5 Things Writing Taught Me About Gaming

I’m an unrepetant gamer, as I’m sure my log of game reviewswould show. One thing I’ve not talked about much is how many RPGs I’ve played, or more specifically run.

Special thanks to K.B. Owen

Over the years, I got better at DMing, but it wasn’t until I realized I could use storytelling tools that I really ramped up my game.

What They Want Is Key

This is huge. This is hours and hours of prep time removed. Ask your players what their characters want, then come up with a difficult way to obtain them. I’ve run games mostly ad hoc using the player’s goals as inspiration.

Specific goals are absolutely better than general ones, since knowing they want a specific weapon, treasure, or bit of information makes it much easier to determine who would have it, and how it’s being protected. But general goals are great for setting traps. If a player wants money, makes a taunting offer of the biggest pile they’ve ever seen, and let them get themselves into trouble.

Don’t Let Them Finish Too Soon

Some RPGs have a focus on combat, specifically fantasy games. But just like fantasy fiction, death doesn’t have to be the only end to a fight. Having additional, interesting, ways to end the fight can lead to further drama, and possibly get the player’s more entwined with the game thanks to their bruised egos.

Further, remember to make the characters work for their goals. Conflict is fun!

Antagonists Matter

Your major antagonists should be almost as fleshed out personality wise as the characters. Know who wants what, why, and what resources they’ve got to go for it. And just like a Conflict Lock, when a fleshed antagonist meets driven players, you have drama in the making.

Don’t forget that an antagonist doesn’t need to be a bad guy. After all, Spock was a pretty cool dude.

Climax Is a Natural Thing

The big finish shouldn’t be jammed into a game. It should be the only possible conclusion at the end of a series of smaller conflicts between an antagonist and the players. When the players finally face the bad guy on their terms, the fight will be satisfying, regardless of how they beat them.

Sometimes You Must Edit

Every once in a while, a game comes to a screeching halt. Sometimes you’ve managed to corner the players and left them with no options. Other times, your careful encounter design wasn’t so careful. If it really is destroying the game, it’s time to pull a retcon and admit your mistake. Better to continue the game then watch it fall apart for all the wrong reasons.

Comment with any additional game mastering tips!

Lost Productivity

So, I got up with all intention of being productive. You know, writing, school work, whatever needed to be done.

Then I heard about the new Humble Indie Bundle. For those who don’t know, these are a pay-what-you-want bundle of cross-platform games that are on sale together for a week or so, profits split between Humble Bundle, the developers, and charities. The thing is, this time, they included Torchlight.

Torchlight is a spiritual successor to the Diablo franchise. Hack and slash gaming through huge piles of dungeons. Oh, and pets that can do your shopping.

Ferret!

It’s a great game, but it’s been a few years since I played it. And now that I use Linux as my OS, I don’t expect many mainstream games to be available to me. The thing with Humble Bundle is that the games support Linux and Mac as well as PC. So one of my favorite games just became available!

I bought it up, got it installed, and found there’s more than one bug still in the Linux version. Strange crash when I return to a boss room, but the more interesting one is this ->

That’s right, that character has no head. I have no idea why. I’m not the only one reporting it either. I assume it’ll be fixed eventually, and the rest of the game works except for the one crash point I’ve found (And managed a work around).

So that’s where my day has gone. Playing and trying to fix an awesome game.

Gamers Against Bigotry

As a serious member of ‘gamer culture,’ I try to keep up on things that affect gamers as a whole, and specifically, new gamers. As I’m sure everyone can tell, I’m all about expanding my hobby, and bringing in new faces. Unfortunately, there’s a subset of gamers who think that trash talk should include identity references that put a lot of decent people off of the community, often for good.

Recently, though, a number of people are calling attention to the fact that we need to be better people to each other. Extra Credits, a web-show on game design recently took a few minutes to describe some possible solutions to fixing the problem. Go check this out, and if you’re into games in general, they’ve got an awesome show.

After watching that, I felt reinvigorated in trying to improve the community. Thankfully, I caught a tweet from @GeekyLyndsay about a petition called Gamers Against Bigotry. This is pretty self explanatory, but it’s a call to action to raise awareness and convince people to stop using identifiers are part of their trash talk. This is a great addition to the goal of cleaning up gaming culture, and being completely opt-in, it’ll be the community that makes it happen.

So if you consider yourself a gamer, or are just getting interested in the hobby, help us out, go sign the petition at GAB!

Alphabet Soup: The World of Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas

Game reviews are back! This time, though, I’m not talking board games (Though I still love them, and if you want some boardgame fix, go check out Cartrunk Entertainment. John is the man when it comes to supporting awesome games) I’m talking about my online game of choice.

Wikipedia calls them action real-time strategy games, which is a fairly clinical description of the genre. Spawned as custom maps in Star Craft and Warcraft III, each player took control of an individual hero from the game and attempted to destroy the enemy base with their team. This game mode became so popular that stand alone games using similar mechanics began getting produced. At first, they got the name ‘Defense of the Ancients-likes’ or similar terms after the original Warcraft III map.

From gamerhalt.com

A number of titles have come out since the original DOTA, including League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth, both versions I’ve played, and other titles like DOTA2 and Demigod, neither of which I’ve tried. Blizzard even added an official version to Star Craft II called Blizzard All-Stars.

The term ‘Multiplayer Online Battle Arena’ was coined by the Riot Games team who produced League of Legends.

So, now that I’ve bored you with the history, what is it that sets MOBAs apart as a genre?

Real-Time Strategy

It is technically a sub-genre  of RTS games, due to being designed originally in RTS games! The catch, though, is there’s much less micromanagement required to successfully play a MOBA. Instead of keeping track of multiple bases, and controlling dozens of units, you get one, and just have to react to the conditions of the battle field itself. For those, like me, who enjoy the genre, but couldn’t come to grips with keeping that much in the air at once, it’s a welcome place to play.

Role Playing Game

There’s two reasons I play role playing games, one is for the awesome stories. But the other, and this one is more important for me to burn through a 100 hour game, is the game play. A solid combat system with interesting character advancement choices is an absolute must for me to really get into an RPG. The thing about MOBAs is they give me those interesting moment to moment decisions, excellent and interesting character development choices, and cool gear, and deliver it in 1/100th of the time!

Team and Objective Based Gaming

I’ll admit up front I’m not a huge fan of conventional first-person shooters. Free-for-all gaming isn’t really my thing. But you take a classic shooter, split guys off as teams and give us something to do besides kill each other, and you’ve got my interest. MOBAs are team and objective based by definition. A large part of the strategy is working together to get kills so you can ‘push’ down base defenses to claim victory.

So, a bunch of great things, can’t be anything bad about these games, right? Well, not so much, and it depends on which iteration of the game you play.

The genre is notorious for its incredibly steep learning curve. With a bundle of mechanics, fairly complex statistics, and dozens of unique characters, you’ll spend a lot of time just learning how everything fits together before you get a feel for what you’re really capable of.

The first thing that stands out to confuse newbies is the ‘roles’ different characters are capable of. Some characters are ‘Carries’ whose goal in the game is to get a lot of money and build into incredible powerhouses that are a force to be reckoned with. Others are ‘Tanks’ which any classic RPG fan will recognize as the guy intended to take damage. In MOBAs, they do their job by being incredibly tough to kill, with a lot of nightmarish effects to keep the enemy from doing much. My favored role is ‘Support’ which MMO players will know as the heal-bots of their genre. A support with friendly buffs, enemy debuffs, and heals.

Then you have ‘last hitting’ which is simple on the surface, but is one of the more skill intensive actions you’ll take in the game. The idea is simple: If you get the killing blow on an NPC you get the gold for the kill. If you score the killing blow on an enemy hero, you get a higher amount of gold than your teammates who assisted with it. For some characters, this last-hitting is what makes them good at their job, and if you don’t do it enough, you end up falling behind.

Another mechanic, which isn’t present in all versions of the genre, is ‘denying.’ This is just like last hitting, except you are attacking your own NPCs and Towers.

So you’ve got the genre in a nutshell, so now I should probably make a suggestion about where to start. Personally, I’m a huge fan of League of Legends. It was a free-to-play version, with a colorful cast and an easier skill curve than its competitors. (Sorry, Heroes of Newerth, but I don’t like the denial mechanic.)

This version has some metagame mechanics through ‘masteries’ and ‘runes’ that are basically passive buffs that apply to your champion in game. It’s got a cool leveling system to keep newbies playing newbies, and you can’t play ranked games until you’re level 30, giving you some time to get used to the game before playing ‘serious’ players. In addition, it has a system for playing games against computer controlled opponents with an automatically generated team of human players.

Only the best support in the League.

Come try it out (That’s a referral link, I get virtual monies if you sign up and play to level five) and you might see me around using Divine Soraka to keep my team alive until we win.

Game Design Journal 3: Staring into the Abyss

Last time, I talked about how the Dungeon in my work in progress will work. Today, it’s a matter of talking about the Encounter part of the dungeon.

After all, what good is an adventure without a little danger?

Each dungeon card will define how many monsters of what relative power will appear, but the Encounter decks will determine just what types of things your plucky band of rogues will face down.

The encounter decks will be arranged by ‘level’ which is mostly just a convenient way to keep you from facing the boss in the first room or a couple of goblins with rusty daggers in the last.

These decks would be assembled before the game with specific creatures to help the ‘theme’ of the dungeon. This allows the game to be expanded if it works well, but also presents an easy ‘boxed game’ for the people who don’t want to expand it. But those goals matter less to the immediate design, what makes an encounter card?

I’ve got two ideas I plan to test: monsters and traps.

Monsters are the thing that make combat. They’ll need all the statistics the raiders will have. Right now, I know I need a damage stat, a life stat, I want to make armor important, initiative, and range. Only four stats, and one of them isn’t going to be very important except to keep the game flowing.

Damage is pretty simple: It’s how much pain a monster can dish out. Without traditional attack rolls, this number is fairly predictable, making each combat more like a competitive puzzle

Life is another simple one: If you take damage equal to your life, you’re dead. Or the monster is.

Armor is where things get a little tricky. Because there aren’t attack rolls, armor can only affect one thing, which is damage. As a direct ‘debuff’ to damage, it’s essentially multiple points of life over time. This means low level monsters aren’t likely to be able to have it, since it puts them outside of the capabilities of early game heroes.

Initiative is only there to keep turns moving, and mix up how things attack. I don’t plan on including a lot of initiative manipulation cards in the players tools, so the printed value is it.

The final value, range, allows weapons to differentiate more than just damage and their associated ability, and allows an extra element to combat, namely abstract positioning.

Traps, on the other hand, will be more passive threats, things like spinning blades, needle traps, collapsing walls, that only affect a combatant if they are unlucky. This will use the dice mechanics ‘whiff’ effects to apply attacks and other effects to combatants.

Next time, I’ll cover the rough copy of the combat rules so you can see how these statistics interact.

Part 2

Game Design Journal 2

You’d think I’d be getting more done on Spring Break? Nope, stayed up late, played some games, vegged out.

Luckily I’ve started my game design before my brain left the building!

So I said I’d start talking about mechanics, so I’m going to start with the important thing in this case:  the cards.

When I say card driven, I don’t mean you get a hand of cards and use them to play the game, I mean quite specifically that the cards are the game.

It begins with the Dungeon. The Dungeon is going to be a specially prepared deck of cards that are flipped over one at a time to reveal the challenges of each room of the dungeon. It’s basically a stacked deck with a rising difficulty curve to keep the players pushing towards that end boss.

Each dungeon card is going to be titled: fairly mundane things like ‘narrow hall’ or ‘cavern’. It will have an effect on the encounter, be it ‘darkness’ which makes die rolls harder, or special hazards when you roll poorly.

It will also list the monsters that need to be dealt from the leveled encounter decks. In addition to fixed numbers, I’m going to include some way to simply add a number of monsters equal to the number of players. We’ll design that when we get there.

The final piece of information on the Dungeon cards is going to be the treasure roll. For now, I’ve decided to make this simple, roll one die, based on the dungeon card, and if you ‘crit’ you get one type of treasure, if you don’t crit you get another type (weaker), and if you ‘whiff’ you get nothing.

Oh, did I mention I plan on a unique set of dice for this game? Come back later to find out how the dice work.

Part 1    Part 3

Game Design Journal Part 1

So, taking a break from writing fiction in order to try my hand at game design again! I’ve entered a contest on a forum I’m a member of, and have decided to bust out an idea that’s been growing since I went to Unpub2.

At Unpub, I played a game called Dungeon Freakout! The game was a ‘cooperate/competitive’ game in which you attempted to earn points by collecting crystals while killing monsters. It was a cool idea, and made me want to approach the same goal the way I’d deal with it.

In this game, you, and three of your schmuck friends, go digging in the local dungeon to make a name for yourselves. With the castoff weapons of your parents and mentors, you’ll fight monsters, collect treasure, and, if all goes well, survive!

The party must face the various rooms of the dungeon, each with its own effects, traps, and monsters to face. When you kill fabled monsters, obtain legendary weapons, or survive deadly traps you gain honor. After you and your friends defeat the dungeon boss, the player with the most honor wins!

But the dungeon isn’t just waiting idle for you. Another player is the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master will do everything in his or her power to defeat the pillaging miscreants. If the party dies, the DM wins.

So it’s obvious, even if turning on your friends to keep them from gaining honor may be better for you in the long run, you may all end up as fresh blood stains on the stone if you don’t work together.

This is a very brief overview of the game, so my question for you: What do you think? This concept sound like fun?

Come back Wednesday, and I’ll discuss exactly what the Dungeon is, and how it functions.

Part 2

Read the Freaking Card: Comprehension for the Rest of Us

Once upon a time, I used to judge card game tournaments. In semi-competitive circles, judges are at once respected and despised. We’re respected because the rules literally say you have to, on threat of being asked to leave. We’re despised because when we lay down a ruling, it can change the way a game is going.

The thing is, the greater majority of our rulings were simple. The ‘golden rule’ of TCGs is the idea that if, at any time, a card’s text disagrees with the written rules, the card wins. Simple right?

The issue is, even with that simple idea, people could misinterpret things. I’m not talking about legitimate issues with card text, since that happens in most games and actually does require some knowledge to be able to call. I mean when the plain English on a correctly written card isn’t read.

Among judges I knew, a simple command starting spreading. “RTFC.” Read the ‘freaking’ card. Obviously, this was never said at an event, we took ourselves more seriously than that, but it was the way to respond on the internet, and our stories took on a new layer of secret language to confuse those poor folks who overhead.

Of course, that admonition really should apply to a lot more. People say a lot, even when they think they haven’t. Context offers us a lot of clues about the deeper meaning of something.

Something as simple as the word used to describe another person can tell us about a person’s outlook. And missing some of those clues can occasionally leave us wondering what’s being discussed.

Books use the same tools, and the best authors build there worlds in what’s not said. So obviously, leaving the clues is a skill I have to master, as I often am too ‘on the nose’ with my dialogue. Serious weakness. And missing the clues can definitely change the interpretation of the books when you’re reading!

What’s your ‘read the card!’ moment? Let everyone know in the comments below!

Game Review: Epic Spell Wars

Actually, the full title is:

Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre

Seriously.

This game breaks every single rule I consider integral to good game design. It’s is almost entirely luck based, mixing cards and dice with very little strategy. The balance is questionable. The art is pretty low on my list.

And yet: I love it.

Gameplay

Each player gets one of eight wizards. These don’t affect the game, but the card is used as your life counter. Favorites at the table are Princess Honey and her Furycorn and Fey Tinklebottom.

The game itself is played in rounds, which last until there’s only one wizard standing. A round begins with eight spell component cards being dealt to each player.

At the beginning of each turn, the wizards assemble their spells out of the different components, with a maximum of one source, one quality, and one delivery.

A complete spell (From Cryptozoic product page)

After each wizard has prepared their spells, each wizard gets a turn to resolve the effect. Spells with only one component go first, followed by two component spells, and finally three component spells.

First, you have to call out the name of your spell in a wizardly voice! Missing components? Don’t worry, just add the required elements and resolve as normal. You resolve spells in order: Source, Quality, then Delivery. Some do damage, some modify other cards in the spell, and some have unique effects.

Each component also includes a ‘glyph’ which powers up Power Rolls on cards with matching glyphs.

Knocked out first? Don’t worry: You get a dead wizard card! At the beginning of each turn, if you’re dead, you get another dead wizard card. At the beginning of the next round, each card gives you a bonus! Some dead wizard cards even give you coveted treasures.

Treasures are cards that you keep through an entire round that give you special effects. These range from treasures that offer you glyphs to the Proton Gem that can be used as a Wild Magic card every turn!

If you manage to be the last wizard standing (Or your spell kills everyone, including you!) you get a last wizard standing token. If you collect two, you win the game!

Let me get back to the subjective part of this review. Normally, I hate games that end up relying on specifically luck. If my choices can be negated due to luck, I won’t be happy with the game. Well, here’s the exception to prove the rule. Some cards pick based on the strongest or weakest opponent, and that will change a lot between spells. Some can turn a perfect spell into a not so good one. A lot can go wrong. But it doesn’t get in the way of this game. Powerful effects are often mitigated by the group attacks aimed at previous last wizards.

The art is something you’ll either love, or hate. Me, I’m not a huge fan of the style, and never have been.

One thing I’ll warn: Some of the themes that come up in the game aren’t exactly kid friendly, so don’t expect this to be a good choice for an eight-year-old.

This is mostly a filler game, but you can lose hours to it if you’re not careful. All in all, would be worth a purchase.

They’re Dumbing It Down!

Ah, the cry of the long term gamer, heard often as new versions or sequels of their favorite games come out and they’re simplified, or streamlined, or optimized, or one of a dozen buzzwords all gaming industries use to describe their games.

The buzzwords are pretty pathetic (since every company picks a new one), but there’s a deeper issue here. Why are gamers bemoaning less complicated designs?

Rewan took the time to talk about the gamer’s view of the industry last week, and I’m thankful he did, since now I can balance it with the designer’s look at the gamer this week!

When games get simplified, their established player base often lashes out at the new version for being ‘dumbed down.’ Rewan’s post approached this topic, describing the backwards trend of the Fable series. I guarantee, he was much more reasonable about it than some fans!

Another grand example is Dungeons and Dragons. I won’t go into the oldest versions (Though I have read and tried to play ‘Classic’), but I want to focus in on 3rd edition against 4th edition.

3rd edition was a remarkably flexible system without changing the rules. Because of things like skill ranks, you could micromanage your characters abilities to a razor edge, and the ‘best’ players did. If you add in other things, like spell casting and multiclassing you could eventually end up with any character you wanted. After a few dozen levels of play.

Then 4th edition came along. 4th Edition simplified almost everything. Skills now had a binary state (Trained or Untrained), advancement happened at the same rate for everyone, no matter what class you chose. And they introduced Powers. Powers functioned much like the spells of 3rd edition, but everyone got them, and they were the primary place the flavor of your character came from. With a little work, you could make the character you want to play right now, and then see where the game takes them.

Now, obviously, a lot of players were a bit upset about the changes, and 4th edition has been unfavorably compared to the Devil himself, but the design was a solid thing that produced some wonderful game play. For certain things! And no, I don’t mean the ‘roll playing’ vs ‘role playing’ dichotomy, stop that right now!

There’s a quote I love that I keep in mind when I go about playing with design:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Complexity, in and of itself, is not a good thing. If two games can produce a similar experience, with a similar end result, the one that is less complex is the better game. So while Mass Effect had a much more complex and customizable character creation system, a large portion of the choice was illusory, as only every fifth or so point actually changed the way the game was played. Mass Effect 2 took care of this by making every character point matter. That’s a good thing. (I’ve not finished Mass Effect 2, so I won’t comment on the game holistically, but the character sheet is much better than Mass Effect.)

So do me a favor, the next time you call something ‘dumbed down’ make sure it’s not just trying to deliver a similar experience easier.

Your turn! Give me an analysis of two games, comparing a complex game to a similar, but simpler, game in the comments!