Worldbuilders

Coinflip let you know earlier this week about a wonderful charity called Child's Play, and a great group of people doing crazy things to raise money for it, called Desert Bus.  I have been watching the antics myself and considering my annual charitable donation going to them.  But I have another charity that I consider every year.  And, in the footsteps of my compatriot, I am going to just drop a short post hear to draw your attention to another great charity: Worldbuilders.

Worldbuilders just fired up its engines for its annual drive, and this year they are looking to blow through their previous totals.  The charity is devoted to helping those in need around the world by, not just providing food and clean water, but actually giving people the means to produce and maintain their own food and water sources.  They buy farm animals to raise and breed by those they help.  They build water filtration systems and teach the people they help how to maintain them.  They provide sustainable help, not just one-off aid that may not last as long as people need.

One of the pillars of the charity is fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss.  He has an infectious dedication to this cause, and that spills over to those that he knows in the community, resulting in a store and an auction that offers unique and exciting items for sale, with all proceeds going towards the charity.  There is also a raffle, with each increment of $10 you donate giving you one entry.  And the raffle is huge, with items you will never find anywhere else.  In addition, Worldbuilders has access to matching funds, up to 1 million dollars.  So every $1 you donate is matched until the million is depleted.  Pretty amazing.  As are some of the stretch goals, where, if the donating reaches certain thresholds, Pat gets community members to do wild and wonderful things, like Neil Gaiman reading the community's choice of works (like he did last year, and previous years).

It's the season of giving, and you are inundated with people and organizations asking you to help.  We understand that.  But we wanted to bring your attention to two worthy charities that could use your help.  If you choose one to help, awesome!  You have helped someone in need and made the world a little brighter.  If you choose some other charity, cool beans.  If you don't have the money to help, not a problem at all!  Just spread the word about a charity of your choice.  That word of mouth is how these charities continue to help how the are able.  So Tweet it, Facebook it, write it on a piece of cardboard and hang it from a phone pole.

Thanks for you attention and have a good one! We will be back to our regularly-scheduled content shortly.  Cheers!

Desert Bus for Hope

No epic post today, just a little comment on one of my favorite times of the year, Desertbus week.

The crew at Loading Ready Run play a videogame about driving endlessly from Tuscan to Las Vegas. There is no other traffic, and your bus pulls slightly to the right. It has been described as the worlds most boring game. I think it looses out Roblox, the Shopkins of minecraft clones. More on shopkins at a later date.

So while they play this awful game they improv and sing and busk for charity. It's like the Jerry Lewis telethon for nerds. The more money they make the longer they have to play the game.

As those of you who have suffered through the PA farm show with me, I love me some endless boring entertainment with heart.

You can find them on twitch or

https://desertbus.org/

Throw em a couple of bones.

Adrift: Shared Worlds

Going in to today's post, I expected to talk about an idea for a Deadlands sandbox that I have been kicking around, and I may still throw that out there as another post because it is a darned ambitious plan that may not happen for quite a while due to its scope versus my time.  The interesting bit was that, in thinking about the idea, I realized that it had its roots in the fantasy boom town idea that I wrote about previously in an Adrift post.  I also had a third idea based around a new game I picked up this past weekend called Monster of the Week that included a certain aspect of the previous two.  In that instance, I realized I had the potential to do something cool: create shared worlds.  How, you ask?  And why would you want to?  Let's take a look.

The core of the idea revolves around a common point of interest in each world:  a cave.  In the Fantasy Boomtown idea, that cave is part of a fluctuating, magical dungeon that suddenly appears, a source of treasure and magic previously unknown to the land.  A town catering to those willing to take on the dangers of the dungeon for wealth and power grows up, creating the game setting.  In Deadlands, a similar idea would be in effect: a mine in some remote place suddenly produces a strange new mineral that creates a boom town around the mine to cater to those delving into the mine, a place that is in constant flux, opening portals to random places and spewing strange dangers as a result of the powerful and unknown mineral.  The final idea I had is of a modern-day town in a world steeped in the urban fantasy tradition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, or Harry Dresden where an abandoned mine or cave system suddenly erupts in magic and chaos, spewing dangers into the local town, but also providing strange and wonderful items never seen before. 

Each setting is a mirror of the other, with the connection being the cave system that suddenly erupts into a mysterious, chaotic flux.  This common connection creates the possibility of shared worlds.  In each world, the cave would randomly open portals to strange new lands, out of which come both dangers and treasures.  What if the portals connect not only to other places, but also randomly connect each of these three worlds?  What if the three worlds are actually the same exact place in three different possible universes (here we get into the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, interesting stuff in and of itself).  The dangers are magically or otherwise twisted versions of creatures from each world, as are the treasures?  What if these unstable portals could act as temporary gateways to each world, allowing those from one to enter the other, at least for a time?  There is so much game potential here that it boggles the mind.  

Juggling each of these worlds, let alone a shared universe could be quite daunting to the game master, though it could be introduced gradually so as to build each world separately then connect them when the game is mature enough to open up new chapters in the games.  Drop hints and nods to each world as the games progress to see how long it takes the players to  figure out the connection.  Of course, this lends itself to the dangers of metagaming, another good topic for a later post, so some groups may be able to handle this idea better than others.  But I know personally I am a fan of dropping easter eggs in my games, nods to past games or pop culture references.  In this idea, I could freely do that, knowing that they aren't just head nods, but hints to something larger.  

Another possible way to handle this would be to partner with another game master, or game masters.  Each running their own games and worlds, but dropping some common element in each world to start the connection, allowing for each to borrow from the other games as sparsley or liberally as they wanted.  At some point, this could even lead to crossovers, players from one game suddenly playing in the world of another.  Game masters could even move with the players, allowing them to run games in each other's settings for fun and entertainment.  If you were feeling particularly saucy and had a good amount of time and energy, you could create an overarching campaign dealing with why these caves and portals are appearing, what they are actually doing to the worlds (probably nothing good) and how the players from each world need to help in order to end the danger.  

The idea of shared worlds is nothing new, not by a long shot.  But I wanted to share my version and how it could potentially be used in my (and potentially your) games.  I am categorizing this as an adrift idea right now due to the time and planning involved in really making this work on a macro level, but it is something I will no doubt work towards.  If you are a player in my games, my apologies for the potential spoilers, but you never know when, where, or how I might final realize this.  Hopefully this gives you something new to chew on for your games.  Happy many-worlds building!

Adrift: 1 hour mmo

Normally adrift is about rpgs that we will never run, in this case I'm going with complicated computer RPG that I will never create.

I don't have a great relation ship with MMO's, I know lots of people who put a lot of hours in on them, playing multiple characters to max level. My experiences have been different, I usually play for a while, get about a quarter of the way through the level grind, get bored and move on. The only MMO that I played to max level was Guild Wars 2, and there is probably a good blog post in what GW2 does right. Despite having never enjoyed an MMO long term I have had enough good experiences that sometimes I get that hankering, I hear about a game, or just decide I need to level something up. The lure of building a character up over time dances just at the edge of reason and I download some tedius free to play. But in general I'm looking for a more condensed experience.

Early on when I was telling my friends about League of Legends I described it as having a character that you level up and buy gear for over the course of 40 mintues, a hyper accelerated diablo. But League really isn't that, it is a twitch pvp game with some rpg elements, but it got me thinking, what if the super fast rpg did exist? What would it look like? The one hour MMO.

The base idea is that you do all the things you do in an MMO over the course of a single hour. You get a fresh character at level 1, and over the course of the next hour you explore, adventure and level up. At the end of the hour the world resets and you do it all over again. Speedrunning for MMOs. The fact that each game you are going from 0 to max level means that you can play with your friends without worrying about who is what level.

So how do you make a game like that interesting and not frustrating? I think you make it incredibly difficult. Kind of like a dark souls situation. The world would be mostly static with set world bosses, dungeons and locations. There would be some randomness in creature spawns perhaps, but in general a person should be able to get better at a particular dungeon or location over time. I would set some kind of crazy goal to 'win' the game. The world is destroyed over and over reborn in fire and monsters, but if all the world bosses are defeated everyone on the server gets a 'win'. There would be a ton of mini bosses scattered around a piles of achievements. Even though the game experience is only an hour, there would be lots of goals that persist on your account. Who will be the first person to kill one of every mob, or complete all the dungeons?

There would be tons of highly specialized classes. As you play and complete goals you unlock more classes that you can play in future worlds. Maybe some classes would even be specialized for defeating certain world bosses or whatnot. There would be specialized gathering and crafting classes. Of course that means that there is gathering and crafting.

Gathering and crafting would be different than most MMO's there would be no market or gold economy to speak of. As you gathered materials they would either go to your personal inventory for crafting or more likely materials just instantly go into a global bank of resources anyone can craft out of. If you are in a guild maybe your materials all go to the guilds bank. Probably there would be an xp buff for sending your resources to the global bank. There would be of course be tiers of resources, and unlocking classes would allow you to gather more epic resources. Maybe some percentage of the resources you harvest would persist into your next games bank, so if you were a crafter you don't 100 % have to depend on other people gathering.

Crafting would be stolen from my friend Chris's table top version of an MMO, swordsphere. Basically in addition to basic materials there would be a mat called essences. Essence drops rarely when you kill a monster, bosses and mini bosses drop unique essences. There are no set crafting recipes, so you wouldn't be able to look up the stuff on wiki and know how to build everything. Maybe there are some basic set recipes, like making a sword is the same for everyone. But if you throw essences or other random mats in while crafting you have a chance to create a unique magic item. You take a sword and throw a swamp essence in, maybe a hamburger, and if you get a lucky roll you get the Misty sword of condiments. It has a chance to proc swamp based effects or hamburger based effects. Most of the time when experimenting you won't get anything, but when you do you get a unique recipe that belongs only to you, so as long as the mats are in the bank you can make that sword all day.

There are no shops and you don't have to return to town to shop. So if you are out adventuring and you see someone crafted the burger sword in the trading window you can get it. Weapons would have level requirements, and there would be a way for crafters to see what kinds of items are on the most wanted list.

Classes might be extremely specialized, each one with only one weapon type, or a set of spells, or damage type. I could see it like an inverted branching pyramid where you unlock the two classes under a particular class to unlock it.

So I would see the game working something like this. I log on and get into a pre world lobby. That lobby lists all the classes that everyone else has picked already. I see that nobody is gathering wood yet, so I pick woodcutter. None of my other friends are on, so I'm ok gathering this game. The world boots up and I wander into the woods and have a chill stardew valley like experience chopping down trees, fighting wandering beasts and stacking logs in the bank. Maybe I see someone crafted a unique chopping axe, so I pick that up. I earn xp toward lumberjack, and ranger which are both advanced classes that can gather wood. Maybe if I have played a shaman before I can get unlock points toward druid.

Another night three of my friends are on, so we all get set to roll with a tank dps healer trio, and make a run on a minor boss that none of us has killed before. We meet some people who are going for a world boss raid, go on the raid with them and get destroyed because we don't have the right kinds of damage etc for it. Getting a 'win' on a world would require several guilds working together each going after a different world boss. You would have to farm the proper mini bosses to feed the crafters the right essences to build their unique epics. You could have a fun hour doing whatever random thing you want, but the hardcore crowd also has their super challenges.

Sorry for the random brain spill on this one, wasn't sure how to start eating the elephant on this one.

Under the Fez with Fezzypug

 

Hello again!  If you are a regular reader, you will have noticed my absence this past week.  I apologize to you for the lack of content from my end, and to Coinflip, who ended up shouldering the blogging duties.  I was dealing with a potent life cocktail of a sick family, job stress, and multiple trips (which, if you have kids, you know are ordeals no matter what).  I will not go in to the excuses, just say that I am sorry and that I will attempt to maintain blogging regularity (that sounds like some sort of bowel issue..) so that we can keep making this blog a blog of substance and class.  Or just give you more to read for funsies.  Either way.  

 

Since I am back from a life-imposed break, I thought I would pull it back and tip back the fez again for another installment of "Who is this Fezzypug guy?"  If you have no desire to read another post about me (I am not a narcissist, honest), I absolutely understand.  But coming back to the blog, I feel the need to give you a better understanding of my personal viewpoint.  I could write articles and never touch on who I am or why I say or prefer certain things, and that would be perfectly valid.  That is easy to find on the internet.  But the blogs that resonate with me are those where I have a sense of who is behind the words on the screen.  Knowing their viewpoint lets me connect on a more personal level to their thoughts and opinions, especially when it comes to reviews, because I have an idea of where they are coming from.  So for the next few paragraphs, I will give you my personal viewpoint so you can understand a bit why, for example, I prefer certain game types.

 

As you can gather from my previous posts, I am a married middle-aged parent of two younger children.  I have a full-time, 9-5 job (documentation specialist in higher ed IT) as does my wife.  We have no local family, which means that we are either traveling quite a bot to see folks, or else we are hosting visitors on weekends.  So what does generic bio mean in terms of my gaming viewpoint?  Let's take a look.

I mentioned in a previous post that I dislike boss fights in video games.  Feel free to go back and read that post for details, but one of the main reasons is that I don't have the time or patience to spend throwing myself at what many times seems like arbitrary game play gates for the sake of lengthening play times.  As you can gather from my bio above, I don't have much game time right now.  Between working and taking care of children, my free time is a sliver of what it once was, so I have to be a bit choosier about what I play.  Not only do I not have time, but I lack the patience to grind endlessly or learn the subtle nuances.  Having younger children whittles down your supply of patience, and the lack of sleep that comes with children that do not sleep through the night cuts that supply to a wafer-thin amount that can quickly run dry if a game tests me. 

Due to this lack of time and patience, my current gaming mindset is one of escapism and relaxation.  For this reason, I prefer story over mechanical complexity, in all aspects of gaming.  Where once I thrilled to play mechanically complex board, role-playing, and video games, I now seek out more relaxed, story-driven experiences.  I have a tough time now enjoying games categories like euro games, tactical strategy games, or extremely crunchy roleplaying systems (at least to run, I can still enjoy these as long as I am not behind the screen).  Don't mistake this for me disliking these categories.  Far from it.  I just find it hard to enjoy them at this stage in my life as my mind is generally mushy with stress and lack of sleep. Additionally, I find myself playing games on easy mode rather than challenging so that I can use that precious time to relax and enjoy the story rather than tensing and stressing over game play (I will have an upcoming post on the benefits of easy modes in games, stay tuned).

In the roleplaying realm, I am dealing with not only my issues, but also a gaming group that is in a similar situation, which causes difficulty in finding regular play time with consistent players.  That is why I have turned my attention to game ideas like the Fantasy Boomtown idea I wrote about easlier, a game that is broken down into one or two nights per adventure, does not require the same people or same characters at every session, and is more about a place rather than a complex plotline.  I like the idea that I can build the continuous story in the background of such a game, and not have play sessions be a bottleneck to the story.  It also allows for a more random schedule, which is what I am dealing with.  In addition, I am restricting my focus on running either a personally well-known system (like Deadlands) or else exploring systems that may be mechanically lighter in favor of story (Monster of the Week being a current interest and the topic of an upcoming review).

As you can see, I am more story-oriented, casual, and time concious in this stage of my life.  Another pillar of my viewpoint is a preference for cooperative play over competative play.  In my past, I was a very competative gamer, even falling headlong into competative Magic: the Gathering tournament play.  But these days, I find myself prefering to co-op my games.  In video games, I enjoy playing on a team with folks that I know, preferrably versus the game, but I don't mind playing a competative game as long as they know that I am not serious about climbing ladders or getting ranks.  IN boardgames, the boom in co-operative gaming is a boon, as I continue to find new and intersting cooperative dungeon crawlers, deck builders, and games that eschew traditional competition for more common interest goals.  And roleplaying, for me, has always been a shared experience rather than my, the game master, versus the party. To me, roleplaying is the pinnacle of a cooperative, share storytelling experience, with the game master as a force to help the players create a story and not and adversary (I have known a few adversarial game masters and to me that diminishes the fun overall). 

Hopefully this rambling mess of words gives you an understanding of my viewpoint on gaming as you (hopefully) read my posts and reviews.  This is not who I was and this may not be who I will be in the future, but for now, this is Fezzypug.  Hopefully knowing me a little bit will let you enjoy my posts a bit more and give you a better understanding of where I am coming from when I review games going forward.  Maybe knowing me a bit lets you completely disregard what I write because it will not be relevant to you, so hooray for saving you time!  If nothing else, my thanks for letting me ramble.  I will do my best to write less about myself now that I have this post out of my system.  With that, I replace my fez, nod my head, and bid you good day. 

Crits!

Inside of us all there is a monster. Its little monster brain doesn't function quite properly. This monster loves games of chance. When you lose, it doesn't care, it can shrug off losses like they are nothing. When you win, the monster goes crazy, releasing dopamine all out of proportion to the scale of what is happening, making you feel wonderful about a ten dollar scratch ticket that you just spent 30 dollars to get. This monster is your brain. In the hunter gatherer days we had to get very good at accepting high risk high reward activities. Without agriculture the world was a giant slot machine spitting out animals, veggies, and berries. So our brains have become masters at forgetting our failures and rewarding those random successes.

Our games have their own random berries and mammoth herds, we call them crits. Designers have been using crits in games for a long time. Even a very old game like backgammon uses them, whenever your dice match you get twice the movement. Any bonus for a rare outcome counts as a crit for us. The most common one we see is getting a high die roll, but I would even count catching one of your out cards in Texas hold em, or getting pocket aces. Even Magic the gathering and Hearthstone have that lovely feeling when you pull the perfect card off the top of your deck. The most beloved house rule of monopoly, putting money on free parking adds crits to the game. As you can see lots of games have crits, but they are most famous in rpgs.

If we dissect the crit a little bit there are two main mechanical factors, the rate at which crits occur, and the effect that the crit has. I would add as a secondary concern the ease of execution on the crit. Another consideration is the number of rolls that you see in a typical session, in a game where you only roll a few times a night you can afford to have a higher crit rate than in a game where you roll 400 times a night. The rarity of the crit is what makes it so tasty and exciting.

The non mechanical aspects of the crit can't be ignored though. Some players are rewarded by seeing big numbers come up on the dice, other players want to hear the gory descriptions their attack. The crit adds to the natural flow of the story, they provide highs and lows to what otherwise could be just rote execution of a map combat or skill checks. When a crit is rolled it is an opening for the players and the GM to remember that they are telling a story and take a moment to bring the descriptive elements back into the game. The guy who always plays the hyper competent, super awesome, Tom Clancy Mary Sue character is annoying, but we all want to be awesome. The crit is the games way of giving us permission to indulge, to do something ridiculous with no shame.

The crit that everyone is familiar with is the dungeons and dragons old standby, the Natural 20. Rolling a 20 on a twenty sided die generally means an automatic hit, and double damage to boot. The Nat 20 is maybe the perfect crit, or at least the standard to judge the other by. With a 5% chance of happening you can expect to see a few of them on any given night of gaming. The double damage aspect is good, but not amazing. You don't need to roll nat 20's to win a fight but it helps thing along. The crit is a perfect bonus that lets you hit that unhittable enemy, pick the unpickable lock, but the game would function perfectly well without it. It happens in an intimidate and recognizable way, when that 20 pops up on the top of the die you know that something great happened.

As a side note, the crit is what makes the advantage system in 5^th ed feel so good. Advantage works out to about a +5 bonus, but if you roll two dice instead of one you get the double fun of crit hunting. So much more exciting than a +5.

The D&D crit has everything going for it, a perfect rate of occurrence, simple to resolve, no game breaking effects. It fits the game perfectly. Let's look at a game that takes all of those aspects and takes them to the other extreme, Rolemaster. The Rolemaster crit is a completely different beast. Rather than crtting fairly infrequently, a crit occurs on many of attacks that hit. Resolving the crit is complicated requiring chart look up. Rather than having a minor effect RM crits run a range of effects from nothing to killing a foe in one shot. Indeed while the goal of a D&D combat is to grind a foe's hit points to zero, in RM your goal is land a crit and kill them or degrade them so much they fall into a death spiral of penalties.

It isn't exactly fair to describe the RM wound resolution as a crit in same way a D&D crit is. Rolemaster has an involved wound system because that is one of the things they decided to model. They just happened to call it a critical hit roll. The design of RM is that they want lots of fun random rolls with potentially devastating effects. So they built a system where most hits give you a pull on the wound chart slot machine. The real crit roll is that wound roll. That's the one where a 0 does nothing and 100 instakills your enemy and a 66 makes them wet their pants for some reason. RM loves this crazy high variance and embraces it wholeheartedly.

Neither way is right, both systems are well tailored to the kind of game that they want to be. A whole range of options in between exist. There are a bunch of things that make a game a good or bad fit for a player, determining what level of randomness you enjoy is certainly one of them. Let's all give crits some love.

The unspoken campaign

The game is running as smoothly as can be expected. Everyone is having fun, every week you get together, catch up with your friends, possibly eat some kind of meat-splosion. You play the game, push the story along, roll some dice, have some victories, catch a few defeats, you laugh and play a little bit too late and go home to get too little sleep. The next week the game is mostly forgotten, but here and there you think about what you are going to do with your character, how you are going to tackle the next challenge. Maybe you shoot a few emails back and forth before you pack up your dice and do it all again the next week. The game keeps on going like this for weeks and weeks, and eventually years and years, building up into one of those epic games you talk about for the rest of your life.

Or

The game is running smoothly, you meet, you eat, you play, you clatter dice and everything is great. Then at the end of the night someone says, “Hey I just picked up Whaling Red Seas, the game about steampunk space whaling on mars. I'm thinking about running it when this campaign ends.” Now you go home tired, get too little sleep and go about your week. Only now instead of thinking about what your character is going to do in the upcoming game, you are considering what character you are going to play, Martian dolphin shaman, Chunkor the one armed harpoonsman, Cogmartial Goodman hunting down a rogue difference engine? You might think of the minor quibbles you have with the current game and how Red Seas would fix them. You might email character concepts around, then someone might email you back, and soon there is a growing snowball of enthusiasm. You miss a few weeks of your current game due to the holidays or vacations, and next thing you know, the epic campaign is dead, and you are on to the next thing. Soon space whales are replaced by supers in the dustbowl which is replaced by cavity creeps the rpg... and you are a serial next big thing gamer.

Now I can't help it, I love trying new games and systems, I have long since accepted my fate as a next big thing gamer. However I hate that feeling when a game isn't working quite right and the game dies before its time, it never feels good to have a game die early. Perhaps it is unfair to the games that I'm playing to be constantly playing the next game in my head. It almost certainly is bad for the current game to talk about future games.

The long open ended game is great. I love the long term building of a character, the chance to build a bigger story, the freedom to wander down random little corners of the world. The short term game is great too, the chance to tell a focused story, to try new things, to maybe play a character who is a little reckless. We are telling a story together, and that includes the time not at the table. So we need to keep focused on keeping our current games going strong rather than looking into the future. Next time I'll try to keep the extra games in my head, or somehow find more time for gaming!