Tobold's Blog

The Favorites of Selune campaign - Level 5 - Session 5

2013-05-21T09:16:00.001+02:00

Our heroes had ended the previous session by killing the vampires in the dining hall of Castle Ravenloft. As they had used up a lot of resources like healing surges and daily powers in the last two fights, this session started with them looking for a place to take an extended rest. They wisely decided to take that in the chapel, and nothing happened during that rest. Refreshed they entered the dining hall again, where Count Strahd von Zarovich was still playing the organ. The players half guessed that this must be an illusion, him not having reacted to the combat and still playing hours later, but didn't go and try to disturb him. Instead they took the stairs down to the kitchen.

Downstairs Igor with his big spoon was stirring his "ghoulash" in a big cauldron, with arms and legs sticking out of it. Igor clearly wanted them out of his kitchen, but was still friendly enough to talk with the adventurers. They asked him what was in his "ghoulash", and got the reply: "Ghouls, of course!". Behind Igor was a double door, and when asked he told them that this was his fridge, and they should stay away from it. Not heeding that, and not making an effort to negotiate passage, the players tried the door, causing Igor to become angry and to attack by spilling his cauldron into the area where 3 of them stood. That not only scalded the characters standing there, it also spilled the 4 ghouls from the pot. Two of the players standing in the ghoulash spill, and taking ongoing damage from it, had high initiative and scrambled away. The third, the cleric, unfortunately had a low initiative and took the brunt of the first ghoul attack, ending up dying on the floor before he could do anything, and failing his first death save.

Fortunately for the players it isn't all that easy to kill a character in 4th edition, especially not in a group with two healers. One healing spell from the warlord later, the cleric was back up on his feet, and blasting the ghouls with turn undead. The group concentrated on the ghouls, and took them down in a few rounds. Igor wasn't much of a fighter, but his cauldron was filling up again, and he got off a second soup spill, this time without ghouls in it. So the players tried to get him away from the cauldron, and managed to push him into a corner and kill him. Searching the room they found only a ring of keys, and no treasure. After a short rest they were ready to look what was in the fridge.

The fridge turned out to be a 30' x 30' room with a magical cold effect. The floor was iced over, and 6 corpses hang from butcher's hook, clinging against each other from the draft when the door was opened. Iron bars with a locked door cut the room in two halves. The rogue approached that door, with two other players in the room, and the remaining 3 still in the kitchen, when the other door at the opposite side of the room opened and 6 vampire guards armed with crossbows rushed in.

Now the idea for the fight was that the players would try to open the iron bar door to reach the vampires, as not everybody in the group was good in ranged combat. But as a DM one has to get used to the fact that things not always work as intended. Instead of rushing forward, the players fled the room, back to the kitchen. They expected the vampires to follow, but the guards didn't have the keys. So when opening the fridge door again, the players were greeted by a hail of crossbow bolts. Expecting that they had constructed a barricade from kitchen tables giving them partial cover. And so they exchanged spells, arrows, and sling stones with the vampires. That wasn't terribly efficient, because only the ranger and mage were really good at that sort of combat. But having run out of the room the players didn't want to press forward again, wanting to deny the vampires the chance to regenerate by biting them. They ended up having to move into and out of the line of fire, retreating and healing the wounded when necessary. But they kept up the attacks on the vampires, concentrating their fire so that they fell one by one. After a long combat, the players ultimately succeeded in killing all vampire guards, and that is where we ended the session.

MMORPGs and win conditions

2013-05-17T08:54:00.001+02:00

Dàchéng believes I don't know the difference between toys and games. But not only am I very well aware of that difference, I also believe that he didn't consider the possibility of somebody playing with a toy and only imagining playing a game. Imagine the following situation: You are on your way from home to work, when a car of a colleague rushes past you at high speed. Once arrived at work your colleague laughs at you and brags on how he beat you in your race. But you weren't even aware that there was a race on. Who of the two has misunderstood the situation?

MMORPGs very much work like that. Many of the people bragging how great they are at this "game" only managed to beat those who didn't even know there was a competition. And even different groups that all consider the game competitive all play under different rule sets: One guild claims to be the best because they had the server first kill of some raid boss. The next guild also claims to be the best, because they did it without practicing in the beta. The third guild claims to be the best because while their kill was later, it was done in less attempts. Gevlon claims to be the best because his guild did it in blue gear. And so on.

The difference between a toy and a game is that a game has rules that are universally understood and agreed upon. Playing with a toy in a competitive mind-set doesn't turn that toy into a game. When I said that World of Warcraft has no win condition, that was not a theoretical statement; it is a statement based on eight years of history: Nobody was ever declared the winner of World of Warcraft except by himself. World's most famous WoW player is more likely to be Leroy Jenkins, famous for his incompetence, than some player playing WoW exceptionally well. At best some guilds achieve passing fame, but they never really "win" the game.

That is not to say that it isn't perfectly all right to find a group of like-minded people and invent your own victory condition and strive to achieve it. Just like you can build a really impressive Hogwarts from Lego, and be proud of your achievement; but can you then say that you won Lego? I don't think so. You only competed against yourself, by rules of your own design. Winning World of Warcraft in your own mind doesn't make that win universally accepted.

No fun later

2013-05-16T13:45:00.001+02:00

As Azuriel always disagrees with me in the comment section of my blog :) , it is worth mentioning that I fully agree with his post on Instant Gratification vs Fun Investment. So much that I'd even use the same examples, deckbuilding in Magic the Gathering and campaign preparation for Dungeons & Dragons: For time investment for a future return of fun to be worth while, the activity into which you invest that time has to be fun by itself.

Of course in the context of MMORPGs it has to be remarked that at least for me leveling up a character has been fun for many years. I did not just do it as a time investment for some sort of "fun later" in the endgame. At some point in time I had 5 max level characters, with only one of them participating in any multiplayer endgame activity. And I always suspected that I wasn't the only one who found leveling fun, because if leveling was a boring obstacle to everybody, somebody would have developed a game where you would raid from the start, or introduced an "instant max level" option in the cash shop.

Furthermore, after having tried both serious raiding during vanilla WoW and more casual raiding later, I found that in fact those activities were not any more fun to me than non-endgame activities. At times serious raiding felt more like a job, due to a strict schedule and participation requirement. That was the guild that kicked me for the crime of going on holiday for 3 weeks in the summer. Also in various phases of raiding I must say I didn't have a whole lot of fun when we had to tackle the same content over and over and over again. Other endgame activities were even worse: I found "keep warfare" PvP in games like WAR or GW2 ridiculous zerg fests, and consider that whoever invented daily quests should be shot.

So the whole concept of investing time for fun later seemed always a bit shaky to me. And when after years of MMORPGs the leveling part became boring out of sheer repetitiveness, with every new game working the same, I stopped having "fun now", and didn't believe in "fun later". There is only so long and so often that you can stand a quest to kill 10 monsters, even if in the new game that quest has voice-over or you get the quest when entering the area with the 10 monsters instead of at a quest hub. And sorry, the writing even in triple-A MMORPGs isn't exactly J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin (probably because the writers of quests didn't have "R.R." in their initials). Most often it isn't even up to Robert E. Howard pulp fiction writing standards. All this is fun for some time, but that fun breaks down after a decade of little change.

Today I want to start a game and have fun right away. And if I still don't have fun after a few hours, I ditch the game and start the next one. There are too many games to waste time on those who aren't fun.

Time, money, games

2013-05-15T15:01:00.000+02:00

There has been some renewed discussions on the "evils of Free2Play" following the news that Rift is changing its business model and like so many others will abandon subscriptions. In the context of people recently pointing fingers at World of Warcraft for being down to 8 million subscribers it is worth remarking that WoW is one of the few games that actually still *has* subscribers. There is a wide range of different other models now, so that even games that on paper still have "subscriptions" now often can be "paid" in in-game currency. Are you a "subscriber" of a game if you don't actually pay the game company any money?

And if subscription numbers can be weird, Free2Play games can be a hundred times weirder. Some people have very incoherent attitudes towards the various business model, especially what to consider "Pay2Win". Can you Pay2Win in a PvE game that has no win condition? Is buying something you could also get from grinding Pay2Win? Some people even claim that whether buying an advantage for real currency in a game is Pay2Win depends on whether you buy that advantage from the game company or from another player, which seems not very logical to me.

What is behind all this can be easily explained by behavioral economics. Fact is that no system is 100% perfect and fair, there are always winners and losers. And people will always end up arguing for the system in which their preferred play-style is the one that is favored by the business model. Take for example two people, one playing only 1 hour per month, the other playing 100 hours per month. In a subscription model the guy playing 100 hours pays a hundred times less per hour played than the one playing only 1 hour. In a Free2Play model the guy playing only 1 hour could easily find himself in the situation of not having to pay anything, because the content available for free is sufficient for him, while the guy playing 100 hours is quickly hitting some paywall. It is obvious that these two people will have very different appreciations of the relative merits of subscription models vs. Free2Play models.

Fact is that Trion changes Rift to a Free2Play model because they hope to make more money that way. And they aren't making more money because of the people who will now be able to play the game for free. They will make more money on the one side from people who previously didn't play, and now pay at least a little for various items from the shop. And more importantly they will make more money from people who will now spend much more than the monthly subscription rate on Rift. A Free2Play model is profitable because it removes the cap on how much a player can spend on a game each month.

And let's be very clear about that: People don't spend that sort of money just on hats. Stuff that sells really well is always of *some* use to the player, even if it is something that can also be acquired by time spent in the game. Calling that Pay2Win is a misconception based on the very wrong idea that everybody plays games to win. You would have thought that after over eight years of World of Warcraft people would have noticed that nobody has won yet. And never will.

Again the rants against "Pay2Win" can be explained by behavioral economics. MMORPGs have been rather good at creating the illusion in some people that they had achieved a lot, because progress is more based on time spent than on skill acquired. So unlike skill-based games, where progress naturally slows down due to diminishing returns of learning the game, MMORPGs have been able to offer almost permanent progress and great ePeen to people who played a lot. If the person playing the most suddenly isn't top dog any more, because somebody next to him is wearing the same epic armor won in a locked chest lottery, that illusion of superiority shatters. And as much as I hate the locked chest lotteries that pop up in more and more games, I must say that people paying money for epics are not the problem; people believing that epics have meaning are.

The reason why I welcome Free2Play games is that I don't play to win. I play for fun, for the experience of playing, of learning the game, and succeeding challenges by skill. A challenge that consists of hundreds of hours of grind seems as stupid to me as a challenge you can succeed by paying hundreds of dollars. Because neither spending time nor spending money is ultimately an achievement at all. It is the money spent to access content and the time spent to learn the game that gives a meaningful "return on investment" in the form of fun and entertainment. It is incomprehensible to me how some people strive to turn games into work. I already have a job, and it pays well enough for me to be able to afford convenience items from Free2Play shops. Pay2Win is if you pay money with the intent of winning the game. These games get a lot cheaper once you realize that winning isn't actually possible at all.

Yes, I've seen the Hex Kickstarter

2013-05-15T09:34:00.002+02:00

Over the years I have repeatedly on this blog proposed the idea of having a game that mixes MMORPG and Trading Card Game elements together. So when Cryptozoic did a Kickstarter for a MMO Trading Card Game called Hex, I got several mails and comments of the "have you seen this?" type from readers. Yes, I've seen it. But no, I don't believe in it. As much as I did like the "we'd do anything for funding" video, I couldn't help but notice that all what they have right now, both in terms of experience and in terms of presented gameplay, is the TCG part. There is next to zero information about the MMO part. And I don't believe you can create the MMO part for half a million dollars.

Basically my impression of Hex is that it is a Trading Card Game *only*, or at least first and foremost. In many aspects it looks like a clone of Magic the Gathering Online. Whatever else they might add to the game, it will never resemble anything you and me would call an MMO. I mean, how would a classic MMO gameplay even be remotely possible when the combat is turn-based and on a separate screen? My Shandalar idea is for a game that is a MMO, and plays like an MMO, with combat taking place in real time in the 3D virtual world, only with cards replacing the current static abilities on the hotkeys. Cardhunter, turn-based as it is, is still a lot closer to my idea than Hex will ever be.

Ultimately Hex is a competitor of Magic the Gathering Online or Hearthstone, not World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2. And as Azuriel already remarked, you can't call it a Free2Play game if the only way to earn cards is to buy them. To me Hex is just a case of deceptive marketing. I haven't seen anything in the material that was shown which would suggest an innovative merge of TCG and MMO gameplay.

Graphics in pen & paper RPGs

2013-05-14T10:12:00.003+02:00

When you read a review of a video game, almost always there are comments about the graphics: How do the characters look, how are they animated, how do their surroundings look, and how do things like spell effects look. There are both artistic considerations to that, as well as technical ones, like how blurry a texture looks when viewed from close. In a pen & paper game like Dungeons & Dragons you would think there are no graphics. And in fact there are a lot of people talking about the "theater of the mind" in which their role-playing sessions take place. That is all fine and dandy if the scene is about roleplaying a negotiation with a tavern-keeper or merchant. But once you get into combat, the theater of the mind quickly breaks down, with every player and the DM each ending up with a different picture of the combat situation in his head, usually leading to heated arguments.

So many people use some sort of aid for depicting battles in a pen & paper game, for example figurines on a battle map. And suddenly you have graphics in your game. Of course that works perfectly well with minimal graphics, badly hand-drawn with a dry erase marker on a blank map with 1" squares. But just like graphics in a video game are nice to have, having better graphics in a pen & paper game can also help immersion.

I was thinking about that because I am preparing Madness at Gardmore Abbey, a huge adventure with 30+ encounters, but only 2 poster maps. The books propose using the official tiles to create the rooms for the other encounters. But I find the tiles both ugly and not very practical: You need to lug around a huge box of them to have all tiles for the various rooms, then you need to find the right ones and assemble them on the table, and as they aren't fixed in any way they can easily be accidentally moved when a player wants to move his figurine, throwing everything over. So I was happy when I found a set of encounter maps at the Cartographers Guild. They are a *lot* prettier than tiles. The grid isn't always visible enough for my tastes, but I'm not going to recreate those maps myself in Campaign Cartographer just to change such a minor issue.

So now I'm spending a lot of time printing those maps out to scale on a color laser printer and taping the pages together to form a battle map. That works reasonably well for up to 2x2 pages, which is 16 x 22 squares. I have been experimenting in the past with having maps printed on poster, but that is only a minor improvement and a lot more expensive. Besides maps, I also try to make other handouts in my game graphically appealing. For example in my current adventure the players found "The Book of Strahd", and I printed the two pages of text in a handwriting font on a parchment-like background. I got real Tarot cards for the fortune teller in that adventure too.

You might say that graphics aren't essential to pen & paper games, but I do think that they improve the final result. And as I can only play a session every two weeks, I have the time to do some preparation.

Randomness in Cardhunter

2013-05-13T16:31:00.002+02:00

There are certain games which would be impossible to play without randomness, for example Poker. And personally I like some degree of randomness in tactical games, because it adds to replayability if for some reason you want or need to do the same combat again or a similar one. Thus I am quite happy with the random card drawing mechanic in Cardhunter. Having said that, randomness is not something binary which you either have or have not. There are varying degrees of randomness, from the minimal variations of the damage your fireball does in World of Warcraft, to games where a random event has a stronger influence on the final win or lose result than any strategy or tactic.

Now Cardhunter in this respect is somewhat weird, because how random the game is depends on your level. As I described earlier, with levels you get new gear slots, and each gear slot comes with a fixed number of cards, even if you don't put anything in. Thus your "deck" gets thicker with level. And that is something that every Magic the Gathering deckbuilder is painfully aware of: The thicker your deck is, the more random it gets.

Imagine a simple deck of 10 cards, 5 red and 5 black. Your chance to draw a red card is 50%. Double the deck to 20 cards, 10 red and 10 black, and obviously your chance to draw a red card is still 50%. But how about the chance that if you draw two cards, you draw exactly one red and one black? Or the chance to draw 3 red cards in a row? I won't do the math here, but it is easy to show that the probabilities for multiple cards depend on the number of cards in the deck. The 10-card deck has a lower chance to draw 3 red cards in a row, because the percentage of black cards remaining in the deck goes up by more after each red card drawn than in a 20-card deck.

Thus at level 10 in Cardhunter I find myself more often with "extreme" results like drawing only movement cards than I did in the first few levels where my deck was much thinner. The other effect is that if you have one specific card in your deck which you would like to draw, the higher you are in level in Cardhunter and thus the thicker your deck is, the lower is your chance to draw that card. To some extent I can counter this increased randomness by adapting my tactics, for example spending a turn running away from the monsters if I drew lots of movement cards but no attacks. But it does happen that I lose a fight and then win it on the next try with the same basic tactics, just because of a better luck of the draw. Well, I guess that is the price you have to pay to get a bit of random variety into your game.

Gardmore Abbey Player Map

2013-05-12T13:17:00.002+02:00

I'm planning on running a huge "sandbox" adventure for my D&D campaign, using Wizard of the Coast's boxed set Madness at Gardmore Abbey. Basically that is a huge abbey complex on a hill with lots of encounter locations, and the players are sent there on different quests and have many different possibilities on how to approach and play through the place. For me it appears obvious that at some point in that adventure the players will need a handout of a player map of Gardmore Abbey. But the adventure only provides a DM map, with big encounter numbers written on it. The one dialog you don't want to hear in that adventure is "Where do you go next?" - "We go to the place marked "3" on the map!".

Now I did find a nice photoshopped front view of Gardmore Abbey, which will be perfect for the first session. But at some point I will need a map with the encounter numbers removed. And to my surprise I couldn't even find one with Google. So I had to make one myself. I am not the world's biggest expert on Photoshop, as evidenced by the fact that I don't even have Photoshop but use MS Paint instead. But I was able to scan the DM map and remove the encounter numbers good enough for my purposes. So as a public service I decided to put my Gardmore Abbey player handout map on my blog, for future DM's to find. It ain't perfect, but better than nothing.

Death in Dungeons & Dragons

2013-05-11T17:09:00.002+02:00

As I mentioned yesterday, Cardhunter is a game about a group of people playing Dungeons & Dragons. At one point their usual DM Gary is replaced by his elder brother Melvin, who makes the players play through an adventure designed to kill them, and is a rather mean DM. He reminded me of actual DMs I played with many years ago, for whom the job was some kind of a power trip. Anyway in Cardhunter your whole party is fit again as long as just one of them survives, and if you wipe you just have to replay the same adventure again. In Dungeons & Dragons death is a lot more severe.

I didn't have a player death in my campaign yet, although there were some tight spots. So some commenters believe I deliberately don't kill my players. That isn't true. But I don't design adventures to be lethal on purpose. I design them to be challenging, and then death can be a consequence of either stupidity or really bad luck. For example in my last D&D session there was the possibility of the players getting all killed: They had found out how to weaken him by scattering the earth from his grave in the dungeon; but if they had skipped the dungeon, they could have gone directly to the end fight, and faced an un-weakened and therefore presumably deadly vampire lord.

The fight they actually did was also not an easy one, as they were outnumbered by the 9 castle vampires. But they played that combat very well, using great tactics to avoid getting surrounded early, and some good combos between the powers of the different players. In my opinion, if the players play well, victory should be the normal result. You can always have the dice rolling some extreme results, but it would require a lot of bad luck for a player to actually die if the groups' tactics were sound to start with.

What I am trying to avoid is the kind of game played in this Mines of Madness podcast, where repeatedly and early in the adventure players die for no good reason, and are repeatedly replaced by a constant stream of "member of your party that came to the mines later", played by whoever just lost his character. If your character is disposable like a Kleenex, you never develop any character story. So while I would agree on a player rolling a new character of the same level to replace a dead one, I wouldn't want that to happen too frequently.

Cardhunter first impressions

2013-05-10T08:44:00.002+02:00

After having made sure that there is no NDA (the beta forum is even public) I want to tell you some more about Cardhunter. You could say that it is a game about a game, you are playing a group of kids playing old-school D&D in the basement. There is soda and junk food on the table, and the artwork of the modules is spot on 80's D&D. Only of course you can't play a real pen & paper game on a computer, so the gameplay has been replaced by one of the best turn-based, card-based tactical games I have ever played.

Your party consists of a classic trio of a warrior, a priest, and a wizard, with your choice of race as dwarf, human, or elf. What your characters can do, whether it is moving, attacking, or mitigating damage, totally depends on the "cards" in that characters "deck". So there are cards like Walk that let you move 2 spaces, or Bash which lets you deal 4 damage to an enemy next to you. But unlike other games, e.g. Magic the Gathering, you can't choose what is in your deck freely. Instead cards are contained in gear, for example you could wear Plain Old Boots that contain 3 Walk cards.

Characters start out with very few gear slots, with no gear in them, but an empty gear slot counts as a very basic item and thus already has some basic cards in it. Every time you finish a fight you get a treasure chest full of items, which you can then equip. Or sell and buy other gear with the gold. At the end of an adventure consisting of several fights on different maps you also receive xp, which make your characters gain levels. With higher levels you get more slots for gear, and you can equip higher level items. Later you also get "talents", shown as little dots, and some gear comes with a requirement of a number of those dots, limiting how many items with talent requirements you can equip. Gear comes in all levels, and in different rarities (common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary).

The link of cards to gear has important consequences. In other trading card games you often wanted to have lots of rare, more powerful cards. In Cardhunter, while of course you'd prefer rare or epic gear over normal gear of the same level, you have the same effect as in a MMORPG: Yesterday's epic will be outdated by tomorrow's uncommon of a higher level. High-level gear doesn't help you if you character doesn't fulfil the level requirement, or doesn't have the talent points. So while there are various ways in the Free2Play model to get more gear with real money, like a premium account that gets you one extra item in every treasure chest, you can't simply buy your way to victory.

Instead you will have to play to win. And Cardhunter is not an easy game. And if I use words like challenging or difficult here, please understand that this is not about reflexes or being able to memorize sequences of button presses. In Cardhunter you will need to think. You and Gary the DM, the computer-controlled opponent playing all the monsters, play cards in turn. You start out with something like 4 cards per character, randomly drawn from the deck of that character, based on the gear he is equipped with. So already in the first turn you need to make decisions on which card from which character to play, while the other two characters won't do anything that turn. You can also pass, which is what at some point you will need to do when you have run out of useful cards to play. When both you and your opponent pass, new cards are drawn. So on the one hand you will need to deal with your draws being random, as well as some dice rolls affecting actions. But on the other hand the sequence in which you do things is extremely important. If you play all your move cards early, the enemy might be able to move away from you afterwards and play ranged attacks on you without you being able to retaliate. Your Righteous Frenzy, which lasts only until new cards are drawn, won't be any good if played after you exhausted your attack cards already. And so on.

There is a huge number of different adventures and game maps already in the beta. And the randomness of the draw makes the same map play out differently even if you play it twice with the same characters and the same gear. You can't just memorize the best moves, you will have to make the best out of the cards you have been dealt each and every turn. And then of course you'll think you need better cards, which means you need better gear, which is a huge motivation to play and advance your characters. And unlike other games you can't simply grind easy encounters endlessly. Each adventure can be played only once per day, and if you play adventures more than 2 levels below your characters' level, their level will be reduced temporarily and they won't earn any xp. As you can recruit more than the three characters that fit into one party, I'm currently planning on opening a second party to play through the lower level adventures that aren't of much use to my more advanced main party any more. This is a game I play because I have fun playing it every single turn, and not just because I need some reward for some hypothetical fun promised for some future date. Fun, fun, fun!

I would like to make one final remark on the quality of execution of the game: It is outstanding, far more than you would expect from a Free2Play browser game. The artwork representing cardboard figurines on a battle map is extremely well done, and everything looks just like it should on a game table. There is a lot of content for a beta game, and balance is generally excellent. I can see myself spending many fun hours with this game. If you like tactical turn-based games, I can only highly recommend signing up for the Cardhunter beta.

Cardhunter

2013-05-09T07:32:00.001+02:00

As there are so many different genres of games it would be hard to say how the perfect game for me would look exactly. But Cardhunter is coming pretty damn close. If you have any interest in turn-based tactical role-playing games and/or trading card games, I strongly urge you to sign up for the beta. You won't regret it.

Neverwinter first impressions

2013-05-08T11:18:00.000+02:00

So yesterday I downloaded the 4 GB of Neverwinter and tried it out. I checked the forums of my WoW guild and found on which server they were playing Neverwinter, so I chose that server. Created a cleric, and leveled him up to level 6, which was all that I had time for. Overall the experience was fun enough, but I'm still not sure how long I am going to play this.

One reason that made me try Neverwinter was their claim to be based on 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. I love D&D 4E. And even the people who hate D&D 4E say they hate it because "it plays like an MMO", so obviously it should work well as an MMO. Only that once you play it, you quickly realize that Neverwinter is very, very, very far from D&D 4E. The names of the cities and the map are from the Forgotten Realms, which is nice; the name of the spells and classes and races are from D&D 4E, but what those spells do is very different, because how the game plays is very different from D&D. You can use an "encounter power" several times in one encounter, for example, and a "daily power" several times a day. Gameplay of Neverwinter is somewhere between WoW and Diablo, and has nothing to do with the tactical turn-based combat of D&D 4E. Neverwinter is a D&D flavored MMORPG. And at the end of the day a steak flavored potato chip is a potato chip, and not a steak.

The cleric turned out to be a good choice, as just like in 4E D&D the cleric in Neverwinter isn't a cloth-wearing sissy. I haven't played the other classes, but the Neverwinter cleric appeared quite powerful to me, as he has at-will attacks that are ranged and both damage the enemy and heal himself at the same time. What more can you want from an attack power? By level 6 I had three encounter powers and discovered that I only had two hotkeys to put them on. Later you get a third hotkey, but as you get even more encounter powers later, it appears that you won't be able to always have all your powers available to you. For the cleric that turned out to be somewhat annoying, as one of the powers is the healing word that can be used to heal himself out of combat. So between fights I need to change the powers in my hotkeys, heal myself, and change the powers back to the attacks.

Other than that I found combat not so much different from other MMORPGs. Yes, you target with the recticle of your mouse that is permanently fixed in the middle of your screen (unless you press ALT to use the mouse to click on stuff on your UI, but I wouldn't recommend trying that in combat). But for the cleric's ranged attacks that is barely different from how a caster plays in WoW. Maybe it makes a bigger difference for rogues, but my cleric just pelts mobs at a distance and then finished them with a point-blank AoE when they get close.

Getting in touch with my guild was more difficult than I would have thought. You need to be level 15 to send a tell. Or, which is what I did, spend some money on the real-money currency "Zen" to be allowed to send tells. No problem, I wanted to buy more inventory space anyway. I also found that I already had 500 Zen before I bought any, and a guild mate told me he had none, so I'm not sure where that came from. If you don't want to spend money, I found there was another way to speak to a friend to get a guild invite: You can search for him with the /who command and then send him a party invite. As Neverwinter uses a CharacterName@AccountName naming convention your friend hopefully recognizes you from one of them, and once you are in a party you can use party chat to speak with him at a distance. The guild was already formed, so I got an invite, and I'm set.

Gameplay up to now is nothing to write home about. There are quests that ask you to kill X mobs or collect Y items or to go to place Z. Every zone is instanced, but some are shared between many players, while others are just for you or your group alone. There is a sparkly path showing the way to your next quest objective. So you go, fight some mobs, get loot from them and treasure chests, and do pretty standard questing stuff like in every other MMORPG. Besides treasure chests there are different nodes which you can open with the right skill, e.g. my cleric can open religion nodes, a rogue would be able to open thievery nodes. These appear to mostly hold crafting stuff, and I'm not high enough in level to be able to craft. You can open nodes that aren't for your class with a consumable kit, but those appear to be not abundant.

That led me to the AH, which was a complicated affair that didn't work all that well. First I had to exchange Zen into Astral Diamonds, which is done on a player-to-player system with fluctuating exchange rates. I exchanged 100 Zen (basically 1€) and then had difficulties to find my Astral Diamonds, until I finally figured out how one of the tabs of the exchange system had a withdraw button. The search function of the AH was somewhat buggy, but I managed to find some kits, and bought out 5 auctions for 1 each. Then I had to find the mailbox (aka postal courier) to get the kits, and there was another bug which resulted in not all of the kits arriving, so I ended up with only 3 of them, although I had paid for all 5. Disappearing items in the AH system is a bad sign, I think I'll stay away from the AH until they fix that.

Overall I was having fun. I appreciated the D&D flavor. The combat system wasn't too twitchy for me. And while gameplay was up to now pretty standard, it wasn't worse than elsewhere. I'm looking forward to trying out the Foundry (once you don't get banned for using it any more) and crafting later.

The Favorites of Selune campaign - Level 5 - Session 4

2013-05-08T09:52:00.000+02:00

In the previous session the heroes had cleared most of the ground floor of Castle Ravenloft. This evening we only played like half a session, because we started late, and then took some time to review all the handouts (like the Book of Strahd) and other clues the players had collected up to now. By doing so it became obvious that their next step should be to search for the grave of Count Strahd von Zarovich in the dungeons of the castle and scatter the earth from it to weaken the vampire lord before attacking him.

One helpful tool was that because I had made the maps of the castle myself with Campaign Cartographer, I was able to print out a map of the ground floor of the castle with a "fog of war" effect blocking the corner they hadn't explored yet. They knew from the butler Igor that the dining hall was in that corner, that the vampires were at dinner, and they could hear organ music playing from there. The butler had also gone that way and said that the stairs down to his kitchen were in that dining hall. And as the only other stairway they had found was leading up and not down, the players decided that the dining hall was the place to go.

So the rest of the session was the fight of the party against the vampires in the dining hall. It turned out that I had done a good job of scaring my players appropriately for a gothic horror adventure, and they were positively reluctant to rush into a room full of vampires. So when they opened the door of the dining hall and saw all the vampires at the tables with servants between them and Count Strahd at the organ playing music, they used their round of surprise to close the door again. Now the castle vampires usually have crossbows, but had not taken them to table. The players heard movement from the room, but one full round of combat absolutely nothing happened, with both sides waiting to pounce on whoever would open the door first.

Finally the door opened, but the vampires had sent one of their servants to open it, while the vampires kept out of sight behind the corner. Considering that as a hostile act, the players killed the servant, but didn't close the door again, placing two melee specialists in the doorway, the fighter and the rogue. Judging the vampires to be intelligent, I played them tactically well, and had the first vampire make a bull rush attack on the rogue which succeeded in pushing him back. That allowed the other vampires to trickle into the hallway over the next rounds where a close quarters combat evolved.

One highlight of the fight was that the cleric tried his new daily spell, Spiritual Weapon, which gave every player combat advantage on the enemy the spiritual weapon was hitting. The warlord had an at-will power that increased the combat advantage bonus on whoever he was hitting with it. And the rogue had an improved sneak attack doing 2d8 extra damage whenever he had combat advantage. That proved to be a devastating combo, with the rogue basically hitting with every attack and doing serious damage. The wizard was less well-placed to act in these cramped quarters with his area spells and mostly resorted to magic missiles. The cleric's turn undead worked well in that situation, being a close range area effect. And the fighter with his artifact axe doing radiant damage was also a serious threat, in spite of being hampered by a negative effect of the despair deck preventing him from doing opportunity attacks.

In the end all the vampires lay dead in the hallway, and Strahd was still playing the organ in the dining hall. The players closed the door again, still afraid of the Count, and we ended the session there.

A limitation of the game, not the guild

2013-05-07T11:01:00.000+02:00

The Godmother is discussing a WoW Insider community blog topic of What if WoW didn't have guilds?. It mentions the problem to "exclusivity" of guilds: "Ultimately the problem is not the Guilds themselves, but what people do IN the Guilds. This interaction thing isn't the fault of the Guild per se, but the people who run them.". And I don't think this is correct. I always thought that given the rules of the game of World of Warcraft, the people who run guilds in most cases are acting perfectly rational in making their guilds relatively exclusive and running them more like a military organization than a social club. People simply adapt their social structures to the needs of the environment.

For people who played World of Warcraft in guilds since the beginning, this is more obvious. For example the needs of the environment were different back when we raided Molten Core with 40 people. A 40-man raid is less exclusive, and in many cases much more forgiving to a single individual's mistakes. A 10-man raid which is designed to fail if a single member of the group fails necessitates a very different social structure.

If we want to "make guilds better", we first have to define what exactly "better" is. In a game like World of Warcraft where an organized team generally performs better than a team of random strangers, guild developed naturally into the social organization that makes organized teams possible. Mostly for raids, but also for PvP. Sometimes you here people advertising a "leveling guild", but those never work, because the game isn't designed to give an advantage to organized teams for leveling over people playing solo. So the only secondary function left for guilds is providing a separate chat channel for some socializing.

If you wanted guilds to be different, you would need to look for a game which works differently and where working together has different mechanics. That is the point where the discussion usually breaks down, because lots of people have no experience of games that work very differently from World of Warcraft. You would need to play "exotic" games like A Tale in the Desert, or the so-called "social games" to experience for example asynchronous social interaction, or game mechanics which reward inclusiveness over exclusiveness.

So I wouldn't say that the interaction is "the fault of the people who run the guilds". The people who run the guilds are asking relatively basic questions of essentially "why would I want this guy to be in my guild?", and if game mechanics tell them that having "Mr. Nice Guy" in their guild is likely to be more of a hassle than it is worth, they decide accordingly.

Tower of Saviors

2013-05-06T16:36:00.001+02:00

Hong Kong mobile applications developer Mad Head Limited sent me an e-mail asking me to review their iOS game Tower of Saviors. I get lots of demands like that and don't always comply, but at least I always have a look at the game in question. In this case Tower of Saviors turned out to be available for free in the iOS App Store, and thus wasn't much of a hassle to get and try out. And even if the YouTube trailer was full of strange Asian English, the game looked interesting enough.

Basically Tower of Saviors can be described as match-3 combined with Pokemon. The match-3 variant is interesting, because for each move you can move one tile wherever you want on the board, following a complicated path if you wish to do so, instead of just swapping it with its neighbor. So you do a whole series of swaps on that path, which enables you to pull of a lot of combos. So even with just 5 colors of tiles and no extras except tiles of the same color with slightly stronger effect and healing tiles, the match-3 game is one of the more interesting available.

Every time you match 3 or more tiles, you power up all the monsters you have in your group of 5 (+1 friend) of the same color. Thus if you have an group with one monster each of each color, each match does something. If you put more monsters of one color, you end up not having another color available and lose all the effect of those matches, but of course you get a stronger effect from the color you concentrated on.

In each fight you can earn cards and coins. Cards can be used as monsters in your army, or you can feed the cards to your monsters to level them up. Then you need specific other cards to "evolve" your monsters past various level caps. The coins pay for the level-up and evolving.

The whole thing is pretty addictive, but comes with a big caveat: You only have a limited amount of stamina, which rises with level, and each fight costs stamina. When you run out, you either need to wait hours for it to fill up again, or pay $1 for full stamina. You can also pay $5 for a rare card, or $1 to get back to full life in a fight you lost. As you can see, there is a lot of opportunity to give money to Mad Head as in app purchase, and most of it smells like Pay2Win.

If you are somebody who has the willpower to withstand such blatant grabs for your money, Tower of Saviors is fun enough as a match-3 and monster-raising game. I was able to play quite well and haven't spend a cent yet (you get some real-money currency for free). Just be aware of the trap.

Anyone still paying full price for games?

2013-05-03T13:48:00.001+02:00

I got an e-mail today from Steam that one of the games on my wish list was on sale. Tomb Raider was available at half price less than two months after release. In a market like this, is anybody still paying full price for his PC games?

Games as a conversation

2013-05-03T12:53:00.001+02:00

I have mentioned repeatedly my model of what a game is: Repeating units, like combat, held together by content (cut-scenes, quest text). So I was very interested when via Raph Koster's website I found this GDC talk by Matthias Worch which explains games with a very similar model: Bits of dialogue in which the player interacts with the computer and bits of monologue in which the computer (or rather the dev who programmed it) talks alone. The video is nearly 50 minutes long, but well worth watching if you are interested in the theory of games.

Once you've understood Worch's model, it becomes very clear why we can get into heated discussions about games like Mass Effect 3, where I was saying that the dialogue parts of the game were lacking, but others praised the game for its monologue parts. Or where I accepted the ending as being a monologue, and thus an expression of the authorship of whoever wrote that ending, and others disagreed with that expression, or would have liked a more dialogue-like structure allowing them to influence the ending more.

Ultimately it all comes down to the question of what percentage of monologue you want in your games. Do you want a Dragon's Lair like game which is mostly monologue? Or a game like Civilization which is mostly dialogue? Or something in between like the modern "action adventures" which have monologue cut-scenes between dialogue gameplay sequences?

Where I very much agree with Matthias Worch is when he remarks that the new PS4 will have a "Share" button on the controller, but people will generally want to share their great dialogue moments of the game, and not the great monologue moments which are the same for everybody. Games which are heavy on monologue also suffer from poor replayability, although that is probably a concept that is outdated anyway, and we are getting to a state where the big triple-A games are meant to be played only once, at least in single-player mode, just like watching a movie.

Camelot got unchained

2013-05-02T18:38:00.001+02:00

Brian Green a.k.a. Psychochild believes that we all need Camelot Unchained to succeed, so he'll be happy to hear that the Kickstarter campaign succeeded with $2.2 million achieved from the $2 million goal. I always find those last minute huge donations on Kickstarter somewhat suspicious, but anyway, the game is funded.

Unfortunately getting people to believe you can succeed is a lot easier than actually succeeding. Psychochild says "We need someone experienced like Mark Jacobs who has shown he can deliver a game limited in scope to pull this off. We need an antidote to the repeated failures we've seen.. And I would say that the odds are against Camelot Unchained actually becoming "a success" in any kind of reasonable measure that the investors Psychochild mentions would recognize. I mean yes, maybe there will one day be a game with ten or twenty thousand players. But what investor beyond some starry-eyed Kickstarter donator is going to be impressed by that?

Dark Age of Camelot had okay success in an extremely limited market, with few competitors. But this isn't 2001 any more! Camelot Unchained will compete with hundreds of MMORPGs. And Darkfall and Mortal Online showed that there isn't much of a market at that end of the spectrum. So grats to Mark Jacobs for having talked the Internet into giving him a job for some years, but I'll believe in the game's success when I see it.

Renting virtual stuff

2013-05-02T15:48:00.000+02:00

I was reading Kill Ten Rats review of Age of Wushu and came to the description of the cash shop: "The cash shop is an unmitigated disaster, with not a single item which becomes permanent to the player. Every item, cosmetic or not, has an expiration timer. Yes, you are basically renting." I very much agree with that assessment: Buying virtual stuff somehow feels a lot better than just renting it.

I'm relatively okay with the kind of virtual purchases that basically increase your xp or virtual currency gain for some time, whether that is in the form of a "premium subscription" or some sort of double xp scroll. But I absolutely hate the Asian games in which the gear you buy comes with a timer. I prefer to play games at my own rhythm, and I hate thinking that I "have to" play a certain game now, before something I bought expires.

My preferred items in any item store are those that not only last forever, but also are useful forever. For example more inventory space is something that you might buy early in your career and then use as long as you play that game. In comparison to that buying some sort of weapon or armor is probably not useful all that long, because there are game mechanics in place where you just outlevel that gear. For the same reason I don't like buying resources in a game that is about resource management, because they usually just speed up your progress for a little while and then are gone. But items you "use up", like gear or resources, are still better than items that might expire while you still have use for them.

The Internet is age-restricted

2013-05-01T11:10:00.001+02:00

I was playing with my iPad, installing various apps from Google. Among which was Chrome, the Google browser for the Internet. So imagine my surprise when the Apple App Store warned me that this content was age restricted for 17+ audiences. I wouldn't have considered a browser to be a particularly offensive app!

On second thought of course there is a justification for that move (I mean beyond Apple trying to put obstacles into the path of a competitor): If you have an Internet browser, you can access all sorts of offensive material. Old meme, "the Internet is for porn". And however "clean" Apple is trying to keep the contents of the App Store, once the customer accesses the Internet with his iPad, all bets are off.

So in the case that parents gave junior an iPad with parental controls set to prevent him from watching stuff he shouldn't see, it would make sense for that restriction to block installing a browser app. Just hope that the parents were clever enough to also block access to the pre-installed Safari browser. And that junior isn't much better at turning off restrictions than the parents are at turning them on.

Pirates complaining about piracy

2013-04-30T06:30:00.000+02:00

Game Dev Tycoon is an indie game that costs only $7.99 in the Windows app store, and is DRM-free. A free demo is also available. Nevertheless Green Heart Games determined that only 6.4% of the players on release day had bought the game legitimately, the other 93.6% were playing a pirated copy. So they struck back and put a slightly modified "cracked" version of the game on torrent. In that version your career as game development tycoon ends in ruin, because of simulated piracy.

The funniest thing about the story is that the people playing the pirated version of the game were then going to the official forums to complain about piracy in the game. You gotta love the irony!

Anyone playing Neverwinter?

2013-04-29T11:31:00.000+02:00

I'm rather busy this week with family stuff, and won't post much. So maybe some of my readers would like the opportunity to contribute and write something about the freshly released Neverwinter? If you play it, simply leave a comment with your impressions of the game.

Unlockable difficulty levels

2013-04-27T08:18:00.001+02:00

I am a huge fan of games with adjustable difficulty levels. I think that every player is different, and so what is just the right amount of challenging for one guy might be trivial for the next, or frustratingly hard for a third. Setting ones own difficulty level maximizes fun for everybody. Now what I don't understand is the trend towards forcing players to work for that feature. I'm currently playing Borderlands 2, which starts out as normal, and I'd have to finish normal to get to True Vault Hunter Mode in playthrough 2 and Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode in playthrough 3. Not to mention that I would also have to pay for Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode.

The same thing with Diablo 3: It has Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulty, but you need to play them in that order to unlock the next difficulty. Imagine that Inferno was the perfect difficulty level for you, then you would have to play through the game three times in an too easy mode before being allowed to play at the difficulty level you actually want. How silly is that?

Now I understand there is some theory behind this unlockable difficulty levels, that you learn the game by playing and are actually *getting* better while you play each difficulty level, enabling you to tackle the next one. But in this day and age I simply don't believe that this is true. How good you are in Borderland 2 will be to a large extent dominated by the skills you learned in previous shooter games, maybe even Borderlands 1. A player picking up Borderlands 2 as his first ever shooter game is going to be extremely rare, and not a good game design basis.

Now fortunately I suck at shooter games, so I can play Borderlands 2 always at normal difficulty level and be perfectly happy. So this is more a game design decision that punishes the more skilled players. But I would really hate for this to become general practice and to be applied to strategy games or others where I am actually good at. I would hate to be forced to play through a game at trivial difficulty level just to unlock the difficulty level that is fun to me.

Social fabric

2013-04-24T11:27:00.003+02:00

There is some new discussion ongoing in the blogosphere about an old subject, "social fabric" or group play vs. solo play. Psychochild thinks that soloing is responsible for people treating MMORPGs like they treat single-player games, stopping to play after a few weeks. Green Armadillo thinks that social fabric equals constraints that turn a game into a job. Me I think that Psychochild is right that MMORPGs need social fabric, but that Green Armadillo is right in that current game design does social fabric badly, by linking it to specific content with a higher difficulty and a necessity for military organization.

But believing that MMORPGs *have to* do social fabric that way is like believing that the army is the only possible social organization in real life. If we consider MMORPGs as virtual worlds it becomes obvious that they should be able to do a better simulation of other real world social interactions than just military ones. Instead MMORPGs today are often designed to *remove* social interaction from our virtual lives. We have fully automated and nearly anonymous auction houses, so we don't need to engage in the social interaction of trading. We have instanced housing or no housing at all, so we don't need to engage in social interaction with our neighbors. We don't have politics, we don't have spectator sports, and we only have very little common public transport left. Gone are the times where you waited 20 minutes for the boat in Everquest and then traveled another 20 minutes on it to your destination, giving you time to socially interact with your fellow voyagers.

The proof that more is possible is evident in niche games like A Tale in the Desert, which has a lot more social fabric than a game like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2. For example in ATitD there are resources that can only be mined by a combined effort of several players, instead of the exclusively solo mining in other games. There are buildings that just require so much work that it makes sense to construct them as a team effort. There are laws and politics to vote on. And a lot of these game mechanics would be totally feasible in other games.

I would expand on Psychochild's consideration of the need for social fabric by saying that what is needed for longevity is a virtual world to live in, not just a game to play and progress in. If somebody plays only for virtual progress, at one point he either reached his goal, or gets tired of the treadmill of not reaching it. But if there is a whole virtual life to lead with no linear level- or "Gearscore"-type goals, people wouldn't consider they "finished" the game after 3 months or less.

Anno Online closed beta

2013-04-24T09:34:00.002+02:00

Just to let you know, the English version of Anno Online went into closed beta (me, I play in the German language open beta). There are a number of reasons why this game stands out from the usual Free2Play browser game crowd: The game is not dumbed down from the single-player versions, only slowed down in time. Anno Online is a complex economic simulation game with no combat. Not only is there no "Pay2Win", as there is no conflict, but also the Free2Play model is based on the most advantageous purchases being one-off payments. You don't buy some double xp scroll over and over, you buy an additional slot for another island once and that is going to be helpful as long as you play the game.

Now I am very much aware that this is by no means a mass market game. Generally browser "strategy" games in which you need to think very little, but can grief other players a lot appear to be selling a lot better than complex games without combat. But I would hope that as the market for games evolves, there is more room for more mature games. For me Anno Online is the perfect "play for 15 minutes twice per day" game. A game about careful planning, not instant gratification.

Compared to other city-building games I very much like how Anno Online handles the economy. In many games you need to supply resources to your inhabitants to make them happy, and then those inhabitants pay taxes to finance you empire. In Anno Online the inhabitants don't pay any taxes, but they pay for the resources they demand. You don't produce linen shirts because something terrible happens if your people don't get their shirts, you produce them because your people pay more for those shirts than it costs you to produce them. And while producing goods to sell them to your people is the standard way of making money, you can also sometimes buy those goods for less than it would cost you to produce them, and thus make even bigger profits through trading than through manufacture.

By splitting your economy up over several islands, with restrictions on what you can produce where, Anno Online adds a nice level of complexity where you need to ship goods from one place to another, and optimize transport. I find it deeply satisfying to have a game where I succeed by thinking instead by pressing buttons quickly. Recommended!