in programming and mathematics (for balance), systems design and narrative cohesion (for good mechanics and story), medieval culture (for accuracy), and just plain ol' gaming (to see if it's fun and retains interest). Coinciding schedules helped too.

The group currently consists of the following concepts:

The regent, an Anuirean youth of the Anduiras bloodline with focuses in Persuasion, Status, and Warfare.
The master-at-arms, a Khinasi of good breeding and excellent martial skill, focusing in Fighting and Endurance along with riding talents.
A Brechtish dandy, expert in matters of larceny and deceit, focusing on Agility, Stealth, and Thievery.
A Rjurik winter-witch, a wielder of hedge magic and ancient knowledge focusing in Cunning, Will, and Wizardry.

They have, as of this writing, elected to control the province of Coere, part of the duchy of Brosengae, in the southwestern reaches of Anuire. The relatively remote nature of their chosen land is countered by severe political repercussions of dealing with their neighbors. To their east, Avanil's prince insinuates himself into their lands through control of law holdings, and to their west, the paranoid Duchess Eriene Mierelen struggles to hold onto her influence despite her plummeting popularity with her subjects.

Ripe for intrigue and possible conquest!

The group seemed rather excited by all the possibilities, though the creation process did take most of the evening, longer that I expected. This is a sign that perhaps creation needs to have some aspects trimmed or streamlined. Given the extremely narration-heavy nature of the game, however, this might not really be as big of an issue as I think, because there really is a lot to go over.

I found it extremely easy to fall into the Narrator role, and even had to stop myself several times from falling into direct narrative when they were requesting simple factual information. I think this is a really good sign on my part that I helped make something I can be truly passionate about running. Though I've had the privilege of running games for some excellent people over the last few years, I don't think I've been this excited about writing and narrating one. I mean that with all possible love to my readers who I've gamed with, as this is purely a psychological reaction to being involved with this conversion project for over a year and seeing it actually achieve fruition.

Though many details still need fleshing out, the group is just about ready to deal with their realm's first real trial with the new regent at the helm. I cannot wait to see where this goes.

Glee!

2011-04-11T19:27:00.000-04:00

Not that obnoxious TV show. Actual sublime glee, like unwrapping a Christmas present.

The Monkey King found a copy of Tribes of the Heartless Waste at the local game store, a rather rare supplement for Birthright that explains the Vosgaard culture and territories. I want to hug it, but I'm afraid of crinkling the pages. It's in absolutely gorgeous condition for a book printed in 1997.

That's all. I return you to your more interesting lives.

Disappointed

2011-04-07T18:36:00.001-04:00

As some people have already heard me gripe, I had the profound displeasure of playing Rift recently. It was a doomed venture from the start, as I had already been desensitized by an arrogant marketing campaign coupled with undeserved swagger from many of its beta testers. I am playing other games, both single and multiplayer, with very intricate plots, superb graphics, enjoyable combat, and/or a community of friends with which I am already established, so I didn't really want to pick it up anyway. But, I felt obligated as a game designer and a game player to give this much-vaunted game a try.

I'll keep my accusations to a minimum and say only that the questing is uninspired and boring as hell (oh look, we're killing ten rats again for the first 45 minutes!), the art is absolutely nothing to be proud of (my armor and my character both look like they are made from plastic and rubber even on near-to-maximum detail settings) and the space in which I was let to run free in was jam-packed full of creatures that punished me for exploring anything outside of the narrow track I was set upon.

It has the singular distinction of being the only game I have actively and seriously looked for information on getting refunded for the $50 I wasted. Even Age of Conan got politely shelved along with my other games.

And yet, I can't help thinking that I was somehow unfair in my criticism. Many people disagreed with me, some of them strongly and even vehemently, but I feel as though I was somehow duped. The game was promised to be, as I said to another today, the best thing since the blowjob was invented by the French. And this is what I got?

I might have set my expectations too high, but this is my severely allergic reaction to things that are hyped. Being on both sides of the game development process (that is, making a game and playing said games) gives me what I'd like to think as a healthy skepticism when claims are made about a game's originality and design strengths. I am apt to come down that much harder on the game's flaws when it is finally presented to me.

A few counterarguments were made about how at least beginner content needs to be made simple both to draw in new players and let players of other games relate, or how there's no way to make MMO questing more appealing. To me, that smacks of an excuse to not come up with fresh ideas, or people with spines too flimsy to go to the brass in charge and say, "No, this is not going to be fun, stop making us do this." Certainly, there are technical and budget (fiscal or temporal) limitations that prevent every quest from being magnificently crafted, but there comes a point when it just feels unforgivably lazy to vomit forth the same dry quests and then claim it's new and exciting.

I was unnecessarily mean towards Rift. The developers clearly worked very hard on it, and I absolutely sympathize with being pressured to forge a solid gold product out of compost, spit, and a prayer. Definitely, my immunity to O'Shynie's Disease (the affliction that causes one to be mesmerized by new stuff and say, "Ooh, shiny!") prevented me from giving Rift the truly unbiased look it probably deserved.

But man, what a letdown. I'm going back to Dragon Age 2. Isabela isn't going to bone herself (or will she?).

Discovery

2011-03-24T18:03:00.000-04:00

I'm in a designer bind and my natural tendency to play devil's advocate against my own arguments has put me at an impasse. So, I look to my experiences as a player and a writer.

For a bit of background, this once again pertains to Birthright stuff (are you surprised?). I've been fighting with rules for the magic system over the course of months, coming up with some great system ideas in conjunction with Harbinger's generous input. I've currently split the magic types (the setting's arcane and divine standards) into subgroups. It's highly probable that I've unconsciously borrowed some of these names from other games I have played or seen, but as any humble and realistic designer will tell you, that's how new ideas are made. :P

Arcane

Masks (deceptive magic, including illusions and disguises)
Dooms (curse magic, which augments the effect of Wracks)
Wracks (destructive spells of all kinds)
Channels (long term spells that require attention, such as domination and shape-changing)
Thorns (working title, basically just common effects and incantations, and would include detection spells and divination)
Calls (short-duration summoning magic)

Divine

Pleas (powerful effects with a high relative cost)
Favors ("equivalent exchange" that allows weakening of one thing to improve another)
Orisons (very basic priestly stuff, minor blessings, holding one to their oath, etc.)
Rebukes (offensive divine magic)
Devotions (boons and blessings that allow others to pay the associated costs)

Seems like I got a handle on this, right?

Thorns are where I get hung up. Not just the name of the subgroup, but the effects. There have been hundreds of discussions all across the vast breadth of the gamer-infested Internet both for and against magic that allows you to bypass investigative opportunities, but I am really hung up on what to do here. Since my personal iteration of the setting is rather low-magic, and because there are so many skills devoted to problem-solving as it is, the inclusion of divination magic or "detect foozle" spells seems... well, wrong. On a very fundamental level.

Whether or not it is correct, players who utilize these types of spells often feel justified using them as dowsing rods for things to hit in the face with a great-axe. Not sure if this guy is telling the truth? Cast Zone of Truth. Is this guy a doppleganger? There's an ~~app~~ spell for that. Where's the bad guy? Detect evil. Killed him too fast before he could spill the beans on where he hid his loot? Guess what? There was even a detect treasure spell.

Argh. Why bother including rules for things not related to combat in the first place?

But at the same time, these things... well, they have a place in folklore. The witch on the edge of town who would divine the nature of things for the farmers, for a price. When confronted with a seemingly impassable obstacle or unsolvable riddle, the heroes would turn to their wizened master of the arcane to literally pluck the truth from the fabric of the cosmos (stop trying to guess, Gandalf, just cast legend lore and open the door to Moria already).

Placing needless restrictions on the magic feels artificial as well. There's never a happy medium, it always seems to be "Not Worth It" or "Why Wouldn't I?" I attribute this to the growing culture of min-maxing in gaming circles across the globe; once the purview of mere munchkins, it is now the expected norm in most systems (different rant, don't comment on this! >_>).

Ultimately, I think I'm going to err on the side of gutting the spells that circumvent thinking and roleplaying. They always seemed like cheating to me, as both a gamemaster and a player, but they feel especially wrong here, in this setting, with this system.

Though, I could be wrong! I think a little bit of self-examination and doubt is handy in these kinds of design decisions.

Roll the Bones

2011-03-14T19:56:00.000-04:00

Hey, guess what? You get to read more of my Birthright junk. Lucky you! Today I'm going to yammer about realm creation during the first session, where players sit down and decide not only what kinds of characters they want to play, but also how they structure their domain(s).

Ideally, the most accurate way to do this, for everyone involved, is to actually talk it out. You get the most indepth information and accurate storytelling from having everyone around the table and going over the five major plot points (read: no mechanical benefits, purely story-based) of a domain:

History - How long has the domain has existed?
Events - What happened during that time?
Legacy - What is the legacy of your domain based on those events?
Enemies - Who did you piss off in the process?
Allies - Who was on your side?

There are many more things I imagine you could include, but I felt these were the most important ones. I reserve the right to stand corrected without shame!

Of course, you could plot out the course of your realm's history... but sometimes it feels cool to determine events broadly, randomly, and allow the emergent narrative to tell the story for you. It is also a heavy part of the way you design a house in the base SIFRP that I use for the system, so the idea is also a nod to their methodology.

Essentially, the players would roll on a series of tables for each category, sometimes making multiple rolls on a single table depending on how long the house has been around or how many events it has weathered. The rough tables I imagined came out as follows:

History (roll 1 die)

1. Bloodthief (you are the progenitor of your line through bloodtheft): 1 event
2. Foundling (your line begins with you or your immediate ancestor): 2 events
3. Common Regent (several generations have passed since the founding of your line): 3 events
4. Respected History (your ancestry is recorded in many academies): 4 events
5. Fabled Bloodline (your lineage is very old indeed; many might not believe how old): 5 events
6. Ancient Lineage (your family line dates back to the days of Deismaar's destruction): 6 events

Right there, you get two awesome possibilities; being of a family so old that it spans a hundred generations, or so fresh that the only way it could be possible is if it was stolen from another scion. But there's not much of a statistical spread here, being only on one die, so this is purely for setting up story for your next few tables.

Events (roll 2 dice, each event taking place chronologically in the order they are rolled)
2. Ravage (your realm was ravaged by a terrible force, such as a dragon or evil sorcerer)
3. Brigandry (your lands were the haven of bandits, goblins or orogs for many years)
4. Ennui (your realm languished for a generation or two, losing influence and prestige)
5-7. Political Intrigue (your domain was involved in an important diplomatic event)
8-9. Conflict (your domain was involved in a protracted conflict, such as a minor war with a neighbor)
10. Prosperity (your lands prospered in a generation of peace)
11. Great Adventure (your cohorts or your lands were the locus of wild adventures)
12. Blessed Years (your domain experienced a period of incredible bounty and earned wide recognition)

Here I was a little more stretched. I think I filled out the events pretty well, but they may be too vague (or not vague enough).

Legacy (roll 2 dice)
2. Cursed (in light of or despite events, your land is known for ill tidings)
3. Isolationism (events have made your people seem xenophobic to outsiders)
4. War (your land either caused or was directly involved in warfare, and is now known for it)
5. Intrigue (your courts played host to or were involved in political scandals)
6. Eldritch (your domain is home to a potent wizard or a magical site)
7. Commerce (the land has good or fair trading that is known far and wide)
8. Justice (your realm is known for its sense of justice, whether it be righteous or tyrannical)
9. Haven of Heroes (some of the greatest heroes are known to come from your domain)
10. Endurance (your realm has survived plagues, war, and famine, and yet you endure)
11. Firm Against the Darkness (you and your people do not bow to the power of the Gorgon)
12. Destined (your realm is said to be home to the next Anuirean emperor)

Little easier to fill out than the events table, but I am worried there aren't enough possible legacies, or the ones I decided to go with aren't that great.

Enemies and Allies (roll 2 dice)
2. Awnshegh/Erhshegh
3. Powerful Wizard
4. Blessed Priest
5. Adventuring Company
6. Goblin Clan
7. Neighboring Domain
8. Mercenary Captain
9. Bandit Tribe
10. Distant Domain
11. Magical Creature (treant, unicorn, spirit, etc.)
12. Dragon (oh shit)

The easiest to fill. You are chock full of options for this setting, and the possibility of getting a Cerilian dragon as an ally (keep in mind there are only like four known dragons in the setting, all of them ancient beyond counting) is a very tempting reason to use this method. Naturally, as the Narrator you can't just have the players ask the dragon for help all the time, so playing it as a Smaug-alike that is only occasionally inclined to dally with mortals is the way to go.

I'm fond of what's come from this brain dump, and I hope you are too.

Withdrawal

2011-03-11T21:56:00.000-05:00

It's been too long since I've sat around a table with some friends and played something. There's games that go on at the office during lunch/after hours, but I'm slow to let new people into my fortress of trust and I prefer to game with people that I trust. Personal failing, and I'm digging my own gameless grave.

On the plus side, this has given me a lot of opportunity to keep writing more Birthright stuff. I put aside the more crunchy system stuff and focused a lot more on actual adventure design (most of which I won't actually post here because some of the potential players read this blog). The sequence of the domain turn means that you probably want to do it towards the end of a night's session rather than at the beginning (unless you really like thinking on your feet all night), specifically because of the domain events roll.

I really, really dig the anticipation that this would create. Not only does it tell you exactly what you need to write content for, it's something the players already have an active interest in resolving. I'm sure fellow DMs lament many junked campaigns because their concept of adventure was just plain boring to the players despite hours upon hours spent crafting the story, and they did something totally off the rails.

Tougher to do in this situation. The players could just say screw it and go adventuring, but their kingdom, the very central focus of the setting, would languish and die. Ignoring the realm makes it deteriorate rapidly. When domain events arise, you either deal with it through NPC retainers or handle it yourself. It's the reason you play Birthright and not something else.

So at the end of a night, your players perform their domain turn. One of the very first things they do is roll their domain event, and it snowballs. They begin taking steps to mitigate or benefit from the outcome of the roll. For the really bad events, it's nice to have a few loosely prepared explanations for what is about to happen (particularly if you roll something crazy like Blood Challenge, when someone comes to your domain seeking your bloodline itself!). Imagine ending a session on that cliffhanger. The anticipation would KILL ME if I were in that position. I couldn't wait for the next session, where all plans are laid.

This is all probably because I'm suffering from terrible tabletop withdrawal. I am such a nerd.

More Birthright Stuff

2011-03-06T17:32:00.000-05:00

You get a small update today to see where the advice, feedback, and continued investment of thought has brought the concept of Domain Qualities.

The nature of an individual province or holding is largely up to Narrator and player interpretation (assuming said player owns the province or holding in question), but there is very little that mechanically defines the particulars. Qualities are a means by which domains may be individualized, providing both cosmetic differentiation and systemic benefit for an investment of Regency and/or currency. Some of these are indicative of structures that are specifically built to fulfill a function, and as such have progression tracking until the structure is completed (this is particularly evident in the case of keeps and castles, which can take many domain turns to construct even with magical assistance).

Progression tracks should be noted alongside the Quality when it is purchased, and as progress is made on the project it should be updated to denote how far along the construction has come. Some construction-related Qualities do not have such progression tracks, as they represent either the re-purposing or commandeering of an existing structure. Progression tracks cannot advance if you do not control the province or holding to which the Quality is attached by the start of the domain turn. Progression takes place mechanically on the upkeep phase of the domain turn.

The categories of Qualities are Construction, Cultural, Landmark, Magical and Terrain. Descriptive keywords outline what manner of game function the Quality applies to (province, law/guild/temple/source holding, etc.) as well as any minimum required level for the target province/holding. Should the level ever drop below this minimum value, Qualities become inert (but do not disappear unless otherwise required).

Construction Qualities

Constabulary
Type: Law Holding (any rank)
Cost: 10 Regency, 3 Gold Bars
Progression: None (instantaneous)

Through the appointing of a local constable and staff of lawmen, the province in which the target holding resides has some manner of official capacity to make arrests and mete out justice in the name of its regent. Minor crimes and adjudications are made as dictated by the regent at the time of the constabulary's founding, but the best use of this quality is during the Feud, Corruption/Crime, Unrest/Rebellion, and Matter of Justice domain events.

The regent may exhaust the constabulary to negate the effects of these domain events once per domain turn, and the quality should be marked as Exhausted. This represents the influence and power of the constabulary being utilized to its fullest to minimize the potential damage from these events. It may not be used again in this fashion until the regent pays 10 Regency and 1 Gold Bar on the upkeep phase of the following domain turn (whereupon the Exhausted descriptor is removed and the constabulary may be used again as needed).

Fortress
Type: Province (rank 1+)
Cost: 1 Regency and 8 Gold Bars per size category (see below)
Progression: Province rating + local Guild holdings rating per domain turn

Fortress is the catch-all term for keeps, castles, palaces and strongholds of all shapes and sizes. The specific layout of the desired structure is up to the Narrator and players, but all of these fall into the Small (1), Medium (2), Large (3) and Huge (4) categories, and require a province rank equal to the fortress rating. A fortress begins construction on the domain turn that this quality is purchased, but the work takes time to complete, progressing at a rate equal to the province rating plus the rating of guild holdings within the province (representing their ability to keep the construction crews staffed, fed and paid) in Gold Bars per domain turn. Excess progression is lost once the project is completed.

Additionally, you may improve upon this quality at any time to upgrade an existing fortress to the next size category by paying the difference between total cost and the cost paid for the current level of the fortress. Progression continues on the next turn towards completion.

Example: The young regent Eist Velescarpe returns to his home territory to take up his father's seat. The previous fortress, Greybanner Keep, was leveled in a protracted battle against an evil sorcerer. Velescarpe attempts to rebuild the ancient keep, opting to start small due to his limited budget and regency. On the domain action phase, he purchases the Fortress quality and spends 1 regency point, as well as 8 gold bars to begin construction on the new Greybanner Keep. The province in which it is located has a province rating of 3/1, and thus can support a Large fortress, but he can only afford a Small one for now. Unfortunately, he controls no guild holdings in that province. On the upkeep phase of the next domain turn, Greybanner Keep progresses 3 points along its track, needing 8 total (its gold bar investment) to complete. Thus, Greybanner Keep, a small fortress, will be complete in three domain turns.

Later, Velescarpe has increased his influence and power substantially, and opts to improve Greybanner Keep into a more impressive fortress. He attempts to increase it from a Small fortress to a Large fortress, and must pay an additional 2 regency points and 16 gold bars (increasing two rating categories). The progression track starts again, and he must complete 16 gold bars worth of progression before the castle is fully upgraded.

Cultural Qualities

Liberty
Type: Province (any rank)
Cost: 5 Regency and 1 Gold Bar
Progression: None

The province is a beacon for freedom and all of the prosperity (as well as the tribulations) that comes along with it. Its people enjoy benevolent constables, the right to choose their path in life and hours of work, and no slavery is permitted to persist. Crime is still frowned upon based on the laws set forth by the regent. The province gains an additional loyalty grade on any action that increases loyalty (such as no taxation for the domain turn). Brutal dictates or senseless punishments of citizens cause the province to lose an additional loyalty grade. You may not select this quality if the target province already possesses the Totalitarianism quality. You may elect to lose Liberty at any time, but you forfeit the regency and gold bar spent to acquire it.

Patriotism

Type: Province (any rank)
Cost: 5 Regency and 1 Gold Bar
Progression: None

You exert influence and expend wealth to foster a strong sense of patriotism for the province and its ruler. Whether this is upheld by threat of punishment or through genuine love for the land, the people respond quickly and fiercely to events that endanger their homes and loved ones. If the province is tread upon by any hostile force, then the domain action of Muster Armies does not decrease the loyalty of the province on that turn or the subsequent turn, and the regent may muster one additional unit beyond the province's level restriction provided the threat remains apparent.

Totalitarianism
Type: Province (any rank)
Cost: 5 Regency and 1 Gold Bar
Progression: None

The regent brooks no questioning of their authority, suffers no fools to damage their influence, and mercilessly crushes dissent. A totalitarian regime is often identified by martial law or the utilization of brutal tactics to quell uprisings and crime. Heroes and adventurers are rarely welcomed in totalitarian provinces due to their propensity to upset the balance of power or put ideas into the heads of the people. Totalitarianism allows the regent to ignore the loss of loyalty from severe taxation, ignoring regional events, or mustering levies to war, but suffers one additional degree of loyalty loss when attacked through the Agitate actions of other regents. You may not purchase Totalitarianism if the target province already has the Liberty quality. You may elect to lose Totalitarianism at any time, but you forfeit the regency and gold bar spent to acquire it.

Tradition
Type: Province (any rank)
Cost: 5 Regency and 1 Gold Bar
Progression: None

The regent fosters a strong attachment to traditions in the province, encouraging the people to become used to events and become slow to accept change. On any domain turn in which no actions are applied to the province that possesses this quality, it generates an additional point of Regency at the end of the domain turn.

Landmark Qualities

Notable Structure
Type: Province (any rank)
Cost: 1 Regency and 2 Gold Bars
Progression: None

The creation or fostering of a structure known to have a great history attached to it, or being the location of a story sung by the bards, makes the province famous amongst its neighbors. Possibilities include a chapel once visited by a passing saint, a tavern where a famous hero proclaimed their devotion to a cause or quest, or the rubble of a castle where a great battle was fought centuries before. The regent that possesses the province applies a 2 point bonus to test results when using the Trade Route domain action, where the target province is one of the points along the route. Additionally, the act of Investiture performed upon the site of this structure gains a 2 point bonus to the relevant test.

You'll note that I totally ripped off Civilization's cultural growth track concepts, because I think they are great analogues for what players might want to do in a particular province. I made them apply to individual provinces rather than all provinces they hold specifically because you may come into possession of a particular province that needs to be governed a particular way. Give a land swarming with tribes of goblins Liberty and they'll turn into a swarm of lawless vagrants.

So yeah, that's where it's progressing now. I like the concept and I'm gonna keep running with it. I think it could be a lot of fun in play!

Simulating Kingdom Events and Customizing Holdings

2011-03-02T16:52:00.001-05:00

My Birthright conversion project brought with it the usual headaches that arise when you try to translate one system's very specific (for the time) method of handling simulationist aspects with another system's rather vague numeric values. Originally, I was going to stick completely with the Song of Ice and Fire system's method for handling houses, but Harbinger convinced me to integrate the old D&D 2nd Edition system for provinces, holdings and events because they were more granular, and ultimately the reason you played in the setting. I found it hard to argue after he chiseled through my stubbornness.

Song of Ice and Fire handles the modification of your house's statistics (Defense, Influence, Lands, Law, Population, Power and Wealth) through house fortunes rolls, investment of Glory (earned through play), and a cool series of creation events when you make the house (when your house was founded, how many major events it survived through and how it was affected by them, etc.). Once you get past that point, the numbers themselves are fairly vague and serve mostly to distinguish how it compares to other houses, with a more or less predictable peaking (1-10 you suck, 30-40 you're fairly average, at 60+ you're basically on the same tier as Robert Baratheon).

The Birthright setting, while it could work with this level of vague detail, needs a more granular system to do it justice and provide the simulationist aspect that makes it such a desirable place in which to play (for the record, I'm usually okay with more vague systems). My conversion pulled out the house statistics system along with the Glory stat, and replaced it with the Birthright analogues. You have Law, Guild, Temple and Source holdings (originally divided in focus amongst the class types) and Regency. Additionally, there are Provinces, in which holdings reside. Each of the holding types, along with provinces, have levels that dictate its basic level of strength. A holding cannot achieve a level greater than the province in which it resides (the province just doesn't have the infrastructure to support its existence). Regency is the numeric representation of the bloodline influence that a ruler possesses, literal divine right to rule, and is expended to perform domain actions.

I could go more into blooded scions, vassalage, investiture, creation of magic rules and other aspects of the Birthright setting, but this would instead turn into a review of the game, which is now 16 years old. So, moving on.

Apart from the currently-untested rules conversions I've made in regards to SIFRP Qualities to affect the Birthright aspects and the Birthright domain actions and bloodline powers to interact with SIFRP rule structure, the system looks fairly good for a test run (with the caveat that I need to create more spells for both divine and sorcerous spellcasters). But then I started thinking whether I wanted to give more detail to the domain and holding creation and maintenance portions, and provide and additional reason to spend Regency (which has a tendency to pool up with frugal regents).

As a player, I wouldn't want an additional complication to detract from the active roleplaying any more than the system already has to potential to do. However, an important part of any game design process is for the designer to realize that they are not every player. So I entertained the idea a bit more.

On an average domain turn, a freshly-created character in the SIFRP/Birthright conversion could generate anywhere from 10 to 40 regency (sum of bloodline strength, plus levels of all provinces and holdings), depending on where their territory is and what kind of holdings they possess. You can increase bloodline score, expend regency to perform domain actions, invest regency into your vassals (in this system conversion, this is generally used to signify other players so you can perform more actions on a domain turn than a single scion could reasonably perform), and even cast realm spells (if you're so inclined). Once you get a dozen or so play sessions under your belt, assuming you've paid even a small amount of attention to the expansion of your domains and haven't had abysmal dice luck, you start to become a regency-generating monstrosity.

I thought it could be neat to give your holdings Qualities that you could purchase with regency (for the uninitiated, Qualities are conceptually similar to D&D's Feats). SIFRP's base rules have a sorta-kinda way of doing this (allocating points from your house statistics to represent structures like castles and such), so I figured hey, why not blend the two a little more? This could replace some of the more kludge-y and difficult to understand domain actions like Fortify as well (feel free to read the rule for it on the linked wiki page, it's basically verbatim save for terminology/numbers modification).

The list of Holding Qualities I've begun to jot down is incredibly unrefined at this point, so I won't bother to integrate them into the conversion wiki until I better define them. However, this does not mean I wouldn't sic them upon the eyes of my poor readers. No idea on regency costs yet.

Law Qualities

Constabulary (can negate one uprising/revolt style event in the province)
Frontier Garrison (some kind of extra bonus against invading military forces)
Customs House (grants bonuses against agitate effects used against guild holdings)
Training Field (units created from this province gain a permanent +1 to combat defense)

Guild Qualities

Counting House (generates an additional gold bar on the collection phase)
Smart Investment (prevents up to X gold bar loss per domain turn from events)
Spymaster (allows the regent to perform an Espionage as a free action once per domain turn)

Temple Qualities

Orphanage (forfeit the income from this holding, but prevent up to 1 degree of loyalty loss per domain turn)
Reliquary (holding houses a rare religious artifact, grants a +1 bonus on Piety-related domain action tests)

Source Qualities

Standing Stones (grants a +1 bonus on tests made to cast realm spells)
Metaphysical Phenomenon (can cannibalize this Quality to force a reroll on domain event check)
Ancient Dragon's Lair (source is built over the lair of a long dead dragon, but lingering magic allows this holding to generate 1D extra regency per turn)
Ley Line Connection (would replace the Forge Ley Line domain action)

So yeah, that's part of what I had in mind. Still booting around some other ideas for even more modifications, such as a more expansive/varied system of domain event possibilities and more race/culture-oriented holding varieties. I'll save those for another time though.

But why do I like it?

2011-02-23T08:33:00.000-05:00

Had some more game design chats with friends recently, and the differing tastes we have seem to have been highlighted in those conversations. I'm a gaming slut; I play almost everything you flash in front of me at least once, shamelessly, without inhibition. I'm the drunk girl who hits on every game at the party, except I have a particular bit of equipment that makes said comparison very, very disturbing.

I have preferences, of course (we're off of the sexual joke, so let's just stop that right there, shall we?). I won't touch the wretched pile that is FATAL or that monstrously horrific Wraeththu garbage, though I would probably try a Twilight game (out of morbid curiosity) if you could find a designer so deep in the bottle that he/she doesn't care what they make rules for.

So it came down to me analyzing the systems I preferred over others. Once again, for the sake of mainstream consumption, I eagerly embraced the switch to 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons over 3rd/3.5 and am still a bit standoffish with Pathfinder. It totally came down to ease of introduction and play, and the types of people with whom I game. I tend to mix both veteran gamers and fresh faces, and the simpler a system is to understand (on its most basic level), the easier time we have getting started and integrating new players.

I dislike unnecessary complication or meaningless obfuscation (hey, twice in two blog entries I got to use that word!). It comes across as a flaw of design to me, something writers do to wave hands rapidly in front of your face while saying, "OooOOOOoooOooOo" to give some air of mysticism or intellectual challenge to their game. At its worst, it involves the integration of mechanics which make the head hurt or require the checking of about six tables in the rulebook just to resolve one stupid roll (we're looking at you, 3rd edition grapple rules).

Further, I thought back to my history as a gamer. I was almost always the guy whose responsibility it was to help a newcomer make their character (expected of me as a GM, something of a headache as a fellow player), and there are many bad memories of trying to explain game mechanics that require at least a passing knowledge of RPGs to people with glassy-eyed gazes. Not to imply that they are stupid, they just have no idea what I'm talking about. I might as well be explaining engineering calculus to someone with a full schedule of pottery classes. So in the end, they just told me what kind of character they wanted to play, and I made the damn thing for them. Twice the work for me.

I won't sing hosannas for 4th Edition in all aspects, but at least it's much easier for someone to pick up. You have a guy. You pick a race and a class. You want to focus on these two attributes (oh look, here's a pre-generated set that you assign!). Choose four skills. Choose one/two feats. Calculate one or two attack bonuses, you use this for every power. Oh look! Here are your powers, they have their own little rule entry right inline with the rest of its info. Bing, bam, done. I've been able to explain it to people who've never played a tabletop RPG before and they got it on their first try.

Of course, there are some aspects that continue to haunt me about 4th, things that will no doubt be improved upon in future iterations. For example, daily powers encourage hoarding of said powers and unleashing them only on your big encounter of the night. No big encounter? A fifth of the player's arsenal goes unused and gathers dust, never getting the awesome demonstration that it longs for. Then there's opportunity attacks, which new players will always forget and whose consequences can often make them feel like idiots when they honestly didn't know better (or they get frustrated at the GM, spouting things like "Is there anything I can do right now that doesn't provoke an opportunity attack?!").

In some respects, I'm glad this blog isn't well known so I don't invite the wrath of the shrieking berserkers that fight in the Edition Wars to fill the comments section with the dessicated corpses of old arguments and the bloated, raven-pecked, exaggerated accounts of the flaws they find in their eternal enemy. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what game people play, so long as it works for them. I just prefer simpler systems that let more focus shine on the story than on the sixteen rulebooks I lugged along.

A Second Job: Multiple Classes in PvE/PvP Games

2011-02-21T13:49:00.002-05:00

A common complaint in RPGs, specifically MMOs, is the problematic balance between classes as they relate to both PvE and PvP. We are at a point in the development of these games where the mechanics players are required to overcome against AI opponents will always vary wildly from what players can do to each other. This is, of course, to be expected; no AI is going to be able to predict player responses in a way that doesn't appear to be outright cheating on the part of the game, and no single player should mathematically provide the same level of challenge that a single boss-level creature in a PvE scenario should provide.

But then you run into the massive piles of complaints and forum arguments as they relate to the abilities players have access to, and how they seem great in PvE but provide a ridiculous edge in PvP that seems hard to surmount. Then the developers make adjustments, leading to complaints from one camp or the other, gripes about homogenization (I'll save my rant on people using hot buzzwords for another time), and various other items which contribute to an unhappy fanbase.

And frankly, you'll never make them all happy.

Some games have instead attempted to make all skills have equal PvE and PvP application. Warhammer Online made a notable stride forward by making their tank-type classes able to actually use taunt mechanics and form shield walls in PvP, but it didn't quite have the impact they expected. The problems still existed, of course, but at least they realized that having skills on your bar that you can't use in a situation really sucks.

I did a little thinking, plastered some incredibly rough ideas on my wiki pages while I ruminated over the implications, and figured that the only way to even slightly pave over the PvE/PvP skill/power debacle was to highlight the difference between skills used against "monsters" and skills used against "enemy soldiers". The Great Blow that I use to fell dragons would leave me wide open against a veteran combatant that is my size and just as agile. The harrying rain of blows works great against scouts of the enemy faction, but causes ogres to laugh at me and use my bones to make plaster for his elegant Mediterranean villa. Some abilities though, like basic infantry attacks and combat sorcery, are equally useful for both.

So why not differentiate the two by having the character progress along two paths? An adventuring career (PvE) and a soldiering career (PvP)?

Bear with me, this is still rather rough and there are obvious flaws to the logic, but it at least has some insights onto the problems and presents a direction for solution rather than just shrugging and trudging through the same tired quagmires of class balance.

For sake of discussion, let's assume basic class types present in most fantasy-style RPGs. You have:

Warrior
Rogue
Mage
Priest

These are the broad concepts. You can truncate it down even further by lumping rogues into warriors and simply differentiating them by combat style rather than skill set, but I think it's important to keep "mage" and "priest" separate because of their implied roles (nuke and support, respectively). More on that later.

Each of these types has an array of classes denoted by their primary function. You would pick two on creation, with possibly some means of selecting a new one early in the character's career if you dislike your choices. While some games (and in particular I'm looking at Rift right now, having briefly toyed with it) give you a big hunk of stuff to chew on and doesn't make any suggestions on what certain things were designed for, this seems like unnecessary obfuscation. If a developer clearly has no intent on making Class A/Build B effective in PvP, they shouldn't bill it as "viable" and then take six months to nerf/buff it or others to try to make it actually work. Or worse, force the player to abandon what they thought was cool in order to pick what was optimal at the job.

Back to the point though, you pick, say, a warrior-type character and are given the following options (again remembering that you choose two careers, one Adventuring and one Soldiering):

Man-at-Arms (Adventuring): A jack-of-all-trades fighter with knowledge of medium armors, shields, melee weapons, and some ranged ability. Uses a Grit mechanic to adapt or reaffirm their focus during battle, and is a powerful front-line combatant. (Grit builds as the man-at-arms uses skills on or receives damage from monsters, and at each Turning Point on their Grit meter, they may unlock new and more powerful abilities or shift focus to restore Vitality to allies or grant them defensive bonuses.)
Slayer (Adventuring): With powerful ranged attacks that lead into furious melee strikes, the Slayer is sought for their ability to track and kill monsters quickly. While not as physically tough as other warrior types, they make up for shortcomings with rapid movement and the skilled use of their Lethality mechanic. (Lethality builds through inflicted damage and all movement made within a few seconds after successfully striking a monster target. Lethality may be expended to boost defense or unleash crippling status effects upon enemies, setting them up for a coup de grace.)
Knight (Adventuring): The kingdom errant, a questing warrior of valor and might, the knight utilizes Virtue and Vice as their mechanics to lay monstrous enemies low. They are experts in shields and heavy armor, the most enduring of all warriors. Where knights walk, legends are made. (Virtue and Vice are a pair of opposing mechanics, Virtue being built through the receiving of damage or use of certain knight abilities, and Vice building through acts of retribution such as dealing damage to monsters or using the environment to harm foes. Virtue and Vice are consumed through ability usage to boost the knight's power.)
Besieger (Soldiering): Amidst the chaos and clamor of a siege, some warriors stride between the raining arrows and boulders unfazed and ready for blood. The besieger is trained in medium armors, shields and melee weapons, and gains bonuses in combat when surrounded by the utter chaos of a battlefield. (Besiegers use Chaos, a mounting six-point mechanic that builds based on how many player-controlled foes or hazards surround them. The higher a Besieger's Chaos, the harder they are to damage and the more harm they inflict in turn.)
Skirmisher (Soldiering): When called to battle against enemies of the kingdom, skirmishers make up the bulk of any first-in units. Preferring light armor and ranged weapons, the skirmishers clash and fade with lightning speed, picking off weak targets and slaughtering unprotected generals. (Skirmishers rely on Mobility and Isolation, which grow based on whether the skirmisher can stay unfettered by other players or whether their enemy player target is alone and undefended. High Mobility increases the skirmisher's combat ability, while high Isolation causes the skirmisher's attacks to deal crippling status effects.)
Champion (Soldiering): The troops of the kingdom fall back, but from their ranks comes an armored hero, spattered in gore and mud, lifting the fallen banner of the nation and planting it upright in the soupy mire. The champion, a warrior in heavy armor and bearing the colors of his kingdom, inspires allies with the power of their presence and remains standing as long as allies are in jeopardy. (Champions use Valor, gained whenever party members receive damage from enemy players, and as Valor climbs a champion's regeneration rates and damage output increase drastically.)

Abilities for a character are drawn from three pools of skills; Class, Adventuring Career, and Soldering Career. Class skills are useful against any target or in any situation. Adventuring Career skills have full effectiveness against NPC opponents, and either reduced or null effect against player opponents. Soldiering Career skills are the opposite (full effect versus players, reduced or null against NPC monsters).

Continuing the above bulleted examples, let's say a player decides to make a warrior who is a Man-at-Arms/Besieger. The basic descriptions of each make them seem similar in basic concept and gear focus (medium armor, being in the thick of things), though they are not the mandatory pairing. The player gains some basic strike powers by virtue of being a warrior (usually things that generate resources for their class's specific mechanic, in this case Grit for Man-at-Arms). All resources are visible at all times, and in non-PvP enabled zones, most of the Soldiering abilities would be disabled or grayed out to signify that they are less effective, and vice versa for Adventuring career abilities in full-PvP zones. Mixed zones may turn on all abilities, allowing players full range of their skills in these incredibly lethal areas.

Alternately, the player could choose Slayer/Champion. They have what appear to be conflicting combat styles, but the choice does not preclude them from using a particular type of armor or weapon. A balanced choice (MaA/Bsgr) causes skills to operate with some parity, while a lopsided one (Slyr/Chmp) can create room for experimentation and moderate frontloading of offense/defense.

The primary purpose of this is making it so that a change made for the sake of one play style does not adversely affect the other in as drastic of a way. You've made it clear by the breakdown of the classes that some roles are specifically designed and balanced in a particular type of content, and if you desire to engage in the other, your secondary choice is designed and balanced for it.

In re-reading what I wrote, it all seems a bit jumbled and hectic (much as the idea is in my mind right now anyway). I'll come back to it in future articles and explain more, but this is the basic idea in my head.

The Adventure Begins(?)

2011-02-13T19:18:00.003-05:00

So the last week has been pretty crazy. And by crazy, I mean it in a good way. Though I will soon be embarking upon my journey to Mount Doom (Maryland has no mountains I know of, but they are both abbreviated MD and thus it is funny to me), I shall miss this particular chapter of my gaming history and the good friends that have come along with it. Fortunately, I'm close enough to Raleigh so that a monthly weekend drive for a game isn't out of the question.

This has sparked some new thoughts about game systems, particularly tabletop ones, and how they encourage the introduction of new players. There seem to be two methodologies that designers use in the rulebooks. The first is the player creating a new character wholly from scratch, or very close to it. This is most common in systems that have no clear delineation of "levels" and thus the striation of power between the players may not be as overtly obvious.

You can also run into a system that gives you a guide for how to create a character at the same or near to the same level as the rest of the group. As the sentence implies, you run into this mostly with games that have a level-based structure (D&D most prominently), and this also has a tendency to include what it thinks the player should have in their possession, usually in the form of raw gold pieces that the player then uses to purchase treasure from the back of the book.

Here we run into the problem.

Gamemasters run such a gamut of preferences on treasure rewarding that these systems inevitably lead to that new character being tempted to select only those rewards that are most strongly beneficial to the type of character they are making. Of course, the GM always has final say, but this seems to always lead to a butting of heads ("Why won't you allow me to take this set of ridiculously powerful items?") or pouting when you say no.

I've not done this myself yet, but I'm beginning to think that the best way to handle this sort of thing is that a house rule set for creating characters mid-campaign needs to be created along with the general campaign bible itself, or at least be given a few paragraphs of notation in case it happens. Without it, players will default to what the rulebook tells them, and your low-magic party of players will end up having a badass warrior with crazy gear show up to the table. Things then screech to a halt as the GM and that player negotiate (and it is a negotiation, don't mistake it) so that the game's balance is not shattered like a kneecap romantically meeting a baseball bat. Good luck running your game that night.

The rulebooks give you a good starting point, but I've always found that treasure distribution is the single worst part of tabletop games in which treasure is one of the primary reward mechanisms when making mid-campaign characters (though see System Sans Setting for the experience points reward mechanism, it's a good read). For the record, I hate treasure heavy systems (MMOs notwithstanding, that is how you advance in today's online games, but that's a different rant). Too much time is spent perusing the books for what goodies you want to buy from the local magic store or grumping about not getting a particular piece of loot from a monster treasure pile, leading to characters erroneously feeling useless. Though 4th edition D&D has taken a great step in toning down the importance of certain treasures (I cringe at the stat-boosting items from 2nd/3rd every time someone mentions them), it is still a major focus, and indeed the point I daresay, of the game for every edition of its existence. Don't let the 4th edition haters fool you.

So back to the original point, before I digressed into my diatribe on "Stuff Quest." Creating a character mid-campaign is always a hassle for the gamemaster and even the other players. But if you've house ruled how you do treasure distribution and shelve what the rulebook tells you to, there's still the method of actually integrating that new character into the story. I think a handy three-item checklist during session writing, kept for every session you prepare, is worth keeping around for this purpose.

If I had to introduce a new player character on the fly, where is the best place this session to interject them? If it's not at the beginning or early middle, I should revise the notes for the session a bit.
The newly-introduced character needs some immediate association with the goal for the night, so I should mark down a particular enemy, location or treasure that they interested in killing/finding, and if they are not already part of the session, tie them into the existing session notes.
I should develop no less than two reasons at the resolution of this new character's goal for the session to give them a purpose for continuing on with the rest of the party, if this player was not just a one-shot character (sometimes someone brings their curious girlfriend/boyfriend, or buddy who is crashing with them for the weekend, and they're only around once).

These points don't need to be incredibly well articulated, just generalized so that the player and character feel connected to the story rather than, "You find yourself in a tavern with these rowdy adventurer types." Interjection during, or just before, an action sequence starts gives excellent means of integrating this new character. One of the party about to be overwhelmed? Encourage the newcomer through dialogue and description to drop terrain on the enemy (chandelier, boulders, other enemies, etc.). Nothing says, "I got your back!" like hitting a pack of goblins with their ogre buddy.

And who knows? Pull it off well enough and you may even get a new permanent player.

Too Much, or Not Enough?

2011-02-09T23:53:00.002-05:00

Chatted with a friend today about a couple gaming topics, and something came up that was thought provoking and I'm still not sure I have the answer to the question.

What's worse for a player, to be given too much information or not enough? And this is meant in the broadest of terms, it could apply to any aspect of a game. To properly contemplate this, I feel obligated to give examples, both for the edification of the reader and my own admittedly complicated (read: wacky) thought process.

Too much information is a problem when it pertains to both plots and systems. When you are told too much about a story and too many details are given away, you connect the dots more quickly and lose a great deal of satisfaction. A game can feel as though it's "too easy" when the cardboard facade of the villain's plot is shot with enough holes to drain boiling pasta with it. When presented with a game system where most or all of the permutations are demonstrated via documentation or whatnot, there is no sense of discovery or innovation. In both circumstances, you can be inadvertently made to feel stupid, as though you need some kind of derp-proof resolution to the story or outlining of the system so you don't strain your brain too hard.

Too little information is an equally thorny problem, where you are left feeling like you're... actually, a guy I used to work with put it best. It's like reaching through a dog door that you can't see the other side of, reaching for cans of beans that are randomly spread about. Sometimes, there are also bear traps. At best, this leads to a false gauge of how difficult a game is, and at worst this creates trial and error gameplay. Too many gamers, usually the ones who associate themselves with hardcore gaming crowds, perceive the limited availability of information as the true sense of difficulty, but we should (and will) examine that further.

I originally decided, in the conversation I had with the aforementioned individual, that too little information was the worse of the two, but now I'm not so sure. So let's examine it by medium. In a tabletop game, a GM can make the mistake of giving out too much info and causing his players to jump several steps ahead of his intended path of story, but he has the option of ad hoc determinations and on-the-fly additions to expand the game session a bit. Video games don't allow that, as there is a limited set of contingencies that developers can actually make available. So ultimately, too much info is more destructive to the longevity and enjoyability of a video game than a tabletop RPG.

Conversely, part of the challenge of some video games, as mentioned above, is using your intuition and problem-solving to overcome not being given all the data. The rapid delivery of information in video games makes the downtime of making a mistake less disruptive to the overall experience than it would in a tabletop game, because naturally computers can process all this stuff at a far greater speed than our feeble meat-brains. With tabletop games, being fed too little information leads to helplessness and boredom, and is thus far more destructive in that medium than in video games. An interesting inversion.

Though, as I touched on before, a lack of data available is usually not an indicator of difficulty, but more a means by which players fool themselves into thinking that something is hard when in truth the game is just poorly thought out. Being expected to consider the ramifications of a character build is a real challenge, but being forced to endure constant failure because the game doesn't allow you to perform an action or see a hazard easily is, as my faithful standby TV Tropes points out, fake difficulty. This applies to all kinds of game media, and is not limited to just video games. If you're expected to know that the evil space alien uses some kind of instant-kill ability at a certain point in the fight and you are given zero indication as to the existence, approach or nature of this ability, then that's not a challenge, that's just too little information provided.

So coming back to the central question here, what is worse? Being told too much about the game, or too little? Getting bored one way or the other? Is it the premature ejaculation of game enjoyment or the frustrating blue balls of entertainment intercourse that is more dissatisfying? Should I never make that metaphor again? Can I make this entire paragraph consist of questions?

All things I must continue to ponder. I'm still undecided.

Though I kinda liked the metaphor.

Humans, Reloaded

2011-02-07T01:07:00.000-05:00

Various chats with Harbinger and Kainenchen have yielded something interesting that I knew but didn't really attribute much to until it was discussed. We've had some differing opinions and varying outlooks on cultural representations, and while most people who know me also know that I am sick to death of elves in fantasy settings, I'm finding more and more that I can't stand humans either.

They are presented to us as the first layer of familiarity; we are humans, thus we can relate, at least in a very basic and instinctual sense, to their struggles, motivations and morals. The cultural layer is applied over that, and skews the perception one way or the other depending on how we as individuals perceive that culture (damn those medieval Englishmen!).

What happens if we strip away humans entirely?

Most of today's gaming environment is of the fast-food variety. You want a rapid fire delivery of interesting and familiar content so you can chew it up and spit it out, get the quick satisfaction, and move onto the next game as free time permits. The information age has sprayed the buckshot of Too Much Choice at us and we often find ourselves with multiple interests and not enough time to satisfy them all.

But before I digress into a separate discussion, we go back to human representation in our games. There's no question that humans are the most played race in the games in which they are available. This is rarely averted in particular games where humans just suck (Horizons was big on that, but this was also a game that introduced dragons as a player race among others), but the sheer flexibility that humans are allowed in most settings makes them the ideal choice for players just starting out or players that prefer to play jacks-of-all-trades.

Some systems just make humans statistically better. In 3.5 D&D, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that any core race was superior to the human with their bonus feat. That alone made them a head-and-shoulders above any other starting character race, and that's before you include non-core material. Tiny attribute bonuses meant nothing if you had no means to apply the attribute to its fullest or in another way, as feats often allowed. You were both more powerful and more flexible as a human.

Balance issues aside, there's also the stock assumption that humans are one of the following:

The dominant race, comprised of either an empire or multiple conflicting nation-states that have successfully repressed or conquered the other races.
The rising stars of the world, a race of both great heroes and terrible villains.
The melting pot race that has assimilated the best aspects of all the other races, which has made them into a political or military juggernaut.

This leads to potential issues if you play anything other than a human, because you will miss out on having even a semblance of familiar relations with the other humans, who make up the largest percentage of the people you will meet. Unless a GM goes out of their way to explain in no uncertain terms that the people you are running into are other than human, the immediate perception is that they are, in fact, human. You don't need to say it, it's just presumed. So why would the choosy player pick anything other than a human for the unspoken societal benefits?

Subversions occur when you place humans in the negative light of the above assumptions. The dominant race becomes the vicious, racist conqueror species that actively works to stamp out the others. Rising stars just as quickly become catastrophic individuals whose actions are all well and good for their own people, but whose consequences actively harm the rest of the world's people. A melting pot race becomes the Borg, adding their distinctiveness to a human collective that obliterates the people whose culture it just assimilated.

So we've determined that humans can suck both from a balance perspective but also a cultural setting perspective (for the purposes of this argument; I won't say that all humans are bad, and of course, your mileage may vary). How well would a game do with no humans?

I don't mean just not using the word, and repackaging humans into some physically and psychologically identical race with a different name. I mean taking humans out entirely, all aspects of them. The world never had them and never did.

Well, the game probably wouldn't sell well. The average gamer likes having that degree of familiarity, and I can understand that. We tend to cling to things to which we can relate. It's why people form social cliques and circles of friends with shared interests. I don't go to a different store every day because I like being contrary and adventurous.

Would the game be interesting though? With the proper writing and setup, it could certainly be very intriguing. You would be forced to look at the world through a lens that doesn't include people as we know them. Cultures could be truly different, or at least mirrored in such a way as to say, "Okay, these guys are probably based on medieval England, but without the monotheistic trappings and chivalric aspects."

Such a world would probably only appeal to a very niche group of players. MMOs have tried it, in the form of Saga of Ryzom and a handful of others, and I found their take to be refreshing if not Warcraft-blockbuster-style. Again, it's like comparing food service. Warcraft is McDonald's. Serves a huge crowd of people while raking in billions, is accessible, has cool toys and gimmicks, but overall isn't anything amazing that you haven't seen before. Other games are more focused and appeal to smaller audiences with that sort of taste, like a German or Indian restaurant. They don't make as much money, but you can probably say you like the food better (unless you actually like McDonald's, and if that's the case then I can safely assume you've never worked at one and seen how that food is made).

I think aspiring designers would get a great workout and tons of practice by designing settings without any humans or human influence at all. You could really get creative by removing the option of taking the easy way out and just assigning random human exported cultures across a generic warped-Europe map. It's a great mental exercise and would make the designer's ingenuity and writing all the stronger.

The Stealth Game

2011-02-01T22:03:00.000-05:00

I like my hack-and-slashers, my first-person shooters, my third-person over-the-shoulder slugfests with either swords or shotguns or swords stuck on the ends of shotguns. Great story is paramount, but sometimes I want to fire up a game and achieve a moment of Zen whoopass to de-stress from a particularly grueling day. Kick in the door, rescue the hostages, kill the bad guy. All in a day's work for the hero of a game setting.

Sometimes, though, I settle in for something different; the stealth run-through of a game. Most often it's the first-person style games (be they shooters or RPGs) that allow me to do this properly; you've got Dark Messiah, Deus Ex, Dark Corners of the Earth, the various games in the Elder Scrolls series, the Thief series (of course), and many more. It's usually a self-imposed challenge, and it is deeply rewarding.

The stealth-run can be either lethal (you create a character and kill from the shadows and with surprise whenever possible) or non-lethal (naturally, never killing at all if the game allows it), depending on the parameters of the game. More and more games allow players to pull this off; you will frequently see FAQs show up explaining how to get through the entire game with stealth, killing the bare plot-required minimum of enemies in the process.

One mistake, one unmeasured sound, and you bring down the entire fortress of enemies upon your head. You have to watch patrols, sometimes painstakingly, before taking an action. The tension is ramped up even more if you're on a time limit or something is hunting you in return. If you have the temerity to strike out at an enemy, you'd better be quick and quiet, and god help you if you give them a chance to scream for help.

I did this most recently with Deus Ex, but tonight I just started a new playthrough of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion doing the same thing. In Deus Ex, you're encouraged early on to seek non-lethal means of subduing enemies (though that quickly goes out the window during the final couple hours of play). Between police batons, cattle prods, tranquilizer darts for your wrist-crossbow, and gas grenades, you can easily take out most enemies before they raise an alarm. You save yourself a lot of ammo and prevent many game overs by being silent and selective in who you take down.

Oblivion makes this harder. In most RPGs I tend to play the tank, with very few exceptions. I don't like the frailty of other archetypes, but sometimes it's made easier. Once before in Oblivion, I did a complete run of the game with an archer-type scout character, but towards the end I found myself giving up my sneaky bow-shot kills for something more up-front and face-punchy (it helps that I'd juiced up this one sword so far that I could light the countryside with it). Still, it's very satisfying to lay out an enemy with a single shot, fired from cover.

You can't generally allow this in good conscience, as a game designer, save in specific game types (naturally, competitive shooters come to mind, since some people revel in playing snipers). Being one-shot in an MMO is a profoundly crappy experience, but the genre still allows for stealth-runs with the appropriate classes and skills.

It's only fair to state that I am not a fan of "I turn invisible" stealth methods, as I not only dislike the fact that people are unseen in broad daylight in the middle of a field without using obvious magic, but disapprove of stealth gameplay that doesn't involve actual skill in staying hidden.

I wonder, sometimes, what a large-scale multiplayer game (if not necessarily an MMO) would be like if the characters advanced faster or gained better rewards through stealth and diversion. Espionage thrillers and heist-style missions always appealed to me as a designer, and I frequently tried to find ways to emulate the experience in my content design, only to be stymied by technical limitations (or lazy programmers).

Even more challenging would be a way to integrate stealth gameplay into tabletop RPGs, which all-too-often relegate sneaking around to the party's resident weaselly guttersnipe and a handful of die rolls while other people stand around bored. Optimistically, I'm sure there's a system out there that's actually done it somewhat well, I've just not experienced it yet. And if I'm wrong? Something to try messing with at some point.

Up yours, Gandalf!

2011-01-31T22:08:00.008-05:00

There's nothing the hero of any adventure hates more than the meddling wizard, especially the one that is, ostensibly, on his or her side. They have a habit of not fully explaining the details of their journey except when they're about to be shanked by the assassins of the villain, improperly expounding on the prophecy in which they are the center point, or just being aggravatingly cryptic.

"I promise I won't wait until the last second to explain that there's a goddamn BALROG down here."

Friggin' wizards.

What is our obsession with the archetype in our fantasy literature and gaming? The hero always seems to have this character, the good-guy reflection of the grand vizier who is the font of all knowledge for our brave protagonist and often possessed of enough raw power to quickly vaporize opponents before they pose a true threat. But, as is their modus operandi, they restrain themselves for obscure reasons and cause the quest to drag on longer than it should.

Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander, the king of this trope.

Stop time? Child's play. Hurl enemies around like rag dolls? Save it for the physics engine of whatever game we're in! Blasts of fire hot enough to melt that portcullis we're attempting to ram down? In my sleep!

So do it already!

Including omnipotent (or nearly so) wizards in fiction makes me wonder why they aren't doing the job. Their very existence chafes me, as both a writer and a gamer, because they loom over the plot even without being present to remind the players that there's someone bigger than them who could be doing all this work, but instead they're busy being aloof. It's like being asked to clean out the grease traps of a particularly foul restaurant grill, with your manager looking over your shoulder, smiling at your misery and the fact that you've ruined the fourth shirt this week.

(Did that sound bitter? Yeah, I've had to deal with that. Never again.)

Tradition dictates that every Arthur has his Merlin. Sometimes, I wonder why we've stuck with it this long.

"Yep, I'm still here. Do you feel inadequate yet?"

Emotional Connections

2011-01-28T00:27:00.000-05:00

A question that came up at an interview I had was essentially, "How do you make a good quest in an MMO?"

Good question.

All too often, games use filler content thinly veiled with interesting (though loaded) dialogue to make players do chores. I'm sick to death of coming to a fantastic new area, throbbing with barely-contained promise, and being asked to kill six snow moose milling about in a nearby field. It's offensive to me, as a player, to be passed this kind of tripe as actual content when games have come so far. I don't feel connected to the world after committing moose genocide, I don't care about the NPC who asked me to do it (in fact, I begin to question why the man/woman/orc hates moose so much; perhaps he loathes Canadians, I don't know), and I certainly bear the moose no ill will.

But in the same venue that has a penchant for inundating me with that kind of garbage content, sometimes you get a positive experience. There's a set of quests (basically, the point of the entire zone) in the Eastern Plaguelands of Warcraft that has you accompanying a caravan of travelers on their way to the chapel on the far side of the zone. You are initially introduced to the caravan driver and two passengers, aspiring crusaders, and along the way you pick up additional travelers. The quests themselves range from the kill-ten-rats variety to more interesting object hunts and problem solving, but between each battery of quests you are treated to some conversation time with the NPCs.

They talk with you and each other. You learn about them. You start to care about their goals, laugh at the jokes they tell about one another, and even compete in the same trials they are undergoing to become crusaders. You pick up a bunch of passengers that range from the mundane but powerful (a mighty shaman who figured prominently in several major world events) to the downright bizarre (a troll mummy guy).

Near the end of the chain, one of the members of the team gets captured and his best friend, devastated, runs off to rescue him. It culminates in the two of you walking in against what is built up to be an incredibly powerful opponent, expecting sure demise... and then your caravan buddies walk in behind you. Through the actions of a zone's quests, you built your own adventuring party of misfits and nobodies, a mighty force to be reckoned with that beats the crap out of the enemy (albeit in a scripted cutscene, where the player is one of the actors) and rescues the missing member.

I did it the first time, and I was blown away. It was the first time I actually gave a damn about any of the NPCs who were shoveling out quests by the book-load. They were with me the whole time, fighting alongside me, asking me for help, helping me in return, and acting like they had motivations and emotions aside from "Grr, I sure hate those snow moose! Kill them for me!" or "I need ten stanky buttweeds to cure this rash I got."

The questing experience is all too often watered down into filler content. It's uninspired, but sometimes designers are forced to include it as part of larger end goals or just to meet unrealistic deadlines from their superiors. Sadly, it prevents players from establishing a connection with the world and the NPCs they are dealing with. And that's terrible.

Single player games do this better. I regularly sing the praises of a particular game, Torment, because it was (and remains) the single best-written CRPG in history, and did everything in its power to make me want to support (or condemn), the fellow characters in the story. When writers take the time to make me care about the characters I deal with, I feel deeply connected to the game and want to play it more. Contrary to what people may think, this is not impossible to do with MMOs. The technology is here, there is no excuse for me to have to do one more kill-ten-rats quest, ever again.

Think of the adorable rats.

I'm such a punk.

2011-01-24T15:31:00.000-05:00

I've had a lot of exposure to the cyberpunk genre of late. It was always a fringe interest of mine, something I used as a diversion from my usual fantasy or modern horror gaming habits, but rarely something that I stuck with for any serious length of time. A buddy of mine recently got me a copy of Snow Crash, which I have been greatly enjoying, and another friend gifted me Deus Ex, which I have somehow never played until now.

And, of course, there was my brief flirtation with Shadowrun some years back, when I was too young to really appreciate some of its messages (I recall my original reaction being, "They have a dragon as president? Badass!"). Your mileage may vary on whether or not you classify it as true cyberpunk, given its shameless incorporation of fantasy elements.

I'll freely admit that my passions are swayed towards whatever I happen to be currently reading and/or playing. As such, I am in the throes of design frenzy as it pertains to the cyberpunk genre and curious about how interesting I can make such a game. There are a few points that have been discussed in my various circles about the common design flaws of cyberpunk games, however.

Repeating themes. There's only so many corporate espionage, government conspiracy, or dangerous nanotech/software stories you can tell players before they begin to acknowledge and predict all of the tropes involved. A designer has to be careful, if they utilize these themes, to make sure players don't roll their eyes and begin inspecting their iPhones for secret software of their own.
"Solo" gameplay aspects. Shadowrun (at least the editions I've seen) have problems with the group's decker spending inordinate amounts of time doing things while the rest of the party watches, bored out of their minds because they did not make characters with that set of skills. While splitting the party is a relic of older gaming, these days it serves only to create headaches, specifically in tabletop games (splitting groups in video games is another matter).
Spastic continuity. Retcons are a fact of life for all designers, as is the generation of content by multiple individuals with wildly varying concepts of what makes a fun story. This is generally forgivable in fantasy settings, where the culture clashes and magic-influenced societies can easily explain away such inconsistencies, but most cyberpunk games are set in a near-future variant of the real world. Players begin to notice oddities about the political environments, the bizarre nature of corporate empires and their interactions with governments, and other aspects that, if not all collaborated on in a highly meticulous fashion, will quickly cause a believability breakdown.
Pseudo-science. You have to give a certain measure of leeway in design to allow the creation process to flow, but more players (especially these days) are knowledgeable about high-tech functions than many designers realize. Further, at least some credibility must be given to our current understanding of physics, chemistry and biology as we know them. We have begun to reach something of a silent agreement in the design of future-tech settings, understanding that projectile weapons will continue to reign supreme for years due to reliability and ease of use, and that there is a finite limit to the strength of materials.
The Internet. Fifteen years ago (when some of these games were designed), you wouldn't believe that there is a massive online database where you can literally find anything (and dear god, do I mean anything) for which you search. That's a reality now. Why introduce a chemistry puzzle or ask a player to make a science-skill roll? Just Google it on your iPhone, with enough time you'll be able to figure it out. Short of a massive world-wide lockdown of information availability by governments and corporations, the Internet exists to destroy the settings of game designers. You have to consider its impact and whether or not it is a controlled aspect when designing the "modern" cyberpunk game.

Despite these challenges, I am not daunted from attempting such a setting design. I'm sure I'll slap some of that data up here from time to time between main topics for perusal, criticism and open hatred.

You want to super size that community?

2011-01-24T00:39:00.001-05:00

The last few days have been a flurry of activity. However, I always find time to sit down and play online games with my friends, because I have to do something to keep sane while I wait for companies to get in touch with me. Unfortunately, my experiences on Saturday left a very unpleasant aftertaste, enough to actually make me consider leaving MMOs as a player for good. I could grow thicker skin, but for what? So that people would just stab harder? Not worth my time.

With big communities comes the problem of policing bad behavior. The bigger the crowd, the worse and more widespread the problems get. It's impossible to provide proper investigations with the meager budgets most companies apply to policy enforcement, and thus tons of reports get lost or are simply unaddressed by overstressed, lazy or uninspired staff.

Gabe's GIFT prepares us for the behavior we will experience on the Internet. We come to expect the worst from people, and it's naive to consider that any given person will be a saint when you encounter them in the virtual universe (there are some exceptions, naturally). Now, it's probably the fact that I am hyper-sensitive given my real life circumstances and general state of mind about the horrible human beings I have had to deal with in the last few months, but this particular game's community gave me three shining examples in the span of two hours as to why I would rather play with a small-ish community rather than a giant one.

Are big communities beneficial to game developers? Well, of course. That should go without saying. The more people that play your game, the more profits you will generate. The downside to this is that your player base becomes exposed to a wider range of degenerate human beings who dog-paddle within the slurry of the metaverse, carrying their diseased husks into previously pristine territories.

Small communities foster individual accountability. You act like a tool, everyone's going to know you are a tool very quickly, and the community shuns you. But if you're one of thousands, nay, millions of players acting like complete and utter douchebags, the accountability fades. You can't keep track of all the terrible human beings because there isn't an ignore list long enough, and eventually you stop trying and caring. The nice players build thorny barriers and close themselves off from others, eventually becoming bitter and losing interest in the product. Then all the game company has left is a community of trolls and stop-having-fun-guys.

It's an argument for keeping things separated where you can. Giant omniservers (or environments/features that might as well lump all servers together) create this kind of problem. It becomes a terrible environment for players who just want to enjoy the game, a terrible mess for your policy-enforcement staff to maintain and police, and leads to a complete abandonment of accountability on the part of your players. Cue the snowball effect which leads to people like me, the average joe gamers, who roll their eyes and boot up a single player game instead.

You can be the biggest and most profitable and still be derided for the crap you shovel. McDonalds has billions served, but that doesn't mean their food or service is good.

Ye Auld Tomes of Magick vs. Excalibur Security Software v4.0

2011-01-21T16:35:00.000-05:00

This one's quick, and more of an extraneous thread of thought than a real full-sized entry.

The dichotomy of a fantasy versus technology setting can be summed up by comparing their documentation. For example, an ancient book of magic is going to be treasured, as it almost invariably contains forgotten knowledge and powerful spells. With technology, you want the newest, freshest ideas packaged in sleek plastic and updated live, as you use it, and you throw it out as soon as something newer comes along.

Now reverse those just for fun.

Technology's most powerful grimoire would be a VCR manual from the early 80s, explaining how to carefully encode visual and audio data upon an easy-to-manufacture, plastic-shielded ribbon. Magic's best spells would be penned by the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, allowing people to share useless information about themselves instantly, across national boundaries.

Poor Merlin. Poor Bill Gates.

Cultures: the Usual Suspects

2011-01-20T14:13:00.000-05:00

Now I play devil's advocate to my own previous article.

Here's a fun exercise. Pick any six fantasy RPGs you know of, and check out the cultures of their respective settings. It's very likely that you'll find a Viking-inspired one, your standard English/French/German medieval nation, and something akin to Mongol hordes (usually occupied by various barbaric humanoid races, which carries its own unfortunate implications). If the game is particularly edgy, you'll also find an Arabic counterpart, a mish-mash China-Japan culture (because all us westerners don't know better, right?) and possibly a Mediterranean expy.

Hoo, boy. What am I going to do with all of these familiar cultures? Oh, I know. I'm going to get the armor from the Germans, the axes from the Vikings, and the horses from the French. No need to go into specifics of their history, religion or unique forms of dress, because you've seen it already in history class.

Now, it's certainly easy to get players to relate to stuff that is an echo of historical cultures, and give them a good idea of what to expect. As a player of games, though, you know what I'd like to see?

India. It's my top pick because I'm fascinated by the dozens of individual cultures represented in the country and its environs. India has a rich history and incredible religious diversity that is a fertile ground for any game developer. Why haven't we seen this used more?
Native America. Like India, there are many smaller sub-groups with a variety in lifestyle, territories, spiritual beliefs, and more. A particularly ignorant developer may feel limited in cultural development, but that's just lazy design and poor imagination. Go read a book, or heaven forbid, talk to someone.
Russia. There is a very fun (albeit painfully grindy and poorly-balanced, back when I tried it) free-to-play MMO called Allods that has this as one of its primary human cultures, and it was done in a very amusing and convincing manner. It is an overtly fantasy version of imperial Russia, but you could just as easily bring this back into the early days of Russia's founding.

So much untapped potential. Alas.

Knowing What to Expect

2011-01-19T23:22:00.000-05:00

I've played many games across a half-dozen kinds of media, and every one of them tries to be unique in its own way. Some succeed, and create a unique atmosphere and storyline that immerses a player in something alien, yet familiar. All too many, however, don't do enough to distinguish themselves from the very tropes they are attempting to discredit. You will find yourself in a game, going through the motions, and realizing you've seen and done this before, and it's not even as good as the first time through.

Then you feel cheated, since you were promised a new experience. Wishful thinking? Dirty marketing lies? You look upon your shattered dreams and the receipt for your sixty-dollar letdown and wonder if it's something you're doing wrong.

Don't worry. You were just led to expect something different than what you got. Game companies do it to us all the time, and it's the reason there are only two to three really, truly good games in a given five year period that change the way we look at entertainment.

This is hardly the time or place to encourage a little more truth in marketing (or a bit more humility as it comes to design), but I sometimes wonder what it would be like if someone put out a game where the player would know exactly what to expect, because the company was honest in explaining what the game was about. Don't hide behind allusions of "dark fantasy" or "space opera" or what have you. Say that you're making a game about a princess kidnapped by a dragon, masterminded by an evil chancellor, avenging the death of a king or uncle or family dog, and make it interesting again without trying to wrap it in something that it isn't. Make the component parts of the story unique, but let the structure flow based on storytelling traditions.

They're story designs that stick with us for a reason. Because they were fun the first time, and can be made fun once again.

Then again, I could just be nostalgic. It's late, and I'm tired.

Convert, or be damned!

2011-01-18T13:51:00.001-05:00

The joy I garner from the player experience also causes me to convert games, a systemic change that allows an old favorite to be enjoyed in a more current medium. The linked example is my take the old D&D 2nd edition setting, Birthright, where the players would immerse themselves in a world where the kings and their lands were, in a very real sense, a function of divine right.

Purists would argue that if I wanted to enjoy the setting as I remembered it, I should just dig out my old 2nd edition books and run it in its original system. Naturally, I have problems with the old edition that render it painful to endure. Gaming has progressed greatly since then, and I have no compunctions about abandoning a once-great system for something that has proven itself superior in terms of ease of understanding, has no necessity for a three-ring-binder full of photocopied tables and charts, etc.

So why convert to a system so different in theme and focus? Moving from 2nd to 4th is a logical progression, but I have instead chosen to adapt it to a system that carries the same flavor and focus on kingship, the growth of realms and influence, and roleplaying as it relates to both. Along with this, I also allow the conversion to include my own preferences of low-magic worlds combined with gritty combat where getting into a sword fight means you are going to get hurt. I like my realism sometimes.

"But Wombat, Birthright is so intrinsically high-magic that you can't really get away with it! And besides, the Song of Ice and Fire system has no real concrete rules for how you could work magic!"

I would disagree on the first point, and take the second point as a challenge to see if I could create and integrate a system for it. It is my honest belief that a world which is bereft of shops full of magical swords, armies that aren't encrusted in the latest military hardware, and where sorcerers are both feared and misunderstood allows the setting's main principles (regency, divine bloodlines, and ancient magical sources) to shine all the brighter against the otherwise grim world.

Here is where I venture to say that my interests as a player overtake my interests as a game designer. I did purposefully go out of my way to make this little homebrew something I would enjoy, with no expectation that I would ever actually get a group together to play it. Most gamers, I expect, fully embrace the more magic-saturated environments of the modern gaming world, and that's totally fine.

Still, there's a niche for this sort of thing, and I comfortably place myself within it while also realizing that it's not for everyone. This, in turn, allows me to satisfy my thought processes and go on to create more widely-accepted game concepts for general consumption.

And sometimes you roll 1s. A lot.

2011-01-17T22:52:00.000-05:00

I can't think of a single gamer that hasn't gone Lewis Black at their foul luck sometimes. Statistically... well, no. Statistics are all well and good, and you can quote math at me all day long, but goddammit there is such a thing as cursed dice.

You shall be spared another gamer's diatribe about how awful their luck was, but it got me thinking. It is a common conceit of "serious" players that when you happen to be unlucky on a "die roll" (read: any randomly generated determination of success), you miss out and that's life. Sometimes, you'll even be called a bad player because of it, something random that you had no control over. There's a certain degree of skill in some systems that allows the player themselves to have a modicum of command over the chance they have to succeed (such as stacking piles of hit rating, munchkin-stacking attack bonuses, or artificially inflating the difficulty of resisting their attacks), but many systems either disallow by design the ability to do this or have special rules that create automatic failures.

Specifically, I refer to infamous "rolling a 1" in D&D.

Because of the pace of tabletop games, which is universally slower and more meticulous than virtual media, rolling a 1 (or otherwise failing/botching a test) and completely wasting your turn is intensely demoralizing. Do it several times in a row, and you begin to contemplate your cell phone, look at the time, and consider doing something else. It's a crappy feeling and even the game master can detect the building frustration on the other end of the table (whether or not he cares is another matter).

How can you salvage this experience? Sometimes it's funny when it continually happens in otherwise harmless situations, but when there's a real chance of a TPK it can be catastrophic to your plans if everyone has such embarrassing fortune that your game ends early due to dragon-related fatalities. No amount of planning or fudging is going to rectify that.

Anecdote time. A long time ago, I was running a session of D&D for some old friends of mine back in jolly old Florida, the state of old people and Disney. It was a long-running campaign, a great war epic where a central character in the party was joined by his company of mercenaries (the other players) in an effort to drive a wedge between two mighty empires that had clashed constantly over the last few hundred years, ruining the land in their eternal grudge. There was excellent roleplaying, high adventure, and thrilling battles across many lands as they sought to gather enough power and influence to challenge the two empires and force them to settlement.

Then they managed to anger a dragon with some poorly-chosen words and threats. And then the dice intervened, compounding their ill-fortune. People were eaten.

Many who know some of my various other aliases will wonder why I am sometimes referred to as "gameslaying dragon". Well, that was the dragon the slew the game. I really couldn't pull it out of the nosedive after a certain point, or so I thought at the time. Hindsight is 20/20, et cetera.

Anyway, ever since then I have been perhaps overly careful not to introduce TPK scenarios, to the point of me pulling my punches unnecessarily. I'm not sure which is worse, a threat that really does annihilate a game I have carefully prepared, or a threat that has no real teeth (even if I don't tip my hand to the players in that regard, though I suppose the cat's out of the bag now!).

There are few ways to make anyone feel truly good about wasting their turn, but I feel that D&D 4th edition, in particular, has a means to smoothly integrate a consolation prize via its power design system. For example:

Not Again!
Immediate Reaction * Encounter
Trigger: You miss an attack. You must not have successfully hit a creature the previous round.
Effect: You gain a +2 bonus to all defenses until the end of your next turn.

This is crude and hastily generated, but merely serves to illustrate a point. The truly hardcore (or masochistic) gamer would say "You missed, too bad, suck it up!" but these players are also the type to hurl their metaphorical dice across the room once it happens to them. Missing in a video game means you either screwed up or haven't geared appropriately, and that's something for which you could have adequately prepared. Not so in tabletop systems, where min-maxing only goes so far, and sometimes your dice reveal themselves to be agents of Kali that are out to end your alter-ego's life.

Having an option when luck fails you restores some faith that you might have a better shot next round. Just sitting around because you can't seem to do jack is the opposite of fun. We play games to have fun. See where I'm going with this?

The Omnigenre Universe

2011-01-17T15:50:00.000-05:00

Hey look, you found a magic sword. Now, climb back into your phlogiston-powered motorcycle, ride through a portal to the Clockwork City, and sit down in the local cafe staffed by a robot barista before you catch a ride to the next planet in the solar system. You've just had an adventure in a genre-blending game that doesn't know if it wants to emulate a fantasy setting or a high-tech space opera. Maybe it's both! Who knows?

And that is awesome.

The more experienced a gamer, the more likely they are to not mind these anachronisms in their video or tabletop games. Sure, it's bound to raise some eyebrows amongst the people who do not expect to encounter it (especially if the players previously saw no sign of any such tech/fantasy blending), but these types of games have a way of sticking with players specifically because of how absurd they can be.

From a design standpoint, it's a way to attract gamers from multiple genre interests, but it has a tendency to backfire if you're literally trying to go all out to include every ridiculous aspect of a blended magic/technology setting. Players will quickly begin to question why there's cell phones if you have a pan-galactic magical communications network that breaks the laws of physics. And logically (if that's a word that even applies here), a culture wouldn't need to invent things like vaccines or labor unions if they had access to magic. Just call the local cleric or put a workforce of golems on the assembly line. Screw paying benefits!

A carefully considered blend makes a rich potpourri for players to enjoy, but a careless mish-mash of pop-culture garbage mixed with campy sorcery will be seen for the comical mess that it is (unless, of course, that's what you're going for; parody settings go a long way).

Now, I'm going to go load up my iPod shuffle and drive over to the local dungeon to acquire rare and mystical treasures from the kobolds that dwell there. Don't judge. I have to wrap grocery shopping in some kind of interesting analogy, because it's a terribly boring thing to do otherwise.

Player Developers: Untapped and Unloved

2011-01-15T19:14:00.000-05:00

I spent a fair amount of time going over the GNS Theory and the Big Model today, and how it applies to my experiences. They are a great way of explaining the friction that is borne from various discussions about a game, and are the "true identities" of the hardcore/casual argument, the battle between the storyteller and the rules lawyer, and the nightmares that game developers have about trying to please everyone.

(What do you mean I need to stop using Wikipedia as a research source? The Internet is the goddamn modern day Akashic record. Bite me.)

Anyway, I'm going somewhere with this. It's a common conceit in the strata of nerddom for one tier of nerds to look down on the activities of the nerds who are "beneath them." What baffles me, as a designer, is the tendency of people in the same tier to turn on each other like rabid animals when they feel their comfort zone is being violated by a tainted subset of people who share the same interest.

This is most evident in the online gaming world (where the community is a constant churning mess of inflexible opinions and anonymous spite), but absolutely applies to other gaming interests. While I'm not the person who would go looking for it, I'm sure there's a forum dedicated to checkers that is bloated with the festering rot of intolerance for other checkers players. I fear to Google it, for what I might find.

Players forget that they enter into a social contract with each other the moment they become part of a community gaming environment. As the Big Model explains:

The Social Contract is the context within which all of roleplaying occurs. This is an obvious but important point, since it recognizes that all actions at the roleplaying table are social actions and part of how the players at the table relate to each other as real people. The relationships between the people around the table affect everything else that occurs.

It is all too easy to demonize the poor schlubs who share the environment with you in order to maintain your own sense of superiority in the dregs of our shunned community of geeks and gamers. Maybe it's a defense mechanism, I don't know. I can't say I've ever understood it fully, but I'm a live-and-let-live kinda guy.

It's rare that I see a multiplayer game that actually tries, really tries to appeal to the three archetypes explained in the GNS theory. It's universally skewed towards satisfying the gamists and the simulationists, with very little thought given to the narrativists and their relatives. Naturally, you're not going to have much of a need for the story-crafting while you're playing Halo or Left 4 Dead, so there are situations where it's just not necessary to devote the development time. Thus, players who are interested in that sort of thing, the players who would be developers yet lack the focus or drive to do it professionally, are left in the dust and derided by their peers.

I think that player "developers" are a vastly underestimated portion of the online gamer market. Yeah, gamers like to laugh at "stupid roleplayers" and people who aren't good at the game or its simulation aspects, but what many gamers fail to understand is that the people who professionally develop these games are those stupid roleplayers. The process of development, however, allows them to exercise their own desire to narrate (in a literal or metaphorical sense) the game. Psychologically, they feel fulfilled without supplying the ability for the players to do more than dip their toes into the same pool.

Nowhere am I saying that there needs to be a roleplaying server all the time or people need to be policed. That's an argument that players use all the time, leading to self-alienation and segregation of the community in ways that is far more destructive than beneficial. They get defensive this way because they feel the need to act out destructively, since the game does not allow them to act out constructively.

These players can end up doing tons of your work for you if you give them the means, without needing to splinter your community into fragments. Imagine, if you will, a system that allows players to create objects, artwork, literature, music, whatever for your world. Popular creations can be voted up within the community via in-game means, be it repeated purchase of the item (and duplicates) from its maker, or demonstration of a piece with approval. Poorly-rated or disruptive crap gets shuffled to the bottom where it's not seen. Your game setting just gained tons of flavor by virtue of its own player base.

Many games have done this (or something approaching it) and are on the right track. Lord of the Rings Online really impressed me with its variety of musical instruments and functionality for the operation of virtual bands. Does it give you wicked end-game loot or privileges? Nope, not at all. But it creates immersion and makes your game feel more real. All you have to do is create the tools and let the players go wild.

Now the so-called scrubs, the noobs, the baddies and the terribles become your greatest asset as a developer. They fill out the world in ways you'll never expect, so long as you're willing to accept that it's the players who ultimately shape your creation after you've made it public.

With proper supervision, of course. This is your private beach, they're just making the sand castles. You have to make sure they don't shape them all like phalli.

The Player and Online Communities

2011-01-15T00:54:00.001-05:00

I have previously mentioned that when players with similar interests collide, they tend to form groups. This phenomenon of social accretion, like the forming of planets, results in the creation of gaming clans or similar structures. With any luck, these branch out into other media and share other interests which are not always so cleanly associated with the parent interest.

Take, for example, the community to which I have belonged for six years. While its genesis was not of my doing, I had the privilege of being the director of this gaming clan for over four years. It began as ten roleplayers on an early WoW server and bloomed into a large community of like-minded gamers and family-persons from vastly different age groups and walks of life. Parents, kids, jocks, nerds, doctors, drifters, and more have all been part of this comparatively small community in the sea of millions of players.

Gaming clans work. They serve as a splinter of a larger community that is small enough to filter out all of the cacophony of the wider game(s) to which they subscribe. Warcraft, in particular, is known for its abrasive, intolerant, and abusive player base that, much like the pirahna, will nip at each other as readily as they would descend upon the poor community managers that are dispatched as messengers. A particularly bad thread could bring a nun to tears, and WoW's community is not even the worst of the lot.

Guilds and clans tend to utilize their own sites, funneling their members to it rather than committing them to the open sea, where there be dragons and forum trolls. These places start out as a means for the constituent players to converse about the game and make contact with other members despite not being logged into the game itself, but they quickly become something more.

A group of any significant longevity quickly develops a camaraderie. People will meet up in person. They play other games together, communicate on various social networking media, talk about music and food and movies and all aspects of life. Properly moderated and supported, they draw in individuals of myriad occupations who share their insights and views for general consumption. Arguments may bloom, and from them understandings are formed (or friendships devastated).

It is usually thought that the members of gaming clans take their devotion to video games too seriously. I feel it is quite the opposite; a devoted member of a clan will be more apt to try out new experiences and gain access to new schools of thought and fields of interest than would be apparent to the casual observer, particularly one who went to school for business and never considered the mindset of the gaming industry for which they are trying so hard to work.

That sounds unnecessarily cruel to business majors, but I don't mean it to be. Consider it biased based on my exposure to ignorance.

Game designers should do everything in their power to encourage the growth of gaming clans, or guilds, or whatever term they wish to apply to them. You want your players to share interests other than your game, because ultimately they will remember the place of its birth or the game in which they found the most connections and come back to it. I can safely say that I would not play any game in the current day unless someone I know from my gaming community either recommended it or offered to play it with me.

Many, many game companies have earned my money solely based on the guild formed in Warcraft back on December 2nd, 2004. Design methodology and direction has changed vastly in the last 6 years, providing many metaphorical cookies to groups of players in an effort to encourage lasting communication and bonding between them. The game that can continue to do this at the apex of its ability will emerge the victor in the MMO Wars.

Rocks fall, Jenado dies.

2011-01-14T18:46:00.000-05:00

One of my most memorable experiences as a player in a tabletop roleplaying game was when I went against natural inclination, against all reason, and dove into a situation that should have been a vicious, gruesome game over.

Don't worry, this will actually go into a game design thought after my anecdote. All you White Wolf employees, former or present, may now rub your foreheads with the back of your hand.

So in brief, the individual whose personality I was attempting to represent is the soldier's soldier. Duty and honor went above all else, even reason, though the character was hardly an idiot. He was ultimately responsible for the safety and triumph of his comrades, including the one who would frequently put him in harms way for his own benefit.

It was easy to find reason not to acquiesce to his requests, no matter how founded in logic they might have been from the character's perspective. The scenario in which this anecdote culminates was when this character whom I was playing, Jenado Sargonia, dove into the ruins of a crumbling fortress which we had just escaped to recover a priceless object that had the potential to carry more than monetary value for our ongoing investigation.

He was asked to do this by the same greedy, manipulative son of a bitch that had gotten him into trouble so many times before with his wheedling. It went completely against every instinct that I, as a real human being, had within me, and yet it was a virtual experience that I find hard to forget.

Playing against type is one of the fundamentals of the roleplaying experience, but I was amazed at how much satisfaction I drew from doing something so idiotic, so potentially detrimental to the continued survival of my character. I mean, that may sound weird to those of you reading who neither game nor roleplay in gaming environments, but think of it this way - no one likes to take an unnecessary risk in a game of poker when you already have a straight flush.

I was apparently wearing my Bruce Willis trousers that day, and decided to play Die Hard. Best decision I ever made. Jenado even lived through the experience with a combination of juiced-up numbers, extreme luck, and a bit of soda-fueled dice voodoo. We had something to talk about for a few weeks.

That brings me to the final point I wished to illustrate, the difference between the gambler and the victor in the gaming world. The victor takes his win and holds it high. The gambler puts his win back in the pot and banks on turning a sure win into something you can really be proud of. Sometimes you win big, and sometimes you lose it all.

Knowing that risk, and taking the chance anyway, is a huge rush in the player experience. Don't underestimate it in the design process, whatever the medium. Give the player the Cash Cab choice, appeal to the inner gambler in all of us. Not everyone has to take the shot, but those who do and succeed are entitled to a virtual prestige and thrill that is unequaled.

I'm a follower.

2011-01-14T17:34:00.000-05:00

Friends of mine keep gaming blogs. Normally, I'm the last person to follow a trend, but being an out-of-work game developer has created a backup in the plumbing of my imagination, a chunky clump of unidentifiable detritus and oozing thought that... okay, it's a gross analogy and even I am getting nauseated by it. Suffice it to say, until I am able to get my foot in the door of a new professional creative outlet again, this will have to be my means of expunging the gloop of idea from the cesspit of my brain.

My professional experience is minimal by the standards of most of my former colleagues, and yet I continue to remain fascinated by game design, without being deterred by their somewhat more extensive backgrounds. I don't usually enter a situation with an expectation of being the best at it, so ultimately I am comfortable with others being clearly my superiors at particular aspects of the design process. For four years, I worked with a pleasant individual whose insight on some of our team's activities would frequently humble me and have me check myself before I made a poor decision that would affect the rest of the legion.

And there's this guy who, while I've never worked with him directly on a project, makes me feel very small without meaning to do so. If Harbinger is the maester, then Samhaine is the ninja that finds the chink in a system's armor and breaks it apart while I sit there scratching my head.

I've learned from my time at that company (as well as the subsequent train wreck of a job after I left it), and like to think I've become a better designer through my experiences there. My strengths, my weaknesses, and those places which I have grown or have yet to grow were all illuminated. While I display competency at most aspects of game design, the part which entices and inspires me the most is the experience of the players involved in the game. There's a good reason for this.

I love playing games. This goes beyond just online video games, and includes board games, word games, puzzles, or whatever. I find an infinitely greater amount of mental stimulation and satisfaction from finishing a quest or unlocking a puzzle box (that was an on-and-off hour of my work day that I thoroughly enjoyed spending, by the way) than reading the latest piece of dry and senseless literature that the eggheads tell me I need to be aware of lest I be seen as a dirt-eating savage from the dark corners of the Florida swamps.

My love of playing games therefore translates into my interest in their design. I've seen professional game designers craft elaborate systems and write stirring plots, but in practice these things were terribly aggravating to just... play. Perspective often deludes our perception of the fun-factor of games, and it's easy for someone in the design seat to make something that is, frankly, not fun. We, as designers, look at the thing we've crafted and go "isn't this great?" all too often, without looking at it from the actual player's perspective.

But nothing destroys the experience of a game more than the corporate heads who dominate its development.

It's easy for some lobster-eating suit to tell their minions to make another World of Warcraft clone because they think it makes them money using a die-hard formula, and thus people try too hard to copy the product without realizing that the market only has room for one of those games at a time. You don't dethrone the king with a frontal assault against his unstoppable 12-million-strong army. I had to do a double take when I saw a television advertisement proclaiming, in no uncertain terms, that Warcraft was the enemy it was attempting to bring down.

Even the developers must have cringed when marketing decided to put that out.

But I digress into an unrelated rant, as I am prone to do.

Players don't care about any of that. They just want to have a good time, and that good time manifests in many different ways depending on individual taste. When interests are shared, groups are formed. When interests collide, nerdrage occurs.

I like to examine those interests, find out why certain things appeal to players, and integrate that into my own work. This work is either done for my own personal edification, or for whatever poor sods decide to hire me on.

So that's what this "blog" is about. God, I hate that word.