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.

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.

Like a Boss

I was watching a streamer on Twitch the other day play through the latest DLC for the game Dark Souls 3.  I like watching people play this game.  I love the sense of exploration.  I love the loot that you can find in the game and the fact that a large portion of the game world's lore is actually found when you inspect each item you find and read it's description.  I love that the equipment is not just another sword or helmet, but it was someone's helmet, and they had a story, a purpose.  The enemies are almost artistic in their art styles and their varied fighting techniques.  There is artistry in the incredible visuals, the mind-blowing music, and the attention to details that many may overlook in a rush to beat the game.  It is a world that invites you to stay and explore, to become part of it's story.  But I said I love watching it played.  What I do not like is playing it.  And that is for one reason:  the boss fights.  If there is one mechanic in gaming that I dislike more often than not, it is the boss fight. 

The Dark Souls franchise is built on a foundation of wild and intricate fights with epic boss characters, each a feast for the the eyes and the ears.  All of the exploring and loot-gathering is merely a preparation to face these gods of the game world.  And each boss fight is a game unto itself.  Dark Souls is not easy.  It is not meant to be easy.  Dying to a regular mob is not uncommon.  But the bosses, they are on another level.  They each have their own powers and moves, their own phases (new parts of the fight that unlock after getting them down to a certain health level), and it is your job to learn the dance that comes with these moves and powers in order to defeat them.  I have heard of people spending hours and hours on one boss fight alone, encountering the boss, trying to learn a bit more of the dance, then dying, and repeating the cycle.  I played the first game, loved it right up until I hit the first boss.  Then, after trying a couple of times, I set down my controller, got up, removed the disk from my machine, and never went back. 

Boss fights are like nails on a chalk board for me.  I get why people like them:  they are the epic finale to everything that you work for in many games.  They are the root of the problem that you are trying to solve, and the quickest way to solve it is to punch it, shoot it, stab it, or kill it by whatever means you are equipped with at the time.  There is a sense of accomplishment at fighting something greater and overcoming it.  But for me, it is many times a jarring interruption in the gameplay that, up until that point I had been enjoying.  I am the first to say that I am not a hardcore-mode kind of person.  I play for story and escapism, not to slam myself repeatedly into boss gates that often seem thrown in because they are expected.  Dark Souls does boss fights well, but I don't have the interest to spend my precious gaming time on those gates.  I have played countless games in my decades of gaming and there are very few times when I have enjoyed fighting bosses.  More often, they leave me frustrated and feeling like I am wasting time I could have been enjoying the game. Don't get me wrong:  I have no issue with difficulty in a game. I even welcome it in many cases, unless I know that a difficult game also has boss fights.

 I know I am not the usual gamer and I am ok with that. Unfortunately, that means I have to suffer through the inevitable boss fights if I want to play many games.  And in more than a few cases, like the Dark Souls franchise, I choose not to play them despite knowing that I would enjoy all other aspects of the game, no matter the difficulty.  Many times when I have this conversation, people ask what alternatives to the standard boss fight there are.  Boss fights have been in games so long that it is often hard for people to grasp the idea of a game without boss fights.  But there are alternatives, and to me these games are a welcome breath in a world smokey with the fires of bosses.  One good example is a recent game named Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.  Though flawed in its own ways, the game sucked me in with the promise of bossless play, and it delivered.  But how?

Beyond the setting, cyberpunk, the game play of Deus Ex revolves around missions.  The beauty of the game was twofold.  One, you had a choice in how to complete those missions.  You could be stealthy or violent, murderous or pacifist.  All that mattered was that you accomplished your goal.  The rest was up to you.  And those goals included taking down someone with more power or thwarting epic plans.  But instead of straight up boss fights to decide the outcome, missions had you erode power bases or steal items important to the plans so that they could not carry them out, or had to figure out some other way.  I played the game stealthy and only killed one person the whole time and that occured at the very end, during what was set up to be a big final boss fight.  The beauty of this fight, though, was that you again had multiple ways of taking care of the boss outside of straight violence, and my method was discovered thanks to wandering off the beaten path and exploring.  What I found was a very game-appropriate way of taking the boss out without firing a shot, and I felt extremely satisfied with my conclusion to the game.  And there is the other side of boss fights for me: if they have to occur due to story, give me another way to defeat them outside of the dance of the boss fight. 

There are many games nowadays that eschew the traditional boss battles, thankfully, so my game card can stay filled without fighting more than a few bosses.  After all of my words against boss fights, I will say that, if they are few, are integral to the story (and not just an artificial game play gate), and offer me a way to utilize the skills that I have developed in the game, then I am not totally opposed to the occasional boss fight. Sometimes I even welcome it if it adds value to the story and is not some devious dance that I have to learn that breaks the pattern of game play.  But if the game revolves around the idea of the boss fight being the driving goal, then I will probably give the game a hard pass.  I don't have the time or patience to offer to those games.  For those, I will turn to watching my favorite streamers on Twitch to experience vicariously the thrill of victory and agony of defeat versus my gaming nemesis:  the boss fight. 

All those tiny glass screens

Nick Bentley over at  the Move38 blog recently published a blog post about smart phone integrated board games, and the general current board game boom we are experiencing.

Smart Board games in the age of screens

The general thrust of the article is that, A: Part of the board game boom is a reaction against screentime and B: This screen fatigue is a major reason that smart phone integrated board games haven't performed very well so far.

I think that maybe there is a different influence that phones and social media gaming have had on the current board game boom. Cell phones are ubiquitous now, we carry them everywhere. Having a pocket computer allows us to do all kinds of incredibly useful things, central to the use of the phone, we can speak with anyone anytime, can send messages and mail with incredible ease. As secondary uses go we have an array of applications that bring incredible utility, guitar tuners and metronomes, Appalachian trail maps and guides, sound and light board control interfaces, medical device monitors, every interest and industry seems to have benefited from pocket applications. Social media is so perfectly suited to the device that personal networking has surpassed the original function of person to person voice communication that phones were originally intended for. The end result is that we have created devices that are so useful to us that in a short 20 years it is now more common in the world to have a cell phone than it is to have indoor plumbing. We haven't even mentioned mobile gaming yet.

Mobile gaming, gaming on a small screen in short limited amounts of time pushes mobile games into a few design spaces. One type are the quick simple control arcade experiences, endless runners, flappy birds etc. Another big one is the turn based or time sink style games, things like clash, or farmville where you can just hop on now and again do your thing and let the game run in the background. Where there are games there is the need to compete as well, but the play at your own pace style of phone games also needs to apply to competitive games as well, simple designs, turn based, ease of learning and mastery. All of these design elements already exist in classic board games. So mobile developers are smart to mine board games for ideas. Words with friends is the most obvious example, just a simple scrabble clone that works perfectly on the platform.

So now we have a massive market, playing games that are essentially digital board games already. It makes sense that some number of these users are going to be reminded of the good times they used to have with board games and go looking for them. Back to the article linked in the move38 blog, they say that in 2015 the board game market made 250 million dollars, (still less than half the CCG category!) The overall mobile game sector in the same year was 34.8 billion dollars. So even a small number of mobile users looking for board games creates a big swing. It feels more likely to me that rather than people fleeing screens for face to face games, that our screens have created more gamer in general. This is a case of a rising tide raising all ships, only in this case it's the mobile gaming tide pulling up the board game segment.

Or more likely it is a combination of both unplugging and new interest.

So if I'm right we should see better performance of these smart phone integrated games. Well in fact we are seeing good sales from these games, when they are good games and the integration makes sense. To look at some of the games listed in the original article we see some winners and losers. Golem Arcana is often pointed out as an example of failed digital integration in a board game. I was at gen con this year and attended a panel by the main developer of GA, and my impression is that he is very interested in the potential of hybrid games, and as such they may have pushed the envelope too far, making the game totally dependent on the app, rather than having the app be a tool to assist in the game play.

Alchemists on the other hand was one of the better selling hobby board games of 2015. The phone in that game is used more as a tool than a game engine. It is used to randomize and moderate mechanics that would be tedious otherwise. Similarly Mansion of Madness second ed seems to be doing well, in Mansions the app manages the bad guys and the map, while the players work together against it. I think the reason we haven't seen more success in app integrated board games is that we just haven't seen that many of them yet. We are just starting to see them and everyone is learning how to execute them properly. It feels more likely that these games fail because of poor execution rather than a societal backlash against screens.

That said, I'm old and curmudgeonly enough that I'm not especially looking forward to tech enhanced table top games. I enjoy the pushing of cardboard bits, I like that you have to understand the mechanics of a game instead of having them hidden. These app games are coming though so the best we can hope for is that they are fun. From looking at Move38 they seem to be working on it, but seeing how they are making proprietary widgets, I can see why they would have a bias against screens!