Once upon a time, about a quarter of a century ago, I played a pen & paper roleplaying game called Ars Magica. Quite an interesting system, as the players were all playing wizards who had to invent their spells on the spot. There was no given list of spells, the player said what he wanted the spell to do, and there were some guidelines on how to determine probability of success. Instead of rules that were binding to both players and DM, there was roleplaying from the players, and spontaneous rulings from the DM to determine success.

I could imagine a similar roleplaying system which had other character classes than wizards. Every action from every player would be based on the player roleplaying what he wants to do, and the DM making rulings to determine success (yes, no, roll this high on that dice). But Dungeons & Dragons never was such a system. Instead earlier versions of D&D had a fundamental imbalance between characters classes in terms of how many pages of rules they got: Fighters got something like 3 pages of rules, Wizards something like 30. 4th edition fixed that imbalance, in 4E basically every character class has the same number of pages of rules. It could be argued that 4E has *too many* rules per character class, which is a subjective thing; but objective fact is that at least this is balanced, every character class has the same amount of powers, the same amount of premade options. Whatever the players decide to roleplay on top of that then depends on their creativity.

And roleplaying and rulings are still very much a part of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, as long as the players want it and the DM isn't horribly bad. I've seen a YouTube video of a 4E play session where the elven mage had replaced all his spells by effects based on birds: His magic missile was a bird shooting out at the target, etc. If there is a chandelier hanging somewhere in the castle, there is nothing in the 4E rules that prevents a player from trying to swing from it. In one of the Penny Arcade 4E D&D podcasts Jim Darkmagic is hanging upside down from a rope ladder while casting spells. And because everybody has the same amount of rules to deal with (or to fall back upon if creativity fails), every character can contribute the same amount of roleplaying.

The playtest material for D&D Next was released with characters who were very far from such a equal distribution of rules. In fact several people complained on the boards that their fighter character sheet was missing pages, as it was the only one being only 1 page long. But what was missing wasn't some pages of a character sheet, but pages of rules in D&D Next regarding the fighter. We are back to a situation where wizards have lots of rules pages full with spell descriptions, and the fighter has to make things up. That turned out to be especially annoying for those players who envisioned their fighter as being "a tank", a protector of the squishier characters in the second row. As D&D Next in the playtest version has no attacks of opportunity, no zone of control, no "marking" an enemy, or any other form of aggro control rules, the fighters were told to make up those rules by roleplaying. Which would have been a good idea in a system like Ars Magica where the wizards have to make up stuff through roleplaying as well. But having rules for wizards and rulings for fighters struck many people as unbalanced.

Both rules-based and rulings-based systems can work. Rules-based systems have the advantage of being more predictable, but require the DM to learn more rules. Rulings-based systems are more flexible, but can easily become bogged down in negotiations between the players and the DM. A good system has an equal amount of rules for everybody, and allows everybody to roleplay based on DM rulings. That is the sort of mix of rules and rulings that works. Mixing rules and rulings by assigning them to different character classes works a lot less well: Why should a players preference for rules-based or rulings-based system end up determining his class choice? The guy who hates rules might have wanted to play the wizard, while the guy who never roleplays might have wanted to play the fighter. In D&D Next, like in pre-4E versions of D&D that leads to problems.

The problem gets worse once you realize that the power of a rules-based character is fixed, while the power of a rulings-based character depends on the generosity of the DM. If all your "may I" requests to the DM are answered with "No, you can't", you not only have a bad DM, but also end up with an extremely underpowered and boring fighter standing next to a powerful wizard with lots of options. But if the DM allows any crazy idea, it is the wizard who ends up being underpowered and restrained by the rules.

D&D Next is a game under development, and the forums are full of people complaining about the fighter. I hope WotC is listening and the next playtesting material brings back more rules balance between the different character classes. I'd be okay with a system in which every class had equal number of powers, but those being a lot less complex and numerous than they were in 4th edition. But having complex spellcasters and simple melee characters isn't the way to go.

If you follow my blog, you will have noticed that I have expressed a lot of pessimism on the subject of MMORPGs this year, and in the last months of 2011. I expressed my belief that the story-driven gamplay of SWTOR would lead to problems with a lack of longevity of the game. I talked about how the fact that MMORPGs are so similar to each other leads to an increasingly fast hype-release-disappointment cycle. And I questioned whether any new game, even if it has some good new ideas like Guild Wars 2, could still "save" the MMORPG genre from a slow decline. Today it seems I was somewhat ahead of the curve: The pessimism is spreading and is becoming mainstream.

I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for over 30 years now, on and off. I frequently switched to other systems, and frequently returned to D&D. I love Dungeons & Dragons. And I am deeply worried about the direction it is heading and its future.

It is possible that the period I had the most fun with D&D was around 1st or 2nd edition. I was at university, and D&D was my main hobby, with which I spent many hours every weekend and some evenings. I was young, and didn't have all the worries of a middle-aged man yet. Compared to that my current 4th edition D&D campaign has severe drawbacks: We can only play for around 4 hours every two weeks, sometimes less. And me living in a foreign country means I have to DM the campaign in a language I don't master completely. And my carefree university days are certainly over.

I wonder how many people are in similar situations, where the D&D they are playing now is not the D&D of their high school / college / university days. And I wonder how many of them blame the rules of D&D for having changed, not realizing that it is THEM who have changed much more. There is a huge "edition war" raging on the D&D forums, with a lot of nostalgia for 1st and 2nd edition AD&D rules.

I've seen exactly the same with MMORPGs. Some people still believe that Everquest is the best MMORPG ever (and then offer various excuses why they aren't playing it). Some people earnestly believe that Blizzard is paying millions of dollars to a huge development team tasked to make World of Warcraft worse with every single patch and expansion. Even single-player games are said to get worse with every sequel.

Isn't all that blaming our games for the changes that happened in our head? As Heraclit said, you can't step into the same river twice, a saying which got transformed into "you can't cross the same river twice", with the idea being that the river changes all the time and is never twice "the same". Any game experience we have now is influenced by our previous experiences, and by the other circumstances we live in.

I can't just tell my group that we are switching back to 2nd edition D&D rules (or the D&D Next rules which evoke it), and somehow magically get the fun experience back I had during my university days. In fact it is likely that if I reverted to such an old school rules system, the fun would actually be less than with a more modern system. Rules systems evolve with the players, with the times, not against them. A lot of the 1st edition D&D rules today appear as strange as the naked corpse runs, level loss at death, or forced grouping of the original Everquest would appear to a MMORPG player of today.

Nostalgia is a powerful force, but as you can't actually turn back time, it is also a powerful trap. You give the players what they say they wanted, and find out that it wasn't actually in your power to give them their youth back. You end up with trying to sell an outdated rules system very few people actually want to play. And you end up destroying alternative streams of income, like D&D Insider, which is very useful for 4th edition, but would be much less so for D&D Next. As I said, I am worried about the future of Dungeons & Dragons. I see the path they are heading down, and I feel that path is a mistake.

What is a role-playing game? While a complete definition would be hard to find, we can at least make one empirical observation: In the large majority of games which call themselves role-playing games there is a series of combat sequences, embedded in something like a story or a world. That is as true for let’s say World of Warcraft as it is for Dungeons & Dragons. And because of RPGs having a combat part and a non-combat part, there is a fundamental conflict about what the relative weight of each of these parts should be. The main problem many people have with 4^th edition D&D is that the combat part appears heavier than in previous editions and the non-combat part lighter. So how can we fix 4^th edition, other than reverting to previous rule editions, which is what D&D Next is doing?

The 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons is a game which is significantly different from earlier editions of D&D. And with the "5th" edition of D&D Next going back to how the game was before 4th edition, Wizard of the Coast will end up with two very distinctive and separate groups of customers: Those who hated 4th edition, didn't buy it, kept playing 3.5, and who are now all cheering and probably will be buying D&D Next. And another group who loved 4th edition, and who won't be buying D&D Next, because it isn't the tactical game they want. If D&D Next succeeds to bring back the customers WotC lost with 4th edition, it only does so by losing them the customers they gained with 4th edition.

In hindsight I think the problem was calling 4E just "Dungeons & Dragons", implying that it was the same game, just further "patched". It would have been better if they had called it "Dungeons & Dragons Tactics", to indicate that it is in fact a somewhat different game, with a lot more focus on tactical combat. They could have then accorded the title of the official "Dungeons & Dragons" to the game now being called D&D Next.

Making 4th edition was a bold move. It took a very traditional brand and changed it into something very different. People react negatively not because 4E is a bad game, but because they just don't recognize it as being D&D any more. If 4E had carried another name and not claimed to be the one and only Dungeons & Dragons, maybe we could have avoided the edition wars. Now Wizards of the Coast is getting cold feet and trying to reverse course, getting back to a more traditional game. Which in itself again is not a bad game, but now you get the people who think 4E is "Dungeons & Dragons" shouting that D&D Next is not the Dungeons & Dragons they know.

I really think "Dungeons & Dragons Tactics" would have been a better name for 4th edition to avoid this split of the customer base.

The level 1 wizard in the D&D Next playtest has a constitution of 14, resulting in him having 16 hit points. In 1st edition AD&D a level 1 wizard with a constitution of 14 would have had between 1 and 4 hit points (rolled randomly, although we used house rules that gave him 4 points at level 1). A level 1 wizard in 4th edition D&D would have 24 hit points. Compared to these big differences in hit points, the damage numbers that for example an arrow does aren't all that much different in the different editions. You could kill a 1st edition wizard with 1 arrow, but you need several arrows to kill a 4E wizard. As a result combat in 4th edition D&D takes more rounds than combat in previous editions, and D&D Next is trying to shorten it somewhat again.

Living in a world where pretty much everybody has attention deficit disorder, many people discussing D&D think that combat which is shorter is automatically better. I do believe that it is good for a DM to keep the time for 1 combat round short, which means managing the flow of combat well, being well prepared with monster cards and initiative riders, and not having to look up rules in the middle of combat all the time. I do not believe that a combat having less rounds is better than a combat having more rounds.

My reason for my preference for combat with a certain minimum number of rounds stems from my knowledge of math and statistics. Most people can calculate that if they have a character with a 50% chance to hit a monster and they do 2d6 damage, they will on average deal 3.5 damage per round. What they might not be aware is that for an "average" to have any meaning, you need a sufficiently large sample size. Imagine that character with the 50% hit chance and 2d6 damage facing a monster with 10 hit points. You "average" calculation only tells you that it will take 3 rounds on average to kill that monster. In reality the result is far more volatile: You could kill the monster with one hit in the first round, or you could take 6 rounds or more of low dice rolls.

MMORPGs, who did a lot to speed up combat, usually work with a to hit chance above 90%. But D&D, and that is true for all editions of it, usually uses around 50% to hit chance in the majority of fights. If you plan for fights with only a few rounds of combat, that creates a lot of volatility. In my campaign we had a fight of the 6 player characters killing 10 rats (MMO joke), in which one character rolled only misses for 6 rounds, and another hit only once, in spite of a 50% hit chance. Fortunately we have so many player characters in my campaign, which reduces statistical volatility, but if you run with a group of 4 or less such a streak of bad luck might well wipe your group. Then the DM gets into the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether he should let the group die just because of a streak of bad luck, or whether he should start fudging dice or coming up with a deus ex machina miracle save.

Of course I don't want the group having fights with 20 rounds of combat. I think in 4E some high level monsters have a bit too many hit points, which then got errataed downwards with the D&D Essentials material. But the D&D Next adventure has a lot of fights in which a character can one-shot a typical monster like an orc or hobgoblin. And those are the fights in which a few lucky or unlucky rolls can take the combat all the way from total party kill to being far too easy to be enjoyable. I find combat which is a bit slower but less random, less statistically volatile, is better.

I've been playing D&D Next against myself, as my regular group isn't signed up for the beta test. That actually isn't a bad method to test a rules system, as you can concentrate on the rules without rule-independent factors like story and roleplaying getting in the way. It also gives me the opportunity to try the "mean DM": What would happen if I played the monsters to the maximum of their written abilities without factoring in "artificial stupidity" for reasons of fairness or story?

In D&D Next that approach yields a surprising result right in the first encounters of the playtest material, where the group is fighting a bunch of kobolds: The kobolds run past the fighter and gank the wizard. It turns out that the fighter in D&D Next only has half the necessary features of a "tank" role: He has the good defenses and health, but he is missing any form of aggro control ("taunt").

In 4th edition a front-line fighter has two ways to protect the wizard in the back: He has what other games would call a "zone of control", that is he can make opportunity attacks on an enemy running through the squares next to him. And he can "mark" one enemy, forcing that enemy to attack him or suffer penalties and opportunity attacks. All these rules of aggro control are gone in D&D Next. There is absolutely no penalty for the kobolds to completely ignore the fighter and go for the softer targets.

In a way that reminded me of PvP in World of Warcraft, of which I didn't play much. But for some time I did some PvP with my tank spec warrior, complete with shield and spell reflection abilities. And I quickly learned that enemies tended to ignore me as long as there were other targets around. I wasn't perceived as much of a threat, nor as easy target to kill, so the enemy rather went for somebody else. Which suited me just fine, although as approach to PvP going as tank was somewhat unconventional.

But while I didn't mind that on an Alterac Valley battlefield with 79 anonymous strangers, I don't like it as a rule system for my D&D group. It basically forces me as a DM to fudge. I need to introduce "artificial stupidity" into the behavior of the monsters, so they don't ignore the fighter. I so hope that WotC still changes the fighter to something a bit more effective as a tank.

I can't help it. When I read a dozen blogs expressing exactly the same sentiment, I have to ask myself whether that sort of group think is justified, or whether there is another possible interpretation of the same facts. In this case the facts are that a lot of game developers lost their jobs lately. Bioware laid off an unspecified number of SWTOR developers (and started talking about server mergers), and 38 Studios fired everybody. And the common sentiment I hear is what a shame that is. Dare I ask: Why?

If you think about it, the theory behind the sentiment is that a game developer is an innocent victim of layoffs. For that to be true, 100% of the responsibility of the success or failure of a game development studio must lie in the hands of the upper management. For example it was revealed that 38 Studios would have had to sell 3 million copies of Kingdoms of Amalur to survive, but sold 1.2 million. So the general conclusion is that Curt Schilling is an idiot, because selling 3 million copies of Amalur was impossible from the start, and the people he employed are now suffering from the consequences of his illusions of grandeur.

Skyrim sold 3.4 million copies in the first 2 days, Diablo 3 sold 3.5 million copies on the first day (plus handed out 1.2 million free copies for WoW annual pass holders). For me there is a logical conclusion from that: Either 38 Studios should have been able to sell 3 million copies of Kingdoms of Amalur because they made a great game, or they shouldn't have started making a $112 million MMORPG in the first place. Either you play with the big boys, then 3 million copies sold doesn't appear all that impossible; or you don't play with the big boys, but then your chances of pulling off a successful triple-A MMORPG are nil as well. Curt Schilling may well be an extremely bad businessman, but it appears that his major flaw was to overestimate the ability of his team to produce a smash hit. Can we really say that his team is 100% innocent of that? Can we not imagine an alternate reality in which the game developers at 38 Studios were all so great that they made a game nearly as good as Skyrim or Diablo 3, selling 3 million copies? At the very least we need to admit that we don't have enough data to judge on that, before all coming out in support of the supposedly innocent victims. As I said earlier, I do believe that the quality of Copernicus has nothing to do with the bankruptcy, because you can't be judged on the success or failure of a game that isn't even released yet. So it is totally possible that the 38 Studios case is mostly the fault of management. But then I'm not sure why we would all be crying about the demise of Copernicus, because if we think it is normal that Kingdom of Amalur is just an "okay, but not great" game, then why would we believe Copernicus to be much better? $112 million is an awfully large price tag for a flythrough video and three screenshots.

The sentiment of the innocent developer being laid off for no fault of his own is even harder to maintain in the case of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Bioware admitted losing 400,000 out of 1.7 million subscribers, which as a percentage is a greater loss than WoW going from its peak to its current number of subscribers. And SWTOR lost those subscribers in a much shorter time. Plus there are some doubts whether the number of remaining subscribers isn't padded by Bioware handing out free months of gameplay. In short: SWTOR isn't doing that great, and the company reacts by cutting costs, which means laying off people. But the people being laid off are those who made the game that isn't doing so great. Are we saying here that the game developers have absolutely no influence over the quality of the game they are making?

I get pictures in my mind of Ford workers producing cars on an assembly line. In such a production process it is possible that the Ford worker has close to no influence whatsoever on the quality of the produced car. Are game developers assembly line workers? Or do we believe that if we read a review saying that some video game characters animation is wooden, the guy having written that animation simply didn't do a very good job? Is there absolutely no way of there being some justification in a management decision of "you made a game that wasn't good enough, you're fired!"?

As I said, these are just contrarian questions. Open questions at that. I don't claim to have an answer on the degree of responsibility of the game developers over the success of their games. It just appears somewhat weird to me to assume that the degree is zero.

Yesterday the public beta of D&D Next, the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, started. There is a partial NDA, which prohibits me from sharing the playtest materials, but allows me to voice my opinion on D&D Next, which is what I’ll do here. Of course the first thing to remark is that a beta test of a pen & paper game is inherently strange. As the people I normally play with aren’t signed up for the beta, I can only “play” D&D Next with myself. Which maybe actually isn’t the worst thing to do, because in a pen & paper game the overall experience very much depends on the players, while the rule-system only plays a minor role. But even weirder than beta-testing a pen & paper game in the first place is the nature of D&D Next.

To explain, let’s make a detour to Everquest, which as it happens also plans a future edition called “Next”. The Wikipedia entry for Everquest Next cites the developer’s intentions “to return to a style of gameplay more like the original EverQuest”. So what would you think if Everquest Next had level loss on death, naked corpse runs, 15 minute forced breaks for meditation between fights, forced grouping, 20 minutes waits for boats, and all the other features of the original Everquest? You’d probably wonder why the game is called “Next”, and not “Previous”.

D&D Next is very much a D&D Previous. It rolls back most of the innovation Dungeons & Dragons had with the 4th edition and reverts to a mix of rules which much more resembles previous editions of D&D. Gone are the powers for players and monsters, gone is the tactical combat and the battle maps, gone is the concept of all character classes having equal amounts of options in combat. There are promises that some of these things might be reintroduced as optional, but they are gone from the base rules.

What we are back to is spell-casters with X spells per day, and character classes without spells just using their basic melee or ranged attack most of the time. That is somewhat softened by spell-casters having minor spells they can cast without limits, so they don’t run out of things to do, and all classes gaining “benefits” with levels which increase their options. Nevertheless the class balance of 4th edition, where a fighter had as many powers as a wizard, is gone. Non-caster classes like fighters are back to a more or less constant damage output, whatever the length of the fight. Casters are back to the situation of being powerful in shorter fights, and then “running out of spells”, albeit not completely anymore, because they now have minor spells as their own form of “basic attack”.

What I like even less is that monsters are back to not having powers either. That is, there are a lot of vanilla monsters which just have an armor class, hit points, and a simple attack dealing some damage. In 4th edition the fight against different monsters of the same level could be very different, because they had different powers. In D&D next the fight against different vanilla monsters of the same level will feel more similar.

What is undoubtedly true, and presumably the wished-for effect, is that D&D Next feels a lot more like “classic D&D”, while 4th edition was a huge step away from “classic”. Wizards of the Coast got a lot of flak for 4th edition being so very different, and they “listened to their customers” and went back to how it was before. I believe that to be a horrible mistake. Their competitors Paizo will be laughing all the way to the bank. WotC released 3rd edition and 3.5 under an open gaming license, which enabled Paizo to launch a rather successful game system called Pathfinder, which is basically an improved D&D 3.5. Now Wizards of the Coast with D&D Next is doing more or less the same, releasing a rule system which will appeal more to the fans of 3rd edition and even earlier editions, while leaving the fans of 4th edition standing in the rain. Why would somebody want to spend a lot of money on buying D&D Next rulebooks, if he can have a very similar game experience with either the old pre-4E D&D rulebooks or Paizo’s Pathfinder rulebooks he already owns?

D&D Next is not at all backward compatible with 4th edition. It would be very easy to convert adventures or other game materials from 1st, 2nd, or 3rd edition D&D to D&D Next or vice versa. In fact the playtest adventure is an old adventure from 1979. But it would be very hard to use either 4E game materials for D&D Next or the other way around. I don’t know in how much optional rulebooks for D&D Next will be able to change that, I don’t think you can easily graft a more tactical combat system onto the D&D Next base rules without creating two very different versions of D&D Next. As I subscribed to D&D Insider for the support the website gives for my 4th edition dungeon mastering, I am somewhat worried whether that support will stop with the release of D&D Next.

In making D&D Next “classic”, Wizards of the Coast created a rule system which is basically a rehash of previous rules. Even if that ends up being a “best of”, it mostly remains old rules, not unlike what a group of players using old rulebooks and some house rules could have cooked up on their own. The only “innovation” I could find was a new rule for combat advantage using the best of two dice instead of a +2 bonus. There is a good reason for not calling the new system 5th edition, because it feels more like 3.75.

Pen & paper rule-systems are different from MMORPGs in that nobody prevents you from playing previous editions if you want to. While I personally like 4th edition better than previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons, I would be totally okay with Wizards of the Coast reprinting old rulebooks, maybe with some errata or even added optional rules. But I don’t see the need to create a D&D Next rule-system which isn't much different from what is already there. I would have wished for a true 5th edition which is forward-looking, introducing a lot of new things, instead of backward-looking and basically reverting D&D to how it was in the “good old times”. I believe that nostalgia is a trap for game design, as it wasn't the old rule-system which made the good old times so good, but other factors like youth. You can’t bring the 80s back by making a new D&D rulebook with the rules from the 80s. I have some ideas how the flaws of 4th edition could have been addressed without reverting to what D&D was before, but I guess I’ll keep that for a separate post.

So in summary I am very disappointed with what I've seen up to now from D&D Next. I simply don’t see anything “Next” about it, it appears very much as a “D&D Previous” to me. And as there is already a ton of old rulebooks for D&D, I don’t see the need to make yet another version of D&D which isn't much different from 2nd or 3rd edition. I’ve been playing D&D since the 80s, and this will be the first time that I will NOT make the move to the new edition when it comes out. It would be a move back, not forward.

Imagine you have a character in a MMORPG who just hit the level cap. You enter a dungeon with a group, somebody in the group inspects you, and he points out to you that the gear you are wearing is bad. He says you could have bought better gear for very little gold in the auction house, as well as enchantments / gems to improve that gear further. How would you feel? Pretty stupid and a bit ashamed probably. Years of games like WoW has "taught" us that it is our duty to get the best gear possible by means like crafting or the auction house *before* trying to get better gear through loot. The auction house is part of the game, and not using it is like deliberately playing badly, like not using one of your best spells.

That attitude works for World of Warcraft, because in the WoW AH you can only get "okay" gear for reasonable prices. Diablo 3 is very different. My monk is level 24 and has 30k gold, and he just bought a legendary orange weapon on the auction house for 10k gold which is basically a best-in-slot item. By playing the auction house as part of the game, it turns out that the auction house is the optimal way to equip your character. Found loot is worse, and crafted loot is ridiculously bad for its cost. The most intelligent strategy in Diablo 3 is to stay the hell away from crafting, vendor your blue items, sell your yellow items on the AH cheaply, and use your money to completely equip yourself in yellow and orange gear from the auction house. And that is before the real money AH goes live.

The difference between World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 regarding the AH is that in WoW all the good gear is bind on equip or bind on pickup. You can't sell the WoW purples nobody in your raid needed, or the gear you don't need any more because you found an upgrade. In Diablo 3 you can. When my monk doesn't need that legendary weapon any more, I'll sell it on the AH again. Probably for less than I bought it for, because deflation is rampant. Unlike CCP, Blizzard obviously didn't hire an economist to make sure their in-game economy made any sense.

Now I could arbitrarily decide that the auction house is not part of the game of Diablo 3 and not use it. But then like Rohan I will be left wondering "Will later difficulty modes be balanced around people purchasing AH gear?". I mean, I could probably play the game perfectly well without using my healing spell, or without using potions, or without using the right mouse button. But there is something inherently stupid about having to make up your own rules for handicapping yourself so as to balance the game.

If the auction house is part of the game of Diablo 3, and that part of the game unbalances the rest, I would say that Diablo 3 overall is a badly balanced game. If I were an achiever, which I am not very much, I would feel at the same time compelled to maximize my character's power through the use of the auction house, and feel that this optimization by AH diminishes my achievement of beating the game at this or that difficulty level. Regardless of whether I used farmed gold or real money to buy my optimum gear.

As you might have noticed this week my thoughts revolve around story-telling in games. Or you didn't notice, because up to now I mostly wrote about story-telling in D&D, and nobody reads my D&D posts. Anyway, I was reading a post from Green Armadillo on Diablo III, and the following phrase struck me as very poignant: "In some ways, it reminds me of SWTOR - you are definitely experiencing someone else's story, between the heavy involvement of NPC's and the relatively non-customizeable player characters, but the story experience and production values have been excellent."

I wasn't a big fan of the story in SWTOR. It sure was excellently told, but I felt railroaded, because whatever decisions I took, the story proceeded the same way. Diablo III doesn't even pretend to give you any choices. Furthermore I find it very hard to care about the story of my monk, who is a sanctimonious prick; his dialogues with his templar follower are cringe-worthy. The hints on future story developments (Belial's secret identity, my monks secret ancestry) are so thick, that there are hardly any surprises left. And as Green Armadillo says, it is someone else's story. Why should I care about it?

Now of course the difference is biggest if I compare that to pen & paper games. But even other computer games, like Skyrim, do a better job of making me feel as if I am playing my own story, and not that of someone else. Or at least they tell a story which is I find it easier to identify with, with characters that are believable and not unfeeling robots without any human weaknesses. If the story is one where I wouldn't have wanted to read the book, turning that story into something more or less interactive doesn't make it any better, as long as there is no way to change the story.

I wonder if certain games wouldn't be better off with no story at all. If the game design demands that I play through the same content several times, having a story which is always the same being retold repeatedly isn't really much good. Repeating content is about collecting more loot, about your character getting stronger, and it is that "story" of character progress you care about, not the canned events and dialogues. Why aren't NPCs talking to me about my shiny new armor instead?

Yesterday I was talking about the importance of improvisation in story-telling in pen & paper role-playing games. You want the final story to result from the interaction between the DM and the players, and no be something which is imposed by the DM on the players. Now that improvisation is relatively easy as long as the story is about role-playing, about dialogue between players and NPCs. It gets harder when we come to combat. And, as many reviewers of 4th edition D&D remarked, it is harder in 4th edition D&D than in previous editions.

As I mentioned before, combat is 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons is a rather excellent tactical squad-based wargame. Much of the Player's Handbook, including the class descriptions, are all about the rules for this tactical wargame. Character classes are more than anything else defined by the powers they have, and these powers are nearly all combat actions. While you could theoretically run a combat-free campaign in 4th edition, you would probably prefer a very different rule system for such a campaign. 4th edition D&D is designed to have about 10 battles per level, although you can reduce that number a bit by the use of skill challenges and quest xp for roleplaying. Thus a typical adventure, a typical story in 4E is very much driven forward by its combat encounters.

Unfortunately combat encounters lend themselves a lot less to improvisation than roleplaying encounters. You can't just put any number of whatever monsters on your dry-erase map, add a few bits of terrain features and expect the combat encounter to work well. Because just like in a computer RPG, balance is extremely important to make combat fun: If the mobs are too hard, the players get wiped and/or frustrated; if the mobs are too easy, combat gets boring. To get the balance right, and to make combat more interesting by the use of terrain features and monster special abilities, requires a good deal of preparation. That is why in an official written adventure module the majority of pages describes combat encounters, with monster tactics, terrain features, and the like.

But if you have an adventure like that, with a defined series of balanced encounters, then how do deal with improvisation and ideas of your players? Do you allow the actions of your players to unbalance your combat encounters, making them either too easy or too hard? For example there is a very good reason why "never split the party" is an official D&D marketing slogan: If your group decides to split up and half of the group stumbles into a combat encounter designed for a full group, you are in serious trouble. Do you modify the encounter and make it beatable by half the group (while the other half of your players are snoring around the table)? Or do you kill off half of the group, forcing them to roll new characters? There isn't really a good solution for situations like these. (Personally I'd go for running the encounter as written, probably killing the characters, so as to not encourage stupid behavior like this.)

Thus a common approach of many DMs is to limit improvisation to the roleplaying part of the game, and to not actually allow the players too much freedom where combat encounters are concerned. If your players go north instead of south, the combat encounter that was planned for the south simply gets moved to the north, as long as that still makes any sense for the story. The players might be able to skip certain encounters, but the DM will do his utmost to ensure the players at least go through the combat encounters that are important for the story. DM improvisation then goes from a pure "anything goes" approach of interactive story-telling to a much more restrictive "getting things back on track" approach. It takes quite a bit of skill from a DM to make that not appear forced.

Sometimes you just have to abandon a large chunk of prepared story with several combat encounters, because what the players did simply don't fit with the prepared story any more. In my DM bag I have an "emergency envelope" with a generic combat encounter which can be used if the players just completely walk away from the adventure I had prepared. That either serves to lead them back to the adventure, or at least to fill the time of that play session, so I can prepare something else for the next session. I would like my virtual world to have a lot of freedom, and not a linear story that is forced upon the players. And sometimes throwing away a prepared adventure and combat encounters is the price I am willing to pay to achieve that freedom.

When I mentioned story hooks in my post about playing D&D modules as written, I got a reader asking whether I could discuss the ongoing story with my players. I thought about the question, and the best answer I can give is that the reason I can't discuss the story too much is that I don't *know* the story. And as this isn't much of an answer, I think I have to elaborate on story-telling in D&D a bit.

Computer games have stories which are either fixed, or have a limited "tree" of possible developments based on player decisions. Pen & paper roleplaying games don't work like that, although if you are unlucky you might stumble upon an inexperienced DM who tries to run his game like that. The best description that I can give of the stories in my adventures and campaigns is that I know how the story will develop if the players either do nothing, or just play along with the suggestions of the NPCs. Let's call this the "base story".

I know this base story not only for the current adventure, but also for the next 3 or so adventures I am planning to play. That enables me to add story hooks for future adventures into my current adventure. I can have characters or items appear in the current story which aren't important right then, but will become important later, in another adventure. And I can have players meet NPCs they already know from previous sessions, which makes the world appear more "persistent", to use an MMO term.

But this base story is not known to the players in advance, and is not fixed in stone. For example in my previous session I had a story hook for a future adventure by having the players meet some Vistani. And the reaction of one player told me that he already knew the upcoming adventure, which then prompted me to change it around. I also start out my game sessions by having the players recap the previous session, and their version of the story which happened tells me which aspects of the story they found interesting, and allows me to elaborate on those.

The most important way for the base story to get altered into something else is that the players do something which wasn't foreseen in the base story. Many years ago I ran an adventure where the story played out in a castle, room by room, having been written as a story development from bottom to top. Only the first challenge was to get into the castle in the first place, and the players had some means of magical flight and promptly entered the castle on the top floor, going through the rooms from top to bottom. Things like that require some improvisation from the DM to still make a story that works. Ultimately in a game of D&D, anything can happen. We've had adventures where the story foresaw a meeting between players and an NPC in a tavern, which ended with the players burning down the tavern and then being on the run from the city watch. The final story as played results from the interaction between the DM and the players, involves a lot of improvised theater, and is often quite different from the base story that was planned.

I think it is best for a DM not to prepare the story of his adventures or campaign in too much detail. You want to know your base story, so that you can prepare something. But you also need to be prepared to throw that base story out of the window and improvise something else if the actions of the players require it.

38 Studios released Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning earlier this year, and some preview material of their MMO project Copernicus recently. 38 Studios is also broke, unable to pay back a loan from the state of Rhode Island, or to make payroll. Most of the blogs I have read make a connection between these two things: Bloggers who like Amalur or Copernicus express their support for 38 Studios, others who didn't like Amalur are more into Schadenfreude. My thought on this is that there is little or no connection between the quality of 38 Studios existing or upcoming games and their financial state.

Making games is one of the most risky businesses to be in. A company making a game has to pay development cost first, and receives revenue later. If that development cost was a guy or two making an indie, iPhone, or Facebook game in their spare time during a month or two, the risk is manageable. But if you have a large team developing a game for several years, the risk is in the millions of dollars. If you run into delays in the development of your game, or you release it and it doesn't sell quite as well as hoped, you can lose your shirt.

Surviving this process as a young game development studio depends on your funding sources, and the management skills of the people running the company. It does not so much depend on the quality of the game you are making. Certainly not as long as the game isn't released. And even if you release a game, you still face the risk of getting good review scores and lousy sales. Finding good sources of funding and being able to keep a game development project on schedule and in budget is more important for the survival of a game studio than having extremely cool preview material. From Looking Glass Studios to Zynga the history of game development is full of examples of studios where the quality of their games had no relation whatsoever with their financial success.

It is always sad to see people get laid off and promising games get cancelled before release. But I wouldn't read too much into it.

On Metacritic Diablo III has a relatively high score from professional critics, and a rather low score from user reviews. I would say that both of these scores aren't representative of anything, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Furthermore I wonder if Diablo III isn't already beyond reviews, being such a cultural phenomenon that classic game reviews can't possibly say anything about it. The user review score of Diablo III is clearly pulled down by people protesting against DRM and server instabilities. But the professional review scores aren't any more accurate: They are being lifted up by this being Blizzard, and a decade of waiting for next Diablo.

Just perform a little thought experiment. What kind of review score would Diablo III have gotten if it had been a game with a different name from a less known company? Let's call the game "Hack'n'Slay" and review it: Hack'n'Slay is a game which is very linear, and very repetitive. Storytelling is weak, and the player avatar's and NPC's voice acting is wooden and stereotype. Combat of Hack'n'Slay is hampered by the very limited controls: The same mouse button does your main attack, movement, and picking up loot, leading to you picking up loot in combat or having difficulties to reach health globes when mobs are still around. 90% of combat consists of finding the right balance between left-clicking and right-clicking. There are only 4 hotkeys, and while they launch important abilities, the cooldowns are long compared to the length of a combat. Crafting in Hack'n'Slay is expensive and boring. And the auction house of Hack'n'Slay makes both crafting and gear collection somewhat redundant. Graphics of Hack'n'Slay are nothing to write home about, the fixed camera angle gives a very dated appearance, and the game could sure use a good zoom function. What sort of review score would you give to Hack'n'Slay? Maybe 70 out of 100?

But as soon as you don't call that game Hack'n'Slay but rather Diablo III, the review score goes up by 20 points. Everybody will explain you that all the features that you'd describe as "outdated" for Hack'n'Slay are "classic" for Diablo III. Hey, this is Diablo, you can't have in that! This is a game many people have been waiting for for a decade, and anything revolutionary or innovative would have been just as likely to anger the fans as to delight anyone. The point of reference for judging Diablo III is a game that is over a decade old, not any modern game. In fact Torchlight II will sell less copies than Diablo III even if it turns out to be a better game.

I like using printed D&D adventure modules. As a DM one usually doesn't have anybody to discuss with while preparing adventures; so if you just invent an adventure out of thin air, you don't have checks and balances to make sure you're not creating something which is boring, or unbalanced, or unbelievable. Using printed material and modifying it is more like a cooperative effort between me and the designer(s) of that adventure module, and thus usually gives a better result overall. Plus I profit from whatever handouts, maps, and other material are provided.

But I think the important part in this is to not use the modules as written, but to make the extra effort to modify them. One good reason for that is that a string of separate adventure modules does not make for a good campaign unless you put in various story hooks and connections to create a greater whole. Even the official D&D adventures that come as a series often have too little connections between adventures. But an even better reason for modifying adventures is getting the balance right.

4th edition D&D is not only a roleplaying game, but also a tactical miniature wargame. And it actually is quite a good tactical game at that if properly balanced. But the D&D module as written does not know how your group of players looks like. It makes an assumption of 5 players with at least one player of each role (tank, healer, dps, crowd control), which doesn't always correspond to reality. Thus if you as DM don't modify the encounters to take into account the strength of your actual group, you can quickly run into trouble.

I've been listening to Dungeons & Drogans I, a podcast of a DM and a group of players playing Keep on the Shadowfell. In session V of Dungeons & Drogans the players are doing the same kobold lair encounter my group did a while ago. Only my group was 6 players plus an NPC, while the group in the podcast only had 4 players, of which 2 were healers. So my group had an interesting and tough battle, while the Drogans basically wiped, in spite of some lucky critical rolls. Their DM had to pull out a Deux Ex Machina story device and offer the group to surrender and be held for ransom. The kobold wyrmpriest who had brought down the cleric even ended up healing him to prevent the character from dying.

The encounter as written is tough. It is encounter level 6, which is rather hard for a group of five level 1 characters, even if as written the second half of the kobolds only arrives with 3 rounds of delay. With my group of six plus one NPC I actually had to make the fight a bit harder by shortening that delay to just 1 round, which also made it somewhat more believable. But for a group of four players I would have removed some of the kobolds, at least one wyrmpriest and one of the kobold "tanks". I don't think the players in the podcast did anything wrong, they just simply weren't a match for the encounter as written.

Encounters in D&D serve two purposes: They provide a tactical game inside the roleplaying game, and they drive the story forwards. If the encounters are too easy, the story proceeds as planned, but the tactical game isn't all that interesting. If the encounters are too hard, the tactical game becomes frustrating, and the DM has to improvise to keep the story going, or admit defeat and kill the whole group. That sort of collective defeat (in D&D either everybody wins or everybody loses, including the DM) is something I would reserve for the players having done something actually really stupid. It isn't something that should happen because the DM failed to modify the encounter difficulty for the size of his group.

My advice: If you use a printed D&D adventure module, consider modifying the encounters if the size or composition of your group doesn't correspond to the assumptions of the writers. You can have a fun game of D&D with any size and composition of group, but it takes some preparatory work to get there.

Between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 there is over a decade of time. And many of the developments of that decade apparently haven't registered with Blizzard's game developers. What they *did* notice was the development of micro-transactions, so Diablo 3 has the real money auction house. But much of the actual gameplay is very old school. And some of these old school decisions appear rather weird in this time and age, as if the devs had been frozen in time.

There are far more players today, which pushes the average to less hardcore, and there are far more games battling for our attention. Thus 90% of players don't ever reach the end of the average video game. Thus I find the design decision that forces you to play through Diablo 3 several times to get to the difficulty level you want somewhat weird. There will be a number of people who will never reach the difficulty level at which the game would be most fun for them, because they simply can't be bothered to grind through the lower difficulty levels to get there.

I am already not a huge fan of the classical MMORPG endgame in which players are offered new content at a higher difficulty level as reward of having grinded their way up to the level cap. But offering them OLD content at a higher difficulty level as reward for that same grind seems even more counterproductive to me. No doubt there will be people playing Diablo 3 at hell level soon, just because that is the ePeen thing to do. But wouldn't they have been better off if hell difficulty had been something you could select already on your first game?

In the real world, not everybody is for free trade. Many people believe that a country, let's say the USA, would be better off without trade, with protectionism, with erecting trade barriers against other countries like China. But if you are a gamer, this week brought a very powerful demonstration of the power of free trade in the form of Diablo III.

You can play Diablo III without trade, without ever setting a foot in the auction house. You will find some gear you can use, you can buy some gear from NPC vendors, or you can craft gear. But if you play Diablo III with trade, with the auction house, you will quickly see how much better that is for the power of your character. Today I browsed the auction house, and found plenty of "gold" items for my character listed for under 500 gold. Crafting a less good "blue" item of the same level costs over 600 gold crafting fee plus the cost of the materials. Buying a blue item from the NPC vendor costs over 1,500 gold. Through trade it is relatively easy to get yourself fully equipped with gold items, the kind of which only 1 or 2 drop from each major boss, and even that only on the first kill. Trade has quickly become the cheapest way to equip your character, and prices are still falling further.

Of course there is a downside to that: In the real world everybody getting everything for less money is a good thing. In a virtual game world not necessarily so. On the one side the challenges are designed assuming you are wearing the kind of gear you could find or craft on your own, so with trade Diablo III quickly becomes far too easy. And with trade being so powerful, the other ways to get gear end up being not very attractive. Learning crafting recipes costs thousands of gold, each craft costs hundreds of golds in fee plus the materials (although the materials can be had for very cheap by trade): Who is going to craft when he can get better items for less in the AH?

My main problem however is that the whole Diablo series always has been about collecting gear from random drops. If I trade you whatever random item I found and don't need against the item I need that you found but don't need, we are both better off. Economics 101. But that ends up taking the random out of the collecting of gear. If I buy gear for pocket change in the AH which is already excellent, I'll never find a gear upgrade for myself in the game. And then half of the fun of playing Diablo is gone. If on the other side I resist buying gear on the AH, I constantly feel as if I'm handicapping myself. It is a no win situation.

I wouldn't be surprised if Diablo III will do considerably less well than previous Diablo games. Previous games did have trade, but in a much more limited way. The highly efficient and huge regional market in gear brings the full power of trade to bear on Diablo III, and to me it feels as if the game isn't designed to withstand that sort of power.

Klepsacovic from Troll Racials Are Overpowered posted something last week about TERA which corresponds very much to what I was thinking:

I've been trying to sort out quite what is wrong with the Elin. My gut isn't much help, since it just screams "oh god what is wrong with those people!?" and gut-based psychoanalysis of developers isn't usually a successful endeavor. My brain kicks in eventually and says that no children are harmed by the development or play of the game, that is it fantasy events with fantasy characters in a fantasy world. Well okay, but that doesn't make me feel any less sick, so it appears as though my gut has triumphed.

I experience the same dissonance between my gut and my brain. The Elin are sexualized children, and I find that revolting. But I know that the issue of whether drawn child pornography is bad and/or illegal isn't quite as black & white. There are countries where the law says that drawn and photographed child porn are the same, and there are other countries where the legislation makes a difference for the reason Klepsacovic mentions: No children are harmed by it. Which for most people doesn't make it any less revolting.

I can rationalize my disgust by arguing that drawn child porn could lead perverts on to an appetite for the real thing. But then my brain explodes, because by analogy a video game in which you play a terrorist planting a bomb (Counterstrike) or shoot people in the head (every FPS) would be just as bad. If we argue that there is absolutely no risk that playing Grand Theft Auto or Mafia turns us into gangsters, then how do we justify the argument that depiction of sexualized children will turn us into perverts?

In the end, as Klepsacovic does, I can only say that the gut wins. I simply don't want to play a game that has panty-shots of children. Call it gut, call it a difference in culture between the Asians and the West, but the disgust easily beats the rational arguments.

Due to login server problems I didn't play Diablo III on launch day. But this morning I was able to play for 10 minutes, just to make sure the game worked. I got to level 3 and had 438 gold pieces. So I went and checked out the auction house: 400 gold pieces bought not one but two blue weapons (I made a dual-wielding monk), each having over twice the dps of the best weapon I had found up to that point. While some people had posted items for big amounts, there were already hundreds and thousands of low level blue and epic items available for extremely low prices.

The real money auction house doesn't seem to be up yet, I got a message that they hope to get it up and running in two weeks. Kudos to Blizzard for at first blocking my access to the real money AH by default due to parental controls. Back when parental controls were the only way to keep your Battle.net account from automatically using RealID, I had pretended to be my own parent to guarantee my privacy. So if you actually have a child with a Battle.net account and Diablo III, you will be happy to know that by default your child doesn't have access to the real money AH until you deliberately give him access via the parental control web page.

But the gold auction house already gives us a glimpse of what the real money AH will be like. Some people were deluded enough to believe that their experience in the beta AH would somehow translate onto the live servers. They couldn't have been more wrong. Very few people use beta auction houses, and beta AH prices tend to be extremely high. On the live servers people quickly realized that there is no such thing as bind on equip in Diablo III. Every item you find or buy, you can sell back on the AH later, even those that you used and replaced by something better. That means that each players every day is producing a constant stream of blue and better gear to feed into the economy, far more than there could possibly be demand for. Thus prices are quickly converging towards rock bottom. The gold you collect in an hour buys you a complete set of the best possible blue gear for your level for every slot. The value of blue gear is so low, that it won't even be traded on the real money AH, being worth much less than the minimum price.

Now of course I can imagine people buying epic and legendary gear for real money. But right now there isn't much incentive to do so. A complete set of the best blue gear for your class and level for every slot already makes you twice as powerful as if you used only the gear you find yourself. And you can get through the game perfectly well with the gear you find yourself, so even the blue equipment is already being a bit overgeared. Maybe the real money AH doesn't open because it would be of no use whatsoever before people played through the game once and started playing through a second time on higher difficulty. But my prediction is still that there is no serious money to be made by playing Diablo III and trading on the real money AH.

I have lost count of the number of MMORPG launches I participated. Given that sort of experience, I would say that the launch of Diablo III was par for the course: Login servers overloaded. Strange error messages including "you don't own a copy of Diablo III" regardless of whether you bought the game online or retail. Lack of official information from Blizzard. Pretty much what you'd expect for any big MMO launch.

Only problem: Diablo III isn't exactly a MMORPG. A significant part of the people who bought the game will not have played MMORPGs, and would have expected the launch of Diablo III to go like the launch of any single-player game: You buy a box with a disc, you install the game, you play. And Diablo III didn't provide that.

Given how many people play actual MMORPGs in a way which very much resembles a single-player experience, I think that most players of Diablo III are looking for exactly such a single-player experience with this game. A good number of players will either never play multi-player at all, or in a very limited way, occasionally with real life friends. But as everybody is forced to play online, even the "single-player" customers get all the disadvantages of a multi-player experience, all the server problems, overcrowding, and the like. I suspect that isn't going to go down well.

Diablo III Digital Purchase on Battle.net for Europeans today: €59.99
Diablo III retail version at the Media Markt in Belgium today: €39.99

Why does Blizzard think that I am willing to pay a full 50% more for the digital version?

In the last session my group started the Reavers of Harkenwold adventure. They learned of a group of evil mercenaries called the Iron Circle having taken control of the Barony of Harkenwold, and started helping the resistance movement by going after a tribe of bullywugs that was allied with the Iron Circle. In this session their fight against the bullywugs continued. Having dispatched the bullywug guards in the entry part of their cavern the last time, the party now advanced into the interior of the cave.

There a more epic battle ensued. Besides regular bullywugs there was their leader, a sorcerer hiding in a dragon's skull, which gave him cover against attacks by the players. And there were two grey oozes as a kind of surprise arriving only in the second round of combat behind the players. The whole thing was pretty well balanced and challenging, with the group succeeding in the end. But as soon as they had rested a bit and found some treasure, a patrol of bullywugs returned, getting them into the fourth fight of that game day (second of the session).

The main challenge of that fight was two giant frogs, who swallowed characters whole, taking them out of combat until they succeed a saving throw. The 4th edition of these giant frogs has been discussed on other D&D sites and forums, with some DMs feeling that they need to be nerfed. The have the potential to take a character out of combat for quite a while, without him able to do anything but take damage and roll saving throws. But I felt that this would mainly be a problem for smaller groups, while I have a six player group, with enough damage potential to take out a frog that is getting too dangerous. And I distributed their swallow attacks around, so as not to take the same character out of combat repeatedly and make the combat boring for him.

The group succeeded this battle as well, and found a halfling boy who had been taken prisoner by the bullywug patrol. The boy led the group back to his clan, a group of Vistani traveling folk on a barge on the river. The Vistani being travelers not only of this world, but of parallel worlds as well, they could advise the group on their enemy of the previous adventure, the ancient vrock Jaazzpaa. They suggested that if Jaazzpaa's chalice of planar travel had been weakened by centuries of contact with holy water, the demon would need a place where the barrier between the worlds was thin to reactivate the chalice. And they knew of the Keep on Shadowfell being built just on top of such a rift in the barrier between worlds.

Exhausted from a day of fighting, the group decided to spend the night with the Vistani, and we ended the session there.

I recently wrote about my doubts about the New Blogger Initiative, and could have expressed myself clearer. To be absolutely clear, I approve of new people blogging, and it is great to give them support and advice. My doubts were on the part of the initiative where they talked about using the NBI to generate traffic for new blogs. My comment was that if you write a blog with the express purpose of generating the maximum amount of traffic, then there are probably hotter subjects around to blog about than MMORPGs.

Now personally I don't write to maximize traffic, even if that is often assumed. In fact I took measures over the last year which pretty much halved my traffic, writing less regularly and switching to even more niche subjects like pen & paper roleplaying games. Thus I would like to talk about a very different form of blogging: Writing for an audience of one. Yourself.

A blog makes an excellent public diary, as long as you limit yourself to writing about things you don't mind other people reading about. Thus the games you play makes for a good diary blog, your love life much less so. If you keep it up, like I did, you end up with a huge archive of what you thought at that point in time about some game or feature or other. You might be surprised to learn that your opinion might change over time, without you even noticing. Sometimes it is really funny to read your old blog entries and think "What? I thought THAT at the time?".

The main disadvantage of writing a blog for yourself is that other people will not only read it, but often also comment on what you wrote, as most bloggers by some sort of tradition feel they should let other people comment on their posts. Comments on the internet are not universally bad, but you must realize that they come in a huge variety: From thought-provoking and useful, to spam, to hateful rants. A rather innocent remark by you, of how you liked game A, but didn't care so much for game B, is likely to provoke some people into a rage. You'll get comments on how game A was designed for morons like you, while only the superior elite to which the commenter counts himself is able to appreciate the absolute superiority of game B. And many variations of that theme. Write what you did in a game, and somebody will tell you that you did it wrong.

Negative comments are almost exclusively due to the opinions you hold, and very rarely about the actual quality of your writing (even if sometimes they use an attack on your writing to attack your opinion). Personally I have found that blogging with strong comment moderation works best, trolls tend to disappear if you just delete their comments without responding. Writing without comments enabled can also work, but then you miss out on the good comments as well as the bad.

The important thing about blogging for an audience of one is that you shouldn't care whether people agree with your opinions. If you start to censor yourself so as not to provoke anybody, you just destroyed most of the value of your blog for yourself. There are enough sites out there where you can read what the opinion of the majority is, you do not need to feel compelled to echo what they say in a hope to please. Do not be afraid to say what you really think, even if the game you like is considered as trite, or the game you hate is the flavor of the month. Writing for an audience of one can be tough in public, but if you want your blog to have any value as an outlet for yourself, you need to *be* yourself. Don't care what others think, your opinions are as valuable as those of everybody else.

I've had the Kindle for several months now, time to write a bit about my practical experience with it. First of all I have to say that I do not regret having it, overall the Kindle proved to be excellent at what it is doing. The only caveat is that what it is doing is far more limited than for example an iPad or notebook computer.

As I was born in the sixties, and didn't have video games in my youth, I spent much of that youth in public libraries. I'm a fast reader, and I read a lot, so public libraries were ideal for keeping me entertained. Now I don't know how public libraries work where you live, but in my experience they were full of books that were over 10 years old, while getting the latest bestseller was next to impossible, because the library had bought at best one of them and somebody else was always reading it. The Kindle is such a public library in reverse: You can have all the latest bestseller, and all very old books without copyright, but finding a book that is over 10 years old is hard. For example I was interested in re-reading the Dalziel and Pascoe detective novels of Reginald Hill, and on the Kindle most weren't available, or only as audio books (and I prefer reading myself to listening to somebody else reading a book). But if I read a review of a new book somewhere, chances to find it available for the Kindle are good. And I could get a lot of classics for free, even directly from Amazon.

These days I mostly read books while traveling, for holiday or business. For that the Kindle proved to be very suitable. Except for starting and landing, where the flight attendant will tell you to switch off all electronic devices, the Kindle makes for good reading material during a flight. Especially during long flights with no internet connection on the plane the Kindle is better than a tablet computer, as it has a much longer battery life. If traveling to a sunny place, the Kindle shines with another feature: e-Ink with no back-light makes reading on the Kindle possible even in bright sunlight, while you need shadows for back-lit LCD devices. Packing a Kindle also means not packing a stack of books, which makes your luggage lighter. And again the long battery life provides reading all day long without worrying about where the next power socket is.

As a replacement for a tablet computer, the Kindle only has limited usefulness. I don't have the new "Kindle Touch", so using arrow keys and enter for surfing is less than ideal. I have a 3G model, and free 3G is obviously good, but it only works for Amazon and Wikipedia. For anything else I need a WiFi connection. And if I have that, I found that I preferred my iPod to the Kindle for surfing.

So my overall impression is that the Kindle is excellent as an e-book, as a replacement for regular books. The Kindle is not really a good competitor for tablet computers. But then the Kindle only costs a fraction of an iPad, so that is okay. As long as you don't expect much more than an electronic device for reading books, I can only recommend the Kindle.

A reader sent me a link to a video of the Rory Sutherland talk at the Oxford Union, which is a very interesting talk mostly about behavioral economics and advertising. In that talk it is mentioned that the total time humanity spent playing World of Warcraft is about 6 million years. I found that interesting, and googled it to sources like this, where it is spelled out that they mean 50 billion hours played.

Now lets say we would have used those 50 billion hours differently, for some economic activity creating value. Now how much one hour of work is worth is a matter of debate, especially since it obviously isn't worth the same in different countries. But assuming that people who play WoW are more likely to be well educated and living in a rich country than African subsistence farmers, and then lowering the amount to take into account the millions of Chinese players, let's go for an arbitrary number of $2 per hour. Which would be considerably less than minimum wage in the US, but more than a minimum wage in China.

Thus by playing World of Warcraft, humanity basically paid an opportunity cost of $100 billion. Or divided by 10 million players, each player chose to rather play World of Warcraft than to earn $10,000. Again, this is an average, there are people in the US who could have earned much more if they had spent their hours playing World of Warcraft with a value creating activity instead.

At the end of his talk, Rory Sutherland mentions a theory that the Internet has not contributed much to economic growth, but has contributed a lot to the increase of human happiness. How does one measure human happiness? Well, economic theory says that if a person does A instead of B, he must value A equally or higher than B. Thus I am not suggesting that World of Warcraft somehow "wasted" $100 billion. Instead it created $100 billion or more worth of human happiness, because we freely chose to rather play WoW than to earn that extra money. Makes you think, doesn't it?

I do agree with Rohan's theory that smaller groups for endgame activity lead to smaller guilds and ultimately to less interest of everybody in the endgame. He says:

First, and most importantly, there's a lot more room for "grunts" in a large guild. Grunts are average players who like playing the game, but don't really want to take on extra responsibility like the officers. If you take a 30-man raid size, and break it into 10-mans, I think you end up losing the bottom 10 players, just because there really isn't room for them in the subsequent guilds that form. I think a lot of people just want to play the game, and are perfectly willing to follow orders from someone more dedicated.

Now I do think that any division of people into two classes, like "top raiders" and "grunts", is bound to fail. Things are never black & white, there are just endless scales of grey. But the argument still works: A larger raid group allows for a larger guild covering a wider scale of grey tones. And that would create more interest in the endgame, and more social cohesion.

But whatever scale you use, the raid endgame model has the fundamental flaw that whatever the size of the raid, the rational decision is to take the top X available with you on the raid, and leave the bottom Z behind. There are other ways, for example in games like A Tale in the Desert. Not only can you be in several guilds in that game, but also everybody can contribute in his own way to the guild's projects. If the guild needs a huge amount of bricks for a project, for example, everybody can contribute at his own pace. And while the bottom Z contribute much less than the top X, they still make a positive contribution, and thus the guild still has an interest in keeping them around.

If Rohan is right and the endgame exclusion of the "grunts" is causing subscription MMORPGs to decline, just upping the raid size might not be enough to solve the problem. I think we would have better luck with a MMORPG in which the endgame was inclusive, not exclusive. Where everybody would make some positive contribution to his guild, even if some did less than others.

The Internet is full of get-rich-quick scams. And with the release of Diablo 3 next week, a lot of new scams are going to exploit player's dreams of paying their rent by playing Diablo 3. Selling virtual items for real money sounds like a dream job. So scammers will gladly promise you the secrets of making $25 per hour, if only you buy their Diablo 3 secret gold guide for $19.95. Only after you paid that will they tell you that they meant you'll make $25 per week, of which you spend 1 hour on the auction house, not 40 times $25 for $1,000 per week. And all the tips in the gold guide will be so common sense, that I can tell you those secrets for free in this post:

1) Know the prices: Imagine you checked the AH several times per week and found each time several copies of the sword of uberness listed for between $10 and $50. What do you think was the average price of all the swords of uberness that sold that week? You might be surprised to hear that the average selling price probably was around $8! Because what you can see is not the price of the swords that sold, but the prices of the failed offers nobody bought. The highest price anybody paid was $9.99, which is why the $10 sword is still there. Don't overestimate at what price you can sell your stuff.

2) Watch the market: Different populations play online games at different times. The fabled Chinese gold farmer plays 24/7, while the equally fabled casual player with more money than time or sense plays mostly on evenings and weekends. Caricature aside, all virtual economics always have predictable price fluctuations over the week. Just observe the market for a week or two, and you will know at what time you can buy low, and when to sell high.

3) Undercut: In Diablo 3 you will be limited in the number of auctions you can have up at the same time (10 per AH). Thus anything which doesn't sell fast will block one of your selling slots for 48 hours or until you cancel the auction (only possible for commodities). There is no use of putting anything up that isn't the cheapest of its kind if you want to actually make a sale. Putting something up for a price where you think it might sell later, when prices have gone up, only makes sense if you didn't plan to be online for some time anyway.

4) Consider the fees: The Diablo 3 auction houses all work on a fee at sale basis. That has consequences if you want to buy for resale: You would need to up the price considerably for this to work. For example if you buy an item for $7 and resell it on the real money AH for $10 with the proceeds going to your Paypal account, you just barely break even, due to two times 15% being deducted. You need to sell items for 50% more than you bought them for to make a profit.

5) Watch the floor: Sometimes there are considerably more sellers for an item than buyers, and because of undercutting the price drops a lot. At some point the crafting materials into which the item disenchants are worth more than the item. At this point you might make better money by buying and disenchanting.

6) Mind the competition: There are considerably more participants on the regional Diablo 3 auction houses than on the auction houses of other games, where they are only server wide. The more players are on the market, the less likely it becomes that you find a good money-maker without everybody else jumping on it and ruining the opportunity. Do not believe tips that promise endless supplies of free money, e.g. by mass disenchanting vendor bought items. In fact because everybody can and will do that whenever crafting materials get too expensive, there is an effective price cap on all materials which you can get from vendor bought items.

7) Use both auction houses: The real money AH is mostly suitable for the rarer and thus more expensive items, or materials. But don't waste the 10 slots you have on the gold AH! You can always sell a large stack of gold on the real money AH later.

8) Prices will fall: All virtual worlds suffer from the same effect of AH prices going down with time, called "mudflation". During the first weeks some prices on the Diablo 3 AH will still be rather high. Don't take those as your point of reference. After a month or two the prices will stabilize somewhere lower. Do not hoard items for sale later, rather sell everything now, and if you need something later, buy it back for half the price.

Most of this is just common sense, or the result of very basic knowledge in economics. If you have other good tips, feel free to add them in the comment section.

In the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign I am currently running the group spent level 1 fighting kobolds and zombies. Now at level 2 they got into combat with humans for the first time. Now in previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons you would have created a level 2 human bandit using the same rules as for creating a player character. You'd declare him to be a fighter or rogue, and give him stats and abilities accordingly. 4th edition doesn't work like that any more, there you'll find a human bandit listed in the Monster Manual. Human NPCs you are supposed to fight in 4E follow the rules for monsters, not those for players.

In a way that is inevitable, due to player characters being so much more complex in 4th edition. For a player it is nice to have lots of powers and choices when creating his character. But for a DM who just needs a couple of bandits, it would be quite a workload. So instead the NPC gets a simple monster template with only a few powers. And you can use rules for "solo" or "elite" or "minion" monsters to vary the NPCs hit points way from 1 to much more than a player character of that level could have.

The downside of that is that players will quickly realize that the NPCs don't follow the same rules as they do. The NPCs use powers that the players don't have access to, NPC wizards cast spells the player wizards can't learn, and so on. It makes the NPCs seem less human, less real. But that seems to be a common theme of 4th edition: More game, less believable world. Still beats MMORPGs, though.

As I mentioned in my review, the Reavers of Harkenwold D&D adventure comes with the last maps of the Iron Keep missing. Wizard of the Coast provides these maps only as printed in small in the booklets, or on their website. But they don't look very good when blown up to scale, and they have all the room and encounter numbers printed all over them.

Thus I made maps for the three floors of the Great Tower myself, using Campaign Cartographer 3. The maps are meant to be printed 40 cm wide and 50 cm high to be in 1" = 5' standard scale. On a regular printer that is 2 x 2 pages. You can find the maps I drew here. Tell me what you think!

What is missing from the maps are the arrow slits in the walls. Campaign Cartographer has wall-"cutting" windows and doors, but they were too wide and didn't work all that well with the 5' thick walls of the Great Tower.

Blizzard posted a webpage with all the information about their gold and real money auction house for Diablo 3. And it is very clear that they plan to make serious money with that real money auction house: The transaction fee for equipment is $1, the transaction fee for commodities is 15%. And that is if you want the money to go to your "Battle.net Balance", from which you can only use it to buy other items, or to pay things like a WoW subscription. If you want the money to be transferred to your PayPal account, you will pay another 15%.

Thus selling for example a stack of gold for $10 leaves you with $7 on your PayPal account, and Blizzard with $3 (part of which goes to PayPal, presumably). If you sell a sword for $5, Blizzard gets $1.75 ($1 fix plus 15% of $5) and you get $3.25. Assuming the real money auction house has a lot of activity, Blizzard will quickly make some serious cash with those fees. Some people might end up paying more to Blizzard per month for Diablo 3 than for World of Warcraft.

Think of it as a 30% tax rate on your virtual earnings, if you want to cash them out. Well, before paying *real* taxes on them as well. But that is a different story. Casual AH users are probably better off leaving the money on the Battle.net Balance. But if you fell for one of those "get rich quick" Diablo 3 guides, the only rich people will be Blizzard and the guy who sold you the guide.

Rohan has an extremely interesting post up on how buying ISK via PLEX in EVE is equivalent to skipping content you don't like. PvP is a negative sum game, and EVE offers you the possibilities of *either* earning the ISK for it through economic activities, *or* by paying real money for PLEX. Buy PLEX, and you don't have to mine/craft/trade. His interesting thought experiment was what would happen if you would apply the same principle to people who like the economic part but hate the PvP part: What if EVE would sell you an IMMORTAL module which for 30 days would make you completely immune to being attacked in PvP? (Of course you couldn't initiate PvP either)

The thought experiment establishes a clear priority of goals in EVE. Doing (or skipping) economic activities to do PvP sounds reasonable, because PvP is the ultimate goal of the game. The reverse isn't true. The ability to skip PvP would make many EVE players howl with rage: No more "burn Jita", no more "Hulkageddon", no more technetium cartel. EVE as a pure economic game with no PvP would probably not even be viable, as the money sink would be missing. My April Fool's joke of a trammelized "safe" EVE was just that, a joke. People would flock to it at first, but soon lose interest. Unless of course CCP would invent a different money sink. But then you would have a very different game which probably wouldn't be recognizable as "EVE" any more.

Once upon a time people on the internet talked about the games they were currently playing, and websites as well as print magazines reviewed existing games. Alpha versions of games weren't accessible at all, while betas were for a few select testers to give feedback. It appears that this was very long ago, with those habits now forgotten. Today a beta attracts millions of players, who are even willing to pay for that access. Blizzard sold a million Mists of Pandaria beta accesses at the hefty price of a year's subscription to World of Warcraft. ArenaNet sold access to the Guild Wars 2 beta at the price of the full game, and was so successful that their own website listed the digital edition of GW2 as being "sold out". I know of several games which are available for the general public for alpha testing. And in print magazines as well as on websites and blogs it seems as if 80% of the talk is about games that haven't been released yet, or are still collecting funding via Kickstarter. It seems as if we are living in the future of gaming, instead of in the presence.

The advantage for the game companies is clear: The digital edition of Guild Wars 2 costs *more* than the price you are going to pay on release day in a brick and mortar shop, ArenaNet gets all the money instead of only part of it, and by having to pay that price before the beta the customer can't reverse his buying decision if he doesn't like what he sees in the beta.Blizzard pretty much ensures that people are going to buy Mists of Pandaria, as they already paid for the subscription. Kickstarter is a way to monetize the hype for a game, with the first scammers just having been discovered and kicked out instead of kickstarted.

The advantage for the customer is less obvious. Personally I find it somewhat frustrating to read a magazine about PC games and find that I can't play all these nice games they talk about, because they haven't been released yet. And I can't help but notice that months later when the game is actually release, the review is a lot cooler than the glowing enthusiasm of the preview. I liked the old-style *free* beta access as enabling me to make a purchase decision (I got into the Diablo 3 beta for free and decided that I will buy it, I played the free TERA beta and decided that it was not for me).

But to me the biggest problem is that the future by definition is uncertain. Did you get all excited by the previews of Prime: Battle for Dominus, later renamed Dominus, promising to bring back Dark Age of Camlot like 3-faction PvP plus sandbox gameplay? Well, that game just got cancelled. Games getting several hundred thousand dollars, or even a million or two on Kickstarter sounds great, until you realize that it takes about a hundred thousand dollars to pay one guy for one year (about twice his salary due to other costs of employment). That million only pays for 10 man years, which might result in a great iPhone game, but probably not a triple-A PC title. And if funding runs out before the game is ready to ship, you'll never see it.

I wonder whether this focus on games that aren't released yet has something to do with us being disappointed by the games we actually have. Do we still have the time to play games that came out, or are we already too busy to actually play while getting excited about games that are still far away?