If you look at the name of the game Dungeons & Dragons and compare it with the reality of pen & paper roleplaying, it is obvious that the Dungeons part is far more frequent than the Dragons part. Over an average full campaign you will have many dungeons, but only few dragons. One reason for that is that "dungeons" is a far more open term than "dragons", there can be millions of different dungeons. If you need a dragon, you just take one from the Monster Manual; if you need a dungeon it usually is worth putting some effort into creating one. So how does one make a good dungeon for 4th edition D&D?

The first thing to realize is that 4th edition D&D has some substantial differences from other editions, which is cause for a lot of edition warring. But once you leave the squabbling behind you, the differences also have consequences for dungeon design. Basically earlier D&D editions (and D&D Next) had more and smaller fights, while 4th edition tends to have fewer and bigger fights. Thus an earlier edition dungeon might first have a small room with 3 kobolds, then another small room with 3 goblins, and finally a room with the one orc chieftain leading them. The 4th edition version will rather have one big room with 3 kobolds, 3 goblins, and the orc chieftain all present at the same time.

Thus old school "blue" dungeon maps of first edition AD&D tend to have a large number, sometimes of over 100 rooms. And each individual room would be small, with the dungeon map usually just showing an empty room. Furniture or other features might be mentioned in the text, but wouldn't appear on the map. And in some extreme cases you'd open a door to a 3x3 room and find 10 orcs in there and nothing else, because nobody bothered to wonder what those 10 orcs were doing in an empty room.

4th edition dungeons need a bit more effort to create, because a room with monsters in it is at the same time a battle map for that encounter. And terrain plays a huge role in combat, so your dungeons get a lot better if the rooms aren't just empty. You will want to know not only what features are in the room, but also how the monsters are placed in relation to those features. An archer behind a barricade at the back of the room is very different from an archer standing on the first square in the open after the door. Therefore it makes sense to build 4E dungeons from the bottom up: First create each encounter with its battle map, then connect the battle maps to form a dungeon. In earlier editions dungeons were often created top-down, starting by drawing the dungeon on a squared paper and then filling the rooms.

While I still use squared paper for the first sketches of a dungeon, I've moved to Campaign Cartographer for the final map. In Campaign Cartographer you can save zoomed in "views" of one room and just print that view out as a battle map. That avoids showing the players the whole map: The view of the room they see is at the same time a description of what they are seeing, and the battle map if a combat takes place. But I don't just print the views of rooms in which combat is planned, but of every room. That has the advantage that putting a map on the table isn't a sure sign to players that there is a combat ahead, and also serves well if a combat for some reason moves out from its room.

For some of my larger battle maps I went to the trouble of having them printed as a "poster", most online poster shops have a service to print your images on a large piece of poster paper. But that is obviously expensive, and with the usual 1 inch equal to a 5 foot square, most battles don't really need a huge poster. Using A4 paper, I try to fit smaller room on one page of 8 x 11 squares, medium rooms to two pages of 16 x 11, and large rooms to 4 pages of 16 x 22 squares. Anything bigger tends to get messy if you try to print it at home and then tape the pages together.

Another nifty feature of Campaign Cartographer is that it has layers, and you can put some dungeon features like secret doors on a special "secret" layer. Then you print the zoomed in battle maps with the secret layer hidden, while the overview map for the DM shows them. In some cases I print out the secret features extra, and overlay them on the battle map once the players have found them.

The ideal size of the overall dungeon basically depends on your play rhythm. My group only plays twice per month, with sessions lasting 3 to 4 hours. Thus my dungeons are more likely to have something like 20 rooms or less, with around half of these being battles. That way my players don't spend half a year in the same dungeon. But if your groups likes long dungeon crawls or plays more frequently and longer sessions, nothing speaks against making much bigger dungeon maps. Just remember that dungeon size also has an influence on the narrative of your adventure: Many rooms with many fights against similar monsters might slow story development down to a crawl while the players are busy with one fight after another.

As Leo Tolstoy's says at the start of Anna Karenina, MMORPG subscription models are all alike; every Free2Play model is Free2Play in its own way. Is it pay-to-win? Can you only buy fluff? Or does Free2Play allow those with more money than time to make up for the difference? And it seems that every game has a new answer to these questions. But the weirdest one I have seen up to now landed in my mailbox today: "Reveal Your True Power: The Lineage II Underwear Event!"

Apparently you can not only buy sexy underwear for your Lineage II avatar, but that underwear actually has stats! Obviously you are far more powerful if you wear a sexy man-string than if you only wear boring boxer shorts! And finally I understand all those upskirt shots in Asian MMORPGs: You need them to check your gear!

I've been playing a bit of Anno Online, which went into open beta this week. In case you haven't guessed it yet, Anno Online is browser-based version of the Anno series (Anno 1701, Anno 1602, Anno 1503, Anno 1404, Anno 2070) of city-building and economic simulation games. Players build cities on islands, and need to provide goods to their citizens to keep them happy. Different islands provide different goods, so you send ships to trade between the islands. Anno Online pretty much works like Anno 1404 (Anno 2070 has a futuristic setting), only that you can play for free. And, as is typical for browser-based city-building games, it is a lot slower than the single-player version, so you can build up your islands over weeks and months.

Today I bought a game with a weird history. Once upon a time Stardock promised to make the best fantasy 4X turn-based strategy game since Master of Magic, and they called it Elemental: War of Magic. The game released, and it was a complete disaster, full of bugs, bad user interface, and severe flaws in the core gameplay. Although some of the problems were fixed with patches, the game never got anywhere close to living up to the hype. So to make up for War of Magic, Stardock made a much improved sequel in Fallen Enchantress and even gave the game for free to early registered buyers of War of Magic.

While I am a big fan of turn-based strategy games, I had gotten word of the Elemental controversy in time to not buy War of Magic. My idea at the time was to wait for the game to get patched. As no miracle patch emerged, I never played War of Magic. And I was sufficiently skeptic of Fallen Enchantress to not buy it on release, but put it on my Steam wish list instead.

It turns out that Steam has a nifty feature that if a game on your wish list is on sale, they send you an e-mail. Until tomorrow Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is 66% off on Steam. At that price I'm quite willing to risk it. Now I just need to find the time to actually play it, as it appears to be rather epic in scope.

Chris of Game by Night is asking Where Exactly Is Darkfall: Unholy Wars?, and while I don't have proof, I do have a hypothesis on the subject. I believe that Aventurine is in fact not making much money from selling Darkfall subscriptions. I believe their primary source of income is various subsidies and research grants from Greece and the European Union, as documented here.

Why this hypothesis? Because it very nicely explains the rather long periods of being vaporware that Darkfall has gone through, and is yet again in. To make money from subscribers, you need a game that runs. To make money from well-meaning bureaucrats, you only need a PROJECT of a game that might one day run. Not running the game is actually cheaper, and thus more profitable, than having all that cost for servers, bandwidth, and customer service.

If Aventurine's business model was based on people actually playing Darkfall, then I can't find an explanation of why they would want to shut down Darkfall v1 mid-November, only to have Darkfall v2 not up and running end February. Not only are there currently no players paying for Darkfall, but the long break between games probably makes less players want to come back for the sequel, because they found something else to do meanwhile.

Of course with the Greek state running out of money, and the European Union not being flush either, Aventurine might have problems getting more "research grants" in the future. I don't think they are a viable company under a truly capitalistic system.

To misquote Oscar Wilde: "To lose one friend may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose 143 looks like carelessness." I spent part of my weekend unfriending 143 people on Facebook. Took a while, because you need to defriend each of them individually. That leaves me with only 2 friends left there, which happen to be the only ones I actually know in real life. Everybody else was friended via a forum of some Facebook game. Over the years these games have become increasingly unplayable if you don't have dozens of friends or more to send you items. That isn't lazyness, the items you get from your friends are needed for the game and can't be acquired by other in-game means. You either get the stuff from your friends, or you buy it for real money. And you need those friend-items for pretty much every quest after the tutorial.

The logical consequence is that all the forums of Facebook games have "add me" threads, where people are looking for fake friends to exchange items with. Somehow the adding of fake friends becomes just part of the gameplay. If adding friends is what you have to do to advance in the game, you do it. And with half of Facebook logins being just to play games, and hundreds of millions of players per month, that ends up with lots of fake friendships.

Of course there are no statistics of how many of the Facebook friendships out there are fake, but it sure is a significant percentage. Add to that the friend connections of the 83 million fake Facebook accounts, and you get a hundreds of millions of "friendships" between people who never met. So who cares? Well, did you ever wonder why a free internet service is worth over 60 billion dollars on the stockmarket? Advertisers pay good money to use the social connections on Facebook. The theory is that word of mouth from your friends is good advertising. But of course that only works if those friends are real. This is why Facebook is now asking you when you receive a friend invite whether you know that person in real life. Not that this helps much, as people are just lying. But Facebook sure has understood that there is a threat to their business model.

I didn't have a problem with lying to Facebook or making lots of fake game friends because I am not really using that Facebook account for anything else. But with Facebook increasingly going after fake accounts and fake friendships, and some Zynga games really exaggerating with the number of friends needed to get anything done, Facebook got increasingly unattractive as a game platform. And then of course tablets like the iPad or Android-based equivalents, or smart-phones, are on the rise as platforms for casual games. Why bother with fake Facebook friends in Farmville if you can play a similar but better Hay Day on the iPad, which doesn't require friends at all? So I quit all Facebook games and defriended all of my fake game friends. I'm sure they won't even notice. But unless they come up with something else, I predict an unhappy future to Facebook game companies.

I haven't supported Kickstarter projects very much. But I'd like to talk about the two projects I did support, because to me they somehow seem typical of the experience I also hear other people have.

My first Kickstarter project I donated to was Banner Saga by Stoic. That was supposed to deliver a single-player tactical turn-based game by November 2012. Now it's 2013, and the single-player game is still nowhere to be seen. Current estimated release date: "Our best guess right now is between mid and late this year." Not good! Instead Stoic made a multi-player game called Banner Saga Factions that is now being released. No wonder the backers are angry, the FAQ looks like a selection of hate mail. I consider this project typical, because I've heard of a lot of other projects that are late and/or delivered something rather different than promised.

My other Kickstarter donation went to rebuilding EN World, a hacked pen & paper RPG site. Now there my motivation to donate was a very different one: Mostly charity, with any rewards I might get being "nice to have" but not essential to my decision to donate. And I think this is another thing which is typical to Kickstarter: People voting with their wallets to express goodwill or charity towards some cause or genre of games. The big advantage of that approach is that it is a lot harder to end up disappointed if you weren't expecting much in return anyway.

So how did your Kickstarter experience go? Did you regret donating, or did everything work out for you?

As expected Sony announced the PS4, and it had no announced feature that would make me want to buy it. Backward compatibility will be even worse than the PS3, because basically Sony is changing the PS4 into a PC. On the plus side this makes it easier for game developers to make PS4 games, but with the downside that these games are increasingly unlikely to be Playstation-exclusives. If you can use more or less the same code on several platforms, why wouldn't you?

What I found disingenuous from Sony was the suggestion that at some future date the PS4 would be able to play PS3 and PS2 games streamed from the cloud. Because I am pretty certain, based on previous experience with the PSP, that you will not be able to use your existing PS2 disc as proof of purchase to be allowed to play the cloud version for free. So yes, maybe you'll be able to play PS2 and PS3 games again, but you will most probably have to pay for them again as well! And then they aren't even really running on your machine, but on some computer in the cloud with the result being streamed to you, and all the disadvantages of ping, lag, and lower quality that cloud gaming has.

If anything, cloud gaming makes me think that there is absolutely no need for proprietary consoles. If I can play by streaming from the cloud, why shouldn't I be able to play games from all possible platforms that way, using just one machine at home? Technically it should easily be possible to switch at will from playing an XBox game like Halo to a Nintendo game like Zelda and then to a Playstation game like Final Fantasy, with you just having one streaming box at home connected to your TV. If that won't happen, it is just because those companies won't work together, nor give the rights to do so to another company.

Today in all likelihood Sony will announce the Playstation 4. As I bought a PS2 and a PS3, I probably count as a likely customer for the PS4. But before the thing is even announced I personally already consider it unlikely that I will ever buy one.

I loved my PS2. There were a lot of great games on that platform which weren't available elsewhere. Specifically the Final Fantasy series on the PS2 was great, I even played some of the PS1 Final Fantasy games that were playable on the PS2. Other games I liked also were often of the Japanese RPG genre, or variations thereof, like Dark Cloud.

Then came the PS3 and destroyed my love affair with the Playstation brand. Only the very early Japanese and US models of the PS3 were backwards compatible, while the PS3 I bought in Europe wasn't. So suddenly I had a huge library of games I couldn't play any more, because I didn't have the room to have both consoles installed at the same time. And then Final Fantasy XIII was a huge disappointment. The one game I ended up playing the longest on the PS3 was Red Dead Redemption, but most other titles on the PS3 weren't exclusive. There weren't so many Japanese RPGs on offer. And many of the games that sold well for the PS3 were the kind that I either wasn't all that interested in, or shooters which I much prefer to play with a mouse and keyboard. I dislike aiming with a gamepad.

Another negative point was that I used my PS2 to watch DVDs, and I had software which allowed me to watch DVDs from any region, allowing me to buy TV series on DVD on the US Amazon.com. The PS3 is solidly region locked, and useless for watching foreign DVDs. Other restrictions of the PS3 annoyed me even more: If I told the PS3 that I lived in Belgium, the only language options I got were French and Dutch. So I lied when I made my PS3 account and claimed I was living in the UK, just so I could run the thing in English. But then of course Sony wouldn't accept my credit card with a Belgian address any more, so I could only use the PS Store with UK prepaid cards bought via the internet. I felt the Playstation 3 totally boxed me in with national and regional restrictions, not allowing for the option that maybe somebody wasn't living in his the country he was born in, or interested in the films and games of other countries or regions.

Whatever the technical specs announced for the PS4 are, two things are almost sure: My current PC has better graphics than the PS4. And my PC is a lot less restrictive if I want to access content from other countries or regions. So right now I have trouble thinking of a reason why I would need a Playstation 4.

• constant spamming of chat channels
• use of stolen credit cards
• credit card chargebacks
• credit card fraud

In other words, as the second quote from Jagex states: "The biggest concern about real-world trading is - sorry for this example as I know it is not politically correct - it is a bit like prostitution. It's not necessarily the prostitution which is a problem, although you might have moral problems with [real-world trading]. But the real problem is the organised crime that's built around prostitution; the human trafficking, the drugs, etc. And that's the same with illegal real-world trading. The problem comes in when they start doing other illegal activities."

Now I totally agree that stealing and fraud are evil. Just like everybody agrees that human trafficking is evil. But as argument for why RMT / prostitution is bad, I find this extremely weak. Not that I would deny that there is a connection between RMT and credit card fraud, or prostitution and human trafficking. But what if you break that connection? What if you have a game like Diablo III with a legal RMT auction house, or a country like the Netherlands where prostitutes have legal protection? If there is no credit card fraud, is RMT *still* a bad thing? If there is no human trafficking or drugs involved, is prostitution still bad? I feel that the slippery slope argument is just lazy and weak.

So why don't these people argue against RMT itself, disconnected from the crime? Because if they did that, they would have to point the fingers at themselves. Between real money auction houses with fees, PLEX, and various Free2Play shop items in different games, a lot of game developers are now very much in the business of selling virtual currency for real money, or taking a cut from such sales between players. Basically what the devs are saying in the linked-to post is "RMT is evil if somebody other than me is doing it". And that doesn't make for a very morally convincing argument.

I very much believe that buying virtual currency has an *inherent* bad effect on a game, which is independent of whether it is a third party or the game company itself that is making the sale. RMT to me is a sign of a game lacking inherent rewards. We do not want to play because playing is fun, we only play because of some virtual reward at the end. And if there are some means like RMT or botting or cheating which allow us to get to that same virtual reward faster, we take it. Because we aren't enjoying playing for that reward. And that, to me, cries "bad game!". RMT means paying somebody else to play the game for you, and how enjoyable can a game be if you feel the need for that?

Even if you don't mind the Skinner box gameplay without inherent rewards, RMT is self-defeating. It breaks the link between the game activity and the reward. Imagine starting a new Diablo III account with $5 worth of gold: You would play for many hours, at least the first play-through if not several ones, equipped 99% of the time with gear you bought from the AH. Diablo III in your mind would not be a game where you kill monsters to find loot, because the probability of finding something better than what you bought with the RMT gold would be so very remote. That very much kills the "I play for rewards" mindset.

I do think there is a good and intelligent discussion that can be held about whether RMT by itself is bad. By just simply labeling every gold seller as a credit card fraudster, we are just avoiding the real RMT issue.

We stopped the previous session of our 4E D&D campaign with a cliffhanger: The players had entered a temple of Bahamut with sarcophagi lining the walls, which had when approached disgorged a load of skeletons. So this session starts with the fight against the skeletons. Due to the position of the entrance the skeletons are both left and right of the players. There are six skeleton minions, and behind them four blazing skeletons.

Now minions in 4E D&D are monsters with just 1 hitpoint, so the players kill most of them before the skeletons even get to act. But the temple has a surprise in store: Whenever it is the skeletons turn in the initiative order, two more skeleton minions come out of randomly chosen sarcophagi. At first the players think that this is controlled by the blazing skeletons, which are nasty enough anyway, constantly setting the heroes on fire or damaging them with their fire aura. But killing blazing skeletons doesn't stop the minions from arriving each round. So the warlord concludes that the stop switch must be somewhere in the high altar area of the temple. There the players find altars to Bahamut with an inscription in draconic, which the cleric can read. They correctly interpret the instruction to kneel in front of the altar and praise Bahamut as the way to stop the skeletons, and the flood of skeletons stops.

Now the high altar region of the temple is bathed in a silvery light. And in a previous adventure the dwarven warrior of the group had acquired a scroll describing an ancient artifact, an axe called Aecris. The scroll said that this axe was last seen in the possession of Sir Keegan of Winterhaven, the last commander of the Keep on Shadowfell they are currently exploring. And there was a cryptic hint to "follow the silvery light". Thus the warrior now eagerly opens the door at the back of the temple, leading to the crypt. There the players find the tomb of a knight, with a stone effigy on top carrying a stone axe. Touching the lid of the tomb gives a rather predictable result: The lid of the tomb disintegrates into dust, and a skeletal knight with an axe rises from the grave, swearing to protect the rift from being reopened and challenging the heroes to state their intentions.

The conversation with Sir Keegan, the skeletal knight, is in fact a skill challenge. That is to say a mix of roleplaying with a series of skill checks. So Sir Keegan poses a series of questions to the heroes, and judges their responses by the result of appropriate skill checks. While starting badly with two critical failures rolled, the players then manage to get the next four skill checks right and convince Sir Keegan that their intentions are good. So Sir Keegan tells them his tragic story about how he was charged to defend the rift to the Shadowfell, but the evil influence of Shar seeping through the rift drove him mad and made him murder his family and lieutenants, before being driven into the dungeon by the remaining soldiers. To make up for his past sins he offers the group his axe, Aecris, which of course the warrior is only too happy to accept. Aecris is an artifact, and thus soon the warrior starts hearing a voice in his head driving him to glory on the battlefield and instilling a hate against undead. 4th edition has an interesting system for artifacts: Their powers depend on a score which depends on how the user's actions align with the goals of the artifact. And they come with an expiry date, leaving either when they fulfill a goal or disagree with the wielder's actions. That allows to have several different artifacts over the duration of a campaign, without them becoming the standard for magic items.

Having done this part of the dungeon, the party now returns to the zombie labyrinth and take the other staircase down from there. It leads to an empty room with yet another stair deeper down into the dungeon, and a simple door. The players decide to check out the door first, and find themselves in a corridor that seems to only have dead ends to the left, while leading further around a corner to the right. Unexpectedly the rogue in the group decides to first check out the dead end, and by that runs into a nearly invisible gelatinous cube. Two rotting corpses join the fight one turn later from the right corridor. This was designed to be a trap where the cube follows the group and attacks from behind when they face the undead, but the curiosity of the rogue foiled that plan. After finding that the rotting corpses have an aura that makes anybody standing next to them take -5 to attacks due to nausea, the warrior can use one of his new axe's abilities: Using it as a heavy throwing weapon that returns to the hand of its wielder. So the priest with his turn undead and the warrior fight the rotting corpses, while the other battle the gelatinous cube. Apart from the undead having a nasty surprise, exploding on death, the combat goes quite well. The group finds some treasure, and a good place to take an extended rest, and we end the session there.

I was reading in a print magazine a review of DmC, and the reviewer gave the game some negative points for the jump-and-run part being "too easy". Although I never even played DmC, somehow that review upset me. I mean, I was happy that I learned that the jump-and-run part of the game is relatively easy, and promptly put the game on my Steam wishlist for the next sale. But how can a reviewer say a game is "too" anything?

I believe that for any player there is a certain span of difficulties in which a game is enjoyable. Less than that and the game is trivial for him, although he still might enjoy doing trivial activities (/wave Bhagpuss). More difficult than his personal range, and the game becomes frustrating. But while thus a player could say that a game is "too easy" or "too hard" *for him*, I don't think one can generalize that for everybody. A game is never "too easy" or "too hard" for EVERYBODY.

I think that sequels are to blame for too general reviewer statements. DmC is the fifth game in the Devil may Cry series. Now imagine two very different players trying it: One a veteran who has already spent hundreds if not thousands of hours on the previous games. The other a completely new player who has never played a game of this style. What is "too easy" for the former might well be just the right difficulty for the latter, while what is just right for the former might be "too hard" for the latter.

It always surprises me that not every game has adjustable difficulty levels. The purpose of a game is entertainment, and what use is a game which for some players is either "too easy" or "too hard"? Wouldn't it be best if everybody could adjust the game to fit his personal preference and experience level?

The Kickstarter project to rebuild EN World got funded with £53,786 pledged of an initial £300 goal. As this was mostly based on goodwill and charity of the users of that website, I find this a very nice result. But this isn't only due to those who gave money. Several companies provided the rewards for those who pledged £25 or more, and the pile of rewards grew with every stretch goal. Which now means that goodwill or not goodwill, I'll end up with a lot of pen & paper RPG material in pdf format for my £25. I don't get a choice, but the retail value of all that stuff is well beyond my donation. Something of a win-win situation, where everybody ends up happy. Nice!

MMORPG fans are a bit like football fans, always supporting their team. Unfortunately, unlike football, there aren't matches played whose outcome would tell us something about which team is currently beating which other team. That mostly leads to circular arguments of the type: "You can't measure quality. My game is best, because it has the best un-measurable quality.". People declare themselves as the only ones objectively being able to determine the quality of games, and then miraculously come to the "completely objective" conclusion that the game they are supporting is the one that has the highest quality.

The other sort of argument usually made is based on player numbers in one form or another. And everybody cheats with their numbers, comparing apples with oranges. Games that are distributed world-wide take their global numbers and compare them to games that aren't even distributed in Asia. Free2Play games count everybody who ever made an account. Games in which everybody has multiple accounts count number of accounts instead of number of players. Games with low player numbers count percent of improvement over last month. And if another game has better numbers than the fans favorite game, then the better numbers are declared to be an anomaly which doesn't count.

All that doesn't only result in numbers which are statistically not relevant, they also don't make sense in a historical perspective. How do you compare games that didn't come out at the same time? Is a game only "good" if it is the most technologically advanced game *today*, thus penalizing all older games in the score? Or is a game only good when measured by its degree of innovation over earlier games, which penalizes most modern games? Is people leaving games a sign that a game got worse, or is it just a measure of burnout?

I don't think there will ever be an agree solution to how to measure which game is "best", and most important. But I was wondering if instead of looking at current player numbers or percent up and down compared to the last month, we shouldn't be looking at the impact of a game from the other side:

How many people did NOT play this game?

There will still be a lot of people who will argue that this isn't a measure of whether a game is "good" or "bad". But I would argue that at the very least this would be a measure of the historical significance of a game. In 20 years, if a journalist writes about the history of MMORPGs in the first decade of the 21st century, what games will have been completely forgotten, and which ones will be remembered? I would say that those which pretty much everybody played have the best chance to be remembered.

While my players are in the middle of their current adventure in our 4E D&D campaign, I am preparing one of the top 10 classic D&D adventures to follow. Or maybe I ain't, because in reality I am writing a new adventure based on one of the classics. Because come to think of it, I'm not even sure that it is possible to play a "classic adventure".

The problem starts with the simple fact that every group who played one of these adventures had a different experience. Pen & paper roleplaying stories aren't like movies, where everybody who watched them experiences the exact same sequence of events and hears the exact same jokes. A D&D adventure module is more like a framework, having memorable characters and places. But the events are very much influenced by the interactive storytelling between DM and players, and most of the punchlines will come from players and be different from one group to the next.

The second problem is that both roleplaying and the players have evolved over time. The adventure that was great in the 80's to play with a bunch of teenagers is not necessarily great if you play it today, 30 years later with people 30 years older. I remember when I was young we once had a 16-hour marathon D&D session, and we played at least once a week. These days I'm happy if I can get a 4-hour session going every two weeks.

In the end the least of my problems is that the classic adventures were written for earlier versions of D&D, and I need to adapt them to 4th edition. Most of that is just legwork, although for a 4E adventure one might want to swap out several "trash mob" fights and replace them by one more epic encounter. "You open the door to a 3x3 room. There are 5 orcs in there. Roll initiative!" doesn't really cut it any more today, and in the classic adventures there was a lot of that sort of hack'n'slash.

So in the end my task is to take a classic adventure, analyse what made it great, take out those good bits, and create a new adventure that uses them. For somebody who played one of the classics it should be recognizable, but not to a point where he already knows what is going to happen next. For somebody who missed the classics at the time, it should enable him to say "yes, I played that one", even if it was just my interpretation of the classics. And of course it should be fun for everybody to play. I'll see if I succeed in these goals.

Last year's GenCon had a D&D Next Live session with Chris Perkins as DM, and Ed Greenwood and several WotC game designers as players. Funny, if you enjoy dirty jokes, but I was actually watching it to learn more about D&D Next. And under that aspect it was kind of a failure. Except for the names of the spells and skills, the game might as well have been any other rule system, from earlier versions of D&D to 4E to Pathfinder.

What I found especially telling was that the advertised faster combat didn't really happen. Combat didn't appear to be any faster than in a Chris Perkins 4E game. There were a couple of one-shot kills (which can easily be done in 4E as well), and the DM having to speed up combat by making the enemy surrender. The players were using battlemaps and miniatures, so it was impossible to judge whether D&D Next would have allowed the same game in a "theater of the mind" mode.

I can't playtest D&D Next with a group, as I don't have an English-speaking group of players available. I'm still playing 4E in the French translation. But frankly, what I have seen from D&D Next up to now doesn't make me hold my breath. I simply can't see any improvement over already existing rule sets. I will probably just stick to 4E and give the next edition of D&D a miss.

MMORPG discussions on the blogosphere this week included such highlights like an argument whether vanilla WoW was really the best version of World of Warcraft ever and the Blizzard developers spent 8 years and countless patches just to make the game worse, and the news that Mark Jacobs is planning to make Camelot Unchained. Obviously people believe that Dark Age of Camelot also got worse with every patch, because they greeted Camelot Unchained like the promised land in spite of the fact that DAoC is still up and running.

There is some serious distortion of reality by nostalgia going on here. If today a game released and got 250,000 players, it would be considered a failure. There were "WoW is dying" posts in response to the news that WoW was down to 9.6 million players. But Dark Age of Camelot, which only ever got 250,000 players at its peak, and is now well below 50,000, is by some still considered to be the holy grail. And that was for a mixed PvE / PvP game, while Camelot Unchained will only have the PvP part. Does anybody really believe this is going to be a huge success? Especially since Mark Jacobs previous attempt to make a new DAoC-successor, Warhammer Online, was such a big success ...

Ask anybody who played MMORPGs over the last decade or more what the best MMO is, and the answer will invariably be one of the first games they played. For the real veterans of the genre that might be UO or EQ or AC or DAoC. For millions of people it was World of Warcraft, often the vanilla version. Everybody thinks that at the time where he started MMORPGs the genre was producing its absolutely best games, and from there on it went downwards. But as everybody started at different times, the timing of this mythical peak is different depending on who you ask.

To me that is pretty convincing proof that there never was a time when MMORPGs were "best". There has been continuous improvement, because every new game built on previous games, and every patch fixed bugs, added content, and made things better. But this continuous improvement is a rather slow process, the perception of which is tainted by the fact that MMORPGs get more boring the longer you play them. Your first virtual world is a wondrous experience, and from there you burn out over time. And people burn out a lot faster than games improve, so the overall impression is one of decline.

Waiting for the game that brings back that wondrous first-time experience is a fool's game. You can't get that first-time feeling back. And the developers know that, although they might be willing to relieve you of some of your cash via Kickstarter by playing to your nostalgia. Throw in a few catch-phrases like player housing and player-owned economy, and you can be sure to get a couple of millions in crowdfunding from nostalgic players who don't know better.There's a sucker born every minute, and Kickstarter is the ideal way to find those suckers.

Syp is geeked about the upcoming Wildstart, and lists his 40 reasons for that. Reason number 4 being: "It’s focusing on a “sandpark” model that embraces the best of both worlds". Which of course immediately makes most people wonder whether that is even possible. What exactly is a "sandpark"?

The problem starts with the fact that most existing games are neither 100% sandbox nor 100% theme park. EVE is generally considered a sandbox game, but it does have agents missions that play like a theme park. WoW is generally considered a theme park game, but it is perfectly possible to step off that rail and do other stuff than to just follow the quest lines from one hub to the next, although some zones are more linear than others. So already sandbox or themepark is a question of shades of gray, not simply black and white.

If I were using graphics in my blog posts, I'd use a screenshot from the start of Darkmoon Island to demonstrate what a theme park is: A dark forest in which you theoretically can go in many directions, but where big neon arrows point towards the most efficient route. Most people will automatically follow that arrow. A sandbox is the same forest without the path and the neon signs, meaning people are more likely to go into different directions, but also more likely to not find the content. Assuming there are things to interact with in the forest, and enough players to meet in that forest to create emergent content, that can be very good. But of course the risk is of players lost in the forest, unsure about what they are supposed to do, and quitting before they found out.

In short, whether a game is sandbox or theme park depends on the amount of guidance offered to the players. Which is difficult, because the amount of guidance NEEDED by each player will be vastly different, depending on both attitude and experience. Thus claiming to be able to find the perfect optimum between the two, the "sandpark" level, appears to be somewhat spurious to me. What do you think?

Over the Christmas holidays I had checked out the progress of Facebook as a games platform, started a few new games, and in fact found improvements over earlier generations. But then of course I quickly got bored with most of them and quit all but one: Cityville 2. I'm in a mood for building games, and Cityville 2 is a stop gap solution until the new Sim City comes out. As Cityville 2 only came out in December, I was somewhat surprised today when I got the message that the game was already shutting down again. No new players accepted from today, and the game shuts down in a month. Two more Zynga games also were announced to close down, in addition to the 13 they shut down in December. Doesn't look good for Zynga.

The announcement was made during an analyst conference call, and the move is of the kind that makes sense to financial analysts: Release lots of games, then cull the weakest performers. But I think they are overlooking some aspects of that which are specific to social games. People don't just play one Facebook game, they usually play several ones. By shutting down 16 games, many of the players of Zynga's remaining games will probably have been affected. And especially everybody who spent money on those games will be highly annoyed: If you spend real money on virtual goods in a freshly released game, you expect your virtual property to stick around for longer than 3 months.

So I think that there is a good chance that this strategy of releasing and then shutting down lots of games will backfire on Zynga. Players will trust their new games less, and especially the "whales" will be reluctant to invest money in a new game that might not survive long.

There is also a lesson to be learned by Zynga in terms of gameplay. They released Farmville 2 and Cityville 2 nearly at the same time, and Farmville 2 did a lot better than Cityville 2. And the main difference between the two games is the amount of requests you need to spam your friends with to progress: In Farmville 2 it is relatively low, but in Cityville 2 it is extraordinarily high. I got around that obstacle by having lots of fake friends invited just for that game, but as Facebook is cracking down on that practice, and many people would rather use their Facebook page for real friends, that isn't an option for everybody. Zynga will need to make their games less aggressively viral in the future to succeed.

I'm not really playing console shooters, as I much prefer aiming with a mouse than with a gamepad. But when reading MMO blogs you can't help but read a lot of commentary on the upcoming Dust 514, due to its connection with EVE Online. Spinks wrote: "CCP is working hard on getting Dust 514 ready for release. The game, which will be F2P for PS3 only, is in beta at the moment. MMO Melting Pot sums up some bloggers’ thoughts on the beta and none of the people they quote actually like the game or seemed inclined to want to play it on release. That could be really bad news for CCP, these are people who were already invested in the genre and probably also play EVE and have Playstations: ie. their target audience." And I couldn't help but wonder if that is REALLY the target audience.

I tried EVE several times, and while there is obviously some shooting going on, I wouldn't call EVE a shooter game. Dust 514 will obviously be very different, with a lot less spreadsheets and a lot more shooting. And as several people repeatedly explained to me that the point of EVE PvP is to create an unbalanced situation, I can only assume that combat in Dust 514 will be significantly more balanced than in EVE. In short, not only do the two games play very differently, they also attract people with very different motivations.

Now Stabbed already remarked that the EVE economy and the Dust 514 economy are very much separate and not likely to intersect much anytime soon. So I am beginning to suspect that the EVE-Dust 514 link is more of a marketing gimmick than a real feature. Beta reviews are decidedly painting a picture of Dust 514 being just a mediocre shooter compared to what else is available on the PS3. Which wouldn't be surprising, given that CCP never made a console shooter before, and isn't exactly famous for great character animation in EVE. It looks to me as if CCP wanted to make a console shooter thinking that is where the money is, and just used their existing game as leverage to promote the new game, without really wanting to integrate the two games all that much.

So what if Dust 514 is just a mediocre console shooter, and the EVE Online link is just means to get the word out and to get journalists to write about the game? I've seen several previews on major gaming sites where the EVE link was practically all they ever talked about, and gameplay was barely mentioned. That marketing strategy certainly works for now, but risks seriously backfiring once the game is released. I don't know if you still read print magazines on PC games, but I've noticed for years a trend where two thirds of a magazine are taken up by hyped previews, and the last third is taken up by disappointed reviews. On release, professional game reviewers actually play the game and start criticizing actual gameplay, and comparing with whatever else is around.

Personally I wouldn't be surprised if Dust 514 ended up with a Metacritic critics score of just around 70. Anybody else want to estimate how the game ends up being received on release?

Imagine adding a rule to chess where the winner of a game gets to shoot the loser with .45 colt. That certainly would make chess a much tenser game! But would it make chess a *better* game? Whether you lose in chess or die in a MMORPG, you already received a clear signal of having lost. Is the game improved by linking that signal to a strong loss? Or is the loss just an artificial crutch to make people care about a game that lacks inherent motivation?

Apart from permadeath caused by bugs and disconnects, discussed in yesterday's threat, the question is whether permadeath if working as intended adds something valuable to a MMORPG. I played the original Everquest for a year and a half, and while that game doesn't have permadeath, it does have level loss on death, and the possibility to lose all your gear. And my observation at the time was that this led players to avoid risk. For example dungeons were rarely visited by groups of players who could still gain xp there. Rather they were farmed by high-level characters gathering gear for their alts or for sale. If a level-appropriate group died in a dungeon, the respawn would very likely cut the now naked players off from retrieving their corpses. So most players rather tended to play it safe and boringly "camped" monster spawn points in outdoor zones.

Now you might say that having significant risk in a MMORPG makes the fantasy world appear more dangerous and real. But if players react to the heightened risk by playing it safe, you get a virtual world full of possible adventure that is being avoided for being too dangerous. Games can keep up an illusion of us being heroic adventurers only exactly because there is no real risk.

Whether a MMORPG is subscription-based or Free2Play with an item shop, game companies are generally interested to keep people playing for as long as possible. Thus we also need to balance the potential heightened interest in a more dangerous game with the potential rage-quit of players who actually died to that danger. Thus there is a long tradition of games with known harsh death penalties in reality having several ways to circumvent those penalties. In Everquest you could get a necromancer to summon your corpse, for example. And there are even Free2Play games in which the death penalty can be negated with an item bought for real money in the item shop.

Personally I like doing crazy dangerous stuff in MMORPGs. I've been running low level characters from Freeport to Qeynos in Everquest, or been fishing with level 5 characters in Northrend. Doing such non-conventional gameplay requires the game to not have too harsh a death penalty. Permadeath and other harsh death penalties limit the game to some sort of safe mode, and ultimately make the game poorer, not richer.

Recently released Wizardry Online has been pulled from Steam due to numerous problems. One of which is "disconnections and other bugs resulting in item loss and permanent death". I can't imagine anyone being happy about permadeath, even if he died due to a decision he made himself. But losing your character permanently due to a bug or disconnect is never going to be acceptable. And I have yet to see the MMORPG which doesn't have bugs or disconnects.

As I recently mentioned I impulse-bought Omerta - City of Gangsters as pre-order. Now the game came out, and I had the opportunity to play it during the weekend. Omerta is most similar to XCOM, having both a resource management part and a turn-based tactical combat part, but the setting is prohibition era gangsters instead of aliens. And unfortunately Omerta doesn't quite have the brilliance of XCOM.

That is not to say that Omerta is a bad game, it just isn't an outstanding one. The strategic part is a lot less tense, because your economic situation resets at the start of each mission. You keep your gangsters, levels, and weapons you picked up in previous missions, but you always start in a new neighborhood, having to rebuild your economy over and over. The reason for that is probably that the economic game is not very deep, and actually doesn't need all that much input from you. Your businesses tend to make money on their own, and in many cases you can just let the game run and it will accumulate money. You might want to interact with your economy just for the fun of it, or to make money faster, but in general you'll always be making the money you need sooner or later.

The tactical combat is more challenging. Your characters have movement points and action points, but most actions also wipe out all of your remaining movement, so just like in XCOM you tend to move first and then shoot. There is a system of cover, and a variety of different weapons, each with different attacks. Each weapon type has its advantages and disadvantages, and over time you can find "green" or "purple" name weapons with better stats. Your character stats and selected perks make you characters specialize in either guns or melee weapons, but inside each category you can freely switch around between fights, giving you a lot of variety. A fight with pistols and revolvers tends to be rather different from a fight with shotguns and tommy guns. I'm not convinced guns are balanced with melee weapons, it appears to me as if you shouldn't bring a knife to a gun fight, but then melee weapons seem to deal somewhat more damage to make up for the short range. With levels, and independent from the weapon they are wielding, your characters also gain special combat abilities, which usually can be used just once per combat, or need you kill somebody to recharge. While graphically and atmospherically less intense than XCOM fights, the tactical fights are fun enough, and the best part of the game.

To some extent you can choose how much you want to fight. For example there are independent operations in your neighborhood, which you could either raid, or first get friendly with and then buy out. There might be a bank, which you could leave well alone, or risk a hard fight to get money quickly. You can't completely avoid fighting, because usually each mission has some scripted fights as part of the story. And with fighting being more fun than watching your money accumulate on its own, I tend to go for the fighting option. The one thing you always want to use your money for is to bribe policemen, because that is one of the few places where you can get new weapons for your gangsters.

Overall Omerta - City of Gangsters is an okay game. Certainly not as good as XCOM, but then there isn't exactly an abundance of modern turn-based tactical games on the PC right now. Would you rather play an okay game of your favorite genre, or a great game of a genre you don't like so much?

In yesterday's thread a commenter remarked about Wizardry Online: "My guess is the same 10-20K people who like that sort of stuff and complain about carebears all the time will gravitate to it". And it struck me how invariable that 10-20K number appears to be over the years. There were about 10-20K hardcore PvP players left in UO Felucca, once the others left for Trammel in 2000. EVE Online has about 10-20K players in nullsec. Darkfall has about 10-20K players when it's up. Mortal Online even less. Compared to the casual PvE part of the market, which grew a lot from 2000 to now, the hardcore PvP market appears to be rather stable in size. Why is that?

Normally I would assume that in any population the hardcore make up a certain percentage. If the MMORPG market overall grows by a factor of 20, the hardcore PvP niche part of it should have grown as well. But other than by mathematically dubious methods of counting every EVE account as a PvP player, which is doubly incorrect due most players having several accounts and 80+% of players staying in safe space, no growth is visible.

Of course I don't think it is exactly the same 10-20K people playing these games for over a decade. At least some must have dropped out and some new players arrived. But the overall size of the group seems remarkably stable. Is there some inherent factor that makes it impossible for a hardcore PvP game to grow bigger than that, unless it offers a lot of safe space for the not-so-hardcore?