Reavers of Harkenwold is a 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure in two parts which comes with the Dungeon Master's Kit. Basically it *is* the Dungeon Master's Kit, if you already have a Dungeon Master's Guide and don't need the streamlined paperback version of it. In spite of that paperback you might not need, the Kit is still good value, because it comes not only with the adventure in two booklets and three double-sided maps, but also with all the tokens you would need to run the game, player characters as well as all monsters. This product very much appears to be designed to be played "right out of the box". The catch is that it isn't quite that easy to do that.

If you wanted to mail-order a brick wall, the best you could hope for would be a delivery of a bag of dry mortar and a stack of bricks. You'd still need to add your own ingredients (water), and have some knowledge and skill in mixing the water with the mortar, bricklaying, and the proper proportion of mortar to bricks. Reavers of Harkenwold is pretty much the same thing. It has about 20 pages of adventure outline, places of interest, and NPCs (the mortar), and about 40 pages of combat encounters (the bricks). You still need to add your own ingredients (the roleplaying), and have some knowledge and skill to put it all together into a sturdy whole. Run by an experienced DM, Reavers of Harkenwold can be an excellent adventure. But I'm not sure it is the easiest adventure to run for a new DM who only got the D&D Essentials red box and tries to run this as his second adventure ever.

Reavers of Harkenwold is designed to take a group of players (preferably 5 or even 6 of them) from level 2 to level 4 in about 20 combat encounters interspersed with some roleplaying. How long that will take will depend on how much roleplaying the DM and the players like, but if you count about 2 combats per session you'd end up with about 10 sessions, which is a lot of adventure. The combat encounters start out easy, but then get harder, even taking into account that the players will gain a level in the middle. Careful! The adventure does not tell you how to scale the encounters down in difficulty, or in fact that they are designed for 5 players. If you try them with just 3 players, or even 4 very new players, you might end up with a total party kill (TPK).

The combat encounters are mostly quite well done. They use a good mix of opponents, sometimes putting enemies the group fought before together with new ones, which is a good design. It mixes the surprise of monsters with new abilities with the recognition of old foes. Some of the maps are also re-used several times, with one generic farm map serving to represent 4 different locations, which is maybe overdone. If you have other maps available, you can probably switch that one out in a battle or two.

The biggest flaw of the Reavers of Harkenwold adventure on the map side is that there are no maps at all for the last 4 battles, the grand finale, which plays in the right half of a keep. Even weirder, there is a rather excellent map of the left half of that keep, which is only used for one battle. You will have to get the missing map as jpegs somewhere online (for example here), or if you are subscribed to D&D Insider from the official site. Or create them yourself with some map-drawing software like Campaign Cartographer / Dungeon Designer. Or you use some dry erase map or dungeon tiles. In any case you'll end up with a style break when moving from one half of the castle to the other. Unless of course you have far too much time on your hand and decide to build the whole castle in 3D. [EDIT: Since I wrote this, I made some maps of my own.]

The biggest selling point of the Reavers of Harkenwold is it's open structure. There is some flexibility: Some encounters can be skipped, or played in a different order. Skipping or failing too many encounters will make the end of the adventure harder, if not impossible. That isn't a bad thing if played right, as it teaches the players that their actions have consequences and they can't just rush through and be confident to still be rewarded. As I said before, with some good DMing, Reavers of Harkenwold could be one of the best adventures for 4th edition. But it does require some preparation, an added dose of roleplaying, and creating of the missing maps. If run as a linear series of combat encounters with little or nothing in between, the quality goes way down, but would in most cases still somehow work. Just be aware that with lower number of players or the players rushing directly to the end there is a good chance to wipe the party.

Imagine a fantasy game in which you have a hero who is exploring single-player dungeons, and finds decorative items there. The purpose of the game would be to build the most beautiful city. It isn't hard to see how a Free2Play business model would work for this game: Buy decorative items to further make your city more beautiful, or buy access to new single-player dungeons. Somebody spending a lot of money would have a prettier city, but except for possible jealousy that would not have any negative effect on other players. It is a model we recognize from the real world: Somebody willing to spend more money on a car will drive a nicer car than we, but that doesn't affect our driving pleasure all that much.

Imagine a fantasy game in which you have a hero who is exploring single-player dungeons, and earns levels and gear there. Then there is a PvP arena, where players duel random other players, with the purpose of the game being to win the most battles. Make this game Free2Play, and you immediately run into problems: Selling either gear directly, or selling access to new dungeons with "must have" gear inside both will lead to players who spend more money being more likely to win against others than those who spend less or nothing. Although for the individual player on his own the business model might appear similar (buy stuff and access to dungeons), the effect is a very different one: What player A buys hurts player B. The business model is likely to be perceived as being unfair.

It gets more complicated if you have a game with many different possible purposes and ways to play: A MMORPG. If you think of dungeons in terms of "server firsts" and steps towards showing how your raiding guild is better than the other raiding guilds on the server, buying access to a dungeon seems unfair. But if you see dungeons just as content to be consumed for entertainment, buying access to more entertainment seems fair.

It seems to me that the monthly subscription business model for MMORPGs is ailing, and only viable for a small handful of top games. When people see a game they don't consider to be a top contender, let's say TERA, having a monthly subscription, they immediately start speculating how long it will be before the game switches to Free2Play. And then of course it is likely that a game which switches business models will have a less well-designed Free2Play model than one which took the business model into consideration right from the start. There are competitive games like League of Legends or World of Tanks which have been designed for Free2Play and which are generally considered as mostly fair. It is possible to design a virtual shop in which items are both desirable and not hurting the game. But there is still work to do in developing this further.

This is post number 4000 on this blog. The blog is now nearly 9 years old. Over 5 million visitors were registered over this time, plus a similar number of feed readers.

The many-headed hydra of the European (and world-wide) debt crisis has resurfaced, threatening Spain this time. And in France a socialist is likely to win the presidential election in a week, promising to overthrow the previous governments promises of austerity for the sake of "growth". And I don't understand. Not the politics of it, I understand those very well. But the economics of calculating GDP and GDP growth.

As this is extremely complicated to calculate for a whole nation, let me explain my problem with a much smaller example, a single person: Imagine a guy who earns €2,000 per month (which corresponds to the median household income of for example the UK). If he spends all of this (Case A), he contributes €2,000 per month to GDP, because he somewhere causes the sales of €2,000 of goods and services. If for some reason the guy finds that €2,000 worth of goods and services isn't enough for him, he can borrow money to increase his spending. So let's say in Case B in the next year he spends €2,200 per month, on the same €2,000 income, by racking up €200 of debt per month. Although he still earns the same, his personal contribution to the GDP goes up by 10%. If everybody did the same, the GDP would go up by 10%.

Now at the start of the third year our guy has received some threatening letters from his credit card company about the debt he is accumulating, and decides to act. He still earns €2,000 per month, but this year (Case C) he only spends €1,800 of it on goods of services, and uses the remaining €200 to pay back his debt. His contribution to GDP is 10% lower than in case A, and nearly 20% lower than in case B. Horror! A recession!

But isn't the recorded GDP growth from case A to case B, and the subsequent fall from case B to case C all just an illusion? In reality our guy earned exactly the same in each year. He caused an "illusionary" economic growth by spending more than he earned, balanced by accumulating debt. The moment he decided to pay back that debt, he causes an "illusionary" recession. "Illusionary" is maybe not the right term, because certainly somebody else earned more money from case B. But is that additional spending really "economic growth" if it is based on borrowed money and not sustainable? Shouldn't there be an asterisk next to the GDP figures, with an explanation that of the total GDP x% was paid for with borrowed money?

If our first economic priority was to increase the GDP figure, we could easily achieve that by all spending much more money than we earn, with money borrowed from China (because money borrowed locally increases the spending of borrower by as much as it decreases that of the lender). We could have 100% economic growth by simply all spending twice of what we earn. But to me it appears rather obvious that this so-called economic growth would be just a Fata Morgana, because it clearly isn't sustainable.

To me the battle-cry of "economic growth instead of austerity" is a false one, because it translates into "more debt instead of paying back debt". The Keynesian economics of "government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up.", paid for with foreign debt, clearly results in "economic growth" on paper. But as nothing useful was produced, it only leaves a legacy of debt, which an implied future reduction of GDP the day this debt is paid back. Economic growth is good, but only if it is the result of an increase in productivity, of innovation, of people working harder. Economic growth paid for with borrowed money is just a trap.

Switching back and forth between discussing MMORPGs and pen & paper roleplaying games made me realize where my personal position towards the famous "Bartle types" of MMORPG players stems from. The explorer, socializer, achiever, killer quartet doesn't really exist like that in a game like Dungeons & Dragons. Or rather, certain types don't work for players and especially dungeon masters:

• You can't have killer type players. There is no PvP in D&D, and killing a member of your group is like a foul on a member of your own team in sports. You risk getting kicked from the team.
• You can't have a killer type dungeon master either. Unlimited power and a goal of killing off the players simply don't mix well. It is too easy to achieve to be a challenge, and if your players feel you are killing them off malevolently, they'll stop playing with you.
• You can't even have an achiever type dungeon master. Again ultimate power and a desire to win don't mix. A DM needs to run the monsters more like an impartial referee, and not as if it was a game of DM vs. players.

As I played Dungeons & Dragons for two decades before the first MMORPG, that very much influenced my expectations of what a MMORPG *should* be. UO was a shock, EQ was a lot closer to the social standards of pen & paper games. In Dungeons & Dragons everybody wins if the DM and the players together manage to tell a great interactive story. The idea that another player is your enemy, which you should kill or harm if you can, or insult as clueless noob if you can't, is foreign to Dungeons & Dragons. And I still find it a bit sad that this is the general attitude many players have in MMORPGs.

Cryptic wants you to know that their database has been hacked, and you better watch out for the various negative effects that could possibly have on accounts where you used the same password, or on your credit card. Oh, and by the way, that database hack happened in December 2010, and Cryptic sent out the warning on April 25, 2012. Because it is inconceivable that the people who hacked them could possibly already have used the information they found, Cryptic decided it wasn't worth warning us before. Fail!

Follow-up on some comments of the previous thread, so as to not derail that comment thread. Several people remarked that if somebody thought that the AH was making Diablo 3 too easy, the simple solution would be to not use it. That is one of these phrases which at first look appear rather obvious, but then when you see what happens in reality isn't obvious at all. For example I said pretty much exactly the same when Blizzard added a dispellable buff that nerfed WoW raids, and some people were complaining about the nerf: If you don't like it, don't use it! But that simple solution was never accepted as viable. Everybody claimed that if the buff was there, you had to use it, because handicapping yourself wasn't acceptable. And of course now people say the same about the option to not use the AH in Diablo 3.

I think the question is one of your reference point for evaluating your own performance, and ultimately a question of maturity. Everybody operating under exactly the same rule set, using the maximum of all available means to succeed, makes the performance of everybody comparable. If everybody uses the nerf buffs in WoW raids, you can see how good everybody is by looking at the resulting epic gear. If some players play with the buff, and others without, those who dispelled the buff risk to look bad, because they end up with the same gear as people who played less good. And to some people that is not acceptable.

Other players don't care about how they look, or what people think about them. They have their own, internal reference point. To them beating a raid without buff is a greater success than beating it with the buff, thus has higher value, even if the epic reward is the same. Gevlon once organized the "undergeared" raid project. Other players organized Iron Man WoW with even more restrictive rules. As long as you only care about your own standards for performance, you can play under whatever set of rules, restriction, and handicaps you like.

I was considering playing Diablo 3 without using the AH long before people suggested it in today's thread, as I don't see Diablo 3 (nor MMORPGs) as a competitive endeavor. In the specific case of the Diablo 3 AH, I very much see the risk that using the feature destroys a lot of the item-collecting fun of the game. In general, if there are ways to modify the difficulty level of a game, I usually don't go for either extreme, but try to fine-tune difficulty to exactly the level where it is most fun, because it provides a good challenge without either being too easy nor too frustratingly difficult. That is obviously a lot easier in single-player games, but to me Diablo 3 is one. But I fully understand the other point of view, where players refuse to handicap themselves by not using features like the AH.

Azuriel discovered the magic of the Diablo 3 auction house. Which actually doesn't come to much of a surprise to anybody who ever used the auction house in World of Warcraft to equip a low-level alt. Basically the equipment you can buy on an AH in any of these games is significantly better than the equipment you are likely to find yourself, without being all that expensive. Thus you can make these games much easier for you by twinking your characters with AH-bought equipment instead of the equipment they find. Which then makes one of the major motivations of the game, collecting random equipment, completely obsolete.

The problem has three sources. One is the very nature of trade. Two people who trade with each other will both be better off afterwards than before the trade. This is because things are worth different amounts of money to different people, and if they trade some item for a price which is higher than what it is worth to the seller, but simultaneously lower than what it is worth to the buyer, both sides win. Thus in game terms, even the most balanced game with trade would make characters stronger than exactly the same game without trade. The larger the market, the stronger the effect, thus the region-wide Diablo 3 AH will have a huge effect.

The second source of the problem is a game design where a given item is worth a lot to one character, but very little to another. If you find an item your class can't wear, it is only worth as much as the materials into which you can disenchant it to for you. But it might be extremely valuable to a character of the class that can use it.

The third source is the fact that if you are level X and kill a monster of level X, you don't usually find items which have level X as their minimum requirement. Normally you find somewhat lower stuff. I don't know yet how extreme that is in Diablo 3, but in World of Warcraft your random drops while leveling tended to be much, much lower in minimum level, and thus power. So if you find an item of level X-5, that is probably not worth much to you, but quite valuable to somebody of 5 levels lower than you.

All this together means that if you find a bunch of items while playing Diablo 3, it is near certain that if you sell these items to other players and take the money and buy other items with it, you end up being more powerful than if you had only worn what you found for yourself.

There is a serious risk here that many players end up rarely wearing items they found themselves. At which point the nature of item collection changes: You just find stuff for sale, which isn't much more interesting than finding little bags of gold. Instead of wielding the legendary sword of uberness you received from killing the evil wizard in the mountain of doom, you wield the legendary sword of uberness with the price tag still dangling from its hilt. That simply doesn't feel quite as heroic.

A reader wrote me a mail with the above title, about how he games the matchmaking in Starcraft 2:

Hi Tobold,

I play a lot of Starcraft 2 ladder games and what I found most disheartening in the matchmaking system is when I realized that every single win takes me closer to be matched to harder and harder opponents. Basically the game systems edges you closer and closer to your physical limits - whatever those might be. You end up having to put in your best all the time. But that is not really why I play a game, I want to also relax.

Moreover there are many people that simply quit at the beginning (probably they want to drop in the ranking), plus there are cheesers and other people that find ways to exploit some features (quick and powerful all ins) so in the end the number of games that I win because I made a lot of good decisions is substantially less than 50%. That makes the game a whole lot less fun.

So this is when I realized the solution - if I am about to win a game (if I see that I am overrunning my opponent and they are left with almost nothing) I surrender. I found this to have many benefits and no downsides - for me whether or not the final page shows me winning or losing makes no difference whatsoever. I know that I have won and I got my satisfaction.

The other benefits are that I am not increasing in rank, therefore my next opponent won't necessarily be harder, moreover my opponents are also happy, they are still in the mindset that the little number of wins matters and in fact many of them thanked me for surrendering and overall are a lot nicer to me - I often get a bad mannered messages after I win but none when I surrender. So it is ending up a win-win!(BTW I am not doing this all the time, just from time to time)

I will say though that in the world of gaming there is no game as intense as SC2. It is a brutal game that with this trick is a lot more fun than before. Every game is a relaxing one that I don't have to push myself to limit while playing.

What he effectively does is winning more often by changing his personal definition of what a win is. The matchmaking system records a loss for the game he considers to have won. And that recorded loss makes it more likely that he "wins" the next game. The obvious problem with that method is that it leads to other people being paired by the matchmaker against an opponent who is far too strong for them, whom they only face because he manipulated his score downwards.

And that is basically the problem of all matchmaking systems. Everybody wants to win more than half of his games, but that simply isn't possible. Either you switch to a PvE system in which the computer doesn't mind losing, or you accept that the optimum outcome of a perfect matchmaking system is a 50:50 win chance. The only game I know that comes close to this perfect equilibrium is World of Tanks, and lots of players complain that their win chance isn't higher than 50% in that game.

There might be a future employment market in this. Instead of paying some guy in a Chinese sweat shop to power-level our characters or farm gold, we could pay him to lose PvP games against us.

Spinks is upset about the demon huntress in Diablo 3 wearing stiletto heels. And Korean game TERA goes somewhat further than games made in the West in depicting women as objects of male sexual fantasies. But of course the discussion about that isn't a new one, sexualized fantasy art like that of Boris Vallejo has been around since the 60's, and the infamous chainmail bikini has been discussed quite often on various game forums and blogs.

What I find somewhat curious about that is that it is always nearly exclusively the depiction of women which is criticized. Judging from the photos one sees from game conventions, I am pretty certain that male players don't exactly look like the muscular hunks they are depicted as in the game either. Isn't that sexualized fantasy too? And, albeit for the most people without sexual context, most wolves, bears, or other animals in a game also look a lot fitter than in real life.

Not only do virtual avatars don't look like the players behind the screen, they don't even necessarily have the same gender. A survey on Everquest at the time revealed that of any female avatar you saw in game, half were played by men. People jokingly suggested that MMORPG stands for Mostly Men Online Role-Playing Girls. If there is no link between the player and the avatar, then how can the look of the avatar be construed as being discrimination?

Of course hunting demons in stiletto heels isn't realistic, and a chainmal bikini has obvious flaws as a piece of armor. But while I am hurling fireballs at a dragon, should I really be worried about how realistic anything in these games is? The notion that something shown in a virtual world in any way is a representation of the real world is a dangerous one. You end up with people complaining about the "occult" elements of these games depicting devils and demons. Or the endless discussion on whether or not a game which depicts some form of romance should allow that to happen between members of the same sex.

Fact is that there is no reproduction in virtual worlds. Avatars never have sex, and female avatars never get pregnant and have babies. As it says somewhere on the label, the whole virtual world is a fantasy. People usually enter these virtual worlds because they want a temporary break from their real-world issues. Projecting those real-world issues onto the virtual world isn't exactly helpful there. It ends up criticizing people for the fantasies they have, and that is an extreme form of attempted mind control. You can't punish people for their dreams and fantasies not being politically correct.

I am playing less computer games this year than in previous years, instead spending more time on other activities like pen & paper roleplaying, reading, and other stuff. And I find that changes my selection criteria for games. I have a lot of interesting and very deep games installed on my computer, but if I don't play them for a while and then come back to them, I have a hard time of getting back into the swing of things. For example Skyrim is a great game, but if you don't play for a week and then restart, it is hard to remember all the different small stories you were involved in. And if you skip from game to game, you also need to remember the controls each time anew.

So I find myself playing games like World of Tanks, which is by its structure already well partitioned into little bits of battles of a few minutes, and the controls are very intuitive. Regardless of how long I didn't play, I can always start a battle in WoT and be right back in the "flow". Other games which are easy to pick up again any time are the various Facebook and iOS games, but that is often because they aren't very deep to start with.

So I was wondering whether Diablo 3 might actually be a good game for me. I'm not playing the beta much because it is boring to play through the same first 10 levels again and again. But the release version wouldn't have that limitation. And the game is sufficiently linear and with easy controls that it doesn't matter how long I didn't play, I should always be able to get right back in. Unlike MMORPGs, Diablo will have multiple difficulty levels, so I should be able to find one which is just right for me, and not be too boring.

What are the games that you like to come back to after an absence? Are there any eternal favorites you play on and off, once in a while?

Imagine when logging into World of Warcraft, you would have a screen on which you could select which patch version of WoW you wanted to play. On offer would be a late vanilla WoW version, a late Burning Crusade version, a late Wrath of the Lich King version, or the current Cataclysm version. Which of these would you play?

Now to completely change this discussion around, let's consider the high likelihood that you actually had an answer to my question. And that this answer isn't necessarily the same as somebody else's. The player base would be split into 4 groups of unequal size. While one day Blizzard might open up a nostalgia server with vanilla rules, there are good reasons for not offering too many versions of the same game at the same time. But then Blizzard is in a rather fortunate situation: Except for badly running versions on private servers, Blizzard is in complete control over what version of World of Warcraft players have access to. Even the players who don't buy the expansions need to live with the rules changes the new patch versions bring. The same is not true for all other games.

Which brings me to the observation that when reading about Dungeons & Dragons, I stumble quite often over blog posts and forum entries discussing the edition wars. Telwyn of GamingSF wrote a nice post with links to a detailed description of the edition wars on The Escapist. Just like you could easily imagine WoW players heatedly discussing which version of World of Warcraft is best, the players of Dungeons & Dragons discuss which of the 4+ editions is best. Only that the old editions never really went away, and the people who think that first edition AD&D was the best can still play it. You can even buy a "premium" reprint of the rulebooks from Wizards of the Coast themselves.

So just like our theoretical World of Warcraft example, the real D&D player base is split into at least 4 groups of unequal size playing different editions of the game. Not to mention versions like 3.5, or Open Game License games like Pathfinder, or 4E Essentials, or millions of house rules versions. Wizards of the Coast is working on a 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, called D&D Next. But a much bigger percentage of people calling themselves "World of Warcraft players" will buy Mists of Pandaria than the percentage of "Dungeons & Dragons players" that will buy D&D Next. Especially if you bought a lot of rulebooks of one edition, the advantage of buying the next edition, which isn't downward compatible, isn't all that obvious.

Personally I am a huge fan of tactical RPG combat, which is why 4th edition works for me. But I wouldn't claim that it is "better" or "worse" than other editions in absolute terms. And I played most of them, starting from 1st edition back in the 80s. Each edition worked for its time, and each new edition brought some improvements and some stuff I liked less than the previous edition. And much of D&D depends on how the DM runs it anyway. For example even if a printed adventure mostly describes combat encounters, every DM will insert a different amount of roleplaying between these fights.

Ultimately which edition you play doesn't change the core of what Dungeons & Dragons is. The last adventure I played with my group was one of my favorites back in the 1990, The Standing Stones of Sundown, and it still works perfectly well after having been updated from 2nd edition to 4th edition. The edition wars of Dungeons & Dragons are not for me, I think all the editions had their strong points. As did all the patch versions of World of Warcraft.

My D&D 4E campaign is between adventures, and I'm entering my player's choices into their character sheets, leveling them up from level 1 to level 2. Now 4th edition has a "half your level" modifier on most d20 rolls, and as you always round down this modifier now appears for the first time. All attacks, skills, and defenses go up by 1, in addition to any changes from new talents and such. And of course hitpoints also go up with level, in 4E by a fixed value depending on your class. What *doesn't* go up is your damage. The half your level modifier does not apply to damage rolls, only to the d20 rolls which determine success or failure.

Now imagine a character fighting his mirror image, both at level 1 and at level 2. His chance to hit hasn't changed a bit, as the +1 to attack and defenses simply cancels each other out. His damage is still the same. But his hitpoints have gone up. In short, the combat between the mirror images at level 2 will take longer than the combat at level 1.

This is especially true at this level, because at level 2 characters only get a new utility power, and not attack powers. One would imagine that in levels where the characters get new attack powers, their damage output goes up a bit. And many powers deal more damage when reaching level 11 and level 21. But it appears that overall damage goes up slower than hitpoints.

Now I understand better the various comments I've been reading about 4th edition combat being "slow". Up to now in my campaign combat wasn't particularly slow. Patting myself on the back I can say that part of that has to do with preparation. But obviously another part of that is that the campaign is still at low levels. If combat against your mirror image gets slower with level, it is probable that combat against monsters also gets slower. Thus if in a few levels everybody has twice the hitpoints but still uses mostly the same attacks and deals the same damage, it is easy to see how combat could be felt to drag.

Over time this could become a problem. One way out of this is making sure that the magic items the group finds adds to their damage output. Basically I want to make sure that a character fighting his mirror image at a higher level doesn't need longer to kill it than he did at level 1. This is something I will have to keep an eye on over the length of my campaign.

TERA is not a bad game. The graphics are good, the characters and monsters different from western games, the combat system a bit different from normal hotkey combat, and they even adjusted to western sensibilities by replacing the G-string panties with shorts. But after playing for a few hours and getting yet another "kill X of these", "gather Y of those", and "go talk to the guy in the next quest hub" quests, I simply couldn't stand it any more. Not TERA specifically, but the errand-based trivial gameplay in general.

It is said that the quest gameplay works by handing out little rewards all the time, which causes a dopamine release in the brain, which we experience as pleasure. I guess my dopamine receptors are dead from overdose. This simply doesn't work for me any more. Reading a quest telling me to kill 10 foozles only makes me want to scream. Because killing 1 foozle is so boring, and adding 9 others and a quest reward doesn't make the activity any more interesting. I would rather play something where I have to think about my moves, where tactics are important, and where my decisions have consequences. Modern MMORPGs just don't offer that.

Guess I won't spend any money on TERA.

Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik (and I refuse to use "alleged" here) said he used Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to train for his massacre. And he also played World of Warcraft up to 16 hours a day, and in fact recommends it as a cover in case you are planning some illegal you don't want your friends and family to know: "Announce to your closest friends, co-workers and family that you are pursuing a 'project' that can at least partly justify your 'new pattern of activities' (isolation/travel) while in the planning phase. (For) example, tell them that you have started to play 'World of Warcraft' or any other online MMO game and that you wish to focus on this for the next months/year. This 'new project' can justify isolation and people will understand somewhat why you are not answering your phone over long periods." 

While science is pretty clear about the fact that playing video games does not turn you into a mass murderer, there is other scientific evidence on how playing these games for over 40 hours per week can lead to isolation from the real world and psychological problems. Maybe how much somebody plays says more about how much he loses contact with the real world than exactly what games he is playing.

I can only hope that Breivik is wrong about to what degree people will understand if you say you are playing a video game 16 hours per day. I would hope that friends and family would recognize such behavior as problematic, and would help the person to get back into the real world. Just like they should help if somebody watches 16 hours of TV per day. Escaping into a dream world is not a way to solve real world problems, and in many cases is likely to make the real world situation worse.

At the Future of D&D Panel at PAX East 2012 the panelists had a question from somebody who had playtested 5th edition D&D the day before and wondered why his cleric didn't have a turn undead ability. They assured him that this would be back in, because the developers had realized that certain class abilities were simply expected from players choosing a specific class in D&D. For me one such class-defining feature is the D&D wizard's magic missile. It has been a staple of wizards in D&D since first edition. But the more I see it in action in the 4th edition of D&D, the more I realize that the 4E version of it is sadly underpowered. Wizards still cast it, out of habit, but if you check sites that advise people on Wizard builds, the recommendation is to avoid it and take cloud of daggers instead.

The main difference between the 4th edition magic missile and previous editions is that these days the Wizard needs to make a roll whether his missile hits. And if you analyze that in detail, it turns out that this roll is somewhat too difficult. In 4E D&D you always roll a d20 to see whether you hit something, and add a modifier, in this case the Wizard's INT modifier, let's say +4 for a Wizard with 18 INT. If that roll plus modifier exceeds the target's reflex defense, the magic missile hits and deals 2d4+4 damage. So far so good. But now compare that to a regular missile: An character with an 18 DEX and thus the same +4 bonus on missiles using a longbow will roll a d20 and add +6, because in addition to the +4 ability bonus he gets a +2 proficiency bonus. And he'll deal 1d10+4 damage, marginally more than the magic missile. But the kicker is that this is his basic ranged attack, without using an at-will power. A Ranger would be able to use a twin strike and fire TWO arrows as an at-will power, which makes the Wizard's at-will magic missile power look extremely feeble in comparison.

At first I thought the Wizard might still have one advantage, his magic missile attack roll being compared to the enemies reflex defense, which is generally lower than the armor class, against which the regular missile needs to be compared. So I took my next adventure and listed for every monster in there the difference between reflex and AC: The difference was between 0 and 5, with an average of 2.5. Thus the additional proficiency bonus the guy with the bow gets pretty much completely makes up for the average difference between reflex and AC, and then the twin strike makes the Ranger exactly twice as good as the Wizard. Not very balanced, I would say.

I can only assume that the design philosophy behind that difference is that the Ranger is labeled as being a "striker", which is the word for dps class in D&D 4E, while the Wizard is labeled as being a controller. Thus the Wizard gets a lot of AoE powers, while the Ranger deals more damage against single targets. That is all very good in theory, but once combat is in full swing it isn't all that obvious for a Wizard to cast his AoE spells. For example the level 1 at-will thunderwave is hitting 3x3 squares *adjacent* to the Wizard. Useful, but far from probable to hit more than 1 enemy every round without either hitting a friend or getting swarmed by enemies. Thus the Wizard needs a decent single target attack spell too, and magic missile just doesn't cut it these days. In fact the Wizard in my campaign is an elf, and thus has good DEX and the longbow proficiency as racial bonus; it is somewhat sad that against enemies with high reflex defense he would be better off firing a longbow basic attack than using his magic missile spell.

More than in computer role-playing games, combat in D&D still has some elements of monsters and events being there for dramatic effect. But while the story-telling and dramatic effects very much depend on the DM and the players, the underlying combat rules provide a solid base of game mechanics, which would work just as well in a computer game. Understanding how this system works and what consequences the game mechanics have for strategy and tactics enables players to be more successful, and DMs to run better battles.

Now 4th edition D&D combat rules show a clear influence of MMORPG combat systems, and that is something that previous editions didn't have. While D&D combat always had heavily armored fighters in the front rank and glass cannon mages in the back, in 4th edition the tanks gain some forms of "taunt"-like abilities for aggro control. And like in MMORPGs, combat healing is now more prominent. All this has as consequence that classic MMORPG "holy trinity" tactics play a bigger role in D&D 4E combat than in previous editions.

Combat in D&D is nearly always a group activity. And in 4th edition in most cases the monsters also come as a group. Especially the introduction of minions, monsters with just 1 hitpoint, enables DMs to create encounters which look a lot more dramatic from the start due to the presence of lots of monsters. This group vs. group concept of combat has tactical consequences, because the two groups aren't equal: In a standard combat all or nearly all of the players should be alive at the end of combat, and all of the monsters dead. But as the monsters don't die all at once, this implies that combat is getting easier for the group as they eliminate their enemies one by one.

The best tactics for a player group usually is to eliminate the minions first, with AoE spells and abilities if available. Then the players should concentrate their fire on one opponent after the other, because every monster gone is making the next round of combat easier to survive. But as D&D 4E combat is highly tactical, using a battle grid, movement limitations, zones of control, and all that, players usually can't all hit the same mob. Often it is better to to engage in some crowd control: A fighter "tanking" one mob while the group kills another monster. Or the mage using spells like sleep to keep some mobs busy.

One important tactical decision by the players is which powers to use. At-will powers have the least effect, but are not used up. Encounter powers can only be used once per combat, and daily powers only once per day. As players don't know how the combat will evolve, and whether they will have more combats that day, they are sometimes reluctant to use their encounter and daily powers. If the players don't know the monsters, and are unsure which of them pose what sort of a threat, it is understandable that they might want to start with at-will powers to not waste their good powers on weak monsters and later regret not having it for a stronger opponent. But even if you start the first round of combat with an at-will power to see how it goes, it is generally best to use encounter and daily powers early in combat. The faster the players take out the first mobs, the easier the combat gets for them.

In principle the same tactics are true for the DM playing the monsters. Only that "winning" the combat isn't actually the DMs goal. A wipe, usually called "TPK" for total party kill in D&D parlance, represents a major setback in the story for both the players and the DM. It shouldn't be impossible, especially not if the players did something stupid to get into that mess. But as the DM controls the number and strength of all monsters, killing the players can't be a challenge for him, because he would always be able to do so by pulling enough of them out of his hat. Instead the challenge for the DM in combat is to provide the players with a tactical challenge and dramatic effects that make the combat memorable for the players, but not necessarily lethal. Having a player dead once in a while isn't bad, and adds to the drama, but a TPK isn't really a desirable outcome.

Fortunately understanding of tactics works both ways. Without having to fudge dice or use Deux Ex Machina events, a DM can moderate combat by having his mobs act more or less tactically intelligent. There is always an excuse for artificial stupidity: Not every goblin, wolf, or bandit is likely to be a tactical genius, so using tactics that are unlikely to kill the group is perfectly justifiable. And fortunately the desire to not kill the group and the desire to make combat dramatic for everybody are not incompatible with each other: Having the mobs spread out their attacks and wounding everybody a little instead of concentrating their fire can feel more dramatic for the players, while actually being less dangerous for them.

Combat needs to make sense to the players, and it is best if there is a certain visible logic behind the decisions the DM takes when running his monsters. For example D&D 4E "taunts" aren't absolutely forcing monsters to attack the tank. But it usually is a good idea to treat them as such, so as to make taunting work as intended. In many battles it probably would be possible for the mobs to ignore the the tank and all concentrate on the healer to take him out first, but that would make combat rather frustrating for the healer and then the other players. If the players make a reasonable effort to keep their squishier members protected, the DM shouldn't go out of his way to destroy that plan. But making combat logical also means that if the group plays carelessly and the mage ends up being a front line combatant, the DM shouldn't hesitate to have several mobs attack him to make the consequences very visible to him.

The DM not being out to "win" and kill the party also means that he should be lenient on rule calls if the players try out something non-standard. The goal is for everybody to have fun, and to create a good story, so the rogue swinging over the battlefield on a chandelier isn't something the DM should discourage. In fact it is probably a good idea to run combat on maps containing various pieces of furniture, obstacles, and other stuff that can influence the fight, so as to encourage the players to try other stuff than just using their standard powers. Of course that doesn't mean you should allow the mage to single-handedly win the whole battle with a simple cantrip. Thus him casting Ghost Sound to create a dragon's roar behind the enemy could be ruled to give a combat advantage for one round while the enemy is distracted, but not to make all monsters run away.

Personally I do like the D&D 4th edition combat system. It is more likely than previous editions to let all players participate in having entertaining and dramatic battles, because everybody has "spells" now. And with positioning being so important now, it becomes possible for the same group to fight similar monsters twice and get battles with a very different feel, depending on the geography and features of the location. And in some way combat is auto-regulating, becoming easier through monsters being killed, while players are becoming more worried over the damage accumulating on them. If players consider every fight tough and dramatic, that is a lot better than the MMORPG habit of thinking "let's go and kill a hundred mobs to grind some xp". In D&D the story is the purpose, the entertainment, and not "winning".

The players ended the last session by having a night's rest in Winterhaven, where they are investigating the mysterious death and subsequent zombification of the mage Arris. Getting up the next morning they are greeted by a scene of busy village life. It is the day before the Blessing of the Seeds procession, and most villagers are busy preparing for the festival: The elder villagers are sweeping the streets, although they seem to be busier talking than sweeping. Some boys are playing noisily, doing all sorts of pranks, and Father Matthias has caught one naughty boy and is spanking him. The girls of the village are busy preparing garlands, and the innkeeper is stretching cords from house to house to hang them up.

The players decide not to interact with the villagers at this point, except for one dwarf getting a second breakfast from the innkeeper. Then, following clues that villagers have disappeared in the woods, they decide to put up a trap: One of them disguises as a villager, hacking wood in a clearing, with the rest of the group hidden out of sight. [DM's note: There is a good DM rule to try and say "yes" to everything the players try, but that doesn't mean that you need every plan of them succeed.] After having spent the whole day that way without success, the players return to the village.

Suddenly one of them remembers that they were previously worried about the chalice in the church getting stolen, so three of the players go there. The chalice is still safe and sound, although Father Matthias tells them that the boy he was spanking this morning had tried to steal it, and got paralyzed by a glyph. The players don't follow that up, but spend the night in the church guarding the chalice, until they are awoken the next morning by Father Matthias coming to prepare for the Blessing of the Seeds. The mage asks him whether he could examine the chalice, and with an arcane check finds that the pentagonal chalice has a symbol on each side representing different planes: Prime Material Plane, the Shadowfell, Feywild, Celestia in the Astral Sea, and the Abyss in the Elemental Chaos. He suspects that the chalice is good for planar travel, but can't activate it without a command word.

Now one of the big classic issues of DMing an adventure arises: The players decide to do nothing, while waiting for the Blessing of the Seeds procession. D&D is designed to be an interactive story-telling experience, between the DM who has all the information about the world and what is going on, and the players who have limited information and are trying to find out what is going on. The DM gives the the players hints and descriptions what they see, and the players are supposed to follow those up. Only sometimes they don't. Either the way to go isn't obvious, or, as I suspect in this case, it is *too* obvious. The dead mage having been found with a ring of depetrification on his finger next to a circle of standing stones with one outer and the central stone missing should have encouraged the players to depetrify another stone, but they suspected that to be a trap releasing even more problems upon the village. I've seen adventures get stuck like that, so the trick to not let that happen is to have a plan B and know how the NPCs and villains will drive the story forward if the players don't.

The procession of the Blessing of the Seeds festival begins at noon, with Father Matthias coming from the church holding the chalice and moving towards the village gate and the farms outside, where he will fill the chalice with holy water and bless the seeds to guarantee a good harvest. The villagers form up in a procession behind him, children first, then the adults. The players decide to stand guard and distribute themselves strategically around the procession. With the detect undead ability of the priest's mace they are thus well prepared when three juju zombies attack.

What they aren't prepared for, having not followed up a lot of available information, is when in the middle of the fight one of the children next to Father Matthias polymorphs back into his natural form: An ancient vrock demon named Jaazzpaa. Jaazzpaa grabs the chalice from the priest, and apparently tries to use it for planar travel, looking somewhat surprised when that doesn't appear to be working. In spite of the player's attempts to stop him (somewhat divided due to the zombie attack), Jaazzpaa then flies away with the chalice. The players kill the zombies and discover that one of them is not a villager; instead it is a man in a loin-cloth with blue painted symbols on his torso, a bone through his nose, a feather hat on his head, and armed just with a dagger made out of flintstone.

Now the players find out what happened. They depetrify another stone of the stone circle, liberating another stone-age shaman in similar attire. With a comprehend languages ritual they learn from the shaman that 5,000 years ago 10 shamans of the surrounding villages sacrificed themselves in a ritual which transformed them and "The Beast" permanently into stone. The Beast (Jaazzpaa) had used his chalice to teleport into the villages from his home in the Abyss, eat a villager or two, and go back home. The shamans' sacrifice was the only way to stop him. When the mage Arris, misled by stories saying that the stones were farmers petrified by a basilisk, depetrified one of the shamans, he inadvertedly broke the ritual spell and freed the demon. The demon killed both the depetrified shaman and Arris with a spore attack that made them come back as zombies two days later, under the control of the demon. Jaazzpaa then tried to get this chalice back, polymorphing into a village boy. As he couldn't enter the church's holy ground, he charmed another boy to steal the chalice for him, but didn't succeed. So he had to wait for the chalice to leave the churce during the Blessing of the Seeds, using the shaman zombie and two villagers he had caught in the woods and zombified as distraction.

While Lord Padraig would like the players to go after the demon, and the players are interested too, they don't know where to start looking for Jaazzpaa now. Valthrun, counsellor to Lord Padraig thinks he can find out something about the demon's whereabouts, using his library of books and network of informants. But that will take some time, and he advises the players to spend that time gaining a bit more experience before tackling a powerful demon. The players thus return to Fallcrest, fulfil their initial quest of bringing the ring of depetrification back to the temple of Selune, and reaching level 2 with the quest xp.

This ends the group's level 1 adventure. Much of it was taken from an adventure published in Dungeon Magazine #25: The Standing Stones of Sundown. The plan is to do another adventure now before coming back at a slightly higher level to chase Jaazzpaa the Ancient Vrock.

Watching other Dungeon Masters of Dungeons & Dragons in action, let's say via YouTube, to learn something from them turns out to be not so easy. First of all there are very few videos of real play sessions on offer. And then those who are of a reasonable production quality turn out to be not quite the real thing: In order to get the film to a reasonable length, combat is often shortened by using just one real monster and filling the rest up with minions that die quickly. And while you can watch some bantering between players, there is never the endless discussion on what to do next which characterizes many real games.

I will be playing D&D tonight, and we are still on the first "adventure". Maybe the group will finish it tonight, maybe they'll need another session. Which means that going through one adventure with one story and a few fights will have taken up to 20 hours of play time. Even if I had the best camera equipment in the world and had filmed that adventure, nobody would want to watch 20 hours of people sitting around a table, talking a lot, and sometimes moving some figurines around and rolling dice. But *I* was immensely entertained during these hours, and as far as I can tell, so were my players. It is just that this entertainment can't be caught on film.

In a way that is a bit like reading a book. Those of us who read the Lord of the Rings years before the movies came out probably all had some vivid images of the fellowship and their adventures in their heads, even if they read editions of the book without graphics. Our imagination is often the best graphics card. Watching a video of a guy reading a book can't possibly display the fun and entertainment happening in his head.

It is also important to point out that most people who play in a regular D&D group don't meet up *only* to play D&D. Hanging out with friends is an important part of the activity, and a lot of the exchange between the players either has nothing at all to do with the game, or is in the form of in-jokes nobody outside their circle would understand.

If I look at computer RPGs and MMORPGs, there are a lot more videos available and it is easier to get an idea what the game is about by watching. Nevertheless there is still a gap between for example the graphics and activities presented in a World of Warcraft trailer and those happening if you play WoW. Probably the trailers are meant to represent what people imagine while they play, not what they actually do while playing. I've seen some hilarious films of people playing a WoW raid where the camera showed only the player, not the screen; between the facial expressions, hammering on the keyboard, and swearing into a headset that gave an interesting image of World of Warcraft, but not one which corresponds to the mental experience of the players themselves.

Dungeons & Dragons not being a spectator sport makes it more difficult for Wizards of the Coast to promote the game. Basically you need to play D&D to understand it. I think they had a good idea of running the "D&D Encounters" every Wednesday in gaming stores, but coverage for that appears to be good only in the USA. There is no store running D&D Encounters in a 200 km radius of where I live shown on WotC's website for finding those. WotC claims that 5 million people play D&D, but I have no idea how they could possibly come up with a reasonably exact number for that. D&D can be "Free2Play" in a way, as X players playing the game together don't need X copies of the rulebooks. But then somebody might have the rulebooks but not be playing. So if the only data you have is product sales, it would be difficult to estimate number of active players from that.

I am happy that I have the opportunity to still play D&D. Computer games are nice, and often a lot more convenient than getting a regular pen & paper group together. But computer games by necessity have very strong limitations to what you can do in the game, limitations that don't exist in a pen & paper game. If you want to play a game which is only limited by the imagination of you and your friends, there is nothing better than pen & paper roleplaying games. Even if it's not much to watch.

The EU version of World of Tanks is celebrating its first anniversary. I'm still playing, but I pretty much gave up on the rat race of trying to get ever bigger tanks. Most of the time I'm playing scouts. And apparently I'm not all that bad at it, my T-50-2 just got the "Mastery Badge: I class - earn more experience in a single battle than the highest experience gain of 95% of the players in the same tank within the last seven days."

But as much as I love light tank scouts, I couldn't help but notice that they got somewhat too good over the last year. There are a lot more light tanks in the tank trees now, and also some other tanks like the new American tank destroyers which move at the speed of a light tank. In a game that has a lot of rock - paper - scissors elements, that has consequences: Artillery has become nearly unplayable, and few people use SPGs any more. Which in turn makes heavy tanks more powerful than they are supposed to be, as their major threat was basically removed from the game. I think that makes the game somewhat less interesting now than it was before.

World of Warplanes is in global alpha now, and a "2012" release date was confirmed. But the game I'm really waiting for is World of Battleships. Until then I can still drive around with my light tanks for a while.

Well, they didn't say that * explicitly*. But how do you explain this promotion, where players with a level capped character receive a free month of subscription, while those who played for exactly the same time and paid exactly the same money are declared being less valued customers because they didn't reach the level cap? Handing out free subscriptions always smack a bit of desperation, but this targeting of players with level capped characters must mean that Bioware sees a high risk of these players abandoning ship otherwise. And while I only have anecdotal evidence, I think that this must be based on lots of people actually leaving after having "played through" SWTOR.

This wouldn't be unexpected at all. The unique selling point of SWTOR is how it tells the story of your character while leveling up. That part of the game simply ceases to exist at the level cap, which makes the "endgame" of SWTOR even less attractive compared to the leveling game than in other MMORPGs. The whole Legacy system is basically Bioware saying "Don't go yet! Play an alt instead!". And even that solution has its limits. You can play SWTOR through only twice before starting to repeat quests, once on each side. With the planet sequence for each side being mostly linear, and most planet quests not being class-related, if you play either Empire or Republic twice, you are bound to do a lot of quests you already know.

If you sell a game on the strength of it's stories, you mustn't be surprised if people quit once the stories run out. But a promotion in which people who unsubscribe get 7 days subscription free, people who didn't unsubscribe but are at risk of doing so because they reached the level cap get 30 days subscription free, and everybody else gets absolutely nothing is rather stupid. Bioware is basically punishing their *really* loyal subscribers, those who played lots of alts instead of rushing through the game. Bad move, Bioware!

There are four things I *could* do related to online role-playing games of 2012:

1. Play the Mists of Pandaria beta
2. Download the client for the TERA open beta starting in a week
3. Pre-purchase Diablo III
4. Pre-purchase Guild Wars 2

Unfortunately none of these look really attractive to me. I might try the TERA beta for the simple reason that it is free and thus I can have a look at the game for myself without having to wait until it goes Free2Play, which will presumably happen next year. ;)

Games generally involve skill. A person playing a game for the first time will need some time to learn the skills involved, provided the game needs different skills than the games the person played before. In some cases it is possible that the acquisition of skill lasts forever, albeit probably with diminishing returns. For example there is no upper limit to the amount of skill you can have in chess. In other games there are upper limits to skill. It is possible to master Tic-Tac-Toe to the point where you can't possible get any more skillful in playing it, because the complexity of the game is limited. In video games, especially online video games, there might also be technical limits to skills: You can't possibly react any faster than your ping, and you can't press buttons faster than the built-in cooldown between button presses.

Raph Koster in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design claims that learning a game and acquiring those skills constitutes the fun of games. Once you completely master the game, it becomes boring.

I would say that the amount of skill you can develop in playing a character in a MMORPG is limited. And because so many games use so very similar game mechanics, many of these skills are transferable. Some details might be different, but if you mastered playing a tank, healer, or dps in game A, you will quickly master playing the same role in game B.

I do believe that most people reached the point where they more or less completely mastered the core skills of their MMORPG character already years ago. Vanilla WoW might still have been about learning how to play your class, but Wrath and Cataclysm certainly weren't. The challenge of raid encounters evolved from "can you get the maximum performance out of your character?" to "can you still get the maximum performance out of your character while being forced to constantly react to scripted events?". You do not learn how to tank, heal, or dps better by jumping out of the fire, you only learn how to jump out of the fire faster. On the one side that game design opens up an eternal "learning process", because the player needs to memorize the scripted events of every encounter, and every encounter can have a new script. On the other side that learning process is less satisfying, as you don't really learn how to play your character better, you only learn to memorize one encounter after another. And you don't even "learn by playing", because in a cooperative multiplayer game anybody less advanced in the learning curve is a burden to everybody else, thus people are expected to already have learned the script through out of game tools like YouTube and Bosskiller sites before even their first attempt.

I observe a growing dissatisfaction of veteran players with the MMORPG genre. And I believe that this is because we are way past the point where we had fun because we learned new skills. And as long as new games don't demand new skills from us, that is not going to change. We will just apply our old skills to the new games, and become bored quicker and quicker with every new game. The whole "cloning successful games" school of game design is a trap, because by cloning successful games you also clone the skills needed to beat those games, and prevent people from having fun by learning new skills.

Tipa of West Karana wonders whether Kickstarter will usher in the age of boutique gaming. Well, I am kind of skeptical. I checked Kickstarter's FAQ and found that the people pledging money will be charged the moment the "funding goal" is reached. After that "It is the responsibility of the project creator to fulfill the promises of their project. Kickstarter reviews projects to ensure they do not violate the Project Guidelines, however Kickstarter does not investigate a creator's ability to complete their project." In other words, if you fund a video game via Kickstarter and the game is never released or totally sucks when released, you're out of luck and have no way to get your money back.

Making video games is an extremely risky business. Changing funding from investors to crowd funding does not change that. Thousands of games every year get cancelled before they are ever released, or are rushed to release in a state that only remotely resembles the promises made before. Pre-ordering a game before the first reviews are in is a risk, which is why companies offer you lots of goodies if you pre-order. Using Kickstarter is a far higher risk, as you aren't even certain to ever get that game at all.

Of course like in any gamble there is also a chance that you win, in this case that by pre-pre-ordering the game you assure that you get the game that you wanted, especially if what you wanted isn't really mainstream. Some types and genres of games have fallen out of fashion, and Kickstarter might make it possible for some not fashionable games to be made. I just wonder if everybody is well aware of the risk involved. Hype for a game and a famous developer don't guarantee that in the end the game will be actually any good. Would you have wanted to Kickstart Daikatana or Duke Nukem Forever?

So I managed to finish Red Dead Redemption over the Easter weekend. One trick I used was a way to get basically infinite money without using a cheat code: Save game, play high-stakes poker, reload if you lose, save game if you win, rinse, lather, repeat. That trick works in pretty much every single-player game which has both a save game feature and a built-in game of chance. And it made me think about how games handle consequences.

Especially in PC games there has been a trend towards "save anywhere, anytime" features, with quick save and quick load function keys. Thus the "penalty" for not succeeding in some activity is having to reload and do it over. And over. And over. The developers know that players can try again, so they don't mind putting in scripted nasty instakill surprises in their games, which players can only possibly avoid after having been killed by them once. Not the very best game design, in my opinion.

In console games you often can only save your game at specific points. Thus you need to play through each sequence without saving, and need to redo the whole sequence from the last checkpoint if you fail. As that sequence might have several of those nasty surprises, you need to memorize them while playing. Every subsequent attempt gets you further, and gets easier, because you will know what will happen.

Multiplayer online games have respawns instead of reloads. It used to be that this respawn involved some sort of penalty, thus trying the same activity over and over by dying your way through it was not a good option. That has changed: Modern MMORPGs let you respawn with just a token penalty of repair cost. As thus there isn't much of a difference between respawning at the graveyard and reloading at the checkpoint, a raid encounter plays remarkably like a level on a console game: You succeed once everybody has memorized what will happen at each step of the encounter. The only advantage of multiplayer games is that you can't reload after every random roll that doesn't come out in your favor.

Personally I am not a big fan of failing your way through the content game design. I feel it is somewhat lazy, as the designers don't really need to worry whether their challenges are reasonable. But I can also see the advantage in guaranteeing that everybody will be able to finish the game and the story. In Red Dead Redemption there is no possible way you can get stuck: Fail a mission repeatedly and you get an option to skip it, with the only consequence being not getting the achievements related to it. I just wonder whether that couldn't be achieved by a different design, one that doesn't rely on the player dying repeatedly without consequences.

Nothing but a long, rainy Easter weekend to catch up with the games in my library I never got around to playing. I started Red Dead Redemption on Saturday and have it around three-quarters complete by now. At first I thought I wouldn't get far with this game, as I had a horrible time hitting anything. I don't play many shooters, and if I play them, I do so on the PC. Red Dead Redemption is console only, and aiming fast with a little thumbstick isn't easy when you aren't used to it. But then I fortunately found the auto-aiming "casual" setting which solved that problem.

Red Dead Redemption reminds me a lot of other Rockstar Games. It's a "Grand Theft Horse" in all but name. But the story is good, and the atmosphere of a Western is well achieved. And it's long enough to include every single Western cliché you ever heard of, from gun-slinger duels to train robberies to participating in the Mexican revolution.

By reducing the difficulty level of shooting, I basically played the game in interactive story mode. There were still plenty of times where I had to retry stuff to succeed, because there are other challenges in the game than just shooting: Racing horses or coaches, or breaking horses, which might actually be the most difficult part of the game. In principle there are also moral choices to make, but I found that these choices inevitably lean towards the good side. Doing quests gives you honor, and to reach negative honor you need to do out-of-story stuff like shooting random strangers and stealing horses. You *can* be an outlaw, but it isn't driving the story forward.

Well, I had bought the game when it was already selling for half-price, and Red Dead Redemption was certainly worth that. There isn't much competition of Wild West games, and Red Dead Redemption lets you "live" in the Wild West for a weekend or so. Recommended!

Dungeons & Dragons had two versions of the 3rd edition, the second being called 3.5. It also has two versions of the 4th edition, the "normal" 4th edition and the "Essentials". In many aspects the Essentials are just a repackaged version of the normal 4th edition, with smaller paperback books instead of larger hardcover books, and with all the rules updates and errata included. But there is one major difference which for me makes Essentials feel like a very different game: Character generation and leveling.

Every time you gain a power in normal 4th edition, you have the choice of one out of 3 to 6 different powers. And if you aren't happy with your choice, you can "respec" on leveling. In Essentials there are a lot less choices. At some levels you simply get a predetermined new power without any choice. The normal 4th edition has suggestions what powers for example a more defensive fighter should take, and what powers a more aggressive fighter should take. Essentials has two completely separate sub-classes for these, with the option of mixing between defensive and aggressive gone.

I was wondering which of the two different 4th editions people are usually playing these days. Personally I like the normal one with its choices much more than the streamlined Essentials version. But maybe that is just me. What 4th edition are you playing?

Imagine World of Warcraft goes Free2Play with a twist: There is no monthly fee, no item shop, but instead you need to pay $1 for each time you die (comparable to what Allods Online did). Wouldn't those real consequences completely kill the game?

A reader wrote me a mail asking "Your recent post on malicious players made me think about the structure and purpose of games today. Is EVE a game, or a platform for abuse? And what about the "gamification" of real life with location services or 3D games that use the environs around you as input into the game world. What is a "game" these days, anyway?". I would answer that a game is a risk-free environment in which you can try out various actions for fun or for learning without fear of the consequences, because the consequences aren't real.

As a consequence of that, it stops being a game when there are real-world consequences. For example "gambling" isn't a "game" in spite of some resemblances. A MMORPG stops being a game when it spills over into real life and results in real world threats to people and their families. Or when it is "played" to earn real money. And "gamification" isn't a game at all, it only uses game-like incentives and reward structures for real world purposes.

As you can see there is a growing trend of "games" turning into "ungames". There are many reasons for that, one of which is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Once you climb up that pyramid high enough, you are leaving the real world needs behind. If somebody's needs are for status and achievement, he can fulfill that need in a virtual environment, and these virtual environments are usually designed to offer a lot of that status and virtual achievements for less effort than it would take to achieve something in the real world. There are now a sufficient number of people who are sufficiently well-off that they can spend real money on virtual status symbols or game achievements. That is bound to be used by those who are still lower on the pyramid and are just trying to make a buck. The danger is that people become confused about where the border between real and virtual is, which leads to stories like the Chinese guy who murdered a friend who borrowed and then sold his virtual sword.

There has been some dispute over how many people play EVE Online *because* of the PvP, and how many people play EVE Online *in spite of* the PvP. With "Sci-Fi" MMORPG SWTOR playing just like WoW, having space flight only on rails, and not having any space trading, there isn't really much of an alternative to EVE Online if you are looking for a space trading MMORPG. That is until now. Mojang of Minecraft fame just announced his 0x10c MMORPG, and that could be some serious competition to EVE Online. I wonder how he'll handle PvP.

Stabs has a post up which predicts that my April Fool's Joke of this year will become reality by 2013, and EVE will get some form of completely safe space. His prediction is not based on the events that already happened, but on the planned "Burn Jita" revenge campaign after the end of The Mittani's 30-day ban. While predicting reactions is always difficult, Stabs does have some good points. CCP long ago published data showing that over 80% of EVE players never leave safe space and never engage in PvP. There simply isn't much choice if you want to play a space trading sim MMORPG, and thus a lot of people who aren't interested in PvP at all play EVE because there isn't much else. If you force these players into PvP by overwhelming the built-in safety mechanisms of "safe" space, it is not unlikely that a significant number of them might quit. And allowing 20% of your players to drive out many of the other 80% isn't a good business strategy.

But ultimately this is just a very narrow battle in a much wider cultural war. Any possible term I could use to describe the two sides is loaded, but to simplify things there is one side which thinks that the internet should provide infinite freedom of expression and behavior, and the other side which thinks that a person's freedom ends where another person's freedom begins.

Predicting the outcome of that cultural war is extremely easy, because it has already been fought in the real world: Absolute freedom lost. You are not free to shout "Fire!" in a theater, or to call somebody a "nigger", or to make overtly sexual remarks to a co-worker. There are various laws and rules against libel, hate speech, harassment, bullying, and other forms of "free expression". There are recognized limitations to freedom of speech. And that isn't likely to ever change. Thus the only remaining question is how fast these limitations and rules and laws will catch up with the internet.

One major obstacle here is anonymity. Both extremes, absolute anonymity and having to post everything under your real name with address attached, have rather obvious problems and dangers. Somebody apparently poster The Mittani's address on the internet, which was followed by various threats against him and his family. Nobody wants that amount of openness. But we are slowly but surely converging to a solution where people can write under pseudonyms on the internet but the authorities will have ways to trace these writings back to the real person. Once that is in place, it becomes possible to treat speech on the internet exactly like speech in any other form.

The other tricky point is separating the virtual lives of avatars from the real lives of the people playing them. There is a huge difference whether somebody is threatened with real world physical or psychical harm, or whether his avatar is under threat of being "killed". As long as virtual property is not recognized as being real property, a Ponzi scheme in EVE Online might be perfectly legal. And it would be perfectly legal too to wipe out an enemy alliance from the map, including threatening them with that. But that doesn't mean that all hate speech, racial slurs, or threats would be legal as long as they are written in a game or on a game forum. Some speech is clearly directed at the player behind the avatar, and the police should treat rape threats to The Mittani's wife on the internet exactly the same as they would treat such a threat made by telephone or by letter or by any other form. And at some point in time they will.

Absolute freedom of expression and behavior on the internet is an illusion created by technical advances moving faster than legislation. There is no doubt that legislation will catch up. There is no reason why somebody should be allowed saying things on the internet that he wouldn't be allowed to say in real life.

When I predicted last week that legislators would step in against cyber-bullying, I wasn't counting on Arizona being THAT fast. Arizona House Bill 2549 just passed and only needs the Governors signature to become law. It says:

"It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person."

Basically if he lived in Arizona, The Mittani would be looking at a minimum sentence of two and a half years in jail, for a "non-dangerous offender with no previous record", with the maximum sentence being 25 years.

Of course the bill is probably going to be shot down somewhere in court for being overly broad and being in conflict with the first amendment in the stated form. But that is an iterative process: Legislator proposes too broad law, courts intervene, law gets restricted to a more narrow form. There are existing laws that make bullying illegal, there is no reason why a wording couldn't be found to make cyber-bullying illegal too. And just like there are laws that force employers to provide a harassment-free environment, game companies one day will be forced to provide a harassment-free virtual world environment.

One aspect in which two Dungeon & Dragons campaigns with different Dungeon Masters are likely to differ a lot is the amount of preparation, the work done between play sessions. Some DMs prepare very little, and then either invent things on the spot, or follow some printed material. Other DMs spend more time preparing than actually playing. That is not only a matter of personal preference, but also related to your play session schedule: If you play often, you don't have time to prepare very much; if you play rarely, preparation makes sense, because you don't want to lose valuable play session minutes with stuff you could have prepared before.

As I am in the latter situation, I tend to prepare a lot. Some of that is story preparation, knowing your NPCs, their motivation, and how they will drive the story forwards with or without the interaction with the players. But of that type of preparation you can only do so much: The story mostly evolves while playing, and you don't want to smother the evolving story by the prepared one.

So a lot of my preparation tends to be on the technical side, like having battle maps, tokens for the monsters, initiative cards for monsters and players, initiative riders to place on top of the DM screen to show turn order, character sheets, powers, and so on. And I'm always looking how to improve that sort of technical preparation, because running combat faster and smoother is always better than having to scramble for information during the play session.

One trick I just recently picked up from watching the D&D videos on YouTube is using trading card sleeves for D&D power cards. While I played a lot of Magic the Gathering until about a decade ago, I wasn't as concerned about the state of my cards as many collectors were, and I played without sleeves, to the horror of some of my opponents. But as many people use these sleeves, they are widely available, and you can get them in different colors. So how does that help for D&D? Well, every character class has powers, which originally come printed in a book. But there are various methods to get those powers into card form, for example the official character sheet generator from Dungeons & Dragons Insider. For my French speaking campaign I use a program called CardsGen, and I'm sure there are equivalent programs in other languages.

By putting the power cards in the appropriate color of sleeves, you can easily keep track of your various encounter and daily powers, by turning them around when you used them. After combat you turn the red ones back up, and after an extended rest the black ones. Green sleeves are for at-will powers, and I use blue sleeves for racial and class traits. While printing out all the powers of your characters and sleeving them takes some time, I'm sure I'll gain time with this system where it counts: During my play sessions.

Dungeons & Dragons is not by design a spectator sport. A bunch of people sits around a table, they talk, they roll some dice, maybe they move some figurines over a map. Not very exciting if you aren't into the game. I remember at university we had a game running in a public space provided by the university, and once an aspiring journalist came to watch us. She ended up writing a not-so-bad article for the local newspaper about it, but I think she was a bit disappointed about how boring the game was to watch.

Nevertheless there are opportunities to watch some D&D played, as Wizards of the Coast is offering both audio and video podcasts of games run with "celebrities" like the Penny Arcade guys, or the writers of Robot Chicken. The latter is 4 hours of video in 25 sessions, and if that isn't enough for you, you can watch the same 4 hours again with Chris Perkin's Dungeon Master commentary.

The videos were interesting to me, because I am a self-taught DM. My very first pen & paper RPG, over 30 years ago, came as a box with books giving instructions on how to play, but I didn't know anybody else who played. So I persuaded my friends, and by default I was the DM. As pen & paper role-playing has a huge degree of liberty, in a situation like this you can't help but wonder whether you are "doing it right". Well, I met other pen & paper roleplayers years later at university, and their games weren't all that different from mine. And now that I watch the "official" video with the Senior Producer for D&D being the Dungeon Master, I'd say that there is not so much difference between all those D&D games over the decades and in various different locations. Even playing different editions or different games doesn't change the fundamentals of how pen & paper role-playing is played. There are some cultural differences in the details, for example the US videos all have a warning label about "adult language" being used, and the game played in the UK doesn't have or need one.

Chris Perkins is an interesting DM. He does stuff I can't, like doing funny voices. And for somebody who designed the game, he is extremely relaxed about the rules. Many D&D players who watched the video pointed out rule calls with which they disagreed, but I guess in the end the most important thing is to keep the game running instead of getting the rules lawyering exactly right. And there is one thing I learned by listening to Chris' DM commentary on the Robot Chicken game: The story the DM prepared is not very important; the important story is the one that is created by the players interacting with each other and the game. At the end of the day, nobody will remember whatever lore and background story you told, but everybody will remember how the mage's fireball accidentally singed the beard of the dwarven fighter. Players simply care much more about their characters than about the lore of the fantasy world. Thus the less time you as the DM spend telling stories, and the more you encourage interaction between the players, the better the game gets.

Well, there was bound to be some fallout from the Mittanigate affair. Apparently several players complained about being harassed, and CCP got under legal pressure to provide a harassment-free environment for those who didn't want to participate in the wars and treacherous politics of EVE Online. Thus they announced a rule-change that from the next patch on empire space will actually become *really* safe. No more suicide ganking possible, players in the safe sectors simply can't PvP at all any more. Even the usual tricks of getting a new player to flag himself for PvP by picking up "a gift" floating in space won't work any more. Empire space simply won't have any PvP at all any more, and those who want to PvP need to fly to Null-Sec.

While lots of players on the EVE forums are rather outraged about the "trammelization of EVE" and think this will destroy the game, the change does provide legal cover for CCP. Somebody like the guy being harrassed by the Mittani can now peacefully mine without fear of being ganked. And there is a very clear line between "safe" and "dangerous" sectors, instead of the wishy-washy assurance that empire space is "more or less safe, unless it's Hulkaggeddon day". CCP can thus clearly demonstrate to the authorities that players are safe from harassment until they ask for it.