Gamasutra recently wasted the perfectly good headline of We Don't Need the Haters with a perfectly good introduction about game developers receiving death threats on a post that then narrowly defined the problem as one of gender equality among video game protagonists. Although most games are either gender neutral or give the choice of gender for the protagonist, the author reduced the problem of haters in video games to statistics on how in the minority of games where you can't choose your gender the protagonist is male. Really? If only there were exactly as many games with female protagonists as with male protagonists we would have solved all problems with haters? I don't think so!

The problem with hate around video games has two dimensions, and the more serious one doesn't even take place in the games itself, and thus can't possibly be solved through game design: The problem of people taking their problem with a game out of the game and into real life. If video game developers get death threats for modifying the stats of a weapon in a game, the solution is not to never make balance adjustments to game any more. Rather the solution should be increased criminal prosecution, with internet companies forced by law enforcement entities to reveal the real identity of the people making the threats. There is absolutely no reason why a disgruntled gamer making death threats to a developer should be treated any more leniently than a disgruntled customer in a supermarket making death threats to the employees there.

The other dimension of the problem is that video games are disproportionately about extreme violence. This is where much of the gender inequality comes from: In the real world, physical violence is not gender equal, but mostly committed by men. The reason why World War II shooters have male soldiers as protagonists is one of historical accuracy, not sexism. And trying to force gender equality in violence is not necessarily desirable. I recently watched a modern take on Grimm's fairy tales, the TV series "Once Upon a Time", which evidently had undergone that sort of gender equality treatment: It ended showing Snow White in a murderous rage going after guards with a dwarven pickaxe and killing lots of people. Is that really better than the original? I doubt it! My childhood memories were ruined, I say!

As another example I have seen several reviews of the latest Tomb Raider which remarked how the sensitivity of the young Lara depicted in the cut scenes clashed with the cold-blooded murder gameplay the same Lara shows when controlled by the player. How can anybody suggest that we can solve the problem of hate in video games by showing more women in the role of murderous lunatic?

The first step towards a solution has to be creating less hateful and less violent games. Why is multiplayer almost synonymous with players working against each other and killing each other? We need more collaborative multiplayer games, and more games about other things in life than killing and blowing stuff up. And if games become more constructive and more about collaboration, having more female protagonists will come naturally. At best gender inequality among video game protagonists is a narrow symptom of a much wider problem. Just trying to heal the symptom without going after the root cause will achieve nothing.

Instead of doing the traditional eternal beta sequence, Card Hunter is going directly from closed beta to release on September 12. I don't know if you remember my idea for a $20 purchase plan for Card Hunter. It seems that Blue Manchu liked that one so much that they propose a rather similar $25 starter pack for the game (it has 9 figurines in it, which my plan didn't).

The previous session ended with the group having discovered Count Strahd von Zarovich's hiding place on top of Castle Ravenloft, ready for the grand finale. So unsurprisingly this session was mostly taken up by that final fight against the vampire lord. And how that went has a lot to do with philosophy of how to run a game of Dungeons & Dragons, so I'll talk about that first.

Basically there are two major schools of thought on how to run an adventure: The first is that the DM creates a world, lets the players interact with that world, and is himself bound by the rules and his creation. The second is that the DM is not bound by any rules, and should "cheat" when necessary for dramatic effect. The discussion about which is the "right way" to do it has been going on for 30+ years, and will probably never end. So suffice it to say that I am in the camp of the non-cheating DMs. I did play with DMs who obviously cheated, e.g. we once killed a giant by clever trickery and the DM created "the giant's brother" out of thin air because he wanted there to be a regular fight against a giant in that point of the adventure. I always felt that such adjustments rob the players of the fruits of their cleverness, but I do admit that the non-cheating way also has disadvantages.

In this specific case I had designed the Count Strahd von Zarovich and his Castle Ravenloft in a certain way: There was an optimal way to beat the vampire lord by weakening him first, but it would have been totally possible for the players to miss that way or willfully ignore it, and go straight for the end fight. And the difficulty of that fight was designed to be bloody hard, but not impossible, if they had faced Strahd early. As it were, the players did go for the weakening route. Furthermore they also went for all the optional encounters in the adventure, so instead of gaining a level at the end of the adventure, they gained level 6 already before the final fight. And so they were a level higher than planned, had done everything to weaken Count Strahd, and approached the final fight tactically clever. I could have cheated and made the fight harder than I had originally planned, but I didn't. And so the grand finale felt a bit too easy in the end. As I said, that is a question of DMing principles. For the story a harder fight might have been better, but it also could have been much worse: Losing that fight after having done everything right to prepare for it would have felt much more wrong.

So, back to the actual events: When the players opened the secret door to Strahd's lair, they saw him standing at the other end of the room, on the balcony. On seeing the heroes, Strahd cried out for the creatures of the night to help him. There were two wolves in an alcove behind Strahd's throne, and a dozen giant bats came flying into the room at the end of the first turn in response to Strahd's summons. The other remarkable feature was a glowing image of light in a spot in the alcove behind the throne, next to a treasure chest.

If the players had rushed into the room, the fight would have been harder, but they cleverly stayed back at the entrance and used ranged weapons and spells first. As they had better range than Strahd and his creatures, that enabled them to pick off most of the giant bats before those had even crossed the room. It also prevented the wolves from getting combat advantage, which is what their special attacks were based on. Strahd used the first round to get onto the glowing symbol on the floor, which gained him an additional action next round. He also took a magical throwing hammer from his treasure and used that from a spot where not everybody could shoot back at him; (Note the fine difference: Strahd using the hammer wasn't planned in advance, but the hammer was written into his treasure from the start, and it was only logical that he would use it.)

After dominating the rogue, and backstabbing the warlord with the controlled rogue, Strahd went into close combat. At that point the players were all grouped together at the entrance of the room, allowing Strahd to use his cloud of bats area attack. That was an attack which had a 1-in-6 change to regenerate each round, so Strahd managed to pull it off twice. The two wolves did serious damage, while the bats were just minions and didn't contribute much except to annoy the wizard in the back. The warlord pretty much countered Strahd's area attack with an area heal. And after first killing the two wolves, Strahd finally fell to a blow of the undead-hating artifact axe of the warrior, fulfilling that artifacts destiny. The warrior noticed that the glowing image on the floor next to the treasure chest disappeared at the end of the fight, apparently retreating into the treasure chest. On opening the treasure he found an ivory playing card with the same gem symbol on it that he had seen in light on the floor. The group also collected the magical throwing hammer, which formed a set with the warhammer the warlord already possessed, so while these were +1 weapons when separated, they worked as +2 weapons as a set. Besides that, there was a magical amulet and gold in the treasure.

The death of Strahd had several consequences. The artifact axe Aecris, having fulfilled its destiny by killing an undead lord of a domain in Shadowfell, disappeared (artifacts in 4E are designed to be not permanently in the possession of a player). Due to the warriors good concordance with Aecris, the magic of the axe wasn't completely gone, but instead turned into a common but still very useful +3 axe. Meanwhile the wizard had gone out to the balcony to see whether the death of the vampire lord had lifted the mist surrounding the domain of Barovia. Instead he found that the horizon was full of a white light, in the middle of the night, and that this light seemed to be approaching. Fearing a collapse of the castle, the group ran downstairs and out of the main entrance, only to find the same light also approaching from the other side. The light effectively was dissolving the domain from all sides. When it reached the players, they had a sensation of falling upwards for a long time, until they finally arrived at the now closed portal to Shadowfell which had sucked them into Barovia in the first place.

Here they decided to finish some unfinished business: Returning the Chalice of Planar Travel stolen by the demon they had killed in front of the portal to the church in Winterhaven. Arriving at Winterhaven they noticed many changes, with the wall having been repaired and fresh troops manning the walls. It turned out that while it seemed like only days for them, they were in fact gone for a full year. So the inhabitants of Winterhaven were surprised and happy to finally see them back successfully from their mission to kill the demon and recover the chalice.

Several adventures ago the group had helped Lord Padraig of Winterhaven to free his court mage and counselor Valthrun from kobolds. During that adventure they had noticed Valthrun having recovered an ivory card from the kobolds' treasure, and gotten the information that if they found any more of those, Lord Padraig and Valthrun would be interested. Now they had found such a card in Strahd's treasure and realized that it had magical properties. Identifying the card led them to the information that in fact these cards were part of a deck of 22 cards, a Deck of Many Items. And Lord Padraig and Valthrun want to gather the full deck together in order to use its magical powers to protect Winterhaven. Valthrun's studies led him to believe that all the remaining cards were scattered at the same general location: Gardmore Abbey, a day's march, or half a day's ride away from Winterhaven.

Now the players don't want to give their card to Valthrun, nor does Valthrun want to give his cards to the players. But Valthrun offers the players to work together to reassemble the Deck of Many Things. Lord Padraig also gives them the information that the recent reinforcement of the defenses of Winterhaven is due to orcs from Gardmore Abbey having started to launch raids. So Padraig proposes to give the players the use of horses and a squire to watch over the horses, so they can go to Gardmore Abbey and at first just scout out the place, see how many orcs there are, and whether there are other inhabitants of the abbey. With this starting point for the next big adventure we ended this session.

One of the enduring ideas in the MMORPG blogosphere is the one about the "WoW Killer", the mythical new MMORPG which steals all of the players away from World of Warcraft. Apart from that not having happened yet, the next bunch of contestants for the title of WoW Killer just discovered that if you try to kill a giant, the giant might unexpectedly make a move and crush you underfoot.

Blizzard started publicly contemplating turning World of Warcraft into a Free2Play game. Presumably just about the time that Wildstar and The Elder Scrolls Online get released as subscription-only games. :)

Computer games now have such a long history that you can find projects today where people are taking old classic games and remake them with better graphics. That shows that graphics are important to immersion in games. On the other side I have vivid images of places like Middle-Earth in my head that come from reading books without illustrations, before video games and films first tried to show the place. Ultimately everything plays in the theater of the mind, whether a story or game has graphics or not.

If you have played pen & paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons with different dungeon masters, you will probably have noticed that some are more skilled at vivid descriptions, at creating memorable scenes in the game. Me, personally, I was always just medium skilled in that. I have a very rational mind and scientific language, which is great for describing a scene completely with all necessary details, but not necessarily artistic enough to really create great images in the theater of the mind. And if my lack of skill at that wasn't bad enough, I now have to deal with the additional handicap of playing in French, which is my third language. The level of French I have that is sufficient for work and daily life isn't exactly the suitable vocabulary to describe a fantasy town or dungeon.

So in my Dungeons & Dragons campaign I am making up for any lack in verbal description by proving an ample amount of graphical support. "A picture is worth a thousand words", they say, so if I have a good picture of let's say a landscape, I need a thousand words less to describe it. :) It is also worth keeping in mind that the memory of different people works in different ways, and people with a visual memory will remember a picture of an NPC better than a spoken description. Mix both and you have a better chance that everybody at the table remembers.

Besides handouts, my main graphical aid is graphical battle maps and tokens with images of the enemies. A map created with software like Campaign Cartographer / Dungeon Designer doesn't just look better than the same shape of room hand-drawn on a blank piece of paper with a square grid. It also makes it a lot easier to have more details, like furniture and decoration, which can then have an impact on the action. If you want your players to have the option to swing from the chandelier, you better have a chandelier in the room in the first place. And a detailed battle map avoids you having to describe every piece of furniture, as the players just see what is there.

I tried in the past to use figurines for monsters, but the D&D universe has so many different monsters, you'd need a rather huge collection of figurines to cover them all. So now I prefer flat tokens with a color printed image on top. I can make those myself, using self-adhesive felt pads for added thickness. And by doing so I can also add numbers to the tokens, which makes it easier to keep track of which monster of a group already got wounded or is under some effect.

There are two downsides to this use of graphical elements in my game: The first is the amount of preparation it takes. I am currently preparing Madness at Gardmore Abbey as my next adventure, and there are 33 encounters in that adventure, with maps and tokens only provided for a few of them. So I needed to create and print a lot of battle maps, plus a few tokens where the tokens from the Monster Vault didn't suffice. The second downside is related to that: What if in the course of the adventure the players do something unexpected and start a fight where they weren't supposed to? Then it is back to a hastily hand-drawn map and blank tokens, which creates a very visible visual clue to the players that this would be an unscripted encounter.

But overall I like my method. It works especially well with 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, where the combat rules are more elaborate and tactical, and encounters tend to be more epic. It wouldn't work so well for systems in which fights only last 5 minutes.

After trying to play The Bureau: XCOM Declassified for a few hours, I gave up. I do like the setting, and the idea behind the game, but the execution is so horribly bad that I just can't get any enjoyment out of the game. Most of the resources spent for this game appear to have been used to create endless cutscenes and dialogue, and then nothing was left to actually make a decent shooter. So you're wasting a lot of time just getting from one action sequence to the next, with bad movement animations and dialogues that don't appear to lead anywhere.

Unfortunately the battles aren't much fun either. In first-person view things happen very fast, and because the controls and camera aren't great, you barely register what is happening. Switch to tactical view slows down time and gives you enough overview to enable you to command your team members, but meanwhile your character can't shoot or move himself. Give decent commands to your squad, and the combat might be over within seconds, without you having done much yourself. So on the one side you have a low-quality version of a Call of Duty-like strictly linear shooter full of scripted sequences, and on the other side you have the tactical elements of squad-based XCOM combat. And while I could image a setup in which those two could mix, The Bureau hasn't found it.

In the end the cool idea of fighting aliens with 60's era FBI types in suits with hats can't make up for the constant stream of annoyances of the gameplay. The game fails to work well as a tactical combat game, while simultaneously failing to provide a good shooter experience. Unfortunately Steam hasn't followed EA Origin yet in giving you the option to return bad games within 24 hours, because otherwise I would have gone for a refund. As it is, I'll have to declare this one a total loss. It looked nice in video trailers, but failed to convince when I actually played it. I recommend staying away from The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

In the ongoing series of What I'm Playing, these are the games I am currently busy with. This week I finished the first playthrough of Borderlands 2, using the assassin character Zer0. Having done most of the side-missions that got me to level 32, which is pretty much where I wanted to be to play the DLC Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep. So now I'm looking forward to this parody of Dungeons & Dragons re-imagined by Tiny Tina as Bunkers & Badasses. But I also made a new character, a gunzerker, currently at level 8.

A comment on DLCs: I am not a huge fan of DLCs and only buy them sparingly. If it wasn't for the D&D connection, I wouldn't have bought any DLC for Borderlands 2. I consider DLCs to be one of the bad consequences of piracy and used games sales: As the game companies lost control and revenue over the original games, they now only deliver you half a game, and then sell you the other half in a system which makes piracy and used game sales more difficult if not impossible. So they do make some money from the people who got their original game without paying the developers a single cent. The downside for people actually buying original games is that we end up paying twice for our games. Fortunately I got Borderlands 2 at half price from a Steam sale, so the extra $10 is still not pushing the overall price over the top.

Borderlands 2 shares a deep flaw with Diablo 3 in that the best way to get a weapon in the game is not by playing the game. In Diablo 3 you have the real money auction house, in Borderlands 2 you have golden keys available via social media giving you guaranteed epics of your level. As I had 44 of those golden keys it was just too tempting to get a few epics every time I faced a really hard fight. On the one side that is preferable to grinding or endlessly repeating content to advance. On the other side any out-of-game way to get best-in-slot loot seriously takes away from the item gathering motivation of games like these. It is easy to say "if you don't like these ways, don't use them", but even just knowing that the better alternative exists already removes some of the fun of collecting items in game.

The other game I am currently playing is The Tribez on the iPad, a cutesy city-building and economic management game. It is Free2Play, but apart from the occasional nag screen with "special offers" to upgrade your warehouse or get gems at a reduced price the monetization scheme can well be ignored. What is harder to ignore is that the latest patch broke the game on some machines, so curiously it is still running on my iPad, but not any more on the iPad of my wife, annoying her to no end. Patching via the App Store is notoriously slow, so for her the game is already down for over a week. The Facebook page has over 2,000 comments complaining about that, so that is maybe not the best advertisement for that game. But when it runs The Tribez is fun enough.

Currently downloading on my computer is The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, otherwise known as "the XCOM shooter". The game was already released 3 days ago in the USA, but Europe only got it today, so I'll start playing this weekend. I'm well aware that the reviews are at best mixed, but as a fan of XCOM and the 60's setting, I still have to try this.

Two out of two MMORPGs that recently announced their business model went for a monthly subscription. Now as I have frequently discussed on this blog, a monthly subscription model benefits a certain population of players, with those who play a lot getting effectively subsidized by those who play less. Thus these hardcore idiots are now declaring victory, "Free2Play is dead", and the like. Which of course is utter nonsense. The subscription business model is still dead, and those two announcements don't change anything.

For proof, just go to a site like MMORPG.com with a complete list of MMORPGs, and count how many games have a subscription model, and how many have some variation of a Free2Play or Buy-box-only model. Even if you add 2 to the subscription side of the balance, the other side still wins by a large margin.

If you analyse the data further, you will find that the most successful business model for MMORPGs is in fact a different one: The bait & switch business model. If you plot something like a curve of interest for a typical MMORPG in the post-WoW era, you will find that the interest is highest before release and quickly falls off in the first three months after release. If you were an unscrupulous businessman, you'd have to be an idiot to not exploit that. Why would you go Free2Play from day one and miss out on all the potential money you can get from the pre-release hype? Far better to announce a subscription model, cash in on all the suckers who buy the box and pay for three months of subscription, and THEN go Free2Play a bit later, after 6 to 18 months, when the hype has subsided.

Somewhere in hidden drawers of Carbine and Zenimax are already plans on how to transform Wildstar and The Elder Scrolls Online into Free2Play games. There are simply too many games and too few hardcore players to make a subscription business model for any new game viable in the long run. The people celebrating the return of the subscription business model are in fact celebrating how they have been duped by a successful bait & switch scam. 18 months after release at the very latest these games will be either Free2Play or shut down completely.

I tend to have the least popular opinion on the internet, the middle-of-the-road, rational option. So I neither hate World of Warcraft with a passion, nor do I love it very much any more. It is funny how few people can see this 9 year old market leader in a rational light. Instead you get people highly excited about the news that Blizzard trademarked "The Dark Below", which could potentially be the next World of Warcraft expansion. So what? With all due respect for the apparent decision to not add yet another undiscovered continent to Azeroth, there really is no news here. No design decisions have been announced and this could very well be yet another standard expansion with a few more levels and zones which doesn't advance the genre at all.

The advantage of a pen & paper roleplaying game over a computer roleplaying game is that in a computer game only those things are possible that have been foreseen and programmed in, while in the pen & paper the players can try anything they can imagine, as long as the DM can come up with a reasonable response. Some people believe that this totally free system should also apply to combat. But playing combat in "the theater of the mind" has certain drawbacks, as every player at the table tends to have a slightly different picture in his mind, which then can lead to disagreements or lack of coordination. So many pen & paper systems have evolved towards combat rules that work best with figurines on a square grid map. If you play combat on a grid, it is evident for everybody at the table who is standing next to whom, and who is in the area of that fireball, for example. That makes a certain style of tactical combat with positioning, zones of control, and the like possible.

I recently bought a rather brilliant foldable noteboard which I added to my DM bag and plan to use whenever I get a combat for which I don't have a map prepared. But if I can prepare, I much prefer full color maps with a 1" = 5' square grid. Terrain features like obstacles providing cover or being more difficult to traverse provide some additional tactical options. And color maps just look nicer and help with immersion.

The official 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons are a mixed bag regarding maps: On the one side they often come with full color poster maps which are generally quite good. On the other side WotC is stingy with those posters, so there are just one or two of them in each adventure. Even double-sided and having more than one encounter map on each side, that doesn't cover all the encounters in the adventure. For the other encounters, the DM is on his own. WotC sometimes proposes to use their dungeon tiles, but I always found cardboard tiles to be fiddly to set up and keep together, and the standard dungeon ones are more or less just grey squares and rather ugly.

That leaves me printing my own color maps from one of two sources: Either I find the maps somebody else had made for that adventure, for example at the Cartographer's Guild. Or I create the maps myself using Campaign Cartographer / Dungeon Designer. I try to keep the map size under 22x16 squares, so that the printout fits on 4 sheets of A4 paper on my color laser printer, which I then assemble using sticky tape. Not the most durable of solutions, but usually the map only gets used during one session of the adventure.

I am not much of an artist, but with the Campaign Cartographer software even I can make pretty maps, as the software takes care of things like lighting and shadow or other effects. So sometimes I need to make a choice: Do I take a map somebody else made, or do I make my own? The Cartographer's Guild maps are often prettier than mine, but then sometimes I run into what you could call "artistic differences" with the map maker. For example frequently the artist, in order not to spoil his pretty image, leaves out or makes barely visible the square grid on the map. At which point the map loses its principal purpose: Providing a battle map for a tactical combat encounter.

On the maps I make, the grid is visible everywhere the players can go. The software allows you to specify the order in which the various layers are drawn, so I put the grid over the floor layer, but under the walls layer. The symbol layer is tricky, because I want the grid to still be visible in areas which have decorations that can be walked through, for example vegetation. But something like furniture tends to look better above the grid layer, hiding it. And then there is the question how visible to make the grid. A grid which is black or grey or white tends to be not visible in areas of the map which are of similar brightness, so the black grid disappears in the dark areas, and the white grid in the light areas. Fortunately the software allows a simple trick: I make my grid to be a thin black line, with a white "glow" effect around it. So in the light areas one can clearly see the black line, while in the dark areas the white glow keeps the line still visible.

I do love the freedom of the roleplaying in Dungeons & Dragons. But I find that not every one of my players can keep engaged with just a story all evening long. Having a fun tactical combat about half of the time keeps everybody interested in the adventure. And a good map with a nice grid helps a lot running those.

If you still need a Card Hunter beta key, Killer Game Deals is handing out 30 of them.

As my players leveled up to level 6 in the previous session, I changed the naming convention of the D&D campaign journal on this blog from "Level - Session number" to "Adventure name - Session number". So the players are still in the dungeons under Castle Ravenloft, searching for the tomb of Count Strahd von Zarovich, so they can weaken him by dispersing the earth from his coffin. They found an empty room with a brick wall at the other end, corresponding to a description is the Book of Strahd that he had bricked up his tomb. But they had detected four long slits from wall to wall in the ceiling, and were wary of what might drop out of this. Fearing some sort of portcullis they had spent the previous session collecting doors from the tombs to build a barricade to block the trap.

So this session started with the players setting the doors under the slits in the ceiling, against the wall, and then approaching the brick wall. That, as expected, triggered the trap. But it wasn't a guillotine or portcullis that dropped from the ceiling, but Edgar Allan Poe style blades on pendulums. I had prepared a side view of this, and it was obvious that the doors leaning against the walls were out of the path of the pendulums. So the rogue got hit by the trap, but then managed to jump out of the way. As the pendulum swung close to the floor in the middle of the room, the players then started moving the doors to there, successfully blocking the swinging pendulums.

But of course that wasn't the only danger here. The trap had also sprung an alarm, and Count Strahd from Zarovich himself came down to the dungeon to defend his tomb. He dominated the dwarven warrior standing outside the room, and sent him to attack the wizard, while staying out of sight of the group himself. That would have worked a lot better if the group hadn't just gained a level, and the wizard learned Dispel Magic. So the wizard dispelled the domination on the warrior, and the whole party turned against the vampire lord.

At this point I'd like to insert a comment on adventure design: Many D&D adventures have a main villain with a big boss fight at the end. But because the DM doesn't want the main villain to die prematurely, that villain often remains out of sight for the whole adventure. And that makes the main villain too abstract, with the players not having much more motivation to kill him than knowing that he is the end of the adventure and probably has the best treasure (like a boss fight in a MMORPG dungeon). To avoid that, Count Strahd von Zarovich is very present in my version of the Ravenloft adventure. He appeared early on trying to kidnap Ireena from the village, was seen as illusion playing the organ in the dining hall, and now makes an appearance in defense of his tomb. But as this still isn't supposed to be his final fight, he is designed to be pretty much unkillable, having lots of regeneration powers and an ultimate escape way in mist form.

So while the players launched a lot of daily powers against the vampire lord, they only had a small chance of actually killing him: Strahd regenerated a lot, and used his escape power when down to a quarter of his health. If the players had incapacitated him for a round and reduced his health to zero before he could escape, they could theoretically have killed him, but that was designed to be rather difficult. So Strahd escaped, and the players were free to open his tomb. They took the earth from his coffin, destroyed the coffin, and dispersed the earth over Barovia using the hole in the window in the chapel on the ground floor that overlooked the cliff. This robbed Strahd of his regeneration and escape powers, and turned him into a killable adversary.

So following the instructions from the tarot reading, the group now searched Strahd's lair "under the sky, behind the fire". For the first time they moved upstairs in the castle, taking the main staircase that went up from an octagonal room with 4 gargoyle statues into another identical looking room. In spite of the gargoyles downstairs having been just statues, the rogue didn't trust the statues upstairs and poked one with a dagger. Well done, because they were in fact living gargoyles. With the warrior and the rogue in the front line, and the others shooting spells and arrows from behind, the gargoyles fell quickly, but not before having done some serious damage, especially to the rogue (who shouldn't be tanking like he does).

After passing some uneventful empty bedrooms and a fencing hall, the players discovered a living room with a fire in a fireplace, and a portrait of Tatiana, Strahd's lost love, in a wedding dress (looking exactly like Ireena Kolyana, the major's daughter Strahd tried to kidnap from the village). The players extinguished the fire, and searched for a secret mechanism in the fireplace, which was easy enough to find given the hint from the tarot card reading. And without taking an extended rest, they opened the secret door, the whole fireplace swung away from them into a big room, and they had discovered Strahd's final hiding place. As it was already getting late, we decided to do the grand finale in the next session.

I received a lot of feedback from the people I handed out Card Hunter beta keys to. Generally the feedback was quite positive, most people love the game. But there were several people who found Card Hunter rather difficult, a comment which usually came with some reference to the luck involved in drawing cards. So I would like to make one rather bold statement on Card Hunter strategy, and a discussion of luck. The principal thing to know about Card Hunter strategy is this:

Play with the cards you drew, not with the cards you wished you had drawn!

The funny thing about this statement is that how much you agree with it very much depends on your history as a gamer. Players of games like World of Warcraft are very much used to applying exactly the same tactics to every single mob fight, because the optimum sequence of button presses is always the same. But I played Magic the Gathering for a decade, and for people with a gaming history like mine the above statement is bloody obvious. One could say that card-based games have a strategy part, which is in the deck building, and a tactics part which is in playing the cards that you drew. Getting the strategy part right is very important, e.g. if your deck is full of piercing weapons you'll have problems with those skeletons in Card Hunter. But generally you only draw 2 cards out of your 36-card deck every round, so having the right strategy of deck building isn't sufficient; you need to learn to adjust your tactics every round to the cards you actually drew.

The specific rules of Card Hunter card drawing are important to keep in mind here: Every one of your characters draws 2 random cards from his deck every round, plus receives his 1 racial movement card. This is why your dwarf warrior is so slow, he only gets a walk card automatically every round, while humans get run, and elves dash. You can also keep up to 2 cards from the previous turn in your hand. So imagine you trade blows with stationary enemies for a few rounds: You draw a movement card every round, but don't use it, and if you don't discard your movement card at the end of the turn, those movement cards accumulate. So you stare at your hand full of 3 movement cards and curse your bad luck of not having enough attack cards, when in fact none of that cards was a random draw. Of course there are also movement cards from random draws, but you can reduce the occurrence of those by choosing boots with armor or attack cards in them. Unless you *want* more movement for your particular strategy.

Staying stationary for some time is very often the wrong tactical decision. Especially if through the effects described above you have several movement cards, there is usually an advantage to be had if you use them. Don't be afraid to spend a round just running away from the enemy: You'll use your movement cards up, keep your attacks (and armor) for the next round, and if played well you'll make the enemy discard his attack cards because he couldn't use them that turn. Movement is also extremely important to position yourself in relation to the enemy: Block cards don't work if you attack the enemy from behind, even some armor cards are vulnerable from the back (the Trog's crude armor for example). Some big mobs have "clumsy" trait cards in their deck, which make them unable to attack you if you are behind them. In short: If your strategy depends only on running up to the enemy and hoping to draw enough attack cards to bash his head in before he gets you, your problem isn't luck, but the lack of refinement of your tactics.

Now let's talk about a different kind of luck: Finding the right loot. If you play Card Hunter long enough, you'll pretty much have every card in your collection you need to build the right deck for the adventure you are facing. But at the very start of the game this is more of a problem. It isn't much use knowing that you can overcome these heavily armored monsters with piercing weapons and spells if you simply don't have enough of those items with piercing cards in it. This is where Card Hunter's Free2Play model is somewhat weird: It isn't Pay2Win in the long run, but you get a huge boost to your options if you spend money early in the game. If you are short on cards, getting that extra club reward item from each battle is huge, and buying a few chests is also having a lot more effect early on than later in the game.

But that doesn't mean you can't play Card Hunter for free, you only need to adjust the way you play it. If you play adventures of your level, you will gain 10 xp per adventure, out of 20 you need to gain a level. So you will get up in levels quickly. An adventure 1 level below you only gives 4 xp, and 2 levels below you only 2 xp, making you level up much more slowly. And you can use that to your advantage, because the loot you get from slightly lower adventures isn't much worse. So if you consistently play the adventures 2 and 1 level below you first, you'll get comparatively more loot per level. You'll level up slower, but end up with a much better collection of cards.

Overall "luck" is something very localized and momentary. If you play a game long enough, statistics tells you that luck always evens out. If your only problem was bad luck, you simply can do that battle you lost again, and you'll do better eventually. If you lose consistently, luck isn't the problem, strategy and tactics are.

After Everquest Next announced dynamic spawns with an ecosystem, destructible environment, and open world player housing, several people dismissed these claims as unrealistic with the argument that Ultima Online tried that and failed: Players kill mobs faster than they can reproduce, gather resources so fast that whole forests are turned into deserts, and build houses everywhere until no more flat surface is left. While that history is correct, the conclusion isn't. As a counter-example look at Star Wars Galaxies, where open world housing clearly worked a lot better than in Ultima Online. So what is the difference, and how can a virtual world with a stable ecosystem be created without players destroying everything? The answer is simply in the size of the world, and the scale of the ecosystem.

My most frequently visited blog post over the years is the one in which I calculated the size of Azeroth, and found it to be smaller than the Isle of Wight, or 4 times the size of Manhattan. Ultima Online was even smaller, and because you only could build houses on flat surfaces there was effectively place for less houses than the number of players on a server. The same housing system worked perfectly well in Star Wars Galaxy, because there was simply far more space on every planet.

The Ultima Online ecosystem failed due to its small size and technical limitations of the time. But a procedurally generated world can be much bigger, even infinite. People don't run out of world to modify in Minecraft. And if the world is big enough, you can put in enough mobs so that players can't possibly make them extinct.

If you put 10 children per square meter into a sandbox, they are going to trample over each others sand castles. At 1 child per 10 square meters the sand castle building works a lot better. Of course there will always be people who will destroy stuff deliberately to grief, and the TTP will be short. But viable virtual worlds are possible if they are just big enough and the players aren't so numerous to crush everything else without even wanting to.

A lot of readers of my blog already play or are interested in Card Hunter. So when Blue Manchu gave 3 beta keys to every player and I posted about giving away mine, I received not only lots of interest for those keys, but also lots of beta key donations from other readers. I ended up handing out around 30 keys, and still had more interest in them. So on the suggestion of a reader I contacted Blue Manchu directly and asked for more beta keys. And they gracefully sent me a batch of 30 beta keys!

So as the last time I am handing out Card Hunter beta keys to the first 30 people requesting one by e-mail. Don't ask for a key in the comment section, I have no way of privately replying to comments and wouldn't be able to make sure you get the key there. Note that this is still beta, and there will be at least one more reset before release. But if you purchase pizza (and I have suggestions on what to do with it), the Card Hunter currency for real money you will get that pizza refunded on reset.

As I am still actively playing in the beta, I was also planning to write more about Card Hunter (there is no NDA). And I would like some reader participation here: What is your feedback on Card Hunter? Do you have any questions you want me to answer? Do you have any suggestions on Card Hunter subjects you think I should write about?

[UPDATE: I'm out of beta keys. Thanks to everybody who participated.]

Over the last years various MMORPG bloggers have used the terms "sandbox" and "theme-park" to describe games with less or more directions given to the player on what to do. The same concept in earlier years used to be called "world" versus "game" MMORPGs. There are people who would like to live in a virtual world, and there are people who want to play a game. Both are okay, and any given MMORPG to some extent allows both, but there are clearly games that go more in one direction or more in the other.

I frequently recommended Card Hunter, a turn-based tactical role-playing game with a combat system based on cards. Now Card Hunter is expanding their closed beta and sent out beta keys to the current participants. Note that this is a closed beta, so there will be at least one more reset before the release version. Nevertheless the item shop is open, and if you buy and spend their virtual currency "pizza" now, you'll get that pizza back at the start of release.

New beta key hand-out in this new thread!

With my reduced posting frequency comes the opportunity to get away from daily news and rather discuss game design features independent from any particular game. Pen & paper roleplaying systems, single-player roleplaying games, and MMORPGs often share commonalities, and by looking at how a feature is treated in different games one can learn more about it than by just looking at one individual game with its idiosyncrasies.