Balance between combat and other

Combat is an important part of many different games, including role-playing games. While games without combat are possible, see for example A Tale in the Desert, they are few and far between. Nevertheless over the decades we moved from single-activity games to multi-activity games. Especially role-playing games always had multiple parts; for example Bioware talked about the 4 pillars of SWTOR being combat, exploration, progression, and story. Regardless of how you call these elements, it is clear that player in a modern game do not spend 100% of their time in combat. At which point the question poses itself of what percentage of the game should be combat, and what percentage should be handed over to the other activities.

For example accepting a quest in World of Warcraft is done with 2 clicks. Reading the short quest description is more or less optional, as the essential summary of "kill 10 foozles" will be shown on your quest tracker and the location marked on your map. Accepting more or less the same quest in Star Wars: The Old Republic takes considerably more time. There is more description, and the cut scenes and voiceovers invite the player to stay a while and listen. The player also will have to make dialogue choices. In addition to that SWTOR on average has longer ways between combats. Add all that together, and on average a player of WoW might well kill twice as many mobs per hour as a player of SWTOR.

Of course there is no universal answer to what the optimum is. Some people hit the space bar often in SWTOR to skip most or all of the dialogue, others quite enjoy it. And to some extent the players have some choice of how much combat they want to have, because they can spend more or less time with optional non-combat activities like crafting.

I was thinking about that balance in the context of writing the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition adventure I'm currently preparing. As I mentioned before, up to now we have been playing Warhammer FRP, which has a set of rules which supports role-playing very well, but isn't all that combat-centric. Players can have character classes like merchant or boatman, which lend itself somewhat less to combat-heavy adventures. And thus lots of the premade adventures have plots of intrigue and murder mysteries to be solved by role-playing dialogues with NPCs, and not all that much combat. D&D 4E is leaning towards the other extreme, where all character classes are designed for combat, and the rules are heavy on how to run a combat with miniatures. As a result the premade adventures are often very combat-heavy, with typical plots leading the players in some monster-infested dungeon with lots of battles and little role-playing.

Fortunately a pen & paper RPG can be more easily adjusted than a MMORPG. If you enter a dungeon in WoW you don't get the choice whether you want to fight or dialogue. If you prepare an adventure as DM for a pen & paper session, you have a much wider range of choices: You can invent an adventure by yourself and put in exactly the ratio of combat to other activities that you want, or you can take a premade adventure and modify it heavily. Remove half the monsters from that dungeon and play up the interaction with the NPCs leading to that dungeon, and you might get closer to the balance you want.

Hopefully what the DM prepares is what the players want. I am not quite sure what degree of combat my players will want in their game, I plan to start with something and then try to get some feedback whether that amount of combat is too much, too little, or just right. As we literally had no combat at all for several months, I hope the players will like a bit more of it. The trouble with long political intrigue and mystery adventures in a group that only meets one evening every two weeks is that the DM spends a lot of time reminding the players what has happened before. I am trying to structure my adventures in smaller chunks, having a sequence of combat encounters and non-combat encounters, with clear objectives to concentrate on at any given moment, and the larger story a bit more in the background. D&D 4E lends itself nicely to that approach. I guess that too is a modern development, taking into account that the role-players have gotten older, and often play less frequently now.

Which side of the game do you prefer in pen & paper roleplaying? Do you like campaigns with very little combat, with a lot, or what percentage in between?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:54 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Amateurs and professionals

The word "amateur" has French (and ultimately Latin) roots, literally meaning "lover of". It describes somebody who does an activity out of love for it, not because he is getting paid for it. While that can result in a performance which is less good than that of a professional, it also can result in an equivalent but different result. Many people argue that for example game developers should feel a passion for games, that they should create games because they love them, thus that they should be amateurs. And it is certainly true that a lot of young people with a love of games dream of becoming game developers. Which is at the root of the many stories you hear of exploitation, long hours, and uncertain recompensation in the game industry.

On the player side the opposite trend takes place: Not only do discussions of games from the players' side often have an air of extreme seriousness. But with price money in e-Sport leagues and the selling of virtual items, some players actually are becoming "professionals".

I think that both of these developments are dangerous. Just like I wouldn't want to drive a car that has been designed by an amateur, I don't always like playing games that have been coded by amateurs. Between rushed releases of unfinished games, bugs, and half-baked "wouldn't it be cool if we had this" features, I really long to see more professionalism in game development. Including regular working hours and proper compensation for the game developers, instead of companies exploiting a bunch of eager kids.

Playing games is the quintessential hobby, something to do to relax and entertain, without a larger purpose or financial interest. Turning it into a profession very much diminishes the entertainment value. One of my commenters uses the handle "Angry Gamer", and the internet is full of people like him, constantly angry about games or their fellow players, because they just took those games far too seriously. And as a actual source of income games are a rather bad choice. If somebody would put the same amount of energy that he uses for theorycrafting a MMORPG into lets say studying engineering, his earnings potential would become much higher.

Thus I would say that games should be created by professionals, and played by amateurs. What do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 5:50 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
SWTOR claims 1.7 million subscribers, Rift goes Free2Start

In yesterday's investor's earnings call, Electronic Arts said they sold over 2 million copies of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and had 1.7 million subscribers. I'm not quite sure at what moment in time exactly they counted those subscribers, but if they really only lost 15% of their players after the free month, that would have been quite a success. Nevertheless I would say that we'd better wait for the next earnings call in 3 months to get a more solid idea of the longevity of SWTOR.

Trion on the other hand announced that you can now play the first 20 levels of Rift for free, in a version called Rift Lite. Which is an exact copy of what Blizzard offers for World of Warcraft. I'd love to see some official subscription numbers, but with all the latest news about Rift being about server merges and price reductions, I get the feeling that they aren't doing so well. It is likely that they lost a number of "anything-but-WoW" players to SWTOR.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:04 AM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
Linearity vs. Open World

Much has been discussed on this blog on the relative advantages and disadvantages of linear games versus open world games. Skyrim was widely hailed as a great open world game, but it also serves as example of the limits of computer roleplaying games in that respect: There are a *lot* of seemingly trivial actions that you can't do in Skyrim, for example moving a table or chair. In computer games only the actions that have been specifically allowed by the programmers are possible. So it depends on the game whether you can do things like breaking a window, moving furniture, or jumping a 3-feet high fence.

Pen & paper roleplaying games work the other way around: Players should assume they can do anything "logical", unless the DM tells them they can't. There usually are no unmovable pieces of furniture in a Dungeons & Dragons adventure. If a chair is printed on a battle map, and the player wants to move that chair for some reason, the DM will come up with a solution, a token that represents the moved chair or something.

So at first it would appear as if pen & paper role-playing games are the ultimum of open world games. But most of that is an illusion. The world only exists in the head of the DM, and to the detail to which the DM has prepared it. So if the DM has prepared a dungeon, the players had better enter it. About 20 years ago I once played as a player in a game of D&D that failed: The DM had prepared this Pharaoh's tomb from some bought module, but the module had a rather lousy story hook: The players got robbed by bandits in the desert, and find the entrance to the tomb while stumbling around. But nobody in our group wanted to enter that tomb. Without equipment, are you crazy? We much rather wanted to pursue the bandits and get our stuff back! The DM hadn't foreseen that, tried more and more to force us into that tomb, which we more and more resisted, until we all just gave up on that campaign.

With that experience in mind, I always tried to give my players all available options. But of course in previous campaigns that led to them sometimes refusing to do the adventure I had prepared, and I had to jump to the next one or improvise. Thus now I hope I can do better. Ideally I want to give the players meaningful choices. But "do you want to enter this dungeon or not" shouldn't necessarily be one of those. I tend to think of a campaign or an adventure as some sort of flow chart: It can have branches and decision points, but ideally the story and the incentives for the players should be designed in a way that they want to go along the story path I prepared. I will see whether I can manage that.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Ancient game meets new business model

The original Everquest goes free-to-play. Somehow I'm not sure that is going to be a big success. But then, I might actually try it again sometime, just for laughs and nostalgia.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:51 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
Which useless collector's edition did you buy?

Syp has a picture of the day a photo of him holding up a Star Trek Online Collector's Edition he bought for $6.50. Which had my fullest understanding, I bought a collector's edition of Final Fantasy XIV for 9.95 over the holidays. With some collector's editions now priced at $150 and more, getting one on the cheap is fun. You never know when you decide to try the game, and if you do you might as well get all the extra CE goodies.

So, are there any collector's editions you bought but didn't play yet? Did you at least get them cheap?
- posted by Tobold @ 1:45 PM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
Level 0 adventure

I am currently preparing my first Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition adventure, after having taken a break of over 15 years from dungeon mastering. I'd love to share, but as my players can read the internet, I don't want to spoil anything. So instead of talking about spoilers and details, I'll talk about the concept of the adventure.

The specific circumstances of my group are that we are currently playing with a different rule-system, specifically Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the Enemy Within campaign. Thus if I really get to DM, it will not just be with a new campaign, but also with a new rule-system. Playing with a new rule-system in pen & paper has its challenges, as players need to know at least the basics of the rules to not spend more time looking up stuff than playing.

Thus I remembered an old idea that has been around as house-rules in several D&D editions: Level 0 characters. The idea is that the players do *not* have to make all the choices that usually go into rolling a level 1 character. Instead they will only need to make some very basic choices: Their race, and what 4E D&D now calls their "power source". The Player's Handbook has Arcane, Divine, and Martial as options, other rule supplements offer more, but I'll stick with the basics. Basically the player just needs to say whether he is some sort of magic user, or some sort of religious character, or somebody who knows how to fight.

The players then start playing with these level 0 characters, with generic low stats of 10 in everything (modified by race), and just one at-will power, based on their power source choice. The adventure not only is designed for that low level of power, but also will teach them the basics of the rules. There will be combat with miniatures on battle maps, skill challenges, hazards to overcome, role-playing, and whatever else I can think of to build an adventure with a representative sample of the game rules.

Besides teaching the rules, the players will also learn more about their chosen power sources. I've created at-will powers with a basic function, plus two optional extra functions which costs 1 action point to activate (and thus basically are encounter powers). By choosing which of these alternative options to use, the players can tend towards what 4E calls a "role". For example the magic using character can use his extra power to either deal more damage, or for some basic crowd control. By seeing what he enjoys more during play, he can then later decide to become a warlock or a wizard.

At the end of the adventure the characters will reach level 1, get bonus stats that get their characters to the stats of a normal level 1 character, and choose a class. At this point they basically create their level 1 character for real, with all feats, skills, and powers. But, and that is the beauty of the system, with a much better idea in their head what they want their character to be, because they already played him a bit. As an added bonus, the characters also gain a background story, how they got from being regular guys to becoming heroes and adventurers. And in my personal case the players also get to see how they like that rule-system and me as a Dungeon Master.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Typing

I have always been interested in writing. So as a teenager in the early 80's I owned a piece of state of the art word processing technology: An electric typewriter. And I even went to a typing course, where I learned to type 50 words per minute, error-free, using all 10 fingers without even watching them. At the time that was unusual for boys, it was usually girls who became typists. In a typical company every middle manager or creative type who had to write a document instead dictated it onto a tape recorder, and then a typist would type that on paper.

Well, computers came and changed all that. Now everybody in a company needs to write his own stuff, many people spend a lot of time in front of a keyboard both at work and at home. For me that meant that the typing course was one of the most useful courses I ever took, as I'm typing twice as fast as the average computer user because of it.

But as I spent this weekend using my typing skills to write a self-made D&D adventure, it struck me how very different the process is from playing a MMORPG. Pen & paper role-playing games are very creative, I write adventures, I play roles, I interact with my players in a back and forth where we all have to invent stuff all the time. In comparison MMORPGs feel a lot more like typing, especially when it comes to the dungeon and raiding part: You want to hit a lot of keys fast and in the correct order. And if you do it wrong, your tear up the page and start over, hitting the same keys faster and with less errors the next time. In a MMORPG I am downgraded to the role of a typist, and my success is based not on the creativity of my ideas or the entertainment value of my expression, but on how fast I can hit those keys without errors.

So right now occupying myself with Dungeons & Dragons feels like a huge liberation of my creative energies, a big step upwards from being a typist in WoW or SWTOR. Needless to say I ended up playing very little of SWTOR this weekend. I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually going to make it to level 50 or will give up before that.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:17 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Developments in maps

A quarter of a century ago I still produced campaign maps for Dungeons & Dragons by hand, using hex paper and colored crayons. Now that I am preparing a new campaign, I realized that I had better options these days. I now own a color laser printer, and drawing software has come a long way. So I invested in Campaign Cartographer 3, with added Dungeon Designer 3 and Fantasy Floorplans. Not really cheap, and like all CAD programs a bit difficult to learn, but the result is well worth it. Not only was I able to make a map of the island my first adventure will play on, but more importantly I created my first battle map.

4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons in some ways has gone back to its roots of miniature wargames, and those are best played on some sort of a battlemap with a square grid on it. There are quite a lot of options on how to do those. You can take a big piece of paper with squares from a flip chart and draw on it, which is fast and cheap, but not very pretty. You can take use Dungeon Tiles, Flip-Mats, Map Packs, or similar commercial products; but then you are limited to the designs on the product you bought. So if you want both pretty and complete control, using software to draw the battle maps yourself is the way to go. For example I printed mine on 2 by 2 sheets of A4 paper, so now I got a battle map with 16 x 23 1-inch squares, which works best for the usual size of miniatures. And it looks very nice, with a green grass texture, boulders, trees, and even a camp-fire. I can make similar maps with caves, dungeons, and whatever else I want, and they serve both as play surface and visual aid for my players.

The downside of these self-made battle maps is that by the time you designed them, printed them, and glued them together with sticky tape, you spent more time on making the map than the players will spend fighting a battle on it. Thus I'll also work with commercial printed maps, and just design the adventures around them to make them fit the story. And if all else fails, my group is using a laminated blank battle map and white-board markers to draw on it. Nevertheless I love maps and I'm quite happy with the progress that software made in this area.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:48 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
A call for donations

One of the major themes of this blog is how people react to incentives. Unfortunately the disadvantage of observing how this works in games is that you realize how much of that is going on in real life, and that tends to turn you into a cynic. Unless you already started out as one. Thus I am rather critical of most charity drives: If I see how Blizzard promises that half of the money for buying a virtual pet goes to charity, I can't help but notice that the other half goes to them, although their cost of selling them is minimal. But if 100% of the collected money actually goes to charity, and the charity drive is about games, I am willing to support it.

Iron Man Mode is collecting money for Child's Play. Iron Man Mode is a blog about playing video games until your character dies, then quitting. The authors wisely stick to harder games, many of them older, because these days there are a bunch of games out there where you would have trouble finding a way to die even if you wanted to. But the stories they tell also teach a lot about death in game design. A worthy cause and a worthy read, what could you want more?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:31 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Will Blizzard keep you from getting rich in Diablo 3?

Diablo 3 is going to have an auction house in which players can sell virtual items to other players for real money. Which prompted some people to start dreaming of getting rich by playing video games. I've been chronicling the negative consequences of that for some time, from the difficulty of getting rich in face of strong competition, to the expected negative social consequences. But it seems I have neglected one aspect: Blizzard might actively stop you from getting rich. My favorite virtual snake-oil vendor Markco posted that Blizzard kicked him out of the Diablo 3 beta for earning too much gold and beta bucks in too short time.

While of course I don't have all the details of the story, it appears to me that Diablo 3 has some sort of hidden code which is designed to ban gold farmers and bots, but which could end up banning players that are too good at making gold as well. Now some people will call that "unfair", but what it is not is "illegal". Blizzard has the absolute right of kicking out players they believe are harmful to the game at large. And if Blizzard doesn't want "professional" players in the game, they can kick them out. In the end it doesn't matter whether you are a Chinese guy working in a sweat shop, or an American college student who would rather get rich by playing video games than studying. If Blizzard thinks that you are just out for the money, and not just playing, they can ban you.

While I think that this is a good idea, I am certain that this will still cause a lot of controversy in the future. Players will want the "Chinese gold farmer" to be banned, but will insist on their right to farm gold and make money, without seeing that this is exactly the same thing, and mostly indistinguishable by Blizzard (unless you add an illegal racist bias to the criteria).
- posted by Tobold @ 10:23 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
Reviewing the D&D 4E reviews

I've spent like 10 minutes yesterday playing Star Wars: The Old Republic before I got bored, and watched video reviews of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons on YouTube instead. And read some written reviews of that game. I couldn't help but smile when noticing how much the discussion resembled us discussing the latest MMORPGs: There are the dinosaurs who hate every change, the hypers who find everything that is different great, the fanbois, the haters, the trolls, and many of the same arguments. So having come 3 years late to that discussion, and armed with hindsight, a fresh look at 4th edition, and all my MMORPG experience, let's have a look at the main discussion points on Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition:

4th Edition is different: This is certainly true. Depending where you read it, the opinions go from "this is so different, it isn't D&D any more", to "this is very different and I like it". I mentioned before that I detected influenced of MMORPGs in the 4E rules, but ultimately it goes much further; 4th Edition D&D rules are recognizably "modern" in a way that spans many different game genres. This includes them being more balanced, more accessible, less prone to one-shot player deaths, and more streamlined. And just like in MMORPGs, each of these modern features has its fans and detractors: Balanced is good because finally a D&D fighter is as interesting as a D&D wizard, but balance is bad because two different damage dealers feel more same-ish. And so on. Personally I generally like "modern" rules in many different genres. And not having played D&D in recent years, I'm not bitter about this or that change to my favorite race or character class.

4th Edition rules are a mess: True again, although not necessarily a change from previous editions. Basically Dungeons & Dragons suffers from being printed on paper. Imagine you had a printed set of rules on how a priest worked in World of Warcraft v1.0, plus a list of how that priest changed in every patch from then up to 4.3. That would be a *lot* of paper and rather unwieldy. Dungeons & Dragons is a bit like that, although there are a bit less changes to the rules over the years than in WoW. You start out with the rules in the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and the monsters of the Monster Manual. Then there are numerous updates and errata on the website. Then there are tons of optional game supplement books (because WotC needs to sell stuff). Then WotC decided to reprint the rules in a different format, including the updates, and released D&D Essentials. And in addition to that there are lots of house rules not only from your own campaign, but also that of others published on the internet and seen by your players. Dungeon Masters with some experience have long ago learned to limit what kind of rules and supplements can be used, and they are the final arbiter anyway. Personally my situation as future DM is somewhat different, because I am going to play a campaign in French. Much less material has been released in French, and I actually had to scramble to get rules books, because it appears that some of them are out of print.

4th Edition is combat heavy: Actually it would be fairer to say that *rules* of 4E D&D are combat heavy. Which then in turn prompted some authors to publish combat heavy adventures. It is today possible to play 4E Dungeons & Dragons in a way which resembles a miniature wargame a lot more than a role-playing game. The idea is that you don't *need* rules for role-playing, thus if you want to run a city adventure with a murder mystery and no combat at all, you can. The books don't talk a lot about that, but that is because the philosophy is that rules books don't have a lot to say in that sort of situation. I'm currently as a player in such a city adventure full of intrigue and mystery, and frankly we wouldn't even notice if the DM switched to a different rules system, because our interaction with the NPCs in this case isn't governed by rules, but by our creativity. Having said that, I welcome the opportunity as a DM to run some interesting combat sessions in the future. As players get older and don't meet for play sessions all that often any more, running a city intrigue adventure gets increasingly difficult; people simply don't remember all the details from their last session 2 weeks ago, and if the adventure spans months, you spend a lot of time reminding people of what happened previously. The 4E rules are quite good for creating more bite-sized adventures and encounters. Just remember that doesn't mean you can't have epic adventures in that system, it just means the books won't tell you how. Epic adventures always needed the DM to use his head, in any rules system.

So I do think that for my specific purposes, the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition rules are quite suitable. And if there are rules me and my players don't like, we always have the option to change them. This is the great advantage of pen & paper games over MMORPGs: You can adjust everything! The whole "WoW is too easy! No, it is too difficult!" discussion simply doesn't exist for pen & paper games, and with a decent DM the game will always be perfectly balanced and adjusted to the needs of the players.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:26 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post