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!

What should we put here?

Fez Flip is about two month in on our tiny journey down the well trodden path of geek culture internet blogging. I think things are going pretty well. It is fun to have a place to write about random topics. The constant pressure to keep on writing hasn't been oppressive. Most of our pageviews probably come from me obsessively refreshing the page, but we just started cross posting and providing other ways to get into the blog. I know that consistently providing interesting post that challenge our readers is the best way to grow the audience. So tonight while staring at the blank page I have decided to make a distinctly boring navel gazing post. Who needs readers? Instead of writing something cool, I'm going to write about all the cool things I could have written.

Something thinky: These posts tend to just be whatever I'm thinking about at the moment. I almost wrote about my love hate relationship with narrative rpgs, and I probably still will. These kinds of posts seem the most self indulgent but they are also the best way to get across a particular take on a subject. I worry that what I have to say isn't that interesting, novel or well put together, but making a blog at all implies that I think I have something to say. As to the point of well put together, that is something I need to work on. Rather than writing the night before I need a post up, I really have to start doing a couple of drafts. Look for improvement on this front.

Reviews: Fezzypug and I were talking about this tonight. Reviews are good content and I think it is something that we want to do. We are working on a format, or at least talking about one. So far I think we are leaning toward shorter overview articles without any kind of numerical score. Another thing we agree on is only reviewing things that we like. If we are talking about something it probably means that we liked it. It would be nice to have some kind of gimmick, but well reasoned opinions are more important than being quirky. I think reviews of everything should be on the table, movies, video games, board games, music, rpgs, food, beer, tv, comics, novels. The other benefit of reviews is that they can be cross posted easily and try to pull some eyeballs our way.

Mining: The mining articles I really like. They allow us to talk about things that arent' necessarily great, in positive way. And it helps show our process when it comes to filing away those game ideas. They are also easy to write because they don't require original content. We are just butchering a movie or whatever and laying out the choice cuts of meat. I probably should have done one of those about the directors cut of Nightbreed.

Adrift: Adrift is our series of rpg games that will never be played. I think I want to expand this into game that are beyond my capability of even making. Why stop at rpgs I don't have time to run? Why not talk about ideas for computer games or board games?

PC posts: There is a ton of Gm-centric material out there. I think because most of the people writing content tend to be Gms rather than players, but also because it is much tougher to create good content for players. Players have considerably less control over your average rpg than a gm, but I think this is a subject worth covering.

Now on to some things that I think I might want to do that require a bit more work.

Monthly adventure: I'm thinking it might be fun to try to put out some kind of larger rpg content once a month. This could be a generic (or specific) scenario. Fezzypug mentioned putting together NPC profiles for games. Those could make good individual blog posts, or be bundled into a monthly pdf. Or both! I have a bunch of background material from my short lived Fort Pitt game that I would love to do something with.

Videos: One thing that we talked about tonight was video reviews for RPGs, it doesn’t seem like there are a whole lot of them out there. RPGS are a bit tougher for video reviews in the sense that they don't have as much to show. Board games have bits, movies have trailers, but an rpg book might just be a few pieces of art. So I was thinking that an rpg review really needs a quick bit of actual play to spice it up. Is it possible to effectively sum up an rpg in 5 minutes of game play? I wouldn't want it to go longer than that. The big drawback I see to this is it works against my other big plan.

Samurai game dev posts: I've been working on this samurai western game for a while now, and it seems mostly in a playable form. What I need to do now is playtest the hell out of it. There are a ton of moving parts to it and I know for sure it needs to be streamlined. What aspects of a game to keep and what to cut can only really be figured out by contact with the player characters. There are plenty of things to write about it for sure. As my friends can attest I will talk about this game to no end. This is really the project I should be dedicating my time to, but procrastination reigns supreme.

So if you are one of our 3 readers, what kinds of posts do you like? What do you want to see more of? What don't you like?

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. 

The Favored: Deadlands

Image Copyright Pinnacle Entertainment Group

I was staring at a blank page, struggling with what I should write about today.  There are times when the well is dried and there is not much you can do to fill it.  I started down some paths and quickly gave up.  Nothing was hitting me.  In frustration, I glanced at my email to see if anything new showed up, and lo and behold I see an email from a recent Kickstarter that I backed: the 20th Anniversary edition of Deadlands, the Weird West RPG that won my heart long ago with the simple subtitle, "The spaghetti western...with meat!"  I had just received my pdf copy of the book, and paging through the copy, taking in the new art while the latest album from the Pine Box Boys played in the background (The Feast of Three Arms, of you want to check it out...horror-themed country folk), I realized I might as well talk about one of my all-time favorite systems and settings.  So here it is, one of my top 5 RPG systems and settings:  Deadlands Classic.

Now, before you go off and google Deadlands, let me clarify which I mean, because there are two versions of the western setting (as well as a couple of versions of a post-apocalyptic setting using the same world and system).  Originally, there was what is now called Deadlands Classic.  As the years progressed, the creator sought to streamline the system and make it more accessible, as well as usable in a number of ways, so he created the Savage Worlds system.  The version that I favor is the Classic system.  Savage Worlds is a decent generic system but suffers the generic system issues of losing setting-specific flavor and unique systems in favor of lighter rules that lean towards bland in order to fit into a number of settings.  Though I would happily play a Savage Worlds game, I much prefer the older system.

Deadlands Classic is a bit of a mess, system-wise, let me tell you that up front. The combats are probably the roughest part, with each attack action taking a number of dice rolls to determine to-hit, damage, location, magic rolls if needed, etc.  So one combat can go on for hours, if you let them.  The system is also ranged-oriented, so the melee rules are a little wonky, at least in the original version.  A later update smoothed some of the issues out, but the system remains close to broken in a few ways, but if you aren't above house ruling, then you should be fine.  

What it does right is add a number of setting-specific mechanics that give the system its flavor.  You use poker chips to represent experience gained, as well as chances to change dice rolls, avoid damage, etc.  Since gambling is a big theme in the mythology of the west, you have to decide whether to hang on to those chips for that experience at the end, or burn in them in a chance to alter your fate.  To keep with the gambling theme, you use a deck of cards to determine initiative.  In addition, one magic class, the huckster, actually plays a hand of cards with a demon in order to cast their spells.  Those that hate randomness in games may want to steer clear of this class because you can get anything from an epic, god-like cast off of a hand in one cast, and a complete dud in the next.  But that wildness, to me, is part of the flavor and the fun.  Beyond these unique mechanics is a skill-oriented system augmented with a merit and flaw system to build depth in a character, and a way to be rewarded for actually playing to your flaws.  

Beyond the system is the heart of the game:  the setting.  Deadlands is the epitome of "weird west", combining history, magic, horror, and a touch of humor to create a wonderful backdrop to tell stories.  The best Deadlands game can move successfully from a straight western to pure horror as a normal situation is turned on its ear by something beyond the norm.  In Deadlands, fear is food for the dark entities causing the horror in the west, making nightmares real in an attempt to sow more fear in a bid to terraform the Earth in preparation for their eventual return.  Player characters represent the light in the darkness, doing their best to fight fear with hope.  Their strongest weapon is storytelling, telling everyone the see of their victories against the darkness and lowering fear levels.  Otherwise, fear can reach a high enough level that an entire area is claimed by the darkness and only the strongest can push it back.  

The alternate history setting gives game masters (called Marshals in Deadlands) the leeway to play with historical events and figures, giving them different outcomes or backgrounds to suit the story they are telling.  In addition, death is not necessarily the end for characters.  If they die, they have a chance to come back as a sort of sentient undead called Harrowed.  If they are chosen by a dark spirit (called manitou), they must play through their worst nightmare in order to fight the manitou for control when they return to the world of the living.  Harrowed enjoy some powers and benefits, but they must constantly fight the manitou riding inside.  If they fail, the manitou can take temporary control use the character to cause the very fear they are fighting.  

I could keep going, but I will spare you my gushing.  Suffice it to say, Deadlands is one of my favorite systems.  Is it perfect?  Absolutely not.  But the unique system mechanics, combined with the wonderful version of weird west storytelling it offers makes it rise above its faults in my opinion.  So if you have never had a chance to play or run Deadlands Classic, look for the 20th Anniversary edition coming soon from Pinnacle Entertainment Group and dive into your own spaghetti western...with meat! 

The myth of Hero

Excitement was in the air, that thrilling anticipation of a fresh rpg. Friends around the table ready to pass through the door of imagination. They sit ready to make bigger than life characters, explore strange worlds, defeat evil, cross and double cross. The GM pitches his world idea and players instantly snap to coming up with character concepts. Someone asks casually, “what system are we using?” The GM pauses, and reaches into his backpack, with a slight grunt he pulls two massive tomes out. Blue and gold graphics start to bring dread into hearts of the players. That internal fear confirmed when the GM says, “Let's try Hero”, as he drops the the books causing a 3.8 tablequake. Instantly fear turns to horror, the joy of the game drains to be replaced by visions of calculus and 4 hour long combats. Another game is a victim of Herophobia.

Hero's reputation as a monolithic impenetrable fortress of rules is well earned. The rule books are huge an imposing. The default setting, Champions, is potentially the most confusing variant of hero that you can run. The quick start rules in their Sidekick editions are good, but no book seems to provide an obvious signpost as to where to start. All of these choices are intentional for better or for worse. The giant rule books are a marketing point, including the famous rulebook can stop a bullet stunt. Champions deserves to be a flagship line because it highlights what hero does better than any other system, but getting that sweet super hero gold requires a lengthy time investment to make it work right. Hero is marketed and designed for Hero players first and foremost, and that has the side effect of keeping hero in the 'hardcore' rpg category during an age of light and story driven rpgs.

Hero has a lot going for it. It has a wonderfully consistent set of rules that once you understand them scales through all kinds of power levels and campaign settings. Layers of complexity can be added and removed painlessly. When people think of hero they tend to think of the full buy in version. High character point super heroes with complicated powers and multi powers. But the true selling point, and the one that puts it in a class above other generic systems is the strength of it base system. The simple bones that build into the variety of beasts it can become. My friend Chris likes to say that Hero is his go to light game. While Hero isn't a light game by the standards of modern rpg design, I know what he means. It is easy enough to apply hero to most campaign concepts, with a minimum of tweaking. For those oddball one shots it is often just as easy to throw together a few Hero characters. In games with no power, or low powers the process of making a hero character offers a lot of control while being pretty painless. At low character point levels fights move extremely quickly, letting you run very action oriented games without a lot of combat downtime.

Easy character generation, quick combats, but that doesn't sound like Hero. That isn't champions, but unfortunately Champions and Hero are mostly synonymous. So what hero needs is a quickstart that plays to those advantages. The allure of the quickstart is that you can hop right into a game quickly, but a hero quickstart would be generic, so suddenly there is a lot of work to build the world. So we need a stripped down quick start game with an easy to understand world tied into it. It turns out that before Hero came out the system published exactly what I described in 1984. It was called Justice inc. JI was a version of Champions with all the powers stripped out, and a really tight pulp hero game theme. All the rules needed to play, with a few little add ons for the sake of theme. A good set of resources for running pulp games. In many ways it was the perfect Hero supplement.

As much as I hate the Fantasy flight new Star Wars model, it might be a good line for Hero games to take. Fantasy Flight with their Star Wars rpg republishes all the core rules with some minor modifications each time they put out a major sourcebook. While this is annoying for a game where the theme changes just a little bit, it is an awesome fit for a generic system that could have wildly different settings and themes. I think a hero curious person might be more likely to buy a small tight game like JI to get a feel, then if they enjoyed it, it would be easy enough to expand into the wider game. It of course doesn’t have to be JI, a cool post apocalyptic game, some unique take or licensed fantasy game. The easiest and quickest way to learn Hero is to play with those already converted to the cult of Hero. Currently there really is no good way for new players to easily get in.

I recommend giving hero a shot. Especially if you are the kind of person who wants a game that is mechanically deeper than most. The mechanical depth is offset by its logical consistency. The math involved is very straight forward.  Hero just isn't as inscrutable as people make it out to be, if you are capable of splatbook surfing 200 pathfinder books to make some crazy build you should be fine playing some good old 1980 rpg technology. Long live Hero.

Musings: Defining Game Value

 

I thought I would take a moment and reflect on how I define the personal value of games. This line of thought actually began a few years ago as I looked at the extremely large number of video games in my PC game Steam library.  As I stared at the long list of games, I realized that I had not played many of them at all, causing me to wonder if maybe I had a game collecting problem.  I did, and still do, but the results of that initial thought has led me to a way to at least stop and consider a game purchase before actually clicking the "Buy" button.  So while I may not have curbed my incessant need to collect games (both video and tabletop), I at least have a measurement that I can call on.

The method I use to gauge whether I have gotten my money's worth out of a game is based on the per-hour cost for the game.  Basically, take the amount of money I paid for a game and divide by the amount of time I have played the game (easy to do in Steam since it gives you an actual time played stat).  The result is essentially paid per hour of game play.  My basic guideline is that I strive to pay one dollar per hour played (so, for example, I would hope to get 30 hours out of a $30 game).  This is a basic method that is sometimes tweaked, depending on the game itself.  I have paid $60 for a game and only played 15 hours, but felt that the experience was so good that I felt that I got full value for my money. So it is, of course, a very subjective sort of measurement, but it lets me feel like I got real value when I hit that mark, or go beyond it.  There is nothing like playing a game to a satisfying conclusion (either the end of the game or when I am done playing) and finding out that I got a great value based on this method.  It's like a double win!

What the above measurement also allows me to do is make decisions when I am considering a game to buy, and this is where it has really helped me. Now, whenever I look at a game, I ask myself if I will get my dollar-per-hour value out of the game.  That makes me think hard about a $60 game.  After all, that means I would be looking to get at least 60 hours of game play out of it.  And in my current life and schedule, that is hard to do.  I also factor in the potential for a great experience that would offset time played, but if I am not sure about a game, the per-hour cost estimation can make or break my decision.  Conversely, it also makes taking a chance on less expensive games easier, since I give myself the permission to play less in order to feel like I got value.  I also feel extreme gratification when I go well beyond the dollar-per-hour goal.

This method of gauging gaming value has had a positive effect on me, both in terms of finding satisfaction in a game even if I do not complete it (a struggle I had for a while, and a subject for another article perhaps), and in making me aware of what games I buy and actually playing them.  After all, there is no value in buying a game and never playing it.  This has led a switch in me from game collector back to game player.  And that makes me happier overall.  My Steam library may not be growing as quickly now, but I am seeing more and more games that have been played.

Now that I am using this metric on my video gaming hobby, I need to start using it on my tabletop gaming buying.  I am very guilty of board game collecting, as well as roleplaying book collecting.  My dollar-per-hour ratio on many of the games that I have bought is not good at the moment, and my addiction to tabletop Kickstarters does not help.  I may need to tweak the metric a bit since tabletop gaming is a different beast and involves others, so there are factors to consider in determining value beyond my own personal enjoyment.  This will be an on-going project, and one that I will update on this blog as I try to figure out how to swing from collecting to playing in the tabletop realm.

So how about you, dear reader?  How do you determine whether you have gotten your money's worth in a game (video or tabletop)?  Do you think my method makes sense or seems off?  It works for me and gives me peace of mind, but it may do nothing for you, and that is ok.  We all determine value differently.  I would love to hear how you determine yours.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get going. I just picked up DOOM on sale, so it is high time I go wreck some demons...

Failure week pt 2: Adding the fail painlessly

So how to we add the ever present risk of failure to our games? Without frustrating the players too much. The following suggestions can be stuffed into basically any game.


The first thing to do is bring up the topic of failure with the players. Let them know that failure is an option and that it isn't the end of the world. See if the players are even interested in upping the difficulty of the game, or if they think the campaign is doing just fine as it is. Odds are the players have never considered if they think the game is too easy or too hard. They may think that things are already too dangerous.

One thing that you can do is explicitly take player death off the table. If the characters can die or not should probably be discussed at the start of any game. For some players this will take all the tension out of the game, for others it can provide a sense of safety that will allow them to act more freely. Player death is probably a full topic in its own right.

Run a game where it is explicitly clear that the players are weaker than their foes and likely to fail. This works better in a sandbox world where the players are allowed to tackle challenges at their own pace. Aftermath. Cthulu. This solution isn't a good fit for everyone. It requires players to be ok with banging their head against the wall accepting failure, but getting the much bigger reward of defeating a truly superior foe. While I personally like that style of game I don't feel like most people would.

Make being defeated not the end of the world and especially not the end of the game. Enemies take the players prisoner, or leave them stuck in a death trap. Or even just win and leave the players unconscious. The one technique I would be careful about is having the bad guys steal the players special gear, players can become very invested in loot. Imagine instead the players are defeated by goblins in the big bads army. They take one of the pcs leaving the rest. The captured pc is taken to the big bad, who interrogate s the pc, and then throws her off a, cliff where she barely survives and is nursed back to health by blink dogs. Now the players have met the bad guy, have more reason to hate him, have learned stuff about his lair etc. Some players might consider this scenario a kind of rail roading, I consider it a natural consequence of player choices. Different players have differing tolerances for this kind of thing, so know your players. And if you are a player in this situation, roll with it and embrace it as an opportunity to have something interesting happen to your character.
Make negative consequences last as short as possible. Prison break movies are fun to watch, but in the context of most games spending every third session escaping from being taken prisoner would be really tedious. Escaping the goblin camp doesn't have to be a whole session. You can do it with just a few dice rolls for escape and stealth. Ten minutes is good enough. The quicker the players bounce back and get into the fun stuff the less they will hate taking a loss.

Make running away very effective. Let the players escape bad situations easily. Rather than having the bad guys shoot then in the back or ruthlessly hunt them, just let the players make a reasonable escape. It makes retreating a real option, so encounters can be more dangerous. The PCs shouldn't necessarily be in a good position when they do escape. The bad guys can still be hunting them, or they might be forced to retreat into a disease infested swamp, retreating shouldn't be fun, but it is nice to have it on the table. The big flaw with this idea is that players hate running away. It feels like the gm stacked the odds against them, and makes things feel adversarial.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and I am curious what people think. Would you want an increased failure rate in your games?

Friday we will take a look at games that mechanically encourage failure.

Failure Week Pt 1: Why you always win at D&D

Welcome to Failure week at Fezflip. How is that different than any other week here? Well this time I intend to fail. Or talk about failure anyway. So put on your chainfail, harpoon a humpback fail, get on the failboat, listen to some nine inch fails, visit your criminal friend in the failhouse, endure the failforce winds, get pelted by the failstorm, and enjoy some blogposts delivered by the failman.

Failure in Table top RPGS

Roleplaying games are designed strangely from a narrative standpoint.

Good stories tend to have victories and set backs for the main characters. Roleplaying games from their dungeons and dragons dna tend to run on design of players win an increasingly difficult series of challenges, until beating the boss in an epic battle. Players start out strong, and get whittled down to win by the skin of their teeth, but they never really take a loss along the way.

The back story of most rpgs is that the players are a small band of heroes, going up against a powerful enemy with vast resources or power. The players are underdogs up against impossible odds. But mechanically games encounters are designed with the conceit that the players will come out triumphant. So the real narrative of rpgs is the players are a small band of super powerful people, up against a giant army of crappy guys who will fight them one at a time until they are all dead.
This design is awesome, it perfectly fulfills player fantasy, they feel like underdogs the whole time, but they get to win win win as well. At the end of the night the players get to feel awesome. This style of story works excellently in the fantasy dungeon crawler. Videogames grabbed onto that model as well, so it feels comfortable to most players.

But, when you listen to people's favorite game stories, they are rarely about the time they coasted through a dungeon and defeated a Dragon with 5 hit points left. Favorite gaming stories are about epic deaths, terrible rolls, hilarious mistakes, and I will add in clever ways of defeating genuinely superior enemies. So apparently people enjoy failing! Or at least enjoy telling stories about failure.
But let's say I designed a d&d dungeon with the typical five to eight encounters, but instead of having a 95 percent chance of winning, the players only had a 50 percent chance of winning each encounter. Players would get frustrated at the constant failure, and the game likely wouldn't progress very far. They game would just feel wrong if the main villain showed up and murdered the players in the second encounter as well.

In books and movies the main villain is often directly intertwined in a story, interacting with characters. In rpgs often exposing a big bad to the party early on just results in a final battle early on. So villains tend to hide behind waves of minions. Role playing games work in a wide variety of genres and tell all kinds of stories. Many of them don't fit into the win win win paradigm. Super hero stories are normally a series of defeats, leading to a victory, the same goes with sports stories. Detective stories all all about dead ends, close calls, back alley goon beating and the like. Action movies often have the protagonists getting abused and chased for the majority of the movie. There are tons of rpgs in these genres but they still often are built on the win win win engine.


Next time we will look at things that GM's and players can do to add the sweet taste of bitter defeat to their games.

Player fun versus character logic: A dilemma

 

A shorter post from me for today.  I have been mulling over a decision as as player for a while now, so I thought I would tell you the scenario and see what you think.  Maybe you have had a similar sort of question, or perhaps you can just tell me that I am thinking to hard about this.  Which may very well be the case. 

Next weekend I will be attending a weekend session for a very long-running post-apocalyptic roleplaying game (Aftermath!, for those interested in the game, though heavily modified because the rules as written are...mystifying) .  In this game, I have a player character (PC) that has survived many years of game play in a game where the life expectancy was a session or two at best, but somehow has been able to survive getting shot multiple times, getting blown up multiple times, giant rat attacks, winged apes, crazy survivors, terminator robots, and a host of other dangers that plague the everyday scavenger. Even gravity itself hates my character in the game, as is evidenced by the fact that I have fallen so many times in the game and survived that the game master actually created a new skill just for my character:  falling.

My character seems to be in a good place in terms of skills, equipment, etc.  He is a gunsmith and armor smith by trade and the party finally found a base with an awesome workshop that has almost everything he needs to ply that trade.  The base is in a community that would value his contributions.  As a character, I always had in mind he was a reluctant scavenger and survivor.  He would much rather pass his time tinkering in the shop and helping the community rather than crawling around the ruins of the city, looking for things to kill him or holes to stumble into.  Impossibly, he has found what may be as close to a happy place as he could hope to find in the miserable world in which he lives.

As a player, I enjoy playing this character.  He has some great skills that can help the party, and not just the smithing skills.  He is actually a really good combatant and is not too shabby at scavenging.  I have lived with this character long enough that he is easy to get back into, even after extended stretches between play sessions.  I would love to see the whole arc of this character, especially considering the amount of time I have put into him and his story.  As a player, there is still plenty of story left in this character.

So where is the dilemma?  As a player, I want to keep playing this character for the fun and the utility of his contributions to the group.  But lately I have been thinking about it in terms of the character.  It seems like, for this character, he has found a place that he could comfortably "retire" from adventuring and settle down.  He could work in the base, outfitting the party and repairing what gear they need fixed before their next adventure.  He could be a huge, constant help to the community around the base, making arms and equipment for better defense, and teaching others his craft so that more people could help in the same way.  It seems like, given a choice, the character would happily slip into an NPC role.  The game master has even offered to come up with a system to continue to improve the character's skills as an NPC in order to avoid suspending all growth after becoming an NPC.

I am torn between what seems like the best choice for the character versus my enjoyment (and perhaps others in the party who may like adventuring with this character).  I know I could make another interesting character that would be a different story and journey, and the idea that I could have a mini game with the original character as an NPC is tempting.  But I like the character I am playing now and as I have said, i wouldn't mind completing his journey.  So there is the choice.  What would you do?

In the end, I think I will keep playing the character.  My enjoyment ultimately outweighs the potential choice a character might make since this is a game.  Games should be fun.  If I am having fun, then keep on keeping on, right?  Of course, you do know what this means:  the next session, my character's luck will finally run out and instead of becoming an influential and essential NPC, he will probably find some hole in the street, fall in, and be devoured by giant rats.  I guess that would just be par for the course in the harsh, sadness-inducing game world in which he exists...

The 40 Year Old Gamer

 

This past Friday I turned 40.  It was an eventful sort of birthday, full of...interesting happenings.  I did get to play some games, and that got me to reflect on my life as a gamer so far, and also what the future may hold.  I hope you will indulge me as I share some of those thoughts with you.  If the ramblings about a gamer's life don't interest you, I invite you back Wednesday for our regularly scheduled gaming content.

I started fairly young as a gamer.  My family played all of the traditional family games:  Monopoly, Scrabble, The Game of Life, and others.  To me, it was part of growing up.  Family game night laid the foundation for my gaming future.  I learned how to play with others, how to follow rules and, when necessary to further group fun, how to make the rules fit our play style.  The biggest lesson, though, was also the simplest:  have fun, and help others have fun at the same time.  Though we could get competitive, my family always made sure we had fun first.  Perhaps that made me less of a competitive style player, but it definitely made me aware of everyone at the table, and how my playing affected them.

In junior high, I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons, my first real roleplaying.  Our school had an art club, and my art teacher at the time had a large collection of books to help stimulate our artful musings.  In that collection I found a set of first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books.  I was fascinated and he caught on pretty quickly when my art took a decidedly fantastical turn.  He mentioned that the school used to have a gaming club until concerned parents shut it down.  The books hadn't been touched since then and he asked me if I would like to take them to keep.  I was beside myself with happiness. My brother had a roleplaying game that we tried to learn and quickly gave up on (Tunnels and Trolls, for the curious).  That was my only contact with roleplaying games until this point.  The frustration of that attempt almost made me turn the offer down, but the lure of those pages was too great.

I was enthralled by the books and their potential for magical stories.  I found others that were interested and we began learning the rules and playing the game.  I spent my junior and senior years jumping from group to group, learning first to be a good player, then eventually trying my hand at running a game, the role that found myself preferring, since I not only could help tell a story, but also had a better time ensuring that the group I was playing with had fun.  In college, I played to an almost hedonistic degree, playing all-night games, campaigns that lasted years, and trying out any system and roleplaying world I could.  Roleplaying has been a hobby and a love that has lasted into today for me, and will continue to be a part of my life as long as I can roll dice. 

In my life, I have played a wide variety of games:  roleplaying games, board games, video games, live-action games, text-based games, and more.  I love games of all types, something I hope to share with you as we move forward with this blog.  Roleplaying holds a special place in my heart, however.  It is what cemented gaming in my life and also where I made some of the greatest friendships I have ever had, and continue to have.  Being someone who suffers from diagnosed social anxiety, it has always been difficult for me to meet new people.  Yet gaming, and especially roleplaying, has allowed me to overcome that mental constraint by leading me to like-minded people who share common interests and have been welcoming and receptive to this shy, awkward goofball.  I love telling stories with people, and I love that this activity works so well to bring people together.

Gaming in my life has evolved from the first taste, through the hedonism of college, to the more mature version of gaming I experience today.  I am a parent, as are many of those I game with.  Schedules are packed and erratic, so regular game time becomes harder to find.  Instead of giving up on gaming, though, we try to find new ways to game, to figure out how we can adapt gaming to our lives without sacrificing the fun.  I will talk in the future about some of those ideas (my "Adrift: Fantasy Boomtown" post is a good example of an attempt at adaptation) in order to help others with similar issues.  But the overriding idea is that I refuse to give up on gaming because it is more than just a hobby.  It is ingrained in who I was and who I became, and I intend on making sure it helps me as I figure out who I will become in the future.

Gaming today for me is more than just the act of playing.  It is creating ideas and worlds to potentially play.  It is creating this blog with a friend in order to get these ideas out there in hopes of connecting with others and moving our gaming in new directions.  It is teaching my kids and their friends new games, and also how to play games with others (not just to win).  It is in looking at how I can use my love of gaming to help others through charity work.  It is in trying to create, and not just consume.

I am not sure much of that made sense.  I hope it shows you a bit more of who I am under the fez, though, and my passion for gaming.  As I enter the second half of my life, I am reflecting, but I am also looking forward to the coming years.  There is quite a bit I plan on doing, and gaming is at the heart of much of it.  Hopefully you can join me on part of that journey.

Cheers.