 |
Main
Tanking classes (if they're build to be good tanks in NON-pvp) suck in PvP situations. They don't do enough damage to take guys down, and all their cool tanking abilities don't do squat.
In PvE: You can taunt a bad guy, forcing it to attack you, so that other people in your group can do their job while you soak all the big nasty hits.
In PvP: Your taunts have zero effect, and any opponent with half a brain will attack the wimpy little mage that does BIG damage first, then come back and whittle through your health at their leisure.
((Note: you can reconfigure a tanking class to do very good damage... at which point their ability to tank starts to suffer.))
Warhammer has come up with an elegant solution that's vaguely like DnD 4th edition: in PvP, if you taunt an opponent, they can still attack whoever they want, but *if* they attack someone else, they do less damage and their chance of missing is higher. This gives your opponent a choice: take out the tank to get rid of the penalty, or try to take out the squishy mage anyway... even with the penalty, knowing you'll miss more and won't hit as hard?
Either way, you as the tank are still doing your job -- protecting the group.
I think it's a genius way of handling it, and I really hope that this kind of idea finds its way into games like LotRO, WoW, and CoH.
I played CoH for a couple years. I think it's fair to say I played the game a stunningly unhealthy amount quite a bit, but I did hit a point with every character when I became less interested in logging them in and more interested in playing some other character. It is perhaps not a coincidence that that point of disinterest came not-so-long after the character hit the level cap.
That's not a fault of the characters -- they were (and no doubt are, if I ever renewed the subscription) still a lot of fun to play, but there was nothing new or interesting to do -- no real sense of "okay, you are now among Earth's Mightiest Heroes (tm), now you're ready for the important stuff." It was much more like "well, you've beat everything the villains of this world can throw at you. Time to retire."
Which is basically what I did. Honestly? The only characters from CoH that I wish I could go back and play some more are Pummelcite and Mister Brightside... because I didn't "finish" them. More than any other MMO I've played, CoH has an end-state more than it has an end-game.
((And please don't get me wrong - I think it's a great game, but it is possible to be 'done' with it, or at least with a character. As evidence, I present the Consortium; they still play the game regularly, but their exploits are (near as I can tell) entirely involved in leveling up new guys; there's simply no reason for them to log in Amorpha or Psi-clone or even their more recent 50s.))
Anyway. Moving on.
When I started playing World of Warcraft, I was in a different mental place than I had been when I started CoH, and I was a lot more careful of how much time I spent playing (though perhaps no more careful about how much time I spent thinking about it); although leveling is much easier in WoW than CoH, it was about 9 months before I hit the level cap with my first character (Grezzk). My total /played time on him was a whopping 23 days worth of online time, when the average amount of time to hit the level cap now is closer to half that time.
The difference between WoW and CoH is that, since then, I've more than doubled my /played time on Grezzk. That is to say that I've spent more time playing Grez AT 70 than I spent getting Grezzk TO 70. And it's fair to say that I'm nowhere near 'done' with everything I could do with him in the end-game of WoW as it exists today (though perhaps I'm done with everything I can do on the server I'm on). I'm getting close, but I'm not done. (And an expansion is coming out in a few months to give me even more to do.)
I had thought that maybe WoW had the corner on this end-game thing. I enjoyed playing Lord of the Rings Online with Kate, but I was struggling with the leveling grind in the mid-40s.
Then we hit 50.
I've been on LotRO for a least a couple minutes (almost) every day since then, I think. There are 7 "epic" storylines to get through, and a bunch of dungeons to explore...
And then there's the Rift (a 12-player dungeon -- a mine in Angmar where they accidentally (or not) unearthed a Balrog that was supposed to stay chained up til the end of days). And this "Rift" thing? If I wanted to do that, there was some gear I needed*, and some old quests to finish up...
In short, there was an End-game. We could finally play with the Big Kids. We were, indeed, among (middle-)earth's mightiest heroes, and ready for the Greatest Challenges, and we've really been enjoying how the game has changed; an already rich and rewarding world opened up and said "You thought raiding Fornost was cool? You thought fighting one of the Nine in the Misty Mountains was epic? Take. A. Look. At. This."
And look, we have. By my calculations, it took us about 12 days worth of /played time (spread out over more than a year) to get to level 50. That was two weeks ago, and in only that time, we've already spent about a sixth as much time just playing the end-game... advancing the Epic Storyline... figuring out how we're going to Beat that Balrog. **
Frankly (and in stark contrast to CoH), I don't have TIME to level an alt.
And in a few months, an expansion comes out to coincide with the Fellowship traveling out of Rivendell and heading (unknowingly) into the Mines of Moria.
I can't wait.
(* - actually, it turns out my gear was just fine.)
(** - Funny story about the Rift. Our Kinship has been working on defeating the Rift for awhile now -- they schedule a run every couple weekends. Kate and I signed up the first weekend after we turned 50, since it looked like they were short on players and, since they were short on players, we were brought along... expectations for our performance were not, I think, very high. Since then, we've gone back a second time. We've gotten farther as a Kinship than we ever have, and faster than we ever have. Our vets attribute a lot of this to us (me and Kate). Kate and I informed the Kin that we couldn't be online this weekend or the next... and they called off the Rift runs until we get back. It's gratifying to feel wanted.)
I feel weird using 'd20' to refer to a game of Dungeons and Dragons 4.0, as the game is fundamentally different than the versatile-but-expensive set of lego bricks that made up the 3.5, 3.0, and d20 systems of old.
But anyway.
We played a little more of the Keep on the Shadowfells on Saturday, and by 'a little bit' I mean 'just that one fight that notoriously kills entire parties, followed by some handwaving in the direction of roleplay'.
Man that's a vicious fight. I'm only playing with one house rule to the 4.0 system, and it is this: "You can trade in Healing Surges for Action Points on a 1:1 basis, and use the resulting action points as indicated within the rules."
If there a limit to one Action Point per encounter? If so, we ignored that one too. If not, and it's just 'on AP per round', we were fine.
Anyway, I think it's fair to say that without that little house rule most everyone would have died. (And don't anyone blame the halfling wandering off, because the fight is tuned to five players, and you had five even not counting the halfling.) As it was, Irontooth dropped the Paladin and Warlord about a round before he himself fell, but some first aid rolls got them standing again.
A few thoughts on the system, scenario, and our general gameplay:
Continue reading "d20 update (and a bit of a rant at the end)" »
 There's Tiranor and Geiri, deep in the frozen lands of Forochel, about 30 seconds before we both hit level 50 (the current level-cap in Lord of the Rings online).
I don't know if there's a way to see the total amount of time /played on a character from within Lord of the Rings, but I don't think it was a whole heck of a lot; it's been a long time since we started playing them, but our play time has been VERY off-and-on since we started, and almost every serious bout of playing resulted in a flurry of leveling and advancing. To illustrate the ease of progression, Kate is now playing a solo minstrel and TEARING through content that took us several months to get through, since we simply weren't playing as often.
So what's next? Well, once you hit 50, there are a number (and that number is about six) of Legendary quests for each character class, so we each have our work cut out for us to go from a 'baby' 50 to a 'real' 50.
Also, there are fourteen 'books' of epic story in LotRO, and we're currently on... Book Seven? Books 8 through 14 are all geared for level 50s, so we have a LOT to do and experience there before the Mines of Moria expansion comes out later this year.
... and I need to improve my crafting of Rings of Power! useful trinkets and magical jewelry. Diamonds and Beryls and Ancient Silver, oh my...
And I have some fishing to do... what?
And... yeah, I've got two (if not three) other characters I'd like to level up. Tyelaf my hunter (and the first actual character I made), my Captain, Finnras... and man I tell you what... Kate's Minstrel sure looks cool...
She needs some help leveling, though... that girl has to "retreat" a LOT.
I have this annoying little thing I do whenever anyone is telling me about some kind of personality conflict going on in the world.
Doesn't matter if it's Margie talking about stuff at work, Kate relaying the woes of multiple-sisterhood, Dave on the latest Episcopalian Brouhaha (a pairing of words so common I feel like it should get a trademark stamp), or Stan relaying the latest in politics --
I nod my head sagely and say: "Yeah... guild drama is the worst."
Because, let's face it; humanity thrives on interaction, and we're all flawed in various ways, and the internet exacerbates those flaws -- so as often as you're likely to come into conflict when face to face, the chances quintuple as soon as the internet is added to the mix.
And what are MMO guilds? Big social constructs whose main product is an increase in Interneteraction.
Result? You will see interpersonal drama fifty times more online than in all other social gatherings, combined, and with that kind of weighting and repetition, it isn't long before every OTHER kind of drama starts to look like something you've already seen online.
I spend a fair amount of time online. I've witnessed (and caused) my share of drama, going back as far as... 1991, when a friend and I nearly came to blows over some argument in a text based Star Wars mmo... and as recently as... well, last night.
I don't like drama. I especially don't like the effect it sometimes has on me, which is frustration that puts the Enter key on my keyboard at serious risk of mechanical failure.
So here's the deal - I'm in a guild now that I don't feel a lot of connection to. Decent enough people, but I just don't feel like I know any of them. I already talked about this:
I’m acquainted with these guys, like people at my job, and they’re cool, but they aren’t my friends; not the way that Dismember or Yodi or Izmut were — or Mal or Sam or 76 were — or even Crystal and Staer.
Added to that was this thing where the guild had posted a need for some healing druids. I leveled a druid up, practiced healing, got geared up at no small expense (in-game) solely to myself, and told them "Okay... I'm ready! Put me in Coach", and got back the empty sound of Nothing in return.
Right. No personal connection in what is an ostensibly SOCIAL passtime, and a lot of effort going to waste? Time to look for better options.
 I'm on a smaller server, though, so I knew I'd have to look to other servers to find another option. In my poking around, I found a guild that not only seemed like a lot of fun, but which actually had a couple of my old friends in it -- including the one guy I've really gotten along with this whole time.
And I posted to their forums, and the responses from the other guys in his guild were... well, it just clicked. I started making arrangements.
Last night, we have a raid going on, and beforehand I go to the head guy and tell him "damn, you just don't seem interested in using this guy I've worked on. What's up?"
There followed a conversation about the guild's concern about me bringing my 'alt' and getting gear that someone's 'main' might need. I assured him that I had no intention of asking for any gear beyond what would otherwise go completely unused -- I just wanted to help the group out. Whatever.
((And honestly? I'm really not that worried about it at this point, because I'm thinking "I'm probably going to at LEAST transfer Syn to another server, if not both characters." I just wanted to voice my thoughts.))
He said we'd talk later, and we got the group going, and not long after that, I get a /tell that says "Get Syn on, you're healing this.")
To quote Matt: "WTF, over?"
So I healed my first big raid (Serpent Shrine Cavern, facing the Lurker Below and Leotheras the Blind). It was fun. I learned alot (and the healing-boss-person said I was "Doing GREAT", so that's cool).
And on the last boss, two identical items dropped that I could use.
And someone in the group says "I'll take one, in case I respec to healing." (He is currently specced for damage.)
And there's silence. One main said something, but there are two of these things.
So I say "Well, I'm in for one of em, if no one else needs em, for this guy." Who is, as has been stated, an Alt character, and thus pretty much the crappy muck surrounding the bottom of the totem pole.
And just as I'm typing that out and hitting Enter, someone else says "I'll take one too, in case I respec to healing."
Ahh. Oh well. C'est la WoW. Right?
And someone quickly says in Ventrillo "You can't get those if a Main needs em, Grez!"
Hmm. Bit over-emotional in the tone, there, but okay. Easy to diffuse.
"Yeah," I say, "it's totally f--"
"Why not?" someone asks.
"Guys," I say, "I just came to play, it's totally -"
"It in the loot rules."
"Well, that's kinda dumb, he healed it, didn't he? Those are healer items."
"It's in the --"
"GUYS," I say, "Seriously. I didn't see the second person before I typed it. My bad. Don't worry abo--"
Guild Boss Guy: "We're going to give the second drop to Grezzk."
Oh. Shit.
Right. The best kind of game drama. Loot drama. (And don't shake your heads at this online foolishness, tabletop players -- the same damn thing happens in tabletops all the damn time, even in games without gear.)
So now I'm in a pickle, kids.
1. I was all 'even steven' with the guild until last night -- my time invested in raids perfectly 'paid' for the loot I'd gotten (you can go in the hole for items that drop and sort of pay it back later, though it would take some guys like... five months to do so). Now, I am not.
2. No one was 'using' Syn in raids. Now they are.
3. I got the gear, and I quote, "Because Syn getting it will be the best benefit to the guild in the long term."
... so... how the hell do I transfer to another server NOW?
Unfortunately, while the raid was nice and all, I'm still stuck with this:
4. I don't know anyone in the guild, really, or feel like there's any sort of connection.
And that #4 is a problem. It's a social game, chilluns; that's why I *play*.
(A Side Note: is the concept of an "alt" vs. a "main" really... viable? I have two similarly-geared characters with completely different abilities, and I'm willing to bring either of them in, as needed. Am I, the player, not the character, the real asset to the group? Yes, obviously that is the case, if for NO OTHER REASON than the fact that the character's can't play themselves. Why not assign loot to the PLAYER who has the most 'points' to 'buy' the drop, and leave it at that?)
* No, no tabletop gaming thoughts at the moment. I'd have to be doing some of that to have any. (Or, if not, I'd be having a lot of Lonely Fun thinking about games I'd like to run but can't. Thanks, but no: been there, done that.) Downsides there may be, but an MMO is (almost) always available for a game at the same time you are.
* There are... nine end-game 'dungeons' in WoW, two of which have been added since the expansion came out. My guild is working on the 7th. We'd like to hit the 8th before the new expansion comes out. Not likely.
* On the last two boss fights, I hit Sunwell (final dungeon)-level single-target DPS with Grezzk. Support for me swapping my 'main' from Grezzk to my barely-geared healing druid is... fading.
* You don't get to know people in 25 man raids. To really get to know them, you need to run (and re-run) five-person and 10-person runs with folks -- where you are the only person doing your job, and they are the only person doing THEIR job... it's more personal. I've never gotten a chance to really run the smaller dungeons with my guild, having joined after my last guild melted, and it changes the dynamics of the game - I'm acquainted with these guys, like people at my job, and they're cool, but they aren't my friends; not the way that Dismember or Yodi or Izmut were -- or Mal or Sam or 76 were -- or even Crystal and Staer.
* I'm looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King (Rash of the Itch King) coming out, because we'll all be leveling together and back to running 5 and 10-person dungeons again. I might get a chance to actually get to know the guys in my guild.
* Hopefully, I'll still like em when I do.
Today finds me pondering (once again) the way that my blogging "life" is currently divided and partitioned off.
Once upon a time, the split was pretty clear: gaming-related stuff went here, and anything that I wanted to write about that wasn't that went onto Average-Bear. This was done for a number of reasons, but none of them were really for compartmentalization as much as organization. The problem is basically that the organization of my gaming posts would suffer dramatically if they all had to be lumped under a single heading of "Gaming" on a blog that was supposed to handle everything -- the bloat from that one category would be hard to manage and the heading itself would be largely meaningless in terms of actually organizing anything -- I've over a dozen post categories on this gaming blog, and porting all that into another blog would, at best, make that combined blog a kind of "gaming, with a few tangents" blog that I'm not interested in doing.
But the problem is that, with my new 'main' blog, there are things that I *don't* want to blog about there, which aren't gaming-related either, and thus have nowhere to go.
Which brings me back to just having one big journal for everything, and the problems be damned...
Which brings me back to actually contemplating the problems and deciding that I can't just ignore them.
And nothing changes.
Not entirely sure what to do with that. Not sure there's much I actually can do about it.
But I think it's telling that I'm writing about all this on my gaming blog... a blog that actually nets quite a bit more traffic now than my 'neutered' main blog. What it tells me is that I'm doing something wrong.
I'm just not sure what.
 I'm seriously thinking about this camera (thirty bucks, so... less than a tank of gas), plus Skype (free), for in-home video conferencing.
It'll be more and more useful as Kaylee gets older and I need some remote face-time, but for gaming? Yeah, I'm seriously thinking about this. Maybe just as a test run if enough people are interested enough to shell out for the camera.
Why? Mostly so I can play with more people without everyone bankrupting themselves for the gas money. :P
So, there's this thing going on with my Gaming People where PTA isn't working for us. We've put Dave's current PTA game on hold for now, to try out In A Wicked Age in a completely different setting (both from the PTA game and from the IAWA default), with a view toward possibly using that for running the PTA game.
The problem is with conflicts. They just take fucking ages to work through. Fucking. Ages. It takes people out of the moment, it's frustrating, and the end result is usually NOT a satisfying 'thing', cuz we've already discussed the scene to death, so when the resolution finally comes, we already know what happened.
I said in a post a few months ago that PTA seemed to work well for us when we used the "car chase" rules, which let us break up the action more, and while that's true, that's not the problem.
The problem is that we're having the wrong conversation beforehand.
The one bright and shining scene I remember from one of our PTA games was when this girl that Randy's guy was sleeping with says "I love you..." as he was getting dressed and leaving the apartment, and put him on the spot. BANG. His Issue was something like "personal commitment" or something, so the conflict was clearly about him trying to get out of the room without pissing her off while remaining emotionally 'safe' from her. In that scene, PTA really sang. We were so jazzed at the end of that game session that we jabbered about it all for an hour.
And never managed to get back to that point again. Why? Well, because I thought, based on that scene, that the trick was for the GM to pose conflicts in a kind of series of "bang" events... and that's not why it worked.
It worked because it was about his Issue. The character's Issue -- and we constantly and consistently FORGET this -- is the whole POINT of the character AND the game... it's a game about TV Dramas, after all -- of COURSE it's about the Issue.
I re-realized this, reading something Matt wrote almost two years ago (emphases mine):
PTA probably adds some to the confusion, because the real Conflict has to do with the protagonist's Issue, and you have to do a little digging around to figure out how it factors into the playing of cards and stuff.
You're sneaking past guards. Your Issue is maybe "Insecurity", let's say. What's at stake, in terms of the conflict, is your Issue, not the guards; how does what happens in your sneakery affect your Issue? You get past them... they spot you... does not matter*. Either outcome could be either a win or a lose as far as your Issue is concerned.
No, you don't say, "if I win, I'm no longer insecure." You do say, "if I win, my character addresses his/her insecurity in a positive way."
Notice how the conflict of interest is clearly established, but nobody knows what will happen until the narration starts flying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what we've screwed up pretty much 70 to 80% of the time in PTA. Dammit.
Makes me want to run it again, just to get it right.
[* - and the events that actual happen should be informed at least somewhat by plot-stuff that 'needs to happen' in that scene]
A thought from Story-Games on how to achieve a certain amount of "success" with running an indie rpg with your friends, and that is this:
There is a minimum amount of creative enthusiasm that needs to brought to the table, socially, by all the players, to make the game work, and that creative enthusiasm needs to be directed toward the thing that the game you're playing does. It's what the Original Poster calls the Social Mandate.
In In a Wicked Age, the Social Mandate is the conflict between characters (and, to a lesser degree, the anthology of short stories that results from play). People need to be interested in and excited about the conflict of everyone's Best Interests and WANT to put that into play. Without that social fuel, the engine dies.
In My Life with Master the power dynamic between The Minion and The Master has to be interesting to the players on an authorial level *first*.
The Individual Wants vs. Community Needs problem in Dogs in the Vineyard has to be compelling to the players *first*.
The play of Trust against the backdrop of Dark Fates in a small group has to be interesting to the players or a Mountain Witch game chokes and dies.
To take it out of the indie realm (which is why I crossed the word out...
The challenge of smart tactical battle play and resource management has to be appealing to players for DnD (or Warhammer) to really sing. Yes, you can roleplay in the game, and have fun doing so, but if you're not into the kind of combat style that the game supports, you're roleplay will be spread between loooong stretches of your own boredom.
I noticed early on that LotRO's main conceit about their "Health Bar" really really works in DnD 4th with regards to healing.
Lord of the Rings refers to your 'health bar' as Morale -- so it's mostly representative of your will to continue the fight -- the rest of the game works in similar ways -- where death ='s 'retreat' and so forth. This makes 'healers' in Lord of the Rings (which is really quite a low-magic setting) make sense -- they are the minstrels with their uplifting songs (VERY Tolkein), the Captains with the rallying crys and bold words, and even the Lore Masters with their quietly whispered words (or sometimes taking your worries on their own shoulders to ease your burden).
That idea really works in 4th edition DnD, especially when you look at the Healing Surges everyone has (accessible in combat as Second Wind) and the names of the healing-type abilities for the Warlord (Captain), which indicate that they're really just boosting your will to continue the fight.
Mike Mearls was saying in an interview that it changes nothing in the game if a player wants to take all his mage spells and switch them to 'cold' damage instead of, say, fire; it's the kind of customization hacking he expects from players in the game as they make their character their own.
Then I thought: it would be a pretty simple thing indeed to hack the Cleric into a sort of lore-master and/or minstrel (or both, depending on which path you took at creation) simply by changing the names of the powers and changing their "implement" from a holy symbol to either a wizards staff or a musical instrument. Do that, drop Mages and Warlocks from the game (or leave them for the bad guys), and you're pretty much ready to play in Middle Earth in LotRO style.
So, to sum up...
- Drop Dragonborn and Tieflings. Duh.
- Elladrin are the elves of Lothlorien and Rivendell.
- Sylvan elves are the elves of Mirkwood.
- Fighters: unchanged. Depending on build, they are either Champions or Guardians.
- Rogues: rogues are more melee damage dealers than the LotRO Burglars, and their benefit to the group is slightly different, but it's still similar enough. Halfling rogues should favor trickster builds, probably, with the other type being more common with sylvan elves and the like.
- Rangers: virtually no changes.
- Warlord: call em Captains and you're done, though I think a lot of them would be multiclassed.
- Cleric: the 'sit-in-the-back' build (whatever the name) you tweak in Power names and Implements to be Minstrels, and the 'up-in-your-face' build you likewise tweak to be Loremasters.
- Warlocks: probably only bad guys -- infernal types serve Sauron entirely, I'd guess. Fey types work alright with the High elves, and Star-pact warlocks would make an interesting type of Loremaster, maybe.
- Mages: too overt to be anything but bad guys, really.
This would simulate LotRO pretty well, would work for a game setting like Midnight quite well, but still be too much magic for true Tolkein.
If you really wanted to be totally hardcore Tolkein, not LotRO, you remove Clerics and Mages. Healing would fall entirely to the use of Healing Surges and any Captains you had with you. Warlocks stay in the setting in very particular instances. Infernal Warlocks are bad guys, Fey Warlocks are the Elf Lords, and Star Pact Warlocks are Gandalf and Sauruman. (Keep the Ritual List, from which you'd likewise remove things like passwall and the Portal magic, but keep the 'rezzes' for when Frodo gets insta-gibbed a ringwraith on Weathertop. Only the various Warlocks would get such Rituals automatically -- anyone else would need a Feat to learn a few -- Aragorn did so.)
A staff writer on Massively.com writes a bit about how he really got into Age of Conan, and then stopped playing in favor of Guild Wars.
Now I know that AoC puts much higher graphic demands on your system and that Guild Wars has had years to eliminate the performance bugs that still plague the early days of AoC, but none of that mattered. Playing Guild Wars made something instantly apparent to me. Age of Conan is an enjoyable game with a great deal of potential but after a month of intensive play I'd gotten to the point where it just wasn't worth the consistent and mundane technical hassles involved in playing it. I wasn't angry, I wasn't frustrated, but at that moment in time I'd found something better to do and so I just stopped playing.
This is the problem I'm currently having with Lord of the Rings Online. My poor old desktop is five years old and, while it's pretty much tweaked out as far as the hardware will withstand, it can't get any better, and when I start up Lord of the Rings, the machine's old bones really start to show. Graphics issues. Lock-ups, some of them system-wide. Horrible horrible lag.
In order to combat this problem (which, rather than getting better over time and bug-fixing on LotRO's part, has gotten progressively worse as they add newer content and cooler graphics -- the problems aren't bugs, they're just the way things are), I've had to dial my game settings down to the lowest possible. The gorgeous LotRO panoramic views? I don't see much of them when I have my graphics set to "Low", to avoid lag -- I dial up to "high" to take screenshots, then back to "low" to actually, you know... move. I have a dual monitor system, but one of them is now simply taking up space on my desk, unplugged, because running both at the same time, with LotRO, causes heat problems on my video card, thanks to the strain that the game puts on my card. Don't even get me started about the hiccuping sound during any of the justly-vaunted cinematics within the game.
I love the game, I really do -- I think they're doing a fantastic job on it, and I acknowledge that the problems I'm having are largely due to trying to run the thing on an old, loyal golden retriever of a PC that really needs to be put out of his misery. Hell, Kate's laptop is only a few years old and IT struggles with all the rendering it has to do in a busy town.
But, you see... there's this thing. WoW doesn't cause me any of those problems. I might have a night of lag, due to a server issue, and when that happens I'm glad to be able to do something else, but that's a known server issue, easily fixed, not an inability of my Hardware to run the Software. When it comes down to it, I spent many evenings choosing to play WoW over LotRO this last month (even when LotRO can include Kate) because I knew that when I logged into WoW, the game would RUN.
I appreciate that games traditionally push the envelope of what PCs can accomplish -- more than any other kind of software, GAMES push hardware developers to climb to the next plateau, and that's great.
But if you want to really be a huge success? You need to remember that you can't be so cutting edge that the playerbase spends more time trying to balance on that cutting-knife-edge than they do ACTUALLY PLAYING YOUR GAME.
I mean, it's not just LotRO. I bought Tabula Rasa because the idea of a good Sci-fi MMO excited me -- and couldn't get the game to play, at all. I made it halfway through the tutorial before I gave up.
I have a copy of Age of Conan gathering dust in my office closet because if I deleted everything but the operating system off my PC, I still wouldn't have the harddrive space to INSTALL IT -- forget about whether or not my other system specs would be up to speed.
It doesn't matter if your game is awesome if people can't run it. WoW graphics are comic-book in style (On purpose - comic-book-style imagery has successfully sold for five decades - uncanny valley CGI? Not so much.) and requires what is now low-end hardware to run quite well. That's at least part of the reason they have retained 10 million active subscribers. Ten. Million. No one seems to know what it is they they're doing to enjoy the kind of grade-curve-breaking success, but I'll tell you what they aren't doing -- they aren't pushing the hardware envelope -- that is not, in any way, where they garner their win.
I had a great, really fun time playing Lord of the Rings last night. Kate and I led a group of heroes (total strangers) into the ruins of Fornost, the last, ruined, capitol of the Kingdom of the North, now thick with wights and orcs and wargs and their horrible leaders, bound to life by the morgul blades they wielded. We fought our first Nemesis-level foe, and defeated him only when Kate figured out that we had to light the old Kingdom's signal fires mounted on the rooftop where we faced him, in order to weaken him enough to win.
It was epic.
But you know what I enjoyed the most? It was the second night in a month where my PC hadn't locked up while playing the game.
"Not locking up" shouldn't be the thing I liked the best out of the whole night; that should be assumed.
My one regret of the evening shouldn't have been "the screenshot I took from the top of the tallest towers of Fornost was pretty boring, because I forgot to dial my graphics back up from the setting where I can play to the setting where it looks good."
Skill Challenges are a new wrinkle in DnD skill use that aim to make said skills use... well, more interesting. The basic idea is that each Skill Challenge has a Complexity rating from one to five.
A Complexity One skill challenge for a group of level 1 adventurers, for example, requires that the group as a whole succeeds at 3 skill checks before it fails at 3. A complexity Five skill challenge is something like "succeed at 11 before you fail at 7".* The idea is that everyone around the table who is involved is taking turns at working on this challenge, either by making their own skill rolls or helping someone else hit theirs, and that each of these 'moves' is roleplayed/narrated as you go, making the whole thing more interactive.
In an ideal world, there are a few 'obvious' skills that work for each encounter, and the unspoken challenge to the players to come up with novel ways to apply the skills they're good at that aren't on that pre-approved list. It's all very, if I may say so, hippy and indie. It's a LOT like how all the skills and combat in Heroquest work.
In practice, the Challenges have come under a lot of fire, both because the Difficulties for success are weighted HEAVILY toward failure in some places, and because people are having trouble getting their heads around it, and finally because the results of the Challenge are, as written, binary: you either Win Completely or fail completely.
Enter Keith Baker, and some excellent thoughts on making Skill Challenges interesting and winnable, without actually changing the math. (Which I'm doing anyway.)
One good suggestion is something straight out of Heroquest, but predicated on the DnD Combat model: more graduated levels of success, ranging from the Crit-like total victory, to a regular old Success, to Moderate success, partial success, failure with some benefit, failure with a single mote of light, and the Crit-fumble of Total Loss.
But the best suggestion is one I've been working on for what seems like years, now: setting up conflicts so that the failures are as interesting as the victories.
* - I know the numbers I quoted for Complexity values are off, compared to the rules -- I'm quoting a mathmatical rework of the rules that makes more sense to me.
For a longer-term DnD game, I am seriously considering using something like the experience point system in The Shadow of Yesterday -- the "keys" that you pick for your character and which give you xp when you 'hit' them. (You'd need about 10 to 15 to level, probably, which would be pretty fast, even compared to the speeded up ratio in 4.0.)
Clinton wrote up a hack of the system for 3.5 d20. It's here, and would require a very little bit of tweaking to update to 4.0. Some excerpts:
The first way you get XP is through Keys. They determine behaviors that will earn XP for your character. Keys are motivations, problems, connections, duties and loyalties. You should pick one at 1st level, and one every odd level after that. You can never have more than five Keys.
Counters
Each Key has a Counter. If you go against the Key - that is, act according to the Counter - you can choose one of two options:
* Lose 2 XP.
* Remove the Key and gain 7 XP. You can never take this Key again.
((A few particularly typical d20 key examples.))
Key of Bloodlust
Your character enjoys overpowering others in combat. Gain 1 XP every time you/your group wins a battle, or 3 XP for defeating a foe equal to or more powerful than your group. Counter: Be defeated in battle.
Key of Glittering Gold
Your character loves wealth. Gain 1 XP every time you make a deal that favors you in wealth (max: 3 per adventure). Gain 2 XP every time you finish an adventure with more wealth than you started with. Gain 5 XP every time you finish an adventure with double your previous wealth. Counter: Lose (or give away) over half your fortune.
Key of Fraternity
Your character has someone he is sworn to, a friend who is more important than anyone else. Gain 1 XP every time this character is present in a scene with your character (maximum 3 per adventure). Gain 2 XP whenever your character makes a decision that is influenced by them. Gain 5 XP every time your character defends them by putting himself at unusual risk. Counter: Sever the relationship with this person or the person dies.
Key of Vengeance
Your character has a hatred for a particular organization, person, or even species or culture. Gain 1 XP every time your character hurts a member of that group or a lackey of that person. Gain 2 XP every time your character strikes a minor blow at that group or person (killing a member of the organization or one of the person's lackeys, disrupting their life, destroying their property). Gain 5 XP every time your character strikes a major blow at that group or person. Counter: Let your enemy go or destroy the entire organization.
Key of the Masochist
Your character thrives on personal pain and suffering. Gain 1 XP every time he is bloodied and 3 XP every time he is dropped to 0 hp. Counter: Flee a source of physical or psychic damage.
There are also some "classic fantasy trope" examples of Keys on the TSoY wiki, here. I particularly like:
Key of the Explorer
Your character seeks novelty and discovery at every opportunity. Gain 1 XP everytime she goes somewhere or encounters something new to her. Gain 3 XP whenever she experiences something unknown to her society. Buyoff: Settle down to a quiet life.
Key of Extravagance
Your character seeks every opportunity to impress those around you with his means and generosity. Gain 1 XP every time he gives a gift or spends money on an unnecessary luxury. Gain 3 XP every time he blows a significant fraction of his net worth. Buyoff: Refuse a luxury you could have had.
Key of Glory
Who cares about power or riches? You crave fame! Gain 1 XP when your actions inspire strangers to talk about you insultingly (there's no such thing as bad publicity). Gain 3 XP when your deeds win you acclaim and adulation. Buyoff: Adopt a pseudonym or go incognito.
You can probably see where a set up like this would speed up the leveling process in some entertaining ways. :)
Played some DnD last night. It was good. I will talk about that more in a bit, but for now, an idea for combating the frustration of repeating missing in a fight.
The Angry Meter
If you miss, you get a token. A Big bowl of glass stones that you get to grab from when you miss -- a nice tactile way of portraying building anger. Conceptually it transforms a miss from "a whiff" into "I didn't hit you yet...but I'm getting closer".
You can turn in five tokens on a future roll, after the roll has been made.
In Heroic Tier: they're worth a +5
In Paragon Tier: +10
In Epic Tier: +15
That way, if you would miss anyway by spending tokens, you wouldn't spend them and just rack up another for the pile.
Critical Fumbles give you two tokens, because 1's make us really angry... alternately, if you want a fumble to suck more, you lose all your stones when you roll a 1.
You lose all your stockpiled tokens during an extended rest.
Kind of like it... but I'm not sure a game with so much "Marked enemy" stuff going on needs another token floating around the table.
... is a fascinating kind of car-crash voyeurism.
Lots of folks into gaming have never really tried anything outside of their comfort zone for gaming, and that's fine.
Many many of those folks are playing DnD.
But what's happened with 4.0 is that the designers for the game, unlike many of their players, have been watching and (unlike some of the gaming-industry-aware-but-disdainful d20 faithful) embracing some of the significant gaming innovations of the last five years or so. For example:
- In-combat "tagging" with non-combat skills to give your allies bonuses. (Spirit of the Century)
- Reducing resource overload to keep the characters streamlined and fun to play as they level. (MMOs)
- "Respeccing" your character without significant penalty as you level. (SotC. MMOs)
- The same system used for all actions, even spellcasting. (Heroquest. Dogs. Hell, any indie game in the last 5 years.)
- Taking actions that set everyone up to be awesome, not just you. (The driving force behind most any indie game.)
- It seems like a small thing, but it's something *I* had been playing with a hack for for a couple months now... mechanics to support a "Tank, holding aggro" in a tabletop game.
One of the things I hadn't seen so far, though, was this little tidbit...
*Q:* Will there be social combat rules in 4E or some other system that allows for non-combat conflict resolution?
A: Yes. We have been playtesting a new social encounter system, which has been one of the most heavily developed—and contentious—parts of the game. Look for it in the DMG.
Sold.
One of the things that bothered me about 3.5 DnD is that, as a tactical combat game at heart (something it does very very very well), non-combat interactions (ie: the "roleplaying" in RPG) never got the same amount of system support that combat does. Consequently, combat is more *important* than other activities; it has more weight, just in terms of time-devoted-to-it-at-the-table. When a scene that uses Bluff and Diplomacy will simply be ten minutes of roleplay and (if I'm lucky and it's not simply hand waved away via GM Fiat) one die roll... while a combat with that same antagonist might run 30 minutes to an hour of game play... why would I put much time into developing my Bluff and Diplomacy feats when Combat skills let my character 'be awesome' for a much longer stretch of play-time at the table? It's got a bad payoff percentage at the gaming table.
Answer: I wouldn't, or I will anyway and be frustrated. (See also: my bard character Gwydion.)
Rules that let an important 'soft skills' encounter get the same love and attention from the system that a physical fight does? Games with that kind of ability are the reason I abandoned 3.5 in the first place.
It heartens me that the designers for 4.0 obviously paid so much attention to the best stuff that the REST of the gaming industry (both pen and paper and electronic) has introduced in the last 5 years.
Why is watching the release of the game like watching a car crash?
Well, for many DnD players, all of this new stuff, which is familiar to ME (and my friends, thanks to the evangelical nature of my enthusiasm for those sorts of games in the last few years), is very unfamiliar, new, strange, and just plain WEIRD to them... watching them come to grips with the new DnD is just... fascinating.
Dungeons and Dragons, 4th Edition.
I'm sorry, I'm just hearing too much good stuff about it. The indie roleplaying community is going gah-gah over it. "If old-school basic Dungeons and Dragons were rewritten by Days of Wonder, after they'd played Spirit of the Century for six months."
It's meant to be a high magic game... crazy high magic like rivers of flowing earth and villages of dragonblood humanoids. Dunno if I love that, but ...
Eh. I dunno. I mention it mostly because of the great reactions from people whose opinions and gaming tendencies I frequently agree with, and from this actual-play write up, in which the gamer's seven year old son plays through the first DnD 4th edition module, simultaneously running five characters, keeps all the rules straight (even for Attacks of Opportunity), and outmaneuvers his dad.
I confess: the battlefield rules sound really fun.
So in this post, I'm going to talk about some different games and how they deal with conflict resolution.
Specifically, in which games do conflicts work, and which they don't work, and how to help out the ones that don't work as well. I'm going to start with something bog-standard that pretty much everyone is familiar with (DnD), and move progressively further out until I get to an indie game with a lot of good going for it, a lot of good rep, and a conflict system that we keep failing to really 'get' -- Primetime Adventures.
DnD
So, DnD. It's hardly perfect, but the thing it WANTS to do well it does really well. The only real problem I have with combat is that there really isn't an end-state where someone doesn't end up dead; there isn't really a point in the game SYSTEM where you can say "no: the potential price here is too high -- I'm out". There is a point in the game FICTION (if the play group supports you) where you can do that, but that's it -- the rules themselves don't support it, and do a lot to discourage it (AoO rules, etc).
The main problem I have with NON-combat conflicts in DnD/d20 is they are all one-roll wonders; you roleplay roleplay roleplay, and then roll to see whether you succeed or just wasted your time. With combat, you get a blow-by-blow recreation of the action, and with a tense diplomatic session, you get... one roll. If you're lucky, the roll might be adjusted up or down via GM-fiat-bestowed bonuses, thanks to your roleplay, but nowhere in there do you get a system that will give you a sense of verbal sparring.
Result: combat is (sometimes unfairly) called "20 minutes of fun packed into four hours". Roleplaying is largely freeform, unsupported by the (inarguably solid) small unit combat system.
Heroquest
Here's a game where you get to use the same system used for everything (unlike DnD, applying the same granularity to everything as well), and as a result of that, all conflicts feel equally important. The basic one-roll system is used when some sort of conflict needs to be resolved, but it's not a hugely important conflict. The "Extended Conflict" system gets trotted out when a conflict is Really Important. This is kind of brilliant, because depending on the kind of game you're running, a huge set-piece battle might play out in 10 minutes, with two die-rolls, while a conversation over tea back at the castle might be THE MAJOR 'FIGHT' of the session.
The only problem with the current version of the rules is that the gulf between the ultra-simple basic conflict system and the ultra-complicated extended conflict is pretty broad, and often filled with house-ruled mini-extended rules, because the extended conflict rules are cumbersome. This is being fixed in the new rules coming out sometime this summer, and from what I've seen, the new "let's use the longer conflict rules, because this scene is IMPORTANT" rules are going to be easy and intuitive and do exactly what they're supposed to do. Bravo, sez I: I can't wait to do some stuff with that system again.
Spirit of the Century
Much like Heroquest, the game uses the same mechanics for both physical combat, verbal conflicts, and really anything else -- this means that everything is equally important (ie: represented by the rules and the time spent on it at the table) and any kind of character can contribute. In many ways it's a very 'traditional' game, but full of stuff you can use to really have some kooky story-game fun. I'd love to use this to run a middle-earth-style game of "subtle magics"; the system in the game of being able to Declare an Aspect on a location or in the scene is perfect for the kind of "did I really see that?" magic that's prevalent in the books.
((Note: it totally isn't fair to list Spirit at this point in the "timeline", because it comes after and learns from a bunch of the games I'm about to talk about, but whatever. It reminds me of HQ, so I'm mentioning it here.))
Dogs in the Vineyard
There has been a lot of talk in the indie-game-design scene in the last couple-four years about "stakes". This is all Ron Edwards fault, thanks to a little game he wrote called Trollbabe that originally introduced the term, after which it was promptly co-opted and at least partially misused in about a gazillion other games.
The idea basically is that before you start rolling dice, you decide what's at Stake. An example of this might be something like "Okay, I want to get Count Bobo to back down and release the prisoner to me -- if I win, he does that." or something like that. The problem with Stakes is that, if you do it wrong, in the process of defining "what happens if you win, and what happens if you lose" before you roll, you frequently end up discussing and halfway playing out all end result possibilities, so that once you roll the dice, there's really nothing else to PLAY. You just kind of grunt and say "Okay, well, that cool thing we already discussed to death? I guess that happens. Moving on."
((Trollbabe, incidentally, bypassed this problem in typical Ron Edwards fashion, via the mechanics of the game -- the stakes themselves aren't nearly as important as the pain you're willing to go through to GET them -- but as is typical with Ron, he doesn't really explain that in the text, and it's only head-slappingly obvious about five years later, after everyone's already cocked up a number of other games trying to pull off the same thing.))
Now, Vincent Baker wasn't immune to this use of Stakes -- he wrote Dogs in the Vineyard during that time, and the concept of setting stakes are there, but (in my opinion) are presented in a far clearer and cleaner way (because it's Vincent, really). Basically, the conversation you have before rolling is basically "Okay, I want you to reveal what you're hiding in the house", and then you roll dice and let the dice sort out what happens. If I just plain beat you in the series of rolls that follow, you're forced to give in.
However, you might not be willing to take the kind of Fallout (damage) from that full exchange, and give in early. In a sense, that is the heart of Vincent's conflict resolution in all his games: Negotiation with a Stick. The Thing You Want is out there, but the getting of it breaks down into ACTIONS; into What You Are Doing.
"What you get" is interesting. "What you are doing" is interesting and COOL.
In Dogs, this breaks down roll by roll and is narrated roll-by-roll as a series of discrete and interesting and impactful actions... all of those actions DO something to someone else (that's the 'with a stick' part) who might decide not to take any more and just give in. (Or they might decide to up the ante and Negotiate with a Knife. :)
It's genius. It sets a bar.
In a Wicked Age
I'm not going to sit on the Vincent Baker bandwagon for very long in this post, but I want to draw a parallel between IAWA and Dogs -- they both do the Negotiation with a Stick thing, but they manage it from completely different directions.
The big thing with In a Wicked Age is that Vincent has entirely done away with the idea of Stakes. Instead, you go back, waaaaaay back to that good old d20 stuff and just talk about "What I'm going to do", which (for me) is a more comfortable place to be as a player. And the end of a series of rolls, you know who actually did what they said they were going to do, and who failed. The winner can then say "give me what I want, or I hurt you." And the loser can say "Okay" or "hell no, tha's jus' a flesh wound!" and you go back into conflict for more pain.
Galactic
((I'm getting there. I'm almost to the Primetime Adventures thing. I swear.))
Galactic isn't a finished game, but it's by the same author who wrote PTA. Since it's a newer game, it shows how the author's learned and expanded what he wants out of the game and the conflicts, but it still carries with it some of the flaws. The biggest one I hear the most is that the conflict system is good for conflict, but not so great for roleplaying during the conflict... it has the back and forth dice and sacrifice tactics of, say, Dogs in the Vineyard, but there's a bit more dice-handling going on, and you're sort of focused more on that and less on the roleplay that (should be) allowing new dice to hit the table.
Hmm. That's not very clear. Let's go to the instant-replay, Bob.
Dogs in the Vineyard Example:
Dave is in a conflict, arguing with a recalcitrant member of one of the towns on his Circuit. The first couple verbal exchanges didn't work out that well for him, so he's going to assert a little authority in the form of his Coat -- the sort of badge of office of the King's Watchdogs.
Step 0: It's his turn.
Step 1: He roleplays bringing the Coat into the scene. Maybe it's how he stands, maybe he says something about it or asserts his right to wear it, or maybe he just flings it back and the end of it swings in the air, all cool-like. Whatever. He roleplays it first. That's mandatory, and whatever is narrated to bring the Coat into play DOES happen.
Step 2: He rolls the dice associated with his coat and adds them to his pool. Maybe the dice are awesome, in which case the coat will have had a big impact on the conflict, and maybe they suck, in which case it didn't.
Step 3. He narrates further, going into what he's doing as his 'move' and 'plays' the dice that will represent the strength of what he just did.
You see what happens there? Roleplay is a MANDATORY prerequisite that allows the player to both strengthen their character's position and justify the dice that he ends up playing against his opponent.
More importantly, it's specifically stated as The Way You Do It in the rules.
Galactic Example:
Dave is in a conflict, arguing with a recalcitrant member of a colony world he's trying to get some information from. The first couple exchanges didn't go his way at all, and he's gotten some of his dice potentially knocked out of play... plus the dice he has are kind of weak compared to his opponent's.
Step 0: It's his turn.
Step 1: He checks off a couple Edges that let him 'save' some of his dice from being knocked out. He also spends a fortune point to bring one of his unused Archetypes into play, to give him more dice.
Step 2: He pulls the 'saved' dice back into play, and adds his new dice to the mix, and he and his opponent roll.
Step 3: We figure out, based on which dice stay and which dice get knocked out, what happened.
Step 4: We narrate what we deduce has happened ... it's a bit like reading tea leaves. :)
See what happens there? Roleplay/narration is a kind of... addendum. An epilogue. It is not central to either the action or the mechanics. Note that this is just the way my group does it. We could (and should, now that I've figured this out) do it this way:
Step 0: It's his turn.
Step 1: He roleplays the actions he takes and everything that happens that will bring in the Edges he needs and the Archetype he's introducing.
Step 2: He pulls the 'saved' dice back into play, and adds his new dice to the mix, and he and his opponent roll.
Step 3: We figure out, based on which dice stay and which dice get knocked out, what happened, and continue roleplay/narration from the stuff we already did in Step 1.
See how that's better? And there's no reason we can't do it that way... but there's no reason we can't do it a slightly sloppier, much less roleplay-reinforcing way either, cuz The Way It Is Done is not in the rules.
Hmm. Need to send these thoughts to Matt. Anyway.
Primetime Adventures
Whoo. Been a lot of typing to get here, hasn't it? Sorry about that.
Okay, so PTA is brilliant. Seriously, and truly, it's brilliant. I've never seen a game that so perfectly represents the way a story is told in the television-medium. The way fan mail works is great, but especially with screen presence and Issues... it's hard for me to watch a show now and NOT see it in terms of "who has the big screen presence this week" or "oh, it's an Spotlight Issue session for Angela", or whatever.
The conflict system, though. Oy. My head.
The problem is, it's so damned simple. I get x number of cards. You get x number. We flip them over, and whoever has more red cards wins. See? Easy.
No, no it isn't.
The problem is two-fold. Maybe threefold. Two-and-a-halffold.
One is stakes. PTA is built entirely on setting stakes, and it was written when the term was very vaguely defined by the indie community, so it's kind of vague and hazy here. It is very. very. very easy to discuss the stakes of the conflict to the point where you've entirely explored everything that can happen in the scene, before you even PLAY. THE. SCENE. We don't focus on what is being DONE; only on what (eventually) happens.
Two is the conflict mechanic itself: flip over of all your cards and you're done. Conflict mechanics are more interesting when you can insert narrative/roleplay action in the midst of them -- we said that even all the way back when we were talking about DnD, didn't we? The combat is better than the non-combat stuff, because there's more stuff going on -- it isn't just one roll. In Heroquest, the "important" conflicts are the ones with a few more rolls and detail. Dogs always has a series of rolls, into which roleplay is completely integrated. Galactic has a similar back-and-forth, but doesn't integrate the roleplay (yet), so it's not as smooth or as enjoyable.
PTA? It has one cardflip. Boom. Done. The most suspenseful conflicts in the games I've played in so far have been when we use the "Chase Scene" rules, which means we flip one card at a time, so if we each have three cards out, we break it down into rounds, basically, and narrate how the action is going up to that point, then flip the next ones.
That's good. Honestly, I think we should use that "Chase Scene" method a lot more of the time, if not always. If we houserule in a rule that said you can spend Fan Mail in the middle of the conflict to bring in another card (probably paying double for it, since it's mid-fight), as long as it was before the last flip, that would give us one more reason to roleplay each of those exchanges.
Problem Three, put simply, is just how the scenes are introduced.
Bad: "Okay, I think we're at a conflict here, what do you want out of this, if you win?" (this is how we do it when we're not feeling comfortable in the game)
Good: "She says 'I love you...' and looks at you expectantly." (BANG!)
-----------
What's all that mean? Maybe nothing, maybe a lot. I'm possibly running Galactic this weekend after a lot of time away, and we're playing PTA next weekend, so these things are on my mind. I welcome any thoughts from those (two) of you who managed to stick with me til the end.
 So a few weeks ago, I was poking through an old chest of junk from high school and found something I thought I'd long, long LONG since lost. That image to the right gives the suspense away, but I'll say it anyway:
The pink-box, 1980 copyright, got it for Christmas out of a Sears catalog, "red box" Dungeons and Dragons. The dice are gone (as is the crayon included to color in the numbers), and the spine of the book is cut through so I could put it in a ring binder, and the box is full of old maps and worlds and character sheets, but it's there. The expert rules, too, in all its weird, crazy, "dwarves, elves, and halflings are characters classes, like warriors and wizards" glory.
And I want to run it so, so bad.
Or at least something like it. For me, a romp down the OD&D lane would be one thick with nostalgia, but I understand that, while the rules are kind of light, not everyone would want to spend the time grokking them (and ignoring the stuff you know from more recent, if not really improved editions) just to smack some kobolds for 1d6 damage with an iron mace.
But... something like that, you know? I love me some Wicked Age, or Spirit of the Century, and I long for a good campaign using Heroquest rules, but while WIcked Age is lean and mean and good story-making fun, and Spirit is a hell of a fun romp and plenty rules crunchy, and Heroquest has a kind of all-in-one fantasy beauty to it, none of the games I'm playing right now scratch a particular itch that I can best sum up as "defined progression."
You know what I mean; that thing that D&D does, where you get a certain number of experience points, and then there's a ch-ching and you get a new skill or new trick or new something. Wicked Age characters change, but it's more story-like. Spirit of the Century characters... shift but, superhero-like, don't really level up. Dogs characters change all the time, but it's as a result of things that happen in the story, not because you got 1000 xp and became a Dog-Exorcist, Level 3, you know? There's no level-up chart for fixing 2 Dogs towns and then *ding!* Heroquest is more traditional, but is like Hero System or other point-based games in some ways -- little, incremental changes that you pretty much get by your own spending of points.
I want... I dunno. Burning Wheel would probably do it, with its skills and mega-crunch and life paths, but it's a big meaty system that Kate played once and didn't love, and I don't want to have to learn and then teach another huge, meaty system, anyway. I did that with DnD 3.0 and 3.5, and it burned me out to the point where I won't play those games anymore; they make me sad the way a failed, codependent relationship does.
So I want something with some structure to character progression, some smacking-kobold fun, that I don't have to spend a lot of brain power learning... so something I already kind of know, and like, and didn't burn out on.
Continue reading ""I kick it (old school) for 1d6+2 damage."" »
So Paul Czege (author of the RPG My Life with Master) has something really interesting to say about that game and how it's viewed and interpreted by the playing public.
I blame [this misunderstanding on] what came later. When I designed My Life with Master, my play style was characterized by fluid scenes involving multiple player characters, a natural enjoyment of roleplay and dialogue without any particular hurry to use the resolution mechanics, and no particular concern for equitable apportionment of screen time. To my great frustration, it has subsequently become characterized by formalized stakes-setting, abrupt usage of resolution mechanics, and narration at the expense of roleplay.
Does that boldface thing sound like some of the less-successful Primetime Adventures play? Hmm...
So there's this thing I always find myself apologizing for on the Story Games forums, and it boils down to something like this:
"Here's some Actual Play that I wanted to share with everyone. It's going to be long, although there's only a few conflicts: we got through about five scenes in the five hours we played -- we just don't play as fast as everyone seems to."
Why did I bother apologizing for something like that? We had a good time with our five hours -- we did some cool stuff and had fun, right? However, I'd been reading so much on the ways that various folks ran their games (and I mean THEIR games -- games THEY wrote) that I wanted to at least try for the kind of style envisioned by person who wrote the game.
What did that mean? Well, based on what I had interpreted to be the case, the idea was to cut into the action, drive straight for whatever the current conflict might be, get there, engage the conflict mechanics as soon as logically possible, figure out what happened, and then narrate it. Then immediately cut to the next scene.
Hmm. Damn, it doesn't even sound viable when I describe it like that. Often it wasn't, although using PTA's rule of "skip anything that would bore the audience" works better.
Result? Usually, Epic Fail.
So lately, I've kind of let that go, a little bit at a time. De helped with this in one of her comments on this blog: "So we play slow? So what, we have fun," and lately I've come to a better place for MYSELF in gaming, where I *still* focus on the next drama- or conflict-laden scene, and still try to get to a point of conflict IN that scene, but I get there with more roleplaying, less narrating, and let more of the CONFLICT be roleplay, with the system itself used to determine the final 'what happened?'
There was a really good example of this in the second-to-last Primetime Adventures game I ran -- so much so that I really started to feel like I was "getting" that game (ironically, but simply letting go and not TRYING to "get" it.)
So, is it stupid be kind of relieved and "cleared" to find out that most of my concern over playing the game wrong stems from incorrect assumptions on my part about how it's being played by others, from the beginning? I hope not: I will feel that way, regardless.
These crazy new games, they talk a lot about the Story and how to get to it -- something I already know, but was sloppy about in the past. They've helped with that. However, all that very specific language about the story made it seem as though the story itself, and the creation of it also had to be parsed out and diced and sliced in the same very specific way, or all the advice would be useless. USELESS!
And it's not that way; it's like writing advice. Yes, it's often good and useful and helpful, but if you try to observe and follow every single bit of good advice all at once, being careful not to forget anything and to get all the words exactly right in the first draft...
... it's going to fucking suck. I mean, it's going to godawful unreadable shit. There will be a gem here and there, and you'll cling to those gems and analyze the HELL out of them, because they are undeniably BETTER than what you were doing before, but the net result is worse.
You can't do it that way. You write. You keep those other new things in mind, and let them all gradually sink in over a great deal of time, or you incorporate one thing at a time until you don't think about it anymore, then add the next thing.
Why do you do it that way? Because if you can write at all, you already know how to write in a way that makes you happy, and that is the important thing you have to hold on to no. matter. what.
The same is true of play. I got all excited for a while about how I could be doing things better, and lost track of the fact that what I was doing already makes me pretty goddamn happy. So I let all those little guides and hints sit to the side, and I'm slowly working them in, a little at a time, and I'm not worrying about the fact that I'm doing it 'wrong', according to what I'd thought I'd read.
And just about the time I got completely comfortable with being wrong, I find out I was okay, all along.
Life is funny that way.
... or, to be fair, a Gaming-widow in general.
I've been giving my Google-calendar a workout for the last couple days, because although I am a gamer of many different colors and stripes, I have traveled down the road of life-imbalance quite a few times since the early 90s (oh, those early MUDs and MUSHes; oh those hours of Space Hulk and Battletech map creation), mid-90s, and far far more recently... and I'd just rather not go back there, thanks.
So: I raid in WoW (though I could wish for a little more progression-status and a little less farm-status -- I did my farming in my youth :P), and I have some alts I really enjoy, and I play LotRO, and a have a copy of Tabula Rasa winging its way to me for a practically criminal discount, and I have table top games I'm running and even more that I want to run, and then there's writing stuff, and reading stuff... the question before me is "how do I get enough time to 'blow stuff up', without ensuring that I have "ALL THE TIME YOU COULD EVER WANT, AND THEN SOME, YOU BASTARD"?
Ahem.
I'm not an expert, but these are the guidelines I'm working with right now.
1. Schedule my time. I don't mean just my play time, but just flat out schedule the Big Stuff that needs doing during the next week. Note: I use the word "needs" advisedly, and not without some irony; leveling my druid does not "need" doing... it's just one of those things I'd enjoy getting to do.
2. Kate and Kaylee first. The time I will, without fail, spend with My Girls during the week goes on the calendar first. Everything else bends to adapt. Non-negotiable. This is fairly easy for Kaylee-time, as Jackie and I already have a set schedule that pretty much ensures I see her every day (barring the off-weekend). Kate and I -- not habitually that detail-oriented -- are working on actually scheduling stuff, too: weekly date nights and the Regular Tuesday Night Activity (currently swing dancing). This also (happily) includes some activities like LotRO and watching geeky shows like Avatar, so... Win/Win!
3. Limited 'play commitments'. I have a limited amount of time to be online and playing stuff. Call it 15 to 20 hours a week. My guild has planned activities that take about 15 to 20 hours a week. I do ****NOT**** want to spend all my online time on those planned activities. Therefore, I need to strictly limit my raiding commitments. This basically boils down to (selfishly, very selfishly) signing up only for stuff *I* really want to do, and NOT signing up for things just to 'help folks out'. I've prioritized my time helping online-people out before, and it always means I spend too much time online with an exponentially decreasing amount of personal enjoyment. I play so *I* can have fun; bugger off, internets. This rule means I get to spend a good portion of 'me' time completely unstructured. I approve.
4. Vetoes Unless I am currently involved in some kind of group activity in which my sudden departure will result in screwing over a bunch of other people. (I'm GMing a game, a central player in a game, or in some kind of group, online), Kate (and, to a lesser degree, Kaylee) can ask me to drop what I'm doing. ((Emergencies, of COURSE, mean that I say "sorry guys, gotta go" and I f-ing GO. Duh. Obviously.)) Conversely, I reserve the right to go kill stuff instead of watching a third hour of Trading Spaces... or Little Einsteins.
There are unspoken parts of this, like the assumption that there will be lots of 'white space' on my calendar that will get filled in naturally with the "sand" of honey-dos, chores, random acts of laziness, and especially impromptu fun stuff involving either The Girls, or Games, or both.
But you have to lay out the Big Stuff first, before the whole area fills in with sand and leaves no room for them.
Or so it seems to me. I'll report back, maybe, on how it all works in practice.
Cooldown: n. MMO-related. A period of wait time before a spell, ability or power can be used after that same spell, ability, or power has been used.
Example: In World of Warcraft, a character's hearthstone has a one hour cooldown. Once you use it to teleport back to your 'home' location, the stone cannot be used again for an hour.
Global Cooldown: n. MMO-related. A period of wait time before any spell, ability or power can be used after ANY OTHER spell, ability, or power has been used.
Example 1: In World of Warcraft, any attack power triggers the 'global cooldown'. At the moment that an attack power occurs, all other special abilities become unavailable for 1.5 seconds. This is to prevent players from stacking up skill uses at an unrealistic or game-breaking rate.
Example 2: In City of Heroes and Lord of the Rings online, the Global Cooldown is actually 'front loaded' into each power -- there is a (often uninterruptible) delay between activating an attack and that attack actually happening. The end result is the same as WoWs global cooldown, but allows players to queue their next attack while the current attack is still 'going'.
Global Cooldown: n. Doyce-related. A period of time during which I need to decompress at the end of the day. Cooldown times vary, depending on what has been happening that day. Cooldowns often include use of an MMO, but might also involve reading, watching videos, or various other activities; however, many people adopt specific activities that they prefer, and are reluctant to change.
Failure to observe the the Global Cooldown can be game-breaking.
Global Cooldowns (as defined here) are strongly affected by who else is in your adventuring party, as other players can aid the GCD, extend the time required, or even interrupt the GCD unknowingly, resulting in a number of system errors.
Communicating with the other members of your team about the GCD is highly recommended, especially when you have recently added a new member to your party.
Okay, that's not entirely true. I like WoW battlegrounds. I like WoW Arena. I even like flagging myself for PvP and going after various PvP "world objectives."
I especially like the way they implemented PvMP in Lord of the Rings Online.
So how exactly am I done with PvP? I'm done with PvP-servers in WoW. I transfered the last of my characters from a PvP server to a 'carebear' server last night.
Here are the things with the PvP that I like: It is challenging and it is a very different kind of game than the typical PvE "Kill Ten Rats" missions that you run over and over and over again with gradually improving special effects budgets. Playing against other players is fun.
It's also NOT what I want to do ALL THE TIME. If I sign up for a battleground or an arena -- that's what I want to do. If I flag myself PvP so I can take back the town of Halaa -- fantastic -- that's what I want to do.
If I'm riding around the open plains of Nagrand, hunting clefthoof bulls for their hides and meat while I get caught up on my newsreader, then PvP is NOT what I want to do. Setting up a game so that anyone who wants to be a jerk can interrupt what I'm doing just for the hell of it is not fun for me. It's like reading a book on the edge of the playground and having some other idiot decide that -- whether you want to or not -- you're playing Dodgeball.
Right. Now.
So the deal with the WoW "PvP" servers is that, if you're in a 'safe' zone, you can't be attacked unless you specifically say you can, and if you're in any of the 'contested' areas (read: 85% of the landmass in the game, and almost 100% of the area you'll be in for 96% of your character lifespan) it's automatically Duck Season.
Switching from a PvE server to a PvP server is like learning how to play an arcade game in a regular video arcade, and then visiting an arcade where all the other players are allowed and in fact REWARDED for walking over while you're playing your game and SCREWING WITH YOUR CONTROLS. Nevermind that they could just wait until you got in line to play one of the player vs. player games there -- they want to screw with you while you're doing one of the solo race car games.
Thank you, no.
What bugs me the most about the PvP-server-players' attitudes is that it's more realistic to play in a setting like that.
Because, well... no. No it isn't. If 'realistic' means 'like real life', then I disagree. The two major factions in WoW are currently observing a TRUCE. Moreover, both sides are being assaulted by other, more powerful forces. The SAME ones. Enemy of my enemy? Hello?
Secondly, people don't just randomly see another hunter on the open plains and say "he's not bothering me, but I want to engage in a life-or-death struggle with him RIGHT NOW." Why? Because they might DIE. And, realistically, DEATH IS PERMANENT, and not to be engaged in between two people over who gets to kill the next clefthoof cow down the road (when both the people in question have thousands of gold in their pocket to buy food).
People go PvP for objectives. Important ones. Otherwise, realistically, it's not worth the risk.
Or, coming back to the game, it's not worth the TIME WASTED. Having some level 40 guy following my level 20 character around to kill her over and over again, then /dance, /spit, and run off? That's now how I want to spend my 15 bucks or my time.
However...
You want to get me in a battleground with that guy?
Bring it on.
It is a very special kind of activity that, when discussed (even in the abstract) via any medium, actually makes you more excited about performing that activity in the future.
I believe that's also the definition of most of the leisure activities I really, truly enjoy.
Penny Arcade discusses why people play games.
Kate said to me "yeah, I definitely play to explore the game -- to *see* it."
I enjoy that, or at least I can understand enjoying that, but for me the real joy is in displaying expertise. I don't mean BEATING the game, really -- I mean doing stuff in a game that demonstrates a level of familiarity and skill.
First thing I learned how to do in City of Heroes? Run along fence tops. Stand on top of traffic lights and do jumping jacks. Get to the altitude ceiling in Steel Canyon without using Flight.
In WoW? Ice Trap two bad guys at once. Defeat a 'team of five recommended' bad guy with just me a long, open road. Tank a whole dungeon using my pet.
In Lord of the Rings? Defeat the evil, haunted oak tree in the heart of the Old Forest with two characters and no healing.
In Halflife? Beat the enemy gunship with a beat up pontoon boat, no cover, and half my health.
In X-Com? Taking an entire enemy ship with one solder, after the whole rest of the crew was killed in the first round.
I think everyone can give a 'woot' when that sort of stuff happens, but for me, that's really the GOAL. I almost WANT things to go pear-shaped when I'm playing -- because that's when it gets FUN. I know Lee's the same way.
By the same token, I really don't like it when I'm the only one in a group experiencing a learning curve -- it makes the whole experience less fun for me, and it's one of the reasons that raiding in WoW right now is a little frustrating.
Why do you play?
So I'm musing about game mechanics; have been for the last couple weeks, actually, because I'm playing a lot of Spirit of the Century, editing a MONSTER of an old-school-style game called Robots and Rapiers, getting ready to run Galactic, and wishing I'd had more luck playing PTA and Dogs.
So all those systems are bouncing around in my head, and I start drawing comparisons.
Here's an observation:
Lots of games have Edges. By "edge" I just mean "that thing on your character sheet that lets you tweak things in your favor." Call them Aspects, Traits, Talents, whatever... in play, they let you tweak results.
There are really two ways that an "edge" can be invoked:
Mode 1. They can be used to give you a intial, "pre-roll" boost to your chances of success, thereby increasing your odds of winning a conflict. Primetime Adventures does this with both it's Traits and Fan Mail. Spirit of the Century pretty much does this with Aspects (they come in after the roll, but before the roll *counts*).
Mode 2. They can be used to stave off or lessen the sting of failure. Galactic's "Edges" do this. Traits you bring in after a conflict has already started in Dogs in the Vineyard do this. "Doom" in Conspiracy of Shadows does this. The appropriately-named Survival Points in Dead of Night do this. There are many others.
Now, my point is this: your final numeric result using 'edges' in either of the two ways above might be exactly the same, but the modes feel different, and that feeling seeps into the tone of the game you're running. pushing either toward adventure-heroic (mode 1) or the survivalist-gritty (mode 2).
I'm not talking about the game's power level. It doesn't matter if you're giving folks one 'edge', or five, or ten -- I think if they're implemented in the style of Mode 1, the game is going to have a kind of "let's be awesome" feel, and if you're using them in the style of Mode 2, it's going to have a kind of "let's survive this" feel.
What does that mean? I think that means that, even if you have a mechanically-perfect 'hack' to the Spirit of the Century rules to use it for zombie-survival-horror, unless you change the way you can invoke Aspects, the system itself will be subtly encouraging you and the players 'be awesome and heroic.' It's not the number of Aspects you give people that matters, but how they can be used that will affect the tone.
Now, let's say that you have a group sitting at the table who (a) totally gets the tone you're going for, (b) agrees to it and (c) actively works to support it. Can they overcome the subtle whispers of the game and run an horrifying zombie-survival game using, say, straight Spirit of the Century?
Yes. Without hesitation, yes. The rules are only one voice at the table, and can be drowned out easily but other voices. It's really no different -- or less jarring -- than when one PLAYER is working toward a different tone than everyone else.
You just can't throw popcorn at the rules and say "knock it off."
We need more Starbucks: the character, not the coffee. An interesting take on probably the most believably religious character in genre television. Very nice ideas about bringing that kind of portrayal to your gaming table.
After reading it, imagine bringing that kind of 'real' religion to, say, a Dogs character. FUN. :)
Yes, I know it's not the end of the year yet, but since the holidays typical kill my gaming, I'm simply looking at the last 12 months, to take a look at what kind of face to face gaming I got done.
November, 2006
- A year ago, today, I ran the first/last game for the guys out in NYC. It was the "freebooters" scenario for Shadow of Yesterday.
- I also started up a play-by-post Mountain Witch game that sadly died of asphyxiation during the holiday doldrums. More sadly, in cleaning spam out of that forum last week, I accidentally deleted all the gaming-related posts. :(
December, 2006
- Nothing
January, 2007
- Got together with the locals and made up characters for a clockpunk Shadow of Yesterday game.
February, 2007
- Nothing.
March, 2007
- Nothing again -- I didn't even post weeks in review for these two months. Sheesh.
April, 2007
- After two months of a big fat nothing, I am *rabid* to play, and fly to Chicago for Forgecon Midwest. There, I get to play Heroquest, run a game of Shadow of Yesterday and the Mountain Witch, and playtest Galactic with Matt. After I get home...
- I start up the Primetime Adventures "Weird War Two" game, and had the pilot session.
- I run the second (and apparently last) session of the clockpunk game.
May, 2007
- Nothing. Scheduling people for games continues to be a nightmarish endeavor.
June, 2007
- Stealing from the very best, I pick up on the NYC crew's gaming plan, which is basically "have a huge group of players, and run a regular game for the first five who say they can attend." I start a Spirit of the Century game and sign up 13 other people. Only one has not played to this point -- most everyone has played at least two or three sessions, and EVEN I GOT TO PLAY ONCE! Success!
- I also start the Nine Princes in Pulp game this month.
- I get in the second episode of Primetime Adventures: Strange Allies -- "Djinn" -- it goes swimmingly awesome.
- Dave starts his Ill Met by Gaslight PTA game.
July, 2007
- Not one but TWO different FULL EPISODES of Spirit of the Century
- Another session of Nine Princes in Pulp -- unfortunately, pretty much the last one, as we've yet to get back to that.
- Dave runs PTA again.
August, 2007
- Spirit of the Century and the ever-rotating player pool wins again.
September, 2007
- Nothing in here. How odd.
October, 2007
- More Spirit of the Century: Two new episodes, both on Friday nights. How unusual. And lots of fun.
- A session of Dead of Night: "Zombies At(e) my Homecoming Dance" Still need one more session on that.
November, 2007
- Flying in the face of history (and sanity) I'm trying to start, play, and FINISH a short Galactic game during the months of November and December. Chargen is this Sunday. No other gaming is on the docket yet, because Galactic is going to take scheduling priority, but I do intend to get in some more Spirit of the Century and finish the Dead of Night game.
Analysis, after the cut...
Continue reading "Year in review" »
From one of the game's author's a great tweak to the phases in SotC character generation to move away from a time-oriented series of phases and instead use a more organic series of questions to find answers for:
* Who are you?
* Who are you connected to?
* What's your big issue?
* What kind of situations do you see yourself being involved in?
it's very very good.
Don't get me wrong -- I love the phases of character creation in the standard Spirit of the Century rules, and I've used them both in a standard game and an Amber game with good success, but the phases themselves are pretty closely tied to the post-Great War setting. This tweak allows you to 'fit' character generation into virtually any setting with no problems at all -- it has all the Aspecty-goodness of SotC with some great flavor added from things like Primetime Adventures "issues" and even the old-school Amber questionnaires. Good stuff.
Last night, Kate and I were running around the edge of this orc camp up the Greenway a few miles from Bree. We're leaving, but one of the guards spots her and takes off after her. She ignores him, figuring (correctly) that she can outrun him and he'll give up the chase in a little bit.
Me? I stop.
"You stopped you shoot him, didn't you?"
"Yeah..."
But let me clarify.
It's not because I'm bloodthirsty or need the xp or anything.
I (a dyed in the wool Tolkien fanboy) am given the opportunity to plant an arrow fletching-deep into the back of a fleeing orc.
It is going to be a long, long, LONG time before that gets old.
Okay. This is going to seem like it has a lot to do with MMO gaming, but at it's heart it's about gaming in general -- even just about social commitments as a whole.
In the MMO world (and in gaming in general, in a much less formalized/articulated way) there are two labels for players that can tossed around: "Casual" and "Hardcore".
Definitions of these two terms vary, but in a nutshell, the two might mean any or all of the following, depending on the speaker:
- Casual - Doesn't take the game that seriously. Doesn't play much (less than 20 hours a week, let's say). Isn't reliable in terms of showing up for planned activities. Automatically drops game-related activities if something 'better' comes up. Isn't a particularly good player. Isn't a particularly 'advanced' player (has good gear -- progresses through game content). Just isn't very serious about it. Might say they're showing up for something and just... won't. Has a life.
- Hardcore - Takes the game WAY TOO seriously. Plays more per week than they spend at work. Never misses, and usually organizes, planned game activities. Automatically drops other activities if something comes up in game. Is a 'leet' player with great gear, ultra-fast progression into end-game content, know the math of the game backwards and forwards, knows the Lore by heart. Is the attendance-nazi for in-game events. Lives the 'life' of a Basement Dwelling Virgin Troglodyte.
Clearly, the generalizations above are filled with statements from one side, talking about the OTHER side. In MMOs (and online forums in general) it's a lot more obvious, but it happens in face to face games, too. We all know the guy who keeps the spreadsheet of all the treasure accumulated at last weeks game -- who's got the best gear so far -- who the group has beaten, what the xp-per-session is, and who's missed the most sessions.
We also know the guy who says they'll show up to the game, doesn't for three weeks running, and when he does, arrives with his second six-pack of the day and proceeds to drunk (yes, "drunk", not "drink") his way through the game. The other players shake their head at this 'casual' person, the casual person wonders about those other five at the table who showed up on time, and clearly have no life.
So... which one are you?
Continue reading "Casual/Hardcore vs. the Serious Gamer" »
A good, though old, discussion about the histrionics and misconceptions that surround 'splitting the party' in gaming sessions.
Are you even really getting less spotlight time? Think about it for a moment - there's still only one GM, either way. He can only shine the spotlight for 60 minutes each hour. And even when the PCs are dialoging, the spotlight is switching back and forth between players. The total number of minutes is the same when playing "split." In party play, you feel a tad less engaged when your character is not in a scene, because you know you won't be able to be called upon to do anything. But everyone has experienced in party play where they've been in the room, but really not involved in the action going on, right? So is that possibility that you might be called on really all that much less engaging than just watching?
I like having characters who feel comfortable with doing their own thing -- this is the kind of play supported in a lot of the game I've played (Amber) and play (anything curre |
